Cachagua Store

Flap vs Skirt.....The Horror!

2011-12-22T22:47:00.000-08:00

Last Monday we had a customer send back his Mesquite Grilled "Skirt" steak in a rage....because it was patently NOT a skirt steak.

He would not eat such an abomination, wouldn't pay for it, and was taking it home to his dog. And...... he wants to have a long talk with me about meat.

He has a meat company, you see.....

Not sure how he figured all that out, but he was right. We serve a "Flap" steak, not a "Skirt".
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At the same time, during the same meal service, another customer was having our "Skirt" steak. The next day, her husbandcalled me up....(Oh, Jesus, no!)...and kept me on the phone for 30 minutes going on about how it was the best piece of meat he or his wife had ever eaten.

Oy!

So here's the deal: we are the Cachagua Store.

We are in Cachagua, not Manhattan, or Paris, or even Carmel. We bust our balls to give nice food at a nice price....and with luck......only moderately hostile and incompetent service.

If you actually want to know everything about every ingredient in our menu go to www.realtimefarms.com and you can see all our sources.

On the other hand, if you are at a table, in Cachagua...with Heather or Shavaun taking your order....time is of the essence. We are the culinary Dutch boys with our fingers in the holes in the dike. There is not a lot of time for education and explanation...and we hope that there might be at least some degree of trust in a diner that has driven 45 minutes into the mountains to eat.

We sometimes lie.

As do all restaurants, butchers, fishmongers and grocers. Lying about your food is not a crime...since none of the food from any of the above is packaged. Lying about your food is bad, but it is not a crime. As a diner or shopper you can get redress through the courts...but with a civil lawsuit, not through poor beleaguered Sheriff Miller.

And, should you be successful in your lawsuit, you will only be entitled to the difference between what was promised and what was served or sold. So, if Whole Foods sells you farmed salmon worth $5 a pound instead of Scottish wild at $15, you can sue them for the ten bucks........assuming you have paid the $200 for the lab processing of the DNA sample to prove your case.

(I have the address of the lab if you want to go this route. I have done it, and no one cares. Well, Sam Farr cares...DiFi, Boxer, Potter, Maldonado, Bill the Thrill Monning and the other poseurs representing us could care less...but that is another story).

Ditto Sand Dabs.....No one in Monterey serves real Sand Dabs....it is all frozen shite from China. We serve real Sand Dabs...and we can only get them once or twice a month. We pay $2 a pound....less than the frozen shite you are buying at your corner bistro. If you sue them for misrepresenting your dish, you will have to pay them a few dollars if you win. Real sand dabs are cheaper than fake sand dabs.

Really.

Anyway...back to flaps and skirts.

Back in my soccer coach life I found that I had to become a certified trainer just to keep my kids on the field. Most were Mexican kids with no hope of ever seeing a medical doctor, or Carmel kids with no hope of ever seeing a medical doctor. I became a certified sports massage therapist at M.I.T....Monterey Insitute of Touch. (Highly recommended).

I also am a recovering body builder (hey....she was really hot! And smart!)....and a life-long Latin speaker. Catholic. Altar boy. And a recovering apprentice union butcher in New York City.

Anatomy is the main deal in massage and sports medicine...and butchery. We humans, and our companion animals, are just big, soft Erector-Sets.

And..... all meats from all animals have been organized by union labor into a series of codes....... defining each cut and each section of anatomy involved. Each code has been laboriously pounded out on the battlefield of worker vs. grower vs. processor vs. consumer. NAMP codes. North American Meat Processors Association

For instance...a filet of beef is a NAMP 1190. With the silverside off it is an 1190a. Center cut filet, silverside off is 1190b. Lamb rack chops are 1204b...and the bone cannot be more than 3 inches from the eye. When I first came to California I would saw off the extra bones on my lamb racks and send them back for credit....everyone was amazed, and stopped selling me lamb racks.

You will not be shocked to know that none of these codes apply in California....... where almost all meats are processed by non-union labor.....who could not identify the codes in English numbers.... with a gun to their heads.

Back to beef.

Our most famous Central Coast only cut of beef is the tri-tip. We locals are all bored with tri-tip, but it doesn't actually exist outside of California, and a few places in Texas where vacationing Texans have brought it back. This is crazy, because tri-tip is clearly a NAMP 185c or 185d......available, in theory, to all union meatcutters all over the world.

In New York City it was known as a Newport, because union butchers all smoked Newports and the Newport logo is a triangle. And the tri-tip presents as a triangle.

The tri-tip is one of my favorite cuts of beef...and one of my favorite muscle names: tensor fascia lata. I love saying "tensor fascia lata".

Tensor fascia lata is your hip pointer....it runs between your oblique muscles on your lower torso and your upper thigh. It attaches at your illiac crest and inserts in the IT band that runs down the outside of your thigh. The IT Band is the one where the massage therapist puts in her elbow and you scream like a little pig.....

Now...on to skirts and flaps.

The skirt steak is either the straight diaphram muscle of the cow, with the peritoneum removed (outside skirt), or more commonly the inside skirt, which is the transversus abdominus. This is NAMP code 121c or 121d.

The TVA, as body-builders know it, attaches at the lower six ribs, the illiac crest, and inserts down at your pubis. If you want to work your TVA you move your belly button in to your spine...without sucking in. Hold it, and feel the burn. The TVA helps with breathing by contracting to inhale, and expanding to exhale.

The flap, on the other hand, is the obliquus abdominus internus. Flap is NAMP code 185a. Flap, or rather, obiquus abdominus internus, has a Facebook page!

Bodybuilders call it the OI. Here is the bodybuilder take on ab muscles.....

It, the muscle....not the Facebook page..... is located right next to the TVA. It runs from the lower four ribs, the illiac crest, and down to the pubis. It also helps with inhaling and exhaling, and also helps turn and flex the torso.

Sound familiar?

It does also attach at the lumbodorsal fascia...around by your lower back. And it nestles next to our old friend tensor fascia lata.

When removed from the cow (or the human) it is collected with the lower back and upper leg muscles....and it actually flaps.

It's very near neighbor, the skirt, is typically trimmed out when the filet and the other upper body muscles are removed.

Both the flap and the skirt attach to the inguinal ligament in males....as in "pucker up"....pull in your balls!

Finally...Americans are dicks when it comes to language. We like short names. Pommard as opposed to Savigny-Les-Vergelesses. Chateau Du Cru Beaucaillou only became popular when hedge fund dickheads started calling it DuCru.

Pinot is so much easier to say then Cabernet. Forget Zinfandel. Probably socialist.

Flap is a short name...but a horrible name. The other name for the cut is "Bavette". This sounds like a sleazy French guy trying to sell you cow balls and assholes with a fancy name....and you would not be far wrong. "Bavette" names a half dozen different cuts in France.

And.....our flap is Akaushi.

With us, even though there are a dozen varieties of Wagyu beef, and we serve Akaushi...we will sometimes call it "Kobe"..........just to not have the conversation about the differences.

Americans like "Kobe". Akaushi sounds scary, and probably socialist, like the Zinfandel.

And by the way, good Zinfandel is awesome with Akaushi.

Obama probably likes it.

Obliquus Abdominalis Internus Akaushi...as opposed to "Kobe Skirt"?

Shut up.

So....now you know all about the difference between "flap" and "skirt".

Do you want to hear all this when you are out with your honey?.....

Or do you want to just enjoy your experience...... and trust your friends....and their expertise?

In Ireland we say: "Why have a dog and bark yourself?"

We will take care of the anatomy, the Latin, the politics....and it will be delicious.

Living the dream......

2011-11-24T00:24:00.000-08:00

Posting this without permission.......from a friend seeking work as a "stage" (ie, free kitchen worker...) in Spain. He tracked some of our favorite spots, even worked in them.....and hated some for being horrible scumbags......

I am posting this because I find Eric's thoughts charming.....if way overly self-deprecating.....and the mere fact that he is actually thinking, working and struggling gives me hope.

The 99%, right? We should be so lucky......and maybe we are.

Hi Michael,

In your last email you said it was good to hear that I’m living the dream, and in my last email I too felt like I was living a dream – the Spanish cooking adventure – but you probably noticed that my dreaminess also left me giddy and confused – dreaming in the wrong ways – and that there was a certain basic stupidity to the way I was going about things. (Immature, unprofessional, naïve, et cetera). I mean, my plan was to start staging at a handful of places that I really didn’t want to be staging at just because by that point I had gotten desperate for anything, and I suspect that I seemed like a child lost in the dark to you as I tried to convince myself (vicariously, through you) that I would be happy and learn a lot and be on my way to bigger and better things if I just got started somewhere, anywhere…your silence has actually been very helpful to me. Not the night-light of encouragement I thought I was looking for (as I stumbled around groping the walls, trying to find my way to the kitchen) but something better: a different kind of light, a light for me to turn inwards and examine the reasons why I’m stumbling around looking for the kitchen in the middle of the night anyway...and I realized that maybe the cookies in the cookie jar aren’t really so great as they sound, and maybe I should be looking for other things instead…

Real life: after one week of staging at that first place – the place with the traditional and innovative mix, where the chef wasn’t so great but living with his brother was interesting – I quit. I couldn’t handle it. I mean the food was shit, but probably more importantly for me the people were shit, so the whole experience was shit, and I realized (inward light) that I don’t have enough genuine cooking integrity to persevere through such things. I’m too picky, too idealistic, too sensitive, and probably ultimately just too weak. I don’t want to work in anything but my ideal conditions, which is an impossible way to start building a career, and (more inward light) by this point I’m 99.9% sure that I should be looking for whatever it is I’m looking for (a “good life,” I guess) elsewhere.

So I left that restaurant and spent a few weeks at a farm/restaurant in Bordeaux, and now I’m back in Spain at another farm. Outside-living, and working hard without an asshole-boss, and getting dirty and tired and cooking/eating good food (instead of shitty staff meals) makes me very happy. I think farming would be a good way for me to live, but also a difficult way to provide for any kind of uncertain future…so I’m thinking to start studying existential psychology in London in January. Maybe this sounds crazy to you (the lost child in the dark again), and sometimes it sounds that way to me too, but also I see it as a good way to deepen my focus on what matters most in life. For me cooking was always mostly about trying to get to the essence of human life anyway. (Which of is a fine idea, but of course another bad way to start building a career in professional kitchens).

The jamón we have curing here, the wine fermenting in the bodega, the rabbits we slaughter and eat with potatoes slow-cooked in the ashes of the fire; the fire from the oak-tree we cut into pieces on that sunny afternoon with the Pyrenees filling the horizon and the cold wind sweeping down their snowy slopes and blowing at my face – this is much closer to the “good life” I’m looking for than the endless compromises and petty bickering that seems to constitute life in most restaurants that serve their guests anything like a decent meal.)

Anyway, don’t want to take too much of your time. Hope you’re doing well.

All the best,

Eric

Fuck Me Silly....

2011-11-10T22:24:00.000-08:00

It may be hard to imagine....but I have probably spent more time and energy coaching sports and working with kids than cooking and working with food in the last twenty years.

This may be why I get hourly calls from my scumbag subprime mortgage holder....and why the only car I own from this century has been languishing at the Jaguar shop for six months....while I pound around in a car older than Dylan.

So.....I can't let the whole Joe Paterno thing go without at least a comment.....or two.

People seem to be lining up on both sides of the St. Joe issue: Hey, he reported to his superiors....let the game go on, get over it; and Hey, he never called the cops, fuck him to the wall.

The Penn State students have given their verdict: riots, overturning media trucks, etc.

Nittany Lions are Everything......

If you want to get the straight story about this whole deal.....I suggest you follow (as usual) the European media. Go crazy....actually read the Grand Jury indictments. Notice that the link comes from an English newspaper.

If you read the indictments......you will need Maalox and an aspirin. And possibly an automatic weapon.

The child rapist coach, Jerry Sandusky, involved in all this was known on campus as a pervert going back to 1998, and before. Around that time a temp janitor found him sucking off a ten year old in the coaches' shower. The janitor was a Korean war vet who had managed to get through that lovely experience (disemboweling of friends, body parts flying around, folks freezing to death in rivers of shit....) without too many problems. His encounter with Coach Sandusky's blow job of the 4th grader put him over the edge. He collapsed, nearly had a heart attack and was a sobbing wreck who needed medical intervention.

But, hey....he was a temp, scrubbing showers in the greatest football program in America. Football at Penn State provided the gym, the fields, the year round programs that provided his job...and the jobs of all his co-workers. Still, he obviously reported the incident to his supervisor...who had to call an ambulance (for the temp janitor!).....and his supervisor's supervisor. They all got together to decide what to do.......Basically, shut up for fear of being fired.

See, the coach in question was up to replace Joe Pa as head coach in the multi, multi million dollar operation that is college football in State College, PA. Janitor vs Head Coach? A no brainer.

Still, word got out. Everyone knew. Coach Sandusky lost his chance at being Head Coach, and quietly resigned. With a pension, an office, a parking place, free access to all campus events, keys to all the buildings, etc.

The list of his victims marched on......The most egregious violation was the ass-fucking of a ten year old witnessed by a grad student four years later. The grad student also melted down, and reported the incident to his dad (a friend of Coach Sandusky) and eventually to Coach Paterno, all the while trembling in fear of losing his job and his place in Penn State Football. These gents volleyed the report up through the channels of the administration, but no one ever called the cops.

The indictment lists Victim 1-8 with various levels of nude showering, back rubbing, knee grabbing, dick sucking, etc. The first two kids....including the ten year old that got ass fucked in the shower by a 6'4" adult jock....are not even part of the indictment.....since no one ever bothered to figure out who they were!

Nobody called the cops.....their best effort at justice was to ask Coach Sandusky not to do it anymore. He kept his office on campus, kept his keys to all the buildings on campus, kept his pension, kept his full free access to all campus events, kept his parking pass and parking spot outside the gym with the showers......

Word will be coming out in the next few days that Coach Sandusky pimped out the kids in his care to high dollar donors to his youth ministry.....

For all those that are horrified that a great man like Coach Paterno got fired because of other peoples' actions......

No. Coach Paterno created an organization with so much power and influence....an organization devoted to kids playing a game, let us not forget......that the second most powerful person in the organization's penchant for ass fucking ten year olds was much less important than even ever finding out the name of the ass-fucked ten year old.

Please remember that all this took place at an institute of higher education. Ummph, higher. Ummph, higher.....oh, yeah.

Joe Paterno does not just need to be fired....he needs to be jailed....for creating and supporting a continuing criminal organization.

Before anyone in GPS proximity to me here gets all righteous about those bastards in State College, PA.....we have a similar continuing criminal organization right here in town. Some people call it Carmel High School.

Actually....I can't say that it is still continuing. I have lost contact with the CHS culture some years back...but I don't have high hopes. The same judgements that put institution over child have been going on here for decades, and see no sign of slacking...because no one has ever called them out or acknowledged them. In fact, the best way for a teacher at the High School or Middle School to find themselves out of a job is to go to bat for a student against the powers that be.

I have know three different women who were sexually harassed by the same teacher at CHS in each of three decades. Another freely admits that she had sex with English teacher when she was 14 or 15. And one of our clients married her English teacher directly out of high school thirty years ago. Not a scientific sample by any means...... At least one called the Sheriff, involved authorities....supplied inappropriate voice mail recordings, had her dad confront the guy parked across the street from her house late at night.....

Nothing happened. Zero.

Full disclosure: I was fired by CHS as a soccer coach for......something. So, I am not completely without rancor towards the Carmel Unified School District.

My last year of coaching, my superior....the athletic director....was having a full blown affair with a junior in the school. The affair affected his work, his marriage.....and his ability to do his job as AD. Everyone on campus knew of the affair. When I was not able to get messages through to the guy, I asked my players what to do. They told the girl to have the guy call me. It worked. I complained to the principal about the situation.....He stopped taking my calls.

I was fired as coach. The AD guy was hired as soccer coach.....the GIRL'S soccer coach.

Another coach (married) started an affair with his assistant....a counselor at CHS. Rather than actually coach...they would repair to his truck and fuck themselves silly in full view of the teams they were supposed to be coaching. Windows steamed up, truck a rockin'.....kids a laughin'. The behavior was only stopped when the coach's daughter went to the principal and complained that she was being humiliated. Neither coach (a teacher) nor the counselor were fired or otherwise disciplined.

In the past few days the internet was all abuzz about two teachers who harassed a fat girl in their class, ridiculed her, abused her, forced her to run on a stair climber between classes. The girl's parents wired her up, recorded the abuse and a scandal resulted.

At Carmel Middle some years back there was another abusive teacher. His office was papered over for privacy, and he was famous for having his girl students sit on his lap and bounce on his knee. Not to mention the private meetings in his papered over office. One of my guys was also a student.....a fat kid with attitude who wasn't shy about pointing out these proto-perversions. The teacher constantly abused him for being fat and short. The kid asked me what to do....and I wired him for sound. Sure enough, really terrible verbal abuse resulted. Zephy turned the tape into the school office, expecting.......justice?

No....the principal called in the Sheriff and had him arrested for illegally recording the teacher. He was grilled for two hours by deputies before his mother was even allowed to see or talk to him, much less a lawyer...and he eventually was suspended for a length of time for his violation of the teacher's rights.

He was eleven.

Ooops.....I used his name. You could talk to him about this whole thing....except he is not here anymore. A kind, funny, bright country kid...... died of his various abuses last year at the ripe old age of 24.

The girl who called the Sheriff is still around, as are many of the others. The girl is a toughy....a hard core fighter for what she holds dear and what she believes in. I still detect some damage under the waterline, though. Just because you survive something, doesn't make it right.

And....isn't school supposed to supply a completely different kind of education?

All the Occupy X movements now are a bunch of random folk finally standing up for principles of right and wrong....and it's about time.

I submit that it is difficult and uncomfortable to stand up against social and economic wrongs at the hands of the powers that be.....and much, much more difficult to stand up against sexual and physical abuse at the hands of the powers that be.

Banks are one thing....they are supposed to be cocksuckers.

But schools?

Once the power and supposed value of an organization....especially a educational organization...completely overcomes the value of the lives and the well-being...and even physical safety....of those it was created to serve.....it is time for a restart.

All Penn State's officials and coaches should be fired and jailed. The program itself should be banned for some years....and start over in Division III or IV, with no scholarships, no TV, no Bowls, no perks.....

As for Carmel High.....the principal involved in almost all these terrible decisions I named above.....just ran for school board. And many of the same board members, and many of the same teachers......who were all complicit..... are still there. I hold out zero hope for any change in that environment. I am just grateful that my own kids are gone.....and that they were boys. Not that that was any help to the Penn State kids.

As for the Cachagua kids for whom I still feel responsibility.....especially the girls....especially the jocks who are girls.....I just shake my head.

And walk away.

For Floyd....

2011-11-04T02:32:00.000-07:00

I didn't think I'd be so sad.....

We inherited Floyd from Tassajara ten years ago. Floyd was then called Madra....a perfectly horrible name for a dog. MAH-drah. Yuk.

Madrah was a Nason dog....part Border Collie and part.....who knows? Tallish, all black with white toes and a white blaze on his chest. There used to be tons of these dogs around. The last one I know is the English guy with the Jaguars across from the Rose's above Calle Cielo. His dog madly runs out in the road challenging cars.....a Nason dog.

Floyd was being banished by Tassajara because he was charging guests. Not money....just rushing up to them in a way that the guests perceived to be aggressive.

Turns out that Nason dogs are supersmart, and super near-sighted. Madrah was just running up to make a new friend....too close and too fast for uptight rich people.

Everyone involved of course missing the lesson that the Buddah would have taught......

So....Madrah had to go. Can't scare the Gooses that lay the Golden Eggs....

An elderly couple in Berkeley wanted to adopt him....with a tiny back yard and no walks. Madrah was the go to guy for days off for the monks, always ready for a ten mile hike up to The Indians or the caves, familiar with every inch of a hundred square miles of back country. Berkeley, no way. We brought him to Buck Mountain instead.

Madrah hated small, cute, furry things: squirrels, kitties, blue jays. He HATED blue jays....was better with squirrels, but I suspect that part of his banishment from Tassajara had to do with his obsession with one of the senior monk's cats.....

Madrah was the project of one of the monks at Tassajara.....Sonia. Sonia eventually followed Madrah in banishment from the mountain. She did teach him some skills: Madrah would bow like a monk on command; Madrah would balance on his back legs for a treat; and Madrah was an inspired vocal tenor.

Part of the Tassajara work day is Work Circle....Every morning after breakfast, and every afternoon after lunch the entire tribe gathers in a giant circle for announcements of news, policy, staffing, etc. The work circle welcomes new guests and workers, says goodbye and thank you to departing workers, discusses work assignments....and recognizes birthdays by singing.

One of the odd side effects of studying statistics is the realization that in any group of 50 people the odds of any two of them having the same birthday are 50-50. Extrapolated out....this means that in any group of 50 or so....there is nearly always a birthday. This is why we only sing "Happy Birthday You Asshole" at The Store....because we, like hookers at The Bunny Farm....don't need to know your name. Our pleasure is supposedly not important....only yours.

For Madrah...with two Work Circles a day....it meant a LOT of Happy Birthday songs. Madrah learned to sing along. Madrah would sit down on his butt and howl like Pavarotti.

The other odd thing about Madrah when he came to us was that he was completely unused to public forms of expression of.....love or affection. If I hugged Amanda for more than a minute or so....Madrah sought to intervene. Not just us....anyone. I think the Tassajara sexual relationship/harassment policy was ingrained in the poor lad at a genetic level. He also didn't know what "Good Dog" was....and we had to teach him to like to be petted.

When Madrah arrived at Buck Mountain we instantly changed his name. My boys renamed him for their favoritie character in their favorite movie: the Brad Pitt part of the stoner in True Romance: Floyd.

Floyd lived nine years with us. He learned to accept and understand human love and affection. Floyd became a fan of the Wolverhampton Wolves......say "Wolverhampton" around Floyd and he would jump up and sing. Any morning a chorus was required for whatever reason, just a few notes of "Happy Birthday" or "Wolverhampton!"....and Floyd was the choirmaster.

But...in our house, Floyd was not the Alpha Dog.....Xabi arrived and Floyd's dark, bitter notes caused him to recede to the background in contrast to Xabi's flamboyant star status. Always there and ready for a hike...and always there and ready to point out which dish had more or less, and which dish had more or less stuff. Floyd was far and away the smartest of the dogs...with the best language skills.....so he was always aware of his decreased position, and his intelligence turned his status into something Dickensian: "Please, Sir....can I have another?"

Still, Floyd never lost his Tassajara upbringing. He was kooky for bread. Especially good bread, and good butter. In his younger years he would race off and bury a particularly good piece on the point of the hairpin opposite our mailbox. Still today you could find a cellar of our better bread efforts buried there.

And good cheese. The sound of the toaster going down for a solitary sandwich at 3am always brought an audience of Floyd. The fancy dogs turned their nose up at the cheese rinds, Floyd was all about it.

Last week he had a stroke, and lost control of his back legs....a little at first, then total. He was such a gentleman that he never lost his bowels in the house....would wait to be carried outside. He fought to the end to show his independence, dragging himself up and down the stairs to be with the pack, even though by comparison we are all idiot knuckleheads.

Amanda made the call that there is a better place waiting for him. "You will come back a monk....a better monk than those guys!" At the word "monk", Floyd's ears popped up.

He spent two bad days in obvious distress. I laced him with Vicodin. We carried him about, but it was clear that our time together was done.

Floyd had never been to the vet. Never had a rabies shot....never seen the inside of scary, sterile, tiled office. We poured the internet for solutions: pistol, heroin hotshot, visiting vet death angel. In the end we decided that he lived such a kind, aware life that a bullet was not the way to go out of it.

In the end, I found some Oxycontin from my friend DJ in a drawer....and we loaded Floyd up with a fatal dose, along with some Xanax, some of Micah's really good bread with good Wisconsin butter and Schoch Family cheese......and drove him to the vet's. We sang "Happy Birthday" and the Wolverhampton Fight Song.....and hope and pray that our efforts love and support in the end were worthy of the dignity of this fine animal.

Jesus apparently said something about how in the end we are judged by how we treat the lowest and most helpless amongst us....

Here is Robinson Jeffers about that....

Hurt Hawks

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat or coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits

The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom

And flies in a dream, the dawn ruins it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him

At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;

Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II.

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, but still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear

at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Robinson Jeffers 1928

Pathways of Desire

2011-10-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

Pathways of Desire is an architectural term....

Supposedly, it determines the dominance of the collective will of the shortest distance between two points for walkers, as opposed to the loopy (in more ways than one) studio designs of architects.

Anyone with an Ivy League education understands Pathways of Desire. Frisbees were not invented back in the day when the various quads were laid out....Aerial shots of any Ivy League Quad....or any University Quad anywhere, for that matter.....shows short cuts. The higher the traffic, the more pronounced the Pathway. And, Pathways vary from year to year, based on the scheduling of freshman classes.

There is one huge exception....BYU. Brigham Young University. Utah. Along with various other strictures on college life (3.2 beer, limited flesh exposure, no sex, etc), BYU is very proud of the fact that its students do not cut across the Quad.

"Cougars Don't Cut Corners!"

This is a disturbing metaphor......I am somewhat reassured that the three people who have related this anecdote to me have all been gay.

Then, you start thinking: "Why would a gay person go to BYU....and why would they be proud....thirty years later....of not cutting corners?"

A discussion for another day.

Anyway.....I live in a dictatorship dramatically more profound than anything Brigham Young ever envisioned.

Dogs run my household.

On occasion, deep in winter....it is possible to sleep all the way to eight am. Even so....if one achieves this Olympian standard behind studious amounts of Gruet and Ambien, and one ignores the obvious sounds of breaking glass and pottery....

This is the kind of vision one awakens to:

The dogs somehow know when we have nothing on the books....well, except the books....and demand their rights to a long hike on the mountain before the dew dries.

This is not all bad.....Some people have the gym and the personal trainer. I have the mountain....and some dogs missing some important neuro-transmitters.

Each morning...rain or shine, sleep or no sleep, business or no business....the dogs and I go out onto the mountain for our constitutional.

It is not all bad. Our mountain is at least a 45% grade, so there is plenty of aerobics to burn off the Gruet.

And the day to day check in on what Mother Nature has in store is grounding. There is a reason that all the electrics in your house are tied to a giant iron rod jammed down into the Earth.

Luckily.....one of my duties as a resident on Buck Mountain is to oversee our communal water company. The system serves five houses and an undeveloped lot from a well down on Tularcitos Creek. Two pumps push the water 2500 feet up a canyon to our distribution tanks. My finicky and very well-to-do neighbors insist that the water lines be inspected for leaks at least twice a month. So, my dogs and I dutifully and regularly traipse the length of the system……ignoring the fact that the lines are completely and invisibly buried in the ground, and any leak could be spotted just by looking for water flowing at the foot of the canyon…...

Since the neighbors all live behind high fences and security gates, my “inspection” is of the canyon and the undeveloped piece. It is one of the most serene and beautiful properties around: fourteen acres of mature oaks spread along an old dirt road leading to a rolling meadow The owners live in Marin and I have met them just once in the twenty-five years we have lived on the mountain. They are locked in some personal battle amongst themselves and have turned away dozens of offers to sell.

The old dirt road and meadow give the lie to the “California does not have seasons” canard. In summer it bakes despite being on the north and cooler side of the mountain. The air barely moves under the big oaks and the leaves and grasses dry until they sound like cornflakes being crushed under foot. In fall the poison oak and madrone leaves turn out in a riot of oranges and reds, and cool airs flow down the canyons. The fallen leaves go from corn flakes to mulch. The scent of rot….and life to be…is in the air.

The spring is the miracle season. I have never seen any place with more wildflowers. I take a daily count of the species. Seven, twelve, twenty….finally at the peak more than fifty different flowers pop out everywhere I look. This is without leaving the road, or even looking around very much as I march on my silly mission for the water company.

The wild flower process begins in the winter, what I call the Irish Spring. As soon as there is even a day of warmth and wet the greenery starts appearing underfoot. The California Gold hills opposite us belie a subversive, lurking Kelly Green. I know of the riot of flowers to come and I feel guilty trodding the new starts into the ground……Nature is cruel enough without my contributions.

Even so, at the very start of my Irish Spring there is a trace of a path meandering down the middle of the road. I notice that the old dogs tend to stick to it, and I follow along. Meanwhile the young dogs race around everywhere, clueless and careless.

My early training in quantum physics and statistics tells me that our particular pathway of desire is the mean result of all the tracks of all the critters down this particular road….the sum of all the individual places where just enough feet fell to crush out the new life springing up each year. Even the wild puppies are doing their statistical part by randomly hitting the ground their wiser elders have laid out.

There are a lot of deer on the mountain, and the road is littered with bobcat and lion scat as well. I have seen badgers and skunks and cameo appearances of raccoons and wild boar. On the mountain proper there are traces of paths even through the thickest brush and poison oak. For whatever reasons, the critters have their little roads and highways all through their territory.

Pathways of desire are the bane of landscape architects: people and critters pretty much decide on their own where they will walk on public and private grounds. Some are shortcuts, some meander for no apparent reason. What is odd is that they are almost never a straight line….they curve and wiggle, just like our pathway down the neighbor’s road.

There is even a branch of philosophy and architecture dedicated to pathways of desire: Gaston Bachelard writes about “The Poetics of Space” where he concerns himself not with design itself, but about how the presence of humans affects and fashions space beyond the plans of the designer.

For the dogs and I, our designer is Mother Nature….or the man who carved the road back in the day. I don’t think he had any idea his grading would turn into a wildflower garden.....he was just getting from A to B, with a chunk of land to sell. As for Nature, she was happy to take his road and bury it in flowers. I am not sure how She feels about us tromping right through the middle of it.

Or…almost the middle of it. Why the wiggles and bends? For my part maybe a step around a favorite clump of a favorite flower….but I doubt that the deer have any such concerns and I am following their lead, after all. And why do the old dogs respect the path? It is barely a foot wide, and it requires some attention. Whose desire are we following anyway?

Whatever the case, our little path gets more distinct as each year goes by. It doesn’t get any wider…possibly because I am the only human that ever goes this way, and the critters all seem to be in agreement in our democracy of strollers.

It is sad, because I get great lessons in patience and appreciation as I meander. My beautiful flowers dry and fade...but turn into seed heads that I used to think of as ugly. As the road dries out and the seeds fall by the wayside and blow around I get a sense of anticipation for the coming show: who will be where, and in what numbers, and will there be new kids on the block? This builds after the first rains and the first sprouts appear. The road changes every day in small ways that I am grateful to be able to notice. The silly useless chore for the water company is possibly transformational. God forbid I could take these little lessons and apply them to my “real” life.

Then….last week the dogs and I took an hour out to do our chore in the midst of the busiest part of our catering season. The typical dread of the boredom, and the dread of the climb back up the canyon…..mixed with curiosity as to what is up on the road and meadow.

The property owner made a deal with a local woodcutter. He traded access to any downed oaks on the property for regular grading of the road. We arrived to find a perfectly flat, dusty, sterile……road. Twenty-five years of topsoil gone in an our. A few invader star thistles cling to the sides of the cut. All our old friends are piled and buried in heaps of rock and dust off the road where the bulldozer left them.

A road from nowhere to nowhere, just there because……someone wanted it so. No reason necessary. Even the dogs seem stunned. No scents, no path, no fun at all…..I am pissed. Depressed. Wrecked. Mother Nature must be seriously pissed.

Still, this is someone’s…two someones’…. idea of beauty. And who am I to talk, what with four vans, two trailers and a dump truck glorifying my own property.

The presence of human beings has definitely shaped this space, merci M. Bachelard. I don’t know if I have the patience to wait for Nature to put Her paths back on the map.

Right there is the lesson for me.

Today on our hike, the sterile road is already covered with leaves already mouldering into compost. A few pockets of soil remain that escaped dozer blade, sprouts already starting.

The dogs and I wander all over the road for a change, unbound by local history…..starting our own, new pathway of desire.

My Man...

2011-08-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

Bernie Leadon wrote this for Gram Parsons.....taken way to early.

I am posting it for my friend Adrian Bryan....the same damn guy.

Tell me the truth, how do you feel?

Like you're rollin' so fast that you're spinnin' your wheels.

Don't feel too bad, you're not all alone, we're all tryin' to get along.

With everybody else tryin' to go their way

You're bound to get tripped..... and what can you say?

Just go along till they turn out the lights,

There's nothing we can do to fight it.

No man's got it made

Till he's far beyond the pain

And we who must remain go on living just the same.

I once knew a man, very talented guy.

He'd sing for the people and people would cry.

They knew that his song came from deep down inside,

You could hear it in his voice...... and see it in his eyes.

And so he'd travel along, touch your heart, then be gone.

Like a flower he bloomed .....till that old hickory wind called him home.

My man's got it made, he's gone far beyond the pain

And we who must remain go on living just the same.

Now my man's got it made,

He's gone far beyond the pain

And we who must remain go on living just the same,

We who must remain go on laughing just the same.

The Fire Next Time....

2011-07-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up.....

Uncle Jerry is proposing a $150 tax on properties lost in the woods....actually, those in the State Responsibility Areas.....properties where CalFire is the ultimate protector and responder to wildfires.

Seems reasonable.....

You have to sympathize with Uncle Jerry....trying to sneak revenue increases past the Republicans while trying to sneak service cuts past everyone else.....all in the name of balancing the budget.

But....take a moment to review the current map of the SRA....here.

Everything is in the SRA.

All of Pebble Beach. All of Carmel Valley and Cachagua.

A tiny strip along Carmel Valley Road is allowed to the locals.....but everything within a few meters of the road is in the SRA.

Right now we already pay $100 or more dollars levied on our parcel tax to Cachagua Fire.....our Fire Protection District. I am willing to bet that parcel holders in Carmel Valley pay a similar tax to firefighters in the Village or Mid-Valley. Believe it or not, my Health Department permit for Cachagua pays forty or fifty bucks for ambulance service in Seaside!

As someone who lives 300 meters from a CalFire station.....which is awesomely captained by the daughter of a dear friend.....I have no problems paying my fair share. But what happens to Cachagua Fire?

In the last fire, whose T-shirt I am wearing as I type......Cachagua Fire got completely dissed and buried by warring bureaucracies. The folks with the local experience and knowledge and expertise were at various times actually banned from access to their own areas of responsibility.

Plus, the way the bill is written.....the levy is based upon the number of structures on a given parcel. We have three.....so my fire protection bill goes from $100 to $550. My landlord's fire protection bill goes from $100 to more than $6,000. And, it would appear that we have less say about allocation of resources before, during and after a fire event.

I am not a completely happy camper here......

More clarification anon......after a word or two with John Laird and Bill Monning.

I Vahs Not Zhere.....

2011-07-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

I grew up with Hogan's Heroes. Sgt. Schultz: "I see....No-zzzzingk!" Plausible deniability was part of my birthright.

Meanwhile.....Col. Klink (Werner Klemperer) was the son of Otto Klemperer, a friend of Mahler and a genuine genius who was one of the first Jewish emigrants from Germany after Hitler took over...

Anyway.....In the last few years we have all become jaded by the constant allegations of cheating from our premier athletes: baseball idiots, Lance Armstrong, Olympic stars, soccer stars.....

My favorite soccer-related faux-pas was when Didier Drogba ran afoul of the drug testers a few years back after a trip home to Cote d'Ivoire. He tested positive for marijuana...after visiting his grandma on holiday. "What am I supposed to do....not have Grandma's famous Christmas green cakes?"

The soccer bureaucrats let that one slide......

We are led to believe that Lance Armstrong has giant balls....well, one giant ball....so please ignore his over the top testosterone test. Fine.

They are all lying, right?

What if they weren't? Even the horrible abusive French serial rapist financier is being released today.

Last week five members of the Mexican National Soccer Team were suspended for blood levels of a steroid, performance-enhancing drug: clenbuterol.

This was days before the start of the Gold Cup....a competition amongst the various North American soccer countries. The winner of the Gold Cup plays in the Copa America....a competition for the title of the whole Western Hemisphere. The players banned were not numb-nuts.....they lost the starting goalkeeper and four other high end players.

No serious person denies that blood doping and performance enhancing drugs do not flood all through professional sports. Serious people also realize that high-end athletes have high-end trainers that walk them through the various chemical mine-fields that await. Sudafed? No way. Clenbuterol? GTFOH.

Clenbuterol is a steroid of such low class and low effect on human performance that no serious trainer would ever think to involve it in his athlete's "nutrition and training" program.

Clenbuterol works really well with beef and pork production. It amplifies lean muscle mass and is used in huge quantities in "modern" meat production.

By "modern" I mean: untested, unscrupulous, corporate, profit-driven meat production.

Right now our Tea Party Republicans are trying to gut the already limited inspection powers of the USDA and the FDA. Today, less than 1% of agricultural and meat products coming in to the US are even cursorily inspected. These clowns want to cut that.....supposedly because regulations and inspections are BAD FOR BUSINESS.

My friends and I (Passionfish, Mundaka, Bernardus, Tree Bones, etc) pride ourselves on the quality of our ingredients. Eating with us costs more than eating at Red Lobster....because we value our sources. If our competitors can buy dangerously cheap, crazy shit from China and Mexico for half our costs....we are at a huge disadvantage. All our suppliers are in America, and all our suppliers have valued workers who they try to pay real wages.....as do all of us.

I love the FDA and the USDA. They validate my hard work, and the hard work of my workers, and the hard work of my suppliers.

The Mexican soccer players are not stupid enough to take clenbuterol for physical advantage. There is better stuff that is still undetectable. These guys are millionaires.

The clenbuterol came from the food they ate. They ate pork or beef so saturated with clenbuterol that after they digested it....they flunked an anti-doping blood test!

This meat is now being imported into the US by way of NAFTA. Unless you are a professional athlete in a sport that tests for drugs....you will never know.

If you think I am kidding...check out this article from the last bastion of real journalism in the continental US....the LA Times.

Clenbuterol poisoning in China is so widespread that it is becoming a social issue. And Chinese pork and beef is everywhere in America....subject to less than a 1% inspection rate.

And you Tea Party motherfuckers want to CUT our food safeguards?

Government enforced standards help me in my business. They protect my workers' jobs, and protect my suppliers' workers jobs....

I love the Monterey County Health Department.....now the Environmental Something Something. Our inspector is Roger, son of Mario. Mario grew up on Cannery Row with Bert and Ted...The Factory, Neil DeVaugn's...Mario still does cameos at Los Laureles Lodge.

Roger is not some oppressive bureaucrat....he is our partner in food service. Roger comes by twice a year and checks out scene. He hated our compost pile, but grew to accept it. He still hates our salmon smoker.....but we agree to disagree. Roger makes sure that my operation bends to the letter and spirit of the law....and my customers can have confidence in our operation. I can fall back on Roger's opinion if questioned....

And most important to me....everyone else that Roger inspects is at least as sanitary and organized as I am. Anywhere I go that Roger inspects.....I can feel safe.

My permit from Monterey County costs about $700 per year. Two bucks a day.

I do not feel oppressed, and my customers do not feel overcharged because of government oversight.

But then again.....I don't buy Mexican or Chinese beef, pork....or anything.

Words fail.

R.I.P.

2011-06-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

Budweiser is now the official beer of the Engilish FA Cup, the nationwide competition that pits the smallest local amateur teams against the best pro teams. Think Salinas Spurs vs. the NY Yankees.

Bud is also the official beer of the World Cup...soccer's worldwide championship in which 178 countries participate.

England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey, Spain, Croatia, Italy, Denmark, Mexico, Jamaica, South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Russia......

That is me thinking of countries whose beer I have had that blows doors off the coldest Budweiser on the hottest afternoon.

In the last ten years America has done many things to infuriate the rest of the world: invading Iraq, for example. Wrecking the world economy, for example.

I think in the long run, Budweiser's invasion of English and international beer will be seen as much, much worse.

Sorry, I'm an asshole....no one has died in the Beer Putsch, I know. But, imposing upon a multi-millennial, trans-national organic culture(s)......both beer and soccer..... the insipid, clueless, boring, lifeless, overbearing.....but profitable! brand that is Budweiser....... might just presage America's own epitaph:

Insipid. Boring. Clueless. Overbearing.....but Profitable!

And definitely "Lifeless" in the long run....

Clink....here's to ya. With a Speakeasy Ale from Hunters Point (orange peel and coriander)....and with a lift of the glass to William Younger's Tartan Bitter.

Where'd You Go?

2011-05-21T00:04:00.000-07:00

Governator Arnold's 17 year old son, Patrick, was quoted from his tweet after the big reveal last week:

"Some days I feel like shit, some days I wanna quit and just be normal for a bit."

Patrick assumed that we all know the rest of the reference...the song.

For you oldsters, these are the first lines from Fort Minor's "Where'd You Go".

Listen in for a pretty devastating outlook on Pops.

Oh.......Patrick changed his name last week from Schwarzenegger to Shriver. Keep a hanky nearby.

Let America Be America Again.....

2011-04-17T01:02:00.000-07:00

Even a huge fan of Irony....I wish it were taught in California schools at an early age, as it is in New York and New Jersey and Massachusetts......I still am occasionally struck dumb.

Even as a huge fan of George Orwell....I hate it when I am gobsmacked with stories that would make him not just churn in his grave.....but turn in his DNA and opt for some other species in retrospect.

Dan Savage is a journalist from Seattle, cultural capitol of the continental US. Dan is possibly the reincarnation of Mark Twain....a distinction he probably has to share with Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, and a few others. Dan some years back defined "santorum" as the foamy mix of lube, feces and sperm that results from anal sex.

Rick Santorum is the former Senator from Pennsylvania who earned the definition by equating gay love with "man on dog" and having a public ceremony with his large family to celebrate the burial of the ejecta resulting from his wife's 12 week miscarriage.

Dan's redefinition of "santorum" is so effective that it takes the first few spots of any Google search of the term.

Still.......Rick Santorum persists in persuing the Presidency of our United States.

This is not a comic graphic novel.

Most recently, Senator "Foamy Mix of Feces, Lube and Sperm" came up with a campaign slogan to support his view of America:

"Let America Be America Again!"

This is the title of a poem by Langston Hughes.....a gay black man.

I encourage you to read it.......I am posting it below.

First....please wrap your head in duct tape and move away from family members and pets you love.

Your head may explode.

Let America be America Again

Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Raw Milk Does a Body Good.....

2011-03-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

We are super excited to welcome Claravale Farm from Paicines to our group of suppliers. Claravale are one of the few raw milk dairies left in California and we are happy to support them just because we and they are rebels......and even more happy to get their wonderful products. They have raw cows milk of all kinds, raw cream and raw goats milk.

You have to be old as the hills (this is me talking) to remember milk that actually used to come in bottles, and had two or three inches of cream floating at the top. Not only that, there used to be a milkman: milk, eggs, butter and cheese came every morning at the crack of dawn, or earlier. Every house had a little metal ice chest on the back porch to care for the morning's delivery. I was about to say that it was recent.....1966....when I realize that 1966 was 45 years ago. I am surprised I can still see to type!

The "Got Milk?" people have a cute series of ads showing famous and beautiful people with little milk mustaches from drinking milk. Trust me....there is only one way to actually GET a milk mustache, and that is drinking real whole milk with the cream on top, straight out of the bottle. Busted!

We have started making our own sour cream, buttermilk, creme fraiche and mozzarella at The Store, and I am very happy we started a couple of weeks BC. Before Claravale. Our normal milk is either Clover or Organic Valley, neither of which suck.....but Claravale is over the top. Silky and satiny are the first adjectives that pop to mind.

A quart of fresh, local, real milk runs $5.75.....including the bottle. I was tempted to say "not cheap", but it actually IS cheap. A decent beer is six bucks a quart. Ben and Jerry's is five bucks a PINT. And if you knew the hoops these guys have had to jump through, and corporate and political pressure that have tried to exterminate them because of the awful threat they apparently pose.....

So.....Live a little. Quality, tradition, history....and rebellion...in a bottle. Less than six bucks.

Check out their website: http://claravaledairy.com/index.html

For a small dairy, their milk is available in every cool grocery in the area, and in California. It goes without saying that Whole Foods does NOT carry Claravale....you have to go to a good store like Cornucopia or Shopper's Corner or New Leaf. Or the Cachagua Store, not that we are either a grocery or cool.

Equilateral.....or not.

2011-03-26T00:17:00.000-07:00

I can't let today go by without a bow and a prayer to the 146 girls who died 100 years ago today in Greenwich Village at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

All the girls doing sewing and fashion work had gone on strike the year before. Triangle was the big hitter....and beat their girls down. No Union.

The chained the doors in their 7 storey factory in the Village....so the girls could not go out on the landings to get air, talk, or smoke a ciggy. Rules were: 14 hours,

no breaks, bring your own food. No urination on company time.

When the fire started, no one could get to the fire escapes....chained exits. When the NYFD arrived, their ladders only went up four floors.

We already dealt with this....100 years ago. Now we are rolling back the clock....to heartlessness?

If you are a geography nut like me.....you can still go on-line and with Google Earth and a little research...find the apartments of almost all the girls who died in the fire.

The factory is still there, just off Washington Square. (There was a rally today with 10,000 folks remembering).

You can clock the walks of the Italian, Jewish and Irish girls back and forth to work each day from their apartments.....before their workplace, and the greed of their employers.....murdered them. The internet reaches back 100 years, no problem. The Coroner's office recorded the address of each of the victims.

14th Street over by Chelsea Pier. Kenmare Street......

My son is now living in the exact same apartment of one of the dead girls...

This thing hits me especially hard, because I was randomly spared from the whole 9/11 thing...but not spared from watching the unedited videotape of couples holding hands, jumping off the top of the Towers.....and not spared from the unedited video of the bodies hitting the concrete of the square below....just ten years ago...is:

Life is supposed to get better.......

I thought that was in my contract.

I dare you to read the following eye-witness account......

And I dare you to explain to me why we should return to the values of 100 years ago.

Tonight I was working as normal....with a squad of....as it happens....young Irish, Jewish and Italian girls. Beautiful, full of energy, life and love......like spring flowers.

As the old fart in the mix.....I kept picturing them on the 7th floor of the Triangle building.....dropping to eternity, one at a time.

If we are the greatest nation the world has seen.....aren't we supposed to get better over the course of 100 years?

I double-dog DARE you to read this eyewitness account:

Eyewitness at the Triangle" by William G. Shephard

I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.

Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.

The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from

the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn't know was there—steeled me.

I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window—four screaming heads of girls waving their arms.

"Call the firemen," they screamed—scores of them. "Get a ladder," cried others. They were all as alive and whole and sound as were we who stood on the sidewalk. I couldn't help thinking of that. We cried to them not to jump. We heard the siren of a fire engine in the distance. The other sirens sounded from several directions.

"Here they come," we yelled. "Don't jump; stay there."

One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. I didn't notice whether those above watched her drop because I had turned away. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces.

The firemen began to raise a ladder. Others took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl's body flashed through it. The thuds were just as loud, it seemed, as if there had been no net there. It seemed to me that the thuds were so loud that they might have been heard all over the city.

I had counted ten. Then my dulled senses began to work automatically. I noticed things that it had not occurred to me before to notice. Little details that the first shock had blinded me to. I looked up to see whether those above watched those who fell. I noticed that they did; they watched them every inch of the way down and probably heard the roaring thuds that we heard.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.

Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward—the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.

Thud—dead, thud—dead—together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best.

We found out later that, in the room in which he stood, many girls were being burned to death by the flames and were screaming in an inferno of flame and heat. He chose the easiest way and was brave enough to even help the girl he loved to a quicker death, after she had given him a goodbye kiss. He leaped with an energy as if to arrive first in that mysterious land of eternity, but her thud—dead came first. The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. But now the crowd was enormous, though all this had occurred in less than seven minutes, the start of the fire and the thuds and deaths.

I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking—flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire.

The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls. . . .

The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

"Eyewitness at the Triangle" by William G. Shephard. From Leon Stein, ed., Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy (New York: Quadrangle/New Times Book Company, 1977). Orig. published in the Milwaukee Journal, March 27, 1911.

You are what you eat....

2011-02-05T00:05:00.000-08:00

Oy.....

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but......

Please don't shoot the messenger....in this economy, all the food-related messengers have already been shot.

There is a new, obliquely food-related disease that no one is talking about....

Well, no one except dairy farmers, cattle ranchers, epidemiologists, the CDC and other alarmist folk like that.

Clostridium perfringens A is the dirty bugger.

Last year in America we had 76 million cases of diagnosed food poisoning. This is 27% of the population, by the way.

My guys in the local Environmental Health Department tell me that the number is probably off by half. Most of the time you think you have 24 hour flu....you have food poisoning. So think more like 100 million....or a third of the population.

Among the 76 million reported cases of food poisoning are 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths.

Given the 76 million cases of diagnosed food poisoning last year...guess what? Only 14 million have any cause that anyone can detect scientifically. Meaning that when you are actually food poisoned...pissing out your ass, puking for hours, sweating like a pig....the health system of the "greatest country in the world" only can tell once in five what your real problem is and what caused it.

And this means that 3,200 of the deaths due to food poisoning completely mystify the locals....

Last year, the "socialist" Obama crowd finally passed a law that allows the Government to intervene to directly remove foods, beverages and drugs that have been proven to actually kill and injure people, pets or plants. Before this year, the Government had no real role beyond messenger, and it was left to companies producing toxic, Shitzu-killing shit to fess up and recall their products on their own.

Or people killing shit. Less than 1% of the food we import from awesome healthy free-market places like China is even examined at all....much less even cursorily.

And, if something really bad was actually killing people...or pets....nothing could have been done beyond whining and wailing, and letting the consumer choose to buy something else....assuming the consumer even knew that all the Shitzus in town were expiring.

And the Republicans think this is a good thing....and that Obama is a socialist. Free Market! Free Willy!

Even in the cases where the Government raises the red flag...it is ridiculously easy to zigzag around the warnings.

Take honey.

A huge amount of the honey imported to the US comes from Singapore. Ever been to Singapore? It is really small.....gots lotsa buildings, all packed onto tiny islands....Not so many honey bees.

No worry.

Chinese honey, which is banned from Europe, has been proven to be actually toxic at times, and manipulated chemically, laced with anti-biotics, diluted, filtered, reboiled into sugar syrup, etc.....
is just switched around after being shipped through Malaysia... and we all pretend it comes from Singapore. Imported by a company from Chicago, owned by Russians, incorporated in the Caymans, and which pays no US taxes on their profits....

Taxes are bad, see? Taxes and regulation stifle the great American entreprenurial spirit.

Ignore the thousands of American beekeepers who are struggling to keep their hives alive (hives which pollinate all our remaining fruit trees and the other crops that supply 25% of our food)......

Free market!

In RepublicanLand, shitty chemically enhanced diluted reboiled tax-free Chinese honey is exactly morally and economically equal to organic American honey raised by a guy who pays American rent, wages and taxes to actual fellow Americans. Perfect. Apparently, objective reality has died the same slow death as irony.

Regular blog readers will know something of my obsession with Duncan Hines. Long before his cake fame, Uncle Dunkie was a traveling salesman....selling printed goods around Chicago.
This is in the teens.....1915 or so, and on into the '20's and '30's. At the time, traveling sales people had an insanely high death rate: not from highwaymen or car crashes....but from food
poisoning. There were no rules, and no laws. Think Upton Sinclair.

Free market. Guys died in agony, all the time.

Duncan was more than a little OCD....which saved his life. He could tell at a sniff and a glance if a cafe or restaurant was potentially lethal, and he kept a list of places that he could trust. Our boy shared this with friends, clients and colleagues. Slowly, word got out, and by 1936 or so he was able to privately print his list of recommendations and quit his day job. "Adventures
In Good Eating". (Despite his OCD, Dunkie was no prude: at least half his places were either taverns for cocktails, or cafes for hangover recovery.)

On our rare days off, Amanda and I take our trusty 1941 "Adventures" and travel around visiting the places that Uncle Dunkie approved back in the day. Locally: Mission Ranch, Normandie Inn, Los Laureles, Highlands Inn, Big Sur Lodge, Cademartori's.....

Duncan Hines had a huge influence on the swing of American food from the merely saleable....to the survivable. Not to mention...enjoyable.

But, looking at last year's food poisoning statistics above.....how far have we actually come?

Back to Clostridium Perfringens A. Aka: CPA.

CPA lives everywhere around us. 20% of us have it in our guts. Many animals have it. It lives in the soil. No one, not even the CDC, understands where the reservoir of CPA bacteria actually lives,
except that it comes from shit. Human shit and animal shit.

CPA is extremely resistant to heat. Normal restaurant standards of keeping food either below 45 degrees or above 145 degrees Fahrenheit will not stop CPA.

When CPA gets loose in a dairy herd, the mortality is Ebola-style....85% of the cows die in agony as their guts turn into bloody sludge. Vets can operate, manually strip the blood clots from
the small intestines of the cows and cut out the necrotic parts that have already died....but it doesn't matter. 85% die anyway.

Pig farmers....same deal. Horror stories of sows and baby pigs dissolving before farmers' eyes.

The really scary part is that death from CPA infection does not seem to be affected by toxic load. A fifth of us have the critter living inside us, and many of our food animals and pets have it as well.
CPA can appear in food, both prepared and raw....Most of us never notice. Patients can be fine with CPA for years and never know.....

But, when it gets you...it gets you. You might just be sick and poopy....or your internal organs could melt and you could die in screaming agony in hours in the best hospital on the planet.

There seem to be few risk factors, but there are some. It is anaerobic, meaning it grows in sealed, processed foods. Especially warm, sealed, processed foods. Mental hospitals, regular
hospitals, old folks homes and prisons are risk factors. Anti-psychotics are constipating and jack the ristk, and uber sterile food also jacks the risk factor. People on anti-biotics are also at risk, big time.

So......Wash your hands after you poop. Pray that your food handlers and house cleaners are doing the same.

Restaurant folk are trained to sing "Yankee Doodle" while they wash their hands.....or "Guantanamera" (it takes 15 seconds of singing while scrubbing).

So....... don't eat anywhere where the staff can't sing Yankee Doodle or Guantanamera.

Oh...stay out of prisons and mental hospitals...

If you can.

After having read 30 medical and scientific papers about this stuff.....at least.

Good food, good digestion, lots of happy bacteria living in your gut are the best defense.

Pro-biotics are a great call (millions of units, please), but so is real sauerkraut, actual cheese, real yoghurt, un-Pasteurized beer and wine......god forbid kim chee...

My Amanda is probably at least as OCD as Uncle Duncan Hines. We have three levels of sponges in our house, identified by either one, two or three corners clipped off: #1 is for dishes only;
#2 is for counter tops and stoves; #3 is for floors and doors. Amanda throws out the clothes she wears on airplanes upon arrival. Hotel bedspreads are Chernobyl, and don't even mention hotel carpets.

Me....I am more George Carlin in my approach to germs: "When I drop something on the street, I pick it up and eat it! I want my immune system to be the Delta Force of immune systems!
My immune system is fighting the fucking Food Taliban every fucking day! We are ready!"

Anecdotal evidence is anathema to scientists, but just sayin': Amanda has been down with the Cachagua Crud for two weeks, barely able to breathe. I am 61, with no spleen, and feeling fine.

So, anyway...I am whipped after turning the compost for a long hour in the sun today. I think I will have another glass of organic Heller Malbec, to go along with my Shoch Family Farmstead cheese. Helps digest the massive amounts of kim chee from lunch at Orient Express......

Here is George:

Baby, baby....

2011-01-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

Where did my blog go?

And all those promises....not to mention the slurs.

Someone hacked my email.....and maybe deleted all that work.

Hmmmmmm.

Raices, otra vez.....

2011-01-22T23:49:00.000-08:00

Our new fish supplier in the City found us some farm sturgeon. Farm sturgeon gets a big Green Light on the www.seafoodwatch.org list, so…….why not?

We go way back with sturgeon.

Our logo is sturgeon related……

Our opening gift from artist Zevi Blum from a series of culinary engravings he had done in upstate New York while working for Steuben Glass.

The drawing depicts a scene from the life of Vatel, a legendary sixteenth century chef.

“Vatel” is also a must-see chef’s movie starring Gerard Depardieu and Uma Thurman.

Vatel’s world was the world of the Three Musketeers. He first worked for Fouquet, the finance minister of Cardinal Mazarin. Mazarin was the head of state for Anne of Austria (Geraldine Chaplin in the movie), the regent for her young son Louis XIV. Her affair with Lord Buckingham…who actually turns out to have been as queer as a four-dollar water pistol….. and the crooked financial dealings of Mazarin and Fouquet, caused a royal rebellion among the princes and generals who supported the young Louis.

Vatel was Fouquet’s chef. He presided over the grand feast in 1661 to which Fouquet invited Louis XIV and all the generals to the palace of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fouquet had built the palace with all the stolen money, and did not survive his hubris.... or the banquet, at least politically. He was arrested by D’Artagnan of Three Musketeers fame, and likely went on to become The Man In The Iron Mask. Really.

The architects of Vaux-le-Vicomte did survive. Andre le Notre, Louis Le Vau, and Charles le Brun went on to build Versailles for Louis XIV.

Hey, when you have lemons….make lemonade.

The baddest of Louis’ generals was The Great Condé, Louis de Bourbon, aka Enghien.

Enghien controlled the vast quasi-country of Burgundy as well as Berry and Lorraine. He was married to the daughter of Richelieu, which would be enough for most folk, but on top of that he was the most capable general in France.

After the fall of Fouquet and Mazarin, Louis XIV got the architects of Vaux-le-Vicomte….and Enghien stole Fouquet’s chef!

The Condé lived at Chantilly, the still-gorgeous palace an hour from Paris.

Vatel was officially the maitre d’hotel, as well as chef. This meant he was in charge of everything: grounds, staff, kitchens, farms, vineyards, stables, livestock, fisheries, mines….you name it. The Condé ran his territory like an independent country, so Vatel had full powers, and full responsibility. The Culinary Karl Rove (his real name was, in fact, Karl Watel…..Swiss).

Ten years into Louis’ reign, the King decided he needed to kick the ass of the Dutch and the Flems. He needed a general, and the Condé was still the best….even though his most recent experience had been kicking Louis’ own ass and stealing the best chef in France.

Meanwhile, the Condé was dead broke after ten years of royal intrigue, and needed Louis’ money…… but he couldn’t let Louis know.

So…..Louis came for a royal visit to hash all this out, with his full, treasury-breaking entourage. Think P-Diddy and J Lo coming by for the weekend…..with Liz Taylor and the Kardashian’s.

Vatel was ready.

For opening night, they served sturgeon. Sturgeon was (and still is… in England) a royal prerogative. At Christmas, Prince Charles portions out filets to his Cool List. No one is supposed to serve it without royal permission, technically now…and definitely in 17th century France.

So, to let Louis know what was what, and who was who…..and who was really King Daddy at Chantilly…. and in Burgundy, even though they were broke…..Vatel and the Conde laid out the royal fish for their royal guest.

Sturgeon are enormous anadromous fish…They live in salt water, and return to fresh water to spawn, like salmon and trout and steelhead. They are hard to kill, live a long time, and can run fifteen to twenty feet, easy.

There was one famous sturgeon….I can’t remember where…that thrilled and appalled the public by eating ducks like popcorn in a public park.

To cook the sturgeon, Vatel had to have special pans made, and to serve them, special giant silver platters. Vatel controlled the mines, the metal market, the artisans…the whole deal.

Timing was, of course, crucial.

Failure was not an option. The galleys awaited anyone, Vatel included, who screwed up.

Row, row, row yer boat…..

Sturgeon are always presented proceeded by a piper…..Union rules.

In our logo, you see first Vatel with his mace of office, then the pipers, then here comes the sturgeon….An eighteen footer….

As Vatel made his entrance before the King, the crowd was puzzled by the pipers….then stunned to see the sturgeon…being served by a General to the King….The Sun King no less!

“Fuck you, Louis…..you are in MY house. I make the calls here……” Holy shit! And, it was not lost on anyone present the last royal meal presided over by Vatel resulted in death and dismemberment for his boss….

As the procession came into the dining room, suddenly the first platter-bearer tripped. The others stumbled with him, and the entire fish came crashing down in a heap of steaming flesh, twisted silver, and screaming servants and guests.

When the chaos died down, all eyes turned to Vatel standing quietly by the door to the kitchen, surely doomed to the galleys.

Vatel looked at the mess, shrugged his shoulders and turned to his assistant, “Ooops. See if we have another one in the back…….”

On cue……out came more pipers…..and a 24 foot sturgeon!

The all-time catering “Fuck you!” (I am still waiting for the right bride and/or mother-of-bride to pull this one on with a wedding cake…….One would assume 100% deposit….)

Post-script: The Condé got the job,and the money. Vatel did not do as well.

For the next night’s dinner, he had ordered 10 tumbrils of fish from Calais. Only one arrived, and the meal circled the Drain of Disaster.

Vatel took out his sword, held the point against his heart, and ran into the wall. The ultimate chef’s tantrum….and the ultimate beleaguered chef’s guilt trip.

Vatel’s other legacy is Chantilly cream…..whipped cream with sugar (what a concept!) that was served to the 2,000 guests the night of his demise.

Honi soit qui mal y pense!

One there is who bad there thinks!

Hey, and in the movie he gets to sleep with Uma Thurman….

And the movie’s tag line:

“Some men are too noble to live among aristocracy….”

Hold that thought, Chef. Voila….our logo.

Many thanks to Etienne Merle, Zevi and Jon Blum……

The REAL Grill...

2011-01-19T00:25:00.000-08:00

Some of us have been working on a REAL fundraiser (beyond Tritips In The Rain in Cachagua and Spaghetti By The River) for Rachel for a while now. It was all set for the Highlands Inn for March. Toby did a killer job with the Big Sur Food and Wine Fest there in November....the only bummer was the absence of Rachel, four days after the accident.

Then, suddenly, the Highlands brass told Auntie Erin that management doubted that we (Erin, Toby, Gina Weston, Molly O'Neal and I) "could pull off an event of this quality in the time frame."

Yeah well, fuck you sideways. Which of Rachel's friends hangs at the Highlands anyway? (Well, except to sneak into the hot tubs after hours....)

We were meeting at The Rio when we got the news, and were grumbling about those fucking corporate douche bags.

Tony Tollner overheard our bitching: "Why don't you do it here? I'll give you the Rio for a night, no problem."

One of the many reasons to love Tony and The Rio......

I always tell people that the word "restaurant" comes from the verb "to restore". We used to be a solace and shelter back in the day, and an important part of not just commerce, but society and communication.

Some places still are.

Hats off to Tony!

Sunday, April 10, 5:30-8pm. Rio Grill. Great wineries, tba but all our local favorities. Great foodies, tba....but think Mundaka, Cachagua, Tim Wood, Tree Bones, etc. All the Photo Mafia are coming together for the auction.....As much fun as you can have with your clothes on....

James Earl Ray Day

2011-01-19T00:20:00.000-08:00

People actually call our recent holiday by this name. Really.

Missed MLK Day by an hour.

Just two thoughts....

Dr. King was involved in the Memphis garbage workers strike against the advice of every single friend and advisor he had: "Martin...it is too dangerous. Martin....you need to focus on the Poor People's March....Martin: it is a tempest in a teacup. Martin: it is garbage workers....."

Against all advice Dr. King made at least three appearances in Memphis...even with clear death threats against him.

Why?

The garbage strike was all about getting better wages and working conditions for the mostly black garbage workers. Duh. Well, turns out that there were lots of folk involved in the Memphis garbage detail: drivers, pick-up men, unloaders, etc, etc.

The drivers were all white. The pick-up guys were all black. In 1968 the pick-up guys made the Federal minimum wage: $1.68 an hour. Somewhere around $250 a month, less taxes.

I know this, because I also made this wage at the time....as a white guy working in restaurants in Upstate New York. Of course, I had no wife, kids or rent.....

The other deal was I was not in Memphis. It rains a ton in Tennessee. When it rains and you are a garbage pick up guy....you have a visceral understanding that a pint is a pound....the world around. A fifty gallon garbage can left in a Memphis rainstorm quickly becomes a living, seething nightmare that takes two strong men to shift, much less lift.

And in between....work rules had the white guys (two of them) snug, warm and dry in the cab of the truck. The "niggers" did all the hard labor....and had to hang on to the outside of the truck between stops. For about $13 for an eight hour day.

The way hard work works....the workers figure out ways to game the system. The only game available to the black pick-up guys in Memphis was to hid in the bed of the garbage truck between stops...out of the rain. A little peace during the thirteen bucks a day.....standing in filth and garbage was marginally more comfortable than getting rained on.

Well, one day...the knucklehead crackers driving the garbage truck in the dry and cozy cab...flipped on the crush switch between stops. Knowingly or un-knowingly....who is to tell? Two African-American workers were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck. Families, children, etc....

They got nothing from the City of Memphis....from the trash company, from anyone.

Martin was both moved and offended. The story of the Samaritan rang true and clear for him, and he refused to turn away from it....even at the expense of his own life. Every single one of his friends and advisers told him to stay away from Memphis....but he refused to turn away from such obvious abuse and heartlessness.

If you listen to his last speech....I promise the hairs will rise on the back of your neck.

I really don't think they make people like this anymore.....

That was #1

Number 2 favorite quote from Martin Luther King....

"Life is just a series of shattered dreams......."

That doesn't get much play....

I have a dream.......

Pablo....

2010-12-14T22:42:00.000-08:00

Last week got word that Pablo was dying.....

Two different women had driven him to town last week for medical care.....and Pablo hitchhiked back to Cachagua (with pneumonia!) because it turns out that modern hospitals don't allow smoking! What is the world coming to.....

Finally, he was so weak that he couldn't get up, or even really move. We at The Store kept sending up plates of food....risking Pablo's ire. Pablo may SEEM homeless....living in a tiny trailer in the woods on someone else's property, getting around on a bicycle....but he pays his bills on time, every month.

Pablo is about a million years old....well, he was a Navy guy at Okinawa. Which means he was at least 20 in 1945...which puts him at around 85 now.

He was a Navy guy, a union meat cutter for years (Nielsen's for old man Nielsen in Carmel)....and who knows what else.

Amanda was the first to point out that 85 year old Pablo has the best legs in Cachagua...and that is pretty much accepted gospel at this point. Pablo also makes his own teeth, that he carves from wood or ivory or whatever is laying around. George Washington style. Pablo gets really irate about the whole George Washington thing...he claims that if George had someone decent to carve his teeth, he wouldn't have gotten the infection that finally killed him.

Pablo is one of the most honest and brutally frank people I have ever met. Years ago when we first bought The Store he came in to talk to me about my cigarette selection. Now, I don't smoke...never have....and my brother and sister-in-law both died at 47 from lung cancer. "Mike, you have to get the hard packs, not the soft packs. See, guys like me...we keep our drugs in our cigarette packs and they need to be hard and tight so our stuff doesn't get smashed when we are fucked up."

Sure thing, Pablo....Hard packs.

One Sunday Brunch Pablo came in and was screwing around with a baggie: "Michael....I just scored an ounce of mushrooms! You want some?" No, Pablo...sorry, I have to work. "Well, more for me! Can you put these babies in an omelette?" The whole ounce, Pablo? "Shit, man! It must be a holiday....and besides.....I am a professional!" Done and done.

Pablo loves young people, and has met most of my Stanford students. When one of them was reading Richard Brautigan (Confederate General From Big Sur...the funniest book ever written in or about Monterey County) and mentioned it.....Pablo got all excited: "James, James, James Brautigan. Oh my lord....it brings me back. I helped him out big time one time. He got stuck with a dead body after a party in Oakland he threw. He and I drove the stiff across the Richmond bridge....and dumped it front of San Quentin!" I believe him.

Pablo's son is Fred....a truly homeless guy. Fred used to live in one of the gorgeous cabins on the river in Princes Camp....for $250 a month....until he decided that his money was better spent on drugs and alcohol than rent. Fred has a beautiful boxer named Henry who was a major source of funding for the homeless who live around Whole Foods....though the boys had mountains of organic dog food from the Pebble Beach ladies, and not so much cash. Fred has moved back to Cachagua to take care of his dad.....

Pablo pretty much died on Tuesday. We were working, so I sent up some funky-ass food to cheer him up: lamb's tongues, chile verde and chanterelles. We kept it up during the week....goat paprikash, whatever was tasty and weird. Pablo was bed-ridden, so he kept sending requests down the hill with our messengers: A .22 rifle, four hits of acid, some methampetamine, a little pot, some more goat tacos, and a bottle of peppermint schnapps.....and a couple of packs of Camel straights. A pretty typical last meal request from an 85 year old.

Pablo's near passing had an electric effect on the Cachagua community.....all manner of folk rallied to his aid, and we all realized how important he was to all of us....and each of us. No one would bring Pablo any smokes, any meth.....not sure about the LSD.

For Sunday, I ordered Wagyu beef brisket from Nishima Ranch in NorCal......corned it myself, and made corned beef hash for what I thought might be Pablo's last meal on Sunday: hash browns, corned beef hash and a soft-poached egg. I sent it up the hill with James on a chipped plate and gave a big sigh.

Bye, Pablo!

Later that day, Cachagua had our Christmas Tree Lighting with Pastor Orville and his crew at The Store/Church. A hundred or so folks turned out......

The photo attached was taken by Orville (who was the lead photographer at The Herald for 30 years).

Apparently, Pablo came down the hill the two miles from his trailer for the tree lighting....

Or the four hits of acid, the weed, the Camels, the schnapps and the meth.

Jesus, even when you are dying....you can't trust people.

If you want a job done right.....do it yourself!

Kobe....or not Kobe. Red Bull is The Question....

2010-11-30T21:21:00.000-08:00

Kobe beef has this weird reputation in America. Fat cows, fed good Kirin beer, rubbed down by gorgeous Japanese girls daily.....ludicrously expensive beef. P Diddy stuff, fit to be washed down with Crystal. Or Krug.

At The Masters (the last real Masters of Food and Wine, as it turned out) I signed for one half prime rib of real Kobe from Japan....airlifted in. Only $2400 for maybe six or eight pounds. The idiot, knucklehead, 3-star Frenchmen who ordered it then cut it up and made stew. This is like using a Dali original to light your fireplace.....just because you can, doesn't make it right.

I....raised in French restaurants.....have not eaten in one since.

Well....pommes frites in CDG on the way to Prague does not count.

Hey!! Guys at Le Cinq! Open a fucking newspaper....or a Spanish cookbook from this millenium.

I don't think they have I-phones yet....much less the app for "No one wants to eat "ris de veau" and other shitty animal parts" anymore unless they are bored, broke, drunk, addicted.....or all four.

We have been serving lots of Kobe and Wagyu steaks of different sorts lately.....and I am getting worn out explaining what is the real deal.

Hence this post.

Kobe is just one type of Japanese-style beef. Kobe is a city about 300 miles from Tokyo, part of the megalopolis that includes Kyoto. Cattle were raised here back in the day....still are, for that matter.

Americans love short names. (Corton and Pommard wildly outsell Pernand-Vergelesses in red Burgundy, for no other real reason). Kobe is so much easier to remember than Tottori, Tajima, Shimane, Mishima, and Okayama. We won't even talk about Akaushi, much less Kochi and Kumamoto.

All Japanese cattle are controlled by the government....and always have been. All Japanese and Japanese style cattle are from a set of distinct breeds called "Wagyu"....which means "Japanese cows". Duh. All the other names and breeds are subsets of Wagyu....Japanese beef.

Cattle were introduced to Japan around 2,200 years ago for use as four-legged tractors. The relative value of their labor vs. their value of meat was incalculable. Eating a cow in Japan in 200 BC would be like taking apart a John Deer tractor to use the fenders as skillets. Until 1868 there was a complete ban in Japan of eating ANY four-legged animal. (The Mejii Dynasty was to Japan what Dick Cheney was to America, and the brief "modernization" of the four-legged food culture did not last long).

All cattle have basically.... always..... been completely controlled by the government of Japan. Bows, arrows, swords, nukes.....Do NOT touch our cattle!

The rugged terrain of Japan and isolation of its people and animals from each other back in the day caused each of the subsets of Wagyu to develop individual characteristics independently.

The Tajima district used cattle to pull carts, so their cows had heavy forequarters, but they were smaller and more agile. Tottori were used to pack grain, so they were big and strong with broad backs.

All those cattle from the island of Honshu were black. The Kyushu island cattle were red: the Kochi and the Kumamoto...generically called Akaushi. (Oyster lovers will recognize the Kumamoto name).

Oh...and what is up with the massaging and beer? Kobe is a big port city. Their cattle could not get out and work and stretch like the country mice...errr, cows. Hey, they got cramps! Kind of like me on Tuesday mornings. Leticia!!!

And beer? Not so much beer as all the ripe, buzzy by-products of making beer....and making soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, tofu, etc....but feeding cows beer sounds so much cooler.

Like Zenyatta, the champion racehorse at Santa Anita with her Guinness every morning.

Actual Wagyu are fed a more mundane daily diet of corn, barley, wheatstraw and alfalfa.

So...basically all the various Wagyu breeds are like breeds of dogs: Alsatians, Bernese Mountain Dogs, German Wirehairs, etc. The main difference between their cattle breeds and ours is that the Japanese government has been intimately involved in protecting and developing these cattle for 2200 years. They are more like wolves than dogs. No....more like Super Models! They have not been cross-bred, like even the best of our beef strains back here in the Land of Outback Steakhouse (Black Angus, Red Angus, Beefmaster, Charolais, etc)

So......their bred-in characteristics are set and durable. The meat comes out the same almost regardless of: diet, weather, age, diet, weather conditions...and whatever weird shit the cattle are exposed to growing up. I mean, 2200 years of JAPAN, for chrissakes.....

Wagyu cattle process and store the energy from the food they eat..... differently. Rather than store fat on the outside of their bodies, they store it inside the muscle tissue as marbling. In fact, dumbass American consumers actually rejected the first Wagyu meats sold here as being "too white".

Jesus wept.

The other aspect of Wagyu beef is the nature of the fats themselves: there are omega-3's and omega-6's, and crazy high levels of oleic acids...as in olive oil....and other mono-saturated fats..... as opposed to saturated fats.

Wagyu fat is liquid at room temperature.....anathema to modern food processors. All the fats currently being banned in New York and San Francisco have as their main quality that they are solid at room temperature. Can't have your Pepperidge Farm cookie leaking onto your lunch bag on the subway! Oleic acids reduce hypertension, reduce bad cholesterol, etc.

Plus....fat tastes good, dammit!

We have been serving American Kobe for months and months now. It is all Wagyu....duh. It also turns out that all American Kobe or Wagyu is from Wagyu bulls bred to Angus or Hereford cows. Faux-Wagyu....but the stuff rocks the house and do you really have $600 a pound (including bone) for Wa-gyu from the Land of the Rising Sun?

It turns out that the American standard for the quality of the beef is settled after the animal has been slaughtered.....the marbling is graded on a ten point standard. We have been selling 1# Kobe first grade rib eye steaks for $36....that cost us $22, just because we love the quality. (A normal nice restaurant would charge $66....in New York or San Francisco, you would pay $100 or $200).

The grading system used by the Japanese for 100 years has been, of course, corrupted by us Yanks. Now, you have to know your supplier to know what you are buying. Despite the T-Party/Former Republican abhorrence for government interference in commerce....there are virtually no meaningful rules that apply to labeling meat, fish, produce or anything else we put into our bodies.

The reputable purveyors grade by the Japanese system after slaughter: they inspect the short loin after the carcass is broken, but there can be variation even in different muscles in the same animal. A heavy marbling Ultra Mishima Ranch ribeye that hits 8.5 out of ten might run $30 a pound in bulk, wholesale. Last month we got one for $20 that was graded low at the short loin, but turned out to rock the house further up the animal. All y'all that had our "Kobe #1" ribeye made out like fat rats....

Our new supplier raises Akaushi (red Kumamoto) cattle from Kyushu. They are little smaller than their black cousins from the other island. Our guy, Beeman Family Ranch, was part of the cartel who originally imported the ancestor cows and bulls back in 1994. They started with 11 cattle, and now have somewhere around 4-5k of them. They are breeding first generation crosses of Akaushi bulls with Angus cows. The Akaushi are more stable and predictable genetically.....One hopes. A nice steak will still cost you $30, even at our prices.....but stay tuned for that animal by animal variation.

This is a little strange.....explaining to people that the steak they had for $36 last month was really worth $200....and we have new and better coming up soon.

Maybe.

Well, the Japanese have been working on cows for 2200 years.....and on audio and TV's for less than 50.

Not to mention Honda's.

That stuff seems to have worked out.......

Blessings and Curses.....

2010-11-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

Our friend Rachael Short was badly injured in a car crash in Big Sur on Halloween.

Much more to say about this later.....but:

Rachael is part of the crop of truly amazing kids that we older fuck-ups have accidentally grown....not that we had much to do with any of their success....except perhaps as a negative example.

Rachael is a gifted photographer.....Her injury, treatment and recovery is being shot by another gifted local young photographer.....Guru Khalsa.

Here is the link.

We have been working for photographers for nearly forty years now: Ansel, Jim Alinder, various Weston's, Tom Millae, Rod Dresser, Morley Baer, Doug Steakley etc.

Something about the Peninsula....maybe the water, maybe the light.....I am so encouraged by the new generation coming on to pick up the baton.....Rachael, Guru, Nic Coury, Kodiak Greenwood....

Reason enough to get up in the morning.....and do it all again.

We have a fundraiser for Rachael at The Store tomorrow at 1pm. You don't have to come.....but it is OK to send money.

Rachael Short
c/o Cachagua Store
18840 Cachagua Road
Carmel Valley, CA 93924

Fire and Ice

2010-11-14T20:08:00.000-08:00

You can listen to me rant, or:

You can get the gist of this post in two articles yourself:

Today's Times

And War on Error's post.

Here is Robert Frost....mandatory memorization in public elementary and middle schools back in the day.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The fact that no one under the age of 50 has ever heard of this poem is part of my point. The teabaggers are widely characterized by the media as being full of fire....."setting the grassroots on fire" says the Economist.

I go with ice....aka stupidity. Ice. Lack of critical thinking. Ice. Lack of information. Ice. Lack of curiosity.

Fuck Global Warming...we are in for a New Ice Age.

In fact, 50% of the incoming freshman class of new legislators are global warming deniers.

Take this beauty....who will be the new Chair of the House Energy Committee, replacing Henry Waxman of California:

Or how about new Florida Governor Rick Scott? Took the 5th Amendment 75 times to avoid testifying in the largest MediCare fraud case in history....in which he was personally involved.

Tea Party folks are supposedly all about less government....and a fresh look at Washington.

Here is the new Senator for Indiana, Dan Coats. Actually, he is not the NEW Senator for Illinois....he used to be the Senator from Indiana, and is now back in action.

In the intervening years he has worked as a lobbyist in Washington. His stellar accomplishment for a client was for Cooper Industries....a formerly Texas-based outfit. He helped keep open a loophole the specifically saved Cooper hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. I say former Texas company....because Cooper is now based out of Bermuda, where they don't have so many worries about paying ANY U.S. taxes.

And Coats is up for membership on the same committee that will once again address that same tax loophole this coming year.

Change you can believe in.

Here is the Tea Party/New Republican program as far as I can discern:

1. Social Security reform that guarantees my current level of benefits, alters someone else's, and cuts everyone's Social Security taxes to boot.

2. A world-class national infrastructure that can be built and maintained without tax dollars.

3. A balanced budget that doesn't sacrifice any of the government programs – especially the sacred military-industrial complex and the various old age benefits – that we like.

4. Clean air without pollution controls, clean water with a neutered and underfunded EPA, and businesses that do socially responsible things without any regulation whatsoever.

5. Consumer goods at Made in China prices that create high-paying jobs in America...

6. Freedom to die of a simple staph infection for 50 million Americans without health insurance.

Now....in the interests of "pragmatism" the Obama crowd is ready to cave on the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy.

Let's face it.....all the decision makers, Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, Libertarian....are wealthy. If I looked at the electorate and saw what they have done.....I would want to steal all the money, too! These people are fucking stupid.....

I have always been of the Satchell Paige School of Economics: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you!" And despite being someone who checks his bank balance only when the nice bank lady calls to say there is no balance.....I encourage folks to look at where we actually stand as a nation right now.

Here is a chart of how our incomes are spread:

I am a recovering engineer....so I love charts and numbers. Here is the chart presented in a different way:

50% of Americans make less than $26,261 a year. All pay the base rate, plus FICA....somewhere around 20% taxes. There are .794% of Americans (a little over a million) who earn more than $250,000 per year. They pay 35%. Back in the Clinton years they paid 39%. The big fight is about .794% of the wage earners paying an additional 4% of their incomes.

For fellow math or engineering geeks, notice that the chart is on an adjusted log scale: at the beginning the gap between the vertical lines is $5,000 per line; at the far right it is $5,000,000 per line. Otherwise the chart would continue from my house on Cachagua Road out to Will's house on Tassajara Road. The reason is because the gap between rich and poor in America is now greater than at any other time since the early 1920's.

Here is another chart for you:

And another depressing article from the LA Times along the same lines. In America today, the top 20% of folks own 85% of our wealth and assets. The bottom 40% own zero.....or are underwater.

I don't want to bore you with tax rates, but the lower the tax rate, the higher the inequality. Oh, and the worse the economy......for the 85% anyway.

And it is getting worse:

Tea Party folk scream about the deficit. Here it is:

And here is how it comes about:

Here is the key.....between now and 2012, do whatever you can to get yourself into the top .794% Or maybe get out and actually vote next time around.

Finally, I leave you with a few maps to compare at your leisure:

Think of it as the nice lady from the bank calling......

And finally......

Ignorance and Arrogance

2010-10-16T01:32:00.001-07:00

I don't know how FaceBook works, but here is my response to someone who tells me I am insanely stupid to support Sam Farr and Jerry Brown.

It is late....so unedited. Sorry about that.

Kris Darch:

I posted about two guys I have known personally for pushing 40 years.

I told my Jerry Brown story. You want to let us all in on your last shrink session, or one from 25 years ago? He lives in a shitty house in Oakland. I don...'t know how much money he has, but he doesn't spend it....he works every fucking day at his job. As governor, he drove a Dodge slant-6 Valiant to work. I did, too...my only legacy from my Irish family. He liked Linda Ronstadt, me too. He hangs at Tassajara, me too. Linda said that his taste in music was what they play in elevators...he was so focused on his job.

Sam Farr lives in a crappy house in Carmel. Yes, there are crappy houses in Carmel. His Big Sur property is a double wide trailer. He chops his own wood, fixes his own water lines and has somehow gained the respect of everyone in Big Sur...and Pebble Beach Republicans...for 3O years now.

As a young man at Big Creek, he went for a hike with the Ranch manager back to the falls. The guy had a heart attack. Sam did what he could, then threw the guy on his back and ran six miles through the brush, rocks and woods for help. I would not go back that far on Honda Mule. Sam ran it with a 220 pound guy on his back. The guy was dead from the get-go, but it did not change Sam's dedication to trying to save him. All I need to know.

Beyond that, these two guys...and Mark Stromberg at Hastings....are the smartest guys I know, and I am not a dummy. Ask either one about the relative protein content in various native versus invasive grasses and how it affects raising cattle. Have you? I have.Ask either one about COOL, and how it affects fisheries, produce and local jobs....and you will get a 45 minute lecture worthy of Harvard. Have you? I have.

I think you need to take your head out of the sand, or out of your ass....do some real work and engagement and get involved in the actual world that is around you.

Ignorance and arrogance are epidemic in America right now.

You epitomize both.

Meanwhile, anytime you are in the mood, you can drop by the Cachagua Store, bend over and kiss my rosy red rectum.

Just sayin'.

Hello Goodbye

2010-08-26T22:27:00.000-07:00

So….I got invited to the Change of Command ceremony at DLI yesterday. My friend Col Dave was relinquishing command of a Military Intelligence battalion. Amanda was invited as well, but she passed due to potential tears….Due to guaranteed tears. We went to the Army Birthday Ball…and Amanda not only cried during the various ceremonies….she cried describing the various ceremonies.

Amanda and I are among the last folks one would think of when someone says: “US Army!”…..but there you have it.

We are fans…..and a lot of it is because of Col. Dave. And Col. Pick. We won’t talk about DJ and Mattie.

Dave is a soccer guy….coach and referee out of Florida. Went to school in the Carolinas, which is to soccer like Saudi Arabia is to Muslims….the heartland. Mia Hamm, etc.

Dave and his crew were also the ones who supplied the manpower for our Carmel Arlington Beach Memorial for our military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. 5,000 crosses on Carmel Beach. Try to not cry……

We met Dave through DJ…at The Store. The first time Col Dave and Col Deano came out to The Store they were a little late, and came in all grubby. A client of ours…Carey…had a flat in his brand-new SUV, and Carey had no idea what to do or how to deal with it. No cell phone coverage, so he couldn’t call his lawyer or accountant. As the Cachagua citizens streamed by uncaring, the two colonels stopped, figured shit out, changed the tire, and got Carey on his way. They all arrived late for their rezzies…..who cares?

Carey later wrote a fat check for Paradox….the 501c3 that builds sports equipment for disabled vets that the two colonels support.

Through Col Dave we not only met the leadership at DLI, but the sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines that are there learning languages. And not just Americans…..we met Frogs, Danes, Germans, Indians…..you name it. Col Dave encouraged his troops to engage us and trek out to Cachagua, so many Monday Nights and Sunday Brunches would feature humble tables of closely barbered, extremely fit and smart young folks….partying down with the locals.

This is not really a normal thing for Monterey and Carmel. We have a khaki ghetto….despite the extreme importance of the DLI and the NPS to our national security and our military in general…..us civilians rarely have any contact with our soldiers. Lord knows parents don’t let RLS, York and Carmel kids join the Army. (Oh, hello Andrew Armanasco……)

Dave went a long way to make that change. Not only did we in Cachagua wind up knowing the kids…..but we met their parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, grandparents…and we got insights into a level of routine commitment and dedication to supposedly worn out old-school ideals that most locals never see. And saying goodbye to these kids as they ship out….full of hope and confidence…..to Kunar Province and other horrible, deadly places. Amanda and I cry…..and we are just the caterers…..not the family. Well, maybe the extended family.

Speaking of family…..earlier this year I was trying to scramble and save the life of one of my knuckleheads….in jail for drugs, and facing a possible three year stretch for being a complete fucking knucklehead, even among knuckleheads. Still, the kid was smart, hardworking….there was hope. Dave wrote a letter for him….got him out of the slammer and got him another chance at life. Got him an Army award that he sent to the judge….just on my say-so.

Colonel Dave has been in the Army for 20 years. He was in Iraq the first time, Germany, Korea….where he was a head spook. Then back to Iraq for a couple of tours. He has been in command of the 229th Military Intelligence outfit here for two years at DLI.

Dave has a Bronze Star. They don’t just hand these things out. You get a Bronze Star for surviving things and making decisions that haunt you for the rest of your life….decisions of courage that 99% of your fellow soldiers would not have made….and your fellow soldiers do not suck……

Dave’s family lives in the East. I have known him for two years…..I have not met them. His duties here keep him apart from his own wife and son.

Before the ceremony I talked for a minute with Dave. “Jeez, I hope I can get through this OK. This is very emotional.”

In his short talk, Dave talked about his soldiers and all the normal valedictorian-type stuff…..thanking everyone. Blah, blah, blah.

Then he went off message….Uh oh.

“At risk of embarrassing myself, I am going off message here. I was in Whole Foods the other week, buying some lunch. A girl in a peace t-shirt came up to me and started yelling: “Get out of Iraq! Get out of Afghanistan!”

(Side note: independent of Col. Dave….who is a silent MI type guy when it comes to his job…..we have other contacts at high levels of our military in Afghanistan and Iraq. They all know and have known for a long time that it is an impossible job they have been given, and that it will never work. They are working to bring that information to our elected officials and the public….without being in any way disloyal to their jobs and their oaths as soldiers. General McChrystal is a first casualty….but down to the grunt level there is an awareness that they are very possibly going in to die in a losing cause….just to earn the time it takes the rest of our country to use the democratic process they are dying for to figure it out. And get them out of there. Is there a better definition of heroism? Forget Thermopylae…..)

The irony of some coddled hippy chick yelling at a military intelligence guy….a fucking colonel… about the futility of our various wars abroad….like it was his fault or choice….is mind-blowing.

The saying in the military is: “The Army went to war; the country went to the mall…..”

And to a Bronze Star holder….who has experienced the death of his friends and co-workers first-hand….at lunch? At Whole Foods? Fuck.

Dave turned away to the check out counter, dazed. The woman behind the counter asked him: “Have you been to Iraq?” “Yeah….twice.”

She came out from behind her register and gave him a hug: “Thank you for your service.”

Telling this story in front of his battalion….Dave’s voice cracked and he lost it for a second or two.

There it is…..

Bronze Star winner. Guy who thinks two years in Monterey without his family is the highlight of his career…..almost breaks down relating the one time somebody local actually showed some love and said “Thanks.”

Minutes later, with all the soldiers assembled out front doing nutty soldier shit…..”Attention, Parade Rest, Order Arms” forever…..they played the retreat…bringing down the flag at 5pm. They had a brass band that Dave had somehow browbeaten into getting together…beats hell out of the recording we all know so well.

The Retreat is from the French, by way of the Romans….and they play it when the flag comes down every night.

I was there as a guest…..and outside the military, almost all the other guests were people who looked at me like a bug….WTF is this guy doing here? May I just point out that Sheriff Kanalakis was invited, mentioned in all the speeches….and did not show. Fucking pussy piece of shit.

When they played the retreat, and all the soldiers did the Atttention thing, and the flag started down…..I actually gasped and sobbed out loud. (This is why Amanda did not go). I caught it pretty quick, and coughed. Damn allergies!

Col Dave sent me an email later saying that he hoped I didn’t think the less of him because of his brief breakdown in his speech.

No, Dave…..this is the whole point. You showed us your world, and showed your folks our world…so that we all know what we both are getting into. Has not happened much in the past.

And the best part? Dave is going on to Fort Meade….where he can no longer tell us what his job is. Basically, listening to our phone calls and reading our emails. Bring it. And munch a ton of blue crab and killer oysters from the Chesepeake, Dave.

And thanks.

And, if you see a man or woman in uniform…..just go up and say: “Thanks for your service…..” You don’t have to believe in the war, just the people….

Purification....Cachagua Style.

2010-08-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

I had a meeting with an awesome client today who we love and loves everything we do. They just came out to talk, and when that went on too long I whipped up a panzanella and some leftover pistachio fed tritip and some Jew cous with some of our arugula. That is what we eat for lunch, and we love it....and they got it. Thank you, Jesus.

Then on to another meeting with a woman who wants us to do a pre-rehearsal dinner in October. No worries. Except she insisted on crashing Monday night to see if we are worthy, or maybe coming to some party we are catering to check out our food. Do people actually let random clients crash parties of other clients? Seriously?

Oh, and she thinks we are stupid because we can't guarantee wild salmon in October like the other Village caterer can, and like the big Carmel restaurant can. I explained that it is not a crime to misrepresent unpackaged food as something else: wild vs. farm salmon; organic vs commercial produce; real meat vs commodity.....it is just commercial fraud, which can only be redressed with a lawsuit, and only for the price difference. So, go ahead and sue Whole Foods for the four bucks for your hunk of salmon....after paying a hundred or two for the DNA test in Santa Cruz to prove that it is actually farmed.

Then, she proudly told me that her caterer for the wedding at Holman grows their own produce. It says so on their voice mail, see. They live on a quarter acre on the cold side of the valley. Right.

We actually do grow SOME of our stuff....chard, herbs, padrone peppers, some weird Peruvian tubers, rhubarb, etc. We have thousands of dollars of raised beds, and spend hours and hours a week composting, fucking with the drip system, trapping gophers....and have barely enough to take care of the few folks at Monday Night who order our weird shit.

We do have people up the street who grow stuff just for us.....and their other friends...and themselves....and a farm that just grows for us and Tassajara. And a kid who grows fingerling potatoes for us across the creek. And the Rana Creekies, who we supply with seeds to grow purple mustard and bronze fennel and arugula and tomatillos. And un-named wine buddies who grow watermelons and heirlooms for us....and another kid who also grows heirlooms. Just for us.

But we don't claim to grow what we don't grow, and we don't claim to serve what cannot be served. I guess we are stupid.

Most of our stuff costs us about a dollar a pound more than everyone else pays (our locals take their stuff out in trade on Mondays....you will see them at the VIP tables). My buddy who owns Corralitos just sent along a defensive, groveling letter apologizing for having to raise his prices for the first time in five years. He got massive amounts of shit for doing this in the middle of a recession. I broke his price rise down.....seven cents per sausage increase.

Our other commercial produce supplier.... who we love beyond words.... made a business out of driving around to all the small, cool suppliers...even as far away as a small, fully organic valley up by Sacrament. We had the best, coolest stuff ever...completely unavailable at any price anywhere. Their real clients were Bernardus and some other hotels and restaurants, and they counted on those folks buying the big stuff: lettuce, carrots, beets, spuds, onions. Those guys dropped them because the prices were a few cents a pound more than the normal commercial crap everybody else buys. This puts my guy out of business....and I am stuck. No fun toys to play with. And I miss doing business with my friend. And that valley up by Sac needs to find a whole new world of clients.

Fuck this.

Back in the day, the sweet ladies in Bemidji who supply our wild rice tried to talk me down...for my own economic good....to commercial grade wild rice. Our stuff is the extra premium, and it is picked by Indians in canoes. Fucking WILD rice.

Cue Fargo accent: "Well, ya know...it's a dollar a pound more for the fancy. That's almost a third, ya know......"

The same story could be told all across the board.....real pineapples are a buck more a pound than the inedible ones. Ditto tomatoes....even Romas.

Here is my response.....

WHAT THE FUCK CAN YOU BUY FOR A BUCK A POUND?

Rice? Flour? Water?

And how much are you eating? Can you really tell me that you don't have an extra dollar for a pound of food to have something fabulous, that may change your life....as opposed to something that just fills the pie hole?

And:

"There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man's lawful prey."
John Ruskin, English critic, essayist, & reformer (1819 - 1900)

Yah...so with the awful lady....I turned into the arrogant prick that lies just below the surface.

I raced back to The Store to email her...after having multiplied our prices by 50%.

I also called ahead for Liz to pick some white sage and put it in the dehydrator. My plan was to lock myself in the homeless bathroom and burn it all up to rid myself of the demons I collected with this lady. (I had only CALLED Amanda about this lady, and she was defensively burning sage....and some other herb).

When I arrived at The Store....Joanie and Lyle were there. They grow tons of the coolest stuff we serve in their little garden: Casper eggplants, manzano chiles, padrones...mulberries.. They raise beef....super sexy odd-looking Scottish cows. Joanie and Lyle had brought me the first mulberries of the season from their awesome tree.

Hah...inspiration! I took a bunch of mulberries and smashed them all over my body.....

Exocising demons....Cachagua Style!

So much better than burning sage!

Thank God No One Reads This.....

2010-07-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long pause.....

No lack of material, that is for sure.....Put it down to an over concern for doing real research and getting everything right.....while running two businesses in the midst of a depression.

Actually....I don't call what we are experiencing a Depression. We had one of those back in the day. This is also not a Recession.....we have had a ton of them. I did some research and realized that I either started a business, got married, bought a house, or had a kid...... smack in the middle of each of them in the last 30 years.....and never noticed.

Well, no one ever called me sensitive....and my economic skills are legendary.

I didn't notice recessions like George Bush didn't notice the Vietnam War.....for many of the same reasons......rich Daddy excepted.

I call what we are in now "The Great Dis Pear". Sort of like Despair, but not quite. There is a probably racist, sexist, homophobic and/or classist shrink joke about a therapist inviting all his patients to a Halloween Party, and encouraging them to come dressed as the most important emotion in their lives.

There is naturally the chick all dressed in white.....Hope. The guy in the Redskins jersey....Anger. The Raiders guy all in black.....Depression.

Etc.

Finally, the shrink's sole poor, gay, black patient arrives stark naked, with a pear stuck on the end of his dick. No one can figure out what emotion he is, not even the shrink.

"Ain't it obvious? I be Fucking Dis Pear!"

A year ago, I wrote somewhat incautiously about our Afghanistan policy, and our COIN (COunter INsurgency) crew that had finally surfaced in the military after years of bureaucratic struggle under Bush and his predecessors. We had inside info on the back room dealings, and even a copy of the full report on Afghanistan......before Obama! Luckily no one noticed.....and none of my peeps got fired.

Who are my peeps?

Eighty years ago in Monterey the place was full of starving artists...full of ideas, creativity, skill and potential....and very short of appreciation, cash and social stimulii. Restaurant guys like Gallitin Powers, the folks who ran the taco joint across the street, and all the other gin joint and food guys wound up with tons of art that is now priceless.

This has been going on for centuries. I am told that one way you can tell a real Modigliani is if it has his hashish bill totted up on the back of the canvas......the man sang for his supper, or at least his bong hits.

New Millenium Monterey has its share of artists....but it is knee deep in highly skilled military (ours and many others) and State Department folk who fall into many of the same categories as the artists did back in the 20's and 30's. Sadly for us restaurant guys.....you cannot put gossip and inside information up on the wall, and your grandkids can't sell it for the price of a house sixty years hence.

Anyway.....there is terrible, brave, momentous, bitter, depressing stuff going on that my grandkids will not be able to put on their walls....if if even have grandkids, and if those possible grandkids even have walls to live among.

And, of course....no one is telling you about it.

But....in the words of John Sebastian......

"But, I will!......"

As soon as I get done fucking this pear.......

Rape me......

2010-06-04T21:47:00.000-07:00

So.....this is one of those posts that has been percolating for a bunch of years. Partly to not embarrass myself, but mostly not to embarrass the other innocent people who are not as mad as I am.

What a concept.

Mostly mostly though...... not to actually find myself in court...... or jail.

But, sometimes......when hideous behavior and injustice percolate for decades.....I think it is OK to at least whisper something about it.

Right?

So......let's talk about rape.

One reason I have not been posting much in months is because of how hard I got slammed for talking about obvious assholes like the Bach Festival lady.....and Carmel Unified's response to the many dead children on their watch.

Having just surfed through yet another burial of yet another Carmel kid......one who, despite the deep flaws he brought to the program..... wasstill serially and parallely fucked upside down and sideways by the rich kid prep school system we swim in here. In the midst of the poverty no one talks about.

More of that later.

Anyway....let's go back to rape. Forcible rape, statutory rape, forcible statutory rape, date rape, rape of drunk and drugged people.....rape as a culture.

Carmel has as big a culture of rape as it does a culture of photography.

Really.

Especially rape of young girls.

I was on the point of starting a Facebook group: "Do you know anyone who hasn't been raped?"....and then I thought....nah. Not good for business.

Probably talking about this on my blog will not endear me to future brides who check us out on Google.

You can search for 3-ply beverage napkins on Google and find stuff I have been pissed about..... that have nothing to do with catering your wedding.

But, seriously.

There was a time when our unstated local culture embraced priapism.....and rape, especially of girls. And, probably since no one has ever talked about it....here it comes again!

Some small part of this has been in the papers recently, when a completely notorious local serial rapist was finally brought to some kind of partial justice. There is not one man or woman within twenty years of my age (60) who wasn't rooting for the DA, prison and public humiliation in this case.....a large part because every one of us has said or done nothing about this prick for three decades.

Well.....some people did do some things.

Back in the day, when the sky was blue, the sea was green, the hills were golden, and restaurant folks were stars, and not features of the fine print in the back of The Herald.....there were people you could call if there was a problem that lawyers would never be able to straighten out.

(From here on, this is all fiction....or hearsay. Or something where the statute of limitations has run out.)

I have always been a fan of unions. Unions saved my people....the Irish. The sandhog union in New York. The carpenter's union in Ireland.... and on Terminal Island in SoCo.

My grandfather was a union carpenter from Ireland back in the day. You came on as an apprentice at about 12 or 13....and you got all the shitty jobs. One of them was planing wood....boards, planks, whatever. In order to hold the hand plane at ever such an angle, a kid had to bend his little finger over almost sideways, into the palm. After a few years of this, the kid was permanently crippled, with little fingers that were bent inside their palms on a handshake.

No union cards were further necessary to get a job.

All it took was a handshake.

All this is past history now, since Ronald Reagan. But, back in the day....we had local unions that were strong, and their members had houses, and businesses, and their kids went to private schools if they wanted.

Among them there was a local tile-setter union.

So I heard. I have no direct knowledge of this, having never been to the union hall in Seaside with the bar and the pool table and all.

Someone I know closely knew the shop steward of the tilesetters....a sweet guy named Nick. Nick was famous not just for being shop steward of the tilesetters, but also because he had a purple dick. It used to worry him....then with our encouragement he decided to embrace his purple dickness......and he wound up with pretty, kind, smart......odd......rich girlfriends. Nick was also kind to animals....especially dogs.

So I hear.

Anyway, even twenty years ago....demand for union tilesetters was waning. Union tile guys would hang around the union hall looking for work. Two particular guys I heard about were Vito and Guido.

These are just stories, mind.

Vito and Guido were the kind of guys who never paid for a meal in any restaurant on the Peninsula....because they were sweet, kind, strong, enormous guys who were clearly sociopathic.

Other people's pain made little impression on them. They were very good at collecting money, therefore.

I must admit I once witnessed them collecting a restaurant tab from a guy working for a jeweler in the Barnyard. Vito held the guy up against the wall, while Guido opened the register and took out exactly what the creep owed. No more, no less. Deal with it, loser.

Another time, Vito and Guido were dining on the patio of a restaurant in the Barnyard when Vito spied a guy in the act of stealing the license plates off another patron of the restaurant. Vito and Guido walked over, grabbed the guy, wrapped him up in duct tape and garbage bags and put him in the dumpster......went back to their salads and pasta.and then informed the restaurant owner. Who might have been someone I know.

So.....in the gorgeous spring of 1990...at the rehearsal dinner for the wedding of a Bar and Restaurant Goddess....... when the now-famous serial rapist showed up in a Cadillac....spoke wheels, cabriolet top....with license plates: "BEG ME!" with a 15 year old girl....suddenly tile-setting came to the minds of all the restaurant guys present.

A hat was passed.

X-rays of the now famous serial rapist will show a lot of healed damage to his major joints and bones....when he gets to prison. He was busted for one rape....and there is probably a Facebook group of dozens and dozens out there that will never be formed. Most of them under 16 at the time.

Meanwhile.....the now Famous Rapist is not by far the only one of his clique. All of them are still out there...well, most of them.

Vito and Guido....and Nick.....are so long gone that even the Australian Shepherds we named for them are also long, long gone.

So, where is the justice? Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice....shame on me only goes so far....

There was a culture in Carmel in the late '70's and early '80's where it was completely OK for rich boys and business guys to grab 14 year old girls off the streets, take them to remote places...riverbanks, since-demolished houses in Pebble Beach....and rape them. Nothing was ever done. The victims have been dealing with this and working around it in their heads ever since.....and in the continuous presence locally of their rapists. At 14, with the kind of support one gets at Carmel High for this sort of thing.....how do you figure out how to live the rest of your life?

Beyond that.....the rape culture even permeated even the schools. I can't tell you how many local women I have talked to who had sex with their teachers....and have worked their heads around to make it seem like it was completely fine. In recent memory the girl's track coach at Carmel High had a "serious" relationship with a 15 year old student....so serious that everyone, including the administration....knew about it. And did nothing. Worse....they appointed the guy to be the coach of a girls' varsity team as some kind of perverse award.

So....I am not sure what the statute of limitations is on rape, vs. the threat of litigation against libel and slander. Libel and slander occur only when you say or publish something you know NOT to be true, that can be proved not to be true, and which have been said or published with the express intent to injure someone falsely.

Even beyond that....Sullivan vs. The New York Times brings the Supreme Court onto the side of risky truth. I am not repeating anything I know not to be fact....and I have no intention of injuring anyone falsely....even the victims.

Also, I do know that many, many civil litigations have taken the place of criminal litigitions where there were gutless prosecutors.....and justice has been done civilly in the long run. So, famous serial rapist with the rich family.....bring it on. I am not taking you on for something you didn't actually do.

Roman Polanski has been much in the news in the last year for his rape conviction for having sex with a 13 or 14 year old back in the day. The victim was set up by her mom....and has come forward as a witness for Polanski: "Let it go....." A lot of the press and public opinion is running in the same channel....

Sorry....not me. This girl's life...ideas about love and sex and intimacy...and maturity....and family and society....were all changed by an afternoon with someone who knew better, and had immediate needs he thought were more important than 10,000 years of history and culture. And her own mother sold her out.....

Roman Polanski needs to stuffed in a bottle and floated out on the Japanese current....or put in the general population at Corcoran. Those boys will teach him all he needs to know about love and sex.

So.....back to here and now. This same stuff still goes on. Famous Rapist still has friends who aided and abetted him, and participated in the exact same crimes.

Vito and Guido could not keep up....though I hear that not all of the suicides off the Bixby Bridge were voluntary.

Just a rumor.

Vito and Guido were righteous...but they missed a few. They missed a lot.....

Right now you could buy a Toyota in Seaside from another long-term serial rapist of young girls. He used to sell Fords in Salinas.....in fact he sold a big Ford to a woman I know who defends him....and she also still defends the high school English teacher who had sex with her when she was 15.

Can you say "Stockholm Syndrome"?

A guy I know has spent 15 years.....at one time or another....following this same car salesman home away from the dealership. More than a few times he has been right behind the rapist with a Colt Woodsman .22, walking quietly, mind turning over the righteousness, the justice...... as the rapist walked back to his wife and family in Seaside.

Not to murder....just to pop a cap in the prick's lower spine.

To let him become as dead to pleasure, friendship, intimacy..... and love...... as all the little girls he fucked..... still fight to not be.

Where are Vito and Guido when they are needed?

This stuff still goes on today.....every day.

Joe Fitz

2010-06-01T01:37:00.001-07:00

Can't let the day end without a word about one of the great restaurant guys of all time who passed this weekend......Joe Fitzpatrick. Joe wrote a daily food and social column in the Herald for years. He made eating in restaurants, drinking in bars....and reading the Herald, for that matter, into something that felt like joining a club. Joe generated magic about our trade, and brought all of us more customers than we deserved. I regret that he never made it to The Store...Joe would have laughed his ass off....

I was thinking about Joe today...in the midst of our economic downturn/recession whatever. The news reports list the previous recessions: 1978, 1987, 1990, 1992......I don't know, I am just making up numbers....but I never noticed recessions before this one. In many of those recession years I actually opened restaurants and started businesses and everything worked out.

Why? There was a buzz. There was a guy who had the inside scoop, who didn't lie....well, much....and if he did he had a way of telegraphing it so that you knew that he knew that you knew....

Every morning there was a column about restaurants and food and who was who. It got people up off their butts and out in public....spending money. If you wanted to be where the action was....you went to places Joe wrote about.

There are lots of great restaurants and bars that start up and are great for a short while.....but no one hears, no one notices....and they fade away. And there are other great restaurants and bars that are there for you every day, day in day out....and you all forget about them because no one hears what is going on. Joe would have loved Mundaka...loved Christopher's. Loved Dametra. Joe would have loved Passion Fish. Joe would have loved Taqueria Garcia.

Joe would have loved a bunch of places that could really use his help right about now.

The last time I saw Joe was at Safeway at mid-Valley. He was clearly struggling. Moving slowly. Joe was tall, and old age is harder on tall folks. We talked and cracked some jokes....shook hands carefully....and Joe shuffled off to his car. A bright red Porche Boxster. Fuck yeah....Go Joe!

Joe and I share a space on the wall of the Rio Grill....that association gives me great honor. Bert and Ted, Billly Quon, Tony Tollner, Csaba Ajan, Kenny Fukimoto and all the other old restaurant souls should commission a statue of Joe. Me too, come to think of it.

Only problem...the statue would have to be portable.

Joe wouldn't want his memory to stuck in a place that sucked.

RIP buddy....you were a long time coming...and you will be a long time gone.

Liberty...

2010-04-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

I have to join a 12-step program....the Criminal Minds support group.

Shocking to have intelligent television....and it stars Mandy Potemkin.

Mandy P was Inigo Montoya in the best movie ever made: The Princess Bride. "My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill my father...prepare to die."

Anything Mandy Potemkin is in, automatically has my vote.

Not only is Criminal Minds smart, but it begins and ends each show with a pithy quote.

How about this "A question that sometimes drives me crazy: am I or the others crazy?"

I love that quote, and didn't know it. We all know Einstein on the definition of insanity....

And, if you google that quote, the Criminal Minds episode comes up near the top of the page. So, I may be hazy....but I am not crazy.

Tonight there was an especially well done episode. The final quote was: "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." Thomas Paine

Well, it turns out is was Thomas Paine, from The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776.

I couldn't agree more. I am sitting here trying to write a talk at my best friend's son's funeral from a methadone overdose...it seemed especially apropos.

This is what parents do. We try to clear a space of freedom and light for our kids in which to grow and prosper.

Also, as a spiritual pacifist...with many, many friends in harm's way in the military who are trying to do just what Tom Paine said, albeit by force of arms, and at the peril of their being....the quote seemed piquant. My soldier friends like their toys, but they don't like their jobs.

When I googled the Paine quote, imagine my surprise to find that it has been hijacked by the Tea Party crowd. This crowd is not worried about economic battles, or foreign policy....They think that they are fighting against their own government, and scary liberals. And Universal Health Care.

This is the crowd that brought us the Arizona anti-immigrant legislation, for example.

I wonder if any of them have actually read any history....or even read Thomas Paine? Actual research is so boring and time consuming.

Here are some further quotes.....ones I learned in the Communist State of New Jersey. One of our signers, John Hart understood Tom Paine much better and more personally than the Tea Bag Scum Bags.

Anyway here is the kind of Tom Paine they teach in New Jersey public schools:

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, December 23, 1791

The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 4, September 11, 1777

A little matter will move a party, but it must be something great that moves a nation.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792

The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 5, March 21, 1778

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 1, December 19, 1776

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 4, September 11, 1777

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Oh...and how about this one, since the Tea Party and the anti-evolutionists and anti-climate change folk drink from the same trough:

A nation under a well regulated government, should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792

Lift a jar to John Hart.....and check out Criminal Minds. Just for the quotes.

Brian's Song....

2010-04-22T22:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be gone so long. Suffice it to say that everything that could go wrong, has. All my text and photos of Spain were moved to my little Dell back-up computer....which someone stole.

Tax time: Intuit is paid by us hundreds of dollars to store our stuff on line....they lost it.

Walking the dogs in the beautiful Central Coast sunshine...I get whipped in the eye by poison oak. Eyeball poison oak. I have dealt with blindness before.....champagne cork blindness, which is kind of ironic, but.....

Luckily, Hacienda Hay and Feed Medical Supply still rules.....and works. Veterinary opthalmic anti-biotic and steroid gels have saved the day again.

Meanwhile....my oldest friend Brian came to visit. And dedicated a perfectly good day off to document a Monday Night at The Store. Ignore the fact that it was actually a Tuesday Night...

His photos are awesome.....and you have never heard him play piano!

Here is the link to his most recent work.

Pax vobiscum.

Barf-a-lona.....

2010-03-04T00:18:00.000-08:00

Wow....loving the Spanish computer that deletes all my text when I upload a photo.

What did I say 16 hours ago?

Oh, yeah.....

The title of the post is not a Hapsburgian lithp.....Catalunya is barely part of Spain, and up here folks pronounce "c´s" as "sssss".....

The title is also not a bad thing.....just a reflection of Amanda´s habitual viceral reaction to the town. Think "Roman Banquet".

Her visit brought her wildly severe food poisoning from a cafe on the carretera.....and led to violent projectile vomiting in Comerc24. Which turned out to be a not inaccurate statement about the food and service, as it turned out.

We are trying hard to love Barce....but it is a rough row to hoe.

As we landed last night we were so stunned by over-work, stress, and guilt that we could not begin to wrap our minds around having a few days off with good food.

Then, it was an hour waiting for bags.....and another hour waiting for the rental car.

Then the de rigeur two hours of terror trying to drive to the hotel in the dark in the pouring rain.

I am a competitive driver....I love driving in cities. I learned to drive in New York City and I even love driving in Italian cities.....In fact, when in Florence I always rent a car and drive around....and avoid looking at churches and art. I have not seen the Uffizi, nor the Davide.....but I have gotten a Mercedes A class through an airborn landing on the Ponte Vecchio while being chased by punk thug Tuscans at 2 am.

A favorite memory of Roma is of driving flat out towards six lanes of oncoming traffic to go around a tie-up....accompanied by a horde of mopeds and scooters.

But Barcelona is off the charts. Barce traffic is a roving, high-speed, murderous metal pogrom.

Driving in Barce is exactly like being in the bombadier´s cockpit of a B-29 with Yossarian and Arfy: flak bursting all around, terrified screams as we jerk the wheel to avoid one onrushing obstacle after another and frantically sort through maps....which float through the air and block all vision.

We finally arrived at the Hotel utterly shattered.

And we were late for dinner.

Time is up on my library computer.....sorry. I am just going to re-edit posts on the fly where I can so as to not lose anymore text.

Oh....the photos that wiped out my post:

We are silly enough to hand carry smoked salmon all the way to the greatest seafood port in the world. I got a wild Port Moller coho salman from Donny Enea and smoked it in Cachagua on Monday before we left.

We carried it to Bar Inopia as a gift for Chema the chef. We were greeted by a line of angry, wealthy Asians standing in the rain by a velvet rope, trying to outwait the doorman.

Believe it or not.....in Barce...at Inopia.....you say "Cachagua" and hold up a fish, and you get whisked right through like Paris Hilton.

Chema took our salmon and whipped up a new tapa.....Voila.

More anon.

Hello, Dalai....

2010-02-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

Posted without comment....so far.

Gobshite Mick comes back...

2010-02-19T22:36:00.000-08:00

Just so's ya know....

Not just ranting about witches in Carmel....

Food at high levels is like sports....Guys move around, stars crash, unknown guys rise up.....old steady guys win and win....week after week.

We are Spain fans....and food geeks.

If you follow this blog or accidentally land here, you are about to get three straight weeks of Spain, Spain, Spain.

We use the internet to try to keep up with the haps. We know what people in Spain think about what is what...we read Spanish newspapers.

Here is my response to the number one foodie website's current situation. Proof positive that the recession is real....and only corporate carpetbaggers are loose in the world with enough cash to sustain us.

Sorry, folks....for me the worst part of the worldwide downturn of the last two years is the utter decay of eGullet, especially the Spain/Portugal forum.

Two years ago it was all about fights about the relative merits of new restaurants in Barca....and what was up with the common esthetic of Victor at Extebarre and Rafa in Roses. And was Mugaritz worthy, if Andoni is never there...and why does the mejordelagastronmia guy boycott Arzak?

Now it is all Bulli, all the time.

Can Roca finally gets their third star...and gets posts every other month.

No mention of Barca restaurants since Halloween.

No mention of what is up in Olot.

Just you fucking wankers whining about getting dissed at Bulli.

Those of us who used to check this forum, and who actually speak with chefs, waiters, wine guys...members of the Adria family....knew two years ago that Ferran is over it and was closing the place.

Why?

Because of you idiots.

How can you possibly imagine that El Bulli is all there is to Spain and Spanish cuisine?

Do you keep track of Ferran's ex-chefs, waiters and wine people? No. Cuisine is like baseball or soccer. The politics, the staff is important. What is up with an ex-Bulli/Mugaritz guy moving to Madrid....and stealing the world's hottest wine steward? And what is up with a Mugaritz guy running the door at El Poblet?

And can anyone reading this thread tell me where to find an ex-Bulli, ex-Mugaritz guy who is chef at the Adria family restaurant? Where is the Adria family restaurant?

The reason that we all admire Ferran is that he has a true apostolic vision of food. But, unlike you whack-jobs, he has an appreciation for the context. Ferran Adria did not invent Spanish cuisine out of whole cloth. He is a product of it. He surfed the wave he helped create.

Duh.

And, unlike most of his fans...Ferran is acutely aware of when star-power and celebrity kill all the joy....and the message is lost. Dinners at Bulli used to be a sort of international, interstellar bonding experience, inspired by the art and science of food. Now it a bunch of assholes sitting at tables not talking and trying to figure out how to Twitter the experience and post photos to their FaceBook page without pissing anyone off..

Get a fucking clue.

Spend more time worrying about where Ferran was seen eating, than whether you can wish your way into one dinner party for fifty people who all think you are an asshole because your shoes suck.

Ferran was all about art, culture, science...amazing hard work and attention to detail....and magic.

No wonder he is pulling the plug.

Here is my favorite Adria dish of all time.

A soft sheep cheese from a Catalan farm of which only the Adria's know. Honey from some other obscure, amazing source. Melocoton with some booze.....Knockout conversation over the passing of the honey down the bar.

Served by an Adria chef....

Ferran was at a table in the back corner, with a bunch of cousins.....

Just so's ya know.

The great local part of my rant....

The chef at the REAL Adria restaurant is shown here.

Note the chef coat.......

Gobshite Mick says: "Chill....."

2010-02-13T22:59:00.000-08:00

This blog is supposed to be entertaining and informative. I will say things everyone knows, but no one will say out loud. Speaking truth to power is one of the tenets of the Quaker faith. In my world it is speaking truth to ignorance.

So...without an editor....this all for free, after all.....and without much of a super-ego, either....you get what you get.

I thought I was a better writer than apparently I am.....

Here is the deal: I (if I say "we" it is not the Imperial we....but the consensus of my fellow workers, pounded out over hours, days, weeks, years of conversation over hard work. I value this consensus vastly more than that pounded out over alcohol, anger, or other over-rated stimulants).....we do not hate the Bach Festival.

I don't hate I-40 in Arizona between Kingman and Williams, either. I don't like or enjoy either one, but neither of them have been part of my life for twenty or thirty years. I can't muster much feeling one way or the other about either.

We especially have absolutely no grudge against the Bach Festival's Master Class....and we positively worship David Gordon. Our dear friend and mentor, Virginia Adams, originally funded the voice Master Class....and David was the first Master. He was dear to Virginia...and therefore dear to us.

David....from a caterer's perspective...is a rare artist, and even rarer human. I think he switched from baritone to tenor....which no one can do (think switching from basketball to soccer). David will sing for you, the most obtuse, work-bound idiot in earshot will find tears welling up beyond control.

Past even that, David is an inspired teacher....and was able to take Virginia's vision and make it real. Very likely it was his vision to begin with.....and she helped him make it real. Regardless, there was a kind of magic about their relationship that caused us to pledge to run through machinegun fire for either or both of them....forever.

Haven't heard from David in possibly twenty years...until my post. The book he gave me twenty-five? years ago still sits over my desk....next to my other treasures.

In my simple Irish mind I have never connected David Gordon, Virginia, and the Master Class with the Bach Festival. One is pure and wonderful, and made of all the stuff that makes life worth living....and the other is a tarbaby of social and politcal horror.

Despite having been a hardworking caterer in Carmel for 33 years....we have never worked for the Bach Festival. They have never asked. Not even once. That is weird. Well, they did ask once...but their budget was so ludicrously small that it was below what even we do for the girls' soccer team at RLS. And they had demands.....

So...that doesn't count. The guy who took the job bought brownies at Costco and cut them in triangles and put Costco vanilla ice-cream on them and called it profiterolles or something.

As if.

We also do not hate the Carmel Public Library. The Library, and the dear souls who support it, are to me the quintessential distillation of much that is good about the mild Carmel social and intellectual whirl.

What I/we hate is power/ego hungry social asswipes who hijack institutions like the Bach Festival, the Library, the Symphony, Forest Theatre, the Museum, the Marathon....whatever.

Right now at the Library, you have folks who have personality differences or some strange agendas with people who love them and have been working hard for them for free for thirty years. What does this have to do with having books available to a reading public?

Asswipes can strike at any moment.

A really good 501.c3 has a good board, and a good director (paid from the proceeds of the fundraising). One or the other can flail, and even be truly awful....and the other can compensate and pull the irons from the fire.

By law, the Board of a 501.c3 is supposed to set policy, and the staff implements it. Many times, the Board are clueless socialite idiots with nice bank balances....but the staff is concerned, committed, underpaid....and is highly skilled at work-arounds. Many of these work-arounds involve the caterer, so we are un-indicted co-conspirators with the staff...Still, the work of the organization actually gets done.

Other times, a director is appointed who is power-mad creature looking for a pay-check and a life-style....and runs rough-shod over the hapless board, however well intentioned. Staff turns over, the organization is a lead balloon....with just the energy and connections of the Board keeping the money flowing in to keep the thing just above the ground. Stockholm syndrome philanthropy.

Other times, for whatever reason....the staff are long-time, amiable incompetents, who the Board chooses not to fire....and does the work for them. Sort of like ignoring the fact that Sparky no longer barks at the mailman...and pisses all over the museum quality Kerman every night. We don't actually want to deal with the fact of her senility, incontinence and incompetence....so we just invest in Bravo paper towels.

Still other charities can survive both crazy incompetent staff, and nutcase directors....because the donors and tradition are strong enough to deal with it.

To me, that is the Library right now. And maybe the director is OK, or just in thrall of a nutty Board. Who knows? Wait two years.....it is all good.

So...as long as I have pissed in the soup already...is my take after 33 years of dealing with local charities....at least the ones that hired us.

Big Sur Land Trust: insanely competent staff, insanely competent and insanely diverse Board. Year after year, BSLT hits the ball out of the park. They tell us what they want....they give us a budget...and we say: "Yes, sir or madam!" They always make us look good, and they have never had a bad or even mildly embarrassing event. I have to say.....tears are not uncommon at their functions, and the caterer has been guilty at least two or three times......

Monterey Museum of Art: awful, vindictive director with staff flying in all directions....great board. Peace be unto them.

Forest Theatre: Nice board, I guess. We did a big party for them supporting minority South County youth in drama....and the director later sent us a letter saying we would not be paid even our costs. Never told the Board. Meanwhile, they could have traded us or let us sponsor some movie nights....we are film nuts, with cinematographers on our staff....but we did not make it up to that level of concern.

Carmel Residents Association: You say "Jump!"...we say "How high?"....on the way up, of course. They just tell us where to be, and what to do....and we say: "Yes, ma'am."

Cherry Foundation: They actually insist on paying us and get all bothered because we refuse to send them bills. Ross and Mary Green were supporters, and the Houston family....so we work for them for free....and it makes them uncomfortable.

Monterey History and Art.....Great, committed, volunteer staff.....who knows what goes on above?

Trail and Saddle Club: Steady, solid......the staff is almost annoyingly on the ball. The Board is super. Like BSLT, they tell us where to stand and how much to charge....and we are happy to be a part.

Big Sur Marathon....Up there with the Museum. Nutball director. Insanely hardworking Board. We used to feed 700 volunteers, and 700 VIP's...and handle all the donations and deliveries of leftovers to charities....for $2500. Not cash, just scholarships for the kids who worked the event. The director stiffed us the last year. Hey....the guy wears lifts in his shoes.

The Photography guys at Sunset Center: We did a party for 500 Carmel folk with free smoked salmon/oyster bar, Bechler petites fours, free martinis in real glasses, champagne....and the bill was $900. The dickhead director refused to pay because we had a plastic garbage can with a plastic liner next to the oyster bar. "Ansel would have been insulted." "Fuck you, Brian. I knew Ansel, and he would never have noticed and would have giggled about how crazy it was to offer free Martini's to the entire city of Carmel. We never got paid. But he is fired now, so fuck him.

Carmel Women's Club: The Board is the staff....and we would run through machinegun fire for them. Last week, during a wake for a great local grande dame....I was dismantling and repairing their classic but ancient oven. I lay on the floor with tools and flashlights for an hour during setup cursing like a sailor. In the end, I won...and dressed and got back out front. The daughter of the deceased asked me: "So which word finally worked? " "I think it was 'Let go, you fucking bitch.....'"

Tor House Foundation: See above. The very first party we ever did was for them...in 1976. Tor House Foundation basically started us in business. They are kind, sweet, appreciative, funny, slightly weird, totally committed.....

I could go on.....Planned Parenthood, five stars. Paradox Sports, five stars. Sand City Arts, five stars.

What it boils down to is that some local charities actually believe in what they are trying to achieve....and earn their tax deductible status by doing good and doing well.

For those who are raging at me for knocking dear departed Nana or whatever her name was....here is my last conversation with her....vis a vis her charging us $1,000 to be in the Bach Festival catalogue with a mention, after thousands and thousands of dollars of work in kind donations to David and Virgina:

"Businesses have to pay.....private people don't. You are lucky we even associate with you! Caterers are a dime a dozen. Your recognition is the fact that we even talk to you! And we let our people eat your food!"

The Waitresses: "I know he liked me....he left money on the dresser when he left in the morning!"

So...here is the deal: we believe in organic food. Our definition of "organic" is that the food should be good and local, that the purpose of the event should be the same, that the donors, the workers, the suppliers, the venues....who are all living in the community that the event is about...and who are all usually donating from slim resources whatever they can give.....should be treated with respect.

Doesn't seem to weird to me.

Am I wrong?

Nigger, get back....

2010-02-10T23:41:00.000-08:00

OK...be all mad because the white guy used the N word.

I submit that my people...the Irish....are running a close second to Africans when it comes to all that diaspora/abuse/genocide shit. There are still people living who will spit on your shoes if you tell them you are Irish.

What is super ironic is what Mick McCarthy did back before the '94 World Cup. The Irish are kinda like the Jews....if you can prove that you had an actual Irish grandparent.....you can get a passport and citizenship! Soccer rules are a little more lenient....no citizenship was allowed if your Irish ancestors were further back than grandparents.... but if there was a mick in the woodpile anywhere....you could play for Ireland. Still can.

The socio-economic aspect of that is that wherever you have black people....you have Irish. We all got sent into slavery. Mick was somewhat cynical about this and spent little time in Australia, and lots of time in Africa, Jamaica, etc......where Irish people were sold into slavery side by side with Africans.

And.....There is a whole section of Irish folk called Black Irish. Has nothing to do with skin color.

Everyone knows about the Spanish Armada back in 1588. Huge invasion, big storm, fleet destroyed by God to protect the white folks. Turns out that the storm was in the Irish Sea mostly, and many of the ships were wrecked on the Irish coast. Since your run of the mill Irishman, like Jesus, stays at home and lives with his mom until he is in his 30's.....the hot Spanish blood was not poorly received in the Ould Sod. Hence: black haired, dark-eyed Irishmen and women.

Oh....and the super irony: Queen Elizabeth had no standing Navy, and no budget for one. She hired private guys...the Blackwater of then....to muster for her against the Spanish. When the storm blew the Spanish away, she still had huge bills. So....she issued land grants to the lucky sailors who had stood up....land grants in Ireland. Of course it was sad that actual people had been living on that land for thousands of years....but fuck 'em, anyway. Dirtbag Irish.

There were other things the Spanish and Irish had in common: no one gave a fuck about them. For centuries, Spanish and Irish joined Armies in droves....and fought for whomever could give them the price of a beer or a meal. There are countless and tragic stories of Spanish and Irish mercenaries fighting their homies and brothers in the pay of some random oligarch. Both cultures are still way better at fighting amongst themselves than fighting outsiders.... to this day. We won't even talk about their African brothers.

Anyway....in my lifetime I have approached bars in England that had signs on the door: "No Irish Allowed". So I will use the N word with some historical imperative, and some culturally in-built sensitivity.

A large part of the nigger thing is class-related, not racial. Upstairs, Downstairs. Back door. Back of the bus. When I first started in the service industry 40 years ago it was part of the given.....though it was fading already. The locals had been blessed with legions of Filipino stewards coming out of the Navy, and tons of Korean and Japanese women to serve in black dresses and white aprons.

Carmel, as always....is the last bastion of fading social orders. We struggled at first because our older clients were uncomfortable with servers with college educations....and who weren't Asian, black, gay....or Irish.

Anyway, the photography folks liked us for serving visually pleasing food. For years we worked for Ansel and Virginia Adams as cooks and caterers. Everyone loved Ansel of course....but almost no one in the modern world realized that Virginia was the real source of power. At least in some ways...not taking anything away from Ansel.

Virginia Best was the princess when she and Ansel met. Her dad, Harry, had the concessions at Yosemite and was a highly recognized Western artist of his time. Ansel was a goofy unemployed piano player working as a caretaker and doing some wedding photography on the side.... and Virginia had the only piano for hundreds of miles. And she sang....and piano guys were thin on the ground in Yosemite in 1920.

Virginia had to talk her Dad into letting Ansel marry her....and some of that dynamic stayed for the rest of their lives. We dealt with Virginia, because we were in her kitchen. Ansel was cool, and good to us...but we probably as a group passed less than 100 words with him in eight years. Ansel...like Santa...worked more with a smile and a wink than with words. Virginia was our girl. To us, she was still the same princess Ansel found in 1920 in Yosemite. I can't tell you how many hundreds of times I witnessed people blowing Virginia off, because they were focused on Ansel. We would exchange a look.....this motherfucker is DONE!

One time she had me actually lift up a five-foot table and carry it away, leaving the people sitting on folding chairs in a silly circle. "Michael...these people are boring. Get them out of my house now!"

So....after Ansel died, Virginia had piles of money, tons of friends...and no more piano guy to play while she sang. She decided to sponsor big parts of the Bach Festival.....well, she and Ansel always had. Can you say Vladimir Ashkenazy?

Anyway...Virginia's fans sponsored the "Virginia Best Adams Master Class" at the Carmel Bach Festival. Like good Irish mercenaries....we were in the front lines for her, and did the big cocktail party around the Master Class every year. 100 people, Chalone wines, full bar with Ansel martinis, and all our best, best (Best!) apps.

We never sent a bill, because we loved Virginia, loved what she loved, and had respect for the wind she had beneath our wings.

Even in 1982 money this was not cheap....about six or seven grand a year. Ten years, twelve years....pushing a hundred grand.

Who cares? Love Virginia....an icon of the 20th century....and someone who was kind and loved us when no one else did.....

About ten years into our deal, the Bach Festival sent us a letter asking if we wanted to be in the catalog.

Sure.

We got a bill for $1000.

Meanwhile, if you were some low-end socialite from Modesto who gave $50, you were in the catalog.

We....supported by our partner Mort Levitt....refused to pay.

They took us to court. And sued us for the $1000 for our mention in the catalog.

Their defense was that since we were working people, we gained benefit from working for free and giving away stuff. And even though our donation at that point was above the level of IBM, their sponsor at the time.....we should PAY to have our name mentioned in their catalog.

Private people got no benefit from giving fifty bucks...so it was OK to mention them in the catalog. Mentioning business donors in the catalog lowered the social level of the endeavor.....so they should have to pay to make up for their tacky partnerships.

So....I wrote this letter. To Nana, who is revered in Bach Festival lore, OK.....expletives deleted....but she treated us like we were shit on her shoe....

"Dear Nana:

"Our participation in the Carmel Bach Festival is based solely on our love for Virginia Adams. Virginia supports you, so we support her. Our love and support of Virginia is at this point collectively worth $120,000 in in-kind donations to the Carmel Bach Festival....which is beyond even the commitment of your major yearly sponsors who grace the cover of your catalog.

"You have chosen to litigate our non-payment for our business-card placement in your catalog...which is fine.

"We just want you and your board to be aware that our commitment is to Virginia...and her apparently bizarre affection for the Carmel Bach Festival.

"Should Virginia develop an affection for the White Aryan Resistance, we want you to know that our business and all our energies will be happy to shift in that direction on Virginia's behalf....and we will welcome association with a better sort of people."

"Sincerely,

"Michael Jones, A Moveable Feast"

Nana thought that because we made things with our hands, and swam in the cess pool of commerce....we should not stain her program....unless we gave actual cash, not the tawdry by-products of our disgusting work. "I mean, really....these people cut fish......"

Which brings us to the Carmel Library Foundation.....

I come from a millenia of readers. The Irish are so devoted to the written word that at one point about 600 AD....we had all of them, locked up in fortresses behind stone on our frozen island. I read 2-3 books a week. My brother was a writer....two books written right here in Carmel Valley....and when he died of the inevitable lung cancer from the writer's drug of choice....he was Editor-in-Chief of HarperCollins in New York.

On top....my Mom is a librarian. Not only that, she is a proselytizer of literacy.....and has been a literacy instructor in Monterey County for 20 years. At 83, she is the oldest employee of the Carmel Unified School District....and still teaches English as a Second Language in Cachagua twice a week.

My surviving brother and I....left alone in a restaurant.....will read the back of our credit cards for something to do. We all read and memorized cereal boxes while growing up....and don't start with me with Longfellow, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, etc....

We are all library fans....so we have been working for the Carmel Library Foundation for 30 years. We do their yearly Donor Salute. A couple of hundred local dears....some nice apps in the afternoon. Thank you all for supporting literacy....in a town founded at least in legend by writers and artists.

My friend Wei Chang...who photographs the event for free...has a nice shot of me during the presentations a few years back....in the stacks, reading an obscure Aldous Huxley tome....

Meanwhile, we continue to work under our original early 80's budget.....$400 for hors d'ouevres and service, glassware, sodas and ice for 200pp. And we work in the basement of the library, on three folding tables and some desks, with one cold water outlet. I dragoon my fifteen-year old apprentices and their friends to help, and try to get Carmel High to write off their labor as community service.

Some of my old apprentices now have kids.....who work the Library party.

I love the Library party....even though I am spending a ton of money....because it is the one time I can see all the great grandes dames of Carmel in one spot: Jean Draper, Susan Draper, Lacey Faia, etc.

Here is the menu we normally serve....with a staff of 10-12, for our $400....including platters, spoons, sodas, ice, glassware, tables, etc.

Quesadillas: spicy, not spicy, vegetarian, chicken
Bruschetti: asiago/scallion, crema porcini, thai chicken, mole chicken, etc.
Paninnetti: baby paninni with herbs and breakfast radishes
Mushroom caps with walnut/parseley duxelles and chevre
Baby roast potatoes with chevre, with hummus and asiago, with chipotle and cheddar
Endive with: Stilton and walnuts; mango and mascarpone; roast pumpkin and candied walnuts
Roast baby beets with coconut chevre dressing
Pear, parsnip shoestrings, Pt. Reyes blue cheese, blue cheese foam and tarragon infused honey
Roast savory tofu wrapped in sorrel
Orange, jicama and toasted cumin
Caprese of organic tomatoes, basil, buffalo mozzarella and EVOO

Shot glasses of hot Valrhona chocolate with passilla chile and chili whipped cream

Spoons:
Winter salad of parsnips, fennel, shiitakes and pears
Dungeness crab cakes with rosemary aioli and basil oil
Local fish ceviche
Maple cured Heluka porkbelly with polenta and tomatillo relish
Beluga lentils ceviche
Big Sur chanterelles with polenta and Meyer lemon/parseley dressing

Corralitos Market sausages with our sauerkraut
Salpicon of beef brisket with mole
Sesame chicken wrapped in sorrel
Prociutto and Rocky Sweet melon

Carmel Valley oak smoked wild Alaska salmon
Fresh Monterey sardine bocadillos with mojito aioli

Not bad for two bucks.

Every couple of years there is a new board, and a new hired director. Whatever, nothing changes for us. We do a nice party for folks in Carmel who love the written word.

This year was different. I started getting emails from the new director about having a meeting about the event.

We don't need to meet. We put out as much food as we possibly can of the best quality while working from folding tables on one 16amp circuit in the basement of a library. We bring tables, linen, glasses, sodas, ice, corkscrews. What meeting? What the fuck for? It has been 30 years....what do we need to know?

"No...we need to meet."

On this day here...which turns out to be my first day off in five months. Sure, I will take the dogs to the beach, meet with you.....fine. If you insist. A two hour round trip drive on my part....on my first day off in months.....

Fine. Did I mention the storm, and the lack of power at our place, and the whole running generators thing to keep us in business?

I load the dogs in the car, drive to town. Go to Library. Wrong place. Go to other Carmel Library. Wrong entrance...whaddarya, stupid?

Sorry.

"Oh, I'm sorry.....I guess I forgot to tell you....the meeting was cancelled. One of our Board Members was a little under the weather. I hope we didn't inconvenience you....."

Nielsen's: Swedish fish against plunging blood sugar....and Diet Coke against plunging self worth. The dogs have been barking madly for an hour because they can smell the see. Every Carmel woman over the age of 40 is looking at me like I kidnapped Elizabeth Smart.

We go to the Beach...except there is no beach.

It is a cold day, I bite into a Swedish Fish.....and my bicuspid #6 shatters. Well, it had actually broken the Friday before....but the ultimate insult that I discover two weeks later after ten days of veterinary anti-biotics is that a piece of Swedish Fish is blocking the abcess from draining.....so the abcess is now attacking the nerves in my face.

As are my dogs.....who cannot believe or understand that the Beach is closed.....

Awesome.

No....two weeks later I am dragged to town.....and grilled by the new board of the Library Foundation for an hour.....with the dogs in the car, who now know that there is no fucking beach.....

What are you serving? Why aren't there more gluten free appetizers? We need to approve your list of appetizers. There is way too much cheese and bread.......Send us a list that we can approve it before the event....

Before you let me spend $3500 on a party I bill you for $400 for? We are serving 20 different apps to 200 people for $400.....and I have to kiss their ass?
I am a fucking Nigger....Carmel-style.....

Here is my response...

We have been a part of the Donor Salute for more than 20 years....note
the noun "part", as in participant, part of the whole. Not only that,
we have felt like an honored part, as if our services had value and
contributed to the greater well-being of the Library as a whole.

You make us feel like some outside agent who is being grudgingly allowed
on the property. I am curious if the board meets to consult on the
font or color of ink on the odd $3500 donation check before accepting
it, or if you are just rude and insulting to suppliers.....those of us
little people who work with our hands.

After reflecting upon our meeting, it is clear to me that some portion
of the board is not happy with our work, and more than likely has
another caterer in mind, or have ideas about catering that do not
match ours. In Ireland we have a saying "Why have a dog, and bark
yourself?" Please feel free to pursue other vendors who might be more
pleasing to the consensus of your board.

Woof.

Michael

Health Care....

2010-02-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

So.....I missed the clinic closing today.

Damn.

I have health insurance.....Anthem has doubled the costs in the last three months, but I have coverage. For now.

$1000 deductible, no dental, no meds, I pay 20% over and above the first $1000....and it caps out after a car crash, but way before cancer or anything really bad.

And it is now more expensive than my rent.

For that shit.

Meanwhile, two weeks ago I broke a tooth.

The nightmare people who now run the Library insisted that I come to town to have a meeting about a party we have done for free for 30 years....to critique my performance and menu selection. Only in Carmel would you have to drive to an hour to town to be bitched at for giving away food....not just for giving away food, but for not giving away the right kind of food.....Too many carbs...not enough sensitivity to wheat alllergies.

Fuck me silly.

I took the dogs along as wingmen....The same way that if you hire a stripper on-line to jump from your cake, she comes with a giant Samoan wingman with no sense of humor. To protect her "honor".

By some miracle we arrived early on the day. No lunch, because believe it or not my day is usually too busy to actually eat. Energy flagging, depression mounting, blood sugar plunging. I stopped at Nielsen's for Diet Coke (caffeine) and Swedish Fish (sugar). Green food coloring (anti-depressant). The dogs howled in the car during my transaction, causing all the LOL's (which used to mean Little Old Ladies) at the Carmel Seniors....... to glare at me as if I were a child molester.

Note the use of subjunctive case....

Anyway....back at the car with the howling Pointers.....I gobbled some Fish, and washed them down with Diet Coke. It was cold day. The fish were stiff.....I broke a tooth.

Fuck.

I drove to the Library, found a parking place, left the howling hounds, ignored the broken tooth....on time for the meeting.

Wrong locale. Wrong Library.

Move the car. By now the dogs are going bug-fucky and clawing the walls, windows, ceilings....and me. I no longer hear the howling. I used to slaughter hogs....and I raised three screaming boys.

I re-park.

I run into the other Library, five minutes late. Wrong place, you have to go around back.

Fuck.

I run around back.....

The Library: "Oh....I am sorry. I forgot to call you. A board member was a little under the weather, so we cancelled the meeting. I hope this didn't inconvenience you......."

Fuck me silly. I am used to it. The Irish were niggers before they even invented the word to describe black people.

Meanwhile the dogs did not give a rat's ass about my broken tooth or my wasted afternoon. They can smell the beach. So, we drive there.....

And...there is no beach.

Proof that there is a God.....and She hates me. And German Wirehaired Pointers are her choice of weaponry.

Meanwhile, as a guy who spent 10 years in Europe in countries where there is no dental care....a busted tooth doesn't worry me.

I call my dentist.

Appointment in March.

Fine. No worries.

Until....

I start losing feeling in the right side of my face. And, I can't smile very well, because the muscles over there don't move. And my sinuses start tanking.

Now....I am scared. But, no room at the Inn. March is a ways off.

Luckily, my mad dogs are so nutty that they charge into inanimate objects for fun.... at speed ....on a daily basis. They have better health insurance and health care than I do, and we all spend lots of time at the vet's. I have bottles of antibiotics and painkillers around for the hounds...pills and injectables.

Can't get in till March? No worries. Got Doggie Downers.....Puppy Uppers.....Puppy anti-Buggers......We can hang in.

Cephelaxin.

Penicillin.

Boxes of Vicodin.....which actually don't matter, because the infection is destroying the nerves.

There is no pain....just a sense of loss.

Awesome.

And...we are oddly busy: in January, in a Depression.

So....no time to argue or seek alternatives. Shoulder to the wheel.

Meanwhile.....in an Alternate Universe....

That is: the Entire Rest of the World Who Don't Know Water Buffalo Personally......

This would not be an issue.

In Spain....where we go for culinary and cultural inspiration....and which country was run by an outfit crazier and more vicious than Hitler or Mussolini and which insane outfit survived 40 years after the war....has universal, single-payer health care.

Hitler thought he had an infinite supply of Jews, homosexuals and Slavs to grind down and burn up to run his industrial empire. Francisco Franco.....the twisted fuck who invited the Guernica massacre as practice genocide and inspiration for Art....realized that he needed functioning, healthy working class slaves to feed his industrial machine.

It is not a little thing.

If you are a Spanish 20 something.....if you have ever been hurt or sick, you go to the doctor and get fixed. Maybe you wait in a line for a few minutes or an hour....people tend to get hurt all at once.....but you are taken care of. Health care is not an issue in your life....more than the supply of oxygen or sunlight.

Meanwhile......

My 20-somethings know how to stitch up wounds with dental floss, and how to make butterfly bandages out of duct tape. There are even funny stories about my guys stitching themselves up with floss....and not noticing that is was green mint floss until too late.

Really.

And they all know where Hacienda Hay and Feed is.

Choice: you have an eye infection. Call Doctor Tocchet and ask for an appointment. Wait three days. Mom takes a day off from work to bring you. You get a script.....which you drive to Safeway to cash in. $80 for Doc, $80 for meds....Mom loses a day of work....you miss three days school. Or you go anyway, and give everyone else pinkeye.....which causes all of them to seek their private doctors and miss work and study.

Or.....you use the Otic salve from Hacienda.....$17 a tube....and you don't miss a minute.

The loss of efficiency, the loss of good labor, the loss of educational potential cannot be measured. Actually...it can be measured, but you don't want to know....any more than you want to know what is in that envelope the IRS just sent you.

Beyond that......is the concept that in Spain a child lives in an environment where she grows up with no question that the society and government are there to take care of her basic needs. No one is Spain has ever had to worry about missing work, or about how to pay for basic health care. It is part of the air they breathe. It is the wind beneath her wings. They think that the world around them values them....and their health and well being.

And, believe me....their kids fly on wings who take them to places of which our kids know not....

And this is a country run in recent memory by one of the top three most murderous motherfuckers ever to walk the planet.....and who cynically wanted health care for his people....

Walk the La Concha beach in San Sebastian today and be stunned by the beauty....and try to deal with the echoes of the daily executions that took place on that beautiful beach for twenty years. Franco was a cocksucker, but he was a realist. He wanted a functioning, efficient working class....so he could exploit them.

In our health care debate....which is really a health insurance debate....the main idea that Republicans have lost sight of is that everyone else in the world takes care of their workers as a given. Even insane fascists like Francisco Franco. The fact that America dumps health care off into ridiculously corrupt private cum buckets means that all of us business owners start off 20% or more short while trying to compete on world markets. Our national health policy has turned us into a third world country.

I own a shitty country store in Cachagua....a different sort of cum bucket. I have skills and visions of foods and service on a world wide scale.....and to implement them I have to count on only hiring kids who feel bullet proof, and who don't mind me stitching them up with dental floss if they fuck up....and don't mind cephelaxin from the vets if the infection gets out of hand.

You can get a way better deal in Kenya.....Don't talk about Spain.

Meanwhile....speaking of cum buckets....our national legislators have sold themselves against popular interests in a way that is unprecedented since Caligula stopped sending Legions to fight the tides.

More than 60% of Americans support single payer, and/or a public option for health insurance. Single payer works great in Canada, Mexico, England, France, Italy, Spain....fucking Costa Rica!!! and all our young people go to these places and understand that.

The medical insurance industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to pervert the popular will....and have succeeded. Did they think no one noticed? The guy getting the blowjob outside the bar thinks he is hiding in a bush?

I think that this epoch of supposed "democracy" and "will of the People" will go down as one of the most corrupt in two thousand years of studied, rampant corruption. People have been working at corruption, just like they work at internal combustion engines.

We now have Ferraris.

Republicans are obviously at fault....but worse are the Democrats who talk the talk.....and fail to walk the walk.

"Money talks....and bullshit walks. So...stop talking and start walking....."

It is inconceivable to me that our society could value the health of children less than the profits of oligarchs. Health insurance execs walk with BILLION dollar packages, while I shop at Hacienda Hay and Feed for antibiotics and eye medicine for six-year old soccer kids?

I think that our present legislators are the most venal and corrupt in the history of the world...

History will judge them....and us, for having allowed them power over us.

Murder in the Kitchen.....

2010-01-10T21:05:00.000-08:00

My Uncle Bob from Portland sent me a big package full of family histories that I found on my desk this morning when I came in to do Sunday Brunch.

Uncle Bob is a retired Oregon Supreme Court judge and a 9th Circuit federal judge. Bob and I have had a cautious relationship for some time....as you can imagine a federal judge would have with a nephew who is clearly missing some important neurotransmitters..... and whose impulse control somehow gets lost in the wash.

Uncle Bob is six months younger than my Mom....and both of them are supposedly retired, but it is very difficult to tell how. Mom still teaches ESL three days a week, is a California Senior Senator, drives for Meals on Wheels three days a week, and runs the senior lunches at the Community Center in the Valley. Also she drives "old people' to their doctors appointments, and takes them to lunch. Uncle Bob still tried more than 60 cases last year....and is the kind of Oregon Republican who wrote the opinion that upheld the Oregon "Right to Die" law.....in the face of a conservative shit storm. I won't say how old they are....but it is very probable that the first movies they saw as kids were in black and white.....and silent.

Still, beyond the politics.....and being my Granpa's son (Gramps had an apron that said: "When It's Smokin' It's Cookin'.....When It's Black, It's Done.....) Uncle Bob has been a major culinary force in my life. At his house I saw my first Weber cooker when he took me in back in 1974. He grilled a filet of salmon over charcoal on the Weber for me one day....a fish dropped off by a local lawyer, fresh from the Willamette River that morning. It changed my life.....and is still one of my archetypal flavor memories.

Uncle Bob and I share one bigotry....we both hate cigarettes. His crazy, gifted writer sister smoked herself to death......Her last words to her mom: "Sorry, Mom.....I couldn't quit." My brother, another crazy gifted writer and editor...... also died of lung cancer. All his authors and editors smoked like chimneys at his wake

In Bob's package were some stuff about his career, some pages about my Grandpa's championship target shooting as a Customs agent (Bob and I are also both 2nd Amendment folk....in a civilized Oregon Republican kind of way.....), and an oral history of my grandmother's that was written by my dead aunt.

When I opened the package and picked up the hand-typed manuscript......the scent of nicotine and old ashtrays wafted up all through the kitchen around me. Aunt Bess. Long gone.....but here I am still breathing her air thirty-five years later. As I read her words.

It was an "Open Sesame" moment. Poof! "Sherman....set the wayback machine for 1921!"

My granny grew up on farms in Oregon.....first out by Ashland, then later in Beaverton near Portland. She lived almost to 100, so I knew her well enough to pick her brains forty years ago for recipes and techniques they used on the farm. Our confit of duck, the pork belly, the brined pork chops we serve every Monday....all Ashland recipes that turned out to be identical to country recipes I learned in France.

Even in Portland in 1921, my newly married Granny and Gramps lived in a house with no inside plumbing. When her Civil War cavalryman dad died, they used the settlement money to put in a septic tank, and there is a great passage about the joy with which they finally busted up the outhouse (and used the boards to pave the driveway). Gramps was unemployed except for gigs as a musician, so they raised chickens and sold eggs. The chicken house was only slightly better than the outhouse in terms of quality of life for newlyweds, and the money was crap.....so they came to the executive decision to fade from the egg business by having a roast chicken every Sunday.

Gramps was, relatively speaking, a city boy. By the time he managed to capture the chicken of the day, the shit was in the fan. Then holding it down and chopping off its head, while not chopping off his own hand....fully sucked. He was a dead shot, so finally he said "Screw it" and just shot the damn bird off its perch....then chopped off its head.

Does this sound like a book review so far? No?

Turns out that my friend Brian from Seattle was one of two people who actually sent me Christmas presents......books! A first "A Moveable Feast". A Toulouse Lautrec food poster book. Some nicely obscure fiction. And.....the "Alice B. Toklas Cookbook".

Brian is an artist....a jazz piano guy, as well as a subtly wonderful color photographer...so I appreciated the artistry of his gift....everything matched: culturally, historically, personally. This is one reason why I hate Christmas: it is really fucking hard to do it right!

It is possible that at one time or another Brian and I could have been called stoners....so I assumed that was the Toklas connection, plus the Hemingway/Gertrude Stein/1920's thing. Alice was "married" to Gertrude Stein, and they all lived in Paris in the 20's with Hemingway and Picasso, etc. And....everyone has heard of the "Alice B. Toklas Brownies".

Then I actually picked up the book and started reading. I started with Chapter 4: "Murder in the Kitchen". The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is not exactly a cookbook. It is the wonderful, witty rambling rap about life and food that accidentally has some recipes. Murder in the Kitchen immediately starts with Alice, like Gramps, trying to murder a beast for dinner.

(And, of course....Alice, like Brian....is from Seattle. Well, by way of Oakland and SF).

Alice's narration had me on the ground, giggling. She writes recipes like I do.....recipes need context: cooking is way more than grams, liters and degrees. "I plunged the knife into the base of the carp's vertebral column. Horror of horrors! The carp was dead, killed, assassinated, murdered in the first, second and third degree. Limp, I fell into a chair and with bloody hands reached for a cigarette, lighted it and waited for the police. After a second cigarette my courage returned and I went to prepare poor Mr. Carp for the table......" The recipe for Carp Stuffed with Chestnuts follows.

Later she speaks of the smothering of squab (Braised Pigeon on Croutons), the murder of Babette, the duck, by the neighbor's sheepdog (Duck a l'Orange), etc. She discusses the crime novels of her friend Dashiel Hammet and his plot organization (the murders always take place before the novel opens) and weaves into the story the whole hypocrisy of diners being isolated from the bloody work of the chefs who serve them.

Then, for perspective: "Many times I held the thought to kill a stupid or obstinate cook.....but as long as the thought was held.....murder was not committed." She meets a genius Austrian chef whom she hires, and whose cooking she falls in love with. "He told us that he and Hitler had been born in the same village and that anyone in the village was like all the others and that they were all a little strange. This was 1936 and we already knew that Hitler was very strange indeed. Friedrich was not so much strange as weak: loving wine, women and song. But he continued to be a perfect cook...." Alice finishes the story of Friedrich's disastrous love life that took him away with a sweet elegaic recipe in his honor.

Alice does, of course, have the one controversial recipe: "Haschich Fudge (which anyone could whip up on a rainy day).

"This is the food of Paradise....of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: it might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chaper meeting of the DAR. In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantitities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilleiant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extentions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Sa. Theresa did....you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by "un evenouissement reveille."

The recipe follows. No chocolate involved. Think Stony Fruitcake. We are serving it tomorrow.

"Obtaining canibus may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as canibus sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everywhere in Europe, Asia and Africa. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called canibus indica, has been observed even in city window boxes......."

My kind of recipe....and I don't even smoke pot......

A side effect of the nutty Nazi race doctrine was that pedigreed dogs got meat rations in Occupied France.....more meat than humans. Alice and Gertrude still gave all their meat rations (4 oz per week!) to their standard poodle. Alice learned to love crayfish and cultivated glorious gardens that she would dream about all winter.

Alice and Gertrude work as nurses in France in WWI, entertain Picasso, despise Hemingway, survive the Germans, welcome Patton, and recreate a lost world that it turns out is not so very lost after all. The book was strange for its time, because France was technically backward compared to Alice's America: no refrigeration or freezers...all the food was fresh and local. All of the interaction in obtaining ingredients involved dealing with crazy locals and crazy local culture...all of which was food for Alice's pen.This is the first cookbook....and the first book of any kind....that I have actually run to my desk for a highlighter while reading:

"The French, like their Bourbon kings, learn nothing and they forget nothing."

"If it seems to soon for another glorious lunch, remember what the young man said: "If perfection is good, more perfection is better...."

"Like many first-rate women-cooks she had tired eyes and a wan smile......"

"To cook as the French do once must respect the quality and the flavour of the ingredients. Exaggeration is not admissable. Flavours are not all amalgamative. These qualities are not purchasable but may be cultivated....."

"What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander....but is not necessarily the sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen."

"The first gathering of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like the mother about her baby.....how could anything so beautiful be mine?"

So.....what a great Sunday! Breathing the smoky aura from my Aunt Bess' story of my grandmother on one side of the desk, and Alice B. Toklas' wonderful book on the other side: two great ladies born more than 100 years ago and both of them still current, reachable, touchable......their ideals and values still vibrant and alive out here in Cachagua.

MFK Fisher.....another great California food writer of a certain age.....wrote about Alice in the intro to the uncensored Cookbook (the one with the has recipe) in 1984:

"I know now that the Alice B. Toklas' Cook Book would feed my sould abundantly if I could find no other nourishment, just as it would make me smile in the midst of sadness, and feel braver if I risked faltering."

It is a good book, as Alice said of something else: "abundantly satisfying....imagination being as lively as it is....."

Say it isn't so.....

2010-01-09T20:37:00.000-08:00

Before you say something like: "Oh, those Brits....always bitching....."

Realize that General Metz has been in charge of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization since November of 2007.....so he should know.

The Brits have lost 246 troops in Afghanistan....more than a quarter of the 882 US losses. This is disproportionate to the size of the relative populations of the two countries, of course.

From the Daily Mail....

US 'won't share secret of beating roadside bombs'

By Christopher Leake, Mail On Sunday Defence Editor
Last updated at 11:09 PM on 09th January 2010

The United States was accused last night of refusing to share with Britain the latest technology it uses against roadside bombs which have killed scores of Allied troops in Afghanistan.

US Army Lieutenant-General Thomas Metz, who retired last week as the chief officer specialising in counter-measures against the attacks, claims the UK and other coalition forces have been denied information which could save lives.

Lieut-Gen Metz has urged the Pentagon to share top-secret methods used by US forces to detect the so-called Improvised Explosive Devices and the terror networks which build them.

Deadly: Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) kill more coalition forces than any other weapon used in Afghanistan

But Pentagon chiefs have refused, arguing that if the information falls into the hands of the Taliban, new ways will be found to beat the technology.

IEDs kill more coalition forces than any other weapon used in Afghanistan.

Lieut-Gen Metz – a 61-year-old holder of two Distinguished Service Medals – described the US as ‘very timid’ in sharing intelligence.

He said: ‘If you’ve got information about the network, you don’t have to share how you got that information.

‘But it would surely be nice if your allies and your coalition partners got that part of the information that they needed to be successful.’

The officer said IEDs were often located using unmanned drone aircraft equipped with sensors to detect where ground has been disturbed to bury explosives. It is understood Britain does not possess this technology.

The Americans also use robotic helicopters to track the vehicles of insurgents planting bombs.

Military sources say there is no question of the US refusing to use its superior technology to help save the lives of British combat troops.

Last night, Shadow Defence Secretary Dr Liam Fox said: ‘Information is key to operational success, and in any coalition operation if we expect better burden-sharing, we must have information-sharing.’

My Friend Marcel....

2009-12-13T21:23:00.000-08:00

Last month we were super busy.....no way to even much answer emails, much less write.

Normally, Christmas is slow for us....we hate fucking Christmas as the ultimate hypocrisy (great idea....bad execution, and the whole thing is supposed to be in March!), and strongly resist working on the cheap for doctors and lawyers for their one token party per year to pay back all the expensive dinner parties folks have treated them to all year.

Our hatred of Christmas is deep, wide and multi-faceted.

Personally, the boys and I recoil from the concept after our experience in 1993. The wife took off four days before Christmas with no notice while we were at a soccer match. We came home to an empty house, empty bank accounts, and no dogs. Still wrapped presents under the tree, though. I got to deal with heartbroken, weeping children for months.....but I still have the presents. Still wrapped.

Strike 2 for Christmas was the infamous Starlite International employee Christmas party.

Starlite was a network marketing outfit that rose from the ashes of Cambridge. Get your friends to buy this shit and you can retire to the Kona Coast. Nutritional supplements, I think. Because Starlite wouldn't pause production for a morning, we had to feed the workers in shifts starting at 10:45 am.....and lasting all the way to 2:45 pm. We set up a buffet in the lobby on Garden Road, blessed with Christmas music from a DJ with giant speakers.

And apparently only one CD.....Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole Christmas songs.

I have heard recently that the CIA uses Black Sabbath, Kiss and Metallica to get Al Qaeda to confess stuff at Guantamo. Fuckers blew it....the needed Nat and Natalie. They should call me....I have the DJ's number....after two hours of this stuff we were ready to confess to the Black Dahlia murder. After four hours we were all ready to volunteer for suicide missions anywhere.

I went up to the DJ at one point and asked if he didn't have the Eminem Christmas album. Joke. Irony.

"Eminem......He is disgusting!"

The corker was when the CEO came through dressed in a Santa suit with his trusty companion, Kurt the beautiful, large and malevolent Alsatian. Santa handed out candy canes to his African and Latino workers (Oh, goody! The Boss smiled at me!) and admonished them not to disturb Kurt unduly.

Strike 2.5 might have been this year when we did another employee Christmas party for a giant golf/real estate/fake environmental thing on an historical ranch in Carmel Valley. The AA's who booked the party insisted on a 100% American menu....with a veggie option. We suggested beef, a stuffed portabella, and maybe some tamales dulces or pavo mole also. Their was plenty of money in the budget.

"No.....Nothing Mexican! We want a real American Christmas."

Of the resulting 175 workers for the meal......160 were Latino. Maybe 60 were comfortable enough to speak English to us on the line.....

"Lo siento...no hay salsa. Este cosa se llama "horseradish con crema". Pica. Es como salsa para gabachos."

"Merry Christmas, you fucking wetbacks! You'll eat American food....and be grateful!"

Normally we serve about 10 people per quart of any given dish. 175 people.....18 quarts of gorgeous wild rice salad with cranberries, pumpkin seeds, currants, etc. 18 quarts of organic French green beans with mint. 30 quarts of mashed potatoes, and gallons of really nice mushroom gravy.

The workers ate TWO quarts of wild rice....about a grain per person. Maybe six quarts of green beans.

Merry Christmas.....the chickens in Cachagua were really festive.

Strike 3 for Christmas was one Christmas Eve at Macy's fifteen years ago. Something technical of ours had broken, and I had to run into the housewares department for a knife or a pan or a blender or some such. In and out, and on to Maggi Weston's....where he have spent the last 30 Xmas eves.

While paying for my blender/knife/pan I ran into Milton Bonilla....one of my star soccer players from Seaside. Milton's family is from El Salvador, and his older brother Walter was the best player ever to play in Seaside or Monterey. Despite my hurry to get out and get to Maggi's, the look of despair and desperation on Milton's face stopped me in my tracks.

"Milton, what's wrong?"

"Oh, Coach.....I have to get a present for my mother. I don't know what to do. I only have eighteen dollars....."

Milton and his family live in a converted motel room off Canyon Del Rey across from what is now Chile's. Eight to ten folks, Dad works as a cook at the yacht club on Wharf 2. Milton was 11 at the time. When not in school or on the soccer pitch, Milton sits in the little apartment and watches TV. For six weeks the kid had been bombarded with Xmas ads......what you give is how much you love. A Lexus with a big bow for the black family.....A diamond of a carat or more.

The message had sunk in with Milton. Message delivered. His eighteen dollars....in the face of the gale force of modern corporate advertising had let him know exactly what is love for his mother was worth....and what he was worth by extension. The expression on his face was the reflection of the seismic shift taking place in the boy.

Love mom with my whole heart and soul. Eighteen bucks don't mean shit.

Of course.....I downed tools. Blew off Maggi because I knew she would cry at the story after she stopped screaming at me for being late......Milton and I went up to the third floor and bought Mom a cashmere sweater. It wasn't the money.....it was soft as her kisses, and her favorite color.....rich and vibrant, just like the space her hard work and love created in their little apartment. Bob Cratchett....stand back!

Bitch.....

Anyway....despite our antipathy, we were super-busy this year. The recession must have dropped whatever businesses used to do down to our price-point. I am thinking that lots of these folks used to go to restaurants....bad news for my restaurant buddies.

So, back to the point.........Last night, our Jenny was telling a story about working at From Scratch and some disappearing eggs. Jenny is in the Hall of Fame of local bartenders, having survived 14 years at the Running Iron. She now works three jobs...two for us....and is going to school full-time to become a nurse.

Her story about the disappearing eggs at From Scratch immediately made me think of Marcel.....

And.....I just now see that I started a post on Dec 13th....also about my friend Marcel, the waiter.

Marcel and I worked together at the Colony in New York City back in the day.....1971.

The Colony was an old school place....Truman Capote, Jacque Kennedy kind of place. Salvador Dali, Tricia Nixon Cox, Andy Warhol.............Cordelia Biddle Duke Robertson even.

Here is the kind of old school The Colony represents: my son gave me a Christmas present of a book about the history of New York restaurants. The Colony and I are about two thirds of the way through the 300 year history of NYC restaurants. OLD school.

Billy Joel was our piano guy. Really. He wrote the song at the Colony with us on long, despairing broke summer nights in 1971.

Anyway.

Marcel was a French guy....very slim and very short....maybe 5'7" and 110 pounds. He favored the big lapelled tuxedos he found in the basement locker room of the 70 year old restaurant.....and Marcel always went to work armed. He had a little .22 automatic with six rounds in the magazine that snuggled right up next to his corkscrew. Those big lapelled tuxes had an inside pocket virtually designed for a piece.....but that is another story.

I was befuddled why I started writing about Marcel in December in the middle of the rush. Something about disappearing eggs at a cocktail party.....

Marcel was the consummate professional. He could deal with all, every and any situation that could arise in a dining room filled with celebrities.

Marcel was from Marseille and started working in restaurants when he was twelve. He got his first big break when he landed a job at sixteen at a cafe on the Champs Elysee in Paris as a commis de suite.

In French dining rooms the waiters work in teams: a commis de suite and a commis de rang. A waiter and a runner. The waiter...the commis de rang....never leaves the station. The rang, pronounced "wrong". He takes the orders, fusses and does all the sidewalk monkey work. The commis de suite....the runner.....delivers the orders to the kitchen, deals with the chefs, and brings the food back to the station. Typically, the commis de rang has a guerridon (a war wagon) which is a rolling cart he uses to serve all the meals. Dishes are delivered on silver platters to the guerridon. The commis de rang moves the dishes from the platters to individual plates with flair and little touches, and the two partners serve the meal.

The commis de rang is the senior partner. He makes probably four or five times the money of the runner. There is a captain above both commis, and a maitre d'hotel above the captains, so the flow of tips is a trickle when it gets to the commis de suites. Truth be told, there are awesome commis de suites who earn as much as the waiters or even captains...but it is only age, experience, politics and flat out speed that allow this to happen. And the ability to produce the only thing that matters to waiters......major tips.

So....back to Marcel on the Champs Elysee.

As a new guy, albeit with a connection that got him the job to begin with....Marcel got the worst station with the worst tip situation. His station was all the way out by the sidewalk. The cafe had an inside area, an upper level deck, an intemediate deck.....and the sidewalk deck. This meant that Marcel had to run up two flights of steps and all the way through the restaurant to the kitchen....four or five times for each table, two meals a day, a hundred covers per meal. He made.... for a full day's work....the price of two beers in the cafe, although he had a room in the dorm and three crappy meals per day.

I was Marcel once....only in Austria. I have lived this life.

Anyway.....

Even though it was a shitty station....Marcel and his waiter still had their regulars. Business guys would pop in daily for coffee, an omelette, a light lunch, a couple of pops....and some time to read the papers and correspondence from the office. Steady, predictable, kind...good tippers. Plus all the tourist douche bags. Heaven and Hell.

One day, the ultimate thing happened for a commis de suite: the waiter called in sick at the last minute. No way to get a replacement....Marcel stepped up and told the captain and the maitre d' that he could cover the station.

This was a huge chance to show off his skills and make some serious dough. Like the rookie pitcher being called in to pitch in Yankee Stadium in relief in the 15th inning.

Marcel rose to the occasion. He polished his shoes, brushed down his jacket, slicked back his hair and got pumped. He took the orders, delivered the drinks, ran the food...sprinting like a maniac up the two sets of steps, through the other stations, through the indoor restaurant....and navigated the craziness of the kitchen to protect his folks.

Marcel ran like a nut....but when he got to his station, he shifted gears......slowed down, and transformed from commis de suite into commis de rang. He was calm, smooth, contained.....attentive. And he had flair.

And he was making major dough.

As always each day....M. Blanc arrived for his table just in the nook of the last set of steps down to the sidewalk. M. Blanc owned this table...the way he owned a major seat on the Bourse. He arrived every day at precisely 11:45 and had precisely the same order: Vichy water, Ricard, omelette aux fines herbes, cafe. M. Blanc always left by 1pm.....and was ritually generous with his gratuity.

Day of.....Marcel was ready for M'sieur. Had the Vichy and Ricard all ready on his side station.

Marcel reassured M. Blanc that all was cool without the waiter, and brought him his water, drink and paper. Marcel had already set up the order, so when he raced back to the kitchen it was already fired and he jumped to the head of the line to pick up.

Nailing it!

Marcel held the silver tray with the omelette over his shoulder as the dodged the kitchen melee, through the doors and through the chaos of the inside dining room.....down the steps to the first terrace, held held high....perfect posture.

Down the steps to the sidewalk...guerridon waiting next to M. Blanc's table.... anticipating the turn at full speed with the platter ever so.....

And the omelette aux fines herbes slid off the silver platter on the turn.....

And dropped directly into the side pocket of M. Blanc's suit jacket.......

M. Blanc was engrossed in his Paris Match....

Marcel had a decision:

Grovel as the incompetent, over-reaching commis de suite failing..... his big chance to cover the spot of the missing commis de rang....what could one expect?

Or.....

Turn.

Race back to the kitchen.

Elbow aside all the other "suites".....

And get a new omelette.

Through the restaurant, head held high.....

Down the steps to the first terrace.....

Down the steps to the sidewalk with the silver platter held ear-high ever so.....

To the waiting guerridon....

Where he moved the gorgeous omelette aux fines herbes from the sliver to the plate and laid it before M. Blanc with as much elan as any waiter ever in the history of France.

"M'sieur....May I get you anything else?"

"Perhaps a coffee in a few minutes. Merci bien......"

Back to work. All good. Check paid, generous routine tip.....

Strikeout on a 3-2 count with the bases loaded in the 16th inning.

One only wonders what M. Blanc thought when he got back to the office and reached for his keys......

So....now I remember what brought Marcel to mind last month.....

I served an hors d'oeuvre to an old guy at a nice party.....bone marrow with some local chanterelles. The guy grabbed the bite, and as he guided it to his mouth everything dropped off the crouton directly into his pocket....marrow, chanterelles, butter...the works.

The guy mowed the crouton.

"Delicious. You are the best, as always....."

And our Jenny....working her third job at From Scratch at breakfast on Sunday. Plate of eggs, slammed, not enough time or help......she is both the commis de suite and commis de rang every day of her life in all three jobs....

Jenny turns quickly....busts through the door and out to the regular customer in his place by the stairs.

When she arrives......no eggs on the plate.

Jenny goes back to the kitchen....

And laughs hysterically with the Mexican chef about the missing eggs....

Restaurant People live in a different Universe than Normal White People.

We have a different God.....

And I love Her....... Sense of Humor.

Props to Marcel.....Wherever you are.

Joyeux Noel......

I was reminded of Marcel tonight while serving a clueless older guy at a cocktail party. Chanterelles with bone marrow.....the guy took the canape, tried to study it, and dropped both the chanterelles and the bone marrow into the pocket of his blazer as he struggled with the appetizer.

What to do? Tell him about it.....or get over it and move on?

Omelette in the pocket. Cab to the elevator.

Waste not, want not......

2009-12-01T22:30:00.000-08:00

Back in the day my first job in the restaurant biz was at L'Auberge du Cochon Rouge.....the Inn of the Red Pig....in Ithaca, New York.

My mentor chef there was Etienne Merle.....who himself was mentored by his father, Pierre. These guys were hard-core, old-school French pricks.

Nothing was ever wasted in our kitchen....nothing. Etienne would even monitor my tying of the ducks for roasting to make sure that I was only using so much string. Then, when the ducks were roasted, he would monitor my cutting through the knots in just the right way......so I could re-use the string for the next load of ducks.

String.

Inches of string.

It mattered.

I am always amused by people who make jokes about the Scots and the Jews being culturally cheap. These folks have never worked in a French kitchen. Don't even talk to me about cooking in the vineyards in Burgundy and slaughtering pigs for the grape-pickers. (Hint: "andouille" only means "sausage" in Corralitos and New Orleans....in France it means "small pig intestine as pasta).

The French kitchen dynamic has been rolling for 700 years. Right now, we follow the Northern Spanish model.....creative, market-driven, etc, etc. Andoni Aduriz taught Brendan to make a killer dish using apple cores......His chefs comb the hills in the mornings for wild saffron, mushrooms, tender herbs......

Unknown to almost everyone is the fact that Northern Spain, a "neutral" country in WWII, underwent a viscious famine after the war. Juan Mari Arzak, Pedro Subijana, and Sr. Elizondo in San Sebastian grew up with no food....and close relatives who died from hunger. It is no wonder that modern Spanish cuisine uses gleaners....and turns the kind of fungus, produce, fish and shellfish Carmel rich folk never notice or are repelled by into high art.

Kitchen work and profitability go back to the struggle between the two age-old dynamics: 1) "It is better to throw out than throw up....."; 2) "It is better to throw up than throw out......"

America is obsessed with weird OCD visions of its food. Americans cut the rind off Brie as something dangerous and disgusting.....and guzzle gallons of poorly filtered, acrylomide-laden fry fats....and don't even mention the GMO corn, sugar, cotton....and the RoundUp Ready rapeseed oil that went into the crappy fry fat to begin with.

In America, image is everything.....and proof positive of our place as Greatest Nation in the Universe (?) is our ability to have Lots of Food All the Time... or the image of an abundance food.....but food that meets our narrowly defined concept of wholesome, healthy and fun.....

Which definition has been defined by a diabolic conversion of marketing, agribusiness and political corruption on a grand scale....

Oh.....and:

There is no hunger in America!

We'll just ignore the whole NY Times article about food stamps. The whole thing about the fact that there are 239 counties in the US where more than 25% of the population is on food stamps......36 million people in all. Such a buzz-kill.

OK.....fold that nugget into this one: Americans now waste 40% of the food we produce and prepare. Check it.

And it is not just the food that is wasted.....the water (25% of our fresh water consumption goes to food production), the energy (production, preparation, transportation).....300,000,000 barrels of oil yearly. I have not heard anyone talk about the labor......I have had gifted engineers carefully slicing green onions ever so.......

And.....we are in the middle of an obesity and diabetes epidemic.

Is this Through-the-Looking-Glass stuff, or what? Water and energy shortages, 36 million on food stamps, 35% obesity rates, increasing diabetes, 40% food waste......

I have been busting my ass in the restaurant business for 40 years. I have still.....touch wood....not lost a nickel doing it, for me or any of my foolish investors. Restaurants, like grocery stores....run on an expectation of a 1-3% profit.

And we are pissing away 40% upfront?

And.....this is a great country?

How stupid are we?

Really fucking stupid....or amazingly lazy and passive, as it turns out.

Six or eight square-state senators control our farm and food policy....and create all this mess, with a huge assist from agribusiness, mass food outlets, etc.

The scientists who calculated that each American tosses 1400 calories a day (which is ironically the Oprah Weight Loss Calorie Goal) trace the loss to marketing and policy.

More is better. Push it, mow it, and toss it.

Anyway...back to waste, local version.

Even as a French-trained, waste-nothing kitchen prick....we still compost at The Store 9-10 five gallon buckets of trimmings and food waste every week....minimum. 400 pounds a week for a little caterer with a one-day-a-week restaurant. This does not include meat scraps, which go in the dumpster.....or the dogs.

Part of this waste is just normal: no one eats the core of the fennel bulb or the carrot peels....even after we make veggie stock from the skins, stalks and cores.

The lion's share of this is just pure waste....we grow too much and we buy too much, trying to anticipate our clients demands. We work our butts off trying to anticipate your needs and demands.....but we work an 18 hour day every Monday....and most weekends prepping food that no one will ever eat.

God forbid we should ever run out of anything. It would be Un-American. We are a good caterer....we never run out of anything.

For example.....today we have a half organic chicken, half a duck, 20# of organic tomatoes, a shit load of chard, kale, eggplant and sorrell...... 10# of organic purple potatoes that went to seed.....15# of tri tip, a whole wild salmon....5# of wild harvested wild rice, 5# of natural pork loin, three racks of organic, smoked baby back ribs, 3 # of wild halibut, 4# of wild scallops, three sheet pans of hand made pasta, six servings of handmade lasagnette, one awesome serving of rabbit, three natural filet steaks, two natural double pork chops......plus the peels, trims and cores. And this is winter, when we are slow. Oh, and two sides of wild smoked salmon nobody bought.

We eat as much as we can....and give away as much as we can...but my dogs are really happy dogs.

And.....we are often on the receiving end of unwanted food. In October we were trying to deal with a half ton of organic heirloom tomatoes a week, plus the plums, peppers, squashes, lettuces of a system geared to only consuming the best of the best when in the mood....and tossing everything else.

Part of the whole abused child/PTSD syndrome that French-trained chefs deal with after our training is Stockholm Syndrome.....a misplaced love for the captor/abuser, and a tendency to propagate the abuse into further generations.

We should be so lucky.

Based on my training.....I still scrape my bowls and blenders with the best quality silicone spatualas because the French taught me to be cheap....but also because they taught me to respect the food, the people who grew it, and the folks put love and intensity into bringing it to me.....and to get the maximum value out of all that time, attention and work.

Tonight my dinner was some leftover pasta I made three weeks ago.....green from the basil pulp that derives from making our basil oil that I blended into the mix for the linguine. It was brittle, and you have to be careful standing it up on end over the small pot of water so it all gets cooked in one piece (all our big pots are at The Store).

I had the basil linguine with some sauteed fresh local boletes.....I bought six pounds from a local gleaner yesterday.....and sold two pounds last night. Actually I sold one pound.....I gave away two orders as a mitzvah, another story. The other four pounds will go to waste, since it is almost impossible to store, freeze or dry king boletes.

I sauteed the boletes in good European-style Wisconsin butter from Wuthrich .....that I have tons of because I have to make a certain weight in my orders to be able to buy my panko and my Valrhona chocolate from my supplier. (Amuricans buy by weight, dammit!). The butter costs dramatically less than Costco butter, and insanely less than Safeway butter....but no one buys it in Cachagua, or elsewhere for that matter. I give it away as party favors with the unserved bread Micah bakes on Monday's, and people often back away from me, politely as I rant...We sell Wuthrich for $2.50 a pound, and make a profit. It is so good that I am torn between considering it an anti-depressive....or a depression enabler. In our household, butter is a beverage, and the fact that I pay less than $1.80 per pound for a wonderful, hand-made product makes me weep....both for joy at my access to inexpensive abundance, and in sadness for Mr. Wuthrich.....family owned since 1904.

Finally, I grate over my pasta the heel ends of my Beecher's cheddar that I bought on my tour with my friend Charyn in Seattle on October 7. It is a cow/sheep blend made in a shop across from Pikes Place Market. In Monterey this would be like buying a bread bowl of shitty clam chowder from a Shake descendant, saving it for two months, and dying of salmonella and botulism for nostalgia's sake....In Seattle the rules are different. In Seattle the tourists are a side effect, not the raison d'etre. Beecher's makes the cheese on the spot....you can watch them. You can also buy the world's best Grilled Cheese Sandwich, and arguably the world's best Mac and Cheese for four or five bucks.....and you can take home chunks of the cheese being made behind you. I bought sixty bucks worth.....Charyn bought the mac n cheese.

As the insanely kind, friendly and helpful clerk was wrapping up my chunks of cheddar......

(Seattle also is the center of American kindness and politesse. People stand easily in lines, and take the opportunity of line-standing to converse. No worries. The day I returned from Seattle I was in the am at the Carmel Valley Chevron trying to buy coffee, gas and Red's donuts.....the fuel of the local construction industry this side of heroin and methamphetamines.....and noticed a builder-type guy standing politely and waiting while uptight yuppies and whacked out sheet-rockers charged the register, banging elbows and throwing money at the poor checker. As we waited, I asked him: "So......How long have you been away from Seattle?"

"Six months.....how did you know?"

Never mind.......)

Back to Beecher's on 7 Oct......

I heard the clerk at the next register respond to a question:

"How long will the cheese be good for?"

"About a week...if you wrap it ever so, and pray to the cheddar gods, and abstain from oral sex....and if the refrigeration and humidity is right......"

WTF?

My chunk has been loosely wrapped in the original paper since 8 October. I consider it an anti-depressant. It helped my parvo puppy over the hump of being scared of food (he was a from Wisconsin in a previous life and is crazy for milk products)......It served us a dozen impromptu meals in October and November....

And tonight I grated the crusts and rinds over my leftover pasta ......with the unwanted butter that sauteed the unsellable mushrooms.

Heaven.

I admit that I did add salt....Murray River Pink.

Apparently.....I was dumpster-diving, according to the American Ideal.

And....

I am still just now getting over being pissed off about the couple last night at The Store who sent back two plates of oak roasted local natural lamb.....without even TASTING it!

It didn't LOOK right.....They refused it on sight.

It wound up as my dinner, as it turns out....and snacks for Zim, the Criminal Border Collie, who was really happy....as was Haji, Zim's puppy, another Canine Criminal-in-training.

It was delicious....and technically perfectly medium rare, as ordered......142 degrees F....digitally monitored.

It was a rich red in color because it was a natural product, raised on a fifth-generation ranch up by Lake Almanor somewhere by folks genetically imprinted to care about their work.....not some shite from Outback.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

You have to really be something to be 86'd from the Cachagua Store. I served wild diver scallops last night to a guy who sleeps in the creek behind The Store in dry weather......

These people are beyond 86'd.

I don't just want to 86 them....I want to hit them with something sharp, shiny and heavy.

Actually.....something dull, filthy and blunt......

Like their world view......

Secret Service.....

2009-11-29T21:58:00.000-08:00

If anyone was wondering seriously about the relative importance of two social climbers making into the State Dinner at the White House.....wonder no more.

I have passed Secret Service scrutiny three times....minimum. Any outfit that would allow me within wine-pouring distance of a sitting President, former President, or Presidential candidate.....has a deep and abiding trust in the goodness of mankind.

Plus....it turns out the dumbass Obama's fired the woman in charge of vetting all the social guests to the White House in advance, and who was always present at the door of all social functions to double check the lists and find problems. Well, they didn't fire her....they just demoted her to the point of absurdity. She was a hold-over from the Bushes, you see. Been on the job since 2001. Knew every idiot in Washington.....

Let's see: Obama kept the Secretary of Defense from Bush....and every one of the politically appointed US Attorneys from the Bushes....and fired the chick who can tell chicken from chicken shit on the red carpet?

Oy.

They probably also fired all the little old lady volunteers who hand-wrote thank-you letters to all the visitors and for all the gifts sent to the White House. They probably have a high-tech firm send out printed letters. So much more sustainable and efficient.

Believe me.....don't let Republicans run your war, but don't let Democrats anywhere near your State Dinner. They don't know fish fork from oyster fork....and they are prone to fake Rolex's and Thom McCann's. When it comes to parties, Democrats could fuck up a wet dream. Plus, they don't know when to leave.

I think Obama missed a key appointment when he failed to hire Ray Krenske (aka "The Radiator" as the door guy at the White House.

Ray worked for us for 20 years....and has since retired to Denver. Ray was fired from virtually every service establishment (Mediterranean Market, Nielsen's, DoReMi, Thunderbird, Bird of Paradise, Grapes of Wrath, etc )on the Peninsula for being rude to the public. Actually, Ray was never rude.....Ray just did not suffer fools.....or rudeness....gladly. He would have spotted the Salahi's at fifty paces.....

Ray was a discalced monk....and a theatre buff and professor. Ray was straight out of Gosford Park. Some would say,not so straight..... but not me.

Classic Ray: Pebble Beach fancy dinner party with Peter Ueberoth, Arnold Palmer and various CEO's in attendance. A scattering of locals and press were invited for cocktails before dinner, but dinner was for 12.....period. Place settings, china, flowers, menu to match all of the above decided months before.

The writer from Forbes Magazine failed to leave on cue at 7:45, and seemed very comfortable sitting on the couch in front of the fire overlooking Cypress Point with a Waterford crystal tumbler of Glenmorangie in his hand.

The hostess was stressing: Cypress Point rules decree that dinner must be served by 8:04. Forbes boy was still there, and immune from all her subtleties. We turned Ray loose.

Ray came into the family room, and in his most imperious voice announced: "Dinner is served.....for all the invited guests."

Forbesy actually got up and made a move for the dining room. Ray gripped him firmly by the arm and steered him to the coat closet and the front door.

"Sir, I am sure you have somewhere wonderful to go to just now......"

"Well, actually......I don't."

Ray...handing him his coat and shoving him firmly through the front door......into the pouring rain.

"Pity......."

Con te partiro.....

2009-11-10T23:52:00.001-08:00

This is a post from last month....I thought it was long and boring. Sorry.

So….a couple of times in my life I have been awestruck by music.

Awe struck….as in gap-mouthed, dumb and drooling…..“struck by lightning”…..full on, melt down….Like the apes in “2001”. Uhhh….that was a movie back in the day, before the whole plane-crashing thing.

I was an electrical engineer once… The last class I failed at Cornell in the EE school was taught by Robert Moog….he of the synthesizer, and brake/alignment fame. I learned that Middle E is 400 cycles per second. A square wave sounds like a clarinet. Turn it up loud enough and it will move you……even if you are a rock.

Hence my early music movements: the Allman Brothers live at the Fillmore East… the Airplane, same venue. Jeff Beck. Drugs may have been involved. Crazy decibels certainly were.

I grew up as the son of a crazy, violent, abusive, schizophrenic, drunken banker who loved classical music. Pops would come home from the train….grab a bottle of Boodles, retire to the den and blast Mozart and opera until he passed out under his New Yorker magazine.

Classical music, banking……and gin…. have never been my favorites……..

After my various and many failures in engineering…..I found myself adrift in the kitchens and cellars of Europe after graduation. Burgundy. Switzerland. Greece. Turkey. Croatia. Kosovo, even. And….Austria. Separated from my childhood sweetheart, Jane….recovering from a broken heart or a broken head. Hard to tell the difference.

I used to work in Vienna at Demel’s….the place that claims to have the real Sacher Torte recipe. (Ggg-grandpa Demel worked at the Hotel Sacher, created the cake….. and they didn’t pay him or whatever. He bailed with the recipe 150 years ago, and the battle over Sacher authenticity continues to this day.

This is how crazy I was/am: I was working in Kitzbuhel in a fancy restaurant from 4pm till 4am....then skiing all day on the mountain. I had no money so I could only afford about eight bucks a day. Eight bucks on the mountain got you a slice of Sacher Torte and a viertel of gluwein……a quarter liter of hot, spiced wine with a good shot of Inlander rum in it. Nutrition according to a 23 year old.

I fell into Sachertorte and gluhwein when I was accidentally in a bar on the mountain when Princess Caroline of Monaco swept in with her entourage. Caroline was the most beautiful, radiant human I had ever beheld….plus, she was a dead ringer for Jane. Princess ordered Sachertorte and a viertel gluhwein…….I was hooked.

I was also crazy. I worked all night, skied all day….and in the wee hours of the night conducted a contest in my mind for “Greatest Novel of the 20^th Century” between “Sometimes A Great Notion” and “Gravity’s Rainbow”. I read them both cover to cover twice in a row in my spare time that winter. And played on a local hockey team.

No wonder I was single and depressed.

I was so hooked by the Caroline/Jane/Sachertorte/gluhwein thing that I finally quit my job in Kitzbuhel and moved to Vienna to work at Demel’s. Did I think Caroline or Jane would show up? Did I think I would master Sachertorte’s and win the love of Caroline/Jane? Who knows.

Anyway, Vienna was brutal in the winter, especially after a 16 hour shift that netted eight bucks……I hauled bags of flour in from the street, up and down stairs…and did all manner of menial jobs just short of the vile Jugoslavian dish dogs.

After work I would always go two blocks to the Augustiner Keller….. if they were still open. (6.5 days a week, two shifts we worked)….a 500 year old bar next to the palace in Old Vienna. I would hang with old ladies like we have in Cachagua….hardworking, classy, bitter, vicious….only these old ladies had worked for the Kaiser….before WWI.

Next to the Augustiner Keller was the Augstiner Kirche…..an old church, part of the Hofberg (Palace) complex of the old Kaisers.

I grew up a hard-core Catholic…the bishop’s altar boy…..so I have had all of Roman Catholic orthodoxy beaten into me. I can still run the entire Latin Mass out loud, or in my sleep….both the priest’s part and the altar boy’s part: “Introibo ad altare Dei.” “ Ad deum qui laetificat, juventutem meum.”

I will go to the altar of God…..to God, the joy of my youth.

Right.

I still have all the hymns in Latin: “Tantum ergo, sacramentum……”, etc. running through my head....

Which is only coincidentally the tune to the Nazi Germans’ national anthem.

So.....on a given night in 1972 in Vienna on my half day off on Sunday…..with no money in my pocket and snow pouring down and my crappy room a two mile hike away.........I turned into the Augustiner Kirche after a visit to the Keller.

“The preacher likes the cold…..he knows I’m goin’ to stay....”

Introibo ad altare dei.......Indeed.

They were doing a Mozart Mass. The place was packed and I was late and a little drunk….so I sneaked up onto the altar and sat out of the way in a spot where I knew no one would notice me. I grabbed a program......which turned out to be the entire score of the Mass.

Mozart wrote the Mass in the Augustiner Kirche….using the Augustiner Kirche’s organ to diddle about and create the piece.

There was a big choir, an orchaestra......and the same damn organ Mozart had originally used to write the Mass.

I had the score….so I could watch everything unfold as it was written out centuries past:: each voice, each instrument......everything.

Sitting on the altar I watched the notes crawl across the printed page as the choir and the band set up a sonic and emotional resonance in the old church that gave me glimpses of things I had never before imagined or felt.

The engineer in me responded to the organization…..the incredibly detailed aspect of one man writing things down on paper that could transmit crazy emotion and knowledge across centuries….instructions for fifty people to follow 200 years after his death to essentially bring him back to life.

It brought everything together for me……the music, the math, the architecture, my dad, the insane work level, the crushing weather…..the refuge of the church. The little frozen, desiccated nugget that was my soul warmed, expanded…..and flew.

I wept quietly and secretly there in my shadow on the altar.....

I got it.

I remember walking home that night and laughing to myself about how cold it must have been to have tears actually freeze on my face.....

So….on to tonight.

We are at the bitter end of a long season. By Friday, we will have done 20 parties in a week. This week alone we have had 15 in four days. We are staggering, fucked and done…..We maintain our sense of professionalism at the expense of our bodies and our souls. Everyone tells us that we are lucky to be busy….and we are too tired to realize that they are dummies and this is all random chance and we will be fucked and broke next month.

Tonight….on our fourth party of the day... we did a fundraiser for Big Sur Land Trust in a house in Carmel. It was sketchy even to have power in Carmel today….and even sketchier to have a Cachagua caterer come 25 miles to town over a winding mountain pass to work after the biggest storm in 40 years.

Big Sur Land Trust event: some piano guy with a concert and board members and major donors. 30pp for apps for an hour, followed by the music. 5:30pm start....with luck we can be gone by 7pm. Please, Jesus….

Upon arrival there is some turmoil in the house. The hot water heater is out. A nice older man is trying to light it and failing. Lee tries to help him.....and fails. The guy just wants a shower, but we come from Cachagua where the storm has taken all of our plumbing out….no water, hot or cold….and no drainage, no sewage, no toilets…..and 36 consecutive 16 hour days without a break. We maintain a barely professional recognition of the gentleman’s lack of hot shower.....We call a plumber.

The household starts to arrive…..BSLT people, the host…who is not the shower guy it turns out....and a beautiful woman who comes in to check out the food. She is from Seattle and loves oysters and champagne. She is a Virgo....August 24….and each year she and her brother buy a bushel of oysters and drink themselves silly and cut their hands up celebrating. She is the cello accompanist for the piano guy….who is the shower guy, it turns out.

I am smitten: Virgo....hot....cellist who is from Seattle, loves champagne, loves oysters and can and does shuck her own in the hundreds range.

Her name is Wendy. Instantly trying to forget the Seattle band, The Odds, song about a Wendy...

So.....”Who is the piano guy with the shower problem?” I ask….

“Phillip Glass.”

Should I know him?

Wendy laughs hysterically and goes off to her room……

Well.....Wendy is Wendy Sutter, and Phillip is Phillip Glass. Wendy started with the Seattle Philharmonic at 16 and now teaches at Columbia after studying at Julliard, etc, etc, etc.

Philip Glass is Phillip Glass.

Wendy is packing a 450 year old cello built by the guy who taught Stradivarius how to build cellos and violins. The cello has the bed in the guest room. The cello is worth 10 million dollars.

Trying to rally…..I ask Wendy about her bows for the cello. Old Jack from Pine Valley builds bows for Yo Yo Ma, and I wonder if she has heard of Jack.

“Well….there are a lot of bow-makers. Sorry. Bows are kind of dime a dozen compared to the instruments. I don’t mean to be disrespectful of your friend….”

Duh.

“So….where did your bow come from, and……what do bows cost?”

“Italy. This one I use for traveling and I got a great deal on it. It was only 17,000 euros. I think I can resell it for 25k eu.”

No wonder a couple of cello bows can keep Pine Valley Jack in beans and rice for a decade or two….

Sufficiently humiliated…we wait for the show to start. Guests arrive and are fed. We manage to get some crab and oysters into Wendy despite her normal pre-concert fasting routine. Phil is a vegetarian….but indulges as well.

Then they play……

A tape of the concert exists….we sat behind the camera. Phillip played an Etude #2, and something else #2. He ran circles and poems around our heads….toyed with us and dazzled us.

Then, Wendy played a solo something that reminded me of Greg Brown…. Or Tom Waits. Growly, grumpy, bassy…..and ultimately deeply moving…..like hearing your granpa talk about courting your granma on the race train to the Derby.

Anyone who thinks that modern technology has all the answers has not met Wendy and her 450 year old cello. Willow wood sides. I forget the wood in front. There is a stainless steel brace where the foot is installed….but everything else is 16^th century. The sound that she brings from that old willow is beyond 16^th century….it is preternatural.

I learned about resonance as an engineer…..and the music and the sound resonated in that room on levels unimaginable. I don’t have the words…..but once again I was reminded that I have a soul….and once again that dessicated little fucker flew……

Con te partirò.
Paesi che non ho mai
veduto e vissuto con te,
adesso si li vivrò,
Con te partirò
su navi per mari
che, io lo so,
no, no, non esistono più,
con te io li vivrò.

No shit….Paesi che non ho mai…..indeed. Su navi per mari che io lo so non esistono piu…..

Yup. Countries I never saw…..and seas which I know exist no more.

Thanks, Wendy…..

The best part?

When the recital was done, Wendy bee-lined it to the kitchen for some bubbly and some shellfish. I stuttered and babbled…..but she was just another pro, back in the kitchen with the other worker bees.

“God…..that was awful.”

WTF? It was supernatural......

“No….the music was OK….It is just having all those people so close to me. Normally there is a big stage, and I can work with my instrument by myself in my own bubble. But all these people were right on TOP of me…..It was weird.”

As the guy who inaugurated his 60^th year on the planet by screaming at nice old lady to “get the fuck out of my kitchen”……

I could relate.

Princess Caroline and Mozart….move over.

I wonder what Wendy thinks about Sachertorte?

Blessed Ollie vs. Blessed Harold

2009-11-08T18:55:00.000-08:00

I will do almost anything to avoid bookkeeping.....this, for instance.

I didn't go get my H1N1 flu shot Saturday.

For me this is epic, since I am old.....and have no spleen.

Lacy Buck once asked me: "Where is your spleen, anyway?"

"Well, Lacy.....mine is in the dumpster behind Community Hospital....."

This means I am at an increased risk of dying from pneumonia and flu, so I always get the seasonal flu vaccine. Usually it is me and the other altekochers at the Carmel Red Cross. I like going there because that crowd still calls me "Sonny".

I was trained as an engineer, long before I ever lifted a knife or a sautee pan in anger. Part of our training was deep immersion in statistics. Electrical engineering at a high level is all about chance....aka quantum theory.

Also, I have this deep reverence for actual facts. Whole new worlds opened up for me when Harold McGee explained to me that custards need to reach 180 degrees F for the proteins in the egg yolks to unfold and make a thick sauce. Before that my Irish Catholic soul was tortured for 40 years trying to decide when the custard was hot enough to "coat the back of a spoon". WTF? What kind of spoon? Wood? Stainless? Big? Small? What kind of coating....the fucking stuff coats a spoon at room temperature, for chrissakes! I would actually sometimes pray to Blessed Oliver Plunkett to give me the wisdom to figure out when the four different spoons I had in the fucking creme anglaise coated them sufficiently that the chef would not kick my ass and take away my only half-day off because the custard was not firm enough. Good ol' Blessed Ollie (an Irish bishop hung, drawn and quartered by the Brits 300 years ago....whose head is on display in Drogheda, and which head still bleeds on the anniversary of his beheading)....... but no offense old guy.....I much prefer Blessed Harold.

Anyway, I am not one of those hippy whack jobs who refuse vaccination because the vaccine causes autism.....or the vaccine is a government plot. (Well....actually, it turns out......)

Believe me....having just spent $5,000 saving my new puppy from parvovirus (the second puppy we have gone through this with!) because dipshit, redneck, hippy fuckwads in Cachagua don't vaccinate their dogs against ANYTHING......I am a big fan of vaccines. I am old enough to have been in the first waves of polio shots back in the day. Some of the kids in our school who opted out.....not so lucky.

So it is with some distress that I discover actual facts about the H1N1 vaccine. From here on out I am gleefully plagiarizing/summarizing an article from this month's Atlantic.by a really excellent reporter, Sharon Brownlee, who specializes in health care.

1) Flu vaccination supposedly cuts the risk of death during flu season by 50%.

Ooops, no one has ever done a controlled study. Hundreds of millions of people get vaccinated. Flu kills mostly old people...and sick babies. It is very hard to determine who actually dies of flu....any old person who dies of something lung related is labeled a flu death. Flu often weakens the body so that one dies of other causes....pnuemonia, heart disease, etc. Almost never do families or hospitals do a culture to discover the real culprit. Why bother? Granny is dead.

Even if you take all elderly deaths by anything remotely close to flu.....flu deaths account for a maximum of 10% of elderly deaths. That means to get a decrease in death rates of 50% in the whole population.....flu vaccine has to protect you from dying of a stroke, cancer...or getting hit by a bus. This is some vaccine!

It turns out that the studies that yielded the 50% number are cohort studies......all the million billion people who got vaccinated vs. the cohort of a million billion people who didn't. Guess what? People who decide to get vaccinated are younger and healthier and more health concious than the opposing cohort to begin with....so they die 50% less, with or without the vaccine.

Actually, 60% less.

If you don't buy that argument, how about this one: Each year the governments of the world and the various health organizations agree on the three strains of flu most likely to emerge each season, and prepare vaccines accordingly. In 1968 and 1997 they fucked up, and got the mix wrong. None of the expected strains appeared....others did. So....no one got vaccinated. The death rate didn't change.

In 2004, the production got screwed up.....like this year....and 40% less folks were vaccinated. No change in death rates.

Back in 1989, before the big government push to vaccinate the entire population.....only 15% of folks over 65 were vaccinated. This compares to 65% now. The death rates were actually lower in 1989 than today.

2) Flu vaccine protects the body from getting the flu, or getting as sick:

Well, not so much. Flu vaccine works really great with young people, with a really good antibody response. The antibody response drops as we age. Over 70, and there is not a very good response to vaccines.....and these are the people that mostly die.

So.....do we vaccinate people who are young and healthy who aren't likely to die anyway....because the vaccine works swell? And, do we vaccinate us altekochers even if it doesn't really work?

3) Let's have a study!

The obvious response to this is to do a double-blind study like they do for all other pharmeceuticals. Get a couple hundred thousand people, vaccinate them. Get another couple hundred thousand, shoot 'em up with water. Wait till the end of flu season and see how many of each group are left....or the severity of flu in both groups.

This has never been done. Why? Because everyone is so sure that the vaccine works, they think it would be unethical not to give it to a test group of people because they might die!

This kind of reasoning led to centuries of crazy medical practices. Leeches come to mind....though leeches are making a comeback. How about not swimming for an hour after lunch?

The most egregious example of bad medicine becoming the norm was breast cancer treatment in the 80's and 90's. The perceived wisdom back then was to give high dose chemo and radiation and follow up with a bone marrow transplant. No one would do a clinical trial to test whether it work because......it supposedly worked! Not doing it to a control group would kill them. It was not until 2000 that some Canadians did a trial and discovered that the transplants were actually killing all those poor women, not breast cancer.

When I bought my property back in the day, my neighbor was a rich dentist who put up a palace with a vanity vineyard. And a big wire fence to keep us white trash out. My wife was a city girl, and paranoid about hugger-muggers sneaking into our property and doing whatever hugger-muggers do. I bought an alarm system....but I also bought 3,000 spiky African orange trees. These trees had serious, four inch spikes all over them. I had read that the Nixon San Clemente White House had installed hedges of these trees to repel intruders. Apparently Africans planted hedges of them around villages to keep out elephants or rhinos or something. Maybe to keep out rich, white yuppies with cameras.....whatever.

One day, I was out laboriously planting my African oranges all along the property line (and even more laboriously supplying them with drip irrigation) while the dentist was watching some Mexicans plant his chardonnay (on the north side of the hill in the shade).

"What are you planting there?"

"African orange trees."

"What on Earth for?"

"Well, in Africa they keep out elephants and rhinos...."

"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of. What a waste of time and money!"

"Ray....."

"Yeah?"

"You seen any elephants or rhinos around since I put them in?"

3) Alright, screw the vaccine....I got my Tamiflu:

The US government's second line of defense is buying anti-virals.....Relenza and Tamiflu. These drugs actually attack the virus. We started stockpiling Tamiflu back in 2005 during the bird flu scare. President Bush asked for and got $1 billion for production and stockpiling....on top of the $1.8 billion already approved for purchases for Tamiflu use by the military by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The Tamiflu patent is held by a company called Gilead Sciences. Any guesses as to who was Chairman of Gilead until 2001? Donald Rumsfeld. He continues to hold stock in the company....whose stock went up 50% after the big purchases in 2005.

Well....if it works, who gives a shit....really. I spent $150 last week on Tamiflu for Little Puppy....and another $300 buying black market Tamiflu from an ER doc in 2007 to save Xabi from parvovirus.

Company press releases claim "Tamiflu significantly reduces the risk of death from influenza. New data shows a more than 2/3 reduction in deaths. Children with influenza are 53% less likely to contract pneumonia when treated with Tamiflu."

Turns out the study was flawed. Tamiflu is fucking expensive. Only yuppy fucks like me can afford it....and our kids, dogs, moms, wives and housekeepers are already in better shape than those poor slobs who can't afford it. Fuck 'em anyway.

Since then controlled studies have cast doubt on the whole Tamiflu experience. The company's own website is required by the post-Rumsfeld FDA to say: "Tamiflu has not been proven to have a positive impact on the potential consequences (such as hospitalizations, mortality, or economic impact (!!!)) of seasonal, avian or pandemic influenza." FDA is not aware of any data that support previous claims for Tamiflu.

In the real world, Tamiflu cuts symptoms of the flu by 24 hours. Oh, and by the way......yuppy fucks pouring down Tamiflu at the first sign of a hangover.....have already created a Tamiflu resistant strain of H1N1. It takes H1N1 only days to get around Tamiflu.

Oh, and among the side effects; 20% experience nausea and vomiting; 20% of children will have neuro-psychiatric side effects including anxiety and suicidal behavior. And there is a death from cardiac arrest thing....but not often. Only 50 people so far. In Japan.

4) Why not get a shot anyway, if it reduces symptoms and cuts the prevalence of the virus?

Because of the media hype....the "worried sick" are inundating hospital emergency rooms and flu-shot clinics. Most do not have H1N1, or if they have it they are not sick enough to be in a hospital. They waste the ER's time...and are literally killing people with real emergencies. Oh, and the sniffling crowds give each other the virus!

Proof again that there is a God.....and She has a Sense of humor.

5) What to actually do to lessen the effect of H1N1 and save your life:

You could go the vaccine/Tamiflu route....which is a lot like the Blessed Ollie route.

I am not poking fun here......I just spent a lot of time and energy and money on this with Little Puppy.

Here is my guy.....and Little Puppy is alive and back to getting fat and happy again.

Or.......

If you believe in Saint Harold....the science guy.....

You could do boring, boring, boring stuff.

Boring stuff that actually works statistically.

Stuff like wash your hands a lot. A lot. Try to learn to not touch your face, eyes and nose......Your friends will thank you.

Don't shake hands with anyone, till May. Bow like a Japanese businessman. Hey, we learned to live without water glasses in restaurants, right?

If you can get a flu shot from your doctor, or somewhere without a crowd.....why not? Stay out of crowds. Blessed Ollie accepts prayers outside of Church. And Christmas parties suck, anyway.

Do like the English, and get a Flu Buddy. If one of you gets sick...the other guy brings him food and meds so he doesn't have to leave the house. If you live in Cachagua, call the Store....we deliver. If you live in Carmel....call Nielsen's or Bruno's....they deliver. Safeway even delivers, supposedly.

That would keep you from actually having to have a friend.......

The Culinary Triangle....

2009-11-07T20:43:00.000-08:00

This is a food-related post.

Claude Levi-Strauss passed over the border last Friday at the age of 100. He almost made it to 101.

Claude was a famous anthropologist....anyone bludgeoned into taking Anthro 101 has been forced to read Tristes Tropiques or the Savage Mind. I hope.

Claude was the kind of genius that is readily recognizable in physics, chemistry, etc. He looked at modern culture and saw a completely different rationale for the way we live, work......cook. Had he written prose fiction, he would have won a Nobel. As it was he inspired a whole new generation of philosophers who in turn inspired physicists, chemists.....cooks....to think not just outside the box, but outside the hexahedron.

Basically, Claude looked at nature and human culture and saw that we had been struggling to define our world in blacks and whites. Ones and zeros. True and false. Good and bad. Fun and boring. He blamed all this on Plato, and he probably had a point. Well, three points as it turns out.

Claude thought the human brain was actually organized to perceive, evaluate and act on three points of view. 1, 0, and not 1 or 0. Good, bad....and not good or bad.

Claude was the son of a painter who was classically educated in Paris at the Sorbonne. He fell in love with an ethnologist and wound up in Brazil for five years in the 30's. His observations of primitive Amazonian cultures were what lit him up.

Anyway, one of his big teaching points was the Culinary Triangle. He used this to push his point about the limiting nature of binary thought.

Raw and rotten on one team. Raw and smoked on another team. Smoked and rotten/fermented on a team and so on.

Here is the extended version.

Culture determines where any piece of food (being French, he is talking meat here, mostly) winds up on the triangle. With no cultural intervention you have raw....rotten.

Roasting Claude saw as a mostly male endeavor. The introduction of subtlety and complexity in the processing of food he saw as female. Boiling is female because it needs a pot, and what dumbass hunter is gonna make a pot? Smoking is on the female side of things because it does not involve heat. Both boiling and smoking preserve all the juices in a given joint...which Claude saw as female. Conservation. Ditto fermenting...a natural process that needs to be controlled to keep it from descending to rotten.

By the way....Claude noticed that the cannibals would roast their enemies....and boil their friends.

Levi-Strauss was an early hero of the feminist movement....a buddy of Simone de Beauvoir. Believe it or not, his thesis that women held an important position in the establishment of human culture was radical at the time.

Claude's book "The Savage Mind" written about his experiences in Brazil in the Amazon...is called in French "La Pensee Sauvage". As an illustration of his ping-pong thinking...."pensee" also means "pansy" as well as "thought" in French. Sauvage means "savage" as well as "wild" in the sense of uncultivated (riz sauvage is wild rice). So the title could be "Wild Pansies"....which was the title Claude wanted for the English edtion. Given his triangle thinking about everything, including sexes.....it is an untranslatable pun. French editions of "La Pensee Sauvage" still have a pansy on the cover.

Think in triangles.....hold two or three thoughts in your head at once. It is how we are wired.

Anyhow....back in the 60's and 70's when all this hit the universities and coffee shops of the world....many different types of people were listening. Dumbass crappy electrical engineering students working in French restaurants. Crazy, cocaine snorting young kids stuck in Dad's traditional restaurants in Barcelona and Denia. Sober, thoughtful philosophy students in Paris working in restaurants on the side to pay the rent. Whacky philosophy students in the Santa Cruz mountains. Automotive engineers in Torino who spent all their free time in restaurants and kitchens. Wack-job poetry students stuck in Mum and Da's pub outside London.

Levi-Strauss' philosophy...or more accurately, his branch of anthropology.....was called structuralism. He believed that the human brain was structured in a different way than was being exploited by modern European culture.

Levi-Strauss was so fucking smart that to follow his reasoning about anything requires a polymath education in linguistics, music, folklore, neurology, philosophy, mathmatics....and a well-caffeinated IQ of over 150. Personally, I found IV administration of upper Amazonian alkaloids seconds before class to be useful to be barely able to keep up and hang on for dear life as talk spun from phonemes to kinship charts to Plato and back to the campfire.

Instantly, the opposite thought process leaps to mind. Well, the mind of the upper Amazonian chemically addled line chef.....the wacky philosopher Santa Cruz guy living in a guest house in a vineyard....the poet with a food science buddy.....the engineer feeling cut off from life.

De-structuralism.

Why am I doing any of this? Why do I have to use only a wooden spoon to whip in the 16 eggs into the pate-a-choux? Why are we sauteeing salmon when cold smoking it preserves all the texture, moisture and flavor? What is the difference between holding something in a bain-marie, and flash finishing it at the end? Why are all the women in the pastry and salad kitchen and all the men on the line?

It seems silly now....but I spent hours trying master tucking the tail of a perfectly trimmed branch of parsley under the curled anchovy caper garnish so the chef wouldn't notice the tucked tail and so the wind of the opening walk-in door wouldn't blow the parsley on 100 canapes all over the place. I almost always failed, and had to redo hours of work to make it look like it always had....and the wind from opening the walk-in door would ruin everything and cause all the work to be done twice.

This was cooking in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's....most places. In Monterey, it is still the way.

Other places, chefs and servers think about every possible aspect of each ingredient in each dish. The concept that boiling and steaming is feminine is a given. Cultural aspects of every ingredient and every process involved in preparing a dish are examined upside down, backwards and forwards. What is it about the combination of these flavors and textures that works....how can we analyze it, take it apart and put it back together in a way that makes people think.....and enjoy it even more for the thought process.

Anyway.....If you are ever in France in the spring or summer and are lucky enough to eat at Michel Bras in Laguigole.....or you eat at Arzak or Akelarre or Mugaritz in San Sebastian with guys inspired by Michel Bras...or if you ever are on the east coast of Spain and eat at El Bulli, or any of the dozen other places Feran Adria's apprentices have opened...if you ever eat at Manresa in Los Gatos....if you ever drink Randall Graham's wines from Bonny Doon....if you are ever lucky enough to eat at The Fat Duck outside London, or La Locanda de Tamerici in Ameglia in Italy.....or even at the Cachagua Store.....you will be participating in the wonderful legacy of Claude Levi-Strauss.

Today was my first Saturday off in six months. I still had to go in and turn some gorgeous halibut and some spot prawns that Les had caught for Dickie Springs' wake into a ceviche. When I dropped off the dish at the Community Center, all the men were gathered around the bbq's roasting steaks and pig. The women were inside laying out the pasta salads.

Here's to you, Claude!

Republican Pride....

2009-11-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

For years I have claimed to be a Republican.....and for years I actually was.

I loved being in touch with the base. In primaries I got to vote for folks like Evelle Younger for Governor, and whack job John Birchers from Orange County. Peter Neuman, the Dick Chaney of the Monterey County Republicans, was the guy who finally outed me. He actually checked the registrar of voters. Oops.

When people would drop their jaws in amazement at this seemingly liberal, long-haired crypto-Republican I would say: "Yup, I'm a Republican. And IRISH Republican.....we have our own Army."

But, really.....I always was a Republican. We had to hide this fact from my Irish grandparents. Grandpa was a union ship's carpenter. He actually transcended unionism. He started his apprenticeship around the turn of the century.....last century. All the work was done by hand, and the apprentices got the shitty jobs, just like in kitchens. Instead of peeling shrimp or garlic, Gramps got to plane boards. For 16 hours a day, 6.5 days a week. The way the apprentices held the hand planers involved tweaking their little fingers in inhuman directions. After four or five years of planing boards, their fingers were permanently bent under their palms. Even an 18 year old didn't need to show a union card or resume to get a job. The interview was all over at the handshake.

(I used this bit of history to save thirty bucks last week! I was in Williams-Sonoma buying a nice Shin knife for my friend DJ, and without ID, checks, cards.....nada. Cash only. I told the chick at the register to give me the chef's discount.

"How do I know you are a chef?"

I showed her my forearms........

Forty years of cuts, burns, slashes and gashes gets you 20% some places....)

Anyway, back in the 50's my parents were Republicans....mom was a precinct worker in Orange County for chrissakes. We had to hide this from Gramps, who was working at the VanCamps cannery on Terminal Island as a Union Carpenter. I blew the whole scene for my folks when I piped up at Sunday dinner in Redondo: "I like Ike!" I still remember the dead, dead silence that followed.

I came upon my Republicanism naturally...even genetically. My great-great grandfather....Publius Virgilius Jones (I am so bummed not to have a photo for you) was there at the founding of the Republican party in Jefferson County, Ohio in the 1850's.

In 1960 my school in Anaheim had a mock election. I was Richard Nixon, and my best friend was Jack Kennedy. His mom was named Jacque, and my mom is Pat, so it was very cute. I won in a landslide and actually got to shake the real loser, Nixon's, hand at one point.

I stayed Republican even in college at Cornell in the 60's. My Dad and I were the only two Republicans registered in our precinct. One year when I was booted out of school I got a job as a precinct watcher..... to check on those pesky Democrats denying Republicans their rights to vote. When my Dad dropped me off at 7am, and we both voted...... my work was done. I spent the rest of the day reading "Confederate General From Big Sur" and choking with stifled laughter. Snot even flew from my nose at one point....thereby confirming the Democrats' impression of the perverse nature of all Republicans.

My affiliation didn't stop me from demonstrating against the War, and John Mitchell's "No Knock". I wasn't a Nixon Republican any more....I was a Margaret Chase Smith guy...a John V. Lindsay Republican.....a Nelson Rockefeller guy. Back then Republicans were Republicans. No one bitched about affairs with interns.....Nelson didn't just grope his interns, he actually DIED fucking one.

Believe it or not, there was a time when rich, successful Republicans embraced noblesse oblige. They thought that a big tent was good.....and helping the working man succeed in life would help the whole nation succeed. Republicans fought political corruption and fought the idea of corporate control of the reins of power in America.

I still like Ike. I am still a Republican at heart.

I am no fan of government interference in business. The only reason I am working in Cachagua now is because Monterey County government is stupid and fucked beyond all reason....but hey, it is working out.

But last week, my 14 year old bus girl (we will ignore the fact that it is actually illegal for me to hire a 14 year old. Exploiting child labor is a Republican specialty.....) broke a tooth at school. She kept it quiet....since she is essentially homeless because her mom is a polar bear (Cachagua slang for a 5150 bipolar person). Mom is the rare non-drug addicted, non-alcoholic polar bear....she is nice and funny. She just has to spend half the month shut in a dark room sobbing....which is hard to express in a job application.

Anyway, Jazmyn dealt with the pain of the tooth. She didn't even have ibuprofen, since their most recent ex-landlord had claimed their jar against back rent. When the tooth abcessed, Jaz hung in there and kept going to school,.......but called in sick for Monday Night.

Of course, no health care for hardworking 14 year old, smart girls in America.....the greatest country on Earth. So.....I called Pastor Ben, who found an actual Christian dentist....I gave Jazmyn a Vicodin, a Costco jar of ibuprofen, a hundred bucks, and the night off.

Employer sponsored health care?

What kind of country do we have where a 14 year old girl has no expectation that her physical health is of any interest to the society she works so hard for?

Jazmyn is a Republican, too. She takes nothing she doesn't earn herself. She is 14, in school, and the only employed person in her family. She works her ass off with a smile, never says no to any task.....and I am afraid may hinge some of her self-worth and self esteem on how not rich her family is.

Oh, yeah.....Jazmyn popped some ibuprofen, half the Vikey.....and worked her shift at the Store. Took home eighty bucks.

Publius is pissed....but proud of the girl.

Meanwhile....today.

Ike, Publius V, Margaret, John V, Nelson and all those old-school dead Republicans are whirling in their tombs. The modern Republican party has finally disgraced itself beyond all recovery.

Today the leadership of the modern Republican Party held a "press event" in front of Nancy Pelosi's office to protest health care reform. This is one of their posters at their event. This is so wrong and foul I don't need to say a word about it.

Comparing the worst crime in modern history to fixing a tooth for the poster girl for the future Republican Party? These are not Republicans....they are pod-people. Not Americans....not even human.

Luckily I found a link to one of the last remaining real Republicans, Phillip Spooner. Of course, he is 87.....and will be dead soon. Of course, he lives in Maine....Margaret Chase Smith country.

If you can make it past the two minute mark without tearing up or getting pissed......I'm sorry.