Anyway, even if I didn’t go anywhere geographically new last week, it was still sort of a feat psychologically. A few months ago, I was puttering around on a Sunday afternoon, fixing a plate of nachos and a glass of chardonnay, and I had that moment that many women apparently fear: the moment of realizing I was turning into my mother.

But my next thought was: maybe it’s not that bad. Nachos and chardonnay are pretty fucking delicious. If I’m going to take after the woman in any way, might as well be this one. I think she had the right idea.

I revisited this conclusion while walking around Lake Calhoun with a friend last Saturday, and we immediately resolved to follow my mother’s example and went to Trader Joe’s (another favorite of my mother’s, obviously) and picked up some of each of her favorite treats. I even put ice in my chardonnay, something that I regularly rail on my mother for doing (it’s so tacky).

BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? I LIKE ICE IN MY CHARDONNAY.

So there. I did it that night, and I’m gonna keep doing it. I like it so much I even changed my blog’s title, mostly because I thought “Chardonnay on Ice” would be a great name for a band or a chick lit novel, but I’m not in a band and I’m not writing a chick lit novel.

On the very first racks, both male and female, the store’s ID establishes itself. I characterize the Bird person as a Bennington graduate whose quiet weekends upstate have evolved into a full-time escape from Manhattan for the explicit purpose of writing divorce poetry. It’s a thoughtful, slouchy, post-Cedar Tavern, Disillusioned Preppy Unisex look, still accustomed to intense, status-minded fashion scrutiny, but overcoated by a spalike, de-stressed and soul-seeky note I’ll call Reprioritized Values or The Benefits of Acupuncture.

I can’t believe they’re going under with this kind of writing! (no, seriously.) LOVE IT.

But in other ways, I’ve been pretty surprised. I didn’t think that the film apologized at all for Hannah’s actions. The only sympathy for her in the movie was that her pride outweighed her chances at justice. No claim was ever made that she didn’t deserve jailing; simply that she may not have deserved it more than any of her other fellow guards did. If anything, it was unexpectedly condemning – her total lack of remorse for her actions and her failure to comprehend the larger immorality of her actions seemed to negate the marginal charm she’d held in the film’s earlier glowing sex scenes.

It seems to me that the movie is in fact not a movie about the Holocaust but about German guilt and shame. Michael struggles with Hannah’s past, and ultimately, cannot forgive her. She can overcome her own personal shame, but she fails to comprehend that she has an obligation to the larger shame of her history. There’s personal triumph, sort of, but it’s clearly negated as a virtue when neither Michael nor the viewer can forgive Hannah’s lack of moral sensibility. It’s an interesting parsing of the differences between shame and guilt, actually. Hannah lacks the self-awareness to feel guilt.

I’d read the Slate article I linked to above a few weeks ago, shortly after seeing the film, and totally disagreed with it. But re-reading it today, I stumbled upon a morsel that I’d somehow missed the first time, and I think I do share this aspect of Rosenbaum’s criticism:

Daldry said he’d had a big fight with the author of The Reader, Bernhard Schlink. In the novel, when Kate’s mass murderer learns to read, one of the things she reads about is—guess what?—the Holocaust. We’re led to believe that she’s learning about it, or at least the extent of it, for the first time, from reading Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Hannah Arendt, and is suitably horrified. You get the idea: Reading can develop a moral sense, a path toward redemption…

But Daldry said he and Hare eliminated the Holocaust education aspect of the novel (over the strong objections of Schlink) because he didn’t want the film to seem to be about redemption; too many Holocaust films offer a kind of false redemptiveness, he said.

Well, good for him, but without that, he’s made a film in which all the techniques of Hollywood are used to evoke empathy for an unrepentant mass murderer of Jews. The elimination of the Primo Levi reading list in the novel—however meretricious a gambit it is—deprives the literacy she achieves of any relationship to the Holocaust, which eliminates the fraudulent moral redemptiveness but also makes the film incoherent as a response to the Holocaust. Why should we care that she can read Chekhov’s “Lady With Lapdog”?

I can agree that the movie seems incoherent as a response to the Holocaust. Some have claimed that the movie exploited the Holocaust, but I don’t think it did, not any more than any other historical fiction does. But when the Holocaust is used as a backdrop, there is a certain balance between moral certitude and ambiguity demanded. Yes, the movie fails to absolve Hannah, so there is a sort of condemnation of her actions. But it also reveals nothing new. We’ve come to expect Holocaust movies to explain “how it could have happened.” This isn’t a case of “how it  could have happened.” It’s a case of how one woman made her choices in highly individual circumstances that the typical viewer – and certainly, anyone who read the book – would not have very much sympathy for. Ultimately, it doesn’t feel like there’s any explanation that we can take away, and without that, and with the forced moral weight of the Holocaust, the movie feels irrelevant. The crime isn’t exploitation, really. It’s more that the movie just doesn’t have anything to say that matters all that much.

Evergreen Chinese: finally, a decent Chinese restaurant. Apparently they have really great mock meat, but I didn’t try it. Delightful and cheap.

Groveland Tap: I was expecting something more Herkimer-like – classy wood and a polished bar. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the Groveland Tap more closely matched (in aesthetics, if not in clientele) one of my old college haunts, the Rueb. And they had $9 pitchers of Summit, one of which I drank almost entirely by myself while in the company of a DD and a teetotaler.

Bryant Lake Bowl: Every couple weeks, my roommate and I have this conversation:

Me: I think I might go to BLB tonight. I’ve still never been.

Kat: “I can’t believe you haven’t been! It’s, like, my favorite bar!”

Anyway, I never end up going, except that I finally did and it was kind of crowded and I didn’t know how to score my bowling card and the middle-aged guys in the lane next to us p-a informed us that we were using their balls and so we bailed and went to the Herk. But I’ll go back; it’s the neighborly thing to do.

Fasika: This was our choice for V-Day after an extremely confusing attempt to make reservations at a couple of other restaurants. It’s an Ethiopian place at University and Snelling in St. Paul, and it was truly excellent. We split the combination platter and ate enough injera to give me a stomachache. I was a little more let down by the vegetarian components, but the lamb was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten, and the platter was very reasonably priced at $32 and had enough to feed 3-4 people. The clientele was predictably (but pleasantly) Ethiopians and Macalester students, the only people around who could handle the dual daunting prospects of intense spice and no silverware.

Overall, my adventures rate A++++++++ would go again.

In other news, I’ve been having a revival of music from my freshman and sophomore years as well as a revival of the accompanying behavior (ie, Bright Eyes, Tilly and the Wall, and The Mountain Goats resonate with me again??). A necessary counterpoint to corporate life, I suppose.

Basically springpads are lists. But they’re more than that – recipes are a perpetual plague/anxiety of mine, as I read over a dozen food blogs every day and always have things I want to try that I can’t remember. Springpad lets me store them and tag them, and even makes shopping lists or meal plans. I can sort them by meal, protein, formality, prep time, whatever I want. This capability stretches across a variety of different types of lists and tasks, some of which I don’t care about. (kids’ homework? knitting supplies? home maintenance? all luckily not a part of my life).

But what I’m perhaps most excited about is the search/map integration for restaurants, businesses, and other locations. You can make a list of restaurants that’s integrated with Yelp!, so you not only have a restaurant name, but also the address, phone number, type of cuisine, and reviews on the same entry. You can add notes and tags, and then you can add it to any variety of other springpads – so when you enter a restaurant once, you can also add it to a springpad for places to go, a springpad of favorite restaurants, a springpad for meal planning, a springpad for your plans for Valentine’s Day.

In short, this will revolutionize the resolution.

I’ll admit I snickered a bit at the charming young man across from me as soon as I saw him. What can I say, I’m a judgmental person. He was pale and pimply, as boys his age are wont to be, and he was wearing a ski hat adorned with an infamous and extremely predictable leaf. He then leaned toward one of his fellow young rogues, and told a scatological sex joke. I turned up my iPod, only to observe him leaning back into his seat and furtively munching on something in his hand. I was like “OPIUM!!!????!?”

I wish. Much to my disappointment/satisfaction, it turned out to be Frosted Mini-Wheats.

I hope they at least were at least frosted with coke.

It basically all started with a weeknight show, Gospel Gossip at 7th Street Entry. Kat and I both begged off driving and predictably, acted accordingly. That probably explains why I have – and I am not kidding – THREE HUNDRED photos of that show. I could make a fucking GG flipbook.

I have no idea if that photo has any particular merit compared to the other 299.

To keep my resolution for the week of 1/19/2009, I visited Shuang Her, a giant Asian grocery store on Eat Street. I couldn’t find lemongrass for some reason, but I did stall for a long time in the fish sauce aisle.

Are they really all so different? It was overwhelming, as was the smell of fresh fish throughout the store. Anyway, I got some black vinegar and some frozen buns for steaming, and it was all very delightful. The fish sauce smells pretty bad but tastes pretty good. I also got some MSG, as Jonah told me it was the missing ingredient in my attempts to make homemade ramen. We’ll see. I have no idea how much a standard serving of MSG is, which is somewhat worrisome.

Other new places I went: some bars in N.E. that weren’t really fun (well, the third bar was fun, but I’d been there before), and an events center. Whatever.

In anticipation of the movie, I read the book about a month ago. I liked the book quite a bit – it was very much of its time, but still felt crisp. (Though one of the few things that confused me at first was why the pregnancy meant they couldn’t go to Paris – daycare was still a long way off then, and the knowledge of how much a child costs is still a long way off for me.) I’m sure it’s been remarked upon elsewhere – I haven’t read any reviews of the movie since seeing it – but I did object to a few minor changes. The movie was largely faithful to the book, but made a few small tweaks at the end that I didn’t care for – namely, the change in location of the climax and the outcome of the children’s welfare. I won’t say more for fear of spoilers, but I wanted to record my disapproval.

I’ll admit that I was a bit bored in places, mostly because I’d read the book so recently (and the movie followed it so closely) that there wasn’t much suspense for me. This may also have been because the movie is so aestheticized – the book is as well, but the lack of free indirect narration left out some of the psychological complexity that makes the book so good – especially since neither Wheeler is very likable in either medium. At least in the book each is more understandable.

I did enjoy the hand across the window of the car in the sex scene. Funny to imagine this movie being a possible outcome of Jack and Rose’s Titanic storyline (I mean, if he hadn’t drowned). True love, indeed.

The OG is great for its predictability: great breadsticks, cream sauce-laden entrees, and first-rate people-watching. I ate salad for the first time in distressingly many months. The heavily advertised four-cheese mezzaluna was decidedly disappointing, but the breadsticks and people-watching were enough for me. We showed up around 7:30 or 8 and didn’t expect we’d have to wait – but on the contrary, there was a 25 minute delay. Surprisingly, most of the patrons were around our age, mid-twenty-somethings with (apparently) nothing better to do or nowhere better to go on a Friday night.

For us, OG had been a trek – not only outside of the city, but located in the depths of St. Louis Park. It presented the classic suburban paradox: viewable from the freeway (and next to a Chili’s, no less), but with no roads that could be intuitively navigated from that freeway to the restaurant. It was a treat. But for the other OG patrons, I think it was a much more pedestrian experience – I imagine many of them were couples, one working at General Mills and the other working at the I-394 Target campus, who have treated themselves to early condo ownership and all the attendant furnishings (Isaac Mizrahi, discounted with the Target employee card and financed through Target credit card debt). On this particular night they  were treating themselves to the featured OG wine (an $8 bottle marked up to $25):

So that was that. I got a terrible stomachache afterward (eating four breadsticks, three bowls of salad, and half a cream-based entree will do that to you). Stomachaches seem to be the theme of this blog so far. We spent the rest of the night watching West Wing and then I passed out around 11:20.

On Saturday I was very uncertain about taking on another culinary experience so soon. But in total contrast to the Olive Garden’s menu, this opportunity was a bit more ephemeral: a $20.21 tasting menu at 2021. A tasting menu at 2021 normally runs more like, oh, $70 or $80. So it was, to put it bluntly, a bargain.

Mimi and I were a little intimidated, as 2021 is a bit more chic than our normal haunts, but we put on some dark colors and our favorite shoes and sat down at the bar. This was the first time I’d ever been, and I was a little surprised at how small the restaurant was – perhaps a dozen tables. Mimi wasn’t really into the fleshy pink color, which she informed me was a favorite of modern painters. I guess the paint color made sense though, since Wolfgang Puck claims that “20.21, opened in 2005, is specifically designed for its home at the Walker Art Center and in Minneapolis. The restaurant is named for the focus of the Walker’s collection—20th- and 21st-century art—and inspired by the continual innovation of the Walker and Puck.”

Anyway, the food was fucking amazing. DUH. Well, in parts, anyway. Each course had two options, so we just ordered one of everything. I was actually a little let down by my Ginger Lemontini – a little too much limoncello, not quite enough ginger.  And the Thai green curry that was substituted for the Chinese chicken salad was pretty standard fare. But the gyoza were excellent – I’d love to learn how to sear them like that, and the shrimp and scallop spring roll was easily my favorite dish of the night, and I don’t even like shrimp. It was light and hearty at the same time, and the fried wrapper was perfectly crisp without being at all greasy.

All in all, no complaints for my twenty bucks. My favorite part, though, was actually the bathrooms. In keeping with the above design comment, they were really remarkable. I didn’t want to look like an asshole and photograph my food, but apparently I had no such scruples about the bathroom.

It was, uh, kind of awkward sneaking my camera into the bathroom. But I just pretended that I was taking a tampon from my coat and it all worked out. Each stall was totally enclosed – no passing toilet paper at 2021. Everything was pure white lacquer and brushed stainless steel, and each stall’s sole source of light was a small overhead beam in the back right corner. It was great. Seriously. I went twice!

His (unneeded) inducement for me to drive down to my alma mater for the first time since graduation was the opportunity to flavor trip. Ever since the New York Times article last spring, I and basically every one I know have been excited to try miracle fruit. Jonah and the Knights provided a veritable feast of acidic foods for us to sample (no picture as my camera was still MIA). Feast we did, downing lime after lime, drinking balsamic vinegar as if it were bad wine, dipping dill pickles in cream cheese, and generally eating as if we were tripping on something else entirely. Anyway, it was fun – the berries are as novel as expected (though not quite as intense as the Times led me to believe), but the end result was mostly a stomachache from ingesting a phenomenal amount of citrus.

Once we got back to Minneapolis, we met up with Tricia and headed out to dinner. We were thwarted by a failure to make reservations at our first choice, so we trucked on over to It’s Greek to Me, thus satisfying my resolution for the week of January 4th. It was good if not exceptional; I had satisfactory lamb, but Jonah’s pork chops were clearly the standout dish at the table – and I don’t even like pork. They were also the standout bargain. I might go again, but probably only if I had a similar debacle with dinner reservations.

Today, waking up to a pile of candy wrappers and other minor embarrassments, Jonah agreed to help me accomplish my resolution for this week early: we’d go to Midtown Global Market for a snack and to explore the wares. There’s a defunct White Castle near my house that is now a historic landmark(?) and houses a jeweler and an accordion teacher. Driving past it prompted a brief discussion about how neither of us had actually been, and as we continued that train of thought down Lake Street, what should appear but – a functional White Castle! So, uh, we went.

The experience was frankly mediocre – 4 cheese sliders, crinkle-cut fries (hadn’t seen those since elementary school), and a soda for $5.75. The “meat,” as Jonah astutely observed, was the same shape and thickness as the “cheese.” My main reaction to the meal was to get another stomachache. Still, I could see how the greasy little guys could be tasty in certain circumstances, and it’d be an appealing late-night walk in warmer weather. Plus it’s pretty charming to see the “castle” motif carried out through the product packaging. At least I now know the face (flavor?) of my tempter.

Anyway, I’m not really sure if this counts as fulfilling my resolution or not. It’s not unique to the Twin Cities, but it’s also somewhere I’d never been before. And Jonah wanted to go because they don’t have them in Boston. At any rate we did end up continuing on to the Market, so it’s a moot point. The Market was enjoyable and there were several treats I may return for, but the experience was considerably dampened by my White Castle stomachache and the dripping White Castle cup of Sprite in my hand.

Now I’m ready to detox with a bowl of dal, clean sheets, and the newest episode of Rock of Love Bus. I hope someone does another Buttery Nipple shot out of another contestant’s vagina!