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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With the Omicron variant spreading rapidly, the country is averaging more than 500,000 new cases a day, January 10th, 2022, New York Times.

covid is fucking horrible let me just say i dislike having it very much A Tweet by Talia Lavin @swordsjew queer jewish journalist. author of award winning book CULTURE WARLORDS. Writer, The Sword & The Sandwich.

“Our view is this is an extremely dangerous situation. We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki

Every day the New York Times shows a series of full-color maps that show the status of the plague in the United States, broken down by County. Pale yellow is the best – well, less awful, actually, no color is good but nobody has had that for the last twenty-two months – and deep purple being awful, terrible, bad. It’s been a fun image to go to because our area of California has, up until recently, looked very pale. Now, the entire map is almost all purple. San Mateo County, where Michele and I live, has a population of about 767,500 and we are now averaging 4,157 new cases a day. Each day! As the number of cases keeps growing, so does our fear and now both the number of cases and our fear are hockey-sticking.

As our fear grows, going out, eating in a restaurant, even outside, or going to a small party seems scary and foolish. So, we stay home, keeping cooped up, and our fear grows. “Oh, don’t worry about getting toilet paper, we can go out and get some tomorrow…or use leaves.” With inertia, comes isolation, and with that, acceptance. Not going out is beginning to feel normal again. A normal I don’t want.

Well, normal except that we are worried that Michele has been exposed. She was out walking with her friend Carol when they saw a fellow walker with a beautiful French Mastiff. In the admiration conversation that ensued, they got close enough to pet the dog, at that point the guy casually mentioned that he has been bedridden for the last fours days because of Covid. So we are now in the same house, masked when we are in the same room, but, usually, we each retreat to our desk for the day, where we even have Zoom dinners. I am truly surprised at how much more isolated this makes me feel.

Well, normal except that, in the background, the sounds of war can be heard just over the horizon. Russia wants Ukraine, they want it as a buffer between NATO and their Homeland because Mother Russia is afraid of being attacked. That seems like a very logical fear to me. Wrong, I hope, but every time a European country, or group of countries, got strong, it attacked Russia starting with Sweden – a couple of times – then Poland, France, Germany, even the United States had an expeditionary force in Russia (in the fall of 1918, we really were threatened by Communism). During the Cold War, Russia used its occupied Eastern European countries as a buffer, but, after the end of the Cold War in 1989 NATO gobbled up Russia’s buffer zone and Russia is pissed – or afraid – and is acting out. If this makes it sound like I’m minimizing the crisis, I don’t mean to, this could very easily end up being both a human and ecological crisis.

Sadly, what is becoming normal again, is that, over the weekend, another group of Jewish people has been attacked by another terrorist while praying in their synagogue. I used to get in low-grade arguments with friends who think Trump is the worst president ever because I’ve maintained that he was a pretty ordinary Republican with extraordinarily bad manners. But Trump’s bad manners were really just a cover for his racism and sexism. Trump’s racism made racism fashionable again. Maybe not fashionable, but OK and that is doing tremendous harm to our body politic.

Lastly – for today – according to National Geographic, the new normal will include more giraffes. There are about twenty percent more giraffes today than there were in 2017 (although some of that may just be better counting). As an added bonus, according to people who decide these things, there are actually four different species of giraffes and three of them are thriving. Also thriving are the California Condors, huge birds, with a wing span of up to ten feet, which, because of lead poisening, had gone extinct in the wild by the mid-1980s. A captive breeding program was started by the San Diago Wild Animal Park and Los Angeles Zoo and, as of today, there are over 500 California Condors with 92 flying in the wild in Central California and 225 spread out in Baja, Arizona, and Utah (171 are in captivity). They are still very rare and I’ve never seen one but we will be driving through Condor country in a couple of weeks, so we hope to.

Dr. King didn’t shrink from controversy. He spoke openly about American imperialism, unionization and labor rights, economic issues, and more. He was targeted, even called a ‘communist’ because of it. It’s on all of us to pick up where he left off. A Tweet by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez

We’re still in the Civil Rights Movement & don’t have the luxury of complacency. To honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we must abolish the Jim Crow filibuster, protect voting rights & legislate like democracy depends on it—because it does. A Tweet by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley @RepPressley

Dr. Martin Luther King was not treated very well by us White people while he was alive. As Representative Ayanna Pressley said: Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history. He was murdered because he was a radical disruptor of the status quo, considered by the FBI & white America to be a threat to our country. The FBI even tried to blackmail him, suggesting that he kill himself. He didn’t become an American hero until after he was dead and no longer a threat to White supremicy. Today is a good day to remember that.