At Seventeen

The human experience as chronicled through music is like pairing air with lungs. It breathes life into the inhaling that feels.

I am largely unqualified to blog of music. I grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, Carpenters, Johnny Mathis, Peter, Paul & Mary, and classical music. I was nearly through high school before I switched from the oldies station on the radio to the pop station. At first, I didn’t even know which station to listen to. Music at my house was performed more than heard. My dad played Hawaiian on his pedal steel guitar, my siblings their band or jazz or MIDI music. So when I speak of music, it comes from a standpoint of feeling, rather than hearing.

Janice Ian is resonance.  I think of Tracy Chapman every time I hear her name and with it the following memory. It is significant for a reason.

I was a promising 21 year old. I spent a lot of time at a house, kiddie-corner from my parent's backyard, where there lived a group of guys. This was my first introduction to what being cool meant. (I still consider my acquaintance with them a crowning achievement.) Cool and popular aren't the same, many are popular but few of those are cool. I suspect it all comes down to whether you think you are elite or not. There were always people coming and going at that house, good conversation, music fests, movies, games, food and people to meet. My time there were my golden years.

Shortly after I took up semi-permanent residence at their house, a new guy moved in for the summer. He had his own place but wanted to mix up the social scene. He was nearly 30 if I recall, which to me back then was ooold. I couldn't resist being attracted to him. Maybe because he was elusive or “older” or just an incredibly awesome attractive guy who had passed the age of caring about being a twentysomething. I was intimidated by him and ipso facto extremely attracted. One afternoon after moving in he was sitting at his computer listening to music. It was the music that drew me over- he was listening to Tracy Chapman. As I listened to her most popular song, Fast Car, I felt, not heard, the music and it felt like Janis Ian. Months later, over a dinner downtown at CPK he asked me a question that changed the course of events in my life, my response began a spectacular love story with…another man. I have never forgotten how young I was then, how flattered I was, nor how naive and inexperienced about relationships I was. I often think back and wonder what would have been if I had answered differently. And now every time I hear that song I think of him.

At seventeen, I had never been asked out. I was never asked to a high school dance or had a secret admirer. I never knew of most the social events I wasn’t invited to. My friends ranged from the Navajo girl I had known since elementary school and wondered where she was half the semester to the student body president. I didn’t have any concept of social positioning other than what dreamed resided at the top. As all high school girls, high school is "real life" and I often felt swept aside by everyone because I blended into the background so well they forgot me. I sat at home most weekends listening to those oldies.

The sound of 70’s is music genius. Think about it. In one song you have Spanish guitar, smooth synth, trumpets, and jazz rhythms- for a folk song. At Seventeen spoke to my soul. Janis Ian and her contemporaries, Melanie, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins (Send in the Clowns is still one of the best songs of all time) wrote about things that mattered. None of this music about partying and raising our glasses until we’re drunk- they were raw and meaningful. You could get lost in that music. You felt that music. Even if you were the beauty queen, you still felt the longing, the loss, and the pain of the 'simple girls like me'. You can’t listen to music like that without going on a journey. Those songs changed something about your humanity- you would come away understanding somehow-even if you couldn’t understand the meaning of the words. You sink into it, like an abyss when you listen.

The music we indentify with, those anthems of experience. Suddenly we have a tool and a way to express what’s within. We can pin ourselves to it and say we are not alone in how we feel.

A few days ago I went to the mall, a place I avoid like the plague unless the words Sephora or Nordstrom are above my head, but it was an emergency and I had only time for one stop. I was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt emblazoned with “Volunteer”, pink sweats and the homeliest mop of hair perched above an undone face. The effeminate man behind the counter stared at me in protest while his coworker resolutely slumped up to the counter to take my money. A few hours later I was at a photoshoot leaning against a wall modeling when a group of photogs walked by wildly snapping pictures. All the while played in my head:

“I leaned the truth at seventeen that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles who married young and then retired.
The valentines I never knew, the Friday night charades of youth were spent of one more beautiful.
 At seventeen I learned the truth.
And those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, desperately remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say, "Come dance with me," and murmured vague obscenities.
It isn't all it seems at seventeen.”
-Janis Ian

Food!

I am a foodie. It often gets misinterpreted as a gourmet. Which I am definitely not. I am qualified to make that statement because I do know a number of gourmets. “Elite” is a four letter word in my vocab.

Why a foodie?

I’ve always loved food. A few years back I took a class on the anthropology of food and a class on osteology. Combining two things I absolutely love, anthropology and food, was magical. It set in motion a whole whirl of purpose. My blog’s mostly about these two topics. But here’s what happened to make a believer out of me:

Food rules the world. There aren’t many things bigger than food in the world. Most people don’t think about it. From an anthropological stand point, this is, well you can’t get much bigger of a topic to study.  Food customs, food beliefs, access to food, food in pop culture, food and ritual (myth, magic, and religion) - it is in everything. And it just keeps getting more popular by the day thanks to the media. Which, as all media does, exploits and promotes in one fell swoop.  

I know a lot about food and it surprises some people that I haven’t joined the vegan bandwagon or shop exclusively at upscale markets. Like I said, I’m a foodie. I’ve been to the slaughterhouse, seen the propaganda movies, visited dairies, food production warehouses, been to open markets, bartered for food from the supplier, seen an airport hanger full of produce and witnessed how its distribution is decided and had my moments where I vowed never to eat food I didn’t grow myself again. I do believe in slow food and I do have my milk delivered. Beyond that, I join the ranks of the informed consumer.  I’m addicted to food. In a strange twist of fate vegans and the like are non-existent in the ranks of gourmets and rare among foodies.

Outside of my food hobby, it is my profession. Originally, I thought the two might come into conflict with each other but they never have. I keep the two separate. I run a seven-figure revenue generating restaurant. It is humble and off the map and you wouldn’t think it’s so successful. It is wildly successful, more than a lot of popular restaurants locals are familiar with. It has gotten me and my chef on T.V. more than a few times.  My wait staff pulls in incomes only fine dining can compete with. Outside of this I run a few more successful ventures: a pizza shop, a coffee shop, a grill, and Utah’s largest outdoor festival, along with a smattering of other special events. So, I know a lot about the industry in these areas. Because of this position I hold, I have a lot of buying power. Through me, insane dollars in product and supplies are purchased. It gets me to a lot of places. What this has effectively done is to build my foodie hobby. Not many foodies have access to those resources.  Only people who revolve in my world know who I am and I like to keep it that way.

I’m not a great cook, but I try. It helps that I have plenty in the profession to mentor me. As a teetotaler in charge of the biggest drinking festival in Utah, I spend a fair amount of time learning about spirits, wines, and beer. This has made me a number of “friends” who want the freebies I get. A lot of people think it’s amusing, I think it’s just the fun part of my job.

So all this exposure has made a foodie out of me but once the stars aligned and anthropology came into the mix- it gave me purpose. I’ve discovered not many view food as a very interesting topic. I understand this is my world and also my bias so I try to keep it real and discuss other things. Next time I am dining with directors and head chefs, I’ll invite you and we’ll see how you feel then. It is a HUGE industry. I am a plebian on this ladder and one seriously lucky gal to have landed in the industry with no background. I still know relatively little and am fairly green.

Food runs as a theme through essentially every aspect of our lives, it’s a fundamental so a lot of the time it isn’t thought about by the average joe. Our food habits are very telling, telling about us, telling about our society, and telling about the world we live in. There are so many food phenomenons now that globalization has taken root for better and for worse.

 I love food dialects; that food “you can only get here.” Food is exactly like language in that way. You have different languages and dialects within it.  It is as broad as the world and as localized as your town. (There’s a great “only get here” taco stand downtown at the Sears on State.) The food on the east coast is different than the west and the food on the west side is different than the east side. I am multilingual in the language of food.

 Even more interestingly, not only does food have dialect, is has gender as well. I wrote an interesting article about men, meat and marriage and in the very next week an article about the cupcake bakery fad sweeping the nation. Very gendered. Food also has social status associated with it and heritage. Food is incredibly telling.

The next time you sit down to eat, consider what you are eating and why. You might just find out a little something about yourself and the world in which you live. And if ever you find food is becoming a hobby, join me, we’ll find a little café somewhere and chat. I’m always excited to meet people who I can discuss passions with. Food and people is the best entertainment, and the oldest, there is.

 "Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans....are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."
--Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidental

American Beauty

I watched American Beauty for two reasons. 1. Rebellion. It was forbidden to watch so I did. 2. I have an obsession with Kevin Spacey. I didn’t understand most of the film at the time; after all, I was breaking the rules watching it for all the wrong reasons. I never forgot the dead bird. I identified with a morbid sense of beauty long before I enshrined it. (Tragedy!, dear readers who have always considered me an absurd reincarnation of Fido who caught a bright little ray of sunshine.)

A year ago as I drove home from church I saw a bird flailing in the gutter on the side of the road after being hit. I couldn’t let it die in the gutter so I pulled over and removed my sweater to pick up the sickeningly car-beaten bird and move it to the grass. The bird was terrified. The thought occurred to me I had made the situation worse putting it on grass that would irritate and poke its already broken body. So I made a nest of my sweater and laid the bird on it to die and drove away.  All the while I cried, not for the bird but because I am haunted by the times I didn’t stop: the child who fell in the street, the couple on the scooter who had impaled themselves on rebar, the ancient man who asked me to trim his hedges on a blisteringly hot day, the time it took me to join the response to a hit and run where the man died and the woman who hit him went insane.

And looking back on it all, it was in sepia tones.

I call those moments tragically beautiful. (Does the word beautiful offend?) My life is riddled with them. And black. Solid black; the things I no longer remember unless dragged to the surface. I call this "beautiful" because it created.

I took this picture this afternoon. I’ve admired this plant from afar the whole winter. I finally had to capture it. It was aesthetically beautiful in death. An ordinary plant this summer; now, it’s paper thin walls spoke volumes to me of how something past, in death and so delicate, can be beautiful where in life it could not. I don’t celebrate my horrors. I honor what filled their place and how from these rose a phoenix. 

I’m not much of a better person but I stop now and dedicate myself to honoring the phoenix moments in us all and I remember every day we see the world as we are, not as it is. 

"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

--C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

p.s. for all you Fido aficionado's out there, a redeeming aside to keep you from worrying (you know who you are--your claims I am going "Amish" are ridiculous...) Here's a little bit o' fun I smattered a good handful of un-suspecting victims via text with in a fit of  amusement. The back story here is that I have a bunch of fresh stitches throughout my scalp...  don't pat my head for a few days. I'm still down to catch a Frisbee though.