I heart Tyler Florence  because of his meatballs.  Seriously.  I made this last night and I swear I felt peace on earth and the end of global warming. Join Tyler’s Meatball Coalition and you too will experience nirvana.

This is not the first dish I’ve made from Tyler’s Ultimate big teevee show. The fishcakes were also a big hit, but did not make the angels sing the way these meatballs did. Gloating side note: my polenta rocks.

Here’s my apology to Mr. Florence: Normally when I make a recipe for the first time I follow it to the “t,” but I couldn’t get chantrelles and I had the most beautiful eggplant and zucchini in the garden.  Here’s my apology to everyone else: I’m the world’s worst photographer using the world’s worst phone cam so the photo is unworthy of the ambrosial nature of this dish.  Make it anyway.

Just do it.

Last week I dumped a can of diet pepsi into my emergency brake well (accidentally). Yesterday I emptied 600ml of water into the same (I only have the one car) emergency brake well (also accidentally). Does the last accident cancel out the first? Do I need to look into a car that doesn’t have the emergency brake in the same spot that I set my beverages?

Poor little (Fjord) Focus.

 

Mood: Parenthetical :-~

 

 

If you should wish to use this photo in an advertising campaign, Poppie and I would consider allowing you to use this for a small fee and a sack of kibble.

Which is better than yesterday’s level which was “overwhelmed by meaninglessness.”

I had a dream the other night the I presume was about monkeys as I woke with The Specials “Monkey Man” earworm and had recently watched Jumanji on the teevee (Monkeys!).

Which of course reminded me of this:

If you don’t know how I got from one to the other, google Terry Hall, my fave 80’s pretty boy.

In case don’t want The Specials earworming you, here’s another Monkey Man:

A couple of years ago bunch of book-worms at my place of employment got a book club together, and while some may tease us about being a wine and gourmet food club, we do read the book and discuss it for at least five minutes. Them’s the rules. Book Club was epic last night, stuffed myself with great food and a delightful Riesling. The highlights were beet and onion salad , cheddar and beer soup , and “Better Than Sex” cake. The pork sampler with fruited sauerkraut was delicious with grainy mustard and brought back memories of dining out in Munich. The book was Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian, which was good to read if light in character development, heavy in subject matter.  Set in Eastern Germany at the ending of WWII, it follows a German family in their trek to get away from the invading Russians, and a group of female Jewish concentration camp prisoners being moved to another camp. The two groups finally intersect at the end to a quasi-Hollywood ending. Of the two war novels we read, I preferred Atonement, better characters and no false redemption or Hollywood ending. I’m an appreciator of well-written tragedy and pathos. That said, I’m ready for something light and perky, to go with my new-found spring is in the air/happiness and light/rainbows and unicorns attitude. Any reccies?

As opposed to the stories I like to read, the stories I write are light humor; bawdy and fun are how most of them could be described. I’m not sure it’s that I’m afraid to turn my hand to drama or that I truly can’t write it. I keep throwing out hints to one of my friends, who has a way with the deep stuff, of a story I would like to read. The dratted woman just ignores my hints. I’m going to have to figure out if tragedy truly is beyond my capabilities or if it’s just fear, and try writing it myself. I read something recently that summed up how I feel: ” Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.” – Gustav Flaubert – Madame Bovary (Gerard Hopkins’s translation)

I long to move the stars to pity.

Apologies to Jonathan Carroll: I am a terrible ambassador for your books.

Have been telling my friends about a novel I just finished that I loved. It’s called Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll. For some reason, I have not effectively communicated the wonderfulness of this book. One friend, who reads Vampire Slut Novels, told me (very snootily) that if he wasn’t reading VSN, he only read very good science fiction novels. The women in my book club (ok, wine and gourmet dinner club) said oh, sounds interesting, and then chose to read some other book, that I had dismissed ages ago as crap. Then I have a conversation with my trusty sidekick (ala Ren and Stimpy) via Yahoo Messenger™ and tell her all about it:

(I, Oceangal, am ‘O’, my friend is ‘H’, for Honey )
O: Have just finished a book I liked very much called Bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll.
H: The moon has bones?
O: In Rondua they do
H: Is that an island?
O: Better
It’s a dream world
H: Ah.
a bony dream world?
O: No- A wonderful dream world in which whoever possessessesess the five bones of the moon will rule Rondua
A kid named Pepsi is Rondua’s next ruler
H: So a handsome lad and ?? sets out to collect plot coupons?
And meet tribulation on the way?
?? = plucky dog?
Pet hen?
O: Lad is 5 years old and is accompanied by his mum
H: Magic hairpiece?
Oh, magic mum.
O: a giant dog wearing a bowler hat is one companion. His name is Mr. Tracy
H: Did you make that Up?
hang on…
O: Nope Jonathan Carroll did.
N: Okay, so plucky woman accompanied by magic boy and bowler hatted dog set off to gather five plot coupons.
It sounds very nice, but not my sort of thing.
(I’m back)
O: Only she’s not very plucky, and she’s dreaming about a world that when she was a child, she almost ruled, but didn’t because she wasn’t brave enough.
It’s got a great villain….
H: Darth Maul?
O: Jack Chili
H: The opposite of Jack Frost?
O: Mean as hell, I tell you.
H: I like good villains.
O: The dream world spills over into her real life of being a New York housewife with an infant daughter. Frightening things happen
H: That’s too scary.
O: There is a very terrifying bit that I couldn’t read fully, and the end made me cry.
I love a good ending
H: The dog lost his bowler?
O: Yes amongst other things
H: Did it have a razor’s edge like Steed’s, so he could throw it and disembowel or disemhead the baddie?
Or was that James Bond?
O: That was from a James Bond flick, bowler belonged to one of the baddies
H: It’s a good trick though.
O: Been done though.

The conversation then disintegrated into discussions on hats as weapons and implements of giants. It was fascinating to us, but only us, I won’t bore you with it. She probably won’t read it off my recommendation, but she would like it. I’m sure of it.

Sorry Mr. Carroll, I loved Bones of the Moon. Your playfulness with words, your imagery, made me laugh and sigh. The absurdity and tension and warm fuzzies you created thrilled me. But evidently I suck at telling people what made this book great so I’ll stop talking about it.

Am being a brave little writer and participating in NaNoWriMo. It’s a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days starting on November 1st. Don’t panic, editing and re-thinking are discouraged, you’ve only to get words down. I’ve done a lot of the grunt work (that’s allowed) and have a synopsis, character sketch, and timeline. May even do an outline. All of this should be helpful in achieving the goal. What’s the contest winner get? The satisfaction of knowing that you can do it, and at the end of 30 days, I may have something I could actually turn into a publishable piece. Or at least the satisfaction of knowing that it’s something I could do. Confidence building etc. So wish me luck and sanity.

Goal:
Words a day 1,666.67
Words a week 12,500

Synopsis: My story is about an American woman, an artist called Annie, who moves to London at the age of eighteen to go to art school. Meets musician Kenneth, has passionate affair, marries him and has two kids with him while his band becomes one of the biggest acts out there. She doesn’t stop being an artist and has her own success and her own identity other that being Rock Star Ken’s wife. After nearly twenty years of marriage, with her ignoring his rock-star infidelity etc, but always coming back to her and the children, he leaves her for a 19 year old french pop singer. She goes through everything you would expect and months later is a complete wreck. A friend of hers, another rockstar ex wife, decides to take her out and break her out of her rut. They go to a dinner honoring a friend of theirs in the fashion world and Annie gets thoroughly drunk and disgusting, but in a charming way. While the friend is trying to get her out without making a scene, Daniel who is also a fan of this designer, sees them and feeling sympathetic to Annie, comes up to say hello. He has known both of them forever, because of their husbands, he likes Annie’s art, been to a couple of her showings and bought a couple of pieces. Has even been over to her home with Ken for dinner. Friend asks for help with drunken Annie, he gives it. He tries to call her after to see how she’s doing and be friendly and supportive etc (he has guilt feelings as he’s known for fooling around with young women as well, he excuses himself from being like her ex as he’s never left any of his wives for a younger woman) and she tells him to fuck off. That pisses him off but later when he runs into the mutual friend from the drunken night, he asks about her and is told that Annie won’t speak to anybody. They decide to force the issue and find Annie holed up in her home, she’s trashed, the place is trashed, so they hose her down and tidy things up. They stay with her until she sobers up and help her get her back on track. She starts taking back her life, drawing and painting. Daniel comes around again just to be friendly and they start a friendship that turns into love.

That relationship will have it’s own ups and downs with both of them being celebrities (him major, her minor) but I am going to give them a happy ending. There will be lots of flashbacks to wild rock-n-roll shenanigans, which is stuff that turns me on. The rest should be relate to life in general and stuff I love in particular. Music, art, girlfriends, men ;). Sounds chick-lit-ish, and it is, but chick lit is fun and easy to read, so I’m praying that it’s almost at easy to write. If it isn’t, keep it to yourself and be an Oceangal Cheerleader!!!

Also if you want to be helpful, leave me a comment with some suggestions for scenes, sources etc. Make yourself useful!

Edit: 12/1/08 – Didn’t finish it nor did I hit 50k, my final word count for thirty days is 28,398. I could make excuses but I hate hearing them from other people, sounds too much like whining (most of the time) so I won’t. I’m looking at it as a crash course in “for real” writing and learned a lot I can use in future writing escapes.  I’ll keep my NaNo Novel, there are parts I wrote that I love, maybe I can moosh it around and use it in a real novel one day. Lot’s of work to do though, I’ll keep occupied. There are books I want to read, story lines to work on, and music that I’ve acquired that I have to listen to in order to justify buying more new music. Thanks to everyone who understood and supported me in my endeavor. – Oceangal

When I was growing up, I loved Halloween. Me and my sisters loved dressing in weird clothes and going around the neighborhood stopping at each house yelling “trick-or-treat” at the top of our lungs. Mom would make our costumes and make us up as devils and ghosts and we carried around a brown paper grocery bag to collect our treats. At each house the neighbors would have a big dish of candy, and without fail, they would try to guess which kids we were.To entertain us they would always say we were the wrong kids and we’d laugh about how silly the grown-ups were. The best houses had the real bar candy, but we were happy to get bazooka bubblegum (remember the cartoons?) and whatever hard candy was on sale at Woolworth’s. We always got our pumpkins a week before Halloween. Mom didn’t like them sitting out rotting, this was Hawaii and October 31st was still hot enough to rot your pumpkins fast. I sliced my hand open one year carving my pumpkin. I had claimed the big butcher knife and was creating the scariest pumpkin you could imagine. My hand, slippery with pumpkin guts, slid up the blade as I stabbed the pumpkin. Blood spurted everywhere and mom lifted me up to the kitchen sink and washed my hand clean. She made me sit down and hold pressure on it till it stopped bleeding while she finished up my pumpkin for me. I remember trying to tell her where to cut so it would be as scary as I wanted. I think she did a good job. Later she looked at my cut and taped it up herself, she was a nurse and we had be next to dead to go to the hospital. I still have the scar, I make sure to point it out to people every Halloween to prove my Halloween cred. The best part of the night was when we had hit all the houses in our neighborhood we’d go back home and count our candy to make sure none of us got any more candy than the other. Except my older sister, she was the boss so if she got extra it was just her due. Mom would put our grocery bags (we wrote our names on them so they wouldn’t get mine and vice-versa) on top of the refrigerator and let us have some every day till it was gone. So Halloween was stretched out for about two weeks. When we got older, we were just as much into creating a spooky obstacles the kids would have to come through to get candy from us girls. The best one was when I took my big sister’s basketball and rigged it up so I could dangle it over the outside stairs. I covered with a sheet and pulled it up and down while shrieking and moaning. One little kid was scared so bad he wouldn’t come up, so my big sis (the nice one) took the candy down to him and showed him it was just a basketball. I was mad at her, I thought it was really cool the way the kid screamed. Now-a-days all I have to do to get kids to scream is to go out in public with no makeup on. Amazing what changes 30+ years makes.

My music got dissed today. As did my favorite “now” Rock Star. The Rock Star happens to make the music that got disrespected so I’m triply offended. Here is the comment from a forum member I’ll call TTNo:

ugh. I can’t stand Jack White, I can’t stand the White Stripes or anything he’s done that others call music. Hype and fadism make me want to puke.

That’s too bad, I think he’s the real deal. True musical mind combined with the balls to perform all out for us. He’s one of those musicians, like Jimmy Page, who wears his heart on his sleeve in terms of putting his musical loves and influences out there for everyone to see. I love his music, have both Raconteurs albums and The White Stripes. And a bunch of d/l’s (blushing smiley). He may be the next big thing right now. But I’ve a feeling that he is going to remain the big thing for a very long time. I’m of the mind that I want my rock stars to be Rock Stars, not regular guys. He definitely fits the bill.

To me, hype and fadism are what surrounds performers like James Blunt, John Mayer, Coldplay, etc. Catchy, pop-y tunes, that appeal to the least common denominator. They don’t challenge the listener to actually listen and appreciate all that’s going on in one of their songs. It’s backround music. It doesn’t make me want to puke, though it does make me want to take a nap.

My favorite band and musician of all time is Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page. The Raconteurs get a lot of comparison to LZ. These snippets from reviews of The Raconteurs Shows give you a clue why.

The band was firing on all cylinders and it seemed as if Brendan’s guitar was having a dialogue with Jack’s guitar throughout the night as if they were interlocked with ESP. Andrew Youssef

This is straight-ahead archetypal, mostly blues-based riff rock, with the occasional heady twist, played with real soul. White’s guitar playing is as possessed as ever. -Victor

That song showed Beatles influences, while “Top Yourself,” with White at the keyboards, was a nod to Led Zeppelin, and “Salute Your Solution” had echos of the Rolling Stones.

In the five months since they blasted a packed Neumo’s early in the tour, the Raconteurs have become a powerful, well-oiled machine — like a Bradley tank or heavy-duty bulldozer.

Jack White and Brendon Benson were incredibly in sync in their vocals and guitar duos Friday night at the WaMu Theater, and the other three guys onstage — bassist “Little” Jack Lawrence, drummer Patrick Keeler and guest keyboardist/fiddler Mark Watrous — were right in gear with them.
~snip~
That chest-thumping sound made the Raconteurs’ beautiful racket a visceral experience, drawing you in even deeper to their dark, Gothic tales, their wailing, stomping blues and messy, woeful love songs.

Their ragged glory shone brightest in an extended “Keep It Clean,” featuring White and Benson’s finest vocal harmonies and sharpest guitar interchanges, and an “Intimate Secretary” that showcased White’s amazing, highly original guitar mastery. – Patrick McDonald

Okay, I’ll stop quoting reviews. But what these reviewers are saying about the Raconteurs, are exactly the reasons why Led Zeppelin was so great. Band members sharing ESP, riff-rock played with real soul by “possessed” musicians. And last but not least messy, wailing, and visceral. They are also about performance, which I miss from so many current acts. I’m not saying that Jack White and Brendan Benson are aping Page and Plant, although they do have a certain chemistry. Or that White and Benson have the sexual charisma of their predecessors. But they give a great show.

My one complaint, which I heard from other reviewers as well, is that they don’t vary their shows and set lists. Both White and Benson have had musical careers prior to The Raconteurs. They are both muso-geeks. Why aren’t they expanding their horizons by throwing in songs from their past? Their own and covers. That is something Led Zeppelin did perfectly. Their covers of Train Kept A Rolling, As Long As Long As I Have You, Killing Floor, and others add a dimension to their performances that keep you coming back for more. Then there are the Zeppelin medleys. If you are a collector of Led Zeppelin concerts you will know what I’m talking about. I’ll just give you one. On September 24, 1971, LZ performed in Tokyo. Whole Lotta Love got expanded to 28 minutes by excerpts from: Boogie Chillun, Cocaine Blues, Rave On, Your Time Is Gonna Come, I’m A Man, The Hunter, Hello Mary Lou, Pretty Woman, and How Many More Times. The scope of it is breathtaking, as I’m sure it was for them to perform it. Our Jack has been spending time with our James, maybe a little of that magic will rub off.

In conclusion, not that Jack and Brendan will listen to me, I love this band, the music, the musicians. Embrace your inner Zep and mix it up a bit more for your fans. We will love you all the more for it. As for TTNo, I hereby challenge you to a mudwrestling match for the honor of Jack White.