Beauty in butter and beyond
How beautiful was yesterday? It was like the day the earth was made. Bakersfield has its moments and Monday was one of them.
Not many wildflowers yet but we saw a few lupines coming down Breckenridge recently. Don’t despair, dry years can surprise you. We’ve seen explosions of wildflowers during drought years.
The column on the pleasures of soft butter elicited this response from Bill Casady:
“I rarely respond to the columns in The Californian, but I have to take exception to your opinion of cold, hard butter. Granted, in most instances spreadable butter works best, but NOTHING can beat the taste of a pat of cold butter on a freshlycut slice of Pyrenees sourdough bread. Getting it distributed onto the bread is a chore that’s well worth the doing.”
One more note on the butter column from Barbra Otter:
“I read your butter column in the Porterville Recorder the other day & enjoyed it as I am a butter addict also ... Have you ever used a ‘French butter dish’? It’s basically a small crockery bowl that holds water with another bowl inverted inside of it filled with butter. It’s a bit of a pain to press the butter into the bowl but it does stay spreadable except in our warm summer months.”
A couple of great movies, but I’m looking forward to a few months from now when we might not be talking about movies anymore. Not talking about what we saw or what’s on our list.
Better to be talking about where we went, what we ate when we returned to our favorite restaurants (inside four friendly walls) and who we saw when we were gallivanting to and fro.
However in the meantime, watch “Satan & Adam” a documentary about a guitar player in Harlem who is befriended by a white, highly educated harmonica player. (This comes from the noted movie connoisseur Ask Bob, He’ll Know). They form a duo, tour and then life happens as it often does. Touching and fascinating.
Also quite good is “Quincy,” a documentary about Quincy Jones, the noted composer who has scored 24 films, countless TV series and worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Rufus and Chaka Khan along with a million other people.
When Jones was working in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra in the mid-1960s, Black artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne could play the big rooms but had to eat in the kitchen or stay across town.
When Sinatra heard this, according to the documentary, he was incredulous and told the casino owners if Jones couldn’t stay where he wanted maybe Sinatra wouldn’t play there either. According to Jones, Sinatra ended that nonsense the next day.
I loved, and it’s a quiet love, “Nomad land,” the film with Francis Mcdormand, who for my money is as good as any actor or actress alive. It’s about the van people, people who live in vans and migrate from one place to another and one job to another.
Mcdormand does more acting with her eyes than most do with their whole bodies. It’s a quiet film bathed in the light of mostly southwestern landscapes. The movie is sad, but not miserable because it’s rescued by love and acceptance.
Music time. I’ve done a Brandi Carlile turn here before but two songs from her “Bear Creek” album, released in 2012, stand out: “Hard Way Home” and “Keep Your Heart Young,”