Month: March 2021

This Is Me

Posted on by Bruce Barone in Color Photography, Documentary Photography, Dog Photography, Food Photography, Inspiration

Self-portrait. Sunday. March 7, 2021. My birthday.

This is me, too. An old resume–a direct mail brochure. It got me my first job at Hearst Magazines. My cousin, Donna, sent it back to me as a way to wish me Happy Birthday. Read her comment:

This is the front, the mail side.

Check out the stamp! 15 cents!!!

Here’s the inside of the resume:

I hope you can read it. The baseball team? That’s my Little League team; Old Salt. Can you guess which one is me? All my childhood friends thought I was going to grow up to be a professional baseball player.

In addition to what is noted on the resume I have been a lifeguard, gardener, antique refinisher, short order cook. But never a professional baseball play. I did, however, coach my daughter’s softball team!

Back to my birthday. I made an updated version of Shrimp Scampi (olive oil, butter, shallot, garlic, crushed tomato, mild banana peppers, red pepper flakes, spinach, shrimp, linguine):

Susan made us a Chocolate Cake:

On my birthday, I always remember a poem by Dylan Thomas, “Poem In October. It begins:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

Read more here:

It was read to me and a college friend by our English Literature professor when we were in college. This was when we were young and innocent and our hair was long and our future, like the grassy hill in Tarrytown, New York, over-looking the Hudson River, on which we sat cross-legged passing a joint, was and would be beautiful, perfect and pure, ever-changing changeless.

Sunset and Pizza

Posted on by Bruce Barone in Color Photography, Documentary Photography, Food Photography, Inspiration, Recipes

On Friday Susan and I watched a beautiful sunset in our backyard and while we watched a beautiful and delicious pizza cooked in the oven.

I make a pizza almost once every week. The dough recipe is from Mark Bittman. I have made hundreds, all a little different: eggplant, calamari, meatballs, asparagus, corn, jalapeno peppers, etc.

This one above had chicken, mushrooms, spinach and red onion on it. And cheese and sauce! YUM!

Date Meatballs with Orange Mint Yogurt Sauce

Posted on by Bruce Barone in Recipes

I have made these a few times and they deserve to be made more often. The first time I followed the recipe below and they were delicious. I made them again with ground beef instead of turkey and used sour cream as I didn’t have any yogurt; not as perfect but still delicious, particularly with roasted cauliflower (picture at below).

Ingredients

  1. 1 pound ground turkey
  2. 2 cups fresh bread crumbs (I used 1 cup dry)
  3. 6 dates, pitted and finely chopped
  4. 2 large eggs, beaten
  5. 2 tablespoons sesame seeds
  6. 1 teaspoon Asian sesame oil
  7. Salt and freshly ground pepper
  8. 1 cup French green lentils
  9. 2 garlic cloves, crushed and peeled
  10. 2 thyme sprigs
  11. 1 cinnamon stick
  12. 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  13. 1 1/2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
  14. 1 cup plain low-fat yogurt
  15. 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (I used fresh orange juice)
  16. 1 tablespoon chopped mint
  17. 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (I used orange zest)

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, combine the ground turkey with the bread crumbs, dates, eggs, sesame seeds, sesame oil, 2 teaspoons of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.
  2. Preheat the oven to 400°. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, cover the lentils, garlic, thyme and cinnamon stick with 2 inches of water; bring to a boil. Simmer over moderately low heat until the lentils are tender, about 25 minutes. Drain the lentils and transfer to a bowl; pick out and discard the seasonings. Stir the olive oil and vinegar into the lentils and season with salt and pepper.
  3. Form the turkey mixture into 1-inch meatballs. Spread the meatballs on a lightly oiled large rimmed baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, or until browned on the bottom and cooked through.
  4. Meanwhile, blend the yogurt with the lemon juice, mint and lemon zest, and season with salt and pepper. Serve the meatballs with the lentils and yogurt.
    ~Food & Wine, 2004

What Would Jesus Do?

Posted on by Bruce Barone in Black & White Photography, Documentary Photography, Inspiration

That’s what Sister Helen asked.

Susan and I were watching a documentary called “Sister.”

SISTER is a one-hour documentary highlighting the work of death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean. The film examines the life and influences of Sister Helen and delves into the evolving role of Catholic nuns in America. This poignant piece follows Sister Helen (best selling author of Dead Man Walking) as she counsels and fights for the stay of execution of Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip.

Sister Helen Prejean grew up in the Jim Crow South, joined the Sisters of St. Joseph at the age of 17, and emerged to become the leading voice against the death penalty in the USA.

Sister Helen’s awareness of social justice came even later, when she attended a talk by an activist nun who noted that Jesus’ message about the poor is that they be poor no longer. That their fate was not God’s will, and that just praying for people was not enough. Social justice, the nun said, meant being involved in political processes, because doing nothing was tacit support for the status quo.

What stung the most, Sister Helen said, “was the realization of how passive I had been.” A year later, she moved into Hope House, a Catholic service ministry in a New Orleans housing project. She was 42 years old. And a year after that, she would begin writing to a death row inmate.

“There’s this thing of how you discern God’s will in your life,” Sister Helen said.

Sister Helen’s latest memoir “River Of Fire” came out in paperback in 2019.

“When you accompany someone to the execution, as I have done three times as a spiritual advisor, everything becomes very crystallized, distilled, and stripped to the essentials. You are in this building in the middle of the night, and all these people are organized to kill this man. And the gospel comes to you as it never has before: Are you for compassion, or are you for violence? Are you for mercy, or are you for vengeance? Are you for love, or are you for hate? Are you for life, or are you for death?“

All of this got me thinking about purpose–my life’s purpose.

I do believe I am making the world a better place with beautiful photography.

But after watching this documentary I wondered what else am I doing to be more like Jesus?

There is my volunteer work with 3rd and 4th graders. Unfortunately this came to and end with the beginning of the quarantine one year ago. Note the date on the above school photo. March 4. One year ago today. You can read about the impact Susan and I had on these children here: https://brucebarone.com/2017/09/26/what-a-wonderful-world/

We pray we can continue with this work again someday soon.

Beauty. Children. Community. Working to make the world a better place.

welcome to march

Posted on by Bruce Barone in Black & White Photography, Documentary Photography, Entertainment, Inspiration, Poetry

Listen To The Lion.

Are you familiar with this song?

Listen:

Reading from Wikipedia:

“Listen to the Lion” has been said to rank amongst Morrison’s greatest work. “During the 11-minute voyage, he sings, shouts, improvises lines, delays and omits them, until he symbolically re-creates the sound of an unleashed lion within himself. It remains a considerable achievement.” (Johnny Rogan)[5]

“Listen to the Lion” was one of the 1001 Songs written about in the 2006 book by critic Toby Creswell who says in part: “Listen to the Lion has almost no words, just the phrase ‘Listen to the Lion inside of me’…He sings the phrases like an incantation, sometimes desperate and longing for love and at other times boasting of the power of his passion; and then at other times he sings in despair that these emotions have brought him nothing but ruin. He doesn’t need to speak, there’s nothing more to be said…”[6]

A sequel to this 1972 song was included on Morrison’s 2005 album, Magic Time that was entitled, “The Lion This Time”.[7]

During the November 2008 concert performances at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, Morrison used this song as an encore after the live Astral Weeks song performances. It has been listed under a new extended title of “Listen to the Lion – The Lion Speaks” on the track listing of the live album Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. In a January 2009 interview, Morrison said: “I wanted to end the Astral Weeks set with ‘Madame George’. I wanted to tell people at the end these songs are a ‘train of thought’ and leave it at that. I think ‘Lion’ is a song that is all me, as well, so I ended with that…It’s a song I guess about me—probably the only one about me.”[8] Also showing the magnitude of this work to the composer is the announcement that Morrison’s new record label will be entitled Listen to the Lion Records.[9

Andy Whitman, a Paste reviewer called this song, “the quintessential Van Morrison moment, the most thrilling and thrillingly strange soul music—in all senses of the term—ever recorded. It’s the sound of a man casting off all earthly bounds and battering down the gates of heaven.”[10]

Jay Cocks commented on the song: “You can hear Morrison courting this muse in the Pentecostal growls and incantations of Listen to the Lion on his 1972 album Saint Dominic’s Preview…”[11]

In his article on Morrison in the 1976 edition of the Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, critic Greil Marcus wrote, “Across 11 minutes, he [Morrison] sings, chants, moans, cries, pleads, shouts, hollers, whispers, until finally he breaks away from language and speaks in Irish tongues, breaking away from ordinary meaning until he has loosed the lion inside himself. He begins to roar: he has that sound, that yarrrrragh, as he has never had it before. He is not singing it, it is singing him.” [12]

Robert Christgau‘s review of Saint Dominic’s Preview uses this song to point out that vocals are sometimes more important than words: “Listen to the lion,” he [Morrison] advises later, referring to that lovely frightening beast inside each of us, and midway through the eleven-minute cut he lets the lion out, moaning and roaring and growling and stuttering in a scat extension that would do Leon Thomas proud.”[13

It’s a classic. A favorite.

Welcome to March.

As they say, “In like a lion, out like a lamb.”

Go create. Love. Build community.