Boo-boos

Last night, I tripped over a patch of uneven Mission pavement and skinned both my knees. Not badly, but enough to remind me how they always used to be like that. Except back then they were scabby little-girl knees instead of neatly bandaged grown-up knees. The more scabs, the better.

It made me want to go roller skating in the parking lot of Cooley Dickinson Hospital. But instead I came home from work early and took a nap.

Some days are like that.

Hazy shades of tofurkey

The Pacific Northwest is wet, grey, and just about freezing this time of year, but that doesn't matter when you're on a road trip with the Lipman kids. Or if you happen to be the Lipman kids on a road trip together. Weather be damned!

Turkey day in Portland: Unceasingly friendly and generous people; a long, delicious meal; a stroll in the downpour; Mad Hot Ballroom; a dachsund named Bill in a soiled argyle sweater.

The day after: Quality hours at Powell's, mecca of me and mine; a quick taste of the rambling, musky Edgefield cellar; a rainy drive to the next state over; David Sedaris on the stereo; Shopgirl on the screen.

Then the sun came out, and someone you know got shutter-happy. My bro and I woke up unrushed on Saturday morning, went for a pleasantly muddy stroll in the park, and made our way to Experience Music Project.

EMP is a Gehry-designed middle finger of a building on the edge of downtown Seattle—part monstrosity, part elegance, it somehow manages to work. Mostly.

Surrounded by a giant baby blue glob and an awkward red glob are swirls of the rich, beautiful, bronze and silver metal that characterizes the entire Bilbao Guggenheim exterior (visit here for more thoughts on that sister museum). The result is like finding a handcrafted ring stuck between two wads of gum. Gross, yes, but worth it.

We spent a while wandering around the streetside exterior, then headed for the main entrance. I'm lucky to have the brother I have for countless reasons, and here's another one: Turns out we're both fascinated by photographing ourselves in reflective surfaces. Here's what that gene made us do for a while:

We also scored on the exhibits they happened to be showing while we were in town. The first decade of hip-hop, a Dylan retrospective, and a tribute to Jimi Hendrix. Let me just check my files, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't get much cooler than that.

And here's one of Avi with the man himself. Ain't they a pair of handsome devils?

Anyone with even a passing interest in music could spend a while at EMP, but we both lost museum steam after a couple of hours. So my good-natured chauffeur and his trusty pickup steed zipped us over to the heart of downtown, sparkly with lights just before dusk, to see the new Rem Koolhaas library.

It's wild. Truly. Here are a few glimpses that don't come close to doing the building justice:


It's just as much of a trip inside as from the street. I only stayed long enough to catch the view from a few floors—and take some pictures of the neon green and rusty red interior that wouldn't do much for you in black and white—but I'm planning to spend some time in there next time I head north.

After our adventures in culture, we had a nice meal at a vegetarian spot in Avi's neighborhood, then took a catnap before meeting up with some displaced New Yorkers for a drink.

Finale: Brunch with my brilliant and beautiful childhood friend Claire and her man on Sunday morning. Then the quick flight home, weighed down by books and wine and a full roll of film.

That's all for tonight's fireside travel tales. Sleep well, and dream of freakish modern architecture all along the watchtower.

Holiday fun for the whole family

I'm leaving for the airport soon to join my wandering big bro in Portland, where the streets are paved with cleanliness, but I wanted to leave you with some fun things to do when you need a break from eating today.

These are also excellent tactics for avoiding awkward and/or annoying conversations with relatives and random holiday guests you don't really know, but have to be nice to because they're friends of your Aunt Mavis or whatever.

Ahem. Here we go.

Tactic #1: Bake pumpkin bread. It's squishy, it's yummy, it's easy to make. You know you want some. This recipe is from Claire's Corner Copia Cookbook, respectfully tweaked here and there by the BCB.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup soybean or vegetable oil
1 cup fresh or canned pureed pumpkin
1/4 cup buttermilk
2 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves (or nutmeg)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
1/4 cup raisins (optional)

Preheat the over to 375 degrees. Combine the eggs, sugar, oil, pumpkin, and buttermilk in a bowl. Beat to mix well using a hand mixer or whisk. (Whisks rule!) In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, ginger, cloves/nutmeg, and cinnamon. Pour the liquid ingredients over the dry all at once and mix with a spoon just to combine. Don't beat the batter, or you will have a tough bread. Gently stir in the walnuts and raisins, if you like that sort of thing.

Grease and flour a 9x5-inch loaf pan. Pour the batter into the pan. Bake on the center rack of the oven for about 1.25 hours, or until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from the over and let stand for 5 minutes. Turn the bread out of the pan to cool. Have a slice. Then another. Hell, eat the whole thing. With gusto! And maybe some cream cheese if frosting is a must for you.

Tactic #2: Waste a few hours playing with this fantastic Swedish website. I'm almost at a loss for words to explain how great it is. Type in anything you want, and a random computer somewhere in Sweden will sing the words back to you using pieces of popular songs. This is so rad. Trust me. You may never work again.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be back in a few days.

The weekend aquatic

I spent some quality with the animal kingdom this weekend.

First stop was the octopuspectacular Monterey Bay Aquarium, which I'd somehow managed never to visit before, even though it's world-famous and only a couple of hours away. It's also very cool, especially the jellyfish, who blew my mind with their bright orange postmodern art statement against a bright blue tank of water. Better yet: They come in wee, not-so-wee, and freakin' huge. The almost invisibly small ones shaped like umbrellas get extra points.

Mother Nature never ceases to astonish. I'd love to hear what theory the "intelligent design" weirdos can generate to explain teeny, tiny jellyfish, not to mention a bagpipe-shaped monstrosity with eight legs covered in suction cups and skin that changes color to reflect its emotional state. That's evolution, yo. Nobody can make this shit up. It just happens.

tell me, o octopus, i begs

Onward from the mini to the extremely gigantic: Stop two, a visit to the fleet of sea lions who hang out under the Santa Cruz wharf. They look like wizened Cambridge professors, with their whiskers and yawns and harumphs and expressions of mild contempt. They also like to shriek at each other. Loudly. And they're HUGE. I'll put up some pictures when I get them back.

Those were the only two stops on the animal tour, actually, but they were enough to make me feel like I spent a solid stretch underwater.

Then I went to see Walk the Line, and it wasn't bad. Joaquin Phoenix clearly practiced saying "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" in front of the mirror enough times to get it down. And for once, Reese Witherspoon's irrepressible perkiness was appropriate. There just weren't enough jellyfish in the movie.

when i was arrested, i was dressed in black

Windex kills ants

Before you go rushing out to buy Raid or Ant-B-Gone or any other specialty poison The Man tries to sell you, hear this wisdom from your trusty pacifist vegetarian friend: Windex kills ants. Like gangbusters.

Poor little innocent ants? Frolicking little happy little ants? Yes. I'm all for their right to live free in the woods and the wide open fields, where they might do some good in the natural balance of things (though I don't know what exactly), but they don't do a damn thing for the natural balance of my bathroom. Which they decide to invade last night. In hordes. And that just ain't right.

Now they're gone. Gone, gone, gone to the happy ant palace in the sky. Because Windex, ladies and gentleman, kills ants. In case you didn't learn it from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I'm here to reinforce to you that Windex is the cure for all your cleaning needs, pest-related and otherwise. That is today's lesson.

The other lesson is that I'd prefer not to shower in an ant mortuary ever again. But killing the ants turned out to be easier than cleaning them up, especially when it was late and I was tired and didn't have much light to work with.

But they'd better not try to come back. I have a giant bottle of Windex, and my conscience is crystal clear.

Pith

It was positively balmy today.

I've been on a spinach kick lately, sauteeing it up with sesame oil and garlic and ginger every chance I get. Popeye should maybe watch his back.

Bono is an interesting cat. A rare example of the potentially grand sociopolitical impact of celebrity. Or just a weird rock star with rectangular shades and a messiah complex. You decide.

It might be kind of late for pith, actually. Unless pith = sleep, in which case I'm all over it.

i am a golden god

Maroon, and good luck

Everyone left work early on Thursday, and I had Friday off by way of thanks for recent overtime. It's amazing how the weekend feels four times as long with an extra day. I got to cross a bunch of things off my to-do list—very satisfying. Also strangely thematic. Let me explain.

First, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond with a scrap of paper I've been carrying around for months: measuring cups and spoons, duvet cover, olive oil bottle, towels, alarm clock, backscrubber, etc. BB&B is a giant store, laid out poorly enough that I had to ask where almost everything was. (Except for the backscrubber—they have a whole section. Yes, they do.) And I stayed there so long that I almost broke down and bought an egg spatula. Where do they come up with this stuff? Is there a special island?

But my favorite part was asking the friendly bespectacled lady if they had "those things you use to tie back curtains." I'd decided it was time to upgrade from the stretchy ribbons I cut off my so-hideous-it's-kitschy French bathing suit. "Oh, tiebacks," she said. "Over here." Tiebacks? Are an actual thing? They had a whole section of them. Yes, they did. I got some dark red ropey ones to go with the dark red duvet cover (40% off! Sale ends soon!). My bedroom has been navy for so long that I'd almost forgotten other colors.

Then I dropped off some clothes at Goodwill, took Mingus for an oil change and a bath, stopped at AAA for free maps of Oregon and Washington (to plan a mini Thanksgiving road trip with my brother), and went to Walgreens for a photo album. The fancy scrapbooks I'm using for my travel photos are too much work for everyday pictures. Walgreens had a nice green version of the brand I usually get, with a maroon accent, and the register rang it up at $5 off. Yay!

Next I went to the wonderland that is Trader Joe's. I don't usually buy produce there, just everything else, but they happened to have baskets of beautiful, tasty pomegranate seeds and raspberries on sale. Into the car they went.

Then, spent by productivity, I came home . . . took a nap . . . and dreamt of endless rows of useful maroon things on sale. And how I still had a whole weekend left to enjoy them.

Twisted and fed

When I was a wee lass, I used to sit and listen to my mom's LPs in the living room. She had mostly musicals (flashback to Sunday in the Park with George), Simon & Garfunkel, and the like, but a few gems from my family's sort-of-hippie days in California in the mid-1970s managed to creep in there. But I never could understand the Bob Dylan phenomenon. Being a snotty little musical theater kid who took a couple of years of opera lessons, I thought Dylan's scratchy off-key delivery was hilarious and painful. And the lyrics sailed right over my head.

Then sometime in high school, my big brother undertook my conversion to Dylan fandom—I think Another Side finally tipped the scales—and now I really do get it. I believe the hype and hyperbole. He's a weird, weird genius.

So, that's the back story on why I picked up a shiny new copy of Chronicles recently in a moment of weakness at Cody's. (It was on deep sale...may the used bookstore gods have mercy on my soul.) This first volume of Dylan's autobiography jumps around too much chronologically and topically, but it's full of casual insights and poetic observations. It's also just cool to hear his stories about kicking around the folk scene back in the day, when it was new and charged and political.

To wit, some of his killer prose about a city on all of our minds:

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen...the city is one very long poem. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. The devil comes here and sighs.

Double bass

Check another of the greats off my list. But with all due respect to Mr. Burrell, the last jazz icon to cross my path, Ornette Coleman has still got it in a way that Kenny just don't got it anymore.

It might have something to do with the space, like a stadium on one of the lesser planets, but it's also the powerful function of wisdom + creativity + insanity that Ornette carries in spades. He took the stage with one of the strangest quartet combos I've seen: drums, two uprights, and the man himself. The drummer is Ornette's son, trained from age 10 to be the frantic, tight rhythm for his father's mental explosions. He more than held his own, surrounded by an odd glass screen that made him seem like Mona Lisa with hands you could almost see.

First upright did his duty, tied the discordance together like a plucky hero. Second bass made his near superfluousness felt with perpetual underlying siren-like drags across the strings, lending the whole scene a tense quality that I could have done without.

But the sum was ethereal, off but on, making time pass unremarked. After my brain switched over to the necessary realm, I didn't notice anything else until they stood up and signaled the end.

Ornette didn't say a word the entire show. He may have mumbled an offering after the first ovation, but we left to catch the tail end of our dinner reservation, so I couldn't quote him for you.

The masters are sacred, but so is a fine meal, and I was glad to have the better part of both.

Stealth mode

Been working in a editorial coal mine lately, long hours and not much daylight to show for it. It looks like we'll need to put in time this weekend also—big project due first thing Monday, and the usual backup from the people who write the stuff and review the stuff means we don't get to edit the stuff or make it look pretty until the witching hour.

But it'll come out right in the end, because my boss told me that when the madness is over, I get to change my title to...ready for this?

Right-Hand Editorial Assassin. Why, yes, that does kick ass.

He also said he's getting us pirate eye patches and skull caps for Christmas, so maybe he's just kidding, but I don't care. I'm hanging onto it.

Editorial Assassin. It needs the coolest business card ever—and you can imagine the outfits. The movie deals!

You could design an entire lifestyle around a title like that. And I just might.

common editor

editorial assassin

The sun's not yella, it's chicken

I'm happy that it's light outside when I get up now, but the darkness at 5:30 p.m. plan just makes me sleepy. Maybe it's way too have-my-cake-and-eat-it, but why can't the sun cooperate more with my schedule? Say by giving us an extra hour of daylight in the morning and the evening, instead of this tit for tat business. I don't think most folks would mind a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daytime.

Mind you, this isn't a bout of Alaska envy. Perpetual sunshine for part of the year sounds like a nightmare also. I'm just putting in a friendly request for billions of years of natural evolution to bend slightly to the left, so I can feel like I'm not at work until the middle of the night.

People have asked for more, right? Check out the King James Version sometime. Now those guys were greedy.

Lila is here!

This morning in North Carolina, one of my favorite people in the world, Ms. Kate Holbein Rademacher, gave birth in championship time (less than 10 hours) to one of my new favorite people in the world, the wee Lila Holbein Rademacher.

Weighing in at 7 lbs. 9 oz., Lila is a beautiful genius. An auntie always knows.

I'm going to buy piles of cute little hats and shoes now. It's starting to get cold in Chapel Hill, Lila clearly needs them. I think she also needs a fuzzy bunny to drool on. Who doesn't, really?

Three cheers for Kate and David and Soren and Lila!