The CIA

I love to write about the CIA. My characters in Saigon: Too Big To Fail are up to their asses with spooks.  Some are, in fact, spooks themselves.  Others, including the protagonist, work for the Agency on occasion.

At the same time, I'm enjoying very much my slow read of "A Brief History of Seven Killings."  I say slow reading because it is, literally, slow reading.  So much so that the library demanded the book back and I had to wander down to the bookstore and actually buy a copy.  Which, since I'm admiring the work, is not the worst thing in the world.

So, given this background, you can imagine my amusement at a New York Times article titled "Topping studies with a dollop of athletics at the Culinary Institute of America."  If I was a better blogger I'd insert an excellent joke right here.  Instead, I'll insert a snippet from "Saigon: Too Big To Fail" taken from memory (because I have neither the time nor inclination to actually find the bit) and presented in the manner in which Marlon James presents dialogue in A Brief History ...

--Who you with?
--The SEC.
--The SEC?  Wow.  Alabama looks great this year.
--Not the Southeastern Conference, asshole.  The Securities and Exchange Commission.
--Oh.

I would urge you to enjoy it, in its entirety here.  I was then going to close by inserting the David Kinch sea bream sushi U-Tube video, but if you just scroll down a couple of posts you can find it there.

Adios Campagnolo

It's a black day at The Mothership.  Mark Bittman, one of my favorite food writers, is abandoning his post at The Times and taking a job with one of those companies that sends you fresh ingredients in a high tech box twice a week, plus recipes.  The twist is that Bittman's company (I'm guessing he has a piece of the action, and to that I say God blessim) is that it's vegan.  Vegan!

Here's a lovely photograph ...

Taken from an article in The Times last week titled "Mark Bittman's Top Ten Columns" or something similar, it's a photo illustrating one of the recipes from the column titled "Simple Stocks for Soup on the Fly."  The stock in question is herb stock.  Which sounds a little like something in a Bob Marley song.

Which brings me to this ...

Marlon James' book about political upheaval in late 70s Jamaica fueled, in part, by factional jealousies about Bob Marley's political leanings (or lack of same) and the CIA's need to stir every pot, even when the soup was cooking nicely by itself.

Da pot a cook but da food no nuff

What a book!  The bad news is that I'm only half way through and I have to return it to the library today or face a fine of a dollar a day.  The real problem is that the book is structured as a series of short point-of-view chapters, at least half of which are written in dense Jamaican patois.

I'm not talking the "Hey, mon" stuff--hey, that stuff is easy.  No, I'm talking deep patois.  I'm talking slang that if you google it you get nothing.

So it's a slow read.  But fabulous.  Immersive.  I think I'm going to have to buy it.

Everybody Wang Chung Tonight

If I had seven grand with absolutely nothing attached to it, I'd march down to Christies and bid on this.

Of course the Christies in question is in Hong Kong, so (since nobody wants to fly to HK coach) you have to add another seven grand.  So that's 14.  Although in this day and age it's the easiest thing to bid via the internet.  So we're back to seven K.

The full listing is here.  The piece measures just more than twenty-six inches square and would, when framed, fill a good bit of a wall nicely.  Because, hey, everything can't be four feet by five.

The piece is either a bit of a poem or a poem.  If my Cantonese is up to snuff it reads:

I do not belittle the moderns but I also love the old;
There are fundamental reasons why elegant and beautiful prose is sought after.

Nicely said, Wang Jiqian.  One more compelling reason to read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

And, of course, the numbers ...

When I wrote The Year of Magical Painting I got a bit too caught up in the numbers.  Which was a sickness I'm going to try to avoid this time around.

That said, I couldn't help but notice that I was averaging about one visitor a day on this site during the period in which I was posting nothing.  Yesterday I coughed up the most modest of posts--a hairball, really; nothing more--and I jumped to five visitors.  Yikes.

In its heyday, TYOMP was bringing in 10,000+ visitors a month.  Because I never attached any advanced analytics for measuring visitors, I relied on the quick snapshot that Google provides every blog and just took it at face value.  But I never really believed that many people stopped by.

I think I'm more comfortable with five.

A Mind Seems Like a Terrible Thing to Waste

Yesterday I blogged here for the first time in six seven eight months.  Sometimes you just have to let the fields lie fallow.  Plant some winter mustard to replenish the nitrogen in the the soil, nothing more.

Anyway, I think I'll come back.  Write some more stuff.  Enjoy the Knicks.  Certainly more than last year.

Check this out ...

It's the basis of my next Saigon: Too Big To Fail short story.

Go Blue

Did you see the Giants game?

I turned it off at the beginning of the 4th quarter.  To quote Carmella Soprano, "I got a bad feeling."

I hate those fucking Patriots and I sure as hell wasn't going to sit there and watch them win it with a 54 yarder with one second to go.  Reading about it is painful enough.

Forza Michael

Who knows how Michael Schumacher (the former driver, not my cat) is doing?  I hope well, but information regarding his recovery is sparse.  It would be fun if he knew that his son Mick just won a Formula 4 race.  This from the Euro version of ESPN ...

Mick Schumacher has won on his first weekend of German Formula 4.

Schumacher, the son of seven-time Formula One champion Michael, finished ninth on his German ADAC F4 debut on Saturday, before crossing 12th in the second race of the weekend on Sunday. For the third and final race at Oschersleben Schumacher lined up second on the reserve grid and quickly moved into the lead.

The Van Amersfoort Racing driver had to fend off a late charge from Australian Joseph Mawson after a period behind the safety car but held his nerve to finish with an advantage of half a second, clinching the first win of his single-seater career. The 16-year-old is fifth in the championship with 27 points after the first three races, but leads the rookie championship. Team-mate Harrison Newey, son of Red Bull design guru Adrian, is 12th in the standings after the opening weekend. 

Mick's father Michael, the most successful driver in the history of F1, continues to recover from the head injuries he suffered in a skiing accident in December 2013 and is currently undergoing private medical care at the family home in Switzerland.

Lovely.

I Love J.R. Smith

As, like, a son.  You know?

Me?  I've got two of the best kids ever.  And let's say one of them robbed a bank and ended up with ten to fifteen in the big house.  Or the other one put a space heater too close to the curtain and burned the house down.  With the cat inside!

If you're a parent you've surely had similar experiences.  And sure you get pissed, but they're still your kids and you still love them.  So what else are you going to do?  You drag your ass upstate every Sunday for visiting hours and pick her up when they finally let her out.  Hopefully sooner than later on good behavior.

I indirectly refer, of course, to my main man J.R.Smith and the bonehead technical he got in the last game against the Celtics for trying to knock Jai Crowder's head off.  It wasn't the technical that was the problem, it was the two game suspension that followed.  And now, absent Smith for two games on top of the season-ending injury to Kevin Love, the Bulls are having their way with the Clicks (Cleveland Knicks).

Did your kids do those things you mentioned?
No.  They did worse shit than that.
Ahhhh.

I employ the term Clicks because the Cavaliers employ three former Knicks of significance.  Smith, as discussed; Iman Shumpert, he of the other-worldly fade cut; and Timofey Mozgov.  Don't get me started on this.  I'm trying to have a nice day.

Check out J.R.'s tatts ...

I think you could argue that the two-game suspension was a bit harsh.  Just prior to the foul Crowder gave Smith a forearm shiver to the back of the neck that would have killed a lesser man.
Nicely said.  My expectation was one game, not two.
You know what they say about expectations.
I thought that was assumptions.
Possibly.  Either way, it applies.

Cast Aluminum Ant Farm

Now this is something you don't see every day ...

Idiot's Goodnight

Tomorrow is a black day for radio.

What's radio?
It's like a way to listen to music.
Like the internet.
Yes, except that it's not interactive.
No?
No.  But it's wireless.  And that's something.
Are there pictures?
No.  That's television.

I used the term broadcast television the other day and the person I was talking to didn't understand the term until I explained it to her. My friend Eric and I once made a pact that we'd never date women who couldn't name all four Beatles.

Growing old is hell.

Anyway, tomorrow night will be the last radio program of the famous free-form radio pioneer Vin Scelsa.  47 years of playing what he felt like on the radio.  Which, if you know anything about radio these days, is saying something.  The man's claim to fame, in counterpoint to everything else he did that was wonderful and lovely, was also a black day for radio.  Likewise the world.  Vin was on the air on WNEW, one of the great New York FM rock stations, the night John Lennon was shot and had the sad task of reporting it to the world.  Imagine.

The only time I ever won anything on the radio was on Scelsa's show Idiot's Delight. I don't remember what the question was, but the answer was Don Was, the music producer.  I got a ticket to a private screening of Backbeat, which was about the Beatles in Hamburg.  It sucked, but I got to meet Vin.

Tune in to wfuv.org tomorrow night at 8pm and listen for two hours.  I think he is the best thing that was ever on the radio.  He announced his impending retirement a month or so ago and for a while I was hoping his last song would be "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," because it's the best Bruce Springsteen song ever (Vin was a big Springsteen fan) and because it seemed to fit the occasion.  But he played it on his show two weeks ago and then, later in the show, when talking about the set, expressed some melancholy that he'd never play that song on the radio again.

At which point I got a massive lump in my throat.



Yoko takes a lot of shit, but I always thought she was a trip.  In the good sense of the world.  And John and Yoko really loved each other, which is its own thing.

Here's a live version of the same song.  You have to click through for some reason, but it's worth taking a quick peek to see John sing the song live, in a fuschia jumpsuit, in front of a bunch of rich people.  It's a bit alarming how much he looks like Bono.

The video reminds me of two things:  First, the famous Lennon quote about rattling your jewelry, which you can see here at the 1:00 mark ...



And second, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, the whole business of Mark Rothko giving his commission back to the Four Seasons when he realized that the people who'd be sitting there eating their Dover sole and staring at his work would also be rich people.  That's a story for another day, but if you simply can't wait, there's a great piece in The Guardian about Rothko's Seagram paintings here.

Back to Vin:  Live long and prosper, old friend.  And thanks for the gift.

For me this boardwalk life's through, babe.

You ought to quit this scene too.

--Bruce Springsteen