view from a room
My mom’s friend Chelo has a special chef in her kitchen.
He watches over Chelo and her kitchen like the Roman Lares used to do.
This is who he takes care of, and who he sees every day. Chelo is second from the left. My mom is on her right.
Chef seems to do play two parts in the kitchen:
cubby | February 1, 2009Chef seems to do play two parts in the kitchen:
1. lucky charm – to enhance cooking
2. be the eyes that give a new view – this one sounds abstract, but when i look at Chef in these first two pictures, the way I look at the final picture of the kitchen is altered – i adopt his perspective – so i think he is there for people to put themselves in his shoes — it reminds me of how often my family sits around and looks at my cat looking at us in our kitchen – i think part of the fun of having him around is to remind us of another completely different lifestyle (extremely difft lifestyle… a different species ) in the context of our most domestic moments — we think, ‘gee, i wonder what robie must think of this’ and we have fun imagining for each other captions for his expressive gestures of reaction. are house pets just around to react to human behavior?
anyway
I wonder – are chef’s two roles so distinct? How does chef’s blessing connect to his watching?
might the notion of ‘watching over,’ inhabit a relational space between blessing/protecting/charming and eying?
we’ve all heard of guardian angels, but it is interesting to imagine what can be contributed by simply gazing on. i spend much time thinking about the dangers of looking – to me, not all image/video sharing is to be celebrated – i think a lot about dangers of appropriation. but chef’s angelic presence reminds me more of something like jane jacob’s “eyes on the street.” for chef and for jacobs, eyes are on shared physical space — does this transfer to cyber space? i feel like the rules change, you?
i like this, cubby. i like your suggestion (i think
Jane | February 1, 2009i like this, cubby. i like your suggestion (i think you’re suggesting this) that there is danger in appropriating chef’s look, which as you’re saying is kind of easy to do. i’m wondering where we could locate that danger. i don’t want to be overbearingly simple-minded about this, but i still want to ask the question: what is a fat black chef guardian angel?
and then i have this other question: maybe are you identifying the danger of adopting the chef’s look? is it because the look belongs to something racist? maybe it’s just scary that we’re trying to find a point of view in an object with racist cultural trappings.