Professional cycling is a tough sport, of that there is no doubt, but it’s also very pretty. 

Think of the Tour de France, with some of the worlds fittest athletes dancing gracefully on the pedals; beautiful mountainous backdrops; fields full of sunflowers; cutting edge bikes; and the colour and movement of the peloton as it glides through some impossibly picturesque French village.

This is the way I like it.

When watching the sport from the comfort of your settee, if the racing itself is in something of a lull it’s the pretty bits that catch your attention, which is why I’m so alarmed about a number of recent blots on the landscape of our viewing pleasure.

French Sunflowers
(Image: Wikimedia CC)

I fear it may be time to take the draconian step of introducing minimum acceptable aesthetic standards to pro-cycling.

Let’s examine the evidence:

Kinesio tape

Depending on your level of interest in cycling, and sport in general, when you hear the phrase ‘Kinesio tape’ you will either be rubbing your chin and nodding sagely, or thinking to yourself, ‘eh, what…never heard of it’. 

For the uninitiated, Kinesio tape is exactly that – tape. It’s usually bright blue, and can be seen stuck in great strategically placed strips to the body of an increasing number of athletes with the aim of preventing or controlling injury. In cycling we see it plastered up and down their thighs, across knee joints, or peeking out of their jersey’s in aid of some long forgotten shoulder injury. 

As this well written article by Cycling Weekly suggests, evidence of the actual benefits to performance or injury reduction seem to be sketchy, with the benefits apparently restricted to short term pain relief to injured areas at best. 

There are some cyclists who appear to be held together by the stuff, and we’re not just talking about the also-rans; Tony Martin, Alberto Contador, I’m looking at you (although to be fair, Contador has recently broken a leg), but still…it doesn’t look pretty.

Nose tape

Nose tape (if that’s what it’s called; it may well have some fancy scientific name, but if I get into googling this stuff I’m just playing into their hands) is basically the same issue as Kinesio tape. 

As pointed out by Chris Boardman on ITV4’s coverage of the Tour de France here in the UK (a man who gives me the impression that he generally knows what he’s talking about), these unsightly strips across the bridge of the nose serve no purpose; they simply give the impression that the wearer was on the wrong end of a knuckle sandwich after a late night in some back-street bar.

Alberto Contador and his nose tape
(Image: Wikimedia CC)

If a cyclist should choose to take the start line looking like they are held together with Kinesio tape, and with a stretch of nose tape across their conk…

…frankly, I don’t care if your name is Tony Martin.

Skinny climbers and their white, muscle free torsos

Some of the legendary figures of the sport over the years – Charly Gaul, Federico Bahamontes, Lucien van Impe – and some of the modern greats too – Nairo Quintana, Alberto Contador – possess the stick thin upper body of the true climber.

As my wife accurately (and hilariously) describes them; they are the ‘pipsqueaks’ of pro-cycling.

I have no problem with this – to ride well in the mountains, the upper body of a badly drawn stick figure makes perfect sense. What I have a problem with is these riders displaying this lack of upper body, often alarmingly white and translucent, to the watching world on crossing the finish line.

The correct etiquette on winning a stage is to zip your jersey up before the finish line to display the sponsors logo’s for the cameras, but also to remove from display your slightly weird looking physique.

Rafal Majka’s win on stage 14 of the 2014 Tour de France at Risoul was impressive, no doubt, but the sight of his pale, sweaty, hairy chest – essentially nothing more than some skin stretched over a bony ribcage – quite frankly put me off my dinner.

This is not a good look. Zip up please lads.

POC helmets

Team Garmin Sharp are never shy of expressing themselves through their kit design. For many years their blue, white, and orange argyle kit design was the last word in love it/hate it divisive styling; they clearly embrace the pro-peloton as sporting catwalk. In many ways, they should be commended for their recent bold attempt to introduce an element of style into the world of helmet design.

I have made my thoughts clear on the dreaded cycling helmet already. For my money, the helmet is a very necessary but ultimately tedious piece of kit that is seemingly immune to all attempts to make it desirable or pleasing to the eye. While I appreciate the attempts by David Millar and his team-mates to elevate the humble helmet, I believe the bar is best kept low in this regard; simply aim to avoid looking like a mushroom head, and leave it at that.

Unfortunately, with their innovatively sculpted POC helmets they give the appearance of the ultimate mushroom heads – the Grand Champignon’s of the pro-peloton – and no amount of strut and swagger can get you away from that. 

Astana kit

The problem is the colour, mainly. 

I’ve heard it described as ‘baby blue’, which is probably about right. Apt, too, as any member of the Astana team kitted out in full winter garb – winter jacket, full-length tights, gloves, overshoes – looks remarkably similar to an overgrown baby in an ill-fitting romper suit.

Astana in blue – big babies!
(Image: Wikimedia CC)

Come on Astana; now that you have the Tour de France winner in your ranks, why not provide him with some kit worthy of his status?

****************

Perhaps you think that an attempt to police this stuff is over the top, and impossible to enforce?

You may have a point, but can I draw your attention to some of the abominations that masqueraded for team kit in the 1990’s.

Perhaps some out there have a certain fondness for the oversized 90’s sunglasses sported by Mario Cipollini and his like…

‘Super’ Mario Cipollini and his massive shades
(Image: Eric Houdas via Wikimedia Commons CC)

Or maybe you have forgotten just how bad the legendary Mapei kit could get…

Mapei – colourful!
(Image: <a href="http://lgcycling.com" rel="nofollow">lgcycling.com</a>)

If we don’t step in now, we could end up in the bad old days.

Is that what you want?

BV= Black Velvet

BVR= Black Velvet Reserve

Maker: Black Velvet, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada (Constellation)

Age

BV: 3 y/o

BVR: 8 y/o

ABV: 40%

Michigan State Minimum

BV: $10

BVR: $13

Appearance

BV: Pale copper with some beading.

BVR: Very similar. Maybe a little darker.

Nose

BV: Alcohol, creamed corn, burnt caramel.

BVR: More balanced. Corn syrup, oak, caramel, vanilla, cumin, tarragon.

Palate

BV: Sweet and fruity. Plum, maple sugar candy.

BVR: Sophisticated and complex. Pralines, plums, oak, toffee.

Finish

BV: Very light. A hint of cookie butter and corn syrup.

BVR: Caramel, charred oak, black cherry, alcohol. Lingers for a long time.

Mixed

BV: Does very well in an old fashioned and with ginger ale. OK on the rocks.

BVR: Did not mix.

Parting words: I had been avoiding Black Velvet for a long time, just because I assumed it was terrible given its price point and its Canadian-ness. I gave it a half drunken try at a local whiskey tasting and I was pleasantly surprised. I was downright impressed with the reserve, which I tried after that.

Both have a sweet fruity quality that is very enjoyable. The original BV is a little rough around the edges, but the low proof smoothes it out nicely. It also mixes very well.

The reserve is a tasty, sophisticated, complex and well-balanced sipper. It’s a steal at only three dollars more for almost three times the age and flavor of its younger sibling. In its case the low proof works against it, though. Black Velvet Reserve would be highly recommended and possibly one of the world’s best whiskies if it were unfiltered and at barrel proof. It’s a shame that it’s not, but as it is, both Black Velvet and Black Velvet reserve are recommended.

What was the in­spi­ra­tion for the de­sign of your store?  

There are so many dif­fer­ent things that came into play. I had a com­pany for a long time and I never had a re­tail store, and I never wanted to for some rea­son. I think I was re­ally in­ter­ested in the prod­uct de­vel­op­ment and all of that for a long time and then it sud­denly be­came like “I re­ally need an en­vi­ron­ment for this.” Ma­te­ri­als are so big for me, in all as­pects of cloth­ing and ac­ces­sory de­sign, that I needed to start there with what the right ma­te­ri­als are, and even the right space. When this space be­came avail­able, I was like “that’s, that’s the space.” We had to do a full ren­o­va­tion. I wanted it to have all sorts of el­e­ments that are im­por­tant to me, like a mas­culin­ity to it, which I think hap­pens with the con­crete and the stone, and then a fem­i­nine el­e­ment with the pink car­pet and the shag. But I needed it to be ac­ces­si­ble in a way, too. It’s not a lux­ury brand in any way, we’re very much in the mid­dle there. I wanted it to feel like, for shoe shop­ping, when you walk in off the street, there’s a fa­mil­iar­ity to the tex­ture on the floor, and I wanted it to be matte so it didn’t com­pete with leather. I wanted the dress­ing rooms to be very lux­u­ri­ous, and nice to be in, and fem­i­nine.

What are your fa­vorite beauty prod­ucts, and the extra steps (if any) that make you feel es­pe­cially pol­ished?

I use this one cream,  I got it from the fa­cial­ist Is­abelle Bel­lis. A friend turned me on to her, I can never get an ap­point­ment with her, so it’s like once a year that I go to her. It’s a french cream. I can tell you the name of it later. And then I’m pretty sim­ple on the beauty prod­ucts, to be hon­est. What makes me feel pol­ished? A makeup artist. Oth­er­wise I’m a total dirt­bag, hon­estly. I re­ally am. 

(ed. note: the face cream is by Joelle Ciocco)

What are your wardrobe sta­ples? Any trea­sured pieces?

I do a lot of de­sign work, I feel like, in the morn­ing when I’m try­ing to get dressed and I don’t have the thing that I want to have. And that’s when I start think­ing about de­sign. So, sta­ples… these days it seems to be a lot of denim pieces. Clogs, I guess, that’s ob­vi­ously a sta­ple for me. That’d be the num­ber one. Trea­sured pieces… I have a cot­ton plaid shirt that I made a long time ago, the yarn-dyed plaid is so pretty, and I love it. It’s sim­ple but worn in just right, I guess. 

Stag hewn.

The movie screen;

The back of your mind:

Head rolls.

Stark.  Raven.  Mad.

We are almost at the final wrap. This last episode is nightmarish – not because of anything in the script -  it’s because we are also shooting tons of scenes from other episodes. It’s our last chance to pick up scenes and inserts and reshoots needed to edit into the final cut of all episodes.

We’ve been shooting now for 7 months and my level of paranoia has been edging into Will-territory: imagining what trouble that evilmeister Hannibal will cook up now. He seemed like such a nice low-maintenance guy back in Episode 1 when we first started shooting…

But now it’s the last episode. So important to hit this one out right of the park.

Waiting is a mind game

Waiting for the script to come in, my mind goes to the Edge of Foodstyling Darkness. What would the worst thing be? Brain. Raw brain being cut into and cooked. Because, guess what – even Zeller’s brain is about 3x bigger than a cow’s brain and 10x that of sheep or pig. No natural animal substitute will do for the human brain. 

I had done a bit of footwork in the brain-faking department last month when I got a call from the Set Decorator of a zombie/vampire series being shot in town. Enrico needed for brains to stock an immense “Brain Shed”. Sort of a zombie’s dream Costco: rows and rows of shelves of brains stored in glass jars in a vast warehouse. It would be shot like one of those Ed Burtynsky photographs except instead of blue-clad factory workers, it would be endless rows of brains in jars. How many brains did they need? Thousands. When did they need them? Next week. 

I worked around with the costs on various possibilities til the dollars made everyone come to their senses and the scene was dropped. 

And I turned my attentions back to my favorite omnivore.

So I’m checking my email every hour expecting the script supervisor to send me the production draft. There’s a production meeting today but I wasn’t called in.  So I’m thinking everybody is on board except me. I feet like when I was four and my whole family got into the station wagon for a weekend drive, accidentally (?) leaving me behind. Luckily for them, I was still sleeping when they dashed back for me. Or I really would have made them pay.

I call the Prop Master.

No, there is no food in the current outline draft of the last episode.

Wha…no food???!!!

I am relieved but slightly miffed. Move along, no food scene to see here, m’am. Fine. Well maybe there was so much plot to pack into the last episode to create that all-important end-of-season cliffhanger that there wasn’t enough bandwidth to luxuriate in a Hanibalicious food scene.

But I keep checking the scripts as the revisions keep coming in. A dinner scene after all! Hannibal is dining with Bedelia at her place. And he's bringing Take-out.
Relax, the guy has gotta eat.

Then Bryan Fuller emails:  Hannibal may be serving veal in a scene with his therapist. Any suggestions for veal recipes and fun veal details?

I suggest: What about the cheek of that veal, Abigail? Bruised -- I mean, braised in sherry and mushrooms...

Jose checks in: Also smoked with dry hay, like a funerary ritual where the dead where burnt. But here hay imparts a unique smokey flavor to the meat and to the room! The smell of death but also the smell of a reborn, you become something else by burning and becoming part of the cycle of life!  Veal head! Will be awesome to do that! Paul Bocuse has a great recipe! Whole head on the table, boil! With the broth....amazing!

Robyn, his assistant sends me a recipe "Tête de Veau en Sauce Verte"  by Paul Bocuse in  French with a Google translation into English. She curses Google Translate but I love it. To me, Google Translate English is like Japanese T-shirt English and it makes me giggle.

Great! I say. The pale skin of the Bocuse preparation of poached boned veal head would look delicate and deadly against the parsley sauce, like a corpse on the cemetery lawn.

Smoke from the hay-smoking is nixed because of the problems it would create in shooting. Problems in shooting? This never seems to hold anyone back from asking the impossible but I now know where the demarcation of difficulty is No Smoking. Period.

Pulling Tete de Veau out of a hat

I turn my attention to putting together the Tete de Veau while I’m still working on food for  Episode 12. In Paris, every other shop carries Tete de Veau and you can pop in and buy a couple slices on a whim. But this ain’t Paris, Toto. Now, with limited time, do I really want a knife fight with a whole veal head? Pig head, maybe. Cow head, not so much.

I make a call to Mike, the pate guy at Sanagan’s down in Kensington. He has cheerfully saved me before by providing an emergency Head Cheese within 24 hours so I’m hoping he can make me another miracle with Tete de Veau. I explain the size and shape and the next day, what should appear but 2.5 kilos of rolled poached “Tete de Veau” mocked up from a giant pork belly he luckily had in the cooler.

The shoot is the usual complication of shooting on location. I set up my kitchen in the laundry room of the rambling suburban home they have rented and redecorated as Bedelia duMaurier’s home office. I try not to get lost as I run back and forth within the warren walls created in corrugated cardboard sheeting (put up all over the house to protect the walls and woodwork from us film cretins) up and down the stairs from the set, to my basement prep area, to my car, to the craft table, and around and around in a circular house a million miles away from anything familiar.

But we get the shot.

I have a debate with the director about whether or not to have a skull on the platter of Tete de Veau. I think it needs the skull to indicate that the bud vases are actually bones. And I like the head/skull relationship. And also because I think Hannibal and Bedelia have this kind of pissing match about who’s cooler and who’s scarier. The director says the skull is out so it’s out. He’s OK with the lengths of thigh bones though so I email continuity photos to Fuller and we shoot the thing fairly smoothly in spite of the added difficulty of running the resets up and down the stairs and the obstacle course of cables, crew and carts between my prep area and the set.

Four hours later, we have the shot. I pack up my stuff  and load out of the location. Out of the drizzling cold and into the car. Then back to my studio to curry the pasta for tomorrow. Chiltern will be coming in so we will be back at the sound stage to shoot the curried guts for Episode 11.

There are lots of little pickup shots and insert shots to do over the next few weeks before final wrap. But Laila, one of the regular dailies, is going to handle them. I teach her how to say Pig Lung and Pig Spleen in Cantonese. And let go.

At last - an end to the madness.

Wrap is a mixed blessing. It’s great to finally be able to sleep but it’s sad to say goodbye to the assortment of idiosyncratic people you have worked with day and (mostly) night toiling together over something that may go unseen or unappreciated or most certainly misunderstood.

But thanks to overwhelming response from all you wonderful Fannibals, foodies and friends, my work -- our work has not only been seen, but appreciated well, and understood.

Thanks to you, Hannibal got renewed and production on Season Two starts this August.

We will all be back for seconds!

Thank you.

Next Week: Pictures and recipes from our Hannibal Pop-up Dinner: wish you had been there!

and

To come: at long last...the lowdown on the High Life Eggs!

In Lorrie Moore’s short story “Agnes of Iowa,” Agnes, a white teacher, stays after class one evening with Christa, her only black student, to talk about Christa’s creative work. Agnes finds Christa “smart and funny,” Moore writes, and enjoys chatting with her about her writing.

Tonight, Agnes had decided to talk Christa out of writing about vampires all the time.

“Why don’t you write about that thing you told me about that time?” Agnes suggested.

Christa looked at her skeptically. “What thing?”

“The time in your childhood, during the Chicago riots, walking with your mother through the police barricades.”

“Man, I lived that. Why should I want to write about it?”

Agnes sighed. Maybe Christa had a point. “It’s just that I’m no help to you with this vampire stuff,” Agnes said. “It’s formulaic, genre fiction.”

“You would be of more help to me with my childhood?”

“Well, with more serious stories, yes.”

Christa stood up, perturbed. She grabbed back her vampire story. “You with all your Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston. I’m just not interested in that anymore. I’ve done that already. I read those books years ago.”

“Christa, please don’t be annoyed.” ….

“You’ve got this agenda for me.”

“Really, I don’t at all,” said Agnes. “It’s just that—you know what it is? It’s that I’m just sick of these vampires. They’re so roaming and repeating.”

“If you were black, what you’re saying might have a different spin. But the fact is, you’re not,” Christa said, and picked up her coat and strode out—though ten seconds later, she gamely stuck her head back in and said, “See you next week.”

Professional writers are, perhaps, no better off than Christa; audiences and critics sometimes play the role of Agnes, preferring that we remain native informants, despite our other interests. And we, too, are sometimes forced to stick our heads back through the doorway and say, “See you next week.” There’s a power dynamic at work here.

But as Christa suggests with her “Why should I want to write about it?” and as Agnes quietly admits, writers write for different reasons—and some are not interested in writing about versions of themselves. A certain kind of writer revisits and reinvents the old; another chooses to explore what is entirely new. Many writers will, in their careers, do both. But who finds it easiest to open the door to the latter category? In a recent piece for PolicyMic, “The One Thing White Writers Get Away With, But Authors of Color Don’t,” Gracie Jin argues that “[i]n a society masquerading as post-racial, it is still only the white man who can speak authoritatively for every man. People of color, on the other hand, are expected to speak only for themselves.”

Bill Cheng, author of Southern Cross the Dog. Courtesy HarperCollins/Joe Orecchio

She’s talking about what’s happening to Chinese-American, Queens-raised author Bill Cheng in the wake of the release of Southern Cross the Dog, his debut novel, which takes place in the Mississippi Delta during and after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. She compares the scrutiny Cheng has faced in writing what he doesn’t know to the leeway given Adam Johnson, who researched North Korea to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Not so shockingly, Johnson, who as Jin notes is “plain old American,” comes out way ahead.

But as Jin observes, Johnson’s rather further along in his career than Cheng. Not convinced that Cheng’s being treated unfairly? Take a look at another example: how The New York Times portrayed Cheng and Stegner Fellowship wünderkind Anthony Marra, the author of the extraordinarily well received debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Marra’s novel is set in 2004, during the second Chechen War, and flashes back to the first war, in 1994. The Times ran an article about Marra in May, the same month it ran a piece featuring Cheng. When the pieces came out, Cheng had never been to Mississippi, and Marra had been to Chechnya only once, just prior to going over the final draft of his book.

I read the articles having not read the novels, though I plan to pick up both. And I read with particular interest; I write fiction using a boatload of research, and I’m curious about how readers, journalists, and critics perceive and credit that approach when it’s obvious that a story is coming from something other than experience. The two stories provide an unusual case study, because the writers have certain similarities: not only do Marra and Cheng have nearly analogous relationships to their subject matter, but both are American men in their late 20s who graduated from top writing programs. And their books came out around the same time. But the Times treats them strikingly differently: Marra receives accolades for writing through research, while Cheng has to earn his way past suspicion.

I chose the appellations above (Marra’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford; Cheng as a Chinese-American from Queens) from the credentials the Times elects to cite first. The initial mention of Marra’s Stegner affiliation comes as an aside late in Charles McGrath’s story. But before that, Marra is quoted directly and at some length about his experiences researching his book: “Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of… It can be one of the real joys of writing. Someone once said, ‘Don’t write what you know, write what you want to know.’” Eventually, we hear about his family and his years growing up in Washington, D.C., but the meat of the story is not his background—it’s his brain and his opinions about writing. When he’s given room to sound off on research and its joys, the Times is sending us a subtle signal that he’s an expert worth hearing. We even get a short history of how his writing developed, and a glimpse of an unpublished novel. When he’s so deeply fleshed out, and speaks for himself, I don’t have to leap a big imaginative chasm to think of him caring about something other than his own life. I have a real sense of what he observes, and what interests him.

Julie Bosman’s piece featuring Cheng, by comparison, marks his ethnicity and childhood home right off the bat, in the second paragraph, and co-signs onto a tone of skepticism about the whole enterprise of his novel: “It’s no wonder the Southern literati have raised an eyebrow at its author: Bill Cheng, a 29-year-old Chinese-American from Queens who has never set foot in Mississippi.” While McGrath’s article about Marra lets him speak first, and talk about his research in relation to his work, the piece about Cheng quotes a bookseller first. The story isn’t about what kind of writer Cheng is, or how he thinks about craft—it’s about what others think of Cheng’s work, and how he reacts to that.

“I was highly suspicious of this book when I first started it,” said Richard Howorth, the owner of Square Books in Oxford, Miss., and a revered authority on Southern literature. “I was won over.”

The article quotes three booksellers, in fact; Howarth was “suspicious,” the second was “questioning,” and the third “said that she believed that Mr. Cheng had ‘transcended’ his own background to write the book.”

Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Photo by Smeeta Mahanti.

While Cheng’s background is an obstacle, something he has to “transcend,” and his writing subject to a series of interrogations, Marra’s background is nearly irrelevant, his achievement inarguable. Marra is cast as a young master while Cheng steels himself for scrutiny and suspicion. Marra, a white American male, is barely a foreigner in Chechnya, and we hear nothing about whether Chechens have read his book, or what they think of it; Chinese-American Cheng is a foreigner in another part of his own country, and we hear more from other readers and booksellers than we do from him. If the booksellers are speaking in coded language about Cheng’s “otherness,” that goes unremarked. Marra’s work is “acclaimed” from sentence one, while Cheng’s novel’s superlative reviews aren’t mentioned until later. Talented Marra has worked and grown to become the writer he is today; talented Cheng, it would seem, has simply and exotically manifested. It’s supposed to be hard to imagine him writing about the South.

In fact, with what we have in this article, it’s hard to imagine him at all. As Jin asks, who has permission to research, to be an outsider, to be authentically inauthentic? The Cheng profile quotes a bookseller speculating about how Cheng managed the feat of writing Southern Cross. “He must have done a ton of research or has read a lot of Faulkner,” she says. Why are we guessing? The only phrase that hints at his method: “he drew from his deep knowledge of the blues to write the novel.” His research remains mysterious, nearly unknowable, as Cheng’s voice is drowned in a flood of opining others. When Cheng is quoted, he’s put on the defensive, and notes his status as an outsider: “I don’t have the advantage of being from there, from that region, of that race… It’s tough. But my responsibility is to tell stories, to tell the story I want to tell in the way I want to tell it. And if there are repercussions from that, I’ll just have to face it.”

Indeed. And some of the repercussions may be in the subtly racialized coverage that has one piece quoting a variety of people asking how he did it—and the other article actually getting to the answer. I wondered if I was the only one seeing this Grand Canyon separating the two stories, but when I Tweeted the two links together in June, other writers raised electronic eyebrows. One person I discussed this with offered various explanations, counterarguments and speculations: Mississippi is in the U.S., and, after all, far easier to get to than Chechnya; publishing marketing material may have landed heavily on Cheng’s ethnicity. The first argument made more sense to me than the second. Should journalists leap onto marketing bandwagons so swiftly? Why is Bill Cheng, a minority, so “suspicious” when he is interested in something not ostensibly himself? How very strange, an American writer choosing to locate himself in regional American literature and history that interests him! It’s as if no one has ever picked up The Red Badge of Courage.

In Cheng’s case, connecting author biography to fictional material throws into sharp relief the question of where an Asian-American voice belongs in a region that’s long been defined in terms of black and white—and the tiresomely pertinent question of who is American. Is the concern that Bill Cheng had never been to Mississippi when he wrote his book, or that people cannot easily imagine an Asian-American living in, writing about, or caring about the South? Must that burden be Bill Cheng’s—or should it, perhaps, belong to Agnes?