Art of the Rind

(originally posted June 2, 2010) Studio Barndiva

Studio Barndiva is proud to announce the opening reception for Photographer Wil Edwards’ Art Of The Rind series, on Sunday, June 13, between the hours of 3:00 – 5:30.

The reception for Edwards’ astonishing new exhibit of limited edition color pigment prints is the first showing in our new gallery space. We are thrilled it will be co-hosted by some of America’s premier artisan purveyors.

Join Studio Barndiva and Cowgirl Creamery, Laura Chenel, Pt Reyes Cheese Company, The Fatted Calf, Cheese Plus & the vintners of Kelley & Young Wines for a stimulating and delicious afternoon celebrating the art of cheese, as never captured before.

All Tomatoes Are Not Created Equal

(originally posted June 2, 2010) Barndiva received some wonderful press last week, which we wanted to take a minute to share with you. We have been very blessed over the years with incredible newspaper, magazine and online coverage. Incredible because we are a family with little PR experience that started a restaurant in a small town knowing next to nothing about the business. When we first opened we were flavor of the month, and that went on for a long time. But even afterwards, when the occasional barbs would come, we’ve tried to put criticism, good and bad, into a context that could help us understand what diners really want, what we might be missing. It was wonderful to hear what we’re doing right this week. Barndiva is our baby. We want the world to love it.

But it hasn’t always been easy to ‘simply’ define who we are, or what we are trying to do. Barndiva was very much a ‘build it and they will come’ adventure. We wanted to make the point that it’s possible to balance cool with accessible, serious with playful. There is a famous image from the 40’s of a café on a side street near the great meat markets of Les Halles, taken in the early hours of morning. Ladies in gorgeous gowns and men in tuxedos, all at the end of a glamorous evening, are sitting elbow to elbow with big butchers in blood-stained aprons, fresh from the market. Everyone is eating and talking, smoking and drinking ~ you just know the food is delicious. What struck me about the photo was how comfortable everyone looked, despite differences in class, the odd hour of the morning, the randomness that brought them together. The photographer had captured a moment where good food and the warmth it generates had brought a totally disparate group together. The meat markets of Les Halles are long gone now, having morphed into a giant underground shopping mall in the late 70’s. It saddens me to think restaurants like the one in the photograph disappeared with it.

Imagine two ideal ends of the dining spectrum. At one end you have a great Thai (or Chinese or Indian) joint, with platters of food served in rooms that are too hot and overcrowded, where service is rushed, the waiter is perfunctory, the music (if any) is scratchy, and you don’t give a damn because the food is so delicious you want to eat it with your hands. We return again and again to that place.

Now travel to the other extreme. Lots of room between the tables. Sound is hushed. Waiters glide. Plates are composed like a Caravaggio still-life, using ingredients in ways that test what you know about taste and texture, making you think about flavor anew. A big bill is coming at the end of this meal, but if it’s been perfect (and it has to be perfect) you won’t care. You are happy to be alive and able to afford it. When you can, you will come back here too.

Barndiva doesn’t fall somewhere in the middle of these two restaurants, that wasn’t why we entered the game. Middle is not what we do best. We wanted to take the vital parts of both of these experiences and combine them, to create a business that was uniquely honest in the way it approached sourcing, preparation and presentation of food, but nevertheless managed to elevate the dining experience, to make it really special. We wanted to design a space where every piece of the room celebrated the food on the plate and the act of eating. The visceral act of eating, that was crucial for us, but so was the before and after. We wanted fresh soundtracks and soft lighting. We wanted to show some love in the service, not just professional indifference. We didn’t want stuffy. We wanted the opposite of stuffy. We have all suffered through one too many evenings of “fine dining” where a ‘church of food’ approach demands supplication, taking the air out of the room, along with any spirited conversation.

We got a lot of props those first years from so many strangers who “got” what we were trying to do, but we also found there was no way to make everyone happy. For some the music was too loud, for others the lighting to low to properly read the menus. We had very few seasoned servers the first few years, preferring to hire children of friends and neighbors who dined with us, but while it was true they didn’t come to us with tired old habits from other restaurants, their enthusiasm did not make up for their lack of experience. Great restaurant service is not instinctive, it must be learned, and in order to be learned, it must be properly taught.

One reviewer in the early days called our menu, which we had flavor profiled into categories of ‘light, spicy, comfort,’ “Barndiva’s mood food.” He wasn’t wrong ~ we all set out to dinner in a frame of mind that the restaurateur is wise to acknowledge ~ but it looked silly in print. On the other hand, the last thing we wanted to present to our guests was a polemic about our food. We put as much information as we could on the menu and hoped intelligent diners would ask questions.

And so we learned, sometimes the hard way, to improve our game and fix what we could, without succumbing to the ever-present desire to take the easy way out and just give people what they were used to getting. I’m not sure why we are so stubborn about keeping it real. Perhaps in part because, in our short but interesting lives, it was usually the things we least expected that turned out to give us the most pleasure.

The recession has upped the ante with respect to making it in this high stakes business as there are decidedly less diners out there willing to part with their money without a good reason to do so these days. But the challenge of perfecting a hybrid like Barndiva is important enough to pursue even in these trying times. Maybe it’s more important now, considering that, thankfully, the underlying politics of food sourcing is becoming more relevant to diners.

I still find it hard to reconcile that even if you put everything you love into place ~ beautiful rooms and gardens, flowers, music, candlelight, inspired drinks, delightful plates of food ~ sometimes it’s just not enough. The timing is off, or one of your key players who should know their lines flubs them. You can apologize, but this being a performance art, prone to mishap, you just have to move on. Sometimes it’s the diner who has brought the unhappiness of his day (or his life) with him to the table and nothing you do is good enough, even if it should be, even if it is. Again, you have to move on.

Through it all you try not to forget what made you get into this crazy business in the first place. Oddly for me, it’s not the nights of perfect service that bring that message home. Since Ryan joined us, and now with Tommy out front, we have many more perfect nights that ever before. But there is still that incredible frisson of not knowing what can happen when you open the doors. Back stage in the kitchen the mix is always heady and slightly dangerous ~ knives, fire, product from hundreds of mercurial purveyors in the hands of a few dozen people who are responsible for carrying out different complex pieces of a single unifying vision. Timing is crucial. So is the chain of command. While on stage in the dining room the scene is the polar opposite, romantic but charged, like a house before a party. Timing, for that first drink, between courses, again, is crucial. Mood, how to create it, how not to destroy it, is essential. Physical semaphore rules. A raised eyebrow can mean something is not quite right at the table and you need to get over there, or, wait, something is happening there you should not interrupt. In a split second, you need to know the difference.

Whatever goes wrong in the kitchen cannot be allowed to interrupt the flow of the evening out front. Everything is in play. Everyone is important. Every detail matters. Getting it all to hang together is magical when it happens, and can haunt you, for days, when it doesn’t.

We served 690 plates this past Saturday and until ten o’clock every one was presented to the diner having met chef’s exacting standards. We were rocking. This, despite the fact that the dishwasher had failed to show up for work and one of the big fridges broke down in the middle of service. Then, heading into the homestretch, with the dining room and both gardens packed, a full board of entrees to fire, inextricably, four plates slid from a shelf and landed with a terrifying crash onto the stainless steel table below, obliterating ten first courses and four desserts. I don’t know what Ryan and Tommy felt. I know what they did. They carried on.

At times like these I think of Alice in Wonderland. No one made her drink the bottle to change her size in the first place, curiosity made her do it. What she discovered in the end was that accepting risk was OK, so long as she accepted as well that growing larger and smaller goes with the territory. Changing shape without changing your essence is sometimes necessary to survive. Restaurants are a consummate collaboration, but for the key players, those of us who have chosen to crawl through the looking glass, growing larger and smaller is the skill we strive to master every night in order to create the art and the thrill of a great dining experience. The rest ~ the security, the reviews, the respect of our purveyors, our peers, and our customers ~ hopefully, will follow.

SF Gate: Michael Bauer's review

SF Eater: Barndiva Lassoes a Trio

SF Chronicle: Prime dining spots in Healdsburg

Edible Marin: Farm to Table Cuisine, pg 20

New York Times: The Place | Napa Renewed, Valley High (and Low)- Healdsburg is a "side note"

Strawberry Semifreddo

In our Kitchen

This is a true story you gotta love. We currently have not one, but TWO human incarnations of our favorite characters from the movie Ratatouille working at Barndiva ~ If you think I lie, check out the images below.

Remy, aka Francisco "Pancho" Alvarez is Barndiva's fast-as-lighting sous chef. Chef Ryan’s “adopted son,” he knows what Chef is thinking usually before he does. Linguini, aka Andrew "Drew" Wycoff is Chef Fancher's Entremetier, like his cinematic doppelganger full of heart and brimming with a beguiling coltish grace. We love them both and feel very blessed to have people of this caliber working with us.

At the End of the Day

(originally posted May 26, 2010)

Heavy coastal fog spilled over the ridges last night blanketing the orchards and burning off just after dawn in great drifts, like magic smoke. Sunlight reflected in puddles on the stony paths and dew dripped like small fat diamonds from the rosebushes. By 9:37 on Tuesday May 18, 2010, it is fair to say the world was sparkling where I stood on Greenwood Ridge.

On mornings like these I think of Victoria. At any time of the year I know I can walk outside and see her hand in something that is blooming or growing, but it is in late spring that her passion for color unfurls as if to shout, Here I am. Look at me.

The little history I know of her does not indicate she was a woman who had time on her hands for passionate pursuits, or, for that matter, leisure of any kind. She lived remotely on the top of a mountain in an age when everything you did to survive pretty much had to be done right where you stood. From morning to night she washed and wrung and hung and ironed and sewed and weeded and picked and stirred and baked and cleaned and tended the animals first thing upon waking, last thing at night. Hers was a small family for an Italian woman, just the two boys and John Cassinelli, her husband. But during the seasons when itinerate workers arrived in the valley for logging, sheep shearing, or (before prohibition) grape picking, she also fed dozens of single men who made their way up the back paths to the door of her kitchen, where she gave them a meal hearty enough to stick to their ribs for a nickel.

She never had a daughter, no one to help with the house or jamming or cooking except on those days when all the families who lived on what was then called Vinegar Ridge gathered. The Fashowers, The Pronsolinos, The Pardinis, The Fratis, The Giovanettis. At those times I imagine a house filled with laughter, pots and pans clanging, bottle after bottle of unlabeled zinfandel passing hands. Had there been womanly touches in the house once, they were long gone by the time I took possession of it. But even if one imagined frilly curtains in the kitchen or a hand loomed rug by the hearth, it would not have brightened what was a resolutely masculine house. Big and dark, with very few windows, a house built in defiance of the cold nights and the long rainy Mendocino winters. Houses with walls of glass to “open” the view are very much a modern construct, not something people who worked their land, and lived the view all day long, thought much about.

When I bought the house and the land on which Victoria had planted her gardens, thirty years had already passed since her death. I was coming from a great metropolis bringing all the mod-coms I thought I needed to survive with me ~ computers, washers and dryers, gourmet restaurant kitchen appliances. I painted the dark paneling white and hauled old iron beds out of the barn for the boys, and painted them white as well. I hired a brilliant couple who had worked in the Queen’s gardens in England, before Alan Chadwick had lured them to northern California, and had them plant formal flower borders like I was channeling Vita, (which I was) with yew hedges that they warned would take decades to reach any ‘significant height.’ I didn’t mind. ‘Significant height’ was exactly what I had come in search of.

Over that first year of innumerable mistakes, slowly but surely Victoria began to make her presence felt.

At first the connection was one of simple appreciation: for the double and single daffodils that sprung up along the road to the house, signaling the end of the rains; for the riot of Matisse colors ~ deep purples and hot pinks ~ that bloomed in what I came to call the shade garden; for the varieties of Azaleas and Camellias she had planted, some as big as small trees. Black bearded Iris, and whole fields of naturalized Ixia would come and go, sometimes making it into a vase and I would wonder when they had been planted, where the tubers or starts had come from.

I also never ceased to marvel at her practicality: like most Italian kitchens there were fruit and nut trees that spiraled out from the back door so at any moment you are only a few steps from that extra Rome needed for a pie, or fat green figs for the cheese, which Victoria had made in the cheese room down in the barn, which I brought up from the city, or from Bert at Boontberry Farms.

It's possible she saved my life once: One summer evening I was loading a heavy pump on the dolly, late to start dinner, when it slipped and the handles sprang forward, cutting a deep gash above my eye. There was not enough time to call for help but before I could grow afraid I remembered the patch of Comfrey growing on the damp side of the house. My gardener friend had thought Victoria had grown it to staunch wounds, 'an old Indian trick.' The boys rushed outside, grabbing handfuls, which we crushed and stuffed deep into the flap above my eye. The last thing I remember before passing out was Victoria's voice in my ear whispering, tell your boys they did good.

It was after that accident that I began in earnest to look for connections between us: the chicken coop had been built beneath a copse of firs where it was hidden from view. Had Victoria planned the path running to it along the ridge so she could follow her boys as they made the journey to collect eggs every morning ~ as I did mine? There was a straighter route, but one that did not afford the same view. I knew that even if we had lived at the same time in history, Victoria and I couldn’t have been more different, culturally or temperamentally, and probably would not have been friends. But that never stopped me wondering how she might resolve situations that I knew she had faced in that very same spot. A sick child in the night and no doctor within easy reach drives the same wedge of fear in a young mother’s heart, no matter what century she lives in, or to which god she prays.

The irony is that with all my education and relative wealth I was adrift in a terrain that she had mastered with no such ‘resources’. Significant height, remember? A Jeep took me to town, not a horse and buggy; when the crops failed I went to the supermarket. But what if there was suddenly no supermarket? I had circumnavigated the world, speaking in tongues, but when it came to understanding the rhythms of a simple existence on the ridge, nothing life had taught me thus far gave me the upper hand. More and more I found myself taking the measure of my day against the faint pattern of hers, as, and when, I could discern it.

For the most part, our farm was a series of outbuildings that served masculine endeavors ~ building, chopping, fixing things. You could go from one shed to another all day long and come upon old and rusted things men had touched: from the lower barn which was dark and dank, its hand hewn redwood beams soaked black by a century of tractor oil, to the wood shed with its wall full of saw blades, some as big as 8’ across, to the tool shed with its cabinets of screw boxes, chains, and hand hewn tools. I never found many things that were hers though: a potato masher with a chipped red handle, a set of framed flower prints, pillow cases from Sears Roebuck catalogue printed with tiny cowboy guns, hats and boots (which Tex loved and claimed), and a prized treasure: a framed picture of Jesus as a handsome young man who looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. I showed it to my mother when she came to visit she said oh look, a picture of Jesus with bedroom eyes.

My mother would have made friends with Victoria, of this I have no doubt. But then she had a talent for looking beyond differences in language, culture, ethnicity and religion. Differences we make into obstacles between ourselves and other people, in spite of what we know of the importance of human kinship. I do not have that talent down yet, but I'm trying. Survival is a collaborative enterprise. At the end of the day we all have another night of total darkness to consider. It comforts me knowing Victoria was up here once, thinking it all through, before me.

A Short History of the Ridge

(originally posted May 26, 2010) The first Europeans to settle in the Anderson Valley were Russian hunters and trappers who made their living selling seal and otter pelts. With the Gold Rush came a building boom in the San Francisco Bay Area and the need for lumber, which made the first growth redwood forests in Anderson Valley highly desirable. Though this was for the most part a transient work force, families that began to settle on the Ridge, mostly Italians, brought with them a rich agricultural heritage. They homesteaded on Greenwood Ridge in part because it offered high ground with a good road that connected the Port of Greenwood with Anderson Valley, a road distance of about 18 miles.

Greenwood Ridge has a very different climate from Anderson Valley proper. The broad ridgetop plateaus and benches sit at elevations of up to 1600 feet above sea level. This puts them above the persistent coastal fog that hangs in the canyons of Greenwood Creek and the Navarro River, fog which can chill lower portions of Anderson Valley in summer as well as winter. Ridge lands are drenched with sunlight, however, the close proximity of the Pacific Ocean keeps ridge top temperatures from rising--or falling to valley extremes. Occasional summer heat waves drive Anderson Valley temperatures well into the 90s, or even 100s. Ocean breezes reaching Greenwood Ridge often moderate these highs by ten degrees or more. Springtime frosts are virtually unknown to many parts of the ridge, where cold air drains down the steep slopes into the canyons below.

The first grapes were grown during 1850s but wine production was “local” until prohibition when most of the vines on the ridge were pulled out. Italians had come from areas where grapes were often grown on hillsides, so in this respect they were at home with their new topography. The climate and rich clay soils also reminded them of their native Northern Italian homeland. They painstakingly hand-cleared the wooded slopes and planted their native Vinifera grapes.

While the incredible reemergence of grapes in the valley since the 1970’s is a result of these factors, over time whole industries ~ forestry, wool, apples ~ have disappeared from our Valley. Some of those loses made sense ~ decimated forests resulting in the closing of the mills, for example, but some have cut deeper into our cultural heritage, most notably the apply industry being co-opted by Washington, Oregon and (wait for it) China. These major players can ship apples and juice (mostly syrup) cheaper and faster the Gowan's, the last commercial apple farmers at the bottom of Greenwood Ridge.

Comfrey Symphytum officinale (Borage Family)

This herb is a favorite first aid remedy. It contains a compound called allantoin, which when applied to the skin accelerates the healing of tissue and the closing of wounds. When fresh leaves or roots are applied to a wound it causes it to contract and close quicker and inhibits the opportunity for infection while minimizing scarring.)

3 Little Pigs

From the Garden

(originally posted February 24, 2010)

Writing about gardening last week I felt overwhelmed with the space restrictions of this web-blog WTF format ~ not to mention what I can fairly expect of your attention span when I suspect most of you get dozens of newsletters a week. I lay in bed wondering: Did I make it clear that while I believe growing food may be the most sensible thing you can do in the dirt, it might not, does not, have to be the trigger to get you started? I feel almost guilty with how much time and energy I’ve spent indulging my passion for growing flowers and vines over the years, but there you have it. The life cycle from seed to wilt of almost any non-hybrid flora can get me jonesin’ like almost nothing else ~ god (or Irving Penn) only knows why.

The renaissance in back yard food gardening we are witnessing is a truly powerful thing. Transforming lawns that suck water like drunks on holiday can give you something approaching ultimate security. “I can feed myself’ is probably the most empowering sentence in the English language, especially now that “I am rich” as a marker has thankfully imploded (somewhat). But. The nourishment you will get digging in your garden over the years does not necessarily have anything to do with literal sustenance. Something else is afoot but don’t look for it. Spend enough time in your garden and it. will. find. you.

When I first moved to Healdsburg seven years ago I certainly wasn’t looking for new friends. One of the few real benefits of being older is that you don’t have to truck in euphemistic social bullshit anymore, your toddlers don’t need friends and hopefully your work life is based upon what you produce, making business socializing passé. But when the eldest called me up one day a few weeks after he had followed us here from England and said “I met a woman you have to know,” followed by “she has an incredible garden,” I jumped. Why?

I have honestly never met a true plants woman I didn’t want to hang out with. Irascible, yes, opinionated, most definitely, but you always have something to talk about with farmers and gardeners. Turns out Bonnie Z was all of the above, and dragonfly wasn’t a garden so much as seven acres of rose filled heaven. As has often happened in a blessed life, the garden interests soon lead to real friendship. Same thing when I moved to the ridge. The kids were little then and I was looking for friends for them as they were going to be stuck on a mountaintop, out of the city, for the first time in their lives. I befriended the woman down the road who had just moved to Philo as well, and had two of the most unaffected charming kids I’d ever met. Over the past three decades I have watched Karen Bates grow The Apple Farm in Philo into one of the more superlative farms ~ with flowers gardens ~ in the country. She and Bonnie work their acreage full time, while I do not, but I have grown through knowing them in ways that friendships not based on shared passions are at a loss to match.

I’ve picked both their brains for the shortlist below of our must read garden tomes ~ some very odd titles perhaps but books we return to for inspiration over the years. Lucky you….lucky me.

Happy reading.

Jil’s Short List: The Metamorphosis of Plants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Well Tempered Garden Christopher Lloyd In Your Garden & In Your Garden Again Vita Sackville West Green Thoughts Eleanor Perenyi Down the Garden Path Beverly Nichols Planting Diarmuid Gavin & Terence Conran Chefs Garden Terence Conran Allotment Handbook The Royal Horticultural Society The Dry Garden Beth Chatto

Bonnie Z’s Short List: Vintage Pellegrini Angelo Pellegrini Honey From a Weed Patience Gray Cooking From the Garden Rosalind Creasey Green Thoughts Eleanor Perenyi Compost Preparations and Sprays E.E. Pfeiffer Great Garden Formulas Rodale Press Book edited by Joan Benjamin and Deborah Martin The Worm Digest

Karen’s Short List: In and Out of the Garden Sara Midda Painted Garden Sara Midda The Unprejudiced Palate Angelo Pellegrini   Everything by Penelope Hobhouse

R.I.P.

(originally posted March 10, 2010) I first met Jim Ortega when Carlisle hired him to work at her green cement table in the dragonfly portion of Studio Barndiva. I didn’t like that he never said hello or smiled when customers entered and as he was the first person they saw I worried it was affecting our new, struggling business. When our chef Jaime Dillon asked if he could work as a commis in the Barndiva kitchen, as they were roommates and the job with Dragonfly had come to an end, I don’t know why I agreed, but I’m so thankful now that I did. The Jim I came to know during his brief tenure at Barndiva was shy, not indifferent. He was hard working, diligent, soft spoken and very kind. He never let us down. While he talked then of plans to pursue baking as a career, I lost track of him, and we will never know now what he would have ended up doing with his life. The day we arrived in New York Isabel got a call from a close friend to tell her Jim had died, another victim of Sonoma County’s deadly love affair with driving while drunk. I have lived through some pretty rough times in some pretty edgy places but I have never living in a place where so many young people die so stupidly, and needlessly. They drink, ok, I get that, and they live far apart so sometimes they drive, I even get that (though I don’t condone it). What I don’t understand is why they don’t take better care of each other. Jim was a passenger in the car that flipped on a dark winding road to Graton, taking him out but leaving his driver, a “friend,” with a lifetime of guilt. He leaves wonderful parents whose love for him was truly remarkable. And he leaves us all wondering what he would have made of his life, had he lived it. This has got to stop. If anyone out there has a good, effective idea to raise the consciousness that will prevent DUI’s in our community, let us know. We will help you in any way we can. RIP Jimmy.

Chef Ryan's basic pasta recipe

Pasta dough 1.25 lb “00” flour 18 egg yolks 3 large eggs 1 tablespoon milk 1 tablespoon olive oil Place flour on a cutting board, making a well in the middle. Add eggs, milk, olive oil. With a fork whisk the egg mixture slowly incorporating the flour. Knead the dough until completely smooth. Let rest at least 20 min, then roll Eggs for our pasta sourced from our friends at Quivera and Earlybirds Place.

Anglotti Pasta~ Celery Root Filling

Anglotti Celery Root Filling

2 large Celery Roots 2 tbsp unsalted butter 2 tbsp minced shallot 2 tbsp garlic confit 1 C white wine 2 C cream salt/ pepper/sugar

Peel the celery root and dice into small pieces. Heat the butter in a medium sized sauce pan. Add shallot & garlic. Sweat until translucent & then add celery root. Deglaze with white wine and reduce. Pour cream over celery & simmer on low heat until soft. Season with salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar. Blend until smooth, then chill. Place in a piping bag

Valentine's Day at Barndiva

(originally posted February 3, 2010)

The most amazing Valentine's present I ever gave or received was the very same gift: a healthy, unbelievably gorgeous 8 lb baby daughter born February 14th, 1989.

You can't plan something like that. Like love itself, it just happens.

Even when you aren't blessed with cosmic chance, Valentine's can still feel like shooting craps. Unlike birthday or Christmas prezzies, Valentine's Day is nothing less that a litmus test on what got you to love that person in the first place. It should be a present that no one else IN THE WORLD would have the insight to surprise them with.

The secret to figuring that out has something to do with really paying attention, a fact I was reminded of last week when a well dressed gentleman came into the shop searching for a Valentine's gift for his wife of 44 years. After roaming around lifting glass vases, cradling wooden bowls, holding jewelry aloft to catch the light, he marched up to the sales counter carrying, of all things, a huge bolt of un-dyed hemp.

I had to ask him why. I love the hemp we sell ~ beautiful product, incredible story ~ but a bolt of limp fabric doesn't exactly jump out at you for it's color, form or narrative the way, say, a nice painting, a wire sculpture, or a 100 years old butterfly collection does. (hint hint)

Turns out he didn't even know it was hemp. Had no idea and didn't even care what his wife was going to do with it, if anything at all. I just love the feel of it, he said. She will too. The woman sees through her fingers.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh once wrote that "...small emotions are the great captains of our lives." A pretty good thought to remember as you head out to forage an object of desire for your sweetheart this Valentine's Day.

Barndiva Gardens

(Originally posted February 17, 2010)

I was 16 when I read Andrew Marvel’s poem ‘The Garden’ and the line “to a green thought in a green shade” jumped out at me. It was the first inkling I ever had that gardens were somehow different from other spaces. Living in big cities all my life, it had honestly never occurred to me. And while I did not seriously start tilling the soil until I bought a fruit & nut farm on a ridge in Philo 15 years later, even that huge commitment (I was at the time living 500 miles away) came more from a desire to have my boys run wild and free than to grow my own food, or fill my rooms with flowers. Well into my 20’s the only edible thing I had ever tried to grow was a $1.29 pot of basil and I watered that sucker to death. Oh, grasshopper, you have so much to learn.

But as is so often the case in life, sometimes the things we think we choose to sustain us are really things that choose us, like a mutt looking for a master so it can find somewhere to call home. Even well into my 30’s, living in Britain & only returning to the farm in Philo every summer, owning a garden ~ or rather having it own me ~ was more a literary pursuit than a life’s commitment. It was a casual interest in the affaire between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West that lead me to read Vita’s old gardening columns she had written for the Observer the last fifteen years of her life. I was charmed with the confessional, confidence building voice she used to describe this world that held such unparalleled delights. Vita moved plants around like they were so much furniture in a drawing room. She made mistakes each season but took them in stride, and did not find any contradiction in a natural world that was both ruthless yet forgiving. The first time I visited her estate at Sissinghurst I knew I had found a road map of what it might be like to create art out of nature. That it would take the rest of my life to become good at it was not beside the point. It was the point.

If you have yet to fall into a garden’s spell, there is no time like the present. Do not be dissuaded by how little you know or how small your plot…Get your hands dirty. Fill your lungs with the loamy smell of soil. Order seed catalogues and leave them by your bed. Talk to strangers in the nursery that you find hanging around plants you think you might like to grow. Read gardening journals by great writers. Never become competitive ~ gardening is not a sport. The only thing you are competing against is the voice inside your head that wants to know what’s taking so long. Tell it to shut up. Unlike everything else in life where time really is stacked against you, in your garden the return of a season brings with it an abiding optimism that instant gratification can never give. Gardens are Valium in landscape form, bringing with them Marvell’s “delicious solitude,” where the mind, “withdraws into it’s happiness,” and the world, and your role in it, will fall into place.

Happy Digging.

Rocky Ridge, Rising

(originally posted April 21, 2010) At a bend in Hwy 1, a mile before the bar at Rocky Point where they will serve you Red Hook in a perfectly chilled glass, there is a long pullout beneath a row of Cypress that marks the trailhead of Garrapata State Park.  On a clear day the vista out over the ocean on this part of the road to Big Sur is sublime.  But while it may feel counterintuitive to turn your back on the undulating hills that fall gently down to the sea, rare pleasure awaits you.

Cross the Hwy and follow the path past an old tin shed, which will bring you into an open sage brush chaparral that marks the beginning of the Rocky Ridge and Soberanes Canyon loop.  The ocean will be for the rest of the year, but these rain drenched meadows, with their profusion of spring wildflowers that gently climb to ancient redwood groves banked by carpets of wild sorrel will be gone by the end of May.

I am walking the trail this extraordinary spring day with two women I have known and loved for most of my life ~ one is an artist whose work I have come to Carmel to bring back to Studio Barndiva; the other a botanist who has made study of native plants a focus the last ten years of her life.  While not a complete idiot  when it comes to native plants (though close) the abundance of flora makes me feel as if I have arrived at a really great party to be suddenly surrounded by incredibly beautiful people whose names I do not know.  I want to know all of them.  At my prompting my friend starts to reel off a rhythmical litany of plant names as if she had swallowed the Jepson Manual: yellow bush lupine, Indian paintbrush, lotus, ceanothus, woodland star, blue-eyed grass, yerba buena, skullcap, morning glory, monkey flower, owl cover maidenhair ~ listening as we walk it strikes me that most of us live and die without any real knowledge of the native plants that surround us.

We ford Soberanes Creek and begin to climb a staircase of redwood treads embedded in the side of the mountain. They stop, start again, then disappear completely as we progress along the narrow path now 20' above the rocky fulminating creek. Between the overgrown vegetation, the sun slaking through the trees and the sound of rushing water, I have a sudden déjà vu of another walk I took oh so many years ago through the jungle of Tikal.

One still had the sense in those early days after the discovery of the great Pre- Columbian Mayan city of pulling back an ancient green veil on a civilization that had completely vanished from the earth.  Many of the temples were only half uncovered; climbing them you would suddenly find a thick vine the only thing keeping you from a perilous drop into the dense stone covered forest below.

In no way would I compare a hike in Garrapata, where we've just passed a shirtless guy in a Raiders cap, with exploring the ruins in Tikal, where I came upon a Jaguar early one mist heavy morning.  But unless something is done in the next ten years to counter the effects catastrophic cut backs have had on our state and national parks, it won't take long before the trails through the forest here in Garrapata, the public trails in every natural woodland across our great state, will ultimately disappear.  The forest does not wait to reclaim it's own back.

At the start of the recession I was not surprised to hear that Hendy Woods State Park, which sits on the Navarro River just below our farm, would be closed for camping for the foreseeable future. I remember thinking ok, if money must be reserved for more essential services, so be it. Yet I also remember thinking how shortsighted the closures were. Here we are telling families to pull in their belts and get ready for a rough ride financially, then closing the public campgrounds ~ beautiful and affordable places they could bring their families. Public campgrounds and maintained trailheads are essential if we hope to teach the next generation how important it is to protect our wild lands. Is this what Arnold really meant by Hasta la Vista Baby?

The truth is, we are not born with habits like hiking and camping. Great hikers usually had parents, grandparents (or great friends) who shared that experience with them when they were young. Almost always it provided a defining encounter they never forgot, and have longed ever since to recover. As to the fundamental importance of a parks system that builds a collective national experience, if you haven’t seen Ken Burns’ ‘The National Parks ~ America’s Best Idea,’ I urge you to so ~ it is an incredible series. Besides rightly reinstating Teddy Roosevelt to the great domestic presidents club, it also makes a compelling argument that as significant as cities were to the development of the American character, our indomitable spirit as a country of great ideas began in the great outdoors.

Like most everything else in life we need to make time to explore them. Plunge off a back road with someone you love this spring ~ mind the poison oak ~ and explore forest trails or chaparrals while they are in their glory. Hiking is free. It will replenish your soul. It’s that rare experience that is convivial yet satisfies a solitary longing.

The night before our walk my friend the painter and I had ended up at the ocean at sunset with hundreds of other folks. The scene was incredibly mellow ~ we were at the end of the first warm spring day, two old friends bantering back and forth as dogs barked, lovers canoodled and little children ran through the breaking waves screaming with joy. On the way back to the car in the failing light, I took a shot of shoe prints in the fine white sand because I liked the patterns they made ~ they seemed extra meaningful as we had been talking at length about a series she was doing for the Studio inspired by the cave paintings of Lascaux.

Looking at that shot now, however, the memory of my forest walk still fresh in my mind, another thought occurs to me. What seemed so distinct through the lens of my camera, what I was able to capture for posterity, was actually incredibly fragile. It would be long gone by morning, blown away, or walked over by new feet carrying lovers to the edge of the sea.

If you ever had trouble answering the age old philosophical question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” try taking it out of the metaphysical realm for a moment, think about it socially, and emotionally, and reconsider your answer. Then go find your boots.

Links to: Garrapata Trail Lake Sonoma trail Jepson Manual Ken Burns The National Parks ~ America’s Best Idea Hendy Woods

Escabèche!

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

Bellwether Gnocchi with Rainy May Vegetables

Barndiva's Mother's Day Celebration May 9, 2010

(originally posted May 12, 2010)

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee ~William Shakespeare

From all of us at Barndiva, we want to thank the beautiful women who graced our dining rooms with their babies, young children, grown children and grandchildren...

The Barndiva Lounge and the Gallery Diningroom were overflowing with Dragonfly roses, knowing looks, delightful banter and genuinely smiling faces.

Thank you for entrusting us with your Mother's Day celebration.

Dungeness Crab Bouillabaisse

I see the moon (and) the moon sees me

(originally posted May 5, 2010) A few weeks ago, on the first real day of Spring, we co-hosted a baby shower in the Barndiva gardens for good friends of ours.  I was busy shooting in the kitchen for most of it, but every now and then I gazed out the window to enjoy the laughter rising from the long table we'd set beneath the still bare mulberry trees.  Four other women at the party ~ all from Healdsburg ~ were pregnant as well.  We are experiencing a veritable baby boom here in our little town.  At the end of the afternoon the expectant mother gave everyone small beeswax candles that we were told to light when she went into labor.  It was a thoughtful gift from a beautiful young woman about to become a new mother.

Seeing the candle on the counter a few days later, however, triggered a complex of emotions.  I'd just come from a meeting with Chef about our Mother's Day menu, which is probably why I paused to consider the rapid progression my thoughts took when I looked at the candle.  In the span of a few seconds I managed to move from 'all warm and fuzzy' ~ envisioning a magic circle of friends all spread out across town in our candlelit rooms, by virtue of our collective energy becoming a force field of positivity unto ourselves, to 'self involved' ~ what if no one called to tell me she'd gone into labor, I'd be left out of the magic circle, to 'worried' ~ what if her labor was a long one and the candle didn't last through the birth?

Sanguine to controlling to fearful ~ this is my MO when it comes to motherhood in general.  Since the day after my first child was born and the miracle of oxytocin had not worn off, until yesterday, when I spoke to youngest, in college 6,000 miles away, I go through the same personal zeitgeist: from happiness (to hear their voices) to suspicion (what do they want/need) to dread (are they ok? Is something wrong? What's happened?). I usually get back to happiness when they aren't around ~ thankfully love is my default setting with all three of them ~ but honest to God, nothing has ever screwed with my head like being a mother.

Fascinating subject, motherlove. And skewed quite differently depending upon whether we look at it from the viewpoint of the child, or the mother. I’ve been both and find the second half of the equation ~ being a parent ~ infinitely more fraught, if only because of the power it conveys which you are obligated to administer during their formative years. Being a parent is an early Bob Dylan song that you want to make wonderful sense out of, but ultimately mystifies you. Perhaps because I have the feeling I’ll never get it right, or that there is no right, or that what’s right one minute is capable of being turned on its head the next. And what’s really interesting (bordering on unsettling) is the fact that while we all seem to approach parenting with our own unique set of skills and expectations, at the end of the day there is a startling verisimilitude to motherhood, a DNA set of emotions that is able to transverse both culture and history. It seems to be rooted in the unlimited potential for nirvana or disaster our children’s very existence brings to bear ~ which always lies just beneath the surface.

As to being the child, while not confusing (you have after all, someone to blame or thank outside of yourself) it is infinitely more complex, capable of building your character, or destroying it. Whether you believe in what Freud called the "unshakable optimism" of knowing you are loved despite your faults, or lean more toward Sylvia Plath's visceral underbelly of "you are always there, 
tremulous breath at the end of my line, curve of water upleaping,
to my water rod, dazzling and grateful, touching and sucking,” motherlove, or lack of it, is the one true thing we really never get away from. Besides death.

Here’s my theory: If you’re very lucky in life, you get the mother you need, the one that makes you believe in yourself, but also never ceases to kick you in the ass when you need it most. But even if you aren’t lucky, and get an indifferent one, or dreadfully unlucky and get the awful abusive kind, chances are you will never really give up wanting her to be a mother of the first order, the one who truly loves you. That singular focus of attention is kismet to our souls from the moment we are born, controlling to a large extent our perception of ourselves, a divining force in molding our temperament. Live with it.

Picasso, who used his mother’s name throughout his life, depicted the relationship in the painting First Steps as one of interconnecting power surges, an impossible geometry that fights against itself, yet in its unnatural construction manages to be wholly organic. Berthe Morisot, on the other hand, painted as if she accepted the planned obsolescence whereby success can only be achieved when the child no longer needs the mother. The queen is dead. Long live the queen.

The first time I saw Berthe Morisot and Her Daughter Julie Manet, I related to the transitional use of color ~ the steely gray of the mother’s hair seemed to pour into the daughter’s dress, turning it a luminescent blue ~ a life affirming color. Looking at the same painting now, I can clearly see what I missed: the figure of the mother has had the life sucked out of her! The innocence of the daughters direct gaze does not negate her rising dominance over the smaller older woman, whose stare is in stasis, the heavy folds of her dress rooting her to the foreground, pulling her downward. And what’s with the colorless hand that looks like a cadaver’s? How had I missed that before? Perhaps because I was not yet a mother when I first viewed the painting.

Thankfully, my own experience does not jive with Morisot’s (in this work.) While there have been plenty of times I felt the rigors of parenting sucking the air out of the room, my children have more often than not been the only thing which kept me going long after I wanted to quit. Not because of their belief in me ~ I’m one of the lucky ones who thankfully did have a mother to do that ~ but, quite simply, because they make me laugh. We share the same sense of humor. When we are all together and the stars align we are capable of creating that rarest of human communities: a family that speaks the same language, shares the same values (most of which came from previous generations), trades in goodwill, and draws its strength from a deep well of loyalty. It's not always easy to get there however. Sometimes the stupidest things can derail our best intentions. While some families seen to get there by just hanging out, I suspect most of us have to work really hard at it.

When I was at ULCA as an undergraduate I took a seminar with the great L.A. Times book critic Robert Kirsch. Walking to class one day we got to talking about family and he dropped into the conversation, quite casually, that while he had more than one child, he really only liked one of them. How can you not like your kids, I asked, shocked to the core. You have to love them, he replied, there’s nothing written you have to like them. And, he added, if you make that a condition of your love, you saddle them with not being free to find out who they really are, without the judgment of whom you expect them to be constantly hanging over them. They are their own people, or should be, he concluded, and at the end of the day that’s what you need them to be. His use of the word ‘need’ instead of ‘want’ wasn’t intended to be pejorative, but empowering. Kirsch was very careful with language. I took note.

A lot has been said about the commercialization of Mothers Day that I agree with, but in the end I think it’s a wonderful opportunity that should not be lost, a chance to say thank you to someone who gave you life and, by hook or by crook, whether for a moment or a lifetime, had a hand in keeping you alive. Whether you actually say I love you or just pass the ketchup doesn’t matter. So long as you don’t use the time to settle old grudges or try and change the family dynamic, there is joy to be found in the quiet moments of time just spent together, especially if you listen to them echo. There is truth~ if not god~ to be found in the details, because details are what ultimately define us. Not the grand gesture, but a touch, a conversation, a knowing look. And hey, in case you need it said out loud, this holds true even if your mother is physically gone now, like mine. That’s the beauty of this profound connection. I spoke to my mum just this morning. Good thing, too. She told me not to get too heavy on the Freud.

There is a wonderful poem by Shamus Heaney that ends

So while the parish priest at her beside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying, And some were responding and some were crying, I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives Never closer the whole rest of our lives

Links: Dragonfly Floral Michael Recchiuti Chocolates