I’ve made pork tenderloin before many times, but it was always hard to tell when it got done, and whether it would be juicy or a log of shoe leather by the end. I also could never seem to get a nice crust on the outside. So finally I decided to get down to learning how to do it right. The recipe I used tonight came from Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, which is a sizable compendium of classic French recipes generously annotated by both Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The recipe is simply called Sautéed Pork Filet or Tenderloin. It was pretty standard, following your classic “sear, bake, and make sauce” procedure. However this time around I made sure to follow the recipe to the letter. And when I deviated, I noted what went differently, why, and how I fixed it. As a result I think tonight’s pork tenderloin was the best I’ve ever made.

I learned a bunch of things in the process, so I shall write them down here in case you too might find them useful. What follows is my version of the recipe, adopted from and even more thoroughly annotated than J&J’s version (if such a thing were possible).

Tina’s Julia & Jacques’ Pork Tenderloin

Ingredients
1 small pork tenderloin (about 1 lb.)
10 apricots
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tbsp minced shallots
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/3 cup beef broth
1/2 tbsp jam (such as black currant, plum, or, in my case, lingonberry)
1/2 tbsp ketchup
fresh parsley or basil for garnish

Method

1. Cut the pork tenderloin into 4 equal-sized chunks and salt/pepper it.
   Jacques says to angle the knife differently each time so you end up more with a series of tetrahedral hunks about 2″ thick at the center, than with round discs. At first I did not know what difference this made, but I realized that this helps you actually brown the entire exterior of the meat, instead of ending up with just the top and bottom browned (as would be the case for a disc-shaped piece).
2. Preheat oven to 350˚ F. Heat vegetable oil in pan on high heat.
   Here is where I began to deviate from the original recipe. First, J&J say to set the oven to 200˚. The oven is for gently roasting the pork after you sear it quickly in the pan, so the inside cooks up all juicy and tender. I found that 200˚ was too low, but this may also be my oven being an old batty apartment oven. Let’s just say you, too, have an old batty apartment oven. Go with 350, otherwise your pork will never be cooked to an edible state in time and you will end up with cold sauce in the pan waiting for it. Secondly, I accidentally used olive oil (reflex…), which was dumb. Olive oil has a low smoke point and it isn’t suitable for high-heat activities like searing… let’s just say our kitchen had an interesting haze for much of the evening. You should definitely use a vegetable oil such as canola. Thirdly, medium-high heat to me is a 7 out of 10 on my electric coil-style stove on the largest burner (8″ diameter). The different burner sizes vary significantly in heat output, so I would say, be sure to save the big burner for this step. Finally, use a non-nonstick pan because I find that nonstick pans just don’t heat up well enough. Also, you’ll never be able to deglaze it without also ripping off all the nonstick coating. I used my 9″ Cuisinart stainless steel frying pan for this.
3. Sear the meat for 5 minutes total, turning throughout.
   First step to happy searing is to really heat the oil up real hot. Heat it until it gets that ripply look on the surface. This is where I often trip up because I’m impatient and the electric coils heat up super slow (I’m a gas stove kind of Tina, alas.) Then when the oil is hot, put the meat in the pan. It should hiss mightily at you. If not take the meat out and keep heating the oil, then try again. When searing, make sure your pan is big enough for at least 1″ of clearance around each chunk or else you will get steaming action and not frying. If there isn’t enough clearance, do 2 batches. One area which I personally have a lot of trouble with is knowing when to flip. I discovered that 2 minutes on aforementioned 7/10 heat is enough to get a perfect golden brown crust on the first side, but the first side only. And no peeking. Afterwards, I begin to turn the chunks every 1 minute or it starts to burn. After 5 minutes and 3 or 4 turns you should have all sides cooked to a crusty, even, golden hue. If not, you will know next time whether you should adjust the heat on your stove up or down.
4. Lower heat to medium. Put the meat in an oven-proof dish and pop it in the hot oven.
   This is to finish cooking the insides, which right now is straight-up raw. At this point, set the mental timer for 10 minutes exactly. At 10 minutes, open the oven and poke the meat. If it feels completely squishy still, give it another 5. Meat should still yield a bit to the poke when you take it out. This will result in medium to medium-rare meat. (I did extensive research, a.k.a. reading the first 10 links in Google, on whether rare pork is OK. The consensus is that nowadays, it is just as OK as rare beef, as food safety standards have improved drastically since the 60s when everyone was scared of trichanosis poisoning.) In any case, 10-15 minutes will result in meat that is still a little pink in the center, but really juicy and nothing like the awful leathery stuff you get when cooked to FDA specs of 155˚ internal temperature. Totally worth the sliver of a risk of dying, if you ask me.
5. Make the sauce: in the pan where you cooked the meat, add shallots and sauté for 30 sec. Add red-wine vinegar, stock, and port. Deglaze pan. Add apricots and reduce for 5 minutes on a gentle boil. Stir in jam and ketchup.
   This step is pretty self-explanatory. The jam essentially thickens the sauce into a beautiful glossy sheen, as Jacques explains in the sidebar. It’s a great trick. Look ma, no flour. Anyway, if you have everything already measured out, making the sauce will beat the roasting meat to the finish line. In which case you can turn off the heat, cover the sauce to keep it warm, and wait for the meat to finish. Use your newly emancipated attention to check up on the meat assiduously so it doesn’t get over-cooked.
6. Take meat out of the oven, arrange on plates, and pour the yummy leftover pork juices into the sauce. Stir, pour sauce over meat, and serve!
   

That’s it. It’s really quite easy once you figure out what your own oven/stove’s equivilant of high and medium heat are. So I guess it really comes down to practice. I’m happy to say next time I make this I’ll have this extremely verbose guide to refer to, and it just might come out as awesome as this time.

***

PS: Yang and I have decided I should publish a book called “Difficult, Unhealthy Dinners,” along the lines of this one. Because I champion fat-and-black-bits-laden foods the world over (hey, Julia says it’s totally OK in moderation) and I seem to have a knack for making easy recipes sound hard. But I think maybe we’ve got it backwards. Many recipes that claim to be easy are actually pretty hard to master. They only seem easy because they are written with an economy of words. You can only learn by doing, for instance, that your oven temperature will be way off and the supposedly “quick” recipe will take twice as long and can no longer be relied upon to produce what it claims to be perfect done-ness. So the purpose of this book would be to make easy recipes seem hard by making them super-long, but of course in doing so they will be easy again because you will be totally prepared when your oven is way off from what it’s “supposed’ to be. And of course all of the recipes will feature ample amounts of fats, sugars, and crunchy blackened crusts. Oh yes.

Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale video projections of everyday people onto monuments and other public edifices. These projections often portray these ordinary volunteers candidly telling stories of their lives and experiences, usually centered around painful ordeal or personal suffering. His work has been installed and shown in public spaces in over a dozen countries, ranging from the town squares of authoritarian governments to right here on our National Mall in D.C. Wodiczko also designs technological devices or machines worn on the body that help construct situations in which people can share their personal stories with others.

Nearly all of Wodiczko’s work follows a socio-political theme. For instance, in his monumental projections work, he chooses to film people whose lives have intersected with war, conflict, homelessness, social inequity, gang violence. In all these works, the melding of private and public spheres is immediately obvious.

Imagine the face of someone, who could be anyone, looking plainly out at you from the pinnacle of the Washington Monument at night. You can hear every tremor or modulation of his voice through amplified loudspeakers. It is surreal, otherworldly, and you cannot pull away. The video is simple and raw, as is the sound recording; the viewer is made immediately aware that this is not a film but a snapshot of someone’s personal reality, magnified and displayed. But the display does not feel invasive; it’s a willing participation. Watching these works, (and not to make light of them) you feel somewhat like you have been invited into the home of a minor diety to listen and to their tale and share in a common humanity.

Not all of Wodiczko’s work about personal storytelling involves monumental projections. The melding of public and private can happen on a more intimate scale. During his talk at the MFA, Wodiczko described a project he did where he equipped a young Japanese woman with a device that continuously filmed her eyes. This video stream was them fed to a LCD monitor worn behind her back. The woman, a volunteer, had experienced a personal tragedy when her father left the family and created a gaping wound in her life. In Japanese society, young people are often expected to hide and suppress their personal feelings, especially with regard to delicate family problems. Equipped with this machine, which allowed her to make eye contact without showing her face, she mustered up the courage to approach strangers and tell her difficult story. Wodiczko filmed the young woman approaching a trio of wealthy businessmen not unlike her ex-father, and she began her story with her back turned towards them so they could only see the video stream of her eyes. It was not long before their eyes clouded with tears in sympathy and sorrow for her. The story allowed her to both reach out and fulfill a personal emotional need, and, just as importantly, break through the culture of silence encouraged tacitly by her society and her peers.

There are several things that really impress me about Wodiczko’s work: one is the use of technology to utterly surprise people and fundamentally reconfigure the way people interact. It has extraordinary possibilities for breaking through social norms that can be damaging if taken too far. Another is his ability to get ordinary people involved, empowering them to become the storytellers and art-makers, while Wodiczko plays the role of an enabler or mitigating factor. It’s telling that he calls his own work “interrogative design.” Finally, the public response. I am used to people drifting through art galleries with a dazed look on their faces, clutching their rented audio guides like it was their last lifeline to a world that makes sense (in many cases it is). Well, Wodiczko’s work can be experienced without any audio guide or degree in art history; all you really need is a human heart. That said, it is also neither trite nor catered towards the lowest common denominator. It just gives you a lot to think about in its simplicity and straightforwardness. Documentation of Wodiczko’s work shows viewers of an unexpectedly wide-ranging demographic in various states of awed attentiveness, some obviously fighting back tears, others with brows knitted in thinking. The emotional impact of his work is huge, and I really believe that what impacts the heart ultimately impacts the mind.

Given all this, you can imagine how happy I was to see that he had new work up at the I.C.A. I went with Yang and Joel yesterday to see it and, in classic Wodiczko fashion, it gave us moment for pause. Wodiczko’s work here, titled Out of Here: The Veterans Project, consisted of 2 parts. One was a series of outdoor video projections and amplified audio depicting the words and voices of medics, soldiers, and others involved in the Iraq war. The other was an indoor projection that transformed a darkened gallery space into a convincing interior of an abandoned warehouse. The projections show only a ring of high windows with dirty glass, beyond which the inscrutable sounds and images of a civilian-military confrontation play out. Like a miniature movie with an ambiguous plot, it dares the viewer to imagine the consequences and fill in the blanks of what it means to be in a war.

The latter part of this series was for me more interesting. It really did feel a bit like you’re standing in a warehouse in Iraq, but with a thick veil thrown around all your sense of comprehension. It conveys the confusion, doubt, and fear of war better than any news report of “events in the region” ever could. I had a hard time snapping out of that state of mind even walking out of the Wodiczko gallery into the adjoining one (which contained a show of really academic, self-referential painting-photographs on wood panels… A jarring contrast to the evocative, emotionally charged and frankly accessible work I just walked out of.  Sorry, but after Wodiczko, I honestly did not particularly care for its impassive pretensions.)

There are those out there who applaud art for art’s sake. There are those out there who prefer formal explorations of color, shape, and material. Personally, I have grown more and more to prefer art that espouses a a message grounded in the concrete, whether this is found in nature or human affairs. I also like art that could be simple without being simplistic. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything at all against art that is intentionally ambiguous or multi-layered in its message, or that references the art world in a self-aware way (I do find Jeff Koons’ antics hilarious and noteworthy). Nor do I always rule out art that seeks to stretch the boundaries of representation or process or whatnot. But it takes a certain perceptiveness and intellectual talent to create art that has reach, that can influence people in a way that leaves them feeling like something was revealed to them, rather obscured from them, when they leave the gallery. That’s the kind of art I learned that I wanted to make in junior year, when I heard Wodiczko talk. Coming back from the I.C.A. yesterday, I was reminded again of why I went to art school, what I got out of it, and what I have to keep doing, even as I work my daily job as a commercial designer making everyday practical things.

And that is just a single Buzz. So… yeah.

I’m surprised at how quickly everyone seemed to jump on the Buzz bandwagon. Normally, at least amongst the folks I know, there’s a period of skepticism that follows the announcement of a new technology or service. Then the few technology junkies will bravely step forward to try it out, and if it’s good, they’ll hook everybody else in. This did not happen with Buzz. Everyone jumped on Buzz at the same time. All day I was pummeled with posts from people far and wide, not all tech junkies either. Most were friends that I haven’t spoken to in a long long time. Suddenly we were chatting like we just saw each other yesterday. It was fantastic. Facebook has never even come close to bringing me in touch with so many friends in such a short time.

So that’s the good side of Buzz. The bad side is… well, all day it was like this constant, incessant, um, buzz in the background, sabotaging my every attempt to be productive. I filtered out Buzz announcements in my Inbox. I turned off new Buzz notifications. It was no use. I felt drawn to it like a… bee to honey. That was awful. Oh yeah, and the pun-tastic simile was pretty bad too.

All day people were making comparisons between Buzz and Twitter, Facebook, email, forums, Google Talk, and of course Wave. This kind of comparison tends to happen whenever a novel alternative to preexisting, ingrained habits (and yes it is a habit) shows up. People try to weigh the pros and cons of the new product in an effort to consider whether to adopt, ditch, switch, sandwich, or something else that rhymes. I think one of the implications of this is that we are slowly feeling a bit collectively overwhelmed. Everyone has to admit, sooner or later, that we only have so much time on our hands in a day, and there is indeed a glut of services out there to choose from. We can’t possibly use them all, even though we want all their proffered benefits.

I admire Google for its ability to create insta-community in a matter of minutes on a preexisting platform. It’s ingenious! But I still can’t help but be a little bit uneasy about this trend towards More. Just this morning I had a bit of existential angst as I wondered whether to switch to Picasa from Flickr. And then I went to work, saw the little colored speech bubble icon, and knew it was all over.

But this cannot be helped; the Internet is the most capitalistic of all societies (and W3C be darned) and in capitalism, competitive semi-redundancy reigns supreme. If we want the webs to serve us, then we in turn must serve it by being the guinea pigs of its various experiments. In the long run, it’s going to suck up more of our time, not just time spent actively using the internets, but time spent deciding “how” or “where” or “what part” to use.

Maybe this is a growing pain we that as consumers have to get used to, until growth tapers. Or it will never taper (ok I admit that last thought was very wishful). If it doesn’t then eventually, like any society born of excess, the Internet will begin to spawn entire, extremely lucrative industries geared towards managing all that excess. In the physical world, we have dieting specialists, home organization consultants, and entire stores where you can buy things to put your other things in. What if we had Internetters Anonymous, and hired personal specialists who will suggest, manage, and streamline all your Web 2.0 services for you? Actually, there’s a start-up idea for you.

As I wrote this the buzz that I screenshotted below just got longer. That’s it, Ineternets. I give up, You win.

For now.

Granted, it was totally predictable about 10 minutes in. And yes, none of the characters were believable or showed any true development; all were just flat caricatures of good and evil. Okay, I’ll even admit that was some pretty heavy-handed moral posturing that I was just smacked upside the head with, even though I’m one of them despicable “tree-hugger” types. =P

But are these actually faults? Or were they entirely on purpose?

All in all, I think Avatar is really just a 2.5-hour-long allegory disguised as a movie. And if this is indeed the case, then all of those “faults” suddenly seem to make sense.

That’s also why I like it. It’s a bedtime story, a fairy tale, a Hans Christian Anderson tableau gone 3-D with full orchestral backing. Even in a modern society of well-informed skeptics, there still is a place for these things. Just like how, I’m sure, society will always have a place for old-school stories like Snow White, despite its flat characters, cookie-cutter predictability, and troubling trivialization of little people. You could pick apart Snow White until the end of time, criticizing its peripheral flaws and failings, but when it comes down to it, its entire, core point is to be exceedingly simplistic, unproblematic, and easy to digest. That makes it accessible to children and adults, and that makes it resonate with human beings as a whole.

And you can argue that there’s no way someone of Cameron’s caliber did these things by accident. I’m sure he wanted the characters to be flat stereotypes, he wanted the story to be “easy” and to spin out just as the viewer knows (hopes) each step of the way. Pure manipulation. He essentially created (I’m sure this was his intent) a movie that would do for the masses what Disney did for young children in its classic glory days—awe, inspire, and unite ordinary people through an easy-to-understand yet stunningly epic story. If that were really the goal, then I think this movie does a pretty good job. The audience clapped and whooped by the end. I always love when they do that. I mean, no one who actually “performed” or contributed to this production is there to receive the offered applause. But people just can’t help it. It was so good, you just had to show your appreciation, if only to the empty air at the front of the theater.

Of course, if he can make Pocahontas this good, I’d like to see what James Cameron can do for the Little Mermaid. Arial packing heat on the back of a flying nine-legged whale? Hell yes.

Final note: Did anyone else notice the visual irony in the scene near the end when the humans were being “deported” back to Earth by the Na’vi? For once, the dusty caravan of forlorn refugees is made up of the imperialists, not the natives.

Post-final note: James Cameron says there will be a sequel. I hope this is not the case, because I think the Na’vi have had enough shit happen to them, and should go on to lead a nice boring life unsuitable for epic filmery. Besides, what could this sequel possibly be about, smallpox? Shudder.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is part personal journal, part manifesto, and part self-help book. Essentially, Gordon Bell tries to make a good case for the “inevitable revolution” towards “Total Recall” (caps, mind you) that will “force” us to “adapt” to it. His diction gives you a good sense of what’s to come, sigh.

If you can stomach his single-mindedly evangelical agenda, you’ll find that this book pursues some interesting ideas about the implications of recording as many details of one’s life as possible. And not just in writing, but in photos, sound, video, drawings, scanned documents, GPS locations, chat logs, pedometer readings, etc. etc.

His primary argument is that we (as in the human race) are on an accelerating pathway towards this state of recording everything ever about our personal lives. He observes that we already have cultural/behavioral trends such as microblogging and increased “surveillance” of our offspring, and points out the sheer fact that we now have all the tools that enable logging, recording, and note-taking at our disposal.

He continues by saying we ought to embrace this trend because of a host of benefits in healthcare, education, national security, work, day-to-day life, and even post mortem. There are, undeniably, benefits that you can’t argue with: detailed recordings of minute-to-minute physical status for health records can be invaluable in diagnosing a disease with vague symptoms. But there are thornier ideas too. For instance, Bell totally adores the idea of a “cyber-twin” that goes on “living” and pretending to be you after you die, so your grandkids can talk to “you.” This simultaneously piques my curiosity and scares me silly, but the biggest part that bugs me is that he does not go on to explore it much beyond saying “Wouldn’t that be SO COOL?” Clearly this is a book about breadth, not depth, and as such, it spends more time reveling in enthusiastic speculation rather than critique and inquiry. As usual, I kind of wish there were more of the latter.

Bell ends the book by providing general instructions on how you can begin recording every detail of your own life too (this is where the self-help comes in). Here’s where his argument that “Total Recall” is upon us falls apart, I think. By detailing all the technological infrastructure required and all the ways we’d have to “adapt” to using it, he only highlights how tremendous a commitment it would be to “life-log.” It would pretty much have to be a person’s one and only hobby. Imagine scrapbooking, but times a million. And the money, wow, you would have to have a smartphone, a GPS device, a digital camera, a scanner, a PC, an e-reader, body-monitoring devices, backup solutions x3 both on- and off-site, shelves of DVDs… Life logging is clearly not for the busy or the poor.

Of course, I buy the idea that tools will get ever-cheaper and technological paradigms will rearrange themselves beyond recognition in 10 years, but this last part of the book, his clarion call to begin lifelogging here and now, still rings utterly hollow to me because we aren’t 10 years in the future yet! It is, literally, the most useless chapter, because it isn’t thorough enough to be actually instructive, nor does it introduce new ideas.

By this point, he has beaten us over the head with the idea that Total Recall is coming faster and surer than the Redcoats and it will make our lives absolutely wonderous. But he has also given the reader a lot to be skeptical about. Rather than spend an extra chapter tackling the skeptics head-on, he chooses to sidestep them by saying “well, there will always be skeptics, but let’s ignore them, BECAUSE THE REVOLUTION IS UPON US. LET’S DO THIS THAAAANG.”

Anyway.

My last point is more about a technical shortcoming on the book’s part: Bell doesn’t distinguish clearly enough between the problems of “recording” and “recall.” There’s a lot of time spent on the endless possibilities of recording, and hardly any on how to organize it effectively. He does recognize the issues of data longevity, the importance of metadata and the need to unify our data, but he doesn’t address nearly enough how monumental the challenge of organizing a lifetime’s data is. His only answer seems to be “keep at it, just do it.” I wish he’d share more of what he learned in his personal experiences.

The final verdict: I think it is worth a read, if only for the impassioned arguments that will hopefully result from some of its claims. Insofar as a book of potentially controversial predictions about the future goes, this is pretty good.

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