Gaelynn Lea performing Watch the World Unfold
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Fred Hellerman RIP
Fred Hellerman, last of the folk group The Weavers, has passed. He was 89. RIP.
Forest Drawings
Here’s a couple snaps of charcoal drawings I made while out foraging in the enchanted mushroom forest a few days ago. 
Ornate boletes and an old chicken
Bruce with a basket of boletes
Buoyed by my success foraging the other day, I ventured off to some other forests this morning. There were quite a few boletes around, mostly Boletus ornatipes, the ornate-stalked boletes. There were also pockets of some variety of suillus, which I don’t care for and left in the forest. I’ve found ornate boletes in these same woods in some other years, usually a little earlier in the season. They like pathways and usually when you find one or two there are others nearby. My experience with these is that they are a tasty edible. I’ve read that some people have collected these and found them to be slightly to distinctly bitter, while others report them to be very good. Hopefully these will be true to my previous experience. I saw at least as many as I collected today which were too far gone for the table.
When I cleaned this batch of mushrooms up, I found the caps to be generally in great shape, but most of the stalks were buggy and had to be discarded.
While I was in the area, I visited another forest which is usually excellent for lobster mushrooms, but there were none today. What I did find was an old chicken of the woods.
an old chicken
Although it doesn’t look so bad in the photo, this chicken was well past its expiry date and was not in good shape. I made a mental note of where this mushroom was, as it may be back on the same stump next year. It’s too bad because if this baby was young and tender it would have meant several pounds of choice mushrooms.
Bonus: as I was driving around, checking out forests, I came across a fry truck. Even better, it was a busy fry truck with people in line on a Wednesday afternoon in a sparsely populated area. Further investigation was necessary. The first thing I saw was somebody peeling potatoes. Ah-ha, this place showed promise. I ordered up a medium sized box of fries and they were excellent, best fries I’ve had in some time.
From the Comfort Food Diner: wild mushroom and cheese omelet
First, visit the enchanted mushroom forest and forage up some tasty edible mushrooms. Any old fool knows that mushrooms you’ve foraged yourself taste best. Just be sure you pick tasty edibles and not sickeners or poisonous mushrooms. Today I used scaber stalks (Leccinum), which I collected the other day. These are mild boletes which characteristically turn black when you cook them.
Next, go out to the garden and pick some fresh herbs. I used basil.
Grate up some of your fave cheese. These mushrooms are mild so I decided to punch things up a little with some quality Parmasan, roughly grated.
The mushrooms need to be pre-cooked. Sautee them with a little bit of oil, salt and pepper. Like most mushrooms, these release fluid when you start to cook them. Once the fluid is cooked off, continue to gently cook them until they begin to get some crisp on the surface. What you want is crisp on the outside, juicy on the inside. Always cook wild mushrooms well.
Whisk the eggs and pour into the mushroom pan (which you have left on the hot stove after removing the cooked mushrooms). Sprinkle in the fresh herbs and the cooked mushrooms and the cheese. When the omelet is ready, fold it up.
We were given a wonderful local tomato the other day, so I cut a thick slice, and finally added some Sriracha sauce to dress the omelet. Finish it off with some fresh ground pepper. Great with a cold ale.
Painting exhibition coming up soon
I just want to let people know I have an art exhibition coming up – the opening reception will be Saturday September 10 at Yumart. My last show was at the old Yumart space on Spadina about a year and a half ago now. For anyone not aware, the gallery has since moved to an excellent larger space now at 401 Richmond here in Toronto (if you go in the east entrance to the building, the gallery is close by).
The Source 2016, encaustic on carved wood
The exhibition will feature a suite of new encaustic paintings on carved wood, some new drawings, as well as a few blasts from the past – older paintings from the 80s, 90s and 2000s, none of which have been previously exhibited.
City on Fire – a book review
Late last night I finished reading Garth Risk Hallberg’s sprawling epic first novel, City on Fire. I bought the hardcover one day, wandering through a bookstore looking for something I could really sink my teeth into. City on Fire served up as much as I could chew. When I bought my copy, I didn’t know this book kicked up quite a fuss as a highly anticipated novel. Later I read that several publishing houses vied for City on Fire and Hallberg was, if what I’ve read around the internet is true, paid $2 Million up front.
A 900 page novel asks for a lot of commitment from the reader. It takes plenty of faith that the novelist will look after you along the way. On top of everything else, the damned book is heavy and awkward. I was worried when I began this novel because Hallberg’s early treatment of the first characters he introduced us to didn’t ring true or “feel right” to me. I carried on though, to discover a book that develops its characters with remarkable clarity and detail over time.
This is a tremendously ambitious novel with a grand scope. It’s set in New York in the mid-70s, and is chock full of characters from all walks of life who are cleverly, seemingly impossibly linked through a New Years shooting and resolved after the July blackout of 1977. I suppose City on Fire takes a shot at being a definitive historical novel about New York in the 70s.
We meet a spectrum of characters from the NY financial elite to punks, police to anarchists. I was reminded a little of the television show The Wire, which dealt with many aspects of Baltimore life linked together by common characters and a central narrative thread. Where The Wire sectioned off themes by season, City on Fire bounces the reader back and forth between story lines, between characters, and even back and forth in time, and it does so in tremendous detail.
The prose is beautiful, each sentence carefully, lovingly constructed. This is a double-edged sword though. While Hallberg tries to get the reader to understand and empathize with his characters, there are places in which his sophisticated writing style and at times ostentatious choice of obscure words just gets in the way.
City on Fire is a remarkable novel but in my view it is in need of some serious editing. There is so much going on, so many characters, so many parts of the storyline, but some of it just didn’t warrent the lengthy treatment it received. Although I appreciated the detail and the pace of character development, at times that pace dragged and bogged down. I think with a mission to present this in a couple hundred pages less, Hallberg might have created the great novel this book tries to be.
In spite of my criticism of City on Fire, I’m going to recommend you read it. It may not be a great novel but it is a very very good one. Flawed as it may be it sets the bar high for 2016 and I don’t think I’ll soon forget it.
Movietime – Hell or High Water
Hell or Highwater is a modern-day western heist outlaw movie set in west Texas. The big bad bank is about to foreclose on the family ranch and two brothers come together with a plan to save the farm by robbing branches of that very bank of enough money to pay back the loan. The idea of the bank being the bigger criminal is not new. It’s the heart of plenty of outlaw stories, and songs too. For instance…..
Of course every story is an old story, though, isn’t it? What matters is what you do with it. This movie stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as the brothers, supported by an excellent performance by Jeff Bridges as the Texas Ranger after them. In fact the entire cast does a great job, including the cinematographer – Texas was never so beautiful nor so bleak.
The film was written by Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote Sicario, another excellent recent film.
I want to make special mention of the superb soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Here’s the track list for the film….
As I was watching Hell or High Water, it reminded me a little of another older modern day western film lodged somewhere deep in my memory and it took a day for me to think of what that film was – Rancho Deluxe, the 1975 cattle rustling flick which also starred Jeff Bridges along with Sam Waterson, Elizabeth Ashley and Slim Pickens as the aging detective who finds the rustlers. It might be very interesting to watch one of these films right after the other. Rancho had a great soundtrack too, featuring Jimmy Buffet.
I guess Hell or High Water is what you would call a genre film, but I don’t see that as a limitation. This movie has a lot going for it, and not the least of which is some very humourous bits that relieve the tension along the way.
Recommended. This may be my fave movie of the year so far. Just right, from script to performance to music to visuals.
Mushrooms
I packed my drawing gear and a mushroom basket and ventured out to the enchanted mushroom forest this morning. It’s been such a poor season for mushrooms I didn’t expect to find much, perhaps a couple lobsters and hedgehogs – but instead I found lots of different boletes.
There were quite a few mushrooms in the forest, but as is often the case with boletes, many of them were wormy or past their expiry date. Still I filled my basket, then sat down to make a couple drawings in the forest. By the time I cleaned up the mushrooms at home, I was left with a nice bowl of slice boletes, ready to be fried up. The photos show some of the variety I saw in the forest today…..
Yum!
don’t eat boletes with red pores!
Some kind of suillus, perhaps?
dinner, before cleaning up
Scaber stalks – lecinnum
Ash boletes – lots of these in the forest. I’m told if you were starving you could eat them, but they are far from choice.
Family BBQ
We had a wonderful time yesterday hosting a bbq with many family (and one honourary family member) on both sides over for an evening of good cheer and conversation (as well as loads of good food and drink). I didn’t take any photos, but Sheila managed to snap a bunch throughout the evening. Here’s a selection…
27th Street 