This kind of salad — including various root vegetables — has the diversity necessary to give a depth of flavor, and you need that if you’re going to eat it for both lunch and dinner. With a small side of protein it’s healthy and filling. I can eat second helpings, and the pounds just melt away. I make a big bowl that lasts two of us three or four days. I add just enough olive oil when I first toss it to lightly coat the ingredients, which helps keep them fresh.
Jan 30
Giselle and the Cad
Alicia Alonso as Giselle, 1955
OK, so I’m an old softie. I cried during the first act of Giselle last night. Thanks to a donation to KQED, we had tickets to the San Francisco Ballet’s performance of this venerable classic. They weren’t great tickets — next-to-last row in the Orchestra section — but even from there, the show had its magic moments. When Lorena Feijoo, dancing Giselle, performed her long solo portraying the young woman fresh in love, there was a fluidity, an effortless defiance of gravity, a transcendent joy that swept all leaden restraints aside and brought tears welling to my eyes. I cried a second time when, at the end of the first act, Giselle dies.
These tears were a tribute to the dancer more than to the story or the production. The story of Giselle is one of class injustice triumphant. Giselle, a peasant maiden, is betrothed to Hilarion, an honest young man of her class (danced by Ruben Martin Cintas). Enter Albrecht, a nobleman from the court, who is engaged to a princess, but disguises himself as a peasant to go slumming in Giselle’s vlllage. They meet. He hits on her. She falls for him big time. She still loves him, or maybe even more, after Hilarion exposes his true identity. (Can you blame her?) But heartbreak soon arrives in the form of the reigning duke and the princess, Albrecht’s betrothed. In front of everybody in the village, Albrecht stands by his class, turns his back on Giselle, and dumps her. She goes crazy and dies.
Act two takes place in a dark forest at night. Legend has it that maidens who are dumped by their men and die before they wed become Wilis. Wilis are vengeful fairies who dance all night to lure men to the woods, and if they catch one they dance him to death. In this production, Hilarion comes, very woefully and sincerely, to put flowers on Giselle’s grave. For this, the Wilis dance him to death and toss his cadaver into the lake. Giselle doesn’t lift a finger to save him. Very unfair to the good man. Then comes Albrecht to her grave, ridden with guilt, and the Wilis decide to give him the same treatment, which he richly deserves, the prick. But Giselle intervenes and stalls the proceedings until dawn, when the Wilis vanish, saving his life. That’s the basic plot, designed to flatter the men of the gentry and soothe their guilty consciences.
There’s great solo dancing in Act Two, but the production leaves something to be desired. After an initial special effect, the dark forest set becomes wearisome over time. Giselle and Myrtha, the queen of the Wilis, wear identical costumes, so that from the rear of the house it’s next to impossible to tell them apart, which makes the story even harder to follow than it already is. And the Wilis are all dressed in white bridal gowns, fuzzy and lovable, totally contrary to their real character as vengeful assassins. In a modern production they might be Dykes on Bikes. The Wilis have to be shown as tough and threatening to give the story some moral bite. But this production and choreography are the brainchild of Helgi Tomasson, who made his career dancing Albrecht, so of course Albrecht the aristocratic cad is saved and forgiven and Hilarion the honest peasant ends up tossed into the lake. A woman might have shaped it quite differently.
My view of the second act might have been cooled by having seen the Pennsylvania Ballet do Giselle in Philadelphia last year. The corps de ballet there in the second act showed such unity and precision that the audience, myself included, burst into a sustained storm of applause. It’s of course brilliant to dance solo, to stand out, but it must also be devilishly difficult to dance in perfect unison with twenty-three other bodies so that none stands out and all appear to be part of one single organism. The San Francisco group had its moments of such perfection, but still has a way to go to reach the Pennsylvanians’ level consistently.
P.S. The program notes cite Alicia Alonso as one of the all-time great performers of Giselle. I had the pleasure of seeing Alonso dance a solo from Giselle in Havana in 1963. She was 42 years old then and almost completely blind, but you never noticed. Neither age nor blindness dimmed the beauty of her dance.
Jan 28
Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger is dead at 94. He set a shining example of life as an artist and activist and a warm, loving human being. I weep for him, and because of him I’ll go out on the street again and sing the good songs. Good bye, Pete Seeger. You’re missed.
Jan 25
Begging for a BUI
Bicycling Under the Influence (BUI) is not one of the brightest behaviors. On two wheels, we need all of our reflexes, our balance, and our judgment as sharp as possible, maybe even more so than on four. You’d think, then, that an organization dedicated to promoting safe bicycling would steer clear of promoting tippling while pedaling. In the case of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, of which I’ve been a member for some years, you’d be wrong. For some time now, this otherwise intelligent and valuable organization has revealed a blind spot by accepting ads and sponsorship from a brewery. Now this blind spot has got bigger, and we find the organization promoting a “Tour de Biere,” which will take riders not just to one but to several breweries, where they’ll be treated to free samples of the merchandise. Have they no shame?
A famous California politician once said, in so many words, that if you can’t take their money and vote against them, you don’t belong in politics. The EBBC obviously doesn’t have that much stiffness in its frame. The organization’s leadership needs to learn how to take the breweries’ money without promoting the brainless and dangerous behavior of consuming alcoholic beverages while riding a bicycle. When the first rider on one of these tours falls and gets injured or killed, the EBBC leadership will have moral responsibility, if not also legal liability. Get a grip, EBBC. What people put in their bodies while at rest on the ground is not the organization’s business, but when it comes to the issue of biking under the influence, a responsible two-wheeler group has to have the courage to say a loud and clear “No Way.”
Jan 14
Memo to Google/Nest: Synch the Clocks
So Google has bought Nest, the maker of smart home thermostats and smoke detectors. It doesn’t plan to stop there but to make all the mundane technologies in the home smarter and more pleasing. OK, folks, here’s your next project: synch the f**king clocks.
In our home we have a digital clock in the microwave, another in the kitchen radio, another in the stove, one in the refrigerator, and another one on the wall, among others. And they all tell a different time. They’re off just a minute or two or three, but as time goes by they drift further apart. It’s laughable that devices with such a show of precision don’t have a clue what time it really is, and are totally unaware of each other. And at the twice-yearly change from or to Daylight Savings, it’s a royal pain to reset them all over the house and in the car. Timepieces that don’t synch and don’t self-correct are as antiquated as cuckoo clocks.
The fix would seem to be laughably easy. The technology is well established. For example, Casio sells a line of inexpensive wrist watches that contain a radio chip that reads the national atomic-clock accurate time signal from a shortwave transmitter at Ft. Collins CO in the wee hours of each night and sets itself to the second. (I have one and it works. See ad below.) Alternatively, clocks could get their signal from home wifi.
So, how about it, Google/Nest? Build a radio-enabled or network-capable digital clock module, cheap, and shame all the appliance manufacturers to license it. The new smart time-synch capability (with appropriate logo) will be a selling point much like the Energy Star label. People with unsynched appliances will be too embarrassed to invite guests over. And all the folks with borderline cases of OCD, like me, will breathe big sighs of relief to live in a space where all the clocks tell the same time and the right time, all the time.
Jan 13
Toward the ATOD Market
This utopian idea has been gestating in my head for some time. Now it looks like the Zeitgeist is opening up for it to emerge.
Item: an Oregon state legislator, Mitch Greenlick, has introduced a bill to make tobacco a prescription drug, and to criminalize off-prescription use. Greenlick is chair of the Oregon House Committee on Public Health and the former head of the Kaiser HMO in Portland. Greenlick doesn’t expect his bill to pass, but hopes to raise public awareness that tobacco is more addictive than heroin, is the major killer drug, and should be taxed much more heavily.
Item: the government of Iceland is raising tobacco taxes stepwise by ten per cent a year, with the ultimate goal of making it a prescription-only drug, same as Greenlick’s bill.
Item: Columnist Bill Tieleman of The Tyee (Vancouver BC) thinks medicalizing tobacco is an idea whose time has come.
And then of course there’s the opening of marijuana markets in Colorado and, soon, Washington state. So, here’s my proposed friendly amendment: the ATOD market.
ATOD, as every addiction treatment staffer knows, stands for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs. The ATOD market would be a store where an adult could legally purchase alcohol, tobacco, and every other addictive drug, including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, crack… you name it. It would be the only place where these drugs could be legally purchased. You’d have to register with the store network, and your purchases would be tracked so that if you were exceeding a certain quantity you’d be alerted to get a medical checkup and steered to addiction treatment.
Boring, I know. Outrageous probably to blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, who’d like the world to forget his own drug addiction history. But it’s (a) a free market solution (horrors!) and (b) it’s consistent with the pharmacology of the drugs — they’re all addictive and should be treated the same way. It’s far from a perfect solution, but it’s a long shot better than the horrible and hypocritical mess called “drug policy” that we have at present. It might also drive the international drug cartels off the face of the earth.
Oh, and for a really far-out proposal, how about we eliminate the major everyday sources of stress and anxiety that drive millions of people to seek quick relief via chemistry. If we get rid of gross disparities in wealth and income, open up jobs that pay enough for reasonable survival to everyone, banish on-the-job boss tyrannies, treat women and minorities fairly, provide single-payer healthcare for all, … (oh, I’m really dreaming here!) …if we did all that, people would have no interest in chemical quick fixes, and the ATOD markets would go out of business for lack of customers.
What have I been smoking, to think such thoughts? Nothing but the Pacific Coast air. I’m clean and sober 21 years plus, and I don’t intend to ever put anything in the ATOD category into my body ever again. But that’s just me.
Jan 13
Leaf Art
Almost a year ago I blogged from a vacation trip to Ecuador. One of the highlights was a visit to the Festival of Fruits and Flowers in the city of Ambato. In the art museum there, a series of pictures executed on plant leaves caught my eye, and I sneaked a photo of one of them, titled “Goddess of Rain” (above). Last week I had an email to this site from the artist, Marcia Chauca, asking for help in getting her work better known. I am happy to cooperate. Ms. Chauca’s website is http://www.marciachauca.com/.
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