Brooks circa 1996 (Crimewave E.P.).
Brooks Headley is my favorite kind of artist. He does his thing, his beautiful, unique thing, and presents it to you with no fanfare. You’re going to love it of course, but what he’s doing isn’t only for you. He does it because he’s found his thing, the thing that animates him uniquely, and screw it, might as well devote his life to it. Other people—you—get to enjoy it, and he takes his responsibility to you seriously. But this isn’t showbiz.
It is a reflection on our culture, not on the profession, that there are plenty of cooks who are in showbiz, and fuck them. Brooks doesn’t pander, or leap on the latest thing. His food doesn’t come in costume. It is common today for chefs to insult the palate in a parody of whimsy, forcing you to learn by experiment what should have been self-evident, that snails aren’t suited to ice cream. As a pastry chef Brooks has his creative crutches, but they don’t include bacon.
They say that all arts aspire to music, but that’s a con. Music wishes it was food. Music cries itself to sleep over not having been born a ripe fig or a shank of lamb. No song, no painting can come close to a perfect meal with friends. I would happily trade the best blow job of my life to relive the best steak or bowl of soup. It is the only art without which we die.
Cooking starts with learning to boil water, but you have no idea how difficult it is to boil water. First, you have your heart broken, and then you revel in the natural wonder of a fresh peach straight off a tree. Next, you drive four hundred miles in a van with no heat and one working door to find out the show has been canceled, but you set your shit up and play anyhow, making sure to bolt before the flashing lights get too close. You have to fuck countless people, or one person who really counts. You need to feel your face flush with embarrassment and beam with pride, and freeze in abject boredom between the two. You have to lie shivering and exhausted in a makeshift bed someplace filthy, and retire with a full belly in front of a crackling fire beside the naked body of the person you care for most. You have to build a mountain of broken junk so big you can’t see the top, then climb it and beat your chest, shrieking like King Kong at the summit. You need to have your best ideas deemed worthless and exhaust yourself in fruitless experiments that lead nowhere. You have to develop a thick skin, hard with calluses and scars, and with the tips of your hard, callused, scarred fingers, feel the difference between perfect and not quite.
Boiling water is a bitch.
All art is an effort to express the creative impulse, and each discipline uses a different craft to make it tangible. You can get by in some situations without the craft, and in others you can pick it up along the way, but being good at things makes a difference. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. You get good by trying things and failing, and in the process you develop the skills and calluses and scars that are the shibboleth of any profession. They are not enough, the calluses and scars, but they are part of it.
It’s easy with cooking to be dazzled by the process and to give an uneven amount of credit to the recipe. Or the technique. Or the stick blender. But what you’re eating is actually the totality of the life experience of the cook, paired with what he knows about history, the ingredients, his kitchen. He needs to be in command of all of those things, not least himself. You’re tasting the whole of the dude, and this particular dude has lived enough to be delicious.
Brooks circa 1996 (Crimewave E.P.).