I miss my long-time friend, Jeremy Gabriel Good - please contact me again !

Dear Christine, Do you remember the case of Jeremy Good ? I took a trip to Portland, Oregon in 1992 to visit Ivar and, during my time there, I became friends with both Jeremy Good and John Anders. Well, Jeremy made such a big impression on me that I brought back several examples of his drawings and writings and I eventually showed them to you in North Carolina. As I recall, you found it very interesting stuff, noting in particular his penchant from composing symmetrically abstract artwork; indeed, you thought it contained signs of a tortured genius, possible schizo-affective. Below is an email he sent me several years ago, when I was still living in New Jersey. --ABN Read below: ================================== From: Rhino Reason To: Andrew B. Noselli Subject: Anyone can cook. Date: Sunday, May 10, 2009, 8:20 AM Andrew: After our conversation yesterday on the topics of chauvinism, snobbery and literature, I thought I'd like to share with you some analysis I wrote. Hopefully you will enjoy reading it. - Jeremy Have you seen Ratatouille? If not, this email contains spoilers if you think that's important. If so, I would hope you will want to watch these clips again anyway. Be sure to watch them in the course of reading my description. By the way, the whole film has been put on youtube, last I saw... I sent this email to my father and likened Anton Ego to a friend of his at Yale's, one Peter Iseman, a displaced New Yorker. My father wrote back, "He does remind me of Peter, in both his egoistic and kinder incarnations" and went on to make what I took to be a gauche reference to Proust (but unlike my father, I haven't read Proust). Ratatouille happened to be on cable and I watched it again recently and then I watched and rewatched several times the scene containing the second clip below. I didn't know why I was watching it so much. Finally I had what I took to be a new insight and I thought I'd write you an email for the purpose of sharing it with you. On Abney's 7th birthday I think it was, I took her and several of her friends to see Rataouille. Well, it's such a well done film and was positively received among actual chefs in France, I read. This first clip isn't the part where Anton Ego is introduced. He is introduced ridiculing the title of a popular cookbook written by Gasteau, the dead ghost chef who guides the rat protaganist through the movie. The title is Anyone Can Cook. That just doesn't fit in with Anton Ego's super-elitist approach to the world. He goes on to give Gusteau's restaurant a negative review, causing Gusteau heartbreak and causing his restaurant to lose one of its stars in its rating. Which can be an absolutely catastrophic event in the world of fancy dining. I recently saw a documentary about a fancy restaurant opening in NYC by the family of a famous chef patriarch. Much of the effort and discussion hinged around the family's hope for a good review and when they only got two stars, what measures they took to up it to three stars (hiring a new head chef among them). Gusteau in fact dies partly due to heartbreak over this sad state of affairs. So Anton Ego is set up to be a peculiar antagonist, the archvillain of the movie. Once Gusteau restaurant starts to gain in popularity because of the teamwork of his unwitting heir with the genius chef rat hidden in his toque, it comes to Anton Ego's attention that Gusteau is gaining prestigious status again. This irks him and he sets on knocking Gusteau back to size again. In this opening part of this scene in the clip below, he is seen laboring over his skull-shaped typewriter beneath a gloomy, frowning self-portrait in a ginormous studio with impossibly tall ceilings. Towards the latter half of this clip, the young fresh owner of the restaurant fresh-faced unwitting heir to the Gusteau fortune, Linguini Maquette sits beside his lover and sous chef Remy. Anton Ego stalks in and insultingly challenges Linguini to find a way of pleasing his palate. Linguini hits Anton Ego back with the remark: "For someone who loves food, you're pretty skinny." Here is my favorite moment of the movie when Anton Ego responds gloweringly: "I don't like food. I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow it." He goes on to unload on the Maitre D' a bit of hellacious snobbery while challenging the chef to present any food item he pleases, certain that it won't appeal to his attenuated sense of refinement. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=2EEKcWoyuEw&feature=related Then comes the scene which Abney said was her favorite at the time and I remember feeling impressed with her for realizing what it was, a flashback. The sequence comes at the beginning of this next clip. The intermittent scene is missing from this email but what happens in the kitchen is that the rat decides to make Anton Ego a very simple dish, one not associated generally with haute cuisine, ratatouille, referred to dismissively by the sous chef as a "peasant dish." Well, never was such a simple dish so guilefully prepared, never were the vegetables in ratatouille so thinly sliced and artfully arranged. But that's not what gets to Monsieur Ego who is not so easily impressed. The moment he puts a forkful in his mouth, it brings him back to a different day and time, to when he was just a poor, skinny peasant boy, presumably targeted by bullies, arriving home from school full of hurt feelings. And there is his loving mother, who is sympathetic and working hard to comfort him. She presents him with a dish she toiled over. It happens to be ratatouille, and this version is prepared not so fancily. The single bite produces an instant shock to the venerable critic Anton causing him to drop his pen and shaking him "to his core" as he says in his review the next day. The reason it produces such an effect on him is not just the chance coincidence it presents of being one of his childhood favorite comfort foods and reminding him of his mother's love, care and attention. It also causes him to doubt his own philosophy, the idea that only the selected few are capable of presenting worthwhile fare. The revelation leads him to a change of heart and causes him to embrace the more egalitarian philosophy of Gusteau. This is brought home to him particularly when he finds that the chef is nothing but a common rat. He writes very eloquently about it in his review and displays a rare depth of introspection and humaneness. The fine actor Peter O'Toole later won an Oscar for the way he portrayed Anton Ego's voice. In this clip is the speech, and below I have copied it. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JDK2azVSE5Q&feature=related The film has an extremely happy ending, one where the conflict of rat and human is surprisingly and neatly resolved and everyone is given a satisfactory place in their universe, with a beautiful kitchen modified ergonomically to specially accomodate the rat head chef.. A tinier rat restaurant sits above the human restaurant, a place where families can relax and cultivated, civilized rats enjoy one another's company. Well, there are other things about this movie that I loved, the romance I thought was endearing, the realistic presentation of how things are done in a kitchen was nifty. A friend who has written a book on her experience as a caretaker of rats informs me that the rats' movements are realistic. Anton Ego's Review: In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook". But I realize - only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more. I HAVEN'T HEARD FROM HIM IN SEVERAL YEARS, MAYBE YOU CAN WRITE TO HIM AND ENCOURAGE HIM TO GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE AT BEING HIS FRIEND ? Happy Thanksgiving, Andrew N.