Foodie Friday: Bouillabaisse . . . ou presque

"Real" bouillabaisse, the kind they serve in Marseilles, isn't what you're likely to find served under the name elsewhere. Even the service is different - broth served first and fish served separately, whole, on a platter. There are plenty of reasons why this is a good idea, not the least of which is that long-simmered seafood tends to break apart and turn into a rather unappetizing stew. But here is a happy middle ground, a bright, spicy, vibrant stock full of firm fish and served over short-grained white rice. I tend to use inexpensive, oily, firm-fleshed fish. Bluefish is a particular favorite of mine.

2 lbs head-on shrimp, peeled, heads and shells reserved
1 lb squid bodies and tentacles, bodies cut into rings
1.5 lb bluefish fillet, skin removed, cut into cubes
2 lbs mussels, rinsed, bad (open) ones discarded
1 lb stock fish/fish bits/fish heads (your fishmonger or seafood counter will usually have leftover bits from trimming salmon fillets and such)
1 large yellow onion, finely diced
2 medium carrots, finely diced
1 stalk celery, finely diced
1 fennel bulb, finely diced
2-3 cloves garlic, finely diced
ground cayenne pepper
thyme, lavender, rosemary, marjoram (fresh if possible, dried if not)
fresh parsley
a pinch of whole saffron pistils
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
unbleached flour
unsalted butter
extra virgin olive oil

The list of ingredients is a little bit intimidating, but the cooking is quite easy. First behead and shell the shrimp. Melt a generous portion of butter (several tablespoons) in the bottom of a good, heavy stockpot. When the butter is very hot and popping, add the shells and heads. Sauté until they have turned bright red, fill the pot 2/3 of the way with hot water, salt generously, and return to the stove. When the water has reached a boil, add your stock fish and reduce heat. Let simmer for 20 mins. No more! Overcooked fish and shellfish stocks take on an unpleasant smell very easily. After 20 minutes, strain the stock at least twice through a fine sieve, then return to a low heat on the stovetop.

Now heat a medium-deep, wide-mouthed pan over high heat. I actually find that nothing beats a wok for this. Melt a tablespoon or two of butter with equal parts olive oil. Season the bluefish and dredge the cubes in flour. Brown in the very hot oil and butter, in batches if necessary, removing and reserving the pieces once browned. The flour that remains in the pan will form a sort of roux with the oil and butter and thicken the final dish. Add the onions, carrots, celery, fennel, and garlic and sauté until soft. Add the herbs and sauté for another minute. Now ladle in a few inches of broth and allow to come up to a boil. When it just boils, pinch the saffron firmly between your fingers and add directly to the liquid. Give it a few vigorous stirs. Add the squid, reduce the heat to medium, and allow it to simmer energetically for about ten minutes. Now add the shrimp and the browned bluefish, and ladle in more broth. Add a few pinches of cayenne pepper, to your own taste for heat. Reduce the heat and allow to simmer together for another ten minutes. Finally, add the mussels and perhaps a bit more broth. Allow the mussels to steam and boil open.

Put a nice scoop of white, sticky, short-grained rice--I like jasmine--in the bottom of shallow bowls. Ladle a portion of the stew with pleny of mussels over the top. Garnish with parsely and more black pepper. Serve with warm bread, aioli, or even just a good, spicy mustard.

LAMA SABACTHANI, yo?

"Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?" William Greider cries that his institutions have failed him, long live his institutions. His government has betrayed him. How will it save him?

Society faces dreadful prospects and profound transformation. When both parties are aligned with corporate power, who will stand up for the people? Who will protect them from the insatiable appetites of capitalist enterprise and help them get through the hard passage ahead? One thing we know for sure from history: there is no natural limit to what capitalism will seek in terms of power and profit. If government does not stand up and apply the brakes, society is defenseless.

When was the last time you stood up to apply the brakes? What have brakes got to do with appetites. Confused metaphors indicated confused thinking. "When both parties . . . " Aw, it's so nice to be with you Frodo, here at the end of all fucking stuff and things. Even for an American liberal, this is desperately self-limiting. On the most practical level, taking that old whore history as our sibyl, it seems awfully unlikely that the two American parties in their present forms and organization will persist for more than another couple of decades. A reorganization appears to me to be pretty inevitable. The current alignment of interests and affinities is out-of-date. Here is something you can bank on: the government will still reflect the interests of the powerful.

The conviction that "representative democracy" and "capitalism" do, ever did, or ought to exist in tension, the one with the other, is wrong. They are complementary parts of the same social order, the same civic religion. If state capitalism is our religion, then representative democracy is our mass, the voting booth the site of miraculous transubstantiation. "Left-liberals", as Greider calls them (honestly, how many dbas can one fucking business have?), can howl all they want about the excesses of their priests and popes, but as long as they go on genuflecting to the old gods and idols, their exclamations about change are worthless.

Square the Circle

Thomas Friedman is right that in many ways the world has become flatter; but in others it has grown spikier.

-Chrystia Freeland in The Atlantic

Make what you will of this use of this recycling of Friedman's infinitely Procrustean figure of speech, especially as contrasted with what is later referred to by Mohammed El-Erian as a "global world," a delightful little tautology that I would be inclined to ignore and chalk up to the fact that English isn't El-Erian's first language were it not for the fact that Friendman himself defines "a flat world" as "a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language." I am aware that non-Euclidian geometries exist, and some of them are very strange, but this is still a little much, don't you think?

The article notes in the banally plaintive language that is business journalisms native speech that "In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever." Indeed, the statement is so banal, such an infinitely repeated sentiment, that it is easy to overlook just why it is complete and total nonsense. Consider its context, though, and it starts to smell distinctly like the south end of an upset stomach. Now more than ever! Except, the very thesis of the article is that today's "meritocratic" "super-elite" are a phenomena unique to the Now; even in the eighties, we learn, not yet three decades past, these übermenschen did not exist. And yet, at least in the English with which I am familiar, the construction "more than ever" is comparative; here, it distinctly implies a past in which "our" present need existed, only, less so. But in the past, they didn't exist. Hum, well, I guess any need is greater than no need; or is it that their past nonexistence implies that we needed them to appear? Well, uh, what?



Let's not get ourselves too tangled, though. In truth, we "need" the "super-elite" neither more nor less than we ever did; all multiples of zero are still zero. At the same time, the insistence here that the transcendence of national borders makes the new elite, well, new, is pretty funny and about as ahistorical as it gets, especially here in the you'll-pardon-the-expression-West. Ms. Freeland, meet European history.

This Be the Worst

I think it very interesting that George Will, betrayed by his rambling, bumbling, incoherent, almost nonsensical prose as having dipped his lizard tongue into a few dozen too many G&Ts before putting pen to papyrus chooses a verse by Philip Larkin, of all poets, as an epigraph to an essay on free will and self-control. Larkin rather more famously observed:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

But, yes, "skepticism about free will . . . has become convenient and soothing." Soothing!

The idea that America was a society of clenched-jaw, New-England Protestant restraint until right around the time the Beatles debarked from that airplane is quite simply the looniest idea ever written, erased, recalled, written, erased, remembered, rewritten, ad inf. on the disintegrating palimpsest of this dumb nation's fictional historical palimpsests.

Happy Gays

Of course, my ambivalence toward and occasional hostility to the central aspirations of the gay rights movement, that milquetoast re-branding of the long-buried notion of liberation, is testimony to my privileged position. The legal implications of not marrying are largely irrelevant to me. I have access to lawyers and accountants and so on. But still, I can't be wholly unsympathetic to the goal of so-called marriage equality. Paltry though admission to that particular civic institution may ultimately be, it is, so long as we are consigned to this rather dull, poorly decorated empire of ours, a meaningful measure of civic equality, and while not something I desire for myself, I find it difficult to condemn the desire in others.

The crazy jubilation that's accompanied the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell confounds me, though. Well, it doesn't confound me at all, actually. I was just being polite. It does fucking piss me off. Most gay people are just as nationalistic and patriotic as their hetero neighbors; indeed, civic aspiration goes hand-in-hand with a narrative of national perfectability that is as fundmamental to the nationalist project as its sister, exceptionalism. The fact remains: the military is an institution dedicated to death and destruction, and America's ongoing wars are cruel, vicious, unprovoked, and unjust. It's hard not to cast back to the prior civil rights movement, which in King in particular came to see American militarism as the enemy of justice and equity in the most essential sense. Yes, yes, the draft, and all that. The comparison is inexact, but still striking. In its effort to get gays into the military, the cause of gay equality has ended up extolling the singular virtue of service in aggressive foreign wars.

Never Fills You Up, Never Lets You Down

I won't bore you with a detailed recapitulation of David Brooks' column about some kind of Goldilocks government, but I do want to draw your attention to a single sentence that represents an often repeated sentiment:

The geniuses flock to finance, not industry.

Other, perhaps, than these geniuses' own self-testimony, I can see exactly no reason to believe that this is true; indeed, I see every reason to believe the opposite. Thieves aren't geniuses, and though there are certainly some whizbang mathletes on Wall Street, it's not as if loudmouth asshole business-major twenty-somethings are actually building or programming the blackbox Culture Minds that make marginal trades on gazillions of shares every picosecond.

But you know, genius is a bit of a term of art, so maybe I'm being a little harsh here. Perhaps it is possible to be a genius at inventing acronyms for repackaged assets, and yet, no, Brooks' unoriginal thesis here is not that finance is full of savants but that it is full of Leonardan superminds who, if they were not busy stealing houses and wrecking pension funds and concocting pyramid schemes, would be curing cancer and building nanotube space elevators. Um, huh, wut? How are these transferable abilities? Do you sit in the concert hall and think to yourself, wow, that Hilary Hahn is a great young violinist; I bet she'd make an even better exotic particle physicist!

Google and Facebook and the Terminator-building department of Carnegie Mellon University and the Doctors Moreaux at Monsanto etc. do not actually seem to have trouble attracting young mad scientists; they do not seem to be chewing their nails in existential worry that either the next Einstein or the next Edison is pretending to work late at Goldman Sachs instead of inventing warp drive.

Why, it's almost as if this idea of all our native geniuses dashing to Wall Street were . . . oh, you know, proposed and promoted by Wall Street. More drivers are switching to Geico! Great taste, less filling! The ultimate driving machine! It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno!

Infant Aside

I will admit it. Until it became utterly ridiculous in its final season or two, I liked Sex and the City. (I never saw the movies.) Yes, it was crass and materialistic. Its female characters were mostly gays-manqués (well, it beats Albee, anyway). Kim Catrall has the range of an escargot. Etc. I won't bore you with all the caveats. That would take a while. But it was the sort of foofy, innocuous entertainment that plays well in the background when you're cooking or cleaning the house, and on occasion it even managed to be genuinely funny or genuinely sad. I mention this because Ross Douthat, one of the Times' stable of badly bearded homunculi, blithely used the show as an example of "the American entertainment industry"'s discomfort with abortion in a blithe column on "the unborn." It's worth noting that the entertainment industry is not so much uncomfortable with abortion as it is viciously opposed to women, which is why it spends so very much of its time kidnapping, raping, murdering, molesting, humiliating, and hating on them.

The storyline to which Douthat is referring involves Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), an attorney, getting pregnant by her at-the-time ex-lover and ultimately deciding to have the baby. On that brief description it does indeed seem to lend credence to Douthat's paltry thesis. She is a career woman, unmarried, not maternally inclined, and the pregnancy is an accident. Why, if the Industry weren't uncomfortable with abortion, she'd have had the little tumor extirpated ASAP! And indeed, in real life, a comparable, mid-career, unmarried, overworked, unmaternal partner in a Manhattan law firm probably would. Of course, in real life, the cheerleaders would not go padding about the house in their underwear without turning on the lights when a serial killer was on the loose. In other words, the nature of fiction is to have characters make decisions that advance a plot. Every sitcom, drama, and romantic comedy ever written would roll credits within ten seconds of the titles if characters behaved in the most expeditious, open, and honest manner. Narrative is a contrivance.

Miranda's fulfilled pregnancy and her eventual resumption of a relationship with the boy's father is a foil for a couple of other plots. Pertinently, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) has been trying without success to get pregnant with her husband, and Miranda's easy, accidental pregnancy is depicted in dramatic contrast--the inability of Charlotte to get what she so desperately wants is made more poignant. It's hard to stress enough how the demands of plot in serial writing drive these decisions and how little pertinence they have to the question of whether a stable of very gay, very traditionally liberal writers and producers are somehow uncomfortable with abortion. In fact, and this is the significant point, the writers use the occasion of this storyline to have Carrie and Samantha reveal that they have both had an abortion--Samantha at least two, if I remember correctly. Neither of them is especially troubled, although Carrie admits to some minor pang of regret at what might have been. "It was the right thing to do," both agree, matter-of-fact. What troubles Carrie is not that she has had an abortion, but that her boyfriend, if she tells him or if he otherwise finds out, will judge her harshly.

This is a good an unsubtle point about "discomfort" with abortion. What we really mean is that men hate female sexuality and are ever-eager to judge the sluts. Carrie is afraid that her boyfriend will consider her a whore, not that he will cite Catholic injunctions about the sacredness of the unborn. Douthat doesn't care or think deeply about the sacred potentiality of human life. The number of little sacred human potentialities ultimately frozen, discarded, and destroyed by the upper-class fertility industry employed by Melanie Thernstrom's "six failed in vitro cycles, an egg donor and two surrogate mothers, and an untold fortune in expenses" is immense, and yet it goes entirely unremarked and unnoticed, whereas an extracted blastocyst from a woman who, interesting interesting, happens to be poor and lacking "a script for sexual maturity," is definitely a daughter.

Argus Panoptes

In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military's most valuable new tools.

-WaPo

Well now someone should probably consult their Edith Hamilton. Next up: Operation Cunning Hercules.

That excerpt is the opening volley, by the way. It was obviously written to please someone, because just a few paragraphs down we discover the real story:

Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.

Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence - eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.

Oh. Uh. Oh.

So the useless exponential growth of unfiltered and unfilterable information grows apace. The plan seems to be to help find some needles by adding more hay.