Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Story of my life...
You're discovering what visual artists who enter the world of advertising have had to learn many a time over in the last 100 years: Selling out hurts - at least after a while.
I'll also wager you'd probably do it again if given the opportunity. Jobs can be "soul-sucking" because they're too "hip" and hectic. They can be as equally "soul-sucking" if they're unchallenging and boring. At least you got the former.
That's why I'm still with Madison Ave. I'd at least like to be entertained while my professional psyche is devoured!
And she had such qualms about her work that she kept doing it until she got replaced by someone cheaper. Oh, mercy!
So she paced her three bedroom house -- bought with her novel's advance -- and felt so curiously lonely. Oh, angels of heaven!
No comfort, those tedious children, who lived on hamburger, popcorn, and oranges. Oh, fiends!
Then enter Salon, whose soul-starved readers hunger for such hand-wringing. Oh, plebs!
And finally our successfull writer can return to her savory meal. Oh, salvation!
I think I'll pass on the novels.
Thanks for reminding me once again why I didn't renew my subscription, Salon. This makes an excellent partner for the whiny Slate article from last week about how opening a coffee shop requires actual work if you want it to be profitable.
I am a food writer. A young one, just like the one who replaced you. And if I ever submitted anything close to as overwrought and (forgive me) ham-fisted as that, I'd have been fired long ago. I used to be outraged, but now I'm just bored by writers like you -- and it's not just you; there are a thousand others just like you -- who think it's sufficient to describe scallops as sunbursts and truffles as explosions and then call it a night. Yawn; over. The Ladies' Home Journal called; they want their aesthetic back.
So please understand if the tears dropping into my beer (Pinot's been passe for ages -- I'm not sure what world you inhabit, but it sure as hell ain't mine) are a little crocodile.
The problem is not that the world you're covering is banal, but it's that you lack the talent to make it not be. Good luck with the novel.
PS: Salon -- I've been reading you since high school, and a premium subscriber since Day 1. No offense, but what are you people thinking?
It is reader responses like the ones above that remind me (just in the nick of time, before I'm tempted again) why I stay out of Table Talk these days.
Uber-yuppies.... what a collection of mental driftwood!
~AS~
Gosh, Harri, I am a writer. If I ever wrote anything as egregiously nasty as your review of this article, I would be worried. About karmic payback. May you be treated as generously as you treat others!
Self-absorbed? Nah.
The author's approach to food writing involved connecting with real people and their lives. A food article about a restaurant that is feeding the homeless out back? I think I'd like to read that. An article about organic pig farmers? I'm pretty sure I'd like to read that. And the observation that the foodies (at least the women) are tasting but not eating? That doesn't sound self absorbed to me; it sounds like the novelist's instinct for observing actual life comes through.
This is an article about foodies in a particular kind of up-scale food scene. It involves the author being sucked into that scene, and then leaving it. The author's experience serves as a lense for for viewing one kind of relationship with food and another, but the story is not about her, and it's theme is not "poor me." Too bad some readers found it boring. I didn't.
I'm deeply disturbed by the notion of food as fashion. Millions of people around the world go without basic nutrition while we have "foodies" in this country who treat a fundamental human survival need as entertainment, as a fad? What happened to the belief of food as being something sacred, as being a sacrifice that the earth makes for our sustenance? Are we Salon readers so decadent in our upper middle class hyper-intellectual mindset that we forget the humbling truth of this?
Salon, please have some integrity with regard to your progressive philosophy. Give us articles than challenge us, question our assumptions, and enrich our understanding. We don't need more inane solipsistic confessionals.
Harri, dear, a couple of things. First, there's nothing wrong with waxing snotty about another writer's abilities, but if your comments are to have any authority you had better be able to demonstrate some serious chops of your own. Sadly, you don't have them.
Second, I'm sure you imagine your handle to be the height of wit. Unfortunately, it is both yesterday's joke and wrongly spelled: If you really want to tweak those clueless rubes who don't kow the French for "green bean," you'll want to spell the surname "Covair," so their tiny little pois-brains can sound it out phonetically.
Not to worry, though, I'm sure your killingly elegant prose-style will protect you from ever getting fired. Absolutely. And listen, no foam on that latte, ok?
ISNT like great sex, unless you are starving, but it's interesting enough , since everyone eats, that everyone has an opinion.
It's refreshing to see a food writer who understands just how tiresome and tiring food writing has become. Most current restaurant reviews are nothing more than a crush of adjectives and bad metaphors. What's more, food writing has degenerated into a sort of cartoonish erotica.
The thing that bothers me most, though, is the fact that so little food writers seem to grasp the concept that food is much more than what's on the plate. Ann Bauer's observation that people relax and become gregarious over good food is an important and often overlooked element of dining. The very best food writers - M.F.K Fisher, Ruth Reichl, and Ernest Hemingway spring to mind - have an earthy, gut-level quality that is the polar opposite of the fussy, precious gastroporn that's currently in vogue. For them and others like them, food is inseparable from other basic pleasures: company, conversation, creativity, warmth, sustenance, comfort, memory.
The very term "food porn" is telling. Porn has less than nothing to do with real sex, doesn't it? It's a glossy imitation of reality. Porn has its place, but it's certainly no substitute for actual, messy, affectionate lovemaking between people who care for one another a great deal. Food porn is to food what porn is to sex: a slick, stylized, empty version of something meant to be vital and sensual and filling.
Bauer's article reminded me of something I read years ago by C.S. Lewis. From Mere Christianity:
You can get a large audience together for a striptease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one...Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
Gorged gluttons, titillated by tidbits. Glossy magazines devoted to the same sort of "bacon striptease" Lewis described. Cooks have given way to chefs, who in turn have given way to "foodies", food stylists and photographers. It's not food as food, or even food as entertainment; it's food as fetish. Statistics about eating disorders indicate a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with food among Western women in particular - a sadomasochistic approach/avoidance mentality that is distinctly at odds with actual pleasure or nourishment.
I'm glad that Bauer has decided not to waste her talent by contributing to the gastroporn machine. May she eat well and with renewed relish!
The Wasilla soap opera just gets weirder as Palin complains critics are "picking apart a good point guard"
The media outlet's use of Bush euphemisms sparks a much-needed debate on journalistic standards.
And so are his Fox News pals, who lambasted Sen. Al Franken's "stolen election"
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in debt. But it's not alone
Thanks for sharing, Governor. Now please take a cue from Norm Coleman, and go away
Salon headlines in your mailbox
