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Blinks

Sunday, 20 April, 2008

Food (and food-related)

• I Love You, but You Love Meat: Interesting article about what you do when you and the one you love eat different things because a rejection of the food you serve feels so much like a rejection of yourself. I found it interesting that one woman said, “I need someone who is ethically on the same page” (i.e. vegan). Yet some couples learn to make compromises. Certain Ben and I have done that: he mostly went off wheat and dairy but we still keep milk in the house because I can't live without it.
• Of Valentine's jinxes and packaged gnocchi: I love this piece of writing—I love that it's about relationships and learning stuff as much as it is about cooking.
• Free Lunch Isn't Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry: This is article is so sad. It talks about how, even though there are programs set up to provide free food for poorer students at public schools, a lot of them forego it because it's not seen as being “cool”. They'd rather starve than let their social standing slide.
• Google's free beer and ‘big-ass’ barbies: An interesting (and slightly disturbing) approach to boosting work productivity: offer free, really good food: “They explained my job was to create this ambience, to build this captivated audience where people wanted to come in super-early and stay super-late.”
• Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?: One journalist wonders whether teaching his sons the joy of fine wine at home will prevent them from wanting to binge-drink later. One man argues,

  “If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

• How the fortune cookie crumbles: Is American Chinese food really Chinese? (Apparently not!)

Fashion and style

• The Sweet Smell of ... Nothing: Why sales of perfume are in decline. Why? Many don't want to wear perfume for the sake of other people who find it a bit too much (plus when many women are wearing perfume in the same room, it starts to smell like “a fruit salad gone wrong”!) In addition, “As people's lives have gotten busier, their relationships are less intimate, and you have to know someone pretty well to walk into a store and explain what kind of fragrance they might like or not like”
• Everyone's a Critic: Bloggers are increasingly becoming a voice which perfume-manufacturers can no longer afford to ignore.
• The Bride Wore Very Little: Women are starting to wear racier gowns at their wedding because “Women now are looking at their weddings more like a movie premiere”. It goes with the trend of fewer nuptials taking place in churches and hometowns, and more destination weddings. Isn't it interesting that people want to look more like celebrities do!
• French fashion industry signs anti-anorexia charter: And it's about time! Hopefully this will lead to sensible minimum body mass index. However,
• Wasn't Skinny Supposed to Be Out of Fashion?: Ali Michael, the toast of the Paris fashion shows last year, was sent home for gaining five pounds. So now “we have bodies being formed to fit clothes, rather than clothes designed to fit bodies.”
• Smoking doesn't make girls skinny: study: If more girls knew this, would they quit smoking?
• A Girl's Life, With Highlights: Girls are getting highlights in their hair from as young as 10. Where do you draw the line??? (Well, we are becoming more of a salon culture ...)

Exercise (and exercise-related)

• Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles: Why muscles get tired (it's the body's way of protecting itself).
• Yes, Running Can Make You High: It's the endorphins (they think).
• Latest Reality TV: Dancing (Along) With the Stars of Nickelodeon: There's a new TV show aimed at children, encouraging them to dance and participate in dance. The moves aren't too racy either. In addition, the behind-the-scenes footage give kids a good incentive to practise if they want to be as good as those on the show.

Travel

• Overnight With Frank Lloyd Wright: Want to stay in a house designed by a world-famous architect? Now you can.
• Going Green in Australia's Blue Mountains: This journalist takes an eco-holiday in the Blue Mountains. It amused me she spent the first third of the article fretting about whether or not to travel because of the environmental impact that planes have (what clinches it for her is Qantas's carbon offset program and her desire to help the tourism industry), and that the state of our public transport system horrified her:

  Buoyed by our rugged hike, the next day we ventured into the town of Katoomba, a backpacker's paradise filled with cafes, restaurants and shops, to say nothing of the mountain scenery—though sorting out an eco-friendly way to get there, or anywhere for that matter, from our lodge proved impossible. While the train from Sydney had dropped us right in Blackheath, once there, we had to take a cab from the station to our lodge, and to reach Katoomba (a 10-minute ride away) we again had to call a taxi. It was obvious that public transport was not a priority here, as no one seemed to know when or where there were buses, and even the locals seemed to wait forever for a bus that might never come.

Music

• Shared Song, Communal Memory: Despite the rise of the iPod, community sing-a-longs are coming back into vogue, helping people to feel like they own the music.
• Rock vs. jazz: An interesting article about how to listen to and appreciate jazz with lots of gems in it, like:

Unlike rock, enjoying jazz didn't come naturally to me: I had to learn how to listen to it.

And I wasn't always sure I wanted to. Part of me secretly thought that jazz was a little, well, square. At its worst, it just seemed to be a bunch of technically proficient middle-aged men taking turns soloing on schmaltzy old tunes. Where was the drama, the storytelling, the creative compression, I was used to in rock? It could seem rambling, indulgent, a mere vehicle for an expertise whose sophistication had a faintly musty air. Compared to the supernova Rimbaud rush of Hendrix, the nasty sneering lust of the Stones or the miraculously protean Beatles, jazz felt like yesterday's drug, one that might be able to get me high if I knew the password, but whose shelf life might have permanently expired.

and

Still, I must confess to sometimes feeling a bit of non-purist guilt about my predilection for what I've clumsily called dramatic jazz. I sometimes wonder if rock, with its powerful simplicity and aura of authenticity and transcendence, was too powerful a drug, if it made it hard for me to appreciate the quieter virtues of less conceptually ambitious jazz. Besides, conceptual ambition can be seen as a limitation on the most essential thing about jazz: freedom, exploration, improvisation. If permanence is a virtue, so is the transience of improvisation.

and

Rock is all about drama. It's one climax after another. While jazz musicians' personalities disappear behind the music, rock puts those personalities front and center. It derives from the ancient tradition of the troubadour, while jazz draws both on that and on the classical tradition, with its emphasis on mastery and formal exploration.

This doesn't mean there's no mastery or formal exploration in rock—it's just usually in a different place. As great artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen demonstrate, the troubador's persona can be as complex as a Sonny Rollins solo. But only rarely is the complexity found in the music. Most rock eschews advanced musical knowledge or technique. It's both voice-centered and communal, which limits its range: Songs that can be easily memorized or sung are not usually musically complex. This gives it a greater immediacy and accessibility: Unlike jazz, most rock does not make you work to understand what's going on.

• Life Imitating Film: A Night Out With Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglov: (Glen Hansard is the lead singer of The Frames. He and Marketa starred in the movie Once together and are now a couple. And they performed “Falling Slowly” at this year's Academy Awards and won Best Song.)
• And the Band Played Badly: which asks “Why should real musicians—the ones who can actually play their instruments—have all the fun?”. So a bunch of amateurs got together and formed the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Record Stores Fight to Be Long-Playing: In this age where buying a song is only a click away, independent record stores are struggling. Yet up-and-coming artists owe them so much, and their staff usually have such a wealth of knowledge, it would be a shame to see them disappear. Hence Record Store Day.
• “I quit being a musician because I couldn't play without drinking”: Cary Tennis responds by saying they're quite alike:

  I was drinking for two reasons. One, I had alcoholic tendencies. I responded to alcohol abnormally. But two, I had not developed the artistic skill required to contain my feelings and direct them into expressive form. My feelings frightened me. I had a narrow emotional range—I could do rage and I could do joy. That was it. I could not handle the middle feelings.

  And here are some clues about what it means to handle adulthood:

  And I had to find some love for myself, dude. So the bit about your relationship with your parents, I relate to that. Somehow you have to give yourself what they didn't give you. You step in as the adult and say, OK, man, I know you are suffering here, and I give you permission to be only yourself! You move that relationship out of the past, which you can't change, and into your present, your inner life, your symbolic life so you can change it.

  Try that. Just step in there as the adult figure and give yourself what you need. You are the only one who can provide that now. Your parents are not ever going to do it. You have to move that whole struggle into your own sphere of influence.

  For instance, in my own case, I now have to parent my dad—literally but also figuratively. I have to help the actual dad. But internally, I also have to create for myself the decisive, clearheaded man I once needed him to be. He is never going to give me that. I have to create a decisive, clearheaded persona to guide me in the present so that, in a sense, I become my own father.

  We have to become for ourselves the parents we need. In your case, you need to become for yourself a parent who says, “My son, even if you didn't have an ounce of talent or brilliance I'd still love you without reservation till the end of my days.”

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