The Carmack Cheeseball

This is something that has haunted me since childhood, or at least since my mother started getting these things, these green fuzzy balls that came, wrapped in plastic, in the weeks before Christmas and, for most of my brothers and sisters, initiated a frenzy of consumption that eroded, triscuit by eager triscuit, these perfect round globes of goodness.

Needless to say the recipe is closely guarded by Jim Carmack and his cheeseball collaborators. However, over the past few years, Pae and I have been conducting forensic investigations of our share of the booty. And this is the result:

8 oz Kaukauna Sharp Cheddar cheese spread
4 oz Philadelphia Cream Cheese
2 oz Mystery Cheese
2 oz Bacos, finely chopped
2 oz minced onion, dried
2 oz dried parsley
2 oz raw pecans, finely chopped
1-1/2 Tbs Cayenne pepper
1-1/2 Tbs A-1 steak sauce
1-1/2 Tbs KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce, original recipe
1 tsp Wright’s hickory liquid smoke, from concentrate
Distilled water to achieve texture
Sugar to taste
MSG to taste

Load ingredients into bowl. Place under a mixer. Blend to proper consistency. Form into balls 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Roll balls in extra pecans and parsley. Place in plastic bag. Place plastic bag into another plastic bag. Tie bags with red and white yard from Stats. Distribute.


(If anyone reading this knows the identity of the Mystery Cheese or the actual recipe itself and cares to correct this one, please do. We are committed to having a fully functional replica by Christmas this year.)

A Manifesto

The current fascination with Pre-Fab homes as promoted by Dwell and other magazines has roots in a genuine concern, that is, to provide a form of housing that is inexpensive and quick to install. The promise has been that, if done properly, Pre-Fab might provide much needed housing for low-income families and the homeless. However, what has happened instead is the emergence of Pre-Fab as commodity, seen online on a variety of websites promoting specific models, but understood most clearly with a quick browsing of the www.fabprefab.com website. It is here where the most crucial of activities related to the production of prefabricated homes takes place: marketing.

Gone is any concern for cost (I could not find anything that could be built for less than $200 per square-foot); gone too is any hope that these could be viable alternatives for affordable housing. What remains is the Pre-Fab as a consumer product, like a car or a toaster oven. More often than not, Pre-Fabs are designed to appeal to the environmentalist in all of us, sporting sustainable features that distract us from the fact that we might was well be shopping for an appliance -- and in the end even these accessories provide more for us as symbols validating our status as earth-friendly consumers than they do as functional elements.

So, without cost or status or even sustainability to justify our acquisition of the Pre-Fab, what are we left with? Convenience. That’s really what it comes down to. I’m guessing that (if you leave out the permit process and the construction of the foundation), these puppies can be bolted into place over a weekend. So Pre-Fab, which came out of a desire to build a home quickly and predictably, has been burdened with a whole host of semes, memes, and other themes that disguise the true motivation for wanting one of these things, which, it turns out, is sheer laziness.

Let this then be a call for Slow Architecture.

A good home takes time to build. The selection of site is critical, as is the placement of a house on that site; the specificity of a site demands a specific response. Every decision made during construction is crucial, and adapting to the ever-evolving conditions requires constant attention. The amazing part to me is that building this way also saves money. Any advantage gained by building a Pre-Fab in volume get lost in other ways - shipping perhaps, profit margins definitely. And when you’re done with your project, when you’ve handed over the wad of cash to the Pre-Fabricator and enter your new dwelling, you’re entering a house that is too small, too expensive for its size, and neither reflects you nor its site.

There’s an old saying in construction: “Price, Speed, Quality: pick any two.” I say pick price but pick quality; and leave the speed to the Autobahn.

Manifest Density

The concept of Manifest Destiny lit a fire under the feet of adventurous Americans over a century ago, stretching a thin film of Western culture from sea to shining sea, and providing justification for all the sins against native cultures that we committed. But Manifest Destiny was a sales pitch masquerading as a pseudo-religious calling and its ultimate result has been the infection of every corner of the continental US with profit-motivated consumer capitalism, an expander of economies to be sure, but a primitive mechanism in the development of cities, a stupid, blundering process that, for the most part, has created a nation made up of cities without civility.

With the rise of the internet, a counterposing movement has emerged. As individuals discover their neighbors online -- in chat rooms, blogs, and Yahoo Groups -- they become more personally invested in their community. In neighborhoods across America, people have begun to take more personally how their environment is being formed. With the land having been conquered, cities are becoming more crowded and density of development is inevitable; yet as concerned citizens begin to take on a more activist role in their communities, they provide a check to the unlimited growth that would occur otherwise. And as a result, cities are becoming more civilized.

This maturing of American cities might be called Manifest Density and promises the advent of a more enduring sort of urbanism. The tyranny of the wealthy, who historically have viewed land as just another natural resource from which they can extract profit, now must engage with the politics of the masses who have now assumed active stewardship of the built environment.