Adoxography

VeganLunchBox makes the best lunches EVER

Cue the scary music and ghost sounds, because it’s time for the Halloween Lunch Box! It’s a ghastly Mummy Calzone on a bed of mummy wrappings (torn paper towel), with a bucket of blood (pizza sauce) for dipping.

Two gruesome shrunken heads (a baked apple with clove eyes) rise up from a swamp of blackberry applesauce, and a little paper pumpkin holds dessert.

I saw this clever calzone in a Halloween recipe booklet at the grocery store. I veganized it by using my recipe for Broccoli Calzones in Vegan Lunch Box . I divided the wholegrain pizza dough into five pieces instead of eight, in order to roll out each piece and trim them into triangle shapes. I used a pizza wheel to cut the sides into strips, then filled the center with broccoli and tofu “ricotta”. I rounded the top strip of dough into a head and overlapped the dough strips all the way down to form the mummy body. Bits of black olives are the eyes.

For dessert, a little pumpkin filled with candy and confetti is a nice way to make a small amount of candy feel like a very special treat. Just wrap one or two pieces of candy and some Halloween confetti or toys in a circle of orange tissue paper. Twist the top and seal with a bit of green floral tape.

Verdict: “It’s very important to decide whether to eat the head or feet first,” shmoo informs. “I ate the head!” He was delighted by the shrunken heads. “Weird!” he says. I warned him ahead of time not to try to eat the cloves!

My hair is thick and fairly wavy; I usually put in some sort of straightening gel or conditioner or something when it’s wet to tame the frizzies and flyaways. Kiehl’s Creme with Silk Groom works pretty well,

especially if you can get it as a sample from the store. Vavoom is also pretty good and has been even better once I found out that you’re supposed to put it on immediately after getting out of the water - no towel dry first.

My new favorite, however, is the $3 bottle of vitamin E oil from Target, put on the ends after conditioning, and then rinsing it out. Highly recommended!

not perfect, but perfectly beautiful

good music and probably my favorite trailer of the year

Courtesy of Now-Again Records; Members of the band gather around a promotional poster in this undated photo.

Link to listen

Kashmere: A High-School Band’s Staying Power

All Things Considered, August 4, 2006 ·

Courtesy of Now-Again Records

What is now regarded as something of a phenomenon started out much more modestly, as a music teacher’s attempt to open some doors for high school students in Houston’s historically black Kashmere Gardens neighborhood.

High school stage performances often prove to be nothing more than memories, but Kashmere High School in northeast Houston has spawned a sensation that’s still drawing listeners, some 40 years later.

Conrad Johnson, the school’s band master, formed the Kashmere Stage Band with some of his very best students and took them to compete at high school festivals. The band became a national phenomenon — not just at band competitions, but in the world of commercial popular music.

Today, Johnson is 92 and physically frail, but he remembers vividly a concert nearly 40 years ago that changed his life: Otis Redding was performing.

“[Redding] was kicking!” Johnson says. “He let all of his men perform, sing, play, and do everything. So I saw that and I went back and [asked my band], ‘If I were to get you to do a show while you’re playing and teach it to you, do you think you could do it?’ My band said, ‘If you believe we can do it, we can do it.’”

At first, judges didn’t know what to make of the kids from Kashmere in their platform shoes and matching crushed-velvet suits. Their impeccably choreographed moves were more James Brown than high school big band, and the music was often an original funk composition by Johnson himself.

But KSB was soon winning national championships, and a larger-than-life reputation as undefeatable. For 10 years, even with constant changes in the lineup as kids graduated, KSB was considered by some to be not only the nation’s best stage band, but one of the best funk bands — period.

Between 1968 and 1978, KSB recorded eight studio albums. As Johnson neared retirement in 1978, the band broke up, and before long, the band was largely forgotten. But not by everyone. Kashmere’s recordings became prized by hip-hop producers and DJs, who sampled them and played them in clubs.

Several of Conrad Johnson’s students have gone on to become professional musicians. Jazz drummer and former Kashmere band member Bubbha Thomas says of Johnson, “There’s not a value you can put on him because he’s touched so many people. Not only people who went to school under him, like me, but people in the community that he’s influenced.”

The recordings Johnson made of the band continue to influence musicians to this day, and are being re-released on a new CD compilation, Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974.

David Brown is a reporter for KUT in Austin, Texas.