L u n a t a l k

One of the great unanswered questions of the culinary universe: What item of food would not be improved by the addition of EITHER chocolate OR garlic? I’ve been pondering this one for years without cooking up with an answer. Not that many foods aren’t just fine or even great without those flavors, but for any ingredient that has emerged from the pantry of my mind, so does a recipe that includes one or the other to eminently edible effect.

So I serve the challenge up to the blogosphere. Feed me your ideas.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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A recent chat with a friend turned to the subject of the nature of art. (Hey, every once in awhile I DO think about something besides sex and chocolate.) I have long held the opinion that art is a form of communication and, as such, takes two: the artist, to initiate creative expression and the observer, to be affected by it.

One of the first songs I ever wrote and performed publicly was an odd little piece called “Invisible Town.” I was perpetually surprised by the reactions it got. People loved to tell me what they thought the song was about. And usually, it was not even remotely related to what was in my mind when I wrote it. At first it was disconcerting. Was I not communicating? How could I take credit or responsibility, as the artist, for meanings I hadn’t meant? That’s when I started to realize that art is a collaboration between the artist and the audience.

A simple dictionary definition of art is “the product of human creativity.” I’ve also heard art defined as “intentionally created by artists.” But for me, a critical element is that it has to affect others - leave them changed in some way.

So what about canvasses that lie stacked in attics? Compositions that never grace a music stand? Poems tucked between the pages of old books? These things still have value - to the artist. But they are children, still waiting to leave the nest and become themselves.

Art informs us about our humanity, reminds us that we are not alone in the world, shows us all they ways we can be in the world. I don’t put artists on this pedestal - artists go about the work of expressing their own creativity for their own reasons. It’s in the sharing of art that real meaning arises. Even when it was not what the artist intended. Maybe especially when it wasn’t.

OK, next time it’s back to sex. Promise.

Or maybe chocolate.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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We had a great show at Egan’s Ballard Jam House last Saturday. Dashed in breathless and nearly late from playing Latin fusion at an Indian Independence Day festival (of all things!). The Jam House is one of my favorite places to play. The sound, the lights, the food and drink - it all comes together in a sweet, intimate setting. Well, except for the sirens that seem to go by outside the windows about every twelve minutes. I could do without that part. But hey. We found ourselves a film student to run the camera: Ashley Russell, a wee elf in a blue hoodie who managed to squeeze two and a half hours of video out of two hours of batteries.

Out of that, here’s the Cliff Notes version of the show. You can download the 18MB full-res QT video, or watch the YouTube version right now here:

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The other day I was out in the yard pretending to like gardening. I actually do like it in small, controlled doses on nice days, but there’s something about it that smacks of Tetris: Unremitting streams of weeds pop up faster than you can clear them away and there’s no way to win. It just goes on and on until you die. At least there’s no annoying soundtrack. But anyway, it was a nice day and there’s this small, controlled spot that’s just right for a bit of sculpture. It’s a shady spot between a small Japanese maple and a tall rhododendron with a thick ground cover of oxalis. I could see a stone lantern tucked in there. Just then, my husband walked by and I said, “I’ve been thinking…”

His immediate, gut-level response was to roll his eyes and moan that those are the three worst words your spouse can utter.

I thought about it for awhile (later, after all the blood had been mopped up - though I wonder if it’s good fertilizer?) and came to the conclusion that “I’ve been thinking” are not the three worst words. They are the three most expensive words. The three worst words are “Can we talk?”

It reminded me of a small family competition we used to have to come up with questions you do NOT want to know the answer to. It was fun for awhile until Alan flat out won it and the rest of us gave up trying to top him. His contribution:

“Guess what you just ate.”

I did get the lantern.

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Kids reach an age where the gift they find most useful is cash: beans, boodle, bread, cabbage, coin, dinero, dough, fund, gelt, kale, loot, lucre, money, moolah, pelf, pile, shekels, shiplaster, simoleans, sterling, wherewithal or Almighty Dollar. Whatever you call it, it’s the means to their ends.

That said, who wants to give up unwrapping brightly festooned packages on one’s birthday? I solved the dilemma by nicking a few movie poster pix and photoxing them into money-themed parodies that fit neatly into jewel cases. I’ve posted full-res versions of 18 of them here to download and use on your own gift-giving occasions. A few samples:

See the rest.

Popularity: 16% [?]

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If your life were a movie, what would the soundtrack be?

A friend sent this to me. It’s more fun than I thought it would be. Share it with your friends to get a peek at their music tastes. The only cheating I did here was to eliminate songs in foreign languages (of which I have a LOT, but it just wouldn’t be fun)

So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool…

Here’s what came up for me:

Opening Credits:
k.d. lang, “Miss Chatelaine”

Waking Up:
Natalie Cole, “Smile”

First Day At School:
David Byrne, “A Million Miles Away”

Falling In Love:
U2, “One Step Closer”

Fight Song:
U2, “Helter Skelter”

Breaking Up:
Talking Heads, “The Lady Don’t Mind”

Prom:
No Doubt, “Excuse Me Mister”

Life:
Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter”

Mental Breakdown:
Uncle Bonsai, “Heartache”

Driving:
Devotcha, “Too Tired”

Flashback:
Frank Sinatra, “Night and Day”

Wedding:
Louis Prima, “That Old Black Magic”

Birth of Child:
Blind Boys of Alabama, “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”

Final Battle:
The Finn Brothers, “Won’t Give In”

Death Scene:
Audrey Hepburn, “Moon River”

Funeral Song:
Allman Brothers, “Blue Sky”

End Credits:
Wild Cherry, “Play That Funky Music”

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Redmond is not exactly the big city, but sometimes it feels more wild than others. We’ve been encountering more of our animal buddies recently. Last week a tiny, white-spotted fawn tumbled across our path, followed closely by mom. They stopped, side by side and watched us pass. Sunday morning we shared a Redmond trail with a scruffy gray coyote who kept a wary distance ahead but kept stopping to check us out. Yesterday, a river otter scampered across our path on the Sammamish Slough trail. I think that must be good luck. Of course hoards little brown bunnies bound and abound. Thank goodness for both the bunnies… and the coyotes.

In other animal news:

This article is more than a little alarming and yet oddly fascinating. People pay to be nibbled by fish. The fish reportedly eat dead human cells, leaving the living ones to shine through with a healthy glow. It could be creepy, it could be stimulating. It could be both. Is PETA protesting the enslavement of fish to human servitude?

More animal exploitation: $75 for a quarter pound of coffee that’s been pooped by wild Sumatran civet cats? How much of that do the cats get? Heck, maybe I should start eating coffee instead of drinking it.

In only vaguely related news, protesters are near success in shutting down businesses that sell horse meat. The idea being, I guess, that horses are more deserving of life than cows. It’s a problem for zoos, whose predators are major consumers of horse meat, which is apparently closer to the type of meat their animals would find in the wild than beef. Why can’t the lions just eat salad?

And finally, candidates for cute jail: A gallery of tiny animals clinging to fingertips and two ducks in a teacup. I love the internet.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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The blogosphere was atwitter last week by the list of 237 reasons people have sex. I was agog myself that my own reasons were so far down the list. Is it naive of me to be surprised that fun, pleasure and intimacy don’t rank so high for most people? You can see the full list here.

But what about the world of fiction? Why do characters in books have sex? In a rigorous scientific survey (an evening spent skimming through a stupendously dreadful Hollywood sleaze 1982 paperback found on the shelf of a hotel room) I can positively state that men have sex for two reasons:

1. She’s so fucking hot he can’t control himself
2. He’s so fucking mad he can’t control himself

Women, on the other hand, are more complex. Yet nowhere does love, lust or even mere pleasure figure into the equation:

1. She was drunk (as usual).
2. She wanted to show that cheating bastard two can play that game.
3. She wanted to stick it to the conniving bitch who got the movie role that should have been hers.
4. She dared him to make her. And he did. And didn’t stop when she changed her mind - the filthy rapist.
5. It was her wifely duty, even though she’d caught him in bed with her twin sister (and was forced her to raise the child that resulted as her own)
6. She wanted to cure him of being (gay/impotent/other)
7. She want to prove to this whole stinking town she could have any man she wanted. Even yours.
8. Even though she still had the abs and tits of a teenager, she knew men would turn away in disgust, now that she’d turned thirty.
9. What’s the point of having the opening of your fabulous artwork at a fabulous NYC art gallery if you can’t boink your ex in the broom closet?
10. There’s been no sex for seven or eight pages and the readers might start to notice the hackneyed prose and ludicrous plot.

I won’t name the book, except to reveal that about 800 pages of it revolve around the making of a movie called “Miami Toast.” Miami Fucking Toast? It did, however, make for a hilarious evening of dramatic readings (”he wore a purple gabardine shirt with orange sequined guns pointing at each other on the chest, skin-tight tan velveteen pants, $2000 snakeskin belt (stolen from a rival) and a white stetson” - how did we ever get through the 80s?)

Popularity: 9% [?]

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This is a sordid tale of good intentions gone awry; a confession, a purging of the years of guilt that have shadowed my life. I have laid the blame on the bear, on the power of literature, my husband, the very sun in the sky - anywhere but on my own pathetic shoulders. No more. And what prompts this soul-baring so many years after the despicable deed? We’re arrived last night on Orcas Island for a few days escape. It’s a charming and idyllic bit of paradise in the San Juan Islands and our room at the inn overlooks the windswept Sound. Like many vacation condos, there’s a shelf of paperback sleaze left by previous guests. I’m never averse to a good sleaze-read on vacation and eagerly scanned the shelf. That’s when I saw it: That book. Shardik, by Richard Adams. It swept me back to that awful day.

It was the summer of 1979. Mike and I were backpacking in the Yosemite backcountry and had reached Lake Washburn, several days’ hike past the back of Half Dome. We’d spent several hours huddled under a rocky overhang while a terrifying afternoon thunderstorm bedazzled the peaks surrounding the high lake with near-coninuous lightning strikes, but now the sun was bright and we pitched our little tent. While I was pushing stakes into the wet sand, a movement at the edge of the clearing caught my eye. I peered closely, but could see nothing at first. There it was again. Something very small: a mouse. Not the usual wily critter one sees darting about the landscape though. This one was a lost baby, its eyes still closed. I have no idea how it managed to get out of its nest, but there it was in the open, poking blindly about, helpless and surely doomed. My heart, of course, melted and I picked it up. It immediately nestled into the palm of my hand and I was a goner. Every shred of the incipient maternal instinct that a few years later would lead me to the production of actual children became invested in “Mousie.”

Mousie spent the night in my hand and was still snuggled there when I woke in the morning. His eyes had opened and he was looking distinctly more feral than the previous day, but still content to stay put. He ate a peanut from our stash of trail mix.

Then came the discussion of what to do. We were hiking out that day, heading up to Tuolumne Meadows in the north part of Yosemite and we knew it wasn’t really good form to travel about with a handful of wildlife. But Mousie was tame. I’d ruined him and feared if I just abandoned him now, I might as well be signing his death warrant. Little did I suspect then, leaving him to the swift dispatch of an owl would have been a mercy.

I made a little traveling nest for Mousie out of a knitted glove and provided him with a small assortment of sunflower seeds and raisins. Mouse heaven. We shouldered our packs and headed down, hitching a ride to our car when we hit the road.

The next day found the three of us comfortably ensconced at a campsite at Tuolumne. You may be wondering where the bear and the novel come into the story. I was no stranger to light vacation reading even then and had Shardik tucked in my pack. I was nearly to the exciting climax and was curled up in a camp chair by the fire ring, Mousie in his little glove in my lap, blind to the scenic wonders of Yosimite. Nothing existed but the giant, mystic bear in the pages of that book.

Just then, Mike strode into camp. I had to come see the sunset. Sunset? I was supposed to tear myself from my riveting read for a mere sunset over the jagged peaks above one of the most beautiful alpine meadows in the world? Well, yeah. Without thinking, attention snagged between two worlds, I stood. The glove fell to the ground unnoticed.

And then, in the instant my foot moved forward, I remembered. That fateful instant, too late to retract the step. Time for the impulse of awareness to enter my brain, but no time for the impulse to change the movement to reach my foot. My booted foot descended onto Mousie’s glove. Mousie, who had trusted me, who I had saved from predation in the high back-country. I had murdered Mousie.

To this day, Mousie lies in a shallow, unmarked grave in Tuolumne Meadows; my unconfessed crime likewise buried. Mousie is at peace. And now, so many years later, perhaps the chance reunion with that fictional bear can bring me some measure of redemption.

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It’s Seafair time again. I can tell by the window-rattling roar of the Blue Angels warming up. They just flew right overhead in perfect formation. I have friends who complain of the noise, but I always find it exciting. Several years ago, we were hiking up to Rachel Lake in Snoqualmie pass near Seattle. It was a beautiful summer day, warm, patches of snow lingering in shady spots. We reached the crest of the ridge and stopped to take in the breathtaking view of the Cascades before beginning our descent to the lake. At that very moment, the Blue Angels flew by, not more than a couple hundred feet above our heads. I know they are not specifically a PNW thing; the Blue Angels fly all over. But that moment wrote them indelibly in my mind as an intrinsic part of my northwest.

Other “Only in the PNW” moments:

• Finding a story in the Seattle Times about what you should do if your kayak is approached by orcas. Not something we worried about much in Georgia. And the kicker was, most of the advice had to do with protecting the orcas, not the kayakers.
• Watching evening news footage of cars stopped on rainy roads to allow salmon to cross in the scant few inches of water. I just want to say that I am profoundly grateful I need go no further than upstairs to spawn and if the kids are out of the house, I don’t even need to go that far.
• Passing a rural roadside shack that offered both bait and espresso for sale.
• Nude bicyclists at the Solstice parade. Go for the body paint. Stay for the piercings you don’t usually get to see.

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