It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Lovecraft’s America: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom” And “The Thing In The White House” Is A Shoggoth. Episode 1.

With HBO’s Lovecraft Country based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name offering a new episode each week, and Black Americans and protestors being shot and villainized as speakers at the Republican National Convention and pundits at Fox News call for more “law and order” (i.e. targeting Black Americans and the #BlackLivesMatter movement), it’s … Continue reading It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Lovecraft’s America: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom” And “The Thing In The White House” Is A Shoggoth. Episode 1.

Thinking About The Rona While Cooking Viltkött Bourguignonne And Talking To Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith And Luis P. Villarreal Who Are All Listening To Nina Simone Sing “Black Swan.”

Nymphs and Satyr as painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and dated 1873.  My eyes were reeling with such images lost in my forest, but having found my way out of branches and roots and the winding, gyring paths of Dr. Seuss and Quantum Mechanics, I’m back home to cut a filet of elk into stew pieces … Continue reading Thinking About The Rona While Cooking Viltkött Bourguignonne And Talking To Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith And Luis P. Villarreal Who Are All Listening To Nina Simone Sing “Black Swan.”

More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.

Last I left Love, I considered Nick Cave’s dark turnings of the lover’s call, playing off of Dante’s first sonnet of beatific and cannibalistic vision.  Yet, Dante a few sonnets on in Vita Nuova, also broods on the havoc Love causes, so one might say with Marc Antony in Shake the Spear’s Julius Caesar, “Cry … Continue reading More Terror and Terroir Of Love As We Still Ascend, As We Must Ascend With Dante Alighieri, PJ Harvey, Diotima And Her Ladder, The Supremes, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nick Cave, Jaufre Rudel and R.E.M. With A Pour Of Caol Ila And A Slice Of Smoked Eel.

Sausages And Cooking Murder.

Louis Vincent Palliere renders in bright colors the infamous Slaughter of the Suitors” by Odysseus and Telemachus, note those gorgeous capes tripping hues between orange and red. I love cooking sausages.  All sorts of sausage.  Beef, chicken, lamb and pig; andouille, bloedwurst, boudin, bratwurst, chorizo, hot dogs, kielbasa, knackwurst, linguiça, longaniza, merguez, morcilla, saucisson, soppressata,  … Continue reading Sausages And Cooking Murder.

Cooking The Bones: Pleasures Of The Table And The Grim Reaper

There’s something compelling about cooking bones.  Maybe it’s the strangeness of seeing recognizable body parts within a food culture that so successfully conceals any connection between meat and a living or dead animal.  Maybe it’s a deep memory in the brain stem of scaring off predators from their kill, gathering bones with shreds of meat, … Continue reading Cooking The Bones: Pleasures Of The Table And The Grim Reaper