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Things Should Start To Get Interesting Right About Now
Bob Dylan shows are like beaches. No two are exactly alike, and there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that you might miss if you’re not paying attention. So Dylan fans go time and again, each time noticing the different shore lines, different eddies and wave patterns. Some bring small notebooks, obsessively sketching every fine grain detail. But most people there just want to kick back and have a good time.
When Bob came through Asbury Park on August 14th, this was no scholarly exercise. He was there to have a good time. He spent most of the show grinning and mugging to the audience. He looked like a kid in his first school play, just excited to get to be in front of a captive audience. This guy has been playing well over a hundred shows a year for roughly two decades now, and he was prancing around the stage, having the time of his life. That’s what music does, if you do it right.
Ally got there early and grabbed a spot in line. The deal was that she’d hold the spot in line, and I’d come bearing whiskey. When I got there, so quickly poured most of the Jim Beam into some ginger ale cans she had with her, and we got our place up near the front of the line. The crowd filled Convention Hall, all ages and types. There were excited old hippies, just glad to have something going on other than golf outings or bridge or whatever it is those people do. There were college kids, and parents who probably last saw Bob playing with The Band in ‘73 bringing their kids out so they could have the experience once. I mean, the man isn’t getting any younger.
We all squeezed into the auditorium at 6:30. There were old drill-instructor types hollering orders to the crowd. “If you have any chairs or blankets with you, you must dispose of them now. Umbrellas will not be allowed in the venue. Make sure you have your tickets out and ready”. Sir yes sir.
Thanks to Ally, we were right up front, just a couple yards from the stage. The remaning crowd packed in behind us. We waited there for an hour and a half before the opening act came out.
Leon Russell was okay. Really, not bad. If I closed my eyes, the music was grooving and fairly soulful. What I couldn’t get past is that he did NOT look like he wanted to be there. Not a single smile the whole time. Once Dylan came out afterwards, the contrast couldn’t be clearer.
Bob’s set was heavy on newer material (you can find the set list here). Right off, he set the tone with Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat. The song is a tongue-in-cheek take on romance gone wrong. Bob was in full jokester mode. To Ramona came next, and was pretty somber, but even that had a lilting beat, an ironic waltz. Soon he brought a shortened Tangled Up In Blue, singing “Me, I’m still on the road, trying to stay out of the joint”. The new Bob is a classic trickster. A Chaplinesque tramp, trying to stay one step ahead of the problems he’s causing.
The biggest surprise of the night was a jaunty version of Mississippi. It’s not surprising that he played this 180° from the album version. Radically changing song structures is practically Dylan’s stock in trade at this point. But this reimagining didn’t quite hit. Instead of being a story of regret and perseverance, Mississipp became, without any changes in lyrics, the story of scamp moving from one con to another. The music was an upbeat blues shuffle, and Bob stood at the mic, center stage, practically acting out the song to the audience. Of course, Bob’s been re-thinking how this song should be played. If you get the Deluxe version of Tell Tale Signs, you’ll find 3 (!) alternate versions. Plus he gave it to Sheryl Crow to cover before releasing his own version. Even if I would personally pick it as possibly the best song Bob’s written in the last 15 years, it’s clear that he still doesn’t know quite what to do with it.
The show continued on. Bob changed between standing at his keyboad, standing center stage, maybe blowing a little harp here and there, and actually playing guitar (3 or 4 songs this time!). A older man leaned in to me and said “first there was Shakespeare. Then 500 years later you get Dylan”. I don’t know if it’s a fair comparison. Shakespeare didn’t have nearly the range that Bob’s built up over the last x-decades. But either way it doesn’t matter. He’s going to pull his show up to your doorstep every so often, and if you’re smart, you’ll go and be part of this experience. But if not, it doesn’t matter. This is a show that exists separate from its audience. It will continue as long as the performers wish.
Balancing Act
I spent this last week making some of the best pizza in New York City. I know, I know, that’s a pretty bold statement. We’re talking New York here. The official shape is “the slice”. With the possible exception of pastrami on rye, there’s no food more “New York” than pizza. Yet even with all the history, pizza is still the hottest food in town.
Everyone knows the standard New York style slice. It’s an icon, like the Empire State Building or Woody Allen’s neurosis. But lately Neapolitan pizza has been popping up all over town. These pizzerias use wood burning ovens and menus entirely in Italian. They’re a combination of the traditional and the experimental. The process dates back to the dawn of history. Cook stuff on top of bread. Yet the flavos and presentation are distinctly modern.
Getting back to the story, last week I was lucky enough to be able to train at Forcella, a new Neapolitan pizzeria in Williamsburg. The restaurant has only been around for a couple of months, but the pizzaiolo, Giulio Adriani, has been cooking this style of pizza for decades in Naples, Argentina, and Brazil. Now he is opening his own place in Brooklyn, with one more spot on the way in the Bowery.
I was glad to work with Giulio because I think he represents both sides of the new pizza. He understands tradition, not just how things were always done, but why. From there he’s not afraid to experiment, and to try to fit the local tastes.
I was lucky enough to be able to see the whole operation. From the mixing of the dough to the firing of the pizza. I rolled dough balls, made mozzarella from scratch, crushed the tomatoes and worked the oven. When you see pizza from this end, it’s not a commodity product, sliding off a conveyor belt. Each one is it’s own struggle of balance. You must time the fermentation of the dough just right. The oven must be burning at the proper temperature. The crust must achieve a harmonious mixture of doneness and char.
Essentially you are walking a fine line between perfect and destroyed. We’re talking about a matter of seconds. Not tens of seconds. Seconds. You have waiters screaming, people pushing past, pizzas lined up to be cooked, and you’re trying to make the one, two, three, or even four pies you have in the oven into a transcendent pizza experience.
Cooking a pizza like this is a lot like mixing a song. There is no precise amount of midrange that should be applied at all times, and every time you inch up the fader, you’re not making a perceptible difference. But pretty soon you tweak a couple knobs and you’ve got a cacophonous mess. The same can be said of cooking in general, but really Neapolitan pizza in particular. You can start getting so focused on minute details that you begin to lose sight of the big picture. You shoot for the perfect leopard spotting, only to miss and end up with char.
I’ve actually never worked in a professional kitchen before. I’ve done a bit of under the table catering, but I’ve never worked in an actual restaurant kitchen. To say this was a wake up call would be an understatement. Cooking for a busy dining room full of paying customers is completely different from anything I’ve ever tried before. Most people there are as interested in the social aspect of it as the food. They went with friends to have a good time. Maybe they’re trying to impress a cute hipster chick. It could be a reunion with an old bicycling club. Whatever the reason, they expect you to do your job so they don’t have to think about it. Any nagging thoughts about problems with their food are a distraction and are not what they signed up for.
Transcendence can be found just about anywhere. We live in an amazing world and it’s important to open yourself up to what you see all around you. However, trying to create this from base parts (flour, salt, water, yeast, tomatoes, cheese) is a whole other story. They say practice is the most important thing. It’s clear that what you want is to get it into your muscle memory. Thinking only exacerbates the problem. You want transcendence to feel like just a part of nature.
Update: You want photos? No problem.
Juggalo Nation
If you share my fascination with Juggalo culture, then this is the whirling death trip into the heart of ICP darkenss you were waiting for.
In the end, it’s just another way for thousands of kids who feel that no one understands them to get together an collectively bitch that no one understands them. It’s like organized religion or a Tea Party rally, but with at least a bit of self awareness at how ridiculous the whole thing is.
We wanted to say in the song because Juggalos are our family, and Juggalo homies are there for you. Especially when you’re younger, going through shit, you’ve gotta lie to your family, and you don’t have to lie to your friends… you go fuck a hooker, you can’t tell your mom or your family about that, but you go right to your boys, and be like, “Man, I fucked a hooker last night!” [Laughs.]
Warren
A little update. Sorry for all the cat-blogging.
It’s been 2 days and I can’t tell if Warren’s really getting better. I didn’t notice him walking around, looking like he ha to pee last night or this morning, but SOMEONE peed in my bathtub last night, and I don’t think it was me.
He seems lethargic. He splays out in the center of the floor. He doesn’t fight me when I try to give him medicine. Doesn’t follow me around. Just doesn’t seem well yet.
Maybe I’m rushing it. Maybe it’ll take time to get him back to his old self. Maybe I’m imagining it. Tonight will be the big test. We’ll get out his favorite toy and see if he takes the bait.
Stop Peeing!
When it starts getting late, one of my cats, Warren, will go lie down on the bed and wait for me to join him. When I show up and turn the lights off, not matter how late or early, he takes that as his cue to go eat his dinner. Then sometimes he comes back and sleeps at my feet, and sometimes he doesn’t. It’s a little ritual we have.
So last night I wasn’t concerned to see Warren jump up on the bed around midnight. Instead of lying down, though, he started sniffing some pants I had put there. Then the crouch, and the look on his face. He looked right past me with that “really concentrating on taking a shit” look. I understood immedietly what was happening. This was inter-species communication at it’s finest.
I swatted him off the bed, and he finds another spot. I picked him up and brought him in to the litter box, but he wanted nothing to do with that. 5 minutes later I notice him peeing on a couple papers I had on the floor next to my desk. There was no need to stop him at that point. He was obviously determined to pee in that room at some point.
Something was wrong.The next morning I was getting ready for work, and saw him in a cardboard box trying to go. He didn’t look in distress or pain, but he seemed like he constantly had to pee, like a barfly who’s been drinking Coors Light all night and can’t hold it in for more than 5 minutes.
Luckily the vet was able to take him on such short notice. I had to leave work in the middle of the day, drive into Asbury to get my pet carrier out of storage, try to coax Warren into it quickly, then shoot down to Neptune. He was quiet most of the way. He’s not trouble, really, which is why I’m being so calm about this. I know he doesn’t really mean any harm.
Anyway, the doctor poked and prodded him for a few minutes, and the verdict is he should be okay. Probably a bladder infection, and we caught it early. Antibiotics for a couple of weeks and he’ll be fine. That does mean he can’t participate in margarita night on Thursday, but so be it.
Still, I’ve spent most of tonight chasing him around the house. You can see that look in his eye where he finds a little corner or a piece of cardboard on the floor, and realizes that he has to pee right then, right there. I still love the guy, but he’s not winning any Roommate of the Year awards.
I don’t mind spending a bunch of money taking him to the vet. He’d do the same for me. And I don’t resent having to miss work. I don’t even particularly get angry about the peeing, because it’s not his fault they don’t make Feline Depends. However, I am not looking forward to waking up early every day for the next couple of weeks and trying to contain a cat and then pour two (2!!!) medicines down a cat’s throat before work. Florence Nightingale I ain’t.
New York Was Amazing Until 5 Minutes Before You Got There
Went to see Midnight In Paris tonight. I don’t want to give away too much, but the gist is that many people spend their lives wishing for a past that never really existed. Or if it did, it wasn’t any more special than where they are now.
Paris has seen a lot of midnights, and they have probably looked pretty similar, whether you were stumbling out of a bar with Hemingway or hold up in a flat with Verlaine. Pick your favorite era, and you probably can imagine strolling the boulevards as they were meant to be, not the diluted version you see now.
People say this about other cities. New York is an obvious one. Also music scenes, art scenes, movies, toaster ovens, you name it. They don’t make ’em like they used to, huh?
Romantics especially tend to live in the past. When you look back, you can filter out all consequences, and be left with only possibilities. Seeing all the choices collapse into history is tough to watch. We tend to say “if only”, and then have another drink.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked to get drunk with Dali, but if you can imagine a perfect world, isn’t it your responsibility to make what you see around you more like it? Your goal should be to make kids 50 years from now look back at your lifetime and say “I wish I could have lived then.”
Deep, Dark
After a week of mid August weather, we seem to have gone back to March, for some reason. Fine by me. It gave me a chance to go all out on tonight’s dinner.
The plan was gumbo. First we needed a roux, so I put Erin to work on that. Cajun roux’s are a different breed from the kind I grew up with. First off, I was always told that a roux should cook for about 10 minutes and have a light brown color. A cajun roux cooks for almost an hour, and turns a dark, burnt umber tone. Secondly, I was always taught that a roux was equal parts fat and flour, but the recipes I looked up had varying amounts of flour, and the textures were probably all over the place as a result.
So we went to about a 1.5:1 flour to oil ratio and I left Erin to stir. Then I started making the chicken stock cause it’s shitty out and I’m on vacation and what the fuck else am I going to do with myself? So in go all the chicken backs and various other parts I’d been saving, along with some aromatics and herbs.
Those issues being taken care of, we just needed to figure out exactly what kind of gumbo this was going to be. Gumbo is one of those great dishes that has no canonical version. It’s a grab bag. Traditionally there’s a few different types of meat and/or seafood. This being vacation, we decided to splurge, and picked up crawfish, chicken, N’awlins style andouille sausage, and a hand full of shrimp.
I don’t really have a recipe to share, but you can get a good idea here. Gumbocooking.com seemed to be the best resource for gumbo tips and techniques and recipes I could find. If you’re interested in making gumbo, look at a few recipes from this site and you’ll get the idea. Most of them have pretty much the same base, then they just add falvors in on tip of it.
The final product came out great. Tons of layers of flavor, and totally worth spending all Saturday working on it.
Blowout
Holy shit. When I left the bar, with 9 minutes left in the game, Boston was winning 5-1. In the last 8 minutes, though, it became a blowout. Final score 8-1.
Patriots
We have a weird political system in America. And without a doubt, the US Senate is the strangest of the bunch. One particular issue is the fact that each issue gets two votes. The first is the procedural vote. Basically this is the vote that allows the bill to come to a vote. The second is the “real vote”. This allows weasely politicians to allow something to become law while still claiming that they voted against it.
So it’s the case with things like the Patriot Act that Republicans and Democrats alike can come together and vote to allow the worst provisions to endure for another 4 years. Of course, this was the procedural vote that paves the way for this to go on and become law. And damn near every Democrat voted for it.
When the time comes for the final vote, many good “progressive” Senators will vote no, then release a carefully worded statement to the press about the necessity of protecting civil liberties.
It’s all part of the game. But it doesn’t get any less upsetting seeing it happen.
Nothing Was Delivered 