COLUMNS
Talk Show 27 with Daphne Beal, Charles Bock, Emily Chenoweth, John McNally, Irina Reyn and Peter Trachtenberg
/ Jaime Clarke
07.02.09
––What do you imagine the present-day obstacles would be?
Beal: There are at least two obstacles that I can think of. The first was an obstacle back when there were chuck wagons, which is that the food probably wasn't all that good except for maybe the sourdough biscuits. I'm guessing on a good night it was fresh killed rabbit, some bitter wild greens collected from a ditch, biscuits, and gravy. But I bet there were plenty of times that it was all about the dried buffalo meat. (A quick Web search, a day later, pulls up "son-of-a-gun stew" and "blackbird pie." I'm not encouraged.) I'm a little more hopeful about breakfast, because my chuck wagon man would have chickens in is wagon, and we all agree on bacon around here. All the same, there would likely be a cholesterol glut and a paucity of fresh fruits and vegetables. The second problem is that chuck wagons were made for cattle drives heading west, and I live a stationary life in one of the most densely populated cities in America, where, even in the old days, there were no chuck wagons, just ice men and street carts. So not only is my fantasy anachronistic, it's totally geographically off.
Bock: I don’t know that it’s the kind of place that I’d want to go to alone, every day, on my lunch hour, if I was a temp in Midtown NYC — that might be a little too depressing and isolating. But then again, I might want to go every day and eat there and read. Why not? In fact, there’s actually a small automat running on St. Marks Place in NYC. You buy food like fries and hot dogs, and anything that needs to be heated, you put in a microwave. It’s a nice idea and an honest attempt at bringing back this concept. Having said this, I do think we know too much about health and microwaves and preservatives for the automat, at this moment, to be much besides a cool novelty, the kind of place you see and are enchanted by and spend some money at, basically, as a lark.
Chenoweth: 1.) Laziness. Email is so much easier. 2.) It would be very hard to get everyone to agree to live in one place, because someone loves the Midwest and someone else can’t more than an hour from the ocean, and just where is everyone supposed to find jobs, anyway? 3.) Where would a mammoth live? In Siberia? In a refrigerated cage? Also, I’d worry that he’d be lonely.
McNally: No one’s fingers are strong enough to make the keys of a manual typewriter work anymore. We haven’t become just a fat nation; we’ve gone weak in the fingers. Also, we’ve grown accustomed to where every machine we own, including our telephone, must have the capacity to entertain us. It’s hard to go back to the days when a machine performed only one function. We all need to go into technology-detox.
Reyn: Finding a date in one’s schedule, an apartment on the Upper West Side that is large enough to accommodate at least ten (French Chinoiserie tapestry addressed in one corner, German Expressionist horror film in another, a heated debate about Nabokov’s real-life model for Pnin around the centerpiece), finding friends who still stay up past 11pm, staying up past 11pm yourself, decent traveling weather to the dinner party, brushing up on Murnau and Nabokov, red wine and humble comfort food, elegant but comfortable evening wear.
Trachtenberg: I’d say the first obstacle is that nobody identifies as a worker any more. Everybody wants to be an “entrepreneur.” You have the most downtrodden people in this country identifying—to an absurd extent—with the super-rich. I’m talking about WalMart clerks earning less than $30,000 a year voting against a presidential candidate who says he’ll raise taxes on people who earn more than $200,000. And that’s not because the clerks don’t know math. It’s because they think that one day they’re going to make $200,000 and they’re damned if they’re going to pay taxes on it.
Beal: There are at least two obstacles that I can think of. The first was an obstacle back when there were chuck wagons, which is that the food probably wasn't all that good except for maybe the sourdough biscuits. I'm guessing on a good night it was fresh killed rabbit, some bitter wild greens collected from a ditch, biscuits, and gravy. But I bet there were plenty of times that it was all about the dried buffalo meat. (A quick Web search, a day later, pulls up "son-of-a-gun stew" and "blackbird pie." I'm not encouraged.) I'm a little more hopeful about breakfast, because my chuck wagon man would have chickens in is wagon, and we all agree on bacon around here. All the same, there would likely be a cholesterol glut and a paucity of fresh fruits and vegetables. The second problem is that chuck wagons were made for cattle drives heading west, and I live a stationary life in one of the most densely populated cities in America, where, even in the old days, there were no chuck wagons, just ice men and street carts. So not only is my fantasy anachronistic, it's totally geographically off.
Bock: I don’t know that it’s the kind of place that I’d want to go to alone, every day, on my lunch hour, if I was a temp in Midtown NYC — that might be a little too depressing and isolating. But then again, I might want to go every day and eat there and read. Why not? In fact, there’s actually a small automat running on St. Marks Place in NYC. You buy food like fries and hot dogs, and anything that needs to be heated, you put in a microwave. It’s a nice idea and an honest attempt at bringing back this concept. Having said this, I do think we know too much about health and microwaves and preservatives for the automat, at this moment, to be much besides a cool novelty, the kind of place you see and are enchanted by and spend some money at, basically, as a lark.
Chenoweth: 1.) Laziness. Email is so much easier. 2.) It would be very hard to get everyone to agree to live in one place, because someone loves the Midwest and someone else can’t more than an hour from the ocean, and just where is everyone supposed to find jobs, anyway? 3.) Where would a mammoth live? In Siberia? In a refrigerated cage? Also, I’d worry that he’d be lonely.
McNally: No one’s fingers are strong enough to make the keys of a manual typewriter work anymore. We haven’t become just a fat nation; we’ve gone weak in the fingers. Also, we’ve grown accustomed to where every machine we own, including our telephone, must have the capacity to entertain us. It’s hard to go back to the days when a machine performed only one function. We all need to go into technology-detox.
Reyn: Finding a date in one’s schedule, an apartment on the Upper West Side that is large enough to accommodate at least ten (French Chinoiserie tapestry addressed in one corner, German Expressionist horror film in another, a heated debate about Nabokov’s real-life model for Pnin around the centerpiece), finding friends who still stay up past 11pm, staying up past 11pm yourself, decent traveling weather to the dinner party, brushing up on Murnau and Nabokov, red wine and humble comfort food, elegant but comfortable evening wear.
Trachtenberg: I’d say the first obstacle is that nobody identifies as a worker any more. Everybody wants to be an “entrepreneur.” You have the most downtrodden people in this country identifying—to an absurd extent—with the super-rich. I’m talking about WalMart clerks earning less than $30,000 a year voting against a presidential candidate who says he’ll raise taxes on people who earn more than $200,000. And that’s not because the clerks don’t know math. It’s because they think that one day they’re going to make $200,000 and they’re damned if they’re going to pay taxes on it.