Random Interests

i think i found my new favorite artist on twitter

Circa 1900. This 14k gold pendant features two green gold ginkgo leaves and matte enamel. Resting on the leaves is a bezel set opal and the spines of the leaves are fitted with diamonds set in platinum. The stems shimmer with baroque pearls. Perfectly Art Nouveau

That list might say things like “Paint a picture. Go birdwatching. Finish that great novel I started reading. Call my grandma. Learn to bake a cake. Visit my sister. Play piano.”

— then it's art nouveau

and if the sexy lady has a bob cut or a hair cap and is wearing a column or flapper dress; there's a lot of geometry like rectangles, arches, rays, and diamonds; angels have super sharp wings and a lot of muscles; everything is steel, concrete, marble, gold, and red velvet seats; everything is VERY angular; and all the foliage is basically papyrus fronds; things feel vaguely Egyptian or Turkish or Mesopotamian; the fonts play with being very skinny or very thick and are sans serif with extra lines; or Gatsby would be found floating dead in that pool

— with lots of lush flora, tiny insects (like dragonflies) or graceful birds, stained glass, iron, warm golden lighting, lots of wood and wood carving (but now it's more wood paneling), a stylistic fondness for Japan, line weight variation in the font, and tile (but this time it's carved or sculpted on, not tiny mosaic)

but you're worried it's art deco

— because the forms (especially foliage) are very symmetrical and slightly more angular or blocky and graphic looking, things are more rectangular than circular or curvy in architecture, the patterns repeat more often, and more of the lamps are pyramids or rectangular, and there are nods to Egyptian or Ottoman style, and they used the color red (probably in an accent chair or carpet rug)

BUT there's no steel, concrete, gold plating or gilding, marble, big muscles, spiky or radiating diamond shapes, angular people, or flappers,

AND the vibes are jacobean, gothic, or spanish mission revival; they love some brick and stone; the wallpaper is an explosion of colorful pattern that could give you arsenic poisoning or help depict a descent into postpartum psychosis in a famous short story; but there are NO people to be seen, not even sexy ladies,

Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?

Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.

Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.

Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.

His early recreational experiences prepared him for a career as a tummler, amusing Jewish businesspeople on holiday. Yet even then, Brooks offered a tragicomic twist, prefiguring Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by appearing circa 1940 schlepping two suitcases and leaping fully clothed into a swimming pool as a mock gesture of suicidal despair because business was purportedly bad. The young Brooks was flummoxed by school lessons portraying Jews as simultaneously plutocrats and their anarchistic enemies. His 1991 tragicomedy Life Stinks, echoing the Book of Job in the Bible, is perhaps part of his inner investigation of the place of Jews in American society.

Complicating this understanding was antisemitic propaganda during Brooks’ youth. The German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 to denounce President Franklin Roosevelt as a Jew whose real name was “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” and scorn Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” For Brooks, who worshipped Roosevelt, this ethnic stereotyping was all too credible. At 17, he enlisted in the military, and like Don Rickles, another diminutive Jewish comedian who survived combat during World War II, Brooks emerged with an explosive penchant for humor as violence. The savage ridicule of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers was authenticated by early experience against Nazi adversaries in The Battle of the Bulge.

Rather than try to untangle such complexities, Brooks has tended to sum up life’s wisdom in bits of homespun wisdom attributed to his relatives, like “Never run for a bus; There’ll always be another” on the 2000 Year Old Man comedy album.

As a young comedy writer for Sid Caesar, he worked with the head writer Mel Tolkin (born Shmuel Tolchinsky near Odessa, Ukraine) who advised him to read Russian literature, and this acquaintance with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and even the antisemitic Dostoyevsky, made an indelible impression. Comedy in the latter two writers, born of absurd pain, transfixed Brooks, who would go on to adapt a novel by two Ukrainian Jews, Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Feinsilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev) in the 1970 film The Twelve Chairs.

Although not a box office success, Twelve Chairs gave the English Jewish actor Ron Moody one of his few leading roles on film, after starring as the villainous Jew Fagin in the stage musical Oliver! and its screen adaptation in 1968. About Russian anti-Jewish pogroms, Brooks concurred with his friend Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that the violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”

This comic fury was expressed by Brooks to Jewish friends like Howard Morris, a Bronx-born fellow comedian working with Sid Caesar, who was repeatedly mugged by Brooks, once by tying him up and stealing his wallet on a Greenwich Village street, and again in a Central Park rowboat. These ludicrous, yet intensely realized and enacted pranks were part of his persona over the past century.

And critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he has long referred to as “crickets,” were other targets of aggression, as Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan notes. The apotheosis of feedback deriding opinionated filmgoers is Brooks’ narration as a grumpy old Jew kvetching about avant-garde images in the Oscar-winning 1963 short film The Critic, directed by the American Jewish filmmaker Ernest Pintoff. As animated shapes form and reform, Brooks-as-Jewish-spectator concludes: “I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.” With each Jewish cinemagoer being an amateur Freud, the need for most critics is hilariously eliminated.

Similarly, Brooks became his own songwriter in hit musicals, despite lacking any memorable melodic gift. So he borrowed from Brahms the tune for the theme song of Twelve Chairs. The song characteristically expresses a generous life philosophy with the lines “You could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst/ hope for the best, expect the worst.” Mentioning the sentimental bestselling American Jewish author Fannie Hurst was part of Brooks’ all-inclusive optic, writing leading roles for African American performers like Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles, a part eventually played by Cleavon Little. And Brooks’ affectionate recognition, albeit mocking, of gay men in The Producers continued in 1983 with his remake of To Be or Not to Be, in which he interpolated a rescue of Sasha, a flamboyant dresser, from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.

Brooks’ equally wide-ranging literary sensibilities are evident in a series of films produced by his Brooksfilms company, a number of them with an Anglophile flavor. Of these, his 1987 production of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, an ode to bibliophilia, offered a plausible Jewish role for his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft.

Edwardian 9ct Gold Pendant Brooch set with Opals & Rubies

Ingredients

Yield: 4 servings

¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, divided

3 garlic cloves, minced

½ teaspoon crushed red pepper

¼ teaspoon dried oregano

1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

2 (15- to 16-ounce) cans chickpeas, rinsed

Salt

½ cup panko or fresh bread crumbs

1 ounce Parmesan cheese, finely grated (½ cup firmly packed freshly grated or ¼ cup pre-grated)

8 ounces fresh mozzarella

Chopped fresh parsley or basil (optional), for serving

Preparation

Wow, this is genuinely excellent. I ate SO much. If you live in a country with plausible non-dairy cheese, all of your vegan friends are about to desire you carnally.

It's also super tasty even without the cheesy breadcrumbs (I forgor). When I remembered them and threw it back in the oven, it went from wholesome and comforting delicious to rich and indulgent delicious. Very wonderful, will definitely make again.