Steel Cage Death Match of Movies

Jesse brought home Danny Trejo vehicle Machete (as in “what’s this long, hard thing?” “That’s my machete”…well, you get the dialog) With Steven Segal and Robert De Niro, you know you’re gettin’ action as well. Jesse votes for it as best movie ever made. I’m an open minded guy. I watched it 4 times de novo, then ran it head-to-head against Big Trouble in Little China, the actual best movie ever made. 


Jess has some points coming his way. Movie addresses big themes—illegal aliens—with a deft hand, from multiple perspectives, and with good humor. For me, it loses big points for persistent gratuitous violence. If I’s gonna be the best movie ever, it has to have wide appeal. It does pull in religious themes and icons, and takes a generally nonlinear path to the denoument, which is  a nice surprise and some dramatic twists. A nicely complicated ending. 


But you know, BTILC is still balls to the wall action, humor, drama, horror, special effects, and you got the floating head that gets knifed and deflated. Complex plot. Tricks from every film school from NYC to Tokyo underground. Master class in cinema, complete in one film. 


Final score? BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA  127 POINTS. MACHETE 80 POINTS. NO CONTEST, BGILC tops the polls for for one more year, no household should be without. Certainly this household won’t! 

10 Albums No Household Should Be Without

Dr. Dan and I have a running argument. Usually at the beach, and usually after the third beer in the morning sunshine. Oh, ok, sometimes after the second Negroni in the evening. 


Anyway. I always start it by listing the “10 Best Albums of All Time”. We discuss that for a while, then Dan points out, and it’s obviously true, that you can’t really identify the 10 “best” albums in any genre, much less rock and roll. 


OK, that may be the case. But you sure as hell can generate a list of albums everybody should own. Without exception. Of course, such a list eventually runs to 100s, if not 1000s. But we have to start somewhere. 


Here goes.


The Velvet Underground and Nico. This album was, and is, so far ahead of anything else on the planet in terms of sound, songcraft, musicianship, and sheer balls-to-the-wall creativity that it is unique among works of art of all fields, not just music. Still the most amazing music there’s ever been. And, likely, ever will be. Plus a violin, for crap’s sake. 


Drugstore. The first album—with the dark, stellar cover. Isabel Montero piloted them away from British hardcore and to a unique form of low-fi, high-intellect, drone. Again, so original as to be almost unprecedented. 


Peter Case. First album—the one with Steel Strings and Small Town Spree. Awesome singer-songwriter storytelling. Nicely underproduced. Just gorgeous. After you get this, go ahead back and find everything the Plimsouls—his earlier band did. Almost as good.


Stones—Beggar’s Banquet. You know, for all the great music the Beatles, Stones, Faces, Kinks, etc. did, there were very few entire stone classic albums. And then, it was mostly the Stones. This slot could’ve been filled by Let It Bleed, Exile, or even more so, Sticky Fingers. But Beggar’s Banquet came out of nowhere and there’s not an uneven, inconsistent, or dishonest note on it. I make it a point to listen to it at least a couple times a year. It’s a wonder every frickin’ time.


Mekons—Rock and Roll. Just one of the best rock albums of all time. Ever. By anybody. At any time. Pounding. Melodic. Great lyrics. Hooks. Plus a violin. For crap’s sake (see Velvet Underground). 


The Clash—Give ‘Em Enough Rope. I don’t care what your older brother, the critics, the punk fanzines, or the Clash themselves have said about their discography. This album is among the finest pure pop metal items on any planet. It kicks more ass than most albums, including those by the Clash.


Pogues—Hell’s Ditch. Speaking of production by Joe Strummer. This is another one to ignore all the bitching at allmusic.com and at Amazon and every where else small time reviewers feel compelled to mouth off. This is the darkest, darkest album ever. If you ever want to sleep again, do NOT read the lyric sheet. Trust me. I’ve read it. I’ve got awful insomnia.


Sisters of Mercy—Vision Thing. I know, this is starting to sound like a…uh…broken record (for those of you too young to remember “records”, think a big scratch in your nutcase friend’s collection of thrash on vinyl), but ignore the bitching at allmusic.com. This is a classic. A classic. “…on Detonation Boulevard…see the flowers on the razor wire…I was thinking about her…skin…”… .


The Who—Live at Leeds. A classic BEFORE they added the entire Tommy to the 2 disk set. The best live album—and one of the best of any albums—ever. The John Coltrane-ish instrumental breakdown at the end of Magic Bus and My Generation is worth the price of admission. Then you get definitive versions of their stage show, plus all of Tommy at its finest.


Nirvana—Never Mind. I know, you haven’t played this in years. Go thou now and do so. Thou will be amazed at what thou hast been missing. Trusteth me.


New material up around the horn. I’ve been sick, I apologize for being a day late with this stuff. Check http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the cancer diary, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for photos and a little ecology, http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for the best in sustainability and the environmental consequences of war. And thanks again for stoppin’ by—every time you guys read this stuff, I feel a little more life come back to my battered frame!

9/11 Nostalgia

I don’t mean to be cynical (I know, I almost always DO in fact mean to be cynical. In this case I do not). When something massive happens in the world, especially now in the age of tight and nearly universal electronic and social linkage, after time passes, the event is remembered simply for the event. Not for the tragedy or triumph. Simply because something happened to us collectively and it is part of our collective consciousness.


This is intensely true for the events of 9/11. There is plenty of legitimate memorial of the tragedy, heroism, and intensity of that day. There is also a lot of memorial simply of our collective experience. What I mean by not being cynical is that I don’t think this is any less legitimate than the more serious and dark-eyed remembrance. After all, a big shock is a big shock, whatever the outcome. The recent earthquake here on the east coast is a lesser example. Not much result, but sufficiently novel and affecting a sufficient number of people to warrant a lot of discussion. In the case of 9/11, of course, you had the much wider collective experience coupled with massive consequence. So the experience itself is a stand-alone event worthy of remembrance.


National Geographic Channel did a great job putting together a series of shows that premier this week addressing 9/11 issues. I thought I would have to force myself to watch them. But the shows are so well done it’s no effort at all. I commend the entire run of shows (well, except the Rudy Giuliani one. Even I couldn’t stomach that. The W interview is worth watching, though), most of them a couple hours, to you. 


In the meantime, where were you on September 11 2000? I was in Cleveland. I flew in early that Tuesday morning, leaving BWI around 0630, hitting downtown Cleveland at around 0800. Three of us—one from Syracuse, one from Denver, and me, were converging for a proposal presentation to a client. We convened in the hotel room that one of the guys had booked the night before. Pulled out computers and started to review the Power Points. Cathy called my cell, something she rarely does during business hours when I’m on the road, so I assumed it was some kind of emergency. She told us to put on a television.


Which we did. Hooolllllyyyyy shhhhiiiittttttt. We watched the second plane hit the South Tower. Then the alarm went off and the hotel announced evacuation. Our near-the-waterfront location was directly in the path of Flight 93. The TV said commercial flights were grounded. Out in the plaza, a big jet flew low overhead in the clear, cool air, slowly turning in a big loop as it reversed back east. It was indeed United 93.


All of downtown Cleveland was evacuated. We wandered around the square outside the train station and shopping mall just up the hill from the Rock and Roll Museum and Hall of Fame. Repeatedly called the client via cells. No answer, of course. I told the two guys that we had to start figuring out how we were going to get out of town. They thought the client might want to hold the meeting later in the afternoon. I looked at them like they were deranged capitalists. Which they were. But they were insistent.


Finally I called our corporate travel agent and had them start reserving three vehicles, one for each of us, at every rent-a-car counter in or near Cleveland. I asked them to locate the nearest Hertz office, because according to the news, traffic in Cleveland was frozen and getting to the airport rental counters would take hours. Turned out to be 4 blocks from where we were. I grabbed the two guys—both of them frantically and repeatedly dialing the client’s number—and dragged them bodily along the street to the Hertz office.


We got into the queue that stretched half a block. A woman stuck her head out the door and shouted “we’re running out of cars. Who has reservations?” I waved my hand and said we had three. Woman behind us had one. “We have four cars left. You four, come in.” She pulled us inside and locked the door behind us.


Took an hour to process us. They did indeed have a car for each of us. When she handed me the keys, I popped the door open and shouted to the line for anyone going to Washington or Baltimore. Two kids popped up, a thin white girl and a black guy, and said they were in. When we got to the car in the garage, they said they had a third who would be along in a bit and did I mind the wait. I told them I thought we had all the time in the world. A black girl, also anorexically slender, showed up, heaved her gear in the trunk, and we headed for I80.


8 hours later we merged off 70 onto 695, then 95. I never did get their whole story. They were with some media firm, pitching a client. Their car was at BWI. I dropped them off, figured the rental counter at BWI wasn’t going to be open and drove the rental home. Swapped it out a few days later, no charge. 


A few weeks later I was back on the road. When my briefcase went through the scanner, the guard said “there’s a knife in your bag”. I said I didn’t think so, I tossed my pocket knife and metal belt into a trash can in Cleveland. But they searched. Didn’t find it. Over the next month, every 2 or 3 security checks, somebody would think they saw a knife in my bag. But the search never turned it up.


I found it months later when I was emptying the bag out completely, getting ready for a long trip. Meaning I passed through the post-911 “enhanced security” at airports roughly 16 or 18 times with a knife in my bag… .


New stuff up around the weblog horn this week. Be sure, if you have a few minutes, to visit http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for an essay on environmental consequences of armed conflict, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for the natural world, and http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the weekly cancer diary. Thanks for stopping by!

Total War

I’ve been involved for a couple years now in preparing and teaching my online course in Armed Conflict and the Environment. That’s led me to read intensively on World War Two and the American Civil War, and to ruminate some on my own attitudes toward war.


I’d say I’m a basic pacifist and generally anti-war. But that’s probably too simple. After much thought, I can’t imagine retrospective bitching about the use of atomic weapons in World War Two. The horrific nature of that conflict, and the intensity of Japanese resistance in the Marianas and at Iwo Jima and Okinawa make it clear that ending the war via conventional arms was going to take a long time and yield terrible casualties. The Japanese butchered civilians and prisoners alike throughout Asia. Using all available weaponry at the ass-end of World War Two wasn’t then, and isn’t now, I think, worth much of a moral second look at all. A no brainer. 


Nor, having actually seen the Iraqi hardware that was on the receiving end along with the aftermath in Kuwait, do I have much complaint about the destruction of the remaining Iraqi armor on the “highway of death” during their retreat from Kuwait. I mean, the invasion of Kuwait, and the pointless destruction the Iraqis wreaked, was so totally brutal that making sure their war machine was hammered on the way out of town only made sense. Retrospective hand wringing really isn’t meaningful.


So when Jesse called Cathy and me together the other night to announce that he intended to join the army when he graduates from St. Mary’s in June, I had mixed feelings. I think our present incursion in Iraq is just an idiotic outcome of Cheney and Rumsfeld’s childish macho posturing despite both of their ex post facto attempts to blame the intelligence community. And our having gotten bogged down in Afghanistan, after the lesson the Soviets provided only a few years prior, sure as hell seems like the wrong approach to battling Al Qaeda to a standstill. 


Still, as I told Jess, among the many things I resented about Vietnam was that it took away MY option to join the military. I was an overweight, self-centered kid who could have used a good ass-kicking when I graduated high school, although football in high school and the transition of college seemed to do a pretty good job.


One of the reasons the present state of political discourse is so fucked up in this country is the complete lack of shared effort. We don’t share the day-to-day of living in a complex democracy, no wonder we don’t share any vision of how it should be conducted. One way to remedy that might be to revive the draft. But make it 100% universal, no deferments or exceptions. Everyone at the age of 18 has a two-year commitment to public service, no questions asked. Everyone should have basic military training. Then we could let people sort themselves by preference. Rebuilding infrastructure; assisting in schools, filling the military, bulking up NGOs like Habitat for Humanity, Red Cross, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, etc. Yeah, it’ll cost a shitload. Yeah, it’ll be logistically and administratively difficult. Yeah, there’ll be a lot of whining. But we really need some kind of shared future, or we’re not going anywhere coherent.


I’m proud that Jesse is at the cutting edge!


There’s a fun new post over at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , the other sites— http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ I’ll update later in the week. Thanks for stopping by!

Displacement Via Movies


This was a tough week, as you know if you’ve been over at End O’ The World. I’ve been trying to hide from my illness and from some of the draining hard work I’m facing to resurrect my professional life in some functional fashion. Although I must admit, looking back on it now, that displacing via writing worked pretty damn well through the acutely painful darkness of the worst of the treatment. I wrote and published two articles in international-level journals, both opinion pieces on global sustainability. So I got that goin’ for me.


Anyway. This week I didn’t write (much). I watched movies late at night.


First up: Predators. This is the one released a year or so ago, about the group of earthly hard-asses kidnapped and airdropped into the Most Dangerous Game style hunting preserve on the alien planet. Where the predators (same ones as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover Predator 1 and 2 respectively, also the entertaining Aliens vs. Predators about the Antarctic predator hunting theme park, and the somewhat more strained A vs. P 2 about the small town in Colorado finding itself a battle ground between alien species). Anyway. In Predators, you got your World War 2 multiethnic infantry squad, in this case represented by a Hispanic guy from the Mexican drug cartels, an African killer for hire, a Russian special forces guy from Chechnya, a Yakuza assassin, etc. Except for the American mercenary and U.N. shock troop lady, they’re all cannon fodder. Suffice to say the plot is credible, requiring not too much suspension of disbelief, the photography is great, dialog at least marginally acceptable. Very good of its kind—Definitely Worth a Look.


Next, Battle Los Angeles. I’ve seen dismal reviews of this on the web. I’m not sure what the griping is about. Shot mostly from a first-person shooter perspective, with lots of shaky camera realism in the style of Generation Kill and Restrepo, it’s got surprisingly strong character study wrapped up in a very well paced shoot-em-up space opera. No Household Should Be Without. 


Then there’s self-consciously gory B movie Bitch Slap. Really, for a low-budget cult-audience targeted late night cable rerun bound film, it’s pretty effective. Pretends to be a repository of sex, drugs, and violence. In reality, the sex is low key and clothed, the drug use is minimal, and the violence, which is fairly extreme, is sufficiently cartoonish to blunt disgust. Got a nice bit of plot twist at the end. Not for all of you. Well, really, not for most of you. Well, in fact, for a small minority of you. Hell, realistically, for Lance. But for Lance, and maybe Eric, it Holds Up Pretty Well.


Finally, and only in theaters at the moment, there’s Cowboys and Aliens. Colin, Jesse and I saw a matinee today. This one definitely delivers. Even Harrison Ford, as one of several villains-who-learn-their-lesson, does a credible job. Plot is more than adequate, visuals are great. And the sound track is absolutely killer. I gotta find a copy. This movie is Highly Recommended—No Household Should Be Without.


Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a cancer melodrama update, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for a festive seafood dinner, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a new essay on Armed Conflict and the Environment. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks!

All Dressed Up With No Place to Go

As Meat Loaf put it in, I think, the last cut on Bat Out of Hell. Actually, I look so awful at this point that you could dress me up all the hell you want and it wouldn’t help. I’d still look like a cross between a six-foot sun dried tomato and an undernourished Gypsy guitar slinger.


Anyway. What is your dream double feature? Hypothetically, of course. Let’s say, you’ve got the house to yourself on a Saturday night and you feel like watching an evening’s worth of movies. What titles would you choose to watch back-to-back?


Back when my folks first got cable for the TV in the cottage in Pompton Lakes New Jersey, various movie channels ran suites of mostly B-level stuff pretty much around the clock. I got hooked on one combination that used to come up pretty frequently: Rollerball (the original, with James Caan and John Houseman) followed by Death Race 2000 (the original with Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). Awesome battle between low-budget, but well-plotted and surprisingly philosophical sci fi adventure films.


Saturday night I was exhausted and cranky (see why at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/). Knew I was gonna have trouble sleeping. So Molly and I slipped out to Best Buy on the way to the grocery store. Picked up Salt with Angelina Jolie and The King’s Speech. But the real prize was a made-to-be double header of Predators (the new one where they’re kidnapped to a big game park planet in a slight twist on Richard Connell’s short story Most Dangerous Game) and Battle Los Angeles. Jesse, Colin and I had seen Predators in the theater, and I remember it being pretty sucky. I don’t know what was wrong with me. It’s a great cheesy sci fi thriller, no questions asked. As is Battle Los Angeles. Both have a surprising depth of plot and decent character development, with Battle LA taking the character prize in the head-to-head.

But hell, you don’t watch movies like this for the subtlety of the characters, the acting, the motivation, or even the story line. You watch it for the dark battle scenes of aliens of various shapes, sizes and threat levels get gunned down by the good guys from Spaceship Earth. 


And for that purpose, this double feature is right up there with the best. Move over, Stallone and Caan. New dogs are movin’ in.


Thanks for stoppin’ by. I have new material up at all 4 blog sites this week, so don’t miss http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . See y’all next week, same time, same blog stations!!!

The CD is Dead

Long live the CD. My kids know I’m not going to leave them much of an inheritance, but I AM going to leave them with a dynamite digital music collection. The only problem with this is that music is now truly digital and doesn’t mess around with hard copies any more. CD shops around the world are closing, consolidating to a few big centers that are desperately trying to find other items to purvey. I myself tend to purchase downloads form Amazon, particularly for stuff that is quirky. I recently bought large collections of T Rex radio appearances and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates studio output. These are sloppy, some of the tracks are poor audio quality, but the music is awesome and the download format costs half or less of what it would take to get it on CD. And the Johnny Kidd stuff isn’t even available at the moment on CD. So, I’m thinkin’ it’s time to get those last few visits to the Princeton Record Exchange in, as it may not be there much longer.


Fortunately, there is still some stuff that is worth obtaining in permanent form. When the Rolling Stones recorded in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, they built up a big stock of relationships with local music scenes. Recently, Keith Richards compiled a big stack of tapes from time in Jamaica, and released a very cool album of pre-reggae spirituals and folk songs, sung by what seems to be a bar full of drunken locals, half of whom stopped by after church and half of whom came straight from the soccer pitch. 

Called Wingless Angels, Amazon offers the 2 disk collection at a good price. It is, in fact, priceless, and so worth buying in hard format. No family should be without!


This week, I managed to get all 4 weblogs up with new material. Goal is to keep it all going weekly for the foreseeable future. If you have time, please visit http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!

Sweet but Torturous


When I was a kid, my folks had a hefty reprint copy of Prosper Montagne’s Larousse Gastronomique on the bookshelves. I’m sure, given how long it sat there, that it was the first English language edition from 1961. It was pretty wacky for a cookbook. Nominally an encyclopedia of French cuisine, it actually was a massive catalog of the terminally fussy school of cooking that can only be considered baroque. Occasionally the Larousse found itself on the hamper in front of the toilet, doing its rotation (along with Mad magazine paperbacks, field guides to various flora and fauna, and high school poetry readers) in the family bathroom library. 


Larousse wasn’t much for fundamentals. Rather, it assumed you had abundant sous chefs and commis, spent full time in a commercially-equipped kitchen, and could throw down such basics as glace de viands, hollandaise sauce, fish quenelles, veal forcemeat, and puff pastry in your sleep. The recipes ran to long lists of stuffed eggs, and not yer standard devileds, either. More like “Oeufs Farci a la Charles DeGaulle”, reading along the lines of “mash 2 salted anchovies soaked and deboned, 25 grams of mushroom duxelles prepared with butter, leaks and forest fungus, 50 grams of foie gras poached in fino sherry and butter with 20 grams of finely minced black truffle, the yolks of 6 hard-cooked eggs, fleur de sel, freshly cracked Malabar black pepper, freshly prepared quatre epices, and 10 ml of 40 year old artisanal Calvados. Stuff the egg whites with this mixture, place each egg in a previously cleaned and prepared artichoke heart, coast each with freshly prepared veal gelatin, place each artichoke and egg assembly in a nest of deep fried shredded potatoes, place each potato nest on a generous spoonful of previously prepared spinach made with heavy cream and nutmeg, coat the entire piece in veal gelatin, chill. Serve with Montrachet 1929 using thousand franc notes as napkin holders.”


You get the picture. Fun stuff to daydream about, not much for day-to-day assistance in the weeknight-gotta-get-dinner-ready-by-7 kitchen.


A client and good friend in Texas sent me a 5 volume cookbook set called “Modernist Cuisine”. Comes in its own custom-made Plexiglas binder, weighs right around 25 kilos total. Fantastic. You might have heard of these guys, they’re all the rage in high end (VERY high end) cooking circles. About as far as you can get from Alice Waters’ “fresh and simple”, this one starts with routinely cooking sous vide (slow poaching at low temperatures in vacuum packed pouches) to decorative foams made from guar gum and gum Arabic, to odd protein glues that can re-assemble deboned fish, fowl, and mammals. 

The hefty set of Modernist Cuisine.


Some of this stuff, entertaining as it is, is beyond the week night meal category (“Beef Short Ribs”: smoke for 7 hours, vacuum seal and cook sous vide at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 72 hours). However, a hell of a lot of it made to whet your experimental appetite (did I mention that these guys open their flagship restaurant only 6 months a year so they can move to their “research laboratory” for the other 6 months a year to develop new wackiness?). Hay-Smoked Chicken Breast, for example. After brining (which I do NOT recommend under any circumstances for poultry, since it makes them come out wet and slimy), you “lay hay in bottom of pan, cover with more hay, light with blow torch, when hay has burned down, remove chicken skin and serve”. 


It’s gonna take me years to get through playing with these babies. With a little luck, I’ll be working on one chapter or another next time you’re around to have dinner with us!


Thanks for stopping by. New material up at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , I’m still working on getting new stuff up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com . But I’m getting there. They’ll all be updated within a couple days. Thanks again! 

Mama's Comin' Home

An acoustic original. Apologies again for the low volume--I'm still on the learning curve. Crank your volume high to hear. There is new stuff up across the board--don't forget http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/. Thanks!

Rockin' Bones

Hopefully this will work. When I realized I was damned close to losing my voice or my life or both, I pasted up a quick bunch of demos so I could remember how to do them if I had to write vocal parts. Since then I've got more, but this'll be a good test case. Apologies for the unprofessional noisy recording. If it's just too inaudible, I have some cleaner stuff I can replace it with while I learn the software better. Here goes an acoustic version of Ronnie Dawkins' hit Rockin' Bones. OK, it seems to work. Turn all the volume controls you have access to way up. I recorded it and mixed it as loud as I could but it lost volume in the compression to mp3. I'll work the bugs out, just stay with me, everyone...... oh, the original file (might play louder directly off the server) is at http://www.archive.org/details/RockinBones_830

Note there is new stuff up at all 4 sites: http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ ; http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ ;  http//:endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ ; and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ .  Visit all when you can, thanks so much for stoppin' by!!!

Guitar Instrumental titled Ride 'Em Timeboys

These days I mostly play this as a sparse acoustic blues. But this produced version isn't bad....





http://www.archive.org/details/rideemtimeboys/

BONUS THIS WEEK! New material up all around the horn. A couple of archival pieces at http://sustainablebiosperedotnet.blogspot.com/ and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/, but they’re good ones and they had a limited run the first time years ago. All new spring ecology celebration at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Visit any and all that you have a spare moment to check it out. Thanks for all the good wishes. I love each and every one of you, and I’m glad you’re out there in the world. That seems to shift the balance between man and the universe just a smidge in my favor (see nominally related essay at this week’s sustainablebiopshere). I’m grateful and humbled.

My Fiction Sucks

Given that you are vested at least one blog deep in this 4 weblog empire, you are no doubt fully aware of the fact that I can’t write fiction. Now, I can write some serious nonfiction. I can write it fast and funny, good and great, understated or overblown. But I can’t write fiction.

Which is a bummer for me. I’d love to be able to toss that perfect phrase onto page to sum up where I’d been, why I was back, and why it mattered. And I never could. I just ended up thrashing, like some kind of medical-crazed rock critic with a fat thesaurus and a bottle of whiskey, and a compulsion to lie.

The diagnosis of cancer—serious cancer—sort of brought all this into focus for me. Seems like the moment when somebody with brains and ambitions and a sense of destiny would promise him or herself get this hands and his heart under control and write that novel he’d had kicking around inside for decades. Not for me, though. I know I don’t have it in me. I got a different problem.

I’m runnin’ a nightly race between pain killers and recorded music. I have a couple dozen really nice originals and creative covers all scribbled out. They are really good. With a little luck, some drive, and short periods of coherence before the hard stuff kicks in, I should be able to get two or three drafts into digital format every evening, Which could get me a decent album a month over the next 6. Not bad, even for a slacker like me!

Completely covered. The future’s so bright…I gotta wear shades… .

Or would have to, if I had actual drive and ambition. So here’s where I’m heading. I’m gonna start sticking the draft music up with the tunes on http://theresaturtleinmysouplblogspot.com/ after I’ve produced ‘em within an inch of their lives.  I’ll keep the sustainability science at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/, the cancer stuff at http://endoftheworldparteux.blogspot.com/, and family and friend and general news as htt://docviper.livejournal.com/. Remember, it’s an adaptive system. Let’s make it work for you!!!!

Lebensraum

A few years ago, jazz producer and entrepreneur Joel Dorn (I think) ended up with the tapes of a radio broadcast concert by Rahsaan Roland Kirk from Germany in the 1970s. To the disgust of his record company (and it was HIS record company,BTW) he insisted on naming the resulting (outstanding) album “Brotherman in the Fatherland”. Even though Dorn recounts the deal at length in the liner notes, it remains unclear why he stuck to his guns on this. I’m gonna guess that it was because: a) Kirk would have appreciated the irony; b) it pissed his record company off; and c) he could. 


For vaguely similar reasons, I’m titling this one with the vaguely similar Lebensraum. Based on none-too-productive casual research, I’m beginning to think that the “German” side of my father’s family may have been Alsatian Jews. And that at least some of the Germans in my mother’s ancestry may have been Jewish as well. As many of you know, I pretty much live for irony. Not necessarily TASTEFUL irony, of course… . 


Anyway, here’s the deal. For the foreseeable future (which, given present state of available cancer therapies is NOT going to be pretty), I’m going to shift http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, originally intended for commentary on music and mass media, to the diary of my illness. But, having recently discovered how smegging easy it is to record shit on Mac laptops, I still need a place to park music and music reviews. So I’ll just make http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ into a food-plus mode, where we’ll pick up entertainment along with dining. That will leave http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for ecosystems analysis and sustainability science, and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for family, photography, and general fun. Hopefully this meets with your approval. With a little luck—like I’m still here to be writing this shit next year at this time—maybe we’ll rearrange priorities again. I’d sure as hell be up for that!


“Brotherman” is an outstanding album, BTW. Highly recommended—no household should be without!

You Don't Get Your Burgers Out of a Can...

…and you shouldn’t get your go-withs that way, either. With burgers up for Saturday night, I needed a couple easy but untrite accompaniemens…accompanamuns…side dishes. And, dammit, I was makin’ ‘em homemade or I wasn’t makin’ ‘em at all.


Baked beans. Classic, right? And if you make them from scratch, a two day job. Dude. This is the 2010s. Here’s how to make really, really delicious baked beans with little time and essentially no work.

First, mix the ingredients pictured above

in a baking dish of size appropriate

to the number of guests you’ll have

at your table. Add them to your taste.

Around here, we like plenty of mustard,

Worcestershire, and a scoop of tomato 

sauce in lieu of catsup (although catsup

works. Hell, this is baked beans. Pretty 

much ANYTHING is gonna work).

Don’t forget your secret ingredient. In this 

case, a small piece of fresh orange peel stuck

with a clove. To be honest, I was out of ground

cloves and I couldn’t figure out how to put in a 

whole one in such a fashion that I could retrieve 

it later so that nobody would chomp it and freak out.

The orange peel idea was sheer genius. 

Don’t forget your other secret ingredient. Bacon.

There is pretty much nothing on earth that isn’t 

better with bacon. 

Anyway. Mix up your sauce, add a couple slices of bacon diced, put in beans from a can (avoiding the necessity of planning a day ahead so beans can be soaked overnight, I didn’t drain the canned beans in advance, just slurped ‘em out with a spoon draining them as I went so that a modicum of the starchy liquid accompanied them), gently stir the whole thing.

I used Goya pintos. All Goya 

products are outstanding, 

especially their beans. 

Sauce ready for beans. 

Beans and sauce ready to be 

baconned. 

Beans, sauce and bacon ready for

the oven.

Stick the little pot of baconned beans into an oven at lowish temperature (say 300 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit) for as long as it takes to get them simmered, thick, and crisped (the latter for the bacon on top).

Beans finished and ready to 

rock and roll. 

Ok, we got burgers topped with choice of French and Danish blue cheeses or cheddar served on those nifty little frozen European style roles that are mostly pre-baked but take 5 minutes in the oven to brown and crisp. We got really, really rich and spicy beans. Now we need something lighter, fresher. Something, say, slaw-ish.


Assemble slaw-ish dressing ingredients. I only used high quality, unfiltered cider vinegar and a bit of not-completely-refined sugar. Oh, plus salt and pepper.

Pretty much all you need

to dress some slaw-ish.

Assemble some slaw-ish vegetables. In this case, a kohlrabi, half a jicama, and a big apple.

Slaw-ish vegetables.

Julienne the vegetables. Dress them. Put them in the frig for a couple hours, spooning the dressing over them whenever you think of it. 

Slaw-ish ready to rock and roll.

Chow down. Hard to come up with a simpler or more delicious Saturday night dinner. Or at least simpler. I was the only one who ate much of the slaw-ish. But the beans and burgers were certainly popular!


Anyway. If you're snowed in and need some entertainment, please wax up those skis (do you know that you put wax on the bottom of skis but the top of surfboards? Hard to believe in the 2000s that we need to use wax for ANYTHING in either case) and scoot on over to:
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http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/


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Got Leftovers?

Get quiche. I haven’t made one in decades. But Molly, who doesn’t eat eggs or egg dishes, came back from France making—and consuming—quiche frequently. I figure, what the hell, I can switch from omelets to quiche. It’s a fine line. Really, except for the crust, it’s no line at all.


And of course, the primary use for omelets is to soak up leftovers. So here goes a leftovers quiche. Or quiches. Because I made breaded chicken cutlets for the non-seafood crowd the night Molly and I ate fritters made with some gorgeous New Zealand mussels I found in the freezer case at the Oriental Mega-Mart. The frig had a bag of the fried chicken slices and one big uncooked boned and skinned breast from the pack I thawed on Sunday evening. So I made one breaded and one un-breaded chicken quiche.


Like this. First, I roasted a handful of diced Kunzler bacon with a couple thin-sliced onions in a touch of olive oil and butter with some basil (the latter because I’m out of dried thyme at this time). 

Bacon and onions roasted and

ready to rock and roll. 

I diced up the uncooked chicken and heaved that into the pan to roast up with the bacon and onion. While that finished up I blind-baked two refrigerator-case pie crusts in springform pans sprayed with nonstick stuff. When they cooled, I sorted the chicken out of the bacon pan and laid that in one crust, and chunked up the breaded chicken into the other. On Molly’s advice I grated a drift of parmesan over each. Then distributed the bacon and onion into the two pans. 

Two quiches ready for custard.

Meanwhile I beat a dozen eggs with a big container of good Greek yoghurt and big slug of Tabasco sauce. Into this I mixed the leftover egg noodles from chicken cutlet night, diced into pieces roughly the size of the bacon pieces from the other pan. 

Custard base with egg noodles

added ready to dump over the

chicken.

Poured the batter over the chicken, grated more cheese atop, and baked ‘em until Molly said they were done. Served them with a salad and the good cheese bread from the Giant. 

Finished product.

Salad to accompany.

Best use of leftovers ever? Well, it’s not an omelet. 


But it is almost!


PS--if you can spare a few minutes, wax down your board and surf on over to:


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Super Bowl Food 2011

When in prior years we researched St. Louis and Indianapolis food, we didn’t get much useful. Having been to both places repeatedly, and eaten Italian or upscale steak house stuff that could have been in Chicago, New York, or Atlanta, there wasn’t much to choose from. We cooked New Orleans style and let it go.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Green Bay Packer fan. This wasn’t quite the idle success chasing it might seem. I loved Ray Nitschke’s busted schnoz, read Jerry Kramer’s book repeatedly, and Vince Lombardi, of course, was from a couple towns over in north Jersey. I memorized the depth charts, and I can still diagram the Green Bay sweep, weak side and strong. When Tom Brown intercepted that pass in the end zone in 1966, and Starr carried it over behind Kramer in 1967, I was glued to the black and white television.

When I got to spend a lot of time in Green Bay for project work in the 2000s, it was just awesome. One frigid night I briefed a big meeting of an angler’s club in a big bar right at the stadium. For meetings in Green Bay or Milwaukee, the law-firm pastry selection always included an odd semi-Danish ring-shaped thing called a “kringle”. It was always way sweet, but seemed to be a real regional specialty. Along with breaded and fried walleye and yellow perch, you had the makings of a good meal anywhere along the lake shore.

For unclear reasons, Molly recently began working on baking kringle. Her recipe is not at all too sweet, in fact it’s a delicious Danish breakfast pastry. For Super Bowl Sunday, we made one not sweet and added a cream-cheese based crab dip as a topping. This was simply frickin’ awesome!

Molly’s crab dip kringle. A truly

delicious appetizer before the

big game with Green Bay on the field.

Now, with a long afternoon of working on

lesson content, and the hugely massive

Premier League game between Chelsea

and Liverpool (with Fernando Torres and

Didier Drogba together terrifying me but not

Liverpool who came up 1 – nil) for warmups,

we siphoned off some of the crab dip, baked up

little tiny Bisquick biscuits to heap it on, and

chowed down with a preliminary glass of wine.

OK, kringle and seafood covers Green Bay. What about Pittsburgh? Well, it turns out that Pittsburgh was and still is the manufacturing home of Klondike Bars. Can you believe it? Dessert doesn’t get easier. And you can divert the kringle to antipasto!

Pittsburgh-based dessert.

Main course? Cover both towns.

Good fresh sauerkraut cooked with

chardonnay, chicken broth, a couple

bay leaves, with a topping of nicely

browned onions and apples, and heaps

of sliced kolbase and something called

 “hardwood smoked chicken sausage”.

Oh. And sautéed potato and cheese pirogies, right out of the freezer case at the local grocery market.

In conclusion? About the best—and easiest—Super Bowl Sunday food ever. We’ll be looking for you to be here next year. Even if it’s St. Louis and Indianapolis. We’ll come up with something. Trust us. 

PS. If you got a little time to kill, boogie on over to the awesome companion blogs:

http://docviper.livejournal.com/

http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/

http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/

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Birthday Birds

When I was a kid, Grandpa Ludwig encouraged me to try the Duck with Orange Sauce at the sort of quasi-Continental restaurant in Dumont where we ate for occasional celebratory meals. That was a portentous day. After that, I ate duck in Chinese places. French places. Oddly, perhaps, German places. At home. Wherever I could get it. Because duck was absolutely smeggin’ delicious.

For my entire adult life, I’ve cooked a duck on the day we do my birthday. This is usually the weekend following the actual date. A tradition handed down from the Ludwig household, where we could barely keep our personalities intact on weekday evenings, much less add in a ritual requiring cake, presents, etc. 

There is nothing simpler or more delicious as a birthday meal than roast poultry with garlic and herbs. Here goes.

Don’t brine your birds. I can’t emphasize this enough. Do NOT brine your birds. Brining renders the product wet and slimy. NOT, as the food network and other commentators would have you believe, moist and juicy. Maybe it’s a fine line, but I don’t think so. Do not brine your birds.

Instead, cook them for a long time at very low temperature. If you have a convection oven, so much the better. But even if you don’t, low and slow will give you fabulously moist, richly flavored, elegantly textured meat. That is not wet and slimy. 

Basic birthday poultry ingredients.

Garlic and rosemary. With some salt and

coarsely ground black pepper, you are 

more than good to go. Stuff each bird’s 

cavity with a sprig of poultry, a couple crushed

garlic cloves, and a palmful of salt and pepper. A 

little olive oil. 

Oh, and a spritz of balsamic vinegar. The over the 

counter version at Trader Joe’s is a particularly 

good product.

Remember to start cooking the birds on their breasts, not their backs. This assures that the breast meat gains moisture and flavor during the first couple of hours. Turn them over halfway through the cooking time. Which will be anywhere from 3 to 5 hours at an oven temperature of 275 to 300 Fahrenheit. 

If you include quail from the Oriental 

mega-mart in the pan with your duck and

chicken (the latter for the non-duck people

in the audience), they will finish cooking way 

before the larger species (note this meal 

incorporates 3 bird species of 2 families, chickens 

and quail both being Galliformes).

Chicken and duck ready to carve. 

The poultry will throw off an enormous volume of 

fat. Use this to sauté the short-grain rice you will serve

as an accompaniment. 

Which rice you will cook with tons of finely minced 

lemon rind, plus salt and pepper, in chicken broth.

Append a simple salad, and you’ve got a meal that 

is stunningly delicious, incredibly simple, and perfect 

for a birthday…or any other…celebration.

Rock and roll my friends! Don't forget to check out:

http://docviper.livejournal.com/

http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/

http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/

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