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Monthly Archives: January 2014

TSF, or Starbucks Nation

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The Most Emblematic Beverage Stop for the Thirty-Something Generation

The Most Emblematic Beverage Stop for the Thirty-Something Generation

It’s finally beginning to happen: The next generation is beginning to make its mark on restaurants and supermarkets/ Today, at Albertson’s Supermarket, I saw a large display of cold beverages featuring Red Bull and Starbucks drinks at $3-4 a pop. I noted to Martine that I pay about $8-10 for a pound of loose Indian black tea that will last me for upwards of eight months, for both cold and hot beverages.

Before going to Albertson’s, we had lunch at Truxton’s American Bistro. Perhaps a more appropriate name would be TSF: “Thirty-Something Food.” The new foodies love to mess around with the menu and its ingredients. Their iced tea was flavored with some chemical extract meant to imitate passion fruit—whatever that tastes like! But you better believe it was called organic, as if that made it taste like tea, which it does not. In fact, it obliterates the taste of the tea, such that I wonder why they bother adding any tea at all. The pizza had fresh basil, but I guess the chef thought it needed salt, a lot more salt. I felt that they were trying just a little too hard to appear unique.

It takes many years of experience to learn how to cook, especially when it comes to herbs and spices. We’ve all seen little kids at self-service soda machines: they try to mix Coke with Seven-Up with Root Beer with Mr. Pibb, with maybe a dash of raspberry iced tea for good measure. The end result of this type of experimentation is usually deplorable. I’m not saying that young chefs are quite in the same category, but sometimes it seems that way.

As the generations change, it is inevitable that the type of foods on offer will change as well. There will be a lot of dishes I will never try because the ingredients fight with one another more than complement one another. On the other hand, there are some successes, such as California Pizza Kitchen. Their chopped salads are superb, and some of their pizzas are excellent (especially the Sicilian). Martine refuses to go there because the menu contains too many of what she considers “experimental” combinations.

I suppose that the ultimate thirty-something places are Starbucks and Jamba Juice and their imitators, neither of which I patronize. I don’t drink coffee; and juice is verboten for all diabetes sufferers (juices concentrate the sugars and carbs and throw out the fiber).

 

A 2,000 Year Old Painting

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Fresco of a Young Woman on a Balcony

Fresco Fragment of a Young Woman on a Balcony

We don’t think of painting as having begun until the Middle Ages. There isn’t much that survives from Ancient Greece and Rome, but there are some, such as the above fresco fragment showing a young woman with a turban on a balcony. The original is to be found at Malibu’s Getty Villa. She appears to be drinking something from a shallow bowl and petting a dog or cat with her left hand. While there were no oil paintings as such—not as we think of them—there were frequent wall paintings in homes, temples, and other public buildings.

If we widen our definition of painting to include mosaics, then there are some even more spectacular works such as were found at the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I have seen mosaics that have solved problems of perspective that were not seen again for over a thousand years. Take, for example, the mosaic of one of the battles of Alexander the Great below:

Alexander the Great at the Battle of Issus Against the Persians

Alexander the Great at the Battle of Issus Against the Persians

It has always been my belief that most people feel that the Greeks and Romans were too ancient to be bothered with, and that art really sprang into existence during the Renaissance. Not so. A visit to Italy or such excellent museums as the Getty Villa in Malibu help redress the balance. For some background, see the excellent web page on Ancient Roman Art and Art Objects. Compare this with the Bayeux Tapestry and other Medieval battle scenes, which look relatively primitive in comparison.

The Art of Dust

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Dust Magnified by an Electron Mkicroscope

Common Household Dust Magnified by an Electron Microscope

One would not think that regular household dust, when magnified by an electronic microscope, could look so artistic. In fact, if I saw a painting like this hanging in an art museum, I would think that here was a painter who had considerable promise.

But then I think of this stuff being sucked into my lungs and down my throat and wonder how I can survive. After all, things are being manufactured with ever more exotic materials; and the detritus from these materials is being sucked into our bodies. Maybe I should look for an electron microscope photograph of our lungs or our bloodstream.

This photo comes from The Guardian’s website, which directs you to other examples of microphotography. Happy hunting!

 

Laser Light

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Extreme Brightness

Extreme Brightness

The month of January is Southern California’s rainiest month. Usually. But not this year. So far, we have been treated to an endless round of Santa Ana winds and low humidity (around 10%). Right now, it’s about 85° Fahrenheit (that’s about 30° Celsius). If the temperature didn’t drop sharply at night, we would all be sweltering.

I just got back from lunch. The heat in this arid weather isn’t quite so uncomfortable as the laserlike light of the sun. It makes me wish I wore my baseball hat or some other brimmed headgear to protect my eyes. Although I wear photo optic glasses, they don’t provide sufficient protection from the sun’s fierceness. Years ago, I used to have super-dark prescription sunglasses. I’m beginning to think I should see my optometrist for another pair of those.

Either Way Is Okay

Shinto Shrine

Shinto Shrine

It is a series of low buildings among trees. Space in a shrine is horizontal and not, as in a cathedral, vertical. In a church, space is confined. It must struggle upward, having no place else to go. In a shrine, space is spread. There are no high walls, no tight enclosures. The space is a grove and this grove seems so endless that it might be the world itself.

The sky seems low, near. There are long expanses of lawn or grove among the buildings. One is not enclosed, nor is one directed. One is liberated, and almost always alone.

Shrine prayer, as I have said, is not communal prayer. It is solitary prayer. It is not a state—it is a function. It lasts only a minute or so and it is spontaneous. One does not enter, as in churches, or descend, as in mosques. The way to the shrine is through a grove, along a walk, through nature itself, nature intensified. Through these trees, over this moss, one wanders to shrines.

This casual, unremarked acceptance of nature speaks to something very deep within us. It speaks directly to our own nature, more and more buried in this artificial and inhuman century. Shinto speaks to us, to something in us which is deep, and permanent.

Certainly we feel—which is to say, recognize—more here than in smiling Buddhism with its hopeful despair, more than in fierce man-made Islam with its heavenly palaces on earth, more than in the strange and worldly tabernacles of the Hebrews or in the confident, vaunting, expectant Christian churches.

This religion, Shinto, is the only one that neither teaches nor attempts to convert. It simply exists, and if the pious come, that is good, and if they do not, then that too is good, for this is a natural religion and nature is profoundly indifferent.—Donald Richie, The Inland Sea

“A Lonely Impulse of Delight”

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British Biplane in World War One

British Biplane in World War One

William Butler Yeats is one of my favorite Twentieth Century poets, and one of my favorites among his poems is “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Although deeply shrouded in skepticism, the poem speaks to all people who find themselves somewhere between a rock and a hard place:

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
No law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Kiltartan is a barony in Ireland’s County Galway, home to Augusta, Lady Gregory. Also, it was the occasional residence of the poet himself.

I am particularly drawn to the final quatrain, in which the airman makes an existential decision to fly for the RAF despite his lack of loyalty to the British cause and uncertainty that his people would be worse off if the Kaiser won. He appears to have been a young wastrel who hazards his life in an uncertain cause, joying only in the delight of flying into battle.

Tarnmoor’s ABCs: Books

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Some of My Books About Iceland

Some of My Books About Iceland

I was very impressed by Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him. Because his origins were so far away (Lithuania and Poland) and so long ago (1920s and 1930s), there were relatively few entries that resonated personally with me. Except it was sad to see so many fascinating people who, unknown today, died during the war under unknown circumstances.

This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the next few months, you will see a number of postings under the rubric “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. My previous posting on this theme was last month.

Well, B is for Books, the love of my life. It all started before I could read … before I could even speak English. I remember my mother reading me stories (translating them into Hungarian). And when she didn’t have a story to read, she made up one. These were just as good as the published stories. I remember walking with her from our apartment on East 120th Street to the public library next to Harvey Rice School. A few doors down, between Buckeye Road and Van Aken, there was a very good doughnut shop where we would sometimes stop.

In 1951, after my brother Dan was born, we moved to the then treeless suburbs of the Harvard-Lee area. I guess my parents didn’t want to have two boys who couldn’t speak English. I was signed up to attend second grade (even though I completed only the first half of first grade at Harvey Rice—Shhh! Please don’t tell anyone) at Saint Henry School on Harvard Road.

Once I got a handle on the English language, by about the fourth or fifth grade, I started accumulating books. On one hand, my parents were delighted at my strides in understanding English. On the minus side, whenever they got some insurance document written in legalese, I had to interpret it for them. (Ever since, I have hated that fine print crap.)

Also, the books started getting to my parents. “Jimmy, why do you need so many books?” “Uh, because I just do.” “Well, pick up after yourself please.”

Years later, the books started getting to Martine. “Jimmy, why do you need so many books?” “Uh, because I just do.” “Well, pick up after yourself please.”

Actually, I have improved some. I now own two Kindles with fifteen hundred books on them. How many physical books do I own? Oh, somewhere around six or seven thousand.

Currently, I read something like ten books a month, usually literature and history, but some travel, science, economics, and philosophy on occasion. If you are curious about my bookish habits, I suggest you check out my page on Goodreads.Com. You’ll see reviews of every book I read. Click here. You can see links to reviews off to the right side of the four or five books I have read most recently.

I have always assumed that God would let me live as long as I have books to read. And I keep buying more books. It’s like finding the genie in the bottle and wishing for an infinite number of wishes.

Okay, so I’m a bit delusional.

 

Bruce Lee Welcomes You to Chinatown

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Statue of Bruce Lee in L.A.’s Chinatown

Statue of Bruce Lee in L.A.’s Chinatown

I’m not sure why it has to be protected by a fence, but there is a statue commemorating Bruce Lee near Chungking Square in L.A.’s Chinatown. When Martine and I celebrated Christmas in Chinatown last month, we noticed Asian family groups taking pictures with the statue. Small wonder: After Bruce’s martial arts films were released in this country, he became a role model for Asian boys who had hitherto been regarded as dorky and innocuous. Even my black friends flocked to see his movies and expressed shock when he died at the age of thirty-two. Needless to say, foul play was suspected.

I myself never went in for what I call “Martian Arts,” but I believe it’s a useful discipline, especially for young men. Once you start on the road to developing yourself into a master of the sport, you learn a lot of good things—including patience. A feisty eight-year-old won’t quickly be able to disarm an opponent the size of, say, Chewbacca; but, as the Chinese say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

 

By Rail to the Past

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Selected Gems amnd Minerals

Selected Gems and Minerals

I should have written this post last Sunday, when Martine and I took Los Angeles’s relatively new Expo Light Rail Line to the Natural History Museum, just south of the University of Southern California. We go there, on the average, once every year or two. It was good that we went last week because the Traveling the Silk Road exhibit was still running (it goes until April 13). It was well worth spending an hour or two to see.

It was fun taking the Expo Line because parking at the museum has always been a bit of a drag. Even though we had to catch the line at its temporary terminus in Culver City, we look forward to its extension westward to the beach in Santa Monica. There will be a station just one mile south of where we live, and it will take us all the way downtown and a number of interesting stopping points in between. It will run roughly along the line of Exposition Boulevard, where once the old Pacific Red Car ran in the days when Southern California was better served by public transportation. (If you’ve ever seen the 1988 cartoon/live action feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, you know what happened to the Red Car line.)

Triceratops on the Loose!

Triceratops on the Loose!

Of the museum’s permanent exhibits are the dinosaur hall (see above) and the gems and minerals (see illustration at top). There are other exhibits of note, but it would take two days to see them all. Also noteworthy are the exhibits of stuffed North American and African mammals, and a California history exhibit, which deserves to be seen by more visitors. After tax season, I wouldn’t mind checking out the collections again.

My favorite Natural History Museum program of all time was back in 2002, when they had an exhibit and a program of lectures about the Vikings. This was just after my 2001 trip to Iceland, and I was still buzzed—plus I got a chance to meet Jesse L. Byock, Professor of Old Norse and Medieval Scandinavian at UCLA, and Gisli Sigurðsson of the Árni  Magnússon Institute in Rekjavík (whose exhibit on “Vikings and the New World” I had seen at the Culture House in Rekjavík just months before). That was the high point of my relationship with the Natural History Museum: I even became a member for a year or two. Since then, I have been waiting and watching for another special event so in line with my interests.

This Bud’s for You

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Camellia Buds at Descanso Gardens

Camellia Buds at Descanso Gardens

Today, in the dead of winter, Martine and I visited Descanso Gardens in La Cañada-Flintridge. There wasn’t much to see, except perhaps a foretaste of things to come. Usually by this time the camellias are in full bloom, but this has been the driest rainy season on record thus far, with less than an inch of rain over the last six months. The number of camellia blossoms was way below normal, but there were a few nice blossoms, and quite a few buds (such as the above) waiting for better conditions.

Sometimes I wonder what the global climate change has in store for Southern California. Will we become like the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, where the annual rainfall is measured in millimeters? And this while the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern parts of the country are suffering from record precipitation!

The Rose Garden was surrounded by a fence to protect the bushes from hungry mule deer that find their way into the gardens and devour up to twenty pounds of plants a day. There didn’t seem to be many, if any, roses; so any damage the deer might do would be mostly to future plants.

Even in a dry season, Descanso was beautiful. It contains the largest camellia forest in North America, shaded by some of the most spectacular oaks on the West Coast. We watched the koi form patterns, as if they were ink strokes in God’s own pictographic language. What He was communicating, I don’t know, but it looked nice.

Koi at Descanso

Koi at Descanso