RAVE - Noel Coward's Brief Encounter at American Conservatory Theater

Front row seats are always a hoot at the theater. You see every nuance of the performance, every bead of sweat, and in this case, even get to speak to members of the cast before the show.

This production mixed film, music and live performance - with the cast serving cucumber sandwiches and singing in the bar during intermission - and was wonderful from start to finish.

This tour comes direct from England, so the 30s English mannerisms and accents were perfect. Of course, I'd done my Noel Coward plummy-accented, cigarette-in-a-holder, top hat under the arm impersonation for Pavey in advance, all to no avail. This is no elegant drawing room melodrama, but a suburban railway station mostly populated by working staff, soldiers and 3 pairs of vexed lovers.

Is there any other kind?

RAVE - A Day At The Beach

Was it The Pope who said "the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco"? It might've been, seeing as everyone from Oscar Wilde to Mark Twain has been credited with that zinger.

What they DON'T tell you is that after the alleged summer has gone, during autumn (and even winter) the ozone layer opens up and we're treated to warm days and nights.

Hence, wheretofore and thusly, yesterday we deposited ourselves onto Dunes Beach, at Half Moon Bay, 20 miles south of San Francisco. While admiring the surfers for their skill and resolve - the sea NEVER warms up off our coast - I buried Pavey up to her armpits in the sand and was able to give her a playful slap without fear of reciprocation ;)

REVIEW - Manic Street Preachers at The Fillmore, Sep 24 2009

For those of you who think I don't know squat about Classical Music, I just revelled in the Manics with friend and software conspirator Ed Gaudet.

I last saw them supporting Oasis at Knebworth in the UK in 1996, along with Prodigy and Ocean Colour Scene. The sound that day was abominable, with a 1 second delay between what we heard from the bus-sized speakers at the front, and those at the back of the 250,000 crowd. No such problems at The Fillmore, which as always hosted an excellent show.

10 years after guitarist Richey Edwards disappeared (his car was found near the Severn Bridge, and it's assumed he jumped), the Manics' new album features his lyrics set to new tunes. I think one ends with "peace out" at these moments.

RAVE - L'Ardoise

The best French food I've tasted in America, let alone San Francisco. 

I hate to say it, because we live just 2 blocks from Chez Papa on Potrero Hill, but L'Ardoise is what Chez Papa aspires to be. 

My wife started with the Tomato and Basil Tureen, which was "tasty and refreshing", and I ignored American sensibilities and had the Foie Gras, which was excellent. She moved on to the Coq Au Vin, with a "wonderfully rich sauce that made chicken an exciting choice for once". I had the Duck Leg Confit, which was the best I've had in years. The Pommes L'Ardennes (I think that's what they were called) somehow tasted like they'd been cooked in a French oil on a French flame in France.

I guess I would have preferred the same fare in a larger space - the place is perhaps too cramped, with tables too close together to properly relax and enjoy the food.

The staff was energetic, friendly and helpful - what more could you ask?

RAVE - Brunelleschi's Dome, by Ross King

To borrow a much-vaunted phrase from the art world: I'm not an expert on architecture, but I know what I like.

This is an exciting account of how the word's largest Renaissance dome was designed and built.

I wish I'd read this book before I visited Florence and gazed up at Il Duomo. It was a dramatic experience, and the icing on the cake would have been to know what it took to build it.

The book also extends the list of Italian words you know (pasta, pizza, macaroni, ferrari, etc. - now you know that Il Duomo means "The Dome").

RANT - Extended Car Warranties

While I've got my synapses wired to the main power supply and the dial turned to 'Full Rant', imagine my surprise to find this! Looking into another annoying TV ad I suspect being perpetrated by scammers - namely, add-on car warranties - at Ripoff Report.com, there among the complaints about stoprepairbills.com, is an ad for Cash4Gold.com. Does this need another exclamation mark?

I don't know whether to focus on the confirmation that people ARE being scammed by these companies offering cover for repairs they eventually wriggle out of, or on the fact that Ripoff Report is getting ad dollars from another company alleged on their web site to be ripping people off!

Lewis Black makes big money wobbling his chops and spluttering over these incongruities.

RANT - Cash for Gold ads

What is it with all these ads telling us to send our gold rings, bracelets and nick-nacks to some company we've never heard of? Most of these companies sound like scammers, smell like scammers and, if you research them online, are in fact alleged scammers.  

How is it that TV advertising has moved from plain old crushingly dull to outright punter-swindling?

There are a number of sites where ripoff-ees have left their "Disgusted, of Sudbury" posts, including this one.

Caveat emptor (which is Latin for "watch your ass").

RAVE - Sociale

Very impressed with Sociale, a restaurant in Laurel Heights, San Francisco.

We had an exceptional evening with Holly, Stephen, Ginger and Ross, starting with a snifter at Spruce, directly across the street.

Strolling across to Sociale, the front yard was full, with everyone enjoying the party atmosphere. We were seated inside, and began what turned out to be a very different 3.5 hour dinner than the Cafe Jacqueline experience (see August 30 RANT). Admittedly, we ate and drank almost continuously, with 3 top-notch Italian reds (Nebbiolo, Rosso di Montalcino, Nobile de Montepulciano), and an excellent Moscato D'Asti with dessert). Everything we had (stuffed olives, peppers stuffed with lamb, Fava bean risotto, lamb chop, quail) was cooked to perfection, while the service was top notch.

Hugely recommended.

RAVE - The Forger's Spell, by Edward Dolnick

Another great history mystery book, sub-titled "A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century", this one, er, tells the true story of a fake Vermeer, painted by budding hoaxer Han van Meegeren and sold to one Hermann Goering.

Apparently, Van Meegeren was a lousy painter, but driven by jealousy and a desperate need for money, he set about working out how to create a painting (and in the end, a series of them) that, though painted in the 1940s would look, feel and smell like something painted 300 years earlier.

Reading this wouldn't enable you to forge an old master, but it shows you to what lengths you'd have to go if you tried. It's not just painting like Vermeer, but using 300 year old wooden frames, 300 year old canvas, paint and minerals, and choosing a subject that would fit into Vermeer's canon.

After doing all of that, you have to come up with a credible story about how and where you uncovered this "lost" work. And in Van Meegeren's case, because his initial success encouraged him to repeat the process with a number of additional "Vermeers", eventually led to his downfall.

Forgers vs Nazis, an exciting, true story.

RANT - Our fridge is broken. Please send cold beer.

As we used to say in England "It never rains. It pours" - a piece of logic that would make a meteorologist turn in his grave.

The cause of my linguistic lash-up? Last week we bought a new washer and drier, because the washer retired with a groin strain, or something. Yesterday, we came back from our week away to find that the refrigerator had decided to heat everything, rather than freeze it. Our repair man has just left to order an $800 part! So, until Friday we are living the Victorian life, sans refrigeration. How will we keep the pheasant and foie gras edible? How will we get by with warm champagne? At least it's given us something else to argue about, seeing as the failed fridge is apparently my fault. I must've broken some rule on planet Pav.

REVIEW - Maui

I have to be very careful about my critique du paradis. That'd be biting the hand that feeds me. We took the 20-minute flight from Honolulu to Maui, and checked into the Ritz-Carlton for 4 days of finding out what it's like to share a big-ass pool with dozens of other schmooze-fans.

Short answer? Pretty darned good.

Sticking a bunch of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific necessarily means you get a lot of cloud and a permanent brisk, warm wind whipping around your speedo. Nevertheless, it is gorgeous here, and only the hedonistic pursuit of luxuries elsewhere and a doctorate in pickiness gives me a somewhat jaded view of resorts like this.

Eaves-dropping on a group next to us in one of the many restaurants at this hotel gave me the perfect get-out - how to criticize the place without inviting too much criticism myself. What do London or New York give you that you can't get here in Hawaii, or in San Francisco? Style.

That might sound a little disingenuous, coming from someone who loves life in SF, but I'm just, er, "being real, dog."

No amount of fancy furniture or million dollar view can make up for an alleged 5-star resort that insists on offering fries with every dish, or not listing the year with any of the wines on the menu, or having 2 flat screen TVs in the suite, but no slippers, or having TVs blasting ESPN into the lobby and main bar all bleeding day, or thinking that having every member of staff intone "Aloha" every time they see you gives them a big check mark alongside "service". Sorry, I'm foaming at the mouth now. Back to the view from our room. Aaaaaaaah.

Will we go back? Almost certainly.

RAVE - Best office in the world?

This is arguably the world's best view from an office desk. I know some of you prefer gazing out of your corner offices at the throbbing pulse of the financial district in [insert throbbing city here], but I'm sure we'd all live longer and happier if we had this view of the Pacific from IBM's Honolulu office.

Sadly, I only spent a day in this office, and left fingernails on the door jambs as I was dragged out to the waiting airport taxi.

RANT - Hawaii 0-5

Thanks to an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time, I was asked to co-present at an IBM seminar in Honolulu. That very pleasant task meant we decided to extend the visit by a few days, Pavey flew in and we blissed out in Maui. I may be a curmudgeon, but I know what side my bread's buttered, so I'm separating my negatives from my positives.

No mistake about it, Hawaii is not all pineapple chunks in Paradise.

First, there are the visitors:

1. Washed out, grey-haired salesmen with paunches stretching generic aloha shirts, droning on about zzzzzzzzz

2. American and Japanese tourists, doing the same thing Brits do in Benidorm, wabbling around with bright red faces and umbrella festooned concotions, telling their whining brats they can get another big mac when they get back to the condo.

3. Then there's everyone else, suspecting that as long as they hang out here they'll not have a proper career.

That's not 5 negatives? I said I would hold the curmudgeanity.

Oh, alright.

4. Two words. West California.

5. Another two. American Luxe.

RANT - Town Hall

There are several things that can take the edge of a restaurant, if not outright spoil it.

I've already banged on enough about singing "happy birthday", and how that drops an otherwise classy place down into TGIF territory. 

Then there's having to stand around for ages in limbo waiting for your reserved and already overdue table. 

Not to mention doggy bags on the table, waiters telling you what their favorite dish is on the menu, imagining that their taste buds are twinned with yours.

Town Hall suffers from all of these.

I picked this photo because it perfectly highlights the Applebys-with-chandeliers vibe exuded by this place.

Enough said.

RAVE - Spruce

Elegant, sumptuous and tasty. But enough about me.

Spruce would be perfect if it hadn't pulled one of our wine choices and suggested another, much more expensive one, and then repeated that "trick" with two of our entrees.

I wouldn't normally mind, but it smacked of the waiter and/or restaurant just trying to leech more money out of their customer.

Aside from that, it's a very special place, for eating or cocktailing.

Not much choice in the leather-bound menu for our vegetarian guest, but all-in-all a great place for a mini-celebration or otherwise special night out.

Last time we were here we just sat in the bar for cocktails before heading over the street to Sociale.

Nice.

RAVE - Michaelangelo and The Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King

Another vivid account by Ross King (see Brunelleschi's Dome), this one covering (no pun intended) the Master's job on the Sistine Chapel.

I'm ashamed to say that on the many times I've visited Rome, business engagements or the long lines to get in to see the Chapel have prevented me from viewing one of the most famous "paintings" in the World.

I say "painting" because in fact - as I learned in this excellent book - it's actually a fresco, which were and still are created in a unique fashion. The laborious method of applying colored minerals to a still-wet plaster surface was one of the many reasons Michaelangelo didn't really want the commission.

Compounding that were the sheer scale and unpleasant working conditions - in cramped, dangerously high locations, mostly working on his back and in poor light.

The large scale of most frescoes, and the fact that panels or sections needed to be completed before the plaster completely dried, meant first sketching the composition on paper, making pin pricks along the lines of that sketch, attaching the paper to the wall or ceiling and then applying colored chalk through those pin pricked holes. The result was an outline on the plaster that could then be colored in. Not exactly painting by numbers, but you get the drift.

Arguably, any job linked with a politically corrupt, soap-opera-ish organization can, and did get unpleasant.

A fabulous thread running through the process of painting the Cistine Chapel was Michaelangelo's jealousy of and rivalry with his "competitor" Raphael.

This might have been called "Holy Roller", if Michaelangelo had done it all a nice flat color.