Category Archives: beauty

On olives

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Jaca negra, luna grande y aceitunas en mi alforja I seldom discuss my favorite food. People are rarely indifferent about whether they live olives or not. Some can only stand them marinated in gin, still others like them only in brine. I like them anyway I can get them: stuffed with pimentos, seed in, marinated in olive oil and paprika, with garlic, with onions, the possibilities are endless. They are a crucial part of any good salad. I love to eat them by themselves as if they were the meal. They also accompany any kind of meat or vegetable. I love them with pasta or rice, ground into a paste for a crostini. The only thing more complex than the wide variety of olives are the various and in-sundry ways to prepare all of those varieties. I never get bored trying a new kind of olive, crushed, green, ripe, whatever. Olives are the stuff of which life is made, delicate meat, creamy oil, bitter taste. There are always olives in the kitchen, in the refrigerator. Man has been growing olive trees for millennia because he has never found anything more useful or tasty. Once cured in brine, they have an almost indefinite shelf life, never losing their food value even in the hottest desert weather. In some ways the simple olive is the most complex of foods, never a main dish, but more than just a snack, neither fish nor fowl, it is a fruit that is not sweet, yet it displays a complex series of flavor profiles that are grounded in a basic bitterness that defines its identity.

On olives

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Jaca negra, luna grande y aceitunas en mi alforja I seldom discuss my favorite food. People are rarely indifferent about whether they live olives or not. Some can only stand them marinated in gin, still others like them only in brine. I like them anyway I can get them: stuffed with pimentos, seed in, marinated in olive oil and paprika, with garlic, with onions, the possibilities are endless. They are a crucial part of any good salad. I love to eat them by themselves as if they were the meal. They also accompany any kind of meat or vegetable. I love them with pasta or rice, ground into a paste for a crostini. The only thing more complex than the wide variety of olives are the various and in-sundry ways to prepare all of those varieties. I never get bored trying a new kind of olive, crushed, green, ripe, whatever. Olives are the stuff of which life is made, delicate meat, creamy oil, bitter taste. There are always olives in the kitchen, in the refrigerator. Man has been growing olive trees for millennia because he has never found anything more useful or tasty. Once cured in brine, they have an almost indefinite shelf life, never losing their food value even in the hottest desert weather. In some ways the simple olive is the most complex of foods, never a main dish, but more than just a snack, neither fish nor fowl, it is a fruit that is not sweet, yet it displays a complex series of flavor profiles that are grounded in a basic bitterness that defines its identity.

On Don Quixote as knight errant

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This man thinks he’s a knight errant out wandering in the world, righting wrongs, protecting damsels, slaying dragons, and dying for the love of his lady, and that is exactly what he attempts to do. The problem, though, is complex because he is a living anachronism, a knight in a time when knights no longer exist if they ever existed at all. The problem of the mere existence of Don Quixote is aggravated by the fact that all of Quixote’s information about how knights act has been gleaned from a series of fiction novels about knights and their adventures. The crusades have been over for centuries, and the figure of the knight has been rendered irrelevant by the invention of gun powder, lead shot, and the blunderbuss. By the time Cervantes writes about the ingenious hidalgo, the era of knight errantry has been over by more than a century. Most of Spain’s military is now pursuing new aventures in the new world, and central Spain, La Mancha, specifically, has become a social backwater where the locals raise grapes, wheat, and olives, and not much else. Whether don Quixote has read too many old adventure novels and gone crazy, or if something else is motivating his actions may be irrelevant. What is important are his actions while he purposefully reorganizes his identity, rebuilds his armor, changes his name, and sallies out on a new adventure, knowing full-well that there are no knights anymore. He is older, in his fifties, perhaps has a little too much free time, has no clear career or life objectives, and is clearly suffering from a mid-life existential crisis–if he doesn’t do something now, he never will. Instead of being young and virile, tough and toned, he’s skinny, got poor muscle tone, and is running on good intentions only. The question though is exactly that: are good intentions enough in the rough and tumble world of 1605, the cusp of modernity, the kryptonite of the knight errant.

On Don Quixote as knight errant

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This man thinks he’s a knight errant out wandering in the world, righting wrongs, protecting damsels, slaying dragons, and dying for the love of his lady, and that is exactly what he attempts to do. The problem, though, is complex because he is a living anachronism, a knight in a time when knights no longer exist if they ever existed at all. The problem of the mere existence of Don Quixote is aggravated by the fact that all of Quixote’s information about how knights act has been gleaned from a series of fiction novels about knights and their adventures. The crusades have been over for centuries, and the figure of the knight has been rendered irrelevant by the invention of gun powder, lead shot, and the blunderbuss. By the time Cervantes writes about the ingenious hidalgo, the era of knight errantry has been over by more than a century. Most of Spain’s military is now pursuing new aventures in the new world, and central Spain, La Mancha, specifically, has become a social backwater where the locals raise grapes, wheat, and olives, and not much else. Whether don Quixote has read too many old adventure novels and gone crazy, or if something else is motivating his actions may be irrelevant. What is important are his actions while he purposefully reorganizes his identity, rebuilds his armor, changes his name, and sallies out on a new adventure, knowing full-well that there are no knights anymore. He is older, in his fifties, perhaps has a little too much free time, has no clear career or life objectives, and is clearly suffering from a mid-life existential crisis–if he doesn’t do something now, he never will. Instead of being young and virile, tough and toned, he’s skinny, got poor muscle tone, and is running on good intentions only. The question though is exactly that: are good intentions enough in the rough and tumble world of 1605, the cusp of modernity, the kryptonite of the knight errant.

On beauty

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It’s all been said before, but maybe this term means more or less than you think it does. Philosophers have driven themselves (and their readers) mad in labyrinthine rhetorical treatises on the subject without ever (re)solving anything. One man’s pleasure is another’s pain. Most essays on beauty are fruitless, thornless, roses that neither praise nor defend any particular position, or perhaps not. The rose has been over-utilized as a metaphor for beauty, but dissolving the concept of beauty in an ironic metaphorical rose soup does nothing to define what makes something or someone beautiful. Some roses are ugly, too. A lot of beauty is about what looks good now–a fad, a passing moment, an ephemeral moment in time, a wisp of smoke, a shadow, nothing. People have fought over what is beauty, but in the long term their explanations are hollow, vacuous, superficial, focusing on the physical, which may be beautiful or may be ugly. Who knows? Some would have you think that they know. I would suspect that they are worried about being found out as fakes and phonies. An idea might be beautiful, or it may deserve to be on the hash-heap of history. We fill museums with beautiful things–paintings, sculptures, and the like, and then we charge admission to see them. Are they more beautiful because one must pay to see them? One might acquiesce to the idea that certain aesthetic structures are more pleasing to look at than others, that colors may go together, that this painting is more pleasing to look at than that sculpture, but again, is beauty a learned concept or are some things innately beautiful? As is the case with all human constructions, beauty is a contrivance, a convention based on what the hierarchy says is beautiful. Beauty is constructed, but I often wonder to what end. Nothing, it seems, is more inherently beautiful than anything else. I suppose that it boils down to what we have learned to love, and that is what we find beautiful.

On knots

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For most people, the first knot that they ever learn to tie is the one that keeps their shoes on. I had to learn how to tie my shoes before going to kindergarten. Whether you started buying penny loafers to avoid tying your shoe lace knots, or you became an ace at tying your shoes laces, knots are a big part of our world. I was not a Boy Scout, so I never studied knots, and since I have never sailed anything, I didn’t learn any seafaring knots either. I am great at letting my stomach get tied up in knots, but real knots of utility escape me. Basically, I can tie a square knot, a slip knot, and occasionally, when pushed by the situation, a non-slippage figure-eight knot. Most of the time, however, I am baffled by a mysterious array of knots that might be found in the world–strange and complex entanglements of cords, ropes, and strings that keep things in place. Nothing, however, is more complex than trying to untie the chaotic mess of your shoe strings at the end of the day which have inevitably created a tangle that would defeat even the great Houdini. Some people like to be tied up, but then again, the world is filled with more mysteries than than are dreamt of in my philosophy. The knot, whether literal or metaphorical, stands for complication, chaos, mystery, and strength. Knots are either being tied or untied, depending on both the purpose of the knot and the end of its task.

On the perfect cup of coffee, or the best cortado

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I do believe that if you take care to make a great cup of coffee, you don’t need to flavor it with anything else. Leave the vanilla for the ice cream, the hazel nut for chocolate spread, pumpkin for the pie. Yet the reality of most brewed coffee, especially if it has been pre-staled by one of the major coffee companies, is really pretty sad. Most brewed coffee is pretty bad–a weak, watery concoction that tastes more like umbrella juice than coffee. Recently roasted and freshly ground coffee, whether drip or espresso, is a pungent, fragrant, bitter array of robust flavors that have nothing to do with the coffee you buy at the local supermarket that comes ground in a can. Why Americans insist on dressing up their coffee with chocolate, caramel, pumpkin spice, vanilla, hazel nut, cinnamon and a bunch of other flavors is really easy to understand–they are drinking a stale, weak brew that doesn’t taste like anything at all. First, they never use enough coffee, so what they brew is as thin as water and isn’t opaque enough to obscure the bottom of the cup, much less taste like anything more than dirty water. Pre-ground coffee is also already stale, the vast majority of its flavor greatness lost with the passage of time as the bean’s essential oils are allowed to change and turn bitter with time, disappearing and losing any potency it once had. Never buy pre-ground coffee; pre-ground coffee is but a ghost of its whole-bean self. Even freshly roasted coffee has a shelf-life that is really very short. If you cannot roast your own, find a local roaster that roasts on a regular basis and buy into their production, buying small quantities so that your supply never gets very old before it is replenished. Old coffee is bad coffee, no question about it.

On the perfect cup of coffee, or the best cortado

Posted on by

I do believe that if you take care to make a great cup of coffee, you don’t need to flavor it with anything else. Leave the vanilla for the ice cream, the hazel nut for chocolate spread, pumpkin for the pie. Yet the reality of most brewed coffee, especially if it has been pre-staled by one of the major coffee companies, is really pretty sad. Most brewed coffee is pretty bad–a weak, watery concoction that tastes more like umbrella juice than coffee. Recently roasted and freshly ground coffee, whether drip or espresso, is a pungent, fragrant, bitter array of robust flavors that have nothing to do with the coffee you buy at the local supermarket that comes ground in a can. Why Americans insist on dressing up their coffee with chocolate, caramel, pumpkin spice, vanilla, hazel nut, cinnamon and a bunch of other flavors is really easy to understand–they are drinking a stale, weak brew that doesn’t taste like anything at all. First, they never use enough coffee, so what they brew is as thin as water and isn’t opaque enough to obscure the bottom of the cup, much less taste like anything more than dirty water. Pre-ground coffee is also already stale, the vast majority of its flavor greatness lost with the passage of time as the bean’s essential oils are allowed to change and turn bitter with time, disappearing and losing any potency it once had. Never buy pre-ground coffee; pre-ground coffee is but a ghost of its whole-bean self. Even freshly roasted coffee has a shelf-life that is really very short. If you cannot roast your own, find a local roaster that roasts on a regular basis and buy into their production, buying small quantities so that your supply never gets very old before it is replenished. Old coffee is bad coffee, no question about it.