Hunkering Down

This is the gulf coast I know:

That is how I want it to remain.

Not like this:

Today I am going to share the secret to excellent grits. It is quite simple:
Follow the directions on your package of bulk grits, but replace water with chicken broth (vegetable broth would work too) and milk. You can make it with half milk and half broth, or whatever combination is convenient for you. After the initial boiling, cook it low and stir often. When you make grits like this they don’t need cheese. Grits are surprisingly versatile. They can replace a typical starch (like mashed potatoes) to add a southern flair to your meal. On this week’s menu I have grits with catfish.

The following is the menu for the week in no particular order.

Simple Calzones
Catfish, Grits and Cole Slaw
Lazy Night Pasta
Chicken Devan
Bean Bacon Soup and Sandwich
Mei Fun
Campechana

I’m participating in Menu Planning Monday

Since I am a stay-at-home-mom I spend a lot of time feeding my babe and being a human crib, so I also end up spending a lot of time reading and surfing the web. Sometimes I find worthwhile stuff. To help encourage me to pursue my better internet inclinations I thought I would make a weekly round up of some of the cool stuff I come across. Here are this week’s picks:

Music:
Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings have a new album out! Of course it is everything one would expect from Daptone Records. I Learned the Hard Way is an excellent album that proves the label remains the source for some of the best records available today. It is yet another testament to the vitality of soul music, to the strength of its roots, and its expansiveness. I’m waiting for them to break into the mainstream, when that day comes, the world will be better for it.

Videos:
The family has been rocked this week by the italian musician Adriano Celentano and his 1972 non-sense song Prisencolinensinainciusol. The lyrics are all gibberish intended to sound like English. This outside perspective on English initially drew me to listen. I expected a novel sing-songy interpretation of this concept, but ended up being floored by the unexpected, driving beat. It was so ahead of its time that I still have a hard time believing it is from 1972.

Recipes:
Banana Ice Cream: I have yet to try it, but the season for food processor cooking is upon me. This looks tasty and healthy.

Environment:
The weather here in south Georgia has been unseasonably beautiful and mild. Which got me thinking about sunspots, I found this recent article from Science, and this year old one from NASA. Really neat stuff. Sometimes I like to think the earth and sun communicate. The earth is saying to the sun, “Hey dude, I need some help here.”

It has been kind of a depressing week for us Georgians, as a new coal plant in the middle of Georgia is one step closer to being built. It just so happens that I caught and ate a Red Fish from the Alapaha River last weekend and didn’t think about the mercury I was ingesting. We are really vulnerable to mercury because of the naturally tannin stained waters here. Coal fired power plants are the greatest contributor to mercury emissions.

Neato:
Found a cool festival via the American Festivals Project in Helvetia , WV. They totally forgot to add in the Fitzgerald Wild Chicken Fest, though. Which was awesome.

I could probably devote a whole blog to navigating the magistral UbuWeb. This week I discovered Aspen Magazine, which was a multimedia magazine that ran from ‘65 to ‘71 and included a record which each issue. There are some experimental recordings from John Cale, Yoko Ono and John Lennon among others. Andy Warhol published an issue and one issue is an ode to Marshall McLuhan. It is a fantastic digital archive that manages to capture the spirit of the magazine, while making it easy to navigate and enjoy.

If unaccessible art isn’t your bag (or even if it is) this article about creativity in the classroom is pretty interesting. Which led me to this week’s YouTube pick via this site

I like this Alot.

So that’s it for my first internet roundup. I hope you enjoy!

We are watching the HBO series Deadwood again. It has been some four years since we first saw it on DVD and broadcasted. It is even better than the first time. Creator David Milch was hellbent on giving the lawless pursuit of the American west the most elegant and honest interpretation to date. It is treated without the cliched depictions of the wild-west. Rather, Deadwood rises from the gold flecked bowels of the Earth, where the law of man remains subject to the natural order. Control is fleeting and when attained, is not long held. And there is always the relentless dirt, disease and bodily functions and limitations. The one thread which holds in the pursuit of order and control is language. Command of the word separates the illiterate “hoople head” from the emboldened pioneer. Adult illiteracy is common, and those with even rudimentary reading skills are better able to steer their fate than the many that cannot read or write. In Deadwood a man must be seasoned enough to use vulgarities unencumbered and these are interjected among grandly flourished orations. It is an incredible script and as much of a treat as the beautiful cinematography, costumes and sets.

We watch Deadwood with subtitles, this greatly improves the show for us, as it is easy to miss the subtleties of the script. For me, all good scripts are enhanced by subtitles. A preference for well written English screenplays with subtitles is perhaps a quirk of our family, brought on by years of loud music and thus somewhat limited hearing. But it has made me think about subtitles in general. Americans have a preference for subtitles, in contrast to much of the world’s preference for dubbing. Perhaps this is due to the comical interpretations of dubbing here in the states, or maybe we just appreciate the original actor’s voice, which is rarely equal to the dubbed interpretation. The distinctly american director Jim Jarmusch does not usually dub his movies, this is probably due in large part to his cross-cultural themes and the importance that language differences hold in his films. Quintin Tarantino’s newest movie, Inglorious Basterds, is as much about language and culture as it is about violence and revenge. (I often wonder what a Tarantino film would be like without violence, though laden with violence, Inglorious Basterds makes me long for it even more. But I digress.)

It is surprising to me that stubborn US Americans are willing to read subtitles rather than listening to dubbing in American English. Perhaps it is our stubbornness that makes us adamantly opposed to the largely reduced quality of dubbed acting. But perhaps it is a product of our monolingual society which makes us long for the foreign and appreciative of it. After all, it is the foreign that made us, it is where we are from, the roots of ourselves, and as we further separate and distinguish ourselves as American we go back to what brought us here in the first place. The loss of language is a source of great disconnect from one’s culture. Perhaps when we hear the foreign, it brings us back home to a place lost long ago. Having lost my family’s various languages, whether it be some Athabaskan tribal tongue, Spanish, Bulgarian or whatever bit I am made up from, I know it pleases me to get away from the English that has indoctrinated and held me in its constraints. Speaking one language is a limitation of mind and spirit. Maybe we need to escape this every once and while and don’t mind if reading a screen is required to do so.

As English becomes more and more narrow, even the English of the recent past are foreign compared to what we speak today. What are we continuing to lose? What can a mind accomplish without the vocabulary and ability to express itself?

Whether Deadwood is authentic or not is beside the point, it presents a greater breadth of language than we have today. My husband and I require subtitles in part to appreciate it more, but also because it is so foreign. Which begs me to question my command of language and what I have lost.

This is the view from outside our living room window. We live behind the Crescent House, a restored antebellum mansion. From here I can see the small brick paved garden and the large grassy area of what was part of an old pecan orchard. Our home is a far cry from the mansion next door. We are renting, share a wall with our neighbors in a small, somewhat efficient apartment. Recently I started looking at real estate for some reason, to dream, to research, to know what was out there. I know we can’t afford to buy a home right now and are still uncertain as to where we may end up. But that part of me that longs for permanency for my small family just wanted to imagine it was possible. Then, I looked at an affordable mortgage calculator and decided, that for now, we must continue to hunker down and save. More and more I’m realizing that it is not where you live, but how you live. We don’t want a mansion, sometimes I think all I want is a double wide and some land (I’ve been swooning over this trailer lately). But what I really want is to live happily, to make a difference in my home and to be able to experience the world with my family. All of this I can do now, no matter where we lay our head.

When I look out my window I don’t long for anything else, instead I appreciate how lucky I am to have any of this at all.

For my 26th birthday this week I decided to try a spin class. Well, I loved it, and think I may on my way to forming an addiction. Today I wasn’t going to be able to make it to the class, but still wanted to workout. After being on the bike, I just couldn’t go back to the elliptical. Without the instructor to tell me to increase the intensity, I decided that some good music could help me with the cues. So I made a mix which worked really well for me. It is around 35 minutes and 40 seconds with a really short cool down song at the end, I’m at the beginning of my exercise career so workouts around 30 minutes are about right. But with the help of this mix it was an intense 35 minutes. You can download the long mp3 version of the mix at the bottom of the post.

Here’s the playlist:

Link Wray: Slinky
The Strokes: New York City Cops
Rolling Stones: Rocks Off
The Stooges: Search and Destroy
Spiritualized: Come Together
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings: My Man is a Mean Man
LaVern Baker: Saved
Calexico: Corona
Electric Light Orchestra: Eldorado Finale
Okkervil River: Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe
Magnolia Electric Co: An Arrow in the Gale

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