Russia treacherously attacked our state in the morning, as Nazi Germany did in #2WW years. As of today, our countries are on different sides of world history. 🇷🇺 has embarked on a path of evil, but 🇺🇦 is defending itself & won’t give up its freedom no matter what Moscow thinks. A Tweet by Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUaПрезидент України Ukraine president.gov.ua

when you read about Ukraine in the news now, you might think of it as a strange place. War, tanks, dead etc. But Ukraine is a normal country with people willing a normal life. To be happy, enjoy life, raise kids. Not to attack anybody. Normality is an important word here A Tweet by Volodymyr Yermolenko @yermolenko_vUkrainian philosopher, analyst & journalist, chief editor at @ukraine_world – explaining Ukrainian politics & society in English.

Driving on the road towards Kyiv and the radio announcer is giving out instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. A Tweet by Shaun Walker @shaunwalker7 Covering central/eastern Europe for The Guardian. Author of The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past.

More TV, more articles to come, but I’m sad and angry. Ukraine is suffering another long night alone. The sanctions so far are weak, ignoring Putin’s worst oligarchs. They would have been fine in 2008, or even 6 months ago. Now, with Kyiv under siege? Too little, too late. A Tweet by Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63 Join RDI! @Renew_Democracy. Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation. Author, speaker, 13th World Chess Champion.

I’m always surprised when I see pictures of people from Ukraine. I always expect them to be more exotic, more like people from further east on the Silk Road, more like people from Kazakhstan, not like blond Europeans. I shouldn’t be though. They are European even if they write their language in Cyrillic and they are even what we would call a first-world country – if that is still OK to use as an identifier – in that they have subways and traffic jams. But it is important ti know that they are not first-world in that their main exports are seed oil, corn, and wheat and they are big importers of coal briquettes and used clothing. The country has a population of over 44,000,000 souls, most of whom want to be more European and less Russian and the capitol, Kyiv, is the seventh-largest city in Europe with a population of almost 3,000,000, bigger than Chicago, Rome, or Paris, so Putin may end up like the dog that caught the bus. Imagining tanks rolling into one of those cities gave me the chills.

I’m reading a book on Hitler and it may be coloring my thinking but, it seems to me that Putin is a typical autocrat in that he will keep trying to enlarge his empire until he is stopped. He attacked Georgia during the Bush Administration calling it a peace-keeping special operation. Then he took the Crimea and an enclave in eastern Ukraine during the Obama Administration and now he is going after the rest of Ukraine. If he takes Ukraine, there is no reason to think he will stop trying to rebuild the USSR by bluff, threat, and, if necessary, tanks. If Putin takes Ukraine, the next target would probably be Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, who are members of NATO, which would mean a major war for sure. The whole thing is frightening.

Proprioception, otherwise known as kinesthesia, is your body’s ability to sense movement, action, and location. It’s present in every muscle movement you have. … Proprioception allows you to walk without consciously thinking about where to place your foot next. It lets you touch your elbow with your eyes closed. WebMD

You’re walking
And you don’t always realize it
But you’re always falling
With each step, you fall forward slightly
And then catch yourself from falling
Over and over, you’re falling
And then catching yourself from falling…Walking & Falling, Song by Laurie Anderson

Proprioception is a word I hadn’t known even existed three weeks ago. That’s too bad because for most of my life I’ve had pretty good proprioception and it would have been nice to know the word when I could have used it in a positive – read subtle bragging – way, but now, my spacial awareness is one of the casualties of getting older. Now, I’ll be walking down a sidewalk and catch one of my feet – one of my shoes? – on, uhh…seemingly nothing. Now, I’ll grab a glass and, while lifting it, knock over a neighboring glass unless I’m specifically paying attention which I almost never am.

Specifically paying attention to the mechanics of walking, however, is almost impossible. Walking is something that most of us have been doing since we were somewhere around one year old, and now walking is entirely unconscious. I’ll trip on a rug on the hardwood floor and tell myself, “Be more conscience.” but it is not about being conscience, it is about my deteriorating proprioception. Knowing that it’s normal to lose my sense of balance as I get older is not as much of a comfort as it might, at first, seem.

In my case, maybe it is karmic punishment for not being very sympathetic when old people complained about their arthritis or I was told of some old person – maybe a mother or, usually, a grandmother – falling over and breaking her hip. I thought they would have solved the problem by just paying attention, I thought they should be more conscious and, of course, that isn’t really the problem. the problem is deteriorating proprioception.

Speaking of proprioception, Michele and I have been watching the Olympics for the last two weeks and, along with their extraordinary athleticism, the Olympians are a group of people who always know where their body is in space. Especially the athletes who are competing in sports like figure skating and are performing aerial tricks. In these sports, in which the competitor is spinning or somersaulting or, as improbable as it seems, both at the same time, superb proprioception is mandatory. And in these sports, East Asians dominate the medals. By East Asian, I mean people whose heritage is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, even if they are now from Europe or the USA.

There are lots of reasons why East Asians dominate these sports but, it seems to me, that the paramount reason is that East Asians just have a better sense of where they are as they are spinning and tumbling. In other words, Nathan Chin, Chloe Kim, Ayumu Hirano, and their ilk just have better proprioception.

After nearly two brutal years fighting for its survival, the soul of Los Angeles dining remains resilient. First Line of an article in the Los Angeles Times entitled These are the 101 best restaurants in L.A.

I think that one can get a good meal, a really good meal, in any city in the US with a population of over, say, 10,000. I’ve – well, Michele, really – had a super goat vindaloo taco in Fredricksburg Texas (population 11, 245), the best beats – fresh, fresh, beets with smoked cashew butter – I’ve ever had were in Bentonville Arkansas (pop 49,467), I’ve even had a perfect French Onion Soup in Boulder, Utah (270), but, what they don’t have is depth. San Francisco has depth, in San Francisco, one can get a superb meal at a restaurant whose main feature is that it is close to the movie no matter where the movie theater is. That’s not the case in most cities, but it is also true for LA and we were going to Malibu (which is close enough to LA to call it LA if you’re from the Bay Area).

So, as Michele was making plans to go to the Getty Villa for her birthday, she chose Malibu Farms Restaurant for the lunch before because it is close to the Getty. Just a regular good restaurant, not one of the 101 best restaurants in LA according to the LA Times, just an average LA – which, means super good almost anywhere else – restaurant serving fresh, organic, food. Michele and I split a raw, purple, Brussel sprout salad and the daily steak flatbread special and sat at an outside table, looking over the calm Pacific, finally soaking up some sun and warmth.

As an aside, Malibu Farms Restaurant was started by Chef Helene Henderson who, improbably, is a Black woman from Sweden. She started with cooking classes in her backyard which turned into a popup on the Malibu pier where she met Meir Teper who, along with Robert De Niro and Nobu Matsuhisa, founded Nobu Hotels and Restaurants. Henderson credits Teper with mentoring her success which is considerable as she now has restaurants in Newport Beach, Montecito, New York, Miami, Cabo, and Tokyo with one opening soon in Tiburon. End aside.

The center of our trip to the Getty Villa is – duh! – the Villa. Neither one of us had been to the Getty Villa and we didn’t know what to expect but what we got was still surprising. It was billed as a recreation of the Villa of the Papyri which was buried in ash from the eruption of Vesuvius and, I think, the awkward entry is designed to mimic walking around a recently uncovered ruin. For me, it doesn’t work and I didn’t take any pictures. And I don’t think I was the only one as there are signs explaining why the entry staging was a good idea which does seem a little defensive.

In 2017, while staying with Michele’s cousin Marion, Michele and I visited the ruins of a real Roman villa in Southern France. It was fascinating and frustrating; fascinating because it was a peek into the lives of people – very rich people, granted – who lived more than sixteen hundred years ago and frustrating because it was only a peak. The Getty Villa touts itself as a re-created Roman country home but, once inside, it becomes obvious that this is a modern building with a Roman villa facade. While there is no place to see what a Roman bath – or toilet, or kitchen, for that matter – is like, the place is full of Greek and Roman art.

I am no judge of ancient Greek or Roman and the “I know what I like” test doesn’t work because almost all of the Greek and Roman art, especially Roman marble sculpture, looks pretty much the same to my untrained eye. I don’t mean to say that Greek and Roman art looks the same, they don’t. Greek art seems to be about the idealized. The idealized human body or a God who is sort of idealized by definition. In The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes postulates that consciousness is the result of language and only developed after civilization. He thinks that, until the very end, the action in the Iliad takes place by men who think the voices they hear in their heads are actually voices from The Gods. I don’t buy the theory but it is obvious that most, if not all, Greek art does not represent individuals in the same way that Roman art does.

But it is hard for me to tell one Greek sculpture from another in terms of quality. With that disclaimer, Getty started collecting in the late 1930s and it seems to me that the Louve and the Met in New York – the two places I’ve seen the most ancient art – had been collecting for a long time. Obviously, Winged Victory and The Three Graces were already gone.

At the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville Arkansas, the viewer is directed around the museum on a – more or less – chronological path, at the Getty Villa the different periods are in different rooms, and the rooms, themselves, seem to be in a random order. The first floor is generally Greek and the second floor all Roman. With the floorplan map, we were able to plot a chronological path through the Greek galleries which meant we saw the earliest Greek gallery first. It was completely different from anything I’ve seen before – or remember seeing before – and a very pleasant surprise.

Unlike Greek art, most of the Roman art seemed to be of individuals. Each piece was different but, after a couple of hours wandering around, they began to lose their individuality.

After spending the day at the Villa, we had dinner in our room and got up the next morning to drive home. At the beginning of our drive, we had what is, unfortunately, becoming too common a California experience, a fire in the hills. Fortunately, we also had what ha become another California experience, great tacos in Santa Barbara.

 

 

For Michele’s birthday, we decided to go to Southern California to get away from the cold here. Not that’s it was that cold, but it was overcast and dreary which makes eating outside in a restaurant less fun and Michele wanted a good restaurant dinner for her birthday. I’ve been wanting to drive Highway 33 where it wanders through the empty space between the Coast Range and the Thatchapies south of the Carizzo Plain which led to Michele finding the Buckhorn in New Cuyama.

We drove through the Salinas Valley, cut over to Highway 33 just before we hit Paso, and followed 33, past the Midway-Sunset Oil Field, to New Cuyama and the Buckhorn. I was going to say that In the 1950s, America was a different country...and then write about how the Buckhorn was a result of the 50s Roadhouse culture that was brought on by the post-war car boom and the start of the Interstate Highway system, but, it turns out, that was not the case.

In the early 50s, New Cuyama was an oil town, essentially owned by Atlantic Richfield, and the Buckhorn was built to attract new residents to the “The Hidden Valley of Enchantment”. It was the center of the community. The Cuyama Buckhorn is what is now called mid-century modern and was designed in 1952 by George Vernon Russell, an architect I had not previously heard of but was fairly well known having designed the original Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas and the Library at UC Riverside.

As an aside, In the 1950s, America was a different country front, George Russell designed the Joyce Shoe Company Factory in Los Angeles, Avery Adhesive Label Building in Monrovia, and the JC Penney factory in Van Nuys, three buildings that probably, today, would be virtually undesigned tilt-ups. End aside.

1952 was 70 years ago and during that time, New Cuyama and the Cuyama Buckhorn slowly went downhill, the Buckhorn changing owners several times. Finally, in 2018, a couple of Los Angeles architects – Jeff Vance and Ferial Sadeghian, the founders and principal architects of iDGroup, a design-build company specializing in high-end properties in the LA basin – bought and revitalized the dilapidated remains. The pool had been shut down and then filled years ago so the new owners built a new pool along with a bocce ball court. Inside, the bar, which had been shuttered years ago was busy when we arrived and everything, from the rooms to the coffee shop, has been updated.

When we travel, almost every place we stay is designed not to offend which is another way of saying they all have beige personalities. They are clean, comfortable enough, and very forgettable. The Cuyama Buckhorn is different, it just oozes personality, the sheets and towels are luxurious, and we’ve been talking about it since we left. The bar, where Michele had a Mezcal Old Fashion and I had a Rye Whisky Sour, both to go, was terrific. The food was also terrific, organic, most of it is locally sourced, and it was delivered to our room; we split the Buckhorn Smoked Platter with red oak-smoked Santa Maria tri-tip and dry-rubbed pulled pork, a plate that I would definitely have again.

All this good news, however, was overruled by the weather. The Cuyama Valley is at 2100+ feet and that elevation was enough to make it considerably colder than the Bay Area. It was too cold to eat outside, the way I was dressed, it was too cold to even walk around outside once the sun went down. But these are the Covid Omicrown times so we ended up eating in the room. The room, for all its style, had no place to really sit down to eat. It also had a shitty heater and the only truly comfortable place was in the luxurious bed, under the covers.

The next day we wandered around the area looking for Condors – we think we spotted three, riding the thermals very high above us – talked about how we would like to come back when it is warmer, and then drove down a very nice Highway 33, through the southern tail of the Coast Range to an anonymous hotel near the Getty Villa.

We went to the Getty Villa for Michele’s birthday. I had suggested that we go to Yosemite but Michele said that she was tired of the cold so we drove to Southern California. Our fantasy was that we could eat at a nice restaurant outside, in the sun, for Michele’s birthday dinner. The reality was that it was as cold in SoCal as it was here and we ended up eating in our hotel room, and very few hotel rooms – none that we found – are set up with furniture suitable for dining.

Meanwhile, on the immigration front, what started my thinking about immigration – this time – is a map in the Business Insider that shows, of all the states, California has the highest proportion of immigrants. 26.9% of our population was born outside of the United States compared to New York at 22.9% and Mississippi at 2.2%. 

I think our high immigrant population is a major contributor to two things that, right now, influence – almost define, really – the state of our state. The robustness of our economy is mostly driven by high-tech and our high rate of homelessness. That’s unfortunate. I wish immigration was all good or all a plus, or whatever you want to call the new world coming out of Silicon Valley, without the negative.

To refresh our collective memory, last December, Lewis Hamilton lost the Formula One World Championship to Max Verstappen because the race director changed the rules to give Max the race and championship victory. It was a controversial call – to be charitable – that is pretty easy to interpret as fixing the results so that the White guy won and Lewis was understandably devastated. He virtually disappeared, at least on social media, although there were a few pictures, by others, of Lewis in Los Angeles so it was pretty big news when Lewis posted this enigmatic post today.

I’ve been gone. Now I’m back! pic.twitter.com/Y8i0cgJXZq

— Lewis Hamilton (@LewisHamilton) February 5, 2022

Along with emails entitled Word of the Day and Town of the Day – both unsolicited and not very interesting – I get an email entitled Animal of the Day. The Animal of the Day is usually pretty mundane, like Siberian Husky mundane, but today the animal was Whole Baked Fish in Sea Salt with Parsley Gremolata and it started with This oven-baked method will ensure your pork… I wonder how this could happen and what the point of these emails, anyway. I must get over a hundred unsolicited emails a day which I end up just deleting. Does anybody actually read them?

Southern California later.

 

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