To Boldly Go Where No One Should Have Gone to Begin With...

I would have taken pictures, but there was really no point. Some time I’ll take you all to the Saturday Super Flea back home, you can imagine everyone there is wearing crimson with little triangular buttons and you’ll get the idea.

So as I’m writing this, I’m DJing the closing dance for the regional Starfleet Conference. Which is apparently like a Star Trek convention only not as freewheelin’. I think if we had done show of hands, at least sixty percent of these folks would either be card-carrying NRA members or at least highly sympathetic. Median age: 43 (to be fair, Helen throws off the curve a bit, this statistical outlier is certainly joining us from not just before the United Federation of Planets but a good decade before the United Nations). Median weight: deuce and a quarter and I’m being generous. Median facial hair: goatee. Lots of them and a fair count of mustaches.

When I arrived at the Ramada (seriously , how the fuck do I allow myself to be talked into these things?), I was greeted by the fairly ancient manager, who kindly waited til I had loaded in everything but a handful of XLR cables before asking if he could lend a hand. I snuck my gear in during the dinner, noting to my utter horror the lack of beer bottles and wine glasses on the dinner tables. A couple folks were sipping some sort of blue concoction, but for the most part this looked like a dry event. A dry dance party. I swear, I am never going to try DJing in Salt Lake City. You need social lubricant, people! Especially if you’re as socially…creaky as some of these ladies and gents.

Once I was set up, I snuck over to the McDonalds for dinner, where the young man at the counter sans front teeth reminded me that no matter how this week ended, I should count it in the plus column since I’m still wearing my whole face despite last Friday’s accident. A moment of relative peace before heading back. You know the view from up by the mall is actually…nonexistent.

Back to the Ramada, I excused myself to get passed a young lady managing to block the doorway all on her own. This is actually my first glimpse of the blue beverages, which I think Esteban jokingly mentioned to me as “synthahol” earlier in the afternoon. I think he was joking. The first emcee—

Time out. Two things have just happened. First, I noticed that everyone in the room was at the opposite end of the banquet hall, staring at me like the Blues Brothers in the country bar scene. Secondly, the very nice older dude with the hell of white mustache came over and requested some slow songs. His reasoning:

“A lot of us guys during this conference, we’ve got our ladies with us and we don’t get to spend much time with them. So this is our chance to make it up to them. So if we don’t have a couple slow dances, we’re screwed. Actually, we’re not getting screwed, which is the problem.”

Anyway, I put on “You Were Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson followed by “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. And you know what? “Unchained Melody” kind of choked me up. No joke. I mean, that’s a whole lot of fucking song.

—the first emcee was giving out awards for Best Officer, Best Enlisted Man—

Time out again. Three Icelandic brothers, statistical outliers far to the left on the weight chart. All sporting hammer pendants. Hammer of Thor, they inform me. You’re thor? I’m tho thor I can’t thtand it. They don’t like me. No one here likes me.

—and so on. Did I mention that the Starfleet is divided into ships? Yep, it’s divided into ships. They’ve all got the name of their ship on their lanyards, along with their ranks, like, “Lt. Ed of the USS Syracuse. Why is it the Star Trek ships are all designated USS? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of United Federation of Planets or is this just reinforcing US cultural/military hegemony? Hey, you know the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout” actually rocks pretty hard. And this whole endeavor is making me dumber by the minute. Also, not to be racist, but these people seem to only like music by white people. Stevie Wonder=death. Oh, and they all love KISS. And schmaltz! Any song I thought was far too sappy to be played went over like…I don’t know, what goes over well? Is that woman wearing fringed chaps?

Following the awards (which begin the trend of injokes I don’t at all grasp) is the auction of goods that would be passed over at your average flea market. Star Trek trading cards. Action figures on which the number imprinted on the foot must be checked before bidding can begin. Next time I go back to Buffalo, I’m totally digging out my old Star Wars toys and checking the tiny numbers on their feet. A picture of Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard dressed as some kind of private eye, signed by Patrick Stewart. A set of commemorative coins that go for (no joke) a thousand dollars. More jokes I don’t get that slay the crowd.

And now it’s my big moment. I lead off with Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”. Which I thought, you know, science fiction related. Involves counting. German. Can’t lose! The main organizer (decked out in what tuxedos will look like in the future) digs it, but he’s pretty much alone on that. At about this point, the first request for Faith Hill comes in and I started scanning the table around me for sharp objects. Requests that followed included: “Can you play some eighties?” during “In a Big Country”. House music. At least three separate requests for “Time Warp”. At least two separate requests for Journey. And I fucking hate Journey! Everyone knows that. I took out that ad in the Ithaca Times. At one point this eight year old kid starts requesting album tracks by Depeche Mode, waving away “Just Can’t Get Enough” in favor of “real Depeche Mode”. He’s thrilled I’ve got “Black Celebration” and for a moment I think there’s hope. Then his dad dragged him upstairs to their room and I’m left with the rest of them.

So the rest of them got me thinking a bit, as I warded off requests for really just the worst songs you can imagine. Now I am very much a geek in any number of ways. I can bend your ear on comic books, Star Wars, X-Files, you name it. I've never gone in for Dr. Who, but I own all of The Prisoner. But the Star Trek stuff has always left me pretty cold. I always thought it was because you had to keep track of a lot of stuff and I like my sci-fi pretty simple ("There's this Force. It has a Dark Side and...well, a side that isn't so dark.") But now I’m realizing the actual reason. Take Star Wars, for just a minute: a plucky band of rebels plots to destroy the oppressive empire. X-Files: a plucky pair of FBI agents attempts to decrypt a vast conspiracy by a shadowy and oppressive government. Star Trek: everyone dresses the same, has a military rank and everything’s pretty okay. It’s the ultimate dream of a police state, free will subjugated to a vaguely defined “common good”. The state is no longer the enemy: the state is ubiquitous. No wonder its fans seem to be, for the most part, conservative and fairly passive. They're supposed to be geeks, but geekism, I always thought, involves a basically inquisitive and acquisitional nature. There's nothing to acquire/inquire about the world of Star Trek that I can discern. Everything is in it's right place, Roddenberry's in his heaven and all is right with the world. All watched over by military-industrial complexes of loving grace.

And I realized I actually wished these people harm. I wanted bad things to happen to them. I wanted them to be eaten by Klingons or anally raped by Romulans or something unpleasant and thematically appropriate. But I couldn’t help trying to please them, struggling to make them like me, please for the love of god LIKE ME!

It didn’t work. They paid me, but they didn’t like me. And I’m out hopefully in time to see some of the Hubcap show. Those guys like me.

Mind-Blown on a Saturday Afternoon

Okay, if you haven't gone and downloaded the new Girl Talk album, "Feed the Animals", you really need to. I mean, you know this guy's shtick by now and this one doesn't really do anything fundamentally different from "Night Ripper", although it seems to me it's a little less heavy-handed with its hiphop samples. That is, Gregg Gillis isn't so much laying his frantic collage of pop hooks behind extended hiphop samples; he's integrating them more fully into the songs. It still has the breathless name-that-tune vibe of his earlier efforts, but it seems a little less ADD. When, for instance, Deee-Lite and Nirvana are seamlessly blended together, you get the feeling that both samples have been digested by the DJ, not just thrown together haphazardly. And yes, there's some Metallica in there and, well, I don't want to spoil any of it. I'm not sure it'll bear repeated listening: the primary joy of Girl Talk is just that: primary. It's the act of discovery, of puzzling out. What's left once the mystery's solved remains to be seen, but for now, this is speeding up a day that'd otherwise be creeping by.

Of course, maybe I'm just happy because there's a lot more classic rock on here. A lot.

Get it here.

The Pretty Things That Summer Brings

During my daily staring at my face too long in the mirror just now, I had cause to wonder if my nose has been knocked off center by my recent encounter on the Commons. The light makes it tough to tell.

Enough about my face, let’s talk about me. I’m finding myself in the last summer of my twenties, which it turns out is a little scary. Oddly, while most summers my mind turns to one thing (kidding, actually. I meant what you probably thought I meant), this summer I’m just feeling sort of quiet, cheerful in a general sense I think is not blindly optimistic but informed by an idea that even with my finances in a state of shambles and the most meaningful relationship in my life existing between me and my cat, things are better than they have been.

Luckily for me, this summer has led off with a couple albums that perfectly suit this mood. Vetiver’s Things of the Past, Bonnie Prince Billy’s Lie Down in the Light and even the Silver Jew’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are pleasant, hopeful little albums. They’re more about affection than love, more about the dawn and the hours after than the night, although it’s clear all three have arrived at the dawn by waiting up.

A new Will Oldham, although not all that rare an occurrence, is always a welcome one. On one hand, Will gives me the creeps. Not just because a lot of his stuff is creepy, but a lot of his material in Palace goes to dark places that I find consistently thrilling and unsettling at once. He’s creepy because he manages to emote with an almost autistic blankness that allows the emotions to be drawn small and explode off the album. As he claims on Lie Down in the Light’s “For Every Field, There’s a Mole”, Oldham is the king of infinite space, but often it’s the infinite space between moments, or eyelashes. The massiveness of the very small, the infinitesimal of the gigantic. And, wait, is that an oboe?

In a recent interview, David Berman, who is another animal entirely, claimed that he could never collaborate with Oldham because Will collaborates with everybody. Berman deftly carried this analogy over to state that “collaborating with Will would be like collaborating with everyone Will’s ever collaborated with.” Which would mean collaborating with this guy:



But seriously folks. In the past few years, Oldham has moved past the stark roots of Palace to collaborate with the heavy guitars of Matt Sweeney on the amazing Superwolf album, then switched over to the guitarless kids in Tortoise for the fantastically weird but aptly titled covers album, The Brave and the Bold. Last year’s The Letting Go was a perfect distillation of what Oldham does with, an exquisite piece on mourning and loss with hints of what sustains us through the roughs. With Lie Down in the Light, the roughs are behind him and the listener is left with what remains: close friends and lovers, current and past. Lie Down in the Light is a collection of objects held so close to the heart they permanently retain their heat and an invitation to hold those objects in your hands, to take a little warmth from them to wash off the last lingering chills of the night before.

Pigs and music (but not music for pigs)

I've been meaning to put this piece up, but as I was less than thrilled with some of the edits it saw in print, I held off for a bit. But if you dig on pig, here's my piece from last week's Ithaca Times in the original, and over at my new favorite toy, muxtape there's a collection of pretty lazy songs, which is kind of what my brain has felt like the past couple days. That Mary Wells song just slays me and if you don't know the Capstan Shafts, the dude is the king of the under two-minute gem and loads of his stuff is available for free in various online places. And yep, that's Ithaca's the Settlers. Now with production! I'm not sure if the new album is supposed to be hush hush, but it needs to be out in the world, wreaking havok soon.

I might post about new stuff before the week is out, since there've been a couple remarkable albums out this month. But first I need to figure out how I feel about the new My Morning Jacket. The key lies in "Highly Suspicious", which you can go download here if you hurry. Is it a joke? Is it deadly serious? Not sure. I can tell you the new Silver Jews, Bonnie Prince Billy and Fleet Foxes are all lovely and make for good headphone fodder on a summer day.

On to the pigs!


This Little Piggery Went to Trumansburg

It’s spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to pork. Well, mine at least. Blame it on growing up in Buffalo, the easternmost outpost of the Midwest and a city that loves meat. After moving away, I was horrified to learn people thought they could have a barbeque without the inclusion of kielbasa or brats. There aren’t many things I miss about Cheektowaga, but the availability of great sausage is one of them. Oh, and my family. Them too.

So it was with trepidation I first approached the Piggery’s booth at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Proprietors Brad and Heather Sanford were friendly and eager to tell me about sustainability and the humane treatment of their hogs, but the proof is in the casing. An hour, two links and a dash of mustard later, I was drafting an evangelical email to friends and acquaintances, urging them to get themselves to the Piggery.

Lips and Otto (von Bismarck)

Off the grid in the outskirts of Trumansburg, Brad and Heather maintain a seventy-acre farm. As I pulled up the drive, scanning the pastures, I spotted a sheep lazing near a shed that looked like something out of the Smurf village, along with some good-looking chickens and myriad pieces of farm equipment. But, oddly, no pigs. I went around the back of the house and let myself into the basement kitchen where Brad and Heather were grinding meat for sausage.

Otto von Bismarck famously opined that “Laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made.” In this case, Otto was more on the mark with the former than the latter. In most states, USDA regulations make it nearly impossible to run a commercial kitchen in your home. That same set of regulations limits the seasoning that can be used in sausage, while saying little about the meat content. This allows larger sausage making companies to dominate the market with low quality product. Luckily, New York State allows Brad and Heather to operate in-house under the same codes as a restaurant kitchen.

The small kitchen was sparsely fitted out with two coolers,both full, a three-bay sink and an old chamber stove, a 1950’s throwback known for fuel efficiency. “One of the things people usually ask is, ‘Where’s your equipment?’” Heather told me, but all of the production is done with a simple hand grinder and a manual device for packing the sausage into its casings. I scoped out the hopper of the grinder to see what was going into the sausage, half expecting the mix of lips and assholes we fear are in our processed meats. Instead, I saw healthy chunks of meat with of fresh garlic and herbs. There might be lips and assholes involved in law making, but there were none in this sausage.

Pigs and their cellulite have gotten caught up in an unfortunate political analogy, wherein anything unnecessary and harmful to a legislative bill is branded “pork barrel”. Once a staple of the American diet, pork fell into disfavor due to its relatively high fat content. The result was two-fold: the price of pork plummeted and pork farmers moved toward leaner animals, producing pork chops that had all the gustatory appeal of a hockey puck. Even a dosing of Shake-and-Bake can’t conceal that without the fat, pork cooks up dry and flavorless. As Brad wrapped up a set of pork chops each roughly the size of my head, he pointed at the inch of fat girding each one. “That’s where all the vitamins are,” he assured me. “All the good stuff.”


Brad and Heather Bought the Farm

Just goes to show, your Cornell degree doesn’t dictate your destiny. Brad and Heather both graduated from Cornell with degrees in genetics and engineering, respectively, but ended up in New York City, with Brad attending the French Culinary Institute and Heather working in the record industry. About four years ago, they moved back to the Finger Lakes to take on “some sort of agricultural thing.” Originally planning to start up a hard cider orchard, they ended up purchasing their first couple pigs.

This is their first year of regular production and sales, but Brad and Heather have been busy in the interim. They’ve been building, trying out recipes and learning the finer points of pig husbandry, setting up their operation with an eye towards sustainability; the house and the kitchen run almost entirely off wind and solar power generated on the farm.

While Heather played with the punk band Trabant, whose single “Fascism is Sexy” was chosen as the theme song for a French children’s show, Brad hit up the Culinary Institute for a refresher course and has devoured every available book on chaucetuerie. Brad said 18th century books are the most helpful while modern books are pretty boring. “Feed them soy and some corn and they’ll be fine,” seemed to be the attitude of most texts, he said, dismissing texts intended for much larger farms. With the increased demand for corn for use in ethanol production, grain prices have gone up nearly seventy percent from last year, encouraging Brad and Heather to form partnerships with local growers while looking for alternative methods of feeding their pigs. Brad described using the pigs as plows, spreading barley and oats in with the larger grain feed so the pigs plant the next generation of their food while eating. Some of the plants were already sprouting and would soon provide a dietary supplement for the hogs.

Meet the Pigs
Pig aren’t as diverse as dog, but there are a number of distinct heirloom breeds. Chunkette, for instance, would chafe at being called simply a pig, since she is, in fact, a Mulefoot hog: a rare breed nearly bred out of existence due to changes in the agricultural market. The Piggery is also raising a number of half Tamworths, larger pigs with thick, bristly auburn hair, better suited for colder environments. But standard, pinkish Yorkshires (think Babe and Wilbur) are also well represented: one of the pastures was teeming with them, lazing about under a simple shelter, chomping on grass and goading Brad and Heather to play with them.

The idea of pigs wallowing in crap and eating whatever they’re slopped with is more of a judgment on how they’re traditionally raised than their natural habits. Given a little room to run, pasture and play, pigs are, in fact, kind of adorable. Contemplating whether or not I could keep one as a pet in my apartment, I asked Heather and Brad if they ever had trouble serving up animals they’d raised from infancy. She shrugged a little and told me they’d just had “one of our moms” in the kitchen the previous week. “But I guess I’ve come to terms with it,” she told me. “It’s all part of a circle of life thing.”

Scattered shots...

Joyce said the broken mirror is the symbol of Irish art. Of course, Mick said that time is on my side and frankly time and I are staring at each other across a line of scrimmage right now, so maybe one shouldn't trust everything one hears from across the pond. But if Joyce is right, my brain is currently the symbol of Irish art. Meaning I have the attention span of a Stiff Little Fingers song.

Which is to say, I haven't had any new musical obsessions of late and music has become more background noise than anything else. This was one of my primary fears opening the store, and while I'm sure it will pass, for right now my turntable is gathering dust. The week before last was spent largely researching and writing about Ithaca's new roller derby team, last week was a piece on pig farming and charcuterie which will hopefully see daylight tomorrow, and this week I've been jotting down notes for the other blog and wondering how I can make this into an article. And for whom. There's just so much I don't know about the circus arts. Does anyone know of any particularly good lit on clown colleges?

Also, in my capacity as drink-makin' monkey, I'm making a summer transition from whiskey to gin. I know, it's sacreligious and I will probably keep it like a secret when I visit the NYC for SchubertFest on Saturday (scroll down a bit). But a fellow ginthusiast has highly recommended I go to Death + Company, so a pre-rock show pilgrimage may be in order.

In other news, the book is back on definite go status after a month or so in a gray area. After some scheduling shifts and a fair brutalizing from the surviving member of the band in question, it looks like late September is the new July. On the bright side, that means I might have a free minute in July to get out of town, on the downside it means the advance check that's supposed to pay off the brand spanking new computer I'm currently typing on may slip even farther into the future.

New York crew, see you at Fontana's this Saturday, n'est pas?