O Volcano!

First, I am adding a new category to the blog: Northern California. This will be its first post, a little photo rumination on the Volcanoes of Modoc and Shasta County.

I am eating leftovers for lunch, a particularly molten, mouth-blistering piece of the aforementioned lasagna. That makes me think of lava, and that is going to be the main focus of today's lunchtime blogging.

The advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of living on the Ring of Fire, is that the landscape is formed primarily by seismic upheaval: plates colliding, uplifting, cracking, magma chambers forming, stratovolcanoes, shield volcanoes, etc. Even down here in the Bay Area we have some volcanic features (Berkeley's Round Top is a very old, fallen over volcano).

But to really take in the splendor of volcanism, you have to get in your car and head up to Shasta, Lassen, Butte, and Modoc counties. That is where you see the spectacular stuff.

Today I am going to show some pictures of the Modoc Volcanic Scenic Byway and some of the areas around it. I have tons, but I am just going to show a few. I could say, "you must get out here," but you probably won't, as it is remote, far from the sort of amenities that vacationers like, requires a sturdy car (4X4 preferable) and the skills to drive it on some rough terrain. Add the weather (scorching in the summer, freezing in the winter, muddy in between), and you have an area that is probably best appreciated by photos from the sorts of nuts who like that kind of thing.

Fortunately for you, we are just those sorts of nuts.

When you go up to this part of the world, your gateway to it is probably Redding, which is a strange mix of the Deep South and Southern California. Redneckery abounds, with folks wanting the government to stay off their backs, and yet, bitterly complaining at the suburban sprawl and nasty traffic that is the result of unchecked growth (and hordes of refuges from LA and the Bay Area seeking the unspoiled purity of wild Northern California). In a few years, the area could be absolutely unliveable, sort of a Valencia North, where vestiges of the former beauty can be made out among the rows and rows of identical cardboard houses.

One of the advantages of Redding is that it gets hot in the summer, outrageously and notoriously hot. I remember as a kid in Sacramento, when the mercury hit 105 we would assure ourselves, well it could be worse, we could be in Redding. Or Red Bluff. The two towns are about fourty miles or so apart, but in our minds they were twin cities, both with the "red" warning in their names. They were red because the land itself was on fire, or at least it seemed. We have been up there and seen the thermometer register 117 in the shade. It is brutal.

But, given proper shade and irrigation, you can grow all sorts of flowers in the summer, for instance this fly-polinated flower:

Copyright 2006 by Melanie Keilholtz

Now, fly polinated flowers are a special interest of Melanie and I. We have been known to drive to various flower conservatories and arboretums to see rare fly-polinated flowers. Of course the old adage is that you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar. Perhaps, but if you really want to attract flies, try rotten meat.

Fly-polinated flowers smell of rotten meat, usually for a day or two, thus attracting flies. So, imagine 110 degree heat, and the smell of rotten meat.

Ah, good.

Time to head for the mountains, no?

Alright. Let's pack up and drive to Dunsmuir.

Well it is still hot, but you can cool off in waterfalls!

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Here is Melanie cooling off in Black Bart's hideout in Dunsmuir.

Well, Dunsmuir is a pretty town with an interesting history (Black Bart and all), but we really were after volcanoes. So, let's move on, shall we?

The Big Mama Volcano is, of course, Mt. Shasta.

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

But it is not the biggest of the Cascades. No, that honor belongs to a Hawaiian shield volcano that is so big most people think of it as a region, or a micro-range: The Medicine Lake Volcano.

The caldera is a lake, as I mentioned earlier, a pleasantly warm lake filled with delicious trout:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

The really interesting volcanic features surround the lake and are on the flanks of this large volcano. So, driving through the area, mostly full of large conifers, you know you are getting close because you encounter lava beds, some even with large conifers growing in them:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, in the glass mountain area, the lava beds have obsidian outcroppings:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Yes, it is not every day that you encounter naturally formed glass hanging around:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And these pieces can get big:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, even up in the mountains it can be hot. Imagine daytime highs in the nineties and you will understand our surprise at this (note the obsidian outcropping in the back):

But that snow does melt, and it fuels the various creeks and rivers of the Sacramento River system.

On a hot day, those streams and rivers can look so inviting. And they are, but they are also cold. Jumping into this 40 foot deep pool at the base of the McCloud Lower Falls was something akin to jumping into that cocktail shaker in the recipe for martinis I posted earlier:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, there are a lot more photos to show, and plenty to say about the area, and we will post and say, in due time, but I have spent enough time at this, and have to get back to work (future painting photos depend on getting actual paintings done, alas). I hope you have enjoyed this little trip through Northern California's Volcano Country!

Two Views of Lake Tahoe Area

Here are a couple of photos I took last summer of the Lake Tahoe area. I think you will get an idea of why I am so smitten with my home state.

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

The Perfect Martini

I have probably talked about the perfect martini before. I probably said that some other proportion of gin and vermouth was ideal.

The thing is, it all depends on the gin.

Right now I am using Bombay, just plain Bombay, not Bombay Sapphire. So I am making it with these proportions:

2 shots gin.
1/2 shot vermouth.
splash of ice water.
Shaken, so ice crystals form.

In my chilled glass, after pouring out the ice water, I put a few drops of Scotch and swirl. If it is just a few drops I do not pour it out. If it is more than a few drops I pour it out. I strain my martini into the glass.

Perfection.

Now, if I were to use Bombay Sapphire, I would use just a quarter shot of vermouth. If I were using Rear Admiral Joseph's, I would use a full shot. If it were Tanquerey, I would probably use a half shot, depending on whether I were adding an olive or a twist (more if an olive, less for a twist).

If I were using vodka, well, forget it. I don't do that.

Beef and goat cheese lasagne

This came about because I had a lump of pasta dough that was not enough to make a pot of linguine or any straight pasta. I knew it was enough for a lasagne, since I used its other half for that purpose a couple of days ago (with mushrooms, gruyere, cream, and white truffle oil). I also had a few ounces of goat cheese, some Monterrey Jack, and two pounds of ground beef (alright! Dinner without having to go to the grocery store!).

So, the first item was to whip up a semi-ragu:

Fry a quarter of a pound of finely chopped pancetta in EVOO. Add a few crushed and peeled cloves of garlic as it nears completion.

Add a finely diced onion and fry for a minute or so.

Add a finely diced carrot and a finely diced stalk of celery. Fry.

Add your ground beef, a generous splash of dry marsala, a cup or two of brown chicken stock, a cup of milk, thyme, oregano, Worcestershire Sauce, a box of Pomi tomatoes, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, pepper, and bay and cook for about an hour. As it nears completion, adjust for salt and acidity.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Layer your lasagna (reading from base to top):

Bottom: thin layer of meat sauce
Fresh pasta
Sauce
Goat cheese in lumps. Grated jack and/or gruyere and a bit of grated reggiano parmiggiana
Fresh pasta
Sauce
Cheese blend. Freshly cracked pepper.

In oven. It is done when it smells right and the cheese on top is browning beautifully.

Remove from oven. Let sit for a couple of minutes (it is about the temperature of hot lava anyway, and it needs to reabsorb juices). Cut, top with freshly diced parsley, and serve with a hearty red wine.

Recipe Day

Today I will give you a couple of recipes, because they are fresh in my head. Later, if I have time, I might post some more photos. Not art, this time, because I have posted a group of those recently, and will give you a few more days to digest them before posting another group. More likely scenery or food or oddities of urban life. Or oddities of rural life.

So, recipes...

My Tomb?

Thanks to Alicia, I found a quiz to tell me what my tomb should look like. They got it wrong, though, as this does not have a statue of me, and my tomb should have a statue of me, with a bas relief panel depicting, on the left, the great men of the twentieth century: Salazar, Primo de Rivera, Mussolini, Marinetti, Russolo, Respighi, Ellington, Diebenkorn, Calvino, Emperor Norton, and LBJ all gazing up in awe, giving me the Roman salute. On the right side shall be the great saints of the twentieth century: Franco, Kolbe, Teresa of Calcutta, John Paul II, etc., praying for me. At my feet will be my trusty dog, who will be entirely a figment of the imagination, since I don't trust dogs, and do not live with dogs. I shall be holding a fasces and wearing a toga. Hiding out in the shadows will be a depiction of my alter ego, the late Richard Nixon, with a mysterious look on his face, part contempt, part amusement, part horror. He will be holding a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Anyway, what the quiz said is posted under the Extended Entry, because it was doing strange things to the formatting:

How Should Your Death Be Marked?

A Pyramid
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Mormon Aspic

Google reliably delivered someone to the Rants and Recipes at the request of "mormon aspic." Now, I have my beefs with the strange theology and culture of the Deseret set, but nowhere have I ever advocated cooking them and setting them in aspic. Nowhere.

Forced exile, sure.

Now, for a recipe of aspic a la Brigham, I am guessing that Jell-O would suffice. They are a Jell-O-eatin' people, them Mormons. Once we were in the Salt Lake City Airport and found a Mormon Cookbook. Totally without irony. It was trying to show the healthful and wholesome ways of the Mormons, so it basically was a book of the worst manifestations of Anglo cooking, coupled to a love of the mass produced.

"My God," I thought, "we ought to build a wall around this state and just shoot anyone who tries to get out." It sounds harsh, but realize that they won't even give you a shot of Bourbon or an espresso to chase the nasty taste away with. That's worse than what they did at Mountain Meadows.

But still, setting them up in aspic is a bit much.

Art, art, art.

I went to the DeYoung Museum yesterday, just in time to see two exhibits on their last day. I won't tell you how wonderful they were, or that you have to go, since that would be cruel. But I will tell you, that the more I spend time in that museum, the more I like it as a museum. I liked the outside (except the tower), since they put the copper cladding on it. I really love the garden spaces. But the inside struck me as a little weird at first. Not the individual galleries, which are fine, but the overall layout. It seemed a little haphazard, and it still does. What is different is how that haphazardness has grown on me. I like the fact that the whole thing feels a little bit like a demented labyrinth, with strange ways to get from one gallery to the next, and some odd ways of veering from the chronological.

I do have to wonder, however, how much longer it will still make sense to have the art from Oceania and Africa? I realize that there is not enough to make a separate museum, like they did with the Asian, but the DeYoung is supposed to be a museum of American Art, or at least that is the focus on the Western stuff. The European art is at the Legion. So, what is with the orphaned of the non-Western world that have (I dare say, beautiful) homes at the de Young?

Remember!

Chesterton is coming! Chesterton is coming! Chesterton is coming!

And we are cooking a feast in his honor!

When: Friday, Feb. 9
Where: St. Margaret Mary's Church in Oakland
Why: To have fun and to benefit the St. Anthony of Padua Institute.
And why? Because the St. Anthony of Padua Institute is playing a central role in the Catholic Renaissance, and what starts here will happen in an area near you, so why not support a good thing coming from here.
Who: John Chuck Chalberg as G.K. Chesterton and yours truly as cook.
How much? $70 a head. It's a fundraiser, and you could easily spend that much on one of our good restaurants around here. And I am planning on cooking at that level.

Honestly, you will have a good time. You will eat, drink, and be merry. You will meet interesting people.

The St. Anthony of Padua Institute will benefit. You will benefit. Your children will benefit.

If you live within 200 miles of Oakland, it is easy to get here for an evening. If you live farther away, let me tell you, this is a great time to visit the Bay Area. If you come from far far away to come to this event, I will be happy to be your Bay Area tour guide on Saturday.

This will be fun. So, come. If you can't, please tell others. Right now tickets are starting to move, so if you are at all interested, act now.

The information is here.

Brussels Sprouts

So, the very first photo I posted on the blog was of a bowl of Brussels Sprouts. It was taken on Christmas Day of 2005 by either myself or Melanie. Now, I know that you have been lying awake at nights, wondering what I did with those brussels sprouts, and I have just been leaving you hanging.

OK. Some folks, who harbor irrational prejudices against brussels sprouts, are probably thinking by now, "who cares, so long as I don't have to eat them!"

Well, here is a picture of them finished:

Copyright 2005 by Erik and Melanie Keilholtz

The way they got there, from here:

Copyright 2005 by Erik and Melanie Keilholtz

is as follows:

1. First, you start with super fresh brussels sprouts. I buy mine off the whole stalk, and trim them right before cooking. You want the color to be very pale green. Dark green will be overpowering, but you can shred the dark green leaves and add them to soups.

2. Parcook the sprouts. I steam them. It is one of two times I ever steam a vegetable (a generally barbaric way of cooking, but for parcooking brussels sprouts and for cooking artichokes, it is good).

3. Finish them by sauteeing them in EVOO with finely chopped goose pancetta (take extra skin from your goose, rinse it in hot water, dry it, rub it with sea salt, freshly cracked pepper, ground allspice, and soak it in grappa overnight to two days), and garlic.

4. When they are just starting to brown, take them off heat, squeeze a Meyer lemon over them, and sprinkle with crushed, toasted hazelnuts.

5. Serve with duck, goose, beef, venison, or wild boar.

It looks like it's that time again...

Don Jim has his latest list up. So, here's mine:

1. "Infernum + Gaillard" composed by Anthony Holborne (1550-1603), performed by the Amsterdam Loeki Stardus Quartet.
2. "Segesta" by Lino Cannavacciuolo
3. "Sea of Heartbreak" written by Hal David/Paul Hampton and sung by Johhny Cash with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
4. "Ricordati Ragazzo" by Natalino Otto
5. "Here's That Rainy Day" written by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen and sung by Tony Bennett
6. "Lost Mind" written by Percy Mayfield and sung by Diana Krall
7. "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths
8. "Watermelon Man" by Herbie Hancock
9. "Refrain 2" composed by Stephen Stubbs and performed by John Potter, Stephen Stubbs, John Surman, Maya Homburger and Barry Guy
10. "Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed

And the Last Lunchtime Post.

Well, Melanie thinks that the bowl of brussels sprouts photo is hers and not mine. She might be right, as we were both taking pictures of that bowl of brussels sprouts. I am pretty sure that, no matter who took the picture, she trimmed all those brussels sprouts herself (and that is no small task, especially since I only buy them on the stalk). They were part of our 2005 Christmas dinner.

And Now...A Word from Our Sponsors

I have discussed the St. Anthony of Padua Institute with you before.

It is a worthy, worthy cause, and one whose worthiness increases the more you participate in it. Seriously. You participate, and both it and you benefit. You can read all about it here. The world needs the Bay Area to have a good, Catholic liberal arts college. Just think of all the ideas, good, bad, and ugly, that come from here and eventually find their way to your neck of the woods. You want to re-evangelize the West? You want a Catholic renaissance? How about just rekindling a love of the liberal arts?

Well, the Bay Area is ground zero, folks. The blast starts here.

And, speaking of blasts...

We are having one on February 9th at St. Margaret Mary's Church hall in Oakland. A Dr. John "Chuck" Chalberg, a well-regarded historian and Chesterton impersonator will be regaling the crowd after a fundraising dinner prepared by yours truly. The food will be a Northern Californian take on British cuisine. Wine will flow. The ticket price will go to a very good cause.

You can read all about it here and you can always email me at EKeilholtz at a[merica]o[n]l[ine] dot com for more information.

Lunchtime Ruminations

I am writing between overly large bites of tunafish sandwich. Today I am doing the easy penance of giving up meat. I love meat, and would eat it around the clock, but if I don't give it up I have to think up an alternative penance, and I always have this nagging suspicion that the alternative I imposed on myself was much too soft. Probably becuase it usually is.

So, rather than have to think "well, is a whole decade of the rosary required, or can I just do the three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, just like what Fr. gave me at last confesion?" and to get into the whole direction of thought that leads the wrooooong way, I am just doing the fishie thing.

Now, the fishie thing is a really light penance, especially since I absolutely love canned tuna fish. And, when it is mixed with celery, a generous dollop of mayonaise and put on some earthy, grainy hippy bread that has been lightly toasted, and eaten with a Lithuanian white wheat beer... Heaven.

Yes, I suppose I could skip the beer, omit the celery, etc., but then it would seem that I am getting away from the whole reason I am simply sticking with the tried and true.

So, as I am attacking a delicious tunafish sandwich, I am thinking about penance and matters spiritual. Terrific. And now, dear reader, you get to be bored by this stuff.

What I am thinking about is the fact that I don't generally post spiritual stuff on the blog. For one, you could probably launch a rock in just about any direction and it would clock someone who would give you better spiritual advice than I would (for instance, the sort of person whose first image to pop in his head for selecting a random person would not involve stoning anyone).

Second, sure, I read a lot, and know what other folks have to say on these matters, but if I were to write this stuff, I would feel obliged to, well, do something about it.

So, I could go on for paragraphs on not letting anger master you. I could tell you about how liberating it is to "let go of anger," to forgive, to not let anyone "take your peace." And then the next time some idiot Volvo driver cuts me off, I would then have to think about whether or not I want to assault him with a stream of Italian obscenitites, and by the time I came to the conclusion that I did, the moment would have passed, and it would have become just a pro forma barrage of obscenitites, and that is no fun. And eventually, the anger would just build. And one day, I would be driving along, whistling a happy tune, and some idiot in a Volvo would come barreling out of a driveway, obvlivious to the world, lost in a fog of shallow thoughts on what a good liberal she was being, and that would be it. All that stress would just make my head pop.

"What exactly did you see?"

"I dunno. It was just a big, like, pop! There was this bearded guy driving, and he got this look on his face, and then his head popped."

Since I do not want my head to pop, I will avoid dispensing with spiritual advice.

Third, I am not a priest. I do not trust non-priests in these matters. They are ordained to do this stuff. Not me. They listen to your confessions, not me. The only confessions I could see myself listening to would be down in the basement of headquarters, and only for very, very big cases involving Badthought against Our Imperial Person.

I will give this advice, though:

1. Go to mass.
2. Go to confession.
3. Pray.
4. Do your Friday penance.

By the way, choking is when you have a blockage in your windpipe. What do you call it when you have taken too many bites and eaten too quickly, and you get a traffic jam in your esophagus? That is really unpleasant, and should teach me a lesson about eating quickly. But you get me hungry and put a tunafish sandwich in front of me...

New Pet

I know, I know. You shouldn't import exotic animals as pets. Endangered species and all that.

But this would make a great pet in my book.

Erik Keilholtz: A Midwinter Survey of Paintings

Welcome to the Erik's Rants and Recipes Art Gallery.

Tonight is the opening reception of Erik's latest show, a survey of paintings. Since this is our first virtual opening, we thank you for your understanding for our numerous glitches.

However, the wine isn't one of them. Normally, galleries like to serve white wine, thinking that it is safer around the art. Hogwash, and cheap red is almost always more drinkable than cheap white (especially if it is a chardo-boring-ney). Since this is a virtual exhibit, we are serving excellent red wine.

You have our permission to sip your excellent red wine, too.

Now, we do need to get the dimensions and (gulp) titles and prices up. By Friday night. And we keep asking Erik for an artist's statement. "No problem," says he. "And keep it short," says We. "Uh-oh," says he.

What we do have to offer for the opening reception is a virtual tour with the artist, who will offer comments and will answer questions. Enjoy!

The first painting is an older one, from 1997. I consider it a breakthrough painting. Before it I was trying to do what I did here (dance on the edge between landscape and total abstraction, a la Ed Corbett or 1955 Richard Diebenkorn (Berkeley series)) in a way that was close, but not getting it. Sometime in 1995 (I think, although it may have been 1996) I picked up Susan Landauer's The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism and was blown away. Here was a link between all of these painters, many of whom I had admired, and many of them were achieving what I had been trying to do for the prior two years!

I read the text of that book three times in a row. When we got married and moved to the Bay Area, we were lucky that SFMOMA had the exhibition that the book came out of, so I got to study many of the paintings repeatedly.

This painting originally started with much more conventional landscape colors, but it was moribund, with far too much stasis. I wanted it to seethe and push around the viewer a bit, but not in a hysterical way, like many of Clyfford Still's works. I was going for tension: between abstraction and landscape, between regions on the canvas, etc. So, one day, under the influence of John Saccaro, I drastically altered the palette. I liked what was happening, and finished the thing in a week or two (after I had been laboring for months on it). While I wanted much of the surface and force of abstract expressionism, I definitely wanted a hyper-controlled painting, very deliberate and carefully corrected. I was very happy with how this came out, and, eleven years later, I still like it. It is based (loosely) on a real place, one that I sketched and studied and painted (more representationally) for years: the little town of Davenport on California's Highway One, about 26 miles north of Santa Cruz.

Copyright 1996 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, I have had a recurring dream for many years (for as long as I can remember) of monster waves crashing into Golden Gate Park accross Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The park was always a bit exhilarating and scary, especially on the ocean edge. The broken windmill was an image that burned itself strongly into my brain. Often in my dream I am watching the waves from the safety (often just barely) of a hillside. The dreamscape is rather loosely based on the area, but it always has that high, chalky light that we get around here (in fact, it is that light that I am quite smitten with in terms of landscape painting. I prefer to go hiking on those crystal clear blue days, when I can see for miles, but when I want to paint, I like to try to capture the mood of the whitish sky). I had to paint this, but also wanted to continue the work from the previous painting and the one after it (not shown). So, from 1997 is this oil on canvas painting called "San Francisco Ocean Beach"

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, in my obsession with abstracting landscape, as well as my continued explorations of the history of Bay Area painting, it was inevitable that I would run up against the Society of Six. I had read little bits about them here and there (Thomas Albright's survey of Bay Area art as well as in the show and the book of Facing Eden: 150 Years of Landscape Painting in the Bay Area), and picked up Nancy Boas's outstanding book on the group. Naturally, I was doing a lot of plein air work at this time, as well as getting up half an hour before dawn, driving down to my friend's apartment, and taking off with him for a morning drawing session at least three times a week. We would sketch Lake Merritt, the wholesale produce market, anything that seemed interesting. At one point I attended a workshop with Terry St. John, who was connected to Lundy Siegriest, the son of Society of Six member Louis Siegriest. St. John clearly felt that this was a tradition and not just an isolated group in the 1920's. I agreed, and still do. There is an approach to light and line in Northern California, that pops up in painters as diverse as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn and even in Robert Bechtle.

One of my favorite places to draw, and later to paint, was the Sibley Volcanic Preserve in the Berkeley Hills. Here is an oil painting I did of one of my favorite locations in that park (this photo is not too good, but I wanted to include the painting. I will try to get a better one tomorrow and to replace it):

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Did I just mention Thiebaud? Why yes, I did. I grew up in Sacramento, and Wayne Thiebaud cast a long shadow on all of us in that area who aspired to paint. A long shadow carved in thick pastes of paint, made cool by ultramarine, no doubt. Everyone knows Wayne Thiebaud, but you have to be either an art geek or a Sacramentan to know the equally talented Gregory Kondos. Anyway, I was studying a lot of his work at the time (thanks, in part, to an excellent show of his that we saw at the Monterey Art Museum). This odd landscape was inspired by Kondos' approach to paint, as well as the various canals that deliver water to the various agricultural regions of the Central Valley. It might seem like this is a retreat from more thorough abstraction, but it isn't. I was simply exploring another mode of creating tension in a landscape:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little watercolor in a similar mode:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, you are probably noticing that there is a bit of a gap, from about 1998 to 2004, and there was a gap. For one thing, I designed some software (for scheduling production in a commercial print shop) and took some time to market it, ended up getting involved in a consulting business and a high tech start up (which, thank God, fell apart due to problems between some of the partners. If it hadn't, we would have hit the market just at the same time as about three well-funded, well-established companies released a similar product).

Getting fed up with the consulting business, I became the Marketing Director for Arhoolie Records (escaping the dot-com bust by going to the record business has got to be one of the stupidest career moves on earth, along with being an artist and having a day job of being a writer), had a baby (well, I didn't, Melanie did, but I cook for it. I have to watch out. It can read now. "Babbo, why did you call me 'it?'" Fortunately it is very cute, still. Now kindly quit demonstrating the benefits of being in the 95th percentile of height by leveraging your 95th percentile of weight into tremendous Italo-Portuguese wallops. Five years old and four feet tall. Some baby), somewhere in the middle of that started writing music reviews and, later food writing, and it was in all that, that the blog started.

So, I was not painting as much as I should have been. I was working on a couple of big paintings, one of which I should probably photograph for your amusement, but will probably hold off on, because of its size. Let me get the photography down on the smaller ones first.

Also taking my creative energies was the world of sound sculpture. My friend who I used to draw with had moved to San Diego, and focused his energies on sound sculpture. Since we had met in the electronic music program at UC Santa Cruz, we obviously shared this interest. So, we did some sound sculptures (we had worked together on sculpture for a joint show back in college) for a show in a really cool gallery down there (alas, it is no longer, but when it was, it was really cool), and did some models for outdoor sculptures (and finally realized that we probably need to be in the same town to work on anything more sustained than a single show).

So, when my friend (and designer of Erik's Rants and Recipes) commissioned me to do a painting a couple of years back, it was a real wake-up call. Oh yeah. Painting. The thing I do. Or did. So, I jumped back in, head first. And, as I mentioned in a post below, as the writing gigs are less frequent, I have been cranking up the painting, and here we are.

I hinted that I am working on very traditional religious paintings (St. Francis receiving the stigmata, for instance). I am not going to show those right now, because I want to show them with drawings, and I want to wait until the big one I am currently working on is done.

But as I went in this direction, I still wanted to keep working in the direction I had been, and, I felt, this required a resourcement at the waters of Richard Diebenkorn, so I did several homages to him, developing some ideas to take me from his late work into something else. Here are a couple of watercolors from that series:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, a particularly gripping visit on the same day to the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and the new De Young Museum, got me to think about combining disparate textures and structures for some interesting (hopefully) results. There is a whole series, which I will show some other time. The last one, which led to The System, was this one, a watercolor that seems a bit like Douanier Rousseau meets Diebenkorn:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

I realized that, like the early atonal composers, I needed some sort of rigorous system to combine these elements, lest I end up getting into some unfortunate ruts.

Many years ago, in order to solve some similar problems in highly abstract electronic music I was composing, I took Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Four Criteria for Electronic Music" and developed a structural system. I was very pleased with it, and used it even for modal and quasi-tonal works for harpsichord. It made for a great replacement structure for sonata allegro form, which really has to have functional harmony to make any sense whatsoever.

Now, confronting a different problem, yet one that shared some similarities, I went back to the Stockhausen-influenced system, as well as to hyper-rationalism, and came up with a system of rules for combining these various elements of color, line, form, structure, and texture. I think I am only at the beginning of this series. Here, first is the one I posted earlier, but with a better photo:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little canvas that I did right after the one above:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, since both the religious works, as well as these highly abstract ones are based in careful observation of nature, I continue to draw and paint nature. Here is a retake of the photo of the Yosemite Nocturne. It is a very difficult painting to photograph, but this gives an idea:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

That is it for this week's gallery opening. I imagine that the next opening will be next week, hopefully and exhibit of drawings. Thank you for coming.

Nina Simone - I Loves You Porgy - 1962 recording

This is absolutely fantastic. I have never seen this before, nor heard this recording.

Melanie and I were just blown away. As I clicked to the edit window, she giggled at me and said, "it's partially a blog, it's partially just another venue for YouTube."

Or maybe you like your jazz even more serious and high-toned:

Or, if you prefer folk, here is Steve Goodman with Jethro...

And then, for those of you into something completely different is Glenn Gould playing Berg...

(Part One)

(Part Two)

CyberGallery Show Opening! Tonight!

OK. So it might actually be early in the morning, especially if you are reading from the East Coast, in which case you will see it in the morning, and can make it your Fine Art Friday moment.

But I took some more photos, which were a little better. I am still tinkering with the method, and these were done in three ways. I have yet to follow some of the excellent advice given, because, well, I had already planned on these techniques, so I wanted to give them a go. I think I will try the suggestions next.

Hey! Maybe by the third round, they will all come out decent.

But, Wednesday is Traditionally Food Day in the Papers

Since Wednesday is the traditional day for newspapers to run their food sections, perhaps we will run food photos on Wednesdays.

First, Two Capons, Some Stuffing, and a Bottle of Wine!

Copyright 2007 by Erik Keilholtz

And, speaking of root vegetables:

Copyright 2007 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, let's spice it up a bit!

Copyright 2007 by Erik Keilholtz

Update on Photography of Art.

Today has almost slipped away, because soon Amalia will be home, and we have an errand to run, and then... bye bye Wednesday. So, tomorrow, with the exception of an eye doctor appointment (nothing serious, just the routine check to see if my glasses are the right ones still), I am going to tackle the art photography again. A friend of mine made a very good suggestion on improvised lighting improvements, and I am going to try them. We will see.

Also, I have a comment from someone who surfs at work, and cannot view any of the photos, because his or her employer blocks Photobucket. Why the employer would think that people are reading blogs on company time baffles me. I look at my site records. I know that the real reason that my readership mainly happens between 8am and 5pm is because of time differences. And the drop at official holidays? It's because families go out of town.

So, anyway, I would like to know if this is a problem for anyone else. I am happy to consider other solutions, but will probably wait until the official art website is happening, just because my computer project time budget will be mostly taxed by that.

How the...What?

Somehow, as I was eating an outrageously large piece of chocolate (the only kind, as far as I am concerned), and gluttonously putting a too big chunk of it in my mouth, I managed to bite the inside of my mouth. I still cannot quite make out the logistics. It is sort of like the time I bit the middle of my tongue while devouring my mother's super-delicious Asian slaw.

How?

Anyway, I am posting this as a public service announcement: when putting too much food in your mouth, be careful that you do not bite yourself in bizarre places as you are chewing. And, no, you cannot use this as an excuse to stop chewing.

And, speaking of eating, now is the time to eat your root vegetables. Turnips. Rutabagas. Parsnips. Celeriac. You groan now, but go out and get some, cook them up and you will thank me later. They hit the spot in the winter. I guarantee it.

Street Date! Paintings!

I am not at all happy with the photographs. No, let's go further: these photos stink. The colors are a little washed out, the lighting is wrong, the vertical lines are not quite vertical, and the horizontal lines are, well, you guessed it. I need to work on my setup and to practice. It will probably take about a week of work.

So, I could delay on these, but there have been enough delays. Expect new photos of these (and many more) later.

Are you ready?

Good. Let's Begin.

I have decided to open the show with a little oil on canvas that took me decades to do. Decades? Yes. I did a little still life years ago and hated the thing. When it dried, I tried to scrape it off the canvas. No luck. I had neglected it too long. The paint and the canvas were one (I told you, there is rarely a risk of my paint leaving the canvas). It was a thick impasto, and would require drastic means to remove the paint. Well, I found the thing again in a corner of the studio, while looking for an unused canvas. "Oh, that," I thought. What if I tried to rework the painting? Keep the thick impasto, but to add a couple of citrus fruits, add layers of paint, change the colors, etc.? I did that, and a few days later I had a painting that I was happy with:

Image copyright 1986 and 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, keeping in the mode of older paintings of vegetation, here is a little watercolor sketch I did of Melanie's garden in Santa Cruz, from before we were married. I still like this one:

Copyright 1995 by Erik Keilholtz

And, after we got married we moved to Oakland, where we lived among the pine trees up in the hills. I did this watercolor in about 1997 of a tree in our back yard. It is framed under glass, which is why you see the irritating glare. Like I said, I am working on this art photography stuff. Sorry.

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Around the same time I was also having fun exploring the sweeping vistas and exciting landscapes, but doing it in these small watercolors. Here is a (from memory, so don't go holding a photo up to see if it is accurate: it ain't) view of the Bay and everybody's favorite Federal Penitentiary:

Now, I was starting to come up with the approach to landscape and abstraction that would fuel me strongly for the next decade. The breakthrough works (completed in 1996 and 1997), did not come out well in the photos, so they will have to wait. But I can live with the photo of this oil on canvas abstraction based on a view of North Beach in San Francisco:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

And, yes, my style remains heavily influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, as you can plainly see in this little watercolor I did last year:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

What came between these paintings? Lots of things, like this oil on canvas imaginary landscape:

Copyright 2001 by Erik Keilholtz

And, even as I am working on different material now, I still take a dip into these waters, as you can see from this watercolor from last year:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Or in this nocturne, loosely based on my street in East Oakland:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Ah, nocturnes. Difficult to draw (because if you are drawing the observed world, you are doing it at night, usually under very bad light), difficult to paint (all those subtle variations of dark), and nearly impossible to photograph. This is an almost tolerable photo of a nocturne I did of Yosemite. I did the drawing almost completely in the dark, and had some horrid glare problems. I will consider a good photo of this one my triumph. I am not even close yet:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, I mentioned the matrix for exploring the physical world in an abstract expressionist mode, did I not? It is a complex thing derived from the musical theories of Stockhausen and serialism. This is one of the recent small oil paintings from it:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Well, that is all for now. One, I need to hone my skills photographing these things, and, two, that is a lot of art to digest for the time being.

At the opening on Thursday (remember the cyber-opening!) I will, hopefully, replace the photos with better ones, and will provide the gallery sheet, with title, dimensions, price, etc.

Thank you for visiting the Erik's Rants and Recipes cyber gallery.

Paella on the Grill

I went to the studio to take art pictures, and the camera's battery needed recharging. So, that will happen this afternoon, no big deal. I went to the pictures folder to see if I had any art photos, and didn't, but I did find this picture of a paella I made on a barbecue while camping last spring:

Image copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

I always like paella, but there is something extra good about it when it is made outdoors over a fire. This one was with rabbit, sausages, clams, and mussels.

Early Endorsements

It is a little early, but Erik's Rants and Recipes is so far endorsing Barack Obama for the Democrat nomination for President. Be sure to talk him up to your Democrat friends.

Street Date: Tuesday

In the record business, records are released on one day a week, called the "Street Date." Record stores get the records before street date, but they are not supposed to sell them before that date. If they are caught selling before street date, the distributor is supposed to not allow them to have records before street date again. In theory. Some distributors don't care, so long as other record stores don't squack.

Bishops seem to be in a similar boat, where new bishops are announced by Rome on Thursdays, is it?

So, I have decided to adopt a similar approach to posting art on the website: a street date. Now, it really is for me, because it will force me to think "uh oh, Tuesday is tomorrow, I better take some pictures and get them ready."

Also, I might cheat, and put stuff up between street dates. We'll see. That would be better than missing a street date.

In the record business, most distributors have two street dates a month. I like that, and thinking in terms of second and fourth is good, because the second and fourth Tuesdays are also dreaded street sweeping days, so the more I make those days special, the better chance I have of not forgetting to not park on one side of the street.

Now, in the art business, one generally has an opening, which I will try to figure out how to do. A cyberopening, in which you can come and sip some cyber crappy wine and eat some cyber waxy cheese and look at the cyber hipsters making sure they are seen on the cyber gallery circuit. Of course you can also run into some cyber friends, and then after the opening, you can all go out to a cyber bar and drink cyber Scotch. Sounds fun? You betchee.

No, a cyber opening will have to be something different. Something completely different. I am not sure what, but we will have a cyber opening. And not on street date, but on the Thursday after street date, so you can come in, get an early view of the art, then come back for the opening on Thursday.

You don't even have to wear black, although I have no problem with people wearing black. Sometimes I wear black. Not all that often, but sometimes.

Anyway, that is what is up.

The show that is tentatively scheduled to open tomorrow (well, actually Thursday, but the art will be posted tomorrow) is going to be sort of eclectic, if the photography goes well today. So far, we are still in the experimental stage of this stuff.

Twenty Years Ago...

It is hard to believe that Himmel Uber Berlin, aka Wings of Desire is twenty years old (although by the time it got to Sacramento, I think it was 1988, so it was already a year old). It remains my all-time favorite film, mostly because it appeals to the lyrical/musical sense (images carefully moving in time) much more than the rhetorical sense (plot). What narratives there are twist together in beautifully subtle and interesting ways.

As far as angelology goes, there are a couple of questionable things, but in terms of a Catholic film, Wings of Desire takes first place, even though the director is not Catholic. Obviously there is the joy of the created world (even in Damiel's first human experience, which was getting clunked in the head with the armor), but more than that is the narrative around the old man (Homer), who is constantly searching for an epic of peace.

His search for an epic of peace against the history of warfare is something the angels contemplate, and is something that goes through the minds of the WWII survivors as they drive through areas that spark memories of the tragedy of that era. And we have to wait until the very end of the film to find the epic of peace, which is the story of procreation.

And, like the old cruise ship, getting there is half the fun in this mostly improvised masterpiece. We have Peter Falk playing himself, a couple of great performances by post-punk legend Nick Cave, some wonderfully off-kilter circus music, cinematography by Henri Alekan, and footage of a Berlin that is no more.

Now, keeping in mind that "getting there is half the fun," I am eagerly awaiting (and probably expecting disappointment from - how's that? To expect disappointment. What does that mean that I am expecting?) how this film works as a stage play. Curt Bois, who played Homer, is dead, the Berlin of the 1980's is gone (and that city really was a character in the drama), and they seem to be doing something different with it. They would have to. My question is how it will relate to the film. I am assuming that it will find its way to the Bay Area. I hope so, since I am currently boycotting both New York (Governor Spitzer?!? Ffft. Phteh. Blech.) and Massachussetts (yes, partly 1630's era grievances, but also to do with having a governor who actively practices the Mormon lifestyle), and will not see it in either of those states.

Anyway, here is an interesting PR piece from the theater company in Cambridge that is doing it, in conjunction with a Dutch company:

Terrine de porc et champignons Chopin

If you read a few days ago, you know that I made a tasty attempt (and, I believe, a successful attempt, although I did not have any actual Poles test it) at Polish schnitzel. I did, however, make way too much for the four of us who were eating it that night (and there are only so many lunches a week in which one can eat fried pork balls). So, confronted with a rather large tub of ground pork, mushrooms, dill, etc, I decided to take Melanie's advice to make a meatloaf. Sort of. I don't detest meatloaf. I just don't like it very much. So the idea of taking my pork filling and turning it into meatloaf just didn't excite.

Until I remembered reading Julia Child's suggestion that any meatloaf recipe, cooked in the manner of a French pate, will yield superior results than simply baking it would. And, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, I am making a pate.

So, I took the remaining mixture, added the three leftover baby Yukon potatoes that had previously been cooked in brown stock, a large mound of goose fat, a generous (and I mean generous) splash of cognac, and the handful of breadcrumbs I had saved in case I did end up frying the lot. I mixed it all together, pressed it into a loaf pan, put a couple of bay leaves on top, covered it with foil and set it in a pan of boiling water in a 350 degree oven (see Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 for details on the method). When it had cooked for about an hour and a half, I removed it, and let it cool to room temperature, overnight, with weight on the foil. This morning I chilled it.

Tonight we ate it with Taylor's Honey Truffle Mustard on bagels. I liked it, but Melanie thought the dill overpowered. She is right, but it did not overpower in a way that bugged me that much. But, next time, I will cut back on the dill. And I will finish it with an aspic coating, because it looks cool and I like aspic.

No photo, because it is not much to look at.

Leonard Cohen and Sonny Rollins

I never would have thought to put these two together on the same bill, let alone the same stage, but it works quite well:

Test of a different size.

Of course, if I am going to give you pretty scenery while I test sizes and formats and such, you can't beat this. You just can't:

Image copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

More Tests

I am just playing with settings and seeing what looks best. I will try to post interesting views, since why waste space with just boring old tech tests? This is an obsidian outcropping at Glass Mountain on the Medicine Lake volcano, a Hawaiian-type shield volcano in far Northern California. It is the largest of the Cascades, and its caldera is a lake (a lovely warm lake full of tasty trout)!

Image copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

So, the tests are successful, which means...

The next step is to get some more of my photos up here. The focus will be twofold, art and food, but you know me. I still am working on getting an art website up, complete with snazzy artist notes, bio, etc. I am, however, working on it in the "thinking and planning stage" so perhaps having a way of at least getting photos of the art up there will be the spark that makes me go further in this direction.

The long and short of it is this: newspaper writing, which is like the grocery business in that it is all about volume, is drying up. The papers I have been writing for have merged with another newspaper group, and I went from being the only food critic for a nine-paper chain of dailies with a range covering the whole Bay Area, to one of three. Add to the fact that the editors I have been working with are now gone, and that the other reviewers are staff people, who do not require extra money (beyond the expense of the dinner, which our management is notoriously niggardly about - a stupid thing in a food-obsessed region such as ours, but that is a different rant), and that the paper shut down the two most lucrative (for me, although they were good revenue generators for the company, too, so go figure) publications, the net result is fewer and fewer assignments, all in the outlying areas of the region (which is not bad, food wise, as Fremont has a rich concentration of interesting south Asian food, but to drive all that distance for the same fee is not all that exciting to me).

Since I do not advertise or market myself in my corporate writing (when times were good, I didn't have to), and am about done with that stuff anyway (although if a gig turns up, I take it), I have to think about a different income stream.

As a result, I have gone back to a pretty rigorous painting schedule. However, without a gallery this means the Internet, which many artists have had good success with.

So, the fast track to getting a website going is the inevitable conclusion.

Now, I am guessing that most of my readership here is more interested in my realist paintings, particularly my religious paintings, so that will probably be the principle focus of the images on this site. I have not, and do not intend to ever stop painting in the high modernist key as well, so those sorts of works will pop up from time to time, too.

There is a risk in being two painters in one: partisans of either style will assume that the work in the other is nothing but sell-out work, pandering to some ideological base or another. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. I like Giotto, I like Diebenkorn. I like a lot of stuff in between.

In the 1950's, the Bay Area Figurative painters faced similar accusations. Diebenkorn, that always level-headed master, pointed out that he saw no more contradiction in painting abstract paintings at the same time as figurative works as he would in painting a landscape one day and a still life the next.

Post-modernism is probably a silly term in its use, but there is an underlying truth to what it originally meant: there is no more artistic mainstream. There may be one in the future, but there isn't one now. Artists should draw from whatever sources and inspirations they need, without regard for fitting into some label.

Easier said than done, as a quick tour of most contemporary galleries will demonstrate: many in the arts world will proclaim the end of the avant garde, althewhile desperately trying to find a place within it. The result is a lot of ideologically heavy work that often falls apart when analyzed for form and structure.

Anyone who has read my writings on art, or attended one of my lectures, will know that I strive after a theory of art that can be applied to a late Diebenkorn as well as to a Fra Angelico, and will make sense of both. The key to that is Music. A musical/structural analysis of any good painting will show that underlying the "rhetoric of images" (my term), all painting works by means of proportion, rhythm, counterpoint, and all of the terms that come to us from the study of music.

So it is in what I strive for in painting, whether it is a realistic painting of St. Francis or one of my recent "Stockhausen structure" paintings, in which the forms are taken from nature and combined, manipulated, and edited to make a highly abstract result.

So, there you have it. In the spirit of twentieth century art, I give you too many words and not enough images. Hopefully that will be corrected in the next few days.

A note on the commercial aspect of the postings: Unless otherwise noted, all posted works are available for sale. And, until I am in a gallery structure, I will be offering these direct to the buyer at wholesale price. So, if something strikes your fancy now, realize that the price will increase (by as much as double) when I get into a gallery representation situation, because the gallery owner has to pay rent, too. I will charge for shipping and handling on a simple formula: my time packaging and delivering to the shipper (on a $15 an hour rate, which is substantially less than what I charge to write, paint, or to cook), plus cost (packaging material, shipping costs, insurance, etc.). I will not skimp on the packaging, as that is silly. I will sell works on paper unframed, if they are not already framed, but the quoted prices will generally include framing (I used to work in a high end frame shop, so I follow sound archival practices in framing my work). If you want unframed, ask, and I will give you an unframed quote.

So, if you see a work that you would like to buy (and I can hold the price on a layaway sort of deal - I am very flexible), let me know immediately. I will email you (or snail mail) a contract (basically it transfers ownership of the painting to you, but I retain copyright and other usual artist's rights). You get the contract to me with a check (or I can set up a PayPal acocunt), and I package and ship the painting with the necessary documentation.

If a painting has a defect in workmanship (I am pretty meticulous, but these things do happen, even in works of the masters), I will make a reasonable effort to repair the work, or will offer a substitution painting. If the painting arrives and you just don't like it, send it back and I will refund the price, but not the shipping (otherwise abuses could occur, however, I am flexible, so if you want another painting instead, we could make some accomodation in the shipping cost).

If you are interested in renting a painting, we can talk. Basically, we could do a lease, after which you get the option of applying that fee to the price of the painting, or could ship it back.

I am also available for art consulting and for on-site installations, commissions, and site-specific works. I will even do dog portraiture if that is your thing (Good Lord, I hope not, though), and I have become pretty handy at restoring and touching up religious statues.

So, at the risk of turning this blog into the sort of blog that is always flogging work for sale, take this as an announcement that Erik's Rants and Recipes will begin functioning as an online gallery within a week.

If you like what you see, buy it, and spread the word!

One final note: feel free to link to and to post images on posts on your non-commercial blogs, so long as you credit the image with a link and post the copyright notice. If you want to use one of my images on your permanent template, that is probably fine, just ask my permission first.

Thank you.

More Food Photo Testing

This is just a test to get the size right.

Image copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

I Lied.

Well, perhaps we will have the new things. If you see a bowl of brussels sprouts below, then the test is successful and we are on to the new era of Erik's Rants and Recipes.

Image copyright 2005 by Erik Keilholtz

No New Things, Yet, But a Strangely Appropriate Old One

The new thing did not happen, and it was not because I did not try to fumble around with it, rather, it was because I got distracted creating iTunes playlists.

So, it is altogether appropriate that Don Jim posted his iPod 10 shuffle list today. Here is mine:

1. "Once Upon a Summertime" sung by Betty Carter
2. "Que Deus Me Perdoe" sung by Maria Ana Bobone (and accompanied by harpsichord!)
3. "Down to the River to Pray" sung by Allison Kraus
4. "Grazie A Francesco/Tarantella N. Calabrese" played on surdulina by Sean Folsom
5. "Remescio" sung by the Squadra Bleu de Zena (Genovese trallaleri group)
6. "On n'oublie Rien" sung by Jacques Brel
7. "I Don't Care (Just As Long As You Love Me)" sung by Buck Owens
8. "Miles Ahead" played by Miles Davis with Quincy Jones
9. "Arcobaleno" sung by Meme Bianchi (yes, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", sung in Italian)
10. "The Broad Majestic Shannon" by the Pogues

Special Announcement

If all goes well, there will be a new special feature to this blog. Perhaps as soon as this evening. Perhaps not. We'll see. It all depends on how my Internet chops are (which should set many of you to tittering wildly).

Pork Fest! Schnitzel

I think this is right. It is right. It tastes good. I think that it is how our Polish priest had me making them, but if it isn't, well, it still tastes good.

I am not Polish. Schnitzel is cutlet in my book. But in Poland, something different.

I had a bunch of mushrooms that were a little past their sellby date. They were edible, but not pretty. I had a bunch of fresh dill. What do I use dill for? Well, next to nothing. I like it and all, but it isn't really a big player in Italian cuisine.

So, thinking back to cooking a big Polish dinner (my one and only time cooking this stuff), I decide to get some ground pork and try it out.

I started with a pound and a half of ground pork and a produce bag of mixed mushrooms. I think you must have at least a quarter of them shiitake or some other powerfully flavored ones. I chopped the mushrooms finely in the food processor.

I chopped an onion by hand into fine dice and ran three large cloves of garlic through a garlic press. I sauted the onions, garlic and mushrooms in goose fat and olive oil. I transferred them to a work bowl, added the bunch of dill (finely chopped), the pork, two eggs, salt, pepper, and caraway seeds(I don't think Father used caraway, but it seems so Polish to do so, that I couldn't resist), and mixed it all up.

I formed little patties, dipped them in breadcrumbs and fried them in oil, letting them drain on paper towels. I served them with potatoes boiled in stock and short braised silver beet. And a red wine. Very good winter meal.

I did this a couple of days ago. In order to balance things out, I had a good bowl of Austrian ox-tail soup for lunch yesterday. I am far too much of a Teuton to just go about eating Polish food and not restoring balance.

El Pana

No, not the baker, although, yes, the baker, since he worked as a baker to support himself as a young aspirante. Known both for his eccentricity as well as for his almost psychotic courage, El Pana is widely considered to be "the one to see" mostly because many folks think that each year will be his last.

This is a clip of a recent performance in Plaza Mexico. Enjoy.

Oh, By Gum! It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity!

Of course there are two ways of looking at this week: a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way is "Lord, let us all come to understand and accept each other's positions and blah blah blah."

The right way:

Lord, shed your Grace on all semi-Christians, heretics and schismatics, help them to put down their pride and come to the True Faith and to grow in communion with the Holy Father, the Bishop of Rome. And if they harden in their apostasy, heresy and schism, then shatter their sects, fragment them, and thus free them from the bonds of Satan, so that they may be better inclined to search for the Truth, whole and complete, which is found only in the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Amen.

Speaking of Good Pieces...

Go read this wonderful and slightly melancholic rumination on the last year and other things. Mr. Luse has outdone himself.

On Baseball

When I started this blog one of the things that I had planned on giving significant time to was the musical/formal aspects to the game of baseball. It intrigues me, because it is one of the few sports that happens entirely in its own time. The clock is simply to measure, not to determine. When the game is won, it is over, whether that is the top of the ninth or the bottom. And so on.

However, due to distractions (even much earlier than YouTube), I have written very little about baseball, and this goes back to when I could go to just about any A's game and sit in very good seats for free. Now that I no longer have my ticket connection, and the A's are looking to move to Fremont, I currently have and will continue to have less and less opportunities to watch the game. Sure, there is San Francisco, a better ballpark, National League, great location, etc., but that is not cheap, and there are only so many times you can tolerate standing in the freebie cage. It is fun to stand in the freebie cage (I did it for the opening day of the first season at the park), but after awhile, you want a ticket, a seat, an overpriced pint of beer, and a bag of peanuts (wasn't that a line from that Persian poet?).

However, I still like the game, and would like to point you to this excellent piece on the steroid nonsense. John is absolutely correct in his portrayal of journalists, by the way.

And Because I Just Can't Help Myself...

One good traditional carol deserves another.

I bet you never heard the "Boar's Head Carol" done quite like this:

And, in goofy comedy mode, do you remember where you were when you found out that "Buckwheat has been shot"?

And now for something completely different...

The Bill Evans Trio doing "Autumn Leaves." Pay special attention to the bass solo (as if you could ignore it):

And on the random direction this posting has taken, enjoy this bit of vintage Grateful Dead in a 1972 recording of "He's Gone":

And "Ramble on Rose" from the same concert:

And, finally, another of my all-time favorite bands, this time the Art Ensemble of Chicago:

I could post lots from these guys, but it will have to wait for now.

It's Time Once Again for...You Guessed It!

This time the YouTube moment is Steeleye Span, one of the best bands to ever come out of England. I grew up listening to this band, and still love their sound. Perhaps my afinity for early music has some roots in listening to this (although my parents' rather extensive collection of J.S. Bach probably had a bit to do with it, too).

Here is "Thomas the Rhymer" from their twentieth anniversary tour:

Any rock band that sings Christmas carols in Latin wins points in my book, and this one I probably should have posted during the Christmas season, but here is a lovely rendition of "Gaudete":

Here is a much earlier recording of "All Around My Hat" from a television show:

Now, it is impossible to speak of the British Folk Movement and to leave out Martin Carthy, who is here with Steeley Span doing "A Lark in the Morning":

And we cannot forget Fairport Convention, here doing "Polly on the Shore":

The Battle is Over, but the War Continues!

In my quest to "get it out of my system" (the "it" being the urge to embark on insanely difficult, labor intensive cooking projects), I have recently finished the latest skirmish, which I have mentioned in this space: cooking an elaborate Italian dinner for 200 people.

And what did I do the next day at the party which was called to help consume leftovers? Find some ingredients that we had overlooked, and did some more cooking.

And frankly, if someone had suggested some crazy culinary adventure at midnight, as we were decompressing after the reception, I would have probably said, "yes!"

Now, I am eagerly awaiting the next culinary campaign, which is the St. Anthony of Padua Institute's An Evening with G. K. Chesterton on February 9th at St. Margaret Mary's Church in Oakland (you have to go, if you live within 300 miles. Really. You will not regret it. If you live farther than 300 miles, you should still come. I promise that this will be the memorable event of the year).

But I think I have given up hope that these things "get it out of my system." It is more like putting out a fire by heaping on more fuel. Sure, you might smother it, but if you don't crush every little spark, the fire will grow bigger. Much bigger.

So, the inevitable question becomes more pressing, more looming, and more difficult to laugh off.

Fortunately for my better sense "Chez Keilholtz" is a horrible name, so that will keep me from any grandiose plans for a little bit.

Alas. The Mad Cook is Away from the Stove

The food went well.

I will post more substantial stuff after rest.

Brrrrr.

It's cold today, and it is going to be cold for the next few days. Arctic airmass and all that. I am beginning to think that I should have a pair of gloves. I have ski gloves, but you can't go around in ski gloves, or people might think you daft.

Unfortunately this will mean going to a clothing store, which is something I hate.

So, I think that I will put off going to the clothing store until the weather warms up, and then I will neither need, nor even want gloves.

"You know, yer roof's leakin'"
"I know."
"Well, why don't you fix it?"
"Well, it's rainin' now, and when the sun's out, why it don't leak!"

Dear Erik's Rants and Recipes...

What's the deal? I tried to view some new content at noon, and I have been put on hold ever since then. What sort of outfit is this?

Well, we understand. We really do. Our aim is to please. Your visit truly is very important to us. Our readers are our passion.

Speaking of passion, this is an expression I am eagerly waiting for the end of. The winner in silly passions? The North Beach Garage on Vallejo Ave. in San Francisco. Parking is Our Passion.

If parking is your passion, let me be the first to declare that your life is tragically misguided.

As it would be if gin were your passion, but I can at least understand a passion for gin. Gin is fun. Gin tastes good. And, sure, it is fun and good to find a parking place, but to have a passion for parking? That is just macabre.

Our whole culture is heading for the macabre, though. People brag about their passions (in public even). They talk about their diets as if their entire well-being in this life and the next depended on it. They believe that truth should and can be settled by vote.

These are symptoms of a bad, bad sickness.

But that is all beside the point, which is this: why is Erik slowing down the content these last couple of days?

And the answer is: Erik is cooking for a wedding reception this Saturday, and is busy preparing all week. So, please forgive me if posting is down to one little post a day until Sunday night (or even Monday, depending on how quickly I spring back into action).

Meanwhile, we have this nice loop of the Four Seasons played on a DX-7...

You Have Reached Erik's Rants and Recipes

Thank you for clicking on Erik's Rants and Recipes.

Your visit is very important to us.

We will be here with fresh, new content! as soon as possible.

Perhaps tonight!

Yipppeeee!

Snow! Soon?!?

My desktop weather just flashed a warning for extremely cold temperatures starting tonight (it has been almost balmy and lovely the last few days). So, grumble, grumble...but...there is a silver lining! Snow. At low elevations (nearing sea level)! At the very least the Berkeley Hills and Mt. Tam will be dusted with the stuff. Yippeee!

Notice that snow around here is a once in a decade sort of affair. We don't have to shovel it, nor plow it, nor worry about it falling out of trees and killing people. If we had that sort of snow, we would be outta here.

The End of an Era... And a Question

Everyone knows that lead can be bad for you. What most people don't know is that lead artists' paint, when properly handled, is fairly benign stuff. The oil that is the vehicle for the paint effectively isolates the lead carbonate, preventing almost all absorbtion. And, most artists I know take care to not ingest their paints.

However, because of the hysteria against this wonderful pigment, it is getting harder and harder to find good lead oil primer. Fortunately, I still have some stockpiled. But I am getting down to the end, and will have to find a new source. The various titanium/zinc substitutes simply do not handle quite the same way.

If we want to see a rebirth of traditional painting, we need to ensure that artists have access to traditional materials. If it comes down to it, I have some pure lead and am prepared to make my own lead carbonate and to grind it into paint. However, handling the unbound powdered pigment is far more hazardous than the paint that is produced in factories and comes already in oil.

I could make a primer from flake white, but that is not really as cost effective as getting a ready-made lead oil primer.

I am no luddite. I have recently switched from rabbit skin glue for my canvas sizing to PVA glue size, mostly because I have been convinced by the literature that pva is better resistant to changes in humidity, and thus stabler.

But they can take my lead paint away when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers (probably death induced by lead poisoning, nevermind the fact that the linotype operators of yore, who worked constantly in hot, crowded rooms with pots of molten lead were tops in the printing industry for longevity).

What annoys me even more is the fact that Naples Yellow is endangered for the same reason. Have you ever used Naples Yellow? It handles beautifully and has a great color. The color of the substitutes is fine, but the paint is never as short and buttery as the real deal.

In a related note: has anyone ever primed a large canvas and, while priming, decided that it still does not have enough tension (and the keys have already been driven in quite far)? I am thinking of taking two sides off the bars and stretching those. Is this daft? Has anyone done something like this? Is this a conservation nightmare waiting to happen?

Two Links

I don't know why I have yet to link to John Salmon's Mystic Chords, or Julie at Sotto Sotto. Oops. They are both good reads, and it is always fun to find someone who is just discovering Patsy Cline (John, I am with you on Patsy. Some of the die-hard country fans I know say, "but she wasn't really doing country music" but so what? Perhaps she should be in the same class as Roger Miller, who was country, but also, not really country. Both were fantastic).

Read them both frequently.

Ah, the snow and the sea...

Those moments when I can go up to the top of the Berkeley Hills and look one way and see the ocean, and then look the other way to see the snow-capped Sierra never cease to delight me. Yesterday we went up to the Sibley Volcanic Preserve (along with, apparently, half of the Bay Area, as we have never seen it so crowded up there - and if you are the woman who we had to talk to about your stinking, frothing, nasty, barking, menacing dogs, the more I think about it, the more I think I should have called animal control on you. Consider yourself lucky, and sell the filthy curs to one of the 10th St. meat markets before you really get in trouble with them).

Something that happens every time we go for a hike: first Amalia says, "no, yuck, I don't want to go for a walk. That's boring." Then we say, "just get your shoes on and get in the car." And we get there, and Amalia runs ahead and runs back and pretends to be a deer, and the smile never leaves (well, usually there are two obligatory falls, where the smile vanishes for a well-timed 45 second cry, only to return). Every time. The encounter with the nasty dogs almost wrecked the trip for her, but the silver lining to the cloud is that the more she sees the true nature of canines, the less she will desire to live with one in the house (yes, I am pretty much a dog hater who sees them as useful only as food, weapons, and beasts of burden. I find the notion of a "canine companion" to be perverse, at best. Unfortunately Amalia wants a puppy. Oh joy).

And, no, I have not yet eaten dog (horse, oh yes, good stuff, that). I am very keen to try it, and not because I find them foolish pets, but because I am always curious to sample different meats. I would rather have a horse for a pet. Or a pig, as far as that goes. And, yes, I would have no problem having a pig for a pet for a couple of years, and then having pork chops and ham (and headcheese and bacon and pancetta and trotters and...) when it got older. People really need to get over the sentimentalization of animals.

So speaking of Volcanic Preserves and things seismic, we had a water main explode on our street. It was quite dramatic yet(I think) it did not do any damage to anyone or anything (besides the street itself). When the Water People were working on it last night, I asked them what caused it, and one of the guys said that they have been really busy recently, and that he suspects that it has to do with the series of small earthquakes we have had recently.

Ah, the fun of living in seismicly active areas!

Nothing beats being rocked to sleep by the earth itself.

And no, this has nothing to do with the fact that every earthquake, no matter how small, drives some carpet-bagging foreigners back to New Jersey where they came from. No. Nothing at all. Bye bye!

Sun Ra

Did you ever see Sun Ra live? His band was a lot of fun, and the shows were great, sort of space-themed three ring circus with stellar musicians (and I mean stellar, these guys could go play anything, and play it well). For those of you who missed it, here is a clip from a 1981 show in Chicago, complete with a burning free jazz sax solo:

Apparently there is a fellow out there who likes to set anime to Sun Ra music. I don't care much for anime, but it is a great excuse to hear a really good studio recording from Sun Ra:

Maybe Dear Margo could learn a thing about giving advice from Sun Ra:

Part of the deal with the Sun Ra Arkestra is that all the musicians doubled on percussion, so that you could get some interesting interludes going on. Like Duke Ellington before him, Sun Ra had members who stayed with him for decades. Some left for awhile for more lucrative and prestigious bands, and did well, but came back because what other band could have been more fun than this:

The Condor

I remember once, a few years ago, we were hiking in Big Sur and saw a bird fly over the trees that was the largest flying bird we had ever seen. Honestly, it seemed that something this large should require a license from the FAA. We were at the top of one of the largest mountains in the area, so we had a great view of this bird, watching it soar over the valley, eventually landing on the top of a tree.

It was the elusive and rare California Condor, a relic of an era where large dead animals were frequent enough to sustain these gigantic scavengers. We did not get as close as the people in this YouTube clip were, but even from a distance, the condor is something to see:

Dear Margo...

Dear Margo, you blew it here. I have no idea who you are, or why people write to you for advice, but this column recently appeared on Yahoo News, so I was intrigued.

You got a couple of things wrong: first, while Wicca probably seems benign "if you read a little bit about it," if you read more than a little bit, and read the right sources you will find that Wicca is hardly benign. It is a resurrection of the old Celto-Germanic paganisms, which were bloody horrid. To make matters worse, Mom, here, is an apostate who went over to the dark side as an adult, not as a pimply teenager who played a little too much D and D and had trouble telling game from religion.

So, on the one side you have "honor your mother," but the other side you are told to put Christ above your mother and father. The person who wrote is having a baby (and no word on that? True, it is good that she is getting married, but this is probably someone who is in delicate spiritual condition, and she needs better advice than the popular multi-culti-tolerance-acceptance crap you dole out, Margo), and having a grandmother (!) who is into Wicca will simply not do.

The correct answer is: "until your mother comes to her senses and gives up the delayed adolecent rebellion, you should avoid her altogether. She is consorting with demons and the demonic [and, no, Margo, your comparison is a not apt at all, rather it falls into the category of non sequitur]. She needs Grace. If you want to do your duty, have masses said for her. Try to get a good priest to visit her. Do not allow her to have any contact whatsoever with her grandchild until she has come back into the True Faith."

Until your answers read more like that and less like "well, whatever she wants, and whatever feels good, blah blah blah" you should lay off the advice granting. Because, as it stands, Dear Margo, you are poison.

Meow!

Back on Mad Housecat Mode. I just saw a mouse. After plugging a hole the other day. Now I will be tearing apart closets and hunting, hunting, hunting.

I thought I got all of the mouse holes.

I have very little use for rodents, especially when they invade the house.

Makes me want to have a cat in here. Sort of. Not having cat fur all over the place is a good thing, though. And we really don't have room for a cat anymore.

And, speaking of cats, our dear departed Hep Cat was a pretty useless hunter. One time we watched him stalk a gopher. The gopher reared up on its hind legs and made a little noise. Hep Cat (who was a gigantic cat who would take on dogs and racoons), ran.

Perhaps a pet hyena would be better. I don't know where they stand on mice, but the neighbor's dogs would have to be on much better behavior if we could menace them with a hyena. Of course, once it was done with the mice and the neighbor's dogs, what would we feed it?

Ohio?

Someone better go check on old TSO.

Here he seems to think that Patrick is an Ohio blogger. Last I checked, he lived somewhere in the Golden State. I will have to question him when I see him at mass on Sunday.

We can't have any undocumented Ohians running around here. Not with Homeland Security risks and all that.

Since we are YouTubing it Tonight...

I cannot go around praising this singer and that singer and not give a nod to the greatest singer:

Alas, since Amalia Rodrigues is no longer among us, we will have to get our live fado fix from Mariza:

The Hawaiian Music Connection

Of course most folks think "steel guitar" when they think of Hawaiian music. So, what happened when a black Holiness Pentacostal church musician went to Hawaii? Sacred Steel was born. It is a longer story, and very interesting (check out the link on the sidebar to Arhoolie Records, and you will find lots of Sacred Steel material).

In this clip, from (I beleive) Sacred Steel, a documentary on the subject by Robert Stone and put out by Arhoolie Records and the Arhoolie Foundation, we see the Campbell Brothers (probably the finest Sacred Steel musicians out there) at their best:

Of course, since the fame brought to this once very obscure musical tradition hit, the musicians weren't content to stick with playing for the same crowd every Sunday, especially the younger ones. So, from a Holiness church to the jam band world, bands like the Lee Brothers and Ray Ray are doing to this music what Little Richard (whose cousin, Katie Jackson, incidentally, is a singer in a Sacred Steel church) did with mid-century gospel music: