Captain Beefheart has passed away

Photo by Ebet Roberts.  Obit at NYTimes.

From the obit:

A bolt-from-the-blue collection of precise, careening, surrealist songs with clashing meters, brightly imagistic poetry and raw blues shouting, “Trout Mask Replica” had particular resonance with the punk and new wave generation to come a decade later, influencing bands like Devo, the Residents, Pere Ubu and the Fall. 

I would have heard Trout Mask Replica the first time in Steve Clark's bedroom, circa 1971 or 72 I think.  Steve and his brothers were big Mothers and Beefheart fans.  It leaves a mark.

“We see the moon, don’t we?  So it’s our eye. Animals see us, don’t they? So we’re their animals.” 

Frank Saliani's lazy bread

I developed a shtick (which really can be like developing a tic) this last summer about not baking bread anymore: because it's too easy in our neighborhood to buy great bread. (I'm thinking particularly of baguettes from Almandine, and sourdough baguettes sold at Grab, and my own bread sort of sucks compared to these.) 

I found myself doing the shtick at a pop up gallery Jonathan Fabricant had this past weekend with two other artists - Frank Saliani and Angela Earley.  What brought it on was Frank offering peanut butter sandwiches on bread he makes, and cookies he baked.  Frank described this particular bread he's making for the sandwiches.  He doesn't knead it.  He makes it wetter than you normally would.  He throws his leftover oatmeal into it.  He let's it rise all day, without punching it down, then just divides it in half and bakes it in baguette pans.

Even as Frank described this, I knew I was going to try it.  And over the weekend I did.  And it turns out to be the absolute killer bread for peanut butter sandwiches.  Super dense, small, consistent crumb, you can slice it real thin.  I had PB&Banana for lunch yesterday, and today it'll be PB&Apple.  Am retiring the shtick.

His safe return was much to the relief of his mother

 

Damgaard Holger/POLFOTO, via Associated Press
Palle Huld, in 1928, as a teenager about to see the world. 

Tintin!

And everything is going fine

We're just back from the premier of And Everything is Going Fine, @ MoMA, and let me urge you, friends, if you are anywhere near NYC when this film opens there in the coming week, GO SEE IT!  (Shameless promotion!  Amy Hobby!)  It is as though the man is in the room with you, from beginning to end.

Buck Howdy

Via everywhere else.

Hauling my reading from the heap

My reading's been all the heck over the place - marooned in the middle of four books at the same time now, and I needed something small and sharp to prod me out of it all.  Seems like Paul Auster's Sunset Park is just the thing.  Your mileage may vary.

City Council to debate idea of Walmart in NYC

Ug.  What's to debate?  Please, kids, write your council person.  Or go knock on their office door in your neighborhood.  It's that storefront on the avenue, currently nestled between the other active small business storefronts.  The one that'll be nestled between the empty storefronts if you don't go knockin' now.  Crain's article.

Why should I care? Who is my brother? What should I remember?

Shameless promotion: Human Rights and Memory.  Coauthored by our friend and neighbor, Danny.  Who's proper form of address is apparently Daniel Levy, Associate Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

And Lori and I have plenty to be thankful for.

Nice op-ed piece about Thanksgiving and eel (and eel and wasteful greed).  I don't think we've ever had eel on thanksgiving, but seeing this and having mentioned my grandparents here a couple of days ago I will just say that I have some pretty dramatic memories of eel thrashing around their kitchen.

Mary Margaret McBride interview of William Carlos Williams, Dec. 4, 1950

I couldn't possibly describe how important WCW was to my thinking and wanting 30 and 35 years ago. I've just listened for the first time to Mary Margaret McBride's radio interview of Williams, December 1950, collected with lots of other great WCW recordings at the UPenn PennSound site.

Best use for stick match. Ever.

Dude, don't light it.  NYPL Digital Collections. 

Image Title
:  Foreign body in eye.

Standard Reference
: Cartophilic reference books W62-79-b

Source
: [Cigarette cards.] / First aid

Location
: Stephen A. Schwarzman Building / George Arents Collection

Catalog Call Number
: Arents Cigarette Cards 865

Digital ID
: 1570037

Record ID
: 800370

Digital Item Published
: 4-26-2007; updated 6-25-2010

Gone to the country

We had a great time getting to hear Ray Allen talk about his book, then seeing & listening to John Cohen play with the Dustbusters, and then seeing Pete Stampfel's Ether Frolic mash up with the Dustbusters for the rest of the evening.  Thank you, Jalopy.

Hey, you say, Why don't you ever mention other folks in the Ether Frolic?  Hey, right, OK.  Jane Gilday.

Turkey

It was always a favorite story of mine as a kid to hear how my grandfather would walk the turkey home from the market in the Bronx, up to the apartment where my grandmother would kill it.

Reahabilitation Through the Arts

The Unofficial House Band of Sing Sing from Fly's Eye Films on Vimeo.

Lota and I attended a benefit last evening for Rehabilitation Through the Arts - mostly theater, but also some music, dance and poetry readings - and you would have had to have been a stone not to have been moved.  A few of the scenes and monologues written by prisoner members of RTA were just devastating. And lest you think this is a soft heart-on-the-sleeve sort of thing, New York State Commissioner of the Department of Correctional Services, Brian Fischer, attended and was honored for his support of RTA. 

Miwa Matreyek - myth and infrastructure

At TED.  Semihemisphere. I've become an instant fan.  Did you see Digitopia?  Kind of freaks me out a little - the disembodied hand thing.  (A la The Beast with Five Fingers, then The Hand...)

Working Families line - walk it

Missing

Pslope. Heartbreak.
Sent via thingy

The Kids Grow Up

I'm reposting this from Lori (Cheatle - hey, Goog, it's Lori Cheatle again, producer of fine feature length docs!)'s Hard Working Movies site.  Hoopla!

The Kids Grow Up opens in theaters

Posted on October 24, 2010

The Kids Grow Up will have its theatrical premiere this coming Friday, October 29th at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. The film will expand on November 12th to Los Angeles, and then will roll out to several cities after that. See today’s Arts & Leisure piece in the New York Times.

Mean Mom Bad Wife

This new shop in our neighborhood...

... reminded us of our old friend, Nicole Lucas Haimes, who is the Mean Mom Bad Wife.  Fo sho.  Way over yonder on the JP coast of the Internet.

Macinwi discovers the Avett Bros.

(@ NPR)

Stew & Heidi & The Negro Problem tonight @ BAM

Tonight.  See you there?

Been making wine all month...

Dah, it's that time of year, when I live over there...

NY bike riders, please vote!

From TA:

Dear Street Activists,
Crain's asks: Should we pull the plug on Manhattan bike lanes?
Transportation Alternatives asks: Are you serious?
Please vote!

http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/polls/2010/10/should-we-pull-the-plug-on-man.php

And forward!
Thanks!

The Breaking Winds, in The Lady Gaga Saga

You go, Dakota!

A Universal History of the Destruction of Books

I've been reading Fernando Báez's  A Universal History of the Destruction of Books: From Ancient Sumer to Modern-day Iraq.  I'd picked it up some time last year, set it aside, then picked it up again in the aftermath of 9/11 book burning.  What an insane and consistent (persistent) story.  

Oh, yeah, you might have missed the American book tour.

Index

I woke some time in the middle of the night thinking, I need to create an index to my diary, and then I gave some thought to just how to do it.  What I didn't think was, I need to stop writing a long hand diary and switch back to electronic documents so I can search for things I've written in the past.

All prompted by N down the block asking about how we pickled our ramps for the night she & D were over our place and we had beef burgers, lamb burgers, goat burgers, I don't remember what veg, and one of the toppings we made were pickled ramps.  N asked because she's got the last of the cauliflower from her garden staring out her.

Searching...  Look!  Mellie Mel mentions ramps in what was probably the last post she made here.

Thanks, yes, we're fine in Little Kansas

Thanks, family & friends, for checking in.  We're fine.  There was a car in front of out place that got a window and door smashed from half a pear tree that snapped and sailed down from up the block (first time I was happy not to be parked in front of our own place) and DeBlasio had some siding ripped from the wall of their place that faces us and insulation from under it was in our yard, but otherwise the serious damage wasn't at our doorstep.  Up the block at D&E's a big old oak split and smashed a truck parked under it - also crunched D&E's wrought iron gate and blocked their front door.  At the corner on the avenue another bog one came down and crushed a car.  Ditto around the block on 10th - that one completely blocked the street.  Ditto many blocks around us.  Thus and thus.  (I wet myself watching that second thus, thanks, JP.)  But all is safe and snug here.  Hummingbird in the flowers yesterday morning and sassy blue & black & white finches in the grapes.

Not Brooklyn, Toto

Sent via thingy

Dear diary, my sweet paprika:

Dear diary, wassup?

Woke this morning and went downstairs to make coffee and stepped in front of the sink onto the little rug we keep there and it was soaked through.  Uh-oh.  After some quality time crawling around and emptying all of the stuff that's accumulated under there and drying things and watching where new puddles formed it became pretty clear the hose at the back of the dishwasher must be where the water's coming from.  Shut the cut-off valve and am gonna leave it that way for the day and not let it harsh my my Labor Day weekend mellow.  (This same dishwasher is wedged tightly under a soapstone counter that's a little too shallow for it, and it took some imaginative work to get the puppy under there.  So it doesn't come out real easy.  About 5 years (10?) when the latch to the to machine busted I decided to replace the broken part with a light, long machine bolt.  Problem was, the latch also acts as something of an electrical switch or lock, so whenever I drove the bolt into place, current would run through it and I'd get a pretty jimmying shock.  But because the washer is so wedged in, I decided not to try to pull it out to get to the electrical connection and unplug it.  Then for the better part of an hour I kept repeating a cycle of screwing up my courage, fiddling the bolt, getting jimmied until I couldn't hold on to it, and weeping as it slid back out of place.  Eventually I got it set, but not before two of my teeth had turned to soap.  And I can still put a q-tip half way into my left ear before it hits anything solid.)

Made coffee and went into the back with, darned chilly compared to what it's been.  Sudden bird-quiet, too, except for the cardinals which where futzing in the grapes.  Just last night we were saying how last year there was a heck of a lot of feeding in the grapes and shitting of totally psychedelic guano.  (I see now it was last Labor Day's post.  Gee.  With pics.)

Then back inside to put a batch of Hungarian peppers in the oven to dry.  I've been wanting to do this since last year when I bought a precious little jar of paprika from Bradley and as I was paying RB himself said, Why don't you make it yourself?  Wella wella.  So yesterday instead of buying paprika from Bradley we bought paprika peppers.  Maggy's Farm has a nice post about making your own.

Da Savino will be over in a couple of hours to bottle the last of his family's Grenache from last year so we can free up come ore carboys.  Lot and I have been concentrating a lot on this year's making, and buying a bunch of new equipment, as B has moved off to Staten Island and will be making his own wine there with the ancestral equipment.  Gonna have to change my pants before we bottle.  Threw on a pair of MK jeans that I bought on a whim a week or two ago at a discount place.  They're nice, but the distance between the top of the jeans way down there and my belly button way up here is interesting. 

By.  Good talking to you again.  Say hi.

Oh, God, no, of course not, it's just that...

these are the songs that lay the base in my little mind.  Like...



(I bet that for Juju it's Roy O.)

Lonely as a man without love

Sorry, I have it stuck in my head an need to exorcise it.

HUMPERDINK LONELY AS A MAN WITHOUT LOVE 

TABBED BY: SONYA ORMSBY 

D       Bm      Fm   D           Em 

I can remember when  we walked together;

                     A7                  D 

sharing a love I thought would last forever

               Bm      Fm     D        Em 

Moonlight to show the way so we can follow,

                      A7            D 

waiting inside her eyes was my tomorrow

Bm         D    Fm          Em 

Then something' changed her mind, her kisses told me

                   A7    A7     A7      A7 

I had no loving' arms,  to……. hold…….. me 

CHORUS: 

 D                     A 

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up, 

Em                        G 

lonely is a man without love  

Fm                      Em 

Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out,

  A                         D 

lonely is a man without love 

D                     A 

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up 

Em                         G 

Knowing that it's cloudy above 

Fm                      Em 

Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out, 

A                         D 

lonely is a man without love 

D        Bm         Fm     D            Em 

I cannot face this world that's fallen down on me

                    A7                    D 

So, if you see my girl please send her home to me 

D         Bm       Fm     D 

Tell her about my heart that's slowly  Em dying;

              A7       A7       A7    A7 

Say I can't stop myself …… from…….. cry…….ing 

REPEAT CHORUS X2....END            

Traveling food comes home

Did I mention we were in Rheinbeck the week before Chelsea hitched?  We were, and at the farmers market there we bought three cheeses:

a fresh pecorino and an aged pecorino from Dancing Ewe, and a blue. we bought from Julia and Isabel of Clermont, but we're not sure who made it.  All delicious. 

And today we just got back from a stay out in Southold and Mattituck, heaven on heaven.  Stopped at one of our favoritest farms on the way home, Sang Lee, where they were selling their ripest tomatoes at half price (ripe and ugly, eat today).  Four pounds of them are on the tray pictured here:

and have been in a slow oven now for about 7 hours.  Gonna come out soon, get a bath in vinegar for a half hour, then get jarred in olive oil for use over the next couple of months, totally intensified.

Fictive whiff of fresh air. And grapes.

Somehow, even though it deals with many of the same issues, reading Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year seems like a whiff of fresh air after reading the very well written The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel, and A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, by Amitava Kumar.  At heart, I'm still just a fiction boy after all these years.  (Also read the two non-fiction books on various e-readers, and am reading the Coetzee in glorious paper.  See the McSweeney's article Juju pointed us to yesterday: After a Thorough Battery of Tests We Can Now Recommend "The Newspaper" As the Best e-Reader On the Market.)  And, yes, I put Diary in the same red paper cover I had used for Island at The Center of the World.  Thanks for asking.

About the grapes: yesterday morning at 5 AM I was out back and smooshed some while I was walking around and realized that I was surrounded with the smell of ripe grapes.  Woof.

NY Pub Adv re Target - yowza

Hi,
For a retailer that prides itself on being socially responsible, Target is throwing its money behind some troubling political causes. That makes them our first “Outrage of the Week”—our way of shining a light on the worst cases of companies distorting our political process under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.

Just last month, we learned that Target donated $150,000 to a group supporting right-wing candidate Tom Emmer for Governor of Minnesota. Emmer is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and a big booster of Arizona’s new immigration laws. In the past, he even introduced a law that would result in sex offenders being chemically castrated.

On Tuesday, our office teamed up with MoveOn.org to protest Target’s election spending right in front of the retailer’s flagship store in Brooklyn. We had a simple message: hands off our democracy.
Target is one of the first corporations to spend money on elections following Citizens United ruling, and unless we send them a strong message, it won’t be the last.

Take action to keep companies like Target from tampering with our elections:

• Forward your friends our video about the campaign to hold Target accountable or post it on your Facebook page.
• Join our Facebook group “Fix Citizens United: Disclose Political Spending!” and invite your friends.
• Join Public Advocate de Blasio and endorse MoveOn.org’s Fight Washington Corruption pledge.

We have 84 days until November’s election—now is the time to teach Target a lesson before other companies follow their example.

Stay tuned for our next Outrage of the Week.
Thank you,

Matt Wing
Communications Director
Office of the Public Advocate

Brooklyn’s Finest: Gilbert Moore

Nice post by Nitasha Kawatra on the Brooklyn Museum blog about Gilbert Moore, who runs the museum's freight elevator. 

Nice things continue to happen to the streets around us

The placard on the planter says, This platform is public space and is not restricted to the patrons of any particular business.  Please watch your step.  And I love that.  The construction of the platform, narrowing of the traffic lanes, putting in the parking bumpers and placing the furniture and planters all happened in a whiz-bang week.  There's some irony to the placement of this piece of public good with dwindling tax dollars, for those of you who can recognize the building behind it.

Untitled video on Lynne Stewart and her conviction, the law and poetry (2006)

I post so little lately that it seems like too much to track back through all of the readings and thoughts that gets me here, but here I am.  Paul Chan's "Untitled video on Lynne Stewart and her conviction, the law and poetry (2006)".

I will say that the tag I've tagged this with, "stand up and say something", are words I heard Lynne Stewart speak, back in the environy days, leading to the wars of our worlds.  If I remember right, she also said, "Make noise!"

Horrible slug death

Just last night, the okra corn hot pepper thing cooked and cooling, I sat on the back bench under the crab-apple tree, surveying our one-rod manse, thinking, Gee, there haven't been any slugs this year.

That was obviously a big psychokinetic booboo.  Because this morning, sitting out with coffee at the edge of the patio and admiring that same bench and tree in reverse view, I lolled my head to the right and there on the wall of Joann's place, not 12 inched from my schnoz, was a big friggin' slug-daddy, a real man-sized slug, a full grown index finger of slug, a slug that if it got into your nostril or throat would undoubtedly suffocate you, you would die horribly between asphyxiation and uncontrollable gut wrenching gag reflex.  Do I make myself clear?

Skank!

I quick footed into the kitchen and came out with a handful of salt (it happened to be Kosher salt) and poured that on the beast, which immediately started exuding heroic quantities of snot and writhed in what a human could only sanely interpret as pain.  Intense, deadass pain.  But it wouldn't drop.  I got another handful.  It dropped.  A little while later it was dead.  I felt ambivalent about that and what I had done, but went back to coffee and Jim Harrison. 

Time got later, I needed to ready myself for work.  I started to stand, put down my bare right foot from where it was resting on an old stool... and missed by two inches another friggin' slug.  A smaller one, practically lithe, the size of a young child's pinkie.  I imagined that eeeuuuwwww feeling I would have had if I'd stepped on it barefoot, smooshing it, and I had an involuntary sphincter tightening reaction.  I went inside.

Gravity, strange torque

Anyone who has spent an overnight at our place knows that we have a sheet metal shower stall in our one full bathroom that seems to have been lifted from a Korean War era Quonset hut.  It's great virtue - the reason why it's still there (other than inertia and money) is that it is the ultimate in anti-low-flow plumbing: big honkin' streams of shower water, which I adore.  (Allow me to digress, and say why we love our friend Ms. Higgins: because when we embarrassedly say how we've been meaning for 14 years to rip out the old bathroom, she says, Why!?  Why would you want to change anything about it!?)

Anywho, this is about the latch on the stall, nicely illustrated over there on the left.  See the top screw?  Every couple of days I notice it's loosening, and I screw it back in with my thumb.  (Right thumb.  Always the right thumb.)  What's that all about?  How's it loosening?  Why?  What's the strange gravity and torque? 

The only thing I can come up with is that the torrential waterflow creates a coriolis effect so strong that it wrenches the screw loose. 

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The lesser calico

This morning I gave up sleeping at 4:30 and went out back to read (Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked).  As the sky brightened one of the two calico cats that live in the gap between our place and Lula & Vincent's, the less athletic one - they are strikingly different this way - came walking in from the back of the garden heading for the gap.  For years there has been a thin space between where our fence meets our kitchen, and this cat would slip through it on her way to the gap.  Last weekend, though, I repaired that part of the fence.  Now this cat slinks onto the patio (we don't like each other), leaps to our kitchen window sill, then up to the top of the fence, then backtracks 5 feet to where there's a clear spot to drop down, then walks to the gap on Lula's side of our fence.    Her more able sister just leaps to the top of the repaired fence and then straight down into the narrow space behind.

Tuli Kupferberg

Lost in the morass of Yankee death - Steinbrenner (eh) and Bob Sheppard (no!), was the death of the uber Fug, Tuli Kupferberg.

Kids, renew your vows to be a little more free. 

The No Smoking Orchestra is totally smoking in every language

Bummer is that if you want to catch their next show you'll have to go to Latvia , but trust me it will be totally worth the trip.  The No Smoking Orchestra is pretty mind blowing.  The pics on their site of last night's show in NY don't do justice to the rocking intensity of the thing.  But I do see me and Lota in one or two of them.

The Captain: Isabel and tales of passion

Our friend, The Captain, wants you to watch Isabel Allende telling tales of passion.

Michelangelo Merisi's occasional verse and jail time

A few years ago I was writing a bunch of occasional verse and really enjoying it.  So I was tickled reading Francine Prose's description of the verse Caravaggio and a handful of his fellows were accused of writing (and jailed for) about their hated rival, Baglione following the unveiling of one of Baglione's paintings of the Resurrection. 

The verses predict that Baglione's utter lack of talent would soon reduce him to the point at which he could no longer afford the cloth for breeches to cover his naked behind.  They suggest that he bring his drawings to the grocer, or use them for toilet paper, or give them to the wife of Baglione's friend Tommaso Salini (a hugely unpopular and notoriously nasty painter), who could put them in her vagina so as to prevent Salini from having sex with her.  The poems refer repeatedly to the sore subject of the gold chain: Baglioni is undeserving and unfit to wear it; an iron chain around his ankles would be more appropriate.

Bagel me, Dr. Memory

From Mark Strausman to wine making buddy Savino to you:  the chef teaches us to make bagels at home.  Real bagels.  Get your malt on.

Welcome back

Jah, we back.  But before we was back and we was away we went again to ol' Fore Street where we said to our waitlady hey, we never been back what you didn't put a card on our table what said welcome back!  But she twicky!  When dessert come, look what she did!!

(Took two home cooked dinners, a leftovers lunch, and a bananas breakfast to get the poops back to normal.  And no bottles of wine.  I knew you were concerned about that.)

Normal

Am reading Don DeLillo's Point Omega, sitting in a car in the visitor's parking lot at the Maine State Prison (long story, short version) and I read:
"They were as normal as people could be and still be normal, she said. A little more normal, they might be dangerous."
Roger, that.
Sent via thingy

Thomaston Cafe, Thomaston, ME

This place has become one of our very favorite. Last time we were here was April of 2009. This time around we had the chilled blueberry and banana soup, Lota had the haddock sandwich and I had the halibut Caesar. Hail, Thomaston. (Last time we finished with the coconut cream pie, but having had all we had this time before noon, pie just couldn't make itself happen.)
File under "great food happens wherever someone wants to make it."
Sent via thingy

Andreas Laszlo Konrath: My Generation

Andreas Laszlo Konrath.  A grouping o prints named My Generation, which we say at the Susan Maasch Fine Art in Portland, ME. on the fabulous First Friday of this month.  Another artist who lives in Brooklyn whose work we first saw in Portland.  Odd.

Lisa Dahl: Trickle Down

Portland, Maine. First Friday. Congress Street.  Lisa Dahl. 
Sent via thingy

And when he was walking away from his car he noticed...

Sent via thingy

This is my tasting spoon

The tasting spoon is all about rule number three:  taste what you are cooking.  (Rule number one is to not pass up an offered drink of water, and rule number two - more important in my older age - is to not pass up an opportunity to use the toilet.)  It's revolutionized my life.

Busted and ratted out

130 people at the house a few weeks ago for the annual big doo, and just about the only thing broken was my blue glass garden ball.  Broken on purpose by one of the kids at the party, who was immediately ratted out by other kids.  And, Lori, he broke it on purpose!  Been meaning since then to photograph it, I don't know why, but now I have and now I can say goodbye to it.

Favorite tool: plumbers' snake

Not many things cause a gag reflex in me.  Large rotting fetid mucilaginous clumps of hair, and needing to grip and pull them from clogged plumbing, are on the short-list.  So, without going into great detail, allow me to say that, after some initial uncontrolled pharyngeal difficulty, it was with relish that I plumbed a dozen feet of spiraling steel coil from my manual hand-spinner through the poorly installed sink and trap and into the century old upstairs drain, yea verily to the 130 year old sailstack, allowing us to shave and brush and freshen up once again without fear of flow and the lack thereof. (Dude remember: never put a quarter inch coil into a pipe of greater than 2 inch diameter.  Bad things can happen.  Cool?  That applies to so many things!)

Steroid Maximus

Well, JG Thirlwell was a lot of fun!

But Dr. Lonnie Smith - he was a whole lotta lov!

Wine book??

Been thinking of creating a wine-making picture-book to share with the 11th Street crew - not theory, but a bunch of the procedural stuff that's easy to pass on to others, and some of the  rules of thumb I'm always forgetting...

My pizza don't stink

Everyone knows the old chestnut, Pizza is like sex - when it's good it's good, and when it's bad it's still pretty darned good. Thing is, my pizza (yes, pizza, not sex) is to me, the best pizza I've ever had. That's a little goofy, and likely not true, but you couldn't prove it to me.

This evening it was the latest dough experiment (1 part bread flour, 1 part whole wheat, 6-ish parts all purpose. Risen twice, and some of it just about thrice as it sat in a fridge for one and two days), and topped with escarole, first wilted and then done up with garlic and pepperoncini and onions and oil. A little more oil and sea salt on the dough before the escarole, and then - who can remember? - maybe more o&s. Maybe not. 7 minutes @ +500 F, crisp & chewy at the same time. Bitter / salty / a little sweet from the onion (and should I have added currants?). A liter cap bottle of Grüner V. to say howdy. A little chocolate afterward. It started raining while I was eating on the patio and I just stayed out there. Think I'm gonna have another leetle cigar.

Duck fat, you are my potato

There was a fabulous plan to do a hand-drawn post, at the center of which was pasted the cigar ring from the only cigar I've enjoyed the heck out of in the last year or two, and surrounding that ring a schematic of the events leading to and away from that cigar. It was a glorious conception. However, mistakes were made, and the post, she is no.

So let me say instead that shortly after the said cigar, there was a using of duck fat, still fresh and sweet smelling from this spring's confit, to fry up little hashy cubes of potato & shallot, and set beside some braised cabbage (honey, fresh nutmeg, currants, white wine) and a couple of lovely flat irons, all on the still warm back yard flagstones with a bottle of rosie wine. I'm just gonna eat me to death.

Bittman => Thorne => Spoerri...

Bittman took me back to Thorne, and Thorne has taken me to Spoerri (the reprint of 2/3 of The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir. John Mandeville, which is Mythological Meatballs).

What have you done with the Cobra jewels?

Wella. The party, she approaches. Don't know if M. Thatos will be there, but thinking about her this morning I remembered her fondness for Maria Montez.

What have you done with the other one, and why is Stumpster posting? Dunno. He's even stopped journaling at this point. Just making lists, and there's hardly ever more than 4 or 5 things on them.

John Lindsay was the first mayor I was fully aware of.  I was a kid, but somehow felt connected to him.  And I'm not even a met fan.  Exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. 

I got bounce

I've been away from baking bread a bit, but got the bug again this morning.  And having just finished Outlaw Cook (Thorne) and being a little ways in to Pot on the Fire, I felt a little freer to follow my natural inclinations rather than following a scale and ratio as I had been when reading Ruhlman.

So, in I dove, and true to my mood I grabbed the drinking glasses I've recently been using instead of measuring cups.  I've learned which glasses are just about a cup, which little spice dishes (I call them eye-cups, in my head)  are a quarter cup.  And I decided I'd use as much water as the flour seemed to want, rather than measuring it at all.  I had let my starter die (or am guessing I did: I haven't feed it in a month and I didn't go look because I didn't want to clean the jar) so I used commercial yeast.  And I did everything by hand rather than by hook or blade.  Last, I decided to bake on my pizza stone and to not add steam to the oven (by tossing water onto a cast-iron skillet in the bottom of the stove - it' hell on the skillet and it scorches my eyeballs).

I guess what.  I got bounce!  Big whoppin' cross-splitting bounce.  Hadn't been seeing that in my bread.  Was it the stone?  Better kneading?  Not steaming?  The weather?  My mood?  Not splurting my energies out into posting?  Now I just want to have grilled cheese and wine in the back yard for dinner.

Wow: Overhead projector musical instrument

Via Make.

Chips, chips, happy feet

Yes, I did start Love and Sleep, but I'm also taking a simultaneous detour through John and Matt Thorne's Outlaw Cook, which has been on our shelf for years but never read.  Seeing this post by Thorne at Bittman - Eating with my mother - made me remember and want to read the book.  My idol's idol.

Anyway, Thornesque, last night I set out to make Lori's favorite chicken dish for her to have late when she flew back home (chicken a la Lori, we call it.  or, sometimes, chicken with scallion ginger sauce, rice and edamame) and along the way (here's the Thornesque part) I cleared the fridge of some past-their-prime shiitake, ramps and scallions.  These three I did up in too much olive oil at too high a heat and them salted the heck out of them (chips!  chips!) and wolfed them down hot standing next to the stove.  Ahhhh.  Happy feet.

Re Thorne's name: I've always misremembered it as Thane, which always makes me remember our old friend, Jane Thane of Ohio.  Or Jane, Thane of Ohio, which she secretly was, who's collected works on Amazons is no longer available.

Re Paolo Conte's Happy Feet.

You're not going to believe what Dan Levy just told me

Sooo...  Night before the sardine pizza I had finished rereading The Solitudes (which I had only known as Ægypt), and that was after finishing rereading the Little Big.  I was 1,000 pages into Crowleyana and teetering on the brink of starting to reread Love and Sleep and investing another 500 pages of time.  And in fact I did start rereading Love and Sleep.  But first I put it into the same paper book cover that I had used for the other two Crowley books.  Then I thought, Oh, Why not, and I reinserted each book in turn into the yellow paper cover and photographed each.  I was going to post it all, then, but, I don't know, maybe I got tipsy and didn't.  Maybe I will tonight.  (It's the same cover I used for Nixonland.  Only totally different on the inside.)

BUT, wait, there's more: this afternoon at lunch time I decided to take a quick trip up to the green market to find something to cook with ground goat (I'm on a ground goat kick - picked up some very fresh broccoli raab and some shallots - need to find me some hot pepper action.  Vinegar?  Something.) and who sits down in the subway car across from me, but Dan Levy.  Dan Levy about whom I have said so many times over the last decade and a half first recommended to me that I read Crowley.  Haven't seen Dan in I think 3 years.  Dan!, I say, I was just thinking about you.  I just reread Little Big and The Solitudes!  And Dan says, Oh, I've never read them.  I hear they're great.

Begorrah!

Meals I make when my Baby's on the road: sardine and roast tomato pizza

So, I was slipping this pizza out of the oven when I realized, Hey, This could be a really nice long-term project.  Maybe over the next 20 years or so photograph the meals I make when Lota is on the road that I would never make when shes at home.  You know, The Liver Chronicles.  The Canned Sardine Diaries.  The Trotters Tearsheet.  Yummala.

Unt da wittle fwishees swummed down di gullet im da hombade winnie - Sanguis jovis 07.  Boomfba!

Fabricant Studio

Bumped into our friend, Jon Fabricant, this morning (me moving the car, him walking the dog) and he told me he has this new site for some prints he's working on, fabricantstudio.com, and now I've gone there and I am telling you you need to do the same.  Fabu.  I'm gonna buy a copy of the Bicycle Rider.  Nu?

Can I have a couple of omens, please?

On what was otherwise a sort of grim day in my skull, I found in the trash on 7th Ave a lovely 50's Harmony baritone uke, waiting to be rescued, just like the one Jake restored at Antebellum Instruments, right down to the tortoise binding; and, the fabulous SbArNuDcIeE wrote to say they'll be at the big Puttanesca & new wine bash in June.  Cheer up!  Turn this thing around.  Accentuate the positive!

Can dreams predict the future?

Juju dropped a note from the Berkeley hills to ask if that Gorilla Coffee uprising wasn't in our neighborhood here in the Brooklyn slopes, and I had to smile because (a) Yes, (b) we'd bought the silverbacked correspondent Gorilla gear and coffee before and put it in one of the never-mailed packets to him (later broken into for our own drinking, but I see there is still a double X Ike Turner T-shirt there...), and (c) I was just then brewing a little stovetop pot of coffee, not Gorilla because we'd used the last of it a day or two before and were switching to some very nice Italian gift coffee for a while.  This was all on that fine last Saturday, and I was sitting out back, but near the kitchen door and window and I could hear the coffee finishing, but was surprised not to smell it doing so.  Guess what?  When I went to pour, there was no there there.  Someone (!) forgot to add the coffee to the coffee pot.  Pretty sure I'd never done that before, and I had to wait a bit for the heat and vacuum of the Bialetti ease off before I could start again.  So, back out back where (d) I was finishing this decade's reading of Little Big, where someone (!) who had oft described this book as one of his favorites was in the end-throes of being shocked that he remembered the first 50 pages really well, and the last 25 pretty well, and was deep under water in vaguery about most of the intervening 500 or so.  How does that happen?  Why does it keep happening to moi? 

Anyway, I didn't weep over Smokey's death this decade.  I think maybe I've come to wear my own Smokeyness more comfortably.  We'll take another look in 2020 (and see, nyuk nyuk).  (Nyuk nyuk.  Who's there?)

And here's why I'm posting: to say that one of the films Lori (Lori Cheatle!) produced this past year, Amy Hardie's fab The Edge of Dreaming got itself written about glowingly at the Huffington Post, by Karin Badt: Can Dreams Predict the Future? Amy Hardie's New Documentary.

Everything. Won't take long to catch up.

I left the salt out of the bread I baked yesterday - gack argful. Flat. Tongue-weep. Two weeks' bread (busy bee me makes his own bread, lazy me now makes it in 2 week batched and freezes half) that will want sardines every day to sassy up to snuff.

Am re-reading John Crowley's Little Big and am re-enjoying my favorite book. (This retreat into fantasy I offered as a treat to myself after braving Slavoj Žižek's communist critique of the current financial crisis, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.)

The 3 tunes I am currently most likely to play when I pick up my ukulele are:

• C'est si bon
• Baby Face
• Hallelujah, I'm a Bum

I never have asthma or breathing difficulty in my dreams. Don't always remember to wear my pants, but I can breath fine and run fast.

The 2009 wine is coming along very nicely. Bikey's happy. Yard's looking nice. We're peeking over the horizon, out East and into the home of our old age.  Sun's at least an hour off, most days. Listen to the mockingbird (Kobblers style, and very definitely not Mr. Lincoln's downer.)

Every boro oughta have one (poet laureate, nu?)

Tina Chang.  NYT article.

(I have no tag for poesy!  I'm a little shocked.)

Goodbye, Granny D

Doris Haddock has passed away at the age of 100. NYTimes obit is here.   Granny D was a prominant character in Lori's 2005 film, This Land is Your Land.

Scene from This Land Is Your Land from Hard Working Movies on Vimeo.

Breaking radio silence for duck confit, G.E. Smith, and David Broza

Which goes something like this:

Feb. 27: Birthday party in Chinatown, sat next to the hostess and on her other hand was G.E. Smith.  Our hostess has been to our place once or twice for our big summer celebrate-the-new-wine and putanesca parties, and has obviously wandered into my little room which is shamefully lined with instruments I can barely play, and she has confused the memory of me owning instruments with the idea that she's heard me play them and that I'm damned good.   She waxes poetic about my playing, while I stare into the eyes of one of the great contemporary studio guitarists and music directors, and I feel my weenie shrinking until it is werry werry smawl.  Mr. Smith is gracious, asks how many ukes I have, and when I say it's an embarrassing number he makes me feel part of the club.

March 1 through March 7: I dip in and out of Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie, and I decide to try my hand at duck confit.

March 8: I go up to Union Square at lunchtime, thinking I'll check out one of the bookstores.  The green market is in full swing - I hardly ever get there on a Monday - and I stumble into the fine people from Hudson Valley Duck Farm.  I don't buy a book.  I do buy 5 lb. of Moulard duck legs and thighs.

On the evening of the 8th I salt and season the duck (clove, black pepper, garlic).

March 9: I take half the day off, come home, wash and dry the duck, and at 1:35 put it in a 190 F stove in a dutch oven.  Goal is to keep it there for 10 hours, rendering all the fat and poaching the meat therein.  At 9 PM we're at City Winery to see G.E. Smith back David Broza.  (Broza has just released an album of songs that are Townes Van Zandt lyrics willed to Broza, that he's set to music - Night Dawn.)  At the end of the concert we boogie out and are home by 11:40.  The duck fat has fully rendered, the meat is tender and delicious.  I weight the meat under a plate to submerge it in the fat, and stick it in the cellar fridge.  Gonna let is sit for a month.  Then we'll crisp it in a hot oven and weep.  Maybe use the rendered fat to do up some taters to put the duck over, Nu?

Thank you, GE.  Thank you, Moe.  Thank you everybody in between.

Dear Diary, Dante and I share a smoke and everything is a little clearer now

Dear Diary, sorry to have been away so long.  I've been spending time with my friend, Lamy Vista, I think I mentioned her before.  You know how it is.  And helping out a bit somewhere else.  Sort of important.

Anyway, I shared a little smoke with Dante this morning and he remindid me I really ought to say something. So here I am:

Last weekend, at our place, after we'd returned home from our sojourns, James Guido, el zorro plateado, or, I guess, really la volpe argentata, cooked a beatiful tuna over carmelized onions and a balsamic vinegar reduction, and broccoli rabe and a dish his mother used to make that's like a pizza rustica without the pastry. Lori made a salad with green olives and sassy almonds and she made a monster goat-cheese cake with a crushed brittle topping, and I made mushroom & fontina pizza for everyone to start with. R&E brought fabu wines & chocolates & a special guest, P&K brought bubbles galore. It was a great night, but here's why I'm really mentioning it: there were fishetarians in the house, so I couldn't put any slices of my cured duck breast on the pizza. Bubububutttt, I'd made enough dough and prepared enough mushroom to make another pizza the next day & did & lavished it with deep dark duck which got deeper and darker after 7 minutes of hot hot hot. And the next day after that I made a side of Brussels sprouts & figs with cubed up little pancetta-like ducky.

There. Sometimes it's all about the duck. Because sometimes all the other stories go somewhere else.

Oh - one other thing. The Losers' Lounge 60th Birthday tribute to Karen Carpenter at Joes Pub was (and will be again tonight) absolutely killer. Killer.  Absolutely On Top Of The World.

Question Your Outer Dante garden sculpture, now available

Thank you, statue.com.  Along the way I also enjoyed Jayhan's moneygami, and Mark McCloud's blotterbarn.

100223 hat moon Dante plague-doctor

(When I posted this image last night I neglected to say that the handwriting in the background is Banjo Paterson's manuscript of Waltzing Matilda.  Thank you, Roger Clarke.)

100222

It's been a difficult couple of days

 

But we're back.  Thank ye.

Oh, the damned tree in front of our house what broke our 10 year old sidewalk

 

Oh, and I walked home after Megan O'Leary made me a hot toddy at Bar Toto, and I saw the snow hanging down so heavy on the damned tree what broke our sidewalk that I'd already shoveled three times today catching on the cracks and nearly breaking my wrists, and I thought, Damn that tree, I hope the wet heavy snow snaps it like a twig! 

(And I'd have taken a better picture of it, but I wouldn't lay down in the wet snow for it.)