Harvard

On Repeat: The Rosebuds - Woods

For a band opening for Bon Iver this summer, The Rosebuds sure pack a whallop. A husband and wife duo turned divorcees on their 5th studio release, lead single "Woods" contains the freewheeling energy of another North Carolina group and personal favorite, The Love Language. In fact, to the untrained ear, Ivan Howard's wail sounds uncannily like Stu McLamb's, and Missy Thangs could just as easily be the one pounding on the toy piano in place of Kelly Crisp. Maybe that's why I like them so much. So much is made these days of how "lo-fi" bands can get their sound, whether by scuzzing out the guitar or burying the vocals deep into the mix, but if the emotion isn't there to round things out, things sound hollow and forgettable. I can't seem to get into bands like No Age or Times New Viking for this reason. The Rosebuds are smart enough to strike a balance.

Lyrically, "Woods" isn't as bright and shiny as it sounds, but I guess that's to be expected from a song that rises amidst a divorce. Several lines sound like insults hurled down the stairs or across a room, Howard exclaiming "you can't burn what's already on fire" one moment, and realizing "there's nowhere to hide" the next. In these tiny glimpses, the song magnifies the steady unraveling of a relationship as astutely as tour-mate Bon Iver himself did on the devastating "Skinny Love", albeit in a more audacious package.
 

Great Film Review: Primer

Primer, the 2004 debut of writer/director/actor/everyman Shane Carruth was made for $7,000 in Dallas, TX. The staff of the film was limited to five people, with family members, friends and random passerbys filling out the credits. It went on to win the 2004 Alfred P Sloan prize at Sundance, an award that is given to the best film that focuses on science or technology. Following this buzz, it went on to accrue a modest box office take of 424,000 before being released onto DVD and becoming the cult classic it is now. I'm not sure what it is about sci-fi/time travel films, but they tend to join the cult canon at an remarkable rate (see Donnie Darko, Moon), regardless of meager box office sales. I believe that the reason for this goes against popular thought, namely, that audiences like to be challenged by films and actually enjoy piecing together a plot themselves. In most film studios, the risk of losing an audience is too big to bear, and any remotely confusing scenes are abruptly followed by the protagonist cleverly explaining the situation to another character for our benefit. For a film like Primer, this hand-holding is thrown out the window, and it is all the better for it.

What makes Primer so thrilling is its sheer audacity to unabashedly use scientific jargon and equations, without bothering to slow down or explain themselves. Even as a scientist myself, most of the terminology was way over my head, but the fact that I could recognize anything at all gave the film an authenticity and a voyeuristic quality that made the "budget" production value seem irrelevant. This complete disregard for the audience does not begin and end with scientific jargon. There are scenes where things happen and it is not apparent until later (if at all) what is happening and its significance. There is a voiceover narration from the beginning, but it is just as ambiguous as the characters themselves. If I am making the film sound like an obscure art-house film that means whatever-you-think-it-means-man, please don't be scared away. Everything you need to know plotwise, is there in the film. In fact, ambitious people have even made Primer timelines to better answer the WHEN questions. And with the film clocking in at a brisk 77 minutes, you can easily queue it up again once its finishes and be amazed with how much more sense it makes (though admittedly, not completely). Scientist or not, sci-fi fan or not, give Primer a chance. You'll be a lot of things, but disappointed won't be one of them.

Old Song Review: Robbie Basho - Night Way

Robbie Basho is widely regarded as a guitar pioneer. As an orphan in Baltimore, he taught himself acoustic guitar and fell in love with the steel string guitar, being particularly enchanted with the "fire" it conveyed that nylon strings could not. As an artist, he was massively influenced by Asian art and philosophy and counted the  great Ravi Shankar as an influence and a friend. He often played a twelve string guitar with various open tunings in an attempt to capture features of the Indian music he cherished. With this preface, I anticipated his remarkable complexity and creativity. What I did not expect was his incredible voice.

"Night Way", the seventh song on his absolutely essential Visions of the Country LP from 1978, starts much in the way you would expect from a guitar virtuoso. They are some sitar-like twangs and pickings, squiggling here and there, gradually gaining in momentum and focus as the song approached a full gallop. After 90 seconds or so, a new sound enters, fluttering above the rest. It's Basho himself, singing in one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard.

His voice is riveting and pure, and within it I can hear the hundreds of artists that have sprouted from it. From the trembling soul of Antony and the Johnsons, to the more experimental (but no less captivating) David Thomas Broughton, I was flabbergasted by what I was hearing. An immense talent I had never heard of, was changing the way I looked at some of my favorite artists today. Much like seeing the film Citizen Kane upends how you view everything that came after it, Basho's art stands tall decades ago, its shadow continuing to stretch ahead in time.

"Night Way"


"Blue Crystal Fire"

EDU: Dr. Pepper Ribs

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Chipotle Pulled Pork I made a few weeks ago, I decided to hit up the Homesick Texan blog again when I found myself with 4 pounds of spareribs and no grill to do them right. Surely there must be SOME way I can make enjoyable ribs without smoking and barbecuing them for 36 hours. As it turned out, Ms. Texan had just the thing - something called "Dr. Pepper Ribs". I'm not a big fan of Dr. Pepper (tastes like fancy Cherry Coke), but this blogger raved about its BBQ power, so who was I to turn up my nose. Amazingly, the kit and kaboodle only took 3 hours and I was able to do it in the oven. The oven part was a bit of a mixed blessing, as it was already hot enough in my apartment, but for convenience, you can't beat it.

For this recipe, I made both a rub and a BBQ sauce/glaze, and here's what you'll need for both.

For the rub

1/4 cup of salt
1/4 cup of black pepper
1/4 cup of brown sugar
4 teaspoons of mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne
2 teaspoons of chipotle powder
1/2 teaspoon of allspice

I had to go and buy mustard powder, but all the rest I had kicking around from my last BBQ experiment, so it was a pretty painless process. I was a bit taken aback by all the salt and pepper, but tried not to overthink things.

Mix all this together and pat into the meat. Then wrap it in Saran wrap and place it in the fridge for at least 4 hours. I left mine overnight and didn't notice any problems. Supposedly salt starts to "cure" meat after 6 hours, which will give it a ham/bacon flavor, but mine seemed just fine. Not that I would have minded some bacon notes.

Here's the bouncing bundle of meat fresh out of the fridge.

 Not terribly exciting/appetizing at this juncture, I'll concede, but just you wait. After adding 1/4 cup of Dr. Pepper to the pan and covering it with tinfoil, I slid this in the oven at 300 degrees for 90 minutes, meat side up.

While this cooked, I started on the glaze. Here's what you'll need.


2 cups of Dr Pepper
1 cup of ketchup
1/2 cup of mustard
1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons of molasses
2-4 teaspoons of chipotle powder

Those Chipotle flakes I bought a couple months ago have seen a lot of action lately, and I can't get enough of their smokey, spicy flavor. As such, I added 4 heaping teaspoons to the sauce. In a large saucepan, I brought the ingredients to a simmer and left it to reduce into a thick sauce for 30 minutes. The recipe used the adjective "syrupy" but mine just looked like a barbecue sauce. It tasted good, so I didn't sweat it.

After 90 minutes, take out the ribs and remove the foil. Spread the sauce on both sides and cook, uncovered for another 30 minutes, meat side up (still). Repeat this process one more time, leaving some sauce for the final step. The glaze cooked right into the ribs and smelled fantastic.

After the 2nd time, glaze both sides a final time, and place each side under the broiler for ~5 minutes to give them a good char and crunch.  When they popped out, they looked pretty glorious and my apartment smelled like some Mississippi BBQ Shack.

All that remained was the serving and enjoyment. Make sure to have plenty of napkins and floss nearby. You may also want a little more BBQ sauce to throw on top to keep things moist, but they were quite delicious on their own. What BBQ item should I tackle next? I'm thinking brisket. I'll keep you posted.

Long (as hell) Trail

Author's Note: Before you tell me to HTFU or STFU or any other precious acronym, let me first say that I hiked 54 miles in thong sandals after the boots I borrowed gave me hellacious blisters and made my big toenails look like those of a mummified corpse with nary a complaint.

Behold some unfiltered and uncensored thoughts about hiking:

Hiking is fucking terrible. I'm sure there are stand-up bits from comedians about how ridiculous it is and why white people need to stop kidding themselves playing Russian roulette with Lyme disease or West Nile virus or a bear mauling and stay in the 21st century where we belong. Whatever possessed otherwise sane and rational human beings to make their life as miserable as possible for an extended period of time should have evaporated around the time of the Oregon Trail, but day after day people stuff an unnecessary amount of items into an unnecessarily large backpack, and proudly march into the wild. The glow of adrenaline lasts maybe 15 minutes, before the harsh reality of hiking sets in: it is fucking terrible.

To clarify, day hikes and camping are wonderful-hell, even a jaunt into the woods can be therapeutic. When you are carrying more than a tent, food and beer, the fun quotient takes a nosedive. Carrying a full hiking backpack is a bit like carrying a heavily sedated 2nd grader on your back. You futilely loosen and tighten straps to alleviate painful jabs into your back and shoulders. You carry 4 pounds of water that scarcely seems worth it. Mosquitoes and deerflies dive bomb you from all angles and you have no recourse but to swing languidly at them. They have locked on a target and will follow you for miles until you stop for water or die. You have to physically restrain yourself from checking your watch every two minutes and the map every thirty seconds.

You may be able to distract yourself by the scenery, but beyond the ninety seconds a day you are above the treeline, the rest of the sights range from heaping piles of moose poop and large piles of mud. It occurs to you at some point that hiking is probably an incredible workout (my heart rate held steady around 180bpm from 8-4 every day), but who works out for eight hours a day? It is at this point when it dawns on you that hiking is no longer an act of leisure and has become your job. You wake up at daybreak on a wooden floor within a mesh cocoon to keep out the bugs, which still have the audacity to stab their tiny proboscises into anything in contact with the fabric. You eat a piece of jerky for breakfast and wash it down with a bag of fruit snacks and a granola bar. Everything tastes terrible. You want salt and fat and grease and sugar. Not protein and Xanthan gum, 200 calories you will burn off before your first water break. You no longer derive pleasure in things you used to enjoy and sympathize with that Zoloft rock. Your shoulders are sore and you have a crick in your back that you can't crack out. When you finally make it to a shelter, you roll out a sleeping bag, eat a bag of tuna fish and a handful of peanuts and go to straight to bed for 12 hours. You smell terrible and other people somehow smell worse. Sometimes it is so bad it wakes you up.

After a few days, the callouses start and you think you might survive. When you cross roads, you feel a primal urge to flag down/hijack passing cars and check into a hotel. Somehow water has become all you can be bothered to care about, but you still play "stream roulette", always looking for a cleaner, nicer one until you realize you are out of water, 3 hours from the nearest shelter and haven't seen so much as a juicy puddle in hours. SS and I did this twice. You find yourself sharing food for the selfish aim of shedding a few extra ounces from your backpack and suddenly feel a camaraderie with those Tour de France ninnies who insist on biking without their valve caps.

Hiking brings out the best and worst in a person. If you do it long enough, you will be reduced into survival instincts that are not glamorous but do what they are supposed to do: keep you alive. Alive so you can return to the real world and warn others. And also to call "bullshit" whenever anyone says how much they love hiking.                    

Long Trail

Review: Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver

To be perfectly honest, I didn't have high hopes for Mr. Vernon's sophomore album. I adored For Emma, Forever Ago when it came out of nowhere nearly three years ago, but its circumstances seemed a little too trite to be much more than lightning in a bottle for some schlubby guy. I mean, if breaking up with a steady girlfriend, contracting mono and moving to a secluded Wisconsin cabin in the dead of winter isn't enough to stir up somber feelings in a man, I don't know what is. It's the hipster perfect storm. At this point, everything he does is preceded by his 'legend', including this review. Huge industry names jumped on his bandwagon in recent months, but apart from sampling his back catalog, I didn't hear anything that convinced me he could avert a precipitous fall from grace.

Ladies and Gentlemen, might I present Exhibit 546983 in the case of Hipster Elite Backlash vs. Shut Your Goddamn Mouth For Two Seconds. Bon Iver, Bon Iver (yes that's the title), is fantastic. It is tender and gorgeous in the same way For Emma was, but considerably more adventurous, as Vernon has an entire band at his disposal this time around. The brilliant Colin Stetson lends his brusque saxophone, Sean Carey (fresh off his own album) handles the drums gracefully, making even the most jarring sounds feel natural. The most interesting wrinkle on Bon Iver, Bon Iver is what Vernon has done with his lyrics. Even with befuddling titles like Flume and Re:stacks on For Emma, the subject matter and lyrics themselves were clear and the songs themselves drew their power from it (See: skinny love). On this album, 6 of the 10 songs are geographical locales (though Wash. is a tossup), and the lyrics aren't any more helpful, leaving two possible conclusions. Either he's tired of people singing along with every song and wants to throw the legion of teens a curveball (doubtful), or he's decided to make art fit the sound rather than vice versa. That's not to say he's stringing along non sequitors, but 'ramble in the roots, had the marvel, moved the proof be kneeled fine’s/glowing storing up the clues, it had its sullen blue bruised through by showing' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And these aren't translations by some tone deaf fan, these are Vernon's own lyrics he shared on his website. 


So why is this album such a colossal triumph? Because despite the misdirection and new hats on display, this album shares the warm core of its predecessor. Because for every nonsensical line, there's a nugget that stops you in your tracks and feels like an epiphany. 'Holocene' is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The first verse is a cypher, but from within this fog you hear Justin sing '...and at once I knew I was not magnificent' and the chills are unavoidable. Throughout this album, fleeting lines like this will snag your attention, before the song submerges into shadows again, but as you listen again and again, you find yourself speaking Vernon's language, and every line gains the gravitas of the first ones that caught your ear. It is intoxicating in the purest sense and now I sing along to every 'sound', whether I know the words or not.   

EDU: Texas Pulled Pork with Chipotle Barbecue Sauce

Lately, I've been trying to simplify things in the kitchen. Most people believe that you can get away with one three knives (Chef's, paring, bread), and I've been trying to extrapolate this even further, relying on my cast-iron Dutch oven and pan to do most of the grunt work, instead of trotting out pot after pot. Utensils are another area where gadgetry can make thing more complicated than they need to be. My parents have a garlic 'finger-trap' that peels the garlic and then another yo-yo-esque contraption to grind it up. While I lust over it at times, if one truly want to improve their cooking skills, the hard way is the only way to bolster the fundamentals. This recipe would certainly be described as pulled pork the 'hard way' but the results were spectacular, and the work involved made the end result all the more satisfying.

Note: This recipe is courteous of the Homesick Texan blog that has oodles of recipes of this caliber.

Step 1: Prepare the rub

Coffee-chipotle rubIngredients:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup black pepper
1/4 cup of finely ground dark coffee
1/4 cup paprika (smoked is preferred but regular is fine)
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon chipotle powder
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
2 teaspoons cumin
2 teaspoons allspice


I had made pulled pork once before, but in a slow-cooker after covering it in Root Beer. It was really good, but I wanted a recipe that would be a bit crispier and smokier, in line with more traditional recipes. This rub wasn't time consuming, but I had to hunt around for a few of the ingredients. The coffee and chipotle powder were unique additions, and while I didn't notice the coffee in the final product, I'm sure it enhanced the smokiness of the chipotle. 


After preparing the rub, I put my 4lb bone-in Pork shoulder in a large freezer bag along with the rub, and shook it vigorously until it was thoroughly caked. There was a healthy amount of rub left over, but the recipe mentioned to simply save the rest rather than try to slather it all on. I then wrapped the shoulder in Saran wrap and put it in the fridge for 6 hours. This was around 2:30pm. The recipe called for 8 hours in the fridge, but I really couldn't push it that late, as I would be doing the final steps before work the next morning, and the old 'I was pulling pork' excuse raises its fair share of eyebrows.

I took it out around 8:30, and it was quite juicy. I unwrapped it, placed it in the Dutch oven fat-side up, and put the whole thing in the oven at 250.

While things got down to business in the oven, I started out on the homemade barbecue sauce. I had purchased a bottle of sauce from TJ's, but I decided if I was going to go through this whole process, taking a shortcut on the last step would be sacrilegious. So I set out to make the sauce. I'm glad I did.


Chipotle barbecue sauceIngredients:
1 teaspoon canola oil
1/2 half a medium onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 cups ketchup
1/4 cup yellow, ball-park style mustard
1/4 cup molasses
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
1/4 cup brewed coffee
2 canned chipotles, chopped
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup lime juice
Salt and black pepper to taste


Much like the rub, I had a lot of these ingredients, it was simply a matter of getting them all on the same team. I did have to get a few things: molasses (I usually hate molasses, but now I can see their merits), more ketchup (2 cups is a LOT of ketchup) and canned chipotles (of which I used maybe 1/4). Sauteing the onions until translucent, followed by the garlic, I added the rest of the ingredients and simmered the whole thing on low for about half an hour. 

 Color me stupid, but I was flabbergasted with how much this looked and smelled like real barbecue sauce! I suppose I had never sat down and considered what actually went into a BBQ sauce, but I would have scarcely guessed ketchup, molasses and mustard. I now feel silly for putting mustard AND BBQ sauce on a burger when I now realize I was double-dipping on the same condiment. Live and learn. After a little hand blender action, this sauce was pureed into the sauce-like consistency we know and love.

This is the point where I went all Ron Popeil and left things cooking overnight. I set my alarm, (recipe said 8hrs, I did closer to 9) and went to bed. When I woke up at 5:30, I thought I had died and gone to hog heaven. I took the crispy-looking pig out of the oven and let it sit for about 45 minute while I went back to bed and felt bad for my roommate having to smell it when he put on his morning pot of coffee. When I woke up at 6:15, the pork was waiting just as cute as can be. 

I grabbed a pair of forks, hoisted the shoulder into a bowl and got a-shredding. The bones slipped out smoothly, and the forks were more than capable tools for the job. In about five minutes, I had four pounds of glistening, crispy pork. The darker portions are actually the caramelized brown sugar and toasted coffee from the rub, NOT evidence of burning as you might think. If I had read more closely, I would have found that this was noted in the recipe. Whoops.

After stirring in the sauce, the Chipotle Pulled Pork was complete. Of course, it was also 6:30 in the morning, so I packed some into a tupperware, grabbed a bun and brought it for lunch, hoping it wasn't a complete failure. 

  
As things so happened, my fears were unfounded. It was delicious, and others agreed. The pork was moist and crispy, the sauce lightly sweet with the distinct smokiness of chipotle and a hearty kick. It really was fantastic, and I had it again that evening with Milwaukee's finest and again for lunch the next day (sans beer, of course). Give it a try, it's well worth the effort, and not really much effort now that I think of it, just patience and trust in your oven not to burn you alive in your sleep. That's it!

Portsmouth

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