Casa del Coyote

Like the whiskey cake I posted yesterday, German Stollen is something that’s been around my parents’ house during the holidays for as long as I can remember. We also gave stollen as gifts, to neighbors, teachers, and whoever just looked like they needed a stollen.

Chef’s note: I often (living in the middle of nowhere) had no cardamon or currants.    I often used larger amounts of candied fruits and always used pecans instead of almonds.    I almost never grated the lemon and orange peels.    So, you can really wing it depending on your mood!

Soften yeast in 1/4 c. warm (NOT TOO HOT!!) water.  Combine hot milk, butter, sugar, salt & cardamon; cool to lukewarm (too hot will kill the yeast!).  Add yeast & egg; beat well.  Stir in fruits, peels & nuts.  Add enough flour to make a soft, moist dough.    Turn out on lightly floured surface.  Knead ’til smooth & elastic.  Place in greased bowl turning once to grease surface.  Cover & let rise ’til double in a warm place, about 1 hour & 45 minutes.

Punch down, turn out on lightly floured surface & divide in 3 parts (more if you want to make 4-6 small loaves).  Cover & let rest 10 minutes.  Roll each part into a 10″ X 6″ rectangle.  Without stretching, fold over long side to within 1″ of opposite side.  Seal.  Place on greased baking sheets.  Cover & let rise ’till almost double, about 1 hour.

While warm brush with glaze made of 1 c. confectioner’s sugar, sifted & mixed with 2 T. hot water and 1/2 teasp. butter or margarine.  Makes 3 large loaves or 4-6 smaller ones.

Double the recipe and make smaller loaves to give to neighbors/friends/co-workers for holiday gifts.  Great on Christmas morning, made in the shape of a wreath (cooked on a pizza pan).

Bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes (depending on how thick the loaves are – whether you make larger ones or several smaller loaves)

There are a handful of recipes that my mom has used since my childhood. I’m going to post a few of them here primarily for my own reference, so they’re not lost on scraps of paper or in random e-mails. This may be my favorite because, as a child, it was the palatable way for this little kid to get a lil’ nip o’ booze on Christmas morning before opening presents.

From The I Hate to Cook Book (on Amazon, Facebook)
By Peg Bracken

First, take the whiskey out of the cupboard and have a small snort for medicinal purposes. Now, cream the butter with the sugar and add the beaten eggs. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg, and add that to the butter mixture. Then add the milk. Now put the soda into the molasses and mix it up and add that. Then add the raisins, nuts and whiskey. Pour it into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake it at 300 degrees for 2 hours.

Your whiskey cake keeps practically forever, wrapped in aluminum foil in your refrigerator. It gets better and better, too, if you buck it up once in a while by stabbing it with an ice pick and injecting a little more whisky with an eye dropper.

Enjoy!!!!

Juliana promotes Girl Guitar & her new CD
(click image for full story)

I’ve been fortunate to have played music with some wonderful people throughout my life. Well, that trend is alive and well. Over the past couple weeks, each of my lead singers has been on Austin TV news, for being both great musicians and pretty awesome human beings.

Juliana Murphy went on Fox 7 with Girl Guitar founder Mandy Rowden. In Mandy’s words, Juliana is a Girl Guitar “success story,” having taken guitar and songwriting courses and progressing in her career through the recent release of her debut CD. Juliana was interviewed and played “Common Ground” from her EP entitled Being Known.

Madame Scorpio a News 8 Profile in Pink
(click image for full story)

Madame Scorpio’s bout with breast cancer is something I’ve been blogging, tweeting, and talking about since she was diagnosed in October of 2009. Her strength was immense and her determination awe-inspiring. And, well, she beat it.

The might of Madame Scorpio’s fight was on full public display during Scorpio Rising’s 2010 SXSW showcase, around which she scheduled her chemotherapy appointments. News 8 reporter, Crestina Chavez, took notice of Madame Scorpio’s story and decide to do a profile for News 8′s feature Profiles in Pink.

Way to kick ass, ladies. I look forward to makin’ music with each of you for many moons to come. [standing ovation]

Yesterday, attorney/political consultant Reid Nelson, Momo’s club owner and Austin Music Commission member Paul Oveisi, and I became the founding Board of Directors of the non-profit organization Friends of the Cactus Cafe. Updates, fundraising efforts, and goals of the organization will continue to develop at SaveTheCactusCafe.org.

A press release regarding this formation was broadcast yesterday.

The video is done. Madame Scorpio alone in the stark frame, singing while almost non-chalantly removing her chemotherapy-damaged tresses.

What a trip this has been.  Saturday night around midnight, after a Facebook status and a few comments, I decided to take the step of a creating a Facebook Group, Save The Cactus (Austin, Texas), in support of the Cactus Cafe’s announced closing.  After one day, there were 5,000 members.  Not yet at the 48-hour mark, the membership is approaching 10,000.

Do Austinites love their live music?  Um, yeah.

The group has hit its top-down communicative limit, as Facebook doesn’t allow for messaging or inviting folks to events if the membership exceeds 5,000.  So, more outlets have popped up:

• Save The Cactus Facebook Fan Page
• Save The Cactus at Twitter
• Save The Cactus Cafe.org Website

The group is still great, though, as people continue to flock to it to share their ideas, anger, memories, and disbelief.

While getting ready for a Scorpio Rising rehearsal, as the Facebook Group “Save The Cactus Cafe” grew at a rate of 100+ new members every 10 minutes, I received a phone call from Sarah at The Austin Citysphere news/blog/podcast, asking for an interview.

Five minutes later, I was talking on air with them regarding the first 24 hours of Austin’s collective reaction to the announcement by the Texas Union management to close the Cactus Cafe. The podcast of that discussion is available here.

Today I was delighted to receive two videos.  Two very different videos, mind you, but two nonetheless.    Both powerful, both simply produced, single-camera-shot videos created for two very different reasons for two very different purposes.

If you’ve ever seen a Juliana Murphy show, you may have caught her a capella, Bessie Smith inspired version of “Sugar In My Bowl.”  Well, John Jordan did and was taken with Juliana’s rendition enough to invite her to work-up a rendition with musical backing courtesy of him and The Miracle Waters‘ guitarist, Chris Moseley.  They shot this video to capture the vibe of what they worked up.

Then there’s the other video.  It’s not available yet, but it’s one helluva powerful bit of footage.  If you’ve caught a Scorpio Rising show and/or a Retarted Elf show back in the day, you know Madame Scorpio.  And if you don’t know yet, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Well, she’s fighting and doing a solid job of kicking its ass.  But the side effect of chemo that can’t be stopped is hair loss.  Well, she didn’t stop it but she beat it to the punch, with a beauty and artistic panache that is all her own.  When it’s released, you’ll see, set to Scorpio Rising’s “Crash N Burn,” Madame Scorpio + her beautiful, long tresses + a hair clipper.  The stark, brightly lit close-up video is a daring, straight-ahead counterattack on the cancer that surprised us all with its presence a few months ago.

Eerily, “Crash N Burn” was written before the diagnosis but its lyrics refer precisely to this sort of dramatic turn in life that “hits you like a lightning bolt.”  The video will be released prior to Scorpio Rising’s SXSW date, which Madame Scorpio has vowed to keep on the band’s schedule.

2010, right now, is crystal clear.  As the final 45 minutes of ’09 tick away, I look ahead to the next 365 and see goals as well-defined as they ever have been in my life.  I’ve got three items on my 2010 To Do List:

1. Recently, just before a Scorpio Rising show, Madame Scorpio found out she had breast cancer.  She’s begun her fight, and in 2010 I’m doing what I can to contribute to the war she and Wonderbred are waging.  Whether that be drumming at SR shows, promoting her fundraiser, just sending positive vibes…that’s my most tangible, visceral task in the upcoming year.
2. Rebuild coyotemusic.com (again).  In ’07 I re-built www.coyotemusic.com from a few dozen hard-coded HTML pages into several hundred pages, using Expression Engine CMS.  It’s big now, and has jumped from getting a few hundred pageviews a year to nearly 100,000 pageviews in ’09.  Still, I am becoming intimately aware of a CMS’ limitations.  Having recently learned Python & Django, my plan is to build coyotemusic.com in that language, on that framework, so that like my EE venture, the site not only becomes much better, but also serves as the proving ground for my delving into a new technology.
3. Find Happiness.  Things are alright on many levels.  Yet Happiness is a path, and not a destination.  Moving toward it is, then, a continual movement…a progression.  And thus shall I continue to progress, toward Happiness.

Pretty clear tasks.  None are simple, yet all are entirely doable.  And so they shall be done.

It Can Hit You Like a Lightning Bolt
- “Crash & Burn” on forthcoming Scorpio Rising EP, The Last One Standing

I’m in for an experience.  We all are–Wonderbred, Madame Scorpio, and I.  The EP is complete, recording-wise.  Five songs.  One you’ve seen and heard:  “Bodyrock It.”  There was the video in which I learned that it is harder to air drum to yourself than it is to another drummer.  But the EP is on its way and will be available by March 2010 (just in time for SXSW…smart, huh?).

Speaking of which, we did make it.  I’ve been applying since 1995 or so, via at least 7 or 8 different bands.  SXSW was a fraternity to which I’d pretty much decided that I didn’t belong, for better or worse.  The great upside is that I’ve had the pleasure of playing many non-SXSW festivals and venues over the years, and have pretty much always been pleased.  3 Penny Opera’s gig at The Spot in ’99 was great, as was The Lowelies’ at the Tribute Band Marathon at Ego’s almost 10 years later.

But Scorpio Rising is in and we’re excited.  Five new songs to share, Bixler’s got brand new fringe on a brand new jumpsuit, and we recently acquired some new lightning rigs that ratchet-up the light show a few notches.

But it’s not all flowers and sausages. The band was recently hit with the most sobering news a person can learn.

Our beloved Madame Scorpio, just prior to getting our SXSW acceptance, was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Yes, her.  Yes, the ‘c’ word.  The really bad ‘c’ word.  We’re talking the same breasts that dazzled Retarted Elf concertgoers via the breathtaking silhouettes of the famed shadow dancer (some of her non-shadowed dancing is here).  Cancer has had the gall to fuck with what could be considered icons in Austin’s music history.  It doesn’t know what it’s gotten itself into.

The band, and Madame Scorpio herself, has been through the stages–anger, disbelief, motivation, annoyance, and even levity.  She has already debated gluing small mirrors on her head after it sheds its hair, so she can grace the SXSW stage adorning a human discoball head.

We have no idea how this will impact our showcase three short months from now, though we expect it not to.  Madame Scorpio will have, by then, been through four chemo sessions.  The first was a couple days ago, and the side effects were surprisingly manageable.

From where I sit (me, aka DJ Bixler), I will help the cause as I can–which is by spreading the word.  I plan to write about this experience as viewed from the drum throne/faux-DJ-booth.  I have already seen courage and positivity from both Madame Scorpio and Wonderbred that provides great hope.  I don’t expect to see anything but that until the word “remission” manifests itself.