"One more thing..."

Steve Jobs
1955 - 2011

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“The Mick”

Rest In Peace, Harlem's George Carlin—1937-2008


We knew we weren't going to have him for long very early in the game.

George Carlin. comedian, monologuist , and member of the “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” troika of dazzling comedy talent of the sea-changing 1970's has passed away—although, as Hubris says downpage a touch—“What (are we) thinking? George hasn't passed way, we didn't 'lose him'. He didn't go to the other side. He's dead.”

Which is a perfectly apt, Carlin-esque way of summing it up.

George Carlin IS dead. And we should thank our lucky, brick wall-backdropped stars that we had his talent for as long as we did. By my count, he'd suffered at least three heart attacks (that we knew of) and kept bouncing back from those should-have-been-life-stealing-episodes to bring us the funny, make us think—and yeah, give everyone who listened a little lesson on writing with wit in the english language. And mind you, those debilitating health issues didn't just crop up as he wizened into a raging old lion trodding the comedy circuit boards. No. He was just shy of forty and at the peak of his popularity when he first dodged death's swinging scythe pointed at his fragile heart, and basically called the black-clad ender of things, word number six—“Motherfucker”—to his face, and then proceeded to keep on steppin'. He would duck and slide away from that bastard's blade at least two more times we knew of, and still he returned to entertain and challenge us again and again.

I referred to him up-page here as “a member of the “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” troika of dazzling comedy talent of the sea-changing 1970's”, and he absolutely was—with Richard Pryor as Willie Mays, Carlin as Mickey Mantle, and the great Robert Klein as Duke Snider. If you don't get that reference, it's to the great trio of Hall of Fame major-league center-fielders who all played here in New York during the halcyon 1950s and were immortalized in the song, “Willie Mickey and the Duke”. If that's too “in” for ya, think of heavyweight boxing in the seventies when it was ruled by colossi like Ali, Frazier and Foreman. Pryor, Carlin and Klein were like those three in the comedy world—dominant, mega-talented forces who changed the game for everyone who followed in their wake. Now, only Klein remains. But if you're a comedy newcomer, or managed to be unlucky enough to miss 'em when they—and particularly George Carlin were hurling thunderbolts of laughter from the heavens, you need to understand just how good these three were and how their work changed the game.

Pryor, who I have discussed at length before, was the most protean talent of the three in my mind. For all of his unfortunate bacchanalian excesses, there may have never been a more all-around gifted comedian and yes, no-holds-barred social commentator. A rubber-face and body, a keen intellect and sense of unsparing anyone for their transgressions—especially including himself, and finally, a sense of verbal rhythm that made him the “Charlie Parker” of the comedy game—were the formidable weapons Pryor brought to the stage, and no one as far as I can see, ever outgunned him. You throw in as an extra his having perhaps the most tuned-in observational powers of regular folks ever bestowed by the creator on a funny person and you get the magic that was him—so much more than dirty words and a bushy 'fro as some liked to discount him as—he was damn near a Will Rogers 2.0, tearing away the veil of false propriety on America's issues of race, sex, class,and justice. He did this not by impersonating the famous, but rather—by channeling the voices of WASPS, winos, and women. Dogs, doctors and Dracula. An old, Black man, a young spotted giraffe, and even a horny spider monkey on the loose in the palm tree fronds canopying Hollywood. And tapping into ALL of those people, animals and more, (yes, he even personified a heart attack trying to kill him), he soared to prominence in the early seventies. But he wasn't alone...

The Bronx's own Robert Klein also came down the pike, and he too was a student of the observational school. But Klein was effectively the first, great, post Borscht-Belt, post-Goodman/Cheney/Schwerner Jewish comic. Relying on the old archetypes of irony and self-deprecation, he flipped the script in dealing with subjects as Joe McCarthy, the stupidity of cold-war excesses and of course, his beloved whipping post of Watergate, in which he took on a president in ways the late Vaughn Meader could only hint at. He took the old cadences of the Catskills and ran the new subversive material through them, while also subtly mocking the style to boot. It was unabashedly “Noo Yawk”-ey, yet it had a deciely college-educated vibe running through it as well, and his exasperation with the world he grew up in, only to see it replaced with the crazier world he was now an adult in only heightened the laughs. His work was finely-crafted and yet...had that corduroy-ed college professor prowling the stage at the lecture hall vibe, riffing on history and seeming to discover some wild, new shit right there in front of you as he spoke and fairly explodied with new energy to “hip” you to his breakthrough. What a time that was.

And we come to the great Carlin, (who was from what he joked was “White Harlem”, aka West 121st Street—the “Morningside Heights” section of the nabe)...who may have been the best pure wordsmith of the three. I am hard-pressed to think of another comedian who worked harder at perfecting his craft than George Carlin did. In his peak years, he Pryor and Klein ALL busted their asses coming up with new material, but it was Carlin who chiseled at the marble more, with finer tools and then buffed it to a glowing finish better than any of 'em. He workshopped his material so hard as he toured the country, and with such a discerning eye for pacing, and just the right phrasing and even intonation, that by the time you saw him at a big venue of on one of his annual HBO specials, you were watching something pretty damned close to stand-up perfection.

You see, every comedian's goal/wish/dream/necessity is to come up with “a fresh fifteen” every three months or so. A “fresh fifteen” being a new, and solid fifteen minutes of new material—staggered in such a way that at the end of every year, you'd end up with a different hour's worth of stand-up than you had the previous year. (Ostensibly so that when you hit spots on “the circuit” for the second time within a year's cycle, you're not booed off the stage for bending ears with the same old stuff) That's a damned hard thing to come up with, that whole new hour—but it starts with that supremely difficult “fresh fifteen” every three months, and Carlin was fucking superhuman at this. He would work from a handful of index cards when starting a new quarter's worth of material, stuff he painstakingly wrote himself, testing it, floating it and then honing it or ditching it based on the audience's reaction. He crafted his sets with an architect's eye almost, with special attention to pacing—when to run for twenty seconds breathlessly, and then, when to pause for a long beat, and hit with that one-liner with the vocal curl up at the end.

Which would of course, push the verbal boulder down the mountainside to start the next run of funny anew.

Where Pryor was an improvisational wizard, springing new additions from his basic outline of things, Carlin wrote these perfect pocket symphonies of comedy. Arranged just so, and when performed by the master—himself, they were quite simply brilliant. Especially when mated with that well-honed stream-of-consciousness, slightly buzzed delivery of his. (He would abandon much of that “stoner” timing as his work got sharper in tone over the years.)

And that goes without even dipping into the nature of the material itself—another observational genius, he—Carlin was also an unabashed observer of language itself. Playing with it, noting it's foibles and inherent silliness in how we fuck it up every damned day. Not to mention his constant highlighting of words' power, and how we as a society constantly mis-ascribe power to certain words to make points beyond the words' meaning.

Thus, we get Carlin's most infamous and subversive bit—“The Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television”. You know 'em...

“Shit, piss, fuck, c*nt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.

The routine itself is damn near a doctoral dissertation on the words and the hypocrisy of the so-called “affronted” so outraged by their use. It's a masterful piece of wordplay, timing and knife-edged in way that simultaneously draws the guffaws while ridiculing the posers who would stand in judgment. It also drew the ire of those posers who held power in media here in America, placing Carlin right where he wanted to be—diametrically opposite them, but also NOT exactly where he wanted to be—which was in a fucking courtroom with these stodgy bastards fighting this shit out like some property-line case in Levittown. Carlin, something of a Lenny Bruce acolyte (who yes, was there in the club the night Bruce was arrested on obscenity charges, and in defending Bruce wound up going downtown with him in the same cop car!) believed whole-heartedly in using language to challenge, and did so with that bit. However, in the most classic case of “You can't fight City Hall”, not only did the powers-that-be use all of their “oomph” to keep their verbal ban in place, but they then ascribed huge fines for broadcast outlets that dared flout said ban—fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for usage “on-air”. I know from that ban close-up. The radio station I worked at for years here in NY had on the wall of the Master Control room (and still does to this day) an ‘Olde English” scroll featuring the calligraphed words you must not ever fucking say displayed in plain view, lest you bankrupt the joint with fines. The ironic thing was that their fighting Carlin on this only gave him that much more fame, and in the end—respect—and it only helped him far more than it ever hurt him. Folks don't give a shit about the “rightness” of the government in it's crusade for morals per se—they remember Carlin's routine, and that cadence of how he rolled those words off the tongue—“Shit, piss, fuck, c*nt, cocksucker, motherfucker and...tits.”, and how he stuck it to the man.

And of course, he'd have the ultimate last laugh in doing his routines unexpurgated on TV whenever he wanted thanks to the birth of Cable which didn't have to hew to the FCC's whips and thus gave Carlin (and other envelope-pushing funnymen) bigger audiences than ever with his perennial one-man shows, centered around his anti-bullshit mantra. He tackled with rough hands society's hang-ups over sex, religion and violence, while brutally making light of our superficial ways of dealing with the supposedly bad outgrowths of those things. He railed—far longer than I ever thought he would, considering his repeatedly failing heart—against those hypocrisies and was damn near as sharp now at it as he was at his youthful peak.

Maybe even sharper.

Having worked professionally in comedy for twenty years, I can say with no doubt that this is a loss of huge proportions for the biz. He was a professional's professional, and cared enough about the craft to keep honing his shit, and never gave in to the temptation to be a lazy-ass, and fall back on lame-ass material because he didn't respect his audience—the ultimate stand-up no-no that some so-called “pros” shittily engage in, as noted by one of my favorite bloggers, Mark Evanier:

It's just the nature of comedy to deflate the privileged and the powerful. It was the Marx Brothers tormenting Margaret Dumont, not the other way around. Lately, Dennis Miller seems to be trying to reverse this principle. I used to really like Miller, though not all the time. One of the "not" times came after I saw him perform years ago at the MGM Grand in Vegas. Rita Rudner was the opening act and she was funny and fresh and giving it her all. Miller came out next and did horribly dated “topical” material — nothing I hadn't heard him do a dozen times — with an attitude of, “Gimme my check and let me get out of here.”

---------------------------------------------------------------

What struck me when I saw Miller on with Leno the other night was that given the state of the world right now, a comic who decides to not joke about the President really hasn't got a lot to say. He started his Tonight Show spot by hauling out his joke about Michael Jackson and George Hamilton officially crossing on the pigmentation chart. It's a joke that has now been rerun more often than the I Love Lucy about John Wayne's footprints and one that really shows its age. I suspect that were it not for Miller and that joke, George Hamilton would not have been mentioned on network television in the last decade.

That's a disease that afflicts many of today's comics—be they big names or guys booked at “The Yuk-Yuk Hut” on Route 11. There's an ugly laziness there, and sadly now—minus the borderline-crazed professionalism of a George Carlin, there's one less person working to point to as a sterling example of “how it should be done”. It's no mere coincidence that in the first year of NBC's Saturday Night (the show's REAL name at first before the change to a bunch of things ending with “Saturday Night Live”), he, Klein and Pryor would be guest hosts, and that Carlin himself would host the very first episode . “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” indeed. And damned if he didn't hit some serious tape-meausre shots like “The Mick” did when he prowled the stage with a mic.

He was a giant. A pro's pro, and as someone who also values the weight and worth of “the word”, I shall especially miss him, as we all should. Because I think we're all a little bit dumber, and a little less brave without his needling, cranky and “How could we not notice this?” presence.

“Sigh!” I guess I'll have to find “a place for my stuff” all by myself now. Damn.

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Liz Phair Rocks

As long as we're throwing up music...

There's a reason Liz Phair meant so much to so many, back when.

Everyone I hung with burned out at least two, maybe three of her albums.

Warning: Flower is NOT safe for work. Not not not. Neither are the others. All three however, rock hard.

Enjoy.


Fuck and Run -- Live in London 10/07/03


Flower -- Live in London 10/07/03


Divorce Song -- Live at Tower Records

Lyrics
Fuck and Run
Flower
Divorce Song

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Violinist Viviane Hagner (Age 14)

Zubin Mehta Conducts Israel Philharmonic with Viviane Hagner
Zubin Mehta conducts the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra along with 14 year old violinist Viviane Hagner performing a piece by Camille Saint-Saens. This concert was in Tel Aviv in 1990.

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Bullying in Arkansas

Billy Wolfe, target of bullies, Fayetteville, AR, March 2008. photo Angel Franco/The New York Times

“He kept spitting blood out”

Billy Wolfe, 16, has been a target of bullies, since he was 12.

Knocked out, stitched up, left bleeding and bruised lying on the street and the floor at school, his mother has one simple hope: "I pray to God every day they don't kill him," said Ms. Wolfe. "Because of all the things that have happened I honestly don't know if he's going to be O.K."

The New York Times

A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.

The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.

Whatever the reason, addressing the bullying of Billy has become a second job for his parents: Curt, a senior data analyst, and Penney, the owner of an office-supply company. They have binders of school records and police reports, along with photos documenting the bruises and black eyes. They are well known to school officials, perhaps even too well known, but they make no apologies for being vigilant. They also reject any suggestion that they should move out of the district because of this.

Judging by school records, at least one official seems to think Billy contributes to the trouble that swirls around him. For example, Billy and the boy who punched him at the bus stop had exchanged words and shoves a few days earlier.

But Ms. Wolfe scoffs at the notion that her son causes or deserves the beatings he receives. She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up, and why school officials are so reluctant to punish bullies and report assaults to the police.

The Wolfes are not satisfied. This month they sued one of the bullies “and other John Does,” and are considering another lawsuit against the Fayetteville School District. Their lawyer, D. Westbrook Doss Jr., said there was neither glee nor much monetary reward in suing teenagers, but a point had to be made: schoolchildren deserve to feel safe.

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Jill is absolutely on the mark.

Brilliant at Breakfast

This just breaks my heart. As someone who endured my share of bullying when I was a kid, from being psychologically tormented by a troubled kid who was Catholic and delighted in telling me I would go to hell when I died to the boy in fourth grade who used to hit me every day to the time I was asked by a high school principal what I did to make so-and-so angry, I'm appalled that more than thirty years after I finished high school, nothing has changed.

That schools are still blaming the victim because they don't know what else to do is reprehensible. And the prevalence of social networking web sites make tormenting misfits an even more efficient operation.

I think back to the recent case of Megan Meier, who committed suicide at the age of thirteen after a boy she liked had turned on her, and the boy turned out to be a fake MySpace account set up by the parents of a girl with whom she'd had a falling out. And I wonder what on earth parents and schools in this country are doing when they want to put every kid whose brain functions differently on medication, but when you have actual cases of kids being tortured by their classmates, the schools blame the kid being victimized and the parents look the other way.

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The same thing happened to me.

Group News Blog

I Know and You're Stupid
Ass Kicking 101: Age Nine

I got my first serious beating at age nine (not counting Dad and any of the times he beat the shit out of me.) It was downtown at the Temple of Music and Art after choir practice. At nine I was in the Tucson Boys Chorus, working my way up towards the Touring group which I wouldn't make till I turned thirteen after a year spent living in Europe. I attended church regularly and was to all outward appearances a good boy. Boy were appearances wrong.

The problem with genius is simple. Genius plays by its own rules. Yet lives in the world with others. I tested out in the 160's both as a kid and then in my late teens on the adult tests. Certainly there are many people more adapt at solving intelligence tests than I am, but so far as relating to people who are "average", I didn't have a clue for a long, long time. Till I figured out how to put a stop to the bullying, people tended to beat the shit out of me because I was socially clumsy and freely volunteered my opinion that not only was I right, but everyone else was stupid for not seeing life my way. *laughs*

Dad forgot to pick me up on time so I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually two older kids, teenagers, showed up down in South Tucson where we rehearsed. After questioning me for a bit, they started to hit me. I was different, that's what mattered. My answers were off; I knew too damn much for a freaking nine-year-old and didn't yet know how to hide it. (Sometimes I still don't.) So they hit me. First a little, then a lot. Didn't matter what I said. Didn't matter what I knew. Only mattered that they were bigger and stronger. They beat on me with fists, boots, belt buckles, rocks, whatever was handy, for close to forever. Had me cornered all the way upstairs back where no one could hear me scream. It got dark as they kept it up. Eventually I wore out their fists on my head and they left.

Dad got there several hours later. I was huddled under a lamp post, waiting. Bloody. Not crying.

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What is happening to Billy is wrong.

He is a strong young man to be standing up to this. I applaud his parents for suing the bullies directly, and hope they soon sue the school district as well.

The refusal of the school administration to deal with these attacks is wrong.

Bullying is wrong -- verbal, sexual, classism, racism, and physical.

Attacking someone because they're different is wrong.

All of these are forms of violence against people.

All bullying (violence) is wrong, both individually and in mobs.

Anyone who participates in mobbing or bullying is wrong.

Anyone who watches mobbing or bullying and doesn't help stop it is wrong.

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Peter Jackson Returns to the Shire

Peter Jackson directs Sean Astin in LOTR: Return of the King (2003)
photo Pierre Vinét/New Line Productions

Jackson to Executive Produce “The Hobbit” in Two Film Deal

After a bitter feud with New Line over payment for their share of the work of the $3 billion taken in so far of all three Lord of the Rings movies, Peter Jackson and New Line have kissed and made up.

Jackson and partner Fran Walsh will now Executive Produce -- Jackson will not write, direct & produce as done previously -- The Hobbit, to be filmed in two movies, lensed, as has become his trademark with the Lord of the Rings, simultaneously.

Hollywood Reporter

Preproduction will begin in January, and principal photography for the films, which will be shot simultaneously, is tentatively set for 2009. The production budget is estimated at $150 million per film. The release of the first film is slated for 2010 and the sequel in 2011.

"I think that we all realized that we were getting nowhere, and in some ways it's possible that the lawyers and the accountants and everyone that got in the middle of this were not serving the objective," Shaye said. "We had to start listening to our own conscience and our own objectives, which was to make this happen."

Lynne said the dispute was about "very complicated documents, in same cases documents that were created many years ago, and differences of opinions that people could have about those documents. It was having that disagreement over financial situations that was of historical financial proportions that created a polarization."

The parties involved singled out MGM's Sloan for helping find common ground.

MGM got involved in the past six months, managing to get the parties to talk to one another. The deal for the new films was signed only in the past few days, after a settlement had been reached.

"You're talking about powerful men who had strong differences of opinion," Sloan said. "When you start with no one talking to anyone, someone has to come in to talk to both sides. We encouraged them to see the great possibility to create what could be in my opinion another masterpiece. We wanted them to see the possibility and not let that slip away."

I'm incredibly pleased at this news.

It demonstrates -- right in the midst of the WGA strike -- that talent and the studios can work out complicated issues of profit sharing, in the midst of deep distrust. (As always, for up to the moment news, check UnitedHollywood.com.)

Second, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh are to the cinematic version of these works, what Tolkien was to the written version -- its creator. To have anyone else helming the project would have risked... everything.

Finally, given I'm taking delivery in January of RED Camera #346 -- *smiles deeply* -- I'm wondering if Peter Jackson who has already directed the short film Crossing the Line on RED and who sings its praises at every turn will use RED? There's an entire thread at the REDUser board, asking the same question.

My children absolutely adore the Lord of the Rings (and Harry Potter.) This is going to make them very, very happy.

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The Genius of Django Reinhardt

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


One of the preeminent Jazz greats, Django Reinhardt helped invent jazz guitar. A two-fingered disabled European guitar player helped invent -- some say invented -- American jazz guitar.

How 'bout them apples?

And as Lurch puts it over at Main and Central

All you young rock whippersnappers take note that it’s possible to get a good sound without a 200 Db amp.

Django Reinhardt - Jazz Musician - 1910-1953

Video from the DVD "The Genius of Django Reinhardt"

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Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Photographer: Stephanie Kuykendal/Bloomberg News Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium in Washington, on May 29, 2007.

Al Gore, U.N. Climate Panel Win Peace Prize

Bloomberg

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and a United Nations panel on the environment won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about the threat of climate change.

Gore, 59, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were honored for ``their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,'' said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, director of the Oslo-based Nobel Committee that picks the winner.

The peace prize tops off a year of accolades for Gore, marking a turnaround that some say makes him ``the comeback kid,'' a moniker typically associated with his former boss, Bill Clinton. The former vice president last year published the book and released the Oscar-winning documentary film ``An Inconvenient Truth'' as part of a campaign against global warming.

India's Rajendra Pachauri, 67, is chairman of the IPCC, which was set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program in 1988. The group has about 2,500 scientists whose mandate is to assess ``scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change.''

``I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,'' Gore said in an e-mailed statement. ``We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.''

The prize is ``a recognition of the contribution of the scientific world,'' Pachauri told reporters today in New Delhi.

Human Cause

The IPCC said in a report in February that the probability that humans are causing global warming is 90 percent, and world temperatures and sea-levels will increase by the end of the century. The Bush administration said the human role in climate change is ``no longer up for debate'' following the report.

``There are already climate wars unfolding and the worst area for that is the Sahel belt in Africa,'' Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, told reporters in Oslo on Sept. 28. ``Nomads fight pastoral farmers because there is less land available, because of long-term climate change.''

``Clearly we are endangering all species on earth, we are endangering the future of the human race,'' Pachauri said in an interview earlier this year. ``We are probably beyond the stage where we could have called it urgent. I would say it is immediate,'' he said, referring to the need for governments to reduce emissions.

Glaciers Melting

Scientists have said global warming caused by manmade emissions is responsible for melting glaciers and ice sheets, and increased instances of storms, droughts and floods. Over this century, those effects may be magnified, according to the February report.

``The consequences of inaction will be devastating to both the environment and the economy,'' Gore told the U.S. Congress at a special climate change hearing this year.

Gore, vice president from 1993 until 2001, drew an audience of an estimated 2 billion people on July 7 with Live Earth, a single day of concerts on seven continents aimed at promoting awareness of what he terms a ``climate crisis.''

The New York Times

Even before Mr. Gore won an Emmy for his so-called “user generated” cable television network, Current, or an Oscar for his film on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” he was growing in stature for another reason: his early opposition to the Iraq war.

He had initially voiced it in 2002 in an address that his newly galvanized supporters now describe as uncannily prescient and unfairly dismissed, though it was seen as a politically off-kilter at a time of great popularity for President George W. Bush.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize to him was certain to further intensify calls for him to enter the Democratic nominating contest for president. The rumors that he would win it had already helped a grassroots movement to draft him into the race raise tens of thousands of dollars for advertisements.

Mr. Gore’s aides, and, on one or two occasions, Mr. Gore himself, have said he is not interested in running for president when his main goal has been raising public awareness of global climate change and man’s role in it. But they have been coy, refusing to absolutely say “no,” and, in the process, giving the various groups now dedicated to drafting him into the race reason to continue their efforts.

Associates of Mr. Gore, however, have said they truly believe he does not want to run but speculate that he does not have reason to tamp down the presidential talk when it serves to keep the focus on him and causes he is pursuing with a perceptibly pure heart — a perception that could change with a presidential run.

“You never say never in politics but I think he’s having such a big impact on the issues that he cares about that if he decided to run for president he would just be viewed in a fundamentally different way,” said Chris Lehane, a former aide and spokesman for Mr. Gore’s 2000 campaign. “Once you become a candidate for president then you have a completely different lens.”

Yet Mr. Gore’s newly charged supporters hope that the Nobel Prize will now cause him to make another attempt to win the prize they believe is rightly his — the White House.

Reuters

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Democrat Al Gore on Friday increases pressure on him to launch a late bid for the U.S. presidency, but advisers say he is showing no signs of interest in the 2008 race.

An organization called draftgore.com is one of several trying to persuade Gore to run. The group ran a full-page ad in The New York Times on Wednesday described as "an open letter to Al Gore."

"Many good and caring candidates are contending for the Democratic nomination," the ad said. "But none of them has the combination of experience, vision, standing in the world, and political courage that you would bring to the job."

Once considered a wooden speaker, he now is a pop culture icon, and happily engaged in a life that includes many speaking engagements about climate change, positions on corporate boards and much travel.

'LIGHT BULBS, NOT POLITICS'

At a time when the United States is preoccupied with the most wide-open presidential race in more than 50 years, former aides like Julia Payne say he does not talk much about politics, recalling that she saw him at the wedding in Nashville of a former staffer.

"The last time I talked with the Vice President, we talked light bulbs, not politics," she said.

Long-time adviser Carter Eskew said he talks to Gore about once a week.

"I don't think he's going to run," said Eskew. "He has said technically he hasn't ruled it out. But I can tell you he's making no moves and no sounds to indicate to me that he's going to run."

Gore's spokeswoman, Kalee Kreider, was more definitive.

"He has no intentions of running for president in 2008," she said recently from Nashville, where Gore lives.

But that is not stopping the draft Gore movement.

Peter Ryder is an activist in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, trying to persuade Gore to run. His group, Algore.org, is planning a Nov. 11 concert to raise money for the effort.

He said none of the other Democrats running in the race for the November 2008 election have the complete package like Gore.

"I think we need more than just a good president. I think we need someone with the potential for greatness. Al Gore, his rational approach to issues and problems, and obviously his work on global warming, made my decision to support him," Ryder said.

A West Virginia activist, Jim Tate, agreed. He said he was concerned that the current Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, could be defeated by the Republican nominee because "she carries a lot of baggage with her."

He said he also believes Gore is the person who can "do the most for our country, and bring back foreign policy. We have no foreign policy."

My bet...

He doesn't run.

It's always flattering to be asked.

I genuinely don't think he wants it. Which of course, would probably make him a great President. But I don't think he runs.

Congratulations Mr. Vice President. Congratulations U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Well done.

PS. Stuff you didn't know about the Nobel Prize.

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Great Questions

The Straight Dope - Fighting Ignorance Since 1973

Straight Dope - Cecil Adams

Why are the antlers on the deer in the deer crossing sign backward?

Dear Straight Dope:

Is there a specific reason that every deer crossing sign posted by this nation's roadways depicts a deer with his antlers distinctly on backwards? I'm sure you can shed some light on the subject. --DKCartrite

SDSTAFF Melis replies:

You know ... you go through life, kinda living in your own little world ... when someone points something out to you that you realize you never really thought about. Your mention of the deer crossing sign did that for me.

At first, I was skeptical, so I checked out the Manual of Traffic Signs ( http://members.aol.com/rmoeuradot/200x200/warn/W11-3.gif) and looked at the sign. And my gawd! The antlers appeared backwards! The next step was to see where the drawing originated. I wrote to several traffic sign companies to see if they would 'fess up ... and they must have believed either that I was personally complaining about their signs or that I was off my rocker, because I received no response.

Then I started to think. The deer on the sign is depicted in silhouette--a two-dimensional drawing. It wouldn't show anything like curving antlers. So if the deer had antlers that maybe curved around the head ... wouldn't they show up as backwards on a sign? On this hunch, I checked an encyclopedia that had pictures of deer ... and bingo! The deer you see on the traffic sign is one of the most common deer in North America--the white-tailed deer. This picture from the Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia isn't the one I was looking at, but it does show that the antlers thrust forward. There's a better illustration in the online Encyclopedia Britannica (www.eb.com), but that's a subscription service so I can't give you a direct link. Trust me, though--it's a photo of a white-tailed that closely resembles the deer on the sign, antlers and all.

--SDSTAFFMelis
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

Heaven... I'm in heaven,
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

"Cheek to Cheek"
music and words by Irving Berlin

I love this site.

The Straight Dope is full of geeky answers to every weird question ever.

You have been warned.

(Sara... back away from the site sloooowly. We went through this last time.)

There's more...

Talkin' Bout A Revolution

Tracy Chapman Live

Bring it Tracy...

Hat tip snow-moon

There's more...

Reflections On Being Happy

Scientists aboard U.S. NASA Shuttle Discovery on Mission S116 to the ISS.

“As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.”

• Three-time Academy Award winner Walter Murch interviewed in The Conversations - Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
• by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient

For me it was music.

From age eight through thirteen, I sang in the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. Under the baton of Jeff Haskell we were world-class artists, touring throughout the United States & Canada, hitting the studio to record, then filming an Easter Special for CBS, touring England & Scotland, appearing on the BBC. We sang in the world's best concert halls and the critics opened their hearts and pens to our young pure voices.

We of course were anything but pure. But I loved music and I had a genuine world-class voice...as a first alto. My voice broke two days before I turned 14 and my one year of touring with the TABC Touring Group at 13 was my last. (I am now an adequate baritone, with delusions of singing second tenor. But I had the voice of an angel, if not the temperament.)

Starting at 12 there was sex and violence and by 14.5 it had swept me completely up into a different dangerous world. But before my life was swept up by testosterone, not to settle down into being anything more than a protracted teenager quite literally for 31 years, I was a choir boy and I loved music first before everything.

I didn't think this assignment had much for me. Just thought I could throw it together quickly, then get back to sleep, wake up tomorrow and surf the comment thread, dropping in bits of wisdom occasionally. I'm such a jackass.

Not only has it taken me four hours just to write (so far), the more I dwell in it, the more shit from my past comes up to be dealt with. Aaaargh! Stupid assignment.

I love writing for the Group News Blog. One might say (and I often do) my entire life has been training for this gig. Even two years ago I wouldn't have been ready. I know Lower Manhattanite and Hubris Sonic feel much the same way -- we've spent our entire lives, unknowingly, preparing ourselves for this opportunity.

Working with Fernando Flores, Ph.D. in my late 20s, early 30s was terrific, but I was still an arrogant fool (Yes, more than I sometimes am now. Really. Shut up.) Being on Staff for that LGAT in my mid 20s was amazing (even if they were & their successor company remains massively controversial) but I was screwing everyone who moved and got my ass fired, twice, a very smart move on their part. Still, I loved giving my heart over totally to something (someone), even though in retrospect my trust was naive & misplaced (not good) (and I betrayed my colleagues by screwing around; double not good.) The amount of affection the Staff had for each other, the results we produced inside that trust; astonishing. Like the love veterans have for each other.

Few of my paramedic experiences were joyous, except the moment of delivering babies. In the end I stopped being a medic because I was burned out and no longer competent (Accuracy of 80-85% in most fields is fine. Heh. But I'd lost my edge and just couldn't get it back, and the more we tried the worse I got.) The paramedics in Oakland recognized my symptoms and made me quit. Worked dispatch for a little over half a year (memory fades), then was gone. Took over ten, closer to twelve years for the memories to stop having command value when triggered, waking me up, stop moving for cover on certain noises. I still get crazy about certain drivers (which look like drive-bys in progress), and just hate being inside crowds, especially mall crowds at holidays. I don't watch television or movies which take me back to those long years of being a medic, and I don't stop to help hurt people unless it's serious and there simply is no one else. I'll do what I must when it must be done; otherwise I'm done.

Same with my military tours. I did my duty and that's that. I address military issues here at GNB because it's political and we're a political blog. I work with troubled vets because they're my brothers and sisters at heart.

Without question, the most joy in my life were the years I spent singing for Mr. Haskell. He didn't accept excuses. We either had what it took or we didn't. Credentials? At ten? Don't be silly. Yet he demanded competence of us which would be difficult -- I know now -- of experienced vocalists singing professionally as studio musicians day in and out, or in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or the Metropolitan Opera Chorus. Mr. Haskell believed in us and under his baton we flourished, growing from boys into young teens with confidence and poise quite literally able to take the world stage under spotlights and sing as though the Gods were lending us voice.

And for a few years, they did.

I was happy. I was thirteen years old, music permeated my heart, and I was happy.

Now, here at Group News Blog, thirty-five years later, I am happy. I am forty-eight years old and happy. Even more, I am a full-grown adult, full of joy and love, and have no anger towards anyone, not even those assholes in the Bush Administration. (I am past anger with them at the bottom of everything. I have compassion for the lost souls they are, and for all the souls they've taken with them. Read Maggie for more.)

This work challenges me every day. I'm running a media startup with partners I trust! We have readers I cherish who trust us. (And all but one child has moved out of the house. Heh. Now if they'd just stop bring home stray kittens. Grrr. Including the two-legged kind.) Our dreams for what GNB can become are enormous, yet day to day we are grounded solidly in the hard work of turning out quality journalism. This is joy unbounded. This is waking up happy in a way I long ago forgot was even possible.

GNB Media is the work each of us has spent our life preparing -- to be the kind of human being you trust to bring you truth through noise.

Yet creating this assignment which I though was, um, not for me (jackass; really, it's the only word which fits) I realize even here at GNB where I'm happy for the first time at best since I was in my mid-20s and on Staff (raising children is a different kind of happy; I love my children, but I wasn't ever personally happy in my life since a long long time ago), and at worst, since I was 13, a full 35 years ago... I realized in writing this post, that even now, I don't have music.

Wow.

I have writing. I have cycling with my children. I have movies which have music. I have photographs; almost every post depends in significant part on the photograph. We have videos we put up. I have books; I've always had books; air, water, books, food. In that order. I have over 700 DVD's here in my room alone, many of them a full year-long series, that is 22 episodes in one DVD case, and probably 50-75 musicals, including The Commitments, one of the best musicals ever made. But I don't have music. And even when I do listen to music -- I have iTunes on my computer with probably 500 songs -- that just isn't MUSIC to me.

Music for me is performing music. Making music, singing music and playing it on the piano, singing it with other people, standing at a microphone and hearing someone count down the beat. Getting a rhythm going off the drums which the piano picks up, the base player joins, then the clarinet comes in with a sweet, soft riff while the horns slide in behind as the backup singers smile sweetly schoolin' all the girls and more than one boy not to mention several stage hands and a assistant producer named Sam. Then the lead singer spins, growwwwls in the mic, tears down the house, and the place goes bug.freaking.wild. Music! What my mom used to do as the Assistant Concert Master in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, practicing for days and days, then sitting down with 100 other people and bringing it together LIVE for 3,500 people. Or when Elton or George Harrison came to town, Mom playing her violin just off stage in the Tucson Arena, for 20,000.

Music happens at the piano in my living room, alone or in a duet, trio or quartet in the practice room at the Juilliard School, Berklee College of Music, a conservatory, with other people in a rehearsal hall or on stage. Music is something created, something actively listened to, not background listening distracting me from life. When I'm walking, in conversation or focused at work, I don't want music pulling me away. Music is too important for it ever to be background noise from a top-40 computer playlist. It can't be just part of life. Music is life. Before writing, music.

I don't have an answer to this. It's part of why I love Venna Teng SO much. She loves, simply loves playing live. For her, live shows make people happy. Making people happy is music. Music cuts emotionally straight to the bone.

The deeper I go, the more Walter Murch seems right on point. In the midst of everything else... music -- live music: music I perform and listen to -- suddenly occurs as missing.

Damn. Going to have to do something about that.

How about you?

• Are you happy?
• Does your work reflect your dreams and aspirations?
• Do your relationships, at home and in life, bring you joy?
• In your late childhood - early teens, what did you love most?
• Does anything in your life now presence what you gave your heart to as a young person?
• What do you imagine your life might be like if you had that present in your life again?
• What would it take? What's stopping you? (Chop away all the excuses; now chop away anything that wouldn't stop you if your life or someone you loves was at stake.)
• Now ask again: How much or how little would it truly take to give your heart away to that which you've always loved?

This week's assignment:
Give your heart away to that which you love, that which brings you joy.

What does this conversation presence for you?

There's more...

Understanding Religious Anger

photo Scott Griessel

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but THE Truth

The Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, as a writer, challenges pretty much everything which passes for traditional Christian thought.

He's been banned by no less than the (very conservative) ArchBishop of Sidney. (What the ban consisted of I don't remember and just don't give a damn enough about to bother finding out.) I've read a number of his books, many of his essays. Like Alan Watts before him, his writing changes my understanding of what Christianity is.

Liberal theologian, biblical scholar, religious commentator and author, the Reverend Spong is a good and extraordinary human being.

In the below essay Reverend Spong leads us towards if not compassion (what he unquestionably would hope of us), then at least understanding of the rage which seems to well up inexhaustibly from within the religious right.

If we are honest with ourselves, religious rage rises up from below (the hydraulic model of the mind) within our self, not just about religion. Religious rage takes us over when the self is confronted with challenges to our core belief structures:

• religion,
• sex & money,
• race & class (social standing),
• work/job (competence), and
• politics.

(Sports do not bring religious rage fundamentally. Which sounds insane to anyone who has ever watched a Yankee-Red Sox game or a Football Match in England. Sports arouse religious rage from identifying one's self with, for example, the sports team at the level of one's core identity: "I am the Boston Red Sox.", "If I'm not there, we'll lose.", "Fuck the fucking Yankees", and so on. This self-identification is not the same as core issues of survival such as sex which arises from biology, and politics which arises from history and the nature of language. Said differently, religious anger over sex, over politics, over money -- these are constitutive of being human. Religious anger over sports is not.)

Want to really get me going? My oldest daughter can get me genuinely angry faster than anyone on earth. Except perhaps my own Dad.

We have Anger. More accurately, Anger has us.

What hopefully separates we liberals from the religious right, is a genuine willingness to engage in authentic self-reflection.

Want to win elections? Understand the enemy; understand yourself.

Reverend Spong speaks as one who knows. Pay attention please.

Understanding Religious Anger

One of the things that always surprises me is the level of anger, often expressed in acts of overt rudeness, which seems to mark religious people. It appears so often that I have almost come to expect it, or at the very least not to be surprised by it. A recent episode simply made the connection between religion and anger newly indelible in my consciousness.

It occurred last spring when I attended, at their invitation, the graduation ceremonies of a well-known university. Indeed, I was to receive an honorary degree. There was much conviviality connected with this event. We were entertained royally by the president of the university and his wife. We saw former classmates. Families gathered to share this transitional moment with a graduating son or daughter. It seemed to be a very pleasant occasion.

When the procession formed to begin the ceremonial walk into the arena, there was a panoply of color marking the assembly. The black caps and gowns of academia were bedecked with bright and varied hoods, representing the doctorates earned by the members of the faculty and reflecting the school colors of the awarding universities. Harvard's crimson was immediately identifiable, as well as the unique form of the doctoral hoods from the storied universities of Cambridge and Oxford. My place in this lineup was in the company of some of the university's deans. While we waited for the signal to begin the procession, I introduced myself to my nearest companions. They were all cordial until I introduced myself to the Dean of the Medical School. It was not a time for small talk for this man. He could not have possibly known that he and I would be together in the procession, so what followed was clearly spontaneous and unplanned. He obviously had strong feelings about me and could not miss this exquisite opportunity to give expression to them. I had never met this man before this moment, but my expectation was that one whose career in medicine had been so successful that he had become the dean of a major medical school would have a broad perspective on life. I was wrong. He was bitter and small-minded, caught more in his narrow religious agenda than in his academic excellence. We had barely unlocked hands in our introductory handshake when he said, "I wish I did not feel this way but I think what you have done to the Church is both reprehensible and destructive. I regret that this university has decided to honor you today." I was taken aback not by the content of his remarks, since I have dealt with threatened religious people many times before, but by the inappropriateness of his comments. This was neither the time nor the place for this tirade. I was after all an invited guest in his world. Yet, he simply could not contain his feelings. I tried to parry his comments by saying something like: "I'm sorry we don't have time to discuss this here, but you must realize that the world has undergone a vast intellectual revolution in the last 500-600 years and if the Church is to stay in dialogue with that world then the Church must also change. However, this Dean was in no mood to let go; he had the bit between his teeth. "You totally ignore the truth of those first 1,300 years of Christian history," he retorted, his anger still rising. "Would you want to practice medicine in today's world equipped only with the medical knowledge available in the first 1300 years of Christian history?" I enquired. At that moment the conversation ended because the music started, the stately procession began its journey into the stadium where literally thousands were gathered. As we walked in silence I could not help but wonder at the rudeness of this Dean, who had so great a need to express his anger that he violated the good manners of his university. I learned later that this doctor was part of a conservative Christian congregation. Somehow, religious convictions seem to give people permission to be rude.

A similar incident occurred in the summer of 2005, when I was the guest lecturer at the Highlands Institute for American and Philosophical Thought in Western North Carolina. I had been there for the past three summers, and had always met with a warm and positive reception. However, on this particular night, a local fundamentalist decided to achieve his fifteen minutes of fame. About midway in the lecture, this man stood up and drew sufficient attention to himself that I stopped speaking and enquired if there was something wrong. "I'm feeling sick," this gentleman replied. So I responded, "There is nothing I'm saying tonight that is more important than your health, so let me pause until you get whatever help you need." "You don't understand," he retorted, "I'm sick of you." Somehow this man felt that his religious convictions justified his interruption of a lecture attended by more than 250 people. It never occurred to him that this behavior was rude to me, rude to the audience and that it reflected little more than his own anger. I learned later that he was a member of the Community Bible Church and that he had been encouraged to take this action by fellow members of his fundamentalist church. Once again if one is acting 'in the name of God,' both anger and rudeness are apparently justified.

Those two experiences set me to thinking about the relationship between religion and anger. It is far closer than most people seem to realize. Sometimes the sweet piety of religion serves to hide anger even from the awareness of the angry one, though it is obvious to everyone else. Is it anything but anger when religious people describe what is in store for those who do not believe their way? Is the threat of hell, which is spoken so freely in religious circles, not a projection onto God of the anger inside the one consigning another to a place of eternal torment? Is there much difference between a person saying in hostility: "Go to hell!" and a preacher threatening a congregation with that same destiny? When one looks at the history of religious persecution, which has included such things as excommunication, torture, and the burning of heretics at the stake, there is ample evidence of hostility associated with Christianity. When one adds to that the Crusades designed 'to kill the infidels,' a history of anti-Semitism, and the wars between Catholics and Protestants, the picture of religion as a source of anger in human society, victimizing people in every generation, becomes clear.

In moments of social upheaval, religious anger becomes very apparent. Most of the anger that was displayed during the movement to emancipate women came from the Christian Church. Most of the anger displayed in the current struggle over justice for gay and lesbian people emanates from the Christian Church. It is very hard to deny that underneath the sounds of religious conviction, there is a boiling cauldron of anger that seems to be an unrecognized part of the religious experience. Step one, therefore, is to recognize it. Step two is to understand it.

Religious anger seems to manifest itself first and most stridently in those religious traditions that claim to possess absolute certainty. It is only when one believes that one possesses the whole truth of God that one finds the need to persecute those who do not accept your version of truth. What that behavior reveals is that the frightened human psyche needs the certainty of religion, no matter how narrowly defined, in order to feel secure. Christianity has developed many security-giving idols inside its traditional formulations, infallible popes and inerrant scriptures being two of them. How rational, for example, is it for anyone to say: "Since my God is the true God and your God is, therefore, a false God, I have the right to hate you, to persecute you or even to kill you?" Yet all of these expressions of anger are found inside the Christian Church.

The second thing that religious anger reveals to me is that organized religion feeds the expression of self-hatred in its people. There is certainly much self-negativity in traditional Christianity with its doctrines of 'the Fall,' its emphasis on the depravity of human life, the need to be rescued, and the guilt-producing idea that "Jesus died for my sins." The liturgies of Christian churches are constantly calling their worshipers such things as 'a wretch,' 'a worm,' 'one unworthy to gather up the crumbs under the divine table,' all interspersed with the plea to God to 'have mercy, have mercy, have mercy.' Are these not expressions of self-directed religious anger?

If one absorbs negativity from any source long enough, one cannot help but become negative. When one is denigrated in worship over a sustained period of time, one inevitably projects this denigration onto others as anger. It is necessary for survival. Does this not help us to understand why prejudice is greater among religious people than among non-religious people; why slavery, segregation and other overt forms of racism have been the pattern of that region of our country that we call 'the Bible Belt;' and why the 'Religious Right' even today is more supportive of war as an instrument of national policy than any other segment of our national population? Each of these attitudes reflects religiously justified violence.

Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized? What happened to that biblical proclamation that the disciples of Jesus are to be known by their love? How does religious anger fit in with the Fourth Gospel's interpretation of Jesus' purpose to be that of bringing life more abundantly?

Perhaps the time has come to recognize that Christianity was never meant to be about religion; it is to be about life. The achievement of personal security is the goal of religion. The ability to live with integrity in the midst of the insecurity of life is the goal of Christianity. Religion seeks to control life with guilt. Christianity seeks to free people to be all that they can be. There is a vast difference. Perhaps it will take the death of religion to open us once again to the meaning of Christianity, even 'Religionless Christianity.' For the purpose of Jesus was not to make us religious but to make us fully human.

John Shelby Spong

There's more...

Sunday Eats

photo Kim Severson/NY Times (click for high def)

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse - New American Cuisine

The best meals I've ever were in Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Not even in the famous downstairs restaurant where reservations seemed always reserved far in advance and meals prix fixe past what I could afford in the 80s. I ate upstairs in the Café.

Oh my Gods the flavors, the tastes, the smells and how the food just looked.

The Grand Canyon down deep inside the canyon by the river a whole mile straight up to above the rim. Ice cold water in your mouth from snow melt high in the Tetons cresting a ridge, and Yosemite's Tuolumne Meadows in the spring as the sun rises through the mist over the still snow-bogged meadow. Thelma Houston live. Taking a bicycle at forty tearing down a hill with your children racing behind. The Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate National Recreation Area especially the Marin Headlands where I so often go to just be. Libraries, books, writing, and movies. The look on her face, coming again unexpectedly. And Chez Panisse.

Alice Waters gave us what is now called New American Cuisine. High-quality products in season, prepared simply to exacting standards (with enormous discipline) so the natural flavors of the foods and seasonings come through, displayed beautifully, from local markets, bountiful, abundant, overflowing with goodness. Food prepared by Alice Waters and her successors at Chez Panisse brings joy to all who partake, as if the divine reaches directly from the kitchens of heaven to the tables of earth.

Last week Alice Waters took the food reporter for The New York Times shopping at a farmer's market, showing a video camera precisely how she shops for food. The video is only available at The Times article, and you'll likely want to go watch. The rest of The Times article is also terrific.

NY Times

WHEN Alice Waters is coming over to cook lunch, the first thing you do is look around your house and think, I live in a dump.

Then you take an inventory of the pantry. The bottles of Greek and Portuguese olive oil, once a point of pride, suddenly seem inadequate. And should you hide the box of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran and jettison those two cans of Diet Pepsi?

At the end of the afternoon, when the last peach was peeled and my kitchen was stacked with dirty pots, it didn’t really matter. Ms. Waters was either too polite or too distracted to mention what was in my cupboard. It turns out she travels with her own olive oil, anyway. And homemade vinegar. And salt-packed capers.

Ms. Waters had agreed to spend a hot September day shopping with me at the Union Square Greenmarket and schlepping back to my first-floor apartment in brownstone Brooklyn to make lunch.

The menu was dictated by two things: the market’s offerings and the recipes in her forthcoming book, “The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution” (Clarkson Potter, October).

The book is more to Ms. Waters than an instructional guide. It is her attempt, through recipes, to save the American food supply. She wrote it because she still believes a plate of delicious food can change everything.

“We’re trying to educate young people and show them how to use that lens of ingredients as a way to change their lives,” she said. “Otherwise, it would be just another cookbook.”

The book is Ms. Waters’s ninth since she started Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., 36 years ago. Unlike the others, the new book does not use the name of the restaurant. It reads more like an organic “Joy of Cooking,” designed to instruct novices on how to make a perfect vinaigrette but also intended to be as essential to experienced cooks as the final Harry Potter installment was to 12-year-olds.

“Food can be very transformational and it can be more than just about a dish,” she said. “That’s what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.”

(Currently, Ms. Waters is not in love, though she longs for “a good pal to be in the world with.”)

By all measures, Ms. Waters should be relaxing at this point in her life. She is 63. She has held court with princes and presidents. A year ago, with some prodding from her partners at the restaurant, she pulled back from the daily work at Chez Panisse. Now she is trying to become better at leveraging her role as the high priestess of the local, sustainable food revolution.

Although she is enthusiastically mocked in some circles for the impossible goals she articulates in a wispy cadence, chefs who once sniffed that her methods were more about shopping than cooking now agree that the heart of great food is selecting the best ingredients.

So why does Ms. Waters still seem so restless, so unsatisfied, so unrelentingly demanding that she can’t show up at someone’s house and trust that they might have the right olive oil?

Because true, radical change — a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth — is simply not coming fast enough.

She is dismayed by the presidential candidates and said she has vowed not to vote for anyone who does not talk about the awful state of the food system.

Although many school districts are trying to improve the food they offer, the results have been unsatisfying, she said. It’s useless to coat frozen chicken nuggets with whole-wheat bread crumbs and fill vending machines with diet soda. Only a complete and radical reform will do, and it must be led by the president of the United States.

“These are little Band-Aids,” she said. “The whole body is bleeding and we must stop it. We simply must.”

A revolution in how we eat means respecting food and the people who produce it, she said. In her world, every aspect of this revolution, be it related to agricultural policy, the environment or obesity, must begin with a plate of lovely, locally produced food and work backward from there.

The book is deceptively simple. As she writes, “Good cooking is no mystery.” Most recipes seem to be built on salt, black pepper, olive oil, fresh herbs and garlic. But they have to be specific kinds, like chunky gray sea salt for boiling water. “If you are not buying the right ingredients, this is going to taste like any other food,” she said.

The attention to detail is maddening and enlightening. She offers lovely notes on cooking eggs, and her passage on serving fruit for dessert is so thoughtful and useful it reads like gospel. She devotes a page and a half to making bread crumbs properly.

But in parts of the book she veers past purity to madness. Halfway into a recipe for gazpacho, while soaking ancho chili, grating tomatoes and mashing it all in a mortar and pestle, you start to look at the blender with longing.

Ms. Waters doesn’t like machines much, although she is partial to the toaster oven. She doesn’t use a computer and has only cursory knowledge of her cellphone. She wrote the book largely by dictating her notes to Fritz Streiff, her longtime co-writer, and collaborated with Kelsie Kerr, who has cooked at Chez Panisse, and Patricia Curtan, who also illustrated the book.

But she knows almost all the recipes by heart, which made it easy to figure out lunch.

Walking through the Greenmarket with her is an exercise in excess. She has never met a fresh herb she didn’t like, and I still have plenty of hyssop in my refrigerator to prove it.

Her good friend Doug Hamilton, a film director and producer, came along to help carry our reusable cloth shopping bags. He was a godsend. When you visit farmers with Alice Waters, you come home with a lot of stuff.

Farmers kept trying to give her baskets of food, but she insisted on paying because she believes contributing money to family farmers is a moral obligation. (In this case, The New York Times paid for everything.)

People literally started shaking when they realized they were shopping next to Alice Waters. When she offered to visit the Queen’s Hideaway, a homestyle restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the owner, Liza Queen, waved her off, already nervous at the thought of it.

“Please don’t,” Ms. Queen said. “If you come in, we’d probably lose it.”

What a lovely article. I have the book on order. It's the word, by Alice. (I tend to fall in love with musicians, artists, cooks, writers, geeks, scientists, doctors, athletes, actresses, even bloggers and politicians and soldiers... the people who are attempting to make our world better. None of you have probably noticed this.)

You'll get to San Francisco sometime. It calls you, that famous place with the Golden Gate.

Make the pilgrimage across the bay to Berkeley, home of the University of California at Berkeley (all three of my daughters were born in Berkeley), right next to Oakland.

Find your way to Chez Panisse, the restaurant which changed American food. You'll need a reservation, although perhaps not at lunch or for the Café, but either way, plan your trip to make it possible. Write me a letter afterwards and tell me how it went. I genuinely want to know.

The Observer

Famously the downstairs restaurant once served for pudding a single peach on a plate. Not peeled. Not cut up. Just a peach. Chez Panisse was saying: this peach is so good nothing we could do would improve upon it.

I wonder whether some diners might not find the whole experience too doctrinaire, a lecture on a plate? 'I don't think they feel that way,' she says. 'Though there are some who say "I could cook this at home."' What does she say to that? 'I say "Great. Go and cook it at home." That's why we put all the names of the suppliers on the menu. I want people to be excited about where food comes from. There's nothing intimidating about Chez Panisse.'

The night I ate at Chez Panisse, the four-course menu was much like many others that I had read online. On a wooden plate in the middle of the cosy, wood-lined dining room was a dish of the most fabulously bulbous spring onions, huge things the size of a baby's fist. These turned up in a salad with artichokes and morels. After that came a tranche of wild king salmon in fish broth with lemongrass and a dollop of herb butter. At this point I was, frankly, disappointed. The ingredients may have been perfect, but neither dish sang out. The dressing on the salad was understated, the seasoning in the butter low-key.

Then came the 'Sonoma County Liberty' duck breast, grilled over open coals in the red brick-lined kitchen, which looks more like the kind of thing you would find in a farmhouse than a top restaurant. It was spectacular, the duckiest piece of duck I have ever tasted. Likewise the Lucero strawberries with the pudding were some of the most delicious it has ever been my pleasure to eat. Cooking like this - doing as little as possible to the ingredients - is not easy. 'New guys always want to do more,' says Jean-Pierre Moullé, one of the two head chefs in the restaurant, who has been here for 30 years. 'When I was first here I wanted to show off, too. But to cook simply takes discipline.' I ask him if Chez Panisse could now run without Alice. 'Technically, yes. But she is an important person. She's always keeping track.' And then, 'She's the conscience of Chez Panisse.'

Recipes from Alice's forthcoming book, used during her lunch with the NY Times.

NY Times

Recipe: Raspberry Syrup

2 cups raspberries or other berries

1 1/2 cups sugar, plus 2 tablespoons

1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice.

1. Combine berries, 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 cup water in a medium saucepan with a heavy bottom. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until berries begin to break down and release their juices, about 4 minutes.

2. Add 1 1/2 cups cold water and lemon juice. Bring to a boil, then immediately turn down to a simmer and skim off any foam that bubbles to top. Cook for 15 minutes.

3. Strain into bowl through cheesecloth-lined strainer, pressing on fruit to squeeze out juices. Return the liquid to the pan and add 1 1/2 cups sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves. Bring to a boil and cook for 2 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool. Store in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator for up to 3 weeks.

Yield: About 2 1/2 cups.

More recipes from lunch:

• Recipe: Warm Olives
• Recipe: Aioli
• Recipe: Salsa Verde

Vitally important to Alice Waters' work bringing healthy food to American schools and children, and to our plates, is the American farmer.

Here is part of an interview called Nurturing Connections With Farmers which I cherry-picked (heh); the rest after the jump.

Seasonal Chef

SEASONAL CHEF: A lot of organic farmers are trying to teach consumers that cosmetic appeal is meaningless, that an occasional bug comes with the territory. And yet in your books, you stress the importance of aesthetic perfection in food. Would you serve flea beetle-bitten arugula in your restaurant?

WATERS: Yes, but I would think about how to use it. I probably wouldn’t make an arugula salad out of it. But I would throw it into the pasta. If it was an apple with little spots all over it, I wouldn’t put it on a fruit plate but I would make a tart out of it. I would choose something else that looks real good for the fruit plate.

SEASONAL CHEF: Why do you prefer organic produce?

WATERS: Taste, for sure. And I’m interested in it because I know I need to support the people who are taking care of the land and thinking of the future, people who are thinking about how communities come together. It’s my feeling that that can happen when the person growing the food is connected with the person who is eating it. A result of those connections is a sense of caring about somebody else’s welfare. That’s how you build up those bonds which ultimately leads you to a sense of a group made up of people who care about one another. I’m interested in organic food for all those reasons. But of course also because organic produce is pure and wholesome and delicious and alive when I get it. And nine times out of 10, it’s picked very ripe.

SEASONAL CHEF: Given that consumers seem to have an insatiable demand for convenience, can farmers markets compete with supermarkets?

WATERS: I think they can. When you come in contact with the people in the farmers market, and the food, and you taste it, you can never go back. There’s no comparison.

Yes, it takes a little longer to shop at the farmers market, but what you get, in my mind, is an experience that enriches one’s life. It’s an experience of connecting with people. It smells good. It tastes good. It has a good feeling about it. There’s no way that that kind of experience can’t seduce people and make the supermarket experience in comparison pretty depressing.

Also we have to begin to understand that a little bit of time shopping in farmers markets will save time in the cooking. If you buy ripe tomatoes, all you have to do is slice them. You don’t have to add salt and sugar, all that stuff that you do to doctor things up that don’t taste very good in the first place.

Also I think the message about the hidden costs of supermarket produce for your health and for the health of the community must be understood. I’ve always said give your money directly to the people who are growing it. They need it. And we don’t need a middleman.

SEASONAL CHEF: Do you think organic produce can gain acceptance in supermarkets?

WATERS: I love that supermarkets are getting organic produce. It brings a certain kind of consciousness to the general public. But organic produce in supermarkets is so overpriced and usually it is not very good looking and, in fact, sometimes rotten because it doesn’t have a long shelf life. People may buy something like that, spend a lot of money on it and feel like they got something that represents organic produce. So I can’t really decide whether it’s doing a disfavor or a service to the organic movement. In general I think it’s probably not a good idea to have it in a supermarket. But sometimes you’re dependent on supermarkets. And I would rather buy slightly second-rate organic produce than conventionally grown produce. Then I will make something of it.

I’ve thought there should be somebody in the supermarket who could hawk organic produce a little bit. But supermarkets don’t seem to be able to afford someone like that. There are millions of checkers and helpers all around the store, but supermarkets just don’t seem to understand the need to have someone like that in a produce section.

Food matters. Healthy food and fresh water nurture the heart of life.

Enjoy your Sunday. Eat something fresh and tasty.

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