WBFO

Here in Buffalo my radio is more or less locked on the local NPR station. Not necessarily its musical programming, but its news. Though I’ll sometimes seek out alt pop/rock or Air America for variety, from “Talk of the Nation” through “Fresh Air,” whenever I’m driving I’m perpetually listening to WBFO. I’ve been a public radio junkie before: in New York, after 9/11, public radio was a lone voice of sanity during an insane time; a few years after that I got rid of my television altogether, and became something of a WNYC snob. But here in Western New York I’ve had a relapse: I’m officially an NPR junkie again.

I suppose it has as much to do with this protracted run-up to the primaries as the amount of driving I now do. I was addicted to CNN prior to 9/11, and during the 2006 midterm elections, having obtained not just a television set but a cable connection, I became hooked on CSPAN. But ever since their zenith (hey!) back in the early Nineties, since the advent of MSNBC and streaming video, since the coming of YouTube and FaceBook, the cable news organizations, like media in general, regardless of political tilt and whatever the form, have become ever louder and noisier. It goes back to the “crawl,” I guess. Now no matter what the form or channel, it seems to have become standard that the visual frame be as busy and subdivided as the screen in an episode of “24”.

My personal turning point with CNN was Bill Hemmer’s defection to Fox News: no more American Morning eye candy—worse, he was sweetening the day’s start for all those right-wingers! On his departing, Bruno Magli-shod heels came the network’s overhype of the 2006 Hurricane Season following Katrina. You could practically hear the rubbing of dozens of producers’ palms in glee as they unveiled their stratotech, multimillion-dollar CNN Weather Center—and the record-hurricane season predicted hour after hour that spring and summer never materialized (and with due respect to Nobel laureate Gore, so far nothing like it has).

Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, one of any given week’s highlights was my ritual of the Sunday New York Times. The parceling-out of Sunday paper sections goes back a long way, historically as well as personally. On the way back from Mass at St. Lucy’s Dad used to stop at the drive-up dairy at the corner of San Tomas Aquino Road and Harriet Avenue to pick up that week’s Sunday San Jose Mercury-News. We couldn’t touch it until we got home, but when we did, by choosing the movie section over the sports or the comics—and choosing it over the fight over the comics section—I could set myself apart from my ten siblings. (And I didn’t not-choose the sports section—like my default admission to the roster of a reluctant third-grade kickball team captain during P.E., the sport section not-chose me.) I chose further when I started reading the San Francisco Chronicle—which again, didn’t feel like a choice but a kind of surrender. Who cared about San Jose? There was a whole city to the north, with real stories and lives. The San Francisco network affiliates’ signals being stronger, we San Joseans pulled in news from The City before we pulled in local stories.

By the time I got to Berkeley I was already in some ways looking East (and not the East that others were looking to, across the Pacific). I can see now that I lacked imagination, or at least enough to imagine that I would sometime move away from California; not until my late twenties did the possibility remotely occur to me, and the move itself was motivated by more reckless decision-making than anything like a long-cherished dream. But by then I’d been a regular reader of the Times and the New Yorker for years. Their writers and critics and editors—Johnny Apple, David Richards, “Punch” Sulzberger; Robert Gottleib, Adam Gopnick, John Lahr, and of course, Pauline Kael—I didn’t always know by name (with some conspicuous exceptions), but they prodded and teased and poked and rasped and refined and polished and buffed my mind. Or perhaps they didn’t; perhaps there wasn’t enough there to prod or tease or poke. My ideas were more like mere ideas of ideas, or notions of ideas, usually theirs, and seldom mine. I was far from having the wherewithal to see that, or say that; from my North Oakland apartment I would stroll over to Piedmont Avenue and get a large Peet’s House Blend and the Sunday Times and tuck in. My fingers soon blackened with printer’s ink, and when I licked my thumb or index finger I briefly tasted all three together—the bitter alkaline coffee, sugar and metallic ink. And somehow, without trying to be, I’d also become a sports fan myself, so if there was a game on (NFL, college hoops, or the A’s) my day felt complete. And because my day felt complete my life sometimes felt or seemed complete. It wasn’t, though. Far from it. It would take the move to New York City, and fifteen years there, where for a long time I would mistake that remarkable city’s completeness as a sense of completeness in my own life, in my own self. I was finally, rudely awakened to the falsehood of that, and not all that long ago.

Not just years but decades have passed since the Sunday San Jose Mercury-News, since my discovery of a San Francisco Chronicle columnist named Herb Caen made me feel like I was the only one reading him, like he and I were having a private conversation. Caen lived long enough to see the rise of cable and the birth of the Internet; perhaps he knew that a writer is really writing for one person, and one person only: himself. I suppose in a way that’s what this blog is about. I read the Times online now, which saves paper and all that. I like that you can get news 24/7; no more evening edition or “bulldog” edition—we have website updates instead. I’m no more or less nostalgic about those Sundays back in North Oakland with the Times and Peet’s Coffee and the Forty-Niners games than I am about those back in San Jose. We evolve, and so does technology. For now, radio remains as it was in its earliest days, so I’ll keep listening to those voices in the same way I used to read bylines: Lakshmi Singh. Carl Kasell. Terry Gross…

The Heart(h) of the Matter

Saturday night is my night to cook, and last night I tried a new recipe. It’s from Mark Bittman’s column in The New York Times, “The Minimalist,” one of my favorite sources for recipes. The recipe was for a Puerto Rican pork shoulder roast, and though I’d never made it before, the results were perfect: I’m not always the best roaster in the world, but the meat was perfectly done, and the flavor…well, let’s just say that I’ve had authentic Nuyorican pork and Cuban pork and mine was just as good. I served it sliced, with big bowls of simple black beans and rice, with a plate of sliced ripe mangoes, avocadoes, and limes. The meal was meant to taste like the Greater Antilles brought to Western New York, and it did.

I haven’t always enjoyed cooking even when I think I have: often I’d set myself a goal too ambitious, and following the recipe felt like composing a higher-maths proof. When I was younger I was simply overconfident, arrogant and pretentious—that may be one of the reasons I liked Marcel on Top Chef Season Two; he had the cocksure attitude that comes with being twenty-five, feeling finally validated as an adult, having had few serious setbacks in life and your whole life ahead of you (or so you think, which is part of it). Like Marcel, I was sometimes more interested in end effects than proper process and procedure. I’d start out making a dish that I didn’t even have all the ingredients for, then have to interrupt myself to run out for baking powder or cream of tartar. Over two decades in the restaurant business, I gained a wealth of knowledge and a good palate, but those weren’t connected to any heart or soul. They weren’t even entirely connected to appetite, to hunger. If there’s such a thing as being a gourmand from the neck up, that’s what I was. Sure, occasionally I had a food experience that was a life experience or vice versa, but they were few and far between and I didn’t recognize them for what they are: the heart(h) of the matter.

Now I have a family to cook for, a kitchen large enough, and an occasion both regular and essential (by which I mean that when we sit down to the table on Saturdays, because of the week’s routine everyone is always really hungry and really tired). And I really enjoy putting the time and effort into thinking, Hmm, I’ll bet this pork shoulder will be a little fatty. That’ll be good, but perhaps something clean to go with it. So, the mangoes… Or, I know the girls like simple foods, but my brother and sister-in-law like a bit of flavor. So I didn’t make just a pot of beans, but a good pot of beans. And as I tended that pork shoulder roast—checking the level of the water in the roasting pan, turning it every hour as recommended, watching the color and trying to gauge its sense of doneness—I realized how much I cared about it. And who made me come to care about it. In other words, I found reasons to put love into my cooking because I’m among people I love, and love to cook for. It makes toasting a slice of cinnamon bread for Nina or pouring a sippy cup of juice for Camille an act both simple and not simple, small and large. It sure made that pork roast taste good.

The Twelfth Day of Christmas

It’s late on the first Sunday of the year, at the end of a very busy and eventful week. (Pushing the envelope, my brother and his family and I went to an indoor water park today; four hours of chlorination and artificial tropics—it was fun, but a bit much.)

My trip to NYC passed in a blur. A lot of restaurant meals, a couple movies (“There Will Be Blood” and “The Savages”, both worthwhile, the former another standout work from Paul Thomas Anderson), a Broadway show (Pinter’s “The Homecoming” in a funny-scary production with Ian McShane), and a day of art at the Met and MOMA. I was gratified to realize, in a variety of ways and moments, and often, that I made the right decision to leave. I could feel the stress coming off city residents in pulses, and was told by one friend that “calm” was coming off of me “in waves.” I kept thinking I was going to feel a moment of regret. Quite the opposite: I very soon found myself thinking, I can’t wait to get back to my life. I do think that to live in NYC and have a life like the one I have here would be very worthwhile; I imagine that such a life would feel rich (and one would probably need to be rich). But since I don’t have that life, I don’t know that it would feel better. I was also struck by how much New Yorkers like to complain. I was a sounding board for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and often as not it was not something abstract or remote they were complaining about. It may also be the people I know there. I will just add that a number of people also said they would love to get out of the city, and can still say that I am glad I did.

As for events on Thursday in Iowa, I have been cautiously wondering which of the several qualified Democratic candidates to support, and have been biding my time because this has been an unbearably long run-up to this first contest, and we still have nearly an entire year until November. Many things will happen between now and then. It’s appalling that for several months we had eighteen (qualified) candidates for the highest elected office in the land without a single candidate running as an independent. Speaking of the kind of change Senators Obama and Edwards (and Governor Romney) love to espouse, that is one thing that needs to—more independent candidacies. (And let’s stop calling them third-party.) I did not expect things to turn out quite as upended as they did, but am not at all sorry about the results—on both sides. But it is time to think about how far we have fallen behind, and about how lousy we feel about it deep down inside (on all sides), and about who really shows the potential to change that—or be that.