Oops, I forgot a link:

Dustin pointed out this SO PERFECT Alternet article: Are Liberals Pathetic? My answer is a solid YES. Gotta love that Chris Hedges! This is a must read, for sure.

In an anarchist society, who will pick up the garbage? A spot-on, super quick read. (Thanks to Facebook pal DS for the link)

And from anarchism to my other love, thinking consumerism! A really great gift guide that the Bonbons were included in– I sort of want everything mentioned, particularly the quirky and lovely animal portraits.

And also

Good article in the NYT on the dangers of kitchen plastics and chemicals.

Also from the NYT, an article pretty much totally about my life, except that I don’t sell my wares on Etsy. And don’t make “more than $140,000 a year.” But still, it’s my business life down to a tee: a so-called perfect work life whose one big giant trade off is working every minute of every day, forever.

Oh, and! As previously mentioned, my farmer pal Kira got a sweet little write-up in the Times too! Oh, how cute is she? I’m amazed they got her to stand still long enough to take her picture—by far, she’s the hardest working farmer I know.  (And I make it a point to know farmers, so I know of what I speak.)

My fave band/performance artist, The Blow, is back from a little hiatus!

My BFF Christy introduced me to this lovely Portland blog. It’s super stylie, pretty,  & thoughtful—in short, delicious in every way. We both hate American Apparel and love hair dye, fermentation projects, and veganism, wooo!

Randy has a great post all about his fermentation 101 experiments (among other interesting life tidbits) and I’m not just saying it’s great because he mentions me favorably in it! Sample bit of typical Randy awesomeness: “there seems to be an unwritten exception to noise ordinances allowing any amount of racket so long as it is produced by gas powered tools designed to manage nature.” Oh god, so true.

This is a reminder, to myself (and maybe you too!) to save my copious amount of jars for the fine folks at Wintergreens when I get back to cooking next…decade!

Word on the street (that street being audubon.org) is that the excellent Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms is soon to be an iPhone app!!!! My exclamation points runneth over! My dog-eared copy of the book hangs out in my car trunk, along with a battered ’shrooming basket, and the promise of a shiny new fabulous-sounding app (the bird one has bird calls!) is making me feel all tingly.

Hello sweet beets,

A Facebook pal friend asked for my pumpkin pie recipe and I thought I’d toss it on here even though I don’t have a picture of it and it’s not exactly my recipe, but rather an adaptation of an old recipe from Fine Cooking. It’s so great though. Make it, take a picture, and send it to me along with your kudos, will ya?

Fun fact! I started making this tart my regular Thanksgiving pumpkiny dessert after Khaela Maricich (yes, Khaela of The Blow!) tasted it alongside my standard non bourbony pie and declared that it “had more going on.” My god, I love that Khaela. We’re actual friends, but every time I see her I still can’t stop from basically screaming about how much I love her and making dorky references to all her songs. This is of course slightly awkward and I commend her for being so awesome about it (full disclosure: she’s more of a Jacob friend than a Lagusta friend, but how great to be in a couple where you get to be friends with all your sweetheart’s friends, non? Actually…read this paragraph quick, because when Jacob sees it he will sigh in that “you don’t have to share everything with the internet” way and I will feel weird and take it down. He is in Sweden today though, so I can blab on and on about my deep and wild love for Khaela to the entire world without any sighing disrupting my oversharing.).

I LOVE THE BLOW!!!

Pumpkin Bourbon Tart with Walnut Streusel

1 11” tart

• This recipe looks long, but it is really just three easy components. It calls for a stand mixer and a food processor, but it can be made without these by combining the tart and filling ingredients (separately) in a bowl and by hand-chopping the streusel ingredients and combining them with a fork or pastry blender.
• The coconut oil should be at room temperature, which means that it shouldn’t be completely liquefied or completely solid – it should be soft enough to scoop out easily but still white. Since it can be tricky to get it to this consistency, especially in very hot or cold kitchens, remember that is always better to err on the side of it being more liquid, because otherwise the dough or streusel could end up with holes that were once solid coconut oil. However, a colder oil makes a more flaky pastry, so finding a balance between workable and too warm (liquid) is worth it. If you’re scared of coco oil or don’t know what kind to buy, read my coco oil manifesto here!

tart crust

2 c all-purpose flour

1/3 c sugar

1 ts. orange or tangerine zest (tangerine adds a special quality)

½ ts. sea salt

10 Tb. coconut oil, at room temperature, see note above

2 Tb. flax seed “eggs” (you know, just boil 1c of water and 3 Tb. flax seeds for a few minutes, then strain it. If it’s too thick to strain, add more hot water and whisk whisk whisk. Voilà! Egg whites!)

¼ c coconut milk, more if needed

1. In a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the flour, sugar, zest, and salt. Add the coconut oil and combine on low speed until the mixture looks crumbly and like dried peas – about 2 minutes.
2. Add the flax seed “eggs” and coconut milk and mix on low speed until the dough is just combined. If the dough is too dry to come together, add more coconut milk a spoonful at a time.
3. Evenly press dough into a 11” ungreased tart pan with a removable bottom. Refrigerate. (Yep, a pressed crust! EASY!)

pumpkin filling

15 oz. pumpkin or squash (I like Blue Hubbard squash the best), steamed (use canned pumpkin and I will kill you. Just STEAM SOME SQUASH, you can do that, Jesus!) [If anyone has both a scale and measuring cups and can tell me how many cups 15 oz. is, let me know and I will update this for the benefit of non-scale-owners. But if you're serious about baking, you should buy a scale!)

scant 1 Tb. agar powder (I talk about it here)

½ c evaporated cane juice sugar

¼ c packed minimally processed dark brown sugar

2 Tb. all-purpose flour

1 ts. ground ginger

1 ts. freshly ground cinnamon

¼ ts. freshly ground cloves

½ ts. sea salt

½ c coconut milk

¼ c bourbon (once I accidentally used Southern Comfort and it was delicious as well, which is weird because I usually find SoCal vomitious.)

1. In blender, combine all filling ingredients over low speed until combined. Set aside.

streusel topping

¾ c walnut halves, toasted, cooled

¼ c crystallized ginger, coarsely chopped

¾ c all-purpose flour

1/3 c evaporated cane juice sugar

¼ c packed minimally processed dark brown sugar

½ ts. freshly ground cinnamon (I always use canela Mexican cinnamon from my local Mexican market [Casa Latina in Poughkeepsie---I call it a Mexican market even though it's a Latina market because I am a big giant racist.] and grind it in a spice grinder, but you can use your sad little tin of cassia cinnamon, sure, go right ahead, even though it’s probably like 10 years old and doesn’t taste cinnamony at all…)

½ ts. sea salt

1/3 c coconut oil, at room temperature

1. In a food processor, combine walnuts and ginger. Pulse to chop into medium pieces. Remove. Add remaining ingredients except coconut oil and pulse briefly to mix. Add coconut oil and pulse until just barely combined. Remove blade and stir in walnuts and crystallized ginger.

assembling the tart

1. Heat the oven to 350F.
2. Pour the pumpkin mixture into the unbaked tart crust. Do not overfill tart pans because the filling puffs a little. It might overflow a little in the oven. I personally like the look of it when it does, and it sinks back down after it comes out of the oven, but if you want a tidy tidy tart, take out 1/3 cup or so of the filling and just eat it. Scatter the streusel topping evenly over the pumpkin mixture, covering it completely. Put the tart on a cookie sheet.
3. Bake until the topping is evenly cooked and no longer looks wet in the center, 50 to 65 to 75 minutes, depending on your oven.
4. Let the tart cool on a rack for at least 2 hours before serving. The tart can be wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated overnight; before serving, let it sit at room temperature 1 to 2 hours.
5. The flavor of this tart is best after one day, and it will keep up to 6 days.

I’m already mourning the passing of the Season of Wearing Cute Dresses in a pretty hardcore way. Yuck. Forgive that I already posted a picture of this outfit (which I have christened “You’d Never Guess She’s a Man-Hating Anarcho-Feminist,”), but I did a lot of tailoring to it to make it fit (there was a LOT more lace) and I’m pretty much in love with it. Those tights have little twee hearts on them!

Lots happening out there in the world, plus I am over my horrid mood of last week! Let us celebrate with links:

My BFFF (extra F for how Fucking much I love him) Than Luu is doing some ridiculous food blogging on his travels around the world with his band Black Gold (Oh look! Another opportunity to mention the music video I was in, how handy!). Check it out!

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Speaking of bands, while I was engaged in a horrible Halloween depression spiral, my sweetheart was in Louisville mixing THIS. Wow.
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Profanity-laced hilarity courtesy of McSweeney’s.

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The new Bloodroot calendar is out! In the two years since Bloodroot published the gorgeous cookbook set that I was honored to have had a hand in creating, they have been publishing a calendar with new recipes. The calendar is super gorgeous and filled with 99% vegan recipes straight out of my mentor Selma’s head–snap it up!

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I’m happy one of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Safran Foer, Ames, and Letham) wrote a book about why you should be vegan or whatevs, and I’m happy that famous blonde actresses are writing vegan cookbooks, all of that is well and good. But these books are written for non-vegans—why people have to keep pointing them out to me I have no idea.

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Speaking of another of the Bklyn Jonathans, Ames wrote that new show Bored to Death and though I haven’t seen it I completely loved & agreed with Nancy Franklin’s recent New Yorker review (I basically agree with everything Nancy Franklin has ever said though.). Particularly this part:

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia.

My god, YES. I suffered through a Jonathan Ames audiobook (which I refuse to Google to figure out the title, as I am unwilling to spend one more second of my life on Jonathan Ames) once, and every second was pure torture.

On the other hand, everyone says this new series is good. Oh, the pain.

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And a few work-related miscellanies:

Heya Baltimorites (?)! Check out Brunie’s Bakery, a cute small-batch vegan bakery in your fair city. Recently their head baker emailed me to say that she was making the wedding cake for the woman who ordered the aforementioned wedding truffles from last week and she just sampled and adored a few truffles. How nice is that? I love it when things like that happen. Vegans can be a crazy bunch, but overall we are such decent, sweet, friendly people, no?

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(All that follows is NSFW!)

So, this erotic chocolate shop in Belgium wants to sell ye olde vulvaz, and I hope we can make it happen. How hilarious does it look? My favorite product so far is the “Candy Gay String.” And while I find these deeply, deeply horrifying….I must say they are pretty well done! And they remind me all over again to be annoyed that no one (Beloved TCHO! Are you listening?) makes high-quality vegan (coco milk!!!) milk chocolate and white chocolate. Oh, and I have this mold! I once made it for my sweetheart filled with peppermint patty filling and presented it to him right before he left on a tour. It was too much sugar (a solid inch or so of peppermint patty filling, I’m not sure quite what I was thinking) and he couldn’t eat it in front of anyone and I fear a lot of it went to waste. But it was adorable!

1) My grandmother (my dad’s mom) is one of those deeply racist people whose racism is so casual and built-in that it’s pretty much impossible to eradicate. She is of a generation that we just need to wait out, if you know what I mean. I think I’ve mentioned before how it took her a decade or three to stop referring to my mother as “your mother, the Jew.” I love my grandma, to the extent that she loves me. And I know that with this love comes a legacy of racism I will never entirely overcome. I think about it a lot, and try really hard to be aware of it. Cut to last week, and me mowing the lawn in intense heat and struggling with what I’ve now figured out is Lyme Disease (see #3).  Completely unbidden, I remembered what my grandmother used to say about being out in that kind of heat:

“I’m sweatin’ like a n—– on the auction block!”

Yep.

So when this thought came to me today, I tried to break it down. Was I remembering her saying that, or was I actually thinking it myself? I know that being tortured by thoughts like these is major conservative fodder for making fun of softie liberals, but the realization that I couldn’t decide what was happening in my own brain tortured me pretty much all day. There’s some pomo shit for you right there, right? What say you, Barthes? Lacan? Mons. Foucault? Do we ever think anything ourselves, or do we merely aggregate? What are thoughts, and how can the transitory nature of language ever truly convey them?

Anyway! In a racial/sexual politics of meat kind of twist, I very clearly remember that my grandmother’s other go-to “it’s hot” phrase was “I’m sweatin’ like a stuck pig!” Of course.

Do pigs even sweat?

2) On an unrelated note, while I was sweating my guts out and hoping to leach out whatever infection has taken over my body, my sweetheart was somewhere in California simultaneously needing a haircut and visiting the world’s largest tree, which looks, if you ask me, suspiciously small.

Look at that hippie!

Per this discussion, it seems appropriate for me to call him my “boyfriend” in the context of mentioning his cuteness, doesn’t it?

Per nothing in particular, last week Brittany got me drunk at the Planned Parenthood Mid-Hudson Valley 75th Anniversary Gala (it was a great night! I wore the heels she likes! Feet still hurt!). I went home and woozily Facebooked, and I can’t really explain what I said on a girlfriend’s page to provoke this response, but it made me laugh so hard the next day I cried:

Oy Lagusta. I am making sure that I get you drunk next time I am up New Paltz way. Goodness. Can’t say that I ever remember examining Jacob’s waist, but I’ll take your word for it that it is perfection itself.

And I love the lost in translation “noodle is keeping running into me.” Hope this morning isn’t bashing you over the head too terribly…

In my defense, Noodle is my little fluffy white cat, and she can bump into one in a most persistent (and, if drunk, painful) way.

3) In other why-am-I-sharing-this-with-the-internet news, apparently I have Lyme Disease, it’s awesome. If you love being exhausted all the time, that is. Are you friends with any conspiracy theorists? Take my advice and don’t ever talk to them about Lyme Disease. I didn’t know it was a magnet for conspiracy theories until this week, and listening to all the grandiose ideas about it people have foisted on me recently has made me slightly insane. I’m kicking it via the allopathic route mixed with the naturopathic: antibiotics + probiotics. I’m opening up the antibiotics and mixing them with soy yogurt, because the pills are too giant to swallow. Add kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, mix, repeat. Gurgle gurgle gurgle.

I actually think the whole thing is just a payback for telling the internet I never get tired. I’ve slept more in the past week than I have in years.

In other karmic news, immediately after I basically said people with bluetoofs should get cancer, I was pretty much forced to buy a Bluetooth. In my defense, I swear to you, universe, I will never wear it out in public. I can’t even wear it in front of Veronica at the kitchen. It’s that dorky. And also, I appear to have lost it. It’s too small!

4) Despite these obstacles, I have transitioned the Marie/Amy into something those sweet lovely Watson Twins might wear in a Jenny Lewis video—half up nice and high, half down. (PS: The Watsons have a blog! Go read it! Go hear their shivery-amazing voices live!)

It’s very hard to convey hair height in a self-taken photo, have you ever noticed that?

(Man oh man, how many links to my own blog can I put in one post? Hello navel! Why yes, I do like to gaze at you! I was restraining myself not to bring up the pill-swallowing debacle again!)

If you ever see a yellow spoonula (yeah, I said it) like that little lady up there, buy like 20. It will be your kitchen BFF forever. Yellow spoonulas of the world unite!

Black garlic—a fermented food I’d never heard of! I’m planning on buying some then trying to make it myself. I’m sure it’s bursting with multi-layered savory flavors. Woooo-umami!

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Gays! Wanna get married, against my advice and that of other commenters on this very blog? Go to Connecticut to do it all legal and shit, and have your ceremony at Bloodroot! I just made this page for them advertising the beautiful wedding you could have at the 32-year-old restaurant, complete with a “licensed lesbian Justice of the Peace.” A licensed lesbian! It’s not every day that you see such a thing.

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Jay Blotcher’s piece on the perfectly strange couple who run Jolly’s Good Grub in Saugerstock (or whatever that place between Woodstock and Saugerties is) in the new Edible Hudson Valley (that link is just to the table of contents, the article isn’t online) was just so Hudson Valley awesome. They are a couple married as a man and a woman, but who now live as two women. It all seems very complicated and post-revolutionary and I-reject-my-birth-certificate-y and it just warms my heart.

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Snapping asparagus spears: Just one more thing your mama lied about (or, in my case: had no idea about in the first place). Harold McGee debunks the myth that it’s the right way to treat everyone’s favorite phallic vegetable (sorry, salisfy).

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I’ve never heard of this band Cornelius, but Jacob just informed me that he saw one of their shows in Japan and it blew his mind so intensely that he pretty much died, and that the graphics show thingie thing behind the band was off the hook too, and that they have a girl drummer (my special weakness), so I’ve been YouTubing them and sort of dying a little myself. Time to go to Japan again perhaps! They are a wee touch too proggy/math rocky for me to totally die, but good to watch while chopping asparagus, for sure. They remind me a touch of my sweet sweet sweet loves The Faint, especially the amazing lightshow.

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Peeps be blogging about their love for the lusciousness!

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Sorry babymamas, but oh boy, this sums up what I so often feel about The Pregnants. The two coolass girls who make up Garfunkel and Oates, Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci, are my new go-to YouTube faves. One part Flight of the Conchords, 1/2 part Riot Grrl and eighty thousand parts cute as shit = YUMS.

Oh, speaking of The Pregnants, my friend Liz, who is not a Smug Pregnant at all, is about to have a baby any second. What’s up with that baby, Liz? Pop it on out and let me bring you some post-preggo whisky!

And!! Late-breaking news! I JUST found out that one of my very closest girlfriends is pregnant, and if there is anyone who would appreciate the above clip without being offended by it, it’s her. I totally cried in happiness for her when she told me she was poppin’ out kid #2. Feministy pregnancy issues are her life’s work, so it’s more than awesome for her to be pregnant again. When I called her up (two seconds after getting a long email that ended all stupid-casual with the throwaway closer “Oh, did I mention that I’m pregnant again?”), we had a great conversation about a Facebook “discussion” she is having because someone posted an abortion “joke” (it involved calling aborted fetuses “children”) that wasn’t funny and she responded.

One of the points she made in the argument was “Aborted fetuses are not children. They are medical waste. Or donatable tissue samples. Ask anyone who works at any abortion clinic. We know the facts.” Her telling it like it is made me love her harder than I ever have before, though when I declared my intention (via a Facebook status update, of course) to get t-shirts made up that said “aborted fetuses are medical waste” she very wisely pointed out that “I think out of context it might get misinterpreted. Like, abortion is wasteful—which it’s not. It’s a great way to conserve resources.”

God damn, I fucking love my friends.

]]> http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/monday-miscellany-wet-like-a-cherryfrom-a-bloodbath-of-birth/feed/ 2 lagusta DSCF6092 http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/in-which-we-change-and-grow-and-all-that-shit/ http://lagusta.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/in-which-we-change-and-grow-and-all-that-shit/#comments Wed, 06 May 2009 04:08:25 +0000 lagusta http://lagusta.wordpress.com/?p=2276 ]]>

Hilariously and tragically, I had this post written before the one below. Ah, instant karma. Or, “isn’t it ironic.” Or something that’s been in a popular song, I’m sure.

I present to you: two stories of calming the fuck down and allowing the universe to make us better.

Or something like that.

ONE

Two years ago, my tour-managin’ sweetheart Jacob opened a case containing a pedal board* to find that one pedal was missing. He had just flown from somewhere to somewhere else, and since he didn’t notice that the pedal was missing at the show, and since the case had one of those TSA fliers inside saying that the Transportation Security Administration had rifled through it and read whatever diaries were inside or whatever, he figured an underpaid guitar shredder TSA drone had pocketed the pedal. Annoying, but life goes on.

Two weeks ago, one of the stagehands handed Jacob a package that had been thrown up on stage. He unwrapped it to find the pedal and a note:

[Pause for "awww."]

My god, my toes just curl with pleasure at the whole thing. Do you know what this story means? Someone in this wretched old world got better. Someone went to a show and got drunk and stole a pedal, but two years later decided they didn’t want to be a pedal stealing kind of person, so they made it all better. Wow. Wow! We change and grow. How wonderful.

Thinking about this story, I figured: if drunks can be all good and shit, so can I.

TWO

On the welcome sheet I give to my new clients, I have all kinds of information about the service, including this little gem:

Included with each delivery is a menu sheet that lists how to heat the meals, ingredients, and tidbits we’re excited about. The menu sheet does not list microwave cooking instructions, because although we know it is sometimes necessary to use a microwave, we aren’t crazy about the idea of gamma rays exciting our organic molecules. If you do need to use a microwave, remember to add water if the dish looks dry, and to stir to ensure that it heats evenly. (Actually, those are good tips to remember when heating on the stovetop, too.)

“Gamma rays exciting our organic molecules”! I liked it. Six years ago I did 2 seconds of internet research before determining that I was accurately representing the science behind microwaves, and the line has been there since.

One of my clients recently emailed me about it. Let me paraphrase the conversation:

Client: Yo, you sound mad ridic with that microwaves “gamma rays exciting molecules” shit. Thing is, microwaves aren’t dangerous. [Insert fancy scientific talk, charts, links and graphs here which I can provide to any interested parties.] You talk all this fancy talk about nutrients and shizz, but when you don’t know your eighth grade science, it’s hard to take you seriously. Like, me and my husband, we’re like, super cautious about stuff to the point where we don’t even own cell phones even though my husband rides his bike everywhere and could get hit by a car at any minute and vitally need a cell phone, but better safe than sorry, you know? But we use microwaves, because: teh convenience. So, um, just FYI, we excite your organic molecules all over the place, and it’s always been fine. ‘Cause “excite” isn’t what it does.**

Me: WTF yo. Better safe than sorry, you know? Here’s my thing: microwaves don’t make your food good. Done. Argument over. I do feel deep in my bones (which is where all scientific theories are best tested, right?) that I want to stay away from microwaves, but also: I just can’t believe that luscious food can be microwaved food. [I didn't say any of this to my client. I just thanked her for the info and moved right along. I am a stone cold professional, yo.] And? I always use my hands-free device when using my cell phone, so I’m, like, totes ahead of the game, no?

Client: Actually:

You’d think that a hands-free setup would protect you from a cell-phone’s microwaves — at least I thought so until I read the Wikipedia entry on possible cell phone hazards.  It’s at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_radiation_and_health and has a lot of very good information.  It seems that although wireless headsets (i.e. Bluetooth [editor's note: YOU MEAN BLUETOOTH DOUCHERS AREN'T GETTING CANCER AND DYING? DANG]) do indeed protect you, ironically some evidence suggests that wired hands-free setups do not.  Apparently the wires act as an antenna.  The electromagnetic wave travels up the outside surface of the wire, where it’s brought directly to your head!

Fortunately, it seems that you can prevent this by putting a magnetic ring called a ferrite bead around the wire.  I know this sounds bogus, but it’s quite legit — ferrite beads are commonly used in electronics for just this purpose: to prevent electromagnetic waves from propagating along the outside surfaces of wires, which causes electronic interference.  I’m looking at one right now — it’s built into the AC power supply wire for my laptop, for electronic noise suppression.  Here’s an article about using them with cell phones.

I hope these references are interesting and/or useful.

Hmm.

For some reason when my clients email me things I’m sort of predisposed to resist whatever it is they are telling me. Partially this is because sometimes it’s things like “So I read this article in Teen People about olive oil and how it will kill you and just FYI I can never eat olive oil again. Hope that won’t be a problem.”*** But probably it’s just because a client email is usually some sort of work for me to do, and like everyone else, I don’t want to do any more work than I’m already doing.

But! Instead of resisting the info as yet another set of things I had to do (change the welcome sheet, buy a ferrite bead, worry about getting cancer, be annoyed about not being able to be smug about not using microwaves and always using my hands-free thingie) and getting grumpy because there are twenty thousand things I want to do before I do the research to revise my feelings on microwaves, I just allowed the good vibes my client was trying to pass along pass into my body like, uh, an electromagnetic wave.

Knowledge is power, let’s make it better, whatever whatever. I’ll do it. I’ll learn and grow. I’ll take people’s good intentions to heart, and will listen to and learn from them. I won’t get a hideous microwave, mos def not, but I might not sneer the next time someone mentions using one. That’s progress, right?

Incrementally, with two steps backward and one step forward, I’m becoming a better person, dammit.

(Tangentially, I am also becoming someone who wears ribbon bows in her hair. Tune in tomorrow for the full report!)

**A pedal board is an, um, board on which guitar effects pedals are affixed. At least, that’s how I understand it. It usually stands near the guitarist at the front of the stage so they can step on any pedal at any time.

**Why am I slandering my client as a crazy talker? She is actually very smart and a nice person too. She is crazy to the millionth power as well, but all my clients are. And yes, I know this is probably a reflection of myself, and I’m cool with it.

***In fairness, I don’t really get emails like this anymore, because most of my clients are good-crazy these days instead of crazy-crazy, like they used to be. I don’t know why or how the balance shifted, but it did, and it’s great.

Some quick notes:

If you’re heading to the Go Green Expo in NYC this weekend, be sure to stop by Sarah & Megan’s Treeo Design booth, where they will be repping the new bonbons as well as their amazing recycled paper wrapping papers, boxes, and biodegradable ribbon.

Also: Than pointed out to me that Karen O (SWOON!!) wore blue stockings on Letterman last night—blue stockings are taking over!

Orlande, will you be mad if I post a link to your Bluestocking Bonbons awesomeness here? ‘Cause it SO made my day. I’m not sure if people can see it if they aren’t Facebookerz, but let’s see.

And can you believe I got another email from this lady? Just one snippet:

This is an opportunity  for you to have your product placed in the hands of some of
the most  influential celebrity mothers and their  children.!
We are nearing our deadline for  this opportunity so please reply  at your earliest convenience if this is  of interest!
Celebrity mothers remain a hot  media topic, so we  will be creating specialty
gift boxes for some of  Hollywood’s most talked about moms. Join us in acknowledging these
“working  mothers” [WTF WITH THE QUOTES?] with gifts for both them and their kids.

We will use our  direct access to top talent and our reputation for pampering the world’s  biggest trendsetters
to introduce the most fabulous of products to these  stars (and their families)
Celebrity  product placement is a  tried and true method of differentiating your product from  the
masses….
Please note that we have selected  celebrity moms who have children under the age of one;
your gift should  either be appropriate for a child this age or for a mother of any  age.

Shipping deadline:  April 27, 2009
(All products will  be packaged and delivered the week of May 4th, just in time for Mother’s Day  on May 10th)
Quantity:  30 (includes 5 Press  Samples)
Inclusion Fee: $1,500

!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy fuck, this turns my stomach.

Back to work!

Since this is shaping up to be a ridiculously dorky week in which I talk about nothing interesting or political, can I just share this absolutely useless little nugget with you?

If you go to an M. Ward show and hear a PSA before the show about how if you take flash camera pictures your camera will be taken away, you will be listening to the dulcet tones of ME!

Continuing the series of useless stupidity: tomorrow I’ll post pictures of my new jeans! They are RIDICULOUSLY awesome—and organic cotton!!

I completely forgot to point out that the aforementioned video in which I

1) Wear makeup for the second time in my life

2) Wear horrifyingly uncomfortable heels for too many hours to count

3) Spend the day surrounded by slightly terrifying LA types who do their best to live up to their stereotypes (leggings and Uggs, leggings and Uggs)

4) Have a life-changing epiphany about my need to wear drop waist dresses

all in the service of making a two-second cameo in a friend’s band’s music video is now online!

You can see me looking catty at all the 1920s hos at around 1:58, and Jacob (also wrangled into service as an extra though, as the band manager, he was technically the boss of the whole operation) shortly thereafter.

My friend Than (drummer) STILL has that ridiculous mustache, I can’t believe it.*

Oh what the hell, I’ll just embed it here too:

*Speaking of Than, this blog post of his reminds me all over again why he (skirt-chasing drum-obsessed valley boy) and I (quasi-lesbian ultra-political intellectual) are BFFs—a shared love of sloppy Tex-Mex (or, in this case, New Mexico Mex)!

So you go to visit.

It is cold, but not too cold. You take the bus to Port Authority then a cab to the studio and find your sweetheart and it is all New Yorky and that weird thing where you’re taking the elevator up with some friends then some famous people get on, and you don’t know who they are, but you know they are famous because they are sort of shinier than you—they radiate self-confidence, they are all externals. Then the elevator lets you out and you go sit in the mostly empty theater and watch the rehearsal and you have that funny feeling: my friends are kinda famous. And it’s all weird and odd and nice, and you’re not supposed to be talking about it. It isn’t done, but who cares. You watch them do their thing once and twice and three times and four times, and you’re still not tired of the song.

You chat with the other people you know, and you look around at the whole set and the showbiz thing, and it’s a pleasant way to spend a Tuesday afternoon, for sure. It’s not exactly your thing—a part of you is thinking about downtown, and the gelatos you could be eating, Chelsea gallery shows you could be seeing, Chinatown browsing you could be doing. But you’re in Midtown and it’s just fine. You hop on and off the tour bus and get caught up on emails, then it’s time for the taping and you go and watch it in the sound engineer’s booth, where you have to be totally quiet. There are all these screens and you can see what all of the camera people are doing, and you smile and watch everyone working while you’re on your day off, just hanging out in Midtown, watching.

Then it’s all over, and you all go different ways—you tag along to an interview at your favorite radio station where you watch the screens and the microphones and hushed quiet that is radio. It’s lovely, and everyone is nice, and you think about how things that are exciting to you are other people’s day jobs, and vice-versa. It’s nice to watch other people’s day jobs every now and then.

Then discussion about dinner options, and you settle on a great little Mexican place, where you get nopales tacos and grapefruit margaritas and jalapeno margaritas and another few friends join you, and your face gets all red because—not (just) the margaritas, really—you’re surrounded by such sweet and fascinating people and you feel lucky and alive and like it’s all OK. We’re all artists just doing our things. You realize that you haven’t been anywhere except your own little inside worlds for about a month, and you suddenly want to ask a million questions and learn everything about everyone. There’s no snow on the ground and there are margaritas and nopales tacos and everyone is wearing such lovely jeans.

You chat and smile and even when you want to insert an outré political opinion it’s all good—people know you by now, and don’t take offense.

Then a bar, where you meet up with more friends and just sip water. It’s of course loud, but you see all kinds of people and chat, and then the show everyone taped earlier is on, and they turn down the music and turn up the TV and everyone is watching themselves and smiling and clapping at the end. All the musicians are pretending it’s no big deal, but you can tell by their faces—even the ones who’ve done it before, even the ones who’ve done it lots before—that it’s really awesome. Their phones are ringing and it’s their parents, and you smile because it’s just cute, no matter how cynical you are.

Suddenly you are so tired, and you two say your goodbyes and take a cab back to midtown, to the bus, to bed. A little email on the bus, more chatter, and you fold yourselves into the small bunk and whisper in the dark for a while, then the bus starts moving and you drift off to sleep.

When you wake up it’s Somerville and it’s sunny and there is an amazing thrift shop two blocks away.

You stumble out of bed, remember not to put toilet paper in the toilet, remember to brush your teeth with water from a water bottle, and vow to wash your face at the venue.

You notice there is a mirror on the ceiling of the front lounge.

Most people are still asleep, and it feels good for once to be the early riser (relatively speaking). Your sweetheart is of course up—on the phone, on IM, emailing, having meetings, more phone calls, counting out per diems and dinner buyouts, getting annoyed at people, putting other people at ease, more phone calls, more IMs and text messages and endless emails, and he has that harried tightness that worries you. It is the third day of the tour, and you know things will calm down, but when his tiny little portable printer refuses to print out setlists, you can see him taking deep breaths and trying to pretend it’s not the final straw. The final straw is always and never coming, and that’s just how it is—things keep rolling along. Phone interviews are set up and conducted, in-person interviews are set up and conducted, it just rolls on and on.

You two sneak out for a quick taco lunch, and things are relatively calm for half an hour. You talk about the cats and gossip a little and he lets off a little steam and you can tell he’s going to be fine—it’s the third day of the tour, it will calm down soon.

With nothing to do except computer work you’d rather put off, you spend two hours in the amazing thrift shop and score some amazing 1960s dresses, along with a gorgeous 1920s-esque drop waist little number that fulfills your vow to dress like a flapper. You resist the urge to change your clothes on the spot.

It starts to snow—but pretty, soft snow, not icy snow. Everyone is soundchecking and consulting with everyone else on final show preparations. You read and wander around the venue, hating this dead time when everyone else is working. It’s always so odd to be on vacation when everyone else is working. You used to sell merch when you would visit, and you loved selling merch—such a small, stress-free job. Count in, count out. Chat, make change, fold shirts, done. You were finished working when everyone else was finished working. It makes you nervous to relax when other people are working. But you can’t sell merch these days—the tours are bigger and more professional, and there are lots of boxes and forms to fill out and it’s more of a production than it used to be. Oxfam is tabling on this tour, and you think, as you do every time you visit, that if you were better you would set up a little table for some animal rights group or something—but then: hauling literature and all that around? You’re on vacation.

With no merch to sell, you get to watch the show. You find a perfect little box seat off to the side, apart from the audience but right above the stage. You take a glass of Maker’s Mark up to your little nook and settle in, and it’s a perfect show—high energy and just the right intensity, slow songs interspersed with fast songs, solo songs interspersed with full band songs. A guy yells out a song he wants to hear and it happens to be next on the setlist—that kind of show.

Afterward is that weird time for you, when everyone is on a big giant show high and is chatting backstage, and you go and chat for a while, then it starts to get old. This always happens to you. After about 24 hours, you find you need more—being on tour is all about maintaining a steady stream of pleasant chitchat, and after you’ve told everyone what a great show it was and asked the sound engineer about her delay philosophy and impressed her with your deep fake knowledge of arcane sound engineery terminology (that is: you know the terms, but not quite what they mean), that’s about all you’ve got.

You lean against a wall, take a long sip of whisky, and start a conversation with whoever happens to be nearby about the economic stimulus package.

Why not?

A good, lively, hotheaded discussion follows, and it’s not just the whisky. You have conquered the chitchat lion, forced it to do your bidding: forging deep connections. Hurdle passed. Now you can talk deeply about politics and chocolate and books and everything for the rest of the trip.

Speaking of books—this little tour bus rumbling through the East Coast just might be the last place in America where people are reading and talking about books. Literary fiction, beat-up vintage copies of Hemingway and Faulkner—your heart beats faster to see books and The New York Times and The New Yorker mingling with the typical tour bus detritus of music rags and alt-weeklies from last night’s town with features on the band. Quietly, knowing how dorky they are compared with most touring musicians, there is a life of the mind on this bus. One night everyone watches an old BBC Lennon documentary, then the back lounge is filled with people playing some kind of music trivia game. No secret makeout sessions with disposable girls, no seas of empty beer bottles clogging the thin thoroughfare to the bathroom. The bandleader is the first to bed and the first awake.

The other great secret of touring is that this bus, like so many other indie rock tour buses constantly criscrossing the country, is full of small business owners running their mini-empires—the muted clattering of a dozen MacBooks is how most days begin and end. Everyone on this tour is a real musician with multiple concurrent projects and/or a professional crew member. Being a real musician and music-industry professional means constantly booking shows, planning upcoming tours and securing one-off gigs to fill in time between tours. The drummer owns a drum shop with a friend back in Portland, four people on tour are sound engineers with studios and mixing projects always in progress. You are all small business owners, and you are right at home, pulling out your old PowerBook, jumping onto the bus wireless network and running a mini-empire of your own.

The next day is back to New York, up to Harlem, and you spend the day wandering around and taking photos.

The venue is beautiful and historic and everyone is on a secret high because they get to play there. Big city days, with their extra interviews and promo appointments, are always crazy for your sweetheart, and because its your last day together for two weeks, you take a few hours and just follow him around, shadowing him like he shadows you when he’s home and you’re working.

You watch a little bit of the show, then it’s time to go. It’s all over.

A subway back to Port Authority and you sneak onto the last bus of the night, next to the drunk kids and the theatergoers. You watch the secnery change from skyscrapers to trees, from concrete to snow. Your car is still in the lot where you left it, and when you get home it’s so quiet. Mewling cats hungry for dinner and no warm body to share the bed with.

Two weeks.