varying degrees of light

The clock on my laptop reads 1 38 AM, which means it's 11 39 PM here in Mount Langley. Bear and I set up our dinner just a few minutes ago. Deep breath.

Olympia oysters pan-seared then topped with a dot of herb butter. After learning to shuck an oyster, and considering that these water-filtering gender-switching creatures are still alive through our sticking a knife into their most intimate spaces, sweeping through the muscles to reveal them in all their vulnerability, I still find myself silent and focused at the counter with a small knife. I've read that oysters are the only food we eat still fully alive. I guess I did have squid in Korea that was still moving, but I think those were "just" nerves reacting - the way a daddy longlegs' leg still spasms when you rip it apart. I know. I know. We're talking about food here. What I mean to say is that shucking an oyster is a dangerous and serious ability - like slaughtering a chicken to feed people you care about, to entice their senses and provide sustenance. And they taste so good. Even as they shrink to the size of dimes in the pan and take on the coloring and flavors of the butter, we taste the ocean.

Roast tomato. As simple as ripe, organic tomatoes, marinated for fifteen minutes in sea salt, black pepper, chopped shallots and olive oil then slow roasted at 225 degrees for... must have been almost two hours, slowly filling the kitchen with an escalating dance of comfort and sensuality. We topped with a few drops of balsamic vinegar right before serving. It was more subtle than sticking your face over a pot of tomato sauce with the music going, and friends laughing in the tail end of spring semester, but along the same lines. This bowl of tomatoes is so precious, we'll keep the juices that are left when the last piece is eaten. It might be the base to a sauce we make, or we might sop it up with a nice piece of...

Olive baguette. We purchased this at the Mount Vernon Food Coop, but we believe one Nate Smith could (and probably has) reproduce such a crusty, tasty canvas for a forkful of...

Roast vegetables - zucchini, red bell peppers, leeks and fava beans with olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt and pepper. This was probably the most visually vibrant plate we had, and a wonderful salad to behold. We could eat this all week, but we'll have polished it off in two days. (You don't understand how much we made of this. If we stuffed it in a bag and placed it under Beardface's shirt, people would ask if we were having twins.)

Salmonberry Wine, picked in May of this year from the back 17 acres of Child's Creek Farm, among the creek and muck, bottled the 4th of August... which is just last week. Beard has a winemaking store owner friend Bob who, with his dog, caught up with us on the way to the co-op for afternoon coffee. Beard gifted him four pounds of Salmonberry when he picked them so they could both make their own wine and share. Bob ranted and raved about how good Beard's was - he shared it with some winemaking aficionados (read: nice snobs) and they thoroughly enjoyed it. So we opened it tonight to see and record notes.

8/15 First Bottle (w/ Alvin) + oysters!

- tang, good berry bouquet and flavor

- very bright and refreshing

- reddish rose color

- lemon on back of tongue?

He's right and there's a very, very clean and appealing finish. It's almost a buzz on the roof of your mouth, but there's no fuzzy film left on your tongue which adds greatly to the drinkability. Right now, I'm not trying to sell this guy. It's a great wine and I'm not a huge fruit wine drinker. So, ladies, first year winemaker and single bearded guy. Must be great with kids and OK with asian life partners and goats.

I was going to take pictures, but most of the food is gone. Later, photos of wine.

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D9 was... well, it's an interesting story of how it was made... apparently a Halo movie (the xbox game) was in the works, but it fell through... and that is somehow related to this... where Producer Peter Jackson approached Director Neill Blomkamp and basically said, "Do whatever you want and I'll support it. I'm Peter Jackson." Whatever Peter Jackson touches is studio insurance (even mediocre, three-hour King Kong with a world profit of well over $250 million). So previews were all over the place, a creative marketing strategy for the bigger cities was executed and a bunch of girls rolled their eyes. When a movie gets well over 90% on Rottentomatoes, it's kind of a big deal, but those usually aren't movies that might be described as "Not enough like Time Traveller's Wife," or "Too much like Transformers, not enough like... insert geeky sci-fi movie here," or even "Where are the boobies?" Let's talk about the flaws first.

The first half or so of the film took a documentary-style to relay the exposition of the plot - interviews and "stock" footage of anti-alien/non-human regulations. The second half is the Transformers/Harrison Ford/Bourne with shakier camera and quick cuts. There was one POV of the alien looking out the window, he is dejected and... claw-cuffed and hopelessly observing some physical abuse and the POV shot itself is swooping all over the place. That, and the gross content, with the cherry coke and theater popcorn, led to a pretty rough headache.

It dipped, for just a few scenes, into the sentimental. The rogue alien and cast-off human kneel before each other, wounded and bleeding with bullets tearing all around them. They look each other in the eye - one set is kind of gray and blue, the other is yellow and black. "We stick together! I'm not leaving you!"

That being said, it's pretty impressive that the film had the audience to resonate emotionally with the aliens. Glory had us caring about Denzel Washington, WallE had us crying for a robot that only said one word, and District 9 had us rooting for a prawny, skeletal creature from space. Nice.

The metaphorical significance somewhat dissolved itself as the specific resolution was being sought out. I think I'm OK with that because it gave way for character structure and decision, but I'm not too OK with as simplified a resolution as, "They have the thing we need, let's go Die Hard on their asses. Thug life." I should have said that I'm not a big sci-fi viewer, and maybe it all dwindles down to the geeky guy getting really mad and picking up a gun that makes people explode in order to make a movie.

I guess the previews led me to believe that the black muck the guy gets sprayed with is some sort of initial infection that would spread, of course, to other humans, which is why the aliens are there in the first place... like several other alien films or, even worse, some vampire flicks and, even better, a handful of zombie flicks. One guy gets infected and starts spewing his business on everyone else, the aliens successfully plague another planet. How many movies are coming to mind right now? Independence Day, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, The Faculty etc. That's not what happens here. What happens is, the guy goes back in time to see what his wife was like when she was, like, six years old. It's OK! It's not creepy because he tells this little girl, while they're standing alone in a field, that he's going to marry her someday. Not creepy. Romantic.

Right?

Happy Allison's birthday. Allison, all my friends like you better than they like me. Enjoy it.