A very sweet band from NC

Saw this band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, perform *free* at the Kennedy Center last night - thanks to Alex who asked me along. The concert was held in the experimental theater, and it was certainly not quite what we expected.

An adorable, Walker-family-esque couple taught any of us brave enough to come down to the front stage to clog before the band came on. Turned out we wound up dancing the entire show. Everyone, dancers and non, had a great time - it really renewed my fervor for (free!) sweet events that bring people together in random ways. And reinforced my belief that dancing should happen waaaay more often than it does. Especially to music as unique and fun as the Chocolate Drops.

Southbound

This past weekend Heather, Aaron Franklin and I hit the road - destination: Manassas, site of the NOVA (northern virginia) Brew Fest. (Sadly, Alex was put out of commission by a blown tire and couldn't come.)

The microbrewery festival was fantastic - by volunteering we were granted free entry, and spent the afternoon pouring teeny beers for festival goers at the Mad Fox brewery tent. They basically slapped some 'Brew Crew' t-shirts on us and set us in front of the taps. It took me a good hour to stop pouring heady glasses and to know enough about the brewery and the four drafts to not sound like a complete idiot, but after that it was fun - who doesn't like interacting with virginian beer-lovers of varying levels of intoxication? 

The three of us spent the night camping out at Bull Run...in a 2 person tent...in the pourin

g rain. Despite the dampness and cramped quarters, it was refreshing to be outside the beltway and in nature. Camping during the last weekend of September would an inconceivable activity in upstate NY. I should note - however - that fellow "campers" were mainly comprised of behemouth RVs complete with satellite dishes for their TVs. Made you beg the question - this is camping?

Staying the night, though, afforded us the 

opportunity to check out the National Battlefield Park at Manassas - probably the one and only civil war (aka War of 

Northern Aggression) site I've ever visited. The park there is grand and sprawling, and the mixture of morning clouds and sun made for a very serene, pastoral sort of view. We visited the Henry Hill house, where 85-year-old Mrs. Hill was on bedrest when the first battle began, literally in her backyard. Refusing to leave, she was ultimately killed by shrapnel during the battle. 

I apologize for this diary-esque digression, but it was a neat weekend that made me really itchy to see the many millions of places and things I have yet to see. Anyone up for a cross-country trip? :-)

David Foster Wallace, Publishing and Nostalgia

The recent death of David Foster Wallace has been shocking or unfortunate or wasteful enough to get some of the media and publishing corps to turn their attention briefly from the even more unfortunate economic turns. 

Publishers Weekly Editor in Chief, Sara Nelson, who spoke at the recent AAP Intro to Publishing seminar I attended, wrote about Wallace in her column this week. In her article, Nelson concludes finally that while "marketing and publicity and distributing and platforms do make a difference," that maybe "we are also in the business of finding, nurturing and disseminating writers and their ideas." 

The world of publishing, as I come to know it in a piecemeal fashion via AAP, alternately and equally repells me (for the former mechanism Nelson mensions) and attracts me (for the latter.) Her reflection gnaws at what bothers me when I take an imaginary stroll down a future path as a book editor. Nelson says Wallace was "a writer of the old school" who was welcomed into  a "similarly old-fashioned" publishing world.  

How many editorial assistants, aspiring writers and english majors, I wonder, would reflect on the fact that writer-centered-publishing is "old-fashioned" with extreme sadness? I do. 

True, economics students and investment bankers are seeing their future careers erased in real time. But I can't help but feel now that I have had every "when-I-grow-up" fantasy struck off the list already. When I was in grade school I had a short-lived to be a Disney animator, a now defunct sort of aspiration, as disney movies are almost entirely computer animated. My next passion, journalism, was born from equal parts Upton Sinclair, Harriet the Spy and the movie version of All the Kings Men. Skip ahead 10 years and meet me circa graduation, when every major newspaper in the country was downsizing its newsrooms and installing mobile bloggerism. J-school degrees abound, but the backpocket reporters notebooks and press passes are practically extinct. Then there is publishing, another art-breeds-fantasy where I imagine myself the Ezra Pound to some unknown T.S. Eliot. You see the trend... 

I recently joked with my cousin Caroline that post-modernism killed true love. Now, in an exclamation romantic hyperbole, I feel like broadening that statement to post-modernism killed everything, especially authenticity. And back to Wallace - who maybe felt the same way when he described life's little rat race in a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. 

Clearly it is possible to experience nostalgia for things you haven't experienced (hell, most of America feels it for some good ole day that never really was), and what I yearn for is a career of  ideas, one that holds Truth and Beauty (keats?) as its two guiding lamps. Where? No clue. Did someone say grad school?

Thoughts about Food

I just finished reading Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" and have found that, though it seemed impossible, I am thinking even more about food than ever before. 

I love food. I love it a lot. Increasingly so since moving into my first apartment in DC and beginning to cook house meals almost daily. Additionally, our proximity to Eastern Market at the NE Capitol Market makes shopping for food even more enjoyable, despite the fact that I continually feel I am the physical embodiment of a post from www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, (#5 - Farmer's Markets; #6 - Organic Foods; #48 - Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops; #90 - Dinner Parties... and don't get me started on shit like #44 - Public Radio...).

Coincidentally, I had to go grocery shopping today, directly after having read and absorbed Pollan's prescriptions for eating food. One of his guidelines for shopping is - if and when you have to visit a grocery store - stick to the peripheries. It is on the edges of the store that most chains stock produce, dairy and meats -- things more likely than not to be Food (rather than processed food-like substances). Another quaint rule of thumb - don't buy things your great-grandma wouldn't recognize. So yeah, no slim jims or cheez whiz, or frozen taquitos. 

These rules work very well at helping you reach the aim of buying non-processed food goods, especially veggies. And for better or for worse, I've now become interested in the ingredients of things, which perhaps isn't quite what Pollan - who advocates the foregrounding of food experience versus foods-as-nutrients - is shooting for. 

These were things I was already interested in before, however, as a food lover (and someone who has the socioeconomic luxury of considering food in terms of enjoyment rather than basic life sustenance, let's be honest). My roommate aspires to be an organic farmer, a goal that looks more an more attractive to me as well, day by day. Since moving here, we've had many discussions about gardening, patronizing local farm stuffs and about the unfortunate disconnect we feel about what we put in our bodies and where it comes from. 

If you think about it - as Pollan invites us to - it's a little weird. To consume things without knowing how, where, when or by whom they are made. But it is a byproduct of our highly specialized society and culture - Wikipedia Culture - where all information is Google-able and therefore commodified. I don't know how to do a lot of things. Aside from general common sense, in which I rank about average, I don't have many survival skills - a fact that makes me more and more uncomfortable as I take on more responsibility. 

Unfortunately, the way we eat is very much tied up in our social class and this kept nagging at me while I read "In Defense," though Pollan is aware of it as well. He advises the reader to "be the type of person who takes supplements" but goes on to admit that that person is highly educated and most likely middle or upper class. I'm not sure what to do with this, its just one of a few ways the book oversimplifies or circumvents the way the mutation of our social fabric has changed our eating habits - dwelling more often instead on the popular notion of Fast Food Culture or the opposite side of the token, orthorexia nervosa. 

It is so disturbing that the simplest food production processes - growing crops, hunting animals - are now rarer, more difficult to come by and much more expensive. Also, considering the often unconfronted yet accepted truth that industrial producers willingly market products to the American public which contain little or no dietary value - or in many cases are actually harmful to people's health - is supremely disturbing.  Food consumption is just one of many cases of things that makes me ask myself why people can't or don't think for themselves (installment two coming soon: voting!). 

In the final chapter, Pollan compares our eating habits with the food culture of European countries, specifically the French in this case. The French and Italians are envied for their attitude toward food - their immense enjoyment of it, their food culture. Yet there is this attitude of Americans toward European food culture that it is still some sort of vacation from the norm. We Americans don't have time for hoity toity leisurely meals with our families. We're busy being the world's supplier of Little Debbies snacks... Oh wait...  Pollan points out that American families don't really sit down to Norman Rockwell-esque meals anymore - nostalgic language that immediately sent up a red flag in my mind. He completely ignores that part of the reason why families aren't eating together anymore is because now many women and mothers are working full time instead of devoting their afternoon and evenings to cooking dinner. There was something off about the portrait of the American family without recognizing this shift in the family dynamic that our culture as a whole hasn't dealt very well with as of yet. 

This portrait of American eating made me think of what my future family life would be like in terms of cooking and eating (contributing factor to this train of thought also being this Inside Higher Ed article today about women with advanced degrees). It make me hope that someday I find a partner who is like my roommate -- equal parts in love with food and concerned about these questions, and just as excited about our herb garden.