Cayucos

Dino exploring the beach in Cayucos

Hwy 1 from Carmel to Cambria may be the most scenic drive in the world.  In my experience only the Amalfi coast in Italy comes close, and there you have to put up with those oversized buses the Italians insist on putting on a road half the width of Hwy 1.  Plus, Route 1 has the added advantage of being a whole lot closer.  The ideal instrument for traversing this somewhat twisty road would have been the Porsche, but Frieda wanted to take Dino Ferrari, our white collie, along for the ride, and he’s just too big to fit comfortably in the back of a 911, so we had to employ the Volvo.  It turned out that, for a leisurely drive, it was perfectly adequate.  I let Frieda steer and spent my time gawking at the scenery rather than carving apexes.  As we cruised through Big Sur I spotted a young man sitting in the shade by the side of the road, leaning against a redwood, with his nose in a book, and was reminded of my first visit to this spectacular area many years ago, when it was the haunt of well-heeled hippies.  I couldn’t see, as we sped past, whether it was Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller, or Jack Kerouac he was perusing, but I still caught a whiff of the old magic that had charmed all of them and me as well.  At the southern end of the drive there’s a tight, twisty stretch of road.  The first time I drove it I was headed north from Ojai in a Corvair Corsa and worried that if the entire road was that serpentine I wouldn’t reach Santa Cruz until after dark.  But it turned out I had nothing to fret about.  That stretch only lasts a few miles.  In no time at all we had passed Cambria and reached our destination, the quaint little beach town of Cayucos, just north of Morro Bay.  

From our terrace in Cayucos

Going south the beaches darken from pearl in Carmel to cocoa in Cayucos, where the sand is punctuated with black, agglomerative rock formations ranging in size from a steamer trunk to a small cabin.  When we arrived it was sunny, but a strong, cool wind was coming in from the sea and I wished I’d worn my hoodie as we lunched out on the Sea Shanty’s deck with Dino.  The Shoreline Inn, right on the beach, was also dog friendly.  Dog compatibility seemed to be trending in the area, catering to empty nesters or DINKS like us, families filled out with canine kids.  The 3 of us went for a walk on the beach there and we found that, just as in our own neighborhood, Dino was the star of the show, fawned upon by everyone we met, while he, as usual, reveled in the attention, smiling and prancing for all like a movie star on the red carpet.  For dinner we got take-out fish tacos from the Smoke House and enjoyed them with a bottle of wine on our terrace, from which we could see, adrift in the haze, Morro Rock, a few miles to the south.  

Dockside and Morro Rock

Next day we drove down to Morro Bay for lunch at Dockside, where a combo was playing Dave Brubeck as fresh fish were being unloaded nearby.  It was quite enjoyable, with excellent clam chowder, fish tacos, and cold Stella Artois to wash it down.  The place even had leashes attached to the perimeter bench to hook Dino up and prevent him from wandering and becoming a nuisance.  Surprisingly cool breezes interrupted the warmth now and then and made us shiver.  Nevertheless we stayed until the combo quit, then wandered south along the docks checking out the restaurants and shops, the Rock looming over us, before circling back to the car.  The Rock, which was once quarried for granite, is connected to land by a sandy spit with a road, so we drove out to it. On the bay side was a nice, quiet beach, while on the ocean side it was choppy, tempestuous.  From there we headed down to Los Osos and Montaña de Oro State Park.  We had thought of taking the Bluff Trail with Dino but found it was closed to dogs, so had to content ourselves with the pebbly beach at Spooner’s Cove where Dino could romp on leash.  Back in Cayucos for supper we picked up shrimp cocktail, clam chowder, and salad at Duckie’s Chowder House, all quite tasty. 

Spooner's Cove

In the morning we cruised farther south to Avila Beach, noted for being a southern-facing beach shielded by highlands that wrap around the northern side of the town and protect it from the north wind and northwesterly swells. It’s the first beach, as you head south, that feels like southern California, and that makes it a strong candidate for an easy winter getaway. Not only was it notably warmer than Cayucos, with calmer waves, but the town also had a more chichi air. The beach was a dazzling eggshell, devoid of the rocks and clumps of kelp that litter the beach in Cayucos. We explored the waterfront for an hour or so, had some ice cream, and then hit the road back north, up through the Salinas Valley, a less scenic but quicker route home. Dino, who in the past has been a nervous car passenger, finally learned to relax, sleeping in the rear much of the way. He was tired from being on the go all morning with his people, time he normally would be snoozing

Avila Beach

When we got home I read in the news that the atmosphere had passed another milestone, 400 ppm. of CO2.  The last time the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was so high was 3 million years ago, long before the advent of homo sapiens, a time when sea levels were 50 to 75 feet higher than they are today.  In other words, our profligate dumping of CO2 has dialed in the programming for this level to return, dooming the world’s coastal cities, not to mention the lovely little towns I had just visited, and yet still we continue, business-as-usual, to dial in ever higher levels.  Stubbornness, a reluctance to change our ways, may prove an evolutionarily fatal quality for our species.

Indian Wells 2013



Practice Court



It’s relaxing to have a familiar vacation, a place you go every year.  For us that’s the tennis tournament at Indian Wells, in the Coachella Valley of California.  It’s a beautiful, landscaped venue with spectacular views of the rugged mountains nearby.  But our excursion got off to a somewhat inclement start this year.  As we were cruising east on I-10 raindrops began to appear on the windshield of our Ford Focus rental and soon the semis were kicking up a thick swirl of opaque mist.  Since it was lunchtime anyway, I pulled off at Carl’s Jr. in Banning for one of our 2 or 3 fast food meals of the year (there are simply no other options out there).  By the time we got back on the highway the flash shower was over and we pushed on over mostly dry pavement.  It was still colder than usual, however, so after unpacking at the motel we headed for Tsingtao, our favorite Chinese place, on the corner of Highway 111 and Portola.  To our shock and dismay, it was gone, vanished, nothing remaining of it but a dark sign and a ‘for rent’ poster in the window.  We were forced to resort to an internet search to unearth a substitute a few miles away, which turned out to be barely tolerable. 

Outside the Main Stadium

Indian Wells is the biggest tennis tournament on the west coast and every year (this was our 10^th consecutive visit) it gets bigger.  The goal this year was 400,000.  Court 6, for example, which used to have merely 3 tiers of white folding chairs, now has 3 of permanent, bolted-down chairs plus four tiers of bleachers.  There are currently 8 match courts and 16 practice courts but by next year there will be 9 match courts and 24 practice courts.  Stadium 2, currently a towering scaffold, will be rebuilt as a concrete arena seating 8,000 (the main stadium seats 16,000).  We’ll hardly recognize the place.  The large, polyglot crowds that show up now make it hard to do the kind of court-hopping we used to do in the early days.  If you try that now, you’ll be unlikely to get a decent seat for anything.  Now you pretty much have to pick a court, get there early to seize the best seats you can find, and plan on holding them all day, while taking turns on snack and restroom runs. 

Relaxing on the Lawn

Friday, our first morning there, was sunny but chill.  When we got to the venue at 11, I was comfortable in a long-sleeved shirt over a tee.  The match of the day we were really interested in was the rising young American Jack Sock against the Croatian giant Ivo Karlovic.  It was the 2^nd match up on Stadium 2 so we headed over there to try to get good seats on the south end, where the sun is behind you.  We got some decent ones but had to sit through Petra Kvitova’s (she of the famous chicken squawk) defeat of Olga Govortsova in 3 sets, in order to hold them.  When Jack showed up he seemed in control, winning the 1^st set 6-3, and taking the 2^nd to a tiebreak.  Meanwhile, however, dense clouds were blowing in from the north and the temperature was dropping like a stone.  We kept adding layers and had put on our full complement by the time Jack lost the tiebreak.  Then he fell apart as the thermometer continued to plunge.  By the time he was beaten, we’d had enough of shivering, and high-tailed it for the car.  At least it didn’t rain, which had seemed possible.    



Ernests Gulbis



Saturday was warmer, and we went back to Stadium 2 to see David Ferrer, the #4 seed, get clobbered by Kevin Anderson in the first major upset of the tournament.  Then we watched 2 more matches that didn’t much interest us in order to keep our choice seats for the match between the young Australian hopeful Bernard Tomic and Richard Gasquet of France.  Once again, Tomic failed to live up to the hype and Gasquet beat him quickly in straight sets, enabling us to dodge over to Stadium 3 to catch the Gulbis/Tipsarevic match.  It was dark by that time, and getting cold again, so there weren’t a lot of people and we got fine seats on the north end.  I’ve always thought Ernests Gulbis an underachiever, but this night, for once, he played up to his potential, completely blowing Tipsarevic, the #9 seed, off the court 6-2, 6-0.  Gulbis was playing so fast, slamming serves right at Janko and blasting forehands past him with such power, that Tipsarevic was reeling, like a punch drunk boxer bouncing off the ropes.  He looked like he’d been hit by a hurricane.  I’m glad I finally got to see Gulbis play as well as I believed he could.  (He won another round before going out in a very tight 3 set contest with Rafael Nadal, who went on the win the tournament.)



Grigor Dimitrov



Sunday was a gorgeous day, abundant sunshine, in the low 70s, with a light breeze, the air dry and crystal clear: perfect for tennis.  We got to the venue just as it opened and secured front row seats at the south end of Court 7 where Frieda’s current favorite player, Alexandr Dolgopolov, was scheduled to play the second match.  We prefer to sit at the end because you can see everything without having to swing your head back and forth, you’re closer to the players, and you have their view, with the ball coming at you just as if you’re playing.  But we had to sit through a boring women’s match before the Dog came on.  Frieda, of course, was impatient for the women to finish and get the hell off the court.  Then, when The Dog finally showed up, his play was lackluster and he lost the 1^st set to Carlos Berlocq, a 30-year-old Argentine clay courter with a career high ranking of 37 (the Dog is 24 and has been ranked as high as 13).  In the 2^nd set his play improved and he squeaked it out in a tense tiebreak.  He was up a break in the 3^rd set and seemed to have Berlocq on the ropes when he pulled something in his left leg.  The Dog called the trainer but he had nothing to offer and afterward Dolgopolov rapidly fell apart, failing to win another game.  Frieda was bitterly disappointed.  We stayed around for Tommy Haas/Andujar and the French/Polish doubles match that followed, and then the beginning of a match between 2 youngsters, Matthew Ebden of Australia and Grigor Dimitrov from Bulgaria.  Dimitrov has been talked up for a couple of years now as ‘Baby Fed’ (as in Federer), and I was impressed by the smooth power of his game.  I would have liked to stay for the entire match but it was dark by now, getting colder by the minute, as it tends to do in the desert, and we had to get on the road for the hypnotic drive back to Ontario.  Later I read that he disposed of Ebden in straight sets, but went out to Djokovic in the following round.  However, he’s on my radar now as someone to watch. 

Chabon vs. Ferrante



Telegraph Avenue



I was an early enthusiast of Michael Chabon, starting with The Mysteries of Pittsburg and continuing through A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but after that he seemed to grow absorbed in family life, writing for youngsters, and ruminations on Jewish identity and, despite my admiration for his ability to compose marvelous sentences, I lost interest.  But then his latest, Telegraph Avenue, fell out of my Christmas stocking, so I took a stab at it.  To my dismay I found it tough going.  The compositional facility was still there, with a fresh angle of attack on nearly every sentence, yet the characters remained dead on the page, lifeless tokens you never believed in or cared about, and the situations never gelled into a story with any propulsive force.  The style is mannered, artificial, contrived, tarted-up, gimmicky, a disguise for the lack of anything of substance or import to say.  It’s so self-consciously clever that it becomes a barrier to experiencing anything beyond itself.  Despite being initially amusing, at some point it just becomes tedious.  I had to push myself through the book by an effort of will and, after the third section (p. 250), a single sentence that ran on for 12 pages, my progress ground to a halt.  I just had no desire to continue.

That was around Valentine’s Day, when Frieda gave me a novel called My Brilliant Friend by an Italian writer named Elena Ferrante.  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I read the 4 page Prologue, wherein the son of the narrator’s childhood best friend calls to tell her that his mother has disappeared: her clothes, her jewelry, her pictures, all her belongings, gone.  She has erased herself.  The narrator, a woman in her 60s, vows not to let her get away with it, but to thwart her wishes by recording everything she knows about her, the story of their friendship.  She will create an homage that is, at the same time, an attack, an act of revenge.  It’s a vow that sets the tone for the ambiguous and tense relationship the book describes, one that both feeds and depletes, between friends who both love and compete with one another.  I was hooked. 

Naples

Over the next 48 hours I managed to put it down on a number of occasions, but I didn’t want to, and was alert for any opportunity to pick it up again, until I finished all 331 pages.  Its plain style, in contrast with Chabon, doesn’t call attention to itself, but instead brings the characters and their poor suburb of Naples in the late 50s to life.  I felt I was living the narrator’s life with her, knew her friends and their families, and cared what happened to them.  That’s because the characters are not only fully formed, they are alive, they change, they discover things about themselves and others, the circumstances of their lives are in constant flux and it alters them.  You peer into their depths.  Ferrante’s work is intensely, intimately personal, she digs into the roots of personality with an exceptional candor and honesty.  Her characters remain true to themselves, authentic, even while changing.  When she describes adolescence, she nails what it’s like to be a passenger in a body that is out of control, and she describes it without letting any distortions of vanity creep in.  At the same time the story carries you; you forget that you are reading, you feel you are experiencing. 

Ferrante’s book is the story of a deep and complex friendship that begins in 1st grade.  The narrator, Elena, is attracted to Lila because Lila is bad.  She is prone to nasty pranks, and defiant of authority.  Yet she is a brilliant student, brimming with potential.  She is a model of courage and assertiveness who pushes Elena to exceed what she would be able to accomplish on her own.  In the beginning, Elena worships Lila, but over the course of the novel the power gradually shifts, the pivot being when Elena goes on to middle school while Lila is held back by her ignorant, plebian father, until by the end, when the 2 girls are 16, it is Elena who has become Lila’s brilliant friend who will conquer the larger world as Lila sinks back into the morass of her origins.  Appropriately for an author trained in the classics, there is a whiff of Greek tragedy in the book, the tragedy of unfulfilled promise. 

Apparently her earlier novels, The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, and The Lost Daughter, are all darker, less serene, lacking the joy that occasionally breaks forth in this book, so I’m not sure if I want to go there.  But My Brilliant Friend is supposed to be the 1^st of a trilogy, and I finished it eager to learn more about the lives of the people I met in it, so I’m awaiting the sequel with keen anticipation. 

Overnight in SF



Hotel Kabuki



Winter’s a good time to visit San Francisco insofar as hotel rates drop as much as 50% from their summer levels, despite the fact that there’s rarely any of the chilly fog that plagues the summer months.  Of course it may be cold or rainy, but sometimes you get these brilliant sunny days when the air is so clear you can see Point Reyes 20 miles away, an ultra-high-def day.  We had one of those on a recent Saturday. 

We arrived at the Hotel Kabuki, in Japantown, around 3 Friday afternoon, check-in time, and parked in the garage beneath, where we found an ideal slot for R2 right by the elevators.  Our room on the 9^th floor boasted views to the north and east and we savored them briefly before descending to the street, walking Post to Fillmore and turning uphill.  In the other direction (south) the neighborhood gets a little rougher, high-end shops giving way to jazz clubs like The Boom Boom Room, Rasselas, and Yoshi’s, not to mention the famous Fillmore, although the recent arrival of a pricey restaurant called State Bird Provisions may signal an upgrade trend creeping south.  It’s a popular place and we considered trying it but the menu didn’t grab us and we already have a favorite restaurant in the area.  . 



Tom Papa



The weather was overcast with a cold wind gusting into our faces, so we ducked into a shoe store called Paolo.  Frieda is a shoe nut and, to be honest, I have a weakness for them myself.  A pair of green eel skin lace-ups sang to me but I resisted their siren call.  We escaped the place with our wallets unscathed and poked our noses into a few other shops before heading back to the hotel.  After changing, we caught a cab to Cobb’s Comedy Club on Columbus, near Lombard (the valet at the hotel discouraged us from driving due to the shortage of parking in North Beach on a Friday night).  We had tickets to see Tom Papa, whom we’d discovered on a Comedy Central special.  We were about an hour early for the 8 o’clock show and had our choice of seats.  I picked a table in the second row; the front row’s a little too close for comfort in a comedy show.  Seeing as how there was a 2 drink minimum, I ordered a bottle of Firestone Gewurztraminer (We visited the Firestone Winery on our trip to the Santa Inez valley in October 2011: see post “The Santa Inez Valley”) plus a burger with fries and a salad.  People slowly filed in while we ate and by show time the floor was filled. 

Things kicked off with a mediocre comic from Sacramento followed by one from LA who was better, but not good enough to inspire full surrender.   Papa, even though we didn’t always agree with his perspectives (closing the Post Office), and even though much of his material had no personal resonance for us (parenting), was just as funny as we recalled from our previous exposure.  He had us laughing until our stomachs hurt.  It’s not just what he says, of course, but his gestures, his grimaces, his timing, the whole package.  After the show we ambled up Columbus to Café Greco for some dessert and espresso, and then caught a cab back to the hotel.  These days it seems nearly as easy to find a taxi in San Francisco as in Manhattan.  The cabbie returning knew the city better, so the fare was about a third less than the fare going had been. 

As I mentioned, the next day dawned pellucid.  We drove out to the Richmond, an area sometimes referred to as New Chinatown despite the plethora of Russian establishments, for brunch at Tan Kiang, a place with locally famous dim sum, and then headed over to Land’s End in Lincoln Park to take advantage of the clarity.  From there the Golden Gate was etched in acid on a ceramic blue sky.  When you consider gateways, there is no other in America with as much iconic power as this bridge.  It’s like the vagina of America.  But while we were walking around there I noticed my Tsubos were cutting into my Achilles tendon, despite the fact that I’d had them for years, so we took R2 back to Japantown, parked it in the garage, and walked over to the Safeway on Geary to pick up some Band-Aids to shield my sore heels. 

Problem fixed, we nabbed a cab to Union and Franklin.  Union is another good shopping street and Frieda was after boots.  She found some brown Steve Maddens she liked so I bought them for her.  Then we crossed the street to La Boulange for a couple lattes, plopping ourselves outside to enjoy the warm sun and ogle the fashionistas.  When we’d had our fill of that we meandered on down to Fillmore and turned up the hill.  Fillmore is so steep here that for a couple blocks the sidewalk turns into stairs.  When you get to the top (Broadway) and turn around the Marina spreads out beneath you, with the bay beyond and then the Marin headlands.  It’s one of the great views in the city.  Over the rooftops to your left you can see the northern half of the Golden Gate.  Facing south it’s a gentle descent from here and we meandered into various shops, just killing time until SPQR, the restaurant we were stalking, opened at 5:30.  We had no reservations but got seats at the bar and ordered a carafe of a very nice white from Umbria, a salmon starter, black ink chitarra, and Arctic char, plus, for dessert, a chocolate assortment with hazelnuts.  We were on the road for home by 7:45.  It was a nice little getaway. 

Durrell and Miller



Lawrence Durrell



There was a time, many years ago, when Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller were my favorite fiction writers.  Much of the Alexandria Quartet I read aloud to my first wife.  In those days many, including professors of mine in both college and grad school, considered Durrell to be among the top 5 novelists of the 20^th century, but now, barely more than a decade after its close, he seems largely forgotten.  Both writers reflect the desire, evident over the past couple of centuries, to escape ordinary, mundane, everyday reality for some form of hyper-reality, an uber-reality.

 Durrell and Miller were friends.  The climax of their extensive correspondence came when, after reading Sexus, which went beyond the casual obscenity of the Tropics trilogy to outright pornography, Durrell sent Miller a telegram calling it “disgracefully bad,” and insisting that he must withdraw it at once, before it did irreparable damage to his reputation.  As a young man Durrell had decried British prudery, but at this point his own reawakened.  It’s ironic, given his concern for Miller’s reputation, that it would be his own that was sullied by factors beyond his control, such as the suicide of his daughter and subsequent unsubstantiated rumors that he had molested her, while Miller, who treated the matter of his reputation with blithe, cavalier disregard, and who could certainly be accused of gross neglect of his own children, has skated free. 

Henry Miller



Most people think Tropic of Cancer is Miller’s best and I think a solid case may be made for that, but it is the Rosy Crucifixion, of which Sexus is the first volume, that tells the central story of his life, the saga of his escape from a life of drudgery to one of self-realization and some measure of fulfillment, and the price he had to pay for it.  It comes across as more of what Miller essentially is: not a traditional novelist so much as a raconteur who button-holes you in a bar and starts bending your ear. In between the sexual bouts are rants about living on the edge economically, emotionally, and existentially, an approach he believes makes for the fullest, most intense life, because more than just a writer he is the advocate of a mode of living.  It’s a life style few have the courage for, and even he can only manage it with the crutch of a mystical faith that he is “protected,” for to live so nakedly would be too terrifying in a universe of sheer randomness.  He was like everyone else in this respect: he believed what he needed to believe in order to live as he was predisposed to live.

What strikes me most in revisiting these enthusiasms of my youth in the current context of commercial fiction is how original they seem.  Tropic of Cancer and Justine are like no other books before or since; they are sui generis.   In the decades since their release the processes of commercialization, homogenization, and institutionalization, prominent features of the industrial world, have proceeded apace, so that contemporary novels are far more like one another.  For a time art, and literature as art, took the place of religion as a vehicle of would-be transcendence, but now it is just a commodity like any other.  Writers have lost the revolutionary, shamanistic mystique they had in Miller’s youth and been reduced to craftsmen, priests of the system, celebrants of the Mass of consumerism.  This is not so much the result of any imposition from above as it is due to the corruption of the artists themselves: where once they pursued immortality, the veneration of posterity, now they are satisfied with celebrity.  This diminution of aspiration is due to the fact that we no longer believe in posterity; we are living in the moment, amidst the processes of rapid irrelevance.  The only future we can imagine is dystopia. 

The best contemporary work is the best on account of the sheer beauty of the sentences from which it is constructed, not because of any revolutionary ideas it communicates about how we might strive to reach over and beyond the confines of contemporary society or any big insights about the nature of ultimate reality.  Contemporary literary novels are enjoyed for the sheer play of language, not for any meaning they contain.  They are, as it were, gorgeously wrapped empty packages.  The fun is in the unwrapping, not in what is found inside.  Durrell and Miller followed Joyce in the language play line (Miller once said that he hoped one day to write sheer nonsense and some would say he achieved that goal on more than one occasion), but they still had one foot in the old novel-of-ideas camp.  With them it was language and the big idea, language and meaning.  Now it’s just the language. 

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.