We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule – a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool – that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to sympathize with or understand. In this age of Gawker.com, we have forgotten the seventies spirit of mockery that smirks at the pretensions and fatuities of others in a way that originates with and encompasses ourselves. Aton for atom, we are made of exactly the same stuff as all the stars and galaxies.

It’s uneven, but where Manhood for Amateurs shines, it really shines.

The challenge, I think, is that food at that kind of restaurant, particularly if you are not a professional food critic, lacks a set of genres and comparables for you to make sense of it. Here’s what I mean: if you have a great slice of pizza, you know what makes a great slice. You have eaten pizza enough times not just to have strong preferences about thick v thin crust, saucy, loads of toppings v minimilist, but also to know what criteria to use to judge said slice. If you are a New Yorker, it’s probably going to be judged differently than if you are a Chicagoan. But that’s fine, of course. The point is that you have a referent for what your ideal pizza is going to be.

Likewise for most foods that you eat on a regular basis, and even new foods that you don’t eat on a regular basis. It is wonderful to taste new and delightful things prepared in an excellent fashion. They expand your taste. But at the same time, the foods at Per Se are a combination of small bites (there are many small plates) and tastes for which you probably have no referent. As Sifton notes about the green salad:

a simple garden salad is the functional equivalent of an aria — particularly as sung at Per Se, with compressed figs and young red beets, Hakurei turnips (small, plump and white, very cute in aspect), red ribbon sorrel and a coulis of pine nuts. Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs.

It’s out of this world, I have no doubt. But you don’t know if it’s sweet, bitter, sour, rich, bright. I found myself describing every dish as amazing, but like nothing I had eaten before. What’s so interesting about Per Se is not, as Sifton says, that it “represents the ideal of an American high-culture luxury restaurant.” It is almost a form of outsider art. And you know what? That’s roughly the same language people use to talk about elBulli, and Alinea, two other meccas of modern high gastronomy.

Which is kind of fabulous, really. Normally, outsider art is used to describe people whose work is created outside the bounds of cultural, artistic conventions. Watts Towers is a good example. There are many. Most of the time, outsider art remains, well, outside. But sometimes its aesthetic, form, technique, or ideals get incorporated into the existing orbit of ‘conventional’ art, changing those conventions.

But Per Se is happening at a different kind level, the same way that molecular gastronomy and elBulli-type innovation works. Here is how Anthony Bourdain described Thomas Keller in a Cook’s Tour:

What’s missing from all the wild praise of Keller, his cooks, his restaurant, and his cookbook is how different he is. You can’t honestly use terms like the best or better or even perfect when you’re talking about Thomas Keller, because he’s not really competing with anybody. He’s playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He’s doing things most chefs would never attempt – in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers.

It’s possible, I think, to simply chalk this up to Weberian charismatic authority, as with someone like Steve Jobs. But I think it’s helpful in the case of Per Se to think about how conventions ground us. I came out of Per Se thinking that it was a wonderful meal, but not one that I can even remember in any kind of detail – there wasn’t enough that I was familiar enough with for me to do that. I had a gnocchi dish once at Tru in Chicago that made me swoon; a wild combination of substantial but not heavy, rich without cloying. I still remember how it tasted. By contrast, I can’t remember a single dish I had at Per Se. They were heavenly, but essentially all unreproducible.

And this, for me, is what’s interesting. Sometimes you can be different by doing what everyone else is doing, but doing it so much better that it takes on a kind of phase-shifting, difference-of-degree-becomes-difference-of-kind. This seems very different from doing something just plain different from what everyone else is doing. Analytically, it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how this is working, but it seems really important.

This year, I suspect I’ll just miss out on a ton of freaked out Democrats, outraged racially-tinged Republican attacks, based-on-whatever-this-second’s-data-almost-says prognostications about markets, breathlessly reported Sarah Palin tweet-farts, and the like

And so I come back, and find that nothing in the world has changed. Earthquakes, floods, miners trapped. This is expected, and tragic. I am surprised to see so little about the BP Oil Spill, which was the MOST IMPORTANT THING before I signed off the newswagon. And of course I am surprised and unsurprised by the mosque-thing. That squeaked past my news embargo. It is exactly what I mean by nothing happens in August. And now apparently Democrats are doooooooooooomed!1!! But the truth is, nothing has really changed since early summer though, so I think that’s a little overblown as well. I guess we shall see.

I did catch the Cee-Lo song, courtesy of WITW, natch. Anything else I missed?

Scenario 1:
In the first case, we have a series of attributes attached to a person, and then we can make arguments (empirical, theoretical) about how these attributes lead to outcomes. A person who is value-conscious is likely to pass on high-ticket items; a person who is sexually adventurous is likely to seek out partners to participate in kinky sex; a person who likes crappy romantic comedies is likely to see Miss Congeniality.

To make these kinds of arguments, we would have to seek out attributes to are causally related to the outcomes in question. In this case, if we want to predict what kinds of parties a person would want to go to, we would ask questions about their introvertedness/extrovertedness and the results of these questions would have a positive/negative/null effect on the kinds of parties they either go to or report going to. That is, the empirical and theoretical difficulty is in finding variables related to the outcomes we want to know about.

Scenario 2:
In the second scenario, the argument is that we should give primacy to a likeness or correspondence analysis to help understand what kinds of parties you want to go to – and a whole host of other things.

In this case, we rely less on the causal relationship between introvertedness and the kinds of parties you would want to go to, and more on the fact that whatever you want to do, another person who is just like you would also want to do those same things. If this were true, then what’s important is not so much to find a causal link between what kind of person you are and what kinds of parties you want to go to. Instead, the challenge is in finding what makes you different from one person and similar to another. If we can somehow ‘clump’ all the similar people, we would be more likely to know what kinds of things they like and do, regardless of their specific characteristics.

In this case, a person who is value-conscious, sexually adventurous, or likes crappy romantic comedies is likely to like the same kinds of things as other people who are value-conscious, sexually adventurous, or who have questionable movie tastes.

I think that approach #2 is behind much of the recommendation engine work that has emerged of late, but I’m wondering in a more and more pointed fashion which of these is a more reasonable approach to understanding what people like. What do you lurkers think?

Now I read that NBC is about to get swallowed by Comcast, and I think it’s a matter of time before we see the tick-tock of Leno’s contribution to this overall state of the media world. For what it’s worth, I think Leno is truly, truly bad, both an unabashed corporate sellout shill and a terrible interviewer to boot.