JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

Posted by jdbernard743

· February 20, 2015

A Single Shot and a Fat Hen

This is not a riddle – and a Single Shot is not intended to bring down The Fat Hen.

Single Shot and The Fat Hen are two new Seattle restaurants, both in out-of-the-way pocket neighborhoods you wouldn’t discover just cruising the streets. It’s a risky bet for both restaurants.You have to know that they’re there and make an effort to find them, but it’s always exciting and satisfying to discover a new restaurant, especially when it seems like a secret. In this case there are two of them hiding in semi-secret micro-neighborhoods.

This is the interior of Single Shot. It opened recently in a small four-shop retail strip on the northwest side of Capitol Hill below the Harvard Exit. You can’t beat the combo of shops – Top Pot Donuts, Sun Liquor (distillery) and Toscana Pizzeria. Wow!!! Hard to find and difficult to park but worth the effort.

Single Shot’s Chef/Bartendar owners come with quality resume’s that include turns at Crush, Zoe, Re:public, and Altura. Everything we had on Tuesday night was sensational but the star attraction without a doubt was the pork chop served in tranches on a plank with spaghetti squash, brussel sprouts, with a pomegranate glaze. My goat mac and cheese was full of flavor and worth going back for, but the pork chop shouldn’t be missed.

On the other side of town, two blocks east of 15^th NW on a residential street in a pocket patch on the edge of old Ballard is the tiny 25-seat breakfast and lunch Fat Hen café. The Hen caters to the dressed-down-stay-at-home Moms whose husbands likely work in the South Lake Union matrix or Ballard’s Adobe complex. It’s trendy but not at all showy – lots of knit caps and strollers – but on the weekend you’ll likely have to sit outside on one of the two benches while you wait for a seat.

The offerings run from pantry items like avocado toast, granola, and homemade pastries to several Benedicts and three different Egg Bakes, along with sandwiches, salads, and daily chalkboard specials. My “in carrozza” egg bake with two eggs on country ham and smoked mozzarella was a match for Le Pichet’s oeufs, jambon et fromage, but everything we ordered was just as delicious.

An extra bonus for guests at the Fat Hen is Honore’ Artisan Bakery, an authentic French boulangerie directly across the street. Honore’ is so cool that there is no signage on the building other that a tasteful lettered sign on the door window. Now that’s stealth marketing.

Honore’ is not new but it has solidified its status along with other artisan bakeries like Columbia City Bakery and Besalu. In 2011 the Seattle Times enlisted the help of three well known Francophile authors to root out the best, most authentic, croissant in Seattle and Honore’ took the honor (no pun intended).

Surviving Seattle is all about uncovering interesting attractions, innovative food and drink, books, films, music and theater. This week was a good one – two hidden restaurant finds, a top notch artisan bakery, and Whiplash, one of the sleeper Oscar films that’s well worth seeing.

Bonne Chance to all of them.

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Tags : Seattle restaurants

Posted by jdbernard743

· February 13, 2015

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When Life Gives You Lemons… in Portlandia

Ah… Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood buried in snow. It’s so majestic and beautiful – unfortunately, it’s not happening this year. Today, the 12^th of February 2015, snow levels at the base and summit are 28” and 39” respectively. The Summit at Snoqualmie near Seattle, which normally has snow well over my head, has 15” and is currently closed. Unbelievable. It’s the worst snow year in my 66 years of skiing.

Last week, honoring reservations we made in December, four of us checked into the Lodge at Timberline on Super Bowl Sunday. As Samuel Johnson said (about second marriages) our ski vacation was a “triumph of hope over experience.” It was raining as we checked in and continued for two days while we watched children playing on the glazed snow through the Lodge’s rain soaked windows.

But, we hung in there. The old WPA-built lodge is magnificent and we had plenty of time to learn about its history and the amazing craftsmanship that went into its construction. It was built in 1937 in the depths of the Great Depression. Everything was made on site by local residents – from the giant rock and log construction to the ironwork handrails, hand woven bedspreads and curtains, carved wooden panels, and the social realism paintings that were the style of the period. The workers, mostly untrained, were paid 90 cents an hour and glad to have the jobs. I was there as a busboy one winter during college and it was interesting for me to go back and see it again.

With two rainy days behind us, on the morning of Day Three we awoke to 4” of fresh snow and an outside temperature of 34°. It still looked dicey but we decided to give it a go before checking out early and heading for Portland. There was nothing to lose. After all, age has its advantages and I ski for free these days at Timberline. We suited up, I squeezed my size 10 feet into my new $700 Lange boots and we were off. For an hour we had decent conditions – untracked snow, and the mountain to ourselves. It was really pretty good – and then it turned to mashed potatoes and we turned our attention to Portland.

Portland is one of the most livable small cities in America but Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the former Saturday Night Live regulars, have given Portland a whole new persona called Portlandia. Like the Daily Show or Colbert there is truth underlying their TV series spoof of the artisanal, handcrafted self-absorbed lifestyle of the Rose City. So… since we were in Portlandia we made lemonade with Meyer lemons (provenance Marin County), Fiji water, ginger sugar and a sprig of fresh mint. So special.

Having turned the Timberline experience into lemonade, we arrived in Portland itself and headed straight for Kenny and Zuke’s Delicatessen where we tucked into its justly famous corned beef sandwiches, sides of potato salad, and washed it all down with local craft beer. Perfect. Then it was off to Powell’s Books, one of America’s great independent bookstores, where we dropped into a reading by author Alexandra Fuller whose most memorable line, for me, was “Shouldn’t there be a Statute of Limitations on how long children can hate their parents?”

After soaking up the vibe at Powell’s we walked down to Living Room Theaters where the five Oscar-nominated short films of 2015 were showing. Very Portlandia, complete with draft beer and snacks to take into the screening room. BTW: the short films from Israel, UK, Iran, Northern Ireland, and China are sensational. Each one can stand-alone. It will be interesting to see who wins.

A good night’s sleep at Portland’s venerable Benson Hotel, still a jewel in Portland’s crown, gave us energy to attack Portlandia another day. It was back to Kenny and Zuke’s for a breakfast of bagels and lox and a latte assist from Stumptown Coffee Roasters next door. All of the sites so far, the Benson, Powell’s, K and Z’s, and Living Room Theaters are within 4 blocks of each other, but we needed the car for the next adventure, Portland’s Japanese Garden.

Seattle’s Japanese Garden is unified and artful but Portland’s 5.5-acre park is composed of five distinct and distinctive garden styles from the rock and sand garden above to the strolling pond garden, the teahouse garden, the flat garden and the natural garden. All are stunning and integrated in a seamless display of Japanese garden art from the giant evergreens to the smallest water feature.

From the Japanese Garden we drove to the Pittock Mansion, the former home of The Oregonian newspaper founder Henry Pittock. The French-Renaissance style home was purchased by the City of Portland in 1964 and totally renovated. Although it seems like the 17^th and 18^th century mansions of Europe it was built in the early 20^th century. Today it is furnished, not with the original furniture, but with authentic pieces from several different periods that show off the architecture in a dramatic way.

Portland is justly famous for its food scene its super hot restaurant of the moment is Pok Pok, where Chef/owner Andy Ricker serves up spicy northern Thai street food. When we told people in Seattle we were going to Portland three of our friends told us about Pok Pok before we had time to tell them that we already had reservations there. It did not disappoint and it was definitely different, from the flavored vinegar drinks to the caramelized skin on the house-specialty chicken wings. It was all good – and spicy.

Sated by our meal at Pok Pok we staggered across the street to Salt and Straw, an ice cream shop that was so crowded at 10pm on a Thursday night in February we had to stand in line for 10 minutes. I passed on the balsamic blueberry and had a double salted caramel with candied orange peel. Now that is Portlandia at its best. See what I mean?

Our new Portland friends, Deborah Mandell and Roy Pulvers, put us up that night at their house high on a hill overlooking Beaverton. Deborah served up more bagels and lox in the morning, and with a short maintenance stop to buy more books at Powell’s and a refueling stop at Peet’s Coffee we set off for home with full stomachs, new friends, a pile of books and a great appreciation for the Rose City.

It was all Portlandia. lemonade and all. Thanks our friends, old and new, who made it memorable.

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Tags : Portlandia, Timberline Lodge

Posted by jdbernard743

· February 2, 2015

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Selma: Revisionist History, Art, and Racism

Appearances can be deceiving – so can revisionist history and films “based on” true stories. This photograph is beautiful, but the beautiful bridge in the photograph was the site of one of the ugliest and most pivotal racial confrontations in American history. This is the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Route 80 where it crosses the Alabama River in Selma.

It is also the primary landscape for Selma, the new film by Ava DuVerney. In 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public accommodations and voter registration, but in order to ensure passage it was weak on enforcement and implementation. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was building a coalition of organizations to bring pressure on Congress to pass a voting rights bill with teeth to enforce those rights. Lyndon Johnson agreed with the movement’s leadership on the need for such a bill, but was concerned that moving that legislation forward would galvanize the Southern Bloc in the Senate and endanger his larger War on Poverty agenda. This is the historical setting for DuVerney’s film as well as two plays by Seattle playwright, Robert Schenkkan, All The Way and The Great Society.

It is not clear to me why filmmakers and playwrights feel compelled to revise history in the telling of their stories. The conventional wisdom behind this artistic license is that a strict retelling of historical facts lacks drama and a little tweak here and there serves to enhance the tension and elevate the art. I disagree.

Tony Kushner and Stephen Spielberg changed the facts in the film Lincoln when they showed two Connecticut congressmen voting against the 13^th Amendment when, in fact, the Connecticut delegation voted unanimously for passage. And DuVerney does it when she sets up LBJ as the foil for Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery. Wasn’t there enough tension in the air – and the country – to tell the story factually? Doesn’t LBJ’s caution about the physical danger and the threats to enacting successful voting rights legislation add enough weight to MLK’s decision to proceed in spite of the warning? The LBJ/MLK relationship was complex to say the least, but LBJ was not opposed, he just thought the action and the timing were incendiary. Several reviewers have called out the director.

There is an interesting discussion in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/selma-vs-selma in which the writer lays out the history of the screenplay itself. The original, by Paul Webb, written nine years ago showed a much different LBJ, but DuVernay apparently felt that Webb’s original fell into the category she calls the “white savior movies” where the oppressed black hero is saved by the white man, citing To Kill a Mocking Bird and Mississippi Burning as examples of the genre. Historians Robert Caro and Richard Dallek both support the view that LBJ was a strong supporter of MLK and the push for voting rights. If white savior movies are to be questioned, what about films that mischaracterize the white character to elevate the black protagonist?

I liked the film, but I was bothered by its portrayal of LBJ and the unseen but unabashed greed of MLK’s family. It seems that when the director approached the family for permission to use his own words in the film they put an exorbitant price on the rights and demanded creative control of his image. To Ms. DuVernay’s credit she declined. She wasn’t ready to allow a whitewash of Dr. King’s flaws, since they were also part of the story.Instead, speeches were written that echoed his tone but were not his actual words.

Notwithstanding the film’s flaws it did capture the time and feeling of the era. Robert Schenkkan’s plays tell the other side of the story by showing us the character of LBJ dealing with the same set of historical facts. His two plays show us a tragic character caught in between the opposing groundswells of trouble at home and trouble abroad. Civil rights vs. Vietnam.

The first play, All The Way, debuted on Broadway with Brian Cranston, fresh off the final installment of Breaking Bad, playing LBJ. It was a big hit on Broadway, and Schenkkan, a Seattle playwright, brought it and it’s companion piece, The Great Society, to Seattle in December. They were very good, fast paced, profanity laced theater pieces, and both the film and the plays were timely in view of the racial unrest in Ferguson, MO and New York. We’ve come a long way since 1965, but when the surfaces are scratched the underlying stress and distrust between black and white rise quickly to the surface.

Do you remember LBJ, MLK, Hubert Humphrey, RFK, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Abernathy, J Edgar Hoover, Everett Dirksen, and Strom Thurmond? If you do you might have been disturbed by the casting of both the play and movie, as I was. Those of us of a certain age have indelible impressions of the faces and voices of these players, and when they are represented we want to see reasonable facsimiles of the originals. Both the film and the play failed us in the casting. Hubert Humphrey was the “happy warrior” but he wasn’t slight or wimpy. J Edgar Hoover was jowly, chunky and evil not small, taciturn, and evil. At least they got the evil part, if not the uptight, closeted, queer part. Stokely Carmichael was very handsome as was Andrew Young while Dirksen was mannered and stately. Some of the actors were better than others. The LBJ and MLK actors were not perfect representations but they were good at their portrayals. Critics are getting some mileage out of the fact that the two leading characters in the film are played by English actors – David Oyelowo and Tom Wilkinson. Aren’t there American actors that would have been as good?

There is always something uncanny about the timing of films that mirror the contemporary scene and remind us that change is slow and difficult. Themes are recurring; 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education and the Selma march there are racially charged demonstrations over the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson and 75 years after the Holocaust there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in France, Belgium and Germany. Hollywood does provide a service by reminding us that bigotry, intolerance, and inequality are not far beneath the surface. I think it is legitimate to question why history has to be revised in order to be artful, but I applaud the motives of the filmmakers – to remind us of our history and our aspirations.

Categories : Uncategorized

Tags : Ava DuVerney, Edmund Pettus Bridge, LBJ, Robert Schenkkan

Posted by jdbernard743

· January 27, 2015

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Paradise Found

I shot these two pictures with my iPhone from the deck of my friend Roger’s house on the island of Kauai. It’s a magical spot on a magical island – 6 ½ miles past the last town on the north side of the island and only 2 miles from the end of the road, Na Pali State Park, and the coast that Michelin calls “arguably one of the most beautiful natural spots on earth.”

Leaving Seattle on a wet and cold January morning and arriving here six hours later was a heavenly gift. Roger and his wife, Marilyn, were welcoming and generous. We were here 6 years ago and loved it then. This is one of the great ways to “Survive Seattle” in the winter.

Every day of our five-day visit was sensational. We walked from the house to the end of the road on three of mornings and rode bicycles into Hanalei for breakfast on another two.

Roger introduced me to stand up paddleboarding on the Hanalei River and after a couple of rookie dunks I was paddling up river under my own power. Two days later we paddled again, this time on the Kahiliwai River into what seemed like the Heart of Darkness. I half expected to run into Mr. Kurtz along the way.

At the end of every day we walked across the road to the beach where we shared some wine and the sunset with a group of their friends.

Not such a bad way to “Survive Seattle.” Good friends, good food, good weather, good beaches. Mahalo Rog and Marilyn.

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Posted by jdbernard743

· January 16, 2015

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Sleeping with Sam Malone

In 1979 Norman Cousins, the long serving Editor in Chief of the now defunct literary magazine Saturday Review, published Anatomy of an Illness, laying out his belief that laughter can play a significant role in recovering from illness. Cousins was not without credentials in this area having also served as Adjunct Professor of Medical Humanities for the School of Medicine at UCLA. At the time of publication Cousins was fighting the debilitating effects of serious heart disease. His research into the biochemistry of emotions led him to believe that laughter could help in the healing and recovery from any diagnosis.

I read Cousins’ book and applied the strategy in 1986 when I was diagnosed with a serious neuromuscular disease called myasthenia gravis. The writers that brought Cousins so much pleasure – P.G. Wodehouse, S. J. Perelman and the like – didn’t do much for me. It wasn’t my humor, and besides, I couldn’t read. My symptoms included drooping eyelids and double vision, so I listened to tapes and comedy records by Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, and Woody Allen. They were gut-splitting funny and did a lot to increase my pleasure during a hard time. Mr. Cousins was on to something, and whether it’s books, music, film, or another art form the endorphins help us maintain or recover the good health we cherish.

I am reminded of this now in an odd way. Thanks to Netflix M and I have been watching reruns of Cheers, the 1980’s sitcom. I totally missed it the first time around. I was out of the country for the first few years (1982-1986) and without television for the rest (1987-1993). I don’t know what I would have thought of it at the time but I suspect I would have dismissed it. Generally speaking I don’t like situation comedies (Seinfeld notwithstanding).

But here’s the twist and how it works for us now: M loved the series and often talked about it nostalgically. I wasn’t interested but put it on our Netflix queue. Then one night she suggested we watch Episode #1 “for fun.” It was funny and real in a timeless sort of way. It was filmed before a live audience with no canned laughter and though it’s dated in some ways it captures a moment in time. The Boston bar was a sealed time capsule. After three or four episodes I was hooked and it has become our prescription after a difficult movie, a day filled with news of ISIS and other real life drama, or the need for some brainless laughs. It’s a soporific just before bedtime.

Cheers ensemble cast had all the right chemistry for a Boston-based story – a handsome, randy, bar owner who had a run as a Red Sox pitcher (Sam Malone), local regulars (Norm and Cliff), intellectual poseurs (Kramer and Diane), lower class Italians (Carla and Nick), a couple of numbskull bartenders (Coach and Woody) and the on-again off-again romance of a commitment-phobic bachelor (Sam) and a hopeless romantic (Diane). It’s a delicious mix of quirky characters fed great lines by a bunch of very clever writers.

So far, M and I have watched 110 of the 275 episodes that aired between 1982 and 1993. Bless Netflix; each one is 23 minutes long and they fly by uninterrupted by commercials.

The whole experience is further enhanced by modern technology. Our son, Jon, gave us a device called ROKU that, with the aid of an HDMI cable, plugs into the back of our bedroom TV, so we can, and often do, go to bed, select ROKU as the AV Source, click on Netflix, and watch consecutive episodes of Cheers as the endorphins build, smile lines deepen, and our eyes slowly shut.

It’s not Don Quixote but Cheers is a happy pill that, more than Ambien, makes it easy to go to sleep with smiles on our faces and a few comic anecdotes in our memories.

Sam Malone was always looking for someone to sleep with and now he has us. I’m sure it’s not what he had in mind but we are very satisfied. It was great for us. Was it good for you too, Sam?

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Tags : Cheers, Norman Cousins, Woody Allen