Will Oldham on his Double Chocolate Chess Pie, as told to Gabe Soria (Arthur, 2004)

Come On In My Kitchen (column)

This issue’s chef: WILL OLDHAM of Louisville, Kentucky
as told to Gabe Soria

Originally published in Arthur No. 10 (April 2004)

I’ve been making different kinds of chess pie for most of my life; it’s like pecan pie without the pecans in it. I think vinegar pie is similar, and transparent pie is similar. It’s just slightly different proportions of the different ingredients and consistencies, otherwise it’s the same thing: the magic of sugar mixed with butter mixed with eggs thrown in a piecrust.

Will Oldham’s Double Chocolate Chess Pie

1/2 c. Butter
2 oz. Chocolate, unsweetened
1 c. Sugar
3 Eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 c. Crème de Cacao liqueur
2 tbs. All-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/8 tbsp. Salt
1 Pie shell
Vanilla ice cream or sweetened whipped cream (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a saucepan over low heat, melt butter and chocolate. Remove from heat. Blend in sugar, eggs, liqueur, flour, salt and vanilla extract into melted butter and chocolate. Beat until smooth. Pour into the pie shell. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until set. Cool on a wire rack for at least 30 minutes.

There’s a place in Louisville called Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen that makes a really insane chocolate chess pie, and that might be where I first had it, ‘cause it opened when I was a teenager. [In Louisville] there’s also Derby Pie, which is pecan pie with bourbon and chocolate chips in it, but that’s not a full-on chocolate experience. In Birmingham, Alabama there used to be a place by the airport called BJ’s on the Runway and they made the best pies ever. They had a chocolate meringue pie, and the chocolate was… it was like a black hole. You got sucked into the whole thing and you didn’t come out until the pie was gone. It was six or seven inches high, with this meringue. Amazing pie. I think that that was when I realized what the possibilities were in a chocolate pie.

[I make chess pie] probably three times a year, ‘cause sometimes it’s easier to go to Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen to get a slice. I’ll make it for a recording session and we’ll just eat it over the course of the session. You get the rewards all along the way. It helps the music stay psyched. This

is nice, though, because it has this Crème de Cacao, and that’s a very good liqueur. I like it. I can have a scoop of vanilla ice cream with whiskey poured over it. It’s good. In Italy they call it an “Apogato”, which means drowned man, and you can have it with your choice of liquor. Sometimes sweet potato pie with a little bit of bourbon or rum cooked into it can be really delicious.

Chess pie and sweet potato pie are two things widely available in varying recipes all across Louisville. It’s a very exciting place for pie. There’s a bakery in Louisville called Plehn’s Bakery that makes a caramel ice cream, and the caramel ice cream from there mixed with the chocolate chess pie from Homemade Ice Cream and Pies Kitchen is… it’s beyond description. When you take a bite of it, it’s like… how you know… it helps you recognize how omnipotent and indescribable God is. Because this food, you know, goes beyond, and obviously God, you know, God would go beyond anything a Pope could tell you, or an imam could say about, or rabbis, you know? They can pretend that they can tell you about God, but it’s way fucking beyond their comprehension, no matter how many books they read or how much they whip their back or do whatever they do. It’s the same thing with the pies when you realize that the way things work is way beyond anything you could comprehend. We can put [the ingredients] together, but we can’t explain why, when you put them together, why they do what they do.

Alchemy: The Art of David Mack – April 2nd at Floating World Comics

art_show_sm

We’re hosting an art exhibit tonight at Floating World with David Mack, to celebrate the release of his latest book, Kabuki : The Alchemy. In the following interview we discuss themes from his Kabuki series and his plans to adapt Philip K Dick to comics.

WHO: David Mack
WHAT: Art exhibit, slide show discussion, Q&A with the artist
WHEN: Thursday, April 2nd, 6-10pm
WHERE: Floating World Comics, 20 NW 5th Ave #101

JASON LEIVIAN:  Kabuki: The Alchemy talks about a new beginning.  Everything that came before (Volumes 1-6) was childhood.  Maybe one way of putting it, when I was younger there was a developmental stage where I immersed myself in books and ideas that I was interested in.  But then at some point there was a breakthrough and things got crazy.  It’s like it all became real and my life became some science fiction novel.  When I was younger I read things in books, but now my life is these things.  What was metaphor, now seems like platonic truth, even realer than this reality, which seems like maya by comparison.  Let’s talk about the spiritual journey of David Mack as it’s expressed through your art.  In Kabuki you see the work as a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Can you discuss that a bit?

DAVID MACK:  I think I understand what you are describing.  What you focus on has a tendency to change you, affect you. When you are passionate about something and active in working on it, it can seem like you hit a point when your real life seems to operate on dream-logic:  You think it and then it materializes.

Creating on a regular basis is a great practice for that.  It clues you in, trains you, to realize how malleable the material world is –  that you can have an immediate effect on it based on your thoughts and actions.  When you write or draw everyday, you start with a blank, and then you make something- an idea suddenly exists in the three dimensional material world.  Just by writing it down, drawing it, you take this thing that only existed in your head, and then suddenly it exists in three dimensional physical reality.  Practicing that everyday, starts to reveal to you that things work that way.  You experience that transition everyday and it becomes larger than the page or the work you are doing.  It has a ripple effect in people that experience your work and their response to it.

Suddenly you realize you have not just created one story, or one work, or a body of work, but you’ve created your own career, and your own life, as your self-portrait, and your contexts for your life, and your work has become your passport to a variety of worlds.  And there is a point when the dream you were dreaming, and then dared to enact in reality, has become completely real and you live it everyday.  And other people can even share it with you.

That is a great lesson to learn.  Because once you learn it, you can go about living it very consciously.  As consciously as you would craft your work on the page, you realize you are crafting it off the page as well.

mack-14 Continue reading →

THE SODFATHER: Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON — text by Daniel Chamberlin, photos by Eden Batki (Arthur, 2007)

The Sodfather
Californian compost wizard TIM DUNDON talks shit with Daniel Chamberlin.

Photography by Eden Batki

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007)

Original design by Molly Frances and Mark Frohman.

Find bonus Sodfather photos by Chamberlin at Into The Green.

Alchemists are often characterized in modern times as bumbling would-be wizards at best, greedy charlatans at worst. They’re portrayed as fumbling hopelessly in cluttered laboratories, unenlightened madmen trying to turn lead into gold. The reality is more complex, of course.

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.” It’s an image memorably realized in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain wherein the thief character takes a dump in a fancy bucket, and Jodorowsky, playing an alchemist, distills those fresh turds into a hefty chunk of golden bling.

Such fantastical processes are well known to dirt-worshipping gardening sage Tim Dundon, the beneficent caretaker of California’s most famous compost pile and the kindly warden of the tropical forest that has fruited from its rich humus. It’s here that Dundon, a scientist-poet in the truest hermetic sense, finds hope and salvation in the transformation of death into life—of rotting organic matter into nutrient-rich soil—that takes place daily in the fecund jungle he maintains on his one-acre yard.

The botanical odyssey of Dundon, the self-proclaimed “guru of doo-doo” and the man whose mammoth compost pile once covered a football-field-sized lot, begins in 1967 with a marijuana shortage. Like any good gardening story, it encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, standoffs with city officials and a violent pet coyote.

Continue reading →

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint – SERGE GAINSBOURG

gains

APRIL 2 — SERGE GAINSBOURG
Sleazy, dissolute dirty mouth of French pop music.

APRIL 2 holiday:
* INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S BOOK DAY.

ON THIS DATE
1513 — Fountain of Youth seeker Ponce de Leon lands on Florida territory.
1725 — Loverboy, spy, memoirist Giacomo Casanova born, Venice, Italy.
1840 — French writer, activist, experimental novelist Emile Zola born, Paris.
1891 — Artist Max Ernst born, Bruhl, North Rhine Westphalia, Germany.
1928 — French singer, composer Serge Gainsbourg born, Paris, France.
1969 — Twenty-one U.S. Black Panthers charged with conspiring to kill cops.
1991 — Modern dance great Martha Graham dies, New York City.

All info courtesy The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective

C & D interview Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon, review AC/DC, more [Arthur No. 27/Dec 2007]

C & D
Two guys who will remain pseudonymous reason together about new music “product”

Originally published in Arthur No. 27 (Dec 2007)

ultimatereality

DAN DEACON & JIMMY JOE ROCHE
Ultimate Reality dvd
(Carpark)
C: State-of-the-art psychedelic film with music composed by electro-dance party joker Dan Deacon and visuals by Jimmy Joe Roche, two guys from Baltimore’s Wham City operation. It’s constructed from clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career—Conan the Barbarian, Terminator, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, Predator, Junior—collaged and layered and doubled together into something altogether overwhelming at 35 minutes in length.
D: This is Arnold’s mind on drugs. Arnoldelic, baby!
C: Absolutely gorgeous, seriously funny, weirdly poignant and possibly seizure-inducing. This is a landmark work. It’s the first time someone has taken the stuff those Fort Thunder and PaperRad dudes were (or are) doing—bright color-saturated, warped psychedelia incorporating pop iconography—and thrust it forward into a new realm of…of…beauty, really. Watching this right now is for me like seeing “Wonder Showzen” for the first time, or Chris Morris’s “Blue Jam”: a breakthrough on many levels, by somebody pretty much out of nowhere.
D: [reading from Arthur Magazine office rolodex] Or Baltimore…
C: [mischievously] Hand me that. Let’s make a phone call. [Dials on red phone…] Hello? [In Howard Cosell voice] Yes, this is Arthur magazine. We are seated here drinking kratom-powered smoothies having just watched “Ultimate Reality,” and we had a few questions for the filmmakers. [turns speaker phone on] So, Jimmy, what exactly is Wham City and you guys must know the Fort Thunder guys, right?
JIMMY JOE ROCHE: Wham City—the space—was a dingy, insane warehouse, then another one. Me and Dan and Dina and Adam and some other kids lived together at SUNY Purchase, all graduated in 2004, and we had this sort of unfigured-out energy. We knew we wanted something, we had a vision undulating out of control, and those guys wanted to move to Baltimore, because it’s cheap as hell. It seemed like it was a potential void where someone could come in and do art, totally fresh.

Continue reading →

Riffs on Ice: Toronto Maple Leafs' center Boyd Devereaux on adding more heaviness to the soundtrack at your local hockey rink.

Toronto Maple Leafs’ center and Elevation label honcho Boyd Devereaux talks to Jay Somerset about adding more heaviness to the soundtrack at your local hockey rink.

71798511DS015_Sens_Leafs.jp

Professional hockey players can usually be to divided into two groups when it comes to music: There’s the good ol’ boys, usually from small-town Canada, who pump Toby Keith in their Sirius-installed Ford F150 pickups; and then there’s the classic rawkers who never tire of the arena anthems that spark to life between referee whistles—“Get Ready for This” by 2 Unlimited, Europe’s “The Final Countdown” and, unfortunately, Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On.”

And then there’s Boyd Devereaux: “Slow-motion, epic sounds get me going—the heavier, the better,” says Devereaux, 30, a clean-cut father of two who, after 10 years in the National Hockey League, has played more than 600 games, scored 61 goals and made 107 assists for teams including the Edmonton Oilers, Phoenix Coyotes, Detroit Red Wings—where he helped win the Stanley Cup, in 2002—and, most recently, the Toronto Maple Leafs. “Last season, I was pumping Boris a lot, especially right before a game, on my way to the rink.”

Continue reading →

BRAVO! SPACE HIJACKERS BRING A TANK TO THE PROTESTS

wowtank

From the Times of London:

“The police stopped an armoured personnel carrier outside The Times offices and arrested all the occupants. It is understood they had planned to join the protests.”

From the Guardian:

“11 protesters who turned up at the protest in an armoured personnel carrier were arrested in connection with the possession of police uniforms and road traffic offences. The latter group are understood to be anarchists known as the Space Hijackers who had come to make their feelings felt through the medium of street theatre.”

Space Hijackers twitter: twitter.com/spacehijackers
Space Hijackers web: spacehijackers.co.uk