Field of Weems

Ewan MacGregor and fellow Glaswegian Craig Ferguson butcher their lines, crack up, and still deliver the funniest sketch on TV this year. Two words: hobo orgy.

East Coast - West Coast

Muna, Aidan and I took a short trip to Boston to see my brother Steve get married. Lucy claimed she had too much schoolwork and work-work to come. We took the red eye, which lived up to its name. Aidan was the only one to get any substantial shut-eye on the plane, even sleeping through the landing! I guess sharing a bedroom with a snorer like Muna will either make you a deep sleeper or kill you. The trip was very short, but the boys got up to New Hampshire to see their Granny and shot down the Pike to Framingham to see their cousins Kyle and Kenzie. I got to meet the bride's mother and brothers, and got to know Gabe a little better. Except for one overcast day, the weather was warm and sunny, meaning we were there in that short spring window between too cold and too hot. It may have been comfortable for me in my suit, but it was hardly what you'd call kilt weather.

Steve's wedding at the inn which used to be the Framingham Town Hall was small and intimate and acknowledged our Scots heritage. Steve wore our family's tartan and hired a bagpiper to annoy the guests. Gabe's mother asked me in her thick Hungarian accent, "Where's your skirt?" At least that's what I think she said. Here the bride is naturally feeling shame at the realization that now she's married to Steve. The food was without a doubt the best I've ever had at a wedding: real Indian cuisine from naan to dal to tandoori chicken, which my boys love. I finally met Steve's old buddy Asif, who Steve's known for twenty short years. Asif made the trip all the way from England, and we got a chance to chat. We'll have to keep in touch.

Asif, who's an Imam, presided over the ceremony and wrote a moving tribute. I'm surprised my atheist brother allowed anything resembling religion in, but it was very appropriate. Not surprisingly, St. Paul's old reading on Love was replaced with a very beautiful passage (p. 43) from Pierre, a novel by Herman Melville, Steve's current favorite author. My favorite line: "Endless is the account of Love. Time and space can not hold Love's story." Both Steve and Gabe have been married before, but seeing them together makes me agree the story is indeed endless, and they're lucky to have found one another. She laughs at his jokes and he hides his ridiculous Heart fixation when she's around.

Of course we had to hit the Natick Mall to replace our tattered Boston paraphernalia: I switched from the blue Sox hat to the red one, and Muna got one, too. Aidan was somewhere else misbehaving so he didn't get one, but we placated him with some Ben & Jerry's. Here are all the cousins dangerously raising their blood sugar levels. I pretended to have the will power to resist ordering anything, but was secretly crying inside when the kids all finished off their goodies and didn't leave me so much as a cone wrapper to lick.

On the plane ride home I reread The Alchemist all the way through. Just like the visit, I didn't want it to end.

Harmony - Not the Crappy Guitar, Either

I was very impressed with this story (attributed to Jung) from the book Do Less, Achieve More by Chin-Ning Chu:

The Rainmaker

There was a village that had been experiencing drought for five consecutive years. Many famous Rainmakers had been called, but all had failed to make rain. In the villagers' last attempt, they called upon a renowned Rainmaker from afar. When he arrived in the village, he set up his tent and disappeared inside it for four days. On the fifth day, the rain started to fall and quenched the thirst of the parched earth. The people of the village asked the Rainmaker how he had accomplished such a miracle.

The Rainmaker replied, "I have done nothing."

Astounded at his explanation, the villagers said, "How can that be? After you came, four days later, the rain started."

The Rainmaker explained, "When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was that everything in your village was out of harmony with heaven. So I spent four days putting myself into harmony with the Divine. Then the rains came."

Chu uses the story to frame her lessons on living a more productive, successful and inspired life, but I couldn't help but be struck by how our American village is out of harmony with everything, even with itself.

Years ago I read (and reread) the early 20th-century Sufi Hazrat Inayat Khan's brilliant book The Music of Life, which first inspired me to look for the harmony in life inside and outside myself. It's a lesson I certainly haven't mastered, but I've kept coming back to it over the years. Our society has precious few role models for creating harmony, and music might be the only good metaphor left in our competition-obsessed culture.

All humans seem to need the beauty and harmony of music of some form or another, and up to a certain time composers, like the Rainmaker, were in harmony with the Divine, or the Universe, or Mother Nature, or whatever you call it. The composer and musician knew the effect of their music on the listener, and knew their responsibility was to create harmony. Maybe we all have that responsibility, and like the villagers, we've fallen down on the job.

Pete's Pizza Secrets

Lately everybody has been marveling at the concept of no-knead bread, and there's a similar idea by the writers of the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, but the commonest complaint I've read about both methods is they have no taste. The experimenters at Cook's Illustrated went so far as to adapt the no-knead recipe by putting in vinegar and beer for taste!

My (flat-) bread of choice is pizza. Five years ago or so I started making it from scratch. I was a teacher with a free summer at the time and I was looking for a challenge. I used to knead the dough by hand, using the recipe from the Scicolones's Pizza: Any Way You Slice It!, a great resource for crust and sauce recipes. Then I scored a free brand-new Cuisinart from somebody emptying their storage area and I found a book at the library on how to mix dough in a food processor. Charlie Van Over's humbly-named The Best Bread Ever contains both the best bread recipe and the best pizza dough recipe I've ever found. Since the "kneading" is done by the Cuisinart in under a minute, they're also the easiest recipes I've ever found.

It's the classic four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water. They're mixed in the food processor per Charlie's instructions (there are temperatures you have to measure before and after mixing), and the dough is put in a ziploc bag to rise (Why dirty up a perfectly good bowl?). Then it's in the fridge for 1 to 4 days. This is the secret to delicious pizza crust: the dough slowly ferments in the fridge as the yeast break down starches into sugars and develop flavors as only one-celled fungi can.

I flatten the dough, add pasta sauce (homemade or store-bought), Trader Joe's Quattro Formaggio cheese blend, toppings like caramelized onions, peppers, mushrooms, sausage or pepperoni and occasionally some herbs. I slide it on my cheap quarry tiles at the hottest my oven can go for 9 minutes and it's done. People rave about the pizzas, and I'm no chef. Get Charlie's book from the library and do it yourself!

South of the Border

Back in the late '90s, when I had a cable package that included The International Channel, I used to watch the subtitled Korean Top 20 Video Countdown every week. It was fascinating; a window into a faraway land, but I didn't actually like any of the songs. It was usually a mix of soulful singers and wannabe rappers or more often both in one cheesy boy or girl band. Then I saw this video. Jaurim was easily the best artist I ever saw on the Korean Top 20, and one of the most interesting bands of the late '90s anywhere. A Jaurim album easily goes from breezy pop to Evanescence-style alt-rock with folk and reggae thrown in, too. When I'd find myself in San Francisco I'd hit Turbo Records in the little Koreatown near The Fillmore and ask the confused clerk for the new Jaurim album. I have no idea what any of the songs mean, and that's the way I like it. I think "Hey Hey Hey" translates pretty literally, though. The guitarist Lee Sungyu is the master of understatement, the incredible bassist Kim Jinman is the John Entwistle of Korea and the vocalist Kim Yoonah has quite a range, from pop chirruping to belting it out. There's nothing quite like them anywhere.

A Faire Afternoon

The boys and I just got back from the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Quite a collection of creative people were assembled, purveyors of everything from rockets, robotics and electronics to beads, calligraphy and knitting. I think the best thing about setting up there would be the interaction with other inventors, getting inspired by their ideas; the worst thing would be getting stuck with a booth next to the guy who makes "music" on an amplified rake.

Muna and Aidan made rockets and set them off outside, they played with magnets, bicycle wheels, wind tunnels, marble roller coasters and LEDs. They saw robot insects, robot crabs, robot dogs, robot birds, and real goats for some reason. We ate the most expensive hot dogs I've ever had and some pretty good kettle corn, too. I've never been to a fair on the West Coast that had fried dough. Why is that? It's definitely not the health issue: every place out here has funnel cakes. So what do I have to do, mix some dough and set up the stand myself? I'm tempted to start up my homemade pizza biz (there was no pizza in the whole fairgrounds) and charge five bucks a slice. Anyway, I had to steer the boys clear of most tables that said, "Do not touch," but they still seemed to have fun. They even had a brush with greatness:

Now I know who the big limo outside was for. On arriving home, I asked them what their favorite part was. Muna's was making the rocket, and Aidan's was meeting R2D2. When Lucy came home, Aidan shouted, "We rode a bus!" Yes, we rode a school bus from the free parking to the fairgrounds, but it wouldn't have made the top 10 memories of my day. Cheap thrills, indeed.