The eye of the beholder
There is only so much I can watch, even of the Olympics. When I start to wonder about obscure and arcane rules of sports that I don’t understand or have any interest in, it’s time to get dressed and go to the SF Museum of Modern Art.
Cindy Sherman is both photographer and model exploring the lives and roles of women.
The big travelling exhibition this season is the work of photographer Cindy Sherman, a major star of post-modern, feminist photography.
Sherman, in a career of about 30 years, has explored what it means to be a woman in our society in a variety of modes, but always using herself as the photographer, make-up artist, costumer and model. Her work is often controversial, but always intriguing and thoughtful. You won’t look at her photographs as pretty pictures, rather as opportunities to examine, study and think. The very large prints are crammed full of detail, all of which you want to study and assimilate, looking for every hint of meaning Sherman has stuffed into the frame.
We saw this exhibition in New York a couple of months ago, but it was closing time and we only had 5 minutes–I was very glad to have an hour or more to savor all the photos and listen to the audio guide. (Always take the audio guide, it will double your enjoyment and understanding.)
That was the good part of the day.
Lime Hills (Quarry Series)
The other large photo exhibition was the work of Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, whose work:
..is known for austere and beautiful large-scale pictures that capture the extraordinary forces we deploy to shape nature to our will — and, in photographs made after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the equally powerful impact of natural forces on human construction. Whether photographing factories, quarries, mines, or his tsunami-swept hometown in northeastern Japan, Hatakeyama is a keen observer of landscapes in transition, witnessing scenes of transformation with calm precision.
Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/458#ixzz22k8e5md9
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Hatakeyama is interested in the earth, where and how materials come from it and where they go. He’s got a big museum exhibition, I guess lots of important art people like his work.
I don’t.
Now maybe I’m just a Philistine, a rube, a hick from the ‘burbs. My opinion is no more valid than anyone else’s, I realize. Nonetheless, it’s my blog so I get to give that opinion, and I think art is great only when it stirs your emotions and the photographs of Hatakeyama strike me as bloodless and cold. My loins were not stirred, and what is art without stirring loins?
Your mileage may vary, of course. Why not let the TV cool off for a couple of hours and head into the city to see for yourself?
A seemingly unending saga
I love my iPhone. I am sure that, by any possible clinical definition, I’m fully addicted to it. I check email, read blogs, Google information, make reservations, get sports scores for Mike, post Facebook and Twitter updates for Fat Slice Pizza. I take photos, approve blog comments and sometimes make a phone call. Since Gail’s phone lives at the bottom of her purse with the ringer off, everyone calls me to get in touch with her, as well. My phone is my life.
Last Wednesday, my phone let me down. I got in the car and noticed that the screen was blank. Not a good thing. But what I could never have imagined was the amount of trouble I would have to go through to get back to normal.
1) go to Apple store, see if they can help. Can’t talk to a “genius”, of course. I don’t have an appointment. Person I do talk to suggests backup and restore.
2) backup and restore. No change.
3) take spare phone to ATT store and have it activated. Ask if they can fix iPhone, but they can’t.
4) get up early Thursday, go to TechRestore, an independent Apple repair place in Concord. They did good work when we needed a front glass on another phone. Leave phone off.
5) get phone call from TechRestore. They can’t fix phone. Drive back out to Concord and pick phone up.
6) return to Apple store, try to leave phone to be fixed. They won’t take it until I see a genius, which of course I can’t without an appointment. They give me the number for Apple Care, who I have to talk to before I can mail phone back in. The store won’t accept items for repair, supposedly a “liability” issue. This is crap, of course.
7) Call AppleCare from the car. They want, no they insist, on the serial number from the phone. I don’t know this number. They tell me how to find it, but you need for the phone to be working. I’m falling deep into Catch-22 here. I hang up.
8) I call back when I’m not driving. No, I can’t read the serial number off the screen, the screen isnt working. That’s why I’m calling. Okay, you can take out the SIM card and read the number from there. No, I can’t take the SIM card out, I don’t have the tools and don’t want to disassemble the phone, that’s you job. They refuse to be of help without the number. Turns out I don’t need tools, just a paper clip. Get the tray out, read the number off the SIM card, although it is very small and I”m not 22 years old. The number doesn’t help. What’s my email address? The phone number? They can’t find anything that helps. Three people later, after I’ve put the SIM card back in the phone and I’m driving home–still on a 45 minute call–they tell me that the number they need isn’t ON the SIM, but on the tray that holds it. Can’t work on it while driving.
9) Spent the weekend in Guernville. The spare phone is a cheap imitation Blackberry, but it will do in a pinch. I miss all the cool apps I have, but can still communicate. I’m more than a bit obsessive about checking the room when we leave a hotel, but manage to leave the charger. I do not have a back-up charger.
10) Google other places that claim to be able to fix iPhones.
11) go to Magic Kangaroo in Berkeley. They can’t fix it and they don’t have a charger for the backup phone.
12) Go to Green Citizen. Guy thinks he can do something. I wait 20 minutes while he tries plan A, then leave the phone and go to work while he tries plan B.
13) Green Citizen calls–he can’t fix phone. I whizz on over, whip into a yellow zone right in front and race inside. Girl at counter can’t get me the phone–technician wants to come out. And talk. And talk. I don’t care–he can’t fix phone, that’s all I need to know. Finally grab phone and leave, just in time to see meter maid rounding corner, after ticketing me. I was in store less than 3 minutes.
14) Stop in ATT store to get charger. My backup is an ATT branded go-phone, they should have one. Wrong. The suggest Walgreens.
15) Go to Walgreens. Ask for cell phone department, get sent to wrong aisle where there is stereo equipment but no phones. Find section with chargers, but they don’t have what I need.
16) Try Target, where I bought the back up in the first place last year. No chargers for me. They suggest independent store like Parrot Cellular or Radio Shack.
17) Go home. Call Parrot. No charger.
18) Call Radio Shack. No charger.
19) Go to Fry’s. There is no charger available. I give up, just buy another phone to get the charger. At least I noticed that it was $10 cheaper at Target and get them to match the price.
20) Having run out of options, take SIM card out of iPhone and call AppleCare again. Here’s a photo of what I had to read:
This is the tray, next to the nib of my fountain pen, The number I need is the very tiny one on the lover arm of the tray. I’ve never seen print that small.
A 10 power magnifying glass let me read the number. The guy on the line was at least reasonable to deal with, and for $149 they will mail me a new phone. I just have to go to the UPS store tomorrow, give them the return number and they will pack and ship it for me, and the new one will arrive in a few days, or so they promise.
This has been an ordeal, and one that could have been much much easier if Apple was more reasonable to deal with–I can’t believe that the serial number is that crucial, they just want to do things the easy way for Apple and to hell with the customer.
Stalking the perfect tamale
Eating out at any new restaurant that opens up is all well and good, but the true gourmand is on a quest, searching for the perfect dish, the perfect waiter, the perfect je ne sais quoi. BJ called, and we have decided to try to find the perfect upscale Mexican restaurant, perhaps the perfect tamale. Tonight, we began our mission at Comal, a very well reputed establishment on Shattuck Avenue near University.
The inside/outside patio in the back.
The owner of the place was the long-time manager of the band Phish, and Comal boasts a more than state of the art sound system brilliantly designed to complement rather than overpower level of conversation in the room.
Making all the tortillas the old fashioned way, by hand.
Executive Chef Matt Gandin has done a spectacular job of designing and implementing a menu using local and organic ingredients to create classic Mexican dishes raised to a level you just can’t imagine.
The food is good, but getting a table is somewhat dicey. Comal only takes reservations for 5:30, at any other time you have to take your chances. We got there early, but although there were many empty tables we were shunted to the rear patio, where there is no food service, you just have to take your drink from the bar and wait. Nobody ever came to tell us that there was a table available, but neither Gail nor BJ is shy and they managed to express themselves sufficiently forcefully to obtain a table. Once again the squeaky wheel got oiled.
The Comal version of albondingas, meatballs in adobo sauce.
On to the food. We ordered a goodly number of dishes and proceeded to share. The albondigas were wonderful, although they were only served with 3 small but perfect hot, fresh tortillas. Not to worry, we squeaked some more and a more appropriate number appeared.
Little Gems, “diosa verde”
Putting lettuce on a plate does not a salad make. The cotija cheese, pumpkin seeds and a marvelously subtle dressing brought this ensalada to an entirely new level of rabbit food.
Chicken tamale in mole.
I like mole sauce, Gail is not a fan. For this mole, she makes an exception–it was delicate and subtle (hmm, that’s twice I’ve used that word. This may be a trend.) A hint of cinnamon but not an overpowering of chocolate. They don’t know how to do this at Chevy’s.
Enchilada with heritage pork, mole coloradito, crema
I don’t think I have much to say about the enchilada. It was good. Very good. I liked it. You won’t find one like it anywhere else.
Then it was time for dessert. We had the Oaxacan chocolate budin, but it was just an incredibly dense chocolate pudding with whipped cream, and not really my style. Fortunately, we also ordered the arroz con leche, which was everything you could ever want in a rice pudding, with cherries on top.
Arroz con leche, rice pudding with cherries. Hard to believe that a dessert without chocolate can be this good.
Finally, we had the flan, that most classic of Mexican desserts:
Flan, perfected.
I’m picky about caramel, and often find it to be overcooked. Not here. The flan itself is often too eggy. Not this one. A darned near perfect meal with a darned near perfect dessert.
Okay, there are nits to pick. The iced tea is the cheap bottled kind you can find in the grocery store, so they can charge you for refils. They don’t offer a decent sweetener, either. Only that dreadful Stevia (it’s organic, doncha know?), or the ghastly Sweet-n-Low (pure chemical, not organic at all, but cheap).
But that’s all. It was hard to get to a table, and then a huge success once we were seated. Comal is close to Berkeley Rep, but I don’t know if I would want to take a chance on getting seated without a reservation when I had a curtain time to meet, so I sure wish they respected their customers enough to take reservations.
If you’re flexible on time, by all means go to Comal for the best upscale, gourmet Mexican food you’ve ever eaten. I haven’t had better, but BJ still has a few places on her list and we’ll be trying them out. Stay tuned.
Prime Choice
This is a deal that’s hard to beat.
Mike raced back from Philadelphia so we could play on Friday, and tonight we went out to dinner at Flemings in Walnut Creek.
Flemings is sort of hidden away on the second floor of the parking structure next to the Century 16. They have a mostly hidden door on the ground level, next to World Market at the corner of California and Mount Diablo. It’s worth you time to find the place, though.
We drove in, and dropped the car with the valet ($7.00). I made our reservation on opentable.com, as always. Although we were two or three minutes early, Mike and Linda were already there and enjoying their wine. More than 20 years, and I’ve never gotten anywhere first.
The facility is very much old-time steakhouse–very dark, thick carpets, dark woods, heavy silver and china. I went to places just like this with my parents when Eisenhower was president. It makes me want to order a perfect Manhattan, just like dad did. I settled for iced tea, like dad should have.
The Sunday night special is salad, prime rib, one side dish and dessert all for $30. (we aren’t fooled by the $29.95 now, are we?) That’s what we were there for, and that’s what we all had.
The salad is just a salad, nothing to write about.
The prime rib is special:
That’s one beautiful hunk of beef, with three choices of dip: au jus, horseradish and a mustard sauce.
My meat was perfectly done; a tender, aged slice of meaty perfection. I don’t eat a lot of beef, so if I’m going to indulge it should be with something this good.
Each meal comes with a choice of side dish, and each side is more than big enough to share. We had the creamed corn, creamed spinach, asparagus and the potatoes au gratin. They were all excellent.
There are the usual choices of hyper-caloric desserts, capped by the lava cake (which counts as two desserts). Linda and I, serious chocolate lovers. chose that. Gail had some ice cream and berries and Mike had the cheesecake. Nobody was disappointed.
Scrumptious lava cake, a fueille of ice cream and, behind, a bowl full of whipped cream just in case there weren’t enough calories.
This is a hard deal to beat. After Labor Day, I think the price goes up to $39.95 and that will STILL be a good deal. Flemings isn’t good if you’re on a serious heart healthy diet, but it’s a great place to fall off the wagon.
An answer to jingoism
Mindless jingoism is the easy way to rally the crowds, especially in an election year. It’s always a surprise, not always a pleasant one, to hear anyone with the nerve to look behind the trite cliches and speak some truth.
Just for fun
Oakland has an enormous event every month called Art Murmur, where a couple of thousand people show up on the first Friday night of the month and hit the art galleries. It’s pretty amazing.
Point Richmond has similar event, called ArtWalk. It’s just a few orders of magnitude smaller. I think there might have been 50 of us, happily wandering among the three tiny galleries of the incredibly quaint and intriguing community at the eastern anchorage of the San Rafael bridge.
The little art collective where our friends exhibit.
When the art is also a clock, is it art or handicraft? I never know.
The proximate cause of the evening was that our friends Ted and Mary Bayer were involved in the art collective. Ted is a retired surgeon who has turned to sculpture. Mary has always been an artist.
Ted Bayer Sculpture in the window.
Just down the block were two more galleries, completing the tour of the city.
Seriously great blues in the courtyard between the other two galleries.
An interesting piece from the next gallery we saw.
The drawings in the Susan Shore gallery
And here is Susan Shore, the artist and gallery owner.
A mural on one of the buildings in town. I never realized Daisy Duck was so buxom.
We stopped in an antique store, and saw this model of cathedral. Or a large gothic dollhouse. Lots of unique things in Point Richmond.
Then it was off to dinner at the Hotel Mac, a local landmark that has been around for a century or so. It isn’t really anything special, but the food isn’t bad and they are willing to put up with a very rowdy 10 of us. Gail and Ted made a culinary discovery.
French fries in the sauce from the mussels.
Gail doesn’t care from mussels, but fortunately Mary does. The mussels were served with french fries, which in turn were covered in aioli. When the mussels were done, Gail and Ted started dredging the fries in the leftover sauce, or juice, or whatever that odd liquid is called. They even called in the leftover fries from Linda’s plate for more dipping. This may start a new trend, and a nationwide chain of fry and mussel stores.
Linda is the daughter of a professional photographer and spent her youth in front of dad’s camera, so she doesn’t usually let me take her photo. Tonight, perhaps as a benefit of the wine, she insisted that I include her in this, so I’ll end with it. Good thing I took all those portrait classes.
Third time, not the charm
There’s a restaurant in Oakland named Pican, where we’ve eaten twice before and liked tremendously. It’s a very hip centerpiece to the whole Oakland Renaissance, catering to the most integrated crowd I’ve seen in the Bay Area. They are famous for Southern food and even offer flights of premium bourbons for the discerning drinker.
We went there Sunday night with BJ and Jack Hawks, and boy, were we disappointed.
We were there early, before the concert we were headed for. I wasn’t thrilled when we walked in and they wanted to know my first and last name, not (they claimed) for their marketing but so “the manager can come over and say hello”. Thanks, but I want dinner not a new best friend.
The menu is exciting, with down-home southern cooking tarted up with lots of seafood and fancy spices. I knew before we got there that I was going to have the She Crab Soup, for which they are justly famous. I did and it was everything I remembered.
Gail and BJ had Caesar Salads, and were not impressed. They both think that the dressing is made inhouse, I have the cynical opinion that it was just “Monarch #6 Salad dressing (Ceasar)”. In either case, nobody was excited over the salad.
BJ then ordered the Southern Fried Chicken, which comes with a side of macaroni and cheese:
Sadly, it didn’t live up to its reputation. Just plain old chicken, nothing special. Even the mac ‘n cheese, which is Gail’s favorite, just wasn’t special.
Gail had the meat loaf. Lots of people like meat loaf; I always think of it as what you eat when you run out of money before you run out of month.
A bed of roasted corn, a square of meat loaf and a topping of tomato jam. Looks turned out to be deceiving.
In this case, the meat loaf was a disaster. Gail had one, small bite and left the rest. She ate the all of the corn and said it was great, but the meatloaf just didn’t make it. The bus boy had an odd look when he picked up the plate with the mostly untouched entree on it–if he was well trained, he showed it to the chef (who needs to know when things aren’t working).
The best looking meal of the night–Pan Roasted, Grits crusted Gulf Snapper.
I didn’t taste the Snapper, but Jack ate it all and didn’t have anything snarky to say.
I had the risotto Jambalaya. It isn’t often that I say a dish isn’t spicy enough, since I’m a sissy about spicy foods, but this was pretty bland. At first, I wasn’t going to have a photo, because the presentation wasn’t particularly interesting–it’s just a bowl of rice and seafood, after all. But then, as I got to the bottom of the plate, I found an orange pool of oil.
That’s one enormous puddle of grease at the bottom of my dish.
That just doesn’t cut it. It’s sloppy kitchen work at best, and not something you should see in a place that aspires to fine dining.
It saddens me to see that this restaurant has let their standards slip so much–the other times we ate there we raved, this time we ranted. Then we paid the check and headed off to the Tim McGraw/Kenny Chesney Brothers of the Sun concert. Maybe we should just have had some garlic fries and a hot dog at the stadium.
Black Bear Diner
Okay, this is a quick post with no photos. I would have pictures, but we stopped on a whim and I didn’t have the camera with me. I should know better.
Black Bear Diner, on Bancroft near Treat in Walnut Creek, is not fancy. It isn’t pretentious. It isn’t glossy. It’s good down home food, huge portions and friendly service.
We stopped for lunch, but since they serve breakfast, lunch and dinner at any hour I was enticed by the breakfast. I chose the Volcano, which is three pancakes, three eggs, two sausage and two strips of bacon. With Iced tea, of course.
This was the largest plate of food I can remember. The pancakes are enormous–10 inches across and half an inch thick. The three eggs barely covered half the hotcakes. There were two tiny pitchers of syrup, and they weren’t really enough. The sausage was nothing special, the iced tea was just what I wanted: plain, cold, iced tea.
I wanted my bacon very soft, because that’s the way mother made it and I grew up with it that way. Sadly, the softest you can order bacon is still incinerated and stiff. These people should come to my house for breakfast to see how it’s done.
Gail had a Reuben sandwich, and it, too was quite large, served on marble rye bread and accompanied by a ton of properly cooked fries. She doesn’t really like places like the Black Bear, but there we were. The sandwich was OK, it seems, but it needed more sauerkraut.
Black Bear is a western chain of about 50 restaurants. It’s very friendly and down-homey; not the place to go for your anniversary dinner but not bad for lunch or a humungous breakfast.
The Scottsboro Boys
Haywood Patterson (Clifton Duncan, center) with the cast of The Scottsboro Boys, at the American Conservatory Theater. Photo by Henry DiRocco.
So what do you do if you have a very dark, awful, sad, sorry story to tell but you want people to hear it? You know they won’t come to the theater to be made unhappy, you have to make the show interesting, funny, amusing, intriguing and, if possible, uplifiting. That the problem Kander and Ebb (Chicago, Cabaret) had in bringing the story of the Scottsboro Boys to the stage. How they solved the problem is on view in San Francisco until next Saturday.
The Scottsboro boys were a group of 9 very young black kids, 13 to 19 years old, who were riding a freight train through Scottsboro Alabama when they were caught by the police. At the same time, the police caught two young white women, 21 year old Victoria and 17 year old Ruby. The girls decided to get out of trouble by claiming that they had been raped by the 9 boys. This being the South, in 1931, the boys were in seriously deep trouble.
The Governor, who called in the National Guard to prevent a lynching, agreed to hold a speedy trial. The Boys were found guilty in a flash. Fortunately, the International Labor Defense, a arm of the Communist Party, took up their case. An appeal to the Supreme Court overturned the verdict because blacks were systematically excluded from the jury.
Over the next decade, there were 7 more trials. The younger of the women, Ruby Bates, recanted her testimony, but that had no effect on the outcome–the boys were convicted 7 more times. Eventually, 4 were released in 1937, three were paroled in the mid forties, one escaped and one died in prison. The Boys were represented by Sam Leibowitz, a famous New York lawyer who went on to become a famous judge.
So that’s the long, sad story in a nutshell. Many of the journalists on scene described the multiple trials described the proceedings as a minstrel show, so that’s how Kander and Ebb decided to cast the play. It opens with the classic characters, the Interlocutor (played by Hal Linden, who I didn’t even recognize), Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The set is mostly comprised of some metal chairs that can be put together in various ways to create furniture, a train, a jail cell, etc.
The nine men who play the Boys also play other parts–especially, and riotously, the two accusers. Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo play everyone else, and there is one black woman who is often on stage but has no lines who represents, I guess, the entire black race.
It’s a musical, of course. Everyone sings, everyone dances. There are old, tired jokes. There is pathos. There is bathos. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Well, maybe not cry–the authors manage to just take the worst edge off the hideous things that happen, pulling back just a bit to keep the audience from getting too emotional. That may or may not be the best theatrical choice, but it’s the one they made.
The acting and singing and dancing are all excellent. Jared Joseph as Mr. Bones and JC Montgomery as Mr. Tambo do all the heavy lifting of moving the show along. Clifton Duncan, as prisoner Haywood Patterson (who eventually escaped prison and wrote a book about the story) is the emotional core of the show.
Yes, the show ends on an uplifting note–but I can’t tell you how. You’ll just have to go see it. It’s worth your time.
The Coolest of Stores
Cool right from the front door. At Cornerstone, in Sonoma, a very cool place all by itself.Off to Sonoma this afternoon, to pick up a piece of furniture from Artefact Design and Salvage. We ordered it from their website when the owner, Dave Allen, was shopping in Indonesia and the container finally arrived. Thanks to the internet he can sell things even before he receives them, and we got a pretty cool new table you won’t find in any other store in the country.
But as wonderful as Artefact is, it is just the neighbor to my favorite store in the world, Zipper. This place quite literally raises quirky to an art form.
A big space filled with uniqueness.Zipper is a gift store, which is a catch-all word letting the owners sell pretty much any darned thing that catches their talented eyes, from furniture to hats to books to watches to kitchen gadgets to children’s items to objets d’art. You go there with an open mind and just see what nabs your imagination. Special for Christmas shopping, read this for more info about the best gifts out there.
A small museum’s worth of objets.The owners are Steve Saden, once a fashion designer, and Elizabeth Cashour, a playwright. How they got into retail I’ll never know, but they’re good at it.
Steve still shows his fashion sense.I always enjoy looking at the books they carry–this is a gift store, not a book store, so their inventory leans to very large ‘coffee table’ books, often on exotic and outré topics. The Big Book of Breasts, for instance, is in 3-D, special glasses included.
The modern world being what it is, they have a number of signs imploring their customers not to see the books there and then buy them from Amazon, and especially not to whip out their cell phones to scan the UPC symbols to make that process easy.
This is not your common book store.
Whimsy. Lots and lots of whimsy.The kiddie section isn’t the place to find a Mickey Mouse doll or a Where’s Waldo book. It’s all different, interesting, challenging, amusing and just plain special.
The children’s section against the rear wall.There are fashion accessories, glasses, jewelry and accessories.
Can’t expect a fashion designer not to have fashion, can you?We’re in the internet age, so of course they sell online, too, at Zippergifts.com The website is interesting, but nothing like the store–you have to go there to get the full flavor of it. Sonoma is less than an hour from here, you really should make the trip and see this very cool store for yourself.
Totally Unauthorized 