This TV shooting was upsetting to many because it was an upsetting thing. Tawdry. Petty. Awful. I have not always been a person that is sensitive to this kind of violence. Until recently, I didn’t think of myself as someone that would have trouble looking directly at the ugliest things that exist in this world. I thought of those people as accomplices to all the ugly, protecting themselves from the knowledge of the evil things that make their lives possible.
I think what changed was a challenge to my belief in the goodness of the universe, what I saw as a giant machine that sometimes provokes a kind of holiness in the people that are, by chance, within it. When that became a point of debate, any bad news became evidence that the whole shithouse is a machine for suffering, evidence that sometimes I can handle and sometimes I can’t.
And the worst thing is waking up in the morning, checking social media, and finding out that the topic of the day is some fucked up thing that happened.
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I got a speeding ticket on the way to work this morning. It smarted extra because I was on my best behavior on the drive up from California on Sunday. It felt like a big fuck you from the world to get a ticket so close to home.
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Work went. I got my new work area all cleaned up, and finished the monotonous data management task that I set for myself for the day. I’m going to make my coworkers embrace my digital file system if it’s the last thing I do.
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I left early to go to my first appointment with a new therapist. I dislike breaking them in, but I’m excited to start afresh with a new person who only knows about me what I tell him.
I stopped for chicken wings after the appointment to reward myself.
I saw TV on the Radio at Project Pabst this weekend
Monday brought one of those Oh shit, what time is it? mornings. I had one of the most start-to-finish full days on Saturday than I’ve had in ages, and Sunday brought a lot of connection and clear thinking and Bojack Horseman, so maybe a great night’s sleep was not in the cards.
Roxane Gay has a new cooking post up on her Tumblr. I am always amazed at her grace, her intimate chattiness in these posts and wish that I could write like her and skip between registers with her sprightliness.
On the whole, work was not terrible. I spent most of the day feeling a little bit unappreciated because this is the week when I feel like I’m working a lot harder than others at my workplace, but that’s only sort of true and not really worth getting too worked up over. I had delicious pork roast leftovers for lunch.
When I got home, I showed Luke the music video that I’m quite taken with right now:
I really love this new trend in production of using very choppy, percussive, square samples of dense textures. A couple of other songs that I like a lot that do this are A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s “In Love With Useless”
and SOHN’s “The Wheel”
For whatever reason, that is the sound of cool to me right now.
In the evening, I completed a friend’s half-invitation to watch the 1980 movie 9 to 5. I’ve been listening to a new podcast called The Sewers of Parisabout gay and camp culture classics, so it seemed like a good time to watch (Jane Fonda! Dolly Parton!)
It was weirder than I thought it would be. THC trip. Bizarrely long dream sequences. Harsh to modern ears usage of the word “bitch” and “girl”—not that it was any less awful in 1980.
Dolly was great. Lily Tomlin is so funny and now I can’t wait for the next season of Grace and Frankie. Jane Fonda is fine, but gets lost in the old lady/divorcee housewife clothes and accessories they give her.
As we were driving to my house, I opened up to my friend that I’m thinking of applying to a job in Madison, Wisconsin. That feeling in my stomach of excitement and fear is as true north an emotional compass as I possess, and I’m trying to sort out how much of what I’m feeling right now is me trying to make it real for myself and how much of it is me working out some feelings of being stuck and frustrated.
Either way, it feels good to have a sense of possibilities again.
The light on Mississippi Avenue was a pleasing yellow that flattered everyone who wasn’t sweating, and the air was just this side of too hot, occasionally lifted by little breezes. The kind of weather where you have to decide if it’s a perfect late spring day, and have a Good Time, or whether summer is coming too soon and it’s Too Hot (Bad). Five degrees in either direction would make the decision for you.
I was sweating before I left the air conditioning in my car. I thought I was going to be very late for a book reading, so I was rushing and worked up. I managed to find parking near a (very Portland) landromat/bar (EAT. DRINK. LAUNDRY.) and rushed over to Beacon Sound, where Jessica Hopper, editor for Pitchfork, was going to be reading from her new book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic.
When I walked into the store, there were chairs set up, but no one there. I realized that I had the time wrong, and had a half an hour to kill. I thought about killing time in the store, but it’s one of those Apple Store-inspired spaces: not in the sterile, modernist furniture sense, but in the lots of space, we only sell 50 items sense. It’s an all vinyl (and a few cassettes) store, and all of the new releases from the indie blogs were up on the wall, but otherwise a really small selection.
These types of setups provoke strong reactions and counter-reactions in me, mirroring my ambivalence towards hipsterdom and my own participation in hipsterdom (and, yes, I should probably find some new words). Part of me understands it’s a different business model, curation rather than breadth, expertise rather than serendipity, becoming the best music store to a narrow channel of tastes rather than a better-than-average music store for everyone. Serendipity does matter to me, though. Heterophony is a beautiful thing. And when I’m in there, I can’t get past the idea that the music store of the future might have less selection than a Sam Goody, a Hot Topic for a different set.
I decide to walk down the street to the Asian minimart to buy some cigarettes. The mouthwatering smell of the fresh waffle cones at Ruby Jewel’s make my stomach do an ecstatic flip for joy. There’s a man playing a musical saw in front of Little Big Burger. He’s not that good, but I’m happy that he’s here. A couple of blocks down, I overhear a late 20’s bropack making fun of the guy, imagining asking him questions like, “How long did it take for you to become a master of the saw? Did you ever consider picking up sledgehammer.” I flash with disdain and hate, then think about whether the kinder thing to do would be to not lose sight of their individual interior lives, and how we say things just to make conversations, before deciding that hopefully there are other people in the world that love them and it’s all right for me to just think that they are douchebags.
When I got back to the record store, it was already starting to fill up. I chose a spot near the front, and started playing on my phone and tried to tamp down the shitty inner voice that gets insecure when I’m at events by myself. I started to look around to people watch. There were some 30’s power hipster women, which in my mind is defined by a look that mashes up traditional femme costume (floral prints, retro dress shapes, lipstick, jewelry) with edgier bodies (interesting hair, tattoos, retro men’s eyewear, severe eyebrow shaping, unapologetic curves). There were some cool kids: incredibly thin and slight young women in band shirts and mesh hats with shit I don’t understand printed on it, young men dressed like Vampire Weekend circa 2006. I ended up sitting next to a good looking tall skinny boy wearing a Breton striped shirt, looking like the one that the housewife has an affair with in a Goddard film. He smelled bad, and I had a brief internal debate about how open I was to being somebody that is attracted to boys that smell bad, whether a bad smell is an unfortunate byproduct of poor hygiene or a valid lifestyle accessory, before letting it go because it didn’t matter.
It took Jessica Hopper forever to get on. Finally, the owner of the bookstore that was presenting the reading walks up and gives a droning anti-charismatic introduction, and she walks into the room. I’m actually not that familiar with Hopper’s work: I mostly showed up for the Pitchfork connection, and because the name of the book intrigued me. I wasn’t prepared for the star power of her arch-coolness. She looks amazing. Like others that started with a more aggressive style that has tempered with age and power and position, each element–the denim jacket over a band T shirt, the dark Wayfarers–is perfect and necessary, a continuity of the style but signaling put-togetheredness as well.
It was fascinating to hear her talk. Critics, especially the good ones, have a very difficult job. There is so much romanticism required to be a critic. You have to believe that music matters enough to care about whether its bad or good. You have to believe that people are going to read your shit and maybe change their minds and that that whole exchange is worth something. You have to take real, primal responses (like, hate, don’t care) and somehow express that in a way that doesn’t stray too far from consensus and with enough intellectual justification that someone can’t just accuse you of being a fan (the worst). At the same time, a critic is also a gatekeeper, and being a gatekeeper inevitably turns people into assholes. George Clinton gave an interview on staying cool forever: “You pay attention to the ones that are just getting ready to kick you out. If you can pay attention to them, you’ll learn what’s getting ready to happen. So you can stay there. You can’t hate on them. Cause the minute you hate on them, you actually make them more popular.” That’s a really hard thing to do when “hating on” is part of your job.
I’m glad I went. I had a good time. It’s so easy for it to become a circlejerk, just name drop after name drop and snark after snark. And I’m a snarky and name droppy person! I am a total hypocrite. It’s been a while since I’ve had so strong a feeling of being the least cool person in the room, so I’ll be thinking about that experience for a little while.
I started my day running late, pissed at myself for setting my alarms too early. At work, I’m able to keep mostly to myself. There are a lot of new staff in the building, like rain on parched earth, but it’s been so long since we’ve been adequately staffed that I have to try and remember what I do when it’s like this. During my lunch break, I go on a run to Walgreen’s to pick up some new pens (my all time favorite are these Pentel EnerGels, but I’ve been making do with Pilot Precise V5s).
During the workday, I was mostly fine and focused on the day at hand. I’ve been doing Planet Earth based activities for 4th and 5th graders on Thursdays, so that meant I had some time to learn about deserts in the morning.
While I was cleaning up in my room, I listened to an On Being interview with Maria Popova from Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is one of those things that is new to me as of this year that has really enriched my life. It gives me a little hope that I’m not the only weirdo that has this well of deep questioning and radical sincerity that I can’t get rid of yet can’t figure out how to do anything with yet, like a Superfund site. Popova on success:
I am going to side with Thoreau. And he said something like, if the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers, it’s more elastic and more starry and more immortal, that is your success. And for me, that’s pretty much it — waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. I mean, there’s nothing more than that, really.
The weather was gorgeous in Washington, which meant that we went outside for an hour. I had gotten talked to by my boss about cellphone usage during work (something I’m really not proud of), so I reached back to 2004 and made myself a hipster PDA to use (#pinterestbeforepinterest). While outside, I had some time while the kids were mostly playing by themselves to make a small sketch of the playground:
I’m not very good or practised at visual art or drawing, but it’s little things like this that keep me going. Taking every micro-opportunity to turn something mundane or some mundane experience into an artwork is a core part of my aspirational values, and I’m always happy when I can live up to that standard.
Later in the day, I ran my crew of 9 to 11 year old junior programmers, as we tried to make a simple game in the MIT kid’s programming language Scratch. They are incredible kids, and there are two boys that have been doing Scratch games and videos for a long time that are so creative and mentally flexible while working on their projects that I feel privileged to be able to be around them and watch them work.
After work, I arrived home while it was still light out. I had been feeling guilty about not doing enough yardwork to the point where it is stressing out one of my roommates. The grass had already been mowed, so I decided to do some of the finish work, cleaning out some of the beds and weeding. It ended up being very relaxing and a nice way to end the day.
After eating, I had a very nice and unexpected long video chat with my sister. If you get me talking long enough, I will eventually circle around to a gibberish of frustration and overflowing of feelings that doesn’t really make sense and is probably pretty boring, an all around not cute display of Young Werther like hysteria*:
Anyway, she was pretty patient and indulged me, and is an allaround Good Egg.
Watched some more Chef’s Table. Still couldn’t fall asleep, so listened to the new album Never Were the Way She Was by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufield. It’s an instrumental album, violin, saxophone, and electronics. It ranges from moody pieces, to incredible reedy noise, to joyful, ecstatic, Steve Reich-like shifting patterns:
I’ve been intrigued by Stetson since New History Warfare: Vol 2, but this is him in just as experimental a mode but with so much more lightness and fun. I’m loving this album.
It didn’t make me fall asleep, though.
I had to cue up the latest Bad Plus album, Inevitable Western.
It kills me that their originals are way more hit or miss for me than their covers. I’ve also been listening a lot to their newly released collaboration, Brand New Day, with the singer Donna Lewis, which is fantastic. I particularly love this cover of the new-to-me David Bowie song “Bring Me the Disco King.”
And, finally, sleep.
*Goethe: “It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.”
This one is going to be from a place of frustration. I learned today that I didn’t get a job that I really wanted. I thought it would be a good fit, and I was looking forward to that new-thing, this-is-going-to-change-everything feeling. “You only like the beginnings of things,” as Faye Miller tells Don Draper.
So I’m a little busted up about that. Yesterday was a bizarre Waiting For Godot experience while I was waiting to hear, and I think subconsciously I knew that even if I got the job it wasn’t going to be the easy, fairy tale version of that story anyway, and so I feel more tired and empty about it than sad.
All that being said, I’ve had some amazing experiences in the last few days that I haven’t had the time to process or reflect on, so this post is going to be a little raw, a little messy, and a little stream-of-consciousness.
A Stranger Walks Into Town
A few days ago I got a text that my aunt was coming into town for a job interview. This was the first I had heard that she would be in town, and the first I heard that she might be moving into town. We had a very nice two day visit, in which I got to show off my new city and the things I’ve discovered in it, and she got a chance to get used to me, the “a and not-a;” both the same and different person that left California and knows things and knows things that she doesn’t know sometimes. We had two fantastic meals together, best meals in a long time for both of us.
I have been avoiding being a Salt & Strawperson for years, but ever since going with Jesus Christ and his friends a few weeks ago, I’ve been dying to have people in town to visit with. I love their Strawberry/Balsalmic/Cracked Pepper ice cream so much, and its going to be a temptation forever for me to just get the same flavor every time (for example, this time I got an Almond Ganache that was delicious, but I’d rather have had the Strawberry). My aunt was overloaded with consumer choice, and the takes-everything-too-seriously focus on radical quality that is Portland’s stock in trade, but I was pretty amused too. After walking around 23rd, Washington Park, and stopping over at Powell’s, we went to Pok Pok.
A five minute wait for Pok Pok! Oh, truly the stars were aligned for us. It was delicious as always (I used my aunt being from out of town and married to a guy that hates fish to order the fish sauce wings). Their basil drinking vinegar was super delicious too. I’d never sat in the upstairs area, and it makes me wonder just how nuts people thought Ricker must have been when he remodeled the house that’s under there. We had a delicious dish of spicy fiddlehead ferns that I thought was so cool, both from a produce perspective and conceptually, as northwest fusion food.
Cape Horn-Skye
The headphone jack on my phone is busted, and the road noise in the blue club van is nothing compared to the asthmatic vacuum whine of the engine. Given the choice between peaceful solitude and the unyielding chatter of talk radio and podcasts, I choose the chatter every time. The steady flow of ideas, arguments, and the New takes me away from the stupid waste of my day, from my cheap uniform, from my body completely.
The road to the school I’m visiting is filled with the windy switchbacking roads that remind me of the highway between Santa Paula and Ojai. There, as here in Washington, newcomers pull off as locals whiz by at breakneck speeds. Every turn was a surprise, as the road is enclosed inside the tall cathedral spaces under the pines.
I drive around one corner of the road and find a view so beautiful that I have to pull over in my rattletrap van to take it in, just for a second. I feel a little foolish, pulling off in my blue exclamation point of a van (LENTS FEED AND SEED, reads the peeling sponsor logo on the side), but I figure that anybody that notices is probably proud that their backyard can create such a reaction. The bruised and brooding sky is all gray light, light gray highlights and dark gray shadows play in the gray clouds and are mirrored on the surface of the gray water. It reminds me of a church, or else it reminds me of Ingmar Bergman reminding me of a church. There are old, stylish concrete pylons holding up the highway above the dramatic drop into the Gorge, and the cliff face is held back from sweeping away the road by rusted chain-link nets.
The school I was visiting was Canyon Creek Middle School, connected directly to the beautifully named Cape Horn-Skye school (in Skamania County, no less, another great name). I was curious later about the name of the school, because of the hyphenation (both for the spelling of “Skye” rather than “sky,” and also because it was pretty unusual to me that a name would be hyphenated with a place name). When I looked it up later, I found out that Cape Horn-Skye is the last incarnation of the two Skye Schools, which pioneers organized and built on the leading edge of the American frontier.
Chef’s Table
I’ve been fascinated by the Netflix documentary series Chef’s Table, from the filmmaking team that created Jiro Dreams of Sushi. We live in an incredible age of documentary film. I’m just spitballing, but I imagine that part of the reason it is so good is that:
We are at the end of an incredible growth period as documentarians have borrowed styles and techniques from feature films, and in some ways leaped past them.
There’s an understanding on the part of the subjects that there is a potential for something great to come from the project, meaning that the right team can get very open and vulnerable (and, to be sure, media-savvy) subjects to cooperate.
Digital video equipment has become better and smaller and faster and cheaper, meaning that there is a possibility of getting footage from smaller places, like a kitchen during dinner service.
I’m fascinated by the way that each restaurant, each service, each menu, is conceptual art. Like anything else, most of them do fall into types: fast food, casual Mexican, upscale American bistro. But each restauranteur or chef makes choices about how the kitchen works as a team, about what the relationship to the food is, to how the relationship is with the customer. I love hearing chefs talk about the choices they make.
It makes me think about classical music (I don’t usually, I gave my ears a break after graduating college and ever since it’s something that I know I’ll come back to listening but I don’t think its the kind of music that I want to make). What if each orchestra made unique decisions about the relationship between the conductor and the players, or the orchestra, the venue? What if musical institutions made their brand on reinventing and exploding standards, like Massimo Bottura, or an opportunity to educate towards a better future, like chef Dan Barber?
The other thought I had was about the kitchen brigades of the featured chefs. For (not very hard to understand) reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about work, excellence, and shared purpose. One side effect of the radical second person perspective of these documentaries, in which nobody but the featured chef and one or two others—critics, associates, or family members—is allowed to speak, is that the supporting cooks and chefs that make up the kitchen become silent acolytes, bowing at each station, intoning the mantra of “Yes, chef” (or in Dan Barber’s kitchen, more creepy, a slower and full throated “Yes”). Even the radical closeups of food and hands means that the people attached to those hands blur into the shadowy background. I kind of get it. Restaurant work has always struck me as the worst kind of repetitive (maybe not the creative side of it, but for sure the cleaning and prepping side of it), but I understand finding yourself in a place where excellence is chased beyond all human proportion and every day is a real opportunity to figure out something new, and never wanting to leave. I was once talking with a friend, a tremendous musician and all around good guy, who had just started at an organic farm. This friend was commuting by bicycle just to get to a transit station where he could get a ride to work, for fairly low pay. He was explaining that one of the couple that owns and runs the farm made lunch every single day and all of the workers ate together, and how that one thing makes him want to stay forever. “It’s the most humane workplace I’ve ever been in,” he told me.
A Stranger Walks into Town, Part II
On our second evening, we went for a late dinner at ClarkLewis, my favorite restaurant in the city. We were one of the last tables seated, and my aunt was Into It. The menu sent her into overload, as she wanted to ask about every ingredient of every dish, appetizer and cocktail. Fortunately, we were matched with the perfect waiter, a thin, ropy man in his ’50s with a city drawl that unfurled at its own pace. He was full of helpful aphorisms. On the tagliatelle: “Pasta…is pasta. As for me, when I go out, I order lamb.” On the delicious looking Pimms and gin cocktail: “You know these kids keep thinking they’ve reinvented the wheel. I’m fifty-four years old. I’ve already lived through the razzle-dazzle. It’s not rocket science—you start with your base spirits, add a nice mixer, then some bitters and a garnish. I’m sure it’s a nice little sipper. But as for me, I like to try the base spirit, and if I like it, I order a shot.” She had lamb, I had a delicious sturgeon. Both were the best thing I’ve ever tasted. We finished up with dessert at Pix, and I had the best frothy cheesecake confection with basil ice cream. I love aromatic food and drinks, herby and delicious.
hammer & jack 