Heavy Duti

About 90% finished, for the time being anyhow, this is my 1967 Schwinn Heavy Duti cruiser bike. I bought the frame (and some tires,) at a garage sale and have restored it to what is called "Period Appropriate" for the genre. Besides an extensive clean up, lube, and tune-up, there are new pedals, a new Schwinn seat and seat post, sparkle grips, "dice" tire valve covers, a mini-license plate, and a rear hub-shiner with red reflector.

It rides incredible smoothly. But it weighs a ton, and frankly with those fat tires, it ought to be smooth



These Heavy Duti cruisers, built by Schwinn in the 60s and 70s (as near as I can tell,) were used mostly in factories and oil fields to haul parts around, say from one end of a factory to another. Some paperboys rode them, but there were so many other choices of fancier and lighter bikes at the time, that it was a rarer occurrence.

I've thought about fenders, but kind of like the stripped down, rat-rod look. Plus the fenders would only add weight. Looking for a Schwinn head-badge that is age appropriate, and I'm done. I think.

I like the cruiser mentality about bikes. I like old things and this fits in with my interests. There is a culture around these bikes that is based on the idea that we're saving elements of our history. I have a road bike, but i don't ride it very often. I don't particularly care for the road bike culture. It's based on athleticism and speed, which is more than kind of antithetical to the cruiser bike culture. Which is about going slow. And making use of the cup holder on your bike. Preferably for beer. Not that drinking and driving is encouraged.

In Colorado where I live, the cyclists, those road bicyclists in their logo-covered, lime green Spandex, with their $5000 carbon fiber whatevers, seem to feel a sense of entitlement about the right of way. I've had packs of them literally force my bike off the road without so much as a "How do you do?" They are in some part, large or small depending on your point of view and mine tends toward the large, douchebags. They swarm here. And are a growing lobbying force, recently having forced the passing of laws favorable to their cause, e.g., that cars must stay three-feet away from them, and that they can ride two abreast. They demand more and more space on the roads, yet pay no share of the taxes. Sadly, they won't be going away any time soon. The fact that their heroes, the pro riders, are being proven to be craven, doped up cheaters, doesn't surprise me in the least.

And so I ride my $700 road bike to post office. And ride my cruiser on the bike paths, happy to have pulled a piece of American history out of the dust bin. And to have gotten its shiny chrome rims spinning again.

Here's an earlier pic, just when i got it running.

Style Icon

My daughter and I started to blog, for one reason among many I'm sure, so that we could kind of track each other while she lived in Florida, while I was still here in Colorado, some years ago. She started writing about thrifting clothes (the apple not falling far from the tree there,) and taking pictures of the outfits she put together and wore everyday.

She's since been picked up by style aggregators like Chictopia.com and Weardrobe.com and her photo has been even lifted by The Gap.com. She gets god-knows-how-many hits everyday. I'm not surprised. Her style is completely her own and her writing is top-notch.

And now (or last month anyway,) she was voted Style of the Year by 303 Magazine, Denver's style, fashion and clothing magazine for the modern hipster.

Yeah, you could say I'm pretty proud. Mostly because she just did something she wanted to do, something that came from her heart and was about who she is as a person. She wasn't trying to monetize it or count the hits or link here and there, though that came later. She just wanted to show the world what she did and let it hear what she had to say. So I'm proud that she's Style of the Year. But mostly I'm proud that she's smart, and beautiful, and witty, and thoughtful, and that she's my kid.

Till There Was You

I played at the Beatles Tribute Night tonight at Oskar Blues in Lyons. My partner Nancy who is in my uke band Gadzukes!, and I performed "Till There Was You" from the first Beatles album, "with the beatles" on ukes. That album came out in late 1962, and of course everything in the world changed. But what really changed the most for me was I learned, from that album, what a good song was.

My parents and sisters loved musicals and played them endlessly around the house. I hated them, mostly because I loved rock and roll and they were not rock and roll. But mostly, I hated the sound track from "The Music Man," a huge Broadway hit that was currently a hit movie. I liked the Kingston Trio. The Beach Boys. Wilson Pickett. The local Minneapolis cover bands that specialized in rhythm and blues. Bob Dylan was a year away.

Then the Beatles (insert cliche here) exploded into the world. The singles started coming. "I Want to Hold Your Hand." "I Saw Her Standing There." "Please Please Me." I waited impatiently for the album. And when "meet the beatles" came out with its now classic noir cover, the half-shadowed pictures of the haircuts I studied for every detail, there was the ecstatic moment, the pleasure of ripping the plastic covering off and laying the needle down on the first groove. And what a record it was. But to my amazement, there on side two, cut nine, was "Till There Was You." From the dreaded musical, "The Music Man." What the fuck?

So what I learned from that track, with it's gorgeous classic guitar solo, claves and cha-cha beat was that it isn't about the haircut. Or the electricity. Or the beat. Or the culture. Or me versus my parents. It's about good songs. "Till There Was You" is a good song. A great song, maybe. And John, Paul, George and Ringo knew it. And once I listened to it, without the wall of the times and the culture, and my teenage anger, I guess I knew it too. And I'm proud that I recorded it on my CD. And that I copied George's guitar solo, note-for-note. And that i play it at every Gadzukes! gig. And that I played it tonight. Because it's a good song. And that's what counts.

I'll Tell You What's Stupid

What's stupid is to have a recipe that works, that you've done a bunch of times, but reading a different recipe for the same thing and saying, "Hey, I think I'll try that," and then failing miserably. Waste of time, waste of food, waste of money. Jeez.

Yakety-axe

Jeez, I've wanted one of these for a long time. Maybe since I saw James Burton backing up Ricky Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet Show. The show ran every week on television from 1952 until 1966. And at the end of each episode, Ricky would come out with his band and do a song. And in the band behind him, on the Fender Telecaster, was James Burton.

There were great guitar players back then like Chet Atkins, and Les Paul, but they were for the older folks. There was Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's guitar player and a giant, but he played more Merle Travis-style swing-style guitar. And Chuck Berry, who wrote so much of the elementary guitar book, but he played a horn-based kind of rhythm and blues. James Burton, on the other hand, rocked. And he introduced me, and the rest of the world, to the Telecaster. Over time, the Telecaster evolved to be the sound of country music, that high mid-range, snappy kind of sound that everyone calls "twang".

And now, some fifty years later, I got me one. A Fender American Special Telecaster. Made in the USA. Gloss sunburst finish with a maple neck and Texas-style pickups.

Do I need one? No. I guess I feel that if you've wanted something for 50 years, and you can give it to yourself, you might just as well go ahead.

Now I gotta get busy and start a country band.

Stranglehold of death

Someone told me once that the word "mortgage" is from the French and means "stranglehold of death". Well, yesterday afternoon I went to my bank and withdrew money from my savings (that was paying me .5 percent) and drove over the local branch of US Bank and paid off my (5.5 percent) mortgage. In full.

So now, my little strangleholders...I own my house. Free and clear. There are now no bankers, stock brokers, debt traders, mortgage companies, real estate agents, lien holders or other low-life bloodsuckers involved in my personal business.

P.S.
I also own my car. I also have no credit card debt.

So, to you...you so-called financial wizards who brought this country to its bloody knees, you who heartlessly drove people from the homes you cheated them into buying and then put them and their children out on the street...you who traded and sold our hard-earned gains like baseball cards...you who created an unprecedented toxic environment of unemployment and deep, ink-black depression...to all of you pencil-dicks in your bad-fitting suits, tasseled cordovan loafers and stupid ties...to all of you I would like to just say, not in a nice way...

..."Go fuck yourselves."

A-1

Yesterday was my birthday. Sixty-four years old. Which inevitably brings to mind the song, and consequently curiosity regarding the answer to The Beatles in-light-of-the-current-situation-really-not-all-that-rhetorical question..."Will you still need me?/Will you still feed me?/When I'm 64?"

Well, I received sixty-plus birthday greetings from friends from all around the world via Facebook and in my e-mail box. Which really was quite special. And I was treated to a truly incredible Japanese dinner dinner and sake by Hollie, in the company of my daughter Zoe and bf Ryan, at Amu, an izakaya in Boulder. Note the mysterious, and wildly appropriate, writing that appeared magically in a bowl of soy dipping sauce. A deus ex machina comment on the day.

And then I was taken back to Hollie's house, fed champagne, the tasty ice cream roll-cake that Hollie made at my request, and showered by very cool gifts...books, folk art, cooking machinery, and more.

So, will I be needed and will I be fed when I'm 64? The answer apparently is...yes.

And now...my favorite birthday song, "Have a Good Time" by Paul Simon.

Yesterday it was my birthday,
I hung one more year on the line.
I should be depressed
'Cuz my life's a mess,
But I'm having a good time.

A wild and crazy guy

Yes. My close personal friend, Steve Martin. We chat frequently, mostly via Twitter.

He posted something the other day and I erroneously schooled him on his punctuation. I mistakenly believed that "correctly punctuated" should be hyphenated. I was then myself schooled by Hollie and some other person who's name I can't remember, and was directed to the Chicago Manual of Style for verification. I was wrong, and stand corrected.

What follows is a verbatim exchange between my close personal friend Steve Martin and myself from Twitter, the afternoon of October 21, 2010.

Steve: Today is get it right Friday! In an earlier tweet, someone pointed out that “correctly punctuated,” should have read “correctly-punctuated.”

Me: That was me. I was proven wrong, according to Chicago Manual of Style

SM: Evidently, that someone was wrong. So "get it right Thursday!" starts off with a bang!

SM: Get it right Friday to become regular feature every Thursday.

SM: So it's correct to say, "Chicago Manually of Style?"

Me: If correctly punctuated, yes.

SM: Am checking Tri-County Area Manual of Style. Very adamant about capitals beginning sentences, or at least being second letter.

SM: Tri-County Area Manual of Style also suggests, for clarity, inserting Arabic numerals when spelling them: Fo4ur. Fi5ve. Six6ty-Sev7en.

Thanks, Steve. Talk to you soon.

Failure is not an option

Wrong.

I made this dinner for Hollie and I the other evening that sucked. It was some magazine recipe. I clipped the recipe out and it sat around and I kept looking at it and the accompanying photograph looked so good I wanted to eat the paper. But I didn't. I cooked the recipe instead. At some expense, I might add. And in hindsight I should have eaten the fucking paper.

But, it was something new and I tried it and it failed and I will try more new recipes because what I really like about cooking is trying new things to see if I can make them, or at least learn the technique. And I don't even get flustered anymore when they don't work because I know that my local is right down the street, less than a block away. And if it's really that awful, I can chuck my efforts in the dustbin, take a short walk down to the corner and be eating a hamburger inside of twenty minutes.

But we ate the bloody mess anyway. And I was thinking later that ten years ago I might have seen what I made as a success. So my standards have risen as, to some extent, have my abilities. And if you watch competitive cooking shows, which admittedly I do, you see that anyone, on any given day can screw the pooch.

So, you know...onward.

Gadzukes! at the Jamestown Mercantile

Interesting gig. The tiny mountain town of Jamestown, Colorado is a throwback. Pot smell filled the air. Lots of big dogs wandering in and out. Abundant dreadlocks. But also well-dressed people with nice homes in the hills. It's kind of hippie/kind of 1980.

Our host, Rainbow (I don't make this stuff up, folks,) was really nice and although we were billed for most of the week as Gadzucky (wtf? Rainbow said someone asked her if we were Russian,) the sign was changed by the time we got there. It kind of seemed like no one was paying attention at the beginning, but the crowd warmed up, people danced and there was a full tip jar by the time we finished. We played pretty well despite being squeezed into a small space with a marginal PA. Got lots of nice comments from folks and invitation to come back.

By the way, the stars at night up in secluded Jamestown were worth the drive.

Le baguette

Tiring of no-knead bread, I decided to make some real bread.

Made a starter with yeast, flour and water. Let it sit for 15 hours. Made dough. Let it sit 75 minutes. Knead it for ten minutes. Let it sit for 45 minutes. Rolled out the baguettes. Slashed them with a serrated knife. Baked for 30 minutes on an oven stone in an oven pre-heated to 500 degrees, then reduced to 450.

First starter attempt. Fail. Not enough water, or maybe weak yeast. But my second try turned out fine. Nice, crispy, chewy, airy baguettes made in my new baguette oven form.

Voila. Madames et monsieurs...le baguette.

Ropa vieja

Old rags. A great cuban dish made with peppers, onions, an average cut of meat like flank steak, lots of garlic, tomatoes, capers, and spiced with cloves, cinnamon and bay leaves. The meat is cooked for hours and then shredded with two forks, thus the "old rags". Rice, beans and a couple of warm tortillas. It has a surprisingly, nutty flavor...perfect for a cool fall day.

This recipe can easily be cut in half, but I like the leftovers. here, try it yourselves.
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/ropa-vieja-with-capers

The raw and the cooked

Lately I've not felt like doing this blog business. But nonetheless, I have been cooking and eating, in no particular order...a veritable cornucopia of hot dogs in Chicago....polish sausage for breakfast at Ronny's in the Loop...homemade moon pies in my kitchen...paella, gazpacho, and some chocolate deal for dessert for eight on the patio...spaghetti vongole at Club Lucky in Bucktown... scallops caprese on the grill...dim sum at Star Kitchen...the tasting menu at Black Cat in Boulder, courtesy of Hollie..croque monsieur tartiflette with bechamel sauce...a food cookoff at Kusmanoff's avec a hookah pipe, and tonight, my daughter's birthday dinner at Colt & Gray.

I'm having dreams about being a pastry chef. And I keep buying cookbooks, for some reason. And I wish I could get better at cooking, for all my books and bookmarks. I think about it too much, and I don't do it enough.

That's all.

Sweet Home, Chicago

Please refer to me for the next four days as "The Man Who Ate Chicago". Thank you.

Bucket of steamahs

I had visions of great meals on a recent business trip to Boston. But I ended up with shitty crew meals on my film shoot, a not bad but in retrospect, average steak frites at Bistro Jo, way too expensive and not terribly well done modern Japanese at Uni in the Eliot Hotel, and a shrimp pasta dish at Legal Seafoods that featured a bed of pasta so poorly cooked that I ate only the shrimp and the lonely cherry tomatoes.

But I have this Proustian memory of the steamed clams with drawn butter that I had at the Amaro household some 40 years ago. The daughter of Portuguese-descendants, my friend the lovely Stephanie Amaro had married a jerk that I worked for. Circumstance dictated that we had dinner one evening at her parent's rambling house in Ipswich near the beach. The succulent, dug-from-the-sand-that-day Ipswich clams, steamed and served with melted butter have stuck with me lo these many years.

So I ordered them at Legal Seafood. And they were pretty good. Sitting at a small table, looking out at the indoor mall, the Hello Kitty cart, and the passing throngs of Japanese tourists and fat, fanny-packed pre-Red Sox game Bostonians wasn't quite the same as sitting around the Amaro's long, noisy, family dining-room table in Ipswich. But the clams, fatter than the delicate Ipswich clams I remember, were good--tasting of the sea with that faint sandy grittiness that means it's for real. The drawn butter, spiked with the lemon wedge that it came with, made it all work.

And Hello Kitty notwithstanding, I got a flash of that magic thing that food, like a song on the radio or a scent on the wind, can do. Which is to not only fill your belly but to transport you to another place. And another time.

Steak frites

Brasserie Jo at the Collonade Hotel on Boylston Street in Boston. Al fresco. Steak frites with red wine butter. Red Sox fans walking by. Boston Brahmins in preppy shoes. Skinny jeans guy with a guitar case. Neighborhood couples pushing strollers. One a woman with cerebral palsy. Pushing a stroller. Mooks with Lucky brand tee-shirts and cargo shorts, their girlfriends in nice dresses and impossibly high heels. Couples riding bicycles. Duckboats lined up in front of the Cheesecake Factory across the street. And me with my steak frites.

My friend Maia tells me there's a Jasper White Summer Shack down the street. I've heard of him. He supposedly does great East Coast seafood, raw bar, oysters, and stuff. So if I can ditch my clients and co-workers, I'm going to live there the next two nights. So...you know...stay tuned.

When the rain comes

Uke fest cancelled. The rain came in around 4:00pm and it rained in sheets for some time. Not the usual four minute Colorado late-afternoon summer rain, but your proverbial torrential downpour. Around 4:30 Dave MacIntyre showed up at my door.He reported that the stage was wet (a deal-breaker for me as I'm not getting up on a wet stage and holding an electrified instrument in my little hands, thank you very much) and the town was reluctant to let its PA system be set up in the rain. Nancy showed up and we spent a half an hour calling musicians and spreading the word. Oddly, everyone is available for the scheduled rain date, September 2nd.

Lyons uke fest update: Moved it to September 2nd and a good time was had by all. Got dark too fast and the Lyons Hawaiians, god bless their pointy little heads, jumped into the crowd and played their hapa swing acoustically. By all accounts and reports people liked it. I think next year just one or two groups. End of that story.

Of course, the rain stopped shortly thereafter and while the skies looked threatening, it didn't rain another drop all evening.

Lyons uke fest

This evening is the first Lyons Uke Festival. My band, Gadzukes!, together with Chris McGarry, Nine Dollar Shawl, and Rue with David Ritchey will attempt to wow the crowd with ukulele pyrotechnics. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected, so come early, bring a chair and prepare to be astonished. At the Sandstone Park stage, 6pm to 8:30. And best of all...free.

A hamburger today

A pre-rehearsal cheeseburger with my friend and First Wednesday band-mate John Goggin as Oskar Blues in Lyons. Not much to say hamburger-wise, except that I'm always proud of myself when i forego the french fries and get a side of coleslaw, which of course is only marginally healthier. but it feels healthier. And more fiber-ey. But my rumination today is on the art of rehearsal.

It's my contention that there is no such thing as a bad rehearsal. Even if many of the players retain only 5% of what we learn, we're 5% farther along than we were before we started. My First Wednesday band is definitely making progress. We learn songs more quickly. We hardly ever argue about arrangements, chord changes, etc. We freely pass on advice, tips, etc. to the other players. (My only concern is that I'm too bossy, but i guess i figure that someone has to step up be bossy and it might just as well be me, since I lead the band on-stage anyway.)

Last night we learned two of Dave's songs ("Up On Cripple Creek" and "Down To Seeds & Stems Again,") one of Josh's (Robert Cray's Phone Booth) and went over some of the ones we had issues with. All in all, it was satisfying. More satisfying than the cheeseburger with cole slaw.

Tastes like chicken

Because it was chicken. Grilled bone-in breast with garlic rub, corn on the cob, new potatoes. Zzzzzz. I told you I was going to record what I ate.

Regarding the image to left, I once got a birthday card with this cowboy and rooster on the front. Inside it read, "This man has a big cock."