AUTUMNAL REFLECTIONS...

The season has continued to be wet & mostly too cool for my preference, yet with enough warmth to encourage growth & blooms when most flora are aware of the shortening days. The garden has been a bit confused, along with the rest of us! This viburnum is blossoming a second time even as its leaves are turning...

[Clicking on the photos enlarges them... click again for full size.]

My camera has been challenged to catch images inside that lowering light. I've made some images forgetting that I'd bumped the the film speed up, rendering a grainy quality I would have tried to avoid, while giving some quality of mood which I rationalize as apropos.

Hollyhocks are favorite flowers from my childhood. These are the last of those in the garden...

One big joy has been the bounty of food available to my chef, although I am loath to harvest from the pink kale "roses" above. It has become trendy to make & share images of "food porn" on the Internet. As will become evident, I am not impervious to that notion, but my gardener would prefer to begin with food more truly "in the raw"!

Here in the north garden, which is in its third year being wrested from a steep dense clay slope, the purple cardoon blooms can be seen with the yellow umbels of bronze fennel

Cardoon is a thistle-cousin to artichoke, which it resembles. Its bud is inedible, but in France the stems are braised as a vegetable. Several have started from seed which survived composting in a bed of other greens seen beyond the smoke bush.... I'll transplant those cardoon to a drier border next spring. A couple of acorn squash volunteered rather too late in the foreground... they are involved in an improbable race to ripen!

But the Brussels sprouts [I've been trying to find why they are so named...] are beginning to find their way from the garden to our table. I've been experimenting with a recipe I found on the web for a salad of those buds raw, finely shaved with mint, dressed with a vinaigrette enriched & mellowed with toasted almond butter.

Now here are some shots of food on our table. Caprese is our favorite summer salad, fresh tomatoes from the local farmers market composed with slices of buffola [fresh Italian mozzarella made from water buffalo milk] dressed with pesto, atop greens [lettuces, Lacinata kale & purple orach] from the garden & garnished with blossoms [nasturtiums, arugula, kale] . Oh, now I spy a single snow pea which I suspect Stephen dropped alongside before he made the photo... I often do not have my camera at hand in the kitchen when I'm cooking. Thank you, M'Dear!

He captured this skillet of a succotash of fresh vegetables for me as well...

Here is lunch one day last month: An omelet topped with avocado accompanied a hash of vegetables from the previous night's dinner, garnished with the last of the season's fava beans... which I love best grilled in their husk... along with some of the pickled lentils I love to make.

Not having room for an orchard, we buy fruit. Pears are favorites for dessert. Here I paired one with champagne grapes & an excess of shaved chocolate. One of my mottoes has long been "Excess is best!"

A second version was grilled with a wonderful Gorgonzola & some pine nuts, plated with a puddle of warm marscapone softening chunks of dark chocolate... Armagnac to sip with. I wish I'd used the erection of the brass figure of Bes as the knife holder it was made to be. Playful friends sent us a pair from Istanbul & we use them with great amusement

A final pear joined the mushroom pies I made for dinner just a couple days ago. The crust was my first experiment using gluten-free flour. Each had a different base to the filling: one of curried lentil Dal, the other of sweet potato seasoned with smoked paprika & finely minced cedar needles, which my palate has been loving to dance with of late. Shitake mushrooms have been abundant, onions caramelized with garlic are constants, both pies were topped with these plus dollops of marscapone.

I made a special pastie for Stephen's flight to Mexico the next day, packed with a frond of that cedar.

Salmon is another favorite local food... perhaps caught in this net being hauled in below the Prow deck.

The reflection which inspired this post to begin with, before I got lost in the kitchen garden, was first seen, but missed as I hunted for my camera. The next day I was quicker & better prepared, anticipating the fleeting opportune moments of a freighter catching raking light of approaching sunset. I didn't plan the fulsome moon getting involved...

As the ship sailed through our view across the shipping lanes of the south Puget Sound, looking toward the city, that brilliant light caught the plates of the hull, turning them into gem facets of topaz... or the scales of a golden fish...

Meanwhile, back in the studio...
my birthday orchid has been joined by dahlias from the garden.

In this spell of solitude, I predictably find myself
seasonally settling inward...

POLITICAL PUDENDA...

Or: Propaganda In The Time Of Tomatoes...

As I watched the Vice Presidential debate several nights ago on CNN I was intrigued by the "reaction graph" scrolling beneath the live visuals of talking podiums that indicated undecided men in Ohio seemed to respond positively more consistently to the female debater & undecided women to the male. Curious bedfellows is a term noting the obviously occurring cross pollination in our current politics. I have to wonder what many of those guys might have thought of another female candidate now overshadowed...

Politics has much to do with innies & outies... left & right... conservative of what is &/or liberal toward change, various versions of yin & yang, female & male, Venus & Mars...

The "Battle of the Sexes" was an archetypical joke line during my growing up, which seemed always to be most true in its lie. The old In & out suggests a Freudian viewpoint but Jung helps me understand better for myself the deeper layers. This is not an either / or argument. We each are wired to want to be in our own way relating to each other. We need each other. We do need all the story there is, especially in the give & take between the male & female selves in each of us... we all have our own particularly sexy ins & outs.

I heard today on one of our local NPR stations an interview with the guy who has started a business making kilts -- Utilikilts is the brand name [http://www.utilikilts.com]. He answered the question from the female interviewer about why men would want to wear skirts when she & her generation mostly eschews them. He answered so simply: "Anatomy".

Anatomy might thus seem curiously at odds with current fashion. Men have worn skirts & robes much longer than they have worn pants. Long pants, indeed are relatively recent in history... our country's founding fathers wore what were essentially tights, sometimes only barely lacking the codpieces of several generations before, which we no doubt would now consider foppish at best. Pants have their origin with the Mongol horse tribes, the barbarians of ancient history.

My father once told of his pride in having a pair of long pants instead of his more common knickers for his school picture in the period before WWII. Pants have long risen to the symbolic connotation of male freedom. Do you get the kilt guy's almost joking point?

Perhaps being gay I have some earlier, if not always easier, blending... yet I must admit I might define freedom by continuing to wear the tights I find habitually comfortable here in the NW under any kilt I might be considering.

Our best experiences have always been while yearning toward drift over some line or another... to join our own other. To procreate & create in all of posibility's bountifully beautiful forms. That coincides with what I think art mostly is, so I can talk this way from under several of my numerous hats.

Us & them does not make much sense when all of us are suffering through yet another lesson about the failure of dominance. We are smart enough to know we need cooperation even as we do not have ready tools to proceed beyond hesitantly stepping up to a line. Why can we get only so far as to confront from our own side?

The battle of those oppositions we call the sexes has always been ultimately about love, hasn't it?

We each talk from under several hats. None of us, no matter our resolution to steady ourselves in some adamant position, has the comfort of only one opinion. Such a mind has no center to hold. Weakness & instability are definitions of moving nowhere in ever changing times. We each have at least two minds... those define our freedom of choice. That is politics. The lines moving up & down on that TV graph were all about that. Those lines were dancing with each other... seemed to be courting each other.

I'll leave you to parse out the colors in current politics: black & white plus the entire range of grays, all atop the entire rainbow's spectrum; & the genders. I suggest we like & actually need all that variety.

In opera the term "pants role" describes a part now sung by a female soprano dressed to play a man, because her role & music were written for a castratto... one musical ideal for a man in a time not so long ago...

Anatomy = pudenda. Women would seem thus to be meant more easily to wear the constriction of pants.

Freedom for men might lie elsewhere...

One of my notions of that freedom could show art's history of the ideal in gorgeously naked Greek athletes training to stride as the soldiers in armies led by generals the likes, they might hope, of the queer conquerer Alexander the Great, who continues, I understand, to be a major strategical study for even today's generals... but don't ask, don't tell.

Some politicians can't seem to get beyond our current paranoia about the many faces of love. Such spectral fact is lost in a polarity of male or female. While I understand there are no small number in their constituencies who share that paranoia, I know, as do the humans they are, the fragility of trying to pin life onto such narrow construction.

Futilely they dig in their heels to shortsightedness. Too many have gay children or grandchildren to not be actively questioning that stance.

I don't mind verging toward writing a tract for being queer, however, I really want to keep the focus on how our polarities get bridged. I point to seeing that we all are in shifting roles. We must celebrate taking our own flavor of position, as absolutely good. That is our role in the body politic of a democracy. I am intrigued by the parsing of our national debates. I never watch television, yet I did tonight,,, wanting to see how the words were spoken. That medium gives me clues from body language, which allows me a rare celebration of that medium, when I ordinarily prefer to listen to those words on the radio.

I needed to look & to see...

In so many ways pants roles still abound... the female opera singer does double duty for those who feel castrated by a system they still don't know how to resist, even as they feel some need, because this system does not care for them either. The masculine myth is hardly democratic.

Can we learn from our love of our own sexual nuance? That part of us we know is unique? We've been studying that for eons... So were those naked Greek hunks parading themselves without the trousers which are needed to play that role now. Our game is the same, but I like the other teams uniforms better...

I've been kilting the issue...

ANATOMY MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT DESCRIBE GENDER... GENDER CERTAINLY DOES NOT PRESCRIBE FASHION. GENDER DANCES WITH FASHION...

In these times POLITICS IS DANCING WITH BOTH.

If I were tech savvy I would have a more seamless link to Sally's Tomato by Henry Mancini from Breakfast At Tiffanys for you to play in the background, while I share a shot of some of the harvest of green tomatoes sitting in my studio because our rains have begun too soon for them to ripen.



If a shot from the unsubstantiated internet follows... meaning that I have no proof of this image's integrity even as I submit it for being the political cartoon it obviously is... I trust you will remember that Masini title celebrates winking toward a moll...

We're all in political drag... may I have the next dance?