recipe; plural noun: recipes

     1. 
a set of instructions for preparing a particular dish, including a list of the ingredients required.

There are recipes for success, failure and everything in between.  Or are there?  I mean, I can give you directions on how to make the perfect bruschetta (Note:  And I will in a bit if you’re patient) but it might not come out exactly to your liking.  Or you could stray from my instructions and produce something much better and more to your liking.  That’s the thing with recipes.  They need to be adapted to the person or situation at hand.

For instance, last week I actually went to my local movie theatre (imagine!) and saw the new film, Noah.  Never mind that it was about a subject as old as the Bible because it quite literally dates back to a story told in that book that long ago.  This Noah promised to be, well, promising.  It’s directed and co-written by one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, Darren Aronofsky (yes, I loved Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream still haunts me,  and The Wrestler spoke to me quite personally about a guy in a neighborhood not totally dissimilar from my own).  The film was also rumored to employ all of the newest technology of the day in the service of updating a classic good vs. evil story that spoke to the issues of today.  And, most importantly, many of the extreme fundamentalist right wing nuts in this country were already up in arms about Noah’s heathen-like approach to religion weeks before it had even come out.  So, to quote an old Jewish philosopher and great aunt of mine, what could be bad???

Well… Noah could.  Though that’s solely my opinion about what seemed like a pretty good recipe on paper.  Still, the film that I saw featured a mumbling and earnestly crazed Russell Crowe doing Bible speak as if it were Shakespeare; CGI’d Transformer-like boulders with glowing eyes pulverizing tens of thousands of starving humans trying to come aboard a large CGI raft made up to look like an arc; and a dull, meandering narrative that precluded any possible thematic resonance to what I see as our contemporary world.

Yes, that’s merely one man’s (Note: this man’s) opinion.  Which is the point.

There is no real recipe for anything, nor has there even been – merely guidelines, suggestions and ideas.  No matter what you’re cooking up, you have to interpret your thoughts and the ideas of others in order to arrange them in something that makes sense to you at the time.  And even then, there is no guarantee of success, or even failure.  Merely a completion of the task that you hope upon hope will work for you and, perhaps, a few others.  And – if you’re really skilled or lucky – a number quite far beyond that.

This past week I was at the Finger Lakes Film Festival (FLEFF) in Ithaca, NY and spoke on a panel entitled Diaries of Dissonance: Filmmaking In And Outside the Mainstream.  It was an eclectic group of filmmakers, fundraisers, marketers, writers and educators speaking about the way new work is created, financed and exhibited in an ever-changing global media and political landscape.  That’s a lot of fancy words for questions like: Do you tailor your material to the big screen, Web, smart phone or iPad? How do you raise money for anything but the most mainstream pabulum?  Or – Why is the US trailing so many other countries in state-supported arts programs and how do we shift our value system back to a more community-based, less corporatist way of thinking?

Looking out into the faces of the many young people in the audience I was forced to reveal the answer that no one wants to hear – especially when they’re young.  And that is — there is no sure-fire recipe for any of that.  Nor does one exist for anything else.  Somehow it’s easier to believe that there is THE ANSWER out there rather than to shift one’s thinking to the truth that only educated trial and error amid real thought will get you to where you want to be rather than strict memorization and adherence to a pre-digested formula and/or set of rules guidebook that will guarantee you victory or your money back.

That is the excitement and the conundrum of working in the arts or doing anything creative.  In math 2+2=4 and in science the world is round and not flat (Note:  It’s  still safe to say the latter, right???).  Those formulas have been proven and do work 100% of the time.  However, the joy of creativity is that there are a myriad of answers to the telling of any one story and none of them are right or wrong.  They…..just….are.

It is particularly important to remember this when critiquing and counter-critiquing the work of the day.  Apparently, there was a media revolution last week with the airing of the series finale of the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother.  I know this not only as an obsessive culture vulture but as an observer of many college aged seniors and juniors whose voices angrily raised about three octaves shouting their post mortem horror and disgust at how disappointed they were that the mother was actually (SPOILER ALERT!) dead and their beloved Ted Mosby would probably wind up with Aunt Robin after all.

Yet to me, this seemed to be the right ending – probably because I stopped watching the show years ago right around the time after Ted and Robin broke up and each were moderately successful yet still somehow semi-miserable in their own single lives.  Of course, that could be a recipe all its own – bail years before something is over so you create the ending of your choosing rather than to wait for the real-life one that might displease you.  Ugh, I hope not.

In fact, when I tried to create a premature ending to what seemed like an endless 24-hour commute from Los Angeles to upstate N.Y. this weekend it fell flat miserably.   You know the drill — you get to the airport and your plane is taking off two hours late.  Then you arrive in a big city like NYC and you have a two-three hour layover to make a connection to a smaller city.  But the crew of the commuter plane you’re taking in the next flight has been delayed on its connecting plane and you have to wait another 90 minutes.  Then you’re on the ground in your plane for another hour in airport ground traffic.  Only to finally land in your location several hours late to find the car-rental place you used to reserve your vehicle to take you to your hotel closed at 12:30am and it’s now almost 1:00am.  So you wait in another company’s car rental line, get an alternative vehicle and drive though endless very dark roads in a new car where your lights don’t seem to get bright enough and your GPS suddenly goes in and out on the fritz.

You pray you will get to the hotel you’ve reserved in time and you don’t speed but you do go the speed limit, alternating between shining your bright headlights and keeping them low when appropriate.  After another 45 minutes you can practically see your destination on the horizon when the bright lights of a police car shine on you out of nowhere and pull you over on a highway that is about to end for no apparent reason whatsoever other than to tease you into believing you soon just might be able to rest.   Then, suddenly an extremely short Highway Patrolman with a shaved head, Pharrell Williams-type hat and an accent right out of Deliverance stops his car, leisurely ambles over and barely explains that when he shined his headlights at you back there that you shined yours back.  You quickly realize that clearly he took this as an insult and sign or disrespect when it was just merely a safety measure on your part to make sure that your lights were indeed working properly.

Anyway, he then leaves while you’re in mid-sentence in explanation and takes another 10 minutes in his car to write you a $210 ticket for failure to dim (could I make this up?) which you’re actually thankful for because you were sure he was using that time to impound your car and throw you in a rural jail where you would be sentenced to hard labor and never see the light of any highway ever again because you will be murdered in your cell for being gay, or for simply answering someone back in much too sassy a manner (Note: As if there’s a difference).

When you finally do get to the hotel at 3:30 am you notice that the warning at the bottom of the ticket stipulates that, if you attend, your hearing will be held in a criminal court – and that if you plead guilty to this offense you could have your license taken away.  This does not cheer you and will give you nightmares.  Most certainly, it has convinced you that there is, nor ever again will there be, any sure-fire recipe for reliable cross-country air travel.  Ever.  At least not in your lifetime.

Well, perhaps recipes are better left for food items since cooking, especially baking, lends itself a bit more to scientific formulas.  Of course, that might be the case in creating the dish but nothing more.  For instance, an article in the Huffington Post several days ago touted a headline offering The World’s Best Cake but when I clicked on the story I found that it was actually the world’s best cake according to the citizens of Norway and it showed an unappetizing photo of a large yellow rectangle with a heavy cream filled middle, topped with slivered almonds.  This all looked, quite frankly, disgusting.  Forget that personally I’m allergic to nuts but the idea that the world’s best cake could possibly not include — chocolate????  I don’t think so.

That being said, the following is the closest I can come to a sure thing.  It is a bruschetta recipe I appropriated from an old Italian cookbook and doctored a bit.  It’s simple and it never fails.

THE CHAIR’S BRUSCHETTA

1. Take three baskets of cherry tomatoes.  Cut then in half.  Put them on a baking sheet.  Sprinkle with kosher salt.

2. Roast them in a preheated oven at 250 degrees for two hours.  Then open the oven, sprinkle them with sugar lightly and continue roasting for another half hour.

3. Take them out of the oven and combine them with one additional basket of raw cherry tomatoes, also cut in half, or even thirds.

4. Pour one-third to one-half of a cup of olive oil (or a bit more) over it.  Then add in  a cup or two or chopped FRESH basil, a bit of salt and pepper.  Then mix and let it sit an hour or so.  Then add a bit more olive oil or salt/pepper to taste.

5. Serve on grilled sourdough, French or other rustic bread.  The best way to do this is brush the bread with olive oil on both sides and grill for 2 minutes on each side.  Take the bread off the heat, rub garlic on one side and cut it in slices.  Then spread a little bit of bruschetta mixture on the garlic side of each piece of bread.

It is FABULOUS.

Yes, there are no sure-fire recipes in the world but this is the closest to perfection that you will get.  Though in the off-chance you don’t like it you can go watch Noah – or better yet, drive an hour from the airport in upstate NY in the middle of the night, and tell me which of the three was the better experience.  Clearly, there are also no sure-fire wins in life, but I’m more than willing to take the above bet.