Talkin' 'bout my generation

I have this very distinct memory from high school.  I was alone in the car with my English teacher and a neighbor on the way home from school.  Both of these gentlemen are of an age with my parents, and are members of the part of that generation who defined themselves by breaking with their parents' social standards and forging a brave new world.  That world is now primarily remembered for experimentation with drugs and new social standards, as well as a revolution in music.  This neighbor, feeling cantankerous perhaps, asked me a question as something of a challenge.  His question was, "What music defines the legacy of [my] generation?"  I was a shy kid.  I mumbled something about The Pixies, as that was the first thing that came to mind. He shot me down dismissively, saying that Art Rock had been around a long time.  He was, of course, perfectly right.  For his generation, Rock and Roll was a revolution that has changed completely the shape of music ever since. 

I suppose it says something about me that this conversation has stuck with me for so long.  I think about it periodically, and have come to the conclusion that the correct answer is very simple.  I was too prejudiced at the time to see it.  He would have hated it and I didn't have the strength of character to argue the point at the time, so I suppose it is for the best that I didn't try to defend it.  The answer, of course, is hip hop and the parallels are striking. 

Both hip hop and rock music have roots in African American music traditions.  Led Zeppelin (the band for which the term "heavy metal" was coined) started life as a blues band.  Rock, of course, has had at least thirty more years to evolve and permeate the mainstream than hip hop has, but when it started, the older generation dismissed it as noise, not music.  Ironically, those same rebellious youths who dismissed their parents as square are now all grown up and dismiss hip hop as noise, not music. 

Unlike rock, hip hop has remained primarily segregated racially.  With a few exceptions (Vanilla Ice, and Eminem standing out among them, each in his own way) artists that most would consider true hip hop remain black or brown (Pit Bull and other Latino artists are examples here).  All it takes is a few minutes on a modern pop music station to hear the influence of hip hop and R&B on modern pop.  I spend as few minutes as possible listening to modern pop music stations, so I am not going to embarrass myself here by trying to list names and songs.  Like rock in the eighties, hip hop aesthetics pervade modern music.  It is my generation's musical legacy.

Perhaps writing this piece will purge my memory of this conversation and allow me to stop making this argument in my head during idle moments.  Of course, it brings up another question to keep me up at night.  I like to think of myself as a pretty cool dad.  My iPod contains plenty of music my parents would find headache-inducing.  I do some judicial editing with the on-off button on my car stereo so that my daughter can indulge her passion for Eminem's Haley's Song (you see, she shares initials with him, and came up with the nickname M&M for herself independently so she feels a certain connection to that bleached-blond, foul-mouthed bad boy of hip hop).  Now that I have freed up some mental real estate, I can spend my time worrying about what the musical legacy of my children's generation will be.  What, in twenty years, will they be listening to that I will consider noise, not music?

A bread post, complete with recipe

I love to bake. For most of the people reading this blog, that will not be any sort of surprise at all, since you all know me pretty well. I started baking as a kid. We didn't buy cookies at the store like some families do. If we wanted cookies, somebody had to bake them. Since I was usually the one that wanted them, I was usually the one who baked them. I developed my own recipe, based off the Toll House recipe, quite young. I’ll share it with you if you ask nicely. I used to make cookies after dinner. I distinctly remember making people pause the movie so I could run into the kitchen to take another batch out of the oven without missing anything. I suppose that was kind of annoying to the other movie watchers, but I always came back with warm chocolate chip cookies, so I can’t imagine they minded that much. By the time the cookies were done, I had usually eaten enough dough that I had no interest in cookies at all. But they keep, and there is always tomorrow.

In college, I lived in a co-op called Columbae. The house was owned by the university, I believe it had started life as a fraternity house. The co-ops were kind of the anti-fraternities. I will just say, forty people (male and female) between the ages of 19 and about 24 (we had a few grad students), living in the same house, making every decision by consensus, and moving rooms every quarter. I will leave you with that image and save Columbae for a future post. It was there that I learned to bake bread. Every weeknight, it was somebody’s job to make a huge batch of bread for the whole house. For a while I held that job, and loved it. I would start prep after the dinner cleanup crew finished (about 8:00 or so). Bread would come out of the oven around midnight. The smell would always attract the many brain-dead students still awake, pulling them away from studying for a much-needed carbohydrate boost. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). My mothers (yeah, I’ve got two, and a father, again, a subject for another post) believe hot bread will clog your ileocecal valve. I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

My bread is, I believe better than what you can buy in the store. At least, I like it better. That is one of the biggest benefits of doing one’s own cooking (aside from saving money, and generally healthier eating). When I make my own food, I can make it to my taste. I like plain whole wheat bread, no nuts or seeds, moist and fluffy. So that is the bread my recipe makes. Just like I tinkered with the Toll House cookie recipe years ago to fit my tastes I have come up with my own favorite bread recipe. It is primarily drawn from Mollie Katzen’s basic bread recipe (I still send people to her hand-drawn illustrations of bread baking when they ask me how to bake) and Nancy Silverton’s everyday whole wheat, combined with everything I have learned in my fifteen year obsession with bread. For those who would like to try it, my recipe is attached below. I intend, someday, to publish it, along with other recipes I have developed. Feel free to use it, alter it, bake from it whatever you want. Please, just don’t publish it as your own. And cut a piece of that first loaf out of the oven, eating it hot however you like it best. Damn the bread cognoscenti and the ileocecal valve (whatever it may be).



Tim’s WW bread:
makes 4 ample loaves

Sponge:
5.5 cups (44 oz.) water
6 cups (26 oz) WW flour
2 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast*

Mix:
4 tsp. instant yeast
4.5 cups (19 oz.) white WW flour**
4.5 cups (19 oz.) bread flour***
2 eggs
½ cup sugar or honey
2/3 cup oil
4 tsp. salt
2 cups cooked grain (optional)****


The Sponge: I learned to bake bread from Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. If you are familiar with her recipe, you may recognize some of it in this recipe. She suggests using a sponge, mixing part of the flour with a little yeast and water and letting it rise before mixing it with the rest of the ingredients. This is a technique called a pre-ferment, used by professional bakers to improve the flavor and rise of bread. Traditional hearth breads use a pre-ferment (called, variously, a poolish, mother, chef, or biga), often allowed to rise overnight. I included the sponge in this recipe because I have tried cutting this step out (I love cutting out unnecessary steps, as we will see in a minute when we get to the kneading bit) and found that my loaves rose significantly less. So, mix up the sponge ingredients (should make a wet dough), and allow to rise in a warm place, covered with plastic wrap or a clean towel. Be sure to leave plenty of room between the covering and the sponge, as it will rise and can make a mess of your towel if there is contact. A minimum of an hour is a good idea. Longer periods (up to 10 hours or so) are fine, depending on your baking schedule. If you are going to go longer than about 3-4 hours, I suggest letting it rise in the refrigerator where the cool temperature will slow things down.

The Mix: Take all of your sponge and put it in a bigger bowl (unless you used a nice big bowl in the first place). Add all of the ingredients of the mix except the flour first, mixing well. Some people caution about not letting the salt touch the yeast before it has been mixed with the other ingredients (they believe the concentrated salt can kill the yeast cells). I have not found this to be a problem, but it is pretty easy to add them to opposite sides of the bowl. Add the flours and stir until thoroughly mixed. If you have made bread before, you may find that this dough is wetter than you expect. Don’t worry it is designed that way. A wetter dough (within limits) makes a lighter loaf.

Kneading: This is one of the places where I firmly disagree with most home bread recipes. The famous “No Knead Bread” recipe from the New York Times a few years ago popularized a method called folding used by professional bakers, especially for wetter doughs, for years. I believe this method can be used for any bread recipe and will save a lot of time and effort (or electricity if you choose to knead in an electric mixer). If you don’t believe me, or really like the stress release and forearm workout of kneading, just knead this dough for about 10 minutes, adding a little flour to keep it from sticking. Use as little flour as possible, as too much will get you back to that denser consistency, and a denser loaf.

For those who are willing to step off the cliff with me, here is what you do: Plan to let this bread rise for about two hours (this will vary a bit depending on the freshness of your yeast and the temperature in your house) For the first hour, every twenty minutes, sprinkle the counter lightly with flour, pour the dough out, and fold it into thirds (as you would fold a letter). Rotate it 180 degrees and fold it again. Return it to the bowl to continue rising. After the third fold, just let it rise unmolested for the next hour. It should about double in bulk by the end of the rise. If it is done sooner, skip to the next step. If it is rising slowly, put it in a warmer place (on top of the dryer, while a load is drying, is a good place, or on top of the refrigerator).

Divide the dough into 4 approximately equal pieces (you can, of course, cut this recipe in half for 2 loaves). Oil 4 loaf pans lightly with spray oil or butter. Shape the pieces into loaves and place them in the pans. Oil the top of the loaves, cover with a clean towel or saran wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. When the loaves have risen such that the part of the loaf contacting the pan is about even with the top, slash the tops with a sharp knife (serrated works well), and place in a preheated 350F oven. If you are pressed for time, about when the top of the dough is level with the edge of the pan, slash the loaves and place them in an unheated oven. Allow it to preheat to 350 with the loaves in there. They will continue to rise as the oven heats, cutting part of the time off of your baking day. Bake until the loaves are golden brown and sound hollow when thumped (the best way to test this is to use an instant read thermometer and bake them to between 180 and 190 degrees). Remove them from the pans, and place on a wire rack to cool. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

* I call for instant yeast (also called bread machine yeast sometimes). The only difference between this and you traditional Active Dry yeast is that the instant is pelletized in smaller pellets at the factory, allowing it to be mixed directly with the dry ingredients. If you can’t find it (big box stores or places that cater to caterers often sell yeast in 1 pound bags for far less than your regular supermarket) Active Dry yeast is fine. Use about 1/3 more yeast (there are fewer living cells in Active Dry than instant) and mix it with a small part of the water (about ½ cup) to dissolve before adding the other ingredients.

** White whole wheat flour is whole wheat flour milled from white wheat berries, rather than red wheat, which is what most whole wheat flour is made from. Because it has a thinner seed coat, it does not have the strong flavor most people associate with whole wheat flour, and produces a lighter loaf without losing the nutritional value.

*** I use bread flour in this recipe because it has more gluten than all purpose flour, which helps make up for the high proportion of whole grain flour. If you can’t find bread flour, all purpose will work (though your loaves may be a bit denser) or you can add a little bit (up to ¼ cup) vital wheat gluten to compensate. Alternatively, you can substitute more white whole wheat for the bread flour (up to the whole amount for a 100% whole grain loaf). A little added gluten, again, will help with the fluffiness of your bread.

**** I used to try to use uncooked grain here, and some might work (cornmeal for instance, adds crunch without absorbing a lot of water). I ran into trouble with uncooked oats and bulgar, in particular, absorbing water out of the dough and changing the consistency of the bread. Feel free to experiment here if you have more patience than I did. You can also add things like a cinnamon sugar swirl, dried fruit, nuts, etc. I like my bread pretty plain so I have written the recipe this way.

Insulation (or the Secret Origin II)

This is another piece that I found on my hard drive. It covers some of the same territory as the last post, but I think I actually like it better. Rather than revise history by replacing the last one with this, I thought I'd post both.

There are a number of things that could be used to sum up my childhood. Each of course would highlight a different part of it. One of these things is insulation. For many years I lived part time with my father, in his unfinished house. By unfinished I mean that the structure was all there, but either money or gumption had run out before the finish work had been completed on interior. So the walls were framed and the insulation was in them, but the drywall that would have completed the inside of the walls in most houses had never been put up, let alone spackled, painted, and trimmed. For many years, in place of wallpaper or the textured walls painted one of the many hues of off-white beloved of interior decorators, when I glanced at a wall or stared at the ceiling I saw the shiny backing of fiberglass insulation decorated with the name of either Johns-Manville or Owens-Corning. It is a testament to the amount of time I spent in this particular occupation (staring at the wall or the ceiling, that is) that I still recall both of those brand names with a familiarity usually reserved for contractors and their employees some twenty-odd years later.

But that is only one way in which insulation can be used to sum up my childhood. As I said, I only enjoyed the warm and silvery embrace of Johns and Owens roughly half of the time. The other half of my life was spent with my mother and stepfather living in a teepee. Now the teepee was the dwelling place of the plains Indians in this country before we white folks killed and enslaved them and turned it into a country. Never mind that the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?). My parents decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest. I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds. Our teepees were not made of skins as the originals were. Remember these were hippies who tended to frown upon the killing of animals. So our teepees were made of canvas. Which brings me back to the subject of insulation. Canvas, especially wet canvas is one of nature’s crappiest insulators. In fact, there is something called a swamp cooler where one wets a cloth and wraps it around the thing to be cooled. The evaporation of the water makes quite an effective cooler.

We were in the Pacific Northwest, however. I like to include Northern California in the Pacific Northwest which I realize stirs anger in the hearts of Oregon and Washington. You can tell I lived there because I don’t consider San Francisco to be Northern California. It is clearly in the rough center of the state. But most non-Californians and a disturbing number of southern and central Californians seem to believe that San Francisco is a few miles from the Oregon border. As evidence for this I present the stickers plastered all over pickup trucks in Monterey which proudly proclaim “NorCal” in gothic script. I will refrain from further comment on this atrocity and simply refer the owners of those trucks to a state map.

Whatever we call it, northern Mendocino county shares a Mediterranean climate with the Pacific Northwest. This means that the summers are lovely, warm, and clear. The winters , however, are damp and miserable. Luckily, there isn’t much evaporation to cause that evaporative cooling I mentioned. There is a lot of rain however and teepees are not well designed to deal with rain. So we added a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year. I remember looking up at the water pooled inside. I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green. We also heated our teepees with wood stoves. We did use that lovely invention the chimney, so the smoke was almost all vented out the side of the teepee. The single layer of canvas was far less effective that Messrs. Manville and Corning. So most of the smoke went out the chimney and most of the heat went out through the walls.

We heated bricks on those stoves, wrapped them in towels, and placed them in the bottoms of our sleeping bags before bed. Yes, for that half of my childhood spent in the teepee, I spent every night in a sleeping bag. It seemed perfectly normal at the time. As did the brick-and-board shelves that occupied the edges of the teepee upon which we kept our things. The lovely part about this was that there was a little triangle of extra space between the vertical back of the shelves and the diagonal wall of the teepee. This was a great place for a boy to hide. Unfortunately it was also a perfect place for a cat to leave the entrails of eviscerated rodents. In the summer they kind of dried up and mummified. I can’t actually remember what happened to them in the winter. I think that may be for the best.

So now, years later, I live in a house like everybody else. I have drywall, plaster, and a lovely layer of off-white paint on my walls. Owen and Johns are a thing of memory and the heat from the gas furnace stays neatly inside the house. The toilet is in the bathroom, not 200 yards up the hill in a little shed built over a hole in the ground. I don’t miss the rodent entrails, the long walk through the snow to the toilet in the dark, or the potential for lung cancer represented by the fiberglass insulation. I do miss walking in the forest by starlight. It can be done if you let your eyes adjust and feel carefully with your feet. Where I live now there is too much light pollution to see the milky way, let alone let your eyes truly adjust to the dark. I wonder how much of who I am is the result of little experiences my kids will never have. And I wonder who they will be as a result. And so I raise a nostalgic glass to Johns, Owen, and all the little red ants attracted by the mouse guts behind the shelves. Then I take a hot shower and crawl into a bed between sheets, with no need of a heated brick and realize I don’t miss them that much.

The Secret Origin

I had a very small circle of friends growing up so it wasn't until high school, or maybe college, that I realized that the way my family lived wasn't exactly normal.  For instance, I knew that most Americans don’t live in teepees but I'd never lived any other way so I didn't have anything to compare it to.  Never mind that the teepee was designed by the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of  what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?).  My parents (more precisely, my mom and my then-stepdad) decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest.  I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds.  And so we had to make a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year.  I remember looking up at the water pooled inside.  I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green

We didn’t really have a kitchen the way other people understand the term.  We had “Darkest Africa.”  In “Darkest Africa,” there was a table, made from one of those industrial spools telephone crews roll telephone cable off of.  A refrigerator, or more properly, an icebox.  It was an old Frigidaire, not plugged into anything of course, into which we would put big 5 pound blocks of ice in the summer, which kept our food cold.  There was a real gas stove, hooked up to a propane tank.  There were some counters around the outside.  I can’t remember how they were made, but I think the top was bare plywood.  We had plastic tubs into which we poured water to wash dishes.  We had to collect the water from a hose spigot some 50 feet away, and heat it on the stove if we wanted to wash out dishes in hot water.  The floor wasn’t qute dirt, it was a mixture of soil and concrete.  You see my parents (I am just going to use this somewhat imprecise term, unless it is critical to the story) didn't want to leave a mark on the land when they left.  I went back years later to look and they were right.  There is only a flat spot where I used to live.

My memory is a little fuzzy about the exact size of the teepees, blurred by the years and the fact that the things around us get smaller as we get bigger.  I think they were about 20 feet across at the bottom.  My step brother (who we will cal Ari) and I had one.  Our parents had another about 100 feet away through the woods.  I described the kitchen already.  Our living room was a fire pit with a brick grill built next to it for cooking my step-dad's specialty, "Chicken Goo-La-Lee."  In the summer, part of our dinner was usually cooked on this grill, and we would often eat around the fire.  In the winter we sat on the floor and ate on a low table in the teepee I shared with Ari.  During the day we would play outside.  Somehow in my memory it was always summer, so I honestly don't know what we did in the winter.  I remember a lot of Uno.  Maybe we played Uno all day.

There is, of course, another room in most modern homes.  That room we euphemistically call the restroom, W.C., powder room, or bathroom.  That room really has two separate purposes, and in teepee land, we separated those purposes in two different places.  Baths were taken in the bathhouse (think cowboys, not the Bowery or the Castro).  It was one of two permanent buildings on the property that had not only running water, but that pinnacle of modernism, hot running water.  Of course, it didn't have a regular bathtub and certainly nothing like a shower.  I used to take baths in one of those big galvanized metal tubs they use to water horses and cattle.  I remember the fitting they used to plug the hole in the side had a hard, square, plastic piece on it that stuck into the tub.  You had to be careful to watch out for that.  

There was also a toilet in the bathhouse for any citified visitors.  We hardier folk used the outhouse, which was literally a wooden structure over a hole in the ground.  I have developed extensive experience of outhouses in my life, and this was the most primitive.  Not even a seat to sit on, you had to squat over the hole and hope your legs didn't cramp up before you were done. 

Looking back, I wonder what my life would have been like in a regular house, with 4 walls, plumbing, and central heating.  I think about raising my own kids and how different their lives are than mine was.  I like to say that I have experienced the industrial revolution in my life time.  I've gone from kerosene lamps and wood-fired cookstoves to iphones, wireless internet (I refuse to call it wi fi), and blogging.  Sometimes I think I would fit better in an earlier, simpler time.  But that isn't the time I live in.  I live in a world of exponential technological change.  Of fast international travel, instant communication, information saturation, and catastrophic oil spills.  If it ever comes crashing down around our ears, I'm ready to go back to the wood-burning stove.  Until then, I'm off to update my Facebook status.

A blog? Really?

I never thought I would be the sort of person who had a blog.  When I think blog I think either of the semi-professional types who have particular insight (think Daily Kos) or the sort of personal journal that has inane details of someone's personal life (think the worst Twitter stereotype with no character limit).  I recently read a couple of personal blogs that made me change my thinking.  They were structured more like the kind of topical essays I used to love but haven't written since college.  The sort of essays that might be published in Harper's or The New Yorker but without the competition and editorial review.  The sort of essays that get turned into This American Life episodes.  The sort of essays I have been meaning to write, and even have drafts of hiding in a file on my hard drive.  I hope creating this will give me incentive to write more often.  I hope that it will help those family members and friends I just moved away from stay in touch a little better. 

A note about the title:  When I was growing up, my father wrote a column for the local paper, which he called "Down Our Road."  I have gone down a pretty different road, but I would like to think I am continuing that tradition.  Depending on your age and connection to popular culture, you can call it an homage or a shout out to my dad.