The Life and Times of Justin Vickers

Last Thanksgiving was a kind of proof of concept. While I spent Thanksgiving ‘06 in China, last year was my first Thanksgiving away from the family that included an attempt at a traditional feast. Beki and I had friends over. We made a bird and cranberries and all the rest. With help from Taylor we turned out a nice meal, but it was an experiment. I spent forty-five minutes that morning chiseling giblets out of my still slightly frozen bird. For the pumpkin pie I mistakenly purchased pumpkin puree rather than pumpkin filling. But for Beki’s genius idea of using graham marsala to spice the puree, there would have been no pie. Still, everything came together and it was a fine evening, complete with playing World of Goo and eating pie out of the pan into the wee hours of the night.

This year lots of folks left town. There was a pot luck happening, but I wanted to improve on my experiments from last year. So Beki and I decided to have a quiet dinner for two. I proved to myself last year that I could make things happen even under adverse circumstances, so I was ready to take care of business. I challeneged to make everything from scratch (except the cranberries because there’s no way I can improve on high fructose corn syrup infused cranberry sauce from a can).

The menu:
Brined turkey
Gravy
Sausage, sage, and roasted chestnut dressing
Cranberry sauce (from a can)
Potato dinner rolls
Garlic brussels sprouts
Mashed cauliflower
Pumpkin pie
Marinelli’s sparkling juice

I opted for the fashionable but well-considered brined turkey without stuffing. My brine was simple: vegetable stock, water, salt, sugar, and black peppercorns. The turkey went in about 16 hours before roasting. While not without a few close calls, I managed to get the turkey and the brine into the bag without too much destruction. I stuffed the turkey with celery, carrot, a head of garlic, and rosemary. I also made a sage-butter rub for under the skin. The turkey was incredible. Moist but not watery with a great flavor. Probably the best turkey leg and breast I’ve ever had. I also had tremendous success with my new bone knife. I’ve just about perfected the butcher-style carving.

I’ve been working on a flaking pie crust for a couple of months and I’ve pretty much got it down. My pie crust now has more layers than the grand canyon. Crunchy and buttery it is one of the better crusts you’ll taste (especially since even good bakeries don’t tend to attempt the time consuming flaky crust). I also put together a very nice pumpkin filling. Cinnamon, allspice, dried ginger, clove, brown sugar, cream, and eggs. I was playing a game of Settlers while I made it and I overcooked the custard slightly, so the texture wasn’t perfect, but still delicious.

The rolls were my secret weapon. Baking has kind of been my thing for the last year and I go overboard with the equipment (I have a three gallon pressurized bug sprayer for steaming my baguette). These rolls have a potato base and the secret is in letting even your instant yeast sit in sugar and warm potato water before adding the other ingrediants. The potato can cause your dough to turn gooey very quickly, so kneading is dangerous; I’ve had two doughs turn to soup right before my eyes. You have to walk the line because you want the dough to be sticky but also bouncy. I eventually succeeded in making some dynamite dinner roles (and I got another great batch today while I was home reading reams of testimony before the House Financial Services Committee).

Everything else was splendid. Beki’s mashed cauliflower was a combination of roasted cauliflower with garlic and steamed cauliflower, mashed and pureed with milk and butter (I hope she’ll correct me if I got that wrong). The gravy came out great with the turkey stock I made with the innards, red wine vinegar, and white wine. The stuffing is self-explanatory and delicious (though next year I’ll do less sausage and more sourdough). We finished off most of the leftovers today, though I’ll be working off the damage done to my waistline for a few weeks. It was worth it.

As I slowly descend into the Led Zeppelin obsession that I never had in high school, I begin to reflect on what might have been the catalyst. Though predominantly owing to a radio piece on Re:Sound (my favorite new program) about Lez Zeppelin, I also watched It Might Get Loud, which features Jimmy Page in handsome coats walking hanging out in expensive English country-homes in between chatting up and rocking out with The Edge and Jack White. What was not made explicit in the film and what I did not put together at the time is that White Stripes records contain large chunks that are, at their core, re-imaginings of the second chunk of When the Levee Breaks (around the 2:30 mark). Fascinating.

Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins arrived a year after Fallout 3 and like that game it is threatening to ruin my study habits at a crucial time of the semester. Forty-five minutes of entertainment before bed turns into two and a half hours of epic mythology.

Open world games, RPG or otherwise, adopted the moral decision-making element some years ago. I’m convinced that decision-making is part of what will push video games beyond mere entertainment, so it has been frustrating just how slowly the implementation of sophisticated, compelling decision-making has progressed. This is in large part due to the fact that the people who make video games don’t tend to be particularly adept writers. They take their cues from other games, big Hollywood films, and often the worst of the sci-fi/fantasy literature. The developers seem to grasp the plots of creators such as Tolkien without grasping the nuance of the narrative. The decision-making tends to be “good” or “evil” with clear moral imperatives. Characters rarely go beyond the Platonic forms of these ideas either. (Many games go so far as to have the character literally change appearance based on how evil you can be, shoving moral blandness down the player’s throat like so much corn.) I praised Fallout 3 for moving beyond the platitudes, forcing the player to make genuinely difficult decision (there are parts of the game that I left unfinished because I couldn’t make a decision, deciding instead not to interfere) but even that game relied on a linear “karma” meter.

Dragon Age has taken the next small step forward. Gone are the sliding scales of good and evil. There are still bars that change based on your action, but they apply to how specific characters react to you. One character will be disgusted by a decision while another will be supportive and a third will be hesitant. The game allows you to, in the parlance of the community, “play evil,” (you can just kill everyone rather than make a tough decision (odd that killing everyone is the easy decision in most games, but that’s a discussion for another time)) but that is an extreme and by no means encouraged by the game’s structure.

My favorite moment of the game thus far came in the first few hours (this is a game that will easily occupy 80 hours of my time over the coming months). I was in the small town of Lotherling, trying to get my bearings having just been thrust into the game’s enormous world. The town was a mess, what with the Darkspawn having just won an important battle and the town’s military having left in a hurry. I walked past a group of people shouting at each other. I moved closer and found half a dozen villagers harassing a merchant. The villagers were claiming that the merchant was profiteering in these dark times by charging what the villagers felt were exorbitant prices. Being a Gray Warden and a nosy type I asked if I could be of assistance. The villagers wanted me to force the merchant to sell his wares at a “reasonable” price (though I got the impression they would rather I killed the poor fellow and left the goods for pilfering), and the merchant wanted me to dispel the rabble in exchange for a discount on his wares. At first I thought it was too good to be true. The game gave me half a dozen options for how to handle the situation. I gave each party a chance to make their case, with the villagers insisting that profiteering is just wrong and the merchant pointing out that he could get no more supplies than he had, so he was just charging what the market demanded. I could hardly contain myself; a chance to put into use my legal and economic training!

Duress is a tough topic in the field of law. It comes up most often post hoc, with one party claiming that they were wrongly induced into a contract because they were under duress. The courts then must decide whether or not to enforce the otherwise enforceable contract. In Dragon Age the situation was a bit different because no contract yet existed. The villagers were in effect asking me to create a law that would prevent the contract under duress from ever coming into existence. “It shall be unlawful for two parties to enter into a contract for the sale of goods if the price of the goods is raised due to a situation of duress on the part of the buyer.” This is just the kind of law that I’ve seen my entire life.

As a Floridian I am quite accustomed to laws preventing duress-created prices. Whenever there is genuine threat of a hurricane, many homeowners attempt to cover their windows with plywood. The citizens rush to Home Hardware to purchase the wood, only to find the item in short supply. The hurricane is approaching and Home Hardware cannot secure anymore wood, so once they sell out they are out. Demand goes up and supply goes down. High school economics teaches us that prices will go up, and they would if the government didn’t interfere. Lawmakers pass laws that make it illegal for Home Hardware to raise prices for plywood. The justification for the law is that Home Hardware is profiting from the hurricane, and that’s just wrong; the government protects the homeowners and everything works out.

But of course things don’t really work out. By keeping the price artificially low the government does not create more plywood. Exactly the same number of windows are covered with or without the law. Home Hardware would not raise its prices to a level that would prevent it form selling its product, so it’s not as if it is hording plywood. Raising the price serves as a way of getting the plywood to the highest valued user, that is, the people who get the most value from the plywood will pay the most for it. By keeping the price low all the government does is make it less likely that the person who values the plywood most will be the one who gets it. It makes it more likely that a homeowner will buy plywood for her living room and her shed rather than just her living room, leaving the person in line behind her unable to purchase plywood for his child’s bedroom.

The counter argument might be that by raising the prices you allow the rich person to purchase for his living room and shed while the poor person is priced out for protecting her son’s bedroom. This assumes that the rich person is so much wealthier and the price of the plywood so high that he still wants to buy for his garage and the poor person is unable to buy at all. This argument is nearly incoherent from economic perspective. Value is only meaningful if someone is able to pay something, not willing to spend money they don’t have. So we might still think that there is nothing wrong with the above situattion because the rich person values his garage more than his home (his Bugatti is worth more than everything the poor person has ever owned). From an efficiency standpoint the garage should get covered rather than the bedroom. This ignores things like the social cost to allowing the bedroom to be ruined, so it might not actually be economically efficient, though it is entirely possible. Even if we want to ignore the economics and decide that it is morally incoherent to say that the garage should be covered rather than the bedroom, I’m still not convinced that the law against raising prices is a good one. Given the limted supply, there is no reason to believe that garages are going to be covered any more if prices go up than if they remain stagnant for the reasons given in the preceding paragraph.

In the end, I didn’t have to consider the counterargument in Dragon Age because there were no wealthy villagers. The issue was about who among the refugees got which supplies. The merchant’s increased prices made certain that those who needed a particular supply were most likely to get it, rather than having one villager buy up everything regardless of how badly they needed any given item. My decision at this point was clear: the merchant could charge what he liked and the villagers could not attack him without fear of my wrath.

This was a fantastic bit of writing by the developers. It was a wonderful, quite engaging, and believable scenario. While the offering of a discount is certainly believable (I performed a service for him, even if I did it with the community’s best interests in mind), it is a reminder that most of my peers wouldn’t think things through quite so thoroughly, instead latching onto only their personal interest. In other games this might well have been an “evil” decision (though other games are not sophisticated enough to have a complex scenario like this one). Here, however, I only had to contend with the opinions of party rather than some supreme arbiter of moral clarity. I could have ruled for the merchant and then been given the option of publicly denouncing the discount so that the villagers could have faith that I wasn’t on the take. Maybe next year.

I’m a fairly active person. If I didn’t eat several pints of ice cream a week I might actually consider myself slightly athletic. I prefer obscure, intense sports. Over the years I’ve acquired varying levels of proficiency in Olympic Weightlifting, Yoga, weight training, Crossfit, Ultimate, power lifting, swimming, sailing, rock climbing, cycling, racquetball, and fencing. I’m not particularly talented at any of these sports, but I work hard and I have a good memory for movement and a decent awareness of body position. I have little hand-eye coordination, so I’m terrible at racquetball and basketball (by far my favorite spectator sport and the mainstream sport for which I most wish had any talent).

I’ve always wanted to wrestle. I thought that my slightly above average full body coordination and knack for memorizing patterns of movement would make me a good candidate. I’m probably the wrong shape for Greco-Roman, but I’ll never know because I disliked the sports community at my high school, abandoning swimming and never even giving wrestling a shot. In college I had friends who got really into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. For whatever reason I never found the time to do it myself and left Sarasota regretting not learning. At some point over the summer I decided that I no longer had any excuses. I live not too far from a top-notch school and I had a bit of extra scratch from my job this summer. So when I got back from vacation I decided to pay for an entire year in advance and jump in.

In competition, matches have time limits and are scored by judges, though any match can end with a submission or a knock out. As in Greco-Roman and Judo, points are scored by gaining positional advantages, such as taking an opponent’s back. In day-to-day sparring, matches are timed, and there are no winners or losers. If someone submits, the players reset and begin again. For white-belts a lot of the sparring is about position, so the goal is for each player to gain a certain positional advantage; the players then reset and go again.

Because matches are often about inches rather than dramtic movements, the pace is conducive to strategic play. The usual refrain is that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is like playing chess with your body. It is one thing, however, to strategize over a board game and quite another to rethink your plan while someone is trying to choke you. Over time, practitioners learn attacks, defenses, and counters. As a player’s sophistication grows, he or she begins to think many moves ahead. She tries to bait her opponent into opening certain positions and then take advantage of momentary weakness.

The only thing I’ve done that I can compare to Jiu-Jitsu on the physical side is Yoga. While I’ve moved away from Yoga toward other sports, it changed the way that I understand embodiment, and so I have a deep love and fascination for the form. Much of Yoga for me is about getting away from thinking of the mind and body as separate; the little man in my head looking out through my eyes fades and with it goes any feeling of an incorporeal self. Central positions stop making being important and things become defined only by their position in relation to other things. My arms are no longer placed in space, but only in relation to my feet, my sternum, my head, etc. The practice becomes meditative and entirely experiential. It find it impossible to say much about it; I can only feel it. Jiu-Jitsu has this characteristic as well. Even after just a few months I have moments of calm on the mat, in which I stop working on strength and adrenaline and come closer to working only on position and leverage. What separates Yoga and Jiu-Jitsu is that in Jiu-Jitsu you must know not not only where body parts are in relation to each other, but where they are in relation to another body. Meanwhile, the other body might move unexpectedly; the goal is to control the other body by positioning your own. You must be aware not only of where your foot is in relation to your hip and your elbow, but where your opponent’s hips and elbows are and how each body part can influence the others. It is a practice in which every movement has a consequence; space is constantly being created and taken away. Watching two advanced players is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

I’m a big Darren Aronofsky fan, though I didn’t realize it until recently. For whatever reason I’ve not typically thought of his films as his films. I admire π, Requiem for a Dream, and the Wrestler, but for whatever I never associated those films with one director. I remember hearing an interview he did with Terry Gross in which she tried her darnedest to come up with unifying themes in his films (something about destruction of the body), but it was largely unconvincing. I don’t find a consistent aesthetic in Aronofsky’s films and this makes it difficult for me see him persist across projects. Requiem for a Dream and π used similar techniques to emphasize the repetition and procedural nature of regular drug use and there was certainly good use of the body-mounted steady-cam in both, but those films had such dramatically different art direction that I hesitate to go further than technical similarities. The documentary-style of The Wrestler feels completely divorced from those early features (Beki was taken by how she could almost smell New Jersey his depiction was so strong). None of this is meant to offer any normative claims about Aronofsky’s work or his abilities as a director; it turns out I’m a big fan. His ability to move easily between genres and to converse with the audience in any number of novel ways means that he is hard to conceive of other than as a name associated with fine films.

It was with this unrecognized appreciation of Aronofsky’s work that I approached The Fountain. The film was on my radar when it came out, but mixed reviews meant that I never made it to the theater. Under normal circumstances a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes for a film by a director that I like is even better than rave reviews. The score signals that the film is doing something different; that reasonable minds disagree and therefore have something to talk about. A 51% means that even if I don’t think the film is successful, I’m guaranteed to have something to think about for a few days (We’ll call this the Huckabees category. I ♥ Huckabees prompted one of the more epic non-academic discussions of my New College career; eight or nine Novo Collegians passionately arguing the film’s merits in my Goldstein living room was a great way to kill a few hours on a weeknight. It eventually transitioned into a fascinating discussion of the cataloging system of big box book stores (it seemed to me a crime that Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark was demoted to genre fiction while Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake sat smugly in “Literature.” I was assured by some of my peers that anything with dragons, spaceships, or Fabio on it didn’t deserve the literature section)). I missed The Fountain because I didn’t realize I was actually a big fan of its director (I have the same problem with Danny Boyle, which meant that but for a chance evening with Alex in D.C. I would never have seen Sunshine). After hearing an interview with Aronofsky (maybe that Fresh Air interview) in which I could hear the sadness in his voice from the negative reception of The Fountain, I promptly added it to my Netflix queue.

It is no surprise that The Fountain wasn’t well received. It fits nicely in the Huckabees category. And I’ll go ahead and note up front that there are some silly moments. The bathtub sex scene is laughable (how did a guy so obsessed with curing cancer and taking care of his cancer-ridden wife have time to workout so much?), and the watching the silhouette of a bald Hugh Jackman doing Thai Chi/Kung Fu made me embarrassed for everyone involved. Yet these moments are rare and focusing on them obscures the film’s greatness.

Part of what makes the bathtub scene work even as we find it a bit silly is that the film has no interest in realism. The characters are essentially archetypes. I’m often frustrated by negative criticism that amounts to noting that characters don’t act or talk like real people. I’m not sure when in literary history this became a valid complaint, but it seems relatively recent and I hope it soon ends. We have in the Fountain something like a fairy tale. Jackman’s character is irrationally obsessed and his wife is much too perfect to be taken seriously, but the film isn’t asking us to empathize with the individuals, instead it wants to affect us through metaphor and imagery; it wants to tell a tale about obsession and redemption and what carrying on can and can’t get us.

I don’t want to give too much away because part of the experience of the film is connecting the dots, but how those dots are connected is where this film separates itself. There is a solid narrative here. It is internally coherent, even if the axioms of Aronofsky’s universe are unpredictable and, even at the end, opaque. The experience of watching the film is one of accepting the fantastic; you take in the stunning imagery, parse the metaphor, and then connect the narrative threads. Heresy though it might be, Aronofsky has bested Kubrick. The Fountain offers a climax with imagery as dazzling and confounding as that of 2001, but has a coherence that’s lacking in the later. The Fountain is both the tone poem and the source material.

I can’t give much of a list of new releases, but here are some top players in my iTunes. For some reason I overlooked The Knife for several years. Silent Shout really is a wonderful record. I just got Alela Diane’s 2009 record To Be Still. She’s a great voice and she’s a good writer. The latest Why? record is also getting steady play. Last year’s Hank Roberts record Green is fantastic. It’s about as far from background music as you can get, but he’s got a great ear for combining experimental jazz with traditional American folk styles. Finally, I can’t get enough of the Flat Duo Jets 1991 record, Go Go Harlem Baby. In particular, their version of the Pee Wee King song You Belong to Me is fast becoming an obsession right up there with the Beatles version of You Really Got a Hold on Me.

It might be too soon to say (I’ve only had the record for a few days), but I think The Flaming Lips might have done what I feared they would never again do: create a great record. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a very good record, but it was a bit of a letdown coming off of Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin. Yoshimi was one of the best sounding records I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing, and it did new things, but it didn’t have the epic experiments that the best Lips records have. Coyne has always done a great job of making platitudes and setimentality work for him, but I thought it didn’t always work on Yoshimi.

I didn’t even buy At War With the Mystics. I heard most of the tracks and just didn’t have it in me to listen to a mediocre record by one of my favorite bands. It was a big deal for me because I hadn’t ignored a Lips record since I fell in love with them in 1997 with The Clouds Taste Metallic. I went back and bought most of their records. Passing on Mystics hurt, and I was scared that fame had actually caught up with them. Drozd had been off heroin for a while and Coyne was such a cult celebrity that I figured it was over.

Then they finally released Christmas on Mars, which I’ve literally been waiting for since 1999. The soundtrack was great and I’m excited to see the film (Christmas gift?). I was still skeptical about the new record because I figured much of the film score had been written long ago. And then came the Pitchfork Festival.

I was initially scared because they agreed to participate in “Write the Night,” which always struck me as nothing more than tyranny by the majority. Expecting little more than every song from Yoshimi, plus Race for the Prize and She Don’t Use Jelly, I got pumped for the spectacle; all I really wanted was Wayne Coyne crowd-surfing in an inflatable hamster ball. While they didn’t disappoint on the spectacle, they delighted by breaking from the majority rules list and played old stuff that I didn’t expect (including the song that really got me hooked on the Lips, Bad Days, from the Batman Forever soundtrack (which is an amazing soundtrack; aside from the hits by U2 and Seal, it features Massive Attack, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Method Man)). Most importantly, Coyne and company played two new songs. They were incredible. The band was playing as a rock band for the first time in almost fifteen years.

So last week I finally got up the courage to purchase Embryonic, a sprawling double album that deserves to be compared to The White Album. The Lips take the time to explore all of their styles, and delve into some new ones. We even get some non-Coyne singing (Drozd?). The band is as tight as they’ve ever been, thanks I’m sure in no small part to the fact that Drozd isn’t playing every instrument other than bass (even if that just means that he’s delegated drumming to their long-time roadie/touring drummer, because he’s a beast). Coyne has said that the album is a lot of jams, but it doesn’t really sound that way. Producer, Fridmann, who deserves to be considered a band member after producing all but one of the Lips’ records since 1990 (particularly since they are such a studio band) has his fingerprints all over the record.

Embryonic is nothing if not sprawling. The tracks aren’t really made to serve as one big suite like the second half of Abbey Road, but the sequencing manages to move from disparate styles over several tracks often without giving clear demarcations. Coyne is going quite dark in his writing and his vocals are buried in the mix. This is a guitar and bass record unlike anything the Lips have done in a long time. Drozd’s playing is inspired, particularly in tracks such as the seven minute Powerless. Like The White Album or Physical Graffiti, there’s too much here to process without lots of listens. I don’t know if this is an all-time classic yet, but I’m sure that it is a great record and one of the best Lips records. I’m sure it will figure at the top of my year-end list.

Though both of us eat meat these days, Beki and I are always looking for good vegetarian restaurants. Finding them is near impossible. We were excited to try the Chicago Diner last winter and wound up mostly disappointed. The food was tasty enough, but like so much American vegetarian cuisine, it was hung up on trying to find meat substitutes, with most dishes including fake sausage or the like. If restaurants don’t go for meat substitutes, they just serve what amount to a collection of side dishes.

Friday was Beki’s birthday, so I took her to Green Zebra. It is a vegetarian restaurant that avoids the traditional problems first by doing away with the inferiority complex and attempts at being carnivore friendly (they reverse the traditional role by offering exactly one meat dish per night (always fish from what I gathered)) and second by offering a tasty menu. The tasting menu means that you are encouraged to order three or four dishes per person and share. By focusing on smaller dishes, the chef is able to concoct inventive dishes without having to figure out a way to make you eat a pound of broccoli in order to fill up. I ordered the Chef’s Tasting Menu, which came with four dishes and a desert. None of the dishes were on the menu. Beki ordered three dishes from the menu. Between the eight things, a bottle of wine, bread (they give each person one piece, which is really a great idea. A server comes out with a basket and asks you whether you’d like whole wheat or white. You tell him and he gives you one sizable piece of bread. You don’t feel cheated because there isn’t a basket with two measly pieces of bread, and you don’t feel gross for eating three loves of bread before dinner), and free extra desert for Beki’s birthday, we were both just the right kind of full.

The meal started with the bread, which came with butter and a shot of spicy tomato soup. The bread wasn’t anything to write home about, but it had a nice crust. The soup had just enough kick and was a great way to prep the pallet for the meal.

The wine was a pinot gris from Oregon. I don’t have much of a nose for wine, but it was tasty enough.

We then had the first of the Chef’s choice, which was a poached pear on a pumpernickel crisp. It was drizzled with some kind of slightly sweet sauce and mustard seeds. The pears were great. The poaching process took out some of the sweetness. They were fork tender but not mushy.

Then we had a mushroom consume with barley. It wasn’t too oily or too salty, which is what often scares me away from consommes. The flavor was subtle. The barley on the bottome gave the broth a nice bite.
Beki’s chickpea fries came out with the consomme. They were exceptionally light and not at all greasy; a very nice job with the deep-frier. They came with a dipping sauce that had strong South-Indian flavors. Beki remarked that it was an Americanized samosa.

Next was the Cauliflower three ways. It was a chunk of roasted cauliflower that was good but slightly too salty, topped with shaved raw cauliflower, and sitting in purred cauliflower with brown-butter. It was really incredible and convinced me that Beki might be correct in suggesting that we make mashed cauliflower rather than mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving.
Beki’s sweet garlic and parsley agnolotti came out with the cauliflower. It featured Moroccan spiced eggplant and toasted pistachios. I thought the garlic was a little too strong, but pasta was incredible and the eggplant more than made up for it.

The last of the savory dishes were two of the highlights. The Chef’s selection was pappardelle pasta with all the ingredients of Italian sausage, minus the pork. It was a very clever acknowledgment of everything that I dislike about vegetarian restaurants. I love Italian sausage, and this was some of the best Italian sausage I’ve had. The flavors were perfect. In particular, the fennel seeds really popped.
Beki ordered braised artichokes with a warm bread salad. It had maybe the best croutons I’ve ever had, and I had bone marrow croutons last year.

The deserts were as perfect as the rest of the meal. We had shortbread triangles with homemade vanilla ice cream and a toffee crisp. It was all served over a very light caramel sauce.
For Beki’s birthday, we got peanut cookies with mashed concord grape jelly and whole concord grapes. It was the grapiest grape jelly you imagine; not too sweet, very fresh.

I’m delighted to finally find a great vegetarian restaurant. It’s too expensive to frequent, but we’ll surely be back.

The internet is killing storytelling is the headline for this piece on the Times Online. I’ve been blogging intermittently for a few years now and was struck by the statement. I often don’t write narrative in my posts (take this post for instance), but just as often I do. The internet seems a fine place for drafting short narratives on a regular basis. The medium allows me to tell stories any time I want. Before this blog I could narrate to others only when in their company or if I was lucky enough to get someone to read a hard-copy of something I’d committed to paper. Otherwise, I was left to narrating to myself in the shower or surreptitiously delivering monologues on walks. If I was lucky, I’d have the house to myself to offer riveting soliloquies on my future achievements to the cat. But now those narratives are at least accessible to the outside, though I resist looking at hit statistics so I have no idea if there are many readers. I have to admit to not reading many blogs. But I have to imagine that there are thousands of blogs out there producing daily narratives.

What Macintyre isn’t clear about is whether the fear is the death of fiction. That might be a clearer concern, though not one that I have to any great degree. When one takes the time to draft a “true” narrative, the truth of it all becomes quite murky. Facts are omitted and the very act of exclusion creates a kind of fiction. I’m not sure there’s a great distinction between fiction and nonfiction where narrative is the focus.

*Disclaimer*
I throw around “coherence” in this post. I’m not dealing with logical coherence in any formal way. This isn’t a possible worlds kind of thing, but a this world kind of thing. So when I say something isn’t coherent, I mean it isn’t coherent because it doesn’t make sense given the way our world works, not necessarily that you can’t coherently imagine some universe.

“The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing ‘imperfect’ institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.”
-Harold Demsetz, Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint, 12 Journal of Law and Economics 1 (1969)

This quotation was forcefully given to me in January by my law and economics professor. It is a powerful point; one that I now see everywhere. It goes far beyond the platitudes that you hear supposedly grizzled “realists” shout at naive “idealists.” It even goes beyond Voltaire’s, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The Nirvana Fallacy is an effort to put policy debates into perspective, and it gets ignored every day by me, you, and those in power. It warns us that comparing two options to a third can get us in a heap of trouble on the level not just of possible outcomes, but on the level of coherence. Taking Demsetz seriously helps us formulate our questions about what the world ought to look like in a way that gets us closer to coherence.

I spend much of my time thinking, writing, reading, and talking about environmental regulations. I do this as someone attempting to enforce law and I do this as someone interested in reforming law. But in order to do these things well, particularly when thinking about reformation, one must be able to formulate coherent questions. It is much harder than you might think, which is why Demsetz is so helpful.

Consider water pollution. The New York Times is doing an incredible job with their water series. In particular the data they’ve put together on enforcement rivals anything that the government or any organization has put together. But what do we really want out of our water regulation? The obvious answer is, “clean water.” But when you take Demsetz seriously, that’s not a coherent answer at all. Even if we could identify what clean water would look and taste and be like, it wouldn’t get us anywhere. All of our water could be clean if we didn’t pollute it. We wouldn’t pollute water if we didn’t have factories. Factories are dirty and gross. So let’s get rid of factories. But now we’ve lost jobs. We’ve lost what the factories produce. We’ve lost a bunch of goods in order to get a different good (perfectly clean water). But was our perfectly clean water worth it? No, perfectly clean water isn’t worth doing away with all of our factories. We can’t coherently reach for a world of perfectly clean water without reaching for a world without factories. And we know from high school economics that there are diminishing returns. Perfectly clean water isn’t worth dark, cold nights. This means that what we really ought to ask might sound like an odd question: “What is the optimal amount of water pollution?” Demsetz’ insight is so important because it shows why this isn’t just the right question, but the only coherent question.

Implicit in Demsetz’ point is the notion that there are feedback loops. We cannot change one variable without changing the others. This is driven home by another NY Times water piece on the deleterious effects that cleaning our air has on our water. The question cannot be: “How do we have perfectly clean water and perfectly clean water?” What we really want to know is: “How we can have clean enough water and clean enough air while still producing the right amount of goods that make water and air dirty?”

We must be careful not to apply Demsetz in the wrong situations. Last night I was pumping iron and listening to the podcast of a panel on gay marriage put together by the University of Chicago. One of the panelists tried to tackle the issue of whether gay marriage ought to be the goal or whether civil unions is the way to go. One of the arguments presented was that civil unions might be suboptimal but more achievable and so ought to be secured as quickly as possible. The argument was that those current couples denied rights cannot be made to wait for marriage, and that this is not a sacrifice we can morally ask couples to make. This is not a case in which the Nirvana Fallacy helps us. Gay marriage is a coherent possibility; it isn’t a Nirvana. The situation is more akin to the grizzled “realist” and the naive “idealist” above. The arguments about whether to advocate for civil unions or to declare “marriage or bust” is a pragmatic question. People can make coherent arguments on both sides. Contrast this with demanding no pollution while maintaining our culture and other goods. This is sort of a nice logically coherent ideal, but it isn’t coherent in our world. It isn’t even a nice idea, it’s nonsense. It is a coherence misstep, not a policy debate.