This adorable hack takes people’s tweets and puts them onto their pics, so they look cuter when you post them on your Tumblr.

The only thing better than a sandwich made out of reconstituted pork offal slurry is a sandwich made out of reconstituted pork offal slurry that is deep-fried and served with bacon and cheese. Sadly, you’ll have to go to Austria to get it. Although that is probably for the best.

by Seth Colter Walls

Philip Glass “may well be the Rossini of his century,” the critic, composer and scholar Kyle Gann wrote — back in a previous century. That analogy, he went on, was a useful way of thinking about the prolific minimalist, who “had an electric impact on the masses but only a portion of whose music seemed worthy of study by intellectuals.” This was the case, Gann added, despite the fact that “much of Glass’s best music has been underrated by disappointed former fans who have ceased to listen closely.”

Intellectuals that can’t bother to listen closely: so problematic! If any among their number wandered into the Park Avenue Armory last Saturday to hear a rare full performance of the three-hour plus Music in Twelve Parts, an early Glass milestone, they kept their incautious objections to themselves during the three intermissions.

Or else the haters just left quietly; there was some noticeable crowd attrition by the time Part 7 began, right after the one-hour dinner break.

But the performance was formidable, even revelatory. The piece, you may not be surprised to learn, employs slowly developing melodic materials and some insistent rhythmic devices. Superficially “repetitive,” these attributes are actually in a near-constant state of evolution and change: a note is added to this instrument’s riff, then just as quickly taken away, before being assigned over to the tenor sax, and then the vocalist. The meditative quality of the entire piece collides with (and, yes, sexes up) the cerebral specificity of the second-to-second goings on in a way that remains uncommon in any sort of music. Appropriately, the floor seats at the Armory were cushions positioned atop a criss-crossing pattern of rugs, evoking the old-school 70s loft culture where Glass’s music developed.

Strict perfection, score-wise, isn’t really possible in a marathon live setting, even though this current incarnation of the Philip Glass Ensemble — which includes two members who’ve been active in the group since the 70s, as well as Glass himself — gave a fully committed performance over the five-hour-plus evening. The sound mix wasn’t quite on in the first hour, for Parts 1–3. Though, after the first break, the problem had been sorted, and the woodwinds were fully present in Part 4. And though the group sounded a little exhausted in Part 6, after a dinner break, they returned for a spree of in-the-cut insanity, during Parts 7–9. Transition after transition was handled like no thing at all. I had a big dumb smile on my face for the whole hour.

Was that intellectual of me? Dunno, and don’t care. Philip Glass’s year-long 75th birthday party won’t be over, in New York, until we see Einstein On the Beach at BAM this September. And while only a disaster could turn that into anything other than a big deal, I’m guessing that spectacle won’t eclipse the Armory rendition of Twelve Parts in my memory, either.

***

I’ve also recently been enjoying the forthcoming record by composer and jazz saxophonist Steve Lehman. Titled Dialect Fluorescent, it comes out from Pi Recordings on March 27th. Though unlike several of Lehman’s past records — including work in octet and duo settings that reveals a flair for modern-classical forms — this new recording leans heavily on some older jazz covers. One in particular, John Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice,” is particularly cool. With the permission of Lehman and his label, we’re streaming it below. I conducted a quick Q&A; with Lehman over email about the performance, as well — and about how groove and intellectualism can naturally co-exist.

SCW: Can you talk a bit about John Coltrane’s original version of “Moment’s Notice”? Did you always love it, or come to love it in some new way by playing it? What about this tune — aside from its being so classic as a piece — made you want to explore it as part of your own practice?

STEVE LEHMAN: Yeah, I always loved this tune and the whole record (Blue Train) like the rest of the world. It’s a great piece. It’s really clear what’s going on structurally but it also has the potential to surprise you over and over again. Since I know the piece so well, I’ll often use it as a template when I try out new compositional ideas, and this was one of those instances. I remember one duo rehearsal with Damion Reid where we ended up playing through the recorded arrangement of “Moment’s Notice” for about 90 minutes straight, just to get inside of it a little better — and because it ended up being really fun to explore the piece in that way.

Talk a little about this version of yours. A really informed listener would probably recognize part of the tune in the first few seconds. But there’s some indirection, too, right? What liberties are you taking here, and how do they relate to the rest of your playing?

[wpaudio url=”http://www.theawl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/03-Moments-Notice.mp3″ text=”Moment’s Notice, by Steve Lehman Trio” dl=”0″]

Well, it’s actually a Coltrane-type arrangement in that we don’t play the melody of the tune until the very end of the piece — something he did, to pretty amazing effect, when he recorded “Countdown” for example. The other thing that’s going on is that the piece is arranged in a kind of groove-oriented 9/4 feel. So, that helps transform the piece a bunch and sort of frees us up to find some new things in the basic framework of the composition.

Call out some good work by your band on this cut, with specific timings if you want! It’s an intense performance: concise and focused, but with a feeling of room in there, too (sort of like the new record on the whole, I’d say).

Well, let me see. I really love the way Matt [Brewer, bass] and Damion [Reid, drum set] play on this entire track and throughout the album for that matter! Calling out specific time markings seems perilously close to the nerd tip, but I guess I can offer up a couple of favorite moments.

At 1:13 after the drums come in, there’s a little saxophone break and I really love the way the three of us move through the end of the break and the top of the form without marking a really strong downbeat or anything like that. I think it speaks to how comfortable we’ve all become with the arrangement and how, when things are going well, we’re able to really play organic phrases together as a trio. I also really like the what happens at 3:00 when I start playing repeated groupings of five notes and Damion picks up on it and kind of uses it to shoot the whole group into the melody of the piece and beyond. It gives the whole track a nice sense of directionality I think.

Some of your other work, specifically the Octet, gets tagged with the brainy/cerebral reputation. Which isn’t wrong, exactly — but which also has a way of suggesting that there’s a deficit in the “soul” department (even when that’s not the case). Is your choice of covers on this new record, like this Coltrane piece, a maybe-not-so-subtle statement in that regard?

Yeah, I think that’s right. I suppose my hope is that hearing my own pieces alongside “Moment’s Notice” and [Jackie McLean’s] “Mr. E” will emphasize some of the ways in which my music continues to be informed by the past, but, more importantly, I hope that it helps to highlight the legacy of John Coltrane and Jackie McLean as future-minded conceptualists.

To be honest, I continue to be a little bit confused by the idea that a term like “cerebral” should have a negative connotation. When I kind of go down the list of my musical heroes — Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Jackie McLean, Betty Carter, John Coltrane, Woody Shaw — I don’t see anything but musicians and composers committed to intellectual rigor, and of course, creating incredibly powerful meaningful music. So, that’s the ideal I’m shooting for.

The last time I saw you live, you were playing a bunch of new chamber compositions with the International Contemporary Ensemble. I remember thinking the gig was amazing. Any chance we’ll hear a full album of your chamber music pieces in the near future?

Yes, I think so. It’s a little bit of a trick to get contemporary chamber music recorded and documented at a high level, but it looks like there are going to be some nice opportunities to do exactly that in the next couple of years.

***

A mirror side of the jazz’s experimental-while-soulful side comes from pianist Robert Glasper, whose Black Radio album sees his working group collaborating with the likes of Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco and yasiin bey (formerly Mos Def).

I quite enjoyed what Nate Chinen had to say about this record in the Times last week. I’ll confess I’m a bit worried for this album; its lack of soloistic work from Glasper leaves it open to a (wrongheaded) charge that it’s insufficiently sophisticated. But the best tracks bump with a nimbleness that hip-hop usually needs recourse to electronics in order to achieve. In other places, there’s a quiet-storm, 90s feel to the record — but anyone who wants a more rough-sounding mix should check out Black Radio’s pre-release, official “bootleg” mixtape — built from various Glasper concerts in recent years to have featured the likes of the aforementioned artists (plus Q-Tip). In particular, check bey’s rendition of “Stakes Is High” at the 20-minute mark of the Soundcloud monster-track below. (You can download the 80-minute compilation track at here.

***

Lastly, I need to make mention of the 31-year-old composer Anna Clyne, whose new album, Blue Moth, drops courtesy of John Zorn’s Tzadik label today. Forgive me, for I’m still processing the thing, but it’s not to early for me to say… that it is so very gorgeous and noisy and beautiful and exactly what contemporary music needs. (The download is just shy of eight bucks.)

Clyne is currently in her second consecutive term as co-composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, because of conductor Riccardo Muti’s say-so.

Good for them, and him. And no offense to the Pulitzer-winning Christopher Rouse, incoming as the New York Philharmonic’s resident composer next season: but he is a super-known quantity, and gets lots of performances already. Given that in this current season, the NY Philharmonic isn’t featuring any women composers, it’s fair to say I’m jealous of Chicago, especially after Andrew Patner’s review of Clyne’s most recent piece for orchestra.

Before I start bothering the publicists for CSO’s in-house label about when they’re going to record the pieces Clyne has been working on for them, I have Blue Moth to enjoy. Take a listen to the first piece, “Fits + Starts,” for a solo cellist playing along with Clyne’s modified tape-related business. Plucking bits alternate with damaged harpsichord moments in the background, but the cello stuff on top is non-ironically pretty. It’s the kind of thing that could work as a film score, if it weren’t so relentlessly interesting on its own terms. And all in six minutes! Intellectuals and fun-havers, both of y’all get on board.

Previously: 100 Great (Not Best!) Songs Of 2011

Seth Colter Walls is a culture critic and reporter for Slate, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Capital New York, and also a contributing writer to XXL Magazine. Photo of Philip Glass performance by James Ewing.

Chris Arnade’s Flickr gallery about the the stories of people living with addiction in the South Bronx is amazing. If you’re feeling too happy with yourself or humanity, also, it’s a great corrective.

“The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.” Fine. King me.

Judging Books

A collection of improbable yet real book titles, including The City and The City by China Mieville: “the title makes it sound like Sex and the City minus the sex parts: ‘Why is it that every time you meet a guy in New York…you meet him?’” (This also seems like an okay place to note that a book called Becoming China’s Bitch is in Amazon’s top 10 right now.)

If you watch one commercial for a Portland-area sushi restaurant today make it this one.

A couple weeks ago, I walked passed a group of high school-aged girls on the street. One of them was talking about another girl, who was not in their group. “She needs to CHILL the fuck DOWN!” the girl said, gesticulating. A slip of the tongue, I thought. A malapropism, like something George W. Bush might have said while giving a speech in front of thousands of people. But then the girl repeated herself. “Seriously,” she said. “She’d better chill down.” It didn’t seem like a mistake. Could “chill down” be a new saying, one that I just hadn’t before? Clearly, it’s a combination of “chill out” and “calm down” (or “settle down”). It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely as either of those, but it actually makes more sense than “chill out,” when you think about.

Yes, it turns out that it apparently is a known saying. Unsurprisingly, I am behind the times, and high school girls are setting the new linguistic trends. As Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the Times today, “It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people. And women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.”

Like I said, this doesn’t surprise me. But this particular example linguistic melange seems like it be taken further. For starters, how about:

1) Calm out!

2) Calm-ax!

3) Take a get-over-it pill!

3a) And be still!

4) Take it in slide!

5) Let it stride!

6) Don’t have a panties, man!

7) Don’t get your cow in bunch!

8) Don’t hate the cow, hate the game!

9) It’s not the end of the cow!

10) Don’t harsh my cow!

I think there’s a lot of potential here. Or, there would be, if I were a teenage girl.

Oh, and President Bush might also have just been ahead when he would say all those things that the press always labelled as malapropisms. He was apparently a master of the well-known valley-speak known as “uptalk.”

Mission, like, totes accomplished?

I can’t tell whether this cat actually knows sign language or not, probably have to watch this a few more times.

by Ben Choi

Pomegranates: beautiful and delicious, but they scare me a little. All those little geometrically arranged blood-red seed pods embedded in fleshy nutritive pulp. If M.C. Escher, H.R Giger and H.P. Lovecraft got together and designed a fruit, it would be the pomegranate. I’m not alone in my ambivalence. Some say it was a pomegranate, not an apple, with which the serpent tempted Eve under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And if in some ancient cultures, the pomegranate was a symbol of fertility and abundance it was also, according to Greek myth, the Fruit of the Dead that trapped Persephone in the underworld.

But, once you’ve fallen to the hypnotic charms of this alien-death-fruit, you’ll find its straightforwardly tart flavor the perfect inspiration for an extremely versatile condiment called pomegranate syrup or, more commonly, pomegranate molasses. The appeal of pomegranate molasses rests entirely in its taste-simplicity. It’s an uncomplicated sweet-and-sour factor that makes this stuff freakishly useful in the kitchen. The flavors just pop. It goes great with lamb, chicken and even salmon. You can use it in vinaigrettes, gastriques, agradolces and barbecue sauces. You can use it in cocktails, mocktails, wassails and shandies. Any place where sweet meets sour. Here are a handful of recipes to give you some ideas.

Pomegranate molasses is produced by simply boiling pomegranate juice, lemon juice and sugar until it becomes the consistency of, well, molasses. You can make your own or find a very decent commercial version in well-stocked supermarkets and in Middle Eastern groceries. The brand I use, Sadaf, is from Lebanon, and is available in stores and online for under 4 dollars.

Koresht-e Fesenjan

This is a very traditional Persian Dish that really spotlights the bright acidity and controlled sweetness of pomegranate molasses. You’ll find these qualities are an excellent counterpoint to the tannins and oils that the walnuts bring to the party.

(Serves 2–3)
4 chicken thighs
½ of a medium onion
¼ cup water
2 cups walnuts toasted
1 ½ cups water
1/2 cup of pomegranate molasses
a pinch of cinnamon
20 strands of saffron steeped in a tablespoon of hot water
salt
pepper

Toast the walnuts in a hot cast iron skillet over medium heat. Stir continuously and get them just a uniform light brown, over, say 4 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool. When they cool place them in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until you get them to the consistency of course, moist sand. Put the nut powder in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat and add 1 ½ cups water. Incorporate mixture well, and bring to a ploppy slow boil. It should remind you of Maypo or Malt-o-Meal. Reduce heat to a low simmer, and keep it at this pace for 45 minutes. You may have to swirl in a couple of tbsp. of extra water if it’s looking too dry and pasty. You don’t want to stir this too much, as you want to eventually be seeing oil bubbling up to the surface; this percolation action is important.

Take this time to deal with the chicken. Preheat a cast-iron skillet on high for 3 minutes. Salt and pepper the thighs to your liking as the pan gets hot. Now put them skin-side down into the skillet and brown them untill the skin releases most of its schmaltz and turns a nice deep golden brown. Flip the thighs so they’re skin-side up and add chopped onions. When onions are translucent, reduce heat to medium low, add ¼ cup water and cover tightly and immediately. Let thighs steam in their own oniony funk for 20 minutes and turn off heat.

Now back to the nuts. After stewing for 45 minutes, they should look something like the last couple of inches of one of those Starbucks Frappuccino drinks, kinda slushy but with liquidy edges. At this point add pinch of cinnamon, pomegranate molasses and saffron mixture. Bring back up to simmer and let it bubble for an additional 15 minutes.

At this point the nut mixture should now be a nice maroon/brown. Incorporate chicken and contents of skillet into nut pot. Blend well and bring back up to simmer. Stay the course for just 30 more minutes to let the flavors meld. Salt and pepper to taste (you won’t need much more salt). Garnish with pomegranate seeds and serve with a pilaf or similar rice dish.

Lamb Chops with a Pomegranate Pan Sauce

(serves 2)
4 lamb loin chops, well trimmed of fat and silver skin
salt and pepper
2 tbsp butter in two pats
the white and light green parts of 3 green onions sliced thinly crosswise
⅓ cup red wine
1 tbsp. pomegranate molasses
1 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
⅓ cup chicken stock
salt and pepper

Preheat cast iron skillet over high heat for about 7 minutes. While that’s going on, salt and pepper chops. Lay chops into hot skillet with the more photogenic side down. It’s also nice to position your chops with the meaty side pushed up against sides of pan like numbers on a clock. That way the meat will cook to a more uniform thickness because the side that is unsupported by bone is made to stand up straight against the wall. Nobody likes slouchy lamb.

When you see that the down side has a nice deep-brown char, flip. Cook to your preferred level of doneness, though I recommend the red side of medium rare. Use the finger test to know when you’re at the right level. Remove chops from skillet and set aside. Turn off the heat.

Now, using the residual heat in the skillet, melt one pat of butter. To that add the green onions and saute for say 15 seconds. Deglaze skillet with red wine, should be pretty dramatic. Quickly blend in pomegranate molasses with whisk. Turn the heat back up to medium-high and whisk in balsamic vinegar and chicken stock. In a minute or two the sauce should thicken to the point where it adheres evenly to the back side of a spoon. Remove from heat and whisk in remaining pat of butter. Spoon liberally over chops and serve lamb with Israeli couscous.

Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Combine 1 tsp. grainy Dijon mustard, 1 tsp. pomegranate molasses, 1 tsp. white balsamic or Champagne vinegar in a small glass bowl; blend well. Blend in 1 tbsp. extra virgin olive oil with small whisk until emulsion is achieved. It should be enough to dress a salad for 2- 4.

Shirley Temple Black (Pomegranate Brandy Fizz)

Dissolve 1 tbsp. pomegranate molasses in 1 jigger (1.5 oz) brandy in the bottom of a small cocktail shaker. Take 2 or 3 sprigs of fresh thyme betweeen your palms and rub to release oils; add to shaker with 2 or 3 cubes of ice. Shake. Strain into a cocktail glass. Add a healthy splash of seltzer. Garnish with cocktail onion.

Chismosa (Pomegranate Champagne Cocktail)

In a champagne glass or flute, dissolve 1 tbsp. pomegranate molasses and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters in 3 oz. grapefruit juice. Top with 3 oz. Prosecco, cava or Champagne.

Greek Yogurt with Pomegranate Molasses and Pistachios

For a simple treat sprinkle some lazily crushed pistachios over some plain Greek yogurt and drizzle with a tablespoon of pomegranate molasses.

Crumbled Roquefort Cheese with Pomegranate Honey
Just crumble Roquefort or any blue cheese you like over some crackers and drizzle with 1 part pomegranate molasses and 1 part raw honey, well blended. It’s a great snack to enjoy while reading a book.

Previously: Gochujang and Habanero Salsa

Ben Choi lives in the SF Bay Area with his wife Erica and dog Spock. He’s considering a raw food diet.