Food Jazz

The Colorado College Community Kitchen will be publishing a cookbook!

Every Sunday we get a buncha random, mostly organic groceries, Thanks Whole Foods! Thanks Miller Farms!),  and magick them together to feed a couple hundred people or so. April will mark the 20th anniversary of the endeavor. We never know what we'll have to work with til we have it.

This is a bit of throw-together, after the fact like, made from 100% blind-luck stuff, plus a chicken from the freezer:

Steve's Chicken Improv

Hack the shit out of some chicken so's it's in manageable, bone-in chunks.

Pan sear the chunks and throw 'em in an oven at around 375deg.
Bake til it's not quite cooked through.

Meanwhile cut up an appropriate amount of onion--about 1 per whole chicken, and some onion-like stuff like scallions or leeks, or whatever. Wild onions are cool, and you can brag about using shit you found lying around outside that way. Put the onions separate from the other shit.
You could use some mushrooms, say, or some bell pepper, but I didn't in this bombulous version.

Also, peel garlic, (1/2 bulb per chicken), cut up a healthy gob of fresh tarragon, (say, 1/2 onea' those supermarket packages per chk), leaves from a few stalks of fresh oregano, and 1/2 a seeded fresh japa-leno.

Heat some olive oil in a deepish pan of appropriate size and press the garlic into the oil. Saute til golden.

Add onions, leeks, and 'shrooms if you're using any, and saute til the onions are caramelized. You'll have to figure the timing of any unmentioned items on your own.

Add a buncha' good fatty milk, the chicken, tarragon, oregano, a generous gob of decent chicken stock, (don't be skimpy with any of this crap), scallions, jalapenos, salt, (watch don't get carried away if you're using salty stock), ground pepper, Worsterchestershire, a little squirt of Sriracha, a pinch of rich, dark, ground coffee, and whatever I forgot about, or you figger might make it gooder.

Cook the shit out of it till the milk reduces and put it on some rice or 'taters, or somethin'.

Yum-diddly-iscious!

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Forgot the can of organic chopped tomatoes in that chicken thing. It goes in with the milk, &c.

Holmes Sweet Holmes

For NMania1: Thanks for the Voice

And for Bob Holmes: I love you Bob, I swear. But you deserve this.

Don't feel too sad--I deserve much worse.

Way back in May of this year, I promised this to a guy who "sold" me a free newspaper in Denver for a $1 suggested donation. He said he was a writer for the same paper, which addresses issues surrounding homelessness in the same city. He was interested in the state of those affairs in Colorado Springs, where I live, and, given that I've been in the free food biz for 26 years, and that I have, in fact been homeless myself, I had to think I was in a unique position to afford some perspective. I also posted an, (untitled ), bit on the same topic clear back on 12 April of 2010, wherein I promised a follow-up. Things have worked around to a moment where changes have taken place in both the homeless community of our town and in my schedule that render ripe the moment. A year and a half ago, I described a little of the circus-like scene in our town surrounding the homeless campers. Here' a bit more flesh, spiced with perhaps a bit more vinegar. Don't get all touchy, now.

Colorado Springs has always been pretty friendly to street-runners, at least since 1984 when I got here. I got to know my way around when I hit town as a 20 year old apprentice electrician and found work for the--ahem--generous wage of  $6.00 an hour. Within a year, I had fallen in with some folks at Calvary Chapel downtown in the same building occupied by our town's token "liberal" free paper now. We gave away sandwiches and such, among some other more ideologically driven activities. I've been in on this little pastime of mine in one capacity or another ever since, from various angles, and with variable motivation. (Spiritual vagaries aside, nothing is ever about just one thing). What I mean to point out is that I have been around long enough to have a little feel for the pulse of the thing, nothing more.

When I'd written about all this earlier in the orphaned posting noted above I mentioned some stuff I'll not mention again, since you can go to that one to see, easily enough: http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2010/04/so-colorado-springs-is-unusual-place-it.html . This follow up addresses the biggie. That's right IT HASN'T WORKED.

I'm no prophet. God has yet to send me any memos. All I did earlier was interpret the writing on the wall that was there for anyone to see, in big scrawling, blocky letters. I think anyone looking could read them clearly enough, including Bob Holmes, if he hadn't been in his customary, red-faced, squinty-eyed, self-imposed insensate condition. That doesn't count for an honest mistake, Bob!

Now, here's a little secret--sshhh! The camps are back. I can't speak for the general level of brain power amongst drunken, whacked out homeless guys, but even the blankest screen among my favorite crowd has developed an ingrained self-preservatory wiliness. So you won't see them sprawled along the highway like a middle class Somali neighborhood, like before. And I'm not gonna tell you where they are. The cops simply must know already, and my friends don't need another three-ring fiasco. But, truckloads of enabling aside--I freakin' told you, Bob!

I have an absolutely gigantic boatload of my own, patented bool-shyte to sling about all this, (imagine that), but here's a little teaser before I have to go actually do something this morning. At this moment of extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, (watch Wall street, now, y'all), we really ought to notice the shit we've been up to all these, say 10,000 years, isn't working. Let's switch to a genuinely loving thing.

Buon compleanno ad una nuova Rivoluzione. Viva l'Esercito dell'Amore!

Jon's Brain Thievery

For Jon:
Thanks, Pal. All aboard the CrazyPeace Train!
Steve Bass
Hey world--I have a very cool, (I think), and effective invention idea. If anyone has the knowledge and/or patience to help out with the patent and pitch, I'll split it with you!


Jon Christiansen patents are theft
5 hours ago · Like
   
ok, so tell me how you reckon I ought to approach the thing. I'm still learning!
5 hours ago · Like
 
Steve Bass I'll split any miracles with the whole wide world
5 hours ago · Like

Jon Christiansen miracles are also theft - stolen from the baby jesus
4 hours ago · Like
 
Steve Bass GTFOOH! I got Jesus in my pocket--he's a friend of mine. He gets great ganja, and how do you think I've miracled ntt life as it is?
4 hours ago via mobile · Like
 
Steve Bass ‎(my) life
4 hours ago via mobile · Like
 
Steve Bass Hey, this comical little dog'n'pony is great fun and all, but you actually reminded me that I am a Social Anarchist, and that my perfectly beautiful and miraculous life works out best when I roll with the magick. So what say we really have this conversation right here on the Wall, for the world to see!?
2 hours ago · Like

Jon Christiansen I just don't have the answers...but I do support social anarchy...much better than that individualist crap
2 hours ago · Like

Jon Christiansen I do think that there are no "new" ideas though. We are all just building on what others have done. On the other hand, everybody would expect to get paid for physical labor, why wouldn't we expect that from intellectual labor - at least in the pre revolutionary era?
2 hours ago · Like
 
Steve Bass Apart from earlier forms stemming from perversion of variously cherry-picked doctrines, "that individualist crap," of which you speak derives, I think, mostly from Ayn Rand--a bloody fascist.
30 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass We can run up some rabbit trails as we go, and find plenty of value in the warrens to which they lead, but for now: I'm not so sure if I think there are no new ideas or not. In one very real sense, nothing new is possible at all, given that Time is demonstrably illusory.
27 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass I fit the label "Social Anarchist" fairly comfortably, but I find the ground near the fountainhead of the doctrinal foundation beneath it pretty dang shifty. (Did you catch the Rand joke there?)
25 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass I don't have the unshakable faith in human goodness that Goldman and Berkman did. Seems to me if the assertions of SA were ultimately true, then Capitalism or Marxism would work just fine, and we'd have no need to even dream up this conversation.
21 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass I don't find it especially valid to read any deep metaphysics into the foundational Anarchist literature, but those heroes may have whiffed a pet notion of mine: Revolution or no, Apocalypse or slow, lingering slide down a meandering entropic waterway to Chaos, this shit is ALL PERFECTLY SAFE.
15 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass And yes, this idea is in my head. It's MINE to treat as I please. As may well be apparent enough, I have plenty of ideas that I rather like that I'm perfectly willing to sow to the wind. The one sparking this convo is rather more a bit of valuable pragmatism, I think, and I know I don't want it out on the breeze for Ronco or, Heaven forbid, Wal-Mart to snatch up with a steel net.
11 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass You touched on it--we're kinda stuck in a paradigm. It's our mission, should we choose to accept it, to smash the fuck out of that rather brittle framework, eh?
9 minutes ago · Like
 
Steve Bass I am NOT an Objectivist, I don't want a Kingdom, other than the one I already possess, (a very wide trail for later), but I do think I have some shit, (not limited to the one idea), that's worth something, as well as some wants that are not immodest by my reckoning, and figuring out how to pull this particular rabbit out of its hat without maiming it--well, let's have a go, eh?
3 minutes ago · Like

Having said all that, I'm going to copy all this and whatever may ensue, to a separate document, and with your permission as co-owner of these ideas, publish it to my Google blog for the whole fucking world to read. For free.

Stage Magick

Stage Magick

For Bruce McCluggage

Had some words with my friend Bruce yesterday--OK, lots of words. In fact, the Spirit moved me, so I was blasting words all over the place like that guy from the X Men, only with a gag instead of a visor. All the way toward the end of much conversatin'--and yes, Bruce held his end respectably in the face of my torrent--we came to a summation.

The idea is already on the pages here so it's important and needing some flesh, but it's also very simple. We all know we can't prove a negative. Any third grade philosopher know this as an unshakable verity, right? So who will step up to prove that? No one, that's who--we can't do it, and mind you, I don't hearsee that term coming from myself often. I'll beat my kids senseless if I hear them using it. (Hi kids! Molto amore!). Hell the notion is generational. My totally outstanding 95 year old Granddad banned the word from his brood's vocabulary, and he started his family during the Great Depression. But we can't, and we know we can't.

We can't even prove that we can't prove that we can't prove a negative. We can add layers to our investigation to Eternity, and never can we prove a negative. And yet we know that we know that we know (&c.) that we can't do it. What the Heellll!!? This is why: Reason breaks down at a point between proving and knowing right here for us to examine like a fascinating diamond, cut in some diabolically ingenious fashion to as to hide its facets from us like a tesseract or something. There's math that explains this pretty succinctly. Look up Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, (here's a good start http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/). Gödel, [whose name I'll be disrespecting til I figure out how to add an umlaut on this thing, (HA!)], wrote a bunch of High Math, way beyond my capacity, that shows us when reduced to terms even I can grok, that any closed system can never possibly contain all the tools necessary to fully describe itself. With me so far?

This shows us another Eternal Verity: Truth transcends Proof; and further--our ability to know does the same. Now, Bruce is a philosopher, and kind of a Christian, so this sort of shit doesn't bother him like it may the Scientific Determinists that read this. What we are gazing upon, through the lens of our little diamond, is an example of our ability to "jump out of the system", and view it from outside, in some manner as indescribable as how we can know there's no proving a negative. (Apologies to Doug Hofstadter for abusing an idea I came across in Gödel, Escher, Bach. I'm about to depart from his comfort zone, I think. He did, give him mucho credit, respectably describe the idea within the closed system of those pages). This is an ability we share with God. This, I think, is at least in part why some tidbit of western scripture says, "Ye are gods," (Psalm 82, for you skeptics; read it all and get some context before attempting to argue, please).

This whole line of thought is closely associated with the Ontological Argument as proof of God, if not fully dependent upon it, (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/). For the uninitiated, this is a supremely brilliant bit of philosophical tomfoolery that attempts to prove the existence of God by reason alone, in an orderly procession of thought utterly divorced from empirical evidence. If anyone would care to take it on, I'd love--no LOVE--to see a genuine debunking. It's very slippery indeed, and feels for all the world like a stage magician pulling infinite decks of cards from his sleeves. But it's irrefutable, in my stupid little mind. It jumps the system.

I'll readdress the crap we've mulled over here, but this is good. Put simply--arithmetically, one might say--1) We can't prove a negative; 2) We know this; 3) Truth is superior to proof; 4) We are therefore superior to the closed system of All-There-Is;5) Only god is thus; 6) We are gods. (Yes, I took a leap there at step 6. I only have so much attention span. Roll wit' it for now, OK? It's in the Ontological Argument if you feel like getting ahead of me). This is arithmetical, yes, and handily sums up my points from yesterday, Bruce and friends. But, as you've seen by now I guess, that doesn't mean one can't do a bit of Algebra, Trig, or (Meta)Physics with it.

***

Jeez, I hope you all enjoyed that. Please don't burn me at the stake yet. There's more. It'll take a while to work around the mess of toroidal thinking here. See Bruce--I didn't forget that part. I'm only human, even if we are all gods. Bear in mind all, that Nothing here is any more valuable than the opinion of one idiot house painter. And any of you who have read the stuff before this will know already: It's all a bunch of bullshit.

CARPE DIEM: World's Largest Jailer By Far, It's Not Even Close

This speaks for itself; it was originally placed as a draft in March of 2011, so think of it in that order as the conversation proceeds. In spite of the rather lengthy neglect the space here will, in fact, be filled with lots and lots of words. Bob Holmes, our Colorado Springs campers, and all that has been noted before will, in fact, be readdressed: CARPE DIEM: World's Largest Jailer By Far, It's Not Even Close

Willie and Waylon and Some Other Guy: A story about weed, marriage, and Texas tall tales. Part I

Willie and Waylon and Some Other Guy: A story about weed, marriage, and Texas tall tales. Part I

                I like telling the story of the time we went to Telluride with my brother David to catch the Bluegrass Festival there. Dave is a pretty dang famous fiddler, and this happened 13 or 14 years ago when his Freight Hoppers were riding a crest, having two then current Billboard Top 10 Americana list releases on Rounder Records, (Rounder is pretty much a ripoff for them, but that’s for another time).  The Freight Hoppers were hot in Colorado, and their set would draw some 30, 000 festival-goers, with a respectable bevy of hairy Deadheads looking for an outlet following Jerry’s departure bouncing, flouncing and working their little Tai Chi dance up at the stage. Lots of really notable musicians liked The Hoppers, too, and still do, actually.

                Anyhow, we would meet up with Dave and the band at the festivals after winding through a long cattle-line setup to get to the will-call desk and pick up our magic-rainbow all-access wristbands and hang out all weekend with all these niche-famous musicians, eating, drinking, being merry, smoking, and playing music together. That shit is great!

                So one day we’re back stage chillin’ with Tony Furtado, (hi Tony—rock on!), and someone goes, “Is that Johnny Cash?” and sure enough, The Highwaymen had showed up to play an unscheduled set. We never made it away from whatever we were doing at the time to see them play, but not long later, as if they had come for no other purpose, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson show up looking for my brother to tell him how much they dig his music. How cool is that!? Well, we all got to jawin’, and knowing a little about Willie I pulled a little fairly decent weed out of my pocket  and offered it, but Willie said, “Oh, no thanks, son, put that away,” and busted out some G13 mutant weed or something, and sparked the stoniest joint I’ve ever smoked in my life, to this very day. What a day!

                Now, Willie has always been a hero of mine. His heroes have always been cowboys, he says; mine have always been outlaws, and I always figured Willie for a true outlaw, to the core. I mean the guy runs for president on a platform built of pot smoke, with Ani DiFranco as his running mate. Go Willie! That’s why some things he’s said lately trouble me. I’ll get to that in a minute but the first order of business here is to retell that story one more time, (not that I won’t tell it again—it’s a great staple of mine at parties and such), and to let you in on a secret: It’s all bullshit! It never happened!

                ***

                I am a teller of tall tales, a spinner of yarns, a slinger of bool-shyte. That’s what I do. I’m gonna do some now, here; it’s my schtick, and folks who know me will instantly recognize some of the regular phraseology of my everyday standup, right here on the page. Hi Tim! Hi kids! Hi Willie! Some will recognize little inside tidbits and feel special. They’ll pick out my little eddies and anticipate how I circle back around myself. Hell, if you’re reading you might just as well go ahead and start feeling all conspiratorial and special right now. I mean, this is certainly not USA Today. You can pretty much count on being in an exclusive number by this count.

                So if this is a bit of improv by a bullshit artist, how do you know this isn’t all bullshit right now? I’ll let you in on another secret: it is! That’s right—it’s the Lying Cretin. Everything I say is a lie. The Lie is truer than the Truth. Willie and I will be burning one in Austin when I make it down that way in a few months and we’ll laaaugh and laugh about this whole thing, because he gets it, you know:

                This statement does not belong in the set of all true statements.

               Wrap your head around that a spell. It can’t be done. And no side-winding tap-dance involving imaginary words like "pseudo-statement" allowed, either. This is True Lies. It’s a breakdown in reason, a blind spot in our panoramic window to Reality like that thing with the dots you learned in elementary school. You can not manipulate the notions here to fit your mind, though you may, just maybe, be able to manipulate your mind to fit the notions. OK, so I’ll admit we can’t prove the magick here, and maybe someday some mathematician will build a technical ladder up and out of Gödel’s pit, but, we can’t prove a negative, right? But let’s see ya prove that. And now follow it back to the beginning of this paragraph, the beginning of this rant, the beginning of everything you’ve ever read, heard, saw, sensed felt.

               
And, lo and behold, you find yourself  “poised on the wave of explicit Presence, the clockless Nowever.”
               
But don’t forget what kinda bullshit you’re reading.

(Don't miss Part 2)!

http://hermetic.com/bey/ 

Walking on Water, Across a Tightrope, Without a Fishnet

Steve Bass
1 April 2009
For Carrie Spencer

Walking on Water, Across a Tightrope, Without a Fishnet

            Very few times in life does one come across an opportunity to interact with a personage who so completely embodies the essence of a world religion as presented by recognized Tibetian Boddhisatva, the monk  Khen Rinpoche Lobzang Tsetan’s visit to Colorado Springs. This verbally acrobatic name and title aptly characterize the man’s persona in many ways.
            Khen Rinpoche, as abbreviated by his local presenters, holds a position roughly correlative to a Catholic cardinal, to hear the presenters tell it-- essentially the Dalai Lama’s right-hand man. The literature provided differs, somewhat, naming him Abbott of the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, a rather secondary establishment, with Khen Rinpoche serving as a sort of sanctioned proxy for the Panchen Lama, himself the “second most important spiritual leader of Tibet,” a prisoner in China. No matter, though, the delightful, cheery man demonstrates no discomfort at the lesser status, and in fact appears to acknowledge no real differentiation.
            The experience of meeting this guy is not to be matched. It is really quite astonishing that someone of his stature would deign to spend four exhausting days in our little burg, interacting personally with us on a ground level. But he doesn’t see it that way. Actually, the way he seems to see just about all things is so jarringly alien to most of the Springsians present at Saturday’s talk and meditation that several of them seemed on the verge of flying apart at the mental seams. I have never met a more cheerfully straightforward and forthcoming individual, but problems of conceptual translation caused the simplest of his words to slip through Americans’ grasps as if they were trying to catch trout by hand.
            Those present attempted to bestow him with honor. He would have none of it. They shifted to attributing humility, and he chuckled as he asserted the loftiness of his spiritual position, equating himself with disembodied “deities.” The conversation proceeded and it became apparent, (to some), that although he was utilizing recognizable terms, when he spoke of God, or gods, or deities, or for that matter, meaning, compassion, selfishness, or virtually any notion germane to spiritual discussion, there existed a sort of topspin to his thinking that caused his intent to fly right over our heads.
            Addressing the matter of selfishness he insisted that our first compassionate responsibility is to alleviate our own suffering, that is, to see to our own comfort. This from a man who lives in a barely heated, stone room. One woman expressed sympathy and somewhat vociferous support for the political situation endured by Tibetians. Khen Rinpoche agreed the matter is dire, but proceeded, chuckling all the while, to negate the concern, positing that it is much better to concentrate on changing ourselves than the world, and advocating compassion over blame for even the most deeply flawed of our world's political leaders. Asked about the nature of creation, he engaged in a truly comical tango with the querent, involving that business of God/gods/deities, mentioned above. She almost melted. He chuckled and told a story about a man who spent nine years cutting a steel bar in half with a feather--get it? No way.

            In the end, Khen Rinpoche admirably represented an admirable spiritual school. He’s no dummy and holds the equivalent of a Ph.D. in theology, but remains as down to earth as a chimney-sweep, recognizing our conceptual difficulties, and thanking us for the opportunity to practice his diabolically terrible English, chuckling, of course. He suggested that rather than wrack our heads with too much endeavor at forcing concepts into our worldviews, we hold on to the most valuable basics that we all seem to hold in common. Tibetian Buddhism, not unlike any variety of Buddhism, can be quite complex, and one can never tell if its proponents are entirely sincere in their traditional descriptions of reality. But throughout his conversation, Khen Rinpoche never really veered too far from a tenet expressed by the Dalai Lama himself: “My religion is Kindness.”