Super secret mystery weekend
So this is the weekend I told Gail about six weeks ago–the trip I planned for us without telling her where.
We got started a day late, but now we’re in Portland, kicking back in the Hilton.
A very bumpy flight up; I’ve never been thrown around so much. Airport security was a snap. They didn’t open my bag, look at my little baggie of liquids or check my CPAP machine. How is it that these items are so critically dangerous one time and meaningless the next?
Dinner tonight at Jakes Crawfish, the oldest restaurant in town and one of our favorite places in the world.
Stay tuned. More surprises in the works.
Not a bridge book, a book about bridge
Book reviews? Now he’s doing book reviews?
He already reviews movies and restaurants and plays and ballets. Talks travel and politics. Gossips about the bridge club. Is there no limit to this guys talent?
Well, no, he said immodestly.
Okay, there is a limit, but reviewing The Cardturner: A Novel, by Louis Sachar, is most certainly within my somewhat circumscribed talents.
Joanna Stansby recommended this book to me, and that can’t be wrong. It’s a pretty simple and easy book, reminding me of the sort of thing I read when I was a kid. It would be perfect for an airplane or a day at the beach.
Here’s the good part, though–because it is set in the world of duplicate bridge, there are “asides” which explain the game. Nothing you don’t already know, of course, but I’ll bet you have friends/relatives who wonder about all the time you spend at the club. Get them to read this little book, and they will understand quite well, without having to study or be bored in the process. The asides are so well marked that you can skip them easily, but the non-bridge playing reader will enjoy them and a get a decent understanding of the game.
Give The Cardturner a try–it was only 12 bucks on Amazon for my iPhone. I think your teenage grandkids will both enjoy it and learn about bridge. Christmas is coming…………………………
A new American hero
I’m no fan of bible-thumping evangelical preachers, but once in a great while one shows the kind of courage and integrity you just have to respect as you watch in awe.
Plum
The place is busier than this, honest. But it's really nice looking.
Dinner tonight atPlum, a new restaurant in Oakland run by Daniel Patterson, celebrity chef and owner of Coi in San Francisco.
This place is so hip it hurts. Open only 4 weeks, it’s a hit. So cool it doesn’t even have a sign in front–you just have to know it’s there.
Very beautiful. The walls are covered in hand dyed muslin. The tables are large, seating 6 or 10, but you may well be seated with strangers as no seat goes unfilled. “Seat” is sort of an overstatement, since there are benches and stools, but not chairs. Even at the chef’s counter, they have cleverly placed coat hooks under the counter because there are no chairbacks to hang you coat on.
Oh, the food. I guess it’s important, even if this is more a place to be seen than to eat.
The menu is small plates, very very small plates–designed to share, designed for you to order at least 3 dishes per person. We had deviled eggs, artichoke terrine, carrots, farm egg and fried faro, and the pork salad. That’s only 5 dishes–and I stopped for a large frozen yogurt on the way home.
Not that the food isn’t great–we scarfed every last morsel. My “pork salad” in particular was fantastic. The people we were with had the mushroom appetizer, and seemed to like it. Or maybe they were just happy that the mushrooms didn’t kill them; I don’t understand people who love fungus.
As always, there is a full letter grade penalty for restaurants that don’t have decent sweetener for my iced tea. Having only Stevia is just too precious for me. Further, they have the strange practice of tacking on a 16% service charge “split between the servers and the kitchen staff”. Well, lah-di-dah. That’s not only insulting, it’s stupid–we would have tipped more than 16%, but if that’s all they want, that’s all they get.
So, the food is good, the decor is nice, the attitude is pretentious and the price is high. Counting the included service charge, a very light dinner was $121.98, plus $5.40 for my yogurt later. If the food wasn’t so darned good I’d be really cranky, but the truth is we have a reservation for next Wednesday (you really need reservations at this place, look on their website). Next time I’m ordering one more dish. And the yogurt place is right on the way home…………………
Airport sanity–from the Brits
Airport “security” is a pet peeve of mine, and it’s nice to see that someone is taking a second look at the inefficient insanity of the security theater. Of course, this comes from England, not our beloved TSA:
The UK’s largest airport owner has backed calls for an overhaul of Britain’s aviation security regime after the chairman of British Airwaysattacked “redundant” anti-terror measures.
BAA, owner of Heathrow airport, said the screening of travellers’ shoes was one example of a safety regime that had become uncomfortable for passengers. Colin Matthews, BAA’s chief executive, said: “I do think that if we could start from a clean sheet of paper and design a coherent overall process then we would be in a better place. What we have today is the result of incremental additions being laid on top of each other.
Heathrow has been a particularly difficult airport to negotiate–I hope that they manage some intelligent reform, and that the common sense approach spreads.
Iris has a birthday
Monday was Iris Libby’s birthday. Which birthday, I don’t know.
So we had a party. Just a small one–Iris, Ally Whiteneck, Gayle Everett, me and Gail.
Ally brought the pumpkin–Iris was surprised.
Gail cooked the Spanish rice, I made the salad and the cake.
Iris told me she was 42. She wouldn’t lie to me, would she?
No. Really. 42.
Happy Birthday kiddo.
Lines Ballet
This is not your fathers dance company
It seem like all the various dance and theater companies share/trade their mailing lists, because once you get on one list your mailbox is filled with the notices from every other company in the Bay Area.
But that’s a good thing, because it alerts you to performances you might well want to see but would never hear of otherwise. Sunday, for instance, we went to the City to see Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, because we got a card from them and thought we’d give it a try.
The day started out with a problem–our tickets were supposed to be at will-call, but they weren’t. While the box office staff told me they had no record of me, the attention they showed and the help they gave belied that–if they really thought I hadn’t purchased the tickets, they would have had security throw me out. Instead, they tried to get us seats. Gayle Everett, who was along for her very first ballet, got seated, but Gail and I and Lois Grandi (a genuine ballerina in her own right), ended up standing for the first act. We all had seats for the second act, pretty good seats in fact. But it was a strange situation.
The Ballet, on the other hand, was perfect. To quote the program:
Alonzo King has been called a visionary choreographer who is altering the way we look at ballet. King calls his works “thought structures” created by the manipulation of energies that exist in matter through laws which govern the shapes and movment directions of everything that exists.
Okay, I don’t know what that means. But Alonzo King has created over 170 ballets, so he’s doing something right.
I do know that I have never seen bodies move like that, and I liked it.
The first act was Dust and Light, an exercise in abstract ballet that left even Lois, an experienced lifelong balletomane, slack jawed with appreciation.
Set to the classical music of Francis Poulenc and Arcangelo Corelli, there is no plot, no story line, just movement and sound. You really can’t think “what is happening, what does this mean?”, all you can do is open you mind and heart to the pure emotion of the piece. It was mesmerizing.
The second act was Scheherazade, which was “commissioned by Monaco Dance Forum to inaugurate the Centenary of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.” The father of modern dance was Serghey Diaghilev, and this dance honors his “spirit of cutting edge artistic collaboration, immersing audiences in a luminescent and richly textured world.”
The story of the Arabian Nights is retold with beauty and grace. The dance is wonderful, and the sets and lighting are staggeringly good. An enormous piece of cloth is suspended over the stage, and by movement and lighting it becomes a cloud, the canopy of a forest, an omen, almost a character of the dance. Light drop from the sky and puddle on the floor. The costumes are delightful (Gayle Everett learned all about them sitting with the woman who dyed the material, Amy Van Every). The dancers do impossible things–we saw one woman balancing on one en pointe toe, which Lois says can’t be done.
At the conclusion, there was the longest sustained applause/curtain call I have ever witnessed, and the LINES Ballet earned every bit of it.
Their spring performance will be April 14-24, at Yerba Buena Center. We’ll be there, you should too. Want to go together?
A tower, but no Rapunzel
You can talk about things, or you can do something about them.
A building contractor named Steve Oliver, up in the Geyserville area, was sick of the commercialism of the art markets. So he decided to make his own statement. He started to collect the kind of art that cannot be moved, and cannot be sold.
He has a large piece of property, and has so far commissioned 17 works of site-specific art. You can enjoy the art, but it isn’t going anywhere and can’t ever enter the art market.
Even enjoying the art isn’t easy–the ranch is not open to the public, except on group tours that benefit arts associations. That’s why on a a rainy Saturday we got on a bus in Oakland with the Oakland Museum Art Guild and headed into the hinterlands.
We weren’t, sadly, on a mission to see the entire collection. Our goal yesterday was to see the Hamilton tower, a 128 foot tall concrete tower, enclosing 2 circular, interwoven staircases in the form of a double helix. It was designed by Ann Hamilton, one of the big names in this sort of art. He gave her the commission 14 years ago, and it took this long to come up with a plan and execute it.
Beyond the tower, though, we were going to hear the Pacific Mozart Ensemble perform 2 brand-new, site specific works. They are a choral group, but not your college glee club.
We trooped across the meadow and over the rise, and then squirmed into the tower–there is no real “door”, just a wide opening you sit in and swing your legs through. Once inside, we trudged up the stairs, noting that the visitors were on one staircase and the musical artists were on the other staircase–all in the same place but not meeting or interacting, sort of like an M.C. Escher etching.
The music started–the first piece was Mozart, honoring the Ensemble’s name, then moved into the new pieces by Sanford Dole and Amy X. Neuburg. This isn’t the kind of music I listen to, so I don’t have much to say. Some of it had words, some was only sounds. The acoustics in the tower are amazing, with warm, round tones somehow coming off the concrete and steel structure. One of the pieces was written around the theme of water, from a poem by Paula Gunn Allen. At appropriate moments, water was poured from high up in the tower into the pool at its base, adding to the moment. To be in that tower, with rain falling the full length of the building and dripping down the sides, listening to the ethereal music and hearing the poetry was one of moments of life that can never be repeated or improved upon.
Following the performance, there was a reception in a winery tasting room in Geyserville, where we got to meet and schmooze with the composers and the tower designer.
On the bus ride home, we were all glued to our iPhones, watching the pitch-by-pitch of the ball game and screaming in delight when the Giants managed to pull it out at the nailbiting end.
We go back again
I told you Gail would have to have that tomato soup and grilled cheese at SR24–we went back for lunch on Saturday, before we left on the Oakland Art Guild tour.
Iceberg lettuce salad
Gail started with the Iceberg Lettuce salad–notice the half avocado artfully sliced.
Heirlooms and ricotta--a slight twist on the standard Caprese salad
I’m well known for my addiction to Caprese salads, so there was no way I could pass up this twist–ricotta instead of mozzarella. The heirloom tomatoes were spectacular, the housemade ricotta was interesting, but less flavorful than a good mozzarella would have been. The most interesting thing was the thin bead of balsamic vinegar along the bottom of the plate. You can spend $100/ounce on the best aged balsamic, but no restaurant could afford to serve it. So the really smart chefs take a commercial grade of balsamic, add star anise and sugar, and reduce it mercilessly. Time, labor and inventiveness replace money yet again.
A sandwich after my own heart--but that pepper is a killer
While Gail tucked into her soup and salad (with a side of buttery, cheesy grits!), I ordered the chicken sandwich–grilled thigh meat, avocado, blue cheese all piled on Acme Herb Slab bread. It was perfect. There was some salad on the plate, but I wasn’t in the mood. Then there was this pepper………………….
So I’m a noted sissy when it comes to hot things, but I thought I should try it. The first nibble was gently, tasty, slightly vinegary. The second nibble seemed safe, so I took a larger bite. Mistake–the damn thing was really just the exhaust from a jet engine, collected and painted yellow. My mouth was on fire, and diet Coke doesn’t put that out. Enjoy the sandwich, but just look at the pepper.
SR24
Grilled Cheese and tomato soup like Campbell's never made
I think Gail may have a new favorite restaurant.
Last night, I thought we were going to dinner and the theater (Compulsion, at Berkeley Rep) but found out at 5:30 that I had the wrong date in mind–we’re going next week. Besides looking/feeling pretty foolish, I now had to figure out a plan for dinner.
I’ve been seeing SR24 on lists of hot places for a year now, and never gotten there. Then, last week, I noticed that it is in the triangle at the corner of Telegraph and 52nd in Oakland, tucked into a tiny space across from a pawn shop. So I made a reservation and off we went, dragging our feet as we left the house because the Giants were in a nail-biter and we hated to turn off the TV. (Buster Posey is my new hero)
This 30 seat eatery is decorated in a strange amalgam of mid-eastern pillows, whorehouse red lamps and modern wood and metal. It’s a long, narrow space with an open kitchen, sharing restrooms with the taqueria next door. The overall effect is, well, too strange to put into words. I guess it’s sort of OK, but it wouldn’t be my first, or third, or seventh choice of decor.
The menu is pretty interesting–classic American comfort food, updated in a modern style. It aims to be the best of both worlds, and pretty much succeeds.
Gail started with the tomato soup and grilled cheese. This is a first course that would easily be an entrée. The soup was fresh and bright, nicely spiced and worlds apart from Campbells. The “mini” grilled cheese was excellent, on crusty french bread with high quality cheddar, not the plastic “cheese food” so often employed. We may all have an emotional relationship to tomato soup; it reminds us of childhood and cold weather and getting over being sick staying home with mom. To see it re-imagined this way is just delightful, and we’ll be going back to have it again.
I had the Pumpkin soup–thick, rich and wonderful. The bowls are enormous–the soup and a salad would be plenty for dinner.
Next up, Gail had the Chicken Pot Pie–she ate every bit of it, but wished that it had crust on the bottom and sides, not just the top. I enjoyed the olive-oil poached Halibut, with butter beans and gypsy peppers. My halibut was perhaps somewhat over done, but the beans and peppers were splendid.
Like too many overly cool restaurants these days, the iced tea was some fancy, strange, ethereal, not-really-tea concoction. On the good side, the waitress managed to make me a glass of real tea and ice it.
The bill was reasonable–the only expensive thing was my halibut. Gail had a decent prosecco from the wine list. Naturally, they are all about organic, sustainable, local, yada yada yada.
SR24 (which always makes me think of Susan Rowley. I wonder if she’s had 23 other restaurants?) is an interesting place for a simple, excellent dinner at a reasonable price. Give it a try.
Totally Unauthorized 