Saturday, July 24, 2010

Look Behind You!  Blogiversary 8, or, The Sick-Ass Lion Sleeps Tonight

No new post for you today.  Why?  You have two choices.  Choice 1:

History, as the blowhards tell us, is the accumulation of coincidental ambiguities.  It is the profundity that is born of consecutive inconsequentialities.  It is a trial without a verdict, a verdict without a sentence, and a sentence without a period.  It is an orange without sections; it is an elevator that stops on every floor.  It is a large and smelly cheese.  You cannot spell “history” without “rot,” “sit,” or “hoy.” And to the limited extent to which any of this makes any sense at all, I agree with the blowhards.  History is many things, and we make quite a spectacle of ourselves saying what they are.  But in one respect, the blowhards and I part company.  Is history truly written by the victors?  I say nay.  Rather, I aver, history is written by the writers.

- Which brings the conversation, as all conversations are eventually brought, to me.  Look upon me, ye mighty, and extrude!  Lo, my shadow eclipses the very feet upon which I stand.  I am blogger, hear me post with drivel more inane than most.  Tweet, and the world tweets with you; blog, and you blog alone.  I submit, something less than humbly, that writers are those whose creative engines engender a world in which they both rule and are enslaved.  I am that slave-king, here at the Chucklehut - and history is the witness against me whose testimony I myself have scripted.

In this case, history began July 24, 2002, with my first tentative, yearning, expletive-laden blog post.  A hut of chuckles had been erected, and I - yes, I! - was its erector.  Never before had so much been said about so little; here, greater blogsylvania was subjected to unprecedented surplussage and excesses of articulation far exceeding federal recommendations.  All too often neither hutular nor chuckleicious, this blog has endured presidencies, surgeries, adoptions and obfuscations.  And now it is eight years old.

Eight years is a long time in internet terms, where a blog mitzvah is celebrated at 30 months and registry for the cyberdraft is obligtaory upon attaining 150 posts.  (For the record, all blogs are born of age both to drink and vote.  Typically, simultaneously.) Well, I’ve got nearly 2000 posts and have been drafted into, and survived, any number of web-based contretemps.  And what have I got to show for it?  This lousy t-shirt.  And when I bathe, not even that.

In a recent exchange of correspondence with a new luminary of the internet, whose punctuation marks are funnier than most of my whole posts and whose daily hit count exceeds my annual ones, I mentioned the longevity of this site.  In response, she referred to me as the “Dick Clark of Blogging.” I took it as a compliment, with only a passing reference to my annual ball-descent.  Still, it got me to thinking - and we all know how tricky that terrain can be for me.

It has been my practice in years past, and you are invited to check the archives if you don’t believe me, to observe the anniversary of my blogception with a look twenty-four to twelve months backward.  I re-read my posts for the year concluding one year prior, and squander an entry by listing off my favorites.  It’s not an objective process, even though it has an objective - I just pick the ones that I most enjoy reading again.  Sometimes I surprise myself, on the plus side or the minus.  Typically there is a scattering of gold in the dross, all too easily overlooked if I don’t refine it out.  Today, I reveal the results of that process - but this time, with one exciting (only to me) twist:

When I first undertook this exercise in 2003, I selected less than 7% of my total of over 600 posts - a “Top 40.” (More Casey Kasem than Dick Clark, perhaps, but those were simpler times.) I’ve stuck with this format ever since, even as my output shrank to barely 200 posts per year.  Well, now when I look back I’m reading stuff I wrote as the father of two children, and there are barely 100 posts in a whole year with which for me to reacquaint myself.  There’s no point in selecting a top 40 when the total pool of essays is so slim.  Forty is too big a chunk; it’s insufficiently selective.  It’s time for me to ratchet back.

So this year, in the immortal words of Captain Chaos and Jungle Judy, it’s Top Ten Time.  I selected ten out of 103 posts for an exactly about-ten-percent slice of steaming hot blog pie.  You don’t have to read them if you don’t want to, but you’ll really only be depriving yourself.  These bare ten posts represent the absolute finest in contemporary American blogfodder available for your internet dollars today.  And if that’s not good enough for you, I guess I’ll have to do better.  Your vote of confidence is appreciatively recognized.  Meantime, read these anyway.  I’m not blogging for my health, you know.

Choice 2:
why I didn’t write you anything - click and learn, grasshopper
(found on the bus a few months ago and jealously protected till the perfect moment arose, which obviously is now)

In either chase, whether you prefer choice 1 or choice 2, here are my latest faves ("sick-ass lions"):

Phat Farm Fresh
The Jewish Goodbye
In Commemoration with Two Sugars
The Grubby Groper of Outer Geary
Hardly Unwanted
the night of swirling stars
Saving Passover - One Stoat at a Time
Social Obligations and the Redistributed Sloth
Unspeakable Wonder
Bag Man

Thanks for your support, I’ll be here all week.  Of course, I’ll be eating or sleeping for most of it.  Recapitulation takes it out of a fellow, you know? 

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Church

San Fran isn’t exactly a new town by our national standards, where 100 years is a long time and 100 miles is a short distance.  The first white-man’s settlement hereabouts was a mile from my home, in the Presidio, starting from 1776.  On his way to establish that fort, Juan Batista de Anza camped where Mountain Lake Park now stands, three blocks up from my front door and just across the old original Lincoln Highway (1913), the first transcontinental highway in the nation.  Back when most of Frisco was concentrated up in the North-East corner of town, my putative hinterland of a neighborhood already modestly boasted a long heritage - relative, again, to the local norm.  By which I mean, for example, my well-worn 1937 copy of Halliburton’s Book of Marvels (The Occident) begins with descriptions of two local landmarks - the Bay and Golden Gate Bridges - showing them in an arial shot that depicts both graceful spans converging on a city not fifty square miles in size and nearly 200 years old, yet still possessed of significant swaths of open, undeveloped land.  My neighborhood, mature though it already was, remains distinguished in that photo by empty lots and sandy dunes among large cemeteries (subsequently relocated in the 1950s).  Highways, boulevards, emplacements and institutions notwithstanding, it’s clear that, in the early ‘30s, the Central Richmond District was ripe for infill.

However, two major social institutions came with the territory, so to speak - they were seemingly plotted out with the city grid, and have been with us, pretty much since the start of things as we recognize them today.  Some lots had been set aside for schools, some for parks; we got an official Carnegie library and the French Hospital was already a well-established institution; but the houses of worship on either side of Park Presidio Boulevard at Clement Street are - or were - too well-matched architecturally and geographically to be a quirk of zoning.  They were planned, clearly, as sentinels to the entry to the city, welcoming the Godfearing visitors streaming off the new bridge that spanned the Golden Gate, and driving the sinners out of Eden.  So it seemed to me, anyway. The presence of those two big imposing sacred spaces pretty much across the street from each other was demonstrably no coincidence.  (I marked their location by an oval in the photo linked-in above.  No, that’s not an actual black oval carved into the topgraphy.  You are just being obstreperous.)

On the west was the synagogue, once boasting a sober facade of damp sandstone carved to resemble an unscrolled torah, with columns and stained glass.  As I’ve written here before, the integrity of that architecture was insulted by a 1970s addition and up-do that added a false front, depersonalized the adjacent assembly hall, and generally stepped on everything of value in the original design.  And then a few years ago it got revisioned, razed, and utterly reborn as a gleaming new edifice unlike any other in the city, a chalice raised heavenward, an ark ready to float away down 14th Avenue.  The old synagogue is now the new synagogue, standing where it has stood since 1934, its message renewed and its presence emphatically reinstated.

Then there was the church over on the other side. I suspect that it started off as a more impressive building than the old original synagogue, and for sure it remained so.  The Fourth Church of Christ, Scientist was a neoclassical structure with a colonnaded facade, uprights framing massive patinaed bronze doors capping a short set of steps that raised the whole building up like an altar.  The sanctuary was a lofty room proportioned so as to be, improbably, both intimate and grand, with walls of leaded windows and a shallow dome of Tiffany glass overhead.  It boasted gardens and lawns, and a classic old school x-tian science reading room with period typographic signage bolted letter by letter to the outside wall, in which room a dwindling cadre of increasingly-elderly believers apparated to peruse tracts and the church’s well-regarded newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor.  Above the main portals the formal name of the edifice, FOVRTH CHVRCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, was incised in clear classic Latinate lettering, flanked by massive yet graceful plaster amphorae. 

As a child I’d found humor in the name of this sect ("They laughed at my experiments in the seminary - but who’ll have the last laugh now!") but over time I grew into a more nuanced appreciation of their ethic, which I considered admirable if misbegotten, and the architecture of their churches, which was frequently robust and inspirational.  In this vein, I was glad to have the 4CofCS as a neighbor.  It elevated the ambient tone and classed the place up.  Even as I wondered how they kept the big old place looking good and pumping out the gospel, I always felt inspired by gazing up at their Parthenon-inspired lintel, surmounted by those huge urns that caught the sea-washed light of this district with almost sentient clarity.  The 4CofCS: living proof that classy dowagers make good neighbors. 

The thing is, dowagers appear timeless, but they’re really not.  Eventually the frailties to which we all are heir will take them down, and thus it was as well for my dear old friend the 4CofCS.  Though she unfailingly kept up her appearances, congregants increasingly failed to throng her, or even attend her perfunctorily.  The free Children’s Sunday School seemed to languish unattended.  As their vaunted newspaper, the Monitor, shrank in size and circulation, so did their reading room dwindle in usership and vitality.  I began to wonder how they kept the place going, in this age of skeptical modernity.  The synagogue had updated, architecturally, and in doing so, seemed to have renewed its lease on spiritual life.  What was the plan for the church?

A brief diversion: I don’t buy a lot of music anymore.  I go on-line and listen free through Pandora or I tune in KPIG, and when I hear something I like, if it’s at all contemporary, I’ll check for concert recordings on the Archive.  Oh yes, the Archive - The Internet Archive - is a massive compendium of digital information - poetry and buddhism, historical children’s literature and kitschy midcentury video, and the Way Back Machine where you can see what the internet looked like at the beginning of time (circa 1998).  And, of course, they’ve got tens of thousands of hours of live concert recordings.  Punk, folk, funk, polk, and all imaginable interpermutations; 7,600 Grateful Dead recordings and about 3000 other artists from headliners to the Dirty Marmaduke Flute Band and Baghdad Scuba Review.  The amount they’ve got ready at your cyberfingertips is mindboggling, and it’s all freefreefree.  The Internet Archives: it’s everywhere and it’s everything.  If there’s a new religion, this is probably it.  Anglebracket slash diversion.

Let’s return to our regularly-scheduled blather, already in progress.  We were (I was) going on about the 4CofCS, stately and noble, enduring but no longer particularly vibrant.  I wondered as to its longevity, and then I saw the signs go up and I wondered no more: one day a cloth banner was draped over the modest lawn marquee at the corner of Funston and Clement, and print-out fliers were posted in the reading room windows: the old church was closing and the new church was moving in.  Christ Scientist was vacating to make room for Dr Wayback’s cyberarchives. 

One piece at a time, a transition was effected - huge servers were delivered and installed, with conduit and circuitry to serve them; the reading room’s musty carrels were upgraded with flatscreens and linux. It took a few months or more, all told, but for me the changeover was pretty seamless - from my desktop at home, I continued to enjoy uninterrupted access to Jackie Green concerts and Alan Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute lectures.  But one day as I strolled the avenue I looked up and those timeless, 70-year-old letters over the portal of that graceful building were no longer there.  Where once their dark lines and crisp serifs had looked down on me, suddenly there was only clean, smooth, unbroken tabula rasa whiteness.  And those big metal letters bolted above the reading room window referred no longer to either Christianity nor science - only the generic “Reading Room” part of the signage remained.  Instead of inspirational tracts, the window displayed a poster graphically depicting the range and scope of the internet in 2002.  In the reading carrels, the Monitor had been replaced by monitors. 

I have not yet been inside the new home of the Internet archives.  I don’t notice that my concert downloads are faster now that the server is mere blocks from my home network (though, technically, since they only moved from a location in the Presidio, it’s not a very big difference, objectively, as you can see from the first-linked photo above), and I still have some trouble converting FLAC files on a Windows Vista platform (but I think I know who to blame for that).  Still, I can’t help but feel that some progress has been made, while at the same time, certain verities have been preserved.  An inspiring edifice dedicated to the power of insubstantial actions and entities continues to function as such.  Its focus has shifted, however, from a messianic deity to individual opinion, unfettered and hubristic; the single text and truth is now an evolving compendium of multitudinous expression.  And that’s all, I suppose, as it should be.  The world may not have changed much since the 1930s, but our relationship to it has.  It only stands to reason that the old church of divine mystery is now a library preserving the evanescent profundities of the profane.  We seek new inspirations now, and I’m glad my neighborhood continues to provide them - on both sides of the boulevard, and for both my heart and my head. 

this is a scan of a photo I took a long time ago, which was developed in four different hues for reasons of technical incapacity.  The original looks a lot “smoother” than this one, but I sort of like the warholization of the image I have here now.  Anyway, this is what the place looked like, when it had lettering up top.  Those urns are still really gorgeous, though.

Up next: blogoversary recap.  I know, you’re palpitating.  Get over it already. 

Friday, July 09, 2010

Return of the Living Recipe Corner: KASHABERRY SALAD in about 17 steps of varying easiness

Is… is that you, weary internet traveler?  Returning to view the ruins and remnants of what was once a mighty, puissant blog?  (And for the record, “puissant” is a good thing.) I can see you, cowering in the shadowed threshold, peering into the crepitating darkness which once was, still somehow is, and may yet become again - the Chucklehut.  Welcome, and take off your damn shoes before you trample HTML all over my nice throwrugs!  Yeah, it’s been a busy time for Chuck and the El-Hutts.  I’ve been doing a lot of writing for work, wound up enmired in yet another final round of edits on my massive story about high-stakes dreydel gambling (no really), got sent out on a road trip (non-Animal House version), and a combination of other factors has led me to forsake the key 1-to-3 am blogging window that was once so productive for me.  But on the plus side, I threw my back out.  Well, composted it, really.  The point is, yowch. 

But that’s not why you came here, is it?  You came here to gloat and glory in my ignominious downfall.  I used to post daily, even more than daily, back when words were cheap and blogging was exotic. Now there are pet lizards that friendfeed more often than I manage to get a handful of random adverbs up here. I’d say it was sad, but it makes me sad to say it.

So what I’ll say instead, is SALAD!  Yes, it’s “sad,” but with an extra AL that makes all the difference.  In Arabic, it means “THE!” So you can see why I’d want to make sure it’s included.  After all, you didn’t just kick your way into some random sub-basement of the Chucklehut.  By glorious happenstance, you wound up in the still-warm remnants of what our forebears once knew as RECIPE CORNER - where gustatory history still wells up from the dispoz-all and sprays deliciousness all over your hungry face.  It’s time, intrepid blogwalker, and the lot falls to you.  Ready your “print screen” button because I’m going to tell you the legend of a salad that will change your life and that of every cranberry in your pantry!

So here’s the thing: I was going to go to a party and wanted to bring a salad, but for gods sake isn’t there enough salad in this soggy old world of ours?  Which is to say, what can a fellow do to make a salad that doesn’t get lost in the sea of icebug (sic) lettuce and hand-cut croutons in which we all marinate?  I wanted to make a salad that stood up to the competition.  Figuratively. A salad that actually stands up would be either creepy or infested.  Neither one was my goal. I just wanted classy sophisticated wankers to say that it was the finest damn salad they ever rammed down their arugula holes.  It was a challenge, and nothing inspires me more than a challenge.  Except maybe a nap, so I took one of those to start, and then turned my attention to the question at hand.

The first thing to come up with was the base.  Salads have bases, you know?  Because otherwise they’d be acids, chemically speaking.  As I typically do.  Some salads are based on greens; some on beens; some are pasta-ish and some are mostly made of woodchips and cardboard flakes.  And that’s where I wanted to start.  Because I hate salad and hoped this one would end its semi-permanent hegemony of the first course.  But I failed.  I failed utterly.

That is because I didn’t actually use those wood-chips, I just used something that looks like them: KASHA.  Kasha is a gluten-free grain, that my peoples typically serve with pasta, because god knows carbs go better with extra carbs.  But I was going to use them straight.  It was going to be a kasha salad, without pasta, which I was pretty sure no one else would be bringing to this particular party.  Or I’d have to kill somebody.  This salad stuff is serious, man. 

So now I had my kasha, and all I had to do was turn it into a salad.  Easy.  -ish.  Here’s how:

Cook the kasha - two cups of grain in four cups of water with some salt and butter, brought to a boil and then simmered, covered, for, oh, twelve minutes or so.  Don’t overcook it.  Then again, don’t undercook it.  I’d recommend a basic cooking of the kasha.  That’s the ticket.  Dump it into a large bowl and let the billows of steam rising out of it sear the flesh from your hands as you turn it with a spoon and fan it a little to help the moisture escape.  No, seriously, help it off-steam a while, and then season it a bit with a little rice vinegar.  Mmm, steaming hot vinegar kasha.  No, no, it gets better.  I’m pretty sure. 

Start gussying it up, with either fresh or frozen gussy.  Lacking that, as I was, I used the following ingredients:

1 large yellow onion, diced small and panfried at medium heat till somewhat caramelized but not mushy

1 medium red pepper, diced small and sauteed till just softened

2 good-sized carrots, diced small (you see the pattern here?) and fried in a combination of agave syrup, cinnamon, and powdered ginger root (and as you can see, this is where the poseurs fade away, since it’s tricky to dice a carrot small and you need to get that damned agave syrup too, though it’s pretty handy to have around if you don’t happen to have a taste for unmoistened agave)

1 large ear’s worth of corn, cut free and barely sauteed with salt and white pepper in olive oil

1 bunch of regular (not “special") parsley, leaves only (not the stems), chopped up but not quite minced

-- so so far it’s pretty standard stuff, right?  I mean, it’s a lot of chopping and dicing and knife work and such, but those all mean basically the same thing so stop your harping and get back to work already.  But here’s where we take a sudden sharp turn toward Scrumptiousville:

Getcherself some simple syrup (ie boil a cup of sugar in a cup of water till it’s totally clear) and use that to simmer a cup of dried cranberries and a cup of dried currants.  You can even add a little orange blossom essence if you want to be cool and impress the ... um ... easily-impressed.  You don’t need to use all the syrup for this task, just enough to cover the fruit - use the rest for lemonade, cocktails, or art projects.  You also only need to simmer the fruit till it’s somewhat rehydrated, or, in other words, a little less chewy.  Actually, when it’s done, drain out the simmer-syrup through a sieve and you can make a damn tasty spritzer with it, together with some seltzer and maybe a shot of gin, but that’s up to you.  Anyway, when the fruit is drained, chop it up so the cranberries are not much bigger than any of the other ingredients, and mix them all into the kasha.  Oh, right, the kasha.  I’m still on that kick.  You’d thought I’d gotten over it.  But really, I’ve barely begun.

Well, that’s not quite true either.  I’ve mostly finished, is what I meant to say.  All you need to do now is come up with a little dressing, which seemed to work out pretty well when I mixed lime juice, rice vinegar, sesame oil, agave syrup (in this case, agave at the office), and enough water to make it not too oppressively tart or sweet.  Toss the dressing into the salad till you can just taste it - you don’t need a whole bunch - and then let it sit in the fridge overnight or whatever.  Then when you serve it, stand back and let nature take its course.  After the dinosaur die-off and the triumph of bipedal primates, you’ll see that all the best people want to know all about your wonderful salad, and the tired old bowl of baby lettuce, raw bacon and miracle whip just sits there wilting under the bug lamp.  You’ll be the life of the party.  Unless the lettuce-salad dude offs you.  I tell you, man, this is serious stuff. 

I call this salad Kashaberry Delight.  You can call it what you like.  It never answers to anything anyway.  But it’s a damn good salad and you can take that to the bank.  It’ll give you something to snack on while you’re in line. 

Up next, when I get around to it: oh, probably something about a building in my neighborhood, or about a creepy old hag.  I’m open to suggestion, and the comments functionality is up and running.  As am I, so I’ll smell you later, dude.