Maggie takes lots of them.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
What I Forgot To Say About Asparagus and Showtunes
I forgot to say about asparagus that you can also stir fry it with garlic, ginger, rice vinegar and black bean paste, if you have it, as I did on Saturday. A quick, hot stir fry till the asparagus just firms up quite suits its fast-goes-fast nature.
Stephin has a new album out. It takes a little getting used to, though it has very nice auto-harp on it. But I really like the cover.
Monday, March 20, 2006
More asparagus
I've been reading Tender Buttons and thinking about asparagus some more, and there's so much to say that I'm not ready to say it yet. It seems clear that GS did care about asparagus, since the very last sentence of Tender Buttons is, "The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain" and remember in the section Stephen quoted she said, "Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet" so the care makes asparagus and the asparagus makes it art, it doesn't have to be asparagus but if you eat asparagus you can see that it's true, that the care makes asparagus and the asparagus makes it art, and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet and whether it is wet weather or it is really a fountain, anyway there is a lot to say about asparagus.
But I haven't just been thinking about asparagus, I've been eating it too. I saw a picture of an asparagus quiche and so I made one Saturday. It was in fact the first quiche I've ever made, since I spent the 70s in Ohio and the early 80s apprenticing under Chef James L. Preston, who for all his food-as-performance ways never made quiche, and by the time I was back in the United States nobody made quiche any more so I never bothered to learn. But mine this weekend was very nice, I'm not very good at fluting the crust, but I made it with smoked Gouda and a little ground chipotle so that it had a faint but delightfully misleading smell of bacon. And now it's cold and raining again, wet wet weather wet weather wet indeed.
But I haven't just been thinking about asparagus, I've been eating it too. I saw a picture of an asparagus quiche and so I made one Saturday. It was in fact the first quiche I've ever made, since I spent the 70s in Ohio and the early 80s apprenticing under Chef James L. Preston, who for all his food-as-performance ways never made quiche, and by the time I was back in the United States nobody made quiche any more so I never bothered to learn. But mine this weekend was very nice, I'm not very good at fluting the crust, but I made it with smoked Gouda and a little ground chipotle so that it had a faint but delightfully misleading smell of bacon. And now it's cold and raining again, wet wet weather wet weather wet indeed.
Friday, March 17, 2006
But what if Djivan Gasparyan is not a man who has never known happiness, but rather a consumate showman, whose specialty happens to be the longing that devours one's entrails? I am reminded of the woman who told me that The Bridges of Madison County was not fiction but a true story, that it had to be true "because it's so beautiful".
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Thursday, March 09, 2006
A friend is/was starting a magazine, and needed content, so I wrote the following. I don't know if it will see print, however; he has now moved on to another project-- something involving magic crystals in happy water. So,
Asparagus
Ariel: I go, I go.
---Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene One---
When Prospero the magician commands his servant Ariel to speed on a fateful errand, the “dainty spirit” responds, “I drink the air before me, and return or ere your pulse twice beat”-- admirable celerity, especially considering the play’s steamy setting in “the ‘still-vex’d Bermoothes…” For the Vikings, velocity was defined as the ogenblikke, the blink-- or the twinkling-- of an eye. In ancient Rome, however, haste was expressed by Augustus’ delightful motto, velocius quam asparagi conquantur: as quickly as cooking asparagus. And this, as any cook knows, is very quickly indeed. A few minutes too long in the pan kills both flavor and texture. In fact, time is of the essence in transferring the vegetable from garden to kitchen, as it loses sugar immediately upon being harvested. Therefore, the Romans established a relay system of runners and chariots to hurry the precious spears from the Tiber to the Alps where it could be preserved in snow. (That is why, if asparagus must be stored, some cooks recommend treating the stalks like flowers, cutting away the bottom ends and placing them upright in a vase of water, refrigerated.)
Curiously, the plant which makes for kitchen flurries in the Spring requires cool, almost cold, patience, to propagate. Once the crowns (which come to you as desiccated, dead-looking brambles) are settled in their rows, the resultant trenches are filled in slowly throughout the first year; the spears this year, if any, are mere wispy things, and mustn’t be touched. The second year passes the same way, and only on the third or fourth year can one harvest, with restraint. Happily, a well-established bed can then produce for twenty years or more. Thus, a better epigram for asparagus might be festina lente, or “make haste slowly”--- symbolized by both the Dolphin and the Anchor.
Asparagus is traditionally the harbinger of Spring, and this may have something to do with its reputation as an aphrodisiac. (Tradition also holds that “sparrow-grass” is consumed by the heat of St. John the Baptist’s Day in late June, much like a young man’s ardor.) More likely, the vegetable’ s sexual possibilities were suggested by simply observing it grow: the spears shoot from the earth in an undeniably phallic fashion. Madame Pompadour, Mistress to King Louis XV, believed in its potency and perhaps had recourse to it in restoring her lover’s flagging interest. She favored it with a sauce containing egg (perhaps a Hollandaise or Mousseline, still standard accompaniments,) another archetype of the Season and obvious symbol of fertility. Louis’ great-grandfather, the Sun King, so prized the plant that he had special greenhouses constructed solely for the purpose of growing it. Arial views of his palace at Versailles, with its splendid Salon de Venus, suggest a fascination not with male, but female, anatomy, however. Architecturally, asparagus is decidedly more reminiscent of the Chrysler Building. (And musically, it most resembles the machismo-drenched tangos of Astor Piazolla: sweet, somewhat musty, suggesting menace and wholly consecrated to the Flesh.)
In his diary, Samuel Pepys, who must have been aware of the vegetable’s reputation, records an intriguing episode for April 22, 1162 which reveals something of asparagus’ internal logic. That day he had taken leave of his wife (“which we could hardly do kindly, because of her mind to go along with me,”) and trundled off to Lambeth. (At the time, Lambeth was home to taverns of questionable repute.) There, Pepys and his (male) companions feasted on “buttered eggs,” in unknowing tribute to Madame Pompadour’s later insights. At Lambeth, Pepys met his friend, Dr. Timothy Clarke--- “a very pretty man and very knowing”--- and together they journeyed to Guilford, where they spent the afternoon cutting “sparagus” in the garden for their supper. It was, says Pepys, the “best that ever I eat in my life” save one. Pepys concludes suggestively, “(s)upped well, and the Doctor and I to bed together, calling cozens from his name and my office.”
Gertrude Stein, no stranger to fleshy pleasure, and who ate amply when there was ample to be had, but knew how to starve with aplomb, had this to say about asparagus: “Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.” I couldn’t agree more.
My most memorable asparagus encounter comes in the form of a dream. I dream of a Body buried in my backyard, beneath the furrows of the well-tilled bed. When Spring comes, bright tendrils exude from the soil, the palpable fruit of the Body’s own dreaming. Upon examination, I find that they are composed of tiny leaves of very fragile writing-paper, inscribed in disparate hands, the memoirs of long- forgotten lives. They crumble at my touch. Flocks of hummingbirds, drawn by a secret magnetism, descend on the harvest in droves. When they sip from the prolix blossoms of the Body, they are at once struck dead, and drop by dozens silently. Their little corpses strew the ground with scraps of vibrant color, like candy wrappers, or so much scat from a busted pinata.
Flowers from the Dustbin
Life Stinks: Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance
The first time I saw Pere Ubu perform they were playing a steakhouse in Albuquerque. The restaurant itself was an eerie dump shaped like a wine barrel, what Venturi would call an architectural “duck“, a fast-frozen specimen of Eisenhower Americana on the low end, creepy as an undertaker’s smile or Slim Whitman’s blue yodel. This was in the late Eighties, when other “legends” with weaker resumes and none of Pere Ubu’s brilliance could fill stadiums, but Ubu seemed to have fallen on perpetually hard times. Embarrassingly, all of their amps and drum cases were rejects, each clearly marked “Foghat” in silver spray paint.. I asked about their choice of venue, and I was told curtly that they were happy being paid in beef. They did not look so very happy, but they were clearly very hungry. The second time I saw them, they suffered the indignity of opening for the Pixies-- a fine band, but hardly worthy to play Christ to Ubu‘s Baptist. I caught them again a few years ago, and they seemed somehow to have resigned themselves to permanent cult status, performing alone in a standard-issue “punk“ bar on a weekday night. Oddly, the band seemed unfazed by the mediocre reception they received, mostly from kids too young to know any of their material and too absorbed with their own pretty costumes to pay attention to what was a rare, inspiring performance. At one point a heckler took on singer David Thomas between tunes, and Thomas calmly dressed the rascal down over the PA, with words to this effect: We are geniuses. I, especially, am a genius. If you don’t understand us, get the fuck out. The lout, oblivious, kept squawking until Thomas, with borrowed cash, refunded the cost of the ticket, remounted the stage, and kicked off another set of incredible power and innovation. (And justice rolls down like water…)
Pere Ubu was named for the grotesque title character in Alfred Jarry’s proto-surrealist play, a too- recognizable bufoon whose most perspicacious articulation was “merdre” ---”shittt”. They emerged inauspiciously from Ohio in the mid-Seventies, their unnatural habitat the dying mills of America’s onetime Tire Capital. Ubu’s earliest singles practically stank of urban decay, with songs like My Dark Ages, Heart of Darkness and Final Solution: a lacerated, leave you with lockjaw sound, desperate to the point of danger. Free jazz a la Ornette Coleman was enjambed violently into psychotic surf punk,, the whole black stew pervaded by Thomas’ aberrant, sometimes alarming, warbling. But it was their first album, The Modern Dance, that drove the point home.
The album opens with a painfully long whine of raw feedback. Then the bass weighs in uncertainly, a tommy-gun guitar and drums follow, and suddenly we’re all along for the crazy ride. At once Thomas, shrieking and strangling simultaneously, bursts through with a heartfelt plea, or threat, to his beloved: sign my non-alignment pact. Clearly, the owls are not what they seem, here.
What results, surprisingly, is not bedlam; it is something far more startling than that. The music presses on with an obsessive urgency. The guitars are quirky, oddly-tuned, but immensely expressive. Alan Ravenstein coaxes unearthly whines and splutters out of some sort of xeno-synthesizer. Clarinets, or perhaps soprano saxophones, waft dizzily through the mix, and at more than one point the roar of jeering crowd noise, taped and filtered, intrudes. (This, despite the album’s having been recorded in a studio.) Thomas actually begins barking for some reason. But through it all, the band is tight---Rather than missing a beat, they seem to pre-anticipate beats which come later on the album. Each cut propels us further through Ubu’s blasted world--”a world to be drowned in,” as Thomas warns us.
Such intensity isn’t meant to last, however; in the penultimate song, Sentimental Journey, the long-prognosticated psychotic break occurs as Thomas reflects on an imagined homecoming. The music seems to collapse as if someone turned off its ventilator, replaced by the sound of smashing light bulbs and soda bottles thrown across a concrete floor, and Thomas, or the fractured character he portrays, whimpers and howls as if he realizes that the trap’s jaws are just clamping down for good. The bluebird of happiness, it seems, is a bus bound for hell. But when all seems darkest, the band, apparently, goes surfing: the last cut finds them suddenly riding the big wave, as if, rather than recovering from their madness, they’ve chosen gamely to plunge further into it.
Breathtaking. Anyone interested in Rock’s artistic possibilities should own this album.
A Cool Wind is Blowing: Djivan Gasparyan, I Will Not be Sad in This World
Armenians have much to be sad about. Armenia was home to Mount Ararat, resting place of the ark, and Armenians consider themselves direct descendants of Noah, who, it’s said, founded the first Armeninan. City. Byron described them as a blameless people, ”oppressed and noble.” But oppression became genocide in 1915, when they were declared ‘internal enemies’ of the Ottoman Empire. Somewhere between two and six million Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks, many during a death march which left the Euphrates river choked with corpses. Bolsheviks did their best to complete the eradication, and in 1920 the few survivors were incorporated forcibly by the Soviet state.
Djivan Gasparian was born in the immediate aftermath of these tragedies. As a child, he was entranced by the live folk music which accompanied silent films, particularly the duduk, a small wooden oboe fashioned from apricot wood. By collecting and reselling empty bottles, he earned enough money to by his own duduk, and quickly became proficient, eventually attending conservatory and rising to the level of “academician.” Later success led to performances in films such as The Last Temptation of Christ and Ronin. In all, Gasparian spent over sixty years perfecting his skills with the instrument, developing a rich, sonorous style which belies the duduk’s size.
To American ears, Gasparian’s duduk is a mournful sound, evocative of Armenia’s history of heartbreak. Its plaintive beauty captivated musician/producer Brian Eno, and in 1988 his Opal Records released internationally an album Gasparian had recorded five years earlier under the title, I Will Not Be Sad in This World. It is a somber recording, despite its optimistic title, but achingly lovely and tender. Over an ambient drone, the duduk sketches landscapes which seem haunted by the world- weary ghosts of Gasparian’s people. An old man reflects on lost love, a young girl dreams of her first kiss--- the moon rises over a desert of bleached bones: it’s like that, or another way. Armenian lore speaks of Ara the Beautiful, son of the king who ruled five thousand years ago, and who gave the land the name it bears today. Ara’s beauty so enchanted legendary queen Semiramis that she waged a war for, and against, him, and in the end Ara and his people were destroyed--- out of love. Listening to I Shall Not Be Sad somehow makes this tale easier to believe.
Gasparian has been quoted as saying that a bad person cannot be a good musician. Whether or not this is true, it seems clear that someone who knew happiness could hardly make such melancholy music--- sorrowful, but gorgeous, too gorgeous to be sentimental and too sorrowful to be taken casually. But for those times when quiet meditation or reminiscence is in order, Gasparian’s sound is a perfect accompaniment to one’s own silent movies.
Asparagus
Ariel: I go, I go.
---Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene One---
When Prospero the magician commands his servant Ariel to speed on a fateful errand, the “dainty spirit” responds, “I drink the air before me, and return or ere your pulse twice beat”-- admirable celerity, especially considering the play’s steamy setting in “the ‘still-vex’d Bermoothes…” For the Vikings, velocity was defined as the ogenblikke, the blink-- or the twinkling-- of an eye. In ancient Rome, however, haste was expressed by Augustus’ delightful motto, velocius quam asparagi conquantur: as quickly as cooking asparagus. And this, as any cook knows, is very quickly indeed. A few minutes too long in the pan kills both flavor and texture. In fact, time is of the essence in transferring the vegetable from garden to kitchen, as it loses sugar immediately upon being harvested. Therefore, the Romans established a relay system of runners and chariots to hurry the precious spears from the Tiber to the Alps where it could be preserved in snow. (That is why, if asparagus must be stored, some cooks recommend treating the stalks like flowers, cutting away the bottom ends and placing them upright in a vase of water, refrigerated.)
Curiously, the plant which makes for kitchen flurries in the Spring requires cool, almost cold, patience, to propagate. Once the crowns (which come to you as desiccated, dead-looking brambles) are settled in their rows, the resultant trenches are filled in slowly throughout the first year; the spears this year, if any, are mere wispy things, and mustn’t be touched. The second year passes the same way, and only on the third or fourth year can one harvest, with restraint. Happily, a well-established bed can then produce for twenty years or more. Thus, a better epigram for asparagus might be festina lente, or “make haste slowly”--- symbolized by both the Dolphin and the Anchor.
Asparagus is traditionally the harbinger of Spring, and this may have something to do with its reputation as an aphrodisiac. (Tradition also holds that “sparrow-grass” is consumed by the heat of St. John the Baptist’s Day in late June, much like a young man’s ardor.) More likely, the vegetable’ s sexual possibilities were suggested by simply observing it grow: the spears shoot from the earth in an undeniably phallic fashion. Madame Pompadour, Mistress to King Louis XV, believed in its potency and perhaps had recourse to it in restoring her lover’s flagging interest. She favored it with a sauce containing egg (perhaps a Hollandaise or Mousseline, still standard accompaniments,) another archetype of the Season and obvious symbol of fertility. Louis’ great-grandfather, the Sun King, so prized the plant that he had special greenhouses constructed solely for the purpose of growing it. Arial views of his palace at Versailles, with its splendid Salon de Venus, suggest a fascination not with male, but female, anatomy, however. Architecturally, asparagus is decidedly more reminiscent of the Chrysler Building. (And musically, it most resembles the machismo-drenched tangos of Astor Piazolla: sweet, somewhat musty, suggesting menace and wholly consecrated to the Flesh.)
In his diary, Samuel Pepys, who must have been aware of the vegetable’s reputation, records an intriguing episode for April 22, 1162 which reveals something of asparagus’ internal logic. That day he had taken leave of his wife (“which we could hardly do kindly, because of her mind to go along with me,”) and trundled off to Lambeth. (At the time, Lambeth was home to taverns of questionable repute.) There, Pepys and his (male) companions feasted on “buttered eggs,” in unknowing tribute to Madame Pompadour’s later insights. At Lambeth, Pepys met his friend, Dr. Timothy Clarke--- “a very pretty man and very knowing”--- and together they journeyed to Guilford, where they spent the afternoon cutting “sparagus” in the garden for their supper. It was, says Pepys, the “best that ever I eat in my life” save one. Pepys concludes suggestively, “(s)upped well, and the Doctor and I to bed together, calling cozens from his name and my office.”
Gertrude Stein, no stranger to fleshy pleasure, and who ate amply when there was ample to be had, but knew how to starve with aplomb, had this to say about asparagus: “Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.” I couldn’t agree more.
My most memorable asparagus encounter comes in the form of a dream. I dream of a Body buried in my backyard, beneath the furrows of the well-tilled bed. When Spring comes, bright tendrils exude from the soil, the palpable fruit of the Body’s own dreaming. Upon examination, I find that they are composed of tiny leaves of very fragile writing-paper, inscribed in disparate hands, the memoirs of long- forgotten lives. They crumble at my touch. Flocks of hummingbirds, drawn by a secret magnetism, descend on the harvest in droves. When they sip from the prolix blossoms of the Body, they are at once struck dead, and drop by dozens silently. Their little corpses strew the ground with scraps of vibrant color, like candy wrappers, or so much scat from a busted pinata.
Flowers from the Dustbin
Life Stinks: Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance
The first time I saw Pere Ubu perform they were playing a steakhouse in Albuquerque. The restaurant itself was an eerie dump shaped like a wine barrel, what Venturi would call an architectural “duck“, a fast-frozen specimen of Eisenhower Americana on the low end, creepy as an undertaker’s smile or Slim Whitman’s blue yodel. This was in the late Eighties, when other “legends” with weaker resumes and none of Pere Ubu’s brilliance could fill stadiums, but Ubu seemed to have fallen on perpetually hard times. Embarrassingly, all of their amps and drum cases were rejects, each clearly marked “Foghat” in silver spray paint.. I asked about their choice of venue, and I was told curtly that they were happy being paid in beef. They did not look so very happy, but they were clearly very hungry. The second time I saw them, they suffered the indignity of opening for the Pixies-- a fine band, but hardly worthy to play Christ to Ubu‘s Baptist. I caught them again a few years ago, and they seemed somehow to have resigned themselves to permanent cult status, performing alone in a standard-issue “punk“ bar on a weekday night. Oddly, the band seemed unfazed by the mediocre reception they received, mostly from kids too young to know any of their material and too absorbed with their own pretty costumes to pay attention to what was a rare, inspiring performance. At one point a heckler took on singer David Thomas between tunes, and Thomas calmly dressed the rascal down over the PA, with words to this effect: We are geniuses. I, especially, am a genius. If you don’t understand us, get the fuck out. The lout, oblivious, kept squawking until Thomas, with borrowed cash, refunded the cost of the ticket, remounted the stage, and kicked off another set of incredible power and innovation. (And justice rolls down like water…)
Pere Ubu was named for the grotesque title character in Alfred Jarry’s proto-surrealist play, a too- recognizable bufoon whose most perspicacious articulation was “merdre” ---”shittt”. They emerged inauspiciously from Ohio in the mid-Seventies, their unnatural habitat the dying mills of America’s onetime Tire Capital. Ubu’s earliest singles practically stank of urban decay, with songs like My Dark Ages, Heart of Darkness and Final Solution: a lacerated, leave you with lockjaw sound, desperate to the point of danger. Free jazz a la Ornette Coleman was enjambed violently into psychotic surf punk,, the whole black stew pervaded by Thomas’ aberrant, sometimes alarming, warbling. But it was their first album, The Modern Dance, that drove the point home.
The album opens with a painfully long whine of raw feedback. Then the bass weighs in uncertainly, a tommy-gun guitar and drums follow, and suddenly we’re all along for the crazy ride. At once Thomas, shrieking and strangling simultaneously, bursts through with a heartfelt plea, or threat, to his beloved: sign my non-alignment pact. Clearly, the owls are not what they seem, here.
What results, surprisingly, is not bedlam; it is something far more startling than that. The music presses on with an obsessive urgency. The guitars are quirky, oddly-tuned, but immensely expressive. Alan Ravenstein coaxes unearthly whines and splutters out of some sort of xeno-synthesizer. Clarinets, or perhaps soprano saxophones, waft dizzily through the mix, and at more than one point the roar of jeering crowd noise, taped and filtered, intrudes. (This, despite the album’s having been recorded in a studio.) Thomas actually begins barking for some reason. But through it all, the band is tight---Rather than missing a beat, they seem to pre-anticipate beats which come later on the album. Each cut propels us further through Ubu’s blasted world--”a world to be drowned in,” as Thomas warns us.
Such intensity isn’t meant to last, however; in the penultimate song, Sentimental Journey, the long-prognosticated psychotic break occurs as Thomas reflects on an imagined homecoming. The music seems to collapse as if someone turned off its ventilator, replaced by the sound of smashing light bulbs and soda bottles thrown across a concrete floor, and Thomas, or the fractured character he portrays, whimpers and howls as if he realizes that the trap’s jaws are just clamping down for good. The bluebird of happiness, it seems, is a bus bound for hell. But when all seems darkest, the band, apparently, goes surfing: the last cut finds them suddenly riding the big wave, as if, rather than recovering from their madness, they’ve chosen gamely to plunge further into it.
Breathtaking. Anyone interested in Rock’s artistic possibilities should own this album.
A Cool Wind is Blowing: Djivan Gasparyan, I Will Not be Sad in This World
Armenians have much to be sad about. Armenia was home to Mount Ararat, resting place of the ark, and Armenians consider themselves direct descendants of Noah, who, it’s said, founded the first Armeninan. City. Byron described them as a blameless people, ”oppressed and noble.” But oppression became genocide in 1915, when they were declared ‘internal enemies’ of the Ottoman Empire. Somewhere between two and six million Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks, many during a death march which left the Euphrates river choked with corpses. Bolsheviks did their best to complete the eradication, and in 1920 the few survivors were incorporated forcibly by the Soviet state.
Djivan Gasparian was born in the immediate aftermath of these tragedies. As a child, he was entranced by the live folk music which accompanied silent films, particularly the duduk, a small wooden oboe fashioned from apricot wood. By collecting and reselling empty bottles, he earned enough money to by his own duduk, and quickly became proficient, eventually attending conservatory and rising to the level of “academician.” Later success led to performances in films such as The Last Temptation of Christ and Ronin. In all, Gasparian spent over sixty years perfecting his skills with the instrument, developing a rich, sonorous style which belies the duduk’s size.
To American ears, Gasparian’s duduk is a mournful sound, evocative of Armenia’s history of heartbreak. Its plaintive beauty captivated musician/producer Brian Eno, and in 1988 his Opal Records released internationally an album Gasparian had recorded five years earlier under the title, I Will Not Be Sad in This World. It is a somber recording, despite its optimistic title, but achingly lovely and tender. Over an ambient drone, the duduk sketches landscapes which seem haunted by the world- weary ghosts of Gasparian’s people. An old man reflects on lost love, a young girl dreams of her first kiss--- the moon rises over a desert of bleached bones: it’s like that, or another way. Armenian lore speaks of Ara the Beautiful, son of the king who ruled five thousand years ago, and who gave the land the name it bears today. Ara’s beauty so enchanted legendary queen Semiramis that she waged a war for, and against, him, and in the end Ara and his people were destroyed--- out of love. Listening to I Shall Not Be Sad somehow makes this tale easier to believe.
Gasparian has been quoted as saying that a bad person cannot be a good musician. Whether or not this is true, it seems clear that someone who knew happiness could hardly make such melancholy music--- sorrowful, but gorgeous, too gorgeous to be sentimental and too sorrowful to be taken casually. But for those times when quiet meditation or reminiscence is in order, Gasparian’s sound is a perfect accompaniment to one’s own silent movies.
Monday, March 06, 2006
UncleN'
While I was in New Jersey my nine-year-old nephew asked me if I wanted to play football with him, so for the first time in my life I voluntarily went out to toss around the old pigskin. I started with a little avuncular chatter: good hustle; oh, just a little high; sorry that was a lousy throw, and then all this advice people had been giving me, utterly of course without benefit, started to come out of my mouth: Hold your fingers like this, then you can bring the ball into your chest when you catch it; throw it a little ahead of me, to keep it away from the defender. Imagine if you can your Moronic correspondent trying to throw spirals and run buttonhooks, all in an attempt to be a good uncle.
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