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The following experiment is a variation on an old camping trick: hollow out an orange, fill it with cake batter, wrap it in tinfoil and toss it in the fire. Since the closest urban equivalent to a campfire is a charcoal grill, and we here at Cat Spit Kitchen have yet to grasp the near-lemming-like universal appeal of outdoor grilling, the recipe is modified as such:
- Oranges will be halved, the flesh evacuated, and used as cupcake diapers.
- The de rigeur oven temperature of 350° will be used as a control point.
- Adjustments in time and temperature will be made in trials until such time as either a happy procedure is found or the experiments grow too tiresome to continue.
We're using the standard Golden Vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Iteration The First:  Two cupcakes, 350°, thirty minutes. They look done, but look under the hood and there's still a whole lot of raw batter swimming around. Iteration The Second:  Two cupcakes, 400°, twenty-five minutes. Note the foil cockrings placed around the bases of the oranges to keep them level. Again, they look nice and toasted on top, and minor surgery reveals a larger percentage of the cake's body mass is cooked thru, but there still remains a relatively thick shell of goop bordering the wall of the orange. By now, the problem is clear. The orange shell, used as both a visual gag and imparter of additional flavor, contains far too much moisture to keep the baking medium in balance. Much like an incorrectly cooked Yule turkey, by the time the inside of the cupcake is done, the crown would probably be closer to carbon. Factor also in the temperature valley and distribution; a grill or campfire can run between 400° and 600° while providing more direct omnidirectional heat, with a kitchen oven one has to rely solely on convection. The solution is just as straightforward. Iteration The Third:  Eight cupcakes, (in paper diapers) 350°, twenty minutes. Halve and hollow an orange. Cool and strip off a cake and jam it in the fruit cup. Frost with orange buttercream and garnish with orange zest. Also known as the "fuck it" solution. Serve and patiently await the gushing praise of your adoring public. ⎋
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| 2008-07-13 21:53 |
| The First Duty. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,416 |
| Future Sound Of London: "Tired" |
| freeform |
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You live parallel lives in parallel to each other, whether you know it or not, double lives reflected back on each other again and again, whether you see them or not, a palimpsest of secret histories echoing back to the farthest corners of the onion cellar, whether you remember anything at all beyond the world placed before you.
Again, is this all there is? But the question is moot, and deserves to die in the throat, leaving an invisible frog made of cobalt to choke on until morning. Maybe a slight adjustment of oxygen intake will clear the muddied mind and allow sights of what there also is besides just "all there is." The eyes are already open, always seem to be open, passing over the same map of objects and persons and landscapes that have been scanned in a hundred thousand times before; only the dates on the newspapers change, only the speed at which the constellations spin changes, only the colors of civilian shoes change. Is this all there is? A day is a number, one number rolls over into another, but the day never really ends. Is this all there is? The same sky, darker now, lighter then, darker again later, wearing only a slightly differently configured gown of upper atmosphere silks, cobalt now, ash blue then, navy again later. Is this all there is? Flat feet pound flat the imperfectly level surface leveled over a flat earth, thin soles let the presence of every piece of insect Kelvar, every fragment of Earth, every prepubescent pea be known to every web of poorly guarded pressure points that drags over the salted plain.
Is this all there is?
It is, as long as one continues to look in the wrong direction; inwards, where the myth of the infinite space between the ears has just as much room to expand and perpetuate, not being subject to Earthly laws.
Replace "ears" with "windows" or "doors" for a similar frame-in-frame parallel. One can be liberated from slavery, one can return to the outside world, one can wake up from a hundred-year nap, but freedom can still be elusive, even deliberately suppressed, summarily occluded, altogether avoided. Whether the wall be made of plaster and wood, steel and iron, or blood and bone, sometimes a prison is entered into voluntarily.
But that just means that the key is within easy reach.
Will you reach for the unlocking device? Will you rattle the tumblers and made the hinges squeal with envy? Will you pollute the inside with the natural waste products of local greenery? Will you fulfill your first duty and escape to the outside again? Will you leave the soft and dusty behind for the lush and dirty?
One can be outside, one can be unshackled, one can be liberated, but one can still be trapped inside. Reach for the concrete in still life, instead of the inverse, for you may still be lashed to the wheel when you awake.
⎋
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| 2008-07-11 10:20 |
| The Stupid Death. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,418 |
| Future Sound Of London: "Deep Into Your Subconscious I Slide" |
| freeform |
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Five minutes should be no great trial. Two hours should be no portion of abraded epidermis removed from your posterior parts. A year should be no heavy load for you to bear. Another year? Another after that? It's alarming, but not unexpected. Five years, then. Ten. Sell, sell. Win your time back, double or nothing. Or get out while the getting out is still good, cut your losses and bounce home with as many torn calendar pages as you can stuff into your cargo pockets. Take the short cut around the Molasses Swamp, ferret underneath the foothills of discarded screen savers, catch the 22 line astrotrain back to the celestial hub; and from there, you can get your transfer stamped, you can get your currency exchanged for more liquid chocolate-covered foil coinage, you can pick up your necessary wants (magazine, Beer Nuts, cheap Mexican sandals) for the final push home.
Back to the bardo. Back to Central Processing. Back to the Concordant Opposition. Back to wherever it is you came from. Back to where you belong. Back to where you should stay, back to where you began, back to where we all return to later or sooner, voluntarily or compulsively. Back to front, back to start, back to mine.
It's a dog's life. It's the bee's knees. It's the bells that toll along the watery staircase thru the high-rise of Hell.
Three hundred and sixty degrees is not enuf range to take in the full panorama of earthly existence. One thousand four hundred and forty minutes is insufficient time in the span of a single Earth rotation to metabolize a sizable portion of highs and lows gleaned from the temporally-sensitive nature of the surface reality. A million billion colors is just short of the spectrum required to make a billion trillion brown eyes blue, a hundred thousand notes this way or that way is not a refined enuf sound to soothe a population of savage breasts, a drop of sugar is all it takes to push a camel's hump over the edge from fatty canteen to furry salt lick.
It's not enuf. It's too much. Too much is never enuf.
So, pack a kit bag full of trouble and money, fill a rucksack with kid fears and cellophane dreams, cram a portfolio with fading snapshots and memories bloated like so much huitaloche. It's a long haul from here to there, from Earth to the bardo, from house to home and back again. Along the way you'll probably run back past many of the mile markers that made an existence in the former world seem so significant upon the surface of the veil; a relationship or two here, a phalanx of rivals and enemies there, a broken internal organ, a bruised imagined emotion, a cat, a dog, a bat, a ball, several hundred thousand identical days and nites, and at least one solitary preservable moment, captured in the æther like a frame of celluloid film unleashed from a snapped track.
A moment in the sun, under a tree, or dying in another's arms. Resting for a degree of a second upon the hot bulb of avenging time, before melting away.
⎋
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Thanks in part to the teachings of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hips_lips_tits, Your Humble Narrator is both slightly more enlightened on the subject of niche Southern cuisine, and twice as ignorant; because the more you learn, the less you know, and nowhere is that axiom more true than when applied to the world of human consumables and its miasma of infinite permutations. Most Southern food is either held in high regard, subject to the yoke of tradition, or caught in the web of regionality, so we're not going to fool ourselves into thinking that tackling any one particular dish is grounds for either celebration or immolation, being a Yankee and everything.
That said, seeing as we don't have a cauldron set up underneath a willow tree to boil peanuts in, don't have the time to kill roasting and shredding a coconut by hand for coconut cake, and have already busted the myth of the muffuletta's mystique, the next logical step was taking a crack at that other hallowed baked good of this great country's nether regions: red velvet cake, naturally transmogrified into cupcake form.
Before:
OMG WHO GOT MURDERED WTF IS UP WITH THE BOWL OF GOATS BLOOD LOL.
No, it's just the base batter, but still, sometimes you have to wonder about the portions in some of these recipes. A cup and a quarter of flour, sure. A teaspoon of chocolate extract, fine. But two whole fucking tablespoons of red food coloring?!? Who knew they were so queer for propylene glycol down South? Still, it makes sense when the ice cream template is used; (ice cream bases are notoriously supersweet, because cold numbs the tongue receptors) anything that red is coming out of the oven not so red.
After:
Check out the bling on those slammin' cupcake diapers. Shake it, girl.
Now, this batch either marks a turning point in Your Humble Narrator's baking education, or a coming full circle back to a revelation already once arrived at. That is, in light of the previously established edict that Frosting Is Evil (apologies to Alton Brown) and the foregone conclusion that a cupcake is little more than a frosting delivery device, perhaps there is no middle ground, no no-man's land, no neutral territory where both beliefs can be practiced in mutually harmonious respect. Maybe frosting is an unwritten divine law. Maybe it's frosting or GTFO. Maybe it's gas, grass, or frosting.
After after:
Cupcakes: AP flour, whole wheat pastry flour, soymilk, cocoa powder, vanilla extract, chocolate extract, almond extract, baking powder, baking soda, red food coloring.
Frosting: Soymilk, confectioner's sugar, margarine, nonhydrogenated shortening, AP flour, vanilla extract, chopped pecans.
If we come away from this episode in the current sequence of experiments, let it be this: Your Humble Narrator can't frost for shit. Or maybe this: red velvet cake is just red chocolate cake with a fancy name. Or perhaps this: maybe frosting isn't evil after all, or at least, not that evil.
One thing's for sure. Sugar buzz notwithstanding, baking works better than Prozac.
⎋
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Slippery, this state. Resilient, this regency. Invisible, this insulation.
It's there for a sliver of a second, like a silver guppie's fishtailing fishtail, then over there like a spray of salt spreading into a slick of slushy saline, and again flashing its broken mirrorball coat up against the brane walls.
Now, gone. Back to its cottage beyond the veil. Where it belongs, on the other side of the æthereal railroad tracks, across the celestial 110th Street, into the dry burrows and warrens that aerate the airless environment of that parallel plane, separate from all that we know and understand and believe.
It's right in front of you. It's only next door. It's just a jump to the left. Turn a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a degree and you're halfway to being halfway there. Don't think. Rotate and vibrate. Disappear.
But don't forget your transfer or else it's going to be a long ride back home. That's provided you even get to the other side intact. And once there at the floating station, past the unsubstantial customs checkpoint, and thru the acclimation chamber of fog, what's to stop you from staying?
An environment unbecoming to one's character. The world outside your world is not, has never been, and will never be amenable to your crude matter.
Which may explain why other objects flourish in it. Sharkskin flashes like ideas, designed to fly over the outworld like dandelions with propellers, but nigh-impossible to latch onto with our hamhock hands. Emotional-based avatars like passion and rage, in their element when in their element, suspended like spirulina in a highball of club soda, but acidic and bringer of pain when transplanted to our organic processors. Tissue-thin ribbons of alternate reality like dreams, cohesive and woven into lattices and laces while summering in the blue and back and gray, but tattered and torn into nightmares of confusion when introduced into the earthbound mix.
Our desires and wishes, prayers and musings, introspective discoveries and painted-over cellar doors; none are of this world of our making. Pain also, itself a fire and an acid and a destroyer, is an alien presence upon our shores, and so it is hostile, it flares and whirls, it lashes and struggles and fights to escape this Hell, this Judgement, this Abyss.
Because it's what we would do, too.
⎋
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| 2008-07-07 10:53 |
| Ask Not For Whom The Buddha Weeps. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,422 |
| XTC: "I'd Like That" (demo) |
| freeform |
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Another flower sprouts in the stomach, another blossom of acid and blood, another bloom of memory crushed in a paper pestle. The pain of everyday, the ignored twinges and tweaks, the miasmic mix of mortal mollifications, coalesced into a lonely sunburst of petal and pollen. A deadly daisy, a turpid tulip, a languid lily.
When old Sol hits the snooze for the final time, when Helios gets a jump from a neighbor's chariot, when Apollo deigns to drag his divine carcass into the office, all the world so below takes a tug on the shiplines in a more or less synchronized effort; all converge into similar chambers with similar lighting at similar times, all make haste along Byzantine grids and conquistador roads and New Deal cloverleaves in parallel time, all generate blood and sweat and tears and hay and golden thread from opening bell thru closing whistle and beyond into purple prime time. All supplicants who call the Olympians their sires follow patterns, twinned over and over, but only as long as the light holds out. When the regency of Ra fades into a carbonized twilight, the dominion of Diana then begins.
Alpha and omega, as the ones with heads of eggs would say. Sparks flare bright and are doused just as flamboyantly, but what of the lost time lost inbetween? What of the mindset that exists between the two gates of sun and moon? What details of the daily journey are retained, even as they are purged from short-term memory to make way for fresh instances? Enuf of recycled dawns and paradigmal dusks, when does the work get done?
And by whom? By clones? By hirelings and henchmen? By slaves and freemen and human traffic? Or by the directors of fate, by the ones who steer activities and tasks and special projects, by taskmasters and linedrivers and chieftains? We ask only because we can't remember our accomplishments from day to day. All we know is the beginning and the end and the beginnings and ends of to-day and yesterday and the day before, the middle is excised, the meat is cavitated, the morass is scrambled and scraped away.
It's the moments of respite that rest heaviest upon our brows, that dominate our thots and feelings, that shape and color our ambitions and directions. It's what we do not do that has the greatest influence on what we will do next.
⎋
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[i.]
As of to-day, La Norme Concrète is now 274 Elvis songs heavier.
...
HAWHAWHAW. Get it!? "Heavier?"
Of course you do.
[ii.]
It's only slightly disappointing to learn that the position of next Feed Nitwit Food Network star will not be determined by mortal combat.
Even without a recruitment drive, an elimination tournament might help to weed out some of the chaff: - Giada De Laurentiis vs. Sandra Lee: Fight!
- Guy Fieri vs. Bobby Flay: Fight!
- Ina Garten vs. Sunny Anderson: Fight!
- Alton Brown vs. Marc Summers: Fight!
- Rachael Ray vs. Paula Deen: Fight!
[iii.] Grady: Cupcakes has nice flavor. Sweet almond extract balances bitter cocoa. Wrapper hard to get off, tho. me: !?! ⎋
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One of the things we don't really do a whole lot of in Cat Spit Kitchen is chocolate. Sure, we've messed around with brownies and thrown chips into the mix, but for the most part, we try to shy away from the wiles of the Brown Menace and experiment with new and different flavors because, to put it plainly, chocolate is kind of vanilla.
...
Let's back up a bit. First of all, chocolate is not boring, far from it. It's dark and mysterious, deep and complex, and at times, forbidden and suborgasmic. The problem is that it's also ubiquitous, ominpresent, and de rigeur. For a lot of eaters, it's the default sweet, the go-to dessert, the sugar buzz to go to when you can't think of anything else relatively legal to get you high; and this fault is something the chocolate-industrial complex clearly recognizes and consistently exploits by constantly producing and promoting a rotating freakshow of cheap and plentiful chocolate novelties, most of which only serve to distract the consumer from more challenging concoctions, but some are blatantly commercial enuf to cheapen the mystique of the venerable Theobroma cacao.
Case in point: the chocolate-covered macadamia nut. Strip search any random disembarking tourist returning from Big Hawaii, and you will invariably confiscate at least one shrink-wrapped box of these globular abominations. On its own, the difficult-to-harvest macadamia is like the jawbreaker of the nut world; a seemingly impenetrable chiton gives way under gentle molar pressure, exposing a subtly bitter, béchamel-like interior that is easily ground into a clean and earthy paste, leaving little to no residue for a toothpick to extricate. Caramelization by roasting and enhancement with salt only seal the deal, so where is the sense in messing with success and enrobing an otherwise perfectly serviceable nut meat with cheap, slimy, island chocolate?
There oughta be a law.
...
So, anyway:
AP flour, whole wheat flour, sugar, canola oil, cocoa powder, soymilk, vanilla extract, almond extract, baking soda, baking powder, apple cider vinegar.
"Chocolate vs. chocolate" cupcakes. The source recipe calls for the addition of a certain chocolate sandwich cookie, but in a blind haste, we inadvertently acquired such a biscuit with chocolate "creme" instead of the requisite, erm, "white stuff." Hence, chocolate versus chocolate, or, if you like, "We can all get along" cupcakes, hur hur.
Note the usage of cupcake liners (or as we like to call them, "diapers") with this batch. The primary purpose of these miniature coffee filters is the same as lining a birdcage with yesterday's (or to-day's) newspaper: ease in clean-up, because cooks are just as lazy as anyone else. And while lining your muffin tin does save scrubbing out recalcitrant non-stick spray residue later on, it does no good if your cupcakes experience a growth spurt and bloom with overdeveloped muffin tops, such as the ones shown above.
Check out the one right up front in the middle, sporting the blue diaper; it's got a muffin top. Its neighbors on either side in the yellow nappies have regular cupcake tops. So what, you say, big deal; which is exactly what Your Humble Narrator said before we recognized the true difference between cupcakes and muffins: you decorate cupcakes, because, for the most part, cupcakes are produced to be presented, and as we've all experienced in one form or another, whether we realize it or not, we eat with our eyes. Since cupcake toppers can range from a simple smear of butter cream to a tower of fruit and piping, the foundation must be strong and flat and level, just like building a church.
A muffin you're just going to break in half and eat at home, so who cares what it looks like?
However, since, as has been mentioned before, Your Humble Narrator is not the biggest admirer of topping baked goods, the issue is moot. For now, anyway.
In the meantime, if you absolutely must have something adorning these things:
There. Phflbblphft.
⎋
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OMG MOJITO CUPCAKES WTF:
AP flour, whole wheat flour, mint-infused soymilk, sugar, canola oil, lime juice, lime zest, dark rum, baking powder, baking soda.
As of late, baking is Your Humble Narrator's antidepressant. Just like walking around the block distracts the mind by utilizing the feet, following a recipe as close to the letter helps to realign the nerve endings and bring the broken brain a little closer into true.
Plus, there's a fam thing in a few weeks, and tales of the cupcakes that conquered Thrillsville and the Central Valley have spread so as to become requests for moremoremore.
Baking: once you have it once, too much is never enuf.
The notion started as a simple repeat of previous episodes' bulletproof margarita cupcakes, but then the "what if" thot balloon appeared: how hard would it be to switch up the recipe from margarita to mojito?
Strictly speaking, or at least when it comes to the actual drinks, it's actually a step down, not necessarily because making the move from tequila to rum is a sign of fortitudinal weakness on the part of the drinker, but rather for the reason that a mojito, while still yummy, is so much easier for cheap barkeeps to water down and not have a patron notice any marked difference.
The hardest part, if it can be called that, was solving the issue of incorporating mint into the mix. We couldn't just chop it up and throw it in the batter, it'd just turn black and bitter in the oven. The solution was to dunk the leaves into boiling soymilk and letting it steep for a bit, just like making a sugar syrup.
Next: caipirinha muffins, celery sorbet, and BBQ spaghetti.
⎋
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This is the space where Your Humble Narrator would normally wax poetic about some sort of junk philosophical experience one might possibly experience whilst rediscovering their once-again neglected record collection by way of post-postmodern technology. While this is true, it's more true that this particular episode is the pseudojournalistic equivalent of finishing off leftovers about to go off just so we can take a step further into the shell of The Concrete Standard and get that much closer to writing about music that speaks to us more often than others.
The following triad of genres by themselves are somewhat unremarkable, comprising only relatively small fractions of the whole of La Norme Concrète, but like the ugly bricks and pedestrian struts that make up any superstructure, they help to complete the body and can stand on their own nonetheless.
• Diction: As in spoken word. As in librettos with or without accompaniment. As in Beat poets and slam prose. Probably the first representative side that sparked an interest in music where the words were not sung and yet still took precedence was "More Noise Please" by Steven Jesse Bernstein, an anti-poem that still shared some of the same values brought forward by Kerouac and his posse: namely, taking the invisible events of everyday life and shining bright spots onto them to illuminate the minutiae of passion, for lack of a better term. Latching onto this kind of recording is doubly weird for Your Humble Narrator because, as some of you may already know, despite excelling with the written word to a certain extent, I am not a words person when it comes to music; I'm drawn more towards beats and cadence and canons than lyrics and rhymes and poetry.
Perhaps it's a processing fault. Maybe filtering thru layers of words and music taxes the brain somewhat, but it could be that taking the libretto and lifting it above the miasma of noise not only elevates it to a whole new genre of note, but allows the confused listener to be exposed to the spoken word as it was meant to be heard; raw, primal, precise.
Standards for diction include Steven Jesse Bernstein, William S. Burroughs, Maggie Estep, Allen Ginsberg, and Saul Williams, among others.
• Difficult: Difficult was a term chosen to both replace the default "Unclassified" genre that came with Proteus' file-organization software, and to provide a catch-all bucket to toss in sides that were recalcitrant to being pigeonholed into one category or another.
Which, in retrospect, is the same purpose as labeling something "Unclassified," the only difference being that "Unclassified" has the added stigma of suggesting that the file information for a particular side has never been touched or modified by the user, which further suggests a lazy music collector who cares less about the contents of their collection than they might let on.
I care, okee? I care. And because I care, I take the time to build a home for the sides that defy description, that slip the bonds of convention, that deny definition, whether they cross several established genres or create their own. Music tagged as difficult is not necessarily difficult to listen to, altho there is a contingent of tracks that can cause the eyes to tear and the throat to close, all side effects from the brain's inability to comprehend an unfamiliar audio structure.
As such, there are no real standards or median representatives for difficult music, altho it should be noted that a number of artists who emerged from under from Bill Laswell's wing fall under this label: Buckethead, Corporal Blossom, Praxis, etc.
• Dub: Dub is reggae's stoner little brother, the natural offshoot of lo-fi studio production, and maybe the least understood of so-called "island" music. But what's more misunderstood is why it deserves its own genre listing, as opposed to simply lumping it in with the rest of the reggae body, seeing as dub is, at least on the surface, little more than instrumental reggae anyway.
Good question. Not that there's a good answer, but still. But maybe there's a hint in the retro nature of dub, its invulnerability to time the avenger, how it seems to be bulletproof against being considered dated or old and busted. Reggae itself, like any mainstream genre of music, evolves and changes and grows, so to even the untrained ear a track from one decade is easily discernible from singles released a decade earlier or later; no one would mistake a Sean Paul mix for a Peter Tosh pressing.
Dub, on the other paw, sounds frozen in time when one listens to it, altho admittedly most of the more golden dub was produced in the 1970s. And while almost every dub track that exists features some form of tape loop echo, for some reason it doesn't bear the stigma of the cheap studio effect that it is, a black spot that glaringly tags more than one rock track from that most derided of decades.
Plus, if you must hear it, dub is decent music to get stoned to, because that's what it was designed for.
Again, standard bearers for dub are hard to pin down, as so many mainstream reggae producers crossed over, but some notables who are known more for their dub work include King Tubby, Mad Professor, and Scientist.
Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Next time: the soul of the machine.
⎋
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Travel Channel: It almost sounds like an oxymoron. I mean, a salmon hot dog?
me: ...
me: Hot dogs also aren't made out of dogs. What's your point?
⎋
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| 2008-07-04 19:25 |
| Television As Virtual Reality. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,425 |
| Ladytron: "Runaway" |
| revelations |
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In the face of the fact that Your Humble Narrator couldn't give two tossing turds over sport, here is, nevertheless, a short regalement concerning said physical pastimes:
My brother and I have a snarky, self-important, generalizing theory about sport, popular and underground. The theory, while ongoing and subject to wiles, moodswings, and whoever feels morally superior at the time, reads as such:
It can't be called a legitimate sport if it doesn't involve a ball.
Now, releasing such a declaration out into the wild naturally dredges up detractors, naysayers, and just those who think they think better. Other than that, our theory is more or less bulletproof, provided one of its publishers is in the vicinity to either back it up or shoot down critics with precisely-aimed skewers. (my brother is admittedly better at verbal defence than Your Humble Narrator; in mixed company, anyway)
So, consider: - Baseball: sport.
- Table tennis: sport.
- Cow tipping: not sport.
See? Easy-peasy. Which is not to say there are no pitfalls, the most common of which are sport that use circular or disc-shaped objects. It can be argued that these shapes are merely one step removed from a ball state, having been flattened or shaped but still retaining a circular shadow of their brethren. These instances can be decided on a case-by-case basis, which keeps our offices jumping all week with inquiries: - Curling: sport.
- Race car driving: not sport.
- Hockey: maybe sport, maybe not sport. To-day, it is. To-morrow, who's to say?
We try not to judge too harshly, as fun as it is sometimes, but unfortunately the level of skill required to accomplish certain feats of agony in sport cannot always be ignored as a dealbreaking factor. Happily, the ones that are directed towards washout are, for the most part, no-brainers, pun intended: - Lawnmower racing: not sport.
- Starcraft: not sport.
- Competitive eating: not sport.
On the subject of the last especially, seeing as most gurgitating tournaments are little more than thin veneers for the marketing ganglions of the cheap and plentiful consumable peddlers behind them. We're looking at you, Nathan's Famous. You, who are only famous for being infamous, and famous before being infamous for being inflammatorily aggressive in promoting the idea of wanton, unapologetic, freakish gluttony and cloaking it under a film of contrived camp and patriotism thru piggishness. You, whose annual Independence Day "celebration" is little more than a bloated sideshow for and featuring the human results of accelerated American ennui; fellow citizens with no prospects, no ambition, no higher aspiration than to be knighted the year's most talented shit machine among shit machines. You, who all but encourage overeating, who all but endorse the culture of the ugly American, you, who all but give your stamp of approval upon the charter of conspicuous consumption. We see right thru you. Someone tell Anonymous that there's an organization on the face of the Earth more dangerous and insidious than the Church Of Scientology. Unrelated: - The frumpy, bug-eyed, lipless actress who mimed her way thru the PetMeds adverts also makes an appearance as a frumpy, bug-eyed, lipless housewife in the most recent iteration of the Foodsaver infomercials.
- After who knows how many years, (probably not too many) almost the entire original cast of the Magic Bullet infomercial are reassembled for a new paid program for the cordless version of the diminutive kitchen torture device. Oddly, almost all the scenes are recreated move for move, kind of like the way Point Of No Return aped La Femme Nikita but failed to add anythiOMG MOVIES ARE SHITE WTF THEY KEEP MAKING THEM HAWHAWHAW STUPID
- Tony Bourdain sings! (Sort of.)
Finally, I'm pretty sure I'm going deaf in my left ear. Figures, because: Q: Ladytron's Light + Magic? A: Okay, sure. Q: Ladytron's Witching Hour? A: Erm, not so much. Q: Ladytron's Velocifero? A: Yes, please! ⎋
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- Samurai Trilogy 1: Musashi Miyamoto: Started, got bored halfway thru.
- High School Musical: Never started.
- Battlestar Galactica, series 3: Started. got turned off by "Unfinished Business," got bored, then finished.
- Battlestar Galactica: Razor: Started, fell asleep halfway thru.
- Sweeney Todd: Never started.
... *sigh* ... *phflbblphft* ... ? Ken Burns' Baseball. ... ! ⎋
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If it wasn't for the leaves in the trees and the artistes who painted them there, if it wasn't for the rocks and the stones and the bored weightless sculptor who rolled them from his bones, if it wasn't for Little Bunny Foo Foo and the elven woodshed he squats in wait for the next in the parade of hapless field mice, if it wasn't for that which grows and wilts, if it wasn't for that which bakes and bleaches, if it wasn't for that which picks and plucks, sucks and tucks, shreds, cuts, eats shoots and leaves; there would be no final fantasy for any self-respecting, sentient, solipsistic biped to get lost in the middle of.
We only think we're middle managers. We only think the dominion that holds sway over the dominion we hold sway over the dominion that is all we can see from a hilltop, from a church steeple, from a pyramid's apex. But look again, and one can see only that what one can see is but the most visible of layer upon layer of clever natural optical illusions, starting with the very air we fortify with the leavings of progress. It turns our stars blue, turns Diana's silver dollar into a copper ha'penny, and gives poor old Sol ten extra pounds before hustling him off horizon's stage. Below that, above that, beyond that, who's to say that what is visible is also provable?
All there is to know, all that has ever been accomplished, everything that was ever built and destroyed, loved and hated, scribbled down and scratched out, exists still in the ash beneath your feet. Every word you ever heard, every color you ever tasted, every face you ever forgotten, all is retained in the subterranean school book depository. Buckets of bullets, boardrooms of books, barometers of billets, all available for the tired left eye and the half-asleep right eye to witness in somnambulistic bliss. Wax worry dolls, concrete curry tins, rubber gaskets stuffed into rubber gaskets, on display for a modicum of a seasonal cover charge. Slurries of shopping lists, troughs of terminated terms, smoothies of sweet nothings, await the prejudiced palates of the popular populace.
With or without the ABCs?
Into or out of the 123s?
...
Coming in with nothing and leaving with less, it's the market of dreams that teases us best.
⎋
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| 2008-07-01 13:43 |
| Absence Of Repose. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,428 |
| People Like Us: "T424plu" |
| freeform |
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Bless the bread with the dregs from your drink, but leave a measure at the bottom of your stein. Best not to curry favor to any one god in the pantheon above. Leave a slice in the pan to put your stogie out in, arrange the exhausted lemon shells into a skin-touching circle of power, scatter seasoned salt and pink pepper over the hardwood site to cleanse the area and discourage the encroaching of hungry ghosts of a particularly epicureanistic school of reptilian desires. Complete the rituals to send the materials of the hour on their way to a gastrospiritual bardo, where reassignments await.
All this is on the card, all this is printed in large type, all this is listed in order of priority in one column, and in order of potential duration in another. This is the list of things to do to-day, this is the list of orphan puzzle pieces, this is the sawtoothed string of events to be undertaken from point A in time until point X in time; with point A being the universal floating point of now and point X being the ephemeral floating endpoint, somewhere, out there, thataway, head for the second star to the right, and sally straight on until morning.
Plenty of time. From here to then, from now to there, from A to be.
It's easier now, easier than it's ever been, easier than you can remember it being. Not because it's easy, not because what you do takes little skill or intelligence, not because you've done it a hundred thousand times before. It's easy because it does it by itself, it completes itself, it runs around the track under its own power, it's self-perpetuating, self-replicating, self-evaluating, and selfish. All you have to do is guide it with your hand, push it along here and there, touch the gas or the brake a bit, oil the governor, replace broken teeth, ease hot towels over copulating cogs, devein expired copper wires, dilute ice water with whiskey, and collate it all. Twice a day, every day, dark weekends.
Then it's time for a pint. Then it's time for a nosh. Then it's time to rub two or more neurons together and hotwire that part of the brain that tastes the vinegar underneath the offal, that detects the clove inbetween the smog and the secondhand smoke, that sees the silver stripes that glow from underneath the underpants on display down Downing Street.
Bless the beer with the crumbs from your plate, but leave a finger of butter on the spine of your spoon. Best not to brown-nose any particular cat from the alley below over another, at least not overtly. Leave the peels in a pile, but leave enuf room for an aggie to spin thru to the center. Spit on the floor before your leave, but shield your cheeks in the way the ones before you did, lest you appear like a common spitter. Arrange your drinking vessels upside down to better season the wood, as well as to trap trespassing detached invisible sticky fingers foraging for a fingerling of free fromage.
Complete the rituals.
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Since the ascension of Gaia, every day is like the first time with Proteus. Your Humble Narrator cannot eat, nor sleep, let alone clean house, scoop poop, or offer a digestive tea to guests after lunch. The world is our most lustful of satellites, and even if she strays a bit from time to time, we still keep coming back to her sweet, cold embrace. At the same time, we are reminded every day of the deficiencies of the flesh and the dearth of closure in the spirit, which we rail against by working the line longer and harder each time. To paraphrase that one Johnny Cash song, we are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and the more we do it, the more we want it.
</segue>
Despite growing up in a radio station and getting my GED at a record store, Your Humble Narrator is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a musicologist; and no recent event proves such as statement as to-nite's rampant, rapacious, romperstomper-rattling threesomes with Proteus and Gaia where, to make a long story short, we once again pondered the specifics of the difference between blues and jazz. Is there a certain point in time when swamp music transmogrified into swing, when Delta stomp crystallized into Dixieland, when Jelly Roll Morton slipped into a phone booth and emerged as Norah Jones? The short answer is, of course, no. Music and music styles may evolve like Archaeopteryx into Petey the pigeon, or flip from one personality to another as quickly as a pill can be popped, but there is rarely any clearly delineated cut-off point where one genre definitively sheds its chrysalis and emerges as a completely different bug.
I worked at a jazz radio station and sold jazz records, which provides a modicum of insight towards the twisted tree of America's premier contribution to music. Which doesn't help a whit of spit when it comes to deconstructing America's other premier contribution to music, country.
This genre most likely takes as many incestuous twists and turns as jazz does when you trace its origins from then to now. And true enuf, just like jazz, the country produced this year bears little to no resemblance to its ramshackle predecessor. Blame it on technology? Can an electric steel guitar convey feeling more efficiently than a washtub bull fiddle? Is the caliber of "blues" different now? Instead of love, god, and murder, is it now more likely to be trucks, 9/11, and, well, love? What is "country," anyway? Somewhere along the way, after the turn of the century but before the rise of Elvis, the path of blues music split into, for lack of better terms, black and white tributaries. Follow the black blues fork and you get jazz and reggae and hip-hop. Follow the white way and you get bluegrass, rock n' roll, and country.
(Anomalies in this generalized, ad hoc, unscientific theory include Charley Pride, Ray Charles, and Cowboy Troy.)
So, if country music is just essentially whitewashed blues, it's both puzzling and understandable why such an almost unfordable rift exists between the fans of country and rock, country and hip-hop, country and techno, etc. (There doesn't, however, appear to be any East Coast/West Coast-style in-fighting like the kind that hip-hop enjoys on a regular basis, which may explain why country artists are notorious for dying in more creative, self-inflicted ways.) Even tho both "sides" express their worlds via similar venues; heartache, heartbreak, horniness, angst, regret, etc., these same human feelings come from different worlds. Country hardship is different from urban hardship, to put it simply, and while joy may be joy, we also get happy over different things, some more subtle or overt than others.
That said, we still don't know why so few fans dare to cross that line in the sand and embrace multiple genres of music that are basically saying the same damn thing anyway.
At Monkworks, regrettably, not a whole lot of country gets spun. Happily, the portion that does is more often than not from one of two camps. "Old-school" cowboy music, (like the Cartwright Brothers, Carl Sprague, and any outfit calling themselves "doughboys") or hybrid bands that take the sensibilities of country, western, black and white blues, honky-tonk, and crooners and either emulate them in fresh yet comfortable ways(like Tarnation or Cowboy Junkies) or dovetail their influences into their own styles so seamlessly that while they may not always sound like a country band on the outside, the subliminal seed is there(like Band Of Horses or Lambchop).
It's a tangle, to say the least, which makes it no different or less tangled than any other tangled genre. So do yourself some good and treat country music like green food and listen to at least one song every day for good health and long life.
Standards for country include: Neko Case. Johnny Cash, Friends Of Dean Martinez, Bobbie Gentry Roger Miller, Buck Owens, Tarnation, Hank Williams, and any number of one-off singing cowboys who came within spitting distance of a wax cylinder.
Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Next time: triple Ds.
*Henceforth referred to as "Deoxyribomusical Acid."
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Selections follow from to-day's tasting menu at Cat Spit Kitchen, the goal of which was to present relatively new dishes without baldly using ingredients designed specifically as substitutes, that is to say, whole foods over processed, naturally occurring over lifestyle-designed; or as we like to call it, "opaquely vegan." Like its twin attribute transparency, where as much as practically possible in a system is made accessible and visible to someone, whether they be a customer, a client, or a civilian, when you eat an opaquely vegan meal, you shouldn't even know that it's vegan at all.
On the other hand, all the food in the world was here before the labels for the kinds of people who eat it existed.
Tuscan bean dip:
Cannelli beans, tomatoes, garlic, basil, lemon juice, sage, nutritional yeast.
It tastes better than it looks, i.e., not like diarrhea.
Cucumber-couscous salad:
Cucumbers, pearl couscous, celery hearts, red onion, dill, lemon juice, EVOO.
Very nice. Clean, fresh flavors, dressed simply. Refreshing and springy.
Baguette bruschetta with olive and sun-dried tomato tapenade:
Kalamata olives, green olives, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, EVOO, basil.
A complete and total one-off, but still pretty good. French bread was not designed to be toasted, however.
And finally, an encore of last week's blockbuster jelly donut cupc...O SWEET JESUS:
Wha'happa? Well, for starters, it turns out that Your Humble Narrator misread the original recipe and used an insufficient amount of baking powder, which may explain the previous batch's sunken tops. As for the unfortunate victims above, they seem to have had their bags blown out their bottoms, which may or may not be attributed to an internal structural failure, as we also switched up the filling. The source recipe calls for the cheapest, lowest, basest fruit filling available, both to more closely mimic the squishy centers of real cop chow, but probably also as an insurance policy; the sweeter the jelly is going in, the less flavor it's apt to lose as the elements in the oven beat the shit out of its surroundings.
All but two suffered catastrophic butt blow-outs, and those two both carried payloads of raspberry preserves, the other cadavers held Concord grape jelly. Both fruit goops have essentially the same ingredient lists, (primarily high fructose corn syrup, another odd thing for a vegan cookbook to recommend indirectly advocate) so why these survived while all around them went kablooey is as much a mystery as that lone barn left standing among the leavings of a twister.
Good, tho.
⎋
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| 2008-06-26 13:17 |
| The Life You Save. |
| Public |
| Monkworks |
| 14,433 |
| Coil: "The Pope Held Upside Down" |
| freeform |
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Look around you, at you, in this world. This is not your world, and yet you find yourself part of the same group that created it. Does that make you a creator? A collaborator? A conspirer?
Maybe you're just a participant, just an observer, just a control group. Maybe you're just one particle in a million, one part in a billion, one fragment floating among gazillions. Floating in mostly empty space, naked without a suit, isolated and separated from your escape pod, miles away from a comfortable planet.
Alone. Alone, even. Even in space, even in empty space, solitude is acceptable, lonesomeness is tolerable, the stance of a singular individual against the wall built to prevent the Celestials from ravaging the only habitable countryside in the known universe; that position is harmless enuf, that vantage point is distant enuf, that suffering is not painful enuf. It's like a LaGrange point, it's like the eye of a typhoon, it's like balancing on the spire of The Concordant Opposition. You become a fixed point, unstuck in time, a weightless electrical spark.
Is that what you want? Is that what you need? Is that the nature of your coordinates, your plotted course, your scheduled destination?
Or is there more? Just a little more? Not a lot, not a whole new world, not another universe built from scraps, not a different existence patched together like a quilt. Just another little bit, just another solitary particle, just another lonely molecule, just another wandering tuft of dandelion fluff lost in the æther of the momentinuums between momentinuums.
Another one like you. Another unleashed soul. Another biplolar angel. Another distorted reflection. Another lonely clone. Another blue feather, another gray tail, another black iris.
Is that what you want? A satellite? Or a freshly emptied gourd to pour your troubles into? Is that what you need? A parabola? Or a conglomeration of carbons to share your empty space with? Is that the right thing? Is that what is written? Is that what lies underneath the arch of Ra's rooster tail, beyond the wake of Helios' overclocked barge, occluded by Apollo's mercurial cloak?
What is necessary for survival? For success? For balance, for contentment, for equilibrium?
You?
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(Public notice: severe snark ahead; proceed as warned.)
In each of the following genres, list five things (or more) that you absolutely fucking hate. The item in question doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of shit, it just has to rub you the wrong fucking way.
Pithy rationale optional.
I. Music: - New Radicals: "You Get What You Give." Hated not just because it was the de rigeur song to close every prom nite in the late 90s, but for the mind-breakingly stupid lyrics: Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson/Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson/You're all fakes, run to your mansions/Come around, we'll kick your ass in. One can just imagine the spike in hooting cheers from live audiences when "ass" was sung live, along with any reference to getting high.
- Johnny Cash: "Hurt." The Nine Inch Nails version is barely tolerable, but the withered Man In Black's croaking reading of Trent Reznor's laundry list of psychological boo-hoos is unique in that it manages to come across as both depressingly pathetic and phenomenonally contrived: Everyone I know goes away/In the end. Get it? He's old! All his friends are dead! It's poignant! It's touching! It's shite!
Anything Everything by Eminem, but especially "Stan." Doubly sickening to sit thru, what with Mathers' megalomaniacal, blustering, delusional rhymes sandwiched between the chorus from Dido's otherwise unlistenable "Thank You," it's the musical equivalent of being tortured in a Venezuelan prison camp with a bottle of Coke. (up the nose, that is.)
- R.E.M.: "Everybody Hurts." Michael Stipe and friends have a message for you: sometimes life is hard. Your Humble Narrator has a response for R.E.M.: tell me something I don't already fucking know. What kind of clueless idiot needs their life lessons to be dictated to them by a goddamn rock song, anyway? (Close second: "Man On The Moon." Third: "Shiny Happy People.")
- Filter: "Hey Man Nice Shot." If serendipity is any indicator, then this song should have rightfully been published as "Hey Man Nice Shit," which is what anyone in a hurry will initially type before making a possibly unnecessary spelling correction. Also, never mind the fact that ninety-nine out of a hundred shitheads think that this song is about Kurt Cobain when it's actually about R. Bud Dwyer, (look it up) because the song is a piece of shite and no one should listen to it anyway.
II. Books:- Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, J.K. Rowling. Too many new characters, too many plot twists, and too much of nothing happens until the very end. (as usual) Harry acts up like a fucking twat, YELLS ALL THE TIME, and alienates Ron and Hermione. (as usual) Plus, Sirius Black (the Boba Fett of the wizarding world) spends almost all of the book cooped up inside, and when he does get out, he's almost immediately killed. How about at least a kiss before you fuck us, J.K.?
- Anything from Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time cycle, but especially The Fires Of Heaven, if only because this was the book (the fifth in the series, BTW) where Your Humble Narrator realized that Jordan was essentially repeating his hackneyed mash-up of The Lord Of The Rings and Dune with every subsequent volume. Not to mention that this book has entire chapters set in a fucking circus.
- Hannibal, Thomas Harris. If The Silence Of The Lambs was like The Empire Strikes Back, then Hannibal is like The Phantom Menace. Sometimes villains are more effective when they don't take center stage. Also: Hannibal and Clarice, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!? Seriously, how stupid do some writers think their audience is?
- The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown. A stupid, misdirected diatribe against the Catholic Church, written for people who spend most of their day lifting issues of Better Homes & Gardens. If there weren't so many words in this, you'd think it was a puzzle book for pre-schoolers.
- Abhorsen, Garth Nix. After the fresh take on fantasy with Sabriel, the sublime (if overlong) sequel Lirael, this third volume turns out to be both a chore to read and hard letdown. Unlikable characters, a tired quest plotline, and an unsatisfying ending serve to make you wish some people would stop before they even get ahead.
III. Movies:- Mars Attacks! (1996) Shite effects, shite jokes, a shite cast, and just really not that good. Someone should tell Tim Burton that the line between black comedy and gruesome horror is not a very thin line at all, and yet he manages to steamroll over it with every fucking trainwreck of a movie he makes.
- Spawn. (1997) This fanboy's wet dream would be laughably obtuse if it wasn't so amateurishly made. Special effects courtesy of Microsoft Paint, acting lessons from the William Shatner School Of Advanced Scenery Mastication, and a spoonfed story straight from the asshole of comicdom's crown prince of assholes, Todd McFarlane. All that's missing is a cameo by Rob Liefeld.
- Anything directed by Michael Bay, but especially Transformers. (2007) Just because you are a fan and an admirer of a thing does not immediately make you the go-to person to head up a major public project based on that thing. (Your Humble Narrator is a big fan of the video game Space Channel 5, but anything I try to produce concerning it is likely to be shite, and not just because I'm not a "professional" like Bay) To put it another way, Michael Bay is a stupid asshole who makes movies for other stupid assholes to watch.
- V For Vendetta. (2006) Overlong, overrated, and over it. Next bloated, antiestablishment, dystopian fantasy, please.
- Blade Runner. (1982) What is the big fucking deal with this movie, and why do so many people cream their jeans over it? (Close second: any gangster movie, but especially The Godfather.)
Feel free to add on add-ons like television or local restaurants or toe shoes or Billy shelves or road maps. Or don't. ⎋
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