The morning feels like yesterday, like last year, like next year. Together, facing a real-time screen, a screen full of bright minds, declarative sentences, short talks, long dreams, wide thinking. The mind is cycling, just saturated with ideas. The eyes see in different light, like some new color has brought the edges into focus. Swallowing [...]
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The Scene of the Hunt
Richard piled up the bird carcasses on his plate. James filled his with crunchy severed wings. This Thanksgiving we roasted an abundance of birds: turkey, goose, pheasant, partridge, cornish hen, squab, quail. These two men helped roast and carve. They chose flesh from close to the bone. Margaret Visser describes the roast as “an echo [...]
Posted in 43 Eclectic
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The Three-Dimensional Cocktail
With the scrape of a chair on the wood floor, the man rose — chest out, head slightly down, arms by his side. And then he began to sing. Conversation in the restaurant soon quieted. From the kitchen we squinted into the dining room. That night, I truly didn’t know what was happening.
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The Quenching of Salted Bones
Looking through his sightglass, Capt. Morehouse of the British brigantine Dei Gratia could tell something was wrong, and he dispatched an emergency boarding party. In the distance, the Mary Celeste was yawing, under short canvas, eerily with no crew on deck. She was a ghost ship.
Posted in The Northerner
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Once Upon a Cuarentañera
Max: It was dark in the kitchen. I struggled to stack multiple bottles of just-opened Champagne and glasses into my arms before heading back into the crowd. Paolo appeared out of nowhere. “You must really love her,” he said. My mind couldn’t help but downshift into first gear. It played back the time you got your lip stuck in a coffee Thermos lid while driving — it had snapped on like a turtle. “Yes,” I said to Paolo, “she is family, and the one friend I have known the longest.” And this is why I agreed to host a “Cuarentañera.”
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Why the Pigs Are on the South Side
Nogales, Arizona, is a shared hunting ground. Border patrol collaborates with ICE, Homeland Security, and the National Guard. Together with their SUVs, heavy firepower, and technology they track immigrants who have crossed the border from Mexico. And in the same rugged, high desert land, hunters with their SUVs, heavy firepower, and technology hunt wild pigs called javelina. We are the among latter group of hunters.
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An Unintended Turn
Our ears perked at the idea of counterfeit caviar. Art historian and curator Tere Arcq told Wendi, Julio, and me a story about Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. In the 1940s in Mexico City, Varo and Carrington were friendly with the Russian Consulate and were expecting members of the delegation for dinner. The mischievous artists served tapioca colored with squid ink as caviar to their unsuspecting Russian guests.
Posted in La Alquimia de los Sueños
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A Recalibrated Zero
I taste bone.
My mouth and hands are coated with meat grease.
And I am cold. We are very very cold.
Wool scratches my neck, but the warmth should make up for it. I can feel the heat from a dog at our feet. As for the grease, it is oddly comforting. The alcohol cuts right through the cold with a different heat, a vibrating, clean heat. On this December night I can see our breath in the soft casts of moonlight coming through the fogged windows, the primary source of illumination.
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