Jim, Winter 1989-1990(?)

Ron's was next to a ball-diamond. At night during the winter I would stand in the snow in the middle of the ball-diamond just for some sense of space. 

Jim from Britnell's lived around the corner with his daughter and British wife. In the winter I would schlep my guitar to their basement where Jim would teach me the C-major scale. “You can play solos with this scale. See?” I could not, but that hardly mattered. 

Jim had shoulder-length gray hair and a Cockney accent. He hated people who abided by class structures. One of the grimmest days of his life was when Peter Ustinov came by the store and his Publisher handler demanded Ustinov be addressed as “Sir Peter.”

“’Sir Pete,’”snorted Jim. “I’ll call him that, alright.”

Jim regaled me with stories from the 1960s. Jim missed the ‘60s — especially the sex. “You should have been there, Darrell. It was great!”

Jim slowed me around the Hogtown house. There were pictures of the young bride and groom looking very squiffey-eyed indeed. Wow, did they get stoned!

Eventually I found my way outside to the darkness and the snowy sidewalk where I pressed my face to the outside glass of a large window to a Chinese diner and watched a fellow coat thick rice noodles with a black bean sauce. I was very hungry but understood the food was not for me. 

For Jim this is John Lee Hooker playing guitar and singing "Big Legs, Tight Skirt": 

What I learned about soup-making from Don Ross

I once saw Don Ross perform at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. During a workshop he took his microphone and said to the older, black bluesman up the stage from him, "I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank you. That is what guitar playing is all about." At the time I was this guy — I thought Don Ross could play circles around the bluesman, but clearly Ross thought he had something to learn from this fellow. Ross eventually won an award for his acoustic guitar playing. 

Yeah, what he said!

Some years later I worked in the kitchen for Diana McConnell at the Cafe Rhythm & Books. Diana parked a bowl of my soup in front of Don Ross. I grabbed it back. "It looks fine the way it is," said Don.

 

"This way to the soup, ladies & gentlemen!"

"Oh no," I said in my best Basil Fawlty impersonation. "It needs miso paste."

I don't know what I was thinking. I had already been in the kitchen of Glen Dias, a soup god if ever there was one. I should have already learned that what gets left out is more important than what gets thrown in. But this was a lesson I would learn again and again — and Don Ross made it easier because he learned it first.  

Links: the Ptatarmigan site is here. Ptarmigan was some years before I met Glen Dias. Glen has done a lot since then. This is the Don Ross site. And because I link to them, the Christian Humanists hang wif Steve Taylor here. 

Necessity is the mother of invention — especially when cooking. Toronto 1989(?)

In Toronto when I first visited my future housemate Ron Russell, he opened the oven door and pulled out some macaroni & cheese. "You can have as much as you want," he said. "I ran out of flour and used BisQuick mix for the bechamel sauce."

I thought it tasted kinda good, actually. Regular baked m&c is sort of bland but this was kinda sweet. 

Like this was -- PROBABLY 

Lesson: use what's actually there — the eater may be pleasantly surprised. 

Waffles! Toronto 1989

During the winter of 1985 in Winnipeg I would hoof it over to a church-friend's house where his mother made us boys waffles and white sauce (this must have been a Mennonite thing — die Frieden das Glitch). 

No recipe. Flowers extra.

In Toronto when I got my first pay-raise from the Albert Britnell Bookshop I marched across Yonge Street to The Pots & Pan Tree to purchase a Vittorio "Belgian" stickless waffle-iron. I ate more than my share of waffles, but if you must make them I like my waffle batter yeast-raised with plenty of melted butter. 

But you should probably make something else — especially now. 

Link: Another Albert Britnell Bookshop memory. 

The home stereo! Fall, 1987

In the fall of 1987 I went with my buddy Kaz and purchased my home stereo system. This was in Winnipeg's Osbourne Village in an old building that had once been a house. The place smelled and the bearded salesman labored mightily, hooking thick cables to Angstrom speakers, etc. while parking me at the rear of a carpeted room where I sat in a stacking chair and listened to the glory of it all.  The receiver, CD player and cassette deck were NAD components. I paid by cheque and waited several days for the ordered changes to be made. 

I remember a friend coming down from a heroin high entering my tiny apartment (also in the Osbourne Village) and turning on my stereo receiver to listen to CBC Radio while I defrosted the refrigerator. 

That stereo was the bane of my existence. It was much too large for my purposes and burned very hot. 

"Just park by the apartment!"

I sold the cables to my Toronto housemate and replaced a woofer in one speaker twice — the second time the woofer was so enormous that I couldn't close the screen on the speaker cabinet. So I wasn't shedding any tears when the NAD receiver finally crackled its last. 

Today televisions sound better than my stereo ever did, and don't get me started on headphones. 

CDs definitely had their day, thanks to stereo shops. I bought and played the first Tracy Chapman CD as well as Robbie Robertson's.  ...Nothing Like The Sun by Sting and Love Over Gold by Dire Straits -- this was what I heard in stereo shops, so why not play the CDs at home and see if they didn't sound just as good? 

I might have lost the stereo habit, but I never lost the CD-buying one. (Just ask my poor wife!)

DUNE Part 2

"Catnip" I tell you!

Links: I kinda liked Part 1 here. I am old enough to remember when David Lynch took his name off of the DUNE movie. Sting and Kyle MacLachlan didn't have the luxury. But the movie got me reminiscing about the tuneless lady in white here. (If you're gonna sing around Mennonites don't be tuneless.) 

STAR WARS Games

Of course you check Metacritic, but if they're not cheeky enough there is always digg. 

Quality Time.