DanielSonenberg.com

Oh I'm just a boring food-obsessed Jew sometimes, I know. Now I've got a freezer full of bagels, a fridge full of lox and herring. You can't buy herring here in Portland. Oh, I mean, you can all over, but it tastes really raunchy. Kind of like what most people imagine herring to taste like, I suppose. So even though when I lived in the city herring was very, very rarely on the shopping list, it always feels very important to cart some back. But the first stop was Absolute Bagels by 107th St. and Broadway. This is the ultimate in authentic bagels: hand rolled, water boiled. Okay, run entirely by Asians who only very occasionally display the requisite New York grumpiness (the man who packed my order was disorientingly and overwhelmingly lovely). But whatever ethnic cred they may be lacking, the bagels are chewy, always fresh, perhaps a tad too large (but that's the trend, you know?) Of course, you could go down to 79th street and Broadway and overpay for some H&H bagels. I stealthily photographed the price list, just in case you don't take me at my word. It might actually be worth it to get one of these usually hot, always too-sweet doughboys at, say, 4AM, when you're stumbling home from the 1 Train, having spent all your cash in the East Village and then having had your tab picked up for the next two hours by visiting Finns benefiting from a healthy exchange rate. Not that I'd know what that's like. But I pity the poor Sunday morning fool who walks in to buy three dozen for the arriving relatives. It's highway robbery. He should instead buy the cheapies next door at Zabar's, which used to and probably still do come from Columbia Hot Bagels. When I lived in the hood they were selling them for about $.39, but I believe those days are gone. I did make it into this mecca, this time around, as promised, and I know if you're a regular reader of this blog you're sick to death of the place already. But for the rest of you, mom, I took some pictures. First and foremost, here's proof about the olive bar: It's a common misconception about Zabar's that it's expensive. True, they sell expensive items, such as caviar and smoked salmon. But they sell these luxury goods, usually, at the best prices in all of New York. Their upstairs housewares department is by far the best place anywhere to buy pots and pans and Farberware coffee makers, and downstairs they sell their famous coffee for $6.99 a pound, compared to the $8.99-$12.99 I seem to have pay up here. Anyway, I had a swell time, and speaking of stealth, I stole a little picture of my beloved David, who no longer has any idea who I am or that we once spend many minutes talking about Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. David's the best fish cutter on the planet - can be moody, but the slice is a serious art form for him, and I've never known him to go into a slump. I drive 300 miles for my Norwegian (don't follow the masses into ordering "Novie" - get the good, dry stuff), I'll wait the extra several minutes for the guru. I couldn't resist photographing one more great deal: That's right - $7.80 for half a pound of salmon caviar. If you're up here in Portland with me, go see what they charge you for the same amount of the same product at Brown Trading Co. on Commercial Street. You could almost afford round trip tix on Jet Blue. If you get the stuff at either place, also get some creme fraiche and some olive oil potato chips, and lastly some chives. Then invite some friends to the park for a picnic, have them bring the champagne, and you bring the cooler. I'm telling you. Well, it was check out time by now, and you'll notice some other usual suspects on the conveyer belt: I am a man of few and simple pleasures.

And it's check out time for July, which means, keeping with tradition, I'll probably leave this blog alone for a few days, and then usher in August 3rd or 4th with a photoless entry. But then, that's exactly what you're expecting me to do!

The big city greeted us with great love and warmth. It is balmy and breezy and lovely and empty here - there was a parking spot right outside sis's building, so we plunked in our luggage and went out walking. If you head north on a night like this you'll inevitably end up at Sal and Carmine's. And they'll inevitably be the same old reliable second best slice in all of New York. First best, unless things have really changed, is Difara, and it's way in Midwood and a fortune and a total, total scene now that Dom's been discovered and written about in all the local press etc. I've debated the merits of Sal and Carmine's with no less an authority than the great Jim Leff, founder of Chowhound.com. You can see the exchange here - be sure to scroll down and read Jim's amusing and certainly accurate take on the real secret behind the brothers' mastery. I won't go into it here - just saying that the pizza was divine. We weren't even hungry, but it was our civic duty, so we indulged. Then circled around past the old Masters Building on 103rd and Riverside where once I lived. The sweet doorlady who I knew and loved well was working her shift today, but Alex couldn't remember her. But then Alex remembered a maintenance guy that I had forgotten, and so we wandered back southward through the warm and windy streets remembering our lives and thinking how funny it is that things change - like, really change. But our love of this city only grows. Let's see how we feel after tomorrow hits 100 degrees!

I don't have much for you, friends. In the last 24 or so hours we've visited 2 sets of parents, 2 sets of grandparents, some siblings, and some dogs too. We're making our way slowly from Maine down to New York. Then, after Alex takes a peek at an exhibition space at Wave Hill, we'll make our way quickly right back up to Maine. No rest for the weary. But the highlight of our trip so far, and believe me I'm ashamed to admit it, has been Barney's Outlet at Clinton Crossing in Connecticut. Alex got two shi-shi outfits for her upcoming business trip to Italy, and I got some brown pants with a broken zipper (discount!) and a striped purple shirt. Tonight we're crashing at me sister's, cuz they're out partying on Fire Island, and tomorrow I'll run around Central Park and then hit Zabar's and Absolute Bagels - only the essentials, no time for friends, alas. Hope to write back again from the road. Secretly even hope to bring my camera phone on the run with me. It'll be like you're right there with me! Can you stand it?

At last I am freed from the yoke of this 600 page tome. It's actually quite a page turner, and an interesting corollary to the other longish book I've read this summer, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At the end of his "Note on Sources," Robert Greenfield, the author, mentions that someone told him "those who love Timothy Leary will hate your book. And those who hated him will never read it." So good thing I came in neutral. The author's opinion of the man, to be sure, is none too high, and Leary comes across as a fairly vacant party fiend whose greatest loves were celebrity and himself. In 1960, British psychologist Humphrey Osmond and author and psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley visited Tim Leary at the outset of his work with psychedelics at Harvard. Greenfield writes: "Osmond and Huxley...could have shut down the Harvard Psychedelic Project before it began. Instead, even as the torch of government in America was being passed to a new generation, they handed the future of psychedelic research to the wrong man." This sentence stuck with me through much of the rest of the book. Of course the implication is that there may have been, somewhere out there, a right man. It's a tantalizing idea. Who was the right man? It turned out, I think, not to have been Ken Kesey either, and these two acid pioneers had an almost unparalleled hand in steering the 1960s to its Day-Glo climax and beyond, into chaos and ultimately dissolution. Mightn't the sixties have gone differently, and certainly the history of psychedelics, if the pioneers had not been such hedonists? Judging by this book, almost from the start, any notion of serious experimentation and research on the part of Leary and his team was superseded by frivolity, tripped out proselytizing and vanity. Certainly dissipation of seriousness was a potential byproduct of the drug. These two brilliant men can hardly be said to have lived up to expectations they established with early work - at least by our conventional standards. And what's the value of getting in touch - seeing the other side - if it isn't manifested in tangible contributions to society? Art. Science. Something. The whole trip seems so selfish in retrospect. And because the scene spiraled so ridiculously out of control, any serious research on the effects and usefulness of these chemicals was entirely curtailed, which might actually be a shame. Oh well. Not much of a book review here, I suppose. It's a good read - well written, well researched. I wish there had been some glossy photos, which you sort of feel you've earned after turning so many damn leaves. Still, I'd read the Acid Test before this one - it's so deservedly a classic. That might put you in the mood to drop a tab or two. Then this book will cure that desire.

Let this not be quite a position paper. Just a sketch of general principles, as they evolve, as they materialize in the mind of a young scientist. The product of experiments past, but grist too for the testing mill of the future. A smoothie dogma, if you will. Dogma 06.

Rule #1: Use 1 very sweet fruit (bananas, grapes, or pineapples are the best).
Rule #2: Use 1 or several kinds of packaged frozen fruit (berries of all sorts, peaches). There is little discernible difference between fresh and frozen berries in the end product - better to save the fresh berries for your granola, or yogurt, or ice cream, or just little bites. If you insist on using fresh berries, make sure that you freeze either the berries or the "very sweet fruit" for smoothie consistency (but don't be a fool and freeze pineapple). Don't use ice.
Rule #3: Use no sweeteners of any kind. Sweetener use is an admission of fruit miscalculation.
Rule #4: Feel good about yourself by avoiding dairy. Use soy milk (Eden Soy preferably).
Rule #5: Put the unfrozen fruit on the bottom, frozen on top, then trickle in the soy milk.
Rule #6: Even still, you'll probably need a wooden spoon a few times if your blender sucks as bad as mine.
Rule #7: Ends here:

Let's face it - this is flat out disingenuous. Why give the price for half a pound? Is that a standard unit of measurement in our society? Do you ever wonder what the half pound rate of coffee, or lobster, or cherries, or pistachios is? Of course not. In fact, you're so used to seeing things priced by the pound that your assumption would be that any price on a sign would be per pound. Especially for a bulk item such as olives, that have sufficient heft and scrumptiousness to easily tempt you towards and beyond those standard sixteen ounces (unlike, say, chamomile flowers). The idea here is that Wild Oats, the criminal organization responsible for this noxious little placard, knows full well that $11.98 is an obscene amount to charge for olives, no matter how good they are. (Go to Zabar's in NYC and the olives are 5 or 6 bucks a pound. And sorry, they're better too. And even go around the corner to Hannaford's, whose perfectly delicious olives and pickled goodies are $6.99 A POUND). Wild Oats can't bring themselves to print the awful truth, so they soften the blow by giving you an irrelevant measure (which they obviously hope you'll confuse for the proper one). Why don't they just put up the price per 4.8 oz. or per bushel, or per stone? Hoodlums. And still I return. Why? Well, to paraphrase Beethoven, "that is the way with men. They are esteemed because they have not committed still greater faults."

Hanging down from my window
Those are my wind chimes
On the warm breeze the little bells
Tinkle like wind chimes
Though it's hard I try not to look at my wind chimes
Now and then a tear rolls off my cheek
-Brian Wilson

First off, this crappy photo era must end. If you're a really big fan of the Twilight Zone, as I once was, you probably know that for a very brief period of time during the 2nd or 3rd season, CBS switched from film to videotape (yes, way back in the early 1960s), as a cost-cutting measure. So you have maybe 8 episodes that look really, really weird - sort of like a home movie. Ultimately, not so hot. The experiment ended in failure and they switched back to lush and more expensive film. I'm hoping that this little period of time on this blog will also be viewed, historically, as such a blip. Be that as it may, I couldn't resist sharing with you my wind chimes. I was out on the old back porch a few days ago when a fierce, burning desire took hold of me. I had to have wind chimes, and now. It was as if my central nervous system was crying out some great inner deficiency. I couldn't bear to be out there without the Woodstock Chimes of my youth. So I ran to downtown Portland, but the chimes were $50. Then I joined Amazon Prime for a free trial period, and paid $3.99 for shipping and I think $33 for chimes, and by Saturday they were here, and then it rained and rained. And what's more, my father-in-law, the great pianist Orin Grossman, said "Wind chimes? But don't you know, when the wind blows they make a horrible, horrible noise?" And the truth is I did suffer some doubt, because when you lift them up and shake them all about hokey-pokey fashion they are quite clangorous. But this morning in the sun I finally had a chance to hang them, and the gentle breeze made for such soothing little dings and dongs, and also, I suddenly heard in the distance other wind chimes. Wood ones. Metal ones. Coming from every direction. It was like I was now part of some greater tuned-in community of chime enthusiasts, taking in the breeze and the Balinese and Javanese scales as we sipped our soy caramel iced lattes on our back porches. It was transcendent in so many ways, so I overcame doubt, ripped off the tag, took this photo, and here we are.

Believe me, there's a LOT I could tell you about. The last several days have been eventful, to say the least. The highlight, or rather lowlight, was probably the two-hour in-home demonstration/sales pitch we got from Kirby Vacuums. We were offered a free rug shampooing, and who wouldn't want that, right? Anyway, I don't have the energy to bore you with the details. But try googling this and you'll begin to understand. Crazy crazy stuff, involving lots and lots of lies. And just say no when they call you up! (I swear, I didn't give your name as a reference).
Meanwhile Truth About Daisies will spend the next two days, all day and night, recording our CD. We're working in Corthell Hall at the University of Southern Maine, and we've transformed it into a pretty sweet little studio, with the help of our recording guru Mark Bartholomew. Here's Sheila McKinley, one of our principle songwriters, in a pensive moment during setup.

Oh - and all you addicts? Notice I've added an RSS feed to this blog, without really even knowing what one is.

Sometimes waiting's not so bad, in the right spot. Alex's folks are in town so we're hitting the our tourist trail that we love so well. First two steps are almost always the Lobster Shack and then Maple's. Even on a cloudy evening, and those are in no short supply, the shack delights.

Hey - guess what? I'm out of the nineteenth century. Now, not only do I have a phone, but I have a camera-enabled bluetooth phone. So homemade photos, alas of a far inferior quality than previously, will return to Argh! - a blog. I thought you might like to see where these entries, and everything else I'm attempting to churn out this summer, come from. The hanging sculpture on the right - a gift from the great artist himself, Alonzo Davis - watches over me in times of doubt and sweat.

When you get tired of absolute ipod shuffle mode, or itunes shuffle mode, as the case may be, why not try listening to your whole collection alphabetically? Just as surprising and fresh, I promise (and it'll help you weed out the repeats.)

Oh my life's a simple thing. Lost my cash card and my cell phone died. So I'm cut off, really. Alex feeds me and gives me a few stray bills when she's got em, and we plan ahead for her days in the downtown studio she's borrowing this summer. I do my running in the morning, even when it's this hot, and then I come home and I'm drinking coffee with abandon. I'm always in a state of almost quitting, or just having quit, and for me a lot is one big cup a day, but the thing is I've finally learned how to make the stuff properly. It starts with the pictured farberware coffee percolator (my grandmother - Omi - turned me on to this - it's the only way to get really hot coffee, she says, but however good my java will never hold a candle to hers), and just a bit too much freshly ground coffee (like I think about 6 spoons for 4.5 cups of water...). And then nuke the soymilk in this big cat mug, pour the hot coffee in, and then a touch of maple syrup. Then out to the back porch with this big Timothy Leary biography I'm reading (what a charlatan). Breakfast a little too late out there, then stumble back in and write opera. It's all so 19th century except I spend the whole rest of the day in a dark room in front of a computer, cranking out my fifteen seconds. In the evenings we shop or cook, or forget to plan and go out and buy pad thai or salmon choo chee, or even both, and then go to the supermarket where they've raised the price of city of Portland Garbage Bags to $7.50, and come home to our lovely sweltering pad and maybe listen to Henry Cowell or some vintage King Crimson for the first time in a long time ("Fallen Angel") and then write in the blog. Even if there's nothing to say - because the huddled masses deserve their fix, they do.

What an odd place the World Wide Web can be. You free associate, half paying attention, and then sometimes you get a kick right to the gut. Let's see if I can recreate the stream: I was on itunes listening to samples of stuff in the music store...mostly Syd Barrett, stuck as I am in this oddly extended mourning phase. Then something made me think of the great song "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar. So I checked to see who had versions of that - and guess what, just about everyone. And they're all - even Helens' - REALLY bad, except for the one from the original Broadway Cast recording, credited to Yvonne Elliman and Marc Pressel. (Once at college I heard Matt Sutton do it - that was something). Then I thought about what a great songwriter Webber was back in the day, and I remembered fondly my first contact with him and Mr. Rice - a 1982 production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I think I actually saw it twice that year - once at the Great Neck North Senior High School, and then again on Broadway - happy confluence of events. And as I'm sitting here remembering, comes to me the fierce crush I had on the Narrator from the Broadway production. On her whole person - her sensuous belter's voice (the sexiest sound my 12-year-old ears had ever heard), and her eager and open brunette good looks. For a while we had the original broadway cast recording, and I would listen to it over and over - she was so dreamy. I realized, sitting here just now, that I didn't know her name. But in this day and age that's no problem, and after a few clicks between Wikipedia and the Internet Broadway Database, I had her - Laurie Beechman. And she died of ovarian cancer in 1998. They named a theatre after her, even, but all these years I had no idea. When I saw her on Broadway I think it was right before the peak of her career, when she played Grisabella in Cats for five years. And then she toured with Les Mis, and did some cabaret, and became a spokesperson for cancer-related causes, and in 1997 a newspaper profiled her and it seemed that she was fighting strong and had the upper hand, and then in 1998, her obituary. I've only found one picture on the internet from the performance I remember - and it's in that Playbill composite above. It's the picture in the lower left hand corner. But if only you could hear her voice too. Then you'd really understand.

Long and lovely day at the beach down at Ocean Park, and then Alex and I frivolously went to the movies, just because. The choice was You, Me and Dupree (we both love Owen Wilson), or A Scanner Darkly. Somehow we chose the latter, thinking that the former was more of a renter. And...after forty minutes we walked out. It's a slightly liberating, but mostly depressing sensation to walk out on a film. Neither Alex nor I knew anything about the flick going in, so we didn't realize the whole thing was shot with some sort of ridiculously cheesy Photoshop effect running throughout, making everything look just like bad CGI. It is a seriously unpleasant film to look at. The subject matter was sorta kinda interesting at times, but seemed to both of us pretty impenetrable and we both found ourselves settling in for sleep. Mabye we were too tired or too old. Oh well...

Somehow I can't get Syd out of my head. I'm surfing around finding stuff on the internet, and I've downloaded Dark Globe and Octopus from itunes (I have the vinyl, somewhere). It's funny how you can completely hear Syd's influence on Roger Waters' singing style on Dark Globe. Then I found this Rolling Stone interview w/ him AFTER he had moved to Cambridge to live with his mum. I didn't realize any such interviews existed. It's heartbreaking, this little thing. And the songs are so incredibly good.

Perhaps it's because Andy Kaufman and I went to the same high school? Perhaps not. But I don't really think there is anything funnier in this world than the late great Tony Clifton (I'm therefore giving him his very own blog category). This is probably not the most representative clip, but it's nonetheless pretty cool (where else can you see T.C. AND the Muppets in only four minutes??) Can you tell I've been a bit obsessed with YouTube lately?

Hard to think of what to say about Syd. Funny that I mentioned his song, several posts below this one. Funnier still that it was my post of 7 July, the day he died, across the sea in Cambridge. I had the chance to ask Roger Waters about Syd one time. I think it was me, or maybe it wasn't. We were waiting for him at the Stage Door of Radio City Music Hall, 2nd leg of the Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking tour - probably 1985. Roger came out to sign autographs, and someone, might've been me, asked: "What's up with Syd Barrett?" And Roger's answer still rings in my ears to this day: "I don't see Syd anymore, he's at home with his mother in Cambridge." I guess in that moment I realized that these - Syd and Roger - were more than icons, more than ideas or heros in my pimply head...they were people. There was sadness in Roger's voice when he said it, and it cut through some of the celebratory thrill we autograph hounds were buzzin' on. Syd the great acid casualty, whose story is so rock 'n' roll it screams apocryphal and yet it's all true. You can study the tale, and get a taste of Syd in his later years here. I wish we'd hear that through the madness and reclusiveness Syd had been sketching songs all these years, leaving behind a treasure trove of his inimitable (but so often imitated) psychedelic confections. That's sort of what we're expecting with J.D. Salinger, isn't it? But with Syd I think the long quiet years were not so fruitful. Just a frightened man, afraid of the light. I hope he gets to have his strength and vision back now, wherever he may be, blowing with the Piper at the Gates of Dawn or riding on his Effervescing Elephant. So I tilt back this small shot of tequila - the only thing on hand - listen to the pissing rain and drink to a great lost artist. Cin-cin!

She's done it! After months of threatening, Alex J. Sax, Portland artist and love of my life, has gone and forged her own website from scratch. All she needed was a little recuperation time. Go have a look (don't use Internet Explorer - and why would you want to anyway?).

Somewhere in this mess of an apartment I have a copy of this Sports Illustrated, from November 1979. It's of special interest because there's a big panoramic photograph of all the NYC Marathoners on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge at the start of the race, and in the lower right hand corner you can clearly make out my dad. I was the one who found him there, nursing my fourth-grade gift subscription to SI. I recently bought a copy of this issue on ebay, but it's packed in the storage room now, or in Alex's flatfiles, or somewhere. Hence no scan for you. I think that was his first marathon. He ran it again in 1980, and one more time in 1981, when his time was about 3:10, but he looked pale as a ghost walking up the lane in his mylar blanket afterwards. The next week on Halloween, the day of my first drum lesson, he went out for a run with my sister riding her bike alongside, and he never came back. Massive heart attack, advanced atherosclerosis. Sis did a fine job administering CPR, but there was no hope. He was 41 and I was eleven. The conventional wisdom in my family has always been that his excessive running killed him. He was excessive compulsive, in his way. Took up photography and bought a Hasselblad, won prizes. Took up guitar lessons and then built a guitar, working deep into the early hours of the morn. I like to think, or hope, I carry some of the gene, but not to its deadly degree. So I started running in 1996 (only New Year's Resolution I've ever stuck to), but swore to myself, and more importantly to my mom, that I'd never do a marathon or even get close, and fortunately I haven't had the desire. It's on my mind now because I've upped my regimen significantly for the summer months. Doing 5.5 miles five days a week, which is the most I'll probably do. It's a way to be outside in the occasionally gorgeous weather we get up here, and a way to commune with the spirit of my long departed father, and let's be honest, a way not to be such a behemoth. I'm a big-boned guy to begin with, and I loves me some eatin', so if I don't watch it I hulkify and scare the neighborhood children. After doing this for three weeks I feel fit, a bit slimmed down, and I feel my legs constantly. Not pain, but just a little persistent song - "we're here." In the afternoons I sometimes catch myself thinking "too bad I've already run today, because now would be a great time for it." And on the two off-days I pine to get back out there. When I'm on my more usual 3-day-a-week schedule it's all I can do to make time to get out and at it. It seems a chore, and there's little residual body-awareness (but certainly some degree of anti-hulking agent). I suppose my point is simply that I can see how one could get consumed with it. With those 40 or 60 or 80 minutes where you gambol along, drifting from thought to thought, feeling your body grow tighter and your knees and calfs hum, then icing your shins, french kissing the water fountain's cascade, feeling intense and connected and in control. I can see the drug side of this all. Whenever I push beyond a certain point, though, like if I were to up the 5.5 mile route to 7, my body stops singing and starts hollering, it falls apart at the seems. Pulled muscles, shin splints, stress fractures. It's, I suppose, the blessing of not really being built like a runner at all - an internal alert mechanism to spare me from the familial path to which I am perhaps alarmingly drawn. Whoops, gotta go sleep now - gotta hit the pavement bright and early in the A.M.

The first is a brand new one by Margery Niblock, an artist who lives right around the corner from us, and something of a beloved local celebrity. Her blog is chock full of info and pictures about life on Munjoy Hill, and she knows her stuff a lot better than some Johnny-Come-Latelies who shan't be mentioned here. Lots of great photos there, taken with her working digital camera (no jealousy here). And you can see more of her lovely woodcuts (like this one), and even buy some for yourself, at her cool ebay store.

The other is WATAT - or "What Adrienne Thinks About That," which contains the musings of Rochester-based children's librarian and author Adrienne Furness. I stumbled onto this when I somehow, perhaps desperately, found her entry entitled "How To Get People To Read Your Blog." You'll note that I've already followed some of her advice. But no posts on throwing up, just yet. I'm not sure what I have in common with a children's librarian, but her blogging speaks to my condition so I'm there.

I found "Days" in a better way than I could ever have imagined! (What am I talking about? Read two posts down.)
Check it:

We've done it friends! DanielSonenberg.com has finally leaped to the top! That is to say, when you google me, or when I ego-surf, this website has pride of place, at long last knocking out that "La Petite Zine" entry, which has been castigated to number 5 on the list. Three cheers!

I sometimes wonder about memory. Isn't it odd that certain days, certain moments, get imprinted on our eternal psyche, while others fall off into oblivion? I mean, do you ever wonder if this day, this hour or minute, will be entirely forgotten, perhaps before the week is over? There are certainly minutes of yesterday I've already forgotten. Have you asked yourself why a Kinks single cover? Just that some music puts me in the spirit of memory - not necessarily any specific thought or day or reminiscence...just that open predisposition towards memory that lives somewhere between nostalgia and melancholy. I was just listening to "Helpless" by Neil Young - a song that does it to me every time. Some songs are about memory - like "Days," by the Kinks. It doesn't seem to be in my itunes library or even in the music store, but it made me happy just to think about it this little while. And of course "Waterloo Sunset" - and God knows what that song's ABOUT - is a memory tune, in its way. I guess so is "In My Life," but perhaps too obviously so. "I said okay baby, tell me what you be, and I'll lay my head down and see what I see." Is about memory - perhaps mine, not his. Late high school, early college, in that hi-fi stereo shop, Ears Nova, Great Neck...these guys still swore by records - CDs were for the riffraff. And their collection had the complete Syd, all two of them, and we all thought these guys are probably drug dealers. They wanted us to just come in and hang out, you know? I mean, we obviously weren't ready to jump loose on some $2k Thorens turntable. Then in college, with the bottom-of-the-line $300 model, I put on Bodhisattva and my roommate asked the dean for a change of venue. Took his 12 string Rickenbacker and all his Morrissey records right out that door.

Here we are by the falls. Yes I know it's old news, but doesn't the photo just warm your heart? These are two people with a lot of driving ahead of them. And a lot behind them too. But there's not too much more to say about that. I suppose there may be some parallel between engaging in such a long trek and composing an opera. I mean, I love those drives where, because the distance is just so ridiculous, you stop clicking off the miles and just float along, rubber on pavement, zen-like and accepting. Each little mile, no matter how expertly conquered, is a wee nothing in the scheme of things. Hundreds preceded it, and hundreds will follow in its wake. That's the opera too - especially for a slow and temperamental composer such as myself. Each day I pound away at my various tools and instruments, keyboards, computer, voice, ears, speakers. Working things out, hearing and hearing, singing and shouting, assuming all the roles, old, young, soprano, tenor, baritone. Sweat and sweat and pounding and sleeping and eating and reading and walking and waiting and figuring. And a good day's yield is fifteen seconds. You write fifteen seconds a day for the rest of your life you'll find yourself with a lot of music. So maybe you could lend me a chunk or two? Oh don't worry, it'll fit right in. In the six minutes that open this exquisite mess I've got Debussy, and jazz, and gospel, and lots of noisy dissonant stuff, drum set, and never far off, the trusty old octatonic. I tell my students to stay focused, and to try to limit their materials and be economical, just like every old composition teacher has preached for the ages. But I'm a maximalist and a spaz in real life, and when this opera gets unsheathed I'll have to be one of those "do as I say not as I do" type of guys who can become a bore. But then I'm hoping the computer, the inner computer, is working it all out. There are thinkers and feelers when it comes to making stuff. I know a lot of people who can sit there and tell you the why and the what it means till they're blue in the tooth, and then there's me and the other dweller in that there photo above - people who work from a place of not knowing, and who don't seek to explain away every dangling participle (whatever one of those is), and who spend a lifetime coming up with lies to answer the question why this purple or that tritone, and what does it mean?

You never know what you're going to get with me, and you have to appreciate that. Take today, for instance. Two blog entries on the same calendar date. But look a little closer and you'll realize it's a new day after all. And after God wept and sweated for much of our nation's birthday yesterday, the sun has resumed its rightful mid-summer perch, lawnmowers are abuzzing, and the sky is blue.

And I found a little poem, just for you. By Garrison Keillor, of all people, and it's Casey at the Bat from the other team's perspective! I'll only quote my favorite stanza, but do read the whole thing because it's a pisser.

There was pride in Casey's visage as he strode onto the grass,There was scorn in his demeanor as he calmly scratched his ass.Ten thousand people booed him when he stepped into the box,And they made the sound of farting when he bent to fix his socks.

Oh whatever. This is a stock image, the camera is just dead, and the powers that be say we're too poor to afford another. So stock it is. The fireworks were fine. In Portland you crawl up to the prom, find your friends who've a tarp set up by the end of Quebec Street, and just lie down and look up, and the feurwerke explode directly above you and rumble your butt worse than James Brown. It goes on a little long, and the end-show, as famed Portlander Jessica Porter put it tonight, is like a ten-year-old's tantrum. Some in our midst were kinda traumatized, but that was nothing compared to the walk home - a perilous jaunt through a battlezone manned by home-firework Yahoos. We saw one serial fireworkist just walking along the street shooting off little explosions with nary a care for who or when or why, and a young mother came screaming from curbside, "my daughter's asleep here - she's terrified of fireworks." And burning embers shuttled toward us, and it was unclear which way to turn and we feared for our eyes and extremities, and then somehow we were home and I made too many too strong margaritas, not realizing that the huddled masses had lost their oomph and were crawling on towards gentle unconsciousness and Wednesday routine. But the whole point of this message is: here's a good recipe for gazpacho. 1) Have Alex make the gazpacho; 2) get some avocado, just on the precipice of ripeness; 3) have some cooked shrimp around, the same you used for a shrimp cocktail earlier in the evening, which had a kickass cocktail sauce fueled by the unexpected strength of Farmer's brand horseradish; 4) serve all of this stuff together with some too-strong margaritas and just let your party spin along like a top. And I made it through this whole bit without once referring back to i-pod shuffle mode, although I assure you it was always on my mind.

And with one touch of the button, my 12 June blog entries get banished to the archive. A fresh start - a blank page. Good news. Also bad, though - the bad is this: the camera, about which you haven't heard much recently, is really, and thoroughly dead. For a while it was doing this odd thing, where with freshly charged batteries you could get it to come on by pushing the power button about twenty times. The first ten times you get nothing...and then a little flash of green, a momentary extension of the lens, and then suddenly the whole thing bursts to life as if it was all in your head to begin with. But gradually those 10 non starters turned to 20, and 30, and now, well - it's sorta all that's left. Just the empy, non responsive button push. So the following comments won't have the benefit of illustrations. We'll all survive.

1st - you wanna make babaganouj? This is what you need: an eggplant, some tahini, garlic, lemon, salt, and preferably some parsley. Oh yeah, and a gas burner.

Take the eggplant and just stick it on the gas burner and fire that puppy up to high. I start on the end, then do the sides. It's an act of great patience, and in a weird way, decadence. You can't overdo it, you know, so just leave the eggplant on the flame, shifting it every so often, until it's a leaky, mushy, liquid mess, and you've soiled your stovetop to oblivion. (you begin to see why the camera might have been useful for this entry, no?)

Then, take the eggplant off the stove, cut it in half on a cutting surface, and scoop out all the wonderful innards. Alex actually runs the whole thing under cold water so the skin just falls away - but I don't see how you can do this if you've really thoroughly obliterated the poor thing as you should have.

Then you're basically done. Mix in some lemon juice, salt to taste, parsley if you've got it, a clove of garlic, and tahini (I don't like much - maybe two or three spoons). It's good! Remember: you can't cook the eggplant too long (at least I've never done it), but you can cook it too short, and if you do, might as well just toss that sucka.

AND, bonus recipe peeps. Why, oh why, does anyone ever, ever buy jarred tomato sauce? (This is a long running feud between Alex and me).

All you need for great sauce in 20 minutes:

1 28 oz. can of good tomatoes (Muir Glen, Red Pack in a pinch). If your tomatoes suck you're hosed.
2 or 3 shallots, diced fine.
3-4 tbspns of Olive oil.
Course salt (if you've got it, otherwise any).

Sautee the shallots w/ salt and then add the tomatoes. Cook over medium until it reduces and gets saucy. Very, very occasionally, if the tomatoes are ultra-acidic, I might add a touch of honey. This is almost never necessary, though.

That's it. Your sauce. Better than anything you'll find in any jar or I'll give you a dollar.