REINHOLD NIEBUHR b. JUNE 21ST 1892

"One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay that leads to death has already begun."

speaking of resurrections, niebuhr had pretty much disappeared from any kind of conversation in & about america. i studied niebuhr, along w/his brother, in a seminar at new college w/jay moseley.

obama has mentioned him as his favorite "philosopher" & he's being referenced again in various books & magazine articles. he's another guy philip & i used to argue about. i think philip preferred reinhold & i preferred richard, his brother. i know i preferred richard's prose but he also started moving towards a wider acceptance of other world religions. not to say that reinhold didn't agree w/his brother but his brother made his positions explicit.

mainly, a solid cold war democratic liberal, warts & all. he took on the great events of his life(two world wars & various smaller ones, desegregation, the cold war w/russia)& wrote about them thoughtfully through the clear lens of his christian faith. he wrote at a time when christian faith could intelligently inform a political position. he was as engaged in the world & it's affairs as sartre was. he was that extinct beast known as a public intellectual. it's good to have him back.

JEAN PAUL SARTRE b. JUNE 21ST 1905

"Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry."

sartre has pretty much fallen out of favor w/the academy. he was all the rage at new college in the late 70s but no one even bothered to mention him when i was at uva in the early 90s. political engagement was NOT what was on the minds of grad students at uva, kissing ass & making the grade was. nothing wrong w/that, tho the faint odor of bad faith was surely not imagined.

his novels aren't discussed at all anymore. nausea used to be on high school reading lists as was his play no exit. his trilogy(the roads to freedom)i remember very well. philip & i used to spend hours talking about it & sartre himself.

doug bergren taught being & nothingness at new college & fay hansen taught saint genet. there is, i suppose, some irony to him being swallowed by history while his lifelong companion has achieved some notoriety among feminists. the time for his kind of poetry has passed but poets have a way of coming back at odd moments.

the spectre of operation ajax

"But hear this: that which is difficult
preserves democracy; you pay respect
to the intelligence of the citizen.
Basics are not condescension. Some
tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe
this and pass on. Certain directives
parody at your own risk. Tread lightly
with personal dignity and public image.
Safeguard the image of the common man."
geoffrey hill



at present, there was no other way this was going to go, really no other way it could go. it's how china dealt w/it. it's how most hard-assed regimes deal w/protest. that doesn't mean things won't change or that this isn't the handwriting on the wall. however folks feel about china, that country was fundamentally changed by tiananmen for the better & those guys don't really cotton to change much.

regardless of what some talking heads were saying, this isn't about america in the least & never has been. it is about the future of iran for & by the people of iran. i'm not talking democracy here or, at least american democracy. the protests are de-stabilizing an economy that was already in shambles. they've made clear the lack of public support of the public face(ahmadinejad)of the government. they've exposed several fissures within the clerical ruling order. it's possible, i suppose, for the powers that be to stabilize this shaky situation but it seems like the damage has been done. a tottering state is a dangerous state but it's also an inefficient one. it's open for change.

it's absolutely true that the cia overthrew the democratically elected president in a coup d'etat in 1953(codename: operation ajax) & installed the shah. most americans don't remember that but most iranians do. what americans remember are the hostages which were pretty much a direct result of the coup. i think there is still a percentage of iranians who view america as "the great satan" but that percentage is rapidly shrinking. that kind of rhetoric & attitude just isn't seen as productive in the global scheme of things anymore. a shift occurred in america that produced the results of last november's election & opened the way for huge & fundamental changes(god knows if we'll actually get them). tiananmen indicated a shift. i think what's happening in iran is another kind of shift. i think that's what these protests today(now aimed directly against the real rulers of the country) actually signify. it's impossible for an outsider to even guess at the changes that might come from this but the fact remains that a change has come to iran today.

"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth." jacques derrida---spectres of marx

KURT SCHWITTERS b. JUNE 20TH 1887

"He pulled one from my folio to admire
-- the one with MERZ in the middle
clipped out of a COMMERZBANK ad.
"What's it called?"
I shrugged. "Merz picture; merzbild."
"But of course!"

And in an instant
what had spun in my head for days
resolved.
"I call them all merzbilden.
Merz, not schmerz, is the core of my art."

"So you're Mr. Merz!" Arp laughed,
and I was laughing still
when I boarded the slow train for home."


"The chaos of the Kurt Schwitters real space was captured in about 65 Kbytes, less then 3,4K polygons as VRML 2.0. The overall performance is surprising regardless the complexity and level of realism, leaving free potential for future implementation within the space of Merzbau, since that space is by definition uncompleted and in a state of continuous growth, as it was in constant change by Schwitters. Implementations, such as an early light show system of the original Merzbau and a spatial interactive �Ursonate� composed by Schwitters and performed in the Merzbau, bring ultimate homage to the work and life of this enormous talent, Dadaist and Artist of the XX century, Kurt Schwitters.'



"My shell, my skin, my diary of dreams
-- dark corners of a life plastered over --
my search through time for a form beyond.
All this it is and more,

for this search need not end in
these planes of white plaster -- this vision
like a life will go on transforming
till darkness takes all."

columnated ruins domino

i remember my first yancy spencer seeker: 6'10" bright orange w/green skeg, soft rails & that huge pointed upturned nose. the nose was the big new feature on the seekers, the more radical the upturn, the cooler it was. the whole idea of the model was that it was supposed to be addressing the specific nature of gulf coast waves, mushy sandbar driven smaller waves. whether it was better in those kinds of waves than walker's beautiful red challenger egg, i can't say. it was mine & i thought i looked pretty damned cool. i pretty much learned to surf on it. at some point it was stolen from philip's carport. ted scaritt told me that he thought he'd seen it once over in gulf shores alabama. one way or another, surfboards could definitely teach you about impermanence.

so i read the chron piece w/great interest. i haven't surfed in close to 20 years at this point. broken ribs & two foot surgeries make me even more awkward than i was back in the day of shooting the curl & hanging ten. surfing has become a global sport. when philip talked me into getting a wetsuit to surf during the winter in p'cola there was at most 50 surfers doing that at the time. watching endless summer part2 the other night, bud browne quoted stats about how many countries now had regular surf communities & it was astonishing. they surf in alaska now, the great lakes, washington state. i can't even get my mind around surfing in fiji or england or sweden(that's right, philip could if he would...).

i'm actually amazed that someone hasn't come up w/something like these boards a while back. like meyerhoffer says in the article, surfers tend to be conservative. i'm not so sure about that. we sure jumped on those "new" seekers way back when but he can certainly point to the lack of any radical design innovations over the last 20 years. to be truthful, there has been some(mostly over the actual material...lighter but stronger...that kind of thing)innovation but nothing like these designs. they do have a platypus shape but the reviews seem to indicate they're moving in the right direction. the fact that they're modular(able to be broken down into a smaller board)is pretty interesting.

when ann & i were on the north shore & fortunate to see a surprize early summer swell come in, we were sitting at the public beach at haleiwa watching the surfers. a family of 6 came down onto the beach, dad & mom & children of ages ranging from early teens to maybe 6yo. each of them had a board. the 6yo's board couldn't have been longer than 4ft. we watched them all paddle out(separately)& start catching waves. i felt reaffirmed in my personal choice of participatory sport. it is truly a childen's song.

NICK DRAKE b. JUNE 19TH 1948

we didn't listen to drake back in high school. i came to his stuff late, sometime in the last 15 years or so. at his best, his melodies are haunting & solid & the lyrics cryptic enough w/o being overly arcane. his guitar playing is damned fine & his voice can approach wispiness. listening now, i suppose you can hear he was carrying a heavy burden but it doesn't jump out at you. hell, cohen was darker. listen to "dress rehearsal rag" if you doubt me but there's a tenderness to drake that i imagine the world just couldn't tolerate. that kind of vulnerability is hard to take & has to be nipped in the bud. he's another artist who died thinking he was a failure only to be resurrected later & praised. an old sad but very familiar story.

OFFAL IDEA

we're all familiar w/the old idea that some fantasies are best left unlived. speaking from experience, i can pretty much vouch for that maxim's validity but fantasy doesn't have to be about sex(& it isn't for normal folks, i suspect), tho in many cases they do revolve around primal things like food. some of the best food writers evoke deep cravings when they draw us into their worlds by their descriptions of the taste & the smell & the feel & the look & even the sound of the food they're writing about.

i remember mike was utterly transported by an idea in alice waters' chez panisse cafe cookbook:

" we store fresh farm eggs & black truffles together in a closed container for two days, so the eggs absorb the truffle's aroma; then we scramble them softly"

when he mentioned it to eka, she scoffed at the whole idea. as usual in the face of eka's immutable opinions, mike backed down, silently crushed. for whatever reasons(could be my 30 years of cooking experience), he asked me about the viability of the whole idea. i assured him his romantic notion of truffled eggs was very much a fact, a simple scientific one based on the power of the truffle's aroma & the permeability of egg shells. i directed him to herve this' book, molecular gastronomy, if he wanted the actual chemical details.

john thorn, a great food writer, wrote about his fixation on an italian cooking romance that had caught my attention too, beans in a flask(fagioli al fiasco). he cites paolo scaravelli's cooking from an italian garden for his epiphany:

"beans were placed in a large chianti flask...along w/water, oil, garlic, & sage. fresh sage leaves were placed in the neck of the flask to seal in some of the vapors. the flask was deposited in the oven[the communal bread oven]on the smoldering embers & lefter for a few hours. when retrieved, the water was absorbed, the beans cooked, & the flask intact. we would eat the beans cold w/lemon juice, olive oil, salt & pepper. beans cooked in this simple manner were light, tender & richly flavored."

i loved the idea of this & so did thorn. there were great accompanying photos. i didn't have access to a large wood burning oven but thorn did. thorn dispelled the romance:

"i made beans in a flask until i wearied of the thrill---or really, of burning my fingers while shaking the cooked beans down & out the narrow neck. this proves to be an almost impossible dish to decant at table..."

jeremiah towers' still great cookbook, new american classics, is filled w/some of the best food writing i've ever read. story after story make you want to be there w/him at stars or chez panisse or w/james beard or julia child or richard olney. this was the first cookbook by a chef that featured incredible full page color pictures of almost every recipe. the picture of lambs' kidneys on page 143 is simple perfection. add to that his description:

"i first saw lamb kidneys still entirely enveloped in the own fat in sollies-toucas, in the south of france, in a butcher shop run by the mutton sisters. i asked richard olney how they were cooked. we had them for lunch that day. though simple, they are quite remarkable & are having a revival in smart parisian restaurants today."

the casual mention of the locale & richard olney, the real inspiration behind alice waters & chez panisse & jeremiah too is coy but effective. i've wanted to cook lambs kidneys since i first got tower's book in 1986. i've done a lot of the other recipes in the book(i made chocolate paradise for jayne way back when)since then but never the kidneys. they weren't easy to come by.

i found them last saturday at the sf farmers market at the ferry building. the beef cheeks & the lamb's tongue that i also bought had been hits & i was looking forward to finishing things up on a high note. these kidneys were NOT "entirely enveloped in the own fat" but that was ok. i decided to simply grill them on skewers since i was grilling pork rib meat too. they cooked up perfectly too, slightly charred & crisp on the outside while still meltingly soft on the inside. exactly like a perfectly cooked sweetbread would do & i love sweetbreads. but...

...but. when i was a little kid, home from school for the day & out playing in the neighborhood, i can still remember having a great time & the exhilaration i felt heading home when i'd been called by my brothers, only to have it all deflated & defeated by that sickening thick heavy smell of FRIED LIVER wafting through the car port from my mother's kitchen. i knew immediately the agony of the next hour, sitting at the dinner table while various threats & imprecations were uttered by my parents. i could feel already the mute reproach of the melting ice cream sitting on the kitchen counter uneaten. i hated liver then. it made my life a living hell. i hate it now too(though i admit i've cooked it for the folks at the retirement community where i worked).

lamb's kidneys aren't anything like sweetbreads(other than being offal). they are nothing like giblets or hearts. i love tripe & kidneys aren't anything like them either. they are nothing like anything except, precisely, liver. did i mention that i hate liver. i ate them. i got them down(unlike the chittlins i had in north carolina at a soul food restaurant which tasted so strongly of excrement i suspected someone was getting some revenge on whitey. i can't let this pass w/o mentioning one of bobo's favorite food jokes: you know how to cook chittlins? you boil the shit out of them).

well, that's one fantasy down & a few more to go. i have to say ann had the better dinner tonight.

grilled pork rib meat salad w/grilled portobello mushrooms.