Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The Wire season six
For those of us who felt sad when The Wire ended after five seasons, reality has intervened: the Blagojevich scandal.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Road Trip
Yesterday P and I joined D and Y and drove up to Mountain View / Blanchard Springs. As it turned out, we got to attend "Caroling in the Caverns" for free because the regular tours were canceled for the caroling program and the federal website hadn't been updated. P finagled it. When we returned to Mountain View the town was gathered in the square for the lighting of the Christmas tree.
"This is Christmas. This is really Christmas!" Y said as we came out from dinner onto the square. It did look idyllic. The Court House was lit and so was the Christmas tree. People were milling around after the festivities and a long line of children stretched across the lawn waiting to sit on Santa's lap.
The idea was to show Y some of Arkansas besides Little Rock and D had thought of Blanchard Springs. P said his grandfather (who due to a quirk of generations was born in the late 1800s) had worked to sink the shafts to the cave after it was discovered. "The only elevator in Stone County," said the bushy tour guide has we rode down to the cavern. Two local sights for the price of one.
It is very white here, Y said at dinner. That's because we are in the mountains, we said. This area has historically had small farms, cattle farming, nothing much that required the cheap labor of slavery or tenant farming. Go down to the Delta and the demography changes. Take music. In the Delta it is blues and BB King and Helena's King Biscuit festival and the origins of a lot of rock'n roll. In the mountains it is folk music. Mountain View calls itself the folk music capital of the world and makes more hand crafted dulcimers than just about anywhere. For "Caroling in the Caverns" the musicians were from Mountain View and there were two guitars, one mandolin and a hammered dulcimer.
"I'd rather poke my eye out with a fork than go to Little Rock," said the lady behind the cash registrar. It's a common sentiment. But what is odd about it is that it is based on the idea that Little Rock is a big city, which it really isn't. So Little Rock remains somewhat exotic, and Mountain View, which would be half as far away if there was straight highway connecting it and Little Rock, remains isolated at the other end of a tangle of mountainous roads. Behind the counter she and I compared IDs. My drivers license is my favorite. All the others - work, school, passport - are awful. She was fine with her passport photo. She has a passport but she never makes it down to Little Rock! But maybe this is what keeps Mountain View Mountain View.
"This is Christmas. This is really Christmas!" Y said as we came out from dinner onto the square. It did look idyllic. The Court House was lit and so was the Christmas tree. People were milling around after the festivities and a long line of children stretched across the lawn waiting to sit on Santa's lap.
The idea was to show Y some of Arkansas besides Little Rock and D had thought of Blanchard Springs. P said his grandfather (who due to a quirk of generations was born in the late 1800s) had worked to sink the shafts to the cave after it was discovered. "The only elevator in Stone County," said the bushy tour guide has we rode down to the cavern. Two local sights for the price of one.
It is very white here, Y said at dinner. That's because we are in the mountains, we said. This area has historically had small farms, cattle farming, nothing much that required the cheap labor of slavery or tenant farming. Go down to the Delta and the demography changes. Take music. In the Delta it is blues and BB King and Helena's King Biscuit festival and the origins of a lot of rock'n roll. In the mountains it is folk music. Mountain View calls itself the folk music capital of the world and makes more hand crafted dulcimers than just about anywhere. For "Caroling in the Caverns" the musicians were from Mountain View and there were two guitars, one mandolin and a hammered dulcimer.
"I'd rather poke my eye out with a fork than go to Little Rock," said the lady behind the cash registrar. It's a common sentiment. But what is odd about it is that it is based on the idea that Little Rock is a big city, which it really isn't. So Little Rock remains somewhat exotic, and Mountain View, which would be half as far away if there was straight highway connecting it and Little Rock, remains isolated at the other end of a tangle of mountainous roads. Behind the counter she and I compared IDs. My drivers license is my favorite. All the others - work, school, passport - are awful. She was fine with her passport photo. She has a passport but she never makes it down to Little Rock! But maybe this is what keeps Mountain View Mountain View.
An Auto Company in Winter
Driving up into the Ozarks you see lots of trucks. Yuske, who was with us, asked why the trucks had GNC on the grills. That's GMC, we said, the car maker whose potential bust we were just talking about. Oh, he said, so the drivers are not devoted to vitamins. Nope, we said, just to trucks.
It is kind of poignant that Yuske, who is from Japan, wouldn't recognize General Motor's insignia. Americans would have no trouble with the Toyota emblem. From what I read in the papers the American auto industry has pretty much ceded the car market (where it has been thoroughly out competed) to Japan and gets by instead on trucks and SUVs. Which of course Americans love, especially Americans from rural states like this one, where getting a truck can be a male rite of passage. But now, even it every vehicle sold in the Ozarks this year were a GMC truck, it couldn't save a company needing billions monthly just to keep afloat.
There is something defining and particular in the American love of the truck, and in a similar sense the auto industry and the big unions feel distinctive of a certain kind of American life. The auto makers are no longer captains of American industry. Their plants are no longer hooks for artists to paint mesmerized portraits. The American public no longer sits in theaters and gets dewy-eyed watching Henry Fonda as Tom Joad vow to unionize. Instead they watch The Wire, where union boss Frank Sabotka gazes out over abandoned factories and empty slips along the shoreline and is powerless to do much besides grease politicians. Sabotka calls a video of a super efficient Dutch port that requires only a fraction of the jobs he'd like to see on Baltimore's docks "a nightmare." And it is if you envision, as Frank does, your son knowing the life you and your father knew and working the same job too. There is human tragedy in the fact that economies evolve. You can see the continued loss of manufacturing jobs on the horizon, no matter what the government does. You can see the blow to unions as they are faulted for undermining the competitiveness of their own companies. GM can go cap in hand to politicians. Unions can ram through card check legislation. But that won't help them compete with Japan.
It is kind of poignant that Yuske, who is from Japan, wouldn't recognize General Motor's insignia. Americans would have no trouble with the Toyota emblem. From what I read in the papers the American auto industry has pretty much ceded the car market (where it has been thoroughly out competed) to Japan and gets by instead on trucks and SUVs. Which of course Americans love, especially Americans from rural states like this one, where getting a truck can be a male rite of passage. But now, even it every vehicle sold in the Ozarks this year were a GMC truck, it couldn't save a company needing billions monthly just to keep afloat.
There is something defining and particular in the American love of the truck, and in a similar sense the auto industry and the big unions feel distinctive of a certain kind of American life. The auto makers are no longer captains of American industry. Their plants are no longer hooks for artists to paint mesmerized portraits. The American public no longer sits in theaters and gets dewy-eyed watching Henry Fonda as Tom Joad vow to unionize. Instead they watch The Wire, where union boss Frank Sabotka gazes out over abandoned factories and empty slips along the shoreline and is powerless to do much besides grease politicians. Sabotka calls a video of a super efficient Dutch port that requires only a fraction of the jobs he'd like to see on Baltimore's docks "a nightmare." And it is if you envision, as Frank does, your son knowing the life you and your father knew and working the same job too. There is human tragedy in the fact that economies evolve. You can see the continued loss of manufacturing jobs on the horizon, no matter what the government does. You can see the blow to unions as they are faulted for undermining the competitiveness of their own companies. GM can go cap in hand to politicians. Unions can ram through card check legislation. But that won't help them compete with Japan.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Pecan Pie
I made my first pecan pie this Thanksgiving
9-inch pie crust, baked
3 eggs
1 1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1 cup sugar
2 Tb. melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup pecans
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Beat eggs slightly. Add other ingredients, mixing in the pecans last of all. Pour into pie crust and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, then another 30 minutes at 350 degrees (assuming a non-quirky oven, which would have been a fatal mistake at my grandmother's house).
This recipe is from Little Rock Cooks cookbook, which is a family standard, is missing both covers, and has its most popular pages encrusted and mummified for eternity. It also has the world's best recipe for cheese grits. More on that later.
9-inch pie crust, baked
3 eggs
1 1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 1/2 cup dark corn syrup
1 cup sugar
2 Tb. melted butter
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup pecans
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Beat eggs slightly. Add other ingredients, mixing in the pecans last of all. Pour into pie crust and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes, then another 30 minutes at 350 degrees (assuming a non-quirky oven, which would have been a fatal mistake at my grandmother's house).
This recipe is from Little Rock Cooks cookbook, which is a family standard, is missing both covers, and has its most popular pages encrusted and mummified for eternity. It also has the world's best recipe for cheese grits. More on that later.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
1863, 1963, 2013
I've been reading Stephen Oates biography of Martin Luther King. Going over events again, it is amazing how much was encompassed in that one year of 1963. There was the Birmingham campaign, Letter from Birmingham Jail, the March on Washington, the murder of Medgar Evans, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't remember much being done to commemorate these events in 2003, which would have been the 40th anniversary. Will there be a 50th anniversary to any of these events? Will memorials be scattered, like say a celebration of the March on Washington, or a commemorative magazine issue on Kennedy? Or will the year be taken as a whole? Because it seems like a major aspect to the events of '63 is their compactness with everything else that was going on at that time, a sense of portentous events being wedged in tightly on on top of the other in a short calendar space. There is a fevered atmosphere in that jumble that a commemoration of only one episode wouldn't capture. The 50th anniversary of 1963 will be 2013. Having just finished the first term of the first African American president, will we be inclined to look back 50 years for our comparisons and contrasts of the milestone? 1963 was momentous in part because Kennedy and King were both looking over their shoulders to 1863 and Emancipation Proclamation, whose centennial was that year. History is like a backward glance sweepstakes; the present is always looking back somewhere and it is simply a question of in what direction the nostalgia tends.
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