Given an earlier post on foodways and street culture, and an interest in reviewing cookbooks, the subject of this post should come as little surprise. At the onset of this blog, I mentioned how coverage of street culture – especially how it was handled through the lens of streetwear – often avoided certain components of culture. King Adz’s The Urban Cookbook challenges this thought, if only in the fact that it exists as published volume.

The concept is simple enough. Adz visits five major cities (New York, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London), interviews local “street culture” legends (25 of them), runs down the scene, and designates a recipes indicative of the place (50 of these). In the abstract, the idea is a strong one. In reality, the subjectivity of choice hampers the potential.

Let’s begin by outlining one of the chapters, for the sake of ease chapter 1 “New York.”  The chapter begins with an outline of hip-hop history and falls into a brief description of two neighborhoods – the Lower East Side and Coney Island. These are “real” places, agreed, but snippets of New York. Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx, for example retains a “real” sense of identity unhindered by gentrification. Yet, it is left out in favor of more street trendy tourist destinations. The choice of interviewees does generate a good cross section of those that contribute to New York’s urban culture. There’s Boogie, the Serbian-born photographer, Rodney Smith of Shut skateboards, and Marc and Sarah of Wooster Collective. Add a toy designer (Tristan Eaton) and graphic designer (Jon Setzen) and a set of strong voices emerge. Adz also contributes a quick guide to shops and cafes, which includes many of the usual suspects (aNYthing, Frank’s Chop Shop, Shake Shack, etc).

The scene is well set, and the interest in a specific vision of the city built. On to the food, and things get slightly muddled. A steak recipe (included because Yanks love steak) comes from a South African uncle. Two pasta based recipes are more gangster oriented than indicative of creative food finds. Chili con Carne, while American, doesn’t scream New York. If chapter 1 is a snap shot of the book (it is), then you’ll understand where subjectivity comes into play. There’s both a severe limitation to the travel guide element of the book and a laissez faire attitude to finding truly unique born and bred in NY recipes.

On food, Adz composes a rather strict definition of street food.

“Street food is anything that is cooked on BBQs, grills or braais, in cafes, diners, snack bars, chippies, takeaway, boots, cabins and food vans, and it has to be good, ethnically diverse and fresh, not ‘fast’ or ‘junk.’”

In short, not haute cuisine. And, the definition works. It speaks to vernacular cooking, styles and flavors built from the intermingling of culture allowed to blossom in the urban environment. Adz himself knows food. He trained, for a short period, as a chef, and this promotes some credibility. However, as noted above, his passion for food does not seem to extend to diving too deeply into a given places food history. As a foodways story, The Urban Cook Book fails.

As an indicator of the variety and depth of urban culture though it succeeds. The book really is comprised of three parts – the introduction to each city, the interviews, and the recipes. Reading the interviews (the strongest portion) one does get a more nuanced view of urban culture. The introductions expose a simplistic (or, more fairly, narrow) view of each city. And finally, the recipes express an interest in street food without an interest in true adventure within food.

The strength of Adz book, and what makes it worthwhile, is that he does succeed in bringing food into the “street culture” conversation. Unfortunately, for those of us with a strong interest in the subject, developing a true understanding of the workings of multi-ethnic urban space through the food is stifled.

Adz presents a view. It’s firm. And, it’s concise. The effort deserves some applauding. But, it also generates questions as to why certain things have been omitted and why a man so obviously talented and intrigued would happily perpetuate limited notions of urban life which are primarily driven by hip-hop eyes and cool guy aspirations.

As discussed before, foodways are a vital component to the make up of a specific culture or community. The exploration of food, at a very surface level, has become rather popular, notably through FOOD NETWORK. Several of the shows are, to be honest, dull and traditional in their intent and outlook. However, there are programs like Alton Brown’s Feasting on Asphault that do a tremedous job of exploring history and culture through food.

You might consider Heston Blumenthal Brown’s UK counterpart. Except, Blumenthal takes Brown’s interest in the science and history of food and in the words of Emeril (or now Martha Stewart after the buy out???) “kicks it up a notch.” More bluntly, Blumenthal’s approach is even more methodical, and his search for perfection more obsessive. His restaurant, The Fat Duck, was Michelin’s 2001 Restaurant of the Year, a testiment to his approach.

In Search of Perfection, the companion to Blumethal’s BBC series, finds the chef exploring the ins and outs of eight of Britain’s favorite dishes. Selected on the basis of the respective popularity and the strength of memories and associations generated by each meal, these are simply dishes any cook should know how to prepare. Roast chicken, steak, mashed potatoes. Simple foods that speak to tradition, family and comfort.

For each dish, Blumenthal investigates the origins and development of the key ingredients. The food the animals eat. The people that correctly butcher them. The chefs obsessesed with aging each cut to perfection. He travels to France to eat chickens, and eats steak in a NYC strip club (so awesome). These individual quests are coupled with accounts of experimentation with ingredients. What potato roasts best, for example, and why. The history and the science of food meld in easy prose.

Blumenthal doesn’t have the same flair for language or description as Anthony Bourdain, yet his conversational tone and passion for the subject keep the chapters humming along. In fact, it is possible to simply forget that the tome is, after all, a cookbook, and get lost in Heston’s search and the people and places he visits.

The journey brings the mundane of the chosen recipes to life. Puts a little adventure in the everyday, and reminds why special meals are not only simple, but full of exciting historical intrigue as well. Blumenthal manages to turn the cookbook into a tidy introduction to foodways.

Waksman’s book addresses the qualities that make the electric guitar important as a transformative object, propelling the musician towards cultural icon status. Interested in issues of technology, race, masculinity, and inherent politics attached to shifting sounds, the book covers the course of the electric guitar’s history. Throughout the instruments history, there is a continual challenge to the idea of what sounds, and noises, are appropriate. 

Waksman traces the history through key figures. He starts with Charlie Christian, whose story brings the guitar through its emergence in swing to a claiming distinct voice within Be Bop. Via Les Paul electronic devices expand and transform the sound potential of the electric guitar. With Mary Ford, Paul domesticated the guitar and made the instrument a central force in pop music. Waksman assesses the importance of playing techniques to the formulation of distinct styles by describing Chet Atkins and the Nashville sound. Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix allow Waksman to review the trajectory of black musicians who incorporate the electric guitar to reform both the music and its performance. Pointing to the guitar battles waged in Chicago clubs (interesting connection to hip-hop here) Waksman establishes the ways the electric guitar aided in flashy, unorthodox routine. Chuck Berry illustrates how the shifting nature of the electric guitar in African-American music crossed over, and became a lead voice in popular music. Waksman considers Hendrix primarily as a representation of blackness – the guitar becoming an extension of the body and driving issues of black masculinity.

Through the electric manipulation of sound MC5 appropriated and reformed aspects of black music and masculinity to rebel against the constraints of the white middle class. From a sonic standpoint Led Zeppelin synthesized sounds from a variety of sources (African American, Indian, Celtic, etc.) balanced with the “technophallus” style of play. 

With these key figures (and bands), Waksman views the electric guitar as an instrument of transformative qualities. Instruments of Desire addresses the social, cultural, political, and technological connections to the sonic space inhabited by the guitar in the hands of musicians of different time, place and genre.

For our purposes, the book superbly contextualizes the guitar in broad historical scope. Understanding contemporary music requires a critical assessment of how it became what it is, and through Waksman a thread in that story is both uncovered and well connected. In his conclusion, Waksman questions the future of the guitar as a radical force in the wake of expanded electronic music production divorced from the instrument. As such, the growth, development and life of the guitar can also help to relay questions that ground our discussions of culture in general.   

 

Employing a series of potent anecdotes, Phil Thornton’s Casuals documents the origins and progression of casual culture in the UK from the 1970s on. Outside the of the fashion industry, away from the self-appointed cognoscenti, “casuals” formulated their own styles, promoting a shared identity and building a unique set of standards. From Liverpool to London, and points in between, the development of this fashion driven subculture was spurred by Football related travel, creating an intriguing dyad between mainstream and underground.

The strength of Thornton’s account comes in the power of the individual stories. Regardless of geographic area, a young man’s (or woman’s) transition into the “casual culture” relayed a point of discovery, and the slow accumulation of a critical visual vocabulary. Picking, and utilizing, discrete locations as entry points, Thorton seamlessly establishes how the “casual” movement spread and mutated over space and time. His ability to tie in surrounding culture (music especially) with the central phenomenon, football, contextualizes and grounds the story. Distinctions of specific styles, often geographically based, emphasize the nuances of casual and  prove the depth  and complexity of the movement.

Less useful are the “casual bits and pieces” that end the book. The lists are overly subjective, and have a tinge of generational bias. In part, this final addition undermines the notion of development so central to the rise of the culture. From a story that benefits so much from multiple voices, the lists close down and dilute an implicit point of the book, that casual is not a static culture. However, as a quick index to the names of prominent brands and key styles, the section has merit as a reference point. It is also good for a laugh.

Casuals should be viewed as an account of one of contemporary streetwear’s antecedents. A culture defined by informed consumption and influenced by a myriad of subculture arts movements. Thornton’s book is an important jumping off point for understanding how our current culture has blossomed. Sure, the circumstances are different in some cases, but the nature of the progression, the learning and the connoisseurship has clear correlation.