anwaya

Ingredients

• 1.5 lb pork liver (provided by a local farm), cubed, membrane and vascular tissue removed
• 1 lb store-bought ground pork
• 0.5 lb pork belly, rind removed, cut in matchsticks
• 2 x 12 oz packages of bacon

• Marsala:
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 tbs shallots, finely chopped
• dried sage, pinch of thyme, pinch of fennel seed, pinch of ground clove
• salt and pepper
• shot glass of rye whisky

Technique

1. Freeze grinder parts.
2. Line a bread mould with bacon. Keep some slices for the top. Chill.
3. Mix meats, and put on a tray to partially freeze (30 minutes and up).
4. Caramelize onions, herbs. Season. Add whisky. Reduce. Chill.
5. Grind meats with the marsala
6. Cover with foil and tie down
7. Cook in a bain marie
8. When core temperature is 145F or so, remove and weight 

Labels: charcuterie, in progress, meat, recipe

 This was a new translation and adaptation of Chekov's bougie masterpiece, presented by the National Theatre (UK) and distributed as a film to places far and wide. Two things stand out in the text:

"Can you imagine if it was possible to completely change the way you live your life? To look at your life and ask yourself what you would do if it died. If your old life died. It ended. And then take what's left of your real life and live it properly. How can I do that, Michael? Where do I start?"

Labels: #vanya, ntlive, theatre

 

She was a racing horse south of Picton way 

Then she hit the big time in the USA.

And if she could only hear me

This is what I’d say

Oh, Crumpie pie

You are driving me crazy

I’m in love but I’m lazy

So won’t you please come home?

Oh, Crumpie pie, my position is tragic

Come and show me the magic

Of your Belmont Downs stride

You became a legend of the racing scene

And now the thought of meeting you

Makes me weak in the knee

Oh, Crumpie Pie, you are making me very low

Sail across Lake Ontario

To be where you belong

Crumpie Pie, come back to me

(Ooh, yeah

I like it like that, oh ah)

(I like this kind of hot kind of music

Hot kind of music

Play it to me, play it to me, Belmont Park blues)

Will the wind that blew her boat across the Bay

Kindly send her sailing back to me?

Hey, hey, hey

Now, Crumpie Pie, you are making me crazy

I'm in love but I'm lazy

So, won't you please come home?

Come, come back to me, Crumpie Pie

Ooh, oh

Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh

Crumpie Pie, Crumpie Pie

After Honey Pie by Lennon and McCartney.

I'd sing this to her while Nancy soaked her hooves in epsom salts.

Labels: animals

 Ingredients: 

• 250g 00 flour
• 2 whole eggs
• 2 yolks

Labels: in progress, italian, recipe

Ingredients, per person:

• 250g potatoes (preferably Yukon Gold) cut in even mouthful sizes
• 1 Tbs duck fat
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 Tbs flat-leaf parsley, minced
• salt, pepper

Labels: recipe

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
While all around me a voice was sounding
Saying this land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking on freedom's highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Note: I wrote the following to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on Sunday mostly because I really do like the idea of constitutional government, but also because so much of the political discourse from the Right has been wrapped in the flag in recent years. I wanted to frame Impeachment as a patriotic action, and I'm pleased with the way it turned out.

The Sun-Sentinel is published in Rep. Wexler's congressional district.


At http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-editgsimpeachsbjun12,0,916824.story, the Editorial Board published an opinion piece which begins:

Issue: Some in Congress want an impeachment

And concludes:

BOTTOM LINE: Get on with REAL issues.

It is not only some people in Congress who want impeachment, and feel it is a "REAL" issue. We want impeachment for the reasons that this nation's Founders went to the trouble of of establishing the United States in the first place: in order to form a more perfect union. If we settle for Bush and Cheney's theory of a Unitary Executive acting above and outside the law, then we will no longer live in Lincoln's "nation of laws". The Constitution of the United States, which Mr. Bush has twice sworn to protect and defend, will have indeed become what Mr. Bush has also described it: "just a god-damned piece of paper!"

My third-grade son knows that the Constitution is the foundation of the Republic of the United States. It doesn't take a constitutional attorney to work this out. If you would pledge allegiance to the flag and the Republic for which it stands, then you must take the defense of the constitution seriously: and the extra-constitutional declaration of war against Iraq is just one of thirty-five charges of high crimes and misdemeanors that Representatives Kucinich and Wexler brought to the House of Representatives this week. They,like Mr. Bush, take an oath of office, to preseve and protect the Constitution. They have no higher duty as our elected delegates. We know that Mr. Bush lied to us about the reasons for going to war, and has sacrificed the lives of over 4,000 US troops for what is still no good reason. We are not safer: the danger we find the Republic in has not diminished, but persisted and grown under this administration's leadership - to the Constitution's cost.

The bottom line, then, is that Kucinich and Wexler are dealing with the very real, basic, issue, which is worth every minute of their time, ours, and yours: the continuing, constitutional, existence of the foundations of the United States. Perhaps you think gossip, tittle-tattle and turf wars matter more than the real Constitutional issues Mr. Bush's presidency has raised: if so, you are free to call in your editorial pages for a Continental Congress which seeks to recognize that the Republic is defunct, and a new Constitution establishing a new form of government is almost eight years overdue.

I, for one, would not wish you success in such an endeavor.

This is from an email I wrote to my friend Ian Macdonald, a very fine photographer, about a show of photographs by three British photographers, Graham Smith, Chris Killip and Martin Parr. Ian knows Graham, and kindly got me an invitation.

My invitation finally came this week, and the show closed yesterday, so I went down and had a look. I couldn't afford any of the pictures, the Killip pictures were priced at $4500, but I bought a couple of books: Graham's photo essay of pictures by him and his father in Granta, and Killip's 55. I recognized Martin Parr's work very quickly, from New Brighton, and from the books he has out I think he's had a lot of commercial success and doesn't need me to buy anything.

I was down there at 10 AM when the gallery opened. Because I had an invitation in my hand, I got a personal tour from the only gallery assistant who'd turned up on time. She was wide-eyed, blonde, informed but not very knowledgable, and deferential: for example, there's a picture of The Commercial pub which has a billboard with a poster advertising paint. Henry Cooper is holding a paint can and a roller, and smiling. The slogan for the paint is something like "step back and admire the view", and Graham takes Henry at his word: a grey morning, foggy, damp, people in motion, all the windows dark. The assistant didn't know who Henry Cooper was, so I explained. There's a boxer here who's retired and sells stuff, George Foreman, he has five sons all called George, and he sells a grill, like a grilled sandwich grill, but at an angle, so that you can grill a hamburger and the fat all drains out.

I like Graham's pictures a lot. They're very clean, visually he doesn't seem to intrude, but the stories which go with the pictures show a deep intimacy with his subjects. He's funny, too, "I thought I saw Liz Taylor and Bob Mitchum in the Back Room of the Commercial" is hilarious. They also remind me of Camden Town in the '60's, when there were still Peabody Buildings at the end of the street, and the rag and bone man came with his horse and cart once a month. The first one I looked at was of a lock-in at the Commercial, with three decades of fashion - a '60's Rocker singing, '70's shaggy haircut on the guitar, and an '80's New Romantic with a pint in her hand. A bare lightbulb, peeling paint, and lino tiled floor. Brilliant. The maintained surfaces are on the people, more or less.

His pictures of prostitutes show similarities with Brassai, though his prostitutes don't have the security of a brothel, and they don't have the same standard of living that Brassai's Parisian prostitutes did. He's also strongly social realist.

Chris Killip, on the other hand, is very hard scrabble. His politics is completely overt in the seacoal pictures. Graham was a gentleman about it, but Chris rubs my nose in my smug bourgeois comfort. Beautifully, too. It's hard to believe that seacoal could still be a way of life, but there it is. Graham's working class could buy a pint in a pub; Chris' sniffs glue on the beach. Graham's pictures are mostly open to friendship; Chris has people's backs to the frame, in one case, looking at a wall. The clearest political statement, though, is the Alcan fence, keeping the seacoal pickers from a beach owned by Alcan: here is a corporation stiffing the little man, again.

Martin Parr, then: all his pictures in the show were from 1988. Chris and Graham's pictures ranged from the mid-'70's to the mid-'80's. So almost all the show was from the Thatcher years. Parr's pictures were mostly of the south west, the middle class, and the tories. Looking at his pictures is like looking at Durer: there's something cautionary about them, I think he looks for naked Emperors and points at them, laughing.

Dear Senator Dodd,

I am spurred to write to you by a request at the Crooks and Liars web site, where there is an invitation to provide you with material to read on the floor of the senate today during your filibuster of the FISA bill with the section on immunity for the Telecommunications corporations which plainly broke the law by allowing the NSA to tap network communications wholesale, without a warrant, with no more than a verbal assurance that it was OK to do so.

I am an immigrant to the United States from the United Kingdom. I was drawn in no small part by the ideas embodied in the Constitution: the promises it holds for all mankind are not only Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, but the Bill of Rights, and a form of democratic government designed to keep tyrants' hands off the machinery of power.

I viewed the United States historically as a nation striving to make itself more perfect by bringing about the realization of these promises. I cannot think of a time in U.S. history when more of the promises have been broken, and so much of the progress undone.

You are standing today for the people, and for the promises of the Rule of Law, and the protection against unwarranted search and seizure. When the people's delegates take their oath to support and defend the Constitution, the purpose of the oath is to uphold these promises against those who would seize power from the people and their delegates: I commend you for your courage today in standing for these promises, and urge your colleagues to come to your side and rally to the cause of that which gives the nation its form and structure: that without which government of the people, by the people, for the people, might well perish from this earth. I give you the Constitution of the United States of America.

Do not let this bill pass today, or any other, with immunity for the Telecommunications Corporations. The Constitution should not be subjected to this assault in the Senate, and it is your duty, truly discharged today, to oppose it.