Over the weekend we seemed to be in the car an awful lot. While we were traveling from place to place, we listened to the radio. If I get control of the radio, it’s pretty much a given that we’ll be listening either to old-school R&B, or else to BBC-One. (If the satellite radio had an All Swedish Pop station, I’d be listening to that stuff twenty-four/seven.) If the Mont is in control, one can be pretty certain that it’s going to be tuned into the stations playing the songs of his long-distant youth.
The Mont was in control over the weekend. It was only a moment or two out of the house that he began singing along with some goopy song I’d never heard of before, allegedly a chart-topper in 1982. “If you must take your love away,” he sang, “take it gradj-oo-leeeeeee.”
“You know this song?” I asked with an eyebrow raised.
“Everyone knows this song!” he protested, and kept on singing.
I let him warble through the multiple melodies of “Hooked on Classics” without comment, before he started bobbing his head along to some Styx number. “What song is this?” I mumbled.
He stared at me. “Oh my god,” he finally said, and let it pass. I sighed, and thought to myself that if we’d been having a pop quiz on the lesser-known singles of Shalamar that the situation might be reversed.
It was after a number of similar exchanges that we had a showdown outside of a supermarket. “You know this song,” the Mont was goading me, jabbing his finger savagely at the radio.
“I do not,” I said stiffly.
“Come on!” he said, as if yelling at me more loudly would jog my memory. “You know it!”
“No I don’t.”
“You do!”
“Who is it, then?” I asked. The radio’s screen had abbreviated the singers’ names so thoroughly that it was impossible to tell.
“It’s England Dan and John Ford Coley singing ‘I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.’ So there,” he said. “Now tell me you don’t know it.”
“I don’t know it!” I freely admitted, taking a sample of the song on my phone and checking to see if he was correct. He was. “What the hell kind of name is England Dan, anyway?
“I can’t believe you don’t know that song,” he said. “What rock were you under?”
“I didn’t listen to white-people music in the seventies!” I protested, as he pulled the car to a stop. We unbuckled our seat restraints and got out of the car.
“White-people music?” he asked with incredulity. “You are white people.”
“I went to a city public school. I was the only white person in my high school graduating class!” I reminded him. “My senior class theme song was ‘One Nation Under a Groove,’ for crying out loud. I don’t know that white-people music from the seventies!”
And it’s true. There’s a huge cultural lacuna in my musical background, a vast gap in which the collected songs of Linda Ronstadt and Olivia Newton-John and Kiss have no resonance. To the Commodores and George Clinton or just about any funk ensemble of the era, I can respond with instant recognition, if not an eerie ability to recall all the lyrics. If it’s not from one of the very few groups that did gain a foothold of popularity in my high school—and that would be limited to Blondie, Queen, and my own secret indulgence of ABBA—or if the hook wasn’t played constantly on the K-Tel eight-track television ads back then, the chances that I’ve heard it are pretty doubtful. Yes, I’m talking about you, AC/DC.
“White-people music,” the Mont said again as we walked into the store. He shook his head, as if I were the whitest person he knows.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
The bread of friendship
A few weeks ago one of our friends stopped by our house with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with a thin white fluid that looked like—well, like baby sick in a plastic baggie. Charming, right? “Here you go,” he said to us. “Friendship bread. Take care of it.” Then he was off and away, no doubt cackling at the top of his little lungs once he was out of earshot.
I’d never heard of Friendship Bread before, but apparently it’s widespread enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the pastry form of a chain letter. You receive a yeast starter (like a sourdough) that allegedly originated from the Amish, from a friend. For nine days you follow the instructions on the sheet that comes with it—instructions that largely consist of squeeze the bag, so that it gives the illusion of simplicity. Halfway through the process, you have to give the starter a little snack of flour, milk, and sugar. Over time, the starter changes from a gruel-like white to toenail-fungus yellow, and begins to bubble, foam, and produce massive amounts of gas. I was burping the Ziploc bag several times a day and recoiling from the yeasty, fermented aroma.
Finally comes the big tenth day. After dumping the ever-growing Audrey II mix into a bowl and adding more milk, sugar, and flour, it’s your turn to scoop out cupfuls of the reeking stuff and put it into three one-gallon plastic bags (just like the Amish have done with Ziploc bags handed down through the generations) to hand out to your friends, along with a clean copy of the instructions for care. I stress the word clean, because by the time I reached day ten, my copy was covered with grunge and starter. Then you bake the bread.
I hadn’t really studied the recipe before I started preparing it. All I knew is that it was supposed to create two loaves of a lightly sweet bread. Lightly sweet, my flat ass. My eyes began to bulge out as I mixed the thing, and continued to bulge as I added ingredient after ingredient, because it seemed to read like this:
Add four cups of flour to the bowl.
Add one cup of sugar.
Add 1/2 tsp. of baking powder.
Add two cups of sugar.
Add 1 tsp. of baking soda.
Add one cup of sugar.
It was when the recipe exhorted me to add “One large box of vanilla pudding (low-fat or sugar-free is fine)” that I decided that whoever wrote the recipe had a fairly mean sense of irony. Especially as the next step was to “Coat baking pans with non-stick baking spray and dust with one-half cup of sugar.”
How was the bread? It was fine. It was a fairly dense, far-from-lightly sweet concoction that tasted like coffee cake more than anything. It was so much like a quick bread I’m not really convinced it needed a starter, to be honest. But spread with butter and roasted under the broiler, it was delicious.
Oh, what happened to my starters, you ask? I foisted one on Ford Girl, who left hers out overnight to freeze and die. The other went to our friend Jeffrey, who let it sit on his kitchen counter for two weeks before he admitted that he’d forgotten about it. He then apologized and said that he really could only have taken care of the friendship bread if the recipe had asked for cocktail pickles and cajun spices to be added to the starter, because that’s all he had in his pantry. Which he might have mentioned when we gave it to him.
The last packet went to our friend Clark. Ten days after I gave Clark the packet, I got a flurry of text messages from him. Why does it use so much sugar?! he asked. I’m running out of sugar! said the next.
Ah, friendship and diabetes. They walk together hand in hand.
I’d never heard of Friendship Bread before, but apparently it’s widespread enough that it has its own Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the pastry form of a chain letter. You receive a yeast starter (like a sourdough) that allegedly originated from the Amish, from a friend. For nine days you follow the instructions on the sheet that comes with it—instructions that largely consist of squeeze the bag, so that it gives the illusion of simplicity. Halfway through the process, you have to give the starter a little snack of flour, milk, and sugar. Over time, the starter changes from a gruel-like white to toenail-fungus yellow, and begins to bubble, foam, and produce massive amounts of gas. I was burping the Ziploc bag several times a day and recoiling from the yeasty, fermented aroma.
Finally comes the big tenth day. After dumping the ever-growing Audrey II mix into a bowl and adding more milk, sugar, and flour, it’s your turn to scoop out cupfuls of the reeking stuff and put it into three one-gallon plastic bags (just like the Amish have done with Ziploc bags handed down through the generations) to hand out to your friends, along with a clean copy of the instructions for care. I stress the word clean, because by the time I reached day ten, my copy was covered with grunge and starter. Then you bake the bread.
I hadn’t really studied the recipe before I started preparing it. All I knew is that it was supposed to create two loaves of a lightly sweet bread. Lightly sweet, my flat ass. My eyes began to bulge out as I mixed the thing, and continued to bulge as I added ingredient after ingredient, because it seemed to read like this:
Add four cups of flour to the bowl.
Add one cup of sugar.
Add 1/2 tsp. of baking powder.
Add two cups of sugar.
Add 1 tsp. of baking soda.
Add one cup of sugar.
It was when the recipe exhorted me to add “One large box of vanilla pudding (low-fat or sugar-free is fine)” that I decided that whoever wrote the recipe had a fairly mean sense of irony. Especially as the next step was to “Coat baking pans with non-stick baking spray and dust with one-half cup of sugar.”
How was the bread? It was fine. It was a fairly dense, far-from-lightly sweet concoction that tasted like coffee cake more than anything. It was so much like a quick bread I’m not really convinced it needed a starter, to be honest. But spread with butter and roasted under the broiler, it was delicious.
Oh, what happened to my starters, you ask? I foisted one on Ford Girl, who left hers out overnight to freeze and die. The other went to our friend Jeffrey, who let it sit on his kitchen counter for two weeks before he admitted that he’d forgotten about it. He then apologized and said that he really could only have taken care of the friendship bread if the recipe had asked for cocktail pickles and cajun spices to be added to the starter, because that’s all he had in his pantry. Which he might have mentioned when we gave it to him.
The last packet went to our friend Clark. Ten days after I gave Clark the packet, I got a flurry of text messages from him. Why does it use so much sugar?! he asked. I’m running out of sugar! said the next.
Ah, friendship and diabetes. They walk together hand in hand.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Brick Wall
I doubt I’m the only music lover alone in experiencing a total and utter burnout over a particular musician. I’m referring specifically to the phenomenon I think of as the Brick Wall Album—a band or artist’s release that completely impedes a fan from following them any further.
I’m not talking about the artist you dislike from the get-go. I’m not talking about the artist who has a promising release or two and then peters out gradually, so that one day there’s a realization that you haven’t listened to her in, well, years, and don’t really care (hi, Sinead O’Connor!), or the artist you might have on the cusp of liking, who then releases something that you listen to with bafflement a few times before deciding she was never really your cup of tea after all. (Why yes, I’m talking about Boys for Pele. How did you know?)
No, I mean the artist whom you love unreservedly for years and years, and whom you purchase automatically on the day that he or she drops a new album. The artist you assume you’ll be listening to until the day you die. The artist who, one day without warning or betrays you by foisting upon your poor ears an album that’s such an offense and an aural assault that after one play, you’re finished with the musician. Forever. Not only do you refuse to listen to that particular album ever again, but it poisons your view of everything else from that artist that you’ve enjoyed in the past. You’re done. Out. Kaput. No more, ever again. Boom! Brick wall.
Does it sound familiar?
My example? Talking Heads. I loved the band during my college years, when they were a favorite on the student radio station. Remain in Light was one of my first-ever LP purchases, quickly followed by my purchase of their first three albums. I wore out my cassette tape of Speaking in Tongues. I saw the movie of Stop Making Sense a half-dozen times when it was released, and caught every concert of the group I could during the nineteen-eighties. I could sing Little Creatures backwards while walking a police line. I loved, loved, loved True Stories.
And then Naked came out. I gave it one spin. My reaction was, bluntly, something along the lines of, “The hell.” And then I never listened to Talking Heads again. If one of their songs came up on random play on my iTunes list, I’d rush to skip it.
For the life of me, I’m not really sure what it was about that album that so turned me off. I don’t have a particular animus against the one single I remember, “Nothing But Flowers.” Kirsty MacColl sings backup on a couple of songs, which you’d think would be a huge plus, since I was a fan of hers. (It’s not.) I’m not even sure I could give the thing another listen, considering the revulsion I have for it—that and the fact that I think it’s the only CD I’ve ever bought that I tossed in the garbage can. After one listen of Naked, though, I basically refused to tolerate the group ever again. Until a couple of weeks ago, anyway, when I imported all my old CDs into iTunes and started remembering why I enjoyed them. But it took twenty-two years!
Okay, so maybe Talking Heads wasn’t the best example, because Naked was really their last release. I’ll throw out another from someone with a longer career.
Prince. You know. The purple wonder. Mr. Doves Cry. Yeah, I loved that little midget for a very, very long time, starting with his very first release. By the time he came out with the 1999 album, I was convinced he was the musical messiah; I was basically walking around my college campus knocking on strange doors with a copy of 1999 in hand, asking people if they’d heard of how their eternal souls could be saved by the gracious good power of Minneapolis funk.
My enthusiasm peaked all during the years Prince played with the Revolution. For dances at school I would dress in tight pants, shirts with lace cravats, and sparkly homemade blindfolds with one eye cut out, so that I looked like a refugee from a Purple Rain-era video. I camped out overnight once for tickets to see Prince, the Time, and Vanity 6. I ran through two copies of Parade on my Walkman. Any spin-off act Prince produced, I bought. The Time? Owned every album. Vanity and Apollonia 6? Girrrrrl, I can still rap the entire “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” at the drop of a hat. (It’s a pity it’s not available for karaoke.) The Family? Still think it’s the most underrated album of the nineteen-eighties. Ditto for Jill Jones.
I was still in awe of the little devil all through Around the World in a Day and Sign o’ the Times, and even after he broke away from the Revolution and started getting a little weird. I confess that LoveSexy ticked me off a little—not because of the music, which I really liked, but because I bought the original CD that had no track markers in it, which forced me to listen to the entire CD or nothing. I didn’t really get the Batman release, for example, but I dug the “Batdance” single and was willing to groove along with the rest.
Then came the Brick Wall Album: Graffiti Bridge. I popped it into my CD player, endured it with the same expression I might have if I’d found an unexpected turd on the bottom of my shoe, and never listened to Prince again. I have almost my entire music library ripped onto my computer—1600 CDs. Batman is not one of them. So yes, I missed a ton of music from the little guy that people would swear up and down I should best believe I would l-o-v-e love, but eh. I didn’t really care. I did like the single of “Chelsea Rodgers” two years ago, and went so far as to buy it, but it didn’t make me a fan again. It wasn’t really until January, when I started spontaneously wailing “The Beautiful Ones” in the shower (“Do u want him? Or do u want me? Cause I want u!”) that I realized even after a twenty-year moratorium, Prince’s music was still firmly wedged in my psyche, no doubt taking up space that could be put to more practical use for remembering dental appointments and or to get postage stamps.
I’ve experienced the Brick Wall in literature, too, though I’m a little softer and more lenient with my favorite authors. When Anne McCaffrey resolved a late-in-life novel by having a meteorite fall from the sky and kill a villain, hooray, problem resolved, end of book!, I kind of gently struck her from my to-buy-borrow-or-library-loan list and set her aside for many years. I might consider reading through some of my old favorites of hers, though. Connie Willis’ Passage was so freaking scary and upsetting that I refused to re-read anything of hers for years after its release, but I bought and am enjoying Blackout right now. But musical artists, once they slam me into the wall, seem never to win me back.
Who else has hit a brick wall with an artist?
I’m not talking about the artist you dislike from the get-go. I’m not talking about the artist who has a promising release or two and then peters out gradually, so that one day there’s a realization that you haven’t listened to her in, well, years, and don’t really care (hi, Sinead O’Connor!), or the artist you might have on the cusp of liking, who then releases something that you listen to with bafflement a few times before deciding she was never really your cup of tea after all. (Why yes, I’m talking about Boys for Pele. How did you know?)
No, I mean the artist whom you love unreservedly for years and years, and whom you purchase automatically on the day that he or she drops a new album. The artist you assume you’ll be listening to until the day you die. The artist who, one day without warning or betrays you by foisting upon your poor ears an album that’s such an offense and an aural assault that after one play, you’re finished with the musician. Forever. Not only do you refuse to listen to that particular album ever again, but it poisons your view of everything else from that artist that you’ve enjoyed in the past. You’re done. Out. Kaput. No more, ever again. Boom! Brick wall.
Does it sound familiar?
My example? Talking Heads. I loved the band during my college years, when they were a favorite on the student radio station. Remain in Light was one of my first-ever LP purchases, quickly followed by my purchase of their first three albums. I wore out my cassette tape of Speaking in Tongues. I saw the movie of Stop Making Sense a half-dozen times when it was released, and caught every concert of the group I could during the nineteen-eighties. I could sing Little Creatures backwards while walking a police line. I loved, loved, loved True Stories.
And then Naked came out. I gave it one spin. My reaction was, bluntly, something along the lines of, “The hell.” And then I never listened to Talking Heads again. If one of their songs came up on random play on my iTunes list, I’d rush to skip it.
For the life of me, I’m not really sure what it was about that album that so turned me off. I don’t have a particular animus against the one single I remember, “Nothing But Flowers.” Kirsty MacColl sings backup on a couple of songs, which you’d think would be a huge plus, since I was a fan of hers. (It’s not.) I’m not even sure I could give the thing another listen, considering the revulsion I have for it—that and the fact that I think it’s the only CD I’ve ever bought that I tossed in the garbage can. After one listen of Naked, though, I basically refused to tolerate the group ever again. Until a couple of weeks ago, anyway, when I imported all my old CDs into iTunes and started remembering why I enjoyed them. But it took twenty-two years!
Okay, so maybe Talking Heads wasn’t the best example, because Naked was really their last release. I’ll throw out another from someone with a longer career.
Prince. You know. The purple wonder. Mr. Doves Cry. Yeah, I loved that little midget for a very, very long time, starting with his very first release. By the time he came out with the 1999 album, I was convinced he was the musical messiah; I was basically walking around my college campus knocking on strange doors with a copy of 1999 in hand, asking people if they’d heard of how their eternal souls could be saved by the gracious good power of Minneapolis funk.
My enthusiasm peaked all during the years Prince played with the Revolution. For dances at school I would dress in tight pants, shirts with lace cravats, and sparkly homemade blindfolds with one eye cut out, so that I looked like a refugee from a Purple Rain-era video. I camped out overnight once for tickets to see Prince, the Time, and Vanity 6. I ran through two copies of Parade on my Walkman. Any spin-off act Prince produced, I bought. The Time? Owned every album. Vanity and Apollonia 6? Girrrrrl, I can still rap the entire “If A Girl Answers (Don’t Hang Up)” at the drop of a hat. (It’s a pity it’s not available for karaoke.) The Family? Still think it’s the most underrated album of the nineteen-eighties. Ditto for Jill Jones.
I was still in awe of the little devil all through Around the World in a Day and Sign o’ the Times, and even after he broke away from the Revolution and started getting a little weird. I confess that LoveSexy ticked me off a little—not because of the music, which I really liked, but because I bought the original CD that had no track markers in it, which forced me to listen to the entire CD or nothing. I didn’t really get the Batman release, for example, but I dug the “Batdance” single and was willing to groove along with the rest.
Then came the Brick Wall Album: Graffiti Bridge. I popped it into my CD player, endured it with the same expression I might have if I’d found an unexpected turd on the bottom of my shoe, and never listened to Prince again. I have almost my entire music library ripped onto my computer—1600 CDs. Batman is not one of them. So yes, I missed a ton of music from the little guy that people would swear up and down I should best believe I would l-o-v-e love, but eh. I didn’t really care. I did like the single of “Chelsea Rodgers” two years ago, and went so far as to buy it, but it didn’t make me a fan again. It wasn’t really until January, when I started spontaneously wailing “The Beautiful Ones” in the shower (“Do u want him? Or do u want me? Cause I want u!”) that I realized even after a twenty-year moratorium, Prince’s music was still firmly wedged in my psyche, no doubt taking up space that could be put to more practical use for remembering dental appointments and or to get postage stamps.
I’ve experienced the Brick Wall in literature, too, though I’m a little softer and more lenient with my favorite authors. When Anne McCaffrey resolved a late-in-life novel by having a meteorite fall from the sky and kill a villain, hooray, problem resolved, end of book!, I kind of gently struck her from my to-buy-borrow-or-library-loan list and set her aside for many years. I might consider reading through some of my old favorites of hers, though. Connie Willis’ Passage was so freaking scary and upsetting that I refused to re-read anything of hers for years after its release, but I bought and am enjoying Blackout right now. But musical artists, once they slam me into the wall, seem never to win me back.
Who else has hit a brick wall with an artist?
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
A thank-you
In the Garden of Iden is one of the best first novels of a series I’ve ever read. In Kage Baker’s universe, scientists from a shady organization known only as The Company have developed not only a way to travel through time, but have developed the resources to transform small children into cyborgs, and to augment their brains and bodies and train them to work quietly on the sidelines of humanity. Baker’s cyborgs are largely gentle librarians of an immortal sort, cataloguing and preserving the creations and resources that short-lived humans squander.
In the Garden of Iden follows the adventures of Mendoza, saved from the Spanish Inquisition as a child, turned into a Company cyborg, and sent as an adult to catalogue the garden of an English country squire in the year 1553. Mendoza finds herself falling in love with an outspoken Protestant during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary. The turmoil that follows is tense, gripping, and a fantastic read that’s rich in period detail and humor.
I was equally enchanted by the two sequels that followed. In Sky Coyote, Mendoza and her mentor, Joseph, attempt to convince a pre-Columbian tribe that they are gods come to save the tribe from Europeans that soon will raze the land completely. And in the superb Mendoza in Hollywood, Mendoza finds herself in mid-nineteenth-century California, confronted by a familiar face seemingly resurrected to torture her.
What keeps the entire ten-volume series moving is its inexorable march to a doomed future, to a specific date in the twenty-fourth century after which no more Company communications are transmitted to the past. The immortal cyborgs fear—with good reason—that the date is their last on earth, and a small handful decide to resist whatever dire fate the Company has in mind. I wish I could say that the rest of the series is as fantastic as the first three books, but I honestly can’t. Once Baker moves past the current day, for me the novels lose their groundedness; when an author’s outstanding strength is weaving in historical detail, it’s a pity when they move out of the bounds of history. The final volume is so convoluted and dependent upon a fleet of secondary characters that I more or less gave up on making sense of it all. I enjoyed it. I simply didn’t understand every nuance, after nine previous volumes and eleven years.
However, I will say this: even past the first three books, rarely has a long series been so readable, or consistently funny, or have some of the characters been so dear to me.
It was with a little shock that I read a couple of weeks ago that Baker was gravely ill from uterine cancer, and with even more dismay that I read she’d passed away, Sunday. To those who never read her novels and short stories of the Company, I’d strongly urge you to indulge.
In the Garden of Iden follows the adventures of Mendoza, saved from the Spanish Inquisition as a child, turned into a Company cyborg, and sent as an adult to catalogue the garden of an English country squire in the year 1553. Mendoza finds herself falling in love with an outspoken Protestant during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary. The turmoil that follows is tense, gripping, and a fantastic read that’s rich in period detail and humor.
I was equally enchanted by the two sequels that followed. In Sky Coyote, Mendoza and her mentor, Joseph, attempt to convince a pre-Columbian tribe that they are gods come to save the tribe from Europeans that soon will raze the land completely. And in the superb Mendoza in Hollywood, Mendoza finds herself in mid-nineteenth-century California, confronted by a familiar face seemingly resurrected to torture her.
What keeps the entire ten-volume series moving is its inexorable march to a doomed future, to a specific date in the twenty-fourth century after which no more Company communications are transmitted to the past. The immortal cyborgs fear—with good reason—that the date is their last on earth, and a small handful decide to resist whatever dire fate the Company has in mind. I wish I could say that the rest of the series is as fantastic as the first three books, but I honestly can’t. Once Baker moves past the current day, for me the novels lose their groundedness; when an author’s outstanding strength is weaving in historical detail, it’s a pity when they move out of the bounds of history. The final volume is so convoluted and dependent upon a fleet of secondary characters that I more or less gave up on making sense of it all. I enjoyed it. I simply didn’t understand every nuance, after nine previous volumes and eleven years.
However, I will say this: even past the first three books, rarely has a long series been so readable, or consistently funny, or have some of the characters been so dear to me.
It was with a little shock that I read a couple of weeks ago that Baker was gravely ill from uterine cancer, and with even more dismay that I read she’d passed away, Sunday. To those who never read her novels and short stories of the Company, I’d strongly urge you to indulge.
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