Thank God It’s Over. Halloween, that is. Though at least someone thought of something interesting to do with all those pumpkins.
(I culled this image from Kitsch’n'Zinc, my favourite local blog).
Now the next thing to get through is C***mas. They’ve already colonised the main street in town with the bloody lights. Yes, Santa and his drunken herd have arrived (come on, why do you think Rudolph has a red nose?).
when you have to do something you thought you might like but half way through you decide you hate it and all you want to do is to get out.
That’s how I felt about halfway through my first waitressing stint, which I’ve just completed. Truth be told, I think this is one of the “nicer” establishments: I did find myself thinking (before the main rush of customers arrived, and all hell broke loose), I was thinking hmm, this place is really nice. There is a pleasant choreography of action here, and all sottovoce: a little murmur, once in a while, of “chef”, and the occasional “bling!” of the service bell, after which a waitron would rush quietly to take the steaming dish (say, medallion of springbok “crepenette” with braised savoy cabbage) to whatever poncy person was greedily waiting for it.
No names mentioned, but this is one of the top 10 eateries in town. The waiting dress code is subtle and classic: black pants, white shirt. About 80% of the clientele were booked in from the ponciest hotels: Sheraton, Grace, Table Bay. You get the picture. (Also, there were a remarkable number of women who looked very German, the thin, straight-haired, square spectacle wearing kind of German. Like a Teutonic Nana Mouskouri. Rather beautiful but a little scary also. They ate the most.)
Then the rest arrived, and suddenly the pretty choreography was gone, and Chef, who had been rather nice and Plain Jane until then, started getting irritated with me for not recognising the secret nod of the head that means “Clean the side of the soupbowl with your dishtowel and the take it to table fifteen, NOW”.
I didn’t have a dishtowel and I had even less of an inclination where the hell table fifteen was.
(What is with table numbers in restaurants anway? They never make any bloody sense!)
So, all in all, it was a pretty horrible experience. The food did look good, but after four hours of it and some nasty burnmarks on my hands, all I could face when I got home was the new Cadbury’s Boost that I’ve been saving for just the right occasion.
I’ve eaten it now and it was really really good. Almost like a Tempo in the good old days, when Tempos weren’t wusses and didn’t behave like the weh-fer thins that they are now.
Maybe it was all worth it after all.
Since I am again unable to wangle time to write anything interesting, thought I would send you on to a good article about Food TV, which is taking up some space in my head these days. It’s from the Telegraph (UK), and when you are ready to leave, you can find the secret doorway here.
As for my own expertise on the subject, watch out for Greenwood’s new Encyclopedia of the Food Industry, forthcoming in 2007. I find myself responsible for informing that public on the subject of Television and that other strange and popular creature, the Celebrity Chef. (Is there a difference?)
(image from postsecret)
Well it’s the end of another weekend. Sigh. And more relevantly, the end of another day of marking essays. Double sigh.
(An aside: growing up in Swaziland I had a friend, a brilliantly creative Danish-Hong Kongese boy called Hans. His father, who was Danish, got Donald Duck comics sent from Denmark so his son could keep up with the language. I was always jealous of Hans and those Donald Duck comics that made an exciting appearance every week or so. But the point is that the young boy Hans couldn’t always tell the difference – well, how should he? – between written and spoken Danish. So, often in conversation he would say “Ak”, or “suk”, the first being a written expression of what you say in a moment of extreme anxiety, the second being Danish for “sigh”. Hans used to ak and suk a lot and I did love him for it.)
Anyhow. As I was saying, it’s the end of this and that. But why the essay marking gets a double sigh is because what they keep getting wrong is how to use other people’s ideas. It’s the dreaded referencing issue. When you talk to them about it in class they get so distressed because they just don’t get it. They are so terrified of this legal thing called PLAGIARISM that they completely miss the point of learning to work with what someone else has said.
Then it occurred to me: that’s the whole point of academia. I’m talking career now. The pinnacle is not when you get this or that PhD, but when you can write a book without having to reference anymore. When you can discourse so fluently about other people’s ideas that there is no question that you have full authority to say what you’re saying. It’s like this: as soon as a 2nd year student mentions Freud, you demand a reference. It’s so hysterical that they can’t even mention the word “bias” without having to give a dictionary definition. But if it’s Susan Sontag talking Freud, that’s another case entirely. Or Edward Said. Or Jean Baudrillard. Or Terry Eagleton.
They have earned the right to stop referencing.
Suk.
Postscript. I should mention that Hans’s father is still Danish, and to the best of my knowledge, the boy Hans has grown into a man who is still brilliant and creative. He even plays the saxophone.
I keep forgetting to share this culinary epiphany I had recently. When you cook pasta and are using a fresh herb (as hopefully you are), particularly one of the more “robust ones” (sage or rosemary, say), here follows a clever trick.
Save a little of the herb – some of which has presumably gone into the sauce at an earlier stage – for the draining of the pasta. Put this saved herb into the colander when you get it (the colander) ready in the sink. Then, when you pour the pasta into the colander, the hot water blanches the herb and it goes back into the pot with the pasta for that final glug of oil and the sauce. The result: the herb is fresh but not as offensive as some of the more robust ones can be.
Ha. Bet Jamie never thought of that one.
For those of you out there with dogs, here’s a friendly reminder from latest BBC Food newsletter:
“It is dangerous to feed chocolate to dogs. Chocolate contains varying quantities of theobromine, a natural stimulant found in the cocoa bean, which affects the central nervous system and heart of dogs and can result in fatal poisoning.”
So, no chokkie for the doggie.
If, however, you fancy feeding the fleabag a little ice-cream, that is Oh-Kay, as they say in the You Ess of Ay. You don’t believe me? See for yourself:
Frozen Dog Treats are Pawsitively Delicious!
“Now, two of the biggest names in the ice cream and dog food industry – Good Humor® and PEDIGREE® Brand – have come together to create the first real ice cream sandwich formulated especially for dogs. The new PEDIGREE™ Ice Cream Sandwich Treats for Dogs from Unilever Ice Cream’s Good Humor brand give pet owners the crème de la crème of treats they can reward to their loyal, four-legged friends.
Like humans, some dogs are lactose-intolerant and cannot enjoy ice cream. While PEDIGREE™ Ice Cream Sandwich Treats for Dogs are dairy-based and have a creamy texture like regular ice cream, they are 99 percent lactose free. They also have added protein and there is no sugar added. When the dairy mixture is placed between two wafers it creates a very fetch-friendly treat and the perfect reward for training, good behavior or as a refreshing snack.”
But wait! It doesn’t stop there. If you’re a fan of that US TV chef whose face has been remodelled into a constant, terrifying, huge smile, aka Rachael Ray, then she has an entire section on her website devoted to pet recipes. Now you too can make something for your DOG which looks like this:
It’s pumpkin barley with turkey. Too bloody ridiculous for words. (Uhm, just one question though. What’s with the FORK?)
Scarlet O’Hansen moonlighted, occasionally, as a model for a life drawing class. During her third session she decided that she should think of it as meditation, or yoga. It takes quite some stamina, you see, to hold a pose. What I mean is to be absolutely still, for fifteen minutes, naked, in front of strangers.
But before she reached this decision she had tried other things.
She thought, for instance, of what would happen if she managed to free her brain from her body, so that she wouldn’t feel a thing, standing there, one arm in the air, legs slightly bent and starting to twicth from the strain, a blurry gaze focussed on some white blob on the wall by the window (she couldn’t wear her glasses while she posed).
And then she wondered what would happen – in the case of a successful separation of mind and body, that is – if she started peeing. What if she just started urinating while people were drawing her? Would they scream in anguished disgust? Would they be so shocked that they would need couselling? What if, my goodness, what if they did NOTHING?
This last scenario was sufficiently disturbing for Scarlet O’Hansen to banish the thought immediately. She knew it would be too difficult to negotatiate the silly irony of how they ought to do nothing – she could sniff her nose and no one batted an eyelid – and the fact that they obviously would, because it would cross some arbitrary social taboo.
To be short, she did not have the energy to think about why urine should be more offensive than snot.
So she decided to treat it like meditation or yoga. Given that she practised neither meditation nor yoga, this translated into breathing deeply once in a while, and thinking of the “centre”. Or a “white light”.
Amazingly, it worked. She made it through another two hours of standing naked in front of strangers. Amazingly indeed. Like the man who runs down to the sea and shouts at the waves to “Bbbbbbrrrreak…..Bbbbbbrrrreak”. And you know what? They did!
…
Scarlet O’Hansen felt so pleased with herself that she came home, poured herself a glass of wine and made a little meal fit for a queen:
- pan-friend slices of chourico,
- a little dipping sauce of yoghurt and dijon mustard,
- two rice-cakes smeared with the ripest avo and little pieces of fresh tomato,
- Maldon salt and black pepper, naturally
Then she browsed the internet and found the site of the day (not for the squeamish).
Thames Town – the ‘authentic British-style town’ in Shanghai – is something that has been in the works since 2001. I hadn’t heard about it until this morning where pictures of the town’s pub and fish-’n-chips shop provided the daily little anecdote for the morning newsreader. There has been some anxiety, apparently, in little ole Dorset, where they have something that looks like this,
because in Thames Town, they have something that looks like this:
(in case you can’t make it out, what we have here are two versions of the Rock Point Inn and the Cob Gate Fish Bar, pics courtesy of Shanghaiist).
Uhm, I don’t even know where to start with what kind of anxiety this causes me. Is it the idea of theme parks invading real life (or vice versa)? Or is it a question of copyright? Gail Caddy, the proprietor of the Dorset pub and chippy, is miffed that the Chinese forgot to ask her permission. Thing is, it’s a British development project, so Caddy’s irritation is misdirected.
Perhaps it’s this chilling line on the town’s official website that did it for me: “Embraced by lush greenery and beautiful scenery,the English church is an exclusive living space to begin a life of happiness and bliss.”
Huh?
François Sicart has written an article on how, despite developments like this, there is evidence of what he terms a “New Nationalism” in China. Maybe it would be more accurate to say because of developments like this? See, the word that keeps appearing in my head is, rather, imperialism. Colonialism. A new mutant strain that should tell us that something, somewhere, has gone very, very wrong.
Debord and the Situationists, it turns out, were right again. The people to watch out for are the townplanners. Urban geography is the most insidious weapon of all.
Scarlet O’Hansen had just sat down to pee when she noticed a fruit fly hovering around the bathroom. This was not good. She had a rather strong aversion to small things that fly or crawl. The fruit fly didn’t bother her as much as if it had been, say, a fat caterpillar doing that thing that caterpillars do, and that she especially hated. But it bothered her nevertheless. What bothered her was that it was inside, and what that might mean. Because now she remembered that she had forgotten to take out the bag of rubbish next to the stove. It hadn’t been there for that long, two days at the most. But if there was a fruit fly inside, the rubbish must be … better outside.
The idea of having to go out again also irritated her, because she had already prepared herself for not having to do that until morning. She had a dvd in the machine (a little indie film she was rather looking forward to), a bowl of popcorn on the table, alongside water (always water), tobacco, rizlas, lighter, ashtray, remotes in easy reach, cell phone close enough, and a little stool for her feet. The pee was the last thing to do before she could settle down to the goodies. But now there was a damn fruit fly and she’d have to find some shoes, unlock the door and go down to the black bins with the rubbish. She’d have to break the spell.
While she was thinking all this she could hear, from the lounge, the voice of a local DJ who was on TV with the debut program of some silly new game show. She hadn’t been paying much attention to what it was all about, but she kept hearing the refrain: “You’rrrrre Toast!” This type of lameness also irritated her. But she wanted to get on with the evening, so she wiped herself and got up and got out there with the rubbish.
After she had dumped the bag and was walking towards the steps leading up to her flat, she became aware of a sound. At first she thought it was coming from the flat she was just passing, but when she stopped to listen, she realised that it was coming from all around her. This was not the homely racket of some Mediterranean courtyard, with women chattering above laundry lines while children break windows with flying balls. No. This is one sound, or rather, the same sound, coming from all the flats around her. She couldn’t believe it. But yes, there it was: “You’rrrrre Toast!”
A joke.
Approaching Frankenstein’s table, George thinks out loud, “I wonder what will happen if I pull this lever?”
Inspector Plod suggests that he had better not.
George: “Why not, I’m a born lever-puller”.
Get it? Lever-puller. Li-ver-pool-er. And George is of course none other than one of the long-gone Beatles, and the joke is in fact a scene from Yellow Submarine, which I watched this afternoon as a reward for getting to the end of my essays on a rainy Friday afternoon.
Actually it might not be George at all. The film requires only intermittent attention so I may have missed a detail. But definitely one of the gang. From Liverpool. The cheasy joke caught my attention. Particularly because it’s wrong, of course. We all know that people from Liverpool are called Liverpudlians.
But I guess it wouldn’t have been as funny for him to wonder if he should puddle the lever.
I can’t quite decide if the film was rewarding. But there were certainly very cool moments in it, not least to re-hear some of the old favourites from my (post-Woodstock-generation) hippie days. Those boys did have something going.