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The culinary arts without a doubt require the skill, dexterity, creativity, and thoughtfulness as artworks of sculpture, painting, or installation. Similar to fashion and pulling away from traditional forms of art, the culinary arts are transformative because you can live your life with it.  However, similar to “hipsters” of late who only know Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm” or Warhol’s “Campbell Soup,” the culinary arts have become more and more of a blockbuster spectacle, throwing around words such as “confit,” “aoli,” and “truffle fillintheingredient,” making dishes seem elevated to gourmet heights when really, there’s just fried food and mayonnaise.

(Note: There is definitely still an appreciation for fried food, mayo, and truffle ANYTHING, but the regularity of these words to attempt to elevate food make the usage of these deceitful and manipulative).

The culinary mass culture is something that I most definitely do not denounce. In fact, I find it exciting to learn about other cultures and cuisines. However, the pretention that follows in restaurants creates an environment that falsely advertises poorly made cuisine into something that tricks people into liking it based on its fancier forename.

I am not claiming to be a connoisseur of the refined culinary arts, nor do I have the skill to create food much better than those of the restaurants I criticize and dine. However, what is frustrating are those who lack in execution, complexity in flavor, service, and authenticity that create an environment seemingly counterfeit.   The appreciation for true gourmet is becoming lost upon us as we demand foods that are fancier than their true being. For example, “Lean and tender pork loin chops crusted with panko and togarashi, with grilled vegetables, lentils and a shallot soy-mustard sauce” actually translates to a regular Don Katsu Pork Chop with overly sweet and salty vegetables (not actually grilled), dry lentils, and a sugary sweet glaze to top.  Why not make the food simpler, better executed, and honest?

Joining Jennifer Lawrence tonight on Saturday Night Live will be the folk/acoustic band from Denver, Colorado The Lumineers. Growing more popular by the day, The Lumineers have charmed listeners with their catchy, earthy instrumentals and chilling vocals. The band formed after frontman Jermeiah Fraites’ brother died from a drug overdose. In an attempt to cope with the loss, Fraites began writing and performing music with his brother’s best friend. After moving to Denver, the pair met Neyla Pekarek, and the trio formed. The story of the band’s inception translates to their music; most of their songs exude a beautifully dark tone along with a deep and relevant message. Their self-titled debut album “The Lumineers” provides a relaxing, cohesive range of songs, each one worth a listen.

The band is most famous for “Ho Hey,” an endearing love song sung in a chant-like response. This track can stick in your head for days, and is quickly rising the top hits charts around the country. However, the album is much deeper than its single; “Submarines” and “Big Parade,” the two most up-beat songs on the album, elevate the overall tone and add a much needed change in tempo. They contrast this with most of the other tracks; “Dead Sea,” “Stubborn Love,” “Flapper Girl” and “Classy Girls” all embody the folk/acoustic genre. They are slow, melodious and pleasant songs, but each has a distinct sound to it. While the topics vary, each song touches upon human interaction, and specifically love. In essence, this album is one giant love song, and should be listened to as such. I recommend playing this album on constant shuffle; do not worry about where one song ends and the next begins, and allow yourself to become hypnotized by the powerful and soft melodies.

Top Tracks: Stubborn Love, Ho Hey, Submarines and Dead Sea

I’m not sure why but I’ve been reminiscing about India a lot recently. Perhaps because it’s been a while since I’ve gone back and thus, my mind has decided to romanticize the notion of the country. Perhaps because I’m bored in Ann Arbor and India holds promises of adventure. Perhaps it’s because I am growing up and desperately long to hold whatever wisps I have left of my childhood.

And for some odd reason, I have missed rangoli more than anything. (In my language, Telugu, they’re called “muggulu” but most English words that describe Indian culture come from the national language, Hindi, but we’ll save the linguistics lecture for another day.) Rangoli are designs drawn with chalk, loose chalk dust, paint, or flowers outside the house, and less commonly, inside the house as well.

Simple ones are drawn everyday to decorate the house. My grandmother would ensure that by the time the sun was finished rising, there was a rangoli drawn outside. And as the sun set, the entire house, including the exterior, would be swept and a fresh one was drawn. She considered a house not decorated with a rangoli to be inappropriate and cold, inhospitable. When I came to the carpeted world that is America, the lack of the colors outside houses welcoming me only added to the infinite grayness of the frigid buildings.

Rangolis are ingrained into Indian culture at an inexplicable level. There are rangoli competitions and for festivals, rangolis go from simple chalk drawings to elaborate works of art. Women flock totemples to draw rangolis together. Gods and stories are drawn out. They become vehicles of expression and protest and love and tradition. Sometimes, I see my mother absentmindedly doodling rangolis on scrap pieces of paper while speaking on the phone and wonder how much she wishes to press and flick colorful chalk the way so many generations of women had done before her. Whether she thought our home was incomplete because there were no chalk flowers adorning it. Sometimes, I wonder if I had it in me, that inane agility of the hand to curve in a way that enchanted me whenever I saw someone draw a rangoli. I had tried it once, when I was younger, with loose powder. I sucked. I was trying to draw a favorite god of mine and He ended up looking like a weird blob. The girl next door giggled but reassured me that it came with practice. Oh. Okay. So when can I practice? The few months I spend in India every few years? Grr.

My mother still draws rangolis. Every festival, she goes outside and draws a tiny flower with some flour (loose chalk powder can’t be found in the States). And I think while that flower remains untarnished, our house becomes a home, filled with the infinite colors of a rangoli.

Artificial languages are constructed for a variety of reasons— as ways to make communication easier, as logical exercises, as creative works.  J. R. R. Tolkien’s repertoire of invented languages falls into this last category, this category of artistic languages that have been crafted with a care and given a historical weight that mirror natural languages. With fully developed grammars and vocabularies, and some even with their own alphabets and scripts, they might even be the subject of study for the rest of us, much like any other foreign language.

Tolkien, a linguist, was particularly well-versed in historical Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Scandinavian varieties) and in Finnish (related to virtually none of the other European languages). This becomes evident in the astounding number of today football predictions from the experts Elvish languages and dialects he develops, modeled primarily after Finnish, replete with older varieties that change into more modern ones, varieties that split and merge and evolve. One of his most well-developed languages is an Elvish one, containing well over 25,000 words.

His “Black Speech” of Mordor is thought to most closely resemble, at least in vocabulary, to an extinct Mesopotamian language.

The Germanic languages manifest themselves in the speeches of other races in his world, in the form of older versions of languages that we know today. Old Norse, for instance. Old Icelandic, Old English. In fact, the speech of Rohan very nearly is Old English. We see eorl, “noble” (earl, etc) in the name Eorl. Dun, in placenames such as Dunland (“…they drove your people into the hills, to scratch a living off rocks!”),  closely resembles the word down, as in downland, a type of hilly landscape. And Theoden the king takes his name from none other than Þeoden— “lord.”

And the point of all this explanation? The point is to illustrate the depth and detail that went into every constructed language. Tolkien did not throw together a random assortment of funny-sounding words and syllables together; each one of his languages has rules and patterns for spellings and pronunciations and sentence constructions, much as any other language that we know. The appearance of invented speeches and writing systems visible in Lord of the Rings is merely the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Not only have they been used to give his characters histories, but his entire fictional world histories, complex intertwined histories that root the narratives in time and geographical space and establish them as all the more real, all the more tangible.