by Christina Waters | Sep 13, 2011 | Home |
The inimitable Rita Bottoms, ah what a broad!
As head of McHenry Library’s Special Collections for many years, Bottoms moved and shook with literary giants and cranky academics alike. She handled every ego with diplomatic skill, almost as well as she handled many Anglo Saxon expletives.
Colorful, brilliant, opinionated and politically adroit, Rita is one unforgettable creature.
Now she’s offering the world some of her choicest observations, words, poetry, and character profiles in the first of her “True Stories,” entitled Riffs & Ecstasies , which officially hits the bookstores this Saturday, September 17.
Those familiar with the styles of Ferlinghetti, Paul Bowles and Bob Dylan will find Bottoms’ pungent voice simpatico and engaging. In this slender, beautifully produced tome, our gal remembers Tillie Olsen, Al Weber, John Cage, David Hockney and morphs into an ecstatic groupie, nay bacchante, as she eulogizes actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
A tiny treasure from an irrepressible observer, Riffs & Ecstasies, by Rita Bottoms, from Cafe Margo press, $10, at all your favorite bookstores. Indulge!
Bruce Btratton interviews Rita Bottoms, next Tuesday, Sept. 20, 7:30pm on KZSC 88.1FM.
by Christina Waters | Sep 13, 2011 | Home |
For Labor Day we did a mesquite grill of chicken, figs and ripe peaches.
What to put on the chicken? My hand reached out toward the wall of artisanal salsas at New Leaf and emerged with this fabulous complex salsa of ripe mango and sassy chipotle chiles. For roughly $4.50 this vivacious salsa did wonders for the chicken, and made a superb companion for sliced pork loin later in the week.
This stuff packs a punch, but not too much if you know what I mean. Better than I could make it — thank you folks at Numero Uno.
If you’re wondering (more…)
by Christina Waters | Sep 13, 2011 | Home |
Congratulations to ardent and skillful home baker, Tom Pistole, whose bread entries at this year’s Santa Cruz County Fair won not one, but TWO blue ribbons.
Pistole can bake his way out of a paper bag, as any UCSC hill dwellers who’ve tasted his creative cupcakes can confirm. But this latest honor has got to be the icing on the whole wheat, as it were.
Kudos!
by Christina Waters | Sep 10, 2011 | Home |
With Marcel Proust gracing the witty label, Bonny Doon Vineyard’s relentless Clos de Gilroy Central Coast Grenache has reached new likeability in its 2010 installment. Full of spice and cherries, this lovely and highly drinkable (as in “drink it immediately”) thinking woman’s vin ordinaire offers a huge helping of grenache framed smartly with syrah and mourvedre. A Rhône you can believe in with bouyant regional terroir.
We poured it with our Labor Day bbq of grilled chicken and cannellini beans. Yes indeedy this wine adores all foods that have been grilled, cooked or consumed outdoors.
Mercifully priced in the $15 ballpark.
by Christina Waters | Jun 30, 2011 | Home, Movies |
After a long gestation, Terence Malick’s fifth film, Tree of Life, has entered our cinematic bloodstream. It is a lengthy elegy on nothing less than desire, loss, faith, love and the cosmos. What else could we expect of a man who once translated Heidegger and taught philosophy at MIT?
In Tree of Life, Malick the existential ruminator meets Malick the filmmaker’s filmmaker, and the result is a controversial, overly-long, unforgettable work that took this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Whatever it isn’t (more on that later), Tree is a deeply moving portrait of an American family, set in Texas of the 1950s. However much Malick attempts to lay on baroque opulence in the form of digressions into cosmic imagery, digressions that literally unfurl the creation of the universe, digressions in the form of achingly beautiful classical music — the soul of the film is the complex and stormy relationship between a father (Brad Pitt) and his sons (the eldest, Jack, played by an astonishing young Hunter McCracken).
Pitt is a revelation as the ambitious father whose dashed dreams (more…)
by Christina Waters | Jun 29, 2011 | Food, Home |
Tuesdays, la Posta. The marvelous live mandolin and guitar music, the house Montepulciano, the neighborhood special….$15 for pizza and a glass of house wine.
We added this sparkling fresh salad of watercress and fava beans, topped with a perfect egg from the house chickens. Affordable, luxurious comfort food.
What a concept.
