Plum, peach, and cherry tart
ANYWAY…the subject of this week’s Sunday interactive playlist is storytelling songs. Songs that tell compelling, funny, or otherwise entertaining stories, with lively appealing characters. As ever, the list is interactive, so add them to the list yourself, or leave a comment, and I’ll try to add them through the week.
Plum, peach and cherry tart
Chocolate-stuffed cherry cake
We recently re-watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film that may or may not have been directed by elusive British street artist Bansky, and is about Thierry Guetta, who may or may not be a real person and who may or may not also be an artist named Mr. Brainwash. Is the whole film a mischievous hoax? A straight documentary? A mix of fact and fiction? I believe it is, of course, the last one, as are all films. (It’s clearly not, as Banksy claims, a re-edit of hundreds of hours of Guetta’s footage of street artists at work, because Guetta is in at least 90% of the shots.)
Whatever else it is, I think Exit Through the Gift Shop is a sneakily beautiful film. It’s clever and amusing, certainly, but underneath all this lies a warm and beating human heart. The film asks questions–literally–the characters are always asking questions, and then contradicting themselves in ways that raise more questions. It makes us think about anonymity and celebrity, about the commercialization of art, about whether or not art has any meaning, or needs to have meaning. Guetta’s art, which is dangerously similar to Bansky’s own, is seen as meaningless, but it sells for lots of money, and Guetta, like Bansky, becomes a celebrity, which seems like a depressingly empty pursuit.
The film questions whether or not there are rules, if we should play by them or make up our own, and if any of it really matters. “I don’t know how to play chess, but to me, life is like a game of chess.” Guetta supposedly took up the video camera because he didn’t want to miss anything. As a child he was away from home for the death of his own mother, and now he obsessively video tapes everything in his life so that he won’t miss it. He starts to follow street artists all over the world, amassing a prodigious amount of footage, and entirely missing the lives of his own children, and all the ways they are growing and changing all the time. He doesn’t watch any of the video, he packs it all away in boxes, for him capturing it is enough.
I’m so taken with this idea…the idea that capturing or creating a moment is sufficient, and that making it viewable, let alone sharing it or exhibiting it, is not a necessary part of the process. It put me in mind of Vivian Maier, a photographer whose work was recently “discovered.” during an auction of the contents of a storage locker that proved to contain a massive hoard of negatives.
Maier had lived in New York and Chicago, and she created a remarkable collection of gorgeous street photographs that she never developed. The images are strikingly beautiful…the focus is uncanny, the blacks are rich and dark, the subjects are full of humor and sadness. She has beautiful images of children on the streets and looking through windows, images of lovers and workers and parents and elderly people going about their day. Maier was a nanny but I don’t think she had a family of her own, and it’s strange to think about her capturing the passage of time in other peoples’ lives, the progress from childhood to old age. She was never a celebrity, never recognized or acclaimed in her lifetime. She became poor and, I imagine, lonely.
Her street photography lies in stark contrast to Guetta’s manically hyped shallow “works” and even to Banksy’s street art. But it seems as though they’re all asking the same questions and all deciding that there are no answers but it doesn’t mean they should stop asking, or that we should stop trying to capture moments as they fly by, though we can never catch time as it passes. The attempt may be futile, but that doesn’t mean it lacks value.
Chocolate-stuffed cherry cake
Well, I’ve said it was my summer of cherries, and here’s another example. We were playing with our new cherry pitter the other evening, and Malcolm invented the method of stuffing the pitted cherries with chocolate chips. Genius! The boy’s a mad culinary genius! Of course I had to take it all a step further and pit and stuff some cherries and then bake them into a cake. I made a very simple cake, with ground hazelnuts. This is similar to clafoutis, of course, but it really is a cake and not a custard.
Here’s Tonight the Streets are Ours by Richard Hawley from Exit Through the Gift Shop.
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Fresh cherry chocolate chip cookies
This is my summer of cherries! I’m cherry-obsessed. I’ve always been a raspberry fan, but I have to admit, this summer I’m very nearly ready to declare the cherry as my favorite fruit. I’m especially obsessed with the combination of cherries, almonds, and chocolate. So I warn you in advance I’ve tried lots and lots of combinations, and I plan to tell you about them all! ALl of them! I thought it might be fun to make cookies with fresh cherries. The cookies turned out very soft, like little cakes. But tasty–fresh and juicy.
Here’s Manu Chao with Denia. We’ve been playing this album for Malcolm lately, because I think Manu Chao might be a satorial soul mate for our Malcolm.
Almond cake with chocolate and cherries
July 11, 2013.
This morning I cleaned the bathrooms for the first time in a few weeks. I thought about time passing. A baby screamed outside the window with that sound that could be crying or laughing, and from behind a closed door Isaac made the same sound. I thought about how summer used to last forever and now it flies by; I know it’s a clichéd thought, but that doesn’t make it less true–it might make it more true. Our summer days are the old-fashioned kind, nothing planned, but long and busy. They race by in a flurry of periods of activity mixed with spaces of inactivity, but they’re not particularly eventful, and maybe that’s why it’s hard for Isaac to think of anything to write about. It honestly doesn’t feel as though we have time in our days for notable events, that’s how full they feel. I thought about how Camus said “Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter,” and about how he died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket, for a train ride he could have been on. I know about these things from wikipedia and some dumb website that collects people’s quotes, and I wonder if Camus would have had any respect for these because obviously it means people are trying to understand everything, on some level, or if he would have been depressed by them because he said, “what we ask is that articles have substance and depth, and that false or doubtful news not be presented as truth.” I remembered another time that I’d cleaned the bathroom, and I’d made a humorous quip about how scrubbing a toilet if two little boys live in the house is sisyphean and leads to existential despair, and I’d wondered if Camus had ever had to do it. And I think that this quip was proof that I’d gotten Camus completely wrong my whole life, and I wonder why that was. Because I’d read him in high school French class, and I don’t speak French at all? Because I speak precious little English, either? Because I’d read him in high school and I heard what my teenage self needed to hear? Maybe I have it all wrong now, because I’m forty-four and I’m hearing what my middle-aged self needs to hear. I thought about this quote “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” which is not despairing at all, but completely hopeful, and I claim it for The Ordinary, and I apply it to all things–to getting out of bed in the morning and deciding to wake up and live, to embracing the long littleness, to scrubbing toilets and listening to the boys bicker and scream and laugh, over and over and over again, to all the beautiful tediousness of our long, busy, uneventful days. Isaac just finished his journal entry, and he said that tomorrow he’s going to write, “Yesterday in my summer journal I wrote about writing in my summer journal, and next day I’ll write about how I was writing in that summer journal about writing in my summer journal, and in that summer journal I was writing about a river!”
Almond cake with chocolate and cherries
Here’s Everyday by Yo La Tengo.
pistachio crumb cake with cherries, peaches and chocolate
Here’s today’s picture. Why is this man at the train station? Where is he going? Where is he coming from?
pistachio crumb cake with cherries, peaches, and chocolate chips
Here’s Waiting for a Train by Mississippi John Hurt.
Story and recipe after the jump.
Drambuie ginger cake
We don’t usually drink much besides wine with dinner or an occasional beer with punjabi mix, but every once in a while we’ll invent a strange and delightful drink. Usually this involves ginger beer, because we love ginger beer. Recently, we tried ginger beer and drambuie. It was really good! Sweet but refreshing, with a nice kick to it. I added some fresh lemon to mine, because I like everything with lemon. This cake was inspired by that experiment. It’s flavored with drambuie and a little powdered ginger, and it has chopped crystallized ginger mixed into the batter. It was really good! Oh yeah, and it has chocolate chips, because everything should have chocolate chips. The second time I made it I glazed it with a mix of powdered sugar and drambuie, but that’s not pictured here. I made the cake in my smallish deepish new old French cake pan. You could make it in a normal 8 or 9-inch cake pan, and it will be just as good, but flatter. And it might not need to cook as long.
Here’s Belle and Sebastian with For the Price of a Cup of Tea.
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Walnut cherry chocolate cake
So I apologize for the predictability of this, but this week’s interactive playlist will be on the subject of fathers and father’s fathers. Also acceptable, and probably more interesting…songs that remind you of your father. As ever, the list is interactive, so add what you like, or leave a comment and I’ll try to remember to add it later. (Though I haven’t been doing a very good job as list-curator lately!)
I made this cake with ground walnuts. It has a nice sweet earthy nuttiness. I put a layer of batter in the pan, and then I added some chopped fresh cherries and some bittersweet chocolate chips, and then I added another layer of batter. The batter itself has a little cinnamon and no leavening, I wanted it to be dense and almost pudding-y, and it was. I made it in my new little, tallish french cake pan, but you can use any cake pan that’s on the smaller side and it will work fine.
Here’s a link to the interactive playlist.
Chocolate-covered strawberry ice cream
I bought strawberries and then we picked strawberries, so we had a lot of strawberries. I wanted to make them into ice cream, but I don’t always like strawberry ice cream. Sometimes the strawberries lose their flavor when they’re too cold. Aha! I thought to myself, what if they have a protective coating of bittersweet chocolate to shield them from the cold! Because chocolate covered strawberries are delicious, and they could only be better if folded in vanilla ice cream. This turned out really good!! A nice balance of bitter and sweet, fruity and creamy. The boys loved it, and asked for many many helpings. The strawberries aren’t completely coated in chocolate, but they each had enough chocolate clinging to them to get nice and melty with the ice cream. Well, it was very tasty!
Here’s Irma Thomas It’s Raining. Well, it’s also from Down By Law, and it’s beautiful.
Almond cone cookies with almond pastry cream
French cone cookie molds
Here’s Chantal Goya with Tu M’as Trop Menti
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Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
Out of the Ordinary 