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.

Gauloises

Flossbonder told me he'd heard that Gauloise cigarettes were being discontinued, and I found confirmation from the IHT. Wonder if they still make Mary Longs?

Wild Turkeys

Three wild turkeys were in the parking lot at work and came right up to the window, maybe three feet from where I sit. That was strange. This is Sacramento, not Jackson Hole. Sorry I don't have a picture.

Two albums

Here are two lightweight, genre-bustin’ albums I've been enjoying this summer: The first is called "Tijuana Sessions Vol 3" by the Nortec Collective. I don't know about volumes one and two, but volume 3 is a dance club cut-up of Mexican music, thus the lame name: Nor(teno) plus tech(no). They use live accordion, tuba, bajo sexto and shrill overblown horns over the rather standard-sounding dance beats, and the overall effect is sort of a hopped-up beery haze. The words seem to have been translated from Spanish into Japanese and thence into English: "what I care about is to see you again and to dance that song".

The other album is called "Nouvelle Vague". It's based on the goof that "bossa nova" actually means "new wave"; thus it’s a bunch of 80s new wave songs done as bossas. The most successful are more what I'd call British synth-pop: "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by New Order, "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode and "I Melt With You" by whoever that was by; the sort of songs one would have heard on WFNX if one was living in Boston in the mid- to late-80s. Juliana was, and she's quite partial to the album.

Sorry I've let the Spartan Bar go dry, though one might recall this hapenned not infrequently at the Paca-Carrol Spartan Bar. I was down in San Jose for Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur and played a bunch of shows with the Mad Maggies, including one at the Placerville Pagan Festival. I made a fine dinner this weekend: squash soup, polenta with gorgonzola and a salad with the eight or so cherry tomatoes I was able to pull from the garden.

Flat Iron

I suppose everyone carries around misconceptions that go uncorrected for years. Ray, my roommate on Mission Hill, pronounced the French poet’s name as “Rim-bod”, probably thinking that those who pronounced it correctly were confusing him with the Sylvester Stallone character. Ned Stone, for another instance, persists—to this day, I saw him only last month—in pronouncing the word heinous as “heenous”. I myself was 30 or so when I finally learned the word that everyone pronounced “egree-juss” and the one I thought was pronounced e-greg-ious, the second syllable with two hard g’s, like the man’s name Greg, were in fact one and the same, meaning outrageous or flagrant.

Well it was only when I saw a little clip on Entertainment Tonight on how to achieve the look of stars at the Emmys—in this case, Halle Berry’s look—that I realized that a flat iron, used to straighten women’s hair, is an implement somewhat like a waffle iron or, more to the point, a curling iron. I had always thought that when women would iron their hair, they would lay their heads down on an ironing board and iron it straight. It’s a crazy image but that’s how I thought women straightened their hair. Silly moron.

Saving Cranes

Well Juliana left to go to Baraboo WI for a month to do an internship at the International Crane Foundation. I'm not exactly sure what she'll be doing but this is their website with lots of nice pictures of cranes.

Losing Nemo

Nemo died yesterday, suddenly and unexpectedly. Nemo, for those who don't remmeber, is our sweet, cuddly, quiet, yellow bird, Harpo to her brother's Groucho. She was a dear friend and we will miss her.

Hey it's Tracy's birthday today. I didn't really bring a present but how's this:

Today is Tracy's birthday
Her virtues are most manifold
She made a little movie
For the Museum of the Seminole

Well, Peter's better at this sort of thing than I am. Anyway happy birthday Tracette.

When The Man that the singer is waiting for finally shows, he's all dressed in black with a big straw hat. What kind of shoes is he wearing? Pierre shoes?