Monthly Archives: January 2015

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

I was very young, certainly less than ten years old, when I first discovered Big Ox. I have not heard of him since, yet I have never forgotten him.

Big Ox, if memory serves, was a cousin of Big Moose—even larger, even dumber (this was back in the non-PC times when it was acceptable for Moose and his ilk to simply be stupid, not dyslexic or misunderstood) and even bullier. Ox was posed as a larger threat than Moose, if such a thing were possible.

Something about the existence of a Big Ox captivated me. Perhaps it was the concept of a giant race of beings, all with “Big” in their names and named for large, hoofed animals. Perhaps it was the idea of a world outside Riverdale, a world populated by convenient cousins. There was Veronica’s cousin Leroy  for whenever a brat was required. There was Jughead’s cousin Souphead whenever a more youthful Jughead-type gag needed to be made. And there was Big Ox, for when Big Moose just was not big enough.

Big Ox. I wonder whatever became of him. Still standing on a suburban sidewalk somewhere, I expect, waiting for his shot at glory.

Food & Drink

My Best Bread

This is the soft white (mostly) sandwich bread I make every week for my family. I do sourdoughs and ciabatta and various French breads too, but this has been the staple for years.

2 teaspoons dried yeast

2 cups warm water

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons margarine

1/4 cup dried milk powder

1/4 cup dried potato flakes

5 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup wheat flour

Do everything in the same big mixing bowl. Dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the honey, salt, margarine, milk powder and potato flakes and stir until dissolved. Sift in the flours. Knead, and keep kneading. It’ll get sticky, then taper off to where you can handle it easily again. When it’s “smooth and elastic,” as the bread cookbooks say, leave it in the bowl with a dishcloth over it and let rise for an hour and a half. Punch down. Divide into two, and put into two buttered loaf pans. Let rise 45 minutes. Bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes or so.

I was given cast-iron loaf pans for my birthday last year and love them. They give the bread a crunchier crust.

Rock Gods

Rock Gods #324

We’ve written aplenty about bands which turn their backs on the audience.

LAst week, we couldn’t see a band for the trees.

It was a grand return to the farm where we once memorably saw The Shaking Quakers and other acts drawn from a religious collective. (When we have raved about this music, we’ve been accused of pimping for a cult, which has caused real complications for us and this publication, and no end of negative press for the bands.)

The management of the farm has turned over. The current occupants are religious as well, they confess, but of a more conventional and non-proselytizing breed.

But they’ve inherited the same spiritual desire to use the grounds of the farm to make interesting  sounds. Where the SQs once shook the barn the old-fashioned way, there are now speakers and microphones surreptitiously planted to broadcast, eternally, the noises of the barn itself.

Composers and sound engineers have been doing things like this for decades, in oceans and canyons. The new farm crew—for that’s their name, The New Farm—adds more human elements to the mix than the more purist and naturalistic found-sound collages, however.

A barn door has been designed to creak in rhythm. A chicken coop has been placed centrally, so as to sing lead. The hayloft is left open, causing certain proscribed wind effects, directed at windchimes and bell-bearing windvanes.

This is not a calm night in the country.You can’t hear much when it’s unamplified, but when it is there’s a whirl of sounds and beats and ca-ca-caws.

The New Farm Crew is at work on its first album, Sounds Like Barn.

Tonight: 466488 and Except Hydrangeas at the Bullfinch. We know, we know, it doesn’t add up… Shirt Special, covers, at Hamilton’s…An Evening With dark, death-obsessed Canadians Satuit Post and Nothrotherium at D’ollaire’s. Lighten up, already…

Archie

Riverdale Book Review

Archie Andrews Anagram #1

This was an amusing game my daughters and I played while having dinner at Claire’s Cornercopia tonight: create descriptive anagrams from the names of Archie characters.

ARCHIE:

American

Riverdale-raised

Clumsy

Heroic

Indecisive

Everyman

 

BETTY:

Beautiful

Enviromentalist

Truthful

Triangle-point

Yellow-haired

 

(More of these will follow in future posts.)

Music reviews

Scribblers Music Review

Jessi Teich, Twisted Soul. Expected that the “Cry Me a River” here would be the Julie London standard, but it’s the Justin Timberlake song by that name. It’s followed, naturally, but Teich singing (in “Someday”) that she’s made a deal with the devil. This is better-than-average smooth jazz, more sweet than sultry but full of intriguing mood swings. The title song is twisted indeed, as if “Fever,” jump-rope rhymes, cheesy disco rhythms and mainstream ‘50s club jazz were all thrown in a cauldron. Stranger still is “Diggin’ a Ditch,” a bluesy rap with calypso and David Lynchian moments.