Went and got Korean tonight – the kind of bibimbap that comes cold with raw beef topped with a raw egg (makes you strong). There is some official Korean name for this, but I like “Daredevil Platter” better. I didn’t let it psyche me out. There can be nothing to fear from the nation that brought you America’s post-WWII afterglow war and pro-circuit Starcraft.
Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t great. Something in it was most decidedly a little bit frozen. So here’s a philosophical question: if a raw dish comes with frozen bits, do you let yourself be cheered by the fact that the meat probably hasn’t been sitting out raw and unthawed, or disturbed by the thought that a restaurant that sends out slightly-frozen food probably isn’t terribly diligent in the kitchen, including in such arenas as food safety? Or do you let those conflicting thoughts cancel each other out and go about your business, which is mostly considering how much the name “bibimbap” sounds like Slim Gaillard code for a drum set?
I spent at least an hour today making mukimono out of the fruits and vegetables I had lying around.
Uh…adorable little apple bunnies…and…uh…apple…feathers…and…a…tomato rose…
Yeah. I’m really fucking bored.
On a related note, I know that it’s more eco-conscious, or locavorous, or whatever buzzword the Daikonoscenti come up with this week, for grocery stores to stock only in-season fruits, but sweet Elijah’s chariot, when you live in a place that’s 75 degrees in December, five months of nothing but apples is needlessly cruel. Apples are the masturbation of the fruit world: it gets the job done, but there’s always the nagging feeling that you could be eating a peach instead.
Or, uh, a kiwi…or…a strawberry. Could be anything, really.
Today I made naan. I kneaded minced garlic into the dough, and instead of brushing it with ghee, which I did not have, I brushed it with niter kibbeh, of which I have a ridiculous amount. Warm naan with garlic and overtones of cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon and fenugreek is…awesome.
Now I just need a massive 800-degree tandoor in the kitchen for that proper heat-blistered effect. It’s almost Chanukah, y’all.
How does a notably irreligious Jew wind up at the St. Mary’s Catholic Church Christmas barbecue dinner/country-western dance in a podunk Texas hills small town?
Extreme boredom, and a familially-obligated roommate who didn’t want to go alone.
I got to sit at the same table as the monsignor, a silent and wizened husk of a man in what appeared to be a Cowboys bib under his suit. I tried to keep my Star of David and the incipient flames of hellfire beginning to lick at my damned feet a secret, since I really wanted some brisket.
Four things:
1) Despite the fact that this was a Catholic party – with actual Irish people – the “open bar” served only boxed wine (Franzia, white and blush) and canned beer (Bud Lite, Coors Lite, Miller Lite). I made friends with the putative bartender, who gave me a couple of stowed-away Shiners and admonished me not to tell anyone. Seriously: what the fuck is Catholicism for if not copious Jameson at church functions?
2) Mixed dancing at a religious function. I’d forgotten how the other half lives.
3) Seeing, for the first time ever, a circle of 50 white people doing the “Chicken Dance” in perfect unison is profoundly terrifying.
4) Naturally, there was only one thing running through my head the entire time:
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I’m too tired to write the post I intended to write, but I don’t want to break my stride, so I dug through some old pictures…
Meet Menashe Stefan. Hebrew name, given name; last name unknown. I came to know the lad during a brief stay on a kibbutz in the Arava Desert, a sun-blasted sliver of mostly lifeless land along the border with Jordan in Israel’s extreme far south. I only stayed a few days, but the emptiness, the stillness, the immutable landscape and the mind-bending 110 degree weather made those days stretch onward endlessly, seventeen hours of merciless July sunlight in which all one could do was slouch motionless beneath thatched awnings and smoke dessicated, seed-filled bushweed between feedings of industrial chow and weak tea in plastic mugs at the dining hall.
Menashe Stefan was a slightly unhinged Francophone Belgian with mildly dodgy English and extremely dodgy Hebrew, who spent the day among the cattle in the refet – a job he performed with such diligence that he one day stayed late stroking and whispering to a dying cow in order to ease its passing. But outside the refet, he listened to Israeli indie pop star Mook-E, earnestly attempted to share the secret knowledge gleaned from a small book of Bible codes with anybody willing to listen, and diligently wrote down extemporaneous French rap verses in a small notebook. “Michael,” he said, “you must help me write rap. I will write in French, and you will write rap in English. We will rap together.”
He has of course been photographed in his element, shirtless and laughing on one of the kibbutz’s thin, stained mattresses, indulging in, as Isaiah might say, some Arava blossoms.
Ultimately, I believe, the kibbutz expelled him for overindulging in the harvest – which was odd, since it was an extremely local product. Beyond that, though, I don’t know what became of him. So Menashe Stefan, if you are out there…hip-hop, et vous n’arrêtez pas.
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Make every morning a Tet Offensive with the rich taste of Trung Nguyen Gourmet Blend and Longevity Brand Condensed Milk!
Smell that? You smell that?
Cà phê sữa đá, son. Nothing in the world smells like that.
Remember my Cerevisaphobia series? If you don’t, refresh your memory by rereading the mission statement and first case study. And then crack open a cold one and prepare yourself for round two.
The death of American industry has not been kind to Milwaukee. Not only did the city see Asia and NAFTA draw away the thousands of manufacturing jobs that gave it its main raison d’être, it let slip its crown as the font of America’s worst beers. Milwaukee was once inundated in piss-poor pale lagers, a sixth Great Lake of fizzing straw-flavored mediocrity. Miller. Pabst. Blatz. Old Milwaukee. Milwaukee’s Best. Olde English. And of course, the beer so identified with the mid-20th century American industrial working class that every can used to come with a union card, a hardhat and a beatnik club: Schlitz.
I identify Schlitz mostly with the crowd of DXM-addled leather-clad rock’n'roll burnouts loosely associated with my high school who drank Schlitz because it was some combination of cheap, ironic and cool-by-dint-of-obscurity. But back in the ’40s and ’50s, by all accounts, Schlitz was the stuff. Your granddad shotgunned Schlitz, and he did it while his other hand was shotgunning Nazis in la Occupied France. The baby boomers happened because of the Greatest Generation’s decade-long Schlitz drunk (so when Social Security implodes in the next decade, blame the beer). But Cerevisaphobia isn’t about historical context. Cerevisaphobia is about how sketchy the beer aisle is in the Internet’s great marketplace of ideas. On we go:
Overweening Cerevisaphile Sez:
Clear bottle, 946 ml, Old Stock VI evening, savoured on March 23 2007; eye: straw, no effervescence, clear, white head; nose: corn, sugar, stale, adjuncts; mouth: sugar, oxidized, adjunct, corn, average carbonation, grainy texture; overall: no thanks FRANÇAIS Bouteille transparente, 946 ml, soirée Vieux Stock VI, savourée le 23 mars 2007; oeil : paille, pas d’effervescence, claire, mousse blanche; nez : maïs, sucre, éventée, additifs; bouche : sucre, oxydée, additif, maïs, carbonatation moyenne, texture granuleuse; en résumé : non merci
You know what’s odd about this one, other than the fact that anyone would measure a red-blooded, amber-colored American workingman’s beer like Schlitz in fuckin’ pansy-ass faggy goddamn Frenchy Canadian milliliters? It’s that this guy, despite being Canadian, has English bad enough that he obviously had to consult a dictionary, and in doing do chose to translate “additif” as “adjunct,” rather than the correct (and obvious) cognate. But it’s good to know that somewhere in the wilds of Quebec, our Francophone neighbors are savouring our worst beers. No wonder they want to secede.
Overburdened Cracker Sez:
What’s wrong with you girly men. There’s nothing that says “how can I be any manlier” than when you’re holding a can of Schlitz. You can drink those pussy beers all you want but there’s something about the beer that made Milwaukee famous that makes me want to either rebuild an engine or grill up a juicy porterhouse. In fact, I’m scratching my balls as I enjoy a cold one right now.
This may well be ironic (the spelling is pretty good); but then, the gauge of truly profound stupidity is to see how well it would translate as overly broad irony. Take for example something like The Secret. The Secret is dumb. How dumb? A short story based on a premise of millions of people spending billions of dollars on a merchandising empire that touted the secret power of getting everything you want by wishing really super hard would be dismissed as hacky and overblown. That’s fucking dumb. So perhaps we should give our Schlitz-loving friend here the benefit of the doubt and assume his limitations are sweetly genuine.
But here is my question: I do not require a Schlitz to want to grill up a juicy porterhouse. I, in fact, pretty much would always like to grill up a juicy porterhouse. I want to grill up a juicy porterhouse right now, even with all this attention I’m devoting to giving my balls a thorough scratch. Does this mean that even without the help of a masculating can of Milwaukee’s finest, I am more of a man?
This does not bode well for the state of manhood in America.
My red kubbeh soup recipe is based on Harry’s, with a couple of tweaks. Harry loves kubbeh. Harry loves kubbeh with an almost intimidating fierceness. A man once came between Harry and a bowl of kubbeh soup and Harry killed him and made his skin into an ascot (he calls it his “soup-eatin’ tie”). Harry always kept a thermos of kubbeh soup warming on the engine of his Merkava, and for every shell fired, he would eat one kubbeh. This remains a Chativa Sheva tradition to this day.
I believe that soup should always be made in ridiculous quantitites and last for days, and my recipe reflects this. There is no better comfort food for the winter. And I have several friends and acquaintances who regularly clamor for “that red soup.” So be forewarned. Making this soup is like going all the way in high school: you’ll have fun and be more popular. Let’s get to it:
You know…like that rad BBC program (Linton Kwesi Johnson, as one might expect, has great taste except for the inclusion of fucking Imagine; Simon Cowell has some remarkably shitty choices considering his Big-Dick-Producer prominence on American Golden Calf; Kristin Scott Thomas adorably includes one of the songs from the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon, the mostly terrible Prince post-Purple Rain vanity project that was her film debut.)
In no particular order. Completed as I feel like it. One album. One song from the album. And plenty of babble.
****
THE ALBUM: Prince, Sign ‘O’ the Times
THE SONG: “Adore”
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1987. Iran-Contra. Jim ‘n’ Tammy Faye. “Tear down this wall.” Baby Jessica. The first intifada. My second birthday. And Prince’s ninth album: “Sign ‘O’ the Times.” The number nine is telling – by his twenty-ninth birthday, the astoundingly prolific Prince had recorded nine albums, one a year since the late 1970s, of which three were good and six were truly excellent (five of those coming in a row). Lesser artists have achieved greater reputations with smaller outputs – Michael Jackson at the height of his powers only managed Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad and the lackluster Dangerous before being utterly undone by pedophilia, paranoia and a maladroit scalpel – but none of them can lay claim to capping a nearly decade-long winning streak with one of the most stunning tours de force in pop music.
Prince didn’t change his given name to the unpronounceable Love Symbol glyph until 1993, the first instance of pop culture infamy I became aware of during my childhood, but the growing disdain for conventional graphemes that led to the adoption of the Love Symbol had already been hinted at by Sign ‘O’ the Times’ title, which replaced “of” with a peace symbol (Prince’s disdain for orthography, of course, had already been well-established, to the point where U probably don’t need 2 C an example).
The album begins on a dour note with its title track, a blippy catalogue of the social ills hanging over mid-’80s America, from AIDS to infanticide to exploding space shuttles, which despite its twitchy minimalist synth funk serves mostly as proof that regular updates on the activities of the humans are beamed into The Artist’s lace-draped purple bunker (see also “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” “America” and “Mr. Man” from Prince’s other albums). Prince isn’t touched by these concerns, but the fact that he even realizes they exist is encouraging – when Prince becomes aware enough of a cause to champion it, it has achieved maximum penetration into the social consciousness.
Scattered throughout the album is the detritus of one of Prince’s many aborted projects, a collection of songs recorded under the alias “Camille,” characterized by a pitch-modulated lady-voice and a pronouncedly feminine take on love and sex. Prince may not be the first male artist to write from the perspective of a woman, or whatever exactly Camille was intended to be, but he may well be the most confused.
Take “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” one of Prince’s greatest songs, and an unparalleled glimpse into the delicately-scented, ambiguously gendered carnal maelstrom that is the man’s id, an alternate, lavender-hued universe where there exists neither man nor woman, only excessively-mascaraed orifices making unlikely love to the persistent pop of robo-slap-bass. The song’s spoken coda, understandably excised from the single version, packs more sexual ambiguity into one minute than the entirety of David Bowie’s 1970s output. Lady Stardust, meet Camille:
“Is it really necessary for me to go out of the room just because you wanna undress? We don’t have to make children to make love. And we don’t have to make love to have an orgasm. Your body is what I’m all about. Can I see it? I’ll show you. Why not? You can do it because I’m your friend, I’d do it for you. Of course I’d undress in front of you. And when I’m naked what shall I do? How can I make you see that it’s cool? Can’t you just trust me? If I was your girlfriend you could. Oh yeah, I think so. Listen, for you naked I would dance a ballet. Would that get you off? Tell me what will! If I was your girlfriend would you tell me? Would you let me see you naked then? Would you let me give you a bath? Would you let me tickle you so hard you’d laugh and laugh? And would you, would you let me kiss you there – you know, down there where it counts? I’ll do it so good, I swear I’ll drink every ounce! And then I’ll hold you tight and hold you long, and together we’ll stare into silence. And we’ll try to imagine what it looks like. Yeah, we’ll try to imagine what…what silence looks like.”
One imagines that the woman, or man, or life-size cutout of Prince at the receiving end of this soliloquy probably responded: “Screw the naked ballet. You know what would get me off? If you could just penetrate me, move it in and out a few times, and then not cry after. That’s what I want silence to look like. You not holding me and crying.”
But seriously. What the fuck is going on here? On first perusal, the lyrics seem to be a man asking his reticent female lover if she would be more liberated were he a female friend rather than someone with a rich pelt of chest hair. But then, of course, we careen abruptly into the matter of kissing down there, where it counts, and subsequently drinking every ounce. Unless Prince, to paraphrase OutKast’s Big Boi, really knows what it feels like to have control over the G-spot, it seems unlikely that cunnilingus would culminate in an ounce-quaffing kind of situation. So that of course leaves us with the gender whose orgasms do tend to result in a technically potable concoction (I’m talking about men, for those of you who color outside the lines), but if “If I Was Your Girlfriend” were a song to a man, by a man, why the squeaky female voice, and why the reference to procreation, which, despite the best efforts of your friendly neighborhood lobbying group, is still something scientifically beyond the reach of the Wombless Masses? Either this is a mixed-up love ode to a Puritan squirter, or Prince spent biology class in high school inattentive, dreamily scribbling “Mrs. Prince Rogers Clinton” into the margins of his Lisa Frank notebook.
But being the funky bundle of leather-pantsed contradictions that he is, the Artist follows that inscrutable rulebook to the game of Musical Genders with a song about an emotionally abusive relationship, a song gently refusing an adulterous advance, and then, as if to Febreze away the reek of debauchery clinging to every lascivious word that came before it, a campfire-worthy song ’bout how we all needs to get saved by Jesus (“The Cross”). The tension between the sacred and profane has always been at the crux of great R&B, a tension which undid Little Richard, Al Green and Marvin Gaye, but even those luminaries didn’t brazenly plant their freak flag at Calvary’s summit like Prince does. Jesus himself is doubtless at a loss.
And so, with salvation thus assured, Prince wiggles into his skintight funk freak regalia for the live Revolution jam “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Night,” plumbing the deep well of James Brownian incomprehensibility in the bass-thumping heart of every true soul man with Wizard of Oz chants, frequent exhortations to say things loud and lyrics like, “Every man a ninja, wid my chicken grease! Get wid it!” All he’s missing is a “HEH!” capping every impenetrable proclamation, a habit of James Brown’s brilliantly commented upon by the young Eddie Murphy (no, really, Eddie Murphy was once considered brilliant):
And then there’s “Adore.” On most of his albums, Prince apparently feels the need to balance his bold experimentation and genre-cruising with a reminder that, his competitors’ Pepsi endorsements and rhinoplasties be damned, he remains the preeminent vocalist of pop’s post-Gaye era. Before there were Controversy’s “Do Me Baby,” 1999′s “International Lover” and Purple Rain’s “The Beautiful Ones,” but the definitive testament to the man’s magical vocal cords is “Adore,” a six-and-a-half minute flight of falsetto bearing the distinction of being the most genuinely sweet love song of Prince’s golden age. Prince usually saddles what we humans would call “affection” with turgid sexual come-ons, unstable histrionics or discomfiting religious analogies (or all three), but Adore mostly eschews all that. Oh, sure, it includes lines like, “When we be makin’ love, I only hear the sounds / Heavenly angels cryin’ up above, tears of joy pourin’ down on us,” proving once again that the 1980s’ most sex-drenched pop star had more than a couple profound misconceptions about what is genuinely sexy (sex in a puddle of voyeuristic, lachrymose angels’ tears certainly isn’t) – but this is Prince possibly at his most sincere, and he even takes his sense of humor out of the Paisley Park vault for a rare appearance. “You could burn up my clothes, smash up my ride,” he croons, then quickly checks himself: “Well, maybe not the ride.” It’s those goofy throwaway moments that remind us that even if Prince isn’t exactly an Earthling, he’s at least from a nearby planet – and he comes in peace, and funk.
What’s the Darwinian adaptive significance of the odd human ritual in which a group of two or more women unleash such brutal rancor on the personality, traits and past deeds of another woman mutually known to them that, were the target of their attacks actually present, she would doubtless cast herself off the nearest promontory – and then, once she has been thoroughly denounced and exposed as the stuck-up pretentious wanton whore bitch Grendel’s mother she is, why do they cap off the ritual by convincing themselves that, actually, she’s “nice”? How did that help us forage for berries and take down mammoths?
Also, what’s the deal with the stock market?!?! Am I right????
