Inherited Secrets

This has to be the best food post introduction ever:

Remember the final section of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev? After Andrei’s taken the vow of silence, and the plague has wiped out most of the region? And the prince’s soldiers come to the bell-maker’s house to demand a bell, and the bell-maker’s whole family is dead, except his teenage son, the kid from Ivan’ Childhood? And the kid boasts how he can make the best bell ever, ’cause the dad gave him the secret of bell-making from his death bed, and the soldiers take the kid up on it, and tell him if he screws up the bell it’s execution for sure, and the kid oversees the whole process and is a complete prick to everyone, and Andrei’s watching from a distance? And finally it’s the moment of truth and the clapper’s in and the bell has to ring in a beautiful tone, and it does, and everybody’s ecstatic, except the kid himself, who’s a devastated sobbing wreck, and Andrei breaks his silence and asks the kid what’s wrong, and the kid tells Andrei that he lied, that his father never gave him the secret of bell-making?

Well, I kind of feel that way relative to my Grandma Petrosino and lasagna-making. And still, I go on, year after year, trying to approximate her sublime results. I am told that my efforts more than suffice, so I will share here, for the first time, my methods and tips.

I know exactly how that feels every time I try to make my mom’s cheese enchiladas. I remember her showing me, talking me through the roux, seasoning to taste, tasting a scoop gathered with the fingernail on her pinky. Then, dipping tortillas into the roux, swishing them around, her fingernails now acting like heat resistant, high-precision tongs. I have to grow my nails out when I know I am going to be making enchiladas.

my entry for Phil McAndrew’s contest

Herzog’s Stroszek. I love that movie. That’s me as Bruno.

Go here for more info on his contest. Due Date: Tomorrow (March 23rd).

Browse around Phil McAndrew’s site, I have a drawing of his on my mantle!

I don’t normally draw, but when I do, it is usually for a comic:

• March 5th 2007 for no particular reason (seriously)
• The Euphonium Story (which was for a mix)
• My Cosmology
• Brownies (which was wrapped around a box of vegan brownies I made for a friend)

The Ice is Melting

I made a new video, view it in full screen, and in HD if you like, oh, sound, definitely with sound.

Meandering Through Austin

San Antonio, TX — I spent the better part of today in the capital city revisiting some old haunts are exploring some new ones. Driving through the sluggish city streets and congested highways is becoming unbearable. I blame the small-city-living of Rochester, NY where even on the worst days traffic seldom slows to a trickle. However, I still love this city and share the sentiment from Olmstead’s A Journey Through Texas:

AUSTIN.

Austin has a fine situation upon the left bank of the Colorado. Had it not been the capital of the state, and a sort of bourne to which we had looked forward for a temporary rest, it would still have struck us as the pleasantest place we had seen in Texas. It reminds one somewhat of Washington; Washington, en petit, seen through a reversed glass.

Olmstead makes the note that “[t]here is a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops, but not one book-store.” which is out of date… or is it? I think of Austin’s infamous nightly college-drunkfest on 6th Street, of which I have the unfortunate honor of once being a patron to, and I conclude there are a remarkable number of drinking shops. But the proliferation of bookstores is definitely different since those days, probably largely due to the University of Texas (my alma mater) being built directly behind the capitol building. A balance, perhaps?

I took plenty advantage of the bookstores. Scored me an Evergreen Black Cat book from Grove Press (circa 1965) of two novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet (perhaps better known as the scriptwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, to which you might exclaim, “Scriptwriter! That film had a scriptwriter!?” and I reply, “Oh yeah!” while busting through the wall a la Kool-Aid man with a handful of matchsticks).

I quote from Olmstead, again and at length:

LITERATURE.

In the whole journey through Eastern Texas, we did not see one of the inhabitants look into a newspaper or a book, although we spent days in houses where men were lounging about the fire without occupation. One evening I took up a paper which had been lying unopened upon the table of the inn where we were staying, and smiled to see how painfully news items dribbled into the Texas country papers, the loss of the tug-boat “Ajax,” which occurred before we left New York, being here just given as the loss of the “splended steamer Ocax.”

A man who sat near said—

“Reckon you’ve read a good deal, hain’t you!”

“Oh, yes; why?”

“Reckoned you had.”

“Why?”

“You look as though you liked to read. Well, it’s a good thing. S’pose you take a pleasure in reading, don’t you?”

“That depends, of course, on what I have to read. I suppose everybody likes to read when they find anything interesting to them, don’t they?”

“No; it’s damn tiresome to some folks, I reckon, any how, ‘less you’ve got the habit of it. Well, it’s a good thing; you can pass away your time so.”

(untitled)

Although the sound track becomes a little distracting from the text, the animation and paper craft is absolutely amazing.

Found at PaperCuts the NYTimes wonderful book blog.