jasonspiro.com blog

Unanswered correspondence with British author:

Dear Mr Young,

[…] I don’t really “get” America’s fascination with food TV celebrities. I understand the attraction to chefs, respect for their skills, appreciation of their products. I love TC but I can’t say the same for the many food game shows.

Over there, the UK Restaurant Nightmares, and the F Word, are consistent, well planned, dimensional entertainment. Over here we should just call every show “Redneck Bingo.” Or “Redneck Bingo Bakesale” if it’s a food show. Even when your countrymen come over here to host, our participants make it an embarrassment. But I am not here to write bad jokes on the fly…

Nor am I here to tell you about myself, but as far as the fascination with the chef’s life goes: at thirty, reading Michael Ruhlman’s books, I thought I could pull it off. Me, a middle- to upper-middle class kid thinks, hey, I’ve always loved restaurants and my mom was a great cook. I ate at Moulin de Mougins! I will surely be understood in this filth pit. I know some successful career changers but I don’t know that I am one. Actually I love the business, I don’t know why I’m wasting your time with my self-pity.

What possesses me, or those people who auditioned for or participated in the Next Food Network Star, thinking, “I can win that cooking game show.” It is something to see a chef with meticulous planning and mental mise en place, running a crew, expediting, helping to execute a couple dozen recipes on a daily basis. It is something else to see un- or poorly- trained part-time cooks take a leave from their banking job or homemaking gig to run the gauntlet that a budget-constrained culinary producer deigns to design for a product-placement littered landscape of puketastic ingredients.

So we worship chefs. No problem. But cooks? It’s the new style. The typical home cook (or part time caterer, or private chef) couldn’t run a station with 30 tickets on the board, synchronize with the other stations, not burn anything and not run out of their own nicely done prep or pots and pans after a long day of multi-tasking, delegation, sweating, putting out fires… I guess I am saying it’s a little improbable that I, and my fellow would-be TV cooks will learn the very specific, myriad abilities of the chef, and be mature while working in or running a kitchen. Likewise these next Food Network TV stars are not likely to develop talent immediately–certainly they’ll be groomed and trained before they’re given a short-lived show.

This doesn’t ultimately address the topic, how are celebrity chef infatuations different from and similar to typical celebrity worship? Are chefs another form of hero in our culture?

[…] How can rage or disdain find unfortunate expression in the restaurant scene, among the dining public? Have you witnessed any brawls and why did they happen? Who do the misbehavers tend to be in UK dining, and why, if you have noticed any patterns at this or that type of establishment.

[…] I think in restaurant reviewing, professional ethics are particularly important. There are too many anonymous, snarky food bloggers who, lacking credentials, make up for inexperience with thoughtless smears. That type of internet resident could use a code of ethics. And, sadly, people eat that shit up. We love us some snark. What are some tenets of journalistic ethics that you’ve lived by and can you speak to the amateur blogger/food blogger debate?

[…] The gf is quick to point out the often homogenous makeup of the TC casts. Always with the white males, she might have remarked, and I can’t completely disagree. But for me, the weakness in casting is, I can tell who is in the bottom eight and the top five or six if not by the end of the first Quickfire then halfway through the first Elimination Challenge.

I’m sure there are more than a couple of TC cheftestants who rued the day they said “deconstructing” or “deconstructed” as part of a dish title or to describe a process. Naturally, I think of Derrida when people use the word deconstruction, but in a funny way because not just TC chefs but many many chefs misuse the term. (It’s getting so I may feel like a pedant for insisting on its proper use or that people say “archives” when describing an archives.) When a misguided chef appropriates the “deconstructing” something concept, and it remains so far afield from the real meaning or spirit–the dish can and usually does suffer. Like the difference between Eugene in S5 and Mike Voltaggio in S6–the ill-fated sushi dish during the wedding shower, vs. everything Mike did, is a way to illustrate the difference between breaking something down without reimagining it particularly well, and recomposition or reharmonization.

[…] Perhaps people conflate would-be food science people, with molecular practitioners, with flavor scientists, and with cooks whose menu writing is informed by post-modern concepts and styles of humor. This misconception about new nouvelle is reinforced by popular commercials that equate New American cuisine with pixie sized portions or elf food. In any case, there is a place for bleeding-edge cooks, I think, and it’s a good place that I like to visit whenever possible. Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria and his brother, and your own Top Chef Richard Blais… (as well as many others, and scores of pastry chefs) are exploring an exciting idiom, cooking good food, and hopefully contributing to good research and development for food scientists.

[…] Would mounting, as an exercise, an imaginary class-based attack on TK’s Per Se and French Laundry be worthwhile? He is not the best example, since Ducasse has run the most ridiculously opulent places around, but who is? Most chefs are not slumming dilettantes who just fell into 30 year careers. But supposing I made the argument that a rejection of middle-class values is a rejection of Thomas Keller’s style front and back of the house? I’m looking at the top guy in our country, probably the most well respected American chef, and just asking whether his focus on luxury all the way up to the point that he opened a Bouchon and then Ad Hoc, whether that was socially responsible even in light of his extraordinary ethics, and the way he puts his values into practice.

You were at Mandalay Bay. I appreciate what Rick Moonen is doing to bring awareness to aquaculture practices and who to buy fish from. Is sustainability in aquaculture and agriculture—or shopping locally and being aware of a supermarket’s carbon footprint—of much concern for people of the UK or for you? Or supporting good fishermen, farmers, local butchers? Does anything about the trendiness of going green amuse you? Based on my viewing of Nuts In May I’d say your general population has been concerned about organic farming for longer than ours.

[…] Thanks again for your time.

Best,
Jason

“In the vacuum of space, no one can hear you scream.”

This slight corruption of the teaser line that the ad-wizards developed for the Alien one sheet, trailer, and other promotional efforts represents the germ of several thoughts that have batted around my brain for the last twenty minutes or so. Home, vacuums, space, screaming… all of these words represent ideas or partial culminations of motives in this week’s chamber pot play. I am not home; I have no home; the place that I am in is a home that I have called home but it is definitely tentative, fleeting, illusory, or at least a participatory imagining of a place in which I could not have been least of all now. Our home is an atmosphere that protects us from a relatively endless vacuum; our atmosphere is the home of the planet; the planet our home to which we are inextricably linked, save for the lucky few who have escaped temporarily, is hurtling through space though to us it is standing still, to try to put it actively.

That feeling of hurtling is the thing, the identity, that saves me from detaching my delusions and hobbling without the aid of my prostheses. The mental appendages are all I have, and they, improbably, are atrophying as I write–at least, far more perceptibly of late it appears I have less appendage to cling to and the void which really whips by now threatens to draw me into it and reveal its mundane finality that follows the brief exciting interlude of perceived flight. The world and time are vast constructs that we collectively agree to, due mostly to biological necessity, which would otherwise render us terror-stricken or schizophrenic or both. Whether we’re in the tree-house or we’ve built or own on our little strip-mall of consciousness, the element of surprise either delights, confounds or eludes us by dint or by nature. The tree-house’s The Thing–the escape from suburban reality that we either provide for our children or is provided as a blueprint for more adventurous children to build in recesses of disappeared suburban jungles. One of the first prostheses, a hiding place.

I should interrupt for a moment here, to save myself the embarrassment of unsuccessfully perpetrating an end to this last, unsuccessful paragraph which as I often do bites off (more than I can chew) probably more than I’d be comfortable with of some metaphysical style or other that I hurriedly half-absorbed, and to apologise to the fantastic Professor Wills for stealing his Prosthesis motive without having read or even been in a class that serves as a final editing ground for his book Prosthesis. By doing so give myself a break from the task of elucidating the tiny, attenuated filament light that was my grand scheming; the discomfort of the present being too much to bear and so I retreat to my wooden mentalist tree-house to plan with my hardly conceived imaginary friends a flight of fancy-ladness.

I mean, maybe it’s just the crazy talking here but everything, euphemistically speaking, is getting a little tired lately. In bed. That’s what she said: a metaphor for America. In the vacuum of space, no-one will understand your appropriated in-jokes–or your expropriated peculiarities–and as you boil away with a rush and a bustle nothing will be gained by humanity save the space freed up by your energetic dis-occupancy and you will have no conscious knowledge of whatever is gained even if you are probabilistically fortunate enough that someone notices you.

It’s timely that Lady should walk into frame while I completed that sentence to comment on her outfit, to say that people noticed her. Of course being in the middle of the sentence I registered physical discomfort, even disdain, while she launched into story and then into view and told me of outfit-affirmation, of sartorial acknowledgment, of outside respect for her get up. I’ve always said she wears the pants and the skirt in this family, and yes Mr. Ames I’m in some way trying to reverse the view of the disapproving parent-in-residence (who has not actually moved in but wouldn’t it be nice if she would I mean she’d probably do it in a heartbeat if you invited her but if she lived upstairs wouldn’t that be weird to like, have sex and everything but how often do you do that anyway) who inhabits the spirit of the skin that you fasten, or festoon mask-like over your partner and try so vainly to glorify with your funkified ideals surrounding the respect concept despite clenching my fists as Lady asked me was she interrupting was only partially involuntary and was not an expression that desired effects and was also entirely protracted and overly formal. Lady’s comfortable wedding to my concept of formality by calling it out, in part, was wholly comforting and in light of any previous thoughts of weddings or unions that we would have–and by we I mean us then–undergone if my own financial solvency were in effect much more strong.

This is all quite deliberate in its random, haphazzard, overly wrought, hastily revealed and poorly concealed way. And so this little essay-that-could spins into the void, finally, picking up that whooshing sound as it rushes past, deadline-like, in absence of eyes that couldn’t open anyway in this thin atmosphere. What I’ve attempted to festoon is a little broach of a subject on untoward ideas that never quite culminate. In this perpetually shifting landscape that I always already try to call home, things enter vainly fighting the cold lack of affect that personifies my life. Such as it is. If I ever may be so bold. Tableau.

Hello denizens of the internet, and the world.

My web hosting service, hostforweb.com, has a pretty good blogging platform available for use with my accounts. So I’ve installed and configured b2evolution.

Then there is the multi-media food blog I set up, located at thespiroeffect.com. Every element is in place, except the “podcast,” or internet radio show. Short video pieces, and a comic strip, are soon to be added to that site as well. I’ve enjoyed updating the site from my iPhone. I do give up a lot in terms of producing a site that has a seamless look-and-feel, but I gain the convenience of being able to produce a site using iPhone apps. In the short term, I can explore the world of iPhone blogging apps and work on sucessfully coding RSS feeds into an HTML based website. I’m sure that this is not an entirely successful endeavor across all OS and web browsing platforms (and feedback is encouraged), but I’m still “in like” (and forgive the “in quotes"–oh, hack) with my iPhone. There is a vast spread of quality coming from iPhone app developers. These phone-only apps range in usability and functionality, from complete shit (iStrum), to highly convenient (WordPress), to providing a nearly revelatory connection with the muses (Four Track). I’d like to see better integration of Google’s voice recognition software, beyond speaking Twitter updates into the phone.

I have the food blog but I’ve also I’ve wanted to explore older preoccupations, such as comedy, politics, and technology. So jasonspiro.com now has a blog. The writing on this site will not be exclusively “slow” in nature–indeed, I expect to do microblogging and to type up simple, quick observations. Yet both blogs have story topics that require genuine bouts of research. Much has been written and discussed about the ethics or lack of accountability in the food blogger community. As a self-published blogger, or unpaid writer, I feel a commitment to standards, superior form, and in-depth research, well presented.