Local trees &c.

Popovers

The popover is a culinary marvel, a loose batter that, with the aid of a hot oven, expands like a golden cumulus cloud, producing a crisp, hollow pastry with a soft, eggy interior. While the mixture is very similar to crepe batter, when you confine it to deep, narrow, muffinlike molds, the surface of the batter sets and the air is trapped, so that the pastry has nowhere to go but up and out, creating a gravity-defying bubble...

The outrageous offenses against Richard Cheney

Journalists love to depict themselves as hard-nosed, rambunctious, ornery adversaries of establishment orthodoxies and political power. The reality is the opposite: there simply is no class of people more reverent of the political establishment and more devoted to protecting and defending its prerogatives. Of all people, journalists ought to be embarrassed to publicly play the role of decorum enforcers when it comes to how the politically powerful are treated. They should be the last ones -- not the first ones -- demanding that controversial political figures be treated with the type of profound reverence typically reserved for religious leaders and monarchs. Identically, in the most minimally healthy political culture, high political leaders would be the least entitled, not the most entitled, to be shielded from cutting political criticism...

from English Things - a set on Flickr

via

Rory Gallagher's Stratocaster

Gallagher was always associated with his well-worn sunburst 1961 Stratocaster, which his brother Donal has officially retired. It was reputedly the first in Ireland, ordered by a showband member who changed his mind about the colour. Gallagher bought it for just shy of £100 at Crowley's Music Store on Cork's McCurtain Street. The guitar was extensively modified by Gallagher. The tuning pegs, for a start, are odd (5 Sperzels and one Gotoh) and all of these have been found to be replacements. Secondly, it is thought that the nut has been replaced and interchanged a number of times. Thirdly, the scratchplate was changed during Gallagher's time with Taste. Another change was the pickups of which none are original. The final modification was that of the wiring. Gallagher disconnected the bottom tone pot and rewired so he had just a master tone control along with the master volume control. He also installed a 5-way selector switch in place of the vintage 3-way one. The most notable effect that years of touring have had is the almost complete removal of the guitar's sunburst finish, partly through being left out in the rain in a ditch for days after being stolen. Other quirks include a 'hump' in the scratch plate which moves the neck pickup closer to the neck on the bass side and a replacement of all of the pickups, though this replacement was due to damage rather than a perception of a tonal inadequacy...

Letters from Beckett

I have read the first volume of “Du Côté de chez Swann”, and find it strangely uneven. There are incomparable things – Bloch, Françoise, Tante Léonie, Legrandin, and then passages that are offensively fastidious, artificial and almost dishonest . . . . His loquacity is certainly more interesting and cleverly done than Moore’s, but no less profuse, a maudlin false-teeth gobble-gobble discharge from a colic-afflicted belly. He drank too much tilleul. And to think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!

James Schuyler reading his poems (including "Hymn to Life") at the Chelsea Hotel, November 9, 1986

Local trees

The New Book Banning

While lead poisoning from other sources, such as paint in old houses, remains a serious public health problem in some communities, no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations—not surprisingly, since unlike poorly maintained wall paint, book pigments do not tend to flake off in large lead-laden chips for toddlers to put into their mouths...

today's YouTube one of my favorite songs Ronnie Lane and Slim Chance--Debris (I had the Faces version on the B-side of "Stay With Me")

I left you on the debris
At the Sunday morning market,
You were sorting through the odds and ends,
You was looking for a bargain

I heard your footsteps at the front door
& that old familiar love song
Cause you knew you'd find me waiting there,
At the top of the stairs

I went there & back
Just to see how far it is
And you tried to tell me
But I had to learn for myself

There's more trouble at the depot
With the general workers union
& you said they'll never change a thing
shook for head & and they're not working

Oh you was my hero
Now you are my good friend
I've been there and back
and I know how far it is...

But I left you on the Debris
Now we both know you got no money
And I wonder what you would have been
Without me hanging around...

a nice version by Billy Bragg (who says that Lane wrote it for his father)

more

Solaris is on TCM tomorrow night...

2 of 14 Rare Color Photos From the FSA

Six Questions for Juan Cole

To tell you the truth, I cannot understand what the mission is in Afghanistan any more. It is not to fight Al Qaeda there. I haven’t seen anything about U.S. troops engaging or capturing “Arab Afghans” for years. It appears that the U.S. and NATO are just trying to shore up the government of Hamid Karzai, which only controls thirty percent of the country. And what do we expect? That someday rural Pashtun Muslims will wake up and say, “I don’t mind foreign troops patrolling my country, I’m happy to be ruled by Tajiks and Hazara Shiites, and I’m not that interested in living by Islamic law anymore”? President Obama has spoken about fighting defeating the “Taliban,” but there seem to be four or five distinct groups now being called that, only one of them is Mulla Omar’s “Old Taliban.” And, I have a distinct sense of dread that some of the Pashtuns attacking NATO checkpoints are just disgruntled poppy farmers whose crops we burned down...

if I had my own country, Tadd Dameron's luminous 1956 Fontainbleau would be its anthem...

more info

Tom Clark on Caspar David Friedrich and the Interior Dictation of Landscape, Captain Cook & the Nootka, etc...


He had a special interest in the moon
He used to say
that if after death men were transported to another place
then he would prefer one less terrestrial than lunar
in order to allow the beings inside him to feel at home...

another opportunity to discover Karen Dalton (1938-1993) if you haven't yet...

Poor South Wellington barely gets a "with coal mines", but Nanaimo comes off rather well in the 1922 Baedeker Dominion of Canada, with Newfoundland and an excursion to Alaska. Handbook for travellers; it's "pretty rose-gardened cottages are very unlike the grimy abodes of coal-miners in England", and there are "pleasant excursions to be made"....

inspiration tale of Surfers vs. the Superferry--

It all started in 2001 as a purportedly modest "local" effort to offer inter-island ferry service to "help local people more easily visit their relatives on other islands, and carry their farm produce to market." Most locals liked the idea but soon found that this ferry, the gigantic Hawaii Superferry, was an environmental nightmare. It uses far more fuel (in total and per person) than big planes. It races at high speed (40-45 miles per hour) through zones teeming with endangered humpback whales, dolphins and rare sea turtles. It could transport dangerous invasive species to pristine islands. And it carries hundreds of cars to tiny places already choking on traffic...

"Who moved Garfield?"


...lots of good links @ Silliman's Blog today...

Meredith Quartermain on David Bromige

“There is nothing ambiguous about our double entendres,” Bromige tells us in “Typicality Enthralls with its Particular Failures,” and then continues with “The poet, having no identity is continually informing and filling some other body, and who isn’t a poet, if by that this case means scorned, spurned, feverish, headed for death, name writ on water, way with words, incapable of not noticing all this and more upon occasion?”