Object Lesson : As Seen in Vogue

On October 4, 2009, Condé Nast closed Gourmet magazine. Gourmet’s closure shocked the media and publishing worlds. The 68-year-old magazine had been a marquee name for the publishing house, and still maintained a healthy (though not phenomenal) subscriber base (at the time of its closure, Gourmet had about 900,000 subscribers). Founded in 1940, on the premise that “gourmet” cooking could be available to all, Gourmet took American readers on armchair travels around the world.

Gourmet is only one of many, many magazines receiving the axe this year, as difficult financial circumstances and changing media consumption habits force a sea change upon the publishing industry.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that 2009 is one of “the bleakest” years for journalism since Pew began producing these annual reports in 2003. (Read the report here: The Pew Research Center’s 2009 State of the Media Report)

Much has already been written on the impact, on journalism, journalists, funding models, and “how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.” Nothing, it seems, remains untouched. Even our habits—of reading, of knowing, of criticism and reflection—are transformed.

This piece is not, strictly speaking, about journalists or the journalism. I am not preoccupied, here, with the content, only the form: the physical object itself, the glossy, 8.5 x 11 magazine that hits my mailbox once a month, twelve times a year, and the sensual experience that accompanies that object.

* * *

A fresh copy of Vogue has arrived. I am twelve, almost thirteen, and the magazine’s arrival thrills me. I suppose other girls fell for boy bands. I fell for the cultured, sophisticated world depicted in the glossies.

The pages are glossy, heavy, and smooth to the touch. If I get in closer, and press my nose against the paper, I catch the ink’s metallic, slightly acrid scent.

In those first heady moments, when the paper is still fresh and the binding still uncracked, one can disappear into magazine completely. Forget the Dairy Queen, the corner drugstore, the mall with its three department stores and innumerable “country living” stores with scented potpourri and Hallmark Christmas ornaments. We’ve switched frames, to a world where princesses dine with countesses, and meals feature fabulous French concoctions on fine china.

* * *

Book Review – Classic Alpine Literature : Land Above the Trees, A Guide to American Alpine Tundra

A mountain is a vertical world. As we move upwards, we travel through layered ecosystems. In the Sierras, we pass through open sagebrush desert (on the dry East side) or rolling grasslands (on the wetter Pacific side), then chaparral, then forest (pine, occasionally mixed with oak), high montane meadows (often wet with mountain streams), until finally we break through the timberline and enter a strange but beautiful land.

Washed by intense sunlight and scoured by strong winds, these high alpine landscapes are a study in contrasts. Delicate, jewel-like plants blossom beneath an endless sky. Miniature columbines and gentians grow amidst massive stone peaks.

I fell in love with these alpine landscapes while still in graduate school. Those long summer breaks seemed designed for long trips to the mountains, and I spent as much time as I could outside, above timberline. This became our summer pattern — to alternate days of hiking or climbing in the high Sierra with lazy days lounging with my papers and notebooks. On one of these rest days, I picked up a copy of Anne Zwinger and Beatrice Willard’s classic Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra. First published in 1972, Zwinger’s book remains a classic in the field, presenting a lucid overview of North American alpine ecosystems.

In their preface to the 1996 edition of Land Above the Trees, Zwinger and Willard note that in 1972, theirs was the only book describing North American alpine regions. Today, Land Above the Trees is no longer situated on ecology’s cutting edge, but it is still a model of descriptive natural history. Zwinger and Willard give the reader precise, lyric images of alpine ecosystems. Zwinger’s delicate line drawings are extremely useful, giving form to unfamiliar flora and fauna.

Object Lesson: Hybrid Tea Roses

The “first” Hybrid Tea Rose ‘La France,’ Bred by Jean-Baptiste Guillot in 1867

Hybrid tea roses are the queens of the garden. Tall, elegant, demanding, hybrid teas require lavish attention and plenty of breathing room. Never crowd hybrid teas. Give each rosebush its own radius, and it will expand and grow, sometimes to six feet or more in height, and offer flush after flush of elegant blooms.

Neglect a hybrid tea, and you are certain to be disappointed. Your rosebush will grow scraggly and leggy. It will refuse to bloom. It will grow interlocked branches that catch against each other, it will develop diseases, die down to the graft union. You may find yourself left with just the dog rose rootstock.

Lavish attention on a hybrid tea, and you will be rewarded with constant blossoms. These are the “long-stemmed roses” of the florist’s trade. At their best, they offer elegant, tapered buds that open into silky blossoms.

My neighbor, a gifted gardener, has banned roses–hybrid teas or not–from her garden. They demand too much.

And they do. Roses demand constant care: deadheading, pruning, removing sick or crossing limbs. They want you to watch them for aphids, to train their growth into the desired “open vase” form, to water them only in the morning and never let moisture settle on their leaves.

But. I can’t imagine my garden without roses. I love their voluptuous flowers, their fragrance, and their free-flowering quality. Planted in a suitably sunny site, and lavished with care, a rose will bloom again and again, from the last frost to the first.

Vertigo

My flight was scheduled to leave Taipei at 7:30 pm on August 7, 2009.  Two days before my flight, the skies clouded over, and rain began to fall, a steady drizzle that built into a real storm.  Satellite photographs indicated that a typhoon was on its way.

I had never flown through a typhoon before.  This would be my first time.

I do not recommend flying in a typhoon.

The first rains were welcome, breaking a long summer drought.  They named the typhoon “Morakot,” Thai for “emerald.”  Emerald waters for an emerald island.

I watched the typhoon idly at first, plotting its course along with the meteorologists from the Central Weather Bureau, curious if the airline would delay or cancel my flight.  Then, someone noticed that Morakot was scheduled to arrive on August 7, on the 50th anniversary of the 8/7 floods that devastated Taiwan in 1959.  A curious coincidence.

I am not, generally speaking, a superstitious person. But I pay attention to signs. And there were a few signs that seemed especially portentous: the 50th anniversary of the 8/7 floods, the fact that Taiwan had been dogged by a prolonged drought just before Morakot’s scheduled arrival (generating ideal conditions for mudslides and flooding), and the unusually heavy and steady rains that preceded Morakot. A typhoon, too, had trigged the 8/7 floods that swept away most of my grandparents’ worldly possessions in 1959. Like the typhoon that preceded it, Morakot seemed to bear an unusual quantity of moisture.

I began to pay attention.

Dinners for Hot Nights: Green Beans Stir-Fried with Pork

When I was in Taipei this August, my grandmother taught me the recipe for this version of stir-fried green beans.  This dish is somewhat similar to the popular “dry-fried green beans,” but delivers a completely different set of flavors.  This dish combines sugar and salt with just a hint of heat.  The soy sauce draws out the pork’s sweetness, and the pork accentuates the beans’ fresh, green flavor.

Perfect for a hot summer night, and fast enough for a weeknight dinner.

Ingredients:

• At least 1 lb of Green Beans or Yard-Long Beans (sometimes called “long beans”)
• Red chile peppers or red chili pepper flakes
• Garlic
• A dash of soy sauce (dark soy sauce)
• Thai basil
• 1/4 lb of ground pork or diced pork belly
• Dark brown sugar

Beans: You can use either regular green beans, or yard-long beans. If you choose to use regular green beans, blanch them first.  The green beans should still be crisp when you remove them from the water.  Long beans are much more tender, and don’t require blanching

Chiles: Depending on the level of heat that you desire, you can use fresh red Thai chiles (Thai Dragons or something similar), dried chile pepper flakes, or dried red chiles.  My grandmother prefers fresh red Thai chiles.  Note that in Taiwan, the fresh red chiles tend to be sweet and tender, with just a hint of heat.  The Thai chiles commonly available in the U.S. are much hotter.  If you’re not a fan of heat, do not slice the chiles.  Use them whole.

What do you do all day long?

I realized that I did a poor job of explaining my job when I set up the “About” page (the dangers of writing late at night, and jetlagged), so I updated a few things on the “About” page.

When colleagues or new acquaintances ask me how I transitioned from a career in the fine arts & in academia to a career in business, I often tell them the same story that I outlined in How I Fell into Marketing.

Sometimes, they will ask me, “But what do you do all day long?”

My job can roughly be broken down into thirds.

Dress Me: Shopping for a Funeral

For me, clothing shopping is never a simple task. I have the same height and build as the average ten-year old. I might even be a little smaller. Shopping for a funeral is even more arduous than shopping for street clothes. They don’t make much simple formalwear that is appropriate for a funeral. I spent 5 hours searching for something to wear to my grandfather’s funeral, something that would not be too short, too tight, transparent, or cause my family to mistake me for a streetwalker.

In July, the stores are full of bright, cheerful summer dresses.  The dress section at Macy’s hummed with excited chatter–teenage girls shopping for strappy sundresses.  I watched one girl pick dresses off the sale rack, trying to find a “very loud” dress for her cousin’s wedding.  I felt tired and frumpy next to so much bright ebullience.

To be frank, I really had no idea what would be appropriate for a funeral.  In a fit of desperation on Friday night, I pulled out my copy of Genevieve Dariaux’s little book on style, A Guide to Elegance. Purchased several years ago, on a lark, the little book instructs women on how to achieve elegance “in personal adornment.” First published in 1964, the book is organized like a little dictionary. I opened Dariaux’s guide to “Funerals,” hoping to get beyond my mother’s terse instructions, “Wear something black, something light and comfortable. Wear low shoes. And it’s 37 degrees Celsius (about 99 degrees Fahrenheit) here right now. Wear something that won’t make you sweat.”

Souvenirs: Polpette

I fell in love with Venice before I ever set foot in the city. I was 19 and an undergraduate at Berkeley, taking Elizabeth Honig’s class on “cities and commerce.” We began with Venice, at the height of its glory, and ended in Amsterdam, following the northward shift of early modern European commerce. I cannot say what made me love Venice.  I knew the city only as an abstraction, a jumble of maps, myths, and fragmentary images.

The year that I turned 24, I flew to Venice, alone. My Air France flight–loaded with Parisians on holiday–almost left CDG without me. On the plane, I sat next to an elderly couple. The husband, a law professor (now retired) at the Sorbonne.  The wife, a fragile, bird-like woman, who fretted endlessly over my decision to travel alone. I confessed that I spoke no Italian, a confession that only heightened her alarm. Our flight over the Alps was magical. We floated over the French-Italian border (“la frontiere,” according to my new friend) in the middle of a crystalline afternoon. As we flew over Mont Blanc, I could almost reach out and touch the Alps.  We descended into a shimmering Byzantine mosaic.  The Venetian lagoon opened at our feet. From the sky I could see the city, a mirage of red roofs and gold stone. (Later, I would realize that the stone was actually pure white.  The gold was an illusion, a product of the honeyed Mediterranean light reflecting on the Lagoon.)

The real Venice enchanted me.

I was also very lonely. I ate every meal on my own, and stayed in a hotel about 30 minutes from the city, in Mestre, Venice’s industrial twin. During that first visit, I experienced little of Venetian cuisine. I bought sandwiches from carts and survived largely on breakfast (from the hotel, generous, with capucchino and fresh breads, brioche with almond paste and fruit) and gelati.

I didn’t actually eat any real, sit-down meals in Venice until I returned in 2007 for the Biennale. I wound up dining with the Senator and his wife at Do Forni. I also made friends with another Taiwanese expatriate, a young woman studying Italian at the university and working, part-time, as a freelance translator.

With her, I finally experienced the range of Venetian cuisine. One hot summer night, she took me on a tour of Venetian cicchetti.  We drank white wine (1 euro per glass) and ate our way through the city. Some of the dishes were quite complex. Others were simple and relied entirely on fresh produce and quality ingredients. At our first bar, we ate fresh chilled melon (provided, gratis, by the house), a squid salad, fried mussels and baby squid with bits of fennel (the batter was light, lacy, and somewhat spicy, with white pepper and something quieter, more red), and marinated sardines (sarde in saor).

At a small bar in Canareggio (near the Jewish quarter), we bought polpettini (tiny meatballs) on toothpicks, and ate them while wandering Canareggio’s cobblestone streets. We finished the evening at the water’s edge, drinking a Spritz in Dorsodoro, and watching boats (mostly luxury yachts) cross the Lagoon like so many glittering jewels.

After I returned to California, I missed Venice, and decided to try my hand at polpettini, because meatballs, unlike other Venetian recipes, do not rely exclusively on the Lagoon’s bounty.  My recipe probably bears little resemblance to the ones that we ate in Venice, but they bring the city back to me.

June Vacation: Eastside

After a few grueling months of preparation for our Spring 2010 sales meeting, I decided to reward myself and hit the road. We piled everything into my Jeep, and went to Mammoth Lakes, California. We had initially planned to hike and climb in the high country, but this was a strange June. It rained and snowed. It even snowed in Mammoth. We woke one morning to a snow flurry. The deck on our rented condo was covered with sticky, wet snow.

We made the best of this strange weather.  We hiked (down low, where it wasn’t storming), and one day, we drove all the way down to Lone Pine and back.  On the way, I visited all the key tourist attractions — Manzanar, the Eastern California Museum in Independence, and Mary Austin’s sadly dilapidated Victorian.

Memorial to the dead, at Manzanar.  Freshly painted, with brightly colored origami cranes at the base.

In the image below, you can see fresh snow on the Sierra peaks.  This was a gorgeous day between storms.  We smartly decided to take a rest day and drive down 395.  The next day it stormed and rained, and the sky turned grey.

Fresh snow on the Sierras, somewhere near Independence…?

Grey, dreary weather forced us to boulder at Casa Diablo.

The sagebrush loved the rain.  As the weather turned wetter and wetter, the entire desert bloomed with a soft wash of green.

We also spent a few days in Tuolumne, hiking and bouldering.  The meadows ran with water.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the meadows quite so wet.  We hoped that this meant the Sierras wouldn’t be so scorchingly hot & dry this summer.  Last summer, with the fires and the drought, the meadows looked dry, singed.  Though the meadows were very wet, we encountered very few insects or frogs.  The temperatures were still dropping below freezing at night.

At the base of Pothole Dome, Tuolumne Meadows

Restaurant Review: First Time at the Chez Panisse Cafe

Last night, I ate at the Chez Panisse Café (or “upstairs,” as some like to call it) for the first time. For the better part of a decade, I’ve passed by the restaurant’s front doors without entering.  I’ve studied the menus, bought the cookbooks, and even patronized restaurants operated by CP alumni, but until last night, I’d never actually eaten at the restaurant.

To access the restaurant, one must first climb a narrow flight of stairs. The dining room itself is long and narrow, almost a galley, broken roughly in halves by a semi-circular bar. The decor itself is very Arts & Crafts―all warm browns and soft creams. On this particular night, the powder-pink peonies dominated the floral arrangements, a reminder that June sits on the cusp between summer and spring.

Before, I agonized over what to wear. Though the staff sports crisp formalwear, the diners are a motley mix of high and low. But I was probably the only diner wearing a bright red dress. Red is not really a Berkeley color.

There were 8 of us, so we sat a single long table, broken in the center by two low copper lanterns. The dinner was a celebration, a welcome for some old friends from France.