Blank sky.

Chicago.

It's weird that there are no stars in the city. This isn't a new revelation, but it occurs to me looking out the window at this moment, at the blank night sky of Chicago. Growing up in the suburbs of southeastern Pennsylvania, I really thought I'd seen a lot of stars. More than I could ever imagine counting, more constellations than I could remember.

Then I spent a few summer weeks in central Arizona. An hour's drive north of Phoenix, surrounded by mesas, century trees and empty space, with bone-dry air, the stars were beautiful. Stunning. You could lay on your back and see the sweeping disc of the Milky Way, with visible stars across an amazing range of color, size and brightness. Shooting stars and satellites - the latter just drifting along - were visible just about every night. Just to lay down, chatting idly, watching the sky was enough to fill an evening.

Here, though, no one seems to miss it. I suppose most have never seen a sky like that. Even before electricity, I'd imagine the sky was never that crisp and clear above the shores of Lake Michigan.

Pre-market thoughts.

Madison.

See an enlightening blog entry from Verlyn Klinkenborg at the New York Times. This is, in essence, how I feel about raising one's own food, especially livestock, except that he's more eloquent, a more self-assured writer.

Even without the ability to raise all of one's own food, knowing its provenance, knowing the people and the effort that went into making it, makes it taste better. That said, a wonderful dinner at L'Etoile last night nearly fits that bill. Not only does the restaurant list their producers quite prominently on the menu, but I recognize almost all of them. I even know several on a first-name basis.

Even the photographs on the wall are familiar, in particular a shot of John Aue from Butter Mountain. Not only does he have that very unique, antique scale, and the hand-made wooden bins of specialty potatoes (the Grill-Roast-Stew variety mix, 3 lbs. for $6, is a dead-obvious sign), but you can tell it's him, with his head out of the frame, by the way he leans forward on his elbows, grasping the fingers of one hand in the other. It's such a familiar sight that I can see the whole picture, in color, extending beyond the frame.

Now, appropriately enough, it's time to go the market. I'll probably buy some of John's potatoes for tonight's dinner, and talk to some of the farmers who had a part in making last night's dinner as spectacular as it was.

I ♥ Progress.

Madison.

I had the good fortune to catch a lecture by Harold McGee, the author of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of The Kitchen, last night. Essentially a history of science in cooking, and hitting just a few of the highlights, he made a point that we can all perform science experiments in the kitchen, at home, and improve our understanding of the ways we cook and eat. As an example, one he undertook with a bunch of willing friends: will a silver spoon in the neck of a bottle of Champagne keep it good until the next day? There may be better excuses for a party, but not many.

The experiment goes like this:

1. Decide on how many different variations you want to try. Silver spoon? Why not stainless steel, or plastic, or even wood? What about just leaving the neck open? Or re-sealing it with a cork, or a wine vacuum-sealer? Or pouring it into some other container you've got handy? One variation, at least, ought to be at least one freshly-opened bottle to act as a control against all of the other test cases.

2. Pick up a case or more of sparkling wine, as needed for all of those variations and the size of the party crowd. If you can afford real Champagne, then, hey, go for it. McGee's experiment used California sparkling wine, and that's probably what I'd use. Whatever you choose, make sure all of your bottles are of the same wine.

3. The night before the party, open up all of the test bottles. Pour out, say, half of each. (Don't waste it, though. This is another fine excuse for a party.) Add spoons, corks, whatever, and let 'em sit until the next night.

4. Do a blind tasting at the party, so no one's biased by any preconceived ideas. Ask everyone to rate each wine on a couple of key characteristics. Use whatever you like. Bubbliness is probably crucial (since that's mostly what the experiment's about), but it's probably worth including aroma, taste, aftertaste, appearance, and other sort of basic stuff. Rating things on a number scale (1-3 or 1-10) may be simplest to tally up at the end, but it's probably worth including a spot for any notes or comments. If some appear to have lost (or gained) certain tastes and aromas, that's well worth noting.

5. Tally it all up and see what trends you find. In McGee's experiment, they actually found that the silver spoon bottle and the open neck bottle were rated highest, even higher than the freshly-opened bottle. That suggests that there's something a little unpleasant in that wine that dissipates when it's allowed to sit a while. Not what you might expect, but a great little discovery.

Another food-related party experiment I like (conceived by my friend Michelle's aunts Beth & Margie): when it's asparagus season, have a dinner party and serve plenty of it. Keep everyone around for a good, long time and serves plenty to drink, so people will need to head to the bathroom at some point. Keep a checklist in the bathroom for people to note if their urine smells like asparagus or not. Classy.

The options are, more or less, endless, limited only by your imagination, budget, and the willingness of your friends to try something a little unusual for the sake of science.

Another good source for mixing cooking and science: Alton Brown of Good Eats. Technologically savvy, good at jury-rigging, and keen on pop culture. His books, I'm Just Here For The Food and I'm Just Here For More Food are some of the handiest cookbooks available.

Love Craft. Not Kraft.

Madison.

I spend the bulk of my days - weekdays, workdays - surrounded by people enamored of "Art" (capital A). I'm unclear on exactly what they mean. This may have something to do with the fact that every building products manufacturer tries to exploit the notion of art in their advertising, their corporate slogan, wherever. I may suffer from a stunted imagination, but I can't really make the associative leap that sort of marketing requires.

Maybe I'm supposed to watch more TV.

There seems to be this loose definition, this vague understanding of what we mean by art, that fuels this mindset. We speak of processes in euphemisms like, "I've got it down to a science," or "There's an art to it." From what I can gather, the former means that the process can be broken down into a series of steps, a convenient line diagram that states, "If A, do B. If C, do D." Sometimes you're allowed to personalize things, but it's pretty much like a mathematical function: each set of inputs determines a specific output. In theory, you could just write down this step-by-step process, and anyone could follow it exactly. (Not exactly science, since it doesn't involve the continual questioning and testing that are the hallmark of the scientific method, but I'm not getting into that today.)

The latter means, more or less, that it requires a sort of intuition - gained through experience, talent, doesn't matter - to get the appropriate end result. Chances are that you have a variety of different things you could end up with, each having a varying degree of success. For some, this is the perfect excuse to inflate their own egos, a sort of proof that they've got the chops and you don't, neener neener. Maybe it's not always so overt, but I think I see it when designers are listed for project awards. I'm fortunate to have a firm that respects individual designers enough to give us all our names beside the images, but I realize that's a rarity.

I don't feel like picking on a particular person today, so I'll use the term 'Starchitect' as a stand-in. Whenever we see grand images of some new, flashy piece of architecture (completed or design-in-progress), they are accompanied with Starchitect's name. Sometimes it'll include the firm, but most references will point to a single individual. The team responsible for executing the design - which often includes other architectural firms in the case of particularly large, complex projects - barely gets a mention. It conditions us, especially those outside that particular technical field, to think of this as the work and responsibility of a single person. Responsibility it may have been, though even the most technically savvy architect is hard-pressed to understand, in all honesty, the full extent of the design of all the systems in most any sizable building. But work? Hardly. Between the technical expertise, drafting plans and details, writing specifications, and all else, it's truly impossible for one person to do it, let alone in any sort of time frame that prevents a design from being obsolete at completion.

If Starchitect's really a manager, then let's call him that. There's a perception of management folks - not entirely positive, deserved or not - that is not entirely out of place.

This also minimizes the efforts of the manual laborers responsible for turning a bound set of drawings into something tangible. Few designers can do much in the way of manual labor these days. Those who can lay claim to titles like 'master builder' that represent positions straddling the divide between design and manufacture, roles that have been essentially eliminated by an increasingly fractured, specialized system. Not only is each side - design and construction - divorced from an integrated understanding of the entire process, but it promotes a divide that one's own side is always right, an us-versus-them mentality.

Where I think the notions of the master builder and the art (little a) live is craft. Craft, or craftsmanship, is the province of the master builder, the intersection of both design and manufacture. It's the work of the artisan, not the artist, a creative endeavor that involves the craftsman in all aspects. It requires more skill, more effort, more of an investment in the process, but results in something that you can view with a justifiable sense of pride. You can say, "I made that." Although it may not be the best of its kind - there's always someone better - those who understand the effort required in their own craft can respect it, can be impressed.

One doesn't need to build one's own house. This can be as simple as cooking a meal, an example that I think most people can relate to. The more you put into understanding the process - both overall and in all its details - the more engaging it becomes. A homemade meal doesn't need to reflect just one's skills at slicing, mixing and heating food, but can reach as far into other realms of interest as one is willing to go: growing fresh herbs and vegetables; getting to know a farmer who raises the livestock you'll be eating, knowing that the animals are treated well; building a barbecue pit in the backyard; making special, unique containers to give with food gifts. Whatever.

I think craft can be and deserves to be taught. Although there is much to be said for individual innovation, an amazing wealth of knowledge and skill to be learned from those craftsmen still practicing their trades. Slow Food is a good example of a movement trying to keep traditional foods, cooking, and the social nature of eating alive and well. Another everyday example is National Novel Writing Month, though it tends to the idiosyncratic, artistic side. It's still an immensely useful tool to understanding and appreciating writing as a craft.

Plus, it's insanely fun. And isn't that what one's craft ought to be?

Action! Adventure! Intrigue!

Madison.

For some reason, I can't stop thinking about Philip K. Dick today. In particular, my mind keeps returning to an early short story of his called "The Defenders". I've never read it, because I haven't been able to find a copy, but I recall him referencing it in one of his later stories. It fascinated me, and stumbles back from memory every once in a while.

"The Defenders" strikes me as a Kilgore Trout kind of story, primarily because I only know it through a very brief summary. It goes like this:

Mankind lives deep underground, following a massive war. Rather than fight the war themselves, the humans built armies of robots to battle each other. Isolated from the surface, the humans eagerly follow war reports from above, waiting for the day when they can go home.

The robots, however, have this whole system figured. Rather than kill themselves fighting a war they can't really win - after all, it's not like they'll have much purpose when the humans reclaim the earth's surface - they've settled down into a fairly comfortable life. They build homes for themselves, tend their gardens, and do all of the sort of idyllic 1950's suburbia stuff, all the while sending bogus reports of continuing battles down to the subterranean colonies.

The story itself unfolds when someone discovers the ruse, but I don't know any details on it. It's a Kilgore Trout story, the short story equivalent of a B-movie. Just think of any old B-movie poster, say, for a sci-fi flick, a hard-boiled noir thriller, or a kung fu action film. If it's a good poster, it grabs you, draws you in with promises (usually in big, bold text, with exclamation points, and sometimes even in a brightly-colored, spiky bubble) that there's no way it can keep. Movie trailers are really good at this, too. If the idea's too good to be true, it probably is, and you're probably best off sticking with the fragmented version living in your imagination.

I have a lot of those sorts of films in mental storage. Every time I stop into Four Star Video Heaven, something - probably in the "Foreign" section, but "Horror" has its charms, too - calls out to me. It almost always has highly suspect production values or a title that suggests the producers included plenty of gratuitous nudity in order to get someone, anyone to see the film. (Example: that masterpiece of the Italian cinema, Nude For Satan.) I have no intention of renting any of these until I've managed to exhaust all other DVD-rental opportunities, but they're still impossible to forget.

Also in the "mental film" category: Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. The novel is deeply fascinating, and characteristically bizarre. I've enjoyed Linklater's stuff - especially Waking Life and the perfectly matched pair of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I even love the rotoscoping effect that Linklater used so effectively in Waking Life, and, judging from the previews, expect it to match the dreamlike, paranoid quality of Dick's writing. I just wonder if my expectations have already gotten too high.

Every part but the squeal?

Madison.

I came to an unusual realization this weekend, which is this: pig intestines have a very distinct smell. I can't be sure of this, but I'd venture a guess that it's a unique odor. How such a realization came to me is this:

Rewind back to April of last year. I'm in New York City for a dreadfully painful convention for work. I'm there earlier than most conventioners for some seminars, along with a coworker who grew up just outside the city. She's a vegetarian, and has a hankering for some good Asian food, so we take a walk down to Chinatown. Though it's been a few years, she's able to guide us to one of her favorite Vietnamese places.

The menu's probably the thickest I've ever seen at a place like this, like your typical New Jersey diner menu filled with both the usual plain American-style Asian food and bizarre Asian delicacies. Maureen, my dinner companion, needs little to no time to decide, in part because she can ignore the eighty percent of the menu that contains meat. I, on the other hand, have decided to order the most unusual thing I can find. Between a shark fin dish for two, deep-fried duck's feet, and other not-available-in-Wisconsin fare, it's a difficult choice. Eventually, I settle on the pork tripe with sour cabbage from the "Chef's Specials" section. The waiter gives me an odd look, and I'm not sure if it's because of my order or because that's just the way he is.

When the meals arrive, I've got a massive plate - enough to feed two people, easily - piled with pickled cabbage and little oval donuts of pig. Immediately, I can tell it's not tripe. I'm still not sure if pigs have tripe. (Beef tripe is the fatty lining of a cow's stomach.) This, clearly, is intestine. Vietnamese chitterlings. And they smell like nothing I've ever smelled before.

This is not to say it's an unpleasant smell. I kind of like it, and the taste is decidedly less funky. I managed to eat about three-quarters of the plate before I couldn't have any more, and would have taken the leftovers with me if I'd had any place to store them.

Fast forward to late January. I've decided to make sausages, and my kit of parts has arrived in the mail. The first sausages are to be a simple affair, packed into hog casings. I open up the bag of casings, and can immediately tell that I've smelled that before. But I can't place it, and later can only remember that I liked the aroma in that bag.

Fast forward again to this past weekend. It's sausage time again. When I open up the bag of casings again, it finally dawns on me. That's the same smell from that Chinatown restaurant. The casings - which are just the thin membrane lining the intestines - smell just like that dish. Then, when I do the same with a bag of sheep casings, I don't get the same smell. Or much of any smell, actually.

When the sausages are finished, any smell of the casing has long since gone. I'd be intrigued to try eating "pork tripe" again, but can't bring myself to buy one of those two-gallon tubs of chitterlings from the monster grocery store. I can't eat all of that. I can't store all of that. And I certainly can't convince anyone else to help me out.

Well, I can think of one person, but he's not flying out here from Atlanta just to eat pig guts. You can ask a lot of a good friend, but there are limits.

Lost in translations.

Chicago.

I've been delving into The Odyssey the past few days. I recall tenth grade English class, when we whined about having to read the whole thing and managed to whittle it down to group work on individual books, presented in ten-minute skits to the rest of the class. Fun? Yes. Helpful in understanding? Not entirely. I was puzzled before I realized that the majority of the crazy action - the Lotos Eaters, the Kyklopes, etc. - occurs when Odysseus recounts his travels. You tend to miss these things when your memory of a great work of literature is chiefly informed by high school class presentations and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Rather like comparing Naked Lunch, the Cronenberg film, with Naked Lunch, the Burroughs book. In the same spirit? Yes, but I wouldn't count on the movie to act like Cliffs Notes.

The Robert Fitzgerald translation also has a strange allure for me, enough that I felt compelled to seek it out specifically. I prefer his spellings of ancient Greek names - Akhilleus instead of Achilles, Kirke instead of Circe - because they help reinforce how they're pronounced in ancient Greek. Granted, I have only a marginal grasp of the various accent marks, but hard Ks replacing soft Cs and extra vowels where Anglicizing took a shortcut are steps I can handle. At times, the text seems a little awkward, a little too formal, but it doesn't really affect my enjoyment or understanding. I think I use the Matthew Ward translation of Camus's The Stranger as my gold standard, but that's unfair to texts that aren't written with that Hemingway-esque style that I really like.

Compare that with some translations of Dostoevsky that have proven so dull I couldn't finish a short story. (David Magarshack's "Notes From The Underground" springs to mind.) I enjoyed The Brothers Karamazov enough to read it twice - and again some time in the future - so I doubt it's the author. Maybe that's a good guess on my part, maybe not. Still, I'd prefer to accept a less-than-perfect version from which I can take something (or can, at least, plow through), over one that is truer to the author's intent but unreadable.

- - - - -

And, on a wintry weather note:

Today in Chicago? Rain and maybe some sleet. A flat, gray day.

Today in Madison? Six to ten inches of snow. Plus what fell last night and will continue to fall tonight. I'd be giddily excited if I didn't have to drive home through it tomorrow. (So, I suppose, I'm just "regular" excited.)

Blizzard?

Chicago.

It's sort of funny to read in the paper about how a monster storm just slammed the east coast. The high temperature today is supposed to hit mid-forties here in Chicago, and Madison ought to be near that. Yet everyone back east seems to think living in Wisconsin is essentially like roughing it on the Siberian tundra, only with more beer and cheese. Of course, we probably do have more beer and cheese. And, for all I really know, never having traveled there, Siberia could be a delightful place. The tales of cruel winters might be their way of keeping out the American tourists.

Also funny: though nearly 27 inches of snow fell on New York City, it didn't qualify as a blizzard because the winds weren't heavy enough for a sustained period of time. Not that it'll stop the local news channels from referring to the "Blizzard of '06" for the next several years. I love when the technical meaning and popular understanding of a word don't see eye to eye.

The gray and windy city.

Chicago.

Overcast and windy. The sky has a flatness that deadens the city beneath it, a quality of muted light from all directions that accentuates the dullness of the city's concrete. It desaturates the colors, shifting everything a step closer to gray. I can see almost three dozen buildings from this spot, and the only one where I can see any evidence of human activity is the one that's currently under construction. Most of the rest could be derelict warehouses, for all I know.

High-rent, derelict warehouses.

True, they make pretty nice office spaces, with high ceilings, a lot of window area, and a comforting mix of brick and timber. Their flexibility for renovation and reuse has made them justifiably popular for all sorts of tenants. Personally, I like the industrial, functionalist aesthetic, when pared down to minimalism. The trend with the architectural community is to take that idea and mash it with a gadget-loving techiness, a love of stainless steel and glass and whatever's flashy. The result is a horrid mess. They praise Mies for his modernism, for his elegance, but forget that those notions of simplicity were to provide decent architecture for the masses by eschewing the fanciful and expensive ornamentation of Architecture (capital A) up to that point.

Yes, you can pick and choose the elements of your design philosophy. I just feel that the design community has chosen poorly.

They're also lousy at making good use of daylight, but that's a gripe for another day.

The Wisconsin winter still isn't here.

Madison.

Briskly cold outside. Mostly clear sky, with high, wispy clouds. Nearly wintry, except that Madison lacks the typical signs of winter. The lakes have large patches of water, with little wind-driven waves lapping at the edges. At this time of year, when one could normally drive a truck out on the lakes without worry, more than one ice fisherman has fallen in.

There were two last week, I believe. Neither seriously hurt. Were they drunk? Does it matter?

Anne Topham from Fantome Farm made it to the DCFM in January. The goats, enjoying the warm weather, were still producing milk, and thus we had fresh chevre when we hadn't expected it. She also brought along an experiment in whole milk ricotta, which inpired me to try it myself. With just two batches under my belt, I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Milk plus vinegar, heated, then drained to separate the curds from the whey. An exercise in simplicity and purity, a sort of food minimalism. When done right, with good, fresh ingredients, it's the very best that cooking can be. I'm thinking of garden-ripened tomatoes, still warm from the sun, still smelling of tomato leaves, sliced, sprinkled with salt and drizzled with a little oil. Snap peas, eaten straight from the vine. Wild strawberries, not even as large as a fingernail, bursting with a deep intensity of flavor that no cultivated berries can ever seem to match.

I remember, years back, wild huckleberries with an intensity like that, with a sharpness, a brightness as powerful as the rich depth of those little strawberries. Rare experiences, so exciting because the element that is so amazing occurred with little or no intervention on my part. Humbling, in a way.