GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Henri Matisse Cut-outs, text by Gilles Neret, published by Taschen, 1994

    I took an art criticism class in my first semester in college that introduced me to John Berger and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. I don’t remember anything from my essay, aside spending a considerable amount of time at the gallery at the SF MOMA and noticing the color imperfections on different reproductions of this image.

    Those afternoons at the gallery are among the few warm memories of a tumultuous year.

    As for this little book, I vaguely recollect picking it up in Houston, without actually reading it. So about almost-quarter century after my introduction to Matisse, I finally read something about the man.

    The book is fine, maybe a little small, but a succinct overview of the final period in his life. The writing is straightforward, but not simplistic. Now that I live in Vegas, the home of zero institutions of high art, I can’t be picky about reproduction colors, but I’ll attest that the printing is bright and vibrant.

    It was a strange experience to read the last chapter of an artist’s life with no knowledge of him outside of staring at a single piece that he painted at the start of his career.

    If I were to pursue it further, I’d need to pick up a good biography (which I most likely won’t do), but I almost certainly will purchase his own monograph Jazz which collected many of his cutouts.

    I generally prefer artist monographs over publisher collections, since those books are usually a journey, not merely a collection of highlights.

    However, highlights are famous for a reason, and I will be ever grateful for this little collection because it showed me this melancholy masterpiece. The Sorrow of the King.

  • Taking Things Seriously, Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes, 2007

    This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

    I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

    Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

    It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

    I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

    Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

    Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

  • Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green, 2018-present

    I stumbled across this podcast via this excellent animation of his review of the Lascaux Caves.

    The concept of the podcast is very neat. Every month he writes two short essays about life in the human world and rates them on a five star rating. He slips in a well written commercial between the essay (not the usual canned stuff, these are actually worth listening) and ends with one random fact that didn’t fit in one of the main essays, along with a small audio bonus.

    It is a joyful little podcast. The two subjects allow for delightful juxtapositions, with a smattering of trivial knowledge keeps the podcast light even when it veers into some heavy territory.

    Like all NPR offerings, it comes very close to being unbearably precious, but he’s managed to avoid crossing that line in the episodes I’ve heard so far.

    I would say this is one of my favorite podcast finds of the year. I give it four and a half stars.

  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir, Haruki Murakami, 2007

    I heard about this book on an interview of Brian Koppelman on the Tim Ferris podcast. Brian recommended this book highly, and it makes sense given other books that he recommends. This memoir is the non-melodramatic version of the War of Art, which makes it a far superior book.

    There is very little about writing in this book, but when Murakami talks about writing, it pops. Especially when he takes a couple pages in the middle of the book to discuss the three key ingredients to making it as a novelist – talent, focus, and endurance.

    That passage alone is worth the cost of the book if one is an aspiring writer.

    I’m not an aspiring writer, but I am an occasional blogger and a slob who has always known the need to get off the couch and start exercising.

    He doesn’t glamorize running either.

    Running is both the subject and the metaphor.

    Put one foot in front of the other. Again and again.

    He doesn’t claim any particular epiphanies during his runs. He just enjoys the solitude of running. But that is quite comforting as well.

    As I’ve broken forty, I’ve become a better at getting bored. During this quarantine, I’ve started talking walks on a regular basis. Just a mile or two sprinkled with the occasional 10k.

    It’s nice to exercise without expectation, not waiting for the runner’s high or some special insight. Just log a few more miles, one foot in front of another.

    Coda:
    As pedestrian as this book may be, it has resulted in three key decisions. Few books can claim such an impact on my life, even if it only lasts a short duration.

    1. I’ve decided to read the entirety of Murakami’s english-translated ouvre. His writing is so forcefully delicate, personal and piercing, that I need to read it all. I had considered this exercise years ago, but his books had not yet been widely translated. They are now, and I have no excuse.
    2. I’m quitting self help books. I’ve known for the longest time they are the junk food of non-fiction prose – quick easy reads that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something but invariably leave you empty after a few days. Just as John Maxwell quit reading for pleasure to focus on his study of leadership, I am going to quit work related reading so I can focus on life.
    3. I think I will refocus this blog with a new tag line “thoughts on my consumption”. My excursion into daily blogging last year was an interesting practice, but without a center the experiment felt rootless. “Write every day” may be a rule that works for many people, but I found myself being starved of input, since I was spending all my free solitude keeping up with the next blog post. “Write about any book that I’ve read” may result in a better balance between input and output. It doesn’t require constant output, but it doesn’t allow the blog to lie fallow for extended periods. Plus, it also addresses my great fear of becoming merely a passive consumer. We’ll see where this goes!

  • Count Zero, William Gibson, 1986

    I revisited Count Zero, the second of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, for maybe the fourth or fifth time since I first read it in college.

    It’s odd to think that I’m further from my initial reading of the book than my first reading of the book was from its publication date. I guess that’s life, it keeps moving forward, but some artifacts keep staying along for the ride, and Count Zero is one of them.

    This book is the tightest, cleanest, and meanest of the trilogy. Almost a novella compared to its older and younger siblings. That’s why I love it. It feels effortless. It’s a story that says plety but doesn’t try to tell you anything.

    It seems odd that I still enjoy such a simple rip roaring genre yarn as a middle aged adult comfortably ensconced in the desert with a prototypical family of four. But then again, I’m not any more sophisticated than my collegiate self, just more willing to embrace the same old dopeyness.

    Certainly nostalgia plays a big part. The heavy, physical tech brings warm memories from computer class elementary school, descriptions of cyberspace resonating with flashy MTV logos, even as the direct neural connections of jacking-in seeming so gauche in this wireless age.

    As I walk around my Vegas suburb thinking of the book I just reread, it seems the real world has ended up closer to the gleaming spotless clones of Star Wars prequels, but during this time of pandemic, it feeling that the decrepit barbarism of Gibson’s Sprawl is just around the corner.

  • 100% Wheat Berries

    Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with a “wet-grind” method that my wife suggested one morning. I soak wheat berries for about 8-12 hours at 160% hydration. Then I just blenderize the heck out of them in the vitamix.

    I’ve had consistently good results with for 50% berry and 50% flour breads (basically 80% hydration dough), though I have had decent attempts all the way to 75% wheat berry loaves (admittedly it took a few tries to figure out how to fold such wet dough!).

    The other day I found some chia seeds in the fridge. In the past, I’ve noticed they soak up an incredible amount of water (at least 4x their weight) so I thought I’d go all wheat berries this time:

    200g Berries soaked in
    320g water for about half a day. After blending, mix in
    100g starter (100% hydrated)
    With the starter, this is a 148% hydration dough.
    40g chia seeds, soaking up an +/- equivalent of 160g water, resulting in an equivalent to about 72% hydration – an almost dryish loaf!
    4g salt, don’t forget your salt.

    And yeah it worked out really well, the oven spring wasn’t amazing (I don’t think I proofed long enough) but this was most likely the best tasting loaf so far this year.

    Plus, with flour being so rare at this time, I think I’ll be doing this 100% wet wheat berry grind method for a while coming up.

    Have fun!

  • Sourdough Bread Video

    I spent all day Sunday editing a video on making sourdough bread.

    It would be a little faster to read my blog posts on sourdough bread, but hopefully this is a good “snapshot” of how I currently make my bread and there are things that video conveys that cannot be described adequately with the 26 symbols of the alphabet.

  • Five legs, Five Snapshots

    After years of being properly frightened by scary stories of salmonella, I finally got around to cooking chicken. I’ve never really cooked chicken before. I’ve roasted a couple of birds, but never actually handled uncooked chicken meat in any earnest way.

    Four weeks ago, I moved out of my in-laws house out of an abundance of COVID-19 caution. Among the few items I brought along with me was a pack of five frozen chicken legs.

    This past weekend I finally thawed them out and started messing with them. The last leg (and a couple bones) are stewing on the stove as I write this up. And it made me think of a few things that have accrued over the my past life that led to this moment.

    When I was in high school, I got really into listening to world music and Seamus Egan’s album A Week in January was in heavy rotation. I recently picked up his newest album, Early Bright, and it has been playing in repeat in the background this whole month. As with his earlier album from the 90’s, it is a lively work, terse and tight, but somehow mellowed with passing of two decades.

    My map in this experiment was the poultry chapter in Mark Bittman’s classic, How to Cook Everything, a book that I’ve purchased twice. The first time, I had accidentally purchased it as a soft cover book, which I salvaged by selling it to the used book store when we left Houston. The second time, was at the friends of the library bookstore; I made sure this one was a hard cover. Even though we work in an internet age, it is good to have a curated tome that you can trust implicitly. It may not have the best recipes for everything, but if you were searching for that, you wouldn’t need a cookbook. This book is properly a primer for those (like me) who have spent decades scared of touching dead birds.

    The friend who introduced me to Mark Bittman was Chris Leong. He was a couple years ahead of me at Berkeley while we were never close I still look up to him. He was (and is) a great cook along with being a great architect. I remember going to his place with a few guys while he cooked up an amazing meal of some meat wrapped in something else. It was both gorgeous and delicious. More than the meal itself, I remember watching him that night in the tiny apartment kitchen enraptured in the task, while the rest of us fools were dicking around in the living room. It was a quietly brilliant display of concentration and craft that has stuck with me over the past two decades.

    The table upon all these meals have been consumed was picked up by my wife while she was was in college. Ikea still makes the Ingo table, if you want one for yourself. We used it as our dining table during the years in Houston, the legs have been chewed up when we had bunnies running wild in the house. It bears the marks and scars from that time with its burn rings and oil stains as a record of our lives together. It spent a while in the garage while we stayed with the in-laws, but hopefully it is now back in use, for good.

    When we had moved into our Hassett house for a brief moment a couple years ago, I decided to get a wok. One morning I popped into Resco to pick up some other items and saw one selling for $10. What the heck, I bought it. It sat there unseasoned for a year and a half. Last summer, I finally seasoned it, only to not use it for another six months. However, I’m happy to say this fellow has now been pressed into service, obliterating napa cabbage to go with a little chicken.

    And yes, I’m happy to report that I am no longer scared of poultry. It took forty years of eatin’ other people’s birds, but I’m finally here to try my hand at this game.

  • Bread, wheat berries and loaf pans (Q1, 2020)

    We bought a Vitamix during Black Friday and after a bit of experimentation we’ve settled into a very good routine with the bread.

    The basic ratio for soaking the wheat berries is 160% water (for winter red wheat, less for white). I also learned that I need to let it soak for a while. Definitely more than a couple hours (learned that the hard way) but it seems to work pretty good by the time you hit twelve hours.

    During Black Friday we also bought a cast iron loaf pan. That allowed us to play with much wetter mixes than I had previously done, since shaping was no longer a limiting factor, I believe that I may had gotten up to 110% hydration on one loaf.

    After playing around with different ratios of wheat berries to white flour, we ultimately decided that a 50/50 split was the tastiest option.

    150g wheat berries all purpose flour
    240g water (soak)
    150g flour
    150g starter
    ±3g salt

    This base recipe results in an 80% hydration loaf, which is well in line with my round loaves. However, we’ve stuck with the loaf pan, primarily because it has been nice to bake in the toaster oven, saving us the hassle of taking everything outside the big oven.

    To minimize waste, I’ll rinse out the vitamix into the starter. And if I put in a little too much water, I’ll take some of that water and use it for the dough, up to about 100% hydration.

    In general this is working wonderfully, I strongly recommend trying this wet grind method. No need for a dry grinder, and no dusty mess.

    The next step is to start throwing some odd grains into the mix and see what happens!

  • Innovation, Carl Chudyk, 2010

    I consider Carl Chudyk a minor diety in gaming. Of all his games, the one I have come to love the most is Innovation.

    I had a rotten introduction to the game, a 2v2 team game where it just seemed utterly uncontrolled random and chaotic.

    Which as any Chudyk enthusiast would recognize is pretty standard impression by the uninitiated.

    The second time wasn’t much better, a 5 player game with one of the expansions. Even now I couldn’t recommend such an experience.

    So I just ignored the game for a few years until I listened to an in-depth podcast extolling its virtues. I also had come to know too many respected gamers who spoke highly of the game. And by then, I had also finally come around to enjoying his other classic, Glory to Rome.

    So I bought myself a copy and the third time was indeed the charm.

    Chudyk excels at creating games with tight tactical play masked in a sea of seeming chaos. His games can require high skill to consistently play well, but the outrageousness of his card combos result the appearance of blind randomness.

    There are a lot of moving part to keep track of. It is cards, but it isn’t random. Chudyk gives you a lot of levers to dance with the crazy. All this takes a moment to grok.

    And when you do, it becomes beautiful.

    Once you know the landscape, moments of brilliant tactical play reveal themselves. Surprise and delight await you around the corner.

    Or sometimes you draw badly, and frustration gurgles in your chest as the draw hinder your progress.

    But experienced Chudyk fans would note, somehow it is the n00bs who always end up in an extended run of useless cards.

    There’s an awful lot of game here. You just need to learn to go with the flow. Of course, you will plan ahead. But the beauty of the game is found when you’re forced to change your plans. The fun starts when your well laid plan falls apart one turn later.

    It is not easy to thrive in this chaos. But if you enjoy such a challenge, Innovation gives you both in spades.