This is not a politics blog...

los boletas oficiales

For good reason, I am a wretched Citizen. I often make my decisions at the polling place based on the sound of people's names (last year, I only voted for female school board members). My absentee ballot arrived today with not one, but FOUR rainbow colored ballots. The guilt just washes over me as I think of the people who have fought and died so I could cast my measly votes. Then my cynic steps in and says it doesn't matter because who ever gets elected will get bought off regardless. Then my really super cynic starts kicking me in the shins because now that I registered, I'll probably get called up for jury duty (does anyone actually like jury duty?). The word on the street is that all registered voters get called at least once a year in this town. Dutch has lots of opinions, and I know if I am lazy, I'll just adopt his wholecloth. The thing is, I do care about certain issues an awful lot, but it takes work to sift through all the fuzz and noise to get to the core of the issues.

Things I do have opinions on...

a classic movie poster from Saul Bass

Right now, I am putting together a lesson for the junior high kids about movie poster design. I plan on showing the usual posters from the golden age of design (the 50s and 60s) and I have put together a lot of material for them to look at and read (maybe stuff for another entry) and so now I have design on the brain. And what is even worse, I have been obsessing over how to explain it to 11-13 year olds. Because they are young, I can cheat a little and make simple, illustrated rules that they could theoretically follow without completely understanding (a real issue, considering that I speak English, and most of them speak something else at home). I am struggling with the fun challenge of creating a foolproof schema.

an unbearably beautiful tea label

I was at the grocery store looking for tea and I bought this brick of pu-ehr, and as I was considering which one to buy, it struck me that this tea label is almost unbearably beautiful. One of the things I am considering limiting is the children's palette. We will be using photoshop, so they have potentially millions of colors to chose from. This is a wonderful example of a limited palette (there are only three colors). They also, left to their own devices, tend to cluttered compositions, and random things they find from the web. I will be giving them a list of limitations, and hopefully it will be enough to get their minds going, but not so much that they give up.

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The tea label is so inspiring because in addition to its limited palette, it has some fine patterns (repeated motifs) and I love the whimsical junk (sailing vessel) included in the seal. The composition is very straightforward, but it works, both in a utilitarian, and an aesthetic way. I don't read Chinese, so the meaning of the characters is completely lost to me, so I can't rate how effective the communication is, but they are always purty (am I betraying my love for exoticism here?). I tore a tiny corner and smelled the tea and looked at it, and I knows pu-ehr when I sees it, and the price couldn't be beat ($3.69) so I bought it. The really gratifying moment came when I was at the Ferry Building today (home of the most overpriced, pretentious, upperclass little specialty groceries in the city) and I found the exact same thing, with an English translation (Yunnan Province Green Pu-Ehr) and an equally English price, $12.50. That works out to $2.00 an English word.

The Tea in Chinatown

Flip Flop is the home of one of my favorite tea shops, and the proprietor, Davi-the-Sufi-tea-mystic, was the first to initiate me into the Ways of Pu-erh. Since then I have marched into tea shops across the City and put my fist on the counter and said,

"BRING OUT YOUR PU-ERH!"

The proprietor at the tea shop in Japantown sniffed and said he didn't carry Chinese tea.

I said, "BRING OUT YOUR LAPSANG SOUCHANG" at a recommended tea shop on Clement St. And when the tea salesman brought out a container of tea and raised the lid and my nose didn't register the smell of the million campfires of the Emperor's army spread out in the valley below, and in fact didn't detect the smoke from one tiny dollhouse barbeque, I knew it would be pointless to bother with what passed as pu-erh there.

I never got to pronounce my demands at the Ferry Market tea shop because of the human swarms (oddly, their pu-erh display was at the floor level, under the cashier, and a toddler was handling one of the bricks, which didn't seem like a good omen at all).

Yesterday, Dutch and I were at a tea-buying disadvantage as he is not an Initiate and my nose wasn't working (due to a head cold), but we found ourselves in a bona fide Chinatown. We wandered aimlessly for a while until he spotted a sign that said "tea." We went in, and the proprietess immediately poured for us. The smells and flavors penetrated my virus-clobbered senses. This was a good sign. I told her about our pu-erh quest. She had the wild-orange-rind pu-erh I knew and loved. She had some other varieties, that she immediately brewed for us as well. She extolled the health virtues of it (second only to the legendary snake-oil as a universal panacea) and I told her I had circulation problems. As if on cue, she produced an oolong that was completely enchanting. I am usually not an oolong fan, it generally tastes like any black tea to me, but this one had a depth and complexity that I hadn't encountered before. It was so good, I didn't mind if it didn't cure my cold fingers.

Buying tea is an art in itself. The buyer has to have the right balance of gullibility, openness and a gentle grip on her own aesthetic while the seller should combine the qualities of an honest showman with an authentic appreciation of her wares (and of course, lots of hot tea for the tasting).

If you find yourself in Chinatown, check out Blest Tea, and bring your senses. If you are in Flip Flop, go to Chaikhana.

One Two Tea

I took a spontaneous trip back to Flip Flop last weekend and one of the stops I made was to Chaikhana to get my brick of Tibetan Pu-er and some lapsang. They were out of the pu-er, but not the lapsang (but I found some other wet-cave-aged tea).

Tea isn't a summer thing. Iced tea is too bitter (and the lemon and sugar that gets added doesn't make it any more drinkable). Tea is, at best, a gentle compensation to blustery weather. Now that it is officially autumn, tea is in season (and I can start pulling my dark brown and black clothes out of the basement) . Besides, tea is mostly a treat for the nose, and if the sublte aromas aren't carried to the schnoz via steam, then about 75% of the enjoyment is lost.

Favorite Recent Tea Experiences

Interstate 580, Mountain River Pu-er

Tea on the freeway isn't usually something I'd recommend. You could spill it on yourself, swerve into a central barrier and die. Also, drinking it properly out of a tea cup is difficult, if not impossible while the car is careening in and out of lanes and zipping down off-ramps. Be that as it may, El Cab found his calm inner tea ceremony guru cruising (on the passenger's side, of course) on N 580. He miraculously got most of the tea out of the leaky thermos into the Winny-the-Pooh cups I stole from the KB that morning. The wet cave smell of the tea overwhelmed even the burning-oil-stale-commute-fart car smell that usually pervades the Silver Bullet. Magic.

Imperial Red, with the Elevens

Eleven has always been one of the tea tastemakers in my life. Her tales of the Tea Guru and of pu-er sent me to Chaikhana for the first time, and she has always been enthusiastic about trying something new. One of her all-time favorites is Imperial Red, a black tea... (and that's all I know about it). It tastes like chocolate, but not in a lame-artificial-chocolate-flavor way. It tastes more like the Platonic Ideal of chocolate, without the annoying parts. If Chocolate had a fakir cousin who could levitate over the bed of hissing cobras then that would be Imperial Red. It doesn't hurt that the Elevens live in a little red cabin surrounded by old growth oak trees, and their book-lined living room is one of the more enchanted places I know.


Ginger Pu-er at Cafe Laila

I usually don't see pu-er at cafes, but when I spied the jar that had this label the other day, I knew I had to have it. It was the ghost of ginger holding a seance in a wet cave.

Saturday

the boardwalk


Saturday comes with a certain kind of languid nothing. Clean laundry makes a squishy carpet on my floor. The ringer on my phone is off.

I swam this morning and the only reason I mention it is because it does something to my brain. It is as if my Wernieke's Area and my little Broca are still lost in the bottom of the pool. I don't particularly miss them, they are loud. A feeling of shimmering contentment extends all the way to my fingertips. All urgency is gone. Minutes can go by, and not a single word registers in my head. Its been almost 11 hours since I got out and showered. I am only blogging because my room is such a mess (and it is slow going, staring at the screen for minutes on end while I try to remember what I was thinking a moment before).

Because it was our first sunny Saturday all year, I decided to go see the ocean this afternoon. To miss seeing it would have been a crime against the local gods. The languidness that I caught this morning was still washing over me in irresistible waves. I let the wave wash me out of the house and into the back yard where my red Raleigh lives. I slowly biked to the river, through the downtown, and moseyed to the boardwalk, where all the intersections were completely gridlocked because the evening temperature drop forced all the tourists back to the warm confines of their cars at the same time. I biked through the dog park, dodging mutts, children and elderly. I biked through the traffic jams. I had to stop myself from making "nyah nyah nyah" noises at the drivers, but only because it would have been too much effort. I biked through the drum circles and the dancing hippies. I biked up and down the wharf, squeezing myself through knots of strollers, up-ended boats and trucks.

Imagine a movie version of Richard Scarry's Busy Busy Town filmed by a German director and set in a small California resort town. Instead of animals, there would be people and the actors would have all done intense Method studies of their particular Busy Busy Town characters. The camera would move slowly, the dialog muffled, between various groups of people, all intensely engaged in their particular beach side activity, while following a cute brunette bicycling meditatively, on a red bicycle, through the entire scene. She would have been a cat in the book. It would be great-- laden with pregnant pauses that the astute audience member could fill with their own deep thoughts about life, humanity and interconnectedness of the universe.

NB-- During the course of writing this entry, I sipped on a cup of black pu-er tea, which really didn't do much for my ambition besides getting me in touch with my inner German Movie Director, a dubious benefit.