The Food Network and other outlets churn out insufferable amounts of coverage devoted to barbecue in Texas, North Carolina, and Kansas City. With good reason, admittedly. Like anything, there are places where people simply do things right. And those locales should be celebrated and honored.
But by falling back on these old faithful locations time and time again (I mean, do we really need another peek at the Salt Lick in Austin, no matter how great the place is?), we miss the opportunity to explore lesser-known, but equally vibrant cultures of cooking.
For me, that oversight was rectified this past weekend when I was finally able to do a bit of exploring of my old stomping grounds, using Wes Berry’s excellent The Kentucky Barbecue Book. The end result was 4 barbecue joints in less than 48 hours and a great excuse to get off the highway and explore something more unique than just the fast food dumps that litter the exits.
An Associate Professor at Western Kentucky University, Berry wanted to document the barbecue customs and, more importantly, the people who dedicate their lives to it, from his home state. Along the way, he uncovered highly unique and diverse ways of treating barbecue that varied from, literally, county to county. What he calls “micro-regional” cuisine changes from Hopkinsville to Madisonville. And while the big time TV shows and annual New York Times roundups stick with only the most prominent representations of the genre, Berry goes deeper to show how two towns, just separated by a few miles, might go about things completely differently.
Imagine that we’re looking at some pizza show on the Travel Channel. They say, “Chicago is known for deep dish pies,” and then they move on to discussing the thin stuff from the Big Apple. That’s about it.
If Berry were in charge of this production, he’d say, “Chicago is known for deep dish pies. And if you’re on Michigan Avenue, that means a tomato sauce, but a quick cab ride over to Oak Park, then it’s going to be a white sauce. Five miles down into Cicero, you’re going to have spinach on there…” And so forth. This is deeply specific food writing. Just look at Berry’s treatment of mutton.
“This is why I’m fond of mutton, as smoky, tender mutton marries well with the tangy black dip sauces you’ll find at the four Owensboro barbecue places and at western Kentucky Catholic church picnics,” Berry writes. “There’s nothing else like this flavor in the barbecue kingdom, and it’s rare to find outside a few counties in western Kentucky… Mutton is usually basted while smoking over hickory coals and served with a savory Worchestershire sauce-based dip, a think, black potion that also contains vinegar and spices like black pepper and allspice.”
As specific as The Kentucky Barbecue Book is, what prevents it from descending into ultra-niche market territory is Berry’s ability to recount stories about the food and the pit masters encountered along his travels. In many cases, Berry even managed to finagle some recipes out of these experts so you can follow along in your home kitchen. So even if you’re not planning a visit to the Bluegrass State anytime soon, the book is still well-worth a read. Part travelogue, part cookbook, part cultural exploration, Wes Berry’s The Kentucky Barbecue Book is like a great meal: it combines just the right amount of spices, along some sweet and a good smoke.
Add another hard rock memoir to the constantly bulging list of headbanging books…
But in this case, there’s definitely a different story to be told, beyond just the usual “banging chicks, doing drugs” story.
Publisher’s Marketplace is reporting that Randy Blythe, lead singer of Lamb of God, has signed a book deal with Ben Schafer at Da Capo. Blythe was incarcerated for slightly more than 1 month (and tied up in criminal wranglings for almost a year) after a fan in the Czech Republic was killed in Prague.
Blythe stood trial and was acquitted, but the legal turmoil took a heavy toll on the band. Drummer Chris Adler recently told The Virginian-Pilot that the court case bankrupted the band.
Expected to be on bookstore shelves in the spring of 2014, Blythe’s memoir will certainly stand out from the rest of the heavy metal bookshelf.
Tim O’Brien has been named the 2013 winner of the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The honor comes with a $100,000 honorarium. O’Brien is the first fiction writer ever to win the award. Although all his books are great, he is, of course, most well known for The Things They Carried.
Super nice guy, fantastic writer… Congratulations on a well-deserved honor.
For more details, check out the full announcement.
Finances are rarely as they seem.
The sports media blasts $100 million dollar deal headlines on an almost daily basis. But it’s only been in recent years that they began drawing the distinction between the guaranteed portions versus the purely imaginary Monopoly money the player will never actually receive. While basketball and baseball contracts are locked in, football contracts can be broken at any time by the team.
The entertainment media reports huge recording contracts, without referencing that the deal also covers merchandising and tour support. A band might “receive” a certain amount of cash in their agreement, but that pays for their studio time and tour bus rental, as opposed to pure profit.
Of course, lawyers, agents, assistants, and everyone else takes their cut as well.
As a result, we often assume that people have more money than they do. Just because TMZ and other outlets reported that Farrah Abraham “struck a deal” for almost a million dollars for fucking in a fake amateur sex tape doesn’t mean the Teen Mom star is depositing a check for exactly seven figures any time soon.
All of which is to say, I get it. You might seem like a big time player in a particular industry, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got piles of cash buried in the backyard, ready to be invested at a moment’s notice. Whatever your accomplishments may be, your bank account might not line up accordingly. Once again, I get it. But I’ll be goddamned if I can understand why we should subsidize a self-described successful Hollywood producer’s efforts to publish a book about becoming a successful screenwriter.
GalleyCat reported that Gary W. Goldstein, producer of Pretty Woman, The Mothman Prophecies, and other movies launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $12,000 to self-publish a book described as a “practical roadmap of every insider strategy I’ve learned on how to make it in Hollywood as a successful screenwriter.”
Let’s highlight the keywords and phrases in that description: “insider” and “make it” and “successful.”
In fact, the word “successful” is used about five times in the Kickstarter profile. Doesn’t this conjure images of someone who can make an investment in their own business and product? Maybe he’s not cruising a Bentley up and down the PCH on the way to his Malibu pad, but at least you’d think someone choosing to self-publish would, ya know, cough up the money to pay for self-publishing. I suppose you could argue that Goldstein’s fundraising effort is, on a small scale, precisely what a producer does: he seeks and puts together money from a variety of sources. Leveraging other people’s cash is old hat to Hollywood folks (and Wall Street) so maybe that’s what’s going on here.
Goldstein’s IMDB profile doesn’t show any projects since 2002 so maybe he’s hit a dry spell. Which doesn’t necessarily negate his knowledge and expertise on the subject. We’ve all gone through fallow periods or maybe changed careers and direction.
But the whole online fundraising thing is simply out of hand. No longer relegated to truly indie projects, charitable efforts, low budget start ups, and outrageous, outlandish flights of fancy, now Kickstarter and Indiegogo are employed to make a success of how-to-be-successful book from a success guru?
