What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.