Movin' On Up

Well, this humble blog that never got any love has gone the way of all flesh. Come see if I can manage more than ten posts in the course of three years over at Quixote States Mark Two. I've already got three up there -- four if you count the photo page. Anyway. This is not an ending, but a glorious new beginning of momentary enthusiasm followed by weeks, then months and eventually years of self-recrimination for not following through on what I start. Join me, won't you?

http://www.quixotestates.com

Leek and Potato Soup

What I like about cooking (as opposed to baking) is the looseness of it. It is very forgiving and allows you to make a lot of mistakes and still come up with something tasty. Or at least edible. This is, I think, the recipe that I have down the best. I have done it a bunch of times, and each time I do it just a bit differently, and I’ve discovered additions that improve it (add olive oil to the butter!) and didn’t (more carrots!). It’s a simple recipe, though. I don’t remember where I found the recipe that I based this one, though. It was somewhere on the internet, and frankly, they’re more or less all the same. It would be hard to reduce this recipe down further. That, for me, is its charm. Oh, and it tastes really good.

Leek and Potato Soup

Serves Four

4 large leeks, split and cleaned
1½ pounds of potatoes, cut into small cubes
4 large carrots, cut into small cubes
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of olive oil
One package 32 ounces of chicken or vegetable stock, or about or four cups
A table spoon of fresh thyme, chopped fine
1 heavy pinch of salt
Salt and black pepper to taste

Cut off the roots and the dark green tops of the leeks, and split them until just before the roots. Pull them open slightly and rinse them under running water to wash out sand and dirt between the leaves. When the leeks are cleaned, split them completely and chop up into quarter inch sections.

Place a six-quart pot on medium heat and add the butter. When the butter is melted, add the leeks and thyme. Add a heavy pinch of salt to the leeks and sauté them in the butter for about twenty-five minutes until they’re soft.

When the leeks are soft, add the potatoes, the carrots and the stock. Bring to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Let it simmer for an hour or so, or until the carrots and potatoes are soft.

You can place the soup into a blender and puree it, or leave it that way. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy your healthy soup. If you don’t want it to be as healthy as that, you can add some parmesan cheese or some crisped bacon, crumbled, as a garnish.

Writing and Cooking

I’ve been trying, for various reasons, to eat healthier and cook more. I’ve pretty much always enjoyed cooking, to a limited extent, I think I’m pretty good at it. I know some techniques, I’ve made some things that I was pretty proud of, and I know to have a good time with it. The downside of cooking, of course, is that can be a lot of work (usually having to do some sort of straightening up and cleaning before I start, and then some again afterwards can be a pain, especially with limited counter space and only one sink). When I get home from work, that’s often the last thing I want to do. But, self-improvement, et cetera. So, as I said, I’m trying to do it more often. I’ve made a couple of things that I was pretty pleased with, so I figured, since I started this blog to practice writing more, that I might as well put things up about that and see how it works out. Two forms of self-improvement: one stone.

I actually have been writing more than usual of late. I wrote part of a short story that was going pretty well before abandoning it, as I always do. I’ve been writing a lot for Ghettoblaster magazine: reviews, some interviews, and other things. I do semi-interesting things on a regular basis. I ought to just start throwing that stuff up here. I will make an effort to do so. It’s my promise to you, the non-existent reader. Anyways, this kind of naval-gazing nonsense is borning, so hopefully the food stuff will be more interesting.

A Thing that Annoys Me

I am no religious, but I know a bit about religion, so I tend to read articles about it when I come across them. Case in point, this Atlantic article that discusses the trouble a Christian author had in getting his Christian movie made. Block quote!

The point of Save Blue Like Jazz, then, is about more than just making a movie out of a popular book. It's a mission to prove there's a market for a different kind of film that explores the Christian faith: one that expresses doubt but falls eventually on the side of belief.

Well, so far so good. Not a whole lot to complain about. Sadly, however, the article then decides that Hollywood never makes movies that fall into that category -- although it notes at the end that Passion of the Christ is a Christian movies, as was Signs, M. Night Shyamalan's Mel Gibson movie, and a horror film I vaguely remember starring Laura Linney. But it bemoans that Hollywood insists on making movies like Saved and (apparently) Easy A.

And, well, whatever, Christians have few more favored hobbies than convincing themselves that they actually represent a persecuted minority. However, just off the top of my head, I, an unbeliever, can think of any number of films that present characters searching for or retaining their faith: Bad Lieutenant, Mean Streets, Last Temptation of Christ, the Passion of Joan of Arc, Jesus' Son.

I suppose the author would say, "Sure, but most of those films are Catholic." Well, Jesus' Son isn't, but it's also only Christian as an undertone. The article was speaking specifically about evangelical Christians. And fine, whatever. But as the article notes, evangelicals don't seem to have a taste for nuanced displaces of faith in a real world setting. They want Hallmark Channel accounts of perfect people perfectly loving Jesus. And whatever floats your boat, I guess. It just annoys me to see the tired old argument about Hollywood, godless Sodom trotted out for the nth time.

Missed the Funeral

Anymore, when I start writing something, even if I have an idea of where I want to go with it, I'll get a page or so written up and then just not no where to go from there, and come to a full stop. Sometimes I'll walk away from it, thinking, "Well, I'll come back to this later." When I finally do, I'm as adrift as I was before. More often than not, I'll simply close the word processor and return to whatever useless nonsense that I was doing. That's the case with this. I had the idea of a long gone son returning to a dusty hometown for the reading of the will. Instead of closing it out, I thought, "I guess I'll put it up here." Not much to it, though.

The reading of the will was scheduled for two o’clock. Steven had gotten off of the bus at eleven fifteen and looked up and down the almost deserted mid-midmorning downtown. Needing some place to kill time, he bought a paper at a battered red newspaper dispenser and pushed against the door of a closed-seeming bar. It gave, and he slipped into the dusty twilight inside. A narrow shotgun bar from the pre-war era, a long silvered mirror and a wood bar ran against one wall into the interior. The left side of the room contained scalloped, blood red vinyl booths. There were two old men sitting at the far end of the bar, several stools apart. A woman in her early forties was tending the bar, standing a short distance from the two men. She leaned against the bar back, reading a battered paperback thriller. Steven sat on a stool halfway down the bar. The woman put her book facedown on the bar and walked over to him.

“Hey – can I get a cup of coffee?”

“Sure.” The woman moved over to the Bunn machine and poured a cup of coffee into a chipped white porcelain mug. She placed it on a napkin in front of him. She moved back to her book.

“Could I have some cream as well?” Steven asked. He tugged his tie loose a fraction.

The woman looked at him. “Sure.” She put her book facedown on the bar again, and moved towards the far end of the bar, bending over and reaching into the small refrigerator under the bar back. She came back to Steven with a paper carton of 2% milk and put it down in front of him.

~

Meanwhile, across town, Susan stood in front of the mirror, putting on makeup. Her two children ran screaming through the hallway just beyond the door, and with an effort of will, she managed to ignore them. They were not easy to ignore, and the effort was made more difficult in her distracted state. Since her father died, she’d had a terrible time sleeping – not that she’d slept that well before he’d died, either. With her mother out of town and Steven MIA, Susan had been the only one able to sit with him in the hospice during the final few days. Being a stay at home mother allowed people to assume she was available to take care of any odd job that happened to come up – never mind that it required her to find someplace to dump the kids for hours during the day, and trusting a fairly useless husband to take care of them and not burn the house down while she was gone. Did anyone concern themselves with the work she had to do? No, of course not. The clothes still needed to be washed, the meals still needed to be cooked (or, more often, bought) and the kids still needed to get to day care.

Power

This new video thing from Kanye West -- he's calling it a painting, and fair enough -- is pretty fantastic. Samples King Crimson, too, which can't hurt, but I really like the song.

Apples and Onions

Last December, when Apple bought Lala, I, like the rest of the nation, assumed that they would be using the technology as the basis for a new version of iTunes. Well, six months has come and gone without a further announcement of what, if anything, Apple intends to use it for. I’ve been pretty much come to the conclusion that Apple purchased Lala simply to shut it down, and incidentally (if at all) fold their tech into iTunes. It’s a frustrating situation, although it makes sense from Apple’s point of view – Lala had entirely supplanted my use of iTunes or even my iPod at work. Apple wants to be able to sell mp3s for a dollar a pop – they don’t want someone coming along and selling streaming songs for ten cents a piece, or allowing people to upload their CDs straight to a cloud-based web player.

What frustrates me about the situation is that we have often been promised a lot of things from the future, only to have it underwhelmingly underdeliver in the expected areas – even if it does deliver in unexpected ways. The ability to access your entire music collection, wherever you can find an internet connection, is what the future should be. It irritates me greatly that we’re going to lose that ability because the content distributors are frightened of the implications of this new technology. Flying cars and pills and silver uniforms are all practically impossible. But Lala already exists! And now, of course, it’s gone.

War

Via Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Chait is confused about Joe Klein’s newfound anti-war stance:

It would rule out not just the intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, but also the Gulf War, the Korean War, and going to war against Germany in World War II, not to mention obviously Vietnam and World War I. Probably the only wars such a standard would permit would be fighting Japan in World War II and, arguably, the War of 1812.

So, that’s it? If we follow Klein’s dictates, we miss out on a Balkans war Europe had little or no interest in dealing with, a war that didn’t accomplish much besides liberating an oil monarch without addressing the underlying issues, an ongoing quagmire that’s been a humanitarian running sore since the ‘50s, the byword for military disasters of the highest order and a war that we were in for little over a year at the very end of the war and were far from a decisive factor? And, as it happened, Germany declared war on the US, not the other way ‘round. Does Chait really think that we couldn't have survived without this catalog of blunders, mistakes and outright disasters? I guess some people just really like war.

Old Neu!

Today, I’m planning on going up to Lincoln Center to check out Michael Rother’s new project Hallogallo 2010, Rother, guitarist of one of my favorite bands, Neu!, has brushed off some of his old tunes and is taking them out for a spin with Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth, and some other guy who’s name escapes me. They’ve been getting some pretty positive notices as they’ve played out – their show at Primavera Sound in Spain was well received. The clips look pretty awesome – Rother can certainly still lay down some slick guitar lines. In addition to trotting out the Neu! material, they’ll also be playing some stuff from Harmonia, Rother’s mid-70s project with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Möbius of Cluster and (occasionally) Brian Eno.

Which is all well and good – it’s exciting to see our musical heroes in a live setting. So what’s the problem? Well, Neu! was originally a duo – Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger. Dinger passed away in 2008. It was unlikely that that either of them would ever get together again – from everything I’ve read, it sounds like there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between the two of them, especially after Neu! 75. Which is too bad, but perhaps that was part of the chemistry that created their unique music in the first place. But how are we to deal with acts that tour long after a vital partner is out of the picture, either through death or estrangement?

I saw the Who at Cleveland’s Gund Arena in 2000. This was post-Moon’s and pre-Entwistle’s deaths. The issue is not that the person they had playing drums (Ringo Starr’s son, I believe) wasn’t competent – he was. It’s more, “Is this authentic?” Of course, that just opens up a whole series of new, not-really-answerable questions, “what is authenticity?” being chief among them. Seventy-five percent seems like a pretty good ratio of original members : hired guns. Fifty percent, as in the recent Who outings, doesn’t seem quite as legitimate.

Of course, then we have the case of someone like Pink Floyd or the Rolling Stones. Both of those bands lost essential members early, and both went on to their greatest fame and success afterwards. And, I think, that’s the defining issue: what did they create after the death of essential, founding members? In Pink Floyd’s case, you’ve got Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here. Those are all vital albums – for me, Pink Floyd is the post Barrett, Roger Waters-led band. For the Rolling Stones, it’s a bit trickier, because I enjoy the Brian Jones material almost as much as their later stuff, but they still had Exile on Main Street ahead of them. With the Who, what did they have ahead of them? Kenny Jones, “Who Are You” (which is a good song), and Face Dances. Hardly their most triumphant hour.

So the issue for me is, “Are they still a vital concern? Or, at least, where they when Person X died?” When Keith Moon died, the Who stopped, for all intents and purposes, to be an essential, vital band – they had a handful of decent songs scattered across two poor albums. So, twenty years after Moon’s death, their touring is clearly just a cash grab – there’s nothing more to be said or that Townshend and Daltrey can add to their legacy. I don’t begrudge them their chance to rake in some cash, but I think we can all agree that it’s slightly undignified. The same goes for the post-Waters Pink Floyd and any number of projects. Most Rock stars haven’t really coped with how to grow old gracefully. I don’t think there really is anyway to play rock music, as popularly constituted, when you’re almost old enough to draw social security.

Which brings us back to Neu! Whatever else it might be, I would say that Neu!’s music isn’t primarily rock in origin or intent. It certainly doesn’t rely on aggression as its driving force (although they do have songs that do – but they’re Klaus Dinger’s songs, like “Hero” off of Neu! 75. So, when Michael Rother goes out and plays a handful of indie festivals like Primavera Sound and All Tomorrow’s Parties, as well as clubs like Maxwell’s and small art spaces like the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, it just doesn’t come across as as much of a cash-in as a Rolling Stones 200-date world tour does. For whatever reason, the music still seems to me as vital and important. Which, I suppose, is a long way of justifying why I’m going to go see a dinosaur act for free tonight. But, RIP Klaus Dinger.

Moving across the waters

I have kind of a strange job at the moment. I work for a major publishing house, but I don’t really have a lot to do. My boss has been gone for over a month, and when she’s not here, there’s really not much to do She is, however, a very nice person and seems to be very understanding of my dilemma. It feels somewhat churlish to complain about a job where I spend most of my time free to do what I want – read (both blogs and the Kindle PC app), kill time, write if I chose to, though up until now I have not chosen to do that. However, it can get to be pretty dull, and I’ve come to worry that, due to my advanced age and my all-too-apparent lack of skills, this job is an active drag on my life. I can probably spin a good game about what I’ve learned and accomplished here, but it will certainly not be entirely true.

But that statement up there, about the writing, is what brings me here. I used to post on another blog, Pseudo Body Politic, with a friend and that friend’s friend. That kind of fell to pieces once I came back from Peace Corps in Bulgaria and had to get a job. Drew and the other guy seem to have moved on to other things as well. It also didn’t help that, following the election in 2008 I became pretty disenchanted with politics in general. I’ve done that a couple of times when it’s become entirely apparent that democracy is, at a fundamental level, fairly flawed – at least when viewed as a rational means of determining social policy. Economic conditions and what political scientists call “fundamentals” (employment levels, interest rates, all sorts of stuff) are what actually determine election results. I’m sure that, on the margins, politicians themselves can help or (mostly) hurt themselves. But what it comes down to is, if the economy is going well, you’ll be reelected. If not, it’s time to find a lobbying job. That just isn’t much for me to hang my hat on.

So, realizing that I don’t have much interest in writing about politics (at least not as a principle project), I’ve decided that writing, by itself, should be something that I make an effort towards. But about what? Well, I certainly have a number of interests: reading, writing, movies, music and videogames, to name a few. Most likely, no one cares about my thoughts on these subjects, but, hey, when did that ever stop me from pontificating? At any rate, the idea of Quixote States is as a semi-private place for me to practice writing and expand upon things that have been interesting me of late.

With that in mind, this post is written to be more or less a place holder while I futz around with the design of the blog. I might come back and try and write something more later on today, but we’ll see. The goal, as I see it, is to try and put at least one thing up each day. We’ll see where that gets me.