bottleofmalibu

bottleofmalibu turned 13 years old on Saturday.

“It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann and the Holocaust

"In intimacy she was a charming and lively companion; she knew how to joke without bad taste and could be ironical without unkindness." — Gustave Thibon on Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Introduction

"I knew I was gay when I was thirteen, but I hid it for years. I folded it and slipped it under the rest of my emotional clutter. Not worth the hassle. No one will care anyway. If I can just keep making it smaller, smaller, smaller.... My shame took the form of a shrug, but it was shame. I’m a white, cis man from an upper-middle class liberal family. Acceptance was never a question. But still, suspended in all this privilege, I balked. It took me years. It’s ongoing. I’m saying this now because I have conspicuously not said it before. I’ve been out for years in my private life, but never quite publicly. I’ve played that tedious game. Most painfully, I’ve talked about the gay characters I’ve played from a neutral, almost anthropological distance, as if they were separate from me. These evasions are bizarre and embarrassing to me now, but at the time they were natural. Discretion was default, and it seemed benign. It would be presumptuous to assume anyone would care, yeah? And anyway, why should I have to say anything? What right do strangers have to the intimate details of my life? These and other background whispers – new, softer forms of the same voices from when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.... Shame can come heavy and loud, but it can come quiet too; it can take cover behind comfort and convenience. But it’s always violent. For me, this discretion has become airless. I don’t want to censor – consciously or not – the ways I talk, sit, laugh, or dress, the stories I tell, the jokes I make, my points of reference and connection. I don’t want to be complicit, even peripherally, in the idea that being gay is a problem to be solved or hushed. I’m grateful to be gay. Queerness is a solution. It’s a promise against cliche and solipsism and blandness; it’s a tilted head and an open window. I value more everyday the people, movies, books, and music that open me to it. If you’re gay, bi, trans, two-spirit or questioning, if you’re confused, if you’re in pain or you feel you’re alone, if you aren’t or you don’t: You make the world more surprising and bearable." — Connor Jessup

“I simply think texture is an important and underrated part of a dish in the Western conception of cuisine. Americans like to focus on crunch, but in Chinese cooking, chewiness is also valued. Nian gao has the perfect texture when fried. It’s crunchy, chewy, and it sticks just enough to make the taste linger in the mouth, so you enjoy it longer. The simplicity of the flavour allows you to focus on the way it feels on your tongue,” he says, sweeping the peanuts into a bowl and moving onto what looks like lemongrass.

“I just wish we were less explicitly obvious about who we think our readers are and what their frame of reference is.”