I’ve been spending the summer thus far in the guise of a house wren though trout fishing a lot within a three-hour range and feeling sorry for the billions of planets in the universe that apparently don’t have rivers. I had hoped to discover and discuss the relationship between music and food but there isn’t one. This, of course, shouldn’t and doesn’t stop a writer. I’ve never heard of anyone demanding to hear Mahler while eating flan and many have died speed-eating barbecued chicken wings while listening to the babble of rap.
I am preternaturally nervous this morning because at dawn I pulled two corned tongues from the brine. I have never corned tongues before and this item is not available in Montana. A couple of years ago the publisher of this magazine tried to send me a corned tongue from a Jewish delicatessen in Toronto, but the permit for its entry into the States would have been five hundred bucks. In terms of geologic time no writer is worth this much money. The beef tongues, oddly enough, are from Mexico, presumably from Spanish-speaking cows in the province of Veracruz where they daily gazed at the vast mountain, Orizaba, and listened to the mauve songs of Caribbean wind.
The tongues were corned in one of Mom’s crocks from the old farm where it usually held pickled herring, one of the family’s few culinary triumphs. Dawn-to-dark work usually equates food with fuel to assuage the hunger of manual labor, rather than with elaborate fare to pique the interest of those who aren’t truly hungry. For reference I used The River Cottage Meat Book by the estimable food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The name doesn’t sound Jewish, but the rich brine he had devised reminds me of when I was a skinny young goy in New York City, and how desperately I searched for food I could afford aside from a fifteen-cent herring sandwich. When I managed to get a buck together for a dinner I’d head for a Jewish delicatessen, I think it was the famed Essex, where the counterman would bellow at me, “Hey, kid, you’re too fucking skinny” and give me a vastly overloaded corned beef sandwich with plenty of life-giving fat, a substance now avoided in North America but which much of the world craves for survival. I would eat slowly, marveling at the beauty of life for a young artist in Gotham, knowing that back home friends and relatives were eating at Aunt Patty’s Squat and Gobble restaurant, which featured Big Sonia at the Wurlitzer. Sonia also made a dozen different Jell-O desserts every day plus her signature dish, chicken à la king, which included a scant quarter of a teaspoon of garlic salt per five-gallon batch, plus the mucus-textured béchamel that contained nuggets of raw flour. Sonia would play “Hello Dolly” and grin with her prothagonicious jaw reminding me of those huge machines used in remaking highways that gobble and grind cement. My Aunt Vera once slapped my face in this restaurant when I asked how Sonia managed to center her ponderous butt on the toilet. The pain of the slap turned my scientifically inquiring mind toward the arts. Once I put my thumb out to hitchhike to New York City, I vowed to forever turn my back on green Jell-O with bananas and peas, and chicken à la king and its dark freight of soggy celery.
Arguably “Hello Dolly” is a perfect accompaniment for many low-life casseroles featured at church or community potlucks, but it is an error indeed to try to extrapolate principles from culinary septic tanks. Perhaps every effort should be made to keep the arts separate from one another. A noteworthy mudbath of the 1960s was poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. Back then when I’d give a public reading there was also a nitwit minstrel wanting to strum his guitar with my poems.
I admit that my thinking is susceptible to disarray during hot weather and my already limited vision can become further blurred. One blistering afternoon on the river I actually asked a friend and fishing guide if what I was seeing in the distance was a Sandhill crane or a yellow Volkswagen, but then Blake said, “Pray God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In a proper mood this defect can make all women attractive. An ancient Chinese Zen man insisted that the fastest horse cannot catch a mouse as well as a lame kitten. Added to this muddy sight and thinking is the acceptance that aesthetically and biologically I am both a Mozart lover and a stray dog within the same skin. On a coolish Toulouse night it is better not to wolf down a big serving of daube or cassoulet before going to a chamber music concert. Frilly Debussy is better suited to a Parisian foam café than a bistro in Lyon. Imagine Ferran Adrià serving up a bowl of pistachio foam to a construction worker from Lyon or a rugby player from Toulouse. Of course all food may be reduced to its liquid essence and thence by our technological gizmos turned into foam. Suffice it to say foam is not the best part of the ocean.
It is a good thing that Schubert’s habitual gluttony didn’t enter his music. And poor drunken Henry Purcell could create the ethereal “Come Ye Sons of Art,” which has little purchase among screenwriters. Purcell’s wife locked him out of the house one hideously cold London night when the cloacal Thames froze nearly solid. Purcell died within a few days at thirty-six, and his wife is reported to have said, “Win some, lose some.” The world has always been full of those who enjoy punishing others. Recently the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs decided the armed services should be a totally nonsmoking entity, including the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates overturned the war-zone smoking prohibition. It is easy here to construct an image of a dying soldier, the last of his blood leaking out on alien soil, being denied a final cigarette because of regulations. The boundlessness of zealotry is amazing but stifling to what we have left of the spirit. Just when I am thinking I’m totally right I prove myself partially in error. Yesterday our first tomatoes from the garden went well with the Spanish composer Soria, and the first peas (with capellini) were made even more perfect by Beethoven sonatas.
The other evening while discovering once again that vodka is not a health elixir, something I first noted on a trip to the U.S.S.R. in 1972, I recalled the TV trays and tables used back before people owned multiple TV sets. The single massive set, though small-screened, would be in a living room and the extended family would gather around with their TV trays eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese that Mom had mixed up in a washtub. Dvořák’s Ninth in E Minor would be on at max volume while a mile-long wagon train with ten thousand pioneers would be attempting to cross the very wide Missouri in a hurry because they were being pursued by ten thousand Lakota warriors. At the same time ten thousand buffalo on the other side were trying to cross to get at the usual greener grass that seems to imperil all creatures. Not incidentally buffalo are poor swimmers and there are records of herds of thirty thousand dying together while fording a river. In this case both the buffalo and all the settlers drowned in time to Dvořák’s booming thud, except for a baby girl who floated downstream next to a rattlesnake on a buffalo carcass where she was found by the famed Indian killer Kit Carson. The baby later became the Queen of California, to be followed by many ten thousands of other queens who were to save the movie business from death by general pure male suppuration. Not incidentally the ten thousand Lakota warriors survived because they stopped for a few days to observe the rites of the summer solstice, then detoured to avoid the odor of deliquescence. An ex-marine and writer friend, Phil Caputo, told me that you can smell a battlefield miles away, another reason to light a cigarette.
Perhaps the most pleasant aspect of being a poet is trading poems with other poets by whatever means. The process is without the taint of ambition and the sodden feelings of publication. With poetry you have to sit around Sardi’s restaurant a year or so waiting for reviews while playwrights get the bad news by closing time.
Recently I received what I feel is the best food poem in the history of the planet; by Merrill Gilfillan, one of our finest writers but not widely known:
The Good World
For a full day after the kettle of Anasazi beans—creamy
white, cumulus whorls of terra red—our heads were
startlingly clear, tireless, ranging at ease, happy, the
good world cast in cool civil light, magnified in the quietest
way: We smelled the chiles roasting miles to the north,
heard the cattle far from town, felt their heat, and long
after midnight, giving up on sleep, walked out, under
the box elder, tireless: calm skies, a moon like sugar
in the mouth.
I read this poem in the steamy lassitude of mid-July and immediately set about making a pot of Anasazi beans despite the inappropriate weather. Beans and pork brought our country’s people west, usually salt pork as wagon trains were short of refrigerators. I use ground Chimayo, a high-altitude chile from New Mexico, arguably the most flavorful. The best beer for beans is either Pacifico or Negra Modelo, the best music Linda Ronstadt singing Mexican songs. You have to be careful as on a recent car trip to Nebraska I was listening to Leonard Cohen while eating a small bag of Fritos and began to choke on my emotions. For the same reason I can’t listen to Aretha Franklin or the blues singer Robert Johnson while driving, let alone eating. The advantage of a pot of beans for a devout liberal is that they may be eaten without guilt, which is not true of the five-thousand-dollar dinner I once ate in Paris with some show business acquaintances (Francis Ford Coppola, Danny DeVito, Russell Crowe, and a few others), or the twelve-hour lunch of thirty-seven courses but only nineteen wines I enjoyed with friends in Burgundy. As a poet I didn’t pick up the tab for either. Metaphorically the poet is in a cage high above the cultural disco with the crowd below him chanting, “Dance, fool, dance.” Baudelaire claimed that the poet couldn’t walk so borne down was he by his giant wings—Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher—which earlier in my career I used as an excuse for bad behavior. Success in bad behavior is guaranteed.
Over the years I have made an extensive but informal survey among the young, inquiring as to why they listen to tens of thousands of hours of loud rock, particularly of the heavy metal variety. My conclusions proved obvious; to wit, such music is an effective anesthetic for drowning out reality. It goes with fast food, which is akin to shoving the gas nozzle in your mouth for a quick fill-up. It might be a stretch to also conclude that bad music is destructive to the palate but the evidence is there. I am unable, however, to connect a particular type of musician to certain cultural phenomena such as the implanting of huge breasts in recent decades or the tendency of men to bench-press until they develop freakishly large breasts. And in the past few years eating contests have become popular, hot dogs being the most frequent item, with the winner downing sixty-eight. This is beyond my ken, as one has always been enough for me. I have never attended one of these contests but have been told that the music is usually the triumphant theme from Rocky. According to Gourmet magazine a man recently ate eight chickens at a Rhode Island restaurant that specializes, not surprisingly, in chicken. No mention was made of the mood music for the feat, but it was likely a clone of Sonia playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the Wurlitzer with flotsam strains as if a patch of hollyhocks could groan.
I am assuming that our bad national news has crossed the border to the land of the maple leaf. Our country is in dire straits and everywhere we hear the keening and howling of the unemployed. Seniors who have seen a severe drop in their retirement incomes have been turned out of managed-care facilities and stand on the curbs waving their arms at the silent heavens, their little potbellies shrinking from lack of applesauce and cottage cheese, their historical staples. One can only pray that their collective curses will doom the financial community to the hell it has blatantly earned.
As I write this, Michael Jackson is still dead. He continues to die daily on CNN for forty days now, the examination of his bad habits revealed in a relentlessly racist display of our dim view of black people. Today at dawn when I arose to make a chalupa, a generic border dish, then walked the dogs, I found myself wishing that I could prance across the pasture like M. J. did the stage instead of my bleak and burly shuffle. Incidentally, if you wish to restore your health, take out your largest iron pot and put in two pounds of pintos, ten pounds of pork shoulder, serrano and pasilla (fresh chiles), onions, cumin, lots of garlic, ground Chimayo chile, chopped cilantro, and water. Bring to heat on stove, then put it in the oven at 300°F for four hours, after which you jerk the pork and remove the bones. Serve on tortilla chips or Fritos with condiments of chopped onions, cilantro, and grated cheese. Eat a lot and then nap.
I am mindful of late of the notion of health. The late Anthony Burgess said that writing is the most unhealthy of professions. In truth you can wake up feeling fine, and writing all day turns you into a pile of dog doo-doo. It’s not only the coffee, the cigarettes, the faux elixir of vodka, and the bottles of wine, but the unnaturalness of the act of writing shared with no other species. Led by birds many species sing, but writing is as suspect as collecting doughnut holes or using cell phones.
My corned tongues turned out well and I must salute Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. If Michael Jackson had only taken a few hours a day cooking his own food he might still be with us like B. B. King or Buddy Guy. My corned tongue is getting me over a long-held prejudice against the Saxons that I acquired thirty years ago while living in London in Jack Nicholson’s household while he was filming Kubrick’s The Shining. The chinless, sputtering upper-crust visitors were absolutely certain I was the bodyguard and hence I was invisible. I still hold a wan hope that they will translate my American novels into English. Meanwhile during this financial collapse I am surviving due to the generosity of the French. We all need to eat well in order to dig the graves of stockbrokers.