Culture – Page 53 – Into the Woods

From Time magazine:

Time magazine has a lame piece today on why there is more obesity in the South than in the rest of the country. They’re right about some things, for example the correlation of health and weight to income. But they trot out all the old stereotypes about biscuits, fried chicken, and pie. Southerners have always been poor, but they have not always been fat, as an examination of any collection of old photos will show you.

As a Southerner, a foodie, and a person who takes careful note of what people have in their carts in the grocery store line, I claim the standing to comment knowledgeably on this question.

1. Southerners have stopped cooking from scratch. This is clear from the contents of their grocery carts.

2. Southerners have too little color in their diets. Pretty much everything in their grocery cart will be meat or something white.

3. Southerners consume astonishing quantities of canned and bottled sweet drinks. By weight, sweet drinks are probably the main items in their grocery carts. Few even seem to make fresh iced tea at home anymore.

4. Southerners eat too much meat. They seem to have cut way back on pinto beans, which, in my childhood, you were guaranteed to get at least twice a week.

5. Southerners eat too much cheap white bread and too many chips.

6. Southerners buy very few fresh foods, not even fresh potatoes. It took me a while to realize that people aren’t interested in starting gardens because they aren’t interested in what comes out of gardens.

7. When Southerners eat out, whether at fast food places or not, they eat even more calories than they eat at home. Restaurants compete on price and the size of the portions.

If Southerners could go back to the era of homemade biscuits, all would be well. People made biscuits because it was hard to get white bread, or the white bread cost more. Biscuits come from an era in which everything came from the kitchen, from scratch.

Michael Pollen’s rule of thumb is the best I’ve ever heard: It’s about remembering and honoring what our great-grandmothers cooked. Many Southerners seem to have forgotten.

Hymns in strange places

Frédéric Chopin, nocturne in G minor, Opus 37, No. 11

Some years ago, a friend who is a professional pianist (and not a very nice person), hearing what I was playing at the piano, made the rude comment, “Hymns are the lowest form of music, you know.” Instantly angry, I threw an insult back at him: “No. Jazz is the lowest form of music.”

I was listening to the Chopin nocturnes tonight, partly because, at last, I can. The speakers and stereo amplifier are in a more or less permanent place in the newly painted radio room, and the iMac (and therefore iTunes) is now connected to the sound system.

Again and again in the nocturnes, Chopin gently slips away from the wild rubato rhythm and falls into a strictly timed four-part hymn, or anthem. The four measures above are just one example. If you’d like to find and listen to this example, the hymn starts about three minutes into Claudio Arrau’s seven-minute recording of this nocturne. Adjust the times for whatever recording you may have.

Anyone who thinks hymns are the lowest form of music knows nothing about human voices singing in chorus in four-part harmony. In the nocturnes, I would say that these hymn-like sections were a form of musical contrast for Chopin, a way of anchoring and grounding the wildness of the nocturnes.

Le honeysuckle nouveau est arrivé!

I first became aware that the new honeysuckle had arrived when I awoke during the night and caught the scent of it through the bedroom window.

And the grass just gets better and better.

Ice cream for Lunch.

By Anivid in the south of France

It was a sunny day in April, a perfect day for trying out an ice cream dessert before the saison of tourists started.
Instead of lunch of course – ice cream desserts being on the rich & heavy side, especially when being enjoyed in the most luxurious place of the town 😉
The one I chose, called Melissa, consisted of vanilla ice cream, drenched with sauce caramel, sprinkled with caramel pieces, nuts, grilled pine kernels, cinnamon (your mouth water starts forming ??) and topped with a lot of chantilly (whipped cream). Finally two sticks of wafers as antennae for decoration.
It was served with the usual tap water carafe.
Need I say it was heavenly ??
Especially the combination of icecream and pine kernels was delicious, pine kernels as a soft chew together with the soft caramel and ice enveloping the toungue.
There was just the correct mix of everything, and it was so sweet & cold as to rise the IQ (my mother always told me to keep my feet warm and head cold 😉 and as the brains preferred energy source is carbohydrates – I thought my choice very wise (and my mother’s maxime satisfied 😉

I sat outside by the little stream led through the city and thoroughly planted with beautiful flowers following the changing seasons.
There might be not so pretty quarters elsewhere in the municipality, but the stream with its flowers & bridges are always kept picturesque – a joy to greet for citizens & visitors.
The pleasure costed app. 14 $ – and my mouth can still remember the feeling of its cornucopia 😉

Signing out Anivid, Southern France, Gastronomy & Culture

How to live to be a hundred

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini [Times of London]

Everyone should read this remarkable interview with Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini, who is now 100 years old, and who won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for her research on the brain.

“The secret of life is to keep thinking. And to stop thinking about ourselves. That’s the only message I have.”

Denmark

Wikipedia

Those who say that the United States is on a course toward European-type socialist democracies could be right. Let’s take a look at Denmark…

In the past eight years I’ve made two business trips to Denmark and spent four weeks there. I helped install a Danish publishing system at the San Francisco Chronicle, so I worked closely with a Danish company, and lots of Danes, for several years. This publishing system, by the way, is the system that’s also used at the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Danes are fantastic engineers and smart, honest businesspeople.

Most of these factoids about the Danish economy come from the Wikipedia article on Denmark:

— Denmark has a free market economy.

— Denmark has a large welfare state.

— Denmark has one of the world’s highest levels of income equality.

— Danes are very productive, and Denmark’s GDP per capita is 15 to 20 percent higher than the United States.

— Denmark holds the world record for income tax rates.

— All college education in Denmark is free.

— 80% of employees belong to unions.

— Denmark spends about 1.3 percent of GDP on defense, compared with about 4 percent in the United States.

— The national health service is financed by an 8 percent tax. This is a local tax on income and property.

— According to Statistics Denmark, the unemployment rate in Denmark in January 2009 was 2.3 percent.

— In some surveys, Denmark is ranked the happiest place on earth.

— Denmark was ranked the least corrupt country in the world in the Corruption Perception Index.

— According to the World Economic Forum, Denmark has one of the most competitive economies in the world.

I realize that Denmark’s model probably would not scale up in a workable way for the United States. Still, in my opinion, we should be studying some of the European models and not let ourselves be scared by them. They work.

So the New York Times confirms my guess…

New York Times: A Los Angeles neighborhood where the creative class wiped out

It looks like I beat the New York Times by two days on this trend. The Times has a story today about the retreat of the creative class:

The deep recession, with its lost jobs and falling home values nationwide, poses another kind of threat: to the character of neighborhoods settled by the young creative class, from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Beacon Hill in Seattle. The tide of gentrification that transformed economically depressed enclaves is receding, leaving some communities high and dry.

I wrote earlier this week about my fear that, when times get hard in cities, the creative class will be the first to go.

Let’s keep in mind, though, that the energy of the young and creative will always go somewhere. It is irrepressible. In the 1970s it took on a rebellious tone and went into place such as communes, or ghettoes such as Haight-Ashbury. During the decline of Rome it took on a more reclusive tone and went to abbeys and monasteries. We will soon start to learn what the creative class will do during this downturn. Will it be rebellious? Reclusive? Nerdy? Super-green? The response of the creative class will be a key factor in setting the tone of American culture for the coming era. If the response is constructive and creative, that could be a wonderful thing. If the response is angry and rebellious, watch out.

Which is scarier, the city or the woods?

Yes, that’s scary… (Arthur Rackham, Hansel and Gretel)

Is this scary, or inviting? … (Anne Anderson)

This is not too scary… (Dover Publications)

The chart is very scary!

For years, I have had a recurring dream. Something has gone wrong with the world, and there is danger. In the dream, I am traveling through the woods at night, alone and on foot, with no light other than starlight and moonlight, keeping clear of any signs of people, and looking for a refuge. In some of these dreams, I find a refuge. It is an abandoned little house in the woods, in disrepair. I go in and build a fire. I decide that, if I am quiet and don’t make too much smoke, I can probably stay here for a while without being found or challenged.

Watching the new version of the movie War of the Worlds got on my nerves. Tom Cruise, fleeing from the city, kept leading his daughter toward crowds of people. I kept yelling at the television, “Get away from all those people, you idiot! Go into the woods!”

Now you know where the name of my blog came from. So who knows. Maybe I was only fooling myself in thinking that my house-in-the-woods project, into which I put several years of planning, was a rational project. Maybe I was just unconsciously being manipulated by dreams.

And what, after all, is wrong with that? I admire people who can find a way to make a dream real, even a small one. I recently discovered the blog of some very magical people in Britain who put a little fairytale cottage on wheels and are roaming the countryside.

My real point, though, or at least my rational point, is that I am very concerned about how the economic downturn will affect people who live in cities. I had been thinking about Richard Florida, his theory of the “creative class,” and how the creative class stimulates cities. I was wondering if the creative class really matters that much in a severe economic downturn. Then a few days ago I learned that Florida has a piece in the March issue of The Atlantic: How the Crash Will Reshape America. Florida seems optimistic about cities. He just seems to think that it’s a matter of figuring out which cities are going to win and which cities are going to lose. I am skeptical. If city life ever became too hard or too dangerous, the creative class would be the first to leave. I have no idea where they would go, but if things get that bad, that’s a trend we’ll want to watch. In an earlier post, I pointed out that, when Rome was falling apart and its cities became too miserable and too dangerous, the creative class went to abbeys and monasteries, and that’s where they stayed for hundreds of years, until they returned to the flourishing cities of the Renaissance.

ABC News is more pessimistic about cities than Richard Florida, with America’s Top 15 Emptiest Cities: These Once Boom Cities Are Now Quickly Turning Into Recession Ghost Towns. Atlanta, by the way, is third on this ugly list. Greensboro, North Carolina, not all that far from me, is fourth.

If you’re not doing it already, it couldn’t hurt to check in from time to time with the worried folks at Survival Blog and see what they’re thinking about cities. If you’re up for a very scary movie depiction of cities fallen into chaos, watch the dystopian science fiction film Children of Men.

The woods are dark and scary, and sometimes I hear howling in the night. But cities scare me more.

The dropouts: Who will they be this time?

Tintern Abbey in Wales [Wikipedia]

I realize that there’s a long tradition of making facile comparisons to one’s own time and the fall of Rome. Still…

From History of Rome, Michael Grant, Scribners, 1978:

“In the vain hope, then, of keeping their armies in the field, the imperial authorities ruined the poor and alienated the rich. They also alienated and then very largely destroyed the solid segment of the population that came in between — the middle class…. But the external invasions and internal rebellions of the third century A.D. had dealt this middle class terrible physical blows, while the accompanying monetary inflation caused their endowments to vanish altogether…. The cities of the empire, their public work programs cut to nothing or severely restricted, began to assume a thoroughly dilapidated appearance; and then in the fourth and fifth centuries, despite contrary efforts by Julian and others, their position still continued to worsen, and the old urban civilization, especially in the West, plunged into a sharp decline….

“So throughout the last two centuries of the Roman West there was an ever-deepening loss of personal freedom and well-being for all except the very prosperous and powerful…. The authorities sought to impose maximum regimentation, to pay for the army and prop up the imperial structure. And yet all they thereby achieved was to hasten the ruin of what they wanted to preserve, by destroying the individual loyalty and initiative that alone could have achieved its preservation….

“There were also various other causes of the downfall of the western empire, secondary and peripheral, though not altogether unimportant. One of these was the proliferation of dropouts who refused to participate in communal and public life. There were many people who found the social and economic situation intolerable and in consequence went underground and became the enemies of society. A large number of them became hermits and monks and nuns, who abandoned the company of their fellow human beings….”

I’ve asked several friends for their thoughts on what form the dropout phenomenon might take this time. The social and economic dislocations of the 1970s led to the hippy and communal movements, and many people (including me), remember that period and were influenced by it. Whatever the shape of the new dropout movement, a neighbor pointed out two attributes that I’m sure we can count on. The new dropouts will be connected by the Internet, and they will be green, very green.

While we're on the subject…

Sean Jackson: Superman visits Trinity Church Wall Street (Youtube)

Don’t worry … this is not going to turn into an organ blog. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about organ installations because I’m in the middle of making tricky decisions about where the wiring and speakers will go for the electronic organ in my new house. In the future, I’ll post details about my plans for a digitally sampled organ, as well as an analog organ console, in my house. I fully intend to have big-organ sound in the house like that in the Sean Jackson video above.

The interesting thing about the organ in the Sean Jackson video above is that this is not a wind instrument. It’s a new electronic organ built by Marshall & Ogletree, pushing digitally sampled electronic organs to a new level. The organ at Trinity Church on Wall Street was ruined by ash and smoke when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, and the organ was replaced, at least temporarily, by the Marshall & Ogletree organ.

A nice thing about the people at Trinity Church is that they’re not persnickety about what kind of music is played on their organ. Though the Mighty Wurlitzer has its place, these church-type instruments are extremely well suited to grand motion pictures music. The more this kind of music is played on the big classical (as opposed to theater) organs, the more people will regain an interest in listening to the organ.

Below: a very good church organist in New Jersey:

When You Wish Upon a Star — played with impeccable taste (Youtube)

Theme from Masterpiece Theater (Youtube)