Reconstituted like a Turkey Twizzler - the philosophy of generation X
Generation X are those men and women who hide amongst the good people of the 35 to 45 age bracket. They are located right at the rotting end of Thatcherism. They are John Major's children and adopted social Darwinism and the new materialism as their philosophy. To them, not only was greed good, but greed in its component parts was good. They plagiarised madly and shallowly.
You can't pilfer in Generation X world. The world of the DJ. Intellectual property is a joke unless it's reconstituted. I was disgusted by it's exponents. The DJs the re mixers. It shows how toxic trickle down philosophy can be when even the wide boys and girls didn't have to finds arguments against thieving other people's music and remixing it. And now intellectual property theft is mainstream. I wonder if John Berger would sanction it? I doubt he would.
Give me Julie Birchill any day. Now she was my generation.People like Emin, lead Generation X. They worked in a knacker's yard of culture. They were contestants in scrap heap challenge they were bodgers and that seemed clever at the time.
* * *
Cheesecake philosophy
So, let's say you have an 'idea' for the perfect cheesecake. Here we have a serious problem. Your idea of something depends on your lived experience of it. In the sensory realm it is hard to imagine the taste of things without having truly experienced them first. This is why the problem of authenticity is a real problem and philistine British chefs feels threatened by it.
Diana Kennedy, for example, could probably do a good job of describing the soul of a flauta. A Texan cook out champion could describe the soul of Chile con Carne.
But can you describe the soul of a cheesecake. Well if you can't this could be for several reasons perhaps. Poverty of experience, poverty of the imagination. a lack of respect for the dish.
In my view a lot of writing on food as a whole in places like the Observer reads like it's written by the generation I most despise. Generation X. Generation X was a sour, bitter, limited unaccountably self regarding and philistine generation.
In fact they just swallowed the reigning philosophy of their youth: Postmodernism.
This is why 'authenticity' is something they despise. But truly, who wants to eat 'postmodernist' food. Not me. It doesn't sound delicious and even when it is delicious after you've eaten it you don't think of it as a cultural experience but as a deconstruction of cultural experience.
This is why Masterchef has 40 somethings cooking deconstructed dishes. To hell with deconstructed dishes. Give me a constructed one, not food that makes me snigger.And just a little note. The mature cheddar and whisky jelly cheesecake is the reason why Tim should not have won Masterchef. There is a difference between creation and re-concoction.
Will British cooking ever recover from the influence of the catering colleges that produced cooks like Jaimie Oliver. Almost all the main British chefs are vacuous philistines. Worst of all if they were influenced by post modernism they didn't even know they were. At least cooks on the continent know what they are doing. They are aware of the philosophical and artistic implications of what they do. They don't just follow in the wake of culture.
So much of what is written about food in Britain can't take itself seriously. It sniggers. People eating their dinner in the toilet in a Bunel film. Or else, like Gekko, they vaunt greed. Or else it there is an article, poe-faced with a Jewel like tear running down it's beautiful child's eye, about the poor people of Bangladesh. Whose thinking of them? Again we served up half understood useless emoting, with an analysis that stops short.
Reconstituted like a Turkey Twizzler - the philosophy of generation X
Generation X are those men and women who hide amongst the good people of the 35 to 45 age bracket. They are located right at the rotting end of Thatcherism. They are John Major's children and adopted social Darwinism and the new materialism as their philosophy. To them, not only was greed good, but greed in its component parts was good. They plagiarised madly and shallowly.
You can't pilfer in Generation X world. The world of the DJ. Intellectual property is a joke unless it's reconstituted. I was disgusted by it's exponents. The DJs the re mixers. It shows how toxic trickle down philosophy can be when even the wide boys and girls didn't have to finds arguments against thieving other people's music and remixing it. And now intellectual property theft is mainstream. I wonder if John Berger would sanction it? I doubt he would.
Give me Julie Birchill any day. Now she was my generation.People like Emin, lead Generation X. They worked in a knacker's yard of culture. They were contestants in scrap heap challenge they were bodgers and that seemed clever at the time.
So, let's say you have an 'idea' for the perfect cheesecake. Here we have a serious problem. Your idea of something depends on your lived experience of it. In the sensory realm it is hard to imagine the taste of things without having truly experienced them first. This is why the problem of authenticity is a real problem and philistine British chefs feels threatened by it.
Diana Kennedy, for example, could probably do a good job of describing the soul of a flauta. A Texan cook out champion could describe the soul of Chile con Carne.
But can you describe the soul of a cheesecake. Well if you can't this could be for several reasons perhaps. Poverty of experience, poverty of the imagination. a lack of respect for the dish.
In my view a lot of writing on food as a whole in places like the Observer reads like it's written by the generation I most despise. Generation X. Generation X was a sour, bitter, limited unaccountably self regarding and philistine generation.
In fact they just swallowed the reigning philosophy of their youth: Postmodernism.
This is why 'authenticity' is something they despise. But truly, who wants to eat 'postmodernist' food. Not me. It doesn't sound delicious and even when it is delicious after you've eaten it you don't think of it as a cultural experience but as a deconstruction of cultural experience.
This is why Masterchef has 40 somethings cooking deconstructed dishes. To hell with deconstructed dishes. Give me a constructed one, not food that makes me snigger.And just a little note. The mature cheddar and whisky jelly cheesecake is the reason why Tim should not have won Masterchef. There is a difference between creation and re-concoction.
Will British cooking ever recover from the influence of the catering colleges that produced cooks like Jaimie Oliver. Almost all the main British chefs are vacuous philistines. Worst of all if they were influenced by post modernism they didn't even know they were. At least cooks on the continent know what they are doing. They are aware of the philosophical and artistic implications of what they do. They don't just follow in the wake of culture.
So much of what is written about food in Britain can't take itself seriously. It sniggers. People eating their dinner in the toilet in a Bunel film. Or else, like Gekko, they vaunt greed. Or else it there is an article, poe-faced with a Jewel like tear running down it's beautiful child's eye, about the poor people of Bangladesh. Whose thinking of them? Again we served up half understood useless emoting, with an analysis that stops short.