1. Visiting with my cousins!
2. peanut sauce
3. Coffee
4. Fishbone LPs
5. Finishing writing articles
6. Spoke records Frog 45
7. Old friends returning to town
8. Bobby Watkins and Fire “Soul on ice”
9. Fried tofu
10. Steely Dan – Gaucho LP
Category Archives: learning
September top ten archived
Filed under learning
Eli Porter documentary
Eli Porter is a disabled emcee whose high school battle video has become a key hip hop trope. Here is the documentary about the actual footage. Complete with commentary from the internets celebrities.
Filed under academics, disability, documentary, hip hop, homophobia, learning, media
Movement is essential
An animal needs more than just healthy food, clean water, and pure air. It needs to move, to oscillate naturally and gracefully and musically with the waveforms of life. If we repress the song and dance of life, we will die of loneliness and misery and frustration even before the radiation and toxic waste and global warming can kill us! Our society is trying to destroy the spirit as well as the body of life; both must be saved or none of us will survive.
via The Essential Teachings, Part One « Talkin’ Blues About The News.
Filed under disability, health, learning
When mockery becomes fuel: Bachmann
Presidential politics might be America’s greatest spectacle. Matt Taibbi writes a nice rant on Michelle Bachmann in the new Rolling Stone. The piece is an enjoyable introduction into the legacy of irrationality presented by the now-presidential candidate. I’m interested in a paragraph on page two, where Taibbi talks about how mockery and disagreement are used as a fuel to turbo-charge her desire to win.
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
via Michele Bachmann’s Holy War | Rolling Stone Politics.
It is a good insight. The question is how to politically challenge these kinds of thinkers without giving them more ammunition?
Filed under communication, learning, propaganda
Juxtaposion: Hip hop/homophobia/queeriodic table of elements
Artifact 1:
T-shirt at Summer jam 2011
Artifact 2:
In Hip Hop this repressive denial often takes the shape of hypermasculine narratives with a no-homo brand of homophobia functioning as the frosting on the cake. Check out Funkmaster Flex’s seething defense of his homie Mr. Cee delivered in response to a rival station’s bit about Mr. Cee’s alleged public fellatio scenario. Flex goes on for at least five minutes straight, berating the entire station, defending Mr. Cee, and intimating that (gasp) there may be some folk at that other station who are actually gay, not (as Flex suggests re: Cee) framed by the NYC Hip Hop police.
But let’s pretend for minute that Mr. Cee is gay. Does that mean that his show, “Throwback at Noon” isn’t hot like fire? Does it diminish his pivotal role as Big Daddy Kane’s DJ? Is Ready to Die any less dope to you now than it was before you thought about the possibility that Mr. Cee was gay? I hope that you answered NO to all of these rhetorical questions and I hope that starting now the Hip Hop community can at last be persuaded to confront its irrational fear of the full range of our community’s human sexuality.
via NewBlackMan: Hip-Hop is Gay: Seeing Mr. Cee.
Artifact 3:
The queeriodic table of elements
Filed under hip hop, human rights, learning
Pissing and our parents
Kalamu Ya Salaam is a star. I know him from Neo-griot, but his reflective essays are pretty sharp. Here he is reflecting on the practice of flushing the toilet before you are finished peeing. He believes that he borrowed this practice from his father. Which leads to a reflection about what we get (good and bad) from the previous generation. Here is Salaam:
whether we know our parents and forbears, whether we look like them, whether we have their temperament or proclivities, their way of walking or talking, way of bearing pain or grudges, whether we love them and talk with them often, or could care less and have not seen them in decades, whether they live now or have transitioned to ancestorhood, whatever, whether whatever, the simple truth is: an essential part of all we are is shaped by whatever our parents have been (even if we don’t know who or what they were)—their influence on our fate is inescapable.
via ESSAY: FLUSHING BEFORE FINISHING – WordUp – kalamu’s words.
A little tinkling of a feminist thought. I doubt as many folks who pee sitting down wind up wanting to push the lever that is behind them.
Yerba Buena Hydrosol
I like the smell of Yerba Buena. A relative of the mint family, it has light aromatics but some depth of flavor. I had been plucking sections of the herb and rubbing it between my fingers, enjoying the smell. I sort of wanted a way to capture that, but didn’t want a big hassle.
Hydrosol is the answer. Water extraction to get all the smelly oils. Pick a couple of hands full of the herb. Put a brick in the bottom of a large pot (I used an inverted pyrex pie plate) and fill up the pot with water up to the top of the brick (or pie plate). Put a bowl on top of the brick to catch the hydrosol.
Add plant material to the water. Turn up to medium. Put on the lid. Add ice to the top of the lid. This will condense the oils on the lid of the pan and then drip the oils into the bowl below.
Worked like a charm for me. I got a quarter cup of essence of Yerba Buena. Thanks to Kami McBride for the methodology and Yerbamansa for the tip.
Thought harpoon
Rammellzee’s Cerembric neutron harpoon. One of the best explanations for communications which corrode against other discourse. As Rammellzee writes:
CEREMBRIC NEUTRON HARPOON (Thought Lance) holds complete thought-processes to constructions and launches outline that can construct any shape energy it wants to construct in any dimension of physical magnetics. Several remanipulators such as dimensional doors, dimension cracks.
via GOTHIC FUTURISM.
Layer this idea against Walter Benjamin writing about Dada:
“Dadaist manifestations actually guarateed a quite vehement distraction by making artworks the center of scandal. One requirement was paramount: to outrage the public. From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. it jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile [taktisch] quality (Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. 39.)
Despite having read chunks of Benjamin in gradual school, I’m finding the re-read to be really insightful. Crucial to my recent reflection about Walter Benjamin was a lovely 1993 film about Walter Benjamin that helped to located his thought in the context of some recent ideas about fragmentation and power. Here is the link to John Hughes film One way street: fragments for Walter Benjamin. Thanks to Ubuweb.com for the brilliant resource!
Filed under art, capitalism, learning
Nancy Silverton on foccacia
Photo: Anne Cusack for the LA Times
Nancy Silverton is one of the greatest food intellectuals I’ve read. She is smart, and capable of sharing her insights. She recently took on the doughy focaccia and also provided insight into how she refines her understanding of breads. I love the passages where she observes an Italian bakery to take some notes. Reminder, this is one of the foremost experts on bread — who still takes time to learn from others. Silverton:
But the other thing I did, which anyone can do, is observe very carefully.
My first clues came when I visited a panificio, or bakery, in Conversano, in Puglia. Although I wouldn’t be completely sold on focaccia for a few more days, I liked what I had there enough to ask if I could peek in the kitchen, where I saw three things that would change my focaccia-making world.
First, I saw that the focaccia was baked in a round cake pan. Until then, I had always baked focaccia in large rectangular sheet pans. But after seeing it baked in cake pans, I realized that by working with such an unwieldy lump of dough, I had been mishandling it and thereby taking the air out of it, which makes for a dense bread. Using the smaller pans means working with dough in a more manageable size and shape — a simple thing that seems obvious in hindsight.
I also saw that the baker was cutting the dough into portions, immediately putting each in the pan in which it was going to be baked, and then leaving it there to relax for its second rise. This eliminated the step of shaping the dough in the pan, which, again, would de-gas it and make for a denser bread.
The third and maybe most significant thing I saw was that the cake pans had olive oil in them, and not just enough to coat the pan, but a layer one-eighth to one-quarter inch deep. It was a substantial enough amount that the oil would be absorbed into the bottom crust, making it crunchy and flavorful.
Less than five minutes in this baker’s kitchen, without asking a single question, and my focaccia had already improved exponentially.
via Master Class: Chef Nancy Silverton explains how to make focaccia – latimes.com.
The LA Times is hosting four master classes with world renowned chefs. Looks to be some cool insights, although even Thomas Keller can’t quite convince me to go stock up on xanthan gum.
Life of refinement 