Grave Error

Back when I was a teenager, I watched the cult Jamaican film, The Harder They Come, religiously with its stellar soundtrack that first introduced Reggae to the world, even before Bob Marley had come onto the international scene. My brother recently gave me the heads up on the album Mos Dub, available for free download. It is the work of one Max Tannone and mixes the works of Mos Def — one of my favorite Hip-Hop artists — with some classic Reggae hits from the 70s, including two songs from The Harder They Come soundtrack: “Johnny Too Bad” by The Slickers and “Shanty Town” by Desmond Dekker. So if you are a fan at all of Hip-Hop and Reggae oldies, check it out.

I have always enjoyed cooking, mainly Italian cuisine (as a quasi Italian American). Over the past few years, though, I haven’t cooked much, but since getting married, I have revisited some of my old favorite recipes – eggplant parmaggiano, various pastas and risottos, and fish. Meanwhile, my wife has started cooking Moroccan food, and it is quite addictive. My favorite so far is tagine de barkouk: a meat stew served with apricots and plums.

(As a side note: the word apricot in English and albaricoque in Spanish come from the Arabic barkouk. Nevertheless, they are false friends as barkouk actually means plum and not apricot).

In any event, during a recent trip through Tuscany, we were surprisingly a little disappointed by the food, having been completely enamored by Roman cuisine on our last visit to Italy with its preference for tomatoes and basil as opposed to the heavier, gamier Tuscan dishes. Nonetheless, I returned with a new pasta in mind: grilled eggplant, black olives, cherry tomatoes, a little ricotta and lots of fresh basil.

First I cut the eggplant and set it on paper towels to soak the liquid and remove the bitterness. Next, I cut the olives and cherry tomatoes and put them in the pot with oil olive. I close the pot and let it slowly simmer for about 30 minutes, during which time I start boiling the water for the pasta and grill the eggplant. Once the water is boiling, I throw the pasta into the water, and then put the eggplant into the sauce.

Finally, when the pasta is ready, I mix it into the sauce, add a little bit of ricotta and fresh basil.

So good! A healthy vegetarian meal and an apolitical blog post.

I am comfortable enough with myself to admit to having waited in line for over an hour and paid € 6.50 (x2) just to see a statue of a naked man. I even paid for my wife to see the dude in the buff. And it was totally worth it. Michelangelo’s David is a true work of beauty: the color of the marble, how the light reflects off of it, and even the devotion that Michelangelo must have felt for the subject.

I am sure that the statue would be scandalous were it produced in present day America. Why are we such prudes about nudity? What are we so afraid of? And why are we always so afraid of everything? Obscenity must be in the eye of the beholder.

Last Saturday, I had the great honor of participating in a concert held at the Lijsterbes Kraainem in Brussels that combined music, painting, and literature. The idea came from my good friend and favorite contemporary classical pianist, Philippe Raskin. The story goes something like this:

In 1874, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky composed Pictures at an Exhibition, a ten movement piano suite in honor of his recently deceased friend, Viktor Hartmann. Each movement is inspired by one of Hartmann’s paintings. Of the original ten Hartmann paintings, only five are believed to still exist today (though there are some doubts as to the authenticity of these remaining works). Listening to the piece, you have the sensation of walking through an exhibition at a museum – hence the name of the title.

With this in mind, Raskin hoped to recreate the spirit of the Mussorgsky composition through the joint collaboration of music, painting, and literature.  To do this, he first asked the artist, Magda Calleeuw, to paint the five missing Hartmann works. Next, he asked me to write ten vignettes inspired by the corresponding movements and paintings. Continue reading →