Fresh basil!

Made something close to this, except that I like knife pesto instead of blender pesto, and that the asparagus were tasty enough that I just tossed them in on top rather than blending with the orzo.

On Bullshit

Harry G. Frankfurt's modern classic: On Bullshit.

You can't talk in your sleep if you don't sleep

On Saturday Amy's coworker took us all to see In My Sleep, a fun indie thriller.

In it Marcus (Philip Winchester) finds himself leading a double life due to his sleepwalking. He's already a parasomniac philanderer, but might be a murderer too.

What In My Sleep does well is balance Marcus's sleepwalking blackouts against his growing suspicion and horror, and I really respected that while it briefly flirted with occult imagery, the film stuck to a psychological mystery. Given a conceit that could have easily stuck to clichés, the realistic portrayal of parasomnia grounded the film and was more effective as a tension device.

That said, In My Sleep does suffer from the indie thriller malady of trying to fit in every twist possible—the film ends up being about half an hour too long, mostly thrashing at the end between two equally plausible solutions before finally settling on one. The reveal could have come sooner, and the movie would have been tighter for it.

This is also a film with a lot of peripheral appeal—The cast is pretty strong, and even though Amy Aquino's campy hardboiled detective ("You know what I like about sunflower seeds? You have to crack 'em just right to get the good stuff.") plays more as comedic relief than a real adversary. The overall tone has more in common with NCIS than Law and Order, and that the closest comparisons are television, not film, seems intentional.

As a side-note, there's also more beefcake in this movie than anything I've seen since 300. Marcus seems to have his shirt off in three-quarters of the movie, and I assume is being sponsored by a boxer-brief company. Even the poster's got him naked. This isn't a film to see if you're in some sort of post-gay recovery program.

One more rewrite and In My Sleep might have been fantastic; instead it's pretty good and worth seeing.

The Secret Life of … Shrooms

The Secret Life of Mushrooms.

A trailer for spec documentary about psychedelics and culture, still in need of funding. via Jesse Green's facebook feed; he's an old high school friend and apparently his wife makes TV about drugs, which we can all get behind.

Duck hunt

I've been meaning to post this up for a while: My pal Matt G's album Dead Duck is up for free on Bandcamp and it's pretty tight. Backpack hiphop, whiteboy uppermidwest (Slug, Atmosphere RIYL).

Goddamn CSS

I can't seem to make the main posting part of the blog wider without it getting rid of the sidebar. I want to make the main part wider so that the photos (uploaded at even medium size using blogger's own defaults) don't get cut off.

Grr. I know enough to know how to monkey around but not enough to fix even a simple problem.

Music can't be seen.

Water, fire, air and earth, how the fuck do magnets work?

I RON IC

Steve Ahlgren takes maybe ironic pictures of modern, generally corporate spaces.

Accidental Mysteries

Snapshots from Accidental Mysteries.

Black line arabesques

Bibliodyssey does blackwork prints.

Beard on Beard

from Jandrewedits.com

The Only Sensible Ranking

1. Special Dark
2. Krackel
3. Mr. Goodbar
4. Milk Chocolate

and there's a pretty huge gap between Special Dark and Krackel, and then another between Krackel and anything else.

Hyenas

Even though it's totally in that danger area of Exoticizing The Other for me (not necessarily for him), I love Pieter Hugo's work, especially the hyena series. I mean, part of the danger is because hyenas just look so goddamned weird to me, these wrong dogs, but even with dogs these would be powerful images.

David Maisel's Oblivion, aerial shots of Los Angeles.

Ghost, by Nick von Woert.

Endless ripples

Been staring at this far too long. Physics two-point interference.

Alberto Seveso

Red and blue.

Grind, grind, level

Wheew.

As most of y'all know, I took a wicked whip offa my bike two weeks ago, leaving me with a broken femur and ulna. Since then, I've been laid out, working on recovering as best I can with the invaluable help of more friends than I even realized I had. There's another blog for the recovery (klangklangston.blogspot.com), but I haven't been added as an author yet, so I'm writing this here.

So far, I've worked hard at the PT and gotten to the point where I can sit up, stand, walk with a walker, get to the bathroom (fracture pan to bedpan LEVEL UP bedpan to drop chair LEVEL UP to commode LEVEL UP to using the extension in the regular bathroom and wiping my own ass LEVEL UP), fix my own food (breakfast, lunch and dinner today). The exercises still hurt like a motherfucker and leave me wiped, but grind grind grind. It's like Final Fantasy without the level breaks. Still can't do stairs, and god knows when I'll be able to ride in a car or even type two-handed, but at least Amy's gone from worrying about 'round the clock care to being able to grab dinner tonight with her friend.

And throughout, I've been all overwhelmed and choked up at the awesome help from people all over—though the locals have been phenomenal.

So, just a note to let you all know that I appreciate this and am still working hard on my end.

♡2BNJOY

On the way back from my coworker's short film premier thingy, Amy and I saw a vanity plate that read ♡2BNJOY.

We have no idea what it means, but we're both going to see how many times we can say "Heart to bean joy" to unsuspecting folks. Already, I'm telling her to tell her Chinese coworker that it's a greeting. "Heart to bean joy! Oh, yeah, no, there's not really a translation. It's an idiom. Heart to bean joy!"

Mostly boring, buying kitchen stuff

Our consumer binge

Two weeks ago, we finally took the money that Amy's parents had given us for kitchen supplies and had a day of it. I looked up the old NY Times $200 kitchen article, then we started out at Charlie's Fixtures, on Venice east a ways.

We already had most of what we needed; my folks got stainless religion a couple years back and proselytized us. We finally got Amy a stainless stock pot that she'd wanted for a while, as well as a mortar and pestle, and a bar citrus press. All told, about $65-70, not bad at all.

We were looking at the microplanes, at better mandolines (weirdly enough, the one I bought at Ross for $9 is a piece of shit. Who knew?), and, well, I started thinking about how life would be different if I had my own soft serve machine and professional doughnut fryer.

"No more amateur doughnuts, Amy. For real."

We didn't find the chef's knife that I wanted, nor the cast iron skillet. Their cast iron was only in griddle form, or tiny, and for some reason they didn't have a very good selection of chef's knives at all. Like, I could get twelve different kinds of boning knives, but all the chef's knives were 10" or even 12", which is pretty much a fucking sword, and where am I gonna store that? A scabbard on my hip?

Then we headed down to the barware joint on Cotner, which swore on its website that it was open weekends. It is not.

Finally, we headed to Surfas (online as Culinary District), in Culver City. Now, we drive past this place nearly every time we go to an art opening, and I figured it was a regular restaurant supply spot, similar to Charlie's, only with a bit more of the chichi that Culver requires, the type of people who would declare that if you're not microplaning, you're not zesting.

Well, it is, kinda. Except that it's lacking about two thirds of the shit you'd need to have any sort of functional restaurant, and has used that extra space to bring in overpriced gourmet ingredients, a cafe, a test kitchen, and about 5000 goddamned yuppies waddling through the aisles like stoned geese.

Sure, granted, it was Valentine's Day. They'd had some kind of test kitchen event where they had fondue (getting TMBG's "Hot Cha" stuck in my head for the rest of the day… "Fondue forks for everybody!").

But we found a cast iron skillet there, no problem. Their knives were a bit of insanity—I'd love to spend $85 on steel honed by German gnomes, but I just can't. And while Charlie's had only had electric sharpening steels for real goddamn professionals—"Sure, our cheapest one is three-fifty." "That's three hundred fifty, right?" "Yeah." "Oh."—Surfas had plenty of exotic sharpening implements that drew the least purpose-driven browsers, so I ended up just deciding that I didn't need to figure out the Japanese whetstone system even if it was only $14 bucks or so.

Then, after waiting behind a guy that kept telling us that he was in line, he was in line, and yet letting cute girls step ahead of him since they had so little, we were finally out. The experience had overstimulated my German gland, and I was stalking off with fantasies of gassing the whole place, but goddamn if I don't love that skillet. We've used it for weekend breakfast potatoes a couple times now, and it's amazing. The stainless, it just took so much oil, and could never get a high heat without sticking the potatoes to it, whereas the cast iron just gets things so crispy and so deliciously brown. Big fan of using it to heat tortillas too, since it takes very little oil there. Stainless seems likely to be relegated to fry pan status, which is cool, because it's deep enough and heat sensitive enough to give a lot of control, but that cast iron is going to be the main skillet from here on out.

Oh yeah, and that chef's knife? Finally just bought a mediocre one at Smart and Final. Ten bucks or so, same basic model that I used at Tio's all those years ago. Loving that too, since now I can slice shallots totally see-through. I need to find a regular place to get our knives sharpened though, since the last guy that did it at the Farmer's Market, those blades barely kept the edge a month. The shitty Kroger knife, I expect that (though it's surprisingly sharp given the abuse it's taken), but the Calphalon santoku should get real attention and needs to be retrued.

Next week? Buying a bed!

But so that this isn't a total waste:

1 oz. Blood orange juice
1 oz. Lime juice
1/4 oz. Simple syrup
1 oz. Soda water
1 oz. Brandy
1 oz. Rye
dash bitters

Pour rye and brandy into rocks glass. Add blood orange juice, lime juice, simple syrup, soda water, bitters. Stir. Delicious. Needs a name.