The folks at HV Food Products, makers of Hidden Valley Ranch dressings, say (in a barrage of TV commercials on the Food Network) that your vegetables aren’t “delectable” unless you slather them with sugar, MSG, and a raft a flavor enhancers and oily fats.

The company’s new campaign has the actress Jenny Garth explaining why fresh, in-season vegetables need all this, and healthy dose of calcium disodium EDTA preservative to keep them that way for — months.

The dining car at the Food Shark (image from the Food Shark).

Marfa is difficult to get to. Fortunately, you can eat quite happily once you get there. The two are connected, though the explanation requires a little patience on your part.

Way out in the high desert of Texas, Marfa is several hours of fast driving from the nearest major airport. I flew into El Paso and, on a tip from a jazz trombonist who knows his food, provisioned myself with some quite good green chile tamales from Pepe’s (just off Hwy 10) before leaving town and heading north north-west. The next three hours were filled with desert, big-rig trucks, Spanish-language radio, and the judicious use of cruise control.

Judd, the minimal
Before he passed away in 1994, the sculptor Donald Judd established a constellation of studios, living spaces, and art installation spaces in Marfa. He’d passed through the town years before as an enlistee in the US Army and been struck by its remoteness from everything else. As a successful artist showing mostly in New York and other major urban centers, Judd’s Marfa experiment began as an attempt to create art that would, by virtue of its isolation and placement, force the viewer to experience it mindful of its location and context. Judd’s largest works are installed here, at the Chinati Foundation which he established in a decommissioned military base on the edge of town.

One of the 15 untitled works in concrete on the Chinati Foundation's grounds.

As you drive into the town center on Hwy 67, you pass the southwest corner of the Chinati Foundation’s property. Here, sixty enormous concrete boxes arrayed in fifteen clusters of three to five boxes along a kilometer-long north-south axis. The boxes are of the same external dimensions but each cluster’s boxes have different faces left open.

A few of the hundred works in mill aluminum.

Behind the concrete works, in two retrofitted hangers, sit a hundred boxes fabricated of mill aluminum to the same external dimensions but with internal volumes permuted a hundred different ways. Both installations invite the viewer to explore the mutability and variety of light, shadow, and space.

Judd’s was a rigorous aesthetic of consistency and consideration in the making and doing of things. Those who were attracted to Judd’s Marfa shared or developed something of that same rigor. This is not to say that Marfa isn’t an art town, because it is. It just happens to be an art town that has only a minimal tolerance for fluff and tchotchkes.

Marfa food
And so we come to the food. Does the spirit of a place permeate its food, like a sort of genius loci? In Marfa, as in other places, maybe it does. For a town with a small population and only a handful of eateries, it was a happy surprise to find as many good places to eat as I did. Two in particular felt like they’d absorbed the spirit of place: simple but not simplistic, complex but not complicated, carefully considered.

The Food Shark at Ballroom Marfa (image from the Food Shark).

Food truck eating
The Food Shark is a food truck that shows up Mondays through Fridays under a canopy next to the railway line running through downtown Marfa. Krista Steinhauer and Adam Bork bought the truck for a small sum and keep costs down by prepping in a kitchen they built in their duplex. They recently installed a dining car—it’s a refurbished schoolbus parked right next to the Food Shark and the railroad track—to accommodate those who find the large tables designed by Judd too exposed to the elements. This is a quirky operation.

Food Shark food is simple and to the point. It’s not trying to be something it isn’t. It is what it is. Here’s an example. One of the best sandwiches I’ve eaten in a long time was a Food Shark reuben (a special that day): pastrami on dense toasted rye, with sauerkraut, swiss, and Russian dressing, served with dilled potato salad. As a list of components, this reuben sounds just like any other. As a gestalt, perfectly made and full of balanced yet distinct flavours, warm in your hand and incredibly unpretentious, it has a weightiness that makes you go quiet, eat it instantly, and then think about it for a long time. On reuben day, the town was empty and flooded in desert sun, and a windstorm was blowing eddies of sand and tumbleweeds about.

Dinner service at Cochineal

Calm under pressure
I stayed in Marfa for only a few days before heading north-east to Austin. The last night I was in town, I went to Cochineal to see what most people told me was the upper end of the local restaurant scene. Just a few years old and three years in the making, Cochineal’s kitchen staff is tiny and consists entirely of Marfa natives trained by proprietors Tom Rapp and Toshi Sakihara (previously of Etats-Unis in New York). There’s been no turnover in the kitchen in the two years they’ve been open. I sat close to the pass and watched the sous-chefs working in the open kitchen through dinner. The dining room filled up up quickly and orders began to filter in faster and faster, but the kitchen action remained precise, quiet, coordinated, and (most pleasingly of all) unfailingly polite. Making the food well was as important as making the food good.

And the food was good. It was really good, and didn’t call attention to itself with fancy pyrotechnics. Handmade pasta dressed with oil, anchovies, tomatoes, and capers, then showered with grated Parmesan was simultaneously tender and delicate, robust and meaty. A veal chop was grilled a textbook medium-rare, served with with black olives, crisp pan-roasted potatoes and parsley. Warm date pudding both dense and light at the same time, and mildly sweet with the complex flavour of molasses and dried fruit; the pile of gently-whipped, nearly unsweetened cream alongside was exactly what the pudding wanted. The food had a clarity rare in an age afflicted with fads: it was carried by classic flavor combinations and superb execution. With a crisp, cold Sapporo, this joined my short list of nearly-perfect meals.

Spirit of place
So, back to the question: Is Donald Judd’s Marfa connected to the Food Shark and Cochineal? My take: Yes. They all share the quality that comes from careful consideration and believing that the act of making of a thing can be as important to do well as the thing itself. Here in the thin desert air, under wide skies and far from the rest of the world, Marfa’s food and art seem quite at home with each other.

Remember AYBAB2U?   This internet meme was single badly translated line of dialog from an obscure video game (Zero Wing, by equally obscure Japanese game developer Toaplan).  In the game the standard evil-lord charatacter, who here appeared to be half-machine and half-human declares forcefully (to the player) “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.”

It was right after the Y2K scare. In-the-know techies who had watched the world hold its breath in collective (and now-amusing) terror as the century-clock hit midnight gravitated toward this comical image of the dated, half-machine character threatening, wth his clumsy confidence, “all your base”.

Why open source programmers, role-playing game characters, and the internet-connected assemblage of like-minded nerds so adored, and propogated the phrase in its many forms was an inside joke, and a statement:  We are in control — clumsy and nerdy as we may be.  We somehow are going to come out on top.  All your base are belong to us, you just don’t know it yet.  By 2002, the phrase was a shibboleth for this clique, and poked into popular culture in only the most subtle and insider way.

Ah, the good old days.  Internet memes now speak to everyone, and speak the same language as mass media: reality.  The memes spread now because they are so mildly appealing to so many, not because they are so viscerally comforting to so few.

Where before the meme said “this is us” to its identity-strong propagators, the meme now says “this is what others will like” to its friend-seeking, identity-weak propagators.  Memes of real significance or meaning are drowned out with a monoculture of short-lived YouTube clips.  Maybe its just becoming to easy to pass information around — and the wrong sort of people are doing it.

Mainstream media itself, of course, has become a monoculture of reality shows.  Odd how slices of every part of reality have a stunning sameness when produced for a television network.  Baking cakes is somehow identical to driving trucks through the arctic is the same as singing Whitney Houston songs.  Like Polaroid color, reality TV casts everything it sees in an eerie same-tone.

Susan Boyle, a chubby, unassuming, and unattractive person with little charisma got on a reality-show stage to snickers — and , famously (for the moment) belted out songs with confidence and some talent.  Then transforms back into a frog when done singing.  The oddity stands out in a monotony of Idol-singing, and so becomes wildly popular.

And, as is the case these days, existing popularity drives the internet memes of the moment.  Enter Lin Yu Chun, a chubby, unassuming, and unattractive person with little charisma who belts out songs (karaoke standards really) on a reality show with some talent.  He’s rather weird looking, and from Taiwan.  And he is dressed suspiciously like Susan Boyle — just add a bow tie.  As if it were necessary, he is usually called “The Taiwanese Susan Boyle”, and became known to American audiences as a nascent internet meme via YouTube.

But the mainstream US media can’t let well enough (or bad enough) alone.  Its not enough that Comcast and other US media companies want to control both the speed and the content of the internet, they also want to control the personality of the internet by drowning interesting would-be memes with manufactured junk-memes.  Like having this Lin-Yu-Chun-the-Taiwanese-Susan-Boyle sing a duet of “I Will Always Love You” with William Shatner on America’s “Lopez Tonight” show.  In the style of Whitney Houston.  With odd looks tender looks at one another that seem designed to entice bloggers to suggest a gay element to the duet. Seriously.  (Lin’s Wikipedia entry, suspected of being a shill written by media interests, is under consideration for deletion.  It may still be here.)

Of course the Lin-Shatner video being posted and reposted, sweeping through social networks and the internet itself like the virus it is, killing any evolving items that would have naturally moved to the top in due time.  There no floating to the top anymore, no natural evolution of odd and compelling ideas.  Just intentionally-created junk-meme catnip (crack?) like this.

If you haven’t seen it, unfortunately, here it is.

The OED sites Orson Welles comment on the drink in 1947: “The bitters are excellent for your liver, the gin is bad for you. They balance each other.”

The Negroni Sbagliato (“spal-yacht-oh”  translates as “wrong”, “mistaken”, or “misbehaving” ) has become so popular in Europe the drink is sometimes just called a “Sbagliato” for short. This latest twist is another substitution, prosecco instead of gin (maybe not as bad for you).

This time they have it right. The prosecco sweetens up the too-bitter Negroni traditionale, and lowers the total alcohol level so you can enjoy more of them.

Usually in a rocks glass, occasionally served in a wine glass:

The Negroni Sbagliato
1 ounce vermouth
1 ounce Campari
2 ounces prosecco
→ Stir over ice and garnish with the traditional orange slice.

Here, a Campari-produced ad recommends sparkling Pinot Chardonnay. I recommend a good dry prosecco.  For the vermouth, the barman here is using Cinzano Bianco, an Italian mid-sweet vermouth made by Gruppo Campari.

My friend Sheryl brought me some fabulously fresh ground sumac from her vacation in Jordan. (I’ve since found sumac to be great on boiled yuca — a very underrated starch. Added to the requisite mojo de ajo it yields a zesty, citrus-like flavor, and a a nice speckling of color.)

In this dish, the sumac is playing a more subordinate role, but it adds a pleasant complexity to the overall taste.

Baked Cod with Cannelini Beans and Roasted Tomato

1 pound fresh cod, cut into 6-inch filets
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp high quality extra virgin olive oil (good for you if you use your best olive oil for all 4 tbsps)
1 large onion, halved then sliced
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 large can whole plum tomatoes
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp lemon rind, grated
1 tbsp orange or tangerine rind, grated
1/4 cup fresh basil, finely chopped
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
1 tsp ground sumac
2 bay (laurel) leaves
1/2 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley
1 can (16 oz.) Italian cannelini beans, drained and rinsed
sea salt (to taste)

Preheat the oven to 375º F.

Drain the tomatoes — and retain the juice for Bloody Marys or vegetable stock or some such thing.  You”ll find the juice tastier than canned tomato juice (so heavily salted and often reconstituted).  Cut each tomato in half, just once, and set aside in a bowl.

Heat a large sauté pan with the 3 tbsps of olive oil, and cook the onions until just soft.  Then add all the ingredients except the cannelini beans and parsley.  Yes, really, all of them all at once.  Cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, for  about 20 minutes — until the tomatoes are soft but not falling apart.

While the mixture is cooking, take the drained, rinsed cannelini beans and stir in a bowl with the one tbsp high of quality extra virgin olive oil.  Add a bit of fresh-ground pepper  to the beans if you like, and set aside.

Salt and pepper the cod, and arrange  in a 3 quart (on similar-sized) glass baking pan so that there is a bit of space in the center for the cannelini beans.  A bit of olive oil under the fish will keep it from sticking to the pan.  When the contents of the sauté pan are done, turn off the heat, mix in the chopped parsley, and pour the contents of the sauté pan on the fish.  Then pour the cannelini beans on the small space you left in the center of the baking pan.

Bake for 15 minutes, at 375º F.  Do not overcook.  Remember the glass stays hot, and will continue to cook the fish a bit even after you remove it from the oven.

Serve with good, crusty Italian bread and a dry white (a white Beaujolais, Vermentino,  or Chardonnay, would work well).

Aldo Buzzi (pronounced “Boot-see”) is an urbane raconteur whose slim, brilliant volumes are mostly available only in Italian.  His books are sometimes classified — as booksellers and marketers are wont to do — as “food writing” or “travel writing”, but the brilliance of the prose — witty, arch, breezily erudite, and very funny — winds up transcending these genres.

Three have been translated into English: The Perfect Egg in 2005, (L’uovo alla kok, 1979), Journey to the Land of the Flies in 1996 (Viaggio in Terra de mosche e altri viaggi, 1994), and A Weakness for Almost Everything in 2006 (Un debole per quasi tutto, 2006) .

Oddly, and inspirationally, Buzzi’s wrote his first book, Quando la pantera rugge, at age 62.  He was first published in English when the New Yorker magazine ran his (long) short story Chekov in Sondrio in 1992.  Buzzi was then 82.

For the first 60 years of his life, Buzzi was set designer, costume designer, and, occasionally, on the scriptwriting team for various movies, mostly with director Alberto Latuada, and, early on, with Federico Fellini.  Trying to find the rather obscure films on which he has writing credit, most notably (if you are an Italian film buff) L’imprevisto (The Unexpected, 1961), is impossible in the US.

The reportedly quirky documentary he directed and co-wrote, America Pagana (1995) promises “a mystical journey to the land of the feathered serpent” — Mayan Mexico.  [If any reader has access to a copy of this documentary, please e-mail me.]

Aldo Buzzi passed away last October (2009) at age 99.  In Parliamo d’Altro he wrote:

“Quello che si prova a 95 anni è quello che si provava anni fa a 85. E quello che si proverà, fra un po’ d’anni, a 105″

“What we try to do at age 95, is what we tried to do at age 85, and what we will be trying to do, a few years later, at age 105.”

Along with a body of marvelous writing, a memorable lesson:  Success is no impediment to trying again.

I’ve heard this before.  I persisted.  “I mean, its is natural maple syrup?  Like from a tree?”  The waitress is getting annoyed.  In San Francisco its not necessary to defer to customers, or even be nice to them.

“Look, ” she began, exasperated and actually looking up from the pad now, “we make the maple syrup right here, in the back.  We made it like one hour ago.”

Natural and homemade!

In Boston, its the Term Sheet

I’ve never been a fan of posts that are largely repost of writing done elsewhere, but in this case …

A post by Roman Stanek, on TechCrunch.  He’s talking about Europe, but in so many cases its about start-ups anywhere (including certainly Boston) where the desire to score big financially is the overriding — and often only — goal.  A real desire to deliver a great product or service usually has a better result.

“My problem with the European startup ecosystem is somewhere else. I actually believe that it bears some signs of a Cargo Cult. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A cargo cult is a type of religious practice that may appear in traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced, non-native cultures. The cults are focused on obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking, religious rituals and practices, believing that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

The best known examples of Cargo Cults come from some Pacific islands during World War II. The American airfields and their personnel brought relative prosperity and modernity to the island people, but once the war was over the Americans took their planes and equipment and left. The local people wanted to bring the prosperity back but they did not understand the substance of why the Americans came there. They only saw the form. And so the locals crafted wooden headphones, lit fires to light up runways and tried to attract back the planes with canned food and other useful goods by emulating airfield traffic.

Something similar happens in the startup community in Europe these days. People start companies, write business plans, meet with investors, talk about term sheets and exits. But in reality most Europeans don’t actually understand the substance of the system—the business plans are wooden headphones and term sheets are fabricated control towers. Repeating the form of US-based startups without a real understanding of how much the deep and complex ecosystem of Silicon Valley contributes to the success of VC-funded US startups won’t bring prosperity to companies coming from Europe.”

I’m waiting for Wesley Morris, a writer for the Boston Globe who has been at work very late writing a piece about Michael’s relationship to race for the Sunday paper. A lot of writers at the Globe are writing a lot of articles prompted by Michael death. There’s a lot to write. As we walk down Dartmouth street, we’re talking about his article. How does his transformation reflect his and others attitudes toward race? And some other issues I didn’t quite get.

From behind us, a young woman, who is white, has overheard part of our conversation and confronts us. “Well, it doesn’t matter if he’s black or white. That shouldn’t come into it.” I don’t know exactly what she’s responding to (because I’ve also been listening to I Want you Back playing from a passing car) but she’s upset. And she looking at us. And approaching. And continuing, “That’s all people want to talk about, is plastic surgery, and kids sleepover, and all that. And its just not right because he gave us so much.” Her date, it may even be a first date, is plainly embarrassed.

I’m struck — and so is Wesley — by how very wrong it is to think we are doing anything but celebrating Michael tonight. “It made me really mad how all the news clips are of child molestation case and all that.” Wesley is quickly commiserating. “I heard the news channels couldn’t get the rights to play music clips. So they keep playing those old child molestation court case clips.” “Oh yes, fair use, they can only play 12 seconds of the video,” I offer. I need to say something.

Her face becomes more incredulous and irritated. Now she’s glaring at me. “Are you a lawyer?” A lawyer who is disrespecting Michael Jackson — is there anything worse. “No,” I may be stammering at this point, “we work for … a media company.” “Oh really?!” This is really too much for her. Did we spend all day running child molestation clips? I continue, “the Boston Globe,” as in, not-the-tv-news. She softens a bit. “It such a tragedy,” I offer. And I mean it.

So many of us spent our adult years distancing ourselves from the man who was the soundtrack to our childhood and adolescence. He gave us our MTV after school, our summer vacations, our prom, our times with our lifelong friends, our weddings, our nostalgia, and still most Saturday nights. And we questioned him, we mocked him, we laughed meanly when the New York Post shouted “Wacko-Jacko”. All at once, we all somehow know this is our time to sing along stand up for him. Even her date felt the need to step up. “They’ll never be another talent like him.” She looked up at him, and away from us. I think he’ll do alright tonight.

I’m feeling — I think we all are — the power to forgive, to absolve, to celebrate.

Pho Republique was not playing Michael Jackson music. They were playing Bob Marley. Our waiter apologized almost immediately. “We’ve been playing Michael Jackson music all night, and I just started getting so sad because … well its so terrible what happened. This seemed like the right thing to play now.” Maybe we came in at just the right time, but as I was scanning the menu, it became clear our waiter is a prophet. Bob Marley is explaining:

In the Back Bay, we’ve been singing them all night.

Fluffy and playful, the internet’s LOLCats spent the holidays posing for staged photos on the living room floor, mangling toilet paper rolls and the English language. Now copies of the doe-eyed holiday book “I Can Haz Cheeseburger“ fills Borders bargain-bin at $1.98 begging you to it home.

Stocks are down, and we’re taking it out on the kitty. Enter “Fuck You, Penguin“. A site that unleashes accusatory vitriol on animals we used to think were cute.

Gazelles are “desperate for affection”, the endangered booby a “blue-footed sleaze”, and “overhyped” cranes are “the mortgage-backed securities of the animal world”. In general these animals all conspire to use mindless cuteness to annoy and endanger humans “hop by excruciating hop.”

The creator of the site, a Boston writer who goes by the name of bza, tells me he is under contract to Random House to produce a “F*** You, Penguin” book, using mostly material from the web site, for publication in Fall 2009. If two points make a line, then Cute Overload makes it a trend. Cute Overload tries to be sick of fluffy kitties, F-U-P succeeds — and is much funnier.

Both sites are becoming hugely popular. As of today, F-U Penguin has 11,700 fans on Facebook, about 5000 Twitter followers, and shows strong page visit growth in Alexa.

Look for the book to be a recession best-seller this Christmas.