The Upsidedown

There’s a guy down the road who has a bunch of Trump flags in his yard. They’ve been there since we moved in, in 2020, when flags like that were a fairly common sight in the county. The guy has swapped out a few flags with more au courant MAGA-isms, but many of the tattered OG election-era classics are still flying.  

Thankfully, they aren’t the flags that I’ve seen around with swear words on them, or that one where Trump is styled like Schwarzenegger, with grotesquely swollen and veined arms brandishing an assault rifle. But they are angry flags, and we have to see them every time we go to town, and if they are meant to bum me out, as a liberal carpetbagger from the big city driving by in a Japanese car, then well, they get the job done.

To round out the cliche, the guy also has a pile of rusted bicycles in his yard, and a mean and feral-looking dog. His outdoor speakers blast weird music or talk radio all day long, and the Doppler effect makes it sound chaotic and haunted when we drive by his house. We’ve heard spooky rumors about the guy from other neighbors. We do our best to give him a wide berth, like when you see someone smoking a joint pantless on the F train.

So it turns out, there’s also at least one of those guys in the Supreme Court right now. He also likes to express his eccentric politics with yard flags, in this case: the slightly classier upside-down hanging of the US flag, which is traditionally meant to indicate distress, crisis, and a plea for aid. Now it’s a dog whistle for those who are hip to coming authoritarian revolution.

We have a US flag flying at our house too. It was there when we bought the place, and the previous owner asked us if we minded keeping it up, which seemed weird. Did he hear us whispering in Russian or something? 

Our Old Glory is flying right side up, but the way I feel about the country these days, I’d like to flip it around to signal my distress as well. Me, Alito, and the weird guy down the road have that in common, I guess.

(Seriously, I am so shocked when I see someone proudly flying one of those FUCK YOUR FEELINGS flags, in their own neighborhood, in front of other people’s kids. It’s punk rock, I guess. They want to épater les bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois pig is me.) 

Speaking of punk rock…

Albini’s Fluffy Coffee

Among my least cool opinions is my preference for the St. Vincent versions of Kerosene and Bad Penny to the original Big Black versions.

(The show she’s playing in the decaying video above was in honor of the tenth anniversary of Our Band Could Be Your Life, which, if anything in this paragraph makes sense to you, you have already read. You should check out the whole show: Titus Andronicus as The Replacements! Yes, that’s Craig Finn as the cop from Kids Don’t Follow! Ted Leo as Minor Threat! Tune-Yards as Sonic Youth!)

I was a teenager when Big Black came out, and I hated it, like I hated the contemporary Swans records, or what Sonic Youth was doing with Lydia Lunch back then, probably because it scared me and made me upset, as it was intended to.

This stuff was good for figuring out just how punk you really were. How much, as a trembling zitface, do you want to listen to music made by people who personally hate you? The B+ Christgau review of Big Black’s Atomizer said it best: “This is the brutal guitar machine thousands of lonely adolescent cowards have heard in their heads. Its creators deserve credit for finding each other and making their obsession real. But not for anything else.” (Sheesh Bob, what record would get a B-?)

I came around on all that stuff eventually (except Swans, sheesh) but it was never going to be my favorite thing. Those same songs coming out of St. Vincent’s face though… maybe it’s the contrast I like. Sweet and salty at the same time is always good.

Having said all that, Albini also engineered almost all of my favorite records, although you are surely in no mood to hear me go on about them in this period of endless eulogies.

So instead, let’s talk about him as a barista.

You’ve probably already seen a million links to Albini’s brilliant Grub Street diet this week, but the real heads already knew about mariobatalivoice, Albini’s food blog, now best viewed on The Wayback Machine. Here’s a random taste of it:

Yogurt has its milk proteins slightly curdled, concentrating and strengthening them, which might form a protein web with the gluten more readily. Also, the acid in the yogurt could be used to excite baking soda as a leavening agent, providing even more lift. I beat the eggs together with about an equal volume of yogurt. I don't know if Bulgarian yogurt is special, but it's pretty much like Greek yogurt, slightly less liquid than conventional supermarket plain yogurt. I had bought it because what the hell, Bulgarians can use my patronage, their roads are pretty fucked up.

If you read this thing closely you could learn a lot about home cookery, and have a good time doing it. Albini was, among his other accomplishments, maybe the greatest living home cook, and his wife was a lucky woman.

Here’s (I guess) an Electrical Audio intern preparing the master’s favorite cup of coffee:

And here is the man himself, doing the same thing with that super expensive civet poop coffee I was goofing around about when I taught you about me and Maya’s personal house cuppa:

Rest without peace, which you would not probably enjoy, Steve Albini.