"Plating"

 

As everyone knows, restaurants "plate" their food. The more you pay, the more they plate.  But let's think about this a moment. At home, where portion sizes are not controlled, you serve from the stove, or from a dish. So home like food is best served by somebody dishing up, or by the eater him/herself, from a dish. 

Indian food is quintessentially home food. The reason is simple. In India, there is still a lot of domestic help in middle class homes. Hence, preparation-intensive food is available at home. This is not to say you wouldn't go to a restaurant. But you would do it primarily because you want to eat a kind of cuisine that you wouldn't get in your own home. It's still home food.

Of course, this is all changing. Restaurant cuisine, with all its fancy techniques, is slowly making inroads in India. But leaving that to one side, restaurants in India are recreations of a home eating experience, and hence they do not plate food. They put it in dishes, which are brought to the table, and served--by a waiter, if the restaurant is old-fashioned and fancy, or by the diner. Of course, the same goes for most Indian places in Toronto. 

That's why it was amusing when Susur Lee did a show on Restaurant Makeover about a ghastly place called Dhaba: Indian Excellence -- I wrote about it somewhere below -- and pronounced it superb. The only thing he wanted to teach the chef was plating. Given that Dhaba has no culinary pretensions above your average greasy Indian dive, Susur was barking up two wrong trees. 

Put that aside. Yesterday, I went to Aravind, a new Kerala restaurant on the Danforth just west of Pape. I was excited to try Kerala food--see previous posts for my eulogistic treatments of Syrian Christian cooking. I was disappointed. Syrian Christian cooking is known for it complex clean flavours and its wonderful textures. At Aravind, all was muddy and mushy. 

But here's the thing. Everything was plated. At the next table, a man ate crab biriyani that had been shaped like a drum. Lynne and I had relatively simple dishes. I had crab with kappa: kappa being mashed tapioca root, which is commonly served with hot fish curries. The correct way for to eat this would have been for me to put the crab next to the kappa and combined them in mouthfuls. But they had plated it so that the two were mingled beyond recognition. And they had put two (very good) southern paratthas on the plate under the kappa-crab mixture. A disaster!

I guess I'll have to wait a while before I can go to a restaurant that serves good Kerala food. 

Springtime in Canada

I must acknowledge a typo in my last entry. When I said that this was the most boring federal election in Canadian history, I really meant to write most interesting.

Ha, ha! But seriously: what a turn around there has been in the last couple of weeks! Suddenly the NDP, the quasi- demi- hemi-socialists have rocketed to nearly the top, and the electorate has woken up, going to advance polls in record numbers. (Remember that distant past day when Americans went to advance polls in record numbers to vote for Obama? The turnout was highish that election, and maybe we can take advance polls as in indication that it will be so in this election.)

So what's going to happen? Suppose the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Bloc each lost twenty seats, and the NDP took all of them. (Impossible, but just suppose.) Then the NDP would have nearly one hundred seats, a lot more than the Liberals at 56, but the Conservatives would still have more than either. However, the Libs and NDP could almost form a government without the help of the Bloc. If Layton were PM, would Ignatieff be Foreign Minister? But who would be Finance Minister? A decimated Liberal Party couldn't claim that post, surely?

A game changer in Canadian politics?

The Election

I’ve been out of the country a lot these last few weeks, and perhaps I am not catching the Weltgeist, but this feels to me like the most boring federal election in history. Is anybody really caught up in it? Politics in the US may be vicious and destructive, but here I find it hard to find anybody who wants to talk about the election. Is it because Canada is so well-governed that the outcome doesn’t really matter? Perhaps no issue really divides us. Could it be that the leaders are deliberately turning away from the issues? Or is it that our largely immigrant population has not yet caught on to Canadian electoral politics?

 

However that might be, Stephen Harper is running this election on competence. Which is odd, because you wouldn’t think that this is a winning strategy for somebody who leads one of the least competent governments in Canadian history. With a few exceptions, we have a Cabinet of dunces, extremists, and partisans. Lawrence Cannon is Foreign Minister and seems only peripherally to be conscious of the vast drop in Canada’s international prestige under his (and his predecessor, Maxime Bernier’s) watch.

 

  (Bernier lost files by leaving them at the apartment of his girl-friend, a motor-cycle gang chick, shown above.) Peter MacKay, the Minister of Defence, is mostly known for his dashing love life—he made a pass at Condoleezza Rice on national TV, and was rewarded by being called “the nearest thing to eye-candy on the diplomatic circuit” by the New York Times.

Peter van Loan (International Trade) and John Baird (House Leader) are known for their slashing partisanship, Gary Goodyear (Minister of State for Science and Technology) questions evolution. And so it goes.

            The Government itself is not known for its savvy. In the last couple of years, it got economists all over the world riled by eliminating a meaningful Census; it fumbled away Canada’s position as the leading supplier of medical isotopes; it lowered the Goods and Services Tax and eliminated Canada’s budgetary surplus just before that surplus was badly needed to bail us out of the fiscal crisis; it compounded this mistake by introducing Tax Free Savings Accounts; it has an anti-crime agenda when crime is on the decline; it couldn't get elected to the UN Security Council. Oh, and Harper says that this is not the time to discuss whether Canada will lend its support to reforming male primogeniture in England (as Canada must, if it's to change.) (The Government also seems homophobic, though in such a quiet way that one could be mistaken.) It’s hard to say what positive thing this Government has achieved in five years: governing with a minority, it is mostly concerned with politics. Competence? And yet, the campaign is working.

Conservatives (Blue) lead comfortably

  It all points to 145 seats for the Conservatives, a little short of a majority.

Two Elites, Two Anti-Elites

People talk a lot about elites these days. The Tea Party is supposed to be anti-elite, for instance, and it has created quite a stir. But not everybody means the same thing by the term.

Yes-answers to the following questions define one kind of elite:

1.     Do you own more than one home?

2.     Do you own a detached house with garden in town?

3.     Is somebody paid to drive you to work (in a car)?

4.     Do food and housing consume less than a quarter of your income?

5.     Do you have tax shelters or deferred income?

Yes-answers to the following define another kind of elite:

1.     Do you prefer live entertainment to TV?

2.     Do you own an iPhone?

3.     Do like restaurants that serve tiny portions for $30 each?

4.     Do you dislike beer, except when it comes from a local microbrewery?

5.     Do you like wine only when it’s from far away?

6.     Do you prefer $7 bread that is hard to chew?

Let’s call the first the economic elite, and the second the lifestyle elite. It’s pretty clear that the two are not highly correlated. People who live in the ritzy areas in town may have some of the habits of the lifestyle elite, but not necessarily because they like the things in question; the lifestyle elite are certainly not all rich.

Now, it seems that all the fuss in the US is about the lifestyle elite. Here is David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise:

If you are in an elite based on brainpower, like today’s elite, you need to come up with the subtle signifiers that will display your own spiritual and intellectual identity—your qualifications for being in the elite in the first place. [For a marriage ceremony] You need invitations on handmade paper but with a traditional typeface. Selecting music, you need Patsy Cline songs mixed up with Mendelssohn. You need a 1950s gown, but done up so retro it has invisible quotation marks around it. You need a wedding cake designed to look like a baroque church. You need to exchange meaningful objects with each other, like a snowboard engraved with your favorite Schiller quotation or the childhood rubber ducky that used to cradle during the first dark days of your Supreme Court clerkship. . . self-actualization is what educated existence is all about.

Clearly Brooks is talking about the lifestyle elites, and it is clear he is umm. . . upset with them.   

On the other hand, when Margaret Wente writes (in the Globe and Mail):

There’s another problem with the new über-elite (who are also mostly über-smart – you don’t get to run a zillion-dollar hedge fund if you’re dumb). The richer they get, the more out of touch. They only hang around with one another. They never ride the subway, and don’t know a single ordinary person, or even a semi-ordinary one. They’re also super-arrogant. They think they’ve got all the answers.

she is clearly thinking about the economic elite (though she is not upset by the wealth). The lifestyle elite tends to ride the subway.

Now here is a very strange thing about the current US mood. The kind of class rage that drove politics in Europe and parts of Asia in the middle of the last century is now redirected against the lifestyle elite. Well, there are certainly times when the lifestyle elite can be obnoxious--as when they talk about "fly-over states". But is there any other country in the world where, on the one hand, politicians are afraid to say they want to  raise taxes on incomes over $250,000 per year because to say this would lose them votes among lower middle class voters, and even among the unemployed, while at the same time you find admired public displays of rage like Brooks’s—directed against . . . wedding invitations?

It’s possible that this is just confusion—that some clever people like Brooks and Sarah Palin have found a way to rechannel class resentment so that it reacts against middle class behaviour. I don’t think so though. I think Americans just don’t like certain kinds of behaviour. They are upset by people who drink lattes. (In Canada, some like to play Starbucks off against Tim Hortons -- but I don't know that a lot of votes have swung one way or another based on this.) 

What’s is truly odd and inexplicable is this: how is it possible that something so ephemeral can become the engine of a potent political movement?

Jonathan Franzen can't write . . .

. . . English.

Here's a sentence from Freedom:


"At home, after checking on the kids, she put on a sleeveless top and little cotton shorts and came after Walter in bed. This was very unusual of her, but thankfully not so unheard-of as to provoke comment and examination; and Walter needed no persuading to oblige her. It wasn't a big deal, just a little late-evening surprise, and yet in autobiographical retrospect it now looks almost like the high point of their life together."

Nice of her to come after Walter did, even if it was unusual. No need for examination though.

Two paragraphs down:


"A few weeks later, Dorothy collapsed at the dress store in Grand Rapids. Patty, sounding like her own mother, expressed concern to Walter about the hospital care she was getting, and was tragically vindicated when Dorothy went into multiple organ failure and died."

It's too bad that Patty's concern about her poor care is vindicated by the multiple organ failure of her mother in law. Vindication can strike pretty randomly, I guess. And this is the first we hear of Dorothy's failure and death.

Turn to any page in the book and you will find at least one sentence of stunning ugliness and and another of analgesic vapidity. 

British Bank Teller Becomes Dean, is Reappointed, then Fired

On Saturday, December 18^th, the Globe and Mail reported that “A bitter dispute at McMaster University’s business school . . . has led to the resignation of the school’s high-profile dean, former business executive Paul Bates.” 

The Globe was not surprised or shocked by what was to me the most startling part of this story. A man without a university education was appointed Dean. According to Macleans (see below): "Bates reportedly got his start as a bank teller in Britain before moving to Canada in the early 1970s. He went on to head up four major brokerage firms and has sat on the boards of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Canadian Investment Dealers Association, and has served as a part-time commissioner in the Ontario Securities Commission." Before his appointment as Dean, Bates was CEO of Charles Schwab’s Canadian division and taught at the University of Toronto, where he was an adjunct professor, a designation often accorded people with valuable practical knowledge who are asked to teach university level courses. 

Universities often contemplate appointing leaders from outside academia. They should not, and this story illustrates why. Universities do not operate like companies, nor should they. Their function is to produce and transmit knowledge. The production of knowledge is necessarily a wasteful endeavour – there are a thousand bad ideas for every good one, but you don’t know an idea is bad until somebody has put it forward and others have tested it. Very few companies can tolerate this kind of waste. Moreover, ideas are produced autonomously, not at the command of an executive -- there is an important area of operations, therefore, in which academics have no boss. This drives Deans crazy, especially Deans who are used to being captains of industry.

Business executives are rarely tolerant of administrative cultures other than their own (except sometimes the command structure of the military). They regularly excoriate the fact that there aren’t more business people in politics -- read Gwyn Morgan in the Globe for a good example of this -- ignoring the fact that the public accountability of politicians differentiates their endeavour from that of a bank or brokerage. Most business executives would similarly be appalled by the chaotic, highly individualistic, non-team-oriented, non-results-oriented culture of academia. Whether they are right or wrong is not something I want to debate on this occasion. The fact is that business executives are handicapped as academic leaders.

The handicap was pretty evident in Bates's case. The Globe says that, according to a review of the school commissioned by McMaster’s President, “Faculty members soon became “perplexed” about how decisions were made on important academic matters such as chairing tenure and promotion meetings, developing research policies and developing new graduate programs.” In fact, things were so bad that the the faculty association actually took a poll:  80% of the faculty responded, and 80% of those opposed Bates's reappointment. The university’s Board of Governors ignored them. Bates was reappointed for a second term in 2009.

As it turns out, there are indications that Paul Bates was not a great respecter of people even as a business leader. Macleans magazine reported on May 11^th 2010 that Bates was in the middle of an “ugly battle” with Schwab employees in 2002. According to Macleans: 

“A 2002 Financial Post column headlined “Slick salesmanship masked discontent,” blamed Bates for the revolt at the discount brokerage—a dozen employees sent a letter to Charles Schwab’s head office warning that management of the Canadian arm was “no longer acting in the best interest of ourselves or our clients”—and suggested Bates should have been fired as a result (instead, he oversaw the sale of the brokerage firm to Scotiabank)."

Embarrassingly enough, the Financial Post report was later used as a textbook case-study of bad management. McMaster students would find photographs of their Dean in their text-books, cited as an example of poor personnel management.

At McMaster, Bates wanted to attract students with an interest in the “real world”, to treat these students as “customers”, and to remove academics from committee memberships, where (as somebody with his background might think) all they did was slow things down. These are telltale signs of a disconnect between the Dean and the entity he is administering. As Macleans observed: “while Bates’s pledge to treat students as “customers” sounds appealing on the surface, academics argue there’s an important distinction between training someone to do a job and providing them with an education.” 

Macleans continued:  

“One professor, who has been at McMaster for several decades, said it’s more than just a case of Bates and his private sector get-it-done attitude clashing with a bunch of cloistered academics. ‘It has a lot more to do with his conduct and him as a leader of an academic unit,’ he says. ‘Even after being around here for five years, he still doesn’t understand how an academic institution should be governed.’ The professor claimed that Bates appeared to recognize early on that he didn’t have the broad support of the faculty and quickly resorted to a system of rewarding those who were loyal to him—the report cites allegations that Bates attempted to influence tenure and promotion decisions—and marginalizing those who didn’t.” 

And when five of six area chairs at the business school expressed disagreement with the Dean's plans for a new facility in Burlington Ontario, they were officially reprimanded by the Provost (presumably after a complaint by the Dean). Those of us who have spent their lives in academia know how this kind of behaviour clashes with the democratic ideals of the university. Though these ideals are often breached, the bully tactics of a large firm are hardly ever seen on campus. (Incidentally, the facility in Burlington is largely devoted to an executive MBA program, hardly a part of a university's core mission. It was hardly unpredictable that the faculty would oppose this diversion of focus. Praise for the project came from other sources: the execs who took MBAs there, for instance.)

It may be that the faculty at McMaster’s business school are an academically disreputable bunch, and that Bates is being demonized for their pre-existent incompetence and lack of cooperation. But taken as exculpation, this does not strike me as particularly convincing. It is certainly true that an outsider faces resistance when brought in to reform an organization. But aren’t business executives supposed to be good at navigating organizational difficulties of this type? This excuse shouldn’t ring true even to those who think that the “private sector get-it-done attitude” should displace academic waffling.

Here is a maxim that Boards of Governors, stuffed as they are with non-academics, are reluctant to take seriously, though they really should: anybody who has responsibility for academic programs should be a capable, if not a distinguished, academic.

The King's Speech

Here's the scoop:

• Guy appointed by god to do god's job has a speech defect. To make up for his/her lack of due diligence, god sends man to cure guy. Under man's tutelage, guy takes oath to serve god, and gives big speech committing his nation to god's care without making a fool of said god (whose faith he was defending, so win-win for god and guy).

That's about it. Colin Firth acted brilliantly as guy, Geoffrey Rush irritatingly as man, and Helena Bonham Carter cloyingly as guy's squeeze: lot's of slap and tickle there.

Thanks to Firth, the movie is extremely entertaining. 

I have been thinking how this movie is a beautiful little exercise in propaganda. First, Guy's daughter, Lilibet, now 83, is remembered less for carrying on in guy's virtuous path, than for having really silly offspring. In the movie, her adorable mom and noble father burnish her pedigree. Attention shifts from silly son (also apparently appointed by god to defend his faith). 

And not bad to revivify the story about guy's wicked elder brother (WEB). WEB is a bully, plus apparently he lost his mind when a not tremendously attractive chick lured him with tricks she learned in a brothel in Shanghai. (Guy himself, as well as WEB, learned them from a Parisienne prostitute named Flora, provided by "equerries" at Buck Pal. -- Shanghai/Paris which would drive a lustful young Englishman mad sooner? Those who say Paris: go see the movie.) 

Secondly, we are reminded that this small island in Europe (that's England, not Corsica) that saved us from Hitler -- led by guy who gave aforementioned speech. Good eh?

England is in tough spot these days, and needs every little boost that its debt-ridden populace can get. Publicly funded films about the glory of the realm don't hurt. When the yobs get excited about Harry and Kate, not to mention the Olympics, the wounded economy may get a little tickle/stimulus. Good investment, guys.

Is There Supposed to be Something Wrong with Germany?

In this morning's (25/11/10) Globe and Mail, Timothy Garton Ash has an argument that goes something like this: 
  1. Germany is very successful. 
  2. Ireland and others are not. 
  3. But Germany wants Ireland and others to stay in the eurozone. 
So 
  Conclusion: Germany should make Ireland and others feel better by becoming less German. "The right balance may be: 70 per cent other euro zone countries become more 'German', 30 per cent Germany becomes less so."

This is of a piece with articles that I have been reading recently, which go something like this. Go to Turkey/Portugal/Britain. You'll find a lot of German goods on the shelves/on the roads/in the home. This is not good. Germany should stop it.

Can I say? -- I don't get it. Everybody in the world wants either a Mercedes Benz, or a BMW, or an Audi. (Oh ok: 90%. Some want a Maserati. But who exactly wants a Honda, really wants a Honda?) When they can't have one of those German brands, they'd rather settle for a Volkswagen than a Toyota. So what are the Germans supposed to do? Build in a few problems with the accelerator pedal? This seems to be Garton Ash's solution.

While I am on the topic, Germany illustrates to me why we all want more government. There's piles of government there. But there's prosperity, culture, and lots of public transit. And as far as I can tell, Angela Merkel doesn't keep showing up and telling you what to do. What do Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck think about this? That Germany should become 30% less civilized?

Memories of 1956

To say that Hungarians are masters of memory is perhaps to risk cliché. But I couldn't help being moved at their genius for preservation. 

Here is the extraordinary statue of Imre Nagy, the leader of the breakaway Hungarian government, executed by the Russians two years later:

He gazes at the Parliament Building.

Here is a flag that commemorates the one from which the rebels ripped the Soviet emblem:

It flies next to a symbolic grave of people killed there.

Finally, here's a more humorous one, of Istvan Szechenyi, who endowed the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and built the iconic Chain bridge in the centre of Budapest:

Two Classical Bridges

I came across two bridges with significance derived from ancient Greece. The first is the Eisener Steg in Frankfurt, an old iron footbridge that crosses the Main river in central Frankfurt.

 

The inscription is from Homer's Odyssey: "to many foreigners on a wine-dark sea". No clear explanation of what that quotation is supposed to mean on this bridge.

And then there is this:

 

"This river I step in is not the river I stand in", an allusion to Heraclitus on a bridge that crosses the Don Valley on Queen Street East in Toronto. No more comprehensible -- and why the allusion, rather than the exact quote? -- but equally charming.