Not even Linus was sincere enough?

At lunch I went into Book Court to check on some titles. I turned towards the hardback non-fiction section and discovered that it was all children’s books now. Whoa! I turned around. The space reeled away before me. They have expanded tremendously into the back. When I asked the woman at the desk when it happened, she said several weeks ago. I’d popped in a week ago, and hadn’t noticed a thing.
*
With every holiday’s span of days seemingly getting longer and longer, the poor pumpkin is no match for the times. In the last several days, I’ve seen many carved pumpkins that were simply cut too soon. They’ve peaked, and fallen in on themselves before their great glory this evening. But give me even a collapsed pumpkin any day over all the incredible ugly plastic -- let’s call it what it really is -- petroleum garbage some people festoon their dwellings with.

Bring us this day our Great Pumpkin! (Actually, I kind of get the feeling the G.P.’s playing cards with Godot, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Jesus, Rabbi Schneerson, King Arthur, Dionysus, and all the rest of those characters some of us spend too entirely much time waiting for.)

Down Amity St.

There’s an unusual ship tied up down the street. A little snooping reveals that it is the BEM Monge, a French naval vessel. It’s a missile tracking ship, or as the French consulate in Boston had it, a “measure and test ship.” (Hmm, sort of smacks of nuke tests in the Pacific.) The commander, at least of a year ago, sports this moniker: Capitaine de Vaisseau Frédéric de Mauduit du Plessis.

On the helicopter landing pad astern, there are two doors. Over the port door, it says Honneur, and over the starboard door, Patrie. Lady or the tiger? Hell, if she’s French, choose the lady!

Junco

From heaven like manna comes the birdseed. More prosaically, I suspect a squirrel raiding the feeder hanging off the 5th floor balcony. Down here, a dozen house sparrows, those familiars, hop about, gleaning the windfall. Then they bolt, to the fence or beyond when a shadow, a gust of wind, a noise, intrudes their finchy -- for they are finches, you know -- hunting. To return seconds later, back at it. But wait, what’s this? A snowbird, the slate colored dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), winter’s messenger. Shooting through a window, at something that will not pause, while trying to not move myself; these pics are more impressionistic than anything else. The white belly and pink bill comes through, though, especially below.
In flight, look for the flashes of white on the sides of the tail. I'll be co-leading this Sunday’s 8 am birdwalk starting from the Audubon Center in Prospect Park.

Glassy-eyed in the morning

Ah, the innernets! I tracked down the markings on the bottom of the gallon bottles I’ve picked up at Dead Horse Bay, one a while ago and one just this past weekend. Isn’t it kind of amazing that these bottles are in one piece? Much of the beach there is made of broken glass, but a surprising number of bottles are whole. Turns out that glass is actually rather strong stuff. Somewhere in the not too distant past, the industry began to “light-weight” glass, so today’s is more fragile, but old school glass was mucho macho.
Speaking of industry, these bottles were made by Owens-Illinois (now known, in typical corporate creativity-shrinkage, as “O-I”), which is still around, and is one of the largest bottle manufacturers in the world. According to this, the 4 on the left side of the logo suggests these were made in the Brockport (it's just west of Rochester) NY plant, which started circa 1963. “4” earlier meant the Clarksburg, WV, plant but that closed in 1942 and I doubt these are that old. The number on the right is a year number, but duh, just one number? Mine are 0 and 1 (and they are different styles). That could be 1960/61 (how circa 1963 did the Brockport plant open?), 1970/71, or, hell, 2000/01. Here my research breaks down: do they still make these; if not, when did they stop? What were they used for?

The point of this one is much easier, as it’s labeled with both the content (Bromo-Seltzer) and its maker (Emerson Drug Co.) in nice raised lettering. The bottle itself: the M in a circle mark stands for the Maryland Glass Corporation of Baltimore, which seems to have lasted into the early 1970s. They specialized in cobalt blue, and it looks like they put less cobalt into the mix over time, because my Bromo glasses get lighter and lighter and lighter. And I presume that's as time advances, not the other way around, because the golden age is always behind us.....

Frights

For your Halloween viewing pleasure, may I suggest Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire movie with pre-teens, now playing at the Angelika? While I have a rule that foreign films with children in them are to be avoided like the plague (American films starring children should be avoided like the clap) for their manipulative sentimentality (has there been a good one since The Bicycle Thief?), this is quite another thing entirely. The arrival in a snowy apartment complex of a girl and her father stir things up for the twelve-year-old boy who lives next door, but I’ll tell no more. I saw it Saturday afternoon, and I haven’t gotten over it yet. Cue stomach-turning… but I mean this in a good way, c.f. the Greeks and their katharsis. The title comes from a piece of vampire lore I wasn’t aware of (others insist it wasn’t just made up for the movie): vampires, being formal types, need to be invited into the house before they will cross the threshold…

Or perhaps, if you like words like threshold, something to read, from M.R. James, the Victorian/Edwardian ghost story writer, courtesy of the good people at New York Review Books. It’s not that scary, but it is delicious.

Now, back to scariness. Isn’t it elemental morality that those who cheat, lie, and consort with the worst are the worst? You’ll know the man by the company he keeps, and his politics by how he got to power. Exhibit A: a no-brainer, Bush II. I am not sure why anybody was surprised he turned out to be such a disaster. It was all plainly visible from the git-go: the petulant spoiled brat, a former alcoholic turned on to another popular drug, fundamentalist Christianity, and carried through a succession of failures by his father’s ghastly cronies. There was a fellow who made a virtue of his ignorance and stunning lack of introspection. Exhibit B: John McCain. One look at his campaign and all the filth it is has stirred; its incompetence and desperation; the nutty anointing of Palin; above all its fundamental basis in nothing more than a blizzard of lies, tells us more than enough about what kind of horror his Presidency would spawn.

Pre-apocalyptic roasted pears

Peel, halve, and core pears. In a roasting pan, drop some pieces of butter, a sprinkling of brown sugar, and a wanton splash of brandy. My measurements are rough because I was winging it. My measurements are usually rough because I usually wing it. You can wing it too. I used the brandy I soaked last week’s golden raisins in; waste not, want not. Roll the pears around in the gooey liquid. Roast for 30 minutes or so in your standard 350 oven. (Mine was hot from roasting sweet potatoes, beets, and carrots.) Serve with crème brulee icecream (Wow, nearly half of your daily saturated fat in one scoopful! Talk about apocalyptic!). Eat, bubbeleh, eat, and savor the crashing and burning of the McPalin campaign. They’ve got their long knives out and are beginning to carve each other up. Nothing could be finer for this socialistic, pal of terrorists, elitist, un-American resident of Sodom & Gomorrah…

To Dead Horse Bay

I took my pal J.S. out there and it turned out to a perfect day for banana fish, American oystercatchers, brant geese, and general glassy weirdness on the beach. He picked up so much stuff he had to do triage twice, deciding what wouldn't make it back to the East Village today.
These are pictures of things left on the beach.
Damn, I like a good glass of Floyd!
Atlas Strong Shouldered Mason jar. Glass top. I would have bought it home, but the stuff inside was really, really disturbing: soft, thick, and white with a caramel-colored topping.
Now, I've always thought dolls were creepy...

Pumpkins

On Bergen Street. A couple of doors down, there was one in an upstairs window that had been carved with “yes we can” but that looked much better lit up at night.

A brief pause...

... from the horror, the horror. I just watched a squirrel munching on a pumpkin. The gourd was on the sidewalk, a small one, like three others on the nearby stoop. I wonder if the animal pushed it down the steps before going to town on it. The skin was bitten off in squirrel-mouth-sized bits to expose the flesh within. It looked good. I'm ready for some pumpkin pie.

Eleven More Days

How did we get here, to where the predators, pirates, and oligarchs control the state? [Maybe because we’re so stupefied by corn syrup and celebrity, cf. the actual Yahoo “headline” yesterday: Beyonce gained 12 pounds.] Bloomberg’s Putin-esque effort to maintain the control of the ruling oligarchy of developers and financiers here in the city was smoothly done. He and his toys on the City Council claim it’s an emergency, an economic crisis, by gawd! Well, it was his class that put us in this mess the first place. But back to the larger state, the US government, agent of predation.

Did you know that a while back the Bush regime invoked an obscure 1863 law to void all state antipredatory-lending laws, and to block the states from enforcing their own consumer protection laws against national banks? I didn’t. There’s just so much venality, corruption, and rank malignancy it’s impossible to keep track. I learned this in a column by the inestimable Patricia J. Williams, who goes remind us:

"For it is not merely a failure to regulate Wall Street; it's a failure to govern at all. The FDA is packed with industry insiders who seem content with the gross understaffing of inspections bureaus. Animal feed laced with melamine was imported from China, consumed here and has now entered the human food chain. Nontherapeutic experimentation with pesticides on humans has been given the nod. Pharmaceutical companies have gotten approval for drugs like Vioxx and Fen-Phen that should never have been put on the market. Efforts by farmers to do voluntary testing for mad cow disease have been blocked by the Agriculture Department. The Justice Department's civil rights division has been gutted. The FCC has hacked away at public access to the airways and OK'd obscene concentrations of media power. The Transportation Department is underfunded beyond all conscience, and the toll has been tragic: collapsed bridges, breached levees up and down the Mississippi and nearly unnavigable railroad tracks. And FEMA... well, we all remember FEMA."

NB: She doesn’t give enough attention to the Department of Justice, which has been corrupted from the top to the bottom with hacks, ideologues and cretins who’s only is loyalty to Bush.

Williams ends, after noting the racist blaming of poor black people for the financial crisis:

"If we must look for figureheads, allow me to nominate George Herbert Walker IV, who just happens to be George W. Bush's second cousin. He also happens to be Lehman Brothers' investment management director, who, just before the firm's collapse, dismissed a suggestion from the asset management firm Neuberger Berman that top executives forgo their multimillion-dollar bonuses so as to "send a strong message...that management is not shirking accountability for recent performance." Walker actually apologized that the very notion had been circulated: "Sorry team. I am not sure what's in the water at Neuberger Berman. I'm embarrassed and I apologize."

And people wonder why the French Revolution happened.

Twelve More Days

Watching the miserable, disgusting, and shameless efforts of John McCain and Sarah Palin to win or steal the election, it’s really quite hard to imagine that the Republican Party was born of the Free Soil movement before the Civil War. That’s where the oft-repeated “Party of Lincoln” line comes from, but, this February being ol’ Abe’s bicentennial birthday, it’s pretty damn clear they’ve gone a long, long way from there, baby! Sure, in their otherwise lily-white conventions and neo-know-nothing nativist rallies, you’ll find a handful of African Americans who remain loyal to a great tradition, as if the GOP never morphed into the Southern Democrats in the toxic days of Dick Nixon, but they’re fantasists.

You’ll remember that the old Democrats were anchored by the “Solid South,” a place where the Party of Lincoln couldn’t get one of its own elected to dog-catcher during the century of American apartheid. The Southern Bourbons, as the rentier and industrialist elites were called, were represented in the Congress by Old Bulls like Stennis, Bilbo, & Russell, and were a permanent drag on the advance of liberalism and progress, a poisonous wrench in the New Deal (making sure southern blacks were kept out of safety net programs, for instance), and a dead head in the Senate until that slippery fox LBJ shafted them, bless his West Texas hill country heart.

But frankly, casting off these gargoyles also took the guts out of the Democrats. I’ve been voting for President since 1984, so I remember how Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, & Kerry all ran from liberalism, how they were all so mealy-mouthed and gutless (barring the horndog Clinton, who thought the way to win was to become a softer Republican, but even that wouldn’t have worked if Ross Perot hadn’t siphoned off enough of the reactionary white populists from Poppy Bush), hapless under the brutal sandbagging of the GOP thugs, fratboy brownshirts, & rat-fuckers. They’d forgotten what LBJ, JFK and FDR all knew: politics is a nasty struggle for very real goals. The massive transfer of wealth to a tiny elite, as anti-democratic as you can get, was one of those goals the winners ran with. Most of us can see the results of that corruption and looting now, although ideology still blinds millions of fools and tools to their masters. The assault on the Constitution that begun under Nixon blossomed a generation later as Cheney (who sharpened his baby-teeth under Nixon) ran his own secretive co-presidency. It’s nearly unending, the disasters of the Republicans have wrought.

Now, I’m no partisan for the Democrats, who have aided and abetted and enabled, serving as they do the same corporate masters. But the Republicans have debased the nation, called upon its worst impulses, betrayed its promises, and been such colossal hypocrites they must be smashed this November. Hose out the shit and slime from the Augean stables, even the so-called moderates. Hurl them from Congress, the statehouses, and the White House. Many deserve incarceration. Their leaders, and their lawyers, deserve international war crimes trials. I know that won’t happen, but at the least we must sweep them from power in an enormous mandate.

I believe that the election’s going to very close, even though more and more people are simply appalled by the ghastliness of the McPalin, and that under-30s, Hispanics, and African Americans are going to vote in record numbers, and a majority of them are voting Obama. But these votes must surpass the GOP’s tens of millions of white zombies, and their party’s desperate effort to steal the election any way they can, as they did in 2000, when the Democrats, winners of the popular vote, surrendered (and then blamed Ralph Nader!). I hope that the psychos and nutcases screaming “kill him” and “off with his head” and “terrorist,” that engage in the most disgusting racist acts, that claim we’re un-American (Jon Stewart nicely riposted Palin on this when he said, “fuck you”), finally, finally, finally show America that a hateful, lunatic fringe lurks in the GOP’s malignant heart. We’ve got to put a stake through it once and for all.

Commonplaces

Devoe pears.

I note that it's been ten years since I started my commonplace book. It's still in the same 100 page composition book, so I've been frugal. Here are some recent entries:

"One world at a time." Thoreau on his deathbed, when a local divine asked him if he could see Paradise.

"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Kafka

"We are lovers of beauty and economy." Pericles

"The cat is an anarchist, while the dog is a socialist. He is an aristocratic, tyrannical anarchist, at that." Carl Van Vechten

"It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." Thelonious Monk

"Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies." Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot

"Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Flaubert

"[It] grows like a tree -- more beautiful the older it becomes." Derek Jarman

"It took all winter to get through summer." Tom Petty (possibly misheard)

"And his idealism was tempered with a deep pessimism, or rather, lucidity about the nature of humanity." J.V. Halperin on Felix Feneon

"If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear." J.L. Borges to 5-year old nephew

Cook these with tomatoes and garlic and time.

Essential reading

Michael Pollan on the food system.

Air, water, carbon, nitrogen

I’m composting this year in the hope that I'll have a bin full of rich material come spring for the Sharecropper, who will be using my backyard for her mad science art experiment. I purchased this metal bin for $20 from the Lower East Side Ecology Center at the Union Square Farmers’ Market. (There’s a wonderfully blunt Nordic fraulein there most every market day.)
Strapped onto wheels, the bin followed me home downtown and over the less-well-traveled Manhattan Bridge. I’ve been waiting for a windfall of leaves to lay down the base of “brown” material. But, getting impatient to start, I threw in a shredded Village Voice and things gleaned from the backyard.
My plan was to liberate one of those big paper leaf bags once the neighbors start stuffing them, as I have no trees of my own. Sanitation doesn’t consider that theft, do they? Anyway, after a bunch of drinks on Friday night, I saw one about two blocks from home and hefted it over the shoulder. Oof! So in go the leaves. And some old coffee grounds, carrot tops, and a few still-green scraps from my pots... plus water, and air.

In the kitchen

The heat was turned on for the first time this fall on Saturday morning. White-throated sparrows and dark eyed juncos, winter birds, are out and about at Fort Tilden. The sun isn’t rising until after 7. I’m up to my armpits in apples.

Apples and pears are piling up from my weekly fruit share. My usual response is an apple crisp a la Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, but last week I made an apple/pear sauce that was pretty good. However, that only used up half of the apples I got two weeks ago. So yesterday it was an apple sauce cake. The apples were all Cortlands, a fair eating and better baking variety, with the skins on, which is the way I always make my apple sauce. To seven apples, I added a sprinkle of brown sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, a little water, and a splash of bourbon. The skins don’t dissolve like the flesh, so I put it all through the blender. I think it's the best applesauce I’ve ever made. Two cups of this went into the cake, which required the assistance of OHS, a genius for creaming butter and sugar. We followed the Silver Palate cookbook recipe, only plumping the golden raisins in brandy for extra yum.

By the way, what is Trader Vic’s I mean, Joe's, anyway? Supermarket? Warehouse? Specialty store? The one that opened a couple of weeks ago on Court and Atlantic has been a madhouse since, but I have to say, after three explorations, it doesn’t do squat for me. They didn’t have cocoa (“we’ll have it for the holidays”); they didn’t have baking soda (“I think we used to have it”); they didn’t ground lamb (admittedly, not a staple); and they didn’t have a coffee grinder, which left OHS gnashing her teeth.

On the beach

Big, big tire. Yeah, but you should have seen the one that got away. It's cool the way these rocks are smoothed by the endless sea.
These flowers were wafting a wonderful perfume fifty yards downwind along the beach. It was quite amazing. Someone was grilling steak, too, and the smell alternated with the perfume. Also, some Orthodox kids were playing hoops and yelling “fuck you” to each other.

If you don’t find a coconut along our Atlantic shore, then you haven’t had a good beachcombing day.
Kinda looks like this cormorant shouldn't have been smoking.... There were about a half dozen dead birds along the shore, mostly gulls, which is normal. But one of them seemed to be a headless chicken, which was weird and probably ritualistic.

More Weekend Mementos

Fort Tilden and Jacob Riis.At places, there was no beach to pass by, so big and wide were the waves.
The little ones are sanderlings, the big guy on the right is a black-bellied plover.
The public bathrooms at Jacob Riis beach. I mean, when was the last time you thought toilet architecture was pleasant?
Gil Hodges Bridge back to Brooklyn. Little bit of pain to get here, taking the 2 train to Brooklyn College Flatbush Ave, it's last stop, then continuing down Flatbush on the Q35, but it only takes an hour.

Weekend Mementos continued

When I used the word memento in the title below, I thought I'd cleverly post the weekend updates in reverse order, Friday first, but the best laid plans of mice and bloggers being what they are....

An intrepid Adventuress took these photos of the Mend opening Friday night.I think the wine had run out by this point.
The lost medicine cabinet.

Weekend Mementos

In Green-Wood.City of the dead, city of the living.We saw entirely too many several pint-sized tombstones and memorials for “Georgie.” George must have been a popular boy’s name.
Lily keel-up. Remember when we saw all this at the same pond?
I like the way the cobwebs have taken to her hair.
Open up this one up to see the remains of the insect this dragonfly is eating.
The bear. For a man named Beard, an American Artist I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard of.

End of the week...

Stopped at the Dessert Truck at 3rd & St. Marks the other night. Had their “molten chocolate cake,” which turned out to be really hot chocolate pudding. A molten chocolate cake has a cakey outer layer and a pudding inner because it’s not cooked all the way through, but I digress. DT’s misnamed affair was pretty good for $5, but it started to wear me down with its unctuousness. Should have been served with ice cream or cold cream to cut it down.

The other day, I plucked a dozen grape tomatoes from my plant, thinking they would be the last harvest of the year, but there’s a clump of greenies still hanging on.

Strange how some weird substances prove so vital to civilizations. Spermaceti. Guano. Kelp. Kelp? Kelp in this sense is seaweed burned down to ash. From the 1700s the soda and potash extracted from the ash was used to bleach linen, and make saltpeter, glass, and soap. In the 19th century, iodine was taken from the ash for medical purposes. Today, by the way, Irish moss, carrageen, is the seaweed used as a thickener in crappy ice cream, paint, and cosmetics.

I came across the Age of Kelp, completely unknown to me, in Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. Walking around the island, literally, this sturdy beachcomber tells the story of the limestone island’s rock, and in doing so, tells the story of the surviving Irish place names, and, of course, the people who gave those names.

Speaking of names, are you out of your chair laughing your ass off yet over FlyLie Boy McBush’s “Joe the plumber” routine? Turns out the guy isn’t named Joe, isn’t a licensed plumber, and doesn’t make that much money. Senile Uncle Ronny summed up their strategy best: “facts are stupid things.” But enough with lying assholes in the White House, already!

Moxie!

Some last random shots of last weekend's trip to the Far Away Island. This bottle of Moxie Nerve Food has been on the top of the bookcase forever.

A "quarterboard," an old way of naming ships now put onto houses.

New cedar shingles with old scythe handle.

A well-weathered figurehead.

Cat Tales

Behold his profile, Roman in nobility. The family cat, Albert, named after Walt Kelly’s alligator (see bonus copyright infringement below), is nearing the end of his reign. Sic transit gloria cattus! A lean mean muscle machine in his prime, Albert was a bone-crunching wildlife devourer. In retirement now, he’s a grizzled old coot, deaf, dreadlocked, and listing ever so slightly to the side. On the plus side, he no longer bites people.
About two months ago, this guy, a rather similar looking tomcat, showed up outside the house. He’s in very good shape, Cat Two, aka Drooly, but clearly starved for affection. He may have been abandoned or lost at the end-of-summer migration, when tens of thousands leave the island. Or he could just be freeloading, knowing my dad’s a soft touch. My dad tried to get Animal Control to take the cat away, but locally they send police officers for that, and, ahem, that didn’t work. As my dad tells it, the cat went into the trap, ate the bait, and then skillfully retreated backwards without setting off the trap. Funny thing, there’s a lot more crime on the island now…
The set-up seems obvious, destined almost. I’ll come back for a visit. Albert will have gone to join the Feline Choir Invisible, and Cat Two will have the run of the house. I wonder if he eats crickets?

Spooning

Friday, the day OHS and I arrived at the “family compound,” there was, as is usually the case, nothing much to eat in the house. So I made pasta with honorary Paul Newman sauce and added one of the old man’s few basics, tinned anchovies wrapped around capers.

Saturday, we went shopping, and then roasted a chicken and sweet potatoes, which we ate with glazed carrots. Sunday, my father’s birthday, friends had us over for vegetarian quiches, salad, and orange cake. When two of the other guests started praising McPalin, I left the room so I wouldn’t have to hurt the mo'fos.

On Monday, I made Sicilian meatloaf and mashed potatoes. OHS, who usually handled the all-important vodka tonic department, made chocolate chip cookies from scratch. Since we were having Elvira and Farney (people not likely to praise crypto-fascist yahoos from Alaska) over, my dad wanted the good silver and china out. Turns out there’s also a bag of miscellaneous silverware that included these spoons: my mother got them when she worked in Iraq for the State Department in the 1950s. (After she married, she could no longer work for State, since married woman weren’t supposed to have jobs in those days, o tempora o mores!.)
Crude but effective designs, I think.

The City Transformed

Attended the first of eight lectures by architectural historian Barry Lewis last night at the Cooper Union. The series is called The City Transformed, and last night he raced from the Dutch founding to the 1830s. Excellent stuff! Should be required for citizenship in NYC. I was reminded of Timothy “Speed” Levitch, tour-guide star of the doc The Cruise, which, if this were Paris, would play every day in some theater here in the city forever.

Mend

On Friday, Proteus Gowanus is opening “Mend.” The interdisciplinary exhibit will run into the new year. PG’s collection of exhibits, readings, objects, and performances are always interesting, and this season, the Brooklyn Bachelor has a piece on display....

For those of you who are true culture vultures, the reception on Friday night is 6-9pm. Proteus is at 543 Union Street, with an alleyway in the back, off Nevins, by the banks of the beautiful but deadly Gowanus Canal. Personally, I don’t much like gallery openings, but I’ll be there to have some mending done; Annette Tacconelli will be hand-sewing in the alley.

Over the weekend

I went up to the Far Away Island for my father’s 84th birthday.