Thanks to the Titan Missile Museum, I was one of the guests on the Jay Parisi Show (KNST 790 AM) live broadcast event from the Titan site on Thursday June 19. It was great to see behind the scenes and talk about the book and the story behind it. How do you get from the Atom Bomb to the Atomic Cocktail Party? (One drink at a time.)
Not just in my strange mind, but the whole atomic pop culture thing. It's black humor, a fist in the face of death. It's eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die, carpe diem, live life to the fullest, stop and smell the roses, and by golly, laugh more. But live and write with panache instead of cliche.
Jay was great, willing to look at all sides of an issue, and to go a little deeper on the questions instead of staying on the surface. I talked a little bit about "why humor"--because we learn better with emotion attached to the learning experience. Think about the best teachers you had--they motivated you by fun or fear.
I vote for fun, or as in the case of nuclear powers, fun and fear.
I hear i have a new nickname: The Margarita Girl.
That's me, an edu-tainer.
Slainte! Salud, amor, y el tiempo para desfrutarlo!
(Health! Health, love, and the time to enjoy them!)
Maurynne Maxwell, aka Em, aka Rev, muses on life, the universe, and everything.
20 June 2008
16 June 2008
The Bourdain Experience, Part 1
Some queries have been coming in…yes, Anthony Bourdain and the No Reservations crew were in Southern AZ at the Titan Missile Museum.
While the release one signs says nothing about remaining silent, it seems only right to let the famous guy get the first take. I’ll post my take after the show airs.
Who knows what will end up on the show? But yes, there was drink involved. And yes, I was there, on the sidelines.
I will say it was very cool to meet him. I’ve read the books, I watch the show, and I was pretty much counting on him being a no-bullshit guy; one of the few people on the planet where what you see is what you get, on the page, on camera, in person. This was true.
In keeping with this authenticity, the show is very much candid videography, minimal set-ups, no do-overs. He shows up, the cameras roll, and that’s it—all kudos to the crew and film editing staff and Bourdain himself for making such great television—we can’t even guess at what the final version of this show will be.
What has made Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations the most successful of the books and shows, I believe, is the consistent tone of a master memoirist—and therefore sensualist—Bourdain. It is that openness of the senses that enables connection to the world and to the people in it; the ability to retain and communicate sensation makes a storyteller, a chef, an entertainer. What we love to read and watch is Bourdain the raconteur.
Bourdain is bold, Bourdain is blunt, Bourdain is charming. He’s a regular guy.
I'm grateful for the experience, no matter what ends up on television. I hope to make the cut, but I forgot to use my teacher voice. I learned a lot and got to entertain a small bit myself, had a great evening, lived the moment. Coolness!
What really prompted this post was Jay Friedman in the Seattlest. (seattlest.com/2008/06/09/appreciating_an.php) Jay thinks Bourdain should thank his fans for making him a success. I don’t think Bourdain has to fall over with gratitude to his fans. Like any traveler welcomed in the door, he pays for his supper by telling his story.
Bon appetit!
While the release one signs says nothing about remaining silent, it seems only right to let the famous guy get the first take. I’ll post my take after the show airs.
Who knows what will end up on the show? But yes, there was drink involved. And yes, I was there, on the sidelines.
I will say it was very cool to meet him. I’ve read the books, I watch the show, and I was pretty much counting on him being a no-bullshit guy; one of the few people on the planet where what you see is what you get, on the page, on camera, in person. This was true.
In keeping with this authenticity, the show is very much candid videography, minimal set-ups, no do-overs. He shows up, the cameras roll, and that’s it—all kudos to the crew and film editing staff and Bourdain himself for making such great television—we can’t even guess at what the final version of this show will be.
What has made Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations the most successful of the books and shows, I believe, is the consistent tone of a master memoirist—and therefore sensualist—Bourdain. It is that openness of the senses that enables connection to the world and to the people in it; the ability to retain and communicate sensation makes a storyteller, a chef, an entertainer. What we love to read and watch is Bourdain the raconteur.
Bourdain is bold, Bourdain is blunt, Bourdain is charming. He’s a regular guy.
I'm grateful for the experience, no matter what ends up on television. I hope to make the cut, but I forgot to use my teacher voice. I learned a lot and got to entertain a small bit myself, had a great evening, lived the moment. Coolness!
What really prompted this post was Jay Friedman in the Seattlest. (seattlest.com/2008/06/09/appreciating_an.php) Jay thinks Bourdain should thank his fans for making him a success. I don’t think Bourdain has to fall over with gratitude to his fans. Like any traveler welcomed in the door, he pays for his supper by telling his story.
Bon appetit!
11 June 2008
Constructing Reality
James Frey is back on the scene with a well-received new novel. Frey got in widely publicized trouble for dramatizing his memoir, merging people (characters) and situations (plot). Or perhaps it was for marketing a novel as autobiography, although you’ll find some literati who would say that’s why one calls it a memoir instead of autobiography. And then I think you would find some people in consciousness studies, monasteries, and asylums that would challenge any attempt at distinction between fact and fiction.
As a book person, I noticed the favorable mentions of Frey. As a reader, I checked out my local library’s copy of Best American essays 2007 and therein read “ Shakers,” by Daniel Orozco. It’s far better written, but it reads like a Discovery Channel special, filled with scientific information, following an earthquake in a moment-by-moment way—with emotion-charged scenes of imagined people caught in the midst of it. At first I was offended, because I like reading science and nature articles and don’t much care for those Discovery Channel specials. But I must admit, it is that human element that gives the story its power and resonance, mimics the force of an earthquake in the mind.
Humans have always used the power of story: to teach, to learn, to attempt understanding of the world around them. Only when science entered the picture did this separation between fact and fiction—equating one with truth and the other with falsity. Ancient stories were relegated to myth. Science was looking to explain the world, not understand it. Science was a new culture, a new religion, stamping out the competition, limiting the world to what could be perceived with the five senses and the tools human beings created. And yet, every great leap forward in science came from intuition, dreams, thought—perception applied to observation.
Here in the 21st century, with our cell phones and computers, electron microscopes and deep space telescopes, internet and satellite HDTV, the lines between fact and fiction blur again. Not only the Discovery Channel, but also the History and National Geographic Channel (or Nat Geo, as its calling itself in the sound-byte age) are dramatizing, fictionalizing. One could say that introducing the human element is the beginning of fiction. The story is what people want, not the bare facts. This desire for story is the hunger for connection and identity, the desire to see ourselves in relation to the universe. Science and religion and story spring from the same hunger in the human spirit.
Are we truly any different than our savannah-dwelling, cave-lodging forebears? We light our cities against the dark night and its predators. In the midst of flood and earthquake, tornados and volcanic eruptions, science has the same power as religion to prevent them.
They really are the same, science and religion. In our quantum world where physicists, the priests and mystics of science, say that reality is influenced by perception, what is the difference between fact and fiction?
Is it such a large leap to change the term ‘influenced by’ to the term “created by?” In a world ravaged by greed (think war, gimme what you got), industrialization (think shrinking rainforests), and the unintended consequences of technology (think nuclear waste, which also encapsulates the former two)—in such a world, shouldn’t the quest of 21st century science be to harness the technology of the human spirit, the power of perception?
Isn’t that what it takes, a shift in consciousness, to create a new world? A shift in consciousness, the power of story. In the modern age, the ideal and story of freedom created the shift toward democracy—and a shift away from democracy to rampant capitalism, Nazism, fascism, communism, repression. Story and will shrank the British Empire. Stories of conquest, entitlement and fear planted the seeds for an explosion of terrorism.
The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we listen to—these are what create the forces of societal, political, religious, and scientific change that in turn change the world. At least, our perception of it. At least, our reality.
As a book person, I noticed the favorable mentions of Frey. As a reader, I checked out my local library’s copy of Best American essays 2007 and therein read “ Shakers,” by Daniel Orozco. It’s far better written, but it reads like a Discovery Channel special, filled with scientific information, following an earthquake in a moment-by-moment way—with emotion-charged scenes of imagined people caught in the midst of it. At first I was offended, because I like reading science and nature articles and don’t much care for those Discovery Channel specials. But I must admit, it is that human element that gives the story its power and resonance, mimics the force of an earthquake in the mind.
Humans have always used the power of story: to teach, to learn, to attempt understanding of the world around them. Only when science entered the picture did this separation between fact and fiction—equating one with truth and the other with falsity. Ancient stories were relegated to myth. Science was looking to explain the world, not understand it. Science was a new culture, a new religion, stamping out the competition, limiting the world to what could be perceived with the five senses and the tools human beings created. And yet, every great leap forward in science came from intuition, dreams, thought—perception applied to observation.
Here in the 21st century, with our cell phones and computers, electron microscopes and deep space telescopes, internet and satellite HDTV, the lines between fact and fiction blur again. Not only the Discovery Channel, but also the History and National Geographic Channel (or Nat Geo, as its calling itself in the sound-byte age) are dramatizing, fictionalizing. One could say that introducing the human element is the beginning of fiction. The story is what people want, not the bare facts. This desire for story is the hunger for connection and identity, the desire to see ourselves in relation to the universe. Science and religion and story spring from the same hunger in the human spirit.
Are we truly any different than our savannah-dwelling, cave-lodging forebears? We light our cities against the dark night and its predators. In the midst of flood and earthquake, tornados and volcanic eruptions, science has the same power as religion to prevent them.
They really are the same, science and religion. In our quantum world where physicists, the priests and mystics of science, say that reality is influenced by perception, what is the difference between fact and fiction?
Is it such a large leap to change the term ‘influenced by’ to the term “created by?” In a world ravaged by greed (think war, gimme what you got), industrialization (think shrinking rainforests), and the unintended consequences of technology (think nuclear waste, which also encapsulates the former two)—in such a world, shouldn’t the quest of 21st century science be to harness the technology of the human spirit, the power of perception?
Isn’t that what it takes, a shift in consciousness, to create a new world? A shift in consciousness, the power of story. In the modern age, the ideal and story of freedom created the shift toward democracy—and a shift away from democracy to rampant capitalism, Nazism, fascism, communism, repression. Story and will shrank the British Empire. Stories of conquest, entitlement and fear planted the seeds for an explosion of terrorism.
The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we listen to—these are what create the forces of societal, political, religious, and scientific change that in turn change the world. At least, our perception of it. At least, our reality.
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