St. Joseph's Bread 2026

I come from a large Italian family. My great grandmother arrived in the United States on the SS Europa in 1910 to marry a man whose family came from the same village she just left. By the time I came along in 1964, she lived with her son and daughter-in-law and as you can imagine, was already quite old and hard of hearing (a problem that runs in our family). When I visited, she would be sitting at an enormous oak table in the front room, a soap opera blasting from the television, playing solitaire. Although she spoke English, she retained a very heavy Italian accent and would lapse into Italian whenever she was excited or frustrated. And I never saw her in anything but plain black or dark dresses, the kind…well, the kind immigrant women wore in the 1920s.

She was of course a Roman Catholic and brought with her all sorts of feast days, observations, and traditions. But the most delicious feast day for us was that of Saint Joseph. There is a special kind of bread that is baked only on this day, Saint Joseph’s Bread or Panne di San Guiseppe. It is tender and sumptuous, more like cake but not sweet, more on the savory side. It was a treat everyone in the family looked forward to all year. I don’t know how many loaves my great grandmother would make but every family got one--she would bake all day and then walk to each home to deliver them in person...so today is the feast day of St. Joseph, the day when she would have delivered these treats.

Anise seed (a very traditional Italian spice that shows up in many national and regional dishes) is what gives this bread a subtle taste. Some traditional recipes call for the addition of golden raisins, but I will say that my great-grandmother never added them. While I am in no way religious (although I am a mystic at heart, which is very different!), I still enjoy this delicious bread.

St. Joseph's Day Bread

5 lb. flour
2 Tbs. salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 tbs. baking powder
2 tbs. anise seed
Combine these ingredients in a large bowl
Work in 1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening

In another bowl combine:
4 1/2 cups warm water
3 pkgs. of yeast or 3 tbs. of yeast
Dissolve yeast in warm water
Add 5 eggs, beaten

Add liquid ingredients to flour and shortening mixture. Mix well and knead on floured surface. Place in greased bowl and allow to rise until double in size. Punch down and let rise another hour.

Shape into small round loaves (should yield around 5), and let rise for 30 minutes. Traditionally, the loaves were small and could be made in the shape of a cross, bambino (baby), heart, beard, crown, or staff in honor St. Joseph.

Brush loaves with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame and poppy seeds. Bake at 350* for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.

St. Joseph's Bread 2025

I come from a large Italian family. My great grandmother arrived in the United States on the SS Europa in 1910 to marry a man whose family came from the same village she just left. By the time I came along in 1964, she lived with her son and daughter-in-law and as you can imagine, was already quite old and hard of hearing (a problem that runs in our family). When I visited, she would be sitting at an enormous oak table in the front room, a soap opera blasting from the television, playing solitaire. Although she spoke English, she retained a very heavy Italian accent and would lapse into Italian whenever she was excited or frustrated. And I never saw her in anything but plain black or dark dresses, the kind…well, the kind immigrant women wore in the twenties.

She was of course a Roman Catholic and brought with her all sorts of feast days, observations, and traditions. But the most delicious feast day for us was that of Saint Joseph. There is a special kind of bread that is baked only on this day, Saint Joseph’s Bread or Panne di San Guiseppe. It is tender and sumptuous, more like cake but not sweet, more on the savory side. It was a treat everyone in the family looked forward to all year. I don’t know how many loaves my great grandmother would make but every family got one--she would bake all day and then walk to each home to deliver them in person...so today is the feast day of St. Joseph, the day when she would have delivered these treats.

Anise seed (a very traditional Italian spice that shows up in many national and regional dishes) is what gives this bread a subtle taste. Some traditional recipes call for the addition of golden raisins, but I will say that my great-grandmother never added them. While I am in no way religious (although I am a mystic at heart, which is very different!), I still enjoy this delicious bread.

St. Joseph's Day Bread

5 lb. flour
2 Tbs. salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 tbs. baking powder
2 tbs. anise seed
Combine these ingredients in a large bowl
Work in 1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening

In another bowl combine:
4 1/2 cups warm water
3 pkgs. of yeast or 3 tbs. of yeast
Dissolve yeast in warm water
Add 5 eggs, beaten

Add liquid ingredients to flour and shortening mixture. Mix well and knead on floured surface. Place in greased bowl and allow to rise until double in size. Punch down and let rise another hour.

Shape into small round loaves (should yield around 5), and let rise for 30 minutes. Traditionally, the loaves were small and could be made in the shape of a cross, bambino (baby), heart, beard, crown, or staff in honor St. Joseph.

Brush loaves with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame and poppy seeds. Bake at 350* for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.

"I'm Lost" and "Wonder" by Dan Black

I am happy to see the return of Dan Black. Last time we saw him here, he was singing for 24 hours about how our hearts never stop beating. And now, here he is with two songs that pluck at the idea of memory and nostalgia. Maybe I am just in a mood, but the words to each of these songs feel personal to me...when I was a boy, I spent a lot of time alone in my room listening to records, imagining a world full of music and performance. And sometimes someone would join me in my room, listening to records, dreaming...and where are they now...

Here is "I'm Lost"... "Everybody is an artist, not only painters."

"Wonder" is, despite its chugging rhythm, wistful. There it all goes, then it's gone.

https://www.dan-black.com/

Memory and Understanding

“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”
--Alain de Botton

"3:42 p.m., 2010" | Photo by Alexander Harding

“The path isn't a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
--Barry H. Gillespie

St. Joseph's Bread 2024

I come from a large Italian family. My great grandmother arrived in the United States on the SS Europa in 1910 to marry a man whose family came from the same village she just left. By the time I came along in 1964, she lived with her son and daughter-in-law and as you can imagine, was already quite old and hard of hearing (a problem that runs in our family). When I visited, she would be sitting at an enormous oak table in the front room, a soap opera blasting from the television, playing solitaire. Although she spoke English, she retained a very heavy Italian accent and would lapse into Italian whenever she was excited or frustrated. And I never saw her in anything but plain black or dark dresses, the kind…well, the kind immigrant women wore in the twenties.

She was of course a Roman Catholic and brought with her all sorts of feast days, observations, and traditions. But the most delicious feast day for us was that of Saint Joseph. There is a special kind of bread that is baked only on this day, Saint Joseph’s Bread or Panne di San Guiseppe. It is tender and sumptuous, more like cake but not sweet, more on the savory side. It was a treat everyone in the family looked forward to all year. I don’t know how many loaves my great grandmother would make but every family got one--she would bake all day and then walk to each home to deliver them in person...so today is the feast day of St. Joseph, the day when she would have delivered these treats.

Anise seed (a very traditional Italian spice that shows up in many national and regional dishes) is what gives this bread a subtle taste. Some traditional recipes call for the addition of golden raisins, but I will say that my great-grandmother never added them. While I am in no way religious (although I am a mystic at heart, which is very different!), I still enjoy this delicious bread.

St. Joseph's Day Bread

5 lb. flour
2 Tbs. salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 tbs. baking powder
2 tbs. anise seed
Combine these ingredients in a large bowl
Work in 1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening

In another bowl combine:
4 1/2 cups warm water
3 pkgs. of yeast or 3 tbs. of yeast
Dissolve yeast in warm water
Add 5 eggs, beaten

Add liquid ingredients to flour and shortening mixture. Mix well and knead on floured surface. Place in greased bowl and allow to rise until double in size. Punch down and let rise another hour.

Shape into small round loaves (should yield around 5), and let rise for 30 minutes. Traditionally, the loaves were small and could be made in the shape of a cross, bambino (baby), heart, beard, crown, or staff in honor St. Joseph.

Brush loaves with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame and poppy seeds. Bake at 350* for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.

I Miss My Mom

"Grief is the price we pay for love."
--Queen Elizabeth II

BEAUTY: Painting--Tom Colcord

In his fascinating series Fluidity of Perception, artist Tom Colcord captures the kaleidoscopic sense of how we perceive and recall our experiences and our world. His imagery consists of a collage of places and elements that get put into a blender and remembered in a lump. I can imagine the inner monologue from some of these paintings: Oh yeah, I remember that was the night I went with my friend Christine to a party at her friend Tom's house in an old apartment building on the fifth floor and one of the tenants had a ton of plants by their door and we all got really drunk and went to Chinatown after midnight for something to eat and then decided to drive over the bridge to Marin and we saw a deer with a big rack in the full moon...

Top to bottom: Flood; Gentrification of the Dead; Greenhouse Effect; It's Not Gonna Rain Tonight; Perfect Is the Enemy Of The Good; The Best Place I Could Be In A Strange World; Time I Forgot

https://www.tomcolcord.com/

"Everywhere at the end of time" by The Caretaker

The Caretaker is one of the many names under which English composer/producer/musician Leyland James Kirby records. Started in 1999 with the release "Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom," The Caretaker project was inspired by the last scene in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant horror film "The Shining," which features the 1934 song "Midnight, The Stars And You" by Ray Noble And His Orchestra. Without giving away a plot point for those who may not have seen "The Shining," the chilling scene alludes to the ideas of ghosts, time, and (the changing nature of) memory. Kirby took that chilling scene and began developing ideas about the echoes of memory and how those echoes can fade. The antique 78 records he samples and loops end up being snippets of songs connected to a time and place but that connection is deliberately tenuous. Aside from the initial spectral sound of this idea, I am sure we have all had the experience of having a melodic phrase or a single line of a verse from a song stuck in our heads, unable to recall what the song is, who sang or played it, or how we know it to begin with. But there it is, a little isolated moment in our brains, surrounded by nothingness, a void. Thus The Caretaker project morphed into the aural manifestation of the disintegration of memory itself...of dementia or Alzheimer's. And now Kirby is in the midst of the final installment of the project called "Everywhere at the end of time," a series of six collections of music, released every six months. According to Kirby, the project itself has dementia. You can listen to Stages 1 and 2 in their entirety through the link below.

THE CARETAKER IS RELEASING SIX NEW WORKS.

'Everywhere at the end of time' is a new and finite series exploring dementia, its advance and its totality.

Featuring the sounds from the journey The Caretaker as artist will make after being artistically diagnosed as having early onset dementia.

Each stage will reveal new points of progression, loss and disintegration. Progressively falling further and further towards the abyss of complete memory loss and nothingness.

Viewing dementia as a series of stages can be a useful way to understand the illness, but it is important to realise that this only provides a rough guide to the progress of the condition.

Drawing on a recorded history of 20 years of recollected memories this is one final journey and study into recreating the progression of dementia through sound.

--

Stage 1 - September 2016 (A+B)
Here we experience the first signs of memory loss. This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.

Stage 2 - April 2017 (C+D)
The second stage is the self realisation and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.

Stage 3 - Released in September 2017

Stage 4 - Released in March 2018

Stage 5 - Released in September 2018

Stage 6 - Released in March 2019

http://brainwashed.com/vvm/

BEAUTY: Painting--Joshua Flint

Memory and the cognitive layers they create. This is the goal of painter Joshua Flint. His Artist Statement sums it up:

"My work is based on images curated from many sources such as digitized museum archives, vintage shops, and social media platforms. The paintings fluctuate between the familiar and the unknown while simultaneously including the past and present. By rearranging the hierarchy of elements the paintings become fictions that allow countless interpretations. Layered into works are references to liminality, ecological issues, neuroscience, psychological states, and the history of painting, among others.

The images sourced from out-of-date materials hold a special fascination. Much like observing the ruins of an old, grand building or a church in a state of decay, the characters and objects that populate his paintings are employed to create a sense of ephemerality, imbuing the work with a kind of fascination and disquiet, over the passage of time. Used in this way they serve as reminders that cutting edge trends and novelty will evolve into new iterations or be abandoned altogether. Using these sources for my paintings allows a certain distance to reinterpret as I see fit. I can see this person or place in a photograph but know nothing about what is going on beyond those paper borders. That ambiguity, between the seen and unseen, between the real and the imaginary, is where my paintings live."

Top to bottom: A Year of Soft Conversation; All The Falling Leaves; Carousel; Shorelines; Soft Preoccupations; The Assistant; The Banquet; The Catcher; The Volunteers; The World Between

http://joshuaflint.com

Grief Is The Price We Pay For Love

"Grief is the price we pay for love."
--Queen Elizabeth II

BEAUTY: Drawing--Garth England

Regular readers know that I am an interior designer among other professions, and I recently had a consultation for a possible new client that touched me deeply. I got a call from a woman on the east coast who said she had inherited a home here in California. She said she had been back and forth several times and had started to remodel one of the bathrooms. But she said she is now interested in renovating the rest of the house. So after we arranged for me to get a key, I went to the house to take a look at the scope of work involved. I was under the impression that the house would be empty, or nearly so. But I was surprised to see a home with lawn furniture and plants hanging on the front porch, looking very much currently cared for and lived in. I let myself in and while the house had been cleared of most large furniture pieces, smaller items remained. An antique table topped with a few books in German. Some lovely abstract art pieces on the walls. Persian rugs. In the kitchen, papers, bills, and sunglasses sat on the peninsula as though someone had just recently arrived home. A bookshelf of cook books sat next to a carved oak dining table and chairs. Pots and pans sat silent in a cupboard, used by someone to cook all their meals. In a home office, walls were covered with framed certificates and diplomas and letters to a woman who was praised as a marvelous teacher, someone who changed the course of the lives of her students.

The more I looked, the more my heart ached and throat closed up, and the more I was aware of the life of a human being who is no longer living...but whose entire life in objects remains...the tiny, precious things that we all take for granted in our lives but that will outlive us. As such things have the power to do to me, I was transported back to the deaths of my parents and their home I was responsible for clearing out and selling--all the daily, average objects suddenly took on a huge importance. My mom's tiny porcelain kitty collection, my dad's favorite yellow bowl from which he ate his nightly treat of popcorn...

And the state of this home in front of me was suddenly crystal clear--the meaningful objects, the ones with sentimental value had already been removed. A kind of infinitely sad, almost tangible half-life existed in the house for me to practically swim through...someone's invisible memories and life unknown to me, echoing with the lives of my parents and the lifetime, knowledge, memories and love and...presence that is gone. Presence. Walking through this house shook me and returned me to a state both familiar and feared. And inevitable.

So I was pleased by the synchronicity when I stumbled across, the next day, information about an artist who had, very late in life, recorded all the places and events he could recall. Since he was not suffering from any kind of cognitive impairment, he was able to recall details of nearly everything.

Garth England liked to draw. So he meticulously cataloged his life in the English town of Bristol, mapping out streets, profiles of houses he lived in as well as his neighbors', elevation views of his boyhood bedrooms, furniture suites, and cartoon panel-stories about episodes in his life. One of the most poignant is a story about him and his brother during what is known as Operation Pied Piper (where children were evacuated to rural areas and away from city centers at risk of being bombed in WWII), and being sent to a family in Woodroyd for safety.

Thankfully these drawings were discovered and published in a book which went to print just before Garth England's death. It is wonderful that he knew of the book and its imminent publication...and by extension the value of his memories and life. Here is the blurb from Future Perfect, the Bristol City Council-funded public art programme that allowed Garth's work to be discovered and turned into MURDERED WITH STRAIGHT LINES: DRAWINGS OF BRISTOL BY GARTH ENGLAND:

"Garth England was a long-term resident of Hengrove and Knowle-West in south Bristol; Murdered with Straight Lines tells the poignant story of a childhood lived through a world war and its aftermath; the development of Britain's Welfare State and social housing provision; vernacular architecture, indoor toilets and fitted kitchens.

The drawings were discovered by Jo Plimmer, engagement curator of Future Perfect, when she visited Hengrove Lodge as part of the public engagement programme. Garth died in 2014 but he knew of our plans to publish his drawings and gave us his blessing."

The title refers to an anecdote England told: "Murdered with straight lines — that’s what my art teacher used to say about my drawings. He didn’t like the way I always used a ruler." He may have been a slave to the precision of his ruler, but these drawings are earnestly created and colored with a beautiful, naïve, loving care.

The things we leave behind.

The book can be purchased through the publishing house Redcliffe Press here or through Amazon UK here.

*sniff*

BEAUTY: Painting--Mark Ryczek

Since we are dealing with the theme of memory, recall, and nostalgia today, here is the touching, distant, gauzy work of artist Mark Ryczek. Each image in his Brooklyn Misremembered series feels like a hazy memory, a snapshot our minds take of relatives homes, childhood rooms, small moments...

Artist's Statement about this series:
"The pieces are inspired by photos taken at a friend’s apartment in Flatbush. They are meditations on small areas that have sparked an interest in me and an attempt to capture my impressions of a typically stark and aged Brooklyn apartment interior, transformed by the slight decorative touches of the inhabitant. My hope is to express both the sheer pleasure of seeing and also to slightly warp what I see as one inevitably warps an experience when they store it to memory. Nostalgia has always fascinated me and these paintings loosely deal with not only with the bittersweet nature of the emotion itself, but the question of why we feel it and why some tend to sentimentalize the past more than others. Is it relative to one’s ability to record detailed information, specifically the dull and/or painful bits? Is it a survival mechanism that propels us forward in the hopes of re-experiencing an imagined past? Or maybe there is no purpose – just another seemingly pointless mental quirk."

http://mryczek.com/

St. Joseph's Bread

I come from a large Italian family. My great grandmother arrived in the United States on the SS Europa in 1910 to marry a man whose family came from the same village she just left. By the time I came along in 1964, she lived with her son and daughter-in-law and as you can imagine, was already quite old and hard of hearing (a problem that runs in our family). When I visited, she would be sitting at an enormous oak table in the front room, a soap opera blasting from the television, playing solitaire. Although she spoke English, she retained a very heavy Italian accent and would lapse into Italian whenever she was excited or frustrated. And I never saw her in anything but plain black or dark dresses, the kind…well, the kind immigrant women wore in the twenties.

She was of course a Roman Catholic and brought with her all sorts of feast days, observations, and traditions. But the most delicious feast day for us was that of Saint Joseph. There is a special kind of bread that is baked only on this day, Saint Joseph’s Bread or Panne di San Guiseppe. It is tender and sumptuous, more like cake but not sweet, more on the savory side. It was a treat everyone in the family looked forward to all year. I don’t know how many loaves my great grandmother would make but every family got one--she would bake all day and then walk to each home to deliver them in person...so today is the feast day of St. Joseph, the day when she would have delivered these treats.

Anise seed (a very traditional Italian spice that shows up in many national and regional dishes) is what gives this bread a subtle taste. Some traditional recipes call for the addition of golden raisins, but I will say that my great-grandmother never added them. While I am in no way religious, I still enjoy this delicious bread.

St. Joseph's Day Bread

5 lb. flour
2 Tbs. salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 tbs. baking powder
2 tbs. anise seed
Combine these ingredients in a large bowl
Work in 1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening

In another bowl combine:
4 1/2 cups warm water
3 pkgs. of yeast or 3 tbs. of yeast
Dissolve yeast in warm water
Add 5 eggs, beaten

Add liquid ingredients to flour and shortening mixture. Mix well and knead on floured surface. Place in greased bowl and allow to rise until double in size. Punch down and let rise another hour.

Shape into small round loaves (should yield around 5), and let rise for 30 minutes. Traditionally, the loaves were small and could be made in the shape of a cross, bambino (baby), heart, beard, crown, or staff in honor St. Joseph.

Brush loaves with beaten egg and sprinkle with sesame and poppy seeds. Bake at 350* for 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool.

It must be March...

...because here in northern California, the wild daffodils are blooming, right on time. They grow in clumps, dotting the hills all around. And they look so beautiful against the green of the emerald grass. Soon enough, the hills will dry and turn golden for the summer.

I love daffodils. The classic yellow kind. They remind me of my grandmother, The Good Grandma of the North, as I referred to her (and yes, I actually did have a Wicked Grandma of the South, too... for real, believe me). The Good Grandma of the North believed in decorating for the holidays--I credit her with my love for interior design--and for spring and Easter, she would set out huge panoramic sugar Easter eggs, the kind with a little idyllic scene inside, and lots of daffodils...

Foxes love them too.

The Weekly Reader and Scholastic Books

After kindergarten in 1970 came first grade, a time in fashion history when the dominant color in everyone’s wardrobe was plaid. I was assigned a classroom in the newer section at the rear of the school that looked onto the playground and across to my house. My teacher was Mrs. S and although she looked like she had just sucked the contents of an entire lemon, she was wonderful, kind, and fun. I liked first grade just as much as kindergarten, maybe even more because we got the Weekly Reader. Now, in the middle of this Weekly Reader was an order form from Scholastic Books for what seemed like an endless list of titles, each with a tiny paragraph description and an even more tantalizing rendering of its cover. We would check off all the books we wanted, carry the order form home and then bug, beg, and harass our parents into sending us back on the appointed day with a check for the proper amount. My mom always set a dollar limit—it was unusual for me to order more than six or seven dollars worth of books but one time I brought a check for thirteen dollars to school. Then there were some kids in the class who never brought their checks. I guess their families couldn’t afford books. I always felt bad for them; what did they read? Finally the day would come when the box would appear holding all of our precious little paperbacks. It felt like a miniature Christmas or birthday as we all tore into the box to find our books. I ordered "Rama the Gypsy Cat” because there was a drawing of a black cat with a pierced ear on the cover. I owned “The Cricket in Times Square” and “No Flying in the House,” both of which made me cry. I have since re-read them and they both describe children in scenes of loss. (Why do people do that to little kids? Walt Disney must have loved doing it because there are always scenes like Bambi’s mother getting killed or Dumbo being taken away from his mother. That had to have preyed on children’s fears of being taken away from or being abandoned by their own mothers.) But my favorite was “Tikki Tikki Tembo.” It was a story about two brothers in China (I am sure the illustrations with their beautiful, washed-out, water color palette and Asian sensibility made me appreciate an Asian aesthetic) playing near a well. One fell in and the other had to run and get help. But he had to tell his elders who fell in and unfortunately, his brother’s name was a long one: “Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Perri Berri Ruchi Pick Berri Pembo.” That name is seared into my brain. My mind connects this with a rhyme I learned around this time but I don’t know from where. I still remember it very well. “One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise, and came to arrest those two dead boys. If you don’t think my story is true, ask the blind man, he saw it too.”
--JEF