Chinese Democracy

A guy by the name of Ryan handed me a cassette of music in Grade 9 science class. I can’t remember if I asked for it or if he suggested it or whatever. I do remember he tried to look like Slash and I do remember that the cassette Guns and Roses and the name of the album was Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide. I remember liking it alot and then I went out and bought Appetite for Destruction. And then I remember being hooked.

I remember wearing bandana’s because I thought they were cool. I wore ripped jeans and cowboy boots. I did all the things I was supposed to do when I started to listen to that music. And man, listening to it still makes me feel good. I have a picture of my daughter wearing a green bandana, wearing a great big grin and a pair of pink pyjamas. I can’t say for certain how old the bandana is but it is clean. I had just washed it. I’m too old for cowboy boots. They beat the shit out of my back and they are too damned tight. I think my wife might have thrown them away when she was cleaning one day and I had a moment of weakness. I couldn’t fit one, fat leg into my old ripped jeans even if I still did own them. I do, however, still have ripped jeans. And I’ve graduated to much more grown up footwear. Converse. My wife calls them my big-boy shoes. My daughter likes my orange pair of high tops best.

I remember sitting on the back steps of the fast food restaurant I was working at listening to Patience, trying to get that damned whistle just right.

I remember waiting so damned long for Use Your Illusion I & II and then regretting it, because a girlfriend of mine at the time insisted on singing November Rain to me while we were in my car together. She wanted romance and I wanted into her pants. I think we both got what we wanted, but November Rain still irks me when I listen to it.

I remember that my friends went to the Metallica / GNR concert (September 13th, 1992). I would have been the impossible age of nineteen, turning twenty thirty days later. I cannot remember why I did not go but if I were to venture a guess, I would tell you that I had to work.

I’m not sure what the ‘critical reception’ of The Spaghetti Incident was (I would have to skip back to the Wiki and see what others had to say about it). But I liked Look At Your Game, Girl ; Chuck Manson cover or not. My favourite track would have to be Down On the Farm. Axl trying to sound english, crying out ‘Down on the fahm’.

They told me to get healthy
They told me to get some sun
But boredom eats me like cancer
Down here on the farm

Love it. Excellent. The farm can be anywhere, can’t it? And boredom as a disease? Sure, it’s not Axl’s lyrics (some British band ; I’ll have to Wiki that, too)

I’d heard about Chinese Democracy and then I stopped caring. And then, I was on Facebook and someone said they were not impressed with Chinese Democracy. And then I wondered if it was out, so I checked online and nope. And then, by the magic of… well, magic, I was able to get a copy of the album. And I chose tonight to listen to it.

I got the day off work tomorrow and my daughter was in bed and tonight is Grey’s Anatomy and ER for my wife, so I figured, what the hell, I would give it a listen.

In short, Axl has grown up, I think, despite how childish his relations with others might seem.

My synopsis would be as follows ; very original and evolved but definitely GNR.

Better = Strong track. Nothing I’ve heard can compare to it.

Chinese Democracy. Title track. Haunting intro and then into it with the guitar. Very GNR. Lyrics, though, for me, make me wonder if he just threw together some headlines or if he thought about them. And if he thought of them, well, I would have to go to the trouble of listening better the second time.

If they were missionaries
Real time visionaries
Sitting in a Chinese stew
To view my dis-infatu-ation
I know that I’m a classic case
Watch my disenchanted face
Blame it on the Falun Gong
They’ve seen the end and you can’t hold on now

Maybe it has to do with the persecution of Falun Gong. It’s a nice tune, but I wonder where he’s going with the lyrics.

IRS = Another nice but confusing track. It has power and strength to it, almost kind of like a ballad, which rings true with the lyrics. Most especially, the lament at the bridge.

Feelin’ like I’ve done way more than wrong
Feelin’ like I’m livin’ inside of this song
Feelin’ like I’m just too tired to care
Feelin’ like I’ve done more than my share
Could’ve been the way that I carried on
Like a broken record for so long

Could this album be as close as Axl’s strong personality can come to an apology? And I wonder why the IRS title? It’s more about the crime someone has committed. The only reason he would want the IRS is because the IRS would determine the couple’s net worth and divide everything up evenly. But the lyrics kind of read like an audit of his emotions.

I like this tune.

Madagascar = slow and plodding and does nothing for me. But that tells me that maybe I am missing something, so don’t take my word for it. I can’t speak to it musically because the only instrument I ever tried to play was a flute (despite my Dad’s best efforts – he bought me a 12 strong guitar for one Christmas. I think my middle brother broke it down to 6 strings and still plays it from time to time ; he can still strum a tune despite his sausage like fingers. Calluses built up like crazy nuts, though)

It has a bunch of sampling thrown into it ; Martin Luther King’s famous speech ‘I have a dream’ speech along with The Captain’s speech from Cool Hand Luke (also used in the GNR tune Civil War). This all tells me that I am really missing something. It’ll come to me later.

That’s enough for tonight. I’ll listen to the album a couple more times and see what else I come up with.

But, for the record – Thanks, Axl. Good work, so far.

This one is for my good friend who came for dinner the other night and who can surf to the bottom of the page and find the attachment called Garden of Eden

And she ate the pasta that I made. All of it, bless her heart. I chose the whole wheat pasta because I thought Sausage Carbonara was a little too filling and the whole wheat would offset it.

Not the best idea I’ve had. Should not have chosen to experiment when company was coming. A pasta dish that depends on eggs should really be white pasta, if not an egg pasta. Would have been remarkably filling but it would have tasted much, much better.

It’s really easy and really quick and really, really good. First, go to the deli counter of your supermarket and ask for 100g of pancetta, cut thick like bologna. You’ll get about 4 slices if they do it right. Go to the cheese section. Get a goodly chunk of parmesan. Do not cheap out and get the pre grated stuff. Loses the flavour.

Go to the butcher counter and get 4 italian sausages. Pick the flavour that suits your mood.

Go to the dairy section. 500ml of 18% table cream, half dozen eggs. Go to the pasta section. 450g of linguine. White pasta. Egg, if they got it. Don’t chintz out and don’t buy the whole wheat, for Christ’s sake.

Go home, split the sausages, roll them up into meatballs about the size of a jawbreaker. Maybe a little smaller than that ; you want them all the same size and not too thick so that they will cook easily. Let’s say five meatballs to 1 sausage but not more than six and not less than 3, otherwise they get too big and take too long to cook and then you overcook and lose the flavour.

Chop up the pancetta into bits ; roll the slices up, slit them lengthwise and dice.

Grate up about a cups worth of parmesan.

Separate 4 egg yolks, mix them up. Add the 18% cream. Mix it all up. Add as much parmesan as you like, but not less than a third of a cup. My wife likes lots of cheese, so I use almost half a cup. Mix it all up. It will get kinda thick, which is good. Save the rest for the table or grate some more if you like. You want to do this sauce first so that it gets to room temperature. Cold eggs and cold milk make for scrambled eggs and pasta when you are done.

Little bit of olive oil in a pan and fry them up all nice and good. Get out your instant read meat thermometer. 150 degrees will do it for pork, making sure to get a reading in the centre. While those cook, bring a good sized pot of water to boil, enough for 450g of linguine (enough for 4 servings in my books). When the water boils, put in the linguine. I get fancy and my wife makes fun of me, but I bunch it in my hand and twist it, so that when I drop it in the pot it fans out all around the edges. I tell her it is so I am sure that it cooks evenly. Truth is, it makes it feel like I am on tv. Set the oven timer to 9 minutes. Good enough for al dente pasta.

Take the meatballs off when they are cooked and leave them on a plate or something and not papertowel. The bits of paper get on them and it fucks it all up. I haven’t done it myself, but I can saw myself making them mistake when I first did this and I thought I would share. Dump the pancetta bits into the pan and let them start to fry up like bacon. Give it a minute or three then toss in the meatballs so it all gets hot and greasy and yummy.

Pasta will nearly be done and the meaty bits is nearly done. As the timer goes off for the pasta, take a small glass and dip it into the pasta water and save that little bit. It helps later to free it all up.

Drain the pasta in the sink, return it to the pot and slosh it about to make sure that it does not stick together. If it starts to, swish a splash of the reserved water about in it and it will free up. Once that is done, slowly add your egg mixture to the whole thing and it will coat your pasta with a silky sheen. Then dump in the meatballs and the pancetta bits and slosh that around a bit.

Take it to your diners plates and away you go. But the whole wheat pasta. Stay away from the whole wheat pasta. Please.

Serve it all up with garlic bread and start with maybe a mixed greens salad with pecans, grated parmesan cheese, and chopped green onions with a balsamic dressing ( a good bitter starter for the rich meal to follow). I suggest a good Italian wine from the Abruzzi region – strong and spicy and very affordable if you look hard enough ; six or eight bucks for a good tasting bottle. Open it when you start to cook so that it has time to breathe.

For dessert, stick to the Italian and go for a tiramisu. I wanted to try and make my own but I ended up having to work the whole goddamned morning and afternoon and had to settle for storebought pastries ; which while very, very tasty I would have liked to try my hand at homemade tiramisu.

But I told you all of that so that I could tell my good friend who came for dinner that the story I told her about me starting (but not finishing ; surprise of surprises) was not something I just pulled out of my ass. Spent three hours data mining my own shit to find the damned thing.

I called it the Garden of Eden, mostly because at the time I had bought Charles Williams’s ‘A Figure of Beatrice’ and was re-reading the Divine Comedy for the umpteenth time in a feeble attempt to get a grasp of it.

So, here it is. Thanks for enduring dinner. I think between you, me and my wife that four or five bottles were killed. And I think I killed at least two on my own and had a shot or two of irish whiskey before I went to bed. I don’t think I slurred too much. I do hope you did enjoy the story you did read and were not just paying lip service.

At any rate, thanks again for coming for dinner and I can’t wait for you and your other to come up and spend the night. I’ll make dinner better next time. I promise.

garden-of-eden