Summer rerun: A Bahamian Breakfast and a story

This post ran originally on 1 September 2008

Here's what I had for breakfast on Sunday morning with my new pal Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is the 74-year-old proprietor of Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma. I told Kermit that I wanted to eat like a Bahamian and that I had a some time to kill. So he pulled up a chair, got me some sheep's tongue souse and johnny cake and proceeded to tell me his life story. Sheep's tongue souse is incredible by the way and I'm looking everywhere for a recipe but alas I am striking out. Anyone? Anyone? I know it was made with the boiled entrails of either a sheep or a goat, lime juice, potatoes, onions, allspice and Bahamian Bird Peppers. Man, who knew boiled organ meats could taste so good?

But more than the food, Kermit Rolle is the best story-teller I've ever come across. He told stories of a life so distant from mine it was hard to believe. Experiences like Sunday morning's at Kermit's Airport Lounge are why I travel. An hour spent with that man had me bowled over with gratitude for how easy I've had it when I compare my life with someone in the developing world. And at the same time I was struck with a deep admiration that someone could have the life he's had and be so happy and grateful as he looks back on it and talks to strangers like me. His joy ought to be counted as an ingredient in the incredible sheep's tongue souse.

Now here's the story part:



On Monday, I wrote about a great Bahamian breakfast I had at Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma and the great conversation I had with the Lounge's proprietor, Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of The Bahamas and he's a man who's very proud of his heritage. He has ample reason to be so, and a cursory Google search of his name shows that the Rolle clan is a pretty influential bunch in both The Bahamas and in the U.S. In addition to bringing us the likes of Esther Rolle and Estelle Evans, a number of Rolle descendants have risen to great heights in the world of professional sports. So much so that two years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a great feature on the Rolle family in the Bahamas and in the world of U.S. professional sports. SI sent a reporter to spend a day with my new pal Kermit and here's what he had to say:

WE ARE coming to the point where my father took me as a little boy," says Kermit Rolle, after the car, rolling along Queen's Highway on Exuma, has passed Jacob Rolle's Christian Academy, Rolle's Chat and Chew restaurant and nurse Lydia King Rolle's clinic and jounced through two bumpy detours around floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel. Sunlight blasts through the windshield. He motions the driver to slow. Kermit is 72 years old, but for a moment he is young again. The turquoise sea flashes through the trees. To understand anything about the Rolles, you must begin right here.

Kermit was nine or 10 that day. His father took him to this spot in Steventon to retrace the route of a slave named Pompey, one of hundreds working five settlements owned by an Englishman, Lord John Rolle. In 1829 the physically imposing Pompey led a protest against a plan to move a group of Rolle's slaves from Exuma to another island in the Bahamas . Pompey and others seized a boat and took it to Nassau to plead their case with the colonial governor. They were caught and whipped, after which Pompey escaped and famously ran five miles to Rolleville to warn other slaves that British soldiers were coming to seize them. The slaves "put hell" on the soldiers, Kermit says, laughing. "Pompey knocked them down left, right and center."

Pompey's rebellion earned him a place in history; he is credited with sparking the Bahamian antislavery movement. For the Rolles, who in the custom of the day took the name of their owner, Pompey is an icon of resistance: He didn't take servitude passively; he stood up and fought. A document from the time tells how soldiers were constantly being called out to quell the Rolle plantation workers. "They were always troublesome," says Gail Saunders, a historian and former director of the Bahamas ' national archives. "They wanted their freedom."

"Maybe that's how we get some of the strong players in the U.S. today," Kermit says. "My father always said of someone who's big and strong and healthy and runs fast: 'That could be one of Pompey's.'" Kermit, a restaurateur and businessman, is one of Rolleville's most prominent figures, a living repository of history. His great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave, told him that Lord John's overseers whipped any slave they caught trying to read and that some slaves risked their skins to secretly teach each other the alphabet.

During that walk with his dad on Pompey's route, Kermit also learned about the source of the Rolles' distinctive pride: Lord John's benevolent deed. Legend has it that, instead of selling off his land after the British fully ended slavery in the Bahamas in 1838, John Rolle willed the 5,000 acres in perpetuity to his freed slaves. Not one clod of that prime Caribbean waterfront land could be bought or sold. It could only be handed down to other Rolles.

This alone, Kermit says, makes Rolles different from other Bahamian blacks, not to mention their counterparts in the U.S. Kermit worked for 14 years in the postwar U.S. , shuttling in and out of the Bahamas on the Contract, and never understood the acceptance of second-class citizenship by many African-Americans. "John, Lord Rolle, was a perfect man," Kermit says. "That's why we ask God to bless him: His mind was so clear that after emancipation, all the lands he had he willed back to his people. That made us the most happiest people, because he treated us as human beings. He set you up in such a way that you can be proud, and there's still that proudness. The other slave owners? They just turned those people loose. [The freed slaves] didn't know where to go. They don't know where they are. But my father showed me the boundaries—and within those boundaries, the land belonged to our people."

A vast simplification? Perhaps. But Kermit is right about the psychological heft a prize such as Lord Rolle's can provide. In a recent essay, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. cited lack of property as a key reason for the growing wealth gap between poor and middle-class African-Americans. Studying 20 successful African-Americans, Gates found that 15 are descended from families that obtained property before 1920. By then, the Rolles on Exuma had been in possession of their land for more than 80 years. "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society," Gates wrote. "They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."

In the Rolles' case, the slave owner's gesture imbued its recipients with a sense of grace. "I heard that story about Lord John Rolle," says Florida State 's Myron Rolle, who was born and raised in the U.S. "Something like that just makes life more fulfilling. It makes you feel more connected with who you are, knowing where you came from and the people who came before you."

Amen Kermit.

Follow this link to read the rest of this article.

Summer reruns: A faux re-education.

This post appeared originally on 3 October 2008.

I had a conversation about faux painting with a client the other day. She wanted me to refer her to a painter who could paint some columns in her entry way so that they looked like they were made from marble.

Now a year ago I would have done everything in my power to dissuade her from this faux marble idea. There was a time when I couldn't separate the idea of faux painting with its most obvious and bad expressions. All too often, people take a page from HGTV and attempt to faux paint (poorly) things that have no business being faux painted. Stuff like this:

I mean really, what are the odds of a contemporary house having walls made from entire slabs of identical marble? The first test these kinds of techniques have to pass is a logical one. Ask yourself, does this application make sense? In the case above, the answer is a resounding no.

But in the hands of a professional artist, a faux marble or trompe l'oeil effect can be cool as well as a compliment to the structure of a room. That said, well-done work of this kind is the exception rather than the rule. Unless you have a fine arts background, do not attempt this on your own or you'll end up with something that looks like this:

Man! That burns my eyes.

The idea of faux marble and trompe l'oeil painting got its start in Ancient Rome believe it or not. I had to see it first hand to believe it and here are some photos of what I saw. Some friends and I were treated to a walk through the excavation of the Villa San Marco in Castellmare di Stabia a couple of months ago. The Villa San Marco was a 28,000 square foot (that's not a typo!) Roman villa on the shores of the Bay of Naples. The Villa San Marco was the home of wealthy Roman family and it was buried by ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. The villa is an amazement and to walk through it today is to get a real feel for the people who lived in it.

The Roman empire had a leisure class, probably the first such leisure class in human history. This leisure class had enough time and enough money to develop the idea of decorative art for their homes. It makes my heart beat faster to think about people two thousand years ago living lives that had an awful lot in common with mine. Now, I don't live in 28,000 square feet of house but I do like a nice paint job. Besides, so much of our cultural stuff --from birthday parties to wedding rings, from exchanging presents in late December to the Superbowl --we got from them.

This is a detail of a trompe l'oeil fresco on a wall in a bedroom in the Villa San Marco. It wasn't until I saw this with my own eyes that I realized that the Romans had mastered perspective. Perspective disappeared from western art for over a thousand years after the collapse of Rome.

Here's a detail from a similar fresco.

This is another fresco from the same room. Now bear in mind that this fresco is around 2000 years old and survived the explosion of a nearby volcano. My mind reels when I think about how this must have looked when it was new.

I thought my head was going to explode when I stood in front of this wall. My photo doesn't begin to do it justice. The room itself was small, probably twelve feet wide by ten feet deep. But even after all those years, this fresco made the walls disappear. If you ever find yourself anywhere near Naples in southern Italy, you owe it to yourself to track down a guide who will get you into the Villa San Marco.

Just inside the main entry and in the peristyle courtyard of the Villa San Marco the the shrine to the household gods of the family who owned the villa. It's made from cast concrete and I was amazed that so much of its original paint job had survived the years.

When I looked closer though I realized that the whole thing had been faux painted. The marble that this faux marble is imitating is all over Italy on ancient as well as in contemporary structures.

Here's an even tighter close up. Un-be-liev-a-ble.

So seeing those Roman paint effects was really something. I learned that the faux marble I'd always mocked had a real history and I started warming up to the idea of it. Ditto trompe l'oeil painting. So I decided to get over my biases and just accept it as another decorative art. So long as it's done well that is. Done well by a master like what I saw at the Villa San Marco.

Well about a week later I was in Rome and I was walking down the Corso d'Italia at 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning. As I now know, rainy Sunday mornings are about the only time when Rome's streets are quiet. I heard a church bell and decided to go to mass. I mean, when in Rome, right? So I ducked into the first church I came to, the San Carlo di Corso. It's also one of the largest churches in Rome. It was built in the early 1600s and it is massive. The entire interior seemed to have been made from marble and granite with a whole lot of gilt for good measure.

So about 20 Italian senior citizens, me and a handful of pilgrims from the world over sat through mass and despite the fact that it was in Italian, I surprised myself with how well I could participate in it. Even after all these years, a mass is a mass regardless of the language it's said in. So I followed along between major bouts of distraction by the incredible building I was sitting in that is. Then, after mass, I couldn't restrain myself any longer and I walked over to the side of the church to get a good look at the stone work.

Wouldn't you know it, every inch of marble and granite on those 400-year-old walls was faux painted.

Summer reruns for the rest of the week

Sorry kids, but I have a couple of days ahead of me that will test my character to say the least. But once that's over I'm out of here until next Monday. So between now and next Sunday, I'll be running some re-runs from deep in my archives. Back when I was first starting out as a blogger I was every bit as prolific as I am now, the only difference then was that no one read me. That's just as well. When I look back most of that reads as the meanderings of someone trying to find his voice. Oh well, I'll pick interesting ones. I promise.

I turned on comment moderation for the time being too. I'm not going to be able to intercept the lunatics and spammers they way I do ordinarily. I'll turn it off again when I get back.

Karim Rashid takes on appliance design for Gorenje

Karim Rashid is a 50-year-old, Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised, Italian-educated force of nature. He's an industrial designer whose Manhattan design practice seems to touch every product category in existence. A year ago he designed a line of appliances for the Slovenian manufacturer Gorenje.

Gorenje isn't distributed in North America unfortunately, but looking over this collection is almost enough to make me want to import them myself.

Distinctive doesn't begin to describe the eye and hand of Mr. Rashid and I have to say that I've never felt the urge to describe an induction cooktop as ethereal until I saw this.

That same design is available in either induction or radiant electric. Amazing.

Here's his version of a wall oven.

That same wall oven is available in a variety of colors and what's interesting about them is that the color comes from LEDs hidden in the recessed handle.

Dear Gorenje, please enter the North American market. Please.

Fibonacci sequences for the kitchen

Fibonacci sequences make me lose control. My logo is based on a Fibonacci spiral and I still get woozy when I look at it. A Fibonacci sequence is an example of a divisibility sequence. That sounds more complicated than it is. As numerals, the first ten places in a Fibonacci sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and 55. Starting with 0 and one, each subsequent number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. It's that simple-looking sequence that describes the proportional relationship of things as diverse as the pattern of scales on a pine cone, the florets in a head of broccoli, the arrangement of branches of a tree and the whorls of a nautilus shell. It's the math that describes life.

Many thanks to the brilliant David Nolan who sent me a link to a set of Fibonacci knives. Yes, Fibonacci knives. Although the designer, Belgium-based Mia Schmallenbach calls them Nesting Knives.

"Meeting is a set of kitchen knives: paring knife, carving knife, chef's knife, filleting knife and a block. They all appear to be sculpted from a single piece of stainless steel. The proportions are determined by the Fibonacci sequence using the average width of a human hand as its base. " 

Made in France by Deglon.