Esoterika

What a great time I had at the last few hours of the Adiantum Harvest event! I only wish I could have attended the whole thing. It felt just like "the old days", in a good way... great range of local and out-of-town folks, nice cozy hall and excellent decorations, diverse workshops, interesting philosophical discussions, projects and socializing, courts and recognition. Everyone playing and working together to accomplish a good time, a delicious feast incorporating an amazing array of gleaned Baronial produce, a quick and efficient tear down. And one stupid irredeemable troll on the mailing list is not gonna spoil that glow for me! He obviously didn't get what real community is about, but we do, and that's what matters.

I was shocked and amazed to discover that I only saw 4 movies in a theater in 2010 (Avatar for the second time, Inception twice, and Salt). I love movies, and I love seeing them on the big screen, but apparently my viewing habits succumbed to the combo of Mary (my main movie buddy) moving out of town, and a lack of new releases that really interested me—and perhaps also the convenience of Netflix. It is odd to find that one is unwittingly, unintentionally part of a cultural trend...

* = best ones, bold = recommended

The best new (to me) movie I saw this year was definitely *Inception (2x). My, my, yes, Christopher Nolan is certainly earning my respect as the premier speculative fiction filmmaker of the day. Like The Prestige, Inception is another clever, intricately layered, masterfully constructed puzzlebox/ mindfuck. But it could have been just an exercise in cerebral gamesmanship, a caper film, had Nolan not, as always, buried a dark and complex emotional secret at the core. The pacing is not flawless, but it’s pretty damned good. And the movie has a pleasurably, maddeningly ambiguous ending that people will argue about for years. Just as enjoyable on repeat viewing, because then you can admire how well it all fits together. Highly recommended.

Only Nolan could make a kick-ass nail-biting suspense movie about psychological catharsis... and get away with it. Someone else could have made a movie about a guy talking to his therapist to accomplish the same goal, but this is a lot more exciting!

On a surface level, this movie is about lucid dreaming and Jungian psychology. But it’s far more a story about the storyteller’s art, an examination of the creative process itself, which I find even more fascinating. For what is art about if not the generative and reactive process, the creation and realization of ideas, and what does art do if not implant an idea in the mind of the viewer... Filmmakers, like dream architects, strive for verisimilitude, to pull you into a story and convince you that it matters--that it's real, even if it could never happen. Inception brilliantly probes the paradox of its own invention.

( More movies and series of 2010 )

Now this is a ritual I can get into...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28985087/

This is for ariadne3...Baron Brutus' caribou from Midwinter's. Cream cheese, apricot paste, currant eye and fewmets, powdered sugar snow, on shortbread base.

(If that title is ungrammatical, pardon my French!)

Since the brain is still just burbling on from this weekend, here are yet a few more thoughts resulting from Midwinter's.

Here's a couple of useful concepts which come to my mind about doing SCA feasts, which I only recently learned names for:

1. Mise en place - literally "put in place" or "set in place". This is a chef term I learned from Anthony Bourdain's fascinating and entertaining book "Kitchen Confidential" (in US kitchen slang it's shortened to mise, prounounced "meez"). It means everything in place to cook the recipes for the occasion--"the prepared ingredients, such as cuts of meat, relishes, sauces, spices, freshly chopped vegetables, and other components that a cook requires for the menu items that they expect to prepare during their shift. Ingredients are measured out, washed, chopped and placed in individual bowls. Equipment is gathered, ovens are preheated. Preparing the mise en place ahead of time allows the chef to cook without having to stop and assemble items, which is desirable in recipes with time constraints. Also refers to the preparation and layouts that are set up and used by line cooks at their stations in a commercial or restaurant kitchen." (Wikipedia)

One of the big shifts from home and other small-scale cooking to SCA feasts (and, of course, professional cooking) is that at that scale and that pace you simply do not have time to get halfway into a recipe and only then realize you need 2 tablespoons of freshly ground coriander, or two pounds of washed, sliced mushrooms. Part of the mental preparation for a feast is thinking through and identifying ANYTHING, any stage, any step, that you can possibly do in advance (whether months, day, or hours) of the actual cooking. In the process you also identify which of those steps can possibly be done by other, potentially less skilled people, so that you can focus on the stuff that you alone can do, whether because of skill or simply because you know what you have in mind. It's a process that becomes fairly obvious and instinctive as cooks get more experienced, but isn't always obvious earlier on, and it's useful to have an encompassing term for it.

2. Mise en scene - lit. "put on stage". This is a bigger one. Variously defined, but generally it's a film/ theater term that refers to everything that appears before the camera/ on the stage and its arrangement – sets, props, actors, costumes, lighting, and blocking (the positioning and movement of actors on the set). I learned the term, or at least grokked it, within the last 4 or so years of doing theater, and found it a useful label for a concept I'd had for a long time. I'm coming to recognize it as one of my most prized and desired elements in the SCA, something I seek to experience and am good at helping to create. To me it's about the totality of an experience. All experience is constructed, but the SCA gives us rare and interesting opportunities to construct an environment that is temporary, transitory, and in some ways imaginary, yet physically and emotionally real. So when I cook a feast, I don't just want to cook good food, though that is part of it. I want to create an experience, an environment, a reality. I want the participants (and they are that, not spectators) to taste and see and hear and feel and smell all the aspects of this experience. My favorite events and my favorite moments in the SCA are when all these elements were in place through skill and effort and luck, when all senses were engaged in synaesthetic fullness. The music, the banners, the scents, the food, the people, the movements, the light. Syzygy, synergy. That's what it's about.

fearga posted this in her LJ, so it occurs to me I could post it in mine! At long last, the cookbook from the Silk Road themed Midwinters Feast that hrothgar1, Yseult, Isobel, and I cooked in February is now available for purchase...

( details here )