Summer Soundtrack 2017

Well, “fall is settling in, days are getting short again, and the morning’s getting real nice for sleeping…” so I better write this down before it fades away.

This was our summer’s iPhone soundtrack in the car and in the kitchen:

Amanda Ann Platt: “The Birthday Song”

Colin Hay: “Are You Looking At Me?”

Peter Gabriel: “More Than This”

Mike Doughty: “Light Will Keep Your Heart Beating In The Future”

Weezer’s cover of The Cars’ “You Might Think”

Suitcase Junket: “Mountain of Mind” and “Everybody Else”

Dawes: "Somewhere Along The Way" and "All Your Favorite Bands"

Elliot and I heard the Amanda Ann Platt song on WEXT 97.7 after our sunrise kayak trip to Round Lake with Kelsey and Colleen.  We were on our way to meet everybody for waffles at The Iron Roost in Ballston Spa.  A great day, and most of it happened before 10 AM.   It’s nice to attach that song to the memory of it.

How to make home-made pizza

At least at the moment, you guys love this more than take-out.

Here's how I make it.

1. Buy a pizza stone or two. I usually cook with these in the oven, but you can use them outside on the gas grill too.  IMPORTANT:  Preheat the oven to 420 with the pizza stone in it.  (The photos show an oven set at 410 because our fire alarm goes off when I set it any higher.)

2. Get a bag of shredded cheese.  I don't recommend reduced fat or 2% because it doesn't melt as well. A pound of cheese will cover two pizzas, but you might want more.

3. One can of tomato sauce.  Generic is fine.  Don't get the paste.  One can is usually enough for two pizzas.

4. You'll need about a table spoon of corn meal.  This is crucial.  I used to make this on foil with olive oil (so that the crust didn't stick), but a cornmeal on the pizza stone is way better.

5. Get a bag of pizza dough.  I've found that whole wheat works/tastes best.  I like to wait until the bag expands and blows up a bit as the yeast in the dough "gets a life of its own."  I'm not sure of the science behind this, but kneading the dough seems easier and in the end, I tend to get a thinner and better-balanced, crispy-yet-doughy crust.

6. Add a tablespoon of flour to a plate.

7. Knead the dough, dab it into the flour, and stretch it into a circle.

7b. I usually do it over the sink to contain the flour mess.

8. Once you have it relatively thin and in a circle shape, set the dough on a plate.

9. While it's on the plate, take the hot pizza stone out of the oven. Then add about a table spoon (or more) of cornmeal to the stone.  Spread it out with a spoon.  You want even coverage.

10.  Work quickly so the stone doesn't lose its heat. Spread and thin the dough out as best you can and lay it on the cornmeal-covered pizza stone.

11.  Then dump about half of the tomato sauce from the can onto the dough and spread it evenly with a spoon.

12. Cover it with cheese and any other toppings you want.

12. Put it in the oven for 10-12 minutes until the cheese starts to brown.

13. Let it cool before slicing. You should be able to slide the whole pie around on the stone if the cornmeal did its job.

14. If you want it to cool faster, slide it onto a room temperature plate. Slice it up and enjoy!

You have the right to remain silent / Learning to shut up

The advice below is not mine.  I subscribe, via my school email, to something called "Daily Stoic" which is authored by Ryan Holiday.  His blog made me want to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which I'm wading through while my oldest son reads Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

"What page are you on Dada?  What book?  You're going pretty slow, Dada."

The stoics make a lot of sense to me now and I find the philosophy helpful.  I remember rejecting the idea of stoicism when I was about 17 and in high school, mostly because of an inadequate and superficial understanding that it meant approaching life without intensity and being intentionally unemotional and numb.  I was very much into Thoreau at the time, or I should say I was into who I wanted Thoreau to be and I was busy thinking about how to live deep so I could suck the marrow out of life.  Passion and fire were what I was after. Anyway, here's the entry that I'm copying and pasting today.  (I'll try to file it under the "found" category."  I'll get the hang of this blog sooner or later.)

__________________________________________________

Why do you speak so much? Because you need people to know how smart you are, right? You have to be heard. Yet, odds are: a good portion of the time you end up looking like an idiot.

This timeless truth is captured in a quote that’s been attributed to both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (and many others): Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

Part of what Stoicism teaches is that you should control what is under your control. How people see you is not—but whether or not you open your mouth is. Consider staying quiet. Or as Epictetus put it:

"Be silent for the most part, or, if you speak, say only what is necessary and in a few words. Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls you, but do not talk of ordinary things - of gladiators or horses races or athletes or of meats or drinks - these are topics that arise everywhere - but above all do not talk about men in blame or compliment or comparison. If you can, turn the conversation of your company by your talk to some fitting subject; but if you should chance to be isolated among strangers, be silent."

Try silence. See what happens.

Beauty on the New York State Thruway

My favorite road in New York is Route 73, which winds itself through the Keene Valley, but we don't get up there as much as I'd like.  Another favorite stretch of road of mine is actually on the New York State Thruway, which we drive quite frequently.  

It's more difficult to get excited about the Thruway, but every time we drive home from Syracuse, the view from this spot reminds me that landscapes can move you.  When you are driving east, just after you crest the hill near exit 29A, you can see for miles.  It feels like you can reach out your hand

(the way people fly their hands like airplanes out of car windows) across the valley and caress the landscape stretched out in front of you.  I'll admit there are more impressive stretches of road, out west especially, but this view reminds me that beauty can be where you least expect it as long as you keep your eyes open for it.

And, for good measure, here are some sort-of-relevant lyrics to a song I used to listen to a lot:

Driving in my dreams I'm on I-90 driving east

Driving the first nail into this corner of my life
But these goodbyes are a beast

(Taken from "Smell the Future" by Peter Mulvey)

My Dad, Neil, and Me

The day I left home for college, my dad drove to work and listened to Neil Young’s “My Boy” on the car stereo.  I can see him in my mind, driving east on I-90, looking into the sunrise, maybe with a tear in his eye, as Neil sings to his son, “Oh, you'd better take your time / My boy / I thought we had just begun / Why are you growin' up so fast / My son?” 

How do I know this happened?  I orchestrated it.  The day before, I slipped a copy of Old Ways into the tape deck of his Ford Taurus, cued it, and left the power knob on so that when he started the car in the morning the song would be the soundtrack for his commute.

Sixteen years later, on May 18th, 2010, I would take my dad to his first concert ever.  Neil Young was coming to Albany, New York.  This was a big deal.  I had just become a father myself, and as wonderful as that is, a night out of the house was nearly as rare an occurrence as a full night of sleep. And spending two hundred bucks for two nose-bleed tickets to a rock concert would certainly strain the budget.  But my wife got it.  She knew how much it meant for me to share this show with my dad.

Truth be told, this wasn’t his first concert.  My dad had seen Johnny Mathis with my mom, and he once took me to a Weird Al show when I was a kid, but this was his first real concert.  It’s not that my Dad lives under a rock, it’s just that rock concerts aren’t his thing. 

Although he and Neil are close in age, and they both have similar lumberjack frames, they live in completely different worlds.  My dad is a conservative baby boomer.  He dreamed of designing cars in Michigan, but commitments to family led him to other less-risky endeavors in civil and environmental engineering.  He’s like a lot of dads, I suppose; he works hard and likes fixing things around the house while listening to conservative AM-talk radio.  My colleagues at school (I’m a high school English teacher) and my siblings, who are also relatively conservative (I’m the black sheep of the family), were shocked to hear that I was taking him to a Neil Young show.  The risks were many. There were all sorts of things that my dad could frown upon.  It might be deafeningly loud.  Neil might play anti-war songs.  People might be belligerent. People might smoke pot. 

I was taking my dad into uncharted territory.

It was the opening show of the Twisted Road tour so I had no idea what to expect.  I warned my Dad ahead of time: “Neil does his own thing.  He could play crowd-pleasers or he could play new stuff that nobody’s heard before.” 

I knew that if Neil played some of his hits, my Dad would know them because I had shaken the walls of our house playing them on the stereo or with my overdriven garage-sale guitar. For the sake of my dad, I was relieved that the show was a perfect mix of old and new.

Before playing the first chords to “Cortez” Neil responded to a  fan’s request for “Old Man:” “I know, I know… Sixty-four and there’s so much more.”  From the third-to-last row my Dad yelled back, “Sixty-eight and it’s still great!”  I was reassured that my Dad was having a good time.

I was too.  Although we were sitting in the third to last row of the Palace, the show was intimate.  It was like watching what I imagine Neil might do at the ranch: putter among his toys, moving from tool to tool.  I got to see Neil play Old Black, his Martins, his White Falcon, his upright piano and pipe organ all in the same show.  I love Crazy Horse, but this way I could really focus on who I came to see.

Having grown up preferring the crooners to rockers, my dad has always had a tough time discerning lyrics, especially over an electric guitar.  I had been scribbling the songs down on my ticket stub so that I could go home and print out the lyrics for him.  I wanted to annotate them with my own liner notes that explained how some of these songs had been crucial to the soundtrack of my life: 

• “Cortez the Killer” was the first song I played in the car when I got my driver’s license.

• “Down by the River” was the song that made me want to learn how to play guitar.

• I memorized all of the lyrics to Rust Never Sleeps before I memorized my multiplication tables.

• I sang “After the Goldrush” and then the rest of Live Rust to my wife on our third date to ease her fear of bears as we descended Mount Jefferson in the pitch dark without the aid of headlamps.

After the show we went down to the edge of the stage.  I couldn’t believe that Old Black was just sitting there among Neil’s set up of Fender tweeds.  I swear it was still resonating. 

“That’s Old Black,” I said. “Neil’s been playing that for longer than I’ve been alive.” 

I explained to my dad how rare it is for a professional musician to rely so heavily on one guitar, and how even its frets were original.  Though my dad doesn’t play guitar, I knew he would appreciate the war-torn ’53 Les Paul leaning in front of his equally ragged tweed amps.  After all, my dad was the first person to teach me to be wary of the fast and new, and to appreciate the beauty of the old.  Larry Cragg was standing in the wings, watching us and looking stressed.  (Neil had experienced some difficulty with his White Falcon earlier in the show.)  I didn’t want to be a star-fucker, so I just pointed him out to my dad as the ultimate caretaker of Neil’s guitars.

As we left we walked past the tour bus.  My Dad dug the Buicks that seem to molt out of the top.  “See the ‘Zuma’ license plate?” I asked.  “His mom used to live in Florida.”  I had just finished reading Shakey so I was eager to play the knowledgeable tour guide to my father, to enhance his evening, and to let him see how much it meant for me to share this night with him.  In a way, I suppose I was still seeking his approval, like my own son will someday surely say, “Hey dad, look what I can do.  Hey dad, listen to what I know.” 

In the quiet of the post-concert city-night, I became fully aware that I had just spent the evening with the man I admire most— the first man to teach me to do work I believe in and to do it with integrity.  Together we had spent the night admiring the craft of a man who, for me, had reinforced the message and made it beautiful.

My dad pursed his lips as he stared up at the bus with wanderlust, “Do you want to wait around a little longer… maybe get a pint?”

I was thrilled to see that my dad didn’t want the night to end.

Neither did I.

(Originally published in Broken Arrow, for a contest.  I came in second place.)

How to properly drill a pilot hole...

When I started making guitar pedals I learned a great trick that my Dad probably taught me, but I ignored. I would use a pen on masking tape to mark the exact spot I needed to drill into the metal box, but inevitably the drill bit would slip and the hole wouldn't be where I wanted it to be.

So here's the trick: put masking tape on the surface and mark your spot on the tape. (I use this masking tape trick when I put nails into Sheetrock too-- the tape holds the surface together so it doesn't crack or shatter.) Line up the drill bit where you want the hole. Then reverse the drill so that the bit just spins counterclockwise-- in other words, so that it doesn't bite or jump.) With enough RPMs this will create a small dimple in the metal or wood. Now the drill bit can sit in this dimple.  Engage the drill bit clockwise and drill the hole.

Oh, and when you drill into metal, be sure to put a dab of oil (motor oil works!) on the drill bit so that bit doesn't get too hot.

When making guitar pedals I use a titanium step bit. It allows you to make holes of an exact size for things like quarter inch jacks or 16 mm potentiometers.

Is this thing on?

I find myself freaking out about my own mortality and its potential impact on the lives of my sons. Lately this anxiety has manifested itself in an obsessive-compulsive desire to amass over a hundred movies in a digital library through VUDU and iTunes. And, so long as the passwords get passed on, I like to imagine my sons getting to know me through the films I deemed important enough to buy, and the music in my iTunes account. But what would they really get out of this?  This is just one more thing I can't really control. How sad it is to me to think that I might not be able to talk to them about why I love Linklater films, how Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first movie I saw on VHS, or where I was the first time I heard Nirvana. And what about all the stupid little things like how to drill a pilot hole into metal? Or how to drain the carburateur of the lawn mower?

So maybe I'll actually do this thing, little bits at a time, and hopefully more consistently than most of the creative projects I begin and abandon. I once read a Goethe quote on the wall of the Phoenix public library that said something like beginning things has genius and power in it; I hope that's about right. Here goes.