Hot Off The Press

This is one of two gorgeous photographs Erin Kunkel shot at Barndiva

for the April edition of Smithsonian Magazine's much anticipated

Ten Best Small Towns to visit in America

.  Healdsburg is #2 on the list, noted for "Food and Living."  The writer nominates Wendell Berry as Healdsburg's patron saint, which gets my vote, but it took me a moment to get my head around us being "farm-to-table via nirvana, a sophisticated culture of nourriture that would have astonished 19th-century food philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin." The image of Savarin trumbling down Center Street brought a chuckle, but I had to look up nourriture. Turns out it's not far off what we've been saying all along:

mange le terrior

!  Check out the entire article here:

20 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2014

First Weeks of Spring

Poets wax romantic about Spring, but I love Margaret Atwood’s line best: ” in the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

There’s no substitute for digging in it, but even if you aren’t so inclined, just get out there and wander. The smell of Spring will seep into your soul. For weeks now at the farm (and all around town) trees and vines and even the most ordinary curbside plants have been bursting into leaf and flower. It's Nature just doing it's thing, but to the human heart this has got to be as close as we get to Irrepressible Joy.

All text Jil Hales. Photos © Jil Hales

Knowing More and More, About Less and Less

(originally posted August 25, 2010) Every year when the kids were little we marked the official end of summer with a blowout weekend at the Mendocino County Apple Fair, held in Boonville. Saturday night we went on all the rides and ate junk ‘til our sides ached; Sunday morning, usually with a strange assortment of hung-over house guests in tow, we somehow managed to slide into the old wooden stands at the fairgrounds with a minute to spare before Guido Pronsolino welcomed the crowd to the start of Sheep Dog Trials. Remember the movie Babe? No animated pig in sight, but the same loyalty, patience, and hushed nail-biting tension ~ even better when it happens in real time.

The County Fair ended up being a hyper version of the pen marks we made on the door frame to show how fast the kids had grown: no sooner did we let go of their hands for a second to reach for the caramel corn than they were shouting over their shoulders, we’ll call you on the cell when we’re ready to leave, disappearing into the fairground crowds just as a few years later they would disappear into their own lives. But hell, that was bound to happen. At least the memories we were making were good ones.

To this day Boonville puts on a proper fair with a parade, a rodeo, sheep dog trials, pie eating contests, a fairground full of rickety (thus exceptionally thrilling) rides, and large exhibition halls filled with every variety of crop grown and animal raised in the county, all spit polished and groomed to what contestants hope is an award winning shine. It was in those 4-H buildings one summer that I first began to understand what a mutually dependent relationship between a farm animal and a human could look like, and where it starts in a young person. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent time with a bright eyed nine year old wearing a green sash who speaks with the authority of someone who can put food on the table.

Growing up in a big city all I’d ever known was the social relationship people have with their pets, starting with the BFF status we invariably confer on them. The relationship between those young future farmers and their animals was different. These were kids who cared for their animals from birth with a matter-of-fact understanding of just how they fit into a farming family’s dynamic. As far as I was concerned the blue ribbons weren’t awards for how perfectly they groomed their animals but for all those early mornings and late nights they’d swept and cleaned and cared for them like their lives depended upon it, which, once upon a time, it did.

The Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Fair isn’t associated with 4-H ~ it’s just a wonderful community event now in its 100th year with the big green heart of a Gravenstein apple, which Sebastopol, with the help of Slow Food, is trying to bring back from the verge of extinction. So I wasn’t expecting a real county fair experience when I set out to go two weeks ago with a group of friends. We wanted to hear great bluegrass by John Youngblood & Company and eat Gravensteins to excess. We scored on both counts: Just as the sun came out John played an incredible set on a stage beneath a giant canopy of spreading oak trees. We ate apple pie, apple fritters, and (in my case, at least) drank copious amounts of hard cider. We saw a display of very old tractors and tried out ingenuous farm tools that had never been patented (some, like the recumbent bike that cut useless roundels out of redwood trees, for obvious reasons). It wasn’t until a much needed trip to the port-a-potties sent me to the furthest corner of the fairgrounds that I found that animals had, in fact, been invited to the party.

Sebastopol is not deep country, not anymore, so it was understandable that the animals on display weren’t many, but it was hard to miss the fact that not one of them would ever end up on the dinner table anywhere. There were cashmere sheep with Jean Tierney eyes, llamas groomed like large exquisite poodles, and miniature donkeys that had been saved from a coal mine ~ I’m assuming somewhere far from Sebastopol. Had I inadvertently stumbled upon the Jonathan Safran-Foer collection of farm animals?

Safran-Foer, in case you somehow missed it last year, is the author of Eating Animals, a passionate and highly personal rant on why he believes the human diet should not contain animal proteins. Safran-Foer is a wonderful writer ~ Everything Is Illuminated, his first book, was a tour de force ~ but in Eating Animals he bullies the reader in much the same way a Jehovah Witness arrives at your door with the ‘either/or’ option of accepting their version of religion or going to hell in a handbag. I have no doubt that expanding one’s vegetable diet would be good for the planet, if not for our health, but there is a big difference between making the decision not to eat animal proteins and an insistence that everyone else make the same commitment ~ which would mean, by extension, that we stop raising animals for food.

Michael Pollan tackles many of the same issues In Defense of Food as Safran-Foer does in Eating Animals, but manages to reach an inclusive endgame ~ he believes that through shared community values that directly effect the marketplace we can still make profound changes in the way food is produced in this country. The first step is to become more thoughtful eaters. The little I managed to read of Safran-Foer’s book struck me as guilt driven, written by a man so petrified by the idea of raising healthy children in a messed up world (and who isn’t) he’s gone into the wall building business: this side of the wall (vegetarians only) is good, that side (the rest of us) is bad. It’s the kind of thinking that can only serve a divisive agenda, creating antagonistic groups of people who, while they certainly differ on eating habits should be waging the same war when it comes to fighting for respectful, responsible stewardship of the earth. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Even if we put aside the case that the human race is predisposed to being carnivorous ~ we ignore at our peril that we have only made it this far in history by a profound reliance upon domesticated animals. A lot has gone wrong with that seminal relationship in the last century, starting with the way we treat animals in the corporate food system that by and large replaced them with machines. But if we can find our way back to it, a culture of mindful animal husbandry holds many answers to the real complexity of farming well. And, as Wendell Berry writes in so many of his wonderful books, there is real complexity to farming well.

Look, there’s little doubt that dependence on machine based agriculture and overdependence on the chemicals their use has engendered has lead us to where we are today ~ mired in the wrong kind of shit, the kind that fertilizes nothing. But the historic relationship between farmer and animal, which should be built upon respect born out of mutual dependence, goes hand in hand with a natural cycle that could provide a roadmap to re-claiming ecological (and quite possibly psychological) health. The widespread soil erosion, toxicity and decay we’ve seen with the rise of mono-culture mega-farms that have proliferated in the last fifty years have gone hand and hand with the destruction of our rural communities, the direct result of not having what Berry’s friend Wes Jackson calls the “right ratio of eyes to acres.” These are issues that cannot be addressed in any meaningful way if we eliminate the central dynamic of personal farming that has animals at its center.

I had a good time at the Sebastopol Gravenstein Apple Fair with my friends, but I left feeling like it was a bit of a lost opportunity. County Fairs have the potential to embody two essential American traits we are fast losing: inventiveness and the ability to admire accomplishment based on hard work, not luck or the hubris that often comes with fame. Walking around a crowd-filled fairground isn’t the same as walking around a crowded mall ~ the mall is a sales construct that teaches us nothing, it exists with the sole purpose of selling a false sense of security. Programmed to replicate the same controlled experience over and over again, all it can inspire is a faster technological response to a shrinking list of stimuli. When are we going to wake up and see that all technology has thus far afforded us is the ability to know more and more about less and less?

A County Fair is an opportunity to have a unique experience with people you can choose to recognize as your community. It’s about hand-grown food, and hand-made craft. Not all of it’s good, of course, but if you don’t like the apple pie at one stand, there is another one a few steps away touting a different family’s recipe. Pies at small County Fairs aren’t flavor profiled by a chemist in some food lab a thousand miles away, their taste testing was done in kitchens like yours just up the road where dogs and kids wander in and out and the oven door has a loose hinge. No doubt every generation had added something to the mix, but they still call it Grandma’s Recipe because, at heart, it still is.

With or without the kids, I’m going to the Boonville Fair this year. I long for that smell of hay with a hint of cow manure you get the minute you step out of the car, full moon rising, into the big field that serves as a parking lot and head off towards the fairy lights of the fairground. At some point the smell of cotton candy takes over, but it’s nice to get a whiff of the real smell of a place, before that overlay of sugar kicks in.

LINK The Mendocino County Apple Fair in Boonville is September 17-19th. Rodeo is Saturday Night. Sheep Dog Trials start at 10 am Sunday.

Our Decisive Moment

Originally posted May 19, 2010)

When life at the Barn gets too intense, which it has a built-in tendency to do, I walk down Center Street to the Plaza and plunk myself down on a bench. I highly recommend it ~ find a bench, ostensibly with a view of something that has its feet firmly planted in the earth, and just sit. After a half-hour of seemingly doing nothing, you will find your personal universe begin to shift ever so slightly.

Sometimes I think great thoughts, but mostly I don’t, I’m alone with them no matter how mundane they are. Our thoughts are like our children, we always seek some redeeming feature in them. For physical health a run would probably be a better option, for speedy energy a shot of caffeine, but for an instant and refreshing change in perspective very few things beat a park bench.

he secret to this particular form of self-medicating is to leave your cell phone ~ blackberry, ipod, laptop, singly or in any combination ~ behind. This is not as easy as it may sound. We all appear to be increasingly addicted to our techno toys, more than we care to admit. Sitting on the bench this week I counted, in the first 50 people who ambled by on their own, 34 who were walking while texting, talking, or listening to something other than the birds in the trees. This was not even counting the groups of people in which someone seemingly “in” the group was simultaneously engaged in a conversation with someone not even there. We go on and on about how little quality time we are able to find in our oversubscribed lives; where once the mantra for our culture was ‘knowledge is power’, now we moan and groan about ‘too much information.’ Why then, do we find it so hard to turn off convergent technology? We are sensible people, right? Where does this insatiable desire to be connected ALL THE TIME at the expense of our and everyone else’s privacy ~ and perhaps our sanity ~ come from?

My first thought sitting on the bench was that digital social mediums wire directly into the part of our brains that bows to a social hierarchy where not much has changed since High School ~ if you aren’t in, you are out. Nobody wants to be left out. The rise of twitching twittering facebook communities seems to support this theory ~ digital popularity as the new religion, documentation of even the smallest details of our lives, as the new confession.

But I had another thought a few hours later, as I watched a man leave the warm and beautiful dining room in Barndiva to go outside in the rain to reply to a text, despite the candlelight, the music and what seemed like an engaging conversation he was having with his girlfriend and another couple. Perhaps our fear of ‘turning off’ rises from a deeper genetic imperative, an urge to know what’s coming before it arrives. Digital Media is our Paul Revere: if we listen closely we will have time to lock the doors and gather the muskets. Or maybe it goes back further still, all the way to our cave dwelling ancestors, where “knowledge is power” really did mean the difference between life and death. You eat the bear or the bear eats you.

In which case this unquenchable desire for information is a rather cool, if subconscious, form of self-protection. The question then becomes, protection from what? What, in modern times, is the bear?

Probably the same thing it’s always been, (when it wasn’t an actual bear), we are, deep down, desperately afraid we’re living unexamined lives and that we will die without ever figuring out what the point was. But trying to find out what the point is, much less finding a point worth living for is an increasingly quixotic challenge. We exist in a world where global warming is touted as a myth, Sarah Palin is considered sartorial, Monsanto “helps farmers learn to be sustainable,” and the oil slick soaking the coastlines on one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, is, according to a “pre-eminent” scientists quoted in The New York Times, “not as bad as you think.” We live in a world where verifiable truth is taking a beating ~ let's face it ladies and gentlemen, truth gets the shit beat out of it every day. Which makes it awfully hard to follow the real storyline of history anymore, much less how our lives might intersect, and even be reflected, in it.

I get all that. What is deeply worrying is that instead of shifting our search for insight elsewhere, using these astonishing media tools and outlets to develop critical wherewithal, we choose to drop the pro and dity in the search for profundity and just go all out for FUN. It's fun to document the minutiae of our lives, and if anyone laughs at us, so what? We, in turn, through the wonders of tweets, facebook, youtube, twiddish, etc. are laughing at them as well. As for traditional ports of call ~ Art, Film, Music ~ where we once sought and found meaningful narratives that reflected a whole range of human values, the work that now gets produced has become, by and large, contrived product placements in-filled with perishable and disposable information. We are manipulated, pandered to, and infantilized from virtually every medium where sales, not enlightment, is the driving force.

Of course Will Shakespeare wanted people to attend his plays as a testament to his genius, but can we assume he didn’t need product placement to get the bard mojo working? If Jean Luc Godard had to track first day ticket sales, would the French New Wave have survived? Where are the Van Goghs and the John Coltranes, who never made a dime out of painting or playing their hearts out? As Thomas Wolfe knew (another example of a crazy art for arts sake guy) you can’t go home again. But where, exactly, are we going?

If everything we are and everything we love, need, and desire, issues from a personal set of values that can only start its engines when our eyes or our ears engage, it's probably a good idea to take a critical look from time to time at how we form those values, what feeds them, and, crucially, what we need to do to keep them humming. When we lose control of the intricate plot of our lives, even for a little while, we lose the linkages that connect one thing to another ~ before you know it you are inside the mouth of the bear.

The great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson believed “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment." By decisive he meant personally verifiable. Bresson wasn’t out to prove things only happen because we see them, but that with patience and perception human beings have the power to visually organize the world so it fits a pattern that means something, and from that pattern a blueprint for living can emerge.

Two years after the second World War ended, when Bresson was, in his own words, “completely lost,” he threw in with fellow photographers George Rodger, Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour” to found Magnum, “ a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually."

It seems to me, even If you never pick up a camera, that these are words to live by today ~ curiosity and respect for and about the human condition, fueled by a desire to create a community of thought based upon shared human values. Decisive moments occur in all of our lives, you don’t need to be a Magnum photographer to find them. You do need the time to look and process, in your own mind, the meaning of what you see. You need time to find the artists out there who are still committed to telling a human story of struggle, for only in that kind of story will we also discover the tools to survive.

The technological sensory overload we all suffer from does not encourage this process. Just having more information at our fingertips does not make us smarter. And we need to get smarter, really fast, because what all our wonderful social media and popular entertainments aren’t telling us is that the bear is gaining.

RESOURCES Museums, libraries and bookshops with more re-prints than top sellers are still the best places to experience art that has transforming powers. Dance and Opera are two art forms which, for very different reasons, have both proved artistically resilient and deserve your patronage. Both are great value (Opera only if you watch it via satellite feed).

To watch great cinema, which is still being made (but you won’t find at your local 12 plex) check out www.filmmovement.com. Not a bad film in the bunch, join or risk them being checked out at Blockbuster.

To hear stimulating music and life affirming conversation, check out programs offered at the Herbst Theatre, especially the City Arts and Lectures Series. One of the best nights I had last year was sitting with Geoff and Lukka, listening to Wendell Berry talking with Michael Pollen. Two human beings sitting on a stage just having a chat and it was riveting. How about that? I missed Frank Rich and Mark Danner in April and I’m still kicking myself.

Intersection 5M- a satellite art space, screening room, and event space in SF worth keeping track of. 5M features local exhibitions focused around arts for change. The inaugural gallery exhibit includes our friend Laura Parker: Let's Talk of a System