miracle fruit party!

After a few straight years of celebrating my birthday with vegetarian dim sum in New York, I did something a little different this year (chiefly because I wasn’t in New York): put together a little flavor-tripping party here at my house.

I’d been wanting to try miracle fruit for a while (Wikipedia entry here, New York Times article here); at a friend’s suggestion, I bought a little box of dried miracle-fruit tablets off eBay back in August, and hauled them with me to Burning Man, although I didn’t get to use them out there. So I gathered a few friends, set out a spread of strongly flavored foods, and (after a ceremonial amuse-bouche of vanilla salt), we each let a tablet dissolve on our tongue.

The effect of miracle fruit is that sour and bitter things taste sweet—or, rather, sour and bitter tastes are dramatically muted, but sweet tastes aren’t. (“Dramatically” is relative, and I think I was less strongly affected by it than other people at the party, although still strongly enough that I was happily eating big chunks of lemon and lime.) Things that are already sweet and not much else aren’t affected—I had wondered if the line “bananas were just bananas” from the Times piece meant “bananas were only bananas” or “bananas were totally crazy,” and it was the former. But citrus, especially sour citrus, was very different and extra-delicious. (I wish we’d had some rhubarb. Next time.) Other things, like radishes, artichokes and Brussels sprouts, had their taste changed more subtly. Fava beans were almost flavorless; sour pickles tasted like mild sweet pickles. Black coffee was gentler than café au lait normally is, and had a nifty aftertaste/aroma. Tabasco, straight up, was like mild barbecue sauce. Some things tasted different after we’d had a few bites of them. The consensus favorite, I think, was balsamic vinegar, of which we drank tiny little shots—it was gentle and aromatic on the tongue, then burned going down the throat.

After about an hour, some of us noticed the effect starting to wear off, but by then we were all stuffed anyway, and retired to the living room. I could barely eat anything later on—I’d eaten a lot of acidic fruit.

sketchbook #4: Carla Speed McNeil

I have been known to call this one my favorite page in the entire sketchbook (I’ve said that about others too, but I say it about this one a lot): a brilliant use of the four-panel grid by Carla Speed McNeil, a cartoonist’s cartoonist if ever there was one.

If you don’t know McNeil’s stuff, I heartily encourage you to buy her books from her site, where you can also read the first chapters of some of them. (I usually point people toward Talisman as a good starting point.)

sketchbook #3: Fly

A very simple but very effective piece by the New York cartoonist Fly, whose real name I know but will never tell. I first met Fly when she was playing with God Is My Co-Pilot (and the… related band Zero Content) in the ’90s, and I seem to run into her every time I stop into St. Mark’s Books.

Fly’s best-circulated book is “Peops: Portraits and Stories of People“—you can see some samples of the PEOPS project here.

sketchbook #2: Roger Langridge

Roger Langridge is one of the funniest cartoonists alive. These days, he does a weekly strip at Hotel Fred, and posts updates on his other work here.

Here’s the page he drew in the sketchbook:

I think I’ve bought every comic I’ve ever seen his art in, but I have a special place in my heart for the material collected in “Zoot Suite.”

sketchbook #1: Seth

Back in 2004, I went to the MoCCA festival and bought a little sketchbook with blue lines dividing each page into four panels. I asked a bunch of the cartoonists I saw there if they could draw something in it; I’ve occasionally brought it to other conventions I’ve been to, and a lot of amazing artists have been kind enough to draw in it. It’s become one of my most treasured possessions. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post some of the wonderful things from the little square sketchbook here.

One of the first people I asked was Seth, who asked if he could draw something on the cover. I ask you: who would say no to that?

I believe Seth’s most recently published work is his illustrations for Joshua Glenn’s handsome little book “The Idler’s Glossary.”

neglected to mention

… that I had another piece in the NYT Book Review a week after the holiday roundup: reviews of books by Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Ames & Dean Haspiel, and David Heatley.

Back home in Portland now, having read In Defense of Food on the plane home (although I’m still in the middle of 2666). I regret that I can’t rush out and buy some parsnips and purslane right now.

fix it up, pick it up, set it up

It’s the slowest time of the year; I take it as a good sign that despite the general slowdown, I’m still sort of crazed with work. But I’m currently at Lisa’s mom’s place in Florida, having just barely escaped from the Ice Curtain in both the Northwest and the Northeast. The sun is shining, the frogs are jumping, the water is rippling, and I’m in no mood to do any actual work. So I’m occupying myself with pseudo-work: putting together the odd mix, assembling the lineup for Mincing Up the Morning for the next few weeks, that kind of thing. The stuff I get paid for? Maybe tonight.

I also wrote a few things for Pitchfork’s best tracks and best albums features, and I appeared on WNYC’s “Sound Check” last week, debating the awesome Daphne Carr on the topic “Music Critics: Irreplaceable or Irrelevant?” (I took the cutting-my-own-throat-live-on-air position there.)

And, very importantly, the Dark Beloved Cloud Singles Club just mailed out two new releases to subscribers: Grace Braun’s “The Soldier and the Lady” single and Fly Ashtray’s Doodnat Mahadeo EP!

launch me into space

My holiday roundup of comics is up at the New York Times Book Review!

Little else to report. Listening to The Juan Maclean’s “Happy House” on continuous repeat.

post-tofurky torpor

Thanksgiving was low-key and fun—I think the best of the things I cooked (the only one that was all gone by the time we put away the dishes, anyway) was Brussels sprouts, snapped right off the stalk, trimmed, and braised in a little vegetable stock and some olive oil. As usual, we broke out the DVDs after dinner—in fact, one of them was the new DVD edition of my old favorite, James Brown’s famous 1968 Boston Garden show. (Nice to see it and hear it in relatively high definition, but I’m not getting rid of my old tape, which unlike the DVD still has the Marva Whitney and Bobby Byrd performances from the show.)

Otherwise: I’m trying to figure out some kind of new design and/or purpose for this site. I currently operate or contribute to seven blogs, private and public, counting the Twitter feed that I keep obsessively adding to (and which has now been added to the sidebar). Mincing Up the Morning will probably be ending January 14, once I’ve completed a full year’s cycle, although I’m not ruling out the option of adding to it thereafter, and Final Crisis Annotations will probably only have two more entries after January 28. I’ve got a couple of vague possibilities in mind for new projects to take up, some of them in accordance with my principles as a card-carrying member of the New Compulsives, some of them not. (Most of them, though, are more… reactive than I’d like them to be.) I might also try to integrate Circle the Globe into Lacunae—maybe the way Fluxblog has done it, maybe some other way. Stay tuned.

well all right then

Traveling and a string of minor but irritating illnesses do take a toll on one’s ability to blog, although evidently microblogging isn’t quashed quite as easily. But: where was I? Oh yes: in San Francisco for APE, then back here in Portland to cheer on the night of the 4th and make a couple of appearances at Wordstock, then in New York to ship some media to the West Coast and meet up with a few people with whom I might be working on one project or another. Everything’s prospective, everything’s provisional, everything’s too-soon-to-tell. I wrote a chunk of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Singers of All Time” package; that one’s seen print, anyway.

And I wrote a short essay for the beautiful little festschrift Tales of Brave Ida, but it’s in Japanese, so even I can’t read it now. I can listen to the CD that comes with it, though—Ida covering “By This River” and “Corona”? Sign me up, etc.

A few other music-related notes, for which I confess I’m consulting my own Twitter feed:

*Today is Alan Moore’s 55th birthday. Go watch a video for his greatest recorded moment, “March of the Sinister Ducks.” It may be the only march ever composed in 3/4 time.

*Wire’s Daytrotter session is a winner, especially “Boiling Boy.”

*And while you’re snarfing up free music, don’t neglect that free Dap-Tone compilation from Amazon. Neo-retro-funk!