Music piece updates — first in an endless series

Part of my goal for finally starting this was to create an overall centralized location for links to my writing as it appears in various places — most notably of course over at the All Music Guide, where so far there’s no way to search by reviewer (and lest you thing this is more ego slosh fest activity on my part, I’ve actually been asked about that more than a few times). I’m hardly going to backtrack and link every review I’ve done — quite a few I want to have buried — but from here on in I’ll be linking to new reviews there as they appear. I don’t always get feedback from others on my work there so frankly I’d enjoy the criticism, however sharp (in fact, especially if it IS sharp — how else can I improve, after all!).

This said, right now I’m going to link to all the pieces I’ve published so far in a new(ish) outlet for me, the OC Weekly — while I had a couple of irregular pieces with them far in the past, I’m settling in well with Dave Segal as music editor and we’ll see where things go from there. Two new pieces just appeared today so I’ll be linking to them, but starting with the older ones — I should note I’m pretty terrible with headlines, BTW, with the only one that’s actually mine being for this first article:

All of This and Nothing — a preview of a Psychedelic Furs/Fixx/Alarm package tour which I turned into a larger meditation on the nature of such tours and how they end up deflating me more than anything else.

One Door Closes, Another Door Opens — another show preview, this time of the indefatigable Cult, who have had one of the weirdest careers around (appropriate enough for one of the most unstable bands around).

Today, meanwhile:

A review of Turbonegro’s Retox — fun album from a fun band, won’t change the world but a familiar enough treat from a reliable source.

Still Waters: Dan Marriner plumbs the depths for his personal and political songs — a piece I’m quite proud of since I like paying attention to good local stuff as I can find it, and Dan’s both a talented guy and a thoughtful one; this story barely scrapes the surface of what is one of the better interviews I’ve ever done. Be sure to follow the link to his Myspace page to give some of his songs an ear.

So again, all thoughts and comments and criticisms of these and any other future pieces not only welcome but more than welcome!

…and that’s why I work at a library

Which is not, in fact the conclusion to a sentence beginning “I’ve adored books and reading since I was two or so,” but it could be.

At the risk of basically sounding like in every one of these introductory posts that all I do is praise my parents (but I have good reason to!), my obsession with always having at least one book to hand somewhere at any given time started because of them, and did start very young. My parents have always been enthusiastic readers and I grew up aware of having a good collection of books to hand, covering a wide variety of subjects, all very understandably reflective of their interests. If you looked at the main bookcase now, you could pretty easily tell the division between their sections — my mom has the endless number of books on English country gardens (along with plenty of Rosamunde Pilcher books — one day I’ll figure out what the exact demographic is), studies of ancient Egypt, the amazing kid’s book collection and a now huge Tolkien section (more on that later!), while my dad’s section almost groans with Civil War studies, mountaineering books, histories of submarine warfare and studies of professional cycling. This scratches the surface in both cases but you get the general idea.

There are also the areas of full crossover, though, and I think that is almost more telling. My parents’ understandable love for Hawaii, where they met and where my sister was born after my dad returned there for work in the early seventies, is reflected by many different books on the islands, and our upcoming return to Oahu in October will mean I’ll be poring through them quite a bit when I go home next week. Meanwhile the art collection is quite striking — I almost forget how well informed both my parents are in the realm of fine art in general, and if I had had more patience growing up to look through their books on French painters in particular I’d probably have a much more grounded knowledge in that field. Novels are more scattershot, I think there used to be a larger collection of them, but not as many are maintained these days.

With this as a model — allowing for the fact it was a different but not necessarily smaller collection in my youth — I was used to books being around, being happily read and talked about, and so forth. Whichever was the first book I read I’m not sure, but I have very clear memories of enjoying both Goodnight Moon and the not-as-well-known-but-should-be Small Pig, with the latter’s adventure to the big city — and then sadly being caught in cement that he thought was mud, the poor bugger (but he was of course eventually freed) — being I guess my first adventure story I read. Not much changes over time in terms of my reading, even if it’s more about Tamerlane sticking the heads of prisoners of war in cement instead.

My mom specifically remembers when she stopped reading to me in bed at night — I was three or so, apparently, and she was reading some stuff from Paddington books, but skipping over parts she thought would be too complicated for me. As I was reading along with her, I eventually started asking why she kept skipping so much, leading her to conclude that it might be simpler to just let me read away on my own. Which I probably wanted regardless — distracting me when I’m trying to read is one of those instances where I get rather annoyed, and say so, to this day, and while my mom was hardly distracting me I was much happier just taking it at my own pace. I still have my first ever bookcase to this day — it holds old videotapes and some excess DVDs now — but like some other pieces of furniture that have held up through the years just fine, it puts me in mind of the past in an understated way.

Meantime, reading at the local library — whereever I was living at at the time — became just as crucial to me as looking through the burgeoning one at home. The Coronado Public Library pretty much was home away from home for many years, and as I grew up and discovered more authors through it, I started investigating the hitherto mysterious tall book stacks, imposing and heavily laden. But I must have gotten well used to it because by the time of my senior year in high school I was working there as a page — my one actual job during high school! — and from there it was an easy step to working at one of the libraries at UCLA all four years I attended there as an undergrad. Meantime, I’ve been at my UCI job now for over ten years, and to say I’ve taken advantage of being able to read as well as borrow via interlibrary loan practically anything that takes my fancy is an understatement.

Going on further about ‘the joys of reading’ in close detail with reference to every instance of it in my life would take too long and probably sound just like so many others’ stories so I won’t go into that here, at least not now — maybe later in fits and starts. But to get back to something I mentioned earlier, my mom’s conversion to all things Tolkien has been one of the more interesting family stories of recent years. She saw the first film when it came out, loved it (and loved Orlando Bloom in particular!) and asked me, “So how does it all end?” I pointed out she could read it for herself, and so she did…and now she and I have downright similar collections. I might be one of the few people in the world who can buy a Tolkien or Tolkien-related book for one’s mom for birthdays or Mother’s Days or the like and not only have it accepted but absolutely loved. I’m all for that!

Food, glorious food

And I can use that subject line in part because way back in eighth or ninth grade I was one of the lighting people on the high school production of Oliver! way up in Saratoga Springs, New York. That was also the time I think was the conclusion of my first real cooking bug, though I don’t think the two events were related. As far as I know.

But on the larger point — as you can see in the Flickr photo collection to the left, I’ve quite some patience for taking photos of meals I’ve eaten and loved over time, and it’s doubtful that streak will end. It’s all seemed to have had an impact — one friend today said she wanted to fly over from the UK and live in my kitchen, another insisted that had she known of my abilities I would have been held hostage to cook for her and her husband forever. Flattering to be sure though I always tend to look at my end results askance, wondering if I can do better.

This said, however, it’s the latest act in my own personal development of a sense of taste and cuisine, which I should note is far less elevated than some folks I know, and I’m admittedly jealous of it. Some dedicate themselves fully to an excellent meal and a specific joy in the act of detailed cooking every time, and that to me is quite a standard to live up to. In my case, it’s a bit more chaotic, but hopefully with some good end results.

But to step back a bit — as noted, when I was younger, after quite simply happily eating away whatever was given to me and developing fairly common 1970s kid food tastes (I sure loved my Spaghetti-Os), I first got a sense of a cooking bug in the latter part of the decade, though small things and side sources. For instance, more than a few Star Wars tie-in books, while of the generic ‘fun activity’ sort, had these random recipes in them to make — create your own big ol’ Death Star cookie! (Which I did, and it was damn delicious.) Meantime I adored Cheerios (still do, frankly, though I haven’t had breakfast cereal as something regular to eat in the morning for over a decade and a half) and ending up sending away for a little recipe book that they put out on things to do with said oat cereal. This led to a legendary incident when, after creating a seasoned version of Cheerios, coated with various salts and spices and the like, I went one today to put them in soup and was puzzled to find the bag in the pantry gone. I asked mom, she knew nothing about it, and I had to have been very confused the rest of the day. Then dad came home and over the course of dinner he mentioned that he was really surprised to find that the Cheerios he’d had that morning for breakfast tasted really strange in milk. Exactly why he passed over the huge box of Cheerios for the small plastic bag of them in the same pantry remains a mystery.

Now I have to say that I wasn’t a stellar eater through and through at this time — I remember my first encounter with green salad and thinking that raw tomatoes were of the devil (a stance long since rectified). I do definitely remember thinking that peas, lima beans and above all else the horrible squishy mess that was boiled zucchini were all designed as punishments for my hubris, though I doubt I put it in those terms. But surely an annoyed deity or fate had set it up so I had to eat them — which I did very grudgingly. (And don’t get me wrong, I love my mom — a very solid cook all around and I had to have learned a lot from her over time, more than I truly understand, but I still don’t quite get why she thought BOILING zucchini was a good idea. Anyway, I digress.)

But somewhere towards the end of middle school I stopped actively cooking as much and, quite frankly, from high school through to the early part of this decade my cooking skills as such were minimal or atrophied. I much preferred the standard options available — dining out, ordering in, or ‘cooking’ in the ‘so you heat the sauce and then soak the pasta’ sense. I had the occasional moment, I’m sure, but mostly I was slack.

What changed was a combination of things over the past few years — getting the place on my own, working in gardens on the UCI campus with close friends, a growing reflection that my diet wasn’t the best. My efforts were sporadic rather than sustained, though, and ‘heat and eat’ was still a standby. But then the best possible thing happened — at the local restaurant I’d grown to love, the Avanti Cafe, they’d set up a community supported agriculture project with the farm who supplied them with their fruits and vegetables, further south in the county. On impulse, but guided by a good spirit, I felt that this was exactly what I needed to get me out of a bad rut — by ordering a lot of random stuff in advance and then by getting it, it would force me to try new things, get me to see what else was out there. While I wasn’t vegetarian, I had no problem cooking vegetarian at home, and ultimately I thought it couldn’t hurt at all when it came to diet and health.

It’s been almost a year now and it was definitely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made — not least because now I know how to work with zucchini properly, and a number of friends are to be thanked for it. What I have also realized, though, is that I am very fortunate with this pursuit — I can and often have taken several hours to create a meal, working on it carefully rather than rushing through it, nibbling on things to tide me over just enough, and so forth. But this is the luxury of the solitary dweller — there’s nobody else (and especially no kids!) to provide for, often in a more immediate way in comparison.

So with that thought in mind, I do hope to use this blog in part as an extension of my interest in sharing photos and talking about recipes and food not to show off or to indulge in ‘food porn,’ but rather to inspire, to encourage. Not everyone has the same luxuries I do — I do after all live in a state noted for its excellent year round harvest season, for the variety of its food products, and that just scrapes the surface, and I do have the money to be able to spend regularly on both my biweekly basket and the numerous other elements needed to try various recipes that catch my interest. Still, there is no reason not to try and encourage others, I feel — the photos aren’t there to simply glisten in the eyes of others, but to serve as notice: “Hey, it’s not that hard to do this. Give it a whirl and see what happens.”

So more as it comes. Or rather is made and eaten.