Frolic: jazz, books, food

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

29 April 2004

Normally I can read a recipe and imagine the taste of the finished dish. The New York Times’ feature on avant-garde cuisine, however, left me totally mystified. Smoked mashed potatoes? Dehydrated bell peppers pulverized and dusted across a steak? Martini jello shots? Beef stock foam?

José Andrés practices this cutting edge cuisine here in Washington at Minibar. If I can get a reservation for one of the six seats at this tiny restaurant inside Andrés’ popular Café Atlántico, I could taste this food from the kitchen of a master. If not, then I need to find a dehydrator and an aerosol whipper and try some of these techniques at home.

Also posted at Too Many Chefs.

Posted by Todd at 10:59 pm | No Comments

28 April 2004

The Chronicle of Higher Education convinces the elusive Invisible Adjunct to sit down for an interview. The blog has closed, her academic career has ended. Best of luck of IA. I’m sure you’ll finally be noticed in your next job.

Posted by Todd at 1:44 pm | Comments (1)

27 April 2004

David Finkel of the Washington Post has traveled across America and found two living caricatures of both political extremes. We meet San Francisco resident Tom Harrison, who represents the liberal blue states. A thoughtful man, he trusts the government and would gladly pay more taxes if it would help the homeless. In Texas, Britton Stein fulfills every East Coast liberal’s nightmare of middle America: “His truck is a Chevy. His beer is Bud Light. His savior is Jesus Christ.”

The long, condescending profile of Stein substitutes a list of consumer products for any actual analysis. I was struck, though, by how important the writer considers Stein’s culinary proclivities. He loves hamburgers, cooks with a gas grill, and doesn’t grind his own coffee. These details, the writer implies, tell us as much about Red America as Stein’s church attendance and views on gay marriage. Right wing ideology, it appears, results from bad taste.

It’s a silly position, since I bet Stein could make something tasty in his “jumbo smoker” and the Wall Street millionaires who support New York’s gourmet establishments probably didn’t vote for Gore. When a lazy journalist can offer up a lack of culinary sophistication as a judgment on the culture of half the country, it does show how deeply an interest in gourmet cuisine has penetrated America. Twenty years ago, would any writer at any paper in the United States even have noticed that someone put American cheese on their hamburger and got their coffee from a can?

Also posted at Too Many Chefs.

Posted by Todd at 10:09 pm | Comments (1)

26 April 2004

Last week, a paneled truck covered with billboards of bloody fetuses slowly drove through Washington. On the sidewalks, people tried hard to maintain their conversations and keep their eyes away from the images. The gore was courtesy of Operation Rescue.

Jamiel Terry, the son of Operation Rescue’s founder Randall Terry, recently revealed in Out magazine that he is gay. Randall Terry’s reaction, captured in a Washington Post article, shows the nasty and brutish personality that spawned Operation Rescue. Randall wants us to know that Jamiel couldn’t finish college. He lies. His mother was a whore.

Since divorcing his wife, Randall Terry has been shunned by the Christian right. Most recently, he’s been recording country music with Ronnie Milsap and agitating against gay marriage. The organization he founded, however, soldiers forward.

This Sunday afternoon, I noticed marchers from the March for Women’s Lives strolling through my neighborhood. Almost a million people showed up to support access to abortion. Women, and men, and families, still carrying signs and balloons, looked serious but energized as they enjoyed the afternoon in Cleveland Park. It was good to see parents teaching their children the importance of maintaining reproductive choice. Terry Randall may have been ostracized from the anti-abortion movement and his children might have betrayed his values, but other parents are training their children to line up on the opposite side of the issue.

Posted by Todd at 10:35 pm | No Comments

25 April 2004

Jerry Orbach filmed his last scene for Law and Order yesterday, according to Gothamist. As someone who discovered the show many years after it started, I’ve never seen a new episode that didn’t feature Lennie. I’m sure a suitable replacement will be found, since every other role–D.A., assistant D.A., female attorney, experienced detective, his reckless partner–has been ably handle by several actors since the show debuted.

It’s said that Law and Order survives the constant turnover of its cast by focusing on story over character. That’s only part of the answer, though, since any series could rehash the details of the most recent horrific crime. The way the show creates its characters elliptically, with the details of their lives outside of work parceled out like clues, explains its survival and continued popularity. Since we never know more than a few facts about Briscoe, Green, or McCoy, we lose little when they depart. At the same time, we tune in not just to learn the identity of the killer or the outcome of the trial, but also to add another piece to our evolving portrait each character.

Posted by Todd at 8:33 pm | Comments (8)

24 April 2004

Friday, in preparation for the angry mobs arriving to protest the World Bank-IMF meeting in Washington, there were double the usual number of souvenir stands downtown. I’ve never attended an anti-globilization rally, but I’m guessing that it doesn’t attract the kind of people interested in buying an FBI baseball cap.

Metal barriers sealed off most of the benches in Lafayette park, so the screaming homeless people who normally hang out by the White House moved down the street to join the protesters in front of the World Bank. The kids camped out to protest seemed harmless, although they didn’t look very clean. I’m sure they’ll be breaking the windows of Strarbucks before Monday.

Posted by Todd at 10:00 am | No Comments

22 April 2004

In a Washington Post article on civilian workers in Iraq, the head of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s economics department says, “Part of the motive may be the adventure of going to a new place and the patriotic motivation of helping out the U.S, with the higher wage compensating for the greater risk and the less pleasant working conditions.” Let’s see those smarty pants across town in the University of Chicago’s economics department say something more profound.

Posted by Todd at 9:46 pm | No Comments

The following phrase can be found in an April 9th press release by the U.S. Treasury:

America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President’s policies are doing; or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation.

Would you believe that the Republican National Committee used the same sentence in their April 2nd press release? [via Wonkette]

Posted by Todd at 7:43 pm | No Comments

A woman in my office returned from Brazil with a box of chocolates. Any country that eats bonbons named Moon and Surreal must be a wonderful place.

Posted by Todd at 4:07 pm | No Comments

21 April 2004

Leo records, best known for documenting the underground jazz scene of the Soviet Union, now distributes its catalog through the subscription download service Emusic. Last year, Leo started offering made-to-order Mp3 collections of their out-of-print records, so it was only a matter of time before they embraced online distribution for their entire catalog. With recordings that include classic discs by Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, and Cecil Taylor, Leo would probably not appeal to the average iTunes customer. Emusic, though, already offered extensive holdings of both mainstream and avant-garde jazz.

Some people believed that Napster fulfilled the potential of the internet: something that most people wanted and could easily obtain, was now available for free. For me, services like Emusic are more promising: something that very few people want and is almost impossible to find, can now easily be had.

Posted by Todd at 10:32 pm | Comments (1)

20 April 2004

Washington will soon be overrun by cicadas when the bugs end their seventeen-year hibernation. When the insects swarm on trees across the metro-area, Jazques Tiziou will be scooping them up and taking them home to sauté with butter and parsley. According to the Washington Post, many Washingtonians have been waiting almost two decades for this culinary delicacy to emerge from the ground.

Despite their enthusiasm, the cicadas eaters have not convinced me to add the insect to my diet this May, but they have reconfirmed my belief that with enough butter anything is a treat.

Posted by Todd at 7:04 am | Comments (4)

18 April 2004

Regular readers of About Last Night, Terry Teachout’s blog on culture of all kinds, noticed hints that Terry has been writing at an alarming pace over the last few months. This week, Terry confirmed that he wrote most of his 40,000 word book on Balanchine during February and March. In those eight weeks, he also managed to produce his regular columns and plenty of posts on his blog.

Like most prolific authors, Terry was driven by a desperate need for money: taxes were coming due and his publisher wasn’t gong to pay him this year unless he delivered by April 1st. A constant champion of blogs, Terry believes he would have never pulled off this feat if not for his regular posting on About Last Night.

I started Frolic so that I would be forced to write something almost everyday. It’s always been said that writing gets easier the more you do it. Blogs offer the possibility, though, that someone might actually read your daily output. For me, this provides some incentive and encourages me to be a little more formal than I might otherwise be.

The problem with blogs as a tool to develop your writing is that you feel an obligation to keep up with other bloggers. Writers need to read, of course, but if you’re reading then you’re not writing. And in my experience, reading is an easy way to avoid writing.

Posted by Todd at 1:48 pm | No Comments

17 April 2004

Andrea: That “Tipsy” song by J-Kwon is really catchy.

Me: I haven’t heard it yet, but I read the New Yorker profile on him.

That makes me a dork, doesn’t it?

Posted by Todd at 8:05 pm | Comments (1)

Remember the early years of the internet, when daily you would encounter weird and wonderful websites? Of course, most of these sites were pretty damn dumb. Today I just discovered Fafblog, which is weird and wonderful, but actually quite smart. [Thanks Jon & Belle]

Posted by Todd at 7:55 pm | No Comments

14 April 2004

Diane Arbus is a photographer of immense power and miniscule range. I had always seen Arbus as the chronicler of a lonely fringe, a place where people are left with vacant stares after life has pushed them out of the mainstream. After the walking through Diane Arbus Revelations, now on view at the Los Angeles County Art Museum, I refuse to believe that her subjects–each one with the same disaffected gaze–exist in the world. Arbus did not find these people, but she sat them before her camera and created them in the image of the people she had photographed before.

Many artists pursue a single idea for much of their career, and when a large number of their pieces are gathered for a retrospective they might seem repetitive as well. There are ideas and issues, however, worthy of intense, obsessive exploration. With Arbus we never delve deeper and each photograph only narrows our vision of the world. She creates caricatures instead of revealing the character of her subjects.

When I return to the photographs individually, flipping through a catalog of Arbus’ work, they regain some of their power. The impenetrable distance between Arbus’ subjects and myself makes me feel like an intruder. It’s an uneasy sensation, but after seeing Arbus create the identical effect twenty times in a single room it begins to feel like nothing more than a trick.

Posted by Todd at 10:55 pm | Comments (2)

Several times in his prime-time press conference, President Bush spoke of the 50-tons of mustard gas found in a turkey farm. Was I the only person wondering if that was Dijon mustard gas?

Posted by Todd at 4:32 pm | Comments (4)