Spread the bloody truth.

]]> http://thebutcherblog.com/burger-at-tiffanys/feed/ 0 http://thebutcherblog.com/its-been-a-long-time-since-that-summer-in-brooklyn/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-been-a-long-time-since-that-summer-in-brooklyn http://thebutcherblog.com/its-been-a-long-time-since-that-summer-in-brooklyn/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:38:59 +0000 Bill http://thebutcherblog.com/?p=1335 #leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; }

In keeping with our new-found tradition of emulating the pop station here in wine country by dubbing Mondays “Music Mondays” we present you with Tom Waits singing (yes, singing) the poem “Fortune” from Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the tribute to the poet this past weekend in San Fransisco. This version was recorded not by us but by another attendee, and we are glad he did.

Waits introduced the poem/song by saying that when he first read it when he was 15, it knocked his hat off. “I wore a hat then, and it was frequently knocked off,” he added. Tom basically turns the song into one of his bawlers, calling it “one of my favorite poems of [Ferlinghetti's], interpreted by myself.”

Marcus Shelby, whose band provided rock steady support to the poets and musicians throughout the show, accompanies on the stand up bass.

If we didn’t miss Brooklyn already, we do now.

Fuller versions can be seen here. (Via The Eyeball Kid.)

British academic and journalist Aleks Krotoski is retelling George Orwell’s novel “1984″ one word at a time through one photo a day. Today’s photo, day and word 22 — “breast” –  just happens to be from the meat section at Sainsbury’s on Victoria Road, according to Krotoski. This “breast” is meant to refer to where Winston Smith’s chin is nuzzled, but just go with it.

You might argue that this is the long way round to reading a novel, but the combinations of images and words in the stream create a transcendent beauty that is unique to the project. Krotoski explains her rationale for the lifestream project on her blog. Yes she’s aware of the irony of combining lifestreaming and “1984.” We look forward to her rendition of “Animal Farm.”

Where in the world is this meat from?

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Books for children should be educational. And what better to teach children about than the joys of eating hotdogs? In “The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog” by Mo Willems an irrascible pigeon … well the title pretty much says it all. The discriminating little pigeon wisely points out “Well, they are a taste sensation.” Couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

The best part of this book is the smile it brings to your face when you see some nasty little disease-carrying winged rodent pecking at a dried-up tube steak in the gutter on 14th Street as we did today. Trying to gather children around to watch proved troubling for the parents though.

Blogger Tim Farris has discovered that there are a few problems with the way food (and many other products American consume) are labeled. He refers to an excellent article in Meat Paper, on the truth (or more accurately, lies) behind meat labels, and both writers make copious and somewhat sensical references to Upton Sinclair’s 1909 novel “The Jungle.” Most of us know by now, that “All Natural” is essentially meaningless. It might mean only that there isn’t a prosthetic bone in your porterhouse, for all the oversight there is on food labeling. Another favorite meaningless label is “Free-range.” It means only that there is a door open somewhere leading to the outdoors (and maybe a six-foot square pen). Do not get the impression that the animals are running through fields and stopping to chomp grass as if on some Disney farm. The best and most obvious way around these labels is to buy your meat from someone you know and trust — maybe a farmer you can talk to at the green market, or a local butcher, if you can find one. This will save you the trouble of having to deal with troglodytes at the supermarket who eye you as you pick up your plastic wrapped “Angus” and stroll past Clorox’s “all natural” Green Works products.

This slim volume, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Zindel, is required reading in English classes across the land. We found it on a shelf in a thrift store on Avenue B. Zindel took the Pulitzer for his play “The Effects of of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”—parallel tales of a botanical experiment and the lives of two daughters of an over-bearing mother. If you came to this page accidentally thinking it would help you write your essay for third period English, we apologize. Check out one of our stories on meat philosophy or P.G. Woodhouse as long as you are here.

All we can tell you about the book is that Hamburger is a metaphor for abortion. You might just read the book, though. It is about 98 pages and will probably take less time to read than downloading Cliff’s Notes.

If a pig could hold a fork you know he would eat pork belly and glazed ham, like the swine does in this commercial for Boost mobile. But getting freaked out by the talking cannibalistic pig is really taking the bait here, since the ad series is titled “Unwrong’d,” with the basic gag being that whatever the wrong thing in the ad is, it isn’t as terribly off as your typical cell service contract. Shades of Animal Farm notwithstanding, none of this changes the fact that Boost is still a shitty cell provider. All the pork and pumped-up Travis Barkers in the world aren’t going to change that.

“We are like lambs in a field,” wrote Schopenhauer in “On the Sufferings of The World,” continuing, “disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.” It’s fate that’s our butcher. Unlike the lambs, who never know the butcher is sharpening his blade, we sense the ravages of time that determine our fate. Ever the cheerful guy, Schopes points out that it’s work, worry, labor and trouble that define our days. However, as an old Kantian, he offers a reasoning: “But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves.”

This is all somehow applicable to the world of Blandings Castle as created by P.G. Wodehouse. In his novel of gluttonous abandon chronicling a sow-fattening contest, “Pigs Have Wings,” the butler Beach, when caught in the cross hairs of Galahand, is described thus: “But his jaw had fallen, and he was looking at his visitor rather in the manner of the lamb mentioned by the philosopher Schopenhauer when closeted with the butcher.” Now the simile doesn’t quite bear itself out, if one is supposed to get the impression that Beach is terrified, since the lambs are never aware of their fate. However, Wodehouse’s double anthropomorphic somersault maneuver might just work, given that Beach is one of only a few characters in the novel with a greater self awareness than the pigs.