Chateau Fluffy closed down! Chateau Fluffy, of course, was Cafe du Jour at 117 West Washington Street in Ann Arbor, where I worked as a baker, sous chef, and occasional kitchen manager for four and a half years. The sign posted on the window blamed the closure on "severe economic conditions," which, though there had been more than a few problems in the past, sounds pretty plausible to me. I've been hearing weird rumors through the grapevine regarding what'll happen to the place next, but will keep them to myself for now as there's enough of that kind of thing on the Internet. It's a little sad, really; it was well past time for me to leave by the time I switched jobs in May '08, but much of what I know about cooking and the restaurant business I learned there and I wished it well (strangely enough, a slightly flaky girl who used to work there as well just walked past my front porch). I may learn more after a few chats here and there; I doubt the space will remain empty for long, and have to wonder what'll come next. There's an unexpectedly revealing look here at Ann Arbor food culture in which there's a brief shot of the storefront. One of my favorite things I learned to do there was make quiches (whence I migrated to tarts), and so here's...

Tarte Corfiote (taken from an existing recipe, but it didn't have a "tart" name, so I gave it one based on the ingredients' Greco-Italian nature, although tarte heptanese sounds even better--I'm guessing the recipe probably isn't actually native to Corfu):

1 tart pastry

2 tbsp olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 lb. leafy greens (any will do, but I used chard from our "kitchen garden" at work), coarsely chopped

1/4 cup chopped and pitted Kalamata olives

15 oz. ricotta

salt

2 large eggs

2 oz. ricotta salata or feta

Preheat oven to 400. Saute garlic in olive oil until soft. Add greens and cook until soft. Beat together ricotta, olives, greens, and salt, then beat in eggs. Pour mixture into tart pastry and sprinkle feta on top. Cook tart for 30-40 minutes until done. 

I found it a disappointment, to be honest. The Natural Area Preservation Volunteer Potluck for which it was intended quickly devoured it, and I hope people enjoyed it, but maybe this is just natural irritation on the part of the cook. The ingredients themselves prepared beautifully--the chard with garlic was spectacular, and the resulting aroma was brilliant. It was a little underseasoned (maybe a little more salt?), but I'm more of the opinion that I'm just not a ricotta kind of guy, at least in combination with these other ingredients. The texture was similar to vanilla ice cream, and there were even a few taste similarities, but overall it seemed rather blah in comparison to the all-too-brief tastes of the kalamatas and chard. I'm not quite prepared to give up on the recipe, though, and may try a more flavorful cheese in the very near future (especially as I still have a crapload of chard to play with).

Bo Schembechler's grave looks surprisingly picturesque from this distance (blogged much of this from my porch--it was a spectacular day).

Well, I screwed up the beet roesti, so that recipe's out. Some of the resulting hash was washed away in the sink, so the post title's at least vaguely fitting this time. I might try it later with vanilla ice cream. It's unclear where I stand on beets right now--they weren't disgusting, as I feared, but the rather nondescript taste really made me wonder why I'd gone to all the trouble of peeling and grating them. Lesson learned, I suppose.

The Visitor (2007): Thomas McCarthy is a writer, actor and director who has been seen in films from Meet The Parents to Good Night and Good Luck to Flags of Our Fathers, and more recently as the sleazy, ethically-challenged journalist on The Wire's final season. Richard Jenkins is an actor who almost anyone would recognize from somewhere--the acid-tripping FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster and Ben Stiller's psychiatrist in There's Something About Mary in particular. One directs the other in The Visitor, a jewel of a film about one man's curious education in multiculturalism. Walter Vail (Jenkins) is a professor at a Connecticut college who's essentially shut down since the death of his wife and conducts his career on auto-pilot. A chance errand to New York to give a paper at a globalization conference reveals that his city apartment has been rented-- unbeknownst to him--to two illegal immigrants, Syrian Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Senegalese Zainab (Danai Gurira). Less through kindness than through a simple inability to deal with the situation, Walter lets them stay and gradually befriends them, finding a bond with Tarek in particular through their mutual love of music (Walter's wife played the piano, Tarek plays the drums). When a simple technicality gets Tarek arrested and thrown into a detention center in Queens, Walter finds a purpose that had eluded him for years, especially when Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) shows up looking for her son. The Visitor is a marvelous film experience, making its points simply and effectively, and taking full advantage of its cast's abilities (sometimes remarkably so--this was apparently Gurira's film debut). Jenkins was nominated for an Oscar, and little wonder, as the experience of a quiet, reserved man awaking to what the world has to offer is matched with a stalwart character actor offered the chance to lead a finely observed film. The symbolism and ironies occasionally veer dangerously towards the too obvious--an economics professor working a market stall and a nearly displaced native-born American officiating at a globalization conference--but McCarthy's directorial touch and the cast's surefootedness (Jenkins and Abbass have fantastic chemistry) make The Visitor one of the best and most pertinent American films of the past decade.

Circle of Deceit (1981): Volker Schlondorff is probably my favorite German director by now, mainly on the strength of the magnificent The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), a brilliant slice of political theater (based on the Heinrich Boll novel and co-directed by Margarethe von Trotta) in which an innocent woman is victimized by an uncaring system. I haven't seen 1979's The Tin Drum, but probably should, although I'm not the biggest fan of the book. Based on the memoir by Nicholas Born, Circle looks at the travails of German journalist Laschen (the always excellent Bruno Ganz*) sent to cover the war in Lebanon, by then into its fifth year and showing no sign of victory on the part of either Muslim or Christian militias (the Israelis would invade a year later). While there, he finds himself unable to connect with his job, wondering how he can accurately convey the suffering around him, especially with the distractions of an attractive widow (an incandescent Hanna Schygulla) and his earthier photographer colleague (Jerzy Skolimowski), whose taste for the jugular cuts across his own doubts. Much of the filming was done in and around actual combat zones, and the surreal nature of the fighting in Beirut is brilliantly captured on camera--in the DVD extras, Schlondorff reveals that he eschewed the obvious decision for handheld cameras in favor of a more traditional setup, as the situation was already "real" enough. A simple story at heart, Circle uses the political and cultural divide between Europe and the Middle East as a vehicle for larger personal questions, such as one's relation to violence and the conflict between reality and media illusion, if there even is one anymore.

 *The Downfall parodies on www.funnyordie.co.uk, so dependent on his remarkable performance as Hitler, were apparently made with his explicit blessing--along with his work in Wenders' The American Friend (1977), that makes him one of the coolest people working in films today, if you ask me.

It's been well over a week since I got Internet, and I must admit the connection has made a subtle impact on my life.  My mental map doesn't seem to revolve so much around the library anymore, and I'm not as cheesed off at staying late at work as I was (not that it was a huge deal in the first place) as I can always catch up on the news and such at home now. As I think I mentioned last time, it'll take some time for the implications of it all to sink in, but for right now, it's actually encouraged me to get out more, as I'm maybe all too aware of the dangers of staying in all day. Every time I try, guilt kicks in and I take the bike out for a couple of hours, as happened today.

So what have I been doing? Having BBC World News constantly available has been a delight, as have the various programs available on the iPlayer radio sites, especially those on BBC 7. Not only are they running a set of original Paul McGann Doctor Who audio plays (Sheridan Smith's funny as hell), but I also got to listen to the genius of Tony Hancock for the first time (an episode of Hancock's Half Hour from 1958) and a very interesting BBC 2 documentary on Frankie Howerd. The sheer international sweep and range of the stuff on offer is nearly intoxicating. It's not all foreign shores--I followed much of the Michigan game today on the hilarious live blog for mgoblog.com.

YouTube, of course, has been spectacular, especially for one who was hooked in his childhood on various historical miniseries. The soundtracks to Shogun and Jesus of Nazareth are both lovingly preserved by dedicated enthusiasts (especially the former's stunning "Mariko's Theme"). Both are by Maurice Jarre, the "third wheel" in my personal trinity of film and TV composers. Ennio Morricone was the head, John Barry was the heart... so I wonder where that leaves Jarre. He was probably the de facto favorite composer of my youth, as the music to the aforementioned miniseries certainly had a lot to do with my eventual fascination on both subjects. There are even clips from 1981's Peter and Paul and 1985's Christopher Columbus (the former has a great moment from the shipwrecked Paul--Anthony Hopkins--in Sicily, with Jon Finch as Luke and Gareth Thomas, of all people, as the centurion Julius, with some engrossing dialogue that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence). The only disappointment is that there's only a NBC preview for 1985's Peter the Great (although the search led me to this hilarious amateur video on the Czar's life).

I'm sure I'll start using it for good eventually, but it's comforting to know that there's somewhere I can always go to listen to the theme music to Danger Man or Jason King.

My housemates decided to sign up for the Internet, and, considering the cost and that winter was coming up, I opted to join in. On getting a USB wireless adapter for my now rather stately Dell Dimension 2350, I found to my not-total surprise and shock that it was too old and out-of-date to accept what was apparently the most basic wireless technology available for our house. The next day, I went out, got a laptop, and joined the twenty-first century. It was time.

 For the first time ever, I'm typing this on a Compaq Celeron 900 which I got at Best Buy after finding that the Toshiba Satellite I was eyeing wasn't in stock at Office Max in Arborland. That was actually a bit of a relief, as Office Max was one of the Arborland businesses that hadn't come out against the bus stop closure (thanks again, Borders and Hiller's) and I was correspondingly loath to throw any business their way.

I wound up with a much greater bus journey than I had anticipated, which was fine by me. The day turned out to be a spectacular one, one of those endangered autumn brilliances (before autumn actually starts, no less), which was a shock to me, as I'd thought it was supposed to be somewhere around 80 and clear. The Best Buy guy was friendly and helpful, and the only dark moment came when I left my beloved wool hat (I'm not given to falling for wool hats, but this one had sentimental value beyond its purpose or function) on the #16 bus. It had gone missing often enough before, but this time it's for good. In a year with so much shakeup and change, maybe that's fitting. I'll probably keep the Dell around for word processing (that's all I used it for before anyway), as the new unit only has Microsoft Works. It's served me well over the years (though I've wanted to kill that mouse more times than I care to remember), but it's undeniable that an era has passed.

I'm now in my room, ready to go out and maybe ride around for an hour before I return and start seriously playing. Hopefully the new lifestyle won't take away from the variety I enjoy, and I doubt it will--I've already written around a thousand words today and nipped by the market for turnip greens and tatsoi (which I'll probably eat tonight with pizza and beer, but nobody's perfect).

Happy Wednesday!

Maybe it's all the fun I've been having at Plastic Passion, DJ Josh Burge's monthly 80s dance night at the Heidelberg, but I've suddenly found myself in an 80s nostalgia trip somehow. As someone who spent much of his time during the 80s wishing they would end, this is a little puzzling.

Pretty In Pink (1986): John Hughes' recent untimely passing occurred right as I was finishing a story inspired by 80s nostalgia, and if anything only increased the nostalgia value. I consider The Breakfast Club to be, in its way, one of the most overrated movies in cinema;it's not so much the relentless, talky teenage self-pity that turns me off as it is Ally Sheedy's disgraceful fate at the end. Was that supposed to be a joke? Ferris Bueller's Day Off, on the other hand, I'd adored ever since I first saw it in the theater, and it only gets better. Kevin Murphy's written elsewhere that the eponymous character could be an Aristophanes figure or Bugs Bunny, and I think that's behind why I love it so much. Even though he didn't actually direct it (and who'll remember poor Howard Deutch's name when discussing the 80s?), Pretty In Pink might actually be his most genuinely affecting movie, dealing as it does with the intersection of adolescence and class, even if the manner's sometimes cartoonishly extreme. I'd never actually seen it until about ten years ago, and didn't for whatever reason appreciate it (probably something to do with my continued relief, in 1997, that the 80s were still over), This time around, it was pretty good. Andi (Molly Ringwald), a poor teenager, falls for Blane (Andrew McCarthy), a rich teenager, to the horror of her best friend and secret admirer Duckie (Jon Cryer). It's all very believable and compelling, although Cryer can be a bit much at times (Two And A Half Men is in many ways an awful show, but his chemistry with Charlie Sheen is strangely reassuring). The plot moves in much the way one would expect, but sometimes in unusual, surprising ways. Though the conflict is cartoonish, none of the characters are, not even the egregious Steff, Blane's slimy "richie" pal played with industrial-strength smarm by James Spader. It's nice to see a bit of genuine nonconformity in an 80s movie that isn't played for laughs--Andi and Duckie are the movie's heart, with able support and advice from a couple of older, wiser characters: Andi's record store boss (Annie Potts), and her mournful, rumpled old father (Harry Dean Stanton, whose presence in one of the ultimate 80s flicks embodies, for me, a majestic middle finger to "the 80s"--hurray!). Though the ending may seem a little pat and cliched for some viewers, the fact that these questions were raised or explored at all is a welcome reminder of the decade's reality.

The Lost Boys (1987): Much less so, to say the least, is perhaps one of the most representative works of one of the most awful big-budget directors that this country's ever... "produced" is a polite word. I stayed away from this one forever, especially after I heard that Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark of the same year was much better. Vampires, to me, represent a mix of an unbridled, wholly selfish will to power and greed with a certain aesthetic snobbery. Fascism and aristocracy, essentially, and if you think that's cool, have at it. Of course, one might suggest this nature to be perfectly suited to cinematic treatment in the 80s, especially from the fetishistic director who later "gave"--again, a polite word--us Batman and Robin (I don't remember being able to watch it all the way through). The Coreys are in it, too. Lucy (a luminous Dianne Wiest, easily the best--and sexiest--figure in the film) and her sons Mike (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) move to a sinister beach town in California which is being terrorized by a gang of biker vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland. Sam eventually enlists the aid of a couple of comic rats (including Corey Feldman) to defeat the forces of evil and rescue Mike and his new girlfriend (Jami Gertz; as with Sarah Jessica Parker, Square Pegs was the last time she wasn't annoying in anything) from the fate of the undead. It's terrible but at least it's mildly entertaining (unlike Lifeforce, on which see here). Edward Herrmann (looking rather similar to John Hughes, strangely enough) shows up as Lucy's potential love interest, and some of the special effects aren't bad. The pre-teen son of my housemate (who, in the grand tradition of my housemates creepily having their family members come to stay for extended periods, has been at the house for a couple of months; here's hoping he leaves once school starts, if he's even going) wandered in a few times and asked me what I was watching. As he looks slightly like Corey Haim if you toasted him lightly in the oven for a few minutes, I did get a few laughs out of the whole thing.

"The Rambo Experience" (1982-85): Due to the relentless--indeed Rambo-like--peer pressure from BHF chums and work colleagues, I finally chose to accept my destiny as a child of the 80s and see yet another of the decade's most emblematic films. Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) was one of the decade's most influential and symptomatic works of art, and as a nascent liberal growing up at that time I loathed what it had wrought and avoided it like the plague. Now, after the admittedly safe distance of twenty-odd years, I find they're rather enjoyable. First Blood, of course, is actually a genuinely decent movie, based on David Morrell's novel of a troubled Vietnam vet who runs into hassle while drifting through a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The "troubled Vietnam vet" had been a staple of low-budget exploitation movies during the previous decade, but First Blood was pretty mcuh the first time they were treated--by and large--sympathetically. John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) comes into town looking for an old combat buddy, and the local sherriff (Brian Dennehy) doesn't like his looks. A few incidents snowball into a regionwide hunt for Rambo, whose skills in combat and survival effectively hamstring the National Guard pursuit. Aiding and (in my opinion) hampering the latter is Col. Trautmann (Richard Crenna), Rambo's former commanding officer and without question the most entertaining character in these movies. Interestingly, Trautmann was (I'm told) originally portrayed as the villain in Morrell's novel (superbly analyzed in Susan Faludi's still relevant 1999 Stiffed), and I thought I caught an echo if that in the film: he more or less seems to get off scot-free while this "killing machine" that he's created lumbers around the woods and causes havoc. Trautmann's "protesting too much" is, for me, the highlight of both Rambo movies, and can form an enjoyable party game if you're so inclined. Every fifteen minutes or so, some cast member will suggest yet another ineffective measure to stop Rambo (or, in the second movie, another possible obstacle he'll have to face), and Trautmann launches into this earnest disquisition on his "creation's" unstoppable nature, e.g. "You're sending two hundred men (or however many it was) against Rambo? Well, sherriff, you'd better have a good supply of body bags." This happens several times (not enough) during First Blood, and I daresay you can tell that Brian Dennehy and Bill McKinney might have been getting a little sick of it.* It's also great fun to watch frequent beatings administered to David Caruso. Rambo: First Blood Part II is wholly ridiculous, but also a lot more fun than I expected. Doing hard labor for his actions in First Blood, Rambo gets a visit from Trautmann, who wants him to infiltrate a camp in Southeast Asia still holding American MIAs. After being debriefed by the sleazy Murdoch (Charles Napier), Rambo's parachuted into enemy territory, is captured, escapes, and then proceeds to go on the most cartoonish killing spree I've ever seen. Maybe it's that the last half-hour or so pretty much influenced all the violence-porn of the present day, but it somehow felt familiar and almost cozy to me. When Weird Al Yankovic parodied Rambo's antics in UHF, I thought he was going over the top. Wrong. The "exploding guy" scene is rendered almost literally. Make sure to watch for Rambo's explanation of what "expendable" means (a great comic highlight) and the sight of Rambo (piloting a captured Russian chopper--oh, he's fighting the Russkies, too) blowing up nearly every single hut in the enemy village. I have yet to see Rambo 3, where Rambo helps out a captured Trautmann and the mujahedin (dedicated, apparently, to the "freedom-loving people of Afghanistan"). Whew!

*An edited collection of our attempts at work: "You think that's gonna stop Rambo? Man, he's hungry, and he's ready for it. He's hungry for pizza, sherriff. He's ready for a pizza party. He'll turn you inside out, rip the skin off your face and twirl it around in the air, and then he'll have his pizza party. With your face. And he's racist." 

My friend Leeann had her thirtieth birthday last week, and I decided to try a variation on a dish I'd made some time back for friends coming over to watch movies. The recipe was listed in my cookbook as "Circassian Chicken," a mix of chicken and a walnut paste from the Russian Caucasus that turned out very fresh-tasting but which still had a little something missing. A variation was given, a richer and thicker concoction called satsivi, which came from further south in Georgia.

 Here's the original recipe. Simmer a 3 lb. chicken in a large pan or pot with 2 quartered onions, 1 sliced carrot, 1 celery stic, and 6 peppercorns, for about an hour until the chicken is tender.l Leave to cool in the stock. Drain the chicken and reserve the stock. Tear up 3 slices of bread and soak in 6 tbsp of chicken stock. Blend in food processor with 2 garlic cloves and 3 1/2 cups chopped walnuts, adding 1 cup of remaining stock. Process until smooth, then transfer to a pan. Over low heat, gradually add more chicken stock to sauce, stirring occasionally until it thickens to pouring consistency. Remove pan from heat and season sauce with salt and pepper. Leave sauce to cool. Skin and bone cooked chicken, then cut into bite-size chunks. Place in bowl and add a little sauce. Stir to coat the chicken, then arrange on a serving dish. Spoon remaining sauce over chicken, and drizzle with walnut oil. Sprinkle with paprika and walnuts and serve.

With the satsivi variation I made a number of shortcuts and substitutions. I had quite a bit of chicken stock (made with Grana Padano rinds, no less) already, so I simply used Amish chicken thighs (they usually have the most intense flavor) instead. The same went for bread crumbs, of which I had a surfeit and used in lieu of soaking bread in chicken stock. The satsivi variation called for two chopped, sauteed onions to add to the sauce before pureeing, then to season later with cinnamon, allspice, cloves and coriander, and the top it before serving with paprika, cayenne, and "a drizzle of pomegranate syrup." All done, but I didn't have cloves or syrup and forgot the paprika and cayenne.

 Making the thing turned out a lot less onerous than I expected. I chopped and sauteed the onions the night before, and managed to work in a batch of cheddar-parmesan scones (now my official fall-back recipe) with it. The whole thing barely took two hours. When cooking at home, I tend to work at a leisurely pace, and so was rather proud of myself that it came in at such a good time. As with the Circassian recipe, my favorite part of making satsivi came with the sauce. Just like harissa, shawarma, or tagine, the name refers to the sauce or method of preparation rather than the actual dish. Once the food processor let the walnuts do their work and grind in the onions and bread crumbs (with help from the chicken stock), cooking the sauce in the pan was almost a joy, especially with the rather boring spectacle of the chicken thighs simmering in the pot nearby. Satsivi turned rather darker than the Circassian sauce, especially after the cinnamon and allspice went in. The smell was a superbly rich aroma that sadly dissipated after it cooled (the same went for the Circassian)--I need to try it warm sometime, though it's meant to be taken cold (and as such was a favorite Jewish dish--I got the recipe from a Jewish cookbook--because it could be made ahead and eaten on Shabbat). Stirring the sauce, watching the edges brown and the middle thicken, then adding more chicken stock and seeing the process begin anew, was by far my favorite part of this one.

I rode them over that day to Gallup Park on my bike in the middle of a gorgeous day--perfect conditions for a picnic. I hung out with Leeann and her family for a while and, at the partial suggestion of others, set down a written description of satsivi so I wouldn't have to keep explaining myself. Everyone seemed interested, but I'm pretty sure I had to throw the vast majority of the thing out at the end of the night--it might have seemed a little too outlandish, especially with vast quantities of fried chicken nearby. The scones proved quite popular, but I felt a little sorry for the satsivi, especially as it had sat outside for a few hours in near-eighty-degree weather and I didn't dare keep it. Next time I go to a dinner party or indoor potluck, I might try it again. For now, though, I'll have the memory of that afternoon. It was great to cook again, and I need to get cracking, especially as autumn nears and my soup skills might come in handy. 

Fear of some inchoate and nonexistent fate or nemesis prevents me from honestly missing the days when I used to be bored. Somehow the past month or so has seen my acvtivity skyrocket. The bike's certainly changed a great deal. Among other things, it's taught me to be more attentive to the grades of roads (on which I now ride generally exclusively) and swells which I'd never even notice while walking. Ann Arbor's not terribly hilly downtown, but once you leave, they start to buck and swell every which way, especially towards the Huron River. The bike, in turn, leads to my trying to swim every week. I finally went to Fuller Pool, which had kept me away with its alarmingly long lap lanes (100m, but keep in mind I hadn't swum regularly in some years), but it hasn't turned out to be a problem. It's a gorgeous place to be, especially in full sunlight, and the water feels great.

 Captivating as all this doubtlessly is, I think it helps to explain another long blog absence. Art Fair came and went with little bitching from me, this time, given all the other stuff I've wound up doing. Most of it's writing--no fiction, but at least a cover letter to send with a few stories to the handful of remaining venues out there, as well as a possible few book reviews for a local publication. There's also a collaborative artistic project on which I'm working, the details of which I can't divulge at present (long story, as you can probably imagine). As captivating as all that doubtlessly sounds, it's actually whittled my blogging subjects down to nothing. Hopefully next month will be less active and more contemplative. 

Oh God, what am I saying? 

A revolution in my affairs occurred earlier this week when Sara and I finally managed to wrench the rusted lock off her old bike whose frame doesn't suit her--as a result she never uses it--and it passed off the fence and into my possession. I haven't ridden a bike in sixteen years, and the sensible thing to do, no doubt, would be to take things slowly at first, getting reacclimatized to the rhythms and physical demands of cycling. A very silly thing to do, of course, would be to ride upwards of twenty miles the very next day.

I fully intended to follow the first course, really, I did. After doing my gardening at the deli, I had little intention beyond maybe making it to Argo Park and along the bike trail to Bandemer. One thing led to another, though, especially along the new Border-to-Border Trail the county developed along the Huron River to link northwest Ann Arbor to southwest Ypsilanti. First Riverside, then Fuller, then... I just couldn't stop myself. The trail starts at Bandemer, but I started at Argo and wound the trailway through the aforementioned, then Gallup before the trail nudged a "pass," so to speak, connecting Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, surmounted by riding a fairly steep grade across the Huron to connect with Dixboro Road and thence the campuses of Washtenaw Community College, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, and Eastern Michigan University before hitting Depot Town and Ypsilanti proper. I only made it to Depot Town, unsure of both my own capabilities and the specific route onward down the Huron. I lost the route past Rynearson Stadium (and it didn't help all that much that there was a fair bit of construction along Hewitt), backtracking along Washtenaw and Whittier until regaining the campus (not the route, whch I only rediscovered on my return trip thanks to an unexpected directional instinct). Despite the brief temptation to load my bike on the #4 bus and cruise happily back home on public transport, I went ahead and took the trail back, discovering the short cut that paralleled Whittier--and with no hills, to boot--on my return journey. By my reckoning, I did about twenty-two or twenty-three miles and crossed the Huron River eighteen times.

It was ninety degrees Fahrenheit, with frequent sun and a heat index of a hundred, and I'm certainly not eighteen anymore. I started to feel a little under-the-weather that evening, and woke up with a bit of a sore throat and feling a trifle feverish. All's well now, though I've learned a definite lesson about my limits (and another one, like I needed it, as to the unpredictably whorish Michigan weather--I got caught out in a furious gale the next day where the wind chill occasionally dropped to fifty, from what I could tell*). Still, it was totally worth it. Making one's way along familiar paths via bike as opposed to foot is a vastly different experience (and with my feet, a much healthier one--I was a little worried about that, but it turned out to be quite a blessing, as they feel great) and completely changes the landscape in many ways. This was quite noticeable around the Michigan campus, especially the Diag, but most of all in the actual parks, mainly Gallup and Riverside. The foliage and the water just zoom by, and there's a much better chance of spotting wildlife as the bike is much faster and quieter than walking (the chipmunks are all safe, in case you were wondering, although I really hope I didn't run over that butterfly). People seem to nod and smile more, perhaps because the "awkwardness window" is drastically curtailed (maybe one has less time to worry about how their smile and nod will be received--they're very uptight about that in Ann Arbor). It was interesting to ride through areas I was pretty sure I'd never seen before, such as the St. Joseph Mercy campus (where the "B2B" people have really done good work, with scenic overlooks over the Huron bluffs and gentle trails through heavily canopied woods where you could barely remember that there was any sun at all) and the grimly vital (vitally grim?) student ghettos of EMU. There were a couple of scary moments when I worried that my lock had rusted shut again. Margot had lent me some rust-remover and its application proved the magic touch that finally freed the bike in the first place, but I forgot to bring it with me. I was most worried at Beezy's in downtown Ypsi (where I probably caught that sore throat, as the air inside, where I bought my Faygo, felt like they had it down to sixty), but I think I've got the hang of it now. I had little trouble from traffic, although I kept mostly to the sidewalk until I know a little better what I'm doing. My only other major experience of biking was in Louisiana in the mid-eighties to early nineties (my bike was stolen in college and I never got around to getting another), mainly around the older suburbs of Baton Rouge and the LSU campus, and I can't really make any comparisons--I don't think the traffic patterns were any different. I understand that Washtenaw County is a much more bike-friendly location, although I'm still sticking to the sidewalks. I used to get annoyed at overly aggressive bikers who insisted on using the sidewalk, but maybe they had the same reasons I did (it probably helps that I'm not aggressive at all, at least not on this issue)--maybe I was just jealous.** All in all, it was a marvelous day, even with the possible sunstroke, and I can't get over how much this changes for me. It'll probably halve my bus usage, and I already made it to work (for gardening duty) before my foolhardy odyssey, and little problem there. The idea that I can get any number of places quickly, easily, and enjoyably in a healthy way without long-term podiatric inconvenience or using up fossil fuels is really quite intoxicating. The "voyages" I've planned (Delhi, Dexter, Saline) will probably have to wait until I'm a little wiser and fiter, but that they're possible at all gives me goosebumps (which, owing to the sunburn, made my lower thighs look like the Martian landscape on occasion).

My journey came towards the end of what's proving to be a wonderful month in an extremely positive year for me. As it's barely halfway done, knock on wood, but I'm still trying to focus on the good things. Our friend Dan came back to the area for a visit a couple of weeks ago (man, it feels like forever--that's how cool this month's been) and he, Sara and I drove out to Detroit with our friends Jon and Alain to visit Eastern Market, the historic downtown market that's been slaking the city's thirst for food beyond potato chips and Twinkies (Detroit apparently qualifies as a "food desert," a major metropolitan area with no decent grocery store in a certain radius of its population center, I believe) for over a century. I'd never been, and it was an interesting experience visiting the stalls and the shops, stocking up on produce (for me, blackberries, asparagus, tomatoes, and a few other things I can't remember right now, all of which I used up in a day or so) and having a fun lunch at an Ethiopian place on the corner (no doro wat, from what I could see, but the lamb stew was spectacular). Afterwards, we made a tour of eastern Detroit, visiting Belle Isle to watch an air-race (barely a week after I listened to Duran Duran's "My Own Way" at work and asked my co-worker, "who the fuck goes to air-races???") and Canadians driving across the river, and then Grosse Pointe, going past the notorious Manoogian Mansion along the way. At a Panera in Grosse Pointe (a Detroit satellite of fabled wealth and hoity-toityness commemorated in that slightly lame--like all John Cusack movies--John Cusack movie Grosse Pointe Blank--as well as Darren Star's unjustly cancelled WB sitcom that bore the town's name) , where all the houses are built like (and are probably intended to be) suburban bastides, I got a loaf of Asiago bread, which I scarfed on the way back along with half of the delicious olives I'd gotten at a Greek bodega near Eastern Market. The resulting coma was spent at home, which was just as well, as I was able to save up energy for Plastic Passion. Our friend Josh developed a sweet series of new wave dance nights named after the Cure classic before he went to Iraq, and has been itching since his return to get it going again. The Heidelberg's Club Above finally came around, and that night would be the inaugural for the new Plastic Passion. It was fucking mint. My coma forgotten, I danced like Dean Martin's marionette. The Eastern Market party, Alain excepted, were all there, joined by Nikki, Amy, her sister and brother-in-law (I think), and Sara's friend Ross from Natural Area Preservation (complete with "skinny tie" whose authentic 80s vintage added considerably to the evening's ambience). Be there the Fourth of July, people! I've already gone far in extolling the month's personal excellence, so suffice it to say, we had a great time.

As for the "now playing" song--I've said this a few times now--I prefer to remember the man's musical achievements rather than the confusing and often contradictory accusations swirling around his twisted later years. Forget Thriller; Off The Wall is one of the all-time great pop albums and what I'll always think of when I remember Michael Jackson ("The Love You Save" is probably my favorite on by the brothers). Those interested in an admirably impartial and nuanced analysis of the circus that followed his 80s hits should check out Jake Austen's terrific pop culture history TV A Go-Go (2005), which not only provides a bracing, thought-provoking examination of the symbiotic connections between the development of American TV and American pop music, but also manages a near-perfect synthesis of academic rigor and stylistic fluency, which few should be surprised to find is very rare; maybe as a result, it's pretty hard to describe. In any case, he has an entire chapter devoted to the Jacksons, and it's very engrossing reading indeed.

On a final positive note, this blog post is another reason why this guy is one of my heroes.

*Part of the reason was that I was riding out the storm beneath Nickels Arcade at State, where some gutterpunkette wearing comparatively next to nothing was having her way with a hula hoop. A number of rather alarming glances passed between us and I wondered for a split second if she was about to ask for money or worse. A good time to go, I thought. Of course, I then took refuge in the cavernous veranda behind the Hatcher Graduate Library, where that scruffy harmonica-player regarded me as if I had violated his lair--which in any case had been transformed into a wind-tunnel by the storm.

**Or maybe not; the only time in the past three days I've come close to being run over was by another biker at William and Thompson.

My life's been swelling recently with new ideas, plans and desires, and it's getting quite a job to keep track of them all and "clear" them, so to speak. I'm planning to start a few fall crops around the house and see how they turn out, despite my house's rather sinister ability to repel the sun. I asked out a co-worker for the first time in years and, though I've received a pair of slightly contradictory replies, I'm trying to focus on the fact that I actually did so. A few more notions cropped up that I'm trying to grab, so hopefully this whole thing isn't getting out of hand. The situation was driven home this weekend, a very active one for me.

Ever since I moved to Ann Arbor, I've wanted to canoe the Huron River, which flows from a watershed in the northwest through Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti until it reaches Lake Erie and offers an attractive and welcoming scene in which to walk. I've walked along the Huron innumerable times since I started living here, and my friend Margot apparently had similar thoughts, as she got a canoeing trip together this weekend, in which we (Margot, her friend Rachel, Sara, Nikki, Josh, Sara's friend Jen, and Jen's boyfriend Walter--oh, and me) took canoes from Barton Dam downriver to Gallup Park, a distance of around five miles (give or take a couple). It was a fantastic day for canoeing and once we got on the water, it was actually thrilling to see the difference between walking by the river and going on the river. I hadn't been canoeing since I was nineteen or so, and it was good to see how naturally the whole thing came back to me (although my "form's" pretty awful). It was quite a busy day for river-goers, but cleared out once we passed Argo Park and portaged the brief break at Broadway.

The route took us past a wide variety of landscapes and terrains: great ridges and boggy marshes from Barton to Argo, forest and post-industrial "office" at Argo Pond, and then a mix of residential and natural from then onward. The graffiti on some of the bridges was rather impressive, as I can never quite make out how those guys get down there. One bridge was separately dedicated to Slayer and the IRA (which made me wonder if the next bridge would feature colossal "Free Derry"-style murals of Bret Michaels and Ian Paisley). The water was relatively clear and the rocks and foliage loomed from beneath, although I couldn't see any fish. Sara, who works for both the National Wildlife Federation and Natural Area Preservation, was able to point out a number of salient features, such as the parks we were passing through and the increasing variety of invasive species, especially Eurasian milfoil, a nasty-looking weed that favors the shallow bottoms of rivers and ponds and has been spelling doom for the local crew teams who use Argo for practice (it really looks like shit, too--one can appreciate the visual appeal of many plants, but Eurasian milfoil... maybe it'd look all right if one ran it under a hair dryer for five minutes, but I doubt it). It also helped further establish a pet theory of mine that one can turn all kinds of invasives into porn star names: Glossy Buckthorn (don't even have to do anything with that), Honeysuckle Bush, Garlique' Moutarde, and now Eurasienne Milfoil. We managed to keep up a running conversation over the various distances on a number of topics, many of which related to all this stuff running through my head--food history, urban development, life in Chicago, etc. Sara and I had an interesting chat on the conflict between notions of preservation and recreation, a debate which is apparently occurring at various levels in the local power circles. The idea is that the Huron is a relatively undeveloped river area, and city planners face a quandary: how to get people more interested in the natural environment without ruining it. There are a few houses along the riverbank, but these are relatively sedate affairs, and haven't apparently led to any pollution or eyesores. My thinking was that some development might be nice, but it'd have to be very tightly controlled, a control that would probably frighten off any but the most socially conscious and altruistic of businesspeople. This train led me to a few other ideas, perhaps the establishment of an organic restaurant with its own kitchen garden specifically oriented towards some kind of educational mandate for the public, much like the "Edible Landscape" we've created where I work. The latter, which really has me stoked, is a garden around the grounds that's growing herbs, tomatoes, and edible flowers in an attempt to raise awareness of personal horticulture (and not least to give relatively inexperienced staff members--hrm, hrm--a little practice in gardening). I've also developed a small ambition to re-learn how to fish. 

The health benefits of a three-hour canoe trip were somewhat obviated by a few beers afterwards at Casey's and what Sara called a "meat sundae" (a burger with bacon, guacamole and blue cheese--for at least nominal health reasons, I got mine with grilled mushrooms), but it was still enormous, thought-provoking fun.

I hadn't intended to go out Sunday night after work, but my co-worker Joe planned to be at the Eight-Ball and, after hearing a hilarious story about his being pursued by two different girls (one "good," one "bad," if we must assign labels), both of whom might show up at the bar, I decided it was something I couldn't miss. If there's ever a guy who can awkwardly embarrass even the unpleasantly obsessive into bailing, it's me. There was also the new project that the Eight-Ball has going on whereby a band plays in that tiny hallway that leads up to the Blind Pig for a few hours every Sunday night, so I figured that might be worth a look, too (it wasn't, although mainly because of the music). Fortunately (?) nothing happened, but I did have a very good conversation with Joe about our respective love lives and careers. Joe's become something of a kindred spirit at work, as we're both very interested in furthering our own experience of cooking and the restaurant business (hopefully in ways that will let us escape the brutal cliches and stereotypes of both) and seem to have a similar attitude of amused skepticism towards a great many things (certainly some of the more absurd apsects of our jobs). Once again, the ideas started batting around and he put the one in mine of maybe teaching pastry cooking at a culinary school (back to the earlier qualifications, hopefully without having to go to culinary school, which I intend to avoid at all costs--among other things, I once more get the feeling that they're now all about turning people into overrated, potty-mouthed, Cabbage Patch-faced Cockney despots a la Ramsay). It all had to end eventually, and a relentlessly negative co-worker of ours showed up and, after a bit of conversation, started staring intently at the TV, which firmly implanted the words "bye-bye now" in my immediate destiny.

I ran into some people on William later that night and wound up at a birthday party, but no ideas were batted around, as I recall. Excellent weekend all around! 

They're sprouting all over the place, and it has to stop. 

In a time when even history starts to seem a little "samey" to me (probably a result of overconsumption), I'm starting to find comfort in the voluminous  literature on world cuisine--cookbooks, food histories, and even plant and animal biology and chemistry (only Dawkins and Gould so far, but there'll be more). It all comes at a point where I'm starting to better figure my new career path. Cuisine in general--I may have expressed this before--is one of the most important (if not the most important) subjects for human study, and yet it gets taken for granted, even in such a relatively well-educated age in terms of human consumption. I confess my own culpability in the situation, to be sure. Though I work with food for a living (and increasingly, I think, as a vocation), it's still hard for me not to roll my eyes when I hear some couple that make probably five times what I do in a year wax rhapsodic over a razor-thin slice of jamon serrano that might have come from the kind of eternally secluded Spanish village that figured in Tombs of the Blind Dead or The Vampires' Night Orgy. One of my favorite humorists, Michael J. Nelson, in Mind Over Matters, wrote a hilariously derisive essay on food snobs ("finally... we must do something about Tuscany") that recommended their force-feeding with "those unnaturally red Dolly Madison Zingers" and I found it impossible not to laugh and sympathize. It's also hard for someone living well below the American median income to appreciate a way of life that's marketed, either explicitly or implicitly, to the upper middle class. The kind of "revolution" that a lot of "foodies" expect as a result of their educational efforts will never get off the ground in this country (and indeed others) unless some way is found to make it affordable for an average citizen increasingly squeezed by a grotesquely unequal distribution of income and resources. That I work (and often live) in an environment where this lifestyle is largely celebrated only complicates matters.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Near A Thousand Tables: A History of Food (2002): Fernandez-Armesto has long been one of my favorite historians both for the fluency and erudition of his writing and for his unnerving knack of focusing on subjects of especial interest to myself: childhood fascinations (the history of world, as opposed to European, exploration in Pathfinders, which I still have to read but which looks like a beaut), overriding adult concerns (the comparative history of world peoples, environments and cultures in Millennium and Civilizations, and even atavistic interests due to family ancestry (Before Columbus, his early study of the medieval Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands). Now, it seems, he's turned his powers on the history of food. A self-confessed food snob, Fernandez-Armesto manages at least to point the way towards a possible history of food, though, even with all his talent, Near A Thousand Tables still seems unsatisfying. I think part of the problem may be the sheer enormity of the task. The work tracks the history of food thematically, using social and echnological developments such as the "Neolithic Revolution" and the Columbian contact with the Americas as springboards for well-disciplined ruminations on the nature of food and eating. Much of it builds on his earlier work in Millennium and Civilizations (indeed, Near A Thousand Tables started out as an over-abundance of notes on the multifarious subjects of study with which he had to contend--in itself highlighting the subject's importance). Though interesting and informative as always (and with a delightful lack of the kind of woolly-headed, soi-disant "naturalism" sadly endemic to food writing), for me it seemed a little too wide-ranigng, without enough definite information or discrete detail to quite satisfy me. That said, though, the field is probably in its relative infancy, and Near A Thousand Tables at least marks an important step.

Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking (1998): Indeed, I wonder if Fernandez-Armesto decided to write his history as a result of dissatisfaction with Symons' own, which has an eminently admirable object but mostly fails, I think, to achieve it. An Australian historian and food writer, Symons brings a refreshingly local perspective to his work (using a Sydney restaurant as his starting point and making frequent reference to Australian achievements in cuisine) but can't seem to decide whether his study is an actual history or one of those airy, maudlin cleebrations of food. Whereas Fernandez-Armesto at least has a definite and recognizable structure, Symons flails all over the place in an overly "philosophical" attempt to find some meaning in the most important of human activities. He does a good turn by focusing on the cook's place in the great chain, and much of the first half explores, however messily, what cooks are and what they do (do bakers qualify, for example?)*. Unfortunately, the frequent philosophical asides and recurring preciousness make A History an often irritating experience. Fortunately, the second half of the book is much better as it lays down an actual history, particularly good on the transition to civilization in which specialized cooking, he contends, played an important role, particularly in the development of Sumerian temple-cities. So it's worth reading in the end, but if you're looking for a comprehensive history of cooking and cuisine, I'd look elsewhere (not that I've found one yet).

*Shit, yeah.