Stevie: did you hear that lady ask how come we always do so well in class?
MO: yeah, did you see what she uses as treats? cardboard squares sprayed with fish sauce.
Stevie: ooh. i love those!
MO: …
Stevie: how come ownerlady goes through all the trouble to cook the meat?
MO: dunno. something about messy pockets
Stevie: lame
MO: i heard this chef once say that he was always disappointed when he cooked a piece of meat because it always shrank in size. you never get back what you put in.
Stevie: even counting the liquid that’s leftover in the pot?
MO: even counting that.
Stevie: (sigh)
MO: and this chef really preferred baking, since something baked always rises. you get more for your money.
Stevie: yeah
MO: speaking of baking
Stevie: ?
Stevie: it wasn’t me.
MO: oh really
Stevie: the bastardo must have kyped it. wasn’t me i swear.
MO: which bastardo you talking about?
Stevie: the B/W one
MO: …
time is a funny thing, especially “brain time,” which is the clock inside our heads that we rely on as “real,” even though it’s actually dependent on our subjective consciousness and perception rather than fixed increments of seconds, microseconds, etc.
the April 25, 2011 issue of the New Yorker has a fabulous article by Burkhard Bilger on David Eagleman and brain time. David is a fellow New Mexican, which fuels my half-assed theory that kids who grow up in New Mexico develop such a weird sense of space and scale they are bound to have a screwy understanding of time as well.
during grad school David didn’t want to take time away from programming in order to eat so he kept a bag of raw potatoes under his desk. he would cook the potato in the microwave and bite at it while he typed. Impressive!
here’s my version of that, eating the entire bucket of ice cream while waiting for something to process. (definitely a disadvantage to have to use both hands, but it’s homemade salted caramel ice cream and that you cannot possibly manage with one hand).
as everyone knows, our perception of time is context dependent. our contractor told us our garage would take a month to fix up, and now three months later it’s really pretty much, essentially, nearly done. so nearly done that we’ve put up the ropes for the yoga wall, and we’ve hung our contractor up on them. ask him how long he thought we left him hanging there, and he’d say half a minute or more when in reality it was closer to 10 seconds.
which is a long time compared to the couple of seconds it took for me to snap this photo at Lincoln Center, where some guy behind me said “some people think they can stop and hold everyone up for a minute just to take a picture,”
and in the excruciatingly long 80 minutes of opera that followed, my brain drifted to things that take an even longer time (relatively) to happen, like my current writing project, the gentrification of Williamsburg (hello! Blue Bottle coffee!), and the formation of a redwood forest.
after all, for every action there is an equal and opposite abstraction. or in other words, they will make no sticks to chew on, before it’s time.
meanwhile back in sunny Cali, from the Front, Back, Side and Middle, here’s proof that there really is less evil in the world, and that a sort of detente among B/W creatures is possible.
Back decades ago, when the chain stores started invading NY, and every corner seemed to sprout a Starbucks or a Rite Aid, Blockbuster Video, Bon au Pain, or a Gap, a friend of mine so aptly said “LA has won.”
Now that the city boasts even more shops from the global marketplace (on this trip a friend said “the reason they have all the same shops you see all over the world is to make it seem less scary to shop in NY) and even the street vendors have the same stuff unloaded from the MOTHER CRAPU STORE that is China, the truly great remaining bits of NY become that much more precious.
NY is still the place for me where bagels are not only edible but delicious, and only there do they give you so much cream cheese you end up with a small cheesecake on your plate after you’ve finished the bagel.
NY is also the place where Sullivan Street Bakery is no longer on Sullivan Street, (a very Los Angeles thing, actually, where Western Ave is east of West Blvd, and they are both located in the east side of the city) and the bakery that took it’s place on Sullivan Street, (the result of some sort of partner divorce split) Grandaisy, is also no longer in the old location on Sullivan street. But at least you know “B” still stands for Bread.
Inside the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a little door painted green and blue like a bad Monet, and through that you must pass underneath some really old and funky looking HVAC ducts to get to another door that says: CAUTION. do not let this close behind you, it will LOCK.
Once inside you arrive at a concrete bunker/meditation pond with a chair, a bulb and the happiest, fattest (and some very pregnant) goldfish you have ever seen. This is where to go when Armageddon hits New York. The only drawback is all the lower levels of the Met do not get reception of any kind. Just don’t let that door close behind you.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the public-sanctioned part of the Met there was a nice little show of stuff from Emperor Qianlong’s private retirement retreat in the Forbidden City, including some drawings of him practicing western-style rendering of antlers. Hey, not bad for an emperor.
Meanwhile, Qianlong’s contemporaries (r. 1736–95) were busy doing what Chinese painters do best – letting a few detailed brushstrokes act as a metonym of something large and abstract and difficult to draw. What these little waves do is bear the representational weight of the entire ocean on their shoulders. They allow all the other water scenes in the painting to be abstract and spaghetti-like, and the whole scroll, some 12 feet long, remains anchored in representation. (Xu Yang, 1750)
A few other fabulous things – Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar can do everything LA can’t: tiny 6 table space with the smallest kitchen in the world, no gas, no coffee, no tea, and a prix-fixe menu that was as reasonable as the food was exquisite. El Quinto Pino’s way awesome bartender served us a basil-gin-lemon slushy that seemed to come out of a feed tube, along with their exquisite Uni Panini and other tasty goods, and finally dinner at Blue Hill on Easter Sunday, where they sent every table home with a half pack of their farm fresh eggs.
In case the eggs got me into trouble with security at JFK, i put the Peeps my lovely hotel left on my pillow in with the eggs in my bag. seems hard to make someone with no shoes on, whose belt is in the bucket and pants are falling down, who calculated just the right amount of lotion to bring, to toss out raw eggs if they’re accompanied by Peeps.
Finally, it might be obvious that other than the bagel, which was eaten at lunchtime, there are no food shots. no artic char with onion glass, no Pulpo a Feira con Cachelos, no passionfruit marshmallow… this is the curse of an iphone battery that cannot last a single day. where in Los Angeles there is always the car to plug into, in NY a semi-functioning battery will bring nothing but darkness after the sun goes down.
Errol Morris’ piece on Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Pythagorus, and incommensurability is a giant brain bender, and it forced me to back the bus up many years. i read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a long time ago as an undergraduate crashing a seminar led by Todd Gitlin, but i was taught the weird concept of the square root of 2 before i could even drive. it wasn’t anything profound, but i was mesmerized at how a number could go on forever, without repeating itself. forever, back then, was the length of time it took for my friend to make a cassette recording of The Clash’s Sandinista, but i still couldn’t grasp the idea. really? forever?
it was so beautiful too, a right triangle with sides of 1. so small, so simple, yet a little sad. that’s all it gets, the three sides, with the funny symbol over the 2.
i imagined standing at the point in space designated by the number 1.414, and looking over the chasm at the number 1.415, and thinking that “forever” happened in between those numbers. it took me a long time to understand that there are way more irrational numbers than rational ones; it’s just that the rational numbers are the ones you can count. it’s sort of like the Republican’s view on redrawing district lines; they want to consider only the people who can vote.
back then i wondered why the other commonly known irrational numbers π and e seemed more practical, for instance both π and e had special names, whereas the square root of 2 was just the square root of 2. e has something to do with how much your credit card charges you when you don’t pay your bill, and anyone who’s ever tried to bake a charlotte from scratch knows the power of using π to figure out how long to make the ladyfinger piece that will wrap around the entire cake. but poor old dowdy square root of 2? not much, unless you spend a lot of time in a country that still uses legal-sized paper and want to know who in their right mind thinks that 8.5×14″ paper is useful. well, it isn’t. (most of the world uses paper based the aspect ratio of the square root of 2. this means when a piece of paper is folded in half in those countries, the resulting piece of paper has the same aspect ratio as the parent, and it corresponds to the next size down in terms of the paper tray. whereas our aspect ratios are all different for our commonly used papers, and all retarded – just look at 8.5×5.5!).
so, in honor of Morris, language, meaning, and the square root of 2, here’s two ways of looking at the same window:
two ways of looking at a pork tenderloin stuffed with pistachios and yogurt, with a coffee-cumin rub:
and… four ways of looking at the same piece of sandwich bread floating in a stream:
Jacques Pepin has a great show on television called Fast Food My Way, where he prepares a three course dinner in a hour, from start to finish. the details are lovely to watch, if you’re not too busy drooling: the way he slices an onion, or spreads jam on poundcake. one of my favorite things is whenever he uses eggs or chickens, he talks about how if he were on a deserted island he would be perfectly happy if there were nothing on the entire island but eggs. but then his sentence always seems to drag on, and he adds to that island a few chickens, a bottle of wine, some fresh peas…a couple of sausages… but really…just a couple of eggs…
a month ago the folks at Chamber Four started a series called Desert Isle Books, where writers were asked to discuss the one book they would bring with them to a deserted island. they didn’t make any restrictions on food, so i figured i’d get to bring my one book, plus all the eggs, chickens and bottles of wine i wanted.
