If I had known how those minuscule boiled sardines from the Japanese grocery store tasted, I would have been eating them every day for my whole life. And now I will. I do not normally attempt to cook Japanese food for the same reasons I don’t bake much and am not really very good at it: you have to follow precise directions. Thus, distinctly imprecise directions for two delicious American things I made in a not very orderly manner using ingredients from the Japanese grocery store:

Pollack roe spread: Melt some finely chopped shallot and a clove of garlic in a couple of teaspoons of butter or ghee in a heavy skillet. When they are softened but not browned at all, add another two or three teaspoons of butter and melt that too. Let it cool until you can taste it without hurting yourself; you don’t want the roe to really cook, so don’t rush the cooling process. Squeeze the contents of four egg sacks into the butter mixture and stir it around until it’s creamy. Finally, stir in a couple of teaspoons of minced pickled meyer lemon. I add a tablespoon or two of olive oil at this point to make sure the mixture stays spreadable in the fridge. If you’re eating it right away, you can just blop it right on a piece of toast and eat it. If you fridge it, you can spread it on warm toast later and it will melt perfectly, liquidy at the edges and cold in the center. A little chopped parsley or lovage on top is pretty and delicious. The first time I made it I added the parsley to the mix. It tasted good, but muddied the coral color. Now I put it on top.

A salad of golden beet greens and tiny sardines: Fry the teeny tiny sardines in butter until they are crispy and slightly colored. Wrench some beet greens apart and put them in a bowl, or wilt them slightly if they aren’t in the finest shape. Chop a golden beet or two into tiny matchstick strips and toss them until they are dripping in a vinaigrette made with shallots and a little bit of mustard. (I don’t abide with this nonsense about forty to one ratios of oil to vinegar. Vinegar is delicious. I usually use something like two to one with plain raw apple cider vinegar and lots of salt. I don’t normally use very much dressing though.) Dump the beets atop a pile of their own greens, and throw the sardines on top of that.

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A few unimaginative types scoffed at the idea of open source housing. That in itself was so surprising (where have you people been?) that it has been on my mind a lot lately. Voila a Metropolis article and the Sam Mockbee film.

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The Rules About Hotlinking and Deep Linking are foggy and skewed a bit toward the paranoid; Wikipedia includes the anachronistic charge of “changing the perceived meaning through an unapproved context” as a controversial use of inline linking. (The meaning of this is something to tussle with, but trying to prevent it from happening is like debating infant baptism. I suppose I believe in it becuase I’ve seen it happen.) Most people assume a hyperlink comprises, or ought to comprise, an explanation and an exit warning, and must be either a species of footnote or a blunt way of shuttling the conversation or interaction elsewhere. That makes sense in a business application or a website designed to accommodate the completion of specific tasks. In the vast rest of the internet, that misses an awful lot. Links, especially within paragraphs of the kind of trailing, conversational text that’s characteristic of so much of what’s warm and intimate about the internet, ought to poke through as secondary sprigs of of communication and familiarity. Any robot or search engine can provide a definition, but so far only a human writer can use hyperlinks in a distinct, idiosyncratic manner; as a tangents, jokes, arch references, or ways of noting the obscure. Linking in online writing is as distinctive as voice.

William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Painting,” part of Table-Talk.

Soil switches on antibiotic genes in bacteria.

Sungsoo Kim’s works in glass (via Craft Magazine).

Christien Meindertsma. Pigs and wooly things.

Hella Jongerius chicle latex objects. The shape research thingamajings!

“Daddy warned me about men and alcohol but he never warned me about women and cocaine.” Really I just think Tallulah Bankhead had great hair. I recently discovered Photo Detective, and have been poring over the portraits and the minutiae of their hairstyles and accessories. It got me started looking at other old portraits, and instead of reading lately when I wake up in the middle of the night, I study these faces the way I do people on the train. I wonder about the choices they made in their appearance and what they might have meant. Fashion is a language and anyone who wears clothing is speaking it. There is no such thing as neutral or meaningless choices in appearance. When I was on vacation, I read a book V had on his phone. It was by William Gibson, but I don’t recall the title. It was a few years old and not very good. For one thing, the author kept describing people, clothing, fashion, art, etc, as neutral or intentionally devoid of meaning. No. There is no such thing. It was really distracting. (Also the protagonist constantly referred to herself by name in her internal monologues. Who does that?) And the more fluent the speaker is in the language of fashion, the more meaning there is in every choice she makes. Even disdain for fashion has to be expressed through fashion, right? I mean, if you speak the language poorly, people won’t understand what you’re trying to communicate, even if it’s disdain. If you speak it well, people will understand, even if they disagree or want to punch you. For people who are interested in fashion as language, the challenge is, of course,  to say something interesting in an intelligible way.

For C: And speaking of fashion, I still think Etsy’s great, but there’s no real way of knowing how reliable a seller is. The review system is binary and, in dealing with an individual, most buyers are reluctant to hurt the sellers feelings or to be the first person to leave negative feedback. As a result, I have gotten a lot of overpriced, poorly made, but flatteringly photographed crap, for which I have declined to give feedback. I actually tried to return a sweater once, but the seller was so horrified that I backed down and kept it. I satisfied myself by taking it apart and using it as a pattern to make a much higher quality version of the same thing, with soft organic wool, fussily finished French seams, and more elegant proportions (read: sleeves that didn’t stop an inch above my wrist.) I would say my experiences are about 50-50 at this point. I’ve gotten some lovely and unique stuff, but just as much knit fabric sewn inside out; ungenerously proportioned clothing (everyone can tell when you’re skimping on fabric); wavy, unfinished seams with clots of wrong colored thread; custom dresses a good six inches shorter than ordered; and “woodwork” that includes toothpastey globs of putty. A good photograph is the absolute minimum for anything I’d consider buying, but a knowledgeable description of the craft and finishes, along with clear detail pictures, is a lot better.

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In which I move back down in the world: First, I freudfully forgot to mention that I got jacked by two twelve year olds on a beach in paradise. They sprinted up and stole my bag under my very outraged gaze. I roared out of the ocean and sprinted off in pursuit cursing them at the top of my lungs for a good ways before I remembered things like pit vipers and my bare feet and that the back of my bikini was really slipping down. The only real outrage in the situation was that the bag had the keys to the borrowed Mercedes. Much tedium and nighttime mosquitoes ensued in getting the car towed back to the cabin from the lonely parking place at the end of the world, where presumably the fiendish twelve year olds were waiting to drive it away under cover of night. In the hullaballoo I left my fancy twist-tied vaseline filter sunglasses in the car of a good Samaritan. Bam! Mercedesless and sunglass bereft in a single afternoon. I felt like Job, cursed by God. I’m trying to stay humbled because I don’t want anything to happen to my Metrocard and cheap replacement glasses.

By way of a further tropical punishment, a Caribeño-ish Salsa, which turned out rather well after a couple of tries. The ingredients are: jalapenos (although proper recipes call for orange habaneros, jalapenos are all we’ve got in the ‘hood this time of year), onion, garlic, turmeric root, mustard, banana vinegar (apple cider vinegar will do), curry leaves, cumin, paprika, and black pepper. Food process away! Titrate the ingredients to taste, but go easy on the cumin and mustard, which will otherwise overwhelm everything else by the next day. I accidentally-on-purpose smuggled an armload of live turmeric into the country. I knew I’d packed it and knew you aren’t supposed to bring in produce, but somehow all that knowing didn’t add up to any sort of awareness and so I cheerily waltzed through customs feeling innocent as a babe in arms. Rather different than last year on the way back from Peru, when I hardly dared meet the eye of the customs official. Every boot, sock, and t-shirt was stuffed with esoteric varieties of beans and corn and dried huacatay.

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Finally, a new Aure stage involving lots of grotesque stories and histrionic disapproval, usually of V and me. He’s as gentle and wildly affectionate as always, but when we disagree, instead of full blown tantrums, I get meandering stories of revenge told with furious emphasis. For example, during an admittedly coercive diaper change: Gonna pop Mami’s head off and throw it out a window! Gonna dash this diaper down and splash it to a shark! I’m gonna do it! A pause as he appears to visualize this with some satisfaction, then, pensively: This diaper is a balaclava for my sweet butt.

At the parents’ house outside of San Jose, the wind blows furiously, sometimes for days on end; it’s a loud and constant whine, too irregular to tune out. We drove through the rain, past the mudslides and waterfalls and bloated brown rivers to the beach, where the rain continued to pound the corrugated metal roof of our cottage for another two days. Everything was wet, everything was green and glossy and grown over; even the plants here are covered in layers of green and growing things, bromeliads, orchids, and mosses. The towels stayed wet, the clothing inside our bags mildewed and the sheets were damp when we got into bed. The indoors and outdoors are not separate here. Even if the windows are screened, they aren’t glassed. It takes some getting used to each time, in the way the proximity of so many other human beings on the subway does. Nature is leaning up against me, breathing heavily down my neck, and reading over my shoulder, indifferent to sighs or dirty looks.

Another thing that takes getting used to is driving a Mercedes. We have been lent a fancy car while we’re here. It’s a dream to drive through the mountains and on wet roads, especially compared to the tinny rental cars we’re used to, but it’s a little like being in disguise. I’ve never really known anything about cars and after living in NYC for a decade I know even less, so I don’t know the model or anything, but I can tell you that this one looks like it should be driven by an elderly diplomat and his hairsprayed wife. It makes me think of pantsuits and designer sunglasses. I wear the Bottega Veneta sunglasses passed along to me as a freebie by a magazine editor friend years ago, the lenses now rubbed to a fine mist, and the arms held on by a naked twist tie and a mismatched screw, but I don’t think we’re fooling anyone.⁰¹ Or maybe we are. On the way into town, a cop stopped us and checked the trunk. What brand is this car, he asked. Mercedes, V told him. Exactly, he responded in mysterious satisfaction.

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I am reading Fuschia Dunlop’s book, Shark Fin and Sichuan Pepper at the same time as I am reading Julia Child’s My Life in France. The latter is awkwardly written, but is exciting and gossipy enough that I can’t put it down. The former is as good as I expected it to be. The author is remarkably self aware, really thoughtful. I will undoubtedly reread. It is getting me all excited to continue to work on my interview project back home in the Bronx. When I have a reasonable bulk of information I will put that whole project online.

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And a list:

Pan Toasted Watermelon Seeds (Just toast them in a pan.)

Qi Gong

Osmanthus Agar Agar

Taoist pills of immortality, among other things