Happy Thanksgiving!

I love this holiday.

Mohawk protestors thwarted an attempt to deliver a new police station building to Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory on Thursday.
Confrontations between the protesters and police including the Tyendinaga police force and the OPP earlier in the day lead to a temporary closing of York Rd. By 4:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon however, the scene around the York Rd. location was more like a family picnic after police presence had ended.
“We want the band council to get its priorities straight,” Dan Doreen, spokesman for the protestors, said, “Our kids can't drink the water at the Quinte Mohawk School. We have been protesting this police station for over a year now.”
Chief Maracle of the Mohawk Territory was not available for comment to The Pioneer.
The protestors claim that there has been a lack of consultation in the community over the purchase of the new portable building. Initial plans were to deliver the building about a year ago. Protests at the time successfully delayed the delivery.
The buildings have been temporarily stored at the 10-Acre Truck Stop west of Belleville for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Protest Video

Aspic, Headcheese and Other Nightmares

My grandmother could suspend any food in clear geletin. It was some kind of badge of honour for her. She absolutely loved a food unit called headcheese. It's not cheese. It's head parts floating in strange thickened jelly. My grandmother was really skinny but she still managed to suffer from gout. I loved telling people my grandmother had gout and teasing my grandmother about it because it was always something I associate with medeval robber barons or some wealthy royalty in the Rennaisance.

I always checked "behind the curtain" when my grandmother was cooking because she was evil in being able to make the most repulsive sounding body parts and food taste amazing. And I used to try and avoid any scary food I thought she was smuggling into my system.

The scariest thing my grandmother cooked...who I must really qualify was an amazing chef...but like a lot of great chefs they love making scary food...

Sorry...about tangent ...but the scariest thing my grandmother made was a real party favourite with her girlfriends and her when they played bridge. When my grandmother had a bridge party the dreaded jelly salad was not far away. Jelly salad. Doesn't that just sound wrong? My grandmother had one ridiculous recipe she made which had avacados, lime jello, marshmellows and god knows what else. I'm not making thisup. It was something she found in a magazine in the 1960's. I ate it...but it was hideous. And my sister and I have been known to fall on the floor laughing remembering this hideous salad. Some day I'm going to surprise my sister and show up at her door with this nightmare party favour.

And this bloody salad came to my memory this week when we met up for book club this week. We all met up at a friends house to discuss YouTube movie Kymatica. (click on hyper text to watch all 9 segments. We had a potluck dinner together before our discussion, very nice). I made some pesto...but I also made some deviled eggs. I had the clear container especially designed above for transporting deviled eggs. Yeah, really, they make containers for deviled eggs. It was funny because I took public transit and everyone was staring at these deviled eggs and smiling. When I got downtown to transfer a homeless guy asked "Are those deviled eggs?" I said, "Yep" and he said" I love deviled eggs" And I said, "Well you better have one then". I thought of my grandmothers crazy jelly salad because I wasn't sure if my container was for transporting deviled eggs or setting aspic. It's probably for eggs because it's so huge and thin...but I could easily imagine that Green jello/avacado/marshmellow salad in it. Shudder.


Aspic is a dish in which ingredients are set into a gelatin made from a meat stock or consommé. It is also known as cabaret.
When cooled, stock made from meat congeals because of the natural gelatin found in the meat. The stock can be clarified with egg whites, and then filled and flavored just before the aspic sets. Almost any type of food can be set into aspics. Most common are meat pieces, fruits, or vegetables. Aspics are usually served on cold plates so that the gel will not melt before being eaten. A meat jelly that includes cream is called a chaud-froid. Historically, meat jellies were made before fruit and vegetable jellies. By the Middle Ages at the latest, cooks had discovered that a thickened meat broth could be made into a jelly. A detailed recipe for aspic is found in Le Viandier, written in around 1375.
Aspic is an ingredient rather than a dish. Aspic, made from clarified stock and gelatin, is used for many things; it can be used as a binder to hold other ingredients together in terrines, or sealers in such foods as pate en croute.



Deviled eggs
The origin of deviled eggs can't be attributed to one specific person, company, date or town. It is a culinary amalgam of history and taste. The concept of deviled eggs begins with Ancient Rome. Spicy stuffed eggs were known in 13th century Andalusia. The name is an 18th century invention.

Not long after the Ancient Greeks and Romans domesticated fowl, egg dishes of all kinds figured prominently in cookery texts. Eggs were eaten on their own (omelets, scrambled) and employed as congealing agents (custard, flan, souffles). The ancestor of deviled eggs? Ancient Roman recipes for boiled (to various degrees) eggs served with spices poured on top:

"Boiled eggs. Are seasoned with broth, oil, pure wine, or are served with broth, pepper and laser."
--Apicius: Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome, edited and translated by Joseph Dommers Vehling [Dover:New York] 1977 (p. 180)
"Soft-boiled eggs," The Classical Cookbook, Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger [J.Paul Getty Museum:Los Angeles] 1996 (p. 177)
---features pine kernels, lovage, celery leaf, fish sauce, honey, white wine vinegar, and black pepper

"Pine nut sauce for medium-boiled eggs," A Taste of Ancient Rome, Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa, translated by Anna Herklotz [University of Chicago:Chicago] 1992 (p. 47)
---features medium boiled eggs, pine nuts, vinegar, honey, pepper & lovage

The first recipes for stuffed, hard-boiled were printed in medieval European texts. These cooks stuffed their eggs with raisins, cheese and sweet spices. Platina's De Honesta Voluptate [15th century Italian text] instructs cooks thusly:

"28. Stuffed eggs
Make fresh eggs hard by cooking for a long time. Then, when the shells are removed, cut the eggs through the middle so that the white is not damaged. When the yolks are removed, pound part with raisins and good cheese, some fresh and some aged. Reserve part to color the mixture, and also add a little finely cut parsley, marjoram, and mint. Some put in two or more egg whites withspices. When the whites of the eggs have been stuffed with this mixture and closed, fry them over slow fire in oil. When they have been fried, add a sauce made from the rest of the egg yolks pounded with raisins and moistened with verjuice and must. Put in ginger, cloves, and cinnamon and heat them a little while with the eggs themselves. This has more harm than good in it."
---Platina: on the Right Pleasure and Good Health, Critical edition and translation of De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, Mary Ella Milham [Medival & Renaissance Texts & Studies:Tempe AZ] 1998
The Making of Stuffed Eggs, An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century, translated by Charles Perry

The practice of hard boiling eggs was popular in Tudor England: "By the later sixteenth century the boiling of eggs in their shells in water had become a common practice. Prepared thus they were more digestible that roasted eggs; but less so than poached eggs, which always earned the highest praise form the medical men."
---Food and Drink in Britain, C. Anne Wilson [Academy Chicago Publishers:Chicago] 1991 (p. 144) From The Food Timeline


Speaking of scary...that is our dinner above simmering away. It's poached chicken in za'atar and beer. Just throw together sumac, ground black sesame seeds, kosher organic sea salt and thyme. Yum!

Related Links:

1) Hideous recipe for Green Jelly Salad...
2) Avacado lime jello recipe, gag...
3) Jello-Salad
4) More scary Granny recipes...

Las Vegas Anniversary

Yep...a year ago today Stagg and I woke up in Las Vegas and went downtown to the courthouse and got our marriage licence. I've got better pictures than these two, which we took obviously later at a Vegas chapel...where Bon Jovi got married...but I need to get ink for scanner...it won't even scan right now if I don't have ink. So here are two photos from the catalogue where I ordered the fancy copies without the word "proof". However, I'm rather fond of the word "proof" tamped all over the pics...


Casino hopping...

This is the woman who helped us find wedding rings at SEARS. No shit, we got our wedding rings at SEARS.

Front "yard" of the threshold Stagg carried me over...I love this courtyard entrance...

Back "yard"...we have a fire escape we often sit outside on and here is the view...

Um, that is me on the balcony of our hotel one morning in Las Vegas wearing a "bride" baseball cap...

Canadian Porn!

Now...this is what I call good fucking eh tv. Battle of The Blades is a little bit like that old movie (written by Tony Gilroy btw) The Cutting Edge where a figure skater is paired up with a hockey player. One of the best segments was watching the guys try to skate with picks. Hilarious!

Battle of the Blades is a Canadian figure skating reality show and competition that airs on CBC Television. It is broadcast from in front of a live studio audience at the historic Maple Leaf Gardens.
Premiering 4 October 2009, the series resembles the international reality show Dancing with the Stars. A number of former NHL players are paired with prominent female figure skaters and perform routines.
The show is hosted by Hockey Night in Canada's Ron MacLean and four-time World Figure Skating Champion Kurt Browning.
The judges for competition are Sandra Bezic, Kelly Hrudey, and Dick Button.

Anne Frank In Archival Footage

Oh what a beautiful piece of film. Thank you to a friend in Alberta who sent me this today. Anne Frank can be seen on a little balcony above the street watching a newly married pair of neighbours walk out into the street. I am so amazed...look how vibrant the street is and busy and full of life. The date is July 22, 1941. It's so incredible to see the life force and people moving so freely in the Amsterdam street. It's impossible and heart breaking to me to imagine how different things will be in such a short time in the future from this very moment.

This video can be found at the official Anne Frank YouTube page. Isn't YouTube AWESOME!?

Why Carl Jung?

Carl Jung is a massive figure or "rite of passage" for many art students. Whether one comes to any conclusion about Jung's thoughts or theories...an art student would be unlikely to have not encountered a teacher or fellow student who wasn't exploring Jung's ideas.

Carl Jung gave respect to feelings and dreams and the inner life of the human being. If only for that contribution to the practice of studying or observing the human condition he is a remarkable thinker.

For me Jung was interesting because he articulated something that I only felt intuitively as a child in museums and art galleries. This is that patterns, themes, content and form seem to have common elements around the world. I love folk lore and Jung gave oral narratives, non-agricultural based artwork validity in many ways. Jung respected artmaking and storytelling from all kinds of cultures, social classes and pre-literate or non-verbal languages. Although I haven't given a lot of thought to Carl Jung in many years...I am very curious about this new publication of The Red Book. I absolutely love the trailer for the book above how it is made with seriousness and with a little fun anecdotes thrown in.The publication of The Red Book is a book lovers wet dream and any book geek will likely be pretty excited about this event. The video cure does capture the feeing of an momentous event or spectacle. I hope visitors check out the video above...it's really quite well done and a lot of fun! Here is the Amazon link for The Red Book




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Here are some note from Wikipedia for those not familiar with this ever-controversial figure Carl Jung.


In 1913, when he was 38, Jung experienced a horrible "confrontation with the unconscious". He saw visions and heard voices. He worried at times that he was "menaced by a psychosis" or was "doing a schizophrenia". He decided that it was valuable experience, and in private, he induced hallucinations, or, in his words, "active imaginations". He recorded everything he felt in small journals. In 1914, Jung began to transcribe his notes into a large red leather-bound book, which he worked on, on and off, for sixteen years.

When he died, Jung left no instructions about what to do with what he called the "Red Book". His family eventually moved it to a bank vault in 1984. Sonu Shamdasani, a historian from London, for three years tried to convince Jung's heirs to publish it—they generally said no to every hint of an inquiry about it, and as of mid-September 2009 only about two dozen people had seen it. But Ulrich Hoerni, Jung's grandson who manages the Jung archives, decided to publish it. When money ran low, the Philemon Foundation was founded and raised more.

In 2007, two technicians for DigitalFusion, working with the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, painstakingly scanned one-tenth of a millimeter at a time with a 10,200-pixel scanner. It was published on October 7, 2009 in German with "separate English translation along with Shamdasani's introduction and footnotes" at the back of the book, according to Sara Corbett for The New York Times. She wrote, "The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical reality."

The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City will display the original and Jung's original small journals from October 7, 2009 to January 25, 2010. According to them, "During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation." Two-thirds of the pages bear Jung's illuminations of the text.


Jung had many friends and respected colleagues who were Jewish and he maintained relations with them through the 1930s when anti-semitism in Germany and other European nations was on the rise. However, until 1939, he also maintained professional relations with psychotherapists in Germany who had declared their support for the Nazi régime and there were allegations that he himself was a Nazi sympathizer. In his work 'Civilisation in Transition, Collected Works Volume X', however, Jung wrote of “… the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land, even those that concern him not at all."[

There are writings that show that Jung's sympathies were against, rather than for, Nazism. In his 1936 essay "Wotan", Jung described Germany as "infected" by "one man who is obviously 'possessed'...", and as "rolling towards perdition", and wrote "...what a so-called Führer does with a mass movement can plainly be seen if we turn our eyes to the north or south of our country." The essay does, however, speak in more positive terms of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer and his German Faith Movement which was loyal to Hitler.

He would later describe the Führer thus: "Hitler seemed like the 'double' of a real person, as if Hitler the man might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in order not to disturb the mechanism ... You know you could never talk to this man; because there is nobody there ... It is not an individual; it is an entire nation." In 1943, Jung aided the United States Office of Strategic Services by analyzing the psychology of Nazi leaders.

In an interview with Carol Baumann in 1948, Jung denied rumors regarding any sympathy for the Nazi movement, saying:
It must be clear to anyone who has read any of my books that I have never been a Nazi sympathizer and I never have been anti-Semitic, and no amount of misquotation, mistranslation, or rearrangement of what I have written can alter the record of my true point of view. Nearly every one of these passages has been tampered with, either by malice or by ignorance. Furthermore, my friendly relations with a large group of Jewish colleagues and patients over a period of many years in itself disproves the charge of anti-Semitism.

A full response from Jung discounting the rumors can be found in C.G Jung Speaking, Interviews and Encounters, Princeton University Press, 1977.

Jung recommended spirituality as a cure for alcoholism and he is considered to have had an indirect role in establishing Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung once treated an American patient (Rowland Hazard III), suffering from chronic alcoholism. After working with the patient for some time and achieving no significant progress, Jung told the man that his alcoholic condition was near to hopeless, save only the possibility of a spiritual experience. Jung noted that occasionally such experiences had been known to reform alcoholics where all else had failed.

Rowland took Jung's advice seriously and set about seeking a personal spiritual experience. He returned home to the United States and joined a Christian evangelical Re-Armament movement known as the Oxford Group. He also told other alcoholics what Jung had told him about the importance of a spiritual experience. One of the alcoholics he brought into the Oxford Group was Ebby Thacher, a long-time friend and drinking buddy of Bill Wilson, later co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Thacher told Wilson about the Oxford Group, and through them Wilson became aware of Hazard's experience with Jung. The influence of Jung thus indirectly found its way into the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, the original twelve-step program, and from there into the whole twelve-step recovery movement, although AA as a whole is not Jungian and Jung had no role in the formation of that approach or the twelve steps.

The above claims are documented in the letters of Carl Jung and Bill W., excerpts of which can be found in Pass It On, published by Alcoholics Anonymous. Although the detail of this story is disputed by some historians, Jung himself made reference to its substance — including the Oxford Group participation of the individual in question — in a talk that was issued privately in 1954 as a transcript from shorthand taken by an attender (Jung reportedly approved the transcript), later recorded in Volume 18 of his Collected Works, The Symbolic Life ("For instance, when a member of the Oxford Group comes to me in order to get treatment, I say, 'You are in the Oxford Group; so long as you are there, you settle your affair with the Oxford Group. I can't do it better than Jesus.'" Jung goes on to state that he has seen similar cures among Roman Catholics.

Literature
-Jung had a 16-year-long friendship with the author Laurens van der Post from which a number of books and a film were created about Jung's life.
-Hermann Hesse, author of works such as Siddhartha and Der Steppenwolf, was treated by Dr. Joseph Lang, a student of Jung. This began for Hesse a long preoccupation with psychoanalysis, through which he came to know Jung personally.[54]
-James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake, asks "Is the Co-education of Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable?" his answer perhaps being contained in his line "anama anamaba anamabapa." The book also ridicules Jung's analytical psychology and Freud's psychoanalysis by referring to "psoakoonaloose." Jung had been unable to help Joyce's daughter, Lucia, who Joyce claimed was a girl "yung and easily freudened." Lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was eventually permanently institutionalized.
-Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be read as an ironic parody of Jung's "four stages of eroticism."
-Jung appears as a character in the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. He appears as the therapist of Tashi, the novel's protagonist. He is usually called "Mzee" but is identified by Alice Walker in the afterword.
-Morris West's 1983 novel The World is Made of Glass investigates Jung's relationships with a mysterious woman patient, Toni Wolf, and Emma.
-Miguel Serrano had a long standing friendship with both Jung and Hesse, which he recalls in El Circulo Hermetico or Record of Two Friendships.
-Robertson Davies alludes to Jung's ideas in his novel Fifth Business and writes frequently of Jung in his letters.

Art
-The visionary Swiss painter Peter Birkhäuser was treated by a student of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, and corresponded with Jung regarding the translation of dream symbolism into works of art.
-American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy in 1939. His therapist made the decision to engage him through his art, leading to the appearance of many Jungian concepts in his paintings.

Television and film
-Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, one of art cinema's most renowned filmmakers, brought to the screen an exuberant imagery shaped by his encounter with the ideas of Carl Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Fellini preferred Jung to Freud because Jungian psychoanalysis defined the dream not as a symptom of a disease that required a cure but rather as a link to archetypal images shared by all of humanity.
-Jung and his ideas are mentioned often, and sometimes play an integral role, in the television series Northern Exposure. Jung even makes an appearance in one of the character's dreams.
Television programs have been devoted to Jung; for example, in 1984, an edition of the BBC documentary Sea of Faith was about Jung.
-Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket makes a mention of Jungian beliefs when the protagonist, Joker, mentions the duality of man he was displaying by wearing a peace button with 'born to kill' written on his helmet.
Jung and his ideas are referenced in the anime Serial Experiments Lain.[citation needed]
-In the American TV Series "Frasier" the main character, Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) and his brother, Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce) are both psychiatrists. While Frasier is a disciple of Freud, Niles bases his therapies on Jungian principles.

Music
-An opera, The Dream Healer, based on the book Pilgrim by Timothy Findley, centres on Jung's efforts to bridge the known and unknown aspects of the human mind.
-Jung appears on the cover of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the top row, between W.C. Fields and Edgar Allan Poe.
-Peter Gabriel's song "Rhythm of the Heat" (Security, 1982), tells about Jung's visit to Africa, during which he joined a group of tribal drummers and dancers and became overwhelmed by the fear of losing control of himself. At the time Jung was exploring the concept of the collective unconscious and was afraid he would come under control of the music. Gabriel learned about Jung's journey to Africa from the essay Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). In the song Gabriel tries to capture the powerful feelings the African tribal music evoked in Jung by means of intense use of tribal drumbeats. The original song title was Jung in Africa.
-On the cover of The Police's final album, Synchronicity, which was named after Carl Jung's theory, Sting is seen reading a book called "Synchronicity" by Carl Jung.
-The British composer Michael Tippett was one of the first composers to use Jungian archetypes[citation needed] as the basis for characterisation in his operas, such as The Midsummer Marriage and The Knot Garden. The notion of the Jungian reconciliation of opposites pervades the whole of Tippett's output.
-Mentions of Jung's work in Tool's song Forty-Six & 2

Superstar

This is my favourite Sonic Youth song.



From YouTube:

Todd Haynes [Far from heaven, Safe] burst upon the scene two years after his graduation with his now-infamous 43-minute "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987). Seizing upon the inspired gimmick of using Barbie and Ken dolls to sympathetically recount the story of the pop star's death from anorexia, he spent months making miniature dishes, chairs, costumes, Kleenex and Ex-Lax boxes, and Carpenters' records to create the film's intricate, doll-size mise-en-scene. The result was both audacious and accomplished as the dolls seemingly ceased to be dolls leaving the audience weeping for the tragic singer.

Unfortunately, Richard Carpenter's enmity for the film led to the serving of a "cease and desist" order in 1989, and despite the director's offer "to only show the film in clinics and schools, with all money going to the Karen Carpenter memorial fund for anorexia research," "Superstar" remains buried, one of the few films in modern America that cannot be seen by the general public.