but sand will still fly off your shoes in the most unpredictable way…

a messload of legal hubbubery between the California Coastal Commission and David Geffen has resulted in a little coastal access pathway leading from the PCH to the nice stretch of beach in front of some expensive houses.
despite the security guy (who takes long lunch breaks in between taking advantage of people who aren’t sure of the legality of what they’re trying to do) it’s public land, as long as you stay on wet sand.
this being high tide season it’s a great place to wander, and get a glimpse of Eli Broad dressed in white on his white chair sitting for his morning tan.

we forgot to wear our “I heart MOCA” pins and refrained from partaking in his outdoor shower, but we did scavenge a nice piece of shale or something that must have come from his bathroom or pit o’ fire BBQ.
in the hopes it came from the latter, we’ll serve up some foie gras or stinky cheese on it soon, in honor of public access.

having spent many years on this best coast, one thing i thought i missed from the east coast were these swirly things that came down from the trees every fall. the few that i found in northern california didn’t have the nose adhesive that i remembered from my childhood.
but, two weeks ago at the amazingly fun Tin House Workshop, i discovered that Portland is full of these things. ah!!

Portland is home to many other great things, including a barista that offered me the extra shot of espresso that he was “going to throw out anyway,” my buddy Too Much Coffee Man, the literary duck that came and sat at your feet as you read into the sunset, and a donation-based service that pays for your taxi home if you’re too cocktail-ed out to do otherwise.

gotta love them stockings… mo shepherd shermans here and here…

we stood in line for a while waiting to order, but when it was our turn, the pizza guy said “we are out of cheese…but i don’t want you to wait, so can you come back in an hour?”

apparently, commies must think that there are different ways of waiting. my friend suggested we “go get martini drys” which i agreed was a marvelous idea, since we had just waited in line for bupkis, and had perfectly stomach empties.

i wondered if i had ever seen an actual martini in Italy before, and whether my friend got that line from James Bond. being a jazz musician, many of his phrases in English come from reading jazz lyrics, like “the girls were working the streets!” or “Oh, to live in Frisco.” turns out he was talking about the Italian brand of vermouth called Martini, which is drunk in Italy as an aperitivo, and is actually what he thought the rest of the world was talking about when they said “martini.” though the name of the cocktail is probably taken from the Martini brand, it’s not quite the same, especially when it comes to packing a punch.

my brain melt might have been from my recent PBJ on a hamburger bun. i was in an office and one of the girls offered me a PBJ. when she looked in her fridge she realized she didn’t have any “normal” bread (and she didn’t want me to wait)…

so here’s to you – dear square dancers:
pizza with salami, parmesan, cheddar, tomatoes, zucchinis, zucchini blossoms stuffed with St. Andre, and avocado bonanza…

and yes, it’s gluten-free – and simply delicious!

but most of this cooking stuff is really about High Chefery. we have Chefs with Designer Footwear, Chefs Undercover (writing “tales from the trade” novelettes, with titles such as “Under Hot Water,” “Hung High and Dry Like a Cold Cut,” “Kept in the Dark and Fed Shit – My Life as a Mushroom in So and So’s kitchen”), Chefs as Celebrities—full scale photos of them in their pearly white outfits on the walls of their establishments or previously mentioned mugshots on said assorted condiment labels—and Chefs That Are Too Busy to Care, by far the saddest and the most pandemic of the lot.

real cooking, to me, is a matter of keeping relativity in mind—comparing what you start out with (or what’s in your fridge) and what you end up eating. a chef once told me the reason he loves baking is because the end product is larger than the dough. meat, he said, “always tends to shrink.” (“unless you eat it raw,” says the sheepherding-is-the-new-yoga members of this family.)

cooking is also a matter of scale. i’d rather have a really small piece of something fabulous than a million pieces of something half-assed, because the “ever-wanting” feeling is way more satisfying than having had my fill.

here’s a professional of the “ever wanting” group.

After one knee surgery, two months crate rest, and a gabillion bones courtesy of Slankers, Canine Sherman rises again…

somedays (and some recessions) there isn’t an easy way to avoid taking a Los Angeles freeway at an absurd hour, and by absurd, i mean, absurd to me, since a lot of other people think it’s a totally fine time to get on the freeway. for all the knee-numbing stop-and-go i do appreciate one thing that comes out of being stuck on the asphalt: freeways—unlike most things in life—provide a clear picture as to which way i want to go, and whether or not it’s the same way most people want to go. you pretty much know where you stand, as you, er, stand.