A few months ago I posted a photo of some street art I came across over by the Fulton Market while on a run to get some propane for brewing. I was struck by the piece’s scale, but I was also taken aback by what seemed a kind of mocking, mischeivousness that animated the death inside the piece. It was almost like life and death were both at odds in the same moment, mimicking and making fun of each other simultaneously in the piece. To find this “hidden” below the skyline of the city worked to bring our entire municipality into the joy and menace and menacing joy that was animate in this work.

It’s rare, but one of the great treasures of living in Chicago – or any cluttered urban environment for that matter – to be struck by the shrapnel of one of these cultural bombs. Like an aerosol sorcery, their cast onto mercurial obscurity, patiently waiting for your nervous system to be ready for their discovery, to take over your life in that moment and flatten some neurons in the name of pleasure and revelation.

After I posted it, Lee Chameleon, one of Chicago’s great Cultural Gastroentronologists, followed up that this was the work of a Belgian street artist who goes by the name ROA. Belgium – Brussels in particular – still has one of the most interesting and unique examples of street art of any city I’ve been in. The volume is impressive, but the singular visions in the work are what really make it stand outside of places like Amsterdam, London and New York City. A train ride south from the airport and through Brussels will give you an incredible tour of some world class graffiti artists. A stroll off the Central and North stations might change the way you look at street art forever. I was not surprised at all to find that ROA was, at least partially, a product of Ghent.

Above is a piece on some partially abandoned office building that is the first thing to greet you when you come out of Central Station in Brussels. It framed my entire experience of Brussels instantly upon seeing it, a smokey spirit of madness escaping from the failed beuracratic facade of Belgium’s capitol. It looked unchained, dangerous, and not at all comfortable with revealing itself in any time, but it’s own. It’s as if the artist knowingly placed it there in the shadow so that it would never be imprisoned by the light.

I just got back from a week in southern Kaua’i. Like all vacations, the time was too short, and now I want to move there.

A week living amongst people who stab away their days in the slow, tropical pulse of the south pacific rim makes me wonder how and why I managed to find myself in Chicago, enduring unending indignities for little more than middle-class shelter and a consistently renewed inspiration to carve my nervous system down to a whimpering mass of battery-operated impulses.

But, I learned a lot about myself on this trip. Yup, that’s right. I just invoked that final resignation of a beaten man, that foul consolation of earning a learn “about myself”. What a gift.

But it’s true, I did learn some things. But nicer than the actually learning of these terrible truths was the fact that I had the time to learn them. That was the real treat as, back here in the shit-show, I’ve been existing in a vacuum of commitments, responsibilities and non-starts for so long I hardly recognize myself anymore. So, even though I acquired that dread insight into my failed gorilla self, I’m at least grateful I had the luxury to actually find that filthy wisdom. Too many aren’t so lucky.

For instance, many of paradise’s natives. Before the U.S. finally wrangled the Hawaiian Islands into it’s quiver of territories in 1959, we had spent almost 70 years courting our would be native bride. By courting, of course, I mean indulging in the same shameless charades of European imperialism we’ve come to be so skilled at over the years. You know the map: introduce wealthy white business creeps then promptly employ waspian double speak while systematically dismantling the culture, swatting away would be pests and make way for your pock-marked and alabaster ass to cradle across all those brown faces and building yourself a home.

Take for example the coyly named “Committee for Safety”. These pony-white assholes, formerly known as the more verbose “Citizens Committee for Public Safety”, were a collection of 13 crackers, all republicans, whose goal was the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s kingdom and the annexation of Hawaii by the United States. Filled with a super-sized sense of entitlement, these shitnoses are the same kind of pin-lipped morons who would fart up onto an island as gorgeous as Kaua’i and resolve themselves to build a double-wide church to help them feel closer to God. Yes, whatever god that is you’re praying to – you know, the one that rubs a little warmer on your leg once you shut out life’s bounty – you best keep praying to that there god, Barb, cuz he libel to fuck you up good n’ hard ifn’ ya don’t.

But, hey man, I’ve got flies on me, too. I took benefit from this smarmy white acquisition, as well. I bathed in the blood of so many fellow humans, doing my backstroke through it all and with no regrets.

I’m not so naive as to think that my right and my pleasure to bitch about inequities isn’t paid for in buckets and buckets of innocent blood every day. Keeping Moloch at bay requires a lot of this red dirt gold. But, it’s these kind of tantric truths that keep a middle aged fat man in repose and one of the good reasons I still need to go on vacation.

And vacation I did. Aside from a little surfing, and less snorkeling, and the disciplined art of keeping my head fully submerged in a mai thai from dusk til dawn, I did discover two little gems of Hawaiian grace: Poke and Musubi.

Poke is raw ahi tuna, cut into cubes and served with a little cabage. Amazing in it’s pure form, but I became addicted to the Koloa Fish Market’s variation on that theme, the wasabi Poke. This is cubes of raw ahi tuna, cabage, mixed with a lightly brushed wasabi cream sauce and just a little bit of fish roe to give the whole thing some snap and texture. Truly, this is the fruit of the oceans.

Musubi is the perfect articulation of the cultural pastiche that is the Hawaiian Islands. It’s one part maki roll and one part Spam, tipping it’s hat not only to the strong Japanese influence of the islands, but also the military pragmatism that brought us little white devils to come and steal that land away. Musubi can be served with just the nori, rice and spam, or it can be dressed in any number ways including scrambled egg and coconut oil.

The bride and I made a daily ritual of waking up with the roosters, pouring a cup of coffee, picking up a Musubi roll and heading to the waterfront to watch the surfers play. When death finally comes for me, it will be those waters that my viking soul will follow to the sun.

Here’s a recipe for Musubi from the Spam website:

2 slices SPAM® Classic
3 ounces cooked white rice, seasoned with furikake* and toasted sesame seeds, if desired
1 tablespoon House of Tsang® Hibatchi Grill Sweet Ginger Sesame Sauce, or SAM CHOY’S® cooking sauce
1 sheet nori **

In large skillet, cook SPAM® Classic until lightly browned and crisp.
Place 1/2 of rice into musubi press or small can. Place SPAM® Classic on rice; drizzle with grill sauce or cooking sauce. Top with remaining rice; press down. Remove SPAM® and rice from musubi press.
On work surface, lay nori shiny-side-down; top with SPAM® mixture. Wrap up. Cut each musubi in half. Slice each half diagonally into 2 pieces. Serve immediately.

With a good Musubi, I can bow my belly and my head in reverence to a world so fucked up and complex that blood can taste like pineapple and defeat like the warmest mother’s sun. So, here’s to it.

This past weekend was great, friends came into town and we drank, and we cooked, and we ate and we drank some more. On Monday, the party continued when some Family came into town and I cooked some more and we drank and we ate. This morning… I cooked and we ate.

I haven’t started the drinking yet today, but I did get my face loaded up with one of my three favorite -caines at the dentist office. Dentistry, I’ve found, is a decent replacement for legitimate intoxicants. There’s something about the tools, the endorphins and the team of pretty girls with rubber gloves pulling on my helpless face that tides me over until the beveraging hour. Which today should be just after 4p.

But, back to this past weekend. A lot of our eating and drinking this weekend took place at some great Chicago standards. We hit Farmhouse, Gilt Bar, and the Gage on Saturday.

Farmhouse is always great and their selections of sours this week made it even better. The drinks at Gilt Bar were awesome and the bar tender was actally a really nice guy despite his dubious choice of profession as a ‘mixologist’.

The Gage had terrible service, slow and poorly paced. And, let’s be clear, when someone whose been drinking for 12 hours notices your service being slow, there’s a real problem there. But the duck breast was fucking amazing. So amazing I wouldn’t think twice about going back despite the service.

In between stops we made drinks at home. I had picked up some St. Germain to fuck around with and found several good recipes with that including a St. Germain Gimlet. I also put together a drink mixing St. Germain, Campari, Gin, Bourbon & syrup to pretty decent results. I made one of our guests a Clover Club which she dug, too. 2 measures of Gin, 1 measure of Grenadine, half a lemon and an egg white.

But the cooking is the important thing here. I made some awesome stuff. A big hit was the liver sausage on butter browned spaetzle topped off with some fresh horse radish and parsley. This dish would put tits on a bishop, my friend.

Another hit was the fried chicken. Super easy, but always a show stopper. I bit on Michael Ruhlman from heel to toe on this one.

THE BRINE
15 ounces water (or 1/2 liter)
3 ounces salt (or 100 grams)
fresh herbs (I used sage above)
4 cloves garlic
1 small onion sliced
1 lemon halved
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons black peppercorns, cracked beneath a saute pan
15 ounces ice (500 grams ice), or 15 ounces of ice water
1 chicken (3 to 4 pounds)
Combine all of the above except the ice and chicken in a small pan and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and remove from the heat and let sit for ten minutes.
Put the ice (or ice water) in a bowl or large measuring cup. Pour the herb brine over the ice. Stir till the ice is dissolved.
Put the chicken in a plastic bag, pour the brine in, seal the bag, and let sit at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours.
Remove the chicken from the bag, discarding the brine. Pat it dry and let it sit out for another hour before using (or you can refrigerate it till needed).

THE CHICKEN
8 legs
8 wings
3 cups flour
3 tblspn black pepper
2 tblspn paprika
2 tblspn sea salt
2 tspn cayenne
2 tblspn baking powder
2 cups butter milk
peanut oil

The key with the chicken is flour/buttermilk/flour. And while you’re at it, why not fry some cheese curds, too?

This morning I made some crepe suzette that I served with some ginger & sage sausage. The crepes are super easy. 4 eggs, 1/2 cup of cream, 1/2 cup of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 cup of flour. Let it sit for 30 minutes and then cook in a cast iron skillet. Right before you serve it dunk it in a syrup of sugar, orange juice, orange zest, lemon juice, Grand Marnier, butter and bourbon. Garnish those fuckers with some mint. Then go get your face Dremilled by a lady in rubber gloves.

That is all.

Anybody can brew beer, but it can be like handling plutonium to create great beer that is repeatable.

Your two greatest allies in that pursuit are time and temperature. Giving the beer the time it needs to fully bloom is essential, and something that took a lot – and I mean a lot – of discipline to grab a handle on. Obviously, you have to let your beer hit it’s FG, but that is the easy part. It’s waiting after the critters have done their job that has been a painful lesson for me.

But no beer is ready immediately after it’s been fermented.

Or at least no beer I have tried. Every style of beer I’m aware of needs at least another month to sit and fully unfold itself before it truly hits it’s flavor potentials. Many beers take a great deal longer.

At this point, my rule of thumb is, after I rack off the yeast cake, I put my keg in a cooling fridge for no shorter than 4 weeks. I’ll test it at that point and decide to either put it on gas, put it in a bottle or let it sit for even longer.

The other great revelation for me in controlling the chaos of brewing has been understanding the need for creating healthy yeast with a starter and nutrients and giving that culture the proper conditions to develop the desired effect. To do that a temperature controller is essential.

There’s more than a few different ways to attack this, but my approach was to pick up a full size fridge from a foreclosed apartment building in the ghetto, add a 2 stage temperature controller from Rebel Brewer and a space heater. The temperature controller is fine, although if you want to save about $35 you can build it yourself. Here’s some instructions.

Everything has been working great until recently. I’ve been able to make my yeast do all kinds of fun things to my beer and have been able to get them to do it over and over again. It’s an awfully proud parent who teaches their yeast a new trick. And it’s a richer, drunker parent who chooses yeast rearing over baby wrangling.

But since winter has finally come to Chicago in mid-February, the temperature has dropped and my space heater has been having to do more work than it likes to bring the fridge to temperature. This is causing a safety feature on the space heater to shut down power as opposed to over heat and burn my house to the ground. Good thing.

So, I’ve had to forego my previous and incredibly dangerous solution and replace it with a FermWrap and a carboy shield. The FermWrap is a variation on reptile cage heaters that are totally effective at bringing your wort to the proper temperature at a very low power draw. The carboy shield helps to optimize the FermWraps efforts, keeping valuable heat from escaping off to the sides.

Life is good again for me and my yeasts. Time to find another way to temp the fates.

“I have seen the face freedom and eaten it.” – Eldridge Cleaver after schtupping Pat Nixon.

My nephew gave me some sausage he had left over from a boar he shot a few weeks ago. I wanted to do right by it.

This morning I cooked up a variation of my biscuits and gravy recipe. I didn’t have any butter so I used duck fat instead. I also added a little bit of thyme to the batter to make them more savory.

I don’t know if it was the duck fat or if I fucked up my measurements and put more than 8 tablespoons in, but these were the lightest biscuits I’ve ever made. Amazing stuff really. I also had larger chunks of the duck fat than I normally have with the butter so that’s something to think about for the future. I also added a pinch of sugar to the biscuits, something I haven’t done before but seemed like a reasonable idea.

The boar sausage is leaner than pork so I added about a half tablespoon of lard to my cast iron skillet before adding cornstarch to make the gravy. I also added 1 diced shallot, some chives, thyme and just a tiny pinch of cardamon.

I like putting cardamon in just about anything I can, I think it brings a really nice spicy earthiness to stuff. Be careful not to over do it though, this stuff can get away from you real fast.

I laid off on the cream/milk mixture this time, adding just enough liquid to capture the thickened fats. This was a good idea.

I topped it all off with some diced tomatoes and some more chives for color.

I could topple empires with this monstrosity.

Boingboing has been running some great pieces on Robert Anton Wilson in honor of the 5th anniversary of his death on 1/11/2007. It’s been fun reading the likes of Ken Goffman and Paul Krassner reflect on Wilson, explaining why he’s so important to them. It’s all made me uncomfortably nostalgic and forlorn.

My personal interaction with Bob was very limited, but very memorable. And, appropriately enough, confounding, absurd, educational, unforgettable, and wonderful. Much like his books.

It was 1998 and my girlfriend at the time and I drove up from Austin to go see Bob speak in the Masonic temple in downtown Dallas. There’s no word in the english language that can properly express the kind of fanboy emotion I was experiencing to be sitting in a fucking Masonic temple in the town that killed Kennedy with Robert Anton Wilson and only about 25 other people.

I sat about 30′ away from him, panting like a mutt, full of joy the whole time. I don’t remember his talk that night being necessarily great, he seemed to be in a bit of pain and slightly grouchier than normal.

The night was billed as a workshop with Robert Anton Wilson, but the extent of the exercises he taught us that night were limited to one. He asked us to shut our eyes and breathe, clearing our thoughts and settling down our minds. And then, when the inevitable inner voice would once again raise it’s borish head, we were told to shout at the top of our lungs at the persistent sod to “Shut the Fuck Up!” I’ve since applied this exercise to some fairly useful ends, it being an effective example of the old-world hucksterism cum mysticism that Wilson seemed to love. It was also a pretty great piece of performance art to get a room full of adults screaming at the voices in their head to “Shut the FUCK up!”

Driving home that night, my girlfriend and I talked about the evening. I’m not sure which one of us brought it up first, but we both seemed to notice that throughout the evening Bob seemed to keep turning into some kind of fish-headed creature. A green-skinned thing, his beard and hair extended and flowed, whiskers hovering out to the sides.

I’m not sure what the hell was going on there really. This was definitely an odd time in my life where events like that weren’t as surprising as they might be today. But even amongst all the circus lights and fireworks of my life at the time I remember us both thinking this was pretty startling.

About two weeks later my girlfriend and I were running some Saturday afternoon errands. She was thinking about trying to buy some kind of Volkswagon or something to replace a dying pickup truck, so we pulled into the VW dealership off 35. I was characteristically annoyed.

I walked through the lot looking at my chucks and thinking about anything but cars or my girlfriend. Maybe I was daydreaming about getting home to some freshly made GHB.

When I looked up from the ground there was a car salesman in front of me. He smiled and asked how we were doing and then proceeded through what I imagine was his usual song and dance used to engage potential customers.

Unfortunately, I was having a hard time responding to him, or saying anything at all, really. I was literally caught – for one of the few genuine times in my life – speechless trying to process what I was pretty sure I was seeing in front of me. As much as my brains wanted to protest, and as far as I could tell, the Volkswagon salesman standing right in front of me, sprawling some endless bullshit about the ’99 Passat’s power rating or some screaming deal he could get us on our APR, looked *exactly* like Robert Anton Wilson. The white hair, the droll mannerisms, the smile that reminded you with every verbal turn that he was indeed fucking with you. He even had Wilson’s Brooklyn accent.

I probably spooked the guy as I imagine it’s got to be more than a little unnerving to be stared at like a ghost or like you’ve just become the hand the universe is using to yank a young acid head’s dick. DoppleBob collected himself and slipped out of our presence as gracefully as was possible. But, before he walked off, he extended a hand to shake, encouraging us to let him know if we had any questions. I looked down to return the shake, as is customary in most human circles, and, on the ring finger of his right hand he had a ring of the same exact style - I shit you not - that Wilson had on the same finger of the same hand. The only difference between the two Bob’s rings was that inside the disc on Wilson’s ring was a chaos star. Inside the ring of the VW salesman was the VW logo.

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on that one, you really need some time alone to unpack that origami octopus. I’m still rummaging through it myself after 14 years.

Standing outside the Masonic temple that night in Dallas I asked Bob about the specifics of the Sirius workings he mentions in Cosmic Trigger. He gave me what, at the time, was a frustratingly simple and, I thought, evasive answer.

He looked up and, blowing cigarette smoke at me, he said, “Art is Magick. It’s incredibly personal, you have to become it. Befriend it. Befriend it and it becomes you. William Blake would eat breakfast with his muse, talk to her over breakfast.”

I was too green at the time to see past my own insistence for specifics to be able to appreciate the exchange for what it was. I was also probably too arrogant.

But here I am now, a bit older, a little slower and in so many ways, even tonight, 14 years later, I’m still swimming around in that curmudgeonly bard’s very simple and mostly true words of wisdom that he dropped on an eager young toad that night in Dallas. And to me, that keeps Bob alive and still working hard in the world today when I need him most. And that is Magick.

Thanks for the laughs, Bob.

It’s getting cold here in Weedwolf’s Shitcago. In fact, today the lake front was shut down and manned by Escalades. I saw snow fall from the sky. I pulled the long underwear from my lingerie drawer.

All this means that my previous method of cooling our wort with a displacement chiller spitting upwards of 75 gallons of water out into the alley is no longer sustainable. Bummer.

Our first attempt at solving this problem was clunky and kind of retarded. Especially when I tell you how simple our solution was.

See, initially we thought we would daisy chain 2 displacement chillers together. We’d put one in the HLT with a bunch of ice and then run it through the pump, into the wort and then back to the ice to re-cool the water. The problem with this was that we had to introduce the garden hose to initiate the flow and without a T hookup this wasn’t going to happen.

While I was procrastinating getting the T I began wondering why we couldn’t just get rid of one of those displacement chillers and just pump out of the HLT full of ice water, into the wort and then dump the water back into the HLT. Which is exactly what we’re doing now.

The one pain in the neck is that we have to pull the chiller out of the wort and hold it below the pump initially to get it primed. Once primed, we pop the chiller into the wort and everything is fantastic and cooled to 70* in less than 30 minutes.

Now I just need to get one of those Blichmann plate chillers and all my life’s problems would be solved.

It would really hurt to put hot, liquid marrow into a syringe and shoot it into your arm or eyeball so Michael Ruhlman has this satisfactory alternative for using bone marrow to activate your pleasure centers:

“To cook the marrow, roll them in flour till they’re completely coated and sauté them in canola oil over medium high heat (too hot and the flour will burn, too cool and the marrow will melt before the surface is crisp), turning them to brown them well on all sides. On the day Powder made the marrow (that’s him grilling the bread and plating), he poured out excess oil when they were nearly done and added some butter to finish them off. This is a chef I love: when preparing a rich, highly fatty dish, finish it off with just a liiiittle more butter. Fernand would have approved. And in all seriousness, the butter browns and makes the crust especially flavorful.”

I will oblige.

It’s the 11th hour and I need to get this beer carbed up for Thanksgiving. I’ve basically got about 20 hours to get this stuff to a decent level of gas. So I’m going to force carb them.

Force carbonating is a black art, elusive and highly subjective in it’s execution. I’ve tried several techniques, but the one I prefer is found in Gordon Strong’s excellent book “Brewing Better Beer”. I can’t say enough good things about this book, Strong’s approach is sensible and informed by years and years of experience. And his jedi like approach to brewing gives legs to Papazian’s abused mantra of “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.” Good stuff.

Anyway, here’s the long and short of Gordon Strong’s force carbonating technique pulled from “Brewing Better Beer”.

1) Chill your keg to near freezing.
2) Attach your gas and dial it up to 30 psi.
3) Slowly rock your keg back and forth about 50ish times until you don’t here gas bubble up into it anymore.
4) Take it off the gas and let it sit for a day or two.
5) When it’s time to check it, release the accumulated head gas and taste.
6) Rinse and repeat as needed.

That is it, go with god.