cacoëthes

Today's craving: Bread

The "what does she want to eat today" question seems to be getting answered in a more sporadic fashion than was first suggested, and while on the one hand it may seem to be a subject that isn't terribly interesting to anyone who isn't me, it is also something of a window into what is and isn't available here, what's different, and what's better. (Dairy, as an example, is far and away better than anything I've ever gotten at home: as mentioned previously, the raw milk here blows away the milk in the States, and the egg I just ate had a yolk the color of the inside of a Butterfinger bar.)

Unfortunately, today's craving illustrates something that I find to be supremely lacking here, that being bread. At first it amazed me that this was the case; there is SO MUCH bread eaten here that I initially would have guessed that the bread quality would outstrip that which I found anywhere else. It's a common accessory to practically every meal, either as an actual part of the dish or just a basket of bread slices on the table to accompany the food. Mămăligă is the Romanian answer to polenta, which is already bursting with carbs, and I've watched people eat just mămăligă and bread for an entire meal.
I then came to realise that my reasoning was leading me to the polar opposite explanation from what actually seems to be the case (not unlike my initial assumptions regarding the widespread use of manual transmissions). The more accurate conclusion seeming to be that precisely because so much bread is eaten, that it's likely people just can't be bothered to put much effort into the making of it. When a family can go through a few loaves a day, it really cuts down on effort to bake the simplest bread possible, or just buy something basic from the magazin down the road that can be assured to go with everything.

Bread used to be one of my favourite foods--good bread, that is. I've always been something of a carb addict, and perhaps this is what's prompting this craving right now, the fact that I've been trying to pay more attention to what I'm eating and as such am making a conscious effort to eliminate any manner of starchy, carby material from my diet (carbs still seem to make up about half my caloric intake, though, through foods like yogurt and apples). But I've been missing bread ever since I got here. True, it can be found, but really just one kind of bread--pâine albă, or simple white bread, one step up from Wonder. No texture and less flavour, I can really only think of it as filler. Occasionally you can find pâine "neagră", or "black bread", which seems more akin to rye, or pâine "graham", which is ostensibly wheat bread, but again, more closely resembles the stuff you find languishing in the bread aisle at Safeway.

So what I'm missing is the good, bakery shop, dare I say "artisanal" type breads. Crusty, springy, toothsome loaves with multiple grains, added herbs or cheese or vegetables. I used to be able to go through a pound of rosemary olive oil sourdough bread in a day, either freshly sliced by itself, or lightly toasted with a bit of good-quality butter. True whole grain breads with sprouted wheat and sunflower seeds baked into the dough, asiago cheese or sundried tomato and basil loaves, seasonal vegetable breads like pumpkin or zucchini. Ciabatta, focaccia, challah ... dare I even think about it ... sourdough. Breads made from every imaginable grain. The kind of bread that can easily be a meal in itself. The closest I've managed to find to this kind of bread in Romania was in the hotel we stayed in for IST, in Miercurea Ciuc. It's no wonder I came back from that training five kilos heavier.

On photography and the nature of memory

As mentioned earlier, I've just recently returned from Budapest. One of the things I'd intended to do but didn't, and one of the few things that I could have done unhampered by the restrictions that were imposed upon me as a result of the 1 May holiday, was photographing. However, I still managed to return with a woefully slim collection of images of this beautiful city inhabiting my memory card.

This isn't an entirely surprising development, I'm afraid. One would expect that someone who spent several years (and tens of thousands of dollars) studying photography at university would be going crazy in a place such as Budapest, where nearly everything is a photograph. Yet far from bemoaning not having purchased a second memory card, I found that I had to convince myself to even bring the camera along when I went out, walking and exploring and visiting neighbourhood cafés.
I actually felt a fair amount of guilt about this. I'd gone to the trouble and expense of researching and purchasing a good, small digital camera and large memory card before leaving, with the intention of coming home with scads and scads of photographs of all the places I'd been, things I'd seen, memorable images of things I'd done and people I'd met. Yet more often than not I found that the idea of pulling the camera out felt tedious, like something that I was obligated to do instead of something I really wanted to do. Someone in my position is supposed to be taking pictures of everything, documenting and remembering this amazing, singular experience, having something to look at that brings those experiences alive years after they've ended, giving others a glimpse into a world they may never inhabit.

In recent years, though, I've been feeling that the act of photographing is quite the opposite of this. I've found that I have less and less interest in carrying a camera with me when I travel, few occasions that feel worth recording images of. I'm not entirely certain why this is, but I have a few theories. One seems right in line with an idea expressed by Neal Stephenson in his essay on operating systems: that the rise in technology is having a strong effect on the way people interact with their environments. The proliferation of cheap photo and video cameras that can record excellent-quality images means that more and more people are choosing to mediate their interaction with the world around them through these pieces of technology. Seeing their vacation through the lens of a recording device, instead of their eyes. Pursuing activities not purely for the enjoyment value, but what quality of image they will create. In short, focusing as much (and sometimes more) on preserving the activity for posterity rather than enjoying the moment.
Which segues neatly into the "tourist experience" that I so abhor. I remember becoming consciously aware of this when I was travelling on a road trip with a friend a couple of summers ago. We were in the Porcupine Mountains of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and as we drove about we visited various sites of interest along the way, along with many other summer vacationers. I hadn't brought a camera; he had, but had probably taken all of a dozen photographs over the course of the trip. This was in stark contrast to other travellers I saw, who seemed to be living their vacations through their cameras. Whereas he and I would walk down a set of 100 or so steps to a point where we could get a good view of a waterfall, and upon arrival would spend several minutes contemplating the scene in silence, during this time we'd have several relays of small knots of people who would approach, snap a couple of photos, and then turn around and go back. They didn't seem to be enjoying what they were seeing, weren't stopping to take it all in and make it part of their experience, but simply snapping a picture as a sort of documentation that they'd been there and seen that, something to take home and show neighbours and co-workers to prove that they'd had a good time on their trip. I get the impression when I see these people that the trip itself holds less importance for them than the artifacts of the trip; that their travel isn't to take a few days, or a week or two, to immerse themselves in a place or a culture, but to "do" someplace, and be able to talk about it afterward.

There is also a component of photographic snobbery involved, I'm afraid (elitism? me? who would have guessed). I've never much seen the point of just snapping a photo of a structure or a place or a landscape, as a documentation or record of its existence. The majority of touristy locations have been photographed thousands of times, and by much more talented people, than the average lens warrior, and if all you want is a photo of Parliament or the pyramids, buy a postcard or a travel book that's got a well-made image in it instead of just pausing for five seconds in your travels to take "your" picture of said location. The same for the photo albums that are filled with images of random people, standing in front of magnificent works of nature, art or architecture. "Look! That's me standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe on our trip to Paris last year!" ... as though the Arc will benefit visually from having a sunblock-drenched, fanny-pack-wearing tourist standing in front of it. As though friends and relatives really want to see photo after photo containing the person sitting next to them, who they see on a regular basis, superimposed over Angkor Wat and a sweeping view of the Venetian sunset. Are the people in the pictures afraid that someone will forget what they look like if they're not in every scene, or not believe that they were actually there unless their image commingles with the landscape?
Perhaps this is a manifestation of my malefic feelings toward large swaths of humanity, but it seems incredibly narcissistic to place oneself in the center of such an image, to make the human the focal point of a beautiful or historic scene, so that ever afterward anyone who looks at that image will see the person as the primary and everything else as the secondary. Maybe it's just a way to try to impose importance, or conquer the fleeting nature of life, to take something magnificent and place it in a supplementary position to oneself. Or perhaps I'm just overthinking this particular plate of beans. Suffice it to say, I have no love for either of these types of photographs.
When I take pictures, it's an activity that absorbs the majority of my focus. I need to be looking at everything actively, seeing the objects and the details, visualising possible angles, imagining what it would look like with a different light or from a different vantage point. I need to plan to be in certain areas at certain times of day so that the light is correct, or walk around for five minutes to find the right angle for a large landscape shot. I can't just whip out my camera and snap a photo, and then move on. Taking this into consideration, photographing becomes almost like work ... which is fine if you're really wanting to do it at the time, but not so good if you don't. And for several reasons, lately I just haven't had the desire. I prefer to go in for the experience, to enjoy walking around, looking at things, going where the whim takes me and seeing what I find, immersing myself in the place I'm in instead of pursuing routes and looking at things with an eye to what sort of image they'll create.

I also abhor being the "person walking around taking snapshots". Call it another manifestation of elitism, but I like being able to adapt to the rhythm and feel of a place I visit, to get a sense of a place through seeing the way the people who live their prosecute their daily lives. I was ecstatic when an old woman in a supermarket in Budapest started a conversation with me, assuming I was Hungarian. I feel that this is a fuller way to experience the place that I'm in, and there's no faster way to shut that down that to be walking around with a travel guide and a camera, holding up foot traffic as you stop dead on the sidewalk to crane your neck upwards or snap a picture of the building across the street. I've been noticing this much more of late, as I've traded the superior quality of my SLR, film cameras and large-format rigs for a handheld digital--previously, I could walk around with my "serious" gear and get taken as a "photographer" when I did my little touristy thing; now there's no escaping the stamp of outsider when my little Canon digital with the viewscreen pops out and, instead of meticulously lining up a shot through the viewfinder, hold the camera out a foot in front of my face and look at the digital representation of the scene.

Perhaps most significantly, I don't often just sit and review my collection of photographs, of people or travel or good times or whatever. The images I forced myself to record on my road trip back from Arizona, because I had this new camera and I should be using it, because there were so many beautiful scenes passing before my eyes and it would be criminal not to photograph them, I'd want to be able to revisit that view in the future now sit, for the most part unaccessed, on my hard drive. All that stopping on my drives, spending my time looking for a good spot to get a nice view, thinking about the potential photograph instead of drinking in the things I was seeing and enjoying the experience of driving these quiet, winding back roads, to have a collection of pictures I don't have much occasion or desire to look at. And if the purpose of a photograph is to be looked at, and mine aren't, then from the pragmatic point of view it just seems a waste to spend the time and energy creating them.

Lastly, it's a question of the nature of memory and experience. Clearly, once a trip is over the only part of it that remains with us is the memories. I once saw photographs as a way to hold on to those memories, to commit them to paper and make them a part of the real world; to give them permanence. Recently, though, I've come to see them as the opposite--namely, something that bleeds the life from those memories, and makes them obsolete. I've looked at photographs of past trips and events, and I don't remember the experiences, just the frozen moment trapped within the image. The photographs themselves hinder remembrance, as they're an easy replacement for memory: the experiential equivalent of Cliff's notes. Trips I took to, say New Orleans, which have piles of photographs trailing behind them, aren't really remembered anymore; the images are looked at as a documentation of that time, but have made the recollection unnecessary. Whereas the road trip mentioned earlier lives in my memory; scenes, conversations, stretches of time, entire gestalts where I can recall the feel of the steering wheel under my hands, hear the song playing, feel the wind through the window and the sunlight on my arm and my companion next to me. I don't feel robbed of those memories because I don't have photographs that represent them; I feel that they're amplified through being revisited in my mind, instead of just looked at.