The music Little Richard Penniman made in the mid-fifties was a crazed jittering sugar rush—sweet candied yams with marshmallow eyeballs popping. Tutti Frutti, Lucille, and Rip it Up turned the heads of every would be flamboyant front man or woman to follow: James Brown, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Elton John; they all looked up at…
Category: Journal
Moons Over My Hammy Recipe & Wacko
A punk rock tornado ripped through a Denny’s in Long Beach, CA last December causing two thousand dollars in damage. Because the Algorithm knows me so well, a video appeared on my social media feed. I was supposed to be working but I clicked. It begins with a baby boomer in a cowboy hat pacing…
Pataconas w/ Hogao Recipe & Gaby’s ‘El Meneaito’
Menaito Mania hit Colombia hard in 1992. By the time my family arrived for Christmas vacation that year the Reggae en Español thumper had the whole Magdalena River percolating. In Honda, Tolima at my Abuelita’s nochebuena party, young and old were sliding to it, at a friends hacienda my uncle was drinking aguardiente to it,…
Belgian Frites with Andalouse Sauce Recipe & Total Science
In 2001 I found myself in a swirling neon centrifuge of euro club-kid culture—the final act of separation between my mind and the rhythms of American teenage life as I knew it. My father and I moved to a quaint Belgian town named Waterloo (famous as the site where Napoleon had his final tantrum). I…
The Legend of ‘Champ’: Eyewitness Accounts
Champ——the prehistoric god of the lake— didn’t bestow Lucas, Alex, Mario and I with any good luck on our ice fishing trip trip last February. We left without fish or new lake monster sightings to add to the record. Perhaps in the age of smartphone cameras, she’s been laying low. In the late eighties/early ’90s though……
Pickled Pike Recipe & Stan Rogers
A briefing just popped up on my phone from the New York Times. It reads, “It will be colder in the Midwest today than in Antarctica.” Terms like polar vortex and instant frostbite are broadcasting from Zoraida’s radio upstairs. All of this frostiness has me reflecting on an ill-fated ice fishing trip I organized last February…
Fisherman’s Eggs Recipe & Andres Segovia
This pairing is inspired by the 1958 movie version of the Old Man and the Sea, starring Spencer Tracy (I never read the book. So what?); The old hazy camera tech makes it feel like a memory and the story deals with the willingness to risk annihilation in order to achieve something, be something, or…
Flamenco Food Vibes
Here is a documentary from Tao Ruspoli that features, Juan Del Gastor, my flamenco teacher in Sevilla. He comes from a long line of Flamenco Gypsys that includes gods like his uncle Diego Del Gastor. I got some hilarious cooking lessons similar to the one Ruspoli is receiving in the video. Del Gastor has a…
Paella Recipe & Camarón de la Isla
Nothing will ever match my first wood fired paella. When I was twelve and my family lived in Spain, we took a road trip out to the farmhouse of some family friends in the dry Spanish countryside near Pamplona. When we arrived there was a stout old man standing over a fire, roughly shoveling heaps of shrimp and vegetables the…
Buttermilk Pancake Recipe & Willie Nelson
Don Fonda was a king in the realm of pranks and wisecracks. He would spin yarns to us grandkids about his days working at the telephone company—like the time he switched around the gas gauge and the speedometer in a co-worker’s truck, or the time he drove a fussy trainee deep into the Adirondack Mountains, looking at him suggestively the whole way, and then finally…
THE MUSICAL INGREDIENT 