Magic number: 89532
Magic word: roadster
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 #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…
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.)
For Tomorrow We Shall Die: Diary of a College Chum #274:
The club guy eats at Francie’s Diner.
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.
Friday, January 16, 2015
Magic number: 12238
Magic word: watusi
Bacharach & David at the End of the Century
You know how many cool versions of Bacharach/David songs there are from the 1960s? Several zillion. From the ‘70s? Still oodles. From the ‘80s? Enough. The ‘90s? A severe drop-off, but those few are dark and distinctive:
• Back to Back Bacharach, Casino Royale (1999). A Herb Alpertian lounge go-go act. Irresistibly oddball, like a costume party put-on.
- That’s New Pussycat, Various Artists (2000). Indie surf and punk acts turn Bacharach & David tunes into instrumentals that might have co-existed (in a different ‘60s genre) with the pop originals, but didn’t. There’s some brilliant interpretations here, from Connecticut’s own Mill Valley Taters doing “Walk On By” to two different versions of “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” by Deadbolt and Mummy the Peepshow.
• What the World Needs Now, Various Artists (1998). Power pop bands from the Big Deal label take the songs out for a spin. Splitsville’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” redrawn in a litany of pop styles from Merseybeat to ELO, is leagues beyond the rest, but The Absolute Zeros’ “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me is killer enough.
- Meow, “This Guy’s In Love With You.” From the album Goalie for the Other Team (1995). Morose, droney reading of the classic. Dark and mysterious as the original, an inspired update for the early emo era.
Rock Gods #322: Adventures in Our Little Music Scene
Noa & The Hark missed their Thursday Bullfinch gig a couple of weeks ago due to a ridiculous misreading of the calendar. They had even renamed themselves New and the Yeark especially for the occasion. They promise not to be late Monday for the next holiday gig they could finagle. They’ve been added to an already packed bill and will be going on at 5 p.m.
Why make room for them at all? Besides them being a fairly decent band, we mean, with shiny new equipment. They’re related to some high-and-mighties at City Hall or Town Meeting or somewhere. They’re ambassadors for town/gown amicability. They’re poster children for a cleaner club scene.
If they’d ever bother to show up.
Tonight: Bliss Kook at the Bullfinch, with a new drummer… Through With You, all break-up songs, at Hamilton’s… Undue Bill & the Money in the Banks, seedy R&B, at D’ollaire’s…
Riverdale Book Review
I’ve never had a problem with Archie as an adventure hero. The old Life With Archie comics were some of Stan Goldberg’s best work, and Pureheart the Powerful put a neat mythic superheroic spin on the mortal tribulations of the traditional Archie & the Gang. The R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. spy stories and the early Archies band inadvertently fighting crime were good-natured parodies of U.N.C.L.E. and Monkees. I even dug the “New Look” Archie stories of the late ‘00s, based on non-graphic Archie novels written by Michael Pellowski and published in the early ‘90s.
But there were some adventures Archie ought to have avoided. I speak of:
- Archie’s R/C Racers, a global race of remote-controlled toy cars.
- Archie’s Adventures in the Wonder Realm. “After hooking up Archie’s new console, Dilton’s invention brings the games to life by sending the gang inside! Little did he know they would end up trapped! Now it’s up to Archie to save them! Will he rescue them in time or its it ‘Game Over’ for his friends?”
- Archie’s Weird Mysteries. Scooby-Doo made its TV cartoon debut in 1969, one year after The Archie Show ushered in a new era of kid-friendly Saturday morning programming. Thirty years later, in 1999, it was Archie who was beholden to Scooby-Doo. The comic book version of the series, drawn by Fernando Ruiz, never really found itself.
- Archie’s Clean Slate. Some of Al Hartley’s longform Christian adventures were easier to take than others.
- Dilton Doiley Dropout. What smart kids will do to be liked.