From Epicurious:

1.5 lb sweet potatoes or yams
2 Tb brown sugar
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
50 wonton wrappers
2 egg whites

1.5 sticks butter
1.5 Tb balsamic vinegar
1.5 Tb chopped thyme

Cook the potatoes until they’re soft by your favorite method. Putting potatoes in the microwave scares me because of times when I’ve overdone it, but M led boldly and they turned out fine. Scoop out potato flesh into a bowl; add brown sugar and nutmeg, and mix. Epicurious also suggests salt and pepper, though I can’t remember if we put any in.

Beat the egg whites and put them next to a work surface. To make the ravioli, brush the margins of a wonton wrapper with egg white, put a medium spoonful of sweet potato in the middle, and set another wrapper on top. Smooth the top wrapper onto the ravioli from the center outward to avoid air pockets; unless you’re some kind of spoon wizard, you will probably also have to flatten out the filling into the exact shape that allows you to seal the edges. You’ll need a large flat surface to put the ravioli on as they accumulate.

Melt the butter in a pan and cook until it browns slightly. Add vinegar and thyme. You’ll want this to be a pretty large pan.

Cook the ravioli in boiling water; they should take about 3 minutes. Drain the ravioli and put them into the butter. This is why you want a large pan– the ravioli will be slippery, and getting the butter distributed without splattering it everywhere will be tedious if you have to be too ginger in moving ravioli around.

This was the best thing I’ve eaten in a long time. And it’s extremely simple, albeit time-consuming. Possible modifications for later… Add goat cheese to the filling, either mixed in or as its own little dot on top during the creation process? Seal the ravioli with water instead of egg? (I know I’ve seen people do this with wonton wrappers.)

Reheating worked much better than I expected– three ravioli on a plate, sprinkled with water and microwaved for 30 seconds made a good snack. The main problem was that they all stuck together in the Tupperware and had to be peeled apart. Separating them individually before storage with Saran Wrap seems like overkill, and yet I suspect it would save time in the long run.

Well, well!

This is a recent side project of Barry Andrews– the leader of Shriekback for most of its history, and therefore also the guy I complained a couple days ago had gone all mooshy. Except here, in 2003, he combines his own recent ambient noodlings with the snarl and creepiness he inherited from Carl Marsh when Marsh left Shriekback in 1985. Impressively, it’s weighted toward the former but doesn’t bore me the way Shriekback often has during the past decade of nebulous semi-existence.

Anyway, going back to the “world music” jab I made, it’s true that Andrews sounds silly when his attraction to odd musical instruments and non-specific mysticism makes him come off as The Great White Explorer. But you know, he’s basically got it right. It’s just that, as evidenced on brilliant tracks like “Muarg Muarg”, he needs to accept that he’s actually Mr. Kurtz.

A partial list of instruments (I left out “bass”, “drums”, “lead vocals”, etc.) that players on the record are credited with:

big rubbery vocals, pervo & distorto vox, vwizz JP8, nembo gong, attack-clavinet, jawbone treatment, unforeseen Kurzweil fast strings, tiny splash cymbal, army of hateful quicas, Insectocutor guitar, DX7 logdrum, JP8 organ surrogate, YOB VOX, Zen bass, low voice, “fairlight: sararr 1, newt 1″, sampled 808 maraca and cobol explosions, bottleneck guitar, glossy guitar, enlightened backing vox, 51 eels, heroic cguitars, shlang guitar, beastly tunes, 23 bells, 66 eels, luminous guitars, event guitars, bell-tree, rogue whoopee cushion 570, skipping rimshots, milkbottle-in-f, big yellow kalimba, bland JP8 chord-organ, piano gank, sea-mart marimba, insect cymbals, good-looking guitar, glorious human singing voices, genuine vibes, snakelike cabasa, cobol distant explosion, star-trek vocals, saurian bass, Kurzweil mongas, intra-uterine bass drum, G-piano gank deployment, numinous bass-ganks, audacious JP8, Little Hammond Tunes, return of the great brush dance, Motown tambourine, guira, terrifying quica of hell (sampled), black-light-trap-ams-clapperboard, sexually-correct-picking guitar

1. There’s a new Shriekback album!

2. Oh, it’s goth-adult contemporary-world music.

3. Well, that must be very nice for them.

4. I’ll just go listen to Jam Science and pretend this was a hoax.

Going through piles of CDs to make my year-end list… the first time around I did not fully absorb how much better this gets as it goes on. For all the times I’ve noticed massive frontloading on CDs that only had a few good tracks to survive on, I apparently have the same listening patterns as all the other inattentive slobs who frontloading panders to.

I recently watched New Order Story on DVD, a huge reminder of how perverse the band are. It ought to show up in their music more, like the clubby voice repeating “I want your love / I need your love” throughout “Guilt Is A Useless Emotion”.

I wrote about my initial reaction to this book here. In the end I had trouble separating the book’s weaknesses as a book from the arguments it puts forward; I’ve had to remind myself that, as unsatisfying as it was to finish, I wouldn’t have felt good assuming it never went anywhere if I put it down early.

According to my notes, the first time Lakoff and Nunez identify an actual person who holds the beliefs they attack is on page 251, more than halfway through the book. That person? Bishop George Berkeley, writing in 1734. I seem to have jotted some obscenities in the margin of my notebook at that point. They do get around to targetting more recent thinkers, though nobody later than the early 20th century. (Bertrand Russell is “pathological”.)

I’m still willing to admit that there could be an insight beyond my comprehension here, but as far as I can tell, L&N’s grand epistemological program consists of changing “this is a true abstract statement about thing X” to “this metaphor preserves inferences about thing X”. At one point, by way of explaining why math appears to be such a good fit for the physical world, they say that “regularities” exist independent of humans. If regularities objectively exist in a way that the concepts we use to abstractly describe them do not, then we are using a sense of the word “exist” for which the book’s thesis is trivially true. As the book winds down, much is made of the fact that nobody has ever seen a pile of e objects or walked i miles along a path, points I didn’t need 400 pages of build-up to accept.

This is not, by the way, a fair representation of what the book focuses on. The bulk of it has to do with a particular conception of infinity that L&N say underlies most of mathematics. What they say hangs together, but they never present any results from cognitive science to show that it’s true, which means that, again, they do something they complain about others doing: justifying an idea by showing that you can construct other things from it which, however, are conceptually prior.

Oh well, whatever, never mind.

Anton Barbeau - “Losing You Makes Crucifixion Easy” (mp3)

My excitement at the Loud Family having a new album on the way is tempered by the fact that it’s a collaboration with Anton Barbeau, who has never been in Scott Miller’s league when it comes to songwriting. Here, for example, you have a great melody laid over words that just don’t mean anything. I’m even less impressed with the lyrics because it took me so long to realize they didn’t mean anything; if you can create that good a facsimile of sense, it probably would have been easier to make it all hang together. Instead– well, no point in dwelling on it. The song still demands to be hummed, and you don’t necessarily share my finickiness about its flaws.

[From Anton's first album, The Horse's Tongue. Currently one can buy his back catalogue via 125 Records.]

The great thing about Tatsuya Yoshida is that he includes lyric sheets with his records.

Grazz grazz ramdiss quevestaim quevestaim ronns
Hilomdhiss tarferzha vorssing ragbortz balnintzkaimm
Obizzigass innilava pollighis

A friend of mine complained that Yoshida seemed to have mellowed on this record, and I do occasionally get an otherworldly coffeehouse feeling from it. That just doesn’t bother me.

The Protoculture - “Driving A Stolen Car On A Borrowed Road” (mp3)
The Protoculture - “My New Laugh” (mp3)

As promised, the first and only emo band.

My logic here is that “emo” was stripped of significance by strange cultural forces, to wit: a whole lot of people started hearing it without knowing what it referred to. Everyone made up their own theories. Around 2000 you could have said it at least had a consensus meaning, but by now, forget it. At the same time, it manifestly no longer means what it meant back in the heyday of Gravity Records, when it was unquestionably definable.

Using science, however, I have determined that for part of the summer of 1997, these two forces balanced each other out just enough that an observer of today can refer to things from that period as “emo” without being engulfed in a howling semiotic vortex. So there.

“My New Laugh” has been one of my favorite rock songs ever since that August, when it appeared in the radio station’s mail. The band seem to really like abrupt volume switches, but ‘quiet’ and ‘loud’ seem to correspond to this mysterious opposition between smiling and laughing instead of to the cliched “tranquil”/”aggressive”.

The Protoculture only ever put out two seven-inches that I saw; this, and one about a year later. If memory serves, they were catalog numbers 1 and 2 from “State Of The Art Records”, and the mailorder address on them was somewhere in Nebraska. That’s all I know. If the web has any information on them, it’s being drowned out by Robotech webpages and other bands who’ve used the name.

Even As We Speak - “Falling Down The Stairs” (mp3 on EAWS website)

Even As We Speak were the first Sarah band that I ever heard, though “Best Kept Secret” was considerably less glossy than this. What I love is the single loud bass note that sounds in the middle of the second line of the song. I don’t know if it’s a mixing mistake or what, but it sounds great– and then it never recurs in the rest of the song no matter how fervently I expect it.

EAWS, I should mention, did the first folky female-vocal cover of “Bizarre Love Triangle” that I know of, in 1987. Devine + Statton released theirs in 1989, and not until 1993 did the one everyone knows by Frente! come out. I don’t actually remember if theirs was good; their new web page claims a compilation of all 17 pre-Sarah songs may come out soon, which would include it.

Later today, if I have time: the first– and only!– emo band that ever existed.