Dear Reader,

There was a joke back in 2021 that every email that year started with a disclaimer like, “I know this letter reaches you after a long winter full of tribulation and sorrow…” Was it even a joke, though? And did it end in 2021? I for one continue to find myself inclined to start every email with a baroque, Oregon Trail-inflected acknowledgment of the sorry state of the world. Even little work emails. Even just sending a stupid picture to my brother.

With that context, this letter really does come to you after a long winter full of tribulation and sorrow. And this last week was particularly long and hard. But this last week was, in many ways, also a good one. The headline from my life is that on Friday afternoon I finally finished my big, giant, terrible, wonderful work project. Of it—at least, at last—I’m free! 

But tired. So tired.

Thus it was that I came into the weekend exhausted, not only without a first draft of Lightplay, but without an idea of what I would write about. I felt used up. 

I decided not to force it. I just hung out with my family. Cooked them breakfast. And a topic presented itself, as naturally as a magnolia flower opening at the end of a bare branch.

Thanks as always for your attention—I hope you enjoy this one.

– Jasper

Banana Waffles

The French way of telling someone to get lost, to go pound sand, to take a hike, is, apparently, Go back home, your mother made you waffles. I love this. It’s so demeaning and, au même temps, who doesn’t wish they could go home right now and have their mother make them waffles?

My mom makes her waffles by instinct, eyeballing how much flour to add, how much baking powder, eggs, buttermilk. They’re always delicious, served with soft butter, maple syrup, cut up fruit, yogurt, bacon for the meat eaters, and hot coffee. 

Myself, I’ve been experimenting with different waffle recipes ever since my I got my partner a Belgian waffle iron for Christmas, back sometime in those distant years before the pandemic. 

For a while I was all about making Marion Cunningham’s raised waffles. After mixing the yeast and flour and sugar together the night before, then whisking the eggs into the leavened batter in the morning, I would would feel like a very responsible housewife indeed. Coming off the iron, those waffles were light and lacy, with a unique nutty flavor. They were not just raised but—elevated? For all that, though, they didn’t always hold up under butter and syrup. And, well, who’s got time for multi-day waffles? 

So I’ve continued on my search. Lately, the buttermilk waffles from The Joy of Cooking have become my go-to, my desert island waffle. The recipe is simple, although Mrs. Rombauer et. al. give you a sliding scale of 4-16 tablespoons of butter, which is insane. Nonetheless, I’ve found my sweet spot at 10 tablespoons. That way the waffles come out crispy on the outside, custardy within, piping hot, sturdy—a dream of waffly perfection. 

Then, two days ago, I switched things up. And I’m wondering—have I improved on perfection?

Necessity being the mother of invention, this of course all started with some poor planning. Saturday morning I had not just promised the kid waffles, I’d even started mixing the dry ingredients when I realized we only had one egg. The recipe calls for three. I thought to supplement it with a “flax egg” (powdered flax seed mixed with water), but I couldn’t find any flax either. Then I remembered a recent episode of the great LA food podcast Good Food in which host Evan Kleiman and Genevieve Ko discussed egg alternatives during this era of bird flu. Her guest had mentioned using mashed banana in place of egg, and hey, I did have few ripe ones on hand. Banana, that flavor could work in a waffle, right? I mashed two bananas, threw them in, and the rest is history. I now present the most ridiculously delicious banana waffles of all time.

Banana Waffles

makes ~ 8 waffles

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 cups AP flour

• 2 tsp baking powder

• 1/4 tsp baking soda 

• 1 tbsp sugar

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 2 ripe bananas

• 1 egg

• 10 tbsp butter

• 1 1/2 cups buttermilk

• Optional: toasted pecans, chopped into little chunks. 

Steps

1. Plug in the waffle iron and get it as hot as possible. 

2. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, taking especial care that there no lumps in the baking soda or baking powder. (What’s worse than a bite of sudden, soapy baking soda?)

3. Melt the butter. 

4. Mix the wet ingredients, first mashing the bananas, then adding buttermilk, then beating in the egg, and finally adding the melted butter. 

5. Make a well in the dry ingredients, pour in the wet mixture, then mix them together quickly, just till the flour is all hydrated. (Be careful not to overmix.)

6. (If adding pecans) Mix the nuts in with one or two stirs, again taking care not to overmix. 

7. Scoop an appropriate amount of batter onto your waffle iron. If your waffle iron is nonstick (as mine is), definitely don’t butter it before adding batter. There is PLENTY of butter already in the batter. 

8. Let them cook until the surface is a crispy, deep gold. (On my iron I have to crank the dial all the way up to get it hot enough.)

Serve hot off the iron with soft butter and maple syrup, and supplement with cut-up fruit, yogurt, and/or whipped cream as you see fit.

For my money, these waffles are up there with banana bread and banana pancakes as great banana foods. They remind me of the paychedelic opening pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, when Thomas Pynchon has his motley band of WWII soldiers, in London during the Blitz, consume a banana feast like a fantasia:

When I first read that passage as a sixteen-year-old who had purchased the biggest and most impenetrable-seeming book in the bookstore, I couldn’t believe how fun it was. I had assumed that with literature, the more elevated it got, the more serious and impenetrable it would be. But here was this masterpiece, a thousand dense pages long, and it was just goofy and pleasurable right out of the gates. Plus: bananas! What a great topic. 

I don’t know exactly how to close this little recipe-essay, so let me take a minute and give my dad some credit for my waffle obsession. When I was a kid, after my parents divorced, my brother and I would spend every other weekend with my dad. Now looking back as a father myself, I see all the small ways he went above and beyond to try to make our visits special. One thing he did was he bought a waffle iron and taught himself how to make very fluffy waffles, the kind that have whipped egg whites folded into the batter. And walnuts. They were delicious, and they tasted extra good because of the love he put into them.

Now, making waffles for my own kid, I try to bring that same special energy. After all, it’s not just a burn to go home and have your mom or dad make you some (banana) waffles. It’s a privilege.

Yesterday there was a rally in Downtown LA that drew 36,000 people. It was thrown by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and had musical guests including Neil Young, Joan Baez, and Maggie Rogers. We were planning to go, too—but woke up exhausted and with a chore list a mile long. So instead we watched the livestream on our TV. It felt really good to hear politicians and union leaders and others with some significant voice say it like it is: we’re in a world of hurt. And: a lot of the mess we’re in is because the Democratic Party has, as a rule, been too captured by corporate money to make a strong case against oligarchy, let alone to fight tooth and nail for policies that really help working people.

After virtually attending the rally, a few little thoughts:

• The musical guests were great. Especially Neil Young, who was on his A-game, playing guitar and singing and generally being the weirdest person to cross the stage. Neil Young multiple times led the crowd in chants of “Take America Back.” As counter-MAGA slogans go, it’s pretty good!

• There were many union leaders up on stage—and it’s kind of wild to see union leaders, real workers who have been elected by their fellow union workers to lead them for a while, on your TV. Unlike geriatric members of congress and airbrushed entertainment industry people, these are real Americans, by which I mean they seem like the people I went to high school with. It’s great to see Bernie share his stage with them.

• AOC has real star power. My partner said it was like seeing Obama in 2007, 2008. She just has it—a clear voice and a striking charisma. No wonder they loathe her in MAGAland.

And one big takeaway: it was exciting to watch the rally, even on TV. It felt pressing and a little unscripted. (At one point, the president of a nurse’s union left the stage, along with the eight other nurses on stage with her, to act as first responders to someone in the crowd who was having a medical emergency. When they came back to stage, five minutes later, it was to grand cheering.) More than anything, it reminded me of the Trump rallies my proudly Democratic stepdad couldn’t stop watching, back in 2015. There is something powerful about live political speech in front of a great, big audience, and it means something when big crowds turn out for political events. Back in 2015 it was a harbinger of MAGA’s decade to come. Today, though, there’s something brewing on the left.

Friend-of-Lightplay Alexander Matthews has a new novel coming out, The President, which sounds wonderful, at least as Alex writes about it in his latest newsletter. Alas it’s only available in South Africa for the time being—but if you’re in South Africa, I think you should pick up a copy! Especially because it comes with this dope risoprint:

We went to the Alice Coltrane exhibit at the Hammer Museum, and it was both wonderful and frustrating. I may have more to say about the exhibition as a whole—I ended up bringing home not just the catalog but also a reissue of her spiritual memoir and a biography. For now, though, I just want to complain about one thing: why do so many museum shows put print materials (like these rad contact sheets) behind glass cases where if you bend to examine them you cast multiple, deep shadows?

Exhibit designers should be thinking about lighting and shadows and reflections and glare as some of their most key concerns! (I love complaining about professions I know very little about…)

For my work podcast, I interviewed the psychologist Stephen Southern about expressive writing—the idea that writing about your own life can have therapeutic benefits. I’m fascinated by this idea, and I had a million questions, which Stephen gamely answered. I think it’s one of the Seed Field Podcast’s best episodes yet. (I just checked—it’s our 74th.) Plus, you might be interested to know that I introduced the topic by sharing my own story of experiencing and evacuating from the LA fires.

Noting with pride that when you look at my office on street view, the window talks back. 2020 was also a protest year!

Why not go to the ice cream store, and if there’s not a big line, ask to try every single flavor that sounds interesting? Even if you already know what you’re going to order in the end.