MAGAZINE FUEL By Kevin Clark
One of my professors has a story about his grandmother’s funeral. She had been a large woman, but was very thin when she died. Her casket was made of untreated pine wood, a Jewish tradition. My composition professor was one of her pallbearers. As he was helping to carry the casket he was overwhelmed by the lightness of his load, the rough surface of the wood, and the smell of the sap. It wasn’t just grief, but the combination of grief with all of those other sensations. And in the back of his mind a voice was saying, “Pay attention to this feeling, right now. Remember every subtlety of emotion. You can use this feeling in your music.” For me, and I think for a lot of people, being an artist means always hearing that voice tell you to stop being in the moment, to stop living your life to the fullest, and to turn all of your experiences into new and wonderful things to share with the world. I live my whole life that way. I don’t like to have hobbies that don’t create art. I go to trivia with my friends, but now we have our own podcast, Actually Happening (featuring #24MAG contributors Victoria Nece and Steven Padnick), so we can be funny as a polished, finished product. My social life is networking with other creative people, and turning friendships into collaborations. I don’t even like to play complicated video games—with that energy I could be making something for everyone! Except in the kitchen.
I get tremendous creative satisfaction from my food. I feel that sense of accomplishment when a dish goes well. My eyes light up when I’m analyzing a dish, and I can always find a little more energy to cook with if I have to. But even so, my food is mostly for myself, my partner Victoria, and occasionally for other people who come visit, or who invite us over. I cook all the time. I’ve always made time for food, and I think about food a lot. I get grief about planning all my leisure activities around food, specifically seafood, specifically clams. (Mmm, clams.) But my food isn’t for everyone. I don’t cook in a restaurant. I don’t blog more than the occasional cocktail. I don’t write cookbooks or review restaurants or do any scalable, internet-distributable, career-building creative work with food. It’s an anomaly in my creative life. It just doesn’t scale. Today I’m feeding the crew of #24MAG, writing about food, and thinking about food and how it fits into my creative life. Yet I haven’t had time to do much thinking, and I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. I knew that this project would involve bumping into a lot of things that I already know about professional cooking, but have never experienced myself: most of what you do is determined by circumstances instead of your creative vision, the hours are incredibly long, and you are going to be very, very tired. I wasn’t expecting to bump into those things quite this much. I should have known. I did know, but I hadn’t done it. There are restaurant professionals working on the magazine, and the way they looked at me after I finished dinner told me they knew exactly how I was feeling. And they knew that before today I’d never experienced it.