october '21

eat with your ears // issue 1

eat with your ears is a monthly newsletter devoted the food eaten and music heard in one month of michael thorson’s life. it’s rooted in food eaten and music heard in a month, but diverges into countless obsessions from poetry, to physics, to arboriculture (love them trees), to chinese tea cultivars. it’s not clear how anything in this newsletter—or in my life—is connected… but this is my attempt to draw lines between the far reaching corners.

let’s think of eat with your ears as a digital dinner table. you have no clue who the other guests at the table are, but someone is going to serve your inbox a hot, steaming, delectable plate of recipes, sounds, and images every month. eat with your ears believes that the best company is formed during the pleasure of sharing a meal. unfortunately, there isn’t a table big enough to fit all the people i love, so an e-meal will need to do… get it?! like email? but food…?

eat with your ears newsletter is a table of strangers and strange ideas linked together through quality food and music. thank’s for joining me at dinner.

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what’s cooking?

devoted to foods i ate this month that i wish i shared with all of you. the what’s cooking column simulates a meal across space and time using visual / textual representations of food that YOU can recreate in your own home. the future is now, i’m emailing you flavor [some assembly required]

pie preserves summer. as the blueberries fade, so do our memories of the bright ball of joy of the season. before the summer fruits decompose into fall, it’s our duty to juice every last blue orb for all it’s worth. i’ll miss blueberries’ bursting tartness, their tiny crowned belly buttons, and even the surprise runts that mush in my mouth and taste like mold. i honor the passing of summer with a blueberry pie paired enriched with an italian amaro— a bitter-sweet liqueur like campari or fernet for any uninitiated readers.

p.s. amari are aperitifs to aide with digestion after a meal. they are lower ABV than a spirit and have complex bitter-sweet flavor profiles. there are hundreds of unique amaro tastes ranging from orange-peel-rosemary (averna amaro) to licorice-cardamon (bigallet china china). both of these recommendations are perfect for baking pies or serving over ice as a no effort dessert replacement.

unrelated to summer OR italy: dates. dates fucking rule. celery however? kinda sucks. dates and celery though? transcendent.

inspired by a salad at the four horsemen restaurant in brooklyn, this celery date salad is crunchy, chewy, zesty, and most importantly: easy as hell to build. it’s hardy yet elegant— a cheat code to a self-indulgent weeknight dinner.

this salad will keep in the fridge for 2-3 days and get more tender as the lemon’s acidity softens up the celery. bon apple teeth!

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sauce . fm

[dance music / experimental / deejay mix]

sauce . fm is music for getting sucked into. it’s a DJ mix built for focus work, workouts, house work, or inner-work: it is rhythmic and hypnotic. sauce . fm can take all your attention or fade into the background depending on how you listen. it’s hard to figure out what the sauce is made of, but it’s full of flavor, layered, and well mixed — let’s get in it.

[no requests.]

september’s sauce . fm was inspired by my resurgent love of shoegaze—a genre of 90s rock music with heavily affected instrumentation where dreamlike vocals are distorted until they begin to blend with guitar, keyboard, and even drums. pioneered by bands like the cocteau twins and my bloody valentine, shoegaze is a fuzzy and disorienting sound that pulls listeners through blurry emotions and drops them off in the vacuum space. apparently it’s a self-indulgent genre like metal or noise rock—at it’s peak, most of its audiences were made of other shoegaze bands.

i always felt the hypnosis of dance music gave off a similar float-i-ness and ethereal feeling to shoegaze… so this month’s sauce . fm explored the mix between soft swirling techno and the dripping web of shoegaze i love. as always, there are some surprise left-turns to keep things ~saucy~

Soundcloud Link

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potluck radio

a community playlist from all the eat with your ears readers. add a few songs and check back in to discover what other readers are listening to. just like a potluck dinner has unspoken rules— potluck radio does too.

no one’s judging what you bring, but we’ll all know who brought the best dish by the time dinner is over. drop the best songs you’ve eaten this month.

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leftovers

[you don’t need this]

the leftovers section is designed to fill up whatever room you have left in your brain after a multi-course email e-meal. honestly, it probably won’t be the substance you need—or even want..? sometimes it’s sweet, sometimes it’s bitter, but it’s always some back-corner-of-the-refrigerator ideas from michael’s mind. no food-for-thought goes to waste in this house even if it truly should be in the garbage can.

last month, i rewatched Arrival (2016) and reread Slaughter House 5 by Kurt Vonnegut so i ended up thinking wayyy too much about time. both orbit the idea of a human becoming unstuck in time, experiencing the future, past, and present simultaneously. i started to wonder why humans can remember the past, but can’t seem to remember the future. is there a reason time only moves forward?

down the rabbit hole we go!

physicists call the direction of time “the arrow of time”. british astronomer arthur eddington defined this term 1927 while investigating why the arrow of time seems to point forward towards the future but never towards the past: a cup shatters when it falls off the table but it never seems to reassemble from pieces scattered on the floor.

although this intuitively makes sense—things fall apart—it’s important to ask: is this always true or just our perception? in mechanical physics, our equations function the same forwards as they do backwards. a video of a ball rolling forward would look OK played in reverse too. imagine a disorganized pool table where a perfectly calculated shot sends scattered pool balls back into perfect pool pyramid. it’s improbable, but mechanical physics tells us it could happen— each ball’s ricochet makes sense.

thermodynamics however— the process of heat, energy and its dissipation in a system— is asymmetrical. the law of 2nd law of thermodynamics describes entropy which states that the disorder of a system always increases. it is the only time asymmetric equation in physics. the creamer will always mix evenly throughout your coffee, but will never suddenly separate or reorganize itself.

if the entire universe was a cup of coffee and the big bang was a splash of milk, we can say the universe is still mixing— so it’s possible that there are local regions in the cup where coffee and milk are separating. total entropy of the universe increases (like in this minute physics video), but it’s possible that entropy of some regions may decrease (like in this quantum computer)

lol, so what???

well… if entropy caused the arrow of time to point forward, then time would reverse in these regions. it makes me think that entropy does not cause the arrow of time to point forward— it’s still a mystery. it’s interesting to think that there’s not really an explanation for why we can’t remember the future. so what would it feel like to be unstuck in time?

imagine the past like a line: a series of single events that we can remember leading from the past to today. we can retrace our path through cause and effect, but there are many forks in the path ahead— many possible futures.

some people believe in fate— only a single future— but quantum physicist werner heisenberg might disagree: the universe is not deterministic, but it is probabilistic. heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that if we know precisely where an electron is at a given time, we cannot know where it moving next (cool visual of what that looks like)

stretched into an analogy about life— if we know where we are in time “today” then we cannot know where we will be “tomorrow”. we have some freedom to move through time how we please. the electron’s location and motion have limits however we can’t perfectly pin it down and therefore it can’t teleport to mars either.

i like to think of the present as a point on the end of the past’s line, and the future as cone similar to the places the electron could appear next. the edge of the cone is the limits of every possible future— kinda like this drawing some futurist or corporate career counselor on the internet drew.

the particular future we pass through will be the line of life we choose or are chanced into living. some futures are simply impossible: no set of choices will earn me a gold medal in dead lifting after shoulder surgery—the electron can’t teleport to mars— but i could win gold in speed walking. it’s improbable that i’ll ever be an astronaut too, but it’s possible.

lol, so what???

well, what if the arrow of time didn’t point forwards? what if we could remember all our possible futures before we actually passed into them? we’d have memories of the feelings we haven’t actually felt yet. joy and suffering would still exist, so would birth and death. successes, failures, love, loneliness. friends would come and go.

we’d remember each feeling ever felt, right now and for all time.

if the arrow of time faded, i think life would be the opposite of boring or predictable— life would be richer in experience than we can fathom in just one lifetime. we would realize that our sadness would fade and our happiness would too. it might loosen our tight grip on them— the craving for these feelings to last forever. life would play out similar to the way it already moves… but with less resistance.

imagine making choices without the loom of unknown consequences

imagine sitting in the blissful quiet of today without any urgency to prepare for tomorrow.

imagine letting life pass through you instead of you moving through life.

if our perception of time dissolved, i think we would make peace with our limits and the anxiety that arises from ambiguity would disappear. i think we’d feel more than we could in just one lifetime: life would feel even richer than it already is.

sometimes when i feel lost and confused in my twenties, i like to think about the arrow of time dissolving entirely. i like to create lifetimes in my head and watch them play out like movies. some are short films, some are comedies, some are epics, some are tragedies, but all these images are so so beautiful.

so it goes…