The dump is closed, all the wrong people are in cuffs, and there ain’t enough SNAP in the EBT for turkey but there’s a big ol’ ham living large in the White House.
Oh, well. We can still sing. Sing loud. You know the words.
Category: Food
What’s for breakfast?
I shouldn’t do any deep reading on a single cup of joe at stupid-thirty on a Tuesday.
Then again, maybe I should do it more often. I might be inspired to compose a new Zen text: “Empty Stomach, Empty Mind.”
If artificial intelligence hasn’t already beaten me to it.
Thus we arrive via the usual scenic route at the first item that got my attention this morning: “A Tool That Crushes Creativity,” by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who fears that generative A.I. slop, once a toxic byproduct of our latest technological Great Leap Forward, has become the shit sandwich du jour.
The second, also from The Atlantic, was “What the Founders Would Say Now,” Fintan O’Toole’s speculation about how the deep thinkers who got our national party started might be surprised that the Republic — as stove-up, surly, and senile as we perceive it to be today — survives at all.
That first one may have been more depressing than the second. The Republic has been in a state of collapse ever since I first took note of it. Maybe even longer. America’s very own Leaning Tower, possibly of pizza, almost certainly from Domino’s. We knew it was wrong, but we ate it anyway.
But creativity — an appeal to hearts and minds with words, sounds, and images — freed me to sing for my supper, the tab paid by all the poor suckers who actually had to work for a living. And now Warzel says that, like made-in-China Marxists, my tools have risen up against me.
Writes Warzel:
The people selling these tools are doing so with a powerful narrative: Generative AI supposedly supercharges all that it touches, democratizing creativity, eliminating friction, increasing productivity, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. … [But] the loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. … It is how we make meaning and move through the world.
I have not consciously employed any form of A.I. as I move through the world, making meaning. If I sniff its spoor in an online search, I tiptoe gingerly around it, trying not to get any on my shoes. WordPress offers a “Generate with A.I.” option when inserting images in a post, but I mostly generate my own images.
Or do I?
I’ve been a scribbler for as long as I can remember, and probably longer. Created my images in crayon on Big Chief tablets; in pencil, pen and ink on Bristol board, augmented with Zip-A-Tone; using Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s Preview; whatever was handy and could enhance my limited skillset.
“Enhance,” you say? Yup. The legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant tipped me to the Zip-A-Tone crosshatching shortcut when I interviewed him in the late Seventies for the Gazette. And I discovered the value of Photoshop a couple decades later when the bicycle magazines I worked for decided they wanted my cartoons in digital form, and in color, too.
I was no artist, as you probably already know. I tried using colored pencils and pens after first penciling an initial sketch and then inking it in. But when I fucked up — as I did, frequently — I had to start over from scratch, penciling and then inking and finally risking everything yet again on the whim of a Prismacolor Premier or Sharpie in my pig-ig’n’ant fingers. Digitizing the original black-and-white ’toons and coloring them in Photoshop let me magically undo what I had done and keep on keepin’ on.
It was so much easier. Frictionless, you might say.
I’ve been writing nearly as long, since George Gladney at the Colorado Springs Sun suggested I start keeping a journal back in 1974. Started with a Bic pen and a Vernon Royal composition book, then shifted to manual typewriter when I became a sure’nough reporter like Gladney, and finally went digital when the newspapers did.
If spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and autocorrection had been available I might have used them, but back then we had angry editors for that sort of thing, and it was either learn or leave. I had bills to pay, so I learned. When I became an angry editor myself word-processing software had made everyone a writer, or so they thought. The software processed their words and I processed what the software shat out.
And yet some people wondered why I was angry.
Well, soon I had company.
I was a terrible photographer and filmmaker when cameras still used film. I had something of an eye — woefully uneducated, in need of vision correction, yet basically operational — but there were so many aspects of the craft to learn if I really wanted to make the magic happen.
Happily for me — and unhappily for pro shooters — digital cameras came along, followed by phone cameras. And before you could say “Ansel Adams” three times fast even I could make an image for a blog post on the cookie-cutter, dot-com version of WordPress (shout-out to the folks at Automattic), with a little help (OK, sometimes a lot) from software (Photoshop early on, and now Apple’s Preview).
I never thought I was a photographer, but plenty of other people thought they were, including one middle-management type who emailed a lame phone-camera snap of a sprint and expected us to use that as “art” for an online race report.
Video got a whole lot easier about the same time, for the same reasons, and I actually made a little money off that, using GoPros and iMovie to assemble bike-review shorts for Adventure Cyclist. Occasionally, and strictly for laughs, I called myself Quentin Ferrentino (h/t to the Grimy Handshake). Meanwhile, podcasting let me walk a few squeaky klicks in the Firesign Theatre’s inflatable clown shoes, with an assist from Zoom, GarageBand, Auphonic, and Libsyn.
So am I a photographer? A moviemaker? A spoken-word artist? Is the driver a car?
The only legit titles I can claim are writer and cartoonist, I think. I can write or draw with a Bic pen on a blank sheet of paper and then staple that shit to a telephone pole if I want to. Less effort than Ben Franklin put into his Pennsylvania Gazette. Nothing between me and you but a little time and sweat equity.
A.I. won’t help me make it, and Google probably won’t help you find it.
But at least we’d know we made the effort while we wait to see whether these new tools become trusted advisers instead of questionable servants — or worse, malevolent masters. That teetering Republic ain’t gonna prop itself up.
Cheezus
Earlier this month, when Wirecutter ran a piece headlined “The Best Boxed Macaroni and Cheese,” I knew it was only the first course.
Today, behold the return of (drumroll, please) … Hamburger Helper!
Writing in The New York Times, proprietor of Wirecutter, food-industry reporter Julie Creswell tells us:
While most food companies are seeing declines in consumer demand for their products, sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5 percent in the year through August, getting an extra bump from its appearance on an episode of “The Bear” in June, according to the company that owns the brand, Eagle Foods.
And it’s not just because people are nostalgic for the good old Seventies, Creswell observes. Now, as then, the cost of food consumed at home is up considerably — 21 percent from four years ago — and the prices of beef, coffee, and many fruits and vegetables are likewise rising.
Thus Hungry America returns to Bullshit in a Box to keep their guts from greasing their backbones. Here’s Sally Lyons Wyatt, who advises packaged food companies at the research firm Circana:
“Cost-of-living expenses are up. Eating and drinking expenses are up. Consumers are looking for foods that fill them up for the least amount of money.”
More reporting like this, please. Americans may not care whether Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel still have jobs, but they might get sick of (or from) eating Yellow No. 5 with Extra Sodium three meals a day.
If you’re trying to cut corners as our “leaders” focus on the culture wars rather than cuisine, might I recommend Pierre Franey’s turkey chili? Herself and I can get three or four meals out of that one, spooned atop bowls of rice and sprinkled with crushed corn chips, cilantro, a sharpish cheddar, and a squeeze of lime.
Likewise this simple bolognese from Giada de Laurentiis. We got three servings apiece out of that one this week, over egg noodles, and then spread the remainder on a couple of corn pizza shells from Vicolo. Topped it with grated mozzarella and parmesan with a scattering of crushed red pepper.
But if you simply must have mac and cheese, well, take a whack at Bob Sloan’s recipe from “Dad’s Own Cookbook.”
And then tell the Dick Tater that he can eat shit. Hell, he already does.
Melting pot
I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.
It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.
This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.
Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.
Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.
After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.
Imagine that.
What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?
He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.
Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.
Through a glass, darkly
Weird dreams last night. Lots of rain; a bicycle with a dynamo light I couldn’t get working; a close encounter with a mystery motorist who nearly clipped me as I wrestled with the unresponsive light; long drives with people I knew through vaguely familiar landscapes and towns; a small, dilapidated guest house that likewise had the feel of someplace I’d lived before; a couple of friendly dogs I didn’t recognize; and a visit to and some conversation with a genial old man living in a single cluttered room.
What finally blew me out of bed at 5:19 a.m. — and I mean had me out of the rack and onto my feet in some fight-or-flight reaction — was the sound of a woman either laughing or crying.
Herself watching a cute-animal video on the iPad? The garlicky pasta sauce I made for dinner? La Llorona?
Wasn’t Herself. She was in the kitchen making coffee and entertaining Miss Mia Sopaipilla. And she had disturbing dreams too, about her late mom and an old friend who passed not long after Herself the Elder. So it could’ve been the pasta sauce, I suppose.
La Llorona? A strong maybe. This is the Southwest, after all, though my crowd, the Ó Grádaighs of County Clare, is more closely associated with the banshee, an Irish herald of death.
So it may be relevant that yesterday I spoke with one old bro’ about friends and relatives gone west, and with another about the Doors, who took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book describing his experiences with mescaline, “The Doors of Perception,” its title likewise lifted from a William Blake metaphor in his book, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
Now, I have had my own experiences with mescaline and other psychedelics, starting in “high” school and continuing off and on into the Eighties. And they certainly took the Windex to my perceptual doors, if only for a little while.
But these days I see “through a glass, darkly,” as did Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, adding, “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
Or, as newspaper lingo once had it: “More TK” (more to come).
Y’think? Naw. Maybe? I dunno.
Until further enlightenment arrives, I’m betting on either garlicky pasta sauce or acid flashback, though the latter doesn’t explain why Herself had weird dreams too. An acid head she was not.
The good news? We have leftovers. So, “more TK.”
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