The Edge of the Village

As of late, Anthony Bourdain’s outlook on the world has evolved. For a long time we looked toward Bourdain to provide us with a kind of debauched interpretation of the culinary world, channeling H.S.

I captured this photo of the Olive Garden in Grand Forks, North Dakota on March 31, 2012. This is the south elevation, the photo taken from a moving car.

Thompson and Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad among others. Tony started it, but the audience (us) came within its gravitational pull and continued to grow. Pretty soon large amounts of people depended on him to say what we wanted him to say.

At least since 2008, various episodes of “No Reservations” have come across as contrived — there’s only so many times a beating cobra heart can be eaten before one runs out of original ways to describe it. Now he’s saying something different. And it irks many, since it deviates from expectations.

There’s an expression that people either stick to their guns, or they fall into a rut. Perhaps Bourdain felt he was in a rut. For some time. And now he wants to shake it up, in this case with Marilyn (who has a Wikipedia entry here), and she is coming into a similar orbit that Bourdain did: thrust into a situation that she had little control over. She just wants to play bridge, take notes on what she’s eating in Grand Forks, and sip a little Crown from time to time.

In a couple days a small cohort (or more like a squad) of NDSU historians will descend on Houston, Texas to take part in the 2012 Western Social Science Association conference (the program here). This year Tom Isern is the official conference Program Coordinator, so he went down early (“down” is the direction you need to go to get to Tejas when you live on the northern Great Plains). There are a couple discussions or panels I’ll be sitting in on, and since I was getting my thoughts in order with pen and paper I thought I would just as well blog them.

• On Thursday, April 12, 2012, about 1630 hours, I’ll be partaking in a book discussion with Tom Isern, James Beattie, and William C. Schaniel. We’ll be discussing James Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The key phrase is environmental anxiety, and it considers how nineteenth-century Christianity (which at the time was loaded with romanticism, among other things; perhaps it still is?) and positivistic science (similar kind of situation) anticipated certain environmental results after arriving on the scene (aka, colonizing) throughout the globe. When these theoretical anticipations fell into discord, it resulted in a type of psychological torment, or environmental anxiety. In many ways this work holds thematic continuity with Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden, or Publius Vergilius Maro’s Eclogues, at least an exploration into how humanity has understood nature, and how humans have or have not altered said nature. We’ll likely talk about the word nature itself, and what it means to be natural or unnatural — I often feel unnatural even though Homo sapiens in the evolutionary scheme of things are natural. Once again, though, the word nature can be a slippery one, and its abstraction is one of the reasons why it has persisted (speak in metaphor if you want your statements to have staying power throughout the ages). Isern and I, among others, are anticipating that today’s politicians will appropriate the phrase “environmental anxiety” if they haven’t already. The latest phrase I cobbled together was Industrial Christianity 2.0, a sort of hyper-Max Weberian model for the 21st century.
• On Friday (04/13/2012) at 800 hours (CST) I’ll be showcasing a poster in, well, the Poster Session. It deals with issues as to how the public has remembered the various sites of memory and mourning that are connected with the Dakota Conflict in the Minnesota River Valley in 1862, and the subsequent Sibley and Sully punitive campaigns in Dakota Territory in 1863 and 1864. I’m working on a research seminar paper for Dr. David Silkenat that deals with this, along with understanding how contemporaneous massacre sites and sites of memory, conflict, skirmish and mourning have been interpreted too. This includes the massacre sites of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, and the Bear River Massacre in southern Idaho. I’m in the midst of considering the global implications during this period, when empires (see Russia, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, French, British, Chinese, and so on) sought to assimilate at best and annihilate at worst the indigenes whom were labeled as not fitting the imperial or national mold. For example, the Maori of New Zealand really gave the Brits a go in the 1860s, and so on and so forth.
• I’m still rounding out thoughts on the panel that explores the Aussie flick, “Red Dog,” and that will take place on Friday (04/13/2012) about 1300 hours (CST). The trailer is just below:

And some out takes here…

• Notions of Human’s Best Friend surface with dog movies, so last week Isern and I tossed around some ideas. I was thinking about grounding this in prehistory, or those stories anthropologists often tell that explain how otherwise non-domesticated dogs became dogs. Hunter-gatherers invariably create trash, and this trash contains scraps of food, or bones to chew on. Eventually four-legged creatures work their way close enough to the human trash piles for a free nibble, and then they start nibbling away more regularly, and eventually relationships between human and dog form. Pretty soon we’re wondering why dogs circle two or three times before they lay down in the corner of a house, or something along those lines. It probably has to do with being hard-wired to push down foliage and tall grasses before taking dog naps. Homo sapiens have been around anywhere from 200,000 to 150,000 years (we pushed our way out of east Africa) and only sedentary for the last 6,000 years or so. There’s the wolf-dog Two-Socks in “Dances With Wolves,” and there’s the usual suspects of Lassie, Rin-tin-tin, Turner and Hooch, Beethoven, Lewis and Clark’s newfoundland retriever Seaman, and some areas of east Asia that still consider it a delicacy. The floor remains wide open, anyhow. This “Red Dog” flick also has similarities with the work camps and crew culture springing up in western North Dakota’s Bakken oil field these days, too.
• Also on Friday (04/13/2012) at 0945 hours I’ll moderate a panel with Erika Wright and Anthony Amato entitled, “Unpredictable Developments” — so far I haven’t thought about where this panel will go.

In the pulp cinema-ist’s 2009 DVD edition of Inglourious Basterds, I recently came across some of the bonus features and decided finally to click “Play” on them. The video short Nation’s Pride is effectively — or affectively for NAZIs — propagandistic pulp on propagandistic pulp, a parody on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), this latter a serious film forwarded by Leni who in the 1930s subscribed to NAZI-lightism (if it’s possible to be kind of a NAZI).

Within Tarantino’s pulp short that is Nation’s Pride, though, it’s important to not take a sip of your beverage just before the below seen, where a fictional American Army commander does not allow for the bombing of a NAZI sniper because the jerk is sniping from the top of a 1,000 year old historic Italian tower. See below for context.

To be blunt, screw the tower and bomb the sociopathic sniper hopped up on social darwinian national socialism. FDR, Einstein and Churchill would have nodded in approval.

While the following insubordinate clause may read like a platitude, we might still remind ourselves that buildings are built by individuals, and those individuals have stories. And once built, those buildings take on owner after owner, tenant after tenant, and this brings additional stories into the fold.

824 Main Avenue in Fargo, North Dakota

In the case of 824 Main Avenue in Fargo, North Dakota, the Fargo-based punk band Les Dirty Frenchmen has for some years rented a space in the basement. They use it for practice, that perpetual process that can easily go unnoticed by anyone not in a band.

To provide a bit of historical context to the origins of punk, it’s necessary to acknowledge it as both a cultural and political movement. In Samuel Johnson’s 18th century distilled book of Insults, a punk is defined as “A whore; a common prostitute; a strumpet.” The Tory Johnson did not

Les Dirty Frenchmen emerge from 824 Main Avenue on March 1, 2012.

mince words. He was pretty much a jerk. Hilarious? In a cynical vein, yes, and even more so at a distance. And a jerk to be sure.

By the 1970s, much of punk rock (whether conscious or not that it was in a labor or labor light vein) would easily interpret humanity as getting ground down by advanced industrialization and ineffective political leaders to the point where it was only appropriate to, well, appropriate the term punk. Every one is grist for the mill, so you might as well pick up an instrument and give it a go. From that chaos emerged a pattern intrinsic to punk (no more than three chords, please), and rockers that are regularly played on the iRadio, such as the Ramones, Green Day, Rancid, and so on.

The architectural style (arguably a brick commercial style) of this Fargo building strongly suggests it was originally built as a creamery, or a creamery co-op (this style is associated with the creameries throughout the upper Mid-West): once again, potential rural and agrarian labor unifying to optimize output in order to compete with larger industrial urban giants. Further research will draw this out (there are only so many hours in a day, folks).

In the meantime, though, here is some on-the-ground YouTube video of a Les Dirty Frenchmen practice from the evening of March 1, 2012. They are practicing the original tune, “All Blowed Up,” another video of that here. In addition to that, guitarist Troy Reisenauer explains the dynamic of the practice space.

Long live punk, intellectual history, early twentieth-century creamery co-ops, and historic preservation.

For an end-of-the-week dose of historiography and some remarks on Augustine of Hippo‘s (354-430AD) thoughts on memory, here is what I came across the other day while browsing some chapters in The Confessions of St. Augustine (I must confess I did this while guzzling pints of coffee at the Red Raven coffee shop in downtown Fargo):

Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof?… The memory then is, as it were, the belly of the mind, and joy and sadness, like sweet and bitter food, which, when committed to the memory, are as it were, passed into the belly, where they may be stowed, but cannot taste.

Memory, and the various perceptions of memory, has forever been the business of historians. It is unlikely to let up. Also, if you ever begin to browse Augustine, at least this work, you’ll note that he is very repetitive in pledging monotheistic allegiance — but this isn’t unusual, especially for a saint.

Augustine of Hippo painting in Richardton Abbey, western North Dakota.

The last time I sat down and read some Augustine was during a graduate historiography seminar with Dr. Jim Mochoruk at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks. We did not read The Confessions, but instead read The City of God (or large chunks of it), the title of the work that is painted into the photo of the Augustinian fresco in Richardton Abbey, western North Dakota. When you enter the sanctuary, look up and just to the left. You’ll see Augustine.

Memories from that class with Mochoruk: he required that we put together two term papers. I wrote one on David Hume and another on R.G. Collingwood, two more philosopher-historians who couldn’t stop thinking about memory, and thinking. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Hume and Collingwood, and thinking about their thoughts as well.

This is — to use the tactful word — interesting: while scanning this link, it is obvious during the Charles Lindbergh portions of this historical write up that the National Park Service decided not make any references to Chuck rubbing elbows with Hermann Goering, this latter jerk being the one in charge of the NAZI Luftwaffe. Nor does the NPS let us know of Lindbergh’s publicly shady side here. Wikipedia (an increasing source of collective intelligence), however, had no trouble with showing how Lindbergh himself adhered to racism, and also referencing and providing a digital photo of it.

If an American rubbed elbows with NAZIs, the NPS today ought to let us know. This is also on par with asking the NPS to let the public know whether or not an American rubbed elbows with Stalinism, at the very least during his liquidation years. The past is complex that way. But Americans are capable of dealing with this sort of information. We can say things like, “While Lindbergh was good at making the first trans-Atlantic flight, his raging shortcoming was that he accepted Nazism…”

These truths will not somehow undermine the objective (though perpetually elusive) of pushing toward the democratic-republican ideal of an engaged citizenry. This ideal can only come about by incessantly challenging us to actively grapple with the realities of history rather than having us passively accept nostalgic national interpretations which are on par with the chicken soup for your soul sections at your local bookstore (rant alert!). I digress. NPS: please feel free to add a sentence or two in the national web site write up on Charles. We are adults. We can handle it.

In late December 2011, I visited the Charles Lindbergh home in Little Falls, Minnesota, snapped a photo of it, and of the public history signage as well. See below photos.

A photo of the Charles Lindbergh home in Little Falls, Minnesota, taken in late December 2011.

The public history signage at the Lindbergh Home in Little Falls, Minnesota. Note how there is no reference to Herb Goering in this signage.

Below are two short, unedited clips from a broader talk given at North Dakota State University (NDSU) on February 24, 2012 by Dr. John O. Voll, one of Georgetown University’s undisputed experts on Islamic history, and the associate director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The talk was hosted by NDSU’s Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious studies, (and publicized by the North Dakota Humanities Council) and in large part came together because NDSU’s Asian historian, Dr. Tracy Barrett, is friends with Dr. Voll. Tracy knows Dr. Voll because Tracy’s father, Dr. Roby Barrett, has known Dr. Voll for years (Roby has put in quite a few years with the Foreign Service, stationed in areas of Saudi Arabia and the Levant, or that former Ottoman Imperial stomping ground). In the business of history and anthropology, we often refer to how this all played out — how Voll ended up talking at NDSU — as the byproduct of kinship networks. You can also just call it relationships, too. In MBA Speak they often call it “networking.” (I don’t know why I’m using air-quotes with all these phrases.) The idea and follow through is pretty simple, though, and it plays out often without anyone ever knowing it’s playing out, at least until we look back on how those sorts of things played out.

In Dr. Voll’s lecture, he remarked on how the language of occupation has changed from the 19th, 20th and now 21st-centuries. In the 19th it was “To the Barricades!” and today, at least in 2011, it has taken on the term of occupation.  That the Arab Spring used the phrase pragmatic program (literally, the revolutionaries want things — government and institutions — to simply work) and that this came up in Voll’s talk, and because I’m a geek, I asked Voll whether Wael Ghonim or other educated elite revolutionaries were grounding the intellectual trajectory of their pragmatic program in, for example, chapter 2 of William James 1907 work, Pragmatism. Voll responded with, “No.” But then it fed into broader ideas about how we might conceive of as the West today, in the 21st century: it can be thought of more as an abstract idea than something that can be contained within a geopolitical boundary.

From left to right, John O. Voll, Angela Smith, Tracy Barrett, Dennis Cooley, and Tom Isern.

How words or definitions are appropriated and used throughout the world is another point of consideration, especially since a 21st century occupation in north Africa is going to have a couple similarities, but also many more differences when compared to a 21st century occupation in, for example, Portland, Oregon, or Wall Street. Yeah, occupations in North Africa are putting much more on the line, and Voll said the chaos from the revolutionaries might not at this early stage appear to have an ideological trajectory (then again, saying one does not have a philosophy is in fact a philosophy of not having a philosophy). But the most important thing to remember is how the seeming chaos brought on by revolutionaries are ways out of the existing (or former) strong-arm regimes (in the 1970s, John Lydon spear-headed a similar movement in Great Britain). Once the revolutionaries in North Africa get out from under these boots, they will continue articulating and charting their own courses for today and tomorrow. This, no doubt, begins at the grass roots level, or with what we call individual relationships, regardless (or, if I want to be annoying, irregardless) of whether we’re at North Dakota State University, Georgetown, or North Africa. Web 2.0 is helping it along indeed.

New Orleans is often thought of as thee place to be on Mardi Gras. Yes, there’s reason for this, and it’s probably worth all of our while to at some point in our lives take in the Big Easy, at least once. There’s a website to plan for next year, and you can also tune in to Mike Rowe to see exactly how a krewe puts a float together, a tutorial on the specialized technique of inflating cow bladders to bang on said float and all. Calvin Trillin has a glimpse into Mardi Gras circa 1968 here. And apparently there are at least 5 big myths swirling around in non-New Orleans, one of which covers the truth and facts about momentarily disrobing at Mardi Gras.

The bottom round beef roast can be more sensibly priced than the skirt steak in northern Dakota. This may have to do with Bourdain, or due to the fact that there are not an abundance of French butchers, circa 2012, in the Red River Valley.

As a type of capstone to a localized Mardi Gras in Fargo (culture is portable, folks), we prepared a bunch of food. And it turns out that I didn’t even mean for this meal to coincide with the new moon in February, and it was only an after-the-2-day-marinating-started-thought that I asserted that the meal had original Mardi Gras intentions. Either way, I don’t think anyone cared. Just cook the food. We’re hungry.

The two dishes prepared were a shrimp-rice jambalaya, and marinated and grilled steak. The latter recipe made its way into my brain via Rick Gion, who marinated and grilled a skirt steak for beef fajitas. It was delicious. After discussing pricing with Gion, I wondered if Tony Bourdain’s nod to and popularization of hanger, skirt and flank steaks has driven up the price? Locally, in Fargo, skirt steak can go for something like $8.00/pound. For the Tuesday meal, I decided to get a chunk of bottom round beef roast, slice it in half, and then marinade it in an equatorial spice, lime and beer blend (the recipe is a variation on this). It turned out tender, but not as tender as the skirt steak Gion brought over a couple nights ago.

The skirt steak from a couple nights prior.