Yummy Pig Meat.

I don't remember how the subject came up, but shortly after I arrived in New York, T mentioned that he hadn't ever had really good pulled pork in New York. The only barbecue he could find was smothered in thick tomatoey sauce instead of the thin vinegar sauce that he remembered from childhood. I said, "I can make that, easy." So I did.

T wanted me to write down the recipe for him, so I thought I'd share it here, too, since I have it all typed up. I have a large slow-cooker at home that will easily fit half a shoulder roast, but if you have a regular size crockpot, you might want to have a whole shoulder cut into 3 pieces.

This recipe is bare bones, using only what T had handy in his kitchen. If I were making it at home, I might add a couple bay leaves and a big pinch of coriander. But it turned out absolutely delicious. We made 3 meals out of it.

PULLED PORK

Pork shoulder roast with bone
2 or 3 small onions, or 1 big one
8 or 10 garlic cloves
orange juice
1 lime
brown sugar
cider vinegar


Sauté the onions and garlic over medium-high heat in olive oil with a few pinches of salt until they have lots of brown charred spots (but not burnt). Transfer them to the crock pot. If you have carrots or celery around, you can brown them in big chunks with the onions. They’ll add more flavor.

Salt and pepper the roast generously. In the same pan, brown the roast well on all sides. Don’t burn it, but the more char you get on it, the better. Transfer it to the crock pot. Deglaze the pan with orange juice, scrape all the yummy brown bits off the bottom of the pan, and pour it all into the crock pot. Add more orange juice to about 1/2 full. Add a few peels of the lime, more salt, some red pepper flakes.

Cook on high until it starts to simmer, then turn to low and cook until the meat falls apart easily when you stick a fork in it -- it’ll take a few hours. Remove the roast to a plate and let it cool enough to handle, then separate the meat from the fat and bone. Strain the liquid and skim off the fat (I put it in the freezer in a cup while I’m picking apart the meat, so the fat coagulates and is easier to skim off.)

Make the sauce: Heat about a 1/3 cup of orange juice, 1/3 cup of cider vinegar, a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, the juice of the lime, and the liquid from cooking the roast. Boil to reduce by about half. Pour over the meat and let it sit for a little while to absorb some of the liquid. Add salt to taste.

When you eat the leftovers the next day, splash a little vinegar and/or lime juice on the meat when you heat it up. It’ll brighten it up.


COLE SLAW

Shred half a head of cabbage. Toss with 2 tablespoons of sea salt in a colander and let it sit over a bowl for 2 or 3 hours. Rinse well and pat dry with paper towels or a non-fuzzy kitchen towel. Toss with just enough mayo to lightly coat it and a splash of white vinegar or rice vinegar. Easy!

T and I ate the pork topped with cole slaw on potato rolls. I can't think of anything better to come home to late after working all day and you're famished.

New York.

I’m in New York. The noise and crowds and traffic are so out of my system now and they stress me out in a way they never did when I lived here. Or, more likely, when I lived here I accepted the stress as a baseline and didn’t read it as stress. I wanted the excitement so badly, I had looked forward to it for so long, and I ate it up and loved it. I had no idea how numb I had become until I left. New York is like white noise: it’s nice for sleeping.

Yesterday, when T and I were driving around midtown, I remembered that during a visit to New York in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I moved here, I witnessed a gruesome murder where two guys hacked another man to death with machetes a few feet away while I was eating dinner with friends at a sidewalk café on 43rd St. and Ninth Ave. It was shocking to be sure, but I don’t remember reacting to it with the kind of horror that I’m sure I would feel now seeing something like that. It was just part of the excitement of New York.

That sounds so perverse when I think about it now. But New York was different then. The subway cars were covered with graffiti, porn shops and prostitutes lined 42nd St., drug dealers descended on you when you walked through Washington Square Park or along First Avenue in the East Village, there was filth everywhere. A machete murder was just part of the mise en scene. New York was scary, and that was a big part of what I loved about it.

We drove down to 26th St. to look at a rehearsal studio. Afterwards, T and his little boy T went to a movie on 125th St. and I caught the A train back to T’s place on 200th and Broadway. It turns out that on weekends, because of some construction in the subway, the A train stops at 168th and you have to catch a shuttle bus for stops farther north. It was a warm day, so I decided to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the bus. 32 blocks is about a mile and a half, which is nothing, and I’d never really seen Harlem and Washington Heights.

Even though it was a mild day, the kind of jacketless day that’s rare in New York, everyone looked grim and gray, and I was depressed by the time I got home. People are so burdened by their lives here, so defensive. I’ve caught a cold too. I haven’t had a cold in years. (My allergies have gotten worse in the meantime, and don’t even talk about cedar fever, but I haven’t had a real cold for a long time.) I’ve been taking mega doses of zinc, which, much to my surprise, works.

What?!

This is just so crazy great I can't keep it to myself. Where's the rest of it?

The Old Days.

J got an email from the Austin Film Society yesterday about a benefit screening of a documentary made by an Austin filmmaker. The filmmaker had been hurt in a car accident on the way to the world premiere at SXSW this year, and the AFS put together this benefit to help him with his medical expenses. It was at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown, so we walked to the 7 o'clock screening.

We love the Alamo. Everybody loves the Alamo. They program everything from first release Hollywood films to obscure local documentaries. They host all kinds of film events, they serve food and beer. They don't let people talk during the movie. It's the best movie theater ever.

Before the film started, when they were showing promos for all the Alamo events, like a night when comedians make fun of Planet of the Apes while its playing, or various sing-along nights, like "Sing Along with Eighties Rock Ballads," etc., we realized we were in the wrong movie! Instead of the benefit, we had stumbled into the "Morrissey Weep-along." We had no idea whether we were in the wrong theater, or it was the wrong night, or what, and we had already ordered food, so -- after a few moments of "Is this going to be fun or awful?" -- we decided to stay. And it was great.

I'd forgotten how incredibly cool The Smiths were, and how much we all loved them. I think the consensus among my friends back then was that, after The Smiths broke up, Morrissey's records weren't as good or interesting or something. His narcissism got to be a little overbearing. But what I'd forgotten is that his music was all about narcissism, and how bracing and beautiful so many of his songs are. The Weep-along was heavy on back catalog Smiths. Remember the video for How Soon is Now? It's mesmerizing and totally holds up as a work of art.



Looking at the work now all these years later, the gay iconography is so painfully obvious, it's hard to imagine a time when all that stuff was buried in code, when Morrissey and Michael Stipe, the two biggest sissies ever to front rock bands, could fly under the radar just by telling interviewers that they were "asexual." Times have changed.

When I met B, my boyfriend through most of my twenties, in 1984, he was the drummer in a band called Crash. B and his friends were the original generation of alt rock gay boys. B was more into old Joy Division and Fairport Convention than the poppier stuff, but they all loved The Smiths, and they all wore straight leg jeans and white t-shirts and mod haircuts.

The songwriter and lead singer in Crash was Mark Dumais. They played around the East Village for a couple years, and Mark created a record label called Justine Records. In 1985, he put out 3 7-inch 45s. One was by Crash, one was by a band called Nothing but Happiness, and one was by The Woods, which consisted of B and I and two women, Mark's friends, a lesbian couple who had just moved to New York from Baltimore. One of them was Linda Smith, who went on to make a name for herself on the cassette home recording scene that flourished for a while in the late 80s and early nineties.

The Woods never really worked because the four of us all had different ideas of what we wanted the band to sound like, but we had a few sublime moments. Our Justine single, "Miracles Tonight" (a Linda Smith song), with the second song I ever wrote, "Love Me Again This Summer" on the B-side, was one of them.

Mark moved to London in search of fame and pop fortune. He died of AIDS a few years later. The guy playing tambourine in this video, a very sweet man who also played saxophone in the band, died of AIDS, too, a few years later. B and I separated in 1989, and I didn't keep in touch with most of our friends from that time who were really B's friends more than mine.

Summer Comes Marching In.

I broke down and turned on the a.c. today. I was going to try to last through Monday when I leave for New York, but after walking all over town with a stack of books, and walking back home with the heaviest ones because nobody wanted to buy them, I turned on the a.c. I guess everybody knows the textbook business is a big scam, so I'll spare you the rant.

I took my last final yesterday! My grades will be posted in a few days, but I'm pretty sure I got all A's except for that one B.

Monday evening I'm flying to New York to help put together a concert performance of Lizzie Borden (a showcase for venue people, producers, and stars we're hoping will want to get involved with the production). I'll be there for about 3 weeks, and then I hope to go to Indiana for a bit. My mother just had major surgery and she'll be recovering, so I want to visit and help out however I can.

("Summer comes marching in with his heavy boots on." from Florida, my favorite Patty Griffin song -- it breaks my heart every time I listen to it, which is a lot)

Thanks for Sharing.

I'm debating with myself whether I should respond to, ignore, or delete comments like the one from "anonymous" to this post. I appreciate the criticism. I like it when my blog becomes something more than just me sending my thoughts into a vacuum, but, besides the fact that anonymous comments are kind of creepy and underhanded in general, I'm not sure how comments like this, which seem to come from a resentment about something other than my blog post, shed any light on the subject. On the other hand, maybe I'm just feeling insulted or guilty and that's why I think this person is full of shit.

I wish my shy commenter would at least sign his or her name to his or her words of wisdom.

We Can All Relax Now.

The pressure is off. I got my first B -- in Texas Political History. The grade for the course comes solely from scores on 3 exams. The first two exams had 35 questions each and the third one had 30. The total of the three scores is curved so that the top 25 scores in the class get an A, the next 20 get a B, the next 20, a C, etc. I got a 75, and the cutoff for an A was 77. You wouldn't believe these exams. I've never seen anybody pack a multiple-choice exam so full of obscure trivia.

I kind of enjoyed the course because the subject is interesting to me, but the exams -- and I studied hard for them -- required more memorization than I can manage, I guess. My consolation for the low grade is that I learned a lot.