Art & Al

Over Labour Day weekend the town of Sausalito on the north of the bay holds an art festival, now over 50 years old.

Now I wouldn’t make myself out to be an art buff, more of someone who knows what he likes. However S, who I shared a house with for over a year, is an art genius and has brought me someway up to speed, or at least knowledgeable enough about the Situationists so as not to sound a total ignoramus.

But it wasn’t art which drove me to get the extortionate ferry ticket to toe town, nor pay for the $30 weekend pass. Instead it was music. Four bands a day play at the festival and by lucky chance two of them are old favourites of mine; Al Stewart and Richard Thompson.

Today it was Al’s turn and he didn’t disappoint too much. I first came across him on my first holiday alone at the tended age of 13. We were in the coach on the way to Verbier for a week’s skiing and the driver put ‘Broadway Hotel’ on the stereo. I liked it so much I bought the album, and then most of the rest of them as well – even the one described by Melody Maker as “Boring old hippy bangs on about his obsession with history.”

He hasn’t had a hit since the 70s and is now well over 60 himself (and was wearing a HUGE pair of trousers - why is it the older men get the higher their waistbands?) but still put on a good show. He can’t hit the long notes any more and most of the more intricate guitar work is done by an on stage collaborator, in this case Dave Nachmanoff. But the banter between songs is nearly as good as the music.

As for the music, well he made some good picks. Some of the stuff he's put out in the last 40 years has been frankly rubbish. Dirges about ex-girlfriends in the 60s, quite a lot of good stuff in the 70s and then the move to historical folk music in the 80s and beyond. As he said himself today historical folk music is one of the most unlucrative musical genres but he's still hoping Mariah Carey will try it for a concept album.

Anyway, lots of people liked the show, including a few who obviously had no idea who he was. There was also some quite embarrassing dancing at the front, the sort of 60s snake hands intertwining in the air stuff that you can pull off as a lithesome young thing but starts to look bad in your 50s and 60s. An astonishing amount of tie die showed up as well, and not being worn ironically :)

After the gig I took some pictures and wandered around the show munching on an enormous smoked turkey leg and checking out the stalls. Had a chat with some of the artists (once I’d washed my hands) and then went into town for a drink with a fellow Brit friend from Yelp.

We sank a few pints, and then a few more, before having one for the road. He invited me to a barbeque he and his wife are holding tomorrow so after Richard Thompson plays his set I’ll wander on up.

Slow Food

Saturday is usually food day in the city – there’s the farmer’s market at the ferry building and it’s one of the few days when most of us have time to cook.

However, today the Slow Food Nation fair hit town and it was time to go and sample some of the wares available. 50,000 people are expected to attend and the city’s been gearing up for it for months. Part of the Civic Centre has been turned into an organic garden (see photo), there’s a music festival and stalls are packing out the city offering food you may not have tasted before.

The Slow Food movement started in Italy in the 1980s as a conglomeration of environmental and leftist thought on the nature of food itself. It builds seed banks, promotes non-standard varieties of fruits and vegetables and lobbies for higher food standards.

I took time to sample a number of new things, including an excellent wild rice salad, orange sherbet ice cream and picked up some slow roasted almonds for later. The tastes were superb and it made a very nice day out in the sun.

Hot stuff

San Francisco may be a food haven but there’s one cuisine I’ve lusted over but couldn’t seem to find a good example of – Indian.

I came to good Indian food very late in life. Ten years of enforced eating of boarding school curries, complete with apples and sultana, left me with a horror of them and I avoided anything curried for nearly 20 years.

It’s a pity, because getting lashed up and going for a curry is a popular pastime, and one brilliantly sent up by the Goodness Gracious Me crew in their sketch ‘Going for an English’.

Then, a few years ago the Masala Zone opened up down the street from work. J and I would meet up about once a month to catch up and have lunch, usually in whatever was new in our area, and the Masala Zone was mentioned. So I agreed, with a certain amount of dread.

But to my surprise I really enjoyed it, and felt none of the queasiness that had accompanied previous attempts to sample curry in the past. The think dhals were delicious and while some stuff is still not to my taste I began carefully sampling a wide range of dishes.

So when I met up with C and his Indian friend we were going to go out for a Chinese but when he suggested a curry house that had been highly recommended I jumped at the chance.

The New Delhi curry house is a wonder. It looks just like a good curry house in the UK, if said place had the money to do the job of decoration properly. Ceiling fans spin merrily, carvings adorn the walls and the serving platters are mostly authentic.

The food is superb, even if the other two thought it wasn’t spicy enough. My lamb rogan josh was perfectly; a dark, rich tomato sauce with well cooked chunks of lamb floating through. The nan was delicious, moist enough to tear well and puffed up like little spicy pillows of delight. Don’t even get me started on the poppadoms.

Add in Kingfisher lager and excellent staff and it was a great night. The other two were on for a late one so I bid them goodbye. Hopefully C and I will meet up sooner next time, six years has been too long.

Friends reunited

I was on my way out on Tuesday night when the phone rang. It was an old friend from school, C, who was in town and wanted to know if I fancied a drink.

That night was out of the question but we met up tonight. C and I were at school from 16-18 and were goodish friends; both class jokers in our way, taking the same A levels and writing for the school magazine. He wrote an excellent piece about elves in the North Pole labouring in inhuman conditions under the evil Santa ‘Claus’ Barbie while I concentrated on cynically humorous advice columns.

Anyway, in the early 2000s Friends Reunited came along and we got back in touch. He was in the technology field like me and we met up for a drink that ended up morphing into dinner, more heavy drinking, an unsuccessful attempt to chat up two air hostesses and me pouring him into a taxi at 3am, only to hear the next day that his wife had locked him out of the house.

We sent each other the occasional email but when Facebook came along we got back in contact and exchanged numbers, thus the call.

It was good to catch up and as the drinks flowed we found out a lot about what else had happened to the class of ’87. An astonishing number of classmates had left Derbyshire for a while and then come back to live. One is a landlord of one of our old drinking haunts, another teaches at a nearby college (and married one of his students!) while yet another was the town librarian until it was shut down.

However, a few of us have flown the coop. One old chum in currently in Spitsbergen, high up in the Arctic Circle, studying polar bears. C himself ran a telecommunications company in Outer Mongolia for a while. Another copped a packet in the first Gulf War. It’s amazing how people get around.

All in all a very good night, only slightly soured by finding out that C got off with a girl I had lusted after two years at the leaving disco. No matter, it was over 20 years ago and we’ve all passed a lot of water since then and it was a damn good night, so we’re meeting again tomorrow.

Boredom

Sunday and it’s another grand Prix day. I got up bright and early and headed down to the diner to watch the race.

Sadly it was one of the most boring races of the season. Valencia is a new course, a street circuit, with all of the disadvantages of Monaco and none of the advantages. It ended up as a dismal parade lap and the top three places remained unchanged from start to finish.

Another disappointment was that D and his girlfriend didn’t make it. I was looking forward to picking his brains about wineries to go and visit.

One bright spot, I won first place in the raffle. I am now the proud(ish) owner of a signed photo of the start of the last race by one of the official Formula One photographers. Not sure if it’s good enough to get framed but I’ll decide that later in the season. If I win more eBay might be an option.

M&S have moved on and the house seemed very quiet so I played with the cat and read. Then everyone else got home and we all caught up before getting an early night, tomorrow the weekend ends after all.

Guests and grapes

One of the British hack contingent is staying over for an extra week and her husband arrived yesterday. They’re staying with me for a few days so early Friday evening was spent frantically tidying up and cleaning.

Today however we got up early and headed up to wine country for a day’s sipping and (not) spitting.

The difference between the city and outside is amazing. The top of the Golden Gate Bridge was wreathed in fog as we drove underneath it but within minutes we’d emerged into bright (and burning) sun. From the rest of the day barely a cloud was seen and the temperature stayed in the upper 90s until dusk.

We took in a couple of Sonoma wineries (vineyard just isn’t said over her it seems), the Ravenswood and Imagine. We got lucky at Ravenwood, they were having a party and for $15 we could taste as many wines as we wanted and got to keep the glass – bargain. There was a good collection of Zinfandels and a very nice port but none of them really grabbed me.

Next stop was Imagine, just down the road. This had a much broader selection and I was very taken with a couple of the wines. Ended up blowing the budget and getting two bottles, one nice, one for special occasions, and a half bottle of port.

Imagine also has a policy of commissioning artists to do one off labels, and has a gallery of the best of the bunch. There are some stunning pieces of work there.

We stopped off at Napa after a hair-raising drive through the mountains. Normally we wouldn’t have driven so far but S decided the GPS was wrong, drove us in the wrong direction and we ended up at a dead end leading up a mountain.

After an excellent dinner, at which I had ostrich for the first time in ages and we shared another bottle of wine S, our designated driver, was getting sleepy so we headed home. After an hour trying to find a parking spot we made our way, in some cases unsteadily, to bed. A very nice day.

Quizzers with attitude

OK, maybe I am getting geekier.

Today we took part in a quiz organised by the hosts, basically covering technical knowledge. As you can see from my expression, we won. My colleague R is wearing his war face, but he's a sweetheart deep down.

To my surprise we won the competition, so a prize will be winging its way to my office. It will also mean we shall have to defend our title next year, for honour's sake. Well, let's not beat about the bush, for competition's sake too - I get very competitive at times.

Geek fest

Day one of the official conference and it was just as I’d imagined – fun and reassuring.

Fun because learning new stuff, and taking the piss out of people who think they can fool you by recycling old stuff, is my idea of a good time at work. Not the only way to have a good time, but let’s face it, if you’re paid to do it so much the better.

Reassuring because every time I worry about being too geeky I come to somewhere like this and realise I have a long, long way to go. When you see lines of excited techies trying to cut in line for a seminar on “Mechanical, thermal and reliability study of a non-lidded processor in a low profile socket*” you realise that while it takes all sorts to make the world go round, you are thankfully not one of them.

Still and all there were slight irritations to the day. Top of the list is overenthusiastic public relations folks. Guys, it’s a new chipset, not a cure for cancer.

* Actual title

Beware Sake

Spent Sunday out at Coit Tower, the highest publicly accessible point in the city centre. I was showing a couple of my friends around and decided to do it literally.

Coit Tower is on the peak of Telegraph Hill and looms over Fisherman’s Wharf. It has survived pretty much everything the geographically unstable city can throw at it and was built by the delightfully eccentric* Lillie Hitchcock Coit.

Coit was a card; wearing trousers when such behaviour was thought shocking, gambling and smoking cigars and generally scandalizing society one hundred years ago. She was also an honorary fire-fighter, and commissioned a very butch statue to them in Washington Square Park.

It’s a lovely building, made even better by a huge display of murals featuring life in California, done in a very nice 1930’s style.

Then we wandered around North Beach, then down to China town and across to the foodie heaven that is the Ferry Building. Then back to the hotel to meet the others for dinner.

We were taken to a very upscale Japanese restaurant - definitely an OPM (other people’s money) place. I later found out it cost our host $400 a head - and the waiter agreed to add a few covers to the receipt so the host wouldn't get fired.

There the night was filled with sake, sushi, sake, Kobe beef and a few more sakes. I didn’t realise quite how drunk I was until I got outside and the air hit me.

This morning was very grim. All in all not the state to meet my new boss in.

*ie a bit mad but with plenty of money

Old friends

There’s a major technology conference on next week so a lot of British friends are over.

It’s really good to see R, I and M and M again. You don’t realise how much you miss people until you can’t see them every week and it was superb to see them again. We caught up on gossip, shared stories and generally chewed the fat.

I’m growing accustomed to the American way of life but there’s a part of me that will always be British, and they exemplify why. Frank, and frankly obscene at times conversations, chuckles over times past and plans for the future. Damn good to see them again.

Lurgy

Today started off badly and got worse.

Woke up at 9:30 with a killer headache and aching joints. My body was trying to tell me something and the message was relax.

I think I slept 18 hours today. It’s not a virus, just that I’ve not so much been burning the candle at both ends but taking napalm to it.

Paying for torture

Today I joined a gym, not the first time I’ve done this but it’s a curious feature of modern mankind that we do so.

Two hundred years ago our ancestors would have laughed it the idea of paying to work out. Life was tough enough as it was. Now we pay to torture ourselves, or get fit which is what it’s all about.

It used to be part of my contract that we got free membership of the local gym if we went more than 25 times a year. That was great, but the new contract didn’t include it, so membership lapsed.

As my friend S reminds me once you reach 40 the body is as good as it’s going to be so it’s time to get in shape before the great downhill road starts. In fact, sod downhill, I intend to get better and break the trend.

So the local YMCA looks good. Golds gyms are a gay cruising spot, Crunch has a really bad reputation and the local place has a pool so I can get in 20 laps before work and still have hand muscle control for good typing.

Plus, even though the gym is rather shabby it’s still more advanced than London’s facilities. There’s a computer system that monitors how you use the machines and gives you points for doing it right. Get enough and there’s a free massage at the end of it or discounts on membership. A good incentive.

Is it safe?

It’s been over six months since my last dental appointment. Time for a clean, even if I have to pay for it myself.

The reason for this is Homeland Security is still checking to see I’m not a member of the Al Qaeda middle class white atheist division and are backchecking my credentials before I get a Social Security number. Without that my dental insurance doesn’t kick in.

Nevertheless two pints of tea a day were leaving me with tooth strains that in California signal ‘homeless slob’ and I’m conscious that you only get one set of adult knashers in a lifetime. So I looked in the paper, found a trustworthy dentist, and booked an appointment.

I hate going to the dentist. It’s like vaccinations or giving blood, essential but highly unpleasant. A British dentist, who I believe eventually was struck off, took out all my milk molars in one operation and I still have occasional nightmares about a sweet smelling rubber mask coming down on my face and waking up spitting blood and having to learn to chew with my incisors.

Add into that Larry Olivier’s performance in Marathon Man and if they’d asked me “Is it safe?” I’d have been out there so fast you’d have seen the red shift.

Since then prudence has demanded I learn to live with dentists and I’ve had some great ones. An Aussie who was cheerfully grim (“Chew ice with that lower molar and I’ll see you back here in tears”) and a mad Brazilian who promised such a good clean my girlfriend would kiss her fingers.

But they pale into comparison with the practice that did me today. Not only was the lass who did the hard work an absolute gem with great taste in classical music* but it turns out the head dentist was an ex public school boy (Stowe – damn good rugby team) and understood the limits of British dentistry.

So now I have a lovely clean set of teeth and I had an appointment that didn’t leave me putting fingernail marks in the armrests. A full review is here and I’ll be back once it’s determined I’m not a threat to national security.

*Bach’s methodical and predictable music is perfect for controlling panic.

Of cats and men

A quiet start to the weekend. The rest of the household was away so it was just me and Kitty* in the house. It was all in all rather relaxing.

Kitty has gradually got comfortable with me nowadays. In the beginning she would just hide under the sofa but gradually she’s become accustomed to me and now complains noisily if she doesn’t get five minutes of magic fingers backrubs once a day.

I say she, but actually Kitty’s a bloke cat, albeit missing the requisite nadgers. His owner/slave, for we are all slaves to cats, E thought he was a bitch (in the biological sense of the word) at first and was a little put out to discover he was a tom so had him fixed and raised him as a female cat.

This makes Kitty a tad gender confused, and pisses off her vet a lot when E refers to Kitty with the feminine pronoun. Still and all she’s a lovely cat, with beautiful tiger stripe markings and an intelligent temperament.

I’ve said it before but dogs are dumb and loyal while cats are smart but independent. I’m convinced there’s an evolutionary argument for this. Early on in the domestication cycle mankind started hunting cooperatively with dogs so loyalty became a key survival trait and keeping them fed was a priority.

But cats became (semi) domesticated simply because they were easy to tolerate and kill vermin. You didn’t train them, they hung around because houses were largely warm and dry and vermin flocked to them. It wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that people even considered cat food – that was what mice and rats were for.

In my youth I spend the odd winter week or two on a friend’s farm helping out. P’s farm, or rather smallholding, showed this difference very well. The dogs slept in the house and were devoted to, and dependant on, the family - with the exception of their golden retriever who would pop down to the pub every evening because the landlord took a shine to her and put out some beer in a bowl each night.

The cats by contrast lived in the barn and were semi-feral. We had to collect the hen’s eggs as soon as possible in the morning otherwise they’d crack and eat them. Try and pick one up and you’d be straight down to casualty to get your fingers stitched together.

Kitty retains her feral heritage but is trainable. She’s noted that any claw swipe brings about a 24 hour cessation of stroking privileges. Now all I need to do is train her to get on the sofa rather than skulking around my feet.

But there’s always the feeling that if someone invented the paw operated tin opener mankind would lose the cat completely and supermarkets would suffer catlifting rates that would make today’s losses to humans look like a golden age.

But they are seductive little devils, who get under our skin. XKCD has it right on this.

* Photo caption - "Make sure you get my best side."

Quiet night out

Friday night is DYL night at the moment.

DYL stands for Destroy Your Liver, basically it’s a bunch of people from Yelp meeting in a bar and drinking, chatting, laughing and indulging in some light flirting.

It’s not a bad way to spend an evening all in all. Meet some interesting people, visit some new bars and a good time is usually had by all. Well, no fights as far as I know and a couple of couples have got together at them.

Tonight’s was sparsely attended and with a sex imbalance that reached 100 per cent very quickly. I called it a night early and went home to bed; I was very tired.

The reason for this tiredness was that I’d had a breakfast briefing for work with a big PC vendor. The actual briefing was set to begin at 8am. Eight sodding am – it’s just not civilised. Usually I laugh at such timing but felt the need to get out there more so went.

As it turned out it went fairly well, good content even if it didn’t start until 8.30am. That might not sound too bad but I’m not a morning person and an extra 30 minutes in bed can make the difference between civil and sarky. Thankfully I’d stopped in Starbucks and was reasonably civil.

Microsoft once tried to arrange a briefing for me at a conference for 8am on a Sunday morning. I told them that was fine, so long as they didn’t mind my first two questions being “Where’s the bloody tea?” and “Who the hell are you anyway?” The meeting was rescheduled.

Brits abroad

While I’ve had some meetings with Brits over here I’ve kept them pretty minimal since mixing with the locals is the best way to get to know the culture.

However one of the people I know on Yelp got in touch, a Brit who’s been here for a while, and suggested a drink and a natter. Turns out he’s met very few Brits over here and wanted to find out the news from home.

So we met at my local and had a pint of London Pride or four while chewing the fat and playing pool.

Now I thought I had it tough moving over here. He moved over to New York initially and landed in the city on September 9^th 2001. Not exactly the most auspicious start to a career move.

After a spell in Texas he moved to San Francisco and likes it. He clued me into the tax system and how it works (or doesn’t), gave some good info on where to pick up a few delicacies from home and some very useful insights into writing for an American audience.

In return I brought him up to speed on Gordon Brown’s long fall from grace, property prices in London and what exactly is wrong with British sport.

All in all a very good night, and we’ll be doing it again, if his wife lets him.

Merde, il pleut

One of the signs of becoming a San Franciscan manifested itself tonight.

I was wandering back home after a hard day at the office (it’s the summer, so lots of silly pitches and not enough news) and as darkness fell I felt something wet on my face. It was raining.

You’d think after a life in the UK this wouldn’t come as a shock, but after six weeks in the city I’ve become used to not having to worry about rain. Sure when the fog's in you get the occasional dampness on your cheek, but not rain, honest to god droplets of water out of the sky.

I was so excited I went into the house and got the others to take a look – sad but true.

I’m reliably informed that I’ll see rain a plenty in January, and maybe February if I’m lucky, but for the rest of the year San Francisco is a rain free zone. It’s a pity, because we need it, the whole state is in drought at the moment.

Not that you’d notice it. J was appalled when she visited, so see the pavements being cleaned with high pressure hoses. It’s the kind of behaviour that would cause riots if it was practiced on the streets of Melbourne.

True, the city has started to put up advertisements asking people to water their gardens in the morning, not during the hottest part of the day and to turn off the taps when brushing their teeth. So far the response has been less than encouraging.

Slacker

In any city you have to take the rough with the smooth, with this many people crammed together somebody’s going to overhear everyone else.

So when I surfaced from the night’s slumbers at 7.30am to the sound of drumming the first thought was slight irritation, which soon metasized into extreme annoyance.

The first thought was “Someone’s got a new drumkit,” which is irritating at the best of times. Hint: If a mate has really pissed you off buy his kids a drum kit.

But maybe in one of the apartments opposite there’s some budding musician inspired by Ringo Starr (or even the Drummers of Burundi) working on his or her dream of one day making it into a band. Besides I thought, you've only lost an hour's kip and you can make an early start on the day.

But the really annoyance came when they stopped. This slacker only practiced for a touch over 10 minutes. You need at least half an hour in a practice session, preferably an hour, to get better. If I’m going to lose an hour of sleep in the morning I want it to be for a good reason, not just for a dilettante to make some noise once in a while.

While I’m not about to go out and exercise my right to bear arms it made me a little tetchy. That said I’d sound pretty stupid leaning out the window and shouting “Get back on those drums you little slacker.”

Winner

Sunday was Formula One day. I'd missed the last one (in which Lewis cut through the opposition like a knife through butter) as J was in town but dragged my hungover head out of bed and headed down.

Was feeling a little bit homesick so called R, my usual Grand Prix partner and caught up. His wife and kids were fine but he told me to hang up and watch the race as I was about to miss a good bit.

It was a good race, but R had a point; it was made all the better by Massa losing a well deserved victory. That might sound harsh but we love to see Ferrari take a beating.

The post-race raffle was a laugh. D's girlfriend managed to win one of the bottles of wine he'd donated. I won a photo of Kubica I didn't really like so we swapped.

Also found a bunch of South Africans there and it seems biltong is available over here. My stomach is already growling in anticipation.