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.)

Hold for Lewis

When I was reading Ruhlman and he kept referring to McGee, I thought, Oh, yeah, I've seen that book...  And when I was rummaging around yesterday for the big Beard (guidance needed re sourdough), Oh, yeah, look, there's the McGee, right next to the Beard.  And when I took it off the shelf and opened it, there was this bookmark in it from Book Court, and on the back of the bookmark was Hold for Lewis 1/6/05.
So, once upon a time, exactly 5 years and one month before pulling it off my shelf yesterday, Lota or I wanted the McGee badly enough to special order it.  Maybe I even started reading it before.  The bookmark was inserted in the section on milk chemistry.  (I sat down with the book and started reading it from the beginning, got weirdly to just about exactly the point where I'd found the bookmark, stuck the bookmark back in, and wandered off muttering about hairy milk proteins having their negatively charged tips sheared of to get all curdlike.) I'm gonna look on that shelf again today to see what else it remembers for me. 

Self-Enervation; it's consequences and treatment

Well, I was indulging in one of my favorite pastimes this morning - browsing the the collection at Making of America, thank you very much - when I came across  Doctor Eldridge's book.  And, yes, I've started reading it.  Oh!

That it is one of the most prolific causes of insanity known to the human race, is well attested by the history of hundreds that are annually admitted and provided for within the walls of our eleemosynary institutions. Out of eight hundred and sixteen cases of insanity in the New York State Lunatic Asylum, there were one hundred and seven masturbators. This ratio seems astonishingly great, but it is nevertheless true, as the fearful records afforded by other institutions, prove the alarming correctness of our statement.

No mention that the figure is closer to 100% for people outside the the walls of the eleemosynary institutions.  Substitute "bloggers", "tweeters", or "facebookers" for the M word?

This week cooking - 7 days & 7 nights preparations

Dear diary, give blood give blood, give blood give blood...

(Rain Machine - Give Blood - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.)

Dear diary, woof woof woof, January's going out like it came in, all action packed.  Joseph Arthur and Bobby Bare Jr. and Antipop Consortium and Kyp Malone's Rain Machine.  (I'd been singing Monk at the Disco in my head from the wee hours of Saturday morning until Mr. Malone blew it out of there last evening.)

Yes, Rain Machine blew my mind, but can we talk about something even more important?  At about 5 PM this evening I'll be going down to our cellar and pulling four half duck breasts (half breasts, not half duck) out from the case of salt I buried them in yesterday.  I'm going to wash them off, pat them dry, dust them all over with ground white pepper, wrap them in cheesecloth and tie them off.  Then I'm going to walk them to a secret place the mice don't know about that's cool and humid and I'm going to hang them there for a week.  During the week the duck breasts are hanging, I'll probably think about knives.  I'll think: do  I have the a knife that's really just right for what happens next?  I'll decide, No, I don't have a knife that's really just right for what happens next.  But what will I do about that?  I don't know.  I just don't know.  I'm not sure that listening to Give Blood or Smiling Black Faces over and over again will help me decide, but I'm probably gonna find out.

Yes, I find this titillating in every way

The dorkiness of the image, madam's zeppelin breasts, the water gushing so lustily from Sir's pail, the decorous arm reaching into the room with more water, and everything and everyone so hot hot hot.

Leonato, Much Ado About Nothing, Scene 1:

...O, she is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!

To say nothing of Señor!  Another fabu image from the digital collection at NYPL.

But good news tonight, Roger B. Tawney is off the hook.

Juju sent a pointer to this Keith Olbermann commentary re the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. A sad event as seen from our window.  Lori's film, This Land is Your Land has a great section on corporate personhood (gack) and corporate free speech issues (gack gack).