Open air

Welcome to California:

Specifically to the heart of the Valley they call Silicon.

(This is taken from the parking lot of the Cupertino Public Library. It wasn't there last week.)

If you want to smoke, you'll have to drive to Nevada.

That's what it's all about

For today’s lateral take on culture I give you…

The Hokey Pokey. Version Bard:

Exeunt omnes.

Tequila and tarantulas

This appeared on my social radar a while ago:

Deep-fried tequila shots.

You cut up angel food cake into cubes, soak them in tequila and then fry them in really hot oil. Pretty easy, as long as you’re not drinking the tequila concurrently with working with the hot oil. Blot them on paper towels and sprinkle some powdered sugar over them.

Apparently they’re not big enough to constitute a whole thing yet, but there’s one thing to be said for this. There’s finally a use for angel food cake, which otherwise is a complete waste of time and effort, because it’s like eating tasteless, spongified chemically-extruded substances that you really don’t want defined for you.

So the tequila would help a lot.

Rum would be good, too—not silver, gold. Or Myers.

But back to the cake. One of my favorite pieces of Raymond Chandler’s writing is his description of Moose Malloy in the opening paragraphs of Farewell, My Lovely.

“Slim quiet Negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side glances. He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

Moose would have taken his tequila straight, no cake, no powdered sugar.

Sign of the times

Walking around any residential neighborhood in October of an election year is bound to give you a bit of a scare.

For instance—I’m not sure whether to be more afraid of the tombstones or the political signage in this yard:

Because of the electioneering (and I don’t much pay attention to who’s running for what at the municipal level when it’s not my municipality) I almost passed by the scariest sign of all:

Then I realized that there was no candidate called Brown or Green. It’s actually a sign of the times, as you can tell from the state of the lawn in this yard.

Viz.: we are smack in the middle of a multi-year drought here, and people are having to cut way back on their water use.

Gratitude Monday: Shocking--not so much

I went hunting for Meryle Secrest’s new biography of Elsa Schiaparelli after listening to an NPR interview with her last week. I love the development of fashion in the first half of the 20^th Century, and Schiaparelli’s designs have always delighted me.

It might be because she was so closely aligned with the Surrealists, and worked with Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau on some of her more fantastic creations. Plus—the lines, the colors, the exuberance…

Well, were I not between gigs I’d probably have just ordered the book from Amazon, but these days, given the choice between splashing out even the discounted $25.23 or getting it from a library pretty much always tilts towards the latter.

And, boy am I grateful. I’m only on page 34, and already I’m feeling a little sick in my throat from Secrest’s breathy style. I particularly despise the device of switching back and forth between present and past tense for no apparent reason.

Also, at not even ten percent of the way through the book, she’s already located the Bay of Biscay off Newfoundland, and Duluth in Iowa. When I see that kind of carelessness (or ignorance; but certainly a listless editor), I always wonder about other “facts” I’m being presented that are equally erroneous. The ones I can’t easily vet.

So today, I’m very, very grateful that I didn’t fork out actual money for this book. Better the Mountain View Public Library’s nickel than mine.