FWD: Handmade Nation Launches at the powerhouse Arena, February 11, 2009

From: powerHouse Events

Date: January 30, 2009 11:49:53 AM EST

To: LOTA!

Subject: Handmade Nation Launches at the powerhouse Arena, February 11, 2009

Streets

Street/blog/films/wiki/etc.

Bodleicious and bodacious

From the Internet Scout today:

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7. Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/ballads.htm

There are few things as fine as a ballad, and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford happens to have over 30,000 in its collection.

Broadside ballads were popular songs, and they were generally sold for a penny (or less) in villages around Britain between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of these ballads have been digitized and placed on this website for use by music historians, social historians, and members of the general public. Visitors can click on "The Project" to learn a bit more about this initiative, and they can move on to listen to a few sound files, and also learn about the graphic images used on such pieces of music. By that point, users will be very excited to browse through the digital collection on their own. If they click on the "Browse/Search" area, they can perform a detailed search on the ballad titles or first lines. To get started, visitors might want to type in words like "lucky" or "horse". [KMG]

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Sent via thingy.

Fw: in case you haven't seen this

I sure hope Shep F is getting some schmeer from Paste.

------Original Message------
From: MacIntosh, Bill
To: Steve Lewis
Subject: in case you haven't seen this
Sent: Jan 30, 2009 12:20 PM

http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/
Sent via thingy.

Use the Farm, Cuke!

(Thank you, DL)

Viva, Joseph Arthur

Looking forward in a big way to seeing Joseph Arthur and the Lonely Astronauts this Saturday at Bell House. Anyone joining us? Most fun. Last summer we saw JA deliver the bestest version of Viva Las Vegas any of us are likely going to see live, at the Doc Pomus tribute produced by Hal Willner. Then we saw him do an acoustic solo gig at the Museum of Modern Arthur. (Is that still there?) This will be our first chance to see the Lonely Astronauts elsewhere than youtube.

Hello? Hello? Is this Gigantor?

This is what I just changed the ring tone on my phone to be for calls from my brother. @ triplets and us.

These boots

I love these boots. They are Merrill's, a model they don't make any more. I bought them on the last day of September, 2004, or maybe the first day of October, in Santa Fe or Albuquerque, just before we started heading a little further west, through Gallop and into Flagstaff (where Lori was invited to attend a screening of This Land). And that's also where we hooked up with Juju Pongo and his Momz, and then headed up to the Grand Canyon. Evidence: the only picture I have of the boots other than the one I took this morning and posted up there on the left. See red circle in right.
Anywayz, the boots are +4 years old and have molded one piece soles and were way down in the heels and I thought, crap, I really don't want to get rid of these but they have these molded soles and what can I do? It never really occurred to me that a shoe repair person could get out his knives and fix me up. But that's just what happened. Hats off to Bravo Shoe Repair on 9th Street in the Slope! Hats off to the whole shrinking shoe repair trade! I have a pair of Naot's with a crack right across the sole of the left shoe, and I'm gonna bring them in to see what can be done.

They're so furry, you don't have to worry about hiding the stitches

Have you seen the NYT piece on Melissa Dixon, urban taxidermist?

Dirty Projectors & Brightblack Morning Light

At long last last night we saw DK & M again. Went together to a BAM show / fundraiser (bamnextstage) curated by Laurie Anderson. It was, uh, OK as a whole, with sparks of great. I especially liked Poor Baby Bree, Arturo O'Farrill, Dirty Projectors and Brightblack Morning Light, and have just downloaded albums by the last two. O'Farrill plays now and then at Puppets, just down the block and where we rang in the new year. Poor Baby Bree, you just gotta go see.

(Time Birthed Spilled Blood, Dirty Projectors)

Practice makes perfect. Bam Bam sworn in again

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=email_en&refer=home&sid=ac0hWsxSCmkM
Sent via thingy

North Pole for overpriced coffee

Cory Arcangel's Starbucks Center of Gravity, via Rhizome. Dude, Garvity? I like it. Kornsyrup Kapital!

Blithedale BAM BAM

Finished Blithedale the other day. Didn't remember the last half of the book nearly as well as I thought, but did remember the end of it very well. Stays on the list, but maybe I'll never have to read it again unless we plan on doing a miniature theater version of it. (That could be fun - I bet we could get it down to 5 or 10 minutes, max.) What was tedious in the book was all that exposition about the rights of women and the nature of men and women. But then, the book was written in 1852 and middle-aged Nat was saying some very frisky things in his staid way. Free love, anyone?

And that brings us to BAM BAM. After watching the swearing in on the big screen that was mounted below the library steps with friends and a few thousand upright citizens, we waddled off to Havana Central for lunch in the space that used to be the West End (and sat close to the photo of Ginsberg, Dylan, Robbie Roberston and... who? I can't remember), and then over to the Hungarian Pastry Shop for coffee. The shop was jammed, and they sat us next door in the sandwich shop and ran our orders over to us. About 15 minutes later, school must have let out and the place was jammed with kids. Doctor D starting asking kids if they did anything in school related to the inauguration. Yup. All of them either watched it at their own school or went to another school to watch it. Then there was a mom with a three month old kid in a stroller. D.D. asked the kid if he thought he'd ever live to see this day. Mom answered for him. She'd been thinking how this thing that was so incredible, so powerful for us, might be hardly understandable to her kid when he'd be old enough for it to matter.

From her lips to God's ear, as our friends are want to say. And that's probably how a lot of Nat's friends felt about all that jazz in Blithedale, too.

(PS: I used to think the narrator in Blithedale ruined it all in the very end. I don't any more. But still, a little creepy.)

Inaugural jumbotron, Columbia dot edu

I haven't read this, but...

The Amazon blurb for Obscene Gestures of an Invisible Hand, by Jeffrey Tester, is:

Jack Klein is a young theoretical physicist turned Wall Street wizard, using chaos theory to beat markets and questioning why he left the life of the mind. Then a flammable hairpiece and irate commuters trigger a bizarre chain of events, collapsing a foreign currency and raising him to the pinnacle of finance. Soon, Jack finds the fluke that brought him stardom sets in motion a crisis that could destroy both him and the global economy. To stave off disaster, the trader must move in realms of money, power and conspiracy, where a media mogul dreams of turning classic literature into video games, Japanese bankers defend samurai legacies and a hedge fund titan thinks he’s a Bond villain. Yet it's a brilliant, seductive ex-ballet dancer turned music producer who makes Jack see salvation lies in understanding the choices he’s made. But she’s made secret and shocking accommodations of her own, and her mystery just adds to a conundrum he can solve only by deciphering... Obscene Gestures of an Invisible Hand.

Woof! Makes me want to read a short book of one paragraph book descriptions. One paragraph novels. Doesn't really make me want to read the novel it's advertising.

Yet another beautiful disincentive to ride

On the plus side, I've finished Blithedale (which should get it's own post) and I'm making baked beans (lima, molasses, onion, mustard, and Dave Shea's way aromatic smoked trotter).

Sent via thingy

How to write a poem for the president

Jim Fisher at Salon, Elizabeth Alexander has been commissioned to write a poem for Inauguration Day. But the checkered history of the form suggests it's an almost impossible task, via Andrew Sullivan.

Seems like six or seven or eight years ago I was fooling around with occasional verse. I like occasional verse. There! I've said it!

Jalopy, BKLYN, stage center

And on stage last night at Jalopy was your hero and mine, Pete Stampfel with his Ether Frolic Mob. I'm guessing that last link <= is subject to rot, so let me say the mob included John Cohen this time, and I'll quote from the blurb:

What is Ether Frolic?? Ether Frolic is when ether came into use in the 19th century, it was widely introduced by Ether Frolics--a stage would be rented, the audience would be charged, the ’show’ involved people inhaling ether on stage and carrying on in a manner not common to 19th century behavioral norms. Audience participation was encouraged. Sort of an old-timey Acid Test. I also chose Ether Frolic in an ironic sense, because I was given what I later found out was an overdose of ether for a tonsillectomy in Minnesota in 1945. This remains the single most painful and terrifying experience of my life. I knew beforehand that something truly awful was going to happen, but tried to be brave. My last words before they clamped the rubber ether mask on my 6 year old face was… This is the life.

Bound to lose.

Jalopy, BKLYN, stage right

Jalopy, BKLYN, stage left

Bad Moon Rising

Should you be in St. Louis tonight, there's an opening of the Bad Moon Rising exhibit. Curated by Jessica Silverman and Jan Van Woensel, the show will be up from January 16th-February 28th. And we're in it, along with some arty types.

Making food & drink

Chef D smoked some pigs feet and gave us one last evening when no one was looking, to take home with us, wrapped in a brown paper bag. The angels sang. I see beans in my future, beans I tell you! And new guy W told us about making an Amaro that infused for 8 months before he popped it at his in-laws' Christmas celebration. Is most the best be making stuff! Do! Do!

Rabbits flay and beat a man

Really, nuff said. The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations.

Readers (and others) passing on

Reading the Times this morning I saw that Hortense Calisher died. She was 97. I've read only a little of her work, and that was in the 70's, when she was already in her mid 60's. It made me think of who else I saw read during those years. And, you know, everyone I can remember seeing in a public reading in the 70's is dead now. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Maybe lots of the readers I saw are alive and I won't remember them until reading their obits jogs my memory. That's probably not good.

Ricardo Montalbán and Patrick McGoohan also died, same day as Ms. Calisher. That be one weird trio. I remember folks talking very intensely about weekly The Prisoner episodes.

Sassy covers

AbeBooks sent out an ad for books it has for sale in unusual covers. Subject to link-rot, so look soon.

Pablo y Dante

And the source images for Pablo y Dante are Picasso and the Loaves by Robert Doisneau, and Conductor Leonard Bernstein Smoking, at Corbis, by David Turnley.

Unblocked Writers Syndrome

DL sends this from The Atlantic - reblock yourself the Polly Frost Way. I'm sure he meant nothing personal by it.

Sorry, I know I'm free associating a little, but this does remind me that I know a surprising number of people who are doing colon cleansing regimes. It's kind of like they've discovered that their intestines are full of poop, and they don't like it. Block it back up, people!

Puddin Head stays on the list

And I'm darned glad it does. I've moved on to the Blithedale Romance, but before saying goodbye again to Puddin Head for another 30 years, let me point to the U. Virginia's etext pages on the book. Fabu. Includes a facsimile reproduction of the first American edition. And illustrations, including the one above.

Fritz Scholder

One of the real pleasures of working down below the financial district is the National Museum of the American Indian. A perfect place for an extended lunch hour. (Though, truth be told, I don't know that any of my coworkers have ever been in here. )

Right now the Fritz Scholder show is up - part here and part in DC. The DC show looks to have the Indian paintings from the 60's & 70's that made Scholder's name. More of the latter work up here, including this self portrait from 2003. Phonepic. FS died in 2005. Be sure to look at the works page at mnai.

(sent by thingy & edited later)

Long ago and far away, comfort books and small keyboards

On the road again for a short trip, couldn't find anything new I wanted to download, so I decided to download three old favorites and find out if they still are favorites: Twain's Puddinhead Wilson. Norris' McTeague. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. Wilson I think I'd only read once, but remember some of it well - but it's what I started first on this trip and I'm amazed how much of it I don't remember at all. The other two I've read a couple of times, but McTeague not at all since the 70's and Blithedale not for 20 years.

Am posting this from a BB with a tiny keyboard and can't quote pages - but need to say that I've just read the section where Tom Driscoll (the fake) get's kicked in the butt so hard he vaults out over the drunken rowdy crowd and they pass him overhead from front row to back until the place catches fire. 1896. Sex and drugs and rock and roll. And race and gambling.

Sent via BlackBerry thingy and edited later.

All hail Rabelais, Inc! All hail cheese! All hail Portland, Maine!

No doubt (and hopefully) over time I've mentioned the great Rabelais, Inc. bookstore in Portland, Maine. Well, I'm doing it again.

Lori just bought this Cheesemaking: A D.I.Y. manual by Calandrelli and Nicastro from Rebalais for some friends. One look at it, and I feel a burning need for us to have our own copy. Book lust. Cheese lust. DIY lust.

[FWD: Score!]

Subject: Score!
From: Lori Cheatle
Date: Wed, January 07, 2009 2:17 pm

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/national-portrait-gallery-gets-obama-poster/

You won't remember this, either - Jeff Scher

(OK, I'm avoiding going in to the office.) Look at this great animation by Jeff Scher, at the NYTimes.

Hey, Jeff, time passes the same way for people who aren't parenting. And think twice about the cheese-stick thing. Just buy a hunk of cheese and cut it up and save on cost & plastic and whatever voodoo process is used to turn curdled milk into a manufactured object. (I say the same to Lota.)

Seeing the New Year In, Paul Cadmus, 1939

For every generation that believes it invented sex and drugs and rock and roll. Paul Cadmus.

How the city hurts your brain

Slashdot points to this Boston Globe article - How the City Hurts Your Brain. Hah! If it hurts your brain to be in centers of creativity like NY or SF, imagine how phukt your brain will be if it gets to be in heaven!

(Reminds me of the David Steinberg joke: God put bees in Jezebel's head. And Jezebel liked it!)

Naked clown calendar

This ukulelia post points you to the naked clown calendar. How did I not discover this before Christmas? Lost opportunities. No, I am not going to create a "naked clown" tag. Or even "clown" tag.

And then we just went ahead and made it, Maraschino 3

So we went out and bought the oils we needed. Someone out there already knew, I bet, that you can't buy bitter almonds in the US of A. Because eating somewhere between 20 and 50 of them uncooked will kill you. (But you can buy them in other countries where people won't eat them raw because, Duh!, that would kill you.) But pure almond extract is the oil of bitter almonds diluted in alcohol. So we went for it and guessed at the quantity. Made just a quarter recipe, in case it's gawdawful. Still need to get some cochineal for coloring. And wait for next summer when the cherries are in season, pit a bunch of them, and add them. Then put it all in fancy jars and send one of them out to Jolly Pirate and the Lady M for next Christmas. Man! Only the 4th day of the year and everything is falling so nicely into place.

Bestest Xmas gifts 2, and Maraschino 2

Lori got me a facsimile copy of Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials and Liqueurs from Fruits, Flowers, Vegetables and Shrubs, by Helen S. Wright, originally published in 1919 and gathered from a half dozen earlier (some much earlier) collections. The facsimile is published by Kessinger Publishing.

And right there on page 141 is a recipe for Maraschino:

One gallon proof whiskey, two quarts of water, dissolve four pounds of sugar, one third dram oil of bergamot, one third dram oil of cloves, two drops oil of cinnamon, two thirds ounce of nutmegs, bruised, five ounces of orange peel, one ounce of bitter almonds, bruised, one third dram oil of lemon. Dissolve the oil in alcohol; color with cochineal and burnt sugar.

Cellar archeology, 001

Hey, kids, we're dedicated to making the cellar more usable / less creepy-scary in 2009. Not exactly a resolution, more like a survival tactic.

So! Cellar Archeology entry 001!
There's a grape carton that a lot of our supplies are in - B's had it since I don't know when and it made it's way over to out cellar on September of 2006. It's got all sorts of stuff in it, some new and useful, some old and useful, some corroded metal implements that are just begging to experiment with your blood, some empty containers and some full but spoiled. I've decided to get rid of some of the older jazz, but am using Cellar Archeology to document them.

1. One half filled 500 cc jar of formerly liquid food grade enamel yellow paint, O'sullivan Paint Co., purchased some time in the past from Presque Isle Wine Cellars. Last year we bought a fresh jar of the same. Still liquid. It's what we paint the iron bottom piece of our press with. The current term of art is Gondola Enamel. Available in black, red, white, and yellow.
2. 4 oz. plastic container of formerly powdered sodium metabisulfate, packaged by Crosby & Baker, and - judging by the $1.75 price sticker - purchased at Party Creations. Who'd a thunk? We haven't used sodium metabisulfite for cleaning these past three years - we use potassium metabisulfite. Probably why this sat around until it solidified.
3. Plastic container, empty, which formerly held 50 Campden tablets. Another form of sodium meta. Price tag says it was purchased at L.J Lapide, Inc., $2.49. Mrs. Lapide is who the group has traditionally bought it's (CA) grapes from - until this past year when we bought LI grapes directly from the grower.
4. Cracked, dirty, empty plastic container. Skanky. 120 cc of nothing you want to put your tongue near.
5. This I like, and if I wasn't dedicated to cleaning out the cellar, I'd keep it, just as it is. 10 oz. Kerr "self sealing" mason jar, once filled with peach butter from Centennial Farms, Augusta, MO 63332 (Send for our catalog), and re-used to hold tartaric acid, with a sticker over the original label and on the lid. Rust on the lid, residue inside the jar. A thing of beauty. Who ate the peach butter?
   

Lookie here, Mr. New Year

Two New Years pics from the LOC. Above, the full caption in the catalog reads, "New Year reception at the White House. Photo shows thousands of citizens waiting to be received", 1927. Below, kids blowing their horns on Bleeker Street, 1943.
Hope and horns both spring eternal.