not ready to go quite yet

'Cause first I've gotta get my hands on Talking Jazz, Ben Sidron's new collection of interviews with jazz greats.

Rolling Stone said: "Sidran's low-key style suggests Charlie Rose with smarter questions."

Sticker's $249. Good thing I've gotta birthday coming. (Sweetie.)

When you spend hours working on your instrument ... blowing in that copper tube ... that copper tube won't change -- but you will.

Ben Sidran paraphrasing Thelonious Monk on the subject of practice in a recent NPR interview.

and if that doesn't work out

I can always donate my body to science. Leave a tidny little nest egg for my heirs.

$5325.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth.

i can always tell

One of my best girlfriends recently said, “I can always tell when you’re stewing on something because the poetry gets thick on your blog.”

Yeah. True. Sorry.

Here’s another one.

nobody but you

nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving your self.

your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your life as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.

only you can save your
self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what
I’m talking about

Charles Bukowski, Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

what goes around comes around

The World's Best Mechanical Engineer had a few questions for the six-year-old Joe-Henry -- his response is up over at anniemcq's »

into the woods

I wanted to love Xanadu, Patrick Dougherty’s new installation at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, but I found myself vaguely disappointed.

Not in the sweeping forms that made up the walls and revealed the windows and doorways of this free-standing structure composed entirely of slender reeds; not in the way the rooms fold in on themselves and lead you, meandering, to the central room which pulls your gaze upward through the open dome -- it was the way he topped it off that disappointed me, and maybe a little bit of the scale, which felt too puny, too much like a playhouse, too much for the kids.

Not that I’m not into sharing, and not that I didn’t enjoy the kids running around saying chase me, chase me to their grownups; the growling and spooking and hiding and surprising in half a dozen different languages. (And thinking: isn’t that what any of us want, really, to be chased, to be wanted, to be found?)

It’s the ill-conceived dome, like a granny's topknot, that makes Dougherty’s installation (which will be at the Arboretum through the year, to experience all four of the seasons) feel like artifice, like something “brought in” instead of grown from the soil, nothing like a Goldsworthy installation, organic to the place – as ancient as it is new.

But I'll go back, and maybe it'll grow on me as the seasons change. Maybe.

Patrick Dougherty’s Xanadu
At the Morton Arboretum
4100 Illinois Route 53
Lisle, IL 60532

Patrick Dougherty’s website, Stickwork.net »

Dear Reader,

I
am speaking.
To you. Now.
This
or that
has happened. Again.
You
and I
should get together.
Maybe
we will
fall in love


Trad. Álvaro García
Aut. Tom Beckett

Found through a random series of links that originated at chi pom pom pom.

Good fix. All of it.

a tart for a tart

It seems that tart Michigan pie cherries come along only briefly and only once a season – gotta grab ‘em while you can, which I did this last weekend at our local farmer’s market. The trouble, of course, is what to do with them. Those babies are TART.

A pie comes to mind.

But truth be told: I’ve never screwed up the courage to bake a pie.

But tarts I do. So yesterday I pulled out one of my favorite cookbooks – Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking – with every intention of adapting her golden cream apple tart to the cherries, but wound up co-opting another recipe instead – this one designed for pears. Worked out just fine, although it needed a little vanilla ice cream to smooth out the edges. (Dang those cherries are tart.)

¼ cup unblanched almonds
1 large egg, lightly beaten
5 tbsp granulated sugar (you might want to dial this up, depending upon the sweetness of your fruit)
2 tbsp kirsch
¾ cup heavy cream (or crème fraîche)
da fruit (enough to fill the shell – recipe calls for 6 to 7 ripe Bartlett pears; I had two pints of cherries, pitted and picked down to considerably less by the time I was done)
1 Pâte Brisée shell, pre-baked and cooled (recipe coming up)
1 tbsp vanilla sugar

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Grind the almonds to a fine powder, and then mix in the egg, sugar, kirsch and cream.

Lay your fruit in the shell (I pitted mine the night before and let them rest in their juices into which I stirred some sugar to see if it would take the edge off. Almost.)

Slowly pour the cream filling over the top.

Bake until the filling has set and the shell is nicely browned (about 45 min – I like to bake my tarts on a small cookie sheet. Keeps things tidy.)

Sprinkle the top with the vanilla sugar while it’s still warm.

Oh right – the shell:

Pâte Brisée
1 to 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour (not unbleached)
7 tbsp unsalted butter, chilled and cut into pieces
1/8 tsp salt
3 tbsp ice water

Place flour, butter and salt in food processor and spin it until it’s coarse and crumbly.

Add ice water and pulse until it just begins to hold together (don’t let it form a ball).

Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap it in waxed paper and chill for about an hour.

Then roll it out and line your tart pan, prick the bottom with a fork, and chill for another 20 minutes.

Line with foil and weight with beans – pop it in the oven that way for 20 minutes at 375, and then another 20 minutes once you’ve removed the foil and beans.

Once it’s cooled off it’ll be ready to go (see above).


Freely adapted, all of it, from Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking

light of day

Over the weekend managed to recycle, due to the kind attentions of Vintage Tech Recyclers:

• 3 PC towers


• 2 computer monitors


• 1 laptop with docking station


• 2 keyboards

And 1 lovely motherboard, which my darlin' companion very nearly didn’t give up, even though he has no use for it, "because it's so pretty" he sighed, when I asked him why.

Best part was seeing the detritus sitting out in the sun, waiting in the parking lot for collection. So strange to see sunlight on gear like that.

gravitas

When people leave in large ways
They rarely say goodbye

Goodbyes are for distant
Reunions
Anticipated
Delivered
Brought round again by gravity
The tug
That brings a body home

The other is a deeper silence

Orbit unsettled
Twin mass displaced
Gravitation undone

there's no place like home(plate)

Reverchon - taped bat
Originally uploaded by ReyGuy.

Lazying at home this holiday 4th and catching up on my Flickr'ng. Amazed as always at the masterful work of ReyGuy out of Dallas, and really diggin' his
Reverchon Park baseball field set »

Happy Birthday, America.

for the love of a crafty girl

for the love of a crafty girl
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Sitting standby at La Guardia yesterday, this business traveler couldn't get enough of the crafty girl's beadwork to his left.

She never seemed to notice that he couldn't pull his eyes away from the careful attentions she paid to the project in her lap.

iPhone, baby.

photo.jpg
Originally uploaded by rail16photo.

Happy with my Sidekick, I was trying to avoid all the iPhone hype, but now the iPhone cameraphone shots are rolling in, and the clarity, the color... oh my.

(And y'all know what a cameraphone whore I am. Practising restraint. For now.)

cool yer brain

Because a "cooler brain is a clearer brain."

Turns out yawning works too »


As reported in Insights: Big Yawn, Cooler Brain? Researchers Say Yes in today's New York Times.

Pith helmet courtesy of Hammacher Schlemmer »

blue skies over brooklyn

Snapped this from my rental car while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway yesterday, while I was still feeling optimistic about my ability to navigate my way first to Brooklyn, and then across Lower Manhattan and finally to Secaucus, New Jersey, where I did my business this morning.

That was before my first U-turn on Delancey (cut to sign reading: "Welcome to Manhattan"; cut to me with thought bubble over my head, clutched forward over the steering wheel, thinking: This isn't Brooklyn...); and before my wide loop around Willoughby and Adelphi in (finally) Brooklyn; before my second U-turn in Little Italy (Manhattan again, dark now); before I queried the guy in the tollbooth on the NJ Turnpike for directions to the nearest gas station (where I hoped to find a map of the wastelands that are the Meadowlands) only to find the station (after my third U-turn) dark and deserted along an equally dark and deserted row of warehouses.

But there was the call to A, who googled me a map and got me out of there, and there was the sound of gurgling babies in the background, twins, just six-weeks in this world, and the memory of holding one of them, sacked out and REMing[1] in my arms, just shortly before.

The reason for going to Brooklyn, the reason for all the U-turns and turnoffs; the best reason, only reason, really, to rent a car out of La Guardia, ever. (No regrets, but next time I’m cabbing it.)



[1] What do babies dream of, anyway?

turnaround

It's pop culture commenting on pop culture commenting on itself. The question is getting the payoff on the joke -- that it's intelligent enough, smart enough, interesting enough where consumers go, 'Have I entered into "The Simpsons" or have I entered into advertising hell?'

Tim Stock, managing partner of Scenario DNA, commenting in today’s AdvertisingAge on 7-Eleven’s makeover for the month of July in which stores in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Burbank, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. New York, Lake Buena Vista, Seattle, Mountain View, Bladensburg, and Coquitlam, B.C. in Canada will become Kwik-E-Marts, featuring well-known goods from the Simpson’s series, including:

The store's frozen Slurpee beverage will be reinvented as the Kwik-E-Mart Squishee. The WooHoo! Blue Vanilla Squishees will come in 22-ounce paper cups with the fictional logo. Another surprise is that Simpsons' creator Matt Groening's Bongo Entertainment Group created a real comic book of Bart Simpson's favorite superhero, Radioactive Man, for sale during the promotion. The 32-page comic, numbered 711, will be wrapped in plastic and sell exclusively at the chain for $3.99.

And an aside: I met a fellow in Guatemala who lived in the U.S. for a while, whose happiest memories of the U.S. involved 7-Elevens. He went off at length about how they had everything, at any hour; how he loved the food, the Slurpees; how when he visited again, he brought home napkins with the logos, which he still kept safe and adored.

p.s. The transformation has already begun online »

Update: As of 25 July, the campaign has doubled store sales »

every adventure

a found poem

in this glum desert
suddenly
a specific photograph
reaches me
animates me

I animate it

that is how I must name
the attraction
which makes it exist

an animation

this is what creates every adventure



Found in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida

fine food

fine food
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Along Jackson in the Loop

Chicago, IL

sisterhood of the traveling socks

Day 177 ~ SOTTS!
Originally uploaded by ambrosialove.

2. When you get the socks, feel free to wash them...but not if you have one of those washers that eats socks. That would suck. You are not obligated to wash them before sending them to the next person.

From THE RULES of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Socks Flickr Group.

Twenty-two pairs of feet so far. Wanna see some more? (Slideshow contains judicious nudity, and some outright goofiness, just like you like it.)

ritual bloodletting, &c.

Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Narthex/equusignis is thinking (some very interesting things) about Copan »

and so it begins

  With the first experiment »