« To the past
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May 26, 2012
Gabrielle Hamilton on yapping about ‘our artisanal, local, organic fwa fwa’
Of all the sentiments I admired and appreciated in Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, I think I appreciated this the most:
She contrasts a girl selling vegetables at a New York farmers’ market with an old man selling vegetables in Italy. The girl is “some hipster chick in a sparkly barrette and perfectly styled farmer’s clothes” who yells at Hamilton for touching the peas. The old man is toothless and the zipper of his pants is wide open but his vegetables are exquisite and well-loved.
“Of course I’m in love with the toothless guy in the gaping trousers,” Hamilton writes. “He’s everything I grew up with, he’s the end of an era, he’s the last of what it was like to just be a good eater and a good grower. A time when we just grew it and cooked it and ate it and didn’t talk so much about it. When we didn’t crow all over town about our artisanal, local, organic fwa fwa. We just went to the farm and bought the milk. I bought everything I could from that old guy.”
I listened to Blood, Bones on audiobook. Hamilton narrates. Her voice is seductive and charming and I found the writing sometimes rapturous but never ostentatious. The story speaks for itself, and though it is not exactly about food, food is a theme that supports the plot and gives the story its context. Even though I loathe words like foodie and locavore, Hamilton’s memoir made me want to get into my garden right away and plant delicious lettuces and beans and broccoli — and withhold from tweeting about it.
May 22, 2012
Losing Clarence is like losing something elemental, like losing the rain.”
-Bruce Springsteen
(Source: youtu.be)
May 19, 2012
Stage Secret by Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, May 21, 2012“What if I don’t get from the audience what I want?” the stage actor John Douglas Thompson asked.
“It’s because you didn’t bring it,” Christopher Bayes, an instructor at the Yale School of Drama, said. “It’s never the audience’s fault. You have to love that thing you brought. Otherwise, you brought an abstraction. You try. You sing badly, but you try.”
May 17, 2012
M. Ward brought his band to Philadelphia on Saturday, May 12, touring in support of his new record, A Wasteland Companion.
He opened the show with the hypnotic title track of 2006’s Post-War. I expected to hear more songs off of Wasteland but the first one, “Watch the Show,” the record’s weakest tune, didn’t appear until nearly a third of the way through.
This show, while not a retrospective, powerfully displayed the body of work he’s built over the course of his career. It was maybe the most pleasing live show I’ve seen Ward perform — and that’s no accident. This tour seems built to please. Songs like “Helicopter” and “Requiem” were at their most propulsive and “Magic Trick,” “Never Had Nobody Like You” and “Rave On” showed Ward’s propensity for writing and arranging songs with considerable pop appeal. “Flaming Heart” would have fit perfectly in this mode (and allowed him to represent End of Amnesia).
Still, I found myself craving more solo Ward. He played “Fuel For Fire” by himself and multi-instrumentalist Mike Coykendall accompanied him on the always excellent “Lullaby + Exile.” Ward comes alive during his guitar jams, hunting around the stage, picking and slapping his instrument.
Solo tours will come, and they won’t feature the scorching double encores of this tour. Ward and his band closed the set with Daniel Johnston’s “To Go Home,” forgoing the Johnston tune he featured on Wasteland, “Sweetheart.” The band left the stage, reappeared for “Roll Over Beethoven” and then left again only to return and close the night for good with “Primitive Girl.”
Ward accented the final word on certain lines in that song — “She’s a primitive GIRL / She don’t like to BOAST” — and I couldn’t tell if that was a sign of playfulness or weariness. In interview after interview Ward seems shy and private, reluctant to give himself away — as you can see in the video interview below — and yet here he his spending every night of this tour offering the crowd all the songs it hungrily wants the most.
Apr 28, 2012
Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were trained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.Chad Harbach, “The Art of Fielding”
Apr 14, 2012
Jack White and Bob Dylan, welders
Jack White is getting into welding through a friend, Bob Dylan, according to a recent profile of the singer and guitar player. He keeps welding tools in his workshop.
“I’d never done it before, and he’d been doing it for a while, so he kind of gave me the lowdown,” White said.
One day the two of them were sitting on White’s front porch, just enjoying the view, when Dylan turned to him and said, “You know, Jack — I could do something about that gate.”
“That would be pretty cool,” White said, laughing. “I don’t know what kind of discount I’m going to get.”
Apr 12, 2012
It might be said, though, that all Instagrammed photos emphasize photography as an elegiac or twilight art, one that rushes and fakes the emotion of old photographs by cutting out the wait for history entirely, and giving something just a few seconds old the texture of time. We are creating a kind of instant nostalgia for moments that never quite were.Ian Crouch, writing in The New Yorker’s Culture Desk blog
Apr 7, 2012
Must be Springsteen fans at the NY Times Magazine. (Taken with instagram)
Mar 11, 2012
I think it’s just very difficult to end a series. For example, ‘Seinfeld,’ they ended it with them all going to jail. Now that’s the ending we should have had. And they should have had ours, where it blacked out in a diner. I don’t know.
-A chuckling David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” talking to The New York Times
Feb 19, 2012
In Walt’s eyes, his studio was not to be subject to the pressures of the world; it was his refuge from them — a sacred place. And his animations could not be compromised; they had to be better than anyone else’s or he would not survive in the business; nor would he want to survive. Excellence was not only Walt’s business strategy, it was the reason he ran the studio and the force that kept his personal world intact. ‘If you want to know the real secret of Walt’s success,’ longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, ‘it’s that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could could have fun with or be proud of.’Walt Disney by Neal Gabler
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This is where I try to keep track of what I'm reading and watching and seeing and hearing and sometimes doing and cooking and eating.
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