April 16 2023
existentialautotrip
April 16, 2023
# 1602
Erbazzone is a savory Italian pie typically made with spinach and chard.
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Recipe for Erbazzone
Here's a recipe from ChatGPT+ :
Ingredients:
1 1/2 lb. fresh spinach
1 lb. fresh chard
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 lb. pancetta or bacon, diced
3 eggs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
1 lb. pizza dough
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Instructions:
Preheat your oven to 375°F (190°C).
Rinse the spinach and chard, and remove the stems. Cut them into small pieces.
In a large skillet, heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic, and cook until softened.
Add the pancetta or bacon, and cook until it is crispy.
Add the spinach and chard to the skillet, and cook until they are wilted.
Remove the skillet from the heat, and let the mixture cool slightly.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs together with the Parmesan and Pecorino Romano cheese. Add the cooled spinach and chard mixture to the bowl, and stir to combine.
Roll out the pizza dough into a large circle, and place it on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Pour the spinach and chard mixture onto the pizza dough, spreading it out evenly.
Fold the edges of the pizza dough over the filling, leaving the center exposed.
Bake the erbazzone for about 30-40 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and the filling is set.
Remove the erbazzone from the oven, and let it cool for a few minutes before slicing and serving.
Enjoy your homemade Erbazzone!
GEN Z GROUP
KAT CAPOSSELA
Feminine Spaces and another good book
Feminine Spaces
I love being a woman. In my adulthood, I've been finding more connection with women than I ever did when in school. Perhaps because the adolescent competition for the male gaze and teenage insecurities have faded, suddenly there is so much space to be free and close with the women in my life.
Within the past month, I've gone to Miami with a close girl friend to dance and drink and meditate by the beach; two girl friends and I went to an arts and crafts studio for an afternoon and spoke about ayurveda for two hours; two other friends and I linked up to take private yoga classes with our favorite instructor.
It's been so healing to do traditionally girly things with other women. To gossip about what kind of nail polish we use or cheer each other on in the thrift store dressing room. It's been so healing to unequivocally support one another's ambitions: the possibility of a graduate degree, what city we want to be in in 10 years. We rarely talk about men.
We simply hold space for one another and unapologetically bask in our femininity. We find joy and security in one another and, at this moment in time, when there is so much pressure for men's approval, that can feel quite radical.
Will, my boyfriend, doesn't particularly care about my skin care routine -- or what flowy dress I bought at the thrift store. But I do -- and so do my girlfriends. We do it for ourselves and each other. And that's enough.
Arts and crafts in Chinatown with two yogi friends.
The Netanyahus
9.5/10 – Joshua Cohen; Made me miss college and debating religious theory and philosophy with friends. Also a hilarious and inventive read. Favorite book of the year so far.
Joshua Cohen at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival.
David Shankbone - Shankbone
Naia Hilo
Frog with a Snail for a friend.
I think frogs are an artistic gateway animal.
They don’t have the complex texture of fur or feathers but their eyes produce a lifelike essence that is the basis to capture the likeness of an animal.
Tucker’s Cinema:
Air - Directed by Ben Affleck
History is written by the winners, and Ben Affleck’s glossy new docudrama, Air, about Nike’s unlikely and ultimately paradigm-shifting shoe deal with a lanky shooting guard named Michael Jordan, is the cinematic equivalent of a victory lap. There’s a recurring joke in Alex Convery’s screenplay that, circa 1984, Nike was best known for its comfy workout apparel. Air works nicely on those terms, as a limber, vigorous jog over familiar territory.
Phil Knight (Affleck) isn’t just the company’s CEO, he’s his own best customer, cruising through suburban Portland in an array of colorful tracksuits. When he gets to the office, he stares down his basketball division’s downward sales curve while Run-DMC trumpets the greatness of their Adidas. Thirsty for market share, Knight instructs in-house hoops guru Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to get thrifty and creative with a minuscule $250,000 budget. Ideally, the amount is to be split among three potential spokesmen, but Sonny, who’s got a paunch and a gambling problem, wants to blow the whole wad (and more) on Jordan, whose game he deconstructs, Zapruder-film style, en route to the unshakable belief that the kid is the next big thing.
Sonny is driven by the poetic, distinctly nonutilitarian idea that the shoe matters less than the person who wears it. He doesn’t know it yet, but his philosophy shrewdly anticipates the larger cults of personality that would come to define American pop culture in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond—the idea that people everywhere would pay a premium if they could be like Mike. We, of course, do know it, and the pleasures and the limitations of Air are bound up in the essential, irresistible frictionlessness of this 20/20 hindsight. Suspense and drama become subordinate to a kind of cozy superiority: The big moments have the exhilaration of windmill dunking on a 6-foot rim. Points are scored on broad pop-cultural reference points from WrestleMania to “Where’s the Beef?,” and characters’ trustworthiness is marked by how they talk about NBA stars whose legacies are long since settled.
Such audience-flattering high jinks are de rigueur in movies of this type, and Air, to its credit, knows exactly what it is. With carefully curated production design and sterile, fluorescent aesthetics—a kind of ambient boardroom hum punctuated by a string of reliable 1980’s pop standards—Affleck’s film belongs to a contemporary subgenre of corporate origin myths whose gold standard is probably The Social Network. But there’s another, even more specific influence here in the form of Moneyball, itself a sort of Social Network clone, right down to the Aaron Sorkin script. The common denominator across the three movies is the presence of self-styled disruptors reshaping various industries in their image—a rare and potent opportunity to yoke together seemingly opposed values of subversion and success.
If The Social Network plays like a millennial Citizen Kane, Air is closer to the light and satisfying sensation of reading a Wikipedia article while shuffling through a good playlist. Affleck has a gift for pacing and working with actors. He got superb performances out of Michelle Monaghan and his younger brother, Casey, in Gone Baby Gone, one of the more impressively fatalistic Hollywood thrillers of recent years; it powers through its own clunky plot mechanics to a nearly wordless final scene whose pathos and ambiguity have a distinct ’70s inflection. Meanwhile, The Town is an instant classic, from the bullet-riddled action set pieces to the scenery-chewing bits from a ferocious Jon Hamm to a mesmerizing Jeremy Renner.
The historical stakes in Air are low, but the movie is even more playfully self-reflexive when it comes to the topic of filmmaking: Affleck and Damon are releasing it under the banner of their new independent production company, Artists Equity, which will strive to reroute back-end profits from streaming to below-the-line talent. Air argues that by giving Jordan a piece of his own sneaker sales, Nike was ahead of the current player empowerment curve—a detail that dovetails conceptually with Affleck’s new startup and informs his endearingly dorky performance as Knight, who famously sold sneakers out of his Plymouth in the 1960s en route to a personal net worth of $46.7 billion today.
Since his ingenious casting in Gone Girl, Affleck has consistently fused elements of his bruised, hangdog celebrity with impressive technique. Consider The Last Duel, in which he conjured up Dazed and Confused levels of repugnance beneath a bottle-blond dye job and douchey goatee. There, he bickered entertainingly with Damon in a sort of anti–Good Will Hunting satire; in Air, he and Damon spend most of the time pumping each other up, and the chemistry between them is undeniable. Damon carries the movie, and Affleck adorns it; his role as Knight riffs on both his indie roots and contemporary neo-mogul status while giving affable, sympathetic shading to a cipher whose extensive résumé as a philanthropist includes significant contributions to conservative causes.
Jordan isn’t really a character in Air (he’s seen mostly from behind or in profile, with only a few cursory lines of dialogue), so the film doesn’t have to worry about idealizing his persona, but the specter of hagiography—not just of Jordan, but of Knight and his employees—still hovers over the proceedings. The near-religious reverence that Sonny has for his potential client is one thing, but telling the story of Nike’s courtship means making underdog folk heroes out of six-figure executives, billionaire CEOs, and their marketing departments, most of whom are white-skinned and white-collared, scanning African American demographics for potential profit margins.
Is it fair to hold Air to any kind of rigorous ideological standard? After all, it’s not as if The Social Network is a particularly progressive piece of work, and it proved shortsighted about the real consequences of Facebook. Read in the broadest possible strokes, Affleck’s film has real acuity about different elements of sports, culture, and industry: It understands how Jordan’s individual brilliance transcended his sport and seduced a generation of consumers; it cares about the engineering and ingenuity that went into making Air Jordans, with Matthew Maher channeling genuine outsider-artist vibes as the eccentric designer Peter Moore; and it pays respect to deep-seated American ideas about risk and reward.
The main takeaways from Air are that an essentially faceless corporation found a way to humanize itself through a perfectly chosen surrogate superhero, and that the middle-aged dudes who made the pick were visionaries. Cool guys that felt they were every-men because they loved listening to “Born in the USA”. But when you’re watching such a triumphant capitalist fable of market dominance, another Springsteen lyric comes to mind: “A king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”
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Politics
True: Trump’s indictment has temporarily strengthened Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.
Which will be enough to frighten off many wannabe seekers of the Presidential nomination.
Which will lead to a much-reduced field of candidates.
Which will gather the majority of Republicans behind one or two solid opponents.
Which will make it significantly more difficult for candidate Trump who can only count on 35% of the Republican Party to secure the nomination.
Which gives DeSantis a huge boost.
Which weakens Trump.
Which is good for America.
DeSantis and his wife, Casey, with President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in February 2019
Government of Florida - https://flgov.smugmug.com/Governor-Ron-DeSantis/2019/February-/2-18-Venezuela-with-President-Trump-/i-LHmnpgm
2-18 Venezuela with President Trump
Happier days.
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Ogden Nash: The Panther:
The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.
A critic’s thought: The poem is a playful and humorous take on the panther, using clever wordplay and metaphors to create a lighthearted and entertaining piece of poetry.
A melanistic leopard in Out of Africa Wildlife Park, Camp Verde, Arizona
Qilinmon
This is a photo of a black leopard from the Out of Africa Wildlife Park in Camp Verde, Arizona
Restaurant in Boston
Faccia a Faccia @ 278 Newbury St was an unexpected disappointment.
Mortadella served w/o bread v foie gras with chopped and slice toast
bream: sauce too heavy blood orange ginger
Nice photos
The meringue dessert was the highlight of the menu.
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This over-fried assault on an artichoke came terribly oversalted.
Could not be eaten.
Was replaced.
By an oversalted, over-fried artichoke.
The restaurant really is not worth any more words and it’s certainly not worth a visit. Knowledgeable people behind this enterprise have created a not-so-wonderful establishment.
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Local Bits
Ben and Jerry’s gave free cones for part of the day about ten days ago. The line stretched down Newbury St. for three blocks.
I passed up the opportunity to save $4.00.
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Understanding Ageing
So, it appears the eighty-one-year-old right arm muscle that I use in my Pectoral Fly exercises is permanently degenerated, and there is no cure. So, for the first time in my life I acceded to a cortizone shot. I’m interested to see how it works out. I’m told the results vary widely.
Structure of cortisone
NEUROtiker - Own work
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Social Life
Eight in-person visits with my friends Lauren, May, Lex, Tucker, and Jim over the last ten days have kept me happily active. A month ago I was bemoaning an unwelcome hiatus in my social life. I take it all back.
Karaoke in an Irish pub in Hamburg
Hinnerk R, Hinnerk Rümenapf - photo taken and uploaded by Hinnerk Rümenapf
Karaoke in the Irish Pub "The Old Dubliner" (http://www.olddubliner.de/) in Hamburg, Germany, picture taken without flash
Permission details
released in german wikipedia under GFDL by author
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Mail and other Conversation
We love getting mail, email, or texts, including links.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
or text to 617.852.7192
This from goo friend, Jim P:
Nice post this week. Thank you.
I thought you were going to post something on the protests in France. They just took over BlackRock!! This might be the equivalent of the storming of the Bastille! Via la Revolution 😊
https://twitter.com/multifymedia/status/1643946963140739072?s=20
Blog meister responds: Sometimes we lean on our friends to help us out.
And this from talented and famous artist Bunny D’Amore, a dear friend from college whom I may have seen only twice in the last fifty years.
On the Martin Niemöller poem and the rise of Naziism in Germany.
Hi Dom,
Can’t have too many reminders - the poem is ever- relevant - sadly so.
Thank you,
B
Blog meister responds: So much suffering. So unnecessary.
Ds. Martin Niemöller neemt deel aan oecumenische samenkomst in de Grote Kert te Den Haag. Vlnr [Vrnl in spiegelbeeld!] . Ds M.N. W. Smitvoors (van de Haagse Oecumenische Raad), ds. Niemöller en prof. P. Kaetske, predikant van de Duitse Evangelische gemeente in Den Haag 27 mei 1952
J.D. Noske / Anefo - Nationaal Archief
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Korean Drama: Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung
is a 2019 South Korean television series starring Shin Se-kyung, in the title role as a free-spirited female historian, and Cha Eun-woo, as a prince working underground as a romance novelist. It is also a fictionalisation of part of the story of the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty and their right to be considered a true history.
Synopsis
The scenario intertwines two storylines. One of them occurs in a "nowadays" placed in the early 19th century of Joseon. The other occurred twenty years before (white horse year, 1810). The first one is treated lightly, in the Sungkyunkwan Scandal vein, with caricatures, jokes, gimmicks, students fights, etc. The second one, only depicted by short flash-backs, is about the unjust situation of the rank and file people, and the brutal suppression of anyone who dares to object.
Showings
The series aired on MBC's Wednesdays and Thursdays at 21:00 KST time slot from July 17 to September 26, 2019, with Netflix carrying the series internationally.
Production:
The drama's entire 13 billion won budget was financed by Netflix. Yeolhwajeong Pavilion—located in Ganggol Village, Deungnyang-myeon, Boseong County—is one of the filming locations of the series.
In order to circumvent Korean laws that prevent commercial breaks in the middle of an episode, what would previously have been aired as single 70 minute episodes are now being repackaged as two 35 minute episodes, with two episodes being shown each night with a commercial break between the two.
In Short
With its richly drawn characters, complex themes, and masterful execution, this series is a television standout.
This is a poster for the 2019 South Korean television series Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung. The poster art copyright is believed to belong to the distributor of the television series, Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation, the publisher of the television series or the graphic artist.
*The Blog Meister selects the topics for the Lead Picture and the Short Essay and then leans heavily on Wikipedia and ChatGPT to provide the content. The Blog Meister usually edits the entries.
**Community Pictures with Captions are sent in by our followers. Feel free to send in yours to domcapossela@hotmail.com
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