Greetings!
I’ve been thinking about colors, as above. Scratch that. Enjoying them, or trying to. My wife reminds me of my uncanny and less than fun ability to turn aspects of life into objects of contemplation, critique, and so raw material to be worked upon. For example, we used to vacation on Ocracoke, fabulous barrier island stuck out in the Atlantic, and one result was Triptych: Three Meditations on How Law Rules after Globalization. It’s a disease really, this responding to life by making something else, a text, and so of course I had to write an essay about my condition, with particular regard to photography: Why I Don't Use a Better Camera, at Least Not Yet.
Laugh if you want. I do.
Here in the United States, it is the “4th of July” or “Independence Day” weekend. You probably know, but in case you don’t, the holiday celebrates the founding of the nation, more specifically, our Declaration of Independence (Jefferson’s brilliant writing, the “old man” in his thirties amidst a crowd of young hotheads) from Great Britain, way back in 1776.
There are myriad mostly tiresome “yeah, buts” but let me confine myself to this: the Declaration of Independence predates the Act of Union of 1800, whence “United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland.” In 1776, then, the colonies were colonies of Great Britain, not the United Kingdom. As an aside, George III was King of both Great Britain and Ireland, that is, they were so united. See? That was bothering me, too, so you’re welcome.
Apex predator of the suburban creek. Nature is where you find it. I have seen the garbage eagles of Karachi, the coyotes of Lawrence and the parrots of Brussels. I hope to see the leopards of Mumbai, the catamounts of Los Angeles . . .
Meanwhile, we frontier folk have long since fallen in love with all the peoples inhabiting the (sometimes fractiously) United Kingdom, and Eire, too. Indeed, we often seem to love these people more than they love themselves, or certainly each other, but I digress. My point is that as a result of the “special relationship,” plus genre mysteries, James Bond, several waves of music, guilty failure to remember much literature or for that matter law, posh accents on stupidly sexy yet hardly fit people, tennis, royalty, whisky, Harry Potter and who knows what not else, the United States has transformed its once rather warlike anti-colonial festival, with marches, into a common(ers) celebration of things American even when we stole them (highest form of flattery), especially summer things, like picnics with watermelon, hamburgers and hotdogs, albeit with rockets and explosives in the hands of inebriated citizens of the republic, where they belong I guess.
For the holiday, then, and in furtherance of my efforts to keep things Light, I’m offering this Signal as a kind of picnic basket – who knows what’s inside?
You can tell it’s artsy because it is in black and white. Storm blew in from the west. We failed to outrun that squall line, but no harm was done. Picture doesn’t do it justice.
My buddy’s boat is built to take on ballast, so it sits low in the water. When the massive engine thrusts the hull forward, a great deal of water is displaced, and the hull throws a huge wake. I grew up with waterskiing, but now the ropes are mounted high. Kids can surf, flip. Wakeboarding Insanity
Lake culture is one the marvelous things about life in the United States, especially in summer. I wrote about it a little in Welcome to New Country
The next day I headed west, watching the storm cells raking across the high plains, occasionally getting caught, the interstate stopped. No tornadoes, but maybe. And when I reached the mountains, more storms, purple black clouds, sometimes hail or graupel. I tried but failed to get many very good images, due to lack of skill, hurry and other circumstances. Worse, my phone’s overly computerized camera “compensates” for dark skies by collecting light, thereby erasing the drama. Seems like a metaphor for corporate slop, come to think of it, the drama drained out, only banality left. I need to work on this. Nonetheless, I have gotten some decent images here and there – the light and colors during storms is fantastic – and maybe I’ll eventually do an album.
Year of total freedom, risk, discipline. I’ve not been in one place for two weeks in 2025, sometimes turning every few days, much family, mostly good, but . . . I want to stand still, for a few weeks anyway.
It’s embarrassing at a picnic, but sometimes things go wrong. I need to apologize.
Dear Reader in West Virginia,
Please, please come back. You weren’t my first, but you are my last. Without you, I don’t have all 50 states. Whatever it is I said, I take it back. Whatever I’ve done wrong, I will make it right. Come on, just give me one more chance. Besides, it’s the 4th of July weekend. Peanuts, and popcorn, and beer, like Frank sings. It’s the American thing to do, even if you’re not a paid subscriber and you don’t like me very much.
Seriously, if you are from West Virginia, please subscribe.
As always, a thousand thanks to my paying subscribers. It means a lot. And if you are not in a position to take out a paid subscription, please share, hit like, and so forth.
For most of US history, newspapers were important, consitutively important. Benjamin Franklin published newspapers. The Federalist Papers were published in newspapers. When I was a child, journalists broke the Watergate story and brought Nixon down. All that has changed.
I doubt the New York Times could have altogether resisted the seismic shifts in our polity. That said, they have not acquitted themselves well in the last generation or so. The damage done has been immense, yet how many are critical, meaning able to feel the objects of their thought, enough to be ashamed? Maybe I should resign myself to my Venetian fate, or the mob. Tough to tell. Basta!
There are compensations, however, brought about in part by some of the same socio/economic/technical developments that have so wounded civic discourse. The Times has unparalleled resources, a near monopoly over several tribes (whom it instructs in all aspects of life), and hires very talented people. Most importantly to me, the “paper” is now basically an electronic communication, which allows them to publish photography. Fantastic photography. Whales Off Long Island
This month, the New York Times published Jason Farago’s Cezanne and the Hard Facts of Time. It is quite simply brilliant. Not only a wonderful introduction to Cezanne, it’s the best short introduction to modern art that I know. Or maybe, as with many introductions, its beauty is only comprehensible if you no longer need an introduction, if you are old in these questions.
There is so much to say, but for now I will simply draw your attention to Cezanne’s understanding of painting vis-à-vis photography, that is, as an activity like but different from geometric representation of the subject. (Farago is apt on this point.) Today, in our age of compulsive and compulsory automation, many of us must ask ourselves what we are doing. Should you, gentle reader, write your own essays, work on your own house? Cook your own dinner? This is not a moral question, at least as “moral” is usually used in English. I won’t think less of you if you go out to dinner. It’s not necessary that you do anything in particular, actually. And, for that matter, painting, at least at the level of Cezanne, is not necessary at all, at least not in any obvious sense. What should you do?
For my part, in the evenings this time of year, I often drink beer and photograph hummingbirds.
If coffee is the most affordable luxury, and it is, hummingbirds are the most accessible miracle. I want to do an album, but for now, a Signal from a while back will have to serve. Hummingbirds at Dusk; Henry James; Marx from Ashes
Many years ago, our son wrote a piece for the Crimson (forgive me my vanity) arguing that “Chopped,” which we used to watch as a family, was the best show on television. Where other TV shows turned on familiar sorts of conflict, “Chopped” turned on the creative process. Over time and in expected ways, the show’s quality declined. Creative leaps, difficult judgments, and risky skills were increasingly displaced by the often bathetic backstories of the contestants. But for the show’s heyday, our son was right: creativity is exciting.
I love thinking about cooking, and especially making ice cream. So many possible combinations. Most of the stuff I dream up I don’t actually make; I would be a whale. But it’s fun to imagine how something might work. It’s a gentle and pleasing form of thought, and that’s not nothing.
She brought me a beautiful organic angus strip steak, stupidly expensive, not sure why other than it’s very hard to finish a book. I didn’t cook it right away, because I wanted to do something good, interesting.
Also, I don’t have a grill up here. Maybe there’s a hibachi somewhere. But bears are an issue, so I don’t have a big ass multi burner searing machine on the deck, like a man should. What I do have, which you might find somewhat emasculating but I’m secure in my masculinity, really, is a Danish Casusgrill. This is a single use biodegradable low CO2 grill. I kid you not. It comes in a flat box, and you build it, sort of like origami, wood and cardboard and a little gravel. It will hold a modest fire for a while, say on a picnic, before the bamboo grate burns. You might want to cook some small organic thing, maybe a mushroom, or a shrimp. The design is brilliant, because hey, Danish. And it’s chock full of European goodness, so very, very good. Kinda the opposite of a Texas or Kansas smoker, built to be hauled behind an F-350 dually. But every time I’ve built/used one of these little grills, I’ve smiled – they are just so cute. And while I don’t do advertisements (hey, hold up), if you want to smile . . .
Leave the steak out a few hours, get it nice and warm.
My kids give me spices I don’t know how to use, try to stump me. I learned that grains of paradise are a relative of ginger, closely related to cardamom, from West Africa. Mentioned by Pliny, forgotten, rediscovered, used to flavor alcohol, maybe good for digestion, sold in US as natural Viagra, currently a celebrity chef thing, who the hell knows. They have a fantastic weird flavor, hot like black pepper but also thyme and flowers and citrus, mostly lemony, bit of bitterness.
In order to really bring out the flavor of the grains of paradise, I decide to make a wet rub.
I grind the grains of paradise, quite a lot, in a mortar. I taste. It’s pretty hot, some bitterness.
In a bowl, mix:
grains of paradise
a lot of fresh rosemary, chopped pretty fine
grated lemon peel, in lieu of garlic
swish of olive oil
squeeze of lemon
sea salt
Rubbed into meat, both sides. Rub in some honey. Let sit for a couple of hours in a pyrex.
I’ll spare you the vegetables and starch. Awesome, summery, strange spices.
Get a cast iron skillet very hot. No oil. Lightly sear both sides of the steak.
Toss steak back in the pyrex, into a warm but not hot oven.
Watch! Cook until a touch over true rare, and let rest on cool plate.
Eat when warm, with red wine. It was a thing of beauty.
The same bird, a male broadtail hummingbird. These pictures taken moments apart in the setting sun, so the angle off the neck is different, so the irridescence is different. When the birds move, they change colors.
Somebody said that the best telephoto lenses are your feet. These were taken from about 15 inches. As always, try to view on a good screen.
For over a decade I’ve thought about writing a book about cooking, well not only cooking, but also embodiment, improvisation and emergence, vis-à-vis abstraction, recipes, and control, and by extension, algorithms, automation, and machine learning. I don’t know if I’ll write this book, but I do have some 60,000 words of notes. What I’m trying to think about, barefoot in the snow at 10,500 feet, greyhound in hand, is how do I, how should we, want to live? Engage our worlds? But that’s as serious as I’ll get, on this holiday anyway.
Enjoy your picnics, wherever you may be.
-- David A. Westbrook
As usual, I enjoyed your post so much. Have a wonderful Fourth of July, despite everything.
"Despite everything" seems to be a little comment I tack onto the end of good wishes to people. Ugh!