“Keith’s turn at the beach”
I would like to start this week with a quote from the late, great Anthony Bourdain, courtesy of the wonderful Bastion restaurant in Nashville:
A lot of great advice in there.
Diana made it home from Julia’s beach house, trapping a mouse in a closet for John to deal with when he arrived after their departure. We enjoyed a late “welcome home” lunch at the Columns on Tuesday, sharing the delicious burger (best in NOLA?) and their new chopped salad.I didn’t make it to trivia. Apparently the most interesting question was about naming 4 of the 5 classic French cooking “mother” sauces. Denny got Hollandaise and Bechamel. I would have added Tomato if I had been there but would not have remembered the remaining two – Velouté and Espagnole.
We participated in our classic retiree activity on Wednesday morning – the classic 10am movie at the Prytania. This week was “Roman Holiday” – the 1953 movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.I’d forgotten how many quiet scenes there were in this one – relying on the facial expressions from Hepburn in particular. The very last scene being an excellent example. We both enjoyed this one very much.
We’ve been working on our wills, medical and financial powers of attorney, living wills etc. for many months now. These were finalized on Thursday on the 25th floor of the Regions Bank building downtown. It’s always entertaining for us to enter the type of building that we worked in for so many years and haven’t been in for many years since. Paul met us there and acted as the second witness for the document signing.
We celebrated this milestone with a Happy Hour at Saint John. This is another great value offering (not quite as good as Cafe Degas, but close.)
The moules frites and crudo with creme fraiche were both very good, and the highlight for me was the muffuletta bruschetta.
Kenny drove us to Grand Isle on Friday. Where is that? Well, it’s the last barrier between New Orleans and the Gulf. Way down there (about a two and a half hour drive.)
I always learn something when driving with Kenny. Two takeaways from this trip:
1. There are three billionaires in Louisiana. Trey’s employer is one of them, and he hails from Lockport, a small town we drove through.
2. Port Fourchon, right on the tip before you turn for Grand Isle, once delivered 17% of the US energy supply. Amazing to contemplate from such a small town.
We arrived a bit before check in time and so enjoyed a burger and yummy onion rings at the Starlite diner.The “fishing camp”, really a big house on stilts, that Denny chose for us was excellent. Big, manly living area, huge upper deck, queen size bunkbeds, massive downstairs cooktop, and a huge dining table. Denny always does such a good job of researching and finding places for us.
We met Denny and Mason at the marina and then Kenny made everyone jambalaya back at the house.
Grand Isle was in sync with New Orleans – hosting a red dress run on Saturday morning. This is a silly charity event where men and women all dress up in red dresses and participate in a short run. We made our way down to the marina to check out the post run festivities. The red dresses piled into their golf carts and started to leave shortly after our arrival. They were off to Cisco’s bar. Why not join?
This was a classic dive bar. The guys played a complicated three ball pool game and we enjoyed the ambience.
Thom ended up winning the pool pot and doing an entertaining happy dance.
Later in the afternoon we headed out on the boats. I was assigned to Preston’s boat with first mate Jack and Kenny.
Neither boat had good luck with catching any fish. The water was choppy and that led to a pretty bumpy ride back and forth from the fishing spots. I was amazed by the selection of extremely expensive reels that Preston’s friend had in his closet after we docked and enjoyed the sunset.
Back at the fishing camp, Denny cooked up a feast (no fish on the grill) while the guys relaxed. Denny works hard on these trips to keep everything going.
Meanwhile, in the Quarter, the girls were enjoying “Dirty Linen Night”. This follows “White Linen Night” which happened the week earlier. This is a fundraising event on Royal Street and most of the galleries and shops participate. You buy a wrist band and get drinks at all the galleries.
The funds go to pre-college education for kids hoping to go to college that might not typically have the right preparation. Last year, 100% of students made it to college. Seems the girls had a great time, finishing with dinner and drinks at Manolito (Cuban restaurant.)
Kenny did a great job of driving us home through serious storms on Sunday morning. Then we took Anne for dinner at Basin Seafood to start her “birthday week.” They had an interesting coolinary menu (the August special menus that restaurants have to try and bring more locals in during the quiet season.) Diana had the crawfish pupusa. I sampled and it was perfect.
Anne started with the corn bisque. Great presentation on both dishes:
Both of them opted for the soft shell crab entree, while I rejected the coolinary menu (not that hungry) and opted for the beet and crab ravigote salad (highly recommended.)
My book this week was “So Far Gone” by Jess Walter. I really enjoyed this – the first half quite a bit more than the second. First half was more character driven, with a lot of dramatic action in the second. This is not as great as Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins”, but worth the read. Here’s the online summary of the plot:“A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he’d done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no phone, no computer, and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a madcap journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and ultimately moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment””
I take issue with the “caustic ex-girlfriend” – that’s not how I read her.
Some passages that I enjoyed:
An entertaining metaphor:
“Rhys sat helplessly between the dim husbands of daughter and ex-wife, quietly nursing his fourth beer. He was a terrible nurse. This patient wasn’t likely to make it, either.”
Emphasizing my hatred of the younger set inserting “like” everywhere it doesn’t belong:
” She was, of course, neither nun nor teenager, but a twenty-four-year-old recent college graduate, still able to conjure a bit of high school indignation on her face when it suited her. “Um,” Allison said, “I’m, like, working on it?” She held her phone up with a flopped wrist. On the screen: a photo of crime scene tape around a light pole. She was, like, posting it! If someone would just, like, leave her alone!”
Getting a little deeper:
“All cruelty springs from weakness. Seneca said that, along with: Ignorance is the cause of fear. Kinnick had always believed these adages to be true, but now, bleeding on the ground, watching Dean Burris stand over his dead son-in-law, Rhys wondered if Seneca might have been a little silly to believe in the causal roots of evil.”
An interesting take on the surface level journalism that we are served:
“Pestered by Lucy the day he left the hospital, Rhys had allowed himself to be interviewed by a young reporter named Allison. When the story ran, Kinnick was deflated. She’d gotten his quotes right and the details certainly seemed accurate, but reading about the whole thing in the newspaper somehow shrunk Shane’s murder, as if it had been nothing more than a seedy domestic squabble between a flaky wife, her religious husband, and his gun-toting militia friends. Rhys even started to wonder if that’s all it was. He had to remind himself of the limits of daily journalism, which was better at posing questions than answering them. Still, he wondered: Where was the story about how fear had infected so many people, how it had killed his poor son-in-law? How a sociopath like Dean Burris had burrowed his way into the Church of the Blessed Fire? How these insane things kept happening, these eruptions of senseless violence, of anger and ignorance and greed and mendacity, like ancient fissures bubbling up under the surface, and what—we were just supposed to go on with our lives? Wake up the next day like nothing happened, like we hadn’t lost our minds? Just turn the page, to the baseball scores or the horoscopes or celebrity birthdays? (Nothing to see here, just America.)”
We watched a documentary on Billy Joel that we agreed was very well done. What a huge talent.
And then I watched a few episodes of the CNN documentary about Liveaid. This took place the day before I started working, and I remember watching it with my new boss, Howard Dunn, at his home. 40 years ago!
One of the interesting scenes is Paul McCartney’s microphone not working during “Let it Be.” The logistics of doing something like this in 1985 are astounding, and this was the only blip that I’m aware of. David Bowie, Pete Townsend and Bob Geldof came out to sing and help with the issue. And then the crowd took over.
Finally, I remembered a crazy good album that I got as a Christmas gift from Mum and Dad one year. It was called “The Hitmakers” and had a ridiculously good set of tracks:
Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits
Oh Yeah by Roxy Music
Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel
Dark End of the Street by Van Morrison
You Wear it Well by Rod Stewart
What an amazing year in music.
Coexist peacefully, with kindness and patience for all.