new jewelry

This is the start of the second necklace with the Chinese millefiore. Here, they're 8mm coins rather than 6mm rounds. The crystals are a mixed color lot of 8mm rondells that I bought as Swarovski off a slightly iffy dealer on eBay. I don't trust a Swarovski seller who doesn't provide the color names. But the lot happened to be an excellent match for this project. I'm planning to make this to about 24" and then to do dangles of the remaining 6mm round millefiore and some 4mm Swarovski bicones. Luckily, I finally found the baggies with my sterling earring findings and my sterling headpins, so I can do the dangles and also make some earrings.

I did a sorting-out today and chose what I'm bringing on Saturday. I always want to throw everything in front of customers, but I decided to get a grip on myself and limit it to about a dozen necklaces, a dozen bracelets, and a dozen earrings in each price group ($12, $22, and $35). If by some strange chance I sell out, I'll take my hundreds of dollars and go home happily. I'm bringing my best wire-wrap pieces except for the jasper one, which Jannah decided to buy after she saw the fuzzy photo. She also wants the turquoise.

It looks like I'm going to have to rejoin Facebook for the Examiner gig, so I'll also use it to publicize my jewelry. I don't mind doing the social networking thing, but I have some real issues with their privacy policies, or lack thereof. Every day I keep reading about information they gather and share and what gets leaked, and it makes me kind of glad that I quit it (this was about a month ago, during the first two days that I was off the venlafaxine). But I'm going to need it to drive people to my Examiner page, as well as to my jewelry sales, and also to contact some of my old blues musician pals to set up interviews.

more foot boo-boo/new blues gig

I had my doctor look at the foot yesterday, which I'd thought was mending well. Turns out it wasn't infected but did have a piece of glass in it. He couldn't remove it easily himself, so he sent me to a podiatrist who had an office downstairs. Luckily, the podiatrist was able to see me right away, and he removed the glass (which was a slight about a quarter in wide and half and inch long), and then put in four stitches because the wound was kind of deep. There was a very painful needle involved, a shot of local to my heel. The bright side was that not only was the doctor very good, but he had a nurse/assistant who was very sweet and a real nut for Swarovski (I noticed a lovely pendant she was wearing, which turned out to be antique Swarovski, and we were off!) So my foot's all bandaged and wrapped, and actually hurts a lot less. But I have to go back a week from Friday and get my stitches out.

It looks like Ive gotten myself a gig with Examiner, which is sort of an online entertainment guide written by freelancers they call "examiners," such as "Brooklyn Nightlife Examiner" or "New York Theater Examiner." I am, of course, to be "New York Blues Examiner." I get paid according to how many people I drive to my page there. I have to officially register in the next couple of days, send in a bio and photo and get detailed instructions about posting. It seems like they're looking more for events listings than for reviews of shows that have passed, so I'm planning to do a lot of "what's coming" and also interviews with local musicians. If I can get some CD labels to send me promos, I'll also do CD reviews. It shouldn't be too time-consuming -- I wrote a 300-word sample piece for them at 4:00 AM, and was offered the spot twelve hours later.

bananas, jewelry, epiphany!

I've been stashing about-to-turn bananas in the freezer and today I took three and made banana frozen custard (sugar free). I've probably only made cooked-custard ice cream a couple of times before, and certainly not recently. I may have overcooked the custard a mite, and possibly it needed a touch more Splenda, but it came out pretty well and tasted rich. Also, it scooped soft right out of the freezer; I haven't yet been able to get the hang of a sugar free sorbet or sherbet that scooped soft without some thawing. I might try only three eggs next time. Here's my recipe, adapted from one on the Food Network website by Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (they used to have a great show called Two Hot Tamales, and now Susan is on Top Chef masters):

FROZEN BANANA CUSTARD (6 servings)
- 2 cups milk (I used 1/2 skim, 1/2 whole)
- 4 large eggs
- 1 cup Splenda (the original recipe calls for a cup of brown sugar, and you might want to add a tablespoon of that or honey to deepen the flavor; or else, maybe an additional tablespoon of Splenda)
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- 3 large, ripe bananas, peeled

In a medium saucepan, bring the milk just to a boil over medium heat. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly.

In a mixing bowl, combine the eggs, sweetener(s)and vanilla. Stir 1/2 cup of the warm milk into the egg mixture, then pour all the egg mixture into the pan with the milk. Cook over medium low heat, whisking constantly until the mixture thickens slightly and will coat the back of a spoon. Do not allow to boil.

Mash the bananas in a large bowl, add the warm custard, and blend with an immersion blender until smooth. (Original recipe involves a food processor, but I now use the immersion blender whenever possible, because anything else has to be hauled down from somewhere, and I'm already hauling down the ice cream maker.) Cook the custard to room temperature then process in an ice cream maker according to manufacturers instructions.

***

I use expensive organic health-food-store vanilla because I love vanilla, and I do not truck with artificial vanilla. This recipe would probably work well with a number of different fruits, although I'd have to test or research (= look at other recipes) proportions. Probably also good as chocolate, with some melted baking chocolate or cocoa dissolved in water over heat (the latter is what I use for chocolate sorbet). I would also try just using an extract, vanilla or almond, and throwing in some nuts or bits of fruit. And I imagine that if you make this up to the point of adding the bananas, and instead pour it over some cooked rice and raisins, dusted it with cinnamon and put it in the fridge, you'd have a lovely rice pudding. (I actually still have, and still use, my mother's covered Pyrex casserole that she used for rice pudding. I use it for a lot of stuff; it's one of my favorite pieces of cookware.)

Today, I cleared most of the non-jewelry matter off my jewelry table. What I said to Barry was, "I need space to spread out so I can sort jewelry for this weekend," since I'm going to sell at that crafts fair in Chelsea. But I kind of knew without knowing that it also meant I was going to make or start making some new pieces to really put myself back into the jewelry head. I unpacked some of what I needed to start up again, although I was unable to find my sterling headpins, ear wires, or chain, which pretty much meant I couldn't make any earrings right away. I actually do have some of those items in gold-filled, but sterling is pretty much where I live. I went to eBay and ordered some of that stuff, plus some more sterling wire. I'm being very positive that I'm going to earn some money this weekend. Since I have a skizillion beads of all types, I can pretty much get away with buying nothing but wire and findings for a year. But it never works that way, since I always find new beads to fall in love with and to be inspired by.

I hadn't made anything for a year, easily, but I decided very quickly that I wanted to do some wire-wrap, maybe an endless necklace long enough to slip over the head (I've done a few in mixed pearls, both on sterling and on gold-filled, that were really pretty). I thought about maybe using a string of black keishi pearls I had (these are known as cornflake or potato chip pearls, rough and flat and bumpy, but with a lot of colorful surface, almost like raggedy-ass coin pearls). But then I was looking at a bag of Chinese-made millefiore (in imitation of the Italian ones, which are very expensive). The Chinese ones are actually quite pretty, and a big advantage for me is that I can use them a whole lot more lavishly that I could with real handmade Italian glass beads. (I actually have some of them, too, but they are generally reserved for starring roles in mindblowing earrings.) So I had an adorable strand of mixed-color Chinese millefiore in 6mm rounds, and pulled out a few colors of 6mm Swarovski bicones (and one color of 6mm rounds) that would work them, and started to work. I took what I did tonight and took a shot at scanning it with my new incredibly wonderful Lexmark 2670 3-in-1 (I love this printer so much it's not funny), and this is what I got:



I hope you can see this decently well since I'm still getting acquainted with the scanner and photo-editing software and uploading to Blogger (the image I'm seeing the the preview screen seems to bear no relation size-wise to the image I edited).

I've been designing and making jewelry for about eight years by simply making whatever I feel like, or something that seems basic and/or saleable, or using a new technique I spotted in a bead magazine, but I've always thought that I didn't have a particular style or look to my work, that there wasn't a trademark or something that set my work apart. But it came to me tonight: duh, what about wire-wrapping? I love doing it, I've done tons of it, it tends to be what people admire the most, and some of the more elaborate stuff looks like nothing else I've ever seen (hope this not very good photo shows something):



(This picture is kind of fuzzy if you zoom in, sorry.) What that is is a very simple wire-wrap necklace, like the one I'm working on, of big red jasper beads, but with other beads dangling off the wire loops in between the main beads. The beads that dangle off are mostly tube cuts of leopardskin jasper and ovals of brown/black obsidian and I'm not sure what all else. But I included that picture and a couple of others in an e-mail to some friends to tell them about the sale, and if I can find where that puppy is, since I'm pretty sure it's not sold, it's now spoken for. Such is the power of wire-wrapping. Plus, if I decide to be the queen of wire-wrap, that can include natural stones, pearls, crystal, glass, and pretty much anything else; it can also be necklaces, earrings, bracelets, anklets and rings. Trademark piece would have to be the Y-necklace:



(Sorry about all the crap in the background -- this was just a test of photographing jewelry with the digital camera, some months back.) This piece ought to sell well, since Everyone Loves Amethyst. I must have originally intended to hang dangles between the links, since I put nice big soldered rings there, but I guess I decided that the amethyst was too pretty to gussy up, beyond the Y-connector with the little flower.

So I think that's what I'll do on Saturday: bring only wire-wrap and brand myself that way. I will have business cards by then; a friend turned me on to an excellent deal at Vistaprint).

And in case any of you are in or around NYC, or have a friend here who's dying to buy some jewelry, the sale is is 306 Eighth Avenue (between 25th and 26th Streets), from noon to 7:00 PM. Free to the public, and $10 of the vendor fee proceeds will be donated to Cultivating Our Sisterhood International Association, Inc. (COSIA). "At COSIA, we develop supportive networks that are not limited by age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion; utilize these networks as resources to produce affordable events and programs that promote team-building and the pursuit of personal and professional life goals and objectives; and support through fund-raising and volunteer activities socially-conscious initiatives and programs that benefit girls and women from underserved communities."

the mysterious foot boo-boo

Early this morning, I remember shift in bed and sliding my foot down a little, and then -- terrible pain and a bleeding foot. Very scary. I have a small gash right on the edge of my heel. We got the bleeding to stop and Barry cleaned it with witch hazel and foot on neosporin and a bandage. But it hurts like hell to put any pressure on the heel, and I have a feeling I'll be more or less off my feet for a few days. My best theory now is that when I stretched my leg down the bed, I inadvertently kicked a cat (all three of them, at times, sleep at our feet), and she swatted out and a claw accidentally caught my foot. None of our cats would scratch us hard enough to cause this injury; our cats, at their angriest (with each other or us), might hiss and air-swat in our direction, and they rarely get angry unless, for instance, we rub a belly that doesn't want to be rubbed.

Anyway, this is freaking me out a bit, and I'm watching very closely to see if the pain lessens or if there's any sign of infection. For me, the absolute scariest thing about diabetes is the possibility of losing my personal mobility, my ability to get around on my own, which is why, ironically, I'm always ultra-careful about my feet. Even when I've been lax with blood testing or diet, I've always been extremely good with my foot care, though not 100%. What I'm supposed to do on a daily basis is wash, dry, examine, and moisturize my feet. I do examine and moisturize daily most of the time, and probably do the extra washing (besides showers) three or four times a week.

I've had some kind of skin problem on the ball of my right foot for over three years. I had thought it might be a recurrence of the psoriasis I'd had some years earlier on the side of my heel, because it looked and acted like psoriasis (hard dry skin that cracked). But when I was diagnosed with Type II, my doctor said that it was an opportunistic fungal infection that develops when blood sugar is high, but I have lowered my sugar, seen two podiatrists and one dermatologist, and three years later, it was still there. Recently, I started treating it more intensively with an over-the-counter diabetic foot cream, and it finally seems to be going away. This was part of the reason that I went all summer without wearing sandals last summer, which was murder for me even though I didn't go out much. I look forward to wearing sandals all year, though I know that these days it requires being extra-attentive about my foot care. So, after walking all over the place in sandals for two days this week with no problem at all, I cut the hell out of my foot in my own bed. Shows you how much I'm in control of my own life.

A new friend of mine, whom I met through my blog and then hers, has been making me think a little more about the lack of spirituality in my life over the past number of years. It's not so much anything my friend has said about me but the example she's shown me. And it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to be involved in any organized religion. Actually, another friend, Jannah, belongs to a Reconstructionist Jewish shul in New Hope, PA, and that's the only organized religion that's appealed to me in years. It's kind of like Reform Reform Judiaism: very gender-neutral, and very inclusive (for instance, they don't really embrace the "chosen people" concept). It's also very, very community-oriented; when there was terrible flooding in the area, the congregation was really, really there for anyone who needed help.

Unfortunately, although you'd think we have every possible kind of Jew in Brooklyn -- no Reconstructionists. There are only two Reconstructionist congregations in New York City, and they're both on the upper west side of Manhattan. I've been in e-mail contact with someone who's trying to start something in Brooklyn, which might initially be a group that floats to different shuls with Recon. rabbis guest-conducting services. But it looks like this activity will probably center around the Park Slope neighborhood, which is not that far away, but is in no way my neighborhood. Unless something is a little closer by, it's not my community; Brooklyn is not solidly car-culture, like some other places. A lot of people have cars, but a lot can and do do without (like us). It does shrink the "neighborhood" a bit, to the size of what's accessible by walking, or a short bus or subway ride. If I have to ride the bus 45 minutes to have coffee with someone from my shul, that's nice but it's also not a nearby network for me. And quite frankly, Park Slope is a little on the yuppified side for my taste. (I did live there for about nine years, in an area that was then a little iffy but is now cleaned up, but the more "desirable" part of the Slope was always too rich for me.)

Barry and I had a great day yesterday -- went to see a matinee of A Behanding in Spokane with Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, and Anthony Mackie (I had scored some ultra-cheap and really excellent seats). It was my second time seeing Walken on the stage, which was a real treat. It was a beautiful day, so I decided to wear one of my new Mission Canyon getups, my new sandals and more of my jewelry than I generally do (meaning earrings, a necklace *and* an anklet). After the show, we went down the the Village and had a bite at our favorite Italian cafe, then smoked a j*int and strolled around. Poked our head into a favorite jewelry store, C'est Magnifique on MacDougal Street (also home to one of our favorite store cats, a tiny three-legged tortoiseshell named Fazool who is well over 20 -- the store guy thinks 23-plus).

Somehow, we ended up putting deposits on two pieces of jewelry, for no particular occasion. (Given that I have made some 95% of the jewelry I wear over the past 8 years or so, I'm trying desperately to feel entitled to my new ring.) I spotted a 14K ring with a really lovely sapphire cab set in a high pronged setting, with three one-point diamonds on either side of the shank, very simply. It's a much higher setting than I usually wear, meaning that I like rings which are closer to my finger, but what's so beautiful about this ring is that the high setting allows the light to really get around the stone and show it off, and it's a lovely Ceylon blue color, not one of those navy-blue sapphires that's so dark it's practically opaque. Barry is actually more of a jewelry-wearer than most men (for which I am truly grateful, since he understood when I began spending so much time and money on making jewelry), and he favors silver, turquoise, and Native American. He spotted a bear-claw and turquoise cuff that was too small for him, but then chose a stamped sterling cuff made by a well-known Native American jeweler (last name is Bill, I can't remember the first, but he's the son of a slightly more famous Native American jeweler).

So he's going to have lunch with his friend Felix tomorrow at the Italian cafe (we go there together, and also separately with other friends), and is going to go pay off the balance on our jewelry and I'll get my ring tomorrow (his cuff actually needs to be made slightly smaller). I actually think this is the first gold ring I've gotten since my wedding band, which was from The Clay Pot (which is in Park Slope, and is very famous for artisan-made jewelry and wedding bands in particular. (I took a quick look, and they no longer sell either of the rings we wear -- his is white gold in a Celtic design, and mine is simple connected leaves in 14K). I'm not a metalsmith so I don't really make rings, though I know a lot of people are making wire-wrapped rings now and I'll probably learn that at some point. So I have a beautiful new ring which was not horrendously expensive ($275). We're going to call the new jewelry "a gift from Poppy," meaning that we'll pay for it with some of the money Barry's dad left him. His folks were always generous with us, and did things like bought us a new bed when we moved out of our original apartment, and paid for the catering at our wedding, and it's kind of nice to feel that they're still doing it. I think they're also buying us a new air conditioner for the bedroom this summer.

OK, here's some truly good and amazing news: I've lost 10 pounds, in a little over a month. (The first ten always goes fast, and after that, I can lose around 7-9 pounds a month if I behave myself with food.) This puts me down to 170, after a few years of being around 180-185. I know numbers are just numbers, but it's one of a number of ways that I can measure how well I'm taking care of myself. I'm trying to test my blood three days a week (I was getting sore fingers from testing every day, and the doctor said I didn't have to test that often). This morning's fasting number was 97, and unfortunately, I fell asleep after breakfast (I woke up with my foot injury only 3 hours after I'd gone to bed), and so I slept through the two-hour post-prandial test time. But I tested anyway, four hours after breakfast, and it was 117, which looked good to me for a double-post-prandial. (Had to order breakfast in, since I couldn't stand up to cook, and had a white-Western-with-cheese omelet wrap -- I asked for cheddar, but ended up with American somehow. And then a navel orange.) I don't mind eating a certain amount of fat in the morning because I know it keeps me feeling full. And there's healthy stuff we can order in for dinner around here -- there are a couple of good kosher vegetarian places (we're neither kosher or vegetarian, but their meals are clean and fresh and wholesome).

My sister-in-law Elise forwarded me some info about a crafts sale in Chelsea next weekend that's looking for vendors. I'm checking to see if they provide tables; if they do, I think I'll cough up the $50 fee and see what I can sell. I was looking through some of my work last night, because I'm sending some earrings with Barry for our favorite waitress at the cafe, and also was going to bring some to my GYN today, before I had to cancel the appointment due to the malady known as Boo-Boo Foot.

My last couple of sales were not successful. I did one last year at the Hudson Guild; after taking a quick peek at my jewelry, the supervisor there was glad to take my table fee, and so I tried to sell hand-crafted jewelry in a room full of people selling old crap from their closets. I had some friends come down, and *still* didn't make back my $25 table price (I would have made a profit if I had sold even three pair of my cheapest earrings). Last summer, I did some outdoor selling In Pennsylvania, at a benefit for the Israeli Red Cross (I had met the folks who do the local fundraising for Magan David Odom at one of their fundraisers at my friend Jannah's shul). This was a cool event because it was a Jewish motorcycle rally. Jews on hogs! rabbis in leathers! "Hillel's Angels"! But the only vendors who really got much traffic were the food vendors; none of the rest of us did much of anything. Also, Barry and I had been staying with Jannah, and in the rush to get to the shul on time, had neglected to put on sunscreen, and this was an outdoor event, and there were no canopies on the tables, no shade. As a result, I got roasted to a fare-thee-well. (Recently, I was shopping at our local Rite-Aid drug store, and grabbed up an impulse item at the checkout counter: a key chain with a little bottle of SPF 30 attached to it. Don't leave home without it. It might prove to be the best $2.25 I've spent in quite a while.)

I got my hair cut on Tuesday, my first venture away from long grey old-hippie hair in about a dozen years (though once in all that time, I went to a very pricey salon and got it nicely layered, though mostly I just trimmed my own ends). There are a bunch of hair cutters and salons around here that all charge about the same, $35 for a wash and cut, so I picked the one that looked the most modern. And oy vey, what a nasty stylist I got! If there's such a thing as good "chairside manner," she don't got it. Instead of saying something like, "I know you wanted to have a very short top, but I'd like to try something a little longer on top first and see if you like it. I think it might be more flattering", what she said was (and imagine the brusque and heavy Russian accent), "Your hair too thin on top, I cut short, you see scalp." I let her cut the sides and back short and leave the top longer, but I felt like she hated my guts for wanting something wash-and-wear, low maintenance, and not dyed. She let me know that she believed women should not wear their hair grey until age 60, and gave the distinct impression that there was something wrong with *me* for not wanted a hairstyle that required a blowdryer or straightening iron or curling iron. I mostly got the short, messy style I wanted, but the beyotch insisted on plastering it down with gel before I left, which was way ugly. When I got home, I immediately got into the shower, washed out the gel, then toweled it and put in a dab of a much gentler styling product, and worked it with my fingers. Nicer.

It got me to thinking about the *good* experiences I've had with hairdressers and haircutting, having worn short hair for most of my life. I really love to hair a hairdresser who will cut for my face and my lifestyle (LOW MAINTENANCE HAIR), and really listen to what I want, and really talk to me, and make suggestions based on his or her eye and experience. It made me think that I might want to learn to cut hair, and I actually made inquiries at a few cosmetology schools. I have an appointment to tour one on Monday, which I now think I'll cancel. Unfortunately, the mysterious foot boo-boo made me think hard about any job that would require me to be on my feet a lot; even if I lose more weight, I'm not sure I can stand for hours and hours the way I used to. (I've learned this the hard way at some standing-room concerts over the past bunch of years.) If I were a haircutter now, I could easily lose four or five days of work over something like the foot boo-boo.

I'm thinking more now about making a new effort to show and sell my jewelry. If I do the consignment route, at least it would be full-time and I could keep up with the shops a little better (it is often hard to collect money from stores in a consignment arrangement). Or else I'll find a couple of good an appropriate indoor flea/crafts markets (not having a car, I can't really provide my own table), so I can only work events where there is access via public transportation and I don't need to carry more than my wares, a hand mirror, a calculator, etc. I think I do good work and haven't yet found the right outlet. I'm also feeling very motivated to start working again. I packed away my jewelry stuff a few months back after our landlord bitched about the clutter in our living room; I had been working at a bridge table with materials spread all over the top, and plastic shoeboxes of beads stacked all around and under. I always have insane amounts of materials, I guess the same way any artist would want as many color and medium options as possible. I just hate the idea of wanting to make something and not having what I need. So we packed it up to show a fairly empty table top, and still need some storage solutions so I can work without cluttering things up. For instance, I could use some shelving behind the table to store materials, and maybe some drawers for finished work. And a file cabinet for the cartons of bottlecaps that are also in this area. Basically, I don't want to unpack anything until the clutter is a little more under control and I actually have places to put things away, rather than just leaving them on the tabletop. But I really do miss making jewelry.

new old music

Barry is usually a little behind me as far as internet stuff goes, since I got online way, way early in the game, being I was a university employee. I was on the internet before there was such a thing as a graphical browser. Like, no pictures. The web was e-mail, newsgroups, and texts with links to other texts, all on a monochrome screen. Big excitement when we got color displays with what we called "Mozilla." Apple computers had graphical interfaces earlier, albeit crude ones, but we PC people had to wait a bit.

Anyway, the one thing Barry somehow was able to figure out and hook up for us, which had baffled me for years, is downloading t*rrents. I still don't understand it all, but I know we have software that can open .rar files, and there are m*sic bl*gs all over the place (though Bl*gger recently evicted a ton of them), and I thereby can acquire and reacquire some awesome music. A lot of it does involve albums that I already purchased in one or more other formats. I no longer have any of my vinyl but now I do have some of the albums that I bought on vinyl, and on cassette, and on CD. I have finally started using the new mp3 player I bought myself a few months ago, which is something I enjoy when I'm walking outdoors, which I'm now doing again. (It's a pretty little Sansa that holds four gigs and has a decent display -- bought it new on eBay for about fifty bucks. I am very loyal to Sansa (my first little 512mb mp3 player was a Sansa, and it was a real little trooper), as well as very loyal to not-Apple. I have never visited the iTunes store, because my understanding is that you have to download their special software in order to download anything there, and I'm not clear if an iPod will accept anything from your hard drive that was not acquired through the iTunes cabal. I know that Apple is the computer of choice for art and film and graphics people, but I also know that it's always been more expensive than a PC, and there is less software available for it, because it is closed architecture. (I swear, I've seen Triumph of the Nerds about 20 times. It's an amazing and funny documentary from PBS, about the development/invention of the personal computer, and the people who did it.)

So...I've had some real flashbacks, both with what I had loaded on the mp3 player and what I've acquired on line the past couple of days. It was my first time loading the new mp3 player, and the capacity was so huge compared to the 512mb that I just kind of threw everything on. And didn't even fill it all the way. I still haven't listened to it all the way through, and haven't set it to Shuffle, so I'm getting everything in the order I threw it on. (Plus, there's a good amount of stuff on my hard drive that I've never listened to yet, since my old drive crashed last July and I've had to reload CDs and recollect various songs all over again since that time.) For instance, a few months ago, maybe more, we had seen a really good TV show about Latin music, and I had downloaded all kinds of Fania All-Stars and Celia Cruz and Ruben Blades, so this was part of what was thrown on the mp3 player. And then that old reliable stuff that's my favorite poppy or catchy or maybe even (horrors!) commercial and well-known. Every hard drive I've ever owned has hosted Bob Seger, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Robert Palmer, Warren Zevon, Randy Newman, The Roches, Michael Hurley, the Grateful Dead, Taj Mahal, Steely Dan...like that. Some of the things that joined my hard drive in the past couple of days are some old Donovan albums, some of which I haven't heard in many, many years; two live shows, Rolling Stones in 1989 and Elvis Costello in 1983 that I can't wait to hear, since between storage tragedies and hard drive crashes, I lost all of my Elvis Costello b**tlegs, which will make me cry if I think about it too hard. I got a Georgie Fame album and a John Prine album and two albums from the Wild Magnolias, a New Orleans mardi gras band, funky as all get-out. I have very broad tastes in music -- maybe you've gotten that idea -- and I've always heard things from New Orleans and influenced by New Orleans. But since I've started watching Treme on HBO, I am ALL about New Orleans music.

Lily and I have been e-mailing about music a lot lately, and I made the comment that even though I'm not too crazy about 80s music myself, I appreciate that she's into it, because I appreciate anyone who digs into music outside their age zone. It's a sign of taste and intelligence and thoughtfulness. Then she was silly enough (JOKING!) to ask me what *my* favorite decade of music was. I don't exactly know how many words or pages my reply was, but it was LOONG. Maybe I'll copy some of it into here, but it was an essay, I tell ya. But being so refocused on music over the past few days, I think I can say that overall my favorite decade is 1976-1985, or thereabouts. If we have to extend it to 1986 to get Paul Simon's Graceland in, so be it; I can't always remember exact years of albums.

Strangely enough, I can't seem to find my Extreme Music E-mail to Lily anywhere in my sent items. Weird. A long part of it was kind of a history of my relationship to and taste in music.

Ah. Found. I'm not usually one to share private e-mails, whether it's one written by me or someone else, but I'm just going to snip out the section which is just me going on about music, because I'm too lazy to write it up from scratch a second time, and if I did, it would be less thorough and much less good. Nothing private here:

When I was a kid, it was pretty much only the Beatles for me, with a little Rolling Stones and a little Cream, and Creedence, and Crosby Stills Nash and sometimes Young. My family listened to a lot of show music and "American songbook," so I was also into that. (Mostly of the "American songbook" albums we had were Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. I wasn't too big on Frank back then but adored Ella, still do.) When I was around 9, I saw Donovan on The Smothers Brothers Show, and was immediately smitten in all ways. This both makes me very old (Smothers Brothers were cancelled in 1967, I think) and explains why I was so jazzed to meet him at the David Lynch thing. That may have been the highlight of my Tarcher career, along with the great sales of 2012: I finally met Donovan, and we were introduced by David Lynch! (Donovan was cuter 40 years earlier, duh. He was supposed to be kind of the UK Bob Dylan, except I think he sings better.) (No, Jennifer Juniper is not about me, though I used to wish it was, and I believe that cool electric guitar on Sunshine Superman is Jeff Beck). Donovan was the first big concert I ever saw, in 1971 at the Garden -- that was also the first time I ever smoked p*t.

Then this weird folk music thing happened to me in the early 70s. My dad's parents, for some odd reason, had an old banjo, which they gave me, and which I took to summer camp, where I knew I could get lessons. I knew nothing about banjo or banjo styles, but it happened that the banjo instructor there played old-timey rather than bluegrass. Old-timey music, also called old-time or stringband music, is pre-bluesgrass country music, based on things like Appalachian fiddle tunes (which in turn were based on English/Scots/Irish tunes). The banjo is played differently than in bluegrass; it's hard to describe w/o showing but I'll try. In bluegrass, the banjo is picked very fast, and the tune is somewhat syncopated. In old-timey, you need a long nail on the second or third finger of your right hand, and the string is struck downward with that nail. Old-timey artists sometimes played solo, but more often in stringbands, which might include fiddle, banjo, bass, guitar, mandolin, etc. I've attached a recording of one of my favorite long-gone old-timey artists, Charlie Poole (Ragtime Annie), who was popular in the 20s. Yes, I spent a lot of my teens listening to that old, scratchy, weird shit. Plus a little bit of old jazz, like Jelly Roll Morton, and a few acoustic artists like David Bromberg. Not to mention some local NYC stringbands like The Delaware Watergap and the Wretched Refuse String Band.

The weird thing is that, at least around here, the people who were rediscovering and playing this music were mostly Jewish. My banjo teacher, who was in the Delaware Watergap, was "Hank" Sapoznik, a cantor's son. (He later started playing klezmer and using the name Henry rather than Hank.) The Wretched Refuse was populated by people like Richie Shulberg, Alan Kaufman, Michelle Weiss, etc. (Alan Kaufman was my boyfriend for a while; turns out he and Barry grew up in the same neighborhood and knew each other slightly.) The two bands were very different: Hank and his band were very serious historical recreators, and the Wretched Refuse were goofballs who often made up their own funny words to songs. The former friend I refer to as V. was also involved in this kind of music, which is how we originally met.

When I went to college, and started doing college radio, some of my radio friends dragged me kicking and screaming back into a lot of rock and roll. I went to see the Dead several times, and became fond of people like Van Morrison and Randy Newman and Warren Zevon and Steve Goodman and Jonathan Richman. But I had still missed out on a lot of rock during my crazy folkie-purist years. Also, at the beginning of my sophmore year at Binghamton, I somehow talked my way into a job doing a weekend jazz show at the local NPR station, even though I knew nothing about jazz -- though I was at the point where I very much wanted to get into jazz, so I kind of trained on the job. My show was the only regularly scheduled jazz show in the area (the Binghamton college station played some, but you never knew what was on the air when), so I became a bit of a local celebrity, or at least known to some extent, at age 18. I was asked to sit on a local arts council, that kind of thing. And I was in a bar once and overheard a guy near me say to his friend, "Did you hear what J. played last night?" After a year, the station hired me as a classical announcer full-time (and yes, I knew nothing about classical music, but as long as you can read the liner notes and pronounce the names correctly, no probs).

So you can see that "what decade?" is sort of impossible for me to answer. I have always been drawn to music that is less known and less popular and off the beaten path. I am very, very picky about what popular artists I like, though I always try to be more openminded.

I don't listen to classical or jazz much any more, but I do have a good jazz story. When I moved back to New York, I went to the upper west side to see a jazz group called Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers. Blakey was a drummer with a great ear for talent, and many of the Jazz Messengers who passed through his band over the years had gone on to be famous in their own right. So I figured it would be a good show. And I was right: he had this 22-year-old trumpet player who was one of the most amazing jazz artists I'd ever heard. But I heard his name wrong -- thought it was "Quentin" rather than "Wynton" Marsalis. Blakey's gone now, but he knew his young talent!

I am lately somewhat interested in hearing more New Orleans music (I blame Treme). Barry and I saw Elvis Costello play with Allen Toussaint a few years back, and Toussaint is a national treasure. Elvis, BTW, came into my musical picture around the college radio station -- a British label called Stiff Records was putting out a lot of what the British called "pub rock" and we called "punk" or "new wave" (but not like the 80s new wave, more like a slightly gentler punk). Elvis was on Stiff originally, as was our pal Ian Dury. In fact, Stiff released an album of a tour they did called Live Stiffs, and Elvis and Ian Dury were both on it. This was the late 70s. Interestingly enough, one of the songs Elvis did on it was a Burt Bachrach song, though he was still in his angry-young-man phase and wouldn't actually work with Bachrach for another 20 years.

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That's the end of the (edited) essay-from-within-the-e-mail. More of the story is probably in other e-mails, but I think the main thing is that Elvis Costello has pretty much been by far my favorite performer, period, since the early 80s. Maybe since Imperial Bedroom, which came out in 1982. I'd been hearing him some from the very start, because my college radio station was very into the Stiff Records artists, and saw him a couple of times between 1977 and 1980, but Imperial Bedroom was the album that took my breath away. It's still one of my favorites. I've seen him live far more times than any other performer; I used to get tickets to every show every time he played in town. I've seen him with the Attractions, with the Imposters, duo with Steve Nieve, solo, with Allen Toussaint, and perhaps most gloriously, at Radio City Music Hall with Burt Bachrach.

Must go to sleep now, I think.

sorbet

I made sorbet today, for the first time in quite a while. And basically sugar-free, except for about 1/2 tsp. of honey that I almost always use with fruit sorbets just to give the flavor a little kick. I made mango-passionfruit, which is pretty much Barry's flat-out favorite, sugar or not. (My three favorites are probably that one, pear-ginger, and mandarin chocolate.) It used to be tough to hunt down passionfruit, but now our splendid Orthodox greengrocer, Ouri's, almost always has it.

I recently bought myself an immersion blender, thinking to use it to puree soups like butternut squash and split pea (though soup season, at least hot soup season, seems to be drawing to a close). But it occurred to me today that I could try it on the sorbet mix, instead of schlepping down my regular blender (in a small NYC kitchen, except for the coffee maker and can opener, most appliances are stored away until needed, since counter space is so limited). This kind of blender is stick shaped and you just plug it in and put it into a pot or bowl. So I put my ingredients (cubed mango, strained passionfruit, Splenda, honey, water, lemon zest, lemon juice, and vanilla) into a mixing bowl, and used the immersion blender, and it worked like a charm! Since the sorbet thing already necessitates schlepping out one appliance (the ice cream maker), it's great not have to also use the regular blender. Plus the immersion blender cleans up by rinsing under warm water, much easier than washing a big blender canister.

Speaking of lemon zest...I made some nice cold poached wild salmon the other night, with a little sauce made from low-fat mayo seasoned mostly with fresh dill, dried mustard, and a bit of dried chipotle. At the last minute, I threw on some lemon zest, since I watch Top Chef a lot and thought it would add something nice. I think it actually made all the difference, since the zest is very aromatic and the whole thing was far preferable to drowning the fish in lemon juice, which is often done by some people I'm married to. It made it lemony without extra wetness interfering with the thick sauce. I only own a lemon zester since I use zest for most fruit sorbets, but it's really worthwhile, since it's really hard to cut zest properly with a knife (unless you're a Top Chef-level chef and have an awesome range of what they always call "knife skills"). I served the fish with a salad of arugola, baby spinach, cherry tomatoes and Italian olives, with a Bragg sesame ginger dressing (Bragg is a health-food-store brand).

Citrus zest is where all of the aromatic oils are, but the white pith under it is bitter, so you can't cut too deep. A zester gives you a superfine julienne of zest with no pith. I wouldn't own with if I didn't make sorbet (see = Jenn's cherry pitter), but it's not a bad thing so have if you make fish a lot, or anything with fruit (maybe a little lemon zest in apple pie?) or anything that's complemented well by a hit of citrus. (I seem to recall my brother's wife once making a sauce or dressing for asparagus which involved orange zest. Yummy.)

I'm not even sure where to buy one any more. Mine probably came from Lechter's, the housewares chain that went belly-up several years back. They were *everywhere* -- the first time I ever met Barry's parents was when we ran into them at the Lechter's on Kings Highway. (I was staying at Barry's a lot already, maybe a month or two after we met, and he was with me as I shopped for a few things his kitchen lacked.) It's hard to find a housewares store like that anymore (basically, tabletop and kitchen goods). But if you want to get one, I'd try eBay first. (That's my battle cry, "try eBay first": my immersion blender came from there, and I am awaiting a nonstick covered skillet and a new 3-in-1 printer for my computer, all from eBay.)

So tonight is chicken cutlets, on top of the stove since our oven isn't working, and I'll probably wilt the rest of the arugola and spinach with some garlic and olive oil, and cook some baby carrots (not the best veg in terms of blood sugar impact, but Barry will eat them.) And sorbet.

Coney Island (finally!)

Perhaps you can tell from the title of the blog that I sort of have a thing about Coney Island? I never went there as a kid, but the place is so drenched in nostalgia that it will lend you some if you can't provide your own. And it's not just one thing -- not just the ocean, not just the Boardwalk, not just the rides -- but the entirety of Coney that is so wonderful. I've had beach summers when I was on the sand and under the sun as often as I could manage; I've had summers where I simply walked the Boardwalk; I've had summers where a perfect day was eating a Nathan's frank and riding the Wonder Wheel. (I haven't had the stomach for the Cyclone, the big old giant historic wooden roller coaster, since the early 80s, but the Wonder Wheel, which has to be about 85 years old or more by now, is just fine for me.

The only bad thing about the eight years I had a really cheap apartment on the east side of Manhattan (Sutton Place area, low 50s) is that it was too far from Coney. Besides, I'm basically a Brooklyn girl, and when I met Barry, back I came. Now, unless it's overcast, I can actually see the Wonder Wheel from my subway station, which makes me really happy.

Also making me really happy: a new amusement park, Luna Park (named after one of the major Coney Island parks which closed in 1946), will open in just about a month, and I've been looking at videos and pictures of the beautiful new rides being built by the Italian firm Zamperla. They're shiny new, those rides, but they just fit. It's going to be great to have something so new and colorful and hopeful to enjoy this summer, and I'm finding the progress reports quite fascinating.

Documentarian Ric Burns (the slightly less famous brother of Ken), made a film called Coney Island that I would recommend wholeheartedly to one and all. It focuses on the heyday of Coney in the early 1900s, and has plenty of wonderful film and photos. It also explains the societal implications of such a place: a middle class American Riviera that the common person could visit and enjoy for mere nickels. It also talks about the technology that made it possible, like the Culver Line subway that made it easy to visit (this is now the F train which is my subway line), and the recent harnessing of electricity which permitted the original Luna Park to light the night sky like nothing anyone has ever seen.

Fun fact: among the handful of poems I've had published in various teeny-weeny literary magazines (I don't really do that stuff anymore), probably one of my favorites was entitled "palm sunday, coney island". I no longer have a copy of it, though I remember some of the lines. And I remember exactly how and when and why I wrote it. Stillwell Avenue, the Coney Island subway station, is where a number of train lines terminate, and can often be a very easy transfer point even if it's in the opposite direction from where you're headed. For instance, I would have to take an F train maybe 15 stops, into Manhattan, if I wanted to transfer for a B or D train -- or I can go back, "the wrong way," four stops to Stillwell and get any number of train lines that terminate there. So I'd gone to Stillwell one day to change trains there, and that day happened to be Palm Sunday, which is the traditional opening day for the Coney rides (which then operate weekends-only until the season opening on Memorial Day weekend). So, while waiting for my train leave, I watched the rides making their first go-rounds of the new season, pulled out a piece of paper, and wrote it.

Today, I was coming home from lunch with Lily on the F, listening to my new mp3 player (I bought it some months ago but this was my first time using it), when a young woman started looking at the subway map over my head. I paused my player and asked if she needed any help or info since, as I'm sure you've guessed, I know my F train pretty well. She said, "No, we're just going to Coney Island, because we've never been there before." I said, "You'll love it, but just so you know, the rides are only open weekends until Memorial Day." She looked a little crestfallen, so I told her what she *could* enjoy today, the Boardwalk and a hot dog and such. She thanked me and went back to sit with her two, similarly young friends. I went back to my music. But when I saw her take out a harmonica and start to play, I thought that was one of the coolest things ever (not a lot of female harpists out there -- the only one I can think of is Little Annie Raines), and I turned off my music and went to sit across from these young folk, who ended up all being 20 and 21. The young lady, whose name is Shana, had just moved to New York, and the two young men were friends who were visiting with her. So I talked blues with them, and Coney, and working as a writer or musician, and I ended up writing down all kinds of things for them, names of clubs and artists, and gave Shana my e-mail and blog addresses, asked her to let me know when she's playing. I'm almost sorry I didn't go with them, since it would have been a blast to see them see Coney for the first time.

In the mid-90s, I had an internet romance with an engineering professor from Wichita, Kansas, a single father of two boys, and he came to New York for a week with them so we could meet face-to-face and they could all enjoy New York. I took the week off from work, but the pace was so exhausting that I begged off a couple of things -- Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, I think, though I did walk them across the Brooklyn Bridge. *My* bridge. (See documentary by Ric Burns, Brooklyn Bridge. I also have a love-thing about the BB, but that's for another time.) We went to Planet Hollywood (yuk) and to see Smokey Joe's Cafe, a Broadway jukebox show of Leiber & Stoller songs. Turned out one of my old musician pals was an onstage performer, which much impressed my heartland friends. And one night Dad and I went out along to see V. perform at the Knitting Factory. But taking them to Coney Island was by far my favorite part of it all (in addition to the rather feverish making out he and I did at his hotel suite after the boys were asleep).

I wish I could say the romance was successful, but since I'm now in Brooklyn rather than Wichita, and not the stepmother to a couple of now-teenaged boys, it's no secret that it wasn't. We were starting to make plans for me to take a trip to visit out there, when he just balked about the entire relationship. This was very bad for me; I take it very personally when someone steps back or away, and it was bruising. Plus, that kind of indecisiveness doesn't bode well for any kind of connection. So we made a clean break. It was too bad -- he was a really lovely guy who had mailed me some of his home-baked bread and biscotti, before our first meeting, and he was so handsome that I even forgave his mullet (he usually wore his back hair in a ponytail so sometimes it seemed less mullet-y). But as upset as I was about his withdrawal, and he refusal to resume contact on a friendly basis some years later, I do hope he and his nice boys are happy, and he has some other nice woman eating his biscotti and running her fingers through that mullet.