Barry's Life in Napa Blog

A big, strong man dissolved in tears of joy...the climax of an aria...someone you love in a cap and gown...a new high score in Angry Birds - all of these things are just like the others. I speak of the moment of catharsis. Warning: Pedantry follows. Catharsis derives from the Greek word kathairein, meaning to purge, purify or clean. Aristotle used it first in a clinical sense, to describe effects of certain actions on the human body, and then later applied it metaphorically to drama and poetry. Being a $64 word, chances are more people have experienced it than have accessed the word to define the experience. Warning: Tortured metaphor follows. Catharsis is like a cheeseburger - it comes in many varieties, and you can have it your way. It's found in your direct, personal experience - when you are the one touching something universal - and vicariously, even in seeing that moment re-enacted in fiction -  and your heart leaps up. We seek it out on stages, on playing fields...

Disclaimer: I suck at science. Chemistry, biology, physics - they all hate me. Sure, I can memorize some shit and pass a test, but any real understanding of why cells divide when it just seems to complicate things, or why protons and electrons continue to hang out together when they clearly have such different points of view, eludes me. Regardless, science intrigues me. It's possible to be fascinated by something while not understanding it at all. Take women, for example. But I digress. Science is the topic because of a new report in the journal Nature. Turns out there may be three times as many stars in the universe as previously believed. Last I heard, the universe is still expanding, so there's probably plenty of room for all this so you don't really need to clear out the garage. It's not like there weren't a lot of stars to begin with. Like 400,000,000,000 (400 billion) here in the good old Milky Way, and 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) in some other galaxies, a...

(Chances are you don't give two shits about the World Cup. But if I let the occasion pass without weighing in I couldn't live with myself, so here goes.) It doesn't take much to be a guru these days. Not in the literal sense of "religious leader and spiritual teacher," but in the modified modern sense of "a n advisor or mentor; a leader or expert in a field." You can quite quickly become a guru just by being the first person to buy the latest gadget and investing the time to figure out a third of the crazy shit it will do, and voila! You will be your local iPhone guru or PS3 guru or Zune guru. Ok, never mind the Zune, nobody cares. So in that vein, I have become, to certain people, a soccer guru - wise enough to know that the rest of the world says "football" and means what we call "soccer," but only a pretentious douche will call it "football" if he/she is American - which means I know just a little bit more about the game ...

Some of my friends know that I was a Girl Scout. Yes, I know, most of the male persuasion were Boy Scouts. I did some of that - Cub Scouts, Webelos (wtf?) etc - but my more formative time was spent tagging along with my mom when she was a Girl Scout leader for my sister and her friends. I learned all about making campfires and paddling canoes and, of course, lanyards, from the Girl Scouts. And let me tell you, that lanyard knowledge has served me well. There was a song - a corny song, for sure - that Girl Scouts sang back then, that said "make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold." I have had the simple truth of that brought home to me often of late, and feel the need to acknowledge it. A couple of months ago I had the chance to visit with C, a friend I've had since Reagan was in office. We spent one summer together and have been buds ever since. We can sit and talk like that summer was yesterday. Today I spent time with P who I've known sinc...

I used to watch tons of TV. It was mostly ritual or habitual behavior. Didn't matter much what was on - just a visual chewing gum. Not unlike old people sitting on a bench just watching people go by - something to do, without doing anything. Lately (and especially since I now live in The Hell That Is Basic Cable ) I don't watch so much TV. The set's most valued function is to lull me to sleep at night and murmur softly so I can't hear the silence that reminds me that I am alone. (This system works well until the wee hours when, inevitably, someone or other suddenly pops on shouting about Jesus. More about Jesus later. Bet you can't wait for that.) But there's one program running right now that has sucked me in - Life on the Discovery Channel. I've watched my share of "nature shows" in the past - dating all the way back to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins. (I loved that show. It ran on Sunday nights and I loved it mostly beca...

I haven't had any dog bites or bee stings, but for some random reason I feel like making a list of a few of my favorite things , in no particular order, and here she goes: 1. Almonds 2. When people laugh so out of control they snort 3. That first morning it smells like fall, or spring, or summer, or winter 4. Email 5. Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) 6. A long, heavy overcoat 7. When somebody drives one deep and everyone rises to their feet all at once 8. Sleeping with the fan on. And the TV. And hitting the snooze button a lot. 9. Reaching a par 5 in 2 (setting up a 4 putt) 10. Frank Capra movies 11. The sound of a cello 12. The memory of sneaking a look at a Playboy magazine as a kid 13. Fighter jets in formation 14. When little kids laugh so hard they lose all bodily control 15. Manzanita 16. Good pinot noir 17. Sondheim 18. The vegetarian burrito at Soda Canyon Store 19. Making people laugh 20. Buying a gift for someone I love 21. The first pass with a new razor blade 22. High...

Resolved: I am vain. I readily admit to being "excessively concerned of (my) own appearance." I have, for as long as I can remember, wanted to look good. Maybe being a kid who got called "fatty" when I was little contributes to placing an importance on looking good. Or maybe it's my general and ongoing need for approval. In any case, I am vain and I try to make myself look as good as I can. Resolved: I have a lot of moles. The brown spots on your skin, not the little varmints under the lawn. You can't choose the distribution of your pigment, so what are you going to do? But moles are more than just blips on the radar, they can be annoying to shave around, and as time passes they can get bigger or hairier or just sort of more noticeable in a negative way. All that said, a few weeks back I started noticing a small mole up near my left eye. It seemed to look different than it once did, and maybe a little inflamed. So being vain, I called up the dermatologist a...

In about 24 hours I will get on a plane and shoot through the night and when morning comes I will be in the most exciting city in the world for me - New York, New York. A trip to New York means theater to me. My first two visits in the late 70s gave me the unquenchable memories of seeing an unknown young actor named Kevin Kline on stage with a Broadway legend John Cullum and an understudy, Judy Kaye, who would become a substantial presence in her own right. The show was "On the 20th Century," and I still remember the chill that ran through me when the orchestra kicked off the overture. I said to myself "I am seeing a Broadway musical!" Not bad for a hick kid from the sticks with a bad case of the theater bug. My mental scrapbook from that far-removed time includes recollections of being in the audience for Frank Langella's star turn as "Dracula," Blythe Danner (when she was known for more than being Gwyneth Paltrow's mom) in Pinter's "Betr...

Cool Hand Luke is the quintessential Paul Newman movie for me. It brought together all those qualities that he portrayed in his best characters - strong but damaged, sly but true, the blazing smile that floats up out of a deep well of sadness. And always cool, always cool. Newman had one of those attributes you cannot teach in acting class - charisma - and he had a trainload of it. A list of his best reads like somebody's top 20 films. My faves after Cool Hand Luke would be The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Hustler, Hombre , and Slap Shot , which was a gross comedy but Newman brought dignity to it. And you can't hardly find a real stinker in his filmography. He had a real sense of what he did and didn't want to do with his acting, and with his life. In his era you made your bones on the stage, New York was the only destination for the legit actor, and he was the first to play some character...

Indifference rapidly turns to rabid partisanship as soon as the Olympics offers its first big moment, and it looks like that's happened, so let's pump our fists and do a little "U-S-A! U-S-A!" In case you missed it, some French swimmers claimed they were going to "smash" the Americans in the 4 x 100 freestyle. (Imagine that, French bragging.) The race turned out to be spectacular, with the USA winning, so in your Gallic face, monsieur. Maybe you can win some gold medals if they had a smugness competition or a smoking marathon. We know the French could win the sprints if they could just have Germans chasing them. But mon dieu, enough cheap slaps at Pierre. (And in case you missed it and you want to see it, NBC has set up an excellent website to feed video. You can get live streams and archived stuff. Go to the site here, and if you get a message that you need to install "Silverlight" that's cool, don't be fearful.) It's a funny thing th...

The was a good book a few years back (ok, I checked and it was 23 years ago. That's my new standard for "a few years" I guess) titled The Accidental Tourist . Anne Tyler wrote a character who was a travel writer for people who don't like to travel - the kind of people who always stay at a familiar hotel chain where there are no surprises, and seek out McDonald's and Applebee's so they're not confronted with culinary uncertainty. I'd like to think there are fewer risk-averse travelers out there these days, due to the relentless promotion of "close to the ground" travel by people like Rick Steves, and "authentic experience" promotion by the Lonely Planet crowd. We are all expected not to stay at Ho Jo's when overseas - better to rent a spare room in some local's house - and seek out the local cuisine. With all those Food Network shows with Rachel Ray or Bobby Flay chowing down in every wide spot in the road - how can there ...

Ask a dozen people how they define vacation and chances are good you will get something like 1 to 12 different answers. Some like a week at the lake, doing whatever it is people do at lakes. For others there's nothing better than the sun/sand/disposable fiction/rum-based cocktails combination. And then there are your guide book-toting types who need to visit monuments and museums. I admit I fall into the latter category. I can do the laid back beach routine for a maximum of two days before I am itching to read some plaques or slap on the audio tour headphones. I am not capable of just lying around doing nothing - at least not when I am on vacation. If it's a weekend at home and there are eleven projects I should be doing, that's when I am very good at lying around doing nothing. So our recent east coast adventure was right up my alley and down my street - two weeks of tramping around in our three great eastern centers of history and culture; Philadelphia, Boston and New Yo...

Today we are back home after two weeks on vacation. Blessed home! The entire two weeks were spent in big cities - big, humid cities - and our quiet, modest abode has never seemed so perfect as this morning. Do I have tales to tell of my travels to far-off lands? You betcha. More soon

The latest issue of Time magazine showed up in the mail the other day. (You'd think a modern, high-tech guy like me would have already sworn off the dead-tree version of weekly news, but I still have a weakness for reading material you can hold in your hand.) I flip through a couple of pages and come across a spread they call "Dashboard." Seems everything these days has a dashboard. When I use my Blogger account for this fine product you're reading now, I go to the dashboard. The customer relationship management software I use at work has an "executive dashboard." And my car, which apparently was way ahead of its time, also uses a dashboard. Although it seems like a thoroughly appropriate term for the software interface (and a term that is ultra American - if we can't eat it or shoot it we want to drive it) it's kind of pathetic that Time wants to work in reverse and take this computer screen term and paste it into their printed magazine. "Hey...

He's made some of the best movies in modern history. The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II alone qualify him for placement on a pedestal, and then there's Apocalypse Now and The Conversation , so he might have 4 films in my personal top 25 all time list. On top of being a bona fide artist with film, the man is audacious and bold, going broke and hitting jackpots with frequency. He had the huevos to go big time into the Napa wine business, buying properties to reunite the former glory of the Niebaum estate, which had been broken up and pillaged by philistine business interests over the years. Once he had the grand structure in hand, he poured a huge sum into restoration. I once watched a master carpenter working by hand to rebuild the massive staircase that you can see today at Rubicon Estate (formerly Niebaum-Coppola, formerly Inglenook.) That's the Coppola style - spend the money to do it right, or don't do it at all. The man lives large, takes big risks, dreams ...

Those with functional memories may recall the recent posting on the topic of pake . I am pleased to report that a pake was successfully constructed and consumed in our household over the holidays, and after initial skepticism, even the initial skeptics were won over. (The initial skeptics - you know who you are - are forgiven for their tendency to treat me like a dolt and tell me how to do everything, even though they had the exact same amount of pake experience I had going in - zero. I will concede that I left out the important step of placing a baking sheet under the pie tin, and received some needed support when there was a blossom of smoke in the kitchen - which turned out to be not the only smoke-filled house episode of the holidays so far, but that is perhaps another story for another time.) It should also be pointed out that my pake did not look anything like the photo I used in the initial post . That photo, according to one of the initial skeptics, was "gross." So ag...

We interrupt the planned "Christmas memories" today for this late breaking news: There's always so much bad news and negativosity these days, it's reassuring when you become aware of something exciting and new - in fact, it's inspiring to learn that the great American spirit of inventiveness lives on. I refer here to the culinary break through of the decade - pake . Pake is a combination of pie + cake. (Artists' rendition of what a pake might look like at left. Pronounce it like "cake" not like Japanese rice wine.) Why did it take so long for someone to come up with this heavenly creation? This forever solves that perplexing question at potlucks and holiday family gatherings: "Which would you like, pie or cake?" My usual answer is "a little bit of both," which of course is a lie because I never want a "little bit," I want a boatload of both. If pake takes the world by storm as I expect, no longer will I need to humble ...

This is really random, but I ran across this most amazing photo while wasting my life on the internet. Look closely. You can get the story behind this here from Snopes. The description makes the photo even more amazing. Then you should go here to the Carl Hammer Gallery and see another 20 or so like this. Colossal. Astonishing. A real honest "wow."

"...That's what the universe gives us every morning. No matter how far we have veered from reverence for the miraculous fact that we exist in a universe that we don't understand, every day we get a chance to start over..." - Steve Hawk "...all I ever had, redemption songs..." -Bob Marley I know that the proper pose for the educated man is to say "I don't watch TV" or "I only watch PBS." So I run afoul of that guideline by professing my ongoing, if tempestuous, affair with the tube. (In truth, a plasma screen doesn't have a tube, but I'm sure the nickname will keep its currency for a few decades. ) I remember the excitement when a new television station signed on in my hometown. (September 2, 1967 - you can find anything on the internet, you know?) It was KUHI, Channel 16, using the daring new UHF broadcast band, and giving us the grand total of three channels to choose from rather than the two channels we were used to. Oh, the...

You reach a certain age and you are entitled to be a little world weary. You've seen it, you've been there, you've felt that feeling - whether the world seems wicked or enchanted, nothing really takes you by surprise. And then, if you're lucky, something comes out of the blue and peels back your well-developed shell and you fill your lungs with fresh air. For some people that something is a new lover or a change of career or a trip to the south of France. For me, that something out of the blue is a grandson. (Yes, I know, I look far too young to have a grandchild, and yes, I must have gotten married when I was 13, and I appreciate the sentiment but try to make the line delivery a little more sincere, ok?) I was wholly unprepared for the emotional kick that this little kid would have on me. The best description is that of flipping a switch - that kid turned on a circuit inside me that I didn't even know was wired. It's an entirely different switch than the one th...