Vote for Chrysten!

Got an e-mail last night from my Aunt Gloria, who wanted everyone she e-mailed to vote for my cousin Chrysten Peddie, who has been nominated for a BroadwayWorld Cabaret award for Best Debut: Female or Male, for her role in Too Damn Tall at the Metropolitan Room. The voting ends on 12/31, so not much of a window, but I thought I'd throw it out there, anyway.

So, to vote for her, you can click here, and to see a video of her singing, you can click here. (Seems like I should be able to embed that YouTube video directly into the post, but maybe that's not something that can be accomplished when posting from an iPad.)

Deep Thoughts #110

The only thing I want for Festivus this year is for some enterprising code geek to figure out a way to spread Ebola by smartphone app. NEXT!

Deep Thoughts #109

Do gasbags like Lindsey Graham stand up in public and bloviate because being wrong on camera is the only way they can still get an erection?

Now How Did We Manage This?

Coal Yard Coffee

So I heard about this whole Coal Factory thing that is supposedly going to happen here in Irvington (from here and here), but what I did not know was that there was already a coffee shop operating in a tiny little space that is part of the area where the Coal Factory will be, along Bonna Avenue, between Audubon Road and Ritter Avenue. I found out about that from here (the paper version).

Since they don’t have a real website, I had to check out their Facebook page, and I managed to surmise from that that they had been open for close to a month by the time I found out that they were there. We stopped in the very next day, and it was absolutely—well, vis-à-vis coffee shops, anyway—the best thing ever. It’s very much a work in progress, but they’ve got art on the walls, lots of places to sit, and a very old-school foosball table in the back. You may want to specify that you want your drink to go, if you’re planning to take it to go, or you may well find yourself getting served with an actual glass. You may also find an artistic design of some kind in the foam on top, if you have ordered something that has foam on top.

You will not be disappointed. Much has gone into making the space comfortable for people who want to sit around and hang out, but much has also gone into knowing how to make coffee drinks. One of the baristas behind the counter even remembered from her Lazy Daze days that I was a hazelnut latté guy. My medium non-fact hazelnut latté, easy on the hazelnut, with an extra shot of espresso, was excellent. They nailed the easy on the hazelnut and the extra shot of espresso, which not everyone does.

By the time the Coal Factory developement is done and is ready for its grand opening, Coal Yard Coffee will have been open for about a year. Things will change between now and then, but they are off to a great start—which makes the second consecutive east side coffee shop to hit the ground running, after the successful launch last year of Tin Comet Coffee. The biggest difference is that you have to make an effort to get to Coal Yard Coffee. Bonna Avenue is two blocks south of Washington Street, in a mostly residential area. That’s not going to stop the people in Irvington, who flocked to Lazy Daze when it was open—and I hope it doesn’t stop the rest of you, either. This is not a great coffee shop in the making—it’s already a great coffee shop, and it’s only a month old.

5547 Bonna Avenue
777-1161
Facebook

Deep Thoughts #108

So is it safe to assume that the Colts probably will not rechristen their pleasure dome as Lucas Oil Reichstadium? Maybe if Frau Lucas begs?

Deep Thoughts #107

WASP supremacist liars like Charlotte Lucas always say ignorant, racist things; but the dullards who believe their fake apologies are worse.

Author? I Hardly Know Her!

Recently, I have been working my way through a thick volume of the collected poems of Charles Reznikoff, which has been both more and less rewarding than I expected. I don’t remember where I found out about him or read his poems for the first time, but it was the prospect of reading poems about New York, because I had found out that he was a New Yorker and wrote about where he was from, that led me to the book; and though it turned out that some of them were about New York, but most of them weren’t, it was still mostly enjoyable.

And then, on page 367, very near the end, in a section called Last Poems, the first of six parts of poem #10, subtitled “Just Before the Sun Goes Down,” was this little nubbin:

Of all that I have written
you say: “How much was poorly said.”
But look!
The oak has many acorns
that a single oak might live.

It’s not like I’m ever going to stop writing, and it’s not like I need any especial inspiration to sit down and work a little bit every day. Inspiration to be confident about what I have written, however…that remains in short supply ‘round here. The lines quoted above acknowledge what should be common sense: not everything we write is great work—but anything we write is of value, because who knows how or when what you initially believe to be inconsequential will reveal its importance?

I read those lines by Reznikoff late Tuesday night, and then came across a poem called “Poet’s Guide to the Foucault Pendulum” in the current issue of the Indiana Review while I was out and about on Wednesday afternoon, having stopped to read for a short time in Military Park. I don’t imagine that it’s couth for me to reproduce that poem here in its entirety, but the gist of it is that progress is a matter of perspective rather than necessarily a demonstration of fact.

The world spins under you
in such quiet and purposeful ways;
you move even if you refuse to,
so why bother being so stubborn,
so convinced you’ve never made
any progress at life?

And then moments later we are asked to “witness how slow / swaying adds up to a complete / revolution. This is all you can ask / of yourself, all the world does too." In the simplicity of those lines is the same appeal to common sense that struck me in the lines from the Reznikoff poem. Like I said before, I don’t need any inspiration to go on with the work. What I sometimes lack (“What do you lack?”) is the ability to believe that the going on isn’t futile. Unearthing little gems like these, out of the blue, goes a long way in that respect.

Deep Thoughts #106 - Special Topical How Could We Possibly Ever Forget?! Edition

Did the O.D. greens hanging flags off of bridges and distracting drivers today get the courage to do that by eating Freedom Fries for lunch?

Deep Thoughts #105

Is this the one Republican who gets that his party, hurtling toward irrelevancy, must now embrace honest-to-Darwin change we can believe in?

Deep Thoughts #104

(I only just started watching Mad Men recently.) We're supposed to root for Don Draper—but how can you root for someone who's so—Republican?

Black Market

Last Wednesday night we completed the Ed Rudisell trifecta and finally got around to trying Black Market. Amy was pretty well seduced by the Devour Downtown menu that included a no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookie for dessert, and even though we didn’t do the planning very well, we pretty much had our pick of seats in the place when we arrived at almost half past seven. I didn’t ask what the building all the way at the far north end of Mass Ave used to be, but Mr. Rudisell and company did well to retain the brick walls and hardwood floors when they built it out into a restaurant.

On another night, we might not have been able to choose our seats, but that night we got to pick between individual seating on the edges of the room, bar seating, and a communal space in the middle that brought to mind eating around the long tables in the conference room, back in the ol’ Clearwater days. They’ve done as much as they can with a small space, as they have also done with Siam Square and Rook—though there is something charming about Black Market that I’ve never felt at Siam Square, and did not feel the one time we tried Rook. I’m not sure what that something charming is…but it’s there.

But enough of that preliminary crap…we need to move directly to the food, because this was one of the best out-to-dinner meals I have eaten in a long time. When we picked Jackson up at my parents’ house after we ate, they asked us where we had gone, and then what kind of place it was; and I had a hard time describing exactly what they’re aiming for at Black Market. It’s not like the other Rudisell joints, which serve specifically Asian food. The phrase I used to describe it to my parents was “contemporary American.” It’s one of those places where the menu changes regularly to take advantage of both local ingredients and foods that are in season, and it’s widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in the city.

After some hemming and hawing, Amy selected the Devour Downtown menu, three courses for $30, which started with a salad of Israeli couscous, blueberry, and melon, with sweet basil vinaigrette and goat cheese. She liked the goat cheese—no surprise there—but seemed indifferent to the rest of it. I ordered from the regular menu and started with a salad of Chioggia beets, cucumber, and feta, with lemon vinaigrette ($9). I managed to overlook the green beans and mint that were also listed on the menu, so those were a nice surprise when the salad came, as was a foundation of hardy chopped romaine. I had never experienced Chioggia beets before, so I looked them up after we got home, and discovered that it’s an Italian beet with red and white stripes on the inside. I don’t recall the thick slices in my salad being striped—which maybe means they were overcooked a bit, but they were still sweet and delicious, a nice counterpoint to the tart vinaigrette and loud, creamy feta cheese.

Amy was less pleased with her second course, described on the menu as Garden Lemongrass-Chicken Broth and Confit with Sweet Corn and Carrots, but which in actuality was more along the lines of glorified chicken soup. I went for the pulled pork sandwich, on a brioche bun from Amelia’s, with mustard-vinegar sauce and two sides ($14). The cornbread with serrano butter was a no-brainer for one of the sides, but I was torn between cole slaw and three-cheese macaroni for the other. In the end, the mac and cheese fiend in me won out, and I was rewarded with a creamy helping of surprisingly well-cooked macaroni and cheese (at least one of the three was goat cheese, but that was the only one I could identify). The cornbread was crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, topped with a wee dab of serrano butter that was intensely pepper-flavored, but not aggressively spicy. It reminded me of the Rico’s Hot and Easy cheese we used to sling on the nachos, back in the GC Eastgate days.

Does the sandwich all by itself deserve its own paragraph? I think it just might, and yet I don’t even know where to begin. The airy, perfectly grilled brioche bun? The giant mound of pulled pork, already sauced, yet not so much that it obscured the smokiest smoke flavor I think I’ve ever encountered? The way it was served halfway open-faced, like they knew even before you did that to attempt to pick it up with your hands and eat it like a sandwich was simply out of the question? That mustard-vinegar sauce, which was just as briny as its appellation would lead you to believe, yet also sweet and a little bit smoky itself? The excellent bread, which had grill marks, but wasn’t burnt, and which retained a chewy breadiness even after being sat upon by a giant pile of barbecued pork? I suspect that from this day forward, any barbecued pulled pork that I ever eat will be held up against this sandwich—and probably found wanting.

There was no third course for me, but Amy got the aforementioned chocolate oatmeal no-bake cookie with peanut butter mousse and raspberry sauce. It looked more like two lumps of brown granola to me, but she seemed to like them; and the peanut butter mousse was admirably peanut buttery.

I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m not sure there’s anything left to say—although maybe it’s worth going back to what I said near the beginning, that Black Market has had the reputation, pretty much since the day it opened, of being one of the best restaurants in the city. It’s definitely the best meal I’ve had in a restaurant since we ate at Bluebeard a couple of years ago. Is it better than Bluebeard? I’m not sure I’d go that far—but I’m not sure I wouldn’t, either. They’re really close. I still haven’t tried R Bistro or Recess, or a couple of the newer big deals, like Cerulean and Late Harvest Kitchen. The best restaurant in the city is probably one of the six—and Bluebeard and Black Market set the bar very, very high.

922 Massachusetts Avenue
822-6757
blackmarketindy.net

Second Grade

So there was a new person at our bus stop on Monday morning, which made getting first-day-of-school pictures of Jackson slightly more difficult than usual. I suspect this kid is going to wind up having a very happy orthodontist. (That sounds odd. I mean Jackson, not the new person's kid. Just look at those gaps between his teeth!)

2012 - Kindergarten

2013 - First Grade

2014 - Second Grade

Deep Thoughts #103

So who would actually be stupid enough to cite breitbart.com as a source - and actually mean it? Oh…yeah. An Indiana Republican, that’s who.

When Alexander Saw the Breadth of His Domain, He Wept - For There Were No More Worlds to Conquer.

That title is eighteen words. You get to pick the 982 others to go with this picture.

Support Recycling in Indy!

Mayor Greg Ballard, who had been doing a respectable job as mayor, for a Republican, recently signed a contract with a garbage profiteering firm called Covanta which will destroy much of the recycling infrastructure that free-thinking and intelligent people have built here in Indianapolis. The lazy and uninformed (nearly 100% overlap if you put that group in a Venn diagram with the Republican rank and file) will believe the shit that Covanta is shoveling, because they will think that 100% participation in recycling is a good thing (never mind that glass isn't included - oops!). They won't stop to consider that recyclables mixed with garbage might be contaminated and unusable, and they certainly won't take the time to consider the long-term effects of signing over our garbage - until the year 2028 - to a company that burns it and sells the steam produced from that burning for profit.

Although the contract has already been signed, the Board of Public Works still has to approve it; and there is still time to make your voice heard. You can click here to sign a change.org petition, and you can click here to contact the mayor's office directly. More information on this blatant money grab can be found here and here. Mayor Ballard will run for re-election next year, and once the details of this embarrassing environmental about-face are made clear to the voters, he's sure to lose the support of a great many voters he lied to when he said he cared about sustainability and the environment. All those bike lanes and re-paved streets are nice, but it's time to ditch the liar Greg Ballard and send him back to the ranks of the unemployed, where all Republicans belong.

Deep Thoughts #102

But then I nail a reasonably solid fake tweet and I feel a little bit better. Patricia Lockwood’s fake sext tweets make me feel better, too.

Deep Thoughts #101

I am currently reading a crappy novel with bad writing, and it’s making me question every sentence of my own. Am I that much of a hack, too?

The Pledge of the Independents

The Abbey Bookshop, in Paris, has launched some kind of Facebook campaign to encourage folks not to buy books from Amazon or any of its lackeys, due in part to the ongoing tussle between Amazon and Hachette. (Just Google "Amazon Hachette," and you'll be up to speed in about 0.36 seconds.) I don't support Facebook, or the way it assimilates people into its collective (especially when those people go about indiscriminately sharing unsourced information just because it sounds good), but every now and then you have to make this kind of exception. So I am sharing a link to the Abbey Bookshop's Facebook page for the Pledge of the Independents.

Amazon's goal of creating a commercial monopoly on goods and (increasingly) services has come to fruition in no small part because they cut their teeth selling books on the magic internets (and culling so much information from their books customers that they very quickly learned how to sell pretty much everything to pretty much everyone) and because they are willing to sell just about anything at a loss, as long as it means that they keep assimilating customers who don't care about anything except how cheap they can get whatever they want. (Walmart does the exact same thing, but with the added bonus of depressing wages in the communities where they plant their discount megachurches.)

Now that Amazon's shareholders have finally begun to bristle at the no-profits business model, Amazon has responded by squeezing yet another of its suppliers, Hachette Book Group. Most of the time when this happens, the supplier in question starts crying and tries to say no, but then is forced by Amazon to take another bump of X, shut the fuck up, and spread its legs. Hachette is putting up something of a fight, and it's starting to feel like they're building some momentum.

I'm not in book buying mode at the moment, but I have made the decision to buy what books I choose to buy from the local indie stores. We're not so fortunate here in Indianapolis to have a great independent bookstore like Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company, but Indy Reads Books and Bookmamas are not bad - and they can get you any new title that you need. Amazon needs to be made aware that its business practices are unacceptable, and that's why I'm sharing a Facebook link. (And no, the irony is not lost on me that I am sharing information about the shady business practices of one giant internet company by using the product of another giant internet company.)

It's Coming Right For Us!

This is a quick video of Jackson zipping down the brick-lined sidewalk next to the Kirkwood Observatory in Bloomington. I got two videos very similar to this one a few weeks ago when we were in Bloomington; but my timing was all wrong, and the videos were way too long. I tried to edit the better one, but wound up with a clip that took up twice the disk space of the original, despite being about 80% shorter. So...when we stopped in Bloomington this afternoon, on our way back from Mammoth Cave National Park, I was fortunate enough to get the same basic video, in a shorter, more compact version.

To wit:

Deep Thoughts #100 - Special Topical Right-Wing Fearmongering Edition

Hang on…you mean conservative wing-nuts are using entrapment and manipulation to scare people about yet another social issue they get wrong?

Seven Come Eleven and She Could Be Mine

Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of Jackson in the morning before school yesterday, and Amy had her two-hour choir jamboree that was already in progress when I got back from work at another mainstream cinema - and that left the unwrapping of the present we got him as my only opportunity to get a birthday picture of him for the ol' blog. Our house throws light oddly, and I'm still taking pictures with a point-and-shoot my brother-in-law brought home from the desert about a decade ago - which is a long way around saying that the selection ain't optimal.

Nevertheless, the streak remains intact for at least one more year - and Amy and I find ourselves the parents of a 7-year-old. I still can't quite get my head around that.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

I've Been Kidnapped By a Guatemalan Banana Monkey!

I wish I had taken a picture of the driveway leading down from the main street to the gate of the River House, the donated apartment house/complex where we stayed in Panajachel. That driveway was very steep, with standing water near the bottom; and when the vans delivering us from the airport in Guatemala City pulled up in front of the River House, we could see, even in the gathering dark, that it stood behind a gated wall, part of which was topped with razor wire. It wasn’t the first wall topped with razor wire I had seen that day, though the others had been in Guatemala City, which I had both read and been told was quite a bit rougher than most of the rest of the country—and yet there we were, arriving to stay at a place surrounded by a wall partially topped with razor wire. Not that there was anything to be done about it – the drivers were already unloading our luggage from the racks on top of the vans, and one of our trip coordinators was opening the door in the gate to let us into the compound. (I never quite stopped thinking about it that way.) And even though it was dark by that time, it was still obvious, if not quite as dramatic, that what lay outside the gate of the River House was much different than what lay inside, which was this:



That was our first glimpse of what the next week, in part, was going to be like for us in Guatemala; but I had a hard time shaking some of the things I had seen on our way to Panajachel. There was all of that razor wire I mentioned a moment ago, topping the walls of not a few buildings (and other compounds—there’s that word again) we saw on the road from the airport in Guatemala City. Some of those buildings were abandoned and crumbling, and some of them had rebar jutting up along the edges and corners of the roofs. We were told that the reason for the exposed rebar was so that if money were ever raised to finish the building in question, the contractor would have an idea of where to begin the work again, so that the building would retain roughly the same kind of structure it had had at the beginning of the project. There is no system of credit in Guatemala, at least as compared to the United States. If a construction project runs out of money, they just stop where they’re at.

People in Guatemala get by with much less than we do in the United States, but it’s difficult to appreciate the truth of that idea unless you see it for yourself; and once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to shake it. We saw and did a lot of amazing things—and I’m not much for using the word amazing in that kind of context, for pretty much the same reason Sam doesn’t like to say “I love you” in the film Ghost—in our short time in Guatemala; but there was also much that we saw that brought the truth of what it means to live among the middle class in the United States into sharp relief. This is the room where the students we worked on the basketball/soccer court for go to school every day:

They attend school for five hours a day, and public education in Guatemala, especially for the least well off people in the rural communities, generally stops at sixth grade. One morning, we stopped at Nueva Esperanza, a community that had been created for people displaced by Hurricane Stan. There, we were able to see the results of a previous project that Mission Guatemala had completed—a kitchen with cinder-block stoves, seen here being used by a group of women who are making tortillas by hand (in traditional Mayan dress):

You may not think it looks like much, especially compared to what you probably have at home; but it was a major upgrade over what they had before, which was this:

I cannot properly convey the spirit of so many of the people we met during our time in Guatemala. I’m sure they’re not all happy-go-lucky, and maybe many of them put on their bravest faces for us because we were easy marks who were eager to spend money on souvenirs; but there is a warmth and kindness to these people that cannot but alter your estimation of what constitutes a full life, a life well lived.

And yet it already seems far away. We’ve been back for a little over three weeks now, and it was all too easy to slip back into my routine. It would have been very easy to sit back and write a series of posts about everything we got to see and do while we were there, everything our position of relative privilege bought us, to post pictures of mountains, volcanoes, art, the surprisingly touristy streets of downtown Pana; but I couldn’t just look away from what was difficult to see. A lot of the pictures I took in Guatemala are of scenes that would not necessarily strike one as picture-worthy. I wanted to be sure I would be able to remember everything, and what all of it meant to me, because I knew it would fade once I returned home.

I know I won’t forget the six-person tuk-tuk ride, or stepping into a brothel half by mistake, or the Spanish guitar at Circus Bar the last night we were there, or what one of the guys in the group looked like wearing the traditional Mayan skirt his wife had bought for herself, or the way a little boy named Brandon Omar (all of seven years old) ran up to me and gave me a hug out of the clear blue sky the day we stopped in Nueva Esperanza, or the guy who tried to sell me marijuana (“Weed cheap!”), or the beautifully simmered black beans and handmade tortillas and fried plantains that we seemed to eat a little bit of every day we were there. I’ll write about the touristy stuff and post those pictures later. It was the less touristy stuff we saw and did that often made the biggest impression, and absolutely made me want to redouble my efforts to “live simply, so that others may simply live.”

Deep Thoughts #99

Has anyone ever thought it a good idea to read A People’s History of the United States concurrently with any part of In Search of Lost Time?

Deep Thoughts #98

Finally, that smug wiseacre who won nearly $300,000 by playing the board the wrong way lost when his Daily Double strategy backfired on him.

The Toothless Snow-Eater and the Giant Sledding Hill!

This past Sunday, Amy bribed Jackson with the promise of letting him tackle the Sledding Hill at Fort Harrison if he promised first to go cheerfully on a walk with us. It's a fairly respectable system she has developed for getting him to do things we want him to do that he doesn't necessarily want to do himself. He was very excited when we got into the park and he could see the Sledding Hill from where we parked the car. We walked most of the 2.5-mile loop around the Duck Pond and Delaware Lake on the Harrison Trace trail, and I was able to get quite a lot of pictures of the snow-covered landscape - as well as a number of Jackson the Snow Eater.

And then once we were done with the trail, we came back to the sledding hill and let Jackson go to town. He walked his little sled all the way to the top of the hill five times and came whooshing back down. The first time was the best for sheer reaction, but I did not get a video of that one. The second one might have been more exciting, though, because he wound up shooting right toward me when he got to the bottom.

I posted a few more pictures on my photo page.

Brian Bosma is a Coward

The dishonorable speaker of Indiana's House of Representatives, Brian Bosma, has voiced the possibility of replacing members of the House Judiciary Committee who may not vote the way he wants them to vote on the legislative abortion known as HJR-3, the Indiana Discrimination Amendment. This would be the second shameful act of cowardice by the House with respect to this bill - the first being to rename it from HJR-6, in order to confuse stupid Hoosiers.

The good folks at Freedom Indiana have another convenient e-mail form you can use to write to Herr Bosma and tell him what a coward he is.

Also, anyone who votes for this bill should be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity, for abuse of power and dereliction of duty. The proper role of government is to protect rights, not to take them away. The state of Indiana would be permanently damaged if this bill were to pass, which makes passing it - and voting for it - an act of treason. If, Darwin help us, this bill makes it to the ballot in November, any Hoosier voting for it would also be guilty of an act of treason.

That's a lot to have on your conscience for something the U.S. Supreme Court is eventually going to overturn anyway, don't you think?

I Would Vote for Kim Jong Un for President of the United States If He Would Promise to Execute American Conservatives the Same Way Hong Kong Says He Executed His Uncle

The right-wing monkeys in the state legislature are so afraid of getting dragged out into the alley and beat the fucking shit out of that they changed the name of their bigoted, discriminatory hate crime from HJR-6 to HJR-3. I have thought for a long time that no other group of feces-throwing knuckle-draggers could look more ridiculous than Indiana Republicans, but now, by changing the name of their intellectual abortion in an incredibly retarded attempt at misdirection, they have shown themselves also to be cowards. People who don’t live here—and many who do!—think that Indiana is a ridiculous laughingstock of a state, and they are correct; and Indiana Republicans are the reason that Indiana is a ridiculous laughingstock of a state. You just have to feel bad for people who are so awful, stupid, and evil.

Reject HJR-6

You too can let your voice be heard in the campaign against the discriminatory piece of legislative fecal matter known as HJR-6, a hateful phallus with which the right-wing fear mongers keep trying to orally rape the citizens of Indiana. Click here, and you can write a message that Freedom Indiana will format into a neat little letter and present to the legislature when it reconvenes next week. Here's what I submitted:

I am writing to let you know that I oppose HJR-6, and to ask for your support in seeing that this discriminatory, bigoted piece of legislation is exterminated. This issue is important to me because HJR-6 would take away rights. The proper role of government is to protect rights, not to take them away. I hope that I can count on you to do what is morally correct, which is to do everything in your power to prevent the passage of this backward piece of legislative fecal matter. If you are able to do so, then I thank you for your public service. I thank you for your time.

Ten years ago, the Republicans used gay marriage as a wedge issue (along with blatant lies about John Kerry's military service), because they knew that Dubya had no chance of being re-elected on his own merits. Ten years from now, gay marriage will be legal in all fifty states, with no restrictions at all. Conservatives are always wrong about social issues. Every. Single. Time. They're just too ignorant and bigoted to admit it, so it's up to those of us with brains to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the light.

That's also a way to kill vampires. How about that?