Reading into.
Well it’s been a while since that sort of thing went on.
And as usual during the writing it got to the point that anything I meanwhile read could’ve been folded in, and I honestly couldn’t say whether you ought to then mistrust the writing that I do, or the reading? —Like as a for instance this piece by Anna Zett on Jurassic World (and what is it with the ice-cold takes on this godawful sequel, damn) which keeps sending up offhanded flares that briefly, brightly, coldly light up just how many and how big, the consequences that depend from the central image-premise, the dragon-like dinosaur-sylph, their skeletons the remnants of an age before a history-ending time-splitting world storm of extinction, and O the FANTASY of using SCIENCE to conjure them once more, spiced with a dash of HORROR at our hubris, thinking we could bring back something so long lost, and all because we wanted, we wanted to justify, we wanted to punish ourselves for wanting just one shivering glimpse—
—but that, that’s the first film, and we’re on, what, the fourth iteration?
There is only one thing that is new in Jurassic World: it is the lack of references to paleontology or what they call prehistory—in fact to any history from before the 1990s. Whatever happened before the supposed “end of history,” before digitization, before the creation of the brand, does not matter anymore. These dinosaurs are no longer creatures of a prehistoric time. They have changed their genealogy, become 250 million years younger and entirely virtual. Therefore they look exactly like they did in 1993, despite the fact that in the meantime the look of many dinosaurs has changed significantly. According to recent research, now mostly based on dinosaurs found in China, these bird-like animals may have had bright feathers and multicolored skin. But feathered raptors and colorful T-Rexes are missing from the American theme park of the present. The filmmakers decided to just stick to the brand. So despite the ubiquity of up-to-date smartphones and smart watches, despite its slick corporate aesthetics, Jurassic World is a spectacle of nostalgia.
The goal has become to conjure a(nother) dinosaur—not to reach for that desire, doubt, belief by conjuring a dinosaur. —And oh but this is such a jejune, an anodyne reading—instead, instead: you remember when Kristen McQueary wrote that column which will forever hang about her neck, about how she wants Chicago to have a Katrina of its own, a world storm that might (okay, figuratively) wash away the old bad union-haunted world and usher in a shining post-apocalypse of neoliberal ahistory? (McQueary has since nopologized.) —Anyway, while that was raging, I ended up reading this profile by Carrie Schedler of chef and restauranteur Iliana Regan, Queen of Midwestern Cuisine—
In the woods, Regan sees a lot of things people miss—and what she sees has become the basis for one of the most distinctive restaurants in the city, a scrappy tasting-menu-only spot in an unmarked storefront on Western Avenue, sandwiched between a soccer store and a tire shop. The 35-year-old opened Elizabeth in 2012, and in her first gig as head chef, she has garnered (and maintained) a Michelin star and been named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award for best chef in the Great Lakes region. The first round of tickets for her last menu, a foraged riff on the foods of the Game of Thrones books, sold out in two hours. “What she’s doing is completely unique,” says one of Chicago’s most celebrated chefs, Schwa owner Michael Carlson. “She’s clever, smart. Totally innovative.”
Elizabeth often draws comparisons to Noma, the restaurant in Copenhagen headed by René Redzepi and considered one of the world’s best, in part because of how it revels in the not particularly celebrated bounties of the Nordic countryside. Regan does the same with the bounty of northwest Indiana. And in doing so, she has accomplished the unthinkable: She’s taken the food of the Midwest and made it sexy.
And, I mean, yes, but, there’s a lot in here for me to like, to find her likable, this Regan, quiet, bookish, inked and buzz-cut, speaking in paragraphs, sharp dry wit and ready smile, but mostly her cantankerous persnicketiness, her inability to sum up, her indisputable drive, that’s found such a constructive outlet, recreating and reinventing flavors from her family, and I’d try a piece of that smoked watermelon, hell yes. But; but—
Prepping for this summer’s menu—an exploration of the foods of the American Indians who lived in the Great Lakes region in the 18th and 19th centuries—was a months-long labor of love. Spare moments were spent poring over articles about the eating habits of the Ojibwa tribe and scouring cookbooks for tips on how to make pemmican, an energy-bar-like blend of meat, fat, and fruit consumed by the native people of North America. Diners can choose from two categories: the meat-heavy Hunter or the vegetable-focused Gatherer. Edible ants will make an appearance. “I’m approaching it from a scholarly standpoint,” Regan says.
The world storm’s long since gone, here, but its effects are everywhere you look, in how it is she’s come to find herself in Northern Indiana, summoning up authentic local flavors rooted away off in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, in how she’s left to scour a scholarly apparatus of cookbooks for hints of the food that was eaten by people who yet live all about the Great Lakes—though mostly further north now, granted, up in Michigan, and Canada. —There’s nothing of the sylph about food; it’s either there, on the plate, or not—but flavor’s the very essence of a sylph, half-made or more as it is of the stories we tell about where it came from, what was done to it, who figured that out, and when, and how it’s best eaten when served up before us, and this fantasy of reaching back to half-understood notions of the food of an utterly other, othered world—but all these conclusions I’m drawing, from a single paragraph written by someone as tangentially involved as any journalist. —And I’d have to admit to some curiosity, on my part? —Certainly more than for a Game of Thrones menu, say.
Oh but maybe this old appreciation of Kate Bush that I tripped over on Twitter?
Although [Wilhelm] Reich’s writings found favour in more occult circles, mysticism and hippy platitudes get short shrift in Bush’s songs. Images of trees, mountains, skies and waves—romantic clichés on the surface—are militantly material. For both her and Reich, nature in all its chaos and danger is the energy required to be fully human, from the kick inside to Aboriginal “dreamtime.” This theme has been explored since “Them Heavy People,” her 1978 tribute to Gurdjieff and whirling dervishes. As with the momentum of so many of her songs, the modern subject tends to retreat from this energy under the fragile armor of contrived personæ (“Wow,” “Babooshka”) or technological hubris (“Breathing,” “Experiment IV”). Since the industrial revolution, unmetered energy has been treated like some ineffectual ghost, yet her lyrics often read like open invitations to it. The Red Shoes alludes to the dangers of unleashing dormant ecstasy as much as Wuthering Heights. However they may be the kind of energies that don’t need to be harnessed so much as embraced, the knowledge that is “sat there in your lap”—
—and I was going to I don’t know get excited about that move there being a way through and out the recognition and return of Clute’s idea of fantasy, for the here-and-now, the reading-into impulse gibbering full-speed behind my wide unblinking eyes, that to be human is to be destroyed by extremes, of Light, of Dark, of that very energy, so it’s only human to turn away, “modern subject” or no, and remember what John Henry Tyler said, about how it is we’re all connected, so we’re all contaminated, every last one of us is tainted, purity is the last thing we can stand, but Christ, why was he pointing a gun at her? What the hell was that about? —But then I remembered it’s essentially the endgame of any nominally mimetic text that dips a toe in the shallow end of the numinous—recognize, return, retreat, refuse, restore. —I can be quite slow, sometimes.
(A train of thought is not unlike a story, in that so much depends on where you manage to stop.)
I could point back to this possibly alternate take on the Triskelion, as I’ve been noting it, our paranoia positing (and fomenting) actual and imagined dynamos, frantically striving for some sort of order; the idylls our dreams, those high-water marks we can see with the right kind of eyes, both the aims of and threatened by the dynamos; the decoherence event lying necessarily in wait, to tumble whatever houses of cards either might toss up, almost by accident—or maybe just admit, here and now, between ourselves, that these Great Weird (Boy?) Theories are just the work of idle hands at dynamos, inimical to idylls, and, I dunno. Go do the work, instead of pretending to have thought about the work yet to be done?
So, go. Read this instead.
