Dinner, Dessert

My winter CSA share is half over. It’s once-a-month for four months, December-March, and everything comes frozen. Winter Sun Farms in New Paltz is organizing, drawing in produce from area farms. I had the 16oz of papaya squash, grown by Evolutionary Organics in New Paltz, the last two nights. Since it came pureed, it was just a matter of thawing, heating, and seasoning (salt, pepper, a drop of maple syrup). A darker orange than the butternut, very tasty, although I may have added too much syrup the second go around. Thawing results in a separation of water from the fiber, but it all blends back together on the stove. Distribution was nine days ago, and I still have peppers, pureed tomatoes, kale, butternut squash, raspberries, and strawberry to go. Some of the other sources: Meadow View Farm, New Paltz; Stone Ridge Orchard, Stone Ridge; W. Rogowski Farm, Pine Island; Phillies Bridge Farm, Gardner; Brook Farm, New Paltz; Hepworth Farm, Milton; Taliaferro Farms, New Paltz. If I had a big freezer I could do it all myself...
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The dank basement of Cooper Union held me in it’s old school thrall, complete with blue lockers, made in Conn., regimented against the wall. I was waiting for Wollman Auditorium to empty out and the event I came for to begin. Some kind of lecture pushed up against the witching hour; it was by someone a good half century older than most of his audience, about the computer programming language C. Several students hung out afterwards getting the book signed. The audience was 98% male.

Next! I was there for a panel about New York Calling, the anthology about NYC’s rough transformation in the last quarter century, from burned-out husk to McMall. It was not a success (the panel; the book was good, thanks again CH!); there were major technical issues, it wasn't very focused, and started half an hour late. Also, Marshall Berman did not look well. The editor, whose introductory essay is the best thing in the book, Berman had trouble walking/standing and holding up his leonine head. Vaguely untrustworthly Wikip puts him at 68 years old, but he looked in his 80s. His sweater, however, enlivened the room in a grandfatherly acid-trippy way: pale purple-blue with huge sunflowers. Turn it down! I’ll always be indebted to him for cluing me into Marx’s near Shakespearian rift on the fearsome transformative powers of capital in the Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned” (his translator probably helped here). Forgotten NY's Mike Walsh was present. And this photographer of the underworld. And Margaret Morton, who has done much to make sure the homeless are not forgotten.

porcupine

Art by M.A. She says she was inspired by my mustard.

Election Special

To flip the Clash: Rudy can fail! It’ll be back to fleecing the suckers by exploiting the dead of September 11th for him, although I did hear some Floridian pine for his appointment to AG under McCain. The longing for a man on horseback runs deep in some quarters. (BTW, the pool on how long Mrs. Ghouliani #3 lasts is open for business.) Sorry to see Edwards go, though. As a person, he didn’t much appeal, but at least he spoke populist and diagnosed the class war we are so profoundly losing; that, of course, was much too much for the media pets and their masters.

Superduper Tuesday cometh: I won’t be breaking my streak of never having voted for a Clinton yet. A pox on their GOP-lite centrism, which softened up the nation for Bush. And regarding HRC specifically, don’t forget her vote for Bush’s war, a craven act of "political viability," as they call gutlessness, that tells you everything you need to know about how hard she’ll fight for you. Voting for her means approving of her refusal to stand against Bush. Gender symbolism be damned; she’s raking in more contributions from the war profiteers than the gung-ho McCain.

To vote symbolically (read: impotently), as opposed to acting politically, is to a priori surrender to the Money Power’s control over our consumerocracy, in which image and money trump democracy. (That goes double for the gibberish about the Obama group-hug that’s going to solve everything; how STUNNINGLY naïve people are! Still! But, if it has to between C and O, I’m toggling O.)

McCain, meanwhile, is a real threat to what should be a Democratic sweep this fall: this country is inordinately fond of old white men in the role of President, and he’s very successfully branded himself as a “maverick” (a bunch of baloney!), not a Stepford-Republican, so he’s not as smeared with the filth of this debased and corrupt conservative era we’re damned to be living in. Still, he is a servant of the party of plutocracy, fundamentalism, neo-confederacy, and neoconnery, and that says more than enough. Plus, four years of him saying “My friends,…”? Please. We’ve already had seven of Bush’s creepy little lisp.

A high wind in Brooklyn

The wind nearly blew me off the Promenade during my lunchtime walk. To slip the surly bounds of earth and end up bouncing off a windshield on the BQE… no thanks. A rectangle of the battleship grey metal roofing on the Pier 2 building was undulating like a flag. The surf was rolling and the harbor was flecked with whitecaps. One of the decaying wooden piers, still ghostly with the rails of old, was white-spotted with gulls hunkered down under the furious air.

And in the afternoon, the sun made my wall look like something out of Dr. Caligari's laboratory. Again. I love this orange brown glass.
You, on the other hand, have probably had your full of it.
A gallon's worth.

Courbet is coming. Next month at the Met.
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At work at the Stamford biznezplex, I noticed that the white clapboard across the water was wonderfully lit up by the setting sun. The house is mid-century, set just back from the water, brilliantly white, and the magic hour sun made it glow warmly and seductively. Then I noticed almost every other window on the side of my building had its blinds drawn. Nobody was seeing this gorgeous late afternoon light and the brief glorious interplay of colors. The building was (practically) hermetically sealed. Later, I saw that someone had pissed all over the seat in the toilet. Since I don’t think the lout was drunk at 4:30 in the office, it could be the rat-like conditions they allow themselves to toil under.

Weekend update

D'oh! I've been called for jury duty. Civil Court: a bunch of wankers suing each other! Must report on St. Valentine's Massacre Day, too.

Saw my first ruby-crowned kinglet of the year, in Prospect Park, which I managed to run into both days this weekend. This is quite early in the season, but it was a definite kinglet. They will get quite close to us. Less sure about the sighting of a Carolina wren. Probably, but not 100%. Three woodpeckers species: red-bellied, downy, and yellow-bellied sapsucker. The starlings are already mobbing the red-bellied as they plot to take over their nests. (There are geopolitical parallels I could use here...) Also, usual for this time of year: red-tailed hawk, crow, blue jay, fox sparrow, white-throated sparrow, house sparrow, mourning dove, and that gem of grey winter, the northern cardinal. The fox sparrows and more numerous white-throated sparrows toss up dead leaves on the ground, rootling about for yummy things (I mean, if you're a sparrow). They move in posses. It sounds like rain hitting the leaves.

Saturday night to BAM for Persepolis. As was the case with the book, I liked the early part best, when she's pre-adolescent. The teen angst and depression... well, less so. Dig the graphic style, though. Afterwards dinner at Chez Oscar on Dekalb, where our table was too close to the bar. Enormous Parka Man kept threaten to overrun our table with the backend of his downy filler. Later there was a handbag practically resting on the edge of the table, and I was tempted to drop in one of my spent mussel shells. Hours later, rooting around in there like a fox sparrow in the leaves, she would find it and say "what the hell is this doing here."

The cat that looks like a border collie slept on my head again.

Found volumes 3,4,& 5 of diary of Virginia Woolf on a stoop.

Ran in C on Union Street this later afternoon. She was out and about as she often is, being a gal about town. She was feeling low so I bought her home for dinner of risotto with almost everything in it. My risotto is like chicken soup for the soul. O, wait, damn, that line's already taken...

The late afternoon winter sun bounces off a neighborhood building and makes its way into my nook of an apartment through a dark glass lightly.