If the shoe fits

This crossed my path a while ago, and I found it mildly amusing.

But it reminded me of an experience I had at Harrods, the iconic emporium that to many people epitomizes London, if not England.

(On my first trip to London when I was actually in possession of credit cards and not staying in student flophouses, I met up with a member of the Metropolitan Police for a coffee. He asked me archly if I had any “little green bags” and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He meant, had I been doing a lot of shopping at Harrods, which he apparently expected everyone with a U.S. passport to do. As it happens, it was November, and I had bought some Christmas ornaments there as gifts for workmates. But the bags were blue, with stars on them, not the standard Harrods green.)

Okay—that’s not the experience. This is:

Harrods has this monster sale every January, and it is much-ballyhooed. I don’t really know how good the discounts are, but I get a kick out of watching other people go a little cuckoo when I don’t have any skin in the game.

Besides, I did get this really nice pair of Bally shoes once.

But this time, I went with my friend Ros, who frankly can shop for Italy and Britain. And I don’t think anyone has more shoes than Ros, except for my other friend Colleen.

Well, it was the first Saturday after the sale commenced. We had moved on from the shoe department, our admitted first port of call, and I was waiting while Ros tried on swimsuits. She had quite a number of swimsuits, so I got to talking with one of the security guys.

(Yes, they had a uniformed guy in the bathing suit department. He must have had seniority.)

Evidently on the opening day of the sale, two women had got into a knock-down drag-out in the shoe department. Over a belt. I’m assuming it was a very nice belt, and/or it was a big markdown, but still.

But when I saw this graphic I just couldn’t help but think of those women, dressed to the nines, in the Harrods shoe department bitch-slapping each other.

Wonder whatever happened to the security video?

But Ros did buy the bathing suit. Actually, more than one of them, if I recall correctly.

Chiller app

This “Chilled Beer Cork” came across my radar somewhere on social media, It was an item on one of BuzzFeed’s never-ending inane lists of “incredibly cool gizmos that you want to have; you do, because we’re telling you about them.”

According to BF, it “keeps any bottle beer ice-cold when you drink it.”

My reaction?

WTF? Who drinks beer so slowly that you have to worry about it losing its chill? And who would bother with corking and uncorking a bottle of beer multiple times in the process of pouring it down their throat?

I’ll tell you who: amateurs. Bloody amateurs.

(I also do not get why anyone would need to be told that you can freeze leftover wine in ice cube trays for future use. How is it even possible to have “leftover wine”?)

Southern comfort

As you can tell from Monday’s post, I’m kind of reveling in summer. Even here in the freakin’ every-day’s-another-day-in-paradise Valley they call Silicon, you can make a case for things being a little slower between July and September. At least around the edges of the frenetic display of unremitting innovative disruption by all those software rockstars and ninjas.

And I look for things around the edges.

So I’m glad that my local PBS station is showing the Independent Lens docu, Muscle Shoals again this week. I first saw it this spring, and I was mesmerized.

It’s all about the two recording studios that sprang up in the Alabama town that I’d previously only known as being part of the TVA. And it’s about the magic that was created in those studios for decades—jazz, rock, R&B, gospel, country, pop, blues. Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, Clarence Carter, Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, Wilson Picket, Taj Mahal, Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Etta James…they all recorded there.

This place has produced more gold than Peru.

The docu starts out with a shot of the Tennessee River—slow-moving and quiet, which is exactly the way the film seems to be going. If you’re accustomed (as I am) to not really giving full attention to your television, it’s even kind of somnolent. And annoying. For the first ten or fifteen minutes, I kept looking for something that was going to tell me a story, a narrator to ‘splain what was going on. It was starting to piss me off.

But in fact, there’s no central narration to the film. Director Greg “Freddy” Camalier lets the participants in the events tell their stories, which unfold gently and unhurriedly, just like a summer afternoon. You have to listen and you have to watch. I realized that just as I was fixing to zap it—even before any of the music started.

Because when Rick Hall, founder of FAME Studios, began talking about his early life, everything in my little Sunnyvale world just faded away, and I did not move until the show ended. Except to get up and dance a little now and then.

Okay, yeah—I could have done without Bono pontificating, like he personally invented jazz, rock, R&B, gospel, country, pop and blues, plus sliced bread and polio vaccine; but he does serve to remind us what a lot of bullshit goes on in the entertainment business. So suck it up a little and get back to all that wonderful music, and all those great stories.

See, this film really ends up packing a whole lot of both music and history into less than two hours of running time. Without predigesting it for you, or making you feel like you’re being instructed, like so many other documentaries. You feel like you’re drifting along, but at the end you realize how much you’ve really taken in, and how much better you feel for it.

If your PBS station isn’t rerunning Muscle Shoals, you can find it on iTunes and Amazon. It’s worth watching, especially on a summer evening.

If you can’t do that, here’s a companion playlist of many on Spotify. Pick any one you like, pick at random, whatever. Your heart will thank you.

Lighting the way

Sunday and yesterday many European nations marked the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. (In Russia, not so much. But then, they're a little busy right now reliving the Stalinist era.) Sunday was the hundredth anniversary of France and Germany’s declarations of war; yesterday that of Britain and Germany.

Naturally there were politicians crawling over everything. I personally find it rather cherce that British Prime Minister David Cameron is pretending to have a sense of history. Well, okay, he’s not; he’s pretending to care about history. I'm not sure who believes him.

But it’s the commemoration by ordinary citizens that I find interesting. My friend Marcia and her colleagues at Holy Trinity Church in Cookham rang a quarter peal last night, to honor the dead. She spent part of the day wrestling the six heaviest of their ten bells to half-muffle them. You muffle the bells for funerals. I’m sure that HTC wasn’t the only tower tolling the loss.

And across the UK, from 2200 to 2300 BST, individuals, families and towns turned off their lights, allowing mostly just candles to pierce the darkness.

As the declarations were whizzing around Europe like machine gun fire in August 1914, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (who’d certainly contributed to the march to war) said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

Well, he got that right.

Anyhow, I thought you should see some of the photos of the #lightsout, which was organized by the British Legion. It was a combination of personal remembrance and community vigils.

In London’s Victoria Tower Gardens, there was a light installation by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda. 

It’s a number of lights shooting up to the sky, which give the impression of a single pillar when seen from a distance. I have to say that it reminds me just a bit of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light for Nazi party rallies, but it was stunning.

This shot came from a cop who flies helicopters for the Metropolitan Police:

And at 10 Downing Street, a single lantern stood on the doorstep:

In Preston, in the North, 1956 candles were lit around their cenotaph, marking the men from that town who never returned from the war:

In Glasgow, the central train station went dark:

And in Belfast, civic buildings did, too:

Even a chippie in Dromore, County Down, operated by candlelight:

Back in London, Buckingham Palace had only one window lit:

And I’m thinking that London has not been this blacked-out for about 70 years:

Gratitude Monday: Tasting summer

Gratitude Monday, and I’m grateful for the wonderful produce of summer, which is filling the farmers markets.

I’m talking multiple varieties of peaches, tomatoes, corn-on-the-cob, blueberries, artichokes (hey—this is California, dude), cherries, asparagus, plums, melons, squashes, strawberries, herbs and even stuff I don’t care that much about, like eggplant and cauliflower.

Have you met Saturn peaches? AKA Donut peaches?

Or did you imagine all the varieties of plums? And that's before you get to pluots. 

I don't know whether to eat these peppers or install them as art.

At the Sunnyvale farmers market you can sample your way through breakfast and lunch--little slivers of whatever's on offer at each stall. Even dates, if you want to clog your insides. 

The plums take me back to summers when I was a kid, before a lightning strike killed the plum tree in our back yard. (Of course it couldn't hit the persimmon tree, oh, no; had to be the plum tree.) I don't think there's anything better than ripe, juicy plums; unless it's peaches; or maybe watermelon. Well, maybe intensely-flavored strawberries that were on the bush yesterday.

I think the farmers markets here in the Valley they call Silicon are the best of anywhere. You're buying direct from the actual producers , because we're close to a lot of truck farms and small ranching and fishing operations. 

And I just love the notion of squash shaped like...well, you know... Snuggling up next to brilliant baby pattypans:

I have to be physically restrained from buying armloads of squash or crates of berries, and when I drive home, my car is engulfed in the scent of cantaloupe or peaches. 

Here's the result of me exercising restraint on a recent trip:

See what I mean?

This all means caprese salads, poached chicken breasts with tomato mayonnaise (homemade, with basil), sautéed summer squash, Greek yoghurt with peach slices,  bowls of mixed melon, salade Niçoise, strawberry shortcake (using cream scones, actually, and with blueberries and raspberries and just a splash of Cointreau), mango-steak-and-grilled asparagus on watercress, pasta primavera…

Oh, yum—summer!