the FDR to the Hutchinson to I-95 to I-91 to I-84, and so forth

Shouldn't we have left for Vinalhaven by now? I couldn't agree more, and we're finally leaving tomorrow. It's been a long time to wait for pine trees and granite and buoys bobbing in Penobscot Bay, but things have been complicated here.

Last year's post regarding the portable kitchen still looks pretty complete to me, so this year I'm thinking about the other things we drag all the way to Maine. It is a long way! It is 7 hours from Manhattan to Rockland by car, and no one comes 'round with a drinks cart.


Luckier travelers, from superbomba's photostream on Flickr.
Because of the timing of our drive and the ferry schedule, we spend a night in Rockland before we arrive on the island. There's not a lot to do there. There's a wine bar we like for dinner, and a really great little market for picking up things for the cabin at the last minute. There's an unusually attractive movie theater and there's the Farnsworth Museum, but after being in the car all day our minds are thoroughly jellied. The remaining source of entertainment: hotboxing behind the Navigator. Please don't knock on our car window, you'll startle us.


Just kidding, Navigator people!
Early the next morning we try to get on the first ferry out, with our tickets and our dog and our toothbrushes and our iPods and all the rest.


Fact: It is always raining when we leave Rockland.
Once we're there we spend most of our time on the deck, and we like to identify the birds we see. An Audubon guide is essential.


We see bald eagles, ospreys, kingfishers and woodpeckers. I intended to get some sort of insect guide this year because I always want to know what I am looking at and it's always a mystery. Can any of you recommend one?



Can't tell you about these; I need a book.

I'm in the market for a guide to mushrooms, too. I know that chanterelles grow on the island; our neighbors there mentioned harvesting them on their property, and many times I've opened a cookbook in the cabin we rent and had a chanterelle recipe clipping land in my lap. So far we've only stumbled across brightly-colored mushrooms that can't possibly be edible, so please light a candle for us or consult your Santería lady on our behalf, etc., because I WANT CHANTERELLES. Lovely frilly chanterelles, not something scarier that would require dialysis after dinner.

A sip of Laphroaig while walking in the woods looking for mushrooms would really contribute to one's sense of well-being, or at least help pickle one's kidneys as a precautionary measure. This tooled leather flask is made to order and has "a protective finish to protect it from drinking binges." I can't believe I don't have one already.


Flask, $60 from Moxie and Oliver on Etsy. It has taken a lot of willpower for me to not order it but I am saving my pennies for a new camera (maybe this one).
Vinalhaven in September is going to be cold in the mornings and evenings, definitely cold enough for sweaters. This is ideal vacation weather as far as I'm concerned. It's hard to look purposeful when it's 80 degrees.


Vladimir and Véra Nabokov on vacation, scanned from Stacy Schiff's Véra.
I recently came across this photo of Lady Rhoda Birley in her garden and it's to blame for the pile of brightly-colored cardigans I'm packing, and my fervent desire to wear them all at once.


Photo of Rhoda Birley from Juncus Effusus on Flickr. I first read about Birley at An Aesthete's Lament, where she was described as "an eccentric Irish beauty and talented gardener." If you know anything about her milliner, please speak up.
The fall APC catalog has me dying to wear a blanket, too.


I didn't want to spend quite so much cheddar on it, though, so instead I ordered a small Hudson’s Bay point blanket.


Hudson's Bay capote blanket, which I say is a jacket, $131 from Woolrich.

I am going to try to pin it together over all my cardigans with one or two of these (pins, $6 on Etsy from A Minor Thread), and if it doesn't look right we'll just have a picnic on it.

yes but what will we be reading?

I try not to bring too many books to Vinalhaven because I never get through as many as I think I will, but what if it rains?

Having finally finished Jude the Obscure, I won't feel bad if I only manage bits and pieces of this-and-that, and many of the books coming with me this year are well-suited for reading a few pages at a time:

• Pier Paolo Pasolini, Stories From the City of God. A collection of short pieces about Rome by one of my favorite filmmakers.
  
• André Breton, Nadja. Often described as a "Surrealist romance." I'm not sure what that means but I am hoping for a combination of Locus Solus and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. It can't possibly be that great so I'll probably be disappointed. Hence the other books.
  
• Robert Walser, Selected Stories. I don't know anything about this; I bought it solely on NYRB's description of Walser as "a Paul Klee in words."
  

• Cecil Beaton, Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1965-1969. I read The Unexpurgated Beaton (his diaries from the 70s and 80s) years ago and enjoyed it, and I'm sure I'll like this too. Beaton was very witty and he knew everyone. I was going to say he was bitchy but really it's just that he was so good at observing others; it's not his fault if at moments they were boring or creepy or interested in all the wrong things.
  
• Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours). Somehow I didn't know of this until I finally saw Withnail and I, and now I feel like I ought to have read it years ago.
  
• Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters. It's only appropriate to bring this along; I didn't realize it until very recently but Bishop spent time on the next-door island of North Haven. In a Paris Review interview from 1978 she explained that she was drawn to the island:

I sometimes feel that I shouldn't keep going back to this place that I found just by chance through an ad in the Harvard Crimson. I should probably go to see more art, cathedrals and so on. But I'm so crazy about it that I keep going back. You can see the water, a great expanse of water and fields from the house. Islands are beautiful. Some of them come right up, granite, and then dark firs. North Haven isn't like that exactly, but it's very beautiful. The island is sparsely inhabited and a lot of people who have homes there are fearfully rich. Probably if it weren't for these people the island would be deserted the way a great many Maine islands are, because the village is tiny. But the inhabitants almost all work—they're lobstermen but they work as caretakers . . . The electricity there is rather sketchy. Two summers ago it was one hour on, one hour off. There I was with two electric typewriters and I couldn't keep working. There was a cartoon in the grocery store—it's eighteen miles from the mainland—a man in a hardware store saying, 'I want an extension cord eighteen miles long!'

We have reliable electricity in our cabin but the caretaker is always a lobsterman.


Vinalhaven viewed from the North Haven casino. A casino in this context means a place where people gather before and after dinghy racing, not a garish gambling hall filled with dazed, hippopotamus-shaped tourists clutching plastic buckets of coins in their sweaty paws.

yes but what will we listen to in the car?

I made muxtapes for you, reader, but then muxtape shut down. So I made mixes for you at 8tracks.com but — are you sitting? standing then? — they are only 8 tracks each. You and I both need more than that, so there are three of them: the A-side, the A-and-a-half-side, and the B-side. 8tracks.com is not the most comfortable way to listen to music, so if you send me a nice email, I will happily send you AN ACTUAL CD. IN THE MAIL. All these songs, on one CD, for you! I will try not to get crumbs and dog hairs in the envelope. Naturally this offer is limited to a reasonable number of persons, to be determined by me. I have maybe four readers (five or six if I publish something that mentions boobs or peen), so there shouldn't be any problem if you want one.

The A-side starts out very calm, as is appropriate for getting off of the FDR and through all that bullshit right after it. We will be sipping coffee and munching breakfast from Sunny & Annie's (Avenue B at 6th St.), and making sure little so-and-so is cozy in the backseat. Mr. Banquet doesn't like The Fall as much as I do so there will be no Fall early in the morning. He likes Joy Division more than I so there's some of that later on. The A-and-a-half-side gets a bit shambolic but it won't make anyone feel super-edgy, I don't think.

NYC to Rockland, A-side
Serge Gainsbourg, Scenic Railway (from Confidentiel)
Orange Juice, Untitled Melody (from You Can't Hide Your Love Forever)
Jeremy Jay, Oh, Bright Young Things (from A Place Where We Could Go)
Young Marble Giants, Brand - New - Life (John Peel session, 1980) (from Colossal Youth - Expanded Edition)
The Jam, That's Entertainment (demo version) (from Snap!)
David Bowie, Drive In Saturday (from Aladdin Sane)
Pylon, Stop It (from Gyrate)
The Monochrome Set, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (from The Independent Singles Collection)



NYC to Rockland, A-and-a-half-side
Bill Callahan, Day (from Woke on a Whaleheart)
Mrs Pilgrimm, Drop My Name (from Mrs Pilgrimm)
Devendra Banhart, So Long Old Bean (from Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon)
Lee Hazelwood, After Six (from These Boots Are Made for Walkin': The Complete MGM Recordings)
The Fall, Iceland (from Hex Enduction Hour)
Au Pairs, It's Obvious (from Perfect Unpop: Peel Show Hits And Long Lost Lo-Fi Favourites - Vol 1. 1976-80)
Jeremy Jay, Airwalker (from Airwalker)
Orange Juice, Three Cheers for Our Side (from The Glasgow School)



NYC to Rockland, B-side
Buzzcocks, Boredom (from Spiral Scratch)
The Fall, Fiery Jack (from 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong (39 Golden Greats))
The Kinks, Wicked Annabella (from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society)
Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Seal of Seasons (from Unicorn (Expanded Edition))
Joy Division, Transmission (from Peel Sessions)
Smog, Ex-Con (from Red Apple Falls)
Johnny Thunders, All By Myself (Live) (from You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory)
Antony and the Johnsons, Fistful of Love (from The Lake EP)

well-fed animals

Those are exactly the type of animals we like to make a fuss over when visiting a country fair.


These photos are not from the same fair I've posted about in the past — that was the Durham fair, which happens September 26th - 28th this year. These are from the Chester Fair, which is even smaller and more rural. It's been taking place since 1877.


Photo from the Chester Historical Society, via the via the fair's web site.

We arrived in Westbrook on Saturday morning and went for a hike at Salt Meadows, which is part of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge.


Salt marsh, Westbrook CT

Salt Meadows is a stopping place for many types of migrating birds, and visiting naturalists record their sightings in an observation log.


Too bad they weren't all together.

We went to the fair on Sunday morning, and the first thing we encountered was a picturesque cattle barn filled with picturesque cows.




There were also plenty of goats (both in a petting zoo and in competition), chickens and rabbits.




These two thought my camera was examining their new egg. And they were totally right.




Piglet, born July 28th.
There was a mesmerizing horse pull competition, in which pairs of work horses pull a sled loaded with cement blocks. The horses are often ready to go before their harness can be linked to the sled, and have to be led back to it in a tense circle.

pancakes for the skinniest skinnies

It has come to my attention that some of you could eat a plate of pancakes with no harm to your adorably scrawny physique, so I am taking the unprecedented step of publishing one pancake recipe after another.

Last week we saw Jeremy Jay at Mercury Lounge, and then on Tuesday we saw Jarvis Cocker at Terminal 5. They were each in their own way "as charming as the top of an apple-tree above a wall,"¹ but the sometimes-Mr. Tiny Banquet, who went with me to both shows, and who is himself tall and skinny, couldn't help noticing the similarities in body type. We know Jeremy Jay eats something once in a while because he said he dug John's Pizza earlier that day, but I suspect that Jarvis — a generous soul who did two encores, and who gave his glass of wine to an audience member who insisted it was her birthday — might actually be giving away the small amount of food that ends up on his plate.


Jeremy Jay, above left; Jarvis Cocker, above. This might seriously be the last time I have to apologize for crap iPhone photos because my real camera is in for repairs RIGHT THIS MINUTE.
Maybe Jarvis is just shake, shake, shaking the weight off. It's difficult to find a video of him dancing with decent sound and image quality and he's pretty subdued in the one below, so you'll just have to take my word that he's a hard-working man. Sheffield's own James Brown, in a way.


Fat Children.

The next concert we're planning to go to is a performance of Scott Walker's recent work at the Barbican this November. Scott is not going to be on stage because he's a reclusive genius, but if he were, he'd be tall and skinny too. He's gained a couple pounds since his Walker Brothers days but not many, and surely he could put away a plate of pancakes with butter and syrup without busting the seams on his pants.


I am not in the habit of flying across the pond for a single show but I can't explain what happened; I read about this event when it was announced and the next thing I knew I was looking at a seating chart. There were only two available seats next to each other in the stalls for the last night and I couldn't not take them.



The recipe below for crispy cornmeal pancakes is based on this one for blueberry pancakes, which I wrote about way back in the olde-timey days of 2006.

If you live or vacation in a place where people keep cows, do try to get fresh, local butter for your pancakes. It's the right thing to do.




If you are not on tour right now shaking your peaches all over the world, then I recommend the Swiss yogurt from Gregory's Coffee: low-fat yogurt, skim milk, cold cooked whole oats, and some chopped apple, banana and almonds. It's not as good as these pancakes but I think it's a decent alternative, and it doesn't smell weird like egg whites on whole grain toast.

crispy cornmeal pancakes

serves 2

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal, preferably stone-ground
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tbsp. sugar
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vegetable oil, plus a little more for cooking
butter and maple syrup for serving, and sliced strawberries would be nice too

Sift the flour into a medium-sized bowl and stir in the cornmeal, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Beat the egg with the milk and the teaspoon of oil and stir this mixture into the dry ingredients with a fork until everything is thoroughly blended.

Heat a good, heavy pan or griddle (cast iron is ideal) over medium-high heat and grease it with the additional vegetable oil. (The instructions in the recipe linked to above are spot-on about using a paper towel to coat the pan with just enough oil so have a look at that).

Ladle or spoon the batter into the pan to make pancakes as big or small as you like. For classic, generous pancakes, use about 1/4 cup of batter for each. Let the pancakes cook undisturbed until small bubbles form on the surface and then flip them over with some confidence. They should be golden brown on each side and crisp at the edges.

Serve the pancakes with butter and real maple syrup, not the cheapo maple-flavored syrup. If you are trying to impress anyone (including yourself), heat the syrup until warm. Sliced strawberries are nice on top, too.

-----------------------------------

1. Firbank, Ronald. Vainglory. New York: New Directions Books, 1986.

A tale of two Seventies

In which we resume our occasional series of reviews of out-of-print cookbooks:
New York Entertains
by the Junior League of the City of New York (1974).

How was 1974 for you? What were you into? I wouldn’t be born for another two years, so I have to take the August 1974 issue of Viva magazine at its word:


Women are into:
total feminism
male nudes
pubic hairstyles
hash smuggling
great new fall fashions

I started collecting old issues of Viva after reading this appreciation of it at Vmagazine.com (no relation), which I urge you to take a look at if you have any interest in magazine publishing, or in a brief period of U.S. history during which even prime-time teevee stars weren't too uptight to pose for photos shoving their hands down the pants of a new friend.

Aside from the fascinating topics listed above, the August 1974 Viva also featured reviews of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and Lou Reed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, an interview with Arianna Huffington, age 24 (then Arianna Stassinopoulos), and a profile of WNEW-FM DJ Alison Steele:


“She smokes tiny cigars, dismisses inconsequential people, and embraces maître d’s in restaurants, where she expects the best tables by virtue of her fame. When they are not given to her, she moves to them, glaring at the waiter.” The tiny cigars make it ok somehow, don’t you think? They’re perfect for her.
Meanwhile, the NYC Junior League published a cookbook to raise funds for its "community program." According to their website, their work in the Seventies focused on job training for women inmates, but for some reason the book doesn't even hint that the Upper East Side hostesses who contributed menus for "celebrating after the opera" and "[the] next time your husband asks you to entertain visiting businessmen" would ever have anything to do with Rikers Island jailbirds.


A detail from the inside back jacket of New York Entertains
by the Junior League of the City of New York, illustrated by Patricia Whitman.
My readers abroad might not know that in the States, the Junior League has a reputation as being an organization for brittle young socialites wearing pearls, a sense of entitlement, and a terrifying back-stabby gleam in the eyes. In London they might be identified as Sloane rangers, but the British have always allowed their upper classes a bit of kink, whereas Junior League girls are expected to have ice water running through their veins.

It won't be a surprise, then, that in 1974 they favored centerpieces that required a little too much effort.


And yet the recipes aren't as WASPy as I expected. Apparently NYC Junior League girls didn't share their New England comrades' affection for potato salad with mayonnaise deluge (and flavorless grocery-brand paprika sprinkled on top, if there was any gathering dust in the summer house cabinet), incompetent drunken clambakes, grilled cheese sandwiches on white bread, and canapés involving Ritz crackers, all washed down with truly grownup-size gin and tonics made with the second-cheapest gin available (often Five O'Clock, quite possibly picked up at the vile state-run liquor stores on I-95 in Vermont on the way to or from Maine).

In Memoirs of a Beatnik, Diane di Prima recalled a WASPy school friend's family she'd met in the early Sixties:

Her parents who had no more money than my own, lived beyond their means in expensive Darien, and shopped in a Gristede's where everything cost three times as much as it did in the local supermarket in Brooklyn, but where Tallulah Bankhead could be seen buying brandied peaches. Tomi's mother Martha was a handsome little woman in her mid-forties, Anglo-Saxon and proper, grim and laconic, a woman who did what was expected of her, and took no pleasure in it. It was a well-known—and frequently discussed—fact within the family circle that she was frigid. Her father was a florid Latin type, half French and half Italian, who drank emotionally, spent too much money, and was openly and despairingly in love with his wife. Their dogs were mangy, but thoroughbred; their heroes F. Scott Fitzgerald and Harry Crosby. Their house was much too small, their barn too big; they read The New Yorker and the Sunday Times, lived on peanut butter sandwiches and scrambled eggs, and drank endless martinis in front of the fireplace in their dark, crowded living room.

One thing we might take from all this is that the classics of WASP gastronomy are fundamentally ill-suited to appear in cook books, and that is because they are embarrassing for several reasons. Stumbling across a recipe for an authentic WASP lunch or cocktail happening in a Junior League fundraiser cook book would be like stumbling across a photo of a grown man in diapers.

So, instead we get modestly stylish suggested menus for structured social occasions: An Easter Luncheon for Six, Derby Day Luncheon for Sixteen, A Theater or Benefit Supper for Twelve, The Bicyclers' Back-pack Picnic for Four.


The menu for the committee lunch for twelve (i.e., fundraising, but "lovely enough to serve as a bridesmaids' luncheon"): vitello tonnato (veal braised in white wine, with a sauce of Italian tuna, capers, anchovies, mayonnaise and lemon juice), leeks vinaigrette, sesame seed toasts, apricot ice, and chocolate chiffon cookies.


The menu for the bicyclers' picnic ("Everyone is biking now, more than ever") includes a chilled lemon soup, salad niçoise, sesame bread sticks wrapped in prosciutto, radishes and carrot sticks, and fruit and cheese for dessert.



If you are curious about the caviar soufflé from the menu for a sans souci lunch ("simple but chic"), note that it calls for four ounces of caviar to serve two people. Hey, some landlords are ok with you being a month behind.


The crêpes Gravetye Manor sound much better: apple, bittersweet chocolate, and cream.


I was going to try that one, but I ended up making the Dutch apple pancakes instead. Yes, I know the part of the recipe with the instructions has a stain on it. It's not mine.



I couldn't bring myself to use 4 tablespoons of butter to sauté the apples so I used about 3, or a little less. That was plenty, even for sautéing in two batches. I used a salted, cultured butter and I added approximately 2 teaspoons of finely chopped fresh rosemary to the cooked apple slices, which I made in advance and set aside in the refrigerator. (If you do the same, take them out of the refrigerator about 15 minutes before you are ready to cook the pancakes. The pancakes don't take long to cook, and if the apples are still cold when you begin they might not be heated through by the time the pancakes are done.) Also: I used the lesser quantity of sugar, I added a pinch of fine sea salt to the flour, and I used Negra Modelo beer.


My camera is on strike so we'll have to make do with a couple of hazy iPhone photos.

We ate the pancakes for dinner with tofu sausages on the side. The pancakes were terrific, very light and crisp around the edges. I'll definitely make them again, but next time I'll slice the apples very thin. I sliced them thinner than the recipe calls for and they were still too clunky, which made the pancakes clumsy to flip (too much weight, poorly distributed) and to eat.


I doubt the Viva crowd made pancakes often, unless for a really special morning-after breakfast. One thing everyone could agree on in the Seventies, presumably: the right capes and tweeds can be hot shit.

cape and tweedy skirt by Luba, Viva magazine, August 1974

Previous posts in this series:
Corinne Griffith's Eggs I Have Known and Mona Bazaar's Cookbook in Solidarity With the Symbionese Liberation Army;

Helen Gurley Brown's The Single Girl's Cookbook

YES WE CAN sell all these cookies

What are you doing reading a blog when all the cool people are at the bake sale? Come down to Hanger Bar on East 3rd between B and C for cookies, cookies, cookies, focaccia, empanadas, spring rolls, and just about anything else you'd want to munch on with drinks. Get there before 8, but if you want an empanada you'd better get there sooner because we're eating all of those.

hey hello, is there anyone here?

It's mercifully easier to end my unscheduled blog-hiatus with a brief announcement rather than an epic post about what I've been up to during the past six months. So, I'm inviting you to a bake sale.



It's this Saturday at Hanger Bar (3rd Street between Avenues B and C) from 1 pm until 7. I will be contributing herb focaccia and maybe some cookies too, if I can really get my shit together. If you can't make it to 3rd and B, go to MoveOn.org and see if there's a Hungry For Change bake sale in your neighborhood.