October 18th, 2006
The NY Times has an article detailing the aftermath of Jamie Oliver’s attempt to make British school food more healthy. N and I had seen a segment of his bizarre reality TV show
months and months ago. Essentially, he was given access to a Cardiff (maybe London? I can’t quite recall the people’s accents) middle school kitchen, and budget for the week, and had to train the staff to churn out reasonable food. Now, mind you, his goals seemed very modest: vegetables, fresh fruit, very little deep-fat fried food, and a strict “from scratch” policy that went against everything the British educational culinary establishment stood for. It was a sweet, sort of pointless program, since we both concluded that his goal was highly quixotic (the students were scared of the food, the staff incredibly overworked, his budget quite small) and would soon collapse. More
October 8th, 2006
Amartya Sen visited the UCSC campus yesterday to deliver the 6th annual Maitra lecture (a lecture series plus Satyajit Ray film screening endowed by Anuradha Maitra, widow of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sidhartha Maitra). His talk was formally a bit off: a response to some critical reviews of his book (or maybe, just some criticisms found in some reviews), Identity and Violence, which few people in the audience probably read. I have not, though I did read this Slate precis when the book came out. The substance of the article/book seems to be this: the Huntington “clash of civilizations” model, which predicted inevitable conflict and drift based on narrow categories (religion, “culture”) misanalyzes people as unidimensional More
October 6th, 2006
So N and I went to see the new Barney film at SFMOMA (a truly lovely building) shortly after arriving here at the end of September. Alongside the movie (in an interestering bid for cultural uplift, shown for free) there was a decade-plus restrospective of Barney’s earlier Drawing Restraint experiments, though, sadly, the Yale senior thesis (winch + vaseline) was not on display. Although this little exhibit helped situate the Cremaster films within a more coherent intellectual structure (i.e., exploring the connection between restraint and growth, inspired by muscle-building regimens), I did end up feeling like the Roz Chast protagonist, certain that there is an intricate, inner language I am simply not privy to. Or perhaps that there isn’t, but that there was the presupposition that this was the case. More
October 2nd, 2006
We’re finally online, ready to document the travails of transcontinental migration. Tune in for pictures and news of the SC area, and our easing into it.
