Reality television show #2

Posted on by Dale

The other day we were retrieving an old family recipe from one of those old church cookbooks that proliferate in one’s cabinet like so many cockroaches, and we made the mistake of actually flipping through the thing.

Oh my.

You have never seen such a collection of canned foods, American cheese, Italian seasoning, and A-1 Sauce in your life.  Most of the items were absolutely repellent—we could not imagine anyone preparing, serving, or eating any of them.  (“Coney Island Quickie,” anyone?  It’s split wieners with cheese covered with cans of something…)

We had a kind of socioarchaeological discussion about the artifact, reconstructing the why of these recipes.  The easy answer is that it was the 1970s.  These were our mothers, and these recipes were by and for women like them: cooking for a large family without a lot of time or money to do so.  Throwing cans of stuff into a casserole dish and heating it for 20 minutes at 375° was the way it was done.

As for the ingredients—canned everything, you guys—it helps to remember that there were not a lot of options.  Kroger didn’t carry kale and leeks and sea bass and tilapia and cilantro.  Julia Child was just beginning to have an impact on American kitchens, while Madison Avenue was very solicitous in providing time-saving and delicious recipes on nearly every page of every magazine.  It was a completely different world.

So our reality TV show is called Mimeograph Kitchen, and it will feature besides its host three couples: 1) someone our parents’ age, 70-80, i.e., the generation that produced these things; 2) someone our age, 50-60, the generation that grew up eating this stuff; 3) someone our kids’ age, 20-30, who have never known what it’s like not to have fresh salmon with dill cream sauce and a side of roasted broccoli.  The recipe is presented and discussed by all three couples (reminiscences, reactions, etc.) , and a sample is provided for a tasting.

Then, each couple updates the recipe so that it is more in line with the 21st century and brings the results back to the table for everyone’s comments.  (It’s not a high pressure competition show; they just go do their thing and then come back.)

It’s got nostalgia—along with the implied “good god can you believe people used to cook like this?”—intergenerational mocking, and creative cooking.  You could take the show on the road, doing a repeat in varying communities across the country.  Or you could just sit in Newnan and have nine seasons of the show in the can in no time.

—————

In other news, it came as a shock to me this morning that I haven’t blogged in a couple of days.  Must have been busy.  Or lazy.  But I am orchestrating “I am alone,” so I’ll have a report on that soon enough—and the materials for the 3 Old Men labyrinth were delivered yesterday, so that will be a fun report as well.

Dream One, 1. “Joyfully gaze” orchestrated

Posted on by Dale

Here’s the opening number.  It’s been done for about a week now, but I haven’t felt like putting it up for review yet.  Made a minor tweak this morning.  Again, I fear I am over-orchestrating.

Dream One, 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” | piano score [pdf] | orchestral mp3

That’s all you’re getting today, because I am now setting out to work in the labyrinth all day.

Reality TV show #1

Posted on by Dale

Occasionally, my lovely first wife and I will come up with silly—yet viable—ideas for television shows.  Here’s one of our favorites: Mama’s Stuff.

The premise is very simple: each episode focuses on a family who is stuck trying to decide what to do with Mama’s stuff.  See?  Great idea—you’ve already tumbled to the possibilities, haven’t you?

Perhaps Mama is deceased.  Perhaps she’s alive and downsizing—moving into a smaller house, or into a facility, or in with one of the children.

Perhaps nobody wants Mama’s stuff, or worse, everyone wants it.

Our hosts are comprised of an appraiser, an estate sale planner, and a counselor.  You can see the need for the talents of all three, I’m sure.

Is there a Daddy in the picture?  Did some of the stuff come from the Other Side of the Family?  Are there relatives who want certain pieces retained in the bloodline, so to speak?  Did Mama make off with some favored trinket in a previous generation’s episode and now Cousin Sally sees an opportunity to get it back?

Are some siblings simply unaware of the value of some of the stuff?  Are some of the siblings… not nice people?  Would the stuff clearly be better off in the home of one of the siblings (as opposed to the double-wides of the others)?  Are any of the siblings hyper-emotional about Mama’s stuff?

Some episodes could be about the interfamily drama.  Others could be about the sadness of a life’s end without any really meaningful artifacts left behind (and by “meaningful” I’m not saying “valuable”).  Some episodes might focus on Mama herself; others, on the heirs.

With the richness of personality types (…) available to us in most American families, I think it would be easy to craft a narrative for each episode that would keep viewers coming back. And of course, we’d be providing a service for the nation by holding up these families as models of how to go about dealing with Mama’s stuff.

TLC, you have my email.  Let’s do lunch.

The Patio: done, for a ducat

Posted on by Dale

So today I finished the patio landscaping with the paving stones for the back gate:

Still a tiny bit of mulching to do, but otherwise, the patio is done.

On to the firepit:

That’s a little over 500 pounds of flagstone there, and it looks as if it’s going to take another 1,000 pounds to lay out that area.  Excelsior!

A confession

Posted on by Dale

OK, I confess: I have developed an obsession with my new friend kaolin.

The discovery that I can have all the white body paint I want for practically nothing has me dazzled.  Yesterday I realized that instead of dipping chunks of the stuff in water, I could go ahead and dissolve all of my holdings into an earthenware bowl.  Even when it dries, it becomes like my own personal bowl of pancake makeup.  Woot!

Of course, the dissolving itself was fascinating:

Isn’t that just grotesque?  I love it!

Soon, of course, I will need to test it out to see how much it takes to cover my person so that I can make plans to create enough paint for our venture at Alchemy.  That’s where I will draw a discreet curtain over the process.

3 Old Men: one small triumph

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been composing/orchestrating with some excellent results, but the intertubes have been destroyed, no doubt by aliens, so we all have to wait until tomorrow to hear the duct-taped glories of “Rise and fall.”

In the meantime, I will share today’s other small victory via the miracle of my iPad and the 3G network.

I’m sure everyone remembers my musings on the 3 Old Men ritual troupe, originally created for a trip to Burning Man next month and now re-aimed at the Alchemy Burn in north Georgia in October. One of the items I needed to figure out was body paint. (At one point in the ritual, we will be adorning our aging physiques.)

The real stuff is expensive, so I went looking for some home made recipes on the web. I found a really easy one, just cold cream, cornstarch and water. When I finally got around to testing it, though, it was not in the least opaque.

I searched again, and found a similar one that added flour. Good, I thought, that’s opaque enough. But the admixture was still just cold cream.

So what would be opaque enough? I thought about using poster paint, but who knows what kind of toxicity is involved there.

And then it came to me: kaolin, Georgia’s own “white dirt.” I asked Facebook where it could be bought, and I got all kinds of responses for local establishments that carried it. The winner was Food Outlet, where you can find it in the produce section right next to the okra.

Next step was to drag out the cold cream and shave off some kaolin into the mixture.

Nope, still not really what I wanted. (What do I want? Something along the lines of Butoh dancers.)

Today, casting about for something to do other than get out in the heat and humidity, I remembered thinking that I should try to dissolve the kaolin in water and then use that precipitate to mix with cold cream.

Was kaolin even water soluble? It was. And as it began to dissolve a little bit, I picked up the piece of wet kaolin and smeared it on my hand.

And lo:

So that’s it: carry chunks of the extremely cheap mineral with us, have a ceremonial bowl of water, dunk a chunk, and smear away.  It doesn’t seem to rub off, and mere water washes it away.  More research is required to see if cold cream might in fact give us protection against rain, although frankly I’m not sure I’m going to be standing in a long, trailing skirt in the rain.

Orchestration… ugh.

Posted on by Dale

And so our long national nightmare begins.

Having successfully copied the piano score parts from 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” into an orchestral score, I set about assigning instruments.  You might think that this particular piece might be a lark, given that it’s just faux-Baroque excess, and to a certain extent you would be correct.

But it doesn’t sound right: too loud, too repetitive.  I will have to let it sit for a day and annoy me.

Mercy, what’s it going to be like when I have to do something subtle?

Orchestration and landscaping

Posted on by Dale

I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template.  In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.

It would not.  It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.

I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.

And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.

Blergh.

I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues.  Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score.  Not difficult but hardly elegant.

That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done.  But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.

 

And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:

When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.

Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.

More patio work

Posted on by Dale

I took yesterday off because it was such a gorgeous day, but I was back at it today.  When last we left the remaining bit at the far end of the patio, it looked like this:

After a little work today, using some paving/wall stones I had lying about and the remaining flagstone, it looks like this:

On Monday, I’ll go fetch some more flagstone and finish this part up.  Finally, I’ll get some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate area, and the patio area is largely done.  (This will include some fern plantings in the new wall part, plus cypress mulch EVERYWHERE YOU GUYS.