Not Talking

The Art of Omission

I will, from time to time, check my email. When I do, I see that I inexplicably have a bunch of new subscribers, probably due to friends I’ve spent time with before referring others to this blog—a blog about food.

Well, I have a secret to share. Several, as a matter of fact. Some time ago, I woke up, and realized I just don’t like food anymore. I rarely think about it until I am hungry. Were I to be deeply honest, cuttingly so, I’d say that realizing that I simply must have to cook something, or else perish, puts me into a mood so fowl that I’d sooner go to sleep than plunder my fridge.

Generally, when the fridge door does open, I find myself similarly unsatisfied. Aggravated. How can it be so full, but so useless? In the past year, more than I’d like to admit, I’ve even allowed some half gallons of milk to go completely rancid.

It may seem as if I am rebelling against something. Perhaps I am. I am not rebelling against any of my readers. I appreciate the attention but regret that I have wasted it so. I want to offer a little bit of an explanation.

On Not Being Who You Say You Are

A few days ago, a friend had a surprise party for being alive for 10,000 days. I pulled out my starter, roughed up some loaves, baked them off, then presented them to her. I’ve spent some time working on pâte sucrée because I really just like a nice fruit tart. Here and there, I’ll braise some beef and pull some noodles by hand. It’s rote. These things are practice the same way you warm up your hands when playing piano.

Some time ago, I had this suspicion that food was, in actuality, not why people follow me. It’s ridiculous to claim otherwise. People are seeing pictures of my food on a website. “This looks so good.” Yes, that’s just about all it accomplishes. After thinking about it some time, I came to grips with the fact that there is a substantial part of peoples’ desire to read about the things that I write solely because, for the longest time, I had a phone with very good image post-processing. Any time I took a picture, it applied filters specifically to make food look more delicious, with its very sophisticated food-detection algorithms.

You may think this sounds strange.

This is a gorgeous picture of almond-crusted roasted black sea bass.

Here is, pardon the vulgarity, some shit I made awhile ago. It is red braised Szechuan beef with hand pulled noodles. The change in phone, specifically in camera sensor, makes it look worse than it actually was.

Don’t misunderstand me when I say this. I am not at all bitter about this fact. It may come off as a sort of inconvenient one, but certainly more inconvenient for you than it is for me. After realizing this, I decided to spend more time thinking about photography.

This wasn’t taken with any phone camera at all. Nor were these:

I spent a considerable amount of time reading about photography. Roland Barthes, which brought me to Susan Sontag; Sontag, who brought me to Alfred Stieglitz. At some point, I was reading Baudrillard along with a now-obscure MIT cognitive scientist and AI researcher by the name of Brian Cantwell Smith as, at some point, I had become positive that some concept resembling a sort of “representational intelligence” must exist. Of course it turned out that it does, which is what this latter fellow was writing about in relationship to AI.

Think of it similarly to spatial intelligence: representational intelligence could best be summarized as a measure of intelligence by how accurately one would re-represent the world around them.

You’d think photographs would be pretty straightforward representations of reality, but unfortunately that is not as correct as you think it would be.

You can identify what this is a picture of, but you cannot identify the editing work that went into it. It’s one of my favorite pictures that I’ve taken, but I have no idea what it actually looks like. I cannot tell you how I changed things; I just moved sliders and knobs until it ultimately felt right.

Similarly, this photograph of a taxidermist, piecing a bird back together.

I know. This is all a roundabout way to say that I’ve been taking pictures of other things; this is all very boring.

Substack, Twitter, social media—these things have a way of flattening people into a brand or some kind of character. This is such a milquetoast observation that it barely necessitates any sort of repetition. It does however produce awkward instances like this, where a crowd of people are waiting for something which is never coming because the author they wait on is something more essential still.

When I was a child, my mother gifted me a toy camera which would print your exposure on a small strip of film. I would promptly take film photos of myself acting like a corpse which, of course, horrified my mom. I think if I had a twelve year old son obsessed with posing dead, I would be similarly dismayed. A few decades later, I would somehow find myself in the comically asinine position of producing a short film to be played at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. When I told her, she breathed a sigh of relief—as if all that torture I had put her through as a pubescent boy somehow paid off because I am so suddenly an artist now.

I had built a puppet for it, I made her tiny little clothes myself.

It is bizarre to say all this. Even more bizarre is that I will begin work on my second film very soon—a cartoon, something I have always wanted to make.

Lying By Omission

I have a deep appreciation for being quiet. I like to read and not talk about things. I like to sketch things that I don’t show to anyone. It pleases me when people find out that I have done something that they could have never imagined me doing. Even learning to cook, while visible here and on Twitter, was something largely invisible to people who I had known personally. Suddenly, to them, I could do this all one random day.

While it is no doubt at my readers’ expense, I like that this is where cooking is at now for me. Certainly, I still have those things in me. They are not retired, I am not a wastrel; they are just simply there, another component of who I am, subsumed into everything else I have decided to work on.

I apologize for those of you who may be deflated by this all. I have always feared writing for this very reason; that eventually my taste or desires would change for something else, and now I have people hungry for something they simply won’t get. So, I’d like to be very straightforward about things: I do not know, and cannot promise, that I will ever write about food here again.

It may happen, and it may not. I am working on different things now, and my curiosities are carrying me into a different direction; a direction I quite like. My first short film should be available for viewing soon. I’m very proud to say that in a theater full of three hundred people, I was the first to pull a laugh out at knife point. Likewise I will begin work on an animated film shortly, and am actively seeking an actress to round out a cast for hopefully one other film before the end is through.

I appreciate everyone who subscribed and encouraged me to write. I also plan on making socks, launching a website, making sculptures, reading more, playing music; there are just a lot of things out there to think about.