My aversion to airport security is well-documented. I’ve never really mentioned that I don’t particularly care for my fellow travelers, either. And when I see headlines like “Baby is sent through X-ray machine at LAX,” it seems to confirm that there are people out there capable of doing some dumb things.

Putting a baby through an X-ray machine at airport security is a bad idea. But if you want to see the Mother of all Bad Ideas, check out the article I found in Capitalism Magazine this morning, entitled “How to Solve America’s Terrorism Problem in 5 Easy Steps.”

Craig Biddle, the author, starts off his list of spectacularly sound ideas with “Stop sacrificing American soldiers to bring ‘freedom’ to savages in Iraq. Pull our soldiers out of that hell hole, and let the savages have their civil war.”

Savages? I’ve heard various adjectives flung from both sides of the Arab - American conflict, but “savages” is a new one. An extremely ignorant one, considering that the denizens of Iraq certainly aren’t savage. They’re descendants of one of the oldest, most storied civilizations on the planet.

The second “Easy Step” is “Declare war on Iran.”

So easy. Apparently Mr. Biddle has personally fought several armed conflicts, because his third “Easy Step” demonstrates his chops as a tactician:

“Obliterate, from high altitude and long distance, all known Iranian military assets, all Iranian government buildings, all Iranian mosques and madrassahs, and the residences of all Iranian leaders, imams, clerics, and government officials. Hit these targets when they are most likely to be occupied (e.g., mosques during the day and residences at night). Do not send soldiers in on foot, except as necessary to identify targets or gather intelligence. We do not need to send soldiers in on foot to fight, and it would be immoral to do so. We have many big missiles, fast planes, and good bombs, and we should use these liberally while building bigger, faster, and better ones. (As to innocent non-Americans, such as Iranian children, who would be killed in such a campaign, they are not properly the concern of our government. Nor would their deaths be the fault of our government. Such deaths are always the fault of the force-initiating regime—and of those who in any way support or enable it—whose actions necessitate such retaliatory measures.)”

Not only would bombing mosques be a complete violation of the Geneva Convention, but imagine the retaliatory strikes against the United States by states like Syria and organizations such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. The attacks of 9/11 would be a walk in the park in comparison to the anarchy unleashed inside this country in the wake of such an attack.

Easy Step Number Four is the basis of an outstanding PR plan:

“Airdrop leaflets across the Middle East explaining: ‘From now on, this is how America will respond to any and all threats to her citizens or allies. We look forward to the time when you decide to civilize yourselves, stop taking religion seriously, renounce the initiation of physical force, recognize the principle of individual rights, establish rule of law, and join the free world. Until then, we will be watching you from way up in the sky—higher even than Allah, by means of technology He cannot fathom—and if we see anything that we so much as feel might conceivably pose even a remote threat either to America or to our allies, we will annihilate it and everything in its proximity without further warning.’

and is closely followed by Easy Step Number Five:

“Notify the regime in Saudi Arabia that it got lucky and has the option of not being obliterated; that we are prepared instead to seize ‘its’ oil fields and sell them to private industry, in part to pay for the campaign against Iran, and in part to return the fields to private industry where they belong; that it has 24 hours to turn the fields over to our agents; and that if it fails to comply or ignites the fields or does anything to thwart our program, its leaders, like those of Iran, will meet Allah sooner than later.”

Mr. Biddle admits that, even if we took these steps immediately “there would still be a few isolated instances of terrorism here and there in months and years to come.” I’d like to ask Mr. Biddle what further terrorist attacks have occurred on American shores since 9/11. I’m not naive enough to think we’ve solved the terrorist problem by the rent-a-cop TSA-types in the airport, the Patriot Act, and the Department of Homeland Security, but I know that we would reap tenfold what happened in Manhattan that day in September 2001 if we followed such an idiotic scheme.

One might think Mr. Biddle was an ultra-militaristic Evangelical Christian, living in a compound in Montana, by the tenor of his approach, but it turns out he’s an Objectivist, motivated entirely by a doctrine of rational selfishness. I hadn’t realized such individuals were in our country, and I’m disappointed to learn that they’re organized enough to publish several periodicals.

In the self-interest of the sane people in the country, I think we should lock up Mr. Biddle and his cronies and throw away the key. If they’re true Objectivists, they’ll understand.

In my previous post I mentioned that I had picked up John F. Szwed’s Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. After a weekend of light reading I’ve already come upon several interesting topics of conversation, one of which kept my mind in a state of slow percolation all Sunday.

In Chapter 10, Szwed begins a discussion of jazz styles - not a series of definitions and explainations of names like boogie-woogie, third stream, and fusion - but of the actual thought process in assigning periods (or “schools”) to jazz, a music that doesn’t delineate into clear-cut movements as easily as other classified arts, such as painting or classical music.

The following is a page and a half excerpt from Szwed’s text:

The matter of jazz styles urgently needs rethinking. Composer/saxophonist Anthony Braxton has suggested that the changes that occur in jazz (though he includes all music in this conception, and perhaps all art, culture, and technology) can be seen in terms of what he calls restructuralists, stylists, and traditionalists. Restructuralists are musicians who change music to the extent that the structural properties of the music change — change to the point that they may literally threaten the musical and even the social order. Stylists, on the other hand, take the music created by restructuralists and recode it and redner it publicly acceptable. They are the technocrats of the music, Braxton says, and confirm the existing reality. If Charlie Parker was a restructuralist, Phil Woods is a stylist; ditto the relationship between John Coltrane and Charles Lloyd. (Critic Martin Williams once dryly remarked that Charles Lloyd’s effort was one of making Coltrane safe for democracy.) Traditionalists are those who live in complete awareness of what came before and reproduce the past by adjusting it for contemporary reality. Using Braxton’s ideas, we can look at the music conventionally grouped under the heading of bebop and see it as being a restructuralist music in the 1940s and early 1950s, a stylistic in the music in the later 1950s, and a traditionalist form ever since.

One can quibble about who fits under what heading, but an analysis like Braxton’s would complicate the way we think about styles and offer some correction to the oversimplification of jazz history. It is also interesting to follow his conclusion that all three of these tendencies should be present in a healthy musical culture. Restructuralism gives music a sense of development and direction, but if there were no other forces at work, it would produce novelty rather than culture, one change following another forever. Stylists alone would put an end to forward motion in music by slowing ending innovation (this is the tendency in music most favored by nightclubs, schools, and public institutions). Traditionalism, if carried to its logical conclusion, would stop change altogether and expend its efforts attempting to adapt another era to our own under a nostalgic rejection of the current cultural situation (Such a condition now exists in opera where the “classics” have closed out all but the occasional new work.)

What impressed me most about that passage is how easily I could apply it to classical music, and to what degree it remained a valid argument.

For example, as Amadeus stressed, at the time of composition, Mozart’s music was incredibly avant garde, both in the way he created the sound and many of the forms or subjects he set it to. Obviously Amadeus takes creative liberties with some of the Mozart story, but one of the things it captures particularly well through Salieri’s narrative is the freshness and restructuralist nature of Mozart’s compositions.

Other major restructuralists in classical music spring ready to mind quite easily - Stravinsky, Wagner, Beethoven - but less clear is where the stylists and traditionalists fit in. Because so little of the classical repertoire is focused on the legitimately new anymore (the crisis of classical music being similar to the crisis in opera, though for somewhat different reasons), it would appear the traditionalists have taken over, putting the entire artistic form at risk. This is not to be construed as a “classical music is dead, or dying” statement, but I do think that Braxton does raise some legitimate debate about the forces at work in art.

How does this strike the classical musicians in the audience?

My friend Rob and I recently had a couple discussions which touched on a subject I find a trifle fascinating. The second of our two chats brushed the subject of poseur-ism, and how each of us is more or less a sham artist at one time or another in at least one area of enthusiasm.

I myself am probably truly qualified to discuss only three or four subjects with any sort of weight to my opinion beyond that of the average individual: life in the Marines (specifically life in an artillery unit), cooking (although I’m less qualified than I was four years ago), and baseball players/statistics from the time period during which I collected baseball cards (roughly the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties) are the areas that jump immediately to mind. The other areas of my more extreme enthusiasm, literature, music, Westerns and film noir, and American art, are all shot-through at various points where my rube-ish lack of depth is painfully (to me, anyway) obvious. The Internet has aided somewhat in patching these areas with intellectual Bondo, but like poorly applied Bondo on a dented fender, my counterfeit savvy is conspicuous to anyone with the ability to see beneath the shiny lacquer that covers it up.

The first of the two discussions with Rob that I mentioned centered around jazz, specifically the roles of the individual musicians in a group, with us breaking down the traditional jazz quartet (pianist, bassist, drummer, and another instrument, be it vibes or sax or trumpet, or anything else) and combing over the various roles each individual plays in the ensemble.

I approached the conversation as a classical musician, for that is where the overwhelming majority of my musical training is derived. About thirteen years as a violinist and five as a violist built the window frame from which I survey the musical landscape. As a musician who has played a considerable amount of jazz (or, if that’s too much of a claim for Rob’s taste, a considerable amount more jazz than I have), Rob had an apodeictic advantage over in the conversation, and he quickly straightened me out in some areas where my approach to the capacity of the different components in the group was completely off-base.

In a correspondent issue, I’m amused at the areas where my intellectual snobbery gets the best of me, and the topics that I’m willing to exclude from that particularly sketchy aspect of my personality. I won’t get bent out of shape when someone prefers reading Dan Brown or Chuck Palahnuik over Thomas Hardy or William Gibson, even though I think they’re wasting their time, simply because I know I can’t expect every reader out there to enjoy the somber style of Hardy or the au courant prophetical-ness of Gibson. Often times I’m simply pleased to see someone read, even if they are filling their head with garbage.

Music is a different beast, however. I get righteously indignant if I hear someone listening to, say, Justin Timberlake at the expense of someone more deserving (say, Queens of the Stone Age). Because music is such a basic cultural component, I can be quite contemptuous of those I see as musical Philistines, willing to devote time and money to music that, were it beef, would be of the quality reserved for kibble and prison chow. Maybe I’m missing my true calling (is “musical abattoir” a legitimate job?), but I can’t help how I feel.

Still, my position is a bit disingenuous. One one hand, I pretend to highly developed sensibilities and look down my nose at those who dare trifle with less worthy forms of music. On the other hand, I have a minuscule amount of actual working knowledge when it comes to jazz. I know quite a few performers and possess a decent musical ear, which helps me fake my way along in most conversations, but I’m still that poseur who pretends to have it together.

Well, I’ve grown tired of the masquerade with jazz. When I was out Christmas shopping earlier this week, I picked up Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. If I’m going to claim this as my music, I should damn well know what I’m talking about, which means knowing how to get from the Original Dixie Land Jazz Band to Chet Baker without fumbling around and checking Wikipedia and All Music Guide.

Shoot, I didn’t even know Walt Dickerson existed until just a few weeks ago, and vibes are practically my favorite instrument to listen to, jazz wise. Until I found Walt, the only vibraphonist I knew of was Milt Jackson.

Then again, who needs to listen to vibraphonists other than Milt Jackson?

Just kidding. Even my hypocrisy knows boundaries.

One of the things I’ve gotten back into during my recent long absence is cooking. To my own mind I feel extremely rusty in the kitchen, fumbling around, burning roux (or worse, melting plastic spoons into it while stirring), generally being the opposite of who I used to be when I wore the whites.

It doesn’t help that I have high expectations for myself or that my sense of taste hasn’t atrophied in conjunction with my cooking skills. Nor does reading Kitchen Confidential to Jo make me enthusiastic about my moves, which would require a Rocky III level of training to recapture.

While I’m not particularly happy with my results to this point, I’ve come across some good recipes that have been fun to cook. There have been a few that I’ve been so impressed with that I’m willing to pass them on, and I decided that posting them here is the easiest way to do so.

I pull recipes and inspirations from a variety of sources, and the one I’m featuring today, Creamed Chicken with Corn and Bacon over Polenta, comes from the September 2000 issue of Gourmet magazine.

The recipe itself is pretty easy and doesn’t call for any ingredient more exotic or hard to find than polenta, which you can pick up just about anywhere. Jo and I aren’t millionaires, and we can’t afford to constantly eat food filled with fancy ingredients, which means that what I do cook is more straightforward and “honest,” as Anthony Bourdain says. We’re talking food for working people here, haute cuisine. Even if I am a whiz with the tin opener…

First, mise en place.

The equipment you’ll need:

1 large saute pan (or cast-iron skillet, if you can manage it)
1 small saute pan
2 medium sauce pans
tongs
whisk
spatula (non-melting type)
sieve
small bowl

medium plate
liquid measurement cups
dry measurement cups
table and tea spoons
paper towels

And now, the ingredients. I’ve made a few suggestions (in italics) and have annotated salt and pepper measurements with asterisks because I firmly believe each cook should season the food to their taste, not to any arbitrary measurement.

For the creamed chicken:

6 bacon slices
1 lb skinless, boneless chicken breast
2 cups corn (~3 ears, if you’re going the fresh route)
1 cup milk
2 Tablespoons unsalted (sweet) butter
2 Tablespoons flour (you’re probably going to need more)
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon ground black pepper*
1/2 teaspoon black white pepper*
1 teaspoon kosher salt*
3 large plum tomatoes, seeded and finely diced
1 large red bell pepper, seeded and finely diced
1 large orange bell pepper, seeded and finely diced
canola oil, enough to coat the bottom of your skillet

For the polenta:

6 cups water (I’d go with half water, half chicken stock for extra flavor)
2 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt*
1 1/2 cups polenta
1/2 lb Fontina cheese, diced (doesn’t need to be Fontina - pick something you like)

1/4 cup fresh basil

Starting with the bacon, cook it in the small amount of canola oil in the skillet, over medium heat, until it reaches the level of doneness you prefer in your bacon. The amount you cook it won’t have an effect on any later process - the bacon is going to be a garnish.

Once the bacon has finished cooking, transfer it to some paper towels for cooling and degreasing purposes. Retain about 1 1/2 tablespoons of the bacon fat/canola oil in the skillet. After the bacon cools, dice it into 1/2 inch pieces.

While the bacon is cooking, pat the chicken dry and season it liberally with salt and pepper. The idea is to get a nice coating of seasoning on the chicken so it cooks in when you toss it in the skillet with the still-hot bacon fat/canola oil. Be careful when you do this, as you’re going to get some splattering.

Cook the chicken over moderately high heat for around 8-10 minutes, or until it’s just cooked through and still nice and juicy. Take it out of the skillet and place it on a plate to cool. Later you’re going to want to tear it into bite-sized pieces.

The corn and the cream sauce come next. You’re going to pour the milk into one of the sauce pans, toss in the corn and diced peppers, and cook both about 5 minutes, or until the corn is crisply tender. Carefully pour the milk through the sieve into a bowl and retain both corn and milk separately.

Using the same sauce pan (you might want to wipe it out quickly in case some of the milk is still adhering to the pan), melt the butter over moderately low heat. If your heat is too high, your flour will cook too fast and your roux will become too powerful. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir!, allowing the roux to cook about two minutes. This is going to be key - if your roux is too strong, it’s going to turn your sauce into a thick gravy (like mine sort of turned out to be).

Gradually whisk in the cream, then the milk from earlier, along with additional salt and pepper to taste. Bring the lot up to a boil, then turn it down to a simmer for three minutes, whisking all the while. Stir in the peppers, corn, and chicken. Cover and keep warm over low heat. Stir occasionally if needed.

Finally, the polenta. While the other things are starting to cook, bring the stock/water/salt (watch your salt if your chicken stock is salty to begin with) combination to a boil. Stir in the polenta and cook over moderately high heat. Keep stirring the polenta as it cooks, or it’s going to stick to the bottom and taste horrible (something along the lines of burnt cornbread). It should take about 5 minutes to cook. After the polenta is thick and pulling away from the sides of the pan, turn off the heat and stir in bits of the cheese, a few chunks at a time so you avoid an enormous cheese curd in the middle.

Divide the polenta into bowls (the recipe says it serves six, but I’d guess it’s more of a real world four, especially if you’ve got hungry folks on hand). Stir the basil into the chicken/corn/peppers mixture and spoon that over the polenta. Garnish with the bacon you cooked and diced earlier.

I didn’t think this a bad recipe, and without serious gaffes it should take only about 40 minutes from start to finish. With all the polenta and corn it can be a bit bland, so if you’re feeling like experimenting, cooking the chicken with some white wine would fit in nicely and add some flavor, as would other spices of a Southwestern persuasion that you enjoy. I didn’t have the peppers on hand - I came up with that idea after eating half the meal. If you drink beer, I’d suggest a brown ale with this meal - I happened to have some Goose Island Christmas Ale that went down well.
If this post piques enough interest, I’ll make a cooking supplement a semi-regular feature here. I cook every night and have already run across three or four recipes of relative ease that I can share for those interested.

The recent ban of trans fatty acids (commonly known as “trans fat”) by the City of New York is such a mockery of the American public and our system of government that it would require more space than I have available to address each flaw in the collective judgment of the New York City Board of Health.

The health effects of a quantitative intake of trans fat aren’t really debatable - once one considers the fact that until as recently as the early 1990s trans fat wasn’t viewed as a significant threat to the physical well-being of the ever-consuming public - but that really isn’t the issue I care to raise. If sufficient evidence indicates that trans fat is dangerous when consumed in significant quantities, I can understand a need to inform the public about the detrimental effects of a diet rich in trans fat. What I don’t agree with is the need to ban the consumption of it entirely.

What concerns me most, what annoyingly chafes my libertarian (please note the lowercase “L”) sensibilities, is that any government, no matter if it is city, state, or federal, feels it has the authority to legislate what may justifiably be consumed as food by the consenting populace. What we eat, beyond the questions of pesticides on produce and the handling of actual foodstuffs prior to the purchase by the consumer, should be matter of personal choice. With the exception for ensuring the general public is not poisoned by unsanitary conditions at the processing plants or during shipment, the essential freedoms engendered by the Bill of Rights should allow Americans the choice - whether ill-advised or not - the food they eat.

One can raise several questions which take into account various aspects where this freedom may be dangerous to the consumer, and naturally such situations require attention and appropriate action.

Nutritional education is essential and should be started at an early age. Schools have become the easiest way to disseminate such information, just as most schools now handle the sexual and drug-awareness education of children, matters once reserved to the attention (or inattention) of parents. While there is a dietary education system already in place for much of the country, the effectiveness of that program is certainly open to debate, especially as the rates of dietary-related disease continue to rise. I submit that this is a failure of the system as it stands and not an opening for the encroachment of the government into the civil liberties of Americans in regard to their food consumption. If an American citizen chooses a diet rich in fast food and other products of questionable nutritional value, it should merely be the duty of the government to inform that individual in advance, through prior education and requiring the posting of nutritional information by food purveyors, of the danger to their health posed by such activity.

Of course, there are children to consider, particularly children of parents incapable of providing them with proper nourishment. Unfortunately, with or without the trans fat legislation, this will always be the case until: a) an application and approval process is established for an official license to have children (which might not be such a bad idea after all), and b) a proper oversight and enforcement agency is developed to ensure all parents provide their children with the proper level of nutrition. The likelihood of either of these suggestions coming to fruition is of course minuscule at best.

I am amused when individuals develop a sense of self-righteousness about the “poison” in the food their children are exposed to and yet who would not stop to consider much of the mental poison that permeates our culture. In reality, which is more dangerous to the development of a child - the harmful ingredients in certain foods, or the glamorization of a life of crime, violence, abuse of women, and illicit drug use through certain types of popular music or motion pictures? As a parent, which would you rather give your child, a Krispy Kreme doughnut or the latest 50 Cent album? Which product is more dangerous? Which should be more strictly regulated?

As a matter of legality, we cannot ban 50 Cent and his cronies from making and selling albums because their rights to do so are protected under the First Amendment. They are using their freedom of speech to make an “artistic” statement in the form of music (although the musicality is considered open to debate by some). We can control, to an extent, the distribution of these products through a ratings system, but a complete ban on the expression of such “artists” would never hold up in court.

I suggest, then, that any company or individual involved in activity that would be endangered or altered by this trans fat ban file suit against the City of New York for a violation of their First Amendment rights. Common consensus is that culinarians - the bakers, butchers, chefs, and restaurateurs who provide us with the (edible) products of their self-expression - are artists of a certain degree. To infringe upon the artistic expression of an individual or group of individuals would constitute an unlawful suspension of such rights, particularly as it applies to the restaurant sector of the industry.

Why not parallel the regulation of the food and beverage industry with the “regulation” of the motion picture and music industries by developing a ratings scheme for food stuffs, restaurants, and bakeries? If that seems a daunting suggestion, I suggest that the enforcement of the trans fat ban hardly is an easy one, either.

A ratings system would not only allow the food providers the latitude to use whatever foodstuffs they required (with subsequent effect on their rating), but would create several niche business opportunities for restaurateurs interested in filling the demand for healthy eateries. A top rating in a variety of categories would be a selling point for chefs and restaurant owners, much as high scores in crash tests are for automobile manufacturers. The roll-out of such a ratings system would also be an opportunity for organizations like the FDA and American Heart Association to educate the public on their intake of the food available to them.

In the end it comes down to how much we care to allow the government to influence our lives. Do we tolerate regulations and legislation that provide a safety net for individuals incapable of fending for themselves, despite the restriction they create in the lives of the rest of the citizenry? Is there a certain level of food safety that we as a society need to ensure is met by all food providers, just as we require emissions and safety regulation for vehicles?

At what point do we draw the line, or do we continually allow the government the latitude to decide what is best for us, collectively, with no respect for our greater rights as individuals? When do we say that the needs of a group outweigh the rights of each individual?

Like it or not, this is about more than just food. This is another battleground in the struggle with the government for control over your body and your personal freedom.