Among the Bills and Circulars

This postcard arrived from the poet Geof Huth last week.

28 January 2012

"Dees ----------------

The reverse of this card... I used to practice three poems that were physical in nature, three poems that I could not start over because I was creating each onto surfaces that I had only one copy of, so this is colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed onto & tomorrow I may begin another one of these. Geof.

Not Yet Off to Storage

The post-holiday pattern is settling in, even though the season ought to last until January 6. Only a scattering of houses still have Christmas lights aglow; spent Christmas trees are appearing curbside, naked and forlorn; and stores are marking down holiday items 50 percent or 75 percent off, at least in the case of candies whose sale can't be delayed much longer. I got a package of six Russel Stover chocolate santas and snowmen for well under a dollar yesterday. I think they were priced at about $3 not so long ago.

Our tree still stands. It comes down next weekend, with its ornaments packed away for the next 11 months. I suppose one-twelfth of a year isn't too bad a run for seasonal decor.

Speaking of storage, Geof Huth reports that his latest contribution to the archives of the University at Albany has been completed, just before the old year expired. Even though I've known Geof going on 30 years, that wouldn't be of any particular interest to me except that about four years' worth of my correspondence to him has been included in the transfer, as well as my brother Jay's.

Geof calls what we send him "mailart." I call it a hobby based on sending (mostly) postcards to people who will appreciate them. Geof gets more than anyone else because he sends (mostly) postcards in return.

Theodore Thomas in Stone

Geof Huth sent me this poem recently, on paper. Pretty close to the occasion of my birthday, which was last week. He's writing a year's worth of poems beginning on the First of June: 365 of them for 365 people, though I don't know if that's 365 different people. I would be hard-pressed to come up with that many individuals to write to, much less to write poems to, unless I started writing to strangers. But then again, I'm not a poet. Geof is, and I'm glad I've known such a talented and interesting one for nigh on 30 years now.

Sometimes, things are carved in stone. On the east side of Michigan Avenue across from the Chicago Hilton & Towers there's an allegorical statue set in lush landscaping. The Bare-Breasted Spirit of Music, I think it might be called, by sculptor Albin Polasek. Nearby is a wall that says: "Scarcely any man in any land has done so much for the musical education of the people as did Theodore Thomas. In this country of the nobility of his ideals, with the magnitude of this achievement, will assure him everlasting glory. 1835-1905."

Well, maybe. Theodore Thomas's face, in relief, is also part of the wall carving. I was the only one at that moment last week who wandered over to his monument to read those carved-in-stone words, but I bet if I'd buttonholed pedestrians along Michigan Avenue one after another asking them who he was, I would have been arrested as a public nuisance before I found anyone who did. I didn't myself, since my own music education was pretty much catch-as-catch-can. So I had to look him up.

Yet the monument promised Thomas everlasting glory, not fame. Perhaps as the first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (and musical director of the World's Columbian Exposition for a time), glory in some measure is still his. He's certainly got a nice monument, though the words and the statue aren't the best parts. In June, the nearby landscape is.

Above: Looking northeast from near the Theodore Thomas memorial. Urbs in Horto is no empty slogan for Mayor Daley.

Above: Looking north from this little part of Grant Park. The Aon Center, a.k.a. the Amoco Building (and long ago, the Standard Oil Building), dominates the background.

Inspected For Your Safety?

I got a couple of Geof Huth postcards from Manchester, England, recently. One of them was postmarked May 4 and featured a picture of an early 2000s Manchester building known as Urbis. On the card, and his blog, he describes a city well worth seeing. Good thing he updated my notion of Manchester, because the last thing I heard about it involved a football riot last year.

Attached to the message side of the Urbis card was this curiosity:

I'd never spent any time looking at the TSA seal before. It's a not-very-imaginative variation of the Great Seal of the United States, complete with displayed eagle. Instead of arrows and an olive branch, the eagle ought to be holding some scanning wands.

I didn't know the TSA bailiwick included inspecting incoming postcards. Maybe it doesn't. The TSA does inspect bags and issue stickers at JKF, however, and maybe Geof recycled it. The sticker is placed on exactly one of the few spots that has no printing or handwriting. In fact, it seems like the handwriting goes around the sticker slightly.

Still, I like the image of a fellow in some TSA warren somewhere reading overseas postcards with a decoder ring nearby, hoping day after day to catch some bit of useful data.

News & Update

News From Afar: My old friend Nancy, who lives in Austin with her husband Jon, is expecting a child toward the end of this year, her first. Some context: I've known her since 1976, during her freshman year in high school and my sophomore year. Congratulations and best of luck to them. Fewer and fewer of my cohort (more or less) are producing children, though I suppose there will be a trickle for many years yet.

Update: Geof Huth, who had open-heart surgery earlier this year, seems to have made a strong recovery. In any case, he's sending me a steady stream of postcards once more, including a goodly number from his recent destination of Englewood, Florida, on the Gulf coast between Sarasota and Fort Myers. Including one depicting a trail in Oscar Scherer State Park, a place I was previously unfamiliar with, though in planning our '05 Florida trip I briefly considered the nearby Myakka River State Park as a destination. I would have happily skipped Disneyworld for it.

"We spent part if the day," Geof wrote on April 14, "--enough of it to sunburn my neck--walking the trials of Oscar Scherer State Park, parts of which are remarkably prehistoric in their feel, though the park's gift shop is careful not to include any postcards that accurately portray that character of the park."

There aren't too many places in North America any more with that prehistoric feel, I'd think. Wouldn't park management want to play that up? Come for the nature trails, stay for the hunting/gathering.

A New Style of Automatic Writing

First thing, as always, on March 6. Remember the Alamo!

Geof Huth is going in for open-heart surgery tomorrow. I wish him a successful operation and a speedy recovery, so that the world may continue to enjoy the word-fountain that he is, among many other good reasons.

With Geof in mind, this will be a wordy post. Yesterday I figured out a way to use Google's automatic translation feature to call up various versions of BTST. I suspect that the translations wouldn't be too elegant, and sometimes would be plainly bizarre, to native speakers of these languages, but I don't care. Just the thought of robo-translation for no special reason is enough for me. And that fact that in three of four cases, "cheapo" is still "cheapo" in the text.

The following are the first paragraphs of the March 4th posting, in automatic Spanish, German, Japanese and Arabic.

Sra Byrne's & I
No sólo es mi cheapo 1984 Edición rústica de la señora Byrne's Dictionary coloración amarillenta y agrietada con la edad en la columna vertebral, es bastante obsoleta, teniendo en cuenta las referencias en línea. ¿O es? Voy a seguir de todos modos, ya que no todo lo que habitan en el mundo de papel-masa ha emigrado a la esfera digital.

Frau Byrne's & I
Nicht nur ist mein cheapo 1984 Taschenbuchausgabe von Frau Byrne's Dictionary Gelbfärbung mit dem Alter und in der Wirbelsäule geknackt, es ist ziemlich gut überholt, da on-line Referenzen. Oder ist es? Ich werde es trotzdem zu halten, da die Wohnung nicht alles in der Welt Papier-Masse hat wanderten in die digitale Welt.

私のバーン＆ミセス
N安っぽいだけでなく、 1984年は私のペーパーバック版のミセス 黄変してバーンの辞書には、年齢やひびの入った棘は、時代遅れのことはかなりよく、ラインリファレンスを検討しています。 それとも？ それを維持するつもりだとにかく、以後は、世界のすべての住居に移住して紙のように大量には、デジタル領域です。

السيدة بايرن 's& أنا
ليس فقط هو بلدي cheapo غلاف عادي طبعة 1984 من السيدة بايرن قاموس الاصفرار مع التقدم في السن ومتصدع في العمود الفقري ، وهو جيد الى حد ما فات أوانها ، والنظر في الاشارات على الانترنت. ام هو؟ انا ذاهب الى ابقائه على أي حال ، لأن ليس كل مسكن في العالم - ورقة الكتلة قد هاجروا الى المملكه الرقميه.

Pommes Frites, Wow

One more posting about New York as I found it in late October 2006. My friend Geof Huth, who knows many good places to eat in the city, gave me some good recommendations this time around. I was able to visit a couple of them, and also found a couple of other places that I can recommend to him and everyone else.

Geof’s Recommendations. Zerza, a Moroccan restaurant on East 6th St. near New York University, gives away free postcards that promise “Belly Dance, Hookah, Exotic Drinks” but all I got on a Sunday night was fine fava bean soup and a tasty chicken bastilla (a kind of pot pie) served by a fetching but fully clothed waitress. Probably the belly dancing is on special occasions, the hookah might be unlawful in public places in New York by now, and I didn't want to spend money on any exotic drinks, though I did order a Casablanca, a Moroccan beer.

I visited, but didn’t eat at, another recommendation: Molyvos, a well-appointed Greek restaurant on Seventh Ave. near Central Park. It so happened that the office of an editor I was visiting was around the corner from it, and he suggested, independently of Geof’s suggestion, that we go there. It was too early to eat, but not too early for a glass of Greek wine, a red whose name I didn’t write down, at the brilliant copper-colored bar (just the top, the rest was dark wood).

My recommendations. Gene’s Coffee Shop on East 60th St., where I had a hearty breakfast. A narrow deli-restaurant with all the right details, including a Greek proprietor in black pants, a white shirt and a redish tie.

Dervish, a Turkish restaurant on West 47th St. in a space that had probably been a saloon at one time, with a large bar and tiled floors. I had a lunch meeting with some other editors there and enjoyed the lamb and okra (etli bamya) lunch special.

En route to Zerza, I went down St. Mark’s Place (a block of East 8th St.) and headed down Second Ave. There are all sorts of places along that stretch, including the off-putting Hip Hop Grub – no one was in there – and a few doors down, a hole in the wall that sold Belgian-style French fries in paper cones. It was called, aptly, Pommes Frites.

I didn’t stop there that night, but remembered it a few nights later when we decided to eat something as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade wound down. We walked a number of blocks to get there, the streets swarming with more people than usual, many in costume, including one fellow dressed as Space Ghost who walked behind us for a few seconds, loudly proclaiming that some other Space Ghost he’d seen wasn’t the real Space Ghost, he was.

When we got to Pommes Frites there was a line out the door, but it moved quickly. For $4, you get a “regular” cone of fries – which is pretty large – and for a little more, one from among a selection of many sauces. Just like in Belgium. We ate them on the sidewalk just outside the place. I had Vietnamese pineapple sauce, which doesn’t sound like it would go with fried potatoes, but it does, because these were no ordinary spuds. Cyrus, member of the Alexander who was with nephew Dees and me, said they were the best fries he’d ever eaten, and I would have agreed, except that none could beat the memory of the cone I had in Belgium years ago. But these were very close.

Go Great Danes!

Today I spent a little while learning about the University at Albany, an institution I previously knew nothing about. For instance, I found out that this state school has about 17,000 students, grad and undergrad, 637 full-time faculty and about 300 part time, and three libraries with two million volumes. Its mascot is the Great Dane. Besides the University at Buffalo, it’s the only domestic institution of higher learning I can find on my World Almanac list that uses “at” instead of “of,” not counting constructions such as the University of Arkansas at Ft. Smith.

Also, there’s a statue of Minerva on campus. According to the UAlbany web site: “Since the University at Albany's beginnings as the New York State Normal College [in 1844], Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, has been the institution's enduring symbol. The figure of Minerva and the Latin motto, Sapientia et sua et docendi causa ("Wisdom both for its own sake and for the sake of teaching") have appeared on the University seal since about 1913. Today, Minerva, wearing her distinctive helmet, continues to symbolize the University's proud past and long-standing reputation for educational excellence.”

Why the sudden interest in a school I previously had no connection with? A postcard from Geof Huth arrived today, including this information: “… my ten boxes of correspondence are going to UAlbany on Sunday [meaning October 15, I think] along w/ all correspondence from you through Sep 2006. Ah, sweet posterity.”

I wouldn’t have thought of donating correspondence to a university, but then again Geof is a professional archivist. I expect the University at Albany to last a lot longer than I will, so with any luck the items Geof has deposited will linger there for a few centuries, probably lasting longer than any other documents I have created or will create, or any other memory of me. Until the massive destruction of the great Quebec-New York war of 2452 or the abandonment of the school after the 23rd century New Black Death or something.

Meat

A few hours after grilling some meat, I almost always forget I still smell like smoke and feel a momentary alert: what’s burning in this house? No, wait, that’s my hair and shirt and pants. Standing near a wood-and-charcoal fire for a couple of hours passes along an odor that later morphs into house-on-fire, for a moment.

But it was dry and nearly warm by Sunday noon, and I was inspired to roll out the black ovoid grill – any simpler in design, and it would be a pit in the ground – and load it with charcoals jazzed up with lighter fluid, plus an assortment of large and small sticks, and fast-burning newspaper from bags in the garage. The papers were put there sometime in the fall of 2004. From the looks of them, there seems to have been some kind of election going on at the time that the newspaper people thought was important. A record of historic doings. I burned them anyway.

I cooked beef, pork and chicken. It was shredded pork, the sort you cook at your table at a Korean barbecue restaurant. So to do it up right after grilling, you wrap the cooked meat in a lettuce leaf dabbed with Sasum Deer brand red-pepper paste. Ah, that’s my kind of fusion cuisine: grilled up Occidental style, spiced by the Orient.

Got a postcard last week from Geof Huth, one of the nation’s foremost visual poets and a regular reader (hello, Geof). “Welcome to spring, tho I expect Dees to complain about the lack of vernality in his blog,” he writes (the card is addressed to all the Striblings under this roof).

Been meaning to get around to just that. Sunday’s short warm spell was the exception. On Friday morning, for instance, we woke to a thin coating of snow everywhere. By about 10, it had melted. A few hours later, huge snowflakes started to fall, coating ground and bare trees. It too melted in a few hours. The equinox may have passed, but that’s not springtime. Spring hasn’t had its first cup of coffee yet. It’s still in its bathrobe, thinking about whether to shave first or make some eggs.

Khyber Pass

Usually I don’t link with other web sites except to illustrate a point, but in the case of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism I think I’ll make an exception. Good for a few grins.

Around this time last year, I visited a Tibetan restaurant called Tsampa in the East Village on the recommendation of my friend Geof Huth, who visits New York City more often than I do (see Oct. 7 & 8, 2004). This year, I didn’t have any special recommendation in mind for lunch on Friday, but I thought I’d go to roughly the same neighborhood as I did then, walk around, and find something that looked interesting.

That kind of strategy doesn’t always work. But luck was with me. I rounded the corner from 2nd Avenue onto St. Mark’s Place, which is really a continuation of East 8th Street, and jammed restaurants, bars, shops and small businesses with offbeat appeal, mainly but not only for youth. I’ve read that the street was once a good deal seedier, and that people complain of its gentrification, as if an urban area can’t be interesting and relatively safe at the same time.

Almost immediately I saw Khyber Pass, an Afghan restaurant at 34 St. Mark’s, small old building sporting a few caryatids. A brief look at the menu, and that decided it. Inside it seemed dark at first, but that was only my reaction to going from sunshine to dark wood floors, red walls and dim lights. All sorts of things hung on those walls, including rugs, plates, musical instruments I took for Afghan, tassels and a large print of the famous National Geographic cover photo of the Afghan girl with the haunting eyes. There was also, oddly, a cuckoo clock on a far wall, with a big brass samovar (idle-looking) nearby to keep it company.

I can remember visiting an Afghan restaurant only once before, about 20 years ago, a place on the North Side of Chicago near Belmont Blvd., long gone now. Much later I learned that it was owned by relatives of Mohammed Karzai. I vaguely remember it being exotically good.

For an appetizer, I ordered mantoo, a steamed dumpling filled with beef, onions and various spices, topped with a yogurt sauce, which went very well with the mint tea I was drinking. It was shaped something like ravioli. Afghanioli, maybe.

The menu described shireen palow as “an exotic rice dish cooked with orange peels, saffron, almonds and pistachios, served with charcoal-grilled Cornish game hen.” The meat was plenty tasty, but the saffron rice with a strong orange favor outdid it by a culinary mile. Worth going to the Khyber Pass to eat.

Weird Ronald

I was in the city for part of the day, and happened to be in the River North district, which abuts the Loop proper to the north. It isn’t a gentrifying neighborhood; it’s already gentrified, but in a peculiar way that allows for a statue of a demented Ronald McDonald.

I went with Lilly to meet my old friend Geof Huth (dbqp.blogspot.com), whom I had not seen in person in nearly ten years—during, in fact, another period of unemployment in late 1995 and early 1996. We supped at Ed Debevic’s, a faux diner that serves decent food, intense milkshakes, and entertainment in the form of the wait staff dancing on one of the counters. Ed’s ought to be part of a chain, since it’s very chain-like in its approach, but oddly enough there’s only this one and another that opened very recently in the western suburbs. During lunchtime, the place is packed. At dinner, there were plenty of open tables.

Ed’s is one of a fair number of restaurants in River North, most of which have sprouted in the last decade or so (though Ed’s is older), along with condo towers, expensive art galleries, assorted boutiques, a handful of nightclubs and other businesses that feed on an affluent population—or tourists, who count as temporarily affluent in most cases.

The latest development in River North is a new McDonald’s. Not just any McDonald’s, but an enormous replica of a 1950s-style restaurant. It replaced the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s on the same site, which was actually the second iteration of a Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s. The first, which I visited in the late ’80s, was a more or less an ordinary McDonald’s that had been stuffed with rock memorabilia of all sorts: the work, I think, of the owner himself, who took this idiosyncratic approach to driving traffic into his restaurant. Sometime in the mid-1990s, some fool (maybe the same guy) decided that it wasn’t good enough, so the place was renovated. It still had rock gewgaws, but it resembled a Hard Rock Café more than anything else—and it so happens that a real HRC is just across the street. I never went there again.

We walked over to see the new McDonald’s after we’d finished with Ed’s. The restaurant itself is two stories, but the overarching golden arches go up at least another story. It’s a commanding presence at that spot, especially since the rest of the half block is taken up with parking spaces. We didn’t go in, but the interior is very visible, and we took note of the many TV monitors inside, all showing McDonald’s products, and the escalator, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a McDonald’s.

Just outside the entrance were about a half-dozen bronze figures, slightly larger than life, standing or sitting in various positions. The more you looked, the odder they seemed. One looked like a well-dressed retiree watering the lawn, compete with hose in hand. A couple sitting on a bench pointed excitedly toward something—away from McDonald’s, toward the Portillo’s Hot Dogs across the street, actually. Of course there was a Ronald McDonald, standing next to a child on a tricycle. His mouth was open almost in a scream, though I suppose that was supposed to represent McDonald’s Happiness. Still, not even the TV Ronald we all know ever shows that kind of ecstasy -- but maybe the sculptor was thinking more along the lines of Ecstasy. But that wasn’t his worst feature. Instead of irises in his eyes, he had a hollow spot, except for a small triangle right at the top of the iris-hole. All of the statues had this feature. Creepy, if you looked at it too long.