Don't bust my crust, baby

Since I’ve got Keith Richards floating around here, I’ll turn a few thoughts to Life, his memoir, which I read a while ago.

Yes, it was written “with” a journalist (James Fox), so I don’t know how much of it is Richards and how much Fox. However, it was much more engaging than other celeb books, with less ego than Lisa Robinson’s name-dropping and product placement-fest (There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll), and none of the whining of Morrissey’s drama queendom (self-consciously titled just Autobiography). Richards certainly dishes dirt—but consider that in more than 50 years with The Rolling Stones how many hectares of the stuff he’s accumulated.

And—the guy does know how to tell a story.

Richards has very strong opinions on food, and advocates only eating when you feel an appetite, not at set times. It was a habit that drove his band mates a little cuckoo.

He also has useful thoughts on his comfort food, starting with the ever popular Bangers and Mash. (Which I have to say are utterly delish, in a good pub, with friends and a pint of bitter.)

“I’ve been cooking bangers all my life and I only just found out from this lady on TV that you have to put bangers in a cold pan. No preheating. Preheating agitates them, that’s why they’re called bangers. Very slowly, start them off cold. And then just be prepared to have a drink and wait. And it works. It doesn’t shrivel them up; they’re plump. It’s just a matter of patience. Cooking is a matter of patience. When I was cooking Goats Head Soup, I did it very slowly.”

And he gives us the recipe.

“My Recipe for Bangers and Mash

“First off, find a butcher who makes his sausages fresh.

“Fry up a mixture of onions and bacon and seasoning.

“Get the spuds on the boil with a dash of vinegar, some chopped onions and salt (seasoning to taste). Chuck in some peas with the spuds. (Throw in some chopped carrots too, if you like.) Now we’re talking.

“Now, you have a choice of grilling or broiling your bangers or frying. Throw them on low heat with the simmering bacon and onions (or in the cold pan, as the TV lady said, and add the onions and bacon in a bit) and let the fuckers rock gently, turning every few minutes.

“Mash yer spuds and whatever.

“Bangers are now fat free (as possible!).

“Gravy if desired.

“HP sauce, every man to his own.”

Another culinary gem is his recommendation for shepherd’s pie: just before you top the meat-and-veg mixture with the mashed potatoes, add a layer of chopped (raw) onions. This tip came from Big Joe Seabrook, one of Richards’s “minders”, “and he was damn right—it just gives you that extra je ne sais quoi.”

I’ve tried it and Seabrook and Richards are indeed damn right.

Richards is religious about his shepherd’s pie—one gets delivered before every performance, even though he doesn’t eat before a show. But no one—no one—is permitted to cut into the pie. “Nobody touches the shepherd’s pie until I’ve been in there. Don’t bust my crust, baby. It’s written into the contract. If you come into Keith Richards’s room and he’s got a shepherd’s pie on the warmer, bubbling away, if it’s still pristine, the only one that can bust the crust is me. Greedy motherfuckers, they’ll come in and just scoop up anything.”

This is a book that should have come with a CD, DVD or link to online playlist. I had to haul out some of my own and queue them up. Like this one:

But as for his Life, I really wonder how Richards remembered enough of it to produce more than 500 pages about it.

What would Oscar do?

For some reason, Keith Richards memes seem to be floating around teh Interwebz. Like:

And:

I sent them to a friend, who commented, “Yep, he got the face he deserves.”

That made me wonder if there isn’t somewhere, in an attic, say, a picture of Richards that every year looks a little younger, fresher and healthier? Because that might explain how it is that he’s still around, in any condition.

Just a thought.

Boooooooo

I was unsettled to drive down a street here in the Valley They Call Silicon and find that they’re already gearing up a Spirit Halloween store.

And then I took a walk around World Market and saw this display:

Not only do I find the notion of pumpkin spice-flavored beverages repulsive, but we’re barely into August, people! Give us a break!

A parting glass

You know—a personality as large as John Farrell’s deserves a couple of days of my posts. So here’s something for his memory.

A glass of Pimm’s Cup, made the way he liked it (with ginger ale instead of lemon-lime soda):

And a song suitable for an Irish wake:

Sláinte mhaith, John.

Gratitude Monday: The Tiger of San Pedro

I learned this weekend that the world has become considerably more pedestrian: I received word from a friend in LA that my friend John Farrell has died. Over the weekend I’ve been remembering him, and reveling in gratitude for our friendship.

I met John the summer before my junior year of college, at a gathering of an LA-based scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars—people who enjoy the stories of Sherlock Holmes. I was seated at a table with John, his younger brother Eddie and others who riffed off of one another like beatniks at a poetry slam. In a room populated by persons with greater or lesser grasps on reality (think a Trekkie convention, without the Vulcan ears or Klingon foreheads), John stood out.

Well, he did in any room. He was 6’3” and hovering on one side or the other of 300 lbs. Plus, he had a distinctive beard and moustache and dressed like an Irish squire—plenty of Harris tweeds. And he never went anywhere without a hat and a walking stick.

[John at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire and May Market]

John didn’t need a prestigious education—Harbor College and Long Beach State—because he was one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met. He was smart, observant and possessed of a formidable vocabulary. He told a great story, but also knew how to shut up and listen. He was not above embellishing a tale for effect, but he did not sling bullshit.

He was passionate about literature of all kinds, and well-known in Sherlockian circles for his scholarship. He was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars (a rare honor) with the title of The Tiger of San Pedro (taken from “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge”), which was an homage to his home town of San Pedro.

He also loved music and theatre. John took me to my first Gilbert and Sullivan performance, The Pirates of Penzance at the LA Music Center, and then to other productions indoors and out. He also gave me D’Oyly Carte recordings, which I’d probably never have found on my own. (I grew up in a house that wasn't big on the arts.)

(I once took a voice class, in which we had to prepare a song to perform for our fellow students. I asked my friend Margaret to come in to accompany me, and John turned the music for her while I sang “Poor wand’ring one”. I think he was tickled that I’d chosen that piece, and was very happy to have been invited to hear my one performance.)

I was working for the Pasadena Star-News for part of the time I knew John, and through that connection he started writing theatre and music reviews. They didn’t pay him, but he got reviewers’ seats (good ones) for the performances, which otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to afford. Frankly, this was work he was born to do: write about the arts.

He was utterly committed to writing accurate and thoughtful reviews, and to getting them into the next day’s edition. The incumbent reviewer, a guy named Thompson (whose actual job was in advertising or circulation, I forget which), would attend a performance, but not write the review until the next day, so it didn’t appear until two days after the show. John thought that was a disservice to the public. He’d sit through the performance, then go to the paper’s city room (no Internet then) and write at speed to make the midnight deadline. He considered it the duty of a reviewer to deliver the goods on time.

Which was kind of funny, when you consider that the single quality that drove me the farthest and fastest up the walls was his feckless, vague Irish notion of time. For John, “I’ll be there at 0930” meant “at some point during the daylight hours I’ll attempt to get myself sorted sufficient so that we can get going.”

In fairness, though, if there was an actual curtain time, we always made it.

(Thompson was hugely unhappy to discover that he was losing the free tickets to important performances. But not so unhappy as to commit to filing reviews for the next day.)

Through the Star-News, John (and sometimes I) attended events including Joan Sutherland and Beverly Sills in Die Fledermaus in San Diego (Sherrill Milnes showed up to serenade us after the performance), Charlton Heston playing Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood (at the Ahmanson in LA) and a whole string of performances at the Hollywood Bowl. (With the reviewers’ seats in the box section came free preferred parking, too, which was just like flying first class.)

John would put together the most wonderful picnics for those nights; he never stooped to slapping anything together or picking something up, he meticulously planned those meals. I still occasionally make a variation on his modified shrimp cocktail on avocados. In fact, that recipe is the only reason I have dill weed in my kitchen.

It was great when he was reviewing Sunday matinee performances at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium; we’d combine the concert with brunch at the Pasadena Hilton.

The concert I remember was Saint-Saëns’s Organ Concerto. Not because I happen to think that that piece makes you sit through a whole lot of meh to get to about 12 bars of spectacular (which I do), but because it turned out that we were seated next to a urologist I knew professionally, who was with a woman not his wife. (The wife was active in civic groups, so I’d conversed with her several times as she brought notices to the newsroom.) I didn’t know any conversation gambits that didn’t involve the two things about him that I was familiar with.

The Hilton staff must have groaned every time they saw “Farrell” on a brunch booking. We’d get there at 1000 when they opened, and drink a glass of bubbly before our first trip to the buffet. What they made on all those people who came in, drank half a glass of wine and basically had the $2.99 Denny’s eggs-bacon-and-toast breakfast for $10, they lost on us. We’d have to leave around noon to make curtain at the Civic. Otherwise, I imagine we’d still be there, drinking bubbly and eating melon, custom-made omelets and pastries.

As you may have gathered, John had quite a capacity for liquor. His most frequent order was a brandy and soda; entirely in keeping with that squirearchy persona. In the summer it might be gin and tonic, and he introduced me to the Pimms’ Cup. We shared the love of champagne. At one Sherlockian event he provided the only occasion where I’ve seen a jeroboam of Cordon Rouge on the hoof, and where I contributed substantially to its demise.

According to the obits, over the years John built a solid reputation around LA as a passionate supporter of the arts, respected for his honest reviews of operas, classical music and plays. I get the impression that he probably wasn’t making a living at it—he wasn’t a staff writer, but contributed to a number of publications—which saddens me; someone that knowledgeable, articulate and diligent should have been properly compensated.

This is what I mean by diligent: I don’t know why, but John apparently did not own a car. He traveled to concerts and shows by bus. If you have any experience with the public transportation system in LA County—and the distances involved—this should boggle your mind.

When I knew him he drove an MG A; you know—the English sports car that actually had wooden floorboards. Anyone who’s ever had one knows that MGs, Austins and Triumphs are not reliable transportation. This one was no exception, and John rarely had the money to maintain it properly, so every outing involving it was a complete crap shoot.

We once set out for a day in Oxnard (about 70 miles away), only to get a blowout on the Ventura Freeway while still in the San Fernando Valley. That was when I discovered that he didn’t have a spare tire. Well. For an hour or two we sat in a bar next to the service station where they were mounting a new tire, me drinking a margarita and he a G&T. I had a few things to say about the fecklessness of not having a spare…on an MG, and finished off with, “And furthermore, you drink that nasty stuff.”

The bartender couldn’t help but overhear, and she said that I should open my mind, because all gins weren’t the same. She personally liked Boodles. I think I tried Tanqueray, Boodles and Bombay. I still didn’t (and don’t) like it, but at least I learned something.

(We didn’t make it to Oxnard that day, but we did another time. John was never particularly bothered about that kind of thing.)

John was sui generis, but he was not a poseur—I’ve known plenty of those. He wasn’t doing any of it—the moustache and beard, the clothes, the intellectualism—to impress anyone. All of that was just what he was. He was completely aware that, with his size, he didn’t meet 1980s standards of appearance. On one level that might have bothered him, but on another I think he just didn't much care that he didn't fit into others' expectations.

One rather amazing thing about John: he never made derogatory remarks about the 99.3% of the world who did not possess his intellectual wattage. (Well, maybe politicians, but I don't recall any specific example.) And I never once heard him make an ad hominem attack on anyone. One time there was a snafu at the Hollywood Bowl about the preferred parking; the attendant was adamant that the name Farrell was not on the list. John was frustrated but he did not say one snappy thing to the guy with the clipboard. I thought about that this weekend as I reviewed my several calls with Comcast since Thursday.

He showed up to more than one dress-up party in an outfit he’d bought from a Hollywood costume house: pink knee breeches, waistcoat and embroidered jacket worn by one of the characters in The Kissing Bandit. It takes a special kind of man of any size to do that.

[John at a party with someone who came as a kind of low-rent Evita]

(Actually, he was once driving home from a Sherlockian event in downtown LA to which he’d worn this, and his car broke down on the Harbor Freeway. Can you imagine the Highway Patrol pulling up and finding this guy in this outfit behind the wheel? And discovering that he was sober? Well, this is LA, so it probably happens all the time.)

He did what he wanted to do—write about the arts—even though it came with a price tag that included lack of financial security. I think that’s integrity, and dedication. You had to take him the way he came.

This was not always easy to do. I’d lose patience with him because I couldn’t count on him to show up on time, or trust that the car was mechanically sound, or that he wouldn’t overindulge on the drink. There was one party where he drank so much mescal that he became essentially legless. Four of us couldn’t get him into the back seat of the car, so we called his father, who brought a pickup truck, which thankfully we could manage. John spent the rest of the night in the back of the truck. He was apologetic the next morning, but as you might imagine, I was pissed off.

As far as I know, he never screwed up a writing assignment—he was always on time, alert, taking notes and filing the review on deadline.

He was always working—in the month before his death in May, I counted more than ten reviews for just one publication (the Long Beach Press-Telegram), and he wrote for many. In fact, the friend with whom he was staying at the time found him dead at his computer, where he’d been in the midst of writing. I believe he’d have pronounced that as good a way of going as any.

Back in the 80s, one of the performances we went to was some 20^th Century opera that had (I think) socialist themes and a bunch of pineapples that featured in the closing act. For the life of me cannot think what that opera was. Sadly, the only person I could have called to ask, “what 20^th Century opera that no one’s ever heard of was staged at the Chandler Pavilion in the 1980s? It ended with a bunch of very symbolic pineapples?” was John.

He’d have known the opera, the composer, relevant historical background, other well-known productions and how he’d reviewed this one. That was what he lived for.

John Farrell died on 7 May 2015, at a friend’s home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 63. I’m one of the scores of people whose lives he enriched, and I’m deeply grateful for that.

-30-

"Your care is important to us"

Remember my monolithic healthcare practice? As with all businesses the size of General Motors, they try to get their customers (“patients”) to do as much of the work for them, with the least amount of human involvement on their part, as possible. They worship anything “online”.

Then they enhance the experience by making it as tedious and opaque as they can.

Remember those days of yesteryear, when the day before your appointment one of the practice people would call to remind you? Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) sends you an email:

Please take note of the fact that they give you no actual, you know, information. They make you log into their site and click through at least two screens to get that.

(Actually, the orthopedics department robocalls you. Seriously, it’s a computer, inexorable and implacable, that calls within two minutes of 1800, when all their office staff has left for the day. So if you do need to speak with a human, you’re SOL until the next business day. Man, nothing says “we care” like robocalls.)

They do the same thing with any appointment follow-up—lab results, or diagnosis from X-rays: an email advising you that they have important information about your health; so go log in if you’re at all interested, because it’s sure as hell not in the email.

(Yes, I know, they’re concerned about privacy. I’m concerned about dealing with an organization with enough employees to fill their own ZIP code, supposedly focused on providing healthcare, who go to great lengths to exhibit all the warmth of an ATM. Also, they have no problem with leaving those robomessages on voicemail or answering machines; there goes your privacy argument.)

The other day I wanted to do some follow-up of my own, so I used the site’s “talk with your care team” function. (Yes, that’s what they call it.) Here’s what they show you when you initiate the application:

Not only do they have the disclaimer that you have to listen to with any medical-related IVR system, but you cannot get to the message screen until you swear that you’re not a danger to yourself or others.

Does losing the will to live while trying to navigate their kludgy systems count?

A rain of ruin

Seventy years ago today a B-29 Superfortress took off from the island of Tinian in the Marianas and headed toward Japan with a single uranium-based bomb in its hold. The Enola Gay was escorted by two more planes, The Great Artiste (stuffed with instruments for measuring the blast) and an unnamed bomber (equipped for photography) that was later christened Necessary Evil.

Their primary target was Hiroshima, an industrial city with a major military presence. Nagasaki and Kokura were the alternate targets. All three were sizeable urban centers with either industry, communications or military infrastructure that had so far escaped the massive bombings that had destroyed large swathes of Tokyo and other cities.

These were the basic criteria determined by US leaders for deploying the world’s first atomic weapon, which was intended to have a psychological effect on Japan’s will to wage war, rather than cause extensive physical devastation. We’d already done that with air raids involving bombers in their hundreds obliterating Japanese cities. The first nuclear explosion was meant to focus the minds of Japan’s leadership on how far we’d moved the needle on the destruction-capability wheel and rethink their strategy of resisting to the last person.

On 6 August, while approaching southern Japan, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, commanding Enola Gay, got the go-ahead for the primary target. A little after 0800 the bomb, named “Little Boy”, detonated about 1900 feet above the center of the city, causing destruction in a one-mile radius and starting fires that spread out further.

And, of course, there was the radiation, which was a game changer in the arsenal of war at that time. The next day, a team of Japanese nuclear physicists visited Hiroshima and verified that the damage had been caused by an atomic blast, which they reported to Tokyo. The Imperial cabinet conferred. They knew exactly what they were facing, but they concluded that the US could only have one or two more such weapons in their arsenal. So their best course of action would be to just take the hits and continue to fight with conventional means. 

The Japanese people could withstand a few nuclear bombs and go on fighting. They wouldn't win, but they'd make the Allied victory a Pyrrhic one, and that was something worthwhile.

It was kind of like corporations today that do risk-benefit analyses on things like product safety and decide that it’s more cost-effective to settle a few lawsuits than to clean up their manufacturing processes. Only, of course, more so.

Harry S Truman—who had known nothing about the atomic weapons program when he became President in April that year—announced the dropping of the bomb and promised the Japanese “a rain of ruin from the air” if they did not surrender unconditionally. They did not, so he authorized the deployment of a second bomb, “Fat Man”, which was dropped on Nagasaki (again, a secondary target for the day, but the primary was too clouded over to be feasible) on 9 August. A few days later, the Emperor announced to the nation his government’s intention to surrender, citing the “new and terrible weapon” that had been used against them.

Finally, a good call, because as it happened, the Americans had several more devices in the pipeline. They reckoned the next one would be ready for use on 19 August, with more to follow, and the only debate was about whether to drop each one as it became available or gather a few and take out multiple targets simultaneously to make the point.

There are all kinds of arguments for and against the morality of using nuclear weapons on Japan. I believe Truman made the right call, difficult as it was; I believe that “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” served the purpose in an immediate way of convincing the Japanese that meeting the Allies’ terms (unconditional surrender) was the only alternative to unimaginable annihilation of their nation, their people and their lands.

Yes—we were well on the way to accomplishing those goals with conventional weapons. But the atomic bombs made it clear that we could now obliterate them without sustaining the kinds of losses that massive air raids and amphibious landings would cost us. That old risk-benefit analysis was clearly seen to be in our favor.

I admit to being uncomfortable with that old rationale that’s hauled out every fucking time someone wants a government to buy and deploy an expensive, untried device, substance or application that has the potential to cause mass destruction. You know—“It’s actually more humane to use [horses; Gatling guns; poison gas; unrestricted submarine warfare; air raids on civilian targets; atomic bombs; SDI], because it will force the enemy to surrender faster and thus it’ll save lives. Right? Sign here. And here.”

Cavalry, poison gas, machine guns didn’t shorten any wars. (In fact, machine guns dragged out the fighting on the Western Front in World War I year after year because no one seemed to be able to win with them and everyone refused to lose to them.) Submarine warfare came close to strangling Britain in World War II, but in the end failed. Star Wars?—meh. And don’t get me started on “strategic” bombing; I can’t even believe we’re still having that conversation 70 years later.

But I do believe that “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” hastened the end of one war. Probably not an option these days, unless you’re down with mutually assured destruction being the full stop to that expedient. And some people are, so that makes it a little tricky for the rest of us.

In the meantime, I take heart in the story that there’s a 390-year-old white pine bonsai tree in the Washington, D.C., Arboretum that survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. It was two miles away from ground zero, in the grounds of bonsai master Masaru Yamaki’s home, and protected from the blast by a fence on 6 August 1945. Yamaki donated it to the Arboretum in 1976. It’s survived natural and manmade disasters through daily attention by its keepers over the centuries.

It would be nice if we could apply that kind of care to one another, both individually and nationally.  

Special delivery. Ish

As I’ve reported before, I’ve received several phishing expeditions that use the USPS and FedEx as clickbait. So the other day when I found this in my queue I just thought, gee, another one:

It did occur to me that the spammers had improved their corporate plagiarism techniques, as well as their verisimilitude-oriented detail (like the tracking number). And then I realized that, hey—this actually was a general UPS email for a genuine UPS shipment.

(In fact, it was my new DVR box from Comcast.)

It is indeed a sad state of affairs, however, when your first response to getting pretty much any kind of “parcel-delivery” notification is to hit the delete button.

Check it out again

It seems that I’m not the only patron of the Santa Clara County Library District to have noticed that their new web interface sucks eggs. I went there over the weekend to renew a couple of items coming due and in the process discovered this notice:

I’m just wondering how long it’ll take them to flip the Back switch on it?

Gratitude Monday: A tragic high-tide accident

During my morning walk on Saturday I listened to Scott Simon interview architect Renzo Piano. Not about his stunning public and private buildings, but about an entirely different design form.

Sandcastles.

Piano, 77, has been building sandcastles man and boy, and has taught his children (ranging in age from 50 to 16) the craft for quite a long time as well. He says you can build them whatever your age, but it helps to think like a child. This is an approach to art that completely resonates with me.

You must first resign yourself to the knowledge that creating a sandcastle is a completely in-the-moment exercise. (“Totally useless,” he says.) Water—an integral component of construction—also carries the inevitability of its destruction. Whatever you build is going to get washed away before you pack up the beach towels. Deal with it.

(This is one of the reasons I totally love baristas who create latte art: it’s never going to last longer than the first sip. But it’s gorgeous while it’s there, and “the usefulness is in the act of the doing.”)

There are, of course, lots of elaborate sandcastle competitions, where people use all manner of tools to fabricate elaborate confections; I like that Piano is a hands-on kind of guy. I can attest to the sense of satisfaction that comes from both the feeling and the sound of small hands packing mud-like clomps of sand into place. You can use a pail and plastic shovel, but—as in making pastry—the magic is in the fingers.

I also like the way the architect connects the lessons learned while racing the waves to principles necessary for architects designing skyscrapers: physical laws, intuition, forces of nature.

So today I’m grateful for overhearing the conversation about the joy of creating something beautiful, of approaching it with the clarity of a child and of carrying the benefits with you long after the waves have washed away your creation.