Riding the Boylemobile back to the future

If you never heard of Susan Boyle, haven’t heard her story yet, go here and enjoy yourself.

When you come back here, you will know what I mean when I say I am feeling like a 15-year-old sophomore in a Studebaker Lark, sitting at a red light waiting for Simon Cowell to pull alongside in his Corvette.

Somebody – at least two or three people, called “bookers” – knew Susan Boyle could sing like that even as she stood on the stage waiting to start. They must have heard her sing at the local audition, before they invited her to this bigger, televised round of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Of course they kept their mouths shut. On this show, 99 percent of the time, audience and judge reaction is an even bigger appeal to the television audience than the performances themselves. The whole Boyle appearance was geared to the two or three seconds after she started to sing, and the cameras cutting to the judges’ faces.

Not that the rest of us might not feel stunned, and uncomfortable, even if we went to YouTube knowing we were about to see something special. I have been trying to figure out how I feel about myself, grinning so broadly, and patronizingly, at a frumpy spinster putting the media culture in its place. In the end, I find that the world is simply full of these pleasant surprises. A version of the Susan Boyle experience happened to me, and a group of my closest friends, a little over three years ago. On that occasion, it was a beautiful woman taking the stage. She was my wife, at our wedding reception, and, out of the blue, she announced to our guests that she was going to sing to me.

And she did. She faced me, took my hands in hers, and started to sing. “Til There Was You.” Her voice was startlingly clear and beautiful, and a complete surprise. Her beauty and voice shocked me then and instruct me now. Robin Givhan, writing in The Washington Post today, said: “Boyle would not be mesmerizing if she were not an ugly duckling.” Givhan is wrong. My wife was mesmerizing, and she is a knockout. Susan Boyle did not have to be an ugly duckling to create the sensation she did. Most people would be no less shocked – maybe even more shocked – if Paris Hilton had taken the stage and opened her mouth, and we heard Susan Boyle’s voice come out.

The last couple of days, I have watched people coming and going. I have to suppress the urge to go up to each and say, “Can you sing?” I’ll bet some of them really can. I also bet that more than half of them, and more than half of the people I see today and tomorrow and the next day, have something they can really do well, even shockingly well, that I just can’t see. Likewise, as they look at me, they would never see a 15-year-old sophomore sitting in a Studebaker Lark at a stoplight, waiting for Simon Cowell to pull alongside in his Corvette. I am not making this up. I was thinking this when I was 15 years old. Not Simon Cowell, but some cool dude in a big Chevy hardtop would pull alongside at the light, goose his gas a couple of times at my ugly hamster-powered Lark, and get ready for the light to change.

Unbeknownst to him, under my tiny hood I had a dual carb 327, stroked and bored and waiting to blow this guy’s jaw off when the light turned green. That would have been such fun. In my thoughts, I think I’ll name the Lark the Boylemobile, in her honor.

Media Literacy: Unmasking the Wizards of Oz

Once upon a time, there was a fabulous movie titled, "The Wizard of Oz." Dorothy is whisked by a Kansas tornado up to the wondrously bizarre kingdom of Oz and embarks on a journey to find her way back home. "We're off to see the Wizard," she and her companions sing, and off they go, down the yellow brick road until, after several adventures, they reach the Wizard's castle in the Emerald City.

The Wizard is one big mysterious dude, a shadowy monster looming above all in his royal chamber, shooting out flames and smoke and roaring noise whether he is pleased or displeased. He, truly, is the fearful Wizard of Oz, whom no one in Oz dares challenge. Except Toto, Dorothy's cute little dog, who trots to a curtained cubicle at the side of the room, and tugs back the curtain, showing Dorothy and the others that the mighty Wizard of Oz is only an old humbug (definition: a trickster; a deceiver) gent, pulling levers and speaking into a microphone.

Media literacy is exactly like that. "The Wizard of Oz" is an allegory for media literacy, as that dilemma so perplexes critics of media and culture in the 21st century. Warnings about the absence of media literacy, and attempts to teach it, take the approach of finding ways to understand the monster, when all that needs to happen is for a curtain to be pulled aside, revealing the instantly recognizable truth. The media monster, which so intimidates citizens and critics alike, is only an ordinary person, using a set of tools that a third-grader could learn to use.

And should, too. No academic subject in America's schools – not language, not reading, not math, not social studies, not science – takes a greater role in the average American's life than media. But media is not a core subject in American schools, never has been. Students are graduated from high school and sent out into a media blizzard they literally don't understand. They have not been taught to "read" media, and so they stare at Oz without a clue.

A few of these graduates go on to become media professionals. In college, they learn the media tools and how to use them, in schools of print and broadcast journalism, entertainment production, marketing, public relations, and advertising. They learn which levers to pull, and when, and how to speak into the microphone for maximum Oz effect. In May 2007, U.S. Dept. of Labor statistics indicated 1.07 million media professionals in an adult population (15 and over) of 240 million. The other 238.93 adult Americans go into other careers and remain essentially media-illiterate, which creates all kinds of problems in a media-saturated world. Americans today accuse the media of bias, irresponsibility, moral decay, Hannah Montana. And many of those accusations are true, because media professionals, the new wizards of Oz, know they can get away with it in a media-illiterate world, at least until someone pulls the curtain back.

The media literacy gap has become a wedge. The result is an American crisis, creating fear and mistrust, even loathing, of a media institution that is the life blood of democracy, vital to our society’s constant and reasonable demand for information and entertainment, and a huge hub of the economy.
Every Monday, we'll be pulling the curtain back and talking about these problems and the media tools with which to solve them. Learn the tools, unmask the wizards. Simple. Speaking of problems, here's one. Terrorists are, of course, not only media literates, but media experts. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately.

A privet space

In my brain exists a neural pathway, created at the instant I got a whiff of Texas privet. Since I was born in March, I would have been two months old. We had privet in the front yard, and its blossoms open in April and May. I imagine I was nestled in somebody's lap on the front porch when it happened. I wonder what I did. I would have hated mashed bananas by then; probably I took the scent of privet as something from the opposite pole of this strange new world, placed there by God as an apology for the banana. So I would have smiled.


I still smile. Every time. Same way. Here is something special about life. When I leaned to sniff these blossoms this morning, I was transported to a specific place in space and time, where it is morning in May, about 10 o'clock, 80 degrees, a hint of breeze. I go to that exact same space, every time. So far we have only two clusters, this and one other, that have bloomed, but the cluster on the left above will pop this week. They only bloom in late April and May, and the rest of the time it's a hedge. So these weeks are dear, and transporting.

Archives: Mirror, mirror - Feb. 8, 2005

I have a theory about photos and mirrors. I think people look better to themselves in mirrors than they do in photos.

But then Karen said she couldn’t see any difference. Photo or mirror, she looked the same to herself.

There goes the theory, I thought. Then again, maybe not. Karen is beautiful. She is beautiful in photos, and she is beautiful in the mirror.

I am not beautiful in photos. In fact in photos, with only a few professional exceptions, I think I look drab and jowly.

But in the mirror, I always look pretty darn good, at least after a shower and I have combed my hair. Why is that? I have a theory.

I think what I see in the mirror is the result of a long and selective process. I have been looking at myself in the mirror for almost 60 years. Never once in all that time have I looked in a mirror for any purpose other than making myself look better. I think that is true of practically all people. I have never heard of a person using a mirror to try to make himself or herself look worse. If they hit the street looking like Michael Jackson or Tammy Faye Bakker, that’s their business.

If I hit the street looking like Michael Grant, well, that’s the best I could do. That is why I can get so discouraged when I look at myself in photos.

The difference is, I think, the camera sees me the way the camera sees me, without interpretation. In the mirror, I see me the way I have learned to see me. I have spent almost 60 years looking for good things. At the same time, I have chosen not to see bad things. Your perspective starts to get shaped. I am positive I look better in the mirror than I do on the street. That is because I have saved every little good thing I ever saw about me in the mirror, and eventually a template has emerged. The template has been forced to submit to reality and revisions over time, but the basic geometry still is of a 20-year-old lean-jawed college sophomore looking for something to like. I am looking at a vain portrait of myself, assembled stroke by stroke. A dumb camera can’t do that.

There is something else, and for this I will never have an answer. I am the only human being on earth who knows what I look like in the mirror. No one else can see me that way. When I look at myself in a photo, my left eye is on the right. I am seeing myself as anyone else sees me, with my left on their right.

But when I look at myself in the mirror, my right eye is on the right. When I first discovered that, it was disorienting. I had to devise a test before I could be satisfied. I raised my hand on the side of the eye my right eye was looking at in the mirror. I raised that hand to my face. Then I looked at my hand. It was my right hand. There was the proof: In the mirror, I was looking at myself backward, and I am the only one who can do that.

It reminded me of the funny and interesting results achieved when a person cuts two identical photos of himself down the middle, then puts the right side with the right side, and the left with the left. It’s like looking at two different people.

In the mirror, is the same principle at work? I don’t know, and I have stopped thinking about it for the time being, because a new question arises. Millions of people look at Sean Connery and drool at his good looks. If he is like me, in his mirror he must look even better to himself. But he is the only one who can see it. What would it be like, to be Sean Connery, and be the only one in the world who knows what you really look like? I will ask Karen. She is beautiful, and maybe she will know.

Stretch Cooking: Beans, Blackeyes, and Bacon - or not

This is Recipe No. 1 in stretch cooking. When you want a little to go a long way, it can’t get more fundamental, filling, or satisfying, than beans. Or blackeyed peas, which is a slightly different recipe but spiritually generic with beans.

The beans are dried pintos. Southerners now in their 50s and 60s – and beyond – will remember that their parents called them “red beans.” Talk about red beans today, and the young people will probably think you are talking about kidney beans, which are about as different from red beans as a tire is from a tornado.

In the really hard times, beans would be the appetizer, the salad, the main course, and dessert. I have never lived or cooked in the really hard times, as my grandmother and stretch cooking champion Susie Grant did, so on my table the beans are a side dish 95 percent of the time. They go with anything, even fish, if the fish is fried. And they freeze well. If you cook two pounds of pinto beans, I guarantee you are going to freeze some.

So let’s cook two pounds of beans. At the supermarket, they come in two- and one-pound bags, so it’s easy to halve the recipe. Pour the beans onto a tabletop a few handfuls at a time and pick through them for rocks, or anything else non-bean, like small dried buds of mud. Sweep the beans into a colander as you work. Then rinse the beans and pour them into a large mixing bowl or pot and soak them in water – about two inches deeper than the beans – overnight. Or you can soak them from early morning into the afternoon.

Chop three-quarters of a pound of leanish bacon, place in a large cooking pot, and barely cover with water. Place over medium-high heat. Chop fine a large onion. When the water has cooked off and the bacon is just starting to sizzle (you don’t want the bacon to get crisp), add the onion to the pot. (If you want vegetarian, skip the bacon and add the onion to a couple of tablespoons of olive or cooking oil in the pot.) Leaving the heat medium-high, add two teaspoons each of pepper and salt, and stir the bacon and onion a minute or two until the onion is soft and a brown glaze is forming on the bottom of the pot. This glaze is flavor gold. Then, if you have some leftover coffee, add a scant cup to the pot, stirring and scraping to “de-glaze” the bottom of the pot. If no coffee, then pour in some water from the soaking beans to de-glaze.

Dump in the beans and add water, if needed, to just reach the surface of the beans. Stir the bacon and onions into the beans, turn the heat to medium-low and cover the pot. After 15 minutes check the pot and adjust the heat so the beans have a nice simmer. Stir them occasionally and with a spoon sample the pot liquor after about 45 minutes and add sprinkles of salt and pepper if necessary. Around 90 minutes, when the beans are starting to look done, get a couple of beans on the spoon and blow on them. If the skin cracks, they are done, or close to it. Chew the beans, and if they are soft, they are ready. If they are a bit firm, check again in 15 minutes.

When the beans are done, you can mash a cup of them in a bowl and add back to the pot to thicken the pot liquor.

Many cooks swear by a meaty hambone in the beans, but that is a different kind of beans, great eating, of course, but not as flexible as a side dish. You wouldn’t serve hambone beans with barbecue, for example. Plus you have to have a hambone, which ordinarily happens only after a holiday. I can’t think of a better stretch-cooking afterlife for leftover ham than in a pot of beans. We’ll talk about that on another day.

Dried blackeyed peas are cooked the exact same way as above, only they don’t take near as long to get done, about 45 minutes. At New Year’s, when the Southern tradition is to eat them for luck, you can find fresh blackeyes even in California. But you don’t lose a thing with the dried, if you ask me. And, if you’re doing a batch for visiting vegetarians, just leave out the bacon. I have to stop now. I am getting weak with hunger. Next Thursday, look for a recipe for Smothered Steak.