Friday, April 30, 2010

Shunned

I joined facebook in order to track down a slippery cousin who isn't returning my calls.

First, that is some weird ass shit.

I feel like the Boar God in Princess Mononoke, when his madness finally overtakes him and he mistakes soldiers dressed in boar skins for his own people, and they huddle and nose and stab him on to his evil destiny.

But that's mostly my own hang-up and will be rectified by the fact that I will never be on that damn site.

What's worse is this: so that's where all you fuckers are. When I'm not being emailed back, when no one calls, when I'm left wondering who the hell my friends are, you are all on the facebook 'liking' random bullshit from people you haven't seen face to face in years. Which makes sense-- you too can get all the attention you ever wanted for virtually free, without the price of actual friendship, and all its hardships, and faces hang like trophies on your page for all the world to see.

And if facebook is your agora, your marketplace, your church, those on the outside are unintentionally but effectively shunned, not only because of their absence, but because facebook, like any community, creates its own mode of discourse by which its community members are known to each other.

I'm making the case more forcefully than I need to, and I'm not blaming my recent sense of loneliness on a stupid website-- I moved to a new town, I'm about to move to another state and I apparently find myself drawn almost exclusively to highly intelligent and highly ethical but emotionally withholding people, but dammit if there isn't some truth to it.

So there. I've become a citizen. 'Like' me.

Monday, April 26, 2010

green horses

I need a website. Double D is on that. I also need a logo. Anyone artsy wanna make me a green horse?















Sunday, April 25, 2010

Um.

We're taking a trip in May to see Su's play. We might stay in a hotel. We might stay in this hotel.

But in researching prices and location, I found this image of a room.

What you don't know is that the picture hanging above the bed in the hotel is of the hotel.

Which contravenes the entire purpose of portraiture.

Fuck Uganda

A few months ago I decided I was done being broke all the time. One of the first decisions I made? I quit my job.

I work in mysterious ways. That was not the reason for quitting, but it was one stitch in the net of reasons. Tending bar part time gave me just enough time and money to live well, but provided almost no incentive to move on.

First I thought I'd make money off my writing. Many people do, and I am in as good a position as any to start. I conceived grand adventures in travel, food, and wine.

But my commitments to my family are more important to me than (modest or immodest) fame, wealth, and travel, and when those roads diverged, I chose family. I tried to get excited about freelance writing-- but querying magazines, making contacts, hustling all the time is humbug. I'd honestly rather not have an article in Spirit than get a couple grand for one. Nothing against all the word-workers making all those magazines happen, it's just not the life for me. Plus, to spend all day every day writing or working for my writing sounds like very thin soup .

So my path towards the middle class, which is 'wealth' to me, began with quitting my job and abandoning monetary literary ambition.

Starting a restaurant and bar is the first opportunity that really feels right. Things have certainly been coming together well so far... (no evil eye, please. seriously. please.)

And this allows me to work on my prose poems, novels, plays... perfectly at peace, because I don't need them to do anything for me other than exist. This is the privilege of either the very rich or the very poor and I think the best kind of life for writers-- okay, not writers, but for Writing, the mistress we all serve.

What does all of this have to do with my apparently hostile relationship to Uganda?

Even though we have already been able to cut alot of costs, there is much more we could do with more money, and we will need to find it in other ways.

My favorite way is to steal from the Third World. Not by taking away and educating its best and brightest, nor by exploiting its resources, or even pillaging its cultural heritage, though those are all great ways to steal from the Third World, but by borrowing the idea of micro-finance.

Kiva, a website I hope most of you have heard of, allows people to make mostly small loans to people in need of them all over the world. You can help someone start a bakery, a private school, a tattoo parlor, whatever. Those seeking loans describe their projects and you can decide whether or not to lend them some cash. I do have critical things to say about the idea and its execution, but I don't even care that much about them. It's a pretty solid force for good.

So I've decided to set up an investment scheme that allows those with limited finances but genuine interest in The Green Horse to put in some money. A few hundred dollars could buy a couple sets of tables and chairs. I would not underestimate any contribution.

Naturally I'd like this to be worth the while. I'm thinking of perhaps three repayment schemes. Let's say Alot wants to invest $500 dollars. Here are the options.

In six months, The Green Horse would repay the loan entirely plus 20%. Alot walks away with his initial investment plus $100.

In a year, The Green Horse would repay the loan plus 50%. Alot trots away an extra $250.

Or, Alot might decide to make his investment more permanent and sign up for profit-sharing. If we use $1,000 as a 1% baseline, then at the end of one year, Alot is entitled to .5% of our total profit. If we only make $100,000 Alot get his initial investment back, but if, in year two, we make $400,000-- Alot reaps $2,000, and if our profit doubles the following year, so does his.

All investments come, of course, with VIP treatment at the Green Horse. Although most of them would be, I presume, friends who can expect that anyway.

Any and all comments on said scheme are very welcome. Long Live the Green Horse.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Mine

Mom went to an auction today looking for restaurant equipment.


(something very like) this:



and this:




Are now in our possession, as well as a couple prep tables and some assorted other kitchen items-- for less than a quarter of the normal price.

I received the news at the Albany Bulb, watching the dogs play, taking in the sun, while our Jetta got four new tires after Olga had a blowout on 80 on her way home. Over all, a fine day.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Alot of the Times




This an Alot. Read the hilarious origin and various incarnations of the Alot here.

Profusely

Olga has another story in today's San Jose Mercury News. Apparently Kaiser has spent some serious money to make an interactive robot for doctors and nurses to practice on.

I think Milton Bradley should talk to their lawyers.

The robot patients may soon replace real patients. They can do all this:

# Bleed (profusely)
# Breathe
# Cough, burp, complain of ailments, scream
# Go into labor contractions
# Turn blue
# Have a pulse
# Have high blood pressure
# Possess racially accurate skin colors
# Change gender
# Urinate
# Swell (with an allergic reaction)

Can you?

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

scary, no scary

I like this, for instance, much better as a short story than as a poem.

REQUESTING INFORMATION


Please tell me your best
facts about animals. I’m asking
everyone. I’ll begin.

The Tasmanian devils are being wiped
out by a frightful epidemic—like the
bees but worse. The epidemic
is actually called Devil Facial
Tumour Disease. It is communicable
within the species via bites
or especially vehement sex.

To sex a sea urchin, you tap it until
it emits a thin puddle of egg or sperm.
What if this worked on other things!
Imagine wondering what a thing is.
For the price of a few pats on the back,
the thing releases onto your
palm a frank sample, a tiny
pool of its own essence, meaning,
and being.

Maybe in another lifetime. Most
things are coy in our world.
They are couth.


Amy McDaniel

**

Oh, hell. Something else then. The smart little kid voice she's channeling is something of a thing these days. They say it goes back to James Tate and most recently I found Zachary Schomburg who does it par exsalonce. I haven't bought his book yet, but here is a good review of his most recent collection and here below is a sample of his work:

I know a dead wolf
we can climb inside
and beat

like little hearts.
It would maybe
come back

to life,
the wolf.

**

The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he’ll ask
scary, or no scary?

You should say
no scary.

**

I small-ly resent this mode because it enlists my sympathies so naturally, but is, ultimately, too easy to mimic, too reliant on those sympathies, and too islanded from other modes of discourse to stand perpendicular to the Ages. I don't know, yet, what that says about our times.

But the poems are frequently good.

Literature is a nettle field for some.

The O. Henry Isopod

Jeremy has an interesting post up on short stories v novels in the no-holes-barred cage match that is the 21st Century, which is cute, because we all know that LOLCATS are the literature of the future and that our grandchildren will be unintelligible cyborg-drones who work for the Apple hive-mind and view us as we view chimps.

OMG! Gmpa ws txtng! Luvs bnanas!*

My favorite part of the post is that he links his usage of 'whatevs' to its urban dictionary definition, wherein we learn that this shortening of 'whatever' is used by cool people-- in case we doubted his coolness, or just to rub it in our faces.

But back to the meat of the post. He ruminates on how difficult it is to write short stories and gives a couple solid strategies for applying 'pressure' to the a story. The underlying notion being that the possibilities of 'success' for a short story are much fewer than for novels... Thus making the genre super-hard, but therefore also specially rewarding, like a 'punch in the face.' The reason short stories lose out to novels in this pre-borgian era is due to this excess of pressure, when want we want is mindless escapism that reinforces our most destructive and least examined cultural assumptions.


But why so serious, Short Story? Jeremy suggests that novels can do more, be more, have larger digressions, like Vic Hugo stopping the narrative of Les Mis to tell us about Parisian criminal argot or retell the Battle of Waterloo, therefore making it a broader and freer medium.

But I like to think of literature in more physical terms, of the generating force of chaos crystallizing into forms according to outside pressures. Think, for instance, of the dizzying variety of life in the insect world vs mammals. Mammals are more complex systems, and therefore, in order to function, must share very basic and unavoidable solutions to the problems of complexity. All the variations average out closer to the mean.

Clearly mammals are novels. We've got one mammal that can fly, a few that can swim, a couple on two legs, and the rest are basically fuzzy with four legs. And hooray! I am certainly on Team Mammal.

But insects, being less complex (but sufficiently complex-- there are only a few solutions to very basic uni-cellular problems), are able to do and be so much more. Therefore, it would seem to me that the short story, having the freedom of prose and the brevity of poetry, could and should and has combined those forces into dazzling variety. But why don't we understand and reinforce this natural creative force? Why do most thinkers of the short story instead make it out to be the most strictly ordered of all media?

I have many theories for this, for instance, that an ordered society fears autonomous forms and therefore applies the most artificial pressure to that which contains the most potential for variety-- like love, for instance. One man and one woman for life, eh?

The literary extension of State Control is Realism and this is the particular fetter of the (literary) short story in the past hundred-so years. If a short story is only comment on a narrow idea of the real, then it's grand, efficacious potential is severely limited and must be very hard indeed to pull off. And thus we are trained to see the narrowness of our vision as an appreciation for the teleology of 'what works.'

Defenestrate Realism like the Old Tyrant it is, and suddenly there is an explosion of Forms. You'll realize that most of our native story-telling is within the realm of the short story-- the rant, the love letter, a joke, the rituals and habits that anchor your days, flights of fancy, your relationship to your father. These all live within us according to the native diversity that the short story is perfect to contain while reinforcing the singularity its material. Death's Head Moth to Fire Ant to the Giant Isopod .

And as this form betrays most naturally the illusion of the Grand Narrative that we all live by, it must be the most misunderstood, ignored, and restrained of all literary gestures.

Which is why no one reads Saroyan anymore.

*Sent Via My Blackberry Neural-Cortex Implant

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

all I want is to get you down to pray

And then out of nowhere there's a Creedence song you've never heard that is perfect.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

here's why it could help you today

I've been following the various incarnations of Olga's story on the web for a few hours now and have a couple interesting observations.

When an entity picks up a wire story they may edit it and headline it (yes, 'headline' is a verb, wanna fight?) as they wish.

A scan of the variations of Olga's story shows that these decisions are completely arbitrary with a tendency towards the willfully incorrect.

In O's original lead, it was 'snot' that was sneezed. 'Mucus' would have been my choice, but 'saliva' is just wrong. And yet it was changed thus by the Merc. I already bitched about globules vs. droplets. Internally, sometimes the story is twice or more as long as other times, and I think Olga's original ending was much better than any of the edited versions.

But the worst of it so far is:

"Did you get the flu this year? So did some spacemen. Here's why it could help you today."

from the Greeley Tribune.

--- wait! I'm wrong.

The spoon-feeding of the headline is still annoying and inaccurate, but I was mainly bothered by use of the word 'spaceman' which, I thought, was a term for people *from* space. Linguistic precedent (Norwegian, Caveman, etc) and my sci-fi literacy fooled me into thinking such-- but most dictionaries say that a spaceman is just another word for astronaut.

Example number 47 to the 54th power of 'What the fuck do I know?'

But what I do know is that nothing in Olga's article about stem cell research on Discovery could, will, or should help you today.

Not that journalistic hucksterism is even worth railing against...

otters, now with more awesome

Holy shit. Also on the cute otters website is footage of Indian River Otters. The first part is fairly predictable-- adults teaching babies to fish, but then a crocodile appears...

And the otters fight it off.

backwards propulsion

Olga's gone nationwide. A news service picked up a story she wrote about stem cell research IN SPACE for the San Jose Mercury News. The first place I found it was here.

I helped a touch on the lead (which I guess is spelled lede? Like the Zeus-raped maiden-swan? It makes my ass twitch.)-- only I suggested the much more accurate and aesthetically correct 'globules' instead of 'droplets.'

Olga's shitting her pants a little. It's very cute. Her last Merc story listed her cell number and she was roused from needed sleep early that morning by a very concerned man telling her his pet theory that now that the sea lions were leaving SF Bay, that the otters would rebound, because, you know, sea lions eat otters (they don't-- too fuzzy). She started taking notes, thinking it was her editor, until she woke up a little and realized it was just a nice old guy. She's since changed her contact information to her work number.*

By the way, the wife checks the blog now! So watch yer mouths.

*I highly recommend the source website for the otter photo. Ridiculous lots of cute, and news, including the saga of Kitchi, who busted out of a zoo in Colorado and remains at large... what's the word for terrorizing but for being adorable... the community.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

"ancay I-yay avehay eethay uffalobay?"

Last night Olia and I celebrated at a not so great Hoffbrau just up the road. It was still fun. We discussed the Green Horse over dinner and Olkin expressed hesitation over serving borscht to Kansans.

O: "Maybe we can disguise it. What's borscht backwards? Thcsrob?"
W: "Thcsorb?"
O: "No, Thcsrob. And it's not made with beets, it's made with steeb."

Which inspired me: Pig Latin Night.

Yes, because I am drunk with power (and La Rossa... and Mahler too while I am at it), on one (or more than one?) random night the menus at the Green Horse will be in Pig Latin and you, the good-humored customer, will have to order in that language.

Which is of course silly commentary on menu language itself, but mainly just fun for my staff. Okay, just fun for me.

"Ocholatechay ousemay?"

"Onay, eeway areyay outyay ofyay ochaolate ousemay. Ancay Iyay uggestyay eethay emcray uleebray ithway assionfruitpay andyay intmay?"

"Eckchay easeplay!"

Kansas Free Press

Sarah first sent me the link to the Kansas Free Press which is part of a nation-wide citizen journalism movement that seems to function, without any sense of irony, as a spontaneous platform for the democratic party.

However, there is some diversity to the group, a couple cranky old farmers, a gaggle of enthusiastic women's rights college students, and even the blowhards are genial enough.

I read this article today, a mini-essay on dreaming about Africa while reading Conrad and others as a child and then finally visiting the Dark Continent decades later:

I joined a group that flew into Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, and then traveled out into the wilderness to Amboseli National Park. Arriving at our designated lodge, weary from many hours traveling, I dumped my luggage in the cottage that was provided for me and then stepped out to take in my first real look at Africa. I found myself grappling with a vague sense of incongruity between the idea that I was in Africa, the most exotic, remote place I had ever visited, and a feeling that it was familiar. I puzzled on this and then it came to me.

It was the smells that created the sense of nostalgia, arousing deeply buried memories as only the sense of smell can. As I stood taking in my first view of the high plains of Kenya I realized that the memories evoked by the smells in the air were memories of Kansas. Gradually I sorted out its elements one by one. The grass beneath my feet was a tough, gnarly species, and was identical to the grass in my yard where I grew up in Topeka. We called it Bermuda grass. I had long since forgotten about it and it was the last thing I expected to encounter in Kenya. As I looked out over the plains and saw zebra and buffalo, I realized that I also smelled them, and that their smells were remarkably close to the smells of the horses and cattle on my grandfather's farm in Silver Lake. It was a strange little epiphany, a cosmic joke that I shared with no one as I stood on the plains of Kenya, thinking I was so far from home, and yet feeling so close to the land of my origins, where I spent the first 25 years of my life: Kansas.

The Greek God Hermes, the messenger of the gods was also known as the trickster. I felt as if he had given me a playful smack on the head as I realized what a great affinity the high plains of Kenya had with the plains of Kansas where I grew up. I had traveled to what I felt was the most remote place in my life and found that it felt a lot like home. At that moment I revisited my childhood self, the little boy gazing with wonder at maps of remote places. And I realized that when I played as a boy at Shunganunga Creek and imagined myself to be in Africa, I had been closer than I ever knew.


Unexamined here is the key difference. How much Africa has of itself that Kansas has lost.

An interesting though unintentional commentary can be found in another article on the site, written by an amateur historian specializing in Indians. Many, many native Kansan animals, so much of our grassland Africa-ness, bears, big cats, otters, buffalo, wolves, beaver were killed off entirely or nearly in the first couple decades of statehood.

"I had designed to spend the winter hunting, but now found myself an Indian trader," Mead wrote. Although the Kanzas brought him their wolf-skins for trade, Mead and his partners also gathered their own wolves.

"We found it also a very profitable business killing the big gray wolves which lived with the buffalo and travelled with them, and also the coyotes."

"Our method of killing wolves was to shoot down two or three old bull buffaloes in different places....We would let the buffalo lie one night in order to attract the wolves. The next night, just before dusk, we would go and scatter poisoned bait about the carcasses, each bait containing about one thirtieth part of a dram of strychnine."

Mead and his men gathered the wolf pelts by the score the next day. One morning they found and skinned 82 dead wolves. The wolf carcasses were left where they had fallen, attracting thousands of ravens which "in eating their stomachs and intestines would also eat the partially digested baits. This would kill them, and the prairie about the carcasses would soon be dotted with the glossy, shining bodies of defunct ravens, with an occasional bald eagle among them."

"The buffalo were killed by the bullets of the hunters, the wolves were killed with strychnine for their furs, and the ravens died from eating the poisoned carcasses of both, so that they all became practically extinct at about the same time," reflected Mead.

As the market for wolf pelts remained strong, strychnine sales boomed. Westport Indian trader William Bernard recalled that from the late 1850s on "an unusual article of trade was in great demand, namely, strychnine, and it was imported and sold in wholesale quantities to hunters who pursued wolves for their pelts.

Council Grove merchant William Shamleffer reminisced that a trader "should have on hand in his store a supply of everything from Bibles to whisky and strychnine."

The effect of ingesting strychnine on the wolves was recorded by a "Western Territories Correspondent" of the New York World:

"...the released strychnine takes hold on the wolf's vitals, and then there is music... He will next stand up on his hind legs and walk about and dance, but it all does no good. His shrieks and cries of pain are terrible to hear, and about the last thing he does is to turn two or three somersaults in the air and fall dead. The strychnine kills them every time."

James R. Mead never wrote about the cries of the death-thrashing wolves he had poisoned, but the veteran wolf-killer remembered their calls as beguiling:

"...the most soul-stirring music I ever heard was the clear deep bass voice of a big gray wolf on a clear cold winter night rolling out over the ice-covered prairie. It would commence on a high note and then run down the scale to the bottom, soon to be answered by his companions from every hill and canon for miles around." Addressing a meeting of the Kansas State Historical Society in December 1904, Mead rhapsodized about "the hills and plains of Kansas, God's great park, surpassing anything art or wealth of man has made. To me their primeval condition was the most beautiful and interesting of all the earth."

A few months later a wolf sighting was reported in Kansas. It was the last one.


I intended to end this post with a clip from the movie Dead Man of Gary Farmer as Nobody saying "Stupid fucking white man." But can't find it on the interwebs, so I'm including a Neil Young video from the movie instead.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

busted

I was in Heyday yesterday to talk about an anthology they've asked me to put together. I had been hoping to pick up something from Heyday before I left, and enormous thanks to my girl over there in Acquisitions who made it all happen, and to whom I owe many, many debts professional and personal. ENORMOUS THANKS! (If I knew html that would be even bigger.)

Said girl outed me to Malcolm about my restaurant plans. He asked a couple basic questions about kind of food, the size of the city, etc., and then said:

"So what you're doing is disguising a cultural center as a restaurant. You're going to have art and music and start conversations about Kansas history... you're going to have poetry readings..."

I was stunned. He saw right fucking through me. That is absolutely what I am doing. I'm disguising a cultural center as a restaurant and bar. Goddamn Malcolm.

The anthology, by the way, collects the very best writing about California from July 2009-July 2010. All genres welcome. So if anyone out there has read something wonderful, please send it to me before June 15th.

In GH news, I am shopping for a commercial range...

Monday, April 12, 2010

have and to hold

This is a section from our lease agreement. I'm not quite sure exactly what this means in a legal sense, but I was caught by the matrimonial language of the provision and thought I would share.



Quiet Enjoyment. Landlord hereby covenants that Tenant, upon paying Rent as herein provided, and performing all covenants and agreements herein contained to be performed on the part of Tenant, shall and may peacefully and quietly have, hold, and enjoy the Leased Premises
during the term of this Lease or any extension thereof, but no rights to air or light are granted.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

can I get an amen

I heard this on the ole npr today.

Part one:

http://p.rhap.com/Tra.7638127


Part two:

http://p.rhap.com/Tra.7638128

Elder Charles Beck was a hootin' hollerin' preacher who preached with a wailin' electric guitar backing him up and some brilliant person recorded his sermons.

This rocking sermon is about the evils of rock and roll. Enjoy, and someone buy me this album. My damn birthday is coming up.

carrie nation

Unbeleiveably, there isn't a cocktail, or at least a well known cocktail, named after Carrie Nation, whose 'hatchetations' on Kansas bars helped spread the temperance movement.

"Hissssssssssssssssssssssssss!"

Obviously I am going to fix that and I am soliciting recipe suggestions. It should have a lot of booze. She called herself "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like" so maybe a take on the Bulldog (gin, orange juice, ginger ale) would be appropriate... but I am wide open.

Any other Kansas themed cocktail ideas are also encouraged.

the green horse lives

I've had this fantasy for years, in thousands of variations, maybe some of you have too. You walk through an empty place, a shell, and dream it into existence, a house, a park, a farm, a restaurant.

This morning I met the building owner at the Kress Building.


View Larger Map

Here is the building before the recent renovation.



Now there is a beautiful facade of limestone and brick behind where the windows are in the photo, and a stairwell that leads below street level. Open to the air is a little courtyard, and then the entrance to the basement space. Courtyard and dining space and kitchen are roughly 2200 square feet.

I'm burying the lead. We got the space. Brian, the building owner, as he'll now be known as, is going to start renovating the space to our specifications as soon as possible. We could be open as soon as July. I spent the morning visualizing the space, talking materials, planning everything, from lighting to work stations to flow of traffic. A fantasy come true. I lived the space. My own goddamned restaurant and bar.

There is still lots to work out, but it has started. It's real.

I'll be taking part in a few of the city's incentive programs, if all goes as it seems it will, and I met with one of the Chamber of Commerce people yesterday to get an overview of the opportunities for grants, forgiveable loans, etc. After going over the programs, we talked casually about what Salina was doing, expanding the community theater, 'refloating' the Smoky Hill River downtown (it has been dammed dry stupidly for decades) etc. Eventually Larry says:

"You know there's a brewery in town."

"I'm sorry, Larry, I'm very certain there is not."

"No, I mean the guts of one. One of the big property owners bought some years ago and never did anything for it. Somewhere in town is a warehouse with everything a brewery needs just sitting there."

I just gaped, then shook it off and let the spooky roll over me. Don't know if anything will come from it, if I could jump into a brewery after the wine bar and small plates are up and running, but what if my brewery has just been waiting for me?

Okay-- I have to get some vines in the ground. There's a chance for weather tomorrow.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

house of Kress

I have four days to plant five hundred vines, set two hundred posts, and find a space for my wine bar.

I am moving back to the farm and opening a wine bar in Salina-- not sure I've said that here yet. All that money I spent on food and drink? Investment.

I have been operating on Bay Area rules. I'm not wealthy (broke as a broke-dick dog) so I figured I'd start in a walk-in-closet-sized space and grow? But when I rolled into town, my dream space downtown, across from the fox theater, down the street from the art cinema, in a recessed basement of the newly renovated Kress building, was still free.

So this morning I called. The man answered, I explained myself, he said can you meet me today?*

He gave us a tour of the whole building-- street level shops, second story lofts, and then the open, waiting, basement with courtyard.

Before I know it, this has happened:

He'll build walls, kitchen, etc, to our specifications for a slight increase in (very reasonable) rent.

He suggests grant money from the city for downtown development.

He can set us up with a potential investor, apparently just waiting for this kind of thing.

He can do it all by August.

I'm working on a business plan now to present to him tomorrow, and he's working on a concrete cost estimate.

I also emailed the chamber of commerce about their business incentive programs and got an email back immediately and have a meeting tomorrow about what the city can do for me.

So that's what the menus are for. Just a sample of what I can do. Not to mention the focus on Kansas products, art, music, etc. I'd like to anchor the business in Place, so that it has elegance and meaning inherent to itself, rather than borrowed, like so many restaurants, like so much everything.

Oh-- best part?

GM and Barman? Me.
Host and Front of the House? Cousin Murphy.
Kitchen? Chef Cousin Chris.

My family has been secretly training for this.

All of this is extremely provisional, but goddamn if it doesn't feel right.

'bout time something did.

Hey Stace-- what's your angle?

Speaking of Family, I'm a sorta uncle thrice! Congratulations to Cousin Clarissa on her third weasel, one Levi somethingorother Mackenzie, the first boy of the new Murphy generation, god help us.

*One of the things I love about Kansas especially when compared to the Bay Area: when you find competent people in Kansas, they get shit done. Immediately. No fuss, just done, usually saying it was no trouble anyway, or even if it was, hell, it's just how things are. Bay Area? It's all Yeah, that sounds great, lemme talk to x and y. I'll give you a call. Next week? No, I don't know. I have a meeting. I'll talk to you in April after I get back from Japan...

please, drink

specialty cocktails


the meadowlark
grey goose, elderberry wine, bitters, egg white

b & b
buffalo trace bourbon, benedictine

old fashioned
rye whiskey, bitters, soda, simple syrup

sour cherry martini
sour cherry infused vodka, simple syrup, lime

the green horse
absinthe, champagne, grand marnier, simple syrup



kansas wines


red

smoky hill vineyards norton
somerset ridge buffalo red
campbell winery cynthiana


white

somerset ridge chardonnay
blue jacket crossing seyval
smoky hill vineyards luce d’bianco

dessert wines

holy-field saint francis port
windswept winery whispering wind white
pome on the range homewood hooch apple raisin wine
somerset ridge ambrosia

welcome to the green horse

with bread

gravlax – house cured salmon & pickles
charcuterie —our choice of meats with mustard & horseradish
cheese —generous portions of aged & fresh cheese
jam –a selection of homemade jams

soup

winter greens & egg flower
borscht: russian beet soup
extreme chicken noodle: garlic, ginger, chilies, citrus


starch

olivieh
couscous
mashed potatoes
egg noodles


more

butternut squash ravioli & cream
basque lamb
portuguese sopas: beef, wine, cabbage
stuffed tomatoes


sweets

house made ice cream
bread pudding in whiskey caramel
truffles

Civilization

Carlsberg brewery workers have gone on strike.

The warehouse and production workers in Denmark are rebelling against the company's new alcohol policy, which allows them to drink beer only during lunch hours in the canteen. Previously, they could help themselves to beer throughout the day, from coolers placed around the work sites.


Delivery truck drivers are exempt from the rule, however, because they don't always have time for a full lunch hour.

We are with you, brewery brothers. This is certainly what unions are for. Solidarity & Struggle... and suds.