I have reached the point in my long and storied existence on this hurtling rock to have properly learnt an important lesson. It is simple, but takes a long time to sink in and resonate with your lived experience.
It’s a two-word mantra which, once you grok the true meaning, will instantly elevate your existence.
Embrace Uncertainty.
Doesn’t seem like much, do it? But applied correctly, it opens up the universe to you. Of course, there’s a bit more to it. Allow me to clarify, at length. Settle in. This is going to take a while.
This year marks some important anniversaries in the musical career of Tom Waits, celebrated with a brace of remasters and reissues. His first album, Closing Time, was released in 1973. For the purposes of today’s business, I want to focus on another milestone—Tom’s 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, which marked a major sea change in his sound and approach to music.
Known prior to that point as a gleefully shabby beat poet/balladeer, he threw that legacy in the nearest dumpster when he realised he was repeating himself. In a bid to re-energise, Tom developed a less structured, experimental groove, based on the weirdest instruments he could lay his hands on (an example—a Mellotron, a kind of early synthesiser, loaded entirely with train noises). The sound he arrived at was, in the words of one critic (I’m paraphrasing), like a street preacher manoeuvring a New Orleans funeral band down an alleyway full of bins.
I love Tom’s work unreservedly, and Swordfishtrombones and the follow up Rain Dogs spun my young head round like a tilt-a-whirl. It opened me up to principles of uncertainty that I am only now beginning to properly understand. That there is no right way of doing things. That even the wrong thing can be right—sometimes.
I love a happy accident. The moment when fate, circumstance and luck collide and present you with an opportunity, moment or flavour which you’d never considered up until then.
I say flavour because, to me, the creative act and time spent in the kitchen are tangled up like a knot of spaghetti. Cooking is an act of love for me. Putting food in front of people and having them react with pleasure gives me a big dopamine hit. I actually get a buzz off it. So of course I try to experiment a little, to get ideas and run with them. Hence the shoulder-high pile of cookbooks in my back room, the subscription to a ton of food magazines in my Readly app on the iPad, the way I will ravenously devour Sam Sifton or J. Kenji López-Alt in the New York Times, Nigel Slater and Felicity Cloake in The Guardian. From inspiration comes creation and thence dinner.
But let’s take a step back. The freewheeling, accident-embracing, throw-the-piano-down-the-stairs-to-see-what-it-sounds-like approach I invoked earlier still has to be built from a solid base of knowledge. I’m not just going to throw onion, jam, aubergine and mutton into a pan and wait for culinary lightning to strike. I can’t just throw words at you in a random order or invent a new language and expect you to find a glorious insight to existence in the mad jumble.
To put it another way, here’s Michael Blair, whose percussion played such a huge part in Waits’ new sound, on the songs Tom wrote for the records.
‘They were bulletproof. You couldn’t kill them! We could play stuff backwards and upside down and wrong, in that context, and Tom could pick what he wanted to use from that, and it always still sounded like the song, because they were just so well written. No matter what I did, no matter how weird it got, if I threw them down the stairs, the song still stood up.’
Michael Blair, percussionist on Swordfishtrombones.
Of course, this applies to any creative act. The old saw about knowing the rules before you can break them still holds true. If you’re baking especially, ratio of ingredients, oven temperature, the care needed in mixing and incorporation are all key to a successful end result. But once you know how the base concept works, you’re off to the races.
I know that a 500g loaf needs a liquid to dry goods ratio of 3 to 5, with a little salt and a teaspoon of yeast. After that, anything goes. Doesn’t really matter what kind of flour, if I throw seeds or fruit or cheese in. I know that, given time and a hot oven, it’s going to work.
It’s the early pioneers who amaze me. The folk who saw the way flour which had got wet and forgotten about fizzed up thanks to wild yeast in the air and turned into a sort of dough. What kind of mind, presented with that, thinks ‘Imma throw that in the oven and see what it tastes like?’ Those are the people who built the slab of knowledge from which I and everyone like me take our little creative jumps. The pioneers. The real wild bunch. My tribute to them is to make my own small leaps into the unknown.
Every time I walk into the kitchen or sit in front of my keyboard, I Embrace Uncertainty. Every chapter of The Swipe evolves organically from the things I read, watch, hear and eat during the week. The reason you don’t have Chapter 31 this week? There wasn’t enough to make the grade. That’s when I reach out to the universe (and yes, OK, my emergency bank of ideas) for a clue.
Even then, there’s no guarantee that I’ll end where I started. This piece was supposed to be about the way recipes and sheet music are loose blueprints for artistic expression, rather than the definitive version. That idea has gone back into the bank. It’ll come in handy one day.
For now though, I’m grateful for the happy accident which led you and I to this point on a warm Saturday morning in late summer, enjoying an existence where rules, once understood, can be pulled apart and bent to our will.
Tell us more, Tom.
See you next Saturday.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 