WE HUMMED
And we hawed. We vacillated. And then today Killer read a story in the Globe and Mail about the community in Queens or Jersey or wherever that’s been laid low by recent events, and her eyes welled up with tears, and then we booked our hotel for New Years in New York City.
We were there on labour day weekend. We stood on top of the World Trade Centre ten days before it dissolved. I thought it was the most beautiful view I’d ever seen. I looked uptown and felt inspired and stilled and awed. I felt like I was in church.
So we’ll meet you on New Years Eve, okay? We’ll be under that funny NASDAQ building.
RODENT UPDATE
Happily, the mouse at work has so far outsmarted all attempts to trap him. The other day a coworker told me that mice will actually tear themselves off of their limbs in efforts to escape the sticky traps. Nauseated, we have redoubled our efforts to convince the powers that be to change our trapping strategies.
Disgustingly, Mango Pudding Blues is also vexed by vermin on the home front. In spite of the ultra-efficient gel that seemed to wipe out the silverfish infestation, today MPB was reduced to cringing jelly when we moved our white cotton film-handling gloves off of the scanner (in a fruitless attempt to tidy our work area) and a big ugly squirmin’ hateful motherfucking silverfish darted out and zipped away behind the desk. If you’ve never seen one of these grotesque stomach-turning sons of bitches with their wiggly appendages and astonishingly fast gait, you’re lucky. They combine the slimy creepy disgustingness of a centipede with the hardcase jeering toughness of a roach and the speed of a cheetah with a hotfoot. If H.R. Giger had been commissioned by god to make a bug, this is what he’d come up with. This one will die, and when he does we will scan his sorry-ass fucking squished remains and post them here. We mean it.
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PISCO ERRATA
1) When I mentioned to C that I had the pisco sour, I was in fact using the recipe from Hotwired’s ancient Cocktail site (more Pisco information can also be found there, incidentally), since I had not brought C’s own recipe home with me. Last night, post-Ute Lemper, Killer and I drank a blenderful of the C version of the Pisco sour, which I thought superior to the Hotwired one. Killer, however, preferred Hotwired’s as being less foamy, less messy and more swank. Killer and I also differed on Ute, whom she enjoyed as a refreshing change from the run-of-the-mill trip to the symphony and whom I thought was probably just fine if that’s your cup of tea, but whom was not my cup of tea. Yes, I realize that I am doing further damage to the shreds of musical credibility that I have with you, having now come out pro-Rod Steward and anti-Ute Lemper, but there you go. The thing is, going to Ute reminded me of why the old Threepenny Opera and Hal Wilner’s Lost in the Stars (A Tribute to Kurt Weill) wound up in the used record shoppe. As much as I’d like to be all hip to that archly Germanic cabaret-theatre-blonde-hair-and-black-leather business, I really just can’t stomach the music itself in anything more than small, and preferably diluted, doses. We did agree, however, that the highlight of the night was a rousing cello bit in Haydn’s 95th Symphony, played by Amanda Forsythe, who is dating Pinchas Zucherman (who was not performing last night), who, together, are our shared celebrity obsession, Killer’s and mine. Oh, how we long to figure out where they live so we can drive by the place once in a while and squeal with delight if we see Pinchy watering the lawn while chomping a cigar. Or Amanda in a ballcap and bluejeans unloading groceries in perfect paper bags, with celery peeking out, from their TT Roadster. Wow. We once went to see the then-touring NAC orchestra when we still lived in Calgary and wound up afterwards in the bar of the Hot Hot Hot Ribhouse or Satan’s Hothouse or whatever it was called, in the Eau Claire Market, where the only people there were us and a knot of afterpartying NAC players, including Pinchy and Amanda in their civilian clothes. We were too cool, of course, to approach them, but oh how we basked in their glow from afar.
2) With respect to the differing recipes above, we took the Angustora Bitters from Hotwired’s recipe and added it to C’s recipe and suggest you do the same. We’re bullish on bitters here at Mango Pudding Blues, although C seems to disagree. I quote here from his correspondence with us this morning: “Bitters? I can see it, but I don’t like what I see.”
3) The many many little glitches and stubbings of grammatical toes in the Pisco transcript posted yesterday are there because the stuff was posted raw. Unvarnished. Cut straight outta Microsoft Outlook and dumped rudely on the world wide web.
4) To those who have suggested, with a sniff and a disapproving look, that C is not real and that the almost nauseatingly droll correspondence between C and MPB is, in fact, entirely a figment of MPB’s admittedly lonesome and admittedly feverish imagination, we invite you to put your goddam money where your goddam mouth is and mount a legal challenge. Yes. We will have the correspondence inspected, verified and notarized by independent counsel, if only a reader who has more money than brains will foot the bill. C is real. He is.
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THEY FIGHT CRIME
Wow.
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PISCO LESSONS
As a public service to our readers, here are the contents of MPB vs. C on the topic of Pisco:
C:
Did I mention my reunion with pisco on the weekend? I had just spent another fruitless hour on the web searching for a pisco distributor in Canada. To no avail. The next day waiting in line at the Kensington Wine Market — about 12 paces from my back gate — I found a fully stocked little cupboard, on a bottom shelf beneath the brandies, of Pisco Control. So, we drank a bottle’s worth of pisco sours and “piscolas,” really the most remarkable cola based cocktail ever. Pisco, I should remind you, is the national drink of both Chile and Peru, and remains the subject of a testy trade dispute over use of the name “pisco.” Pisco is a region (maybe a town; don’t recall) in Peru, but it was once a region in Chile who won it, then politely returned it, from Peru in an obscure 1870ish conflict called “The War of the Pacific.” Pisco is classified as a brandy, and is made from muscat grapes. So, it’s not entirely disimilar to very potent ice wine. You should request a bottle from your discerning liquor merchant; it may be the best liquor you’ll ever taste. It certainly makes for sours that make all other sours seem somehow tragic in comparison.
MPB:
Um, I guess now is the time I tell you that I have for ages been meaning to tell you that they stock pisco rather regularly here, in the same area where the Verisinthe [a faux absinthe product available here in Ontario] sits, and that I’ve been meaning to buy a bottle for a long time.
I’m keen on the piscola and the sour, but i need some recipies, Mr. Boston. So bring ‘em on.
C:
Well, your basic piscola is pisco, coke and ice. Yes, it strikes you as pedestrian; however two stiff glasses and it will strike you as a defenseless pedestrian, caught jaywalking by a speeding freight truck.
The real pisco gem is a sour. You make it as you would any other sour. Sours vary somewhat, but my recipe is as follows:
1 cup pisco
juice of 3 lemons
4 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup water
1 egg white
1 cup ice
Put all the ingredients in blender. Puree. Wait for foam to settle until you can see the liquid. Serve in glasses (I use hiball tumblers, others use martini glasses) with sugared rims.
If you have objections with the egg white you can substitute with some other veg-friendly egg white substitute or omit.
It will follow your empanadas nicely.
MPB:
egg white? really?
C:
Like all good sours, the egg white is needed to give the drink a dazzling foamy head. However, as you know, eggs — whites and yolks alike — have mostly vanished without a whimper from cocktail recipes. So, you don’t really need egg white. And you can buy egg white substitute from the supermarket. Or you can just blend like hell without the egg white — you should get enough foam. Just stop quivering and buy a bottle tonight on your way home. It’s unseemly for a well-rounded, cultural sophisticate such as yourself not to have some familiarity with pisco.
MPB:
Well, I have no problem with egg whites. ’S alright with me. More than alright, really, since I am seeing the pisco sour as an opportunity to significantly increase my protien intake. D’you suppose that there are American bartenders named Al somewhere who still whip in an actual egg white? I had a whiskey sour once in a Kensington bar, and I can tell you that it for sure had no such thing.
C:
Sours in pub can be quite awful. Ordered a sour at V. Choy’s bass brothers and it was essentially lemonade and had never seen a blender. Ordered a sour at Ming and it was everything a whisky sour ought to be — likely had egg white, served in proper glass, sugared rim.
MPB:
Pisco sours last night. Avec le blancs des ouefs. I dunno if that’s actually how you say that. Mon francaise est terrible! They were good, but I prefer the piscola, not least because it’s just so much easier to make. Next; pisco and fresh-squeezed orange juice.
C:
Well, I salute you for embracing the pisco — a man who couldn’t enjoy a nice piscola would oblige me to reconsider my friendship with him. Frankly, I raised your expectations so ludicrously high that I’m surprised you didn’t walk away disappointed from the whole thing.
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THE VENTO
In Japan, Hamish tells us, the Jetta is called the Vento. Would anyone else like to add an international Jetta name to our list? By the way, Hamish, whom you met here a short while ago, is now hurling his own words into the void. Fun, huh? You will find him contemplating the mysteries of teevee in his adopted homeland, the importance of Shuggie Otis and...well, just go look, won’t you?
As for our tantrum here yesterday, in which we berated you for not pulling your readerly weight, and in which we cried bitter tears about the pointlessness of our blog, and in which we bemoaned our stalled growth in readership, and in which we marvelled in horror at our sad back end, and in which we practically begged you to drop us a fucking line, your response was a collective shrug. Oddly, Mango Pudding Blues found this invigorating. Mango Pudding Blues is finding new strength in being unwanted, unread, and under-appreciated. Mango Pudding Blues had previously entertained visions of arriving Fleetwood Macesquely in blogland, stepping out of white Rolls Royces in cream bell-bottoms and long hair with a fur coat and a glass of white wine in hand, but now, hurt, understands that this will never be. Instead, Mango Pudding Blues will grow up defiant, snarling, safety-pinned, scoliotic. Dedicated to the fringes and filled with a spitting rage that will deflate all that came before it. Rolling in peanut butter and broken glass and staying, when in New York, at the Chelsea Hotel. Sneering and idolizing Lou Reed. Oh wait, we already idolized Lou. Well, you get the idea.
From now on, we will only answer to our new punk rock name, Manga Pussy Booze.
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KRAUT FACTOR TEN
Killer is taking me to see Ute Lemper singing Kurt Weill songs at the National Arts Centre tonight. How much more German can you get? None more Germaner.
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A CRUMB:
At Mango Pudding Blues, we have nothing for you today. Well, okay, a tiny crumb. It’s not much, we know, but in Barbados, and perhaps in other places in the world, the Volkswagon Jetta is called a Bora.
Yes, you are right in thinking that that is some pretty thin gruel. If any of you would prefer to submit a meatier post, we’d be pleased to run it. But frankly, we’re a little disappointed in you. Did you misunderstand us when we told you to spread the Mango amongst your friends of influence and power? Amongst your friends of wealth and taste? Because, to be honest, we have spent a lot of time today studying our back end, and we’re not impressed. We’ve been considering our back end, sighing, because it tells us that readership is not increasing. Not at all. The grand spike we were expecting has failed to materialize. Perhaps you are not as well connected as we suspected. Perhaps you think we’re doing this for our own health. Perhaps you don’t feel you owe us anything. Perhaps you think it’s funny that we are hurling our words into the void.
Well, we will no doubt continue to hurl them. We will hurl them until the fucking void is full. But now, now gentle reader, would be a good time to send us a small sign that you are listening to them fall, screaming.
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PERCEPTION:
This is a story about mistaken identity. It happened to a friend of mine who moved to Calgary from Vancouver. In Calgary there was this denture clinic near where he lived. Fresh from his move, knocked slightly off kilter, surrounded by nothing but new new new stuff, my friend was hyper-aware of everything. His senses were on wide open input mode. He saw and heard everything about this new cowtown and hadn’t yet developed the requisite filters that sift the insignificant and the redundant from what counts. He noticed another denture clinic on his way to work. And another near where he was shopping for groceries. There were, he noticed, lots of denture clinics in Calgary. He was new in town, so he was constantly analyzing all input, searching for patterns, looking for keys to his newly adopted city. Perhaps there was an unusually high percentage of old people in Calgary, he thought. He started to notice that there were a lot of old people. Or maybe there was insufficient fluoride in the water, and people had bad teeth. He started to notice people’s teeth. They were often bad. On the phone, to his old Vancouver pals, he would explain that Calgary was full of old people with bad teeth. He was fairly certain that this was a characteristic of Calgary. It took years for this notion to dissolve. One day he was passing a denture clinic and noticed it and chuckled to himself, realizing that he was finally free of his damn fool ideas. There were no more denture clinics in Calgary than there are in any other Canadian city of its size.
He told me about his denture clinic hypotheses when I moved to Ottawa just under two years ago. I was telling him, on the phone, that people here did things slowly and drove crazily and were mainly frumpy.
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SECURITY
Yes, yes, I am broadcasting live from Montreal now, ensconced in the very swank, very exclusive inner city boutique hotel de frère. As usual, I am loving the city, but also as usual for the last few months, the soft-focus fantasy filters that I used to see it with are being gnawed away by nagging niggling worries I have about moving here. Of course, those worries didn't exist when I first moved to Ottawa, because I had nothing. I was scrubbed clean and pure; no belongings, no prospects, no attachments to the physical world. In the two puny years I've been there I've managed to accrue enough security that the idea of moving again is starting to seem like a hassle. And is there anything I hate more than hassles? No, gentle readers, there is not. So I look at the beautiful people and the unbelievably cool buildings and the magical Montrealness of it all and always always always now I am thinking somewhere, "Jeeze, I wonder how much the movers will cost?" and "Hmmm. Is it true that wages are generally lower here?" and "Wow, there are more bums here than in Manhattan."
And so my point here, folks, is that you might think, as I used to, that it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and start all over again. You might think that it would be all zen-like and purifying to release it all to the winds and just move on with only what is inside of you and what you could ship cheaply in a four-foot-by-four-foot-by-eight-foot block. And you would be right, but the part you might not realize is that although you are releasing decades worth of baggage, the new baggage will accumulate faster than you think. It will turn out that baggage accumulation is geometric in its progression, with the baggage you gain this week being twice as heavy as that from the week before and so on, so that the baggage of those past decades is actually pretty insignificant and you can be dragged back down into security in no time at all.
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FIRELAND
...is back up and running again. With words. It's nice. Go read it. It made us a little sad, though, here at Mango Pudding Blues, because although we are happy to once again have access to the archives, which we have not finished reading but had been enjoying immensely, we are also burning with hot envy over the sexy design and the sharp, wistful writing and the, well, the just obvious mastery of the form that they have over there. We wish we were supplying you, our readers, with a package as accomplished as that. We hope to one day, and in the meantime we recommend that you consider this to be one of those times when you've come upon something in its early, raw, formative days so that when Mango Pudding Blues is all big and corporate and being made into a movie starring Ed Harris you will be able to say to the johnny-come-lately fans that you were reading the Mango back in the early days, when it was cool. Back before it sold out. Back when it was just a clunky little page with a crappy stupid flash-ified header that wasn't wide enough. Back in the old-school days. Let's cherish these days, okay?
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What is it?
