![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
My people are clods.
One thing I never understood is the willingness of Americans to stand in as proxies for the French when it comes to debates about British food. You would think by all the mockery of British food from this side of the ocean that we live in a paradise known for its its gustatory refinement and delicacy. After a childhood shredding my palate on 10,000 servings of reheated pizza and tator tots, however, I have my doubts. I can remember when Sizzler seemed upscale because it had a salad bar and the silverware did not need to be first removed from its plastic wrap.
I think honestly prepared bad food trumps mass produced bad food--which is why, on a whole, I consider American food to be more polluted and befouled than British food. As with everything else in this country, rampant corporatism and consumer infantalization has ruined our food culture. (Though I recognize in the age of Whole Foods and locavore restaurants, plenty of green shoots can be found.) Yes, the British have invented such execrable comestibles as jellied eel and steak and kidney pie--but at least those food are likely to be locally sourced and prepared in mom and pop pubs. If massive conglomerates have taken over the British jellied eel industry, please do not tell me. I don't want to know.
Last Saturday Yoko and I got a rare chance to explore British food. We traveled about an hour north of DC to the very pretty town of Frederick, MD. In a red brick row house in the center of town there is a British we stopped at a placed called Cafe Anglais. We had made reservations for high tea and the owner took as through the kitchen to a garden seating area in the back. I read the menu which explained that the owner was from Lincolnshire. A blurb on the back of the menu noted the owner's "British charm," which I thought was rather dubious marketing. People with genuine charm rarely have to call themselves charming. In person, the owner answered the question: "If Phil Collins has a less vibrant younger brother, what would he be like?"
Charm is overrated anyway. He seemed considerate and thoughtful, which matters to me more and more. Even more importantly, the man showed a definite care when it came to the matter of making crispy, buttery pastries. Talk about charm! He also brought out finger sandwiches, which had been daintily shorn of crust as if prepared by the feckin' queen herself. They were a smashing success in they weren't filled with the sickly, oily mayonnaise that ruins most American sandwiches. I also have to say one more thing: my people know how to properly slather heaps of clotted cream on a fresh scone. The experience made me want to take up gardening or buggery or whatever it is that upper crust Britons do.
Next time? A report on the steak and kidney pie...
I've recently gotten it into my head to try my hand at writing really crappy genre stories. My idea is to write absolute junk merely to amuse myself. I've also realized that reading geniuses like Coatzee can do little to help you write good crap.
I recently read Terry Pratchett's "The Color of Magic," which is also not a good model because Pratchett may be the single most inventive writer I've ever read. But as I was googling for background information I stumbled upon a quite similarly named book that perhaps represents a more instructive model:
Something tells me this book will either be dreadfully entertaining or dreadfully dreadful.
I probably won't start it until May, but expect a very thorough exegesis.
The 50 miles itself went quickly, and then after a restorative shower and nap, it was time for the Dogfish Head Brewpub for a sampling of simply stunning beers. Our friends were dyed-in-the-wool beer snobs who were happy to trade and I came home with a new favorite: World Wide Stout, and 18% abv super-barleyed beer that's aged in a sherry cask and resembles a combination of Belgian stout and port wine.
It was my first trip to Rehobeth, a town that feels like a combination of nicer Jersey shore town and Provincetown. Rehobeth feels much more like DC than Philly; it's just somehow feels more affluent and professional. I have to say after a year of griping that DC lacked Philadelphia's "character," I think I've come to prefer the more upscale orderliness and cleanness of DC to the rougher and grittier charms of Philly. I really like DC a lot now--it's just SO DAMN EXPENSIVE HERE.
This afternoon our program manager came handed out tiny little pins with the words "CREATE THE FUTURE NOW" cast in them. The phrase "create the future now" is a corporate initiative being spearheaded by the Vice-President of Strategic Some Impressive Sounding Bullshit or Another. I already had to sit through a 90 minute webinar and learned that the CTFN strategy boils down to two objectives: make our customers happy and make money for our stockholders.
What it means for me: keep punching that clock.
After he left, I regarded the pin in my hand. My officemate, a quiet Nigerian man who grinds his teeth and each day tells me in extensive detail the story the day's commute, laughed and said: "Aren't you going to put the pin on? Come on, Rob, aren't you a company man?"
I dutifully put on my "create the future now" pin, grabbed my Cthulhu coffee cup(*) and wandered down the hall to make some tea. I passed the offices of the impressively smart developers who work on our floor, who somehow manage to appear to take an interest in their work, even though the work here is mindblowingly segmented. Everyone has their subset of some little piece of some small widget, and everything is managed according to elaborate processes.
I have moved into a (soon-to-be) higher paid role of quality assurance; my job is to make sure that each "artifact" specified by our "software development lifecycle," a highly controlled and very carefully constructed engineering methodology called the Rational Unified Process, is in the right form and in the right location.
Of course, the phrase Rational Unified Process is so portentous you'd think it held the secrets of the universe. Trust me, it does not. What it does do, however, is overwhelm people like me who lucked into an IT job at a time when hundreds of thousands of people each month were losing their jobs with arcane jargon and terminology: product readiness review, requirements traceability matrix, iteration plan, use case models, supplementary business specification, test evaluation summary, etc.
In case you're wondering, this is "model" represents the "high-level design architecture" of the the Rational Unified Process:
Sadly, I can actually explain the significance of this chart.
Needless to say, if you can learn this jargon, you can get jobs. Fifteen months of hanging around the office occasionally editing documents but mostly browsing the web--have I mentioned that in a federal contracting position no one really seems to care if you're busy or not?--has given me the breathing space to learn the things I pretended to know when I interviewed for the job.
I suppose I'm the luckiest bastard in DC but on the other hand... fuccckkkkk.
As a man of indeterminately white origin--though all signs point to Irish/English--these kind of events put me in a bind. So how do I best represent the majesty of my people's food? Kidney pie? Jellied eels? Deep-fried Mars bars?
In order to solve the riddle, I've done some recent Googling. I think I've discovered a dish that promises to be both visually stunning and pungently flavorful: Stargazey Pie.
It is a pie made of god-knows-what (some sources say it includes potatoes) with two whole pilchard fish sticking out of it. According to Wikipedia, it is a delicacy originating in the perfectly named town of Mousehole in Cornwall.
This is just the type of dish to remind my coworkers of the majesty of the British people.
There is invariably a moment shortly after I begin my ride when I ask myself why the hell I'm huffing and puffing through these city when there's a perfectly cozy subway I could be sitting in. These questions are most keen on cold winter days when all I really want to do is curl up and snooze somewhere toasty and warm. Having begun the habit of riding into the city--we'll see if it sticks--I have to say that I am grateful to Yoko for dragging me along on her biking obsession. It's been a really terrific addition to my life. Thanks, Yoko!
Some of the benefits are obvious. Typically at this point in the year the trajectory of my cardiovascular health resembles one of those charts depicting a stock market crash. Down, down, down. This year I have a good three or four months of fresh air in my system, meaning I no longer get winded on my way to see what's in the fridge. I also think the exercise has been good for my mood and sleep (insomnia being the bane of my existence.)
I also have to say, however, that the experience of riding through the city is giving me a new appreciation for Washington, DC. My route cuts through a huge cross-section of the city, from the working class northeast through neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and the U Street Corridor, which are gentrifying faster than you can say "Whole Foods," through the Dupont Circle, one of the nation's trendiest gay neighborhoods--ending up cutting through the section of Pennsylvania Avenue behind the White House that was closed to traffic after 9/11. As I traverse the city, I watch the architecture slowly become more stately until I find myself surprised be travelling through tidy streets lined with handsome brick row houses that remind me of what I like about Boston.
It never gets old biking past the White House. Closed to traffic, I can bike leisurely down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, dodging only the occasional clump of excited tourists and a few stray federal workers shuffling off to work. Finally, about 50 minutes after I leave out the door, I arrive at 17th and F Street, where I lock up the bike and start my day. This is the view from that corner:
He also signed is book for me, Getting America Back to Work.
So I started going through my Itunes tonight trying to find a couple dozen songs that will introduce him to Anglo-American popular music. It is an interesting project given that literally the entire history of American music is in play. The chances are anything I include--Arethra Franklin, CCR, Paul Simon, Madonna, the Beach Boys, you name it--is likely going to be new to him. It's kind of like that recurrent fantasy of mine of being able to go back in time and astound people back in, let's say, Elizabethan England, with my garbled knowledge about the basic facts of science and technology, except in this case there is little risk of me getting sent to the gallows for being a warlock.
It is a fun project for several reasons. Reason 1: All the catchy pop music that has become deadened to most people due to overplay is going to seem astonishing to CK. Who is this amazing guy who calls himself Prince? Does he come from royal stock? Reason 2: Coolness is beside the point, which is kind of refreshing. For instance: the odds are good that Captain and Tennile are going to be on it. Reason 3: I get to wallow in nostalgia by listening to these insiduous songs from my past. Oh, that Adam Ant and his high, rosy cheekbones.
What I am learning is that, when it comes to stuff I consider crowd-pleasing and accessible, it all seems to go back to early 80s pop. In retrospect, the songs that seem most appealing to a complete outsider tend to be associated with cheaply produced music videos.
Though what the hell: maybe I should throw "War Pigs" in there just to make things interesting.
What fascinates me with this video is the way it combines the fevered screwiness of 9/11 conspiracy theory with the goopy cheesiness of 80s power pop. It reminds me of something bad. GTR? Mid-80s Yes? Or something equally execrable:
For the record, though, I think this song does less damage that the out-of-control mythologizing of September 11. For those of us not directly affected by 9/11, the best thing I can say about the tenth anniversary is that it marks a convenient moment to move on. My sense watching the country's attempt to memorialize the day is that many Americans are more interested in remembering the ideas about 9/11 than the tragedy itself. It feels like, for many, it's become about capitalism or militarism of some disorted version of patriotism rather than being an attack by religious zealots on innocent office workers.
