I made shrimp tacos the other night for dinner—mostly from scratch—and they were good.
With this meal, there are a lot of pans going all at once. One has to pay close attention, but it all comes together really quickly. Once everything is prepped, it only takes about 15 minutes to cook and assemble—there’s nothing tricky to it.
This recipe serves 3 people.
Here are the ingredients:
1 lb. of shrimp, peeled and deveined, chopped into ¾ inch chunks
A couple of poblano chilies, seeds removed and sliced into strips. (poblano chilies are a little bit spicy, but not much. When cooked, they have more flavor than a bell pepper.)
½ of a large onion, sliced—but not too thin
A few gloves of garlic, sliced
Fresh cilantro*
Store bought white-corn tortillas (I bought the Tortilla Factory brand—they’re corn, but flexible like wheat tortillas.)
Store bought fresh mango, pineapple and jicama salsa*
Queso fresco (a type of fresh, Mexican cheese—white and crumbly.)*
*Note: The salsa, cilantro and queso fresco are quite perishable. They’ll keep for a few days in the fridge—but once they are opened, they don’t last long.
Here’s how I prepared them:
First, I sautéed the poblano pepper strips, onion and some garlic in oil, with a little salt and pepper. I cooked this over a low-medium heat for about 10 minutes—I learned that peppers burn if cooked too quickly.
While the pepper/onion mix was cooking, I tossed the shrimp in a separate pan with the rest of the garlic. I let this cook for about 4 minutes.
Then, I got the third burner going and tossed the tortillas one by one in a dry frying pan, flipping each after about a minute—just enough to warm them up.
I put some shrimp and the pepper/onion mix on each tortilla, added the salsa, some crumbled queso fresco and a sprinkle of cilantro on top. I had some other salsas available as well, but the mango salsa was the most fun.
I had a dream the other night in which the production designer of a documentary about a farm family was presenting me with some color swatches to view. All of the color swatches were dull colors—beige, pale blue and a muddy, off white. The idea, as the production designer explained it, was to make the entire setting, the farmer, his family and their home, look “better.” It was decided that the clothing and environment should be contained within a proscribed color universe. To do this, they would dye all of the farm family’s clothes, empty the rooms, repaint the walls, remove all of the knick knacks and utensils around the house and even alter the color of those in order to create a somewhat duller but more unified world.
This aspect of production design is common in fictional films. David Fincher is famous for color coordinating the rooms of his protagonists—for example, their clothes, furniture and walls might all be varying shades of bluish gray. Other movies might use this technique to confine flashbacks to golden warm tones while others might choose to unify the colors within the setting by meticulously coordinating wardrobe pieces, or even curtains and furniture. This can be obvious or subtle. For example, it’s fairly common for a white shirt to be dyed down to an off white during production of a film so it does not pop or glow too much against the background. You might not notice any of this art direction at work, but it’s there.
Anyway, many of these design elements were going to be applied to the documentary in my dream. Once the clothes, house and other items were all coordinated to depict a color-muted universe, the stuff would be put back exactly where it had come from and the family would be allowed to resume their normal daily lives.
In the dream I thought to myself, “This is very clever. Visitors to the farm family will immediately look like garish outsiders with their loud clothes, sporting colors that will inevitably clash with the toned down world of the farm. The sense that the farm is a world unto itself would, therefore, subtly be reinforced.” This seemed, in my dream analysis within the dream, like a pretty cool idea. Leave aside, as I did in my dream, the issue of whether this is a perversion of the notion of a documentary.
As my thoughts within the dream drifted, a disturbing thought arose. “What about the vegetables?” I realized, being a farm, that there would inevitably be bright red peppers, rich green leaves of kale and chard, and a variety of colorful fruits that would be brought from the farm into the house or barn. I thought to myself, “What about those? The film people wouldn’t re-paint vegetables would they? Nah, that would somehow be crossing a line.”
From the breakfast room in my Shibuya hotel one can see Fuji-san! It’s a remarkably clear morning and it looks like the endless city stretches until the foothills of Fuji begin (it doesn’t quite). It’s a weird sight—a vision of a planet that is all city, except for the occasional volcano.
I went to Tokyo to be present for the installation of a small art show (one piece likely needed technical tweaking). The space is in Harajuku, and it’s called Vacant. The parents of the gallerist are old friends of mine, and the dad had a chain of clothing stores that sold U.S. thrift store items. Similarly direct, it was called Department Store. He’s sold the business now.
When I was in town for my performances over a year ago I saw some photos he had by Ikebana (flower arranging) artist Yukio Nakagawa. I’d seen a few of his own photo documentations of his work in an ICP show that Noriko Fuku curated a while back, but now I was seeing a lot more—and was blown away.
I’ve seen some wacky Ikebana work before, but Nakagawa’s stuff is way extreme. Some of it isn’t even recognizable as flowers; though in the titles one finds that indeed is often the material used—but mashed, pulverized, sexualized.
These images are from some time ago. Nakagawa-san is still alive, though he lives in a nursing home now. Apparently he trained in a proper Ikebana school, but was sort of kicked out—gee, I wonder why. To us in the West this might not seem a big deal, but in Japan, where flower arranging is a big business—and being certified is like a law degree or a medical degree—certification all but guarantees you a living for life. So being "disbarred," as it were, was a serious business—it forced Nakagawa into a subsistence existence. My friend Seiji and his son Yusuke have been negotiating with the Nakagawa family to do prints for a show in early 2011.
Nakagawa was pals with Kazuo Ohno, the father of Bhuto dance, and a wild figure all on his own. Of course these two revolutionaries would cross paths. Though what, if anything, they did together, I don’t know.
My own show was some old and some new stuff, and most of them without text, as that’s a bit of a barrier here. There were two relatively new pieces—one of which is a piece with almost 100 guitar pedals that the public is invited to walk over.
Here’s a kid taking an audio stroll at the opening.
As he steps on each pedal it either turns on or off, depending on its current state, and the sound of a guitar loop (the guitar is off camera in this picture) is affected in some way. Echo, flanging, distortion, pitch shifting, delays, auto filters—the combinations are pretty limitless and sometimes sound quite nice!
This piece was originally done for a benefit The Kitchen (an arts space in NY) was having a year or so ago at which they were “honoring” the artist Christian Marclay, who does a lot of sound and audio works. So this piece was inspired by his work, in a way. However, the fire marshal at that event said the piece had to be removed, as I’d installed it in a hallway between two spaces—which I did as a further encouragement for folks to walk on it. Though I made a narrow safe passage around the side for the timid and for ladies in heels, the fire marshal was, I think, miffed that he’d never been consulted, so he showed us who was boss. By the time the partygoers arrived the piece was gone.
The oldest pieces in this show were some prints of some pictures I’d taken of a video monitor that were possibilities for the Bush Of Ghosts record cover. We ended up using similar pictures with little figures, that Eno took at the same time. In those days (1980, I think) one could mess with the color controls on a TV or video monitor, and with the addition of some video feedback get some pretty trippy vortex visuals. Turning the color settings way off and fucking with the contrast and other tiny knobs was very hands on, and not so different than messing with guitar pedals. One can’t do this with digital flat screen TVs—you’d have to access and manipulate a whole array of menus simultaneously, which isn’t really possible.
There were also some large banners of the inside of masks—Halloween masks of political figures (in this case Bush I and II hung on either side of Saddam Hussein). There is a whole series of these.
Note that the gallery space isn’t a white cube like the ones in Chelsea and elsewhere. It’s wood-paneled and half the floor is covered in wacky floral linoleum (made in Japan), so it has a little bit the feeling of a giant rec room or suburban basement.
There were some old and new lenticulars, which are sometimes known as winky dinks. In one older group Danielle Spencer and I altered some photos I’d taken of corporate tombstones so that from one view they’d have the name of the company, and from a couple of feet to the side they’d say something like “honesty” or “trust”—what these corporations would like to elicit from us, but certainly don’t these days.
Lastly, there was another group of lenticulars that each consisted of three photos of roundish objects on black backgrounds, but as one moved, the objects overlapped and almost morphed into one another. It becomes hard to see where one object begins and another ends.
Here’s a sample—as an animated gif. It’s not the same, but you get the idea.
We all went out for dinner a few times, and twice had a seasonal dish that Seiji said was made of the organ that fish eggs come from (but NOT the eggs themselves). He said its name is translated as “white baby.”
Needless to say, on my day off I went for a bike ride. There aren’t many bike lanes in Tokyo, but more and more people are riding anyway. There are lots and lots of bikes locked up here and there, and the bank where I used a cash machine had indoor bike parking! Not many banks in the U.S. cater to cyclists like that.
As some of the main thoroughfares are busy a lot of cyclists ride on the sidewalks, which is pretty insane from our point of view—though I didn’t see anyone get hurt or yelled at. But a few times as I was walking I had to jump out of the way as a housewife with a basket of groceries slalomed through the throngs of pedestrians.
I stopped at the Mori Museum—a contemporary art space on the top floor of one of Tokyo’s rare skyscrapers. This one in the middle of a development called Roppongi Hills that includes condos, offices, cinemas, shops, restaurants and a rooftop viewing area with a heliport. The main show was a retrospective of Odani Motohiko, a contemporary sculptor. He represented Japan at the Venice Biennial in 2003.
Then I biked to 21 21 Design Sight, a new design museum designed by Tadao Ando. The concrete building is half submerged in a park—which was a pleasant surprise, as a small urban public park is sort of a rare thing in itself in Japan. Though it’s a design museum and their upcoming show includes Sottsass and other furniture designers, their shows generally encompass an impressively wide range of material.
The show I saw was called Reality Lab, and it was curated by fashion designer Issey Miyake—who was also an instigator in the creation of this museum 3 years ago. Whether he curated all the parts, I’m not sure, but I think they were, which made it all the more surprising.
One section was an exhibit of meteorites—both actual and in large photo blowups, that allowed one to see their interior structure and makeup. In the same room were interspersed a collection of globes—some of Earth, but most of moons and other planets, colored to reveal their geologic structure or other features.
Further on there were large photos by Hiroshi Iwasaki of various items than had been frozen using a new technique called CAS (Cells Alive System) that minimizes tissue damage during freezing, which allows for specimen storage and food preservation than keeps nutrients, freshness and flavor intact. Like the meteorites and globes, this was almost more science exhibit than art of design, but the overlap was exciting.
There were more varied groupings of more science related items here and there, but the largest room featured a collaboration between Miyake and some scientists and students that eventually, no surprise, ended up as innovative designs for clothing.
Next to a wall covered with mathematical formulas (used in the process) were the beginnings of the designs—which were experiments in paper folding. Like Ikebana, origami has broken free of its roots and is now a hands-on way of investigating serious studies of morphology and topology. Believe it or not, the shapes below were made by folding flat pieces of paper!
In some display cases were samples of these paper foldings that one could touch and examine. I pulled a few apart gingerly to see how they were made, and even the Japanese kids around me were amazed, we all went ooh and ahh. I then had a little bit of a hard time getting the pieces to resume their folded shapes—luckily the paper has some memory, so it guided me.
Miyake then had the students do similar foldings with fabrics, which were sewn along just one side, creating a tube, and unfolded to make dresses that retained much of their foldings. He had metallic pigment (almost like silver leaf) roughly added to the top surface when the items were folded, so you saw what was exposed when the garment was in its folded configuration. Here is the garment emerging from its flat form in reverse order.
They have an art biennale here — doesn’t everyplace? Cindy has one of her new wallpaper pieces in the show, so we took advantage of the opportunity and came over and stayed a few extra days. The biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, who has done other big surveys, featured, besides some well-known names, lots of stuff that some might not call art — period Korean advertising photos, minus text, by Hanyong Kim, and a promo film commissioned by a Japanese bicycle company done by an avant-garde film collective in the ’50s. There were pieces by Asian artists we’d never heard of (a Korean artist did paintings in an old Buddhist style, one of which was about women who’d had abortions suffering in hell), healing drawings by Swiss healer Emma Kunz (who died in 1963), and some vaguely outsiderish pieces (including incredible drawings by Chinese healer Guo Fengyi that she originally started doing to heal herself of ailments contracted due to factory work, and now does to “heal” others). Here’s one of her drawings:
It was great to see one of these biennale things loosen up a bit on their criteria regarding what to include. Too often they seem like sales conventions for successful galleries, with an idea tacked on to add a veneer of intellectual substance — a puppet government run by the lobbyists. This one actually seemed to be about a gathering of great stuff, no matter where it came from — some of which is shown in commercial galleries, and much that is not.
Here is a sample page from one of Shinro Ohtake’s books. He’s a musician/artist who is now in a band called JUKE/19 with Yamantaka Eye, of the more well-known Boredoms. An entire room was filled with these scrapbooks, opened to random pages. They seemed to be made of ephemera and then drawn and painted over — most pages were even more messy than this spread:
Not too many of the name artists were in attendance — I saw Maurizio Cattelan and Ai Weiwei at a lunch, but not a whole bunch of others. Other curators attended — Okwui Enwezor and Francesco Bonami showed up, checking out their co-curators’ work. It’s a long way to come for Americans and Europeans, though some westerners were making this part of an itinerary that included Beijing and other new art centers.
At the same time, almost next door to the biennale, which shows in two purpose-built buildings, there was the Gwangju art fair opening in the massive convention center. This was more of a hodgepodge — some kitschy stuff and some contemporary art from an alternative universe. Art has become a “thing” here, as it seems to be in China. It’s apparently something you have to have — every town should support it, and there are weird little galleries everywhere. Gwangju is proud of their biennale, as they should be, but what a choice for a town that on the surface seems fairly nondescript.
Gwangju, we were told, is a cultural town, and it is famous for being politically uppity too — there was a rebellion that the whole country remembers and celebrates. In 1980 the citizens of Gwangju rose up against the dictatorship that ruled Korea at that time (another that was aided and supported by the US), and were fired upon by the army. Citizens raided armories and essentially took control of the town before the uprising was brutally suppressed. On the face of things it’s a little hard to imagine — the town seems to be largely made of identical tower block apartments and love hotels. Chris Wiley, who wrote a lot about the artists in the biennale catalogue, called the apartments dystopian, but he added that the middle class here loves them. They prefer them to the funkier homes that used to fill this town. The tower blocks have gyms, pools and other mod cons, so the trade off might be understandable from a pragmatic point of view. When we arrived, I saw row after row and mile after mile of them and sort of began to get depressed, but then I was reminded that my reaction was based on the legacy, history and reputation of US and European housing projects, which is generally a story of vast neglect and of dangerous warrens for the urban poor. These, apparently, have none of that connotation, though it’s hard for us to shake our western biases and presumptions.
Here is what much of the town used to look like:
And here are some typical tower blocks. They stretch from one end of town to the other. You can identify your block by a number.
Most young folks don’t live alone before they’re married, so love hotels abound to fulfill the need of a private place to smooch. Typically the parking is indoors, and designed so that no one sees you coming or going, or sees your car parked out front. Here’s one that mixes the Statue of Liberty with neoclassical soft core — because that’s what liberty is all about.
A typhoon hit Seoul while we were in Gwangju, which may have affected biennale and art fair attendance — all flights from the capitol were suspended, trees were uprooted in Seoul and there were power outages.
We went for a walk to the old market, Yangdong. There are two markets split by a street — one side is for clothes and curtains and such, the other for food. Korean food is wonderful — spicy, pungent and mainly vegetarian. Fish and meat are used as flavorings more so than massive portions. Typical meals are accompanied by a host of pickled vegetable dishes, and few dishes are fried.
In the market there were lots of dried and fresh fish dealers, hundreds of kinds of kimchee, and beans and legumes galore. Here is a kind of pizza with greens, crab and sausage on a bean pancake. It makes a nice composition.
A vendor told us that the older folks continue to enjoy silkworm larvae, but the young folks don’t go for it so much now.
On the clothes-side of the market there were, aside from Nike and Adidas knock offs, aisle after aisle of traditional formal wear. It was hot that day, and by the time we arrived it was mid afternoon, so some of the sales personnel took advantage of the slowness and napped. We saw booth after booth of incredible, brightly-colored, formal clothes — with here and there a sleeping beauty fallen down among them.
Jeju Island
The island was recommended to us by a Korean American friend. It’s a volcanic island (though not active) about the size of Puerto Rico and lies off the southern coast of Korea. One large volcanic mountain dominates and there are hundreds of smaller cones scattered about the lush green landscape. An organization called Jeju Olle initiated the establishment of a series of trails that lie along the southern coast. The trails are divided into numbered sections, each about a 5-hour hike. Eventually they hope to have trails surrounding the whole island. This one used to be a honeymoon resort, but no longer — for a while tourism languished a bit, but now these trails have stimulated a kind of ecotourism as visitors collect hikes and compare experiences. It’s an admirable project in a place that has some local culture left (they speak a unique dialect). Unlike the theme parks and resorts that often get built in places like this, the trails are free — they foster an appreciation of the land and place (of a sort, see below) and leave no carbon footprint. The hotel suggested we try Number 7.
The first part of Number 7 is fairly mediated and built up. Along the path there are signs that show the exact locations used in historical TV dramas. There are also special tours of the island that focus entirely on former movie and TV locations — a different way of viewing a landscape. It’s landscape as a set — with accompanying nostalgic and emotional connections, if you happen to have seen the TV series.
Further on there is a baffling sign/billboard that depicts, in heightened colors, what lies directly behind the sign. Maybe it’s there to help you recognize the landscape as the real manifestation of a more iconic and familiar image: “Ah yes, that’s where we are! I’ve seen this image before.”
Further on the trail becomes more primitive, the signs are no more and one has to scamper over rocks at the base of some basalt cliffs that are honeycombed with indentations.
Then the trail leads along volcanic black rock beaches typical of this place, where women are bent over gathering seaweed that they dry on bushes or on the bike lane at the side of the road.
Koreans eat some seaweed with almost every meal — either in soup, dried as a garnish or pickled as a kind of kimchee. It’s delicious, healthy and judging by the huge piles of it these women accumulate all over the island, I assumed that Jeju might be a major seaweed source for all of Korea. I was told that no, what is gathered here is pretty much consumed here — the Korean peninsula is surrounded by water on 3 sides, so lots of seaweed is needed and it’s gathered everywhere.
Nearby these pungent piles are loads of tiny fish farms. There is abundant fresh water that pours down from the interior, which feeds these farms and is then dumped into the ocean, along with some fish that manage to escape.
We stop for a meal of fishtail stew and an amazing iced soup that is made of ground red pepper, sesame, cucumber, garlic and raw squid slices — and ice cubes. Nearby the local fishermen are bathing, naked, in a rocky pool where a river pours into the sea. Later some of them are having lunch in the restaurant, and they sprinkle a kind of acid on their dishes. It’s like super vinegar concentrate — 30% as opposed to the 5% in European vinegars — and the odor is like smelling salts or amyl nitrate. We were warned not to even smell it.
However, they do also make low acid vinegars — pomegranate, persimmon, garlic, apple and pepper — that are for drinking.
Lava Tubes
When the volcanoes in this island were erupting, the lava flowed down towards the sea, creating huge underground tubes as the outer layers of lava cooled and hardened. Subsequent lava flows took the same readymade routes, and we visited one where you can walk 1 km in. It goes on much further, 17 km I think. They’re not like limestone caves with stalagmites and stalactites, but more like a road, an abandoned subway tunnel. Water drips down everywhere and one imagines there are significant aquifers deep underground.
There are lava tubes elsewhere in the world — I went into one out west, in Utah I think it was. Those are more on the surface — one can see the overgrown snaking mounds stretching across a lava field that betray their presence, and fairly often a roof collapse allows one to clamber down into them. The tubes in Utah are smaller than those in Jeju, and in the one I climbed into there was no one around. I went in a ways, but without good lights I stopped and turned around, thinking one of the branching tributaries might be a perfect hibernating spot for a bear.
Stromboli is an island that is also an active volcano and is fairly close to Sicily. Its population is between 450 and 700. A week ago there was what they call an “explosion”…one of the craters blew out some fiery rocks that set the grasses halfway up the mountain on fire. (None hit the town.) The explosion and fires happened in the late afternoon, and helicopters flew in from the Sicilian mainland and put them out in the morning. The volcano has been erupting more or less continuously for 20,000 years. Most of the eruptions were like the ones we saw — periodic spurts of glowing molten rock, but no lava flows…though there are those too. The most recent was in 2002, after a gap of 17 years.
In 1930 there was a fairly major eruption, and all the inhabitants of the island were evacuated. Magma hit the sea and plumes of steam arose. Flying “bombs,” as they are called, landed in the sea as well, causing a local tsunami.
In those days the two villages here were pretty isolated — no electricity, irregular fresh water, and forget about wi-fi. Stromboli conserves water as best they can via rain barrels and containers that harvest and recycle AC drips, but even so, every week a tanker arrives to bring fresh water to the island.
Southern Italy wasn’t a wealthy area anyway, so for many inhabitants that eruption was the last straw, and they left for elsewhere if they could — Australia, Argentina and the United States had waves of Italian immigrants. In the tiny town of Ginostra (current year-round population: 27 people, 7 donkeys), the church has a plaque commemorating the Strombolian Club of Brooklyn, which sent funds for its renovation in 1940. The members of the club didn’t return to Ginostra, though. In 2003 one of the larger explosions sent rocks raining down on the village, and some houses were damaged.
Ginostra got electricity of a sort a few years ago — via solar panels — so now they can watch Berlusconi’s bimbos on TV.
In 1949 Roberto Rossellini and his then-girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman, made a film here called (in English) Stromboli, God’s Land. It’s interesting as a peek at life here some years ago, but as one local said, “It’s a terrible film! He was blinded by his love for her!”
In the movie she is a Lithuanian refugee in Italy after WWII who impulsively — or, being a refugee, pragmatically (or both) — suddenly agrees to marry an Italian serviceman. He takes her back to his town, his mother and his family, which is Stromboli — doubling for Ginostra. [Spoiler alert!] Young Ingrid freaks out and there is some overacting on her part — though the other performers, who all seem to be locals, and non-actors, seriously underact. Weird combination: calm Italians and one hysterical Hollywood actress. Her new husband in the film eventually boards her up in the house, as she’s getting seriously out of control. However, she manages to escape and heads out over the mountain (still today a more clearly marked path than the way around the outside), and we see her clawing her way over the volcano in hopes of reaching the town of Stromboli and a ship.
The shooting was troubled — partly because RKO, the Hollywood studio backers, wanted a more narrative film than what they got, and partly because Bergman was a bankable star and her affair with Rossellini didn’t go down well with the US public.
During the shooting of this scene of her at the crater, one of the crew died as a result of inhalation of the volcanic fumes.
In the early evening, we hike 40 minutes up a switchback trail to a pizzeria in the middle of nowhere that overlooks the lava flow. From the outdoor seating area one can, as the sun sets, gaze up after a sip of white wine and a mouthful of so-so pizza and see the periodic (about every half hour) explosions of lava from the crater above.
The sound is like a sudden great gushing expulsion of liquid,which it is, I guess — liquid rock. Hiking to the crater itself is prohibited, due to last week's “explosion” in which “bombs” (red hot rocks) landed not just around the crater but also on the inhabited side of the island. These landed among the bushes and grasses about 500 meters up, catching the vegetation on fire. We can see the burnt area from our little hotel room. Had anyone been hiking up to the top they might have been either struck or burned in the subsequent fires.
This is what we saw — the red chunks don’t look as dramatic in the daylight.
Being an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, the seafood is amazing and super fresh. Every morning one can hear the pinched melodic cries of a man with a little motorized cart who wends his way around town selling “pesca fresca” — fresh squid, swordfish and dorado, and whatever else came in that morning.
This is an appetizer of raw marinated fish.
The overnight ferry back to Napoli takes about 12 hours. We sit in the tiny cabin, having some wine and cheese, and watch a Planet Earth nature doc on my laptop. (“Deep Oceans” episode — incredible!)
I’ve just finished a press tour of London, Paris, Hamburg and Milano talking about the Here Lies Love project. It comes out in about a week over here. Norman (Fatboy Slim), my collaborator, would have joined me but he and his wife Zoe have just had a baby and have taken a holiday.
A tour like this consists of day after day of one interview after another. I was told that Ry Cooder once fell asleep in the middle of a phone interview. To be fair, in addition to fulfilling a publicity function, I also find out how the work is being perceived — if it’s confusing or if one aspect I hadn’t noticed seems important to people. For example, in this piece thus far, I don’t detail the Marcoses’ human rights and financial abuses. I allude to their nefarious behavior, but don’t list their nasty habits one by one. I often brought up this omission to the interviewers myself — saying I chose to intentionally focus on the psychological issues that drove Imelda… issues which, as I see them, manifested in more influential and sometimes tragic behavior later on — decisions that affected their whole nation.
I wrote in the HLL book that this whole project originated when I became fascinated reading the late Kapuscinski’s (now questionable) account of the court of Haile Selassie, and how theatrical it seemed to me. It was a theater of the absurd, stylized and in no way naturalistic — absolutely stagey, with proscribed movement and gesture, dialogue and ceremonial dress. I just now stumbled upon the phrase “political theater” in a book by Chris Hedges, in reference to contemporary TV reporters — they who often debate whether a pseudo event was convincing or not. Perfect. It’s already theater, I just needed to make it explicit.
I also mentioned that the piece might be an allegory for the human capability for evil. We see Imelda’s extravagant, ruthless and decadent behavior, which became especially prevalent after martial law was declared in the Philippines, becoming increasingly bold and widespread, as reporting of said behavior didn’t filter back much due to a censored press. When Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, all opposition papers and TV were shut down; the populace only heard what the government wanted them to hear. (Hello, China and Italy!)
In the most inexcusable behavior I saw a manifestation of a common human trait — that when all restraints are removed, we tend to lose our moral compasses. I think it could happen to any of us. In the interviews I noted that, for example, I don’t think the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were particularly bad apples as was claimed, but that they were put in a situation where they were handed absolute power — and that kind of ultimate power corrupts absolutely. In a way, there are no evil people, but situations and contexts that allow the evil in all (or many) of us to come out. See the famous Milgram test regarding our capacity to inflict harm.
Granted, not every soldier at Abu Ghraib engaged in torture and disgusting behavior, but let’s put it this way — the leaked pictures that were proudly circulated were the whistleblowers, not the soldiers. The few bad apples rationale put forward by the administration acted in effect as an excuse for them, the higher ups — and let the poor grunts be the fall guys.
Lastly, I stated that the project is about understanding that the Marcos era is perceived, especially in the Philippines, in shades of gray, not as black and white, good vs. evil as we outsiders might tend to assume. While both Ferdinand and his wife brutally suppressed dissent and opposition, and sunk their country heavily in debt, there is in the Philippines a common perception that they, at least before martial law was declared, did some good too. They built rural schools and clinics, roads and higher education facilities that everyone there is proud of. Later, there were vast, expensive art centers built that were meant to impress foreigners and the elite, and self-commissioned monuments to the Marcos glory. Also, in the early days of their era, as a handsome couple, they represented their country on the world stage — flattering photo essays in LIFE magazine, etc. This was all something that hadn’t happened before. Of course, the good does not excuse the bad, but it makes any absolute judgment more complicated. One wishes that in this and other cases the bad could be fixed or dealt with in some way, though the most obvious — revenge and punishment — doesn’t really get us anywhere.
Looking for other gray examples, I asked a friend in London, “Did Margaret Thatcher do anything good?” Needless to say I’m no friend of Thatcherism. The answer was yes — one thing she did was to allow people living in public housing to buy their own dwellings. Developers and speculators weren’t allowed to do this, only the residents. So, eventually you had people, some of whom might have been living in squalid housing estates (projects, as they’re called in the US), beginning to take an interest in their homes, surroundings and neighborhoods. Does this mitigate the other stuff Thatcher did? (With an understanding that not everyone might agree that this housing policy was good.) Well, it humanizes the Iron Lady just a little bit; it adds a tiny diamond to the pile of brutal nastiness.
Maybe the South African Truth and Reconciliation system is a model for dealing with past crimes? If the perp comes clean, absolutely, and admits to every wrongdoing, then forgiveness can be granted in some cases, and healing begins. But if there is an insistence on excuses and an attempt to justify offense, and the plea is refused, it gets them a court prosecution. Maybe this is better than The Hague, which the US set up as a sort of legalized vengeance institution. In this process it seems it’s not about healing, it’s about punishment. But throwing one man in jail for slaughtering hundreds, or hanging another, doesn’t soothe the pain — it merely makes the object of hatred vanish.
A lot of the interviewers zeroed in on the statement in my written introduction in which I proposed that this package — with its thematically linked songs, DVD, 120-page book and 2 CDs — might be a response to the “death of the album.” I guess there are some record collectors out there who will miss that format. All, however, agreed that CDs, especially in their plastic jewel boxes with tiny booklets, are ugly. Most had trouble imagining what might happen in the near future. I suggested that multimedia packages (with links, text, video and images) might be perfect for smart phones and other new devices; they might be better than CDs in some ways, which have gotten increasingly stingy in their packaging and content, offering the consumer less and less for their buck.
Mega pop artists might, for example, just release a few singles and attention grabbing videos of those songs. Many more millions might be willing to spring for a couple of songs (or video downloads) than for a whole album from artists who typically fill out their CDs with less than stellar tunes.
Others will have to find some other format, which is only regrettable in the sense that there is an economy of scale in selling bundles of 12 tunes. It doesn’t cost a whole lot more to market a CD that contains 12 tunes than a single — but the income from the 12 song bundle is 10 times as much, or more. So, while mainstream pop artists might sell many more singles, the lower ends of that bell curve — the artists whose output will never sell millions of singles but does have an loyal audience — won’t find that model very sustainable.
Much of the personnel of the local Warner branch have been laid off not too long ago. Some actually got their notices very recently, and the day I arrived was their last day on the job. The woman who represents Italian artists to the world was let go. I saw her vanish down a hallway — she resembles the fashion mistress in The Incredibles.
I wonder who and what will be left of these regional offices in the next few years. Not much, I fear. I heard a story that one executive felt the obligation to visit Tori Amos and her husband at their home studio complex in Cornwall to assess or hear a record of hers. It’s a good four hours from London by train and car (I know because I went there to record her vocals on this project), so the exec took a helicopter. Those days are over.
While at the Warner offices in Milano, I was right in the midst of a series of interviews when a siren went off and everyone in the building evacuated. We trooped down the stairs, 7 flights, to the front driveway where many turned it into a smoke break. We walked over to the hotel and continued over there.
For lunch we went to a nearby vegetarian restaurant with a molecular cuisine slant — my entree was called “A stroll in the forest” and consisted of a bowl of two colored foams under which lay buried crispy and flavorful vegetables, each flavored with a different spice. As one of the Warner staff mentioned, “Each bite gives another flavor and another surprise.”
In case you think this meal is proof that helicopter-style extravagance hasn’t gone out of style, the set lunch here goes for 17 euros — not as low as a cheap slice or a gyro from a Halal cart, but not a helicopter either.
On lunch break in Paris I used the local press officer’s metro card to bum a ride on one of the Vélib' bikes. It’s a little bit confusing, all the swiping and button pushing necessary to release the bike, but then it’s easy. I went for a ride down along the Seine, over a pedestrian bridge by the Eiffel tower, and circled back to the hotel. It costs one euro for a 24-hour period (or you can buy a monthly or yearly pass), and within that period there is unlimited use as long as each individual ride doesn’t exceed 30 minutes. So, you could go to get groceries, or to the movies, or to meet friends for dinner or commute to work, if it’s not too far. As there are Vélib' stations all over town, you reinsert the bike in the nearest station-locking port to your destination, and the clock stops ticking. Then, at no additional charge, you pick up another one to get back home or to your next stop and the clock resets at zero again.
[Photo: Matthew Rankin]
One bike at the station had a flat tire, and its port flashed red, indicating it was not available for use. I was also advised to check the brakes and chains before removing a bike, as sometimes they’re not kept up. When I asked about the recent US news reports that the Vélib' bikes were getting vandalized and trashed, mostly by the immigrant population of the Parisian suburbs, I was told that it seemed like an anti-immigrant rumor and that the theft and vandalism rate is much lower than reported in that article.
The bike itself is heavy and has only three gears, so it’s fine for most of the town but riding up to Sacré-Coeur might be inadvisable.
I read a review of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human in the NYRB. As usual the article summarized much of the book’s ideas. The author, Richard Wrangham, argues that the eating of cooked food by early protohumans was, to a large and unacknowledged extent, what enabled them to walk upright, get brainier, become more social and even to verbalize. In a nutshell, he says that since cooked food allows a more efficient transfer and absorption of nutrients than raw food does, the digestive track could evolve into a smaller-sized part of the animal (raw foods require large stomachs and long digestion), which then allowed the little guys to begin to stand up more, as their bellies were smaller. It also enabled the brain to evolve into a larger organ, as large brains require a lot of nutrition only available to hominids by eating cooked food. I’m beginning to see how some of these factors converged in ways that were lucky for us.
Cooking, Wrangham claims, necessitated that some part of the household guard the hearth (and children), and it also meant that groups larger than a single family were more practical. It’s been argued by others that the increased social interactions of early humans were what formed many of the brain’s pathways that determine how we behave and get along, or don’t get along. These new complex social structures also required larger brain capacities, as others have suggested… and both allowed and demanded the evolution of language to help mediate some of that social drama.
Wrangham also says that once we started eating cooked food, our mouths and jaws no longer had to be equipped mainly for tearing, ripping and intense prolonged grinding… which left early mouths available for other purposes — vocalizing… and maybe singing, too?
It’s an amazing argument — to tie all these crucial protohuman attributes to cooking. And equally interesting is how each attribute facilitated the others — all seemed to be interdependent.
Needless to say, Wrangham doesn’t buy into the relatively recent raw food movement — which claims that we humans are more naturally engineered for eating uncooked food, which is therefore presumed by adherents of this movement to be better for us. The assumption there is that early man and woman didn’t cook. Wrangham says that if they didn’t cook they wouldn’t have survived, and could never have evolved into us, as cooked food is so much more efficient at delivering nutrients. He says that standing and talking would never have happened on a diet of raw foods.
Sufficiently caffeinated from the morning’s bus coffee, Mark and I hopped on bikes and rode downhill to the seaside hotel in Leith. Fed, showered and shaved I ride back into town, noting the interesting shop fronts along the way.
Later I meet up with Hungarian-American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth and his family at the Talbot Rice Gallery, where he has an installation. Right now the family is living in Roma, which must be interesting — a lovely city, but I imagine it’s a bit hard getting things done and running an efficient organization out of a southern Italian town.
His show consists of quotes from Nietzsche and doodles by Darwin, interspersed and rendered in white neon. One has to “read” the exhibition. It’s presented in a room that was one of the studies where Darwin worked; this one originally contained thousands of stuffed birds. The frilly Victorian details add a nice touch; the columns along the walls serve to break up the texts at irregular intervals, making reading a bit difficult. Cleverly, Joseph arranged that the text fits perfectly, making a circle around the entire room and its little balcony. The Nietzsche quotes form an argument that art and creativity are the highest forms of philosophy… the Darwin doodles look like proto-genealogical trees, as if his hand was unconsciously figuring out how evolution worked.
Next door is a show by Jane and Louise Wilson based around some stuff they found in Stanley Kubrick’s archives. Here is an image from the Kubrick archive site:
Apparently he’d planned to make a film about a Polish-Jewish woman who passed herself off as a Catholic in order to save her family. The film was never shot, but a lot of screen tests with a young actress, and much location scouting, were done.
The Wilsons’ video shows the now slightly older actress re-enacting some of the earlier screen tests and poses, with her voice-over added. In another room were some of Kubrick’s location shots, which, to me, were truly bizarre. Like anthropologists or archaeologists he photographed banal details (windows, doorways, corners of rooms and stairways), always with a striped yardstick in the picture, sometimes held by an assistant. (The inches were alternately painted black or white, so they could be easily counted in these 8 x 10 prints — much easier than trying to see the little gradations on a regular yardstick.) As with archaeological and dinosaur dig photos, these give an accurate sense of scale — critical when one is looking at a photo of a fossilized bone fragment or a piece of partly buried pottery, but a normal Polish room interior? It seems a bit obsessive — a clue to Kubrick’s working method — and maybe that’s the point of the Wilsons’ inclusion and interest in these.
I wonder how many unfinished projects Kubrick had on the go? Another one was A.I., the film about a robot boy looking for love, which was eventually directed by Spielberg. Apparently the original story and script was a Kubrick project, and completing it was Spielberg’s way of making homage.
I meet the Kosuths at the Café Royal, where Joseph claims Princess Anne used to meet her lovers. It’s a baroque pub and café tucked away in an alley behind busy Princes Street, so it does seem plausible — though the place is too crowded for secret assignations these days. I have local food: black pudding (blood sausage) followed by local oysters. The food is gastropub fare nowadays — the black pudding isn’t wallowing in grease as it might be in a more typical Scottish café. Here there are dainty little greens sprinkled around it.
While on tour in Italy a few weeks ago, our new friend Giorgio invited us to lunch at a restaurant in Modena, where we were playing in a beautiful old theater.
Little did we know this would be a culinary experience of a lifetime. The restaurant, Osteria Francescana, had been voted number 13 of S.Pellegrino’s top 50 restaurants in the world just the day before — which also made it the top restaurant in Italy. That’s saying something.
The whole band was invited to this incredible lunch, which featured Lambrusco, an amazing sparkling red wine. Sometimes touring isn’t so bad… well, actually, this tour has been a lot of fun so far. Massimo, the chef, uses local Emilia-Romagna ingredients, processed with the techniques of molecular gastronomy. This region is famous for its Parmesan cheese (as well as its balsamic vinegar), so one memorable dish had the cheese prepared 4 or 5 different ways — as a foam, a pudding, a sauce and a solid. It was a carnival ride for the mouth. There was also a dish that featured another specialty of the region, bologna, turned into something that looked like a dollop of whippy ice cream, speckled pink. Haute hillbilly food.
I glanced at the 50 best list online and saw that I had been to a small number of these establishments. A couple of them in NY, one in London and one in San Francisco. Yes, the food at all of them was amazing, surprising and innovative. But most of the winners are fairly “haute”… and while not necessarily fussy, they’re not what you would call casual. None are cheap (duh). Some are slightly more relaxed than others and forgo the elaborate serving rituals. Some do less as far as presenting food as geometrically arranged art objects. But in general these establishments are of a type. They are the kinds of places that stay more or less within a given range.
The chef of El Bulli, Ferran Adrià (whose restaurant was voted best in the world five times, including this year), was invited to participate in documenta in 2007, the curated art event held in Germany every few years. I don’t think they went so far as to christen his dishes "works of art" — but why not? I’ve never eaten there, but I have perused one of the large art books he publishes, illustrating the dishes and techniques invented over the preceding years. It’s art, all right — edible and ephemeral — I don’t know what else you’d call it.
After all that, I wondered, who decides that the "best" is all more or less of a related type? It’s almost always true, isn’t it — not just for food, but books, films, you name it.
While C and I were wandering around Barrio Alto in Lisboa a few days after the amazing meal in Modena, we stopped to eat at a nondescript lunch counter filled with locals on their lunch break. One outside window looked on to a flat grill, typical of any diner — though on this one, fish were grilling.
By the cash register, under the counter where the donuts might be in a NY diner, there was an array of fresh merluza, dorada and some of the famous Portuguese sardines. The special of the day was octopus stew, so we ordered that along with a couple of draft beers, and a fish. (These came with simple salads.) Here’s the point: the fish, simply grilled and served with olive oil and lemon, was one of the best I’d tasted in a while. The stews weren’t bad either. The beer was cold and delicious. I’d rate the place, on the strength of the fish alone, as one of the best I’ve eaten at — but of course the S.Pellegrino judges won’t give it a glance.
In Melbourne, Australia C and I joined some friends at Cumulus — sort of an unpretentious foodie lunch place.
We sat on stools and had plates to share. Here is the cauliflower, roasted with pine nuts on a bed of goat’s curd with fresh herbs, that had a surprising mix of flavors.
In Kyoto, Noriko Fuku arranged for us all to dine at a place near the university where she teaches. It’s not a highfalutin kaiseki place — the expense account restaurants that offer set menus of a series of tiny, super-refined dishes — but was maybe just as delicious. Here is an appetizer of preserved fish eggs in a slightly thick broth.
In Wellington, NZ their famous green-lipped mussels could be ordered almost anywhere — and they were both larger and more succulent than any of the ones imported to fancy NY restaurants. This plateful was from the local brewpub/restaurant.
C and I went to a fancier seafood restaurant for lunch one afternoon, Martin Bosley’s. Quite a bit fussier than the brewpub — which is saying something for NZ. Here is an example of some clam porn.
When the dishes are as fresh as they were at these places, sometimes there isn’t really any point in making the presentation or preparation too complicated or fancy — it would merely cover up the actual taste of the item.
There are New Yorkers (and Italians) who rate certain pizza places as favorites — and that doesn’t mean the pizza is arranged in a tower, foamed, frozen or gelled. Massimo from Osteria Francescana often goes out for pizza at the end of the day. Even high-end chefs love simple, fresh food that’s well made. In Japan there are fierce discussions over which soba and ramen joints are “za besto.” One could easily say that some of those places also qualify as being “best in the world,” but they’re not in the running for the S.Pellegrino list. One would need a huge number of categories in order to list all these places.
Maybe that’s OK. Maybe we have to take all these ratings and lists with a grain of salt (oops), or at least accept that there’s some implicit category and limitation being discussed in each one that’s not always mentioned outright. Everybody knows that certain genres of film will never be nominated for Oscars, and the books that win prizes are equally of a type — complex, weighty and “important.” Every “best of” list may be the best within a limited category, but not simply the “best” in all categories. We’re supposed to know, for example, that Oscar-winning films are often serious, and therefore somehow morally uplifting, which doesn’t always mean feel-good. Who determines what is morally uplifting, well… that’s another question.
At Johnny’s suggestion, three of us took a local commuter train 25 minutes east to Howth, a village at the narrow neck of a bulbous peninsula on the seaside. There was a market in the town parking lot with local Irish breads and cheeses and a whole pig on a spit — though by the time we got there, only the head and bones were left. Further on, a path leads around the perimeter of the peninsula, along some spectacular windswept and barren cliffs. When the sun came out, it was gorgeous.
Back in the village, we stopped for Dublin Bay oysters and prawns — both amazingly fresh. I don’t know if I’ve ever had oysters as fresh; in NA restaurants, they’re usually flown in from somewhere — with the exception of Seattle and Vancouver.
In the Beginning Was the Word Image
The next day, at Keith’s suggestion, I went to view the Book of Kells at Trinity College. The book itself was fairly underwhelming — the vellum (calfskin) pages had yellowed somewhat, and those on view were partially transparent. The blown up reproductions on the walls were easier to marvel at, and much more engaging. Wall texts detailed the book’s history: the monastery on the barren and windswept island of Iona, off the Scottish coast, where it was created; the repeated sacking and burning of the monastery by the Danes (Vikings); and how the book was always sequestered and saved.
Some of the symbolism in the elaborate illuminations was explained — for example, the intricate mesh of snakes covering many Celtic objects typically represents rebirth, as snakes do in many cultures, because they shed their skins.
But even with the various wall texts, diagrams and maps, something — some vital piece of the information puzzle — seemed to be missing. Why does this book (and some others from the same period) look both so Arabic and Pagan to our eyes? To us, it looks as if the Christian “content” is merely a clever way to distract us from the real mystical shit hidden in all those intricate and labyrinthine illuminations. Sounds a bit Da Vinci Code, eh? I suspect that the mystery-in-plain-sight quality is part of the power and attraction of this “book.” “Book” in quotes, because it was always less a book than a sacred object, displayed on the altar on a specially constructed stand rather than read from. It seems the “information” it carries is not just in the text… though the “word” is acknowledged to be a powerful force. One thinks of the passages in the Bible — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — and then the bit where God names things. When something is named, and therefore placed in a separate conceptual box and isolated from everything else around it, that power is immense. It allows us to both think abstractly about things and people, and to intellectually manipulate them when they’re not right in front of us — even if they exist somewhere in the future.
These illuminated books seem to celebrate the letter and the word while at the same time rendering them completely meaningless — mere shapes overwhelmed by the deep psychological power of Pagan symbolism.
Up some stairs, above the Chubb Insurance Company security case that encloses the book, is the Long Room library... there are a lot of words in this room.
