I seem to always go looking for trouble – even where there is none. Such is the life of a maverick. (Since Sarah Palin’s preposterous rise to fame, the word “maverick” is having a re-birth.)
I counsel others to think, to do, to act, to vibrate with anticipation of every new day. I however, find that more and more, the palliative quality of TV is too seductive to resist. I can become a passive receptor, content to lie back and let someone entertain, divert, or amuse me.
Having made my case for slothfulness, I can proceed to my point: cooking, or more specifically, the presence of ancient bromides in the fine art of cooking.
Watching one of my favourites – The Food Network, I am uplifted by the artistry of Anna Olsen, blondly glittering her way into the inner depths of my gustatory psyche. (Wow! Talk about flights of poetic fancy!)
The point – wait for it – it’s coming. She is busy concocting something delectable when she says: “Nothing like home cookin’.” I am startled. If I had a cook like Olsen in my home I would never go out to eat again.
The point here is not the beautiful Mrs. Olsen, but the notion somehow that home-cooking is the be-all-and-end all. The expression keeps cropping up on other cooking shows like Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. The best of the fine food in a small town diner is that it is: home cookin'! It is not!
Besides, I have a special antipathy toward home cooking. It’s right up there with other aphorisms and bromides like “No place like a small town and no people like small town people.” You can, if you wish, substitute “country-folk” for “small town.
I bow to Flannery O”Connor, during whose short life, targeted the notions of “good ole country folk” and their apparently inherent goodness, trustworthiness, and reliability.
Back again to Home Cooking.
I don’t know about you but I have eaten in some homes where the food was so dull and pedestrian it was nearly an insult. Not every mother is a good cook. Not every home-cooking kitchen is paradise. Some of the food is awful. It has been coasting for years on its unwarranted reputation.
Near me, in the St. Lawrence Market area of Toronto is the Saturday-only Farmer’s Market, where all the good things of country living are sold. It is where I, believing in the inherent virtues of country- folk cookin” bought a corn bread.
It was the driest, most totally tasteless thing I had ever eaten. It reminded me of the other “country-cookin”” fable – the one where you xtop by a farm house on the way back from the cottage to buy some home-made pie. It is often good but it is also often terrible – crust like wet cardboard, and fruit overcooked.
In all fairness, I have experienced some great stuff too – like the pieces at the big War worth competition that brings mothers’ food to the masses.
But by and large, we have been seduced because we want to be. We really do want to believe that home is not only where the heart is, but it’s where the cooking is down-home good.
My advice: stay away from anything billed as “home cooking”, and stop lying around watching TV.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
HOPES, DREAMS, AND DELUSIONS
When you are growing older and long past the traditional age of retirement, there is still a spark – a belief that somehow you will resume some kind of a career. It is not, for some, as the saying gores: a snare and a delusion. It is reality. I have two friends – one two years older who still heads an important organization for monitoring the media. The other, is perhaps better known because he remains – at just four months younger than I – an iconic (wow I am getting tired of that word) journalistic figure on TV News. And of course, there is Mike Wallace, who continued to work on “60 Minutes: well into his nineties.
I remember meeting with John Knight, president of Knight-Ridder newspapers and when I met him, still working after two Pulitzer Prizes. He remained as editor-in-chief of the Miami Herald. Interviewing him in 1976 I commented that it must be a distraction to sit in his office, surrounded by pictures of himself and Presidents, to look out on the beautiful palm-fringed scene and the causeway leading to Key Biscayne. “Once you get used to the view – it’s just another place to work,” was his reply.
I commented, lightly I thought, that he was “well into his eighties.”
He bristled. “I am not well into my eighties. I’m only 82.
These men are unique. It would be folly of any elderly (nut still ambitious) man to try to emulate their success and their vocational longevity.
Folly.
Yet, here I go again. The other day I had lunch with a young entertainment-business lawyer whose father, a cinematographer had worked with me in my palmier days.
He asked me what I would like to do. Do?? I’m lucky to be sitting there talking to a successful man who was less than half my age.
“I’m serious,” he said. Would you like to get back into “the business?”
There is not room for me – I’m the wrong demographic”
“Nonsense, there are many people who still admire and remember you.”
Flattery always works.
I agreed that perhaps, just perhaps if he could get the funding for a pilot, I might be persuaded to put a show together.
We talked a bit. He suggested travel. I suggested Home Exchange.
Why not? Let’s put together a pilot of a typical home exchange, complete with the two exchangers – I would be one of them of course – visiting each other. There would be footage of me the exchanger, fitting into the neighborhood, making new friends, shopping for food, finding the best boulangerie and seeing the sights.
Sometimes, and I have said this before, you and the person you exchange with get together. There is usually overlap at either end of the trip.
Do I have the stamina to do it? Does the audience have any interest in seeing an octogenarian and his wife trudging around a small city in Holland, or visiting the zoo in Lisbon that is directly behind the place where we are staying? Perhaps we could meet the people, like Ricardo in Lisbon who showed us ancient Celtic monoliths in the middle of nowhere or Trees and Dick who made sure we visited Delft and also saw “The Pearl Earring” at the museum in The Hague.
Maybe I could do it. Maybe I can still crank it up.
I remember meeting with John Knight, president of Knight-Ridder newspapers and when I met him, still working after two Pulitzer Prizes. He remained as editor-in-chief of the Miami Herald. Interviewing him in 1976 I commented that it must be a distraction to sit in his office, surrounded by pictures of himself and Presidents, to look out on the beautiful palm-fringed scene and the causeway leading to Key Biscayne. “Once you get used to the view – it’s just another place to work,” was his reply.
I commented, lightly I thought, that he was “well into his eighties.”
He bristled. “I am not well into my eighties. I’m only 82.
These men are unique. It would be folly of any elderly (nut still ambitious) man to try to emulate their success and their vocational longevity.
Folly.
Yet, here I go again. The other day I had lunch with a young entertainment-business lawyer whose father, a cinematographer had worked with me in my palmier days.
He asked me what I would like to do. Do?? I’m lucky to be sitting there talking to a successful man who was less than half my age.
“I’m serious,” he said. Would you like to get back into “the business?”
There is not room for me – I’m the wrong demographic”
“Nonsense, there are many people who still admire and remember you.”
Flattery always works.
I agreed that perhaps, just perhaps if he could get the funding for a pilot, I might be persuaded to put a show together.
We talked a bit. He suggested travel. I suggested Home Exchange.
Why not? Let’s put together a pilot of a typical home exchange, complete with the two exchangers – I would be one of them of course – visiting each other. There would be footage of me the exchanger, fitting into the neighborhood, making new friends, shopping for food, finding the best boulangerie and seeing the sights.
Sometimes, and I have said this before, you and the person you exchange with get together. There is usually overlap at either end of the trip.
Do I have the stamina to do it? Does the audience have any interest in seeing an octogenarian and his wife trudging around a small city in Holland, or visiting the zoo in Lisbon that is directly behind the place where we are staying? Perhaps we could meet the people, like Ricardo in Lisbon who showed us ancient Celtic monoliths in the middle of nowhere or Trees and Dick who made sure we visited Delft and also saw “The Pearl Earring” at the museum in The Hague.
Maybe I could do it. Maybe I can still crank it up.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Apologies
I have no one to blame but my proof-reader - me! Sorry for the goofs. I was reminded that Lord Jim was (of course) Conrad and the Amis book was "Lucky Jim." And for the other nit-0pickers, my comment about "test-messaging. I'm sure you realize I meant text-messaging.
AGING AND IMPATIENCE
AGING AND IMPATIENCE
One of the hazards of growing older is that when you read momentous announcements of things to come – you know you won’t be there to see them. Just as I won’t be around to see my grandchildren go to university, I will be long gone when the City of Toronto does something about the development of the 800 hectares of land in the central waterfront – land that could create public and commercial space, and add to the downtown critical mass of residential housing. Think of it – another ten or fifteen or twenty thousand people living downtown and leaving their cars parked.
The prediction is that the billions required to get going on this will mean that we won’t see it all for another twenty-five years, when I will be 105!
What really bothers me is not just the inability to get things done ( for those of us who remember the endless haggling of the railway lands, it’s déjà vu all over again,.) it is the monumental failure of people to conceive, to think, to act, on a massive issue.
Alas for me. There was a time when I could say all this and cultivate ideas in a few hundred thousand listeners. Now I shout words down a deep well echoing only the sadness I feel at being powerless.
Mark Kolke (of Mark Musings) has asked me for more material like my reminiscences about Kingsley Amis. He is not alone. Old friends (and fans) continue to tell me I have to create a memoir based on all the people I have met through the years.
The problem becomes insoluble. On the one hand I want to more forward (or as the blog says – Look Ahead) and stimulate new ideas and perhaps some change. No way. What they all seem to want is memories. I have them and I treasure them.
But who wants to be “remembered,” when you really want to be a force for change?
It is up to all of us closing in on our final years to stay relevant and active and persuasive. Funny, the Chinese (and look at what they achieve) hold the elderly in high esteem and look for their advice in decision-making..
Is it Confucianism? Is it reality?
I want to be here for the good stuff. I want to help make it happen.
One of the hazards of growing older is that when you read momentous announcements of things to come – you know you won’t be there to see them. Just as I won’t be around to see my grandchildren go to university, I will be long gone when the City of Toronto does something about the development of the 800 hectares of land in the central waterfront – land that could create public and commercial space, and add to the downtown critical mass of residential housing. Think of it – another ten or fifteen or twenty thousand people living downtown and leaving their cars parked.
The prediction is that the billions required to get going on this will mean that we won’t see it all for another twenty-five years, when I will be 105!
What really bothers me is not just the inability to get things done ( for those of us who remember the endless haggling of the railway lands, it’s déjà vu all over again,.) it is the monumental failure of people to conceive, to think, to act, on a massive issue.
Alas for me. There was a time when I could say all this and cultivate ideas in a few hundred thousand listeners. Now I shout words down a deep well echoing only the sadness I feel at being powerless.
Mark Kolke (of Mark Musings) has asked me for more material like my reminiscences about Kingsley Amis. He is not alone. Old friends (and fans) continue to tell me I have to create a memoir based on all the people I have met through the years.
The problem becomes insoluble. On the one hand I want to more forward (or as the blog says – Look Ahead) and stimulate new ideas and perhaps some change. No way. What they all seem to want is memories. I have them and I treasure them.
But who wants to be “remembered,” when you really want to be a force for change?
It is up to all of us closing in on our final years to stay relevant and active and persuasive. Funny, the Chinese (and look at what they achieve) hold the elderly in high esteem and look for their advice in decision-making..
Is it Confucianism? Is it reality?
I want to be here for the good stuff. I want to help make it happen.
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