Welcome to September!
Last night, Jenny Ruth & I were the only staff at a beautiful wedding in a forested park in San Francisco (a small city with a larger population than Alaska.) It was a totally beautiful, small friends & family affair, & the two brides kept asking us what people usual do at weddings: like "when do we do a toast?", or Jenny would say "do you two want to cut the cake in the traditional way," & they'd ask "how's that?" Even tho the brides & the bridesmaids helped set up & clean up, I'm still so sore today on this Labor Day I can barely move my body to the bathroom, let alone the hike thru the redwoods I had planned. And I only mention this, because I believe in love, & altho you may ache the next day, I say to people who are against gay marriages, as a general rule they are so much more fun than yuppie marriages, Jesus ones or drunken Vegas ones.
For anyone just turning in to our spectacularly humble blog, it's been quite a month. A particular highlight was the first-ever international live-blogging, with our correspondences from various cities & countries that begin with the letter 'B', most of us with names beginning with 'B', non-sequentially updating a series of posts about the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. If you'd like to read thru this in order, with all the steppes & mesas of a Tony Hillerman novel, here are links in bold rainbowed chapters.I. Prelude & The Committee discusses the Logistics.
Now that Hurricane Gustav has kept George W. Bush from reminding voters that he's part of the same noble party as John McCain, who knows what will happen this Thursday Night? It might be worthwhile to check this website just in case. Stay tuned in September for Olaf Mary's first posts of artwork from Morocco, white gospel tunes from Berkeley, meditations on the science of dust, poetry based on Wayne's World, & who the frick knows what else.
II. Brains Prematurely Articulates, others have to rush from the bathtubs to set up the live CNN feed.
III. Brooklyn Arrives, Experiments with Zenlike short posts.
IV. Welcomes all Around & Al Gore's Speech.
V. Word from Bulgaria, & the Liberal Crepe Warfare
VI. Gobiden
VII. Climax, Wrapup, Dénouement, Cigarettes
UPDATE: September 1st, 2008, 11:55am. Talking about the plan of drinking Sazeracs on Friday Morning at 5am in Bulgaria (during McCain's convention speech) may be altered due to the difficulty of finding Peychaud's bitters in the Balkans. From Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day:They finally parted company in New Orleans after a confused & repetitive headache of a night that began at the establishment of Monsieur Peychaud, where the Sazeracs, tho said to've been invented there, were not a patch, it seemed to Reef [Traverse], on those available at Bob Stockton's bar in Denver, tho the Absinthe Frappés were another matter.
-pg. 368.
I'm guessing Pynchon made up the Absinthe Frappé, altho it doesn't seem to be impossible to duplicate from fiction; & timely, considering the reintroduction of proper absinthe to America & the current shaken & frothy state of New Orleans. I'll call David Chang & ask him how to get sea-foam on the top of an absinthe drink. (Also, considering the murky origins of America's first cocktails, I think it's a bloody good joke that the sazeracs at "Bob Stockton's bar in Denver" would be better than at Monsieur Peychaud's.) We may need a drink of this caliber to get thru Thursday night.
August 31, 2008
August Review: "Gushes of Blood, Gushes of Tears: got all these gushes coming out of my VJ"
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1 comment:
Thank you, Todd, in response to your e-mail asking "wha?", the passage from that New Yorker article about David Chang (of Momofuku & Noodle Bar), I was channeling when picturing an absinthe frappé, & the difficulty of ironically parodying 1990's food trends in your menu.
"They’d been working on the scallop dish for weeks. It was a thing of beauty: a smear of black nori purée on the bottom of the bowl; then a layer of sea scallops and chanterelles and possibly clams; and then, spooned on top in front of the customer, a soft heap of foaming dashi (kelp and dried-bonito broth), made intentionally unstable with just a little methylcellulose, so that in front of the customer’s eyes the bubbles would burst and dissipate into a fishy liquid, at exactly the speed that foam from a wave dissipates onto sand. It looked like the sea and tasted like the sea, and Chang was extremely proud of it. The only thing he was worried about was the word 'foam,' which, owing to its trendiness in the nineties, had become a symbol of everything pretentious and unnatural about nineties cuisine. In Chang’s mind, he was making fun of foam, but of course some people were not going to get that and were going to think he was just another leftover foam slave. 'It’s gonna piss people off,' he said happily."
-Larissa MacFarquhar, "Chef on the Edge", The New Yorker, 24 March 2008
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