I’m on a retreat right now. I’m taking the train from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, with a change in Chicago. It’ll take four days. The boy is with his grandparents, and the dog is with a trainer who hopefully will get her to stop jumping on people. I have a two-person “roomette” to myself for the entirety of the journey. After fifteen months of full time single parenting with just two six day breaks when the ex-wife flew out to have in-person time, I’m savouring every moment of being solitary, just the gentle sway of the train, and no more human contact than the occasional trips to the cafe car for mixers and ice. I miss the boy and the dog, but my guess is, on some level, they’re both enjoying a break from me, too.
Continue reading “Down by the tracks”Seasoned and sharpened
A good friend told me this story, knowing I would find it funny.
Some time ago, his family had guests staying with them for the weekend. On the Saturday evening, my friend prepared a meal with a variety of dishes, mostly drawn from the Chinese cookery tradition. They all ate and drank well, and they talked until the early hours of Sunday morning before going to bed. When my friend woke up the next day and headed down to the kitchen to make coffee, he discovered one of the guests busy at work cleaning up the kitchen. All the plates, the cutlery, and the glasses had been washed and dried, and were stacked neatly on the table. On the draining board were clean pans and lids. The guest was standing at the sink, working away with a wire scouring brush, on my friend’s oldest and most prized wok.
“Nearly finished,” said the guest with a smile, “it takes a lot of work to get these really clean.” He lifted the steel wok out of the water to reveal that the near spotless metal was as smooth and bright as when it had first been bought. My friend forced a smile, nodded, and then retreated upstairs to his bed, speechless. Ten years of cooking – ten years of sizzling hot oil, infused with ginger, garlic, chilli, black beans, spices, sauces, and marinades – ten years of working at the stove, carefully building up the patina on the surface of the wok, ten years of culinary labour, all obliterated by ten minutes of over-zealous uneducated cleaning. Disaster!
Continue reading “Seasoned and sharpened”Pause
Last weekend, I visited several commercial galleries in London, enjoying the opportunity to look at art works, which is possible once again after several months of enforced closures. However good the quality of online images and virtual tours of exhibitions, the intermediating presence of a digital screen changes the nature of the perceptual experience: there is no substitute for being in the physical presence of the art object. (Compare, watching a cookery programme online and eating a meal in a restaurant.)
One drawing in a room of recent work by Luc Tuymans attracted my attention. It showed a view across a square or courtyard towards the façade of a large three-story building opposite, with two other buildings, one to the side of the square and another slightly behind the first, also visible. All the buildings were shaded grey as was the paving of the courtyard and the road that led out of the square. The scene was drab: a deserted space on a cold, sunless day in winter, with no people, no colour, no objects of interest. In the centre of the drawing, as if superimposed on this dismal vista, was a white equilateral triangle, with one side rising vertically and the two other sides leading to a point to the right. It is a familiar sign in the contemporary world, visible on every phone, laptop screen or video monitor: it is the sign that means “click here to proceed” or “start”. It is the sign that means the opposite of two parallel white vertical lines, which means “click here to pause” or “stop”.
Continue reading “Pause”