This Week

im diving head first into a 40 song compilation of Hank Williams's greatest.
Early indications are that i'm going to be impressed by it.

Tacos

Tonight it's gonna be tacos. I'll be putting together some guacamole, and chopping up some lettuce. We like the high fiber soft tacos starting with a base of refried beans to act as the "glue". Pretty much improvised from there. I like lots of lettuce on mine. Guacamole recipes are plentiful, but on ones that call for onion, I like to cut the amount required in half, and substitute shallots. Shallots have a milder flavor than onion, and my main pet peeve for Guac is not to have too many elements fighting each other. If im doing say, 4 avacodoes, i'll usually use 2 tablespoons of shallot, 2 cloves of garlic, and one whole juiced lemon or lime. This is all arbitrary. Taste as you go is okay, but always use a clean spoon. You can always add, but you can't take away. Salt and pepper of course.

Classic Movie Roles as Portrayed by vegetables #4

rosebud

Colon cleanser

Nature's Fireballs

A radish a day keeps........something away.

Cucumber.

In Search Of the Perfect Hamburger.

This extra wide coffee cup is just about the perfect size. I want the pattie as thin as possible. When I grill it, i'm not going to flip it over until almost all the pink is gone. The second side grills for 30-45 seconds , tops. Hopefully, i'll have great texture and juicyness. Im using 80-20 ground beef. You could go 85-15, but no more.

Thoughts on the name change

There's a famous quote "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture". Since the last couple of posts have been about music and with gardening season on the wane, I thought the blog name should also evolve. Funny thing about that quote, some sources attribute to Zappa, still others say it's Martin Mull of all people.

Gonna grill burgers tonight, and put them on those great 100 calorie high fiber pepperidge farm deli flats. Probably a salad. Been a while since i put up pics, so maybe there will be some. I have a new burger molding method to share

Chicken Pesto Melange

Take some boneless chicken breast and use enough pesto sauce to cover it. Top with sliced tomatoes and sprinkle liberally with Parmesiano Reggiano. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. Throw it on the table.

Fun, fun, fun at the Autobahn ‘till her daddy takes the T-bird away.

Or how I finally discovered the passion behind Kraftwerk.

The music of Kraftwerk had always struck me as distant, cold and calculated. It isn’t that I’m not a fan. I’ve heard most of their stuff and believe it to be great, just on a different plane. Music that comes from the brain and not the heart. I was very, very wrong. It required me to re-think it a little, but this music is as emotional and as heartfelt as any love song or for that matter, protest song that you can name.

So what was it that changed my thinking? Well, while looking at some performances on their website what really struck me was how their fans are reacting to them. They are literally losing their minds hooting, hollering and participating. I figured the audience at a Kraftwerk show would be pretty tame and reserved, the way I believed their music to be.
The tune would end, and then there would be some polite applause. As these videos prove, that hypothesis was not even close.

http://www.kraftwerk.com/

So some obligatory internet research was mandatory. I must be missing something to be so far off base. The first clue I got was a quote from Kraftwerk leader Ralf Hutter that cites The Beach Boys as a musical influence. Like a “hot kiss at the end of a wet fist” there it was, everything I needed to know. The group’s biggest hit is “Autobahn”, a paean to the legendary German highway with no speed limit. Very similar to the way the Wilson brothers expressed their praise of the Pacific Ocean. It is in fact, a spot on comparison. Believe me, I’m not patting myself on the back over this. Quite the contrary, I’m kicking my own ass down the street for not picking up on it sooner.

Time to do some re-listening. I had a couple of their LP’s, specifically “Trans Europe Express” and “The Man Machine”. Just as I suspected. Although their approach strikes me the same, I’m now listening to the end result in an entirely different way. “Neon Lights” may not be just a casual glance out the window, but actually a sobering wish for simpler times. Tunes like “Man Machine” and “The Robots” actually predicted the future. These are warning signs, more accurate now than they’ve ever been. We ARE Showroom Dummies. “The Model” is an eerie portrayal of how lost we are as a planet with our priorities completely screwed up. These guys might as well be the freaking Clash!

We should talk influences here as well and this end of the stick was no surprise to me. These guys have influenced practically every pop genre you can name. Disco, hip hop, house, even those crazy early ‘80’s new romantics owe a lot to Kraftwerk. They continue to influence current bands like Coldplay, who requested and received permission to use riffage from “Computer Love” on their 2005 single, “Talk”. Electronic music of course owes their entire existence to them,(along with those other German pioneers Neu!) and the list of bands that have used samples of their work read like a who’s who of the genre.

It was the emotion that I missed out on. Or at least the level of emotion. My friends and I would listen to music daily, and Kraftwerk was a great way to mix things up a little when we were tired of the soup de jour. Once we heard that our beloved Elvis Costello was listening to Kraftwerk almost exclusively on his tour bus back then, that was all the confirmation we needed that we were beyond hip. This music spoke to me, but on an intellectual level only. Something I could listen to while pretending I was smarter than everybody else. It never occurred to me that I could “rock out” to Kraftwerk. It took a live video of thousands of screaming fans to open my eyes.

Broken Scapular

Songs of faith, higher power, wisdom and love. Chord progressions and melodic structures that reach to the sky. So how is it that the architect of some of these most holy sounds could live such a tragic life?

But that’s how it goes isn’t it? That’s the other side of the coin. For all her songs of aching beauty, Judee Sill couldn’t save herself. No man could save her either. Jesus is a tough act to follow. Could any one of us have been her “one star in the false darkness”? On the day she needed it most , could any mortal man get between her and that last fix that took her life?

Lyrics are typically an afterthought for me. I don’t put much emphasis on them when first listening to a new tune. There has to be something initially in the music to pique my interest. If it’s good enough, I’ll keep going back to it and the words over time will reveal themselves to me. If those words can resonate on some kind of spiritual or even a sexual level, then that’s just gravy. In the early ‘70’s though, singer/songwriters had to have a message. Think “Wild World” or “Cat’s In The Cradle”. It wasn’t enough to just create good music, there had to be some sort of Aesop’s Fable that the kids could relate to. Sill’s lyrics were just as complex as her music. There is a message, but you’re not going to have it simply handed to you.

The first tune from Judee that I had ever heard was a cover version of “Lady-O”, buried in the depths of a “hits” compilation by The Turtles. It was so different from the rest of the record that it passed swiftly right over my head. It seemed to be just an odd footnote to a band’s star crossed career, their last ever 45. For Judee though, it was her big break. David Geffen signed her to his newly created Asylum Records label along with Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell, hoping to mine gold from the new “Laurel Canyon” sound.

Unfortunately, this music was never going to be “The Next Big Thing”. It was not for the jaded or the disillusioned. It asked that you cast off your feelings of apathy and believe in something. Pet Sounds to the third power. During the post-Woodstock “Won’t Get Fooled Again” era, this music regretfully would find no audience whatsoever, despite glowing critical reviews.

Jesus saved Judee’s life many times over. At least you would think so by reading her Wikipedia bio. As a juvenile, her wild ways landed her in a Catholic reform school where as legend has it, she cut her musical chops learning and playing hymns on the church organ. By the time she was a recording artist, she had already been a junkie, a prostitute, and a criminal. Sort of a late 20th century version of Mary Magdalene.

A scapular was typically given to Catholics upon their first holy communion, along with a rosary. It was a necklace of sorts, with large rectangular images of Saints at either end.. We as Parochial school children were instructed to wear this scapular all the time with the belief that as long as you wore it you’d get to heaven. This type of easy-pass mentality appealed to me, so I wore it. Or at least at I did at first. Scapulars were very un-cool. You couldn’t hide it underneath your shirt, because it showed through your school uniform. Besides, this was the early ‘70’s. Faith was passé. The cord eventually broke and it ended up discarded in a dresser drawer.

Judee Sill left us with two beautiful records, parts of an unreleased third one and some BBC radio sessions. There were also some UK TV appearances on “The Old Grey Whistle Test” that can be found on YouTube. Among those, “The Kiss” is the one above all others that packs the biggest emotional wallop. Giant piano chords cascading down, with no orchestral embellishments like on the studio version. This is only Judee at the piano, singing about how a kiss is the greatest sacrament of all. By the mid ‘70’s she had fallen so far off the pop radar that she was rumored to be dead even while she was still alive. Fiction became fact on November 23rd, 1979. She spent the final years of her life broken, eventually lost forever.
Just like my scapular, Singer/songwriter Judee Sill

Ina Garten's Chicken Chili

This was really good and super easy. 4 cups of onion sautee'd till just done, add bell peppers and mexican spices, 2 cans of plum tomatoes in puree crushed, 1/4 cup fresh basil--simmer to reduce about 30 min, then add about 4 cups cubed chicken and simmer another 30 min. Food network has the recipe. I added a can of kidney beans drained, and about a cup of corn. There were no complaints. The acid in the tomato broke down the chicken pieces into something positively addicting.
Be sure to use tomatoes in thick pur'ee or you'll end up with soup. The simmering is mandatory - it thickens as it reduces. Don't cover it.