Nico
Muhly,

Well, isn’t this just the best thing in the world. My friend J”” emailed me this link, which is a video of the Queen of England very slowly dialing up the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. Look at her face when the she first hears a ringtone. This conversation is the best thing in the world. Also I am now going to wear her outfit every time I make phone conversations. WHAT SCARF THAT EVEN IS!? And all the conversations need to be scripted in that fashion.

So good. In other news, on Chris Cosentino’s website, a recipe for preparing a Giant Humboldt Squid. He is great because his website is basically a tribute to Offal, 1, and 2, he is from Rhode Island. Click around his site for a minute and see what’s up. His image navigation is way more complicated than could be expected; I like it. I’m happy to see that he has a recipe for Turkey Lung, which is a thing I et this one time in the old meat market of Testaccio in Rome.

Here’s some Byrd:

[audio:07 O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth.mp3]
William Byrd O Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth
The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips

O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our Queen to rejoice in thy strength:
give her her heart’s desire, and deny not the request of her lips;
but prevent her with thine everlasting blessing,
and give her a long life, even for ever and ever. Amen.

There are a few moments in this little anthem where you have simultaneously sounding D-natural and D-flat: a delicious relic of an age when that stuff was allowed in voice-leading. It creates a sour moment that quickly passes, like a caper in a tomato sauce:

Maybe I should start a website like the Burger King one called “Caper Virgins Dot Com.” And it’ll be these pictures of me going to, like, Benighted Places of the Earthe Where They Knowe Not the Caper with a tiny butane stove, dishing out little bowls of caponata or something.

I’ve been debating ““ now that I’m in New York for a few weeks in a row ““ some deep salting and curing. In the wonderful book “Beyond Nose to Tail” by Fergus Hendersdóttir (which, I should say, has the place of a holy book in my life) there is a recipe for “Trotter Gear,” which is essentially stewed pig foot and mirepoix, which you then allow to gelatinize and use later. The last paragraph of the recipe reads: “You now have Trotter Gear, nuduals of giving, wobbly trotter captured in a splendid jelly. One can sense its potential even now.” Then, one is advised to construct a salad of Snail, Trotter, Sausage, and Chickpeas, or, Pot-Roast Bacon, Trotter, and Prune (the recipe for which calls for a large dollop of duck fat). Yes, please.