LOOK AT LIFE / COCO HAMES

Garlic and mustard and linens and face creams - these are a few of my favorite things...

By Coco Hames

My friend always sends those quizzes around, you know the ones where it's a bunch of questions about you?  Whenever I've worked in offices, and been stuck at a computer, they're really fun to fill out.  You know, stuff like...

When's your birthday? May 4 (same as Audrey Hepburn and Julian Barratt).

What's your favorite color? Black or white or grey or a combo.

What's your favorite place?  Either the south of France or western North Carolina.

Who would play you in a movie? Alan Rickman or Jeanne Moreau.

Favorite sport? SEC football, but that's about it.

What word or phrase do you overuse?  I say "Oh..." when I don't want to answer something, in a scornful but playful way, like my Grandma Max did, which she may or may not have gotten from Agnes Moorehead in The Magnificent Ambersons.

Beach or mountains? Mountains.

Dogs or cats? DOGS.  Goddamnit I hate cats.

On and on it goes.  But they never give me enough room.

I like all-white linens because they are aesthetically pleasing (in that they are not aesthetically disturbing) and because you can bleach them.  Only partially because color towels look gross and it's gross to get pilly little red or black balls in your armpits after you've just taken a shower.  All-white linens are good for lots of reasons.  I've been known to fall asleep with a glass of red wine in my hand.  Bleached that right out.  No one's the wiser.  I've been in bed with someone who scratched a bug bite on their leg WITH THEIR TOENAIL and sliced it open, bled everywhere.  Bleach!  Also bleach just makes things SEEM cleaner, smells all bleachy.  Bleachy clean.

A good gift for me would be a seltzer maker because I drink a lot of seltzer water.  They have some Swiss machine at Williams-Sonoma that makes seltzer.  FYI - Christmas is coming eventually and all I'm saying is, it'd be a nice gift for me.

I love books and spend all of my money on them.  If you gave me $1,000 right now, I'd go directly to Amazon and buy all the books I want.  I love books and expensive cosmetics.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  I like things to feel luxurious, if I ever am able.  Just things.  Like the fabric on a sofa or clean hardwood floors underfoot.  I like high thread count sheets and exorbitantly priced face creams, but I wear clothes until they fall off my body and haven't gotten a professional haircut in like five years.  When I used to wear extensions.  Those were the days!  Actually I can't have hair touching my neck, it freaks me out.  I shaved my head in high school and pulled out all of my eyebrows and eyelashes.  

I compulsively touch my face when I'm talking, which I imagine is annoying to look at.  I hate things that taste sweet or smell sweet.  I don't like candy or ice cream.  I came around to ice cream briefly in Devon (of the famed Devonshire cream) where I had the most freakishly delicious fresh strawberry ice cream.  On the beach, in winter.  Nothing is more civilized than walking on the beach in winter.  Anyway, I'm lactose intolerant so anything with milk is just not going to work for me.

I like red wine very much, and believe I'm one of those "New World" people who like wines from California and South America better than wines from Spain or France.  But I do like Italian wine.  And you know what, sometimes I just like any old red wine, because I like tannins.  I like vodka because it tastes clean; I do not like rum or tequila or anything like that, retch.  My dad likes Scotch, which I do not like.  I like Irish whiskey, but only now and then.  My friend Christian gave me Irish whiskey in London in the middle of a party because that's what he was drinking, and I really liked it.  But it borders on too sweet for me, so I water it down a bit and take it on ice.

I didn't like ketchup when I was little, which doesn't make any sense, because ketchup is awesome, but maybe it had to do with the fact that ketchup has a surprising amount of sugar in it, and I don't like sugar.  I LOVE yellow mustard, probably one of my top five favorite things in the world.  Fancy candles, dogs, books, lemons, yellow mustard, those are my top five favorite things in the world.  I also love spicy food, especially vinegary spicy food, like hot sauces and things like that.  I like chiles; I grow some right now on my stoop.  I like many herbs, but not cilantro because one time in Gainesville someone put too much cilantro in the salsa and that was it, it was OVER for you, cilantro!

I like some movies but I hate horror movies because they give me nightmares.  I can be persuaded to watch a horror movie from time to time, but I will never, ever forget it.  I never, ever forget anything.  The difference in the color of several leaves I saw while driving in Georgia fifteen years ago, I will never forget that.  I don't like to think it's useless but sometimes it feels useless.  I get very upset if people talk in a movie theater.  I went to see Harry Potter and four stupid girls sat in front of me chatting away like it was hen's night at Applebees and I even said, "Shh!" TWICE!  But they didn't shush, and then the guy next to me started texting and his phone was SO BRIGHT, so I just started crying.

And it is not that I don't like coffee, it's just that you seem to have to do so much to it to make it palatable, so probably you shouldn't drink it?  I don't know, I mean because of the lactose thing, I HAVE to take my coffee black (unless there's soy, but a creepy actress in LA told me that it makes you gain weight in your womanly parts because it has something in it that mimics estrogen, but taste-wise soy's never strong as milk anyway) and so my only recourse is to add sugar?  Gross.  I like tea okay.  Yorkshire Red tea with soy milk.  But then again with the estrogen.

Anyone who shares a bed with me has to have their own blanket.  My body temperature is at a constant 105 degrees and I simply cannot stand to have that raised at any point.  Not while watching television, not while napping, and definitely not during a full night's sleep.  I don't like to touch very much at all.  I have a synapse misfiring or a general subconscious misunderstanding of what touching means, sometimes it feels like we're dating, and that is super confusing.  I am not good at holding hands, especially with friends.  Or linking arms or hugging or doing any of the things girls do together.  It freaks me out.

If you take your clothes to the cleaners and get them pressed, they look brand new.  Fear birds because they can make tools; they even use the bones of other animals - such as cuttlefish - to sharpen their beaks.  Every time you slice a piece of garlic, it breaks a cell wall in the structure of the garlic, which releases the enzyme that tastes so garlicky.  This is why garlic is milder sliced than whipped up in a food processor.  This is why you really only need one clove of garlic when you're making pesto, but you need to chop up a lot to make a pasta sauce, which is what I'm going to do right now.

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Blurt "co-co-editor" Coco Hames fronts The Ettes - Hames on guitar, Jem Cohen on bass and Poni Silver on drums - whose album Look At Life Again Soon and EP, Danger Is, were released by Take Root. Their new Greg Cartwright-produced album Do You Want Power hits stores Sept. 29, and you bet we're gonna have a big feature on the band in our next issue. Check out the band's MySpace page for music and tour dates - a tour kicks off this week, in fact, on August 13.

Photo of the Ettes: Heidi Ross