What we been readin'

What's it to you? Ah, well, since you asked...

After finishing Mr Barth's The Development I really did dive into Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul, as I threatened myself I would. Great friggin' book. Much of the first half of it is devoted to an explication of fundamentalism better than any I would have thought to have read. Taking it seriously (and opposing it) on its own grounds. And then a description of fundamentalism's grip on the current Grand Old Party and its dark service at the core of the Bush administration. All as a prelude to Sullivan's description of true conservatism. Makes a liberal wish he could help the conservatives wrest back control of the GOP.

Then (or maybe during), Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell's Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck. Then (and now) Umberto Eco's Serendipities : Language and Lunacy, alternating with recipes from A.J. Rathbun's Luscious Liqueurs. (Something about a fantasy of replacing much of the booze in the cabinet with our own concoctions. The better to read Eco by.)

You?

Do you think Cosmos is obscene?

Bless you, Gerald Ross. Bless you, Ukulelia. Ukulele Cosmos.

Sigh. Great sauce. Meat dry. WInchester Cathedral.

I thought I'd make up for last evening's disappointment by making Bittman's dish-o'-the-day, pork clay pot. Let me tell you, the sauce was delish. Double delish. But in a hurry I couldn't get any pork shoulder and went with some chops that were too lean, so even though there was plenty of liquor in the pot, they dried out. I was a little disappointed, but not like last night. After dinner I went rumaging through hooch hutch, found two bottles of the same porto (thank you, RR), both three quarters empty, decided to combine them to make a little shelf room and, oops, filled a wee glassy for my troubles. Well, the chile and ginger from the sauce, the dinner wine, the we dram afterward, the small disappointment of the dry pork, the lingering hurt of last night's dinner... and I found myself singing. Singing Winchester Cathedral. Huh.

The disappointing meal

You know when you make dinner and it's just not that good? I hate that. Happened last night and it's still bothering me.

I was making a simple dish - a bunch of veg diced 1/4 inch (eggplant, zucchini, yellow pepper, celery, red onion), roasted, then sauteed in butter, add some chives, and mix it all with some whole wheat pasta - but I was following someone else's method, roasting the veg at a lower heat & for shorter than I would have on my own, and when it just wasn't turning out, instead of adjusting, I slavishly followed on. So the veg didn't roast enough, then didn't break down enough while sauteing, and I would up with more of a chunky-veg-relish-thing than a chunky sauce.

Why didn't I just slow it down and follow my eyes and nose and taste? Sheesh.

Cycle Chic

Loved the link out in Juju's last post from clusterflock to Cycle Chic (Copenhagen).

Alas, weather here is still a'teasing. Warmer, but the sun just won't break on through. Last night in the 20's. Brrrsky. More like those Copenhagen pics than Brother Berkeley.

sunny hereabouts...

after a rainy night, astonishingly bright sunday morning sunshine flooding through the living room windows...

point ye in the direction of the clusterflockers, many good photos on display there (sequence of photos begins w/the seventh post of the 22rd...) in response to early post on the 21st...

Obama Veg

Meatballs!

Our friend, Mikey S., born and bred and lived his whole life here in our little borough, took me a few months back to see Mark Strausman give a cooking demo at De Gustibus. Mikey has become chummy with Strausman over the years and after the demo a number of us chatted. Well, out of the blue in the mail yesterday was a copy of Strausman's and Pino Luongo's Two Meatballs in the Italian Kitchen, inscribed to me by Strausman, and all of it Mikey's doing. Grazie mille, Mikey.

And it's a great read, this cookbook. All of the homages and disconnects and insults of the two friends that are the conversation between traditional Italian regional cooking and Italian American cooking.

Reading chapter 2, The Great Meatball Debate, I suddenly understood something in one of my own family traditions that I'd seen a thousand times before but never given much thought to. How my Mom serves meatballs.

(Sidenote: I spent most Sundays of the first 8 years of my life at my Grandmothers' apartment in the Bronx, as did all of her children and their young families. My southern Italian grandmother's meatballs and my Italian American mother's meatballs are very different - maybe not as different as northern Italian Luongo's and Jewish American Strausman's meatballs, but way different.)

So, my realization.
Like most Italian Americans my Mom cooks her meatballs (and, in the older family days and still for big dinners, her sausage, veal, pork, braciola, or whatever she chooses) in her tomato sauce. First brown the meat, then into the sauce. (Strausman doesn't brown the meat first. To the barricades!) But then, unlike in the Italian American spaghetti and meatballs tradition, she doesn't server the meat on the pasta. But she also does not quite serve the meat after the pasta as a separate course. The meat gets put into it's own serving bowl, with sauce, and appears on the table after the pasta. Like maybe, literally less than a minute after the pasta, but after the pasta and not before. Then some of us put the meat on our plates along with the pasta, and some of us eat the meat after the pasta, but no one puts the meat on their plate before the pasta.

A small step in the lifelong process of understanding one's family.

And today's only Saturday and there's still time to shop for Sunday dinner!

happi first day o'spring!

won't ye be my neighbor?

in re our own earlier post hereabouts,
Mark M. weighs in on the topic...

& gaawwdamm, it be good to see S. Baum back at it regularly on EtB

on the cusp of spring's arrival...

meself am feeling a bit of melancholy these days, and there be any number of reasons for that, tho we won't be getting into much detail hereabouts, altho might liven things up elsewhere with those stories...

we all aware of the headlines regarding those same producers of headlines, the demise of daily newspapers across the country, the effect that the very technologies we utilizing to share these thoughts with ye and for ye to indulge in lengthy perambulations throughout the ether be, well, in some fundamental way, the things that contributed mightily to the scenario, & yourstruly sad to read about it, to realize it. Amigo-at-a-distance Gordon Coale relates a bit of his own history with Pacific Northwest newspapers & within that post a link to Clay Shirkey's piece on topic. Esteemed amigo Lee S. delivers something of an epitaph for the local fishwrap, where we once labored together on the killing floor of the classified ad sales department and where he labors yet, dealing with the stories of dead folk daily. Speaking about that local fishwrap, longtime columnist there Jon C. makes some mention of related events in yesterday's column.

so, is kind of unsettling, no?

Not so fast...

Wella, wella, wella, this one's for all of you who are somehow outside of the NY Post's footprint. That's a condition I'd normally say is a good thing, but every now and then there's a cover that makes you smile.

Tobacco, where have you been

It's been a bad past year, breathing wise, requiring drugs and instilling something between caution and fear. But the last month has been suddenly better, and this last weekend I was able to ride bikey w/out xopenex, and this evening after making wild rice w/ baby bok choy and broccolini (t) (sku 3277) (hurts me just to type that word, but it tastes good) and cutting the backbone out of a chicken (I use a cleaver, not a sissor, and I leave the keel bone in) and rubbing the s(k)in side with a voodoo of cumin, corriander, allspice, ginger, salt, cayenne, black pepper and a sassy sweet paprika-like powder and doing it up at 425 for about 40 minutes, and drinking most of a bottle of Almira Los Dos grenache syrah blend... Where was I? Oh, after that, and Lorishki and me chatting about the day's challenges and Lorishki going upstairs to bathe, I thought... C O H I B A. And yes, with my newly recovered lungs and the last of the Los Dos I grabbed one of the little Cohibas I still have stashed away from the last Paris trip, and in the dark of the back yard, hoodie up, I did smoke that little beauty. And it was good.

Are you lonesome tonight, Jumbo Jimbo?

Salute! Are You Lonesome Tonight, at Jumbo Jimbo.
I find myself looking for lots of songs from the 20's and 30's lately. The one above (1926) is by Roy Turk and Lou Handman.

The Development (more berets) - John Barth

Back when I started studying litrichur, scratching slates with coal, etc., John Barth (and, unofficially) was an already established writer. I remember reading Floating Opera and Chimera in classes - don't remember if I first read Sotweed Factor for fun or profit. (Just thinking about it makes me want to do it again. Or Letters - maybe I'll take a crack at Letters.) But anyway, he was there then, and he's still here now, and I've just read last year's The Development. Thanks, Mr. Barth.

The ending of the second story in the book made me cry. On the subway. Generally, brothers and sisters, don't do this. Your fellow passengers assume you are, you know, crazy or unstable or just generally about to impinge on their personal space in a way that's really going to harsh their mellow - though probably make for good dinner / drinks conversation. But Mr. Barth is 79 now, and was just a few years younger I guess when writing The Development, and he was writing about the things he and his coevals are worrying about and going through - the diminishing of life, health, the shortening of days, dementia, death. It's a long life, but we do get to the end of it.

Sidenote: The Scriptorium asks, and answers:

For whom is the fiction of John Barth fun? Perhaps for lovers of complex metafictions. For people constrained by nineteenth century notions of realist literature it is a place of fear and confusion.

World Naked Bike Ride - giddyap!

una cosa mas...

etta james

i would rather go blind


courtesy the fine mind behind gmtPlus9 (-15)

p.s.

methinks me died an' gon t'hebbin...

the unspeakably named mc-thing...

and it goes so nicely with a bold chianti...

an endeavor recommended for..

the more hirsute amongst ye...

Beard Team USA

1 million names

What's the biggest crowd you've ever been in? I'm guessing for me it would be the Caribbean Day parade in BKLYN - I haven't been for a few years, but they say these days it's up to about 3 million people, so I'm guessing I must have been around the 1 mil. mark or better. Bigger than Vietnam or Iraq era marches I've been in.

Anyway, this just in:

Terrorist Watchlist reaches 1 million entries (representing about 400,000 individuals)

U.S. Terrorist Watchlist reaches 1 million entries; since many individuals on the list have several entries owing to the different ways in which their names may be rendered, the number of individuals on the list is about 400,000. full story

Lunchtime Robert Melee

City Hall Park. Rodin + crayons.

Via thingy.

Oscar Aleman - Besame mucho

Da'Levy writes to say that he's listening to

(Will I never tire of this new imeem widget toy?) O.A. wiki; vidi.

Everybody hurts

We were lucky enough to see the arts benefit / REM tribute at Carnegie Hall last evening - twenty bands playing REM tunes, and then REM came on for a little night-capper with Patti Smith. Describing it all would be linky-dink-a-doo all afternoon - maybe I can find a post by someone else somewhere else - (Yes - I can - the poster site here for now) but this post is here to say that the emotional high-point (low-point? stress-point?) was Vic Chesnut and Elf Power performing Everybody Hurts. Woof!

VC:
North Star Deserter

Hey, something about that Elf Power site - the painting by Terry Rowlett - Through The Garden. I've seen it. It used to hang in the place that was Zipper. On Smith Street. No? makes me wonder if the Zipper people are from Athens, too.

Germs, Viruses and Secrets

I'm still a big fan of Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News.
From today's email:

"No one in the Federal Government even knows for sure how many of these labs there are in the United States, much less what research they are doing or whether they are safe and secure," said Rep. Bart Stupak at a 2007 congressional hearing, the record of which has recently been published. "What we do know is that the Federal Government has been funding the proliferation of these labs on an unprecedented scale."

See "Germs, Viruses, and Secrets: The Silent Proliferation of Bio-Laboratories in the United States" (pdf), House Committee on Energy and Commerce, October 4, 2007 (published December 2008).

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Imeem, umeem, we al scweem fo imeem

Nu? Macinwi's an imeem fan. Hard not to be!

I will never wash my kazoo again

I posted about January's Pete Stampfel / Ether Frolic Mob gig at Jalopy, and that was fun, but let me tell you, last evening's doings wuz da bes yet. Clicky away on that little kazoo pic - they had a box of them last night, signed by everyone on stage and to be used (vigorously, if not tastefully) by the audience. And they were. But, horrors, the sweat and spit and lipping and squeezing wore away the Sharpee! Still, the "Peter" is professor Stampfel hisself, and the "John" is John Cohn. "Jeannie" Scofield, who is the perfect vocal foil to PS. Jalopy is the place to be.

Sausage!

I don't think my gustatory friend will mind me sharing this:

"I thought you all might appreciate this photo taken at the annual sausage making event that I was fortunate to be able to attend a couple of weeks ago. Thirty of us gathered in a house in K..., New York and we turned over 300 pounds of pork shoulder into sausages over the course of the day. We were supervised by three Italian brothers who have been doing this forever. The shot you see is us seasoning the ground pork before putting it into the casings. Throughout the day, we were fed – fried cheese, various kinds of pizza, grilled pork – and we ended with a feast of pasta, pork stew and home made wine. Truly heavenly ( and I went home with 10 lbs of sausage!!)"

Sent via thingy.

'Nuff said

I just couldn't let this go

Aside from really loving the song, the dance number in the second half is to die for. Those clear raincoats! And the way Modugno stretches out his right arm the first time he sings Ciao, Ciao, Bambina. (c)(t).
Of course, as a kid in the Bronx, it would have been Jerry Vale, not Modugno that I would have heard.

Thank you, neighbors

We snuck into JFK last evening just before the storm, and I had a sorry time of it dragging myself out of our time-lagged bed this morning knowing that I needed to go downstairs and face the foot of drifted snow at our door, shovel in hand... When, low and behold, booted and hooded I swung our house-door open and saw that someone had shoveled our walk for us. Not just the sidewalk, but a path right up to our door.

Thank you, neighbors.