A Review of "Didion & Babitz" by Lili Anolik

Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz pairs up exemplars of their age to examine how their age let them (and pretty much most women) down. Just as Seligman made the case for an Apollonian Susan Sontag and a Dionysian Pauline Kael, Anolik does the same for the heady, distant Joan Didion and the easily past Dionysus all the way to Bacchus Eve Babitz. This book is not a high-blown literary assessment or simply a twined biography, but cultural criticism told in an engaging, gossipy tone in which Anolik often directly addresses the reader, sets us up for her methods, previews her structure, even offers two versions of one crucial event and then shrugs and says, “You decide.” Didion & Babitz reads as if you and Anolik were cozied up in a red leather booth at Musso & Frank Grill, dishing dirt over bone-dry martinis.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Revamped and Rejuvenated Harbor Restaurant in Santa Barbara Aims to Elevate Even More

 

Photo: Ingrid Bostrom

Walking into the recently revamped, reconsidered, rejuvenated Harbor Restaurant, it sort of feels like you’ve entered the dining room of a Viking cruise ship. Perched on Stearns Wharf, you are as much on the water as any building can be. The wide expanse of windows offers you a full view of the marina, the slope of the Mesa, and, as the evening extends, a sunset view, given which way west points on our edge of the Pacific. Each table, now, has its share of the view in a room of wood, white walls, and booths with a charming, mid-century modern swirl of green and brown. It’s clean and niftily Nordic.

And it’s all according to the plan of the new ownership group: couples John Thyne and Olesya Thyne, and Gene Sanchez and Carolina Jimenez. “Our focus has been to bring the Harbor Restaurant back into the hands of the locals,” Sanchez says. “Talking to people, it’s been 20 years since some have come to the pier to this quote-unquote ‘tourist trap.’ We want to change that.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Dressed to the Nines, Wine Auction Crowd Raises Nearly $900K

“All lives have equal value,” said Jessica Gasca, addressing the well-heeled crowd of almost 400 attendees in the ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara. “But equal in value does not mean equal in opportunity,” continued the owner of Story of Soil wines, speaking in her role as president of the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Vintners Foundation — the charitable umbrella under which the Santa Barbara Vintners Association conducts its philanthropic work. “We can help change those experiences. We can’t stand by as people suffer, not when we have the means to help.”

Those “means” are the biannual Santa Barbara Wine Auction. By the time the November 9 event concluded, $868,000 was raised in support of the Vintners Foundation’s mission, “Grounded in Giving.” Proceeds from the event will provide essential healthcare for medically underserved people through grants to Direct Relief and Community Health Centers of the Central Coast.

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

(photo of Jason Paluska's Channel Islands crudo)

Celebrate a Great Just 8 at Clean Slate

(Photos by Christian Rodriguez Photography, courtesy Clean Slate Wine Bar)

Consider this post just a quick preview of a future article for the Independent. Back in October I was lucky enough to attend a Just 8 dinner at Clean Slate Wine Bar in Solvang. Eight courses, 16 and a bonus wine generously shared from the cellar of the Indy and Wine Enthusiast's Matt Kettmann, only 8 guests, hours of delight. As good as Chef Melissa Scrymgeour's menus usually are, for an event like this one she really gets to play, to do things that would bog down service in her tiny kitchen if she had to crank the dish out all night. So you get stuff like that King Salmon Thai Pumpkin Curry above, with kuri squash standing in for the pumpkin--never a bad move if you ask me. 

I'm not going to do a run down of each of the courses, just drop in some tantalizing glimpses to make you get to one of these extravagantly special evenings one day. Plus it also reflects the nature of what Melissa and her husband Jason, a wonderfully warm host, are doing every night. After all, the restaurant's name refers to the slate they chalk each evening's menu upon. Sure, nights often have themes, from curry to Cajun, but you never quite know what might be served up. It all depends upon the season, what some farmer has that's perfectly ripe, etc. And on Melissa's exquisite palate--see her modern salad Niçoise above, the bluefin tuna a hearty tartare beneath both a potato-parmesan crisp and a scatter of angle-sliced green beans. Four leafs of little gems. Dollops of Dijon vinaigrette. And then the molecular magic of caper pearls, like frozen teardrops of salt.

 

And this elegant rethink of Coquille St. Jacques, one expertly seared scallop, a sprinkle of local, roasted mushrooms, a sauce of bright cream and wine. Speaking of, Kettmann did a wonderful job double pairing each course, to the point with this one the two Chardonnays, a 2022 Beauregard Ben Lomond Mountain and a 2019 Solomon Hills Estate "Belle of the Ball" Reserve, did one of those odd flips--I preferred the former with its racy, Chablis-like character just to drink, but then with the rich dish, the richer Solomon Hills said, "I got this," and sang forcefully along.

So, here's to the gang at Clean Slate, where I did far more than just ate. Look for an article before the next one goes on sale in 2025. And get up there in the meantime.

A Review of "Dorothy Parker in Hollywood" by Gail Crowther

 

Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.

Parker also lacks a dedicated archive, and very little exists of her drafts or letters or journals. A paucity of such materials just made Crowther digger harder and deeper, both finding many helpful sources from her friends and contemporary writing about her, but also using Parker’s work itself as a means to measure the woman. And a complicated one she was, for as Crowther puts it, “It is difficult to know whether it is better or worse that however rude Parker was to other people she was equally hard on herself.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 27, 2024.

A Review of "Plastic" by Scott Guild

 

The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.

Did I mention when the characters converse, they do so in a quick cut new language? At one point history is described by a person explaining why not to study it: “War war war. Kill kill kill.” And here’s how a match from phone app Hot Date attempts to comfort our heroine Erin early in the book: “It okay feel bad, he says. No need embarrass. I get—I get total. Life just…creaky, no? So tough sometime.”

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Pascale Beale’s Latest Book Favors Flavour

 

Even 11 cookbooks in, chef-writer Pascale Beale can still surprise herself. While working on her just published Flavour: Savouring the Seasons: Recipes from the Market Table, she returned home from a spring visit to the Santa Barbara Farmers’ Market, one of her favorite sources of inspiration. Hoping to develop a recipe for stuffed zucchini blossoms — despite dreading the mess of the frying process — she ended up with a bit more stuffing than she needed and an extra, tinier blossom. “I wondered,” she recalls, “what would it taste like raw?” So, she stuffed the smaller flower and discovered a deliciousness that amazed her. That led to the oil-free recipe you can find in the new collection.

Care to read the rest then do at the Independent's site.