The oil spill is a mirror

Chris Reid | Special to the Times

The oil spill crossed the Rubicon on Friday.

At sundown Thursday, families frolicked in the crashing surf at Pensacola Beach. A few surfers tried to find a wave. The beach bar troubadours played Neil Young and Eagles tunes as college kids knocked back beers. A skinny guy with a metal detector shuffled along looking for treasure.

All was as it should be, the classic chamber of commerce picture of Florida beach life.

On Friday everything was different. The families were still there, splashing around. The beach bars still sold brewskis to thirsty college kids. But in the surf line, mingled with the broken sand dollars and the calico shells, lay an army of invaders straight out of a science-fiction movie:

Thousands of shiny, reddish-brown globs, glistening in the sun — signs that the Deepwater Horizon disaster had at last stained Florida's sugar-white beaches.

Tar balls washed ashore along more than 40 miles of the Panhandle coast, from Perdido Key State Park on the western end of Escambia County to Navarre Beach in Santa Rosa County. Boats snared big tar mats floating in Pensacola Pass, and a dozen more mats were spotted late Friday in the gulf about 6 miles south of the Navarre Beach pier, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The St. Petersburg Times, 5 June 2010

The oil reached Florida and so the waiting's over in the Panhandle. Now the waiting takes on more urgency to those of us farther down the coast. It's no longer a matter of will it get here, now it's a matter of when.

This spill didn't have to happen of course, but the unholy union of our culture, our government, our society and our economy made it an inevitability. As a Gulf Coast resident, this effects me personally and I want to blame someone. I want to blame BP of course. I want to blame Ronald Reagan for birthing a bankrupt school of governance that says that industries should be free to write their own regulations. I want to blame Haliburton. I want to blame globalization. I want to blame who ever it's politically expedient to blame.

But if I want to level blame with any degree of integrity, I need to blame myself for buying a tank of gas yesterday. I paid around $2.65 a gallon when I filled up my tank, a fraction of the actual cost to bring it to me. Despite its bargain price, I still groaned when I saw the total price go over $30.

According to a 1998 paper written by the International Center for Technology Assessment, the actual cost of that gallon was somewhere between $5.60 and $15.37. Mind you, that was based on a retail price of $1.25 and before the costs of invading and occupying Iraq are figured in. Part of me doesn't want to know what that number is now. Gasoline and petroleum prices are kept artificially low by the oil companies' practice of externalizing their costs. Most of these externalized costs are absorbed by federal, state and local governments. The costs to find the oil, drill for the oil, ship the oil, keep the shipping lanes secure for the safe passage of the oil, refine the oil, transport the refined oil, market the refined oil, discover new uses for the refined oil, etc. are either paid by governments directly, or indirectly through a series of subsidies and paybacks.

It's not just gasoline either. Crude oil gets made into the stuff that makes up life in 2010. Look around you, if you need a reminder of oil's omnipresence, here's a partial list: nylon zippers, ballet tights, plastic hangers, pantyhose, flip flops, fake fur, polyester, ball point pens, ink, computers, copiers, magic markers, telephones, microfilm, cameras, earphones, footballs, knitting needles, tennis racquets, golf balls, baby aspirin, stuffed animals, Band aids, Vaseline, Pepto-Bismol, hair coloring, soap, cough syrup, hair spray, lipstick and on and on. Oil subsidies and externalized costs keep these things and the raw materials that make them artificially cheap.

This is not some dark conspiracy or nefarious plan. My spending habits and my need for speed and convenience created the whole mess. Every time I buy a dollar bottle of shampoo or a $4 T-shirt I give my consent to the whole system. I vote with my money and so does everybody else. Calling for the head of Tony Hayward, BP's Chief Executive, won't stop any of this. It won't clean up the Gulf and it won't stop the world's dependence on (artificially) cheap oil. Boycotting BP won't help either. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is their fault and their problem, of that there can be no doubt. But this disaster could have happened at any offshore platform anywhere in the world.

Exxon Valdez groundings and Deepwater Horizon explosions will continue to happen in a world where consumerism reigns supreme. All of the talk about energy independence and alternative energy sources don't amount to a hill of beans when most of what I touch, buy, own and use starts out in an oil well and is sold to me at an artificially low price.

Oil disasters and oil-related world instability will continue so long as oil subsidies continue. Deep water oil drilling Russian roulette will continue without back up safety plans so long as the oil industry continues to call the shots. But oil subsidies won't go away and a functioning regulatory environment will never come to be in a world where you and I demand $2.65 a gallon gasoline and $4 T-shirts.

Thinking about this stuff is of zero comfort as I wait for the tar balls to arrive at the beach down the street or in my beloved Pass-a-Grille. This monster's awake and I don't think anything can stop it at this point. The oiled wildlife will suffer and die, the fishing fleets will stay in port and our already shaky economy will suffer a blow this summer that hurts to think about too much.

The road out of this can't stop with addressing the Deepwater Horizon disaster. We have a lesson to learn here, as a society. The newly fouled Gulf is a mirror and in its iridescent sheen anybody can see the gruesome reflection of a world gone mad. The oiled pelicans in the news this week are the result of a society that will go to any length to keep energy and consumer goods as cheap as possible. When you look at those birds, think about your role in how they got that way. Then vote with your dollars or pounds or euros or pesos. How you spend your money will determine what's next. Let's face it, at this stage of the game, it's the only meaningful vote you have.

A recipe hack that doesn't work and a smart one that does

Our pals at Apartment Therapy figured out that you can't make whipped cream in a French press this week. Duh.

In yet another sterling example of why a working knowledge of chemistry will set you free, had the brave experimenter paid attention he or she would have known that whipped cream is milk fat mixed with air. Whipped cream needs to have at least 80% of its volume made up of air and there's no way something that works as a plunger can get that much air into a liquid. The need for air thing is the reason you can't make whipped cream in a blender either.

Short cuts abound but I find the best way to make whipped cream is to make it the way my grandmother did, with a bowl and a wire whisk. Making whipped cream by hand can be quite a work out but I find that when I have to work at something like this, I am more in touch with what I'm eating and I also eat less of something when I know how much labor went into it.

Take a glass or stainless steel mixing bowl and a wire whisk and put them in the freezer for about an hour. Once they're chilled, take a cup of cold, heavy cream and a tablespoon or two of powdered sugar and add them to the bowl.

Put the bowl in the crook of your arm and commence to whisking. You can also set the bowl down on a table or counter but I find I have more control if I hold the bowl against myself with my left arm.

Whisk for about ten minutes. Nothing will happen for about the first half of that time but the mixture will slowly thicken. About 9/10ths of the way through the cream and air reach critical mass and the mixture stiffens significantly. You're at the soft peak phase. Soft peak is what you want if you're going to add your whipped cream to another recipe.

This is what "soft peak" whipped cream looks like. Once you're at this stage
 you have about another minute to go. Photos from Pastry Pal.

If you're making a dessert topping keep going for about another minute and your whipped cream will reach the consistency of the whipped cream that comes out of a can of Redi-Whip. Stop immediately.

If you keep whisking, the fat globules in the whipped cream will begin to stick together instead of the air bubbles you just worked into the mix. When that happens, the mixture separates into butter and butter milk. That in itself is pretty cool but probably not what you're after.

Congratulations, you just made whipped cream.

You want a low-fat version of this? Eat a teaspoon of it instead of a quart.

A night at the opera

I write about art a fair amount. At least I think I do. Ordinarily, when I'm writing and thinking about art, I'm dealing with visual art. So in a bit of a shift, I'm going to write a bit about The Arts. By that I mean the performing arts.





I am going to the opera tonight and I cannot wait. The St. Petersburg Opera Company is currently mounting a production of Georges Bizet's Carmen. I have great seats, good company and a good three hours to turn off my phone and get swept up in the story of a gypsy with loose morals, her affairs and her demise when one of her lovers decides to kill her rather than face the thought of her ending up in the arms of another man. That's the plot in a nutshell and I'll spare you the experience of my recreating the entire libretto.

Carmen is Georges Bizet's best known work. It was his final opera and at its debut in 1875 in Paris it received a lukewarm response. He died at age 36, three months after Carmen's premiere, so he never saw it turn into the cultural juggernaut it would become over the years following its debut.

Carmen is one of the most popular operas in the modern operatic repertoire and for good reason. It tells a compelling story and the music sets the tone for the entire art form.

I did not grow up as an opera buff. I never really understood it, all I could hear were loud vibrato voices. It took me a number of years to work up an appreciation for it and even then I wouldn't say that I liked it. In the lead up to turning 40, I started training to run a marathon. One of the ways that I found it easier to run the miles required of my training program was to wear an iPod and let music take me into the zone. Pop music distracted me and didn't let me get into the meditative space where I needed to be. I'd always appreciated classical music so when I ran, I listened to classical music.

I spent countless hours in the zone and listening to the great composers. I ran, I listened, and as I ran and listened it felt like a switch went off. I could really see the achievement of a great symphony for the first time during these runs. I mean, someone had a thought and he expressed it musically. Then he had a really complex thought and he imagined an entire symphony. It's a real achievement of human brain power when you think about it. Somebody like Claude Debussey imagined a melody, and then a series of connected melodies. He then imagined how it would sound as played by an entire orchestra. Then he sat down and wrote the music an orchestra would play to match that imagined series of connected melodies. I'm floored by that, really.

My own imaginings that I turn into real things are simple objects or they are a series of planes and angles. I cannot fathomthe creative energy required to imagine and then to create La Mer, the way Debussey did.

Along the way to my epiphany about classical music, I added some arias to my play lists just to see if they would appeal to me the way the orchestral music did. The first aria that I latched onto was an old recording of Jussi Björling singing Che Gelida Manina from Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème. The more I listened to that old recording the more I could hear the control he had over his voice. It took Jussi Björling to help me see through the conventions of opera and to see the art of it. I was hooked.

Opera singers train for years to be able to sing the way they do. What to an unschooled ear sounds like a mess of vibrato and wild scales is in fact an incredibly trained and controlled instrument. Opera singers sing the way they do because their art form predates anything close to modern sound systems, so they train their voices to be a self-contained sound system. To this day, opera singers sing without microphones. When you sit in the nosebleed section of an opera house and you can still hear every word and sound without the help of electronics, operatic singing makes perfect sense. Not only can you still hear everything, it's loud.

I know I'm not going to convert anybody. It took me years to be ready to like opera. Art forms like opera offer a great window into the past even as they stay completely current. Carmen's lyrics and story line are today what they were when Bizet wrote them 135 years ago. The actors come and go but people have been rooting for Carmen as she works her wiles in an uninterrupted chain of performances that stretch  back across the generations to that Paris debut in 1875. Carmen's continued popularity is proof that people are the same now as they've ever been. Knowing that helps me keep my pride in check and it helps me see myself as part of a continuum. I am a link in a human chain that extends back through time. After I'm gone, that chain will continue into some unknown future without me. I find that comforting.

A conversation with Daniel Ogassian

Daniel Ogassian showed up on my radar a couple of years ago when a photograph of a wall covered in his concrete tile landed on my desk.

Ogassian calls the pattern Japanese Weave and I'd never seen anything like it before. It's at once modern and retro, it's high and low tech, it's engaging and off putting. This was a wall that existed in creative conflict and the energy it gave off was palpable, even through a photograph.

I noticed he was on Twitter a few months ago and developing a repartee with him there has turned into yet one more amazing thing that's come into my life as a result of that service. Daniel Ogassian and I had a long ranging (and long winded) phone conversation the other night and it was great to thank him for his work and to get to know a bit about what makes him tick as an artist.

Daniel Ogassian is an artist and a craftsman and in his mind they are the same thing. There is a term used in fine art, sprezzatura, and it describes a master painter's technique to produce a painting that appears to be very simple on the surface but is in fact incredibly difficult to pull off. Sprezzatura is a perfect description for Ogassian's life and work as a master tile maker.

He came to tile in the early '90s originally and set it aside for more than ten years as he worked in a series of other media. Over the course of his evolution as an artist and as a craftsman, he's worked in high-end furniture, ceramics, glazes, tile, concrete and gypsum.  Each skill he mastered added depth to his work without exerting too heavy an influence. Again, it's sprezzatura at work. Japanese weave doesn't look like a furniture design but without furniture design in his background, Japanese Weave never could have come to be in the first place.

His tiles are available in concrete and ceramic and are a study in juxtapositions. Their warm and organic textures delicately balance with clean, not modern - futurist shapes. The high-chemistry glazes are rendered in earthy shades adding a depth and texture to wall surfaces and floors.

Ogassian's tile can be specified in any of his matte or gloss glazes, as well as custom glazes formulated and designed by Daniel.  Each glaze is meticulously formulated for the way it flows over horizontal, sloping and vertical facets of the tile.It’s his glazing expertise that supplies the warmth and touch to the finished product.

To Daniel, the light and shadow play is where he finds life, activity, movement.  “Imbuing a wall surface with surface tension reveals the interaction of static components. When walking past a tiled wall, light and shadow play along the raised patterns and create the illusion of movement."

This work is amazing, all of it, and it's a true pleasure to see someone work with this much passion as he pours a lifetime of experience into every project. Daniel Ogassian is the real deal, a sui generis. You can learn more about him and see more of his work on his website. You can also follow Daniel on Twitter where he's @Daniel_Ogassian. Thanks Daniel!

I got moxie

You bet I have moxie, Building Moxie that is. The great JB Bartkowiak's reborn blog featured one of my screeds this morning. It's a rehash of something that appeared here previously but it poses a question that can never be posed often enough.

Check out my post and the rest of JB's posts at Building Moxie.