Dog Hood

When the couch was against the wall I would refer to it as the dog's jungle gym. But now that we are in the new place, the couch is no longer against the wall and the couch is still the dogs jungle gym. They hang out on the arms and back of the sofa and so far, they haven't fallen off, though they've missed a few jumps from the slippery floor to the top of the couch back. It's a good thing it's a camel backed couch because it's fun to see them go up the camel's hump to get to the other arm. This new neighborhood is very doggie. And unlike NYC, the dog people introduce themselves and then their dogs. So you have to remember two or three names for each pooch you meet on the street. I feel the need for ginkgo biloba living here. There is a wide variety of doggieness too, and nary a golden lab in the bunch. We have two Italian Greyhounds, one basset hound, a basenji (notice I'm doing the hound group first) some gigantor yappy pekes, various shepards and pits, a dalmatian mix that bit one of the little greyhounds and a mastiff. Yep, across the street there is a 190 pound, unneutered male mastiff. It's like having a pony on the street. I often think that whoever was developing the dog breeds had no sense, like breeding all those flat faced dogs who can't breathe or English Bulldogs who can't reproduce without artificial insemination and c-sections, but the world is a better place because no one in their right mind would actually breed a mastiff sized dog with a jack russell's temperament. Imagine. It's scary.
Hey the spell check wanted to change unneutered to unbuttered!

Organic

We drove down to LA and it's been raining forever so the hills were green and covered with wildflowers and there was a dusting of snow on the peaks of the Tejon Pass. The hounds were remarkably well behaved; for hounds.
Napa for my birthday was wondereful, especially Bouchon and the mudbaths. There is this totally weird moment with mud baths where you simply don't want to get in and get DIRTY! But you screw your courage to the sticking point and wallow in like a pig and you are rewarded with flotation warmth. Your body is supported by the mud, so you really don't have to do anything while your joints and muscles ooze into relaxation. But it's really hard to get in or out, and you make a little popping sucking noise as you get out.
The profliteroles at Bouchon arrive in a trio huddled together on the center of the plate, and with a big boat of warm chocolate sauce. The choux pastry (which they put herbs in and poach to make gnochi which are also incredible) was warm and recently made, often you have profliteroles and the pastry is popped onto a ball of ice cream and then frozen so you are eating frozen pastry which is not good. But these were pretty much the platonic ideal of profliteroles, the chocolate sauce combined with the ice cream and the whiff of pastry - yum. Good vanilla ice cream and rich bittersweet chocolate sauce is a damn good combo.
On Sunday we went to the farmer's market in Santa Monica after a long walk on the beach. I bought bags of organic baby lettuces , fresh herbs, asparagus and strawberries. That evening I pan seared chicken breasts stuffed with butter and tarragon then baked them, while I then sauteed the asparagus with lemon and tarragon and butter and a few walnuts. It was very fresh and the aspargus was divine.
Last night I took the organic baby lettuces and made a salad.
We have lemons in the garden so I made a dressing with olive oil and lemon, threw in some turkey bacon for protein. After we had made a significant dent in the ORGANIC salad, a green beatle walked out of the ORGANIC baby lettuces on my plate and across the table.
Which was a kind of protein I hadn't been anticipating.

Smash Blatt Pop!

Everyone is rather wrapped up in their own lives; certainly I am. I know what I've just done and what I've got to do, and I sort of plod along getting stuff done. Rather like my life is a sphere, my recent past is visible behind me and my soon to be future is in front and I sort of walk along in my sphere, interacting with other people in their spheres, but only if I know them and checking in on the globe sphere occasionally - mostly through the new York times and NPR. Areas of intersection; where my sphere is also a subsets of your sphere.

But every once in a while something happens that breaks into your sphere, an unforeseen intersection, a smashing. And your present is twisted and spun - and someone else is flailing and distressed, distorting your expected path, and then they are gone. Leaving a dark smoke that slowly dissipates until you can't believe that this event happened. And because you didn't know them there is a gap; an impact and no follow up.

This is not my normal kind of post, so please feel free to skip it.

The day before the movers were to come, I was packing in the kitchen, not really listening to the radio. I'm embarrassed to say that it was Prairie Home Companion on the radio. But I wasn't listening closely and I was using packing paper so I was crinkling and noisy. I heard something, it wasn't quite what a packing Sunday was supposed to sound like. I walked into the living room and stared at the radio. It is pretty obvious that you will never hear on Prairie Home Companion actual anguish, Garrison Keillor never writes "Oh God! Help me, Please Help Me! Dear God Help!"

Clearly something was wrong in Sacramento that day. So I walked outside and didn't see anything, and called something out like "Do you need help?" And a young woman flung herself up the stairs at me; crawling. Luckily G., the woman in the next apartment over came out. M., the young woman, was hysterical, she had long brown hair with punk red streaks and a white t-shirt and white skirt, brown hippie boots. G. and I got M. up off the ground. M. had come home just now and found that her boyfriend had shot himself in the head while she was gone. So I left M. in G's arms and called 911.

That sounds so factual, but it wasn't experienced that way. I can still hear M.'s shrieks in my mind, her repetitive shouting, trying to give us information, trying to make sense of what had happened. Her grief and guilt. While she was so upset she couldn't remember her mother or father's phone numbers, she was able to get out an astonishing amount of information. Stuff that I would never have known, since she and her boyfriends were not very visible in the apartment complex. They had cars that had bumper stickers that were references to some obscure bit of popular culture that I didn't grok. Later C. and I went and looked at the bumper stickers - "There's that kid on the escalator again" - from some Kevin Smith film. So as a couple, they were "arty" and obviously, very fragile. Something I understand.

Here's what I gathered from M.. They had had a fight, she had spent the weekend at her mom's house. He had promised that he wouldn't do this to her (commit suicide). She didn't think that there were any bullets for the shotgun in the house. (But again, this is Sacramento, and as you can tell from my Armory Sign post, bullets were just minutes away on J Street). Her cats were there. She didn't have keys to the apartment, he had blood in his mouth. It was all her fault, she killed him. She had to make it all better, what would make it all better. They were going to get married. How was she going to tell his mother? He had promised he wouldn't do this to her. He hadn't answered any of her phone calls all weekend. She should have come sooner, she had killed him because she wasn't there. How was it going to get better?

The police came in what I'm sure was a reasonable amount of time but which seemed like forever when you have an hysterical girl on your hands and you don't know why. We got hold of the parents, and they came by. The police took statements. They were professional. M. lost it more and more throughout the day. But the parents, police and police chaplains took her off our hands and we went from holding a moist hysterical young woman with compassion but little ability to by standers.

But there it was, her smashed sphere was rolled away, and my sphere was left smoking.

Here today

Gone to LA tomorrow. Well not tomorrow, but I will be taking a little break from the blog to pack and move. And bravely go eat at one of the best restaurants in the Napa Valley for my birthday and have a mud bath. But I have had several job interviews, and I am packing everything I own, so I deserve a little break. Check back in late next week. I promise to repoort back on the proffliteroles at Bouchon. Ciao.

Signs: Mercury Cleaners

So we went out to this mexican restaurant and there was the ubiquitous flat TV screen framed on the wall of the bar. It was playing some sort of fishing show. Now, I really like the fishing show "Fishing with John" but since that is sort of a retro-ironic everything in quotes fishing show, I'm not sure that it counts as a fishing show. But that is my exposure to fishing shows. One of the things about having a TV set that is cable only and being too stingy to actually buy cable services is that I have absolutely NO IDEA about what is on TV. So I am always both appalled and fascinated that restaurants would put TVs up because really I want to spend time dining with my friends and noticing the food and not looking at TV. But you can't NOT LOOK at TV, it's like a train wreck. So there was this fishing show, I'm eating my guacamole and drinking this lovely Malbec from Argentina and I think: "Wow, what a great gig, to be the camera man on a fishing show!" It's not complex camera work. It's not like the f-stop would change at all. You just bob about on a boat pointing the camera at the deep blue sea, or the stupid guy commenting about fishing (that must be really hard, to make something up about fishing, which is basically waiting until a fish bites your line -- it's almost as boring as watching golf) and then if they catch something you point the camera at the net. Meanwhile all you have to do is bob along on the boat and make sure your sun block is applied. What a great gig. When the fisher dude caught the fish, he took the hook out and released the fish. Catch and release that was the name of the game.

So I was totally unprepared for what happened next.

Who knew there was a
Hunt Fish Cook channel??? The next show was some weird sort of homoerotic hunting program. Two guys dressed in camouflage outfits were wandering around the spooky forest; using whistles to lure turkeys. When they had spied the turkey nest they put camouflage masks on their faces and hid themselves in the bushes. They guy who wore glasses took off his glasses. Does someone see the problem with this? Someone who needs glasses to see takes them off to shoot at things. Would you want to work camera on this show? No way. Then they actually SHOT the turkey - and the two men ran to each other from their respective hiding places and did a little hooting dance over the dead turkey. Then the guy put his glasses back on (a little late if you ask me) and the two walked off, hand in hand with a turkey hanging down one's back. What kind of weird little fairy tale is this? Does any one believe that the two guys who are carefully applying "smell like forest not like hunter" perfume on themselves and dressing in camouflage and hiding so the turkey won't notice are actually hunting a turkey? When was the last time you noticed an inconspicuous camera crew, with producer and caterer? Like the turkey won't notice the camera crew because the hunters are hidden.

Signs: Simons

This is a pretty groovy sign, isn't it?
We are packing and packing and packing. And then we are going to Napa Valley for my brithday (mudbaths, dinner at Bouchon) for a little respite from packing. I will bravely bring my camera and snap photos of interesting signs in one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I know it's tough, but there you go. I won't be able to say that when I move to LA. Though I popped down to LA to have a job interview and since it's been stormy all week, the sky was clear blue with big thunderclouds and crisp clean air, allowing me to look out the window of the office building and see the Getty Center and the Hollywood sign, and the bumper to bumper traffic on the 405. And it was a gorgeous day in Los Angeles.

The Imagination of Fear

Here's a picture of the Bay Bridge. It's a pretty bridge, rather majestic and totally unsafe because it hasn't been fixed since the Loma Prieta Earthquake in the 80's. So I'm always a little bit afraid when I travel across it. I don't particularly trust bridges, since our infrastructure in America is not well maintained (I read an article about how some 30% of bridges needed to be repaired.)

I like the view from a bridge; until I look down. When we lived in Brooklyn, Cam and I would walk across the Brooklyn bridge, there's a part in the center that you can walk along. It is made of wooden planks. You can look down between the planks and see the East River as you walk on wooden planks that have not been replaced since 1883 when the bridge was built. It was there, in the middle, standing on old wood looking at frosty cold currents swirling that I would get a touch of vertigo. Nothing too bad or crippling. Just a sense of fear and dread, the possibility of calamity.

The Bay Bridge, besides being beautiful and part of the optimistic era of american engineering, is tall. It affords you a lovely view of the city and the bay. It cruises the top of Angels Island (where I breathe a sigh of relief) and then continues outwards and upwards before depositing you in the mess that is San Francisco's traffic system. I always imagine the big one happening. The fall where your stomach decides to stay much higher than you. Even though both you and the car, as Galileo points out, fall at the same pace, in my imagination the car falls a little faster so I am pushed up against the roof. Bridges, I imagine falling off them. It's a possibility.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is not tall, it is close to the water. But it is long, and when you are on it there are places where you can not see land. You are driving along, skimming the water, no land in sight when suddenly there is no bridge. The "and Tunnel" part is never quite highlighted so you can be surprised when you realize that you are about to be submerged. The tunnels allow the BIG ships to pass over the tunnel into the bay keeping the port active, since the bridge is so low. Well, I'm not particularly fond of tunnels. Seepage, leakage, catastrophic breaks, water rushing in. But this tunnel, it was built in 1965. Things have gotten BIGGER since then. What if the hulls of container tankers and cruise ships have gotten deeper and bigger and what if they've been chipping away slightly at the tunnel. You see where I'm going? What if, when I'm under it, the tunnel fails? I can imagine it.

Basically, I can imagine disaster at any given point. I can imagine that it would be a bad thing to change lanes while driving fast on the freeway when another car is in the next lane. I can imagine the car in front of me stopping suddenly, and so I don't tailgate. I can imagine bad things and I can imagine consequences, and so I am mostly careful.

And I stay away from bridges.

I take exception!

So I was looking at a bumper sticker that said "Who would Jesus Bomb" with it's implied criticism of our current administration's policies and I thought "What if we started a grass roots campaign to send letters to the president asking him to take care of our own personal axis of evil? I mean, as long as you can preemptively take a country out in complete violation of international law, why not apply it to your own country?" For example, someone could write the president the following letter:

Dear President Bush:
My father is evil and does not support demovcracy. We never lets us vote at home and he never goes to church. He is not Christian and never goes to church, and threatens our christian way of life. God told me to let you know this, so you can put it on your agenda. Please send a drone to take him out at 3434 East Elm Street, Peoria, IL. Yours in Christ, Yolanda

I urge you to look around and write to the president today.

There has been much brow beating in the press lately about Francis Fukuyama's defection from the neo-con camp, apparently because he realized that no one outside of America likes American policies and that that sort of makes being a hegemon and leading because of American Exceptionalism hard. Um, duh. It has become increasingly clear that torture was sanctioned at the highest levels of the government, and that Chenney and Rumsfeld set all their attorneys to creating memos that would lead to torture, condone torture all under the premise of "presidential authority" to apparently break what ever laws and international treaties they decided to. Here the flaw in the neo-con argument is never more apparent. America is exceptional because we value civil rights, the individual has inaliable dignity that is not granted by the government, it is recognized by the government. The government can't take away the individual's dignity, because it doesn't GRANT the dignity. It recognizes the dignity.

Flowing from that we do not torture, we do not violate international laws, we lead by example. However it is abundantly apparent that the United States is, in fact and action, NOT Exceptional. It is NOT an Example. This administration tramples on the rights of humans and thinks nothing of authorizing torture at the highest levels. As an article in this weeks New Yorker makes clear, Rumsfeld thought it was a funny thing to joke about torture, in memos authorizing torture. President Bush never met a felon he didn't think should be hung, how can a country expect to lead if it imposes the death penalty selectively on black people? How can a country expect to be exceptional if it can't provide basic health care for it's poor? How can a country expect to lead if it spies upon it's citizens with out judical oversight or review?

How can a country invade another country for no reason and not expect the people of that country to oppose them? It's a historical fact that people don't like to be invaded. Who thought that violating international treaties was "Exceptional?"

Can't we impeach these guys yet?

Signs: Orpheum

This is from our trip to San Francisco's lovely DeYoung Museum. Apparently there was quite a stir about putting something contemporary in Golden Gate Park, but it is a lovely and surprising and intimate place to look at art. My two takeaways are Chiura Obata and Masami Teraoka. Obato was a Japanese American who worked in the 30's (no doubt he was interred in the forties) who was trained in the Japanese style and then hit modernism - so his brushwork is lyrical and the the paintings are gorgeous modern pieces with this flat and spare japanese style. Teraoka is a contemporary artist who did a huge folding screen with bravura brushstrokes representing a woman and child being drowned in a sea of AIDS. Amazing.