Holidays.

The Holiday season is upon us like rigor mortis. It seethes incandescent under floorboards. It rolls up against our legs and pulls the hairs from our shins. We are torture victims after the war.

I did not purchase presents for people. I decided to print some photographs for some people, and drew small things on cards for others. Love does not need or want a price tag - nobody values anything that should be valued. Assigning a value to love makes it nothing at all. Our hearts can't handle the pressure, and love dies softly, without a sound. Our eyes closed, we wouldn't see it happening until it was already over. We mourn loudly because death comes so quietly, and never on such tiptoed steps as when love is killed by passionate greed.

The holiday season is one that parts of me love and that other parts of me hate. I hate the crass commercialism. I hate the expectation, the driving desire to let our greed and vanity overcome us. It is one thing when we buy presents for others, but it is another thing entirely when we let ourselves expect presents from others. There is a difference. It is too easy to become caught in the moral ambiguity of those two thoughts. It is too easy to not care, anymore.

What then, do I love about the holidays? Perhaps it is the opposite side of the spectrum - the holidays let us expect ourselves to do wonderful things, to help people that we would overlook on a normal day, to intervene where courage is a gilded lily. We are human and as such we are capable of everything. Good and Evil taste the same to our moral hunger and the voracious appetite that accompanies our actions. We think with our bellies and our hearts think the same way - it is no coincidence that our instinct to kill and fuck are so closely related to our instincts to eat.

It is that humanity, then, which I love so much. It is our instinct to do all of these things except those things that benefit others. We do those things because we can, because doing them makes us human. We help others because it is in that tenuous contact that we can remember what it was to be in the womb - to be one and all, to encompass the world when our heart beats.

There is no snow this year but when I look outside I can see the light falling down like frosted dew and I remember that there were years with snow, and years with you, all of you intact.

-Rich

love in an empty room

Spinach pasta with a mushroom tomato sauce!

This weekend I was supposed to be studying for finals. I did not do that. Instead I worked on a scarlatti piece and made food.

Stage 1: Pasta Sauce
handful of fresh basil
4 vine tomatoes
2 roma tomatoes
1/4 large white onion(peeled, minced)
3 medium cloves of garlic(peeled, minced)
1 can tomato paste
1-2 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste
sauteed mushrooms(see stage 2)

Stage 2: Mushrooms
1 lb chanterelles
1 large portobello cap
1 few drops truffle oil
extra virgin olive oil

Stage 3: Other stuff
1 large section of Kale(reduces down to a small portion)
1 ball of bufala mozzarella
2 packets fresh spinach pasta(in this case, linguini)

Stage 1:

The most important part of a chef's work? The love of cooking. Ha, no, actually it is the knife.



In this case, Henckels. Always sharpen your knives after a few uses, and store them separate from all other cutlery.

Take your knife and attack your tomatoes.



Your Vine tomatoes, above, and below your Romas.



In the picture with the Romas, you can see that I've already chopped my garlic(in reality, I had garlic left over chopped from last week's chili), so I am skipping that step for you. Chop the garlic, chop the roma tomatoes, and then Quarter the vine tomatoes. Don't go to slowly and don't press down - you want to reserve the tomato liquid as much as possible. Place the quartered vine tomatoes and the chopped/minced romas with the garlic, and chop your basil as well. Your first stage prep should look like this:



Throw all of this into a pot



and add some tomato paste and water.



more paste = thicker sauce. Add the paste in tablespoon amounts and adjust with water to get the consistency you want. It will get thicker as the tomatoes break apart, so don't worry if it seems a bit thin.

Stage 2: Mushroooooooooooms

As the sauce is cooking(turn the stovetop onto hi to bring to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer then cover the pot),

you will wash, remove the stem from, and then chop up your portobello cap



and then treat your chanterelles in the same fashion. Keep the chanterelle stems - they are meaty texture for your sauce.



Throw on some awesome music while you are at it, dammit.



And your mushrooms should look like this:



I did this all beforehand(in the pictures you can see the tomatoes still not in the sauce) but you don't have to. I just find it easier to get everything ready before I begin to cook.

Throw a pan onto the stove, head the pan FIRST then add the olive oil and a few drops of the white truffle oil. Then throw in the mushrooms and sautee the hell out of them. You want the smell of the truffle oil to lessen, as it gets pulled into the mushrooms and the mushroom liquid comes out. It looks like this:



right before it is done, at which point you throw the mushrooms(with about half of the liquid in the pan) into the sauce, at which point the sauce looks like this:



at this point, I removed the large quarters of vine tomato, put them in a bowl, and mashed the hell out of them with a knife and fork. I then threw the whole contents into the sauce again. Turn the heat up to about a 4-5 and leave uncovered. You want the sauce to start reducing. Throw in your chopped up 1/4 onion if you have it, and let sit.

Stage 3: everything else
at this point, you want to add a bit of oil to your mushroom pan and let it smoke a bit. Get your Kale and wash it and place it on your cutting board. It looks crazy. Like this.



Well, that is not crazy enough. Let's make it crazier. Chop it up into large chunks! Don't worry about it seeming a little too big. It reduces down a hell of a lot.



place the kale in your mushroom pan and cover with a lid of some sort to trap the moisture. As each batch gets smaller, add more and more kale until all of your kale is in the pan. Let the Kale wilt and absorb some of the flavor from the mushrooms - Kale is a wonderfully textural vegetable, and is basically a blank slate as far as flavor goes. It is not as difficult as some Spinach, and our pasta is spinachy anyways, which is a good complement. The kale, fully wilted, looks like so.




Throw on a song, and wait for your sauce to reduce. The song should be something like this,



and the sauce should look a little bit like this,



at which point it is pretty much done. You should take a large pot, add water with a handful of sea salt, and let it come to a rolling boil. Once it is at a rolling boil, add some pasta,



and cook until at the texture you want. remove the pasta and place in a container with a little bit of the starchy pasta water. Let the sauce continue to boil, and take your mozzarella,



and slice it into thin slices, maybe about 1/4" thick. set aside with the mozzarella water.

Yeah, then throw some pasta in a bowl, add the kale, pasta sauce, and some mozzarella. It should look like this:



and it will be DELICIOUS.

Till next weekend! I think I might cook something difficult, like short ribs with wheatberries and capers. Or I might get drunk at a party, so either way, someone is happy. And vomiting.

-Rich
the subtlety is reduced by two

The embuscade.

Everything around us is like an explosive. Everything quivers when something else moves - a movement here means a movement there, and it spreads out like a dying wave across white sand. Yet nothing changes. Nothing is altered in any way - no purchase is found on any handhold.

We are all waiting for something. Looking around us, the scenery shivers, and we know that behind the horizon is something amazing. It thrills us to anticipate that unknown thing and we expect to see it soon, if not now. Yet it never comes.

It never comes because it is lodged within us. We are the mountain and the shade. We are the bell that never rings. We are the mouth that never sings. Nothing happens in this world because we are too afraid to act - if we act, then we change and we die. It is our fear of death that makes us indifferent to life. All of life is death and dying, everything exists for only a moment. The person that we are now is not the person that we were a moment ago, and somewhere on a very spiritual level we understand this fact. It seethes under covers.

I look across the sea and smoke cigarettes and let the ash fall into small tails that linger on the legs of my pants. I watch the water lap gentle, full of everything but grace, and I wonder whether my life is just as plain, just as certain as the bottom of the sea.

These last few weeks have been hellishly difficult for me to deal with, in the sense that I don't particularly give a good goddamn about anything. Life is an expanding concentric circle. It plays a rainbow melody, even when I can only hear the reds and the blacks. I am certain that after my trip to Milan I will be recharged. I am certain that I will be different. I wish that I could be the same.

-Rich
tomorrow washes stars in black brigades

waking up.

I was standing and watching the creeping advance of cars outside when I heard that a friend's family member had died. There was a rushing sound of elevators in transit and then nothing. I stood at the very tip of a slate iceberg and when I looked down it was impossible to tell where the clouds ended and the water began. Everything eddies when we look at it from above, even people.

I remember watching my mother play with the telephone cord in a swank hotel room. The sunlight came in through a window blocked off by my father reading a newspaper that should have been important, and the television in the background played the kind of music that we have become accustomed to. The spring was dying outside and we ignored it.

When you do something like counting the curls in a telephone cord, eventually the act gains meaning. Buddhist monks use the same technique - they count the 108 beads on their cords as they chant their sutras and at some point the number 108 becomes the same thing as the number 1, and then numbers mean beads, and suddenly the world has become more precise. Even though everything is the same, it is that sameness which remains different - the thing that everything becomes is really the thing that everything is. It exists, always, like the world in a movie screen exists. It is there and reality attaches itself with hooks and ladders to it, and perhaps that means we can see it somehow. Perhaps when we count over and over, we are opening a door. This door is chased silver with acid etched patterns like the spots of a jaguar riddling its surface. It creaks on a single brass hinge tainted green with the patina of arrogance. It bleeds air where the frame meets frame. When people exist, when their frames meet the frames which enclose other people, the door opens and we discover that life is neither a lock nor a key.

I sat outside and a red car beetled past me. The road appeared as a withered branch and I reached out a hand to snap it off, to pull it towards me. I thought about the Casalinos and I wondered if in the perpendicular of the sky, whether their life was my life, whether my life was theirs, and whether this was the true face of violence - cold and laughing, voice choked sorrow by the wind.

-Rich
two out of three ain't bad