End of The Empire

From the Palo Alto Daily News  a little while ago: “End of an Empire: Downtown Palo Alto pub closing its doors after 21-year run” by Jason Green:

For two decades, the Empire Tap Room [aka the Empire Tap and Grill] has injected a bit of East Coast flavor into downtown Palo Alto.

It’s been a favorite of movers and shakers like Congresswoman Anna Eshoo [whose office is across the street], San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator Vic Fangio and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen.

But on April 28, an empire will end, so to speak, when long-time proprietress Josie Jelks closes the doors forever.

Jelks said she made the decision with a heavy heart. Costs have increased prohibitively across the board, from rent to liability insurance to the supplies necessary to run the pub at 651 Emerson St.

April 28th is today, and the Empire is essentially out my back door — a very pleasant place, with a wonderful long bar and a fabulous patio / courtyard, and inventive simple food. It will be much missed.

Zao Wou-Ki

(About art, and my life, rather than language.)

In the NYT national edition today (but apparently printed first on the 11th), an obit (by Paul Vitello) for painter Zao Wou-Ki, “Zao Wou-ki, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92″:

Zao Wou-ki, a Chinese émigré who merged Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions in his abstract paintings — helping to shape avant-garde art in postwar Europe and attracting a newly wealthy Asian following that made him one of the most commercially successful living artists in either hemisphere — died on April 9 in Nyon, Switzerland.

… Mr. Zao’s paintings, which are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern, among others, have sold at auction in recent years for between $1 million and $2 million each. Since 2011, when sales of his paintings totaled $90 million, art journals and art dealers have frequently referred to him as the top-selling living Chinese artist.

Finding his own identity in that label — as a Chinese artist — was the crucible of Mr. Zao’s artistic vision.

Leaving China just ahead of the Communist takeover, Mr. Zao settled in 1948 in Paris, where his first sustained exposure to Western Modernist painting left him feeling ambivalent about the classical forms of landscape and calligraphic ink painting in which he had been trained. He loved the work of the Impressionists and Expressionists, and of contemporary artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

But through nonobjective Western painting, especially the work of Paul Klee, who was influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese art, Mr. Zao gained new insights into what the British art historian Michael Sullivan called “the Abstract Expressionist element in his own tradition.”

Putting aside the issue of money in the art market (now a feature of virtually all artists’ obits), there’s the remarkable blending of Chinese and European Modernist artististic traditions in Zao’s work (the Times renders his name with family name first, Chinese-style). And a story from my life.

On the portmanteau watch: Boston, coyotes

I’m gripped by the story of the past day’s events in the Boston area, large portions of which are under lockdown as the search continues for 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — suspected as being responsible, with his older brother Tamerlan (now dead), for the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday and the fatal shooting of an MIT policeman and the wounding of a transit policeman in an exchange of gunfire in Watertown MA last night. In the midst of this, occurrences of the portmanteau Marabomber ((Boston) Marathon + bomber), echoing the name Unabomber. And while I was listening to NPR coverage on KQED, there came a local feature from a naturalist about coyotes, with the portmanteaus coywolf and coydog (referring to coyote-wolf and coyote-dog hybrids, respectively).

Food presentation

(Mostly about food.)

Ned Deily and I had lunch at the local Gordon Biersch on Wednesday, and I got him to take a photo of my meal, the Tapas With Flatbread, because I thought the presentation of the dish was so attractive. (That’s the noun presentation ‘the manner or style in which something is given, offered, or displayed’: the presentation of foods is designed to stimulate your appetite (NOAD2), used especially of food.) The photo:

Glass eels

In the NYT Sunday Review of 3/31/13, a piece by Akiko Busch (author of The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science) on “Why I Count Glass Eels”, about

half-hour increments spent on spring afternoons at the Fall Kill, a tributary of the Hudson River. In addition to pondering the notions of changeability and continuity that watching a stream flow into a river tend to prompt, I was also counting and weighing glass eels, tiny transparent fish only two or three inches long that enter the tributaries of the river each spring.

Which is to say, I was practicing something called citizen science, loosely defined as scientific research in which amateurs help experts gather data.

Here’s a single glass eel:

To come: some more about citizen science, then a bit about the compound glass eel, a fair amount on eels, and eventually eels as food, especially in unagi sushi.

concussion

On Tuesday I saw my family doctor, to have him remove the staples from the head wound I suffered in the Great Fainting Episode of March 4 (see my “vasovagal syncope” posting, here) and talk about my condition since then. It’s been slow and difficult going: unsteady on my feet (for several days I went back to using my cane to get around), terribly tired, sleeping badly, not always thinking clearly (lots of trouble recalling names), little appetite, and so on.

The CT scan at Stanford showed no brain injury, but my doctor said I had clearly suffered a concussion — he recalled a concussion from his own experience — and that it would be a slow recovery. I’m supposed to take things easy and not push myself. Not easy for me.

Linguistics dreams

Night before last my sleep was tortured by endless linguistics dreams — in this case, dreams about morphology. My linguistics dreams are intense and vivid; they always concern some pressing analytic issue, touched off by some data file, website, or publication which always turns out to exist only in my dream. On several occasions I’ve wakened and gone to the computer to find this material, realizing in the process that the idea I’m checking on makes no sense at all; I go back to sleep and the dream returns full-strength. I keep thinking that I really should be taking notes on my thoughts.

When I wake up during this process I always try to shift myself to sex dreams; they are much more pleasant and they have the possibility of a satisying resolution. But that never works.

Good ideas sometimes come to me on long solitary walks. And often in the shower. But never in my dreams. No Kekulé carbon rings for benzene for me — but then Kekulé is said to have had the image of a snake biting its tail come to him in a day-dream reverie, not a nighttime dream.

 

Science Talent Search

In yesterday’s NYT Science News, a nice story (“A Laboratory Grows Young Scientists” by Ethan Hauser) about the Intel Science Talent Search, the winners of which were announced last night.

Chocolates

(Some language content here, but mostly about my life.)

Valentine’s Day, the holiday of love, has become associated with chocolates (one of the foods of love), as well as flowers (especially red roses, the flowers of passionate love). February 14th is also my daughter’s birthday. This year, inspired by the realization that I have come to live in the Chocolate Gulch of Palo Alto, I decided (for the first time) to do chocolates for Elizabeth. It’s a nice story.

Define “living room”

(About my life, but with a linguistic hook.)

Back on December 30th I recovered my living room. For four months, my (nominal) living room had functioned as my bedroom: I slept, sitting up, in a chair (a recliner), and the coffee table next to it served as my bedside table, covered with all the things that would normally have been kept in my bedroom; meanwhile, my (nominal) bedroom served as a kind of storage room for stuff that had to be moved out of the rest of the house (to accommodate the family and friends who were helping to care for me).

Though there were places for a few people to sit in the room I was sleeping in, the function of the room was clear to visitors, who were a bit disconcerted by the arrangement. (By the way, for a considerable part of this time I was living in my bathrobe, or just a t-shirt and sweatpants, which functioned like pajamas, so I looked a lot like a man in his bedroom, whichever room I was in.) I’ll go through some of the history in another posting, but my immediate interest here is how to talk about these things. What goes along with the labels living room and bedroom?