beetree

For all their research, however, the designers failed to capture the most alluring feature of Julia Child. Her cooking was always first and foremost a performance. Even if the kitchen could be planned and choreographed, the performance was created with each meal, in real time. This is why Child remains such a cultural force today. We might go out and buy the right gadgets, and they might now be designed ergonomically, but Child’s great insight is that cooking is about action. She inspired universal and accessible design, but she also transcended it, as it was realized commercially. Instead, she taught us that mastery does not reside in a set of objects; rather, it is about activating certain relationships to objects as a way to live, regardless of age, ability, or background.

“I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned,” for which he uses a process that involves chance. “There have been times when this has worried me a great deal, and I’ve seen this reliance on chance as a shortcoming on my part.” But, “it’s never blind chance: it’s a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I’ve worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I’m often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.”

The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out.