I have a piece out this week in the Reader’s annual These Parts edition on Azerbaijani-to-Wisconsin transplant Sofya Hundt and her excellent blog, Rich Food, Lean Times. If you’re in the market for a recipe for venision-blue cheese stroganoff, step-by-step instructions for pickle soup (pictured), or just some tips on tender pelmeni, she’s your girl.
Back in January I was having dinner with a friend when he launched into a description of the performance he’d attended earlier that day. The performer was a mutual friend of ours — a writer and critic who had, in the great tradition of underemployed journalists across the land, gotten himself a job in a bar after leaving his editorial position at a weekly arts and entertainment magazine. And, with said bar at his disposal, he’d decided to start a salon, a weekly showcase for writers, actors, comics, and anyone else looking for a forum at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. My friend had gone to check it out.
He did this piece, said my friend, that started out all meta, about the death of journalism and whatnot. He talked about how the New York Times had started charging readers for online content and about how this was freaking people out, and about how once upon a time not so very long ago, there was a viable business model for the free dissemination of news and stories. He talked about the Reader, said my friend — about how it could be free because the editorial side was supported by the classifieds, and about how Craigslist turned that model into mulch. And then, said my friend, he talked about you. A lot.
[Insert phonograph needle screech -- universal audio signifier for cognitive dissonance -- here.]
It was hilarious, said my friend. He made you out to be some sort of ass-kicking editorial superhero!
I was, to say the least, intrigued. And flattered. But despite a few attempts over the winter, I never managed to get my hands on this monologue, in text or audio form. And eventually I sort of forgot about it. Until this past week, when Christopher Piatt, the writer in question, put the audio up on the website for his series, the Paper Machete.
It’s here. (Scroll down a bit.)
And I don’t want to go too much into the gist of what Chris is saying, because you can listen to it yourself. But I did want to point out that, while I am (again) very, very flattered by the portrait he has painted here, it’s sort of awesome how wildly off it is from my memory of the period we worked together — the glory days of journalism, which Piatt locates way back in the mists of time in 2004.
Because in 2004? Man, I was a mess.
That Piatt didn’t see this is, of course, a testament to our ability to compartmentalize and put on a good show. But it also speaks to the power of narrative to construct a character. In the service of character, writers put in the stuff that hones the persona, and leave out that which makes it blurry. Anyone who’s ever been written about — ever expectantly opened a paper, or clicked on a link — knows how disconcerting this can be. Anyone who’s ever written knows how critical it is.
Teasing out the truth of the character in 1,500 words or less is a parlor trick, and in this sense, I guess I did do a good job schooling Christopher Piatt. Because there’s nothing factually wrong with this story. I did work insanely long hours at the Reader of yore — we all did. And I did work with a lot of green writers to whom I can imagine I was probably a figure of mysterious power. Yet, I couldn’t help laughing through the whole thing, shaking my head at this too-cool-for-school woman who seems so very much a stranger.
And, in terms of narrative, it’s funny that this popped up again right now. Because after two years in the wilderness (when I was not so much “writing books” as Piatt thinks I was, as “writing book proposals that disappear into the void”) I started a new editorial job this month, as an occasional copyeditor at one of the city’s big dailies. It’s a good gig. But it is weird to be back in a newsroom, weirder still as the lowliest of the low on the cubicle ladder. It’s a biographical development that doesn’t quite work with the up-and-out arc of Piatt’s piece. Maybe I can use it myself, though.
That’s the cool thing about constructing stories. You can always create a new one from the puzzle pieces of the old.
Image courtesy Wordle.net.
This — a tag cloud created from all the text entered on this blog — is making me reach for the Klonopin. Or at least vow to get out a little more. I present it here, in all its ugly, unedited glory, for your edification.
This one’s pretty cute though.
I just spent a very long three days at this year’s FamilyFarmed expo, “live blogging” it for the Reader and, g-d help me tweeting it to boot. You can read the results over on the Reader blog, where I weigh in on the sad saga of shared-use kitchens, whole-beast cookery, urban chickens, and bunch of other stuff. I think some iteration of all these posts will run in the paper later this week.
This was an experiment for me, and mostly it went well. For one, I think I finally understand this whole Twitter business. But, man, the blogging part was hard. Trying to process hours of information, synthesize it, and then spit back out through the fingers on a dime left my brain a blob of jelly and did a major number on my wrists. Is this the best way to disseminate information? To tell a story? It was a fun challenge but I remain unconvinced.
I have a piece in this week’s Reader — a special issue devoted to all things Hyde Park-Kenwood — on the ongoing hoo-ha surrounding the U. of C.’s plan to use the lot long-occupied by the 61st Street Community Garden as a staging area for construction of the new Chicago Theological Seminary at 60th and Dorchester.
The hardest thing about writing this story was not just relying on all the previous reporting on it; the saga’s been going on for a year now, and it’s been reported up, down, and sideways. I’d recommend anyone curious to get a more thorough picture of the garden community and (at least one side of) the current controversy check out Jamie Kalven’s Invisible Institute site, which has a pretty impressive collection of documentary information (interviews, photos, essays) on the garden and its gardeners. In fact, I pinched the photo above from there. I hope they don’t mind.
Chicago; January 17, 2010
I am the busiest un(der)employed person I know.
Soup and Bread is up and running again. We continue to sell cookbooks and expand our empire, and people are saying nice things about it — and me — on the internet. We are even going to New York in a few weeks, which should be super fun.
Day to day, I’m working constantly: wrangling recipes, posting photos to the blog, lining up cooks, taking meetings, shipping cookbooks, writing press releases, Facebooking, Twittering, picking up bread, dropping off donations.
And yet, I feel I’ve crossed some sort of recessionary line.
Last year was marked by some of the most personally fulfilling work of my life. Today I’ve got just barely enough cash to cover February’s rent.
I spend most of my mornings pecking away at the laptop from a sofa cushion that shares a corner with the cat scratcher. Little bits of catnip and shredded cardboard fluff invade my keyboard. I have wrangled a few part-time gigs here and there: consulting on marketing local foods, teaching a workshop on the food system to some eighth graders, writing copy for an online education firm.
I still have bartending, g-d love it. But the first week of Soup and Bread I gave half my tips to the bar back because I felt so bad about all the dishes she was stuck washing. That’s not a exactly a sustainable solution.
So this month I interviewed for a full-time job at the Chicago Botanic Garden. I applied for a short-term contract position with a local food policy group. I tried to spin my volunteer work into a paying gig.
So far, nothin’.
Friday I spent hours at the unemployment office trying, unsuccessfully, to reinstate my claim. After I gave up I congratulated myself on not crying till I got to the car.
One of my best friends, who has been un(der)employed for 2+ years, lost his apartment in November and has been living with me since Christmas. We sleep in shifts, like flight attendants, or members of a large immigrant family. Luckily he’s a night owl. When I wake up at 8 he moves from the sofa to the one bedroom.
People think this is crazy. The people I have told, that is. I haven’t told many because, see previous re: “crazy.”
But, it’s not so bad. In fact, most of the time it’s nice to have company. It is dark and warm and quiet in my tiny apartment, and we cook dinner and listen to music and insulate ourselves against the deep freeze and the images of devastation and horror that flicker across the muted TV. Watching disaster unfold on CNN being itself an obscene luxury for which I am grateful.
And, of course, it’s my birthday today. I am 42. For which I am also grateful, but how did THAT happen?
We’re not supposed to talk about all this. Being poor, and scared, and 42. The formula for underdog success runs towards the scrappy and ambitious and 25, right?
But it’s scary. Being broke and not-young messes with your head. It shoots static through the once-clear belief that you are a competent adult, able to navigate the world of work and commerce with only a socially acceptable dose of anxiety — enough to keep you wired but not so overwhelming it can’t be washed away by a good bitch session or a couple of pints. Lately, though, the disconnect can get so loud the dial tone drowns out the music, chills the warmth, blocks the light.
Maybe that’s why I’m posting this here, on a blog with all of 27 devoted readers, and not over on the soup blog, whose relentlessly positive tone and practical content ensure a much wider audience.
Maybe if I put it out there, it will go away?
I did this little interview with Nance Klehm as a companion piece to an exhibit she participated in earlier this year called AgriART: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems.
Although the premise seems at first quite straightforward — “An array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption” — I confess I never quite understood what the curators here were getting at. I made a good faith effort, I swear, but the art-world language in which their exhibit is wrapped seems at once overdetermined and frustratingly opaque.The interview is perhaps rather free-associative as a result, but this bit here gets close to some more complicated truth:
M: It makes me thing that maybe the reason talking about this is so hard is that people (or, me….) are hardwired to interpret the natural world in terms of human experience. We are (I am) always unconsciously looking for metaphors and analogies. … but nature is just nature. The soil isn’t there to articulate life lessons! It’s just THERE….
N: Metabolising like the rest of us …
And, speaking of which, Nance has a new piece in Arthur in which she talks a bit about her “skeptical” relationship with interpreting what she does as art.
But, mostly she talks about chicken care. It’s inspiring.
[artwork by Alana Bailey]
But over on my other blog you’ll find more than you ever possibly knew you wanted to know about the very exciting, very lovely Soup and Bread Cookbook. Go there. You won’t be sorry. For real.
Bye.
Some months ago, my former colleague Mike Sula captured the attention of answer-man Cecil Adams with an admiring account of the bounty to to be found at Cleveland’s West Side Market and a plaintive query. “Even in this economy,” he wrote, “if a midsize rust-belt city can support a place like that, there’s no reason Chicago can’t. I’ve said it before: Chicago can never seriously consider itself a world-class food city until it builds a market like this. Why can’t we have a public market like Cleveland’s?”
Now, with the impending debut of the Metra Market, the question’s still got traction. Last month Art Shel Jackson [sheesh -- how did I do that?] published this thoughtful analysis on his blog, and over at the Local Beet Rob Gardner’s pulled together a useful roundup of links to recent writings on the subject. All this local press (understandably) holds up markets in midwestern Milwaukee, Cleveland, Kansas City, and even Toronto as points of comparison. But back in February Cecil also mentioned the market forever wrapped tight around my heart: Seattle’s Pike Place Market.
Smack in the middle of downtown Seattle at the foot of Pike Street, overlooking Elliott Bay, the market — whose name is frequently mangled by out-of-towners as “Pike’s Place” — celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2007. I spent a lot of time there in the 1980s, loitering at the newsstand that stocked exotic magazines like Harper’s and Interview, poking around in the anarchist bookstore, and smoking clove cigarettes in Victor Steinbrueck Park — and it hasn’t changed all that much in the intervening 20 years. It can be frustratingly clogged with tourists, especially on a nice weekend, but it’s also still full of weird little shops selling off-brand Asian tchochkes, dusty magic tricks, vintage postcards, Birkenstocks, bongs … you name it. I shot the following photos in late September, when I was home visiting my family for my father’s 70th birthday.
Fishmongers clad in chest waders and sturdy aprons take the place of honor at the Pike Street entrance. I didn’t get a photo of the famous flying fishes at Pike Place Fish (a practice that has come in for some heat of late) but this guy here, at a less flashy rival stall, is an appropriate cute-guy stand-in for the fish dude my friend K unsuccessfully wooed one summer in the late 80s.
If I have the timeline correct, she and I were living together in the U-District at the time. We ate a lot of fish that year.
After the fish zone come rows of stalls stocked to the gills (sorry!) with fresh produce.
Followed by a stretch of flower stalls run by Hmong farmers, who grow a blinding array of blooms west of the city in the Snoqualmie Valley. In late September it was apparently zinnia season.
At the north end of the market the trade shifts from fruits and flowers to handicrafts. Here, vintage Northwest hippies hawk silver jewelry and batik flags across from Native American artists selling woodwork and leather goods. I didn’t get a picture of this scene, but it’s up here in the northern zone that the market becomes less clogged with tourists and more the market I remember from my childhood. Beyond the retail corridors the market is also home to about 500 low-income residents, who live in property managed by the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. I’m no authority, but I’d hazard that this residential population gives the market a certain stability. Though Seattle has changed radically since I was a kid — thanks to the double whammy of the grunge and dot.com booms — I can’t imagine the market will never get truly slick as long as there are still knots of crusty punks panhandling and still clutches of craggy-faced men, too loaded to be truly menacing, hanging out by the totem pole in the park. I find this comforting.
The market itself is also a bit of a museum of Seattle’s commercial history. Above, for example, is the sign outside the Original Starbucks — once upon a time the only place in town for aspirational yuppies to buy an espresso maker and a pound of dark-roast beans.
And just up the hill a bit is the original Sur La Table, which is still crammed to the ceiling with pots, pans, gadgets, linens, and Le Creuset cookware in just about any imaginable shape and color.
But, again, the heart of the market — for me — can be found in the dusty little places I’ve been hitting for years. Tenzing Momo, in a little atrium off the south market’s south wing, is an “herbal apothecary” stocked with everything from acacia flower to yohimbe bark. The smell of nag champa is sort of overwhelming, but if you can get past that you can get lost in the array of tarot decks and essential oils in every scent known to man and animal. (My current olfactory indulgence is a homemade blend of “white tea” and civet — which I’m sure will horrify my more perfume-savvy friends.)
More memories: For one long summer in 1987 I worked the breakfast shift at a cafe in Pioneer Square. I was living in a grotty little north-end apartment with too many people, and if I wasn’t quite the only one who had a job, I was definitely the only one getting up at 6 in the morning. I’d get off the bus at the market, where at that hour the only signs of life came from a few bakeries and delivery trucks, and stop in here for a pint of of carrot-apple-ginger juice. Then I’d drink my juice and walk the dozen blocks down First Avenue to work, where the early morning guy would make me a fine espresso. At the end of the summer, I slept with him.
Sometimes on my way home from working and flirting with the morning guy I’d stop here for a snack — delicious steamed buns stuffed with just a spoonful of meat (or veggies, or … mayonnaise). To this day, though, I remain scared of the “ham and corn” bao.
And then there’s this little shop — tucked into a corner of the Sanitary Market mall. The name may tout its collection of woks and bowls, but throughout high school this was the go-to spot for footwear. My friends and I all had extensive collections of their rubber-soled cotton espadrilles, which came in a rainbow of colors and sold for something like $12 a pair. If you were daring you could also pick up a pair of what we came to term “suicide shoes” — stretchy vinyl slippers with pointy toes, some rhinestone ornamentation, and the slipperiest soles ever created. They were predictably lethal when worn by a crew of drunk 16-year-old girls.
It’s these odd little outfits — and the dubious fish and chip stands, the head shop in the basement, the multiple vintage/rocker clothing stores, and the smell of fresh fish and diesel early in the morning — that I miss. I hate to get all nostalgic about “authenticity,” but with a CVS as its anchor I have a hard time imagining there’s this room for this kind of weirdness in the plans for Metra Market.
EDITED TO ADD: I just found this nice, comprehensive essay on the market’s history. I now really want to change the title of this post to “an honest place in a phony time.”