Thing of the Week: A Stranger's Straight to Hell Tattoo; This Weird Thing Some Chick Said on 'Chopped' Last Weekend; How Should A Person Be?

LJ'S THING OF THE WEEK: A Stranger's Straight to Hell Tattoo 

Two days ago my friend Charlie wrote me a text message reading Just put on lose this skin at a 4th of July party and a friend said he saw Joe & the mescaleros and tymon played it and I'm eating noodle salad, which would have been the best Clash-related thing that happened to me this week if a stranger with a Straight to Hell tattoo hadn't come into my work the next day. But what happened was a stranger with a Straight to Hell tattoo came into my work the next day, and I loved him.  

        The stranger's Straight to Hell tattoo was of the cards/skull/words picture from the Straight to Hell single seen above (only minus the words "The Clash," which makes it cooler in my opinion because to get it you have to be in the know), and it was on the inside of his left forearm. I didn't fall in love with him, because he was old, but in the wake of this event it has become obvious that I probably couldn't fall in love with anybody who doesn't have a Straight to Hell tattoo, so that complicates things. 

        When I first saw the stranger's tattoo, I freaked out. I was deliriously exhausted as it was, and a weird thing happened to my body. My jubilation made me light-headed, and I thought I might pass out. "OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR STRAIGHT TO HELL TATTOO SO MUCH," I exclaimed, and he seemed a bit taken aback, so I calmed down and cleared my throat and told him, "Straight to Hell is my favorite Clash song," which was when he came around to me. "Me too," he said, "Since I was eighteen." 

       I wanted to break down and sob into his arms and tell him every single Clash-related thing that's ever happened to me; instead I cleared out my head a bit and tried to tersely and coherently explain as much as I could about my relationship with the Clash within the confines of a socially acceptable timeframe. We shared a heavy but brief exchange about the concept of #CLASHLIFE, and by the end we were both a little teary-eyed. When he left he called me "Sweetheart" in the Clashiest and least-sleazy way any middle-aged man could ever call a young woman sweetheart. It's just like Joe Strummer said: "Without people, you're nothing."

LIZ'S THING OF THE WEEK: This Weird Thing Some Chick Said on Chopped Last Weekend 

 

Do you guys ever watch Chopped? It's this show on the Food Network where four chefs compete for $10,000 and there's three rounds and in each round the contestants are given four bonkers ingredients and 20 or 30 minutes to create a dish from said ingredients. It's so good, I'm addicted, I highly recommend it. Last weekend there was an episode in which one of the contestants was this super-wacky Laurie Anderson-esque chef named Gillie Holme (that's her, on the left) and in the first round the chefs were given peking duck, cape gooseberries, biscuit dough, and eggplant to make their appetizer. Chef Gillie was kind of an asshole about the biscuit dough ("hideous," she called it) and for some reason it took her like nine years to figure out how to open the tube. Her dish was kinda lame; she didn't really do much to "marry" the ingredients or whatever the hell, and the judges gave her major guff about just baking up the biscuit and flopping it down on the plate. But then Gillie said this amazing thing, while defending her biscuit decision to the judges: "I would like each of you to go with me on the journey of assembling your own interesting biscuit," she told them. It didn't fly, of course; Chef Gillie was "chopped" in the first round. But I think that's a really cool sentiment. We should all join each other on the journey of assembling our own interesting biscuits: free-spirited and free-thinking, yet totally united and supportive of one another's striving to create the yummiest, most interesting biscuit we can. That's so beautiful, guys. I am so thankful for Chef Gillie.

JEN'S THING OF THE WEEK: How Should A Person Be? 

I started reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? On Tuesday. I’m almost finished and I wish I wasn’t. I’m really loving this book. I love it. I feel excited and acknowledged. It makes you (me) want to make art and talk. It’s about thinking and not and being alive and trying to make art as a woman right now and female friendships and sex and email and everything else, really.  Believe the hype. A special bonus is that Sheila is a writer living in Toronto drinking Campari & sodas so I am thinking of LJ often while reading.