1. I took a break from most things Grateful Dead related today, aside from their music playing in my head all day -- "Playing in the Band" was especially present and kept playing inside me over and over, to my delight.
Instead of exploring the Grateful Dead, I read my homework for the next Westminster Basement Study Group Zoom meeting coming up on Feb. 7.
One of our members, Val, is working on a masters degree in public history online at the Univ of Nebraska-Kearney. Currently, she's studying historic preservation and she sent the members of our study group articles to read about preservation efforts in Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Portland, OR and articles arguing for the value of historic preservation and how to best go about it. One article argued against it. The writer argued that preserving old homes is impractical and unwise.
Well, as far as how I see things, I enjoyed the positive articles much more than the negative one. Over the years, I've paid attention to the ways freeways, say in Spokane, Tulsa, and other cities, and new construction (or urban renewal projects) in, say in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Portland, gutted minority communities, isolated people within these neighborhoods from one another, or displaced them. More affluent neighborhoods, often predominantly white, and old buildings of importance to white communities have more often than not been more likely to be historically preserved. I very much enjoyed it when these articles addressed that disparity.
2. Later in the evening, I returned to reading Stanley Tucci's book Taste: My Life Through Food. I had left off a day or two ago when Tucci was beginning to describe each year's Tucci family Christmas and how Christmas always meant the assembling and the baking of a labor intensive, temperamental, and ultimately heavenly dish called a timpano. Once Tucci narrated the importance of this dish in his family, he turned his attention to his role in helping write, direct, and co-star in one of my favorite movies, Big Night. That movie reaches its peak when the movie's chef, played by Tony Shaloub, decides to assemble and bake a timpano for the movie's climactic passage, the big night itself. I loved reading Tucci's memories of how the movie came about and, even more, I enjoyed finding that the great timpano scene is available on YouTube and I loved watching it again. I especially enjoyed the big moment when Ian Holm's character, Pascal, responds to how much he loves his serving of timpano. It's tempting to give away how he reacts and what he says, but I won't do it. No one should spoil that moment in the movie for another person by describing what he does and quoting his most memorable lines.
3. Tucci's book sent me on another trip to YouTube. In one chapter, Tucci recalls his devotion as an adolescent to movies and television shows, including cooking shows. The two cooking shows that utterly fascinated him were hosted by Julia Child and Keith Floyd. I'd never heard of Keith Floyd, an animated English celebrity cook and travel guide, who, as Tucci describes him, traveled far and wide and prepared and cooked meals in all kinds of situations: in farmhouse kitchens, using outdoor fires, grilling on a hibachi over an open flame, and more. Tucci describes a particular episode he loved when Keith Floyd prepares a fish stew and a ratatouille for a party in Provence. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I found this episode and it was highly entertaining and instructive.
Watching programs like this episode of Keith Floyd's show, movies like Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and after reading the Joseph Mitchell's descriptions of the Fulton Fish Market in his collection, Up in the Old Hotel, I have to say that I often daydream of living near an open fresh fish market. One of the pleasures of watching a cooking show is imagining being able to fix similar meals at home. In the Keith Lloyd episode, we didn't see him go to the local fish market, but we saw what he had purchased. His colander was stocked with a variety of small fishes. Keith Lloyd rattled off the names of the fishes -- none of them familiar to me -- and I knew right then that being able to cook the stew he prepared is impossible for me to prepare here. That's okay. It's not a problem -- but, I thought, it would be fun to have such a variety of fresh fish and other foods available nearby and be able to transform them into delicious meals like the one Keith Lloyd prepared.
I had the same wistful feeling when Tucci described visiting a cheese cellar in Italy and wrote about other Italian dishes he loves to eat in Italian restaurants (or prepare at home), made possible by the proximity the restaurants have or that Tucci has to a wide variety of pastas, cheeses, and other ingredients.
Oh well.
To conclude, I'd just like to record, off subject, that I enjoyed watching Arizona's win over USC, 73-62 and watching the second half of Oregon's game with Utah. Utah made a titanic comeback late in this game. The Ducks showed signs of falling apart under the pressure of Utah's frantic full court press. In the end, though, the Ducks hung on by the skin of their teeth and prevailed, 80-77.
No comments:
Post a Comment