The teeming stars of the globular cluster NGC 6544 glisten in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster of tightly bound stars lies more than 8,000 light-years away from Earth and is, like all globular clusters, a densely populated region of tens of thousands of stars.
(via)
Born this date, 1956: Anthony Bourdain.
There are few voices I miss today more than that of Anthony Bourdain. His warm-hearted embrace of the entire world, his endless curiosity, his willingness to bridge gaps and accept differences–these are qualities our world is deeply lacking today. I, myself, fall short of his example…but I do try. Obviously I’m not able to travel as much as Bourdain did, but I do what I can. His oft-cited bits of travel advice, starting with eating where the locals eat, are always well taken.
By pure good luck, I read a book of Bourdain’s wisdom this very morning, after I checked it out of the library yesterday. I didn’t even know that today was Bourdain Day, as we’re all calling it now, honoring the life of a man who modeled a way of looking at the world to which we should all aspire. The book, Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, is actually a short collection of several interviews, ranging from one he gave in the early 2000s to several he gave in the last few months of his life. I realize that the temptation may be there to read those last few and try to find any hint of the demons that were lurking in the dark places of his mind, but I strongly advise against it. Bourdain’s life should stand for more than just the fact of its ending.
Here are a few excerpts from the interviews in this book:
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: How do you distinguish between tricks–and I don’t mean it in a circus sense, but just secrets–versus ten years of doing it? You serve a food to someone and they say, “what’s your secret?” as though they can just tell that to them and then tomorrow they can do exactly what you made. At what point do you say, “Look, I’ve been at this my whole life?”
BOURDAIN: There are no secrets. The secret of the restaurant business and professional cooking is there are no secrets. It is a mentoring business. Chefs spend their whole lives learning stuff, and then, because of the nature of the business, every few months teach everything they know, invest time they don’t have, in teaching somebody everything they know so that they can maybe have a Sunday off, and that they can count on a crew. It is a military hierarchy, and it is import–there are no secrets. There are no secret recipes. There are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in a kitchen you are either told, open-source, by your immediate supervisor and that’s been shared with everybody in the kitchen, or you have learned it over time, painfully. You know, the ability to tell when a steak is cooked by listening to it in the pan or on the grill. Or determining that a piece of fish is probably ready to come out of the pan just from the sound of it–these are things you learn through repetition. And that is the great secret. It’s that this is how professionals learn, this is how home cooks should learn. People shouldn’t be intimidated by recipes. They should understand that professionals learn through getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, starting to get it right, eventually getting it right, until it became second nature. It’s repetition, repetition, repetition. You learn all of these things, even if you don’t understand the technical, the science behind why your stew is transforming, why it’s becoming thick as it cooks longer, why your egg scrambles, why the steak gets dark on the outside when you expose it to heat. You may have no understanding of the science behind that, but you instinctively–of course through repetition–understand it, you learn to use it, and you count on it.
Bourdain on writing (this interview is from a writing conference in Sydney; the interviewer is author Jill Dupleix, whose name is apparently misspelled in the book):
BOURDAIN: I don’t work for a living. I mean…
DUPLIEX: You’re making it sound good.
BOURDAIN: I mean, writing–I have no sympathy for anyone fortunate enough to get paid any kind of money to write whining about writer’s block or how hard it is, or some sort of internal torture. You’re doing it in a sitting position, so right away, you know? I spent my whole adult life on my feet. I feel very, very lucky that anybody even gives a shit what I think. It’s not something I’m used to, and it is a privilege to be able to write and have even eight people care what you’re saying.
[A bit later in the same interview]
BOURDAIN: I’m gonna tell you something that aspiring writers or writers here will really hate me for: I’ve never written anything in my life that hasn’t been published.
DUPLIEX: Yeah, we hate you.
BOURDAIN: I have never toiled away in a garret for years writing unsuccessful or unpublished manuscripts. I wrote the article that Kitchen Confidential was based on for a free paper in New York. I figured they were lame enough to buy my piece. It ended up in The New Yorker. I got lucky. I’m always talking, telling stories. Being a little provocateur with a way with words was something that was true of me when I was a little kid. I’ve always used that skill to get the things I want, to manipulate events to my liking, to get myself into trouble, to get myself out of trouble, to hurt my enemies, to seduce people, or make people do things I would like them to do. So I was always a little…you know, my parents very early on said “You should really be a lawyer, you’ve got such a way with words.”
Bourdain on differences and contradictions within people:
BOURDAIN: I used to think that basically, the whole world, that all humanity were basically bastards. I’ve since found that most people seem to be pretty nice–basically good people doing the best they can. There is rarely, however, a neat takeaway. You have to learn to exercise a certain moral relativity, to be a good guest first–as a guiding principle. Otherwise you’d spend the rest of the world lecturing people, pissing people off, confusing them and learning nothing. Do I pipe up every time my Chinese host serves me some cute animal I may not approve of? Should I inquire of my Masai buddies if they still practice female genital mutilation? Express revulsion in Liberia over tribal practices?
Fact is, the guy who’s been patting my knee all night, telling jokes, sharing favorite Seinfeld anecdotes, making sure I get the best part of the lamb, being my new bestest buddy in Saudi Arabia will very likely later, on the drive back to the hotel, guilelessly express regret over what “the Jews and the CIA” did to my city on 9/11. What do you say to that?
Bourdain wasn’t one to hold an opinion for life, if he learned otherwise. He was very open to changing his views as his perspective evolved. I remember that he was rather disgusted by the degree to which Emeril Lagasse became a big “brand” in the 90s and early 2000s, but later on he would write an article in which he acknowledged Lagasse’s skill, knowledge, and the fact that he had paid his dues. Bourdain also famously sprang to the defense of a small-town newspaper food critic in the Midwest who praised her town’s new Olive Garden restaurant, even though he has made clear his general distaste for corporate food (see the quote in the title of this post). Here’s an example of Bourdain’s shift in perspective altering a previous strong opinion:
PETER ARMSTRONG: You said in an interview I read a couple days ago that you’ve changed your take on brunch as a result of having a kid.
BOURDAIN: Well, I hated brunch because for many years of my life, for many low points of my professional career, when I was fort of unemployable by any reputable restaurant for various reasons, I could always get a brunch gig. Because restaurants are always desperate to find somebody to cook three hundred omelettes for drunks on Sunday morning, and that was me. And so the smell of eggs cooking and French toast was always the smell of shame and defeat and humiliation until I became a dad. And now, if I want the fast track to looking cool in front of my daughter’s friends, it’s make a pancake bar for them, you know, “Your choice: chocolate chip, blueberry, or banana?”
I think what I appreciate most about Bourdain is that he rarely talks about food the way a “foodie” talks about food. He talks about the people who make it, why they make it the way they do, maybe a bit about the method of how they make it, and what it means to them in a cultural way. You almost never hear Bourdain talking about the acidity of a dish or the way it “elevates” certain ingredients or any of that Master Chef bullshit. Even when he visited a high-end restaurant on his shows, he always focused on the human connections involved with the food.
My God, I miss Anthony Bourdain. He was to food and food exploration what Carl Sagan was to science and space.
I don’t even know how I end up with this many tabs open.
:: Pop-up Instagram bakeries during the pandemic.
This article is a couple years old, but it showed up on some feed or other that I follow, so here it is.
But working at the absolute capacity of their home kitchens, for a year straight, means burnout is very real. Multiple chefs I spoke to said their houses were full of pastry boxes and their fridges full of butter and freezers full of ice cream; they cooled cakes in stages on tiny counters and used stimulus money to buy equipment; their plants are long dead and their kitchens reek of fryer oil; their phone won’t stop binging, and when their oven died, they switched to steamed and boiled desserts. For all of them, home is no longer merely home: It’s the world’s worst commercial kitchen, with a bedroom attached. They welcome press, but they hope their landlord doesn’t see the photos.
:: The end of manual transmission.
I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
Honestly, I can’t see getting nostalgic about the stick shift. I drove one for years, and I do not miss it a single bit. How about you, folks?
I would endorse this either way, but the overalls are a cherry-on-the-top kind of thing.
:: A bad joke incorporating a pie in the face. I tip my hat!
I don’t have a lot to say about this, other than to note that this is one of my favorite psychedelic pop songs of the 1960s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBFY1-eEhdU
Is hiati the plural of hiatus? Let me go check….
Answer: It is not. It’s hiatuses. OK then!
Anyway, I had no planned intention to take an entire weekend off from posting here, but that’s what happened. Nothing major happened, just a busy weekend full of stuff I felt like doing more than posting here. I’ll write about some of that at some point soon, but for now, just as a quick way of getting back into things, I’ll do something I used to do a lot: a quiz-thing! This one is from Sunday Stealing, which Roger faithfully does most weeks. Here’s this week’s quiz:
1) What is your favorite way to spend a lazy day?
For purposes of this question, I’ll assume that the lazy day is a day at home (i.e., not on vacation someplace) without much by way of expected activities or duties. My answer depends a bit on the weather: if it’s nice out, I might go to a park for some walking or hiking and photography. Also, sitting and reading and writing is always on the docket! Listening to music, too.
Basically, a lazy day is a good time to engage my various hobbies.
2) What do you look forward to every week?
The weekend!
OK, fine, let’s be more specific and less obvious. Saturday night, we usually have a cheese-and-cured-meat selection for dinner (yes, I could use the hoity-toity word Charcuterie for this, but come on, do we really need a fancy French word for cheese-and-crackers?). We also usually stream a movie on Saturday nights, so that’s a pleasure. I also follow some content producers who generate stuff on weekends; their work is always nice to see. One example is Critical Role, which I do not have time to follow in entirety (each episode is like, four hours long!), so I skip through quite a bit. I don’t always know what’s going on–no, scratch that, I almost never know what’s going on, but the geeky energy surrounding that table is always infectious.
3) Name three pet peeves you currently have.
Like, fairly new pet-peeves? OK: well, right now, thanks to some BS unfolding over the weekend, I’m sick of guys issuing challenges for debate. The latest example is RFK Jr., who has become a fountain of complete bullshit, and Joe Rogan, who has yet to find a shitty idea he won’t amplify, challenging a vaccine scientist to “debate”. My general position on debates is that they are always, in every single instance, a complete waste of time.
(Oh, by the way? Remember the 1988 Vice Presidential Debate, when Dan Quayle got the “If you became President, what would you do first?” question three times? And on the third time he dragged out his comparison of his Congressional tenure with that of JFK’s, to Lloyd Bentsen’s obvious delight? The obvious right answer to “If you became President, what would you do first?” is, “Well, it depends, doesn’t it?” Or even “How the f*** do I know?!” I mean, is he taking over because the President had a heart attack, or is it an assassination, or a 9-11 style attack that killed the President, or is it a huge scandal that forced the President to resign, or….” As cloying as it was, probably the most authentic and actual answer Quayle could have given was one he did give: “First I’d say a prayer.” Anyway, the Bentsen “You’re no Jack Kennedy!” line was a delightful piece of red meat for a Democrat like me, but it also started me thinking, “Maybe debates are kind of a waste of time?”)
Moving on…oh wait, I didn’t finish the question. Two more pet peeves: People who don’t clean up their dogs’ solid waste, and people who wear their overalls with one strap unfastened. I hate that last one. It always looks weird to me.
4) If you were to win an all expense paid vacation for two weeks to anywhere in the world, where would you choose to go? What are some of the things you would like to experience while you were there?
Ooooooh…I would not be able to choose, so I would do so randomly. I would roll a d8 (that’s an 8-sided die, for those of you who don’t play role-playing games), with these results, dependent on the roll:
1-2: Finger Lakes vacation, either in Ithaca or Geneva, NY
3-4: NYC
5-6: Toronto
7-8: Waikiki
In each case? Sight-seeing, visiting museums, shopping, eating, drinking, walking around, and folding in a few lazier days. I have no problem filling up time. The Finger Lakes and the Waikiki vacations would present opportunities for nature engagement that NYC and Toronto don’t, but the cities would have live theater and movies to a greater degree.
5) What was one of your favorite toys as a kid? Did you save any special things from your childhood that you still have today?
Check this out:
My parents gave me that little nesting doll set when I was in first grade (I think). I remember wanting nesting dolls because I loved the concept. I remember being a little confused by these because I was expecting the traditional “Matryoshka” style, but this grew on me quickly. I still dig this little sailor family–made in Poland!–and this item has a place of pride on my desk even now.
6) What is your favorite holiday? What is your least favorite holiday?
Favorite? Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Years Day are all in a big tie. And honestly, Halloween is right up there. I love that the year ends with four months of cool celebratory days, each with its own flavor and air.
Least favorite? Hmmmm. It’s never really on my radar because I never get it off, but Columbus Day sucks and needs to be renamed to something better. As in, not honoring a racist colonizer.
7) Have you ever met anyone famous? What concerts have you attended?
The vast majority of concerts I’ve attended are classical concerts. Outside that area, I’ve heard Celine Dion (that was a great show!), the Trans-Siberian Orchestra several times (always a blast), and…gosh, that’s about it. I do think more about going to concerts moving forward, though. After hearing what I’ve heard about her current “Eras” tour, I’m intrigued by going to hear Taylor Swift.
I’ve met almost zero famous people, but as a kid I once went backstage after a Buffalo Philharmonic concert to get then-music director Semyon Bychkov’s autograph. He was very friendly and gregarious.
8) Are there any expressions that people use that really annoy you? If so, what are they?
Roger doesn’t like “common sense”, and I am in agreement.
Of course, some other expressions come and go depending on what pop culture does with them. Thanks to Letterkenny, I have a new appreciation of “To be fair”.
9) Do you like your name? Are you named after anyone? Is there a story how you got your name? Would you change it if you could? If so, what name would you give yourself?
My name’s fine. At this point, changing it would seem kind of pointless, and anyway, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t love it or hate it…I’ve never been one to find some innate connection between myself and the name I carry around, but it’s fine.
If forced at gunpoint to change my name, though? Hello, Max Power!
10) It is said that it’s the little things that make life worth living. Name five of those little things in your life.
A longer post breaking this unplanned hiatus is coming, but meantime…here’s Franz von Suppe! This is not an overture, though: It’s a march called Fatinitza.
A two-fer, because I couldn’t decide which of these to post. That’s when I remembered, “Hey, it’s MY blog, I can post two things if I want!” So, here are two things:
Our songs:
From our trip to Seneca Lake last year….
A piano concerto, today, and a very modern one at that: composed in 2018 and premiered a year later, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is the third piano concerto by composer John Adams.
Adams is best known for his operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, but he has been a prolific composer in many genres, and he may well be the best known contemporary American composer alive, aside from possibly film composers like John Williams. Adams has had a long career and thus his work has evolved over the years, but he is most often characterized as a “minimalist”, writing works that often rely on repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs. This piece is no different.
Cast in three movement-like sections that are played without pause, the concerto deploys a number of interesting effects, like giving the piano a kind of honky-tonk sound. The second movement uses a minimalist kind of lyricism, and the last movement returns to the upbeat feel of the first, but with a more care-free, dancelike character. The three sections are given these tempi by Adams:
That first is particularly interesting: “Twitchy, Bot-like”, as if to suggest a mechanistic feel in the first movement that slowly gives way throughout the work until the last movement takes on a more improvisational feel.
Here is Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, by John Adams.
Thirty years ago yesterday, Jurassic Park opened in theaters, after quite a lot of hype. I remember at the time the general reaction initially was “Pretty good, not Spielberg’s best, but a really solid effort, but too bad he didn’t have the kinds of technical difficulties on this movie that kept him from showing too much of the shark in Jaws because that created the film’s mood,” yada yada yada.
I always found that criticism a bit wrong-headed, but I had to wait until the second time I saw the movie to figure out how I felt about it, because the first screening I attended was so abysmally awful, thanks to the theater, that I felt it unfair to judge the movie based on that screening.
There used to be a hotel in Olean, NY called the Castle Inn. It was, apparently at one time, quite a place: a very large restaurant with numerous medieval-themed dining rooms and the exterior made to look like a castle, and then a whole lot of “luxurious” rooms in several buildings. (Here’s a history of the place, which was apparently quite the going concern in the mid-20th century. I suppose it had the usual charm of the 20th-century over-the-top roadside attractions like Wall Drug and others.) The place had a pool, and a nine-hole golf course out back, and…a movie theater. The Castle Cinema. When we first moved there, the Castle Cinema was basically a large single-screen theater that wasn’t that bad.
But ten years later? It was terrible.
The decline began when the owners decided that they could obviously make more money by adding a second screen. However, there was no way to add to the existing building, which was hemmed in on its lot. So they did the next best thing: they cut the existing building in half, so you had two shoe-box style auditoriums side-by-side, each with its own screen.
Obviously this reduced the screen size significantly: each auditorium had what I’m sure is the smallest movie theater screen I’ve ever seen. I imagine that some rich folks own teevees with larger screens.
And the new wall between the two auditoriums was not sound-proofed very well, a problem which the owners got around by turning the volume on the movies down.
Also, if you remember reading Roger Ebert’s writings back in the day, one of his biggest pet peeves about movie theaters was theater owners who tried to penny-pinch by turning down the brightness on their projectors, thinking to not have to buy expensive movie-projector bulbs as often. This resulted in films often looking terrible.
That’s what happened to Jurassic Park the first time I saw it: the Castle Cinema made it a murky, hard-to-hear crap-fest, instead of the rip-roaring fun man-versus-nature adventure movie it actually was.
Oh! The Castle Cinema would have ONE guy working. Doing EVERYTHING. He’d sell some tickets, and then when the popcorn line got long enough, he’d slide over and do that for a bit. Eventually he’d break away and go turn the damned movie on. This meant that movies at the Castle never started on time, and they frequently started twenty minutes or more late. And that screwed things up because the Castle never advertised movie start times with any thought given to the movies’ actual running times; unless it was a three-hour film, they advertised four screenings a day: 2, 4, 7, and 9 o’clocks. Jurassic Park is 127 minutes long, so guess how that turned out.
In short, the Castle Cinema was a horrible place to see a movie, and not long after the Jurassic Park debacle, during which entire plot points were missed entirely because we either couldn’t hear the dialog explaining them or see the events displaying them (since half the movie takes place at night), I ended up seeing the movie again at a mall theater in Buffalo. (A General Cinema theater, precisely…and I’m pretty sure General Cinema has gone away too, but they at least could show a movie well.) In fact, seeing Jurassic Park there so irritated me that I refused to see movies at the Castle again. If a movie I wanted to see played at that theater, I would drive to Buffalo to see it.
The Castle Cinema is long gone now, as is the Castle Inn, the Castle Restaurant, and the Castle Golf Course. When we moved to the Olean area in 1981, Olean itself had already peaked and was on the decline. But the signs of the peak were still in evidence in the businesses that existed (and soon started failing), the vibrant (for then) downtown street, several factories, and connections to larger businesses in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and farther away, New York City.
But back to the movie: the second time I saw Jurassic Park, I got it.
The afore-mentioned critique that the film needed to show less dinosaur has always struck me as an odd one. Yes, that accident of a poorly-functioning shark model led to increased tension and suspense in Jaws, but Jurassic Park isn’t Jaws. The earlier film was about a single monster terrorizing the people of Amity; this film isn’t really a monster film at all. Jurassic Park is about what happens when two apex predators come into contact with one another, and the advisability of scientific “progress” at all costs. Sure, parts of Jurassic Park are definitely monster-movie-ish, but I don’t think the movie is actually a monster movie at all. The dinosaurs, the movie tells us, are not malevolent creatures bent on eating humans; they’re animals, created and thrust into an ecosystem that has evolved beyond them.
Jurassic Park is a much less subtle film than Jaws was; where Jaws suggests its themes, Jurassic Park states them outright and often, usually via some good dialog put in the mouth of Jeff Goldblum. While you can’t go wrong with giving Jeff Goldblum things to say, the film’s constant pointing out of what a bad idea it is to resurrect dinosaurs gets a bit repetitious. Still, it’s worth it to hear lines like “Yeah, but John, if the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”
Being a Steven Spielberg movie, Jurassic Park delves into issues of parenthood. By now we’re out of the realm of kids from broken homes, and instead we’re focusing on a scientist who has little desire to be around children…so of course, he’s forced to spend the movie escorting two kids through the most dangerous theme park on the planet. Mostly this works, once the actual thrills start; the movie gets a lot of the cloying material out of the way early, thankfully. After that, it’s all Movie Relationship Magic, because what better way to form bonds with other people and learn truths about oneself than through shared life-threatening danger?
Jurassic Park‘s build is slow. We don’t really see any dinosaurs until around twenty minutes or so into the film, and when we do, rather than make them scary, Spielberg makes them objects of wonder. This is a wise choice. First of all, it is wondrous; few cinematic reveals top those jeeps coming to the top of the rise and Sam Neill lazily looking off to the left and then suddenly realizing just what is happening. And that thing he says! That wonderful thing he says when he realizes that his own scientific hypotheses regarding dinosaurs are being confirmed: “They move in herds…they do move in herds.”
Laura Dern’s character is a bit short-changed by the film; she does strike a blow against “sexism in survival situations”, but she doesn’t get much by way of opportunity to demonstrate that as a scientist she is every bit as smart as the Sam Neill character. At least she is capable and strong; the movie doesn’t make her into a shrieking damsel-in-distress. But aside from her desire to study the sick triceratops, she doesn’t get much chance to be the expert here. That’s a shame. And it’s kind of telling that the movie’s credits list Neill’s character as “Dr. Grant”, while it lists hers as “Ellie”.
Some of Jurassic Park does seem admittedly dated today, particularly the hacker girl’s recognition of the software: “It’s a Unix system! I know this!” Though she isn’t really doing any real hacking; we don’t see her boot up a command-line interface and start typing madly in an effort to retake control of the system. No, she just mouses her way through a GUI file system until she finds the one for the security systems.
These are all pretty minor complaints, though, because the movie is otherwise full of moments that never fail to thrill me when I watch the film. The T-Rex attack is still harrowing to this day–and was there ever a more whoa visual effect than the T-Rex’s pupils contracting when he leans down and the flashlight is in his eyes? And you can’t beat the entire last act, with the velociraptors on the loose, all the way from “Clever girl!” to “Unless they figure out how to open doors” to the raptor with the genetic code being projected onto its face.
Jurassic Park absolutely did show me things I’d never seen before in a movie, and it cranked the bar upward several more notches. It was certainly much easier to think of dinosaurs in a real, living way after this movie came out. Of course, like all such blockbusters, Jurassic Park sired a franchise of sequels, only one of which–the first one, The Lost World: Jurassic Park–I have actually seen. That sequel is a much more uneven movie than the original, and it has some escapes that are simply not believable, but it’s not without its charms. I have no idea where the franchise has gone since then, but that’s OK; I’ve still got the original. I’m not totally sure if Jurassic Park is a classic, but…people still remember it and it’s still watched, so maybe it is.
