The east and west halves of New Mexico have always been divided by the Rio Grande rift, and now scientists say the fault line is expanding, making the drive across the state that much… slower.

To stretch out our trip to Santa Fe to visit mom even more, we took a drive through the lowlands of southern New Mexico, where the landscape and the affinity for southwestern-style clothing is quite different from Santa Fe, otherwise known as the Center-for-Real-Indian-Stuff.

Down there, “New Mexican” is a geographical location, not a style. The food, often labelled as “Mexican” or “local,” is truly New Mexican (flat enchiladas, non-fried fish tacos, sopapillas, etc.), but it’s not edged in silver tassels and driblets of turquoise.

Also interesting is that in the south, cactus stands in as the token vegetable, and only as you start climbing north does guacamole start making an appearance. Carne adovada *anything*, however, makes its disappearance wherever you are in the state.

At White Sands National Monument we had a rare sighting of the famous Desert Clown,

did some missile testing,

and stopped to visit some Hatch chile farmers. The roasting season is over and what’s left are the dried husks that get sent away to have their color extracted. Apparently the coloring will be used for things like Gatorade, and then the fully denuded remnants used in some other food form. (Plurine anyone?)

Rift or no rift, the idea of scale in New Mexico is always fluctuating and weird. Near and far become two drastically different states of mind.

This spawned all sorts of discussions (still underway) about getting a roaster PLUS a new espresso machine. In the meantime we discovered our neighbors just down the road had none other than the GS/3 Marzocco, and we actually like these neighbors, so, in the spirit of the right-wing debates going on we decided to covet our neighbor’s appliances.

Guess we’ll be going back and forth as easily as their kitty crosses over shoulders… and yes, I covet that cat.

here’s Joe doing the master technique, and he really is a master, as the whole reason they have a damn GS/3 in the first place is that he happens to be the freaking 2009 winner of “On the Rocks: The Search for America’s Top Bartender.” Like WTF.

The machine’s sort of a beast, and needs a good warm up time, or else you might have to toss the first few shots. we tasted 4, and that was enough to send us around the block a few times. (Sampling a few of his scotches didn’t help either.)

It’s Lunar New Year, and there’s no better way for the Chinese to celebrate than deep-frying some ground pork. Better yet, since it’s the year of the Dragon, let’s take what is traditionally known as Scotch Eggs and call them Dragon Eggs, or, in honor of Kim Jong-un, who was diagnosed by Jerrold M. Post “as having malignant narcissism, a personality disorder characterized by ‘extreme grandiosity and self-absorption,’” we can call them Nargisi kofta, which means “Narcissus meatballs.” And since Post goes as far as to characterize Kim’s narcissism as malignant, maybe these eggs—covered in sausage meat and rolled oatmeal—are the form of narcissism that is somehow benign?

True to form, you’ll always find your face reflected in their golden yellow souls.

In 2006 the Los Angeles Philharmonic put on a series called the Minimalist Jukebox, featuring music by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, Avro Pärt, John Cage, etc. John Adams was the musical director, and I don’t know if he’s to credit for the outreach of the series but someone had the smarts to include enough electric instruments (100 electric guitars for Glenn Branca’s symphony #13), gamelan drumming, and $10 seats to bring in “the youth.” I watched as kids in hoodies and tennies gawked at the inside of the concert hall for the first time, made fun of the blue hairs sipping intermission champagne in their neck braces, and I swear you could hear a few of them say “SO that’s where ambient dub came from…”

Later on that year I was on the phone with someone in the Philharmonic marketing department who wanted to ask me about my series, seating choice, blah blah. I told her it was so exciting to see so many new people under the age of 40 attending the Jukebox program (many of whom shiver with disdain for “classical music”) and I wanted to know if they had any ideas for how to keep them coming. She told me that keeping “the youth” inside the walls of WDCH was a top priority and not to worry, if I donated some extra bucks they could actualize many of those exciting plans. Sorry lady.

What they ended up doing was getting Brian Wilson or Bob Mould to play concerts, which is fine and great and all that but they completely missed the point. In 2006 they had in their hands what I would call the “classically curious,” a younger generation willing (shitty-ass coffee notwithstanding) to come back to the concert hall to see more connections between Sonic Youth, György Ligeti, Brain Eno, and good old JS Bach. They missed out on a chance to do some really intelligent programming, to maybe help Alex Ross out a little, or, to do what European promoters are already doing.

But oh well. WDCH needs to keep the blue hairs donating, so they pretty much keep the classical classical and the minimal minimal, and everything else falls into “Additional Concerts.” That being said they can still put on some amazing programs. Last night Steve Reich himself performed his clapping piece, but here’s a good rendition of it performed by Angie Dickensen and Lee Marvin.

and here’s the Bang on a Can again with a part of Reich’s 2×5:

With season two of Downton Abbey just starting and the new Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy movie in the theaters, it’s high time for a rambling post about British television dramas and how they continually create six-part series for Sunday night viewing that yank the knickers off anything we Americans call good TV.
I am possibly the least qualified person in the world to be talking about television, but this isn’t a bemoaning of how the BBC had a series called, say, Prime Suspect, and now there’s a show set in New York by the same name but the British one was so much better. This is how the entire genre of TV was set adrift in the 70′s by one man, Dennis Potter, who created a blip in TV space/time that all television writers since then (if they aren’t David Lynch or Lars Van Trier, who OWE, and i mean really OWE everything, to Potter) have madly tried to patch up by even more aggressively forcing viewers into the usual “dreamlike-state of passive subjective identification.” Granted Potter was using Brechtian ideas of non-naturalistic drama, of cross-gender lip syncing, of Freudian themes, of interjecting songs and fantasy skits to discourage the audience from “really connecting” with a character, and so on, but the big deal is that he didn’t hide these ideas behind a glossy tear-jerker. What Potter does is total transparency.

And that’s what makes his shows so creepy. I’ve only seen The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, but in both shows there is a flatness across everything. There are no personal conflicts, no Aha! moments, and certainly no role models (though the Accordion man in Pennies From Heaven does also play Jesus in The Life of Brian). Every man is a sleaze, a sex maniac, and a perv with a mom-complex; while every woman is a tart, or a bitch, or a hilariously frigid wife, or just beautiful naked. The only thing that generates feeling and emotion (including those of disgust and revulsion) are the songs that are scattered throughout. Everyone—nurses, patients, Russian prostitutes, schoolchildren, facial cleanser salesmen—breaks into song. It’s all lip syncing, there’s no illusion as to who’s not doing the singing, but it’s horrifyingly seductive. At the end of each song the actors fall back into scene, and the only thing that is disrupted is you the viewer.

But the disruption is one of relief, as if something annoying had just been turned off, a food nugget pried out from between two teeth, a forgotten name suddenly recollected. This relief is not a narrative-device like the unexplained smile on Robert De Niro’s face at the end of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America where the running theory is that the shot is of De Niro waking up in an Opium den, and so the entire last part of the movie has all been a dream. Potter’s relief is actual. As the rapturous lights of the song numbers fade, your mind is rested and ready to go on. This gift, this gilded pillow of num-num, owes its soul to the Marx Brothers. Marx Brothers’ movies aren’t so much musicals as they are pure dramatic overload—with so much going on you simply must take a break and have a cup of tea. It’s not a coincidence that Potter only uses songs from the 1930′s, the same time as the Marx Brothers movies were made. It’s also not a coincidence that Potter and the Marx Brothers do not care (as in Leone’s case) where the viewer frames the plot in terms of real and fantasy. There really is no real.

Potter is creepy not for the sake of being creepy (a sad trait today for both fiction and television, as if creepiness is the new cupcake, which was the new yoga, which was the new black) but he manages to achieve creepiness by flattening everything to the same level. He doesn’t set up contrasts or leave room for whether a character might be remorseful or not. Everyone is mucking around in a very godless world.

I say godless, because religion (and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, come to think of it) depends on the existence of an evil in order for the good to exist. Ever wonder why it’s only the religiously-raised children who participate in Satan worship. They know what to do, they know which animal to get blood from, and how to draw the horns and which Pantone red to use for the printing. Ask any kid who has never gone to church or studied the Bible what to do for a proper Satanic ritual and you’ll get something more like a rock band trashing a hotel room kind of scenario. (And, for a truly obscure tangent, this is why the art world booms in economies where there are the largest inequalities in income).

In this flattened, godless world the simple things—the way the girls eat cream-filled pastries without smearing lipstick, the hug/lift from the male porter who helps a patient out of a wheelchair, the way they pour cream into a cup at the same time as the tea—become just as creepy as a woman putting lipstick on the points of her bosom (“little rosebuds”), the march of psoriasis across a man’s body and the implied greasing of his penis, the rape and murder of a blind girl.

Song Break.

Because there is no real, it’s also possible to see the characters in all the Potter shows as living in the same village, crossing mediums and sharing drinks with other genius British television series such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and even the ongoing Downton Abbey. I also can’t help but think there’s only fifteen actors in all of Britain. George Smiley is Obi-Wan, who is at war against Darth Vader’s Admiral Piett, who’s the aforementioned Jesus from The Life of Brian aka the Accordion Man in Pennies From Heaven. But then, there’s Ricky Tarr—the bait, the spy who dared to love, the missing nugget—in Tinker Tailer, playing a pimp in Pennies From Heaven. He’s not really playing a pimp so much as he’s still the sweet-talking spy, seducing not the Moscow Center’s spy’s wife but the schoolteacher turned prostitute.
But i could go on. Strickland, the nasally and totally incomprehensible official in Smiley’s People plays the doctor that manages to help the psoriasis patient in The Singing Detective. The father of the young Singing Detective, the crooner, the poor chap wailing with anguish in the Forest of Dean, is none other than Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey. Oh, and it gets worse. Elizabeth McGovern, Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey is also in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Lastly, Edith, the second daughter in Downton Abbey, is the girl flirting with Peter Guillam in the new Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy Hollywood movie.

Here’s one of the Marx brothers waiting for some pennies from heaven to drop to Earth:

foggy doo and mo’ veggies for you:

a McPhee and a McCallum discussing all thing Scottish:

as a child my family never really celebrated Xmas, though we did send cards (ideally without any mention of God or Jesus) and my Mom sewed some velvet stockings with our names on them for our white brick fireplace, and they occasionally grew fat with things like staple removers, pocket calculators, and… Hanukkah chocolate money (i didn’t realize how funny this was until a few years ago—child-appropriate and shiny representations of money—a great hit with the Chinese). i do have memories of a fake tree with a red metal stand and nice glass globe decorations but presents were optional, especially since my dad (starting on the day after Thanksgiving) stormed about the house ranting on how if everyone agreed to buy presents after December 25th then everyone would save a shitload of money.

over the years my Dad has had a lot of ideas of “getting a pact together,” and though they all have good intentions, they somehow don’t resonate well in a world where not everyone (thank God) thinks like him: in Los Alamos where i grew up in there was only one supermarket, and one day he found green plums for sale, his favorite, a total rarity in that town. he bought several bags worth and then came home and called all his friends to go get them, in order to send a message to the manager that there was great demand for these plums. instead what happened was that after a few days the store ran out of green plums. more often than not his call to arms are political, usually to “clobber” the Republicans, teach the Communist pigs a lesson, or elevate the political power of Chinese Americans (the majority of which—to his dismay—tend to be in the Republican camp).

this year my Xmas weekend started with a bang and ended with a whimper. Mid-morning Xmas Eve i got a call from a client and after a few comments about the holiday and the weather, he asked if “we” had an offsite backup of his computer files. i asked if this was a “if someone were to firebomb the office” type of question and he responded, “actually, more like if the Feds come and raid the office.” he was serious, by the way.

the whimper came Xmas day just as the sun was setting and we were lounging on the deck. Something scrambled up a tree which startled both dogs and even Bing-Bing the cat, otherwise known as Bing-Bing the Brave, who had ventured on the deck to view the farolito lighting,

stepping outside for only the second time since her accidental procedure several years ago which turned her into a Manx, despite knowing that one dog is convinced she morphs from “tolerable roommate” to “prey” the second she crosses the threshold. anyway, if you were a small thing, say a baby possum, and you were in a tree, and down below were two dogs with four front paws on the trunk and it was dang close to dinnertime you wouldn’t go DOWN the tree, would you? would you?

a little about our client. i don’t know what happened and apparently it’s an innocent mistake, (not like the two-year sting operation on rawesome, who did have their computers confiscated) and i certainly hope so. these people are the coolest people on the planet. they have their holiday dinners at places with this kind of art on the wall (faces blackened to protect the innocent, but gawd that world map! that flag! those paintings! and the photos aren’t showing the bowl full of non-dairy creamer, the Sutter Home red or white option, or the other carafe filled with what tasted like bong water)

but i wouldn’t miss their holiday party for ANYTHING in the world. and i am dead serious. if you know me, that means a hell of a lot. plus, how can the Feds bust a company where the Office Manager has to remove this from under her desk, in order to stash things, like…

dead body parts?

in-between dealing with the off-site backup system, i went on a good hike, ate a bucket of latkes with lox and homemade applesauce, became addicted to a fudge called Fungus Amongus, converted a Scotch naysayer into an Islay lover, painted bookshelves, talked to both parents, one of which couldn’t believe you could just email some blogger to ask him what Chinese writing software he used (“i DON’T know him personally!”) and the other said “Guess where i am calling from?” before revealing that she was sitting at L’Atelier at the MGM about to eat a soufflé with a scoop of pistachio ice cream dropped in the middle (“It’s falling into the center of the Earth”), pulled weeds (while on the phone), brined a pheasant, took a recipe for butterscotch budino seriously when it said to finish everything within three days, figured out our New Year’s card (late this year – holler, or rather, send us your address, if you want one), and best of all, got to see the Star of Beeflehem.

when you have a Scottish dog, it’s easy to—say—get into drinking Scotch, speaking “Come by” as if you’ve swallowed a golf ball, and over-romanticizing fog. but to really get it right, you’d have to eat Steak n’ Kidney pie, and when your Scottish dog comes by way of Texas, you have to add that extra Texas oomph.

and what exactly is that Lone Star pizzazz?
well, along with the meat there’s BACON that’s browned to a crisp, a token carrot or two, and the while thing is stewed in broth and red wine. But you must have peas in order to get that authentic dump truck green.

then, before you seal it up with the top crust you pile on a LOAD of buttery mashed potatoes. YES INDEED.

then and only then do you get to simulate a Neil Jenney painting.

and here’s the really insulting part. i just couldn’t cram all those mashed potatoes into the pie. i just couldn’t do it. gratuitous leftover mash.

well that’s the way the cookie crumbles. i’ve always thought the Scandinavians to be a one-extreme-to-the-other lot, and i’d always figured it was because they have all-sun part of the year, and no-sun part of the year, but then i met a bunch of really intense-all-the-time Russians from St. Petersberg and that blew my theory out of the water.

many years ago i visited a friend who lived in Stockholm and we decided to have a dinner party (“can you cook Chinese food?”) while i was there. my friend was at work but he gave me directions to get to the wine shop, which, by the way, was government controlled (heavily taxed), and they kept a detailed list on who buys what and have quotas to cut people off. i asked him how many bottles to get and he replied “two each,” meaning two bottles for each of us, which meant four bottles total. in addition to my friend having a really funny Swedish accent he liked to exaggerate it, so what i heard instead of “two each” was “twelve.” so off i went to the store, worrying more about my name being on some list then how i was going to drag a case of wine home by myself.

i managed to get it all back to the apartment, and my friend was plenty surprised to see so many buddies waiting for him when he got home, but he was even more glad when he realized the name on file for all this booze was mine and not his. turns out these Swedes liked vodka before dinner, and dinner involved pork dumplings (skins made from scratch – come on, i’m in Stockholm) and cutting up a whole chicken and so on, so by the time dinner was actually served the crowd was rowdy and drunk as hell. i actually have no memory of whether or not we managed to open even one bottle of wine, but it’s been so many years since that trip i think my quota must be refreshed by now.

some time ago, we used to be invited every year by a friend from college for Xmas Eve dinner. his boyfriend was French so the feast (stuffed tenderloin, green beans, Burgundy wines etc.) was fabulous. however, one year his boyfriend became bored when a small group of us started discussing art, philosophy, and other “intellectual and fussy” topics incongruous with the Jingle Bell CD on perma-loop in the background. we were never invited back.
so, this Thanksgiving holiday after a hike with the dogs,

we stayed home and had a friend over for crispy skinned duck, brussell sprouts, and sour cream apple pie. oy.

our friend is about to enter just about the worst divorce situation ever, and i can’t give out the details, but it’s wretched. Lies! Fake photographs! Loaded guns! she got so worked up her face turned pink and puffy, and the dogs, who can read emotional distress as accurately as an unsupervised block of gruyère, were all up in arms with her. Woof.
all i can say is thank god she’s got the lawyer charging an iPad an hour and he’s managed to find himself a shyster—who’s got quality topics on his blog: “Am I Crazy? – No, just dealing with a narcissistic personality,” and “Use a Condom and Pay Child Support Anyway,” which the husband must have read before hiring the guy, as he recently called our friend a “Psychotic Narcissist.” upon which we had to pull out the big gun to look up exactly what that meant.

turns out, we also needed google’s help. according to the Internet, you can’t actually be a Psychotic and a Narcissist, because the Narcissist depends on having an audience, and can’t afford to shut out the world because it’s the world that gives them self-worth, whereas the Psychotic ignores everything that isn’t in their world view, eventually retreating into the “inner recesses of their tormented mind.” (isn’t google great?)

we felt a little stumped, because we all know this husband, and he just wouldn’t use words unless he knew their precise meanings, and he would never, even in a rage, take a compound noun lightly. we pondered LaPlanche and Pontalis further and decided that our friend misremembered the epithet, and that he must have called her a Pathological Narcissist. BINGO. that’s what it was.

why all the fuss? because whatever he calls her is exactly what he is. her role is that of Narcissus’ pond, the reflection. plus he’s got the Peter Pan complex, which, in a joyful coincidence, is called Puer Aeternus in Latin (meaning Eternal Boy), and there we were drinking Puer A-teapot.

ooh! and you can see my reflection. <3 <3 <3

incidentally, our friend told us that schools can now tell when a child has been eating too much saturated fat simply by looking at their ears. i guess that means i’m going to wear earmuffs from now on.

so welcome to dinner at our house. no dumb, fussy conversations here. just more pie, please.