Seasonal obedience means retract your energy.
Be a little sprout if there is no snow, or be the quiet tunda wind voice if there is snow. Be the winter creature.
If you get sick, take a long and very hot bath and then get out and put on your most comfortable pjamas and cover up with a heavy blanket. Drink a cup of ginger tea, or mint, or cayenne and lemon, and sweat out the sickness. Close your eyes and dream up the memories of summer, or a portrait of your most vital and feel the sickness working for you, making you retract, rewind, reflect in preparation for future adventures. Make sure you change your bedding and clothes before you go to bed, after sweating but not until exhaustion, and your immune system is stimulated by that experience.
If you are having trouble healing, remember that love for yourself is the most powerful medicine. Respect your body's process.
Be alone if you want to.
I do want to be alone, but then I want to talk to you.
I cooked a big dinner, wild mushroom risotto, and roasted brussels, and celery salad with pickled plums and almonds, and grilled radicchio but then there's nobody home but me to eat.
I would cook for you if you were here but I am kinda glad you are not!
I want to see you when I have more to say, and when you are not coughing.
I turned 30 a few days ago, two days before the change of the decade, so I had the chance to reflect both on the unnamed decade we just endured and also my 20s.
I was in Ixtapa, Mexico on New Year's 10 years ago and when the clock struck from 1999 to 2000, a big frail structure jizzed fire all over these BMWs in an amatuer fireworks display! This year I was in a similar situation when I was next to a Christmas tree shooting flames when midnight came. The flames were coming close to these weird bottles of propane near me and dude I just took off because in this last decade, I have seen too many close calls in the world of fireworks, Burning Man jerks, artsy shit, etc. and I have decided that I am finally old enough to know better and move away from hazards!
You know how when kitties are super happy and they knead blankets and stuff? That's how I feel about turning 30. I'm like, yeah, I can get really comfortable here!
Wow, I want to illustrate how grand these last 10 years have been but it's hard to describe. I just never thought I would be so blessed to be here, to have a creative practice and good buddies and a whole family hugging me with acceptance.
Music changed my life. When I entered the world of music I thought it was and always had been so frenetic and frenzied and heart pulpy. That was 2003 in Portland, and the commotion was insane. The mental image that illustrates that most for me is when Lightning Bolt played Million in probably 2003 or 2004 and it was so packed that my chin was on some jock guy's shoulder and the whole room was people melted together. It was so hot that the venue walls were wet with sweat for days.
It still is this hot vein running through culture and enlightening teenagers and keeping the scared and polluted proud and daring, but music didn't end up being everything as maybe we thought it would in the early days of the Bush administration.
And honestly I'm happy about that.
I'm happy to see my friends who were so committed are now diversifying, and choosing to hold the musical and creative torch still, but also valuing being a family member or a helpful professional, channeling their spiritual gifts into less abstract functions, or even becoming luxuriously lazy sometimes because we work so hard to be something and it is sumptuous to just be happy basking in earth's hues with no concerns at all.
Tour, tour, tour, practice, practice, practice, email, email-----so much work!
Sometimes I imagine myself a mold budding bright blue on your windowsill or a ruffly mushroom on a wet log.
Obeying the seasons. It's not wimpy! It's a maximization of energy.
I am so grateful for the musicians and artists who stimulated my chakras through this decade, but as there is no lack of accolades for those dedicated people, I want to say that the creative people who changed my life most are cooks.
I would cook for you but maybe let's wait a little bit, so I can get all the alone time in with William T. Vollmann books helping me ignore my wanderlust. But in a few weeks, let's eat radishes and mustard greens and notice how winter has a special spiciness. Let's go hunting for mushrooms!
Above is a picture of me playing in Darmstadt, Germany, one of the performances on my European tour in November. Before I played I had some traditional German food, including red cabbage braised with apples. Every time I had delicious food prepared home style before or after my show, I was so happy that I would play excellently and laugh really deep all night. That tour made me so happy!
Soft fires autumn time
California dusk honey mirrored lapped dapples
Ladles of warm measures
Air travel causes me some apprehension, but I like to travel and soon I will be like Michael Jordan jumpshotting like a rainbow over to Europe.
Before I leave I fall more in love with home.
Every chromatic mellowment of sunshine is witnessed here in Oakland.
I will walk over grass crunchy with frost and rob the last persimmons from the trees in countryside Italy.
November 11 in Porto at Plano with Grouper
12th in Lisbon at ZDB with Grouper
13th Coimbra, Portugal at Via Latina
14th Traveling
15th in Madrid at Tanned Tin
16th OPEN
17th Angers, France
18th OPEN
19th Lyon, Frace at GRNDDD ZERO with Foot Village
20th OPEN
21st OPEN, maybe Barcelona??
22nd Damstadt, Germany with Samara Lubelski and Kuupuu
23rd Prague (probably)
24th Milan at Palazzina Esterni
25th OPEN
26th Udine, Italy at Kobo shop (playing at 6pm!!)
27th Verona, Italy at Esposta
I have a few days open and I hope people might invite me to their autumn festivals and I will play there! Or a special dinner tribute to turnips and butter. Or the uncorking of the herbal liquors. Some kind of moongazing and hazelnut ice cream! What I am saying is I have a few days open and if you would like to meet and get a brain massage via emo bubbles, or a sincere sol noogie, give me a ring and let's talk about setting up a show! Or a dinner/show, with some physical jaccuzzing to my ipod loaded with 1970s Mali music.
I hope I'm being clear: please email me at incaore@gmail.com and let's set up a special show!
Babies are in my life. They are trying out their faces. They are testing out the gap between the emotions inside a body and the exterior tools for expressing those emotions. New baby mouths deciding between a yawn and a cry. Fingers tightly bound into a thoughtful boil, soon to steam out patty-cake and midnight wails. Skin so new even to tears on the cheeks, or a sunburn, or an accidental scratch.
There's a new baby in my family and for the first time in my adult life, I held a baby barely brave enough to open its eyes and introduce itself to Earth's shades. It was warm with newness, possibility, the amazing permitted innocence.
A few weeks ago some babies sprouted behind my cactus. Little kittens were born there, feral babies, their eyes looking like hot-glued googlies. Their effortless humor was heart-melting, making toddling mistakes and splashing milky sprinkles all over their baby faces. I wanted to protect them but their feral mommy won out in the end, and now there are hiding somewhere in the neighborhood, in the thickets of magenta-flowered bushes or one of the foliage collages in between fences in our neighborhood, where winter and tornadoes never come to rearrange the cob-webbed green tangles. The mommy is about still, stalking the squirrels who rumble in the quince and fig tree, or taking midnight chicken parts to the babies from the Chinese neighborhood spot On Luck, which helps keep the feral cats of 15th Street's coats shiny.
Now the baby cats are gone somewhere, and the garden beds they scratched in are now prepping for winter. The tomatoes are offering last fruits, and the peppers are providing a surprisingly late-fall crop. In one bed, I scattered seeds of watermelon diakon, Italian dandelion, watercress and peppercress, and I soak those beds morning and night, scanning the dirt for sprouts. This is the first time I've planted food from seed and I'm hoping to witness the miracle.
Beyond where the cactus sprouted kittens, over the fence, is baby Nadia, just born to our neighbors. Behind where I sit now is the home of our newest neighbors, whose little toddler girl erupts in delighted screams that cut like confetti through the lazy yellow late afternoon sun. What emotion motivates that unadult sound? Tickling? TV? Imaginaries?
Birth is such a relief. The honeybees didn't all die and George Bush didn't cause the women of the world to suddenly stop ovulating. Life persists. It makes its first appearances with such humor and tenderness. I can't imagine having a real baby now, but the creative conception is always happening. Got to stay fertile.
Birthdays have been such an inspiration to me. The last two major projects I worked on, my album "Birthday of Bless You" and my zine "Birthday" were obviously inspired, and this is why: any day could be your birthday, could be the day when you start again, when you embody the blessed creature you are, when the armor of the confusing cultures that adorn you with symbols of unworthiness are blasted off, and your holy nudity is evident, is blazingly your new form, and you buff this supreme newness with the emotional gestures of innocence.
And today is another birthday! "Silver Sea Surfer School" is outta the incubator today, a real vinyl album, pressed by Not Not Fun and is my offering and evidence of the obstetrics I'm trying to experience. I wanted to explain this album a little bit, and draw the line of birthdays through it, as its spine.
Becoming a musician was a miracle for me! I never expected it, but it swept me up, delivered me from the shyness and antisocial misfit frowner-girl I once was. I am not the kind of musician that delights in geeking on pedals in a crypt all summer long, or somebody who has a clenching drive to master an instrument, though I really admire those who find a purpose in life through that kind of practice. For me, making music is about enjoying my life, and continuing to heal from the burns of Babylon, and using the musical medium to unclench my baby fingers and air out the ferments of my emotions and experiences in an accentuated spiritual experience.
When you are newborn, you may experiment like a three-day-old baby and watch how your emotions inside sprout in your voice and on your face.
I like to play music at most 15 minutes a day, improvising things and making recordings and whittling through those recordings after months of daily playing. For me, practice is hot spring baths, and cooking dinner for my beloveds, and looking the homeless in the eyes and smiling so long and touching their arms, or growing some plants, or putting my feet on the wall and staring at the ceiling, or running in the eucalyptus forests and watching the sunshine turn liquidy, or acting against productivity and taking a long walk with loved ones and sampling churros and horchatas on the way.
Everyone is rushing lately, but this new album of mine "Silver Sea Surfer School," was made as slowly as a snail. So many discarded tracks, labor pains of self-doubt, sudden bursts of heavenly lyrics. The songs were improvised often in earshot of my neighbors, many of whom are American infants, brand-new immigrants from China or Mexico or El Salvador or Laos, people who are truly awesome and so are their children, who I substitute teach in Oakland schools. These kids are mini-hyphy and amazingly creative inhabitants of the internet-spawned Alien Earth.
This new album is a spiritual work because when I was making it, I experienced a lot of the unnamed depression that perhaps we all feel but try to erase with the important but sometimes deceiving "posi" thing. As in, is this the last generation of a verdant Earth, and how am I implicated?
The baggage of that fixation made me trudge heavy footprints through the boundless abysses of depression, but through these months of recording, footprints that start walking through mud eventually began to skip and jog and then dance and then disappear because I ride a kitten-sleigh to the whipped-topping of all of our heavens, blended into one delicious smoothie.
If we are going to participate in the licking-clean of our planet's bounty, could we at least do it happily?
On my album, there are gospel tunes, a cover and an original called "Rough Riding," which I am ending all shows with now. There is a song about the innocence of new sweet love. There is a song about the divine illumination of life through the muse. There is a song about the shelter of friendship, and your pulsating heart as a flotation device surfing you over the silver seas. And there are ditties that are just me on the excellent jumpy castle of my imagination, yelling YAYYYYYY!
Tonight I am playing in Oakland for the last time in a while because I am preparing to go to Europe in November. I am playing at 21 Grand tonight, October 10th, with Sex Worker, Psychic Reality and Robedoor. Michael Whittaker is backing me up on these shows and in Europe. I remember one time Michael played flute to these little twin boys, who were about 2 or 3, and their awe of his piping was astounding, they had to struggle to find gestures to express their near-disbelief of something so magical. And that's how I feel about his playing too.
Please email me if you would like to order "Silver Sea Surfer School." incaore@gmail.com I'm hoping to have a new zine printed by mid-November too.
Hi, I'm in Detroit with my family.
I am playing Detroit for the first time tonight!
At Donovan's, at 3003 W. Vernor Hwy. It's free, it's with the Genders. I'll play about 11, Genders at midnight.
It's my first time playing with a new lineup. A special guest is backing me up on all these midwest shows.
This week, I'm going to frolick around Michigan (be in touch if you have any special recommendations about Michigan adventures) and then play more shows around the Midwest.
FRIDAY August 21---Chicago at the Enemy 1550 N. Milwaukee 3rd Floor with White Prism and Implex Grace
MONDAY August 24---Iowa City at PSone with Horsebladder
WEDNESDAY August 26--7:30 pm in Detroit with Modern Garage Movement (DANCE TROUPE!!) at
THE LOT 3013 Cochrane Detroit, MI 48216 http://thelotdetroit.blogspot.com/
One of the creatures pictured above will back me up on these shows!
Glitter innermost bling! OM from a giggle dune!
In the midst of the first quarter of the waning moon this month, just a few days ago, I walked along the herbal ways of the wilderness in Oregon and celebrated my second wedding anniversary. The piney clime was bluish and there were baby deer springing in the grasses, their butts painted with white dots. I saw butterflies that were black and orange, and yellow, conducting their experience with a bobbing humor, until they went to a bed of minerals to taste and meditate. I was at the hot springs. At midday I sat in the hottest tub and panted and reddened, sweating and wilting, until I couldn't take it anymore. Then I tried to run but my bare feet would barely tolerate the pebbles and rocks sharpness, so I walked quickly, through the grasses and then next to the labrinthe of stones and then over a small ridge and through prickly green plants until finally I was at the shore of the river, rushing with snowmelt over a rusted mosaic of rocks. I ran into the current and plunged in.
The cold plunge---the shock is the substance of a most treasured feeling. Hot tub enthusiasts and sauna devotees know what I'm talking about, it's the million-word wordless therapy, an instantaneous reckoning and forgiveness, a visitation into forgotten memories and identities, a surfacing of dreams, a lucid illumination into the opaque paths we see ourselves on when we peer back into the past.
The path----it's the way I try to blunt the impact of the future onto my present, or to make sense of the meanderings of the past----I explain that it's my path. The path, it's the mellow word I use to explain the mysterious combination of decisions, coincidences, syncronicities, hot tar months of depression or brilliant sudden breaks. At the hot springs the other day, I felt a gratitude for my path, its meadows and potholes both, and I revisited those little pebbles of moments that pave where I walk now.
The best thing about a path metaphor is the movement implied. I love to run lately because it so quickly metabolizes what's going on with me, and sometimes I have to stop and kneel and cry a tear or three, and just get out all the depression in a quick liquid, or I have to really laugh loud on the trail or put my chest into a tree trunk and get emotional about the gift of a green minute on EARTH.
My love of nature is exploding today, in proportion to summer's blossom. My garden vegetables are festooned with fruit or little baby buds, the herbal leaves are multiplying. We are growing basils both Thai and Italian, thyme, parsley, lavender, lemon balm, lemon verbena, epazote, valerian, yarrow, tomatoes that are cherry small and or fist sized and bulb-like, green and purple tomatillos, green beans, cucumber, squash, cantaloupe, lettuces producing so much they are funking on each other and most specially, a Peruvian tree tomato. That plant was a special score from a local plant sale, and an exciting adventure into my newest dimension of plant love.
It's such a blessing to be back here again, back in Planet Summer, with its pleasures unimaginable in the dark of winter. Watching a strawberry redden, feeling the sun's searing promise, the relief of wind, the achievement of jumping in freezing cold rivers, the sublime sensations of bare skin and the luxuriously long days. I want to commit every calorie of myself to physically efforting to experience the most enjoyment of the summer. It's exhausting to love Earth so much in the deep of summer, but it's the kind of productivity that I can finally overachieve.
I just got a watermelon infinity tattoo on my right wrist. For a half hour today I slowly ate a watermelon slice and that was my JOB. Last summer a melon brought tears to my eyes, so exquisite. I just spent a few weeks in Portland and went to Sauvie Island on two different occasions, just to gorge on strawberries too delicate to experience but a few miles from their origin, and once I went to try to gain a pound of perfect blueberry flesh. Portland was the summer ultimate as usual, and the city continues to be the North American capital of feminine pacific beauty conquering all consciousness, upending rottenness and fertilizing the new fruits of the mother millenium. OMG, the women of Portland, they fed me their fruits from the trees and vines and I swallowed the seeds and rushed to the Bay Area and sent the seeds into the earth here, trying to keep with me what that group of women is doing so lovingly.
I have new fruits.
Records. Recordings.
My pomegranate fruit is HEAVY WINGED/INCA ORE "Ring Mining" on Not Not Fun. One side of the record is a collab between me, and Heavy Winged and Nick Bindeman too. This track was recorded live in Brooklyn, and it is embedded with a crazier vocal energy than I usually exhibit as Inca Ore. I love this track! The other side is a collab we did through the mail. At that time, I was living in a house upstairs from my landlord, who was slowly perishing from cancer. One day she knocked on my door and said breathlessly, "I just have to tell you, I love your music. You should join the Cirque du Soleil, you would fit right in. I can find out about auditions for you. Please keep playing, I love it." Theresa died a few months later on July 4th, but the Heavy Winged/IO collab was recorded during her listens, and though I wouldn't reference the Cirque, I can see where she's coming from. I did the art for this release, a potpourri of images of the Himalayas at sunset.
MALIBU FALCON "How is hell fact met? All of them witches" is another release, maybe a cherimoya fruit, on cassette by Not Not Fun. Malibu Falcon was me, Nick Bindeman and Stef in the year 2003-2004, making music in a moldy basement and stretching our food stamps while listening to Les Rallizes Denudes and DJ Screw. Lowering property values, imitating Mason Family antics, hanging with a brindle pit----Malibu Falcon has some crazy lyrics that maybe I wouldn't include here in case my dad googles me. I don't have this cassette quite yet but it should be here pretty soon.
I also have copies of the Grouper/Inca Ore split on CD and vinyl (pluot embodiment) and the retrospective of my old band Alarmist (it's like a persimmon). Each member of the band made some solo music for this four-way split----Argumentix, Tunnels, Ghost to Falco and Inca Ore. I also have a few copies of the Inca Ore/Secret Abuse split on Not Not Fun, which I think is like a mangosteen. You can email me at incaore@gmail.com if you're interested in any of these.
Also, I have just finally finished my new Inca Ore album SILVER SEA SURFER SCHOOL, which is super up-front and emotional and maybe exactly what you wouldn't expect---that's also my JOB. It will be released by Not Not Fun and Acuarela in the fall. I have to let this fruit ripen before I tell you its flavor.
Marriage Records is a new home for me too, so happily, as Adam from White Rainbow and Honey from Valet and I have made a dub album and they will release it hopefully really soon! I need to call in some overdubs tonight. Our group is called We Like Cats and the album is titled PROPER EATS!!!! Head out to some Portland party times for a sonic sneak peek. This album has a fruit embodiment but I think it's like a whole papaya tree that a tiger sharpened its claws on and all the fruits fell down. I feel HIGH.
Below is me and my idol Saul Bindeman. I miss him.
Please come over to 3960 NE 6th tomorrow July 5th.
Potluck at 3 pm
Show at 5 pm
featuring
Inca Ore
Pete Swanson
Wraith (Ashby and Nick)
Foque Mopus
So much news to offer, but it's party time!
Talk to ya later.
These are delicious days at my home, though we count the money even for groceries lately. But it's ok. Beans, seaweed, grains, vegetables in season. It's not so expensive to eat well at home. If I ate the meals I cooked at restaurants, it would cost $50. So every time I cook for myself, I imagine I am paying myself $50. Tonight's $50 is for white beans cooked with sage and bread and bitter greens salad.
Bitter and sour, spicy: you might not associate winter hardy veggies with those flavors, but let me remind you. Many of the more common winter leaves are very mild: when kale is strong it has hints of a seaweed flavor, and collars are definitely in a cabbagey family. I've noticed lately that spinach is almost flavorless compared to my favorites. I am hungry these days for the piquant spicy greens that you have to go out of your way for. Cresses. Mustard greens, chopped fine and raw. Red velvet striped chicories, sometimes shockingly bitter. I have a special friendship with a certain farmer's market stand that lets me fill my bags for half price every Saturday at the end of market, and this is what I scoop up. Young onions. Delicate and slightly swoopy fennel roots with fronds, sweet baby turnips, tender stems of broccoli rabe. Today I made a salad of purple baby kales, maroon chicories, minty ancho cress, curly parsley, dressed in lemon juice, ume plum and olive oil. With dumpstered bread, broiled tofu and a pot of grassy green tea: my friends were happy!
I'd like to get poetic also about the spicy radish, plucking up that mellow wintertime lull of sweet mushy winter vegetables like pumpkins, beets and turnips. Once again, I have to sing the praise of the watermelon radish, it's strong flavor and spider vein design of my favorite color pink. This radish impresses everyone!
You know, we are a couple of months into the cold season, and I'm not even sick of pumpkins yet, or hardy greens, or roasted roots. I have no strawberry fantasies, not yet. But I was delighted to see little white buds as fragile as ice foaming on our plum trees in the backyard. Just in time. I am down to my last pint of plum jam.
Pubescent loquats are appearing too, green and modest. This year I really must learn to like them. Loquats are one of the few fruits known to my region that I'm sour on, I think for their vaguely Asian flavor.
January in Oakland, California, this year was dry, warm, sunny. Day after day cloudless carefree sunshine basted us. It began to feel very wrong. Poppies and plum blossoms burst alive too early. Wintertime is a period of huddling, of expressive weather rolling and blasting. Our region felt like an island, unmolested even by the winds or moisture of the big licking ocean that dwarfs us. Michael made a wish on his birthday for rain.
Michael's birthday was on February 4th and I made him a little vanilla maple-syrup blood orange cake that collapsed. We had lunch at La Torta Loca on Fruitvale Avenue. It was unforgettable because the owner of the restaurant, which is a counter with stools on the sidewalk, had a weapons display behind the register that made a lasting impression. He had pepper spray, a giant hook, chains, 4 different bats, 2 different brass knuckles---and mushroom quesadillas reminiscent of the mastery of masa in Mexico, but more greasy, more expensive, less loving. It was grey and windy and there was small-time mafia action that distracted me until I ate so much that I wasn't hungry enough hours later to make the birthday dinner.
Lately, on very special holidays I like to skip dinner and avoid the cooking, and have something like magic mushrooms and cake for birthday dinner, enjoying the brain buffet on the special day. Our pupils were full and dark as we laid in our bed and watched a milky purple moon wink and undress under filmy clouds.
Michael's birthday wish was for rain and a special storm granted his wish a week and a half later. As we made homemade pizzas with friends and drank absinthe on Valentine's Day, a fierce rainstorm belched arctic all over us----a birthday wish granted in delay. The winds rustled the banana trees out our window, interrupting the stream of Vietnamese karaoke blasting out a neighbor's window.
We are finally getting winter rain storms, days of nonstop rain and whipping winds followed by other days of the sun shining on a newly verdant and beautifully vegetably landscape. The dandelions are born suddenly in the yard to nod appreciatively at the rain and sun cycles. Life feels very perplexing lately, with the economy shriveling and values quaking. California is in a drought too. If you check the news, the drought and its impact over these last three years is radically affecting the Central Valley, which is the fertile belt of this coast and maybe the most blessed growing area in the world.
When the rain comes, we rejoice, we are not complaining of inconvenience or scowling at the crybaby face of the curdled cloudy sky. We are so relieved, we are bailed out. The more I witness the world, I have my doubts about humans' abilities to actually deliver each other from trouble or suffering in a comprehensive way, but how pure is the sensation of the diety of nature granting us another green day, the most divine bailout, clean and irreplaceable RAIN.
The proportions of error in civilization become exponentially magnified with every day, the magnitude is indigestible. I find myself avoiding the numbness and alarm by so wholly enjoying what is so miraculously here and still thriving. The first artichoke of spring. The oversized pomelo. The olive oil, only $20 a gallon, because of the trees' proximity. The homemade chocolate and nettle butter shared by Brooke at the dinner party last night. My potted peppermint still managing next to the rotting garage though its companion, the valerian, has died. TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED. Last night, I had a piece of apple pie at my dear friends' dinner party and Michael said, "WHAT NO ICE CREAM?" and I saw the carton passing around the table and I served myself because, "DO I LOVE LIFE?"
You must, for those who are so inexplicably in the horrible vises of civilization's failures, those who are thirsty without clean water. Those who would have to pay a huge portion of their income just for a loaf of bread, because of the cost of wheat, or the instability of their currency. I have so many loaves for free, in dumpsters and food banks.
Shouldn't we fast too?
Maybe our time for that sacrifice will come. But for now, no lemon should rot under the holy stem it grew on. No peaceful land which could give to our communion should ever be squandered. Every bee thanked. Every raindrop praised. Every eater's appetite must match the gratitude toward the farmer.
We aren't experiencing it so much in California, but the snow-bound know: It is the deadest time of the year. Cold, biting and dripping with mortality. I hope if you read this from miserably rainy Portland, or frozen Detroit, you recognize your sacrifice and pay deepest tribute to the infant cheer and brisk winds of early spring. Asparagus is coming, so are difficult artichokes and then, the brilliant strawberry, offering you a back payment of the sweetness you were deprived of for so many months.
ENJOY YOUR FOOD AND HEALTH
ENJOY YOUR RAIN AND SNOW
ENJOY THE FLIRTATION OF THE SUN, BUSY WITH ITS OTHER EARTH WIVES
PLEASE EAT 3 MEALS A DAY OF WHAT GROWS IN THE DIRT
EVEN 4 IF YOU LOVE LIFE SO MUCH
RUN REALLY FAST TO HUG SOMEBODY
COOK THEM DINNER (menu: green lentils cooked in wine, thyme and with pumpkin in the oven with a dutch oven, a tart and bitter green salad, your homemade sauerkraut, bread retrieved from the dumpster, a spread made of tahini and miso and chopped garlic, braised baby turnips, blood oranges, if you are not the cook, you must bring the wine and do the dishes! and if you don't live in a temperate climate, I have no idea how you eat local in the winter! do you pickle, can and freeze everything?)
I LOVE TO EAT IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY
GOOD EVENING
HI
I MISS BLOGGING HERE
MY FOOD BLOG IS TASTEEUCHARIST.BLOGSPOT.COM BUT I ALSO WANTED TO PRINT IT HERE
In every discipline that guides people toward food as medicine, the weather and how it makes us feel is the way we intuit what we should be eating to supplement our experiences.
At first when you're learning how to do that, you look at long lists advised by Chinese medicine or Ayurveda or macrobiotics, but once you see the seasonal relationships, you can wing it and eat how you feel.
When I'm chilly, I want pumpkin, butter, warm spices and ginger and chiles, garlic and onions, long-cooked stews, wilted and sauteed greens, roast vegetables, steaming soups.
Oakland has been wildly rotating between climates lately, which I think is pretty usual though the degree is drought-like and a little mystifying. For most of this month, we have had sparkling sunny nearly hot days, which upset my seasonal rhythym. I found myself craving watermelons and having ice cream cones in a T-shirt on a January Monday while the sun set in peals of pinks.
The rain finally came a few days ago to our relief, and now the kabocha squashes on my countertop are being put to use. Daikon radishes, turnips, beets, leeks, celery root, potatoes and all the hardy greens are perfect and delicious.
I grew up eating Dairy Queen in blasted-heat SUVs in Michigan winters, so I guess I'm used to climate bi-polarness, but these Oakland days are crazy! The sunshine days are blazed-out full solar breast dialation, and then these rainy days are painted with the grimy Portland-like dreary long strokes of rock shades. I'm indoors this afternoon, drinking black tea, sensing the homey hearths of my neighbors who I can feel cuddling into their own nests.
Cuddling and cooking: it's the way to cope with this recession. I'm really already feeling it. I work usually in catering, and people aren't really feeling like partying right now. Suddenly, I have found myself with only two days of work this month, and scrambling for other work in the company of many, many people. That makes you really not only want to cuddle, but it makes realness, affection and love spiritual stabilizers.
As an artist and strident anti-materialist, I have been entirely broke more than a few times over the years, and here I am again, scraping by for the meantime. I know I'm not alone and I've never felt embarrassed about this. Over the years I have anticipated the topsies and the turvies and tried to garden and dumpster dive to ensure my food security. My current landlord does not permit a garden, and I am long-evicted from my old vacant-lot garden, but I am still very very lucky to have an essential community resource. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, four women manage a mostly local, organic produce stand at two elementary schools in my neighborhood.
The women speak Spanish, Mandarin and Vietnamese and peddle unusual greens grown by Mien farmers in the area. They don't have beautiful watermelon dikons, or celery root, or parsnips, or spiky emerald brasing mixes, but they always have seasonal, inexpensive fresh food. This time of year we have pears, grapefruits, lemons, oranges, tangerines, sugar cane, onions, garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, potatoes, winter squashes, organic eggs, raisins, walnuts, almonds and tons of greens.
I can buy almost more food than I can carry for $30. I strap the goods to me and start to walk home, though usually I am interrupted by a small talk with the elderly Filipino man at the corner, who has watery blue eyes and a life story whose first chapter exceeds 20 minutes. In those 20 minutes, I am like a laborer, holding all those groceries and sweating. Then the Chinese crossing guard with the rouged cheeks and large smile escorts me across the street and I hobble home with my bags overfilled with leaves.
When you're broke, fruits and vegetables seem really expensive and quesadillas and grilled cheese sandwiches are more economical, but it's essential to find inexpensive providers of produce. Forget organic if you're broke, unless you have a subsidized hookup like I do. Variety and bounty are more important. There's good quality plants that aren't organic, and some research helps to know which foods are essential to buy organic (like potatoes and peanuts).
Fruits and vegetables' essences teach us how to prevail in tough times; they are tough, they thrive in days of drizzle and dreariness. Beautiful, colorful vegetable meals enhance pride in ourselves and the brilliant hues of the gift of life, and the lushness of earth. When out of work, I have so much time on my hands and when you're low on money, there's a lot you might have to give up, but eating is still essential. Why not spend a lot of time on cooking? Foraging for lemons in the neighborhood and preserving them, making breads, soaking and cooking beans, preparing desserts, making steel-cut oats for breakfast instead of the usual rolled oats, making things extra special to compensate for how demoralizing it might be to let tough times feel like your fault.
These long hours cooking, I fantasize about a branch of the Obama WPA projects on the horizon. People who are not literally rebuilding infrastructure by engineering bridges or rebuilding roads, but reworking infrastructure by pursuing community-based preventative health institutions and working to eliminate the carbon footprint of our food. I think of communities having people like me who are supplemented by the government in order to explore ways that our neighborhoods can be less reliant on fossil fuel, more sustainable. Imagine grants for people committed to growing their own food in cities, committed to buying local as much as possible, and are subsidized by the government in order to afford local products as a way to stimulate local small business.
I fantasize so much about grants for people who live simply, who are not cut out for typical American earning and buying patterns, but whose difference should be enhanced and appreciated because our routines leave such small impacts on the treasury, but are so supportive of community.
I want to be a yoga teacher, a local food cultivator and a cooking teacher, whose role is supported through a public works project that makes sense and is an important element to our changing public health system. For now though, I'm on a list to be a substitute teacher.
I want to tell you more about eating well while broke. Many people who work lots are perpetually struggling because they don't know how to cook. Eating out is so expensive---it is amazing how a meal you could make for $2 in your home and have leftovers for lunch---would cost $12 in a restaurant. Cooking is a skill that just doesn't come naturally to everybody. Hopefully you have a roommate who will do the cooking in exchange for dish duty. I will write a blog entry one day on how and where to start, because when I think of it, it's a big job!
If you are unemployed, get food stamps if you can. Do it proudly especially if you try to spend your money as much as you can on locally-grown and produced products. Make a pantry list and spend as much as you can afford on the basics. For me, I go to Rainbow Co-op in San Francisco and buy 20 pound bags of rice, breakfast grains, dried beans, seaweeds, flours and yeast, nut butters, sweetners, vinegars and oils. Try to pay attention to how much things cost. It's crazy when you notice. Some places in my area sell brown rice for about $1 a pound, some places only carry organic and charge up to $3 a pound! That's a big difference for a simple staple grain, and in some countries, they'll riot over that kind of ripoff.
Just empty your pockets for these simple foods, and avoid the chips and cookies and all that shit because it's a big waste of money. Especially avoid drinks. I like to drink alcohol on occasion, and when I'm kinda broke, it's hard to fit that in, especially because I won't drink the swill anymore. I like the decent stuff. So I stay away from other bottled drinks: no iced teas, no kombuchas, no sodas, none of that. Try to buy all your basics so you won't need to visit the market often and get tempted by all the goodies.
Then, head to the farmers markets a few times a week to get the rest. Go at the end of the markets and make friends with the vendors, who are sometimes nice enough to sell discounted pocked turnips or deformed carrots. Farmers markets might be out of your reach, they can be so expensive, so also check out food banks and dumpsters and ethnic markets for the affordable stuff. Try to have a garden also, if you have a landlord who isn't a sourpuss! Pay attention to what's local, that's what should be the cheapest.
It's such a nice feeling to know how to cook, and to bring people together over the meal you made, which was so carefully prepared, from the source of the food to the consideration of how the food will make the person feel. The other night I had a dinner and a show on Obama's inauguration night. I made posole, which is a Mexican stew made of hominy, chiles and herbs like oregano, which perfumed my house in a witchy way while I stirred and chopped, listening to the inauguration coverage and feeling swells of relief. I felt such psychic parasites hooked on my system during the Bush administration, and for a minute I suspended my cynicism and poured imagination and possibility from my heart into my cooking task.
I made posole, black beans, brown rice, a huge salad of dark spiny greens and striped soft lettuces and maroon endives, with salsas made by my local market and onions and chiles on the side. After the show, we danced until we got hungry again and the kids stood over the pots and fed again. I took a snapshot of the moment in my mind. Life has got to be like this forever. Dancing, music, friendship, celebration, food, fellowship.
There's a contraction in ways of life now; the era of human innovation and manifestations through commodity gestures is so thankfully ending. I hope this transition will be comfortable for me, but it won't for anybody gripping on the old values. I visualize inventions in the new peasant life.
I decided to start a food blog.
Urban Honking is not hosting it, it seems to busy to ask right now. Maybe in the future?
For now, it's at
http://tasteeucharist.blogspot.com/
No pics yet, I need to get a digital camera.
Just plant and planet worship for now.
Today is a very happy day.
First, because I have regained my health after another spell of fever and sickness. I had so many dreams. I dreamed that I slapped a snake's face off, and then of a cat named Apron that waged a sinister war against do-goods.
Now I am better and I can feel nature awakening to the fertility of spring.
After months of work, today I offer the fruits of my own fertility. In a triumph against the creative-reproductive pathogens, I have published my first zine and am in a cycle of releasing my best music yet.
BIRTHDAY is my zine. It is more of a personal anthropology confection than a zine. It is a cake made of the ingredients of home, story and personal mythology, made special tart and sweet with opinions and confessions, and frosted and dressed with shakes of my own pretty collage confetti. It tells the story of my Oakland home, my first climb up a mountain, and my wedding. There are tributes to dancing, Princess Diana, ballerinas on Earth, and a review of an Ornette Coleman performance. It is more sincere than serious. It is $4, including shipping.
BIRTHDAY OF BLESS YOU is my new album on Not Not Fun records. It is my meditation on feminine sacred invention, on sun worship in the moments before earth disintegration, on the proud miracle of creation in a trash-proliferation era. I am really proud of this record. It is equal sincere and serious, and there is also a Merle Haggard cover. I was smiling a lot while I recorded it, even though sad things were sometimes happening. It is $15 including shipping.
If you would like to order BIRTHDAY and BIRTHDAY OF BLESS YOU together, please email me at incaore@gmail.com and I will sell them to you for $18 together, including shipping. Not outside of USA though, we'll have to talk about that. And for $20 total, I'll also send my new 7 inch on Arbor records. It's a split with Axolotl.
More good things happen this year. Grouper and I are self-releasing our split tape on vinyl! Acuarela will release it on CD in Europe soon too. My CDR BALLET CHOP is coming out very soon on Ruralfaune in France. A collaboration between Inca Ore, Tunnels and Heavy Winged will be imprinted by Not Not Fun. And Grouper and I play two dates next weekend at SXSW.
Friday March 14 at Habana Annex
Saturday March 15 408 Josephine St. 1-5:30 (Higher Publicity Party)
I'll see you soon.
I'm moving back to California.
