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. * * *