A Literary Digression

I was in a Paris mood after reading Les Miserables.  When I got around to it I found several books on the shelves, The Dawn of the Belle Époque, Paris Was Yesterday, and Paris in the Fifties.  The first devotes a chapter to each year of the last three decades of the 19^th century, running from the war and the Commune up through L’ Affair Dreyfus.  The third is a personal history by Stanley Karnow. Like me when you see the name Stanley Karnow you think “the Philippines,” but like every self-respecting journalist of the era, Karnow spent time in Paris after the war.  I haven’t gotten to it yet – I am reading in chronological order – so I don’t yet know how Stanley spent his time there.  Just now I am reading Janet Flanner. 

Flanner arrived in Paris in 1925, and spent most of the remainder of her life (she died in 1978) living there.  Shortly after arriving, at the urging of Harold Ross, she began sending him biweekly dispatches in the form or letters, which ran in the New Yorker for years and years.  In Flanner things are opening or closing, beginning or ending.  Josephine Baker: opening.  Isadora Duncan: dying.  The flea market and the Lapin Agile: closing.  The trial of Frank Harris for publishing My Life and Loves Volume II: opening. 

Before talking about Harris, I should mention the death of Anatole France.  France won the Nobel Prize for literature, and his funeral was a bigger event than the funeral of Victor Hugo, but, Flanner notes, a year after his death there was no public ceremony, and she saw him fading from memory.  I haven’t read him, have you?  I have certainly heard of him, but couldn’t name any of his books.  While looking him up I stumbled upon the name Ialdabaoth.  Did you know that some Christian sects (my definition of “Christian” may be broader than yours, but I have the advantage of perspective) think Ialdabaoth created the world?  I had some business cards printed years ago that read “Jake Jacobs – Savant.”  Now I have the urge (there is a pun coming, wait for it!) to print some that read “Jake Jacobs – Demiurge.”  (Was it worth the wait?)

If Anatole France is forgotten, what of Frank Harris?  Harris got into trouble for My Life and Loves.  It wasn’t the “life” portions that caused the problem.  His life was interesting.  Jack Lemmon plays him as a young man in the Glenn Ford Western Cowboy, which is based upon a small part of Harris’ autobiography.  Recently Harris turned up as a character in the staged reading here about the trials of Oscar Wilde.  That one man could be both Chicago bellhop turned fledgling cowhand, and Oscar Wilde’s best buddy hints at the fascinating life he lived.  One anecdote of his has stuck like chewing gum to a corner of my memory.

In his youth he traveled the Continent, and in Germany found himself in a street fight.  Harris was not large, and his opponent was an outsized thug who would have preferred to settle matters with a sabre.  Harris claimed to have learned a bit about fisticuffs, and knew the secret: an uppercut to the chin.  This secret has verification from no less an authority than Sgt. Nick Fury.  In one of the early adventures of the Howling Commandos Fury is battling Sgt. Bull McGiveney of the rival Maulers.  McGiveney lands a solid shot to Fury’s gut, and is amazed that our hero doesn’t crumble. “A man wears his kayo button on his chin,” Fury growls.  Maybe, but medical experts, and my friend Roberto Pedreira whose knowledge of martial arts is encyclopedic, say it is a lateral movement of the head that causes concussion; a straight on uppercut is not as effective as a solid hook.  In any event the German authorities of the mid-19^th century were not accustomed to seeing knockouts on the street, and Harris was charged with striking his opponent with his cane. He won acquittal by demonstrating his technique in court.

Or so he says.  Harris is suspected of artful embellishment here and there.

His loves were as interesting as his life.  It was their detailed, explicit accounting that got Harris into trouble.  When I read him in the sixties it was because Grove Press had won a censorship battle first fought in Paris in the twenties.  From his lubricious memoirs I also recall that, like Casanova, who was known as Monsieur Seis Fois, Harris claimed he needed no refractory period but could keep right on going without pause.  Once again there might be a bit of embellishment.

Another death noted by Flanner is that of Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven of Greenwich Village, Paris, and Berlin.  Often impoverished, she was momentarily flush, and so could afford the gas that accidentally asphyxiated her and her mother.  The Baroness was, according to Flanner, possessed of a magnificent torso, putting her in great demand as an artist’s model.  She also, to celebrate the birth of modern art, shaved her head, then painted and lacquered it.

While magnificent torsi are not uncommon, noblewomen with shaved, painted, and lacquered heads are somewhat unusual.  Which brings me to Alexander King.  If France is unread, and Harris forgotten, King is the answer to a trivia question in an experts round.  King’s moments of fame came in the late fifties and early sixties.  He was a frequent guest on the Tonight Show when it was hosted by Jack Paar.  Many of you never saw Carson, so you will be flabbergasted to learn that when Johnny was hired the show was already, by television standards, venerable.  Paar was a force on early TV who quit over the censorship of a toilet joke where the initials W.C. for “wayside chapel” are confused with the same for “water closet.”

King became a guest because of some autobiographies that were bestsellers: May This House Be Safe From Tigers; Mine Enemy Grows Older; and I Should Have Kissed Her More, all out of print, which is a shame.  King was an artist, writer, and editor. He was also a heroin addict for many years, his books coming after he cleaned up.  He knew many of the more interesting people of his time, famous, and not so famous.  One of his stories was about a noblewoman he knew in Greenwich Village who shaved her head, painted it pink, and lacquered it.  She fell in love with William Carlos Williams. She had never met Williams, but his poetry, and his name, inflamed her.  Then she learned he was, when not writing poetry, a physician in New Jersey with a wife and children.  The wife and children probably wouldn’t have bothered the Baroness, but the fact that he was bourgeois and suburban!  Horrible!  She picketed his house, but then realized that he was too pedestrian to apprehend what she was about.  “It was that name that fooled me! He isn’t Latin at all,” she told King.  She repainted her head purple and relacquered it, then wrote the poem “The Rape of the Cast-Iron Maiden,” and moved on.

As we shall: me to Karnow, and you perchance to Harris and King?

 Les Miserables

Les Miserables Movie

Dawn of the Belle Epoque

Paris Was Yesterday

Paris in the Fifties

My Life and Loves

Cowboy

May This House Be Safe from Tigers

Mine Enemy Grows Older

I Should Have Kissed Her More

Software Shouldn't Be Hard

I remember a time when software came in a great big box and in the box was a manual.  Not that people read them.  When a problem arose – as problems did and do – you would call “the expert,” a friend or relative who was supposed to know how to fix everything, and you would ask what to do. 

“I changed directories to ‘C:’, and wanted to get rid of unnecessary files – How can one person fill up two megabytes? – so I typed ‘DEL *.*’ and now I am having problems.”

Meanwhile the manual sat glowering on a shelf, unread.

Eventually I developed a fondness for manuals, one in particular.  I spent several months in Bangkok working on a project that required a thorough knowledge of Microsoft Access.  When I began about all I knew was how to spell “access,” but I packed a manual for Access 2003.  It was a lot of fun! Ta would do data entry in the bedroom, while I would sit in the living room writing queries, and ignoring the wrestling matches Sasi’s babysitter spent fourteen hours a day watching. Around three in the afternoon I would be ready to throw the computer through the window, where it would plummet fourteen stories and take out one of the noodle vendors on Soi 11. Instead, I would throw on my swim trunks, grab the manual, and after a workout and a swim, dry in the sun reading all about union queries.

Today you buy a software package in the same great big box, but that box is light as a feather, because inside is a CD and no manual at all.  Some packages have a PDF version of the manual on the CD.  There may be one on the web.  Many times I hied myself to Funan, which had a bookstore that sold nothing but manuals, the complete works of the Dummies folks, O’Reilly, WROX, SAMS … Closed, unfortunately, like many bookstores before them.  The only outfit that still sends manuals is Stata, and they don’t send one, they send stacks!  My set takes up half a shelf.

When I have a question, do I pull down the appropriate volume and look up how to reshape data from long to wide, or what nifty graphic features can be accessed through the GUI?  (Stata users typically do it all through the command line.)  Sometimes.  But I have learned, and here is one of the most valuable tips I can offer:

Whatever problem you are facing, someone else has already run across it, and sought help online.

There is no problem so complex or obscure that you cannot find help on the web.  Date conversion functions in Stata?  Foreign currency transactions in MYOB?  The syntax for querying tables in multiple databases in SQL?  Type conversion errors in VB? (Those are probably SQL issues in disguise.)

Those are all bread and butter problems, but aren’t those the ones that come up most often?  The problems you face are the things you think you ought to know, but somehow … you do not.

I did once discover a bug in MS Word, an honest-to-god stumper.  When I was writing my first book I had many problems with tables.  I had tables that stretched to the absolute limits of what could fit on a page, and even “the expert” couldn’t help. I had to work with a senior tech support guy at Microsoft.  (It used to be possible, after undergoing a few hours of torture, to speak with someone who qualified as “senior tech support.” Good luck with that today!)  The bug wasn’t in the tables, though, it was in the pagination.  Because the tables were so large they could only appear in landscape view, not portrait.  Picture what happens to the page number if the view rotates 90 degrees.  If that weren’t enough, there was the aforementioned bug. 

Part of the solution to the above required paginating in the footer, rather than not in the footer.  The end product was going to be an actual printed book, so the page numbers had to alternate sides, so they would always appear on the outside edge of the page.  And because of the tables I had to break the book up into a half dozen sections, and turn the page numbers on and off, and restart the numbers not at “1,” but wherever they should pick up.  (And in the introduction I used Roman instead of Arabic numerals: I, ii, iii …)  Anyway, the page numbers in the new sections refused to alternate.

I called MS and after an hour had worked my way through to a senior techie.  We spent another hour doing all the things I had already tried on the advice of “the expert,” before calling MS.  Finally, we had tried everything, every arrow in his quiver, and with a “ta da!” in his voice he proclaimed: “There, now it works.”

“No, it still isn’t working.”

And, swear to god, he shouted at me: “Why is it doing that!?”

Um, if I knew that, why would I call you?

But while we were talking, I selected the page number in the footer and tried dragging it outside the footer.  Did you know you can drag the page number?  You can.  But you can’t drag it outside the footer area, it snaps back in before you get very far.  However, that solved the problem.   Whatever invisible gremlin was clutching my page numbers, when you drag it outside the magic square of the footer box, it drops dead.  I reported this to the senior tech, who without missing a beat took credit!

I was inspired to write this today because of pagination in MS Word.  You might imagine that after going through all of that seventeen years ago I would have the last word on Word, especially pagination.  You imagine wrong!  Yesterday I was preparing a story for submission and ran into a problem.  This time, I found the answer in one minute of web searching, a YouTube clip that addressed precisely the problem I was having.  I had to watch it three times, as one command was so small (I didn’t think I would need to go full screen) I had trouble reading it the first two times.  I noted that at least one comment below the clip read: “You saved me from throwing my PC out the window!”  (Another noodle vendor owes his life to timely technical support!)

Here is today’s challenge.  The submission guidelines called for the story title on the upper left of every page, and the page number on the upper right.  You could cheat and type them in by hand, I suppose.  (It also called for the word count on the upper right of the first page, and that is how I inserted that.)  But the preferred method is to create a header, and put in the title at upper left, and page number at upper right, and let Word take care of the rest of the document.  That is what the header is for, after all.

So, go ahead and try it.  When you are ready to throw your PC out the window, then do your search for a solution. The truth is out there

Chicago Improv: Guru

Recently I wrote about Bob Sickinger, the Godfather of Chicago theater, whose Chicago career took place under the aegis of Hull House.  I'd heard of Viola Spolin, but just learned that she, too, worked at Hull House in the 1930s.  Viola developed a whole new method of teaching children (and adults), non-actors, how to act, showing them how to improvise scenes rather than working from a script.  This was the birth of modern American improv.

Improv's childhood came in the late forties when Viola's son, Paul Sills, joined with friends at the University of Chicago to create a group called The Compass.  The Compass left Chicago, moving to St; Louis, with branches opening in other cities, spreading the new form.  In St. Louis, in the mid-fifties, a company which already included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Severn Darden, was joined by an erstwhile fire-eater named Del Close.  A few years later some of the Compass Players would return to Chicago to found Second City, and would invite Del (who was doing stand up) to join them.  There, Close began the first of his two tenures - ultimately, he was fired twice - where he taught and directed some of the greatest improvisational performers of the past fifty years. 

In between stints at Second City he lived in San Francisco, where he created the original psychedelic light show for a group called The Warlocks (they changed their name soon after), roomed with Wavy Gravy, hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and taught his techniques to The Committee, another legendary group (who may be seen in the movie Billy Jack, of all places).  After leaving Second City for the second time, a much longer stint during which he helped create SCTV with the Toronto company, he joined ImprovOlympics, teaching there for the rest of his life.

Close was a madman, his madness exacerbated by heavy drug use, and was a physical wreck by his early sixties, when his partner at ImprovOlympics, Charna Halpern, hired one of their young students, Jeff Griggs, to chauffeur Close, a job made complicated by the fact that neither Griggs nor Close owned a car.  Griggs performed this duty for two years, forming an unlikely friendship that led to his book, Guru.

I never met Close. I wish I had, though there is no telling if we would have hit it off.  I did meet an interesting friend of his, Don Depollo.  I was at a New Year's Eve party at Becky Brown's house in 1971-1972.  Becky also had interesting friends.  (Me, for instance, if I may be so bold.)  At her party there were members of The Process (not an improv group, they were believers in a Manichean religion that used to wander around Chicago in black robes, selling pamphlets and looking spooky).  And there was Don.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"I'm the head writer for Second City."



"They don't have writers; they improvise." I was naive.

He laughed. "Oh, yeah? I have a staff of twelve."

Second City features shows that run for a few months, e.g. Sex Among The Buffalo, or The Gods Must Be Lazy.  After the show, on certain nights, they invite the audience to stay for the improvs from which the shows are created.  The audience is invited to provide place, some characters, and a situation, perhaps "a plumber and a Japanese tourist, on a Madison Street bus, trying to persuade the driver to run them up to Wrigley Field in time for the game."  Then, they improvise the scene.  What I now realized was that they would fill a blackboard with suggestions, but they did a bit of steering, so that the choices they made from the audience suggestions were not entirely random, and some bits would drop in that were not entirely improvised.  The writers would work with this material to polish it, and eventually when enough polished bits were gleaming they would have the next show.

This was part of the reason that Second City and Del Close parted company for the last time.  Second City's head, Bernie Sahlins, and Close, disagreed about improv. Close believed it to be a new and independent art form, that entire shows could be improvised.  Sahlins felt that ultimately, even the best material needed writing and editing.  While the ghost of Del Close may rise angrily from the grave, and pee on my keyboard, I side with Sahlins.

Don't get me wrong, I love improvisation, but I am a writer.  The best written dialog (to say nothing of plot and dramatic structure) isn't like actual conversation, it only sounds that way.  Real conversation is filled with ers and ums and huhs, sentences that stop in the middle, or begin there.  There is needless repetition, and plenty of boring "you remember ... " that the reader can't possibly remember, so the writer must either drop that prompt, or fill in what is being remembered.  If you don't believe me, check out some of the improvised films of John Cassavetes or Robert Altman.  Both managed original, creative work, but the dialog is boring, phony, or both, even with the benefit of film editing. Improvised dialog produces pearls, but someone then needs to choose them, polish them, and string the best ones into a necklace.

Griggs took the pearls of his time with Del Close, polished them, and strung them together into his book.  Anyone interested in improv, Second City, or anecdotes about an amazing person, should check it out.

Guru

I Shot JR

I Shot JR

Three years ago I learned of a strange phenomenon of modern life: taking pictures of one’s food.  It had of course been going on for quite some time before I noticed it.  I am sure it began here in Japan, where ubiquitous camera-equipped, and internet connected, cell phones, in the hands of compulsive photographers who happened to be obsessed with food, meant that an entire nation could no longer be content to eat food, instead they had to share the experience with the world.  I was raised in an era where taking photos in a restaurant would have been considered gauche, if not rude.  But I have snapped a surreptitious photo from time to time, and last night I decided to embrace the trend and shoot the whole meal.  The decision was prompted by the occasion: I was dining at Joël Robuchon.

Joël Robuchon, or JR, is the most starred chef in the world.  How many stars does he have?

Billions and billions! – Carl Sagan

Twenty-six – The Michelin Guide

Let’s split the difference, and call it two billion and thirteen and a half.

In Tokyo alone he has seven for his three restaurants: two stars each for the Atelier in Roppongi Hills, and the Galleria in Ginza; three stars, Michelin’s highest accolade, for La Table in Ebisu Gardens at The Chateau.  It was for the latter that I made a reservation last night.

I did not take a photo of the building.  You’ve seen castles before, and even dined in them.  While they are a proven winner in the food business, I think JR went wrong here, as I am sure he gets plenty of walk-ins expecting to find sliders and fries, and I was unable to find either on the menu. 

Speaking of menus, usually the price of set meals rises as you page from left to right.  Perhaps he was catering to the Japanese habit of reading things backwards, or perhaps he was trying to trick Westerners, but the menu last night had two pages, and the verso was higher-priced than the recto.  There was also a loose sheet with a special menu that was steeper yet, but the mid-priced set menu had the most items, and seemed the most interesting.  Here’s what the discerning diner was ordering last night.

You’ll notice that the menu is in French.  Happily, there is an English translation for each item, but sometimes these restaurants go all French, just to intimidate you.

Rule One: Never show fear!

As it happens, I know some French food terms, such as Le Boeuf (beef), Le Gorgonzola (Gorgonzola), and Le Pommes Frites (but you won’t find those at JR, they are at the other Castle along with Le Sliders). The rule also comes in handy when the chef decides to surprise you with a dish he learned in the jungles of New Guinea, or the Swiss Alps, something exotic such as “Tripe of Dog, with a garnish of Mustard Greens, and Quail Ovaries.” Just remember the rule:

Never show fear!

It was easy to relax, as I was sipping a glass of Bruno Paillard Champagne while making my selection.  I didn’t get a photo of the bottle, as it was whisked off in the Champagne cart before I could draw a bead on it, but it was definitely a bottle of the good stuff.

This didn’t look like “Amuse-Bouche Le Caviar,” but what was it: cheese, sherbet, or some other tidbit?

Still not sure … I took a forkful, rolled it on the tongue.

“Butter?” I asked the waiter.  He smiled to acknowledge the keenness of my palate. He knew he was in the presence of an experienced and discerning taster.

The wine steward offered the menu, but I declined, asking her to provide pairings.

She had some things to say about this wine, and all that followed.  Between you and me, they make all that up!  They use buzzwords like “nose,” or “smoky,” or “fruity,” and never say “forgot to remove gym socks before stomping the grapes.” Whatever she had to say didn’t matter; if the Champagne was good, this was Ohmigod!  And since they left the bottle on the table, when I finished the glass I figured I was meant to pour another.

Apparently not.  The waiter didn’t actually slap my hand, but he did pry the bottle from between my fingers, poured a begrudging taste into the bottom of my glass, and whisked the bottle away.

While drinking it, the caviar arrived. The menu says it is served “in a surprise tin.” Surprise! It has JR’s name on the lid. The caviar is on a bed of crabmeat.  Can you see the little spoon in the picture? Of course not, because I ignored it, or rather, failed to notice it, when I shot the picture, and when I picked up my fork and dug in. The waiter, back from confiscating the Haut-Brion, grabbed the fork and steered me to the spoon.  I had forgotten that you are not supposed to touch caviar with metal. I was committing faux pas, French for “eating with your paws, you dog!” with every course. But never mind:

Never show fear!

Three kinds of uni, JR recommending that I begin with the dish at nine o’clock, the one with “coffee-flavored mashed potatoes,” and continue counterclockwise through the sushi rolls, ending with the shrimp custard.  I could tell you that the foam atop the first dish was, according to the waiter, also potatoes, apparently whipped into a frenzy. I could also tell you they, the foamy ones, were very salty. And if I told you it all tasted great, I wouldn’t be lying. But I won’t tell you any of that.  One of the reasons I don’t write restaurant reviews is that I don’t know a darned thing about cooking.  Sure, I know that you fry or boil on top of the stove, and one requires water.  I know that you bake and roast inside the oven, and that “roasting” probably requires that the target be meat, as I have never had baked turkey or roasted muffins.  On the other hand, I have had roasted potatoes, so go figure.  I also know that sautéing something involves butter. The real foodies are all cooks, and turn up their highly tuned noses as they type: “The sea salt was from Corsica, when of course Maltese salt was required.  Further, the reduction of the veal stock …” Not only do I not know which salt is required, I don’t know how to “reduce” something, and don’t want to know.  Nor am I into emulsifying.  At least, not consciously.  Sounds bloody disgusting, it does!  Take a tip from me, if the waiter says, “How would you like your steak: a) Reduced; b) Emulsified; c) Sautéed, choose “c” every time.

Bread anyone? There was bread with bacon, bread with chestnuts, bread with bacon and onion, bread with cheese, bread with anchovies, and bread with I forget. I went with the second, third, and fourth.

They whisked this one away as soon as it posed for its picture. Didn’t they trust me?  Actually, I saw the waiter hastening to pour from it across the room.  It was a 2008, for those who keep score.

This was the pumpkin.  I was so busy following the waiter’s instructions to mix the ingredients – it was an interactive dish – I nearly forgot to take its picture.  I am not sure what the black rock was supposed to represent.

A new pairing.  They had placed a copy of my menu at the table, this with a list of suggested pairings, and I was curious as to why some wines such as the Châteauneuf-Du-Pape were listed, but others like this, or the Haut-Brion were not? “But we have so many!” I was told that the ones listed below were mere selections.  Either that, or they saw me coming!

Not quail ovaries, just one of the eggs hidden inside a raviolo.

I had no reservations; it was particularly good.

Take the shrimp at eight o’clock, dip it in the green curry at ten o’clock, then eat the aromatic condiment at four, and finish with the spicy broth and herbs at two, as shown below.

Oysters with a caper.  Not the style my wife prefers, but I could develop a taste for them.

I was beginning to be glad I hadn’t tried to down a second glass of every wine they brought.

Never show fear!

This was another dish you are supposed to smush up.  That’s Le Gorgonzola with le fruits.

Yes, time for more wine.

And more bread.  I didn’t take pictures every time they brought more bread (heated by the waiter after one’s selection) because you might get the idea I wasn’t sticking to my twelve hundred calorie a day diet.

Never show fear!

About time for more wine. My glass was empty.

The fish, a turbot swimming in “mussel cream,” though this mussel cream tasted nothing like Bengay.

The beef is coming, better get some red on the table.

But where’s the beef!  It reminds me of the old joke:

Waiter: “How did you find your steak, sir?”

Customer: “I shifted a pea, and there it was!”

And there it is!  With wagyu beef, that really is all you need.  Otherwise we might deduce that JR would be right at home in that other castled restaurant.

We did the beef, back to white!  (From 2008)

The risotto.

Cheese, thoughtfully grouped into mushy, blue, and stinky.  I like ‘em all!

But I stuck with these six. Ah, the self-discipline!

Ready for your close-up, ladies?

Naturally you need the right wine!  All the wines were sensational.  I have been served wines that were rated in the high 90s, and were quite nice, but if those were 98s, the average wine tonight was 113.  I like dessert wines, so of them all, I’d rate this Sauterne a 129, with the Larrivet-Haut-Brion that came as the first pairing a 126.  Those are bold ratings on a 100-point scale, by I stand by them.

A group picture.

Speaking of groups, there was a table of seven behind the man cutting the cheese. :-) At one point there were nine waiters serving them; seven in uniform held sliver serving trays while two ranking captains in suits distributed the dishes.

With the dessert courses.

Tea …

Jelly, sherbet, and mascarpone.  The thing that looks like an olive is filled with juice. The shell is chocolate, which you eat after drinking the contents.

Le Decaf …

Candy, anyone?

A modest selection.

If you are worrying because they stopped pairing wines, don’t.  I had three glasses of the Cognac.

After dinner mints …

The menu neatly wrapped to take home.

Table decorations they wouldn’t allow me to take home.

The sum of money they wouldn’t allow me to take home.

Never show fear!!!!

After all, who knows how much that is? It is foreign money, so those numbers could represent anything. If those were Zimbabwean dollars that amount wouldn’t even buy a gumball.  Unfortunately, those are yen, and I know what they buy. Luckily, I have a wallet full of these bad boys!

I did ask the waiter whether the staff minded my taking all of these pictures.  He smiled as he counted my money. And he smiled some more as he assured me that, no, they were fine with it.  It was the same smile he gave me when I tasted the butter.

They handed me a loaf of freshly baked (not roasted) muffins to take home. I must have looked like a man who needed the bread.