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The first official week of summer, this is what we are.....

(originally posted June 30, 2010)

 

doing early in the morning...... Lukka's ideal, relaxing, magical day in Summer is a journey down the Russian River between Healdsburg’s Memorial Bridge and Wohler Bridge - an undeveloped, eight mile stretch of clean river that boasts some of the most exquisite and diverse landscapes in Sonoma County.

It's an easy paddle which rewards you with face time with herons, ospreys, turtles, egrets, and Lloyd the bald eagle who lives just after mile 2. Last week Lukka clocked 55 miles! Mondays are reserved for taking groups down the river (whoever shows up) with large coolers filled with copious amounts of delicious food and drink. Russian River Adventures SOAR canoes are inflatable, more stable, and extremely comfortable for lounging . . and owners Larry and Amanda will pick you up at the end of your journey, take care of the boats, and return you safely and most contentedly back to your car!

inspired by... We have more and more vegetarians dining at Barndiva, along with vegans and gluten sensitive guests. It's a misnomer to think that just because you eliminate proteins you lose a discerning palate or the desire for creative options when you dine out.

Ryan is loving re-visiting the vegan cookbook Raw, right now, because of the amazing array of color on every plate. Always a firm believer that people eat with their eyes first, color is a key trigger for him ~ whenever we get new art in the gallery he is immediately drawn to the most vibrant work. Now that summer is finally here he is looking forward to maximizing flavor without heat. "The images for these recipes remind us what bright and fresh looks like. They celebrate in every 'sense' that vegetables are still alive when they reach your plate."

 

pouring... After this rainy spring we are all ready to enjoy some crisp, lean Italian white wines while basking in the late afternoon sun in the gardens. Tommy has snagged us a few cases of Orvieto "Terra Vineate" from Palazzone, which has everything one would expect from great Central and Northern Italy whites: bracing acidity and minerality coupled with a subtle extra layer of opulence and glycerin. Palazzone produces inexpensive yet highly sought after blends of Umbria's indigenous varietals (Procanico, Verdello, Grechetto, Drupeggio and Malvasia Toscana) the very same ones used to make wine centuries ago by the Ancient Romans and still coveted for their remarkable golden hues and intense flavours. The traditional Cepage is unique in that Palazzone includes a high percentage of Grechetto and Procanico which gives the wine an interesting note of hazelnut oil as well as distinct spiciness. The best part for last: Organically farmed, hand harvested, indigenous yeast fermentation, bottled unfined and unfiltered...and only $10 by the glass in the Lounge.

mixing up... On Wed we hosted a small mixer, one of several Barndiva will be throwing over the summer to say thank you to wineries, concierges, and wedding planners that have supported us. It was a great time to kick start our summer cocktails. New bartender Stephan came up with a wonderful libation for the coupe using pineapple sage from the gardens which we bought a few seasons back at one of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center's plant sales. He paired it with lashing of gin, sparkling water, yellow chartuse and St. Germain. For a peek at our specialty cocktails, check out our cocktail menu...but you better hurry as it's about to change again as more summer soft fruit starts to ripen.

doing with our kids... When 2 year old Teagan isn't searching for the perfect spot to go berry picking in Sonoma County, she's heading North this week to Portland. This summer's trip is to cheer on the kids from Girls Rock Camp. Her aunt, Marisa Anderson, is the Creative Director for this program which runs throughout the summer and teaches girls (ages 8-17) how to form bands, write original songs and play instruments. This spectacular program started in Portland, but now offers camps throughout the US and Europe.

 

jamming... Turns out our bartender Sam Levy not only has a jones for jam but an incredible talent for making it as well! He will be working with Jil and Chef Ryan all summer as we buy up slightly soft or less than perfect fruit to wave our hot wand over. Voila, come winter we will still be eating peaches, apricots, berries...summer fruit! When apricots from Coombs Ranch showed up this week (with just a little frost damage but great flavor) Sam got busy and came up with a smooth chutney with a hint of brandy, fresh ginger, and allspice ~ perfect to serve with our Artisan Platters. He is also working on a jam for Sunday Brunch with vanilla bean and carmelized Meyer lemon rind, and a cherry jelly which uses apricot and peach juice. Sam caught the jamming bug from his mum, who caught it from hers. At their house some days they have three generations going strong, using fruit from their own trees. We are thrilled to have a jam fanatic in the house this summer.

proud to see in print... Great article in this month's Garden Design Magazine which features our own Mick Kopetsky and our great friend Bieke Burwell. Mick, who owns Mix Gardens with Bieke, is one of Barndiva's main vegetable suppliers and a dedicated Fork & Shovel member. He also recently took over Healdsburg Landscape Materials down the road which supplies many of us with great soil mixes and river rock ~ We know this because we just finished spreading about 12 yards in the new Studio Gardens. Great to see his accomplishments in print. We are thrilled his muse Bieke is back from London for the summer.

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Jimmie Johnson in the house

(originally posted June 23, 2010)

We don't want to brag, but we can't help being totally jazzed that the day after a superlative (his words) 4 hour dinner party at Barndiva, Jimmie Johnson had a incredible Nascar win at Sonoma's Infineon Raceway on Sunday.

Johnson, who Chef Ryan cooked for at the French Laundry, sent a rave review back to the kitchen after the meal, which he shared with 12 of his friends at our beautiful new Family Table in the front patio. Though we obviously can't take any credit for the win, we are chuffed we played a small but delicious part in the good spirits he took with him to help start his engine.

Our lovely hostess Gracie was there celebrating Father's Day with her dad to cheer Jimmie on.

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Waiting for Scarlett Johansson

(originally posted June 23, 2010) Sofia Coppola made a sweet little film a few years back called Lost in Translation, where an incandescent Scarlett Johansson meets a morally exhausted has-been actor played by Bill Murray in a hugely impersonal skyscraper hotel in Japan. Needless to say, the terrain they find themselves lost in is not just Japan.

I’m thinking of this movie on Wednesday, standing in the middle of Target in Rohnert Park, when it suddenly occurs to me I’m in the remake playing the Bill Murray role, with Target standing in for Japan. Scarlett Johansson is nowhere in sight. A good number of exceedingly large people are however, gliding around me with shopping carts, some motorized, as I stand stock still with what feels like a classic Bill Murray look on my face ~ bemused, baffled, slightly demented.

The carts have no trouble navigating around me because the aisles are inordinately wide. Wide enough to swing a cat. They are also very clean. In fact the entire enormous store, as big as side by side football stadiums, feels like one big clean country. I know I am lost in more ways than one, and I’m pretty sure I don’t speak the language.

The journey which lead me here actually started on Tuesday in another Target down the road in Santa Rosa. My good friend Bonnie Z and I left Healdsburg just after nine heading for a nursery to buy chef flats of basil and peppers for our gardens. As I also needed umbrellas for the front dining patio, and Bonnie needed a large grill for Dragonfly, we agreed on a ‘brief’ foray to Target and Costco to see if mega store America couldn’t fulfill our needs.

Contrary to popular opinion, I am not a shopping snob. I will shop anywhere when the mood strikes, the Salvation Army, Ross, Barneys, Bergdorfs ~ bring it on. My usual litmus test for purchase is that sweet spot where beauty meets quality. But since I opened the restaurant and the gallery and began in earnest to meet the people who grow my food and make things I choose to sell, more and more, before I make any purchase I find myself wondering how an object came to be sitting before me in the first place.

Like most of us I can play fast and loose with the word ‘need,’ when desire strikes, rendering its true definition useless. How many pairs of shoes does a woman really ‘need?’ As far as I’m concerned it’s an unanswerable question, right up there with angels on the head of a pin. The frustration around sourcing a decent American-made umbrella every summer has lead me to make peace with the fact that until such a time as I start hand-looming them, Chinese umbrellas live in my world. It was the name right next to the words "Made in China" that took me by complete surprise.

If you haven’t been following the sad tale of what happened to Smith & Hawken, once one of the most wonderful companies in America, here it is in a nutshell: In 1979, Dave Smith and Paul Hawken opened a shop catering to organic farmers in Mill Valley in order to sell beautifully designed, handmade English gardening tools. That they were equally mindful of ecological and social justice issues made them visionaries for their time in developing what we now call a sustainable business model. The shop grew in its product line, and then into many shops and then into a corporation. But it held the line with its original ethical model. I still have the English bench (same one as Kew Gardens!) I bought from the flagship store. It has survived 28 years of storms and intense summer heat, yet managed to age to a beautiful smooth gray patina, yet with an integral strength which is rare for a garden bench (except for the ones in Kew Gardens!).

Smith retired after a few years to open a bookstore in Ukiah, but Paul Hawken soldiered on at the company, in addition to writing a number of significant books on his journey trying to create a mindful but profitable business in America. So far, so good. Then, in 1993 when Paul Hawken retired, the company began to change hands. It went first to a retail conglomerate that expanded the line and eventually went bankrupt, then was bought in receivership by a private investment company that quickly unloaded it to the Scotts Miracle-Gro conglomerate. Scotts Miracle Gro is a corporation at the top of a merchandising food chain quaintly known as "Grow and Kill" (to us layman, that means a company that sells gardening and chemicals). The irony of this purchase was not lost on anyone, except perhaps the GM at Miracle Gro, who blithely told the SF Chronicle that his company had only purchased Smith & Hawken to “make us seem more green than we are.” As if that wasn’t unintentionally droll enough, he concluded, “We want to enter categories less chemically oriented and much more female."

The first thought that occurred to me as my hand hovered was that perhaps the fact that Smith & Hawken had landed at a company known for using great design to move merchandise wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Hadn’t great design been an indisputable part of Smith & Hawken’s original précis? Isn’t getting companies to acknowledge that things need to be designed well before they are sold a first step toward the redemption of production? The back-story on Target lines like Michael Graves and Issac Mizrahi is that their contacts with Target saved these iconic designers ~ both of whom had expanded too fast and had lost (or were about to lose) control of their creative empires. Designers need to keep working if they are to survive but it's valid to ask if this kind of pseudo design ultimately does more harm than good. It wasn't a question I was going to be able to solve with this one purchase however, so with a 'what difference can two umbrellas make' shrug I slung them in my basket, paid for them, and Bonnie and I got the hell out of dodge.

What happened next was a perfect ‘you can run but you can’t hide’ experience. I had not bought enough umbrellas. This necessitated yet another trip to Santa Rosa the next day, where I was belatedly informed that during the night gremlins (my word) had crept into the store and fiendishly marked all the remaining umbrellas in stock on close-out to make room for back to school gear (in June?) Since that morning they had been selling like hotcakes ~ that’s Target shoppers for you the salesgirl helpfully informed me ~ and they were all gone. Except for the floor model which they agreed to sell me. That’s when I made my fatal mistake. I asked if she might check to see if any other Targets had more umbrellas.

What commenced after that I am not completely sure. Target strategically places a popcorn machine at every entrance to their stores, so the first thing you smell when you pass through their doors is comforting. It’s a clever marketing ploy to make you feel relaxed, to slow time, and now that I’ve subjected myself to it I can attest to the fact that it really works. For the next forty minutes, life as I knew it went into suspended animation. I suspect this is where millions of Americans get lost in our country, some of them forever. The longer I waited the more I felt compelled not to give up and thus squander the time I had already wasted.

They located the last Made-in-China Smith & Hawken umbrella in Northern California, also a floor model, down the highway in the Rohnert Park store. This meant time spent in horrendous traffic because THEY WILL NEVER FINISH WIDENING HWY 101, then involved getting lost looking for the right shopping center. I found it but then had to park a mile away because, incredibly, all the spaces in all the rows directly in front of the store were marked handicapped. There simply cannot be that many handicapped people in Rohnert Park, can there? According to a clerk I asked once I finally reached the front door, if you count obesity as a handicap there certainly are.

Helpful as he was on this issue, neither he nor three other team members could tell me where Backyard World transitioning to Back To School World was located. So I began to wander, more Andy Warhol than Moses, but still a woman on a mission. I did not find umbrellas. I found: a row with 14 different toaster models (every single one made in China), two rows of shiny trash cans (ditto), picture frames, pickled things, Target sheets, hampers, rings for the shower, and row upon row of plastic this and that (ditto ditto ditto). I contemplated for far too long a close-out sale that included some very attractive lamp shades. I steered clear of the sections I knew were outright wrong ~ food and drugs ~ though by now the word drugs was starting to sound pretty attractive. It wasn’t until I found myself in the George Foreman aisle for the THIRD time that things started to unravel. I love George, but I do not want to be alone with an entire row of his grills again in this lifetime. Where had I gone wrong? I knew better then to get lost in translation.

I knew better because for me, at this point in my life, there is no middle ground left for pragmatic decision making when it comes to what I purchase and what I eat. I don’t have a large family to feed anymore. I know too much about how things are made. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that when an object like a toaster is put together on the floor of a Chinese factory, then packaged and shipped and tracked and trucked and stocked on the aisle of your megastore of choice, it shouldn’t cost “only $12.99.” Something is seriously wrong with that equation. If you have any doubts about where our greedy dependence on cheap fossil fuel driven products has lead us, turn on your TV and take another good look at the oil burbling up from the depths of the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, it’s possible that the aroma of fresh hot popcorn or even Scarlett Johansson might have saved me from this dénouement, which I know full well will bring a world of tsuris for me in the future. The thing is, only a few aisles away from where they pop their corn at Target, the lovely smell dissipates completely. From there on out, as far as you can smell, all you get when you sniff the air is the vaguely synthetic odor of guilt.

Links: Paul Hawken has a number of wonderful books really worth checking out.

Go Local is a Sonoma based co-op that supports local businesses and runs a number of exciting educational programs throughout the year. Join them!

Consider alternatives when you make purchases, especially big ones for your home. Friends recently demurred buying a foreign made fridge and bought a Sun Frost instead, beautifully made right here in Arcata California. They love it.

Or how about giving Pottery Barn a pass the next time you need dinnerware. Most of the best designs you see in catalogues like Crate and Barrel are stolen from small but talented designers. For gorgeous pottery that will grow old with you check out Aletha Soule, whose studio is right down the road in Sebastopol.

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Art of the Rind

(Originally posted June 16, 2010)

We want to thank Cheese Plus, The Fatted Calf, Cowgirl Creamery, Pt Reyes Blue, Kelley & Young Wines and Dragonfly Floral for making our opening reception of Wil Edwards Art of the Rind such a perfectly delicious event.

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Why do they call it Father’s Day when it’s really Dads we honor?

(originally posted June 16, 2010)

I’m not being specious, there really is a difference between the two, one that goes deeper than a name. It’s Dad we will take out for brunch or dinner this Sunday, not Father. Just like it’s Dad who bought us ice cream when Mom told him we’d had enough sweets for the day. Taught us to ride a bike, then a car, for which he paid the insurance, and repairs when we had the inevitable accident forgetting in an instant all he taught us. It’s Dad who imparted a sense of security to our early lives, even if all he did was be a solid, sleeping presence down the hall.

I love dads, I love the ones I know and the idea of dadness in general. The sporty kind who shows up at school meets, the pedantic, stick in the mud kind, who, it turns out, said a bunch of stuff we try to live up to every day now that we are adults. The tinkers, the thinkers, the ones who cook, even if badly, when no one else is around to put dinner on the table. I especially love the ones who try and fail at a multitude of things in their lives, but hang in there, even when we realize, years later, that they must have been dying inside at how hard success, and sometimes just living, turned out to be.

Fathers, on the other hand, bring a whole different game to the playing field. Check it out: we have Father Time, Father Christmas, the Father of our Country (which in our case is George, but every country has one) and not last, certainly not least, Our Father Who Art In Heaven. Fathers are the big theme winners in the game of life: Time, History, Power, and Religion ~ they hold all the cards. Even old Saint Nick (his other name) the jolly, seemingly benevolent one, is a potential game changer if he deems your behavior warrants it.

These are powerful masculine entities who have controlled history and held sway over every big decision we’ve made in the civic realm from Plato on. So what compels us to call them by a declarative name which by rights should be reserved for the real flesh and blood guy who taught you to throw a soft ball? Where did the practice of calling them Father come from? Does it make the King more user friendly, less likely for us to overthrow? Strengthen our connection to God in a way that deepens it? For whose gain? Forgive me for asking these impertinent questions. One of the great things I learned from my dad was to be unceasingly suspicious.

My dad grew up in an era when good and evil were clearly delineated, where honor, not wealth, was the defining characteristic of a man. He’d gotten all the way through to his mid-30’s a bachelor, and if his life was not completely carefree ~ he supported his mother, four sisters, and a brilliant but invalid brother ~ he enjoyed a quintessential New York high life where Sinatra was the soundtrack and even dames wore gloves to dinner. An exceedingly handsome man ~ Clark Gable with less hair is how my mother once described him ~ while he played all night, he always returned home to his mama (and responsibility) in the morning. The age of Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll in which he was forced to raise his children must have presented epic questions for him, and no small amount of frustration. Short tempered when faced with what he could not control, he barked a lot around the house. But there was no bite to the man when it came to his daughters. My dad’s whole raison d’etre was to see his daughters succeed ~ a goal which required enormous sacrifices that I’m not sure he was ever amply rewarded for. That he didn’t do it for the glory made him a perfectly normal dad and totally terrific.

Which didn’t stop me from being disappointed in him when I was growing up. Historical archetypes have their doppelgangers in popular culture in a way that affects us deeply. I secretly wanted a father just like Nancy Drew's. He never meddled in her business, in fact he was conspicuously absent while she drove around the countryside (in the coupe he had given her) solving mysteries. But he always managed to arrive in the nick of time when she needed him to get her out of trouble.

Instead I was stuck with a dad who told corny jokes and yelled advice from the balcony instead of talking to me in quiet measured tones like Atticus Finch talked to Scout. That I held his lack of erudition against him is understandable, given my age. What’s sad is that even nowadays, when parental stereotypes have gone through so many changes, too often we still miss seeing our fathers for their unassuming virtues. Mine, as it turned out, was blustery but unfailingly brave in the face of moving cultural targets that loaded on financial pressures. He wasn’t Father Knows Best, because he didn’t know what was best ~ who could have in those frightening times, fraught with psychological baggage which seemed to emanate from deep global uncertainty, much like today. If he didn’t know best, he nevertheless wished for the best. Without guile or motive. From what I’ve learned of life since then, this well-spring of loyalty, this selfless pride, is one of the greatest gifts of love we have to bestow on one another.

I’ll let you in on a big secret: Most of what mothers do we do because we don’t have a choice. Instinctive or intuitive ~ it doesn’t matter why, our responses to the great challenges of motherhood are driven by something deep within us, a primordial knee jerk reaction. We can’t help ourselves. A mother doesn’t throw herself under the bus to save her child because she thinks it’s a great idea.

Though I’ve never been one, I get the feeling dads aren’t wired quite the same way. When they stick around, through thick and thin, it's elective, not because their hormones and 2,000 years of genetic imperative force them to. For the ones that do stick it, and despite what you read the large majority of them do just that ~and then some ~ it’s all about character. And choice. Which makes their roles in our lives all that more amazing, when you come to think of it.

 

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Shaking the TumTum Tree

(originally posted June 9, 2010) Where do you want to be in five or ten years? Do you want to die with the most toys, or do you want to die with the best life and experiences? -Tibor Kalman

In the normal course of our day we are exposed, literally, to thousands of unsolicited messages ~ in newspapers, magazines, on television, billboards and, increasingly, on the web. Whether you live in a farming community, a suburb or a metropolis, this adds up to trillions of images and voices in your ear over a lifetime. It doesn’t matter if you never succumb to any of them ~ never eat the $6 burger for $2.99, cruise the boulevard in the Ultimate Driving Machine looking for skinny jeans, or seek relief from a “serious medical condition” you innocently thought was only heartburn. For your entire life you will be exposed to a tsunami of words and images that will flood your cerebrum pretty much non-stop during your waking hours with the intent to cajole, entice, and manipulate you into believing, then buying, the entity behind the message.

Don’t kid yourself that by not paying attention or rarely succumbing you can avoid the effects of our intensely commercialized visual culture. You can’t. We are basically animals whose survival instincts keep us monitoring the horizon for the next meal or the tiger who wants to make us his next meal ~ we’re programmed not to ever fully turn off perception of our surroundings. Information we don’t need to feed ourselves or keep us safe we still have to store somewhere. ‘Tis the nature of subliminal. For all we know we're dreaming about the the blond in the Skyy Vodka ad while we sleep. (or the brunette in the Ty-D-Bowl commercial). All of which makes it pretty relevant to ask why 99% of the ubiquitous sales-motivated design that’s out there is such crap. Stupid, ugly, habitually misogynistic and, when it comes to misleading political ads (yes, they are selling something too), dangerous in the extreme. The Madison Ave mind set which went global in the 70’s, flawlessly captured in the HBO series Mad Men, has cheapened sex, twisted our notion of beauty out of all proportion, and made monitoring our frailties, instead of our strengths, a national pastime.

And yet, call me foolish, I am nevertheless fascinated by the potential of vernacular design ~ the ubiquitous signs, billboards, TV and web adverts that compose mass culture. For a start, the tools at the fingertips of both the artist and the adman are virtually the same. An ad is a Rorschach mix of words and pictures which needs to convey a message in an exceptionally condensed period of time, usually seconds, less if the image is a still one. How to do that and manage to instill a message that lingers is daunting. But the creative possibilities are endless. Or should be.

Think how much more enjoyable it would be to move through our days if only a little more talent and pride was focused on delivering messages that appealed to our critical sensibilities, instead of insulting them. Why is it then, that advertisers almost always pander to what they construe are our base instincts? The English critic Philip Toynbee called it the result of “an impoverished ability to communicate.” It’s not an impoverishment relegated to the advertising industry alone. But in their role as a major contributing factor to the crass stupidity everywhere that is demoralizing us as a culture, it’s a medium which provides a perfect Petri dish for study.

When I asked ten people why they thought the advertising industry was so insidiously bad, seven of them said it was the nature of the beast to appeal to the “lowest common dominator.” I’ve used that excuse myself in the past, but while it may make us feel superior (surely they didn’t intend that annoying Aflac duck to appeal to moi) it really isn’t a helpful answer. There is nothing wrong with finding common denominators in our culture ~ correct me if I’m wrong ~ but isn’t that the basis of democracy? It’s the fact they always seem to stoop to the “lowest” level to find them that’s worth challenging.

Unlike a painting in a museum, where you can linger over brushstrokes, or the two hours you spend getting to know the characters in a movie, the ‘art’ in an advert doesn’t have time or much space to tell a complete story, it has to imply one. Because of this, whether or not we are aware of it, we are all masters of a curious form of sub-text. When an ad nails sub-text, whether it does so through humorous or dramatic means, we take notice.

Famous case in point: with its “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagens in the 60’s, the ad agency hired by VW was faced with finding a way to sell an odd, ugly looking car, made in a former Nazi plant, that was half the size ~ with none of the bells and whistles ~ of any automobile then on American roads. The agency, Doyle, Dane & Bernbach, choose to define their product in a stark but humorous, refreshingly honest fashion. The sub-text of “Think Small” was “utility,” and the public not only got and liked the message, it bought the car by the millions. In one great design stroke a single ad campaign arguably changed automotive history.

Volkswagen took a risk because they had to. But more to the point, they delivered what the ad implied. If we rarely see this combination of creativity and truth in advertising in the products being sold, we ~ the common dominators ~ have only ourselves to blame. We vote with our wallets.

 

Starting In the 1980’s, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, Paul Newman’s Own and Kenneth Cole devoted untold advertising dollars to promote social and environmental change. That they were able to do this while simultaneously increasing their bottom line was accepted (and respected) by their public as sustainable business models. That those companies were willing to make the connection between product and producer only worked in the long run because the products themselves were good, so even after being seduced by the come-on, we continued to buy them. Of course we don't have to limit ourselves to only buying products from companies that care about the long term well-being of their constituencies. I don't really know the deeper social agenda of Steve Jobs or Mac; from the beginning they have mounted ad campaigns which have accurately, cleverly, and often powerfully positioned products which deliver what they promise, thus ensuring a growing family of users over time.

I’m aware, of course, that many bad companies have great design. Nike comes to mind and you can think of dozens more. Differentiating the line between eye candy and visual porn, while rejecting useless corporate sites, marketing drivel and meaningless design is ultimately up to us, the consumer. Get rid of the product and you get rid of the need to sell it.

One of my favorite adman savants of all time was a curious fellow by the name of Tibor Kalman. Irreverent and often profane, Tibor eschewed a career in PR which might have afforded him “a good opportunity, a nice career, a chance to make a killing,” for one that “affects people’s lives and affects people’s brains.” Diagnosed with cancer in the 90’s, his response was to move to Italy to work with Oliviero Toscani on a series of controversial print advertisements for the huge clothing company Benetton. Together, with Benetton’s money, they went on to create the groundbreaking design magazine “Colors,” which many feel set the bar for cutting edge design with a pertinent social message.

Both Kalman and Toscani believed advertising had a creative responsibility, but they clearly understood the difference between their medium and fine art: they didn’t espouse an elitist approach. Both sought to rethink the relationship between the commercial and civic realms, both grappled with how best to serve the demands of business while raising the bar on artistic expression. For Tibor it was about “the struggle between individuals with jagged passion in their work and today’s faceless corporate committees, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience, and are removing the idiosyncrasies, polishing the jags, creating a thought-free, passion-free, cultural mush that will not be hated nor loved by anyone.”

Toscani believed his responsibility as a designer extended beyond any one product to the nature of a medium itself, which he felt spoke a universal language. “The globalism of sales is not a bad thing to be avoided. It’s a blessing. Proclaiming that McDonalds is bad and should be banned is like saying you’re against photography because you’ve seen an ugly picture somewhere. You know what you should do? Take a better picture. THAT is revolution ~ not screaming in the streets.”

With the growing increase of ads on the internet ~ where it seems we will be spending the twilight of our civilization ~ it behooves us to take another look at why, with what IB Singer called “souls starving for oxygen,” we aren’t angrier and more vocal at companies trading in the public forum, companies we never invited into our lives in the first place, who clutter the visual landscape, insulting our intelligence while boring the hell out us. Talk about adding insult to injury.

We have, after all, the ultimate power in this design game that wallpapers our lives. All it will take is a little chutzpa. The first step is to throw down the gauntlet and say: We’ll only consider your product if you stop talking down to us. Amuse us, educate us, empower us, or get the hell out of our lives. For those companies with good products to sell, this should not be a stretch. And who knows, it may well be a start back toward influencing what is produced in the first place. Wouldn’t it be something if the proliferation of crap in the world slowed, simply because, before being manufactured, somebody at the top was forced to frame the question: “How are we going to sell this? The public’s not stupid, you know.”

Links: Annie Leonard is the bomb. The Story of Bottled Water is not simply a pithy expose on how we have come to be a nation that buys a commodity that should be free, it’s a neat way to understand how messages are disseminated in our culture. Show this one to your kids. The Story of Stuff The Story of Stuff Project

Check out Tibor Kalman's Perverse Optimist next time you are in the bookstore. It’s worth owning if only to read the “F____Committees. I Believe in Lunatics essay. Perverse Optimist: Tibor Kalman Princeton Architectural Press

Kenneth Cole's Spring 2010 collection on You Tube is interesting.

Local Talent with a Long Reach:

Tod Brilliant is a wonderful PR guy with more than a little Tibor in him, who lives right here in Healdsburg. In addition to his own design work, two years ago he created a national design collaborative. Check them both out. http://www.todbrilliant.com http://www.creativejobagency.com

 

Chris Blum is a local legend who has designed the logos and packaging campaigns of many products you may use daily like Thanksgiving Coffee and Rosie Free Range Chicken. One of his best designs (in our humble opinion) is the one he did for Barndiva Tractor Bar. Thanks Chris!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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

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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.

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