Rectifying Your Own Pitiful State

The way to be a cook is to cook. There is completely no secret: just plunging in, allowing time, making space, giving energy, tending each situation with warm-hearted effort.
-Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Cooking


I felt quite sheepish having to call home to ask if I can come to dinner.

After leaving the house with my stomach satisfied, I rode to the 24-hour supermarket. I wanted to make something to give back and also rectify the pitiful situation my refrigerator was in. The supermarket is a gleaming white halogen wonderland. At any time of day or night, the automatic doors slide open and you can find packages and cartons and boxes stacked high; logos and shapes and colors in neat rows of repetition. I surveyed the aisles. Light bounced off the food into my retinas which sent electrical flashes through my brain. Gyoza! (potstickers), I thought.

When I was a kid, I would help my mom wrap the filling, and I remember her teaching me how to tuck in the folds just so. You learn once, and it stays with you forever. Making food in pockets is like making sculptures, and each one turns out different. Arrange them as you go and they look like an army.

You know what Beavis? This sucks.

Uhhh...You want us to be what for Halloween? Sexy nurses? Slutty maids? Boring witches? Yeah right, dumb ass! We’re gonna be, like, Beavis and Butthead!!! Uhhh huh huh. Yeeeah! Yeeeah!

If you have no idea who they are you are sleepin’. Wake up to the greatness of The Great Cornholio!

Jazzy Bread: Randy Weston & Alex Blake @ Kamigamo Shrine

Went to see a jazz show at Kamigamo Shrine last night! Randy Weston piano and Alex Blake bass. Dressed up and on the bus, walked umbrella in hand in the drizzle through immense torii gates on sandy soil beneath until reaching the illuminated tarp covered with signs for the show. The tent formed a kind of walk-way in and extended out to accomodate low benches. T-shirt and CD tables lined one side, and excited staff-members sold coffee, tea, and "jazzy bread" in back for the hungry. Water slid off the edges of plastic covering into tin buckets. The rain grew heavier, the light grew dimmer, the stars turned on one by one. I stood in line early and when they finally let us in, scurried shoeless over the ramp into the raised wooden structure to try and nab the best seats. The rectangular room was bare and simple save the Japanese pine tree painted on one wall. Square zabuton cushions made neat grids around three sides of the performance area. There was a sense of being incapsulated when the heavy wooden doors were slotted into position and slid closed from outside.

In came a towering Mr. Weston, like to the ceiling! He sat down, no introductions, no greetings to the audience or formalities of the like, introduced the first song, and began. His big hands on the keys commanded the thing, but they undoubtedly had the control of a professional, hitting high notes on the farthest right just so; stars in outerspace. He's in his 80's and wore an African hat. The bass player Mr. Alex Blake played like he was possessed and people were loving it by the likes of the applause and hoots after each crazed solo. While playing, both musicians made scatting and grunting sounds and periodically shot eachother looks like, wooo!... I'm feelin you! Mr. Weston explained, "The ancient Egyptians believed that music was the first and universal language." Then started that tune, and each one of us found ourselves clapping in unison to a rhythm, and I do believe the temperature rose a few degrees. Rain was pounding the roof but energy was flying everywhere in this intimate space: many eyes, hands, ears, pulses, one black piano and an upright bass.

Here is Randy Weston, and a taste of Alex Blake