consume: bad music

Of course, the album of the year -- metal clowns or no -- is Mastodon's Leviathan (you can watch the offending video here, unless your browser crashes).

But because of my advanced age, I will instead be talking about an album from last year, High on Fire's Blessed Black Wings. The label calls High on Fire a cross of Mötorhead and Slayer, which might be true if you were trying to listen to them from the bottom of a well. Full of Jägermeister. Their last album felt like drinking a well full of Jägermeister, then deciding to go smoke a bowl and listen to some tunes with Grendel's mom, which probably explains why it took me so long to buy the "new" one.

But this record does sound a little like Mötorhead, probably thanks to the Steve Albini production, which lifts and separates Matt Pike's trademark sludge without violating its spirit. Joe Preston (ex-Melvins) on bass helps the songs move along more than had been their wont.

I still have no idea where they got the Slayer, unless it's Pike's lyrics, lifted, as usual, straight out of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Most importantly, Blessed Black Wings features monstrous riffage, which is all that matters. Buy it for all your loved ones this holiday season.

Disclaimer: I have terrible taste in music. Do not follow my advice, unless you want to rock at all costs.

*

Typically, I forgot about one of the most interesting books I read this year, Julie Guthman's Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, reviewed here. Since the book came out last year, though, I'm off the hook. Better new book ideas are to be had from Kitchen Arts and Letters. Ask them for a copy of their latest newsletter.

consume

Regarding one of the many new "commercial" food blogs, anonymous correspondant asks "Who died and turned blogs into a way to beam press releases into our homes?"

1. Where the fuck have you been?
2. With the exception of the AOL offering, which is somehow even more mind-numbing than your average recipe blog, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Some excellent sites have been fulfilling this function (among others) for years.
3. Someone has to tell us what to consume.

And it is now the season for people to tell us what books to buy. It is a sign of something, if only my tumescing irrelevance, that I do not seem to have read a single new book this year (last year, I did find two good ones). A few have potential (someone should send this to those "whole" food people), but, on the whole, meh.

So this is an excellent moment to introduce my new feature:

Old books made new

If Leite is correct that 456 fewer cooking and food books were published this year than last, you see the problem. In the entire history of the world, 456 food books worth reading have not yet been written. The laws of thermodynamics thus dictate the following axiom: the more recently a book has been published, the more likely it is to be a piece of shit.

Of course, it is still technically possible to write a good book. Ruhlman, may, for example, have finally superseded Grigson. The point is that for most of the last 36 years, the book you should have been reading was out of print. The probability is that this is true of anything you want to read about. So: buy old books.

Animal to Edible (pb still in print) is an excellent example: undoubtedly the finest anthropology of the abattoir ever written. It is true that this is because it is the only such book ever written, but that is another reason you should read it. The approach is (appropriately) a fascinating relic of pre-poststructural theory -- you turn each page expecting Levi-Straussian diagrams of offal. But this fear is a necessary companion on your voyage: unravelling the manifold symbolic operations required to transform a living animal into the object of your digestion.

Animal to Edible's origins in a thèse are obvious from its occasional repetition and aimlessleness, but it is mostly short and clear. A more conclusive conclusion would have been nice. It's not going to show you the way out of the meatrix, but it will teach you how to think about leaving.

Tune in next week for this year's must-have casettes.

crazy

In my absence, I was apparently nominated for an urban food blog award. I have no idea how they found me. I guess it's because I'm so edgy. This is funny because I am monumentally suburban. Verging on Sac-ish. It would have been funnier, I admit, if anyone had voted for me.

This morning, while enjoying a pseudo-urban bus commute, I observed a crazy man talking to himself. After a while I realized that he was basically practicing a conversation. Because he was crazy, no one would talk to him, so he had to conduct his conversations with himself. This is how you write a blog -- wander around constructing "observations" in your head to later unload on your absent interlocutor, the internets. It is only because you don't do this out loud on the bus that no one notices that you are crazy.

These days, I'm not making up those conversations the way you're supposed to. A little too much real world on that last vacation, I guess. I was starting to fear my lack of content would drive away all two of my readers. Then I remembered the papers.

At this point, you'd think I'd dive eagerly into DI/DO looking for cannon fodder. Oh, it's there, don't worry. I just can't read it yet. I did, however, drag my sorry ass through another pinnacle of New Times journalism to read all about the brown fairy. Well, not all about it. Just the important stuff: no one knows what's in it; they drink it in SF (edgy! urban!); it's very indie rock. Bonus: stupefying misuse of the word Romanesque.

All right, this is my stop. I've got to go abuse myself with Jenny 8. Lee's book deal.

Hello world.

Is this thing on?

The internets are always especially bewildering after a nice long vacation. What are you all talking about? Why do you care? And what is this COM-PU-TOR of which you speak? But one is always seduced, again, by the information.

Consider this rather confused article about disappearing languages (cf. more-or-less edifying discussion on Languagehat). Ties in nicely with the NPR program I heard last night. The most interesting segment of the latter was the story of what happens when an ethnologue "linguist" moves into a Zapotec village and starts translating the Bible. Although also confused, it's definitely worth a listen if you're into that kind of thing (religion, language, indigenous peoples, etc.).

Anyway, ethnologue allowed me to confirm that there are 58 dialects of Zapotec. Not to mention 69 Mayan languages. And then ethnologue reminded me of the somewhat less controversial efforts of the Centro Editorial de Literatura Indígena (Oaxacan nonprofit) and the Instituto para el Desarollo de la Cultura Maya (Yucatán state agency).

What was I talking about again? Oh yeah: I love you, internets. But I didn't miss you.

catfight

I'm gone until the Kalends of December. Surely you can amuse yourself until then.

If not, keep an eye on this egullet thread where the self-important navel gazing was just interrupted by John Mariani himself. John, you will recall, has been taking a beating for frequenting those outrages known as "familiarization trips" (i.e., free shit). One wonders when food writers will finally figure out what they're paid for (In this sense, Ruth does deserve credit for hawking the Vikings).

Also features plenty of somnolent pontification from the usual suspects, including the one Regina likes to call the porcine pantload. Mee-oww!

And don't brine your fucking turkey.

Let me tell you about my mother

Inspired by Julia's success, we wondered what would have happed if gastronomic mastodon Ruth Reichl hadn't "predated the internet":

Although I stumbled on all of my knowledge about food accidentally, like a dusty bottle of Cheval Blanc in a Hollywood Boulevard convenience store, I can actually be quite smart. I like to wear ridiculous disguises and expose myself at the same time. I've distilled the wisdom of my many years writing about food to this: you really need to buy some expensive stainless steel appliances if you want your neighbors to take you seriously.

Huh. That's really not very funny, is it?

Is coherence necessary?

Now, I'm no media critic, but I do understand the necessity of mocking Maureen Dowd as much as possible. Surely, however, we can all agree that the real menace -- to the English language as well as our democracy -- is not, unfortunately, locked away in a TimesSelect box. From Judy Miller's letter to MoDo:

I was unaware that any such campaign existed, and if it did, that I did not think that I had been a target of it.

Suitable responses range from "as were we" to the Coxian "fuck you," but (oddly) Arianna says it best:

Fine, Judy didn't screw Libby. Just the American public. Good riddance.

Pending the inevitable "Paris is Burning," coming soon to a New Yorker near you, Judy may be the most hateful writer in America.

ADHD

• This isn't "Babe." It's "Battle of Algiers."
• Hey, let's get Libby Lewis to cover I. Lewis Libby's indictment.
• The best possible name for a housing development outside Beijing: Chateau Regalia.
• I've decided that this is the best two word blog post ever [inspiration?].
• I don't see why you think the French are going to do anything: I don't even subscribe to the Economist, and I've been reading this article for at least ten years.
• On postmodernism: when did a paradox become what critics call a paradox?
• Never underestimate what you can learn from Yahoo's most emailed pictures. Update: I've been following this story so closely it didn't even occur to me to inform you.
• For some reason I neglected to mention this last week: you need these books.

T:bag addendum

How funny that La D. brought up Marie Antoinette; I was just thinking about her for some reason.

She was, of course, hardly the the last to indulge in agrarian fantasy.

But the Times today raises an interesting question: what does it mean when the peasants themselves join in?

The short answer

What is it about the ethics of eating that is so confusing for everyone? Daniel Patterson is right about one thing:

I'm troubled by the possibility that, as the Bay Area has become increasingly wealthy and more ideologically self-selecting, the Chez Panisse ethos has become a touchstone for the tastefully furnished stone houses and rolling, lavender-covered hills of an elite preindustrial agrarian fantasy. I worry that we have begun to reflexively equate an aesthetically beautiful lifestyle with a morally good life, and that the way we cook and eat has become bound up in that mix.

But it is a wonder to behold how he gets from this unassailable proposition to his "solution": more sous vide. The poor guy's logic may even be more torturous than Julie Powell. Here's a tip for future commentators who have something really, really important to share with the world: do not wrap yourself in the mantle of defensor pauperum if your goal is to make twee tapioca foams for the vulgarly rich. Also, move to Chicago.

*

Patterson does, inadvertently, bring up an interesting question: Is it logically possible to challenge this orthdoxy of sustainability? One would undertake such a project not because it cramps your "creativity", or because the people at the farmers market are irritating (although they certainly are), but because of its insiduous equation of aesthetic beauty with moral good.

Patterson deserves credit for identifying the equation, though the purely aesthetic conception of sustainability indicates the chef's limited grasp of the question better than anything I could write. We can capture more of the real issue by rewriting the equation: is it a moral good to spend more money than strictly necessary to make yourself feel better about your lifestyle?

The answer depends on another question: how sustainable is what we are calling sustainable agriculture? If it's not really sustainable, than we have something to argue about (because the yuppies are just making themselves feel better instead of doing anything real). But if "organic," local, seasonal produce really is better for the planet and those who produce and consume it, the only possible resistance is that cheapness is better than goodness -- or rather that cheapness is the greatest good. Not an indefensible position, though it hardly puts you on the side of the angels.

But somehow I doubt that's the argument of the chef whose "creativity" is so cruelly crushed by his inability to invent anything that tastes better than a Zuni hamburger.

quickly

• Dan Shaughnessy is outraged that I left him off the list of world's biggest douchebags.
• NYers should keep an eye on snack for the latest, e.g., the michelin men.
• If you must know, the Times takes on the OTA v. OCA story. Organic is so five years ago.
• Reconstructing historical fish stocks from NYPL's Buttolph Collection of historical menus,
• which is now online.
• The traditional skull panna cotta for Día de los Muertos [thx muse].
• Le Montrachet: Il faut le boire à genoux.

multimedia extravaganza

All this shitty news is too distracting to focus on anything meaningful. Like that's what we normally do around here. So let's look at some pictures.

Desperate stab at relevance: It is important to remember, even as the Times wallows in its various miseries, that the paper is still relevent, if only for awesome pictures like goats in trees.

[And if you have not checked out Argan oil, do so at your earliest convenience. Killer.]

And let us also give thanks for the art director who illustrated the pension article with Duane Hanson. Brilliant.

Let's just pretend this never happened.

For the love of God.

After all, it's all the "news" that's fit to print. Though this picture of America's sullen youth trapped in the eternal struggle of trying to look cool and get a picture of Madonna at the same time just about says it all. Wow.

remedial science

You will have to read the paper for yourself today (tomorrow), as I have other plans, but, through the magic of the internet, some links from yesterday (today) for you to enjoy:

• speaking of the Assyrians: irrigation is unsustainable [Schoups et al., "Sustainability of irrigated agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley, California," PNAS Open Access]

  In the same issue, also open access: no evidence of increased Bt resistance in cotton bollworms after 8 years of GM cotton. Further evidence amassed in the new Environmental entomology.

• Mazza et al., "Assessing the Transfer of Genetically Modified DNA from Feed to Animal Tissues," 14 (October 2005): 775-84. Abstract:

  In Europe, public and scientific concerns about the environmental and food safety of GM (Genetically Modified) crops overshadow the potential benefits offered by crop biotechnology to improve food quality. One of the concerns regarding the use of GM food in human and animal nutrition is the effect that newly introduced sequences may have on the organism. In this paper, we assess the potential transfer of diet-derived DNA to animal tissues after consumption of GM plants. Blood, spleen, liver, kidney and muscle tissues from piglets fed for 35 days with diets containing either GM (MON810) or a conventional maize were investigated for the presence of plant DNA. Only fragments of specific maize genes (Zein, Sh-2) could be detected with different frequencies in all the examined tissues except muscle. A small fragment of the Cry1A(b) transgene was detected in blood, liver, spleen and kidney of the animals raised with the transgenic feed. The intact Cry1A(b) gene or its minimal functional unit were never detected. Statistical analysis of the results showed no difference in recovery of positives for the presence of plant DNA between animals raised with the transgenic feed and animals raised with the conventional feed, indicating that DNA transfer may occur independently from the source and the type of the gene. From the data obtained, we consider it unlikely that the occurrence of genetic transfer associated with GM plants is higher than that from conventional plants.

• The authors of the NBT paper [some background at the end of this post] on plant-derived marker genes discuss the work freely at ISB.

Greek love

Fuck this so-called "news". I want indictments goddammit. Nothing less will satisfy our bloodlust.

The news vacuum did produce this genius tidbit: Ninevah is a "swing state".

Speaking of our ancient forebears (or at least of swinging both ways), we all owe an immense debt of gratitude to a certain nuisance for translating an enigmatic -- dare I say Delphic? -- Greek blog about Julie Powell's infamous op-ed. I promise to stop making fun of Greeks.

Bonus link: The "Elgin" marbles blog.

Bonus #2: For some reason I've already forgotten, the story of Xerxes and the waves.

fallacies

I take it back -- there is a such a thing as a luscious, elegant new world pinot noir. Too bad I forgot what it was called as soon as I saw the price tag.

There's an old joke where a chap asks another chap: "Describe the worst blowjob you ever had" and the chap replies: "Terrific." Well, I feel the same away about meals. A really good one is just a bonus -- but really any old thing will do.

Perhaps, sir, you should not be writing about food for the Times [via].

My command of Greek is not what it was, but I'm pretty sure this chick is saying that many bloggers are homos. All I know is that "gastro-surfer" sounds gay in every language.

updates

In re: the economics of sustainability, the mayor of SF is going to serve Slow Food at the homeless shelter.

On plenty.

Memories of Bill King.

porno*

A long time ago, when I was young and stupid**, I wrote something about Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett. As I worked on it, the casual similarities that inspired the comparison became profound and seemed to require an explanation. I settled on Jungian archetypes.

Have I mentioned this was a long time ago? I wrote it on a typewriter, so give me a fucking break.

I don't know if Frederick Kaufman has mastered WordStar yet, but his Harpers article*** comparing food porn to real porn reeks of the same interpretive desperation. The relevant similarity -- fantasies of control**** -- is real enough that there is no need to resort to the murky explanatory device of our lizard brains, or sphincter***** system, as Kaufman would have it.

Although it is funny that the Times followed that right up with their soporific Rachel Ray profile.

* Like all good links, courtesy the great-haired muse.

** Yes, now I'm old and stupid. Har.

*** Cf. interview.

**** Also, fantasies of satiety.

***** German word for sphincter is Schließmuskel.

Sacramento is the new Belgium

New best poem ever?

Dangerous Acquaintances

Would you rather
I turned my ass
to you?³
Well, say so,
don't stand there
holding a mirror.

³ Yes.

Courtesy La D. Now back to our regularly scheduled Sonny Liston and foie gras coverage.

*

Vive le Roi

In incredibly sad news, Bill King died today. It is probably impossible for those of you in more benighted radio markets to imagine what a funny, warm, literate sports announcer sounds like. You will read words like "legend" and "renaissance man" and they are not the typical self-important sports bullshit. Just to give you an idea:

Those wishing to make donations in memory of King may do so through the Smuin Ballet or the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

I'll never forget an interminable rain delay in Colorado some years ago (King hated both delays and interleague) during which he discoursed learnedly on a surreal number of topics, from the Isabella Stewart Gardener museum to the stars of the 1930s. At least once a game, you thought "did he really just say that?"

further dispatches from the provinces

People in LA apparently still drink mudslides! This article from 20 years ago a/k/a Laguna Beach purports to explain what a woman's choice of beverage means to the male gaze:

Rum and Coke: This is a basic, and fairly safe, drink choice. Someone who likes to have fun but can keep herself in check.

Whiskey and Coke: Borderline alcoholic. Someone who is a bit sassy, will speak her mind and won't care what anyone thinks.

Priceless.

Only in New York: at this point, the Times should just publish a weekly Johnny Apple section. This week he's expensing Bangkok and Shanghai.

Only in LA: our cousins down south are freaking out about their new Silverton/Batali feedlot restaurant complex:

And then there is the name: Trattoria del Latte, Enoteca del Latte and Pizzeria del Latte. The milk obsession is making some prospective investors a little nervous. What if the public is lactose-intolerant?

But surely they will just think it's a Starbucks?

And Russ Parsons gets the last word, on "Kobe" beef:

Both a waitress at Sterling Steak House and Sterling's chef Andrew Pastore claimed their porterhouse was the real thing, imported straight from Japan. When told that if this was true, it was completely illegal. Pastore adopted a Brooklyn wise-guy stance: "I let my suppliers worry about that."

(The next day his publicist clarified that what Pastore really meant was that the meat came from Japanese cows that had been brought to the U.S. to be slaughtered -- which would also be illegal.)

Downsizing

Save the copyeditors: sign up for Times Select now.

Saucy pedantic wretch

Wait, come back! I'm not really going to write about poetry. I have, however, been thinking about Donne since reading Alex Ross on Dr. Atomic, and I merely wanted to draw your attention to luminarium, and its handy selection of Metaphysicals. There you will find all the Donne you need, including Batter my heart, three-person'd God (Oppenheimer's fave), and Elegy XX (mine).

*

It is easy to hate Kermit Lynch, mostly for his lifestyle. This is the wrong reaction, or at least it must be tempered with appreciation: Lynch is both funny and right. If you want to know anything about wine, you must read his first book (even if you can no longer afford to buy his wines). As noted previously, you can console yourself by not spending $40 on his his second.

democracy in action

I am probably the only person in the world who's never had an idea for a screenplay, but today must be genius day. Any agents out there who want to make a shitload of money, give me a call. Think Elmore Leonard x Henry James x Aeschylus. [Although, under Alex Ross's influence, I'm thinking it would make a sweet opera too]. Seriously: someone tell me how you sell a screenplay without actually having to write anything.

Hey midwesterners: what the fuck is wrong with you? I tried to listen to the Cardinals game on your radio station, and I had to switch to the SD feed after 1/3 inning. The guy started channelling a leg-humping French Canadian dog when Edmonds hit his HR in the first. And why do the Cards have an official hand cleaning product? At least now I know why Joe Buck, Jr. is such a douche.

Speaking of which, the title of world's biggest douchebag has become hotly contested. Nominations now include: me, Athanasius of Alexandria, Thomas Krens, Joe Buck, and some guy in the White House. I suggest that we exclude the last, as "politicians" seem to transcend the category. Who can choose between Pol Pot and Hitler?

But the choice is yours. Vote in the comments.

For old time's sake, let's throw Dennis Kozlowski and David Denby in the ring.