Venasque

A medium format shot from Venasque on our last trip to provence

St. Eynard

We walked up the snow covered road

to the Fort St. Eynard

enjoyed some tea

And some nice views of Grenoble

and the Chamchaude

I was using my hassy/gitzo 1228 legs/arca head, and on the way down I realized just how light my camera bag is without the damn tripod. Most of the weight is from the head, so now I'm looking for a lighter one. The arca is a fantastic head, but I originally bought it to hold a much heavier camera (Toyo 45AII view camera), and I think its kind of overkill for the cameras I use right now.

We also managed to get our car stuck trying to get out of the parking area.

old photos

I took a 6 month old roll of reala 35 in to be developed a few days ago, and after the usual photo-store-employee sneering and unpleasantness I picked up the prints and some other velvia I had shot recently. To our surprise, the 35mm shots were largely of our lunch/dinner at La maison de Marc Veyrat. It was a truly memorable meal: unquestionably one of the finest we have ever had. Out friends Deb and Howard were celebrating their wedding anniversary, and took us out to this dinner (and another at le Pere Bise) as a wonderful wedding gift.

We all had the tasting menu, which is listed below, with some pictures:


Pot de yaourt de foie gras, gelée végétale,
myrrhe odorante (plante sauvage cueillie au dessus de 1800 mètres)




Trois ravioles de légumes, trois souffles de vinaigrette


*
Nouilles plates sans œufs et sans féculent
aux arômes de parmesan, d'anchois et de poivrons


*
Jaune d'œuf de 9 heures, piqûre de cumin des prés,
mouillettes aux amandes


*
Féra du Lac fumée, écorce de sapin, boudin de riz craquant,
hostie virtuelle du pauvre, pinceau de benoîte urbaine


*
L'omble chevalier confit à basse température
(si cette Dame désire taquiner l'hameçon)


*
Turbot en croûte d'argile, laitance d'oxalis des sous-bois


*
Homard en pièces, vapeur, bonbons sans sucre de serpolet


*
Bonbons de caviar, chocolat blanc, écume de tussilage


*
Soda vera


*
Brochette de gros haricots blancs en conserve,
souffle d'acha (cousin du céleri)


*
Purée de rates, truffes de Seyssel, cacao très amer


*
Papillote de veau, bonbons de café sauce
de chicorée des talus, cube de polenta

ou

Volaille de Bresse rôtie enveloppée de citrons,
mélissés, citrons


*
Plateau de fromages des Savoies


*
Les trois desserts de ma fille Carine



and here's the man himself

mini whitehouse

Today was the last day of an unproductive work week for me: I was trying to get some data together for a paper we're writing next month, but was unmotivated. I did figure out what the problem was with a structure that wasn't refining well today, but that was about it! I also have framed three photos. I've completely given up on the idea of cutting the mats myself. It's just not worth saving an extra 10 euros per photo when the framing shop will sell me perfectly cut custom mats.

After work, Chloe and I walked up through to the bastille

Where there was snow on the ramparts

and a beautiful sunset over the Chamchaude

the Belledonne

Grenoble

and the Vercors.

Later that day we went to a FANTASTIC framing store called L'eclat de Verre. While I was picking out mat colors, Chloe got waylaid by the manager. I was a little surprised to find her still missing by the time I got back to the counter, but the manager told me that she was upstairs. What was upstairs? Well as it turns out, Pierre-Yves is a fanatical model builder, and wanted us to see his giant room full of models


including Versailles, the Orangerie, etc etc. However, in a special place of honor on the landing was this:

yeah thats right: the Whitehouse. With a silver prom limousine out front, a Little Bird attack helicopter and a fully camouflaged presidential Seahawk (with a big presidential seal on the sied: isn't that a bit counterproductive to the camo?) parked on the roof. There is of course an associated web site which, Pierre-Yves was quick to point out, has no membership fees!

Kenji

I'm finally continuing the scanning of my parents old negatives (My original project was to print them out, but I dont have enough time to get into the darkroom right now) on my excellent new epson 4870. Heres one of my dad:

which I thought was kind of interesting because I didnt know they had color film back then. Just kidding, dad.

Natto

OK first of all, now I'm not sure what it was that Bourdain was served that was called "mountain potato". It was probably Nagaimo, but maybe in a special kind of preparation. In any case, I dug up this quote about natto and nagaimo:


I thought I would die. Nothing, not bugs, not iguana, not live reptile parts, not tree grubs, nothing I'd ever eaten would approach the horror of these few not unusual breakfast items. I'm not sneering. I'm sure that natto AND mountain potato are, as they say, 'Acquired tastes.' And I'm sure that over time I could learn to appreciate them. If I were incarcerated and natto was the only food available. But for right now? Given a choice between eating natto and digging up my old dog Pucci (dead thirty-five years) and making rillets out of him? Sorry, Pucci.


so there you have it.

Alinea

Today, after much prodding I convinced Chloe to go to a store called Alinea, which I had heard a lot about but somehow never ventured out to. In the past couple of weeks there were at least four occasions when I would mention that I was looking for something and someone would say: "Oh they have those for really cheap at Alinea". So today we drove to St. Egreve, and (I was at least) were blown away. I was expecting a kind of Le Ikea, but it was so much more. Most of the furniture was of pretty high quality, and their lighting department was amazing. Instead of having a large section of floor dedicated to say "beds", they have little three walled setups to simulate what a room would look like with a bed, and a perfectly chosen dresser, lamp, footstool, desk etc. It made both of us yearn for a place of our own where we could buy a nice bed that doesnt break our backs, track halogen lighting, and a bookcase! But we were there to find frames for the twenty or so 16x20 cibachromes I brought back from Berkeley. Except for a metal bathroom rack, a pyrex measuring cup and a fancy ergonomic oyster knife, we stayed mostly on track. I found some decent light oak frames with pre-cut mats; the only problem is that many of my cibachromes have white borders, so I'll still have to cut mats for some of them. Now I just need to enlist the sage advice of my dad on tricks for archival framing.
Here is chloe, red handed in the glass section

Grenoble at night

Theres a certain understated elegance of just plain white xmas lights

Xmas

The center of Grenoble is charming even in the half freezing drizzle that we get this time of year. It has a certain somber beauty to it, which is quickly lost as soon as you move out of the center and into the socialist block house neighborhoods. Yesterday we had xmas lunch with a woman from work and her family in the region between the center and the block houses (in a quiet part of town near the Parc Paul Mistra)l. They have three children who are perfectly bilingual; I was very jealous (of being bilingual, not having three children)






It was a lot of fun, and we ate a bit too much food, as usual. The highlights were oysters and a goose with apple stuffing. I made potatoes in our new saucepan


Several hours later we left, and went to our friends Dave and Sandy's apartment. Sandy gave birth to a son (Dylan) earlier this month, and it was the first time I got to see him, which was a lot of fun. We continued gorging ourselves, but ate a more north american meal than lunch: turkey, more potatoes, broccoli, stuffing and a wonderful 1982 Bordeaux which had been given to us as a wedding present. It was a nice day, and hanging out with two "real" families with actual Xmas trees made us feel a bit less lonely, but we both still missed being with our families!

Snow is coming in at lower elevations today, so I hope to be able to finally snowboard this week. Heres a picture of snow on the Neron (taken from our window)

Gratin

Today I worked from home, and took care of some much delayed errands. Most notable was bringing my wonderful Fuji GA645 (perhaps the perfect travel camera) in for repairs. Its nothing serious, but the focus seems just a touch off, which is an annoying "feature" of rangefinders in general. Going to the store reinforced my general experience that being a photographer is a very expensive proposition in France. The up side is that French people seem to appreciate good photogtraphy more than Americans, but that is hardly surprising! Still, 60 euros just for them to just tell me whats wrong is ridiculous (update: it would cost 500 euros to fix the camera!). Actually, I'm looking at buying its successor, the GA645Zi, since all the pros are dumping their gear on Ebay now.

On the way, I stopped in at a snowboard/skate shop called Speed, and was a little surprised to see that it has gotten sucked into the trajectory of all successful board shops. That is to say that while half the store used to be devoted to actual skateboards and snowboards for you to uh, go snowboarding with, now the boards are relegated to a little corner, and the rest is a fashion shop. I'm not trying to be a crotchety old school guy here; they can get rid off all the remaining 10 snowboards that they stock; I understand where the real money comes from. But how about calling the store "Board Fashion", or "Teenage Fanclub", or even "Poser"? ANYWAY, the best thing I saw there, on my way past the Arnet display case, was a series of decks that had things like "Gratin Dauphinois" in Gothic font. You see, "Gratin Dauphinois" is a speciality of the region, and it seemed like a strange place to see it. It turns out that theres a local board manufacturer with a team and everything! Its so entertainingly french that they would call a signature model the "Gratin Dauphinois"'. There is simply no equivalent in the US.

Data Collection/Snow

We got our first good snow yesterday, so chances are improving of our actually being able to board in the next month. Heres a view of the Vercors on my way to work

And then later of the Chartreuse

I had a productive but very long day frantically collecting data on EH4 before the shutdown. Normally this is supposed to be the best time to collect, but there were periodic problems with the beam which led to some datasets being thrown away. Ergh. I'll be going back today after a little gym climbing at Espace Vertical

party time

We went to an Xmas party at our friends beautiful new apartment which overlooks the Isère River. Much of the entertainment was provided by the son of a lab guy:


still no snow here

Car decrapification

We picked up our car today, after leaving it in the mechanics care for two weeks. The purpose of this extended visit was to remove the absolutely ridiculous car alarm system which would periodically make it impossible to start our car. Hooray! The garage guy told us that the company that was responsible for the alarm system has gone out of business. This might be related to the fact that their alarm system is completely useless.

Back in Grenoble

after a long day of travel whose only redeeming part was a beautiful view of the Vercors

from the bus.

We managed to stay up until eight, after watching my favorite car chase movie(They pass by Les Baux in the movie!), but slept fitfully, and I was wide awake by 4 AM. We got an early start and went to the marketwhere the arab vendors were wearing Santa Claus hats with blinking red LEDs on them

and then stumbled upon an Antique street fair on the banks of the Isere

so we checked it out. There were some nice tools

and some very nice armoires:
(2800 euro, but willing to deal)
The vendor saw me taking pictures, started joking with me : "Hey you can't take photos here!", then showed us a less expensive, but also very nice armoire:
(1600 euro, and also negotiable. there was no cornice)
And told us that it would go perfectly in our chateau: "You have a chateau, right?". Interestingly, the armoires he has seen in chateaux are as a rule not of very good quality. Here were some more, in the low 1000 euro range:

There were definitely some deals to be had.

Later, we found out that a chocolcate shop one block away from us sells Valrhona chocolate, as well as a few other things

And we ended up buying three "special" bars:

Ampamakia, from the Millot plantation, from Madagascar

Palmira, from the Palmira plantation in Venezuela

Gran Couva from the Gran Couva plantation in Trinidad

I'm no expert, but the difference in tastes are striking. This could become an expensive habit.

Berkeley

Berkeley was great, despite the fact that it was only for two weeks (1 week really, considering the fact that we were on the road for almost a week). We had made a tick list of restaurants to go to while in the bay area, and I am proud to report that we hit almost all of them. They ranged from the pedestrian (In-N-Out, the only fast food we can eat without guilt after reading Fast Food Nation) to the extremely embarassing (Rubios Fish Tacos) to the sublime (Kirala Sushi

(the bamboo device is a sake dispenser!)
and Ton Kiang Dim Sum, and finally to the unclassifiable (carne asada tacos from taco stands in Fruitvale). And of course we had some nice meals at home as well:
Heres chef Kenji with his Shabu Shabu setup:


While my dad and I were at the Japanese food store, a packet of orange mini crabs with the words "Let's Party!" caught my eye. At $2.85 these might seem over-priced, but consider the effort of the humble japanese fisherman, and how hard it must have been to catch all those little bastards with chopsticks. Here's Kenji with a particularly enticing sample:

The initial flavor is sickeningly sweet with a bit of sesame thrown in for good measure: think Japanese Halvah, only worse. Then, as you crunch through the exoskeleton, a wonderfully potent crab essence fills your mouth, leaving you breathless and vaguely sickened. The most interesting thing about the Party Time crabs is their ability to elicit a very reproducible and consistent series of feelings: deja-vu (i.e. other sweet Japanese snacks), then confusion, followed quickly by regret. It's hard to imagine any circumstances under which you might want to eat the Party Time Crabs, and the idea of coating your hands in crabby fishyness (and thats not even talking about the crab breath) at a party seems foolish to say the least.

I usually try to help out with tasks that my parents would be crazy to do by themselves, like clean out the gutters, chop tree branches etc. This time we built an anti-deer fence out of opaque fishing line (the efficacy of which remains to be seen), and tried to seal a water leak in the camping shell of the pickup. On the latter job, we failed miserably. Heres a picture after a night of rain:


notice the water bottle floating in the pool of water!


This morning the reality of being back in Grenoble sank in when I realized that there would be no Japanese breakfast waiting for me: no kasuzuke Salmon or rice, no tofu or kamaboko, no Nagaimo with seaweed and soy sauce, no fried tofu (age), no miso soup with bizarre and delicious mini-mushrooms, and none of the other dozen or so other staples of my dads morning ritual. The only thing I won't miss is the natto. Incidentally, two of the foods Anthony Bourdain vowed never to eat again (after tasting some pretty disgusting things) were normal parts of my breakfast every day (Natto and Nagaimo).. w00t!