Anniversary

On this day, fifty years ago:

Happy anniversary,
Comrade Gagarin, and Sputnik "Vostok"!

I remember the 1961 news only vaguely. According to this, Gagarin's flight was no big surprise to U.S. space scientists. They soon followed with Alan Shepard's suborbital flight the next month, and John Glenn's orbit in '62.

I came upon the Gagarin card twenty-plus years after the event. Beyond the heroic image-making, it seemed the sensitive face of this Soviet boy-next-door had something quite genuine about it.

That seems to have been a good read.

This suggests the first man in space was a highly likeable and accomplished person, shaped by humble origins and the deprivation of a war-time childhood.

On a tour of Britain three months after his space flight, Gagarin was such a hit that

... The Russophobe Daily Mail even ran the headline: "Make him Sir Yuri!", while John F Kennedy was so alarmed by his popularity that he banned him from entering the United States.

And he's still popular:

According to Andrea Rose, a director of the British Council who is behind plans to erect a statue of Gagarin in London, this veneration is because Gagarin is "the one untarnished figure from the Soviet era".

He died far too young, in a 1968 training plane crash.

Interesting to read about world reaction to Gagarin in 1961.

While I remember the flight just dimly, I have very strong memories of an American TV show, about three years later. Now I wonder: did the Gagarin image influence a certain fictional Russian?

He was an attractive, charasmatic Russian.

Sound out his name, with Hollywood Russian accent: hear the strong resemblance to Yuri Gagarin.

Arrival of Spring

Japanese post card, c. 1970s—

Today marks one month since Japan's deadly earthquake and tsunami.

And it's just after the first weekends in April, when the cherry trees flower and people in Japan get together for hanami: blossom-viewing (with picnicking—and especially, drinking—under the trees).

A Tokyo resident, photographer Alfie Goodrich, expresses some thoughts about this year's hanami as "a chance to celebrate the best of mother-nature, after seeing her worst."

I started the year posting Japanese images, and it's been painful to think about continuing, with all that's happened in the last month.

Another post card, c. early 1970s—
There's no English caption, and for years I treasured this card as an amusingly odd image: working-class Japanese enjoying a sunny day outing, as they accompany a boat transformed into what looked to me like a somewhat goofy creature.

(It's something about the look in that eye...)Years after finding this in the U.S., I had learned enough Japanese to identify the location in the card's capition, and google up this description:

Minato Matsuri (port festival), held August 4-5 in the city of Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture. Portable shrines are carried aboard two large boats, decorated as a phoenix (as in the card) and a dragon. The main boats are followed by family fishing boats, as everyone joins in to pray for good catches.

From this series of photographs, here is a Shiogama scene last month:

Volunteers sift through debris in Shiogama, northern Japan, Sunday, March 20, 2011, after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
AP Photo/The Yomiuri Shimbun, Miho Takahashi

Having lived in the country (though in a region far from the disaster zone), I have a sense of how much life will never be the same. And having traveled through a good bit of Japanese countryside, I know that the rural population is elderly, as are so many of the survivors living through this trauma.

Toward the end of March, there were some very moving images and words by photographers traveling in the region.

Jake Price's photo essay is here. He stayed in a shelter for the displaced and reported that —

The elderly were hit the hardest. At least sixty percent of the people in the center were elderly...

While much has been written about Japanese stoicism, I don't see it that way. There's a lot going on in thoughts and hearts if you look closely at faces and eyes as well. The events of two Fridays ago were swift and violent; people along the coast are still in a state of deep shock. The first person whom I spoke with in my hotel in Yamagata started shaking and was nearly brought to tears when she heard that I was interested in her story. "Aside from my husband it's been a week since I've told anyone about what happened. I just needed to tell someone."

... Although I had my own food, I was constantly being given more. I wanted to turn it down, but to do so I thought would be impolite. While reserved, people were also open, giving, concerned for this stranger who showed up with dirty boots and two bags. Not stoic at all. If anything, I found people determined to keep a gracious spirit alive even during this most trying of times. At the epicenter I did not come across one crack in a single building; accordingly, the same can be said about people's dignity.

Price's experiences are echoed by Wes Cheek, who traveled to rural areas where aid was finally reaching some of the people who, isolated in their own homes (not shelters), had been cut off from the rest of the country.

He phoned reports to Sam Seder's podcast during the trip, and the March 30 show [after the 2:30 mark] has some inspiring stories of survivors helping each other.

The March 31 report [2:00 mark] had stories like Jake Price's: of survivors being grateful that someone was simply listening, and that the world had not forgotten them.

Wes also had some observations about how, enormous as the task of rebuilding will be, it will be helped by the country's focus on infrastructure, and a sense of refusing to let the survivors down.

He also mentioned the difference from American attitudes after Katrina, as in the "why didn't they leave?" blaming of victims.

To that, I would add: Japanese society isn't subject to the kind of divide and conquer rule under which we live. After Katrina, the political agenda that benefits from pushing fear of the other acted as it always does, in demonizing the storm's victims. A practice promoted by our media, directly, or by declining to perceive it.

True, there was a Japanese right-winger's grandstanding after the disaster. But Ishihara soon had to walk back what he said; unlike here, there is not a Japanese mass media promoting this kind of thing, 24/7.

One month later: the nuclear plants are anything but contained. Belatedly, the evacuation zone is being extended a bit, as aftershocks continue.

As in this country, there was a long history of government collusion with corporations corruption in hiding the lack of safety.

Long-range consequences to the environment and human health, in Japan and around the world, are unknown. They will be unaffected by national borders.

If there's to be any hope for this poor planet, it will be if activism in Japan and the rest of world aren't too late, and can get results.

Anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo, March 27.
Reuters/Toru Hanai

Serious Fooling Around

Sheet music front cover—

Words and music by Slim Gaillard and Lee Ricks, 1946
American Academy of Music, Incorporated
1619 Broadway - New York City

A fine singer—as comes through even his silliest lyrics—Slim Gaillard was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist.

He also was an early experimenter with studio overdubbing, which let him record at least one number, "Genius" (aka, "Ride Slim Ride"), where he plays every instrument in a combo.

In the late 1930s he teamed with bassist Slam Stewart. Recording as Slim & Slam, the two had several hit records.

Songs incorporated a hipster lexicon, "vout," which Slim invented. The lingo is so out there, it seems a parody of hipster talk, and Slim continued to use it to the end of his career.

He had an excellent ear for languages, and was able to combine a smattering of words with convincing ad libbed sounds. One example, in "Spanish," is after the 1:50 mark here.

And this was supposed to have been inspired by Slim's boarding with—and being fed by—a woman of Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Wiki, his landlady was Armenian, and the entry cites several dishes, as well as Arabic phrases ("I'm broke!") in the lyrics to "Yep Roc Heresy."

A few minutes of a 1980s video ; Slim's interviewer is George Melly, an English musician, arts critic, and author.

Melly calls Slim "the possessor of a truly surreal, freewheeling imagination."

My own favorite example is how he turned a 1950s pop hit into this:

Everybody's wondering
How high the moon.
Does the moon ever wonder
How low you are?

That's only the intro; it gets seriously surreal after that.

A good sampling of typical hijinks, as well as musical chops, is here.

The TV show (c. early 60s) is not identified, but a segment combining jazz + comedy has to be from a Steve Allen show. Apparently, Oxydol and Westinghouse were sponsors, per Slim's ad lib lyrics.

Slim's "o-rooney" linguistic inventiveness was surely an influence on "Steverino," perhaps inspiring Allen's "Schmock-Schmock!" catch phrase coining.

About twenty years after that performance on the show, Gaillard recorded with Allen, as one of the quartet on "Steve Allen's Hip Fables" (1983).

These were re-tellings of children's stories, in "cool" jazz lingo. A track I've heard: "The Three Little Pigs," where each line of Allen's lyrics is followed by a melodious barrage of rolled "r"s, as Slim "translates" the story into his own version of Spanglish.

J. spotted this at a library sale:
According to this, tracks were recorded in 1951 and '52.

Some cover art detail:

Illustrator David Stone Martin included cats hanging out here:
With all the food references in Slim's lyrics, I took this for some kind of dish or cooking pot until J. set me straight: it's a trumpet mute.

Back cover portrait of the recording artist:

The song list even includes a seasonal note for April:

March - Card of the Month

Japanese post card, c. 1960s-1970s; captioned on reverse—

March - "Hina Matsuri" Doll Festival or Girls Festival – March 3

On March 3, little girls display their dolls in classical dresses, which have been handed over by their sisters and mothers, on a stand covered with red cloth. They invite their friends each other and share the delicacies of the festival season.

Cooking In a Bedsitter

A 1977 paperback: "First published as Kitchen in the Corner, 1961"—

Even though the cover is the only illustration, this book is a treat (if for reasons other than my wanting to use the recipes).

The author is of the school of English writing which treats all subjects with unrelenting cheer.

Never mind that you live in a single room: you, dear reader,
can always muddle through—

Cooking a decent meal in a bedsitter is not just a matter of something that can be cooked over a single gas ring. It is a problem of finding somewhere to put down the fork you take the lid off the saucepan, and then finding here else to put the lid. It is finding a place to keep the butter where it will not get mixed up with your razor or hairpins. It is having your hands covered with flour, a pot boiling over on to your landlady's carpet, and no water to mop up any of it nearer than the bathroom at the other end of the landing. It is cooking at floor level, in a hurry, with nowhere to put the salad but the washing-up bowl , which in any case is full of socks.

However, with imagination, common sense and a great of newspaper, all this can be surmounted...

The first hurdle to consider:

... it is a sad fact that the better the room itself and the house in which it is found, the worse the cooking problem tends to be. In a large squalid rooming house, where the landlord calls only to collect the rent and where the cleaning, if any, is done by an indifferent slut with no standards to maintain, adventurous cooking is perfectly possible. If you find the sink filled with someone else's filthy crocks you can heave them out on to the floor without fear of a come-back. If you fill the whole house with the smell burning onions you will be cursed but not evicted; and nothing will look much worse whatever you spill on it.

But in a respectable house you have much more to worry about. Often you are not really supposed to be cooking at all (it is a common fallacy among the better class of landladies that one can exist entirely on tea, biscuits, and good books, without the need for food, beer, the wireless, or the companionship of the opposite sex). At the slightest crash your landlady will come tittupping out of her sitting-room to worry about the effect you are having on her nice furniture. If you want to peel onions under running water, you will probably have to peel them in your bath; and there will be nobody from whom you can borrow salt or a corkscrew in moments of emergency.

Where there is a will, our author believes, there are ways and means—one only need recognize certain limitations:

The principles of English cooking demand that first-class food should be cooked as simply as possible, and that a number of different foods should be cooked separately and served together. This is impossible on a gas ring. Indeed, bedsitter people have far more natural kinship with nomads brewing up in the desert over a small fire of camel dung, or impoverished Italian peasants eking out three shrimps and a lump of cheese with half a cartload of spaghetti.

The first thing a bedsitter cook must do is abandon the idea of 'meat and two veg', in favour of the idea of a simmering cauldron... And that brings us, inevitably to the casserole.

Here is how Ms. Whitehorn introduces readers to one-pot cooking:

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE CASSEROLE

A French politician representing a somewhat backward district in Africa was some time ago found to have been eaten by his constituents. The journalist who discovered this used the phrase: 'Je crois qu'il a passé par la casserole' (I think he ended up in a casserole). Clearly the Africans knew what they were about. For making a delicious meal out of tough and intractable material, the casserole has no rival; and though, traditionally, most casseroles are oven dishes, all but the ones needing a crusty top can very well be done on a gas ring over an asbestos mat.

Not to worry: he was, after all, a Frenchman...

Before getting down to recipes, the author offers pages full of helpful tips, such as:

The coldest place in a bedsitter is very often under the bed. By all means keep food there, in a suitable box; though you had better find a way of reminding yourself of its presence before it reminds you.

Some advice is quite detailed—

BREADCRUMBS: Breadcrumbs are a bore in a bedsitter, but sometimes one must have them. There are four ways of getting them:
(1) Buy them. Some bought breadcrumbs are an alarming shade of orange and suitable only for fish; others are quieter in tone and will do for Wiener Schnitzel, fried chicken, etc. Bought breadcrumbs are not very suitable for the kind of pudding where you will eat them as they are, without further cooking.
(2) Dry slices of bread in front of the fire until they are hard; wrap up in newspaper, and first bang then roll the parcel until it is a parcel of crumbs.
(3) If you have a grater, you can grate a chunk of bread to make soft crumbs; but these are no good for frying.
(4) Get some housewife who hates to waste crusts to give you some of her crumbs.

The recipes here are more ambitious than heating canned soup, but still are campfire cooking; really, all that can be done in this setup. And as former chef and London resident J. remarked, not only are the dishes pathetic, but many are the kind of thing a corner shop would sell, ready-made.

The author does, however, offer wisdom beyond simplified recipes and single-pot cooking.

Ms. Whitehorn's guidance about coping with one-room life includes preparing and cooking for categories of visitors, from

Your parents, or your parents' spies — who are there to reassure themselves that you are eating adequately, get to bed early, know no vicious young men, and breathe plenty of clean fresh air.

...to, "Delicious little parties à deux."

That last includes separate sections, on "COOKING FOR A MAN" vs."COOKING FOR A GIRL", and:

ASKING HIM UP
...If you are not sure of the state of the room, don't ask him in. Many is the young man I have horrified by saying, 'Oh, do come in, I'll have it all cleared up in a minute,' picking the dirty clothes out of the fender as I spoke...

Do not, whatever you do, tell him the truth and say: 'You can't come up, because I haven't made the bed.'

ASKING HER UP
...If you have a set of rough and ready house rules designed to protect the amorous from casual interruptions, DON'T put these precautions into effect unless you really mean business. Nothing causes the timid fawn to shy away faster than the feeling that the rest of the house knows what she is in for (especially if she hopes she isn't). A towel hung over the outside door handle may lose you game, set, and match.

Ms. Whitehorn offers an Epilogue, where she suggests there may be one person in Britain

... who has wholly solved the problem of eating well in a bedsitter. When I went to visit him, a compound smell of celery, garlic, and freshly ground coffee - the essential smell of a French kitchen - met me faintly as I climbed the stairs. There was a sound of steak-bashing from within, and when I knocked on the outside of his door, a bag of vegetables fell heavily to the ground on the inside.

That last touch seems a bit much, and other details about "Marcus" and his room are laid on thickly:

... On every wall there were hooks from which hung knives and saucepans, and a string of onions, and another of garlic, a salad-shaker and a grater, and two kinds of egg whisk, and a bunch of bay leaves. The only picture was a Victorian still life in oils, showing a brace of freshly killed pheasant with some vegetables. There was a beer barrel in one corner, with an old slipper under the to catch the drips; and in another some curd cheese draining into a small shaving bowl through a sock. The open wardrobe door revealed, beneath the somewhat agricuItural jackets and trousers, a box of earth in which some mushrooms were growing.

The backstory is that Marcus had been working as a chemist when he invented and patented just the thing for bedsitter occupants: a refrigerator that uses chemicals and needs no power source—

... a model of this now stood in the shadows near his wardrobe. The invention had sold, though not spectacularly; Marcus was now eating entirely on the profits, and had given up regular work altogether in favour of food.

When I asked him 'How do you manage to live so well in your bed-sitting-room room' he winced like a huntsman hearing a fox's brush called a tail.

'You mustn't think of it as a bed-sitting-room,' he said. 'I'm sleeping in the kitchen.'

Ms. Whitehorn is not advertised as a fiction writer. She is, however, married to one—who contributed the book's chapter on wine; could "Marcus" be an invention of one of the couple?

In any case, Marcus' story illustrates the most elaborate adaption to bedsitter conditions imaginable, and Ms. Whitehorn lays it all out in her jolly manner.

With her own bedsit days behind her, the author has (the front matter informs us) gone on to be jolly about a range of topics:

Katharine Whitehorn is now a columnist of the Observer, married and possessed of a perfectly respectable kitchen stove. Before that, however, she cooked on a variety of gas rings, primuses, and hotplates, while working as a publisher's reader, teacher, waitress, cook in a bowling-alley coffee shop, and journalist... Her other books include Whitehorn's Social Survival (1968), How to Survive in Hospital (1972) and How to Survive Children (1975). She is married to thriller-writer Gavin Lyall, with whom she lives in Hampstead, surrounded by guns, books and (too many) cats.

February - Card of the Month

Japanese post card, c. 1960s-1970s; captioned on reverse—

February - Picnic in Early Spring

In early spring, kindergartners enjoy spring sunshine under the plum trees in full blossom in the suburbs. Plum blossom symbolizing happy tidings of spring is one of the representative flowers of Japan, like cherry and chrysanthemum.

Never mind the month's beginning with that foot of snow, outside...

Today is also Lunar New Year (Rabbit),

On the traditional Asian calendar it's yet another marker of spring, hard to believe as that may be...

Not Likely to Melt Soon

Chinese post card, c. 1970s—

"Ice Sculpture" (no other detail)