Eating Out

I have been reading back issues of The New Yorker of late. One issue, from September '07, was dedicated to food and included several essays entitled "Family Dinner". It made me think of some experiences I have had in the culinary realm, particularly those with my favorite cuisine, Indian food.
For two years, back in the 1970's, I lived in India, teaching at an International School in a small town in the mountains called Kodaikanal. It is what in India is known as a 'hill station', what we would call a resort town, a place where wealthier (and luckier) inhabitants of the sub-continent can go to escape the infernal heat on the plains in the hot season. Kodaikanal has the distinction of being the only hill station in the whole country that was actually established by Americans, not by the British. It is located in the Nilgiri Hills, a mountain range that runs parallel to the west coast of South India. At 7,200 feet in elevation it is the equivalent of a quarter of the way up Mount Everest. The altitude takes some getting used to. But because it is located only five degrees north of the equator, the enviornment is quite unique. It has been described as a 'high altitude jungle'. It is the most exotic place I have ever lived in. The Nilgiri Hills are eternally green, a fertile garden in which all kinds of spectacularly blooming trees and bushes abound. Pointsettias grew naturally outside the door of the staff lounge of Kodai School and they bloomed every October. The main attraction of the town is a man-made lake surrounded by eucalyptus forests (see photo). Even today, so many years later, the scent of eucy oil can send me back to South India.
But getting back to food...During 'the season', when Kodai was overrun with visitors, various Westerners and Indians would rent cottages in the area. Some people (the Indians being a very enterprising lot) even managed to make their stay pay for itself . Every year, in 'season', a certain gentleman (he was from Gujerat, I believe) would rent a small cottage further up the hill where he would run a kind of private restaurant. You would have to pre-arrange the date with him and he would cook a grand meal for you. It was said to be an exceptional experience. Three of us from the Kodai staff signed on. This rent-a-chef was known simply as Kaka, which supposedly means 'father' in Gujerati. The cottage he worked in was really a tiny, one-room shack, with no kitchen. But somehow he managed to prepare an elaborate meal (vegetarian, of course), with rice, several curries, chutneys and roasted bread that was delicious beyond description. He cooked his local cuisine which, as I remember, had a slight hint of sweetness in the curries. (North Indian cuisine, with its influence from the Mughals, is far more varied than that of South India, which tends to be somewhat limited and monotonous -- but hotter, if that is possible.) But there was one really weird thing about that experience (and in India there is always something a bit weird in every experience): Kaka, a rather large man, sat cross-legged on a neighboring table in his ample dhoti and watched us eat the entire time. Can you imagine eating a meal with someone staring at you THE WHOLE BLOODY TIME? Apparently, he wanted to be certain that we enjoyed his culinary efforts. In India it is not considered rude to stare at other people. Like the altitude, it took a little getting used to.
And speaking of the habit of staring...That reminds me of another memorable repast in India, one on a train. I returned to India some twenty-two years later for a visit. After a stay in gorgeous Kerala, the state that lies between the Nilgiri Hills and the Arabian Sea, I took a train through the mountains to neighboring Tamil Nadu. I have always loved traveling on the trains in India, and usually did so in second or third class; it was much more interesting that way. The route made a tortuous ascent into the mountains, traversing a high-altitude pass which cut through ragged peaks. There were palm trees in the valleys. The landscape was enchanting, something like Palm Beach on the moon; I had never seen anything remotely like it. It was a long ride and when lunch time rolled around I threw caution to the wind and ordered a meal. Eating out in India can be a risky business as one can never be assured of the cleanliness of the preparation. Cholera, dysentary, intestinal amoebas, etc. can result and, believe me, they are no fun. On any long-distance Indian train there is an established system whereby one can place an order for a meal (veg or non-veg are the options). The orders are then phoned ahead to an upcoming station where your meal is delivered to you. I was ravenously hungry. The packet I received was wrapped in discarded newspaper and tied with string. Inside was a large banana leaf (the ubiquitous dinnerware of South Asia) which offered a generous portion of rice, several veg curries, a simple chutney and a small plastic bag (also tied with a string) with fresh curd. I knew I was really being incautious by partaking of that last item but, what the hell. As I was the only Anglo on the train, the other passengers were very curious to see if the burra sahib (me) knew how to handle the niceties of eating an Indian meal -- and that means eating with your fingers. A small mob took up positions around my area, unashamedly staring at me. I felt like an animal in a zoo exhibit (talk about unnerving!), but the best policy was to simply ignore them. When they observed that I was a pro in culinary etiquette they quickly lost interest and let me be. The meal was delicious. And I didn't get sick from it.
And where did I learn my impeccable manners in eating from a banana leaf? Not from Emily Post, I assure you. I remember my very first encounter with eating Indian fashion. After several weeks of living up in Kodaikanal after I first arrived, a weekend trip was planned to the ancient city of Madurai, a place famous for its spectacular Sri Meenakshi temple. I joined a small party of colleagues and was very excited about finally getting to explore the real India. One of my companions, Karsten (originally from Wisconsin), had been in India for many years already and knew the ropes. He suggested a nice little place for lunch, one with great food. He said it was frequented by local businessmen. One could have conjured up a vision of Mom's Diner, only with curry on the menu. We arrived at the eatery, a veritable hole in the wall, and were shown seats. One bearer (server) came by and plunked banana leaves in front of us. A series of bearers then laddled rice and various curries out of large pots, followed by the other savory particulars that make an Indian meal so interesting. There was no cutlery, of course. I had never faced the prospect of eating with my fingers and didn't have a clue as to how it was properly done. It didn't occur to Karsten, old India hand that he was, that I was uninitiated in the art of eating rice and curry off a banana leaf. So, it was a matter of careful observation and following suit. There is a whole etiquette to it. First, you only touch your food with your right hand, NEVER with the left (there is an established system amongst the Hindus of clean and unclean body parts); you mix the rice and curries lustily, create a manageable ball of food with your fingers and funnel it into your mouth with the thumb. It's okay to slurp and grunt, by the way -- it shows that you're enjoying your meal. Try that at the next time you're dining at the Hotel Four Seasons!

Ponder this...

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, "Is there life after death?"
The Zen master says, "How should I know?"
The guy replies indignantly, "Because you're a Zen master!"
"Yes," says the Zen master, "but not a dead one."
as told by Brad Warner

Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
Woody Allen

"You're alive right now. Just be what you are, where you are. That's the most magical thing there is. The life you're living right now has joys even God could never know."
Brad Warner, from "Hardcore Zen"

The Ironville Mystery

(The following was written in the summer of 2007, during my stay in Schroon Lake, NY.)

The Ironville Mystery. Doesn't that sound like a good title for a novel? If I ever write one (fat chance!) I've got a good beginning, real life scenario.
On my excursions around the area I discovered a short cut a few years ago that shaves a few miles off the route from Schroon Lake to the Champlain Bridge at Crown Point into Vermont. Just before the descent into the Champlain Valley and Ticonderoga there is a turn off with a marker for 'Historic Ironville'. It's a lovely rural road that passes through the hamlet of Ironville, a village consisting of ten or so well-preserved early nineteenth century buildings. I've been through there a number of times and, although the properties are well-tended and gardens are blooming everywhere, I have never ever seen a single living person there. It is like something out of the Twilight Zone---a weird but picturesque ghost town. The other day I had the afternoon off and drove to Crown Point via the long route, then returned via the Ironville road. I drove through the town, but on an impulse decided to stop. It was a blazing hot. Again, there was not a living soul in sight. The door of the church, a modest white clapboard structure built in 1830, was wide open. Not a thing has been changed in it since it was built---even the glass in the windows is original. Across the street there is a fine Victorian house which contains the Ironville Museum. It's front door was also invitingly wide open, but there was nobody there, not a soul. It was really eerie. I almost expected to walk into a time warp and find the inhabitants of the house dressed in their 1830's finery, going about their business, glancing up at me quizzically as I entered their domain. Out of thin air, it seemed, an older gentleman appeared, trotting across the road. He declared himself the caretaker of the place and informed me that he lived in one of the historic houses across the street. He assured me that there were other sentient beings about. As I signed the register I noticed that the place has about one or two visitors a day. Ironville is really off the beaten track. It was even more surprising to see that the visitors on the previous day were from London, UK. (Does Ironville have four stars in the Michelin Guide or something?)
The caretaker gave me a lengthy personal tour of the place (he had nothing else to do, anyway). The fine house was built by one Eliasar Penfield who owned the iron ore mine in the hills above the town. Original settlers came over after the War of 1812. By then Vermont was settled and the Adirondack region was still uninhabited wilderness (the Indians didn't count, of course). The original attraction was timber, of which there was an ample supply. But in these hills above the Champlain Valley seams of iron ore were discovered. Around 1830 somebody came up with a method for extracting the ore using an electrical magnetic brush (a very simple process, apparently). Hammondville, the mining town in the hills above, became a boom town. It once had a population of about 3,000. Many of the workers were immigrants who were recruited as they stepped off the boat in New York City. There were photographs of the place, completely de-nuded of trees. The nearby stream had three dams to provide power and there was even a small guage railway to haul the ore to Lake Champlain. It must have been a hard life up there. With time the lumber was depleted and the mines became too deep to mine effectively. When the Hammondville mines were closed down in 1920 every single building was dismantled. Since then the forest has regenerated itself and the mine entrances have been covered over. Ironville remains as the last remnant of a bygone age of life in the Adirondacks. The last Penfield passed away some fifty years ago. The house remained closed up and vacant for thirty years until someone had the idea of preserving what was left of the town. The Penfield Manse is crammed with period artifacts. It still has in some rooms the original wall paper (hanging there for 170 years!). The family was quite pious and one of the spinster daughters went off to Japan to do missionary work. She returned with a stack of small sized wood block prints which she tacked around the top border of her bedroom. (They are still hanging there and would probably fetch a small fortune on eBay.) Two of the Penfield sons served in the Civil War. In one of the upstairs bedrooms artifacts from the war were displayed. The adjoining barn was filled with farm implements, including a large, still workable loom. There is an ice-house where blocks of ice were cut from the nearby pond and buried in sawdust for summer use.
I love small, out of the way museums like this and the treasures they contain---glimpses of ordinary lives which have faded with time. It reminds me of the vanity of our own self importance. The passing of time rolls over us as well. Will anyone appreciate my wallpaper 170 years from now? I rather doubt it.

Summer Travel

If you have come across the recently published book The Rest is Noise by music critic of The New Yorker Alex Ross, you will recognize the accompanying photo. It's a casual shot of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler at the stage door of the opera house in Graz, Austria in 1906. Salome had already been premiered in Germany (at the Dresden Hofoper) the previous year, but since the Emperor's censors decided that the subject matter of the opera was too scandalous, the Austrian premiere could not take place in Vienna. Graz was brave enough to take it on, and Strauss conducted. Music lovers came from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond to witness the newest, most outrageous creation of the enfant terrible Richard Strauss. It was a huge success.

Giacomo Puccini (with his wife) is also in this photo, with his back to the camera. Isn't it staggering to see these three great composers of the early 20th century in one place? Alban Berg was also in attendance. He saw the opera multiple times and even brought a score along so that he could learn more about the orchestration. And notice how small of stature Mahler is; he was a small man who wrote titanic music.

And what does this have to do with me? It just so happens that I will be spending the summer in Graz. I got an offer to coach a class in German Lieder at the AIMS program which takes place there in July and August. I couldn't think of anything I'd care to do more! Last winter I decided to relinquish my position at the Seagle Music Colony. I had spent twelve seasons there and felt it was time for a change. When thoughts of a long, boring, hot summer in Kansas City loomed I felt intuitively that something really interesting would turn up. And it did. I intend to make use of this blog to report on my travels and experiences in Europe this summer, so do check back. I am trading the Adirondacks for the Alps, a summer of doing opera for a summer of doing Lieder. There's a lot I will miss about Schroon Lake, New York --but I think I can get over it.

Dharma

"To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Neither satisfaction nor self really exist. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Yet these are two things that the whole world is looking for and it sounds quite reasonable, doesn't it? But since these are impossible to find, everybody is unhappy. Not necessarily because of tragedies, poverty, sickness, or death: simply because of unfulfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn't available...But satisfaction and self are both delusions, so how can they ever be found? Searching here and there keeps everyone busy on this little globe of ours. If we were to stop looking for satisfaction for the self, we would have an immediate lessening of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), since dukkha arises from wanting something." Ayya Khema

I thought I would just share the above with you; it's something I read that resonated with me. Yet another tragedy of massive proportions unfolds in Sechuan province in China and in Myanmar. Life is suffering and who can explain or comprehend why such horrible things happen? This is one of the imponderables of life in this human form. We don't have the vantage point to see how every event in the universe is part of the perfectly-tuned whole. Any attempt, by way of religion or New Age theorizing is, in my opinion, self-delusion. We desire to convince ourselves that we inhabit an orderly universe. We attempt, doggedly and futilely, to impose our own limited ideas of what that order should be. We just don't know, nor do we need to. It is ultimately a waste of time and distracts from the matter at hand, living in the now and discovering our true nature.

While we don’t wish suffering on anyone, I don’t mind one bit if the Chinese government, that band of thugs, is embarrassed. Some say that the Tibetans have been appealing to the mountain deities to show their displeasure. Who knows about that, but it is curious that this earthquake happened on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and at a time most inconvenient for the government which is trying to put a happy face on its repressive regime. I read that they pressed ahead with the torch relay at first and many Chinese were outraged at this inhumane insensitivity and expressed their displeasure by inundating the officials with e-mails. Good for them. Another thing to be thankful for in this life: we don’t live in Burma.

The Raj

Now that I have a bit of time on my hands before my summer employment, I have tackled the pile of books that has been accumulating on my desk. I began with Raj: the Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James. The subject of the Raj continues to fascinate me. During the several years I spent in India (1974-76) I met a few individuals in the hill station of Kodaikanal who had opted to stay on, left-overs from the end of the Raj. In that way I felt I had intersected with the last living remnants of British rule in India.

We read history to learn about ourselves. Indeed, the same conflicts seem to re-play themselves over and over again in different eras and cultures. And it all boils down to the same thing: men's greed for money and power. The author, Lawrence James, is a prolific historian. He is British, but he is no apologist for the deeds of his countrymen in the past. He tells it like it is (and bravo to you, Mr. James!). One episode in the early stages of British mercantile involvement on the Indian sub-continent struck me in particular because of its uncanny similarity to our own situation here in the USA. The East India Trading Company was set on making as much profit as possible and by the mid-1700's it saw the province of Bengal (of which Calcutta is the capital) as ripe for the picking. The EITC also came to realize that political subterfuge, playing one side against another, would advance their cause. With a single-minded dedication to avarice, the Governors-General Robert Clive and his successor Warren Hastings, made as much mischief as they could, pillaged Bengal, bled the country dry and filled their own pockets at an alarming rate. When word eventually reached London of their doings, those of a more liberal bent raised a ruckus. To the Whigs, such behavior was a blight on the integrity and moral standing of England. The Tories (read: Republicans) claimed that intervention in the affairs of the EITC would forcibly diminish their rights of free trade (think: NAFTA and other 'free-trade' agreements). The Tories yammered about an 'assault on property', bought off members of the parliament and mobilised the bankers and the rich and powerful (today we call it lobbying). The monarch of the time, George III (the Dubya of his day) intervened to have a bill thrown out, one designed to control the East India Company. The Parliament was dissolved and new elections were called. The Tories won the day. Some things don't change in this world; the rich trample on everyone else and see it as their divine right to do so.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. Granted, the last thing the cyberworld needs is yet another blogspot but, I ask myself, why not join the party in this modern age of instant and comprehensive self-expression? I do not flatter myself that I am any more clever or witty than thousands of other bloggers. Yet, due to my life experience, I may have an interesting perspective on the world around me and my own involvement in it. I have posed the immortal question to myself a good number of times: what the hell is going on here anyway? And I have done some serious looking. I am now sixty-one years old (and I gently remind you that 60 is the new 40), I'm still going strong, still curious about and interested in lots of things. I am, by all accounts, a pretty serious guy. In the accompanying pic I may look like I've just swallowed a dill pickle or interrupted a reading of the complete works of Schopenhauer -- but don't buy it . It's all a facade; it's stage make-up and a costume. Behind it all is a person even unknown to me. And before I figure out who is inhabiting this body, this mortal frame will have turned to dust and the 'me' dissolved into thin air. Such is life.
Last year I had an opera of mine successfully premiered here in Kansas City. That was, if I may say so myself, pretty cool -- and astonishing even to myself. Who determines when you should 'hang it up'? Nobody but yourself. So, my opening words of wisdom are: continue to be curious and enjoy what life has to offer. Don't believe anything. At the same time don't forget the exploration of that ever intriguing question: What's it all for?