This Monday morning, many more San Diegans woke up feeling better than they would have on any other regular Monday morning.
The reason: our own Little League team, the Park View All-Stars from Chula Vista, on Saturday won the U.S. Little League Championship, and then on Sunday beat Taiwan, 6-3, for the Little League World Championship.
See the words, "our own?" Three weeks ago, the people claiming the team as "their own" would have numbered about 500. This morning, the number is certainly as high as 50,000, probably more. Park View, even though the team has played here all summer, for many summers, first came onto the San Diego radar when it was winning games in the regional playoffs at San Bernardino. When they won those playoffs and went to Pennsylvania for the Little League World Series, they established a secure place in San Diego newspapers and newscasts.
The team kept winning at Williamsport, and not only winning, but really clobbering people, with scores like 14-0 that started to sound routine. When that happened, San Diegans really started to jump on the bandwagon, adopting the Chula Vistans as "their own."
Actually, co-opting, or "appropriating," might be a better word. People like to win. It feels good, in the humdrum of routine. And when people can enjoy the thrill of winning without doing any work, well, there you have the sports industry in a nutshell. TV ratings go up so much when Tiger Woods plays because viewers know it gives them their best chance of seeing their own favorite player win. They appropriate his skills as a strategy to feel good.
The Park View team has offered the same deal, providing an early example of an autumn reality affecting millions of Americans, on Sunday and Monday mornings. If their college team wins on Saturday, they have such a good feeling on Sunday morning. If their team loses, they feel, well, conflicted. On Monday morning, if "their" NFL team won on Sunday, they have that same good feeling, a genuine, relaxed feeling of well-being. If the team lost, it's a blue Monday. It's the chance that fans take.
In media literacy terms, the values at work are conflict, which people have to live with; progress, which people love; prominence, which people are drawn to; proximity, which empowers people to connect; and novelty, which people seek for its rarity. Our good feeling about Park View in Southern California this Monday morning starts with proximity, both physical and emotional. I say Southern California because the proximity weakens with distance but most likely extends beyond San Diego County, since a Southern California team had to beat those uppity Northern California teams to get to the World Series at all. Proximity means "feel close to," empowering San Diegans to co-opt both the Park View Little Leaguers, who are actually Chula Vistans, with the same power they co-opt the Chargers, whose players come from all over the country but play for a billion-dollar sports business which has a franchise in San Diego.
The players have become prominent to the level that we know their names: Luke Ramirez, Bulla Graft, Kiko Garcia, Andy Rios, just like they were the lineup of the 1927 Bronx Bombers. They became stars, to the men who remember their own Little League experience, and to the women who saw the stars as little boys. Progress was great, as the team resolved its sports conflict at the highest level, and let its fans escape their conflicts for a little while, in the process. A note to the fans arriving late: Park View's colors are not blue, the uniforms assigned to them for the World Series; their Chula Vista uniforms are green and gold.
"TOP OF THE WORLD!" trumpeted the top-of-the-front-page headline in Monday morning's San Diego Union-Tribune, in sensational 96-point bold all-caps type. Front page? Top of the world? That's the natural power of novelty; a San Diego team (El Cajon/La Mesa Northern) had not won a Little League World Series since 1961. In a Starbucks, a man picked up a paper off the rack, looked at the headline and smiled to a clerk: "San Diego!" "Yeah!" the clerk grinned back.
Well, yeah. Nothing wrong with a good sports fix. I am happy this morning that the team won, for them, and for me. But there's nothing wrong, either, with having a handle on the dynamic. Park View is a one-time media story, with nothing at all to gain, compared to the NFL, a billion-dollar media business reliant on these same media values to keep the ad revenue coming in. The feeling of proximity is very important to the Chargers, who have built their pre-season advertising around the word "own." Fans who want to send a message to a business like the NFL, about prices, for example, only need to distance themselves. Another story in the papers this morning tells of the new stadium going up for the Giants and Jets, and worries about filling seats because fans aren't buying tickets. Sports consumers, through media, have more power than they realize.
August 31, 2009
August 30, 2009
graynation: The end of a long novel
For most people in graynation, watching Teddy Kennedy's funeral on Saturday was like reaching the end of a long novel and closing it. Kennedys have been in our consciousness since the late 1950s, when John F. Kennedy started getting national attention. His debate with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, in the fall of 1960 (I was a high school senior) was the first televised presidential debate in history.
And it was historic, because of television. "That night," wrote Russell Baker of The New York Times, "image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics."
We didn't see near as many images of our presidents and politicians as you kids do now. What we knew of them, we read, mostly, in newspapers and magazines. The first coast-to-coast television broadcast was not until September, 1951. It showed President Harry S Truman opening the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. And it was all black-and-white. Most of our national leaders before 1970 we never once saw in color, unless they came to campaign in our town..
When I was born, a man named Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. He died in 1945 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Mr. Truman. I was 2 at the time and don't remember much about it. Truman was elected to his own presidency in 1948 and held the office until I was in fourth grade. School is where I learned that Truman's middle initial was not followed by a period.
I liked Truman, who looked like a high school principal, but my favorite president was Dwight Eisenhower, who had been a top general in World War II. He was elected in 1952. His wife was named Mamie, and she looked like she should have been married to Harry S Truman. We didn't have what you call terrorism at that time, but our huge enemy was Communist Russia. There was what they called the "Cold War" between the United States and Russia, that started right after World War II ended in 1945. So it felt good to have one of our war generals in the president's office. We worried about Russia and the Communists all the time. We had bomb drills at school, bomb shelters all over town with big yellow "CD" (Civil Defense) signs on them, and once a month (or was it twice?), the air raid sirens were tested, at noon, all over town.
Eisenhower was re-elected in 1956, the same year he signed bill that created the interstate highway system. If I had to pick one image to illustrate the difference between that graynation America of 1956, and today's America, it would be the difference between a two-lane U.S. (as all the major highways were then called) highway and a multi-lane interstate freeway. The fastest traffic in those days could go only as fast as the slowest truck, until you could find room to pass.
The new highways were also intended to make military movements quicker and easier in case we were invaded. The Cold War really got serious in October of 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik, the world's first space satellite. It was about 23 inches across and weighed 185 pounds. But it meant to Americans that the Russians could spy on us from space and launch the ominous ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) at us. We felt a little better when America put its first satellite into space in January, 1958.
The Kennedy era began with JFK's election over Nixon in 1960. At that time, the big airport in New York was called Idlewild, and the space launching complex in Florida was Cape Canaveral. We had a real scare in October, 1962, when JFK confronted Russia for its attempt to ship nuclear missiles into Cuba. The Russians backed down, and historians say it was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war.
Then, of course, JFK was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, and his brother, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated on June 5, 1968, as he was campaigning for president in California. Robert's funeral was June 8, where his brother Ted delivered a eulogy that many of us still remember, in part. "My brother need not be idealized," Ted said, "or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
The Kennedy era acquired a nickname: "Camelot," after a 1960s musical based on the King Arthur legend, whose title song included this verse: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot." Now the last player in the graynation's Camelot is at rest. If we seem a little quiet today, that is probably why.
And it was historic, because of television. "That night," wrote Russell Baker of The New York Times, "image replaced the printed word as the natural language of politics."
We didn't see near as many images of our presidents and politicians as you kids do now. What we knew of them, we read, mostly, in newspapers and magazines. The first coast-to-coast television broadcast was not until September, 1951. It showed President Harry S Truman opening the Japanese Peace Treaty Conference in San Francisco. And it was all black-and-white. Most of our national leaders before 1970 we never once saw in color, unless they came to campaign in our town..
When I was born, a man named Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. He died in 1945 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Mr. Truman. I was 2 at the time and don't remember much about it. Truman was elected to his own presidency in 1948 and held the office until I was in fourth grade. School is where I learned that Truman's middle initial was not followed by a period.
I liked Truman, who looked like a high school principal, but my favorite president was Dwight Eisenhower, who had been a top general in World War II. He was elected in 1952. His wife was named Mamie, and she looked like she should have been married to Harry S Truman. We didn't have what you call terrorism at that time, but our huge enemy was Communist Russia. There was what they called the "Cold War" between the United States and Russia, that started right after World War II ended in 1945. So it felt good to have one of our war generals in the president's office. We worried about Russia and the Communists all the time. We had bomb drills at school, bomb shelters all over town with big yellow "CD" (Civil Defense) signs on them, and once a month (or was it twice?), the air raid sirens were tested, at noon, all over town.
Eisenhower was re-elected in 1956, the same year he signed bill that created the interstate highway system. If I had to pick one image to illustrate the difference between that graynation America of 1956, and today's America, it would be the difference between a two-lane U.S. (as all the major highways were then called) highway and a multi-lane interstate freeway. The fastest traffic in those days could go only as fast as the slowest truck, until you could find room to pass.
The new highways were also intended to make military movements quicker and easier in case we were invaded. The Cold War really got serious in October of 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik, the world's first space satellite. It was about 23 inches across and weighed 185 pounds. But it meant to Americans that the Russians could spy on us from space and launch the ominous ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) at us. We felt a little better when America put its first satellite into space in January, 1958.
The Kennedy era began with JFK's election over Nixon in 1960. At that time, the big airport in New York was called Idlewild, and the space launching complex in Florida was Cape Canaveral. We had a real scare in October, 1962, when JFK confronted Russia for its attempt to ship nuclear missiles into Cuba. The Russians backed down, and historians say it was the closest the world ever came to nuclear war.
Then, of course, JFK was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, and his brother, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated on June 5, 1968, as he was campaigning for president in California. Robert's funeral was June 8, where his brother Ted delivered a eulogy that many of us still remember, in part. "My brother need not be idealized," Ted said, "or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
The Kennedy era acquired a nickname: "Camelot," after a 1960s musical based on the King Arthur legend, whose title song included this verse: "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot." Now the last player in the graynation's Camelot is at rest. If we seem a little quiet today, that is probably why.
August 28, 2009
Archives: "Son of Roll"
August, 2006: On the shelf behind the toilet in our bathroom sits a roll of toilet paper autographed by Herb Kelleher, founder, former CEO and now executive president, of Southwest Airlines.
Actually, this is “Son of Roll.” There was an earlier Herb Kelleher roll that came to me in events initiated in the 1990s by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas, living in San Diego. Jim was in labor relations and traveled a lot, up and down California, mostly on Southwest flights. I knew Jim Price from the media ramble in San Diego, and Jim knew Herb Kelleher, knew him well enough to send him a personal letter of complaint about his airline.
Jim told Herb he had flown Southwest faithfully, “but no more,” Jim said, until Southwest corrected the toilet paper feed on its fleet. At present, Jim said, the paper in the airplane lavatories fed over the top. Everyone with any sense knows it should feed off the bottom. I received a copy of the letter, as one who, Jim sensed from knowing me, would have a definite opinion about toilet paper feeds. Immediately I wrote a column for my paper, The San Diego Union, saying what a great guy Jim Price was, but he was dead wrong about the toilet paper, which should always feed over the top, never off the bottom.
The column found its way to Dallas, because several days later I received a congratulatory letter from Herb Kelleher, along with a roll of Scott tissue, autographed on the wrapper by Mr. Kelleher himself. This I displayed in the bathroom for the longest time, until a new cleaning lady took the roll from the shelf behind the toilet, pulled off the wrapper and threw it away, and installed the roll on the dispenser.
I was mortified, but of course it was my own fault, that the cleaning lady didn’t know the roll for what it was.
Now into the picture comes Dr. Ted Martinez, who until last December was president of Grossmont College, where I teach journalism. At that time, the college district board decided not to renew his contract. It was unpleasant for us. Dr. Martinez was much respected by faculty and staff, as an involved, effective, innovative, president. The board was, well, the board. Faculty and staff were surprised and tickled to death when, in January, Dr. Martinez accepted a high-level job – much higher and infinitely more visible than the Grossmont presidency – in the administration of the new San Diego mayor, Jerry Sanders. I wrote a column about that for San Diego’s online newspaper, voiceofsandiego.org.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a voiceofsandiego column about the ongoing debate (60 years now) concerning a new San Diego airport to replace Lindbergh Field. In that column I expressed great affection for Southwest Airlines, and included a mention of the long-lost Herb Kelleher toilet paper.
This week, we got a call from Dr. Martinez. I wasn’t home, so he told Karen who he was and that he and his wife, Lidia, had read the two voiceofsandiego columns, and they had a surprise for me. As they chatted, Dr. Martinez told Karen that Lidia was the California marketing director for Southwest Airlines. I may have known that, but I had forgotten.
Last night they came over, and Lidia, just back from company meetings in Dallas, presented me a roll of Scott tissue, inscribed on the wrapper: “For Emergency Use Only!” And signed by Herb Kelleher. In a brief installation ceremony, we placed it on the ledge behind the toilet. My next stop is Bed, Bath and Beyond, to get a glass or acrylic case for it. Herb sent a letter, too, and I thought about framing it and hanging it above the toilet paper, but that would probably be a bit much.
Actually, this is “Son of Roll.” There was an earlier Herb Kelleher roll that came to me in events initiated in the 1990s by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas, living in San Diego. Jim was in labor relations and traveled a lot, up and down California, mostly on Southwest flights. I knew Jim Price from the media ramble in San Diego, and Jim knew Herb Kelleher, knew him well enough to send him a personal letter of complaint about his airline.
Jim told Herb he had flown Southwest faithfully, “but no more,” Jim said, until Southwest corrected the toilet paper feed on its fleet. At present, Jim said, the paper in the airplane lavatories fed over the top. Everyone with any sense knows it should feed off the bottom. I received a copy of the letter, as one who, Jim sensed from knowing me, would have a definite opinion about toilet paper feeds. Immediately I wrote a column for my paper, The San Diego Union, saying what a great guy Jim Price was, but he was dead wrong about the toilet paper, which should always feed over the top, never off the bottom.
The column found its way to Dallas, because several days later I received a congratulatory letter from Herb Kelleher, along with a roll of Scott tissue, autographed on the wrapper by Mr. Kelleher himself. This I displayed in the bathroom for the longest time, until a new cleaning lady took the roll from the shelf behind the toilet, pulled off the wrapper and threw it away, and installed the roll on the dispenser.
I was mortified, but of course it was my own fault, that the cleaning lady didn’t know the roll for what it was.
Now into the picture comes Dr. Ted Martinez, who until last December was president of Grossmont College, where I teach journalism. At that time, the college district board decided not to renew his contract. It was unpleasant for us. Dr. Martinez was much respected by faculty and staff, as an involved, effective, innovative, president. The board was, well, the board. Faculty and staff were surprised and tickled to death when, in January, Dr. Martinez accepted a high-level job – much higher and infinitely more visible than the Grossmont presidency – in the administration of the new San Diego mayor, Jerry Sanders. I wrote a column about that for San Diego’s online newspaper, voiceofsandiego.org.
Several weeks ago, I wrote a voiceofsandiego column about the ongoing debate (60 years now) concerning a new San Diego airport to replace Lindbergh Field. In that column I expressed great affection for Southwest Airlines, and included a mention of the long-lost Herb Kelleher toilet paper.
This week, we got a call from Dr. Martinez. I wasn’t home, so he told Karen who he was and that he and his wife, Lidia, had read the two voiceofsandiego columns, and they had a surprise for me. As they chatted, Dr. Martinez told Karen that Lidia was the California marketing director for Southwest Airlines. I may have known that, but I had forgotten.
Last night they came over, and Lidia, just back from company meetings in Dallas, presented me a roll of Scott tissue, inscribed on the wrapper: “For Emergency Use Only!” And signed by Herb Kelleher. In a brief installation ceremony, we placed it on the ledge behind the toilet. My next stop is Bed, Bath and Beyond, to get a glass or acrylic case for it. Herb sent a letter, too, and I thought about framing it and hanging it above the toilet paper, but that would probably be a bit much.
August 27, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Tuna casserole, eventually
There was a time, before I was married or knew how to cook, that I ate a lot of chili with rice. It was pretty simple. Boil a cup of rice – I learned how to do that – and when it was ready, open a can of chili (preferably Wolf Brand, no beans), and dump it in the pan with the rice, add a handful of chopped onion, stir it all together, and let it heat until the chili was steaming.
It was good, it was cheap, it was easy, and it was filling. I am starting to crave some right now. I haven’t had it in years. It carries a whiff of kid stigma, like slicing up hotdogs in macaroni and cheese, as my son Tyler used to do. Maybe still does. But then if somebody asks him, “What did you have for dinner last night,” and he says, “Hot dogs sliced into macaroni and cheese,” the person will say, “What are you, a college kid?”
Same way with chili and rice. It’s just not something a grown man would naturally do. “What did you have for dinner last night?” “Chili and rice.” “And you can get a woman to live with you?” On the other hand, if I say, “Frito Pie,” the person may say, “Oh, how interesting.” So I’m interesting if I mix together a bag of Fritos, a can of chili, and some onions, and heat that until the chips are nice and mushy, and eat that, whereas if it’s rice, I’m a slob. Such is the unaccountability of stigma.
It must be the rice. When I announce that I am going to make tuna casserole, and 10 people hear me, eight of them will think I am going to make it with egg noodles. Rice needs a council or something, to lobby for its status. Maybe it’s because of all the instant rice on the shelves, a Rice-a-Roni onus. I happen to like most Rice-a-Ronis, but I would never make chili and rice with it. Nor would I make chili and rice with noodles. The flavors that rice picks up (and, with its chewiness, incorporates into every bite) just slide off of noodles.
But I’m not here to talk about rice stigma; I’m here to talk about the merits of tuna casserole in a stretch cooking repertoire. Tuna casserole has established itself as the best way to stretch cans of tuna and bags of potato chips. Typically, in the chip drawer, a day will come when there are a couple of bags of potato chips, each down to their last handful, which are sort of stale. That is the time to make tuna casserole.
Following instructions on the bag, boil a cup (dry) of rice. In a large saucepan, heat together a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of cream of chicken soup. Add to the soup a small can of button mushrooms, a small can of tiny green peas, and two cans of light tuna. You can use albacore, but that is like putting tenderloin in Hamburger Helper, if you are one who likes Hamburger Helper.
Add the cooked rice to the soup. Season to taste with black pepper and garlic powder. Stir until the ingredients are mixed, then pour the mixture into a casserole dish that has been lightly oiled. Some people like a deep dish, others a shallow one; I favor the shallow because there’s more acreage for the potato chips. Sprinkle the casserole with grated cheddar. Roll up the bags tight to crush the chips, then sprinkle them on top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.
Next day, if asked what you had for dinner, say, “Tuna Casserole.” And if you can’t resist, add, “With rice.”
It was good, it was cheap, it was easy, and it was filling. I am starting to crave some right now. I haven’t had it in years. It carries a whiff of kid stigma, like slicing up hotdogs in macaroni and cheese, as my son Tyler used to do. Maybe still does. But then if somebody asks him, “What did you have for dinner last night,” and he says, “Hot dogs sliced into macaroni and cheese,” the person will say, “What are you, a college kid?”
Same way with chili and rice. It’s just not something a grown man would naturally do. “What did you have for dinner last night?” “Chili and rice.” “And you can get a woman to live with you?” On the other hand, if I say, “Frito Pie,” the person may say, “Oh, how interesting.” So I’m interesting if I mix together a bag of Fritos, a can of chili, and some onions, and heat that until the chips are nice and mushy, and eat that, whereas if it’s rice, I’m a slob. Such is the unaccountability of stigma.
It must be the rice. When I announce that I am going to make tuna casserole, and 10 people hear me, eight of them will think I am going to make it with egg noodles. Rice needs a council or something, to lobby for its status. Maybe it’s because of all the instant rice on the shelves, a Rice-a-Roni onus. I happen to like most Rice-a-Ronis, but I would never make chili and rice with it. Nor would I make chili and rice with noodles. The flavors that rice picks up (and, with its chewiness, incorporates into every bite) just slide off of noodles.
But I’m not here to talk about rice stigma; I’m here to talk about the merits of tuna casserole in a stretch cooking repertoire. Tuna casserole has established itself as the best way to stretch cans of tuna and bags of potato chips. Typically, in the chip drawer, a day will come when there are a couple of bags of potato chips, each down to their last handful, which are sort of stale. That is the time to make tuna casserole.
Following instructions on the bag, boil a cup (dry) of rice. In a large saucepan, heat together a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of cream of chicken soup. Add to the soup a small can of button mushrooms, a small can of tiny green peas, and two cans of light tuna. You can use albacore, but that is like putting tenderloin in Hamburger Helper, if you are one who likes Hamburger Helper.
Add the cooked rice to the soup. Season to taste with black pepper and garlic powder. Stir until the ingredients are mixed, then pour the mixture into a casserole dish that has been lightly oiled. Some people like a deep dish, others a shallow one; I favor the shallow because there’s more acreage for the potato chips. Sprinkle the casserole with grated cheddar. Roll up the bags tight to crush the chips, then sprinkle them on top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.
Next day, if asked what you had for dinner, say, “Tuna Casserole.” And if you can’t resist, add, “With rice.”
Staring at a new world beyond the windows
We are doing a lot of gazing out the window these days. A guy named Greg Rubin lifted up our house this summer and plunked it down in the middle of the most amazing desert garden. He and his crew finished their work two weeks ago, but still we gaze, and try to understand. I could have sworn there was an ancient, cracked, concrete patio out there, and hideous, stamped pavers – some of them scalloped! – set on their edges and used as a low retaining wall, and below the french doors a wide step I made myself, out of concrete brick and two-by-twelves of which any trailer park landlord would be proud.
Now, from the living room couch, I swear we see a curvy design of pale flagstone terrace and walkways, gravel areas, mulch beds, tiny (for the moment) native plants, and dry-stacked stone walls, a landscape such as tourists might encounter when renting premium villas in Palm Springs and Scottsdale. For a few days, Gulliver would have none of it. He would creep gingerly halfway down the new stone walk meandering through mulch beds along the side of the house, then make a decision: “This is not where I live.” And retire to the indoors, which he still recognized.
Actually we wish his confusion had carried on a little longer. Now he feels quite regal in his new environment and never returns to the house within bringing in a few strands of mulch clinging to his Sheltie feathers, which mulch, it turns out, loves.
The terrace tableau carries around the corner to the glider porch, with space expanding several new feet out from the porch to the lip of a retaining wall that gives a crisp frame to the view. Beyond the front door, with its new flagstone stoop, the flagstone transitions to the meandering stone walk and a long slope of mulch studded with a variety of native plants. The walk passes a new garden setting on the left, at the back of the house, and on the right, a bubbling fountain at the point where wide stone steps cascade down to the garage and street. The transition from the old back to the new back is even more startling than the change around on the patio side.
The term, “native plant” refers to plants that are native to the deserts, both high and low, that are so typical of Southern California and much of the Southwest. Our house is 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean, which we can see – when we remember to look, these days – from the new terrace. Yet we are lucky to get 12 inches of rain a year. Someday the water SoCal imports from the north and east will run out, but for now there is enough to support all types of lush, grassy landscaping, but many Californians dote on the native plant option. In fact there is a “Native Plant Society.”
Native plants love our natural semi-arid circumstances, and once they take hold, they grow into a palette of sizes, shapes, textures, and flowery color. Around our house, Greg, the owner of CalOwn, and his crew set in 16 varieties of native plants, and a couple of types of trees. We are already seeing tiny flowers of blue, purple, yellow, and red.
The work took a hard-working crew five weeks, and it was the kind of hard work that goes with landscaping a house that has, as they say in the trade, “difficult access.” I won’t tell you what it cost, but it was ungodly reasonable, given the result. I have never in my life seen an equivalent bang for the buck.
Now, from the living room couch, I swear we see a curvy design of pale flagstone terrace and walkways, gravel areas, mulch beds, tiny (for the moment) native plants, and dry-stacked stone walls, a landscape such as tourists might encounter when renting premium villas in Palm Springs and Scottsdale. For a few days, Gulliver would have none of it. He would creep gingerly halfway down the new stone walk meandering through mulch beds along the side of the house, then make a decision: “This is not where I live.” And retire to the indoors, which he still recognized.
Actually we wish his confusion had carried on a little longer. Now he feels quite regal in his new environment and never returns to the house within bringing in a few strands of mulch clinging to his Sheltie feathers, which mulch, it turns out, loves.
The terrace tableau carries around the corner to the glider porch, with space expanding several new feet out from the porch to the lip of a retaining wall that gives a crisp frame to the view. Beyond the front door, with its new flagstone stoop, the flagstone transitions to the meandering stone walk and a long slope of mulch studded with a variety of native plants. The walk passes a new garden setting on the left, at the back of the house, and on the right, a bubbling fountain at the point where wide stone steps cascade down to the garage and street. The transition from the old back to the new back is even more startling than the change around on the patio side.
The term, “native plant” refers to plants that are native to the deserts, both high and low, that are so typical of Southern California and much of the Southwest. Our house is 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean, which we can see – when we remember to look, these days – from the new terrace. Yet we are lucky to get 12 inches of rain a year. Someday the water SoCal imports from the north and east will run out, but for now there is enough to support all types of lush, grassy landscaping, but many Californians dote on the native plant option. In fact there is a “Native Plant Society.”
Native plants love our natural semi-arid circumstances, and once they take hold, they grow into a palette of sizes, shapes, textures, and flowery color. Around our house, Greg, the owner of CalOwn, and his crew set in 16 varieties of native plants, and a couple of types of trees. We are already seeing tiny flowers of blue, purple, yellow, and red.
The work took a hard-working crew five weeks, and it was the kind of hard work that goes with landscaping a house that has, as they say in the trade, “difficult access.” I won’t tell you what it cost, but it was ungodly reasonable, given the result. I have never in my life seen an equivalent bang for the buck.
August 24, 2009
Media Literacy: for producers and consumers, being schooled in the tools
When I talk about "media literacy" – or the absence of same – I always run the risk of offending educated people. I never mean to be offensive, but you have to agree that the average, aware, involved, hard-working American with a high school or college education may not take kindly to being called a "media illiterate."
The trouble is, people tend to immediately associate the word "illiterate" with "can't read or write," as opposed to "not schooled in." Being not schooled in is what I mean when I talk about media literacy. It is the same as being not schooled in surgery, or accounting, or engineering, or education. No one would call a university president a "surgical illiterate." Nor would I call him or her a "media illiterate." It's just that he or she has not been schooled in it.
Today, in my classrooms at Grossmont Community College, in a suburb of San Diego, classes in media literacy begin. There will be around 130 students in all, in five classes. Four of the classes teach the basic tools needed to produce media content. Specifically, these students will be learning journalism, but the same tools apply to all the media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television.
One of the classes will teach the basic tools needed to consume media content. These consumer tools are almost exactly the same as the tools the producers use. And that is an overlooked, but fundamental requirement in consuming media. In education, we call this consumer course a "survey" course. More than 90 percent of the students in the class will not become media producers; they will become surgeons or accountants or engineers or educators. They take this course, "Mass Media & Society," because a) it is a required course; b) they like mass media; and c) it looks more interesting – and easier – than philosophy.
There are dozens of scholars and academics who have written textbooks about the relationship between society and its mass media, and they are thoroughly instructive. However, they all tend to use social constructs and communication theory to explain the relationship, which is fine, but it misses some important nuts and bolts: the tools used by media producers to develop content, and the tools used by media consumers to interpret that content. And they are basically the same tools.
The awareness of these tools, and the ability to use them, whether to produce media or consume it, is what I call media literacy. But in the present American educational system, these tools are taught to the media producers of the future, but not to the media consumers. U.S. Labor Dept. statistics from 2007 show 1,007,000 Americans working as media producers. They learned the production tools in specific media production classes, at the high school and college/university levels. There are no equivalent classes for media consumers, all 300-plus million of them in America, in the general curriculum. Those 300 million are not schooled in media.
Is that important? Well, it's important enough for practically all institutions of higher learning to require classes like "Mass Media & Society." It's important enough to make "media literacy" a hot topic among secondary school educators and parent associations. It's important to those of us defending the media from extremism. And it is important in uncounted other ways, some of which you can already read about in this Media Literacy series, and some that will appear later.
It has been about seven years, through teaching both media producers and consumers, since I realized that the same tools were used by both sides. Today, another 130 start receiving the information. At this rate, the entire American population could receive the information in another 115,384.6 years. You always have to start somewhere.
The trouble is, people tend to immediately associate the word "illiterate" with "can't read or write," as opposed to "not schooled in." Being not schooled in is what I mean when I talk about media literacy. It is the same as being not schooled in surgery, or accounting, or engineering, or education. No one would call a university president a "surgical illiterate." Nor would I call him or her a "media illiterate." It's just that he or she has not been schooled in it.
Today, in my classrooms at Grossmont Community College, in a suburb of San Diego, classes in media literacy begin. There will be around 130 students in all, in five classes. Four of the classes teach the basic tools needed to produce media content. Specifically, these students will be learning journalism, but the same tools apply to all the media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television.
One of the classes will teach the basic tools needed to consume media content. These consumer tools are almost exactly the same as the tools the producers use. And that is an overlooked, but fundamental requirement in consuming media. In education, we call this consumer course a "survey" course. More than 90 percent of the students in the class will not become media producers; they will become surgeons or accountants or engineers or educators. They take this course, "Mass Media & Society," because a) it is a required course; b) they like mass media; and c) it looks more interesting – and easier – than philosophy.
There are dozens of scholars and academics who have written textbooks about the relationship between society and its mass media, and they are thoroughly instructive. However, they all tend to use social constructs and communication theory to explain the relationship, which is fine, but it misses some important nuts and bolts: the tools used by media producers to develop content, and the tools used by media consumers to interpret that content. And they are basically the same tools.
The awareness of these tools, and the ability to use them, whether to produce media or consume it, is what I call media literacy. But in the present American educational system, these tools are taught to the media producers of the future, but not to the media consumers. U.S. Labor Dept. statistics from 2007 show 1,007,000 Americans working as media producers. They learned the production tools in specific media production classes, at the high school and college/university levels. There are no equivalent classes for media consumers, all 300-plus million of them in America, in the general curriculum. Those 300 million are not schooled in media.
Is that important? Well, it's important enough for practically all institutions of higher learning to require classes like "Mass Media & Society." It's important enough to make "media literacy" a hot topic among secondary school educators and parent associations. It's important to those of us defending the media from extremism. And it is important in uncounted other ways, some of which you can already read about in this Media Literacy series, and some that will appear later.
It has been about seven years, through teaching both media producers and consumers, since I realized that the same tools were used by both sides. Today, another 130 start receiving the information. At this rate, the entire American population could receive the information in another 115,384.6 years. You always have to start somewhere.
August 23, 2009
graynation: thinking outside the box inside the box
It is true that people my age, when we were children, would get a gift that came in a box, play with the gift for a minute or two, then take the box outside and play with it.
Our parents would act befuddled. They couldn't explain it. And they didn't have anyone to explain it to them. Professionals in the 1940s, like Dr. Spock, were beginning to research child behavior. But parents, even if they cared to look, couldn't find much information about why a kid could get a great gift, then prefer the box it came in. A few parents would intrude, calling the child out for ignoring the gift, particularly if it was a gift from a favorite relative. But most parents, in the 1940s and '50s when I was a kid, would just let the child play with the box.
I don't remember, hunkered in my box in the front yard, peering over the rim for enemy airplanes or lions or spacemen, any adult coming out to ask me why I preferred the box. If they had, and I could have articulated it at the time, I might have said, "The box is full of questions, and the questions are very interesting." Actually, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said something like, "It's fun."
As it turns out, researchers can now tell us, I was learning. And learning was fun. Who would have thought? But it's true, and I think most people have known it, without knowing it, all along. Once we realize it, we see how obvious it is. In my journalism classes, we write a story about a 13-month-old named Duane Shelby who has been ordered to report for job placement or lose his food stamp privilege. At its core, the story is about a bureaucratic screw-up, but we're always looking for ways to make the story interesting. So we ask ourselves: what do we know about Duane Shelby? For example, can Duane work? You wouldn't think so, until you think about watching a 13-month-old at play. When he isn't sleeping, Duane Shelby works all day long. Every move he makes is a learning experience.
All us Duane Shelbys are explorers. We learn the most, and have the most fun, with things unknown. Traditionally, by the time a kid was four years old, the unknown was always outside, sometimes with a box full of questions. As time went by, we staked out neighborhoods. I call them our "sovereign neighborhoods," our home turf, or what today is frequently called a 'hood. To better understand your childhood sovereign neighborhood, read some of the anecdotes at my blog of that name.
Kids in my generation went outside naturally – wasn't much to do inside – but in the '60s and '70s, that started to change, as television, and then computers, and then the digital blizzard, lured kids indoors. Today's parents and grandparents are made uncomfortable by that, sometimes just by instinct, an instinct that we easily acted upon by going outside, and that we wish for today's kids as well, because there is something important out there. Various researchers have started to put their finger on it, including my San Diego friend in journalism Richard Louv, who identified it as "nature-deficit disorder," wrote a prize-winning book about it, and created a national "Children & Nature Network."
Now, in the Aug. 16 New York Times, comes a report about a Berkeley researcher, Alison Gopnik, who worries that parents think their babies, their very own Duane Shelbys, should "learn in a focused planned way," even though research shows those babies can learn better when left to their own devices. They "carefully watch," she writes, "ceaselessly manipulate," and "imagine different ways that the world might be." This, she says, is "very different from schoolwork," which is mostly data compilation.
"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally," Gopnik concludes, "and, most of all, by just allowing them to play."
And that, the brave sons and daughters who are the parents of our young learning-machine grandchildren, is the advice from one box-loving graynation veteran of the pre-digital world.
Our parents would act befuddled. They couldn't explain it. And they didn't have anyone to explain it to them. Professionals in the 1940s, like Dr. Spock, were beginning to research child behavior. But parents, even if they cared to look, couldn't find much information about why a kid could get a great gift, then prefer the box it came in. A few parents would intrude, calling the child out for ignoring the gift, particularly if it was a gift from a favorite relative. But most parents, in the 1940s and '50s when I was a kid, would just let the child play with the box.
I don't remember, hunkered in my box in the front yard, peering over the rim for enemy airplanes or lions or spacemen, any adult coming out to ask me why I preferred the box. If they had, and I could have articulated it at the time, I might have said, "The box is full of questions, and the questions are very interesting." Actually, I would have shrugged my shoulders and said something like, "It's fun."
As it turns out, researchers can now tell us, I was learning. And learning was fun. Who would have thought? But it's true, and I think most people have known it, without knowing it, all along. Once we realize it, we see how obvious it is. In my journalism classes, we write a story about a 13-month-old named Duane Shelby who has been ordered to report for job placement or lose his food stamp privilege. At its core, the story is about a bureaucratic screw-up, but we're always looking for ways to make the story interesting. So we ask ourselves: what do we know about Duane Shelby? For example, can Duane work? You wouldn't think so, until you think about watching a 13-month-old at play. When he isn't sleeping, Duane Shelby works all day long. Every move he makes is a learning experience.
All us Duane Shelbys are explorers. We learn the most, and have the most fun, with things unknown. Traditionally, by the time a kid was four years old, the unknown was always outside, sometimes with a box full of questions. As time went by, we staked out neighborhoods. I call them our "sovereign neighborhoods," our home turf, or what today is frequently called a 'hood. To better understand your childhood sovereign neighborhood, read some of the anecdotes at my blog of that name.
Kids in my generation went outside naturally – wasn't much to do inside – but in the '60s and '70s, that started to change, as television, and then computers, and then the digital blizzard, lured kids indoors. Today's parents and grandparents are made uncomfortable by that, sometimes just by instinct, an instinct that we easily acted upon by going outside, and that we wish for today's kids as well, because there is something important out there. Various researchers have started to put their finger on it, including my San Diego friend in journalism Richard Louv, who identified it as "nature-deficit disorder," wrote a prize-winning book about it, and created a national "Children & Nature Network."
Now, in the Aug. 16 New York Times, comes a report about a Berkeley researcher, Alison Gopnik, who worries that parents think their babies, their very own Duane Shelbys, should "learn in a focused planned way," even though research shows those babies can learn better when left to their own devices. They "carefully watch," she writes, "ceaselessly manipulate," and "imagine different ways that the world might be." This, she says, is "very different from schoolwork," which is mostly data compilation.
"Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally," Gopnik concludes, "and, most of all, by just allowing them to play."
And that, the brave sons and daughters who are the parents of our young learning-machine grandchildren, is the advice from one box-loving graynation veteran of the pre-digital world.
August 21, 2009
Archives: Knowing it all for a short while
First published in June, 1986.
The smartest I ever was, was on a Sunday morning in Texas, 25 years ago this month, walking across a warm and grassy courtyard toward the Abilene High School auditorium. I was about to be graduated from high school.
There were 560 of us in the auditorium that Sunday (minus the usual number of hoodlums skipping the ceremonies), quite a critical concentration of superiority, as graduating classes go.
I have a snapshot from the event, of me and my pals in the grassy courtyard, graduation robes slung over our forearms, grinning the grins of kids who have absolutely nothing further to learn.
And we didn't, for maybe three months, the most carefree of summers. Then there began an educational process, continuing to this day, concerning all the things we really didn't know, possibly still do not know, and may never, ever, know.
This was not unnatural. The unnatural thing would have been to sit in the auditorium that morning offhandedly aware that you did not know it all yet. There could have been two or three of those, who today are on their way to being such unnatural things as Supreme Court justices.
The rest of us may have switched horses since that verdant Sunday May morning. I was going to be a doctor; advertised it openly in fact. No one, peers or parents, said to me directly that I was crazy. If they had said to me, "You are going to flunk college chemistry as it has never been flunked before, and then you will become a newspaper columnist," I would have laughed my utterly confident laugh in their face and said, "See you in surgery, beetlehead."
The Sunday auditorium event was the baccalaureate. They may not do this anymore, but baccalaureate and commencement were separate events in those days, one in the auditorium on Sunday, the other in the stadium on Monday night.
At baccalaureate, the traditional sermon was delivered, of which I remember not a syllable. We bounced our gold tassels and spooled the programs, and watched the ushers, junior girls, the best and the brightest from that class, gliding along the aisles in white dresses.
My name in the program was appointed with all kinds of asterisks and daggers and stars, connoting me as one among the wonderfully smart. One had to be humble about this, though privately I counted the typographical salad as proof of my ascension to perfect knowledge.
But the writing was already on the wall. Some months earlier, the Scholastic Aptitude Test had asked me to define "thesaurus," and I blacked in the circle by "extinct reptile." Later, learning the truth, I responded from the summit, "Ah, what dummy would ever need a thesaurus anyway?"
I still tell people that I was smart in high school. For a long time I wondered how a kid so smart in high school could sink like an anchor as a freshman. It was years before I realized that high school asterisks and daggers connote nothing more than the difference between memory and intellect. If I had a word of counsel for smart seniors, that would be it.
The AHS auditorium is still there, filling higher and higher each June with new batches of great expectations, most of which are left behind. That is where most of mine still are. As far as I know, no one who was in the auditorium that morning in 1961 holds it against me.
It generally works out somehow. A quarter-century is plenty of time for this, if it is going to happen. I am not a doctor and the beetleheads were not crazy, and I have no complaints.
And it felt pretty good, those summer months of '61, knowing it all for a little while. Such confidence will not come this way again. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.
Present-day postscript: Boy, have I learned a lot since 1986. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.
The smartest I ever was, was on a Sunday morning in Texas, 25 years ago this month, walking across a warm and grassy courtyard toward the Abilene High School auditorium. I was about to be graduated from high school.
There were 560 of us in the auditorium that Sunday (minus the usual number of hoodlums skipping the ceremonies), quite a critical concentration of superiority, as graduating classes go.
I have a snapshot from the event, of me and my pals in the grassy courtyard, graduation robes slung over our forearms, grinning the grins of kids who have absolutely nothing further to learn.
And we didn't, for maybe three months, the most carefree of summers. Then there began an educational process, continuing to this day, concerning all the things we really didn't know, possibly still do not know, and may never, ever, know.
This was not unnatural. The unnatural thing would have been to sit in the auditorium that morning offhandedly aware that you did not know it all yet. There could have been two or three of those, who today are on their way to being such unnatural things as Supreme Court justices.
The rest of us may have switched horses since that verdant Sunday May morning. I was going to be a doctor; advertised it openly in fact. No one, peers or parents, said to me directly that I was crazy. If they had said to me, "You are going to flunk college chemistry as it has never been flunked before, and then you will become a newspaper columnist," I would have laughed my utterly confident laugh in their face and said, "See you in surgery, beetlehead."
The Sunday auditorium event was the baccalaureate. They may not do this anymore, but baccalaureate and commencement were separate events in those days, one in the auditorium on Sunday, the other in the stadium on Monday night.
At baccalaureate, the traditional sermon was delivered, of which I remember not a syllable. We bounced our gold tassels and spooled the programs, and watched the ushers, junior girls, the best and the brightest from that class, gliding along the aisles in white dresses.
My name in the program was appointed with all kinds of asterisks and daggers and stars, connoting me as one among the wonderfully smart. One had to be humble about this, though privately I counted the typographical salad as proof of my ascension to perfect knowledge.
But the writing was already on the wall. Some months earlier, the Scholastic Aptitude Test had asked me to define "thesaurus," and I blacked in the circle by "extinct reptile." Later, learning the truth, I responded from the summit, "Ah, what dummy would ever need a thesaurus anyway?"
I still tell people that I was smart in high school. For a long time I wondered how a kid so smart in high school could sink like an anchor as a freshman. It was years before I realized that high school asterisks and daggers connote nothing more than the difference between memory and intellect. If I had a word of counsel for smart seniors, that would be it.
The AHS auditorium is still there, filling higher and higher each June with new batches of great expectations, most of which are left behind. That is where most of mine still are. As far as I know, no one who was in the auditorium that morning in 1961 holds it against me.
It generally works out somehow. A quarter-century is plenty of time for this, if it is going to happen. I am not a doctor and the beetleheads were not crazy, and I have no complaints.
And it felt pretty good, those summer months of '61, knowing it all for a little while. Such confidence will not come this way again. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.
Present-day postscript: Boy, have I learned a lot since 1986. But I still think the thesaurus is overrated.
August 20, 2009
Stretch Cooking: Why they call them Home Fries
The one kitchen item I have always coveted, just as at the same time I was so grateful I didn't own one, is the deep-fat fryer.
Coveted, of course, because of french fries, fish and chips, onion rings, etc. You can fry any of these in a skillet, but they aren't the same. After half a dozen tries, and five fool-proof techniques, including "pre-frying" the fries, I quit altogether, trying to fry french fries at home.
Onion rings, I tried once, and before they were anywhere near going into the skillet, they had become more trouble than they are worth. As a general statement, I think you can say that about all fried foods. It's a testament to the desirability of fried foods that, by God, no matter how big the mess gets, in prep, in clean-up, and in your arteries, people keep trying to fry them at home.
That general statement is the reason I am grateful not to own a deep-fat fryer. If I did, I know where I would find it: at the back of the bottom cabinet, with webby spider civilizations thriving in the dark corners. More trouble than it's worth. Actually, a big addition to the trouble. So you've pulled out half your hair trying to batter onion rings, then you pop these rings into the deep-fat fryer, and three-quarters of the batter slips right off the rings and sticks to something else. When you are finished, what do you do with two quarts of oil and half a pound of bonded-to-the-basket batter? I pour all my used oil into coffee cans, but we can't drink coffee fast enough to deal with the oil that Emeril LaGasse goes through in half an hour. And I won't follow any recipe calling for a basket, or a grate, like pork chops baked on a grate over a drip pan. Cleaning that grate just isn't worth it.
So I save the rings, fries, fish, calamari, for the cafes, and do home fries in the skillet. That's why they call them "home fries." They bear not the slightest resemblance to french fries, but they are potatoes fried at home, and the name acknowledges the difference. Home fries also re-heat nicely, which is not something you can say about the french kind. As I write this, Word keeps capitalizing "french" (don't you hate it when Word corrects you, or even tries to help you?), and I keep going back and overriding the capitalization because they aren't French fries. In France, they're pommes frites. I mean no disrespect here, because the French really know their way around pommes frites, in the cafes, at least.
For a big batch of home fries (and I always make enough for two, sometimes three, meals), pre-heat a 13-inch black (cast-iron) skillet over medium heat. Wash and cut into one-inch dice, four medium baking potatoes. You can peel them, but I like to leave the skins on. Chop one large onion and a medium green bell pepper. Place these in a mixing bowl, add salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste (and paprika for tang and color, if you like), and add about three tablespoons of olive oil, so that stirring coats everything nicely.
Add the mix to the skillet and stir around. Cover the skillet, to help cook the potatoes. Stir every five minutes until the potatoes are softening. You should not rush the cooking process. You want the potatoes golden, not black, around the edges. When you can easily cut through a potato piece with the spatula, leave the cover off, turn the heat up a couple of numbers above medium, and cook until the potatoes are nicely browned, stirring frequently.
These go great with steaks, pork, chicken, hamburgers, sausage, eggs and bacon, and they don't lose a thing in re-heating. And clean-up is a snap.
Coveted, of course, because of french fries, fish and chips, onion rings, etc. You can fry any of these in a skillet, but they aren't the same. After half a dozen tries, and five fool-proof techniques, including "pre-frying" the fries, I quit altogether, trying to fry french fries at home.
Onion rings, I tried once, and before they were anywhere near going into the skillet, they had become more trouble than they are worth. As a general statement, I think you can say that about all fried foods. It's a testament to the desirability of fried foods that, by God, no matter how big the mess gets, in prep, in clean-up, and in your arteries, people keep trying to fry them at home.
That general statement is the reason I am grateful not to own a deep-fat fryer. If I did, I know where I would find it: at the back of the bottom cabinet, with webby spider civilizations thriving in the dark corners. More trouble than it's worth. Actually, a big addition to the trouble. So you've pulled out half your hair trying to batter onion rings, then you pop these rings into the deep-fat fryer, and three-quarters of the batter slips right off the rings and sticks to something else. When you are finished, what do you do with two quarts of oil and half a pound of bonded-to-the-basket batter? I pour all my used oil into coffee cans, but we can't drink coffee fast enough to deal with the oil that Emeril LaGasse goes through in half an hour. And I won't follow any recipe calling for a basket, or a grate, like pork chops baked on a grate over a drip pan. Cleaning that grate just isn't worth it.
So I save the rings, fries, fish, calamari, for the cafes, and do home fries in the skillet. That's why they call them "home fries." They bear not the slightest resemblance to french fries, but they are potatoes fried at home, and the name acknowledges the difference. Home fries also re-heat nicely, which is not something you can say about the french kind. As I write this, Word keeps capitalizing "french" (don't you hate it when Word corrects you, or even tries to help you?), and I keep going back and overriding the capitalization because they aren't French fries. In France, they're pommes frites. I mean no disrespect here, because the French really know their way around pommes frites, in the cafes, at least.
For a big batch of home fries (and I always make enough for two, sometimes three, meals), pre-heat a 13-inch black (cast-iron) skillet over medium heat. Wash and cut into one-inch dice, four medium baking potatoes. You can peel them, but I like to leave the skins on. Chop one large onion and a medium green bell pepper. Place these in a mixing bowl, add salt, pepper and garlic powder to taste (and paprika for tang and color, if you like), and add about three tablespoons of olive oil, so that stirring coats everything nicely.
Add the mix to the skillet and stir around. Cover the skillet, to help cook the potatoes. Stir every five minutes until the potatoes are softening. You should not rush the cooking process. You want the potatoes golden, not black, around the edges. When you can easily cut through a potato piece with the spatula, leave the cover off, turn the heat up a couple of numbers above medium, and cook until the potatoes are nicely browned, stirring frequently.
These go great with steaks, pork, chicken, hamburgers, sausage, eggs and bacon, and they don't lose a thing in re-heating. And clean-up is a snap.
August 17, 2009
Media Literacy: The truth about Paris
Today's media literacy blog was first published in the summer of 2006.
I look at Paris Hilton and can’t for the life of me understand what people find so exciting about her.
Paris Hilton looks at a picture of me and says there is not a single reason on earth why she should try to excite me.
Her view is closer to the truth than mine.
Sigh. I live in an old world. My biggest entertainment excitement of the summer is wondering if the CBS Evening News will start showing car commercials when Katie Couric takes the anchor seat in September. It would be the first time since 1993 that the advertising world believes I might actually be interested in buying something you can’t find in a drugstore.
Paris isn’t the narcissistic one. Well, yes she is. Narcissism is her business, and she is very good at it. She was shopping in New York City not long ago, trying on shoes, and one pair she was looking at cost $1,000. She argued to the management that she should be given the shoes, because when others saw her wearing them, they would come in and buy a pair, too. For the $1,000 investment, they might get $15,000 back. They gave her the shoes.
But in our unique relationship, Paris isn’t the narcissistic one; I am. Mine is a narcissism of time and place. The time I was 15, or 20, or 25, was the best time in all of history to be 15, 20, or 25, and if everyone understood that, what a wonderful world it would be.
I need to go sit in a large mall for a couple of hours every day, until I reach a point where I can acknowledge that youth has changed. I just need to let go of June Allyson, Phyllis Thaxter, Donna Reed, Wanda Hendrix and even Jean Arthur, as the femme for whom the hero eventually falls. June Allyson sets a good example. June Allyson has grown up; the last time I saw her on a screen, she was selling incontinence apparel.
I need to follow her lead, start to live in 2006, and let Paris be Paris. Matt Leinart has fallen for her, and he certainly is not George Gipp or Monty Stratton or Glenn Miller or an F-86 Sabre fighter pilot with seven kills over Korea. Matt Leinart, falling for Phyllix Thaxter? I need to give myself a break. In a recent Sunday supplement magazine, some fossil in his own recliner at home took a big gulp off his oxygen bottle and wrote Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, wondering, “Why would quarterback Matt Leinart, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner, who is going to make millions playing for the Arizona Cardinals, hook up with a total airhead like Paris Hilton?” Walter’s reply: “Because he likes tall blondes and L.A.’s club scene. Next question?”
Thank you, Walter. Your answer was like a pail of cold water thrown in my face. Mattworld and Parisville are not strange places at all, in 2006. I am the one who is strange. I am the anomaly, not Paris.
The mall looks so strange to me because I am the only one sitting on the lip of the planter box with my bermudas buttoned at my waist, the hems above my knees, my shirt cut to fit my size, my baseball cap on frontwards, no tattoo on my body, and my cellphone on the kitchen counter at home. From my narcissist 1959 fortress I will peer through a portal at 2006 for an hour today, maybe a little longer tomorrow, and when I am finished I will go over to Marie Callendar’s for a martini and some oatmeal.
I look at Paris Hilton and can’t for the life of me understand what people find so exciting about her.
Paris Hilton looks at a picture of me and says there is not a single reason on earth why she should try to excite me.
Her view is closer to the truth than mine.
Sigh. I live in an old world. My biggest entertainment excitement of the summer is wondering if the CBS Evening News will start showing car commercials when Katie Couric takes the anchor seat in September. It would be the first time since 1993 that the advertising world believes I might actually be interested in buying something you can’t find in a drugstore.
Paris isn’t the narcissistic one. Well, yes she is. Narcissism is her business, and she is very good at it. She was shopping in New York City not long ago, trying on shoes, and one pair she was looking at cost $1,000. She argued to the management that she should be given the shoes, because when others saw her wearing them, they would come in and buy a pair, too. For the $1,000 investment, they might get $15,000 back. They gave her the shoes.
But in our unique relationship, Paris isn’t the narcissistic one; I am. Mine is a narcissism of time and place. The time I was 15, or 20, or 25, was the best time in all of history to be 15, 20, or 25, and if everyone understood that, what a wonderful world it would be.
I need to go sit in a large mall for a couple of hours every day, until I reach a point where I can acknowledge that youth has changed. I just need to let go of June Allyson, Phyllis Thaxter, Donna Reed, Wanda Hendrix and even Jean Arthur, as the femme for whom the hero eventually falls. June Allyson sets a good example. June Allyson has grown up; the last time I saw her on a screen, she was selling incontinence apparel.
I need to follow her lead, start to live in 2006, and let Paris be Paris. Matt Leinart has fallen for her, and he certainly is not George Gipp or Monty Stratton or Glenn Miller or an F-86 Sabre fighter pilot with seven kills over Korea. Matt Leinart, falling for Phyllix Thaxter? I need to give myself a break. In a recent Sunday supplement magazine, some fossil in his own recliner at home took a big gulp off his oxygen bottle and wrote Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, wondering, “Why would quarterback Matt Leinart, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner, who is going to make millions playing for the Arizona Cardinals, hook up with a total airhead like Paris Hilton?” Walter’s reply: “Because he likes tall blondes and L.A.’s club scene. Next question?”
Thank you, Walter. Your answer was like a pail of cold water thrown in my face. Mattworld and Parisville are not strange places at all, in 2006. I am the one who is strange. I am the anomaly, not Paris.
The mall looks so strange to me because I am the only one sitting on the lip of the planter box with my bermudas buttoned at my waist, the hems above my knees, my shirt cut to fit my size, my baseball cap on frontwards, no tattoo on my body, and my cellphone on the kitchen counter at home. From my narcissist 1959 fortress I will peer through a portal at 2006 for an hour today, maybe a little longer tomorrow, and when I am finished I will go over to Marie Callendar’s for a martini and some oatmeal.
August 16, 2009
graynation: The very first day of school
In 1949, I entered first grade at Ben Milam Elementary School in Dallas. (Ben Milam was a fighter in the Texas revolutionary war against Mexico.) There was no kindergarten then. Before the first day of school (traditionally the Tuesday after Labor Day), my mother and I completed my off-to-school shopping. Her name was June, and she was a worrier. My good young grandchildren, you may have your own thoughts about mothers who worry, but it is far better than having a mother who doesn't. When you are 20, you can start weaning them.
My mother bought a fabric coinpurse, with a gold metal clasp, in which I would carry my lunch money. She reasoned it was more difficult for a six-year-old to lose a whole coinpurse than it was to lose the loose coins themselves. Off I went, the first September morning, with my pencils and ruler and tablet and the coinpurse in my pocket.
Ben Milam was huge, brick, and imposing, in the early 20th century style of elementary schools, two storys and a basement. It was in the Cole Park neighborhood of Dallas, where highway crews were busy excavating the right-of-way for the North Central Expressway, the first urban freeway in Dallas, just across a temporary fence from the upstairs apartment where my family lived on Keating Way. I and some friends had found our way through that fence one weekend, after a rainstorm, when all the huge machinery was still, and we returned home with only the whites of our eyes peeking through the mud.
Susie, my grandmother, could barely restrain herself at the sight. She filled a hot tub and parked me in it, but that was not enough. A few minutes later she re-entered, with a spatula (she called it a pancake turner) in her hand. She hoisted me onto my feet in the dark water and flailed at my bottom until she was satisfied.
But I digress, though I must say I would have preferred a spanking in a muddy tub over being in a line early on a Tuesday morning to have my picture taken in the basement of Ben Milam Elementary. The cafeteria was also in the basement, and 60 years later I remember its scent, though I still can't describe it. It was somewhere between mashed potatoes and peas. In the photo queue, I became a Bluebird, like half my mates, while the others were Redbirds. So early, in our lives, to whet our competitiveness.
I do not remember my teacher's name, but as lunch hour approached, she kindly explained the lunch protocol to us. Then she smiled and held up an object. It was my coinpurse! She said: "What little girl has lost her coinpurse?" It certainly was not worth lunch, or two nickels, or my entire educational future, to respond. I played dead until she gave up and placed the purse in her desk drawer. I was trapped in a startling day in a startling world within a startling world, and I saw no choice but to run.
I had to wait. I didn’t know the penalty for a shamed first-grader bolting for freedom and relief on the first morning of school in the Texas educational system of 1949, but there must have been one. Eventually we filed out of the classroom and marched to the basement, and lined up as Bluebirds or Redbirds, on either side of the hall at the cafeteria doors. Only, when I saw the portal and stairs that I remembered as the way we had come in that morning, I broke for it. I ran up the stairs and out of the school and down the sidewalk three or four blocks to home and unrepentantly threw myself against the apartment door, wanting in.
The next day, I reluctantly walked back to my second day of school at Ben Milam, with two nickels rattling loose in my pocket. I took it as a victory of sorts.
My mother bought a fabric coinpurse, with a gold metal clasp, in which I would carry my lunch money. She reasoned it was more difficult for a six-year-old to lose a whole coinpurse than it was to lose the loose coins themselves. Off I went, the first September morning, with my pencils and ruler and tablet and the coinpurse in my pocket.
Ben Milam was huge, brick, and imposing, in the early 20th century style of elementary schools, two storys and a basement. It was in the Cole Park neighborhood of Dallas, where highway crews were busy excavating the right-of-way for the North Central Expressway, the first urban freeway in Dallas, just across a temporary fence from the upstairs apartment where my family lived on Keating Way. I and some friends had found our way through that fence one weekend, after a rainstorm, when all the huge machinery was still, and we returned home with only the whites of our eyes peeking through the mud.
Susie, my grandmother, could barely restrain herself at the sight. She filled a hot tub and parked me in it, but that was not enough. A few minutes later she re-entered, with a spatula (she called it a pancake turner) in her hand. She hoisted me onto my feet in the dark water and flailed at my bottom until she was satisfied.
But I digress, though I must say I would have preferred a spanking in a muddy tub over being in a line early on a Tuesday morning to have my picture taken in the basement of Ben Milam Elementary. The cafeteria was also in the basement, and 60 years later I remember its scent, though I still can't describe it. It was somewhere between mashed potatoes and peas. In the photo queue, I became a Bluebird, like half my mates, while the others were Redbirds. So early, in our lives, to whet our competitiveness.
I do not remember my teacher's name, but as lunch hour approached, she kindly explained the lunch protocol to us. Then she smiled and held up an object. It was my coinpurse! She said: "What little girl has lost her coinpurse?" It certainly was not worth lunch, or two nickels, or my entire educational future, to respond. I played dead until she gave up and placed the purse in her desk drawer. I was trapped in a startling day in a startling world within a startling world, and I saw no choice but to run.
I had to wait. I didn’t know the penalty for a shamed first-grader bolting for freedom and relief on the first morning of school in the Texas educational system of 1949, but there must have been one. Eventually we filed out of the classroom and marched to the basement, and lined up as Bluebirds or Redbirds, on either side of the hall at the cafeteria doors. Only, when I saw the portal and stairs that I remembered as the way we had come in that morning, I broke for it. I ran up the stairs and out of the school and down the sidewalk three or four blocks to home and unrepentantly threw myself against the apartment door, wanting in.
The next day, I reluctantly walked back to my second day of school at Ben Milam, with two nickels rattling loose in my pocket. I took it as a victory of sorts.
August 15, 2009
Stretch Cooking: little burritos, fat chimichangas
I always keep flour tortillas on hand, because they make quick and easy lunches, and because they are a great way to stretch things in a pinch.
Say a couple of friends call at 4 in the afternoon. They are in the neighborhood and wonder if they could stop by for a drink. There is nothing more fun than that, particularly when they bring the wine.
So you're into the wine (or margaritas or whatever), and 5 p.m. becomes 6, and at the patio table, somebody's stomach growls. Doesn't matter whose. The host says, uh-oh, I'd better offer up something to eat. But all I have in the icebox are a couple of bits of leftover braised pork. Not enough for four. Hmmm. I'll chop those up, with the onions they braised with, which with some cheese rolled into flour tortillas will make eight mini- burritos, two each.
These tortillas are the eight-inch size, which you can heat to soften, then roll into them grated cheese and salsa (or chili or leftover veggies or whatever, put in the oven for 10 minutes, and make the easiest, cleanest, fastest lunch in the west. Or the fastest patio snacks for unexpected friends. The larger sizes, 14 inches (or larger, for the "burrito grande") are for making the kinds of burritos you get from take-out places. These I like to feed a passel of family, which includes kids, all of whom would never turn their backs on a hot chimichanga, with sour cream, salsa, and guacamole.
A chimichanga is basically a burrito, fried in oil to a golden brown. Arizonans claim the chimichanga originated in Tucson, specifically at the El Charro Café, where, accidentally, a burrito was dropped into a deep-fat fryer.
Get two packages of flour tortillas, the 12- or 14-ounce size, that come eight or 10 to the package. (You might as well make a lot of them; they freeze nicely.) Brown two chorizo sausages, one pound each, in a large skillet, then add two large cans of refried beans. Blend these well. If you want leaner chimis, you can use a pound and a half of hamburger, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic powder, a pince of cumin and a couple tablespoons of chile powder. But the chorizo variety is better.
In a hot, dry skillet, soften the tortillas, one at a time. Place the tortilla on a carving board and drop half a cup of the chorizo mixture onto the half of the tortilla nearest you. Flip the sides of the tortilla inward, then roll the tortilla from the bottom to make a cylinder. Keep the burritos on a cooking sheet until you are ready to eat.
Heat half an inch of corn oil or peanut oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat. CAREFULLY place the burritos into the oil, three at a time. Let brown on the bottom, then flip to brown the other side. Drain on newspapers or paper towels and keep warm in the oven until serving. The ones you don't fry, put in a freezer bag and freeze.
Say a couple of friends call at 4 in the afternoon. They are in the neighborhood and wonder if they could stop by for a drink. There is nothing more fun than that, particularly when they bring the wine.
So you're into the wine (or margaritas or whatever), and 5 p.m. becomes 6, and at the patio table, somebody's stomach growls. Doesn't matter whose. The host says, uh-oh, I'd better offer up something to eat. But all I have in the icebox are a couple of bits of leftover braised pork. Not enough for four. Hmmm. I'll chop those up, with the onions they braised with, which with some cheese rolled into flour tortillas will make eight mini- burritos, two each.
These tortillas are the eight-inch size, which you can heat to soften, then roll into them grated cheese and salsa (or chili or leftover veggies or whatever, put in the oven for 10 minutes, and make the easiest, cleanest, fastest lunch in the west. Or the fastest patio snacks for unexpected friends. The larger sizes, 14 inches (or larger, for the "burrito grande") are for making the kinds of burritos you get from take-out places. These I like to feed a passel of family, which includes kids, all of whom would never turn their backs on a hot chimichanga, with sour cream, salsa, and guacamole.
A chimichanga is basically a burrito, fried in oil to a golden brown. Arizonans claim the chimichanga originated in Tucson, specifically at the El Charro Café, where, accidentally, a burrito was dropped into a deep-fat fryer.
Get two packages of flour tortillas, the 12- or 14-ounce size, that come eight or 10 to the package. (You might as well make a lot of them; they freeze nicely.) Brown two chorizo sausages, one pound each, in a large skillet, then add two large cans of refried beans. Blend these well. If you want leaner chimis, you can use a pound and a half of hamburger, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic powder, a pince of cumin and a couple tablespoons of chile powder. But the chorizo variety is better.
In a hot, dry skillet, soften the tortillas, one at a time. Place the tortilla on a carving board and drop half a cup of the chorizo mixture onto the half of the tortilla nearest you. Flip the sides of the tortilla inward, then roll the tortilla from the bottom to make a cylinder. Keep the burritos on a cooking sheet until you are ready to eat.
Heat half an inch of corn oil or peanut oil in a heavy skillet over medium heat. CAREFULLY place the burritos into the oil, three at a time. Let brown on the bottom, then flip to brown the other side. Drain on newspapers or paper towels and keep warm in the oven until serving. The ones you don't fry, put in a freezer bag and freeze.
August 13, 2009
Les Paul
For several years – seven or eight – I gave my son Tyler the same birthday present every year. It was a Les Paul CD, adorned with a store-bought, factory-folded green ribbon bow, attached with a strip of Scotch tape.
And for my birthday, Tyler gave the same CD back to me, with the same green bow. It said something about him and me. The gift was the essence of simplicity, in selection and presentation, which men like us prize at gift-giving time. (I also taught him how to use the Sunday comics as gift wrap.) And the gift was something we knew the other wanted: a Les Paul CD.
Today, then, I imagine Tyler and I feel pretty much the same about, for us, the day's most newsworthy event, the death, at age 94, of Les Paul. I heard about it on the (appropriately) car radio, and when I got home, I found "How High the Moon" on YouTube and emailed it to Tyler with no message. The story was front-and-center, with photo, on The New York Times Website, where a day earlier Eunice Kennedy Shriver's death story had appeared.
I say "appropriately," above, because Les Paul was a primary driver behind the music on all my car radios, starting in 1955 when I got my driver's license, and hence, the music fingerprints that I left on Tyler, when he was 4 years old and I would bounce him in my arms as we stood at the turntable and played the old 45s. "Honey Don't." "Blue Suede Shoes." "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man." "Don't Be Cruel."
Les Paul was rarely the artist, but he was the reason, for the formative sound coming from my radio, and so many radios, listened to by teenagers who by 1956 were a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. His artist's career was starting to end in the 1950s, just at the pre-dawn of the rock and roll era. He acknowledged as much in an interview whose date I can't pinpoint, but it may in fact be in the "Chasing Sound" PBS documentary from a couple of years ago. He said as soon as he heard rock and roll, he knew that his recording career was over.
But not his sound. Les Paul invented the solid-body guitar, and he invented multi-track recording. It is that sound, that he created, that drove the new music. When you listen to Les Paul playing at speed, on "How High the Moon," say, you can hear his personal technique, which was dazzling but more jazzy than rock and roll, but you can also hear a rhythm, the same rhythm that Chuck Berry talked about in "Johnny B. Goode:"
"He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
"Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
"Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade
"Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made . . . "
Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made. That's the sound that makes the record producers, in "Chasing Sound," sit forward in their seats, listening again to Les Paul play "How High the Moon." There's a passage in there, that, well . . . when people like Tyler and me, and others who are hooked on rock and roll guitar, are listening to a great song with a great guitar break, and the break is about five seconds away, we'll sit forward and say, "Here it comes." And then we'll back it up to that same point, five seconds to go, so we can feel it coming all over again. It may take five or six of these until we are satisfied.
In 2002, Tyler moved to Nashville, and the green-bow birthday string got broken. I don't remember who wound up in final possession of the CD. I think it was me. Thank God for YouTube. It's not the only, but the best, I think, last gesture of respect to Les Paul to listen to that song today and feel yourself inching forward when the passage starts to come.
And for my birthday, Tyler gave the same CD back to me, with the same green bow. It said something about him and me. The gift was the essence of simplicity, in selection and presentation, which men like us prize at gift-giving time. (I also taught him how to use the Sunday comics as gift wrap.) And the gift was something we knew the other wanted: a Les Paul CD.
Today, then, I imagine Tyler and I feel pretty much the same about, for us, the day's most newsworthy event, the death, at age 94, of Les Paul. I heard about it on the (appropriately) car radio, and when I got home, I found "How High the Moon" on YouTube and emailed it to Tyler with no message. The story was front-and-center, with photo, on The New York Times Website, where a day earlier Eunice Kennedy Shriver's death story had appeared.
I say "appropriately," above, because Les Paul was a primary driver behind the music on all my car radios, starting in 1955 when I got my driver's license, and hence, the music fingerprints that I left on Tyler, when he was 4 years old and I would bounce him in my arms as we stood at the turntable and played the old 45s. "Honey Don't." "Blue Suede Shoes." "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man." "Don't Be Cruel."
Les Paul was rarely the artist, but he was the reason, for the formative sound coming from my radio, and so many radios, listened to by teenagers who by 1956 were a new extension of culture that would become a culture unto itself. His artist's career was starting to end in the 1950s, just at the pre-dawn of the rock and roll era. He acknowledged as much in an interview whose date I can't pinpoint, but it may in fact be in the "Chasing Sound" PBS documentary from a couple of years ago. He said as soon as he heard rock and roll, he knew that his recording career was over.
But not his sound. Les Paul invented the solid-body guitar, and he invented multi-track recording. It is that sound, that he created, that drove the new music. When you listen to Les Paul playing at speed, on "How High the Moon," say, you can hear his personal technique, which was dazzling but more jazzy than rock and roll, but you can also hear a rhythm, the same rhythm that Chuck Berry talked about in "Johnny B. Goode:"
"He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
"Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
"Oh, the engineers would see him sitting in the shade
"Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made . . . "
Strumming with the rhythm that the drivers made. That's the sound that makes the record producers, in "Chasing Sound," sit forward in their seats, listening again to Les Paul play "How High the Moon." There's a passage in there, that, well . . . when people like Tyler and me, and others who are hooked on rock and roll guitar, are listening to a great song with a great guitar break, and the break is about five seconds away, we'll sit forward and say, "Here it comes." And then we'll back it up to that same point, five seconds to go, so we can feel it coming all over again. It may take five or six of these until we are satisfied.
In 2002, Tyler moved to Nashville, and the green-bow birthday string got broken. I don't remember who wound up in final possession of the CD. I think it was me. Thank God for YouTube. It's not the only, but the best, I think, last gesture of respect to Les Paul to listen to that song today and feel yourself inching forward when the passage starts to come.
August 10, 2009
Media Literacy: When considering the source, include the Internet
Professionals in the business of information-gathering have always looked at information with a caveat: "Consider the source. The information is only as good as the source."
With the Internet, history's greatest source of information, the caveat creates a couple of problems. First problem: most of the millions of Internet users are not professional information-gatherers, but amateurs. Considering the source is not a caution that would occur to them, and we have already seen the dangerous stampedes that unchallenged bad information can cause, as instantaneously as lightning crackling above a cattle herd.
That problem can be fixed with education, patience and time, and eventually, no doubt, with a bit of professional standard-setting. The second problem is a stranger duck, an original duck that the professionals haven't seen before. It has to do, not with sources that use the Internet, but the Internet itself as a source. It feels like a suspicion, gradually rising, that the Internet, as a source, is flawed. It's like asking the reader of a book to consider not only the author, as a source, but books themselves, as sources. How would one go about confirming the reliability of books as sources, even if one were moved to?
It's not a question being openly asked, about the Internet (not yet, anyway), but a subliminal suggestion. "Consider the source," as it applies to the Internet, seems to appear peripherally, almost unconsciously, in conversations that didn't start with the Internet at all. Joe Morgenstern senses it in his Friday Wall Street Journal review of a move, "Julie & Julia." The movie comes at the audience in two halves, he says, and the half about Julia – Julia Child, the celebrity chef – provides far more than half the movie's substance. The other half is about Julie Powell, a New Yorker who had the idea to cook all 524 recipes in Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year, and write blogs about the experience.
The problem for the audience is watching half a movie about someone who really does something – Julia Child – and watching the other half about someone writing a blog. It's a good blog, and a great idea, cooking all those recipes in a single year, but to the observer, it's still only a blog. Monty Python had the same idea 30 years ago, imagining an audience watching an author composing the opening lines of a great novel. Great sketch, but not so great that I can remember the author or the novel, which I will recognize instantly, once somebody tells me. See? What Julia Child did was real accomplishment: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." What Julie Powell did was blog. One is on the field. The other is on the sideline. The world will remember Julia Child, who mastered her art, but not Julie Powell, because she couldn't even overcome her source.
That same feeling pops up in a Sunday essay in The New York Times Book Review. This essay is one in a series that "will explore the dominant themes and currents of thought in a particular area of American life." This essay, by author Kurt Andersen, is about American pop culture "in the Age of Obama," when cable TV and the Internet represent a "vast new maw" for consumption of pop culture. He concludes:
"There's a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy."
The lesson is important for the masters of the Internet, who all agree that, on the Internet, content is king. If so, then it should be original content, and made well enough that the consumer, in considering the source, will be able to discriminate it from the shoddy. Otherwise, content on the Internet may never be king, or prince, or even duke. Nobody will ever remember its name.
With the Internet, history's greatest source of information, the caveat creates a couple of problems. First problem: most of the millions of Internet users are not professional information-gatherers, but amateurs. Considering the source is not a caution that would occur to them, and we have already seen the dangerous stampedes that unchallenged bad information can cause, as instantaneously as lightning crackling above a cattle herd.
That problem can be fixed with education, patience and time, and eventually, no doubt, with a bit of professional standard-setting. The second problem is a stranger duck, an original duck that the professionals haven't seen before. It has to do, not with sources that use the Internet, but the Internet itself as a source. It feels like a suspicion, gradually rising, that the Internet, as a source, is flawed. It's like asking the reader of a book to consider not only the author, as a source, but books themselves, as sources. How would one go about confirming the reliability of books as sources, even if one were moved to?
It's not a question being openly asked, about the Internet (not yet, anyway), but a subliminal suggestion. "Consider the source," as it applies to the Internet, seems to appear peripherally, almost unconsciously, in conversations that didn't start with the Internet at all. Joe Morgenstern senses it in his Friday Wall Street Journal review of a move, "Julie & Julia." The movie comes at the audience in two halves, he says, and the half about Julia – Julia Child, the celebrity chef – provides far more than half the movie's substance. The other half is about Julie Powell, a New Yorker who had the idea to cook all 524 recipes in Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year, and write blogs about the experience.
The problem for the audience is watching half a movie about someone who really does something – Julia Child – and watching the other half about someone writing a blog. It's a good blog, and a great idea, cooking all those recipes in a single year, but to the observer, it's still only a blog. Monty Python had the same idea 30 years ago, imagining an audience watching an author composing the opening lines of a great novel. Great sketch, but not so great that I can remember the author or the novel, which I will recognize instantly, once somebody tells me. See? What Julia Child did was real accomplishment: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." What Julie Powell did was blog. One is on the field. The other is on the sideline. The world will remember Julia Child, who mastered her art, but not Julie Powell, because she couldn't even overcome her source.
That same feeling pops up in a Sunday essay in The New York Times Book Review. This essay is one in a series that "will explore the dominant themes and currents of thought in a particular area of American life." This essay, by author Kurt Andersen, is about American pop culture "in the Age of Obama," when cable TV and the Internet represent a "vast new maw" for consumption of pop culture. He concludes:
"There's a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy."
The lesson is important for the masters of the Internet, who all agree that, on the Internet, content is king. If so, then it should be original content, and made well enough that the consumer, in considering the source, will be able to discriminate it from the shoddy. Otherwise, content on the Internet may never be king, or prince, or even duke. Nobody will ever remember its name.
August 09, 2009
graynation: touching Susie's hands
The graynation concept spreads! Here's the first paragraph (called the "lede" in journalism) from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott's review yesterday:
"I've reached the age when my children sometimes ask, 'Dad, what were things like in the olden days, when you were a teenager?' They mean the 1980s, and it's not so easy to explain. The ancient past never is."
I can see A.O.'s tongue bulging in his cheek when he refers to the 1980s as "the ancient past;" I would wager his yearbook pages haven't even started to yellow yet. To our kids, though, it's all relative. They just know that their parents came from a time from before they were born, and what a strange place it must have been. To them, any graynation story is unique, whether it dates from the 1980s or the 1950s (when I was a teenager) or the 1890s, when my grandmother migrated from Belgreen, Alabama, to Haskell County, Texas, in a covered wagon.
I would ask my grandmother, Susie, about those days, and she told me unique stories about that move, and what Texas was like before I was born in 1943, but she never wrote any of it down. It's not so easy to explain, as A.O. says. The ancient past never is.
I think we owe it to our kids, and their kids, to try. Hence, graynation. In the effort, we may well learn something about ourselves. "We shall not cease from exploration," wrote T.S. Eliot, "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And we provide our kids bragging power: "My dad shelled pecans with his grandmother, whose parents were alive at the time of the Civil War!"
True story. I sat at the dining room table and shelled pecans with a slender, gray-haired woman whose eyes were icy blue, whose parents and grandparents told her stories about living in the Civil War, and life in the United States in the early 1800s. I could touch a living hand that had touched those living hands. I think that is an awesome transmission.
And through Susie, I experienced something first-hand about 1800s rural life. In all the time that I knew her (she died in 1977), Susie was a country woman living in the city. I, my mother, and her two sisters lived with Susie in her house. My mom and dad were divorced shortly after I was born, and Susie (he says) had a role in it. But that's another story. Right now, I was about to say that Susie saw her mission in life as keeping the men in the fields. I watched her cling to that life, through choice, or lack of choice, even though the men had become daughters who worked in downtown offices, and one small boy who was under foot most of the day and once managed to set the dining room curtains on fire.
There were two real men in her life, two sons, whom I never saw until I was three. One was fighting in the Pacific, the other in Europe. The newspaper every day had battle stories all over the front page. I remember the tension, wondering whether we would win or lose. I didn't worry like they did about the two men. I didn't know who they were. They both made it back, and I was amazed by them, coming into my house. They were huge, of a gruff humor, and totally different from the women.
Susie kept food on the table and everybody healthy. Dinner was on the table at 5 p.m., ready for the girls when they hit the door. I hated it. If it was August and 105 outside (no air conditioning), Susie still poured the milk at 4:45, and if we ate at 5:05, the milk was warm. For health maintenance, she had two principle remedies: Vicks Salve, and black salve. Kids, I've told you the Vicks Salve story a hundred times, so I won't repeat it here. And the black salve is another story altogether (so many other stories). Susie could mend and chop wood and run a ringer washer and kill a chicken in the back yard in the morning and have it fried on the table for dinner. She was the toughest person I ever knew (Dan Fouts, the fabled Chargers quarterback, comes in second). She was a trained schoolteacher, a Methodist, and a church-goer. When we didn't go, she listened to the services on the radio. She never learned to drive.
She was gentle to all people, except, maybe, sometimes, her own. Her daughters could be spiteful and high-tempered. Sometimes she would chase them with a broom. Getting older, I would have liked to learn more about the relationships in that house, but there were some things that nobody would talk about. As the graynation people know, it gets complicated.
"I've reached the age when my children sometimes ask, 'Dad, what were things like in the olden days, when you were a teenager?' They mean the 1980s, and it's not so easy to explain. The ancient past never is."
I can see A.O.'s tongue bulging in his cheek when he refers to the 1980s as "the ancient past;" I would wager his yearbook pages haven't even started to yellow yet. To our kids, though, it's all relative. They just know that their parents came from a time from before they were born, and what a strange place it must have been. To them, any graynation story is unique, whether it dates from the 1980s or the 1950s (when I was a teenager) or the 1890s, when my grandmother migrated from Belgreen, Alabama, to Haskell County, Texas, in a covered wagon.
I would ask my grandmother, Susie, about those days, and she told me unique stories about that move, and what Texas was like before I was born in 1943, but she never wrote any of it down. It's not so easy to explain, as A.O. says. The ancient past never is.
I think we owe it to our kids, and their kids, to try. Hence, graynation. In the effort, we may well learn something about ourselves. "We shall not cease from exploration," wrote T.S. Eliot, "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." And we provide our kids bragging power: "My dad shelled pecans with his grandmother, whose parents were alive at the time of the Civil War!"
True story. I sat at the dining room table and shelled pecans with a slender, gray-haired woman whose eyes were icy blue, whose parents and grandparents told her stories about living in the Civil War, and life in the United States in the early 1800s. I could touch a living hand that had touched those living hands. I think that is an awesome transmission.
And through Susie, I experienced something first-hand about 1800s rural life. In all the time that I knew her (she died in 1977), Susie was a country woman living in the city. I, my mother, and her two sisters lived with Susie in her house. My mom and dad were divorced shortly after I was born, and Susie (he says) had a role in it. But that's another story. Right now, I was about to say that Susie saw her mission in life as keeping the men in the fields. I watched her cling to that life, through choice, or lack of choice, even though the men had become daughters who worked in downtown offices, and one small boy who was under foot most of the day and once managed to set the dining room curtains on fire.
There were two real men in her life, two sons, whom I never saw until I was three. One was fighting in the Pacific, the other in Europe. The newspaper every day had battle stories all over the front page. I remember the tension, wondering whether we would win or lose. I didn't worry like they did about the two men. I didn't know who they were. They both made it back, and I was amazed by them, coming into my house. They were huge, of a gruff humor, and totally different from the women.
Susie kept food on the table and everybody healthy. Dinner was on the table at 5 p.m., ready for the girls when they hit the door. I hated it. If it was August and 105 outside (no air conditioning), Susie still poured the milk at 4:45, and if we ate at 5:05, the milk was warm. For health maintenance, she had two principle remedies: Vicks Salve, and black salve. Kids, I've told you the Vicks Salve story a hundred times, so I won't repeat it here. And the black salve is another story altogether (so many other stories). Susie could mend and chop wood and run a ringer washer and kill a chicken in the back yard in the morning and have it fried on the table for dinner. She was the toughest person I ever knew (Dan Fouts, the fabled Chargers quarterback, comes in second). She was a trained schoolteacher, a Methodist, and a church-goer. When we didn't go, she listened to the services on the radio. She never learned to drive.
She was gentle to all people, except, maybe, sometimes, her own. Her daughters could be spiteful and high-tempered. Sometimes she would chase them with a broom. Getting older, I would have liked to learn more about the relationships in that house, but there were some things that nobody would talk about. As the graynation people know, it gets complicated.
August 08, 2009
Waking up to an Acorn Fever scare
Yesterday morning dawned cloudy, breezy, and suspiciously cool. Not just our run-of-the-mill coastal Southern California "marine layer" clouds, either. These clouds had some heft. I checked the calendar: August 7. A chill rose on the back of my neck. Acorn Fever. We have never had a breakout of Acorn Fever this early. The weather records show that we have had occurrences in August, but always late August, with enough proximity to September to allow us to think it could happen any day now.
But Aug. 7 would catch us totally unprepared. I pulled on my sweatshirt – DON'T BE ALARMED, I have been wearing it indoors as we have kept the A/C running to combat our recent hot days – and went outside to sniff the wind. It was brisk, out of the southwest, coming off the ocean. It was unusually cool, and it almost, but not quite, had a bite. It's normally this bite that sets off the Fever, so I felt good about that. The low, thick clouds were also starting to burn off, another good sign, but above them were high streaks of cirrus with scattered cumulus below. It looked like a November sky. It would bear watching.
The cause of all of this was a low pressure system, "unseasonably strong," the Weather Bureau said. It was moving off the ocean into Central California. Trailing off it, into our territory, was a windy front that was prompting wind advisories in the mountains and deserts to our east. For us, it meant the arrival of this breeze I was sniffing, and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than earlier in the week. The clouds, the actual temperature drop, and, most critically, the Saturday morning weather, would determine the actions of the populace.
It was this populace, the Southern California locals, to whom my reassuring DON'T BE ALARMED, above, was directed. These are Acorn Fever veterans, and they know the symptoms: a feeling of coziness, an urge to pull on sweat clothes, the need to build a fire, to rake leaves, to cook a pot of chili, to drive to the mountains with the car heater on to buy jugs of apple cider.. I assumed the duty, three decades ago, of Acorn Fever sentinel in our area, advising readers in my San Diego Union column of the conditions and what we might expect as each Fever season approached. People still approach me in supermarkets, saying, "What kind of Acorn Fever season do you think we will have this year?"
Well, this year, I am glad the harbinger happened on a Friday. Saturday being a holiday for most will naturally minimize the number of workers who might otherwise have gone to work in woolens and pashminas this morning. The number of homeowners pulling on Pendletons, swilling hot chocolate, raking nonexistent leaves (the Fever and what it does to humans can truly be pitiful to watch) and building roaring fires will be increased, of course, on a Saturday morning, but these victims will be closer to safety when the temperature hits 90 by noon. That is the typical Acorn Fever pattern in Southern California: a cool snap arriving overnight, a cloudy, breezy morning with temperatures in the 60s – or, in severe episodes, in the 50s – and then the temperature rebounding to 90 by noon, trapping victims far from home, spilling out of office buildings onto steamy sidewalks under a stark blue sky, leaving silent rescue crews to collect soggy piles of autumn outfits where humans, melted alive by the Fever had stood, nothing now but the DNA in their sweat to identify them.
Yesterday remained on the cool side – high 70s – through the afternoon. So far so good. We would know the rest at Saturday daybreak. When it arrived, I pulled on my sweater, got coffee, went outside and sat on the glider. There were clouds, but not heavy, more marine-layerish. No breeze. Just cool enough to feel bare skin draw up, but only slightly. I scanned the neighborhood for chimney smoke; there was none. Good sign. After 20 minutes I went back to the kitchen and waited for the urge to make waffles and chili. It didn't come. I think we dodged a bullet.
But Aug. 7 would catch us totally unprepared. I pulled on my sweatshirt – DON'T BE ALARMED, I have been wearing it indoors as we have kept the A/C running to combat our recent hot days – and went outside to sniff the wind. It was brisk, out of the southwest, coming off the ocean. It was unusually cool, and it almost, but not quite, had a bite. It's normally this bite that sets off the Fever, so I felt good about that. The low, thick clouds were also starting to burn off, another good sign, but above them were high streaks of cirrus with scattered cumulus below. It looked like a November sky. It would bear watching.
The cause of all of this was a low pressure system, "unseasonably strong," the Weather Bureau said. It was moving off the ocean into Central California. Trailing off it, into our territory, was a windy front that was prompting wind advisories in the mountains and deserts to our east. For us, it meant the arrival of this breeze I was sniffing, and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than earlier in the week. The clouds, the actual temperature drop, and, most critically, the Saturday morning weather, would determine the actions of the populace.
It was this populace, the Southern California locals, to whom my reassuring DON'T BE ALARMED, above, was directed. These are Acorn Fever veterans, and they know the symptoms: a feeling of coziness, an urge to pull on sweat clothes, the need to build a fire, to rake leaves, to cook a pot of chili, to drive to the mountains with the car heater on to buy jugs of apple cider.. I assumed the duty, three decades ago, of Acorn Fever sentinel in our area, advising readers in my San Diego Union column of the conditions and what we might expect as each Fever season approached. People still approach me in supermarkets, saying, "What kind of Acorn Fever season do you think we will have this year?"
Well, this year, I am glad the harbinger happened on a Friday. Saturday being a holiday for most will naturally minimize the number of workers who might otherwise have gone to work in woolens and pashminas this morning. The number of homeowners pulling on Pendletons, swilling hot chocolate, raking nonexistent leaves (the Fever and what it does to humans can truly be pitiful to watch) and building roaring fires will be increased, of course, on a Saturday morning, but these victims will be closer to safety when the temperature hits 90 by noon. That is the typical Acorn Fever pattern in Southern California: a cool snap arriving overnight, a cloudy, breezy morning with temperatures in the 60s – or, in severe episodes, in the 50s – and then the temperature rebounding to 90 by noon, trapping victims far from home, spilling out of office buildings onto steamy sidewalks under a stark blue sky, leaving silent rescue crews to collect soggy piles of autumn outfits where humans, melted alive by the Fever had stood, nothing now but the DNA in their sweat to identify them.
Yesterday remained on the cool side – high 70s – through the afternoon. So far so good. We would know the rest at Saturday daybreak. When it arrived, I pulled on my sweater, got coffee, went outside and sat on the glider. There were clouds, but not heavy, more marine-layerish. No breeze. Just cool enough to feel bare skin draw up, but only slightly. I scanned the neighborhood for chimney smoke; there was none. Good sign. After 20 minutes I went back to the kitchen and waited for the urge to make waffles and chili. It didn't come. I think we dodged a bullet.
August 07, 2009
Archives: Football, boys, heat, and motivation
August arrives, and soon the dreaded two-a-day football workouts will begin at high schools across the nation. This week's archive is from my 2004 book, "Warbirds – How They Played the Game," about the 1954-57 Abilene High School Eagles, voted "Team of the Century" in Texas high school football.
“When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks - not that you won or lost - but how you played the game.” – Grantland Rice
On autumn Friday nights in Texas, the One Great Scorer is a busy deity. In brilliant metropolitan concrete bowls and in rural settings where the lights are barely strong enough to cast a player’s shadow, thousands of Texas high school boys (and an occasional girl) go at each other on the football field for personal fulfillment and the glory of their schools and towns.
Unless it’s a tie, one school wins and the other loses but the Scorer pays no mind to that. His only care is how you played the game. Still, most of the time there was a predictable correlation between the Scorer’s judgment and the final score. It was possible to receive the Scorer’s highest marks and still lose, but it didn’t happen often.
Thus there were two compelling reasons to begin each season with how you played the game. In Texas high schools, football was not and is not an extracurricular activity. Football is a class in physical education, whose curriculum credits are as necessary for graduation as credits in English and math. In fact football was a very long class. It always began by mid-August, and in some places players started receiving mimeographed instruction from their coaches, their “teachers,” as early as July 1.
Of course there were lots of X’s and O’s, that are central to how you play the game. But it hardly ever began with X’s and O’s. A few coaches might settle for that, but most understood that their first job was to extract from a 16- or 17-year-old boy a commitment to achieve a goal. That was a far more difficult teaching assignment than the belly series or 5-2 defense, and coaches took inspiration where they found it, in convincing a boy that an afternoon at the lake was not as good in the 100-degree heat than putting on 15 pounds of football gear and slamming into each other for three hours.
If the boy accepted that commitment, there was a good chance he would learn what it felt like to win, and winning, he was promised, was a feeling that would serve him well in building a successful life. Not one, but thousands, of coaches have told their teams in August: “Men, football is like the game of life.” Of course it became a cliché and fuel for mockery, but it was a true cliché nonetheless.
Winning was a powerful attraction. Not many 16-year-olds would submit to twice-a-day football practices in order to prepare themselves to lose. Coaches talked about winning, and what it took to win, constantly.
But the coaches knew that every weekend there would be as many losing teams as winning ones. The best they could do was prepare their teams to give them the best chance to be the team that won. If their boys won, the coaches knew they would like the lesson. It was equally important that the boys who lost would feel like they learned something, too. It was the only way they could improve.
Some coaches developed great skill in articulating that truth to their players. Others could rely on the literary sports writer, Grantland Rice, for inspiration, even if they couldn’t recall the Scorer quote verbatim. “Boys,” they would say proudly in both locker rooms, “you did your best.”
Doing your best. What does it take to do your best? First of all, you have to do good. Good, better, best, we all learned in English class. Best is the superlative of good, but good is where it starts.
There are two main ways to do good. You do things good, and you do good things. That is where not just football, but all athletics, start. Before they ever pick up a ball or get into a stance, athletes are taught to do things good and do good things. Many of these they are given to do; others they are encouraged to do. Get in good shape. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Have good eating habits. Have good study habits. Make good grades. Be a good citizen.
If you do things good, you will get better. If you keep getting better, you have a chance to be the best. All over Texas, in rich huge districts and poor tiny ones, those were the first lessons of the season, and they did comprise a good textbook for preparing for the life beyond athletics. Then finally, when you go on the field, make the best use you can of all these good things. As long as the deity is the One Great Scorer, and not God, you could almost call football Sunday School taught on grass and not get in too much trouble with the U.S. Constitution.
Year after year, thousands of times over, the lessons are taught and learned and a team goes into a game with its best chance to win. But every Friday night, someone wins, and someone loses. Then in one Texas town, a team started to learn from a new coach how to do things good and do good things. He was a man who understood that principles were principal to any success on or off an athletic field and he was exact and unrelenting in teaching the value of values. Studying him now evokes a nostalgia for that time when principle and values were unabashedly traditional in the American dialogue. With these lessons and his meticulous knowledge of the game, he provided his players their best chance to win, and on Friday night they won. And won. And won. And won, won so much they made history and set lasting examples for coaches everywhere to give their players about how to be good, and maybe better, and maybe the best. This book is about that coach and that team, and the reason for the book is their winning streak. But its content is about how they played the game.
“When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks - not that you won or lost - but how you played the game.” – Grantland Rice
On autumn Friday nights in Texas, the One Great Scorer is a busy deity. In brilliant metropolitan concrete bowls and in rural settings where the lights are barely strong enough to cast a player’s shadow, thousands of Texas high school boys (and an occasional girl) go at each other on the football field for personal fulfillment and the glory of their schools and towns.
Unless it’s a tie, one school wins and the other loses but the Scorer pays no mind to that. His only care is how you played the game. Still, most of the time there was a predictable correlation between the Scorer’s judgment and the final score. It was possible to receive the Scorer’s highest marks and still lose, but it didn’t happen often.
Thus there were two compelling reasons to begin each season with how you played the game. In Texas high schools, football was not and is not an extracurricular activity. Football is a class in physical education, whose curriculum credits are as necessary for graduation as credits in English and math. In fact football was a very long class. It always began by mid-August, and in some places players started receiving mimeographed instruction from their coaches, their “teachers,” as early as July 1.
Of course there were lots of X’s and O’s, that are central to how you play the game. But it hardly ever began with X’s and O’s. A few coaches might settle for that, but most understood that their first job was to extract from a 16- or 17-year-old boy a commitment to achieve a goal. That was a far more difficult teaching assignment than the belly series or 5-2 defense, and coaches took inspiration where they found it, in convincing a boy that an afternoon at the lake was not as good in the 100-degree heat than putting on 15 pounds of football gear and slamming into each other for three hours.
If the boy accepted that commitment, there was a good chance he would learn what it felt like to win, and winning, he was promised, was a feeling that would serve him well in building a successful life. Not one, but thousands, of coaches have told their teams in August: “Men, football is like the game of life.” Of course it became a cliché and fuel for mockery, but it was a true cliché nonetheless.
Winning was a powerful attraction. Not many 16-year-olds would submit to twice-a-day football practices in order to prepare themselves to lose. Coaches talked about winning, and what it took to win, constantly.
But the coaches knew that every weekend there would be as many losing teams as winning ones. The best they could do was prepare their teams to give them the best chance to be the team that won. If their boys won, the coaches knew they would like the lesson. It was equally important that the boys who lost would feel like they learned something, too. It was the only way they could improve.
Some coaches developed great skill in articulating that truth to their players. Others could rely on the literary sports writer, Grantland Rice, for inspiration, even if they couldn’t recall the Scorer quote verbatim. “Boys,” they would say proudly in both locker rooms, “you did your best.”
Doing your best. What does it take to do your best? First of all, you have to do good. Good, better, best, we all learned in English class. Best is the superlative of good, but good is where it starts.
There are two main ways to do good. You do things good, and you do good things. That is where not just football, but all athletics, start. Before they ever pick up a ball or get into a stance, athletes are taught to do things good and do good things. Many of these they are given to do; others they are encouraged to do. Get in good shape. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Have good eating habits. Have good study habits. Make good grades. Be a good citizen.
If you do things good, you will get better. If you keep getting better, you have a chance to be the best. All over Texas, in rich huge districts and poor tiny ones, those were the first lessons of the season, and they did comprise a good textbook for preparing for the life beyond athletics. Then finally, when you go on the field, make the best use you can of all these good things. As long as the deity is the One Great Scorer, and not God, you could almost call football Sunday School taught on grass and not get in too much trouble with the U.S. Constitution.
Year after year, thousands of times over, the lessons are taught and learned and a team goes into a game with its best chance to win. But every Friday night, someone wins, and someone loses. Then in one Texas town, a team started to learn from a new coach how to do things good and do good things. He was a man who understood that principles were principal to any success on or off an athletic field and he was exact and unrelenting in teaching the value of values. Studying him now evokes a nostalgia for that time when principle and values were unabashedly traditional in the American dialogue. With these lessons and his meticulous knowledge of the game, he provided his players their best chance to win, and on Friday night they won. And won. And won. And won, won so much they made history and set lasting examples for coaches everywhere to give their players about how to be good, and maybe better, and maybe the best. This book is about that coach and that team, and the reason for the book is their winning streak. But its content is about how they played the game.
August 06, 2009
Stretch Cooking: The "Joy" of it
Of course the champion stretch-cooking cookbook of all time is the good old "Joy of Cooking," whose first copyright was recorded in 1931, just as the Great Depression was beginning to seriously ravage the land. Yes, you can find many high-tone recipes in "Joy," such as Beef Wellington, but you will also find this caveat preceding the recipe:
"If time is no object and your aim is to out-Jones the Joneses, you can serve this twice-roasted but rare beef tenderloin encased in puff paste – but don't quote us as devotees."
I am actually an unabashed fan of Beef Wellington, since I was introduced to it in, of all places, Abilene, Texas, in the early 1970s. I was a sports writer at The Abilene Reporter-News, and my then-wife Lynn, the mother of our children, worked in the nutrition department at Hendrick Memorial Hospital, headed at that time by Milla Perry, who today is the sister of the sitting Texas governor.
On evenings when the Hendrick board met, Lynn would bring home with her whopping slices of Beef Wellington left over from the board dinner. Were such extravagant habits already embedded in the health care culture, contributing to today's crisis? I couldn't say, but the Beef Wellington sure was good. It was a whole beef tenderloin, quickly roasted in a hot oven, smeared with pate de foie gras, rolled up into puff pastry, then baked to a golden brown. The beef was still rare in the middle. I wouldn't mind a slice right now.
Where was I? Oh, yes. I was saying that "Joy of Cooking" reminds us that stretch cooking embodies practices that today may be considered haute cuisine, but whose origins were absolutely basic. Take stock, for example. It has not been all that long, really, since all recipes began with harvesting or killing something you had cultivated, found, herded, or hunted. Cooking, shelter, and finding water were the original hard work, and those cooks learned to use everything, and make it go a long way. I have absolutely no attribution for this – it just popped into my head – but the first "gourmet" cuisine probably evolved as the human class system evolved, and the privileged class developed privileged tastes because they had the lower class doing all the work out there in the kitchen, the fields, and the pasture. Part of liking Beef Wellington so much was that they didn't have to make it themselves.
The same holds true today. I would like to know if any members in the history of the Hendrick Memorial Hospital Board ever made Beef Wellington for themselves. Daily, I am sure, their recipes are the original lower class, modified by our present, astonishing, ease of procurement. A frightening number of Americans can't even cut up a chicken for themselves, even though whole chickens can be bought for a fraction of the price of cut-up ones, and the gizzards, hearts, necks and backs, used for – that's right – stock.
To make a piece of meat go a long way, buy a big piece of meat with the bones in, learn what to do with it, and use all of it. It's all right there in "Joy of Cooking." On the very same page as the Beef Wellington recipe is text and illustrations showing how to cut up a whole sirloin into tenderloins, T-bones, ribeyes and porterhouses. If there are bones, there are five pages on preparing stocks, which can be frozen and show up in hundreds of stretch recipes, in soups, in gravies, in braising.
Outside of the slaughtering, the head, and the hide (you don’t want to go too retro here), with "Joy" you could essentially raise your own steer, butcher it, and use all of it, for some minuscule fraction of the cost of buying all those parts through a middle-man. There are some recipes in the book that I wouldn't eat, ("Beef Tongue with Raisin Sauce" is one), but "Joy" is the essential stretch cookbook. It doesn't throw anything away.
"If time is no object and your aim is to out-Jones the Joneses, you can serve this twice-roasted but rare beef tenderloin encased in puff paste – but don't quote us as devotees."
I am actually an unabashed fan of Beef Wellington, since I was introduced to it in, of all places, Abilene, Texas, in the early 1970s. I was a sports writer at The Abilene Reporter-News, and my then-wife Lynn, the mother of our children, worked in the nutrition department at Hendrick Memorial Hospital, headed at that time by Milla Perry, who today is the sister of the sitting Texas governor.
On evenings when the Hendrick board met, Lynn would bring home with her whopping slices of Beef Wellington left over from the board dinner. Were such extravagant habits already embedded in the health care culture, contributing to today's crisis? I couldn't say, but the Beef Wellington sure was good. It was a whole beef tenderloin, quickly roasted in a hot oven, smeared with pate de foie gras, rolled up into puff pastry, then baked to a golden brown. The beef was still rare in the middle. I wouldn't mind a slice right now.
Where was I? Oh, yes. I was saying that "Joy of Cooking" reminds us that stretch cooking embodies practices that today may be considered haute cuisine, but whose origins were absolutely basic. Take stock, for example. It has not been all that long, really, since all recipes began with harvesting or killing something you had cultivated, found, herded, or hunted. Cooking, shelter, and finding water were the original hard work, and those cooks learned to use everything, and make it go a long way. I have absolutely no attribution for this – it just popped into my head – but the first "gourmet" cuisine probably evolved as the human class system evolved, and the privileged class developed privileged tastes because they had the lower class doing all the work out there in the kitchen, the fields, and the pasture. Part of liking Beef Wellington so much was that they didn't have to make it themselves.
The same holds true today. I would like to know if any members in the history of the Hendrick Memorial Hospital Board ever made Beef Wellington for themselves. Daily, I am sure, their recipes are the original lower class, modified by our present, astonishing, ease of procurement. A frightening number of Americans can't even cut up a chicken for themselves, even though whole chickens can be bought for a fraction of the price of cut-up ones, and the gizzards, hearts, necks and backs, used for – that's right – stock.
To make a piece of meat go a long way, buy a big piece of meat with the bones in, learn what to do with it, and use all of it. It's all right there in "Joy of Cooking." On the very same page as the Beef Wellington recipe is text and illustrations showing how to cut up a whole sirloin into tenderloins, T-bones, ribeyes and porterhouses. If there are bones, there are five pages on preparing stocks, which can be frozen and show up in hundreds of stretch recipes, in soups, in gravies, in braising.
Outside of the slaughtering, the head, and the hide (you don’t want to go too retro here), with "Joy" you could essentially raise your own steer, butcher it, and use all of it, for some minuscule fraction of the cost of buying all those parts through a middle-man. There are some recipes in the book that I wouldn't eat, ("Beef Tongue with Raisin Sauce" is one), but "Joy" is the essential stretch cookbook. It doesn't throw anything away.
August 03, 2009
Media Literacy: cooling a pair of overheated jets
When you have media literacy, you understand how a story about a feud between two motivated but minor entertainers like Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly could possibly wind up on the front page of The New York Times.
There are three reasons, actually. The first is the second law of media, which we talked about just last week: the media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. It doesn't take all that many sets of eyeballs to make a person a media celebrity. Olbermann hosts a weekday talk show on MSNBC, mostly political, called "Countdown." It has a viewership of about one million, which is 1/304 millionth of the national population. O'Reilly hosts "The O'Reilly Factor," a weekday talk show on Fox, mostly political, that has a viewership of about three million, which is 3/304 millionth of the national population.
It means that while these shows are on, 300 million Americans are doing something else, which brings into focus the media's third law: the most misused word in the media-public relationship is the word "we." When you hear a media pundit say, "What are we to make of the Olbermann-O'Reilly feud," you know the pundit is badly misusing the word "we."
Yet the second law bestows enough power into their minuscule percentages to provide Olbermann and O'Reilly the kind of fame that gets them coverage on page one of The New York Times. And it is legitimate power, measurable in revenue. If these same two guys were local hosts, duking it out for ratings superiority in metropolitan Rapid City, nobody outside of western South Dakota would know their names.
The second reason for the story is the "conflict" media value. Olbermann and O'Reilly have maintained a long-running feud, based on their social and political views., and recently the feud, in the view of the only two people who really matter – the ones with the money – started to get too far out of hand. The personal conflict is long-standing. Olbermann's viewers – and I am one, occasionally – commonly tune in to hear Olbermann call O'Reilly "Bill-o the Clown." O'Reilly's viewers – and I could not bear to watch O'Reilly even if I agreed with him – tuned in to hear O'Reilly call Olbermann a "vicious smear merchant."
Though it was entertaining, the personal conflict lacked the strength, as a media value, to merit the attention of the Times. Then corporate chieftains – General Electric behind Olbermann, the News Corporation behind O'Reilly – became involved, providing strength aplenty, in the minds of Times editors, for the conflict value. A reporter was dispatched. Olbermann was reported saying, "The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.” But that would mean Fox losing a tidy revenue center. In turn, O'Reilly said on the air, "Federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business." This is not the kind of allegation G.E. would love to deal with, no matter the source.
That was enough, the Times reported, for Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and for G.E. chairman Jeffrey Immelt. In a bit of fascinating negotiating (you really should read the story), overseen by the remarkably (comparatively) level-headed talk show host Charlie Rose of PBS, the two corporate bosses set up a deal, which provided the story its third strong media value, novelty. "Even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs," reported the Times, a "cease-fire" was arranged. It is a cold day in hell when you find corporate media ownership pulling the plug on anything that increases audiences. But then, as a source told the Times: "“They’ve won their respective constituencies. They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
Which brings this story full-circle, back to the second law of media.
There are three reasons, actually. The first is the second law of media, which we talked about just last week: the media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. It doesn't take all that many sets of eyeballs to make a person a media celebrity. Olbermann hosts a weekday talk show on MSNBC, mostly political, called "Countdown." It has a viewership of about one million, which is 1/304 millionth of the national population. O'Reilly hosts "The O'Reilly Factor," a weekday talk show on Fox, mostly political, that has a viewership of about three million, which is 3/304 millionth of the national population.
It means that while these shows are on, 300 million Americans are doing something else, which brings into focus the media's third law: the most misused word in the media-public relationship is the word "we." When you hear a media pundit say, "What are we to make of the Olbermann-O'Reilly feud," you know the pundit is badly misusing the word "we."
Yet the second law bestows enough power into their minuscule percentages to provide Olbermann and O'Reilly the kind of fame that gets them coverage on page one of The New York Times. And it is legitimate power, measurable in revenue. If these same two guys were local hosts, duking it out for ratings superiority in metropolitan Rapid City, nobody outside of western South Dakota would know their names.
The second reason for the story is the "conflict" media value. Olbermann and O'Reilly have maintained a long-running feud, based on their social and political views., and recently the feud, in the view of the only two people who really matter – the ones with the money – started to get too far out of hand. The personal conflict is long-standing. Olbermann's viewers – and I am one, occasionally – commonly tune in to hear Olbermann call O'Reilly "Bill-o the Clown." O'Reilly's viewers – and I could not bear to watch O'Reilly even if I agreed with him – tuned in to hear O'Reilly call Olbermann a "vicious smear merchant."
Though it was entertaining, the personal conflict lacked the strength, as a media value, to merit the attention of the Times. Then corporate chieftains – General Electric behind Olbermann, the News Corporation behind O'Reilly – became involved, providing strength aplenty, in the minds of Times editors, for the conflict value. A reporter was dispatched. Olbermann was reported saying, "The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.” But that would mean Fox losing a tidy revenue center. In turn, O'Reilly said on the air, "Federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business." This is not the kind of allegation G.E. would love to deal with, no matter the source.
That was enough, the Times reported, for Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and for G.E. chairman Jeffrey Immelt. In a bit of fascinating negotiating (you really should read the story), overseen by the remarkably (comparatively) level-headed talk show host Charlie Rose of PBS, the two corporate bosses set up a deal, which provided the story its third strong media value, novelty. "Even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs," reported the Times, a "cease-fire" was arranged. It is a cold day in hell when you find corporate media ownership pulling the plug on anything that increases audiences. But then, as a source told the Times: "“They’ve won their respective constituencies. They don’t need to do this anymore, really.”
Which brings this story full-circle, back to the second law of media.
graynation cont.: See the USA, in our DNA
Normally I plan to run graynation blogs only on Sunday, but Mason left a comment on yesterday's blog that deserves immediate attention for what it proves about the strength of DNA.
"This," Mason said, "is the car I hope to drive."
An excellent choice, my young friend. We will get to the grim details about gasoline prices, insurance, and maintenance another time. In this blog, I just want to show you the car that I actually did drive.
It was this very same color, but it had the stock wheels. Blue interior, bucket seats, four on the floor, and that big mother 396 engine. I bought it in Norman, Okla., on the day, or the day after, I was graduated from Artillery OCS at Ft. Sill in June, 1967, with orders to West Germany (I was a lucky boy; I'll tell you about it sometime) in my pocket. The car cost around $3,000. I drove it all the way to Abilene with the windows down, partly because it was cool (in the sense of hip) and partly because it wasn't air conditioned. Somewhere I have a Kodak (that's a type of photograph) of me in that car, 180 pounds, shaved head, in my khakis, left elbow on the door sill, right hand draped at the wrist over the wheel just-so.
I had that car for three years. It is the car I had when I met your grandmother. We traded it in, in Abilene, in 1970, for a Fiat 124 Spyder. Now THERE was a car.
"This," Mason said, "is the car I hope to drive."
An excellent choice, my young friend. We will get to the grim details about gasoline prices, insurance, and maintenance another time. In this blog, I just want to show you the car that I actually did drive.
It was this very same color, but it had the stock wheels. Blue interior, bucket seats, four on the floor, and that big mother 396 engine. I bought it in Norman, Okla., on the day, or the day after, I was graduated from Artillery OCS at Ft. Sill in June, 1967, with orders to West Germany (I was a lucky boy; I'll tell you about it sometime) in my pocket. The car cost around $3,000. I drove it all the way to Abilene with the windows down, partly because it was cool (in the sense of hip) and partly because it wasn't air conditioned. Somewhere I have a Kodak (that's a type of photograph) of me in that car, 180 pounds, shaved head, in my khakis, left elbow on the door sill, right hand draped at the wrist over the wheel just-so.
I had that car for three years. It is the car I had when I met your grandmother. We traded it in, in Abilene, in 1970, for a Fiat 124 Spyder. Now THERE was a car.
August 01, 2009
graynation: check out THIS 14th birthday
You can credit Mason Bell, a grandson of mine, just turned 14, as the inspiration for this new Sunday blog called graynation. He asked me, "Gpa, what was it like when you were 14?" That's the same kind of question most children eventually ask their elders.
Children/grandchildren become very curious about the world in which their parents/grandparents, the graynation, lived. They receive short, intensely interesting, verbal reminiscences, but nothing ever written down, nothing to keep, and read again, or actually shape into the annals of a civilization. So every Sunday morning, I, a resident of graynation, am going to write stories for Mason, and all my grandchildren and children, stories from a planet even I can hardly believe existed, and I was THERE.
Mason, your 14th birthday was July 24, a little over a week ago. I hope you had a great birthday. My 14th birthday was March 6, 1957, and my birthday celebration was different from yours. On my 14th birthday, I got my driver's license.
This was in Abilene, Texas, where I grew up. The driver's test office was on Butternut Street, around South 16th Street, which in those days was almost on the edge of town. My mother drove me to the office, I took the written test, and then the driving test, and I walked out licensed to drive my mother home. I was in the eighth grade. In Texas, in the early-to-mid-20th century, the legal driving age was set at 14, because so many farm and ranch families, and city families as well, after the Great Depression, put their children to work as soon as they could, and driving a vehicle was a regular part of work. My first job, in fact, in the summer of 1954, required a vehicle: a bicycle. I delivered blueprints for Abilene Blueprint Company.
I learned to drive in a 1951 Chevrolet just like this one. The hardest part was dealing with the clutch. Like most cars back then, the Chevy had a three-speed manual transmission (called a "three-speed stick"), with first, or "low," gear, second gear, and third, or "high," gear. Low gear was powerful, as it had to be to get the car under way. The shift lever was on the right side of the steering column: you pulled toward you and down to get into first, then up and away from you to get into second, and straight down for third. When shifting gears, you had to disengage the transmission from the drive train, and to do this you pushed in the clutch pedal with your left foot. When you were in the gear you wanted, you let out the clutch, and power went to the rear wheels.
Low was so powerful because it turned a lot of times per second. If you knew how to "pop" the clutch and hit the gas just right, low was so powerful that it would make the rear wheels screech against the pavement; that was called "getting rubber." For beginners, the trick was to let the clutch out smoothly with your left foot as you pressed on the gas pedal with your right. That was called "engaging" the clutch. The pressure, as they say, was on. If you let the clutch out too slowly, the engine would scream. Let it out too fast, and the car would "buck." If it started to buck, you had to push the clutch back in and start over. There was no "play" in that clutch at all. As soon as you started to let it out, you were in peril of starting a buck.
And that, of course, was mortifying. Other drivers laughed at me, including (you would have to be a boy reared in West Texas to truly appreciate this) a couple of high school girls one day at the corner of South 7th and Elmwood. But my desire to drive was far greater than my fear of mortification, so I bucked that Chevrolet all over town, as my mother hung on. (Actually, teaching your kids to drive is one of the grandest experiences of parenthood, something you have to look forward to.)
By driver's test day, my 14th birthday, I was good to go. And, sure enough, in the summer of 1957 I got a job that required driving. I worked at Lucile's Flowers and delivered arrangements all over town in a 1957 Chevy panel truck, pale green with a three-speed stick. By then, I was so good with the clutch that I could get rubber in all three gears. That's why, Mason, looking at you and the great, responsible, 14-year-old that you are, that I am so thankful you have to wait until 18.
Kids of mine, your personal graynation connection welcomes more questions.
Children/grandchildren become very curious about the world in which their parents/grandparents, the graynation, lived. They receive short, intensely interesting, verbal reminiscences, but nothing ever written down, nothing to keep, and read again, or actually shape into the annals of a civilization. So every Sunday morning, I, a resident of graynation, am going to write stories for Mason, and all my grandchildren and children, stories from a planet even I can hardly believe existed, and I was THERE.
Mason, your 14th birthday was July 24, a little over a week ago. I hope you had a great birthday. My 14th birthday was March 6, 1957, and my birthday celebration was different from yours. On my 14th birthday, I got my driver's license.
This was in Abilene, Texas, where I grew up. The driver's test office was on Butternut Street, around South 16th Street, which in those days was almost on the edge of town. My mother drove me to the office, I took the written test, and then the driving test, and I walked out licensed to drive my mother home. I was in the eighth grade. In Texas, in the early-to-mid-20th century, the legal driving age was set at 14, because so many farm and ranch families, and city families as well, after the Great Depression, put their children to work as soon as they could, and driving a vehicle was a regular part of work. My first job, in fact, in the summer of 1954, required a vehicle: a bicycle. I delivered blueprints for Abilene Blueprint Company.
I learned to drive in a 1951 Chevrolet just like this one. The hardest part was dealing with the clutch. Like most cars back then, the Chevy had a three-speed manual transmission (called a "three-speed stick"), with first, or "low," gear, second gear, and third, or "high," gear. Low gear was powerful, as it had to be to get the car under way. The shift lever was on the right side of the steering column: you pulled toward you and down to get into first, then up and away from you to get into second, and straight down for third. When shifting gears, you had to disengage the transmission from the drive train, and to do this you pushed in the clutch pedal with your left foot. When you were in the gear you wanted, you let out the clutch, and power went to the rear wheels.
Low was so powerful because it turned a lot of times per second. If you knew how to "pop" the clutch and hit the gas just right, low was so powerful that it would make the rear wheels screech against the pavement; that was called "getting rubber." For beginners, the trick was to let the clutch out smoothly with your left foot as you pressed on the gas pedal with your right. That was called "engaging" the clutch. The pressure, as they say, was on. If you let the clutch out too slowly, the engine would scream. Let it out too fast, and the car would "buck." If it started to buck, you had to push the clutch back in and start over. There was no "play" in that clutch at all. As soon as you started to let it out, you were in peril of starting a buck.
And that, of course, was mortifying. Other drivers laughed at me, including (you would have to be a boy reared in West Texas to truly appreciate this) a couple of high school girls one day at the corner of South 7th and Elmwood. But my desire to drive was far greater than my fear of mortification, so I bucked that Chevrolet all over town, as my mother hung on. (Actually, teaching your kids to drive is one of the grandest experiences of parenthood, something you have to look forward to.)
By driver's test day, my 14th birthday, I was good to go. And, sure enough, in the summer of 1957 I got a job that required driving. I worked at Lucile's Flowers and delivered arrangements all over town in a 1957 Chevy panel truck, pale green with a three-speed stick. By then, I was so good with the clutch that I could get rubber in all three gears. That's why, Mason, looking at you and the great, responsible, 14-year-old that you are, that I am so thankful you have to wait until 18.
Kids of mine, your personal graynation connection welcomes more questions.
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