Guilty as Charged

Interesting things are happening in Guatemala. Despite the election of Otto Perez Molina, installed as president just a couple of weeks ago, the Guatemalan judiciary proved its bravery and independence two days ago by indicting former General and one-time de facto president Ephraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide. Ríos Montt was Otto Perez Molina's boss in the grim dark 1980s, when something like 200,000 Mayan Indian highland peasants were massacred by the dictadura. Perez Molina's election, on a campaign to restore security in a country that suffers from Juarez-like rates of murder and impunity, was generally seen as a setback to the cause of justice for the victims of the genocide. He is a genocide-denier and a former military man.

But on the same day that Perez Molina was sworn into office, Ríos Montt, leader of the junta in the bloodiest days of 1982 and 1983, ended his twelve-year term as a congressman, and with it ended his legislative immunity from prosecution. With pre-emptive bluster, he promptly announced that he was prepared to present himself before the courts, should they require his testimony. The courts, and specifically a heroic judge, Carol Patricia Flores Blanco, took him up on his offer. Flores Blanco decided two days ago that there is sufficient evidence to merit a trial, and Ríos Montt is now under house arrest. Impunity and corruption reign in Guatemala, and we may be some distance from seeing Ríos Montt rotting in prison, but that he went directly from a seat in Congress to home-bound defendant is, in the context of the country, extraordinarily significant. The Mayan majority, ostracized, marginalized and disenfranchised since the arrival of the Spanish conquest, may finally get some justice.

For background on the genocide and on Ríos Montt I highly recommend you seek out and see Pamela Yates' latest film, Granito, which among other things presents evidence of his guilt, in footage she shot in Guatemala thirty years ago. I'm very proud that I got the chance to work on this film. I'll be even happier if Ríos Montt goes to jail in any part because of it.

Today's Semiotic Malfunction: Please Enjoy Passively

 

In Fort Greene Park, where on one recent evening I passively walked past this sign and the monument it protects.

Happy Lower Manhattan Firecracker Day!

Time to Make the Cookies! UPDATED

Although I was showered with gifts yesterday on my birthday, the best present I received came last weekend when I fulfilled a Christmas promise to my niece, a budding baking aficionado, and invited her out to Brooklyn to make cookies and bake bread. This was just about the most fun I can remember having in months. First we traipsed around Fairway hand-in-hand, collecting ingredients. Then dough was kneaded, peanut butter, butter and assorted shades of brown sugar were creamed together. Bits of batter plopped onto the floor, swelling loaves were spritzed with a waterjet to generate steam. We formed blobs of insanely delicious mixture into golf-balls and tined them with forks. The kitchen filled with delicious smells. We tasted the results. So much better than any amusement park!

Photo: courtesy Ashley Singer

01/31/2012 UPDATE:

 Just found, the cutest shopping list in the history of shopping.

Blackout, UPDATED

I'm too internet clutzy to figure out whether there is a way to black out antarcticiana in solidarity with today's webwide SOPA and PIPA protests, so these screenshots of major websites, all shut down for the day, will have to do. SOPA and PIPA are two pernicious pieces of legislation making their way through Washington. They would make much of what makes the internet great, illegal, such as the ability to link to any bit of information, anywhere, at any time. Masquerading as enforcers of copyright protection, SOPIPA essentially makes websites responsible for the copyright, piracy and trademark infringements of any other website that they link to.

In the non-virtual world the equivalent of this would be if the police were to arrest me for giving a tourist directions to Canal Street because I might have known that the reason they wanted to go there was to purchase counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags.

This legislation would have two immediate results. The radical impoverishment of the richness of the web, and a mammoth migration of the United States information technology sector, one of our last thriving industries, to parts offshore. These laws were written by over-priced movie-business lawyers and Washington legislators whose web experience is having an assistant who checks their email for them. They have to be stopped.

 

UPDATE: Amy Goodman's story in the Guardian does a great job of laying out the issues and explaining why this is really censorship legislation masquerading as an anti-piracy initiative.

Metropolitan Etiquette Authority

Situated somewhere comfortably between street art and public service are the amazing signs of the Metropolitan Etiquette Authority. Presenting like a hybrid between an alternate-side parking warning and one of those friendly "mind-the-gap" style helpful hints you find in most subway cars, these pleas for sanity and common decency are ones you wish some city agency was actually producing and plastering all over the city. In fact, they are already fetish objects, "free" limited edition artworks that I suspect are frequently stolen just about as fast as the artist cleverly bolts them to existing signposts. So far, I have resisted the very powerful temptation to stalk one and bring it home for myself, if only because the messages on them so desperately need to get out there in front of the public.

This one is my favorite, so far. Photo spotted, and stolen from, Eileen Costa's facebook page.

Making too much of Gumbo

Although it was not an event officially sanctioned by the Association for the Promulgation of Gumbo, dinner at my house last night owed a lot to the founding spirit of that organization. Call it the fraternity of consumption. Never having invited twenty people to dine at once before, I was typically concerned that there wouldn't be enough food. While at this point I pretty much grasp what dinner for eight should look like when laid out on the chopping board, were two and half pounds of okra, two chickens, and my last few sticks of Laplace, Louisiana andouille going to be enough for the gathering hordes? The affirmative RSVP rate was running at about 96%.

Not to worry. Despite my protestations that I had everything under control, "although a bottle of wine would be welcome, if you feel like bringing one," everyone bought food, and dessert, and wine, and I probably could have fed forty.

 

Just one little corner of the groaning board. Wild rice with a trio of mushroom species bundled up in lotus leaf, by Ordoubadi. With friends who bring platters like this to your gumbo social, you can almost get away with not even bothering to cook at all, and just blaming the lack of gumbo on a last minute scorched roux accident. But I'm ahead of myself. "First," as it says at the beginning of hundreds of Louisiana recipes, "you make a roux."

Roux, along with okra, is one of the defining, character-bestowing ingredients in gumbo. White flour, slow-fried in bubbling oil, must be whisked constantly to avoid it carbonizing and infecting your gumbo with the acrid taste of arson. Donald Link, of the brilliant Cochon Restaurant, in New Orleans, whose gumbo recipe I was following, writes that "the process of making roux can be hypnotic.... Watching the oil and flour mixture slowly change color and begin to take on its unique aroma gives you plenty of time to be alone with your thoughts."

Indeed, with the narcotic swirling of the whisk, I began almost to hallucinate. The surface of  bubbling roux has the quality of primeval swamp, as if, ultimately, life may emerge from it, the product of some wondrous accident of science and heat. The world and my thoughts, reflected in this toasting caramel lake, put me in mind of that film school classic, Jean-Luc Godard's cosmos as experienced in the swirling bubbles on the surface of a cup of coffee. It's from "2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais d'elle," and while sort of fun, it is almost staggering in its pretentiousness:

It is now time to admit the artistic debt the Association for the Promulgation of Gumbo owes to Godard in its own cinematic debut from early 2011, even if our version is perhaps too minimalist to reach the same heights of pretension:

Almost ready: one wants the roux, says Link, to be the color of a dark copper penny.

Lots of stock.

Perhaps the defining moment in the preparation of gumbo is the addition of the so-called Holy Trinity, along with abundant cajun seasonings, to the lava-like roux. This mixture of equal parts finely chopped onions, celery, and peppers is an obvious manifestation of Louisiana's French culinary heritage, for the Holy Trinity is essentially a mirepoix, with the peppers substituting for carrots. Once this flavor-base is added to the stock, the only remaining question is what sort of gumbo the dish will become. Will it be foot of pork or pile of crawdad? Back of crab or eye of newt? Just about anything can go in there, because no matter what you do next, now it's unquestionably a gumbo.

 

This one was andouille and chicken, cooked until the chicken was shedding off the bones into string. Last to go in is the okra, a symbol of fertility and virility thanks to many attributes, from its proud, firm shape to its womb-like interior cavity, bursting with seed and slime. Okra likely originates from Africa and was brought to the new world for or by slaves to grow and eat, and Cubans call the vegetable quimbombo, a word almost identical to various West African Bantu names for okra. Gombo, ngombo, gumbo, okra is synonymous with the dish.

The (mostly) Manhattan contingent, the Brooklyn locals having (mostly) wandered home in a gumbo-induced stupor by this point. This and the first photo courtesy of WoWe.

That is the bottom of the kettle you see there. Malheuresement le gumbo est terminé.

Brooklyn Multiculturalism at its best

"La Boulangerie Lopez," a bakery that obviously takes Eurozone Unity seriously. And they are not kidding. While the Mexican hipster at the counter was bagging up my tamales a most beautiful brioche came steaming out of the oven in the back of the shop. This is a newish place up on Fifth Avenue between 18th and 19th. The tamales were not bad, either.

Loafing on New Year's Eve

I'm attracted to superstition, but I'm not superstitious, except perhaps when it comes to natural processes. It doesn't seem to me to be black magic to feel that if the rivers are flowing and the clouds are blowing and the trees are growing as they should, then there is room for optimism. This is the source of the solace I take from the natural world, from wild places. The tide has gone out, but it will come in again.

So I took it as an auspicious auguring that the loaves of bread I baked as my contribution to a New Year's eve dinner last night were, if I say so myself, magnificent. The dough behaved as I expected it to, it swelled and rose in accordance with my understanding of the natural cycle of fermentation, understanding gained after significant effort and observation and much poking and prodding of moist compilations of flour and water. This is a blow-hardian way of saying that my sourdough starter is kicking ass right now.

It has been months since I used commercial yeast. I have no use for the stuff. An untouched jar of it sits in the fridge in the ghetto of mouldering condiments. This bread is made from water, flour and salt, one less ingredient than the Germans allow in their beer. Unless you count life itself as an ingredient, the wild, living yeasts of the air, which find their way into the starter to feed and multiply and expand. When they are doing their job this well, it is hard not to take it as a sign that it will be a glorious 2012!

I'm not bragging, I'm just saying: I would put these loaves up against Balthazar's in a shaolin kung-fu battle for bread supremacy. I apologize that there is no crumb shot, but I didn't want to bust any of these open before taking them to dinner, and snapping pictures of my own bread laid out on the groaning buffet table seemed dreadfully gauche, even for me. Technical details in the comments.

Will work for rum

Some forty-eight hours ago, a cry for help went out from Daric Schlesselman to the members of the Van Brunt Stillhouse facebook page. Schlesselman is my neighbor, three houses and a vacant lot to the west of me, and he recently launched a new alcoholic business venture. His rum distillery is another neighbor of mine, three blocks and several vacant lots to the east, and I had been eager to stop in for a visit for some time, just to watch the sweet nectar drip out of the alembic.

"Time to start the rum!" He wrote. "As a few of you know, I had to buy sugar in 20 oz. bags this time around. I know. I'm insane. Who knew that sugar is seasonal? I would love some help cutting open all the bags for the first batch. I'm offering a bottle of rum to anyone who comes and helps open sugar...."

His message captures the essence of what it is that I love about my neighborhood. New York City is not a place where people typically stop next door to borrow an onion, an egg, or a couple of inches of ginger, but I do this sort of thing all the time. Red Hook is a village unto itself, hidden away in a remote corner of Brooklyn, surrounded on two and a half sides by water. Although the population seems almost to have tripled in recent years, and I see many new and unfamiliar faces in the streets, it retains the kind of casually intimate public life and community self-awareness described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities as essential to any thriving neighborhood. Despite her analysis, these are today rare commodities.

I'm proud and happy to live in a place where my neighbors are comfortable sending out the Brooklyn artisanal locavore version of an invitation to an Amish barn-raising. For this to work, however, one has not only to think it's a lovely idea, but also to participate. So, yesterday morning, after a couple of pots of tea, I clipped the box-cutter my father had conveniently given me for Christmas onto my belt, and headed down the block.

"She was only a bootlegger's daughter, but he loved her still."

"

Denise and Tim, unbaggin'

In Haitian kréyol they say "men anpil, chay pa lou," a classic aphorism of communal labor that plausibly originated with slaves cutting sugar cane. Meaning: "with lots of people, the burden is light," or, "many hands make light work." Daric had slightly pessimistically written "depending on work flow and number of hands, I'll be there into the evening [i]f you'd like to help but can't come until later...." I arrived about ten-thirty and was home an hour later, five hundred pounds of organic, unrefined sugar having been liberated from its packaging. When that bottle of rum shows up on my doorstep I just know those few drops of neighborhood sweat that went into it are going to make it taste that much sweeter.

We gathered around the vat, knives flashing. Derek Dominy (center) proposed that we form a union, but we were finished work before we had even had time to have our first meeting.

The merry crew, after licking their fingers and rinsing their blades.

 Daric and his wife, Sarah Ludington, checking the plumbing. The sugar is dissolved into a slurry and then put into a holding tank much like a wine cuve, where rare Guadeloupian yeasts will hasten it on its journey rumward.

Stirring the sweetness. This would go great with pancakes.

Desert Therapy

On jets flying into Las Vegas from the east, the bubbling red hills of the River of Fire are visible out the starboard side windows. Almost grotesque, these wave-like ridges of orange sandstone rise incongruously out of the desert floor, weathered into globules, as if molten. I didn't know what they were when I saw them, but later, when I saw "River of Fire" on the map, fifty or sixty miles east of the city, I was certain that's what I had been looking at out of the airplane.

It is perhaps a commonplace to note that Las Vegas is the most appalling city in the United States. My heart freshly broken, I was working on a film shoot when I probably ought to have been at a spa, or reclining on a psychiatrist's couch. I was staying at the Palazzo, twin luxury tower of the absurd Venetian, with its plastic indoor canals, imported gondolier-chanteurs ($65 for a twelve minute paddle through a mall, now that's entertainment!) and multi-story shopping experience replete with all the finest names in the franchise pantheon. There are more glorified fast-food joints bearing Mario Batali's imprimatur than you can shake a pair of chopsticks at. In my room, on my California king-size bed, operating my remote-controlled draperies, I couldn't stop thinking that someone else should be there by my side, my one-time best friend, to ridicule the laughable opulence, the black-marbled bath, the gold-brocade settee, the view, from twenties stories up, of an endless acreage of gleaming conference-center roofing dotted with air-conditioning units.

I had the brilliant idea that I would extend my trip by a couple of days, and drive away from the neon and the plastic, deep into the desert, and surround myself with an eternity of primeval rock, soothe my soul, contemplate my faults, bravely face the future.

After four days in the canned, smoky casino air and the eternal twilight of the utterly bogus Piazza San Marco, I felt I needed to get into the desert just to recover from Las Vegas, let alone the catastrophic trainwreck of my serial monogamy. The good news? Speeding along the blacktop with the windows rolled down in the desert cool, the gilded shark-fin towers of the Vegas strip receded quickly into the distance, and from memory. Surrounded by millenia-old sandstone bluffs unchanged since long-before they were wandered only by barefoot Anasazi, the grotesqueries of Vegas barely registered on my consciousness. The bad news? The heartbreak, not so easily diminished.

To try and recover from the sudden and unexpected shattering of your life by going alone into the desert, is a double-edged sword. In retrospect, I would argue that it was very brave of me. Lying, alone in my tent, the freezing desert sky filled with a billion stars, was a magnificent exercise in solitude. It was absolutely quiet. Except for the occasional bird or passing airplane, even during the day the winter desert was absolutely quiet, with a quality of silence I have not experienced since being in Antarctica. At night it was a perfect, complete silence. To be there, alone, is manifestly to prove that you are capable of being alone, that the world will not come to an end just because you are alone in it. Geologically, I was surrounded by proof that the world has existed for millions of years, compared with which the entirety of humanity and the triviality of its billion broken hearts is but an infinitesimal blip on the timeline of wind-sculpted rock.

But the tent was built for two people. Not for nothing is the desert the setting I find most compelling for Waiting for Godot. At least Vladimir and Estragon had one other to talk to. In south-west Utah I drove through places where pressing "seek" on the car-radio resulted only in an endless loop of blurry numbers. Like those numbers, the mind races. It fills with a turbulent tide of self-doubt, fear, longing and loss. The salty water sloshed around in my brain, constantly threatening to leak out of my eyes as fragile tears. The staggering beauty of the folded red rock and the striated canyons sometimes barely registered. I wanted to lose myself in the landscape, but it was difficult not to drive past all the magnificence as if trying to escape, or fleeing a crime scene.

I got to the airport four hours early, where I enjoyed bad enchiladas and the hilarious immorality of a departure gate clogged with one-armed bandits, cynically exploiting the desperate addicts who deposit the last of their dollars while listening with one ear for their row to be called.

 

As we slid through the orange midnight sky into JFK, I thought, the lights of New York City haven't looked this good in years.