Last Night, I Did Not Eat Any Of The Food Appearing In This Post

During the two months I spend in Peru, I managed to forget my home-grown comforts of pasteurized milk and hamburgers and instead focus on traditional Peruvian cuisine. Which is fantastic. My three favorite dishes in Peru were ceviche, a dish of bite-sized raw fish pieces mixed with a super-sour lime juice sauce, garnished with onions and yams; anticuchos, bite-sized pieces of goat or cow heart, usually skwered, and served with a spicy aji sauce; and lucuma, an Andean fruit first cultivated thousands of years ago, and now a Peruvian flavor staple along with the traditional favorites of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. The fruit itself doesn't taste very good, but when you mix it up all fancy with some sugar and chocolate sauce, the subtle yet delectably nutty taste is to die for.

So when I heard that Inka Heritage, a new Peruvian restaurant, is opening in Madison, I had to go. Soon after it opened its doors, I ran in to grab a paper menu and nearly did a backflip of joy when I saw that no less than all three (!!!) of my favorite treats were on the menu. The lucuma is particularly difficult to get, since the fruit usually only grows in South America and is almost impossible to export. Shewara and I quickly made plans to go, and set the date for last night.

6:00PM rolls around, and off we go. Down University Avenue, then a right on Park Street, and we are there. The place is half-empty, and so we immediately walk up to get a table. My heart is crushed when we learn that due to the plethora of reservations at 6:30, the place will be full and the next available table is not until 8:00PM. I of course don't believe this (why can't we just put our name in and wait like at a normal place) but I chalk it up to them being so new and not knowing anything. We instead decide to go home and res-schedule our planned 7:20 showing of Hot Fuzz (which was hilarious) to 9:50, and then make an 8:00 reservation. That should leave us plenty of time for a large meal, full of my Peruvian favorites, and still be able to make it to the movie in plenty of time.

Shewara and I occupy the next ninety minutes with a series of futile attempts at kite-flying in a nearby park (we would succeed the next day), so at 7:47 we are back in the restaurant, eagerly awaiting our seats. We discover our table is already open (!!!), so we sit down and order immediately. Shewara gets the Aji de Pollo (shredded chicken coated in the aforementioned aji sauce) and I order my ceviche and anticuchos, saving the lucuma mousse for dessert. Half an hour passes, with food orders whizzing by our table, every time thinking the food is ours. Finally, Shewara's chicken gets placed in front of her, and I wait to see my delicious food.

That will never come. "I am so sorry, but the chefs just informed me that we don't have ceviche or anticuchos tonight," says the server in Peruvian-accented English. "Would you like to order something else?" I of course can't think. These dishes are the entire reason I came - I am crushed without them. What's more, given the amount of time it took to prepare Shewara's one dish, I won't be able to get any other food in time to make it to our movie. Shewara nudges me to ask a smart question: "Do you have any lucuma tonight?"

"No."

I am crushed. Completely saddened. Years of anticipation built up in my tastebuds, smashed in a few seconds. No lucuma, no ceviche, no anticuchos. Nothing. I am almost crying at my table (mostly for dramatic effect, but I am still totally depressed). Begrudgingly I help Shewara finish her food, pay the bill, and walk out the door. I go home and grab some gnocchis before the movie, still craving my Peruvian food.

Next time I will special-order it before I go.

'S

At odds in my mind are the facts that I am a stickler for correct grammar, yet also painfully aware of how language is an organic entity, constantly changing, and thus cannot be subject to fixed rules governing its use. If a language wants to change, it will. (Unless you are a member of the Academie francaise.)

And so today I couldn't decide whether or not to cry when I read the following YouTube comment beneath Radiohead's smash hit music video for Karma Police:

"This Band Rule's."

Now, I am sure many of you are aware of the interesting place the apostrophe occupies in American grammatical structures. It is used to connote a noun's possession of something - never a pluralization - with the notable exception of "it's" and "its" where the former is short for "it is" and the latter denotes possession. Many people have, with increasing regularity - especially on dry-erase grocery store signs advertising deals on fresh produce - used the apostrophe to pluralize words. Mango's (or even better, Mangoe's), for example. Orange's. Apple's. You get the point. I feel I began to notice this trend some time around the mid-1990s, and it seems to have progressed so far as to be considered an acceptable form of pluralization. Practically, it doesn't make much sense since the trend in languages, especially English, is the lessen the amount of unnecessary letters, whereas here one has actually been added.

As I said before, English is full of such trends. "They" is a great example - previously only meaning two or more people (They all went to the park), it now stands as a substitute word for the cumbersome phrase "he or she." (Likewise "them" for "him or her.")

But this YouTuber's comment left me completely dumbfounded. "This Band Rule's." That's sentence is so ridiculous that it can't even be considered wrong in any normal sense of the word. The author didn't break any real grammar rules, since "Rule" here is not a noun that is being pluralized or possessing something - it's a verb. A conjugated verb, third person present tense. Yet there it is, smack dab center on the YouTube page, chock full of no less than three capital letters, indicating that the author was clearly paying attention to the keyboard.

So do I bemoan the fate of English or get on this new bandwagon before it gets too crowded. I'm not sure. But I do know Radiohead's lead singer: They Rock's.

Had A Good Day Today

It's getting to the end-of-semester workathon, and I took a big step toward easing that today by finishing a good portion of what needs to be accomplished in the next few weeks. I gave a class presentation (20 mins) on an obscure Congo burial practice, and then wrote another paper on a similarly obscure set of Kongo sculptures. That means roughly 1/2 of the major work is done - I just have to convert the presentation into a paper, and write yet another paper on a film from Burkina Faso (this is Africa semester, if you didn't know.)

Shewara's coming this weekend to hit up the Farmer's Market on Capitol Square with me - our two goals are the famous "Spicy Cheese Bread" and Hook's Cheddar Cheese. Tasty.

Cuajinicuilapa

That's the name of the city I'm going to this summer. I'll help you pronounce it: KWA-HE-KNEE-KWI-LA-PA. Fun, huh?

Yay for me for getting my first ever grant as a graduate student. I'll be doing some work with Afro-Mexican artists and the surrounding communities in southern Mexico, in Cuajinicuilapa and another city named El Ciruelo (just over the Guerrero border in Oaxaca state). Cuajinicuilapa is one of the largest African-descent communities in Mexico, and it comes with a thriving artistic scene. Check out some of the dance celebrations (on YouTube even!):

Los Diablos del Guerrero
El Toro de Petate

And as I was discussing with Shewara earlier, I am trying to prove that Art History can and actually does have a real-world use. The essential focus of my study will be interviewing Afro-Mexican artists about their work and how they view themselves in relation to the larger Mexican nation (nation as in a homogenous group of people, not necessarily the Mexican state.) I am then going to contrast this with how Afro-Mexicans are literally exhibited at both the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago as well as the Museum of Afromestizo Cultures in Cuajinicuilapa. My theory is that Afro-Mexicans are paraded around the United States as symbols of how diverse and accepting Mexico is in contrast to the USA, yet in Mexico they are virtually ignored, second-class citizens - facts that become apparent through how Afro-Mexicans are represented.

So that's me: improving the lives of Afro-Mexicans, one museum at a time. Plus I'll get to meet a lot of cool new people.

More Evanston Fun

I went to Evanston yesterday primarily to help Shewara do some apartment hunting for fall when she starts at Northwestern, but I also needed to do some research at the Herskovits African Studies Library for some papers I'm writing in the coming eight weeks. After an hour or so of poking around some old and unexpectedly helpful books, I drove south to Main Street to check out a cool fabric store she recommended. I ended up purchasing an awesome "African print" (no more specific location was given, but I'd bet a small chunk of change it's Nigerian) - it's a nice blue color with an abstracted snake design in light purple and yellow. I'm going to use it as a divider between my main room and office in my new apartment.

After the fabric store, I went next door to a place I believe was called Dave's Rock Shop, an awesome establishment dealing in an assortment of rocks, precious stones, fossils, and Native American artwork - typically NW Coast masks and Kachina dolls. The best part was that the store had a "Museum of Prehistoric Life" in the basement which featured a surprisingly thorough assortment of artifacts, many of them excavated (and all of them acquired and curated) by the owners of the store. There was even a cheesy, low-budget narration in the background to guide you through the space.

After my rock fun I met Shewara at the train station to commence the apartment search. We saw a few studios, nothing overly impressive. The best of the night was a potentially fantastic 1-br place, but its location directly above a dry-cleaners means that, according to a UK study, any occupant will have a 400% greater chance of lung cancer later on. So we passed.

Tomorrow I'm heading downtown to check out the new Field Museum's installation of the Americas Galleries, as well as an African architecture exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, plus eating out at a new Mexican bakery on Shewara and I's favorite block of retail establishments on Earth.

The Danger Of Movie Rentals

Shewara and I were browsing around the local Blockbuster yesterday, trying to decide between Babel and Borat as our movie choice for the evening. No sooner had we decided on the Kazakh moviefilm when we heard a thunderous crash from the front of the store. All the store employees and customers jumped a few feet in the air at that exact moment, when we realized a large van had slammed into the storefront at 30 or 40 miles an hour. The windows didn't break, but you can see from the attached photo of the damage the broken bricks and nearly shredded metal frame of the entranceway. Though no one was hurt, within minutes we heard the sirens from all of my sleepy little town's bored emergency and law enforcement personnel come to investigate the scene. Our main concern was, of course, renting our movie. We ran to the front of the store, threw Borat over the counter, and watched in agony as the clerk fumbled with our gift card and five dollar bill. If we were still in the store when the police arrived, we'd be forced to stay around as witnesses, a situation which would greatly cut in to our movie watching/ice cream eating time. As we saw the officers and firemen strolling to the door, we began to run out without our change - but she got it just in time, and we managed to escape with both our money and our film.

Later we ascertained that, judging by the man's relatively nondescript appearance and the fact that this all took place at 8PM, he probably wasn't a drunk driver. More than likely, he just hit the gas instead of the break. However, you also need to be going pretty damn fast in order to do that much damage to a solid brick wall, so perhaps it was the shock of hitting his van into Blockbuster that seemed to sober him up.

And for the record, Borat was pretty funny.