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.)

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).

Dear diary, let's lay it on the line about me and Dante

Uh, Clem.

Having worked with Dante Oblimov now for just about ever, I really do look at him and think, Gee, as I'm getting older I'm coming to look more and more like Dante.

Truth is, Dante hasn't had much of a life since editthispage.com folded and took the entire archive of Cabinet with it, and then weblogger.com sunk in on itself and took the environy archive with it.  No more Charlie Rose interviewing D.O., no more D.O. clothing lines, no more D.O. freeing the mermaid slaves.  Like so many heroes, Dante Oblimov is now just pretty much an image.  Or maybe D.O. is out there doing all the things he used to do, but he and I just aren't in touch the way we used to be.

In any case, reading Jaron Lanier's book is continuing to make me be just a wee bit more questioning about what I am participating in here - with or without Dante -  and just how detached or glib I might be being, and whether I ought to participate in rehashing other people's things or just scaling back to concentrate on my own things.  And can I accept just doing my own things and not posting about them?  So I'm futzing around on a couple of sites away from view, one that's only pictures, and it struck me there: How would it change my approach to MNIDOAILY if my own face was on it?

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes...

These are two etchings by Charles Emile Jacque (1813-1894), now in the New York Public Library’s digital collection, acquired from the collection of Samuel Putman Avrery (1822-1904).  The images are digitized and on line at NYPL – digital IDs 1220758 and 1220759.  Officially “sujet libre”, but browsable under “sex”.

The 25th anniversary edition of Little Big, by John Crowley

Ron Drummand and (as) Incunabula has put together a web site (interviews, essays) celebrating the 25th anniversary of John Crowley's Little Big.

Dan Levy, who I haven't seen more than once or twice in a long time, is the person who recommended Little Big to me.   (He recommended I read Ægypt first, but I didn't. Faraway Hills is in Ægypt, and farawayhills is, sort of, where I live.  Now I'm really digressing, but there's a spur of land in the Hudson just north of Cold Spring on the east bank of the river, 41.425841,-73.969586, which I always make believe is the site of some of the parties in Ægypt.  I don't typically mention this to anyone, because, aside from Dan, I don't know anyone else who's read Ægypt: maybe I just need to ask more people if they have.)  Dan's been many web people, pretty fancy, but at the time we're talking he was Levity.) My jaw stayed dropped the entire time I read Little Big. I laughed, I cried. I mean I really wept at one point when I realized how much I identified with one of the characters and that character was now, no kidding, just dead.

You know, when I finish reading what I'm reading now, I'm going to go back and reread Little Big. Or maybe wait for the 25th anniversary printing in April.  Thank you, Incunabula.

[Well, I'm in a groove.  Let me say a little more.  David Kassel introduced me to Dan Levy, lo those many years ago, and David is the other half of a few of web projects I posted about earlier this week.  We saw D last week for the first time in a long time, and I told him then that I had a dream - a pretty horrific dream about Dan L.  OK: here's how old friends differ.  DK immediately launched the question What does that mean about you (me, Stumpy)?, whereas I was telling DK because my next question was Is everything OK with DL?

I think I'm done now.]

Tuli Kupferberg benefit at St. Ann's Warehouse this Friday evening

Help the man who helped bring you so much joyful insanity (as opposed to the other kind).  From the article at Broadwayworld:

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Lou Reed will join a host of others in the January 22nd concert to benefit Tuli Kupferberg. Kupferberg is an American singer songwriter and found of the band The Fugs who suffered a series of strokes in April and September 2009, leaving him blind and in need of full time nursing care. The concert will take place at St. Ann's Warehouse, Friday, January 22 at 7:30 P.M.

The full lineup will include The Fugs, John Kruth and an All Star Band, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Pete Stampfel, John Zorn. More performers have yet to be announced.

Fugs homepage.  A 1965 photo of the Fugs (meet the Fugs) by David Gahr: wow.

Dear diary, juxtapositions

Jeez, I already felt bad about the juxtaposition of the sausage post and the MLK video, and now Ted Kennedy's seat has been frittered away and my saying so right here is the top slice of bread on this sandwich of embarrassing abutments.  Oy !

I have two personal Kennedy nearnesses. One I mentioned a while back, the other is that I shook Ted's hand after a talk he gave a few years ago and really felt here is the old lion.

Can't make myself go read all of the news analysis (gack) on this, so instead I'm going through email, and there's a piece in yesterday's Secrecy News about the DoD "clarifying" it's doctrine on psychological operations.

It endorses a new, negative definition of the term “propaganda,” which had formerly been used in a neutral sense to refer to “Any form of communication in support of national objectives designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.” From now on, propaganda will refer only to what the enemy does:  “Any form of adversary communication, especially of a biased or misleading nature, designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of any group in order to benefit the sponsor, either directly or indirectly.”

Bummer that the military has joined the (rest of the country) (the Senate) (your noun here) on this. 

Boy's first sausage

Mmmmm.  Chicken thigh meat, pork back fat, roasted red peppers, basil, garlic, salt, black pepper, red wine, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

About 2 and a half pounds of it.  Just enough to get initiated.  I was working alone, so no pics of the grinding, etc...

And, because man does not live be sausage alone...

MLK, I Have a Dream

Scientific amusements

Chest of Books, Scientific American Supplement, The Dance of The Electrified Puppets, and Silhouette Portrats.  It's a warm day, but it's still winter, folks, and these amusements can come in handy.  I love silhouettes.  And I love Chest of Books.  Pretty gummed up with Google ads, but pretty great.  (Amazing how many old illustrations Dante's image pops up in.)

Hear Hear !

that in response to Esteban's post which you should read after passing this one by (da trute: ju ju be tryin' his paw at f-bk, full disclosure).
(HI to everybuddy by the way, methinks this be Ju Ju's first post here since the new year showed up...)
CLUSTERFLOCK CLUSTERFLOCK CLUSTERFLOCK
meaning that there be lots of good stuff to peruse over there, me including linky bit below just becuz me got one hella crush on Sheila Ryan...
Hadj M´hamed el Anka | Chaabi algerien

The proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook.  Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their design, such as the comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.

Instead of people being treated like the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not A Gadget. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.

The quote's on pp. 16.  I'm guessing that if you're a youngster you might say, What's this weird old dreadlocked dude talking about? Or, if you're an older fart, maybe in particular you are this older fart, typing this entry, who once concentrated on projects of proud extroversion in an earlier wave of web culture, you think, What am I doing?

Long ago, and far away, in a land before the blog...

And while I'm here...

 

 

 

Golden Lips, Golden Fest, be there right now (we are)

Hitler Learns Leno Is Moving Back To Late Night

Visuwords

Simple, for example.  Woah!

Secret encoded message: There are no google results for "tony hoostine"

(Until this one.)  Good work, dude.  Unc.S.

Watch thy neighbor watch

Nice NYTimes interactive graphics piece showing neighborhoods in large US cities, broken out by zip codes, and the Netflix rentals in each.  Full disclosure: no, we're not a Netflix family (but Netflix does rent movies that one of us makes.  Shouldn't you be renting more documentary films from Netflix?!).

Got feelings and dang proud of it

Cuz Kev is pointing to this Daniel Johnston session at Daytrotter: Got Feelings And Dang Proud Of It.

I'll take the long road

One thing led to another, we ran into a good friend, and after the Unusual Creatures show last night we took in Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens.  What! (have you done, have you done).  And now, me no wanna go to work today!

Doh! Worlds collide!

Ron English, Morgan Spurlock, Homer Simpson...

worlds collide!

NYT article, pointed to by Juju, Ah, Homer, It Seems Just Like Yesterday

Rudy G forgot why he wanted to postpone his leaving office and what made him America's Mayor in his own mind. I guess.

Macinwi point to this:  Rudy Giuliani: 'We Had No Domestic Attacks Under Bush; We've Had One Under Obama'.

Songs for Unusual Creatures

Songs For Unusual Creatures - The Robot Show from Michael Hearst on Vimeo.
Hey, clear your calendar for Monday night.  We're all going to Joe's Pub to see out neighbor Michael Hearst perform Songs for Unusual Creatures.  Descrip:

Michael Hearst (One Ring Zero, Songs For Ice Cream Trucks) celebrates some of the lesser-known creatures that roam the planet. From the Australian Bilby, to the deep-sea Magnopinna Squid, the songs are brought to life by a gaggle of bizarre sounds and instruments including theremin, claviola, stylophone, and musical instrument robots.

Song for Unusual Creatures is featuring Michael Hearst (theremin, claviola, stylophone), Ben Holmes (trumpet), Allyssa Lamb (piano), Ron Caswell (tuba), Kristin Meuller (drums), and gaggle of musical instrument robots provided by LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.

Be there or be square.  Or be there and be square, but very, very happy. 7:00 PM - January 11.

She never saw it coming

Right here in the Slope, kids.  Brooklyn Paper: OyPhone! Thieves are picking Apples right out of people’s hands!  Takes fairly good bike skills and well oiled gear.

"I prefer..." survey closed

Van Johnson's socks 6
Bono's sunglasses 0

America's daily data consumption

Neatorama and elsewhere.

100 games cupcake game

Yup.  100 games cupcake game.  Via Make.

Seymour Topping

Yeah, well, right, you probably don't have an hour to watch this.  But dip in and out.  Seymour Topping was at amazing places at amazing times.  (And he's our friend's dad!) This is a 2005 interview, shortly after the publication of his book, Fatal Crossroads, A Novel of Vietnam 1945.

Topping articles at the NYTimes.

More Bill Cunningham: Nyawker - Man on the Street

Lota just sent me a link to this New Yorker profile of Mr. Cunningham, from March 16, 2009.  Man On The Street: Bill Cunningham Takes Manhattan by Lauren Collins.  Danka u, sweapea.

To our friends on the compound in Boise:

Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images

Globalfest

Hey, kids, we're going to Globalfest NY this year @ Webster Hall, no fail.  Couldn't make it the last couple.  Coming with us?  Lineup includes:

- Alif Naaba, West African acoustic song (Burkina Faso)
- Cara Dillon, striking Celtic vocalist (Ireland)
- Caravan Palace, swingin’ electro manouche jazz (France)
- Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole, Creole Zydeco heir from Louisiana (USA)
- Federico Aubele, bolero and cumbia meets electro downtempo (Argentina/USA)
- François Ladrezo & Alka Omeka, Gwo-ka master (Guadalupe)
- La Cumbiamba eNeYé, music from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Colombia (Colombia/USA)
- La Excelencia, old-school salsa dura revivalists (USA)
- Meta and the Cornerstones, African roots reggae export (Senegal/USA)
- Namgar, Siberian shaman rock from the Central Asian steppes (Russia)
- Nguyên Lê’s Saiyuki, acclaimed French-Vietnamese guitarist leads a Pan-Asian jazz trio
(Vietnam/Japan/India/France)
- Nightlosers, Transylvanian blues-rock/Gypsy chameleons (Romania)

Bill Cunningham, my guilty pleasure

Yes, I admit it.  I am addicted to Bill Cunningham.  When I look at the Times on line, if there's an On The Street  photo essay by Bill, it's the first thing I go to.  (Then maybe Mark Bittman, then onto all the news that fits and makes one ill.)

In 2002 Bill wrote this piece for the Times, Bill on Bill (archived without the photos, damn).  When you read this little bio, you think the same thing that you think when you listen to him narrate his photo essays: What a nice man!

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

RS has sent a New Year's note, and I don't think he'll mind if I post it here.  Old people might remember RS as the Ralph Nader look-alike back in Stumpy's blogs of '01.

I've seen him around the neighborhood for years with his street weary boxes of candies and his wind burnished face, enduring.  On occasion I have put coins in his can, more often I give him a passing glance and brush on. This morning out walking into the fatigue and guarded elation of a new year I pass him sitting in front of starbucks in his big rolling chair, quiet with his candy, seemingly as dazed and determined as me about this new day. Ten yards past, I stop, turn back and approach him.

He looks down, roots around his crumpled box and extracts a tattered bag of candy and hands it to me in exchange. I stand still, he tilts his head up and croaks ... happy ... new .... year. 

Then he extends his fist slowly over his chair's arm seeking my fist. 

It seems a good place to put the first dollar of the new decade.

from a tejano of our acquaintance...

comes this linkybit to share with thee, sort of a welcome to twenteeten as many folk be calling it. Esteban has met and shared a table with the esteemed C J, who oncet upon a time blogged regularly at BookNotes, now busy as one of the wizards behind the curtain of BookLab, out there deep in the heart of texas hillcountry with the fella responsible for sharing the link below, el ultimo dudo laid-backo, G. (for gimme gravy widdem grits...) McLerran. Un Feliz Ano Nuevo a ustedes, tejanos estimados!

y andale pues, chiquitos y chiquititas!, vamos a jugar con morecowbell.dj

btw, there's a picture of both G & C.J. from '06 via the post you'll find here

Dear 2010, so far you totally rock

It's true.  We're in love with you.   We even love your name.

Let's see, how did it begin?  Oh, yeah, just a couple of hours after a gaggle of friends left our place we were up @ Provini when Midnight opened the door and you came in, all whoopee and kissing.  Then we slid down the hill to Bar Toto and there was more whoopee and kissing.   Then we went sideways to Gingers for a while where it was orange light and thumpa thumpa thumpa.  Then we went deep to Sunny's and wasn't that fun!  What a crush!  Not sure how we made it home - must have bought a vowel or two along the way.

Then, a little cruelly maybe, it was up pretty early so we could clear our heads, find our orange invites, and make our way to the inauguration! Mayor Mike, our man and Public Advocate Bill De Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu.  That was glorious, sitting out there in the crowd in front of City Hall, the mix of folks who'd invested their time or money in pushing their ideas and wants through the political process. Racially & economically mixed, with the common thread of having opted in rather than having opted out. And hey, it was a little folksy - students from the newcomer's high school in Queens introduced the speakers & office holders & told jokes.  Small town New York.   (And this is the twin school that our neighbor Brooke Hauser wrote about in the Times.  Remember? This Thing Called Prom.)  Yada yada.  It was great fun, but cold and when it was over thousands of people who had been holding their pee suddenly needed a place to go, totally overwhelming the local coffee shops.

Then home, dear Twentyten, where we did up a couple of sausages and had them on the last of the home made batards of ratty old 2009.   Jeez, that old year looks dreary already, doesn't it?  Dinner was with pesto Laurita put up during the summer on what was probably the best smelling day of Oh Nine. Then we hauled out a fresh ham we'd been hoarding, already slathered with the adobo sauce we'd mixed up earlier in the day, and got that into the oven. Couldn't go to sleep until it was out, and then almost couldn't sleep when it was out 'cause the air was so thick with pork.  But we managed, dear Twentyten, we managed.