The Gates

I know, it is wrong to be in Rome and not do as the Romans do, but I am a football ignoramus and so I benevolently tolerate the Super Bowl craze, but I never participate in it.

Instead, tonight I went over to a friend’s and we watched documentaries. Your adrenaline flow could not surpass mine, because I finally got to see Running Fence, the film about Christo’s art project in California from the 70s. Why is this exciting? Because Christo is again setting up his miles and miles of terrain art (titled this time “The Gates”) and the unveiling of this two week wonder (26 years in the planning) will be in Central Park this Saturday, coinciding with my trip to the city. Will I blog about it? Stay tuned.

And speaking of mincing (garlic, etc.)…

A reader kindly requested that I increase the number of posts devoted to food. I cannot. I have a confession to make: I am taking a (rather extensive) break from major cooking. Indeed, today I restocked my refrigerator and this is how it now looks:

an exciting array of foods and beverages 

It would be even less full if someone hadn’t packed in a dozen cans of Klarbrunn many weeks back.

Have I grown tired of the culinary arts? Have I thrown in my polka-dot apron and replaced it with the now ever-present in the kitchen Dell Latitude? No. I continue to love to cook and I diligently have the Food Channel on every time I am at the gym, in case a new creative cooking idea pops up on the screen. But everything needs a pause and a rest in life and this is the season for me to withdraw from cooking (the exception: when people come over – then I am all about pots and pans again).

Do I not eat? Oh, I’ll broil a fish now and then. But I am discovering the simplistic beauty of eggs, cheeses and raw vegetables – hardly postable material! Not to worry, though. My trends never last. Today’s cooking calm may soon develop into a cooking mania. One never knows.

Ocean proceeds mincingly

Brian writes that if you type in ninacamic into Blogger, the spell check will suggest a replacement: mincingly (M-W def: “affectedly dainty or delicate”). Although some would scoff and say that a person who plunges into each day with spirit cannot lay claim to any such finespun imagery, that robustness is incompatible with something balmy and light, let me (timidly) suggest otherwise: Ocean does indeed at least aspire to be more subtle than bold, more whimsical than forceful, more delicate than coarse. Bottom line – Blogger spell check and I are friends. Mincingly is a better fit than schoolmarmishly.

Neither prudish nor school-marmish

Last night a friend mentioned that my reputation may run the way of Marion the librarian in some blogging circles. Oh, how wrong you, who think that, are! [And I am not referring to episodes of skinny dipping in my employer’s pool with the lively crowds that frequented the Connecticut summer residence where I once worked as a nanny.]

I want to raise a quiet thumbs up to references to sex and nudity (caveat: in their non-exploitative form, and I don’t care if that is a hard line to draw, it can be done!) though I’m still firmly negative on gore and violence. Just because I refrain from dotting the Ocean pages with words that would make Margaret Spellings ears turn pink, I see no reason why others cannot express themselves more *creatively*. There’s a long stretch of road from acknowledging our interest in sex and the various fascinating parts of our anatomy, to plastering highway billboards with pictures of naked women and men having sex with animals.

It came as no surprise that the public response to nipple-gate was usurped by those who were eager to turn this into an all-out campaign against any positive reference to gays or even cohabitants on network TV. A cleaned-up Super Bowl is a blimp of an event. An absence of racy dicey commercials may lead to a boring half-time, but in the scheme of things, it is just a moment in television history. The pendulum will swing back and Paul McCartney in a turtle neck will again be replaced by something more representative of our lust for the daring and the obscene.

But the door has indeed been propped open for regulation of a more invidious kind: the banning of references to sexuality (sad in its own right) has spread to a standing ovation in favor of the clean, the morally upright, the perfect heterosexual couple, raising the clean the morally upright, the perfectly groomed pair of children.

I say no. I’m all in favor of getting rid of violence and meanness, of cleaning up our discourse so that degrading offense is not bandied randomly, endlessly. But please, let's not go the route of a sanitized nation, where even this splendid Ocean post would be regarded as inappropriate for public viewing.