My Night with Adobo

I love food.  Truly.  I memorized a recipe for homemade chocolate chip cookies when I was six or seven.  I learned how to make a perfect omelet in high school.  When I studied abroad during college, I collected Ghanaian recipes and sent them around to all my abroad-mates.  And last night, oh last night, it was... amazing.  When I told my coworkers what I ate, they burst out laughing – look at the giddy white kid who just discovered Spanish seasoning!  That’s right, last night I marinated skirt steak in homemade adobo (although you could argue it was more of a sofrito) and in so doing, rocketed myself into a coma of pure foodie ecstasy.  After tacos, guacamole, salsa, three coronas, two packs of gushers, all while listening to my recently acquired Fragile LP, I passed out on the couch smiling ear to ear.

My first adobo experience was in Somerville, Massachusetts a few weeks ago.  Somerville isn’t exactly the mothership of ethnic diversity but the internet tells me that 1 in 10 people who live there is Hispanic/Latino and the internet never lies.  A buddy of mine grilled skirt steaks marinated in his adobo and after one bite, I knew I needed to make it myself.  Fast forward to last night.

I arrived home late but I was determined to embrace the spicier side of my heritage (despite my florescent complexion, my last name is Guimaraes and although that's not Hispanic, Latino or Spanish, we're close enough, dammit).  First off, you combine all the ingredients in a food processor.  For a boy, this is the cooking equivalent of a sword fight with the toll booth operator to pass through the toll.  Second, you can’t have tacos without guacamole and salsa so I gleefully made a righteous mess of avocados, onions and tomatoes.  Lastly, the recipe called for beer and they sell THAT in packages of six soooooo do the math?

After food processing and marinating, I spent an hour or so catching up on current affairs.  Back into the kitchen to broil the steaks – alas, I do not own a grill.  While the steaks were cooking, I perfected my lime-juice-to-corona ratio!  Without lime, Corona has an amazing ability to taste like mule tears (stay with me here) but squeeze a lime slice into it and you’ve just produced the green potion from Legend of Zelda.

DING!  The steaks are done!

Tortilla, melt some cheese, add lettuce, tomato, onion, cover with slices of steak annnnnnd: it was as if I had never eaten before.  I sat on the couch loving every bite of seasoned goodness, washing it down with corona, a chip here or there with salsa or quac.  I couldn’t stop from moaning.  My roommate told me to quit being so dramatic but she’s a vegetarian so how could she understand my heaven?  I told her, “You don’t understand.  This is the vacation.  When I head home this weekend, I’ll have to help my mom with her computer and clean out the garage and fix the car’s rattling AC but sitting here right now, eating this delicious food, relaxing - this is the vacation.  Nothing could make it–”  And that’s when I remembered my Fragile LP.

Like wine, some years of music are better than others.  2008 gave us tremendous albums from Fleet Foxes, Cut Copy, TV on the Radio and M83.  1971 gave us Led Zeppelin III and IV, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and Yes’s Fragile.  And like I’ve said in the past, vinyl is a great way to listen to music.  As Roundabout ended, as South Side of the Sky climaxed, as Heart of the Sunrise began... I simply passed out.  Apparently, I asked my roommate to repeat something as my eyes clothes and my head dropped to my chest.

I woke up on the couch around four in the morning still smiling.  A few hours of bed-sleep later, I cleaned all the dishes and fantasized about today’s lunch.  I’m listening to 808’s and Heartbreak (another 2008 gem).  Maybe I’ll do Indian buffet...

Dear Music

This weekend, I picked up a few albums I’ve been meaning to dig into for some time.  The latest Sufjan Stevens, the latest Dream Theater and a few in between.  As I walked through Carroll Gardens yesterday in the pleasant temporal nightmare that is Daylight Savings Time, I listened mostly (embarrassingly) to Dream Theater.  You know, I say embarrassingly but A dramatic Turn of Events is fucking out of this world.  Anyway, last night as I was going to bed, Sufjan.  This morning on the way to work, Panda Bear.  Now that I’m at work I've got the Chick Corea record that won a Grammy oozing out of my desk speakers.  The soundtrack of my life is varied and incredible and most importantly, always playing.

Picture a basic American Colonial house.  Got the shape?  Now paint it brown and scale it down to the size of a Happy Meal container.  Handle for a roof, six buttons on the second floor and a little plastic window right in the middle... what you’re picturing is my Cassette Player from the 1980s.  The most effective tool in my defense against the enemies of childhood: boredom, monsters and having to listen to my siblings.  Basically, if you took this image:

and photo shopped my Tape Player over the Teddy Bear, you’d get my nightly sleeping experience.

Like most parents, my folks would ground me now and then.  But it wasn’t about candy or phone-time or TV.  No, if they really wanted to punish me, my parents would take away my tape player for the night.  I’m not sure if they knew it was my Aragorn to the Boogeyman’s Voice of Sauron but they definitely knew I loved the thing.  And it had magical powers; a soul, even!  One night, while listening to the instrumental part of the Ghost Busters soundtrack, the curtains in my room blew open just a little during the creepiest section of the score.  I very nearly shat myself.  I don’t know if my tape player thought I’d enjoy the experience or if it was actually a sadistic anti-hero; a deranged defender sociopath who loved and hated me.  Whoa.

The first tape I owned was Pearl Jam’s Versus.  My older sister gave it to me and the first time I played it, I was terrified of the rock-awesomeness that exploded out of the single speaker.  I didn’t get it.  I didn’t like it.  I couldn’t stop listening to it.  Every night, I’d play it again and eventually realized I was in love with the album.  It took me fifteen years to fully embrace the lesson that sometimes you end up loving things you can’t stand on the first go around.

Eventually, I moved on to a “My First Sony”.  I couldn’t tell you what I listened to at night but Scott and Todd on 95.5 woke me up every morning.  The alarm could be set to one of four different sounds (including a coked-out woodpecker) or the radio.  Although I’m not a huge fan of morning radio DJs, WPLJ played a couple songs that always kick-started my morning (Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day”, All-4-One’s, “I Swear”, or Genesis’, “I Can’t Dance”).

Next up, a Sony Boom box, tons of CDs and leaving Top 40 radio for classic rock and jazz: Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin.  Then Phish, Miles' Kind of Blue & Coltrane's Blue Train... it’s amazing that the laser in the CD tray didn’t burn a hole through the discs I spun day in and day out.

Fast forward through CD players, iPods, a shower radio (really awesome) and I now have an iMac full of music, a Technics turntable and two boxes of LPs, a bunch of MFSL recordings, three pairs of headphones (Klipsch, Grado’s, and a pair of in-ear monitors) and an itching desire to snag a sweet pair of cabinet speakers for the living room.

I want to thank someone.  My sister Cate for that Pearl Jam album.  My sister Jen who taught me not to “kill a record” by overplaying it.  My dad for the time we listened to “Gimme Shelter” in the garage even though we were already home.  My mom for encouraging me to sing along to Tina Turner in the car.  Kyle & Congdon for writing music, Drew & Greg for playing music, the wind-up, Skidmore.  So many people gave me so much music that really, I want to thank Music itself.  Victor Wooten says Music is a woman and she's all about communication.  If that’s the case, she’s most incredible woman who’s ever walked the earth.  I want to thank her for letting me play and work and create and listen.

Meanwhile, back to work for me.  But not before queuing up LCD Soundsystem and turning the dial on my desk speakers a little further to the right.

A quick note

Monday was the highest point of both my life and my career so far.  Since the two are magically held together with Music, the highs and lows of one always correspond to the other.  I want to talk all about it but haven't had the time to sit down and write it all out.  I will, however, give you two points:

First, last week was terrible (as you can see from reading my entries about breaking points and Victoria Asher).  This week was amazing, exclusively due to Music.  Next time I feel so down, I'll have to remember that as my beautiful sister Jen says, "Life is a crazy parade."

Second, I was asked last Saturday after stepping off the stage, if I enjoyed playing the drums.  Anyone who's ever seen me play knows the answer to this, or so I thought.  In any event, people match their instrument.  Most trombonists are intelligent, most french-horn players are unique and most trumpeters have a fantastic sense of humour.  If I had my way, I'd love to play a flute based on it's size compared to a drum set but I'm not a flutist, I'm a drummer.  The drums are my most direct connection to Music.  They are the building blocks for the bridge to Music as well as the shoes that let me dance with and mold Music.

To answer the question: yes, I enjoy playing the drums.  More importantly, they allow me to expand.  They help me excavate the energy of my surroundings and reshape it into whatever I choose.  There is no other instrument or method of communication that would allow me to express myself so fundamentally.  They are dynamic and beautiful and deeply rooted in human history.  But above all else, I love the drums because they chose me.