Slave Patrons

Between my wife and I, at least one of us is thankfully in tune with the contemporary TV entertainment landscape of today. My wife might join me for an indulging leap into some great old full-length, obscure prime-time presentation of the late 1970’s on YouTube now and then, but she’s the one to refer to about what’s just hit the platforms in the last few.  And, like any TV consumer, she has her favorites. At the top of the A list, which means Now Playing on the i-pad in our living room or kitchen for continuous showings, is one or more incarnations of the Chef Competition shows branded and made famous by Chef Gordon Ramsay. Among them are Master Chef, Top Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen.

These shows don’t need my endorsement. Folks who for some reason never liked The Beatles are inclined to keep their lack of enthusiasm to themselves, lest they be uncontrollably excoriated by the nearest human. I’ve always had a respectful appreciation for the art of cooking, and those who master it, even if I’m not riveted to recipes, visual demonstrations, or motivated personally by the challenge of kitchen range efforts.

The odd thing is, the tone and directive of these smash-hit Ramsay shows don’t seem to have any of that base respect. To spend some screen time with any of them, it’s evident that the food, the creations and their ingredients are little more than the equivalent of props in some Animal House cafeteria scene.

If you’re not familiar with these shows, some clarification would help: they aren’t traditional cooking shows. Graham Kerr in the late 1960’s would spend twenty-five minutes in a glamorous designer kitchen setting, focusing hard on completing one course or dinner. He may have been the eye candy, but the star was the entrée. Julia Child on PBS was strictly business. She shared the gears on how to make that gourmet dish actually happen in your kitchen.

The Ramsay gallery is a reality-show format, using a very hyper jump-cutting documentary approach to capture the heightened drama and impulsive energy behind the competition amongst pedestrian kitcheners chasing their wild dream to become America’s Next Top Chef.

It’s essentially designed as a voyeuristic approach to what goes on in the challenge to become what Ramsay and his fellow judges are, professionally. Unlike the panel however, the contestants haven’t necessarily spent a decade or more studying with the Great Chefs of Europe on a pile of scholarships. Take a bunch of U.S. civilians with lots of kitchen experience and a love for food, pit them against a tribunal of dour elitists as well as each other, and voila..! The world’s first Culinary Gong Show..!

In a world of fear, with broadcast presenters petrified over any misapprehensions or behaviors their presentations might provoke, you’ll be sure to see redundant and sometimes almost unnecessary disclaimers flagging these reality shows at all times. But these smug “Chef” competition shows bear none of those. They wouldn’t dare. It’s tacitly understood as to what the purpose of the show really is, and what it really isn’t: The star of the show is the outwardly toxic behavior. The food is a mere prop.

But as a prop, it’s skillfully used, in conjunction with the directing, editing, lighting, and every other artistic element so exquisitely combined to bring home this symphony on your device.

The template for the show is the crafted design of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World. The indoor version. No car chases or biplanes. No basement explosions. When they do the movie, that might get added. But if they did this show in 1963, Ethel Merman and Dick Shawn would have been perfect casting.

They of course were actors, and these Chef shows are populated only with non-screen civilians, of a more local fame in their own right, perhaps. But for a bunch of civilians who have never acted, boy can they erupt on camera..!

The directorial style, again, is not in any way linear. A passionate, involved, on-site showdown to create a masterpiece can only be effectively depicted within a forty-minute format in bite form, something akin to those little teasers we used to see in the cold openings of Mannix, Cannon and The Love Boat. The only linear process elapsed in the presentation is the competition itself, and the behaviors and anger of these determined grillers. Food flies off chopping tables, tools and containers get dropped or broken, people fight and sulk, and it’s really good diet management TV. For a food show, you don’t really ever get hungry watching this.

But food is legitimately part of the plot, so at some point, it’s spatulas down, and time for judgement. And herein lies the predominantly antisocial component of these ultra-chef competition showdowns.

As each contestant’s finely crafted dish meets the tribunal, it faces a brutal scrutiny, based primarily on visual appearance. If it doesn’t look as artificial and spray-painted as an entrée in Gourmet magazine, it’s put to the slaughter, on national television, direct and in color, for all eyes adult and youth to bear witness. A public execution.

King Ramsay himself will angrily disparage the plate and smugly cite the particulars of its perceived grotesqueness, voiced over an extreme closeup of the culinary submission, shot under some clinically intense lighting, something akin to a forensics lab training video, rendering any possible subject immediately toxic. Under that lighting, an Entenmann’s Devil’s Food Crumb donut could pass for debris from Three Mile Island. Music swells, then falls to a deep, orchestral diminuendo, bass strings at a low moan, as the sheepish judges under the King’s domain quietly and submissively concur on the outrageously obvious unacceptability of the ugly trash before them. Upon the sacred tasting by each, the heightened response speaks to the visceral olfactory experience mitigated by the moistness of the crust or lack thereof, the offset of the parsley sprig deemed congruent or not, and whether or not the perfectly layered cheese melt envelopes each bite of the crepe in the perfect oral sensation.

I’m not about to get into or tamper with the great Ancient Roman Spectacle of gourmet chef competition scrutiny. Like a piano competition at Julliard, it’s rightly based upon a set of criteria unattainable, an approval achieved only when the submission is known to provoke a profound wonder across the panel, unanimously. That’s the kind of on-screen subtitle disclaimer those judging scenes could use. Because as industrially attuned as that level of scrutiny might be, in the decisive kitchens of Italy or France, when elite competitions behind closed doors are electing the artists that will feed a population of elitist bistro patrons, also very much behind closed doors, in a world functionally detached, galaxies away from the people waiting ninety minutes on a register line with their three children at Target on a Tuesday night, hoping they can get to Family Dollar on the way home before they close, a very dysfunctional message is being teleconveyed.

The thrilling object of the game show known as Master Chef and its counterparts is in that inarticulate catharsis, the inner vulnerability exposed, of seeing these heart-set goal strivers have their dreams shot down with one single bullet by the Arbitor of Great Taste. There’s something quite gothic about it. If an illustrated version hasn’t yet been unveiled at Comic Con, it will be, before long. All the elements are there: Evil Lord, disciples, supplicants, scenic locales, the works..

The TV programming makers of today clearly are not in the broadcast game anymore. As the late, great sage Fred Silverman once presaged over fifty years ago, it’s now an industry mostly of “narrowcasting”, a telescoped effort to create a mix that will reach a particular and presumably large audience in the most immediate and visceral way possible. A can’t-miss recipe that makes no apologies for itself. It’s the Diana Christensen formula from Chayefsky’s Network, so long ago.

It's long known that food, and the most succulently presented, elite-gourmet-prepared, bears to a mass population, one so removed from the balconies of privilege, an impulsive and almost sexual power, one that ignites the most Freudian imbalance in the cortex. One hundred years of advertising research has established this scientific fact. Master Chef and it’s counterparts are a one-hour story of romance, hope, vulnerability, betrayal, and the intense eroticism of naked rejection in the bedroom with all the lights on. An edible Harlequin series.

That’s what gets the eyes riveted and the Arbitron meters tabulated. But this show does not play strictly to adults on the Playboy Channel. It’s a Gong Show no less ubiquitous at dinner tables nationwide as was Chuck Barris’ original The Gong Show, forty-five years ago. That formula hasn’t changed either.

So with families, grownups and children alike, all gazing at this handsome, immaculate presentation together each night, believing it in many ways to be educational, sophisticated, and perhaps a voyeuristic journey into the world of food-making competition, what is the take-away doctrine..?

Basically, the gift-wrapped message is that food any less than visually and tasteably exquisite on the very first bite, in the eyes and mouths of professed experts, is worthless, and fit for nothing but the trash. Propagated is the dictate that if it’s not sexy enough on visual sight and oral contact, it’s unworthy of anyone.

Again, the scrutiny within the gourmet competition game is an elite puzzle. If that twenty-four-year-old who just blew me away with that Mozart sonata at the Steinway told me he’d lost the Juilliard competition by four notes, I’d never have known, and still wouldn’t care. The kid’s a knockout. And his performance was stunning.

Our nation is fed primarily by the services that provide the courses and treats we thrive on, good or bad, predominantly healthy or not, every single day. It’s a nation of short-order cooks, wrap-rollers, deep-fry shufflers, pizza tossers and couriers, Chinese take-out kitchen boilers, cold-cutters, sandwich-makers, hash-slingers and egg-scramblers. Those people are the daily providers of breakfast, lunch, dinner, to a ravenous and satisfied America. A trucker at road-stop diner will likely not take exception to the fact that the edges of the scrambled egg were almost unnoticeably charred, or that the hash browns touched the edges of the bacon strips on the plate. He won’t likely be inclined to question or analyze how well the ratio of cheese-to-egg in the omelet is balanced by that slurp of coffee in his mouth. On the whole, that trucker, student, mom, commuter-in-transit will be fitfully nourished and placated by their offering, and they’ll know it’s value in their daily lives. These are the Slave Patrons of America who can only find excitement, and in some ways a relatable vindication in the spectacle of the Master Chef competitors vying for the palettes of the One Per-Cent.

And these are often the same gratuitous souls who will find themselves keeping rapt score while watching this yummy gong show, concurring with the conviction of that smarmy head chef from that Chicago restaurant about how the layout of the cheese over that crepe is something no one in their right mind would do anything with but fling in the trash.

But in the concern that lest our patrons lose their perspective in the process, on the intrinsic and critical value of food in our lives, one and all, all these chef competition shows will usually include some public-service message for those food-for-the-hungry organizations, or maybe a full episode that presents the cooking challenge in conjunction one week with one of those soup kitchens across this great heartland of ours. Then, once penance has been done, back to our elitist comfort zones, eating and disrespecting.

A friend of mine told me of how he presented a sandwich he’d wrapped for himself to a begging vagrant on the train one day. He graciously handed it over and said as a rejoinder, “Well, I don’t think Gordon Ramsay would give it five stars, but, y’know it might be pretty good..” The humble vagrant thankfully accepted and said….”Oh yea, y’know I’ve seen him….that guy’s totally a food genius..!!

Noah F.

Why Am I Getting All These Retirement Articles and Medical Ads..? I’m Too Young For This..!

I don’t doubt it for one moment.  Numbers are numbers.  But even the value of currency changes vastly over time, as does the significance of the numeral on that U.S. legal tender.

I’m fifty-six. I’ve never been that before, and my life’s experience, oddly, never endowed me with a thorough understanding on just how to be fifty-six.

In today’s anti-ageism world, gratefully, we generally all don’t judge or discriminate by age the way we once did. Professionally as well as socially. It undoubtedly has to do with the result of the vast population growth of the last fifty years, coupled with the existing population of so many of the grownups preceding that explosion. Unless the legislation of a “Logan’s Run” Bill were to be passed, the answer is, we all just have to learn to live with one-another. Peacefully.

Unfortunately, one unconditional side effect my age has provoked is this inexplicable comfort I experience when I’m presented in any situation with someone within or beyond my years.  I’m always grateful for the company I keep and those who nourish me. Those younger “old soul” people also know my algorithm, and there are blessedly plenty of those.  But somehow, advancing toward Senior Cat in a world dominated by more and more chronological kittens is something to be reckoned with.

The irony that characterizes my life is, I never could really be a kid.

From the time I began grammar school, Grade K, I was more in tune with adult company.  I was raised in a home of three middle-aged grownups.  My aunt and uncle were the fifties family in the 1970s. Empty nest, with constant grandkid visits. They were my cast playmates. To offset all that silly kid stuff, thankfully there was my mom.  Sometimes, when things got too raucous with the little ones, she’d snatch me aside and whisper, “hey, wanna go to the movies…?” She was just as bored as I was..! We’d get a ride over to the UA Quartet or Glen Oaks, and regardless of what the chosen feature promised, it was a respite.  And she took us to some great ones, like Day Of The Dolphin, Funny Lady, or the uproarious re-release of Take The Money And Run. But what made those afternoons important were the discussions.  Lectures, actually.  My mom was known to venture on in table talk about English literature, Socrates, Aristotle, the Mortimer Adler or Leonard Bernstein interview she watched on Channel 13 last week, and all things academic.  None of them college-learned.

She never attended college. I was raised by a single woman in her mid-forties who lived on administrative office jobs and a lifetime of reading everything in any college bookshop.  She would come to insist in years to come that nothing I was being taught in my Core Curriculum of History or Arts was being related nearly as comprehensively as her efforts would offer.  I had enough exposure to her home-schooling to second that, actually.

Despite some of the numerous setbacks of being raised, ultimately one-on-one at age nine, by a codependent elitist intellectual, one of the top benefits, I never doubted, was some very good company.

Being with my mom and her closest companions at the time, her older ex-husband and friends, in their trendy Village settings in the late 1970s was kind of like hanging out on the set of Open Mind or The Stanley Siegel Show.  Their sociocultural references were ones I’d research and learn all about if I didn’t get them already.  I became absorbed in knowing what all those Bogie and Bacall cracks meant, if I didn’t already figure it out from all those 1940s Warner Bugs Bunny features I’d wake up with on Channel 5 each morning.  When kids my age were wrapped up in Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever, I was fixated on the Museum of Broadcasting, and those precious mid-century kinescope films of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, Texaco Star Theater, The Ed Sullivan Show, and that Lincoln Diamant collection of TVs earliest acclaimed commercials. When I was approached by one of those high-rise living room talkers wanting to hear what this little kid had to say, this ten-year old was never spoken down to. I could rap about the history of TV comedy for an hour. With Norman Lear.  We would have dug one another when I was ten.

I studied the men’s styles, their wardrobe, these men in their greater fifties.  Mom’s silver haired ex- was a dapper Manhattan schoolteacher, and almost never showed up in anything less than a nifty tweed jacket and knit tie. His notorious Costanza-like twin brother was also a snazzy clothes horse.  I didn’t wear such fashions.  A ten-year old doesn’t stroll into the schoolyard wearing a jacket and tie. But I sure could dream.

My daydreams consisted of the tall, slender grownup me, decked out in the sport jacket, the print tie, and that girl in the fifth grade I secretly crushed on, arm in arm on our way out of the Metropolitan Museum.  Every ten-year old has his dream.

I’d grow up, and keep all that frame of reference I’d cultivated within me. The eighties didn’t really impress me when I lived in them. I held my high school teachers with great respect, perhaps the kind not all my classmates maintained.  Our Assistant Principal was a finely composed man, impeccably dressed each day, with a voice and delivery like a commanding TV news anchor, a veritable Milton Lewis or Roger Grimsby.  My English Honors-Program Lit teacher was lost on his entire class, in their eyes an unmistakable Saturday Night Live sketch.  But to me, this silver-maned semi-Anglican in tailored formals was the real stuff. 

Even if I did hang with a bunch of high-school co-seniors who prided themselves on some kind of worldly sophistication because they watched Masterpiece Theater Sunday night as part of their Honor Society project, but were more focused on the latest Wham video on MTV, I still saw myself not quite so applicable. Ultimately, I’d figure out how to recognize my own individuality, and appreciate it. 

Part of it always meant tossing out references of a world of the past.  Why was a kid of seventeen in the eighties comparing a TV sketch to Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.? The one response I’d never stop hearing from elders around me was “You’re too young to know about that..!!” How rude.

I never knew why that was an offense.  I still don’t.  If someone today introduced me to their sixteen-year-old and the kid began discussing the early days of Studio One and Playhouse 90, we’d have one fine conversation..!

And amidst a majority of my life spent in the wings of the radio business, where it’s all about the thrill of just “getting the show on the stage”, a constant, collective Olympic effort, surrounded by like souls just as dedicated and clever, there’s been little call for academic conversation or formal attire on any regularized basis.  Just absorption in and gratitude for one’s occupation, while ignoring the changing cultures, if one so choosed.  That’s how I woke up one day in 2005 with no computer or cell phone.

I would learn soon that my elitist disdain would need to change, along with my other virtues.  And in this odyssey I would come to discover not a generation gap, but an existence on a planet in a generation galaxy.

Those grownups, the stencil by whom I designed my self of today, were my age back then.  They were much less healthy by comparison, they had accrued more experience and establishment professionally and financially than I’ve yet to conquer. And to this day, I continue to admire the long lost presence of those vintage towers, indulging when I can at last in some of the era literature and available media on which they once dined. I can actually, virtually pretend I’m them back then..

And suddenly, I’m me now.

Last time I looked in the mirror I was twenty-four years old dreaming of the respect I’d receive as a shirt-and-tie, cardigan-clad grownup. Respect of course, begins inside the self.  I can’t honestly say I’m frightened or dismayed by the sight of a full beard of gray fur.  Trouble is, I’m not so at home with being surrounded by what the AI-driven society believes is my proper wheelhouse.

It’s understood that soon I’ll be a member of that distinguished senior cult. And with that comes the necessary debriefing and indoctrination, on Medicare, health care supplementation, benefit capabilities, matters of “retirement” such as that might be. It’s been commonly believed that the challenges for a man in retirement consist of dealing with the nature of the relationship with his wife after forty years, while sanding the wooden patio deck of his American Gothic backyard, of his palatial two- story pre-century house of six bedrooms, as seen on those financial ads during NFL Sunday. Perhaps the dreaded word of retirement brings to some of us the dreaded fear of just how we expect to exist in some livable way without our codependent source of income or professional identity.  If the holographic Doctor on Star Trek Voyager lost his license, which I think may have happened on one episode, he’d be a mess..!

Most in today’s world, those reaching in age but still vital to our professional teams, are not necessarily ready, or are they persuaded, to step down.  Some, like home-bound pets gazing out windows longingly, cannot.  And therein lies the new dichotomy of the American culture, dividing rich from poor.  The ballad of the Boomers is only the beginning.  Soon we’ll have something called the Split of the “X”.  And it won’t be a kind one.

With life costs and health care costs going nowhere but up, the Medical Industrial Complex surging prices inhumanely, it returns to what some mad, raging House Speaker once yelled in a session years ago, citing the message of the modern health care system: “Get rich or die quickly”.

Taking proactive care of ourselves begins of course with apples per day and less doctor appointments.  But even Jack LaLanne saw his physician.  And for those of us blessedly long un-beset by such immediate need for so long, certain birthdays mean finally dealing directly with that annoying thing you just lived with forever and didn’t think about. Usually because it won’t go away and you don’t know what it’s gonna turn into. It also means looking at how you’re gonna afford to live, maybe where you might be forced to leave and migrate to.  That’s if nothing else changes the plot.

The fifty-sixers I once knew likely did not have to contend with these kinds of untold dreads. They had pensions, safe long-term investments, and policies.  And yet, this looming tidal wave ahead on the radar, I do not perceive myself in any way as “grown up” as those sometimes ailing, ached-and-pained elder statespeople.  I’m blessed, after odysseys of my own to be mostly fitness-minded and dodging the pack in the men’s locker room at the gym, the thirtysomething Schwarzeneggers, talking sympathetically of all the moves they can’t do anymore because of what the prescription meds and steroids did to them. It’s kind of like winning a game of checkers on the Titanic.

But I’m reminded that on this Titanic I’m just a passenger. Age or not.  And if I care to pretend I’m on the Preferred Deck while confined to the rafters, I just might do that. Ultimately, we’re all going to the same place.

Noah F.