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(originally posted Dec 2010)
(originally posted January 5, 2010)
(originally posted January 5, 2011)
In case you missed Virginie Boone's wonderful article on Classic Cocktails in last week's Press Democrat, here is a link. Shot here at Barndiva, we were pleased to have them include 'Midnight Harvest,' sure to become a Barndiva classic, currently on our winter cocktail list.
(originally posted December 29, 2010) Considering the tragic, scary and downright stupid things which dominated the news this year, we thought we would end our last newsletter of 2010 with a Top Ten list that speaks to brilliance and talent, with one pertinent reminder that because nothing ever stays the same ~ the only direction that ultimately matters is forward.
1. The Low Budget Film, alive and kicking
The Social Network had a great script, and Inside Job should be required viewing for every American, but the cinematic theme of the year wasn’t about greed and technology, rampant though they both are. Film is primarily a visual medium, so it was all the more remarkable that the most inspired films released this year focused on how, in spite or because of the proliferation of social media, language is failing us. Nicole Holofcener’s mordant, deeply funny Please Give was a pointed but gentle rebuke at the narcissistic face of liberal guilt. Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love was a ravishing visual roman à clef that brought Visconti to mind, confirmed Tilda Swinton’s face as a force of nature, and for all the power in which it captured the empty language of the rich, could have been a silent picture. Of all our favorite films this year, however, none was more impressive than Debra Granik’s Winter's Bone. An explosion of brilliant new talent both in front of and behind the camera, it was the kind of low budget film about the human condition we used to think only foreigners could make. A mystery, an exploration of what it means to be poor and illiterate in America, and, most poignantly, a use of lost language as spare and wounding as a Faulknerian tone poem, this is a great American film. In drawing a world bereft of morality and faith, it speaks to what happens when human beings fall back on superstitions and tribal tradition to guide their destiny. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty powerful global message as well.
2. Montaigne Rules
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the great American novel of the year, deserving of all the hype, but the most remarkable book this year, for being both a homecoming and a map to the future, was How to Live (or) A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. An inventive biography about a dude who lived four hundred years ago, Bakewell invites us to re-discover a voice so honest, charming and clever its wisdom is as relevant today as any self-help book you are likely to find. I am an unapologetic member of the dying tribe that still believes the unexamined life is not worth living, but even if your definition of wisdom runs only to aphorism, you will find a lot to chew on here. Bakewell does an extraordinary job of letting Michel Eyquem de Montaigne speak for himself, while placing him firmly in a Renaissance tradition that exalted the life of the mind. This genteel nobleman was a winegrower who spoke fluent Latin, a self-taught philosopher who participated fully in politics and invented the short for essay which he used to reflect amusingly on every issue of the day. Montaigne believed the more thought we put into life, the more we get out of it. Amen to that.
3. Park Here If You Must
I’ve not yet been inside Herzog & de Meuron’s new parking & retail structure in Miami, 1111 Lincoln Road Garage, but I almost don’t need to. It's pretty damn hard to rethink space on any level in the current economic climate ~ when you work as big as these guys do it's practically impossible. Yet this Swiss firm consistently challenges preconceived notions of material, design and program in future-forward ways. While the current focus in architecture on ecological and ergonomic utility is certainly important, aesthetically, when it comes to public spaces that aren’t deep pocket museums, it’s been pretty much of a bust. As Healdsburg’s parking problems continue to grow, it’s refreshing to think there may be alternatives to addressing that problem without resorting to the concrete parking bunker. 1111 Lincoln has a mixed-use program with pop-up retail on the top floor. Its undulating concrete walls will eventually be grown to soften the ‘view’ of all that metal inside. During the recent Art Basel Miami Beach some of its vast floor space was also used for performance art, very cool indeed. Even for a town as small as ours I see the potential of parking cars, flea market sales, and stimulating performance art all in one place, especially when that art could represent a segment of the community that cannot afford high street rents.
4. In Bed with Jon and Frank
With the exception of my husband, I spent an inordinate amount of quality time in bed with these two men this year. Late at night, especially when it was a frustrating news day, I fell asleep with a smile on my face thanks to Jon Stewart, America's court jester, who says what we are all thinking a hell of a lot funnier than it plays in our aching heads. Frank Rich provided a different kind of salve for these trying times. In an age when facts have become almost beside the point on a increasingly partisan and commercialized media playing field, his thoroughly researched, riveting editorials in the New York Times every Sunday morning were David and Goliath efforts that never failed to speak truth to power.
5. Public Speaking
While Stewart and Rich deserve twin “the Emperor is Wearing No Clothes” awards this year, Martin Scorsese did us all a favor by bestowing a lifetime achievement nod on Fran Lebowitz, the closest thing America has to a wit the size of Oscar Wilde’s with the feminine acuity of Dorothy Parker. Public Speaking, which arrived on cable without much fanfare is a program that actually lives up to being Must See TV. An hour spent with this woman is an instant elixir, brief respite to the proliferation of Kim Kardasian types and all those other 'fame ho’s' (both male and female) that increasingly clutter the airwaves, and our lives. This is that rare hour of amusing enlightenment which sidesteps youth for age, fake beauty for character, stupidity for profundity. I was especially taken with her remarks about the audience that was lost with AIDS and how that has affected the arts, and the importance of elitism in culture (as opposed to building an elitist society) which has lead to a degradation of quality that has affected every aspect of American cultural life.
6. Jamie at Home
One of the questions I asked myself in 2010 ~ that I didn’t get any closer to answering~ was why food programs on TV continue to get worse instead of better. With the proliferation of farmer's markets, the fervent interest in sourcing, the rise of urban farming, why does food programming increasingly reek of such dumbing down? I haven’t been a fan of the Food Network since they went over to the dark side dropping Mario for Paula. So I was thrilled to find Jamie Oliver over on the Cooking Channel (with fellow Brits Nigella Lawson and Two Fat Ladies) a few months back. I have no idea if he really lives on his farm with Jools and the kids, cooking in wood fired ovens using food he has grown, and I really don’t care. His visceral description of ingredients, the way he touches food, the simplicity of his ideas (recipes are almost besides the point for Jamie) are simply brilliant. I’ve loved Jamie since Naked Chef days. He is a lovely boy (as my dear friend Lynda would say) who has taken his fame as a serious opportunity to improve everything around him for as long as the dance lasts. Yes, his experience with getting Americans to eat healthier was a disaster, but this program is worth taping and referring back to. If you don’t get the channel, go online where you can download the recipes for free.
7. Jil at Home
Speaking of food that doesn’t have to be precious to be delicious, go figure that the best meal I had all year (not made by Chef Fancher) was a simple vegetable soup. Why vegetable soup when I had the great privilege to eat food from the kitchens of Mario, Jean-George, Daniel, April, David, Doug and Ari? You know the Paul Simon line ‘life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans?’ Sometimes it's true about great dishes as well. Food was the last thing on my mind when I started to think about dinner on November 2nd. The stupidity and vitriol in the run-up to the elections that day had, quite literally, made me sick to my stomach. As it was a Tuesday and the restaurant was closed, I rummaged through the walk-in and the fridges, then spent a long time foraging through the raised herb and vegetables beds behind the gallery. It must have taken three hours to make that soup. At first I was simply avoiding the results of the election, but slowly, as I sliced every vegetable carefully, adding them to the pot one at a time, patiently watching them turn translucent, bubble, and simmer I came to see that while the results were now out of my control, feeding myself, my family, and members of the human race who, by luck or by design, wander into Barndiva, wasn’t. In the end I didn’t make that soup so much as it made me. When I finally came to taste it I took great pride in the balance of sweet to salty, the rooty, herbal, heavenly smell, the glorious color. When Geoff tasted it later that night he looked up and said “this is really great, what’s in it?” “Hope”, I replied. He probably thought I was crazy, but there is nothing new in that.
8. Cocktail of the Year
I don’t care if it sounds like nepotism, the best cocktails anywhere this year were served here at the barn. Strawberry Life called for the ripest of wild strawberries macerated into a cognac base to which we added a touch of Nagori Sake (cloudy, the result of unfiltered dormant yeast particles), homegrown Thai Basil and fresh lemon juice. Finished with a mist of Crème de Violette, it was summer in a glass which we should have called Sex in the Grass (no, not that grass Virginia). Ernest in Love, another favorite (ode to Hemingway’s first marriage) featured Tequila and Aperol with local watermelon compressed with lemongrass, lime juice, agave nectar and, as a grace note, a spray of fresh rosewater. Thanks in great part to Stefan’s mad genius and Adam and Sammy’s desire to push the limits, we infused spirits with all manner of fresh fruit, herb and spice drams, cold smoked apples and rosemary from our farm, washed brown butter, infused rare black teas, fabricated pumpkin curries and stone fruit jams, chopped through all manner of homegrown chili and exotic citrus until our eyes rolled. Croatian cherries? No problem. Jack Daniel's barrel woodchips? Torch ‘em. With the exception of the night Stefan almost burned down the barn cooking up some concoction, every drink these three guys put out this year was bloody brilliant. I was a very proud mama indeed (albeit one with an aching liver.) Cocktail of the year goes to The Lover (named after the great Marguerite Duras novella of the same name) because it perfectly balanced my favorite fruit (white peaches) with fresh ginger and the green herbal notes of lemon verbena we grew from a plant Bonnie Z gave us. Filtered sake and a hit of Navarro grape juice added sweet and yeasty notes. We finished the drink at the bar by igniting a poof of green chartreuse ~ this Divatini even had magic. The trick of making craft cocktails at this level is that all the flourishes must soften and meld the minute you pick up the glass to drink. These do. Cheers.
9. Picture of the Year
Without a doubt you will find more globally important images if you click the links below, but the moment Lukka captured of the Healdsburg Post Office burning resonates deeply for us on several levels. It marks the end of an era: no more walking distractedly through town to post a letter and find the moment of the day in which the town reclaimed you. Sometimes it was just a wave from a neighbor, a quick coffee from Flying Goat, a simple breeze that made you look up at the trees in the Plaza. I am not alone in mourning the loss that experience will mean to living here. But in the weeks and months that followed the fire, as it became clear that efforts by Jim Wood, Ray Holly and others to re-build would come to naught, I began to understand that more than the post office was gone. What if the loss we were experiencing on a community level was just the beginning of the end to Snail Mail which will be gone soon, like listening to music on CD’s, watching films on DVD’s, conversing on land-line telephones. Some of these ‘advances’ are good, no doubt, and all of them will seem inevitable when we look back. What is hardest to reconcile is how change like this undermines a precious connection to the time and place, and to the people you accidentally get to know when you wandered out to experience life first hand.
New York Times 2010 year in pictures
10. A Town Full of Babies
Losing the post office was sad, which makes the last item on our top ten list all the more important. 2010 was the Year of the Baby here in Healdsburg ~ everywhere you looked gorgeous babies glided by with their newly minted parents, making everyone in their wake feel like a cockeyed optimist. Some were spied repeatedly dining in our gardens or at Scopa, others were seen hiding in the foliage at Dragonfly, the changing rooms at Arboretum, the shampoo station at Brush. One young man we knew as a baby had his first, while our bookkeeper had her fifth. This proliferation of new life, the growth of families that have put roots down here and have already contributed so much ~ with so much more left to come ~ is something we can take joy in. And we do.
(originally posted December 22, 2010)
For the second to last newsletter of the year, we thought it would be fun (and relatively easy) to take a quick look back at all the ‘dish of the weeks' we compiled and choose a winner. Fun yes. Easy? Not a chance. We were blown away with the sheer volume of mouthwatering images and fascinating cooking tidbits chef and I managed to compile in one short year. Choosing a dish each week is not based on science (discovering a new technique) or math (what sold the most), it's an ephemeral decision made a few days, sometimes a few hours, before compiling ingredients and shooting them. We did not set out to build what has turned out to be a fascinating food journal (a calendar? The start of a cookbook?). Only two things mattered: the joy of working together and the connection each dish had to a built-in reverence for great raw product, which always guides us.
What began as a bit of entertainment, a way to make the newsletter a more enticing read for you, turns out to be the best Christmas gift we could have given ourselves ~ a grace note to a year that, while it tested us in every way possible, ended up being more nourishing ~ in all senses of the word ~ than any that has preceded it.
Dish of the Week is very much a collaborative project ~ just as every dish we send out to the dining room must be. In this, Chef Ryan, Lukka, Geoff and I are supported by an insanely talented kitchen staff. A special call out to Tommy, who has brought so much to the table (literally and figuratively) this, his first year with us, and to Pancho, Danny and Drew, who always have our backs. A special note of thanks as well to my incredibly talented assistant, K2, who patiently works with me every step of the way to capture the essential spirit of each dish.
In the end, we could not come up with a single winner ~ so we give you our favorite meat, fish and vegetable entrées. While each in a special way contributed to the food narrative we try to tell here at Barndiva, a remarkable taste profile combined with the beauty of Ryan’s plating ultimately won our vote.
2nd Runner Up...
Compressed Watermelon Herb Salad This dish was the height of elegant simplicity, but only one of many that hummed with glorious local color, matched by a wonderful taste profile that brought the farm right into your mouth. We are blessed to have many produce partners, thanks in part to Fork & Shovel speed dating events we host here at the barn every year. Two of our favorite veg and fruit producers, Early Bird's Place and Mix, also contract plant for us, a business partnership more thoughtful restaurants are discovering. One of our most popular blogs this year was the one about Myrna and Earl Fincher (October 6th) whom you can buy from at the Healdsburg Farmers Market.
Herbs for these dishes, like most coming out of our kitchen, were grown right here in our raised beds behind the gallery, or at Barndiva Farm in Philo where we also get our dry farmed apples, pears, figs, and chestnuts.
1st Runner Up...
Fritschen Vineyard's Lamb's Liver & Onions 2010 marked the beginning of our collaboration with the Fritschen Family, whose vineyards boast the grapes that Thomas DeBiase, our sommelier, makes into fine wine here in Healdsburg. For three weeks in July we chronicled a nose to tail cooking project that utillized almost every part of a beautiful animal raised for us at the Fritschen Family Farm. Whenever we can, we will continue to work with local farmers to procure excellent animal proteins for Barndiva. We do this despite a lack of local humane slaughterhouses that make these purchases more expensive than it need be for both farmer and chef. In the coming year, look forward to more lamb from Fritschen and the wonderful Preston Family Farm, along with goats and rabbits from new farms. Every season we list on our menus at Barndiva the primary purveyors who inspired us to create that specific menu. Some can be found at your local Farmer's Market if you live in Sonoma, Marin, or Mendocino County.
AND now...the winner is...
Escabèche! Keeping the fish and shellfish selections interesting for our customers continues to be a challenge for us as we try to honor a commitment to primarily source from waters within 100 miles of the restaurant. Though we keep an open mind to ongoing science about the safety of farmed fish, we do not serve it in Barndiva for a variety of reasons (taste being only one). When I spoke at a Seafood Symposium at the U.C. Davis Bodega Bay Marine Aquarium a few years back, (a wonderful event, the brainchild of my good friend Randi Seidner produced by Slow Food Russian River,) I made the point that some responsibility must fall on the diner when it comes to helping restaurants source sustainable fish and shellfish. If you say you want local, do not turn your nose up at varieties you are not familiar with when a restaurant you trust serves it! Happily, there is such faith in anything Chef Fancher sends out of his kitchen that we are able to stretch with less familar local selections without fear it will hit our bottom line. The dish here, Escabèche, is a case in point. It sold out every time it appeared on the menu, often as a result of someone just seeing it come to an adjoining table or hearing our servers talk about it. Make no mistake: when a line caught wild salmon walks in the door in the arms of one of our fishmongers, we grab it. We love local halibut and sole. In the coming year we may cast our net as far as Oregon and Washington's coastal waters, but no fish served at Barndiva will have taken a plane ride to get to your plate, or ever been frozen.
The full collection of our Dish of the Weeks, are available in the Barndiva Journal Archives- or keep reading...
(originally posted Dec 15, 2010)
(Originally posted December 8, 2010)
I often start to write these blogs in my head, which saves time when I can edit in there as well. Last week in NYC, walking blissfully through a Central Park ablaze with glorious fall color, I was playing with the idea of using Oz as a metaphor for the role the city has played in my life. At the exact instant I thought naw, yellow brick roads of possibility is going to sound trite, a tumultuous windstorm came out of nowhere, lifting thousands of leaves high into the air. Runners halted, mothers covered their children’s heads, tourists like Geoff and I, stunned, looked around dumbly, as if for the culprit. It was a truly serendipitous moment, magical, but also a bit unnerving. Classic New York.
I was in New York ostensibly to help my second son relocate from London. Secretly however, I also went in hopes a week there would shake me from the awful mood I had been unable to vanquish since the election. The tenor of discourse in the country has fallen so low, grown so ugly, I have begun to fear that nothing good will ever come from the way we currently practice democracy. Where are we going as a nation? Who are we anymore? As the world sinks into what feels like unprecedented violence, both natural and man-made, too many Americans have resorted to a mindset ever more petty and short sighted, deeply mistrustful of anything which requires intellect or reason.
In the past New York has afforded me solace, if not answers to questions like these. I was 16 when my despairing parents, “at our wits end!” shipped me off to a very rich aunt who lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. They were expecting a miracle, or, failing that, a short course finishing school. My aunt took one look at me in full hippie attire, a backpack of contraband and a guitar I could not play slung over my shoulder, threw up her hands and promptly decamped to her daughter's house in Connecticut. The closest thing I had to minders for the rest of the summer was a cabal of doormen who thought I was crazy. I wasn’t. I was confused and deeply disillusioned, mostly about the war in Vietnam.
Though I only lasted the summer, by happenstance several things conspired to keep me safe and propel me to a place where I began the long journey trying to make sense of Power with a capital P, and the creaky way it turns most people’s lives on history’s spit. I was young, dumb and stoned enough most of the time not to fear the city, and as I was intrepid in my appetite for adventure, explored Manhattan from Harlem to what was then a meatpacking district with actual butchers. Coming from monosyllabic LA, where vocabulary basically consisted of only three statements ~ “far out,” “that’s cool (especially when something wasn’t), and “bitchen” (when something was), I was fascinated with the way new yawkers talked, talked, talked. Everyone, from the countess across the hall to the taxi drivers who picked me up late at night, dispensed advice. In Paris success in social conversation resides in the perfect bon mot, in Italy the well chosen hand gesture, in New York it means 'having the last word.' Which of course is not a word at all, but a stream of passionate, opinionated, often colorful lectures that fall somewhere between a short story and a graduate thesis. On any subject. Even if marginally not worth talking about in the first place.
On long hot muggy days, waiting for night to fall, I stalked the halls of great old American buildings stuffed with Robber Baron art, starting with the Frick, one of greatest small museums in the world, which happened to be right across the street. It was my first exposure to art where I wasn’t tagging along with my mother, or forced to look at muddy prints in boring school lessons. Experiencing it on my own, from a vulnerable yet curiously open place, it opened my eyes to a number of things. The first was that Americans didn’t understand sex or the female body, (I was from LA, remember, which still doesn’t). It was incredibly exciting to know there was a whole sensual world out there. The second, which spoke directly to the pain I was in, was the extent to which art was a valuable witness to the misuse of power that is repeated in every age, no matter who the man was behind the curtain is. What was taking place in my lifetime wasn’t an aberration of history. While I must have already known this on some level, instead of making me even sadder, as I studied canvas after canvas of masterful paintings and sculpture going back more than 500 years, I began to see a concurrent theme of hope and ambition. One that, against the odds, almost seemed to be fueled by adversity. The history of art is the history of an indomitable human spirit, a hunger not just to survive, but to see the beauty in life, bruised though it may be. Life is opportunity, which for an artist starts with the very impulse to pick up a brush or chisel.
We stayed at The Surry for the first three days, a hotel not far from my old haunting grounds. In the clear bracing sunshine we walked in the park, took our time over delicious prix fixe lunches at Café Boulud (which happily was attached to our hotel), then climbed the big steps of the Met and went our separate ways, or slowly trailed each other, until just before closing. Below are my notes on a few of the shows that I saw. The Barndiva Newsletter is primarily focused on food and art; both are sources of nourishment without which we cannot survive. But even if you are not traveling East in the next few months, the diversity of what you find in any great museum is essential viewing. The Met, sadly, is one of the few in NY that is still free if you do not have the money to donate ‘an appropriate’ entrance fee. It astounds me that we are making fine art an elitist sport in this country when it offers one of the few singular opportunities for citizens of all persuasions (income levels, ethnicities, religions) to come together in consideration of shared human values. Go to a museum and look around, not just at what is on the walls.
I won’t lie: while my time in NYC’s museums and parks topped up a flagging spirit, the most important moments for me on this trip were those I spent with my family. Seeing the Metropolitan Opera’s Così fan Tutte with my daughter ~ her first opera experience. Having a grown son know enough about New York (and for that matter, life) to guide us straight into Bemelmans Bar when the sky opened and a sudden rainstorm clamored down. Noisy and late dinners at Del Posto, abc kitchen, Pastis, where, for a few hours, it was permissible to believe that good restaurants, the ones that source with their hearts and take care to provide great service, like Barndiva, will survive this recession. (A glass raised to Mario Batali who has the biggest balls right now in this big balled restaurant town, not only for what it took to build the beautifully retro Del Posto and take it to four stars, but for his just launched and truly audacious attempt, with his partners, the mother and son Bastianich, to create America’s first great food hall in Eataly).
I also won’t lie that all those experiences cost money. A not inconsiderable amount of it. My point is that even as we feed the essential personal narratives in our lives, to whatever extent we find important and can afford, we need to make time to consider upping our participation in institutions and public open spaces that everyone can enjoy and reflect in.
On one of our last days Geoff and I walked the new High Line Park, on the lower east side, where we were now staying. Even in the cold, without the families with dogs and young children, it was easy to see what a wonderful addition this park is to the city. Designed by the always excellent Diller, Scofidio + Renfro out of a raised rail track built in the 1930’s but unused for the past thirty years, it instantly transforms one’s view of the city ~ not just the views down into the streets, but an inner view of what it means to reclaim and interact with awkward unused urban spaces. The High Line is a sculptural park with simple but sinuous benches of concrete and old wood that rise up out of the old tracks. The hardscape is softened with a landscaping plan by James Corner primarily of grasses which pay homage to what had been growing there wild, since the trains stopped running.
I was greatly impressed with Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance, an exhibit of lush representational color with a politically subversive subtext which must have raised eyebrows at the time. The Dutch empire fell from a height of considerable power for sins of hubris, so make your own connections on that score. This was a good one for me to see right now.
In conjunction with viewing the work of Gossart, I was really looking forward to an exhibit of a series of Joan Miró pieces that the great Spanish artist did shortly after he returned from studying the Dutch masters at the start of his career. But while the works in Miró: The Dutch Interiors makes clear the colorful and compositional connections between what would seem two remarkably incompatible styles, the show was not as revealing as I hoped. Not really a surprise: Miró is to the Dutch movement like Jeff Koons is to real sex. Having said that, for me, a day where you can see three roomfuls of Mirós, even marginal ones, is always a joy.
Of the exhibits I managed to see, I was least impressed with John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, the much touted show of the season, which, intended irony aside, simply was not. (beautiful) For me this show was another case of the Emperor's New Clothes a la Art Basel. From all accounts Baldessari was a great teacher, but in even his strongest work here (and with the exception of what he burned in the 70’s, it's all here) this is art with a heart of stone, wordplay that is dated, video that makes me long for Nam June Paik. Baldessari is an LA artist in the same way Frank Gehry is an LA architect. There is great irreverence here to be admired, a “take that” attempt at disarming pretension anyone hoping to survive LA must have in their DNA, but whereas Gehry plays to his strengths in three dimensions, Baldessari’s antipathy to negative space produces work that is flat and ugly, devoid of even a rueful use of color. I would love someone to explain why this shit works for them.
Which is not to say that living the vida loca (modern life IS crazy) does not come with a concomitant desire to take a deeper look at why post war prosperity ultimately led to the American soul becoming disenfranchised. American’s suffer from a misconception of what material wealth really brings to the table, that much is clear and sorely needs to be addressed. Lee Friedlander: America By Car at the Whitney (which I wandered into by accident on my way to visit the Hopper exhibit upstairs) is the real deal. Taken over the last decade through his car window while he crisscrossed America, it is one of those shows that builds as you move through it. The exhibit is a revelation that speaks to Friedlander’s talent for composition which brilliantly straddles wit with profundity. Image after image reveals what happens when our insatiable hunger for illusion gets left by the roadside. Like unfinished poems, the detritus and people he captures along the highways and byways of this country made the point about junk culture the Baldessari exhibit didn’t. Think Wim Wenders of Paris, Texas crossed with Bruegel the Elder if you transferred his work to black and white and then set to having some fun with a mimeo machine.
My favorite show this fall, perhaps because I was on a lover's journey in New York, was Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand which takes up a number of connecting backrooms at the Met. Stieglitz, the master teacher, and his two most famous protégées (who arguably overtook him in the craft) captured images from a mindset we hardly remember now as the instant documentary aspects of the medium have subsumed the painterly qualities they sought to capture. In addition to being beautiful in their own right, most of these images are fragrant love letters to New York, and while I have seen many of them before, seeing them collected together in room after room, made me realize that all the bells and whistles we've added to the medium of photography hasn't done as much to capture its soul as envisioned by these pioneers. Technical virtuosos in their day, while that aspect of their work is no longer remarkable to our 21st Century eyes, their approach to the details of everyday life is all the more thrilling when you realize so much of what they captured happened in the incredible city right outside the door of the museum.
Links: The High Line The Surrey Hotel (I booked The Surrey at half price on Jetsetter which you can join for free.) My favorite travel site, Tablet, also has auctions every week worth checking out if you are willing to spend a bit more on boutique accommodations. SoHo House- These are among the biggest and most comfortable rooms in Manhattan if you can take the neighborhood which parties on Fridays and Saturdays until the wee hours. Great spa and you are graciously invited to all the in-house events. I came back from dinner too late one night for the premier of Paul Haggis' The Next Three Days but I crashed the after party and though I knew not a soul, had a good time.
(originally posted November 17, 2010)
Ever wondered what it looks like above Barndiva? Here's your chance. Great images and recipes by Chef Ryan accompany the article by Sarah Lynch in California Home + Design Magazine.
Raising the Barn: An International Aesthetic Meets the Best of Wine Country's Heartland
Photo credit:
Photography by Drew Kelly and Brad Gillette
LEFT: Studio Barndiva’s eclectic offerings include local artwork and imported accessories, but the blue fireplace—adorned with a Magritte-worthy “It is not a fireplace”—makes it clear that visitors can always expect a surprise. TOP RIGHT: Jil and Geoffrey Hales built their barn (right) from scratch.
The perfect evening out brings together three elements: a delicious meal, a warm atmosphere and lively conversation. For Jil Hales, the proprietor of Healdsburg’s Barndiva restaurant, the bar is set significantly higher because the bar is where it all began.
“We came to Healdsburg eight years ago, after raising our kids in the U.K. and living in San Francisco for a few years,” says Hales, a Los Angeles native married to Geoffrey, a Brit, who brought his hardwood flooring company to the U.S. “What this town was missing was a world-class bar—a place to get a cocktail and a bite to eat late at night.”
LEFT: The kitchen island in the pied-à-terre was fitted with fluorescent lighting and colored gels as a prototype for the restaurant bar. RIGHT: A farm-worthy monitor, painted salmon pink, in the center of the ceiling will one day be accessed by a catwalk.
While the Hales were dividing their time between London and a fruit farm in Anderson Valley that Jil has owned for 30 years, they bought a property just off the town square in Healdsburg and built a two-story barn from the ground up. Downstairs, the bar and restaurant serve the best cocktails in town and an ever-evolving menu of farm-to-table dishes. Upstairs is the Hales’ pied-à-terre. Acting as general contractor and chief designer of the barn was an all-encompassing project, and Jil lived up to the nickname her friends had given her when she first moved to Anderson Valley: the Barn Diva.
Adapting the name to her new venture, Jil’s restaurant suitably hits a few high notes. From the outside, the building suggests a familiar rural vernacular—it’s a single structure with richly stained board-and-batten siding. Inside, the towering space is a sophisticated mix of travertine floors, wood tables, a colorfully lit bar and cream-colored walls adorned with modern art and antique farming tools. Out back, an enclosed garden is set with tables, big rustic sculptures and a trickling water feature; overhead mulberry trees are draped with twinkling fairy lights and a heritage black walnut offers dappled shade during the day.
FROM LEFT: The Cor-Ten steel and neon lights in Barndiva’s sign hint at the owners’ modern sensibilities; Studio Barndiva represents local artists such as painter Laura Parker and wire sculptor Ismael Sanchez; floor-to-ceiling drapes, formal flower arrangements and streamlined drum shades are just some of the sophisticated designs Jil chose for the restaurant; before coming to Barndiva
The pied-à-terre upstairs, which is accessed through the front door tucked alongside the restaurant’s entry patio and up a Dan Flavin-esque staircase with rainbow fluorescent risers, is even more of a surprise. It feels like a loft in Tribeca rather than a barn apartment in Sonoma County. The voluminous main room is centered on an oval dining table surrounded by red leather Eames Executive chairs. On one side a 16-foot-long kitchen island is topped with another fluorescent-lit bar (the prototype for the bar downstairs). The kitchen itself is an updated take on the European unfitted kitchen, with open storage, several sinks and a formidable black-enamel Lacanche range. A built-in bar adorned with Jil’s favored Tunisian ironwork, more classic midcentury furniture and artwork collected from around the world complete the scene in the main space. On one end is a guest bedroom and office mezzanine, and on the other is a master suite.
Two-and-a-half years after completing the barn, the restaurant was bustling on evenings and weekends, and Jil was ready to raise the bar even higher. The Hales’ life in Healdsburg had become increasingly focused on the community around them as they supported local vintners and farmers. But Jil’s passion for art and design needed an outlet, and the four walls of the restaurant were filled. So in 2007 she opened a gallery next door in a space that was formerly an opera house. Artists & Farmers, as it was originally called (now Studio Barndiva), was a place to celebrate and sell the art and designs she discovered locally or on her many travels. On display is an assemblage of Hales’ own lighting made from Tunisian architectural salvage along with locally crafted paintings, wire sculptures, blown glass, reclaimed wood furniture, imported gifts and accessories. “I don’t want to show things that can be easily found somewhere else,” says Hales, pointing out one exception: aselection of John Derian back-painted glass plates. “I know he’s in lots of other shops, but he’s a friend.”
LEFT TO RIGHT: The restaurant’s back patio features pendants that Jil fashioned from Tunisian window guards; fluorescent lights show up at the bar, where a circular backlit inset mimics the two round windows at the top of the building; the entrance to the private residence is marked by a dramatic glowing staircase; the weather in Healdsburg makes it ideal for outdoor wedding receptions.
Behind the gallery is yet another garden. This one is filled with raised vegetable beds, outdoor sculpture and a table large enough to seat 200 under an armature designed for a canopy of mini-globe lights. Like the garden on the other side of the fence, the setup begs for a modern country wedding and it’s been a popular spot for such events since it opened. In fact, Geoffrey and the couple’s eldest son, Lukka, run Barndiva’s event and hospitality business, and they’re now averaging 60 weddings a year. The Hales have also taken over management of the nearby Healdsburg Modern Cottages, four nightly cottages authentically furnished with pieces by Eileen Gray, George Nelson, and Ray and Charles Eames.
LEFT: The humble facade of Barndiva belies the stylish elegance of the experience inside. RIGHT: An outdoor area behind the gallery is attached to the restaurant’s garden through a gate and is a popular spot for wedding receptions.
In her mission to open a world-class bar in this sleepy town, Jil has elevated the creation of the perfect evening to an art form. “I went for the type of environment where I would want to share a meal or toast a special occasion with friends,” she says. “If something doesn’t come from the heart, it just doesn’t work. If you’re not authentic, you’re running on fumes.”
Sitting under twinkling lights, as a parade of seasonal dishes made by Thomas Keller–trained chef Ryan Fancher, original cocktails and wine selected by the in-house sommelier passes by, it would be hard to argue against that.
Recipes from Barndiva’s Chef Ryan Fancher
Both of these recipes make the most of fruit and vegetables in late summer or early autumn, when ingredients are at the height of their season. They are great dishes to source at a local farmers market.
Barndiva’s Heirloom Tomato & Compressed Watermelon Salad Serves 4
1 medium watermelon 1 tsp. lemon verbena 1 large golden beet 1 large Detroit dark-red beet 6 heirloom tomatoes 2 Tbsp. sweet basil 4 Tbsp. Spanish sherry vinaigrette Salt and freshly ground pepper 1 cup purslane (optional) 2 Tbsp. crystallized ginger, diced 2 red radishes
Spanish Sherry Vinaigrette 1 cup grape seed oil 1/3 cup Spanish sherry vinegar A pinch of salt, sugar and freshly ground pepper
• The Watermelon - The night before or a few hours before serving, cut into large cubes and sprinkle with the chopped lemon verbena. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate. • The Beets - Cover with 2 cups water, 1 Tbsp. butter, 1 clove garlic and a sprig of thyme. Cover and cook at 350° for 3 hours. Cool and slice. • The Heirloom Tomatoes - Slice them thickly and mix them in with the chopped sweet basil. In a bowl, whisk together all of the ingredients for the vinaigrette. Bathe the tomatoes in 4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette for 30 minutes or more. Season with salt and freshly ground pepper. • Assemble - Stack the tomatoes, largest one on the bottom. Arrange the watermelon. Dress the beets in the bathing vinaigrette, season with salt and pepper, and plate. Sprinkle ginger and thinly sliced radishes over the dish. Dress the purslane, and add it to the dish to finish.
Herb-Roasted Local Halibut Serves 4
8 baby artichokes 2 Tbsp. canola oil 4 cloves garlic 2 springs rosemary Salt and pepper 20 fava beans 1 zucchini 1 gold bar squash 5 lbs. Roma tomatoes 15 Toy Box cherry tomatoes 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil 4 6-oz. halibut filets 1 Tbsp. butter 1 cup tempura batter 4 squash blossoms
Tempura batter 1/2 cup flour Corn starch 1 tsp. baking powder 1/2 cup sparkling water Salt
• The Baby Artichokes - Peel the outside layers to reveal the heart. In a hot pan, roast the artichokes with canola oil, garlic and rosemary until soft. Season with salt and pepper. • The Fava Beans - Peel the favas, and cook them in boiling salted water for one minute. Let cool. • The Summer Squash - Cut the zucchini and squash into diamond shapes, and cook them just like the fava beans. • Vierge sauce - Puree the tomatoes, and strain the clear liquid from the tomatoes through a clean kitchen towel. In a saucepan over medium heat, reduce the liquid by half, and season with salt and pepper. Drizzle extra virgin olive oil. • Halibut - In a hot sauté pan, sear the fish until golden brown, being careful to not overcook. Baste with butter, garlic and rosemary. • Assemble - Pool the sauce in a bowl or shallow plate. Arrange the vegetables in the sauce, and nestle the halibut in the middle. In a bowl, mix the tempura batter’s ingredients, and dress the blossom lightly with the tempura batter. Fry in 350° oil until golden, and place on top of fish.
By Sarah Lynch on October 04, 2010 at 3:13 PM
(originally posted October 13, 2010)
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The compulsion to make art has been with us for 17,000 years. For most of that time, the foremost question asked of the artist (perhaps second only to where’s the rent) has been why do you do it ~ where does this unstoppable urge to create come from? It’s a fascinating question especially if you’ve never had the calling, but beware the loquacious artist ~ Picasso pops to mind ~ who can come up with what sounds like a dazzling answer to what is ultimately a goose chasing question.
“You might as well ask me why I get out of bed in the morning,” an artist friend once explained, to this day the most refreshingly honest answer I’ve heard. By and large, art is made by people because ~ excuse the double negative ~ they can’t not make it. Doesn’t matter whether the art they make is good or bad. In your or anyone else’s opinion. They make art because, just like getting up in the morning, there is simply no alternative for them. Even in an extreme case, like van Gogh, anybody out there really think he wouldn't have flicked the switch in exchange for a normal, but art free life? He couldn't, not didn't. And constant use of his messed up mental health by art critics the world over as an explanation of his work is not just a ruse, it’s an insult to his genius.
An infinitely more interesting question is why we need art, what we see in it that is so intrinsically different from what we see just walking around, living our lives. Surely art explains the world to us, but while we can’t argue that context is unimportant, don’t trust history alone for an answer as to why you respond so deeply to one artist’s work, while you are left cold by another’s. In any case, the historical “reasons” we make art change every few hundred (or thousand) years. Since we’ve been keeping track we’ve gone from religion (with God the Über curator) to documentation (Vermeer and the Camera Obscura onward) to a need to explore the psyche (Freud and the Surrealist Movement did a nice tango on this one). For the last few decades art has been obsessed with finding meaning in materialism ~ you can thank Andy Warhol for the soulless Jeff Koons generation. My point is that while context is important, something else is up with our fascination, our need to look at and experience art. Is it finding grace? Is it looking in the mirror? Is it seeing our worst fears exposed?
A few years ago I dragged the family to NYC to see a Gustav Klimt exhibit, 8 paintings and a 120 drawings, at the Neue Galerie, Ronald Lauder’s exquisite private museum on the edge of Central Park. Though one of the most published artists in history, endless squabbles over Klimt’s legacy has made viewing more than one painting at time nearly impossible. The exhibit did not disappoint, but what happened unexpectedly while I was there set me thinking about context in a whole new light. Starting out in poverty, Klimt trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, immediately gaining acceptance and public commissions by Emperor Franz Joseph I. But instead of following a proscribed career, in 1887 he founded the Vienna Secession, a controversial group that encouraged unconventional artistic expression, invited exhibits by foreigners, and published a manifesto that debunked the myth that any one artistic style ~ especially what was in vogue at the time ~ should rein supreme. In short, at the turn of a century that would see two world wars change the map of Europe and, not least, the direction of art forever, Klimt helped push the envelope. Even when briefly shunned by society ~ his work deemed pornographic by every quarter that had once supported him ~ he defied conventions of the day, broke from tradition and become one of the most successful artists of all time.
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Towards the end of the day I found myself standing in front of Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. The painting, which had been purchased by Lauder for $135 million ~ the highest price ever paid for a single work at the time ~ depicts a beautiful, fragile Jewish woman engulfed in a gilded, intricately decorated world that we know from history was on the precipice of extinction. Lush, subdued color draws the viewer into a universe that cossets yet distinguishes the female form from the fabric of her history. Light skims off the surface of burnished gold leaf, while intricate ornamental detail is eloquently rendered with flowing sinuous lines. Egyptian, Byzantine, Japanese influences, arguably all present, are subsumed by techniques that speak to no known style at all. What seems a sharp edged nod to a Dürer engraving catches in the light and disappears, only to be replaced by a soft tonal mosaic that brings ~ of all people ~ the neo-impressionist Seurat to mind.
As I stood there, a nine-year-old girl who had pulled away from her mother in another gallery came to stand beside me. While all these thoughts were going through my mind, she shifted uncomfortably from side to side. Like it, I asked? Yeah, she said, gnawing at her sleeve, but why is she so sad? Is she, I countered, to which the girl’s eyes, which had been darting around the canvas, looked directly into mine and held for a good five count ~ eons for a nine year old. The only thing free of her body is her mind, she replied. A non-contextual response, to be sure, but she had nailed it. In that moment, somewhere between the two of us, Klimpt’s ghost stirred.
In a few week’s time the question of context will become particularly relevant as the studio mounts Susan Preston’s “One Button Off,” the last show of this exciting and transitional year for us. Susan is one of the most well known and ~ though she would be the last to admit it ~ beloved members of our community. She and her husband Lou have created, in Preston of Dry Creek Farm and Winery, a living agrarian document that eloquently tells a deeply political story which has been instrumental in helping to inform Sonoma County’s embrace of sustainability. The edible gifts of their working farm, which exist so successfully alongside their vineyards, winery and tasting room, have also helped expand a previously limited viticultural agenda for Sonoma that was up to now scarily Napa bound. If you’ve visited the winery, walked the grounds, been lucky to share in their hospitality on any Guadagni Sunday or at any one of a number of public events they host, you cannot have missed how a refined artistic presence infuses everything they do. We live in a county where great wealth has spawned many extremely beautiful wineries, but few speak so fully of an independent artistic vision.
What we haven’t yet seen, though it has been much anticipated, is a full viewing outside the framework of their family endeavors of Susan Preston’s work as an artist.
The one-woman show will consist of 14 pieces. The hallmarks of past work will be there ~ the use of wordplay and talisman; the almost mystical transformation of the most common materials ~ but there is a great deal more here as well. A sense of universal themes with rousing, if slightly disturbing narratives. Susan Preston has what I can only describe as a lovers gaze for the animal/people that live in her world, an understanding of sensuality as distinct from gender, a belief that a battered nature is still capable of rocking us to sleep at night. This is a world where fools are kings and art has all the power of the confessional.
The greatest thing about starting with the premise that art need not document anything other than itself is that it enables the viewer to cauterize the aesthetic experience, allowing all the blood to flow back into what you have in front of you. This, at the end of the day, is really all you need to react, feel, reject, or love a work of art. While it may be hard to separate the Susan Preston for whom all actions have consequences (the better to eat you my dear) with Susan Preston, the artist, go for it. The exhibit, which opens on November 10th will run through December. Oh, and don’t forget to bring a nine year old if you happen to have one lying around.
(originally posted November 10, 2010)
Simple lines…complicated faces, the man next to me mumbled. He was talking to himself, but I followed his gaze to a poster across the underground track on the wall just beyond where we were standing, waiting for the train. London was awash in great art shows that winter but the Giotto Exhibit, which the poster was touting, was not high on my list. Religious painters are not my thing really. Yet once the stranger had drawn my attention to the image of the Madonna and child I found I could not look away. Beneath a film of soot the face of a woman who lived centuries before me glowed with incandescent dignity. I felt a better person just being in the same space with her.
I thought about that moment a few weeks back as Susan Preston and I moved through her studio on West Dry Creek looking through a collection of paintings that would comprise her one-woman show at Studio Barndiva, which opens November 10th. It may seem like a stretch to compare the work of a woman living today in a small farming community in Northern California with a man who, in wrestling with how to present the human form realistically on a flat surface, developed his own language for three-dimensional space that changed the course of art history. But that’s the thing about remarkable art: its capacity to capture the singular attributes which make us human transcend both time and providence.
Susan Preston is also an artist who begins with an extremely shallow picture plane that she fills, sparely, with ‘naïve’ characters who challenge our notion of what it means to be spiritually relevant. Whereas artists of Giotto’s time painted from a place infused with religious certainty, Preston, a woman very much of our time, poses a series of complex moral dilemmas. She does this through the development of a mixed-media/mixed-message language that is both literary and textural, resulting in work that, very much like the great Italian master, leaves us believing that the spiritual is ever present.
Take the half naked woman sheltering beneath the waves of Just Drops, Really. Is she the artist viewing history from a distance, or mother nature herself surreptitiously controlling the faceless monks as they make their Canterbury-like way down the mountain, catching rain drops any which way they can? She views the scene with a curious detachment from her self-contained envelope, neither strident nor embarrassed in her nakedness which, despite her age, radiates a rakish charm. Step away from the canvas and you are left contemplating an utterly contemporary question Giotto never had to consider: resources and who controls them. This confrontation without violence is a recurrent Preston theme, one that hints, if not confers, contemplative power.
This is especially true of her babies. These old souls, wise as Buddhas, complacent as cool California dudes, resonate without having to interact with the spare natural order that surrounds them. The caped baby in On Top of the Mountain and little boy on the back of a yak in Upward Tears are all but oblivious to the crow and farm woman who respectively share their world, yet the artist manages to convey that a powerful connection exists between them. The babies of Heaven of the Milk Tree pay little or no attention to the forbidding tree that dominates their landscape, yet their direct but unreadable expressions challenge the viewer to wonder if those dripping fruits which loom above them are filled with milk, or poison (life-giving or deadly). I Can’t Decide, the artist avers, in the title of Milk Tree’s companion piece, leaving us forced to engage with the work on yet a deeper level if we want to arrive at an answer. Which, I would hazard a guess, is precisely what she had in mind.
As for the Preston women, indecision reigns here as well. Motionless while dangerous insects creep into their hair (Hold Still), sanguine and naked in the face of traveling monks, (Just Drops, Really), even with a spike coming out of the head (We’ll Never Do That Again) they persevere with lacerating visual humor co-joined with word play used subversively in the title, or directly written onto the canvas. Whatever the animal is in One Button Off, it is surely female, and dressed for tea and sherry with Dottie at the Algonquin. With Comb Your Hair Jezebel the absent Jezebel, represented by two suspended combs, tines facing inward, answers the exhortation (by her mother?) not with words, but with a solid wall of black that vibrates affirmation in the negative. Black is often used as a conduit for Preston’s question and answer games. Take the portrait of the woman who dominates We’ll Never Do That Again, who for all the nostalgia implied by the use of the silhouette is not only disconnected from her body, but has that alarming bolt driven straight into her elegantly coiffed head. Which of the two calamities that has befallen her will “We” not do again?
Yet for all the unsettling questions that go unanswered in these paintings, they are not sad pictures, not by a long shot. With an irreverent and politically charged sense of the absurd the artist creates a strange band of characters and anthropomorphic animals that challenge our perceptions of what it really means to be alive, to be hungry. They also give us the chance to reflect on a universal truth: no sooner do we gain command of life than circumstances beyond our control will no doubt shake the ground we stand on.
This shifting sense of reality is made manifest visually with Preston’s collage technique which relies heavily on the use of distressed recycled paper. The brown paper ~ a supermarket variety which we all know so well from a lifetime of carting groceries home ~ is put through a time consuming process in which she buries, drowns, irons, and over paints it with watery gauche, the better to see through. This alchemy transforms the uniform brown into a gorgeous tonal pallet that brings to mind sun-baked earth, cracked leather, butterscotch, wheat, parchment, and sand. Under her hand, ordinary paper becomes all but unrecognizable, yet somehow retains the very essence of itself.
As wonderful as her use of paper is, it is but half a visual pas de deux that takes an archaic reference of reflective gold, once used for its resplendence and to confer both spiritual and political power, and turns it on its head. Here, beneath a cracked pavement of cut and torn paper, a silvery world beckons. The inference, that there is nothing to stop us finding magic in the most prosaic of materials (in this case chewing gum wrappers) goes well beyond the trope that all that glitters is not gold. Viewed straight on, the juxtaposition of textural organic earth tones edged with silver registers as a flat opaque surface, but the moment the viewer commits ~ an eye moving across the canvas, a shift of the body ~ light catches along the irregularly cut edges of paper igniting a grid of luminous intersecting lines, electrifying the entire canvas.
Though they have the power to haunt you for days, these are not, to my mind, personal pictures. The artist herself remains very much a mystery to the viewer. The one exception is Goodbye Pina, painted after the death of the great dance choreographer Pina Bausch. With an initial nod to Giotto’s God in the heavenly direction Pina’s body takes in her contorted dance of death, Preston then refuses to relinquish her beloved muse to an idealized heaven. Pina dances into eternity only after she has risen through an undulating landscape and crossed over into a searing black monolithic sky. Relieved of her pain and made whole again, the power of this simply drawn figure in danceflight is remarkable.
A versifier of the highest order (she could easily have been a poet) words are used to great effect throughout the pieces in One Button Off. We Killed The Wrong Twin begs two questions: our complicity, and why the wrong twin needed to be killed in the first place; Bring It Back may be a refrain from the kid issuing the baby bottles from his mouth, or again, from the artist to the viewer about our inability to feed ourselves in what Preston, in her other life as a organic farmer, knows full well are dire times. The elongated goat in I Never Told You I Was A Contortionist, clearly is, while the caped baby in On Top Of The Mountain, clearly is not. Are these titles lies, or, by being put on notice to suspect all words, are we simply being cajoled into making new meanings from them? Take your pick. By consistently sneaking up on the viewer and whispering discreet possibilities in our ear, on both an intellectual and a sensual level Susan Preston has made it clear in this collection that we are free to consider all options. Art that exhibits this level of profundity seeks not only to claim the epicenter of our attention, but creates its own morally complex force field. To the man in the train station I would say “Simple faces, complicated lives.” Much like our own.
(Originally posted November 17, 2010)
All of Healdsburg turned out for the opening night of Susan Preston's one woman show ~ One Button Off~ last Friday evening. Thanks to an insane Barndiva cocktail called The Contortionist and a surfeit of always wonderful Preston wines, no one seemed to mind the wall to wall crowds. (We apologize to any of our guests who did not get to taste the spicy chopped Mediterranean salad we served on Lou's baguettes or our crispy tempura string beans.)
It was, in short, a great night.
Best part of the evening: the party atmosphere did not stop folks from taking the time to slowly view this extraordinary show.
One Button Off will be on exhibit through the month of December in Studio Barndiva.
