[Previous entry: "edward said"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "new pop"]
09/27/2003: "music and food"
I've long been fascinated with what people eat and how they eat it -- musicians especially, because it always seems to offer interesting insights into the music they make. When I interviewed Blixa from Neubauten the thing that stuck out most in my memory was him reaching into the fridge, taking out a thing of pomegranate juice in an ornate glass bottle, and pouring the tart blood-red liquid into a German crystal wine glass, sipping from it slowly to slake his thirst. It just seemed to suit him. The one thing I remember in a whole long interview with David Bowie was his observation that in every country, the milk tasted different, and how he didn't like the way American milk tasted ('I think I saw you in an ice cream parlor/drinking milkshakes cold and long'!) Totally weird cuz I never can imagine people at the celeb level of Bowie doing totally pedestrian human things like drinking milk ('Ecch Iman this milk is rubbish! It made my Cheerios all funky! Check it, the 'NYC sell-by date' was last week!') Reminds me of what Warhol said once, that "you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. "
There was this interview with Brian Eno once where he talked about how much he loved to cook, improvising various meals and saying something about how you can make good food ('n music too) with only a few ingredients, something I generally agree on (when I cook I tend not to follow recipes to the letter (recipes are for rockists!) in favor of a more weirdo intuitive approach, usually with pretty good results.) But Eno also described how he enjoyed cooking the same meal day after day. Three or four days in a row, the exact same dinner! Makes you glad you're not a member of the Eno family eh?
The late and great zine Gourmandizer chronicled what musicians ate, and how they ate it, running a memorable interview with ol' meatatarian Albini where he described the eating habits in depth of the people he worked with, like KK Null's predisposition towards the more out-there reaches of Japanese cuisine (who'da thunk it?) and the band Ut, who 'drank a ridiculous number of medicinal herbal teas (including a sage infusion that stank like old socks), depending on the mood that each song required and the state of their individual hormones and menstrual cycles' (!!) And PJ Harvey's eating of only potatoes during the entire recording of 'Rid of Me'! In the Bourdain book I've been reading recently something popped off the page: Madonna brings her own eggs to restaurants for use in her Caesar salad dressing! Why does the lowly egg deserve such special treatment from the godlike Madonna, you think? Are they from those fancy free-range hens which are massaged, fed an organic diet high in Omega-3, and are taken out for walks in the park each day? Or perhaps they're blingin' 24-karat golden eggs? One can only wonder!