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Friday, January 01, 2010
HANDCARVED PESTO New Year's day, 2010, in Toronto, in the slick downtown hideaway condo we're renting from my brother's husband's company. Interior design company. Imagine. We at Mango Pudding Blues are unbelievably lucky. Debussy and the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. Cava. She brought provisions for languid eating today. Cheeses, meats, pates and wines and so on. Eggs for breakfast. I wanted to make a parmesan garlic spread for the olive bread to go with the omlettes. Normally I combine half butter, half parmesan and a bit of garlic and into the broiler. But this time I made a little handcut pesto. Started with the cheese and garlic, and a little of the wilted-near death basil and then some of the walnuts that her sister sent us from their backyard Kelona tree. You don't need a fancy mortar and pestle (although I have one); just cut it all, as fine as you've patience for, on the board. Salt and pepper. Mix with extra-virgin olive oil. Yeah. I made another last week for pizza; sun-dried tomatoes in there too for a dynamite red pesto. Among my new year's resolutions: make better use of the sommeliers; cook with 15 percent more intense heat (where appropriate); more sex; more music; more art; move toward grace; be here now more. Saturday, December 26, 2009
THINGS THAT WON’T SAVE YOU The Hallelujah Chicken Run Band won’t save you. Practicing piano every day won’t save you. Your memories of Paris or Bali or Cuba or New York City won’t save you. Photography won’t save you. Your sparkling personality won’t save you. The Absinthe Martini you invented won’t save you. Art won’t save you. Love won’t save you. Nothing can save you. Sunday, December 20, 2009
OEUF EN COCOTTE My Oeuf en cocotte this morning was overdone. Yours will not be, because you won't make the same mistake I did, of prodding it with a chopstick and leaving it in the oven more than, say 18 minutes when the centre looks runny. Trust me, the eggs’ll cook just fine. This breakfast was a dry run of one of the contenders for a boxing day breakfast in Montreal for my brother and his husband. It failed, in part because it was overdone, and in part because I used what we had on hand, as is my wont for a weekend breakfast, rather than making a trip to the grocer. So, today, no cream, and the poor oeufs suffered for it. So it’s still in the running, even though it was only very good and not great. Am I worried about potentially ruining the surprise? No. Like you, my brother no longer reads this stupid blog. Preheat the oven to 350 and put in a water bath, as per instructions in The Joy of Cooking or whatever basic handbook you use. Okay, so: chop a shallot like the size of 3/4 of a ping pong ball. Sauté in a tablespoon of butter until soft and then throw in a handful of baby spinach and a bit of water. If you washed your spinach, that’s water enough. If you bought it, as I did, pre-washed in a glassine coffin, you must add a teaspoon or so. I just cupped my hand under the tap and took what I could get that way. Prior to that, I should have mentioned, I soaked a couple of dried flower mushrooms in cold water with four chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Use fresh exotic mushrooms and tomatoes in oil if you can. I was, again, improvising with what I had at hand. Mushrooms in cold water reconstitute just fine, to my surprise. I always used hot water, but Killer today informed me that she read in The Science of Good Food (Joachim/Schloss. It’s not Harold McGee, but it’s not bad at all, and remember; we’re workin’ with what we have at hand here) that cold is best unless you intend to use the water itself. So, slice and pat dry the tomatoes and mushroom. Mix with the wilted spinach and shallot and some salt and pepper. Melt some more butter, like a tablespoon, in the spinach pan. Butter up a couple of bowls. Beat two eggs in each. add half of the spinach mixture and some parmesan. In they go. Meantime, chop up some parsley and a green onion and some fresh thyme. Add half of that to the cup or so of leftover mashed potatoes you have in the fridge from Friday night’s filet mignon with panko-bluecheese crust. You channeled Joel Rubichon while making them; his are said to be the first cookbook recipe to contain more butter and cream than potato. Butter butter butter. Melt still more butter over medium low with a couple of twigs of thyme. Press the potatoes into patties and stick ’em in there. Mix the other half of the herbs into sour cream. Pour pink dry Italian sparkling wine over a candied hibiscus flower in a flute along with a bit of the syrup from the flowers. Debate with your girlfriend the merits of pink vs. white sparkling wine in this drink. She favors white, and you like pink. Concede defeat. Poke the goddam Oeufs. They seem a little runny. In the meantime, drain and brush the excess sugar and salt off of the three-pound piece of pork belly you have been marinating in the fridge for six hours. Think about the perfection demanded by Thomas Keller vs. the more stick-it-in-there-and-shrug approach of David Chang. Plate the meal; rectangular plates with the sour cream in tiny sake cups. The potato pancakes get finished at the truffle station; a smear of truffle butter, a scoop of jarred truffle and mushroom tapenade, a pinch of truffle salt. Serve and talk about that article in the New Yorker about Michelin reviewers. Curse your technically imperfect, overcooked eggs. And Bently’s dead. Ran over by a car on the cold road yesterday. His owner came over last night to tearfully tell us. It was widely known that Killer and I loved Bently. It was widely known by Bently and I that he was really my cat, in spite of the technicalities. He walked onto our deck one day three summers ago and bit me, the little shit. Later my wrist turned all purple with infection. I got fucking drunk last night. Bently. Friday, December 18, 2009
YIN AND YANG And then she got me the new Momofuku cookbook. Keller and Chang, the yin and yang of cooking right now. Well, we have already ordered our three-pound slab of pork belly for this weekend’s attempt to make Chang’s famous buns. We have eaten those buns, which we at Mango Pudding Blues believe to be justifiably famous, at Momofuku. Twice. Once on the same weekend as we ate Kellar’s food at Per Se. Well, it’s been a very good year. Saturday, December 12, 2009
TOUS LES MATINS DU MONDE I was downloading (legally! Paid for ’em and everything!) Jordi Savall records and the new In C Remixed this afternoon when Killer burst in with a bottle of cava and a present for me; Thomas Kellar’s Ad Hoc at Home. “What’s the occasion?” I asked. “I like your spirit,” she said. Could life be finer? And yesterday after work popped in to the neighbourhood Italian deli for some parmesan for the mushroom risotto I had promised her. My fromaggier, an amazing fellow, surprised me completely by congratulating me on my new radio show. Turns out he’s a longtime listener of the station, so he caught it and recognized my voice. And he had a new truffled cheese for me to buy, a truffled pecorino. It’s an adequate substitute for the Boschetto al Tartufo to which I am addicted but is so hard to get here. Radio show? Ah, I didn’t tell you, dear reader, even though my new radio show is a beam of beautiful bright light in my life, because of my obsession for anonymity. For to tell you of the show would be to reveal my true identity. Suffice to say I play world music for three hours once a month or so, filling the hearts of my listeners with nearly unbearable delight. You may e-mail me here, at the above link, with an essay of no fewer than 300 words as to why I should tell you and a link to listen. I will consider your application, but I promise you nothing. Sunday, December 06, 2009
EL BULLI Our plan, y’see, is to put in for a reservation at El Bulli for 2010. Me and my brother and my girl and his husband. The odds against us gettin’ it are astronomical, and if we get it we can’t afford it, but the food gods tend to look sweetly upon me. For instance? Once, on a spring friday night in New York city, the Killer and I lit out from our wicked love nest at the not-quite-completely-open-then Standard Hotel for a little walk. We were headed uptown with the idea that we’d perhaps take a cocktail at the bar at the Modern, the lovely Danny Meyer restaurant in MOMA. I had a hankering for their Modern Cocktail: cilantro infused gin and cucumber, I think. An aside; a beautiful book of cocktails from Danny Meyer restaurants came out this year, and Killer plucked it from the library so I could enjoy the Modern Cocktail at home. I eagerly infused a bottle of Bombay Sapphire for 24 hours with the instructed amount of cilantro, turning it an amazing green. And it was completely awful. It’s still somewhere in the bottom of my freezer. So Danny Meyer; you need to adjust that recipe in the next edition. And you owe me a bottle of gin. Anyway, the food gods; so we’re strollin’ uptown and we get to the Modern, but the cracks start to appear in my plan, as cracks so often do in plans of mine; for one thing, the bar is completely packed. Duh. Friday night. So much so that I feel compelled to ask the two hostesses at the little podium whether we can actually cram ourselves in there to take a drink. For another, our stroll took us longer than expected, so now it’s dinner time and we’re hungry and without reservations anywhere. We walk through the packed bar and I become increasingly dismayed. I love the place, but I hate being crowded whilst trying to enjoy a pricey libation. Killer is getting cranky, as she does when her blood sugar is low. Our perfect cocktail is turning into a disaster. Desperate times, so I suddenly lurch back through the room to the podium, leaving Killer momentarily alone in the crowd, for the most desperate measure. Hostess one: Hello. Me: Er, hi. I don’t suppose you have a table in the restaurant. Hostess one (affects highly practiced smile/grimace that they’re trained to deliver to fools who show up without reservation at one of the hottest restaurants in New York City on a Friday night): I’m sorry sir, but – Hostess two (who was, until that moment, dealing with someone else, and who snaps her head around to look at me, interrupting her comrade): The two of you? For dinner? We’d love to have you. Yep, we got a perfect table right in the corner overlooking the sculpture garden, and had one of the finest meals in our little lives there. Completely brilliant. And why we got the table, I’ll never know. I’d like to think she liked the look of me with her steely, professional restaurant eye. But probably she just had a cancellation moments before. In any event, I slickly slipped her a $20 on the way out and thanked her, and for one tiny little moment, my stomach full of truffles and my head full of grappa and bordeaux, I felt like Robert DiNiro. Also: I had to borrow a jacket from the house! Amazing! She said to me, after telling me she had the table “Now I have to ask you a personal question; are you wearing a jacket under that overcoat? Because jackets are required in the dining room.” I said no, thinking for a moment that our hopes were dashed. But no! She crisply dispatched her comrade, the one who tried to deny me, off to the back to fetch a jacket! Just like in an old Bing Crosby picture. So yeah, the food gods smile on Mango Pudding Blues. El Bulli, here we come. One day I’ll tell you the one about the best sushi in Tokyo. Tuesday, June 23, 2009
BIKINI She answered the door in a tiny rock and roll bikini and made me a martini and a bowl of her homemade lavender icecream. Just another Tuesday night ’round here, Jake. Sunday, June 14, 2009
MERCI, JEAN Sunny back deck summer lunch with neighbour’s cat lolling lovingly at our feet. Soy-cured salmon on thai basil crème fraîche with flutes of lemongrass-vanilla lemonade garnished with a slice of starfruit. They paired beautifully. The salmon you can find the recipie for in Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges. Me, I ran out of cilantro, so I used thai basil instead, and couldn’t get an asian pear, so used a nectarine. It was amazing. The lemonade? Boil a cup of water with a cup of sugar and the business end of two lemongrass stalks, hammered. Also maybe half of a vanilla bean, split. I say maybe because I thought I had one, and I didn’t. I had, tragically, put the empty test tube from the last one back in the spice basket, and having seen the test tube in there so many times, I had come to believe that we had at least one vanilla bean in stock. Well, no matter; I had in the freezer a nearly empty bottle of vodka with two whole beans still inside it, the remnants of an infusion from some months ago. Might that do? I threw it in, and yes, it did nicely. So, boil all that and then cool it. I made extra to drizzle over grilled fruit later in the weekend. Then mix it (you have made one cup, right?) with a cup of lemon juice and a very generous cup of vodka. Voila! Your base is done. Three or four ounces of this and then top with lemon Perrier and garnish. Best served with bop-era Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Best served on a weekend that kicked off with your Balinese orchestra joining a group of avant-jazzers accompanying German silent horror flick Nosferatu at the local rep theatre. Best served wearing the snappy fedora that Killer bought you for your 44th birthday. Best served whilst contemplating your August reservations at Alinea in Chicago. Thursday, May 28, 2009
IT’S TRICKY Leonard Cohen had this bit of advice to us at the end of his brilliant show here in Ottawa: “Be kind to one another, although it’s tricky.” Sunday, May 24, 2009
CONTRARY Huh. Contrary to my expectations, listening to Eat the Music by Kate Bush loudly and repeatedly does nothing whatsoever to dispel a hangover. Saturday, May 23, 2009
TODAY’S SNACK I was in my kitchen working on today’s snack. She was digging up our day lilies from our tiny front garden for transplant to the sidewalk garden of the automotive joint across the street. Philip Glass, very loud. The soundtrack to that recent documentary, which I just got and saw this week. She had asked the dudes, the Indian guys who run the place. Our neighbourhood, as regular readers know, is a slightly dingy inner-city area known for biker gangs and crack whores. Slummy or up-and-coming, depending on who you believe. No Starbucks yet, no serious modern condos, and the 100-year old crooked houses like ours rub shoulders with auto garages and a second-rate banknote printing company and a grinding operation that grind, I don’t know; gears? Tools? Machine parts? A laundromat. A really crappy diner. A seedy adult shoppe. And a couple of green shoots of funky young retail shops. It’s a great neighbourhood. But these transmission guys, they have a weedy sidewalk garden to which, a couple of years ago, they added some plastic flowers. She wanted to get rid of our day lillies, so she offered to plant them in place of the plastic ones. So it’s a typical Saturday at our house. Killer does the hard labour, I do the pretty stuff. That’s our deal. Salad rolls with seared tuna. With what I have on hand. So: dipping sauce: one part honey, one part rice vinegar. You can add anything you like to that base. I chopped up a red bird chili, some chives and come cilantro. President’s Choice sustainable tuna from the freezer. You could use anything, as long as it’s good. Shrimp or whatever. She had made 5-spice powder for something else a month or so ago, so I mixed that with canola and some sesame oil. Turned them in the mix, and into the hot frying pan for a minute a side. Could have done even less. Then thin spears of red pepper and cucumber, mint leaves (lots) and some special greens I get from the fig lady, cut into shreds. Tossed it all with some miso dressing I had left over from the salad I made for was last week’s sushi snack. Salad roll paper. Plate of water. Dunk ’em. A tongful of salad, a couple of slices of the seared tuna. Roll. There. The greens have edible flowers. I pressed one into the top of each roll. Serve with the dipping sauce and a bowl of ponzu. I served a French Muscat. Thursday, May 21, 2009
CHAPTER THREE ...in which I resume the writing of my memoirs, Mango Pudding Blues, or Diary of a Supertramp. ...in which I turn 44, now unquestionably middle-aged. ...in which I am visited by a series of epiphanies. ...in which I struggle to connect the music that I feel with that which I can play. ...in which I contemplate what last things I need to obtain before the vast hole in the internet slams shut. ...in which I struggle with the nameless remaining devils that beset me. ...in which I reveal an unexpected tenderness. ...in which I catch a Leonard Cohen concert. ...in which I eat a lot of raw fish; sushis and sashimis and crudos and ceviches and tartares and carpaccios. ...in which I preach tolerance and forgiveness. ...in which I dispense much unasked-for advice. ...in which I pass along hot stock tips. ...in which you, dear reader, become increasingly baffled. Monday, May 18, 2009
EVOLUTION Like cathode ray tube TVs, like cassette decks and CDs, one day we'll be obsolete. Saturday, March 21, 2009
SHAZAM! Killer? She’s taken recently to saying “shazam!” whenever she’s triumphed in some way. You know, like the way Emeril would say “bam”. Her other favorite word these days is torque, particularly referring to materials that have been twisted. Me, my favorite words these days are maxim and axiom. It is axiomatic that I draw my maxims from the Oblique Strategies app for the iPhone. And it’s our tenth anniversary next week and so we are going to Bali, with a few days stopover in Tokyo for the blossoms on the way. Ciao, darlings. Thursday, March 19, 2009
FUSSY PUSSY Read somewhere that a Cheech and Chong routine featured a moment when one of ’em refers to a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé as “Fussy Pussy”, which had us shrieking with laughter. We have since taken to referring to ourselves as fussy pussies on increasingly frequent occasions when we are left cold by a restaurant or a bottle of wine. Thursday, January 01, 2009
TO BE FAIR, I ONLY GOT IT RECENTLY “I love my iPhone,” I said. “I know,” she sneered. “You play with it more than your dick.” Wednesday, December 24, 2008
LIMITED EDITION Of course I have the limited-edition Chuck Close/Philip Glass t-shirt from the Gap. I just can’t find it right now. Tuesday, December 02, 2008
ARE YOU SURE KEITH JARRETT DONE IT THIS WAY? ...trying to learn to play piano more with my shoulders, less with my fingers. And to maintain an appropriate suppleness of the wrist. I want to have a more physical relationship with my piano. Sunday, November 30, 2008
IN PARMA “In Italy,” she said, reading from The Joy of Cooking, “they feed the pigs chestnuts.” She was working on a salad idea that had prosciutto and chestnuts. I just grunted. I was working on my laptop, trying to steal a Mulatu Astatke album on the internet. Ethiopian Jazz. Sunday afternoon at our dining room table. “In Parma, where the best prosciutto comes from, they feed the pigs the whey from the parmesan cheese process,” she continued. “Do you suppose that adds to their piggy pigerifficness?” Saturday, November 29, 2008
FUCKED BLOG We at Mango Pudding Blues have been rather tentatively poking around here once again, as you may have noticed. The electricity ain’t on, the furniture is all still covered in dropcloths, and every time we take a step the dust motes billow up in the sunbeams that are slanting through the dirty windows. The biggest problem is the archives. Google changed Blogger’s thing a while ago in a way that none of the sporadic but wonderful poetry that we’ve produced since, oh, 2006 sometime has ever made it into the archives. Well, fuck it. We will carry on, nevertheless, while we contemplate how to fix this little disaster. Perhaps it’s time to change our technology. Boring! Sadly, we insist on having the fucking think look precisely like we want it to look, and we think that some of the free services that allow this sort of thing would attempt to constrain us. What would really be ideal is if one of you freakin’ web developers could just do the building for us in exchange for a lifetime subscription. How about that? Oh, wait; nobody reads us anymore. Friday, November 28, 2008
THE MONKEY’S PAW AND THE PARADOX OF WEALTH Ironically, amidst the collapsing economy, we at Mango Pudding Blues are enjoying a period of fantastically unprecedented personal wealth. Granted, it is a grisly Monkey’s Paw kind of wealth, but it’s wealth just the same. An aside: how much wealth? Well, vast wealth, by our standards. Which is to say a laughably tiny wealth by your standards, because our standards are low. Unlike you, we are bucktoothed paupers from the hills. But it’s wealth, just the same. And so we are seeing, now, the paradox of wealth. We are rich, but we feel poor and consternated as only the rich can. We have money, yes, but we are no happier, and in fact might be slightly less happy. We long now for the simpler days when all we had was a bottle of plonk and a rose clamped between our teeth as we waited in the velvety night outside grimy highrise housing projects for the objects of our affection to throw down the front door keys. We long now for la vie boheme, when we had to scramble to scrape together our rent and our gloves had no fingers. We long now for the impossible days when the fun had to be manufactured from raw scraps of imagination and determination. Now we are rich, and poor in the way only bloated gassbag rich scumbags can be, leeringly licking the foie gras off of our silver spoons and pronouncing it unsatisfactory. Buying ever-more pricey clarets that fail to capture the charm of the cheap wines we guzzled in our paint-spattered garrets. Now we dismiss the wait staff in pricey restos with a haughty half wave, angrily knowing that they’re having the kind of fun after hours that used to belong to us. When we lived in the gutter, it was so much easier to see the stars. Sunday, October 12, 2008
BUDGET CUTS Goddam worldwide economic crisis. Am I going to have to cut back on the truffles? Tuesday, September 30, 2008
SAN FRAN TO CHICAGO 1) We took a black limosine “house car” from the Clift hotel to the airport. Our driver was from Alexandria, Egypt, by way of Philly. San Fransisco melting away. Melting away. I would buy the e-ink issue of Esquire in the airport, and some sushi and sake for the flight. We got in trouble for bringing the sake, but only after we drank it. I was listening to Miles Davis. The Complete Bitches Brew. The e-ink? I couldn’t decide if it was interesting or not. Probably not. An article within said that Steve Jobs had dismissed the Kindle, saying, “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad; people don’t read anymore.” But I want to. Read. I wonder if, by the time I get an iPhone, someone will have made a decent reading app. 2) And all around us the economy is falling to bits. Crazy oscillations. Interesting times. I’m on vacation, so I haven’t read a newspaper in days and days. I’m shopping! Looking at shoes slightly more flamboyant than the ones I’m wearing now (unreasonably long, pointy, slick), and I set them back on the shelf. I see, for the future, more austere clothes. Less flash as manufactuers and marketers turtle up. A shakedown reflected in increasingly conservative styles. Or who knows? A period of austerity followed by the long overdue appearance of a colorful new cultural movement. The way unfavorable economic conditions in the seventies gave birth to punk rock, and the same in the eighties that gave birth to rap. 3) Long overdue? Well, consider the ascendancy of vapid celebrity, bling-obsessed hip-hop pop music and the sadly formulaic stiffness of what’s left of rock and roll. Surely it’s time for something big and young to crack the crust that the long boom has baked over us. 4) I decided: the e-ink magazine cover? Awful. Imagine a future when all magazines would have e-ink. At first primitive and partial, like this Esquire cover, but increasingly bigger and more sophisticated as the technology advanced and got cheaper and as the new designers who grew up with the possibility began to push the format. Magazine racks undulating, swaying, popping and zooming, writhing with beguiling images. A miniature Times Square at every airport newsstand. The endless ribbon of hot chicks on lad mags now dancing in their bikinis. How long before someone demanded sound? Why does everything yearn to be TV? It happened on the Internet too. From text to full video in no time at all, and everybody everywhere keeps telling me that nobody wants to read. 5) And so why didn’t I like Las Vegas? I wasn’t even aware of how much I disliked it until I got to Los Angeles and was instantly relived to encounter authenticity again. Imagine that; Los Angeles inspiring me with its authenticity! That’s how phony Las Vegas was. I thought I would enjoy the indulgence of a party-all-the-time adult playground. I’m known for my self-indulgence, after all. But Vegas was Big Entertainment, as entertaining as a night watching network television or a trip to the mall. None of the stores or restaurants or entertainments bore the mark of real people starting real businesses because they loved to cook or make clothes or tap dance. Every square inch of every place instead had been planned and executed by collusions of corporate boards blindly chasing the lowest common denominator. Even the high-quality operations had no soul. The service I got was usually professional, but it felt like a professional veneer over a deep-seated feeling of rotten contempt. The waiters and the shopclerks were in cahoots with the dealers and the pit bosses, dedicated to separating the rubes from their dollars for their corporate overlords. You’d see it most at the gaming tables; dead-eyed dealers locked in bored mortal combat with the dead-eyed gamblers, nobody having a shred of fun, and everything shrouded in the kling-clang clatter and trashy lights of the omnipresent slot machines. And every surface, every floor and wall and ceiling created in a boardroom in search of the texture that would somehow convey some idea of what the greatest number of tourists might buy into as a kind of glamour or class. Borrowed from New York, borrowed from Venice, borrowed from Paris, borrowed from Rome; no place anywhere near gutsy enough to be something of its own. And that’s the nice places. At the Jean-George steakhouse in the Bellagio I had a technically perfect martini, but a few nights later in our tiny hotel in Los Angeles, I had an much better cocktail in the bar that the waitress (who was, of course, an actress) proudly told me she had named when the bartender invented it back in the day. She was proud of the cool little drinks in the cool little bar of the cool little hotel where she worked, and that was something I certainly never saw in Las Vegas: pride. And yet, I want to go again. Immediately. Thursday, September 25, 2008
THE DHARMA BUMS Keroauc visited, far sooner than expected. Or rather, the ghost of Keroauc. Not at night, when we drove up from LA, although the evening had plenty of ghostly fog as we wound around and around the twisted Pacific Coast Highway. No, he came in the morning, when I was sitting out on the rustic hippie Ken Kesey deck of our Big Sur lodge. He was a bluebird. Deep indigo bluebird avatar who eschewed the expected breathless poetics and asked me only why I was challenged by Big Sur. Why my razor-sharp black pointy shoes that walked so good all over LA suddenly made me feel out of place. Had I finally become some irredeemably sneering superficial poule de luxe? And why was I scoffing at the naked joy in the journals of the past inhabitants of my room? That Kerouac. You'd think he’d be just all poetry, but he’s a hardass. Wednesday, September 24, 2008
90210 Today I am ensconced in my beautifully hip Beverly Hills hideaway, surfing on blissful waves of fantastic LA. The Los Angelinos love me here, and they love my new straw hat. Friday, September 19, 2008
TODAY AND TOMORROW Today I’m working. Runnin’ various verifications on a website I designed, did principal photography for and mostly wrote. That’s what I do. It’s wonderful. Plus I’ll do a little management, a little admin work, some cleanup of various chores. And then tomorrow morning I will tuck an ace of spades into the brim of my porkpie hat and hop a plane with Killer to Las Vegas. We’re taking a ten-day technicolor American dream tour. Vegas followed by a road trip through the desert to Los Angeles, up to Big Sur to channel Jack Kerouac, and then San Francisco. Monday, September 15, 2008
HER KEYS FELL INTO THE STAIRS She had dropped them at the front door and they fell through the planks and down, down, down under the stairs in front of their house. He got an extension cord, a coat hanger and a work light up from the basement and set to unbending the coat hanger to fashion a hook to extract them. It was dark even though it was still early in the evening, and he could feel the first hint of a clear chill in the air. Summer was over. She stood on the stoop and watched him peeping through the boards and poking his coat hanger into the dark loamy mystery down below. She felt badly about dropping the keys and wasn’t sure at all that he could get them back. But he found them and hooked them, and as he carefully pulled the hook back up through the space between the boards, for a split second he left his body and soared straight up, off of the stoop, seeing himself on his hands and knees. Seeing her leaning over him, hands clasped in ecstatic expectation. Seeing the two of them together in the blue night, in front of their house, bathed in the warm electric light spilling out of the open door, in love and lucky but preoccupied by the minor challenges that come in endless waves. Seeing their inner-city street from above, with its other houses and their equally endless waves of small stories, small moments of small terrors and triumphs and then he was back on the deck, her keys in his hand and they went inside. Sunday, September 14, 2008
THE FEAR, PART XI I have the same fears as the next guy. You know; the economy; my health; whether my scallop tartare will taste as good as my tuna tartare. Friday, September 12, 2008
BLUEGLASS ...my other long-term ambition is to learn the banjo and find a like-minded guitarist and acoustic bass player and start a trio that would play nothing but bluegrass arrangements of Philip Glass tunes. We’d be called BlueGlass. Thursday, September 11, 2008
WE ARE ALIGNING OUR DEVICES We are aligning our devices. Our wireless networks. Our investment vehicles. Our digital instruments. Our fancy French cologne. Our spiritual infrastructure. We are calibrating our gauges. We are girding our loins. Fitting our mouth guards. We’re licking our index fingers and holding them up in the air to gauge the prevailing winds. We are ready. Tuesday, August 19, 2008
YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH I’m still here. Jeeze. Friday, April 04, 2008
SO LAUGHABLE DID SHE FIND PHILLIPE STARCK’S PRONOUNCEMENT... 1) Typical morning at our place. As always, we were talking obsessively about our weight. More obsessively than normal, in fact, because neither of us has a clue how much we weigh, because our bathroom scale is on the fritz. 2) The scale is a funky slab of featureless, purely modern silver designed by Phillipe Starck for his collection of stuff at Target. It was cheap! 3) Unless you count the gas that it took us to drive to Rochester, New York, three or four years ago. We went, actually, just to go to Target. We’d heard all these great things. Imagine our disappointment when it just turned out to be another Zellers/Walmart kind of place. 4) Although we both found Rochester lovely. 5) And we bought the scale, which has served us well for years, and is now dead. There’s a 1-800 number on the back for service, which Killer will call, but you know how these things are now. My brother just had some problems with his very nice point-and-shot digital camera, and the repair shop said it would be cheaper to buy a new one than repair it. Surely the Phillipe Starck scale will be the same. Disposable. 6) But talking about Phillipe Starck reminded me of what I’d read earlier. “He’s retiring,” I said. “Says he’s ashamed to have been a maker of things. That design is dead and that in the future there will be only personal trainers and diet consultants.” 7) And at that she spat her mouthful of coffee out into a basket full of her own clean laundry, so laughable did she find his prounoucement. Thursday, March 27, 2008
IS IT WRONG TO EAT GREENS IN A BOX? Hell if I know. Perfect florets of maché encased in glassine plastic tombs? Frisée? Radicchio? Baby romaine? Wily produce finally reduced to squared off product? Picked, packed, prewashed, shipped and merchandised by armies of men? Trucked through the night in precisely orchestrated campaigns of freshness and plunked down by me next to my tenderloin with chimichurri? Tossed with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese and baby beets? Bedded down beneath the szechaun peppercorn-encrusted seared tuna? Sunday, March 16, 2008
DISCIPLINE Scales and warmups daily for 10 to 15 minues. Blues-based two-handed improvisation daily for ten minutes. Then a run-through of the repertoire and work on the latest two or three songs. If I like a song, I’ll keep playing it. The ones I don’t like, I dump after I get them. I’m idly working up a schmaltzy arrangement of Walk On the Wild Side. I’m also working on a heartbreakingly bright improvisation based on the theme for Mango Pudding Blues, which you may have downloaded from this website earlier. And theory. Endless transcriptions of notes and scales to try to understand the architecture of sound. Noise divided by time. Saturday, March 15, 2008
A FEW THINGS I MIGHT NOT HAVE MENTIONED TO YOU DURING THE LAST LONG SILENCE I bought a new piano. My father died. I decided to get more serious about my career as a graphic designer. I went to Thailand again, this time with the lovely Killer. Spent some time in Chaing Mai during the Loi Kraton festival. Magic. Went to New York City with on a brotherly love roadtrip with my brother to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of my father. Had my house infested by rats. Had a waterpipe burst in the ceiling over my dining room, which sounds like bad news but was good news, since the insurance paid for replacing the ugly ceiling with a very pretty new one and the old hardwood floor with wildly cool bamboo flooring. Bought a new gas stove when the old one conked out. I loved the old one, but the new one is better. Has a griddle on the middle upon which I make my long-suffering girlfriend her two favorite meals; blueberry lemon griddle cakes and grilled goat cheese sandwiches with onion jam. Got a bottle of ultrafine aged balsamico. I mean the really good stuff. It was for Christmas from my brother and his boyfriend, who are the finest. Bought a new spring coat. Urban grey. Very cool. Ate a lot of sushi. Ran a lot. Listened to lots of Miles Davis and Wolfgang Dauner and Lou Reed. Played some pretty cool gigs with the gamelan, including two wild fusions with jazz players and ghanaian drummers. Well, that about brings us up to date. What have you been doing? Sunday, February 24, 2008
BOTCHED CASTRATI 1) I once read a harrowing account of the good ol’ days of opera when the thing to do was castrate pre-pubescent boys so they could develop ethereal high voices. You can look it up on Wikipedia. This was probably published ’round the time the film Faranelli came out. The article said the operation was not always completely successful, medical science still being in relative infancy. And it claimed, perhaps outrageously, that there were entire gangs of botched castrati roaming around menacing the citizenry of 19th century Italy. I’ve been contemplating the gangs of botched castrati on account of my own botched vasectomy, in which I seem to have developed a hemotoma in my inguinal canal, where my hernia used to be. The condition is painful and depressing, although only when I sit, walk or do anything. I’ve been treating it with Naprosyn (perscribed by my doctor) and alcohol (perscribed by me). The alcohol treatments are distressing to my long-suffering girlfriend, who has had just about enough of me. 2) In addition to pain and depression and an angry girlfriend, I also have fear. A close friend of mine has had chronic testicular pain since his own vasectomy, over a year ago. His symptoms began exactly as mine have. Chronic testicular pain. 3) However, I can offer you this nugget of comic relief. Before you go in, you must shave your scrotum. I cleverly decided to use the clippers that I shave my head with. And with the first cut they spectacularly bit into my scrotum. Blood everywhere. Big gash. When he was finished the vasectomy, my doctor laughed, saying, “You left a much bigger mark down here than I did. ” I remember with a sigh when that gash was my biggest ball-related problem. Before the hemotoma. 4) Do you know about the push gift? It’s what some men get their wives for going through the pain of having a baby. Killer got me a knife. Get it? It’s a small Global utility knife, to go with the Global cook’s knife she got me a few years ago. We had a good laugh when I opened it. 5) But now we’re not laughing. We’re crying. Holding each other and crying on the bed last night, because I’m in pain and I’m scared and she feels guilty and scared too and when is this going to go away? Saturday, February 02, 2008
THINGS OF WHICH WE STRONGLY APPROVE THESE DAYS The Time-Warner building in New York City, although we hear some people hate it. The Hudson Hotel, where we stayed recently with the Killer and which, a visiting friend of ours pointed out, is too cool to even have a sign outside. Patricia Barber. Our own tuna tartare. Peruvian Boogaloo. The paint color of our main floor; Willow Wood. It’s a vivid yellowy green. Our cosmopolitain, which we believe is better than those we drank in chi-chi bars in New York. Chicago. Our new look, “graphic trash rock”, which involves lots of black clothes with grungy graphics and very dark jeans. The Complete On The Corner Sessions by Miles Davis. Handmade pasta. Philip Glass, more than ever. The Local Bar, a new wine bar with terrific food and a lovely visual appeal that opened in the lobby of the new Great Canadian Theatre in our neighbourhood, Hintonburg. The movie poster, album cover and idea of Control, the Ian Curtis/Joy Division film. Although, it must be said, we have not yet seen it. The smokey margarita that we stole from John Grey’s place in Playa Del Carmen. Hell, John Grey’s Place in Playa Del Carmen, on the Boulevard Del Corazon. THINGS UPON WHICH, ON THE OTHER HAND, WE HAVE TURNED OUR BACK Jonathan Lethem. Michael Chabon. Williamsburg. Beckta restaurant and wine bar. Blade Runner, a little bit, although it chokes us up to say so. The Replacements, who seemed to us so important during the strange, stunted second adolescence that we went though in our 20s, when we were devoted to them, REM and Husker Du. We do, however, intend to read that new book about them. Friday, January 18, 2008
136 BEEF SOUP NEW MEE FUNG BOOTH STREET, OTTAWA Tuesday, January 15, 2008
THE TRUE VALUE OF PI The smartest man I know told me the true value of pi: “When you’re calculating how long it will take you to do a job, give it your very best guess, pad it a little and then multiply the estimate by 3.14159.” Wednesday, January 09, 2008
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO Shave the front of your scrotum. Wear an athletic support to the procedure and for a week after. Have someone to drive you home. Don't lift anything. No sex. No running. Take an asprin or ibuprofen for the pain. Thursday, December 20, 2007
2008 RESOLUTIONS To make rabbit cacciatore. To finally and fully embrace my inner intellectual elitist euro-snob fuckbar and just be it. Oh, wait. I’m already doing that. To continue the total devotion to beauty in all its forms. To get somewhere musically. To work harder. More minimalism. Intelligence. To edit more fiercely my communication. Saturday, December 15, 2007
WHAT WE’LL BE READING ON THE BEACH IN THE MAYAN RIVIERA, MEXICO, DURING OUR CHRISTMAS VACATION The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross. He’s the classical music critic of the New Yorker. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Both are hardcover, the schlepping of which on vacation is is against my policy, but Killer says I should get over it. CRAZY OSCILLATIONS We are hung over, today at Mango Pudding Blues, the effects of a party at a neighbour’s house. And it’s not helping that our shuffling i-tunes has chosen to play Inspiration From a Vietnamese by Paul Motian, a free-jazz freakout with, we think, Keith Jarrett on piano. But our mental state has called to mind a quote by Liang Jing, Chinese economist, that we read in the Globe and Mail business pages some time ago and have been meaning to share with you. “The stock market will carry on with its craziness, whether it collapses, oscillates, or both at the same time – collapsing in crazy oscillations.” Thursday, December 13, 2007
PUSSY MOUSTACHE She grew out her pubic hair because we read somewhere that big bushes were back in style for the first time since the 70s. This was a while back. She’s young, you know, so she wasn’t really aware at the time. Didn’t believe that girls ever just let it grow wild down there. I had to dig up some vintage porn on the net from back in the day to show her. The porny girls looked so real then! So anyway, she grows it for fashion’s sake, because her attitude is that fashion is fun and so why not? But after a while it got tired and she sheared it all back off into the little stripper-style ’do that’s more the norm nowadays and I picked up a wad of her curlies off the bathroom floor and held ‘em over my lip in a big, bushy Gene Shalit pussy moustache. And that was pretty funny. And the young ones among you are sayin’, “Who’s Gene Shalit?” Tuesday, December 04, 2007
DEDICATION We are dedicated to joy. We are dedicated to beauty. We are dedicated to the pure miracle of Sam Cooke. We are dedicated to the night. We wiggle our toes in the sand where the land meets the sea. We are inspired by the wonders wrought by human hands. We are firmly on the side of those who are against those who are against the pleasures of the senses. We believe in magic in a young girl’s heart. We eat truffles! We eat truffles! We are soldiers in the vast secret army of delight. We are foes of dreariness. We are wearing red nail polish on our toes. We are dedicated to vigorous sexual intercourse. We are dedicated to love. We are dedicated to awe. We are dedicated to you. Sunday, December 02, 2007
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN PT. 2 And, as professor Tolkien once said, there is much to be said about bad times, and not so much about good times, since conflict is the heart of stories. And times, dear readers, have been very good here at Mango Pudding Blues for a long time. In spite of the bear market that has devoured all of the dizzying gains we made earlier this year on the stock market. In spite of the headache we’re nursing in the aftermath of the delightful corporate Christmas party we attended last night. In spite of the mysterious pink albino rat infestation of MPB headquarters. In spite of the unshakable existential despair that lies at the foundation of life, the times have been extraordinarily good. And so next we will settle into our steel couch next to our gorgeous long-suffering girlie to watch Audrey Hepburn in Paris When it Sizzles, snacking on a very special truffled Salt Spring Island goat cheese, a nice veggie paté from Quebec and some Italian truffled olives. We’re bullish on truffles here at Mango Pudding Blues. And on Wednesday next week you will find us in Montreal at the sleek ultra-modern condo of my brother and his boyfriend; Thursday we’re eatin’ at Jo-jo, a Jean-George Vongerichten spot, followed by Philip Glass performing selections from Einstein on the Beach at Carnegie Hall, then to drinks and bed at the very fucking cool Hudson Hotel. All part of the week-long K34 celebrations we’re undertaking for Killer’s birthday. As we said, times are good. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? Thomas Pynchon once said of his famous status as a recluse that he is not, in fact, reclusive at all. “I talk to all sorts of people all the time,” he said to a reporter (we are, perhaps, paraphrasing, from memory), “I just don’t talk to you guys.” And Jello Biafra, singer (?) of the California hardcore punk rock band the Dead Kennedys, vanished temporarily after the band broke up before finally resurfacing with, we think, an album called Lard. Of his time away from rock ’n’ roll, Biafra said that he’d spent a long time thinking about his next move, and how it had to in some way be better or bigger or at least a departure from what he was doing before, and yet one day it dawned on him that he just wasn’t doing anything at all, and that singing for a fast, mean punk rock band was what he wanted to do, because it was his thing, and that he was just gonna do his thing and not worry so much about how it fit in with whatever happened before. And U2 were, once, desperately trying to transmogrify their sound in the style of David Bowie; throwing things out the window and trying not to repeat themselves. And they were hanging out with and being influenced by a DJ, Howie B, whom, we at Mango Pudding Blues are slightly hesitant to say, didn’t do them any favors. We’re sure he’s a nice fellow and whatnot, but really, what were they thinking? Anyway, one day they had arrived at the studio and were just jamming in the classic U2 style, perhaps fatigued of trying to find a new way of sounding. And Howie B hears them and says, hey, that’s really something, that thing you’re playing. What is that thing? And they stop and look at him and realize that the very thing they’re artistically trying to flee is, in fact, the thing they do best. The thing they were put on the planet for. They were born to rock and roll. And we at Mango Pudding Blues have always been nearly freakishly dedicated to the moment. And we at Mango Pudding Blues are gathering ourselves like storm clouds on the horizon. And we at Mango Pudding Blues will lead you out of the desert. And we at Mango Pudding Blues have no idea where the time went. Saturday, July 29, 2006
THINGS I DONE SINCE YOU BEEN GONE Tuesday, November 01, 2005
BORDER=0 Sunday, October 30, 2005
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