Sky Full of Bacon


Thanks For the Linkeries

Big big thanks to Monica Eng for a really nice link to the latest podcast at The Trib-Stew. (She links to the similar story of hers which I’ve recommended a couple of times by now.) Scroll directly below to find part 2 for yourself.

Also to Vital Info, who reminds me that I never got around to thanking MenuPages for the comments on Part 1.

Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with the podcast, but I really love those things people do where they roam around some spooky abandoned building taking pictures of its state of decay. Here’s a great one I discovered via Chicagoist, about a power plant in Dixmoor, IL (no, not nuclear) that seems to have been abandoned like the Marie Celeste.

UPDATE: Thanks to Gaper’s Block and Chicagoist and Helen at Menu Pages whose reference to lion and bear meat apparently led to a nationwide mention on the Menu Pages Blogpire. Matth, who’s posted a couple of comments, posted a longer take well worth reading on his blog here.

UPDATE 2: And Serious Eats has linked to it here with thoughts of their own. Thanks!

Helen made bemused mention of my arty switch to black and white at a couple of points. I’ve used this a few times now because to me, switching to black and white sort of steps out of the flow of the story, as it’s being told in the immediacy of realistic color, and says… “here’s what we thought when we had time to contemplate it a little more.” It seems to work well to mark the line between the hurry of making food on a schedule, and the thoughtfulness of talking after the fact.

That said… like more “artistic” decisions than we realize, I suspect, it was initially rooted in a “salvage something that didn’t work so well” moment. My interviews with Kelly Cheng at Sun Wah for podcast #2 just came out looking lousy; the fluorescent light was sort of greenish and the stretch of wall behind her was just kind of dingy and plain. So I tried different things to improve it and it turned out that simply making it black and white suddenly made the dingy, bumpy wall seem like it was full of character. It’s worked for me ever since….

UPDATE 3: In a perfect illustration of the point about how sheltered we all are from the reality of meat processing, The Huffington Post is ragging on Sarah Palin for being filmed in front of the “gruesomeness” of a turkey slaughter. Because, to borrow a phrase from Full Metal Jacket, if you eat a nice fat juicy turkey this holiday season, God miracled its ass into your oven. There’s no bigger hypocrite than someone from the city slagging rural folks about the reality they help shelter us from while keeping us well fed. (No, this should not be construed as a political comment for or against anybody. It’s a political comment for honesty about the food we eat.)

UPDATE 4: Thanks to ex-Readerites Nicholas Day at Chow (there was one about part 2 as well, which is proving impossible to find), and Martha Bayne at her blog.  And when I looked at the referrers on the Vimeo page, a bunch of them seem to have come from a post at NDNation.com, which turns out to be… a Notre Dame chat site.  I can’t access the post so I have no idea why my videos have turned up there, but thanks anyway, from a descendant of the Fightin’ Irish (my grandfather, no joke, played for Knute Rockne, and my dad went there to play football too till he messed up his knees).

There are also some great comments you should read, mainly in the announcement post for part 2 (be sure to read Jon in Albany’s) but also a new one in this old post.

If you like this post and would like to receive updates from this blog, please subscribe our feed. Subscribe via RSS

Comments are closed.