Food Tastes Good

The aisles of my local beautifully disorganized used bookstore disgorged something truly fabulous and strange into my waiting hands a week ago. It's perhaps the oddest, and certainly the most amusing cookbook I've ever set my food-writing-loving eyes on. What is this culinary wonder, you ask? Well, my friends, it just so happens to be a collection of recipes sollicited from prominent indie rockers.

It's called (ahem) I LIKE FOOD, FOOD TASTES GOOD

It's fascinating to see what some of these bands cook and eat ... or don't. The highly predictable (Pork Loin with Poblano Chiles from the oh-so-Portland-trendy Decemberists or They Might Be Giants' "Countrypolitan," which involves pomegranate juice) trades twos with the "... what??"-inducing. Death Cab for Cutie's "Peanut Butter and Veggie Sausage Sandwiches" spring to mind. ("Shouldn't be tasty, but it is," says their singer.) And who on earth would have predicted that the Violent Femmes, in all their rough-around-the-edges glory, would be cooking wild boar ragú?

The dishes themselves are amusing enough, but the recipe instructions are frequently (though not always - it's like a treasure hunt) written in a sort of odd email vernacular that's half recipe, half manifesto, half insight into what famous-ish musicians do when they're not on stage. "the honey will not want to mate with the lime at first, but it will." "Make some jasmine rice, why don't you?" "When the lentils are officially finished cooking, put on side 1 of the Beatles' Revolver LP."

Devandra Barnhart, though, is the one who takes the cake ... or the fried bananas, as it were. His ingredients list for "my favorite recipe for AFRICANITAS RICAS you shall require!" includes "many bananas! two eggggs!! SOUR CREAM!!! HONEY!" And this instructions passage cracks me up:

"STIRRRR!!!!!! leave the bowl alone and go get another bowl, crush the graham crackers into a fine fine powder! like sand!
SIR
LAWRENCE
OF ARABIA!!!!!!!
put it in bowl number two!"

Not to be outdone, from Jonathan Richardson of the Early Day Miners (who, I'll admit, I've never heard of), a cocktail comprised of ice, sake, and root beer. Says its creator, "it's about half and half as far as drinkability." He calls it the Karate Kid, and I'm planning on taking his word for it (shudder), but if anyone else wants to take the challenge ...

Look out, Julia Child. The rockers are a-comin' for your tiara.

Book Review: Musicophilia

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
by Oliver Sacks


If you listened to any NPR programming between October and December of last year, no doubt you've heard about the esteemed neuro scientist and popular science writer Oliver Sack's most recent book. Along with Steven Pinker, Sacks is probably the best known science writer around, and each new publication is cause for a minor public media frenzy; add to this the fact that his new book is about music, and the charms to this reviewer become patently clear.

Just as Dawkins's The God Delusion was published at right around the same time as Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, inaugurating the movement of "New Atheism" (or "nu-atheism" if they were a little bit more hip), Musicophilia was released just after the clinical psychologist (and U Oregon alum) Dan Levitin's This is Your Brain on Music. Furthermore, the fine Americanist and folk music scholar (and my old adviser) Anne Dhu McLucas is currently putting the finishing touches on a book that deals extensively with the cognitive aspects of music learning and transmission. In these few fleeting, serendipitous months, the coming together of cognitive science and musicology are all the rage in our popular imagination. Levitin and Sacks gave interviews on NRP, traipsed around the nation giving lectures, and similar pieces of research emerged mushroom-like from the blooming Zeitgeist. With a big interest in this area of study, I naturally went out and read the book soon after its release, which was now close to half a year ago.

Musicophilia is a generously sized book that, in a nutshell, examines all the myriad ways our brains can go haywire in processing musical stimuli. As with Sack's other books, it is essentially a tenuously tied-together string of case studies on musical malfunction. Some of the stories are really amazing: for instance, a man is struck by lightning, has a near-death experience, then awakens to find himself obsessed with piano music. Having never been particularly interested in music his whole life, he becomes so driven by his musical visions that he quits his job as a surgeon to pursue piano playing and composing full time. In another case study, an old woman is haunted by music that will not go away in her mind - sometimes, this interior soundtrack is painfully deafening.

In other remarkable case studies, Sacks reports on the effects of music in speech therapy. For instance, numerous clinical studies indicate that singing can greatly increase the changes of an aphasic person (damage to the language centers of the brain) to relearn how to speak. Words alone are impossible to speak, but if they can be encoded in song, then an aphasic can access their language, and thus their ability to communicate again.

It is also very interesting to note that basically all brains look similar, and you cannot tell the different between Einstein's brain and Bush's just by looking at them. But musicians brains actually look different - according to Sacks, this is the only category of human being with a distinctive brain appearance.

All of these case studies and curios were engaging enough, but at a certain point it all just gets to be too much. Musicophilia is 347 pages of what amounts to a neurological freak show, and as intriguing as the topic and the nascent field are to me, I just couldn't really get into this book. Devoid of any musical context (how music signifies meaning) and frustratingly light on the scientific explanations for the conditions discussed therein, Sack's book struck me as not musical enough for the musician and not scientific enough for the scientist. Of course, this may be precisely why this book was so popular: just how many of us in the general popular are serious musicians and scientists? (The writing staff of Mirth and Matter is another story..) With such light explanations, nothing really sticks with you. Despite the very colorful stories presented in this book, six months later and I can barely remember a single fact that I learned from it. Like the amnesiacs discussed in the book, Musicophilia has disappeared from my mind leaving scarcely a trace.

I encourage anyone who read this one and got a lot out of it to post a comment - I'm genuinely baffled by why it was so popular and really would like to hear your take on it.

Book Review: The God Delusion

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Mariner, 2006)


One long hot summer when I was 10 or so, I went with a friend to an afternoon of Bible camp. Having not grown up a believer in any religion, the experience was fascinating and a bit terrifying. The organizers were ultra-conservative Evangelicals with a very literal, fire and brimstone sort of interpretation of scripture. Everything was "heaven" this, "hell" that. I was one of the younger kids, and I remember that, despite all the talk of being a good and righteous person, the older boys were little tyrants. Rather, I played the Canaanite to their Israelites.

We also sat for prolonged periods (at least to a 10 year-old) in silent prayer, silently communing with God. I remember that the rest of the kids closed their eyes, so I did too. I couldn't stop thinking about snack time, and opened my eyes a few times to see if anyone else was distracted. Sure enough, goodies were more popular than God; kids were shifting in their seats and looking around impatiently as the adult leaders looked on, gently chastising the hungry kids for being kids and not saints.

Since I was young, I've always been suspicious of organized religion. Now, nothing was ever clearly thought out, and my objections were never based on any sort of theological understanding; nevertheless, I couldn't shake the intuition that the whole thing was just a little silly. This early memory was one of many childhood experiences in my largely-Christian little Oregon hometown that gave me cause to doubt the truth of the faith. It just never seemed to make sense, as much as it would have behooved me socially to believe. There were a lot of cute Christian girls, after all (a topic I will return to shortly).

For all of us who have had lingering doubts about religion, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion is the long-awaited proof that justifies our suspicions with lucid argument, comprehensive research, and wry wit. As a writer, Dawkins is capable of articulating difficult concepts; as a scientist, he is capable of demonstrating that our understanding of reality no longer needs the old-fashioned superstitions of religion.

Dawkins's work comes as part of a three-prong assault on religion that was initiated a couple years ago along with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. It is also (admittedly) a text of conversion: it is his attempt to change people's thinking with the book, and to make atheists who have been in hiding come out of the closet and exclaim their pride in who they are (the parallels to the Gay Liberation movement do not go unnoticed by the perspicacious author). While this goal of transformation is perhaps a bit grandiose (a charge that has been leveled at Dawkins before), I must say that I can't imagine reading it and not being challenged, not having your ideas forced upon the grindstone and made sharper as a result. Simply put, it is impossible to ignore Dawkins's reasoned plea. The argument is too powerful and too urgent to ignore.

Trying to summarize all the key points in this 420-page book would be an arduous task and would probably begin to feel like homework for the tenacious reader. Instead of itemizing the major arguments of the book sequentially, then, I will bring up a few of the fascinating points that are made in no particular order.

• Religion has gotten a massive free-be over the years. To prove a case in court, the prosecution needs evidence; it can't simply base the argument on belief. In every aspect of modern society, we are governed by evidence, reason, and sound logic. Religion, on the other hand, is given a free pass on all of these hallmarks of modern thinking. It is not held to the same level of intellectual rigor as science, law, or scholarship. And this, Dawkins says, is a major problem. Religion should be held to the same standards as every other facet of our society. So with exacting reason, Dawkins approaches the idea of religion just like you would any other idea: as a theory.
  
• Debunk #1: The faithful often argue that scientists will never be able to prove that God doesn't exist. Dawkins turns this argument on its head and exposes it for the sophistry that it is. In a memorable turn, he suggests that we will never be able to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, or of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (proudly, Pastafarianism was created by a fellow Oregonian). Saying that something cannot be disproved is nonsensical to the extreme - there are plenty of imaginable things that can never be disproven.
  
• Agnosticism is a cop-out. There is no reason to even entertain a belief unless there is empirical evidence or blind faith - agnostics, lacking both, try to have it both ways.
  
• Many people argue that religion and science are two totally separate realms of experience and should be kept that way. This notion has been called "non-overlapping magisteria" (or NOMA) by Stephen Jay Gould, connoting that science cannot be brought to bear on religious issues and vice versa. Dawkins firmly rejects the idea of NOMA on the grounds that is is popular purely because there is no good evidence for the God Hypothesis. To keep the religious masses from rising up again scientists for their presumed arrogance, then, many scientists have taken this stance of non-involvement. To Dawkins, this is an act of intellectual cowardice.
• Debunk #2: Pascal's Wager states that, in the absence of evidence of God, it's best just to believe because the penalty if it is true (everlasting damnation) far outweights the penalty if it isn't (you die). I've heard this argument a lot from exasperated Christians. Unfortunately, if you don't believe something, you can't force yourself out of fear of a potential negative outcome. Wouldn't the omniscient God surely see through this sly stratagem?
  
• Debunk #3, The Boeing 747 Sophism: Creationists claim that the extreme complexity that we see around us could not possibly be the result of random genetic mutation and natural selection over billions of years. That, they say, is like a Boeing 747 being assembled out of a junk heap by a tornado - the probability is simply too remote to consider. This argument, however, suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution: indeed, evolution is a process and not a sudden random act. In addition, Dawkins points out, how come this same argument never applies to the ultimately complex being, God? If the probability of coming up with a 747 randomly is remote, what's the probability of coming up with a God?
• Debunk #4, The Anthropic Principle: There are, as Carl Sagan said, billion and billions of stars in the universe. Only a minute portion of these could sustain the development of life. This fact leads many to claim that, of course God exists because we're on one of these rare planets. Again, they phrase it as an issue of probability: the chances of us simply being here at all are too low for random processes to have generated. This claim is refuted by a simple twist of logic: if we were not one of the few species to have evolved on one of these rare planets, we couldn't make this observation to begin with.
  
• Debunk #5: "If you don't have a God telling you what is good and what is bad, how can you be a moral person?" This argument implies that the only reason people are good is because an angry father figure is watching over them and coercing them to act this way. There are plenty of real, biological reasons to exercise a degree of morality - we don't need scripture to tell us not to kill our neighbors.
  
• Getting back to my aside about cute Christian girls: we should never refer to children as "Christian children," "Muslim boys," or "Jewish little girls." To Dawkins, this is a form of child abuse, for children don't have the judgment to believe or disbelieve anything. It is pure indoctrination, and it saddles children with religious identities before they have they mental capacities to judge for themselves.
  

There are hundreds of other provocative arguments here, but I vowed to myself to keep this review short. Of course, there are reasons for maintaining faith that Dawkins does not get into, such as the strong community support that it often provides. It is never his intent, however, to debate the absolute value of religion: he easily recognizes that a little Biblical knowledge goes a long way when reading Western literature, for example. Although he views religion as a huge net negative for human happiness and civility, the book does not advocate throwing away our whole Judeo-Christian cultural lineage: rather, it simply encourages us to question the God Hypothesis a little more voraciously. For us natural questioners out there, it comes as a welcome suggestion.

Book Review: The Rest is Noise

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007)

Twentieth Century music, for the uninitiated, can be an iron maiden on the ears. Or better yet, one of those torture boxes they use in Dune to test whether an individual is human or not. To many people without academic training in the methods of the Twentieth Century, it is precisely this that is lacking in last century's pantheon of composers: humanity.

Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker (and author of a great blog, see "Good Reads" list), has attempted to bring thorny modern music to the neophyte and a deeper understanding to the cognoscenti in his debut book, The Rest is Noise. Grant it, this is not at all the first book that has tried to make this recondite repertory accessible. Authors often assume, good musicologists that they are, that understanding music only goes as deep as one's understanding of structure. Therefore, for the masses to "get" twelve-tone music, they simple need to learn the methods. Many introductory appreciation texts for this type of music focus purely on rows, retrogrades, inverse retrogrades, transpositions, and a lot of other stuff more fitting for a math than a music book. Ross, luckily, abandons this failing course.

First, a brief summary of the book. The lens through which the reader views the century in music is Richard Strauss, the great master of late Romanticism and early atonality. We begin the journey in turn-of-the-century Vienna, when society was on the verge of collapse and music was undergoing rapid mutation (connection?). Strauss is a fascinating bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries: his early years (1880s and 90s) were filled with orchestral grandeur and Wagnerian pomp, but the man lived all the way until the end of WWII, when tonality had disintegrated along with his native Germany. The story of The Rest is Noise, then, is the tale, seen through an individual's eyes, of violent change. In swift and dramatic colors, it is the portrait of the birth and death of states, styles, and sentiments. Ross takes us through all the classics of 20th century music, from The Rite of Spring to Shostakovich's coded symphonies, the solitude of Jean Sibelius to John Adams's Doctor Atomic of 2006. A full retelling of this fascinating tale is far beyond the scope of this post, and I don't want to labor the details. Suffice it to say, it pretty much hits it all (including obscure works like "I Am Sitting in a Room," the subject of one of Ruxton's posts on this blog).

The history itself isn't so revelatory, as Ross is a journalist and not a scholar. It is Ross's telling of it that is so exciting. First off, the reader will notice virtually none of the technical language that accompanies many books on the subject. Instead of buying into the idea that one must understand structure in order to appreciate music, Ross transmutes the sounds of the pieces he talks about (not the scores) into the language of poetry. Instead of row permutations, he gives us colors; instead of dodecaphony, he gives us precise and witty metaphor. It is clear that Ross wants his reader's to grasp this music with their hearts, not just their minds.

This leads us to another fresh aspect of the book, and indeed of Alex Ross in general: there is no respect for the high/low art distinction. Music is music, and unfortunately all the arcana typically associated with 20th century music doesn't need to be there at all - in fact, it impedes society's access to great music by turning it into an Ivory Tower. Ross has published articles that compare Monteverdi to Sade; he has likened Gyorgy Ligeti to Sonic Youth. And his attack on the traditional dichotomy of high/low (classical/pop, etc.) also finds its way into his presentation of the composers' lives. This is no Big Man history, with powerful individuals driving Progress; it is a humble story of both human accomplishment and frailty. In one of the more telling anecdotes of the book, he tells of the famously curmudgeonly Arnold Schoenberg pompously decrying: "if it is art, it is not for the people; if it is for the people, it is not art." Yet, the happiest his son ever saw him was when the Schoenberg family was driving through Big Sur and they stopped at a fruit stand and heard Vertlarkte Nacht (one of his early pieces) playing on the radio. Normal Joes listening to his music on the radio made the father of twelve-tone music giddy.

Another common approach to the telling of history is to focus on innovations and progress, a tale that is often linked all too closely with the Big Men. In this regard, Ross's book is an epiphany. Rather than explaining the twentieth century as a series of aesthetic and historical ruptures, he charts the years and the music through connections and similarities. Many authors are content with explaining the technical novelty of Anton von Webern's serial language and his influence on that compositional school; Ross tells us how Webern inspired La Monte Young (the father of minimalism) to look towards the atoms of music and build up from there; Young, in turn, inspired the Velvet Underground in their heady psychedelic rock, often based on Young-like drones; the Velvet Underground influenced virtually every rock act out there today. In another fascinating story of influence and musical connection: Stravinsky drew on Russian folk songs for The Rite of Spring, transmuting the material through his cutting, modernist tongue; both the folksy elements and the modern spikes made their way into the playing of Charlie Parker, who worshipped Stravinsky. Music is a circle, not a bunch of lines.

I've read a lot of cultural histories of music, but I must say that this is my favorite. For the academy-trained musician and the neophyte alike, Ross reveals the fundamental humanity of some challenging work. In his masterly hands, very noisy music becomes poetry.

Petite Book Reviews:

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol. Who said 18th century Russians can’t be funny? Dead Souls follows the exploits of a strangely charming anti-hero as he travels over Russia buying the “dead souls” of peasants from an assortment of eccentric landowners. Gogol is able to hold his own among the Russian literary elite. Everything is here: social commentary, a careful dissection of human emotion, musings on ethical improbables, but Gogol goes one step further by adding an element of black humor. While not as consistently funny (or bizarre!) as his short stories, Dead Souls does have its moments of genius and hilarity. However, the overall experience was weakened by the fact that this novel, Gogol’s first and last, was never completed. Towards the end, brief Editor’s Notes bridge the gaps between large segments of missing text. Because of this, the end comes abruptly and no satisfying resolution is achieved. It’s unfortunate as this broken conclusion mars an otherwise wonderful book.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami. This marvelous collection of short stories is a perfect illustration of Murakami’s mastery of tone. While all 24 stories deal with widely divergent topics, such as a man made of ice, a kidney shaped stone, and vanishing persons, each story is unparalleled in its ability to evoke a sense of mystery, fate and the all encompassing magic of the human condition. I have never encountered another writer who could create such a hypnotic atmosphere with such few words and with such simple events. Murakami’s style is almost zen; less is more, great depth is found in minutia, all the most profound secrets are hidden within the negative space. His writing is calm, poetic and patently brilliant. You could easily lose yourself in Murakami then emerge hours later, never to be the same again.

Sayonara, James Michener. Published in 1953, this book charts the romance between an American Air Force pilot and a Japanese actress, which was socially, racially and politically unacceptable at the time. In this sense, there’s a strong whiff of the Romeo & Juliet “love vs. the system” vibe, though it’s infinitely more profound here as it’s culture vs. culture, not family vs. family, and of course, these systems in Sayonara were institutionalized and, amazingly, completely real. Romeo & Juliet had it easy. Pansies.

This work is short for Michener (no, he doesn’t describe the pre-historic geology of the Japanese islands), but what little is said, is said amazing well. This book doesn’t reek of Western domination and Eastern sexualization like many similarly themed books do, and is able to avoid stereotypes or use them ironically. Michener also, incidentally, married a Japanese woman and it is clear he has a profound respect for the culture and handles his subjects with honesty and care. This is not your typical love story but it is achingly beautiful.

As She Climbed Across the Table, Jonathan Lethem. I’ve often wondered what would happen if my wife fell in love with lab-created black hole named Lack which defined itself by the things it devoured, like homeless cats, and the things it rejected, like ice-pickaxes. Well no, that’s not entirely true, I’ve never pondered this before – but it was an interesting ride. This book provided some fascinating glimpses into the arcane world quantum physics, such as the issue of the subjective observer, but little in the way of anything else. This is a conceptual book. It’s about one peculiar idea and fails to extend this to the human sphere. While there was human drama, it was performed by two-dimensional cardboard facsimiles. Strangely enough, the most artificial thing about this book was the characters, not the miniature black-hole which possessed signs of consciousness. Nope, good science doesn’t make good literature. But it was fun. So I suppose that’s a testament to Lethem, he turned quantum physics into something light, airy and playful.

Atonement, Ian McEwan. The influence of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf is welcome and wonderful in this expansive novel which begins in England on the cusp of WWII. Simply put, Atonement traces the effect of a childhood mistake over the course of 60 years. The (meta)narrative covers domestic English priggishness, the horrors of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, the insight of old age and the raw emotional power of literature. Atonement is one of those strange novels that left me lukewarm until the final 20 pages slugged me in the stomach. Viewed through the lens of the final section, the whole novel upends itself and becomes an entirely new, deeper creature. I’ve read my share of pre-war ruminations on English socialites (thanks to Huxley), but McEwan delivers something entirely fresh. I hear there’s a movie out based on this book but I’m skeptical. At its very pith, Atonement is about the power of literature and language. Film is neither of these things and lacks their subtle devices. I think the very soul of the novel would be lost in translation. But then again, it got nominated for an Oscar and Keira Knightley is hot.

On Beauty, Zadie Smith. Smith is a master chronicler of human motivation and interaction. This book, one of my recent favorites, follows the unraveling drama of two multi-national, multi-ethnic academic families. While the fathers of each are embroiled in an academic rivalry, the remaining members of both families are linked together by a series of unusual circumstances. And to sweeten this polarized stew, religion, politics, art and current social controversies play an integral role in the characters’ actions and psychological states. It is in this combination of extremes that On Beauty blossoms. Everything is finely observed and skewered. Smith gives a spot-on depiction of the inner workings of academic bureaucracy, and at times I found myself laughing in agreement. And of course, love plays a large role in the book. But it never becomes saccharine; each manifestation of love is unorthodox and imperfect, though at its very core, hopeful.