Heart and Soul--a window into SXSW with Carson Daly

     Carson Daly rocks.  Of course I only know who he is because I don't work and I stay up late at night when television programming choices dwindle.  Last Call with Carson Daly airs after Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC, which airs after the current Tonight Show (Fingers crossed that we get the next version soon!  Not a Leno fan.  Dave was robbed.)

     I love Last Call.  Let me explain why, in case you are my age but you have to go to bed at 10:00 on weeknights.  The people and bands Daly showcases are original artists working on what seems to me to be the leading edge in their genres--people who need a break.  “The average artist can’t get on a network and I want to be that beacon. Come on Last Call, [I’ll] give you the tape and you can give it to Jay Leno.  To give artists a chance"  By doing so, he lifts the veil enough that you can see the artist behind the art, and I find it fascinating.  I would never have heard of the music/film festival  South by Southwest (SXSW) that takes over Austin, TX, every year, had I not begun to watch his show.  And it has apparently become a big deal in the last couple years.  Last night they showcased a band playing at SXSW called Bomba Estereo, a mix of native Colombian music and electro.  He introduced the video of them performing by saying it "will absolutely blow you away".  And as usual, he's right.  It actually reminds me of the next generation of music from the music in the Mexican rave scenes in Man on Fire, the Denzel Washington movie.  (Which, by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough.)

     Also featured last night, the makers of Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary about independent video game developers that was featured at Sundance this year.  Director James Swirski has been a gamer his whole life.  He and his partner Lisanne Pajot say they really connected with the subjects of their film because they were doing essentially the same thing the designers were doing--quitting their day jobs to pursue a passion.  "No one is helping you make your thing, you're just making it to make it," she says. Their hearts and souls go into these projects.  One guy featured in the documentary says "My whole career has been me trying to find new ways to communicate with people, because I desperately want to communicate with people, but I don't want the messy interaction of having to make friends and talk to people because I probably don't like 'em."  It's this kind of raw, heartfelt honesty that makes me love documentaries, and I love Carson Daly because he gets that. 

     Last Call is an oasis of  cool in my otherwise bland, lonely life.  It's a half hour nugget that I cling to as my last, best chance to stay connected to the cool.

     Here's where I get a little self-conscious:  Is it cool that I find Carson Daly cool?  Or does that mean I am a huge dork who is behind the times and is the last to know it?  Is Carson Daly even actually objectively cool--is this stuff...pop?!?  I'm so isolated I don't even know the truth, here.  But what I do know is that when you connect with something so deeply as being cool to you, it's OK to just call it a day and declare it cool.  Cool isn't a set of rules--it's where you find your heart and soul in what other people are doing.  It's about how it makes you feel.

(Actually, in finally researching the show for this post, I have decided that Carson Daly is cool!  The first thing I did was look up Lex Land, also on last night's show.  It was then that I found out Daly is associated with the network show The Voice. Whatever that is. lol)



Via press release:
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. – March 9, 2012 – NBC’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” announced that it will host its first-ever music showcase at the 2012 South by Southwest Music (SXSW) Festival, one of the world’s largest music industry events, in Austin, Texas on Wednesday, March 14 (8 p.m. CT). “Last Call” will partner with Sony Entertainment Network’s Music Unlimited Service to spotlight six artists, including Tennis, Roll the Tanks, Thee Oh Sees, Lee Fields and the Expressions, Bomba Estero and Cults, from the Red 7 Patio in Austin. Daly will serve as the emcee for the showcase and introduce each band prior to their performance.

Fuse: Carson Daly on the Last Call Showcase - SXSW 

Rolling Stone has a short video of Daly playing drums with Thee Oh Sees from that showcase last week.  Things didn't exactly go as planned, but he pulled it out.

http://www.rollingstone.com/videos/new-and-hot/carson-daily-plays-drums-with-thee-oh-sees-20120315

Official trailer, Indie Game: The Movie
http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/

Thee Oh Sees 2011

Ah HA! Improvisation, man. I did not plan this one.

     Being vegetarian means you have to wing it, quite frequently, and a big part of why I wanted to do this blog thing is because there are so many crap vegetarian pseudo-food "recipes" on the Internet.  I once saw a recipe for "delicious" tomato soup:  tomato juice and cracked pepper, heated in the microwave.  I knew then that something had to be done. 

     I am lucky enough to have learned the cooking basics from my mother. I never had macaroni and cheese or a cake out of a box until I was living at home and going to college.  Mama was too tired running after my baby brothers to be as circumspect about the food they ate as she was when we were growing up.  I was also lucky enough to have come of age during the first TV food renaissance, beginning with Jeff Smith, Julia Child, and Natalie Dupree on PBS.  I do not eat bad food.  Yeah, we are sort of food snobs in my family.

So here's how it went down tonight. 

     I had red, yellow, and green bell peppers and some mushrooms, and was planning to make vegetarian fajitas a la Casa Manana (our favorite locally owned Mexican restaurant).  But I also had some broccoli that needed to be eaten, too.  What to do??  Stir fry.  I even decided to make white rice. Normally the only time I use white rice is when I make what I call "sweet rice", a low-fat, barely sweet rice pudding-y dish.  (I'll share that and the fajita thing another time.) 

     It had been a while since I had done stir fry.  They've kind of gone out of vogue--out of sight out of mind, I guess.  I started the rice in my grandmother's old heavy-bottomed aluminum pot.  Since moving here and cooking on this gas stove, I've had problems with rice sticking to my pots.  I couldn't get the flame low enough to work with the 6 quart pots I had used on the electric stove I had in my last home.  All of a sudden one day I broke out of "this is how I have always done it so I have to continue to do it that way forever and ever" and realized that I could use my grandmother's pan.  Unfortunately, I also have had a problem recently with not completely rinsing the dish washing liquid from my pots and lids.  So when I opened the lid to check on the rice after 15 minutes, I was assaulted by the steamy smell of cooked dish soap!  D'oh!  Oh well.  Nothing I could do about it at that point. 

     I cut up my vegetables and aromatics and sat down in front of the TV.  (Aromatics?  Dang, but I'm fancy.  Hey.  I told you I learned the basics!)  I  hesitated to start because I couldn't think of a protein to use. Of course I didn't have any tofu, and it's fairly unappetizing when cut into cubes and stir fried anyway.  I figured out at some point this last year that I can make fried rice using only an egg--no ham--and it still tastes like fried rice to me.  But I had never done it in a stir fry.  Then it hit me--I bought lemons (a splurge) and I've wanted to make a Lemon Ice Box pie, which uses three egg yolks... So, ta da!  Stir fry with three egg whites.  Perfect. 


Here's what I did.

Caveat emptor:  I'm not into precise measurements.  At all.

One cup rice, 2 cups water
About a quarter of a medium onion, sliced more thinly and longer than my normal dice
One rib celery, sliced 
2 medium cloves garlic, minced
Green, yellow, and red bell peppers--about a fifth of each, sliced 1/4" x 1"
1 stalk broccoli cut into 2"florets, stem peeled and cut into chunks
1 carrot, sliced
1/2 lb button mushrooms, sliced
3 egg whites
1/2  vegetable bouillon cube dissolved into 1 cup boiling water
1 T soy sauce
1 tsp corn starch
1 T canola oil

Note:  I split the bottom of the celery in two so that the size more closely matches the slices from the top.  And I usually just slice into the peppers from top to bottom and remove a 1 1/2"-2" section, leaving the rest of the pepper intact. Cooking for one. You know. I steam broccoli in the microwave with 1/4" water, covered with a paper plate (which I re-use relentlessly before going on to the next one).  My bouillon is Edward & Sons Garden Veggie.  Bouillon is expensive, and I got this in the natural foods section at the store, so it was about $5.  But it's one of those things that I have to rationalize--since I don't eat meat, it's OK to splurge a little on some ingredients. 

Cook the rice.  Steam the broccoli for one minute. 

Saute onion and celery in oil about a minute on medium high heat.  Add garlic and mushrooms, stirring for another couple minutes until the mushrooms begin to soften, then add the carrots, broccoli, and peppers and let them cook another minute or two.  (Until they look like you want to eat them--my mother's rule for how long to cook things.  She is always right.  No, really!)

Move the vegetables to the side of the pan and add the egg whites, breaking them up when they are cooked through, then push them to the side, too.  Whisk the corn starch and soy sauce into the broth and pour it into the cleared spot in the pan.  Stir the slurry until it thickens. 

Then just stir it all together and eat it with rice and a splash more soy sauce.  Easy as pie. 


Which reminds me.  I need to get back in there and make that pie!


The pie:

It took a little effort to find the recipe for this Lemon Ice Box Pie, because I wanted the same one my  grandmother used to make for me.  I found this on the Canadian Eagle Brand web site, of all places.  I like this one because it's the same ingredients she used, but they have you bake it so the egg yolks cook.  I am not a fan of uncooked egg yolks, so I was happy to see that they had added that bit.  The funny part is that there are essentially just 3 ingredients.  And I don't make the meringue.  For one thing, I already used the egg whites.  And of course I make my own graham cracker crust, crushing the crackers in a heavy-duty zipper seal bag with my rolling pin.  On my coffee table, of course.  I just cannot make myself buy graham cracker crumbs when I can torture myself by crushing them at home.

http://www.eaglebrand.ca/recipes-details.aspx?rid=1628

Looks like love, smells like baby

I just ordered photo prints for my mother from Walmart.com. Say what you will about Walmart, it's perfect for this because my mother doesn't do computers or cameras, but she does shop at Walmart. All she will have to do is pick them up when they come in--at the Walmart in her town. It's brilliant, honestly.

I was always the one in the family who brought a camera and took pics, and I was a film holdout. I regularly took film to be processed and I shared my prints with my mother. Then at a certain point I realized that she was still bugging me about getting pictures of my nieces and nephews for her, and I said, wait--those children have parents!! So she finally quit asking me. Now that I am using a digital camera exclusively, it hasn't even been an issue.  It's weird. The whole thing is weird. To think that a grandmother is essentially excluded from seeing pictures of the kids because she has been left in the technological dust--no computer, no fancy cell phone equals no pictures of your grandchildren. And it's weird that I just now realized that I have not seen a physical print of any of the photos I have taken since I got my new camera for Christmas.

I'm obviously not the first person to moan about this, but these photos we take all the time, share online, email and post on facebook don't have the same meaning as the pictures we grew up with. In my family it was a fairly rare occurrence to get the old pictures out. So it was special. Every picture you looked at reminded you of that hat--oh my god that hat I wore all the time!--the trip you took to spend Easter with your friend in Germany. And of course the black and white pictures of my father and his sister taken in front of a wooden fence in about 1933...being especially scarce, they are really precious.

This is my effort to make pictures matter again.  I like taking pictures and telling a story with them, even if it is just "hey, it's Spring here and we have great landscaping!"