TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I only lived in Portland for two years, although it’s hard to imagine that so many bad things happened in such a short about of time. Most of the bad things that happened to me there were a direct result of my actions–or, more precisely, a direct result of my alcohol consumption, which was high, though in no way atypical in Portland. Actually, not all of the bad things were a direct result of my decision to, say, quit a full-time job with benefits and a company cell phone because working before noon was incompatible with my hangover. There was, for instance, the time the sewage main in my apartment building backed up into the drain in my bathtub, which felt like the city itself was shitting on me. This situation certainly wasn’t helped by drinking all day while I waited for the plumber–I peed in the alley beside my building in full daylight, twice–but most of the other bad shit was my fault. Still, even though I now recognize that it was me with the problem, not Portland, I find the love-affair everyone under fifty and to the left of Congress has with the city an annoying reminder of two really bad years. For this reason, I avoided watching the first season of Portlandia, which seemed like a TV version of a Keep Portland Weird bumper sticker: tacky, self-congratulatory, and, like the city itself, not really funny. But after reading Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker profile of Portlandia creators Carrie Brownstein–the former guitar player from Sleater Kinney–and Fred Armisen–the not-famous guy from SNL–I decided to try it out. Besides, it’s been four years since I moved and it’s not as if Portland broke up with me, right? I mean, I’m the one who left. Surely I could handle a few hours of Portlandia landscapes–which look nothing like the city for the ten months of the year when it is choked by drizzle–without collapsing into my dislike for the city, which started soon after my girlfriend kicked me and my drinking problem out.

Portlandia is a sketch comedy show with Brownstein and Armisen doing caricatures of Portland’s subcultures. You have the ultra-feminists, the fixed-gear cyclists, the dumpster-divers, and players in an adult hide-n-seek league acting, respectively, dogmatic, obnoxious, disgusting, and infantile. The sketches are all pretty much the same: take a stereotype and stretch it to the extreme. Make the people who quiz servers about the origin of their chicken leave the table to check out the chicken’s free-range home for themselves. Take the couple who pickles everything and make them pickle everything. This formula was funny for a minute before I got bored and started tallying the number of times I wrecked my bike on the streetcar tracks after getting shitfaced with a bunch of strangers when I lived in Portland. Better than the actual show is synopsis from Talbot, who writes that it’s about “campaigners against any theoretical attempt to bring the Olympics to Portland and animal lovers so out of touch that they free a pet dog tied up outside a restaurant,” which does sound pretty funny.

What should be enjoyable about Portlandia is that, even as a farce, it shows a place not so different from many other left-leaning cities and towns. Sure, Portland is quirky with it’s sanctioned pillow fights and double-decker bikes, but it’s no quirkier than Asheville, where I periodically attended college while dumpster diving everything from bagels to sushi, working in a lesbian bookstore, and judging women who shaved their armpits. Portlandia could be about Carborro, North Carolina, where I moved after Portland: a town of 20,000 people that passed a resolution opposing the Iraq War and where a completely unqualified transgendered woman came close to winning the 2008 mayoral race because how cool would it be to have a trans mayor? Portland’s just not that different. It may be known for it’s locavore movement and the multitude of drummers with tattoos of inanimate objects, but you see just as many toasters with wings on peoples’ biceps and Eat Local tote-bags at the farmer’s market in Durham, North Carolina, where the hot social event is vegan brunch at the queer bar. But more so than yogis and cyclists and kombucha babies, what cities like Portland and Asheville, Carrboro and Durham, San Francisco and Austin have in common is an immense love of self. People are just so proud to live in all these places. And this is what I dislike about Portlandia: the show pokes fun at hipsters and freegans and earnestness itself, but it does so while patting itself on the back for being just so special.

The sketches that succeed do so because they are less about Portland and more about Portlandia’s audience. One of my favorites is “Did You Read That,” in which Brownstein and Armisen battle each other across a table: Did read that thing in the New Yorker last week about how golf is an analogy for marriage? Did you read the thing in McSweeney’s comparing cd tracks and album tracks? Did you read that thing in Mother Jones? Did you read that thing in Spin? Paste? Dwell? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The phone book? That fortune cookie? Those menus? As someone who frequently–though with embarrassment–starts conversations with, “So I was reading this piece in the New Yorker,” this skit made me laugh. It was, after all, about me. And that’s why Portlandia appeals to people: we all like to see ourselves. The same people who are laughing at “We Can Pickle That!” are people who actually can pickle that. But I don’t pickle and I’m not vegan; I haven’t dumpster-dived since college and I’ve been shaving my armpits for years. So maybe that’s why I dislike Portland and Portlandia–they represent a type of person who I fundamentally am not: those with optimism and a passion for their home and the honest belief that what the world needs is more birds on things.

What follows is a review of Julie Powell’s new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Disclosure: what I have is the advance copy, so I’m actually reviewing a late draft of the book. Also, I have yet to and probably won’t finish it, so I’m actually reading a late draft of I book I’ve only skimmed.
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Julie Powell, author of Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, is really, really lucky. She started a blog, got a book deal, the resulting book was made into a (pretty good) movie, she met Meryl Streep, knows the answer to everyone’s favorite fantasy question (Who would play me in the movie of my life?) and got a Wikipeida entry. And why? Because the timing was right. Julie Powell started blogging before even technophobic grandparents with mild Alzheimers had a Blogspot. Her blog isn’t even that interesting. Let me paraphrase a recent post: “It’s New Year’s! I should lose ten pounds.” Compare this to my New Year’s post: “It’s New Year’s! I’m going to see if I can get to my low weight of six pounds, eight ounces by eating Capt’n Crunch until the insides of my cheeks are so torn up that the only food that doesn’t cause blood to pool in my mouth is distilled water. Also, work out more.” Who would you rather go to a strip club with? Someone whose dream is a dinner date with Julia Child or someone whose dream is a temp job as a census-taker? Bad example. Point is, her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Meat, Marriage, and Obsession, is less fun than accidentally swallowing beer with a cigarette butt at the bottom.

The fundamental problem with Cleaving is that, after the success of Julie and Julia, Little, Brown, & Co. tried to capitalize on Powell’s new found literary and cinematic fame too early. Not a year went by since the movie’s premier when Powell’s sophomore attempt hit the discount bin. What happened in that time? Well, a lot. Namely, Powell got rich and famous, which is a story we all want to read and hopefully emulate. But did Powell chose to write From Minimum Wage to Meryl Streep: The Julie Powell Story? No. She chose to write about her unpaid internship at a butcher shop.

The premise: Julie Powell throws away her marriage for a lover named D. (This itself annoyed me. Why not give the adulterer a better pseudonym? At least call him Dick or something.) Her husband of ten years—who not only put up with her “year of cooking dangerously” when he just wanted some Kung Pao Chicken and a back rub, but was also portrayed as somewhat of a wuss in the movie—finds out, cries a lot, and is generally treated like a bad ant infestation by his famous wife. They stay together, but Powell moves to upstate New York to apprentice as a butcher for six months, all the while ignoring her husband’s efforts towards reconciliation because she’s waiting for a text from her former lover even after he’s moved on. And while I know what it’s like to obsess over someone else to the point of callous unconcern for the person you’ve made a life with, Powell almost seems proud of her adultery. I don’t care if you think that your fuck puppet is the love or your life, cheating isn’t nice. Just cut the fucker lose before you buy a time-share with the new guy.

Speaking of Julie Powell and her fuck puppet, reading about the author’s trysts was as comfortable as introducing your parents to your former professor/current lover. Every time Powell laid down some detail about her affair, I pictured Amy Adams, who played Powell in Julie & Julia and is cute but not sexy and also has a gummy smile, doing the illicit. Besides, reading about sex generally makes me uncomfortable. Although Mazog recently said this blog is about “raunchy gay sex,” I’m actually part Mennonite and part vanilla ice cream and thinking about Amy Adams ‘opening up like a grinning harlot flower,’ when D slaps her across the face makes me feel like I did five minutes ago when I saw my landlord manscaping through the window. I admit that after Google Imaging Julie Powell and seeing that she looks human as opposed to preternaturally sexless and gummy, my discomfort lessened a bit, but the sex scenes still made me squirmy.

And so, why I will not finish Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, in bullets:

• Terrible pop culture references. Various epigraphs include quotes from a Decemberists’ song, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and from Veronica Mars, a show beloved by teens throughout the middle states. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste as I’d rather have “Birthday Sex” stuck in my head for all of Spring 2010 than listen to a single Decemberists’ song, but why not use something that resonates with more than those still ruing the death of Buffy, a population composed solely of gay boys born between 1980 and 1985? While this may seem small, it speaks to a larger problem: this book is built with an expiration date. As much as I’d like to believe that the immediacy of blogs easily transitions to the printed page, it just doesn’t. Will a book that refers to Anya the Vengeance Demon, Little Feat, texting, and BlackBerries be anything but dated in 2011, when, instead of drunk dialing, we drunk time-travel? Yes, plenty of books are meant to be read right now (See: Sarah Palin’s American Rogue and Twitter for Dummies), but Cleaving was meant to last and it won’t.

• Product placement. I counted seventy-four references to Powell’s beloved BlackBerry, which is much like Season Two of Gossip Girl, in which even the cocktails are made with Vitamin Water. Even worse, I doubt BlackBerry ponied up any cash for this endorsement, which is free advertising I just can’t respect with the exception of the argyle sweater vest with a prominent Tommy Hilfiger patch that I’m wearing right now.

• It’s hard to read. I don’t mean Infinite Jest hard-to-read, I mean IKEA manual hard-to-read. Example: after reading a 476 word passage on Frenching rib ends, I know nothing about Frenching ribs or even what Frenching ribs is, but, even if I understood this passage, it seems like it’s only there to fulfill Powell’s minimum page requirement. I get that cutting meat is intense and dirty and maybe even sensual, but if I wanted to French a rib, I would Google that shit. Cleaving isn’t just full of “practical” information like this, it’s also full of recipes. Again, filler. No one reads memoirs for recipes. No one. Stop it. You’re lying. You read cookbooks.

• Terrible metaphors, especially for a book that is basically a 303-page-long metaphor (Butchering as catharsis? Redemption? Sex?). In the aforementioned 476 word paragraph, Powell writes, “The crown is about the same circumference a garbage can lid, the white rib bones splayed atop it, the eyes of the chops plumped out below like a muffin top over too-tight jeans, if muffin tops were to be considered lusciously attractive.” I mostly read this book in bed, making mental notes because the last time I tried to write in bed, I woke up with blue ink in my hair. Because of this, every time I found I passage that bothered me, I folded the page over, hoping I’d be able to identify the offending part the next morning. In this passage, it was obvious. Muffin top? Please.

• Julie Powell is dirty, and I’m not just talking about sex. Powell doesn’t shower after a shift up to her elbows in edible carcass. I’ve previously discussed my own tendency to be obsessive about cleanliness, but every time she mentions falling asleep splattered with the blood and juice and bits of bone, I can’t think of anything until I come across the sentence, “And then I took a shower.” It’s distracting.

• When flipping through the final chapters of the book, I came across a few emails written between Powell and D. The final one was signed with an actual name!!! I won’t spoil it for you, but remember the penultimate scene in the Sex And The City series, when SJP is walking down the street and her phone rings and it is finally revealed that Big’s name is actually John? That worked in SATC because viewers had wondered what the man’s given name was for about a decade. But here? No one cares about D and no one cares about his name and it’s a stupid way to end a book. Maybe they took it out in the final draft. Hope so.

I will, however, admit that Cleaving wasn’t a total waste of time, although when your plan for the day involves taking an online aptitude test and cleaning the litter box, very little can be considered a waste of time. But I did learn a few important things from the text….

• Left-handed presidents include Obama, Clinton, Bush the Elder, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Hoover, and Garfield (159).

• Pig skulls are so thick that when shot in the head, the bullet merely stuns the unhappy animal and it can’t actually be rendered into breakfast until after you’ve shoved a pick into its coratid artery (87).

• Various recipes, including Valentine’s Day Liver for Two, Juan’s Mother’s Blood Sausage, A Nice, Simple Way to Make Short Ribs, Taking A Boning Knife To Your Spouse, and Trading Self-Worth for a Little Hotel Strange.

It’s not just facts and recipes, however, that I learned from Julie Powell. She also makes me feel better about myself. Why?

• Since I have recently taken real and positive steps to curb my own excessive drinking, I’ve taken up judging other peoples’ substance problems. And you, Julie Powell, are a sloppy drunk (i.e. “Meathead Holiday,” AKA the chapter about Christmas. Don’t barf in front of your parents. It’s tacky.).

• I have never spent fifteen semi-naked minutes against a hotel wall with a stranger who called me a “pretty little whore.”

• Given the accolades Powell received after J&J, I’d write a riveting memoir about what it’s like to go from sleeping on my mom’s couch to sleeping in your mom’s bed. Give the people what they want.

Let’s skip to the end. Actually, let’s not. I’m not going to finish Cleaving now, but I’ll pick it up again the next time I’m feeling jealous of anyone who has been able to make an actual living doing the things they want to do: those who publish in books and magazines, those who leave the butcher shop covered in blood but still smiling, those who would give it away even if they weren’t getting paid. It’ll remind me that there’s only so much work you can do: sometimes it’s just luck and timing that gets you the book deal and the movie and the second home and the frequent flier miles. I’m jealous of Julie Powell, yes, but I don’t want to be Julie Powell.