MotherPie

Best-Ever Turkey Soup...

Our holiday will be full of all sorts of cultural soup. Watching the Macy's Day Parade preparations the night before with darkness surrounding everything, the big balloons look completely different, tethered close to the ground...

Traditions are soupy things, too.  What we toss in, what we keep, what we savor, what we share.  What we aren't doing but would, if we could, would be making my mom's yummy yummy turkey soup. 

MotherPie's Best Ever Turkey Soup Recipe (From Mom...)

Thankgsiving turkey bones
left-over turkey
carrots, 5 or so, grated fine (food processor works great)
Celery, 5 stalks cut into small pieces
Center of celery, heart with stalks and leaves
Onions, 2 - yellow, 1 cut in half, 1 cut into pieces
Garlic - three toes, mashed (put in baggie, hit with kitchen hammer to mash)
olive oil
One of these: spaghetti, brown rice, red potatoes with peel, corn
Beef or chicken broth cube if needed (which you usually might need if it isn't a free range turkey)
Dash of organo
1 bay leaf
Spice with thanksgiving
Season with gratitude

Put turkey bones in large pot, with cover with water, add one onion cut in half and celery heart with stalks and leaves and bring to boil and then turn to low simmer for an hour.  Let cool. Skim off fat at top and remove bones and celery stalks (cut leaves into pieces to re-use - same w/ onion halves).  In another large pan, heat olive oil then put in carrots, onions, celery and garlic in and saute until tender.  Add to soup stock with organo and bay leaf.  Simmer for 30 minutes; add shredded turkey pieces to soup.  If you use brown rice, add that at the beginning of the simmer process.  Otherwise with the other starch ingredients, add them using as much as you wish.  (I use relatively small amounts as we are stuffed after the big turkey dinner).  Simmer for 30 more minutes on low.  Salt and pepper to taste. Serve with love.

This is especially good the next day.

Traditions & Turkey Day...

We've had so many "traditions" as we've moved around.  What traditions do you embrace? We'll be eating something with turkey at Sarah Beth's restaurant in NYC once more.  We may be ogling the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade floats the night before the event.  We might be avoiding the crowds that day.  We might have a good perch from Trump Tower as we have been lucky to do in the past.   You might find us walking through Central Park as we did the day after Thanksgiving last year when my daughter got engaged. Little bit of Broadway, wee speck of shopping.  We have to go back to remember, go back to close the past, go back to move forward into our present future.

You? The International Folk Art Museum folks would ask you to scrutinize your cultural traditions, why you do what you do and the role you play in how you do that day.  Janet, the Kentucky transplant blogger and Pooh fan had a link to a quiz  and I found out that at least I am NOT STUFFY. HA. You go take the test.  What are you?

I Am The Stuffing

I'm  complicated and complex, yet all my pieces fit together. People miss me if you're gone - but they're not sure why.

What Part of Thanksgiving Are You?

Ramble: Reading...

Reading rivers? Reading rivers of books? Old cottonwoods tell of rivers that once were vital.  The Santa Fe River runs dry and is one of the top 10 most endangered rivers in America.  Some are hoping to make it once again a living river. The old cottonwoods stand in testimony.  One day books will be like the old cottonwoods, testimonies to old times, old ways.  Dams stemmed water flows; digital reading will change the page. 

Today Amazon.com's new eReader, the $399 Kindle, is being unveiled in NYC.  Newsweek's cover story, The Future of Reading, tells more but if Jeff Bezos is betting on this, he might have the customer base/distribution muscle to cause a Black  Swan sea change.  Books are one of the last analog vehicles to shift to digital.  The Sony e-Reader (second version out in October) just didn't cause a shift; eReaders have been around since the late 1990s and I've not had the urge to clamor for one. The Kindle has dimensions of a paperback, can change font size, can hold 200 or so books with more on a memory card, doesn't run hot, has six-inch screen that can can equate to print clarity, can hold 30 hours of reading on a charge, recharges in two hours and has wireless connectivity.  There will be 88,000 titles available at the Kindle store at launch with NYT best sellers priced at $9.95.  Slashdot's review made some good points about why this might not catch on. It isn't on my wish list...yet. The thing is...I just don't know ANYONE wanting to get more books on their bookshelves. Do you? 

Reading of electromagnetic fields and cell phones? I've been concerned enough to think that a holiday gift idea would be giving these little gizmos that diminish the risk when attached to cell phones (and blue-tooth gizmos, laptop computers, microwaves and cordless home phone sets as well).

Reading online? The Wall Street Journal online will be free once Rupert Murdoch's sale goes through, opening the site to 10 - 15 million readers rather than the 1 million current subscribers.  Online advertising continues to grow and the revenue from ads will more than make up for subscription fees.  The NYTimes abandoned its subscriber-only limited access in September and the next month online unique viewership grew by 3 million.  NYTimes online readers spend about 34 minutes reading the site.  The top five online newspaper sites in October: NYTimes; USAToday; WaPo; WSJ online; and LATimes.

The young are reading less for pleasure and their reading scores are dropping, according to a new study released today by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Just finished Water For Elephants (wonderful) and was a book club co-reviewer (my cousin pulled me right into her club) for Dreaming in Cuban and finished Valerie Plame's Fair Game.  For the latter's author event in Santa Fe, the Lensic Theatre packed in a big crowd.  On my way to NYC, reading: Mrs. Astor's Baby - The Fight for a Mother's Love and Money, and hoping to read that the Broadway strike is over so we can see Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cheers...

Wh-Wh- Warhol: The (Art) Market Has Juice?

Well, Christie'sNYC auction of Post-war and Contemporary Art might be an indicator that the economy still has air in that balloon or that Christie's is cookin' and is a well-oiled machine. Sixteen pieces sold for record prices in the $325 million dollar sale (second highest total ever in the field) but others barely sold above the low estimates. Some say the (art) market still has juice, based on the prices. Especially when the market has jitters.  But I wonder: what sort of punch does a work have when copies and posters are out there? 

Andy Warhol's Muhammad Ali sold at Christie's for $9.22 million (it was estimated to sell for between $2 and $3 million) and with posters of Warhol's Ali, at right, selling for $59 or $299, I just wonder what is going on. What is the value of an original when so many prints are out there?  Is it the essence of the orignal of all the copies? What has become so interesting about contemporary art, especially the pop art that Warhol did, is that he used images from everyday, including pop icons and consumer products, and recycled the imagery and gave it back to us reformed.  When things are not unique anymore, when we have a mass culture, society pays for the familiar-formed. Warhol set a record last year and this week his Ali sold for above estimate. His Liz  (offered up by Hugh Grant and sold for $21 million) and Rorschach ($4.8 million), sold closer to the lower estimates.  Warhol's Elvis 2 Times sold for $14 million and was estimated to sell between $12 and $15 million.

What does this say, these exhorbitant prices paid for our current Americana? Culture Critic Walter Benjamin had a lot to say about our culture and mass production and how the aura of the original is lost when art becomes a manufactured thing. Warhol is a good example of the loss of the individual and the creation of the brand, our society and what we image/imagine and use as tokens of our iconic culture, memory and consumption. I could go on a rabbit trail about what this all says about our culture but I'm interested more in the economy of art and the popularity of it all - the interest of the patrons and what these sales might say about our economy. Hugh Grant's Liz wasn't even a good work with the color of her lips leaching out all over her face.  But hey.  It is icon movie star Liz Taylor, by icon artist Warhol, and Taylor is still alive and we can all reference both star and artist.  They pulse in our memories. 

The ugly Liz was a big money-making investment for Grant.  As recently as 2002, Warhols weren't selling for above $4 million.  Then boom, last spring Lemon Marilyn went for $28 million and Blue Mao went for  $17.4 million and soared to a record $71.7 million paid last spring for one of his car crash works, left.  At the end of the two-week auctions in NYC, the Warhol's didn't fare well in the Phillip's auction with only one of three selling (for $500,000).   

The International Herald Tribune had this to say about it the auctions: "An equally telling indication of the irrelevance of aesthetics to contemporary art market trends is provided by the latest artists to be promoted to celebrity status."

So... what is this saying about our economy, with our dollar down and the national debt increasing at $1.48 billion per day, at $9 trillion, up from $3 trillion since Bush took office?  Last week I thought there might be jitters.  My husband wonders if the buyers are outside of the U.S., taking advantage of the weak dollar.  Probably so. There might be those intending to buy and flip - or new hedge funds trading in art.  It could be that the estimates are tools and buyers base their bidding on that. Seems the buyers are a mystery. I don't know who bought the Warhols but the upward Warhol momentum is just cruisin' this fall, not going out the roof like last spring. But still. Still.  Tulipmania? It is still woo-woo Warhol, wooing the buyers.  Everyone wants what is hot. Pepper in the art pot.

Warhol thought that people felt better looking at the same things over and over.   The familiarity made meaning  meaningless.

More on the flip about Warhol and the economy...

Ramble: Blogging, Birdflu & Plutonium in the Water...

MotherPie: this space, this place.  This is an edible thing that you mentally can chew on. It is also the seed of things of potential, just like we all are.  It can grow where it is planted, or change, like me, depending on where my roots are growing or where they plan to go, rhizomatically sort of.  I'm finishing my last grad class that is EATING MY LUNCH -- web design (which is very hard for me to do online without a real-time instructor - my instructor is in Spain). 

• Blogrolls: Most bloggers have them and I appreciate when good bloggers list me on theirs.  I took mine down at the end of the summer to reorganize.  After reorganizing my feed reads on Bloglines, including blogs I regularly read, now Google Reader is offering blog reading list sharing via blogrolls.  One of the Google engineers took this up as a personal project and it looks like a very easy way to go. Now I'm  studying this as an alternate way of sharing.  I apologize to my blog friends for not having you up there and I promise I will.
• Anonymity: Many bloggers are comfortable being completely "out there".  I'm not.  I feel safer writing under a pseudonym.  I've had two blog friends recently have problems with creeps who stalk online.  I respect the privacy of my family. I monitor my comments carefully, kill the spam and if you are not comfortable commenting under your name, email me with your moniker at hapage at motherpie dot com so I will know who you are.  In many ways online we are naked to the world and privacy is a drowning idea but we also must be cautious. 
  
• Birdflu - we need to take a look at modern farming and how we are losing biodiversity...the 300th human case (60% mortality rate) happened in September and human deaths are doubling. It hasn't yet mutated to spread from human-to-human and has now turned up in the U.K.  The major avian killer hasn't turned up here...yet.  Intensive modern poultry farming is thought to be the blame but that puts industrial agriculture at risk.  Fecal-to-oral transmission is hastened by poultry fertilizer. Easier to blame wild bird migrations.
• Water Issues...Storm-water run-off is showing plutonium at 16 times the safe-drinking-water standard -- such is the risk of living close to Los Alamos, one of the nation's top nuclear bomb factory. City and county leaders are trying to hold the Department of Energy and Los Alamos accountable.
• Modern Cleaning Products? Instead of anti-bacterial soaps, my mom says use peroxide and plain soap and water. Germ-free environments may weaken our immune systems and anti-bacterial soaps cause resistant strains. Green cleaning products?  I'm at fault here.  We're neurotic in some ways about health issues and blind in others.  What is the balance... we're getting out-of-whack. Scientists say:
  

Scientists have discovered high levels of triclosan and triclocarban -- two of the common compounds found in soaps and detergents -- in our ecosystem. According to a U.S. Geological Survey report from 2002, the substances can be found in nearly 60 percent of our streams and rivers. Kristopher McNeill, a University of Minnesota chemist studying the effect of triclosan on the ecosystem, says it might be a source of certain types of dioxins. The chlorine that is routinely added to wastewater, McNeill says, reacts with triclosan. The chlorinated triclosan, in the presence of sunlight, is transformed yet again in a reaction that forms dioxin -- not the most toxic type of dioxin, but one that may be harmful to aquatic life and, as a result, the food chain.

So... crunching on my final project, thinking of environmental things & appreciating my online friends.  Cheers.

Male & Female...

Oh, are we different.  It doesn't begin and end with the Birds and the Bees. Look at these X and Y chromosomes magnified 30,000 times.  Can't you see?  It's there from the start.  If women have more there on the two X's what does that say? 

We just couldn't SEE this before.  We are learning so much about science and genetics.  Do we have a male and female brain?  Or does it become that way based on senses? New studies based on just ONE gene show that it might be the sensory system that makes us act male or female.  Dr. Barry Starr of Stanford University writes about this in the study of mice in an article called Lovers not Fighters -
Changing a single gene eliminates gender specific sexual behavior in mice. 

The canonical beliefs about genetics are being upturned at a rapid rate with gene sequencing. The fascinating field of epigenetics  -- The impact of the environment and other factors on genetics is just now being unravelled. Epigenetics is a scary thought. On Project Censored's 2008 list of news stories that didn't make the news, Epigenetics was the #15 story: Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code” with a link to articles about how, for example, exposure to chemicals can cause illness that can be passed down to future generations.

It is more than just the birds and the bees...

Santa Fe: The Oldest Capital City...

Santa Fe is celebrating its 400th anniversary, starting this year and continuing through 2010.  A three-year celebration sounds about right for a city founded before Plymouth Colony that thrives on tourism. The contest is on for the logo design; my favorite is this one, at left.  The new city convention center was delayed when artifacts were discovered; now the new city rail line is stalled so that a prairie dog colony can be relocated this spring once their hibernation ends. 

This city has a look of its own called the Santa Fe style, thanks to architectural codes that are 50 years old this year and which echo the historical adobe structures, both Indian and Hispanic Indian-influenced.

After living in some of the biggest cities in the U.S. - Atlanta, Houston, NYC , living in the oldest capital city is a real treat.  I grew up in Oklahoma -- celebrating its 100th anniversary of statehood this month.

Mother of the Country: Traditional Queen Elizabeth...

The Kingdom has always been her baby. She will have reigned longer than any other British monarch, including that long-serving Queen Victoria, next month. Yet her era has not been called Victorian and the Elizabethan era was for Henry VIII's daughter. On November 20 she is celebrating her 60th wedding anniverary.

Queen Elizabeth, 81, is such a firm keeper of tradition, holding the ruling the reins tight. Yet she isn't a matriarch in the familial sense. Victoria was more of a domestic mothering influence.  This Queen doesn't embrace change --she still comes out in carriages.  Her image is closely crafted; her portraits are reminders of position and  influence. Where once the Bishops wore hats and the saints wore crowns in England, she wears the icon of radiating glory, the indicator of  worship and all the pomp and ceremony that goes with those symbols of power.

Like the first Queen Elizabeth, whose only marriage was to her country, she has never been seen as a "loving figure" but as a person who puts position over personal.  This makes me think about mothers, power and place in general.

What does this say about women in high postitions and our Anglicized culture?  Thatcher was a tough cookie, too.  Can women hold power positions and also be seen as good mothers?  Does England have the mommy wars? Is it more about security in our society than the role of the female in the family?  She inherited power but did her position grant her power or has she worked to keep it?

Kickin' Cowgirls...

Two great cowgirls were nationally noted last week. One of my favorite artists, Donna Sickles-Howell, was inducted this last week into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame for her work with the imagery of the cowgirl.  Her work is fun, whimsical and appealing.  She has developed quite a following.

Her work usually breaks out of the frame in some way and her compositions use bright colors, cowgirls and revolve around horses and female friendships for the most part.  She has been interested in cowgirl imagery in art since her college years.  I think she taps into several deep themes with her work.  Cowgirls were some of the first original female athletes in America.  Early photo imagery of those long-ago cowgirls not only inspired her, but led her to focus on an original American (female) go-get-'em spirit.

Just recently I enjoyed a Canyon Road gallery show at McLarry Fine Art in Santa Fe that featured some of her newer works.  Her cowgirls are contemporary, with big white white smiles. It is exciting to see her work evolve over the years.    Her book, Cowgirl Rising, is a good one and my cousin gave it to me for Christmas a couple of y ears ago.  If you like notecards or scarves, or know a cowgirl that might, you can buy them directly from her.

Terry Stuart, a real cowgirl running ranches in Oklahoma, was also inducted last week into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.  She has a post-grad degree in Ranch Management from TCU in Ft. Worth (she was number one in her class). She has become a legend in the Southwest for her successful running of her ranches, some of which date back to the original Oklahoma ranches of her ancestors.

Marlboro Man of Iraq & War Journalism...

Luis Sinco, photographer for the L.A. Times, took this photo, quickly dubbed the "Marlboro Man" that instantly became one of the most famous of the Iraq War and later nominated for a Pulitzer.  The photo entwined the subject and Sinco and he wrote a gripping tale about Sinco's difficulties post-war published in the L.A. Times today.  The photo initially captured my attention because of my interest in the mythical Marlboro Man.  But it is now morphed beyond just an image into a sad tale of how war impacts soldiers and how the images impact us.  After last week's news that 1 in 4 vets are homeless, this personal tale of journalist and subject might be as important as the photo because it personalizes the war and its damage, especially the pyschological after-effects.

A.P. photographer Nick Ut captured Kim Phuc of the most famous photo of the Vietnam War that won a Pulitzer.  Burned from a Napalm attack, Kim Phuc remains burned in our minds, an image of a war that impacted our soldiers with chemicals like Agent Orange and civilians with napalm.  It wasn't until years later that the story came out that he had saved her life.

Some stories will capture us with the image and then the story will unfold, entwining us with the personal side of war.  Truths unfold with the reporting of the stories.  Editor and Publisher reports that reviewers are linking Robert Redford's new movie, Lion for Lambs, with journalism issues....Meryl Streep's journalist character is reminding some of NYTimes reporter Judith Miller, who became a mouthpiece for war propaganda.

On another note, the NYTimes is adding comments to news stories -- a good move.  WaPo is getting sloppy with its online content.  Today links were broken on media critic Howard Kurtz's story on Pakistan and emails to his story were covered up repeatedly with pop-up ads.

Related:  My Marlboro Man Story