Lydia Mendoza, R.I.P.

I am getting sick and tired of writing obituaries of great people. Stockhausen, Oscar Peterson, and now Lydia Mendoza, La Alondra de la Frontera, the great Tejana singer. She was in her early nineties and had a stroke some years ago, so it is not entirely surprising (in fact, just a couple of weeks ago I was listening to her and wondered whether or not she was still alive).

Of the three musicians who died in the past month who I have written about in this space, my closest connection was with Lydia Mendoza, as she was one of the stars in the Arhoolie Records stable, where I was the Marketing Director a few years ago. In fact, if you are wondering about Lydia Mendoza, you should go over to Arhoolie Records and pick out one of her records. I am not sure which one to recommend right off the bat, but there aren't any stinkers, so just get one. Her voice was stunning: powerful, direct, versatile, and emotive. She toured around Latin America to wild aclaim and was beloved in the Texas-Mexican border communities.

And, yes, the man who puts the Party in The Falangist Party is home blogging about dead musicians on New Years Eve.

What can I say? We had some friends over for dinner last night, and Melanie and I are singing at mass tomorrow. I might pop open a bottle of bubbly, and we might toast the New Year with champagne and cigars, or we might just wait for all that tomorrow. I actually have a prime rib and a fantastic cabernet, but we decided to just have leftovers tonight and have a good dinner tomorrow night.

Bah humbug? No. I love New Year's Eve. We're just having a low-key one this year.

Anyway, Happy New Years!

Back in the Studio Today!

Ah, the smell of goose stock! It permeates everything. It wafted upstairs last night, so that we woke up to the smell of roasted goose, garlic, onion, etc. Of course this means waking up pretty hungry, but pizza took care of that. Pizza for dinner, pizza for breakfast, pizza for lunch. It's a trifecta.

But this is not a food entry, and certainly not one of those miserable entries that people put out there that list what they ate for lunch:

-Today is pretty good. I had a tuna sandwich for lunch. I think I might check out the latest Dave Matthews Band video.

No, no, no. The only reason I mention pizza is because it was a three in a row affair, and thus becomes a curiosity: ah, the erudite restaurant critic, when left to his own devices, eats exclusively pizza! The savage! What next? Hot dogs?

But the thing is, the exciting news, is that in a few hours I will be descending into the studio with a good friend of mine to build a theremin.

When it is done, I will report. Maybe some pictures, although if I post pictures, they better be those long-promised ones from Las Vegas.

One last random item: I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is bleak, dismal stuff, but worth reading if you can stand the setting, which is post-apocalyptic America. It is a portrait of love enduring through the most hopeless of situations, and is very well-written. I can't say that I recommend it to everyone, though.

OK. I've got to go rig up some more lights downstairs.

The great Christmas Tradition...Goose Stock

Now that the feast is over, and the cook is (mostly) recovered, we are on to that great delight: having two picked over goose carcasses along with necks, hearts, and gizzards. The house smells of simmering goose stock, and goose risotto is around the corner. I have reserved the livers and have made pancetta from the goose skin, and will be using black currants and creme de cassis in the risotto, to make a rich, complex, and very yummy dish. If I am happy with it, I will post the recipe.

Oscar Peterson, R.I.P.

This morning I heard the news that the great Canadian pianist Oscar Peterson died on Sunday. He was 82 and had suffered from strokes in recent years.

Whenever I am asked to list my favorite jazz records, Oscar Peterson somehow manages to show up on at least three:

1. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald (the best jazz record ever made), which features Oscar Peterson and Buddy Rich
2. Stan Getz with the Oscar Peterson Trio
3. The Oscar Peterson Trio, Night Train

His treatment of Porgy and Bess on the clavichord (a Pablo Release), is one of those records that at first is so unusual that it almost seems a novelty, yet on subsequent hearings reveals a deep musicality and subtlety (the clavichord is the only keyboard instrument with natural vibrato).

Oscar Peterson was a classically-trained pianist who refused classical gigs because the standard amount of rehearsal for an orchestra was insufficient to reach the musical heights he demanded. His drummer-less trio, with the solid discipline of Herb Ellis and Ray Brown was more to his liking.

One music critic (I think it was Burgess), pointed out that Oscar Peterson was really sort of an anti-pianist, because his Mozart-influenced crystaline lines were a refutation of sorts of the Romantic tradition, and that is probably right. Peterson did not use the damper pedal. He had no interest in blurring and over-emoting and all that bag of crap that the Van Cliburn sorts trot out as they vulgarly gush over the "Rach 3". Peterson's music is a more classical music, a more refined music. He stressed melodic inventiveness and the age-old quest for diversity within unity, over the desire to hit the listener over the head with emotion, which is the unfortunate direction that the piano has gone in since the days of Schubert and that prissy Brahms.

Oscar Peterson was also a political conservative, who enjoyed waterskiing with his family. He was a brilliant conversationalist, well-read, and a natural leader, which is essential when working with the likes of Buddy Rich and Stan Getz. The jazz world has lost one of its greatest ever.

Recovering

Too much cooking (ha hahahahaha. Not really). Too much eating (really). Today was spent indoors, doing too much cleaning. Oh how I hate dishes.

Now, fortified with my nightly espressi, I am feeling more normal. We return home tomorrow. Maybe we are home now, because Sacramento does feel like home, as does the Bay Area. Santa Cruz doesn't feel like home, and hasn't for some time. Rome feels like home, too, even though I am not Roman. I have some family in Rome, but they are not "real Romans," just displaced Tuscans. Pisa, which is where our family is from, never has really felt like home. Maybe it would have before the war, but not now.

Rome is home, because of the church and because of all the baroque architecture. You know, if I were ever to long for a nostalgic past, it would be the baroque. I would look good in a powdered wig, playing my harpsichord.

Sacramento is not a very baroque city, and the Bay Area is not a baroque area. Go figure.

Lodi, where great wines come from, feels a lot like the area by Pisa where my family is from, but it has never felt like home, either. I like Lodi, though, and would not mind being stuck there again, which would mean being stuck there twice, since I have never been stuck there.

It is cold in sunny California. Sunny and cold. Crisp, they call it. Crisp like the dried skin we all have this time of year.

Anyway, please continue to have a Merry Christmas!

Have a Blessed Christmas!

We are back in Sacramento. The cooking fun starts tomorrow, so blogging will be sparse. Of course, reading will probably be sparse, too.

So, Merry Christmas! I will be back to the irregular blogging schedule on the 26th.

Immigration

I am generally very pro-immigrant. In fact, I am so pro-immigrant that I believe in displacing and subjugating the Indignant Peoples who were not doing their share of defending their homeland. Thus, when Magyars immigrated to Hungary without proper visas, it was their right and duty to simply take over from the weaker Slavs. When Europeans discovered vast, resource-rich lands that were barely occupied by some Asiatic shamanists, it was their duty to bring civilization and to protect the little fellows who could not have defended their land. You see, the next invaders would not have had nearly the decency or compassion as the Europeans.

Now, this sounds to your modern, liberal ears, like the spew of some KuKluxery at worst, or, at best, like the quaint "white man's burden" rhetoric of Kipling. And, the latter is correct. In universities where one is told to question everything, questioning the equality of all cultures tends to be frowned upon. So I am offering a restorative:

Imagine that your little tribe of indians has the misfortune of living next to the Aztecs. It is the early sixteenth century. You are going to be invaded tomorrow. You get to pick the invaders. Obviously there is going to be some friction, and some heartache. One way or another some of you will die, and some of you will be enslaved. Now, do you want the invaders who will err on the side of concern for your immortal soul or the ones who will gleefully pluck your still-beating heart out and chuck your head down the side of a pyramid?

Or try this little game: Which people subjected to Attila the Hun were able to go to avoid a life of menial labor or sex slavery to go to University of Hun and write books about their oppression?

The possibilities are endless. In fact, being invaded by ANY non-Western power was infinitely worse than being invaded by ANY Western power (at least until Marxism came around).

But this is invasion. It is only one of the modes of immigration. It is the mode that most people like to hysterically bat around. We are being invaded by the brown people! We must defend against the menace. But we are not really being invaded.

Of course there are other modes of immigration to think about, as well, such as the one where one population is too low to sustain its economy. When this happens, you have to import people. You can do it completely on your own terms, and go to the Arabs and buy some hapless folk who happened to get conquered by that lovely non-Western power (yes, there were examples of enslaving Indians, which, as we all know, was a complicated and not nearly so mono-lithic practice among the Iberians, but the main way of getting dark-hued slaves was to buy them from other dark-hued people). This leads to problems, especially if you color code your slaves. If, for instance, we were to bring in Englischers as slaves, when slavery was abolished, they could blend right in the general population. But when you enslave black folks, there is always the stigma, the unspoken family history, the tragedy that faces you. It is why, unless we have such thorough intermarriage that race becomes totally negligible, there will probably never be comfortable race relations in this country. I can look to a Greek and know that perhaps his ancestor owned mine, or maybe mine owned his, but the possibility is two-way. When a black person looks at me, he knows that it could only have been a one-way possibility.

Do I have the solution to race relations? No. I tend these days to think that, very generally, perhaps folks should stick to their own, with lines, but not legally defined lines, and, these lines should certainly be blurred. Jazz, for instance, is a great example of why the lines ought to blur once in awhile. And if there are no legally enforced lines, there should also be no legally erased lines, either. Don't make an Italian neighborhood accept an Englischer. If the Englischer really wants in, he can work to gain the acceptance of the Italians. And likewise, don't make the WASPS take in an Italian family. If some misguided Italian wants to become one of them, at the risk of his eternal soul, then he can bargain with those people any way he wants. They are notoriously easy to win over with little trinkets and an imitation of their own accent. That is his business, and theirs. Forcing them to accept an Italian family in their enclave will not help either side.

So, we see the problem with slavery (besides the fact that it is morally unacceptible, although we could certainly craft some sort of indentured servitude that would preserve the dignity of the human person, in fact I am working on it, as we will need something to do with the Englisch after the war), and that leaves us with the huddled masses: the folks who see which side of the border their tortilla can be buttered on.

Now, some huddled masses are in such a state that they will become slaves, because it is better than what they are leaving. You have the situation with Exodus of old, and you have the Chinese of today who are willing to risk death and slavery to get out of the Middle Kingdom. Now, the obvious thing here is to let them in and imprison the slavers. These people so determined to come here are going to be good workers. Yes, there is the risk that if they do not assimilate, they will become an invading force, but that is where the superiority of our culture comes in, as well as our own will to dominate.

Certainly there are some wortwhile things to learn from other cultures: some techniques of medicine, some knowledge of botany, some food uses for things, perhaps even a poetic or artistic trick, certainly music, etc., and there is no need to worry about that. Things of a utile nature will be absorbed or rejected based on their utility. What we need to preserve is the fundamental cultural matrix, the philosophy, the religion, to some degree the language, although any Western language will do (obviously it would be best for everyone to speak good, old fashioned German, but I have no objection to one of the modern Latin dialects taking over), and the understanding of the common good and the relationship of the individual to that common good.

So, here is my proposed Immigration Policy. It, of course, violates the standing policies of the Endarkenment Government of our time, but it will go into effect within the first month of the Keilholtz dictatorship. For those of you who wish to craft some better policy in the meantime, you can borrow from it.

Anyone who is willing to accept and absorb these critical points: the orthodox Catholic Faith, Western language, Western concept of law, etc., ought to be fully accepted as a new resident, and should be held accountable to the law of the land to the exact same degree as anyone else, with one exception: if it is determined that he never held the essential core culture, that it was nothing more than a sham, he should be stripped of everything but the clothes on his back and a hundred dollars and deported. Otherwise, he should be considered a fast track candidate for citizenship.

Now, a second category are those who refuse Western culture and religion. Insofar as they are willing to abide by our rules, which we may set for them at our convenience, they may remain as Guest Workers for a fixed period of time. If, during that time they become won over to our Culture and Civilization, they may begin the process of moving into permanent residency. If, on the other hand, they transgress any of our rules, they go back, with fifty dollars in their pocket and absolutely nothing else. If they speak ill of our culture, they go back. If they participate in any politics beyond the Syndicate of Guest Workers and Employers, they go back. If they are sent back and return without authorization, they are to be executed.

Now, the other side of this coin is that those who leave the good graces of Western Culture, no matter their race, their place of birth, their ethnicity, are to be given one chance at re-education. If they relapse, they shall be stripped of their citizenship and their goods, and deported to the place of their new-found fondness. So a convert to Mohammedanism gets to go to Arabia. A convert to Marxism gets to go to North Korea. A convert to neo-paganism gets to go to Africa. If he reenters without leave, he shall be executed.

Mormons, since they have no true homeland, shall be sent to sex-segregated camps in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, where they should be allowed to live in peace, prosperity and relative isolation (of course they will have regular visits from Dominican friars to help them see the error of their ways) until the cult has faded away on its own.

But that is then. Now we are in a different situation, and it is a situation so dependent on immigrant labor that most of this debate is pointless and stupid.

Go ahead, ship all the illegal aliens back, if you could. See what will happen to the economy.

Better yet, make them legal as John suggests.

And then we can adopt one of my future solutions, to fit our current liberal democracy: only print our ballots in Western languages. German, Spanish, English. If enough Basques come here, then add Basque. But never print a ballot in an Eastern language, never in Arabic, never in Chinese. It is not that we want to exclude the Arab or the Chinese, but that we recognize that there is a gulf in their notions of the common good and ours, that cannot be mutually observed.

Anyway, enough of this. Amalia has finished her math final (97%), so that she will begin second grade math in January, and I need to get back to the Keilholtz Academy. There are cricket larvae to study.

Meanwhile, amuse yourself with thism via Mr. Salmon.

And finally...

Yes, this is what I was going to sit down to write before getting distracted by politics.

It is a dirty game politics, and I like it. I would like it more if it were a little more unruly, a little more boisterous, a little more dangerous. Politics has become safe and sterilized. I am personally disgusted watching some twit backpedal from some rather funny slur, just because it offends someone.

Ah, for the days of George Wallace or Spiro, wonderful Spiro. St. Spiro? No, he was a criminal, but a criminal who could SPEAK! Nixon was entertaining in the way that paranoids are entertaining: the fun wears off fast.

And, here I am back on politics.

What I meant to write about was film I watched last night, an early Louis Malle film titled, in translation, The Elevator to the Gallows. It is good, but very French. I don't want to give away too much, because there are some interesting story twists, but the film is worth seeing not so much for the story,(which is good, though), but for the stunning visual sense of the whole, the musicality of the whole (artful command of timing, rhythm, visual counterpoint, textural variety), as well as the music itself, which was provided by the late great Miles Davis. Put it on your Netflix queue.

Speaking of which, have I mentioned how much I love Netflix? It is especially good when you have moved from an area with good video stores to one without.

Anyway, lunch is over. I have to get back to teaching and mitigating flooding in the studio.

The Reluctant Endorsement

As you may know, I am disgusted with most of the candidates for President.

So, here are my tentative endorsements, subject to change.

1. Ron Paul (I will probably be TEMPORARILY reregistering as a Republican for the sake of voting in the Primary. Then it is back to the Falange, and it is time to do a Falange registration drive, by the way. More on that later).

2. John McCain. OK, he is a loose cannon. He has a temper. That is what I like about him. Diplomacy will be better with a McCain than some mealy-mouth.

3. Anyone but Huckabee. Obvioulsy the field is loaded with heretics and a polytheist infidel, but Huckabee goes beyond that. He is, by his "ordination", a heresiarch. No heresiarchs. However, this is just in the primaries. Huckabee is probably better than Clinton.

4. Anyone but Romney. And this includes the general election. I would support Hillary over Romney. The United States would be hanging a "Smite Me" sign over its collective culo by electing a Mormon for President.

No Mormons.
Not now! Not Ever!
Mitt - Repent and Retire!

On the Democratic side:

1. Barack Hussein Osama. I dare ya! Yank Middle America's chain that hard. Go ahead! Tee hee hee.

2. Al Gore. Bring back the old loser, so we can watch him pout on television again. On second thought, if I have to hear more of that droning, idiotic voice on the news...naw, leave him out to pasture along with Cornball Carter and old Krieg Kriminal Kissinger, and the rest of the august club of Nobel Peace Laureates. Maybe he will choke on a laurel leaf.

3. Geraldine Ferraro. You know. It was a very cynical move of the Democrats to break the sex barrier on an election that they knew they didn't have the slightest chance of winning (Woooooo! Minnesota and the District of Columbia - speaking of which, why are those people allowed to vote at all?). Now, more is at stake, and it is time for them to show their commitment to the cause by pushing one of the legendary sisters to front and center. After all, it takes a special kind of person to be able to play second fiddle to Walter Mondale. Maybe she could draft Ed MacMahon to be her running mate.

4. Diane Feinstein. Hair worse than Thatcher's. Reactionary in the schoolmarmish, worst sense of the word. A manly woman locked in a womanly man's body, or something like that, Feinstein could run as the love child of the long lost mutated femininity of Chastity Bono and the long lost mutated masculinity of Elton John. Oh, so mean, so mean. Keilholtz, you are mean. But the day that old hag retires is a day that will put a smile on my face. The way Gray Davis treated her in the gubernatorial primary is about the only thing I like about that twit.

5. John Vasconcellos. Just for the laugh of it. It could be the seventies all over again. I do feel a little guilty for planting dumb ideas in his head, which came to fruition years later, but at the time I was ten, and he was an elected public official. Since that time, I have come to see the errors in my logic back then, and he has come to see the wisdom. Poor bastard. But, just think, he could run on a ticket with Jerry Brown. Maybe bellbottoms would make a comeback. But it would be funny, in that tragicomical sense.

Now, the other thing that needs to happen, is that the people of San Francisco need to wake up to what a compromising centrist Nancy Pelosi has become. If they want to keep their progressive creds in tact, they will need to toss her out and elect a real firebrand, preferably a Green.

TSO proves that he has good taste.

Check out the YouTube clip at the bottom of this post. You don't get much better than Archie Campbell. At least that is what Amalia says.

And she is right, you know.

Snowboarding, Waterboarding, Recipes

Well, since I have written rants against snowboarding, and I post recipes, I, naturally, get google hits for "snowboarding recipes." The temptation is to talk about the various ways to prepare boogers, but I think that the typical snowboarder is a raw foods sort, in that regards.

Now, if you are looking for some apres-ski recipes, try my oxtail soup. Skiing, as you know, is a civilized activity, engaged in by civilized people, like Germans and Swiss and Italians and the better sort of Frenchman. Snowboarding is a half-savage grunt practiced by the sort of people who think that good music and good coffee come from Seattle.

You know, I really don't like Seattle, and I am not too keen on that old hippy Indian who was named after such a cruddy city.

Well, who knows? Perhaps Chief Seattle was an alright sort. What I object to is the fortune cookie/bumpersticker quotations:

Chief Seattle say Marxist notion of property actually make sense! How!

Or is he really supporting serfdom? Belonging to the land sounds like serfdom to me.

And serfing is sort of like snowboarding, which brings me to...

Is snowboarding worse than waterboarding? Does snowboarding make people confess or tell secrets as effectively? Do either of them work? Are either of them morally licit? If a person undergoing waterboarding thinks he is going to drown, does one undergoing snowboarding think he is freezing to death? Since there are perverts who go snowboarding for recreation, are there perverts who get waterboarded for fun? Do waterboarders listen to crappy music, too?

I have questions, dear readers, I have questions!

Burma! Burma! Burma!

A certain Latinist told me that a few years back those protestin' Buddhist monks were awarded honorary doctrates from the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Fr. Privett, the president of the university said that he wished all of USF students were like the monks. Presumably he did not include the "not Catholic" part of the picture in his wish, but one never knows, now, does one?

Burma! The one Commie dictatorship that Fr. Privett doesn't like!

I shouldn't pick on USF, because so many wonderful folks have come out of there as of late. For instance, Boy Wonder, aka Mayor Newsome of San Francisco. Boy Wonder is always looking for the next hot thing to jump in front of, banner a-wavin'. It would seem that the soda pop industry is his next target. You see, there are too many fat people who just can't seem to say "no" to soda pop. And since, as we have learned from tobacco, moderation is not an option, one is either among the pure, or one is a six-pack a day soda guzzler, gripping at the Super Big Tub, desperate for that fix of high-fructose corn syrup.

So, the logical thing is to tax the industry to make them pay for "their fair share" of the medical treatment for those who, of course, cannot be helped in their decision making.

Now, the ironic thing is that San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general, is home to the slimmest bunch of folks outside of some third world famine zone. When I leave the area, though, I feel skinny, and I should not feel skinny. Have you been to the rest of America recently? Those people are huge. I mean, really, tremendously, outlandishly huge. And they don't eat all that well. You try to find a block of reggiano parmigiana in your average small town in the hinterlands.

Surely that pre-packaged crap can't be making them fat, as how can anyone stomach it? But they do, along with quarter pound bags of chips, buckets of high fructose corn syrup, etc.

Now, it is not my job to nanny anyone about their eating habits. I tend to eat a little too much, myself, and a little bit too high on the sweets side, since I do think we have to count dark chocolate as a sweet. But I weigh 200 lbs on six feet. If I get up to the 210 side of things, I figure that it is time to cut back to three meals a day. If I got up to the 225 side of things, I would probably schedule a one-month backpacking trip in the High Sierra, packing in only a fishing pole and a small bag of salt for dinner. I would certainly cut out the soda pop.

I like soda pop. I rarely drink it, though, because, well, it is loaded with calories and sugar, and the strong (and oh-so-fun) artificial flavors sort of jack up the flavor expectation, which is not a good idea for someone who is in the food world. A number of years ago I just stopped buying the stuff except for a once-in-awhile treat. It was as easy as that. I was pretty active and busy at the time, so I wan't even recoiling from some approaching weight (although I generally just guess at my weight - and tend to be pretty accurate. We don't have a scale, and I am usually within a pound of my guess when I do step on a scale). The point is, it is easy to stop drinking soda. It is easy to stop smoking, if one is smoking too much and cannot moderate. It is easy to stop eating chips. However, we have a whole industry of professionals whose job it is to convince us that we can't do anything without them. Instead of saying, "just stop it," they say, "ah, but your sublimated desire and anxiety and post-traumatic chronic fatigue allergy...you need to boost your self-esteem. Take this product."

But I digress.

The thing is this: all of the soda pop and chips and so on were around twenty years ago, when people weren't so fat. What has happened is that people talk more and more about diet and health, and spend more and more time worrying about it, and the government has a nifty new food pyramid, and then a nifty newer food pyramid, and the nanny state has been going at it harder and harder and the result:

Special Report: The Ballooning of America!

Well, now, Boy Wonder sees something of a future campaign: the people guzzling the soda pop are not to blame, it is the people who make the soda pop who should bear the weight of bad dietary choices.

And USF must be so proud of its little Secular Neo-Puritan!

Well, now, isn't that nice?

I have been reading up on this Burma business, and it would seem that the place is one of those horrible pits that one should give thanks that one does not live in. It would also seem that its military junta is a cowardly bunch of Commie-wannabes, enabled by oil.

So, it must be a quandry for the Left. On the one hand, these guys are their boys: sort of like petty Che Guevaras, but not nearly as handsome. But on the other hand, they have been propped up by American oil.

Ooooh. Quandry! Oooooh! Hand-wringing.

I have to say that it always has struck me as one of those obvious things, but shouldn't Conservatives be in favor of, well, conservation? Waste is waste, whether it is through out-moded engineering or through shovelling gold into the trough of Cadillac-Escalade-driving welfare queens (before any of you indignant, filthy-haired leftists start whining - let me tell you this: on the corner near where we used to live in Oakland, there was a grubby little Section 8 mini-complex. One of the tenants drove a brand new Escalade, was always gabbing on the cell phone, obviously had her nails and hair done professionally on a regular basis, etc. So, yes, I have actually seen a Cadillac-Escalade-driving welfare queen). And moving away from oil seems like an obvious cause for the right: it is not the most efficient form of readily-accessible energy out there, it is a bit dirty (sort of like a hippu on a Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday, or...), it bankrolls Mohammedans, Chavez, and these Burmese Commies-light, and it should be used for making more plastic.

Anyway, recess is over. The girl expects her teacher to get back to teaching. Of course, she probably would prefer that I keep ranting, but I am, as we all know, a meanie.

Before we can get Beyond Rangoon...

First we must learn the basics of Burma.

What better way than to explore those well-loved favorites, the Burma Shave signs?

Here is a place to do that.

Have no fear

Don't go out and wave,

Keilholtz is not writing about beer

Nor about a man named Dave

So shed not a tear

And read up on Burma Shave

Burma

I really don't know the first thing about the situation in Burma, beyond the fact that they have a military junta that is the target of the fashionable left. I have no idea why the junta came into power, but given its enemies, I suspect that it was for good reasons. I also have no idea of how well the junta is doing, although they certainly get points from me for arresting some activist for "public mischief". UN "Human Rights" Commissars, various professional protesting Buddhist monks, and the Berkeley City Council aren't exactly a major source of credibility.

At some point I will have to investigate the Burma situation.

But not now. I have to leave for Sacramento in about half an hour. Cooking must be done, and I must do it.

If anyone knows of a good non-Leftist source of information on Burma, please let me know.

Food Rants, Recipes, Etc.

I know. It has been since something like forever that I last posted a recipe, and it has not been for lack of cooking activity. I have a small catering gig on Thursday in Sacramento, and then I will have some time to post a slew of holiday recipes, just in time for Christmas. No turduckens, though.

Capsule Film Reviews

1. The Devil's Playground. I have never been one to fall into the romantic spell of the Amish. Sure, there are a lot of things to admire about them: their sense of community, their self-reliance, their goofy Abe Lincoln beards, and, hey, really, who doesn't like buggies? However, when it comes down to it, they are just another Prottie sect with some particularly horrible notions: for instance, they hold the necessity of baptism but withold it from their children, they think that education above the eighth grade is bad because it leads to pride (not to mention the realization that their doctrines are a bit suspect), etc. One way or another, they are a fascinating bunch to observe. For instance, one of their peculiarities is that at the age of sixteen Amish kids are turned out in the world to live for awhile until they decide on their own to come back (a remarkable 90% do, but if you are sheltered from the world, woefully unequipped to deal with it, what else are you going to do?). This film is a documentary about that period in a young Amish's life, particularly focusing on a few of the kids as they go wild and then either come back or go on. I highly recommend this film.

2. A Mighty Wind. I finally got around to seeing this Christopher Guest spoof of the folk revival movement in the 1960's. It is split-your-sides-laughing funny, as we have come to expect from Guest. A couple of mannerisms of the era are perfectly captured, and the bickering passive-aggressive Boomer trio, the Folkmen. are such a right-on skewering that it isn't hard to see them as an actual band. And speaking of silly Abe Lincoln beards - there is one here, too. If you haven't seen this one yet, put it on the Netflix queue.

Albanian Kosovo?

What?!? They want an independent Albanian country? They have one. It's called Albania. One of the worst policy decisions that ever came out of the Clinton reign was the decision to back the Mohammedans in Kosovo. The best solution, the one that would have brought about lasting peace, would have been to evacuate all of the Mohammedans from the former Yugoslavia. Send them on to Arabia, seeing as how they like to bow to the place five times a day anyway.

As far as I am concerned they can send all the Mohammedans in Europe to Arabia, too. And the ones in the Americas, to boot.

This sort of stuff is very unpopular these days, but it is the best way to have peace with the Mohammedans.

I am ready and willing to sign the work order, and we can load 'em up.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, R.I.P.

It is with great sorrow that I must report on the passing of one of the greatest musical minds, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Many years ago I fell in love with his music due to a hearing of Hymnen. It motivated me to read his theory and to hear as much of his music as possible. Eventually, I used his essay "The Four Criteria of Electronic Music" to develop my own organizational system for largescale compositions. Of course it started as a way to generate forms for electronic compositions, but I found that it could work well with acoustic instruments, even as a structural basis for tonalist compositions (although I have rarely found any need to write much tonalist music), particularly for the sort of tonalist composition one hears these days from composers who want a sort of tonalist sound without being locked into tonalist functional harmony.

At one point I wanted to go to Germany to study with Stockhausen. I was warned off by my academic advisor ("no, you will kill each other") and a composition professor ("oh, you would learn alot, but you would end up hating his guts."). So, I never did make it out there, which is probably for the better, since his work of the last few years has been quite eccentric and not really, at least at a few listenings, not of the quality of his early works.

Stockhausen was, of course, a prickly character, with some odd and even unsavory manners. But it is almost solely due to him that I became interested in music theory and was able to develop my own system of form. I am sad that I never got to meet him, but I could say the same of Scarlatti.

Western Civilization lost one of its greats.

History of Music Through Significant Works

This looks interesting. I have not gone through it completely, but I scanned the modern music section, and I think he has done a pretty good job. Some of his classifications are worth thinking about, as well. I will be returning to this when I have more time to study it in depth.

Via Mr. Riddle.

The Good Old Days

I have been meaning to write about this for awhile, but haven't had the time. I still don't, but this will have to do for now.

Often we hear bleating whenever Mitt "Windsock" Romney's Demon Cult is mentioned that "I thought we settled this in the 1960's with Kennedy." No. No. No. And Hell No.

What Kennedy did was to make it almost impossible for a faithful Catholic to be elected to public office. Only by adopting a heretical, outright Protestant position, one of radical compartmentalization of faith, morals, and public duty, could he be accepted as President. The dimbulb "Greatest Generation" Catholics, exhausted from having won the war for Stalin, jumped and cheered, because one of their own had been elected.

And, you silly Papists, look! The era of religious discrimination is over. Now just swallow the Kool Aid and vote for the Mormon.

Here we have a story that wonders what a person's morals has to do with his creed anyway. Are we buying this crap?

It would be better to have Protestants not vote for Catholics because of what we believe (in fact, I don't see how a faithful Protestant could vote for a faithful Catholic, if the Catholic really holds the Catholic faith in its entirety and not just some neo-Modernist whitewash) than to have Catholics twist themselves in knots to be more palatable to Protties, Mormons, Witlesses, Scientologists, and whathaveyou. If some Kennedy were to come out and say "I will not take orders from the Pope," then WE should be the ones to shun him. Let the Protties take him, as he has become one of theirs.

So, then we get Mitt Romney. I have heard him defended as being "well, really, not that good of a Mormon anyway." Gee. That is going to make me jump on board: here we have a fellow who proclaims some screwball cult and then says, "well, but don't worry, when it comes to making decisions, I ignore that stuff anyway and just do what is popular." This man is such a windsock that he was elected governor of Dukakisland. (O'Neillistan?). So, here he holds a strange pagan creed, but we are not to mind because he only holds it privately. Give me a break.

And what about this strange pagan creed? Remember to beware of anyone who gives you another Gospel, even if it be an angel (but a P.T. Barnum-style obvious fraud should ring some warning bells, too). What more do you need to know that this is a demonic cult that preys on the gullible and stupid? A Mormon should not be trusted in any public office. I have never knowingly voted for a Mormon, and will not knowingly vote for a Mormon, and, frankly, do not see how any Catholic ever could, either. I also try to avoid doing business with Mormons, as Romney's compartmentalization seems to be something they are all quite good at, and knowing that 10% of the profit will go to sending missionaries to Catholic countries to try to lure souls into Hell is serious business.

We must choose, if the choice must be between only two people, a Christian, even a nominal Christian, even a heretic, over a pagan. Martin Luther may have wanted a wise Turk, but most of us are wiser than Luther, and realize that a Christian at least has the help of Christ ready for him. Valid baptism is valid baptism, and Grace flows from it. Mormons do not have a valid baptism.

Let our slogan this election cycle be:

No Mormons, Not Now, Not Ever, No Way!
Romney! Repent and Retire!

Wrong, wrong, oh so wrong.

This story is wrong in many ways, but if you want to see a sign of the deep rot, look no further than the name of the street itself: Waterford Crystal Way. Does that cross Royal Dalton China Ave?

And I am not really sure which explanation is worse: that these folks are so caught up in status symbols that they name their streets after them or if the developers sold naming rights.

Snowboarders and their ilk...

Somehow I got placed on some snowboarding spam list. I have no idea why.

1. I hate snowboarding. I hate the slacker/scunge culture around it. I hate what it does to the slopes. I hate having to sky around some snowboarder sitting on his culo in the middle of what would otherwise have been a good run.

2. I would be happy to have snowboarding outlawed or at least banned on ski runs.

3. I hate spam.

Therefore, Mr. Snowboarding Culadero, I will not be advocating your illegal and dangerous activities to "get snowboarding recognized as legitimate." I long ago realized that snowboarding was a sport for degenerates, along with all of the other "extreme" sports.

Civilized people play tennis and bocce. Dirtbag hippies snowboard and play hacky sack.

So, go get a haircut (or at least wash that filthy tangle) and engage in a real sport, that is fit for men rather than beasts.

And stop spamming me!

Happy Repeal Day!

Remember: this year, absinthe is being made in California and Carrie Nations is still dead.

Evil gets its battles, certainly, but ultimately, good wins.

Tobacco prohibition is just beginning. Well-meaning and foolish folks already can be heard muttering, "well, I don't see what is wrong with that," just as their ideological ancestors muttered on the dawn of Satan's earlier Great Experiment.

So tonight, drink a martini. Smoke a big, powerful maduro (mmmmm. Padron 6000). Burn an effigy of a Puritan heresiarch. Eat meat, particularly veal or foie gras. Get in your SUV and just go for a drive.

Tomorrow we will have to resume the earnest battle agains the secular neo-puritans, but tonight we get to savor a major victory against them.

If you can go to mass to give thanks, that would be quite appropriate. Because, certainly we can and should enjoy smoking, drinking, and eating meat, we fight for these things not solely because they are enjoyable. We fight for them because they are good, and the Enemy wants to declare the good bad and the bad good. In every gin and tonic, every bite of bistecca, in every smoke, we must recognize that it is a gift from the Almighty, and that if we are not led back to God by our enjoyment of these things, then we are no better than the secular Puritans. If Bombay Sapphire with a splash of dry vermouth, a splash of water and a vigorous shaking, tastes that good, then how much better is the gift of His Son? Foie gras is great, but the Eucharist is immeasurably better. Of course the taste of foie gras should recall to us those words, "and He called it Good."

Ralph Nader does not call anything Good. He calls it all unsafe.

Jesus miraculously turned water into the very finest wine through a supernatural act.

Dr. Welch, the infamous Methodist, turned grape juice into a sterilized diabetes-inducing solution through unnatural acts.

Peter the Pope, Apostle and Saint was told to eat these animals. He was asked how he could dare call anything from God unclean? St. Paul tells us that it not what we eat that pollutes our souls.

Peter Singer indeed calls them unclean to eat. Or even worse, equal to us. Don't eat the pig, since the pig is a person and eating it will pollute your soul, but the unborn child is not a person and can be killed without a moment's thought.

Bach wrote the "Edifying Thoughts of a Tobacco Smoker".

Hitler hated tobacco and wanted to abolish smoking. He wrote Mein Kampf and ordered people to be killed by the millions, while he was concerned for the health of Germans. The Democrats hate tobacco and want to abolish smoking, while promoting the soul death of sodomy and the concrete, material death of abortion. The babies that make it out of the Roe v. Wade era alive should avoid transfat, I suppose.

Let us take pleasure in the good things God has given us, and let those things bring us closer to his Passion, Death and Resurrection. Let us avoid the two-headed snake of gluttony: the one head that eats and drinks and smokes and indulges to numbness, the snake that makes a god of the things we consume by placing them above all else. And let us also avoid the snake that makes a god of the things that we abstain from: the god that tells us that our purity comes from teetotaling and nonsmoking, the god of health and the idolatry of the body.

So, tonight, you should feast. You should remember the hardships of those uncelebrated Veterans: the bootleggers, who risked life, liberty and limb to keep Western Civilization alive in a land infested with fanatical Puritans. Sure these brave men took some profits, but who begrudges a soldier his wages?

And also, remember those who suffer under the Mohammedans, who have neither wine nor pork, nor access to the sacraments or even the Word of God.

The Storm About to Hit

There is supposed to be a big storm hitting.

Now, when I say "big storm" it really means some rain and a bit of wind, and people driving like maniacs. We rarely get really big storms here.

But, people sure do drive like maniacs when the weather heads south.

We need the rain, as is often the case in semi-arid California. I like not having to water the garden. And a storm is an excuse to listen to Bach while drinking a hearty drink.

Not that I need an excuse for that. Bach is fun to listen to, fun to play, even fun to sing along to, although the neighbors might start talking.

Speaking of Bach...recess is almost over, so it is Bach to work. Poor Amalia. If she were in regular school she could be spared many of these wretched puns. Of course she gets her revenge with extended impersonations of Archie Campbell.

"Oh no," she drawls, "that's goooood."

I have only myself to blame.

Happy December.

And for us it really is, since we are having a new furnace installed as we speak.

The problem with autumn is that it hits so gently. One furnace does the trick. It really doesn't matter that the other furnace is out.

Then the cold snap hits.

The bedrooms took the brunt of the cold, which is really fine, since we tend to stay downstairs during the day anyway, and at night, well, that's what down comforters are for. We actually ended up hot the other night, from being overbundled on a chilly night.

Speaking of December, it is time for the Christmas tree decision. As far as the options go, Melanie and I agree on the thing: big and bushy. No spindly things, no dwarves.

However, deep down, I want something else completely. I want a tree made of spun aluminum, one that looks like WWII radial engine aircraft cowlings, stacked up from largest to smallest, with the lights made by holes punched in the walls and lenses fitted inside, with the ornaments enameled onto the brushed aluminum. Yes, I want the tree that that bald little fool Charles Brown rejected in favor of the spindly dwarf tree of his naturalism fetish. I want the magnificent techno-fascistic Futurist tree. I want a tree that screams to the world of Italy's technological prowess, not some passeist fantasy of an agrarian past. I want a tree that will stand tall, upright, like the blackshirts preparing their March on Rome.

We are sorry for the technical difficulty, but the blog is currently under the control of the spirit of F.T. Marinetti.

Standing by.

Standing by.

Oh wait. It is Keilholtz's blog. Perhaps it was a false reading. Never mind. No outside agent has infiltrated Erik's Rants and Recipes.

carry on....