Farce alert

A good friend, who writes under the name Amber Belldene, linked to a fellow writer's blog post about a recent release. The blog post is headed Where to Dump a Body in Austin. This immediately made me think, wow, there are a zillion places for that.

But my second thought was -- based on my visit to Austin in the fall -- that would get me in trouble right away. Because as my recent trip demonstrated, while I used to be intimately familiar with Austin, that town has changed a lot in 30 years, and if I tried to do anything there -- never mind dumping a body, how about getting a sandwich -- I'd quickly get in trouble.

So this scene suggested itself: Suppose someone like me who used to live in a place claims to be an expert on that place. And a friend comes to him asking to dump a body. No problem! But when they get to the first place, which in 1978 was a garbage-strewn ravine, it's now the grounds of a day care center outside a corporate complex. And when they get to the second place, which in 1979 was an abandoned rail line, it's now a nicely landscaped bike path. And so on. Finally they dump the body on the steps of the governor's mansion, which in Texas is always a place where you'll find garbage and plenty of skeletons in the closet.
 

I think foodie-ism is not really about food

At Easter dinner, an interesting discussion cropped up. It started by someone asking why in the world someone would want to collect first-edition books, because wasn't the value of the book solely in the words printed therein, and therefore an electronic version of a landmark book was every bit as valuable as a first edition? And from there we somehow got onto a subject very often discussed by the family: food.

I've said before: I'm not a foodie. If by foodie we mean someone who considers herself an aficionado of certain (or all) types of gourmet food. While the definition of what we mean by "gourmet food" has changed over the last fifty years, as people become interested (or obsessed) with the provenance and nutritional effects of food, it's still pretty much the same impulse: to set yourself apart by gaining a commanding knowledge of and refined taste for expensive grub.

At least that's my opinion. The other people in the family no doubt feel they're interested in the provenance and nutritional value of food because they care about their health and that of the planet. And yeah, I get that. Some foods are better for you than others, and some foods are raised in more sustainable ways.

But what irks me are the lengths people go to to control these aspects. It isn't enough to, say, shop at Whole Foods or some other store (and let's not make this about Whole Foods) because you feel they do a pretty good job of assessing these issues of provenance, nutrition and sustainability and making the decisions for shoppers (in my opinion, that's their job, and why should I do it if they're already doing it?).

No, one must educate oneself about these issues and make choices for oneself, ultimately becoming one's one purveyor, buying directly from ranchers you've met personally who can provide a detailed description of the life of that cow from conception through slaughtering and continuing onward until the side of beef is at rest in your personal $10,000 top-of-the-line freezer. One must go to farmers markets, not just shopping if you please, but engaging the farmer (not his or her worker, but the grower herself, and god help her if she doesn't have dirt under her fingernails) as to the location of their plot, the methods they used to raise their vegetables, the things they put on the plants and the things they refrained from putting on; the conditions for workers on the farm; the Ph of the soil; and every other possible bit of information. And so on, ad degustandam.

Foodies would say that this attention to detail makes them more healthy, and encourages farmers to raise food in ways they approve of: "sustainably," "organically," and so on -- supposedly the twin goals of foodie-ism.

My question is: Is this really about health and well-being of oneself and the earth? Or is this really about fear, and control, and trying to stave off death?

I think that no matter how healthfully I eat, I will eventually die. In fact, I seriously doubt that making every single correct choice, when it comes to what I eat for the rest of my life, will extend my life more than a year or two. Set aside the likelihood of me dying in an accident or from a communicable disease, because I realize most people still die of heart disease and cancer. In my case, I think cancer is more likely, as my father (who worked for 40 years in oil and chemical refineries, albeit in the office while wearing a white shirt and tie) died of brain cancer in his mid-70s, and I lived from ages 1 to 6 in one of those oil refineries. It hasn't killed me yet, so maybe it's not going to; but I have had the exposure, for what it was worth. Can what I eat affect that?

And more to the point: Can I, by jumping through hoops to ensure the correct provenance of my hamburger, rather than noshing at Burger King and Taco Bell as I do at least once a month, affect anything? Yes, it's probably worse to eat Burger King every day than to eat ecologically blessed beef three times a week. But if I only have to make the choice twice a month, and I choose Burger King every time, is that really going to kill me? I kind of doubt it.

Of course, by choosing Burger King I'm missing out on the sense of virtue, the feeling of control, the feeling of being part of a dietary and ecological elite that my other family members are enjoying. But I don't think that feeling extends your life either.

My mother, who died six months ago, lived til 90. She wasn't in bad health until the last five years. She also smoked heavily for 50 years, ate crappy American food with hardly a fresh vegetable for most of her life, and exercised fairly little after age 25. If she had lived a "more healthy" lifestyle, would she have lived til 95? Maybe so, and maybe she would have preferred it to dying. But 90 years is already a long time. On the other hand, Herman Wouk just sold a novel at age 96. (Wouk is the perfect example of the kind of mid-century realist who's out of style now, but "The Caine Mutiny" is a crackerjack book. Dare you to read it and be bored.) If I'm still writing at 90, or 96, or 106, maybe I will wish I had been more finicky about hamburger. But if I last that long, I have the feeling that the 2010's fad of near-worship of food will, at best, seem like a pretty amusing piece of nostalgia.

Something else lost

Driving down 17th Street the other night, I passed this building on the corner of Florida Street, catty-corner from Project Artaud.

Project Artaud was one of the original factories converted to live-work spaces in the Mission District, a conversation which took place in the 1970s and which in addition to providing living spaces for dozens of painters, sculptors, dancers and actors, birthed several performance spaces and studios which are still lively places to go see art. And it's still a collectively-run building with many of the original artists -- now in their 60s and 70s -- still living and working there.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a performance artist and used to go to Project Artaud all the time for rehearsals and performances, a restaurant opened in this building. You can still see the sign -- Moxie Restaurant-Bar -- though the restaurant closed a long time ago, at least fifteen years ago, and some kind of architectural or design firm has been there ever since. Back when the restaurant was open, I not only could not afford to go to it, but I was too intimidated to do so. I felt bars and restaurants required a certain gravitas and adult presentation, and in many cases I was afraid to go into them, especially if a friend of mine hadn't brought me to them first.

So I never made it into this restaurant before it closed. And driving past it the other night, even though I drive past it several times a week (because 17th Street is a convenient cross-town route), it suddenly struck me as never before that the restaurant was not only closed, but closed long ago, so long that it belonged to the distant past when I was a performance artist and went by that corner several times a week not to go cross-town, but in order to do my art. And all that seemed very long ago suddenly, and it is: 20, 25, 30 years ago. It wasn't about the particular restaurant as the exact geographic spot that 17th and Florida represents, or more accurately, that it represented to me in the 1970s (even before I came to San Francisco) and 1980s and which is now so far in the past. More than anything else it represents my youth, my fresh, untrammeled notions and ambitions, my pure heart.

I remember going to Project Artaud during my first few days in the city, to the street address, because it was where Mangrove [8-minute video] had their studio, and Mangrove more or less encapsulated the whole reason I came to San Francisco: to do Contact Improv and perform. And even more before I went to the contact jam on Vancouver Island a week later, where I met the local contactors for the first time, I had that single piece of information: 499 Alabama, the address of Mangrove [Google Books page from the book "Sharing the dance: contact improvisation and American culture" by Cynthia Jean Novac]. The building turned out to be a large factory building that had been converted to studios and lofts: that was Project Artaud. And while the door at 499 Alabama was locked, other doors into the building were open, and I bravely went in and wandered the halls, looking at the bulletin boards outside studios and theaters where I would one day perform. And while I didn’t see any dancers and didn't actually run into a single soul, I was on a pilgrimage and just being there was enough. That’s what I mean by my untrammeled ambitions -- not careerist ambitions, but spiritual ones. My pilgrimage was not even about what I would one day do; it was about who I would one day be. And all of it -- all the performing I did, all the love affairs I had, all the adventures and rejection and ecstasy and pain -- was still in the future.

I've felt nostalgic pangs before, but they had never been as sharp as the pain I felt at the moment we drove past the former Moxie Restaurant. And my painful feelings were for a restaurant I'd never been to, but which represented, when it was still there, something I could aspire to. Back in my 20s, and really until my late 40s, my life was aspirational. I felt success and fulfillment were still in my future. I might, through a combination of talent and luck, become a more well-known performer or writer; I might, when I finally acquired sufficient gravitas, go to a cool jazzy-looking restaurant in an artsy neighborhood. By contrast, now my life is limited in other, more painful ways. I no longer think there's much chance I'll become a well-known writer, or even publish a novel. In fact, I measure out the rest of my life in the number of (probably unpublished) novels I can still finish before I die. Maybe four or five more.

This feeling of limited horizons and chances is, of course, a characteristic of middle age. Maybe the prime sign of middle age. And I'm probably lucky I didn't feel it this sharply before now.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.