Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat by Bob Dylan

Well, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Yes, I see you got your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
Well, you must tell me, baby
How your head feels under somethin’ like that
Under your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, you look so pretty in it
Honey, can I jump on it sometime?
Yes, I just wanna see
If it’s really that expensive kind
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, if you wanna see the sun rise
Honey, I know where
We’ll go out and see it sometime
We’ll both just sit there and stare
Me with my belt
Wrapped around my head
And you just sittin’ there
In your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, I asked the doctor if I could see you
It’s bad for your health, he said
Yes, I disobeyed his orders
I came to see you
But I found him there instead
You know, I don’t mind him cheatin’ on me
But I sure wish he’d take that off his head
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Well, I see you got a new boyfriend
You know, I never seen him before
Well, I saw him
Makin’ love to you
You forgot to close the garage door
You might think he loves you for your money
But I know what he really loves you for
It’s your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat

Copyright © 1966 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1994 by Dwarf Music

Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/leopard-skin-pill-box-hat#ixzz3K6kM487T

Swimming and Dancing are Orgasmic

Article

Turtle Island Sketch

I met an American Indian man today all decked out in snake skin jewelry, shells. He was carrying a walking stick decorated with feathers. He told me about dream catchers and that the USA is called Turtle Island.

I met a woman who told me about her life of being a homeless junkie, prostitute, and living in prison. Where she read Simone De Beauvoir and Shakespeare.

I met the scrap metal guy who said something disparaging about immigration and I said think deeper, we're all from somewhere else, that's what makes the country great. He admitted his grandfather was from Germany.

It's time we have compassion.

Ernest Hemingway

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
—Ernest Hemingway

We Became Protagonists

Many of us conceive of our relationship to our pets as analogous to that between a parent and child. But the natural history tells a more pragmatic tale. Cats emerged in the context of profound ecological changes to the post-ice-age landscape wrought by humans.

We were the authors of those changes, but in the process of telling that story, we became protagonists within it. One of the essential steps in knowing ourselves, and seeing where we are going, is to look around and take note of how we’ve reshaped those nearest to us, and they us.

Article

Ode To Utensils by Jane Shore

after Charlie Smith

Opening the drawer, I like the old-fashioned egg beater best,
green painted handle so worn and flaked
the blanched wood underneath shows through.
I like to see the evidence of another hand
beneath my own. I like how the twin rotors spin
in tandem, whipping up ghost breaths across my face.
I like the old apple corer and potato masher,
the ones you find at flea markets,
and the hinged egg slicer that, when opened,
is like the miniature lyre I used to pluck
playing in the corner of my mother's kitchen,
its perfect slices of cooked egg like cross sections
of boiled sun. I like the church key's one tooth
biting tin lids so that cans sigh with pleasure.
Strainers, funnels, slotted spoons, spatulas, ladles, tea balls
excite me. At night in bed, I swoon over catalogues of cookery,
and imagine my life as it will never be.
Utensils that sift flour, rice potatoes, plane cheese,
knives that are specialists, with blades
that pare and bone, fillet and carve-
gizmos that zest lemons, curl butter, strip an ear of corn
of its kernels, unravel its strands of silk-
cherry pitter, pepper mill, mortar and pestle, hand-cranked
grinder gnashing down chunks of raw meat and shitting
them out in one long continuous sentence-
peeler undressing the modest carrot, meat thermometer
stuck in the turkey's breast, barely grazing the wishbone-
O utensils, I like your tangs and tines and tongs and prongs.
Unlike me, you work without complaint.
When I close your drawer, do you pray in the dark
to your ancestors, those ancient scoops
made of horn and shell, socket and knuckle,
while I recline, cleaning my teeth with thorns?
-Jane Shore

Listen

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
― Ernest Hemingway

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
― Ernest Hemingway

All thinking men are atheists.
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
― Ernest Hemingway

Courage is grace under pressure.
― Ernest Hemingway

Give that to People

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.
― Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms

“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
― Ernest Hemingway

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
― Ernest Hemingway

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
― Ernest Hemingway

Teddi's Dream

Nagla's gold fish is HUGE I said what are you feeding her? WIENERS!

That reminds me of a dream I had last night.
I was trying to drive home, but got detoured through Cumberland, and kept getting further detoured Through forests. A national park. Crossing streams...
There was a middle aged woman with wispy hair and her daughter and they were chasing a small deer along side the road.
Something was wrong with it, and they were trying to catch it. And they did.
It looked like they were doing something to its ear, and I realized they were giving it coke to drink.

A few minutes later, the deer turned completely see through, as if it was made out of glass and it had the coke bottle in its stomach.
The mother and daughter were trying to get it out.

Then I was walking with my husband. Who as a very tall person, American, and wearing clothes like an English country squire would wear, replete with weird hat.
We had our arms around each other and I remember thinking, hmmm, who would have ever thought that I would have married ....insert typical American name here, like Jeff.
I love you so much I said to him and he responded with something unintelligible.

Then I ditched Jeff and was hanging around a beautiful outdoor, in ground pool.
Kittens were swimming in it!

One was holding its breath and swimming underwater.

Sent from space

Bari Sax Cello

video baritone sax -like a cello

Simic in the Small Hours

Magical night. I got up at 1 am. fed Lily and Sammy, hung the wet clothes in the boiler room went to my office and read Charles Simic....
while jazz played on the radio.

Charles Simic

SIMIC

There’s a story they used to tell in my family. The war ended the day before May 9, 1945, which happened to be my birthday. I was playing in the street. Anyway, I went up to the apartment to get a drink of water where my mother and our neighbors were listening to the radio. They said, “War is over,” and apparently I looked at them puzzled and said, “Now there won’t be any more fun!” In wartime, there’s no parental supervision; the grown-ups are so busy with their lives, the kids can run free. A few years ago I reviewed two huge books of photographs of the war in Bosnia. Every face looked unhappy, except for some kids in Sarajevo who were smiling as if saying: Isn’t this great, isn’t this terrific! When I saw those faces, I thought, That’s me and my friends. Then, after the war, the fun continued. Yes, we had poverty, Communist indoctrination, but also a few American movies, jazz music on the American Armed Forces Radio, and gangs of kids fighting in the streets. I lived in the very center of Belgrade in a bustling, crowded neighborhood, so it was never dull. In school, there were pictures of Tito, Stalin, and Lenin over every blackboard, watching us do our schoolwork. Our teachers told us daily that these were three wise men who were bringing happiness to children like us all over the world. I, myself, didn’t know what to believe. At home, I was told they were bad men who were responsible for my father being away.

-Charles Simic, Paris Review

Charles Simic

Paris Review Interview

CHARLES SIMIC

My father came from a blue-collar background. He was the first child in that family to go to university. On the other side, my mother came from an old Belgrade family that had been living in the same spot for a couple of centuries. They were pretty wealthy in the late nineteenth century, but lost everything. My grandfather on my mother’s side, who was a military man, gambled it all away, as I only found out years later.

INTERVIEWER

How did the different branches of your family get on?

SIMIC

To tell the truth, they despised each other. My mother showed her dislike for my father’s relations with sighs, the rolling of eyes, and meaningful asides, while my father’s side was more direct. They were a rowdy, hard-drinking bunch. I identified more with them. My mother’s family was fearful, paranoid, and secretive. They had lost their wealth and were worried about keeping up appearances. They had no sense of humor. Nothing was ever funny to them. My father’s family, when they got going at a dinner table, they were like a dadaist cabaret, so you can imagine how my poor mother felt in their company.

Choose Love

The Day I Lost My Brother But Found Myself
by Traci Bild, Author of forthcoming book Get Your Girl BackArticle

The Road In The Clouds

by Charles Simic

Your undergarments and mine,
Sent flying around the room
Like a storm of white feathers
Striking the window and ceiling.

Something like repressed laughter
Is in the air
As we lie in sweet content
Drifting off to sleep
With the treetops in purple light

And the sudden memory
Of riding a bicycle
Using no hands
Down a steep winding road
To the blue sea.

-Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat

Let them Marry

Article

We Must Have a Pie

By SAM SIFTON, NYT

“We must have a pie,” David Mamet wrote in “Boston Marriage,” his 1999 play about Victorian women struggling not to talk like Mamet characters. “Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”

It may well be true. For much of the nation, this is the season of deep winter blues, lake-effect depression, the sad pull of midwinter dismay. There is either too much snow or not nearly enough. The furnace clicks on regardless. Night comes fast.

Introduce an apple pie into the equation, though, and watch what happens — as a result not just of the pie itself, but also of the process of making it. Apple pie is a weekend project to slow the baker’s heart rate and restore belief in happiness. The scent of fruit softening, kissed by cinnamon, of buttery crust, of sugar caramelizing — these can combine into a fragrance of redemption for the cook and everyone else. The taste delivers bliss.

Of all the great pie bakers in New York City, the current champion is probably a young woman named Kierin Baldwin, who runs the pastry department at the Dutch, an American restaurant in SoHo. Baldwin serves properly fancy-dan desserts on her menu — a winter sundae with cranberry-pomegranate sorbet, cinnamon ice cream, maple caramel and brioche currently leads that list. These desserts are quite good.

But for the cognoscenti who think of themselves as Dutchmen and try to eat in the restaurant monthly at least, Baldwin’s chief business is pie. Her crusts neither shatter nor wilt but taste of flake and butter and salt; they encase fillings that are thick without being starchy and intense without being gooey. These are pies to offer the comfort of a family-movie third act. They are intensely delicious.

And for a home cook hoping to step up the pie game, Baldwin is a godsend. “I can get pretty geeky about baking pie,” she said in an interview. “But it’s a mind-set. It’s not difficult.”

Advice from a master, then: Start with a dough made from flour, cold butter and shortening, and scramble an egg yolk into the ice water that will bring it all together. Most pastry recipes advise strongly against “overworking” the dough, lest the crust turn tough. Baldwin tacks left. “You need to work the dough a little so that it will hold its shape,” she said. “You don’t want it so delicate that it won’t hold up to the filling.” The yolk helps a great deal in this regard, even in its tiny measure. So does a good, strong measure of fat.

Baldwin blind-bakes her bottom crusts before she fills the pies, cooking them beneath parchment paper and a layer of Goya beans she bought at the supermarket to use as pie weights. She doesn’t like the texture that otherwise forms below the fruit, she says.

You may well agree. But my experiments suggest a more-than-credible result without the blind baking — and in less time. For the weekend baker struggling only to amaze friends and family, time spent cooking is a crucial distinction. It’s not a kayak we’re building here. It’s pie for dinner. Tonight.

Nevertheless, all should heed Baldwin’s exhortation to precook the apples for the filling. It concentrates their flavor. “Apple pies that have crunchy, raw apples in them are a pet peeve of mine,” she said. Peel and core the fruit, cut it into slices, then macerate them in a plume of sugar. Cook these soft with a splash of acid (like lemon juice or cider vinegar) and a hint of cinnamon and allspice, then add some starch to thicken the whole. Allow the mixture to cool completely before using it in the pie.

(More advice, on apple varieties: “My preference is for straight honeycrisp, or pink ladies,” Baldwin said. “They have nice natural acidity and they don’t break down.” True statement!)

Now assemble the confection: crust below, cool filling above, more crust laid on top of this, the package crimped together artfully with the tines of a fork. Paint the top with an egg wash, cut steam vents and dust with sugar. Slide the result into a hot oven, on top of a hot baking sheet. This can catch any overflow of fruit and sugar, should the seal burst when the fruit gets to bubbling and the crust goes gold in the heat.

Which is when it’s done. Let cool for a couple of hours, ideally somewhere you can smell it. Serves eight, though you can cut it in four, as Yogi Berra famously required. “I don’t think I can eat eight,” he said.

Laura McHugh's Grandma's Stuffing

source

My grandma passed away just after I graduated from college, and I’ve now lived half of my life without her. That doesn’t seem possible, as she is with me each day in a hundred small ways, and especially in the kitchen: her dented measuring cup; the rolling pin with the broken handle.

Every Thanksgiving we make Grandma’s stuffing, and we do our best to get it right. She never wrote down her recipe, so we work from memory. It is a group effort. My sisters and I hover around the stove like a team of surgeons about to perform a risky operation. Our brothers stand back, requesting status updates and begging us not to screw up. We remind each other to be generous with the sage, to mix in the egg with bare hands. We fret over turkey drippings. We always think we won’t have enough bread and we always end up with too much.

When it comes out of the oven, I take a test bite, hoping that it will transport me back to my grandma’s tiny kitchen in Keokuk, Iowa, where she let us tear the bread and crack the eggs. When the stuffing turns out right, there is nothing better. We serve it with reverence, like communion wafers. We rejoice as though we have done something miraculous. We eat the scraps left on our children’s plates—they don’t quite grasp its importance. When it is right, it is more than stuffing; it is a certain kind of magic, like Grandma is still with us at the table.

Recipe: Grandma’s Stuffing

1 loaf of dried or toasted white bread

1 small onion, chopped

1 stalk of celery, chopped

2 eggs

Turkey drippings

Dried sage

Salt and pepper

Tear the bread into pieces and place in a baking dish (kids love to help with this part!). Sprinkle a generous amount of sage over the bread. Cook onion and celery until tender. In a mixing bowl,combine cooked onion and celery with two beaten eggs, more sage, and a little salt and pepper. Add this to the bread and mix with your hands. Pour turkey drippings over the stuffing, adding enough to make the bread moist, but not soggy. Feel free to sprinkle on some more sage, because Grandma was right, you can never have too much. Bake approximately 20 minutes at 350 degrees.

source