All the things that came apart in my head

What I should write about is the experience, last night and this afternoon, of helping rushthatspeaks make char siu bao (two batches with the original pork, one with a vegetarian recipe Rush invented), Tibetan vegetable momo, and homemade custard buns for my cousins' going-away party this afternoon. It was epic. The dough did strange and malevolent things in the humidity. We made our own five-spice powder. It is surprising how much spinach diminishes as you cook it and how cabbage never seems to go away.

But since I just bit into a nectarine, heard an unpleasantly gritty snap, and now there is a visible half-circle missing from the bottom of my left front tooth, I am instead going to use the rest of this post for a mix I was putting together earlier in the evening and then read my newly acquired translations of Stanisława Przybyszewska's The Danton Case (1929) and Thermidor (1935) until I pass out, because my mouth hurts and I am in the kind of mood whose comfort reading is historical dramas about the French Revolution.

The Secret History is the band that formed out of the breakup of My Favorite, whom lesser_celery introduced me to in 2004 (and interviewed for Not One of Us). They share with their predecessors a recurring concern with the mythologies of adolescence, suburbia, and Catholicism, and I was not expecting the Bride of Frankenstein to turn up in their lyrics. In her honor, and because I haven't posted any music in forever, have a selection of monsters.

( We get so strange across the border. )