Friday in Ramadan

So, what to do? It seems that we should be eating extra pork on Fridays during Ramadan, except that they are, well, Fridays, and we should not really be eating meat at all. Fortunately we have the flexibility of substituting another penance!

So, by all means, substitute another penance, say your Rosary for the defeat of Mohammedanism, and eat pork heartily! Might I suggest Niman Ranch uncured bacon? Arista pannini?

Also, as per Alicia's suggestion in the comments box below, have more children and pray for those trying to have more children!

Europe and America, Arise!
Awake from your materialist slumber!
Carthago delenda est.

Wow! When was the last time I posted a recipe?

Cowboy Stew from the Comargue.

I may have posted this recipe already, but I have made it twice in the last month, so here it is:

Brown beef stew meat in a pot in butter, a few cubes at a time, remove when browned to a work bowl.

Heat more butter in the pot.

Throw in 1 1/2 large cloves of garlic for each pound of meat (peeled and maybe cut in half, but not chopped) until the smell of cooking garlic is clearly in the air.

Saute a sliced onion (or equal weight in shallots, which add other flavors that are nice) in the pot. When it is transluscent, add the beef, a good sized can of chopped or crushed tomatoes, a generous splash of red wine (I used a whole bottle of two buck Chuck for nearly four pounds of beef), a couple of bay leaves, broken up, fresh thyme, the juice and finely julienned zest of on orange, lavender salt (maybe some lavender blossoms if needed), and simmer for hours.

As it gets close to done (the meat should be falling apart), add the juice and zest of a second orange, a handful or three of good olives (last night I used a mix of Kalamata and Hondriolia), and serve over rice, finishing with freshly chopped parsley.

I made this for my parents and Amalia, since Melanie and I were reviewing a restaurant last night. The restaurant was good, but at that price, I think I would have rather stayed home and had my stew and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape (or even the $4 Australian Shiraz (Yellow Tail, from Trader Joe's, not bad) I opened for my parents (I did not have a fancier Cote du Rhone style wine, so it had to do)). Fortunately I get paid for eating at these places, so I can't really complain, but more times than not, I find eating out a less than satisfying experience.

Revolting!

Reading the comments on various blogs about the impending Mohammedan invasion is driving me up the wall. We have a lot of Americans who are either treasonously defeatist or, even worse, gloating over the perceived Mohammedan takeover of Europe. One thing that is particularly striking is the level of ignorance on display, mostly a result of repeating things heard without any first-hand evidence.

Example number one: Christianity is dead in Europe. No one goes to mass. We have heard this chestnut over and over, but is it really true? Perhaps in the barbarian transalpine lands it is. I have not been over the Alps in quite some time, so I cannot say, but in Italy last year we only went to one mass that was less than standing-room-only full, and that mass was at the same time that the neighboring town had a large festival, which drew just about everyone away for the day.

Where are people getting these ideas? I think from the Liberal media, who have a vested interest in portraying the people as turning away from the Faith. Then the "conservatives" use them as a banner to warn the folks on the home front.

The problem is that it becomes incredibly defeatist. No Catholic should ever see the triumph of Mohammedanism as an inevitability, in fact, should recoil and foam at the mouth at the mere suggestion of it, or, even better, should think about what needs to be done about it (I am open to suggestions). The Faith could be stronger in Europe, but I don't think it is as bad as one would believe from reading the doom and gloomers.

One thing that we must remember is that we are part of Europe. No Europe, no America. We stand in absolute common cause with the Mother Continent. If Rome falls, we all fall. In the not-so-long run, I am fairly sure of the inevitability of a long and bloody war against Mohammedanism, and the fall of Mohammedanism into a local cult in Arabia and remote mountainous regions of Central Asia. If not in our lifetimes, in Amalia's lifetime, Mohammedanism will cease to be a significant force in world affairs.

In the meanwhile, the West will have some serious thinking to do on the nature of religious freedom and what it means to extend such freedom to those who have absolutely no intention of returning the favor.

For the entire period of Ramadan, I am going to devote significant space on this blog to the battle against Mohammedanism, and will offer suggestions as to what we, as common laymen can do.

First, during each day of Ramadan, we should pray a decade of the Rosary, for the intention of liberating the followers of Mohammed from the errors of Koranism and one decade for the increase of the True Faith in Europe and America.

Carthago delenda est.

See a shaggy early music geek, live!

Since our plans changed and we did not make it to Mexico last weekend, I did not get to see my barber in Tecate, and I have not been able to either find time for a haircut or to talk Melanie into doing it ("But I have never cut hair before other than Amalia's and do you want a haircut that looks like that?" To which I say, "pish posh! Better to look like a crude conservative than a hippy!")

So, I will be a little shaggy tonight (although it has been much much worse). If you are in the area, once again: 7:15pm at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi on Vallejo between Grant and Columbus in North Beach, San Francisco. I will be the shaggy idiot in the suit jabbering on about polyphony. Come ask questions. If the question and answer session demands it, it may move to Tony and Nick's later on (although I might grab a bite to eat first). Tony and Nick's is a couple of blocks down on Stockton. It is a good hole-in-the-wall that makes a great martini. Ars Nova sounds even better after a martini, or so I am told.

Meanwhile, I have to pack my bag and get my shirt ironed and all that!

Idiot software

I have noticed a number of blogs and other websites that are using various collections of characters to suggest the word PORN when discussing the issue (not offering the stuff for sale or rent, mind you, just discussing the abstract of it). I couldn't figure out why: was this some crazy thing where folks are afraid of uttering the word, lest they fall into temptation? Then I realized that there are probably computers that will not load a page with the words PORNOGRAPHY or PORN in them.

I am all for censorship, but this is outlandish. I will not go along with such silliness and will write the word "porn" and "pornography" as well as "smut", "scum-sucking exploiter", "pervert", "deviant", and all those other proper terms for this industry. If your computer cannot handle them, it is time to change the settings to "all growed up" and join the conversation.

This sort of thing is just an example of parents wanting the machines to do the thinking for them. If you want to monitor what junior is looking at on the internet, then monitor it, but to resort to this sort of silliness is only fit for half-wits.

In the words of the General, "Gimme Eat."
Carthago delenda est.

Happy Ramadan!

In honor of the beginning of Ramadan, I am launching a new contest! Wheeee! A free pork sandwich and glass of wine will go to the winner, as well as bragging rights. This year's Ramadan contest winner will be the one who provides me with the best plan for building the Basilica of Our Lady of Lepanto in Mecca. The criteria are:

It must account for the removal of one large black rock. Ideally the tabernacle or crucifix should be placed on that specific site.

It must be Triumphalist! There must be a lot of statues.

Dante's depiction of Mohammed must be featured somehow in the design, whether as a fresco, a frieze, of a full scale baroque sculpture out in front.

It must be Latin-rite. The easterners can have their own competition. Ideally the pipe organ and bells should be audible for blocks and blocks around the church.

This is partially tongue-in-cheek. I am not yet advocating total crusade against the Mohammedans. At least not on their own turf. Yet. But something like this should inspire us to think grandly, in terms of art as well as evangelization.

Proposals are due by the end of Ramadan.

Eat more pork!
Carthago delenda est!

Hot, hot, hot

We are having unseasonably hot weather here. It was in the 90's this weekend, with hot dry offshore winds. We do not have any fires here, but it would not take much. When we used to live in the Oakland hills, near the firestorm site, weather like this made everyone jumpy. It is not like that in the flatlands where we live now, but I feel for our old neighbors up there.

Down south, they do not have it so well.

I just talked to some very good friends in east county San Diego, and, while they are not in the immediate line of fire, it is a smoky mess, with businesses, schools, and government services closed, ashes falling from the sky, etc. Fire fighters are really stumped, as it is too big for them to do much more than watch and wait. It jumped a 10-lane freeway, so you can get some idea of the magnitude.

It really sounds like the good folks of San Diego and San Bernadino could use some prayers (not to mention an extra borate bomber, if you have one idle and want to practice your skills at dumping flame retardant in nearly 0 visibility).

Chagall

Amalia and I finally got around to seeing the retrospective of Marc Chagall at SFMOMA. I have never been totally smitten by Chagall, and was expecting to see a better view of him than I have ever seen. I was correct, as there were tons of paintings, including early works.

My verdict: Chagall was even worse of a painter than I used to think. Was he colorblind? Once in a while he would hit on a sound color chord. The rest of the time, his work was just garish. Combined with his weak sense of composition and his perfectly wretched paint handling, these works are astonishing in their utter lack of craftsmanship.

However, there is something there. His ideas were often good, and I think that there is a real thirst for portrayals of mythologies. The public is obvioulsy enthralled, as evidenced by the line around the block (fortunately we are members and could walk right up). Melanie thought that the crowd was probably in love with the color. Perhaps, but one can get powerful color in Pierre Bonnard, who was a much better painter. The difference in the public's eye is that Bonnard painted domestic scenes: the view out his window, his wife, the cat on a sofa, etc. Chagall gives us flying goats in wedding dresses, and touches on part of our imagination in a way that for many has not been touched since childhood.

Afterwards we went downstairs to the permanent collection. For reasons rather suspect, they have two Barnett Newman paintings on display. There never was a more overrated painter (if we can call him that) than Newman. The contrast between his work and Chagall's is illuminating. Chagall might have been a hack, but he was a hack who gave us flights of imagination that transcend even his own lack of painterly talent. I found myself enjoying paintings upstairs that were really quite atrocious as paintings.

But looking at Newman only brings feelings of contempt. This fellow was one of the few abstract expressionists (if we can call him that) to paint to the theory. Others may have claimed it, because it was good press, but they were first and foremost about the painting. Even the weaker ones, like Clyfford Still, had moments of greatness when they let go of the preposterous notions that were thick in the art world air in the 1950's and simply painted. There is none of that in Newman. His work embodies the worst of minimalism with the worst of the verbiage of abtract expressionism.

If you take a long look at a good Rothko or a Still (or better yet a Diebenkorn or a Ryman), you will be rewarded. If you take a long look at a Newman, you will find next to nothing.

I was also annoyed at the lack of Diebenkorns on display, considering the number of his masterpieces that SFMOMA owns. Certainly a 1955 Berkeley Diebenkorn abstraction would have been a better choice than a Newman.

In other depressing news, the contemporary art was all junk, derived from the worst ideas of the last 50 years, executed without a shred of talent, and puffed up with laughable text on the side. And it is time to put the hatchet in multi-media art and to start over. Sure there are some good pieces here and there, but to sift through all the rest is painful, and it has to be done with more time than one can dismiss a gallery full of paintings (an unfortunately easy thing to do these days).

On a happy note, we ran into Amalia's godfather at the beautifully restored ferry building, had a great conversation with an Armenian-American grape farmer from Dinuba (mostly on the finer points of roasting whole lambs), ran into a friend of mine from high school who I haven't seen in over seven years, had a wonderful dinner at the Fog City Diner, and (highlight of Amalia's day) got to ride in two choo-choos and a bus. It was a balmy day in the City, with a pale blue sky and views that make me wonder how anyone could ever leave the Bay Area (the other time I get that feeling is when I do venture out of the Bay Area).

One of the fun moments was walking down the Embarcadero with Amalia riding on my shoulders and proclaiming to her godfather that she was tall. She rides grasping my hair in both hands, so I think we may have a natural English-style rider on our hands.

Authority

Over at Alicia's blog there is a lively debate going on over obedience to authority. Obviously I am firmly on the side of authority, but having been a teenager, I can understand the appeal of the rebel side.

The problem stems from the fact that the United States was born of revolt. The French have a similar problem. Until we change our mythology, or at least the slant of the mythology, we are doomed as a people to constant flux and a desire for perpetual novelty.

The solution to this problem lies in the Declaration of Independence. The document speaks of inalienable rights that had been violated by the British colonial government. Basically we need to read our founding mythology with the British recast as the Rebels. God is the ultimate authority and all rights come from Him and Him alone. When Parliament callously violated those rights, it was following in its tradition of Rebellion against the Law of God.

When the founding fathers finally saw the need to cast off Anglo high-handedness, they had already used all of the avenues of petition. Thus their war was one of restoring the Law, not violating it. Unfortunately some bad ideas wormed their way into the fabric of this new nation, and a most unfortunate mythology was created at the same time, and we have been paying the price ever since.

Natural Law is not based on a social contract, as we are taught in the government schools. Some of the framers of the Constitution understood this, but Endarkenment ideas became enshrined as ultimate Truths (hence the peculiar notion found amongst most college students (and professors) that Truth is negotiable, or even so individualized that it bears slight resemblance to what we as Catholics recognize and rightfully call the Truth).

As a result we have a perpetual revolution, and an unfocused legion of rebels without any cause beyond the joy of the revolt. Our so-called conservatives enshrine this in their laissez-faire policies. "Get the government off our backs" translates equally well into "get the government out of our bedrooms" as well as "get the government out of the marriage business." Our leftists want the government out of our medicine cabinets, as long as the government pays for what goes inside them (leftists are essentially teenagers who want Dad to pay for the car, the insurance, the gas, not to establish a curfew, and to pay for the abortion afterwards).

For democracy to work on any level (and in spite of my love of Franco, I believe very much in democracy at the local level), it must be built on an understanding of Natural Law and a healthy respect for due authority, which can be in the form of a parent, a teacher, a mayor, the President, a King, whatver structure is best suited for that particular people. The trick, of course, is to keep the lawful authority from rebellion against the higher law (in short, to also respect due authority).

The Constitution has some good ideas on that, although a runaway judiciary that confuses policy with law may be the Achilles heel of our system. I have given up on trying to figure out the system that is best for these United States. We may be approaching an age where the whole spaghetti is ungovernable. We may have to break it up into five or six countries. I really don't know.

I do know that nothing lasts forever, and that someday Pax Americana will end. I believe that the end is a lot closer than we suspect, and I fear what will come to replace it, as we have federalized too much of the power that should reside in more local levels (the Department of Education comes immediately to mind), leaving our local government structures completely unfit to govern effectively without the massive Washington-based structures they depend on like little chicks peeping for bits of regurgitated worm.

If we are to salvage representative democracy we need to build the notion that authority is good, even when it is imperfect, which it always is. I am reminded of a story about St. Francis. When asked what he would do if he knew that the priest saying mass kept a concubine, Holy Father Francis said, "I would go up to the altar and receive the Body and Blood of my savior from his annointed hands." The priest may be completely unworthy of his office, but the office remains the same. So it must be with our other authorities.

Certainly we must safeguard our rights, as that is our supreme right and duty, but we must do so by respecting due authority and respecting the basic humanity of our authorities and by resorting to and advocating extreme solutions only when the circumstance is extreme and dire and our cries to higher authorities are ignored.

I can think of times when I advocated various revolts in high school and cringe at the knowledge that I never attempted to address the issues through legitimate means (and our principal, a Knight of Columbus and a thoroughly decent man, was always available to students), but I was operating under a glorified image of the lone wolf, the righteous rebel with the sword of Justice (or at least the sword of sex, drugs, and rock and roll).

There is a tendency among Catholics to pick the examples of saints and examples from the Scripture that reaffirm our own worst traits. Those of us disposed to "taking on" hierarchies love the image of Christ with the money-changers or rebuking the Pharisees. Those of us who delight in sharp words take comfort in St. Jerome's personality. I think that a restorative is to develop a devotion to a saint who repulses us. For me this has been Ste. Therese de Lisieux. Quite frankly, she leaves me cold. Her example sets my instincts to run or at least to roll my eyes, yet she has been proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by our Holy Father, so I force myself to read her writings, to study her example, and to do so with charity and the desire to be corrected. I find myself often floored by her when I approach her with an open mind and heart.

I am not saying that I am completely converted nor that I no longer have an urge to giggle once in a while. I still am much more attracted to the examples of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Dominic and those great men of action who threw the book at the heretics and could roll up their sleeves and fight it out with the Albigensians, but I cannot say that my reading of Therese has been without benefit.

Since we cannot hope to transform our society without transforming ourselves first (or more correctly, without blocking the Holy Spirit in the work of transforming ourselves), I propose this sort of thing as the first step in rebuilding sound government in the West (Western Europe is just as much in the thralls of this idiocy as we are this side of the pond).

Bloomdido

Someone found the blog by searching for "describing Bloomdido by Charlie Parker"

Here you go: beautiful.

That piece still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Grrrr.

The quality of notes in early music recordings has really diminished. The length of essays has gone down, the clarity of the listings is often a mess, and the packaging has become downright bizarre in various futile efforts to interest the mass market in trecento music (ain't gonna happen, label people). I have been comparing a few titles that I have on vinyl and just bought on CD (from the same label), and pages of useful material are gone, unless the CD is from earlier days of the medium.

It is really stupid to skimp on this stuff, because the primary (dare I say only) market for a lot of this music is specialists, who want every little decision and source explained. I really cannot imagine people impulse buying a disc of Machaut motets at the supermarket. Why are they being packaged that way? Those of us who want Machaut are, well, nerds.

Anyway, with that you get an idea of what I have been doing with my free time these days. I will be leaving for San Diego later this week, and will try to post a couple of good recipes before that, and I should be able to post on the road, but I will probably be at this more diminished level of blogging for a week or two. Things should pick up after the 29th.

Exhausted

I am terribly sorry for the lapse in posts. I have been working under deadline as well as researching for the Dante presentation. In re-reading long forgotten material about the Italian Ars Nova, I began to question some assumptions I had been making about music history in general, so all of my spare time has been used digging around music texts.

Part of the difficulty is that what we know about the way music sounded is an educated (more or less) guess, always in flux. What I could write about with confidence this year could look utterly silly as soon as a new source is found, but then could look good again, if something casts yet another light on the matter. Generally it is a matter of fine-tuning our knowledge, not a matter of drastic reversals.

One of the big problems, of course, is rhythm. For an modern example of this, look at the difficulties encountered in notation "swing" rhythm. Without phonorecordings of jazz, it would be really interesting to see what future scholar-musicians come up with as the sound of jazz (and I am not even getting into the difficulties of reconstructing improvised solos and comping figures based solely on written sources). Of course the recordings are going to be the source for this stuff, so unless the various media are forgotten, they will have something quite accurate to go by.

At least 14th century musicians were debating the questions of rhythm quite fiercely. The more debate there is over a stylistic point, the more precise writing there is, since musical battles (at least at the theorists' level) are battles of the significance of minutiae.

The big point of contention between the Ars Antiqua defenders and the Ars Nova defenders was over the relaxation of the rhythmic modes (corresponding to the types of poetic meter), and the increased use of duple meters. Fairly heavy dissonance was accepted by both sides (it just was not seen as that important an issue).

In contemporary times we debate dissonance, although really what most people have a problem with (as Michael Tilson Thomas points out often) is density, rather than dissonance. There is a theory that I have always accepted, since it came from James Tenney, a composer and theorist I have long admired, that we have, as a people, an ever-increasing amount of dissonance that we are willing to accept, with major changes happening at certain points (Monteverdi, Satie, Schoenberg, etc.). It is a tidy theory that perfectly conforms to the notion of progress in music, but when you look at 13th and 14th century music, it does not work.

The other day I was listening to a Machaut motet and it really struck me as how dissonant it was, even on strong beats (not all voices had to be in consonance, just a couple). The rhythm was complex, but did not strike me as that out of order.

So, forgive my long-windedness on this, but I have just a little time before I have folks coming over for paella, and wanted to post something to let you know that I am still here, and that you can expect more musings on this topic.

IMPORTANT NOTICE!

While the North Beach Lectura Dantis meets every Wednesday at 7:30pm, my presentation on Music in the Time of Dante will begin at 7:15pm, as per National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi policy (lectures always start at 7:15, so folks get used to regular starting times. Makes sense to me). I am glad that one of the friars showed me the poster!

So, for those of you planning on attending, please note the time change.

In preparing for this, I realized that my approach is sort of like a drunken darts tosser: I am starting in the 20th/21st centuries in America, bouncing back to 10th century Paris, eventually finding myself in a dark wood somewhere between Florence and Ravenna in the middle of our lives. It should be fun, and I will answer questions afterwards.

I am trying to decide what to post in advance on the blog. Perhaps detailed notes, perhaps something more like a paper, perhaps just a transcript of what I plan to say. I will certainly post all the bibliographic information here, for those who are interested in digging deeper. If any of you have a preference, I will try to accomodate.

There is also the tricky issue of how much detail to go into in the nuts and bolts of music. Some folks will want excess and some will want only the most general terms. It is a tricky balance. Some folks will roll their eyes into their heads and start snarling at the mention of "perfect tempus and imperfect prolation."

Needless to say I have been spending more time with that great resource, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a reference work only a true music geek could love. Every home ought to have one (at least to have something to store in the harpsichord that every home ought to have as well).

So, if there are gaps in the blogging record, it is not because of my secretary's careless foot, rather that I am sifting, sorting, organizing and generally immersing myself in the world of ancient music (and I will not tolerate folks calling it "pre-music").

So far it looks something like this:

1. The difficulties of understanding what Italian music of this period actually sounded like. Musicological Sherlock Holmes!

2. General trends in music from the School of Notre Dame to the emergence of the Italian Ars Nova.

3. How Dante used musical imagery in the Commedia, with particular emphasis on Paradiso.

4. Questions, answers, evasions.

5. Tony and Nick's drinking Scotch. Feel free to bring the conversation over there.

Happy Columbus Day!

Three cheers for the heroic Italian navigator who brought the Holy Catholic Faith to the New World! History records often dirty business, and so the dealings between Europeans and Indians are often clouded by such misfortunes, but in the long run I have to say that this one aspect of Christopher Columbus' doings is the greatest thing that ever happened to the people of the New World. Even a cursory reading of the grotesque human sacrifices, the cannibalism, the superstition, the animism, the cultures of people entirely subjected to the cruelties of nature (which is, of course, often trumpteted as noble), and the barbarity of pre-Columbian Americas will show the Spanish conquista as one of the greatest triumphs of all humanity ever known.

I was hoping to celebrate by being at a great bullfight, but that will have to wait. Instead I will be in North Beach for mass, then the festivities (complete with the stunningly lovely Blue Angels roaring overhead).

Interview Questions for Steven Riddle

I ended up not going to San Diego this weekend due to a scheduling foul-up. Instead I have been enjoying the lovely autumn weather, the corn harvest at the Ardenwood Historic Farm (picked lots of corn today), and finally got around to writing the promised questions for Steven. I have been in a particularly poetic mood these last few days, so:

1. Steven, you are obviously keenly interested in and deeply knowledgeable of poetry. What do you expect from a poem?

2. Who is the most striking example of a Catholic poet that you can think of, off the top of your head? I mean Catholic in terms of spirit of the poetry, not in terms of the actual confessional status of the poet (for instance, I consider Rembrandt one of the great Catholic painters, in spite of the fact that he was a member of the Reformed Protestant Church). Please explain.

3. In your field (modern science in general, and museum crowds in particular) you must be a rara avis as a faithful and devout Catholic. What are the conflicts that come up and how do you deal with them?

4. If you could be any kind of tree… No, just kidding. The real question: has the writing of Teilhard de Chardin influenced you much? I do not mean this as a gotcha question. We all know that he had some iffy ideas, but he was deadly serious in his attempts to reconcile anthropology and theology. How have you interacted with his better ideas (that is, if you have given him some serious study)?

5. What direction do you see poetry going in? Any particular poets that do it for you these days?

The food debate continues

I see that Mrs. Dashwood has responded to my post about the importance of good food. She has delivered a scattering of arguments, so I will take them on one by one and try to hammer a unifying factor out of them.

First she accuses me of finding evil in those food articles that I do not like. If I were to call hard-cooked eggs evil, she would have a point (although they do smell closer to fire and brimstone than anything I care to encounter on my table). However, my attack is on a whole philosophy of food that supplants quality with uniform banality. Satanway does not exist in a vacuum, rather it is part of a whole factory food marketing phenomenon that is dependent on government subsides and low wages at every step: from the field workers, to the grocery workers, and increasingly to the consumers, who have been conditioned by a half century of intensive marketing to buy increasingly processed food from the likes of ADM (remember them? Supermarket to the world, makers of high fructose corn syrup and the like, providing completely empty calories that are as much a product of the factory as the land). But that will get addressed further down, when we discuss “small is better.”

In her first red herring, she throws in a little jab at la fiesta brava, so let us begin by addressing the treatment of animals caused by the factory farming that produces pork so bland it has to be brined to be acceptable. A pig is raised in deplorable conditions for its entire life. It is bred and fed to produce lean meat at a rapid rate. Its movements are restricted, especially if it is a breeding sow, which is rendered almost completely immobile, so that its piglets can suckle non-stop. The only humane thing about the process is the killing itself.

Contrast this with the four to six years of a fighting bull. The toro bravo lives on the range, with ample opportunities for movement, eats grass, which is natural to a ruminant, has a lot of social interaction with the herd, and has a life closer to a wild animal than any other product of breeding. Until one week before its final moments it probably never has been inside a box car or a trailer. When it enters the ring for its last half hour, it is full of adrenaline. It gets some fairly superficial wounds, which, in its state simply do not cause a lot of pain (if you watch a particularly good bull take the pic, it will return for more several times, until the final quite is performed). A good half hour before it would really start to feel pain the bull is dead of a sword thrust (a remarkably efficient way of killing). Note that it is not “tortured to death.” It does not die of the pic or the banderillas (which barely prick the skin, considering that a bull’s hide is leather).

In terms of dignity (although I hate using that word to describe a lower animal), the bull dies a fighting death. It is not loaded into trains and transferred to a feedlot to wallow in its own excrement until it is led into a factory for a killing that is fairly close to the sword. If a bull (or any other mammal) were left in nature, it would get old, arthritic, and succumb to cold, disease or predation. There are cases when an incompetent matador botches the job (although the bull will still be finished off before those wounds start to ache), but mistakes happen in slaughterhouses as well, like the case a few years back when a factory slaughterhouse was videotaped flaying live cattle because the killing mechanism did not work effectively enough, and no one on the assembly line seemed to care.

Mrs. Dashwood’s second red herring is about the folly of her possibly learning anything from me. Well, she is the one who is “tired of cooking,” not me. She has been cooking for about twenty years, and so have I (we start young in fiercely competitive Italian food families). We start with making pasta then move to soup and sautéing, finally being allowed to make the ragù. We all have calluses on the index finger of our knife hands. I had one period of nine months in the last twenty years that I was not cooking pretty close to daily, and that was when I had dining commons food inflicted on me. It was such an awful experience that to this day I shudder to think of the undercooked chicken and overcooked beef that was passed off as food.

In my family we cook well into our eighties, usually for small armies. It is not enough to feed our families and friends, but we take charge of the parish’s feasts, the ICF dinners, the Sons of Italy celebrations, etc. A very few even ended up in the restaurant business. There is a pecking order, and everyone knows what it is (and which generation slacked off – they are the ones who also are tired of cooking, but my generation has returned to our traditions with full fury). Are we superhuman? No. We keep at it because we don’t see cooking as a chore.

As far as our way of applying small is better, we live it. In the days before regular good farmers’ markets we traded with each other the fruits of our gardens (one of the drawbacks of Italian culture is that we almost completely misunderstand the notion of an ornamental garden – even in the smallest of spaces we raise some food. Note that I stopped doing this only because I could finally get superior produce on a daily basis in the Bay Area and I want to learn how to treat a garden as an ornamental space, not just my fattoria). For those ingredients we could not grow, we imported them (back before the rest of the world discovered our food things like dried porcini were cheap) from small producers via small importers (generally family, because they could be trusted better). We are talking about strictly blue collar Italians here. My parents’ generation was the first to go beyond high school (or even to complete high school in some cases).

The key to cooking this way is to buy strictly seasonally. If something is too early or too late, it is better to skip it altogether. When things are good and cheap in season, we buy a ton and preserve them for the rest of the year. That is why I pay an average of $1.50 a pound for organic, heirloom tomatoes (a brief note about organic here – I have absolutely no worries about the health effects of pesticide residue, a bunch of baloney for the most part (although there are environmental issues that are real). The advantage to organic is the methods of farming tend to yield produce that is bred and picked for flavor over appearance and transportability). If I had more patience and held out another three weeks each year, that would drop to about $1. A bit more than the $.69 cents a pound that I could pay for the bland red mushballs that are sold at the Satanway, but how many pounds do I need to go through to make that an issue? Also, with better flavored produce, I don’t need to use as many enhancements.

Now we can get to the meat of all of this, which is Mrs. Dashwood’s argument, which is a tired out populism that sees Small is Good as elitist. Do I want the poor to have chevre instead of Velveeta? Absolutely. It was good enough for my peasant ancestors for centuries (in our case it was pecorino – more sheep than goats in Tuscany). Why would anyone prefer Velveeta? It provides nothing that heated corn starch, milk and salt cannot provide (seriously, heat cornstarch in water to gelatinization point, add a splash of milk, and salt it, not much difference and a lot cheaper). Velveeta has little useful nutrition, offers nothing in the way of experiencing a connection with the land, with the bounty that God has provided us. It exists solely to replace food at profit to the Kraft company. To help with that noble endeavor, Kraft keeps coming up with fun and exciting packaging for Velveeta including unconscionable pre-made box lunches for children (and I say that if you can afford those nutritional wastebins, you can afford a good local cheese).

How did this become the status quo in a few decades, in startling contrast to thousands of years of Judeo-Christian emphasis on connecting our food with the seasons (so strong that the language of much of our liturgy is based on it)?

First let’s look at the way agriculture works in this country. The supply and demand issue is completely blurred by subsides and advertising. Factory farming is dependent upon a subsidy structure that favors large scale farming. Small farms cannot make it on set aside land payments, simply because they do not have enough land to put into set aside. Since the major agribusiness concerns have used advertising to create demand for an increasingly narrow range of raw materials, which are used in an increasingly wide array of substitute food products, the small farmers have had to sell out to agribusiness. As a result the status quo rolls on, making it easier to make a profit as a large agribusiness, but not as a small farmer.

In post-war America, the entire cultural emphasis has been on assimilation. Wonderful variety meats like tripe, pork liver, oxtails, lamb tongue, etc., were marginalized as ethnic or rural. If one was a real American, one ate steak (prime cuts only) and potatoes. We just beat Hitler so we wouldn’t have to eat tripe anymore, dadnabbit! And to make it all easier, the intensive sales pitch was on convenience. Cake mix, margarine (talk about fraud in a tub – ersatz butter sold as tasting “just like the real thing”), TV dinners, the list of offenders is endless. Obviously cattle still have stomachs, so what happened to them? Processed into meat food products, bearing only a passing resemblance to the food they replaced.

Fortunately Julia Child introduced Americans to real cooking and that led to Alice Waters and the tide is slowly changing. We now have small farms that compete by offering produce that the large outfits have neglected, and the market for those products is increasing, to the point that the large concerns are casting an eye at things like spring salad greens.

Now that we finally have an opportunity to support small family farms it is more imperative than ever that we do so. We can create demand for good food and that demand will be met. By supporting small farms we really do not spend more money, if we are smart about our shopping, and by cutting out the megamarket a higher percentage of our food dollar goes directly to the family farmers. If the megamarkets see this, they will be forced to follow (as they have slowly been doing in the Bay Area), and will have to pay better wages for more knowledgeable employees (again, we are seeing this in some of the mass market places here). If the prices of some foods go up it will be more than compensated for by less money going to high value-added processed junk.

We should look to food as a source of contemplation, as a source of community (that includes the farmers), indeed as a focal point of the community, and we should spread our enthusiasm first by praxis, then by words, but if we only spread the gospel of food we miss the mark. It has to go hand in hand with the Gospel. I might seem a bit harsh on Mrs. Dashwood (look, I have the stubborness of a Kraut combined with the hotheadedness of an Italian, and I have found that when I try to beat around the bush I end up insulting people more than when I am truthful and undiplomatic), but have no doubt that she is a good person, a good mother, wife, daughter, and most importantly (the thing that undoubtedly structures it all), a good Catholic. I would rather sit down to a brined pork roast with her than for seared foie gras with some hedonist foodie who lives for his own pleasure alone. I especially dislike the hedonist who uses food as a badge of his social status, who chokes down a shot of Laphroaig even though he cannot stomach the peatiness, simply because that is what the in-crowd drinks.

One final point is that Mrs. Dashwood states that skill is the important thing in cooking. I agree, but consider the shopping part of that skill. I have seen virtuoso shoppers in the form of octogenarian Italian nonne making the butcher cut meat to specifications so demanding that they would make lesser men cry. Watching them at public markets in Italy is one of the few things that rates higher than Grand Opera for passion, with their squinted eyes, twitching noses, and facial expressions scrutinizing the farmer’s every move (in Italy, one does not pick up the produce, but asks for it, bringing in the chance that the farmer will dare to pass off one unripe tomato in a bag of fifty). I have chosen a more collaborative route, working with a small number of farmers who know what I like and know that I will take a chance on their recommendations (or as my friend Ann said regarding fava greens, “ha ha, she has you buying her compost”). Some day, when I am eighty and have grandchildren who know better than to stir sauce into pasta in my kitchen, I hope to attain the level of shopping virtuosity my Great Aunt Sarah had (she was the notorious nitpicker, who my butcher/grocer cousin Mario learned to fear).

I also offer to Mrs. Dashwood and Cacciaguida the open invitation to come to Oakland to discuss this stuff the way it should be discussed: at the table, over good wine and food. If you show up, you will be guaranteed of three good meals a day, and we are in walking distance to a great parish (with a Latin Novus Ordo mass as well as the indult Tridentine). I also give great tours of the Bay Area to our out of town visitors (with the caveat that Amália always insists that a little part of each day is spent either riding on a choo choo or looking at choo choos. She might grow out of this, but I haven’t, so streetcars and regional transit will probably have to be part of the tour).

Links, links, and more links (but not golf links - I leave that to my mom)

I haven't updated the links for awhile. There are some that I really should have added by now. I will start with Gregg, even though he made a disparaging remark about the Raiders. Of course I forgave him, since, seeing as how the Raiders have been playing, I have made my share of disparaging remarks about them (and remarks about Al Davis are always tolerated here). Gregg is in Colorado, which is a beautiful state.

Second on the list is John, who seems to be as much of a jazz nut as I am. I must warn him to watch out, though, as jazz nuttiness can lead to becoming that scariest of all creatures, the record collector. It is too late for me (I cannot pass a yard sale without digging through the box of LPs hoping for some gem), but if I can warn the rest of you before you have crossed the Rubicon, I will be doing some good. Jazz is wonderful music, but it leads to such manias as wanting every single Thelonious Monk record ever made.

The third on the list is one that everyone already reads anyway, but if anyone needs the address to Catholic and Enjoying It, then it will be here. I generally steer clear of apologists (I have nothing against them, and admire and respect the work they do, but find they tend to drive me nuts, especially when they start talking about C.S. Lewis, who I find tedious), but Shea can write and has a sense of humor. He seems like a good guy and his blog is a good read. But you knew that already.

There will be more on the way, but that is it for now.

Mexican feast

This weekend we went to Santa Cruz to visit Ann and Jaime. We were going to cook dinner on Saturday night, but got caught up watching that stupid baseball game. Instead we cooked up a bunch of food Sunday afternoon:

1. Ceviche. I soaked strips of fresh tombo tuna in lime juice with onions, cilantro and salt until the fish is chemically cooked by the lime juice.

2. Mango salsa. Diced organic Brazilian mango, diced California organic Haas avocado, finely chopped jalapeno, diced onion, finely chopped cilantro, crushed garlic, salt, lime juice.

3. Guacamole. Avacado, diced onion, crushed garlic, lime juice, finely chopped cilantro, chopped jalapeno, salt.

4. Salsa fresca. Molino Creek organic dry-farmed tomatoes (if you are not in the greater Bay Area, you will have to find some other intensely flavored ones. These, from the Santa Cruz mountains, are the best tomatoes I have ever eaten), diced onion, crushed garlic, finely chopped cilantro, finely chopped jalapeno, extra virgin olive oil,salt, lime juice.

5. Carne asada, thin steaks of beef, rubbed with salt and pepper and grilled. Finished with a drizzling of extra virgin olive oil.

6. Toasted tortillas.

Served with chips and beer. Followed by a three mile walk to Capitola Village and back (with a hot chocolate and espresso break at Mr. Toots, one of the most pleasant coffeehouses in the world).

Great meal, great weekend. Amalia really gets along with Ann and Jaime, but seems to think that their house is owned by Kobu the cat (although Amalia calls it "Kubu's house"). One of these days I will have to get Ann and Jaime's secret for getting the cat to buy you a house. Hepcat didn't even kill mice. I want a cat like Kobu.

By order of the Blogduce

I got a troll! It was a comment on a very old Friday Five, but it was my first genuine troll. This gives me a perfect opportunity to announce my troll policy. Trolls will have their IP addresses listed for the world to see, so that other bloggers can track them. I realize that trolls can use many IP addresses, but if folks start noticing a pattern, then it makes it that much easier to patrol and delete.

Unless a post is outlandishly out of bounds (or is posted by someone known to the blogosphere as a troll), it will not be deleted automatically, but I may add editorial comment in addition to posting the IP address. I may decide later to delete troll comments, however, so be warned if you want to play this role.

Oh well.

I guess I will not have to worry about baseball until April, and with the Raiders playing the way they are I might just take a pass on football this year. Since I am usually bored by basketball, that means a sports-free few months, unless I suddenly take an interest in watching golf, which is unlikely.

Friday Five

1. What vehicle do you drive?

Ford Explorer

2. How long have you had it?

Since January

3. What is the coolest feature on your vehicle?

12 CD changer and 4 wheel drive

4. What is the most annoying thing about your vehicle?

It handles like a truck and gets lower gas mileage than the Krautrocket (my beloved and gravely injured BMW 325)

5. If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now?

Alpha Romeo Milano

Great Day in the City!

Today Amalia and I spent the day in San Francisco, interviewing Michael Smuin and watching the Smuin Ballet rehearse. Amalia was particularly well-behaved, and watched the dancers (for 3 hours!) attentively, with only a couple of breaks to snack, have diapers changed, or to play in the empty studio that Michael Smuin graciously let her run around in (he even provided a couple of those gigantic balls that dancers use in their stretching).

The way there involved two choo-choo's, which, for Amalia, was probably the highlight of the day, even though she really did seem to enjoy the dancing. Walking back (Amalia fell asleep around Civic Center, so I kept walking, all the way to the Embaracadero) was interesting, as I got to pass many of the places I used to pass every day when my office was in the City.

It is interesting what changes, and what does not change, at who is still around (you get to know the regular Market Street folks, from the businessmen who walk the same route, like clockwork to the homeless who shift from one side of the street to the next, depending on the light and the traffic). One of the people who I half expected not to see was there, one of my predecessors as Chairman of the Student Senate in college, the one I tried to model my reign as exactly opposite as possible. This fellow runs a rather upscale magazine shop on Market Street, something he has done for several years. He does a good job, and I am sure that they have a whole bunch of procedures for everything. If Adam (if I told you his last name was Smith, you wouldn't believe me, but it really was (and is, I presume)) was about anything, it was procedure. I, on the other hand, have always believed in the politics of personality. Adam would try to carefully negotiate consensus. I would try to do as much by fiat and out of the realm of voting as possible.

We always got along, and I am happy to see his shop thriving and continuing to carry such a good selection (one of the crucial elements to good civic life is good magazine shops in the downtown areas, along with bars and caffes I would rate this as one of the highest priorities).

Many of the other businesses I knew, at least by sight, are gone, however, and I think there are two more Starbucks on Market Street that I did not know about. The biggest shock was the fact that the Chevron building is no longer the Chevron building. I knew it was the case, but seeing it on foot (always more of an impact than passing in a taxicab or car or bus), really struck me.

Market Street seemed a little grubbier than usual. The skies were gray, and that always makes it seem sad, and it goes in cycles. Some days Market Street is full of life and excitement. Other days it seems more full of broken men, angrily muttering to themselves, to their fathers, to the world in general. Today seemed to be full of lost folks, clearly on ebb of their fortunes, but not energetic enough to even panhandle. It could be the weather, it could just be a cyclical thing, as it always has been, or it could be a new trend. I have been away from Market Street for awhile. As we do our weekly museum visits I am sure we will see more of Market Street.

Anyway, the Smuin Ballet looked fantastic in this, their tenth year. I was impressed by Smuin's views on music and dance and equally impressed by his company. He has assembled some excellent dancers. The current program (that opens Friday), is Les Noces (Stravinsky), Short Pieces by Gershwin, a short piece by one of his dancers, and Tango Palace, a fantastic take on tango, with an Amalia Rodrigues fado and an Edith Piaf song added in. Then they will be doing their annual Christmas Ballet, which will feature a section of Mozart's c minor mass. Yet another reason to make a trip to the Bay Area!

Shortly I will be back in the City for the Transitus of St. Francis, which will be observed at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, followed by an event at Campion College, followed by a fiftieth birthday celebration of one of the Campion faculty members, then tomorrow we will be off to Gilroy and Santa Cruz, so blogging might be light over the weekend (unless I have too much espresso after the birthday celebration, so watch out for those late night postings).

Have a blessed feast of St. Francis. If you need something to meditate on may I suggest the Canticle of Creation and Thomas of Celano's second biography of St. Francis?

The utmost importance of food in our culture

In the comments box on autumnal cooking below, Mrs. Dashwood offers the notion that my dislike of brined pork is simply a matter of preference, not a moral issue at all. She rightly states that abortion, divorce, etc. are evils, but not the consumer culture that goes hand in hand with these things.

In terms of proportionality, she is correct. It is far worse to kill a human being in his own womb than to foist off phony food on the market. However, the major supermarkets, and the consumerist culture they perpetuate is part of the same problem. We have a culture that is motivated by inordinate desires for material riches as well as convenience.

Excessive convenience when it comes to the family dinner table is a gigantic erosion of the social fabric that binds families. The other side of selling convenience is encouraging the two income families, and the ills that come with absentee parents. Certainly using pre-brined pork is not going to suddenly break apart a family and send the teenagers into wanton sex and drug abuse, but it is a step in that direction. Pre-brined pork is a fraud. It is a way of boosting the weight of meat and enhancing the flavor of the meat that has been sacrificed by the practices of factory farming. Brines that are loaded with dextrose and hydrolyzed vegetable proteins are designed to increase desire for the product, in essence making them less satisfying to increase desire and consumption.

It is the same as selling soda pop as a thirst quencher (the once normal 8 oz. Coca Cola has morphed into the Super Big Slug or whatever the buckets of soda pop are called that you see in the world of convenience foods). I do not make the claim that drinking the occasional 120 oz tub is a mortal sin equivalent to murder, but if we are at all serious about fighting the culture of death we have to deal with the cultural aspects, which begin at the family table. Otherwise we are simply fighting a political battle that will be doomed to failure.

Of course this garbage is foisted on the market in the name of consumer choice (just like abortion), but notice that in the case that brought this all up we are talking about someone who cannot find unbrined pork in any of her markets. When the culture of death strikes it starts with a liberal propostion: a man alone with his God in the supermarket, and don't you food snobs dare tell him he is wrong. Then, when products that are by their very design made to increase desire rather than to fulfill a basic need (believe me, I worked in a food lab where we developed food like this) edge out the staples of wholesome food, the choice suddenly vanishes or is marginalized. Those of us who object to the wholesale destruction of our food culture are then branded as elitists or snobs who obviously have a lot of time and money on our hands (I assure you I have neither, but making sure my family eats a good, wholesome meal around the table is a much higher priority than watching television or the countless other diversions that are sold to fill the time supposedly saved by factory-produced shortcuts).

We live in an era of amazing technological prowess, but the fruits of this prowess in our culture are few and far between. With our power tools and heavy equipment we do not even dare to think that we could build something as magnificent as the cathedral in Chartres, or have artists of the calibre of Giotto painting our churches. Instead our technology goes to more and more trivialities, which are, at best, substitutes for real culture. We work just as long hours and have more two income families than ever, so that we can enjoy canned stock, factory farmed produce, and premade sauces, all in the name of saving time, and you are saying that this is not evil?

Music in the time of Dante

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area on October 29th, I will be giving a presentation on Music in the Time of Dante at the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi, relating the musical trends of the period to how Dante uses music in the Divine Comedy. It is free and the fun begins at 7:30pm. Come one come all!

Hola

We just got back from Redding, and it is very late, so this is just a quick note to say that I have not dropped from the face of the planet, and will be back to regular blogging tomorrow or the next day (tomorrow is Lectura Dantis, so don't expect volumes, just quick observations and the like). Meanwhile, I forgot to mention on my interview, that the idea is for me to offer to interview you! So, if you are interested, drop me a line at EKeilholtz [at the domain] aol [period] com.