Sally Binford, Al Green, the Santa Cruz Felony Tank, & Strawberry Masa
Thursday Round-up January 9. 2024
To all my friends and family in Southern California: my heart is with you. Sending HEPA filters, chainsaws, and generators.
Hold on tight.
Now for the other news . . .
Sally Binford’s masterpiece: “Myths and Matriarchies.” Y’all have been begging me to find a copy of this, and I finally bought a copy of an OOP paperback and tore it apart to make a PDF.
Sally was a precedent-setting ancient history anthropologist, who late in life decided to take on the supposition of “Goddess-forward-feminism.” It was so controversial at the time, it got killed everywhere! Always refreshing to read Sally kicking ass.
1970 Santa Cruz Jail Tank - I belong to a hometown history group, where old-timers remember the long-haired days of the downtown Bad Boy Tank, right smack in the middle of everything. Small town jails are . . . Different. Secret tunnel to the courthouse. Party on the roof. The comments are great: “Is that my dad?” Here’s the FB thread.
I like working class history groups.
It’s not too late for Holiday Tamales. When I first started making tamales with Honey Lee, she used the gringo-Mexican cookbook par excellence, “Authentic Mexican” by Rick Bayless. The instructions and illustrations are fantastic.
As years went by, I grabbed more pre-made ingredients from the Mexican supermercado: the wet masa dough, the husks to soak, the cooked chicken, pork, and any delicacies to stuff inside. The postal string to tie them up! Big tamale cooking pots are lined on the market walls.
From there, all you have to do is know how to multiply your recipe. As my daughter says, “You need to make enough that you can be satisfied for weeks without begrudging anyone else a plate.”
Just ordered from the library: An honest woman : a memoir of love and sex work. I met author Charlotte Shane years past, when we were making the rounds of Sirius Radios shows, where let’s face it, the producers hoped to humiliate us—the “sexpot feminists” or whatever they called us. Charlotte was unflappable and we both turned the tables on our puritanical host.
“WHO ARE YOU?” I said afterward. She’s a killer writer; political and incisive.
Fascinating memoir on audio: Marsha Linehan is the woman who developed dialectical behavioral theory: Building a Life Worth Living. Not every shrink can write. This is different. We’re all going to need our therapy chops this year.
Thursday Throwback: There’s not enough said about magical realism in the shower.
The Thrill of the Meet-up: one of our greatest soul singers of all time and one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time did a live take in a TV studio. They look ready to die of happiness.
