Food, As An Experience

About four months ago, I visited my home state of Illinois, a state that I hadn't seen in about a year's worth of time. I was there to visit both sides of my separated family, and tried to plan things out so that I'd see each half for half of the time that I was visiting. It was kind of strange how I planned it, in retrospect. I stayed with my mother and sister for the first couple days in a suburb called Batavia, outside of Chicago. After that, I rode down to Springfield with my sister in her new, red car, and stayed with my father for a few days before I went back up to Chicago to see my mother again.

Now, I'm not one to brag (genuinely, at least), but my mother's father, my grandfather, is an exceptional cook. He and his wife travel the world and eat well, then share their experiences with the family through their cooking. Since I and my sister are out of my mother's house and she's had time to be free from motherly obligation, she's taken the time to work on her own culinary adventures. When I visited last June, I noticed that she'd started subscribing to a magazine called "Bon Appetit".

I know how marketing works, and I'm very aware of how photography will make or break an advertisement. The pictures in this magazine got me drooling before I even made it halfway in. Roasted meats, grated cheeses, a spattering of water upon fresh tomatoes. Everything looked amazing, and after subsisting on my own very plain, simple diet, I started to second guess myself. So I humored this magazine, and I read the recipes.

"You mean I don't have to have a grill?" I remember thinking. The ingredients were simple, and for a lot of their recipes, not too costly. Part of me wonders if, as children, most of us never wonder how our food is made because our lives are so simple. There's an excerpt from the movie "Fearless", that I believe is fairly relevant to this idea. In the movie, a Japanese martial artist (Tanaka) is discussing his passion of tea with a Chinese martial artist (Huo), and it goes something like this:

Tanaka: Mr. Huo, according to what you say, you don’t really know the nature of tea.
Huo : It’s not that I don’t know. I don’t really want to know. Because I don’t care about evaluating teas. Tea is tea.
Tanaka : But each tea has its own character and properties.
Huo : What is the purpose of grading? These many teas are grown in nature, all of them. Is there a discernible difference?
Tanaka : Yes, once you learn this, you can tell the difference between the teas.
Huo : What you say may be right, but the way I see it is, the tea doesn’t judge itself. It’s people that judge its grading. Different people choose different things. As for me, as far as I’m concerned, I just don’t want to make any choice.
Tanaka : Oh, is that so?
Huo : Drinking tea is a mood, really. If you are in a good mood, the grade of tea doesn’t matter.
Tanaka : I've never looked at it like that. I understand that there are many wushu fighting styles. Are you saying that no style is greater than another?
Huo : That’s what I’m saying.
Tanaka : If that is true, I want to ask you: If wushu does not differ in any way, why do we fight each other?
Huo : I believe for all the styles of wushu, there is no single one that is superior. All of those who practice different styles of wushu, they would naturally have a different level of skill. Through competition, we can discover ourselves.

Profound? Debatable. True? From my experience, I couldn't agree more, and I want to make the argument that this kind of philosophy could be true about food in general. I know that if I'm in a sour mood, I tend to eat my food quickly while my mind bothers with distraction. If I'm in a good mood, retrospectively, I might take the time to savor and enjoy what I've chosen to eat. However, Tanaka does have a point that food has taste, and with taste comes variety.

After I returned to my townhouse back here in Houston, I willed that I would stop eating the same meal every night (which consisted of baked chicken, mixed greens out of a can, and beer), and open my mind and try to learn how to cook with diversity. I started this journey by purchasing my first Bon Appetit magazine, and grazed over the recipes before I found a very simple one, that consisted of white fish with tomatoes and basil. I'm very happy to say that it was my first successful venture into cooking, and has become one of my "go to" meals since then.

But I didn't stop there. I've since subscribed to the magazine, and have cooked at least two things out of every issue I've received. My roommates and I have taken to a habit of visiting a farmer's market every Saturday morning, where the same cheerful woman sits under a canvas canopy, eager to sell her various produce and make light conversation with us. Keep in mind, this isn't the block-long farmer's market in San Fransisco, teeming with people as they scramble for the choicest of what they can reach. It's a very small setup, with one or two people actually getting payed for their work, which includes the former woman.

I want to say that I'd never thought I'd live this kind of lifestyle in Houston, Texas, but I love it. Getting up early, sipping coffee while we drive about twenty minutes to the "market", sharing a bit of dialogue with the familiar woman before leaving. Then, after that, taking what we buy and making it into a meal that will feed three people for two days. It's inspiring to me, and after our last meal, I'm happy to say that I'm enjoying this cooking thing, and I'm mostly making this post today to encourage other people to get into it. For the sake of inspiration, I've got a couple pictures below of what I and my roommates have cooked in the past few weeks, however, I don't want to seem like an egotistical yuppy, so I'll spare you the details. If you're curious, though, feel free to ask me via keystrokegraffiti@gmail.com! Bon appetit!

The Wounds of September

I was 13 years old, in a Tech class at Batavia Middle School, in Batavia, Illinois. We were making little electronic devices that used a 9-volt battery to power lights or make sounds. I remember our PA system came on and instructed all of the teachers to turn on their TVs, and all of us kids watched the second tower go down.

So few of us actually knew what was going on, myself included. We were a bit awestruck at watching the events unfold, and the whole school seemed to become quiet and contemplative for the rest of that day. For myself, it was a reality check. People can be insane, violent, and heartless. Even faced with those kind of facts, though, I became motivated to grow up and change the world for the better. I got into politics, and learned about protests. I found System of a Down. I learned a lot about the people who attacked us, and why they did it.

For me, the experience was more of a personal growth, and less of a surge of patriotism. However, knowing that I have two brothers that will have been to the Middle East because they -personally- want to help heal the wounds of terrorism, fills me with pride. The terrorist group attacked us out of bitterness and religious fanaticism, and we are helping their civilians see the lies that have been spread to them about us. We might be ruled by people of greed and selfishness, but we are not a nation of evil.

In my opinion, all religions have their failings. All of them have drawbacks. However, there is a stark irony that has stayed with me, about the attack in September, 2001. They claimed that we were an evil people, who suppressed their religion and caused them pain. As far as I know, however, I can't think of any instance where a group of Islamic missionaries have traveled to a third-world country to teach children and offer food and clothing to the poverty-stricken. I can think of plenty instances of Christians doing this, however. In fact, it's almost a staple of the religion to go out and help people where and when you can. I may disagree with Christianity myself, but the hypocrisy of the reasoning given behind Osama bin-Laden's funded attack on us is glaring.

I'm not saying that Islamic people aren't kind and helpful. I've seen plenty documentaries of Muslim doctors from the Middle East going to offer their aid to poverty-stricken areas, to help out with HIV vaccinations and other similar forms of aid. It's not them that I'm talking about, it's the religiously-fanatic terrorists that claim our people are evil.

In conclusion, after September eleventh, I never feared a terrorist ever again. I saw their cowardice, and their weakness. I saw that they were acting like children who just wanted to blame someone and cause them pain, because it made them feel better. I, as the son of my mother and father, who happens to have been born in America, am a better person than that. And you are too.

Writing Blues

So, for the past four months, following my victorious attempt at NaNoWriMo, I've been unable to focus my mind on my writing and continue to work on my "talent". In December, I looked back over the story I'd been hashing away at for the past thirty days, only to realize that I had misinterpreted the meaning behind the contest. As many NaNo veterans would tell you, trying to blitz your way into a noteworthy, block-busting novel in thirty days is pretty rare (possible, but rare), and will most likely end up as something that you'll have to continue spamming away at into the next year.

My personal failing with my novel was that I didn't plan it appropriately, even considering the literal -days- of research I put into it. I had also come to understand, afterward, that this novel that I'd been writing, even though I'd poured so much time into it, was not the story that I've been wanting to tell since I started writing creatively. Don't get me wrong, I'm really interested in World War II and I'd be ecstatic to be able to interview a veteran from that era, but it isn't the story that I want to tell.

Sometime last week, I was randomly thrown a symphony that was originally created by the composer Tchaikovsky. What was given to me, was Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, as composed by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. Now, I've heard time and time again, that classical music inspires creativity in a way that modern music can't compare to, and from personal experience, I can wholeheartedly agree.

The symphony is a beautiful, thought-provoking, goosebumps-driven piece of music, but it was the finale, "Adagio Lamentoso", that helped my imagination to create the story I've been trying to tell. This particular story started, ironically, through the music I was listening to when I was about seventeen years old, almost seven years ago. At the time, I was listening to a lot darker stuff than I'd previously heard, mixed with religious and semi-religious undertones. It was, more specifically, a combination of Mudvayne, UnderOath, Oh, Sleeper, and As I Lay Dying.

I can't help but think that most intellectuals would look down on me for being inspired by that sort of music, but it created a story, for me. I had to nurture this story with my imagination, which manifested itself into my life in various ways, from studying current events on social justice, to role-playing a character on a video game. It took a lot of time for me to get my main character down, but once I did, and once I saw how people reacted to them, it became clear that this was something people wanted to care about.

The tragic hero has always been something that I've emotionally connected to. Someone who has burning passions and is constantly fighting to achieve them, though their effort is mostly in vain. It's something about stubborn, ardent passion through adversity that just clicks with me, and the stories that embody that description are the ones that end up sticking with me the longest. I don't know whether or not the finale in Symphony No. 6 was meant to be a requiem, but the sadness that is invoked near the end of the piece created an image so vivid in my head, that it solidified this character that I've been slowly creating.

In consequence, I'm happy to say that I've finally got the novel idea that I want to write. It's taking a lot of time to figure out my universe, but at least I know that this is something I'll be able to focus on and enjoy. Special thanks to the guy that happened to show me Tchaikovsky's No. 6, you know who you are, brah.

And lo, the music did play, and it was good

If you didn't watch the Grammy Awards this year, don't worry, because you didn't miss much. What you did miss was another award show that looks and feels like yet another glorified circle-jerk for the tried and popular. The thing that upsets me the most, is the complete lack of effort on the nominee selection process. In case you didn't know, the nominees are chosen by the collective effort of one-hundred and fifty people who are described as "leading experts in the industry".

If you ask me, these guys aren't trying hard enough. Throwing up "Coldplay" and "Kings of Leon" in the rock category is not only bad joke, it's an insult to the genre. Either these experts were given a list of names to choose from, or they Googled "popular bands of 2011" and pinned the tail on the donkey five or six times per award. If you don't believe me, here's a list of band that oozed with talent last year, who were utterly left out of last night's ceremony:

-Evanescence (Rock)
-Ha Ha Tonka (Rock)
-Common (Hip Hop)
-Protest The Hero (Rock)
-Talib Kweli (Hip Hop)
-The Roots (Hip Hop)
-Florence + The Machine (Pop)
-Thrice (Rock)

Granted, I personally enjoy listening to most of this list, but you have to at least give credit to positive reviews and exploding fan bases. I would argue that "Undun", The Roots' newest album, is the best they've recorded thus far (and I wouldn't be the only one), and they didn't even get a nomination.

If the "leading experts" and going to allow good talent to remain in the shadows, then a twenty-something from Illinois will at least try to light a candle. Stay tuned, people, and start getting outside of your boxes and digging for music.