On Friday night I took a meal at Palomino with Lauren, Mike, and Zach. Our server was impressed with Lauren for dining with three such gentlemen as ourselves. Ever since Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, I've harbored an urge to be the bearded blue-jeans-and-sportcoat guy; since I rarely "go out", this was a rare opportunity, so I seized it, but had to substitute the sportcoat with a suit jacket. As an appetizer we ordered the roasted garlic, which was so deliciously soft as to be pasty, and came with "cracked pizza bread", some powerful Greek [I think] olives, a tomato chutney, and a very soft and mild-yet-flavorful Chèvre. All of this was wonderful, but of greatest interest was the unassuming other bit of cheese... it was the Cambozola! I haven't been an admirer of fine cheeses for long, but I have a few favorites up my sleeve [literally]. With the first tiny taste of Cambozola, however, it was as if all the curds of my particular proclivities had been squeezed together into a single flawless morsel. Imagine with me, if you will, a cheese brings together the rich, creamy, goopy consistency of Brie and the muscle, stink, and assertiveness of a Bleu. That is my uneducated analogy, but apparently Cambozola is actually a German hybrid of the Italian Gorgonzola and the French Camembert. [Like the ultra-smart guy that I am, am I just now, writing this, coming to the realization that the word, Cambozola, is also something of a hybrid]. Either way, without really looking, I may have found... the perfect cheese.

Though typically a teetotaler of sorts, such fare awakened in me a desire to enjoy a glass of fine wine with the meal. Our server recommended a pinot noir called Echelon, and it proved to be a satisfying libation which furthered the variety of the meal. The best part, however, had for me already passed with the appetizer. I ordered the scallops, which were enjoyable enough, but simultaneously disappointing. They were breaded with Asiago and almond, but puzzlingly, the prevailing flavor was of fried potatoes, and the presence of the scallops themselves was rather obscured. I also sampled one of Zach's clams and a taste of Lauren's salmon, which was excellent. At the end of the meal, we had a hilarious [to me] unrehearsed American Psycho moment, when each of the four of us presented an identical golden Wells Fargo credit card.

Saturday, I went to TJ's new house with Mark and twin daughters [two years in December], Kinzie and Eden. TJ has various construction projects in progress, and I was expecting to be put to work; to our credit, a sheet of drywall did get hanged [I provided measurements for an outlet opening to be cut], but we ended up spending most of the afternoon hanging around, eating pizza, and trying to keep the girls [who had colds] happy. Eden, that day more irritable than her sister, required a lot of attention from her father, but Kinzie was content to stroll about the house in her particular way, looking at objects that piqued her fancy. The girls have both taken an interest in cleaning, and Kinzie engaged in this act with vigor; pushing a broom around by the very end of its handle, or lying on the floor and scrubbing at it with a Wet Nap, which had been repurposed from wiping messy young faces after an enthusiastic meal.

Later, I dropped in at the Golden Leaf, and was surprised by a crowd, present for a Perdomo event which happened to be going on. Apparently, Nick Perdomo was there. It wasn't the quiet environment I was hoping for, but I smoked my meerschaum and pretended to read a book while listening in on a heated discussion between a conservative and a liberal. I was impressed with the conviction and apparent knowledge of each participant; they moved effortlessly and organically from subject to subject, from deforestation on Hispaniola and other environmental issues to Israel and Lebanon, Iran and Iraq. Aware that such self-centeredness is unhealthy, I nonetheless couldn't help but reflect on my own lack of practical world knowledge; even so inclined, I wouldn't have had a single thought to contribute to that conversation. A bit later, my sometimes-smoking buddy Chris showed up, and we had a cigar, while incongruously sitting through college football and automobile commercials on the giant television. Still, I can't remember enjoying a cigar more; it was a Hoyo de Monterrey maduro, and I was quite taken with its delicate sweetness.

After holding on to the DVD for several weeks [Netflix just made me their Customer of the Month], I finally sat down and watched Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness, which is a "documentary" concerned with Kuwait following the first Gulf War, lingering longest on the oil fires. I didn't know anything about the film prior to the viewing, but having some experience with Herzog and a finely-calibrated BS-o-meter, it wasn't long into the film before I was contesting the narrator's [Herzog himself, of course] words. The first highly dubious statement I heard was that the battle raged so ferociously that "grass will never grow here again." It may be a nicely romantic notion that the terrors of human behavior could affect nature in such an instantly dramatic, pre-packaged-for-Fox-News way, but that statement is obviously bulsh: 1) Life is extraordinarily tenacious, and will fight its way back through anything. 2) You're in a desert. There was no grass there to begin with, Werner.

The other scene that raised doubt is probably the most talked-about of the film, in which the firefighters, apparently having completed their task, are, according to Herzog, gripped by "madness", and being unable to bear "life without fire," one approaches the spurting geyser with a torch, and re-ignites it. This type of commentary seems irresponsible - Herzog could have unquestioning viewers believing that a group of highly-trained professional firefighters and engineers left their families to travel to the other side of the planet, risking their health and their lives to complete a task, and then, on a whim, decided to reverse the work. [I understand there are a few reasons, other than madness, why the workers would re-ignite an oil well, all of which are in support of their primary goal of ultimately putting out the fires.]

Reading about the film later, I learned that Herzog considers the film to fall between documentary and science fiction. The man has some ideas concerning "superficial truth", delivered in 1999 at our own Walker Art Center. Among some garbled confusion ["We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile"], are some thoughts which could apply to Lessons of Darkness. Tenet number five of the "Minnesota Declaration":

"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such as thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reach only through fabrication and imagination and stylization."

At this point, it's only fair to state that despite everything, I really, really enjoyed this film. I'm not certain I agree with all of Herzog's photographic decisions [the amateur-looking camerawork in Aquirre, the Wrath of God nearly ruined the film for me], but let it be said that the cinematography in Lessons of Darkness is simply stunning. The entire film is gray desert, gray smoke, brilliant flame. The music selected was equally enjoyable, drawing from Wagner, Mahler, Prokofiev, Grieg, and others. Some of the music-image pairings seemed rather inappropriate, such as a triumphant bit of Wagner [the theme featured prominently at the end of Excalibur] during slow-motion helicopter shots of empty, burning landscape... I suppose it's a biased judgment on my part, but I can't help it - I like the music.

As long as the ideas put forth aren't taken as literal truth, Lessons of Darkness is an fascinating and worthwhile film. Gasp at the imagery, enjoy some Romantic and post-Romantic music, struggle with the merits of Herzog's M.O. It seems counter-intuitive to critique the spoken component of the film, as it was the voiced-over musings of Herzog that so impressed me during my first exposure to his work, in Grizzly Man. Despite the man's efforts to plumb the depths of cinema verité, I fail to see how he could think it was a good idea to create such gorgeous and compelling images, which happen to be connected to one of the major events of current history, but then inflict his own "poetic" version of the truth upon his viewers as well.

I was supposed to bring a coworker out golfering for the first time, but he couldn't make it, so it ended up being just myself and JP at Theo Wirth. Made a few good swings and some awesomely bad ones; I've been a bit frustrated with my inability to get appropriate distance out of my irons [which is, of course, all I play with], but some of that difficulty evaporated during the round when I whacked the bejesus out of a couplea balls. That particular shortcoming was replaced with a certain aiming dysfunction, however, as I pulled the long ones way off to the left. It seems I need to find the Middle Way. To remain in the Buddhist vein, I tried to stay conscious of the Zen Buddhist principle of Beginner's Mind during the round. I'm certain that the subject was exhausted a long time ago, but it seems that certain Buddhist ideas do pair well with golf, as lame as it is to apply an ancient Eastern religion [is it a religion?] to a snooty Western sport [is it a sport?].

There were four unused season ticket seats at work, which fell into my hands. I tried to wrangle up three folks to accompany me, but only JP was available [self-employed chums are great, try to get some]. Happily, we were able to magically transmogrify the extra tickets into a sum of cash, not unlike as if they were straw, and either JP or myself was... the miller's daughter? Actually, let's forget that entire thought. The upshot is that prior to the game, we wandered over the sidewalks outside the Dome like a couple of nervous seventeen-year-old suburban kids who had come into the city to buy some drugs, until we found an individual willing to part with a number of dollars that I felt was adequate in exchange for the tickets. That individual turned out to be a scalper, and he was apparently able to "move" the "product", as they say in the industry [probably not], since an elderly couple came along to occupy the other two seats. After the game we presented ourselves at McCormick & Schmick's, and exchanged the newly-acquired dollars for toothsome portions of the Ocean's Bounty [tilapia, cod, and oysters].

It turned out to be an excellent game; Santana gave up one over seven complete, and struck out eleven. Can nothing stop that man? As league leader in all of the big three pitching stats, he's on track to win the Cy Young for the second consecutive season. His seventeen wins are only one better than Garland's, Halladay's, and Wang's sixteen each, but his ERA of 2.84 is nearly a half-run better than second-place Halladay's, and at 219 Ks, he's racked up thirty-eight more than second-place Bonderman. It's similar to the situation he was in at the end up last year, dominating in ERA and Ks, but his record was actually slightly worse than that of Roger Clemens, and still the vote was unanimously in his favor. If the numbers stay where they are for his last few starts, he's a shoo-in.

At the game, JP temporarily parked his bag of chips upon the unoccupied seat in front of us, and when its owner [pictured] returned, he picked them up and decided to hang on to them awhile. Apparently, in his life, it is a common occurrence for bags of chips to magically appear, for he seemed quite content simply to clutch them without questioning their origin. "Mana from heaven" was the phrase that JP used. I found this situation endlessly hilarious. It wasn't until some time later that the gentleman realized what he was holding, and inquired of his neighbors as to the bag's ownership. JP, being habitually unable to quell his decency, chimed in that the chips formerly were his, but that he didn't want them, and they ended up with a kid in front of us. If they were my chips, I would have sat silently to see if any more entertainment could be squeezed from the confusion.