Perfect Cinnamon Buns

My all time favorite breakfast treat is the cinnamon bun. I grew up eating those Pillsbury ones in the airtight tubes that you had to whack against the counter to get open.

I had a friend whos mom, would place them in a pie tin and they would expand. Being what I thought cinnamon buns should be, this was illusive concept to me. I only ate them once and have been trying to find ones that compare, ever since.

Heres what ruins anything that has ever come close to those homemade cinnamon buns that I have spent a lifetime dreaming about:

• the weak cinnamon to bun ratio
• not enough frosting
• raisins. gross. Why do people find the need to add pruned grapes to something so perfect?

I realized that in order to do something right, I would just have to do it myself. Baking with yeast is still pretty new to me, so I was a bit scared of it. My baker dad informed me that yeast and humans live comfortably in the same temperatures:

• If you add yeast to something that is about the same temperature as a warm bathtub, it’ll flourish.
• If you add it to a liquid that is too hot, you’ll kill it.
• If you add it to something cold, it’ll hold out on expanding until the temperature is warm enough or it’ll just take longer.

With this, I began skimming through cinnamon bun recipes, plucking what I liked about each one to concoct my idea of the perfect cinnamon bun.

It was so good, that my appetite almost didn’t give me time to take a good photo of the final product.

Rainin’ Blood

During the past couple of gloomy days, I stayed cooped up, listened to one of my favorite metal albums (Reign in Blood by Slayer), and got crafty!

Some results of my metal induced furry are for sale on my Etsy shop, I Felt That.

Jungle Bunnies!

I’m lookin’ to borrow $42,500.00 anyone…..anyone….anyone?

While looking for a cheaper version of this book that will soon be replacing the headboard of my bed, (the book is fucking huge) Ebay teased my fragile heart with this original hand painted 18×22 1903 Jungle Imps print by Windsor McCay. 

“Who are the Jungle Imps?” you may ask.

Let me enlighten you!

Windsor McCay is best known for his series of Little Nemo comics that ran  mainly between 1905 and 1914. From there, his fame flourished and he kind of became the Darwin of animation. But previous to all of this, in 1903, he drew a series of 43  strips called ”Tales of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle.” They was only published for the Cincinnati Enquirer to illustrate the poems of Enquirers editor George Randolph Chester. 

He used these illustrations as a prototype for his brightly colored art nouveau-ish comic strip styling that was later made famous though Little Nemo. 

The Imps themselves, are three main jungle uh…creatures….that pester and annoy animals. In this particular one, they kicked and teased and hung a snake for its ascetic differences. Things go full circle, I guess.

Furthering My Argument That Cat People Are Crazy

What happens when you remove the unamused carb loving cat Garfield from the comic bearing his name? This guy went there.

Sometimes funny,  mostly just surreal. You can now watch Jon Arbuckle fighting a losing battle against boredom, travelling deeper and deeper into insanity. It makes you wonder…did Garfield even exist, or is Arbuckle a spitting image of that neighbor I used to have who did too much acid in the 60′s? 

Bad Artists Die of Natural Causes: The Mix

Bands are such a market, nowadays. And a dying one at that. Just milking what they can as fast as they can based mainly around an image and an air-headed fan base, more than the music. 

Fleeting Foxes?

Go screw yourselves.

The type of music I used to keep an ear out for, has turned into  winey sludge with stock riffs. It has lost whatever made it memorable or inspiring, by holding on too closely to what inspired them and hacking it to shit. When musicians stick too closely to the music that inspires them, i feel like it ultimately ruins the category of music they want so badly to be part of. Shit can only inspire more shit.

Heres the aproach that seems to work: Getting your drum stick out of your ass, and realizing that you’re not anywhere near as good as your idols. You never will be. But the only thing to aspire for is uniqueness. Unique makes you memorable. Memorable is a beautiful inspiration to do something well, and never finding satisfaction. 

The most innovated ’artists’ seem to be the ones that end up offing themselves. 

Because they seem to know they’re not who they idolize.

This is why Ian Curtis is rotting and why you don’t see this Conor Oberst character on any type of suicide watch.

I’m not artist. I am not a musician. I don’t even care for ‘good music’, by todays standards. But I don’t think a time will come when I don’t like making a mix cd.

Being a happily rebellious teenager, I completely missed that pre-emo late 90′s era of music that included a lot of band like…i don’t know, Quasi. 

I suppose I thought that if the music wasn’t happy or angry I wanted nothing to do with it because I couldn’t relate. Nor did I have any desire to relate to anything remotely sad.

It apparently just took a few elements (and 10 extra years) to finally  appreciate this type of music:

• Acceptance of sadness
• A clean mental slate/ open  mind
• The right song to guide you in (I think mine may have been Sidewalk by Built to Spill)

The only new music that I’ve found myself listening to is mainly hip hop, and it can only amuse me for so long. I recently decided to start a trend to keep me encouraged on music, even if its ‘out dated’. 

I would keep my spare computer with all of my iTunes music (bought and ‘borrowed’) playing on shuffle continuously. I made a playlist to document the month and year.  Every time a song came on that would catch my attention, I would be sure to add it to the playlist. By the end of the month, I would have a collection of songs that I had spent so long ignoring or letting myself forget about how much I enjoyed. Then I made a few copies of this mix, and sent it to a few friends along side some people who just sent me their addresses. 

March was the second month of this irrelevant project of mine, and was the first one where I sent it out to others. I plan on doing it every month since I have a memory that seems to mainly work when stimulated by sounds and smells. 

Heres what was on my most recent mix:

1. Fortress: Pinback
   
2. I Wanna Know About You: International Noise Conspericy 
   
3. Mason City: The Fiery Furnaces
   
4. This Here Giraffe: The Flaming Lips
   
5. Epic Problem: Fuguzi
   
6. Winters Come And Gone: Gillian Welch
   
7. A String Of Pearls: Glenn Miller
   
8. Look How We Made These People: Half-Handed Cloud
   
9. Screw The Naysayers: The Hidden Hand
   
10. 1-2-8-: Mighty Mighty Bosstones
    
11. Anything You Can Do: Irving Berlin
    
12. Footsteps In The Dark: The Isley Brothers
    
13. In The Wee Small Hours: The John Pizzarelli Trio
    
14. Would You Die For Me: Notorious B.I.G.
    
15. Present Tense: Piebald
    
16. Cupid: Sam Cooke
    
17. Kodachrome: Paul Simon
    
18. Penelope: Pinback
    
19. Engine Heart: Mirah

To The Vector Belongs The Spoils

Chuck Jones directed this reasonable love story in 1965. Based around a short story by Norton Juster in 1963, Jones showed his creative genius by turning shapes into intriguing charters. A sensible line, in love with a perfect circle, who was in love with a chaotic squiggle. Creating an open ended love polygon (I am fully aware that this is an oxymoron) if you will.

Each of its three main chracters are animated into life.

The Squiggle (animated onto rice paper before being xeroxed onto the cells, in order to create its unkempt appearance) shuffled around the screen organically and frivolously

The red Dot seemed to roll in and out of a scene with grace. Unchanged from her surroundings.

The main character. the Line, was visually effected  by human-like emotions. For instance, when he became depressed and friends began to notice him getting ‘thin’.

The cartoon did an excellent job at combining geometry and human emotion. Why aren’t people able to create animations with simplicity and morals, like this anymore?

Do we not have the patience to watch ten minutes worth of shapes? Are all of our great animators gone, with the hyper expanding increase of technology?

Where have all the Chucks gone???

As said in this animation:

“Freedom is not a license for chaos,” he observed the next morning. ‘Oh, what a head!’ And right there and then he decided not to squander his talents on cheap exhibitionism.”