tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85046922596245555062024-02-07T01:15:38.453-05:00Joel FinselAmerican AuthorJ.F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17609759807306153399noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-36521085128395371902019-03-10T16:45:00.001-04:002020-12-13T21:29:30.366-05:00Franz Kline in Coal Country<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">––Detail of <i>Lehighton</i>, 1946, Allentown Art Museum </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Allow me to introduce our new book, a biography of Franz Kline, published by America Through Time. If you're not into art history, you may have seen Kline depicted in an episode of <i>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</i>, or in the film <i>Pollock</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">––Franz J. Kline, Self-Portrait, 1945 </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the pinnacle of his career, Kline was celebrated internationally. <i>Avanti!</i>, a newspaper in Rome, called him the "Elvis Presley in art." He helped found the New York School and died in Manhattan in 1962. But before the cognoscenti claimed him, he spent his youth in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and we share a hometown. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />In a letter to a young lover, Kline described home as a 'little Dutch settlement wrapped up in a cloud of coal dirt,' referring to Lehighton, Pennsylvania, a railroad stop along the Lehigh River with deep history, nestled amid mountains rich with quartz and anthracite coal. Like these mineral deposits, Kline's "action paintings" are infused with energy. The stark lines command the kind of tension that transforms coal into diamonds, and single works have sold for over forty million dollars.<br /><br /><i>Franz Kline in Coal Country</i> is the first biography to examine Kline's formative years in Wilkes-Barre, Philadelphia, Boston, and London, before he joined the ragtag group of artists who stole the art world away from Paris after WWII. And our book, according to Kline's sister, Dr. Louise Kline-Kelly, sets the record straight in more than one place. <br /><br />Compiled over three decades, it contains over 100 of Kline's earliest drawings, cartoons, photos, paintings, and linoleum-block prints. Most of these little-known works, rescued from the attics and scrapbooks of friends, appear here for the first time. We also include over twenty of Kline's letters, as well as a recently unearthed (and previously unpublished) essay from 1965 offering a rare view into Kline's personal life, student years, and marriage. <br /><br /><i>Franz Kline in Coal Country</i> is published </span><span style="font-size: large;">in the United Kingdom</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">by </span><a href="https://www.through-time.com/products/franz-kline-in-coal-country" style="font-size: x-large;">Font Hill Media</a><span style="font-size: large;"> for the </span><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781634991018" style="font-size: x-large;">"America Through Time"</a><span style="font-size: large;"> Series, copyright 2019. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Click here for personalized </span><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/293036949121" style="font-size: x-large;">copies.</a><br />
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<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4EwAQ1p5xtLfEoMEzoJMNGUYDmSUHjYYYRoxbEOmYkIb6deuWlZDrTqgRy_GSD9qi5JHPo-mUYiE_kx4E-_xoIwHOl_c1cqMLAwq1srEDxISlA1Vxc-spJpZvhBPmJSZ_QhXN9Csl-JI/s640/frontis+copy+2.jpg" /> </div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">––Kline in Lehighton, PA, circa 1925</span></div>
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Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-31930194000179794812017-06-11T13:10:00.000-04:002019-04-23T21:52:35.441-04:00Set Forth: Thumbing with the Founder of the Great Hitchhiking Race<div style="line-height: normal;">
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "crimson text" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 20px;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "crimson text" , serif; font-size: 20px;">"When we hitch, we make ourselves vulnerable. We get to know unfamiliar people, and it allows for a kind of unpredictable magic . . ."</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "crimson text" , serif; font-size: 20px;">Read my full account of chasing the founder of "The Great Hitchhiking Race" </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "crimson text", serif; font-size: 20px;">across seven states in the </span><i style="font-family: "crimson text", serif; font-size: 20px;">Southern Journeys</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: "crimson text", serif; font-size: 20px;"> issue here: </span><i style="font-family: "crimson text", serif; font-size: 20px;"><a href="http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1245-set-forth">OxfordAmerican.org</a></i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Cover painting <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">“Cutlass with iPod” by </span><a href="http://www.cherylkelley.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: black; text-align: start; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Cheryl Kelley</a></span></td></tr>
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Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-88394607354135503202016-11-28T14:04:00.001-05:002019-03-10T16:54:57.725-04:00"Cocktails & Conversations from the Astral Plane," Live on Stage!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><i>-Click to watch the live performance</i> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It was an honor to have my first book, <i>Cocktails and Conversations from the Astral Plane</i>, adapted for the stage by <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0360393/">Zach Hanner</a>, Artistic Director of </span>THEATRE NOW<span style="font-size: large;">. The show ran for six weeks and brought back a lot of memories about tending bar in one of Philadelphia's most eccentric restaurants, once described as "like dining in a faded starlet's dressing room." </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Here's what members of the press had to say:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.encorepub.com/sipping-truthiness-short-essays-about-bar-life-from-local-writer-makes-it-to-dinner-theatre-setting/">"Sipping Truthiness"</a> <i>Encore Magazine</i>, August 9, 2016. </span><br />
<a href="http://www.starnewsonline.com/entertainment/20160803/cocktails-amp-conversations-combines-storytelling-with-mixology-at-theatrenow"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></a>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.starnewsonline.com/entertainment/20160803/cocktails-amp-conversations-combines-storytelling-with-mixology-at-theatrenow">"<i>Cocktails and Conversations</i> combines Storytelling with Mixology"</a> <i>The Star News</i>, August 3, 2016.</span><br />
<a href="http://stylegirljessjames.com/5349-2/"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></a>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><a href="http://stylegirljessjames.com/5349-2/"><i>"Cocktails & Conversations</i> Revisited - Memory Lane"</a> Jess James, August 18, 2016.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Special thanks to Producer Alisa Harris, Chef Denise Gordon, and the cast: Jacob Keohane, Reid Clark, Kai Knight, Ruth Golsteyn, Zeb Mims, Blake Howard, Lupin Byers, and Sandy Vaughan. </span><br />
<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-31351070903882857112016-02-14T23:21:00.002-05:002021-01-14T22:43:00.869-05:00"Though the Heavens Fall" Parts I & II<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 16px 0px 4px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><b><span class="s1" style="box-sizing: border-box;">On Texas, Old Newspapers, Race Music, and T</span><span class="s1" style="box-sizing: border-box;">wo Black Lives that Shaped the History of Civil Rights</span></b></span></div>
This pair of stories was born out of months reading Black newspapers from the early 20th-century on microfilm. During that period––as John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html?_r=0">"The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie</a>" for <i>The New York Times Magazine––</i>I was his researcher. This was our first shared byline.<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKikvG4MFnjU09jsnCBTFC3Gj-ix2u0iDqBJGT8kVjyJyfhXA28Jd_23BX612JxLVgUz5zAl-aJ2P68nv-CsKPTFJLcapSfI2hKV6U10aL3_Nmu66fnIFvdr7X4DsNHXLBJdOedyjKzvvl/s801/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.40.36+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="529" data-original-width="801" height="401" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKikvG4MFnjU09jsnCBTFC3Gj-ix2u0iDqBJGT8kVjyJyfhXA28Jd_23BX612JxLVgUz5zAl-aJ2P68nv-CsKPTFJLcapSfI2hKV6U10aL3_Nmu66fnIFvdr7X4DsNHXLBJdOedyjKzvvl/w607-h401/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.40.36+PM.png" width="607" /></a></div><div class="itemImageBlock" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crimson Text", serif; margin: 20px 0px;"><span class="itemImageCaption" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: block; float: left; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>–Clifton “C. F.” Richardson behind his desk at the Houston Informer, 1920s</i></span></span></div><div class="itemHeader" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Crimson Text", serif;"><div class="itemToolbar" style="box-sizing: border-box;"></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div><div><br /></div><div>Long live the memory of these fearless, old time editors: C. N. Love and C. F. Richardson. <span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Read both parts here at </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><a href="http://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/541-editor-love">The Oxford American</a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">.</span><div><div>
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</div></div>Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-33694078576480844582015-07-01T18:55:00.000-04:002020-04-07T23:13:33.291-04:00Ah, the mint julep: bourbon, powdered sugar, mint. Smashed ice in a silver cup. Stirred until the sides frost up. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">originally published in</span> <i>SALT</i>, <span style="font-size: x-small;">July 2015</span></div>
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Ah, the mint julep: bourbon, powdered sugar, mint. Smashed ice in a silver cup. Stirred until the sides frost up. </div>
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During my first decade behind the bar, I made mint juleps rarely, and in most cases only on Derby Day. In my mind I associated them with sorority girls and pre-batched mint syrup. Only gradually did I learn what a deep history the drink comes trailing. </div>
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The word julep evolved from the Persian gulab, meaning rosewater. It’s a very ancient word. Supposedly the second part of it, the<i> ap</i>, goes back more than five thousand years to Proto-Indo European. <i>Ap</i> meant water. <i>Jul</i>, or something like it, meant rose. So, rosewater. Or for practical purposes, sweetwater. </div>
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In the late middle ages, Europe started to import sugar from Arabic-speaking, cane-growing countries. Along with the sugar came words associated with it, including the word sugar itself. Also, “candy.” Also, “syrup.” And of course, julep. According to linguists, it first shows up around the year 1400. An apothecary’s book advises that the doctor “give him in the beginning Julep — that is a syrup made only of water and sugar.” </div>
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Many traditional cocktails are traceable to apothecaries. “Juleps” were used as a vehicle for bitter medicines. The mint julep is first mentioned in a doctor’s notes from 1783. On February 20 of that year, in London, Dr. Maxwell Garthshore visited a Mrs. P——, on Orange Street. He found her “emaciated” and sick at her stomach, with “frequent retching.” He “prescribed her an emetic, some opening powders, and a mint julep.” She “seemed better for a few days.” (She died in the summer, but the good doctor made her last several months much less miserable, prescribing one trusts many more juleps.) </div>
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The first actual recipe for a mint julep comes from a hospital — St. John’s, in London. A book published around 1785 says that the doctors there found mint juleps useful for “removing nausea” and advised making them like so: Take of simple mint water 8 ounces, spirituous mint water 1 ounce, loaf sugar a drachm; mix them into a julep. Four large spoonfuls taken frequently are of great service... </div>
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In America the mint julep came to be associated less with medicine and more with leisure. Less, that is, with the “simple,” and more with the “spirituous.” The shift seems to have been especially strong in the South. In 1805, in Virginia, we read of a “Turk” from Tunisia (interesting coincidence, given the julep’s Arabic roots), who has a trick played on him by some American soldiers. A correspondent in Washington, D. C., writes, “You know Turks drink no spirits. While at Hampton, they made him drink a ‘mint julep,’ a morning dram in Virginia, pretending that it was water from a neighbouring mountain.” </div>
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In Kentucky, to this day, they grow excellent mint — long-stalked, red-stemmed mint. And in the eighteenth century, people in the central part of that state were starting to distill a new kind of dark corn whiskey. As for how they came to call it bourbon, that’s another story. The Oxford English Dictionary has it slightly wrong. There you can read that bourbon is “Whisky of a kind originally made in Bourbon County, Kentucky,” but in reality, when they started making bourbon, there was no “Kentucky.” That territory was called, instead, Bourbon. It was an outpost of French settlement and a fringe of Louisiana. There’s still a lot of French influence in that part of Kentucky. They never mention it when you visit the distilleries, but it’s there. The reason Thomas Merton could live at a monastery near Bardstown, the reason there were Trappist monks in that part of the world to begin with, was because of the French. Whoever invented it, one thing is known: when they shipped it down the river to New Orleans, they marked the barrels “Old Bourbon.” That was its name before they called it Bourbon, Old Bourbon — as in, it’s Kentucky now, but it used to be called Bourbon. The OED says the name appears first in the 1840s, but in fact as early as 1827 (in the Maysville, Kentucky Eagle) a man named H. I. de Bruin could advertise “a small, but tolerably good, assortment of dry goods and groceries,” among which were, “a quantity of OLD BOURBON WHISKY, by the barrel — and a few barrels of 9 YEARS OLD BOURBON WHISKY, of superior quality, which he will sell by the gallon only.” Almost two hundred years ago, and there was not only already “Bourbon” in Kentucky, but Bourbon snobbery. </div>
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The mint julep has inspired perhaps more literature, or at least more writing, than any other cocktail. If you ask legendary barman Chris McMillan to make you one at Bar UnCommon in New Orleans, you can hear him recite a nineteenth century poem about the drink. </div>
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The poem, published by Col. Joshua Soule Smith in the Lexington, Kentucky<i> Herald</i>, praises the drink as “the zenith of man’s pleasure.” Smith had clearly sipped a few already when he wrote that the julep “is fragrant, cold, and sweet — it is seductive. No maiden’s kiss is tenderer or more refreshing, no maidens touch could be more passionate. Sip it and dream." </div>
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In the long tradition of writing on mint juleps, the standout is undoubtedly Charles H. Baker, Jr.’s 1939<i> Gentleman’s Companion</i>, specifically Vol. 2, “Being an Exotic Drinking Book, or, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Flask.” Baker was rediscovered nearly a decade ago in the <i>Oxford American</i> magazine, by the modern-day writer/bartender St. John Frizell. </div>
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A Southerner by birth, Baker had spent the roaring twenties in New York, but he left just as the Depression hit to work as (of all things) a publicist on a cruise liner. As panicking Americans made runs on banks, Baker sipped juleps (and many other tipples) in calmer waters abroad. Acting as the ship’s publicist meant charming the guests. One of these, the heiress to a mining fortune, became Baker’s wife. As they traveled, he sent off stories to <i>Esquire</i>, <i>Town & Country</i>, and <i>Gourmet</i>. He refers to the mint julep as a “peerless American conception.” Having sipped them in places ranging from “the shaded upper gallery in Versailles, Kentucky all the way to the coffee and cocao plantations of central Guatemala,” he was an expert on the cocktail’s many varieties. To our benefit, he took fastidious notes, including advice on which glass to use. </div>
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Since the mint julep is traditionally served in late spring/early summer, it’s typically served as cold as possible, hence the silver or metal cup (still called, in the South, a julep cup). The two substances, metal and glass, conduct differently. Glass insulates the hand, helping to keep fingers warm from chilled contents. Metal acts as a conductor, sucking the chill outward. That’s why the cup frosts on the outside. (Keep this lesson on the physics of heat transfer in mind when ordering a mint julep: if you don’t want cold hands, ask for yours in a glass, even if they have julep cups). </div>
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Baker, in the 1930s (and Chris McMillan today) would warn you against the rough handling of the mint. Bartenders should rub it around delicately in their hands. This helps one get a feel for how the aromatic essence of the oils are released. Crushing the plant too violently releases its bitter chlorophyll, which can sour the taste. When making mint juleps, it’s essential to press the mint gently. </div>
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Of the many mint juleps that Baker recorded on his travels, the one he drank in Louisville, Kentucky, at the historic Pendennis Club, is probably closest to the one we think of today, i.e., the International Bartenders Association version. For Baker, it was one among many. In Georgia, the drink often came with a hearty dose of peach brandy. In Santiago, Cuba, he encountered bartenders who added rum, fresh lime, and grenadine. But Baker’s favorite of all these wasn’t even from America — he found it in the Philippines. He writes that it was mixed for him by a Chinese boy at the Manila Hotel on Luzon in 1926. It consisted of top-shelf bourbon, fresh red-stemmed mint, a little sugar, a teaspoon of demerara rum, and two ripe spears of pineapple, to be eaten as a snack at the end. </div>
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Here are two recipes. The first is the classic version, the one Baker had in Louisville, and the second is his favorite, from Luzon. Notice that, heretically, the latter is served in a pint glass. </div>
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1) Combine the following in a metal cup: </div>
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a teaspoon of powdered sugar, two teaspoons of water, and four mint leaves. </div>
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Gently press the ingredients against the sides of the glass with a muddler, careful not to bruise the mint. Overfill the cup with finely cracked ice. Add a jigger (1.5 oz.) or more of good bourbon. Stir for about fifteen seconds until the glass frosts over on the outside. Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint, leaves splayed out.</div>
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2) Combine the following in a pint glass: </div>
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a teaspoon of powdered sugar, two teaspoons of water, and four mint leaves. </div>
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Gently press the ingredients together with a muddler, careful not to bruise the mint. Fill with finely cracked ice. Add a jigger (1.5 oz.) of good bourbon and a teaspoon of demerara rum (I like Zaya). Stir for about fifteen seconds. Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint, leaves splayed out, and two ripe spears of pineapple.</div>
Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-29728563267329614342015-04-20T22:18:00.000-04:002015-08-06T22:48:28.255-04:00Walker World: From Fishing Shack to Artistic Eco-Mansion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Transcript:</div>
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Walker World: From Fishing Shack to Artistic Eco-Mansion</div>
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by Joel Finsel</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?" </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-size: x-small;">George Bernard Shaw</span></div>
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Blossom Ferry Road is paved for about half the distance to the house before it turns to gravel and then dirt. You cross a railroad track. Homes thin out as the forest thickens. Just past a white trailer is a Palmetto palm with a pile of stones and a sign with an arrow pointing left. In blue, yellow and purple letters, it reads: Walker World.</div>
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After the turn, the road thins down to a single lane. The forest opens onto a clearing. Curiously, there’s a park bench and a streetlamp. The urban tableau seems totally foreign to the terrain. It reminds me of the fake Prada store (described as “a pop architectural land art project”) in the desert outside Marfa, Texas. </div>
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Across the road is an open shelter, almost like a lean-to, but overflowing with salvaged building materials: columns, shutters, sheets of metal. Shells of old boats and cars line the road like an American Picker's dream. I count half a dozen antique Mercedes, a school bus, a pair of Air Streams, and a carport with an upside-down sport-fishing boat for a roof. One car is actually the front end of a Mercedes welded to the back end of another. Allen Walker, the owner/builder, called it his limo.</div>
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To the left of the long driveway was a garage made mostly out of glass, with a sleeping loft. Walker hasn’t settled on a name yet but a contender was “Garage-Mahal.” Next door was a three-story playhouse with the guts of a piano mounted upside down. There were climbing ropes, a brass pole, and swings. I passed an open-air garage. My tires crackled as my car inched forward. The path came to an end at a paved circle surrounded by gardens. There was an entire patio set up as a chess board, with pieces as high as my thighs. I parked next to an old Army jeep, a stone’s throw from the Northeast Cape Fear River, finding it difficult not to smile as I took in the house.</div>
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This sprawling artistic lodge sprouted from the seed of a single-room cabin. If you look hard at the front door of the house as it appears today, you can still see the outline of the original shack. Walker keeps an old photograph of it pinned to the wall in his kitchen. It looks as if it had been built of Lincoln Logs. There’s a refrigerator on the porch. “It had a collapsed cabinet for a kitchen,” Walker said, “as if hobos had been living there.” </div>
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Walker was no stranger to remote places. Born and raised in an old historic Wilmington home, he says he really “grew up” in a tobacco barn on a 200-acre farm in Pitt County. He remembers watching, as a young boy, while his father lifted the old barn onto a trailer and moved it a half-mile closer to the creek. About a dozen farmers came from all over the area to see the spectacle. Walker remembers looking on and feeling like there was nothing he couldn’t do.</div>
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After high school he took a job on a framing crew but retired after a few weeks to be his own boss. He moved into the barn full time and built a loft, then added a kitchen and a bathroom. The back deck stood thirty feet above the swamp. Cypress knees knuckled up from below. Once the barn was ready, he filled it with paintings made during breaks from ECU classes. He bought a piano with a little light inside he could turn on, to keep moisture from damaging the strings. One day the bulb ignited something flammable, and when Allen returned from class, there was nothing but a burnt hole in the swamp where his house had been. </div>
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In 1999 he heard about a weird old cabin about ten miles north of Wilmington that might be for sale. The owner’s name was Hoke Bullock. He had a long, white beard, and a seaplane dock on the river, from which he would fly back and forth to his home in Raleigh. Walker had actually heard of the place before. One of the only neighboring houses belonged to a friend of his, an underwater archaeologist named Wesley K. Hall (part of the team that recovered the H.L. Hunley Confederate submarine from Charleston Harbor). One day Walker got a call from Hall saying that the old man, Hoke Bullock, had died. The cabin belonged to his son now. Walker drove to Raleigh with a thousand dollars in cash, hoping to persuade Bullock’s son to sell. He promised to deliver the rest of the money within a month and wound up getting the entire ten-acre plot for $100,000.</div>
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Most of his friends expected he would tear down the derelict structure and build something that was, in the words of a neighbor, “worth living in,” but Walker had other ideas. He says that nearly every one of his neighbors has, at some point in the last fifteen years, called the law on him. “But once the house began to take shape,” he adds, “they started to come around."</div>
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Today, inside there are unexpected “interventions” at every turn. It’s a creative reinterpretation of a house. You open the door to an antique player-piano blasting out show tunes. The giant dried flower-stalk of a Century plant (a strange organism that flowers only once every ten or twenty years) rises three stories high, almost touching the ceiling. Suspended from the main beam that runs overhead is a 60-foot, upside-down rowing scull. The boat is too long for the house—it sticks through a hole in the front of the house, like a horn. </div>
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As Walker showed me around, I was struck by how much local history had come together in the house. Excluding the materials used in plumbing and wiring, everything in the place had been reclaimed. Many of the windows were salvaged from the famed Lumina Pavilion at Wrightsville Beach. Old bottles incorporated into the wall gave the appearance of stained-glass. An aluminum airplane prop was mounted under a street sign for Soaring Spirit Drive. One mirror had been salvaged from the set of The Crow. Out back stood a huge deck made from the docks of the old Southport and Bald Head Island marinas. Straight ahead, a deep water slip. To the left was a rope-swing platform, dangerously high-looking, for swinging out into the river. My visit took place on one of the coldest days of the year, but Walker said that he would jump into the river if I wanted (this was before he had any idea I wanted to write an article about him). I had the sense that day of having stumbled on the Holy Fool's southeastern retreat—not completely polished, but a decidedly great place to start a second childhood.</div>
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Recently Walker has started opening the place up to people. He lists it on Airbnb for $400 a night. He rents it to groups who need a space for weekend outings. He has a vision of turning it into a part-time “organic artist retreat.” I asked Walker if all of these plans meant that he considered the house “finished.” Walker answered, “I never expect to be finished.” Finishing, he said, isn’t something he even wants. For him, it’s all about “not losing” the sheer pleasure that can be found in "doing something for fun." </div>
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“I could have paid someone to build a house out here,” he said, “but then I would have had to go to work to pay for it. Instead, I built something from garbage.”</div>
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To many, his approach to building would seem backward. Instead of drawing up a plan and then buying the necessary materials, he flips it around. Only after he finds the materials (“or the material finds me,” he says) does the structure begin to take shape. Only then do a pair of discarded patio doors change into huge light-pouring windows. In Walker’s world, form creates function.</div>
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“I built this place for my children,” he tells me. He has three by an ex-wife, a nine-year-old girl and seven-year-old twins (a boy and girl). He says that although they’re still too young to participate in creating the house, their perspective—“seeing the world through their eyes”—has helped bring the structure to life. It’s a place where grown-ups are invited to act like children again. A place to paint, cook, fish, write poetry, swim, relax. </div>
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People have begun to notice. Last summer, in France, the novelist Frédérique Deghelt was scrolling through the “most eccentric houses” on Airbnb, and spotted Walker’s World. She wound up bringing her family over from France for a month, and later based a character in one of her novels on Walker. He became a 70-year-old man who helps guide a woman through a difficult time.</div>
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“I knew that Frédérique’s husband enjoyed playing the piano,” Walker said, “so one day I bought an old concert grand and smuggled it onto the boat when they weren’t watching, just for them, and covered it with a sheet. Later that day we went up the river a few miles, cooking dinner on the grill and drinking wine. At sunset, I told them I had a surprise and pulled off the sheet. You would have thought I had pulled up a trunk full of buried treasure.”</div>
<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-19387791190263173332015-04-19T00:24:00.000-04:002015-10-05T19:05:59.027-04:00Story of a House: Healing Gay Adair<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;">
published in <i>SALT, </i>May 2015 </div>
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In the century-old suburb of Carolina Heights, back when canary-yellow trolley cars still ran from downtown to the beach, a two-story house was built on a corner lot. Unlike many of the other homes in the neighborhood, there’s no historic plaque near the front door. It’s certainly eligible, residing in the official historic district, but the research has not yet been done. The new owner seems to prefer a bit of mystery, or maybe she’s just been so busy restoring it to its former grandeur that she has shrugged off worrying about its past. We don’t yet know the name of the man or woman who chose the design from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue over a hundred years ago and purchased the ground. But we know that the pre-cut pieces arrived by train and were assembled in 1910. Aside from those details, all Gay Adair needs to know about her new home is that for over a hundred years, it sheltered many lives until it, like her, had fallen on hard times. </div>
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When she took possession in late 2012, all but two of the floor joists in the kitchen had rotted. Walking on the layers of pegboard that had been installed as a patch felt like walking on a sponge. Outside, shutters hung at oblique angles. The place was in such remarkable disrepair that One Tree Hill featured it in an episode called “Not Afraid” as the creepy house that was too scary for trick-or-treaters to approach. Inside the entry hall, peach wallpaper with images of black and white women in antebellum dresses walking amidst blooming magnolias and plantation homes. The carpet reeked of dog. The bathroom walls featured gods and humans frozen in mid-bacchanalian orgy. The shower was stacked with trailer tires. At the top of the stairwell: a wall. A person could walk up a few steps, turn left; up a couple more, turn left again; up the last few and all you could do was try to listen through the barrier separating the house in two. The only way to access the second floor was a set of wooden stairs in the backyard. Inside felt “dark” and “oppressive,” according to a neighbor who admitted that she couldn’t believe someone actually lived there. Yet someone did, in fact. A venerable man who kept his bed in the dining room. He passed away four months before the house was sold. </div>
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Having known Gay Adair for the past eight years, I asked her if she felt like the state of the house was anything like the state of her life when she bought it. She had been smoking a Sherman cigarette by an open window but turned immediately. “Yes,” she said. “It was exactly the same. That’s why I was undaunted.” </div>
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I first met Adair when she opened her second furniture store, the Gypsy Jewel Wagon, downtown. Many others remember her from her first, The Red Dinette. Fewer people know that before her career in interior design she was a modern dancer for eighteen years and studied under Martha Graham in New York. There’s a photo of her posing in tights in her downstairs bathroom. After New York, she returned home to Arkansas and found her own troupe, the Church of Perpetual Motion, named for the old church where they practiced. She fell for the dilapidated structure because it was never modernized. The attic became her living space; the Sunday school room, her kitchen. In the sanctuary, she danced and choreographed with others, later receiving a national endowment grant. She had invested so much of herself in the building that when it became time for her to move on, she was confident it would sell. “I had this really crusty, chain-smoking realtor,” she said. “I was so proud when I showed her around. And do you know what she said when I asked how much she thought it was worth? She said, ‘Burn the son-of-a-bitch!’”<br />
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But Gay didn’t listen. Her intuition was right. The church sold in a week to a couple from San Francisco. The fact that it sold so easily reinforced her belief that, of all the things she did in life, she could always count on selling her homes for profit . . . at least the first twelve. “I treated each like I was going to live in it forever,” she said. “I never did it thinking I would make money, but I always bought houses with a certain soul.”<br />
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When age forced her to retire from dancing, she embraced her gift of arranging objects in ways that harmonize a person in his or her environment and began to study under a master of feng shui. To catalyze the start of her new life, she moved to Wilmington. This was back, she says, when the Henrietta was little and cute, Claude Howell read from his journal on the radio and WHQR’s only programming was opera on Saturdays. She loved how people gathered around steaming cups inside Front Street News, and later, Caffe Phoenix. Inspired by the play of color on the ocean and river, she finally felt free to do what she had longed to do ever since she was 6 years old and snuck downstairs at night to rearrange her Aunt Rosy’s furniture. <br />
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By the time we met, Adair’s career had been humming for many years. Aside from local clients, she spent weeks on the road and earned excellent money. But she wasn’t happy. She and her husband separated a few years later. She was forced to sell her condo on the Intracoastal Waterway for a loss. After experimental brain surgery, the once nimble dancer had to relearn how to walk. Her hearing evaporated in one ear. And then her mother grew ill, and passed. Yet underneath all of the pain, she discovered an upside. “It made me a lot nicer,” she said. “Before the surgery, I was driven. I worked seven days a week, at one point decorating twenty houses at a time. I suddenly had to relearn how to live all over again. I was single and alone and scattershot everything until . . . this house.”<br />
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Approaching the front yard, the first thing I noticed was how the house sits up on a hill. The lowest porch step is at eye level from the sidewalk. The front windows peer outward, as if from a perch, giving the impression of an actor on stage. Adair first discovered the house 23 years ago, before the brass gutters were swapped for vinyl and the garage collapsed out back. While the former owner lived his final year in the house, Adair traveled to Marrakesh, to be near her son, an English teacher abroad. When he was reassigned to Shanghai, she moved to the French Island of Guadeloupe and took language lessons every day until her visa expired. Back in Wilmington, where she had once fallen for the colors of the sky and the smell of mud and marsh grass, she found herself walking around Carolina Heights one afternoon after helping a friend nearby. To her amazement, the house that she had developed a crush on two decades before was now for sale. She offered $100,000. After three months, someone finally called her back, and they were able to settle on $130,000.<br />
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“The day I closed, I came over and ripped out the carpet myself.” she said. “It felt so good to be doing something.” Of all of her previous homes, this would be the first in three decades she designed alone. “I saw it all right away,” she said. “I still have the original sketches, and it never changed. I love how it’s so high in the trees and has access to so much light. It’s my homage to the feel and history of the town. This house is the lab, and it has been very healing to me.” <br />
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She first broke down the wall at the top of the stairs, and burned cedar boughs in an iron skillet as she walked around, contemplating her plan. She opened another wall downstairs, careful to have the trim milled to copy the original arches, and installed kitchen windows big enough to allow the morning light to bounce all the way across the floor to the far wall. Around the windows, she chose a sylvan-themed wallpaper with leaves that pull the outside trees in with a Disney-like magic. “When I’m planning a room, I always ask, do the colors pull me in from the front door?”<br />
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Of the many intriguing objects, two in particular snagged my eyes. The first is a black-and-white photograph of a young woman smiling brightly, which is actually the door of her fridge. While envisioning what to install for this centerpiece, she just happened to be unpacking a box in which she had rolled up the image of her mother that she had blown up for her ninetieth birthday. “My mother was a powerhouse,” she said. “She was the first woman president of a telephone company even though she never went to college. We flew all over together and went to nice restaurants. It became a family joke that I would always have to go to the bathroom as soon as we sat down so I could explore all of the rooms. When I unrolled that photo, I ran down the stairs like I had won the lottery. And it fit so perfectly in the space.”<br />
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The second object is a photograph of a woman tickling her bare derrière with a feather. But even if you get caught staring at it, as I often do while washing my hands in her kitchen sink, it’s easy to save face with a quick glance around, for there is fascination everywhere. An old sign warns ‘Safe Cooking is Good Cooking’ and it has done so in every kitchen she has ever owned. “My kids fight over who gets that one,” she said. “It’s funny. With fire and knives, there’s nothing safe about cooking.” Maybe so, but at least her kitchen floor is no longer sagging. After investing an additional $225,000, the house now sits on a solid foundation with a new roof overhead. There’s a new garage in the works, as well as a saltwater pool. But the transformation hasn’t always been peaceful. The morning after the massive hole was dug in the yard, she had a terrible dream and couldn’t sleep. Feeling a need to mend the damage, she called a healer friend named Joyce who led her through a meditation of protection and renewal. They burned sage afterwards and spread sea salt around the perimeter of the yard. “Joyce felt the presence of more than one friendly female spirit,” she said, “and I have felt nothing but safety and creativity ever since. It’s become hard for me to leave.”<br />
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Near the end of the remodel, a man contacted her. The house once belonged to his grandmother and he had visited often while growing up. He asked if it would be OK if he brought over his own grandchildren. A couple of weeks later, he arrived with nine or ten other family members, older folks as well as babies. “They were all very polite and dressed for church,” Adair said. “They were so lovely. And as I described to them what I was planning to do, I often heard someone gasp and say,<br />
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‘Why, that’s exactly what grandma had done!’ Talk about healing. Then, as they were leaving, the oldest son said that he remembered visiting only one time outside of summer, on his birthday.”<br />
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“Oh yeah,” she asked, “when was that?” <br />
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When he said November 25th it was her turn to gasp. “That’s my birthday,” she said, smiling.<br />
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“Hang on to your hat,” he said, pointing back inside. “Because my Grandma, the woman who died in the dining room, that’s her birthday too.”<br />
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<span id="goog_897583774"></span><span id="goog_897583775"></span><br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-10250708029335687422014-10-01T20:44:00.000-04:002015-08-06T21:24:39.548-04:00Finding No Boundaries: crashing an artist colony for an evening <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Finding No Boundaries</b><br />
<b>crashing an artist colony for an evening</b><br />
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<i>SALT</i> Magazine<br />
October 2014<br />
<br />
Words and Photos by Joel Finsel<br />
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At the eastern tip of the Cape Fear Coast, where the northern and southern currents collide, the surf forms sideways rather than parallel to the shore — the waves project outward from the beach in a line that almost seems palpable, as if you could walk along it, like a path. Some people think this point gave the Cape Fear its name, since so many ships would wreck on the sandbar there.<br />
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I had come to Bald Head Island to learn about No Boundaries, an international artists’ colony, but was lost. The tram driver had taken me to the wrong house, leaving me alone on a stranger's porch just before dark. I rang the bell and a disheveled man came to peer at me from behind the glass.<br />
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“Hello,” I said, “are you the chef?”<br />
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He looked at me with raised eyebrows.<br />
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Somewhat desperate, I held up my Moleskine as credentials. “I’m a journalist covering the artist colony,” I explained. “I'm sorry, I was told I’d be staying with the chef.”<br />
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Something in my eyes must have let him know I was something other than the horror-story villain who shows up at your vacation house in the off-season just after you and your wife have settled in for the evening. Or possibly he was just bored and looking for a touch of adventure. He drove me to the old lighthouse keepers’ cottages, where the artists stayed. Someone there would know where to put the outsiders like me.<br />
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Many artist colonies are like utopian experiments where creatives live and interact with one another. Those not invited tend to shrug them off as a bunch of lucky people able to escape the status quo for some time in paradise while the rest of us continue to suffer. But the story of No Boundaries is more daring than that. It began in 1993 when a Wilmington painter named Pam Toll traveled to an artist colony in Macedonia. The country had just been formed two years before. Toll had a friend who’d studied there and come back full of stories about the fresh enthusiasm surrounding the arts. Macedonia had thirteen arts colonies, the woman said. Toll applied, and months later found herself at an 800-year-old monastery in the Osogovo mountains, about seven miles from today’s Bulgarian border.<br />
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Living among the Macedonian people, Toll says, she felt as if she had been removed from time. Men walked their goats into town. She discovered that a hike through the hills meant multiple invitations to sit and sip rakija, a brandy made from a variety of native herbs and fruit. She left with an impression of having been initiated into an international tribe of artists, many from countries still at war with each other –– Serbia, Kosovo, Albania. If they could live together and inspire each other, then peace seemed possible.<br />
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Toll was twice asked to return to the Osogovo colony in subsequent years, and to bring another American artist with her. She first invited Gayle Tustin, a painter friend from Wilmington. “Pam and I were in a painting group together before she went on the first trip,” Tustin says, “and I saw a huge change in her when she came back.” The next year Toll brought along local painter Dick Roberts, a co-founder of Acme Arts Studios. Afterward, in talking, the three painters realized that the experience in Macedonia had profoundly affected each of their lives. It was then, in the mid-nineties, that they started dreaming up the concept of No Boundaries.<br />
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The question became, location — where to place their particular thumbtack on a world map of similar enclaves. Nearby, picturesque, and relatively undeveloped, Bald Head Island already offered retreats for solo artists (Toll had been awarded one there too). And she knew the president of island’s management company, Kent Mitchell, from swimming at the YMCA.<br />
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Mitchell happens to be an architect with a drawing habit. They struck a deal. Bald Head would transport the artists to the old lighthouse keeper’s station and give them accommodation in the three cottages there. In return each artist would leave behind one painting per week of their residency.<br />
Toll, Tustin, and Roberts met weekly for a year to manage the details. “We knew we were never going to make money,” Tustin said. “We considered it to be one drop in the sea for world peace.” Sixteen years later, painters from all over the world have done stays at No Boundaries. If every artist’s journey to the colony were represented by a different colored thread on the map, the end design would be a multi-layered tapestry.<br />
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Last year marked a turning point in the history of the colony. The founders — Toll, Tustin, and Roberts — stepped down, and a new president, Michelle Connolly, took over. Connolly is a Wilmington artist with roots in both England and Australia, the perfect No Boundaries blend of international and local. With the change in leadership, the format has changed a little, too. The colony now invites international artists every year, rather than on alternating ones. But the founding spirit remains: “There are literally no boundaries,” Connolly said.“It’s funny how often we repeat the saying, but it’s true.”<br />
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I thought of one. “What about the rest of the community?” I asked. “Are there boundaries against people visiting who aren’t a part of the colony?”<br />
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“We encourage the public to come,” she said, “especially during the open-studio day. Visitors are welcome other times, but there’s no guarantee the artists won’t be out painting in the marshes. It takes some doing to get there, but that’s not because they are trying to keep people out. In fact, we invited an entire class from DREAMS [Center for Arts Education in Wilmington] to come out last year and spend the day with the artists.” <br />
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When I posed the same question to Tustin, she said, “No Boundaries is remote on purpose, but more to give the artists space to make breakthroughs than to keep other people away.”<br />
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The artists arrive to find the floors of the three modest houses of Captain Charlie’s Station covered with plastic, to keep the paint off the floor. The structures take their name from lighthouse keeper Charles Swan, whose family and staff occupied the government-issue buildings between 1903 and 1933, back when supplies had to be air-lifted in by planes landing on the beach at low tide. The entire layout looks to be about the size of one of the neighboring mansions visible from the beach.<br />
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Each artist stakes out his or her own place to work and sleep. They live communally for two weeks. Dinner is provided, but for most of the rest of the time they are on their own. It’s a fascinating Petri dish to observe. When I was there, applicants had come from as far away as Indonesia, Australia, and Rwanda. Styles ranged from primitive and outsider, to figurative and abstract. The close quarters force exchanges, resulting in a cultural cross-pollination. As someone crashing the party midway, I felt a little like I was walking onto the set of a reality show in the middle of the season without having watched a single episode.<br />
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The first artist I met was Brandon Guthrie, who welcomed me onto the porch with a smile. He offered me a beer, and we sat down on rocking chairs to stare at the moon’s reflection melting into the sea. Guthrie said that before coming to the island he’d felt burnt out, artistically. He’d been making a lot of similar work for weeks on end. He had also recently become chair of the Humanities and Fine Arts Department at Cape Fear Community College. He welcomed the added responsibilities but said it was “nice to set them aside a while.<br />
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“Something about coming out here,” he said, “it’s like opening up all the windows in your body and letting fresh air in.”<br />
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Guthrie described how strange it felt to be around so many people who liked to talk about abstract ideas as if they were normal topics of conversation. “We tend to hold back from those types of discussions in ordinary life,” he said. “Out here, it’s the kind of medicine people need. It’s important work, definitely not a vacation.” <br />
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Inside the cottage, a group of five or six other artists were passing around a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry and taking turns reading poems out loud. After listening for a few minutes I decided to walk into the kitchen and say hello to the chef, who was supposed to be my roommate. To my surprise, he turned out to be a friend I’d known for years (Jameson Chavez, the head cook at Manna, where I tend bar). Having watched him cook a hundred times, I could tell by the way he smashed the butternut squash that something was different about him. He was taking his time.<br />
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As the artist assigned to be his kitchen helper poured us each a glass of wine, I asked the chef what was up. He responded that this was his first day off in weeks. When he’d woken up that morning knowing he would have to travel all the way here to cook for a group of strangers, he hadn’t felt particularly motivated to get out of bed. He had heard about No Boundaries, and knew that the colony had a tradition of inviting in chefs to cook for the artists, but he hadn’t really known what to expect, and confessed that he’d almost bailed. “But all of my gloom lifted when I arrived,” he said, smiling. “Everyone has been so friendly. I haven’t felt this calm in a long time.”<br />
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He had been warned to prepare for having little in the way of cooking tools or spices, so he decided to keep the menu simple: roasted pork tenderloin with braised cabbage. Happy to discover a blender, he puréed red chile, onion, garlic, and vegetable stock into a sauce as the rest of the artists began to arrive.<br />
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I asked the first, a painter named Jonathan Summit, about his experience so far. <br />
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“It’s a gift from God,” he said, sitting down next to me. “I feel like I could go anywhere in the world and know someone who is a No Boundaries alum.”<br />
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Others began trickling in. Soon there were about twenty of us seated around a couple of long tables. Every time my glass of wine got dangerously close to empty, someone topped it off. After Jameson had stood and explained the menu, the rest of us cheered and clapped. I recorded over two hours of dinner conversation, but when I replayed the files, there was too much chatter, interrupted by toasts and spontaneous laughter, to render them indecipherable. But I know it was an excellent night.<br />
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There was a Rwandan artist, Nkurunziza Innocent, whose colorful abstract canvases and shell-totems I had seen. There was a Chinese tea master named Weihong, who had brought with her, to that remote Atlantic outpost, teacups salvaged from a shipwreck in the Pacific. Wilmington’s own Harry Taylor was there, making his distinctive tintype photographs. An Indonesian artist named Jumaadi, who had a show scheduled in Charleston right after the colony closed, played the guitar and sang. It was well past midnight when the chef and I finally staggered off to our house a half-mile away.<br />
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Since its inception, No Boundaries has existed mainly for painters, but under Michelle Connolly’s leadership the roster has expanded to include more film-makers and photographers, as well as the occasional writer. The outlier slot for this fall’s class will go to a singer-songwriter from Nashville named Gabriel Kelley (it’s not clear yet what he will leave behind, in place of two paintings — a song?). The group arriving on Bald Head in November will include artists from Brazil, Spain, Argentina, and Cuba (pending visa approval).<br />
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For anyone interested in a casual visit, Open Studio Day is Tuesday, November 18, from 2–5 p.m., at Captain Charlie’s Station. Those unable to make the trek — including but not limited to those who have heard about ‘Cloden,’ the ghostly child bride said to inhabit the middle cottage — there will be an exhibition in Wilmington. The Wilma Daniels Gallery at Cape Fear Community College will open the show with a reception on November 22. Interested buyers, or anyone with an interest in art, will have a rare chance to see pieces from all over the world, made right here on our coast during two intense and transformative weeks.<br />
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Joel Finsel profiled humanitarian inventor Jock Brandis in our March issue.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn5_Qu0ufgar3vaa60C98ZdzjT_BBtRwUgXvyoz3T3IHHMTCvsQzTexoMsINiWTNE-EXWCzHE9iVVmKawn5tcKMcjjKafHdhssgDjLwByl7gsfZgBFc_kvlzAMpy5EWoxk0s93zMsdE9UJ/s1600/NB+cover+Oct+2014.bmp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn5_Qu0ufgar3vaa60C98ZdzjT_BBtRwUgXvyoz3T3IHHMTCvsQzTexoMsINiWTNE-EXWCzHE9iVVmKawn5tcKMcjjKafHdhssgDjLwByl7gsfZgBFc_kvlzAMpy5EWoxk0s93zMsdE9UJ/s320/NB+cover+Oct+2014.bmp.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-59410622324284660922014-07-28T18:53:00.002-04:002021-01-14T21:01:12.891-05:00How Jock Brandis became the Thomas Edison for the world's bottom billion <a href="http://replanit.tv/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Jock-Brandis1.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a>
The Ongoing Quest of a Humanitarian Genius<br /><br />by Joel Finsel<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwmUdifweoCxwe0OIcEI8Q3nRg3n5CXWa_uEIo_K_WJpcRD4cmoLqqq-HJq-fOzXx0cBD93-Gq7nOQteYChlOxmZWt5g4ARh5i8oUexxi3VnunqSR0mE27otgnQLNWAhQ7h73rxtvMVDUt/s1192/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+8.44.46+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="714" data-original-width="1192" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwmUdifweoCxwe0OIcEI8Q3nRg3n5CXWa_uEIo_K_WJpcRD4cmoLqqq-HJq-fOzXx0cBD93-Gq7nOQteYChlOxmZWt5g4ARh5i8oUexxi3VnunqSR0mE27otgnQLNWAhQ7h73rxtvMVDUt/w650-h390/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+8.44.46+PM.png" width="650" /></a><br /><br />originally published in <i>SALT</i><br /><a href="http://issuu.com/saltmagazinenc/docs/march_2014_salt/47?e=8175378/6922974">click here for original spread</a><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div>
The tall, slender, gray-haired man known simply as “Jock” to people scattered all over the planet was born with the slightly more exotic name of Joost Brender a Brandis, in 1946, and not in North Carolina, but in the Netherlands. When he was still a baby the family moved to an isolated farm in northern British Columbia, where he spent his childhood. His parents had not been farmers, but his father had always wanted to live in the country (on the passenger’s list of the SS Delftdyk, which sailed into San Francisco in August of 1947, he identified himself as a Dutch “agriculturist”). It was an upbringing that required a lot of improvisation. “We were so isolated,” he says, “and there was no place to buy anything. If we wanted toys, we had to build them from scraps of wood.” At age 12 he was given a simple how-to science kit and within a year had learned enough from it to fashion a crude blowtorch, which he used to begin building a small jet engine. According to the book his sister wrote about him fifty years later, <a href="http://www.mariannebrandis.ca/booksinprint.htm">Thinking Big, Building Small</a>, the sight of a young boy doing such dangerous work had proved alarming to visiting Dutch relatives. But his parents indulged it. <br /><br />For a time, in his teens and twenties, Brandis’s urge to tinker with machines lay dormant. He enlisted in the navy, to pay for college, which eventually he did attend, majoring in anthropology. After graduating, and with his “idealism glands working overtime,” Brandis joined CUSO (Canada’s version of the Peace Corps) and wound up living in the Trench Town slum of Kingston, Jamaica, where he was supposed to teach rude boys auto repair. But because he was one of the only people there with a university degree, they asked him to teach general science instead. He did receive his first exposure to filmmaking during these years, coming to know the director Perry Hensel (of Harder They Come fame), but mainly Brandis found himself giving lectures on what he felt were essentially useless concepts, to kids who desperately needed hands-on skills to improve their lot and even for survival. <br /><br />Brandis never forgot the frustration he’d felt, in those classrooms. It sparked a belief in him that most often what people in crisis needed was not cultural betterment but know-how. Give them tools to take care of themselves and they’ll build the rest. Working with Canairelief in the late 60s to help starving children in the war-torn country of Biafra (at one point it was estimated that 5,000 children were dying a day), he found that he never felt as useful as when — at a base on the old Portuguese penal colony of São Tomé — he was able to put his metalworking skills to use fixing shrapnel holes in the relief planes that carried the supplies. He accompanied some of these missions as “loadmaster,” physically exchanging tons of food for starving babies, some of whom died as they lay on blankets in the cargo hold under his watch. On one of these expeditions, while riding in a jeep across a crater-strewn runway, Brandis looked up at the man across from him and recognized Kurt Vonnegut, there to report on the massacres (Brandis’s stories often contain these fantastical-seeming but, it will turn out, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R33KA867Q6FGKM/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0595129978&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books">verifiable details</a>). <br /><br />“It was a fast way to grow up,” he says with characteristic understatement about his time in Biafra. But in hearing him talk about it one gets the sense that some of what he witnessed left scars. Poverty and violence had been one thing, blood and death and starvation were another. At the age of 25 — but much older in terms of experience — he decided to go home to Canada, hoping to pursue a lighter existence for a while. <br /><br />It was at this point that Brandis’s oldest love — amateur invention, tinkering with gizmos — came back into his life through a strange channel (though one familiar to many in the Port City), the movie business. In Toronto, he landed work on the set of a forgettable comedy-thriller titled 125 Rooms of Comfort. He was hired as a gaffer, basically a lighting electrician. This led to work on several other productions. During one, the “rather grisly motorcycle gang feature” Race Home to Die, he noticed how the thick cables that snaked across the floor were causing everyone problems, tripping the actors and making it hard to maneuver carts. He started daydreaming a sort of structure, a system of aerial rigging that would elevate the light-cables up off the floor, both removing them from people’s way and making the lights easier to move. The design involved a series of interlocking aluminum segments that, via a system of screws, could be made to hang in place overhead in various irregular spaces (making it perfect for on-location shoots). He called it the Light-Beam. The December 1974 issue of<i> Cinema Canada</i> called the invention “revolutionary” and included this little scene under “Technical News”:<br /><br />"Toronto lighting-cameraman Jock Brandis strolled into our office not too long ago with a home-made equipment case in hand, and proceeded to construct a lighting beam across our office which was capable of supporting a couple of hundred pounds of lighting gear without making a mark on the wall. Not only that, but the entire thing weighs less than 20 pounds."<br /><br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimT6MGzQXha6rYG5YQY10QMXILaufp-d0nrf5poCpKbm8cJoXGe0TpGO5FKHCossM6h8KHU3jYF03m47PyFJlcqfhppzbXSF18tbQxpAX4CFWJwUxrHdaPiQhLU5stBCB7Mjz2mESK54-3/s1600/Jock+-+chest+hair+-+photo.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="463" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimT6MGzQXha6rYG5YQY10QMXILaufp-d0nrf5poCpKbm8cJoXGe0TpGO5FKHCossM6h8KHU3jYF03m47PyFJlcqfhppzbXSF18tbQxpAX4CFWJwUxrHdaPiQhLU5stBCB7Mjz2mESK54-3/s1600/Jock+-+chest+hair+-+photo.jpg" width="358" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"><i>––Brandis from Cinema Canada in 1978</i></span></td></tr>
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The article goes on to add that, “Mr. Brandis may be found in his basement, hand-assembling these highly practical and useful items.”<br /><br />Four years later Brandis was living not in a basement but on a tugboat in Toronto Harbor. For fun he restored antique motorcycles. He’d set up his metal-shop in an abandoned warehouse with towering ceilings in an industrial part of Toronto (in a surreal twist he was approached by a group of French Canadian circus artists wanting to know if they could “rent the air” above Brandis and his team, in order to get used to performing above crowds, as they soon began doing under the name Cirque du Soleil). <br /><br />According to Cinema Canada Jock’s “innovative designs,” some of which are still in use on movie sets around the world, had “established [him] as a living, breathing legend of the film business.” The magazine even ran a beefcake-y picture of him, to accompany the profile.<br /><br />In 1984, the “Italian DeMille,” Dino De Laurentiis — the producer who made the great La Strada with Fellini (and also made Barbarella) — decided he liked Wilmington and wanted to start making movies here. For the enterprise to work so far from Hollywood, and from the special skills and workshops that had grown up around the industry there, De Laurentiis needed people with highly adaptable talents. He needed guys like Jock, who even if they weren’t in your department could tackle special problems as they arose and cobble together solutions, with limited materials, as actors sat getting paid to wait in their trailers. When directors needed quieter generators, or a bed that would appear to eat people whole, or somebody who knew how older lighting systems worked, they knew they could call Brandis. For twenty years he was a gaffer/prop maker/best boy/fixer, working on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the Stephen King films Cat’s Eye and Maximum Overdrive, eventually earning an Emmy for his work on, of all things, Monday Night Football. “I was basically a lighting guy,” he says, “but I was never that good at the politics of it. At one point I did a movie with a pair of big stars, and I thought, if I ever have to spend another day with these oxygen-thieves, I’ll shoot myself.”<br /><br />One day a friend of his, a woman named Carrie who’d become similarly disgusted by displays of Hollywood behavior, simply walked off the set. It was a particularly stupid film, and she was a script consultant. She threw down her clipboard, announced to everyone in the room that she’d been “put on the planet to do better things with her life,” and left. She joined the Peace Corps and moved to Africa, to a mud-hut village in Mali called Woroni, where she stayed. <br /><br />In 2001 Brandis got a call from her. The solar-powered water pump that powered the village’s water system was broken. Nobody knew how to fix it. The Danish government workers who’d installed it fifteen years earlier were long gone, and without regular maintenance, it had stopped working. She’d told the local officials she knew some people who might be able to figure it out. Jock joined a team of local volunteers and, with some trepidation (this was his first trip to Africa since he’d left the “hell” of Biafra in a hail of gunfire three decades before), flew to Mali. <br /><br />When the pump was fixed, some folks decided to hang around in Mali for a while. Jock did a few days of exploring around, getting to know the village. Lush, green Woroni was a far different place than Biafra had been. It was actually more like “paradise,” he says. <br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="321" src="https://afktravel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/dogon.jpg" width="485" /></div>
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Woroni, Mali</div>
<br />One morning he walked out into the surrounding cotton fields. Having at that point been a Southerner for many years, he understood how the crop could devastate once fertile fields by robbing the soil of nitrogen. He was reassured to come upon a group of women shelling sun-dried peanuts. The villagers understood a basic concept of soil conservation, that peanuts and other legumes can replace the nitrogen cotton absorbs (the lesson George Washington Carver taught us in America). <br /><br />But then Brandis looked closer and noticed the women’s hands. They were raw and in some cases bleeding, from shelling the tough and leathery sun-dried nuts, using nothing but their fingers. And although Brandis couldn’t have known it at that moment, these cuts in their hands were allowing a mold-born toxin to enter their bloodstreams, giving many of them a sometimes deadly immune disease. <br /><br />“I thought, surely there was a better way,” Brandis says. <br /><br />Before he left Africa, he made “a very casual promise” to the head of the local women’s cooperative that if she would encourage the villagers to plant more peanuts, he would send them a shelling machine. “I figured they could take the excess to market.” <br /><br />Back in Wilmington, he sat down at the computer, assuming that a few minutes online and a credit-card transaction would be enough to satisfy his end of the bargain. But logging on led only to frustration. He found that he could easily buy a peanut-shelling factory if he wanted, but nothing that would be of any real value in a village that lacked electricity. <br /><br />Confounded, he did what any rational person interested in peanut-culture would do and called Jimmy Carter. The former president’s secretary got in touch with him, and dropped heavy news: Brandis was wasting his time. The machine didn’t exist. Other people had called asking about it over the years, he’d checked. Brandis would have to tell the woman he couldn’t deliver. <br /><br />This was precisely the sort of challenge that Brandis had always loved, that had fueled him as a kid in that cold shed back in British Columbia. Something didn’t exist — you had to make it yourself. Hearing that others had tried and failed just encouraged him. “Whenever I have an idea people don’t laugh at,” he says, “I seriously reconsider.”<br /><br />At first he had only a string of setbacks. The technical difficulties were formidable. It was easy to make a simple machine that would crack open shells, but one that would do so without harming the nuts inside, and especially with any kind of speed or efficiency, that was different. He ran through a sketch-book’s worth of failed designs. <br /><br />His luck changed when he made contact with an expert in the field of plant physiology, a professor named Tim Williams at the University of Georgia. Williams had also been looking for a small nut sheller, describing it as “the holy grail of sustainable agriculture.” His own years of searching and tinkering had produced one potential clue: he’d seen a sketch of a machine that another traveler had encountered in a Bulgarian village (Bulgaria was long one of the only places in Europe that grew peanuts). The machine worked by rolling the nuts around in a kind of cone, a hollow cone with another, solid cone inside of it, and just enough space left between the two to crush the shells without hurting the nut. Williams sent Brandis a copy of the sketch. <br /><br />Brandis — accustomed to working with metal — immediately took the picture to a friend’s machine shop. But the machinist surprised him by suggesting they consider concrete rather than steel. “I hate messing with concrete,” Brandis can be heard saying in a Canadian documentary made about this project. “I automatically assumed my idea was better than his, and having sufficiently ridiculed him, I got in my pick-up. I drove about a block when it dawned on me that he was a genius . . .” <br /><br />Concrete could be made anywhere in the world, solving a major aspect of the shipping problem. Instead of sending finished machines, they’d send kits with molds and a few prefabricated metal pieces. People could build the sheller anywhere, and for almost nothing. <br /><br /><div>
One problem: the molds had to be both light enough to ship and strong enough to hold up under repeated pourings of concrete. Brandis visited his old friend Pete Klingenberger, a local boat builder, to ask about the possibility of using fiber-glass. Klingenberger is “a man of infinite patience,” says Brandis, who brought him model after model, as he tinkered with the design. Klingerberger would cast each one in fiberglass. </div><div>
<br />After months and dozens of prototypes, they created a machine that worked . . . but only when shelling a single nut at a time. In the Bulgarian sketch, the cone had been upside down, i.e., with the fatter part at the top (a funnel shape, the most natural-seeming shape for the task). But it created a situation inside the machine where multiple lanes essentially merged into one, jamming at the bottom. <br /><br />Brandis made the one modification he accepts credit for: reversing the geometry. He literally flipped the design on its head, giving it more the shape of a traffic cone or an old-fashioned butter-churner. Now it worked beautifully, the nuts and shells falling together out of the bottom into a basket, to be wind-threshed like wheat and chaff. In an hour, someone using the sheller could outperform five others working by hand for a day. The quickly dubbed Universal Nut Sheller is now in use in at least thirty-six countries. Thousands of lives have been saved, and many more thousands improved. <br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji046pvkzwuWvB-vGDeTlpEkDy8RWI0yyAywwUDrJv3MwQySMfeePpOPPWz8s1JRdvRLn6zZTHuxQ1iZ3_7votURK0JFD2m11ridFpdDEvvx9oXlX13syaDf5tHUohXgYSzTKGqFKqk_ZB/s603/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+8.53.01+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="603" height="543" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji046pvkzwuWvB-vGDeTlpEkDy8RWI0yyAywwUDrJv3MwQySMfeePpOPPWz8s1JRdvRLn6zZTHuxQ1iZ3_7votURK0JFD2m11ridFpdDEvvx9oXlX13syaDf5tHUohXgYSzTKGqFKqk_ZB/w609-h543/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+8.53.01+PM.png" width="609" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><br />In the dozen years since its invention, Brandis’s peanut machine and his efforts to disseminate it have made him famous. He has won a $100,000 Purpose Prize for humanitarianism, a Popular Mechanics “Breakthrough” Award, and been invited to deliver a series of lectures at M.I.T. on the value of “Stone Age” technology in the modern world. Numerous documentaries and interviews cast him as a dashing inventor-hero. <br /><br />In person, he seems refreshingly uninterested in the myth of himself. Quick to joke, self-deprecating, eager to engage with strangers. Of the different interviews I’ve done with him, about 99 percent were conducted in bars. His daughter, Maaike, owns Cape Fear Wine and Beer. His son, Darwin, followed him into the film industry. His partner, Gwenyfar, runs Old Books on Front Street. He carries himself very much like an unassuming fellow citizen. The Canadian in him? You do get a sense that a big part of Jock never left that shed in British Columbia. He never comes quite as alive as when talking about making things, describing his latest inventions. “How’s it going?” you might say. “Great!” he replies. “Hey, what if we built a cellphone charger that was powered by houseplants?” Or, “I’m working on this gravity-powered water pump, trying to figure out how to keep it working when the stream is low,” and he’s off . . .<br /><br />The enterprise that has consumed his attention during the past decade is the internationally recognized <a href="http://www.thefullbellyproject.org/">Full Belly Project</a>, which Brandis co-founded in 2003 with a group of fellow returned Peace Corps volunteers. The non-profit started its mission under an unusual banner: to create technology for “the bottom billion people” on the planet. One of the unfortunate things about that market is, there’s not a lot of money in it. Which explains how the industrialized world could go a century without inventing a machine as simple and vital as a hand-turned peanut sheller. But people invent things they’re hoping to sell. Full Belly is different. It works to invent things that it’s actually hoping to give away, or even just to teach other people how to make. Brandis never even took out a patent on the Universal Nut Sheller. </div>
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<br />Most of the organization’s work has been done in the developing world where a lack of infrastructure makes smaller, human-scale machines essential. Recently, however, Brandis’s thinking has taken an interesting, inward turn. In 2009, after an awards ceremony at Stanford, he met a man named Tim Wills, who’d founded the non-profit <a href="http://www.foothillsconnect.com/">Foothills Connect</a>, a “rural technology” initiative that worked to link North Carolina farmers with high-class chefs in Charlotte. The locavore food movement had created a market for locally, sustainably grown crops, but it wasn’t easy for the restaurants and the small farmers to find one another. More than that, many of the farmers were facing new challenges brought on by climate change. There was less rain, for one thing. They’d grown used to growing only corn, and corn needs a lot of resources. It’s easier for big farms, with giant irrigation and fertilizer systems. But for the smaller landholders, “Monsanto has left them behind,” Jock says. <br /><br />Wills introduced Brandis to Henry Edwards, an 84-year-old man in the North Carolina foothills whose 340-acre farm has been in his family since the eighteenth century. When Edwards started growing corn, “back when the climate cooperated,” as he put it, rains averaged fifty-five inches, which was enough not to require irrigation. Recent droughts had changed all that. Still, the family was holding on. <br /><br />On Jock’s first visit to the Edwards’ farm, he watched Henry push an antique hand-cultivator through the field to dig a furrow. “I thought, ‘That’s too Africa for words.’” He quickly realized that some of what he’d been doing and learning in other, poorer countries was relevant to people in his backyard. <br /><br />In consultation with Henry Edwards, the farmer’s son, Duncan (a former Exxon geophysicist who worked closely with Brandis at the farm), and Tim Wills of Foothills Connect, Brandis turned the power of his daydreaming on an Appalachian small-farm. They developed a cluster of ingenious devices: a gravity-powered water pump that sits directly in the bed of a stream and by a seesawing motion generates enough energy to move water 900 feet, also a portable pump apparatus that could be moved from pasture to pasture with the stock and used to fill the drinking troughs, which could themselves be modified into special solar-powered motion-activated basins (Brandis calls them “horse water fountains”) that can detect an animal’s approach, filling and emptying as needed or not, getting rid of the stagnant pools that breed equine diseases like “the strangles.” In the last two years the Edwards clan has started harvesting eight to ten acres of corn again.<br /><br />On a recent Saturday, I joined about twenty other volunteers at the Full Belly Project’s cerulean-blue shed on Chestnut Street. Brandis was in Cambodia, filming an episode of the documentary series REPLAN-IT. The challenge was to help poor people in Cambodia who don’t have access to sanitation. Brandis and the other crew members were staying in nice hotels in Phnom Penh, and he noticed (as one does occasionally) how much soap was being wasted. He used the bar once or twice, but the maids replaced it every day. Meanwhile the people they’d come to help were dying, some of them, from unsanitary conditions. Full Belly partnered with a Cambodian NGO to start a soap-recycling initiative. The used soap bars are sterilized, used coffee grounds are stirred in as an exfoliant, and the mixture is pressed into new bars. The hotels buy the machines and do the soap-making. In exchange they get to put up little cards in their bathrooms boasting of the fact, providing some valuable green P.R. </div>
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<br />Snooping around the shop, I took in a few of Brandis’s other recent inventions. There were portable sanitation stations to be positioned next to outhouses (empty two-liter soda bottles are suspended upside down around a kind of concrete sink, with a barrel-and-tire contraption to catch used water). There were aflatoxin Peanut-screeners (they look like futuristic versions of those old Fisher Price Viewmasters and use black light to identify infected nuts). And finally, desks designed to fold out into beds for students in typhoon-stricken places, where schools are often the only safe havens to wait out storms. There was also a new design for students in Africa where most children are still forced to sit on classroom floors. The skeleton of the seat and table is built of a single piece of rebar—the pliable metal rods sometimes seen jutting from cracked concrete—folded fifteen times into an origami desk. A high school volunteer came up with it. The surfaces will be made of the “mountains of plastic trash” in places like Nairobi, where the Full Belly Project will soon begin partnering with another NGO already on the ground. Jock envisions paying slum-dwelling children to gather the plastic. He will set up the solar ovens somewhere out in public, a place where locals can gather to watch him melt it into hard sheets, offer their own ideas, and hopefully decide to use the same process to make other materials, like roofing tiles. Scanning all the prototypes, it was obvious that Brandis’s quest to design for the bottom billion was far from complete. It could even be said that he’s just getting underway. <br /><br />Grabbing a pair of work gloves from a nail by the door, I overheard one high-school-age volunteer, a tall dark-haired kid, ask another what they should do with Jock out of town. <br /><br />“What we always do,” the other answered. “Get the shop ready for when he’s back.” </div>
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published in <a href="http://www.focusonthecoast.com/comedy-community-cliff-cash/">Coast</a> </div>
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Tuning in to satellite radio on a long road trip last year, I spent the late hours listening to short clips of comedians. Almost all of the jokes on the Comedy Central channel were good, but only a few penetrated my highway hypnosis enough to make me laugh out loud. One that I remember started like this: “Let me ask you all a question. Do you feel safe?” It was a man’s voice (possibly) imitating a redneck. “Well, you shouldn’t,” he continued, “You know why? Because that Obama’s gonna take all the guns in the whole world and melt them down to make rings for gay people to get married with.”</div>
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As others in the car laughed with me and the comic’s name, Cliff Cash, was announced, my mirth paused. “Wait a second,” I thought, “I know him.” Cliff Cash, owner of Green Coast Recycling, is also a founding member of Friends of the Lower Cape Fear that started the Stop Titan website and ongoing petition to halt the opening of the Carolinas Cement (Titan America) facility here along the Cape Fear River. As a strong community and environmental advocate–winning last year’s North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Pelican Award for his efforts–this local comedian keeps Wilmington engaged, and laughing.</div>
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Excited to tell him about hearing his joke on the radio, I met up with Cliff a few months later to talk about the evolution of his career—from losing nearly everything he had when the real estate market collapsed to becoming Port City’s Top Comic.</div>
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<strong>HOW HAS COMEDY CHANGED YOUR LIFE?</strong></div>
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I was at a low point when I started writing jokes about three years ago. I was down and discouraged and needed a laugh, so I went to a Nutt St.’s open mic night and after that, everything changed. People had said, “You should be a comedian” to me before, but it took seeing other regular people up there doing it to convince me to try. I went back the next week and rattled off an over-written set about chickens having abortions, and it went so well that I was hooked. Timmy Sherrill, co-owner of Nutt St., was a huge part of my growth. He encouraged and helped me make connections. The first two years were mostly me figuring it out, building confidence, and traveling a little. Then in 2013, I started to go for it. I won Port City’s Top Comic, then Comedy Zone’s Almost Famous competition. I made it into the finals of Comedy Central’s Up Next nationwide comic search and was pretty ecstatic about that.</div>
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<strong>SOUNDS LIKE YOU’VE FOUND A WAY TO FOLLOW YOUR BLISS.</strong></div>
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You always hear people say, “Do what you love.” You hear it so much that it feels meaningless. I never tried to do something that I really loved before as a job. I sold cars, then renovated and flipped properties. I started Green Coast Recycling thinking that doing something with meaning and purpose could be as good as doing what I loved, but there really are no substitutes for doing something you truly love. I never knew what that was until I started doing standup. It really made my life better. I’m a much happier person. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I met my fiancé around the same time and she’s really changed my life, too.</div>
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<strong>THINK YOU MIGHT EVER DECIDE TO SELL GREEN COAST AND GO INTO COMEDY FULL TIME?</strong></div>
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I would if the right person was interested and I thought they would do things the right way. The right person could take it to a whole other level. I’d love to do comedy full time. Nothing would make me happier. I’ve done the math on how much I can make on the road and I think I could make it work. The most encouraging things have been other comedians telling me I’d be “crazy not to chase this.” Another thing I realized is that I can get a message to people through comedy in a way that I never could have before. I can speak about things that I believe in and maybe change the way people see it all while making them laugh. If I can reach 100 or 1000 people a night, maybe I could achieve more through comedy than with a recycling company or an environmental initiative. It’s a much bigger and captive audience. They want to laugh, but they also want to be made to think. A good comic can deliver both.</div>
Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-32220000705970333532013-12-20T20:40:00.000-05:002013-12-20T21:19:28.221-05:00Social Media and the "Arab Spring"<span id="docs-internal-guid-1e1bfae5-1293-1618-931a-476fa28d8c96"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 35.55555725097656px; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor* [without Facebook].<i> </i></span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 35.55555725097656px; text-indent: 36pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">*Voltaire</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Communication today has evolved from primarily spoken to extensively written interaction with destabilizing effects. Take the epistolary novel </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dangerous Liaisons. </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">O</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">riginally published in 1784</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">;</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the title foretells some fairly standard dramatic fare: two main characters scheme the exploitation and ruin of others. Only by examining the subtitle </span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or a Collection of Letters from One Social Class and Published for the Instruction of Others</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 2; text-indent: 36pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> do we begin to understand its revolutionary purpose. In the end, De Laclos’s novel exposed a nefarious aristocracy’s excesses, leading, in part, to the French Revolution. Turns out, our new media interfaces have helped sustain a few revolutions of their own. </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-1e1bfae5-1293-1618-931a-476fa28d8c96"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In December 2010, a 26-year-old high school dropout named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire because a policewoman confiscated the fruits and vegetables he was selling on the streets of Tunisia. Twenty-eight days later, the Tunisian President Ben Ali was forced out of power after 23 years of “iron-fisted rule.” Eunice Crook, Director of the British Council in Tunisia who had just returned three days before the upheaval, said:</span></span></div>
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</span><span id="docs-internal-guid-3f9b8c88-1290-f111-b1a9-2f2f428c97db"></span>Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-38590413825898287292013-11-22T12:15:00.002-05:002021-01-14T21:15:55.932-05:00Shooting the Breeze with fiction writer Taylor Brown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: right;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnvsYxf71qOlYkYiSLw_y9heieHubbVu4qQ5QL_T9MMbSdoQ8XG0BFAJvvb-BuEDHDw-2B8VPmHovf3c_VDlYeefbkhvSKdENsaNhQpCI8zrSkMtcXzxrS_30J2adzh82ENYa_GNLHyHcz/s820/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+9.13.21+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="820" data-original-width="609" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnvsYxf71qOlYkYiSLw_y9heieHubbVu4qQ5QL_T9MMbSdoQ8XG0BFAJvvb-BuEDHDw-2B8VPmHovf3c_VDlYeefbkhvSKdENsaNhQpCI8zrSkMtcXzxrS_30J2adzh82ENYa_GNLHyHcz/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+9.13.21+PM.png" /></a></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">––Taylor Brown, original tine-type by Harry Taylor</span></i></div></i><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Originally published in</span> <i>Coast</i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></span></div></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of the twelve stories included in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taylor Brown’s debut collection </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Season of Blood and Gold–</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to be released in May from <a href="http://www.press53.com/">Press 53</a>–ten have been previously published. Notables include </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rider</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, winner of the 2009 Montana Prize in Fiction, and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kingdom Come,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> which took Second Place in the Press 53 Open Awards. Another of my favorites, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cajun Reeboks</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, was listed as a “distinguished selection” by </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Best American Mystery Stories</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 2010. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Despite his recent success, Brown has known the slap of rejection. His path, littered with “Sorry but your work is not quite right for us” slips, shares this common ground with most storytellers hoping to shoulder their way into print</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. When I brought this up to Brown, he nodded. “You begin to get used to the taste of blood in your mouth,” he says, “but you need to be able to spit in the dirt and get back up.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Originally from St. Simon’s Island, Georgia, Brown landed in Wilmington a few years ago after stints in Asheville, San Francisco and Buenos Aires. After a quick tour of his shared office above the shops of Lumina Station, we sat down at Brasserie du Soleil to talk about his big break, rye whiskey, and how the best stories transcend genre. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Have you always been a storyteller?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My first grade teacher gave our class a handwriting exercise everyday with special sheets of paper, unlined at the top to draw, and lined at the bottom to write about whatever we wanted. One of my earliest stories was about a spider who stole a remote-control car from under the Christmas tree to escape from the cat. I remember trailing my mother around the house with long-winded ones explaining why my dinosaur toys had rocket launchers, or why my GI Joe’s were so small compared to the trees in the backyard–that the world they came from had expanded, like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Indian in the Cupboard</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It got to the point where she would have to hide in the bathroom to avoid me.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What’s your method like today?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I try to get down at least one page per day. Like a good bird dog, when given a task I target-lock on the goal. The novel I’m working on now deals with bootlegging in the 1950s in Wilkes County, NC, so I’m reading a lot of non-fiction about the beginnings of NASCAR, snake-handling churches, and Glenn Johnson–Jr. Johnson’s father–who went down in one of the biggest busts in moonshine history. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How did you end up in Wilmington?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before graduating from the University of Georgia, I spent a lot of time traveling. Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Barcelona–crashing on friends couches in London, passing myself off as a student. I later took some classes at Oxford, which was old-school tutor style where you meet with your professor once a week and read your paper out loud to them and they critique it to your face. After finishing, I sold my car and moved to Buenos Aires–even though I didn't speak Spanish or know a soul down there–to get my certification to teach English as a Second Language. I stayed there a little under a year before accepting a job in San Francisco, fell in love, moved to Asheville in 2009, then Wilmington in 2011, though I’m single again now.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Have you ever felt like you need a sense of danger to write? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think a little bit of danger is good, but unless you grew up with it, I think it makes it harder to write. Then again if you are too secure, too comfortable, you may not have the same experiences, so I’m finding that it’s all about balance. Like everything, try to find the sweet spot and stay there. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Then there are stylistic dangers. My friends who work in academia and are around writing all day long, the same way as if I were reading </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Blood Meridian</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> right now and Cormac McCarthy’s style would infiltrate my own work, I’m afraid that reading student work all day will affect my stuff. And up until tenure, most don’t know if they’re going to have a job next semester.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I like reading work some may consider to be in a certain genre but that takes it to another stylistic level. I never set out to write crime or noir, the stories just become about what the characters are interested in. I have to be careful what I read now to make sure that the style is somewhat neutral. I really like a lot of people who might be called stylists: someone you could read once and you’d know right away it was them. Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, even Hemingway whose the anti-stylist stylist. I really like those guys but if I read something that’s really distinctive, their styles sometimes work their way into my stuff. The cadences get into your head. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tell me about </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the Season of Blood and Gold</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first issue of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surreal South</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that Press 53 published had everyone I liked: Brad Vice, Chris Offutt, Chris Rodriguez. So I knew right away that was where I wanted to submit. In 2010, my story took second place in the Press 53 Open Awards, and later some of my work was selected to be in the anthology </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Press 53 Spotlight</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, so I knew they knew my work, but they still rejected the collection at first because they said the stories were too similar. I had put my strongest ones at the end, and made the mistake of grouping similar ones together, so the later ones were never read. I knew it was a long shot to ask if I could reorder them and resubmit, but they agreed. Jason Frye suggested I put the stories on index cards and experiment with drawing their arc in different ways. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When I found out it worked and they were accepted, I ran around the house in my underwear, screaming, like a soccer player who takes his shirt off after scoring a goal. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Do you have advice for others who might not yet be published?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.duotrope.com/">Duotrope</a> is a great resource to keep your submissions organized, but it really all comes down to persistence. That’s the crucial factor. What did Calvin Coolidge say? ‘Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.’</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While experimenting with the order of the note-cards, did you notice how your work has evolved over the years?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I feel like there is a lot more light in my stories now. I’m more open to the concept of wonder than I used to be. When I’m done for the night and I’ve just completed something I know is good, I feed off of that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like tapping into something that energizes you?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Georgia; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Exactly. Feels like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. </span></div>
Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-55770774463379657362013-09-16T16:28:00.001-04:002013-09-22T22:24:57.226-04:00manna cocktail menu retrospective<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nearing <a href="http://www.mannaavenue.com/">manna's</a> third year in operation, I've been reflecting on the evolution of our cocktails. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The summer afternoon in 2009 Billy Mellon called to say he was quitting the wine sales racket for good and wanted me to help him create the bar program for a new restaurant he was opening on Princess St., I knew it was the opportunity to actualize what had been </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">marinating in my mind since I first attended <a href="http://www.talesofthecocktail.com/">Tales of the Cocktail </a>in 2006.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Hurricane Katrina had wrecked nearly everything eleven months earlier, but the cocktail convention persevered despite a few electrical blackouts. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I was young and foolish, but because I had been tending bar for seven years then and had a few original recipes published, I felt like I might have something to contribute. Reality proved I was completely out of my league. I was terribly behind, though still a little bit ahead of the slow curve back home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Inspired, I created the restaurant-bar-where-I-worked's first cocktail menu. And many more would follow after future New Orleans seminars in 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011, including an updated ice program, our insistence on fresh juices, a variety of home-made syrups and bitters, as well as our fairly recent experiments in barrel-aging.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To honor manna, the small satellite of the craft-cocktail renaissance in Wilmywood (and also because our web guy seems to have a hard time keeping up with our ever-changing lists on the restaurant's site), what follows is a </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">retrospective sampling of our menus past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Co-created with Karl Amelchenko in early 2011, while not our first menu (we had already been open for about six months by then, although quietly, taking the first few months to find the holes), it helped establish us as the first craft-cocktail joint in town.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When Karl's license to practice law in NC came through, after scouting around town I decided to approach Ian Murray, a young man now working my old job at Caffe Phoenix. He had taken what I had already started there and ran with it. When I heard he was a transplant from Philadelphia like me<i>, </i>albeit six years later, I took the coincidence as a strong omen and invited him to bring Billy his resume. Lucky for us, he's already proved to be a star, winning a food festival cocktail contest in Moorehead City with his <i>Aperteavo</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">For Ian's apprenticeship period, every Tuesday night his task was to feature a different classic cocktail, a sort of "paint-the-fence" Mr. Miyagi approach. We called it "Speak-easy Night" and folks could learn along side him, as well as walk away with custom recipe cards with a short history of each</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">. Not only did it force him to learn the foundations of the craft, but it gave him an easy window into developing a strong regular clientele.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">For our most recent menu, we resurrected former manna barman (and fiddle virtuoso) Jesse Ryan Eversole's <i>Malague</i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><i><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 16px;">ñ</span>a</i></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><i>.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">I've found that the most important element to our success has been the owner's enthusiasm and confidence. As we gained traction, Billy was okay to risk special ordering cases of Creme Yvette, Fernet Branca, Chartreuse and other semi-obscure spirits that the folks at the ABC (where we are forced to buy all liquor by law) had little idea, at first, what we were talking about. In response, ABC created a "boutique list," making it easier for others to expand their back-bars. </span></div>
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Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-82362385550416156582013-08-13T17:15:00.015-04:002021-01-14T21:35:48.591-05:00NC Weekend visits manna for cocktails<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the PBS series, <i>North Carolina Weekend,</i> featuring mixologist Joel Finsel<br /><br /></td></tr>
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Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-33058942325670818072013-08-04T22:56:00.029-04:002021-01-14T21:21:56.753-05:00Shooting the Breeze: Holler Brown<table class="contentpaneopen" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; color: black; font-family: Helvetica, Geneva, Arial, SunSans-Regular, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 501px;"><tbody><tr><td align="left" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" valign="top" width="70%">
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia; white-space: pre-wrap;">Holler Brown is a man of immense depth, having once literally worked in the bowels of the New York Public Library, cataloging books deep underground and finding plenty of time to read.</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">During the evenings he wrote, producing six novels and numerous short stories, one nominated for the prestigious literary Pushcart Prize. After a tour of his home and gardens, we talked about Tolstoy’s mother-in-law, the genius of David Foster Wallace, and the elusiveness of being happy.</span></span><br /><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm4xZwCTPGiyOpHlfClH9_2LQgqSgGP61H-IBLJQ2Bd6PmicG0sLcWUc9KuZlcpYidZjhn_RiIAdkBLz-smBrIZZ8S1IRAeBkZrCMMl1BbBmBPui4R4YKfIwueaM9CngBzqIad3vp0aOfs/s201/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+9.18.36+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: small;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="201" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm4xZwCTPGiyOpHlfClH9_2LQgqSgGP61H-IBLJQ2Bd6PmicG0sLcWUc9KuZlcpYidZjhn_RiIAdkBLz-smBrIZZ8S1IRAeBkZrCMMl1BbBmBPui4R4YKfIwueaM9CngBzqIad3vp0aOfs/w339-h334/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+9.18.36+PM.png" width="339" /></span></a></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" /><table class="contentpaneopen" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; color: black; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 501px;"><tbody><tr><td align="left" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" valign="top" width="70%"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74eaddc2-4c5a-b7de-b76d-41d696f7dd5b"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74eaddc2-4c5a-b7de-b76d-41d696f7dd5b"><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Joel Finsel</span><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></span></div><span id="docs-internal-guid-74eaddc2-4c5a-b7de-b76d-41d696f7dd5b"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-74eaddc2-4c5a-b7de-b76d-41d696f7dd5b"><span style="font-family: Georgia; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #666666;">for <i><a href="http://www.focusonthecoast.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1506&Itemid=63">Coast</a>, </i>August 2013</span></span></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></div></td></tr></tbody></table></h3><h3 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 4pt; margin-top: 14pt;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-style: italic; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: small;">You’ve been vegan for twenty-five years. What made you stop eating meat?</span></span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“At the New York Public Library some fairly obscure things came across my desk, including some really graphic images of animal abuse. I began reading more and it really stuck, so I wrote a novel about an animal laboratory where they do obscene experiments on animals, like spray hairspray into rabbits’ eyes. I’d recommend the film <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlings_(film)">Earthlings</a></i> to anyone thinking about going that way in their own life. Animals are not treated with respect or regard to their sense of self. Reminds me of a story about Tolstoy: his mother-in-law came and wanted a chicken dinner, so he gave her a hatchet and said, ‘Go out in the yard and kill one.’ She wasn’t going to chop its head off. If people had to kill the animals they eat, they wouldn’t.”</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still write every day?</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I look back on how I used to write diligently from 8-12 every night and question it. The main reason I was doing this was for approval from my family, peers and friends. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, a big deal book, and realized, Now what? I’m not happy. I’m still the same person. Now everyone’s expecting the next book. Is it going to be as good?”</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“But artists are driven by things other than success. To my advantage, I’ve been able to let go of a lot of the ego that goes with it. It’s less crucial for me to succeed, but it’s still important for me to write. I still want to publish and have people read my stuff, but my self-view is not dependent on that the way it used to be when it was all or nothing. DFW said he wrote eight hours a day, and when he wasn’t, he worried about not writing.”</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Would you say he’s your favorite author?</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I read his stuff and think ‘oh, my God, it’s so beautiful.’ But I can’t talk about favorites without talking about decades. In the fifties it was Jack Kerouac; forties, Henry Miller and Hemingway; 19th century Dostoyevsky… I’m fascinated by geniuses like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, whose dialogue is like nothing else.”</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What are you working on now?</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Amassing a body of published short stories to submit as a volume.”</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tell me about the Pushcart.</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Truthfully, I spent a lot of years without success. I didn’t begin publishing until my mid-forties and I’d been writing regularly for over twenty years. When <i>Solomon’s Seal</i>, the novel about animal abuse, placed second in the Carolina Novel Award, I suddenly had editors clamoring; then dismissing me as often as accepting. The Pushcart nomination was for a short story published in Vincent Brothers Review. All writers say you can plaster your wall with rejection letters. We work with what we have, and if it brings you joy, keep doing it.“</span></h3>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Happiness is such an elusive thing.</span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“For me, happiness is basically letting go, opening up and allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Imagine it’s nighttime, you’re in the middle of nowhere in the woods, you have no clothes on and your heels are over the edge of a cliff. You have no idea what’s behind you, but you have a sense it’s a long way down. But you just release, let go and there’s no longer any problems. You’re free. You’re falling. You don’t know if there are sharp rocks at the bottom or a deep lake. It’s all means. You just are. You’re</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in the moment.”</span></span></h3></td></tr></tbody></table>
Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-47228096117846248992013-06-30T23:01:00.091-04:002021-01-14T22:09:22.943-05:00Sexy Herbs: The Aphrodisiacal Power of Truffles + Cilantro<div>I recently began a resurrection of sorts, writing stories in the vein of <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cocktails-Conversations-Joel-Finsel/dp/0578003309">Cocktails & Conversations from the Astral Plane</a></i> for <a href="http://www.devourilm.com/2013/06/10/cocktails-and-conversations/">Devour</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbpPeG9fhlEMdTqJM9wS-1Wq43nTtVJgA6hn_mTTSzOZ-XKqw7W-dMXApXLULyOxvy1u1cK5YW9Ys87cHnX8MnHzMtRQ4jQOoJObdtfrwOsW6Wfrh7PbifhYOQ0H0Dd-jz4UUeo1WwRoAL/s469/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.03.01+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="469" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbpPeG9fhlEMdTqJM9wS-1Wq43nTtVJgA6hn_mTTSzOZ-XKqw7W-dMXApXLULyOxvy1u1cK5YW9Ys87cHnX8MnHzMtRQ4jQOoJObdtfrwOsW6Wfrh7PbifhYOQ0H0Dd-jz4UUeo1WwRoAL/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.03.01+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>In the sample below you'll eavesdrop on three strangers as their night evolves into risqué exchanges involving truffles and cilantro. Many thanks to Clive Watson of <a href="http://www.triplesequitur.com/">Triple Sequitur</a> for helping this come to life, and Sam Thompson for introducing me to the Chicago Fizz.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: start;"> –</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: start;">Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé </span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: start;">Flora von Deutschland, 1</span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; line-height: 19.1875px; text-align: start;">885</span></span></i></span></td></tr>
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<div><br /></div><div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Truffle sosommé (so-sue-mé)</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Joel Finsel </div><div><br /></div><div>“It is possible to stand around with a cocktail in one’s hand and talk with everyone, which means with no one.” —Jerzy Kosinski</div><div><br /></div><div>Cast in the piano glow of fading candles, the end of the evening lingered alive in specks of conversation as I swept the floor among the gimlet-eyed. Hiding behind my work, I made my eavesdropping rounds. One woman, who’d out-wined her friend four glasses to two, repeatedly insisted in a voice meant to shout down a crowd of naysayers, “No. No. No. In tantric sex, your heartbeats need to match up…”</div><div><br /></div><div>A gray-haired couple sat leaning forward over the bar, each with an arm around the other, whispering to each other. Every now and then the woman giggled and his chuckle would chirp shortly after. They reminded me of a teenage romance that could never be, finally finding fruit.</div><div><br /></div><div>Keeping on, I locked in around a group of three: two men and a woman. All strangers initially, each arrived during the slow build up to the 7:30 grind four or five drinks/hours ago. The woman worked in film—costumes, I’d guess. The older gentleman, who’d bought the last bottle, consulted corporations. The younger gent in a bow-tie, now loosened, hailed from lawyer stock. Each placed dinner orders before the dining room began to bulge, forcing upon us their overflow of guests. Service slowed as drink tickets piled up, but these three managed to land ahead of the curve and developed a lax camaraderie.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Raw egg?!” the woman asked, scanning our cocktail list. Both men turned toward her at the same time, filling her up.</div><div><br /></div><div>“The Chicago Fizz was a fog-cutter,” I explained, “a gloom-lifter, a corpse-reviver. People drank Fizzes to resurrect the morning-after.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“I’ll try one,” she said, and the men congratulated her, each with his own story of crazy things consumed on the road. Hours later, having come into their cups, they’d broke new ground over the aphrodisiacal powers of cilantro. Here’s what I collected in hurried scribbles on a cocktail napkin found wadded up in my pocket the morning after:</div><div><br /></div><div>“Your sosommé was soup,” she said, nodding to the older gentleman. “And mine was raw tomato. What’s yours?”</div><div><br /></div><div>The younger man leaned forward, then sat back, as if battling with something in his own mind, before he finally said, “Truffles.” </div><div><br /></div><div>His small audience made outraged faces.</div><div><br /></div><div>Feeling the need to defend himself, he sat up straight, eyes bulging. “Here’s why: First, they’re all farmed by female pigs.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Yeah,” the woman said. “And they’re delicious!”</div><div><br /></div><div>The older gentleman nodded. “My wife and I have paid $50 a plate for black truffle risotto and it was incredible!”</div><div><br /></div><div>The younger shook his head. “I find something downright repulsive about them. Everyone treats them like this awesome delicacy, but they really just smell like…”</div><div><br /></div><div>“What?” she asked.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Think of it this way,” he back-pedaled. “Aside from the way they look, truffles grow two-to-three feet underground in the gnarled roots of oaks. Female pigs must have great snouts to find them. But why are they attracted to them in the first place? Because truffles contain the same chemical produced in the male boars’ sex glands.”</div><div><br /></div><div>He had their attention now. “But that’s not even the freakiest part. Turns out the same musky substance is produced in human sex glands. It’s actually secreted from our armpits.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Downing a large sip of wine, the woman’s eyes widened.</div><div><br /></div><div>“It’s true,” the older man said. “It’s amazing how close our genetic make-up is to pigs.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“That’s crazy!” she said, holding back her outrage. “You’re basically saying we like truffles so much because they remind us of our own B. O.?</div><div><br /></div><div>“So-sue-me!” the young guy said, lifting his arms up triumphantly. “And it gets even weirder.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“How so?”</div><div><br /></div><div>“OK, only the females search for truffles…”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Yes.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Seeing where he was leading her, the older gentleman cut in. “So this would have you believe that male humans who like truffles, on some primordial level, are attracted to other men, since the chemical comes from the sex glands of other males.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Uproarious laughter covered my retreat.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Yes,” the younger man said. “I smell truffles and it’s unctuous; it is of the sex—and not the kind of sex I want to be on board with.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“It’s musky and deep,” the woman agreed. “And it’s kinda like….”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Yeah,” he continued, “and to me, everything connoted by female sex, I’m good with—like when I metaphorized cunnilingus, it was in the direction of snack foods. There are a lot of parallels. Salt-and-vinegar chips are called crotch-chips for a reason…”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Are you saying that a woman tastes like salt and vinegar?” she asked. “Because that’s what men taste like, mustard and vinegar.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“But wouldn’t that depend on the woman,” the older man broke in. “And on consumption?”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Of course, if they’ve got something gross coming on….” she started, confused.</div><div><br /></div><div>“No,” he said. “I mean, if you stop eating meat, you start to smell it on everyone.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Really?” the younger asked.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Yeah. Every time you meet someone, you can tell whether or not they eat meat.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Get your man some cilantro and pineapple,” the younger guy chimed in. “I hear that makes us smell better.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“Oh, no, my man doesn’t need pineapple,” she said. “I’m 42 and he’s 26. He’s just fine the way he is.”</div><div><br /></div><div>His joke lingered. “Just in case you ever need to turn up the volume…”</div><div><br /></div><div>“No, the speakers are just fine! But in the long term, am I gonna marry this guy? No. He’s a chapter in my book. My sister’s always saying, ‘Why are you dating this guy? Sure he treats you great, but it’s never going to work out.’ But I’m like, ‘The chapter’s not over yet. Right now I’m on page 355. It’s not over until 560. That’s how I live my life.’”</div><div><br /></div><div>“That’s a hell of a chapter!” the older man exclaimed.</div><div><br /></div><div>“He’s been a great read! I live my life by sharing it with different people. Sure, I have my core group of friends, but some of the characters change. That’s the way I am. And my sister can’t wrap her mind around it because she’s been with the same guy forever and she’s got her kids and her house, and all those people are the same, and they all make sense.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“It’s a different world,” the younger one said. In his downcast eye I caught a glimpse of whoever lived on the other side of his wedding band back home.</div><div><br /></div><div>“My sister can’t understand why I don’t want what she has. It’s not that I don’t want a husband and a family, it’s just that I haven’t gotten to that chapter yet. So, right now, I’m having a great time with a younger guy who likes to go climbing and do hot yoga. I’m having fun. He brings out the best in me. Wants me to be healthy and strong. Be vibrant and huff cilantro.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Laughs again all around.</div><div><br /></div><div>The older man raised his glass. “Here’s to huffing cilantro.”</div><div><br /></div><div>“He’s the guy who makes me want to sniff out the truffles. And six months from now, I’ll probably be dating someone else who likes to read, and sit back and watch TV, but right now, I’m not in that mode. So—wait, I take mine back. I like younger guys with hard bodies who challenge me, so-sue-me!”</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MESi47sldStltHMaKEJs0wwep5libi3W9eFMy4pIQE0BZ75DD8uiUSVyJjyQn0g0EtQNddOfwhKzNN5OJkKZVd0mtzufUNekvklZUcI0GMy-XyZZAN4070bcePFp3oHAKcvkPD32YAel/s363/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.02.33+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="363" data-original-width="271" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-MESi47sldStltHMaKEJs0wwep5libi3W9eFMy4pIQE0BZ75DD8uiUSVyJjyQn0g0EtQNddOfwhKzNN5OJkKZVd0mtzufUNekvklZUcI0GMy-XyZZAN4070bcePFp3oHAKcvkPD32YAel/s320/Screen+Shot+2021-01-14+at+10.02.33+PM.png" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Cilantro Sour (right)</div><div>1 egg white</div><div>1.5 oz. cilantro-infused vodka*</div><div>½ oz. fresh lemon juice</div><div>½ oz. fresh lime juice</div><div>½ oz. fresh orange juice</div><div>¾ oz. demerara simple syrup</div><div><br /></div><div>* Empty about a cup of vodka from a full bottle to make room for 1-2 cups of fresh, rinsed cilantro. Allow the herbs to extract their flavor into the vodka, like a tincture, shaking the unrefrigerated bottle every few hours. After a day or two, try a little.</div><div>Combine ingredients in small tin shaker and dry shake without ice to emulsify the egg white.</div><div><br /></div><div>Add ice. Shake again, vigorously, for 20 seconds until the tin begins to ice over on the outside. Strain over fresh ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a sprig of fresh cilantro and a lime-peel twist big enough to spritz the oils around the glass rim and surface of the cocktail.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chicago Fizz (left)</div><div>1 oz. aged rum</div><div>1 oz. Port wine</div><div>½ oz. fresh lemon juice</div><div>one raw egg white</div><div>2 oz. club soda or seltzer</div><div><br /></div><div>Combine ingredients in small tin shaker and dry shake without ice to emulsify the egg white.</div><div><br /></div><div>Add ice. Shake again, vigorously, for 20 seconds until the tin begins to ice over on the outside. Strain over fresh ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a lemon twist big enough to spritz the oils around the glass rim and surface of the cocktail.</div></div><div>
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Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-25234222581460165632013-05-14T17:55:00.002-04:002013-05-14T17:55:52.356-04:00Palaver Spring 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT_EEiVYjXOBjpHUmiB7Bg7a4N5IvcBAf2_D5ITcm82mKo1oGu01_jo4sO2_SWiDS5G-Rinn0laOnd-049W8lBUNYULnCxwoydUXpP8Imk3AO2VCX9rWo0Otwv-lt48W_EJCfIKBZzdhWU/s1600/Palaver+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT_EEiVYjXOBjpHUmiB7Bg7a4N5IvcBAf2_D5ITcm82mKo1oGu01_jo4sO2_SWiDS5G-Rinn0laOnd-049W8lBUNYULnCxwoydUXpP8Imk3AO2VCX9rWo0Otwv-lt48W_EJCfIKBZzdhWU/s1600/Palaver+cover.jpg" height="412" width="640" /></a></div>
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Delighted my essay was accepted in the debut issue. </div>
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<br /><br />Setting our Schools on Fire:<br />A Case for Enlightened Education<br /><br />The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.<br /> —Plutarch<br /><br /><br />In my third week of student teaching I was faced with diving into a dull lesson on coordinating conjunctions while, from the north tower of the World Trade Center, a toxic miasma of black soot billowed out into the otherwise clear blue September sky. I had the television on during my prep period and was still watching, transfixed, as my third period class began to trickle in around the screen. One little girl began to cry. Her sister lived in New York, she said. Another student, who jogged in just as the late bell pulsed and the second plane struck, watched with wide eyes. “Whoa, that’s soOo cool!” he exclaimed, “It’s like a video game!” Leading him to his seat with my eyes, I handed the girl my phone to call her sister, reassuring the rest of the thirty-three ninth-graders that everything was going to be okay. <br /><br />I was pretty sure the principal would make an announcement soon, probably instruct us to get under our desks with our hands over our heads. But until then, my instincts told me to wait and see. After a few minutes fielding questions, I finally called my mentor in the faculty lounge, whispering into the phone, “What should I do?” Her response: “teach through it.” I was to stick to the lesson plan. “Kids need structure,” she said. “This is no different than Columbine. Continue on as though nothing has happened.”<br /><br /> But I couldn’t. The little girl was having trouble getting through to her sister. How could I expect her to pay attention to my grammar mini-lesson? Even more unsettling was that this was the class when I was expected to execute my mentor’s ultimatum: give a student detention, no matter what happened, or face a C for the semester. To defy her, in her words, “would be extremely detrimental for future job prospects.” Were we still living in the dark ages? I wondered. Like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, forced to ascribe form from the distorted reality of shadows cast upon the wall? <br /><br />Although I was only a few years older than most of my students, I knew not to befriend them. But what was wrong with being friendly? Apparently, the flexibility I allowed in class, to my mentor, registered as a liability. Whenever I allowed the class to deviate from the outline I had given her a full week in advance, she perceived a weakness. Did I have difficulty staying on task, or was my willingness to improvise an essential part of the educational process? <br /><br /> In order for students to learn, teachers need to help them find connections, to build a bridge between what they already knew and the new material at hand. When an opportunity arose for what I considered meaningful discussion, I didn’t hesitate to step back, to see where a tangential flow might go before bringing them back to task. My mentor embodied a more traditional, authoritarian approach. As I observed during my first few weeks of class, her lessons allowed very little breathing room for spontaneous interaction. Maintaining control, above all else, remained paramount. Having recently re-entered academia after over ten years of contemplation, I can’t help but wonder: should empowering students to take back some control of their studies have a place in the future of education? Would a paradigm-shifting concept, like the introduction of a more democratic class structure in our public schools, work in favor of the future by allowing smothered flames room to breathe, and, perhaps with some care, fan to a blaze?<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Continue reading <a href="http://palaverjournal.com/spring-2013/">here</a>.</div>
<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-74781246276810323622013-05-01T16:22:00.019-04:002021-01-14T22:49:16.678-05:00The Cullen Bohanan cocktail<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDXgPSbK5yetxSEaqlNT3Ouvmdxs1hojGKoDxrIz38G1Cspam30L6eYT3ajY5rheaAZxgdEFSwE8Qa8C0bBNPZ_tsSPQtvSpLF_-_OMrTh-_GKIabEoR0dWF6UtscOQlMXkgM3fMBzenVg/s1600/Cullen+Bohannon.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDXgPSbK5yetxSEaqlNT3Ouvmdxs1hojGKoDxrIz38G1Cspam30L6eYT3ajY5rheaAZxgdEFSwE8Qa8C0bBNPZ_tsSPQtvSpLF_-_OMrTh-_GKIabEoR0dWF6UtscOQlMXkgM3fMBzenVg/s1600/Cullen+Bohannon.JPG" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cullen Bohanan</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Named after the character on AMC's series <i>Hell on Wheels</i> known to take a stiff tipple from time to time. </span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">If I were to go back in time and make drinks for the louts building the transcontinental railroad, this is what I imagine I would be able to scrounge up (if lucky) to make a balanced cocktail. </span><br /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">2 oz. un-aged corn whiskey (moonshine)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;"> </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">5-7 sage leaves (thyme or rosemary could also work)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">1 oz sorghum syrup (a 2:1 blend of the molasses and hot water)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">1/4 oz. fresh lemon</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">2 dashes of celery bitters (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><a href="http://the-bitter-truth.com/bitter/original-celery-bitters/">The Bitter Truth</a>)</span><br /><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Muddle the herbs, sorghum syrup, lemon and celery bitters in a mixing glass. </span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Add whiskey, a scoop of ice, and shake for 20 seconds. </span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Double strain into a pre-chilled coupe.</span><br style="color: #222222; font-family: arial;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Garnish with hibiscus and thyme.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial;">Turn your lady 'round and 'round.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-1832974686232218252013-04-03T15:18:00.003-04:002021-01-14T22:51:39.880-05:00Venda-quote<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqmwReJydKxSvJktmpjAWjNg13BclbHT-LZW1XhQJSbPCvvV56y9uNdmDvLNY7_gjxBAHviqHrHq4FiEPX09MD9jlH9_4s13GnvdPfidZAZnYUIw3kcT2929ILSkWwaZJdFiocP9o6nSk/s1600/venda-quote+(2).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYqmwReJydKxSvJktmpjAWjNg13BclbHT-LZW1XhQJSbPCvvV56y9uNdmDvLNY7_gjxBAHviqHrHq4FiEPX09MD9jlH9_4s13GnvdPfidZAZnYUIw3kcT2929ILSkWwaZJdFiocP9o6nSk/s1600/venda-quote+(2).jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-38463764849115826772013-03-26T15:53:00.000-04:002013-03-26T15:56:00.298-04:00Clyde Edgerton "Night Train" interview<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilcNvdEcz6TPFzH9C0KExcGfsrEol7A1MShfK3EymJKB8BvbnDR3MvKzBp1GESMCdGJbVlFaRxKdMg9TYBhCoL0NEVKn7UVmB-0YkdulL92wA-jNFxZQ7VbZHm59WSIlAzqBiytg3H3r82/s1600/Shooting+the+Breeze-99.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilcNvdEcz6TPFzH9C0KExcGfsrEol7A1MShfK3EymJKB8BvbnDR3MvKzBp1GESMCdGJbVlFaRxKdMg9TYBhCoL0NEVKn7UVmB-0YkdulL92wA-jNFxZQ7VbZHm59WSIlAzqBiytg3H3r82/s1600/Shooting+the+Breeze-99.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>
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This article can also be accessed from the <a href="http://www.focusonthecoast.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1397&Itemid=63">Focus on the Coast's website</a> for easy reading. Clyde is the quintessential gentleman and an encouraging mentor for up-and-coming writers. His next book, a sort of fatherhood instruction manual, has already been garnering advance praise. If you haven't read<i> Night Train</i>, I recommend you do, especially if you love jazz, but otherwise just for the laughs.Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-1364795367417775682013-02-06T23:28:00.008-05:002021-01-14T21:44:42.731-05:00The Density of Language<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfbLJRQFnt0095b2QaFpJzQ5k6LbA6ofrWCwfLR1qGJL8lEIHtLx7sm7KHb174UTLqkKTSr281h0Hp8Po2uEUdlnrcQg-RzaLDre9isOYi1Ew4Wz0RIJ3PVv1SOmLnpyTD2RUncZCa8Jic/s1600/legalese.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="508" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfbLJRQFnt0095b2QaFpJzQ5k6LbA6ofrWCwfLR1qGJL8lEIHtLx7sm7KHb174UTLqkKTSr281h0Hp8Po2uEUdlnrcQg-RzaLDre9isOYi1Ew4Wz0RIJ3PVv1SOmLnpyTD2RUncZCa8Jic/w687-h508/legalese.jpg" width="687" /></a></div>
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This was found in a desk that hadn't been used in decades. Based on the other papers accompanying it, I would estimate it was typed in the mid 1950s.<br />
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<br />Joel Finselhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07628388429166665590noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-5450523145554149302012-08-04T15:39:00.012-04:002021-01-14T22:56:56.492-05:00Pairing Cocktails at Boucherie in New Orleans: Tales of the Cocktail, 2012<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMsr1viln3JEiPbQscU7BdZMquK0NNg8vKBK7t4e0zMLiNRI_mVpBQHSRkW30Jk6ATQrI8qagJx_FDb51DMB7Pz79_bkx-XoZ9Xihtt-1KefW-E41emgvThlUXLlixRU-hVJpz32yl_ms/s1600/boucherie.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMsr1viln3JEiPbQscU7BdZMquK0NNg8vKBK7t4e0zMLiNRI_mVpBQHSRkW30Jk6ATQrI8qagJx_FDb51DMB7Pz79_bkx-XoZ9Xihtt-1KefW-E41emgvThlUXLlixRU-hVJpz32yl_ms/s320/boucherie.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Boucherie <br />
8115 Jeannette St, New Orleans</td></tr>
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Sly, Berto, and I spent a few hours prepping for the over fifty cocktails we would later make on the fly. The night sold out, the menu was terrific, and everyone enjoyed a night full of great taste.<br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blue Grass Moon menu card</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLb-wRWT_ZT05CBuUmZJ3myLhjbfEpAMQH9oyfcsI1Nd7mCL-nKOrGSoc1hKviehNIZpejw1IB-Ttef6DOdf1V3nhAnzPZDT842T50PpQfb4LKosH0axZCrfb0rqU3njtkAfmGeXweIQI/s1600/boucherie+menu.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLb-wRWT_ZT05CBuUmZJ3myLhjbfEpAMQH9oyfcsI1Nd7mCL-nKOrGSoc1hKviehNIZpejw1IB-Ttef6DOdf1V3nhAnzPZDT842T50PpQfb4LKosH0axZCrfb0rqU3njtkAfmGeXweIQI/s640/boucherie+menu.jpg" width="476" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">signed menu from the night</td></tr>
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J.F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17609759807306153399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-86283456375702603992012-07-17T13:08:00.000-04:002012-12-07T02:29:15.544-05:00Starchefs Review: Cocktails & Conversations<br />
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Cookbook Review: </h1>
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<u>Cocktails & Conversations</u> </h1>
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by Joel Finsel</h1>
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by Deanna Dong</div>
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July 2012</div>
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As <a href="http://www.starchefs.com/cook/chefs/bio/joel-finsel" style="color: #225275; font-size: 9pt; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">2004 Rising Star Mixologist Joel Finsel </a>muses in the introduction<br />
to <u style="background-color: white;">Cocktails & Conversations</u><span style="background-color: white;">, the role of bartender extends far </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">beyond </span><span style="background-color: white;">a steady grip over the cocktail shaker. As Finsel puts it, he is </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">a </span><span style="background-color: white;">“friend, therapist, </span><span style="background-color: white;">peace-maker, peeping Tom [sic], simultaneously </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">a </span><span style="background-color: white;">hired ear, and the last life </span><span style="background-color: white;">raft one can hope to cling before drifting off </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">into the sea of total inebriation.” And </span><span style="background-color: white;">during his years behind the bar at </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Philadelphia’s </span><em style="background-color: white;">Astral Plane</em><span style="background-color: white;">, Finsel has performed </span><span style="background-color: white;">all these duties dili-</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">gently. </span><span style="background-color: white;">But now he’s taken on an additional role, that of pseudo </span><span style="background-color: white;">bar </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">historian. </span><span style="background-color: white;">Readers get a barfly’s point of view as Finsel records the </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">bizarre </span><span style="background-color: white;">encounters </span><span style="background-color: white;">and ridiculous stories of colorful clientele and </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">kitchen staff in a </span><span style="background-color: white;">collection of </span><span style="background-color: white;">fictional vignettes inspired by true events. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">Scattered between these </span><span style="background-color: white;">tales are </span><span style="background-color: white;">short essays on the basic spirits of </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">the craft (bourbon, cognac, gin, </span><span style="background-color: white;">vodka, </span><span style="background-color: white;">tequila, rum, scotch, & absinthe) </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">as well as a few classic recipes for each.</span></div>
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The emphasis of <u>Cocktails & Conversations</u> is definitely more on<br />
conversation <span style="background-color: white;">than cocktail. This is not an innovative recipe book (drinks </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">edge </span><span style="background-color: white;">on the side of </span><span style="background-color: white;">tradition and simplicity), nor will you find an academic</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">tract on the </span><span style="background-color: white;">delicate balance </span><span style="background-color: white;">of sweetness, bitterness, and acidity. But </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">what you </span><em style="background-color: white;">will</em><span style="background-color: white;"> sense is </span><span style="background-color: white;">how much the bar </span><span style="background-color: white;">is like the theater: conflict, </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">romance, comedy, and tragedy spill </span><span style="background-color: white;">from the stools like </span><span style="background-color: white;">so many tipped</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">over pint glasses. Cast members are all </span><span style="background-color: white;">walk-ons and the dialogue </span><span style="background-color: white;">is </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">all improvised, although Finsel discloses that it’s </span><span style="background-color: white;">a work of fiction based </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">on a real </span><span style="background-color: white;">place.</span></div>
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A preview of the scenes: the <em>Astral Plane</em> publicist’s near run-in with Vivien<br />
Leigh, <span style="background-color: white;">the</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">main man meeting tempting female customers, the history of gin </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">presented by </span><span style="background-color: white;">a </span><span style="background-color: white;">precariously sane woman from the street, and the excitement </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">of being chosen by StarChefs.com as the 2004 Philadelphia Rising Stars </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">M</span><span style="background-color: white;">ixologist (we can confirm </span><span style="background-color: white;">the last event is nonfictional). In a rambling, </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">casual </span><span style="background-color: white;">style, Finsel meanders from </span><span style="background-color: white;">one story to the next, loosely covering </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">his tenure </span><span style="background-color: white;">at the restaurant from hiring to </span><span style="background-color: white;">his last night. And like a stand-up </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">comedy </span><span style="background-color: white;">routine or the latest Will Ferrell movie, </span><span style="background-color: white;">this memoir is best enjoyed </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;">with a drink </span><span style="background-color: white;">in hand.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.starchefs.com/features/cookbook-reviews/images/cocktails-conversation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Cocktails & Conversations" border="0" class="img-shadow" height="320" src="http://www.starchefs.com/features/cookbook-reviews/images/cocktails-conversation.jpg" style="-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 0px 2px 6px, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.292969) 0px 1px inset, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.199219) 0px 10px inset, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.246094) 0px 10px 20px inset, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.292969) 0px -15px 30px inset; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.496094) 0px 2px 6px, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.292969) 0px 1px inset, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.199219) 0px 10px inset, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.246094) 0px 10px 20px inset, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.292969) 0px -15px 30px inset; cursor: move;" title="Cocktails & Conversations" width="205" /></a><strong>Author:</strong></div>
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<a href="http://www.starchefs.com/cook/chefs/bio/joel-finsel" style="color: #225275; font-size: 8.5pt; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">Joel Finsel</a></div>
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<strong style="background-color: transparent; text-align: -webkit-auto;">Wish Upon a Star:</strong></div>
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<em>Astral Plane</em> Owner Reed Ray<br />
Apaghian waited six months for<br />
the stars to align before opening<br />
the restaurant. He also asked<br />
Finsel for his astrological sign<br />
before agreeing to hire him as<br />
bartender.</div>
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<strong>Professional training:</strong></div>
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Finsel provides useful tidbits for<br />
novices to earn their bartending<br />
stripes, including eight steps to<br />
tasting wine and a discussion<br />
of Cognac vintages.</div>
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J.F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17609759807306153399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-15809669960278138442010-01-27T20:31:00.008-05:002021-01-14T22:57:54.205-05:00Cocktails & Conversations Review<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhoRQDs15-BoUqFypFK1tAIxM8vv9HpXM4QLBHMNW3VZx_UqsCpt6_8VTc1VFABCMtDe6d3HwSoouEcHITZGfCMqo4dvijynsn4k-lvs_Tu7xuN36FAJn0vCQTub6_Fel3R3qXNQwKjDo/s1600-h/Bartender+Magazine+-+C+and+C+-+Winter+2009+-+Cover.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhoRQDs15-BoUqFypFK1tAIxM8vv9HpXM4QLBHMNW3VZx_UqsCpt6_8VTc1VFABCMtDe6d3HwSoouEcHITZGfCMqo4dvijynsn4k-lvs_Tu7xuN36FAJn0vCQTub6_Fel3R3qXNQwKjDo/s400/Bartender+Magazine+-+C+and+C+-+Winter+2009+-+Cover.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5431597470300618322" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 280px;" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtqx02McsqhCSvxa8gGs1HtNa9BdLofVReFGn5pGgTB3L3NSp6dO5teWh7UDaJLL_g1M6eh6PQf5L9E1KxnaF9mfGZFAV7FdKOCx-iXnD4vtYA0l-y4SI-G7Gd_zemsANu-Sv_W1gXlLA/s1600-h/Bartender+Magazine+-+C+and+C+-+Winter+2009+-+Review+002.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtqx02McsqhCSvxa8gGs1HtNa9BdLofVReFGn5pGgTB3L3NSp6dO5teWh7UDaJLL_g1M6eh6PQf5L9E1KxnaF9mfGZFAV7FdKOCx-iXnD4vtYA0l-y4SI-G7Gd_zemsANu-Sv_W1gXlLA/s400/Bartender+Magazine+-+C+and+C+-+Winter+2009+-+Review+002.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5431597568435196946" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 284px;" /></a>J.F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17609759807306153399noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8504692259624555506.post-48351938397987929022009-05-28T16:00:00.000-04:002020-04-08T00:28:20.232-04:00Reinterpreting Culture<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxqLyPbEgsD5BNrR6i5O7Jn11e16AJw4Ukq7_Jdk6GaCRanrc828DtNUUTJ-mlUVYPIYy0AXmBgg_jR5HF0mvgMtjI5nisHwvKLxCLCj3iUuOMmjZtYyaiCNI_c7aTgXfezqj0fOBm7ww/s1600-h/StarNews-P-I-Article-(05-09.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" height="640" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423737403181222834" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxqLyPbEgsD5BNrR6i5O7Jn11e16AJw4Ukq7_Jdk6GaCRanrc828DtNUUTJ-mlUVYPIYy0AXmBgg_jR5HF0mvgMtjI5nisHwvKLxCLCj3iUuOMmjZtYyaiCNI_c7aTgXfezqj0fOBm7ww/s640/StarNews-P-I-Article-(05-09.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" width="452" /></a>J.F.http://www.blogger.com/profile/17609759807306153399noreply@blogger.com