Archive for "Oct 30 2008"

Rant: saying bye-bye to ‘Headcase’

The inevitable occurred yesterday. Creative Loafing’s editor, Ken Edelstein, called and let me know the paper was discontinuing “Headcase,” because, he said, “We can’t afford it.”

I’ll get the snark out of the way first. The explanation made me laugh. I’ve written “Headcase,” previously called “Paradigms,” for – I don’t even remember. It’s been over 15 years. As of last week, I was being paid the same amount I was paid when it first started and, believe me, that was not much, at least not much before CL declared bankruptcy. I wrote it mainly to keep my mind active and it was a good way of advertising my psychology practice.

Granted, too, the column’s length was very reduced over time. It actually started as a couple pages in the paper, then was reduced to about 1000 words and, in the end, it ran about 700 words. The radical truncation was not much of a convenience to me. I could not develop ideas the way I could at the longer length.

If you’ve read me long, you know that my problem isn’t writing too little. I tried to take the shorter length as a meaningful challenge, but it left me often frustrated. (If you think truncation of newspaper and magazine articles doesn’t affect the depth of writing, you’re probably under 30.)

Ultimately, as I told Ken, I began to feel like I needed a break from writing “Headcase.” I’d been complaining a lot to my partner. This is not an unusual experience for writers. Generally, when one starts to feel this way, it’s best to shift overall focus (as I did several times) or find a new publication.

Of course, it’s unusual to write a column that long, anyway. I’ve written my other column, “Grazing,” even longer and it will continue along with my posts on the paper’s “Omnivore” blog. (And by the way, I haven’t had a raise for Grazing in over four years, either, despite greatly increased meal and transportation costs. I’m just saying…)

A new way of thinking?

I did notice an unexpected change in my thinking within a day of losing my column. Although actually writing 700 words is easy for me, finding new things to write about after 15-plus years had become challenging. Like most writers, I have long looked at all experience as “copy.” It’s a weird way of living. You’re constantly asking, in the middle of an experience, “Is this something I should write about?” So, I’m stopping myself now and thinking, “I don’t have to ask that question.” At least not with the same urgency that a weekly deadline requires.

I’m not sure what I will do for an alternative outlet. I confess I started this blog in part expecting to lose my column. But I’ve learned from our food blog that people seldom read more than a few grafs of blog posts. (If you’ve made it this far, you’re already like my best friend.)

People have constantly suggested that I make a book of my columns. I’ve even been contacted several times by publishers. But, having had the experience of blowing a book contract years ago, I’m not that enthralled with the idea of undertaking a book, and certainly not one that rehashes my work.

In actuality, I’ve never saved a single thing I’ve written. A month or so back, I received an inquiry about a magazine article I wrote years ago. I didn’t even remember it. I also wrote a (very controversial) biweekly column for a gay publication, ETC, for seven years and, when I was asked for copies of the columns for an archival project a year ago, I had to admit I’d not saved any of them. My admission was greeted with shock.

There’s no particular reason for this. I’ve never enjoyed re-reading my own stuff and, truth be told, I’ve had unpleasant arguments with friends who insisted on reading me in front of them. Re-reading all my columns to publish a collection of them is not appealing, to say the least. I can almost always think of 10 ways I could have said the same thing better.

But this is the first time in many years – well over 20 — I’ve not had to write a weekly column about something besides dining. Although there’s some grief in the loss – and I need every penny I can get in this economy — I’m interested in seeing what I can do next. Maybe not having the burden of a weekly deadline but still having the impulse to view life as copy will provoke me to finally write the book HarperCollins paid me to write 25 years ago.

And then there’s always blogging.

And so forth….

In any case, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about writing, Creative Loafing and its predictable financial hari-kari as time passes. Unmentioned in most of the articles about CL’s bankruptcy is that this is the second time it’s happened, the second time an expansionist fantasy has caused financial problems and the umpteenth time CL’s tried to recover from financial missteps by screwing with content.

I’m not saying that other publications aren’t having the same problems, because of print media’s general decline and the current economic climate. But CL’s management seems to have learned very little from its past. It’s painful to watch what would be called a repetition compulsion were we diagnosing a psychological condition. This is what happens when the so-called alternative press becomes more about entrepreneurship than journalism.

(Oh! Will someone tell me what this little picture that ran with Headcase is. I literally never figured it out.)

The psychology of taste

I posted the following on Creative Loafing’s food blog, Omnivore, today. Since it deals with psychology as well as gastronomy, I’m posting it here too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychology of taste in recent weeks. In my other occupation, the psychology one, I conduct workshops related to the imagination and creativity.

I’ve been developing one specifically about the interplay of taste and the imagination. About five years ago, I came across a study — I’ve lost the citation, unfortunately — that concluded that people who develop an adventurous palate also tend to develop a more adventurous, open-minded approach to life generally. The study, which followed students, advocated gastronomical education in the schools.

This seems sensible to me, but I’m also interested in the specific effects of different flavors. We’ve appropriated those to describe mental states. She’s sweet. He feels bitter. John McCain has a salty disposition. I’ve soured on Sarah Palin.

There is a fairly common but little discussed condition, synesthesia, in which the senses overlap naturally (as they do sometimes in the psychedelic experience). Synesthetes, about one in 2000 of the general population, most often hear color or see colors when they hear music, but taste is often involved too. I’ve been interested in the phenomenon since I interviewed R. E. Cytowic, author of The Man Who Tasted Shapes, in 1993 for Creative Loafing.

Recent research has concluded that the synesthetic experience seems to be within everyone’s capacity in childhood. In fact, people who don’t “outgrow” it report that their experience has been consistent ever since they can remember — meaning that if a particular word produced a particular taste in childhood, it continues to do so in adulthood. In short, it’s a virtual language of taste.

Neuroscience hasn’t concluded yet whether the synesthetic experience can be developed or intentionally recovered, although, as I said, psychedelic drugs often produce the effect, meaning that the overlap of the senses is not neurologically inhibited in all scenarios.

I have posited that part of the appeal of Ferran Adria’s so-called molecular gastronomy may have to do with synesthesia. By breaking down the elements of a dish into its purest flavors and then playfully rearranging them, does molecular gastronomy affect our perceptual and psychological experience? I don’t mean to suggest that it literally causes a synesthetic experience but that it does disorient our usual experience of flavor and, in that moment of disorientation, may awaken an imaginal capacity that’s not so present in day-to-day experience.

Adria has gotten a lot of publicity in the last month because of the publication of his newest book, A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adria. Find NPR’s recent essay here.

I was interested to read in a BBC essay that Adria’s style has been re-dubbed “techno-emotional cuisine,” a term that hints at its psychological effect. Adria himself says his work is most analogous to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In that controversial discourse, Derrida argues that our sense of the unified whole — the meta-narrative — is basically a delusion, whose elements, broken down, turn out to be full of contradictions.

I won’t bore you with an entire discussion of deconstruction (and someone would invariably argue that I misunderstand it, anyway), but I can tell you that, at a psychological level, it’s a stimulating challenge to the usual sense of identity. By challenging identity, it invites us to try on different behaviors.

The point, gastronomically, is that by, for example, foregrounding the technological aspect of cooking, Adria sabotages our usual assumptions about dining. (Indeed, he’s come under intense attack for this by another famous Spanish chef, Santi Santamaria, in a kind of culinary debate between the essentialist and the relativist). Adria’s (and Richard Blais’) separation and intense distillation of flavors into their separate parts, often allowing the diner to play with taste, induces reverie in my experience and, whenever the imagination is intensely stimulated, there is an opportunity to increase awareness.

This of course also happens with traditional cooking, but, in my experience, the psychological effect is typically nostalgia or a sense of the beauty that architectural symmetry induces. When I eat this kind of food, I see Greek temples. When I eat Adria’s kind of cooking, I see fractals and Rorshach inkblots. One invites reverie on the solid and immobile; the other evokes a sense of the new and the changing.

By paying attention, mindfully eating, there is a kind of synesthetic response at the level of sensation and thought. I’m speaking metaphorically, although the experience is often literal. It’s worth cultivating in any case.