Same Song, Different Drum

In the 80s, it was a cliche: “SSDD—Same Shit, Different Day.” The first 14 bars of Golden Dawn’s march song (original at link) bear a striking resemblance to a historical song from their ideological antipode. A Las Barricadas (To the Barricades, original at link) was the theme of 1930’s Spain’s CNT/FAI, an anarchist unionist party that fought Franco and the Falangists to the concentration-camp end. Note the resemblance here in “To The Golden Barricades at Dawn: Golden Dawn vs. CNT/FAI.” The Spanish are using the trumpets and singing in a higher register, but it’s even almost the same key as the Greeks with their drums, trombones and tuba. The only editing necessary was some tempo correction to stretch/shrink Barricadas at some key points; Golden Dawn’s song was metronymic. Coming soon to a torchlit street near you.

News of Greece’s Hryssi Avgi (Golden Dawn) Party taking 7 percent of the vote in this week’s elections has catapulted this fasciform political concern into the international spotlight. Any disclaiming of neo-fascist intentions is pure smokescreen, and more steam than smoke. Embrace of GD is a particularly extreme example of the widespread disgust with mainstream politics all over the West. And as we in the States are in the throes of our 2012 presidential campaign, disgust is a healthy response.

Historically, in brokendown times, democracy was drawn and quartered between fascists and communists and/or anarchists. They faced off in the streets, burned and destroyed, looted armories, and started revolutions (both social and violent). The rise of one extreme necessarily evoked the other as the only possible cultural response. There have been punch-ups between GD and Greece’s far left for years. With GD’s 21 of the 300 seats in Parliament, do you expect to negotiate with a man like its leader Nichos Michaloliakos? Michaloliakos said in a speech prior to this year’s election: “They haven’t understood that when we have the power we will be merciless.” Maybe he will respond to a little online petition or a boycott. The eternal Paul Robeson said to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956: “Wherever I’ve been in the world, the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the Communists.”

Radical left and right also developed a lasting iconography that is resurfacing to accompany the exhumed conflicts of yestercentury. Golden Dawn’s flag uses the same colors as that of the the Nazis, and in that context the “meander,” a common architectural motif from Greece’s Geometrical Period (~900 BCE) becomes a dead ringer for a swastika. At least the meander is actually Greek, where the swastika came from almost everywhere except Germany. (Ironically, there are more swastikas in Greek Geometrical design than there ever were in pre-Nazi Germany). Since WWII, we have seen so many swastika flags in black red & white that the mind reflexively warps Golden Dawn’s sigil into a swastika.

On the extreme left and right, the symbols, uniforms, catchphrases, and similar trappings were honed by propagandists and burnished with blood. They were even cross-borrowed, like Franco’s Falangists copying the “worker blue” shirts of the CNT/FAI into their uniforms, and using the anarchists’ black and red for the Falangist flag. Those colors had a proven emotional response. I’ll be interested to see if this time around, political artists rise to the occasion to provide something new—or we just remix the nostalgia of the 30s like we have the 70s and 80s.

Mayday: I Believe the Children Are Further

I should have written it up last week, but I’ve been struggling with a commission in uncharted technical territory and a victory garden being despoiled by an opossum. The opossum is so acclimated to people that she lumbered casually off the porch when I opened the door on my way to the studio; she had been picking through the compost for weeks (THAT’s how that mango pit got 5′ from the bin!) and more importantly, eating my seedlings. Point being, this post is too little too late for May Day, but I wanted to post these videos and a couple of comments.

I’m the only one at my office that I know of who took May Day off. Hell, of the folks I talked to I’m the only one who knew what it was—except for the Colombian custodial guy, who is a Union plumber that’s had to do custodial work for years because of the nationwide construction sag. His greeting was: “I know where you were yesterday!” Otherwise, the ignorance was depressing, but the march was more fun than usual because I met up with a large group of friends. The chatting made for poor observation…so this would have been a thin blog anyway.

This little girl was the highlight of the march for me, and one of the highlights of the whole OWS experience, though she mightn’t have been there with her mom in the coalition-building days of Liberty Plaza. She shouted with such poise and confidence, and incredibly, without appearing to be shouting. In the first video she’s saying “Tell me what you want tell me what you want! Tell me what you need tell me what you need!” to which the crowd responds “JUSTICE!” She was a bit shrill in person but really got your attention because hers was obviously not an adult voice. In the second she’s saying “They say cut back!” and the crowd responds “WE SAY FIGHT BACK!”

BUNKER MENTALITY, or, How Migrant Workers Carry Fruit

Fruitcase (by NutcaseOM), open at a rakish angle, with avocado

The first time I saw a Banana Bunker, I thought it was the invention of the year. I wasn’t producing very much of art or utility at the time, so I missed its rather obvious design flaws—until the first time I tried to use it. That, I’m sure, was the idea once the Banana Bunker got out of prototype.

Bananas are not standardized, because Monsanto hasn’t bought the Banana Bunker patent yet: bananas are bendy or straight, and vary somewhat in dimensions. The Banana Bunker is too rigid to hold most bananas, and is instead a Banana Chastity Belt, causing as much harm to its contents as did that hoary puritanical garment.

To the chagrin of all urban bedouins, I still haven’t found an olive green solution for the banana transport quandary, but am closing on one. (Don’t look for it in stores because, as usual, it will be opensource and crappy-looking by the Factory-Fresh standards we’re drilled to venerate. It’s also not a trademark, but an OpenMark^OM, which is like Creative Commons with more indifference.) Anyway, an easier nut to crack has been an even more delicate comestible: the avocado.

Now that everyone in the Occident is concerned with “probiotics”—for millennia known elsewhere as “food”—it couldn’t be easier to find the materials for the Fruitcase (by Nutcase^OM): Two matching yogurt cups and four standard rubber bands. Interloop bands as shown to form a figure 8, then loop them around the bases of both yogurt cups, with one inverted. The mouths of the cups will meet to provide a protective rib of plastic lip at the widest part of your avocado, the part most likely to be bruised. Given all the brands of yogurt vying for our guts and all the variations in their packaging shapes, you can surely design a Fruitcase (by Nutcase^OM) for anything smaller than a grapefruit. See photos.

This solves two intractable problems: bruised fruit and the difficulty of recycling #5 (polypropylene) plastic, of which all yogurt cups I’ve seen are made. The only way to get rid of the damn things is at Whole Foods, where the Preserve Gimme 5 program will pick them up and make them into toothbrushes and razors. Splendid!—if you like to shop at national chains that throttle market diversity. Besides, I’m not driving 5 miles to drop off 550 yogurt cups. I’ll wait until they’re in the four-figure range.

Heart of Snarkness

While you're here, doesn't China Miéville (right) bear an astonishing resemblance to fellow leftist Sergei Udaltsov, outspoken Putin critic of the Russian Left Front?

I almost missed this February piece from the inimitable China Miéville, but for the blog Who Makes the Nazis? reposting it as “China Miéville: When Did Bigotry Get So Needy?” London School of Economics doctorate and literary polymath Miéville demolishes the logic behind the Belgian Supreme Court’s decision to allow the publication of Tintin au Congo without any label warning against its acrid racism; he responds with a tour de force of arguments encompassing very au courant tropes of free speech, political correctness, and libertarian saber-rattling. I should have mentioned him here sooner, as possibly my favorite polemicist and fiction writer.

[…]To claim that everyone talked like Tintin about the Congo back in the day is (whatever other serious political arguments we may have with them) to slander, say, Felicien Challaye, Albert Londres, the French Socialist movement that declared at its 1907 conference that colonialism ‘relies on violent conquest and institutionalises the subjection of Asiatic and African peoples’.[…]

[…]There is the absurd hyperbole, to turn a victimiser’s culture into a victim. In his effort to derail the issue, Staggs insists that the ‘trump’ of racism is ‘used to blot out any part of our cultural heritage that might cause embarrassment.’ ‘Blot out’. Right. Who, after all, could forget the monstrous erasure performed by Stalin on Trotsky, by putting a warning sticker on him & refusing to shelve him alongside The Gruffalo? The Tintin Vanishes. Quick, conjure images of book burning! First they came for the Boy Reporter & shelved him alongside Persepolis & Sandman, & I did not speak out, because I was not a Boy Reporter, &c.[…]

Again, read the entire essay here.

La Galette Nouvelle: only 1-3 ingredients!

Please attempt this at home.

In the past month I changed my diet almost completely. The largely-vegan fare of my college days has been tougher to digest as I age: variations on Caribbean and Indian recipes, meaning a lot of beans, lentils and brown rice. When dining out, I often eat fish or dairy, because I have an enormous appetite and burn energy beyond what refined carbs and vegetables can provide. But my staple pulses, grains and seeds have been troubling enough to occasion a break with my orthodoxy.

I’m still working on a post about what I’ve learned from research papers and a biochemist/nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet’s blog, but I want to share a recipe that has illuminated my grain-less days.

Buckwheat is not wheat or even a grain; it’s actually a cousin of rhubarb that became unpopular with the advent of modern agroindustrial practices. Once a U.S. frontier food, it’s still widely consumed in Russia and Eastern Europe and is said to have originated in China, cradle of so much early civilization. But having a distinctive taste and texture that makes it less versatile than wheat, it was crowded out when technology permitted wholesale modification of the land (it actually hates fertile soil).

I’ve been learning more about its uses: porridge in Russia, soba noodles in Japan, galettes in France. But it was Guyenet offhandedly mentioning that he grinds and ferments soaked buckwheat groats (hulled seeds) to make a versatile batter for griddle cakes that made me want to try it. Since it’s not a grain, I figured I’d feel fine after eating it.

And how! As a child I loved pancakes, but in adulthood have hated the abrupt unconsciousness attendant on their consumption. Even in my youth they knocked me out. (I have an unscientific theory about the vagus nerve, omitted here.) But although light, this buckwheat griddlecake is incredibly filling without the bloating from grains and glutens, and easy to digest because of the sprouting and fermentation.

It’s fair to call it this recipe a galette, since it’s adapted from a traditional Bretagne recipe, informed by Guyenet and given the key fillip of sprouting. Sprouting and fermentation both improve digestibility and nutrient absorption, making this a great recipe to try if you suspect grains are aggrieving you. Plus the recipe is bunker-simple…it doesn’t even require the egg but that greatly helps the consistency and airiness. If your system’s anything like mine, you’ll be amazed at your Olympic energy after eating only three 18″ diameter crispy discs of paper with a thin skim of tanginess just under their crusts.

La Galette Féthière
Makes five 18″ galettes

1.5 c organic raw  (not roasted) buckwheat groats
1 egg
1 tsp kosher salt
Virgin olive oil (not extra virgin, it will smoke) or another high smoke-point oil
Iron skillet: not Teflon, which ruins the texture and air channels
Filtered water to thin and rinse

Teflon vs. iron skillet. Same batter, worse heat distribution & aeration.

Soak the groats in enough water to cover for 20 min. Throw out water and rinse well, until most of the gel they produce when wet is gone. Then put them in a jar, tray, or sprouter and keep them moist, rinsing every 6-10 hours, until most of them show tiny rootlets. You want a rootlet no longer than a gnat; anything longer will work but not ferment as well. This takes 12-18 hours. Do not rinse them with chlorinated water within eight hours of grinding because it will retard the wild yeasts and enzymes needed for fermentation. You can still do use them if you do but the fermentation won’t be as robust, and that’s what makes them so light.

Don’t worry if they’re still a bit slimy, it’s difficult to rinse all that off and the fermentation will break it down anyway. Throw them in a blender or Cuisinart (works best) and puree them into a smooth batter. Add filtered water to keep it very thin, just a bit thicker than water. (Thin batter allows yeast to distribute more thoroughly and ferment faster.) Pour batter in a clear glass bowl and cover with a wet paper towel. If you put it on a heating pad on its lowest setting or in a sunny nook it will accelerate the fermentation. Leave it for 12-16 hours depending on how well the fermenting’s going; smell for a sour, mineral odor and look for air bubbles trapped along the sides (in a clear glass bowl) or puffiness and cracks near the top of the batter where air is escaping as the yeasts break down the starches and sugars.

A well-fermented batter. Rose about 3/4" in 12 hours.

When the batter is aerated and soured, you’ll have about 3 cups of it. Heat and oil an iron skillet to just under the smoke point of golden virgin olive oil: gas mark 6 for me. Use a separate bowl and mix 1.5 cups of batter with one egg, thin with water (or milk, which I’ve never tried), and add the teaspoon of salt. Use a whisk to beat as many air bubbles into it as you can for about 20 seconds before pouring. Pour in a circular motion, allowing batter to run into the middle from the outside…this is crucial for even crisping. The batter should be thin and flat and full of trapped air bubbles.

The only downside to this recipe is the wait. The longer you wait, the better they’ll be: it’s a pancake at 8 minutes (still a bit wet in the middle), but a galette at 15-20 (just a hint of moisture between two thin crispy layers). Flip only when the top is firm and dry, and the edges have begun to curl away from the griddle a bit, about 7 minutes. It’s stiff enough to lift an 18″ disc with one spatula.

…

It’ll take a little practice but by my third run I was making delectable ones. Even a friend who’d thought my bizarre 25-lb bag of buckwheat and olde-tyme preparation rituals were goofy had to admit this was damn tasty. And she agreed: no carb-crash drowsiness and very satisfying.

UPDATE: When I ran out of sprouted buckwheat and needed breakfast for the next day, I had no choice but to soak them only. I then prepared them according to Guyenet’s instructions and there was very little fermentation compared to when I used sprouted buckwheat (tiny bubbles of visible aeration, nothing like the above picture). I thought they would be indigestible and gross but was astonished that they were more delicious: the extra sugars not used up by the groats while sprouting carmelized on the griddle, making the galettes crisper, and the flavor was lighter and less aggressive. Despite the lack of air in the fermented batter, they whipped up and retained plenty of air with an egg.  I ate four and felt just as fit as with my sprouted ones.

My favorite way to eat these so far is with a bit of butter, some honey and wrapped around chunks of a creamy Turkish goat feta. Ga-zow.

We’re still too excited with them just with butter and syrup or honey, but they can just as easily be made savory with goat cheese and chives, Jarlsberg and olives, what have you. Today I was too full after three to eat a fourth, so I left it on the griddle to cool and it dried into a delightful cracker that went great with both sprouted chickpea hummus and chocolate-hazelnut spread.

It’s become a canard that the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity.” But the failure of my lifelong diet has given me a chance to discover things I’d never otherwise have left my studio to try.

What Kind of Times Are These?

The late great Adrienne Rich reads her poem “What Kinds of Times Are These?” Text transcribed from this reading; breaks and punctuation mine. Listen anyway, the delivery is great.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE?

There’s a place between two stands of trees
Where the grass grows uphill
And the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
Near a meeting house abandoned by the persecuted
Who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there, picking mushrooms at the edge of dread
But don’t be fooled
This isn’t a Russian poem
This is not somewhere else, but here
Our country, moving closer to its own truth and dread
Its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
Meeting the unmarked strip of light
Ghost-ridden crossroads, leaf-mold paradise.
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything?

Because you still listen.
Because in times like these, to have you listen at all
It’s necessary
To talk about trees.

Ω  Ω  Ω

Providentially, I discovered Adrienne Rich’s poetry in that video, posted in the comments on a blog, the day before she died. Though this is only my introduction to her, I hope she is an heir to Brecht’s impetus and voice. I found this video extremely invigorating, listened three times and felt a surge of hope for politically committed art—and then she died. If she has intellectual scions I’m not aware of them.

Some quick items in memoriam:

“Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power that holds it hostage.”

USA Today (Tomorrow, the World!) reminds us of her conscientious objectorship:

But when then-President Clinton awarded [her] the National Medal of Arts in 1997, Rich refused to accept it, citing the administration’s “cynical politics.”

“The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote to the administration. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

“Rich is one of the few poets who can deal with political issues in her poems without letting them degenerate into social realism.” —Erica Jong

LifeHackett

Photo: Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Have you ever found someone who’s a full-blown expression of your diverted dreams? Not at all moments in his life, but in the one where The New York Times saw fit to give him a richly deserved profile. The guy is probably the purest embodiment of Olive Green—however unintentionally.

I can’t say I met him, but I stood next to Hackett in a loud, darkened warehouse in 2005 or so. I was living in Bushwick, Brooklyn and going to a lot of the art/performance parties that started there after years of my own, smaller party in my warehouse subdivision (cranked drum & bass with air compressors & powertools). It was an exciting time, and as a metal artisan myself, Hackett and the Madagascar Institute were mythical forces to me. But I really had nothing to say: I was in journalism school and working full time, too tired to pick up a torch for weeks on end. Distracted from one love by another. Now that I have my own studio and the skills that stem from it, I’m strangely happy to see someone so dedicated to the mining and smelting of “obtainium” on his way to becoming a cultural icon.

We have a lot of differences, but the most personal things about us (as described in the NYT piece) are uncannily similar. His style is usually performative, where I’m more reclusive, and our politics are at odds. But our time in this world may be nigh, and it’s reassuring that I’m not alone so far east of Burning Man.

Sieben—Sanguine Consanguinity

In the United States, the right has talked about “culture wars” ever since we borrowed the word from the Germans. In Europe, the concept has come a long way from its 19th-c. roots of government vs. religion to suggest more of a guerrilla conflict of “folkish tradition” against an overweening liberal welfare state. The reactionary neoplasm loosely known as “neofolk” is the self-styled bard of this clash, obliquely nurturing the next generation of [color]-shirts.

Britisher Matt Howden’s one-man project, Sieben, has taken an unequivocal political stance within the European neofolk scene. Like the talented Karl Blake, he works as a hired strings (violin, whereas Blake is a bassist) beside musicians who flirt with the dangerous blood-and-soil aesthetics that were so seductive during the 20th century’s darkest hours. (Aesthetics the proponents of which, in our festering worldwide recession, are building their followings zealously in discontent as they did before, and always will.) Unlike Salvador Dalí, it seems unlikely that Howden will be seduced by the company he keeps.

In comments at the watchdog blog “Who Makes the Nazis”, the aforementioned Karl Blake speaks of his days touring with neofolk bands of questionable ethics. The information does not come out under interrogation, or “pulling worms out of the nose” (die Wurme auf die Nase ziehen) as Germans graphically put it. Ruing wilful blindness, Blake volunteered anecdotes over time which WMTN’s editor collected in the linked post:

“If I come out with “hate-speech against hate speech” it is my reactionary shift against all of that – I’ve got ‘Neo-poisoning’ if you like! I really am fed up with it and a lot of that is down to feeling thoroughly used and duped. I hold my hand up and say I enjoyed going abroad and playing all the time – and recording. Its my own fault that I took the path of least resistance and sat back and took the easy option of just turning up and playing bass and laughing at all the idiots with silly haircuts and anal-aryan uniforms.”

Howden won’t make that mistake. He’s an accomplished violinist who uses the instrument in much the “one man with processing” style ably practiced by Iceland’s Mugison or Finland’s Kimmo Pohjonen. His voice is finer and his lyrics more nuanced than many neofolkers bar Karl Blake himself (and Rome, about whom I wrote previously). And though Howden’s career took off through associations with Karl Blake and dicey Sol Invictus, he puts paid to any ambiguity in the song “Rite Against the Right” while acknowledging that musicality is an afterthought in much of the scene: “Licking the dregs of evil—it’s feeble…using symbols to shock because your music is cock.”

I’m not a fan of the purple cover featuring a prone naked dude and a big stick (erm), but it’s otherwise a fine album, like the rest of his releases:

Eating Babies

Sprouter in Bushwick BK, ca. 2005. Hanging from an overhead sprinkler line.

Wait until PETV (People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetation) gets a hold of me—I’m eating babies.

Sunflower seed sprouts, 3-day

As I write this I am snacking on sprouted sunflower seeds, after a breakfast of sprouted oat groats & buckwheat. Later I’ll eat some sprouted chickpea raw hummus. I’ll admit it’s extreme, but I’m excited to be back.

Above is the first iteration of the sprouter, tapped into the bathtub spigot and hanging from an overhead sprinkler pipe in a Brooklyn loft. Water filter, air filter, timer and grow light orbit an underbed storage box ringed with piping and stainless/brass misting heads. Neighbors brought strangers by at all hours of the day and night to see the spectacle and hear the hiss of the heads punctuated by the whingey snore of the drainage tube. It was a dramatic solution to a grave problem.

Marrowfat and Yellow pea sprouts, 3-day

In those days, Bushwick at Morgan Ave. was a food desert. The only fresh grocery was run by a transplant from Seattle, as more of a public service than an efficient business (he later cashed out to a Korean crew). I knew I was nutrient deficient when in the dead of winter when I took a shot of wheatgrass and got a high that lasted 15 minutes. That’s when I began researching sprouters.

Val Archer could have a better website, but nevermind that; she designed a great sprouter. I reinstalled it last week, plumbing it with 1/4″ OD icemaker line from my coldwater line under the kitchen sink. With seeds from Sprout People, my diet is again full of microgreens like broccoli, turnip and watercress, augmented with varieties of lentil and pea.  Sprout People have an astounding selection of affordable, turnkey sprouting solutions, like the hempcloth sprouting bag which, at $10, will do most of the things I have growing here, and much simpler. Almost as valuable as the sprouts is the water: full of enzymes, minerals and vitamins, it’s like a growth factor for anything with roots.

In Bushwick I used sproutwater on 5 habanero pepper plants (raised from supermarket pepper seed) and all grew to over 3 feet, bearing ~40 peppers apiece in a window with southern exposure. A tiny subtropical plant produced 3 flowers almost as large as it was.  Now that I have an outdoor garden I’ll be able to use the ~5 gallons a week it produces, and I look forward to exciting results.

Sprouter, 1-day. L to R: Black lentil, broccoli, turnip, black sesame, bl. lentil, Pardina lentil, sunflower seeds, oat groats & buckwheat, Bill Jump peas, Yellow peas and Marrowfat peas.

 

 

Murdochtopus

The phone hacking scandal of 2011 inspired MURDOCHTOPUS, but its 2012 birth coincided with revelations of News Corp. involvement in computer hacking, an FBI bribery investigation, the resulting depredations-defense legal fund nearing $1B USD…and Murdoch’s endorsement of Rick Santorum. Further, Murdoch recently tweeted his support for Scottish independence, possibly owing to the Murdochtopus’s striking resemblance to a bagpipes.

Fortunately the Murdochtopus is made of dyed, anodized aluminum, and therefore colorfast, weatherproof and a poor conductor of heat and electricity. As such it will doubtless survive its electrified kingdom crashing around it with such force that the rubble stops only at a sewer splashdown. Yet The Sun never sets on this empire, for its body is made from a streetlight reflector, disabled and torn as a refutation of the maxim: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

The lost foam-cast tentacles preserve the undulatory movements of the octopus, and the lost wax-cast face is that of the legendary mug at its most cheery and unflappable. As empires go, it’s a decent housepet—but you’ll never train it on newspaper.