Guest Chef is the brainchild of Bay Area real estate developer Scott Cameron. Simply put, it is a permanent space without permanent cooks…So the 20-seat restaurant changes hands every two weeks as a new emerging or established chef takes over with access to a fully stocked kitchen, wine reserve, and three-person base staff of dishwasher Manuel and servers Kristen and Shannon. The two-week window ostensibly gives the chefs a chance to find out if they are confident and skilled enough to impress area crowds with their adventurous long-term ideas.

 

So far, it’s working. Local firefighters drew a crowd in early November when they prepared a benefit dinner for the venture’s inaugural event. Since then, cooks have ranged from Eva Santillanes, a grandmother from Zacatecas, Mexico with no industrial kitchen experience, to Michelin-Star-winning Joseph Humphrey.

 

The effort began with an empty kitchen. Last year, chef Mark Valentine—a friend of Cameron’s—suggested that they find a creative use for an unused space along a gentrifying Oakland neighborhood’s main drag.

 

“I’m like an artist in a gallery,” he says. “An artist doesn’t wait for a buyer to arrive in order to start painting. I’m here to cook my food and work on my craft. If people come in, I will be happy to share my passion and cook for them.”

A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

An article from The Guardian by Susie Steiner

Read the full article here.

But, it’s just, well, kind of sudden, don’t you think? I suppose they say that you just know when you know. But, I can’t help but wonder if anyone really, ever, knows. You know?

From what I’ve heard, you had only been dating for 5 months! But, that’s just what I heard. I haven’t really kept up with any of it. I’ve been busy.

From the pictures of you two together, that other people have insisted I search for on Google images, I can see why you like her. She’s got that cute little smile and that pixie-look that guys swoon over. I’m sure she’s really nice too.

The "Happy" Couple.

No, really, she’s really nice, isn’t she? Yeah.  I don’t know her but I guess I just didn’t picture the two of you ending up together. Not that I ever took time out of my own life to picture you or something. That’s crazy. I just mean that when I think about it, now, just this very minute, I can envision you with someone else.

That sounds so terrible, as if I’m jealous or something. I’m sure I couldn’t be happier for you. I’m sure I couldn’t.

No, no, I know. It never would have worked out between us. Yes, right, there’s that; we’ve never been in a relationship. Fine.  Still, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’ve been intimate for a number of years now.

I mean, you rode with me on the bus, stood with me on the subway and walked with me through the streets of NY. I eagerly introduced you to all of my friends and I proudly introduced you to my family. (My Mom was a bigger fan of you than my Dad, but I think that’s fairly typical.)

No man had ever shared his weaknesses with me so honestly. No man had ever shown his heart to me so courageously. No man had ever been humble enough to admit a need to fall on his knees before the Creator. I couldn’t stop gushing about how great you were. Knowing that a man such as your self existed gave me hope that Mr. Darcy did too.

I hope I’m not overstepping, but, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I felt we had a connection. And, if I remember correctly, you were the one who opened up to me first. Weren’t you the one who spoke about giving your heart as well as your body? And confessed your love, as well as your folly? Yes, you sure did lead me on.

The good news is that I finally made it to London. The bad news is that… ok, fine. The other news is that you’re engaged.

I hope you’re happy.

Yours,

Sincerely,

However, such praise requires justification. What even qualifies as a fairy tale? What separates it from general folklore, myths, legends, fantasies, and fables? And how, in a world where realism as fantasy far outweighs the truly imagined fantasy, do we effectively continue this age-old tradition?

The first two questions may prove the most difficult to answer. There is no standard definition of a fairy tale, and experts– equally undefined– don’t always agree on the components. Some insist that fairy tales must include a kind of magic, which seems like proper guidance until one considers that a great many of the famous fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, while exploring some supernatural themes, have nothing at all to do with magic.

Another commonly thought of component shirked by the Brothers, and a significant number of other fairy tale authors, is anthropomorphism. Apart from some of the heavy-hitters, like The Chronicles of Narnia or The Wind in the Willows, anthropomorphism is the exception rather than the norm.

It is more common for the stories to include mythological creatures– the naiads and dryads and dwarfs and goblins and so forth. Yet, fairy tales cannot be said to be simply myths because myths are, or at one time were, something believed to be true. Fairy tales never endeavor to suggest an actual historical event, which may be the reason that so many of them take place merely “once upon a time.”

There is also the question of a moral, which many people would offer as a device signaling that a story is a fairy tale. This is where the fairy tale may become mixed up with a fable. But fables are usually shorter, and are more anecdotal. They don’t imply morals as much as they dictate them, and usually not more than one or two at the end. Fairy tales, on the other hand, are often infused with morals or a particular moral throughout; the moral drives the story instead of being the point of it (although some do end with a moral lesson). Thus we have traditional tales like Rapunzel, Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland, which people generally accept as offering a moral message without necessarily identifying what that message is, and more complex fairy tales like The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy’s fantasy leads her to a better understanding of her reality, or MacDonald’s Phantastes, in which each advancement of Anodos through Fairy Land presents him with a new moral struggle and simultaneous revelation about himself. Both of these latter examples end with a fable-esque lesson; Dorothy learns that somewhere over the rainbow is not necessarily better than being at home, and Anodos learns “good is always coming…What we call evil is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good.” So while these all have to do with morals, it is the way those morals are included in the story and presented by the author which leads the classification of “fairy tale”; in other words, a fairy tale may also be a fable, but a fable by itself cannot be a fairy tale.

It is somewhat surprising that one of the few things we can say about all fairy tales is that they do not need to have anything at all to do with fairies. Indeed, many of them do not (see Hansel and Gretel, The Light Princess, etc.). Interestingly enough, you’d also be unlikely to find many people who pick up a fairy tale actually expecting to read something about fairies, suggesting that even audiences have become somewhat desensitized to the literal name of the genre, further confusing the answer to the question presently at hand.

Perhaps the thing that makes a fairy tale different from its cousins is the fairy tale voice; that strange and varied tone that hints at a childish audience despite the fact that the story most likely wouldn’t be understood by anyone so young as that. It is a voice unique to each fairy tale author, walking the line between the innocence and brokenness of the world, addressing us as though we are children but with every intention of speaking to us as though we are adults. It is the thing that draws the child out of us while continuing to develop the adult within us.

Interestingly, it is this voice that creates the greatest obstacle to writing the modern day fairy tale. How it has come about in our culture that fairy tales are merely children’s stories is beyond me, but somewhere along the way, we’ve lost the tolerance not just for stories we find to be juvenile or fantastical in content, but also for any voice that threatens condescension. We baselessly insist upon intellectualism in the narrative voice, upon being spoken to only as adults, which is to say that we don’t much care for simplicity, innocence, dare I say even magic, to underlie the narratives we use to explore and understand the complex and confusing nature of humanity. As far as literature goes, we like a well-balanced meal and even the occasional fast food, but we seem to have tragically lost our taste for dessert.

The consequence has been an attempt to reconstruct the fairy tale narrative as though it were purely for our adult minds instead of appealing to our child minds at the same time. A glaring example of this — though not altogether a bad novel — is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. This novel-length “fairy tale” has been hailed as essential for those who are fans of Narnia or Harry Potter, but upon reading just the first three pages, it is clear that this story will be nothing like its predecessors. The narrative voice is the same you will find in most literary fiction, the subject matter has more to do with angsty college students and their exploits than it does with their adventures in whatever other worlds they visit. There is profanity, sex, drug use, and most any other thing you might expect to find in another literary piece about the lives of college students. The few exceptional moments where the story tiptoes on the border of fairy tale, such as the appearance of The Beast or the cave battle in Fillory, are overshadowed and cheapened by the attention given to predictable, sadly commonplace things like the reckless sexual behavior of the main characters and their inability to function as emotionally intelligent members of their world. It is in these moments that the magic is lost.

But Grossman’s work is not a failure as literature, just as a “fairy tale for adults.” That’s large in part because, as I’ve said before, the narrative style of the traditional fairy tale is already for adults. Changing the narrative in order to appeal only to adults ignores the fact that fairy tales are not merely a vehicle for escaping our mundane lives for a little while. Instead, they serve to remind us of the importance innocence plays when believing in something beyond ourselves; that to truly believe in something at all, one must receive it with the heart of a child, and for any heart to embrace childishness, it must also remember innocence. The adult-child balance in the narrative of fairy tales is part of what opens our minds to be transfixed completely by a world to which we do not belong. It is the difference between telling a magical story and merely a story about magic.

An exceptional example of a modern fairy tale in which this essential balance is maintained is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente. The Wonderland-esque adventure of young September through Fairyland (different from MacDonald’s “Fairy Land”) is a non-stop tumble through a most bizarre, enchanting world in which September is not only faced with myriad trials of good and evil, but also with realizations about her own courage, insecurities, strengths and weaknesses. Where September differs from the characters in The Magicians is that she learns these things externally — we do not experience any of her complex emotional struggles through a narrative saturated with omniscient or introverted analysis of character motives or personalities. September learns these things, instead, the way most things are learned; not through deep, intimate introspection, but by the choices that she is forced to make every day, the choices that don’t allow time for introspective analysis. Topped off by an americanized Victorian voice, Fairyland is a rare, successful return to the narrative style of the fairy tale, giving some much-needed weight to the old maxim that if something isn’t broken, that ought to be a good enough reason to not go trying to fix it.

Despite some recent attempts to modernize the narrative style of fairy tales, I don’t think there’s much danger in the long run. Between the deep historical roots of the genre, the relatively undefined component structure of such stories, and the fact that these stories allow us to explore our humanness in ways which literary fiction simply does not, fans of the fairy tale can rest assured that this genre of literature is unlikely to disappear, or going through any successful changes. There will always be naysayers, always those who think of fairy tales as childish or silly, those who want to bring the fairy tale to the adults instead of bringing the adults to the fairy tales, and those who will refuse to take the genre seriously as an important part of our literary past, present and future. But in the end, I’d like to think that those of us who are happy to embrace adulthood without relinquishing the reigns of childish hopes and dreams, those of us who stubbornly cling to the whimsical, fanciful playgrounds of our imaginations, and those of us who are willing to approach the complexities of our humanness with what childish innocence we have left, will eventually, against all odds of reality, find our way to that place called happily ever after.

It is the first day of 2012.
What are you afraid of?
Last night I cried
and said out loud

I didn’t expect I’d still be waiting tables
at the same restaurant I was at 6 years ago.

What changes in the heart?
Where is solitude?
Who makes the body pure?
What soulish fiend am I?

Always hungry for the escape,
the deeper inside to get away from
reality.  Who said reality was where anything
mattered anyway? I swallow beauty,

rail against the beast of skin
when too much of everything
growls back at me.

What year is this?
What woman am I?
Who nailed the spikes into my heels?
Who told me heels made a woman?

East Village you dirty, loud, unruly heart.
East Village blood and chambered fruit.
East Village pump my heart chokes

on seeds of every pomegranate
reminder of love.
Love and marriage.
You can’t have one without the other.
I want.

What is Purity?
Whose hands fashioned the hips, the back?
Who curled the rib cage around a fluttering bird?
I heart.

I wail for a living’s sake.

I drink my tea with sugar.
Year.
Year.
Year.

No coffee.
Sugar cubes no milk.
Soy milk.
What kind of half alive is this?

What kind of cancer comes from smoke?
Stacks back against family?
Liver.
Throat.
Breast.
Lung.

When does it come together?
The dots unconnect themselves,
sprawl across the sky as stars.

Orion.
Legs like God.
Whose footstool
am I?

“To love,” said Stendhal, “is to derive pleasure from seeing, touching, and feeling through all one’s senses and as closely as possible, a lovable person who loves us.” This is the popular view of what love is–a deep, all-pervasive positive feeling toward another person.  Indeed, it is such a view of love that leads many of us to ask questions like these: “Is this feeling that I have really love?”  “Yes I feel comfortable with him (her), but is this love?”  “I thought falling in love would feel like fireworks going off, and this doesn’t.”  “We have great sex but I am just not sure if it’s love.”

The answer I want to suggest is in the affirmative; for in my view, love is not a feeling in the first place.  While people in love do indeed experience tingles, titillations, or other warm and fuzzy churnings, these are not themselves what love is.  These positive feelings and sensations may be like the icing on the cake, but not the cake.

Love, I submit, is a purposive activity undertaken by two (or more) people in a close, intimate relationship such as the aforementioned ones.

Want to know how to get better at loving or find out how good you are at it?

Click here to read the full article.

Horrible storytellers, like me, rely on images to tell our tales, both ordinary and extraordinary. Typically, the best spoken stories involve uncommon events: strange encounters with the homeless or rescuing an outrageously drunken friend from his demise. But what about the ordinary, the everyday moments that lack the intrigue of the unusual? Are those stories not worth telling?

The stories that stay with me are composed of the quiet moments that can easily pass us by, and which are, incidentally, the hardest to describe in words. For example, the glance lovers exchange when no one is looking or the expression on someone’s face as they view the earth from 30,000 feet for the first time. I realize the impossibility of capturing every single ordinary moment and that catching those real moments is innately challenging, but it is that struggle which makes those stolen images so much more powerful.

The experience was breathtaking, and I’ll attempt to describe it here, as I hope to answer a question posed to me by an audience member as I was standing up with the rest of the musicians at the end of the performance while the audience applauded us and the dancers. He looked up at me on the stage and he said in a loud, earnest voice “What will we do without the avant-garde?” He was very concerned, and I, at a loss for words, just gave him an awkward smile. This kind of response is pretty typical for me. I have rows of dimples in my cheeks from smiling when I’m uncomfortable. But I thought the experience, if not the question, was so interesting that he deserves a response.

When I was hired to play trumpet on this piece, all I knew was that it would be a new work by Christian Wolff. (The piece turned out to be Song (for 6), a fragile but vivid and democratic music where individuals have an important role in the creation of an ensemble voice.) This was already a dream gig, and I eagerly said yes. I later found out that the performance was with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and a dream gig became the realization of two dreams. I took the opportunity to read several interviews and books about the company’s history– about Cunningham, Wolff, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and all the other famous artists who have been associated with the company throughout its history. Learning about the humble beginnings of the MCDC put this man’s question into an interesting context.

I don’t want to attempt to define the avant-garde of today, if we can even use that term, or to tell this man where to look for it, if in fact he is actually interested in being exposed to it. I would rather look at how the company became what it was this year as it formally closed up shop, and then to draw lessons for how we might see the development of an arts institution approaching the significance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the future.

After sixty years, the company was a well-funded and fully-staffed organization, an institution. Given the challenging artistic choices that Cunningham and company made over and over, even through its last performances, it is a remarkable achievement that the company thrived in this way. In contrast to the MCDC’s final performances, where six shows in three nights were filled with 1,500 eager audience members, the first performances of the company were actively disliked by critics and audiences. It wasn’t until ten years into the company’s history that it achieved financial stability and a degree of favorable status with critics and audiences. Merce Cunningham and his partner and music director John Cage, saw a bright and productive future for this company, and over many years they realized this goal, with results probably beyond their wildest dreams.

In its early years, MCDC toured in a Volkswagen bus driven by John Cage with just enough room for six dancers, the two musicians, and a stage manager, who was often Robert Rauschenberg.

One of Cunningham and Cage’s most important innovations was the separation of the dance and the music. In traditional dance, the music supports the dance in terms of its rhythmic structure, and also in an echoing of the narrative or sensibility of the dance. The MCDC began disconnecting these elements by creating pieces where the dancers didn’t hear the music, and the musicians and costume designers didn’t see the dance until the dress rehearsal. Though a traditionalist might see this as a killing of all the meaning of dance, I see it as a great-hearted embrace of human potential. When I think of an ensemble learning a dance with complicated steps that move in and out of coordination with nothing to depend on but each other, I am moved by how they can work together to execute such a difficult task with such grace and precision. When I watched the dance, music and everything else each pursuing its own separate yet complimentary logic, I was struck by the vibrancy and the multiplicity of this created environment.

The potential of human beings as creators, working in collaboration among people with different talents, is greatly expanded by the company’s repertoire. More artists have been and will continue to pursue this goal, and fortunately, this is true among those who are following Cunningham and company’s line of inquiry, and those who have found their own. The exact mode of the work is not important, only the pursuit of broadening human potential. The “avant-garde” hasn’t disappeared; one just needs to know where to look.

So, to ask what we will do without the avant-garde is to miss what’s truly important. For anyone who is interested in new artwork, the only way to proceed is by looking forward. The most important part of my answer to this question is that there are plenty of artists out there in all media, working to find a new way to answer the same questions, and I hope there always will be. I hope this man will look for them and support them. For me, the most important lesson I learned from my experience was to continue working on the art that is important to me, and that if I work diligently enough, perhaps I can build something that will be as dear to me as the company was to Cunningham.

Drama and spectacle attract people. We can call it quirkiness, suspense, conundrum, but a dramatic bang makes us perk up and pay attention. Although we may not want our own lives to follow an overly dramatic arc, it’s often what propels and energizes us. From college essays to job interviews, people bring out their “hook” – their defining, but perhaps embellished, narrative – to differentiate themselves from the masses. And with the ubiquity of the internet, anyone can vie for attention via blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Drama – hair-pin turns in a person’s narrative – is what makes the entertainment industry spin. It’s why books like Room (ripped-from-the-headlines heartbreak and despair), Little Bee (global, political, and personal tragedy), and The Time Traveler’s Wife (scientifically impossible plot) crash into our psyches. I enjoyed all of these books, but these novels grabbed me partially because of the complete unfamiliarity and distance from my own life. The plot, rather than the language, drew me in.

And then came Sebastian Barry.

I read a new-to-me book by Barry that I had never read before: Annie Dunne. Despite the fact that his novel The Secret Scripture was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and should have been on my radar, I was unfamiliar with him. The reason I sought out one of his books was because I had just moved with my family to Dublin, and he is Irish, residing in the county south of ours. A relative had recommended I read his work. I bought Annie Dunne on a trip to the Dublin Writers Museum.

Initially, it didn’t captivate me. When we’re conditioned to be wowed at every page turn, an ordinary story feels plodding. The plot? Two small children come from the city to live with their great-aunt Annie on a farm in Wicklow, while their parents seek employment in London. A local farm hand feigns interest in her cousin, Sarah, who has passed middle age without a husband, like Annie. A few noteworthy events pass, yet Barry does not dwell on them – these events could be primed for drama, but they don’t affect the plot directly. Rather, these events inform our protagonist’s emotions. The primary plot caterwauls on, just like life at Kelsha, the Dunne family farm. The tension in Annie’s heart arises not because of what has happened to her, but rather as a result of reflecting on what has not happened: namely, she does not have her own children, and caring for her great-niece and –nephew has stirred this in her, a husband-less, hunchbacked old maid.

But I stuck with it. Annie Dunne is not necessarily a book that can’t be put down. At times, I had to force myself to read a few pages. Annie’s heartbreak starts to crescendo, yet Barry never employs tricky plot twists: his protagonist doesn’t contemplate suicide, run away, nor dramatically alter her life by joining a convent or other mode of escapism. She simply continues to grapple with her sorrow – and surprisingly, this affected me deeply. Barry’s subtle language and deft forwarding of his story caused me to put the book down, sigh, and simply sit. He writes:

“And when now and then rarely I saw another bowed-back girl, all my instinct was to jeer her too, although I had no license to. This afflicting music of my childhood was hard to hear then, but I o’ercame it. It is now, oftentimes lying these decades later on a flattening mattress with a ticking of old goose down, that I am gripped by fearsome rages, to think of it. Never kissed, never fondled, never embarrassed by a boy’s desire! It is a wretchedness.”

A few pages later, when Billy Kerr, the farm helper who pines for her cousin Sarah, lambastes Annie and verbally lashes, wounds, and damages her, the emotion welling in my heart is like nothing I’ve ever experienced while reading a novel. Just like Barry writes from Annie’s perspective, “Then an emotion larger than a horse invades me.”

The way that Barry slowly develops his characters by using words instead of action builds a different kind of book than one that seeks to thrill.

If a book, in its simplicity, engaged me so dramatically, then perhaps I could read my own life in the same fashion. Here’s what I mean: if suspended in a reality mush that whistles and whizzes and otherwise attempts to astonish the reader by teetering on that elusive line between reality and what I’ll call “reality-plus,” a book essentially relies on that aforementioned balance instead of the stringing together of specific words and phrases and precise use of punctuation. Maybe the beauty of life doesn’t lie in its uniqueness, but rather in the simple way our experiences weave together to form something subtler, something richer. What if we are “known” – not because we position ourselves so far from normalcy and convention, but because the quiet ways we live our lives reflect unexpected beauty, like Barry’s prose.

Can language – our lives – instead of an actual event, stir up as much emotion in one’s soul? Is it the plot, or is it the words? When it seems that the publishing industry is on the prowl for some “wow” oriented books that will provide an eye-catching cover or marketing materials, it’s easy to ignore the structure of thousands of words strung together to create one enormous tapestry.

So, as I notice my own daughter picking up Lois Lowry’s beloved books and diving into the world of Anastasia’s escapades, I think I’d like her to know that perhaps a book – and a life – is not simply about the story, but also about how it’s told.

From the post:

 

Facebook’s Timeline (the new version of the user profile which is slated to be released to the general public “in the next few weeks”) wanted to do something more: It wanted to convey a feeling. Two feelings actually: The feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory–of remembering your own life.

 

Facebook wanted the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about.

 

Facebook could simply have given the same weight to each individual event–a song you listened to or a run you took–as it gives other pieces of data, like status updates, and listed them all in the Timeline. But that doesn’t work well over time. Individual songs are interesting in the moment you’re listening to them. But over time, you’re more interested in patterns. So Facebook created a set of aggregations and reports, to let you “find those individual patterns that define your identity,” Felton says. By seeing aggregate reports on what songs you listened to at particular times in your life, you get to see “the soundtrack of your life.”

 

Whether we like it or not, within the next couple weeks the ‘Timeline’ is going to be the only interface Facebook offers. What do you think? Will this new design create a more ‘memorable’ social networking experience?