The Big Box

Today I was listening to Rachel Maddow (a local Northampton girl) on Air America and I finally figured out why her theme music has always bugged me. She has a guitar and drums intro to her show that kind of rubs your ears the wrong way. And today I heard it - the drums have the same weird big box sound that mine have on New Fun Master. That damp, recorded in a cave, overdubbed, wet magazine smack that I thought was impossible to duplicate. Well someone must have heard it. And now it's out there - it's out in the world.

Thanksgiving

When we lived in Jackson and Juliana had first become a vegetarian we didn't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving and we weren't going to have turkey, so we came up with the idea of having Indian food for Thanksgiving: there are lots of different dishes, it takes more time than an everynight dinner and has lots of vegetarian possibilities. Since we moved to California we've been having Thanksgiving at Juliana's mom's house in Sonoma, but this year Juliana agreed to work at the UC Davis Veterinary Clinic on Thanksgiving Day, so once again we had Indian Thanksgiving. Here's what we had:

Curried pistachios and cashews as an amuse-guele
Carrot and cashew salad
Spinach and eggplant curry
Brussels sporouts with coconut
Spicy chick peas
Cranberry chutney
Cucumber in yougurt
Naan and papadam that I bought at a store and reheated
Cardamon and pistachio ice cream


Thanksgiving has also occasioned memory of the year, it might have been 1987, when Tracy was living with Charlotte in the building with the feral cats in the alley. I took the train down from Boston and arrived at about 1:00 in the morning Thanksgiving Day. Tracy met me at Penn Station, which is right across the street from Macy's, where they were clearing the streets. The next morning when I woke up Tracy was watching the parade on TV and she said, see, that's where we were yesterday. And there it was, on TV.

Robert Wyatt

I check the Robert Wyatt sections in record stores from time to time, because deep down I know there's some great secret stash of Robert Wyatt music that I haven't heard yet, and it turns out I'm right because last week I found an album called Theatre Royal Drury Lane Sunday 8th September 1974, put out by Hannibal. It's the one-off show of the Rock Bottom material with the usual Robert Wyatt players: Hugh Hopper, Fred Frith, Mike Oldfield, Nick Mason and even Ivor Cutler doing “For me is the life of the highwayman, yum yum". It sounds like Matching Mole or 801 doing that material, much more fusion than psychedelic. Of course I prefer the latter. I always heard the Zappa connection in early 70s Soft Machine, but was actually quite surprised, when I really listened to late-60s Miles Davis, at how much End of an Ear borrowed from that sound.

The live album includes to its detriment that unfortunate fusion staple, the Fender Rhodes with its horrid bell-like tones and also has too many funny-mouth-sounds for my taste. Mike Oldfield’s playing, however, is sort of a rediscovered treasure. But the main benefit of the album, I suspect, will be to send every Robert Wyatt-loving listener back to the inexhaustible Rock Bottom in search of an answer to that musical question, What's a baloley when it's a gafoley?

Appenzeller

I was surprised to see Appenzeller in the cheese section of my local grocery store. The cheese lady told me that they can’t seem to sell it in Woodland, though it does well in Davis and Vacaville. At $16.25 a pound, I can see why it would be a hard sell. I myself prefer Gruyere or Emmenthaler, which, by the way has been running advertisements with Susan Lucci promoting it as “Emmi”, a sound-alike for the television award which Ms. Lucci never wins.

Autmn reading

It's finally autumn here. Even my crazy upside-down tomato plants, which had leaves but no fruit in July, were producing on my birthday. The summer's so unpleasantly hot here--how unpleasantly hot is it?--that I have to wait till after dark to walk the dog, and there's only a couple of months on either side when it's pleasant and not raining and still light so that I can walk the dog after work. With Daylight Savings Time ended and the fog and rains begun, that season is officially over, so I've started my Serious Back-to-School reading: Thucydides. It was the first seminar reading I didn't finish and I figured it was time to catch up. I think I re-read Herodotus once, and found him as cheerfully digressive as I had the first time, but 28 years later, Thucydides is still kind of slow going. I wonder if Jimmy ever finished The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Word of the day

Juliana told me a word that one of the doctors in the hospital taught her: witzelsucht. I couldn't find it in my American Heritage Dictionary I won for being on It's Academic, but the two root words in German add up to "joke addict". According to Juliana it's someone who cracks himself up, but whom no one else finds funny.

Garbo stamp

37 cents of pleasure

Uncle Sarkissian

For those who don't get the College magazine, John Sarkissian died on July 11 of this year.

Many Happy Returns!

Happy Birthday Johny Blood -
I'm sorry I can't get the right day. I think it was actually yesterday, but tomorrow is election day, which is what I remember.
Perhaps you had some of that delicious Wisconsin dessert cheese for your birthday meal. If there were a fondue restaurant nearby, you might have eaten there, too.
Maybe you opened some presents.
And maybe you wondered if your friends forgot, but we didn't.

It's A Boy

Dennis, who played the Phil Manzanera role on When They Go To Sleep, and Chris, with whom I collaborated on a tuba-text-'n'-film performance piece and with whom I hope to again, had their baby yesterday: Miles Patrick Finnegan.

Pictures here.

Cheese, Gromit

Juliana's back from Wisconsin, and she brought me lots of cheese: cheddar with cranberries, jack with morels and leeks, 4-year aged cheddar, string cheese whips, frying cheese as well as Fennuusto, which is called Juustoleipa in Finland and is some sort of baked cheese product that is reheated and served with jam or maple syrup and dipped in coffee. She also brought me something in wax shaped and colored to look like a cow, which I haven't cut into yet, and chocolate cheese fudge, which I haven't dared try yet.

California has been marketing its cheese with the slogan “Great cheese comes from happy cows”, presumably because everyone, even cows, wants to live in California, and indeed some fantastic artisanal Old World-New World cheeses are made here. But fine as those cheese are, California can never even hope to be considered the Dairy State until they produce Juustoleipa.