Culture

Food, Beer and a Music Podium

WriterMinionLeave a comment

So I started thinking about food.

No, not like that!

Err, okay…pretty much exactly like that, but I plead hunger and impatience for my lunch to come.

Well, it’s a bit more than that, actually.  I started thinking about food a few days ago, mainly because I was cooking…and because I love to cook.  I love the process of taking a pile of disparate ingredients and turning them into something greater than the sum of the parts.  It is actually one of the more satisfying things to me, to be honest.  Strangely — for a guy as given to impulse, randomness and flights of fancy as me — that process of turning chaos into order is pretty damned relaxing.

But just as much as the process do I enjoy what food means.  Look, when I get together with friends, we inevitably end up in the kitchen.  We inevitably end up sharing booze and food and good times.  Even at “work”, when I get together with others involved in the beer world, we inevitably end up back in the brewhouse, still sharing booze and food and good times.

So where am I going with this?  No, that’s not me projecting your response to the opening above, it is me legitimately asking myself that question…

When it comes to food, I love it.  No, really, there is nothing I won’t try.  I love it all. I’ve had some of the most refined, perfect food you can imagine, from Kyoto to New York to Nice.  I’ve also had street food.  In the back alleys of Mexico City; in the streets of Marrakech; in those neighborhoods in Naples you aren’t supposed to go…

And in every bite there has lived that one thing so impossible to define, but so crucial to life: culture.  The culture and life and heartbeat of those who gave birth to that food, both the individuals and their people as a whole.  The food that sticks with me — and the food I like most to eat — is, by the way, the street food.  The peasant food.  The food that make families brag about still using great-grandma’s recipe.

I once spent several hundred dollars on a formal 30-course kaiseki dinner in Kyoto.  I loved the meal, but if you pressed me, I could only really describe one or two dishes.  Do you know what I remember more from that trip?  The grilled chicken cartilage* I had at a tiny Shinjuku izikaya.

*Yes, it really is a thing.  I won’t explain in the interests of saving space and word-count, but buy me a beer sometime and ask about it.  I can go on for hours about some of the weird shit I’ve had in my life.  Just don’t ask about the sheep’s eyeball — I didn’t enjoy that one.

I thought about this as I was cooking dirty rice, by the way.  More peasant food.  Food that started as a way to extract all the flavor possible from leftovers and off-cuts and what was left after the rich had their pick.  It was James Michener who introduced me to this reality.  I don’t know if you have ever read any Michener, but one of the things he excelled at was connecting his readers to the cultures he was trying to explore.  One of the ways he did that was through their food; more importantly, through the historical nexus between food and culture.

In the US that nexus is one of class, yes, but also of race.  Steaks and roasts we all know.  They were — and still are, to an extent — the food of the wealthy.  Then you have the foods for the rest of us, for those at the bottom.  The fish stews and pies for the New England fishermen.  Gumbo and jumbalaya for the French Acadians (yup, that’s where “cajun” comes from) transplanted to far off Louisiana.  For the slaves and former slaves there were wild greens (collard, mustard, etc…), catfish and leftover/unwanted cuts of pork and beef…all those things that lie now at the very heart of American barbecue.  As a matter of fact, I just paid $25 for a meal that once was given to slaves because the master couldn’t be bothered to supply anything better.  Hell, lobster was once so despised that is was used only to feed prisoners…

That is how food both reflects and embodies culture.  That is how food defines who we are as a people…and, just as much, who we once were.  That is a key part of the magic of it all.

As a writer, I sometimes get chastised for using food and booze too much.  I use them, however, to reflect my characters.  To reflect who they are, and who they aren’t.  I use them, often, to create situations where the food — and the atmosphere around it — defines the cultures and backgrounds of the characters in ways that would otherwise take hundreds and hundreds of words.

I am, at heart, a peasant.  I would rather have real coq au vin in a tiny country village than the best dishes from the fine dining places in Paris.  I would rather, as a writer, use a hundred words of my characters’ thoughts and reactions about food and everything surrounding it as a mirror for the real world than five thousand words of exposition.

One of my disappointments with George RR Martin, by the way, wasn’t that he talked too much about food, it was that he didn’t use food enough to truly comment on the lives and circumstances of the different strata of the society he created in GOT…

{Musical Notes — this started as something very different.  It started as a desire to find a good, old school song to use.  That desire morphed into finding those anthems that are truly evocative of an era.  Then, me being me (and beer being beer), everything morphed again into finding those songs that we don’t even have to actually hear anymore; into those songs from which we need only an exposure of a second or two to remember, and to feel.  I had to limit things to the last fifty-ish years, if only to keep the number of songs manageable.  As a further note, these are all songs I love…and all songs that bring their own memories for me.

Gold Medal: perhaps the most instantly evocative of these songs, for far more than one generation.  Don’t cheat, don’t look ahead.  Just listen.  It won’t take more than one second if you are anything at all like me…

Silver Medal: a better song than the first, it does not have the instant cross-generational impact of the “winner”.  It is to me one of the best songs ever recorded…

Bronze Medal:  This song is my generation.  It should probably take the Silver, to be honest, but the second place song is just a better song by a better creator…

Honorable Mention: I couldn’t help myself, this song had to make the list.  It had to make the list because, not long ago, I was walking to my own locker room at a hockey tournament, only to hear a bunch of middle school players belting out this song in the next room.  That is cross-generational appeal…and a song you will instantly recognize…

Lambs Beat Bungles in Superb Owl!

WriterMinionLeave a comment

Okay, if you’re not a fan of American football, this post’s title very likely means nothing to you.  Even if you are a fan, if you don’t take part in the time-honored fan traditions of snark and sarcasm towards other teams — not to mention the internet slang/jokes the title is pulled from — it still likely means nothing.  Bear with me, all will (hopefully) make sense as I try to work a whole bunch of random, unrelated thoughts into a coherent post.

Yesterday was Super Bowl Sunday here in the US.  Now, the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events in the American media universe.  Whether you love or hate it, the Super Bowl dominates the landscape in a way almost nothing else can touch.  Hell, we’ve had twenty years of the freaking Puppy Bowl solely as an anti-Super Bowl for those who hate football…and if that ain’t impact on culture and life, I don’t know what is!

Okay, but…

Yes, there’s always a but!  But the media landscape is changing.  It is changing as surely as is the socio-cultural landscape.  That is no bad thing, by the way.  Nor is it a new thing.  Things change.  Things have to change.  Life and love and progress are built on dynamism, on imbalances in the system and the alterations those imbalances drive.  Think of it as a physics problem, if you will; unchanging stasis is an utter impossibility.

At present, the change to the landscape is a splintering, and a devolution.  Oh, not devolution in a bad way, but devolution in the sense of de-centralization.  No longer do we all watch the same TV.  No longer do we all experience the same programs and thoughts and cultures.  We, for the most part, are far more active in our viewing today; we pick through Netflix and Prime for the best movies and TV.  We follow Youtube and Twitch and TikTok creators who are the definition of niche — our niche.  We actively choose our viewing, rather than the simple passivity of absorbing what someone else chooses for us.

Individuality is the order of the day, and that is a change very much for the better.  For the most part.  It has its negatives, too.  The splintering of the media landscape also reflects a splintering in the socio-cultural fabric of our lives.*  This is why I mentioned the Super Bowl above; its power is on the wane.  It still is a media behemoth, and an arguably over-powered presence in the American media landscape, but no longer is it an absolute, automatic dominator.

*Or is it a cause?  You can argue that one from both sides and make a good case either way.

I don’t do “regular” TV in any way, I only stream.  Over the last couple of years the Super Bowl has been far more of an afterthought than it a must-watch.  For anyone with similar viewing circumstances — a large and growing percentage of us — to watch and get overwhelmed by the Super Bowl requires actively seeking it out, rather than having it thrust upon us.  Now, that is no bad thing since American football is not for everyone.  Nor does it, in and of itself, say much of anything about our culture.  But…

But, the Super Bowl used to be one of those touchstone, shared-experience things.  We all saw it because we couldn’t escape it.  We all talked about it the next day because there was nothing else to talk about.  That no longer applies.  One of our shared experiences — one of those things that unifies a culture — is no longer filling that role.  Another crack appears, another splintering of our shared experiences.

The question of the day, of course, is what comes out of those cracks and fractures?  What culture emerges?  History is, in this, not much of a guide as “today” really is unique (a concept I am usually loathe to assert).  In the past, the slow pace of communications meant culture was essentially a local thing.  There could be no real splintering as, try as they might, folks living next to each other experienced the same things everyday.

Today?  Today I doubt my neighbors watch the same things I do.  Yeah, a whole lot of folks have experienced The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+ right alongside me, but how many followed that up by watching the Millenial Farmer on Youtube?

Yeah, the Lambs beat the Bungles on Sunday, but I didn’t watch it.  I didn’t care.  Instead I binge-watched Apple’s attempt to turn Asimov’s Foundation into a show (hoo boy, is that a post for another day!).  Thanks, Mr Yeats, for touching on this:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Wait…was that another crack I heard beneath my feet?

Okay, so this part of the post started as a mere Musical Note appended to end, but it grew a bit from there.  It grew into an explanation and an exploration that I think merits inclusion into the main body.  Music exerts tremendous power and influence over me.  I say it all the time, but it bears repeating: music has power.  I don’t do a terribly good job of explaining the particular how’s and why’s of that power, so I thought I would take a stab at it again by using an explanation from this particular song’s writer/singer as a way to illustrate:

“I write quite a few songs where the sort of issue is faith – having faith, keeping faith. And this song in particular is about the difficulty in having faith in things, and finding things to have faith in. In yourself, in God, in like he said, a woman. Faith is a weird thing, it in a sense it is all about waiting. It’s not actually about getting anything, you know, faith is about the wait, because once you get something there is no need anymore. So a lot about faith is just the willingness to sort of throw yourself on a fence and hang there for a while. That’s a very difficult and bitter thing, you know. In this song, I keep saying the main character, *I*. I said, “All my sins, I would pay for them if I could come back to you.” It’s not just about finding things to believe in, it’s about wanting to be able to believe in anything too. And it’s about all the voices that get inside your head and whisper for you to do it or not to do it as well.”

The Hard Way

WriterMinionLeave a comment

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Because, well, you can’t go wrong with a good Dickens quote!

So, anyway, getting to my post…

Err, more specifically, getting to reactions to my last post: either I’m an over-reacting loon who is trying to turn a “minor flu” into the Black Death…or, I’m an under-reacting loon who is trying to turn the “the new Black Death” into the common cold.

Got it.

As a writer, by the way, if you ever manage to piss off both political/cultural sides, you’re probably doing something right.

I’m gonna let both sides keep going in their preferred brands of tunnel vision, by the way, without further addressing that particular topic.  Nope, instead I want to touch on something that we can all* pretty much agree on: we’ve had it pretty damned good.

*Yeah, right, all.  When did all of us ever agree on any-freaking-thing?!

One of the consequences of this epidemic may — hopefully — be a return of the hard-won wisdom that we have lost over the years and decades.  Look, let’s boil it down to the basics — it is, depending on our age, our grandparents or great-grandparents who last had to learn the hard lessons of survival amidst disaster.  It was they who last had to truly learn how to be self-sufficient and careful.  It was they who last had to well-and-truly worry about care and consequences and the cold, bitter hand of reality smacking them on a daily basis.

For those of us born in the US or Western Europe in the last 75 years or so?  Yeah, we’ve had it pretty freaking good.  Be honest — at least with yourself, if you can’t be honest with anyone else — who among us has had to truly learn the need for savings?  Who among us has had to truly worry about the damned world ending?  Who among us has had to develop a personal relationship with fear and disaster, and life lived on the knife’s edge of death?

Oh, I’ve courted death…I’ve been in situations where my life was on that knife’s edge for survival.  No, I never fought in a war — wrong brother for that one! — but I have done stupid shit, beyond frolicking with bears and chasing wolves.  I’ve done stupid shit like hike this trail in the midst of a biblical thunderstorm:SkyRim_01-670x1024

As I was saying, I’ve been on the edge of disaster, but — and this is the important bit — I CHOSE that edge.  I chose it every single time.  Worse (or better, depending on your outlook), I chose to walk that edge in situations in which I was knowledgable and in control.  I did not have it thrust upon me.  I did not have the Universe itself cry out to me, “You think that’s bad?  Hold my beer!”

My grandparents did.  Like so many others of their generation, they lived through the best of times, and the worst.  The rest of us?  Yeah, the “worst of times” has not really been on the radar.  Not yet, anyway.

The preparatory bombardment of Kwajalein Island was unprecedented in the Pacific in both volume and effectiveness. During one period two shells per second were hitting specific targets or areas in the path of the assault troops. The 14-inch naval shells of the six battleships of Task Force 51 (TF 51) were most effective in piercing and destroying reinforced concrete structures. From the cruisers and destroyers, 8-inch and 5-inch shells ploughed into bunkers and tore up the thick growth of pandanus and palm trees. All together on February 1, 1944, almost 7,000 14-inch, 8-inch, and 5-inch shells were fired by supporting naval vessels at Kwajalein Island alone, and the bulk of these were expended against the main beaches before the landing. The field artillery on Carlson also joined in the preparatory fire. Its total ammunition expenditure on February 1 against Kwajalein was about 29,000 rounds. Finally, aerial bombardment added its bit to the pulverization of Kwajalein’s defenses. At 0810 Hours six B-24 Liberators of the 392d Bomb Squadron based on Apamama reported on station. Between 0830 and 0910 they flew above the trajectory of the naval and artillery shells and dropped fifteen 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound bombs on the blockhouse and dual-purpose twin-mount guns at the northwestern end of Kwajalein. This was followed almost immediately by bombing and strafing attacks carried out by carrier-based aircraft. USS Enterprise (CV-10), USS Yorktown (CV-10), USS Belleau Wood (CVL-24), USS Manila Bay (CVE-61), USS Corregidor (CVE 58), and USS Coral Sea (CVE-57) sent eighteen dive bombers and fifteen torpedo bombers that struck the western part of Kwajalein Island while as many fighters strafed the area with machine guns and rockets. All together 96 sorties were flown from the carriers in support of the troop landing on Kwajalein Island. The results of all this expenditure of explosives were devastating. The damage was so intensive that it was impossible to determine the rel

Let’s be clear, COVID-19 is not the worst of times.  It’s not even close.  If you want the worst of times, go re-study what the Bubonic Plague did to the world.

What this current epidemic is, however, is a nice little reminder of just what could happen.  It is a Black Swan event to clue us in to just how bad shit really could get.

We’ve been complacent.  We’ve been comfortable.  We’ve been, if you want brutal honesty, soft.  We’ve had it too good for too long.

We have to re-learn the wisdom that we’ve spent so many years disparaging.  We have to re-learn the value of saving, of having money put aside to cover our asses when the world falls apart.  We have to re-learn the necessity of being able to handle our own stuff: to fix a leaky faucet, to repair minor car problems, to protect our friends and family.  Crap, a huge percentage of our population has to re-learn the ability to simply walk a mile!

To be even more gloomy-blunt — for when things really do go to hell — we have to re-learn to forage and hunt, and to survive.  A common isolation joke in my little corner of Montana is, “Who cares if the store is closed?  I’ve got plenty of ammunition…”

And, no, I’m not going all join-a-militia-in-Idaho crazy, thank you very much.  What I’m saying is that COVID-19 is a reminder that the worst really can happen.  Our forebears learned that lesson the hard way, and now we have to, as well.

Musical Note — the song below, for those of you who disparage video games (for which I’ve written, goddammit!), is from the soundtrack of a game.  It’s a great song, off a great soundtrack album, and it kinda fits our world of isolation and quarantine and looming disaster:

Climbing The Second Mountain

WriterMinionLeave a comment

I’ve mentioned before that my news and opinion reading is pretty dang broad.  I do my best to take in info and viewpoints from all across the spectrum, then run all of them through my own perspective (and BS filter) in an effort to come up with something approaching the “whole picture.”

You come up with some surprising results that way, by the way.  You come up with writers that you like — that you take quite seriously — even though you may not agree with the policies and positions and opinions they express (I’m looking at you, Richard Cohen).

That’s rare, however.  More commonly you find those writers who simply make you shrug, who are there just to read in the moment.  Every once in a while, however, one of those “blah” people surprises you…every once in a while you find a column or an essay that makes you sit up and take real notice of someone you had dismissed for years…

I ran across one of those this past weekend.

Maybe it was because the piece had nothing really to do with politics, but rather was about life itself…about life, and second chances.  Given that I, in the essay’s terms, am on my “second mountain,” this piece really resonated.

I cannot for copyright reasons quote the entire thing here, but I am going to put a pull-quote to give you an idea of what he has to say, along with a link to the piece itself.  It is…erm…a terrible title for the piece, by the way.  The headline has nothing whatsoever to do with what is actually written, but that’s not the author’s fault…blame the editors for that one.  Ignore the title and just read the essay, it’s worth it.

David Brooks, “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy”

“Life had thrown them into the valley, as it throws most of us into the valley at one point or another. They were suffering and adrift.

Some people are broken by this kind of pain and grief. They seem to get smaller and more afraid, and never recover. They get angry, resentful and tribal.

But other people are broken open. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upends the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. The basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew. Some people look into the hidden depths of themselves and they realize that success won’t fill those spaces.”