Luck

Last week there was an interesting article in the New York Times about some kids from the US who have gone to Moscow to study ballet at the school of the famed Bolshoi ballet. (Read the article here.) How times have changed! But in fact, these kids are not the first to do this. Way back in 1996 CPYB student Vanessa Zahorian left Carlisle to go study at the Kirov. She has gone on to have a stellar career at San Francisco ballet. I am always intrigued by people with particularly strong passions. One kid, Joy, put it quite plainly, "I want to be Russian." I can't identify with that one, but I definitely could identify when I read that she burst into tears the first time she saw Natalia Osipova on video. Sometimes beauty is just that powerful. (Osipova is currently in New York for a stint with American Ballet Theatre. Read Alistair MacCaulay's rave review of her performance Tuesday night here.) In any case, regarding Daniela's passion, it seems like really good luck that we are in Carlisle, where the passion is so conveniently engaged. Nonetheless, it can get complicated. I just read a marvelous essay by yet another CPYB dancer from Carlisle, Abi Stafford, a principal dancer with New York City Ballet. She writes in Pointe Magazine about competitiveness, professional anxieties, and how she's learned to manage it all. And I feel confirmed: from the very beginning I've tried to impress upon Daniela that it's about having fun. (She's also taught me the very same lesson.) Fun can be very serious business, can involve hardship, sacrifice, and a lot of pain, but we need to keep coming back to that joy and, I think, to the sharing.

(Luck is tricky to define. Well, perhaps not, but it is complicated when we try to determine how it applies in our lives. Sometimes just about everything can seem like chance. At the other extreme, I often hear said "there are absolutely no coincidences." It's usually affirmed by people who believe in an all-powerful, participatory God. God as Director. I don't believe in that one.)

I don't know if this constitutes a passion, but it sure could be fun: we make an obscenely huge paella, then get a crowd, all nicely equipped with thick oven mitts, and we hoist the paella/throne and procession it to... to some huge cathedral? We've had the bread and the fish, now it's time for a paella miracle. (In the image, above, the making of the world's largest paella, near Madrid. Paella for 110,000! Check out the big equipment!) If I could manage to make a very large paella, maybe not for hundreds of thousands, but, let's say, maybe for a thousand (I've reached 100), and got several people to help parade it in a sacred culinary procession, would that be luck? I don't know, but it would certainly be lucky.

More on Astronomy

Yesterday's news about the Planck spacecraft led me to a little further reading and I came across the following statement from a 2003 article that reported on a then new estimate of the number of stars in the universe: "The result [of the calculations] is said to be more stars than there are grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches". Imagine that! That's what I call unfathomable. Do an experiment. Take one handful of sand from the beach. Just one puny handful. Try to count the grains. You'll get tired of it before long. Imagine a whole beach. Miles of beaches. Thousands of miles of beaches... Feeling kind of small? And every grain of sand, every star, separated by billions and billions upon billions of miles. I'm feeling dizzy. Maybe it's all just a joke. God is playing an incredible joke on us, right? When he senses that we're closing in on the answer he'll say, ok, enough already, I was just kidding... That's the optimist's, the dreamer's view. More likely, we are so small and insignificant, not even God remembers us. In fact, the very idea of God is just a strange evolutionary coping mechanism. Back to the rabbit: yes, the universe is so big that it's quite reasonable to imagine seemingly absurd realties. So big... that it's perfectly normal to imagine another world on which a being just like me is writing these very words at this very moment. Maybe the only difference is he's a rabbit. And I'm a human (so they say) and like to eat well. Last night Danny, Asun and I had the world's greatest eggplant at the Fogón Argentino, right here in the neighborhood. Then we followed that up with the boletus edulis croquettes at the Dehesa Extremeña.  Wow! I believe you could search entire galaxies before coming across something so delicious! And the Belgian chocolate ice cream from Trastevere to wash it all down was not bad either. 

New Food Rage!

Today everything is ok. Asun and Daniela came in from Madrid friday night. And Murphy arrived too. Yesterday we had a nice lunch at Emilia's to welcome back Ana Salinas from Strassbourg. This morning I've been reading José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, the centenarian poet form Antequera who has been "rescued" for literary history in recent years. He's quite enjoyable to read. (Another activity this morning has been doing war with the seagulls, a few of whom have very strangely decided that our terrace is now their territory. This has never happened before and it's rather disconcerting. I've had two direct hits so far with pepper water!) Last night we went to see Victor Ullate's company do Coppelia at the Teatro Cervantes. It was a good performance, if rather uninspired. We were supposed to meet with Víctor before or after the show to talk about Daniela (and perhaps disabuse him of the illusion that she's staying next year), but he had some kind of health emergency and couldn't make it. Apparently he's ok. The theater was full, which is always nice to see. The lead role was danced by Alessandra Ball, a young American from Atlanta. She was very good. Finally, my first video, dedicated to a a fascinating topic: the latest Spanish food craze.

Apparently we have a very slow internet connection here, so this thing took quite a while to upload. Enjoy!

A Gastronome's Paradise?

According to the 2009 rankings of that iconic Italian water, San Pellegrino, among the eight best restaurants in the world, four are in Spain. That's really rather extraordinary. They are El Bulli (#1), Mugaritz (#4), El Celler de Can Roca (#5), and Arzak (#8). Two in Catalonia and two in the Basque country. Filling out the top ten are two from the US, two from France, and one each from the UK and Denmark. Asun had a memorable lunch with Cristi and Daniel at Arzak back in December to celebrate Daniel's eightieth birthday. The star chefs who lead these culinary meccas have mentored dozens and dozens of other extraordinary chefs, creating a ripple effect that one does notice all over the country. We're not exactly suffering down South. Expectations are high. I've written earlier about Dani Garcia's place here in Malaga, and that's just one of many superb tapas bars available to us around the city. And the 12 euro menú del día at Bilmore, while not really high cuisine, is always excellent; a better meal would be difficult to get for three times the price in the US. Just within a quarter mile radius of this apartment we've got a dozen magnificent restaurants to choose from. And San Sebastian? For the past several years I've been having lots of fun listening to Daniel Arnedo describe the "errands" he must run downtown. Oh, the sacrifices. The basic narrative goes like this: "well, I had to go pick up some medications at the cooperative, and since I was right there, I thought I'd just stop by X (name of some fine bar) to rest for a minute. Well, the kind gentleman tending bar suggested I try some Y (fill in with some amazing culinary invention). Oh, holy Mother, it really hit the spot, and the wine that went with it was simply extraordinary..." And so it goes, day after day. His latest errand brought him back to the basics: just a glass of nice white wine and three fresh oysters. Not a bad midmorning snack for an eighty year old. (In the photo, Daniela in front of some nice looking raw octopus in the famous Boqueria market in Barcelona.)

More good food

Yesterday a bunch of us got together for lunch in Pedregalejo. We ate at Mari Cuchi, one of the many restaurants right on the beach. I'm feeling too lazy right now to go over all the goodies, but I do want to mention the espetos de sardinas (again), because we're in June now and this is the best month for fresh sardines. Oh were they ever good! Very fresh sardines, sea salt, the embers of olive branches. That's it. Simple food. Oh my, and the concha fina, the delicious clams from these waters! They are eaten raw on the half-shell. Out of this world. It got quite chilly around 5 pm when we were finishing up, then it got warm again a couple of hours later. The weather in May was just crazy.  It's rained a great deal in most of Spain, but not here, where it's just been strange. Lots of work today and tomorrow, then it's home!