I'm no a dead yet. (I think)

Our friend, Zahra Partovi, has invited us to a screening of her new film,  REM:

Rapid

trEe        

       Movement

Our old, old, old friend, Lewis Klahr (begorah, we're old) was just in town showing films at Millenium, and sad to say, we weren't able to get together.

Our friend, Giuseppe, took us to a raucous birthday celebration for himself at Enoteca Maria in St. George, the county of Richmond, and I had flashbacks to looney times of 30 years ago.  Yowza!

A crisis has struck the family, and we siblings have pulled together as though not a day has passed since we lived under one roof.  It's sad and beautiful.  And we're no a dead yet.

Our Valentines Day dinner in the borough of Love

Well, I'm wiping the cobwebs from my eyes.  I see I have a couple of unanswered emails from JalaPeno.  It's a call to post.  Bruddah, I'll answer.  Meanwhile:

we had buckwheat galettes in which we wrapped leftover duck confit, plum butter, and shallots (because I forgot to buy scallions).  The batter for the galettes is from David Tanis, and the confit is leftover from last night's dinner, still making it in the way Ruhlman outlines, and it was sitting there in the fridge for most of the last month, slumbered under it's pool of rendered and then congealed fat until we crisped it last night.  Magic duck fat.  And we had it with stir fried book choy and daikon.  We cooked it together,a la Valentine, Lota at the hot hot cast iron for the galettes and me at the wok.  Happy Valentines, y'all.   Food is love.

The table, my seat...

So, here's something I've noticed.  The table we eat our meals at, I call "the table".  I don't really have very warm feelings for it.  I'm not sure why.  It's perfectly good, and other people seem to like it.  I must have liked it pretty well when we first bought it, I guess about 14 or 15 years ago. 

There's a seat at the table I think of as Lori's seat, and a seat at the table I think of as "my seat", and they are opposite each other.  I sit in my seat at dinner time, when Lori sits in her seat.  When we have lunch at home, Lori sits in her seat, and I sit in the seat at the end of the table to her left, which seems closer to her than my seat does, and that seems right for lunch.  When Lori's not home for dinner and I sit at the table, I sit either in her seat or in the seat I sit in at lunch, but not in my seat. 

I just about never sit at the seat at the other end of the table, and I don't really know why.  It just seems like that would be wrong.  That's the seat I most often drape a coat or sweater over, if I'm going to do that sort of thing.  Lori often will drape a coat over her seat: I'll always move the coat from her seat to the seat at the far end of the table, when she's not in the room.

I thought about this a few mornings ago.  I woke at 4 and decided to stay up and read, and my mind wandered.  I think it was the morning I finished reading The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, which is very beautiful and simple and sad and has an improbably happy ending, improbable but you feel it's somehow deserved and you just go with it.  I dozed off again at 5:30 or so, and woke again at 6 and thought that there was something I was thinking about that I wanted to jot down, but I couldn't remember what it was.  I remembered that I thought it wasn't really the type of thing I usually write about in my journal, so maybe I would post it, but that's all I could remember.  Then last night or this morning I remembered what it was I was thinking, then I forgot again.  Then I remembered, and it's not that I think now I should post it, but I just made the new image with the third eyes for the Dante banner, and I need some text to separate the banner from the image I posted the other day - almost the same image, minus Dante.  So.

My hat...

Dutch A/V: Reggie Watts and Tommy Smith

Doh, it's a little late to say so, but we were at LaMama Friday night for Dutch A/V, and it was a great evening.

And, you know, something about the sample video below?  It's all in the evening, and yet in a way it's only tone.  Everything counterpoints off of it.  Watching it now it sets up a frisson, but it doesn't tell the story.  Oh, la.  Trust me, if it comes around, be there.

Dutch A/V (sample) from Tommy Smith on Vimeo.  And Mr. Watts.  Uh, like this: Thus Far (Alternate) by reggiewatts

Bobby Bare Jr. in DUMBO tonight and we plan on enjoying the heck out of it

BOBBY BARE JR. & SPECIAL GUESTS ROCK BROOKLYN, NY 1/11/11
MANHATTAN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS!?… HAVE YOU EVER BEEN DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS?
1/11/11 – WHEN NASHVILLE ROCKER BOBBY BARE JR. MAKES HIS DUMBO DEBUT – TAKING OVER SUPERFINE BAR RESTAURANT – THE PARTY REALLY GETS STARTED!
THE UNTITLED BOBBY BARE JR. DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS COLLABORATE WITH SUPERFINE TO PRESENT: AN EVENING SHOWCASING INDEPENDENT MUSIC & INDEPENDENT FILM
JOIN US IN DUMBO – THE CENTER FOR ALL THINGS ART AND ALL THINGS THAT ROCK
DOORS OPEN AT 8PM
PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS HERE – $10 ($12 AT THE DOOR)
*PRICE INCLUDES FREE DRINK TICKETS

The forfathersproject

Our friend, Marlon Cole, is the editor of 4fathers, forfathersproject.org.

And, if you happen to be near DUMBO this evening:

PIXOD STUDIO
55 Washington Street, Suite 451
Brooklyn, NY 11201 (DUMB0)

TIME:
6PM - 10PM

forFATHERSTM project invites you to the...

Intro Photo Exhibit / Meet & Greet

forFATHERSTM project Invites you out to the top of the year 4F meet and greet. The photographic project displays the importance
of having a Father in a child's life. It is a time for us to honor these Fathers we see pushing strollers, holding their child's hand across
the street and picking their daughter up from school.

Visually displaying these positive images will be the hope for better parenting and a brighter future for our children, with the roles of men taking on the responsibility of being an active father in his child's life.

Our mothers cannot do it alone, dads we need them and having you involved in this project will help make it more influential.

25th anniversary of the destruction of The Garden of Eden

ADAM PURPLE AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARVEY WANG

FusionArts Museum (Gallery B)
February 2-20, 2011
Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday: 12-6 pm
Friday and Saturday: By appointment only
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 3 from 6-9 pm
57 Stanton Street, New York, NY 10002


NEW YORK, JANUARY 4, 2011 – January 8, 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the destruction of The Garden of Eden, an earthwork created by Adam Purple that once spanned five city lots on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  This selection of Harvey Wang’s photographs, for the most part unpublished and on display for the first time, documents the expansion of the Garden from 1978 to 1985.  Rare prints of a few of Adam’s 1975-76 negatives will also be shown.

In 1975, Adam Purple set out to plant a garden behind his tenement building at a time when the Lower East Side was a crime-ridden wasteland.  It was a massive undertaking – the site had been buried in rubble from the demolition of two other tenements. While clearing nearly 5,000 cubic feet of debris using only simple tools and raw muscle power, Adam began to create his own topsoil from materials he found at the site and around the city. In addition to traditional composting, Adam made the seven-mile round trip to Central Park on his bicycle almost every day to bring carriage-horse manure back to the Garden, carrying about 60 pounds on each trip.

His circular design had mathematical and metaphysical meaning: The Garden of Eden grew exponentially with the addition of each new ring of plant beds, and at its center was a double Yin-Yang symbol. By 1986, his world famous eARThWORK had grown to 15,000 square feet. Among the many crops and flowers were 100 rose bushes and 45 fruit and nut trees.

Adam “zenvisioned” the Garden expanding until it replaced the skyscrapers of New York. For Adam Purple—social activist, philosopher, and urban gardener/revolutionary—the Garden was the medium of his political and artistic expression. When the Garden was slated for demolition to make way for a federally funded housing project, many prominent New Yorkers wrote letters and delivered statements of support for Adam and the Garden.  Alternative designs that would have spared the Garden or incorporated it into the new structure were displayed in the 1984 exhibition “Adam’s House in Paradise” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo.  Nevertheless, The Garden of Eden was razed on January 8, 1986, and the new housing project did not include an apartment for Adam or space for a new garden.

In terms of his revolutionary ideas about sustainability and living as humble members of the natural world, Adam was ahead of his time. He has not yet been properly recognized as an important environmental artist.  It has been 25 years since The Garden of Eden was destroyed, and this exhibition aims to ensure that Adam Purple and his unique, site-specific artwork are not forgotten.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
To hear an interview with Adam conducted by Amy Brost for the StoryCorps Oral History Project, visit http://www.harveywang.com/podcast.html or download the podcast from iTunes.  For the interview transcript, contact Harvey Wang at (212) 777-5918 or hw@harveywang.com.  A slide show of selected photographs along with audio excerpts from the StoryCorps interview is on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfBvdzgQxY

TO HELP SUPPORT THE EXHIBITION, VISIT KICKSTARTER.COM BEFORE FEBRUARY 2.  Search for Adam Purple on the site or go to:
http://kck.st/ejHJg6

ABOUT HARVEY WANG

In the 1970’s and ’80’s, Wang was a resident of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, an admirer of Adam Purple, and one of several photographers and journalists to visit The Garden of Eden periodically to document its expansion.  His photography career has spanned more than 30 years.  Wang’s books include the critically acclaimed "Flophouse: Life on the Bowery" and "Harvey Wang’s New York." His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the New-York Historical Society.  In addition to his work as a photographer, Harvey Wang is a commercial director and a filmmaker.  His short films, ranging in style and approach from documentary to experimental, have been seen in festivals all over the world. His film "Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones" won the prize for Best Documentary Short at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival, and "Triptych" was chosen as Best Experimental Film at the 2004 Rhode Island International Film Festival.  He recently directed his first feature film, "The Last New Yorker," which had its theatrical release in 2010.
# # #

www.harveywang.com

Swap. With beer. And charity.

Sunday 1/23 Swap Meet @ Southpaw
bring something..take something…

3-8pm
$5 cover includes a drink and free food, good music & cheap drink specials all day

Trade or donate your unwanted items in good, clean condition…
Clothing, housewares, books, records & electronics.
nothing to trade? purchase items for a small donation to NY Cares and Housingworks.
All donations and items remaining from the swap to benefit NY Cares and Housingworks.
…get the junk out of your trunk and come on over!

Money: I am an ass dollar bill

Money: St. Jude dollar bill chain letter

Money: Psalm 103 dollar bill

Button or tooth

Chunk of button or tooth, not sure which, long saved (by me) in a box.

Money: 1976 nickel, abused

Let's get lost. Undercity. With Andrew Wonder.

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.
 undercity.org

Stumpy's delicious 23 month chicken liver sandwich, in 13 easy to follow steps

Step 1:  February, 2009, win old maple handled S. Richard (Southbridge, MASS) cleaver at silent auction to benefit Lucky Dog Farm, at Applewood.  Put cleaver in drawer, lose track of it.

Step 2:  June, 2009, Purchase a beautiful knife made by Roselli, from the fine folks at einmaleins in Oly, WA.  This knife puts all other knives out of my mind.  It becomes my knife.  The S. Richard cleaver recedes further into the drawer.

Step 3: November, 2009, another trip to einmaleins, and this time I come away with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio, which gets me to baking bread every week.

Step 4: January, 2010, I buy a very nice pair of poultry shears, all stainless steel, no plastic, so I can more easily cut the backs from chickens and pursue my current favorite dish of a spice rubbed, flattened chicken.  I adopt the habit of cooking the livers from these split birds as a cook's treat.  Lori need not know.

Step 5: May 2010, I have been experiencing bread ennui, and am reinvigorated by Thorne's Outlaw Cook.  But that doesn't last...

Step 6: July, 2010, damn it's too hot to bake every week and there's just too much good bread in the neighborhood.  I become a bread slacker.  I even stop making pizza.

Step 7: October, 2010, I decide to use the wine yeast and the must from this year's Primavera production to make, yes, purple pizza.  Flour is back in my life. 

Step 8: December, 2010, sculptor Frank Saliani describes to me how he makes a no-knead bread.  Hmmm.  I do the same.  And again.  And again...

Step 9: December 2010, I watch a video of Melissa Clark making a prime rib.  Her knife, her knife...  the lady uses a cleaver!  I rummage through our kitchen drawers.  There it is! Feels good in my hand...

Step 10: December, 2010, Lori buys so much nutmeat for baking Christmas cookies that it affects the futures market. There are bound to be leftovers.  There are.

Step 11: December, 2010, whenever we're at home on Christmas day we have a Polish meal of pirogi and kielbasa.  Usually we buy rye bread to go with it.  This year we forget to buy the rye bread, so I decide to make it.  I can only find 5 pound bags of rye flour on Christmas eve.  There is rye bread in our future.

Step 12:  January, 2011, I make New Years Day rye bread.

Step 13: It all comes together.  I buy a chicken for dinner and prep it just before making lunch.  There's the liver, in the little glass cup, waiting for me.  While Lori reheats eggplant leftovers for herself, I fry up the liver.  I butter two slices of our rye bread.  With my mighty cleaver I chop up walnuts.  Then mighty might cleaver minces the liver, smooshes it together with the nuts, and spreads it on the buttered rye.  Then back into the frying pan and pressed down a bit on each side to warm and toast everything just a touch.

And let me tell you, Sweet Baby New Year, it was totally worth the wait.  Delicious.
Happy happy, everybody.

See you at St. Marks?

And a happy New Year!  And there's poesy in the air!  Nu?

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."
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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.