I took a day off this week to accompany my mom to an appointment in Indy. All is well and we had a nice lunch to celebrate. I had grilled salmon at Palomino and the weird thing is it tasted like a rib-eye steak. My first thought was that maybe they had grilled the salmon on top of grill space recently occupied by steak, except that wouldn't explain why all of the salmon meat seemed so moist and infused with that rounded lipid flavor. The waitress claimed its flavor profile was due to a vermouth butter that tops the fish. So, uh, vermouth tastes like rib-eye? That's news to me... Anyway, it got me thinking.
What if I cooked a couple of rib-eyes on a grill, then trimmed off the excess perimeter fat, threw the trimmings in a saucepan and heated it up, rendering out the fat so I had a nice basting liquid of grilled rib-eye essence. I could then repeatedly swab this liquid fat onto a grilling piece of salmon. Hey, I never claimed it was healthy. But it sure would taste good. Oh, if anybody is thinking of attempting this at home - be careful when basting the salmon with liquid fat over an open flame. This could cause some serious flame flare-ups. So maybe it would be more prudent to sear the salmon off in a pan and then roast in the oven, basting while roasting. Less opportunity to lose an eyebrow.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
so it goes
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.
NYTimes obituary
Vonnegut was one of the few authors who enjoyed a decent amount of real estate on my parents' bookshelf. Don't get me wrong, my parents had a large collection of books, it's just that the collection was comprised of many varied authors, most of whom did not have repeat appearances. I can remember being about 10 years old, sitting in our basement on the brown and orange shag carpeting, looking at all the titles written by the same person. At least two of the paperbacks had color-rimmed pages. "Slaughterhouse-Five" was turquoise-green and I think "Cat's Cradle" was red. I'm not sure if this practice of colored pages was en vogue in the book production world in the 60s and 70s or if it was just a Vonnegut thing. Regardless, it was attention-getting. So were the titles themselves. "Deadeye Dick," "Player Piano," "Welcome To The Monkey House," "Slapstick," "Galapagos." Think about it. Isn't "Galapagos" a really interesting word?
I read "Slaughterhouse-Five" in early high school. For fun, mind you, not as assigned reading. I know that I couldn't possibly have gotten as much out of reading it as I would do now, so it's one of those books that I should go back and re-read. As it stands now, I have two distinct memories from that book - the first is not worth mentioning. The second would be the repeated phrase "so it goes," as in the following passage from "Slaughterhouse-Five":
"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."
I give that example to provide the context of the phrase's function within "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was to take emotionally loaded situations (deaths) and reduce them to the barest of factual utterances, equivalent to "it happened, it is." It's understatement to the point of anaesthesia, very bleak and but somehow humorous at the same time. My dad, who had read so many of Vonnegut's novels, would often say "so it goes" (albeit normally in acknowledgment of events somewhat less monumental than death, though still negative) and so this formed something of my sense of the world and how to cope. Some things happen and you can get lost in the pain, but strip all of the emotional connotations and feelings away and you are left with a simple fact, a simply stated event, like saying something as neutral as "he's eating dinner." Emotional tides are more difficult to handle on a daily basis, whereas you can learn to co-exist with a fact.
The present tense of the phrase "so it goes" also helps because it implies that not only did this one event happen, but other events will happen and continue to happen. There is some forward progress implied, even if the events that will happen may continue to be of a negative nature. I suppose it's a more palatable way of saying "life goes on," which is a phrase that I can't stand. I think "so it goes" somberly acknowledges the negative nature of many of life's events. I suppose it could be taken to be flip or superficial, but knowing the context of the events that Vonnegut applied the phrase to (e.g. Kennedy and King's quick-succession assassinations) allows the reader to know it is not meant superficially. It is merely meant as a grave acknowledgment of perpetual sadness combined with the lightening effect of compressing all that sadness into one small event. Sort of like an emotional clown car.
Vonnegut's death weighs heavily on me, I think most likely because his sense of humor always reminded me of my dad's and he was someone my dad admired. I'll just leave off with a couple of quotes of Vonnegut's.
First, the fact that Vonnegut was a vocal religious skeptic adds some poignancy here:
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'" -- from "A Man Without A Country"
And last, keeping in mind that Vonnegut's mother killed herself and that he was an American POW encamped in Dresden during the firebombing so I believe this is to be taken ironically...wistfully at best:
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." (written on a picture of a headstone drawn by Vonnegut that appears in "Slaughterhouse-Five")
NYTimes obituary
Vonnegut was one of the few authors who enjoyed a decent amount of real estate on my parents' bookshelf. Don't get me wrong, my parents had a large collection of books, it's just that the collection was comprised of many varied authors, most of whom did not have repeat appearances. I can remember being about 10 years old, sitting in our basement on the brown and orange shag carpeting, looking at all the titles written by the same person. At least two of the paperbacks had color-rimmed pages. "Slaughterhouse-Five" was turquoise-green and I think "Cat's Cradle" was red. I'm not sure if this practice of colored pages was en vogue in the book production world in the 60s and 70s or if it was just a Vonnegut thing. Regardless, it was attention-getting. So were the titles themselves. "Deadeye Dick," "Player Piano," "Welcome To The Monkey House," "Slapstick," "Galapagos." Think about it. Isn't "Galapagos" a really interesting word?
I read "Slaughterhouse-Five" in early high school. For fun, mind you, not as assigned reading. I know that I couldn't possibly have gotten as much out of reading it as I would do now, so it's one of those books that I should go back and re-read. As it stands now, I have two distinct memories from that book - the first is not worth mentioning. The second would be the repeated phrase "so it goes," as in the following passage from "Slaughterhouse-Five":
"Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes. Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes."
I give that example to provide the context of the phrase's function within "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was to take emotionally loaded situations (deaths) and reduce them to the barest of factual utterances, equivalent to "it happened, it is." It's understatement to the point of anaesthesia, very bleak and but somehow humorous at the same time. My dad, who had read so many of Vonnegut's novels, would often say "so it goes" (albeit normally in acknowledgment of events somewhat less monumental than death, though still negative) and so this formed something of my sense of the world and how to cope. Some things happen and you can get lost in the pain, but strip all of the emotional connotations and feelings away and you are left with a simple fact, a simply stated event, like saying something as neutral as "he's eating dinner." Emotional tides are more difficult to handle on a daily basis, whereas you can learn to co-exist with a fact.
The present tense of the phrase "so it goes" also helps because it implies that not only did this one event happen, but other events will happen and continue to happen. There is some forward progress implied, even if the events that will happen may continue to be of a negative nature. I suppose it's a more palatable way of saying "life goes on," which is a phrase that I can't stand. I think "so it goes" somberly acknowledges the negative nature of many of life's events. I suppose it could be taken to be flip or superficial, but knowing the context of the events that Vonnegut applied the phrase to (e.g. Kennedy and King's quick-succession assassinations) allows the reader to know it is not meant superficially. It is merely meant as a grave acknowledgment of perpetual sadness combined with the lightening effect of compressing all that sadness into one small event. Sort of like an emotional clown car.
Vonnegut's death weighs heavily on me, I think most likely because his sense of humor always reminded me of my dad's and he was someone my dad admired. I'll just leave off with a couple of quotes of Vonnegut's.
First, the fact that Vonnegut was a vocal religious skeptic adds some poignancy here:
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'" -- from "A Man Without A Country"
And last, keeping in mind that Vonnegut's mother killed herself and that he was an American POW encamped in Dresden during the firebombing so I believe this is to be taken ironically...wistfully at best:
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." (written on a picture of a headstone drawn by Vonnegut that appears in "Slaughterhouse-Five")
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Do you have discerning taste?
My friend Sid posted this link earlier and I think the set-up of the social experiment is really fascinating, although the results are not surprising. Joshua Bell plays as a street performer
Friday, April 6, 2007
Rescue Me
My latest obsession:
Rescue Me. The new (fourth) season is scheduled to start up in June 2007 on FX. Until then, I'm in a DVD rental/purchase bonanza to catch up. FX is also showing re-runs in 3-episode chunks on Saturday nights, so uh, mahk ya frickin' calendahs. Denis Leary's character makes some seriously poor choices, but there is a ton of humor in the show to offset the troubled lives. Show's got a good theme song too ("C'mon c'mon" by the Von Bondies).
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
let it go
For the past four months or so, I have wrestled with some serious angst over the pronunciation of the word "Babel." See the former blog for a chronicle of the dictionary research developments. I've alienated friends over this (ok, well if not alienated, I've at least moderately irritated friends). I've nearly given up on uttering the word at all or even thinking it. I just mentally sort of skip over it, the synaptic equivalent of the old literary device of dashing out the majority of an offending word (B——— in this case), a strategy that used to be reserved for whitewashing blue language or to half-assedly protect the innocent by throwing a thin veil of obfuscation over the proper name in question.
My main beef with this word is that I pronounce it one way ("Bay-buhl," slight emphasis on the Bay) and other friends and certain movie-announcer guys pronounce it other ways. I automatically assumed that my particular pronunciation branded me with an indelible label of "hick" (inferiority complex still alive and well, clearly). So I fled to my dictionary references trying to justify my pronunciation, to mixed results that effectively justified not only my pronunciation but nearly everyone else's as well, much to my irritation. Then, yesterday, I got a wily idea to check if there is a regional preference of pronunciation of Babel - to determine once and for all if my pronunciation was hick-ish, or something else. I wasn't entirely worried about this mind you because I heard Cate Blanchett pronounce it my way at the Golden Globes and you can't go wrong if you're in the same league as Cate. So the first place I checked was the Oxford English Dictionary. They list my pronunciation as the only pronunciation, with the edition note that all pronunciations are British English unless otherwise noted. So. Apparently my instinct and familiar pronunciation of Babel is the British way. I can live with that. Just like I say "toasted cheese" instead of "grilled cheese," "toasted" being the British preference. It's just a family thing. And it's not like the family is fresh from England. I have some Welsh and English in the blood, but that part of the family came over several generations ago. So who knows. The bottom line is that I'm letting go of my little ball of fluster about Babel. And that should be good news for everyone.
My main beef with this word is that I pronounce it one way ("Bay-buhl," slight emphasis on the Bay) and other friends and certain movie-announcer guys pronounce it other ways. I automatically assumed that my particular pronunciation branded me with an indelible label of "hick" (inferiority complex still alive and well, clearly). So I fled to my dictionary references trying to justify my pronunciation, to mixed results that effectively justified not only my pronunciation but nearly everyone else's as well, much to my irritation. Then, yesterday, I got a wily idea to check if there is a regional preference of pronunciation of Babel - to determine once and for all if my pronunciation was hick-ish, or something else. I wasn't entirely worried about this mind you because I heard Cate Blanchett pronounce it my way at the Golden Globes and you can't go wrong if you're in the same league as Cate. So the first place I checked was the Oxford English Dictionary. They list my pronunciation as the only pronunciation, with the edition note that all pronunciations are British English unless otherwise noted. So. Apparently my instinct and familiar pronunciation of Babel is the British way. I can live with that. Just like I say "toasted cheese" instead of "grilled cheese," "toasted" being the British preference. It's just a family thing. And it's not like the family is fresh from England. I have some Welsh and English in the blood, but that part of the family came over several generations ago. So who knows. The bottom line is that I'm letting go of my little ball of fluster about Babel. And that should be good news for everyone.
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