a moment

 

Dear Today,

Here is your song!  I kinda love it, and I hope you do too, today, because you are all we have.

corazones quebrados

 

Dear Listening,

Well.  We find ourselves in such a pickle these days.  I don't really know where to start or how to address this mess we are in, so I guess I won't speak of it just now.  Today is the anniversary of the first Dodo post; 12 years ago.  Time flies, but not really.  It goes forward and back and stays still too, sometimes.

I started writing the Dodo to memorialize all these things that were disappearing: the empty lot, the VHS player, the corded telephone, the roller rink; but right away, I couldn't do it; I couldn't only send you stories of my sadness and loss.  It felt cruel; people want to look forward, to look to something that hasn't been despoiled yet.  Plus-what, I don't think of every loss every minute of everyday.  Double plus-what, I am not sure that sadness isn't a kind of patina that we could learn to enjoy.  Nostalgia might be one; we seem to enjoy that kind of sadness so much it isn't even funny.  I didn't want to just give you nostalgia either.  I wanted to give you that one cream biscuit recipe, only now I usually make *these biscuits (which are NOT fast like the cream biscuits are!).

In any case, happy anniversary to you, too, if you read these pages- because if you don't, it's kind of silly for me to be here, whistling in the dark, but I will be here anyway.  Making art is like that; you just make it, even if you can't find anyone to show it to.

PS  Your song for today.

* Flaky-ass Biscuits adapted from Jessica Koslow's Everything I Want to Eat.

4 cups AP flour

2 Tbs. sugar

1 3/4 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. baking soda

1 1/2 tsp. salt

Put all this into your mixer- mix it.

Add:

250 grams (1 cup plus 2 Tbs.) frozen unsalted butter that has been patiently cut into cubes.

Mix it for maybe 30 seconds.  Then add:

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

while the machine is running- don't mix it too long!  What does that mean?  You know it if you know it, and if you don't, make biscuits more often, or watch some cooking shows. 

Put the dough out onto a flat surface; shape, roll, or pat it into a rectangle about 3/4 of an inch thick.  Spread:

4 Tbs. room temperature unsalted butter

over two-thirds of the patted out dough.  Now fold the unbuttered third over the buttered third, and then fold the last third over that.  Like you would fold a letter.  

Put it in the fridge, and in a half hour, roll it out, and give it what the pastry chefs call a 'turn.'  Repeat this two more times; then leave it in the fridge for an hour.  Now, roll it out and cut it into biscuit about 3/4 inch a thick.  I just cut them into squares, but you can cut circles with a cutter if you like.  To be even more exacting, to exercise even more patience in the kitchen, you can brush the tops with buttermilk and sprinkle flaky sea salt on top of them before you bake them at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes.  

Note:  One December, I gave this book to several pals, for Old White Man's Mas.  It was received as though it were a Rubik's cube: it might be fun, but it is too hard.  I still say, it is an amazing cookbook; I think my mistake was in my estimation of people's patience.  If you, dear reader, are not looking for ease, if you like hard things; women like Violette LeDuc and Emily Wells, then you should get this book!

The bookshelf.

 

Dear Reader,

It's time for me to try to tell you about a book I have been reading.  I am reading it slow, languorously even.  I think, as I often do, that it is a book for everyone, but don't I think that about most of the books I am reading?  

Let us think on that while we listen to this, your song for today.  

It has to do with the problem of audience- audience of one, or less than a million, or less than a hundred; the audience is like ants, you know, one only matters to oneself.  One ant is nothing to even mention.  Of course, in writing you here, I do think of audience, I think of reader, listener, viewer.  It's thorny.  Do I do a thing for just one person?  Or, even for the hope of just one person?  

Here is a page from The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden:

CULTURE = LIFE CONTENT

If you have ever found yourself on the periphery, outside of dominant narratives and nuclear-ish families, you will have passed through a period of emptiness wherein the material of  your life was not 'suitable' for any of the things around you.  Meaning: no outlet or form of communication existed to convey your experience, and so the experience remained caught inside you, seething.  Without external channels to link to there's no way to transmit your information, so the internal landscape deactivates.  It shuts down and remains inaccessible, since no actions or language can scrape away at it.  Since you are, in fact, on your own.

The only recourse then is culture.  Instead of one's experience, songs, podcasts, and TikToks are transformed into a shorthand for particular emotions or situations.  At certain points in my life, if you asked me how I was I would have only been able to respond with data.  I could summarize the latest Game of Thrones episode, or recite the anecdote about Esther's dollar bill from This American Life.  I could tell you about the New Yorker story of red honeybees and the 'maraschino mogul,' but I would not be able to answer even the simplest question about myself because I had nothing inside.  I felt like a ghost and quite often when I entered a room I felt people pull away from me as if suddenly encountering a cold front.  Maybe this fetishizes or romanticizes the situation, puts a metaphor on a state of being that quite possibly doesn't deserve one, but how do we talk about pain in a world full of pain?  We can't.  We don't even try.  We talk about culture instead.  That's why it spreads.

  

Let's hope this message finds its audience.

PS

I might have given you this one, instead:

OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK

If life has ever scraped you out and left you with no prospects, you can use art as a coping mechanism.  You can apply it to your day-to-day.  Take its content or its forms and use them to patch in what's missing.  Take a fictional premise, maybe even a genre, and adapt it to your situation.  See what happens.

 

The ease.

 

Dear Friends,

A woman writer friend of mine, one that I stay in contact with through the flattening affect pasta machines of the digital devices, says something that sounds pretty much like "we don't have a technology problem, we have a Capitalism problem."*  It fit, for me, into a story of how we got to this field strewn with the broken rubble of culture and society that I keep stumbling over in my haste to try to Understand Things as They Are.

Obviously, I could probably find more clarity if I stopped trying to Understand Things; and I am working on that, too, in a multi-pronged approach to coping.  Anyway, it isn't always about me (ha- that's a bald faced lie, isn't it?); it's about my friend and her suggestion to read this interesting article.

May reading it help you in your daily sorting of murky facts & ever more terrible news!  And if not that, well, may it make you feel less lonely while you scamper around that field of broken stuff.

* Forgive me if I have misquoted you!

effet de neige

 

The Magpie, Claude Monet.

Dear Listeners,

I do feel more optimistic on the first of a month- it isn't rational, but the feeling persists.  January can be such a December hangover, and this January might go down in the great stone carved annuls of the universe as One of the Worst; but February is such a lightening up month!  First blossoms are spotted, the days can be felt as lengthening, and the first of a month is always for Fools, and I want to be with you everywhere, so please accept this humble offering as your first song of the second month of the year.  Play it loud, won't you?

a little trip

 

Folk art passenger ship model, early 20 c.

Dear Journeypersons,

Come with me!  On a voyage of discovery!  Come and sift through the fabulous Smog and Bill Callahan oeuvre.  Be amazed at how you could have missed all this greatness!  Here is a fellow, one of only a few of his gender, that I really wish I could be!  Let Smog be your songs for today!

Russian Winter

I Break Horses

Rock Bottom Riser

Four Hearts in a Can

In the Pines

Teenage Spaceship

Bathysphere

Cow

I Feel Like the Mother of the World

To Be of Use

Cold Discovery

Beautiful Child

Feather by Feather

PS  

Three more things:  One, you know where to get more, and Two; don't you love how they seem to have sprouted up from nothing, from sounds and thoughts just piled up together, these songs? and Three; I can't be totally sure yet, uh, and maybe you can tell me, but I Break Horses might be one of the most lovely songs I have ever heard....

ears (& noses)

 

I wanted to get you a pile of marble ears, but all I could find were these noses.

Dear Ears,

Oooh, listen to these great sounds!  Let it be your song for today!