Don’t ask me why it took so long for us to invite the roaster into the household, what with all our other forays into quality beverages, but we finally did it.
We opted for the microwave-sized Behmor 1600 recommended by none other than my fanatic dentist, and started up the machine as soon as we checked to make sure our fire extinguisher was still charged. And the first thing we did was under roast some beans. Whoops.
Though I take full responsibility for being a little too trigger happy on the “Cool” button I have to say my confusion for when to stop the heat was partly due to mediocre descriptions for when “second crack” (the critical point in a roasted bean’s life) is reached. Most people describe “first crack” as loud pops similar to popcorn (basically the bean heating up and emitting CO2, hello—it’s farting) and “second crack” is softer, more like rice crispies (apparently the cellular matrix of the bean itself is getting fractured). Whatever. I just know the cracks started happening and I couldn’t tell whether they were popcorn-y or rice crispy-y, and all I could see was the giant warning in the manual of “Do not go 10 seconds beyond second crack or you will have FIRE!” and little pieces of chaff were flying about and landing on the heating coils and bursting into flames, and one timer was ticking down to zero and another timer was ticking up to infinity and things were just a little chaotic.
And so. There’s nothing like the sour-bellied recoil from an under-roasted coffee and the fact that you have no other beans in the house to help get over that learning curve. All it took was a little practice.
I have to say though, that “second crack” sounds an awful more like sizzling meat than any kind of rice crispies, and, since sizzling meat is the most familiar sound to me second only to the coffee grinder, that would have been a much easier sound for me to spot. In addition, what’s happening to the beans between first and second crack is that the sugars are undergoing the coveted Maillard reaction, which has something to do with deprotonated amino groups, but without which we’d have no browning of meats, toasted brioche or fried onions!
When we were traveling in China several years ago my dad often sent emails that started out like this: “since you’re in the area, why not go to…” When the next stop on our itinerary was Xian and the Terracotta Warriors, he made a huge deal for us to “not miss” the Banpo Neolithic Village, which showcased a matriarchal society dating back to 5000 B.C. (They call it a matriarchal society because “Women, the crucial labor force, were responsible for making pottery, spinning, and raising the family, while men fished.”) Although we were exhausted from seeing the Warriors, and disturbed at the parents who let their children (wearing the butt-less pants) pee on the dirt, and concerned for all the people who bonked their heads against the protective glass, we went. Turns out Banpo was incredible, and more amazing (shoot me now) than some Emperor’s maniacal dream to entomb an entire army of soldiers. The pottery had an eerie resemblance to Pre-Columbian pots,
the shape of this water jug “proved they understood physics”*
and best of all, they had a display of a “neolithic ball,” which was really just a rock, only they dated it to the neolithic period, just like the pottery, only it was just a rock.
When I told my dad that Banpo was better than the Warriors he wanted to know what I was smoking. I told him about the rock, and about musing over what the difference was between a really old ball-shaped rock and a slightly less old rock-shaped ball. His response was somewhere between the response he gave me when I told him I was going to art school, and when I told him you could see the Great Wall of China from the moon. If I could have seen his face I imagine it was closer to the art school moment.
Turns out, that kind of thinking was excellent practice for contemplating the rock that is currently on its way from Riverside County to LACMA to become Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass.”
They date Heizer’s idea of the piece to 1968, but it took him all this time to find the right rock and then move it. Not like the rock is in any kind of hurry. It’s the ideal (if not the heaviest) piece of found art, actually, where it’s been lying dormant for 20,000 years and now it’s art. Well, it’s not quite art yet, it’s en route to becoming art. Which makes the whole transport and the gawking and the engineering so fascinating. (And oddly worth all the hoopla.)
Like Duchamp’s urinal, which is art because it’s not being used for what it was intended for, the rock is actually art only when it’s exhibiting a non rock-like state, in other words, when it’s moving. Heizer’s own expectation for the finished piece is that when the viewer walks under the rock, the rock will appear to be levitating.
Some funny facts LACMA keeps pushing over and over:
– “At 340 tons, the boulder is one of the largest megaliths moved since ancient times.” and “The transporter is roughly 260 feet long and 32 feet wide. The large size of the transporter enables the weight of the rock to be distributed over 196 wheels, in such a way as to prevent road damage… LACMA has worked with numerous city, county, and state agencies in acquiring proper permits and establishing the most prudent route for this endeavor.”
They make it seem that in the olden days when megaliths of this size were moved frequently (and usually before supper time) the ancient people were not bogged down by permits and worries of road damage, thus they were able to do similar feats of rockery with less dependance on engineering.
– Read my lips: “no public funds or taxpayer’s money was used to fund this project.”
One dumb fact I keep pushing over and over. The grassy lawn slated to become Levitated Mass used to be a nice place to run the dogs. Just saying.
*why this water jug is genius: when you put it in water, it tilts and lets water in. As it fills up, it will straighten itself automatically. If you get tired as you carry it, you just jab the sharp end into the ground and take a break.
Due to some perverted Hollywood magic and/or karmic what-not, the wonderful folks at CBS asked our little tea company (blush blush) if they could use some of our pots and teaware for an episode of “Unforgettable,” a TV show involving murder, mystery and memory (very appropriate for Aged Pu’er). The tea will be the clue which sparks the protagonist’s memory, leading her to solve the crime. The episode is called Heartbreak, and we think it has something to do with a man being tossed from an airplane. Holy camellia sinensis!
Now we know our air date (this Tuesday. February 21—please check local listings for showtimes) so don’t miss it! But if you do, you can always watch the episode online, and pause the video at the appropriate times to see the clues.
During the process we got to talk to their prop master (and isn’t it a sign of quality that the prop master has an insane Brooklyn accent), insert a little authenticity into exactly how the hell the tea was going to be brewed, and, seeing as how the crime hinged on the tea being a rare Chinese Pu’er, we created a selection of special labels for them. This being a real TV show, however, the Brooklyn-accent told us we weren’t going to get very far with our real logo on the labels. Aw, we said, but you gotta have something on the labels… this being… ahem… rare Chinese Pu’er etc. etc. etc.
So the big hats at CBS had a discussion,
and after they realized how small we were, that we were actually as close to being a fake company as you can get, they agreed to let us use our labels. Yippee!
So here we have the total numbers of viewers of the show:
Separate out the chunk of viewers who are into high end Chinese tea:
Then extract the people that are into aged Pu’er,
Allow for the offshoot of people that have read 1000 Plateaus,
and you’re left with this, our dearly beloved fan base. <3 <3 <3.
We’ve finally exhausted our Santa Fe goodwill so today we headed up to White Rock for a hike down the Red Dot Trail.
White Rock might seem like a megatropolis from the size of this sign, but it’s really a tiny little suburb of Los Alamos (population: 6000), and if you’ve ever wondered what exactly is wrong with me, well here you go. Here’s where I grew up. Literally. I mean, this was my backyard.
The only things that have changed since then are the well-marked trailhead, and the spray-painted red dots on the rocks (hence the name of the trail) to keep you from getting lost seem to have tripled in number.
At the bottom of the canyon we found my old waterfall/swimming hole, along with pussy willows growing by the stream, which makes for perfect basket weaving if you have the time.
Here’s the view looking up, which is about as intense as it looks.
One of the dogs got into a fight with a cholla cactus, one of these,
and she had a piece larger than her leg stuck in her paw in about ten places. I have to say in all my years of hiking this canyon I have never seen a dog step on a cactus so badly, in fact, I would’ve taken a photo of her prickly limb, only PETA would’ve probably come after me for the delay in pulling that damn thing out. Which dog? This one…
On the very nice signage at the trailhead i was especially proud to read the most reasonable rules—well, more like FYI’s then rules—about dogs off-leash, especially this bullet: “Unleashed dogs may intimidate other hikers and their dogs, depriving them of the peace the forest provides.” Indeed. While we were huffing and puffing our way up we passed a hiker on his way down (why are they always German?) with his dog. Before we reached the top, he had somehow made it all the way down and then came all the way back up to lap our ass. To make it even worse, when he got to the flat area before the road he jogged to his car. Jogged.
We and our unleashed dogs were not in any way intimated by this performance. We took advantage of the very light traffic in this part of New Mexico to prove that what matters is not how fast you cross the road, but how you do the crossing.
After the hike we cruised Los Alamos, which included walking over a frozen Ashley Pond, which should really be called Ashley Pond Pond, since it’s named after a guy named Ashley Pond, a favorite drunken teenager thing to do.
That building in the background is called the Community Center, and there is where I danced to Ultravox and Echo and the Bunnymen and Black Sabbath. Yes, in the same night. Los Alamos is a pretty weird place. Here’s my old jazz band teacher rocking the bistro,
and here’s the best mushroom cloud with battleships I have ever seen. I have made a lot of cakes as school projects in my past, but I could never dream of anything as good as this.
A friend of mine recently blogged about the self-flagellatory hellhole travelers to third world countries often fall into, the pit of “why the fuck am I here?” and the sorrow of “I want to buy the rock that makes a bell sound when you shake it, but i only want to pay 12 cents, rather than 13, you poor child, you wearer of the butt-less pants.” And I quote her “…you are those kids’ meal ticket, and traveling to their far-flung hamlet is, for you at least, all about “improving” yourself by being witness to a kind of poverty which, if borderline globally abject, is at least presumed to be aesthetically pleasing.”
Hello, Lunch.*
In our many months of travel through China there were several days when one of us felt like it was absolutely impossible to leave the hotel room. It wan’t anything in particular, just a feeling that if we saw one more worker hiking rice up the mountain (because the government designated the use of the telpher for tourists only), rice that would feed us, or one more family tossing a watermelon carcass out the train window, or one more wealthy couple plucking each other’s chin hairs to the theme song from The Titanic, we were simply going to die.
So it’s funny, or maybe not, that on the drive last week from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, I got a similar feeling somewhere around the site of Occupy Tucson which lasted all the way to Las Cruces.
Which brings me to the Turquoise Trail. About 15 miles south of Santa Fe is the ghost town of Cerrillos, where Native Americans mined turquoise and galena since about 600 A.D. They used turquoise for its medicinal power, and extracted lead from the galena to paint their pottery. In 1540 the Spaniards came and found silver and gold in the area and forced the Pueblo Indians to work their mines until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 which sent the Spaniards ass over tit back to Mexico for twelve years. When the Spaniards embarked on their reconquest of New Mexico, they fought over Santa Fe, forgetting completely about the Cerrillos mines, which lay dormant for about 150 years.
When the gold rush started a couple of miners on their way to California found traces of gold in Cerrillos and soon the town was “rediscovered” in 1879 by everyone and their dog, including Louis Tiffany, whose boxes I mistakenly used to call “robin’s egg blue” are actually designed after the “gem-worthy” color of turquoise he extracted from the hills by the truckload. Soon, coal mining began to take over as the state’s economic mainstay, effectively ending the mining boom by the end of the century.
The short version of this history is: where the Spaniards had victory there are tourists,
and where the Spaniards met defeat there are holes in the ground.
Being a tourist in a place like Santa Fe, which really is a theme park, is slightly less emotionally painful than being a tourist in a ghost town. There’s less hate in the air, you don’t get the weird feeling like people are spitting on your car after you walk away, and the cheesiness doesn’t hit where it really hurts.
The fat man from the fancy knife store on the plaza told us he used to bring his dog to church with him and they’d sit in the pew together. All in all, it seems right that if you have to go to church, you might as well be able to bring your dog.
* “Hello Lunch” was a common greeting we received in China, often accompanied by the hand gesture of shoveling food into one’s mouth. After crossing into the south, where dog meat is a speciality, we greeted every dog we met with the same words.
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.
Our shiny-faced morning friend, the ever-cheerful chrome peacock, coming up on fifteen years, took a big dump the other morning.
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:
