Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 4

Cover reveal! 17 “Hot & Sticky” Summer Reads from @PassionateInk

Summer beach reading season is almost here, and so is the release of a new anthology from 17 authors in Passionate Ink, including myself! Passionate Ink is the leading organization for erotica and erotic romance authors (and was founded by Sylvia Day back in the day!) and we’re getting together this collection of delicious novellas and stories as a charity for ProLiteracy. The cover is revealed TODAY!~ and pre-order links are going live! Scroll on down…

Set your summer beach read list on fire with seventeen scrumptious stories in one BIG package.

Join Passionate Ink’s celebration of all things summer with their release of “Hot & Sticky.” These steamy shorts will heat you up, wet you down, and make you melt. From historical dalliances, fantasy monsters, shifters, and sci-fi, to fated mates, friends to lovers, and parties of two (or why choose), there’s a perfect flavor to fill your ice cream cone.

Authors Ryley Banks, David Camily, Lil DeVille, W.D. Drames, Jordyn Kross, Darah Lace, Katherine McLellan, Minette Moreau, Leslie Morris Noyes, Michal Scott, Belle Sloane, Cecilia Tan, Vixey Todd, Marie Tuhart, Mandy Valentine, Cadence Vonn, and Sharla Wylde have joined together to create this scorching summer-themed collection. Proceeds for this anthology will be donated to ProLiteracy. ProLiteracy is the leading resource and champion for adult education and literacy worldwide.

My own story in this one is a steampunk erotic novella that has made the rounds to various steampunk anthology and magazine editors over the past 10 years or so, all of whom said that the writing and historical / alternate history details were wonderful… but it was WAAAAAYYYY too sexy for their publications. Story of my life, eh? Then along came this anthology and it just seemed like a perfect fit. I’ll post more about it in a separate post, but for now, it’s called “The Blossoming of Summer” and you can preorder it with the links below the cut and above the now-revealed cover!

LINKS: Amazon | Books2Read | Goodreads | Bookbub

Eulogy for Dr. Sergio S. Tan, my father

My Dad passed away a few weeks ago. This past weekend was his funeral, and here’s the address I gave to the over-100 friends, family, and neighbors who gathered to celebrate and honor him.

I wrote this eulogy in my mind so many times.

There was the time in the ’90s when Dad was supposed to fly to the Philippines where his own mother was on her deathbed, only to land in the ICU with 90% collapsed lungs. Thank goodness he didn’t get on that plane, and after a hospital stay he was just fine.

Then there was the time he had a heart attack in Myrtle Beach. I get a text from my mother saying “I think Dad’s having a heart attack. My phone battery is dying, call you later.” Later, of course, Dad’s main worry was whether he’d be able to watch the Yankees in the World Series from his hospital bed. And he was fine.

Later, as most of you know, Alzheimer’s dementia set in, and in some ways we lost the Dad we knew years ago, and we grieved for him, but even though the intellectual part of the relationship was gone, the emotional part remained. Many times during the past five years I’ve thought his days were numbered and wondered what I would say at this moment, right here. So here goes.

Dad wasn’t a big philosopher. He didn’t sit around debating life, the universe, and everything. He did tell me, though, that when he was in the ambulance on his way to the heart trauma center in Myrtle Beach, that he made a deal with God, where if he survived the heart attack, then he’d start going to church again. And he did.

He was the kind of guy who if he made a promise, he kept it. When I was growing up, he wanted me to be a doctor like him. I told him from about age five that I wanted to be a writer. When I was around ten or eleven it got more serious. He’d try to talk me into going to the hospital with him and I’d say why? I’m going to be a writer. Instead of trying to dissuade me, he tried to motivate me and teach me a lesson about how difficult it is to be a writer at the same time. He said, I’ll make you a deal. For every dollar you earn as a writer while you live in my house, I’ll match it. Okay, sounds good, right.

Well, I went out and got myself a job as a monthly columnist for Superteen Magazine. They paid $50 a month, which was very good in 1983, when the minimum wage was around $2.50. So I went to him and I said hey dad, remember that deal? And he handed over a check to match every check I got. I sometimes sold articles for $100 a piece, too. It was great motivation for me, and he never complained or tried to back out of the deal. Thanks to the Dad Matching Fund I made more as a freelance writer when I was 16 than my friends who worked part time after school as bank tellers.

I think my dad was often confused about the expectations of being an American Dad, but he did his best to fulfill those expectations, whether they were ours or society’s. He absolutely loved baseball and the New York Yankees, but he didn’t play baseball as a child growing up in the Philippines. But he dutifully brought me to the sporting goods store in the mall when I was ten so we could pick out baseball gloves and attempt to play catch. The thing is he didn’t really know how to catch or throw, but he gamely went along with it. I didn’t know either, so we just muddled our way through it. This was the same Dad who taught me to ride a bicycle, and I didn’t learn until afterward that he didn’t know how to ride a bicycle! What mattered to me, really, was that I got to spend time with him, throwing the ball around, or just sitting together, the two of us squished into one recliner together, watching the baseball game on TV. When he went into hospice care last month, I know a lot of his memories were already gone. But when they put the hospital bed in the living room in front of the TV, what he wanted was for me to squish in next to him and watch the game.

Okay. One last thing I want to say, since I know Dad couldn’t really say it himself toward the end of his life, was how much he loved being part of the community in Heritage Springs. All of your kindness, love, and support of him over the past several years has meant the world to me and my family, and to him, and I am joyful that he lives on in all of your memories. Thank you.

—-
FYI, a short version of his obituary appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger: .

The full length version can be found on the Trinity Memorial Gardens website: https://www.trinitymemorial.com/obituaries/Sergio-Tan/#!/Obituary

Editing Beyond the Non-Western World: Notes on a panel from ICFA44 in 2023

This morning was the ICFA panel on “Editing Beyond the Non-Western World,” which was intended to feature guest of honor Oghenechovwe Donal Ekpeki, as well as myself, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Clarke, and moderator Mimi Mondal. As it has turned out, Oghenechovwe was detained when he traveled to the USA to attend the NAACP Image Awards and denied a visa for entry, meaning he could not attend ICFA, either. And I am missing the convention also, even though I’m currently only a 90-minute drive away, because I’m in the Tampa area where my father’s health is failing. (He was giving last rites in the hospital a few days ago when his doctors believed his expiration was imminent, so I cancelled my plans to go to Orlando, but now that he is home and having home hospice care, he seems to be holding up…! Thank you everyone for all your good wishes and prayers!)

Although the panel room had no WIFI, Mimi had the idea to try to bring us into the panel via Zoom using her own cellular data plan, and this effort was largely successful, but in many ways was a perfect metaphor for the difficulties of publishing writers from outside the USA or Great Britain. One common theme of the panel’s remarks was that there are systemic and logistical barriers to entry for writers from the non-Western world, including issues with currency conversion and difficulty of access to markets and source materials. And another theme was how often the only entities redressing the situation were individuals applying their own resources.

The panel opened with the panelists introducing themselves, and one common thread among us has been our tendency to go out and start things for ourselves. I founded Circlet Press to publish erotic sf/f when no one else would; Mary Anne Mohanraj founded Strange Horizons, but also Clean Sheets at a time when erotica and sexuality markets were disappearing, and also the Speculative Literature Foundation; Oghenechovwe had to take the lead in publishing the anthologies of African science fiction that he is well-known for; and of course Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld.

What follows are some notes on some of the remarks made on the panel, based on my notes. I didn’t attempt to capture a true word for word quotation except here and there, and I don’t have notes on my own statements since of course I was talking at the time and not writing things down. But I thought it would be useful to blog this portion of it.

Neil’s direction of Clarkesworld has included the approach of including a translated work in (almost) every issue, “to normalize it.” He told the story that when he embarked on the project of publishing sf/f in translation, many people urged him to “do a special issue” or an anthology, but his argument was he wanted to normalize reading and enjoying the varied perspectives from non-English-speaking writers. “Too often they are treated as a special case.” He looked into the history of such anthologies and came across an International Science Fiction anthology edited by Frederick Pohl. Lester Del Rey wrote the introduction to that volume and in it he blamed the US science fiction market for ignoring the rest of the world. Neil tracked down the exact quote: “…[O]ur stories are sent to large numbers of fans and translators all over the world, while our own authors and fans seldom get even a hint of the work being done in our field by others. We’re in serious danger of becoming the most provincial science-fiction readers—and writers—on earth.”

Del Rey was prescient. That’s the situation we find ourselves in today.

Mary Anne Mohanraj spoke about working with writers from some other countries, including Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and finding both the language and the style of story many writers were telling felt dated, like they were stuck in the 1960s, and in fact when she went to bookstores in India and Pakistan, the works of sf she found on the shelf were “classics” of sf like Heinlein from the 1960s. “But they’d never heard of Samuel Delany, who I consider one of the all-time greats,” she lamented.

Ebooks and the online magazines have helped this problem of access somewhat, Clarke pointed out, but you can also track the influence of what gets translated out of English into other countries “like an invasive species.” Everyone on the panel lamented the phenomenon of English-language sf writers being lionized over local and indigenous writers.

Some paraphrases from my notes:

Mimi Mondal: I traveled all over the area of India where I am from taking photos of the sf section of bookstores, and the only writer of color on those shelves was Rebecca Kuang. I tried to handsell my own book some times and they are almost less interested in Indian writers than the white imports. They want “Seth Dickinson.” That sounds like a “science fiction writer” to them.

Neil Clarke: There’s a pedestal effect. The US market is still considered the “important one.”

Mary Ann Mohanraj: While editing a Pakistani writers anthology, I learned Urdu has a tradition of long, lyrical narratives, and you see it reflected in the style of the writing, even in English. But to a commercial fiction editor or reader it comes across as slow.

Mimi Mondal: The American market also has expectations on “foreign” writers. A women who writes bestsellers in India, but whose themes are very dark and very sexual, her literary agent could not sell these works in English. It isn’t that she isn’t a good writer or even a proven seller! It’s that the US doesn’t “expect” that type of material from a South Asian woman.

Oghenechovwe Donal Ekpeki: Regarding expectiations, so much of editing and reviewing is driven by expectations. Reviewers will say “this was good, and that was good, but I still don’t like it.” They can identify why a story is good or why the writing is good, but not why they don’t like it. Reviewers need to be familiar with a type of story because it will shape thei expectations. The stories that come in an “African” anthology get much more appreciated, get much more notice for awards, get much more praise from reviewers, than the stories in “bigger venues (i.e. Asimov’s) but that don’t have the “African” label on them. The label sets people’s expectations. It won’t be like Asimov’s which has only had a few African writers. The stories in my anthologies get more awards instead of disappearing. By having a space that is defined as our own, it helps to create that expectation. Publishing the translations in Clarkesworld helps to normalize them, but. These days I am now a popular name in short fiction. The magazines have built a reputation for me, so I don’t get lost, but others do.

Neil Clarke: We definitely need both approaches, a two-pronged approach to the problem.

Mimi Mondal: Certain subgenres have narrow expectations as well, like urban fantasy is supposedly saturated, where the readership just wants material from the same ten writers over and over.

Mary Anne Mohanraj: One thing I feel I should mention is the effect of theocracy. I went to Pakistan to work with 14 writers, mostly age 31-40, ten women and four men. And I didn’t really understand how much social pressure they are under in a theocracy. If they wanted to write about LGBTQ issues, for example. Some of the women were queer and they told me I was the only other queer writer they had met. It’s literally illegal to publish blasphemy. These students had never read Salman Rushdie because of the fatwa. One student had a story that had the concept of god as female and the whole class was like you can never publish that, or only under a pseudonym, or you’d be in danger. I’ve never had to deal with that level of threat in my own creative life.

Mimi Mondal: The thing is within various cultures there is a certain way to write about queerness that is coded. And everyone within that context understand what you are writing about. But then if you send it to an English editor, they are like “what? who’s gay in this?”

Cecilia Tan: Ditto what Mimi said. One experience I had editing erotic sf/f was that we often needed to encourage the writers to put the sex scene in that they had left out, because they assumed that it wouldn’t be allowed. And I’d have to explain that the reason Circlet Press exists is to publish those things that no one else will.

Audience member question: I was in a book club that read Remote Control (by Nnedi Okorafor) and they just hated it because it’s not told in a traditional European-style narrative. How do I convince them to branch out and try new things?

Neil Clarke: Well, you can’t just “convince them,” but the great thing about short fiction is that you can expose people to things in small doses. You aren’t going to like every story in a magazine, but if you read them all you will find some you like and some you don’t. It’s one way to expose people to some styles and ideas they might not stick with in a whole novel.

Cecilia Tan: One interesting parallel to this is the world of food and cuisine. When calamari was first introduced the menus in the US, it was considered a weird and exotic food, but there was overfishing and a surplus so the US government literally encouraged restaurants to buy it up and start serving it. And their suggestion was make it an appetizer, because that’s less threatening. People will try something new if they know they’re only getting a little taste of it and not the whole main dish. It worked so well that calamari is now the number one appetizer served in the USA today! [At the time I said octopus, but calamari is actually squid, of course…]

Mimi Mondal: Academic syllabi are also a place where people are open to trying new and different things. They expect to be exposed to things in a class. Mold some young minds!

Mary Anne Mohanraj: I like to share syllabi on the SLF site! The canon is rigid and annoying, but it can be changed and expanded, slowly.

And then our internet connection crapped out, so I didn’t get to hear what folks’ closing statements were, if any, but thank you very much Mimi for making sure we off-site folks were able to put in our two cents! I hope to be back at ICFA in person next year.

Update: Oghenechovwe Donal Ekpeki is fundraising to help settle the visa issues. See more details at the GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/f/oghenechovwe-ekpeki-visa-processing-legal-fees

Support BENT for LEATHER, Cecilia Tan’s short story collection

Guess what I did? I launched a Kickstarter in the wee hours, hoping to be able to publish a collection of my queerest, kinkiest short stories in time for International Ms. Leather and Bootblack in April.

My previous short story collections have jumbled my kinky and vanilla erotica together, and have also mixed my heterosexual stories with my queer ones. BENT FOR LEATHER, the title I’ve chosen for this one, is specifically the stories that inhabit the particular queer corner of the leather bar in my soul where my lesbian, butch, and transmasculine characters hang out.

Over on the Kickstarter campaign page I’ve listed the table of contents, and I’ve described a bit more about my aspirations for this book… as well as why it took until I put this table of contents together to realize that my own relationship to my gender has always been one of my central themes. I feel like it’s only in the past 5-6 years that I really have been dealing with my “gender stuff,” but obviously, it’s been there all along.

The main thing I’d like to spend the Kickstarter money on is professional proofreading, design, and layout. If we exceed the initial goal, the stretch goal I’d really like to hit is the one that makes me write an all new story to add to the book. That would of course be the most fun of all!

Please help me spread the word if you are able to.

2023: The Year of Speeches

Speaking engagement plans for 2023 are shaping up:

March 15-18: ICFA, Orlando, FLApril 20-23: IMsLBB Piscataway, NJMay 19-22: MISTI-Con 10th Anniversary, Laconia, NHJune 5: StoryStudio workshop onlineJuly 5-9: SABR National Convention, ChicagoJuly 13-16: Readercon, Boston areaAugust 20-23: EFACon, Alexandria, VA

Okay, maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call this The Year of Speeches, but it’s what it feels like. Yes, I’ve been a keynote speaker or guest of honor for a few conventions before, including HELIOsphere and the OutWrite festival. But this year there will be two really disparate ones that really frame my extremes:

International Ms. Leather & Bootblack
aka IMsLBB, is a leather title contest that has been running since 1987, and has been a destination convention and play party event for leatherwomen and kinksters, including transmasculine folks and trans women, for over 30 years.

I was slated to deliver the keynote at the 2020 conference. The organizers had booked my airline tickets and I was all geared up to go.

Then COVID lockdowns hit, and of course the convention was cancelled. IMsLBB went virtual for a couple of years, underwent a big turnover in who owns/runs the contest, and this year they’re re-launching the in-person convention on the East Coast (!) for the first time in years, and I’m finally going to get to give that keynote speech!

It’ll be a very different speech than I had been planning in spring 2020. The world has changed, and just the act of getting a bunch of kinky folks together in a building–which was always radical–has a different significance than it used to. The BDSM community has always been focused on “safety.” In the wake of both the #MeToo movement and the global pandemic, many people’s relationship to “safety” has been transformed.

That means many people’s relationship to pleasure itself has been transformed, and all kinds of negotiations have to take place around even the “simple” pleasures of going out to eat or dropping by a friend’s for a cup of tea.

I believe tickets are still on sale for IMsLBB if you’re interested: April 20-23 in Piscataway, NJ: https://www.imslbb.org/2023event

In a complete change of subject, I’ll also be giving the keynote at the Editorial Freelancers Association conference in August. This is a conference for professional proofreaders, editors, and related fields. As someone who has cobbled together my freelance income successfully for the past (*checks notes*) 29 years (?!?!) I guess I qualify to give a bit of advice!

I used to often say to my interns and assistants that one of the good things about book publishing is that if you miss a typo in a book, or miss a deadline by one day, or misspell an author’s name… at least no one dies or loses a limb. We often feel tremendous pressure to be perfect, but if we’re not, it’s important to keep it in perspective.

But that doesn’t mean we should think of our jobs as boring or meaningless. And of course, in the face of relentless misinformation and hate being poured out all over social media and even “respected” outlets like the New York Times, perhaps publishing’s stakes are pretty high after all.

I’ll be ruminating on that a lot as I prepare that speech.

Early bird registration for EFACon is on now (get $100 off): https://www.eventleaf.com/e/EFACON2023 (August 17-19, Alexandria, VA)

Other appearances on my schedule

I’ll be at ICFA on a panel on editing in March, entitled “Editing Beyond the Western World” moderated by Mimi Mondal, with me, Neil Clarke (of Clarkesworld), Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Mary Anne Mohanraj.

The big excitement in May: I’ll be at the MISTI-Con Reunion (at the Margate Resort, where it all began) where me and my trans and nonbinary Harry Potter fandom peeps will mourn what’s been happening with JKR becoming a louder and louder voice in the anti-trans movement. I believe there are still some tickets left if you’d like to join this group of highly creative Harry Potter fanatics. The group includes many queer and trans fans, and in particular transmasculine folks, which is why I’ve always felt the most at home at MISTI-Con out of all the fandom spaces I’ve inhabited over the years.

I also expect I’ll be at Readercon! I’ve been trying to get two initiatives off the ground in recent years, one for a track of workshops for sf/f editors at Readercon, and one for an annual award for works of erotic sf/f (currently named the Diadem Award(s)), but I just haven’t had the braincells to get them going. It feels like since menopause and the pandemic, I just can’t make my brain do what it used to do. Everything takes longer. But I will get to them eventually!

I am probably NOT going to the Worldcon in Chengdu, China, (which is having various problems, not least of which is COVID, but also the convention center that was supposed to be built by now isn’t yet done, and so on…). Given the Chinese government’s recent anti-gay actions and their penchant for relocating their own citizens to “re-education camps” etc… I feel like as someone who writes queer characters of Chinese descent and who is an outspoken advocate for gay and trans rights, my presence there would just endanger anyone who might be a fan of mine.

Online Workshops, Coming Soon

On Monday, June 5, I’ll be teaching How (And Why) To Write a Sex Scene for StoryStudio Chicago. Registration will go live for that soon!

Also the class I mentioned in my last update, Writing Bisexual Characters, for Writing the Other, will be going live sometime soon as well! I’m just waiting for WTO to get back to me about when it’ll go up. The first 10 days after a class is live there will be Q&A interaction between me and those taking the class, as well. I’ll post everywhere when I find out the exact dates.

Duck Day 2022: Bistronomy

Now that I finally posted last year’s Duck Day notes and photos, I can do this year’s, which had the theme of “Bistronomy.” This year’s meal had the constraint on it that we were going to be in Singapore for the TwoSet Violin concert and wouldn’t get back until basically 6 days before Thanksgiving — functionally 5 days since jet lag wiped out an entire day — and normally we would have to start more than a week in advance to both source all the ingredients and do other prep of pickling, growing sprouts or herbs, etc etc. So we knew we had to keep ourselves from getting too ambitious, and we wouldn’t have time to run test recipes.

As it turns out, we’ve got so much stuff in our larders and already in process, though, and have stockpiled so many cooking techniques over the past several years, that we could pull it off in 5 days without straining ourselves too badly.

This year’s meal was highly influenced by last year’s trip to Paris. (The trip to Singapore was of course also an influence but there’s no way we were going to come home and try to work out Peranakan cuisine in 5 days, so it’s only there in a few spots.) In addition to the fancy ADMO dinner, we also managed to eat at Septime, one of the leading restaurants in the “bistronomy” movement. If you are from the Boston area you might have eaten at Journeyman, which was also a very bistronomic place. The Green Goddess in New Orleans was another notable US entry to this type of restaurant, and my fave is Edison Food Lab, Jeanie Pierola’s original place in Tampa (still there!).

“Bistronomy” was coined when various chefs, trained in the usual French haute cuisine style, found themselves not wanting to spend seven figures on tableware and having to have a huge staff needed for the typical fancy restaurant, and instead preparing a hyperlocal, constantly changing menu in more casual settings. (I’d almost call it “food forward” if it weren’t ludicrous to imply that stuffier, more traditional restaurants were not somehow also about the food…?)

Among the hallmarks of bistronomy: pickling your own stuff in house, growing your own herbs (since you are a small place and not trying to do 200+ covers a night…), inventive “outside the box” fusion…. heeyyyyyy, does this not sound like the way corwin and I cook and eat all the time?? A second theme emerged, though, which was basically: reuse – recycle – repurpose.

So he bought the Bistronomy book by Jane Sigel (get it on Bookshop, Amazon, Indie boosktores) just to look at recipes and read up on the history a bit more, and we planned our menu while jaunting around Singapore. (I think we were at the Michelin-starred restaurant Meta, which is deeply Korean while at the same time being very much in the French tradition of fine dining, when we came up with most of the menu.)

I drew my design inspiration from the menu look at Edison Food Lab, Jeanie Pierola’s foodie destination in Tampa, FLReady to go out to the table with the finger-food amuse

Amuse: Duck liver mousse
in a banana bread crust with savory chocolate sauce
–last minute addition: also in a cucumber round

I got the idea for this course when corwin mentioned he had already made duck liver mousse and so it could be incorporated into the meal without all the usual prep time. I was inspired by the dessert they serve at The Black Hoof in Toronto which is essentially grilled banana bread and foie gras, with chocolate sauce, and it’s amazing.

I ended up serving the mousse two ways, one in the crust and one in cucumber rounds, because prepping cucumbers for another dish ended up making handy cucumber cups as “waste.” Why waste?

I started with my usual banana bread recipe, which is the one in the Fannie Farmer cookbook, except I use 4 bananas instead of 3, swap in pecans (freshly toasted) for the walnuts, add a heaping cup of chocolate chips, and a pinch of cinnamon and a bunch of freshly grated nutmeg. I let the bananas go black on the counter and then put them in the freezer until it’s time to make banana bread, but I’d done this already so the black bananas were ready to go when prep day T minus 4 came.

I made one mini loaf with no chocolate chips in it, sliced it and toasted it, and then made that into breadcrumbs. Then I followed a mix of recipes on making graham cracker crust. (You basically add melted butter to the crumbs until they hold together, then press into a pie pan and bake for 10 minutes.) The only problem with this is to get the graham cracker crust to hold together, it actually needs to be fairly thick, and the teensy tart tins ended up a little too full of crust with not enough room for the mousse.

If I do this again, I think my strategy will be to try to form the crusts out of untoasted banana bread bits and then bake that. Or maybe just do it on toasted rounds of banana bread?

The savory chocolate sauce was basically shallots, olive oil, red wine, and 80% bitter chocolate, thickened with some corn starch slurry. I had tried to follow a recipe for making a savory chocolate sauce to go on filet mignon, but the proportions were all wrong and I subbed in red wine for the beef stock and Worcestershire, so I just winged it and it came out as I intended.

Had to resort to teensy disposable tart tins to get the crumbs to pack properlyLeftover crumb crust mixture not quite enough for a full size pie, so I made small handsize tarts and later I whipped up a no-bake cheese cake sort of thing (cream cheese, sour cream, whipped heavy cream, sugar) and filled them…

Opening Cocktail: Japonaise Hi-Negroni
ヴェルモット, dry curaçao, carbonated ginger water

Repurposing the ginger water that was generated when I made the mignardise, but carbonating it, and mixing it with dry curaçao liqueur and Japanese “vermouth” (“verumotto” made from sake instead of grape wine), served with twists of lemon and orange peel.

corwin pouring the miniature hi-ball

Bread & Butter
pain au levain with beurre normandie

The bread and butter course went over so well last year we decided to do it again. corwin leveled up his baking again, too. I did not make my own butter this year, though, instead opting for a Normandy butter that they sold us at the cheese shop with the words “butter so good you could serve it on your cheese plate.”

corwin and his loafHe bought a fancy slashing tool a while back. Here’s the results.

Composed Salad
Charred “miniature leek”
Pickled root veg (beet/orange, carrot/lemon, hakurei turnip/yuzu)
Compressed cucumber, ponzu
Shredded napa greens
White kimchi
with a roasted hakurei turnip-miso dressing

If you’ve followed my food blogging for a while, you know I hate salad. I love vegetables! Even uncooked ones! But I dislike eating — or serving — a big bowl of greens that no one likes. Okay, some people do like it, but I don’t, and most of the people at my table who would claim they do, they don’t actually LIKE munching on a pile of flavorless rabbit food, but they think they are supposed to. The idea of a “composed salad” changes all that. Journeyman used to make the absolute best composed salads, so I hope this lived up to their example.

Composed salads plated and ready to go out to the table.

I had started the white kimchi (something we were served at Meta), a few days before, using a Asian pear and rice flour slurry in the fermenting paste instead of the more colorful ingredients. (loosely based on a recipe on KoreanBapSang.com but very loosely) I only let it ferment 24 hours before putting it in the fridge on Wednesday. (We make regular kimchi with red chili and green scallion and carrot slivers regularly.)

Rosettes of white kimchi (napa cabbage) ready to ferment

The “miniature leek” is slightly an in-joke on chefs who sub ingredients (Todd English once infamously used “sun-dried grapes” on a menu when he had to sub raisins in for some other dried fruit…) — it’s just a scallion, since leeks are currently out of season and a full size leek would have been ridiculous.

The bright sauce on the leek was supposed to be a hollandaise sabayon (foam), but the emulsion broke and it just dribbled out of the ISI. But it was delicious anyway, so we just went with it.

The three pickled root veg (beet/orange, carrot/lemon, hakurei turnip/yuzu) were all done with the Japanese salt pickle method, where you just pickle it in the salt for an hour before rinsing it and then leaving it to sit with the various citrus zests. Very simple, but amazing flavor. (We have yuzu zest in the freezer from previous years when we bought a whole shipment of yuzu.)

Compressed cucumbers, with the “miniature leeks” in the backgroundAs I was melon-balling the hothouse cucumber, I thought hmmmm what could we do with these rounds? I filled them with duck liver mousse and served them with the amuse.

The compressed cucumber was done by melon-balling the cucumber and then putting it in the chamber vac with a ponzu, soy sauce, and sesame oil dressing.

Not everyone has a chamber vac. You could make do with just bagging them and sticking them in the fridge.

Once the cukes came out of their sauce, the shredded napa greens were then tossed in the leftover liquid. (The greens were left over from making the white kimchi.)

The final dressing was corwin’s idea: roasting hakurei turnips with miso butter, then pureeing the whole shebang. You could just eat this on toast it’s that tasty.

“Cassoulet” with duck confit, toulouse sausage, and been puree“Cassoulet” plated and ready to serve.

Deconstructed Cassoulet Redux
Duckleg confit, toulouse duck sausage
White bean puree, crouton
Echalote vietnamienne

This is a redux because many years ago we did a deconstructed cassoulet, but this one is slightly different from that one. corwin already had the sausage made from a previous gourmet meal, so that saved him a lot of prep time.

Where we didn’t save time was we had one disaster. We had duck legs in inventory already in the chest freezer. One of our m.o.’s is to make a large batch of duck confit, some of which gets used in the meal, and a lot of which gets put away for us to eat during the winter. We do the confit in individual bags in the sous vide.

The house has been under reconstruction since the latter half of 2020 (construction would have started sooner but… pandemic). All four bathrooms have been gutted and two of the four have been rebuilt… and the third one, the one off the dining room, was supposed to be ready for use by the date of Thanksgiving. Well, they did get a functional toilet and sink in place, and tile partway up the wall. And they did get the lights working.

corwin knew the electricians were coming to work on the lights first thing in the morning, but somehow he didn’t think to set the sous vide station up with a UPS (or even in another section of the house where maybe it wouldn’t be affected). Of course the electricians cut off the power to the kitchen and dining room while they worked on the fixtures.

And of course that meant that the Anova circulator (one of several different models of sous vide circulator we have) re-set to its default temperature, which is 40 degrees C (instead of 68 C, which it had been at). 40 degrees C is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. A great temperature for growing bacteria and not a great temperature for cooking, for that reason. By the time we found this out, the duck had been sitting around in the “danger zone” for a few hours. Not wanting to risk the health of all our guests, we had to throw it all away.

And then we had to scramble around trying to find 9 duck legs within 12 hours or there wouldn’t be enough time to confit them. Thank goodness Savenor’s did have exactly 9 legs they could sell! Whew!

The white been puree was an artisanal “yellow eye” bean that corwin sourced from Rancho Gordo, I think, and cooked it down with mirepoix, a little bacon fat, etc and then topped with house made breadcrumbs.

Oolong, lychee, and gin

Singaporean Palate Cleanser a la Candlenut
Oolong-Lychee-(Optional Gin)

One of the other fancy meals we ate while in Singapore was at the one Peranakan cuisine restaurant that has a Michelin star: Candlenut. They have an interestingly robust mocktails program, and one of the ones I tried was described as oolong and lychee. Turns out that these two flavors meld exquisitely.

If you take really nice “jade” (i.e. not heavily roasted) oolong mixed with the liquid from canned lychee nut, about 2:1 tea to syrup, you get a very close approximation to what we drank at Candlenut. And if you want to make it alcoholic, you can add one part Plymouth Gin, and it comes out fantastic.

The only drawback to serving the whole lychee in the drink is the resemblance to a human eyeball… (no one seemed to mind, though)Seared smoked duck breast on a nest of crispy shoestring potatoes and under arugula.

“Steak” frites
Smoked duck breast, with duckfat fried shoestring potato and traditional arugula

Steak frites is one of the classic bistrot meals, of course, but this is a duck themed meal, so instead we lightly smoked the duck (with the “smoking gun” and sealed containers, just letting it hang around in the smoke).

corwin tried a recipe earlier in the week to see if shoestring fries could come out not-soggy without a double-fry. Alas, they could not. However, you can do the first fry a day ahead!

Duck breasts in smokeFries being double-friedThey tell me the arugula on top is traditional.

Cheese Course
Comte Gran Cru • Delice de Bourgogne • Roquefort Carles • Brebis du Haut Bearn •
house yuzu marmalade
amarena cherries, truffled marcona almond

This was mostly a store-bought course because we don’t milk our own goats for cheese or anything like that (yet…) nor truffle our own almonds (though we have bought a truffle in the past). But we did have the yuzu marmalade on hand from a previous year where we bought a whole case of yuzu.

We decided on individual cheese plates to keep cross contamination to a minimum, since several folks are getting over bad colds (first colds since 2020…)

Dessert:
Chocolate lava cake, vanilla ice cream, toffee shortbread

This is the classic chocolate lava cake we’ve been making by Jean-Georges Vongerichten out of Food & Wine magazine since the 1990s. And corwin has been making this “Philadelphia” style vanilla ice cream for a while. Every time he makes it we say just make more of it. No egg, no custard, just full fat cream and real vanilla.

It wanted something crispy as well, so I made what was supposed to be a shortbread cookie from the Smitten Kitchen. Mine spread more than theirs because I used the Kerrygold butter and I replaced the chocolate chips with chopped up toffee bars from Trader Joe’s. But the result was still delicious, and mostly crispy in a slightly different way from expected. I used the spatula to shape the round spread cookies while they were still hot out of the oven to be triangular for better elegance and edge.

Unshaped toffee shortbread cookies, coolingToffee shortbread cookies hot from the oven

Tea, coffee, and Mignardise
No one wanted coffee, and half the guests were too full for even tea, but the ones that lingered a bit got to try my candied ginger, which I finally got to work by equally heeding and ignoring all recipes I found.

The recipes varied in how much sugar, how much water, how long to cook it, whether to toss in granulated sugar at the end or whether it should come out sort of crystallized as it is… a huge variety.

In the end I used an equal weight of sliced ginger and sugar, cut the ginger by hand instead of fussing with the mandoline, put it and enough water to cover it well in a medium pot, and boiled it until the ginger was looking kind of translucent and “done,” about a half hour. The syrup was still very syrupy at that point and so I fished the thinnest/done-est pieces out with chopsticks, swished it through some granulated sugar, and lay it on the cooling rack. Eventually it had all been picked out and racked and what I was left with by that point wasn’t really syrup anymore but hot ginger sugar, that solidified basically as soon as I put it in a container for later.

The pieces that sat out overnight for two nights got crunchy, but the rest which were in a sealed container have remained soft and chewy, just about perfect.

(Maybe next year I’ll finally attempt pate de fruits again. or maybe I’ll give up and go right to kohakutou…)

Candied ginger finally worked

Duck Day 2021 (last year’s food porn, finally posted!)

Apparently, I never got around to posting last year’s Duck Day compilation of photos and recipes…? So I’m quickly trying to put it together now before I post the 2022 ones…!

Since there was no Duck Day in 2020 because of the pandemic, we decided our theme for 2021 would be “Togetherness” expressed as menu items that included an Ampersand (&). But it being us, some things were not as simple as their names might imply:

Bacon & Eggs
Bread & Butter
Spaghetti & Meatballs
Soup & Sandwich
Milk & Honey
Salt & Pepper
Cookies & Cream
Peanut Butter & Jelly

Here’s the full menu as presented to the guests, though they were encouraged if the preferred to be surprised to read it later (and most of them did that):

Cocktail: Bacon & Eggs

A duck-bacon-fat-washed bourbon flip
with maple syrup, maple bitters, and garnished with grated candied bacon

Bread: Bread & Butter

Home-baked pain au levain
with two house made butters (honey, herb)

Dim Sum: Spaghetti & Meatballs

Hubei style “pearl” meatball
with hand-pulled chen mian noodles in spiced duck gravy

Soup Course: Soup & Sandwich
A duck confit bahn mi with chicken liver mousse, pickled daikon, on baguette
with pho broth for dipping
Pairing: Limeade Chu-Hi (limeade soda and shochu high-ball)

Palate cleanser: Milk & Honey
Black tea and honey soda with a condensed chai cream

Main course: Salt & Pepper
Duck breast cantonese salt&pepper style
with stir-fried greens and garlic
and white rice

Dessert: Cookies & Cream
Mini classic creme brulee, vanilla ice cream, house made “oreo” crumble
served with an almond ampersand

Mignardise: Peanut Butter & Jelly
Chocolate-covered peanut butter truffles
with strawberry pate de fruit

Bacon & Eggs (cocktail) – Forgot to get a photo until after I’d drunk most of it.

Here’s the linkspam on the recipes used to create all of the above, and their descriptions and tips:

Eggs & Bacon Cocktail

The basic recipe for the Bourbon Flip from Jiggers N Drams:
https://www.jiggersndrams.com/bourbon-flip/
(the variation with just the egg white, not the whole egg)

but instead of grating nutmeg on top, I candied bacon and grated that.

And instead of just bourbon, I used a duck-bacon fat washed bourbon, a la Don Lee’s Benton’s Old Fashioned, which introduced the world to the baconized bourbon concept:
https://punchdrink.com/recipes/bentons-bacon-infused-bourbon/

To get the fat rendered out of the duck bacon, I made candied duck bacon by starting with the smoked duck ends we can sometimes get from one of our local restaurant suppliers. You basically coat the thick-cut bacon in brown sugar and bake it until it caramelizes onto the meat, while the fat drips into the pan below.

Here’s a candied bacon recipe that uses regular thin cut bacon, but most of the recipes out there I saw called for thick or the bacon will burn before the sugar gets all the way to caramel.
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/how_to_make_candied_bacon/

FLIP NOTES: dry shake the egg first

If I did this again, I would halve the maple syrup.

Heavy grate on the bacon is OK.

ctan making butter by hand (literally)

Fresh butter: herb butter or honey butter

Sooooo many recipes for how to make your own herb butter or honey butter at home start with pre-made butter?? Where’s the fun in that?

Here’s the technique I used for making both the honey butter and the herb butter for the most part, but I skipped the “washing” stage. I just squeezed the balls of butter in my hands to squeeze out as much buttermilk as I could and then blended in the honey and/or pre-chopped herbs.

https://www.honeyrunfarm.com/honeyrunfarm/2013/02/how-to-make-your-own-butter-and-honey.html

One pint container of nice local dairy cream makes enough butter to fill two medium ramekins. For the honey butter I only made one cup’s worth of cream into butter and it filled two small ramekins we had.

Hubei Style “Pearl” Meatballs
from Chinese Cooking Demystified (one of our fave YouTube channels/Patreons)
Written recipe:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/68lazd/recipe_how_to_make_authentic_hubeistyle_chinese/
(we subbed in two duck breasts, separated the meat from the skin & fat)

Ampersand cookies:
I followed this recipe from TasteMade for “homemade pocky” but I cut the salt in half, and swapped in almond for vanilla extract and doubled the amount, rolled the dough out as a 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick sheet and used the dough scraper to cut into strips, then folded/twisted the strips into the ampersand shape.

https://www.tastemade.com/videos/pocky-sticks/

(The Food52 recipe says either/or on almond or vanilla extract)

“Cookies & Cream” – mini creme brulee with vanilla ice cream with homemade black cookie crumble, and an almond ampersand cookie

Homemade “oreo” cookie crumble

Starts with making homemade oreos.

It helped that I had this on hand already:
https://www.momococoa.com/shop/momo-baking-cocoa-original-dark-classic

I used this basic recipe:
https://tasty.co/recipe/homemade-oreos

What I found was that the salt crystals didn’t ever dissolve in this dough, though, so next time I might just try starting with salted butter and leave the salt out of the recipe? (I think salted butter is going to be the way to go.)

Inspired by the look of the pattern on the homemade oreos here:
https://www.sugarhero.com/gourmet-homemade-oreos/
I used the meat cleaver to give them a nice texture, no special cookie stamp needed. I just had to keep the cookie dough cool/cold and spritz the cleaver with spray oil once in a while.

Actually, at first I was cutting the cookies and then stamping them, but toward the end I discovered it would have been faster probably to stamp he pattern across the entire piece of rolled out dough and then cut the circle out of it.

Squares work too, btw.

I did not use the Brave Tart recipe, which uses Golden Syrup and I don’t think it was missed in any way.

Also I halved the recipe and it still made so many that I still have 1.5 cups of cookie crumbs left as well as almost 40 round cookie halves. (Update: one year later is still have cookie crumbs left even though we’ve been topping ice cream with them all summer.) A few nights later decided to try to use the cookies up by making actual sandwich cookies out of them and they came out fantastic. (The white filling is mostly powdered sugar and butter.)

Pate de Fruit

I’ve tried and failed to make these “fruit jelly” candies before: I used a korean plum juice one time that did not remotely gel or firm up even after I’d added triple pectic, gelatin, and agar agar to the SAME mix. Eventually we decided there must be some anti-coagulating property to plums or to that formulation (the label was in korean so it was difficult to be sure).

This time I decided to try using the Boiron fruit purees, which most of the pastry chefs online swear is the only foolproof way to make pate de fruit, and each fruit puree has a separate master formula of how much pectin, acid, and sugar to add so that it works with the amount of natural pectin and sugar in that particular fruit.

I bought one kilo of the strawberry puree because that’s the one size it comes in, and cut it in half because I didn’t need that much candy and then I’d have a half in reserve in case the supposedly foolproof recipe failed.

I used the recipe and instructions here:
https://pastrychefonline.com/pastry-gems-pate-de-fruits/

After also referencing the original PDF from the Boiron website, which is apparently gone, but chefs are still passing around the formula on places like eGullet (https://forums.egullet.org/topic/157856-gone-missing-boiron-pate-de-fruit-chart/) I also got a tip from ChefSteps to soak the finished candy in Everclear to firm up the exterior:
https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pate-de-fruit

Many of you might also be interested in “TEXTURE: A hydrocolloid recipe collection” which can be downloaded here:
https://khymos.org/wp-content/2009/02/hydrocolloid-recipe-collection-v3.0.pdf

While we’re on the subject; no, tartaric acid and cream of tartar are not the same thing. If your pate de fruit recipe calls for tartaric acid and you don’t have it on hand, look for one that uses citric acid instead? According to Jenni Field you should also be able to sub in lemon juice. I’d like to try it with lime juice the next time I make strawberry ones to cut the pure sweetness a little, too.

The thing is… the foolproof recipe failed. I think in the end my thermometer wasn’t accurate enough, I didn’t let it boil long enough, and my pectin was probably too old and partly broken down. After leaving it to set overnight and ending up with strawberry sludge, I reboiled it, added more pectin, and this time instead of testing by temperature, I went with Brix score on my refractometer (which had arrived in the mail that morning).

Checking the Brix score (sugar content) with the refractometerChecking the Brix score (sugar content) with the refractometer

What Is a Brix Refractometer And How Do They Work: https://www.instrumentchoice.com.au/news/what-is-a-brix-refractometer-and-how-do-they-work

The end result was still too soft to cut with a knife, but was *just* firm enough to form into balls that I then soaked in Everclear for 2-5 minutes, let dry out for a minute or two, and then rolled in a mix of decorator sugar and regular crystal sugar. Just in case they didn’t stay firm and denatured over the course of the day, and because they were still a little tricky to pick up with fingers, I arranged them to be served on fancy spoons.

Some 12 hours later, when they were finally served, they were still in much the same shape they’d been when I rolled them in the sugar: firm enough to call candy, but still not as firm as desired.

I’ll give the other half of the puree a run before our next party, maybe, with lime juice, and see if I can get the science to work right? (Update: as of 2022 I have still not done this.)

PEANUT BUTTER TRUFFLES

I used the basics given by Sally’s Bakign Addiction:
https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/peanut-butter-balls/
but I changed a few things.

For the coating: I used about 80% of a semisweet Callabaut chocolate (they have it at Whole Foods in the cheese department) and made up the other 20% from either a Callabaut or Valrhona bittersweet.

For the peanut butter I was NOT going to use Jif or some store brand full of preservatives and stabilizers. I used Trader Joe’s Organic Creamy peanut butter. As predicted by the recipe, this resulted in a dry, crumbly filling… that is, until I added about a tablespoon of melted virgin coconut oil (also from Trader Joe’s). It didn’t add a noticeable coconut flavor and made the texture perfect.

Her instructional video on how to dip in the chocolate is spot on, though. I couldn’t find the spiral dipper tool she recommended in my local shop, but they did have one that was just a loop of wire, and that worked well except for the times when I tapped the dipped truffle on the glass too many times and the peanut buter center would weld itself to the wire.

I eventually figured out they came off the wire loop better when it was held sideways to dismount them rather than fully upside down. (And now I know why truffles often have a distinctive oval swirl on them!) Also a warmer/softer coating releases better.

BLACK TEA & HONEY SYRUP
to make the black tea and honey soda

I used the basic idea described here:
https://simplelooseleaf.com/blog/life-with-tea/tea-syrup/

but I used honey instead of sugar and water.

I brewed about two cups of quadruple strength Viet Assam (black) tea, by doubling the amount of leaves and doubling the steep time, then mixed it in a pot with about a cup of local wildflower honey, and simmered it until it was reduced back down to about 2 total cups of liquid.

VIETNAMESE PICKLES for the bahn mi
https://www.seriouseats.com/pickled-daikon-and-carrot-do-chua

I used the spiral slicer and cut the amount of water in half to intensify the pickles.

Spiral cut pickles to go in the banh mi“Spaghetti & Meatball” hand-pulled noodles with hubei “pearl” (rice-coated steamed duck meatball

Another shot of the so-called “spaghetti & meatball”

“Soup and Sandwich” an almost-traditional bahn mi on fresh baked baguette, but made with duck and spiral cut homemade picklesAnother shot of the banh miMore banh miPeanut butter truffles, finished and served

If I’d known a Brix refractometer looked this much like a miniature light saber, would I have bought one years ago?

“Leftovers:”
Later in the weekend, “repurposed” the leftover oreo cookies into actual sandwich cookies.

Paris: ADMO: December 2021

So, corwin and I went to Paris (yes, France) in December 2021, to celebrate our 30th anniversary and also to celebrate our latest booster shots and go somewhere that still had COVID regulations in place that made sense to us. (Of course we know so much more now about re-infection and all, but this post is not about that.) At the time I posted a long twitter thread with lots of photos but who knows if Twitter is even going to be around or functional soon, so I’m reposting here, with some tweaks for blog format:

So, the big thing that got us out of our semi-quarantine and all the way to Paris was some friends invited us to join them for what promised to be a stellar meal, a tasting menu worthy of corwin and my 30th anniversary. So, yes, here is a food porn thread!

It’s my first time in Paris, and we had been here a few days already before the night of the big dinner, but hadn’t made it over toward the Eiffel Tower yet. We took the Metro from our hotel in the 11th arrondissement and came up to a stunning view.

corwin and ctan with the Eiffel Tower on a moonlit night

The Eiffel Tower at night, across a moonlit river Seine, is pretty hard to beat. Our destination was just across the water, where a couple of the world’s most decorated chefs have set up for 100 nights. You can’t really call that a “pop up,” can you?

Alain Ducasse, the current leader in most Michelin stars, Albert Adria, of el Bulli fame, and some of their associates, collaborated on this unique gastronomical effort and they dubbed it ADMO and situated it in the Musee du Jacques Chirac.

I’d love to talk about nothing but the food, but really it’s not possible to discuss the meal or ADMO without the context, and that context is COVID and the tremendous impact on the restaurant industry, on travel, on the food supply, and on how people gather.

It's my first time in Paris, and we'd been here a few days already before the night of the big dinner, but hadn't made it over toward the Eiffel Tower yet. We took the Metro from our hotel in the 11th arrondissement and came up to a stunning view. pic.twitter.com/pkbXlaNwwB

— Cecilia Tan (@ceciliatan) December 13, 2021

“Eating out” is a major part of our lives. But we didn’t set foot in a restaurant (except to scurry in to grab a take-out bag) from March 13 2020 to April 8 2021. In the summer we took to patio dining. But then winter arrived, and we finally moved indoors.

Once we started eating indoors again, it was not that big a mental leap to decide if it’s okay to eat in a nice restaurant in Boston, why not in France? (It’s probably even safer in France given that you have to show your “pass sanitaire” to do so!) [Author’s note: this was before the Omicron wave. After we returned to the States, we stopped eating indoors again for the rest of the winter.]

It’s not just that we like having someone else do the cooking and cleaning, either. Sharing a communal dining experience is itself a thing. And the ephemeral nature of ADMO emphasizes that communal nature: you’re only going to have this chance to do it once.

In that way, the sense of restaurant as theater is heightened. It’s like wanting to see a Broadway show with the original cast, knowing that a show like Hamilton caught lightning in a bottle, and that every night’s performance is unique and to be savored.

After our year of no restaurants (and no theater, no live concerts, no travel, etc) we were especially keen to leap at this chance. The ephemeral nature of the dining experience wasn’t explicitly stated part of the ADMO theme, but I couldn’t help but feel it.

(I’m getting to the photos of the dishes, I promise.)

Screencap from the ADMO website with photos of the chefs

The site for ADMO was a restaurant, Les Ombres, that has presumably been lying fallow during the worst of COVID, so who knows if without the pandemic this “pop up” would even have come together? And what a space: a glass-roofed atrium with Eiffel Tower view!
The view from my seat in the restaurant.

At 7:30 we were seated. Only two other tables were that early, meaning we had the nearly undivided attention of a small army of waitstaff and sommeliers at the start. Our party of 7 decided on a wine budget and told the sommelier to pair freely within it.

I regret I didn’t actually get a list of the wines or remember to take photos of all the bottles. (A friend did, though… I think he may have posted a reply in the tweet thread…) They were all exquisite. A pairing should always enhance the food’s flavor, but in this case I felt like in particular the note being enhanced was the *salinity.*

The theme of salinity played throughout the meal. I hesitate to use the word “salty,” which has negative connotations. Usually if the saltiness of food is remarked on, it’s to say it’s “too salty,” or we equate salty food with junk food. This was not that!

The amuse-bouche was “shadows and light,” a juxtaposition of black & white liquids: pressed caviar and celeriac-almond milk. The caviar essence is a deep umami and the salinity of the sea, while the celeriac-almond is the opposite: creamy and a touch vegetal.

The shadows and light were served in a boat as long and elegant as a greyhound’s snout, that you picked up in hand and just poured the liquids into your mouth. It reminded me of my mom letting me drink the gravy right from the gravy boat at the end of a holiday meal as a kid! Delicious, playful, and pure.

As if to announce the opening act was about to arrive, the Eiffel Tower then lit up like a giant sparkler, accompanied by twinkling lights inside the restaurant! An unexpected magical touch.

As if to announce the opening act was about to arrive, the Eiffel Tower then lit up like a giant sparkler, accompanied by twinkling lights inside the restaurant! An unexpected magical touch. pic.twitter.com/dPb0WmMqSN

— Cecilia Tan (@ceciliatan) December 13, 2021

Another opening bite was a contrast to the all-liquid amuse, a cracker (cracked at the table) made of whole seeds, just barely held together by whatever starch or flour there was, as textured as a cobblestoned street.

The main flavor in the cracker was the earthiness of the seeds, extremely crunchy and satisfying to bite on. (The menu listed 5 amuses and 2 hors d’ouvres, but they were not served in the exact order listed, kind of mixing and matching.)

Then came something with truffle. November/December is white truffle season, and this means that when corwin and I go out to celebrate our anniversary there is nearly always something with truffle. Et voila!

It looks like it’s on a cracker or round bit of bread, but it’s actually meringue! With “Brillat-Savarin cheese cream, shaved Paris mushrooms, and tartufi di Alba “(white truffle). Also shown here: the finger towel since the amuses were mostly finger foods.

Another amuse in a wooden bowl: described as shaved salsify, mustard, miso, and ginger confit, and apparently held together with magic…? Who knew you could confit ginger?

Another amuse: oyster sausage. I have never before had oyster sausage, but it’s the only way I’ve ever had cooked oyster that preserved what’s wonderful about raw oyster: the mixture of creaminess with brine. (Just like the shadows and light..) A revelation.

I didn’t read the menu during the meal, preferring to just experience the food rather than read about it (especially given the long and voluminous descriptions — I’d rather hear the details from the waitstaff and be able to pepper them with questions), but I’ll use it now to fill in details! The dish of vetch listed was served alongside the scallop dish, but I didn’t get a photo of the side dish.

The English on this reads: “The Vesce (vetch) from Gaec Emmanuel et Marion is a leguminous plant consider as a green manure, served as a salad and foamy, shallot and vinegar powder, finger lemon and Espelette pepper. Shekwasha paste, a japanese citrus, in the bottom of the bowl.”

Another quote from the menu: “Brine sea scallops from Seine bay, quick seared, topped with toum, traditional Lebanese recipe with garlic, burnt lemon and breaded with puffed quinoa. Served with confit shallot, an onion, sea scallop liver, squid ink, heart of smoked tuna and a burnt onion extraction sauce.”

Some of the translation from French to English I might quibble with, but you get the idea when a description of a dish doesn’t fit in one tweet. Scallops, of course, are a seafood, but they are all about sweetness.

A single scallop, dotted with crunchy quinoa, on a gorgeous dollop of pitch black sauce

So here we have that theme again, the white, sweet scallop contrasted with this incredible sauce, black with squid ink and full of rich depth of flavor from the toum. I licked the plate.

Next: a tart levitating on air! (There’s a film of plastic you can’t see…) A tiny pastry shell, filled with raw gamberoni from San Remo and topped with two teensy tiny white chevrettes (shrimps). With a coral emulsion.

Tiny shrimp tart floating on air above a silver bowl!

I believe I cribbed this photo from one of our dinnermates because mine still had the decorative leaf on top, and the chevrettes were so tiny they were hidden under it.

For our Thanksgiving dinner this year (2021), we made the theme “togetherness,” (&) and served all courses with names like “Soup & Sandwich” or “Peanut Butter & Jelly”. One was “Bread & Butter” which was literally fresh baked sourdough with homemade herb & honey butters.

Having people literally breaking apart bread and then slathering it with butter was not only fun, it had a serious comfort component to it. There’s something so satisfying and comforting about eating bread with butter. And ADMO did this too!

ADMO served a “Beurre” (butter) course! The breads were interesting though, one was rice flour and beeswax, and the other was a rice flour focaccia with olives. The butter came on a wooden spoon and I used every bit of it.

The bread is looking at me…

From there, we moved to the “entrees” which in French cuisine means “first courses” and not “main dishes” (“plat” is “main dish”). This is “soba” made of salted cod skin, with mushrooms, sea urchin, and quail egg. Not quite Asian, but quite delicious.

Then came something amazing: sea cucumber. In Spain we once ate at Via Veneto, and the maitre d’ there explained that two cultures eat the sea cucumber: the Spanish and the Chinese. But they eat two totally different parts of the sea cucumber.

The Chinese eat the rubbery exterior. The Spanish eat the unctuous, gooey-chewy interior. This dish used the interior, with chickpeas, confit garlic, celery leaves, and topped with caviar. My favorite dish of the night.

Two main dishes still to come, but I should mention again the theme of salinity. With so many types of seafood, it was like we experienced as many different kinds of salinity as there are oceans. We had a wine that reminded me of green apple with burnt sugar.

Main dish #1: blue lobster. The English on the menu does not do the dish justice: “blue lobster dried on the ember, fermented raw turnip. Lobster claws turnip spices and coral emulsion condiment. Slice of turnip like black garlic.”

Main dish #2: confit monkfish liver and black sesame paste, served with a mexican-style molé of spices and black garlic, “with a cauliflower in salt, then dehydrated and rehydrated in the leaf juice (??) roasted with brown butter.”
Those vertical lines aren’t glitches in the photo, they’re on the plate.

The cauliflower was great, even if the description in the menu sounds a bit sus. And monkfish liver is always delicious, somewhat similar to sea urchin.

As is traditional, a cheese plate was served after the main dishes and before dessert. This special cheese was apparently aged just for ADMO, “made of Salers cow milk only when their veal are with them!” (They mean calf, I swear) With oxydated (? – they must mean oxidized?) quince.

Two desserts followed, created by Jessica Prealpato and Albert Adria, but not described on the menu. This first one was like a granita made out of beer with apples? quinces? Not overly sweet, and nicely refreshing.

Beer granita, who knew?

Then came an ice cream with paper-thin crispy chocolate leafs on top and I no longer remember what was underneath it… I really should have taken notes but I was into enjoying the food & company more than scribbling things down.

This was less of a dessert than it was a palate cleanser: a yellow kiwi, pre-cut inside its skin for ease of eating with the fork.

And then a final little snack, very reminiscent of the cobblestone-like cracker from the opening, a seedy and chocolatey bark, that we nibbled on with coffee and tea.

And thus the meal was concluded. A very lovely traipse through the cuisines and techniques that have made these chefs famous. It was not as full of theatrical “wows” or trickery as meals I’ve had at places like Field in Prague or Moto in Chicago.

I would compare it most to the meals we had in Spain with Carme Ruscalleda, or at Les Cols, but being in this ephemeral space of the temporary restaurant, ADMO didn’t have the same element of welcoming into a specific “home base” that is so central to those.

Instead, the ADMO meal is timeless because it is ephemeral. It captures this moment in time, this moment in the talents of the chefs and the situation of the world at large. It will never be recreated except in our memories.

Why I went all the way to Singapore to see two guys play violin

Okay, I have a lot of thoughts about TwoSet Violin, and they’re not all going to fit in one blog post. But this is my personal blog where I write about whatever I want, so here goes. You want to know why I went all the way to Singapore to see two guys who play violin? Keep reading.

If you don’t already know TwoSet, my recommendation is to watch a couple of their videos before you read this as it’ll all make more sense if you do. (Here’s a typical one, here’s a “reactions” one , and a “games” one.) If you’re already a TwoSetter and you’re here to bask in the afterglow of the #TwoSet4Mil experience, welcome.

Explain TwoSet in under twenty words:
Two talented violinists inspiring a new generation of classical music fans by being totally genuine goofballs on the Internet.

Explain TwoSet in under 100 words:
Two Asian kids growing up in Australia fell in love with playing violin, decided to go to music school (instead of med school), got actual orchestra jobs, then quit those jobs to devote themselves to their YouTube channel. Described as “classical comedy,” the channel is much more than that. Yes, there are funny skits about orchestra life, hilarious violin-based games, and “reaction”/roasting videos. But the channel is also about Brett and Eddy’s personal journeys and their relationship to classical music itself. And that’s the core that ties together all that with events like #TwoSet4Mil.

So… What’s #TwoSet4Mil?

The whole reason I went to Singapore was to be there in person for a once-in-a-lifetime peak experience: someone else’s! TwoSet started a tradition a few years ago where whenever they hit another million YouTube subscribers one of them would play one of the “big” violin concertos and they’d livestream it for the fans as a kind of celebration/challenge. Like a lot of things with TwoSet the idea started out as an off-the-cuff joke and — as I wrote in The Strad classical music magazine — “quickly became a moral imperative.”

At two million subscribers, on February 8, 2020, Brett played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto (there is only one) while Eddy played the entire orchestra part himself. They streamed it in front of a curtain in their apartment in Brisbane, and Brett talked himself through it, repeating often, “I’m so nervous!” He got through it, though, with 40,000-plus fans watching the livestream and cheering him on. (At the end, even their neighbors clapped.)

With the lockdowns of 2020, and so many people watching YouTube, their subscriber count zoomed to three million under a year later. So it was Eddy’s turn: on January 30, 2021, he played Sibelius–again in front of the curtain. But another offhand joke was made — I think it came in a comment from a viewer? — wouldn’t it be great for Brett to play the next one with a real orchestra with Eddy serving as concertmaster?

What ended up happening is pretty close, though Eddy couldn’t exactly bump the actual concertmaster of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra out of his seat. I don’t know exactly how working with the SSO came about. Brett and Eddy have been living part of each year in Singapore for a while now, and somehow they got the SSO on board with doing the 4Mil concert. Then Tarisio, the rare musical instrument auction house they did a video with a few months back, jumped in with a loan of two Stradivari violins. Worth about $10 million each. Yep, things just kept getting bigger.

Tickets for the concert and open rehearsal sold out in under two minutes. I’d believe it was under one minute, honestly, because on the day the tickets went on sale I was in a hotel at a work conference and I had four devices all pointed at the sale site. I saw the “buy” button go live on the mobile devices and hit it immediately. (It never did come up at all on my laptop.) One of the three mobiles was given a queue number in the 300s, one in the 600s, and one around 2000. Victoria Concert Hall, the elegant and acoustically excellent hall where the SSO plays, only seats 650. Between the concert and the rehearsal that was 1300 tickets available. By the time my number in the 300s came up, the concert was sold out but the rehearsal was still open. I grabbed three seats and then sweated through my credit card company declining the charge as very definitely fraudulent three times before I realized I could switch the Paypal to pay. Thank goodness!

Having secured actual tickets and being one of the very lucky few compared to the number of people trying, I felt it was then a moral imperative to go to Singapore and be present for this momentous event.

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How Did We Get Here?
TwoSet have gone through several stages since the channel’s founding. I haven’t gone through and classified all their videos, but I feel like it breaks down to roughly this:

2014-2017 – experimenting with everything for the channel, skits, games, leading up to the Kickstarter for the first World Tour2017-2018 – Post-Kickstarter Era: establishes several go-to formats including games, roasting2019-2021 – Post-Bumblebee Era (including the pandemic) more of the same, but even better leading up the the Virtual World Tour2022 – ongoing – Era of the Artistic Statement

The Era of the Artistic Statement
Playing the 4Mil concert with the Singapore Symphony definitely counts as an Artistic Statement in my opinion, but it’s one of several they’ve made in the past year. It really feels like TwoSet have been leveling up repeatedly throughout 2022, both in production values and in choosing to invest in some longer term projects. We see it reflected in everything from they finally came up with a background set other than just the plain white wall or curtain (and one they can recreate whether they’re in Brisbane or in Singapore), to the build up to and then release of a K-Pop style group video “B2TSM” (except instead of 5 Korean idols it’s five classical composers…), the Virtual World Tour show/storyline which kind of led to the production and release of a long-form video/film project called Fantasia… we’ll have to talk about that later, because to understand Fantasia you have to be familiar with various parts of the TwoSet mythos.

One piece of that mythos is Brett’s oft-repeated lament of “I had dreams” of growing up to be a globetrotting violin soloist like, say, Itzhak Perlman. Around the time he and Eddy founded TwoSet was about when it was really sinking in that those dreams were never going to come true. Toiling away in their orchestra jobs, hurrying from rehearsal to ballet performance to concert, it was becoming clear that if they had chosen this path because they loved classical music, that after some time it was going to make them hate it. Unlike in music university where they had multiple outlets for their creativity, working orchestra life was stifling. Starting a YouTube channel seemed a risk worth taking. (They’ve addressed these issues repeatedly, like in the video “Why We Left Orchestra”.)

At the time when they started the channel, they received little support from the people around them. As Brett tells Hilary Hahn in a conversation video they did in Boston during their 2018 world tour (see December 22, 2018) everyone–parents, teachers, friends, other musicians–were basically like “what (the heck) are you doing?” No one understood. And things started quite slowly. But eventually things began to take off and the choice had to be made: they quit their orchestra jobs to concentrate on TwoSet full time.

Two other motifs that repeat often in TwoSet videos are laments about their struggles with intonation (every violinist’s bane) and with performance anxiety. When they toured in 2018, the show began with a bit about Eddy getting shaky bow and having to go and eat two bananas (this is apparently a known cure for stage nerves among classical musicians and even seems to ve supported scientifically). Eddy later revealed in a video that the reason they wrote that gag is because Eddy would actually get shaky bow, so turning it into a comedy bit was the best solution.

It’s far from the only time that TwoSet have drawn on their real life feelings and experiences for their content. This is why I think it’s not the “comedy” that really makes people into TwoSet fans, it’s the genuine, relatable personalities, flaws and all, that make Brett and Eddy special. The “story” of TwoSet is the story of their relationship to classical music and how it continues to change over time, and them passing their love of classical music on to us.

The Cult(ure) of PRACTICE
So how do we get from Brett standing in front of a curtain in a Brisbane apartment talking to a laptop screen about how he’s so nervous he can barely play the Tchaikovsky, to him standing on stage with the Singapore Symphony and taking a bow to people streaming the concert all over the world? Well, the old joke about Carnegie Hall is true: practice, practice, practice. TwoSet have inspired a whole cohort of musicians to join the culture of daily practice, as nearly every one of their videos ends with the exhortation “Go practice!” Much of the popular merch on their website features the word, as well.

I was one of those folks sitting at home during the pandemic who, upon hearing Brett say “go practice” nearly every day, decided it was time to actually start doing it. I took the classical guitar that’s been sitting in my closet for literally decades and which I never learned to play “properly,” and I’ve been practicing *almost* every day since. I even practiced while in Singapore! I keep track of my practice and am part of the online practice community on the Tonic music app — founded by violinst Ray Chen, who I also found via TwoSet. (You can join the Tonic app, and our online TwoSet discussion group, here, btw: https://www.jointonic.com/invite/twosetappreciation) I got to meet several Tonic Twosetters in Singapore including another classical guitarist (hi Wei!) who borrowed a guitar for me from a friend. I practiced twice a day while in Singapore, in between touring the famous sights and eating a ton.

The culture of practice is real and without TwoSet I don’t know if I’d have ever gotten back to it.

Brett took a measured approach to learning the Mendselssohn after it won a fan poll for which concerto he should play. (I couldn’t find the original poll on Reddit but it was between February and July 2021.) As he said in a video in early 2022, he set benchmarks for himself about how far into learning it he needed to be based on when the subscriber count hit 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, million and so on.

And he did it. He mastered the piece. I’ve been listening to the audio of it (downloaded off YouTube) during my flight back to Boston from Singapore and I just keep thinking “damn, that sounds good!” Does it sound like Ray Chen or Hilary Hahn? No. They both have the otherworldly god-level perfect intonation that most of the great soloists seem to have. Brett doesn’t, but that doesn’t matter, because the point is that he doesn’t sound like Ray or Hilary: he sounds like Brett Yang. The whole purpose of a performance is that it’s live, it’s a moment in time, and the soloist isn’t there to just be a puppet on which the composer’s work is imposed. The soloist is a conduit, yes, but it’s what they put into the music of themselves that makes the performance special.

Brett might play the Mendelssohn again, who knows, but he’ll never have the milestone 4 Mil concert again. That he was able to have the experience of spending over a year working on the one piece, and having over a month to play on a Strad, and to have prepared for and then done the concert with a national professional orchestra… these are all experiences that matured him as a violinist and as a person.

At a typical classical music concert, you go there to enjoy the music and be enraptured by the performance, but you aren’t rooting for the soloist the way we TwoSetters were at Brett’s Mendelssohn. Being there at the rehearsal, I can tell you a lot of what some of us were feeling was a kind of relief, actually. I’m sure Brett was anxious, and so were we! But for us, at least, the anxiety dissipated within the first few lines of music. It was so clear that Brett had hold of the moment and it wasn’t going to get away from him.

At a typical professional classical concert, the audience probably also doesn’t feel “proud” of the soloist or the orchestra, but I’m sure I’m not the only TwoSetter who felt proud of Brett and Eddy afterward, and who could clearly see the growth in both of them as musicians and performers. They’ve had to get past so much to reach this point, not only all the naysayers, but also both of their internal critics, performance anxiety, imposter syndrome, and battles with physical and mental health.

Real Life
In several of their videos, Eddy references how at one point in university, when he was pushing himself the hardest, preparing for a major competition, etc. he experienced such a bad burnout that he was literally in a wheelchair and went through a period where he could not touch his instrument. To put it mildly, that’s heavy stuff. With Brett’s support and visits to various doctors, he eventually got past it and was able to play again. (For one example, see “Opening Up About Our Mental health”)

Brett went through something similar, but in his case it happened right in the midst of TwoSet’s surge of popularity. On December 11, 2020, Eddy posted an announcement video (“Taking a Break“) saying that Brett had been hospitalized. They never revealed Brett’s exact condition–in fact, at the time the diagnosis was still “not clear” although the root cause was: stress and overwork. Up until that time they’d been maintaining a schedule of five (!) videos a week, and had already mentioned they were going to cut back to three videos a week because Brett hadn’t been feeling well since October, but just “cutting back” wasn’t enough, and a total break was needed. At the time they didn’t know if the break was going to be weeks or months.

As it turned out, the break was about one month long. They officially returned to YouTube on January 14, 2021 (“We’re Bach” — that’s not counting a couple of pre-filmed videos they did release, nor Eddy’s somewhat impromptu “Give Brett Christmas Gifts” video). The scare left a deep impression on both of them, but it wouldn’t be clear just how deep until the Fantasia film was released.

Fantasia
Okay, I said we’d talk about this later, and now it’s later. TwoSet made a short film in which they played the soundtrack music themselves (original score by their frequent collaborator, composer Jordon He) and play the parts of themselves in… basically an alternate universe where either they never become TwoSet or where they split up and went their separate ways. The film is wordless, and I suspect it’s not easily comprehensible to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the mythos built up over the course of over one thousand YouTube videos (not exaggerating, there are over 1300 videos in the channel) and hundreds of offhand comments that turn into lore.

If you’re not a TwoSetter, I’m kind of curious what you think of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmDtLvCEVsk

SPOILERS AHEAD. I’ve seen various interpretations of “what happens” in the film, but a prevailing one seems to be: at some point in the past Brett and Eddy split up. Brett pursued his goal of becoming a soloist, burned out, and landed in the hospital in a coma. Eddy gave up violin entirely and landed a boring desk job. But he just can’t forget the violin and Brett entirely. When he opens his violin case again for the first time, he goes into a dream realm that leads to the two of them playing a performance together. It’s the emotional closure they’ve both needed, and Brett can finally die in peace, having brought Eddy back to music. (A less dark interpretation is that once they reconnect psychically, Brett comes out of his coma and the flatline is because he pulls the wires and leaves the hospital.) Either way, there must have been some dark moments of anxiety about health and career and the fraught choices one makes in life to inspire such a story.

I feel like Fantasia is a terrific piece of art, but it was really made for TwoSetters. It’s packed with references to the TwoSet canon. For example, we haven’t even mentioned actual Singaporean violin prodigy Chloe Chua (the violin goddess in Fantasia) or TwoSet’s ongoing series of torturing themselves by watching violin prodigies, nor the fact that bubble tea is A Thing with them (did I mention the Tiger Sugar pop-up stand at Victoria Concert Hall for the 4 Mil concert?), or the fact that Bubble Tea was the time-travel device in the Virtual World Tour…?

And we haven’t even talked about how the Virtual World Tour concert, which was livestreamed at the end of 2020, was also a huge pack of references while simultaneously being a showcase for Brett and Eddy’s violin playing…

Like I said, there’s a lot to say about TwoSet Violin. But this essay is getting very, very long, so it’s time to wrap it up.

The 4Mil Pinnacle
Classical music as a whole is a sort of cult of perfectionism. Everyone is trying to perfect their craft and their artistry. It’s a challenging pursuit. There are plenty of easier genres of music if one just wants to play for fun or pleasure. Being challenging is part of classical music’s ethos. The pyramid of success in classical music, then, leaves behind many people at each level. Climbing from one tier up to the next takes a combination or talent, drive/ambition, and hard work and practice.

Brett and Eddy climbed to the tier of going to conservatory for university, leaving behind the vast majority of teenage classical musicians. Then they climbed to the top of the ranks there, Eddy making concertmaster for the opera orchestra, and each of them having a few rare soloist chances for competitions and the like. From there they climbed into the professional ranks of working orchestra musicians. At each one of these stages, you leave behind 90% of the people on the previous tier. That was the tier where Brett and Eddy decided to get off the pyramid entirely.

For violinists, there are not many tiers above that one. There are those who rise to the rank of concertmaster. And then there are the soloists, and then the very top tier soloists, the household names. There are just a handful of them, really, violinists who aren’t just at the top of the craft but who are a draw to a concert hall, the rare players whose appearances sell more tickets when a symphony’s season is announced.

TwoSet’s concert with the Singapore Symphony sold out in under two minutes.

Only those folks on the top of the violinist pyramid ever get the chance to play the great concertos professionally. So can we appreciate just how rare it is for someone like Brett, who wasn’t a prodigy, didn’t go to Julliard or Curtis, and who hasn’t played in an orchestra since 2016, to be able to take over a year to master a concerto and then play it in a concert hall, with a top national orchestra, in front of a packed house of adoring fans? (I mean… has anyone else ever done it?)

And then to nail it? Come on, he nailed it. Okay, sure, there were a few notes where the intonation wasn’t PERFECT, and the Straits Times review of the concert even called this out. When I first saw the review I thought, oh no, that’s all Brett’s going to see. Why did he have to call him out like that? But a friend I know through the Tonic app who is playing in a professional orchestra herself pointed out, actually, it means the reviewer treated Brett like a “real” soloist and not some dilettante.

I’ll say this, I did notice some wavering intonation in a few particular spots, but we’re not on the classical cult-of-perfectionism pyramid anymore. I did not fly all the way to Singapore to grade the playing like a competition judge, but to appreciate it for what it was, a heartfelt and genuine performance. To me calling them “imperfections” in the playing would be like calling Brett’s accent imperfect English, which would be ludicrous. (In fact there is no such thing as “perfect” English and the only people who believe there is, and that they themselves speak it, we define as “snobs.” Which I suppose applies to classical music snobs just as well.)

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But another thing that was great about the concert was that it didn’t stop there. TwoSet then played the Bach Double (aka The Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043). I don’t have time to go into all the things that make Bach great, or what counterpoint is, or fugues (but of course there are plenty of TwoSet videos about this!), but I’ll quote musicologist Phillip Spitta, as translated at Wikipedia about the Bach Double: “Two solo violins are here employed, but it is not, strictly speaking, a double concerto, for the two violins play not so much against one another, as both together against the whole orchestra. Each is treated with the independence that is a matter of course in Bach’s style.”

In other words, two more soloist works, undertaken as a team, in true TwoSet style. (I’ll note the Straits Times critic was much more taken with the Bach than the Mendelssohn.) They played it enchantingly.

And then there had to be an encore, right? We thought maybe there would be a round of “Navarra” by Sarasate, which has become something of a signature duet for TwoSet and a fan favorite, but no, as Eddy would reveal in the post-concert chat, two weeks earlier Brett had the bright idea, “what if you (Eddy) played ‘La Campanella’ for the encore?” It was an idea that was too good to pass up. So now we know why two weeks before the concert TwoSet announced they were taking a break from making videos until the concert because they needed time to practice. It was because Eddy was cramming La Campanella.

If we’re going to talk about all the reasons why Eddy playing it was so fitting, we have to open yet another can of TwoSet worms that includes their ongoing love-hate relationship with Paganini, the fact that Eddy played the role of Paganini in not only the B2TSM video but in two followups, and that in one of those, Paganini drops a “diss track” on K-Pop idols Blackpink for the fact that their song “Shut Down” uses a two-bar long sample of La Campanella over and over. Blackpink fans lost their minds over the parody (not in a good way) because, I think, also in very TwoSet fashion, the video was too much of an in-joke, making as much fun of Paganini’s purportedly massive ego as pop music’s tendency to oversimplify.

But anyway. Eddy absolutely nails La Campanella in the concert, which whets everyone’s appetites for what will happen when the channel reaches five mil subs, since it will be Eddy’s turn. That and they announced a new world tour coming in the end of 2023 into 2024. No dates or details yet, but stay tuned.

So, was it worth it to go all the way to Singapore to be there for the concert? Even though I didn’t have concert tickets, I did see the livestream with a large gathering of TwoSetters who rented an entire movie theater to see it on a huge screen. First of all, it was truly incredible to connect with other TwoSetters, both at the movie theater and also in meetups with fellow members of the TwoSet Appreciation group on the Tonic app, whom we had a few different meals with include a large group lunch after the rehearsal! Secondly, seeing TwoSet on such a big screen, so well shot by a professional camera crew, real brought out the details of the concert that seeing it live would not have. The beauty of the Strads, the intricacies of the fingerings, the interplay of glances and facial expressions, all was terrifically captured by the camera crew. The only thing I missed was, well, getting to actually meet Brett and Eddy for the autographing afterward. But hopefully I’ll be able to catch them on their world tour instead!

tl;dr: Yes. I went halfway around the globe to see two violinists play, and it was completely worth it.

(Watch the entire concert livestream for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlRRdGnzA00)

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“Sacred Heart” erotic magic story video reading by Cecilia Tan

I’m writing this post from Orlando, Florida, where I attended ICFA 43 (Int’l Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts). ICFA is always great: a mix of sf/f writers with academics and students presenting their papers on various sf/fantasy and sff-adjacent topics like games and gaming, or the immersive fantasies of theme-park design, or connections between gothic literature and gothic subcultures.

One of the program items is sf/f writers reading their work. I opted to do a reading rather than speak on a panel this year, but I was undecided what story I should read. When I was packing for the con I was waffling about this one, entitled “Sacred Heart.” The story appeared in the Unfettered Hexes anthology (edited by Dave Ring, Neon Hemlock Press, buy it from Bookshop.org, Amazon, or your local indie bookstore) which was published for Halloween in October 2021.

This was, without a doubt, one of the short stories I wrote while procrastinating from working on my novel. But it was one of those ones where I sat down at the keyboard with a blank word processor document and it just poured out. Dave, the editor, only had a few small suggestions to make. It’s so rare when something just crystallizes like that, where it’s like you kind of see the entire thing right from the start. When I write stories like that, it’s like I see the first sentence or the first paragraph but that little piece is a fractal which contains the whole, and as I write through the story, more and more of it reveals itself, but it was all there right from the start.

But, still, two days before the con my internal censor was yapping at me: this story is kinda weird, isn’t it too weird? Maybe it isn’t that good. Maybe you should find something else, or write something newer, or… or… or…

Well, I read it, and people REALLY LIKED IT. The audience was pretty much full, which was especially great given that the reading was in the very first session of the con on Wednesday and a lot of attendees weren’t even here yet. My co-readers were Regina Hansen and Rich Larson. Afterward, several folks, including a writer I admire and whose literary taste I trust, made a point to come tell me how much they liked it. And then throughout the weekend, people kept telling me how great they thought the story was.

So, take that, internal censor! You’re clearly wrong.

The video of me reading the story, above, I recorded in January when the Arisia convention was scuttled at the last minute by the Omicron wave. I set up a Zoom event for myself and read three stories, of which “Sacred Heart” was one. Folks who are Patreon supporters got the full video, but I decided to release just the one story to the public for fun. I’d meant to post this weeks ago, but this weekend’s events reminded me to do it now!

It was good timing for the lesson on the internal critic, too. Over the weekend, I got an email rejection on a short story I had sent out recently, and I was half-tempted to “trunk” the story and never look at it again. But I sent it out to another market, instead. I know it’s a “weird” story that pushes certain boundaries and, unlike most of my stories, really should carry a warning about violence. But if I learned one thing this weekend, it’s don’t self-reject. Maybe this story will make the rounds and not land anywhere. Maybe I’ll end up just reading it to my patrons. But I’ll try other markets first.