afrojet

My House Shakes At Night
I remember the rain. I also remember these unending stretches of days where the sun hibernates in the deep pockets of the thick gray overcoat this city wears so well. But, I do not remember this wind – these heavy tempests that roll in around dusk and beat my evergreens throughout the night. Each morning, after I look out over the estate, I assess damages and then patiently roam the grounds, collecting the anemic limbs that didn’t make it to see the morning. I drag them all to the expanding brush pile in the Southwest corner of the lot, next to the holly trees.

Last night as the winds began to kick up and drive the rain horizontal, I noticed a soaked kid and his grumpy yellow dog struggling on my front stoop. I was directly below in the driveway and from my vantage point it looked like the kid was trying to choke the dog. I yelled up to him through the rain. He yelled back that his dog, this dog, had run away. He had found it on my stoop trying to break in. Smart dog. I walked up the front steps to find the kid yanking with everything he had on the collar of his stubborn hound. The dog clearly had no intention of budging one inch. I was hesitant to help the kid in his efforts as I have a healthy respect for dogs that I do not know. And this one already looked massively irritated. Eventually, after I presented my case and made it clear to the mutt that I had no intention of letting him into my abode, it relented a bit and presented an unconvincing happy face. But it took the arrival of the kid’s parents in minivan to satisfy the dog’s misgivings and assuage the dread of walking home in this weather. The inertia it displayed earlier was replaced by blinding speed as it leapt like a gazelle from my front porch through the open side door of the minivan. Crisis averted but something tells me this isn’t the last I’ll see of that hound.

Currently enjoying…

Music: The often overlooked Duke Pearson and his album The Phantom. The cuts written by Airto are massive toe-tappers.

Movies: Any documentary with the word ‘Grizzly’ in the title. Grizzly Man and Project Grizzly. And, oh yeah, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.

Books: The works of Helene Hanff. 84, Charing Cross Road and Q Legacy.

Television: The fact that at any hour of the day there’s bound to be some James Bond movie playing on some channel. Speaking of…The Guardian has a good piece about Sir Ken Adams, the production designer who is responsible for bringing to the screen all the those great sets from the early films.

Experiments With Jelly Beans and Other Firsts
This weekend saw some mad experiments in the kitchen, not all of which were good. I’m really not at that point in my cooking career where I should start improvising. Nope, I should be following recipes with strict obedience. The loose idea of ‘eyeballing’ amounts and measurements should still draw penalty flags and chants of ‘flagrant foul’ from my inner referee. My neighbor came over the other day whilst I was baking some cookies. He took one look at my cuisine laboratory and noticeably grimaced at the turd like droppings that had just come out of the oven. He remarked, “What the hell are those?”

“Cookies”. I said. “chocolate chip to be precise.”

“Man, those are really sorry looking”.

Defeated but realistic, I had to agree. In all honesty they tasted worse then they looked. And I have to imagine that chocolate chip cookies are pretty hard to fuck up. It doesn’t help matters that his wife is a professional baker. I should have never let that snarky unbeliever in my house in the first place.

Whatever. The fight continues. I shall not succumb to the shallow, uncultured tastes of every doubting Thomas. No. I shall press on and make delicate folds in the pie crust of the avant guard. In that spirit, I present to you the fruits of my latest epicurean experiments. Consider – nay, Behold! Jelly Beans and Wine! Really. It’s good. Trust me. To start, get yourself a bag of those exotic flavored Jelly Beans (the new valentine flavors are especially good for this) and a bottle of your favorite dry white wine. Pop individual beans and then chase them down with sips of wine. The different flavored beans bring out all kinds of crazy sweet (and sour) tastes from the wine. Serve as a dessert.

Continuing on the experimental cuisine vibe. This weekend, the misses and I visited the massive Asian market called Uwajimaya for the first time. This place is unbelievable. A whole aisle dedicated to soy sauce. Another for tofu! I came home with bags of exotic vegetables that I have no idea how to prepare. I can’t even remember what some of them are called. I even considered attempting to make my own sushi. But then I stopped. I took a deep breath and pictured my neighbor standing in my kitchen wearing a referee uniform. He was blowing a whistle and making some wild hand gestures before he exclaimed, “Hey SirCooksALot, I think you need to graduate chocolate chip cookie school before making the quantum leap to sushi school.” He’s got a good point. Fucker!

Another in a weekend of firsts for this newly transplanted Portlander, was an inaugural visit to the city dump. Not nearly as tantalizing as the Asian market but equally fragrant. Actually, the dump rules. Where else can adults go and throw things with violent force and break things and stomp on things without anybody batting an eye? Aggression is encouraged at the dump. It’s also very humbling and life affirming to see gigantic mountains of a cities refuse, sprawled out in concrete warehouses, bathed in warm fluorescence. It kinda gives you the chills. Or maybe that’s just the stench.

First Thursday
Cruised down to the Pearl District last night in our newly rented über-swank Chevy Malibu (they’re saying the Passat will be good-as-new by the 16th). Landry Deese (step-brother of the misses) and his partner Kim Hamblin were having an opening of their work at the Visage Artspace, a cool little eye-wear shop/gallery. Landry’s working on sculpting new amphibious species out of clay, complete with type written neo-biologies. Kim works in vivid technicolor multi-media (mostly paper, paint and nails – lots of nails). I like her work a lot (pictured above). If you get a chance, you should get down there and check it out.

After the opening, our motley crew ended up at a ridiculous bar/lounge called Apotheke. This all white, German, minimalist catastrophe is something to behold. In hindsight, I should have appreciated the clean aesthetic but the place seemed to be trying way to hard to not be a parody of itself. It didn’t help the vibe that the place was full of small pasty kids with asymmetrical hair cuts, all looking way too bored with life. Viva l’arte.

Bent Steel
Welcome to 2006, feel free to smash your car into anything you like. Uggh. Crashed up the new ride the other night. Great way to start the new year on the positive tip. Good news is nobody was hurt. I smacked into a parked car about three blocks from the Skelton Ranch. No one was in the parked car.

The accident occurred at night on a particularly tricky and narrow piece of residential road that has multiple switch backs on a steep grade. Another car was coming up the hill in the opposite direction where there is a bit of a blind corner. The car flicked its brights to let me know it was coming. That startled the heck out of me and I jogged the car to the right. I was unable to make a correction before slamming into a car that was parked on the road. Fucking hell.

The fantastically bizarre part of the story involves the folks whose car I hit. Turns out the car that I hit was actually a rental car. The car was rented because both of their SUV’s had been smashed in two separate incidents during the snow/ice storm we had a couple of weeks ago. These people were getting used to people crashing into their cars. It was almost like my name was Ed McMahon when I walked up to their door and told them I had killed their car. “Oh no problem, come on in, have a beer.”

Funny how we only get to know our neighbors when tragedy strikes.

So yeah, these folks were more than cool about it. Technically I didn’t even have an accident with them at all. I had an accident with Enterprise Car Rental. Fortunately insurance will pick up the tab for everything except a $500 deductible. None of this however makes me feel good about the fact that I smashed up a perfectly good car that was barely three month old. Luckily most of the damage is just to the body of the car and none of the air bags blew out.

Let’s be careful out there.

Stylin’ my Slips in the Double-O-Six

Welcome to another year of Afrojet blogging. It feels good to be back. Hope everyone had a fine holiday season. I’m enjoying the new year in massive comfort thanks to the lovely pair of replacement Uggs that I received from the misses. Without question, The Ugg slipper was the most used and appreciated item from my wardrobe in 2005 and I don’t think 2006 will be any different.

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions. The shame, the guilt, the failures – I’ll let other folks deal with those elephants. This year, I’ve decided that I will only ‘resolve’ to do something after it’s done. You’d be amazed how fast the win column fills up in the scorecard of life when you take this approach. My only real resolution that will be ongoing this year is to eat more Lemon Meringue pie. I will look back fondly on the final days of 2005 when I was kindly introduced to the pie. Sadly, I had made it 32 1/2 years without ever crossing paths with that tart treat. 2006 is all about righting that wrong. I have total confidence in my ability to make good on this resolution.

Ma Skelton was here for a solid visit over the holidays. Over bottomless cups of black coffee we plotted world dominations and cruised to different spots all over the city. Together we identified almost all of the flora and all varieties of vegetation on the Skelton plot and made designs for some hard yard work in the spring. The only mystery that remains is a large tree in the front yard that she claims is a Magnolia tree while other say it’s some kind of fruit tree. I am devoid of opinion on this subject.

After a cruel battle these last few weeks with the poison oak. I’m happy to report I’m about 90% recovered. I’ve still got some nasty marking on my right calf but I don’t think there will be any scaring. I am however resolved that if I ever venture out again on my fathers property I will be wearing one of these.

Also, I had some bizarre email hiccup between Christmas and the New Year, where all of my email was being duplicated like 50 times. At one point I had over 74,000 messages in my inbox. This brought a lot of emailing to a standstill and I had to do some major surgery to get things back to normal. So, for all you folks who emailed me pictures of cats (or lambs) wearing funny holiday hats or other good messages of cheer, you might consider resending them to me. Or not. It’s your call.

Minnesota Laughter And The Need To Scratch
The Portland weather people were at it again yesterday, forecasting great fear and untold troubles that were going to swoop down the Columbia Gorge and bring the city to a dead stand still. One weather personality claimed that the weather was going to be so bad that he had brought enough clothes to the studio to last him till Thursday. Ha! As punishment for his bullshit overstatements, he should be forced to wear every article he brought with him for every forecast until Thursday.

Sure we got a little dusting of snow and some rain but nothing remotely representative of those ‘Ice Storm 2005’ graphics that the news channels had running. Pretty underwhelming really.

It might just be me tho. I’m a little more than irritated. I’ve been plagued for a week now with a vicious case of Poison Oak that I picked up at my Dad’s property last weekend. It’s spread all over my belly and although the belly is not the worst place one could get the rash (I’ve had it in far worst places in my lifetime) it’s proven to be quite uncomfortable. Very fucking uncomfortable.

I’ve been pretty fortunate in life thus far. There’s only one thing that I’m allergic to and that’s the dreaded Poison Oak/Ivy weed. Unfortunately, I’m very allergic to it. When I get it, I gets it bad. The simple solution would be for me to just stay in The City. But from time to time I like to get out amongst the Wild Things and run through the forests. If I stick to well worn trails usually I don’t have a problem. Funny then, that my father would buy a piece of property that is completely overrun with the one thing that can bring his son to his knees. It’s like, if I was Superman, my father (Jor-El) has built a house made entirely of Kryptonite.
Could be that when this Poison Oak clears up I’m going to have to check myself into therapy to figure out why my father would do this to me.

Say Hello To My Little Friends
Yup. Snowbabies in the house. Gaze upon these petite porcelain statuettes with all your holiday jealousy. I got ’em and you do not. You think you got holiday spirit? Oh no, my friend. You got squat next to my bedecked babies. This is just the beginning – the tip of the iceberg of what will go down in history as the greatest collection of Department 56 figurines ever amassed by one human. My previous collection of illuminated holiday animals will pale by comparison. I will start a new blog just to document the building of my porcelain empire. A new day is dawning…

Happiness Fashion Spread!
More poor decision making: trying to use the Remington 870 to fell your Christmas tree. It’s messy and unless you’re using slugs or good buckshot it’s pretty damn time consuming.

(Model: Afrojet, Photographer, DRF from the Verb Squad, Hooded Sweatshirt: Champion Sportswear, Corduroy Jacket: The Gap, Jeans: Levis, Boots: Red Wings, Gun: Remington)

Also, vintage photos with santa, and Beatnik Snowman available on eBay.

The Holidays Are Magical
I should be hung up by my thumbs for some of the loose and lazy thinking on my part this weekend. Indeed, sometimes the best made plans go catastrophically awry. Certainly, chief amongst those poorly thought out weekend schemes was the idea that I might save a few Christmas dollars by chopping down my own tree on my dad’s property for regal display at the Ranch. I had imagined a tree display that would make local headlines. What I got was something that would make even Charlie Brown cry.

My dad’s property doesn’t lack for evergreen trees. There’s thousands of ’em. Unfortunately, through years of Christmas commercialization, we’ve all got a good idea of what makes a proper Christmas tree. It’s about six and a half feet tall with a straight stem, it’s shaped like a nice tapered triangle, and dense as hell. For good or ill, those are the proper measurements. My tree looks like a gawky stringy teenager who grew too fast for her feet and has trouble with the whole balance thing.

Somehow, when hunting for a tree I lost all sense of scale and domestic proportions. The tree I brought home measured 15 1/2 feet from head to tail, which, when properly set up meant that the top five feet of the tree ran across the ceiling like some ridiculous Dr. Seuss drawing. After trimming it down to a more manageable eight feet, the thing was a hopeless embarrassment – a mean caricature of ‘Holiday Spirit’.

To make matters worse, ALL Christmas tree stands are sold out around town! The only thing I was able to purchase was a lonely stand on some back shelf at Fred Meyer. And even though it clearly stated on the box: “For Trees Up To 7 Feet Tall”, I bought the fucking thing anyway. I was desperate. Turns out they weren’t kidding about the 7 Feet thing. My trees continual refusal to stand properly means that this afternoon I will be feeding the entire thing face first into my fireplace. Then I will pay the neighbor kid $50 to go to the Boy Scouts Tree Farm and buy me a $100 Christmas Tree.

Going Down South
Heading down to Pa Skelton’s Southern Oregon Ranch this weekend. Plans have been made for rural styled wild west target practice, including the purchase of plastic crow decoys! Also, we’ll be bringing down other appliances and “white elephant” household items that have been voted off the home decor island. I’ll be shooting a 38 revolver for the first time so I’m more than a little excited.

In addition to shooting there should be some chopping as well. My Dad said he’s got some nice Christmas tree specimens on the property that we can claim as our own.

Only somewhat related to chopping, Peanut Butter Wolf has a great Holiday Music Mix up on Stomesthrow.

And iTunes Signature Maker “analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to”. Here is what mine sounds like.