Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Magic is Where You Find It

After we moved to the farm when I was ten, I felt like my world collapsed inward.

No more going to school - now school was held at the kitchen table, with #2 pencils and textbooks from Alpha & Omega and A Beka. No more piano lessons from the nice lady in the trailer house - now I walked up the road to take piano lessons from the neighbor girl. No more spending the afternoons with friends or going to sleep-over. Now there were diapers to change, diapers to wash. Sticky toddler hands to wipe and cherries to can. Chickens to feed and goats to milk. Zucchini and pole beans to weed and water.

We were only 23 miles from Portland, 4.5 miles from the grocery store, but it seemed to me that we might as well have existed in our own universe.

And then: my father got a job working as a building engineer in downtown Portland. He left before dawn and returned in the early evening, upon which he would change his clothes and head back outside to work in the barn, or add another section of fence, or chop branches for the wood pile.

One Saturday morning, he announced that he was going into his office for a few hours.

"Can I go?" I asked.

He studied me for a moment. "Well," he said, finally. "I suppose you might like to see a bit of Portland."

Sparkler Dancing

I meant to write a post for the holiday.

I was planning to tell you about the July 4th celebrations of my childhood, about how we rose early on those mornings to butcher a dozen or more chickens, strewing the ground between the house and barn with blood and matted white feathers.

I was going to write about how we finally put the last packages of meat into the freezer in the middle of the  afternoon, and how afterwards we sat on aluminum folding chairs and ate fat wedges of watermelon, still smelling chicken flesh beneath our fingernails as sticky pink juice dripped from our wrists.

I wanted to tell you about our annual tradition, when twilight began to fall, of doing the Sparkler Dance, and how our father directed us to the front yard and pressed those thin powdery sticks into our hands and egged us on: put your whole self into it! Jen, let’s see a real smile! and watched as we carved shapes into the air, circles and squiggles and question marks, while the sharp, dry grass pricked the undersides of our bare feet.

About the way my adolescent self shrank during those moments, feeling like it was wrong to pretend that we knew how to dance when in fact we looked like the chickens, hours earlier, who ran helter skelter, this way and that, confused.

We traced fizzy blue lines in the night when what we really wanted was to be at the fairgrounds, stuffing our cheeks with greasy popcorn and cotton candy and watching the fireworks light up the sky. And we wished, as the distant popping sounds of the fireworks amplified our seclusion, that we were Normal.

{ that is what I intended to write about }

Then I decided to lock up my keyboard for the weekend and celebrate instead.

On the night of the 4th, as the night echoed with explosions and spark trails etched the sky, I marveled at the fact that here, in this moment so many years later, the Sparkler Dance and the chicken smell are tinged with nostalgia. And I laughed a little bit about the craziness of it all, about the way that sometimes happiness feels like a secret code, impossible to decipher, when it is here, always, mine for the taking.

I thought about how no one, anyone, is Normal.

And how I like it that way, and cherish the opportunity to swap un-Normal stories about muggy summers filled with adolescent angst + discovery + revelation.

Flashes of light and brilliant, blazing color: they're everywhere.

Swooning over LA's Getty Center

 
A few days ago, I did something that I've wanted to do for ever-so-long: visit the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Ooh, the Getty Center: Temple of Modernism. Ode to Light. Tabernacle of Beauty. Perched on the edge of a plush, sinuous mountain, the Center casts a cool gaze over the city of angels, seemingly impervious to smog and exhaust fumes. Driving on the 405, I had gazed longingly at it, but had never had the chance to stop.

Well: it isn't as if I drive by it often - after all, I do live nearly 400 miles away.

But last week, at long last, I stepped into the gleaming white tram at the base of the mountain, and stepped out into a dazzling, shimmery, light-spangled daydream.

The Center is actually something of a campus, made up of multiple buildings, all connected by a vast  "courtyard" of sorts in the middle. In theory, the buildings house a stunning collection of art, but I can't verify that, because I scarcely spent any time inside. I just kept walking around the buildings, eyes big as pizza pies, taking in the sumptuous curves and soaring archways and squares in grids repeated over and over.

It was all light +  glass + thick-veined Italian travertine.

Look:

And:

See? Isn't it divine? Don't you just want to... hug it? Or lay on your back on the floor and stare up at the shapes + shadows for hours and hours?

Oh, if only.

In lieu of all that, there's learning about it. Here are few facts that I found fascinating (culled from the friendly tour guide on the Architecture tour - any mistakes are entirely the fault of my memory):

+ The squares that appear everywhere are based on a 30x30 grid, which architect Richard Meier used as one of his recurring motifs in the project. Sometimes the squares are multiples of 30x30; sometimes, they're a division.

Can I just say that it makes me warm + tingly when artists and architects use a particular numerical scheme throughout their work? Speak numbers to me, baby.

+ Knowing how much Meier loved bright white, the City of Los Angeles forbade the use of bright white on the bulk of the buildings. Instead, he used a creamy tone that matches the travertine. Over and over, the design committee urged him to incorporate bold pops of color, but he would not.

Good. Man.

Instead, noting the lavender that bloomed on the mountainside and the purplish cast of the sky on summer evenings, he incorporated lavender plants and trees with purple flowers (whose name escapes me) to create harmony between the hardscape and the environment.

Can I interject here how much I adore white + neutral tones, and how seriously thrilled I am that the Center doesn't look like a giant Legos set of taxicab yellow + lipstick red and indigo blue, and how imagining the buildings in those colors makes me shudder?

Deep breath.

+ Another recurring motif Meier used was passageways and long, narrow corridors. His inspiration was the naturally-formed channels that run across the ridges of the mountains, which you can clearly see from the deck of the building, and the strips of freeway that cut into the mountains along those same parallel lines, creating a gorgeous sense of continuity.

+ Meier was all about framing views. From every vantage point on the property, the space between each building creates a magnificent frame that showcases the mountains, the valley, the city... spectacular.

It's like white space in design, or the space between notes in music - just as important as the design itself or the musical notes - or the building, in this case - is the space around it.

I'm smitten. Does it show?

I'm going to have to go back.

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More Getty Center Links:

+  A blog that collects interesting Getty-related links.

+  A group of LA-based photographers spent an evening photographing the Getty, and what they captured makes me want to toss my camera away and cry. Simply stunning.

+ From the New York Times, a story about a photographer-scientist-detective who works in the Getty Conservation Institute to decode the information in old photos. Fabulous read.

+ Richard Meier's official website

+ Check out some of these photos of Meier's various projects.

Next post: a little bit about other LA-based inspiration.

Chef Richard Näslin of the ICEHOTEL in Sweden

Richard Näslin

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I was at the ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden last year, where I met with Chef Richard Näslin. I've been intending to write about our chat ever since, but somehow I let a whole year slip away without doing it.  You might also remember when I wrote that Richard reminded me of Matt Damon, and I'm finally posting the pictures to prove it.

See? Wasn't it worth the wait?

While I was twiddling my thumbs, the rooms that I walked through and slept in last year softened into slush and melted away; the ground was leveled, and blocks of ice from the Torne River were dragged to the site. A different group of artists arrived with hammers and picks and saws and created a new temple of ice filled with freshly imagined shapes and three-dimensional structures.

Daydreaming about what it might look like this year, I checked in with Richard via email to make sure that he was still at the ICEHOTEL and doing well - he is, and fabulously happy, it seems. The restaurant is packed, he reports, and they've built out a brand new kitchen and dining room. 

But now - at long last - let's rewind to 2007. The night before I met with Richard, I had dinner at his restaurant, located across the street from the temporary ICEHOTEL. The restaurant is a permanent structure, warm and cozy, with a huge entryway full of parkas, coats and boots that people shrug off when they come inside from the -30°C air.

While the snow fell outside the dining room that night, we began the meal with a piece of arctic char alongside a quenelle of smoked arctic char ice cream in a pool of beetroot sorbet. The ice cream was creamy and smoky, enlivened by the salt-flecked fish and perfectly balanced by the tangy-sweet beetroot. Next came a terrine of foie gras with smoked reindeer, accented with gently dried grapes and drizzled with a honey-grape juice reduction. Served with lightly toasted brioche, it was a knockout.

But I might have been most in love with the reindeer joint that arrived on a simple white plate with a single morel mushroom to one side and a judicious drizzle of wild game gravy. An ice glass filled with bright red cranberries cooked in port wine was delivered alongside. Tender and rich and wild, the dish was like nothing I had ever eaten.

I was thrilled to find that the menu didn't have a single piece of lettuce on it; not one watery tomato; nary an option for pasta with cheese. I loved that it was so distinctly, vividly different, and very much at place in its surroundings.

Needless to say, by the time I met Richard the next day, I was over-the-moon impressed.

Reasons to Go to Acapulco

On the first day you arrive in Acapulco, you might temporarily forget why you came. As the car whisks past the airport, you see palm trees, but you also see Wal*Mart and Costco and KFC and Starbucks, and you think: oh, no.

You are, however, thrilled by the sun and sand and guacamole and salsa fresca. You’re in your own private villa, after all; there is a man who brings you icy drinks while you splash in the pool, and a woman who cooks breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The moist, humid air caresses your skin; you begin to relax.

The second day, you are delighted by tacos al pastor, assembled on the lightest tortillas you’ve ever tasted, by the pile of tender roasted meat, the crunch of white onions, and the sprinkle of feather-light cilantro, topped with a hint of pineapple-y sweetness.

On the third day, you happily tear into a pan-fried fish dressed with a bare squeeze of lime juice.