Back in the autumn of 2008, I mentioned starting work on a radio play involving "a brash reporter, a hurricane, Al Capone, and a gigantic whale."
These Deming years have been hectic, and that script spent a lot of time in the drawer. In a virtual drawer, that is. In this age of word processing, manuscripts don't linger in drawers so much as linger on hard drives. At any rate, months would go by, I'd play around with it some; then I'd get busy, unable to look at it for several more months; and repeat.
This was the man who first challenged me to write a radio play back in 2006. The result was Do You Hear What I Hear?, which was produced in 2008 by the Shoestring Radio Theatre in San Francisco. Lance later visited New Mexico and produced two short plays of mine, Simulated Drowning and The Heart Has No Location, which were broadcast on KUNM in 2009. I found the medium very freeing as a writer.
Lance is a good nudge: not too much to provoke resistance, but enough to get me working on it whenever I could (and in my home, it is very difficult to write). He presented me with a deadline. Well, you know what Douglas Adams said about deadlines:
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
But I was only a few days late when, finally, a complete first draft of Ricardo and the Whale swam the world wide ocean to Lance's email box.
Its dramatic theme widened over the past few years. There is still a brash reporter, an improbably large whale, and a terrible hurricane. And Al Capone. It is an extraordinarily silly play about environmental issues. And American culture. And dreams.
I'm awaiting word on a possible production of this play, that you might be able to enjoy.
Dear meat eating friends, you know I'm not one of those vegetarians who preaches at you or judges your diet harshly. Once in a while, a little bit of animal flesh even passes my lips. This is rare, no pun intended. Anyway, we're friends. Let's chat about this "pink slime" controversy.
The recent explosion of revulsion and protest, mostly on social networking websites, over this image of "pink slime meat" has us scratching our heads at the Burning House. It is almost, if not quite, as if you were all just waking up to the fact that your hamburgers come from those nice cows you see grazing on the side of the freeway. It's touching, really.
Granted, this image is rather disconcerting. You are not meant to see your meat in this stage of processing. If you harvested your own meat, as some still do, it would not look like this -- but that would be a pretty disconcerting sight, too, if you're not used to it.
What you are looking at here is a "textured beef." You see, during the slaughtering process (for your meat comes from animals), a lot of "bits" end up on the floor. Forgive me, but these are bits of muscle and sinew and tissue from freshly-killed animals. This stuff used to be ground up for pet food, but now it's used for human consumption. They grind it up and mash it together. But dead bodies are germy. In order to kill pathogens that may cause you to get sick, the meat plants treat this mash of dead meat with a pink chemical that kills the microbes. It's an ammonia product, and it has been used in beef products since the 1990s. That includes the meat served in schools. Your supermarkets. And yes, McDonald's.
I'm not picking on my meat-eating friends, really. I'm not a preachy vegetarian. Just sayin', if y'all are going to get in a tizzy about how your meat is prepared, we here at the Burning House would suggest (1) not looking at photographs of the process, (2) harvesting your own if you are appalled by the meat industry (and it is a pretty appalling industry, we'll grant you), and (3) considering a smaller helping of meat and a bigger helping of the other stuff.
Left to myself, I could eat stir fry just about every day. This image shows some of the preparation for a stir fry tonight. Not in view is the chicken, which I cooked separately with a spicy ginger sauce for my wife, and served to her as a side dish for the main event: brown rice and stir fried vegetables and mushrooms.
This post, however, concerns itself with what's in that yogurt container.
Scraps for stock.
No doubt, some of the readers of this blog already do something like this. But for those who don't, let's join together and let them in on a wonderful secret: making fresh vegetable stock is easy and suffuses your home cooking with added flavor.
It isn't hard to do. As I prepare a meal, I have this yogurt container out and I throw mushroom stems, ginger peels, and various vegetable trimmings in there. When prep is done, that goes into the refrigerator for the next day's stock.
Today's stock, meanwhile, would already be simmering on the stovetop. Water in a very gentle simmer for at least an hour. It might also include water left over from cooking vegetables. I put stock on at the same time I put on brown rice (which takes an hour itself) and just check occasionally to make sure it hasn't gone to a boil. That's it.
Most of what I need to know about vegetable stock, I learned from Ed Brown's wonderful book Tassajara Cooking, a copy from the original 1973 printing, which I regard as a treasured possession even though it's been splattered with food stains over the years.
Vegetable scraps: almost anything--ends, tips, tops, trimmings, roots, skins, parsley stems, outside cabbage leaves, limp vegetables. Go easy on the green pepper centers. Some people find a large amount of onion skins or carrot tops makes too strong a flavor. Water to cover.
It's important that this brew simmer rather than boil. Simmering means a few wee bubbles are popping gently to the surface -- a quiet, subdued leaching process, while boiling means that the entire surface is in turmoil, bubbling and frothing. Vegetables do not endure boiling very well, soon yielding their more rank flavors and aromas, so bring the stock to a simmer and then turn the heat low enough to keep it there, or you will have a harsh-flavored stock.
Let the stock simmer an hour or more, and then strain out the vegetables, squeezing or mashing out the last juices. Use in place of water for soups, or for cooking vegetables, grains, or beans. If not using immediately, leave uncovered until cool, then cover and refrigerate.
It keeps for a couple of days in the refrigerator, if you don't use it right away.
Here's a photo of that quiet, subdued leaching process.
One less bozo on this bus. Peter Bergman, one of my heroes from adolescence, passed away this morning.
On its Facebook page, the Firesign Theatre announced that Peter Bergman, one of its four company members since the group's earliest performances on Los Angeles radio, died today from complications related to leukemia. He was 73 years old.
My parents made an occasion of sitting me down in front of the record player and having me listen to my first Firesign Theatre album when I was 12 or 13 years old. The album was How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All (1969), and it was audio theatre as I had scarcely dared imagine it. As summarized on the Firesign Theatre's home page:
The title track, which follows a babe in the woods as Climate Control draws him into a revisionist hysterical Americana travelogue/propaganda montage, is bookended by the omnipresent Ralph Spoilsport. It's Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses in the blender of popular culture, set to puree. This segues into "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger," a classic parody of golden-age radio theater and one of Firesign's most enduring creations. This segues into (go back to the beginning).
Yes, and more than that, even. I was hooked. Obsessed. And this album is what I thought of as soon as I heard that Peter Bergman was gone.
Bergman played the central character in a hilarious odyssey fitting on one side of an LP. It starts with Ralph Spoilsport doing a car commercial, when Bergman's character shows up and immediately buys a car. It appears to be an RV, absurdly large and equipped with a magical "climate control" device that instantly transports him into different lands. He meets up with a group of irritating and inept explorers, who end up following him into the Land of the Pharaohs. At one point he complains that he wants to go home and the sun is setting, and one of the explorers (who sounds exactly like W.C. Fields) says, "No, you're confused... the horizon is moving up!" To prove it, they decide to stand him on his head. He then falls and someone complains, "He's no fun, he fell right over."
And that's just the beginning of an adventure that takes him through a pyramid into a surrealistic tour through U.S. history, and ends with Ralph Spoilsport talking about marijuana and reciting Joyce.
On the flip side, we had the first recorded adventure of Nick Danger, "Third Eye," a private eye in the mold of classic radio-noir, with Bergman playing his foil, police lieutenant Bradshaw. At one point in this seemingly-unrelated story, the A side of the record begins to infiltrate.
It blew my mind. This was as if Thomas Pynchon had written for Monty Python. I devoured all of the early Firesign albums, listening to them over and over again. They kept on working together right up until today, doing podcasts and videos and occasional spots for NPR's All Things Considered. Famously, they recorded a Thanksgiving piece entitled "Pass the Indian, Please" in 2002 that NPR refused to air. NPR called it "incomprehensible" but in my own opinion, it was too subversive. (You can hear it and judge for yourself by visiting this page and scrolling down a bit.)
Peter Bergman was a Yale graduate who taught economics, and started improvising radio broadcasts with the other members of Firesign in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. (When I lived in Los Angeles, I had to listen to these albums all over again -- there are so many local references!) We have lost one hilarious genius.
So Peter Bergman has passed on from this absurd planet, and I am enjoying a fantasy of him emerging in that tropical paradise from How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, meeting up with those wisecracking explorers in pith helmets.
This video contains three excerpts from that album, starting with Babe's first drive in his new car and trying out that chromium switch...
And if that has you intrigued, why not go back to their first album and listen to it in its entirety? Here is Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him (1968), an amazing satire of european colonialism, 1960s counterculture, television, and a bizarre Kafka-esque fantasy on the B side.
Up at 2:00 AM to make sure the call time hasn't changed. It hasn't: 6:30 AM at a base camp near Albuquerque's old town. The car is already packed and fueled. The road to Hatch is pretty lonely at night, but there is radio -- until there is neither scenery nor much worth listening to on radio, and it's just a long drive in the dark to Albuquerque.
This was for another day of work on the set of In Plain Sight, and this episode we might actually watch with friends, not only to enjoy one of the final episodes of a fine comic-drama, but for the added enhancement of a drinking game along the lines of "Spot Algernon." You can play along with us at home, dear reader.
The day began with an elderly woman falling kersplat! in the middle of the street right around the spot where the photo above was taken. (This is not my photograph: I brought no camera with me to set, and it is not Christmas time.) On location like this, the crowd easily gets mixed up with the 100+ extras on set, but the medic rushed to her aid regardless.
The first half of the day was spent here in this plaza, shooting dialogue in the midst of a crowd, with some of us costumed as undercover FBI agents. I was in a mailman costume with the telltale sign of an undercover Fed: the earpiece with squiggly cord on the right side of my face.
A fake mailbox was set up immediately next to the real one you see in the photo here. Despite a piece of gaffe tape bearing the words "FAKE MAILBOX" I had to keep an eye out for people dropping their bill payments and Netflix DVDs into the fake mailbox.
The clock began at 6:30 AM and I was sent home at 7:30 PM after appearing in two scenes. First as the FBI/mailman and later as the partner riding shotgun with a guest actor in the episode, pulling up to a "situation" and jumping out of the car looking all federal. I feel empowered to use that adjective since the script-consultant, a law enforcement guy who makes sure the show gets the details right, described me as looking "really federal." Go me.
For non-speaking extra work, this was a good day, and long enough that despite the long drive I earned a little money. Furthermore I actually did get to act, receiving direction even, and might be visible enough to make the drinking game work.
Coming soon to this space: tales of temporary employment including another day on the set of In Plain Sight followed by a couple of days bottling beer by hand at Deming's microbrewery.
But right now, we need to wash beer out of our hair.
Probably I was home from school sick that day. I don't remember clearly.
What I remember is that I was an adolescent, and when I had time to myself alone in the house, I would go exploring my father's record albums. He had more than 2,000 of them, meticulously organized on store-bought shelves in the living room of our house in East Providence. His LPs covered vast territory: classical and baroque music, jazz, albums by standup comedians from the 1960s (Bill Cosby, Rusty Warren, the Smothers Brothers, "Jose Jimenez") and musical humorists like Stan Freberg, Oscar Brand, Allan Sherman, P.D.Q. Bach, and tons of weird novelty records. Rock from the 1950s up into the present day (this would have been early 1980s). This was the period when my parents actually sat me down and introduced me to Frank Zappa and the Firesign Theatre.
I had never heard of Quicksilver Messenger Service. Knew about the Airplane and a little bit about the Dead already, but no one had told me about this Bay Area band. The album's cover art intrigued me. I put it on the record player and lo! Orpheus descended and rocked. One of the best albums ever, dating from 1969 and blowing the walls off most of the new music I was hearing. Still one of my favorites.
