“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
Well…there’s a lot going on right now. A lot going on right now. Some of it I’ll almost certainly write about soon, when I have leave to do so; some of it I likely…won’t. But yeah. There’s a lot going on, and no, it’s not all bad. Some of it, though, is a struggle.
For now, here’s a nifty video from a professional wildlife photographer to whose content I’ve recently subscribed on YouTube. I find this man fascinating for a lot of reasons…some of which I’ll be going into at some point, soon!
Having the Titanic on the mind for obvious reasons, here’s some music from a movie about the wreck…but not the famous movie. This is the rather less famous movie from 1980 or 1981 called Raise the Titanic. I watched this movie years ago when it was on a mid-afternoon matinee kind of thing, and…well, that’s probably the best way to watch a movie like this. I don’t even remember if I watched it before or after Robert Ballard’s famous discovery of the actual wreck itself, which rendered the movie even more inaccurate than it would have been to begin with. Raise the Titanic‘s plot involves, well, a plan to raise the Titanic from the ocean floor, because there was some kind of cargo that was somehow still very valuable many years later. (All this is from faded memory; I’m not looking it up and I only watched the movie once.) I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal that, yes, they do find the Titanic and raise her from the ocean floor in a big special-effect set-piece.
The music from the movie is by John Barry, who by this point in his career was starting to lean hard into his “big sweeping slow melody” phase that would peak ten years later with Dances With Wolves. Here is a suite from Raise the Titanic.
OK, fine, here’s the actual clip of the ship rising to the surface again. Note that at this point, most people still thought that the ship had sunk in one piece, rather than snapping in two before sinking.
No, I don’t recommend the movie…unless it’s a Sunday afternoon and you have some popcorn handy.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Mandarin orange sparkling water with cranberry bitters
Sharing a Nutter Butter with the dog after work
Walking around the Hamburg Farmers Market
When I figure out how to fix something I’d never taken apart before
This deer in my neighbors’ yard last week. The deer was determined to eat from their bird feeder, so she (I’m not sure of the gender, but no rack, so…she?) geared up, reared up and stood on her back legs, and balanced there while she ate. I watched her do this twice, and before executing her standing maneuver, she would suddenly wag her tail quickly.
