Instead – feast your eyes and ears upon:

Stan Lee reads “The Raven.”

Two great tastes that go great together.

5 lbs red potatoes
1 lb bacon (I prefer honey or maple cured)
1 med-to-largish red onion

Chop and saute the bacon to crisps (but do not burn).  Keep drippings and bacon together.
Chop the onion pretty finely and leave raw.
Chop the potatoes into desirably sized pieces and boil.

Make the sauce by whisking:
1 cup mayonaise
1/3 cup stone ground mustard
2 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp rice vinigar
2 Tbsp cumin
1 tsp smoked paprika (or regular paprika if you don’t have smoked)
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp ground thyme
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper

Drain the potatoes and add the onions and bacon (including drippings).  Pour over the sauce and combine.  Let sit for 20 minutes or so before eating.

Yours truly,

Cinnamon J. Scudworth

2 Sticks (1 cup) butter, room temp.

3/4 Cup granulated sugar

3/4 Cup dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. kosher salt

2 Cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 3/4 Cups rolled oats (“Old Fashioned” oatmeal)

1 12-oz package semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Cream the butter, either by hand or with a kitchen mixer. Add sugar and brown sugar and continue to cream vigorously. Add eggs, one at a time, creaming ruthlessly after each one. Add vanilla extract and salt. Cream. Sift flour and baking soda into the bowl on top of creamed wet ingredients. DO NOT STIR. Add the oats and chocolate chips. Stir unaggressively, just long enough to incorporate the ingredients. Spoon dough onto cookie sheet in roughly 2-tablespoon increments, rolled into golf-ball-sized mounds. Bake for 8-10 minutes. For best results, remove from oven when they still look just a bit undercooked — when they just begin to get a bit of brown on top. Let them cool for just a few minutes. Eat lots and lots of them, hot and gooey, with cold milk.

General tips. Let the butter soften before creaming. This takes patience. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, MICROWAVE TO FACILITATE SOFTENING OR ENGAGE IN ANY OTHER CULINARY NONSENSE WHICH MIGHT POTENTIALLY RESULT IN THE BUTTER’S MELTING. The general idea for stirring/creaming is: use as many strokes as possible before adding the dry ingredients (everything from the flour on) and as few strokes as possible once the flour is added. You will be tempted to let them overcook. Do not succumb to such temptations. If they look a bit undercooked when you take them out, by the time they have cooled they will be perfect. If they already look browned enough when you take them out, they will be slightly overcooked by the time you start eating them. Once they are out of the oven, take them off of the baking sheet and put them on a rack to cool. This is an incredibly delicious, incredibly unhealthy recipe, so be warned. Also, the dough itself is decadently good, but resist eating too much of it. These cookies are worth the wait.

Yours truly,
Cinnamon J. Scudworth

Ingredients:

4 Mangoes (slightly under-ripe)

1 Medium-to-largish Red Onion

4 Roma Tomatoes

1 Bunch Fresh Cilantro

1 Red Bell Pepper

1 Jalapeño Pepper (optional)

Salt, Pepper, and Sugar to taste

Directions: Peel Mangoes and remove flesh from pit. Finely dice. Finely Chop onion, tomatoes, bell pepper, and jalapeño (if desired). Tear off roughly 1/2 cup of cilantro leaves and finely chop. Combine chopped ingredients and add about 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper. Serve immediately with good quality salted corn chips (Scudworth prefers either homemade or Santitas brand). Be warned: it is disturbingly easy to consume an entire batch singlehandedly in one sitting. (Note: a food processor may be used, but process the vegetables only to a fine chop and do so separately–if you put it all in together and hit the button the salsa will turn gray. Process separately and then combine afterward.)

Yours Truly,

Cinnamon J. Scudworth

The result is perhaps a lesson in the power of expectations. I came to the experience expecting something odd. Glass’s music and Cohen’s words have both always been heady, cerebral, and emotionally complex. Yet Glass has a marked preference for precision and mathematical rigor in his composition, while Cohen’s writing favors the messy rhythms of lived experience. I expected a tension between these sources, with the success or failure of the music to really depend on how that tension was managed.

I was not at all disappointed. The collision of Cohen’s earthiness and Glass’s ties to the world of art music creates moments of wonderful irony, as classical vocalists solemnly intone profanities, sexual innuendo, and the occasional goofy joke about monastic life. Yet, to my delight, these tensions came off as both comical and intentional. Glass’s score occasionally underlines such moments with percussive exclamation marks and other such sonic winks and nods. Another tension, between the natural-language rhythms of much of Cohen’s poetry and the high precision of Glass’s compositions, also worked well for me. This potential contradiction pushed Glass, I think, to find ways of making his musical formulae more flexible and expressive.

After the single listen I had last night, I can’t remember the details of every part of this piece. Some poem settings were not especially memorable, but I found others unforgettable. Three segments of the piece were clear stand outs to me. The first is the near-rock composition that Glass created for a Cohen poem about a puppet version of the Holocaust, which was melodic, propulsive, and simultaneously tragic and comic. The second was the wonderful, sprightly composition for a charmingly melancholy poem about death and reincarnation, featuring the idea that your dead dog has become an ant that you should not pat — because your clumsy affection will kill it. Finally, my favorite segment of the piece is a poem about a sexual encounter between the narrator and a married woman, in which the narrator both describes the woman’s seductive qualities and explains to the listening deity the reasons he made the mistake of sleeping with her. The poem is outstanding, reminiscent of Cohen’s best songs. And the music just sells every emotion in it; it’s tender and sensual when it should be, lyrical and sad at the right times, and achieves an amazing mysticism when necessary.

So, I had a good time with this seemingly unlikely collaboration. But my experience certainly seems not to have been universally shared. I overheard a few impromptu reviews on the way to the car. “It was really… Different. I like older classical music better.” “My girlfriend got the tickets. Halfway through, I turned to her and said, what did you bring me to?” “Well, they can’t all be good.” I obviously can’t argue against these people’s aesthetic judgments. But it’s interesting that all three of them imply that the speakers expected something quite different from what they got. I don’t know if they would have liked the concert better had they done their homework on Glass and Cohen, but it at least seems like a plausible idea to me.

But my favorite current comedian would have to be Jim Gaffigan.

I’m actually not too up on current comedians. I don’t like swearing so I rarely go see any live. My faves of all time would have to be Steven Wright and Emo Philips, both of whom I’ve seen live. I wish I could’ve seen Mitch Hedberg before he died.

Jim Gaffigan’s stand up that aired on the Comedy channel had me rolling. It’s not so much what he says but how he says it. I can’t walk down the frozen junk food isle in the grocery store now without singing “Hot Pockets” in a high pitched voice. See here.

Who else is good?

Pilot episode: One of their Internet buddies unexpectedly commits suicide. His brother, not a regular Internet user, comes online to notify them. His brother refuses to accept it was suicide, and only the Internet buddies believe him. They start digging around and discover it wasn’t suicide…he was murdered!

Now we need some scary shadow internet criminal group that killed him because he’d stumbled onto some big illegal plot.

And voila! a tv show is born.

Characters:

A Mormon housewife (into doom metal!)
A speed-reading lawyer
A grad student
A computer programmer, or possibly a chocolate entrepreneur
A teenager in Iowa

Who else?

Or, we could just create a show based on, hmmm…how about a court reporter?…who solves crime! Brilliant, eh? And maybe she’s psychic. Or a genius!

Feel free to expand on these ideas or post your own. Come on, it’s fun.

(1) Listening to jazz (and, specifically, jazz by people who are still playing today) prevents jazz from becoming a museum piece. It’s cheaper for record companies to keep releasing old Miles Davis albums, because they’ve already repaid the costs. But if that small portion of record stores that houses jazz is full only of albums by dead musicians (and note that I adore Miles), there will be no call for young, innovative players whose music interacts with contemporary culture (such as, for example, Roy Hargrove, whose RH Factor band plays jazz, funk, and rap).

(2) Having some acquaintance with jazz is necessary to be culturally literate, in the same way that, to be culturally literate, we need some acquaintance with Beethoven, with Hemingway, with Picasso, etc. (I realize that this kind of sticks jazz back in a museum, rather than as a flourishing artform, which kind of contradicts #1, but I think both sides are necessary.)

(2a) For our United States readers, one more reason. Jazz is a part of our shared culture. And in the U.S., we don’t have much of that. In Brazil, the older generation may listen to Roberto Carlos, while the younger generation listens to techno, but everybody listens to samba. Italy and France have what amount to national cuisines. There are folk dances in countries that everybody learns and is familiar with. We don’t really have that. We’ve got some great cuisines, but they tend to be regional. If you think jazz is a lot of work for the payoff, you should try modern dance (which is essentially the United States’ contribution to the dance world). Jazz is uniquely American, and may be the closest thing we have to a shared culture.

I’ll try to get some music into radio.blog tonight after work. For Part I, see here.