an upwind conflagration

good morning ~

(click the link / NYC night tree to listen)

My Big Breakan upwind conflagration

today’s track gently morphs from floaty viber into kind of a hot bop, I was surprised myself

feels like I haven’t played a show in quite a while but I’ve got one in NYC coming up on December 14th that will feature an actual wizard as MC and fun music from fun band Fun Facts and like, a bunch of other stuff, too - something to look forward to :)

Hard to beat the moment of pure anticipatory joy that bubbles up when the elevator doors open up at the Golden Unicorn - we're about to eat some goddamn dim sum! Let's fucking go! The happy bustle of chipped tea pot lids and metal steamer trays jangling on their carts as they get wheeled around the grand space, the aunties in their hairnets giving everyone the hard sell on congee and tripe, the click of the thick, plasticky chopsticks at every seating, conversations in more languages and dialects than I can identify and they're all talking with their mouths full, reaching across to spin the elegant lazy susans at the center of the table. Nothing could be finer after drinking two beautifully NYC fruity coffees on the way to Chinatown - you can smell the sesame oil and soy sauce in the air and hear the crunching of the special birds nest taro guys at a considerable distance. And what's this? Our table for five is apparently up on the dais - I assume this is where the couples sit when this place is rented out for weddings - and directly behind us is an enormous LCD television screen currently displaying the default Apple TV menu. As we sit down someone selects CNN as a channel and as we point at the various buns and dumplings and Chinese broccoli we'd like to eat there is a special on the anniversary of the falling of the Berlin wall behind us, the pundits appearing at actual life size. Blessedly a few minutes later it switches to the weather channel and I watch the forecasts and the maps reflected on the highlighted cheekbones and glasses of my dining companions.

At first I'm disappointed to see that they've seemingly done away with the robot servers - at some point in the last few years there used to be these adorable little Wall-E type guys that would wheel up to your table, very cute, I missed their little smiling screen faces. However I am glad to chalk up a John Henry style victory for labor performed by human hand - naturally there's no way artificial intelligence could ever replace a lady in a hairnet at the helm of one of these custom built steamer carts. She's got the knowledge, she's got the know-how, and yes, I will take an order of this delightful looking shrimp dish, absolutely.

My enjoyment of the food is only slightly diminished by my recent pescatarianism - I look the part and historically have been the type of guy to absolutely fuck up a char siu bao, to eat and leave no crumbs as the kids say, so I amazed even myself when I let them glide by me on their rotation around the table. Also? No soup dumplings did I eat which has got to be some kind of dim sum first for me - delightful nevertheless to watch my buddies slurp and spill. I may have accidentally eaten pork here or there - I do not think those were mushrooms, sweetie - but there were so many other wonderful bites - rice rolls, the most perfectly bouncy shumai, salted egg yolk custard buns, very lightly steamed broccoli whose stems slathered in piquant mustard were a total lifesaver, an enormous dish of garlicky, piping hot noodles, and then something I had never seen before - some kind of hot pepper slathered with shrimp paste and steamed, like a savory, appetizer version of ants on a log. All of it delicious and sprawling.

Going out for dim sum with your buddies is a good holistic well-being indicator - if you're locked in and seated on the dais, you're probably doing okay overall. For one thing, you have to have a big enough crew to justify the extravagance - it's just not the same at a table for two, you need buddies to maximize the amount of bites you get to try. Plus it's kind of an all morning affair - an all day affair if you eat too much - so you should feel blessed that you have a willing squad and the time to kill. And it's not something you can hurry doing - you must demonstrate serenity waiting for the foods you want to roll by, and if you order something off the menu, it could arrive in thirty seconds or half an hour. You can expect to be treated with dignity but not with super individualized attention - we're all seated in the banquet hall, it's one big room and you're in it. Impossible to imagine someone having a bad time when they keep refilling the teapots, the ears of the little pig-shaped dessert buns peeking out from the bamboo basket. That the wheels keep on squeaking is a great comfort to me and on this day we ate well and laughed.

As soon as the elevator started taking us down to the lobby we started smelling the smoke and when we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk and parted ways the sun was remarkably orange in the obscured sky. We weren't yet aware that the palisades were on fire - somehow that didn't come up on the 12 foot tall weather channel behind us. And Prospect Park had caught fire the night before - the world is apparently burning. But the smell of wildfire smoke choking the breeze always sends me Proust-like back to my childhood in Southern California, when on multiple occasions we mistook falling ash from an upwind conflagration for miraculous snow - I promise you it was far less sweet on the tongue. An approaching column of flame is nothing new, at least in my lifetime - I have refreshed live wildfire tracking maps many, many times in my life. Has the world always been burning? It feels like this: logs leaned against each other in a fire pit that, burned away, tumble and fall against each other, spewing up dancing embers. It's the same fire but with the shift we now see that it is burning differently, and now with what appears to be greater force.

But what about you? Did you smell the smoke? Are you feeling up for dim sum? What’s your go-to order?