Bon scrappétit!

Beep beep!

For the nine months after August 5, 2001, an unauthorized freeway sign announced a previously impossible-to-see exit for the 5 North off of the 110 Freeway in downtown Los Angeles. One could finally anticipate the biggest highway on the west coast and get in the exit lane ahead of time, avoiding a five-lane Tokyo Drift only necessary because the existing marker was miniscule, unilluminated, and placed nearly at ground level on the other side of the freeway.

The bootleg sign — an exquisite simulacrum of Caltrans workmanship — was a “guerilla public service” performed by one of L.A.’s finest sign painters, Richard Ankrom. A still-active Major Weirdo in a Good Way®, Ankrom is responsible for lettering at some of L.A.’s most beloved restaurants (and at my favorite wine shop).

But it’s his documentation that goes wayyyyy in, drawing equally on the image fidelity of public access television, the spectacular absurdity of Ant Farm crashing a car into a wall of TVs, the zaniness of 60s science fiction serials, and the excruciating how-to detail of Primitive Technology.   

Yoohoo!!!

Delighted to present to you a very long, revealing interview with my friend Gracelee Lawrence. We spoke on March 20th of this year, and life being what it is, I have just now been able to finish editing it down. More interviews are coming, as I finally make good on an early promise of this project to introduce you to fabulous weirdos I know and love.

Gracelee is a sculptor and art professor working out of Climax, NY (!). As her website bio nicely lays out: “Gracelee’s work deals with relationships between food, the body, and technology. It is born in the transfigurative space between physical and digital reality, exploring the ways in which bodies are both gendered and metaphorically fragmented in terms of capitalist-driven material desires, physical sustenance, and the digital spaces we inhabit.”

Helloooooooo,

Writing to you from the lower bulb of the hourglass. Sand is washing over me. Time is coming.

I am feeling older. For the first time in my life, I can actually feel that I am getting older. Things are starting to ache. I took my first trip ever to the ER (nice people! — Kaiser on Sunset if you’re ever jonesing). Some of our best friends moved to Vegas last year. Another two are now in Berlin. One is (temporarily, thank god) teaching in NorCal.

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Good morning, beautiful. Some breezy flora/fauna on the menu today.

Read a kinda underwhelming Denise Levertov poem a few weeks ago called “Fritillary”. But I was piqued by the word, which she rather thoroughly defines and even offers some etymology for:

A couple friends recently moved from LA to NYC, and I promised them a list of some things to do. I'm providing it here for other folks visiting or moving to the city — my suspicion is it will be of less value for seasoned New Yorkers.

But who knows? I'm not interested in turning scraps into a recommendation engine, and I instead tried to make something suffused with memories, biases, and instincts that might be a little record both of a place I love and miss and of a way to live with ruthless indulgence.

Instead of trying to explain why this is mostly a list of places to eat, drink, and buy books in Manhattan, I'll (somewhat testily) just say this: I didn't move to NYC 16 years ago to live on a block dotted with 3rd wave coffee shops and increasingly inhabited by a community of my own class. I moved there kind of accidentally, by eliminating other options. Because I had no better ideas. Because I was rejecting the Ivy League, because my parents were rejecting tiny liberal arts schools in the middle of nowhere, and because I got a little money from my college.

Parev, parev. Inch ga chiga??

For a few years, I’ve been thinking seriously about what happens to culture over time, ever since a friend boldly declared that dining at a restaurant could never qualify as meaningfully engaging with the “culture” behind the restaurant’s cuisine.

He argued that culture is an ineffable, multisensory, intergenerational pile of things on the other side of a portal one can at best reach through. For many, it can be impossible to explain what these things add up to, and when we try, we risk sounding like the epilogue of a bad diasporic novel.

Not much to say today, folks. Feeling quiet. Happy.

We visited some good friends in Pittsburgh earlier in the year and had a jolly good time. Amita explained that the proper way to eat Jon's aguachile was by taking a bite of the antagonistically spicy and citrus-cured shrimp, sipping on your beer, then dragging from a cigarette. The order of operations is, I believe, flexible.

One day, we went to the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh's famous artist-founded exhibition space strewn across multiple venues. With the exception of one artwork I'll write about in a future newsletter, the art left something(s) to be desired: very 2000s, scrappy-but-not-DIY-enough, "site-specific"-but-in-a-temporary-space energy.

Or DRINK it more precisely!!!

This long-advertised issue comes courtesy of a guy who works at Rick's Produce, a lovely farm stand in L.A.'s Original Farmer's Market on Fairfax. As you probably know, I've been on the road a while and thus haven't run into him again: when I learn his name, I'll update you.

One day, a year ago or so, while I was busy squeezing Buddha's hands at the market, he, apropos of nothing, stormed my cottagecore inner sanctum and asked if I'd like to see an old farmer's trick for snacking on hot days. When he held up a pomegranate, I stiffened: I don't know about you, but all the crazy methods out there for knocking pomegranate halves around, turning them inside out, seeding them underwater... It's enough! It's really enough!!! Then try prying all the pokey bits from your teeth for the rest of the day..... come ON, my beautiful freaks!!!! You simply do not have to live in a world like that.

I will now open the sanctum to you.

Guanciale, amore mio. This one’s a long time coming…

Tonight we’ll dive into a wonderful publication from Japan’s recent past: the great “Last Orgy 2”, a column on streetwear and streetwear-adjacent pop culture first printed in Takarajima (Treasure Island, a magazine that then centered on subcultures in Japan) in the early 90s.

When this recording came on the radio in my car, I pulled over so there was no chance—not a mote of possibility—that I would miss the end. It turned out to be the Argentine piano queen Martha Argerich playing Chopin's Polonaise No. 6 in A-Flat Major, Op. 53 "Heroic".

There's plenty to say about the song. A Polonaise ("Polish") a kind of a waltz or slow dance on amphetamines. This version was recorded in 1965. I mostly knew Chopin for his cerebral, wandering, fluttering nocturnes and preludes. Martha's very talented, still shreds, and is v cool and famously reclusive. In this version, she plays so loudly that the microphone "peaks", pushed beyond its natural limit in receiving sound to distortion.

Despite myriad mistakes in the live version, her panache touches the entire keyboard (literally) and delivers a lethal dose of hardcore human emotion: the melancholy of a lovely memory... the complete abandon of having a great time... the syrupy illogic of love and sex... the sick delirium of power... our propensity for pomposity and the sheer DELIGHT of experiencing it all.

Where Routes 64 and 180 meet in the Arizonan desert, on the way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, a grounded squadron of birds of prey sulk in their cages.

We’re at Raptor Ranch, a rehab and conservation facility for eagles, falcons, hawks, owls, etc., that can’t be released into the wild because they were domestically bred or injured. This place ostensibly exists to teach visitors about birds, but in practice, they seem to just let the birds fly insanely fast in the middle of nowhere because it’s gnarly.

Coming out of a life-giving two weeks with my friends in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico to deliver, over a month later, on my promise of a newsletter with "no publishing schedule". (I moved too, ok??) Deserts are famous for not encouraging life, but I didn't feel that way petting scaly junipers, bouncing on the rolling shoulders of Big Steve (my Grand Canyon mule) or savoring a stray Parkinsonia's feathery cool. Whenever I travel, I take a lot of photos of plants and rocks. They move me. The following stretch back a long time and go out to green gangstas everywhere.

Shout out the spectacular Museum of Jurassic Technology: I ripped this week's subject line from their slogan. More soon(er). ;)

love,

alex

Teen Vogue recently feted Lux, the extremely cool socialist feminist glossy magazine my partner helped start during the pandemic.

“I think all interesting magazines are aspirational," Sharanya says to the interviewer. "In our case, rather than attain a certain lifestyle or luxury goods, we aspire to make a world in which we want to live. As Rick Owens asks, ‘Isn't it more chic to be free?’”

I know next to nothing about fashion and less than nothing about the designer Rick Owens, yet the above delivered an instant and satisfying lol. Probably because of my ignorance, I have for years found it extremely rewarding to dip—without context—into the freaky, beguiling world of fashion’s favorite health goth, and I very much recommend you do too.

Owens is the image non-fashion people call up when they imagine a fashion person: brooding, ghoulish, acid, a workaholic, somehow a minimalist and startlingly extra at the same time. Dig into any of his writing or interviews, though, and you have a lifetime of extraterrestrial little koans (and occasionally a pearl of legitimate wisdom) to wake up the group chat when it gets sleepy.

A bloke called Paulie Wax SMSed me the other day with a request I thought might be bloody helpful to you lot. (Recently finished Downton Abbey, so buckle up.)

Could I help him expand his cooking repertoire now that he had rented an Upper East (and I mean east) Side apartment and was itching to entertain?

LIKE, OF COURSE! But where was he at in the kitchen?

Over the last year, these three music documentaries (all free on YouTube and for some reason British) either got my brain working or my ass shaking, sometimes both. In the arena of pleasure, what else really matters, y'all?

On the Edge: Improvisation in Music

The English Avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey is a trip. His playing can be hard to classify, much less listen to, but for me, free improvisation only really works when it erases and redraws the boundaries of what is possible. I have to honor his willingness to play the guitar for what it is and will never be again.

In addition to playing, Bailey produced one of the most important studies of improvisation in music around the world, a book called Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music, which became a BBC series called On the Edge: Improvisation in Music twelve years later. All four parts of that series are on YouTube.

Ted Nelson, radical computing, and software for stoners

What if every piece of knowledge were connected non-hierarchically through a futuristic web that defied the earthly operating systems we hold dear and instead felt like the cosmic realization of Daddy Internet’s home truth that all things are one and all knowledge is connected, man??? 

We keep a small rattan box under the coffee table filled with ephemera—all kinds of little well-designed things that don't really go anywhere but that we can't bear to trash.

We're not really precious people: we have some nice things we treasure and use the hell out of and otherwise don't hold on to much. But this box is filled with absolute tat: tat with grace, tat with flavor, tat with -usian, tat that's drunk at karaoke. The point of opening this box is to get a quick hit of little scraps of favor that, for reasons that are hard (really easy??) to explain, make you go "WOW!!!!!!"

I want to share some wow with you tonight :) Here are some selections from the box, not organized or even scanned well... just a lick, a tease, a taste, an aroma. Next time you're over, ask, and I'll get the box out.

Cheese pulls are fired. Fussy glassware is fired. Oversalting is fired. Gramming every meal you eat is extremely fired!!!!!!!!

You won’t see it on your social feed, but my favorite ballast to the hyperbasic food media scene of late has been a little journal called Petits Propos Culinaires (“Little things about food”).

People… is this the week we rise up? No? Well, I’m ready when you are!

In the meantime, I prepared a few resources for you to mix up your outdoor life: Breathe in that crispy fall air and go commune with the Great Mother.

A Schematic Cloud Study, Alexander Cozens, Photo © Tate, shared under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

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Howdy, all! ＼ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ／

You’re reading the first issue of a newsletter called scraps of favor, an experiment I’m trying out.

Earth life is tectonic. Trying to stand up on a sphere covered in shifting plates, where nearly every jolt arrives at the whim of a class that doesn’t care about the future of that sphere, can be pretty hard, right?? I trust that we each spend some of our time grappling with alllll that.