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Arlington West
symbolic Iraq War (II) Veterans memorial.
16008 shopping days
until my 100th birthday...hint hint
RSS . < Subscribe!
Why ever not? https://hrw.org/blogs.htm
Arlington West
symbolic Iraq War (II) Veterans memorial.
16008 shopping days
until my 100th birthday...hint hint
thedailychannel.com — daily weblogs
A little while ago I was given a book for review, The Pocket Book of Patriotism, which I enjoyed reading, even though it didn't take very long. A handy little hardback, it's under a hundred pages. Before I tell you what's in it, though, let me tell you about our expedition to Arlington West, this Veteran's Day 2005.
I got an email telling me about some peace activism in Santa Monica this Veterans Day weekend. The symbolic burial ground, Arlington West, was going to be set up on Friday morning instead of the usual Sunday, on the beach just north of the Santa Monica pier, and on Saturday 100 flag-draped coffins were to be carried through the streets of Santa Monica. Since kids don't have school on Veterans day (although many adults have to work) we hopped in the car and hit the beach on the lunch hour.
There was plenty of news coverage, judging from the dozen-or-so huge ENG (Electronic News Gathering) cameras, and a large number of laptop-wielding and blackberry-thumbing staffers on the pier overlooking the vast graveyard of white crosses. I even saw someone juggling and appearing to simultaneously type on TWO little blackberry communicators at the same time. Note to people who think you're busy: if you just have one blackberry, you're liable to be seen as a slacker, compared to these hardworking newsgathering overachievers.
It was a beautiful November 11, blue sky, mountains in the distance, Pacific waves breaking on the beach. Lists were posted next to the walkway to the ocean, showing page after page of war dead. Who, where, when and how. Still not sure about why, really -- that wasn't listed. Small slabs of cardboard were set out, with little containers of rubber bands so that you could write a message and bind it to an empty cross. Name, rank, and loving message. As I was reading through the list, I looked up and saw a loving message on a small white cross in the sand "Never a better friend, nor a worse enemy." And on another: "I helped bring you home."
On the far side of a a dozen flag-draped coffins, a man bent over a news camera as if in prayer, a U.S. flag behind him suffering at half mast. Far to the right, near the breaking waves but landlocked in a sea of small white crosses in the sand, was the subject of his filming (not shown): a woman kneeling next to a cross with flowers. She was there when we arrived, and there she remained, an hour later when we left.
Now, on to the The Pocket Book of Patriotism [buy at amazon] , which is useful, inspiring, and which everyone should have.
This little book has speeches, poems, songs, and quotations about patriotism. In addition, it has a timeline of history from the dawn of man to the present. How useful? Let's just say I was sitting around wondering when penicillin was discovered, and bingo! 1928! My God, I'm lucky my father didn't get a deadly infection before the age of 8, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this now. I'm also lucky the Hitler Youth who so disapproved of him on the golf course in Germany when he was 14 didn't finish him off then, but that's another story.
The Pocket Book of Patriotism has the words to The Marine Hymn, it has John Kennedy's inaugural speech and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and George Washington's "To Bigotry No Sanction," delivered to the Hebrew congregation of Newport Rhode Island on August 19, 1790. Having each one of these around to read and re-read is worth the price of purchase. But wait, there's more! The Bill of Rights is in there too, as well as Lincoln's Gettysburg address.
In the two pages of quotations on the topic of patriotism, the very first, and one of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain. "Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man." This is a good thing to remember, in a time when, incredibly, an attempt is being made to tag disagreement -- not even determined dissent -- as unpatriotic. And when political leaders believe that it is helpful to their own cause to deride those who disagree with them as "girlie men."
The many reviewers who say that The Pocket Book of Patriotism is unbiased, though, are correct.
Of course there's a section on how to treat the flag, and there's a little bonus in the back, too. A small section on medals for valor includes information on The Medal of Honor, which many people think of as "The Congressional Medal of Honor," but which in fact has a simpler and better name.
The pledge of allegiance is given, as well as the naturalization oath.
An inspiring and informative book, under a hundred pages. Buy it, read it, know it, love it.
We attended the exhibit "Ecstasy: in and about altered states" at Los Angeles MOCA. And naturally, after just after we got past the sign that said "warning, sexual and other adult themes," right off the bat there were mushrooms. Isn't that kind of obvious? The direct artistic link, between mushroom image and altered state, in my opinion does not really exist. Remember, these mushrooms grow on cow puckies in cow pastures, and are identical in appearance to the ones that kill you. Hey, who said art was safe? As a disclaimer I think it's only fair to the artist, considering the controversial history of shit in art, to say that no cow puckies were depicted.
Mushrooms used in this way are a gimmick, aren't they? The very first exihibit in Ecstasy [in and about altered states] is a room-sized bay filled with low lying mushroom models growing directly out of the white floor, about 2 or 3 thousand of them. People are lying on the ground in front of the piece, getting a bugs-eye perspective view of the toadstools. Then, as if they have suddenly remembered about the cow puckies they get up and leave, and my 13-year-old lies down on the floor to get the same perspective. A guard comes up and says, no, you can't lie on the floor.
Pigs everywhere, doggone it. In this case, 'the man' is a woman, and one of the other guards tells me "she's kind of straight." Only now, as I'm thinking about this later does it occur to me that maybe I ought to have dropped down to the floor and gone limp, like Gandhi. What would Gandhi do? Aside from not being there in the first place, of course.
The next piece is a huge panel of multicolored you-know-whats, except with huge eyeballs painted all over them. Well, maybe they're eyes, not eyeballs. I forget exactly. Anyway. There's a viewing bench you sit down on to look at them, even though you're not a bit tired yet. Hey! The bench is moving! It slides slowly and gently down to the other end of the painting! You get a really good view of all the mushrooms. Then it stops, though. It's a one-way trip. Get it? Trip? One-way?
In the other big mushroom piece (oops, I'm giving this away) the guard prevents you from walking into this tunnel, woops, then he says go ahead. It's dark and there's a sign that says "caution, low-hanging moving sculptures." You go down this progressively darker tunnel, switching back upon itself, you're just waiting for that low flying sculpture to swing in out of the dark and conk you.
Then it starts getting lighter and lighter, and you come into a color-of-daylight room with fluorescent panels set into the floor (maybe you're supposed to think it's the ceiling, ha ha?) and gigantic upside-down rotating guess-whats are suspended from the ceiling. Or wait am I really upside down and it's the floor? You walk past, avoiding them, and out into a gigantic room filled with other weird art gimmicks, like plates and glasses on a table that are rotating so imperceptibly slowly that you can't tell they're rotating. According to the catalog "some are rotating clockwise, others counterclockwise". This is one of those moments when its essential to have a catalog, because of course the direction of motion is imperceptible. The wise people before you look underneath the table to try to see the motor. Less wise, I look directly down onto the top of the plate, and see that someone has spit onto the plate, the glistening spittle twirling around making the direction of motion clear. Silly me, I had thought that was the art part. Did we mention earlier art might not be safe?
In some cases, it might not even be art. Consider the antics of one let's just call him a non-performance artist, who ingested seven different drugs over seven days in New Orleans and then walked around taking photographs. "Spirits", marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, i.e. speed, some other drug I forget, and ecstasy. Two incoherent photographs were shown, definitely not of New Orleans as it exists today, or maybe even any day in that particular week. A coterie of high school kids was gathered round, avidly noting down the drug sequence in their spiral notebooks. School project? Impressive!
Some of the pieces were luridly sexual, others erotic in the sense that you really ought to take someone there with you and feel the tension build. Together. I won't talk about these now, but if you send me your phone number and suggest a time I'll be happy to give you a call. editor at thedailychannel dot com
Another piece: a film. A black and white movie of a man asleep in the back of a car evoked someone being driven home after a big bender of a bar crawl but it turned out he had ingested a sleepworthy dose of the sleep drug halcyon in order to make an ecstatic movie. In another piece, a fountain that purported to spout LSD-25 was attested to by a certificate of authenticity by the homeopathic doctor that allegedly concocted the mixture. Obviously fake but I steered clear of it anyway. Even in the seventies I never tried acid and I certainly don't intend to start now. If you need drugs to generate peace and love, is it really peace? Is it really love?
Other parts of the exhibit. You won't see the enclosed view of the flagpole near LA City Hall -- the fire department said: unsafe. But, art, though. And you missed the huge confetti guns that shot 600 pounds of confetti on opening night. Surely enough to make a sad person really happy, even if just for a few moments. But there are a couple of completely successful pieces that you will remember for a long time. For me, it was a huge matrix of small green lights, stretching on into infinity in a huge area of inner space -- all the way up to the row of green exit signs.
And there is a masterpiece. A three-screen video of a house in the forest. If you walk in at the right time, a woman is floating slowly through the trees, narrating her fragmented mental state in some language you almost certainly won't recognize, but which is subtitled in English on all three screens, the same words, different views of the same scene. It's a house in the woods with a Volvo that drives itself and then dissociates (or is the living room breaking down?), a cow that was just a minute ago in the TV walking in flagrante bossy swingin' that udder through the dining room. No wonder the poor woman puts up drapes.
Of course there was more, even in 2 hours we didn't absorb it all. You'll just have to visit LA Moca yourself, at the Geffen Contemporary near Little Tokyo, through February 20, 2006.
Sometimes it just comes in over the transom. You're just sitting around, innocently enough. And then the next political battle is joined.
Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi have joined forces in backing Phil Angelides for Governor in 2006 to defeat Right Wing Arnold. And so it must be, that Democrats in California are going to kick some serious butt in 2006.
I admire and enjoy the maps in 'Children Map the World' which arrived for review from ESRI press last week, completely unsolicited. These unforgettable images of the world, rendered by children in a global map competition, are beautiful, moving, and profound. The story of the competition is interesting, too. It was started by the cartographer Barbara Petchenik, and over time she interviewed over a thousand kids from all over the world about their cartographic knowledge. It turns out that kids prefer clear and uncluttered maps without too many extraneous elements. No surprise there!
Lower-quality web scans of the prizewinning images can be seen online for free, but the book is worth buying, either for yourself or as a gift for your favorite world history teacher or school administrator. Or kid! The quality of the images in the book -- a typical uncompromisingly good ESRI production on heavy stock -- will change the way you think about both maps and children.
I enjoyed Savitri Brant's light and clear book design, and appreciate ESRI's good efforts in designing the book. I know from Richard Hendel's excellent and wonderful book, 'On Book Design', that books which are designed have no commercial advantage over books which are not. Thanks, ESRI!
The maps (by children, don't forget) are elegant; intense and heartfelt, by turns altruistic, pessimistic, hopeful and inspiring. "Children Map the World" is worth re-examination, to think and re-think what the art means, and as a reminder that even the youngest of us can take a global perspective, sharing our fears and hopes.
Only a few entries actually 'map' the world. Most, although they contain maps, are art from starting blocks to world competition winner. My favorite example of the former though, is the thematic map 'The Horse Population of the World", by Taiga Marthens, showing the size of each country drawn to reflect the number of horses in the country, the number also being shown.
Global warming and pollution are recurrent themes of the maps. One particularly arresting image, "No Smoking" by Horvath Agnes, 15 years old in 1993, renders the world on the bowl of a pipe, with puffs of smoke in the form of deathheads floating out the top. An ominous image, not easily shaken.
Another entry shows a band-aid strategically placed on top of the northern ozone hole.
Imaginative and whimsical images abound. The continents are shown as leaves, fish, even collections of paper sheets. One of my favorites was 'Snail Planet' by Lazar Czvjetkovic (age 12) showing the earth in orbit as a snail crawling around a snail sun, with other snail planets of the solar system in similar slow orbits. The planet's motion may be slow, but it is inexorable.
Don't you dare delay. Whirl your way over to amazon.com and click yourself a copy of Children Map the World: Selections from the Barbara Petchenik Children's World Map Competition [buy at amazon] . It's a colossal bargain.
The Intelligent Eye: Learning to Think by Looking at Art [buy at amazon] . by David N. Perkins
On Book Design [buy at amazon] . by Richard Hendel
If you always drive everywhere, you can lose the sense of how easy it is to walk, even for relatively long distances. With gas prices the way they are, I walked over to a nearby park in Culver City, where the Shakespeare Scum were putting on the Shrew Cycle, or as they named it "Shrew Variations."
The 'Scum started off with Shakespeare as playwright, but Kate became dissatisfied with the result, and quit the play just before the intermission, unable to finish her famous speech "why are we soft?" Instead she shouted "I'M OUT", and walked offstage, returning for a few moments to berate Will Shakespeare himself for a bit before her final exit. After intermission the story resumed as "The Shrew Orchard," with Petrucchio a rich Moscow nightclub owner there to buy the prune orchard. Next stop, "Waiting for the Shrew," soon followed by "Shrew on a Hot Tin Roof. The show continues next week, in that little park at the intersection of Braddock and Motor, and is free. Sit on the grass, or bring your own chairs, and bring a dollar for the freshly popped popcorn at intermission.
Of course, I also walked over to the local supermarket on Friday and picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince [buy at amazon] . by J.K. Rowling. This means that I know (since I have read the book) who the Half Blood Prince is, who was killed, and who did the killing. Children's literature? Perhaps. In this sixth tome of the series the world is already well on its way to a dark wasteland, with death and destruction at every turn. The frightful dementors (if given an opportunity they suck your soul out through your face, after which you're not good for much) have escaped from their role as prison guards at Askhaban State Prison, but fortunately don't put in an appearance. Harry and Professor Dumbledore take many a trip down memory lane through the illuminative magic of the 'pensieve' a bowl into which you pour a silvery strand of (yours or someone else's) memory, and inhabit it realistically for a few moments of present time, sharing the experience with your guest. And a good thing, too. Harry will need the knowledge of Lord Voldemort's early childhood in the seventh and one presumes final tome of the series, which can appear not a moment too soon.
This morning, to the music of Cubanismo, I sliced two small onions and a red pepper, and sauteed them in just enough olive oil. (I've been using too much, and have instigated a successful effort to cut back even though it entails more stirring) Then I cut up three small tomatoes and tossed them in too. The tomatoes were Early Girls grown in our Los Angeles rooftop garden, and I have been watering them each morning while gazing, in the cool morning air, upon the gigantic billboards of one gigantically bad movie after another -- although the movie posters have now been replaced by posters showing gigantic headshot photos of radio personalities. Perhaps the shift in advertising focus from movies to radio is responsible for the decline in moviegoing? After sprinkling in some turmeric, spicy japanese pepper, curry powder and ground black pepper, I cut half a block of firm tofu into cubes and mixed it in for another 2 or 3 minutes, before adding a huge handful of baby spinach greens and covering the frying pan so they would wilt down in.
McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container [buy at amazon] . All about container gardening, a Megnut-inspired purchase, now come to fruition.
Recipe from If the Buddhha came to Dinner: how to nourish your body to awaken your spirit [buy at amazon] . As disappointing as this book is from a nourishment perspective, it has given me this extremely serviceable breakfast recipe. (The tomatoes from the rooftop garden were my addition).
Today a bike-riding shopper wished me a "Happy Solstice". And so it is! She was well aware of the earth, as we all should be. For my part, I have checked the 2nd edition of "Global Warming: the complete briefing" out of the library. The third edition, which was just published last year, adds over 100 pages and ten years more experience with climate change.
If you're interested in the climate of Earth, I think there's probably no better introduction than this charts-and-graphs-filled book. Easy to read, hard to refute, not alarmist by any means (but maybe I should wait until I've actually read the 3rd edition, rather than the older 2nd!) Paddle your kayak on down through the rising waters (if you live near the ocean) or saddle your dustbowl desert burro (if you live inland) to amazon.com and grab a copy of Global Warming: the complete briefing [buy at amazon] by Sir John Houghton. I guarantee you'll be better-informed on greenhouse gases and the global carbon cycle.
A trip to the library here, a bookstore visit there, it's no mystery when 4 mysteries appear in my pile of books stacked up for review. With one exception, each of these books was good all the way through and offered a new view of today's world, a tale told by a veteran mystery writer, loaded for bear and out for vengeance.
Chasing Shakespeares [buy at amazon] . by Sarah Smith
Sarah did a great job her first time out (she's not a veteran mystery writer). The protagonist, suckered by a forged Shakespeare letter and a Harvard babe, is a rube. The babe pays his way to London and they kick around town. They kick around any Shakespeare venue they find. They may even have discovered some new venues: you make the call. At moments, he doubts the whole Shakespeare story. In the end, she dumps him. I can't believe I read the whole thing, but I wouldn't dream of faulting a so-carefully-researched tome on one of my favorite topics, albeit not from this perspective.
Absolute Friends [buy at amazon] . by John Le Carre
When the Cold War is over, what happens to spies? They keep on spying, don't they? With the way facts are made to fit Iraq, it probably comes as no surprise that spies could be killed in service of the same story. Then, the story belongs to the living.
That's the conclusion at the end of this carefully crafted historical thriller, but it takes a long way to get there. Pakistan, London, Berlin, somewhere in Eastern Europe, and then back to Germany. The sad part? Spies don't tell their wives what's going on. They just limp along as lames, no one the wiser as to the true value of their fearful endeavors. The happy part? There isn't one. John Le Carre? Hasn't lost the touch. Definitely worth reading for a caring depiction of the radical '60s/'70s.
Voodoo River [buy at amazon] . by Robert Crais
Elvis Cole, L.A. private eye, heads to Louisiana in a well-researched and well-told regional novel. Louisiana is well-known for its food, and Elvis explores it well. Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and a small Delta town provide the setting for an adopted-daughter family discovery, with a mixture of illegal-alien smuggling, murder, and movie star avoidance of tabloid coverage thrown in. When Elvis falls for the local lawyer covering the case for the well-known movie star, well... read it yourself. Unlike Blacklist (next), it became too exciting to continue reading, which made it take 4 days to finish. Interesting concept: a page-turner in which the dramatic tension becomes so intense that you have to stop turning pages for a couple of hours. Robert Crais has the gift, and he has written a half-dozen other books.
Blacklist [buy at amazon] . by Sarah Paretzky
A post-9/11 private eye novel, worth reading for that fact alone. VI Warshawski goes up against the FBI and Homeland Security birds. If you know Chicago you'll probaby like this, too. It delves as deeply as it might into the Black (now African-American) communist dance experience in Chicago. A pretty interesting scene that no one knows much about. Otherwise wouldn't I have known too? Unfortunately I got lost in the last half of the story, as the entangled family story became far too tangled up for me to remember, follow, or care much about. Read the first three-quarters anyway, it's a paradigm of detective stories in the age of after-Ashcroft.
Unusual weekend visit to the Huntington Library in San Marino, to see Isaac Newton's books and journals on display. It was definitely well worth the trip just to see Hooke's and Descartes' own drawings. Newton's journals in his own handwriting were in English and Latin, with plenty of diagrams.
In his review of the exhibit when it was in NYC, James Gleick, one of Newton's many present-day biographers, complained that Newton's dark and lonely side was left out, and his interest in alchemy not even alluded to in the exhibit. Well, at the Huntington they made room for some alchemical books and drawings. They were in another room, so either Gleick missed it or they simply added the new texts.
In fact, a fascinating page showing five or six staves of musical notes was displayed, from a book on alchemical music that Newton was known to have read. Irene was with me, she said it was a chant and was kind enough to hum a few bars of this 450-year-old music. Exactly what it was that made the music alchemical remains to be discovered by me. I can tell you this much. In the gift shop they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
The exhibit was curated by Mordechai Feingold, a professor of history at CalTech, and the exhibit book is available on amazon. A really fun thing to do would be to read a copy of the exhibit book and then hop over to the Huntington Library before the first half of the show is over in June. he Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture [buy at amazon] . by Mordechai Feingold
Heading up Beverly Glen Blvd in Los Angeles, we caught site of a Michigan manufacturer's plate: a Ford. Lo and behold, there was a gizmo on the left rear wheel, taking stats. Look for it soon on the Ford Focus carlot near you.
Here's a blurry photo of the new Ford, caught in flagrante de road testNote protruding gizmo on left rear wheel.
Recently read three thinking person's mysteries. What did they all have in common? Their authors had their characters think.
What is TInspector Saito's Small Satori [buy at amazon] . by Janwillem van de Wetering The Perfidious Parrot [buy at amazon] . by Janwillem van de Wetering Skinny Dip [buy at amazon] . by Carl Hiaasen
You can find great things roaming through the stacks of your public library. When I found "The Complete guide to Chi-Gung", I had to check it out. Sure enough, it was chock full of diagrams and instructions on exactly how to unlock your inner power and best of all it was in English. Chi-Gung is a huge quasi-religious movement that is sweeping/being suppressed in China. There used to be a Chi-Gung school on Overland Avenue in Los Angeles right next to the freeway, but it turned out to be short-lived.
Still, you can learn Chi-Gung now, from a book. However, a chapter entitled "Signs of success in Chi-gung" indicated to me that it is a course of study you might not want to undertake lightly. For here are some of the signs of success:
Special notes on supernatural powers: "Supernatural powers may manifest as luminous visions of deities, energies or cosmic phenomena that appear in 'the minds eye' sounds or voices heard in the 'minds ear', and spontaneous insights into the past, present or future...."
"Intuitive visions of particular events unfolding in the future reflect the acheivement of clairvoyance. All such signs must be handled with the greatest respect and vigilance. It also takes time to learn how to interpret such visions, voices and insights, and how to properly utilize them."
Nonetheless, if you dare: The Complete Guide to Chi-Gung [buy at amazon] . by Daniel Reed.
If you have time for one slim book to give you background on the Islamic view of pre-Iraq war world events, a very good choice would be The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, by Princeton Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Bernard Lewis. This book has been influential, and the influence is well-deserved.
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror [buy at amazon] . by Bernard Lewis.
If you would like to read a difficult, yet liberating book, here's an excellent choice for you. Sam Harris starts out strong in The End of Faith, then ends up somewhere in obscure (to us) Upanishads, wherever that may be.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason [buy at amazon] . by Sam Harris.
The Vendee globe is not over, but the winner has landed. The race has been won. In the meantime, I have read the first three books of the new year. First, a memoir from a failed zen career by the great Dutch mystery writer Janwillem van de Wetering. He had so many interesting adventures pursuing a dream of Eastern nihilism in a civilized country, and encountering Zen and other gurus in his travels. Which, as it turns out, are partially fictionalized, episodes having ben collapsed and combines. No matter. He's a great story-teller.
And about that failure? Perhaps it's all for the best. As it turns out Zen careers are very narrowly defined. Fortunately Mr. van de Wetering did quite a bit afterzen [buy at amazon] . by Janwillem van de Wetering. Including write a whole string of wonderful Amsterdam Cops mystery stories.
We took in the executive gala celebration of the opening of "Thing" at the Hammer (corner of Westwood & Wilshire Blvds) and found the sculpture on the second floor well worth the wine, cheese sticks, sandwiches and flavorburst canapes on the first floor. They were both standard fare, with a couple of real standouts. Ok ok the art surpassed the munchies but both are requirements of an interesting life.
The first floor lobby has been repainted with a vast iceberg scene and the first floor gallery filled with a subjectively interpreted solar collector based on Lem's Solaris. Or, rather, inspired by Solaris.
Attempts to try describing art and what it all means are usually pretty silly unless you go whole hog into it at length, which is often pretty silly too. Let's just say there was one piece so huge, so surprising, and yet so diminutive (and so orange) that it alone will be worth the trouble you take to find free street parking north of the Mormon temple and walk the five blocks to the Hammer. Which is exactly what we did not do, but it wouldn't have taken any longer than spiralling downward on a concrete ramp into the bowels of the earth and then riding a tiny elevator nearly to the very surface of Trantor, where we emerged into a higher level of the parking lot, then finally issued forth onto a carpet along with all the black-clad, earringed, coiffed, and besuited individuals, enjoyed wine, art, and song, and finally beat our way out and back up to the planet surface against the oncoming art-hungering crowd, to a cloverleaf shuffle of freeway entrances and exits, bopping our way bulletlike to a distant concert only to be greeted with a cryptic sign on the small chapel, "latecomers may be seated through door 34," a door which at that time and on this plane, patently did not exist. Maybe we ought to initiate a close-read study of the book of Revelations.
My daughter Nicole designed this tall-ship-based oceangoing curriculum, and she and Chris would like to set up other 2-week courses like it at other colleges. (Thereby spending more time at sea themselves.) Here are some of Nicole and Chris's blog postings from last month, send by radiotelephone on their ship at sea, the HMS Bounty. For real!
Nicole
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicole-wednesday-night.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicole-no-sight-of-land.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicole-saturday.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicole-moment-of-glory.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicoles-5th-entry.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/nicoles-final-entry.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/postscript-re-entry-nicole.html
Chris
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-friday.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-friday-ii.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-saturday.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-sunday.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-final-days.html
http://mhcbounty.blogspot.com/2005/01/chris-escapism.html
Preparing for trans-USA travels at Christmas, what better than a religious action thriller? Suppose an ancient order of monks was charged with keeping a certain Christian safe from enemies -- and finding him for rescue if he had been captured and buried in an unlikely prison? And suppose further that a beautiful woman, a Harvard PhD candidate, was attacked by a bunch of terrorists for no obvious reason, yet rescued at the last minute by a mysterious Frenchman who was seriously injured in the rescue, but who hours later simply got up and walked out of the Mass General Hospital emergency room after an apparent clinical death?
This is just part of the intriguing, unlikely, and gradually unfolding premise of The Assignment [buy at amazon] .by Mark Andrew Olsen, a book that is everything that the Da Vinci Code hoped it could be, and was not.
Vitiated somewhat by the literal appearance of devil-homuncili (you can see them riding on the backs of their possessed hosts) and the implied appearance of angels (not to mention the holy longevity of the central character), this multi-millenial tour-de-force was pretty doggone readable. I, at any rate, read the whole thing in one single escapist rush. What can I say, I love it when the monks at Mont St Michel pick up automatic weapons, even if they do perish. A mighty fortress, and all that.
All in all, the protagonist had a long and unhappy life, having to live with his own repeated and soul-deadening failures in his battle with evil. "Oh, but to have been an angst-ridden existentialist", he might have been excused for thinking. Fortunately at long last he eschews the weakness of self-reliance, casts his lot completely and totally with the Lord, traps the arms of the evilly-possessed-one (formerly a Nazi, now a Catholic priest) at the crucial instant and recites 'maximus expelliarmus' or whatever the spell is called in The Church and rejoins his loved one and her centuries-old family, not to mention his Lord and Saviour, for their long-promised but never really-truly expected final reward. Thank God and Amen.
Last night I coarsely chopped two onions, swearing like a navvy through my tears, sliced two big orange carrots, squoze two garlics through a blue plastic press, minced two half-ribs of celery into sminy little pieces and because I don't have a large enough dish, I popped it all into TWO flame-proof casseroles. Each dish was filled about half-way up with cut-up chunks of stewing beef, for a total of about two and a half pounds. I split 3 bay leaves and a fresh bunch of thyme between the two pots. THEN I poured a bottle of wine into the dishes, half the bottle into each dish, and put them in the refrigerator overnight.
The wine? Vin de Pays du Gard 2001 from Mas des Tourelles, a small family vineyard between Provence and Languedoc. I obtained this from the good-time flavor fanatics over at Wine Expo in Santa Monica (310-828-4428). Just the thing for Provencal beef stew, n'est-ce pas? It's a mixture of 60 percent syrah and 40 percent merlot grapes, so you can duplicate the recipe just by getting a bottle of each, and mixing accordingly.
What am I doing right now, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, when I should be over at Caltech listening to Edward Tufte talk about his forthcoming book "Beautiful Evidence?" I'm simmering the pots of beef stew for three or four hours, before popping them back in the fridge for another overnight flavor-meld. And, of course, I'm writing to you from high up in my atelier loft, the beef-and-thyme aroma wafting all the way to the nearby rafters. Welcome me back online and join me in the pleasures of life.
One of the pots I'm using is a standard flame-proof casserole with a glass cover that I have employed to such great success in the past for the life-changing "lamb baked at 350 with 40 cloves of garlic". The other dish is a heavy brown container from Washington state, crafted from volcanic ash. Sad to say, it has lost its cover and so it's topped off with aluminum foil and, for God's sake, an upside-down plate. Whoever said cooking isn't rocket science would feel right at home in my kitchen.
And here's a thing to worry about, a small fear in today's too-fearful world. If I place the volcanic pot on the flame, will the flame, a thin flickering barely-lit blue light from a gas stove, approximately one-one hundredth as hot as the interior of a white-hot violent volcano, could this cause the pot crack in half, ruined? We must live as we live: The answer to the question of whether the pot will survive, will appear tomorrow, along with the beef stew. The recipe, estouffade Provencal (I forgot to mention 2 tablespoons of olive oil) can be found on p. 202 of Bistro Cooking [buy at amazon] . by Patricia Wells
Note: the word "sminy", appearing above and not in any dictionary, was first heard used by Mr. Gregory Schern of Moab Paper (moabpaper.com) in a presentation of his company's paper products to the Southern California Adobe Technical Exchange (atxsocal.org). "Sminy" is intended to combine the meanings of the two words "small" and "tiny". Sminy pieces of celery are, therefore, not very big at all, while "sminy little" pieces would be smaller still.
The Vendee globe starts on Sunday. You might enjoy following the only American entry on this around-the-world race. It IS an ocean planet, after all.
Visit OceanPlanet.org on one of the last adventures if you have plenty of money and are crazy about getting away from civilization.
Here's a link to a great election map at CSPAN, and a long message from a hardworking peace activist who has gone to Florida. There's no reason I should be the only one to read this message...
Great Election Map at CSPAN
[Letter from a friend in Florida on Nov. 2 2004]
My Friends,
It's 3:48 a.m. I distinctly remember this feeling before I have run marathons. You can't wait for it to start, and you can't wait to get it done. Excited, slightly nauseated, scared and confident. After months of preparation, you can't predict how it will finish.
But there the comparison ends. Because I know we have already won. Yes, we have.
Look at this magnificent sea of Americans - millions of us - who have already come together to take our country back. That's the miracle. This state of aliveness, of piercing, painful concern for the future of our United States. I think of my beautiful friends back in my Mar Vista neighborhood in California - our perpetual (19 month) Friday night vigil for peace. We have witnessed the shift of opinion against the war, learned to laugh at the nasty Bubbas in their trucks or fine cars. Through the marches and the fliering and tabling and the pot lucks, I have found my community, my home. My heart. I am miles and miles away, but they stand with me.
Think of all the MoveOn bake sales that brought more of us together in just a few months... It was like underground springs that suddenly shot up, out of the earth, as people found their passion, their hope, and donated time and hard earned money to bake sales, house parties, phone banks. Who would have ever imagine themselves, traveling to another state get out the vote. Look what we are all doing. We are all in a new place. We have come to believe that we can make a difference.
Here in Ocala Florida, it truly is the front lines of this battle. Right now, back at the Democratic HQ, a one floor office suite about the size of two double garages, the decorations are hung, waiting. Robert the field organizer and a couple other buddies are probably crashed out on the floor. I left at 11:00 last night, as the computer team was shifting the hardware in place. Cases of water and handouts were flying out the door, into cars that will take them to our 12 key polling stations at 6:45 am. These stations will be manned in shifts by our Watchers, inside the polls, and our Greeters, out on the lines, who are charged with keeping people hydrated and happy. More clipboards and t-shirts, ( all purchased by California donors) are going to a church and a union hall in key neighborhoods, where volunteers will canvass relentlessly. Waves of updated data will be driven out to the staging areas by a team of runners, so the canvassers will know exactly who has yet to vote. Another team of drivers will stand by to take folks to the polls. Oh, and add to that more runners with dozens of doughnuts and sandwiches.
I will man the volunteer line, as people call in, desperate to do some thing, any thing to help. And, I will try to direct confused volunteers to their shifts in unfamiliar neighborhoods. I will also have to turn away a good number of retirees who wanted to come in and help on the phones, getting out the vote. All the phone banking has been handed over to our friends in California. No extra folks inside the HQ today. We can't afford to have any Bubbas cutting the phone lines. (Yeah, they do that here.)
It's absolutely incredible to witness this volunteer army readying for battle. After all this is over, I will send you the photos of these ordinary heroes. Right now, count your self among them, no matter where you live. We are all together in this. We are the change.
This IS the victory.
Paging backwards through the 1 November issue of the New Yorker magazine, I came across an amazing photograph. And then another. I hadn't seen any of them before, but after another page or two found tears come to my eyes. I knew if these great landmark photos continued to appear as I paged on, that I would start to cry. It wasn't a good feeling, knowing that a great photographer must have died.
These were the last photos by Mr. Richard Avedon. The newsstand price of the November 1 New Yorker is only four dollars and ninety-five cents, and while there are lots of reasons to read it, including what is being billed as a first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate (Kerry), Avedon's last photos are a compelling reason to buy it and keep it around.
Venturing far from his studio in the final days of his life, Richard Avedon evidently had it in mind to document, or at least create some views of, an America under considerable stress and disagreement. Born in 1923, he hadn't finished his final project.
A bonus of your strongly encouraged immediate purchase? A well-reasoned and not-too-long indictment of Bush-as-president. Run don't walk to your local newsstand. And then, of course, be sure to vote.
Tomorrow I will make 40-garlic chicken for my family, but they will be out collecting chocolate treats which they will not eat. Why won't they join me for dinner?
Of course at this point none of us know this future, and we don't know the consequences either. All I can tell you now? 40-garlic chicken is easy to make, although time-consuming, and a once-in-a-lifetime experience. If you have the opportunity, and I'm not necessarily saying you ever will, make sure not to miss it.
An incredible sculpture: a Japanese Zero (the fighter plane) photographed from a model, blown up to life-size, and inflated (?!). Then, after the exhibit, burned up. Burning Man, this is Burning Plane. The artist, interviewed, was unable to put the underlying idea into just a few words. "The meaning is too complicated to explain," he said in a video that was showing in a loop in the lobby.
To me, the burning plan seemed kinda toxic, what with PVC flames flying in the neighborhood. I would try to stop it if I lived there. It definitely seemed like it might be worth a march. Do you live in Northampton Mass? I don't think it's been burned yet.
The restrooms on the 2nd floor of the Smith College Art Museum have been designed by artists. How appropriate is that? You must make it a point to visit both the mens and womens. Please forgive me, but it's a must go.
(Bring your student ID if you want to get in free. Smith doesn't practice reciprocal art-museum admissions unless you actually work for the art museum.)
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