Smart guy, that Dalai Lama:
He sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Novelist Eliot Peper on where to turn your attention:
Barely plausible niche ideas. The outskirts and underpasses of a megalopolis. Burgeoning self awareness. The cultural fringe. Technologies that appear to be nothing more than toys. The fractal outline of a fern frond. Marginal returns. Emotions that are just barely ineffable. Border towns. The moment just before you lean in for a first kiss. Coastal ecosystems. Flirting with irony. The lucid dreamscape halfway between sleep and wakefulness.
The ragged edges of things are always the most interesting part.
I would add any temporal, geographical, social, economic, or natural frontier; that which people are not saying; the melody barely heard; hints of color; the sound beneath silence; ghost walls; the kid in the corner; the scene opposite the picture; the wine's finish; where someone just left.
In 1998, I convinced anthropologist Sidney Mintz to cook a Thanksgiving dinner in August. He had pronounced views on cuisine, including the view that there was not such thing as an American cuisine. I thought I could make a good piece out from conversation with him as he shopped for and cooked the meal. I was right.
This piece is one of the final candidates for inclusion in Profilia, an anthology of profiles scheduled to arrive in July.
A glance at the long shelves of Super Fresh could convince you that Americans are a people consumed by food. Stacked and aligned are ingredients for recipes from Mexico, Japan, Thailand, China, Italy, Morocco, France. Americans can buy from neighborhood stores a half-dozen varieties of lettuce, and exotic produce like starfruit, kiwi, lychees, white peaches, and Asian pears; ground buffalo meat, frozen rabbit, and cooked prawns; Thai peanut sauce, Swiss muesli, Polish pierogi, Indian masalas, and Icelandic salmon; squid-ink pasta, sun-dried tomatoes in oil, and canned quail’s eggs; walnut oil, sesame oil, canola oil, and rosemary-infused olive oil; hotdogs with no fat, a little fat, or lots of fat. The profusion and variety of foodstuffs in American markets are staggering. But Mintz does not look at this abundance and see a deep interest in food. He sees instead a shallow taste for novelty.
Mintz believes that Americans do not have the same deep involvement with food as do people from the various regions of France or Italy, for example, people who in his view truly understand cuisine. When Mintz uses that word, he means cooking that has developed over centuries of preparing, by traditional methods, whatever was near-at-hand. He says, “I mean both the system of foods eaten by people in a region, and the way they share a dialogue with each other about what they are eating.” This is why, in his view, all genuine cuisines are regional. They rely on the products of local agriculture and food gathering. They follow the seasons, using fresh ingredients as they become available throughout the year. (It is hard to discern the season in an American grocery, unless the staff has taped cardboard turkeys to the walls.) At their core are preparations that form the standards against which all recipes are measured.
The people who inhabit a culinary region know intimately what goes into proper kapusta, or Hasenpfeffer, or risotto. They cook from scratch, wouldn't dream of substituting ingredients, and do not expect to go to Milan and find authentic zuppa di pesce, because that is not a Milanese dish and they know that a true zuppa di pesce can be had only on the Mediterranean coast. They speak knowledgeably and have deeply held opinions about food. Says Mintz, “The notion of cuisine hinges on the ability of a community to discuss the foods they eat.” A pair of Frenchmen in Marseille, for example, can have a meaningful conversation about bouillabaisse, about the proper ingredients, preparation, acceptable variations. This conversation helps define them as citizens of a region, rooted in a tradition. Americans could not have the same conversation, he says. They do not have the same sort of fundamental, cooked-from-scratch dishes common to everyone in a community. “French bread is prepared in familiar ways by everyone in rural France,” he says. “We Americans can’t really talk about bread the same way. Do we mean by bread pita? Croissants? English muffins? Pizza dough? Matzos? Challah? What I baked yesterday if I’m middle class and snooty?”
Mintz concedes that, as an anthropologist, he has no ethnographic data to back up the claims he makes on behalf of French or Italian or Chinese diners. “There is not yet a mature anthropology of food,” he says, “or much good ethnography of everyday eating among ‘modern’ peoples. Food studies are still not considered important enough to figure clearly in academic studies.” He also admits that central to accepting his ideas about cuisine is the acceptance of his particular definition. “It’s always possible to win an argument by making up your own definitions,” he says. But for all of that, he is no less convinced that he is right.
Looking at the store shelves, he sees another aspect of American society that bespeaks its lack of culinary sophistication. Like any neighborhood grocery, this Super Fresh stocks a lot of stuff that is a long way from fresh: cardboard containers of instant ramen, frozen Southwestern vegetable medleys in pouches, heat-and-eat three-course Indian dinners, bread mixes, salad-in-a-sack, canned chow mein, jars of tandoori sauce, boxes of Hamburger Helper. Mintz surveys these offerings with the same jaundiced eye. Americans love convenience food, he says, because most of them do not care what they eat. “I have no idea why that should be so,” he says, “To me, it’s quite baffling.” But it is something that, to his dismay, is spreading to cultures that always have cared: “I never thought the French would eat frozen food. But they are now buying frozen food.”
Read this.
Ellen Ullman, from "The Museum of Me," written in 1998 and collected in Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology:
What had happened between 1995, when I could still think of the Internet as a private dream, and....1998 was the near-complete commercialization of the Web. And that commercialization had proceeded in a very particular and single-minded way: by attempting to isolate the individual within a sea of economic activity. Through a process known as "disintermediation," producers have worked to remove the expert intermediaries, agents, brokers, middlemen, who until now have influenced our interactions with the commercial world.
... The first task in this newly structured capitalism is to convince consumers that the services formerly performed by myriad intermediaries are useless or worse, that those commissioned brokers and agents are incompetent, out for themselves, dishonest. And the next task is to glorify the notion of self-service.
... All those who stand in the middle of a transaction, whether financial or intellectual: gone! Brokers and agents and middlemen of every description: good-bye! Travel agents, real-estate agents, insurance agents, stockbrokers, mortgage brokers, consolidators, and jobbers, all the scrappy percentniks who troll the bywaters of capitalist exchange—who needs you? All those hard striving immigrants climbing their way into the lower middle class through the penny-ante deals of capitalism, the transfer points too small for the big guys to worry about—find yourself some other way to make a living. Small retailers and store clerks, salespeople of every kind—a hindrance, idiots, not to be trusted. Even the professional handlers of intellectual goods, anyone who sifts through information, books, paintings, knowledge, selecting and summing up: librarians, book reviewers, curators, disc jockeys, teachers, editors, analysts—why trust anyone but yourself to make judgments about what is more or less interesting, valuable, authentic, or worthy of your attention? No one, no professional interloper, is supposed to come between you and your desires, which, according to this idea, are nuanced, difficult to communicate, irreducible, unique.
... The first task in this newly structured capitalism is to convince consumers that the services formerly performed by myriad intermediaries are useless or worse, that those commissioned brokers and agents are incompetent, out for themselves, dishonest. And the next task is to glorify the notion of self-service. Where companies once vied for your business by telling you about their courteous people and how well they would serve you—"Avis, We Try Harder"—their job now is to make you believe that only you can take care of yourself. The lure of personal service that was dangled before the middle classes, momentarily making us all feel almost as lucky as the rich, is being withdrawn. In the Internet age, under the pressure of globalized capitalism and its slimmed down profit margins, only the very wealthy will be served by actual human beings. The rest of us must make do with Web pages, and feel happy about it.
... In 1998, I spoke of a society becoming divided between those who receive the goods of the world at their doorsteps and those who bring the goods to them. Then the goal for the receivers was to stay at home and connect to the world digitally, while other people, those in a different and lower social classes.
... Yet this moment of the chasm between the receivers and the deliverers is just a blip on the way to the complete peonization of the working class. Amazon wants to get rid of those guys with their flimsy dollies; the company is moving to replace them with drones. Uber drivers, the ultimate symbol of the sweep and penetration of the gig economy, are on their way to be supplanted by self-driving cars. The starkest and most terrifying description of this fulcrum moment comes from the media-and-technology critic Douglas Rushkoff, who wrote: “Uber’s drivers are the R&D for Uber’s driverless future. They are spending their labor and capital investments (cars) on their own future unemployment."
As is the case with everything she writes, acutely observed and stated with clarity and force.
Paul Chidlaw: “Rocks and Harbor with Boat” (please click on all images)
I am just back from Cincinnati, where I grew up and where I attended a special exhibit celebrating 150 years of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. My father was a student there from 1947 to 1952, and I toured the show, taking note of the artists he encountered there: Paul Chidlaw, Charlie Harper, Noel Martin, Josef Albers, John Ruthven, Donald P. Sowell. Some were his teachers, some his classmates. Some, like him, were in art school thanks to the GI Bill of Rights.
He never talked that much about his days at the academy. I know he worked in the dishroom for spending money. He lived at a nearby YMCA, where he was a wrestler on the Y's team and where he met a big, tough veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who eventually introduced Dad to his sister—my eventual mother.
Charles Harper: “Cornprone”
I have some trouble picturing him as an art student. He would have been six feet in height, strong and tough, with a flat belly and big arms. When he was discharged from the Army Air Corps in 1945, he weighed 130 pounds. But two years of working in a cement factory and a lumber yard—and eating his mother's cooking—had built him up to about 175 pounds. His hair was already in retreat, his ears were prominent (in scale with his nose), and he had an intense gaze. He had been a boxer in the army, apparently a pretty good one; his face was unmarked when he came to Cincinnati in ’47. He probably wore white t-shirts and khaki trousers from the military, and workboots. I think he liked beer, but I doubt he ever drank too much. He was not a party guy. When he practiced wrestling at the Y, he wore grey sweats that he still had when I was a little boy. He was quiet, a loner.
My dad, in the foreground.
My father, center, doing the war; I’m not sure where.
Okay, so I can picture him as an art student. But I have trouble imagining how he was as a person, how he behaved, how his mind worked, his personality. The man I knew was practical and had little ambition as a painter, so I don't see him in late-night conversations over coffee and cigarettes about painters or new trends in art, I don't see him enjoying the company of oddball creative people. He was probably relieved to be among other GIs who had seen too much and were too old, in so many ways, to be amused by bohemians, both real and wannabe.
I do know that for five years, every day began with four hours of drawing class; the academy put a premium on draftsmanship, and that would have appealed to him because I think he was confused by any sort of non-representational art. The abstract impressionists left him cold. I remember the time he chuckled as he recalled one of his first days, when an instructor asked the class to name their favorite painter. "Everybody said Norman Rockwell," my dad said, "and the instructor said, 'He's not a painter, he's an illustrator.'"
What else? He said his teachers spent as much time teaching him how to see as how to paint. He once sold a drawing from a student show. And that's about all I can remember.
Now I wish I'd interviewed him about his art school years, or at least pressed him a little about what he did and what he was like. Too late.
From a Michigan deer hunt, around the time he was an art student.
© Dale Keiger
Photo originally published by The Berkshire Eagle
Another profile under consideration for Profilia, the work-in-progress anthology of profiles coming later this year. I spent time some years ago with the writer Roy Blount Jr., including on tour with the writers' rock band Rock Bottom Remainders. I'm all but certain to include this one in the anthology. Here's how it opens:
Roy Blount Jr. looks none the worse for events of the last few minutes. A woman done up in this season’s finest dominatrix leatherwear just stubbed out a cigarette on his forehead, sending him to the floor where he rolled on his back and kicked his legs in the air. Friends helped him to his feet and he staggered about comically, grey hair mussed, skinny necktie askew. A few hundred people have witnessed this spectacle and now they hoot and cheer as the tough chick wielding the coffin nail, who happens to be the writer Amy Tan, finishes singing “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.”
Is this any way for one of America’s foremost writers of humorous prose to behave?
Well, yeah, sure it is. What the hell, all this had taken place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and Blount is onstage as a backup vocalist, sort of, for the Rock Bottom Remainders, and the Rock Bottom Remainders is the band that features a bunch of Blount’s writer friends, including Tan, Dave Barry, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, and Greg Iles, authors who collectively have sold a gazillion books and now and then like to stash their laptops and pick up guitars and drive around in a bus like real rock stars and play a few gigs. Besides, the cigarette was not real and one thing you should know about Roy Blount Junior is that not only is he a seriously literary fella, he is a clown. He likes to make people laugh, always has, and the fact that he cannot sing, cannot dance, and cannot play an instrument does not prevent him from being part of an antic rock ’n’ roll show.
Which recalls something a long-time friend, poet James Seay, says about him. Seay, who teaches writing at the University of North Carolina, the big one in Chapel Hill, has known Blount more than 30 years, and annually they and four other guys go to Florida to fish for speckled trout and cobia and various trash fish. They used to go offshore for grouper and snapper, but they are getting a little old for that. Anyway, of these fishing trips, Seay observes, “In general, whether we’re fishing or whatever, we act like 12-year-olds. Actually, over the years most of us have advanced and worked on up to 13-year-old behavior, but Roy’s stuck in that juvenile, almost puerile kind of 12-year-old thing. I don’t know how we’re going to bring him along. He may just be stuck.”
This one even includes a doodle that Roy drew on my notepad. For a look at that, you'll just have to wait for the book.
© 2019 Dale Keiger
Smokestacks at Revolution Mill in Greensboro, North Carolina, a cotton mill repurposed as entrepreneurial and creative space. A building so cool inside I wanted to be an entrepreneur just so I could work there.
Scientist David Deutsch, from "Why It's Good to Be Wrong," Nautilus, Issue No. 2:
Our systems of checks and balances are steeped in traditions—such as freedom of speech and of the press, elections, and parliamentary procedures, the values behind concepts of contract and of tort—that survive not because they are deferred to but precisely because they are not: They themselves are continually criticized, and either survive criticism (which allows them to be adopted without deference) or are improved (for example, when the franchise is extended, or slavery abolished). Democracy, in this conception, is not a system for enforcing obedience to the authority of the majority. In the bigger picture, it is a mechanism for promoting the creation of consent, by creating objectively better ideas, by eliminating errors from existing ones.
Deutsch's essay is subtitled, "Nothing obstructs access to the truth like a believe in absolute truthfulness." Amen.
A most peculiar prohibition. Found at the Montreat Conference Center outside Asheville, North Carolina.
Free day in Asheville, North Carolina, so headed over to the Biltmore Estate, George Vanderbilt's monumental exercise in vanity.
Standard admission is $55, which I thought a bit steep. "Youths" got in for half that.
"Welcome to Biltmore, sir, how many?"
"One, please. Can I convince you that I'm a youth?"
"No, sir." Smiles. "Are you military?"
No, ma'am, I'm just old."
"Old will get you $10 off, sir."
Deal.
Currently embarked on a 10-day road trip through Asheville, Black Mountain, and Greensboro, North Carolina, then on the Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati.
This was my first time walking around Asheville, and I'm smitten, which led me to think about what makes a good, funky town. My personal roster of such places would include Arcata and Santa Cruz in California; Missoula, Montana; Telluride, Colorado; Athens, Ohio; Rockport, Maine; and, now, Asheville. Probably a few more that aren't coming to mind as I write this. (There are good funky cities, too, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, but that's for another day.)
What are the essential elements? A yeasty mix of solid local business people, artists and artisans and musicians, good cooks and bartenders, residents who have lived there for at least three generations and residents who have lived there for four or five months, residents in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who have an investment in the status quo and residents in their 20s and 30s who poke them out of smugness and complacency. A local college helps a lot. There needs to be openness to the human cornucopia of sexual, ethnic, religious, and political orientation.
I'm drawn to places with jumbled topography, a layout of streets that could never be described as a grid, alleys, apartments above storefronts, and smart zoning that mandates mixed use.
Coffee shops, got to have coffee shops, with good wifi. And book stores, at least one, preferably three, run and staffed by serious readers.
I look for some sense of history and acknowledgement that it matters. There should be plenty of plaques and historical markers (No. 17 among the Rules of Life: Always read the plaque.) and preserved old buildings and repurposed industrial buildings. I like lots of late 19th- and early 20th century structures; they typically have a lot of nice architectural flourishes. I'm a sign painter's son, so some ghost walls are a bonus.
There needs to be a certain level of prosperity, and this part can be problematic. A shabby, down-on-its-luck town isn't funky, it's just shabby and depressing and full of the bad vapors of resentment. Towns that go too far the other way—all the food and liquor and merchandise pretentiously artisanal and precious and available only to those with robust net worths, those aren't towns, really, they're dispersed, open-air shopping centers for the well off, Short Hills Mall without the roof and canned music. The problem with the essential prosperity is, these days, it's never shared equitably. Towns that rely on tourism are full of those who do the hard work of serving visitors but can't afford to live in town because people like me have moved there and raised the price of housing. All those essential artists and craftsman? Too many of them are working their arts and crafts around being baristas, waiters, and bartenders.
I think the one fundamental element is a population that's mixed in every way, invested in community, playing a long game, and tolerant of constant friction that can be irritating but signals where some civil lubricant needs to be applied and some social settings recalibrated. It's never easy, but the rewards are substantial.
In the 1974 Whole Earth Epilog, John Holt wrote:
A society of large tools cannot be democratic, egalitarian, socialistic, humane, and just. It must be hierarchical, exploitative, bureaucratic, and authoritarian. If the day comes when all of humanity’s wants can be supplied by a few giant tools, the people who tend them will rule the world.
There's an ominous dose of prescience for you.
The exemplars, unordered:
Your life begins when you are born. Your life story begins when you realize you were born into the wrong family.
Someday, I will understand what he meant by this. I'm looking forward to that.
The photo above is of my mother, probably in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The image suggests that she was a lively young woman who must have been quite something to the young art student who met her in 1951 or '52, married her, and collaborated with her in producing me in late '53.
Below is a portrait my father painted of her early in their marriage. My mother was a pretty woman, as you can see, and my father loved her as much as it's possible to love a spouse, I think. To my knowledge, this is the only portrait he ever painted of her. I've never found another, or even any sketches. He just didn't paint her, or me. There are a few portraits of me as a little boy which he did with his camera. But no drawings, no paintings.
He seemed to lack the impulse to paint. It's odd to say that about a man who studied for five years at art school, but I don't remember him ever evincing real interest in being an artist. He showed little creative drive to make things. When he did paint with oils, or carve a piece of wood, or pick up pastels to work on a still life, he clearly enjoyed himself, but when he did make a picture, it was because he enjoyed spending some of his time that way, not because he wanted to create a new art object. He always said he had nothing to say, but I think what he meant was he had nothing he wanted to say.
What I really think was going on was he lacked confidence as a painter, and perhaps more to the point he shied from opening up emotionally and putting what he felt on a canvas. My father always claimed to be perplexed by passion, by strong emotion, but I think it scared him. He was a physically courageous man who lacked emotional courage. To him, any emotional information was too much information. His youngest brother once told me the most striking thing about my dad as a boy was how much of a loner he was. I think he never pursued being an artist because he couldn't stand the messy introspection that would require, and couldn't bear to invite the world to gaze into his heart in the way that an artist must. He didn't want to do it with friends, so he didn't have any, and he didn't want to do it with paint, so he has few paintings.
Look closely at the oil portrait of my mother and you'll notice it was left unfinished—Dad never filled in her ear. Why, so close to completion of what I think is a lovely canvas, did he stop? Why did he never go back and paint the last bits? My father was a mystery to me in many ways, and this is one.
William Kittredge, in “Who Owns the West?”:
The deeply fearful are driven to righteousness, as we know, and they are the most fearsome fools we have.
The typical human being is smart, far smarter than commonly apparent. The typical human being is amiable and kind to at least some degree. A typical human being is tolerant and generous.
That is, until scared. In Frank Herbert's Dune, Paul Atreides, the protagonist and hero, silently recites to himself in times of danger, Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the mind-killer. In everyday like, that doesn't happen. When people are frightened, they revert to thinking with their brain stems and adrenal glands. They capitulate to prejudice, suspicion, rumor, and they become followers. People are prone to be followers in the best of times; in scary times, they are especially susceptible to demagoguery by the cynical opportunists who lurk in any society. And as Kittredge rightly observes, the most scared become righteous, which is never a good development.
Stronger minds stare down the mind-killer and grasp that most fears are baseless and distract us from the handful of things that we really ought to be frightened by. What scares me is how few stronger minds seem in evidence when we could really use them.
My friend, the superb science writer Ann Finkbeiner, was married to a physicist, hung around physicists, wrote about physicists. She had this to say about them:
Physicists as a group are off-scale intelligent, gossipy, competitive, relentlessly rational, and promiscuously curious. Their taste for pure research comes from the belief that some given truth about the real world exists and that they can find it; and when they’ve found it, sooner or later they’ll all agree it’s the truth. They are fascinated by the congruence between their theories and reality. They are famous for arrogance; because physics is the most fundamental science, physicists say, a physicist can solve any problem in any field by figuring it out from first principles, from the ground up.
Henri Landru, “the Bluebeard of Paris”
Here is another candidate for inclusion in Profilia, my forthcoming anthology of profiles. This one is forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, an expert on serial killers and other dark individuals.
Park Elliot Dietz owns a complete set of serial killer trading cards. He keeps them—the Jeffrey Dahmer card on top—in a wall-length display case in the study of his house. There is other stuff here. Antiquarian texts on criminology and psychiatry, among them a goatskin-bound first edition of the earliest published work on forensic medicine, written in the early 1600s by the papal physician Paolo Zacchia. Trophies from shooting matches. Insignia from law enforcement agencies. Miniatures from Paris, including one of the French serial killer Henri Landru, “the Bluebeard of Paris,” who stands, dressed in a black frock coat and holding a handsaw, beside a little washtub filled with the blood and severed limbs of is latest victim. Atop a book rests a human skull, named Arbutus, which has been in the Dietz family for three generations; family lore identifies it as the skull of an executed criminal, but its present owner is skeptical.
These objects are tokens of Dietz’s extraordinary interests and uncommon professional life. Dietz is one of the country’s most prominent and accomplished forensic psychiatrists. As a researcher, consultant, and expert witness, he applies psychiatric knowledge to legal problems and issues of crime and public safety. He has testified at the murder trials of John Hinckley Jr., Jeffrey Dahmer, Better Broderick, Arthur Shawcross, and Joel Rifkin. He has consulted for the FBI, the CIA, US attorneys general offices from Miami to Honolulu, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the US military services, the Department of Justice, and more than 120 corporations. He has investigated the behavior of serial killers, family annihilators, sexual sadists, celebrity stalkers, product tamperers, cannibals, necrophiliacs, and the sort of people who show up at a workplace one day and gun down five people with an assault rifle. The human soul has a lot of dark, infested alleyways, and Park Dietz has walked down most of them, asking questions and taking notes.
... Dietz is part medical examiner, pat private detective, part scholar of the bizarre. In interviewing Jeffrey Dahmer, he discussed dismemberment techniques and the right temperature for preserving body parts. To collect information for litigation against Soldier of Fortune magazine, he attended a weapons demonstration in the desert with some of its heavily armed readers, who despite his name tag didn’t realize who he was when they expressed their desire to kill “those sons of bitches who are suing the magazine.” To gather data about sexual bondage practices, he interviewed New York prostitutes and inventoried sex shops in Times Square. In one porn parlor he had to memorize a tabulation of the magazines for sale, then duck into a peep show both to write down the data; he had already seen the shop owner cane one customer who had annoyed him. Among the scholarly articles listed on his curriculum vitae are “Compliant Victims of Sexual Sadists,” “Mass, Serial, and Sensational Homicides,” and “Murder at Work.”