| |
 |
Saturday, June 01, 2002 |
Kill It & Grill It
The Times Book Review's Summer Reading issue is out, and Dwight Garner writes about a recent crop of cookbooks. Two catch my eye: A REAL AMERICAN BREAKFAST: The Best Meal of the Day, Any Time of the Day (Morrow, $34.95), by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison; and Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby's LET THE FLAMES BEGIN: Tips, Techniques, and Recipes for Real Live Fire Cooking (Norton, $30). I've been making fritatta's lately for breakfast which is really a lot of fun, and a new crop of recipes sounds great. Schlesinger & Willoughby's earlier books, THE THRILL OF THE GRILL and LICENSE TO GRILL are favorites of mine, great confidence builders, well written.
In the lead, Garner says, "I've fallen the hardest for cookbooks by people who can actually write -- books by people like [Laurie] Colwin, John Thorne and M. F. K. Fisher, for whom recipes are almost an afterthought." I need to dig into these authors; I wish he had mentioned some titles as well as author names. M. F. K. Fisher (I was looking at a picture book about her at a bookstore yesterday) is particularly fascinating, though I'm not sure where to begin.
6:54:28 PM Permalink
|
|
In Praise of Vulgarity
Popular culture is the bane of both the oppressors of, generally, the East, and the "cultural elite" of the West.
[The] first breath of cultural freedom that Afghans had enjoyed since 1995 was suffused with the stuff of commercially generated popular culture. The people seemed delighted to be able to look like they wanted to, listen to what they wanted to, watch what they wanted to, and generally enjoy themselves again. Who could complain about Afghans’ filling their lives with pleasure after being coerced for years to adhere to a harshly enforced ascetic code?
The West’s liberal, anti-materialist critics, that’s who.
Capitalism has its own rules; it doesn't pay any attention to morality of any sort, except for what sells. Obviously, this has both its benefits and its drawbacks. A lot of times those who praise the free market for "products" are not in favor of it in terms of "ideas" or expression.
In other words, the confluence of markets and culture has repeatedly advanced democratic values, because it has allowed a series of outgroups -- women, blacks, Jews, gays, etc. -- successfully to address the larger society about injustice and inequality. Such appeals have been successful precisely because of their "vulgar" forms. It is because they have involved such emotionally compelling forms as music and melodrama that they have induced their audiences to experience a given injustice through the eyes of those suffering from it. Justice’s medium is empathy, and empathy’s medium is more often the melodrama than it is the manifesto. In short, it is the broad-based culture that emerges from markets that frequently serves as a means of democratic self-correction...
Capitalism’s critics in the West blame what they call "the culture industry," which makes itself rich by aggressively manipulating consumerist idiots. The latter part with their money because they have been persuaded that some truly useless but expensive object will make them hip, youthful, or desirable, or raise their status. This manipulative scheme is now a global enterprise, filling the world with what Benjamin Barber and his ilk castigate as "junk." Worse, say the Daniel Bells and Hillary Clintons, it’s a threat to Western prosperity, because it instills self-absorption at the expense of the work ethic.
This critique completely misses the point of cultural commerce. The citizens of the post-subsistence world have a historically remarkable luxury: They can experiment with who they are. They can fashion and refashion their identities, and through much of their lives that is just what they do. They can go about this in a lot of ways, but one of the most important methods is what is known and reviled as "consumerism." They experiment with different modes of self-presentation, assert or mask aspects of their individuality, join or leave a series of subcultures, or oppose and adhere to centers of power. It is from this complex mix that the things of the material world become the furnishings of both a social and a personal identity. That’s what meaning is.
I've been reading it off and on in paper for a few years, but having Reason online is very nice. There's a wealth of good stuff there.
12:03:04 PM Permalink
|
|
Cooking the Books
Michael Kinsley has a good piece in Slate giving the background for the growing Dick Cheney scandal. Hint: Enron wasn' alone in using Arthur Anderson to help it book revenue that hadn't actually been received yet, Haliburton was doing it too. And the practice started when none other but our current Vice President was President of Haliburton. Next, W will start calling the veep "Mr. Cheney" the way he stopped calling Ken Lay "Kenny Boy" and started using "Mr. Lay."
The New York Times, which first reported the Halliburton funny business, explained it pretty clearly: The company runs large construction projects, mostly for the government and the oil industry. Apparently, large construction projects work just like small ones, such as remodeling the bathroom. That is, the contractor states a price, runs over budget, then tries to get the customer to fork over the difference. Until 1998 Halliburton had the tact to wait until it got the extra money before putting it on the books. In that year, it began guessing how much of a disputed surcharge would ultimately get paid and crediting itself in advance. Why not? You only live once! This self-administered pick-me-up added $100 million in reported revenues to Halliburton's books...
And where was the future vice president while this was going on? The company insists, graciously, that a mere $100 million flyspeck on the company accounts (1999 income: $438 million) was beneath the notice of a busy CEO like Dick Cheney. This is believable. Cheney's income in 2000, his last year at Halliburton, was $36 million in salary, bonuses, benefits, deferred compensation, restricted stock sales, exercised options, frequent-flier miles, a turkey at Christmas, and other standard elements of the modern CEO compensation package. It is a vital responsibility of anyone who is that valuable to remain completely ignorant of anything improper going on around him. He owes it to the company to be untainted.
Good thing we don't have those immoral, dishonest, greedy Democrats in power now!
11:52:57 AM Permalink
|
|
From Omphalos RoboPundit this link to a really interesting article about life among Brazi'ls elits. As he states, this does remind one of a lot of Cyberpunk scenarios. It's harrowing; when there's a small elite controlling most wealth, and a large poor sector, the elite live in justified fear.
Sao Paulo -- a city of 18 million, populated by the fantastically wealthy and the severely poor with little in between -- is, by some accounts, a vision of future urban life in the developing world. As homicide and kidnapping rates have soared to record levels, civilian helicopter traffic here has become what industry executives describe as the busiest on Earth. Helicopter companies estimate that liftoffs average 100 per hour. The city boasts 240 helipads, compared with 10 in New York City, allowing the rich to whisk to and from their well-guarded homes to work, business meetings, afternoons of shopping, even church.
11:21:07 AM Permalink
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
|
|
|
|
|
