A day late, but for you peanut butter freaks out there, dig these recipes for your favorite food over at Serious Eats.

Last week, there was a wonderful essay in The New Yorker by Donald Hall called “Out the Window” (subscription only):

After a life of loving the old, by natural law I turned old myself. Decades followed each other–thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty–and then came my cancers, Jane’s death, and over the years I travelled to another universe. However alter we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying–in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way–but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial. If we forget for a moment that we are old, we are reminded when we try to stand up, or when we encounter someone young, who appears to observe green skin, extra heads, and protuberances.

People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be good-hearted, and is always condescending. When a woman writes to the newspaper, approving of something I have done, she calls me “a nice old gentleman.” She intends to praise me, with “nice” and “gentleman.” “Old” is true enough, and she lets us know that I am not a grumpy old fart, but “nice” and “gentleman” put me in a box where she can rub my head and hear me purr. Or maybe she would prefer me to wag my tail, lick her hand, and make ingratiating dog noises. At a family dinner, my children and grandchildren pay fond attention to me; I may be peripheral, but I am not invisible. A grandchild’s college roommate, pulls a chair to sit with her back directly in front of me, cutting me off from the family circle: I don’t exist.

A few years ago I spoke to the writer Arnold Hano on the phone. He was 90. Profane and funny. He told me that something had been written about him in the local paper and the writer had called him spry. “How come you only hear the word spry when people talk about old people?” he said. “That drives me crazy. C’mere, and watch me stick my foot right up your ass.”

Click here to listen to the New Yorker podcast with Hall.

And click here to read Hank Waddles’ two-part interview with Hano.

[Photo Credit: Matthew Gordon Levandoski]

Check out the  Something to Write Home About series over at the beautiful site, Pictory Mag.

[Photographs by Emily Raw and Larissa Zhou]

Extra points if anyone can guess who sampled this one (no cheating, now).

[Picture by Bags]

Untitled by Morris Barazani (1965)

We are familiar with Nicholson’s greatest performances. Here’s a list of worthy ones that are less celebrated:

The Missouri Breaks, Reds, Heartburn, Hoffa, and The Pledge. There are others, of course. He’s funny in a cameo role in Broadcast News.

But one of my favorite Nicholson movies is The Border. He’s coiled but not a ham. It’s a wonderful performance.  Put it on your Netflix queue.

[Photograph by Annie Leibovitz]

From Brother Stein:

I’ve been eating kale like it’s going out of style lately. Usually, I  saute it in olive oil along with some garlic for a few minutes. Salt n serve.

This salad looks nice. From Food 52.

Here’s more movie memories from the great Charles Simic:

Back in the 1990s, I got an interesting call from a newspaper editor in Europe. He asked me if I could remember the first movie I saw as child that I liked, not because of the plot, but because of something else in it, something I had no words for at the time. Without ever thinking about it before, I knew what he had in mind. I recalled instantly trying to convey to a couple of my pals back in Belgrade what I liked about Victorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, and becoming incoherent, as far as they were concerned. Like me, they were strictly fans of Westerns and gangster movies, but these were in short supply in the postwar Communist years, when we had a choice between upbeat Soviet films about fighting the Nazis and building socialism, or bleak Italian and French neo-realist films that were supposed to teach us a lesson by showing us the miserable lives of the working classes in the capitalist world.

The day I saw Bicycle Thieves I had become an aesthete without realizing it, more concerned with how a particular film was made, than with whatever twists its plot had. All of a sudden, the way the camera moved, a scene was cut and a certain image was framed, were all-important to me. I’d lie in bed at night replaying some scene from a movie again and again, making it more suspenseful, erotic and, of course poetic, and taking immense pleasure in that activity. No wonder my friends began to think of me as being a little weird when it comes to movies. I was twelve years old, clueless about most things in life, but already carrying in my head my very own exclusive and constantly expanding film library, not yet a match for Halliwell’s, but large enough to occupy me and enrich my inner life when I lay awake at night.

Star Wars is the first movie I remember seeing in the theater other than Lassie and my Dad took my brother and me to see Superman, as well. But The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie that I was obsessed with. It came out six months before my parents’ marriage ended and I got Darth Vadar and my father and the frozen Han Solo all wrapped up in my mind and it wouldn’t let go. It was thrilling–a true escape–but gave me no relief.

“Babe Ruth” By William Auerbach-Levy (Via MrBrnMkg)

From the collection “When The Lights Go Down,” here is Pauline Kael on Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Nicholson is an actor who knows how to play an audience; he knows how to get us to share in a character. In The Last Detail, his sweet-sadastic alternating current kept us watching him, and we followed his lowlifer’s spoor through Chinatown. Nicholson is no flower-child nice guy; he’s got that half smile–the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is. He’s the people’s freak of the new stars.

…Since Nicholson doesn’t score when he plays unmagnetic characters–and he must it by now–the danger in Cuckoo’s Nest is that he’ll take over: that he’ll use his boyish shark’s grin, the familiar preening, brutal one-upsmanship. He’s won the audience with his cocky freaks, and this is the big one–the bull goose loony. Nicholson can be too knowing about the audience, and the part he plays here is pure temptation. Before Kesey went to Stanford to study writing, he’d gone to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming an actor, and role-playing is built into McMurphy’s character: he’s swept up by the men’s desire for him to be their savior. Except for the red-haired-giant externals, the authority-hating hero of the book is so much of a Nicholson role that the actor may not seem to be getting a chance to do much new in it. But Nicholson doesn’t use the glinting, funny-malign eyes this time; he has a different look–McMurphy’s eyes are father away, muggy, veiled even from himself. The role-playing is still there, in the grandstanding that McMurphy does when he returns to the ward after shock treatment; it has to be there, or there’s no way of accounting for why he’s sacrificed. But Nicholson tones it down. As McMurphy, he doesn’t keep a piece of himself out of the character, guarding it and making the audience aware that he’s got his control center and can turn on the juice. He actually looks relaxed at times, punchy, almost helpless–you can forget it’s Nicholson. McMurphy is a tired, baffled man, and with his character more unresolved he gains depth. [Director, Milos] Forman hasn’t let the McMurphy character run away with the picture, and it’s Nicholson’s best performance.

And from the same book:

Despite his excessive dynamism (and maybe partly because of it), this satirical actor has probably gone further into the tragicomedy of hardhat macho than any other actor. He exposes cracks in the barroom-character armor and makes those cracks funny, in a low-down, grungy way. With his horny leers and his little-boy cockiness and one-upmanship, he illuminates the sources of male bravado. His whole acting style is based on the little guy coming on strong, because being a tough guy is the only ideal he’s ever aspired to. This little guy doesn’t make it, of course; Nicholson is the macho loser-hero. (In an earlier era, Nicholson would probably have played big guys.)

From the most tasty blog, The Dog’s Breakfast, dig this savory tart of butternut squash with chorizo and caramelized onion.

There was a good review in the Times yesterday by Cullen Murphy. It is about a new book on Georges Remi (aka Herge), the creator of Tintin:

What’s most distinctive about Tintin is the artwork. Hergé’s trademark ligne claire style, which developed gradually, dispensed with shading and relied on inked lines of uniform weight. To accentuate that line — “the true backbone,” Hergé would insist — colors were restricted to a range of relatively soft tones. Although the characters were cartoon figures, the backgrounds were realistic, even elegant. Hergé did a vast amount of research into cars, ships, airplanes, animals. His pacing and composition owed much to movies.

You can order “Herge, Son of Tintin,” By Benoit Peeters here.

A rare MC Lyte Joint (Featuring Milk D): The Emcee.

This one is for Chyll Will, Ms. October and Dimelo. Nod your head, my dudes, it’s Monday.

And how about a little love for Johnny Otis?

Rest in Peace. A master.

Dig the range:

[Drawing by Larry Roibal]

Snow in New York.

Remembering Etta James.

Dig this one: 07 How Deep is the Ocean.

And this: Etta James – You ‘ve Changed.

[Photo Via: It’s Johnson!]

Feeling blue?

Need a pick-me-up?

Try Charles Simic’s Buster Keaton Cure:

Charlie Chaplin’s bum is at the mercy of a cruel world. Keaton, with his impassive face and a hat flat as a pancake, is a stoic. He confronts one setback after another with serenity worthy of a Buddhist monk. In one short film, “The Goat” (1921) he’s standing on the sidewalk behind two tailor’s dummies, under the impression that they are at the end of a bread line. When he discovers his mistake, he moves on quietly.

Keaton’s movies were a big success in Europe since his type of comedy doesn’t need a translation. I first saw one of his shorts in occupied Belgrade during the Second World War. I liked him instantly. His films are full of remarkable acrobatic stunts. Keaton started out in vaudeville when he was four years old working with his parents, whose comedy act included a lot of roughhousing; he was thrown by his father across the stage and sometimes even at the hecklers in the audience.

Ah, Buster. My hero.

Check out these beautiful photographs by Andrea Gentl over at the lovely site Hungry Ghost (food+travel).

[Photo Credit: Nina Ai-Artyan]

Saw me mudda last weekend in Vermont. She came over to the in-law’s and brought two apple pies. Dag, were they ever good.