Crossroads Dispatches

It Was So Hot We Stopped Talking About Google (briefly)

"So your offices don't have air-conditioning either?," I say as I plop down next to two laptop-focused solo office warriors gathered at a long bamboo table yesterday at Fantasia.

102 degrees in San Jose Saturday. Broke 100 Sunday. Wicked hot ever since my writer's workshop at Foothill College - so much so that heat came into personhood. Virtually its own character in one thread of my white peach poem. (I like to write multiple versions sparked by differing inspirations -- then weave and snip them together later.)

If my brain was functioning I might recall the economic study that shows industrial nations congregate around temperate zones. Equatorial = poor. Who needs studies? I do not doubt that these languid days I cannot muster energy, or productivity, for much except poetry. (Yep, summer turning brains turn to mush.)

Peaches waltzed into my head as the fan whirred, the air limp in the stultifying college room during the writing workshop two weeks ago.

"In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azor Nafisi wrote about women who could be expelled from the university because of the way they eat a peach." - Bunny Crumpacker, The Sex Life of Food

Peach. Why peach? That wall set against the stained glass Art Deco door....is it coral, salmon, copper, better yet Copper River salmon, smoky rose or perhaps peach? Whether it's the book, poem, love letter - alright maybe even marketing copy - I care about words more.  The words selected are not accidental, they're richly evocative, archetypal. (Fair enough, you cannot always tell this from the blog.)

Archetypal? Yes, peach evokes fruit - a fragile vulnerable, sensual one - evokes tender surrender, giving flesh, evokes the forbidden ripe fruits of the garden of Eden, evokes the garden of Gethsemane, evokes praying until dawn, evokes the Tree of Life, evokes fertility, evokes creativity and the feminine, evokes sultry July peak ripeness, evokes the orchards beneath the concrete of Silicon Valley. It's the perfect choice for all the themes of my book. It's perfectly clear that all the other pinks are not.

"Peaches are one of the most delicious summer fruits. I prefer the white peach, which is the most flavourful, scented and luscious, though also the most fragile. As a boy, I used to remove some of the velvety skin from a nice white peach and then suck up only its nectar," writes chef Bernard Loiseau - very heavenly evocatively.

I'm entirely entranced. I'm wooed reading the rest of the copy for Monseuir L's recipe Roasted White Peaches with Yellow Peach Sorbet and Red Currant Sauce. He languishes on peach words: Téton de Vénus, Belle de Vitry, Anita and Manon. He courts us with the story of peach origins from China to Persia to France and Italy. I travel everywhere with him and arrive paired with mint and cinnamon. Delicious...writing.

Plus there's something sweetly innocent and refreshing about recounting our passions as young children when they are our passions today. I remember being carried away by chef Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and certainly not because I chose the book (rather it was my women business owner's monthly book club's selection five years ago). I was sold because the first few pages were remembrances of food intertwined with stirring memories of childhood:

I ate ray in beurre noisette, saucisson a l'ail, tripes, rognons de veau (kidneys), boudin noir that squirted like blood down my chin.

And I had my first oyster.

Now, this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity -- and in many ways, more fondly.

August that first summer was spent in La Teste de Buch, a tiny oyster village on the Bassin d'Arachon in the Gironde (southwest France). We stayed with my aunt, Tante Jeanne, and my uncle, Oncle Gustav, in the same red tile-roofed, white stucco house where my father had summered. - Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

(Me? Passion stirred and inextricably tied to books. That's why the grand love affair with books, with words. My fondest memories as a child are with fairytales and myths. Stories - and storyworlds - allowed me to fly beyond the horizons of my birdcaged childhood...but that's another post.) What was your first love?

Good stories exudes care, devotion, consideration, cherishment. Like making love: "I think Doc has said [something like] "sales is real; marketing is bullshit." That's like saying "orgasms are real -- and sex is bullshit." ...People like a little foreplay. It's the romance that makes them feel special. Marketing's fun. It's the promise of the world class customer experience. And that promise, if delivered seductively enough, can actually enhance the experience," rejoins Harry Joiner (couldn't resist pun) in a comment on Hugh McLeod's gapingvoid blog.

I don't know Harry from Adam, or Eve, but I sense he's a man who can appreciate an upcoming post (or series depending on my bravado) on how becoming a great lover transfigures you into a superb innovator and marketer.

Few few marketers are attuned to romance. Take a close look at the next press release, next marketing brochure, next product packaging you come across if you don't believe me. Romance? Think not. It's pushing the line into rape.

One tweak Harry, nix the seduction (connotes: manipulative, creepy clingy, whats-in-it-for-your-notch-on-the-bedpost). Please do woo me, oui. But I'm more into mutuality of interest. No pressure. Let's see where this slow dance unfolds, k?

p.s. Piqued your interest, below is the current draft of thread 1 of the poem-in-progress. (The second thread was triggered by contemplating Harry's Bar white peach puree and prosecco inspired by Renaissance painter's Bellini's painting The Agony in the Garden, and later, Michelangelo's Dawn located in the Medici Chapel. Thread 2 adds depth, layer and textures of meaning, like Sufi poetry, when woven in.)

Did you know that white peaches like White Ladys and Snow Kings are available primarily through local farmers? I like Kashiwase Farms peaches. "White-fleshed peach varieties were known in Europe as early as 1655, although they were so delicate compared to yellow peaches that they nearly disappeared from commercial orchards."

thread 1, white peach bellini dawn

the bounce of a white peach in your hand
low jazz overtones
lullaby sleepy fuzz heat
tonight's ebony moon casts
no shadow no shade
pure ivory sheets drenched

in your perfume
our bodies a poem
one word breathes
against each other

sweet glaze trickles down your back
yearn to sprinkle slivered almonds
and glide my tongue dripping
glide my body
the window open
sighs moan with birdsong

bite into voluptuous giving
flesh of White Lady
gobble me falling
away clean halved to the pit

wish
we are splashing cool desire
dripping juice in the Trevi fountain
feet rub against copper half-pennies
& shoulders against marble crevasse

your lips, mouth, sink into taut
skin of Snow King
swirled with prosecco
puree me into libation
puree me unto dawn

p.p.s. Borrowed headline from a tech story in the Monday San Jose Mercury News. I coax you to have a White Peach inspired salon in the next few weeks. (Harry's Bar resembled a salon in its day: "Since its inception nearly 70 years ago, Harry's Bar has played host to writers, artists, celebrities and aristocrats -- all attracted to the simple yet elegant atmosphere, great cocktails and cuisine.") I'll share some of my White Peach Dawn Salon curator's notes in a bit. Perhaps a new parlour blog off to the main room here hosting these longish curator notes for salonists?

images I couldn't resist the recipe - or the photo. (Sure got me eating out of his hand.) I've got Art Deco on my mind because I'm envisioning vintage Parisien + Art Deco inspiration for my boudoir. That a door at the Chrysler building in NYC, the most erotic city according to The Sex Life of Food. (Peaches, apples, the forbidden fruit thing: get it?)

The Myth of the One-Woman Inspirational Whirlwind

Marilyn sweetly wrote a comment recently: "I wish someone would just give you a big gob of money with no strings and no stipulations because you are a one-person inspirational whirlwind."

I reply:

"The Italian Renaissance wasn't about one artist, one patron. It was a movement. A concerto with many players in the orchestra. I concur with this statement from the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA: "While the voice of an idea may appear to be individual, in fact the emergence of new ideas is a collective effort."

So it's about whether others can be enthralled by the same vision, join it and embody the renaissance themselves. I'm only one little spark, in the end. The fire must burn of its own."

To that end, I'm going to share little tidbits on salons, art colonies, why artists spark other artists, mutual inspiration, muses, how to stimulate your inner muse, why boudoirs and gardens are tres inspirational workspaces, how to host your own salons, sprinkled with crazy inspirations from this newly minted curator of ephemeral experiential living art.

Fair warning: You must be willing to be daring & looney to the point of frisson. (Synonyms: shiver, chill, quiver, shudder, thrill, tingle). You absolutely must invite people outside your normal social circle. Invite an eclectic combustible crowd of people that aren't "supposed" to go together like the fusion chefs mix ingredients into culinary taste explosions.

Bonus: The heat has driven me back into Starbucks  (my cafes don't have a/c). My choices are Earl Grey tea if the a/c is frigid. The new pomegrante juice/tea blend is pretty good and not overly sweet. This The Way I See It #90 was written on my paper cup. There are many forms to shared spaces. I like the core of this concept:

If we really want to understand innovation and collaboration, we have to explore shared space. Consider Watson & Crick: How many experiments did they do to confirm DNA's double helix? Zero. Not one. They built models based on other people's data. These models were their shared space. Their collaboration in that shared space powered their Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough. If you don't have a shared space, you're not collaborating. - Michael  Schrage, MIT design researcher and author of Serious Play

p.s. I also liked The Way I See It #138:

The good life is the middle way
Between ambition and compassion
Between action and reflection
Between company and solitude
Between hedonism and abstinence
Between passion and judgement
Between the cup of coffee
and the glass of wine. - Jay McInerney
Author of Bright Lights, Big City and The Good Life

image (1) This Year, Venuses Again... Always Venuses! (1864) - Honore Daumier
no. 2 of the sketches made at the Salon from Le Charivati, 1864. French. Honoré Daumier satirizes the bourgeoises scandalized by the Salon's Venuses, 1864. (2) I've no idea who this woman is and I don't read a speck of français or allemand, but she oozed "salon hostess" to me.

Encourage People to Stop Compromising 3,000 Times A Second

That line from Seth Godin's post stuck and stung: Encourage People to Stop Compromising 3,000 Times a Second. That should be framed, I thought. 

Seth's post's in reference to restaurant connoisseur site Chowhound's sale to CNET (and a Toronto restaurant tour). Chowhound founder Jim Laff says his mission and task have not changed post-sale: "Run a site with really discerning and trustworthy information contributed by people who care as much as I do about the credo of refusing to settle for mediocrity — ever."

So the headline's another Laff aphorism: Encourage people to stop compromising 3,000 times a second. And hits close to home:

I've mostly tabled the book except for a five-day writers conference I recently attended. The forty day slice of life mad journaling (I was capturing it all in real-time) ended for me mid-June.

Need a breather, I said, before I start the revision process. True, and truer still, is the book scares the bejesus out of me. It's the boldest, controversial, most inspired thing I've ever written.

Last night I had one of those too-ubiquitous discussions at a dinner party where a bevy of artists (and I mean real artists, not dilettantes such as myself ;-)) justify their compromises on behalf of paying the rent and eating a square meal. The conversation ain't different than that which I hear among entrepreneurs. (Highly recommend the life-changing The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur.) Or worse yet the internal chatter that goes on in my own head way toooooo often.

We start compromising on the spark of inspiration. The inspiration that snowballed the whole reason we're living in a scrappy loft in the first place. Always, temporarily, of course. The inspiration which is intimately tied to the vision and momentum of the whole thing. We start compromising on the important stuff that holds it together and keeps it cohesive, worthwhile and magnetic. (That slippery slope ends up comproming brands too.)

We convince ourselves the "public" (labelled They, Them and sprinkled liberally in our rants and whines), ya know, like everyone knows: They truly wants, desires, clamors for the safe, acceptable, watered-down, mainstream "commercial" choice.

We follow the herd rather than that wee (but insistent) voice. We create another photo-sharing web 2.0 company because that's what's in. That's what's They are funding.

Our theory is confirmed by powerful corporate curator-Them's such as when Microsoft's Michael Klein firmly says: "No sex, nudity, politics, violence or religion." The Them's that nix your next movie idea:

"He got withering stares and a stern lecture. The suits didn't understand his claustrophobic world of outsiders and ogres. His made-up words (scrunt, narf, tartutic) sounded like recycled Beowulf [hmm, sounds like Lord of Rings to me]. They especially didn't like the shots he took at film critics." - "Will M. Night Live Happily Ever After? Book Chronicles Filmmaker's Quest to Bring His Fairy Tale to the Screen", San Jose Mercury News, July 23, 2006

No matter that "maverick" (maverick is San Jose Mercury News subtitle moniker, not mine) director, M. Night Shyamalan had previously grossed over $2 billlion worldwide for Disney ("The Sixth Sense", "Signs", "Unbreakable"), they slammed the door in his face this time. (I haven't seen Lady in the Water, yet. I will now.)

So what happens when someone blows the cozy theory and sells their uncompromising artwork at Sotheby's for $427,000. That's no one-time lottery ticket bonanza: "On the private resale market, his prices have shot up to $600,000."

Now I'm talking about "maverick" John Currin. A heck of a lot has been said about John Currin's work and John himself. Good, bad, lukewarm - everyone has an opinion.

Yet one thing I haven't heard is that he panders to the masses. In fact, he manages to sell his work to the very same audiences he routinely skewers in his canvas ironies. His work has that same eerie holding-the-mirror-to-ourselves resonance that the film American Beauty did. Inexplicably people pay huge sums when someone digs beneath the surface vapidness and the wan masks we cling to for seeming safety -- with conviction. (1)

It's precisely that unswerving conviction that's ultimately so compelling and attractive: We want to risk feeling, being, what they exude. (And this once they is not They.)

"The story of [John] Currin's rise to prominence generally begins in the early '90s, when political correctness held sway in the art world... By the late '90s, critics were pointing to a re-emergence of the figure in painting, crediting Currin along with a few other young artists like Lisa Yuskavage, Elizabeth Peyton, and Jenny Saville...These painters weren't contrarians like Currin; it was just that these were the kind of paintings they wanted to make."  - "Talk of the Town: Critics love the painter John Currin. But Why?", Mia Fineman, Slate (highly recommend the slide show overview of Currin's career)

"I felt a powerful force coming off the guy...I was rooting for him and his movie. Maybe that sounds like the writer getting too close to his subject." - Michael Bamberger, referring to M. Night Shyamalan, "The Man Who Heard Voices: or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale"

The NYT's book review shows the risks of fawning fans writing books yet there is an authenticity to the charismatic pull of M. Night that rings true. It's not everyday that any actor admits: "I'm gonna let him guide me. I'm gonna do something I don't often do, which is completely give myself over to the director's hands." (Paul Giametti interview, "Giamatti Wades Into New Territory in Lady in the Water", CTV.ca)

By now, I've read so much about John Currin I'm dizzy (and, no, it's not the blasted heat; I'm in air-conditioned heaven at tea haven Fantasia in Santana Row right now. Yummy jasmine milk tea with pearls.) One hopelessly undelicioused lost and mesmerizing article interviewed Currin and I felt the palpable joy exude reading how he enjoys playing with the brush and colors and canvas.

Did I say real art earlier? Yes I did. Here's an example of real art: Connoisseur and serious collector Jim Laff knows inspired art when he sees it. Within forty-eight hours of his serendipitious discovery, Laff's enthusiastically engaged nine other curious collectors to a studio and gallery of culinary art. Here's the acclaimed critic's review of Toronto's Gharoa Restaurant:

"I live in a Bangledeshi nabe in NYC, and really know the cuisine," confides Leff. "Yet every single item here surprised and delighted me. So soulful, so accessibly delicious. A gem."

Every single one of us is an artist when we move from inspiration, we follow our heart wherever it leads us. The inevitable result: So soulful, accessibly delicious. A gem.

So I encourage myself to stop compromising 3,000 times a second. So I encourage you to stop compromising 3,000 times a second because the honest truth is I yearn for more art in this big blue orb we inhabit.

Bonus: I was enchanted by this critic's love for two of Currin's pieces. His ending sentiment still echoes for me: There are certain things that belong to art alone. (To read the entire "Bad Boy, Good Manners: John Currin" The Nation article go to google and search: madame pompadour boudoir. Yeah, seriously, that's how I learnt about John Currin.)

"The two figures are exceedingly mysterious... Hobo and Sno-Bo could be panels -- say summer and winter -- in a Mannerist boudoir, the way Boucher's paintings of the seasons decorate Madame Pompadour's boudoir, now in the Frick. They are erotic paintings that imply larger meanings. The women are protected by their beauty against the harshness of the world. The images imply the world's harshness by indirection. As paintings they have the power to hold us in front of them, contemplating meanings too fragile and remote for application to life, like the kinds of visions a wizard in Shakespeare is capable of summoning into momentary being for someone's entertainment--interludes in life. There are certain things that belong to art alone. - "Bad Boy, Good Manners: John Currin", The Nation

p.s. Funniest line in San Jose Merc piece on M. Night: "Can this guy really read minds and communicate with some Higher Power?" Geez, we all do. Artists throw less barriers to it less often. Yeah, it's some power alright. When you feel something akin to an electric current coursing through you, you know what I'm talking about. What'd ya think inspiration feels like?

p.p.s. I can't help notice the archetypal mystical fairy tale quality inherent in both John Currin's and M. Night Shyamalan's work. That'd be an interesting thread to follow. I encourage you sleuth and learn about John Currin and M. Night Shyamalan yourself.

Footnote (1) "The show begns with a painting from 1989, after a photograph from a high school yearbook, of a blonde named Mary O'Connel, unsmiling, pinched, an embalming in paint of this familiar brand of middlebrow institutional portraiture. Mr. Currin is not the first to recognize the cheap pathos that is in these vacant, ritual images, as there also is in magazine advertisements and pornography. But he nails the fake sentiments better than most.

Mary O'Connel's eyes, flat disks, are the emotional vortex of the picture. Eyes in Mr. Currin's work tend to be black holes, sucking up light. All of his scrubbed, fair-skinned subjects beam on the outside, whether they are skinny wives giddily puffing cigars in ''Stamford After-Brunch'' or the wan, waxen blonde preening in ''Park City Grill'' before her alarming date -- but the eyes make them look vacuous or desperate." - "ART REVIEW; With Barbed Wit Aforethought", Michael Kimmelman, New York Times

image Not your average Rockwell, eh? I'm going with culinary theme with Currin's Thanksgiving, 2003, oil on canvas. Then, actress Bryce Dallas Howard, plays a narf in Lady in the Water, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the treacherous journey from our world back to hers. Finally, Currin's Honeymoon Nude, 1998.

Italy on My Mind

"I thought -- and now I know -- that Italians claim more time for their lives." - Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

It was love at first sight. The first post I saw front and center on the new Simona Invites You to Italy blog was about chocolate. (Thanks Yvonne for the announcement.)

Ah, Italy. Memories of 2003. Memories of abandoning my first blog (titled The Big Picture):

"I abandoned my first blog somewhere in the vicinity of the Duomo in Milan. Strolling in the shadows of the cathedral, I noted families walking slowing in the plaza, laughing, immersed in the languid Sunday evening tradition.

Waiting in line that thick July evening for my nocciola gelato was savored just as much as the first lick of the cone.

Italians perfected “Il Dolce Far Niente" ("the sweetness of doing nothing") to an art and I was an ardent student." - "The Artistic Gifts of Women Bloggers", New Communications Review, July 22, 2005, Evelyn Rodriguez

I've been noting a definitive love affair for all things Italy (and it has hardly anything to do with the World Cup game) especially within the Palo Alto/Menlo Park vicinity.

I only have time for one anecdote: A friend shares that his Stanford semester abroad program was at a lush villa outside Florence. Back home, his Palo Alto dormitory was called Casa Italiana and everyone spoke Italian in the hallways and their Italian chef was the envy of the campus. Tom recounts, "In Italy, I'd walk into stores with my sister-in-law [Italian] and she nods, 'Bella' when just the right shirt or tie is brought out. Whereas here, I'm greeted with clerks asking what color I need or if it the jacket is for an interview. I know bella when I see it, feel it. It's not a matter of function."

In Italy that April 2003 it felt ludicrous to be squirrelled away after hours in my client's offices flinging out blog posts when the streets and smells of Italy beckoned.

"Whatever a guidebook says, whether or not you leave somewhere with a sense of place is entirely a matter of smell and instinct." - Frances Mayes

Back in Silicon Valley, I never picked my original blog back up because I realized it was missing an essential vital ingredient: passione. I was too self-conscious. Or, in other words, I was contained.

"For many Italians, passion is an emotion we simply can’t contain. If it is there, it must come out." - Simona

The other day I wrote in my journal: The secret to life -- Don't resist it. I believe it's not physically going to Italy that calls us so much as psychicly going to Italy. It's living the vita Italiana that's highly contagious.

Contagious? I should say seductive. "Go to Piacere Mio. It's a very seductive kind of store," Sara, my calligraphy instructor says. Yummy, I can't wait to go:

Owner Nancy [Verdtzabella] is enthralled with Italian culture. "I love the beauty and care they put into everything," she said of the Italian merchants. - "New downtown stationery store offers paper imported from Italy", Los Altos Town Crier, December 17, 2003

Murano glass pens, luxuriant Italian paper, a flamboyant love of writing personal handmade letters and notecards rather than e-mail, and they visit, know and like the suppliers they carry -- what more can one ask for in a store? (Btw, I'm making my own business cards by hand now. Each it's own piece of art. That's another story.)

Yesterday, via Jeff Nolan's blog, I stumble onto a new VC blog from Tom Cole at Trinity Ventures that was love at first sight too. The first post I saw front and center on the new Consuming Ambitions blog was about chocolate. Déjà vu.

Called Consuming Ambitions, it might just as well be called Consuming Passions (uh, but that site is already claimed by a porn site). Any VC that blogs about the top 5 ways to enjoy heirloom tomatoes rather than the top 5 tips on negotiating your term sheet is on my ever-shrinking list of blogs to read.

"I'd never guess that Amy would gravitate to gardening," says Jerry, a former Hollywood film executive and now a marketing consultant. A lifelong urbanite, Amy [Giaquinta] had been involved in media too, working in television production about ten years ago." Now, their two-acre Napa Valley estate is home to organic heirloom tomatoes with "names like Moonglow and Aunt Ruby's German Green...Today she has an informal business, supplying seedlings and tomatoes to friends and local chefs with kitchen gardens." - "Tomatoes: A Love Story", Food & Wine, August 2006 (I noticed this eco-epicurean issue of Food & Wine laying at IDEO's offices the other day.)

The Italian mindset flourishes in the angel community too. Via Tom Cole's blog, I revisit the Angel Forums site. In addition to the usual suspects, I note the Angel Forums portfolio is onto this post-industrial boutique artisan trend:

• A very avante garde restaurant experience (restaurant, art-gallery, stage and club) named the supperclub  ("Supperclub is founded by artists and therefore art will run through the veins of the club forever.")
• The yummy Charles Chocolates (hat tip from Charles Chocolates: invite blogger connoisseurs to your press tastings and tours, merci beaucoup oops, grazie.) The founder was an art major, btw. ("Everything is made by hand in very small batches using traditional techniques, and all of the chocolates are shipped to our customers within three days of being created.")
• Speciality's Cafe and Bakery ("You will always see ovens, mixing machines, dough, flour, grain, and many other odds and ends a real bakery needs and uses...healthy, wholesome products from scratch")
• Tea Living (children's apparel, global aesthetics with tagline "the world is a big place, especially through the eyes of a child". Plus: "We envision with a sense of art, approaching the process of our work organically—moved by the distinctive beauty of a global source towards the creation of an inspired, original interpretation.")

Va Bene!

p.s. This is the last weekend of the Tuscan-inspired Napa Valley Festival del Sole ("music, art, cuisine, wine, wellness"); you'll have to catch it in Cortona, Italy for its next stop.

p.p.s. Have you evere noticed that Panera Bread's warm colors - mustards, olives, plums - and its ambiance seem Tuscan-inspired too?

images from August 2006 Food & Wine, chocolatier Andrea Slitti from Simona's blog, cover of Chocolate Therapy: Dare to Discover Your Inner Center, and the Chocaholic event poster at supperclub from Tom Cole's blog

The Top 10 Books

Reader Bob writes in:

I read your posting on Gut Check with a great deal of interest.

Does it happen with a particular book/artwork or with a type of book, such as religious or spiritual books? So in a bookstore that is full of life, does a particular book grab you or do you naturally feel better in a certain section?

Ever since your awakening, has some of the books that you were passionate about no longer or vice versa?

I know that it's impossible to come up with top 10 books or anything, for how can anyone just select top 10 books/artworks/science discoveries, for every little item that we were conscious and unconscious of left a footprint in our growth [I say that's very true], but given your current state, using your gut check, could you recommend top 10 books or things that pull you up or resonate strongly with you?

I hope you answer appears as an entry in your blog!

Well a lot has stabilized since that post. Yet I've never ever been an advocate of step-by-step formulas or how-tos or do-this-and-be-happy-lists or the ever-popular umpteen keys to a successful life. There is no "TOP 10 DEFINITIVE LIST". I've no formula. Truth is a pathless land, as J. Krishnamurti reminds. (There is a path clearly before you, but it's yours alone.)

Life is dynamic. Life is growth. If there were a top 10 list this moment, it'd flow into yet another top 10 list tomorrow. If you're growing, The List evolves. So the trick is to learn to flow with Life yourself.

Rather pay attention to what books leap off the bookshelves for you. What strikes a deep chord with you. Pay attention, period. Spend less time in books (the map) and more time directly experiencing and perceiving (the territory) with your senses.

I can tell you what the very last ten books I bought are, though, for whatever that's worth. I buy books mostly for pure enjoyment these days.

• Exuberance: The Passion for Life, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison ("The book is called "Exuberance: The Passion for Life," a long-overdue look at the positive life force that resides in all of us, the antidote to her previous "Night Falls Fast" on suicide." - review)
• The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat, by Bunny Crumpacker
• The Agony & The Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo, by Irving Stone
• Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone
• The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
• The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
• The Gardens of Emily Dickenson (excerpt), by Judith Farr
• Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring, by David Mas Masumoto (author of Epitaph for a Peach)
• The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
• Home is Where the Heart Is, by Ilse Crawford (I reallllllly love this book)

And the coming number 11 will be: The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, by Michael Kimmelman.

p.s. The cover of Home is Where the Heart Is is sensual red velvet. I opened the book first to the section on the relevancy of the boudoir in this day and age (image above is on front cover). Next I randomly flipped to the section on bread making. I closed the book shut and bought it on the spot at Anthropologie.

Now those symbols mean something to me -- Life will whisper in signs that are intimate and personal and relevant to you. The key is to be present to them.

p.p.s. My other (neglected) blog, Pointing to the Moon, has a list of spiritual books I would recommend.

How to Be An Eco-Epicurean

My heart is set on living.  - Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I'm doing the spa at his Tuscan inn, L'Andana. He's talking about doing little, er,  I don't  know what he would like to call them, but delicacies of some sort tied to local ingredients. We've got rosemary, citrus and olive oil and all the obvious things in Tuscany. And he wants to do little gourmet bits and pieces to match the treatments we'll be using. For instance, he's doing a soy-milk panna cotta with seasonal fruits for clients who have a facial, and a lavendar tart for those having a hot-stone massage - and he's doing infusions of rosemary, thyme, wild fennel and lemon balm." - regarding chef Alain Ducasse, interview with luxury spa designer Susan Harmsworth, "Spa Mastermind", Food & Wine, August 2006

We're all used to gorging on ten-course meals here at this blog. Yet, last night my dinner consisted of an orange, about a dozen almonds, a 1/2 inch chunk of dark chocolate with tiny bits of ginger washed down with pomegrante green tea. 

So I'm thinking a lot like chef Alain Ducasse. I'm thinking tantalizing artful appetizers. I'm thinking delicacies tied to local ingredients.

I'm thinking epicurean blog. I'm thinking Italian Zen (with infusions of innate divine spark absorbing, enveloping, our essential humanness).

I'm thinking evoking a feel here that mixes up farmer's market, public gallery, (and once I'm through with my current neo-Luddite phase) and Demo combining the triumverate of my passions: how food connects us to  land, people and place; how art enlivens us; how applied technology can enrich us. All featuring things and experiences made by people and companies I know myself and like.

I hear you whispering: Evelyn, er, epicurean? Asked what spa trends she foresaw, spa designer diva Susan Harmsworth replied: "We'll probably see more destination spas where there's no TV, no telephone, no electricity...[That's definitely me. I call it backpacking, though.] We might even see places where people have to build their own fires - something that addresses  the need for grounding, because we're so technologied out."

According to the dictionary, ecipurean equates to wanton hedonism. Ah, poor totally misunderstood Epicurus. This snippet sets things right:

"Epicurus, in the fourth century B.C., was the original advocate of a pleasurable  lifestyle, and though his name has been misappropriated ever since  - there are several luxurious restaurants called The Epicurean - he himself preferred moderation  when it came to the appetites. He drank water rather than wine and was happy with a dinner  of bread and olives. His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.

I would agree with the old Greek that you can't be off in a stupor, drunken, overfed,  or otherwise, and still thrill to the sensation of all your cells dancing. Neither does an armchair, or a plate of ravioli, have to be overstuffed for you to feel you have got your money's worth. The more present and awake you are to your experience, the more likely the experience will be one of genuine pleasure.

No, the message of this book is that if you can be present to it, life is already enhanced enough as it is." - Roger Housden, "Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living"

p.s. If you live in the Bay Area, I'll be at Montalvo Arts Center "Tastes of Tuscany" luncheon Wednesday (tomorrow). Say ciao if you're there!

Bonus: After a nearly twenty-year career (ah, yes, I'm revealing age) in high-tech, I'm not nearly the neo-Luddite I wish I were. I'm salivating over the "cuisine mode" on the 7.1 megapixel Olympus Stylus 710 that boosts the color saturation and contrast in food. Yum yum.

Foodie photo-lush blogs recommended in this August's Food & Wine's awesome "How to be an eco-Epicurean" issue include chezpim.typepad.com (by a former Silicon Valley executive whom humbly deflects the limelight to share her own drool-worthy foodie blog favs), thefoodsection.com, shewhoeats.blogspot.com, and 101cookbooks.com. And tips for stunning food shots.

images Flickr photos include figs by xerones and lavender by wanderingnome

Art is Either Plagiarism or Revolution

It was either that quote by Paul Gauguin, or this these two interrelated ones for a headline. Gaugin won out as I'm in Parisien frame of mind, but I still want to share the two runners-up.

• "Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist - art itself." - Alexandra Stoddard

"It is time to come out as yourself." - Neil Crofts

My little contribution to a new renaissance in Silicon Valley? Reinstating the Parisien tradition of the salon:

In the early 17th century, the behavior of male aristocrats still reflected the idea that physical strength and military prowess were a man's most important virtues. Around 1610 a young noblewoman, fed up with the prevailing loutishness, did something unprecedented: she abandoned Louis XIII's court and set up her own "alternative space." The Marquise de Rambouillet remodelled a mansion near the Louvre, creating a suite of adjoining salons, or large reception rooms, culminating in her sanctum sanctorum, the so-called chambre bleu. In this room (also known "the sanctuary of the Temple of Athene"), the marquise received her visitors from her bed. - Salon.com's "Brief History of Salons"

Centuries of salon culture ensued. It was a salon hostess who published James Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would. Women were instrumental in arranging that the leading thinkers of the day attended: artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, scientists.

These are busy influential men, and as Salon.com rightly caught on: "Without erotic intrigue, it is unlikely that so many 17th-century men and women of, uh, affairs would have sacrificed their evenings to debates over Racine's prosody." This wasn't simply idle gossip, it was an intimate private place where folks were introduced to people that were outside their normal public social spheres (for instance, politicians don't hobnob with avant-garde painters).

Anything I say here is just tip of iceberg. I'd love to converse more. Face-to-face. If you live in the Bay Area, come over to an open house this weekend at Legends Fine Crafts Gallery, 516 Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park from noon to 8 pm Saturday and noon to 6 pm Sunday (coincides with 20th Annual Connoisseur's Marketplace, so tons of art, food but not parking).

Ben Franklin went to Paris salons to raise funds for the American revolution. Later he'd present his scientific ideas such as electricity to these same salons.

The French, certainly, loved Franklin. With his fur hat and his Poor Richard homilies, he was everything they imagined America to be. Or at least he knew how to play the part. He also loved the cosmopolitan whirl of pre-Revolutionary France, and apparently made out like a bandit in the Paris salons. The beautiful Madame Helvétius (to whom Fontenelle, at age 100, was moved to say, "Ah, madame, if I were only eighty again!") took a liking to Franklin and scolded him for not coming to see her. "Madame, I am waiting until the nights become longer," he said. (Take my word for it, in the 18th century that was pretty risqué.)" - "It's Mostly About the Benjamins", Rob Macdougall blog, 12/2/04

John Adams accompanied Franklin to one Parisien salon and was rather appalled. Adams was a bit puritanical.

The Parisian salons were the opposite - provocative, scintillating.

Sort of how Menlo Park used to be. A little controversial even.

Steve Jobs waltzing into Don Valentine 's office (yep, 3000 Sand Hill Road is a Menlo Park address) for Apple's funding wearing cutoffs and barefoot (or maybe it was flip-flops) was controversial.

Imagine Ken Kesey tripping out (it's research, man) at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital on LSD while he worked the night shift in the psychiatric ward. He spawned not only his own novel but Tom Wolfe's too. The Grateful Dead hanging out in Kepler's bookstore in Menlo Park and playing bluegrass and folk at a nearby field in Palo Alto. Marxists meeting at Kepler's and working by day at the national labs. (John Markoff, New York Times technology columnist, writes that the whole personal computer revolution can be traced to within a ten-mile radius with Kepler's as the hub.) The Homebrew Computer Club gathering at a garage in Menlo Park ("From the ranks of this club came the founders of many microcomputer companies, including Bob Marsh, Adam Osborne, and Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.")

Anyway, in my calligraphy class Monday, that's when I first saw this quote by Paul Gaugin, "Art is either plagiarism or revolution."  And it's stuck with me.  Haunted me. When I'm writing, it feels natural, it's just flowing.  Of course it's original. I'm not trying to be provocative, scintillating -- that would be contrived. I'm just expressing what wants to come out.

So a friend is playing devil's advocate. She mentions a local Menlo Park art institution. They could hold salons. Why would any philantropist invest in mine? (First, the Medicis were hardly philantropists, and second they're not mine. It's more of a platforrm, an API, if you will.) (I'm currently reading Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. Sure, there's a few parallels with Sand Hill Road and the Florentine  Medicis.)

So I had to check out this institution for myself. Perhaps we could host salons at their location too (I am on look-out for places to host where people already congregate, gather, stroll), I thought. Well, not as is, it's like a purported arts theater that only plays Disney films. I like Disney films, yet....

I certainly couldn't imagine reading my white peach poem there. The dripping juice, the erotic play in the Trevi Fountain symbolic of the dawn after the dark night of soul. "And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) until Crayola and the civil rights movement change it to "flesh" became "peach". And there's Bellini's 'Agony of  the Garden' where Jesus prays until dawn in the foreground with Judas and the trailing soldiers and that painting's pink dawn glow inspires the Bellini made from white peach puree and prosecco at Harry's Bar, Venice, the haunt of  Hemingway and Maugham, and you get idea, yeah, it's a long poem in progress.

I imagine reading there, and I'm tempted to compromise. To fit into what's deemed acceptable, rather than true to me.

This year's tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin's birth, has brought a slew of biographies and articles. Reading one review, it begins: "It is a popular axiom today, that no one with "great ideas" and a passionate commitment to uplift all humanity, can be "politically successful." That's left to the "practical man," the compromiser, the manipulator. No one exposes the falsity of this axiom more completely than Benjamin Franklin..."

Hmmm, you could say the same of the Founding Fathers. They had a passionate commitment to high ideals.

I have a lot of friends pushing me to explain my latest obsession with art. Why? Of course they end this same discussion admitting they were daydreaming about Goya and the Prada Musuem the other day. (Why are you converting your apartment to a boudoir is a second popular query.)

"The idea behind "The Accidental Masterpiece," writes chief art critic for the New York Times Michael Kimmelman, "is that art provides us with clues about how to live our own lives more fully..."

"I hope to approach the art of seeing here in the spirit of an amateur," he writes in his introduction. "I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, wholeheartedly."

Art gives me a nudge -  as if we need a license - to be a lover, my natural self.

A lover doesn't compromise. They are. They are wholly themselves. Wholeheartly.

Whole, total, absolute - intero - in Italian. Whole, entire, all - entero - in Spanish. A lover remains open. A lover coasts in the direction of themselves, gently takes the foot off the brakes.

A lover reads white peach poems with aplomb.

p.s. A lover builds cathedrals.

There's an old story about a passer-by who stops to ask three stonemasons: "What are you doing?"

"Doin' me job," replies the first stonemason, gruffly.

"Cuttin' stone," says the second one, irritably.

The third stonemason straightens his back, looks up and says, with passion in his eyes: "I'm building a cathedral."

images white peaches via Flickr by Old Shoe Woman; "Agony of the Garden" by Giovanni Bellini; "Sweet Dawn Study" by James McCallum

Update: A philanthropist and friend reminds me: "Well I think it all depends on the intention. I like to think of Vittoria Colonna as a well-intentioned patron/philanthropist versus any of the Medicis."

That sweet poet and nun (alright, technically: "Although she did not take the veil, Vittoria Colonna lived the last years of her life in a convent, dressed like a nun, and was buried as a nun") and beloved of Michelangelo was a bit of a radical in her day. She lived her intention and ideas:

• The idea of gifting freely.
• The idea of art as a free gift.
• The idea of God's grace as a free gift. (And this during a time when Medicis and everyone else were earning and buying their way to Heaven. At this time, money-lending and banking regardless of interest rate is considered an unnatural sin according to the Church: "It's like money copulating.")

So I'm reminded of my post, "An Abundant Fertile New Renaisssance" about gifts and patronage and renaisssance and Vittoria and Michelangelo.

And I'm re-reminded of my intention. How easy they are to compromise. It all depends on intention.

And there in that post I find another answer to Why art?

"Love is like a painter. The works of a good painter so charm men that, in contemplating them, they remain suspended, and sometimes to such an extent that it seems they have been put in an ecstasy and have been taken outside of themselves, and seem to forget themselves." - 15c Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola

Living Takes Time, Thinking Big Takes Time

"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it." - Soren Kierkegaard

Full weeks what with writing the book, sharing time with my 2.08 close confidants ;-), working on kick-starting the Silicon Valley Renaissance (truly I only half-jest) which requires a lot of deep hanging out time in the field offline, prayer, and living.

Yet I'd never cut out my morning tea time. I set the tone of the day with my early morning ritual in the backyard where I meditate and contemplate over a steaming cup of aged earl grey with bergamot or perhaps a pomegrante oolong or maybe an orange spice moonlight white tea.

"You honor life with tea, and the only way you can do this is by making the effort to stop time," says Alexandra Stoddard in the beautiful book, Tea Celebrations: The Way to Serenity. I unearthed the book - a total delightful surprise - buried under layers of other books at the lovely and welcoming Leigh's Favorite Books (reviews/Google map) practically across the street from the historic Del Monte building (yeah, there were really orchards and fruit growing in Silicon Valley once).

Reading the June 2006 issue of More magazine about former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz handing the reins over ("Bartz, 57, and her board were worried that her heir apparent, Carl Bass, would leave Autodesk if he didn't get the chance to run it.") I pondered why Americans find it so difficult to slow down. The article states:

Bartz's biggest challenge may be the one she has now - slowing down, even if it's from 120 miles per hour to 115, as she puts it. "I don't have experience" in downshifting, she says. "I've never done it."

That's an understatement: "Recovering from a mastectomy and trans flap surgery, to rebuild the breast with abdominal tissue, was brutal. She just took four weeks off, then worked full-time through seven months of chemotherapy treatments. "It's a blur now," she says, "but the chemo part was hell."

..."Please tell people that when the doctor says it takes six weeks to recover, you shouldn't go back work after four," she says. "Missing work for those two weeks wouldn't have killed anybody."

A caption picturing Bartz standing in her Atherton, California garden accompanies the story, "The World According to Bartz," says she "wants to spend more time with her hands in the soil."

I've heard an executive coach say, Slow down to go fast. She said most of her clients, like Bartz, had no idea how to do that. They weren't opposed to the idea at all. They just weren't sure how.

I've found slowing down itself, alone, isn't the answer. I used to race around at probably 90 mph (to Bartz' 120) back in the heyday: back when I didn't have time for a wedding because I was working two dot-com jobs because I just had to have my stock options vest in the first company.

There are plenty of miserable folks puttering around at a zombie pace. (One day I'll share the research that links obesity and sexual dissatification - hint: eating fast, and eating without enjoyment translates over to your love life too.) It's more about savoring, being vitally present every moment, every step of the way. Sometimes that's not so slow, rather it's quite energetic, seemingly fast on the outside - but wholly without friction, and flowing ease.

So this is my favorite passage from the treasure I found at Leigh's:

"Living," as wise Eleanor Brown once said, "takes time." Even though she died January 30, 1991, a little over a week before her 101st birthday, Mrs. Brown is alive in my heart. I never saw her rushed or anxious. She was an interior designer working for the most prominent families in America, and there were many times her clients tried to put undue pressure on her and her staff. This was unacceptable to her. She valued everything about life and didn't want discord or manipulation.

At four o'clock every weekday afternoon, a maid served tea to Mrs. Brown and to all the employees. Cookies, too. No matter how frantic we were, or upset or stressed, we all stopped working. Tea was a command performance with Mrs. Brown. This was a time for sharing. I switched my attitude instantly. She'd engage me with questions. "What was the most beautiful thing you saw today? Why?" Or, "Don't you feel we get too fussy in our decorations?" Or, "Did you know that our client Mrs. Harris is home every afternoon when her daughters return from school, and they have tea together?"

I learned that teaching is in the act, in the performance. What you do, you are. Our four o'clock teas at the firm were not four-hour Japanese tea ceremonies, but they did happen every day. Probably they lasted twenty minutes, which is one hundred minutes a week. This adds up. In a year, you have had 5,200 minutes of tea, or a little over 86 hours. Think of what you and someone else can share in that time.

Mrs. Brown was an extremely successful businesswoman. Why did she instigate this ceremony in 1922, when she founded her firm, and serve tea for over sixty years, every afternoon, to her employees? It forced us to stop whatever we were doing and pause. Over tea we dreamed up solutions to design projects. We tended to pair up. A younger assistant could spend some one-on-one time with her boss or a senior designer. Of all the habits I've acquired from Mrs. Brown, my adopting the tea ceremony at four each afternoon at Alexandra Stoddard Incorporated is one for which I'm especially grateful. This break refreshes us and clears our heads.

When my assistant, Elisabeth, and I sit alone having tea, we talk about our work in broad, speculative terms. We talk about the big picture and let go of the pressing problems for a time. Sitting at a desk isn't the only time when ideas surface; in fact, it is much more likely that something new springs to mind in moments of peace and leisure.

I have several busy friends who enjoy coming over for tea after work before going home to their families. The more frenzied we become, the more important it is to take undiluted time to be with a friend...Tea for two is a special opportunity to catch up and talk in shorthand and get to the marrow of life. There are far too few occasions when two people are alone, face-to-face, in communion with one another. Each meeting should be sacrosant, even if it is only for twenty minutes. Just being together, sometimes even without a whole lot of conversation, binds us with invisible threads of grace and love. - from Tea Celebrations: The Way to Serenity by Alexandra Stoddard

image Flickr photo by Rick Takagi

The Secret of Happiness

I was struck so much by Eckhart Tolle's words, that they're pretty much summing up the gestalt of this blog, where it's heading, evolving. I'm evolving. These are from the great sub-section "The Secret of Happiness."

"There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now [or, the present moment, or Presence]. You then realize that you don't live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance." - Eckhart Tolle, The New Earth

We happen to be reading and applying A New Earth right now at the weekly Sunday night "Daring to Live An Authentic Life" group that meets at our home in San Jose (jointly hosted with my housemates).

I was about to write this paragraph: "Here are my favorite tips, also from the book, on avoiding tripping on the dance floor. (It does happens to the best of us. I sprawled face down big time this week. First, make sure you didn't take anyone down with you, then get up gracefully and keep dancing.)"

I'm looking over for typos before I hit publish. And it hits me, that can't be right: I am not the dancer. Holy shit.*

Here are my own favorite practices from the book anyway, sans commentary:

One day I will be free of the ego." Who is talking? The ego. To become free of the ego is not really a big job but a very small one. All you need to do is be aware of your thoughts and emotions - as they happen. This is not really a "doing," but an alert "seeing."

And...

In Zen they say: "Don't seek the truth. Just cease to cherish opinions."

p.s. & image one piece from the gorgeous artwork of Mindful One. Mindful One's, aka Kathryn Petro Harper, M.A.'s blog is at The Mindful Life, I found her blog because she linked to my ever-popular post (via Kathy Sierra it's getting a lot of traffic) If Not On The Day I Die, Then Not Today.

That post was written last August. And I'm not sure that I'd change anything on 43 Things list except the desire to do a documentary film has waned, I really am writing the book now, and understanding the nature of Enlightenment, I realize as this author has, that "Awakening is not an end in itself, but a doorway which leads to another segment of the spiritual process." Be kind, ouch, that one needs some practice 'cause it takes two to tango on that cosmic dance floor.

Actually my list these days pretty much comes down to loving whatever's in front of me.

* - Bonus: This reminds me, I've memorized this exchange quoted between a student and the mystic Ramana Maharshi to point it's nearly a mantra. Note: You can definitely replace Self with Dancer: