Wine and Art



Ladera landscape

Fall usually finds us in Europe, but this year, on account of the car and the deck expense, we economized and instead hosted a bevy of visits from distant family: Frida’s youngest nephew from New York, 22, that age when you know everything except what to do with your life; her 92-year-old mother from New Jersey, growing frailer but still in love with life; her oldest nephew and his girlfriend; my insurance executive niece from Wisconsin; and finally my recently retired sister and her less recently retired husband from Iowa. With Frieda’s oldest nephew and his live-in girlfriend, we ventured up to the Napa Valley and the city.

 

Cabernet vines

In their 30s, with political views congruent to ours, they’re as fun for us to hang out with as friends.  They live in Manhattan, near Lincoln Center, and although the nephew has visited several times before, this was the girlfriend’s first gander at northern California.  They flew in on a Tuesday night.  The nephew has a friend-of-a-friend connection at the Ladera winery in the hills east of St. Helena so Wednesday we headed up there for a VIP tour.  Our tour was scheduled for 2 PM but, because it took a bit longer to get there than anticipated, we had no time to stop for lunch, and consequently started drinking on empty stomachs.  The weather was spectacular for wandering around a vineyard and sampling the tiny Cabernet grapes; not a cloud in the sky, the hills still corduroyed with lush green vines.  They had a gravity process on 2 floors of a 19^th century building that would fit right into rural France.  We ended up in a cool adjunct of the cellar where welcome cold cuts and cheeses were served along with a Cabernet that went for $90/bottle.  Normally I’m not a big fan of Cabernet, but this stuff was smooth as silk and so naturally we all got a tad sloshed, and had to take it slowly down crowded highway 29 to our B&B in Yountville, the Oleander House. 

Yountville, though so small you can easily walk from one end to the other in less than 30 minutes, has at least 4 highly-rated restaurants: French Laundry (3 Michelin Stars), Ad Hoc, Bouchon, and Bottega.  All are owned by the famous chef Thomas Keller, except for Bottega, which is Michael Chiarello’s.  French Laundry, designated best restaurant in the world 2 years running by Restaurant Magazine, is pricey ($270/person); Ad Hoc is more affordable.  It serves a single 4-course meal on any given night for a prix fixe of around $60.  We were eager to try it but learned to our disappointment that it was closed on Wednesday nights.  The last time Frieda and I stayed overnight in Yountville we’d visited Bouchon, so we decided to try Bottega this time.  Keller’s inspiration is French cuisine, whereas Chiarello’s is Italian, and generally I prefer Italian to French, although it’s been too long since we ate at Bouchon for me to make a direct comparison.  But it was delightful sipping drinks out on the veranda in front of the fireplace at Bottega and the food was worth the wait.     

In the morning, after a distinctive breakfast at the Oleander House that included tapioca pie, and then a stop at Domaine Chandon to pick up some champagne, we took the girlfriend down to San Francisco for a quick tour.  Although the day started off sunny, it began to cloud up as we drove south through Marin and was completely overcast by the time we reached Sausalito.  After a stroll along the strand to savor the sight of the San Francisco skyline across the bay, we swung across the Golden Gate and circled around to Fort Point for a dramatic view of the southern tower looming into the drifting fog.  From there we cruised through the emerald velvet hills of the Presidio and down to the Marina, passing all the white yachts moored in the basin before heading up Fillmore to Pacific Heights, where we parked and ambled down to Roam Artisan Burgers for some lunch.  The last few times we’ve spent the night in the city we’ve stayed in Japantown, so we’re pretty familiar with the Fillmore neighborhood.  San Francisco is a spectacular city, the most beautiful in America, for my money: half New York, half Honolulu; the Paris of the Pacific.

China Beach

After lunch we dropped them at Union Square to catch a cable car, because there’s nothing quite like the vistas that open up from side to side as you roll along Hyde oblivious to the traffic.  We picked them up at Lombard.  After nosing down it, we found parking on Columbus and wandered through Little Italy to Chinatown where we ogled the oddities of the street vendors.  When we’d had our fill of that we cruised back across town to Sea Cliff, on the far side of the Presidio, the ritziest residential area in the city, and descended the stairs to China Beach to take in the fog-smeared views of the Golden Gate from outside the bay.  We’d planned on staying for dinner (we had reservations at both SPQR and Delfina, our 2 favorite restaurants in the city) but the weather had continued to deteriorate and by now rain was coming in, so we decided to cut our visit short and head out of town via the Great Highway.

The nephew with Dali

An event called Open Studios was going on that weekend in Santa Cruz and since the girlfriend was starting a jewelry business we took her around to see what the local jewelry makers were doing.  The Thursday storm had passed through by then and the sun had returned.  We started with Beth Gripenstraw, whom some friends had recommended.  Jewelry wasn’t her main thing, she’s primarily known as a ceramicist, but it was her recent watercolors that really caught our eyes.  The décor theme was Paris in the 20s and around her dining table she had set up life-sized figures of Dali, Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Gauguin, Diego Rivera, Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Monet, all seemingly about to dine off plates she had created inspired by each artist’s work, while friends of hers attired in 20s outfits cruised the scene and French cabaret music appropriate for the Lapin Agile played on an antique phonograph.  Refreshments were set up out on the front porch that overlooked downtown.  On the side was a yard enclosed with bamboo, utterly private where, last year, apparently, she’d set up a safari camp with life-sized papier-mâché animals.  A tiger remained from that event to greet visitors at the door this year. 

Aldo's

 The subsequent studios weren’t as much fun, nor was the jewelry that enticing, until we came to Ann Wasserman, who had a little workshop in the courtyard of her condo in the Seabright neighborhood.  She took the girlfriend into her workshop and gave her some pointers on her processes.  Both women were impressed by her work, so the nephew generously bought each a ring.  From there it was a short hop to Aldo’s for lunch on the deck overlooking the mouth of the yacht harbor, where we could watch the boats come and go in the dazzling sunshine. 

All in all I think it was a nice break for them from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. 

Bourgeois Concerns 2

When I was in college and in rebellion against the social class I grew up in, I believed the only important thing was to think big thoughts and that such trifling concerns as those discussed in my previous post were insufferably bourgeois.   But given the current state of income inequality in the US, affiliation with the middle class has come to seem something of a badge of honor.  The rich like to imagine they are the engine of the economy but they’re not, the middle class is.  A large and thriving middle class is the one social stratum an advanced industrial economy cannot do without, because without it, there would be no market, no demand for the goods such an economy produces.  The poor and the rich don’t consume at a high enough rate.  The larger the middle class is, the more stable the society is, and the more equitably the wealth is distributed.  The middle class is the glue that holds modern societies together, it’s the most law-abiding class.  The more polarized a society becomes, the more split into rich and poor, the more unstable it becomes, and the more likely it is that centrifugal forces will pull it apart.  Ideally, nearly everyone would be middle class, with just enough poor and rich to keep things interesting, enough for a soupçon of instability, if you will. 

But since the Reagan years the extremes have been expanding at the expense of the middle.  This phenomenon has become known as the Great Divergence.  While the number of poor has increased, the rich have gotten a whole lot richer.  Since 1979 the income of the top 1% has gained over 275%.  The United States now has one of the highest levels of income inequality of any of the high income nations.  At the same time the share of total income going to the middle class has declined from 62% in 1970 to 45% in 2010, while the share of the rich has gone from 29% to 46%.  The middle class has shrunk; its median income and median net worth have both fallen over the past decade.  Too many rich or, as in our case, a few too rich, is a drag on the economy, sucking the blood of demand from it, making it anemic. Extremes like this are a social distortion that cannot be sustained. 

The Republicans do not want to reverse this trend, far from it.  To raise taxes on the middle class in order to give the rich yet another tax cut, when the latter’s tax rates are already at historic lows, as Romney proposes to do, would be economic suicide.  Romney may actually believe in such voodoo economics (after all, he believes in all sorts of other nonsense), despite its having been proven decisively wrong over the past 40 years, but I think it’s actually more of a class loyalty thing.  He just wants to make himself and his rich cronies even richer, and to hell with the rest of us. 

It’s been said that Romney wants to return to the Gilded Age, the era over a century ago when super-rich industrialists and financiers rode roughshod across the economic landscape and lowly workers were grateful for any crumbs tossed their way. (Besides the abysmal business ethics, this was also an era of rampant political corruption.)  Ryan, his sidekick, gets his economic notions from sophomoric fantasy novels and wants to wind the clock back 2 centuries and reinstate the gold standard (which, btw, is a terrible idea).  But to me it seems that the Republicans really, in their heart of hearts, would like to turn back the clock 500 years to an era before the middle class even arose, an era when women were chattel and did as they were told, an era before science when religion and an hereditary aristocracy held sway and were supported by the sweat of a vast peasantry who didn’t ask troublesome questions of their betters because they knew their place as inferior beings.  That is the lost paradise the Republicans long to reinstate, with themselves as the aristocrats, of course.  They would like nothing better than to do away with modernity and all its trappings, and replace it with a new feudalism, a capitalistic feudalism.  They want to get rid of the state because the state is like the king in those old days, a check on their oligarchic power, which they wish to be as absolute as possible, and beyond the reach of the masses and their annoying vote.     

But surely, you say, they could never imagine this is a viable program.  Well of course, not if they were sane.  The trouble is, while their grip on reality wasn’t sure before, after a Black man was elected president the Republicans well and truly lost their minds.  The party was hijacked by its lunatic fringe and has now become the party of ignorance and superstition, the anti-science party.  Composed of people who imagine facts can be whatever they wish them to be, it has become utterly disconnected from reality.  Republicans have abandoned facts, evidence, and pragmatism, in favor of ideology, blind beliefs, and wild assertions.  Also, Romney and his cronies are contemptuous of anyone who’s not rich and convinced that such people are easily duped.  And, unfortunately, if the polls are accurate, they’ve managed to dupe a whole lot of them already. 

For the rich the Romney/Ryan ticket represents over-reach.  The rich have done exceedingly well over the past 4 decades, far better than everyone else.  But that’s not enough for them, of course.  Greed is their defining characteristic.  If, through a combination of misdirection, lies, voter suppression, fraud, and dirty tricks, they accomplish their coup of the few, and then proceed to carry out their program to push income inequality ever further, to unprecedented levels, the result won’t be good for anyone who values economic or political stability. 

Bourgeois Concerns



Before

During the transition from spring to summer we were taken up with a section of our back yard we refer to as “the trellis.”  It’s a pergola-like structure along about a third of the back fence with a canopy of redwood 2x2s that covered a hot tub and a koi pond.  For the past year or so it had been slowly collapsing beneath the weight of a massive wisteria.  Every month the supporting 4x4s took on more of an angle.  The contractors we spoke to about the problem all said the wisteria would have to come down, so we asked our gardener if he could cut it back off the structure so the latter could be rebuilt and he said yes, he could, and it would survive, but 2 or 3 years would be required for it to recover and get back to where it was.  Then, scratching his chin, he offered that he could rebuild the trellis without harming the wisteria.  Now, up to that point I had had no direct knowledge of his carpentry skills, so by way of a preliminary test I gave him a little repair job on the opposite corner of the front yard, where the fence had gone wobbly, and he did a fine job with it, so we decided to let him have a go at the trellis. 

When we first moved into this house, many years ago, we were excited about having a hot tub and a koi pond, even though the previous owner had taken the koi with her.  But 2 weeks after we took up residence the pump quit.  As there were no koi and we had, as it were, other fish to fry, given that the deck was collapsing, we just drained it and got on with the more important project.  Over the years we’ve had some people look at it but they all wanted many thousands of dollars to get it operational again and it just wasn’t that important to us.  As for the hot tub, a relic of the 80s big enough for at least 3 couples, we noticed the first winter that keeping it hot was giving a hefty boost to our power bill.  We also noticed that we didn’t use it that much, so the second winter we elected to shut it down.  In the spring we opened it and found wads of slugs and worms, so we had to drain it, scrub it out, and refill it.  We used it that summer, but less than the summer before, because we had begun to realize we didn’t actually enjoy feeling like a cannibal’s dinner all that much.  When fall came we shut it down again and in the spring we scrubbed it out again, but that summer used it even less.  The following spring we just left it. 



After

So now, under the trellis, we had a cold tub chock full of disgusting critters and their even more disgusting excrement and a koi pond with nothing but soggy, decaying leaves in the bottom. Although it sounded nice to say you had a hot tub and a koi pond in your back yard, we weren’t actually getting any use or value out of either of them. They were just taking up space. So we decided to seize the opportunity presented by rebuilding the trellis to get rid of both of them. That would give us room to build a lower level onto the deck where we could put a table for outdoor dining and a gas grill. It’s surprising how many decisions this sort of thing entails. One thing leads to another and pretty soon a $3,000 project has become an $8,000 project. We already had electricity out there, a 120 volt line for a flood light on the koi pond and a 240 volt line to run the hot tub, so we figured we might as well put some more atmospheric lighting on the 120 line and an electric heater on the 240 line for chilly nights. So now we’ve got 3 lantern lights, 3 spots, and a hanging overhead light plus a fixture for another, all on dimmers, plus the heater and a plug for another, plus 4 outlets. I think we kind of overdid it, to tell the truth. The electrician was here for more than 2 full days putting all the lines in conduit.



At night



The cost of this project has insured that we won’t be getting back to Europe this year.  We’d been toying with the idea of a trip to the Costa Brava, our favorite part of Spain, where we haven’t been in a dozen years, combined with a stop in Mallorca, something new.  Or, alternatively, a trip back to Sicily to see at least a couple of the Aeolian Islands, plus Sardinia, and maybe even Apulia, the heel of the boot of Italy.  But now these hypothetical trips will have to be put off because of our friend the trellis and what lay beneath its shadow of shame. 

Epicurus

Epicurus

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) anticipated much of the scientific worldview 3 centuries before Christ.  Following his teacher Democritus (460-370 BC), he was a materialist and an atomist, believing the world to be composed of tiny, invisible, indivisible particles in constant motion, combining in various ways to form all substances.  With astonishing intuitive insight in the face of scant evidence, he concluded that all things come to be through random deviation, and that living beings had evolved through a long process of trial and error.  The universe was not created for humans, he concluded.  Rather, we are just another creature of the world different from the others only in degree, not in kind. 

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve tells the story of how the philosophy of Epicurus managed to cross the sea of time to impregnate the modern world.  Like so many important events, it was an unlikely fluke.  The vehicle of the voyage was a long poem called De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius (99-55 BC) which, in a 9^th century copy, happened to wash up in a German monastery where it chanced to be discovered in 1417 by a Florentine book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini.  Recognizing it as a rare find, Poggio, an exceptionally talented scribe, immediately copied the manuscript and sent it back to Florence where it was recopied and began to circulate among the leading humanists of the day. 



Lucretius



The survival of Lucretius’ poem was a miracle in the 1^st place because, given the chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the attendant rampages of illiterate barbarians, it is miraculous that any literature of the ancient world survived.  But then came the rampages of a Christian orthodoxy bent upon rooting out and destroying any nonconforming text, and De Rerum Natura was not merely nonconforming, it was heretical down to its bones, because it posited pleasure as the highest good, whereas for the Church the highest good was suffering and pain.  There was no place in De Rerum Natura for notions of Christian Providence, no place for a creator or designer.  Instead it held that human society began in a brutal struggle for survival.  The soul died along with the body; there was no afterlife.  Organized religions were superstitious delusions.  There were no angels, demons, or ghosts.  Such fallacies were considered the greatest obstacles to happiness, which was the goal of Epicurus’ philosophy.



Poggio Bracciolini



Recognizing the threat, Christianity attempted to stamp out Epicureanism, yet somehow Lucretius’ manuscript survived.  Perhaps the elegance and grace of his Latin had something to do with it, or maybe it was just pure chance, but not long after it was rediscovered Gutenberg came along with the printing press (1440) and then there was no stopping it.  Soon there were just too many copies for the Christian thought police to find and destroy them all.  In the centuries since their rediscovery these ideas informed the Enlightenment and shaped the modern world.  Isaac Newton, Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi tried to reconcile Epicureanism and Christianity, but later figures of the Enlightenment (Diderot, et al.) realized the two were antipodal and came down on the Epicurean side, because it had been validated by science and passed the test of Occam’s Razor.  Subsequently Thomas Jefferson seeded the founding document of our country with the Epicurean concept of the pursuit of happiness. 

Today people are still loath to give up the ideas of divinity and the afterlife, but otherwise in practical terms they increasingly live their lives as Epicureans, pursuing happiness, seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  When you consider the amazing insights Epicurus had so long ago, it’s difficult to avoid feeling that in the form of Christianity a Levantine mysticism overwhelmed Grecian clarity and clouded the collective consciousness of the West for 1500 years, and the result was a long, dark, and fruitless detour in our intellectual history.  You have to wonder where we might have been by now had we not taken that fateful turn into darkness and superstition. 

Melinda Gates

Apparently Melinda Gates read my last post (ha!).  I say that because after I suggested there that we needed a billionaire to come on board for the cause, I saw that she has stepped forward and begun a $5 billion campaign to disseminate birth control information and the tools of contraception to women globally.  She, a Catholic, is bravely taking on the Vatican.  We’ll see if they have the cheek to excommunicate her (or send the Inquisition to arrest her). 

Now, compare that to Larry Ellison buying Lanai.  Melinda is using some of the Gates’ billions to benefit humanity, to risk herself in a courageous crusade to make a better future.  She deserves our admiration and gratitude.  Larry is just wallowing in self-indulgence.  Living proof that wealth, in and of itself, does not confer virtue.

Mother's Day

On Mother’s Day R2 took us and our dogs to visit some friends in Woodside, a small town on the peninsula just west of Palo Alto.  Appropriately, the topic of overpopulation came up again (see Freedom, Dec. 2010).  Actually, the husband of this pair brings it up every time we visit.  He’s on the faculty at Stanford in Earth Sciences and is convinced that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded; the human population needs to be reduced by at least 30%.  (Like us, they have no children, only dogs.)  He said: “It’s all well and good to honor your parents and the sacrifices they made, but as a culture we need to stop holding parenthood up as an ideal, something everyone ought to aspire to, because excessive breeding is destroying the human future.”  This is why imagined futures have been dystopian for decades now.  Unless we can stop population growth, there’s little hope of things going well for us.  It’s the root cause of all our ecological issues.  We are rapidly depleting natural resources, especially fossil fuels, but also water and minerals.  8,000,000 hectares of forest are being lost every year, resulting in increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and diminished levels of O.  The amount of arable land is dwindling while deserts are spreading.  Other species are being exterminated as we gobble up their habitats; perhaps as many as 100,000/year.  The world is filling up with our trash.  We may be fast approaching a tipping point with regard to climate change that will take us down a rabbit hole from which there will be no return or escape.  We’re headed for environmental catastrophe unless we can kick the compulsion to breed.  Choosing not to have children is the single most efficacious step an individual can take to try to avert disaster. 

Religious and ideological opposition to birth control is a big part of the problem.  Worldwide, 40% of pregnancies are unintended (50% in the US).  That’s 80 million unwanted children every year.  Bush’s AIDS program (PEPFAR) in Africa (the foremost continental driver of world population growth) intentionally withheld birth control information from women, focusing instead, as the Republican brand of sex education tends to do domestically, on abstinence.  Studies have shown that when women take control, birth rates go down, especially when they have other options in their lives.  Republicans and the Church in their campaign against contraception represent the old patriarchy in a rear guard action against empowering women and the new, more gender balanced, multivalent, panpotent culture that is struggling to be born.  They do all in their power to further the obsolete belief that women who choose not to have children are defective, because in their view the whole point of women is to be baby-factories.  Our friend said: “We should hold a non-mother’s day to celebrate women who have foregone motherhood.” 

Of course, in democratic countries a 1-child policy can’t simply be imposed by proscription as it has been in China, but having children can be made less alluring through tax policy and by means of moral suasion, because the decision to have children has now taken on profound ethical dimensions.  It’s not just a choice about the quality of your life and your children’s lives, but about the quality of everyone’s lives, the quality of life of everyone who will ever live.  The choice to have children has moral weight; it may well be the most fraught ethical decision of most peoples’ lives.  Prospective parents need to think long and hard about what they’re about to do.  What’s needed is a media campaign to put the brakes on breeding.  If only some civic-minded billionaire would get behind it, a sea-change in awareness could be effected, whereupon the askance glance of others would discourage reckless breeding.  At least, if Franzen’s view that it is merely the freedom to breed that is ruining the planet were true, but it may be something else, something more insidious and more difficult to combat.  In the US, at least, children have become sacraments in an informal religious cult conceived to transport the faithful beyond the individual limits of sex and death.  This persuasion may be the most difficult obstacle to overcome on the road toward Zero Population Growth. 

R2 Joins the Fleet

Volvo V70

One night a few months ago we were out to dinner with another couple and afterward walked them to their car.  They own half a dozen cars, at least 2 of which are what they call “appliance vehicles:” a minivan and a wagon.  The rest are collector cars, antiques.  (Well, one is a Studebaker pickup, so that kind of straddles the line.)  But on that particular evening they’d brought the wagon, a Volvo V70.  After they drove off Frieda said: “We should get a car like that.”  We had 3 cars already, but they were all 2-seaters and the newest one was 30 years old, so it didn’t seem a bad idea to add a vehicle to our fleet that could be used to pick someone up at the airport and still have room for their luggage; something we could fit another couple in, along with our collie; something that, if we folded the seats down, would haul a few 8’ 2x4s or the 8’ long fluorescent tubes that illumine our garage; in short, a practical vehicle, a vehicle that didn’t have to be coddled but could just be used.   

So, I started looking.  Frieda didn’t want to spend a lot of money.  Our friends’ wagon was a ’98 (you see a lot of older Volvos on the road, they’re pretty sturdy), worth maybe $3500, so that’s what I started looking for.  But I found that vintage tended to have a lot of mileage.  And, as you might infer from all our cars being 2-seaters, we both, unlike most Americans, prefer small cars, and the V70 seemed just a bit too big for us.  Being a sports car guy, I gravitated toward a sport wagon.  I liked the looks of the Audis, but they were pricy and online I found a lot of complaints about them not being reliable and being in the shop all the time getting expensive repairs.  The styling of the VWs was ho-hum and they also had a lot of complaints online.  Not as many as the Audis but enough, given that they weren’t as pretty.  The Subarus got good reviews, except for an apparent propensity to blow head gaskets.  Frieda liked the Forester because the high roofline in the rear meant our collie could stand up without bumping his head but I thought they were homely.  I preferred the styling of the Outback, but we didn’t need AWD and I was therefore reluctant to pay for it.  To me it was just something else to go wrong, a needless complexity.  Then I spotted the Mazda Protege5 which looked small and sporty.  Mazda only made it for 2 years, 2002 and 2003.  When I looked it up online I found nothing but raves.  Almost no one seemed to have anything bad to say about it.



Mazda Protege5



I saw one in the Auto Trader and called.  The guy said he couldn’t meet me that day, but I could drive by and look at it.  Cosmetically it looked fine, but it had 150K miles on it.  He was asking $4200.  The next day when I called him back he said it was sold.  It took a while before I saw another one within a reasonable distance.  It had 96K and they were asking $6500.  Frieda said that was too much.  I thought about it for a couple of days and then called the guy anyway.  He said it was sold.  I began to realize that a) these cars didn’t come up for sale that often and, b) when they did, you had to jump on it because they usually sold within 48 hours.  I told Frieda that, if she really wanted a car like this, we were going to have to pay at least $6K to get something decent, something with less than 100K miles.  After getting her grudging agreement, I started checking Craig’s List on a daily basis, looking for the lowest mileage Protege5 I could find, but weeks went by and the only ones that came up were farther away than I wanted to go, and most of them had over 100K miles.



Volvo P1800



I was beginning to feel frustrated when Frieda said she’d seen something on a used car lot nearby that might work for us.  I found photos of the car online.  It was the smaller Volvo wagon, the V40, with 77K miles; a nice looking car, not as sporty as the Mazda, but clean and smooth, almost elegant.  According to Wikipedia it won an Italian award for “Most Beautiful Estate in the World.”  (“Estate” is the European term for a wagon.)  It was also the first car to be awarded a 4 star safety rating by EuroNCAP.  I had long admired and aspired to own a Volvo P1800, last produced in 1973, the car that holds the Guinness world record for most miles driven at close to 3 million but, in a concession to practicality, I thought, perhaps I’ll have to make do with this one.  The reviews online weren’t as good as the Japanese cars but were better than the German ones.  The lot offering it just happened to be the same one where our friends had bought their Volvo wagon a few years back, so I knew it was reputable. 

I took the car for a test drive and there was nothing to complain about.  It was tight and smooth.  Not gobs of power, but adequate.  With leather, power everything, ac, a sun roof, it had all the modern comforts and conveniences our vintage sports cars lacked, including a defogger that actually worked.  It was boring to drive, of course, but that was the point.  It insulated you from everything, including the driving experience.  It was a quiet cocoon in which you floated down the highway.  Only one thing bothered me.  Every so often an odd twittering and chirping emanated from the dash, as if a family of electronic birds had nested there.  The salesman pled ignorance and I was reluctant to buy the car without knowing. 

Volvo V40

So I took it to a Volvo specialist and, after giving it a clean bill of health in every other respect, he told me the sounds were being produced by an aftermarket stealth radar detector.  Apparently this had been installed at considerable expense as there were tiny holes drilled into the sides of the instrument binnacle with red LEDs that flickered in concert with the chirping.  Back at the lot I told the salesman I liked the car, except for the aviary in the dash.  Could he quash it?  Alas, no, he said.  It would have to go to a specialist.  He offered an extra discount instead.  The sticker on the windshield said $7950.  I paid $6250. 

That afternoon we took it to Pet Pals and just happened to park next to a Protege5.  Looking at the 2 cars side-by-side Frieda said: “The Mazda is too small.  The V40 is just the right size for us.”

The twittering can still be annoying at times, barraging you in an overbearing way with too many indecipherable messages, but the other day I was cruising along when it went into a chirping paroxysm and when I looked around, sure enough, there was a CHP ahead parked on the other side of the road, so maybe it’s not all bad.  Frieda says she has come to find it endearing, like R2D2 is in the cockpit trying to communicate with her.  Consequently she’s dubbed the car “R2.” 

Top 40

Adele

Top 40 radio was invented in my home town, Omaha, Nebraska.  Previously the standard rule was that radio stations never played the same song more than once a day.  In 1949 Todd Storz, the grandson of Omaha brewing legend Gottlieb Storz, convinced his father to buy him a radio station, KOWH.  Then, one day in the early 50s, Todd and his buddy Bill Stewart, the station’s program director, were across the street in a diner waiting for Bill’s waitress girlfriend to get off work when they noticed that, even though the restaurant staff listened to the same handful of tunes on the jukebox all day, played by different customers, after the customers cleared out, when they were free to play any song they wanted, they played the very same songs.   Todd asked the staff to identify the most popular tunes and the next day the station started playing them in heavy rotation.  Ratings went through the roof. 

By the end of the 50s top 40 was the most popular radio format in the nation.  But toward the end of the 60s FM radio came in.  Rock was becoming increasingly pretentious and the single was diminishing in popularity.  With the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s,” the album became the dominant format and remained so throughout the 70s.  In the 80s and 90s popular music began to fragment into subgenres, each with its own following.  Top 40 never completely went away, but it could no longer claim to be the ubiquitous soundtrack of American life. 



The Black Keys



But since the advent of iTunes, the single has staged a comeback and, with it, top 40.  Now there’s no need to buy an album.  You can download the singles you like and put them together in your own album.  The best selling singles chart on iTunes lines up closely with YouTube’s most popular videos and the Billboard Hot 100.  In a turnaround, top 40 now dominates FM radio, once the bastion of album rock.  If you think of punk as an early revolt against the pretention of album rock, you could say we’ve come full circle now back to something resembling the mindless bubble-gum pop and innocent emotion of the 50s, albeit with dirty words and more sophisticated production.  I can keep up with what’s new simply by sampling the iTunes top 200. 

So here’s the playlist I recently downloaded:

1)  “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye – An Australian transplant from Belgium.  I’m not crazy about xylophone, but top 40 is about infectiousness and this lodges itself in your head. 

2)  “Paradise” by Coldplay – A little too lush for its own good, but sticky.

3)  “Someone Like You” by Adele – She owned the year and this was my favorite.

4)  “Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys – These guys just keep growing on me.

5)  “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 – Initially felt this wasn’t up to the standards they set in “Songs About Jane” (and maybe it isn’t) but it won me over nevertheless. 

6)  “Tonight is the Night” by Outasight – Callow, but good for the gym. 

7)  “Levels” by Avicii – Swedish technopop, but the video is amusing.  Also, like the Gotye song, it reminds me of Venice, where we heard them everywhere.  It appears that, this time around, top 40 has gone international. 

8)  “Drive By” by Train – Very catchy and infectious, perhaps even more addictive than “Hey Soul Sister,” their top 40 hit from last year.  Frieda loves it.

9)  “Not Over You” by Gavin DeGraw – His best since “I Don’t Want to Be.”

10)  “It Will Rain” by Bruno Mars – Frieda loves Bruno, that’s all there is to it. 



Broken Bells



11)  “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells – Here the list veers a bit away from top 40.  Broken Bells is a side project of James Mercer (of the Shins) with Danger Mouse and, even though they’re a couple years old, I like the 2 songs on this list better than anything on the new Shins album.

12)  “Hidden Hand, Hidden Fist” by STS9 – An instrumental band from Santa Cruz, too jazzy to be top 40 but with some hooks nonetheless.

13)  “On the Corner” by the Twilight Singers – A project of Greg Dulli (formerly of Afghan Whigs) too dark to be top 40, but this much saccharine pop on one list needs a little leavening.  Nice wah-wah guitar solo.

14)  “Tighten Up” by the Black Keys – Yeah, and my next list will have yet another song from these guys, so there.

15)  “The High Road” by Broken Bells – Maybe the better of the 2 Broken Bells songs; at least, the more accessible. 

16)  “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele – Frieda’s favorite.

17)  “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire – Every list needs a touch of pretension.

18)  “Missed the Boat” by Modest Mouse – Almost an oldie, already, but Frieda loves Modest Mouse, and we didn’t have this one.    

Indian Wells, Again



Practice Court



Our annual pilgrimage to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden was slightly distorted this year by our failure to make a reservation at our usual hotel early enough to beat the sell-out.  Consequently we were forced to book a room 20 miles away in Palm Springs.  The positive aspect of this was that we got to know a different part of the valley.  The negative was that we burned up a lot of gas and time going back and forth.  Our usual practice had been to fly in Thursday morning, check-in to the hotel, get some lunch, and then mosey over to the venue for an afternoon and evening of tennis.  But last year we felt a bit burnt out by the end of the weekend, so this time we decided to fly in Thursday afternoon and start the tournament on Friday. 

By the time we got to the hotel we were hungry, so we grabbed an early dinner at a pub in downtown Palm Springs. and then cruised out highway 111 through the heart of the valley to the Ralph’s near our usual hotel, which we knew stocked the Styrofoam coolers we always take to the venue.  We found the Coachella valley to be the opposite of Venice: hot, dry, spacious, full of cars, relentlessly modern and rootless.  We timed the trip and, because of all the stoplights, it took 45 minutes.  We already knew the venue was another 10 minutes from there.    



Tommy Haas



Because it took so long via 111, in the morning we detoured over to I-10, figuring it was farther, but faster.  But right after the Cook Street exit the traffic bogged down to stop-and-go and consequently, we got to the venue nearly an hour late and had to park in the overflow lot (like just about everywhere, the crowds get worse every year).  Calculating what would be the easiest match to get into at that point, we headed for Court 7 to see Tommy Haas play Nieminen.  Frieda’s always had a soft spot for Tommy because he’s so good-looking.  He got as high as number 2 in the world back in 2002 but he’s 33 years old now, in the twilight of his career, so we figured we may not have many more opportunities to see him play.  After witnessing his victory we moved next door to see the Latvian Gulbis play Llodra.  Gulbis is a talented underachiever, but both players were cranky, ragging on the ball kids as if it were their fault they weren’t playing better.  At one point Llodra turned to some Korean-American woman sitting near us who was rooting for his opponent and, in French, called her a Chinese whore.  Later we learned a journalist in the vicinity had overheard the slur and reported it to the referee, who assessed a $2500 fine, about 20% of what Llodra earned for winning the match.  We finished the day back on Court 7 where the Australian phenom Bernard Tomic was scheduled to play the dangerous floater Gilles Muller, from Luxembourg.  When we got there the promising young American Sloan Stephens was playing the 18^th seed Angelique Kerber.  Stevens was in total control until she served for the match at 5-1 in the second set.  Then she abruptly imploded, allowing Kerber to win 6 straight games, the set, and, ultimately, the match.  Tomic likewise seemed to have everything under control until the 2^nd set tiebreak when he had a meltdown.  In the final set he completely lost his way, not winning a single game.  In both cases the turnarounds seemed to have more to do with the mental fragility of these young, inexperienced players than with any lack of ability. 

Sloane Stephens

On Saturday the freeway was clear and we arrived early, nailing down good seats in Stadium 3 for Gasquet, followed by Schiavone.  Neither of these matches proved interesting however, so we bailed on the latter to catch the end of Mahut/Monaco on Court 6.  We weren’t much interested in this match, either, but were after good seats for the following doubles featuring the Ukrainian Alexandr Dolgopolov and the Belgian Malisse against Mahut/Simon.  Dolgopolov, “the Dog,” is currently Frieda’s favorite player.  He has a quirky, unconventional game that is a hoot to watch.  We saw he and Malisse play doubles last year and it was fabulous (see my post “Indian Wells 2” in March of last year).  They ended up winning the tournament.  On that occasion there were only about 50 people watching, but this time the court was utterly jam-packed, not a vacant seat, with people crammed into the entrances waiting (and hoping) to get in.  Those lucky enough to succeed saw a delightfully entertaining contest, with shots that made you ooh and ah and laugh out loud.  The most enthralling match we saw. 



The Dog



On Sunday we got to the venue even earlier to get the best possible seats for the Frenchman Monfils (a great showman) against the veteran Davydenko.  After waiting for over an hour, Davydenko showed up with a lucky loser from Qualifying.  It turned out Monfils had withdrawn due to a stomach virus that was decimating the players.  As Monfils was who we had come to see, we regretfully abandoned our perfect seats and went next door to see Tommy Haas again.  Because it took a while for people to figure out what was going on, we still got excellent seats for this one, but Tommy lost.  Frieda wanted to just stay there (Court 7) all day, because the last match on the schedule was the Dog vs. Darcis.  It turned out they moved the second match to another court, so we went straight to the 3^rd match, Verdasco/Sweeting, and then the Murray brothers played doubles against another team from Great Britain.  The place really jammed up after that because Americans Isner and Querrey were expected to play doubles against Melzer and Baghdatis, but again the officials moved the match because Melzer was still playing a singles bout on another court, and so Darcis and the Dog came on early, which suited me to a T, because I was ready to get out of there, go get some dinner, and hit the road to our hotel in Ontario (we were staying there overnight and catching an early morning flight on Monday).  The Dog started off strong, got up an early break, and seemed in control, but then Darcis broke back and sent the set into a tiebreak.  This was a seesaw affair of shouting and groaning, with no one able to close it out until Darcis finally dropped the hammer at 13-11.  However, the Dog came back strong in the second set, breaking Darcis twice and closing it out at 6-3.  But then Darcis took command in the 3^rd and it looked like the Dog was going down with Darcis serving for the match at 5-3.  Instead, he faltered, the Dog came barking back and won 4 straight games to close the set at 7-5 and take the match.  It was an exciting, edge-of-your-seat affair and a fitting end for our tournament. 

 

Carnevale

Sunday morning from our apartment

Saturday was the first day of Carnevale.  We took a vaporetto to St. Marks to see what was happening and found a number of people braving the cold, some of them in costumes, and several announcers on the stage keeping up a steady patter.  But there wasn’t enough going on to hold us so we hopped another boat back to Rialto and Osteria alla Ciurma for bacala mantecato and spritzes, and then went to Do Spade for lunch.  Afterward we tried to walk around a bit, but it was just too arctic.  For a week now I had been hoping the weather would break and we would get at least a couple of nice days out of the 10 we were there, but we were running out of time and it wasn’t happening.  So we stayed in again in the evening, even though we were starting to go a bit stir crazy because there was nothing much to do there (the TV didn’t work and our internet connection was intermittent) and we were wasting our time in Venice, but it was just too damn cold to go out. 

A chilly night on Strada Nuova

In the morning we woke up to snow and an almost solid coat of slushy ice on the canal in front of our apartment.  When I looked out the window, my heart sank.  Our time in Venice was almost gone and we just could not get a break from the relentless cold.  Nonetheless we sucked it up and went out anyway, catching a boat to St. Marks for the ceremony of the Descent of the Angel.  A lot more people turned out for this and the square was almost packed, despite the snow and cold.  Many people had on costumes, most of them the traditional 18^th century style (the 18^th century was the height of Carnevale, when it went on for months, and entailed a lot of anonymous sex, which led to an epidemic of syphilis).  Without really understanding the background of the event, we nevertheless caught the excitement of the occasion as they shoved some poor girl out of the Campanile and she dangled there with her skirt blowing over her head in the frigid breeze some 300 feet above the pavement on a steel cable.  There was a lot of screaming and cheering as she slowly slid down the cable to the big stage.  But it was still extremely cold, so after the ceremony we took a boat back to Cannaregio and had lunch at a place across the canal from the entrance to our neighborhood.  Afterward we walked up the Rio de Spagna and actually had some gelato.  Given the cold, it was hard to get in the mood for it, but our departure date was approaching and I couldn’t leave without having had some.  Later, after dark, because it was our next to last night and we were sick of being cooped up in the apartment every night, we braved the frigid conditions and took a stroll down the Strada Nuova.  Maybe I was starting to get used to it but it actually didn’t seem that bad.  At least there was no wind.  We went into a shop and I bought Frieda a dress and a scarf.  Then we found a bar and had a couple of spritzes (a couple apiece, that is) and watched the people (some in costumes) come and go while Gotye and Avicii played on the sound system. 

The next day, Monday, was the best weather of the trip. It was the break we had been hoping for, the beginning of a warming trend that, sadly, came too late for us.   The sun was out, there was no wind, and it was so warm that I actually didn’t wear a hat.  It might have gotten close to 40 degrees.  We went back to the square, and this time the costumes were unbelievable, fantastic.  We had seen the crude, corny costumes on a par with Halloween in the States on Saturday, and the traditional 18^th century-style costumes on Sunday, but now we saw conceptual costumes that were dazzlingly creative, elaborate, and intricate, costumes that were thematic and some of which looked as though they had required many, many hours to conceive and execute, and maybe hours to don.  We stayed in the square all day and shot about 300 photos in an attempt to capture the magnificence and splendor of the masquerade, as well as the magic of the occasion layered onto the ubiquitous, everyday magic of Venice.  Frieda was so blown away by the artistry of the costumes she actually suggested that, despite all the discomfort and frustration we had been through on this trip and our vow to make the next winter trip to warmer climes, we return next year for the entire duration of Carnevale.  I looked at her like she’d lost her mind, yet I understood.  The color and grandiosity of the costumes evoked and amplified the unique enchantment of Venice, and brought us back under its spell.  

For more photos of the costumes of Carnevale, visit my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75896250@N06/sets/72157629536035111/