4: Utah

Lindsey looks over the San Rafael seabed


THE COUNTRY CHANGES once you leave Delta, Utah, driving east on Highway 50 -- "the loneliest road in the country." West of Delta, after you've crossed into Utah from the mining country of central Nevada, the landscape had softened into farm country: alfalfa, some truck farming, maybe a few orchards. Delta would be a provincial capital in another country; in the USA it's just another county seat bisected by Highway 50, serving for twenty minutes or so as Main Street, impossibly wide.

Then it's back for a short time to farm country and then the red rock begins. I'd only seen southern Utah before -- Cedar Breaks, Zion, Capitol Reef. Central Utah shows the origin of those amazing formations. Here the flat country begins at the same time to solidify and to break down. From the automobile, at nearing eighty miles an hour, grain gives way to mass. It's no longer sand, pebbles, rocks, brush, bush; it's simply red rock, white clouds, blue sky: American colors. (Yes: and Dutch, and French, and...)

From time to time the highway finds a long grade, cutting through the rock, and the geological history reveals itself: layers of white stone, grey, red again, layers put down by various forces I suppose, in eras dominated by different pollutants -- volcanos? shellfish? forest? And at the new level, lower, you get out of the car at a viewpoint on the bluff overlooking the coast, and look out over a vast ancient seabed.

The kids run off exploring and climbing where they dare, and you contemplate time and space so extensive, marked by change so incredibly slow, that you cannot reason it; you can only meditate on it -- rather, you must contemplate rather than reason. You know the general principles of geological change; you have an idea of the geological pace; but you have no way of relating it to your own life experience, not even after seventy years.

There's none of Christopher Alexander's "half-inch trim" here. Everything that is not human -- your kids, your car, the road it drives -- is more than monumentally huge. Monuments are made to human purpose: this landscape has no human concern whatever. To think of it in any human terms is to be either insufferably arrogant or insufferably sentimental.

This realization is so striking it's been expressed over and over. I remember being seized forty years ago by the insights in Ross Parmenter's The Awakened Eye, recording his own enlightenment, by desert contemplation, beyond the human concerns of his previous years as a journalist. I apologize for repeating his discoveries here, badly, in brief and not persuasively: but the experience, like the landscape that inspires it, cannot finally be expressed verbally: one has to absorb it on site, at one's own pace.

We descend through an amazing cut in this seabed to arrive in one lower yet, though the distant horizon still looks like the end of the world, another final drop-off into who knows what. The nearer horizon is threatening toward evening, and as we approach this evening's motel we drive through a dust-storm. Ah: this is what has carved those caves and arches, what has worn away the soft earth to reveal the hard bones within it.

The road drops a bit more, to a live river, the first water we've seen in this landscape, other than a few absurdly transitional irrigation projects, in a day of driving. The Green River, which rises, I believe, in Wyoming, flows through Utah into Lake Powell, and is joined by the Colorado, a relatively minor tributary which nonetheless takes over naming rights to the Grand Canyon and the now pathetic conclusion, sapped by irrigation projects, hardly surviving to its eventual outflow in the Sea of Cortez.

At Green River we check into a motel whose pool, of course, is not working; then set out for one of the many fine restaurants the motelkeeper had mentioned when I telephoned for the reservation. There are three: a fast-food franchise; a Tex-Mex bar; the "family restaurant" Tamarisk. We choose the last, and are rewarded with nothing memorable.

3: Highway 50

Austin, Nevada





THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS, as I understand it, were built a day's journey apart -- a day by foot and mule, of course. The towns on Highway 50, you'd think to look at the map, were similarly distributed -- a day by jalopy, not mule. You'd also think that modern automobiles would make the trip faster, and they do. But it's still a long way between them.

Until fairly recently even the automobile club was advising against this trip except for travelers with "strong survival skills." Until thirty years ago we wouldn't have attempted it without a toolbox in the trunk, a spare set of hoses and belts, and five gallons of water. Today, so complacent and credible have we become, our only preparation is to fill the tank; and even that isn't so terribly necessary: one tank will get us across Nevada and halfway across Utah!

(34.6 miles to the gallon, if you want to know; 17-gallon tank. Oh: $3.09, on the average.)

In truth it's probably just as well there are so few towns along this road: they take a distant second to the open spaces between them, in my opinion. The Intelligent Designer has arranged things with a better eye, if perhaps a less obvious sense of humor. But the aesthetic and philosophical rewards of Landscape aren't enough for the questing human mind and spirit: one wants as well food and drink and repose, and the occasional bit of society.

We'd planned to spend the night in Ely, I don't know why -- roughly a comfortable day's drive across Nevada -- but a couple of phone calls revealed there was a convention in town, and a movie being shot on the outskirts, and not a room to be had. So we stopped the next town short, in Eureka. While in Reno I'd researched this a bit, gullibly, in the easy way Internet blogs offer: Man in a Suitcase had made this exact trip recently, though east to west, and had offered his own recommendations, with enticing photos.

If you're curious about Austin or Ely I'll refer you to him, and his comments on Eureka are interesting as well. But just how recently did he make this trip, anyway? The "gourmet meal at the Jackson House's restaurant" hasn't been available for years, the girl at the visitor's center told us; the place has been desperately for lease. We'd checked into the Best Western, where the only room sleeping four was a hundred-dollar suite, well beyond our normal limit, so we had little choice as to dinner: we were eating in Eureka.

I don't recall the dinner, so it can't have been too bad.

Next day we drove across the desert to Ely, where we found hundreds of motels, nearly all with vacancy signs lit up. Well, these days we reserve motel rooms from the AAA guide, so we miss all those little mom and pop motels, the twentynine dollar ones that look quaint and clean and nostalgic when we drive by, next day.

On across the imperceptible state boundary into Utah and the town of Delta, where we find a Radio Shack franchise. Maybe they'll have an adaptor for my laptop! I left the power unit back in Reno, of course, the one I bought in Glendale when I forgot to pack one for that trip, a couple of months ago... The Reno motel said, when I called, that it hadn't turned up, and I regretted the tip left for the housemaid, but chalked it up to the increasing carelessness and forgetfulness that comes with one's seventies.

Well, of course, there isn't an adaptor for the low-wattage adaptor in our car, used for the cell phone and the handheld. No matter: when we get to Santa Fe I'll be able to borrow one, and I've ordered yet another to be sent on to Albuquerque. I can get along a couple of days without a computer -- but that's why this is being written three days late and the memory fading...

2: Desert Grain

Sand Mountain, Nevada

THE EYE LIKES CONTINUITY-- continuity of line but also continuity of grain, and when it cannot have continuity it tries to feign it by filling in gaps. That's hard, though, and the eye fatigues. Christopher Alexander writes about this among his hundreds of architectural "patterns," recurring postulates he gleaned from observations of vernacular architecture in various cultures. "Half-inch trim," he calls it: ornament of a size sufficient to accommodate the ocular nervous system as it jumps from the grain of stone, plaster, or wood, on essentially plain surfaces, to the bigger events of corners, doorways, steps.

There's a lot of grain in the desert. Grain and grains. The sand ranges from almost a powder, at Sand Mountain -- about which more later -- to irregular grains recalling their origin in shell or stone. The stones themselves, worn and carried to these flat places, are of all sorts of color and texture.

But there are few flat places; the desert undulates, often imperceptibly, occasionally more certainly when washes wind across its surface. Here the finer grains have been swept away by water -- when might that last have happened, one wonders -- and the smallest "grains" are pebbles, the softest of them more rounded, water-worn.

Then there's the botanical grain. I'm no more a botanist than a geologist; I lack names for these things -- another failure of grain, of lexical grain this time. The rocks are all just rocks, or pebbles, or, ultimately, sand; the plants are all just brush, or bushes, or, rarely, flowers.

But you don't need literacy to appreciate the architecture of these plants, the feathery foliage attached one way or another to sticks that have followed some hidden instinct or influence in growing by twists and curves. Or their delightful palette, finding a hundred ways of mediating grey and green.

Or, for that matter, their instinct for location. For miles there will be little vegetation, and then the desert will fill with it, plants clustering closely or keeping their mutual distance, responding I suppose to the hidden ability of the soils to retain moisture. The plants on the flat desert are often different from those on hillsides, even adjacent and under the same huge sky.

Everything you see responds to some set of consistent influences, I'm sure of it; that's why everything in this desert looks "right." This in itself is reassuring and restful. Perhaps there's an implication that where such things as sand, rock, and brush inevitably find their proper place, determine themselves their proper distribution, why then all will ultimately be well with humans too, even the humans who stick these absurd fenceposts in the ground, and stretch out their rusty barbed wire to mature in the desert air.

But then you come upon Sand Mountain. Sand Mountain is an anomaly: an enormous pile of perfectly soft, perfectly white sand, limestone I imagine deposited somewhere else by a glacier distant in both time and space, ground into powder by unimaginable forces, and blown here and only here by currents of wind rising only at certain times (themselves determined by some secret agenda) and responding to the contours of the surrounding hills and mountains.

You turn off Highway 50 a few miles east of Fallon and follow a gravel road, perfectly straight and due north, to this pristine thing; and as you do your heart sinks a bit, or at least mine does, at the sight and sound of recreational vehicles -- motorcycle-like things but with four wheels, most of them -- scurrying along, not particularly fast, a few feet above the base of the sandpile; or occasionally, with a more strenuous snarl, riding straight up.

At the end of the gravel road, say a hundred yard from the mountain itself, is an improvised city of campers and trailers, a community whose citizens have only one purpose: to transport themselves in these mechanized crawlers across the sand. To do this they wear protective clothing: goggles, helmets, brightly-colored synthetic-cloth shirts, gloves. I'm sure they hear nothing but the unmuffled complaint of their engines; smell nothing but the hot-dirt-oil of their exhaust.

As to what they see, I can't imagine. Their view of nature must be constantly jostled and bumped; the glare of the sand and the brilliance of the sky must overcome the exquisite ocular system we humans have evolved, normally so sensitive to subtlety.

I suppose there's another layer of values in this community, a hierarchy (or at least a system) determined by the trappings these citizens surround themselves with. The Sierra Club published, years ago, a wonderful book of photographs of families posing in front of their residences and surrounded by all their possessions. This community recalled those photographs. These sand-bikers, let's call them, sit in front of their trailers and campers, shaded by improvised ramadas or patio umbrellas, coolers and things scattered about, sand-buggies parked nearby, helmets and gloves piled on their saddles or hanging from handlebars.

A glance reveals differences of economy: some of this stuff looks pretty trashy and well-used; some seems newer and fancier. But there seems no system to the distribution: this is clearly a transitional community, here for only one purpose, the strange rite of burning oil to travel purposelessly across these sands.

I write this a few days after seeing Sand Mountain -- and, after it, the isolated Nevada towns; the red-rock Utah country; sandstorms; the sudden nostalgic relief of the southwestern Colorado farmland; and the climax of Mesa Verde. All this has changed -- no, not changed, focussed -- the experience of Sand Mountain. Internet availability allowing, more on this to come.

1: Reno, of all places

Reno, June 22

The drive is a familiar one: down 101 to Novato, across the Black Point cutoff past Mare Island, onto highway 80 at the improbable roller-coaster garden, through the Vacaville hills and into the central valley.

How it's changed in the last fifty years and more. When I was a kid the Black Point cutoff was something out of Dante, a narrow road through heavy fogs, chasms real or, worse, imagined on each side. You only took that way if the ferries were out of commission, because of a late hour, or heavy seas on the Bay, or perhaps, who knows, some kind of labor issue.

Now the road's uneventful. Everyone drives at the same speed, of course, since there's only one lane in each direction: but everyone is now able to drive at the same speed, whether through the cruise-control or, less likely, attentive competence. The cars don't break down; you never see anyone pulled over onto the shoulder: it's just drive, listen to another CD, answer the phone, drive; and then you come to the amazing humpback bridge past Mare Island, and stay these days on a multi-lane freeway across the canyon toward Six Flags or whatever it is, and you're out of the Bay Area and into the Valley.

One hundred six outside the car, says the thermometer on the dashboard, but we're hungry, it's past one o'clock, so I pull off the road into Davis and stop at the park, two or three blocks north, two or three blocks west. One parking bay is shaded, and there's a concrete picnic-table and -benches in the shade; and afterward we walk across the park to Ciocolat (301 B Street, 753-3088), a fine place for an iced mocha at a table on the deck.

From home to Reno is 250 miles, five hours not counting the Davis stop (but including time wasted in Santa Rosa, driving to and from the AAA office to pick up some maps). Finding the motel was easy: Lindsey picked the cheapest one in the AAA Tourguide, a Travelodge on West Fourth Street -- forty-four dollars for us and two grandchildren, who made friends quickly with other kids in the pool while I got the e-mail on the free wi-fi that doesn't work in the room but comes in okay on the parking lot.

While online I look for a restaurant. Zagat has nothing in Nevada north of Las Vegas, it seems. We find some other webpages, though, and reading between the lines, and making allowances for local enthusiasms, we settle on the 4th Street Bistro. Good thing we do: the place is genuinely good. There is a place to eat east of the Waterboy in Sacramento: I would not have believed it.

I have a nice Greek salad with boquerones, those sweet little Spanish anchovies innocent of salt and olive oil; and afterward a truly inspired plate of lamb noisettes, grilled, touched with lavender-scented salt, and set about a mound of pureed cannelini, with a mint-based "pesto" and tracings of harissa sauce -- not Italian, not Sard, not Provencal, not North African, but beautifully balanced, integrated, fully arrived; a thing I'll happily order every time I'm in this town.

The hostess looks at us appraisingly as she brings something or other: Aren't you Lindsey, she says; and Lindsey admits she is. Natalie the executive chef comes out with Lindsey's book, for a second inscription -- for Natalie did an internship at Chez Panisse back in the late 'eighties, before cooking stints at Stars and Bix, and then opening this place of her own in Reno six years ago.

4th St. Bistro is, in short, a Bay Area restaurant in Reno, the only slow food-like place, she says, in the entire state of Nevada. She's working with local farmers and purveyors, moving the Waters revolution into the Basin & Range, and to judge by tonight's dinner with both authenticity and real polish.

We have dessert, of course: pot de creme, apricot upside-down cake, semifreddo, and -- my choice -- a clafoutis that's just the ticket, the thin batter, the cherries, the sugar crystals --

We're on our way to Santa Fe, if you don't mind a little rhyming. Tomorrow we cut across Nevada on the old highway 50. I'm not sure where we'll eat tomorrow night. But even if it's a total wash-out we'll have the memory of tonight's dinner, better by far than anything I'd have looked for along this part of the road.

4th Street Bistro: 3065 W. 4th Street, Reno; phone (775) 323-3200

The Crucible in Healdsburg

Every great civilization has its theater. The Greeks, the Romans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Elizabethans, the French court -- all those great civilizations depended on the theater for public contemplation, discussion, and enactment of the pressing issues of the day. Actors, a public space, an engaged audience, and speech served as a sounding board for the verbal examination of the great issues: moral, political, personal, familial, religious.

Tragic, comic, historical, or fictional: playwrights from Aeschylus to Harold Pinter and beyond have kept this tradition vital: considering timeless problems of human life on earth; casting various points of view on memorable dramatic personae; examining conflicting versions, opposed actions, irreconcilable passions on what remains arguably the most flexible, all-encompassing, fascinating focus yet devised for human attention: the theater stage.

One thing wrong with contemporary life is the relative absence of community theater. The great issues of the day are debated, if at all, on television. Generally one-dimensional considerations of public matters are given short, often superficial notice in the newspapers. Virtually every issue that is discussed in this multicultural country which prizes individual dignities is reduced to polarized opposing positions which are given “equal time.”
Theater, which spends an entire evening on the airing of its dramatic subject, has been largely replaced by commercial entertainment increasingly enjoyed in private: television, videotape, and the DVD have replaced the movie theater with the living room, as surely as the movie theater replaced vaudeville and burlesque, not to mention the legitimate theater that once prospered in small cities across the country.

Technological and commercial evolution has changed not only the means of entertainment but inevitably its quality and meaning as well. But theater is irrational in its will to persevere, if only because of the dedication, the passion, of its practitioners. In Healdsburg, of all places, pop. 10,000, there is relevant, resourceful, entertaining, provocative, and above all communitarian theater.

Its most recent production was The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller in 1953, in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign -- vital history to fewer and fewer of us, but suddenly all too relevant again. The program quoted McCarthy:

Today we are engaged in an all out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity… Can there be any one here tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the Communist world has said, “The time is now” -- that this is the time for the show down between the democratic Christian world and the Communist atheistic world?

Miller’s response was a dramatic meditation on the intricacies of the Salem witch hunts. Massachusetts, 1692: a few adolescent girls dance naked in the woods, led on perhaps by the exotic Tituba, a slave nursemaid brought from Barbados by the tense, zealous, egotistical parson Samuel Parris, a Harvard man determined to be important and to keep his congregation strictly at heel.

In this rigorous, autocratic, monocultural (and monomaniacal) community there is no explanation of such lewdness but witchcraft. Before long nearly everyone’s indicted, because the only plausible cause of a succession of stillbirths, or a wife who insists on reading books, or a sick child, or an inability to raise healthy pigs, is witchcraft. What cannot be explained through common sense can only arouse suspicion, and suspicion inevitably leads to denunciation and punishment.

There is really nothing simple about any of this. Miller’s play is “about” morals, “moral politics,” the morality of politics (and the politics of morality); but also about the growing distance, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, between landed gentry and honest farmer, between preacher and serving-girl, between freeman and slave. (Mercifully, Miller leaves the American Indian out of the picture -- except for one gruesome recollection by the complex, passionate, troubled Abigail Williams: “I saw my parents’s skulls smashed on their pillows.”)

If the play is about these public crises, it is also about all the familiar individual ones: adolescent yearnings, marital infidelity, proud careerism, insolence, weakness before authority, hunger. Eternal issues arise at the intersections of these individual crises with the public ones, and that’s what The Crucible is about.

But it’s more than anything else about the conflict between the natural human animal and the societized civil unit we all must be if we are to live in a civilized society -- or even a tribal one. This is a matter of some concern. If you don’t think we must all think long and hard about confronting pressing social (what some call, misleadingly, “political”) concerns, think about Iraq -- or go see the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Well, our local community theater company has done a first-rate job by The Crucible. The production is in the round, set out in the country, out of doors on a grassy field by an oak woodland, beginning at twilight, the girls’s songs ringing from down by the creek, Deputy Governor Danforth scowling at his desk.

When not on stage, all the actors are seated among the audience, always in character. This is brilliant, for it eases the link between Miller’s play (and its matter) and us in the audience. Since actors are seated among us, we inescapably take our place within the action.

Last summer this company put on a haunting and memorable production of Sophocles’s Antigone, like The Crucible a tragedy about the conflict between individual moral responsibility and an authoritarian society. This week’s performance of The Crucible reveals those similarities -- across two and a half millennia of history! In 2,500 years, society has refused to learn from that history!

But the performance also reveals the strength of this theater company -- strength of ensemble, shown in the ease of their interruptions, the quick exchanges, the vivid flow of emotion and intelligence; even, when necessary, the resourcefulness with which they meet unforeseen problems: the sudden drop of a few pages of dialogue; the insistent screaming of a neighbor’s peacock or the drone of a nearby tractor.

There’s also individual strength. Karna Southall was a fine, brooding, sinister, wholly troubled Abigail. Alex Walker did well as the complex, high-minded, essentially weak preacher Samuel Parris. Avery Sholl was a resourceful, often commanding John Proctor. Nicole Mitchell made sense of the intricate, finally ethical Reverend John Hale. Caitlin Coey personified the absurdity of individual moral commitment even at the cost of life and family as Elizabeth Proctor. Odin Halverson rose, after a problematic first night, to the bluster and complacency of Governor Danforth.

Secondary roles were often just as well achieved: Amanda Haecker as Tituba; Quenby Dolgushkin as Mrs. Putnam and, later, Ezekiel Cheever (for a number of roles were double-cast); Anna Fuertsch as both Rebecca Nurse and her husband Francis; Ian Houghton as Giles Corey.

Emma Monrad took the pivotal small role of Mary Warren, whose eventual turnaround tries to bring Salem to its senses; and here I must reveal that (as many of you know) she is my granddaughter, and thereby that all these actors are in fact adolescents. The company producing this Crucible is the “Teen Ensemble” of Healdsburg’s Imagination Foundation. But this is not children’s theater: it is simply community theater, with the difference that some of these community actors may well become professional actors in the future.

Of course it adds to the pleasure, not to mention the intellectual reward, of any thoughtful member of their audience, that in this production one sees adolescent minds coming to terms with what is essentially a drama about the adolescent mind -- literally in the case of the unfortunate girls whose woodland revelries lead to hanging; more extensively the case of a society like Salem’s, formed by rebellion against authority, attempting an idealistic community of conformism, failing to understand context or complexity, innocent of irony. (A society troublingly like our own, needless to say.)

And that adds one more layer of meaning and relevance to this production. Seeing it, thinking about it, we deal with so many issues, from Salem to Sonoma County, from 17th-century Christian zeal to 20th-century ditto; elections, the death penalty, the uncertainty of social justice, the irrationality of animal instincts in the context of social structure -- and we see a group of intelligent, eager, relatively innocent boys and girls -- I insist on calling them that, and not “young adults” -- working with their own approach to the world into which they must soon take their adult place.

The final paragraph from the program:

The Teen Ensemble has been working on this play for four months. In every way it has been a challenge; material, speech, historical context, maintaining ensemble. That is why we chose it. And through this process we confront ourselves -- our habits, judgments and fears. Now we share with you the inherent challenge of this play and the legacy that Arthur Miller has left us.

Those are the words of the directors of both the company and the production, I believe: Brent Lindsay and Amy Pinto, who with characteristic modesty leave their own names off the program. Any community is fortunate to have resident such intelligence, commitment, insight, and artistic power; and the young actors who work with them are particularly fortunate.

Half a century

from left to right: “the Etruscan Warrior,” a welded-steel-rod sculpture by Mel Strawn (I believe) bought from Contemporary Arts in Berkeley. We still have it, sitting on the garden wall outside our bedroom. A coral-colored stoneware bottle from David ____, a handsome, bearded, middle-aged potter who had a well-known studio in Larkspur, where there used to be a brick factory and is now a shoppingmall. The “fish dish,” also from Contemporary Arts, and still resident on a top shelf in our pantry. In it I had carried a loaf of French bread, split, rubbed with garlic, spread with butter, coated with grated cheddar cheese, and toasted under the broiler, when I went to dinner at Gaye Notley’s apartment in Berkeley a couple of years earlier, and met there her roommate Lindsey Remolif. I can’t read the book titles from here, which is too bad; I’d like to know what they are.



Three planks; five concrete blocks. On the bottom shelf a white speaker cabinet I made to house a loudspeaker salvaged, I think, from an automobile radio. At the center of the speaker cone, to serve as a high-frequency diffuser, I glued a half-eggshell carefully cut with embroidery scissors from a hard-boiled egg. On the wall hangs Lorraine Crawford’s oil painting of an abstracted standing figure on a blue ground. On those rush squares, on the floor, a corduroy-covered cushion, orange as I recall, no doubt made by Lindsey. The scene is lit from above by a hanging lamp I made of two plywood discs and a sheet of splotched fiberglass, with an ordinary light bulb hanging from a length of zip cord plugged into the wall, right. It was our second home.

Mozart

ALL MOZART'S MUSIC arrived a couple of days ago in a box five inches square and a foot long -- 179 CDs: all the authenticated work: operas, symphonies, concerti, chamber music, choral music, solo keyboard music, all performed on period instruments by young, intelligent, delightful musicians.

I write this perhaps too soon: obviously I haven't heard them all yet. I'm tackling them in my usual way, chronologically: so far I've heard the first disc of four "volumes" -- symphonies, Concerti, violin sonatas, keyboard music.

One ear-opener is the choice of instruments. The earliest keyboard solos are played variously on organ (by Bernard Foccroulle), clavichord, or harpsichord (Guy Penson), with deliciously varied but always expressive results. The recordings are clean and close-to.

The early piano concerti K. 107 are performed by Pieter-Jan Belder on a Ruckers-type harpsichord and accompanied by two violins (Remy Baudet and Marten Boeken) and double-bass (Margaret Urquhart), with the soloist filling in also . The resulting texture is lean and clear, a fitting suggestion of the child's lean, clear mind processing his originals -- three keyboard sonatas by J.C. Bach, also present on the recording in clavichord performances) into pieces with the wider range of dynamics and textures offered by the strings. I like the string-players a lot: their elegant period style, with slight swells on the long notes and the resonance of gut strings, and the lightness of their touch.

I began this survey with the early violin sonatas, K. 26-31, composed by a ten-year-old who was already a formidable violinist himself. Remy Baudet and Pieter-Jan Belder play these with a great deal of pleasure and intimacy, on a 1706 violin and a recent Ruckers-type harpsichord, lifting the music well away from the more juvenile pieces Mozart had written only a few years earlier.

The first six symphonies have a completely different sound from the chamber-music recordings, with Jaap ter Linden conducting the Mozart Akademie Amsterdam (recorded in the Doopsgezinde Kerk in Haarlem, with open, spacious sound). Oboes and horns have a fine bite in sudden fortes, a smooth resonance otherwise; the strings are vivacious, and the entire affair is lively and public, graceful and ingratiating.

I bought this set, issued in The Netherlands on the Brilliant Classics label, from eBay; it arrived within a few weeks at a very manageable cost, not much more than a dollar a disc. I don't know how they do it. It's a marvelous gift from modern technology, patient scholarship, and dedicated but joyous performances. I can hardly wait to get to the first opera, Apollo and Hyacinth: I'll let you know how it sounds.

Bread from Gayle's

IT’S LIKE THIS: A number of years ago a couple of people we knew decided to go into the bakery business. She’d interned, I think, at Chez Panisse, where she helped out in the pastry department; maybe she filled in for Lindsey one of the summers we took off to see what was going on in France.

He’d been a musician and had decided it was time to settle down. A very gifted man: a painter, a sculptor, a guitarist. And an incredibly gifted baker, an intuitive baker — but one with a sense that there were things to learn.

They travelled. He was incapable of visiting a bakery in France, or Italy, or Belgium, or Scandinavia (I think), without pestering the baker in charge: How do you do this? What do you use? How does it go together? How long, how hot? And then what?

They opened their bakery, in a small town south of San Francisco, adjacent to a town we frequented every summer because of a music festival.

I told Lou: There’s a great bakery down here. Oh yes, he said, we’ve gone there for years. No, I said, not that one, this new one. He and Bill were dubious, but they dropped in. Oh yes, they said.

I truly believe that when he bakes bread himself, as he still does from time to time, Joe Ortiz is the finest baker of bread I have ever met. Of course the bakery has grown far beyond its early days, when a business consultant asked if their bakery was a business or a work of art: Business, they said; Good, he said, in that case we can do something.

Something they have certainly done. Gayle’s Bakery dominates its town, Capitola; or, at least, it dominates the crossroads which serves as one of the three or four entrances into town.

We stopped there on Friday for lunch. The Bakery has for many years also included a Rotisserie. We ordered chicken breast from the spit, and roasted potatoes and carrots on the side. We had two or three hours yet to drive, so contented ourselves with water. For dessert, an apricot-raspberry galette for me, a cookie for Lindsey.

But we took care to provision ourselves for the next day. I saw a loaf of raisin nut bread up on the shelf.

In the old days Joe baked what he called a pumpernickel loaf: dark flour, raisins, nuts, baked into a loaf weighing perhaps five pounds, with a slab of white bread-dough across the top, “to distinguish it from its neighbors,” he might have said — that’s an inside joke.

He stopped doing that years ago, and it’s been my sole ongoing complaint with Joe Ortiz and Gayle’s Bakery.

I had a buttered slice of toast from that loaf of raisin nut bread this morning, with my soft-boiled egg — a tradition here now on Sunday mornings.

We finished dinner a couple of hours ago, a delayed St. Patrick’s Day Dinner, corned beef and cabbage, potatoes and carrots. I just finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. The raisin-nut bread called me from its perch on the breadboard.

No butter, just a thin slice of bread. Absolute perfection. You taste the flour, the yeast, a teeny bit of salt, the raisins, the nuts. Everything in perfect balance. I have long believed that a true loaf of bread has only four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, water. This bread of Joe’s persuades me there are two different kinds of perfection.

Landscape

THE OTHERS THINK it’s wildflowers we’re looking for, and maybe that’s what they’re after, though I notice Mac’s just as much interested in birds. But what I’m really travelling for is landscape.

I think landscape is the most essential thing for me — the way I place myself in my world, the way I make whatever sense I can (and that only intuitively, certainly not analytically) of the big and deep issues of Life and Place and Meaning.

This must go back a long way, to my childhood. We moved to the country when I was ten, but even before that we lived in an open landscape for a year or so. In the summer of 1944, when I was not yet nine, we drove slowly down California’s Central Valley, through the Mojave Desert, across Arizona and New Mexico, and settled for a month or two on the dusty plain in Guymon, Oklahoma, before driving on further to northeastern Oklahoma where I turned ten, then eleven years old.

Once out of doors there was no near barrier there; the landscape stretched away as far as one could see. When we moved back to California we were again in the country, and if here the horizons were much closer — since we lived essentially in a valley all our own — the landscape was still the spatial context of my life, far more than would have been the case in a city or town, cluttered with the streets and buildings, telephone poles and front yards, automobiles and passersby so routine a part of an urban existence.

I have my favorite landscapes, dozens of them. We began this trip, last Sunday, visiting one of them, pictured above — not that it would be possible to “picture” it on even a much huger canvas than your computer monitor provides. It’s the view out east from in front of the Mission San Juan Bautista, sweeping from the willow outside its cemetery, on the left, eighty degrees or so to the south. You’re looking across the San Andreas Fault, on which a rich black layer of bottom-land has been deposited over the centuries by the San Benito River.

The missionaries who arrived here after a hard day’s walk from the south, accompanied by pack mules and horses, must have recognized this landscape for its promise — the rich soil, the protecting hills to the west, the water, the immense numbers of birds, the game.

We drove down from San Juan Bautista, on highway 25, to Coalinga, stopping off en route to ramble for hours among the Pinnacles, as described in the previous blog; and the next day — Monday — we continued south, first climbing the graded gravel Parkfield Grade Road into magnificent unspoiled mountain landscape, then dropping into the — well, parklike Parkfield valley, where the search continues for the meaning of seismicity; then pressing on to the third goal of this trip, the vast silence of the Carrizo Plain.



Even on a grey day Soda Lake is impressive; even when there’s considerable water, as there was this time, its evanescence is apparent — landscape in its majesty, its sheer size and space, always implies permanence; but its subtly changing light and color expresses mutability, susceptibility; and vernal pools like Soda Lake can’t help but bring to mind the provisionality of our existence.

MORTALITY. Next day, though, we drove on down to Ojai, where Jim Churchill’s tangerines reminded us of the renewability of it all, and life was once again full of zest. And today the fine historical museum in San Buenaventura, and the fine Santa Barbara Botanic Garden; and tomorrow once more on the road, through the matchless Santa Ynez Valley.

Pinnacles

http://www.shere.org/pinnacles/pinnacles.html


Off south, mid-March, with two friends, to see if we can find some wildflowers.

Day 1, yesterday: South on 101, across a fine Golden Gate Bridge, stop in Woodside for a lunch in a bakery-cafe, then south on 280, back roads, 87. A discovery: Chitactac-Adams Park, a county park south of San Jose, with a fine interpretive trail and exhibit-room reconstructing the Ohlone community that once existed in this charming pastoral setting -- stream, oaks, boulders, oaks, wild plums.

On, finally, to San Juan Bautista, where stayed the night at the San Juan Inn, not terribly expensive, a walk from downtown; and dinner at the Basque restaurant -- don't go there unless you have the steak, savory and flavorful. The lamb stew unpleasant, I'm told; and the house red about what we'd have expected in the mid-1950s.

Up this morning for a walk through the Mission San Juan Bautista, recently and very nicely restored since the latest earthquake -- the painted decorations in the plaster nicely done, the museum exhibits polished up a bit though still lacking in explanatory labels (okay with me), the retablo a tad too operatic, the garden a real delight.

Then the slow drive down Highway 25 and a four-hour ramble through the Pinnacles. What a site! Amazing terrain, rock formations; the wildflowers just beginning -- bush lupine, paintbrush, Indian warrior, white ceanothus, monkeyflower, several others -- I'm no botanist. A fair amount of birdsong down at the parking lot, then silence on the trail, just as I like it. Snow, shade, sun, lichen, silence, rocks, vistas, woods, stream.

An hour's drive south, then turn east, through Coalinga, a snowy owl flying across the road in front of us, the motel, dinner -- expensive! -- at Harris ranch.

You can see more photos at


http://www.shere.org/pinnacles/pinnacles.html

Mangia, mangia

ONCE IN A WHILE a cookbook appears that just can’t seem to go wrong. Judy Rodgers’s Zuni Café Cookbook is one example: when it arrived I almost immediately made a Caesar Salad following the recipe, and the result tasted exactly like being in the Zuni Café. A few weeks later, same experience with her marvelous roast chicken.

The latest example is Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques, published last month, I believe. Suzanne worked a stint at Chez Panisse, is how we know her; then she moved on, first to the sous-chef role at Mark Peel’s Campanile in Los Angeles, then opening her own restaurants — first Lucques, later AOC.

We’ve only had time to try one recipe so far: we’ve been away. A couple of days ago Lindsey decided to try Suzanne’s Pappardelle with wild mushrooms, shell beans, and parmesan, making so many substitutions you’d be excused for thinking it was an entirely different dish. Farfalle instead of pappardelle; a mix of storebought mushrooms; lima beans instead of fresh shell beans — that sort of thing.

But the result was absolutely delicious. And better than that: it was intriguing, interesting, substantial. Everyone commented on it, from twelve-year-old Fran (as fine a bouche as any in this family) to seventy-year-old me. And delicious as the thing was the night Lindsey made it, it only got better the next day, when it was served warmed over in the skillet you see here.

It tasted of Suzanne’s restaurant Lucques, which — like Loretta Keller’s Bizou of fond memory — seems at its best in slow-cooked dishes — braises and the like. There’s something special about dishes like these, comforting of course this time of year, but beyond even that there’s something really interesting — their complexity and depth suggest something chthonic and primordial.

In this case, as Giovanna pointed out, there are so many details. Textures, colors, tastes. And each forkful brings a quantity of physical interfaces far beyond what you’d expect: the tiny morsels of bean, pasta, mushroom, spinach, parmesan, breadcrumbs have so much texture; so many wrinkles, edges, folds, grains; each of them immediately finding a receptor on the tongue, then moving on to dozens more.

It’s a complex recipe, but not a daunting one, I think — I say complacently, as I had nothing to do with making it. But it is a delicious thing, and a glass of Nero d’Avila does not hurt it.

PORTLAND again: jazz history lives

THE CULTURE IN PORTLAND, at least as far as I am concerned, is predominately a café culture. Here I am under my black Italian hat next to Pavel, who is instructing me in the art of the Treo, an electronic gizmo for which I lust, as another aspect of the Portland culture is electronics. Giovanna took the photo, with her cell phone, I think, or maybe her Palm, I’m not quite sure.

In fact I wrote a much shorter version of this instalment of the blog on the Treo and uploaded it from this café, one of the small locally-owned chain of Mio Gelato shops. We admire these shops for their correct and delicious gelato, and overlook their insane loyalty to Illy Caffe, what I would call the Starbuck’s of Italy. When you put enough fior di latte gelato into a cup of said Illy espresso the result is a perfectly acceptable affogato, and life does not get that much better.

We had been to the Portland Art Museum, there to see a short documentary film made by a seventeen-year-old highschool student named Samuel Allen. When a little short of his seventeenth birthday he read and reacted to a history of the local jazz scene: Bob Dietsche’s recently published “Jumptown: The Golden Years of Portland Jazz, 1942-1957.”

During those years Portland had a vibrant jazz scene, centered on the black part of town (naturally) situated across the Willamette river from the majestic railroad station. Jazz greats toured on the train in those days, and after playing dates in clubs frequented by white audiences they jammed in their own clubs in their own part of town. This is the scene recalled fondly in Allen’s video, consisting largely of interviews with survivors, many of them conducted at a local senior center.

Alas, that part of town was demolished during the 1950s when “urban renewal” became the prevailing social value. An interstate freeway, a convention center, and a basketball arena dislodged the rooming houses, bars, and jump joints that had been at the center of thriving economy of booze, gambling, music, and social entertainment. Like so much of America, Portland turned toward the bland.

It’s amazing and ironic, in a way, that it was left to a high-school student to translate Dietsche’s book, already published to celebrate a nearly vanished strand of virile urban culture, into a documentary film not without its own ironic glances at the stuffier clichés of that medium. There are problems with it, of course: the sound could be better; some of the interviews get lost in the background noise; there isn’t enough of jazz itself. But it’s honest and evocative and fascinating, partly for its subject, partly for its own charming innocence, which frequently presents an ironic counter to the lusty, witty intelligence of its subject.

And as urban cultural history it offers an important challenge to many another American city. There must be dozens of places with similar stories. Properly researched and presented -- or even simply put together on the fly -- their telling would go a long way to correcting the star-struck metropolis-ridden view most of us have of our own national heritage. Sam Allen’s movie, and Bob Dietsche’s book, deserve wide currency.

Gently sliding away from “consequence”

THERE’S NOT MUCH REASON to say much here about Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address, but I was struck by two features: its relentless optimism, calculated to tarnish any disagreement as mere pessimism (a lesson learned from Mr. Reagan); and its insistence on a continued global engagement as America’s right, privilege, duty, hope.

Lebensraum, an earlier world leader might call it. It seems odd that in a speech so welcoming of “bipartisanship” domestically there was so little said about any kind of global negotiation or co-operation.

My friend John Whiting [www.whitings-writings.com] regularly sends me information about depressing but accurate assessments of the present condition, and Mr. Bush put me in mind, last night, of a recent one, which I’ll simply print here, as John sent it to me:

“What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between the government and the people. And it became always wider.....the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think....for people who did not want to think anyway gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about.....and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ’crises’ and so fascinated.....by the machinations of the ’national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.....

“Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ’regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ’little measures’.....must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.....Each act is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.

“You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone.....you don’t want to ’go out of your way to make trouble.’ But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.

“That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.

“You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father.....could never have imagined.”

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p 166ff

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!