Lay down on the mat and count to three

Well it's been an interesting few days, if only for the fact that I've been busier than ever and not especially pleased about it. Now, before you beat me over the head with your trusty work ethic, puritan or otherwise, know that this problem isn't ultimately one of quantity but rather one of quality.

First of all, those who know me will recognize that I'm an unlikely candidate for producing matter of fact coverage on celebrity hair styles. I thought I had clearance to write up a slightly bemused examination of why one might be a committed barber shop or salon patron, but no dice. This angle was enjoyable because I got to make reference to The Godfather and an early Howard Hawk's gangster flick, as a matter of setting the scene. Eventually I was disabused of this approach by the editorial powers that be, and forced to write about David Beckham's faux hawk. It was, dear friends, a soul destroying defeat, and I've been scrubbing the single digit I use for typing obsessively ever since, futilely trying to get the dirty off.

I had hoped to ease into the holiday this week, but have had my deadline pushed forward fairly abruptly at Freehold Weekly (the UAE's premier wrestling journal) and now find myself straining to form the requisite number of sentences by close of business. You may be wondering why I'm posting here then, but in doing so you would be betraying your own managerial tendencies, which, really shouldn't be spoken of in public, or private. I subscribe to sufficiency instead, if I can meet my deadline then I've passed the test, everything other than actual typing (with my single aching finger) constitutes a lunch break. Soon, I'm hoping to take a week long lunch break-- I wonder what I'll eat?

These small setbacks aren't so small when you're living 8000 miles from home, although this is a good time to mention that our many ex-pat and local friends here in Dubai are a great comfort, and have made much effort to include us in their holiday plans. Still, I'm afraid I'm mostly lacking any holiday spirit and currently find Dubai a place to be endured more than enjoyed. I miss Oakland, and find it difficult to trust a city that favors cinderblock dormitories and slave wages over free range homeless people with their festive hats and carts full of liberated recyclables. 

I suppose I'm making the point that both places have their share of problems, yet somehow one's own domestic troubles (in the municipal sense) seem much less menacing than those of a strange land that is overtaken every four hours or so by the eery atonal yodeling of call to prayer. I cannot, at this point, really ever imagine feeling completely at home here, and that's probably OK. Please don't think less of me, I have always been a Cancerian creature of comfort. Yet, whenever I travel I have the sense that life remains essentially unchanged almost everywhere you go, which isn't to say that different corners of the world don't experience an undue share of suffering, but that the fundamental rituals of being alive each day remain surprisingly similar. I suppose it's those relatively small differences that make us who we are, meaning that if you talk fancy and like your baked beans savory you then must be from the UK, while someone like me prefers sweetened baked beans and knows that soccer is visually inferior to basketball. So from my personal viewpoint, Beckham and his crap TV show, faux hawk, and pug nosed bride, can all go pound sand. 

What I'm working on this week

1. In search of a Men's hair care philosophy; Barber Shop versus Salon. 1000 words. I found a couple of really charming Pakistani barbers, but of the three chairs only one has a tenuous grasp on english. I asked him what advice he had for balding men and he said, "no problem, if less hair I charge less."

2. How t0 make a marinade, featuring Ricardo's Mom's Chicken Adobo by way of Nate Dalton. 250 tiny words. Nate has some advice of his own for balding men, which he offers in protest to the trendy Kojak look: "Be a man, just be bald." 

Here's the first draft:

Ingredients:

Whole Chicken, cut into pieces
1 10 oz. Can Coconut Milk
1 Bay Leaf
1 clove Garlic, smashed not cut
1 cup 7-Up
2 cups Soy Sauce

Dutch Oven
Measuring Cup

Cut up one whole chicken making sure that the resulting pieces will all fit in a standard casserole dish without peeking over the lip of the container. Use a plastic cutting board, and make sure to wipe down any surfaces that the raw chicken comes into contact with.

Fill the casserole dish with 500 ml of soy sauce. Peel one large garlic bulb, and add the smashed (not cut) cloves to the dish. Also drop in one whole bay leaf. If you prefer a sweeter taste add 250 ml of 7-up.

Cover the dish and place it in the refrigerator over night.

Remove the chicken from the marinade and pat dry, preferably using a non-linting type of towel, you don't want to be picking lint out of your dinner. Fry the chicken on medium high heat in a Dutch Oven until browned. If you don't have a traditional ceramic dutch oven, any pot that has a cover and is suitable for baking will suffice.

Strain the solids from the remaining marinade and pour it into the dutch oven and place the whole thing in the non- dutch oven at 350 for 15 minutes or fully until cooked. Once the chicken is through, set it aside and add one can of coconut milk to the marinade, reducing until proper viscosity is achieved. Serve the chicken over rice, ladling on the final marinade as desired.

3. Must have gadget's. This one's pretty self explanatory, I will definitely be promoting the Nikon D-40 which is an amazing value. By the way, if you click on the pictures a high resolution version will open in a new window, then you can see what I mean. 650 words.

4. Sustainable Developments in the Gulf Region. In which the solar powered oil derrick final gets some good press. I think all PR people might be part of the same huge inbred gene pool, because they so often seem incapable of dredging up the very basic resources that their clients have tasked them with providing. Individual realtors are always better at getting back to me than developers, whose PR toadies are too busy setting up facebook pages. Maybe it's my common-man circa 1998 hotmail address that gives me that faint whiff of blow-off-ery. 1500 words.

Also, I somehow missed the towering Christmas Tree at MOE when I was there for my home stereo assignment. The tree is surrounded by a pink clad polar bear santa and his ice skating penguin chums, who whiz by excitingly on an electric rail. 

I don't find any of this the least bit perplexing, in fact I've decided that the commercialism of the holiday is actually less worrisome in a Muslim country. The decorations surely arrived with the malls, and now they're here to stay. This is afterall, a country that has it's own shopping mascot, a distant Pac-man cousin by the name of Modesh.

Anyway, two trips to the mall in one week proved to be too much for me, and I was forced to hide out in MOE's movie theater, leaving Ness to shop for boots on her own, although I did assist in the final decision once I'd seen all the lovable Zoo escapees settled in Africa. Madgascar 2, which was the only film with an appropriate start time, is either a work of great cinematic charm, or I was just extremely relieved to escape the mall. I didn't even really mind the catered event taking place in the seat next to me, although short ribs seem like a strange choice for movie food, even if it is TGIThursday's signature dish.

Winter on the inside

Apparently it takes an Islamic country to bring Christmas decorations to a less blaring volume, and while there are plenty of tree decorations and stockings in sight, we are at least spared some of the traditional grotesquery. Just yesterday I spent several hours tooling around Mall of the Emirates researching a 700 word primer on buying a stereo. The first editorial stricture was that all the products I wrote about had to be available at this particular mall, and the second was that the article should avoid sucking. Happily MOE offers a wide range of equipment, spanning a variety of incomparably nasal computer speakers to the stern looking but highly musical and esoteric McIntosh amplifier, a version of which once helped Jerry Garcia to kick out his loping electric jams.

MOE is also home to climate scoffing Ski Dubai, a nearly 10,000 square foot indoor ski park, now featuring a permanent Picabo Street exhibit, wherein the former Olympian and Mountain Dew shill entertains onlookers by trading ski tips for clean clothes and/or hot meals at MOE's  St. Moritz cafe. I haven't yet had a chance to set ski-boot inside what is essentially the world's largest walk-in freezer, but each time I visit the mall I'm drawn to it's glowing facade. Ski Dubai is like some huge and frigid human terrarium, it's inhabitants forced into unwitting visual harmony by their rental togs. Because the best views are reserved for the many dining establishments that skirt the park, and I'm currently adhering to the kind of fiscal diet that encourages eating at home, my pictures offer only the most cursory views of Ski Dubai. Someday, when the economy thaws out I'll take some shots from the inside.

Upon exiting the mall I encountered a puzzling art-show/corporate ad campaign that refers to itself as The Art of Can. All submissions contained some vestige of, or reference to, a Red Bull can, a guideline that made the paintings excruciatingly bad in particular. While anyone seeking thoughtful consideration of contemporary art would be better served visiting Rob's excellent blog, I can tell you that my reaction to the show varied from amusement over it's brazenly compromised premise, to genuine admiration of the craftsmanship evident in certain submissions. While the included submission is perhaps genuinely inspired by Rodin, I choose to think of it as a pun on the word "can", one that might be titled "The Art of going to the Can" or, maybe just "Rodin on the Can."

Cowrite commitment

So, I suspect two things-- the first is that photographing your own writing and posting it on the internet is both redundant (I could just paste in the text) and a little like singing your college application essay and dropping a CD-R off at the admissions office because mp3 just doesn't sound as good. My other suspicion, is that this will get annoying if I keep doing it. Still, there are two points which I'd like to make, the first is that I do have employment of some sort, and second that Vanessa is an awesome researcher and writing partner. We're teaming up on screen play based on this blog,  actually, it's just a slideshow of this blog adapted for IMAX.