Margaret Atwood had a great op-ed piece in Wed NYT (yes, I’m just getting around to reading wednesday’s paper on friday AM. It’s been a rough week.) “A Matter of Life and Debt.”  Here’s a snippet:

[W]e’re deluding ourselves if we assume that we can recover from the crisis of 2008 so quickly and easily simply by watching the Dow creep upward. The wounds go deeper than that. To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.

If you’re interested, read the whole piece. It’s not too long.

Recently Eileen and I watched the DVD “My Son the Fanatic.”

The screenwriter is Hanif Kureishi who is also an English novelist of note. He has been writing novels and screenplays for quite a while. One of his subjects is the relationship between the English cultures and the Indian cultures as typified by interesting human characters. The idea of immigrants versus natives (whatever the fuck that means) is a controversial topic in many parts of the world and Kureishi has been using this idea as a foil for narrative for a while. I think he can write sentences, dialogue and tell a story. I am reading his first novel, “The Buddha of Suburbia” [1991] and he seems to see English life through a lense similar to my hero Anthony Burgess.

I also have been turning to the short stories of Irvine Welsh in his “the acid house” as an antidote to too much phoniness and mediocrity in my immediate experience. It helps. 

And then there was this in Maureen Dowd’s wed op-ed about Colin Powell’s recent expression of sanity:

He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not McCain, had said: “ ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also received more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him “unconstitutional and unbiblical” for daring to support a socialist. He got a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was reading a book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.

“Holy cow!” Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was a reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and hosts a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is “The Post-American World.”

from Moved by Crescent by Maureen Dowd

Skipped blogging yesterday. I am dealing with some pretty classic horrific caregiver stuff with my father. Takes some time to process. Also met with a staff person from church yesterday.  I talked to her briefly about family systems, especially in relation to church work. She said she was going to read Friedman’s “Generation to Generation” which happen to be laying around at church. 

If you’re curious about this man, I found a transcription of one of his lectures which starts with the fable about the scavenger fish who lost her taste for shit. Recommended. 

Spent much of the day yesterday sorting and copying my CD collection to my spare hard drive. I find it satisfying to group the recordings under the composer, especially when multiple composers are found on one CD. I have a ton of old BBC recordings which are essentially fascinating anthologies. I file my CDs under composer and often I have to choose which composer to file it under. The way I am approaching ripping will make recordings much more accessible to me. And it’s kind of fun. Big project, actually.

My brother called last night and said he is coming for a three day visit. It’s a good time, because we might be looking at readjusting my parents living situation, getting Dad into 24 hour care and Mom into a smaller apartment. 

My wife brought home a book I interlibrary loaned last night, “Consiousness Explained” by Daniel C. Dennett.

I ran across this title in the comment section of the introduction to “The Third Culture” by John Brockman. The commenter was Roger Schank:

 I’m on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and one of the things that went on a year or two ago was this discussion of who was going to be taking care of the encyclopedia in the future, and what would be in it. The board, who are all these literary types, decided it would let computer people in, because the world was getting to be computerized. And Clifton Fadiman said that he supposed we’d have to resign ourselves to the fact that minds less educated than ours would soon be in charge of Encyclopedia Britannica. I said, “Hey! How did you decide that I’m less educated than you are?” And he actually got out of it — he said, “Oh, I didn’t mean you! You’re a very phenomenal and unusual computer scientist.”

But I’m not a phenomenal and unusual computer scientist at all. What’s interesting about such people in the literary world is that they somehow think that if you don’t know the classics you’re uneducated, whereas it’s O.K. for them not to know beans about science. And I don’t understand why that’s O.K.

We’re living in a world in which no one can be an expert on everything; there’s too much to know. So the idea of being very broad is no longer an appropriate model — everyone’s going to have limitations. Somehow, we’ve set out these limitations. The ultimate one — the one society cannot put up with — is that you don’t know the classics. Mortimer Adler, the head of the Britannica editorial board, says the same thing. We’ve argued a lot about the “great books.” He’s had a list of the great books printed; they’re very interesting books, but the fact of the matter is that they leave out almost all of what we’ve learned in the last hundred years.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about consciousness. I’m interested in this subject now, and I want to find out as much as I can about it. And finding these things, written by many different authors, has been easy for me because of an index Adler has put together called The Syntopicon. I’ve been able to find remarks on the subject by Thomas Aquinas and Montaigne and Aristotle — the authors Adler has listed under “consciousness.” These people have a vague hand-waving notion of what consciousness is about, with a religious tinge to it. Their work wouldn’t fly at all in modern academics. Yet we’re being told that if you haven’t read them you aren’t educated. Well, I’m reading them, but I’m not learning much from them. What I’m learning is that people have struggled with these ideas for the last two thousand years and haven’t been all that clever about it a lot of the time. Now, with the computer metaphor, and a different way of looking at the idea of consciousness, we have entirely different and new and interesting things to say, and yet the Clifton Fadimans of the world wouldn’t read what we have to say. I’m willing to bet he didn’t read Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, for example — but it’s O.K., he’s still educated. 

Read the first forty pages last night and it blew me away. Dennett is seeking to explain mind without the classical dualist mind/body or mind/brain metaphor. He writes a clear readable prose about interesting difficult ideas. 

I also read a bit more in my ongoing project, “The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K.Chesterton” by Alzina Stone Dale. I listen to Librivox recordings of Chesterton works at night to soothe and lull me to sleep. I used to think of him as mostly the author of the Father Brown Mysteries. But in the last year I have listened to many of his other works including “The Man Who Was Thursday,” “A Short History of England,” and “Heretics.” 

I found out yesterday that Kafka had read much Chesterton and was apparently influenced by him. Also I ran across his book, “The Ball and The Cross,” which seems to be a sci-fi work. Chesterton knew Wells. I read a bit on Gutenbergy and it put me in mind of a cross between Verne and Wells. 

In the last few days, I have tentatively picked up my guitar again. My guitar compositions are really my personal therapy. Interesting how I will lay off guitar for months at a time, then pick it back up. Fortunately my guitar skills keep returning pretty quickly. And of course I keep playing piano (Mozart, Schubert, and Joplin yesterday) and reading.

I got nothing in that spent yesterday in the gray area of numb.

I did the usual reading and practicing. But by evening I felt that I had not really done anything and didn’t feel like it had been a day off, more like the first day of a needed vacation. 

The good news is that I just checked my calendar and there’s not much on for today. I plan to try to coax my father into attending day care to give my mom some time off. This probably won’t work. But speaking of caretaking, the NYT New Old Age Blog has an interesting entry today: “10 Things to Know About Assisted Living.”

I liked this:

The goal of medical care for the elderly, in Dr. Woodson’s view and the view of every geriatrician I’ve ever interviewed, is to make day-to-day life more comfortable, not to cure illness or extend longevity…

“Why draw a map to someplace we know we’re not going?” Dr. Woodson asked.

Speaking of articles in the news, for you people who still like books:”Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs” by Simon Romero. Columbian primary school teacher Luis Soriano has a “Biblioburro” instead of a bookmobile.  Thank God there are people like him in the world.

And don’t forget bubblewrap.

If you are in the 5th or 8th grade or you know someone who is, take a look at this contest to win 10K with a clever idea about how to use bubble wrap in an invention. Details here.

Doing a little online reading this morning. Here’s what I found.

First, a little reminder about how the government is set up from one of the Supreme Court’s conservatives.

The Declaration of Independence sets out the basic underlying principle of our Constitution. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . .”

The framers structured the Constitution to assure that our national government be by the consent of the people. To do this, they limited its powers. The national government was to be strong enough to protect us from each other and from foreign enemies, but not so strong as to tyrannize us. So, the framers structured the Constitution to limit the powers of the national government. Its powers were specifically enumerated; it was divided into three co-equal branches; and the powers not given to the national government remained with the states and the people. The relationship between the two political branches (the executive and the legislative) was to be somewhat contentious providing checks and balances, while frequent elections would assure some measure of accountability. And, the often divergent interests of the states and the national government provided further protection of liberty behind the shield of federalism. The third branch, and least dangerous branch, was not similarly constrained or hobbled.

“How to Read the Constitution” excerpt from a recent speech by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas posted in WSJ.com

Then, I find myself in surprising agreement with part of the underlying ideas Detroit News writer Nolan Finley writes in “America Should Follow LIttle Red Hen.” I can sense both his Justice Thomas’s points of view that I don’t agree with (Thomas doesn’t see his own bias and Finley is using wisdom to beat up people he disagrees with). But the Little Red Hen story is one that is often in the back of my mind when I work with volunteer singers who would prefer to skip rehearsal and show at performance or just drop in for Christmas singing and skip the commitment the rest of the year.

Here’s a snippet from Finley 

She planted the wheat and ground the flour and baked the bread and felt no obligation to break off a piece for the shiftless sheep or do-nothing donkey — unless she wanted to. She was my kind of chick.

But she doesn’t fit into an America that increasingly questions the fairness of one person having more than another, without weighing sweat or skill.

In the hen’s world, if you produced, you ate; if you were able to and didn’t, you went hungry.

Why is that too sinister a concept to teach tykes today?

And last but not least Clarence Page asks 

[Did] anyone in McCain’s campaign bothered to check Joe’s background before McCain used him as a debate foil — and [it makes one wonder] whether Joe might have been vetted by the same genius who vetted Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be McCain’s running mate.

Page is a columnist I admire quite a bit. His entire article, “What Joe Plumber Doesn’t Know,” is on Real Clear Politics. If you don’t know Real Clear Politics and you are following US Politics you might want to check it out. I think it’s great!

Reading in “Listening to Music or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin” by Theodore Gracyk.

I am reminded of my flirtation with aesthetics and philosophy a decade or so ago. I have sworn off this kind of thing for the most part. But I am still interested in the conversation around the music that interests me. So I’m still giving this book a chance before I stop reading it. 

I came across an interesting passage in it recently. First Gracyk mentions John Prine’s song, “Angel from Montgomery,” in which the lyrics speak from the point of view of an old woman. He uses it as an example of how songs work. That is they do not need to be written from the point of view of personal expression or experience.  Then Gracyk quotes David Cantwell about singing:

“Insistence upon a singer’s ‘authenticity’ is commonplace today, but it misunderstands how art works. It especially underestimates the art of the singer. Art is artifiicial, it’s human-made, and even art that is what we call realistic is capturing not what is real but an illusion of the real …. When we demand authenticity of what is essentially inauthentic, we disrespect the singer’s art.” David Cantwell, “Sammi Smith: The Art of Inauthenticity” Oxford American 50 (summer 2005) 114

I have a strong intuitive and rationale objection to the use of solo material in liturgy. I except the use of cantor. I have said that the singer culturally is one who assumes the spotlight to tell a story. I think this is as true of Paul Simon as it is of Schubert lieder. I happen to love both of these writers, but I still try to limit liturgical music to congregational and choral for the most part. Cantwell and Gracyk seem to be talking about something else about the nature of the solo song.

I love the idea that Cantwell is writing in the magazine, “Oxford American,” about Sammi Smith (whom I do not recognize but am instantly a bit curious about.)

Anyway, the idea that solo music creates illusion and is maybe at its most effective when it springs from craft, art and inspiration rather than just personal feelings and experience seems to reinforce my predilection to minimize the use of the solo voice in the area of “the public work of the people” (i.e. liturgy).

Pages later Gracyk delightfully uses The Big Lebowski (!) to illustrate a point about aesthetics, namely that the idea of aesthetic judgement includes not only art but humor and even carpets. (Believe it or not, Kant the philosopher mentions carpets as just such an example:

“Why, Lebowski is asked several times, is he making such a fuss about a rug? Because, he patiently explains, ‘it really ties the room together.’

In the context of the movie, this line is hilarious. It is not funny that a rug should tie a room together. What’s funny is that we don’t expect this character … to have an aesthetic sensibility.

This example illustrates an important point, and it does so in two distinct ways. First, the line is not instrinsically funny, The line is made funny by the particular situation. Second it remindsx us that ruges really do ‘tie’ rooms together.” 

I love it that Gracyk uses Lebowski to make the point that sometimes art is not instrinically valuable in it of itself, but needs context. 

I picked up “The Army of the Republic” by Stuart Archer Cohen last night. I am about half way through this indulgence read. It’s a pretty thinly disguised tract on how screwed up our country is right now. The characters seem thinly drawn. But I came across a scary passage that seemed to be illustrating ideas from another book I read recently, “Mostly True” by Farhad Manjoo.

In Cohen’s novel, the bad guy hires a PR corporation to help his company deal with bad publicity. The corporation is a below the radar group that manipulates public opinion in ways that are far from ethical. I think it’s a fictionalized portrait of a real-life company called DCI.

Manjoo describes this influential lobbying and public relations firm as one that deliberately stays hidden from public scrutiny. It’s made up of Thomas Synhorst, who worked for years as an aide to Republican senators Charles Grassley and Bob Dole, was a part-time field coordinator for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco company and was responsibile for conducting the company’s smokers’ rights operations in the Midwest (which Manjoo described earlier in detail) Douglas Goodyear a former exec at Walt Klein and Associates, a PR and marketing company in Denver that worked closely with RJR on many projects and Timothy Hyde an RJR in-house public affairs chief in volved in virtually all its campaigns including the infamous GGOOB project (Get Government Off Our Backs…. in which RJR kept its involement secret as possible.

Manjoo cites some other DCIs projects.

Microsoft hired them in the late 90s when the government was trying to break it up over antitrust charges…. helped MS found at least one pro-MS industry group, Americans for Technology Leadership, these efforts have not been documented due to DCI’s low profile. But an ATLs executive director was also an employ of DCI.

DCI covertly published a science mag called TEch Central Station, edited by the former journalist James Glassman. This mag was anti-regulation. Glassman denies the connection despite many connections enumerated by Manjoo.

Manjoo devotes pages to other activities of this group including a YouTube response to Gore’s an Inconvenient truth purportedly by  someone going by the handle “toutsmith.” “Toutsmith”‘s email came from a computer at DCI. 

Google has hired DCI at points.

Anyway.

You get the picture.

If you’re still reading, here are a couple of bracing quotes from “The Army of the Republic” that I like:

“Voting in this country is like going to the theater to watch the worst actors in the world, and then applauding them like they’re fucking De Niro!” p. 189

This is about a guy from the DCI clone:

“Now he went into a critique of our previous efforts, pointing to charts he’d had made of our expenditures and the media we’d used. Our cummunications had been print-heavy and too filled with facts and figures. ‘That’s all thinker stuff. You want to influence thinkers? Fund some studies. Form an industry think tank and have hem issue press releases. That sort of presence helps create a reality among thinkers, and we’ll do that. But be clear: Our real job is not to make people think. It’s to help the broad majority of the general public feel that your company is a positive part of their community. When we rebrand Water Solutions as a fair and reliable caretaker4 of water supplies, your opponents will come to be seen as the goofy fringe elements that they are. And at that point, people will stop opposing you and move on.’ “

Get it? Truthiness.

:

 “Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech” By Frank Schirrmacher

German publisher and journalist takes his fellow Europeans to task for their lack of vision and understanding and in the process names many fascinating people and describes their ideas and creations. Recommended.

“Reduced to its skin and bones.” The new reality just over the horizon will have as much in common with Windows as a monitor does with a windowpane. What then? “To grasp the scale of this revolution, think of the everyday things,” recommends Hillis. Unlike Myhrvold, he is not yet a billionaire and is founding a new company: “Think of visits to administrative offices, schools, universities, libraries or doctors. In a few decades, all these things will no longer be as we now know them.”

Linda Greenhouse is the New York Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court.  She will be interviewed today on Fresh Air by Terry Gross.

I just wrote a long post about my experience at a funeral yesterday and then decided it was probably inappropriate for a public posting.

After the funeral, I came home drained and confused. The funeral went fine. I am still processing the event and my reaction to it. Church makes me crazy.
It was a huge affair. People were packed in the pews and also sat in the choir area. There were chairs in the next room with a big flat screen video of the altar area. This area was not full but there were people there. The gathering sang so well I had difficulty keeping up with them with the little organ.
The closing hymn was “For All the Saints.” All 8 stanzas. People sang their hearts out.

They buried the ashes of the deceased in the small garden on the grounds of the church. I think that’s pretty cool.

I have been practicing a jig by Alice Parker for the organ all week. I thought it was scheduled for my prelude this morning. But, when I checked the bulletin yesterday I found I had my weeks confused. This is good. One more week to prepare the Parker.

This is Alice Parker. She is wonderful. She has written a ton of choral music as well as organ music.

Interestingly enough today’s postlude is “Canzon on Martin Menoit” by Andrea Gabrielli “Martin Menoit” is a choral piece by Clement Janequin. I was checking out the meaning of the original tune and found this info at the website of the Ottawa Chamber Music Society:

“… in Janequin’s narrative Martin menoit, Martin’s amorous interlude on the way to market is interrupted at the moment of truth when the pig, tied to his lover’s leg for safekeeping, understandably takes fright.”

I circumspectly changed the title in the bulletin to Canzon on a theme by Janequin. Heh. It’s a great piece.

And Gabrielli has also written a Ricercare on the same theme. What a guy. (That’s actually the composer Hassler in the picture but I still think it’s kind of a cool pic).

My prelude today is “Meditation” by Barry Cabena, am Australian composer. (For some reason I always thought he was Canadian but poking around on the web this morning taught me differently.)

I told Mark this week that I felt a bit like Father Mackenzie in Eleanor Rigby “…. writing the words to a sermon that no one will hear… no one comes near…” except I’m practicing the notes to a prelude and postlude no one will hear…. heh….

This afternoon my church community is burying a woman who was a pillar of the community. I am playing for that also.

Since coming back from Fenton, I seem to be playing a lot of John Adams for some reason.

Specifically, Phrygian Gates by him. The score is just about 60 pages long. It has no movement designations that I have been able to find. But I am noticing that there are some places that feel a bit like movement ends. This is handy because since it’s John Adams it’s a bit, how shall I say?, repetitive and actually a bit on the tricky side for me to learn. So sections are helpful not only for learning but maybe for excerpting on the street (which is where I would like to play this piece…. specifically in the park).

Also have been doing a bit of cooking.

Went to the Farmer’s Market yesterday and bought

cherries,

blueberries, bib lettuce (not pictured) and

broccoli.

Yesterday I made

a ricotta cheese pie, banana bread and braised the broccoli in olive oil that had been seasoned by cooking garlic and ginger in it.

The broccoli worked. The banana bread was soft in the middle.

I used two recipes for the ricotta cheese pie.

For the crust, I used my Italian Time/Life book I have been perusing. I used a spring form pan. The crust is great!

For the filling I improvised a bit using a recipe I found online. It called for 2 lbs of ricotta cheese and I only had under one. I supplemented with about a half pound of whole milk yogurt. Basically to make the filling you beat egg whites (I used my whisk instead of the electric mixer. It’s much more fun whisking.) and then mix together the cheese, yogurt, sugar, flour, egg yolks, orange and lemon zest, almond extract, vanilla and a bit of lemon juice. Fold in the beaten whites and bake.

I cooled it overnight and cut a piece this morning. It fell in the middle and is also a bit gooey in the middle. Probably needed more time in the oven. But what is done is pretty good.

Miranda July has a very clever web site for her new book (“No one belongs here more than you”) on which she makes every frame a photo of her writing on her fridge and stove.

I have been out of town this week.

Monday I drove over to Ann Arbor, met my brother Mark and spent a couple hours at Encore Records. Although this is a used CD and record store, they keep boxes of sheet music in the back. I purchased a bunch of music books there. (Tom Lehrer, Dave Matthews, Van Morrison, Chet Atkins, Buffalo Springfield, Steve Cropper).

Mark and I had a delightful reunion with my old friends Dave Barber and Paul Wizynajtis at the excellent vegetarian restaurant, Seva’s. I haven’t seen them for something like 25 years. Even though we all are a bit grayer and plumper, it felt so familiar to sit around a table with them and talk. What a pleasure!

After this Mark and I drove up for a few days at my parent’s house in Fenton. We spent the time chatting and doing little chores around the house for them. Mark’s project was working toward getting them setup with a cable internet connection.

It never fails to amaze me how my Mom keeps on plunging in to the internet. She is way past dialup and will enjoy the heck out of a better connection.

I took advantage of the fact that Fenton has the wonderful little restaurant and bakery, The French Laundry and drove over there each morning for coffee, paper and amazing sweets.

Unfortunately, when we ate there as a family on Tuesday my Mom took a bad fall on the cement and we ended up at her doctor’s office. After an xray and cat scan, it seems that she is basically bruised but okay.

Mark’s wife, Leigh, joined us for the day on Wednesday and we all pitched in and did stuff around the house like mess with drapes, install smoke alarms and other stuff.

Of course there were complications with the cable people and it’s going to take a couple more visits before Mom and Dad get up and running with cable Internet connection, but it is coming.

On Thursday, Mark and I said goodby to the folks and once again drove down to Ann Arbor and hit the book stores.

For some reason (out of practice?) I was pretty overwhelmed by browsing at Dawntreader (David’s was closed). I picked up an autobio of Oscar Peterson, “Reading Jazz” an anthology, Concerto Conversations by Joseph Kerman. Mark recommended “The Ancient Historians” by Michael Grant.

Arrived back in Holland last night, tired but satisfied.

I love LibriVox. Free audiobooks read by people like me and you. Mostly the readers are very good. Here are links to a few.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois

History of the Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides

Part I “A Different Understanding with the President” by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker.

Some fascinating stuff in this first of four articles.

Cheney flunked out of Yale.
His secret order signed by the President stripping foreign terrorist suspects of any access to court and allowing them to be held indefinitely provoked Colin Powell to ask, “What the hell just happened?”
There is a link to the notes taken by  James Baker in 1980 when Cheney gave him a bunch of advice on how to be a good White House Chief of Staff. Advice that Cheney has routinely ignored as “surrogate chief of staff” (This is specifically how Dan Quayle describes him in this article.)

Still reading this, but thought I would put up a link here.

Bought real espresso coffee from Lemonjellos yesterday.

Came home and experimented with it. I was making shots of espresso. First was was satisfyingly strong but I wondered if I could use less coffee. I used 1 teaspoon on the second shot. Mmmm. Pretty weak. How about 2 teaspoons? Better. Hey why is my hand shaking. Oh, yeah. It’s probably not a good idea to sit here and drink shot after shot of espresso. Silly me.

Continuing on my Italian cooking adventure, I made Noodles Alfredo last night.

I bought prosciutto to put in it and broke down and ate it with Eileen.

Not sure I’m exactly a vegetarian these days because I keep eating meat. Heh. I used the excellent imported hard italian cheese in the Noodles Alfredo. I thought it was pretty good. I served it with fresh mozarella (you know the soft kind that comes in water), fresh tomatoes, olive oil and basil from Steve’s garden.

I stared the day making strawberry compote from fresh strawberries. Made pancakes and served them with the strawberry compote. Not bad.

Ended the day watching Eileen eat the rest of the compote over ice cream.

Good food day.

My score for Grande Pièce Symphonique by Franck looks like this. I played through the entire thing yesterday. Not sure why. I played this piece on my Junior recital. I like it okay. I took more Franck with me today as well as Durufle and played through some more.

Going through the Grande Piece, I remember the many things Ray Ferguson taught me about this piece. He was a very good teacher especially for me.  I miss him.

Yesterday morning I bought some plants at the Farmer’s Market and planted them. I think of this as Steve’s garden. Above you can see the area where I put the basil, tomato, parsley, mint and oregano plants.

Recently, I wanted some parsley for something I was cooking and walked out into the backyard and realized there was no parsley in our garden.

At the Farmer’s Market, I told the lady I bought the plants from that my wife was the gardener and I was the cook. And that we have a little rule at our house, if you want something done, you do it yourself. The lady said it was a good rule. I said it’s worked for 32 years so far. Heh.

Since reading a couple Donna Leon mysteries set in Venice, I have been thinking about Italian cooking.

I resurrected my old Krups espresso machine and cleaned it up yesterday:

I ran vinegar through it and cleansed it with water. It took a bit for the little vapor guy to start working but lo and behold it seems to be up and working. I made a couple espressos for myself yesterday.

One of Leon’s characters routinely drinks cups of espresso and adds sugar. I have never done this but a little poking around in Italian cookbooks confirms that this is a usual way to drink espresso. Haven’t tried it yet, but plan to.

For cooking I put on a record of La Boheme. Then I proceeded to prepare fresh Asparagus and make a pasta for last night’s meal.

I went out and bought some Italian wine and cheese.

I was interested in a red Venetian wine called Amarone della Valpolicella and a simple white Soave. One of my cookbooks mentioned that the Amarone means bitter or “more precisely, ‘bitter in a big way.’ Yet the wine is not bitter.” I love Valpolicella and this author described the Amarone as a super-charged Valpolicella. I haven’t looked at the wine section at Meijers in a long time so I wrote down the name of the wine and went looking.

I couldn’t believe it. They had an Amarone but it was 28 dollars. I decided that was a bit steep and bought a cheaper Banfi Chianti pictured above. It was okay. Couldn’t find any Soave, so I bought a Pinot Grigio.

Anyway, I braised some portabello mushrooms in good olive oil and mixed in the good cheese the pasta. Yum.

Settled down later and read the first three chapters of “Pastures of Heaven” by Steinbeck. Life is good.

Rebecca Hostings, (the UK film maker not the US song writer) has made a film about trash: “Hawai’i: Message in the Waves.”

She says “I hope people realize that this film isn’t just about Hawai‘i, it is about everywhere. Iokepa’s message is simple – our planet is like an island. It has a limited amount of resources to support life. An expanding human population living with little regard for the future is stretching those resources to breaking point. To be an environmental thinker is to be a humanist. If we want our species to continue then we have to look after the environment, otherwise it’s all of us who will be paying the price. But when Iokepa says it, it sounds a lot better.”

Not sure why Hosking is the “filmmaker.” If I have the right film, it’s actually directed by Tim Green. But maybe Hoskings in the brains…

Related links:

Plastic bag revolt spreads across Britain: Spurred by a filmmaker’s documentary, the English town of Modbury became the first in Europe to ban them outright.

By Mark Rice-Oxley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Could you live without a carrier? by SARAH CHALMERS, Daily Mail

Throwaway Lines unattributed article on the  Guardian

Not everybody goes for Banksy:

“… [A]ny lingering illusion anyone has that Banksy’s street art represents some radical alternative to the world of Damien Hirst (who of course buys his work) and the
Chapman brothers must surely be washed away now, like unwanted graffiti, in the light of the case of the Bristol council contractors who have painted over one of his works.”

“Why All the Fuss Over Banksy” Jonathon Jones, Guardian Unlimited, May 13, 2007
“Banksy’s black and white daubing is an art form in its own right, and although it falls under the umbrella of street art, it is actually a closer relative of stickering, fly posting and billboard advertising than of graffiti-writing.”
Street Signs by Edward Hammond, Guardian July 15, 2006

Mickey News points out that “American animator Walt Disney is the most respected artist among 18-25 year olds, beating the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, a survey suggests.

Comedian Peter Kay took second place in the poll, which asked young people to name the artists who most inspired them in film, music, dance, TV and art.

Jane Austen was the only author in the top 10, which also included Will Smith, Bob Dylan and guerilla artist Banksy.”

I still say, thank God for Banksy.