adventures in thrifting

went to about six thrift stores with my friend today, but it was on the first rack of the first store that i found this beauty.



i think it's from romania, probably twenty or thirty years old, and i got it for 50p, or about 75 cents in american money. i couldn't believe it - probably my best find of the month. it looks quasi-military, but reminds me more of the old communist jackets worn in the soviet bloc countries in the '70s.



it has shoulder epaulettes, a left breast pocket that's sown shut, and three large belt loops around the outside of the waist - presumably for a large military belt. it goes down just past my knees, and fits just about as well as you can expect. i feel like a military dictator wearing it, or one of those old communist politicians, looking out over a grand parade in red square. in other words - brilliant.



also saw a bunch of real neat hardcover books from the '30s on another store's bookshelf. they were all about mischievous schoolchildren in depression-era england, and the dustcovers (which were pretty torn, but whatever) had big color drawings of them playing pranks or swimming in a pond. one even had a schoolteacher throwing a book at one of the students, which i thought was quite funny. saving my money, though, because on monday i'm heading to brighton, home to some of the best thrifting in britain!

union jack pillow

my good friend eileen surprised me a few days ago with this great pillow she made for me. it's a union jack, the flag of britain, made out of five different fabrics (if i counted correctly). she's quite talented, with good attention to detail. it even has a zipper in the back so i can wash the cover and keep it looking as nice as the day she stitched it.



thank you, eileen! such a dear.

cottage pies and long goodbyes

two of my best friends, antoni and cari, departed for wales yesterday, which was quite sad, though i was happy for them. antoni introduced me to cottage pie, a delightfully english dish of mince beef, mashed potato, cheese, and vegetables, and taught me more than i'll ever need to know about horse racing, while cari inspired in me a love of beyonce karaoke and drunken dancing.



on monday night we had a proper evening of it, going to a giant chinese buffet and eating more food than i probably tuck away in three days. they brought the food out to you piping hot, as opposed to the traditional buffet-style buffet, and we had squid, duck, ginger seaweed, honey roast pork, hong kong-style beef, barbeque ribs, chicken (of countless varieties, sweet chili being my favorite), and lots of things i can't remember. we had fourteen people in all at our table, and got our own room in the restaurant.

after that we went to a bar and then a club, where antoni and i sang elton john and george michael's "don't let the sun go down on me", but last night i appreciated much more, because we had a quieter evening, going to 'the fox', a fetching little pub in a village down the road.



turns out that the fox is quite historic, and was home to the arrest of the poet william blake for insulting soldiers of the crown in august 1803. you can read about the incident in excerpts from a blake biography here .



antoni, cari, and i had gone to the fox earlier in the day for a little hung-over lunch, where we were all a bit delicate, before going to a bookmaker's shop to place bets on the glorious goodwood horse races. later on, though, we headed back with more people and sat in the pub's beergarden, talking until well after it got dark.



suffice it to say, the fox is easily one of my favorite pubs in england. it's tucked away down a little lane, where all the thatched-roof cottages have window pots overflowing with summer flowers. apparently it was owned (or otherwise associated with) a rogue eighteenth-century smuggler, who brought up his illicit wares along the southern channel coast and the isle of wight. because of this history, the pub has an extensive nautical motif, with old sailing maps, ship rope knots, and faded photographs of sailors lining the walls. an old ship's wheel was balanced precariously atop the bar, and oil-burning chandeliers hung down low from the ceiling. i loved it.



these were the surroundings where i said goodbye to cari and antoni, making it very bittersweet. i'll miss them dearly, though i'll be leaving pretty soon myself, so such departing was always in the cards. i always make a good number of friends on my travels, but rarely too many really good ones, and they were just that.

a pilgrimage to abbey road

turns out one of my best friends from back home, taylor, is traveling through france and england this week, and yesterday i was lucky enough to meet him in london. we explored the city for the afternoon, getting the most out of our discount subway passes, and then indulged in a little english night-life (but not too much).



we visited bookmarks, the bookstore of the socialist workers party, a good number of quaint pubs, and had a nice three-course curry dinner in little india, complete with kingfisher and cobra lager.



the highlight of our rendezvous, however, was a pilgrimage to abbey road and the studios where the beatles recorded their eleventh album. the famous crossing, immortalized on the front of the record, was filled with people taking photos, as you'd imagine, all in the single-file pose. it took us forever to have our photos taken crossing abbey road, but i'm glad we did. a cute french girl took our photo too, which made it even better.











taylor, by the way, is the bassist in an excellent metal band called "black acid devil." you can listen to them slay here .

let them truckers roll

two days a week i do reception at a nearby hotel, and because the building itself is terribly designed (aesthetically pleasing, but a functional nightmare), my job is essentially to shuffle people from the car park to the reception desk. there are two bellboys who work with me, bringing in peoples' luggage, naturally, and we coordinate with hand-held radios. the housekeeping staff use them as well, keeping it live on channel two, and because i rarely use it, and only keep it clipped to my belt, it's kind of like having a talking butt.

the radios are quite fun to use, as you'd imagine, and my personal call sign is "mother goose," which is a bit cliché, granted, while the bellboys are "chick duck two" and "dark knight," respectively. we're the only ones in the hotel with call signs, but, undiscouraged, we've begun reading up on trucker slang, to make it more authentic.



there's a treasure-trove of information on trucker slang out there, which normally revolves around the "citizen's band radio," which is the radio most of them use in their cabs. turns out cb radios got pretty big in the '70s when they were used, amongst other things, to outwit speed traps set-up to impose the new fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit.

most trucker slang, for what i've been able to gather, seems to focus on police, other vehicles, and destinations. "bear," for instance, is probably one of the most popular terms, referring to police in general. from this one word comes a great slew of variants - "bear cave" (police station), "bear in the air" (police helicopter), and "bit by a bear" (get a speeding ticket), to name a few. school buses seem to have a wide-range of monikers, as well, like "cheese wagon" and "blinkin winkin" for the normal variety, and "half cheese" for the shorter ones.



"buffalo" is a male prostitute, "breaker" initiates conversation, an "organ donor" is a motorcyclist, and, for some reason, a "pregnant roller skate" is a volkswagen beetle. a "chicken choker," it turns out, is in fact a truck hauling poultry, and not what i originally thought.

besides serving more mundane conversational purposes, trucker slang has also inspired more than its fair share of art and music, a personal favorite of mine being c. w. mccall's 1975 classic, "convoy".



in animated form, the sadly temporal "cb bears" cartoon, produced by hanna-barbera for three months in 1977, followed the adventures of three mystery-solving, truck-driving bears. the show's introduction described itself as a "constant comedy chase," which, while scoring points for alliteration, may have been a bit presumptuous.



film-wise, "the shining," "big trouble in little china," "dazed and confused," "the brady bunch movie," and "transformers" have all featured cb radios, with varying levels of trucker-appropriate slang.

hotel reception work is pretty boring, can't lie to you, but it is made more tolerable by trucker slang. which, in all honesty, goes for most things.

for a thorough-going trucker-slang dictionary, have a look here .

dan lacey, painter of pancakes

minnesota, my home-state before i ventured westward, has one of the most under-rated art scenes in america, especially in minneapolis and st. paul. dan lacey, the painter of pancakes, is, in my humble opinion, a prime example of a great minnesota artist, not only on account of his fine paintings, but also because he tends to get sued for them.



orly taitz, an electorally-defeated republican politician from california, has filed papers with a court in the district of columbia, accusing lacey of intimidation and defamation, i think, all because he painted her giving birth to delicious pancakes.



i, for one, cannot imagine a greater honor than being painted by the painter of pancakes, whose previous subjects have included dr. house, josef stalin, and a naked obama wrestling a bear alongside a unicorn. he's also depicted a naked sarah palin riding atop a moose, with lady-bits and little brown bush visible to all. more of his works are available for viewing here .

"por ahora": gringo literature and the bolivarian revolution

oliver stone's new film, "south of the border," has been generating a lot of attention for latin american politics, especially concerning venezuela's "bolivarian revolution," something i've been particularly interested in as of late (believe it!). the new york times has been spilling a fair amount of ink on the documentary, condescendingly calling it a "valuable, if naively idealistic, introductory tutorial on a significant international trend." i haven't seen the film yet, though i plan to when i get back to america, so i can't really make any judgments.

nevertheless, i've been reading a good deal on venezuela, and hugo chávez in particular, and finished nikolas kozloff's "hugo chávez: oil, politics, and the challenge to the u.s." a few weeks ago.



kozloff is a sympathetic fellow traveler of chávez and his socialist revolution, a doctor in latin american history, and has lived in and written about venezuela for a number of years. as the title of the book implies, much of the focus concerns the venezuelan economy, which is dominated by petróleos de venezuela (pdvsa), the state oil company which manages the largest oil reserves in the western hemisphere, and accounts for a third of the national gdp.

for years, before chávez and his fifth republic movement came to power in 1998, pdvsa served more-or-less as a personal slush fund for venezuela's oligarchy, and much of the great wealth of the country was exported beyond its borders. nationalized during the first term of president carlos andrés pérez in the 1976, the welfare of the company has often determined the fate of the country.



state control of pdvsa under the chávez administration has meant very different things for venezuela than during pérez's tenure, and instead of using petroleum revenue to bankroll a small national elite, chávez has changed the entire character of the institution, attempting to bring it in-line with the principles of democratic socialism. as kozloff highlights in the first chapter of the book, oil "is a geopolitical weapon" in the venezuela of today, and much of the profits are being re-introduced in society by way of the new "missions."

"mission robinson," for instance, is a a multi-million dollar literacy program that has nearly eradicated illiteracy in the country. "mission barrio adentro" provides free health-care to the poor, and "mission sucre" has established nearly one hundred university campuses to provide higher education classes, completely free and open to all.



i really enjoyed kozloff's "chávez," but it's very much a piece of current affairs literature, and to get a little more background, i read and just finished bart jones' lengthier biography "hugo!: the hugo chávez story from mud hut to perpetual revolution."



jones, a former associated press correspondent, details the rise of hugo chávez frias from his childhood on the llano grasslands of west-central venezuela up until 2008, the tenth year of chávez's presidency, when the book was published. born desperately poor, and largely raised by his grandmother, rosa, chávez grew up wanting to play baseball in america, only to enter military academy at the age of seventeen.

after much disillusionment with the reigning government and a long political radicalization, chávez and number of fellow soldiers in the revolutionary bolivarian movement-200 (the 200 a reference to the anniversary of simon bolívar's birth), launched a failed coup d'état against the venezuelan state in february 1992.



after serving a brief prison term, chávez was pardoned by then-president rafael caldera in 1994, and was elected president in 1998 as a member of the fifth republic movement. after consolidating power in the months after the campaign, chávez began to actively challenge the venezuelan oligarchy, cutting into their profits and redistributing their wealth to the poor.

in response, the venezuelan capitalists launched a coup on 11 april 2002, arresting chávez, dissolving the national assembly and supreme court, and installing pedro carmona, president of the national business council, as interim president. within 48 hours, however, millions of poor people, streaming down from the slums surrounding caracas, encircled the presidential palace, miaflores, and demanded the return of their president. chávez, re-installed as president on 13 april, was challenged again by a bosses' strike in november of that year. surviving it, he purged the leadership of pdvsa, who had helped organize the coup and lockout, and began taking the offensive against the counter-revolutionary elements in the country.

for a wider, regional context to the bolivarian revolution, i've just started another of kozloff's books, "revolution!: south america and the rise of the new left."



only a few chapters in, so no real review yet, but the focus extends beyond venezuela's border, covering morales' bolivia, lula's brazil, and many others, especially in their foreign relations with the united states. exciting stuff!

also, i attended the national conference of the 'hands off venezuela!' solidarity campaign at the university of london last month. it was nearly eight hours of intense debate, discussion, and speech-making, and i got plenty of photos - but that's for another post.

walks along the channel

i've spent the last two summers in england, working as a bartender and generally avoiding trouble. it's quite nice here, this place called west sussex, on the english channel and one of the sunniest spots in britain, though that isn't saying much. about an hour south of london on the train, it's where the old pensioners who can't afford spain come to retire, and for that reason most of the kids born here can't wait to leave. england's middle florida, i guess, but without the ihops.



my flat is about a block from the pebble beach that forms the south coast of the island, and a £30 ferry ride from the north of france. i walk in-land to get to work, but the route to the grocery store takes me along the beach's promenade, and even when it is rainy it is quite nice, in a masochistic kind of way. i grew up in the middle of north america, so being near any large body of water is a thrill.



the best pier and boardwalk on the channel coast is probably in brighton, thirty minutes east of here, but the city itself is very hip and cool, two attributes i'm trying to avoid. bognor regis, the village i live in, would probably be the type of place i'd generally shy away from back in the states, but one of the joys of living in another country is that everything mundane, banal, and boring becomes instantly exciting.



a lot of travelers, i think, frantically hoping to distinguish themselves from the "tourist" archetype, go to the opposite extreme, imagining that they can only really learn about another place by engaging in its most extreme practices and in its craziest places. i was this way when i lived in south africa, but i think i got tired of it, or it got weary of me, and, at any rate, it's not how the people who actually live there go about their business anyway. tourist attractions are great, and so are the uber-chic underground shows too, but i've found i prefer going grocery shopping at morrison's, or buying stamps from the royal mail, or reading the "sunday times" in a pub to either.



my accent, while not being overly, comic-ly american (like a southern drawl), is pretty much instantly recognizable, and i get a lot of "what are you doing here?" looks when i tell people where i'm from. the english seem to assume that any american coming here would want to live in london, or at least brighton or one of the major midlands cities like manchester or birmingham. it's a natural reaction, i guess, like how any american would assume that a briton moving stateside would reside in new york or los angeles.



part of the appeal of a place like bognor regis, west sussex, for me, at least, is that it isn't london or brighton, or manchester or birmingham, and that it's unknown to nearly everyone except those who know about it. it's "real britain," in the same way the mid-west is "real america," save for most of the backward conservatism that implies. this is a place where you're either dying to leave or coming to die, and where many of those living today as the former, by luck or inertia, will soon become the latter. for every small town american kid who wants to make it big on the coasts, but doesn't, and wiles away their life in quiet desperation, in a shit job with no future, on and on until the day they die - their english counterparts live here.

the english love steven seagal

i've been living in england for about three months now, and beside gambling on horse races (which i'm getting pretty good at), i've been watching a lot of steven seagal films with my horse-racing-gambling friends. we watched "under siege" last night, and "above the law" the night previous.



we got a seven disc special-edition pack from a grocery store for about £12, which includes the two aforementioned classics, along with "out for justice," "executive decision," and "exit wounds," among others, the last being perhaps my personal favorite, because it has dmx playing a hardened gangster tracking down a huge shipment of heroin through the streets of detroit. so, you know, i can relate. also, anthony anderson and eva mendes are in it, for some reason.



imdb describes seagal as "boyishly handsome," which can't be right, especially considering that casey ryback totally bangs erika elenaik at the end of "under siege". not on-screen, of course, but i think we can all agree it's implied. the film is surprisingly filled with famous actors (gary busey and tommy lee jones especially), which makes sense, considering how well-acknowledged they are on the cover of the dvd.



steven seagal is much more than his films, though, for wikipedia tells me he is also "an environmentalist, an animal rights activist and a supporter of the 14th dalai lama tenzin gyatso, and the tibetan independence movement." he also owns a dude ranch in colorado, which is a lot less hot than it sounds, and makes music videos for songs called "girl it's alright."



i appreciate the drummer's backward baseball cap, which reminds of my youth, and the song's lyrics are especially poignant, dare i say byronic, and have to be praised for their consistent use of the editorial we.


this is the kind of thing
one might see in a movie
this is the kind of thing
that inspires one's greatest poetry
out of a million chances who would have thought
i'd be this kind of lucky one
girl it's alright
girl it's alright by me


the record, "songs from the crystal cave," apparently belongs to the "outsider country-meets-world-music-meets-aikido" genre, which makes sense, i suppose.

the last word in that genre, aikido, is a form of japanese martial art, it turns out, so i can add it to the list of other great japanese exports, like sushi and hentai. i don't know anything about it, but i'm sure it's fun, as far as men tackling other men can be. but, hey, who the fuck am i, right?

when i was in high school a lot of the kids were into karate and what-not, and they would hold demonstrations of their kicking ability during assembly. i never knew these brave souls, never wanted to, but they could probably have kicked my ass, so i never said anything.



i'm all for teaching children how to fight, but it's the twenty-first century, let's be serious, and anyone who's anyone is carrying heat. my parents actually signed me up for a few karate classes when i was in elementary school, which i dutifully attended, attaining the rank of white belt with two yellow stripes. the instructor always warned us that we were never to use our new "skills" for aggression, only defense, but that if we were attacked, to respond in kind. good advice in theory, i suppose, but an idea that always brought the old "raiders of the lost ark" scenario to mind.



but i digress. seagal is an american legend in an age without heroes, and no amount of bad interviews and sexual harrassment lawsuits can change that. at any rate, he will break you arm, before breaking your neck, but if one thing is for certain, he loves children and animals.

"french toast cupcakes, or, mise-en-place is for lovers"

i had some of the ingredients left over from making funnel cakes last night (which people seemed to like, though some complained that i put on too much powdered sugar, as if there was such a thing), so i decided to make some french toast cupcakes with what i had left. it’s a pretty easy recipe, pantry staples really, and you can be rather flexible with amounts and ratios and whether or not the maple extract called for really needs to be maple, and whether, perhaps, it can be almond instead.

basically you get yourself a small bowl and a big bowl, throw some flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt into the former and mix it (barehanded, preferably, flour-powdered hands being a necessary part of the baking aesthetic), and combine eggs, butter, and sugar in the latter. the butter was a nightmare for me here. the first time i melted some and put it in the freezer, within like five minutes it was back to quasi-solid form. how it happened is a mystery of science, best left to experts. so i melted it again, and put it in the refrigerator, stirring it occasionally with the handle of a steak knife (there was dried peanut butter on the blade). this technique worked, though it required constant vigilance. the recipe i found said that if the butter is too hot it will give you scrambled eggs in the mix, but it didn’t happen to me, so i don’t know.



in the big bowl, whisk in your flour mixture, milk, and maple extract. i didn’t have any maple extract, and i’m sure as hell not paying two dollars an ounce for it (fuck you, whole foods), so i used my roommate brad’s almond extract instead. he also had lemon and “imitation butter” extracts, which i didn’t even know existed, but i guess makes sense when you think about it. once you have combined all of your ingredients, the batter should have a thick liquid slowly-fall-off-the-ladle consistency that you can easily spoon into cupcake papers, strategically located on a muffin tray, of course. i went a little overboard with the milk, cause i’m still kind of hungover, and to compensate i whisked in more flour, but then things kind of got out of hand and i can honestly say i’ve done better. but whatever, friends will still eat them and if they don’t, well then, one has ended relationships over less.



i’m kind of all over the board with how long you need to bake it, at least twenty minutes or so, but just keep checking it every so often and you should be fine. turn the oven to three hundred and fifty degrees, put the cupcakes in, and then go outside for a cigarette or something. check the laundry, i don’t know, this is a recipe for food, not life. the cupcakes should be golden brown in the end, and gently bounce back when you poke them (sans giggle). let them cool for a little bit, or pass them out right away to people you’re only semi-fond of. your call on that one. i too ate a really hot cupcake once, as an impressionable youth, and the experience was bittersweet, kind of like getting high on fumes at the dentist.



anyway, you should now have some delicious french toast cupcakes on your flour-dusted hands, a source of pride and prestige for any upright citizen. i guess this is kind of what i’ll do in the future for this blog, coupled with riveting social commentary and acute cultural criticism too, of course. at any rate, my ultimately motivating aim is to ride this paltry medium to global celebrity and a seven-figure book deal. so, you know, heads up on that.



…

baking soundtrack provided by the “my maudlin career” lp by camera obscura, and the “aboa sleeping” lp by the burning hearts.

…

ingredients
- one and a half cups of flour
- one and a half teaspoons of baking powder
- a half teaspoon of ground cinnamon
- a quarter teaspoon of salt
- one cup of sugar
- a half cup of butter, melted and cooled
- two eggs
- two teaspoons of maple extract
- a half cup of milk