Unfinished Projects

I may not be ready to take pictures at concerts, but I can show off my food photography skills. Here is my delicious dinner from Monday night. The recipe came out of my favorite part of Bon Appétit magazine, the RSVP column. That column takes letters from readers that describe their favorite meals out at particular restaurants and then the magazine gets the recipe straight from the chef. So this recipe is from bills in Sydney and it can be found online here.

It’s been a while (what, like two posts or something?) since I wrote anything here about how much I like the new Marnie Stern album (other people like it too). Well, I was sitting around at work, greatly enjoying the song ‘Precious Metal’ and I discovered that she has posted an mp3 of it on her site. So go listen!

Last night, at the Empty Bottle, I saw Konono No. 1 play. They are a band from the Democratic Republic of Congo and their primary instrument is an electric likembé. As the group leader says:

…the normal likembe is not very loud and Kinshasa is a very loud town. I wanted to be heard around a large circle, to make some publicity for my group. Guitar pickups didn’t work, so I broke car alternators with a hammer, took the magnets out of them and wound copper wire around them. It’s so powerful, the output overdrives any amplifier. No guitar pickup can compete with my artisan work. (link)

The other fantastic thing is that the band’s full name is ‘L’orchestre folklorique T.P. Konono No. 1 de Mingiedi’ with the ‘T.P.’ standing for tout puissant, which is French for all powerful. Anyway, I discovered some pictures from the show on flickr (courtesy of this guy, who also has a photoblog).

So that’s definitely me in this picture. And I’m dancing (to Jenn’s horror). They started up at 10:30 and then proceeded to kick out some non-stop jams until midnight. There was a little break then before their encore, but I already had sore legs and an exceedingly sweaty t-shirt. The Empty Bottle is probably famous for scenesters who don’t dance, but people were getting down last night.

This guy here is the band leader. He was super cool, basically just staring straight ahead and not moving the whole time. Then he would suddenly break out these really interesting, cascading melodies from that little box you see in the photo.

Jenn and I went and saw Modest Mouse in concert last night. It was at the Auditorium Theater at Roosevelt University, which is a big multi-balconied affair. I think that we were six floors up from the stage actually.

Anyway, Modest Mouse are working through their set, after an extremely forgettable opening band, and they strike up this one song with a pretty sweet disco beat. Somehow this triggers in my mind the vision of a big choreographed dance number that follows the ebbs and flows of the song (well, there were a couple of times where I expected a swell and the band slowed down instead, but my mental image was able to catch up). After that point, every song they played fell like a puzzle piece into the outline of a totally rad musical. There were a couple of tunes that needed to be gently forced into place, but, on the other hand, there were others that just perfectly slipped into the developing story structure. When I got home, I grabbed my notebook and wrote as much down as possible so as not to forget. Also Jenn now thinks that I’m a total head-case.

Here are the scenes, in order for the musical. Each scene corresponds to a song I heard last night, but they weren’t played in this order.

1. Our hero wakes up in his modest, working-class home. He goes downstairs to have breakfast with his loving family. This scene establishes that the hero is really a good kid despite his tough exterior (Jenn suggested that he’s like Shawn Hunter from Boy Meets World). At the end of the song is a quiet, introspective bit when our hero takes out the garbage.
2. Now dressed as a street tough, our hero heads out with his buddies. I actually envisioned this dance number as ballet / modern dance, moving through the alleys and backyards of the town.
3. Meanwhile, in his underground lair, the villain reveals his nefarious plot. He is a bit cartoonish, dressed in red and black, and he possibly is wearing a cape. This is a solo dance (his henchmen don’t show up until later) but there are choreographed swarms of bats from the special effects department.
4. This is the big disco scene that started this whole process rolling. The true love of our hero and his friends is dancing at their disco club (hence saturday night fever in the post title). While it’s mostly a big group dance, there was definitely a section in the song where our hero and his partner take center stage, showing that he is definitely the leader in his crew. Unfortunately, his partner doesn’t really show up anywhere else because Modest Mouse don’t really have any love songs.
5. This is the most dramatic scene of the musical (yeah, the ending is a bit of an anti-climax). As the dancers are closing up and leaving the disco, the villain and his bumbling henchmen arrive. Our hero has an opportunity to catch them sneaking around, but he shrugs off the noises he hears and goes home to bed. After breaking into the disco, the villain briefly loses control of himself, becoming enraged, smashing the bar and breaking records over his knee. As the song finishes, the scene alternates between the villain preparing to blow up the disco and our hero sleeping restlessly. This builds to a climax with the hero tossing, turning, and moaning. At the last minute, he wakes up sweaty, wondering if it was a dream. Looking out the bedroom window, he sees flames rising from across town.
6. Racing back to the disco, our hero finds only a still smoldering ruin. The next song follows him as he staggers through the streets, alternately angry and in despair. We also see the villain gloating in victory as the hero laments that he is not strong enough to get revenge.
7. After collapsing in the gutter, our hero is revived by his friends and dance partners. They encourage him and tell him that he needs to stand up to the villain because he is their only hope.
8. An old wise man emerges from the crowd of disco kids (perhaps he is one of their grandparents?). The wise man takes our hero back to his warehouse and puts him through the stereotypical action movie training scene. The wise man is clearly a bit crazy and enjoys expounding on his personal philosophy.
9. The fight scene!! Compared to some of the darker tones from earlier in the story, this is fairly light and somewhat cartoonish. A fluffy superhero type fight would work well here, rather than anything more realistic and graphic. Our hero triumphs, of course. After the start of the fight, the outcome isn’t really ever in doubt.
10. Closing credits. This is a cop-out, but it was the only place that I could figure ‘Float On’ to fit in.

So yeah, that’s the whole thing. It’s obviously pretty derivative, but the whole point was to try to take the songs as they were coming at me and squeeze them into a fairly generic plot framework. That I got a disco in there was just a bonus. There are definitely some weaknesses though. The song for the final fight just didn’t have very much dramatic back and forth. It is pretty clear from the first few bars that the hero is going to triumph. Also, as I mentioned above, there really was no opportunity to introduce a love interest.

And just to stoke any fears for my sanity out there, I’ll mention that this is definitely not the first time that a series of songs has triggered an elaborate narrative in my head. I still have detailed memories of the much-darker-than-Fantasia animated story that could accompany the whole Pink Floyd album ‘Wish You Were Here’. Maybe I’ll save that one for some other time…

So I fed a previous blog post into the Gender Genie and it told me that I’m a man! Some information on how it works can be found here or here.

I’m a bit skeptical of their algorithm seeing that the largest contribution to my masculinity index came from using the word ‘the’ 20 times (who doesn’t use ‘the’??). But it does claim to work better on samples larger than 500 words and I only provided 383. Finally, in case anyone is wondering just how manly I am, my male score was 485 and my female score was 446. So I’m pretty much just squeaking by as a 52% manly individual.

Jenn‘s birthday was over the weekend and she got a neat vegetable cookbook from Dan. Those Cook’s Illustrated people do extensive experimenting in order to get all of their recipes right, so it got me inspired to take their instructions for various roasted vegetables and go from there (plus there was some inherent uncertainty because I almost never use my oven). Into my Pyrex dish went diced potatoes, chopped carrots, a quartered onion, and a quartered green bell pepper. I drizzeled on some olive oil and also tossed in some minced garlic (3 cloves, I think), salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme. Then, because I was curious and it looked pretty, I put some of the carrot greens on top (spoiler alert: those didn’t roast so well).

The cookbook had different temperatures and durations listed for all the different vegetables, so I split the difference and went with 425°F for 20 minutes with foil over the pan and then 20 more minutes uncovered. It smelled fantastic and tasted pretty damn good as well. However, since we’re going for more quantative analysis here, I’ll break it down a bit. The bell pepper was pretty much perfect, but it was an amazingly good bell pepper to start with. The onions maybe could have been cooked a little more, but they were very close. The potatoes were cooked about the right amount, but I should have tossed them around at the halfway point because their bottom sides were baked onto the dish. Finally, the carrots were undercooked, but Jenn humored me and said that she likes them crispy. Oh yeah, the carrot greens were blackened and wilted, so don’t try that one.

Now my original conception of this dish full of vegetables included a bit slab of pork cooking on top, so that the juices from the roast would drip down and mix with the aromatics. But we’re going vegetarian here, so I just baked some tofu in a separate tray, covered with foil, for the last ∼15 minutes of the vegetable’s cook time. The tofu was pretty tasty, but I owe that exclusively to some delicious barbeque sauce that I picked up and used as a marinade.

I meant to take some pictures, but that didn’t happen. Maybe some other time…