The House within the Buttresses by Quentin Cockburn

The house we stayed in at St Flour, (pronounced ‘Saint Fler’) is built within the buttresses of a 15th century church, almost a cathedral except it lacks the spire.  Allegedly, (according to the brochure) this ‘house within the buttress’ was built during the French Revolution, and I suppose it was a terribly good way for the Girondists to say, ‘up yours’ to the conventions of church and state and the ancien regime and all that.  Liberte, egalite, what better way than allowing high density within the exoskeleton of the church.  Much the way the rhino or elephant is impervious to the tooki-tooki bird living off its arse, so this Church is impervious to this house.  So, though I believe people were small back then, and this five rooms, on five floors is a wonder, a miracle of improvisation and execution.  (I have a suggestion for the Melbourne Diocese regarding St Patricks, smaller parish churches in regional Victoria, and perhaps, (and at a pinch) the buttresses of Princes Bridge.)

The house has a very simple floor plan.  There are five floors, the stairwell of about 3.5 mx 1.25 metres; connects all five. The stairs are very narrow with very high risers.  The rooms are each about 3m x 4m, that’s about 12 square metres.  Within the fabric of the structure, there are cupboards, bookshelves, and the odd niche, an ecclesiastical outline as the relief of one arch is stenciled into the rear facing wall.  Why?  Because it is an arch.  The walls are plastered, and from within there’s this tremendous sense of security and comfort, (I wont mention saintliness).  The windows and street-frontage are, (at the time I write) facing the sun, which illuminates the rooms gloriously, because of the lack of depth.  We stayed there with the children, hardly ever saw them, until time for dinner.  A vertically integrated house has so many natural advantages.

If you have unwanted guests, just don’t answer the door, they’ll never ever hear you from the street.  If you want to throw things, (our domestic situation invokes this) you have limited internal range, but extraordinary opportunities for hitting gargoyles on other rooftops, and if you’re having a row, you can isolate yourself to the top echelons an never come down.

There is no spillage, everything is isolated within its own niche.  There is complete privacy, and you can tell when someone is lurking about by the creaking of the stairs.  But unless anyone moves, the building itself is a silent as the grave (or the crypt).

Whilst in this house, I’d read a biography on Spike Milligan, and I think this house would have suited him.  Where else could you be a self absorbed depressive, and,  emerge extravert and visionary.

We watched as a group of architecture students held a mini  tutorial in front of us, and the day we arrived St Flour held a big music festival in which people wandered round in quaint costume with Brueghellian era instruments, performing the French equivalent of Morris Dancing.  What a coincidence I thought, and as the Jacobin said to the Prelate….what’s the reason ‘Qinc reason’!!, ‘Quelle reason’, ‘Cinq’  ( brief pause) Oh I thought you said sunk,. Oui, end of conversation..

Cheers
Quentin Cockburn

Monet and the Status Quo* 

I do like Water Lilies.  And I don’t like being challenged, hectored and proselytized.

I am so glad that all the major state galleries are doing exhibitions devoted to the nineteenth century.  “Relaxed, and comfortable”, an artistic “Narnia”.   It is like we’re living in a perpetual sepia coloured soft focus world in which everything is “so nice”.

In fact I feel a poem coming on:

We need a lot of Monet

In each and every public gallery, theres more and more of the same
It’s comforting. So reassuring, to know each and every artist by name
There’s Degas, Turner and Manet, whilst you sip your Pimms and Dubonnet
There’s goings on at the Musee de Orsay, though it’ll cost quite a bit of Monet

Through a rose coloured palette we wander, bathed in impressionist light.
“Bad children!’- the shrill voice of those moderns,  banished from all of our sight
Safe, cosseted comfortable.  A dictum  all you need to know.
Saved ugliness, contemporary directors decree ‘Preserve the Status Quo’

‘Contemporary art is too shocking’,  though an occassional glimpse will suffice
The purpose of art must surely to be more than decorative, pleasing and nice.
Why challenge ourselves with an artist who will tell us all where to go
When we wallow in nostalgic pathos, without pangs of needing to know

And click, click click go the turnstiles, as a Blockbuster rolls into town
The Biggest!  The Best!, Most Expensive! Dusted off and made ‘new found’
And what purpose this dull repetition, what stratagem deigns to surmount us?
A victory for the man in the street? No, a victory for the accountants.

*(Not the band, famous for their lyric, “ roll over lay down and let me in”)

The Sunbeam Little Wonder Junior by Quentin Cockburn

We had this shearing machine, it was portable, allegedly, one of the best. It had an Austral Villiers engine, painted green enamel.  Like all ‘British-built” engines, simple.  (Unless of course you were really foolish and purchased a Triumph Dolomite.)   A single arm, and attachment for a comb, all worm drive and oil lubricated. It looked like a tentacle from ‘Captain Nemo’, with a bit of fifties sci-fi thrown in.

To work properly we needed to keep the thing at the correct engine speed.  ‘Too fast’, and the hand piece would tear strips of the sheep, ‘too slow’, and the bloody thing would get jammed and stall.  The trick was to know when the hand-piece was labouring round a particularly area, the belly, the flanks or in the dags.  (For our extensive overseas readership, ‘dag’ is a colloquial term used to describe the turd encrusted bits of wool around the arse and the flanks. Adopted as a pejorative adjective to describe absence of sartorial refinement… Parl: “ Jeez, aint Brian a real Dag in them corduroy flairs! )  

The governor, the device that kept the engine from over-revving was the key to the operation.  It consisted of a bit of wire on the carby, connected to the throttle, if it revved too high the wire would trip the throttle and it’d calm down a bit.

Our shearer, (after many had come and gone) was a great bloke called “ Dave’.  We’d stand by the machine as it ‘putt putt whirred putt putt whirred’, and he’d give a signal and we’d ‘go easy’ on the governor.  It required nerves of steel, and an engineers ear for “listening” to the ‘note’.  Of course we only used it for one season.  After that Dave brought his own electric one and lashed it to the rafters.  Problem Solved!  We returned to pretending to herd, draft, and push.
We were hopeless!

We need a Sunbeam Little Wonder Junior, (favoured device for sheep duffers the world over) in Parliament.. We lack a “Governor”.

Now I’m being serious here.  I was educated by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Both as the genial and astute ‘Pete and Dud’, and the crass and profane ‘Derek and Clive’.  In between I learnt, with (the ‘governors’) acute ear, to distinguish between amusing and crass, and somewhere lower down the scale ‘unspeakably vulgar’.

There are cadences in humour, and nothing worse for the “educated” than vulgarity without wit, polished inference, lucidity and the (for want of any other description) the governing principles of effect, resonance, and obliqueness.  You see the best humour attacks you from all sides, it packs a punch on myriad levels, and it’s depth is in the telling, and the ‘wonder’ is in being unaware of where the “Schwerpunkt” may strike.  (Dear readers I am a novice in matters military, but I believe this was the term used by Guderian and others to describe the meeting point of ‘pincers’ in Blitzkrieg. Something about surprise and overwhelming strength. I have neither,.)

The governor is embedded as a shared cultural inheritance wrapped delicately in an established social convention, colourful, mannered, and universally understood.  To share a light on something we acknowledge and make it different, transformed.  Isn’t that what humour is.?

Mal Brough’s’ Menu is a tipping point, these conventions have been devalued, and the governor despatched.  No small wonder, and not a lot of Sunbeam either. Is it manners, or education?

Passivity abounds? This week we tackle environment, molasses, fermentation, yeast, justice and wrap the week up with some rather glorious poetry.
However lets start with a word from Errol:
“The pursuit of gold, pleasure and danger motivate most of my springs.”
From My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn 1959.

An enormous sense of Environmental Responsibility has come over us here at PC.  It is also to the fore at Endette Hall as the ever altruistic Ira Maine tells us – here.

Cecil Poole has recounted childhood adventures in a piece titled Molasses. This sweet post can be viewed here

Passive Complicity has an unashamed interest in food.  Good food, and lots of it.  We enjoy beer, cider, wine and spirits.  We like pickles of all descriptions.  We get excited whenever ferment is mentioned.  Thus it was with pleasure that over two days we brought you the foreword to a fascinating book by Sandor Katz, “The Art of Fermentation”. The foreward is written by the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan.  Read the piece here and here.

Staying with food and with fermentation, at least with live cultures in yeast, Friday saw Ira Maine at his best with “Cutting Corners”, a piece exquisitely illustrated by Sir Bertram.

We completed the two part series “Justica” in this weeks Musical Dispatch from the Front, a piece that demonstrates the great richness in indigenous culture and white society’s inability to engage with or appreciate it.

And our poem this week was “The Pilgrimage” by Quentin Cockburn, of which our Poetry Editor, Ira Maine, had this to say “I think Quentin’s poem penitential is first class. However I do think that he should have persisted in his pursuit of the penitent’s pudenda. Even from here I could tell she was going to crack…”

It is cheering to know that Quentin is still alive.
Cheers
Cecil Poole

Publishers note: We apologise for this posting, we had asked for something of substance, yet are left, at the last moment with only this.  Trite and inaccurate as it is.  

Fermentations by IRA MAINE.

I am very concerned that our beloved leader is stewing about a bit of fermentation I have inadvertently failed to bring to a head.  We were required, in hot house conditions, to cogitate, ruminate and speculate on this subject until a sort of cranial microbial ferment, a critically created  journalistic compost, rich, heaving and stinking of fecundity, would bring us shouldering out of our brown and crumbling darkness and into the life sustaining day.  This strategy, of itself a notion possessed of impeccable credentials, reckoned without the fickle fecklessness of our management team and their eagerness, the moment the smallest profit is arrived at, to exercise their right, as they described it, to attend essential ‘fact-finding missions’, together with ‘International Brainstorming Seminars’ in both France, the UK and the United States.

As a result, and left to our abandoned devices, I think it only fair that those of us who continue to steady the helm, who have maintained, through thick and thin, certain gentlemanly standards, when others had so lightly and shamelessly cast honour aside in favour of a vulgar mess of foreign potage, should benefit in some important ways.

Now, in this business of fermentation, I would not like to give (to our junketeers) the impression that we are attempting, in their absence, to foment a ferment in order to form a formidable force to fling down the citadel.  Far from it.  Fermentation you want and you shall have, but with one essential condition, without which I don’t see how we can possibly continue.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Quantum would like, nay, insists, that he be allowed sit behind your desk, in your big comfy swivelly chair, and bark impressive commands down the inter-com., even when there’s no one in the outer office.  This casual exercise of naked power, he tells me will create such an intellectual ferment within him that we won’t be able to keep track of his enormous output.  (I’m not at all sure what he means by this…)

Casting your eye over these disconcerting developments, I’m not sure you can fully appreciate how demanding this situation is, and how it is calling on all of our powers, as diplomats, negotiators, and all round ‘hard men’ just to keep the pot boiling.

Just to round up and round off, trouble has arisen in Singapore after an undercover ASIO operative was discovered to be encouraging the locals to rebel.  He is to be arraigned before the beak next Tuesday accused of attempting to ‘Ferment Asians’.

And further, dear Leader, I have had to despatch bags of placatory lollies to all of our correspondents, so on your return you may find that this necessary expense has left the coffers a tad depleted. I would also like to know if it is safe to have your inflatable friend dry cleaned?

Today Quentin presents a sad and tawdry rhyme.  Our Editor has words at the conclusion.

The Pilgrimage by Quentin Cockburn

Tween the stacks of the Centrale Nucleaire, and the mighty Garonne
In single file they, the pilgrims trudge, untied by talk, laughter, song
In pilgrimage, they stoically plod, alone with self, alone with god
I wonder from those shielded brows, do their thoughts concur with ours?

If I may make one observation, I entertained a pretty pilgrim in conversation
Straining for an epithet obscure and witty, I mused; for pilgrimages? far too pretty
And just for a moment our eyes they met, for pilgrims it’s as close as they get
And whilst that awkward pause ensued, I imagined fancies coarse and lewd

She looked askance, and in dull retort, I asked; ‘and what do you do for sport’?
Without any pause, nor inhibition, she replied ‘tis my destiny is to see a vision’.
I knew at once our paths diverged, our footprints, they would never merge
I bad her well, and with kind regard I was hoist upon my own petard.

Comments by Ira Maine, pcbycp Poetry Editor:
I think Quentin’s poem penitential is first class. However I do think that he should have persisted in his pursuit of the penitent’s pudenda. Even from here I could tell she was going to crack…

Continuing our Dispatch on the vagaries of Justice from last week (Originally posted 15 Sep 2011)

Recently in Alice Springs an Alyawarr man spent two months in gaol (he was arrested at Alice Springs Hospital maternity ward whilst visiting his wife and newly born daughter), and received a two year suspended sentence.  He is not allowed to return to his community until his wife’s 16th Birthday.
http://youtu.be/WusQjMnD0cs
The judge’s sentencing remarks included the following:  “Because of the remoteness and your traditional lifestyle, concepts such as ages are irrelevant to you.  Your day-to-day life has centred around the traditional hunting and gathering of bush tucker for the community.  You spend most of your time in the company of your grandfather who is now in his 90s, and who is an important traditional elder in the community.  In terms of modern day society you are extremely unsophisticated and you are one of those increasingly rare persons in a remote Aboriginal community who did not know that having sexual intercourse with this child was wrong according to Northern Territory law.  No one had explained to you the concept of your age and the age of the child.
http://youtu.be/w7nQ9VpG4jQ
Your family and the family of the child were also unaware that it was wrong for the pair of you to engage in sexual intercourse.  The victim has told me in her victim impact statement the following about her belief and about you, and I quote what she has to say: ‘I didn’t think it was wrong and was happy to be with him.  In our law it’s okay.  He’s been good to me.  He looks after me.  Our families are happy that we are together, even though I am young, because they know he is a good man and will look after me. ….The lack of knowledge by everyone concerned in this case about the law of the Northern Territory in connection with sexual intercourse with children under the age of 16 ….While it may be increasingly rare, there are sections of our community who do not have this knowledge and understanding.  It is a sad indictment, indeed, of our community as a whole that we have not been able to educate everyone in our remote communities about these matters… (my emphasis)

http://youtu.be/23S7lAhXR2M We don’t need no thought control…
This Justicia from a society that in 1789 sentenced 10 year old Mary Wade to hang.  The sentence was not carried out, instead Mary was transported to Australia.  By today’s standards, all of the Convicts sent to Australia had only committed trivial crimes.  The serious crimes, such as rape, murder, or impersonating an Egyptian, were punished with the death penalty.

Mary Wade was 14 years old when she gave birth to the first of 21 children.

The legal age of consent in many Latin American countries is 14.

Romeo wooed Juliet when she was 14 years old.

The ‘victim’ in the Alice Springs court case was 14 years old when the Alyawarr man committed his heinous crime, because he hadn’t been properly ‘educated’.
Just as well no Warlpiri or Alyawarr person has impersonated an Egyptian.
http://youtu.be/BWP-AsG5DRk
This judgement has very little to do with ‘Justicia’ and everything to do with ‘Dogma’, Assimilationist Dogma that is.  Being subjected to Assimilationist Dogma is something many remote Aboriginal Australians would be quite happy to live without.  They are not given that opportunity. They have no choice.

Justicia, Tierra y Libertád….

http://youtu.be/mJqK2bivKRE

También Respeto y Dignidád…. 

http://youtu.be/zzY28Unb3v0

PS- Have I mentioned it before? Centrelink’s motto: “Giving you Choices” ¡Que pavada!

Cutting Corners. by IRA MAINE.

I was watching, in a purely academic way, as Herself withdrew from the oven one of her delectable loaves of bread.  This happens in our kitchen a couple of times a week and I always contrive to be nonchalantly thereabouts, subtly aware that within half an hour there’ll be a buttery, hot and crusty morsel available if I just happen to be passing.  These, as you might expect, are no ordinary loaves.  They are raised in an overnight bowl, then the spongy, springy dough is placed in a hot cast iron pot, in a hot oven, to bake.  The results are magical and probably close to the bread they eat in Heaven.  One way or the other the bread is baked in a round pot so the resulting loaf is wheel shaped, high in the middle and flattening towards the edges.  As a result of this, to take a satisfying slice off one edge you have to first remove a bit of the curved edge and place it carefully on one side.
That bit, that crusty little offcut is the reason why I am busy with very important structural alterations just outside the kitchen when this hot and steaming surgical procedure takes place.  All that crackly crust, the overwhelming smell of hot baked bread, the steamed and runny butter dripping on your chin… ‘Heaven, I’m in Heaven…’

Now you may have just woken up and thought, for a fleeting moment, you’d accidentally stumbled into a bread-making class.  This is not the case.  I have simply used the bread-making process as a tool to point out to you one of the principle reasons why the world has changed and why we need to abandon corners.

With a round loaf, there’s always that little offcut.  In the olden days, before they invented bread tins, all bread was round.  Multiply all those tiny offcuts by millions and you have enough little bits of bread to feed a million chickens.  That’s the only reason we’ve still got chickens!  It was a cruel person, a thoughtless, uncaring technocrat who dreamed up the nightmare bread tin and deprived the chooks of their daily sustenance.  As a result of this shameful deprivation, it immediately became necessary to invent chook pellets.

And it doesn’t end there.  The bread tin mercilessly seized the round and sensual loaf and forced it to conform to the tin.  Go to the shops and see the results.  Bedraggled and soggy, the box-like and misshapen bread looks betrayed and tortured, as if the loaf has been denied it’s birthright.  It’s a spongy, wrapped and soggy shadow of it’s former self.  And it’s not just the loaf…

Houses have nothing but corners.  Which particular oaf or oafess invented those?  Probably the same guy who invented bread tins.  I distinctly remember being a kid and standing, facing the corner, whilst the other kids smirked.  If there were no corners you wouldn’t feel cornered…so to speak.  I’ve also crashed into the corner of our house on my bike, (and once in the car).  Go on, try putting stuff away in that corner cupboard in the kitchen where the worktop performs a right angle.  I’ve been on my belly, on the floor, poking around with a walking stick to retrieve stuff out of that creation.  I reckon there are items in there which are permanently lost to civilisation, whatever they are.  Another thing; there’s no piece of furniture on earth, of any practical value, that will fit in a corner, except,perhaps a pot plant.  The pot-plant is always on a stand, which, like the treacherous limb of an old red-gum, invariably topples over and knocks the dog unconscious.  Old Pythagoras and Euclid have a lot to answer for, because it’s bloody obvious that when they went about their geometrical duties, the corner cupboard didn’t even cross their minds, let alone the cost of having the dog’s head repaired.
No, if we bring back the round house, which is how people lived for many thousands of years, we can then turn full circle, and people will begin to remember that things are not only made round to go round, but that the circle has been round for a long time.

Publishers Note: We published Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poem Circles and Squares a few weeks ago.  Revisit it here.

Passive Complicity has an unashamed interest in food.  Good food, and lots of it.  We enjoy beer, cider, wine and spirits.  We like pickles of all descriptions.  We get excited whenever ferment is mentioned.  Thus it is with pleasure that over the next two days we bring you the foreword to a fascinating book “The Art of Fermentation”. The foreward is written by the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan.
Here is the second part of this piece.

The Koreans, who know a thing or two about fermentation, distinguish between the ‘tongue taste’ of various foods and the ‘hand taste’.  Tongue taste is a simple matter of molecules making contact with taste buds – the kind of cheap and easy flavours any food scientist or food corporation can produce.  ‘Hand taste’ is the far more complex experience of a food that bears the indelible mark – the care and sometimes even the love – of the person who made it.  The sauerkraut you make yourself will have hand taste.

And you will have plenty of it to give away, trust me.  One of the best things about making your own ferments is sharing them with others, off the grid of the cash economy.  I now swap bottles of beer and mead with other homebrewers and take part in a steady trade in mason jars, which leave my house brimming with sauerkraut only to return brimming with other peoples kimchi or pickles.  To delve into the world of fermented foods is to enter the community of fermentos, who happen to be a most interesting, eccentric and generous bunch.

But of course there is another community to which The Art of Fermentation serves as a kind of passport or visa: the unseen community of fungi and bacteria all around us and within us.  If this book has an underlying agenda (and it assuredly does) it is to help us reconceive our relationship with what biologist Lynn Margulis calls the ‘microcosomos’.  Since Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microbes in disease more than a century ago, most of us have found ourselves on a war footing with respect to bacteria.  We dose our children with antibiotics, keep them as far away from microbes as possible, and generally strive to sanitize their world.  We are living in the age of Purell.  And yet biologists have come to appreciate that the war on bacteria is not only futile – the bacteria, which can out-evolve us, will always win – but counterproductive.

The profligate use of antibiotics has produced resistant bacteria as lethal as any we managed to kill.  Those drugs, along with a processed food diet lacking in both bacteria and food for bacteria (aka fibre), have disordered the microbial ecology in our gut in profound ways that we are just beginning to understand, and which may well explain many of our health problems.  Children protected from bacteria turn out to have higher rates of allergy and asthma.  We are discovering that one of the keys to our well-being is the well-being of the microflora with whom we share our bodies, and with whom we co-evolved.  And it looks like they really, really like sauerkraut.

In the war on bacteria, Sandor Katz is a confirmed pacifist.  But he isn’t just sitting out the war, or speechifying about it.  He’s doing something to end it.   A Post-Pasteurian, Katz would have us renegotiate the terms of our relationship with the microcosomos, and The Art of Fermentation is an eloquent and practical manifesto showing us exactly how to do that, one crock of sauerkraut at a time.  I fully expect that, like a particularly vibrant microbial culture, this book will spawn thousands of new fermentos, and not a moment to soon.  Welcome to the party.

Michael Pollan, December 2011.

Passive Complicity has an unashamed interest in food.  Good food, and lots of it.  We enjoy beer, cider, wine and spirits.  We like pickles of all descriptions.  We get excited whenever ferment is mentioned.  Thus it is with pleasure that over the next two days we bring you the foreword to a fascinating book “The Art of Fermentation”. The foreward is written by the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan.

The Art of Fermentation is an inspiring book, and I mean that literally.  The book has inspired me to do things I’ve never done before, and probably never would have done if I hadn’t read it.  In fact, Katz’s book is the main reason that my kitchen counters and basement floors have lately sprouted an assortment of mason jars, ceramic crocks, jelly jars, bottles, and carboys, the clear ones glowing with unearthly colours.  since falling under the spell of Katz’s fermentation evangelism, I have launched ig crocks of sauerkraut and kimchi, mason jars of pickled cucumbers, carrots, beets, cauliflower, onions, peppers, and ramps; jelly jars of yogurt and kefir; and five-gallon carboys of beer and mead.  All of them, I am regularly reminded, are alive.  When it’s late at night and quiet in the house, I can hear my ferments gurgling contentedly.  It’s become a deeply pleasing sound, because it means my microbes are happy.

I read cookbooks all the time and never make a thing from them, so why was The Art of Fermentation different?  For one thing Sandor Katz writes about the transformative power of fermentation with such infectious enthusiasm that he makes you want to try things just to see what happens.  It’s the same way I felt the day my elementary school teacher told us something miraculous would happen if we mixed up some vinegar with baking soda.  These microbial transformations are miraculous and so, very often, are the results: striking new flavours and interesting new textures, wrought from the most ordinary ingredients, and not by us but by bacteria and fungi.

Another reason Katz inspires us to try recipes to make things you never even knew existed (kvass? shrub?!) is that he never intimidates.  To the contrary.  As a cookbook – and, as I will get to, it is so much more than a cookbook – The Art of Fermentation is empowering.  Though the book traffics in many kinds of microbial mystery, Katz is by temperament a demystifier: it’s not that complicated, he assures us, anyone can make sauerkraut; here’s all you need to do.  And if something goes wrong?  If your sauerkraut grows an alarming-looking beard of mold?  No need to panic; just shave off the mold and enjoy the kraut beneath it.

But this attitude has something more behind it than Sandor Katz’s easy-going temperament in the kitchen; there is a politics at work here as well.  The Art of Fermentation is much more than a cookbook.  Or rather, it is a cookbook is the same way that Zen and the Art of Archery is a how-to about bows and arrows.  Sure, it tells you how to do it, but much more important, it tells you what it means, and why an act as quotidian and practical as making you own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world.  Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land.

This might seem like a large claim for a crock of sauerkraut, but Sandor Katz’s signal achievement in this book is to convince you of its truth.  To ferment your own food is to lodge an eloquent protest – of the senses – against the homogenisation of flavours and food experiences now rolling like a great undifferentiated lawn across the globe.  It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we were all passive consumers of its commodities, rather than creators of unique products expressive of ourselves and the places where we live.  Because your sauerkraut or homebrew will be nothing like mine or anyone else’s.

Michael Pollan December 2011

(To be concluded tomorrow)