The Old Contemplates the New

THIS PHOTO OF THE BINNENHOF in The Hague, taken last September, keeps pushing toward the front of the desk, I don’t know why. The Hague used to seem stuffy and snooty to me, and in fact I was told, years ago, that the Dutch themselves use the term haagse, "haguish" I suppose would be the translation, to mean something like nose-in-the-air.

In recent years that’s changed, and The Hague seems more like Los Angeles, or Sydney, less like ... well, the Boston of old. I suppose Boston has changed similarly.

The Binnenhof is at the center of The Hague: it’s the complex of governmental buildings, a fine old castle of a complex, in fact, its oldest rooms dating back to the 13th century. That’s it on the right, the brick building with all the dormers, beyond the pond which itself is, I suppose, a remnant of the old defenses around the castle.

Above and beyond the Binnenhof rise three of the many new buildings which have so changed The Hague, brought it into the late 20th century you might say. Twenty years ago I would have hated all this, but now that I’m seventy years old I better understand that Change is not a jerky motion from one state to another, it is the constant flux, stately at some times, astonishingly quick at others, without which there is no life.

And here in The Netherlands this change, at least in this period, is being done with such style; and the style contains so much good humor! The sharp brick gables on the rose-and-blue skyscraper at the right comment on traditional Dutch canal houses, and more specifically on the gothic roofs of the Binnenhof. That curious copper-blue-green cupola on the brick tower to the left of them -- some architect’s comment on the dome, of course; but also the traditional structure of the once-ubiquitous Dutch windmill, lacking its sails.

In the foreground, the Dutch fondness -- an obsessive fondness, really -- with sculpture. And how the substantial Haagse lady in her pink T-shirt confronts this green abstracted speedwalker, and how the jets of the fountain beyond him lend angel’s plumage to his shoulders!

The people in the boat -- you won’t believe this -- are installing another sculpture, a temporary one I suppose, consisting of gaily colored spheres floating in the pond. I don’t know if they’ve finished and are rowing away, or whether they’re towing it around the pond, or whether it’s chasing them; it doesn’t seem to matter.

I think that’s the Mauritshuis beyond the trees, which in fact are growing on an island in the pond. The Mauritshuis is one of the finest art museums in the world, home to splendid Vermeers and Rembrandts and Ruisdaels, to Paulus Potters’s amazing portrait of a magnificent bull, and Carel Fabritius’s tender and mysterious portrait of a goldfinch.

Everything comments on everything else. This is urban landscape as conversation, a conversation marking a protracted present moment in a long and generally prosperous history of a civil and cultured society. I love it.

Books, books, books

AMONG MY FAILURES: keeping current with my reading of current material. So only now do I see the December 5 (2005) issue of The Nation, the annual “Fall Books” issue, with its opening sidelong glance at Georges Perec (whose W, or The Memory of Childhood I finished reading this morning), and its reviews of Canetti’s final memoir instalment, and biographies of Voltaire and Rousseau and Laurence Olivier, and Andrew Delbanco’s biography of Melville.

Now as many of my friends and family know I contribute to my failure to keep current with literature a terrible foible I’ve cultivated for years: I like to read authors chronologically; that is, to read their books in the order in which they were written. Clearly I violate this principle from time to time: I’ve read Rousseau’s Confessions and Voltaire’s Candide, but nothing else of these indispensable progenitors of Modernism.

From time to time there are errors of reading, as when I thought W, or the Memory of Childhood was an earlier work than in actually is, and discover that it belongs instead to the middle of Perec’s output: so now I have to loop back; and I sentence myself to recapitulating Perec’s work next before I get to move on to anything else...

So Canetti will have to wait; I have not read Canetti at all.

And the Melville survey, beautifully begun with Typee and Mardi and Omoo, won’t move on to Redburn this year.

All these musings are set in motion by a chance intersection: Vivian Gornick’s review of Delbaco’s Melville with a letter to the editor of The Nation by one Bill Halsey, responding to a review last October of Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America. Halsey points out that the reviewer (Russell Platt) had overlooked the role of recorded music “in destroying a musical culture [the American musical culture] that [had] produced great musicians.”

Halsey presents two signal results of the commercial success of recorded music: it deprived many, probably most musicians of their livelihood; and it “created a class of canonical performers... and music became consumed with imitating the past.”

Gornick laments the lack of a “grand theme” in Delbanco’s biography of Melville, contrasting his work with “the truly grand terms” with which Melville was presented in F.O. Matthiessen’s classic Amierican Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, which appeared over sixty years ago.

“...[T]he tragic vision of Man Against Nature, our own Innate Depravity, the guilty need for Crucified Innocence, the Malign Intelligence of existence itself -- those terms were fresh, original, exhilarating,” Gornick writes. “Today they are worn thin, in criticism and biography alike.”

Here of course is yet another example of a Present failing by comparison with the Past. “The problem is one of imagination,” as Gornick herself writes.

So I return to Perec, looking forward to Melville (and, of course, a resumption of Henry James). Why these novels? Because, as the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk writes in yet another piece in this yellowing issue of The Nation, “The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is... one of the cornerstones of European civilization, it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature...

“I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else.”

This exactly describes Georges Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood. W is the name of a fantastic island off Tierra del Fuego, an island whose perfectly organized society centers on a cruel and efficient obsession with Sport. The Memory of Childhood is an account of a presumably Jewish childhood in French Savoy during World War II. The two accounts, at first apparently completely unrelated, interrupt one another in a presentation that alternates nervously between them, but they converge as the book continues; at the end you might think W either a parable of the insanity of Hitler’s Europe, or the first fictional attempt by the child whose early days are being remembered; or perhaps both are true.

Perec is a marvelous literary stylist. (He’s best known, I suppose, for his long novel La Disparition, translated into English as A Void: a long novel that dispenses entirely with the letter “E,”) But he is also a keen social commentator: he knew as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau that it is in the novel that Europe thinks, understands, and imagines, and thereby unites experience and the consideration of experience. His first novel, Things, is a brilliant insight into the commoditarian culture of the late 20th century. I look forward to continuing with him.

Coffee Time

THE BAD NEWS IS, it’s in Palo Alto. Not very likely I’m going to drive two hundred miles for coffee, not even really good coffee.

But the good news is, my very favorite coffee in the world is now available here in the USA, and it’s only a couple of hours away. And after all I do occasionally get down near Palo Alto. And, who knows, maybe they’ll ship me a pound from time to time.

We’re talking about Cafe del Doge here. I first ran into this rich, complex, yet completely friendly coffee in Venice, in the café by that name, not that far from the Rialto as I recall -- it was a little while ago.

Later I found it in Treviso, a few miles north of Venice. In Italy Cafe del Doge has a fairly good web presence, but the coffee itself was nowhere to be found outside the Veneto, where it’s blended and roasted. In Rome, for example, no one I asked had heard of it. Oh well: Tazza d’Oro wasn’t a bad substitute, while we were in Rome.

Here in northern California, though, my favorite coffee remained Mr. Espresso, which we’ve been drinking for years -- at home, at the bar upstairs at Chez Panisse, and at the Downtown Bakery here in Healdsburg.

I like Mr. Espresso and I like Carlo who runs the company. His mechanics have done a good job keeping our old Faemina running. When you depend on a machine that’s a half-century old for your morning coffee you come to appreciate that.

So I felt a little disloyal a couple of months ago when a new roastery opened in Oakland, providing a coffee very close to Tazza d’Oro -- so close I had to switch to Blue Bottle.

Blue Bottle sells a number of blends. It’s the Romano blend that approximates Tazza d"Oro, and you have to get it early in the week; it seems to sell out quickly. Then too there are only so many places you can find it: the Berkeley farmers’ market, the Oakland roastery but only Monday and Friday. And the "kiosk" in San Francisco, on Linden Street a few doors west of Gough, in Hayes Valley.



We stopped at the kiosk yesterday for an espresso. At about 3:30 there was a line of perhaps a dozen people patiently waiting at the counter; the line trailed out onto Linden Street itself -- fortunately a little-trafficked alley.

But they were out of Romano. Too bad, as I wanted to taste it right then, to compare it with what lingered in memory of Doge -- for we’d stopped at Caffé Doge about noon.

THE CAFE ITSELF, at 419 University Avenue, Palo Alto’s Main Street, is stylish, comfortably exciting, at least to me. There was a real Italian working the machine: his English is pretty shaky, and you’re better off talking to him in Italian. I asked him what Caffe del Doge was doing in California: we have a friend here, he answered simply, and he made this possible.



We had a delicious cup of the Doge Rosso, which is one hundred percent Arabica, and we split a prosciutto sandwich, a panino on a soft rectangular roll, not too soft of course, with a little butter and a good supply of lettuce and a very judicious amount of pickle -- a beautifully calibrated set of flavors. And then I had a second ristretto, this time Doge Nero, which is a blend of Arabica with other coffees: I find it less redolent, less chocolatey, but Lindsey thinks it smoother. So we bought three quarters of a pound of each, in the bean, and soon we’ll see how well they serve as our every-morning coffee, taken by Lindsey with a great deal of hot milk, really a sort of café au lait, and by me more as a cappuccino.

And I have a hunch I’ll be switching brands for the second time in just a few months. Sorry, Mr. Espresso; sorry, Blue Bottle; I love you both, and I’ll dally with you again from time to time. But for now my heart’s in the Veneto.

WELL, THAT HAVING BEEN WRITTEN, we’ve had breakfast. Lindsey: You know, I like the Blue Bottle better. This [Doge] has a bitter undercurrent.

She's right, of course. But it has to be pointed out that she puts a lot of milk in her coffee, or rather a very little amount of coffee in her milk. I made my usual breakfast caffelatte with less milk than usual the second time, and liked it more. But the fact is that Doge, in my opinion, does not carry milk well: a doge is not a cow. It makes a fine espresso and a fabulous ristretto,, both with the requisite amount of sugar. (The need of espresso for sugar is a subject for another day.)

So after we've run through this supply it'll be back to Blue Bottle. Unless something else turns up in Portland next month.

Winter Moon

THEY SAY YOU GET to see one thousand moons. Well, that’s what I remember reading somewhere the Chinese say, or used to say; one thousand moons. At thirteen per year, on the average, I’m seeing number nine hundred fifteen, and I must say I am enjoying this one.

It’s cold and clear, a perfect winter night. Orion lies on his back low in the south on his short ride to the horizon. We have been eating well and visiting with friends. Winters are made for this.

Nathan Rubin 1929-2005

ABSURD, OF COURSE, to have a favorite musical instrument, or even to prioritize among them. But the violin has a special place. Maybe it’s because it was the first instrument I played in public. It was in 1940 or ’41, and I was in an orchestra of children, playing “Kitty-cat Waltz” on Treasure Island, during the World’s Fair. I distinctly remember the little girl next to me; her nervousness apparent in an unfortunate and inappropriate release of fluid; and I remember the sound of gunshots, from the nearby Sally Rand Nude Ranch.

I like writing music for violin and other stringed instruments, and I particularly like writing for the combination of soprano voice and violin. And over the years I’ve been lucky to hear the results played by some fine musicians.

Today a memorial service was held at Mills College for one of them: Nathan Rubin, who died suddenly last October when he apparently tripped on a sidewalk and fell, striking his head on a concrete driveway. He never regained consciousness. It was an absurd end for a man whose most memorable quality, to me, was his grace.

He was a graceful, intelligent, sensitive man; and he was also a shy man, I believe, and when I first met him I was as shy as he and for better reason, and so I never really knew him, knew him as a friend I mean, and that was my loss.

I knew him first as the concertmaster of the Oakland Symphony. I particularly remember his playing in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, when his solo playing seemed to be exactly right -- his tone and expression completely realized the ache, the yearning, the ineffable awareness of life and death and nature that Mahler stands for in his best moments, and his playing lacked the ego and self-pity and complaint that produce what some think are Mahler’s worst moments.

That was over forty years ago, that Mahler performance, but in each of the few encounters I had with Nate since then it seemed to me the same things held -- he was a remarkably consistent man, always occupied, always giving full measure to the occupation of the moment.

Nate was a remarkable sight-reader. You could give him a new piece in graphic notation, for example: he would ask only the least, most efficiently phrased questions, or often no questions at all, and would tuck his violin under his chin and play the piece effortlessly and with complete comprehension.

He spoke more often with his bow than with his larynx when it came to talking about music. It always seemed to me that he engaged the world with his ear and his bow, and so I knew nearly nothing about his verbal life, his life as reader and writer. Again, my loss; though I respect the grace and range of his book John Cage and the Twenty-six Pianos, which he sent me with a little note:

Dear Charles, Here, with the compliments of the house. (Is that the right phrase?)

With Nate it was always the right phrase; to me his life, busy and amazingly diverse as its activities were, was a single effortless phrase, lyrical, aware and easy and above all graceful though not without an undercurrent of amusement at how small we performers are in the face of the larger totality within which we’re simply momentary events and minor processes.

This morning, as I was thinking about all this, I listened to a performance of the Cavatina reproduced above. Nate and Judy Hubbell performed it, years ago, in Hertz Hall, on a concert I couldn’t attend because I was visiting another friend, a much closer one, who was going into emergency surgery. The surgery was successful, Hippocrates be praised; and the concert was recorded, Apollo be praised. And so while musicians come and go, the music continues forever; that’s the pleasure and solace and purpose of music, it is a way par excellence we mortals have of intersecting and participating with the Infinite.

8: Closing the Amsterdam dispatch book

Healdsburg, a week later

AND SO WE’RE HOME again, after a final uitsmijter in an ordinary bar-cafe in the Marriott Hotel, and a trudge back to our hotel the Prinsen, shuffling through new-fallen snow and chuckling at the windshields, on half of which someone had scraped the word BRASIL through the snow, and getting up next morning at six to take the tram and the train to the airport, and then spending six hours at the Atlanta airport because San Francisco was all backed up because of the storm.

And we’ve unpacked, and sat stuck in the house two or three days because the river was up over the road, and six days in the Netherlands seem an awful long time ago, until I look back over my notes, to find:

A'dam details home mentally ill; hotels tech (iens, metro...)

Yes, that strange and beautiful building across from our hotel room was a mental hospital. Richard and Marta found that out the day we went to Hans and Anneke’s anniversary party: that night the hospital had a party of its own, with musicians in many of the rooms, and apparently even outside, and everyone staff patients visitors and all seemed to be having a good time; What’s going on, Richard asked someone, Christmas party came the answer, and the other details.

I may not have mentioned (though perhaps I have, in which case forgive me) that the Dutch have four days of Christmas: St. Nicholas’s Day on Dec. 2, I think it is, when gifts are exchanged; Christmas Day on the 25th, when one visits one’s parents; Second Christmas Day on the 26th, when one has a nice quiet day at home; Jan. 6, Epiphany, when one celebrates the end of Christmas. This is all part of that Dutch fondness for gezelligheid, for comfort and company and snug domesticity -- “values” more bourgeois than Calvinist, perhaps; but values it’s hard to argue with.

* * *

I DIDN’T WRITE MUCH about Hans and Anneke’s celebration, because, well, one doesn’t write publicly about the closely-held narrative of one’s friends. (I already felt I’d overstepped propriety a bit a few pages back, in writing about Kees’s restaurant Marius.) But our friendship with this family has given us some insight into what seems to me a characteristically Netherlandish approach to weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas: and over and again I come away from these insights, and the experiences suggesting them, with real respect for the “values,” the attitudes and even the institutions, that underlie them.

I am not religious myself, and certainly not monotheistic; but I don’t begrudge others their rituals. Heer, dank U voor het lekkere eten (Lord, thank you for the delicious eats) doesn’t seem a bad beginning to a comfortable meal, once past the first word. And a longish but not quite too long disquisition on Generosity and Gratitude at an anniversary was certainly something to think about.

The speaker, in fact a minister, suggested that a good marriage is a gift; we ought to be grateful for it, and recognize the generosity of the source of the marriage -- after all, no one forced any power to grant it. But one ought also to recognize that with the gift came a responsibility to make the best of it, to tend it -- even to improve what Nature, as I prefer to think of it, has given. I thought, of course, about our own marriage, and those of a number of close friends and relations; and I looked around at the guests -- over a hundred people, nearly all at least as old as we are (excluding the children and grandchildren of the anniversary couple). A surprising number had celebrated their own golden anniversary, or soon would; though a number of course were widows or widowers, and the event had its bittersweet quality when one saw one of those wiping away a tear or two.

* * *

THAT PARTY WAS IN Apeldoorn, as I’ve said, a hundred kilometers or so east of Amsterdam, and we stayed there one night at the Kaiserskroon Hotel, where the party was given. Quite a contrast with the Prinsen! Spa, pool, gym, restaurant, bar; busboys and waitresses; easy chairs and couches... and a bed nearly as big as our room at the Prinsen, and a room nearly as big as our floor at the Prinsen. You begin to think in terms of area, of square feet, when you spend much time in Amsterdam, where real estate, being confined, is precious. (One friend recently bought a house in a tiny town in Friesland. Why Friesland? A house there cost the same as a single garage in Amsterdam.)

But the Kaiserskroon, like the Prinsen, like all hotels I’ve stayed in in the Netherlands in the last few months, has no free highspeed internet connection! In the States we’ve come to expect that as a given at the cheap motels we stay in, the Comfort Inns and Econolodges. In Apeldoorn as in Amsterdam you are invited to sign on to a Swiss provider that costs as much for a day as ISPs charge here for a month. I think I know why: Internet connectability has become such a popular request that the providers have realized there’s money to be made here: why give it away free, or at a minimal charge?

And to compound the irritation, the Amsterdam internet parlors don’t allow you to bring in your own laptop, as I’ve done in Italy and Spain and here in the States. So we get our e-mail in the Netherlands the old slow way, connecting to the telephone; and we have to forgo web-surfing.

That’s too bad, because the Netherlands has two or three first-rate restaurant-listing websites. I use one a lot: IENS, named for its proprietor Iens _______; you can find it at http://www.tinystocks.com/iens.html. The reviews are not wholly reliable, coming from apparently too small a Zagat-like sample of contributors; but as usual reading between the lines helps sort things out, and the hard information -- hours, phone number, address -- are indispensable.

I use IENS rather than Simple Bites, whose reviews are more reliable, because you can put IENS on your Palm, and I’d never go anywhere without the Palm -- in a pinch it sends and receives e-mail, it keeps my journal, our address book and calendar, the Oxford English Dictionary and a fairly adequate Dutch-English dictionary.

And a wonderful thing called METRO, which tells you how to get from A to B via tram or metro in any of 329 cities, from Aachen to Zwickau, and including Tampa, Tashkent, Tbilisi, and Timisaora. One of these days I’ll have to install the BART database, to see how well it works here: the Amsterdam one is first-rate, giving tram options for all sorts of places -- it’s how we decide how to get to Marius, for example, from our hotel near Leidseplein.

With all this equipment in your belt-pack you can look up a restaurant in the next town, phone it and make a reservation while you’re walking out in the heath or dunes or forest, and we’ve done this from time to time on our rambles across the Netherlands -- though this six-day jaunt scarcely left time (or weather, come to that) for rambling. The country’s flat enough that cell phones and wi-fi work very well indeed. On longer trips, when we cross a border, we simply change phone chips in our little phone, so our calls are never international; you can get a chip with ten minutes of calls for ten euros or so, and recharge it as necessary. On this trip I spent twenty euros, I think, for the phone, and didn’t come close to exhausting its credit, which will be there for me next time we’re in the country.

* * *

AND WE WILL BE in the Netherlands again this year, no doubt; we’re drawn to it by a mysterious attraction. As I apologized in advance to Richard at the beginning of our Amsterdam visit: I am tediously enthusiastic about the country. After all these years there are still corners we don’t know at all. And the literature continues to turn up, in the library, in used-book stores, among the latest publications. Of them I would particularly recommend:

James Boswell: Boswell in Holland. Edited by Frederick Pottle as part of the Yale edition of The Private Papers of James Boswell, this volume appeared in 1952. In it the 23-year-old Boswell is in Utrecht, sent there by his despairing father to study law; and in addition Dutch, French, Latin, and love, all of which he records with charming detail.

Simon Schama: The Embarrassment of Riches. This study of what the Dutch call The Golden Century -- the 17th century,when a country of farmers, fishermen, sailors, merchants, and clerics somehow made the first modern Republic -- truly a sort of Venice of the north, founded on trade, exploration, and expert seamanship, enabling them to war successfully with Spain and then England. Schama explores the Dutch temperament across this century, across the complex social classes (never quite rigid in this country), disclosing the national qualities that still inform an enlightened populace.

Geert Mak: Amsterdam. Alas I read a library copy of this book, and took few notes -- because Mak, a popular Dutch journalist, writes so effortlessly and charmingly that you just keep reading and before you know it it’s finished. Mak focusses on the city, but writes about its entire history, from its founding in the 13th century up to the great social changes of the 1970s. We plan to spend a month in Amsterdam one of these years, and this book will be an indispensable guide, not only to the geography but also and especially to the temperament. Amsterdammers have lived through incredibly hard times, and probably have hard times still to face -- don’t we all? But they have responded with a unique kind of tenacity, combining fierce defense with pragmatic tolerance. Mak discusses this, and the great Dutch preoccupation with societal provisions (prisons, almshouses, public housing), and the preoccupations with comfort and collecting, turning up fascinating individuals along the way, drunks, bigots, heroes, and ordinary people with extraordinary detail.

Sacheverell Sitwell: The Netherlands. Sitwell concentrates on art, costume, and social life, describing maritime Netherlands (he does not visit Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Gelderland apart from Het Loo, or Limburg and North Brabant) as he found it just after World War II. I know I’ve used the word “charm” a bit too often, but it’s needed again here.

And I must include a book that meant a great deal to me when I was ten or twelve, and which continues to fascinate me, and which undoubtedly began my extravagant love for things Netherlandish:

Hendrik Willem van Loon: Van Loon’s Lives. Stuck in the little town of Veere, in the remote maritime province of Walcheren, during World War II, the author invites a series of great historical figures to dinner, writing a little biography of each of them to introduce them to his cook and houseman, then describing the evening that follows. Rossini cooks dinner for Chopin who serenades Emily Dickinson one night; Torquemada and Robespierre squabble another; Leonardo, Mozart, Peter the Great, St. Francis, Thomas Jefferson -- all appear; only one guest refuses. The jacket squib calls the book a Handbook of Intellectual Liberalism, and that’s not a bad description. It’s also a testament to the Dutch intellectual and moral tradition, for van Loon wisely chooses Erasmus as his advisor in all these proceedings. It’s a wonderful book, witty and discursive, with comments on food, art, music, governance, and history of course, and charmingly -- there it is again! -- illustrated by the author.

And with that, finally, you’ll be happy to know, I end these Amsterdam dispatches, and 2005. We’ll stay home for a few weeks, and then go back to Portland. Maybe I’ll write you from there.

Previous dispatches from this trip to Amsterdam:
http://www.shere.org/AmsterdamDispatchWeb/Amsterdam2005.htm

High Water

THE RIVER’S UP again here on Eastside Road. The road itself is about five feet below that brown water stetching out across the road, the vineyards, the new county park, the river itself, and the vineyards on the other side of the river -- I suppose about a mile and a half altogether.

We’ve been here before, and the drill is familiar. Yesterday, New Year’s Eve, Therese and Eric spent the day moving everything upstairs from downstairs. We helped; so did two friends from Healdsburg. A couple of thousand books, but they were the easiest part. Furniture that couldn’t be moved easily -- the dining table, for example -- was fitted out with garbage-bag booties. Sawhorses and scaffolds were set up in the living room; we took all the interior doors down and laid them across them, and piled the lighter furniture on top.

We still have power and telephone, as of 10 am New Year’s Day, so we’re better off than a lot of people. The main immediate problem is that we’re isolated; it will be a couple of days before we can drive out -- unless it continues to rain badly upstream, in which case it will be longer. We can walk out across the hill behind us; it would take about an hour or so to walk to town, longer if it’s raining of course.

The other immediate problem is that our well is under water, and the water is full of unpleasantness -- I won’t go into that, except to note that Santa Rosa’s main sewage-treatment plant, well south of us, was breached. That won’t affect us, but closer leachfields, barns, fertilizer and insecticide stores are undoubtedly making their contribution.

It’s funny to look out at all this water less than a week after flying home from the Netherlands. Clearly we have a lot to learn, in this country, about governmental administration of floodplains, roads, levees, bridges and the like. Perhaps after we get through rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq we’ll have time to deal with this.

Speaking of the Netherlands, I’ll try to post the dispatches written from there on my website soon -- when I get to a high-speed internet connection. That may take a while!

Grazing and Eating

THIS IS THE COUNTER of The Cheese Course, the local cheese store, a block and a half off the plaza defining the center of the tourist destination that has become Healdsburg, California. I put it here as a decoy; I don’t think there’ll be much here today about cheese, though it’s on my mind as we tune our mentalities back to Holland, anticipating a week there at Christmastime.

What I’m thinking about now is the difference between Grazing and Eating. Each has its place. Last night, for example, we were at a wonderful party at Foreign Cinema, a favorite restaurant of ours in San Francisco, and since a couple of hundred people were jammed into the dining room, the courtyard, and the adjacent art gallery, refreshments were necessarily Small Plates: chiles relleños, little strips of grilled beefsteak, fried manchego (ah there, the cheese!), various tacos, prawns...

But Grazing is not Dining, and this came home to me a couple of weeks ago, in two consecutive dinners at really quite good restaurants in Portland. We ate first at Vindalho, a Goan-inspired restaurant striving to find a Portuguese presence in an Indian table, and I would never complain about the results, especially the date chutney, and the naan, and my lamb in yoghurt. (It’s amazing how a bit of lamb improves the innate sour curdled unpleasantness of yoghurt.)

But the six of us shared plates, a technique I famously (in my small circle) loathe, and the flavors piled up, shouldered one another aside, crowded forward, shouted all at once and in general behaved quite uncivilly. And the next night, and Nuestra Cocina, I refused to share in either direction, and tended to my duck-confit tamal with its raisins and mole, and lamb shank, of all things, cooked in rich tomato broth.

Now you might think duck confit and lamb shank add up to rather too rich a combination, and you would be right. But it was wintry that night, and Christmas is coming, and this goose is getting fat. In point of fact this was a beautifully balanced combination of courses, and I skipped dessert. (Though now that I look at the menu, and find two dessert tequilas on the list — one of them flavored with almond! — I have my regrets.)

HAVING GIVEN SOME THOUGHT to the hardly revolutionary idea of an orchestrated meal I decided to cook dinner the other night — not that my usual home-cooked dinners lack intelligence and artistry! And this is what we had:

cockaleeky soup
porkchops ma facon
steamed broccoli flowerets
green salad

And this is how I made it:

SOUP: Clean the leeks, lose much of the green part of the vegetable, and slice the remainder really thin. Sauté these slices in a little oil and salt. Peel as many potatoes as you’ve sliced leeks, cut them into smallish chunks, and dump them with the leeks into a pot of chicken stock. When the potatoes have cooked, smash them with a potato smasher, check for flavor, serve.

BROCCOLI: rinse the head, cut off flowerets, steam them in the water still clinging to them from the rinse, put in a shallow pan with a little salt and a pinch or two of red pepper flakes; steam under a lid until done.

CHOPS: Rub the white fat on the edges of two nice thick pork chops onto the surface of a black iron frying pan just big enough for them. Grind a tablespoon of fennel seeds, a teaspoon of black peppercorns, and a pinch of sea salt with a mortar and pestle. Drizzle a few drops of olive oil onto one side of each chop; then smear quite softly crushed garlic (see instruction for salad, below) onto it, and dust liberally with the fennelseed mixture. Put the chops, doctored side up, into the pan which you have let get quite hot, searing the untreated sides of the chops. Pry them up with a spatula and flip them, giving the now nicely browned sides the same treatment with oil, garlic, and dust. The chops will likely be done before you know it, after the second side is seared: press the surface with a forefinger to test. Remove the chops to the warmed dinner plates and deglaze the pan — this is where the inspiration came in — with dry Vermouth, reducing the result to a nice sauce.

SALAD: Our usual salad happens thus: I mash a clove of garlic in the garlic-press, then forcefully blend it , in the bowl we’ll use for salad, with a pinch or two of sea salt, using the tines of a dinner fork. I work this until the resulting paste is quite smooth and creamy, adding a teaspoonful of olive oil. When it’s all quite smooth I add the amount of oil we’ll need for the salad and let it stand through dinner, having washed and torn the lettuce (or, more likely, Lindsey having done the washing chore). After the main course (and, in this case, the soup, which naturally came first), I add enough vinegar — say one part to four of oil — and blend it briskly with the fork; then add the lettuces and toss.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS, of course, is the fascinating focus of the flavors. Chicken, leeks, potato. Broccoli, red pepper. Pork, fennel, garlic, vermouth. (I can’t overemphasize the beauty of that combination!) Salt, garlic, olive oil.

Years ago I knew a wonderful man named Anthony Boucher — well, he wasn’t named Anthony Boucher, but his name was so named, it was a nom de plume — an intellectual, a liberal, a humanist, a gourmet; a man who managed to combine several specialities in one rewarding though too brief life: a specialist in canon law, in liqueurs, in pornography; an author of mytery and science fiction; a historian of opera. The kind of man of whom it is said all to truly the sort no longer is in fashion.

In one of his stories, I wish I could remember which, he wrote about the first human travel to the planet Venus. As I recall the story was really about the technology involved, with perhaps a romantic plot carrying those details. But what I do recall, the only detail I recall, is a parenthetical aside in which his narrator refers to a plant discovered on the planet Venus, that plant without which, as is now well known, the combination of lamb, garlic, salt, and rosemary is utterly incomplete.

That’s a masterstroke of imagination, to think that combination needs yet another ingredient to render it perfect. Of course it does not: but then we can’t know. How could Tony have done this to us? How I wish I could introduce him to my vermouth, fennel, and pork!

A new oratorio

A QUICK NOTE ON BITTER HARVEST, which we heard performed by the Berkeley Symphony Saturday night. This is a new dramatic oratorio: a poetic libretto by Amanda Moody, set for soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus and orchestra by Kurt Rohde.

The subject is the tragedy of a midwestern American farmer, a Vietnam veteran, recently a widower, still mourning the further death of his only son, and now losing his farm to an unspecified Corporation that sounds a lot like Monsanto, the gene-modified seed-patenter that recently sued the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser for harboring patented plants he hadn't paid for. (They sprang from seed apparently drifting in on the wind, or spilled by passing vehicles.)

Bitter Harvest has so many qualities that a list of them inevitably sounds contradictory. It is intelligent, passionate, lyrical, poetic, serene, biting, ironic; above all it is beautiful. It is not fresh: the music often shows its own roots in both the 1960s avant-garde and the more recent new consonance. But the consonances, themselves often recalling Alban Berg's velvety sudden major triads, emerge as acoustical facts rather than a musical grammar forcing the melodic and harmonic issues.

The production was visually arresting as well as acoustically: the fifteen-voice chorus, changing from farm flannel shirts to corporate white shirts and neckties, sat stage center, the three vocal soloists in front (farmer John Duykers on the left, corporate villain Troy Cook and social worker Henrietta Davis on the right). On either side of the stage stood a percussion section, and the large chamber orchestra was in the pit. Everything sounded amplified, and this threw the sound off to my ears at first: but ears are amazingly adaptive, and after a few minutes all fell into place.

The soloists were at the top of their form, and Kent Nagano managed the detailed complexity of the score skilfully, easing its precision into a lyrically dramatic long line.

At a little over an hour long, and divided clearly into 17 chapter-like sections, Rohde's score moved easily. Moody's libretto doesn't proceed chronologically, but loops and doubles, repeating not words, as in a Handel oratorio, but entire phrases and references, often after extensive developments taking the story into a parallel context -- the farmer's family life, Vienam, legal confrontations, and that narrative that strikes dread into anyone familiar with it: the tragic farm auction, where an entire working life is dismissed as so much worn-out machinery.

Bitter Harvest won't easily find a place in any standard repertory: the music is dense and often angular; the plot is poetic rather than straightforward; the subject is less than gripping, alas, to most Americans these days. (Even here in Sonoma county a moratorium on genetically-modified crops failed miserably at the polls last month.)

But Bitter Harvest is powerful, important, and best of all beautiful. The performance was splendid, completely persuasive. I'm glad I heard it, even at the end of a long day's drive from Ashland to Berkeley. And I'd like to hear it again.

Home again...

left: our ridge, twilight

BUT NOT WITHOUT FIRST seeing three more plays, eating one more fabulous meal, getting lost once or twice. All that in two days!

Okay, dinner first: That was at Campanile, an old favorite unvisited too many years — unless you count an occasional breakfast. Mark Peel, who was an assistant of Lindsey’s years ago at Chez Panisse, opened this fine restaurant in Charlie Chaplin’s old house, half a block off Wilshire Blvd. on La Brea Avenue, more years ago than I like to think. At one time it was fabulous; for a while it seemed to me to have slipped a bit; now it’s right back where it began, with Mark at the helm and a menu that’s engaging, enterprising, excellent.

We began with squab on risotto, white truffles shaved over it, the rice cooked just so, the squab tender but meaty. A Bibb lettuce salad refocussed things, with the snap of lemon juice lifting the cool crisp leaves out of the ordinary. And then, for me, duck breast, grilled, served with a sort of compote of winter vegetables including chestnuts. With this a St. Amour 2003, direct and mature and fruity, and then a glass of Sean Thackeray’s Pleiades, to complement the duck’s complexity.

The drive from Glendale, where we stay on these semiannual theater outings south, to places like Campanile or the LA County Museum (where we’d been the day before), is easy and enjoyable. Down to Los Feliz, across on that avenue past the strangely dumpy Mulholland fountain to Western, down Western to Third or Fifth, down La Brea or whatever. The drive back, after that dinner, was less direct, for Hollywood likes to post two street-names on the same post. So we turned east a block too soon, discovered the mistake, and turned north to explore a narrow street, cluttered with unnecessarily large cars parked wherever they could find a place, and winding through what must have been a relatively upscale neighborhood, since all we could see were high board fences, automatic yard lights, and an occasional Beware the Dog. No matter: it took us right to Los Feliz.

That afternoon we had seen William Inge’s Picnic, beautifully detailed and lovingly portrayed by A Noise Within. I hadn’t seen it before, oddly enough, and was struck by its resonances — Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as Gaye pointed out, but, more personally than that, my own childhood, or at least one year of it, spent in a small town in northeastern Oklahoma. I wasn’t old enough to share Madge’s problems, or even Millie’s — adolescence was still a few years away — but the yearning, the perplexities, the awareness of all kinds of isolation, even the apparent war between physicality and intelligence — all that was indeed resonant.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, we saw the third play currently in repertory at A Noise Within: Ibsen’s The Master Builder. What a play! You can read it in so many ways: the tragic birth of Modernism out of Romanticism; Ego as the enemy of Community; Ambition as the tragically flawed child of Success...

And the production, and the performance, completed a cycle of three plays very satisfactorily, for the problem with Thursday’s Othello — an overly detailed and therefore distracting Iago — was a great virtue in this Builder: a brittle, complex, riveting Halvard Solness: both roles were taken by Geoff Elliott, who was also, with his wife Julia Roderiguez-Elliott, co-director of both plays.

A footnote to the comments, below, on Dwight Baquie’s performance of the role of Othello: what we saw was in fact only his fourth performance in the role, and the first had been the previous day. He stepped into the part in a student matinee, played it again Wednesday night, and then repeated it Thursday in another matinee before the performance we saw. It’s odd he’d never played it before, because he was born for the role; when he has it in hand it will be memorable for only good reasons — and perhaps Elliott’s Iago will be in better balance.

Yesterday after the Master Builder matinee we drove down to Los Angeles for dinner with friends: Dan the painter, Tony the actor. Dan made a delicious bolognese to put on pasta, and we had a bottle of four-dollar Hungarian cabernet, and then we walked over to Evidence Room, a sort of storefront theater club, to see David Greenspan’s She Stoops to Comedy, postmodernly, neo-cubistly taking on Pirandello with half an eye trained also on Restoration comedy, cutting back and forth between narrative and commentary, and generally making great fun out of confusions of gender, role-playing, Art and Life, as they develop out of the six characters — one of them Tony — in search of a play. I’d see it again given half a chance.

And what else. Glendale’s cute little Spanish-Mission train station, where we left John and Gaye to Amtrak. Dan and Tony’s magnificent dining room, crafted, table, floor, walls, ceiling and all, out of an ash-tree that came down in their front yard. Urartu Coffee, as nice a little community coffeehouse as you could want, a block off Glendale’s troubled Brand Avenue, now in the throes of yet another redevelopment.

And a long walk, having lost my bearings in spite of Lindsey’s correct directional instinct, in the dark night, cluttered with rejected furniture and distressed cars on the lawns and boulevard strips, peopled with the unemployed and the dubiously employed, lit by the occasional sweeps of a hovering helicopter’s searchlight, warm with spent passions and delayed hopes — yet oddly intimate, friendly, and nostalgic: or perhaps I was still basking in William Inge’s Picnic.

Once More to L.A.

left: LACMA at twilight


Glendale, November 12—

A LITTLE ODD to say of Shakespeare’s Othello that all’s well that ends well, but that’s how it went Thursday night. Until the intermission we thought we were seeing something else, a play called Iago, interesting, abrupt, a little rough, thrown out of whack by an apparently minor character, a Moorish admiral, unfortunately played by an understudy who was still carrying his lines with him.

After intermission, though, things turned around. Othello stayed on the book, even consulting it while strangling his poor wife, but his voice and demeanor brought the role back to center where it belongs. Iago was more convincing when on the defensive than he’d been earlier in the play, and the ladies were fine: Desdemona small, vulnerable, wronged, uncomprehending; Emilia angry, violent, believable. I found myself wishing they’d all lived, so there could be another play, telling us what might come next. But of course by the end of the play nearly all the interesting folks were dead as a doornail, and we felt like Shakespeare had hit us in the stomach once again, and we shuffled back to our motel in a rather bleak mood.

The only hilarity of the day had been inadvertent, at dinner, in a restaurant we’ve tried before: Fresco, whose Venetian decor has housed a Sicilian-Neopolitan menu a couple of blocks from this theater company — A Noise Within — on Glendale’s Brand Street. The food was good enough: my canneloni were rich and tasty, and Lindsey liked her mushroom ravioli very much. But soon after we sat down we were surprised to see a small Italian-looking fellow walk in with a cello case. Before long he’d unpacked the thing, set up a pre-programmed synthesizer, and begun playing the most god-awful versions of soft rock, Strauss waltzes, and easy listening — though he made any kind of listening difficult in the extreme.

I’ve only once before heard such blatantly bad playing, from an amplified violinist on a street in Rome. Like that fiddler, our cellist was ultimately ushered away by a waiter, but not before he’d labored through the entire prelude of Bach’s C-major Suite. On his way out he bowed to Gaye, who was watching him astonishedly. Live amateur cellists might best be banned from restaurants.

Yesterday was better, a fine day: two restaurants, two museums, three engaging one-act plays; all shared with two friends. Lunch was at Tre Venezie, a real Veneto restaurant in Pasadena, where the cooking expresses the rich, earthy complexity of a culture that triangulates northern Italian, Austrian, and Slavic sources, and the result is served in a comfortable, quiet, intelligently furnished room (paintings, books, bottles) that has likely never heard an amateur at the cello. We had Savoy cabbage and house-prepared guanciale, pork jaw; and after that I had the best fegato Veneziano I’ve had outside Venice herself: calf’s liver, sliced consistently thin, sauteed in white wine, oil, and perhaps a little bit of butter, served with perfectly sweated sliced onion and beautifully grilled polenta, with an interesting Merlot from the Collio hills on the Slovenian border.

Afterward a tour through the Pasadena Museum of California Art to see landscapes, mostly, with a few portraits, by an American impressionist, Allston Something, whose early work, at about 1900, showed great promise, but whose later work, on extensive travels but chiefly in Southern California, seemed to me to settle into too-quickly executed illustration.

They weren’t improved by their contrast with the Pissarros and Cezannes we saw next, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — a fine show from New York’s MOMA, focussing on the work those two friends did, nearly side by side, in the significant years around 1870 when Modernism was emerging from landscape painting in the vicinity of Pontoise. Short conclusion: Pissarro was about light as it it is expressed by surfaces; Cezanne was after the substance and weight behind those surfaces, and the physical presence, almost the substance, of the light and air that makes them visible and distinct. This is quickly said, but it took these disciplined, gifted painters years to reveal the concept, which underlies everything the Impressionists and their followers achieved in the years following.

The Actors’ Gang, an engaging and very physical theater company whose artistic director is Tim Robbins, has moved into a fine, newly recycled historic building on the edge of Culver City, a former electrical plant facing a small, pleasant park on Venice Blvd. Here we had a quick meal of fish and chips and Martinis at Pacifico, a fast, simple marisco restaurant, and then continued our globetrotting with three one-act plays from Japan: a melodramatic portrait of smoldering small-town resentment; a commedia dell’arte-cum-Kabuki flavored account of a family’s despair at the apparent idiocy of a poetic son; an Albee-esque view of three ghosts, former actress-prompters eternally reviewing the competing small successes of their former lives.

It was an impressive evening of theater, stylish, exotic, constantly fascinating. I wish these guys would bring us a play of Michael McClure’s.

Groningen street, September 2005

FOR SOME TIME NOW, since the middle of September in fact, I’ve been meaning to show you this photo. Seems to me it says all you need to say about what routine automobile use has done to community life. This was taken on a fairly busy street in Groningen, a street leading from the market square at the heart of that provincial capital in The Netherlands out toward the edge of town where the university campus and its great medical center are situated.

We were there with a couple of friends, having transferred our intention to walk the shorline of the old Zuider Zee to the less rainy and windy route Lindsey and I already knew from a long walk taken five years ago. We had just arrived in Groningen, and were walking down the street toward our hotel, when I was struck by the sight of these two old guys having a palaver in the middle of the street.

This is by no means an uncommon sight, but our two friends, new to Holland, remarked delightedly on it, so I pulled out the camera for a quick shot.

I doubt that had these two guys would have stopped for conversation had they been driving cars. In Groningen, as in so many other Dutch villages, towns, and even cities, residence, shopping, and offices are frequently mixed. You can walk from one end of Groningen to the other in twenty minutes. We spent nearly a week there, using it as a base for walks in the countryside, and we never once even thought of using any means of transportation within the city but shank’s mare, our two good trusty feet. There’d be no point in it, not even when it gently rained.

Movies and community

AND WHAT DO I THINK about the closing of our town movie theater, the Raven Film Center? It’s a very sad event, another step in the erosion of a town in real danger of dissolving into a theme park. Well, that’s put a bit extremely, I suppose: but a real disconnect is developing between two Healdsburgs, one of them a nice cozy town of 10,000 or so, where residents rub elbows at the library, the shopping centers, the cafés, the bakeries; the other a destination for tourists who stop in at tasting rooms, boutiques, and white-tablecloth restaurants.

Healdsburgers used to manage this negotiation by ceding the town square to tourists on the weekends, but the weekends have stretched; tourism is now close to a seven-day-a-week activity. There’s still a feeling of community on certain warm evenings, or at least there was last summer; but the town’s in danger of losing the very facilities that give a physical context for community.

There are two Ravens in town, not to be confused with the dining Raven-spinoffs, Ravenous and Ravenette. It’s an interesting history, I think: a local movie theater was built in remote antiquity, the 1930s or ’40s I think, called the Aven. (No, not a misspelling of “Avon,” as in Bard Of: it was named for a member of the founding family.)

In the 1970s, I think it was, the languishing Aven, then a victim of television, was bought by a film buff and community idealist who turned it around, chiefly by booking interesting films. It became so successful that when the big retail space formerly housing the J.C. Penney Company became available — Penney’s having lost its customers to sexier retail rivals in Santa Rosa, our local metropolis, and to the cheaper big-box stores that becan to emerge fifteen or twenty years ago — the lease was taken over by the Raven folks, who installed a four-theater complex, hoping thereby to be able to bring more niche-market films to town.

Then, a few years ago, two huge new multi-screen movie theaters opened nearby, the Rio in Santa Rosa and the Airport Cinema a few miles south of Healdsburg. The Raven lost much of its audiences to these competitors. The film-booking business is arcane and baroque and I won’t go into it here, not that I really understand it: suffice it to say a small local exhibitor of commercial entertainment film can’t seem to prevail in this competitive context.

WHAT’S TO BE DONE about this state of affairs? A couple of Sundays ago the town turned out to discuss the question. The largest of the four theaters seats 243, and it was overflowing. A good many very knowledgeable people filled us in on the history of the Raven’s decline, and then there was a brainstorming session.

I suppose you could say there were two big kinds of ideas, structural ideas and programming ideas. It’s clear the community wants a movie theater, but it’s not clear a conventional movie theater can survive — the current owners say it takes about 2,500 customers a week to keep the place open, and they’ve only been drawing 1500 or so at best. Twenty-five hundred customers: that’s a quarter of the town population, every week! Even if you could get the films, programming the place to draw niche audiences would be real sleight-of-hand: youngsters want noise, and go to the Airport; aging intellectuals want foreign movies, and watch DVDs; liberals want documentaries, and find them at the Rio (or on PBS); and the sizable latino population — some say forty percent of Healdsburg’s population — don’t seem to have the habit of going out to the movies.

The structuralist ideas tended to group around establishing some kind of non-profit organization to subsidize the Raven. I myself said I’d give a hundred bucks a year over the next ten years if it would help; if all of us in that room did that it would amount to $25,000 a year, surely enough to begin to find some solution. That idea didn’t fly far, but others suggested an organizing committee to look into some kind of community management of the facilities — assuming, apparently, that the place will soon be up for sale.

I HAVE ANOTHER IDEA, perhaps too complex to work, but complex enough I think to float. One of the things a community needs is a place to sit, to stroll, to talk. This has to be a place big enough for really lots of people on some occasions, but cluttered enough with visual and architectural features, and comfortable places to sit and stroll, that it doesn’t seem bleak when less heavily populated.

The Raven Film Center is on the edge of the Mitchell Shopping Plaza, a typical small-town strip mall with a big parking lot, a big retail store anchoring one end (currently a Long’s Drugs). The other spaces are leased to quite a variety of operations, from a specialty cheese shop (and a very good one at that) to a money-order office for the latino laborer; from a former photography shop now converting to an art-supply and framing shop to a resale merchant with everything from electronics to clothing; from a doughnut shop to a Mexican restaurant.

All these shops are drive-ups; there’s very little pedestrian traffic from the heart of town, only a block away — the parking lot effectively walls these shops off, announcing who’s really wanted here: people who drive in hastily, grab whatever it is they’re after, and take off again.

Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of “Third Place” — the alternative to Work and Home — a community needs. If I were king, I’d convert the south end of the mall to another village square, with a café-bar-restaurant with outdoor seating, and convert one of the Raven screening rooms to an indoor café constantly projecting films onto at least two walls — travelogues, documentaries, art films, old features. Sound off, of course; and if possible DVDs for sale on the premises.

Another of the four screening rooms should be used more fully for live performance, sincee it’s fitted out with a stage, overhead lighting, and a green room. There’s a fledgeling chamber-music society a few storefronts away: why shouldn’t it have access to this room?

I’d use the remaining theaters, seating 54 and 167 apiece, for quickly changing film repertory, Spanish and English, in a mix of programming frequently punctuated by special thematic series: food movies, or dance movies, or movies catering to other special-interest niche audiences willing, perhaps, to drive to Healdsburg from San Francisco or the East Bay, willing to have dinner in a local restaurant and stay in a local motel. We’re only taling about fifty people in that small theater!

What would this require? A person or group to buy up the current lease. A willingness on the part of the owners of the shopping center to re-think the use and purpose of their real estate. A commitment by the townspeople to support their own community.

Is any of this likely to happen? Frankly, I’m quite pessimistic about that. There are complexities here — economic, legal, insurance-related — that I know nothing about. Clearly the town council needs to spend a week or two traveling to places where these things happen better, either because there’s more vision there, or social conventions friendlier to the evolution of Places for People (not necessarily Profit).


I’ve put here a photo of the market-place/parking lot in Barjols, a very ordinary bluecollar town in the Var, in southern France. It’s a special day: there’s a boules competition going on; it’s drawn people from far and wide — from communities as much as a dozen miles away. No one’s getting rich from this, but the three or four bar-cafés at the edge of the place are doing good business. No reason part of the Mitchell Shopping Center couldn’t look like this.

Dogs and Cats

NOT A DOG PERSON, no no no no, not in this country. We had a dog, of course, when I was a kid, sixty years ago and more; just about everyone did. A toy shepherd named Butch. But none since. I tend to agree with Emma, who doesn’t like dogs because, she says, they pee and they slobber.

Cats, yes; we like cats just fine, and for twenty years or so we had at least one and usually two. The last two, Joe and Blanche, lived to be nearly twenty, and I miss them still.

And so when I walk into a hotel to check in and see a cat in the lobby I immediately feel things are breaking my way. The old Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles; the Sylvia in Vancouver.

And when you duck into a bar or a café and find a cat sleeping in the window, or under a chair: you feel immediately there’s tranquility here, and after all that’s what you’re looking for.

Dogs are another matter, but not in Europe. Every time we go to Europe we begin again the list of disadvantageous differences, disadvantageous to our own country I mean — the never-to-be-written-or-published book Why Can’t We... — and one of the chapters will surely center on Man’s Best Friend.

Kees and Irma, for example, have a wonderful border collie called "Yella," spelled Jelle I think, a Frisian name having nothing to do with his colors which are the regimental black and white of his breed. Perhaps that’s "her" breed: sex never seemed to be an issue with this fine animal.

One night sleeping I developed a Charley horse, that excruciating sudden pain in the calf of your leg. I couldn’t cry out, as I generally do, because I’d have awakened everyone in the house. Instead I whimpered, and immediately there came Jelle full of sympathy and concern, nosing me to be sure I’d recover. There was something immensely reassuring about this and I’ve had to revisit my attitude toward Albert Payson Terhune.

We had breakfast a couple or three weeks ago in Groningen, that fine regional capital in the north of The Netherlands. Curiously every chain café in the town center was out of milk at seven in the morning — they only serve fresh milk, it seems, in their cappuccinos — and we ended up at an upscale Cafe´-Conditerei serving pastries and coffees to comfortable-looking people at small tables, nearly each with a newspaper, most of them conservative.

There were no fewer than three dogs in our part of the room, a smaller raised central room with perhaps eight tables. They were small fat shaggy dogs with short legs and tiny feet, and they moved rather sluggishly I thought if they moved at all. One did, ultimately, giving up its post under another table to come stand patiently at the feet of my own chair, foolishly thinking I was about to give up a piece of croissant.

(Or perhaps, given its shape, hoping for a sugar cube. I think this was one of the few places that hasn’t given up sugar cubes in favor of those ridiculous little paper tubes of sugar, no doubt forced on the restaurant industry by the Dutch Society of Friends of the Horse in an almost completely successful effort to interfere with my passing out sugar cubes to horses on our perambulations through the Dutch countryside.)

These dogs were no harm to anyone, not even the waiters who brought things here and there through a space whose navigation was made difficult by its forest of tables and chairs and seated readers of newspapers. (I wonder how the room looks to those dogs, who see it from a vantage much closer the floor.)

They were really small slow sculptures, clean as a whistle (this is the Netherlands, after all), quiet, friendly and patient, never demanding. They were, in short, almost cats.

We had lunch last week in a café in Amsterdam — a bar-restaurant, really — at about four in the afternoon, an hour when I never really expect to find anything. Only one other table was occupied, by two English girls looking over a fashion magazine and not really eating much of anything.

We ordered off the lunch menu: a salad of some kind for L., a merguez sandwich for me. That turned out to be a sort of hamburger bun, toasted, with four grilled lamb sausages (very good, by the way), sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and some onion. Delicious; and afterward I asked the waitress, now tending bar, the name of the fine sleeping cat perched on the ledge-overlook near the English girls.

Caspar, she said, and that’s Gaston in the window, pointing to Caspar’s match.

I know, I know, the health authorities in this country would shudder at the thought. I don’t know why they don’t in the Netherlands, whose health laws are sometimes even more insane than our own. But I retort that important studies have revealed that children who grow up with household pets are sixtyseven percent less likely to develop asthma. Don’t ask for the source of this information: I can’t provide it. But I know it’s true. It stands to reason.

Mark Morris at Zellerbach

HOW WAS THE MARK MORRIS, a friend e-mails, and another writes

I wasn't as convinced about the performance as you were, but am very glad to have seen it and it's fun to watch you swoon over the art you enjoy!

Well, "swoon" is perhaps an extravagant word, but I must say I was tremendously impressed with Cargo, the new piece Morris set to Darius Milhaud's La creation du monde. It began with a white pole lying diagonally on the otherwise bare floor of an empty set. The dancers crept in from the wings, tentatively approaching it and one another, and as Milhaud's magical score evolved so did they, balancing curiosity and timidity, discovering emotions and pleasures, playing with their stick and one another, inventing social hierarchies and disagreement. You felt you were watching the evolution of humanity from its animal source, and since that evolution stopped short of the discovery of conscious thought the spectacle was a delight.

All Fours, to the Bartok Fourth Quartet was the most abstract I've seen from him, still detailed and quite close to the musical argument, but intellectual, I thought, especially after the more primitive exploration of the Milhaud.

What had attracted us to the evening was the music, particularly the Stein-Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts -- I never miss a production of it if I can help it. Morris treated the opera as a pageant, with lyrical naive-art backdrops and costumes, and avoided overly detailed mime interpretation of the content of the opera (distinguishing this from, for example, his setting of L'Allegro ed il penseroso, which I delight in in spite of its fussiness).

The commere and compere were the soloists here, as they tend to be in the opera, with the two Saints Theresa collapsed into a third solo dancer, and it was a pleasure to find that the chorus represented not all those miscellaneous Saints brought into Stein's libretto, but Spanish villagers on a sunny plaza, perhaps in Avila, miming and worshipping and more than occasionally spoofing them.

What I like about Mark Morris is his combination of sentiment, energy, and intellect, all in the service of commentary (or, as Stein would say, "meditation") on his subject. And this program was so artful, beginning with the primal source of humanity, continuing through the human application of intelligence, ending with faith and humor.

The other thing I like about these Morris productions is: Live Music!

The Berkeley Symphony did a fine job of the Milhaud and the Thomson, and the Bartok Fourth was played as if it were the easiest thing in the world -- though one of the most beautiful and enlightening -- by four young musicians, I'm sorry I haven't the program at hand, seated audience right at the edge of the stage. Fabulous.

How to Write Music

FOR A SUPPERCLUB CONCERT last night I'd been asked to provide about fifteen minutes of music. I put the assignment off too long, but a few hours before the concert I began to sketch the piece out.

Three or four sheets of paper, landscape mode, roughly pencilled horizontal lines dividing the instruments -- flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trombone, percussion, three or four strings.

Horizontal pencil lines dividing the time, five seconds or so at a time. I wrote in a few figures -- scale patterns here, the outline of a melody there, a few quickly repeated notes, a few sustained tones. No specific pitches.

Then I ran out of time, and had to go to the club with no music. The musicians were there, of course, and I watched them get out their tools and warm up. I knew several of them. The audience was sitting behind me, also facing the musicians.

I explained I hadn't finished anything, and began to describe the sketch I'd begun. I conduct it like this, I said, sweeping my right arm like a second-hand, punching out individual notes or curving lyrical phrases with my left hand.

It begins with kind of an oriental-sounding plaintive melody in the bassoon's second and third octaves, I said, singing it and looking at Greg Barber, who began playing along with me. I glanced over toward Larry London, who began counterpointing a similar tune on the clarinet.

I showed the brass players how they come in and drop out with sustained tones, higher if I point upward, lower if downward, quieter when my left hand drops.

The strings waited for me to curve some tunes toward them, and the winds tapped out repeated notes as I signalled them. This went on for a while, and then I said

But of course I never got around to writing the piece, or making you parts, so we won't be able to play anything tonight.

And that was the end of the piece, and the end of the dream. But I realize now that it's exactly how I notated the first movement of Tongues.

NOTHING ELSE to report, except that while making guacamole last night I sneaked slug of tequila and one of the almonds Lindsey had out on a pan on top of the stove. What a combination that is! Gotta capitalize on it somehow!

Go Solar!

There seem to be various proposals afloat to help homeowners add solar panels to their roofs. Good idea, no doubt about it.

But I have another proposal for our dear Governor Schwarzenegger. How about requiring panels on all new big-box stores, shopping malls, franchise-food joints, gas stations, and auto dealerships?

This would have the immediate effect of slowing the construction of such impositions on the landscape, I suppose, and that wouldn't be an entirely bad thing.

But it might have two positive effects as well. First, such immense consumers of electricity might begin to produce a sizable percentage of their own energy. Second, the great quantity of solar panels and other hardware suddenly needed should help bring down the cost of the technology -- a more direct help to the eventual residential user than short-term government subsidy.

While we're at it, why not require government buildings to go solar?

Trash Talk

We're back from a September in the Netherlands and the Var -- a week visiting extended family in The Hague and Friesland, two weeks walking the country dikes, forest paths, and magnificent heather of Friesland and the northeast Netherlands, and a week car-touring the best and least-toured corner of Provence.

Last night we drove with friends to Berkeley, there to see the Mark Morris Dance Group in a bill I'd even come home early from Europe to see: intelligent and entertaining dances to Milhaud's La creation du monde, the fourth Bartok quartet, and my candidate for the signal work of musical theater of the 20th Century, the Stein-Thomson Four Saints in Three Acts.

But it's not the sheep pastures and mixed forest of the Netherlands, the pines and vines of the Var, or the stunning humanity of Morris's choreography that I contemplate this morning. It's the amazingly trashy thing my native city has become.

Driving the length of University Avenue, from freeway to campus, is a revelation of the triumph of litter, neglect, exploitation, and utter unconcern for human comfort and civility that has become the accepted background -- foreground, actually -- of contemporary urban American life.

This results, of course, from the prevailing American view that private gain trumps public responsibility, that one can do what one wants with one's own property regardless of the resulting deterioration of the setting in which it participates -- whether the ecology of the physical environment or the temper of the public mood.

I heard earlier yesterday of the pending legislation to "compensate" property-owners for potential profits hypothetically lost because of ecological priorities such as the preservation of endangered species. The arguments referred to the property-owners "rights," but never once contemplated the civic and social responsibility that comes with the ownership of property -, the extent to which such ownership entails stewardship.

Cities are pre-eminently for people, for the people who live in them, work or study in them, visit them. Context affects content, and to condemn the citizenry to live in physical squalor and confusion inevitably condemns them to anxiety and stress, to their own confusion and disorder.

I don't think it's too far-fetched to suggest the unconcern for order and tranquillity is related to the prevalent American unconcern for maintenance and prevention. The urban American eye is on details and the dollar, not the long term and stability.

It's time to find a way to persuade planning and zoning commissions of this, but also to demand greater collective responsibility from developers, architects, landlords, and shopkeepers.

September dispatches, 5: Elfring days

Friesland: from the Franekervaart
Originally uploaded by charlesshere.

Rien, Sept. 6--

WE TRIED TO PUT politics and the news behind us and have fun and be sociable for three days, visiting the Dutch sector of our extended family, the Elfrings, who were host to our daughter Thérèse for a year nearly thirty years ago.

We've remained in touch ever since, and grown closer over the years. It's a wonderful family. Saturday and Sunday we were in den Haag, first with Tom and Judith, who spend a few weeks in our house five years ago. (Can it really be that long?)

Sunday we visited Joost and Tanja, who were in our house for a week in July. You don't spend time with Elfrings without bicycling, and Sunday we biked maybe eight or ten kilometers out into the country around den Haag.

Sunday night there was a party, where we met Judith's father, a fascinating man who has published significant books on cerebral neurology -- it was fun to defend Mozart against his champion Bach, and to explore ideas of scientific materialism and the irrational.

We then went up to Friesland to visit Kees and Irma, who have settled in a marvelous 18th-century house there, and who took us on a leisurely cruise through nearby canals.

I've posted a number of photos from the trip so far on Shutterfly: you can see them here

[http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AZMm7hs0auGEc]

And I hope to have more things to say about all this in forthcoming dispatches.

September dispatches, 4: some words on Katrina

UP THIS MORNING LATE, to log on to Tom's marvelous high speed connection wirelessly, and read the news, oh boy.

In Le Figaro two or three things quickly catch my eye. An account of Les Américains consternés par la fragilité de leur puissance, America in consternation at the fragility of her power.

Another account, L'administration Bush aurait ignoré les prédictions des experts, discusses the Bush administration's having ignored expert predictions of the New Orleans disaster.

Somewhere, I've already lost track of the URL, there was a fine round-up of the world press response to the crisis.

And in Corriere della Sera an editorial, Il mercato non ci salverà, suggests that optimism won't "correct" the market's disruption following this disaster, and a market recovery won't resolve the real crisis, because it extends far beyond the state of the dollar.

The financial fallout will be bad enough, as L'économie américaine déstabilisée points out. According to this article the grain market, for example, is collapsing, at least for the moment, because the barge traffic between wheat storage in the midwest and freighters in the Gulf of Mexico is interrupted.

And warehouses are affected. Do you drink coffee? According to Le Figaro, a quarter of the stock of coffee in the United States is rotting in a Procter & Gamble warehouse in New Orleans.

But this is only to discuss the economic fallout from Katrina. The real meaning of the disaster goes farther, much farther. I think the Katrina disaster will quickly prove to be much more influential on the course of social and political American history than was even 9/11. For one thing, it will be very hard indeed on the incumbent Administration. The President, poor man, is never terribly expressive of his emotions, and this was clearly not a moment to hide them. He was elected for two reasons: He's a the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with, and he's the kind of guy you want to keep the steady course. What we needed in New Orleans was another kind of man, someone closer to Mister Rogers. No one has ever confused George W. Bush with Mister Rogers.

Second, the American penchant for gambling. We've been betting badly lately. In Iraq we bet on hidden WMDs, on quick military victory, on easy democratization of the Iraquis: we lost each bet in turn. And like so many compulsive gamblers when confronted by a loss we redoubled our investment, throwing good money — not to mention less replaceable capital in the form of friendships and credibility — after bad.

Similarly, we bet the levees wouldn't fail. Preventive maintenance is boring and expensive and frequently its payoff is a long time coming: we're an impatient nation. We bet the levees would hold, and we bet wrong.

Finally, worst of all it seems to me, a very ugly side of the American mentality has been revealed, the side that is callous, even contemptuous, of losers, of victims, of the poor and downtrodden. I know: it's axiomatic that Americans stick up for the little guy. But they stick up for him when he's still got some spunk: nobody loves you when you're down and out.

A few months ago a taxi-driver in Madrid asked me about the American health system. Is it true, he wanted to know, that there are many people without any medical coverage?

When I explained the situation he shook his head sadly. "A nation that doesn't provide for its poor is like a father who refuses to care for his children," he said — a phrase that's stuck in my mind ever since.

The citizens of New Orleans were told they must evacuate. Those with cars drove away. Others got out in rental cars, or other transportation.

But thousands were left for a number of reasons. They didn't have transportation. They didn't have money for transportation. They were too sick or frail or old to leave. They simply didn't understand the gravity of the situation. Or they were simply to skeptical of a government announcement to heed.

The whole world is looking at the faces and the bodies of these people, listening to their outcry. They are almost invariably poor. And like all the poor in our country they are for the most part sick, frail, old, children, and/or illiterate. They get their information from pictures, not the printed word. Their dietary advice comes from advertisements for sodas, potato chips, and fast-food restaurants. Their health advice is little beyond pharmaceutical advertisements.

America has turned her back on a large percentage of her children, and they have grown resentful. New Orleans is perhaps only the beginning of their outrage. It is an outrage that transcends race. It is an outrage that just might have a profound influence on the future of American politics. At least I hope so.