Come Together

There are very few times in the history of humanity — admittedly, a short one, as these things go — that one finds a SuperBeing, someone who transcends the drudgery of being merely human and crosses into almost SuperHumanism.

And what’s funny is that said SuperHuman would be the first to deny, deny, deny. Not superhuman, just an ordinary bloke. And he’d deny it till the cows came home and the pubs were closed.

But John Lennon was that creature, a person perhaps many of you only have a vague memory of, of “Uh, yeah, he was in the Beatles?” and don’t feel the same pain as I when the world erupted on that December 8 as he was gunned down by some asshole with mental problems.

Mercurial and not without his controversies, John Lennon was a world-changing guy, and how many of us can write, say, Across The Universe?

I listen to the Beatles’ early catalogue and I marvel. Such talent will be a long time returning . . .

Ginger Beef

This is a great, very easy-to-make "Asian" dish — not sure where it comes from — that you can literally put together in 20 minutes. I garnish it with red serrano chilies from my balcony but then again I have a steel tongue.

Ingredients:

1/2 onion chopped in square slices as if for stir-fry
1 large chile (serrano, jalapeño, habanero or to taste,) diced
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons grated ginger
1/2 pound sliced Boston Steak (what they call it in Montreal), or good-quality sirloin--slice as for Stroganoff
Shiitake mushrooms, sliced (10-15 mushrooms)
1/2C chicken broth
Lemon juice
Mirin
Chinese chili sauce (Kum-kee chili-garlic comes to mind)
Stir-fry powder
Cornstarch (if needed)
Cilantro for garnish

Method:

Sauté steak in canola or peanut oil on high heat, 1 minute each side; set aside (add few shakes pepper + garlic salt while sautéing).

Add a little oil, sauté mushrooms until they lose all their water--they will first get very liquidy and then start to dry up. Set aside.

Add more oil. On high heat add onions, chile, ginger. Stir constantly, turn to medium high, 4-5 minutes. Add garlic, cook one minute.

Add 1/4 cup Mirin (Japanese sweet cooking rice wine), stir well. Add 1/2 cup chicken broth, stir in . Add splash Schezuan sauce (or other Chinese-style hot-pepper sauce) and a few shakes Chinese stir fry powder (or similar powder--thickens the sauce.) Add mushrooms, stir well. Add splash lemon juice. Now add beef, stir in, cover, simmer on low. Serve in 10 minutes.

If not thick enough, add 1 tsp. cornstarch. If too thick add a little chicken broth. Serve on long-grain rice with cilantro garnish.

The Horror, the Injustice

If you live in Montreal, no doubt you’ve heard of the strike by the people who maintain the Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery. Basically, it’s around 129 people who do the tough stuff — mow the weeds of vast tracts of meadow on state-of-the-art tractors while listening to their iPods (I’ve seen it; I’m not exaggerating) and otherwise trundle around the cemetery in their oversized vans at a leisurely pace, all for the penurious sum of $24 an hour.

The horror, the injustice of having to slave so much for so little.

I literally live across the street from the cemetery and I’ll have to say these motherfuckers know how to be assholes. Not content with camping out in front of the gates of the Decelles entrance and eyeballing everyone who walks in (they’ve closed the gates and put barriers up on the roads so cars can’t get by) they’ve plastered the fences and map post with their stupid, childish, very-difficult-to-remove stickers. As if anyone besides themselves gives a shit. But someone is going to have to clean all their puerile shit up — these are the types of stickers (thousands upon thousands of them) which tear immediately when you try to remove them. Read: ten years of having to look at the aftermath. This is not to mention the acres of waist-high weeds someone is going to have to cut — and you and I are going to pay for.

$24 an hour. 129 selfish bastards. The math just doesn’t seem to add up.

The above is a shot of my son playing in the cemetery today. Think we could make room for 129 new plots?

Words to Not Use in Restaurant Reviews

Yes, "yummy" and "to die for" are definite no-nos, and "scrumptious" is execrable. But I'd also add a couple of other words that should never be used, for any reason, in any article about food: "Rotten", "rotting", "spoiled", "fabuloso", "edgy", "brave." Oh, and let's not forget that despicable "delish".

But there is an entertaining list at grumpygourmetusa.

Computer, Earl Grey, Hot . . . Not.

What a crock of shit.

Talent? Or Just Practice

It’s really, really hard to write. No, I didn’t exactly mean that, but to write well.

Of course, you can’t just generalise like that — obviously, writing a technical manual is a far different skill than writing a speech.

No, I mean writing to entertain without being boring, pedantic or wordy. But how do some writers work a word like “exigencies” into a passage where it fits like a glove and I can’t?

I’m reading The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1 and some of it is just astoundingly good writing. I guess a great start is getting the vocabulary, but that cannot be all. You have to know exactly when to use a hard word without it sounding out of place. Of course I know what "exigencies" means, but why doesn't it come to me when I'm writing?

I’m in California at the moment and I went to a session with three other musicians and I finally appreciated, after years of playing, that a cascade of notes does not equal Good. They have to all be in the right place at the right time. Okay, so a lot of people like Al di Meola (the guitarist) or Allan Holdsworth, but many also find their incredibly fast noodlings to be just a useless waste of sound waves. So now I choose my notes instead of just mindlessly trying to play them as fast as I can. (Ah, the joys of middle age.)

But this should not be confused with a musician who just can't play quickly as opposed to one who can but chooses not to, just like a person with an arsenal of vocabulary who doesn't necessarily drop it like flyspecks on every page or, say, Picasso, who could paint realistic paintings like a champ but chose not to. All these things have to be done judiciously, precisely so, or you’ll lose the listener or the reader or the looker.

So maybe, this is where the talent comes in. The magician can't just pull a pigeon from his sleeve without it pecking him to death without a large amount of talent (and a heavy dose of practice.)

Obviously, false notes, like typos, are the real place to start, but once that’s cleared up it becomes another thing, something that has to be refined to an enormous degree in order to be called truly “good.”

I hope the practice I’ve done on my Thai curry will please the troops tomorrow. I'll need every spice in my arsenal to be exactly correct.

Hiccups

What asshole designed the vagus nerve, I’ll never know. Dante?

At any rate, I’ve had the hiccups for about 9 hours. It ain’t pleasant. It gets old real fast. And then it gets into Urban Legend territory . . . am I going to be the one who hiccups for 34 years nonstop?

But—speaking of Urban Legends . . . I just HELD MY FUCKING BREATH FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE and, sweet, sweet glory. (A glass of Chardonnay may have helped)

Sometimes, just goes to show.

Love Story

Okay, people, it doesn’t happen often. And my age, I’ve seen it maybe once. So we’re lucky if it happens again.

But a love story like this . . . it’s one for the books.

She was my sister’s best friend in New York in 1970. Her apartment was across the street from ours. Her elder sister became my elder brother’s intense girlfriend. Her elder brother was my eldest brother’s best friend — you know the 70s. Beatles, Stones, guitars, long hair.

Her parents were wanderers — you know who you are. So when I moved to Africa, she moved to Spain . . . and we wrote those ridiculous things called aerogrammes to each other all the time. I can’t recall what we wrote, but no doubt it was whatever two slightly nostalgic kids who secretly were in love but weren’t allowed to be, by fate, by age, by circumstance would pen . . .

And then she disappeared. Slowly, as our lives diverged. She went there, I went to other places. We got old, slowly. So, when I got a phone call in 1985 I thought I’d seen the last of Virginie. But it wasn’t so. I was in San Francisco and so was she.

As a huge obstacle, I was living with someone at the time. It was almost operatic. We went out to dinner, with my elder brother at the wheel, whose previous love, Virginie’s sister, was to go on to become a doctor, then tragically commit suicide with her own prescribables. But we didn’t know that then.

And we held hands like kids in the back seat on the way to where she was staying, my brother being like an unwilling taxi driver.

And so we dropped her off and I went home and I was a tiny bit crazy with love. I wrote her a long letter that I intended to mail the next day — a day in which I was flying to Montreal. So I put the letter in carefully with my ticket and passport.

And went to sleep.

And somehow, the person I was living with saw it her mind to make sure I had my ticket and passport all in order . . . and guess what she found.

Needless to say, that was the end of that.

But then, I went off to climes like Japan and Virginie wandered and had a husband and kids that I didn’t know anything about because I was doing my stuff . . . and then two years ago she somehow found me on the Internet. And we began a near-constant email exchange . . . but nothing happened (she lives in France) until she decided to buy a ticket to come to Montreal. And it wasn’t until we’d been in the taxi from Dorval five minutes that I knew that I was going to be with this woman forever. You have been informed. Trust me, this doesn’t happen often.

Montreal will always be a priority for me but now France seems likely to be my new home. No firm plans, but . . . ya can’t stop love.

Gino

I’ve written about Montreal being cool. Come on, people, I’m not even Canadian. But one of the coolest Montrealers, and I risk being hilariously out of date — is Gino Vannelli. As Montrealers, you should be very proud of him.