Music Friday: "Friday I'm in Love"

I heard this song today as we were coming back from Effingham for my son's travel baseball game. 

This song was played loudly on many a Friday at the Gin Mill in Kirksville, MO. 

Smooth move Coleman. 

Random Notes from a Crank

In a recent visit to my local CVS, I scanned the clearance liquor/wine rack. To my surprise, I found bottles of Manischewitz Blackberry wine for $2.77. It's a sweet, kosher wine that I sold at my dad's liquor store way back when. In fact, if I remember right, a Lutheran church bought cases of the Concord grape variety for communion wine. 

I'm a sucker for clearance booze racks, which reminds me of Colonial Party Mart. 

Colonial Party Mart was a liquor store back in my undergraduate college town of Kirksville, Missouri. They went out of business sometime in my junior or senior year. They were selling booze cheap as hell, probably at cost, and boozehounds  descended upon that establishment and got lots of good stuff at great prices. Unfortunately, when my friends and I got there, all that was left was mixing liquor and off brand stuff. I do think we bought some Ouzo though. I can't remember if it was the cheap stuff or one of the good Greek brands.

!Opa!

Figuring out how to spell that exclamation above led me to this interesting article: "What Does the Word Opa Mean Exactly?"

And that expression reminds me of the Norwegian expression of "Uffda." My mom had a plaque of that expression hanging on our back door. I need to use that expression more often. 

Music Friday: "The Watermelon Crawl"

The Nasty family went to Six Flags "St. Louis" with another family yesterday. We didn't get back until 11:30 pm or so. That trip and the fact my kids had their big conference swimming meet today is why this post is late. We left way early in the morning to travel to Effingham, so my son could be there for warmups at 7:15 am. 

While we were at Hurrican Harbor at Six Flags yesterday, this song was played. I hadn't heard it in ages. It was a regular tune on a jukebox at a certain tavern I frequented in college. 

Enjoy the cheesy country music. 

Fumbling Toward Culinary Talent: Ham, Mushroom, and Leek Hand Pies

This recipe is a slight variation on a recipe that is in the current Rachel Ray Every Day magazine. My modest change was adding mushrooms. But I have another idea for this recipe, which I'll share at the end of the post. 

The big deal for me is that I've never had leeks before. I've obviously seen them in the grocery store, but I've never made anything that called for them. I had no idea what they would taste like. I was surprised. They're pretty tasty. Once cooked, they become sweet. 

Anyway, here's the recipe. 

Ingredients
1 package crescent roll dough, unmarked variety
2 tablespoons of unsalted butter
3 large leeks, trimmed, halved, and cut thinly ~ just the white and pale green parts
8 oz. of diced ham
1 package of mushrooms, sliced 
2 cloves of minced garlic
1 small dollop of Dijon mustard
4 oz of cream cheese, cut into tiny squares
1 egg

Process
Cut up the leeks, ham, mushrooms, and garlic and sit aside. Set out the cream cheese, so it gets to room temperature. Take the crescent roll dough and cut it into four equal sections. Take a rolling pin, use flour on the board, and roll out the dough so it's roughly a square with six-inch sides. Set the four dough squares in the fridge to cool. 

Melt the butter over medium-low heat until it has melted. Dump in the leeks, stir, and cover the skillet. Add salt and pepper. Cook for five minutes. Add the mushrooms, stir, and cover the skillet. Cook for five more minutes. Cut the heat and add in the ham, garlic, and mustard. Thoroughly mix. 

Lay out each dough square and top with cut-up cream cheese. Then top with the leek-ham-mushroom mixture making sure to leave roughly a one-inch border. Take the corners and fold to the middle. Brush with a beaten egg. 

Place into a 425 degree oven for 12-14 minutes. 

What I'd Do Differently Next Time
When I make this recipe again, instead of using cream cheese, I'd probably use grated sharp cheddar or jack cheese or smoked gouda on top of the leek-ham-mushroom mixture. I think that would be a good contrast to the sweetness of the leeks. 

What I plan to do next is used the same kind of "hand pie" but make it like a half-assed Ronza, which is like a calzone but has sauce inside of it. 

Post-Kirksville Thoughts

As some of the "regulars" of PlannedOb know, Mrs. Nasty and I went up and over (mostly over) to Kirksville, Missouri for my fraternity's 40th Anniversary celebration. We imported my mother-in-law from Florida to come up and watch the kids while we were away for the weekend festivities.

What follows are my so-called thoughts based on my experience in Kirksville this past weekend. If you also traveled to Kirksville for the same shindig, feel free to react or provide your own observations in the comments section.

• For a local fraternity to stay continuously active for forty years, hence never having issues that shut it down [knock on wood], that's pretty darn impressive. In fact, I'm told it's pretty rare. I'm sure there have been times, in fact I know of some, where the viability of the chapter has been sketchy, but forty years in a row is impressive. 
• I observed young people doing stupid stuff I once did. 
• Ronzas rule. Head-to-head, a ronza beats a calzone every time. Not even a competition.
• I was struck how my old haunts are gone, mainly The Flamingo and Bogie's. 
• Having a downtown Arts Center for Kirksville is a major deal, I think. But the lack of variety of dining establishments surely deadens that happy addition to Adair County.
• I had forgotten how bad roads are in that town. Yikes. 
• As for my local fraternity house, I just don't get it. There's a perfectly good basement for the actives and other people to have fun in, but they choose to ruin the upstairs foyer for their shenanigans. Using the main foyer as a party area has many ramifications on the smell, appearance, and viability of the house. If you extrapolate the causal chain for many years, the consequences are not good. Major complaint right there. 
• I hadn't been back to Kirksville for what probably is about seven years when Mrs. Nasty and I stopped by on our way traveling from Iowa to St. Louis. If I can make it, I hope to get together with other alumni and actives this summer for one of those work weekends. We'll see if the date works for me though. 
• The Dukum Inn, what was considered somewhat of a "townie bar" or an expensive bar during my time there, has changed impressively. It's tripled in size, and the drinks don't seem as expensive anymore. Or maybe I just have money now.
• Meeting my brothers from college days makes it clear that we don't change all that much. We just get older and perhaps somewhat wiser.
• Then again, I am impressed with the diverse professions and accomplishments of my brothers. 

Random Notes from a Crank

At the end of every Inside the Actor's Studio, a program that I watch on occasion, the host James Lipton ends with a gauntlet of questions he got from some French talk show host (if I remember right). One of those questions is "What is your favorite curse word and why?" I watched the program that featured Tom Hanks when it aired, and his favorite curse word was "horse shit" because, if I recall correctly, it doesn't get used enough and it's very specific. Like Hanks, if I were to pick an underrated curse word, I'd have to go with "dog shit." Lowly old dog crap is what I'd pick. In comparison to Hanks' favorite, the poo of dog is not highbrow at all. Only the wealthy have horses, right? The hoi polloi have dogs, and they shit a lot. That stuff is common. Just think of saying something like, "That proposal is dog shit." That means it not even worthy of horse shit found in stables. It's common shit. 

Recently I picked up some stuffed jalapeno peppers wrapped in bacon at the local supermarket. I won't be doing that again. The bacon was incredibly fatty, even for bacon, and the filling had a bland sausage intermixed with some manner of cream cheese. So, since my bell pepper plants and poblano pepper plant croaked because of a cold spell, I plan to get a jalapeno pepper plant and do my own stuffed peppers, but I'll be using Laughing Cow cheese shoved inside them, and I plan to wrap them in turkey bacon. Healthy choices and all that stuff.

On a TV channel (Inspiration) I had never heard of before until recently, they've been playing episodes of The Brady Bunch. I used to watch that show all the time when I was a kid, and now my kids are watching it too. What an anachronism. One of yesterday's episodes we taped was the Johnny Bravo one when the whole gang becomes a musical group. I was troubled by one episode though that has the plot line of Marcia wanting to a female "Frontier Scout" like her brother Greg. As one would imagine, the plot focuses on Greg making it extra hard for his sister to become a Frontier Scout, but Marcia perseveres. Then in a twist at the end, Marcia suddenly decides not to become a scout because that's "boy stuff," and then Marcia turns to Carol Brady and asks about checking out some "fashion magazine" since she's a girl. Luckily, I usually watch these programs with my kids. After the plot twist, I loudly stated, "That makes me mad. That's wrong" in front of my two kids. My eight-year old daughter asked why, and I went into a diatribe about sexism, about how women can and should have equal opportunities and not have to necessarily do what people consider "girly" things. She agreed and said, "Yeah, that is wrong." Stoopid sexism.

On a more humorous note, I had forgotten about how often "groovy" was used as a descriptor on that program. People are groovy. Events are groovy. All sorts of stuff is groovy. Groovalicious I tell ya.

In addition, there's the hair. Oh, the hair styles. When I went to Alabama from '98 to '02, I thought those Southern fellows had shaggy hair. But the Brady boys, especially Greg and Mr. Brady with those white dude 'fros, that male lineage is lousy with shaggy hair.

I've been listening to The Hold Steady quite a bit recently. Today in the car I was playing the band's latest album Heaven is Whenever, and the opening track on the disc is "The Sweet Part of the City," which is song that's an homage to a certain part of Minneapolis, the band's hometown.

The song got me to thinking about the cities and towns I've lived in and their sweet parts. And these are all personal connections of course, but I thought I'd share. Heck, it's a blog. If you don't like it, get your own blog for your own solipsism.

In Waterloo, I'd have to go with my dad's stores, Virg's Foods and Independence Ave. Liquor, that he was able to start with the grace of small business loans somehow. I spent a lot of my working youth in those two establishments, learned a lot, and grew up in them. Likewise, the practice range at Byrnes has a great deal of significance to me since I at one time in my life was obsessed with golf and being the best golfer I could be, practicing till my hands started to bleed, stressing out about my swing plane, practicing my natural draw, trying to hone mindfulness (because once you get a decent swing, most of the important work in golf is done inside one's head). And the park on the outskirts of town with the concrete dinosaur my friends named "Fugly" is a place that rings of sweetness. I'll admit to a picnic there with one of my girlfriends once that led to spontaneous nookification.

And then the house at 1051 Wisconsin St. I grew up in, of course, a home my parents lived in since the early 50s. They sold it a couple of years ago and now live in an assisted living facility.

In Kirksville where I got my B.A. and M.A., the core places for me were Pickler Library and my fraternity house at 207 E. Normal, a place that was nothing close to normal. We eventually got a new house at 815 S. Davis, but for those of us who went through the chapter during a certain era, the 207 house was our house. It wasn't a pretty place. It got the job done. It worked. From people turning up the volume on our shitty living room TV with a pen because we didn't have a remote and the volume button was broken to our brilliant idea of having a band, aptly named Shaft, play on the front porch mid-afternoon on Friday right in front of Baldwin Hall when classes were in session, it was a good place to be. Now that area is plot of grass next to a parking lot for the university.

Likewise, the place where Mrs. Nasty and I first lived together as a married couple has either been wiped off the face of the Tuscaloosa landscape, or it possibly just was severely damaged. The tornado of April 27 did its diabolical work. Then there's Bryant-Denny, Morgan Hall, and our crappy GA office in Rowand Johnson.

With St. Louis, I'd have to go with my office at Meramec with my good friend. Not an aesthetically pleasing place, but I got a lot of work done there, and we laughed a lot--even wrote parts of my first major published article in that office. I still miss my neighborhood in St. Louis--Lindenwood Park and Francis Park. My daughter doesn't remember St. Louis much at all, but most summers, unless it was raining, we went for a stroller ride to either Lindenwood or Francis Park every day. Our two-bedroom home was/is tiny, but I still really like that house. We were only the third owner of that house that was built in 1939.

As for our current patch of land on Cedar Drive, I'd have to go with the Nasty backyard.  

A Hopeful Wine Trail

On Tuesday in the local paper in these here parts, the Managing Editor had a column titled "New Wine Trail Adds to Tourism Opportunities in East-Central Illinois."

When I think of Illinois, wine is not a product I associate with the Prairie State. But the author, Bill Lair, points out the growing list of wineries in East-Central Illinois, many of which I had no idea about until yesterday. The one I did know about was Cameo Vineyards in Greenup, but some of the wineries mentioned are southeast of the Nasty family homestead here in Chucktown. They're located pretty close to Indiana in the Wabash River Valley, which isn't that far of drive.

But the wine areas I've frequented (the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York, the Mt. Pleasant area and the quaint town of Hermann in Missouri), have a more concentrated aspect to them. All those wineries are bunched together. With the Missouri wineries, the towns are close to the Missouri River, and they reflect a Germanic heritage. You not only get Germanic style wines, but in Hermann there's also opportunities to get your wurst on.

Uhmmmm ... sausages. Meat in tubular form. Me like lot.

What I'm getting to here is that the wine "trail" Lair pitches seems to entail a lot of driving.

And if we're talking wine, I'm not fond of sweet wine, which is featured in the editorial for whatever reason. I like able-bodied red wines. Mrs. Nasty, however, likes the white stuff, especially that ice wine from Wagner Vineyards that we discovered from our travel to Elmira, NY when I presented a paper at an International Conference on Mark Twain Studies back in grad school.

So I'm for these wineries producing some strong red wines, maybe some of that native Norton grape.

But the editor is also idealistically calling for a microbrewery in the area. I'm for that too of course, but it'll be tough market with college students who inhale Keystone Light and a limited population when college isn't in session.

But when I think about it, over in Kirksville, MO where I went to undergrad and got my Master's, in a town of 17K there was and hopefully still is a small microbrewery in operation. It opened long after I left that dusty hamlet in '98. Damn you Fates.

And besides the town of Kirksville, there isn't much around in Northeast Missouri. At least if a brewpub opened here in Chucktown or Mattoon, the establishment could pull from larger neighboring towns.

Or maybe I'm just being idealistic.

Ode to the Flamingo

I've referenced the Oxford American a number of times on some Music Friday posts, but the recent issue of the magazine is the "Best of the South" annual issue. The issue features "odes" to various entities that are distinctly Southern or just interesting or thought provoking. Some of the ones this year are Odes to "The College-Football Fan," "A Summer Afternoon," "Ten Sexy Books," "Fishing with Love," "Regional Pride," "A (Phallocentric) Painter," "The Loneliness" (a tribute to the late author Barry Hannah), among others.

The one that sparked me waxing nostalgic and possibly moronic is "Ode to a Jukebox" where Joni Tevis talks about the old style jukeboxes and how one "exercises authority" by making selections.

As she says, "Like calling a radio station to dedicate a song--an act that feels very old-fashioned now--choosing a number on a jukebox gives you a brief share in the tune's ownership. You didn't write the music or words, but you selected it over the others, and changed the evening from what it would have been into what it became by giving it a soundtrack. Exercising your authority over song and community takes only a quarter" (82).

The jukebox that I connect with was the one in the front room of the Flamingo bar in Kirksville, Missouri. That's right, a bar named the "Flamingo" in northeastern Missouri. A pinkish hued bird native to Florida taken as the symbol for a bar in the Show Me State sense does not make. But what the hell. Bar owners, especially one like Irene, are not usually known for their poetic prowess.

But we went to the "O" for cheap drinks and because it wasn't crowded, at least initially. The bar having college kids patronize the place happened gradually for a while, and then the Flamingo exploded as the hip place to be. We, the Pi Kapps and Phi Lambs, didn't know what to think about that initially. For a long time it was a "townie bar" with some frat guys hanging out from time to time or becoming regulars.

But I still remember the tunes I connect with the jukebox at the Flamingo because, well, I spent a good bit of time there in my late undergraduate and graduate school days. Hell, some of us up in Kirksville at that time deserve some manner of pseudo-undergraduate certificate for the time we put in there, maybe a University of the Flamingo diploma like folks in northwestern Iowa have the University of Okoboji inside joke with paraphenalia.

So the tunes, right? That's where this post was supposed to headed. I'd have to go with "The Rodeo Song," "John Deere Green," and Patsy Cline's "Crazy" as ones that call out to me from those beer-soaked and pool-shootin' memories.

There are many stories to be told of the exploits and characters at the Flamingo, so perhaps I'll save some of those for other posts. But the jukebox, which was definitely not a top of the line one, played some good tunes.

Brief Tracks

I received a postcard in the mail today from Truman State University where I got both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

I was sad to see that one of my former professors passed away this year. Jim Thomas was a Professor of English at Truman for over thirty years, and students knew him well as a kick-ass raconteur and poet. On December 3rd, there will be a poetry reading in honor of him in the 'ville, and Truman State University Press has published a selection of his poems from his lifetime collection called Brief Tracks.

Thomas had a wicked sense of humor, and he loved to read his poetry in class. I took him for three classes: creative writing, American Realism & Naturalism, and a special topics course where we read the novels by John Updike and Toni Morrison (an odd pairing). One of my favorite short quips of his was that one of Dreiser's lesser known but great novels was A Canadian Tragedy. He turned me on to Updike, which led me to write my Master's thesis on Updike's four novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.

If you're interested in checking out Brief Tracks, click HERE.

Random Thoughts on Music

I was listening to Blind Melon's debut album today, and like other albums and songs out there, certain songs or bands rekindle memories.

When listening to Blind Melon, I recall the Gin Mill, its parties, Anchorman, and brotherhood. "Tones of Home" reminds me of Roy.

Songs from Gun 'n Roses provide multiple memories: "Paradise City" (theme for senior year homecoming), "Patience" (living with Chuck), and of course "Welcome to the Jungle." 

Camper Van Beethoven, R.E.M., and The Replacements remind me of high school. I listened to them a lot.

The Kudzu Kings & Blue Mountain recall Oxford, Mississippi in all of its splendor.

The Drive-By Truckers are quintessential Alabama--"Never Gonna Change."

The Gourds' version of "Gin & Juice" brings back a memory of when I was listening to the song at a stop light on Bryant Drive in Tuscaloosa and I noticed two frat boys in a 4Runner next to me smoking a huge Bob Marley joint. 

And Jay Farrar's "Cahokian" and "Feel Free" remind me of St. Louis because of the references.