Local Elections

A strange thing happened on the way from the elections last week in Monroe County. Everyone voted Republican. It was almost like a straight party-line ticket across the county. A friend of mine asked rhetorically where the progressive Keys had gone...and I wondered if this most recent vote was just another facet of gentrification.

My wife  thought President Elect Trump had coattails because not only did he  win Monroe County just about every other vote went Republican as well. I don't know quite how to explain it all, and in the end most of these votes don't really matter as a winner has won and everyone else lost: so what?  Yet there are a couple fo races that I think had outcomes which may portend change of a a deeper sort across the county.

In Key West as elsewhere across the nation people were talking about Trump's victory, a revolutionary that took the chattering classes by surprise. In Key West that sort of chatter took place at a  Cuban coffee shop or two, and I heard the talk because I was awake unusually early on the morning after the election.

The statewide race that puzzled me was the win by State Attorney Dennis Ward who defeated Catherine Vogel one more time for the top prosecutor's job in Monroe County. Dennis Ward  defeated Vogel's former boss Mark Kohl; two elections ago and as a result Vogel, the chief deputy prosecutor left the county without a job and moved to Ocala. But the rivalry didn't end there. Dennis Ward ended up prosecuting the Schools' Superintendent Randy Acevedo as an accessory to his wife's kleptomania for which she was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing funds from the school district. In the photo below a picture I took during the trial, the taller older Ward withhis chief deputy rosecutor Mark Wilson who defeated...

...Dennis Ward's rival who was defending Randy Acevedo, Catherine Vogel:

It was a long and sordid case but I was not at all convinced Acevedo was guilty- of his wife's guilt there was no doubt. Frankly I still miss Acevedo as superintendent today, but things went the way they did and I don't blame Ward for prosecuting Acevedo as he did. Ward ran on an anti-corruption platform so he left himself no room to maneuver.

The odd part of that long complex story is that the reverberations from that trial led to Vogel running against Ward and defeating him. He was suddenly back in private practice and Vogel had the top prosecutor's job. Which you would think should have been the end of it. Instead they had a rematch this year and Ward, to my astonishment won! Ward was nominally a Republican (he used to be a Democrat), so was that why he beat the women supported most intensely by the Conch voter base in Key West? Were hey outgunned by the rest of the Keys?  Apparently they were and maybe the rest of the Keys turned out in large numbers fired up by their passion for Trump at the top of the ticket.

The Blue Paper  published a devastating story about Vogel's loudest supporter in this story:

Is Local Politics Getting In The Way of  Public Safety? LINK and here's an excerpt:

When the previous State Attorney, Denis Ward, prosecuted another one of Harry’s sons for lobster trap poaching, the father declared war. Harry Bethel, Jr. was out on bond for arson at the time. He was sentenced to three years in prison.  Dennis Ward lost his job.

“Karma always wins and payback is a bitch,” wrote Harry Bethel in a diatribe published in the Key West Citizen at the time. He had championed Catherine Vogel’s 2012 campaign against Ward: “I worked as hard as I worked in my own campaigns just for the satisfaction of being a part of your DEFEAT,” he wrote in the email to Ward, “I hope that you and your family have as much misery in your life [as] you have put in my family’s] life.” The email was signed, “A loving father.”

So now Ward is back and rumor has it he is warning there will be a clean sweep through the office. There is no love lost apparently between the office factions. 

The other race that puzzled me a bit was the County Clerk's race where the incumbent, elected in the last race when the long time incumbent retired, was knocked out of the primary. With Amy Heavilin reduced to lame duck status the race closed in on Kevin Madok an experienced employee of the office versus Ron Saunders a local favorite who has held statewide elected office and seemed far too over qualified for the Clerk of the Court position which has been badly mismanaged lately. Madok Profile LINK .Luckily Madok won which was a vote for experience and qualifications. Too bad Saunders has been made redundant by term limits but clearly this wasn't the job for him.

One other surprise locally was  a win by Robert Lockwood in the Public Defender's  race. Again this was a Republican beating a much more qualified Democrat for a more or less non partisan job. Trish Docherty Gibson had worked in the office for twenty two years, was the chief assistant and was anointed by the outgoing, well respected Public Defender when she retired at the end of this term. It seemed like a non contest considering Lockwood has only two years experience and outside of an election he would never have been chosen over the much more experienced utterly scandal free Docherty Gibson. So why did she lose? Who knows whether Trump had coattails and more Republicans turned out or if Conchs in Key West are losing their grip on a county who demographics are changing with the influx of money.

One should I suppose be glad the whole cycle is over but it seems at every level repercussions will continue to jar our consciousness if we are paying attention. 

Ferran Adria and El Bulli

The Invention of Food at the Dali Museum, an exhibit worth seeing before it departs November 27th.

Ever since I read about this place years ago, said to be the best restaurant in the world, I have been curious about El Bulli ("Bulldog" named for the bulldogs the original owner loved). It closed in 2011 after a quarter century of serving the weirdest and most sought after cuisine.

If you have no idea what I am talking about the pictures that are to follow will be helped by these perforce elderly essays about the now closed restaurant:

This Little Piglet My favorite essay about eating there, unabashed hero worship. A lovely read.

Chocolate and Zucchini Review of El Bulli 2006  This essay includes a  very complete list of the  three dozen items on the menu and if you click on each item you will get a photograph! Astonishing.

Or this essay from 2008 View From The Wing: Dinner at El Bulli which includes pictures (several broken links too unfortunately) of the restaurant and the staff.

Then there is this gallery of food from El Bulli. Like the restaurant itself which directed diners on how to eat the food,  I am offering you a bunch of links to understand that which intrigued me and propelled me to this exhibit in St Petersburg.

In the photo above the orange thing is food disguised as flame. In the 1990s after an already successful career as a chef Adria and his brother set off on their own path creating food as art. Ferran is the creator of so called molecular gastronomy where flavors are reduced to their essence, and foods come at the diner in shapes and consistencies not previously imagined.(Ferran Adria has the gray hair on the right with arms crossed contemplating an experiment):

Soups could be solids, solids could be gases and liquids could be encapsulated in skins. El Bulli offered a tasting menu for about $250 (plus wine etc) consisting in 36 dishes served at a pace of one every five minutes over a period of three hours. Adria was assisted by 40 cooks and as many wait staff at his isolated farmhouse restaurant by the sea on a rocky headland in Catalonia not far from France.

If you think this is all too weird you'd be right but if you read the essays above you'll know  this odd style of eating was revered by the lucky few who got tables there. El Bulli served 8,000 guests a summer and received about two million requests every year. On principle they declined walk-in traffic to avoid encouraging such rash behavior.

Ferran Adria ©elBulliArchive/Pepo Segura

I cannot explain my fascination with El Bulli from such a distance and had I been truly thoughtful I should have written an email one October when he was taking his annual reservations and hoped for the best and planned a trip to Spain based on a positive response in the grand lottery to eat at El Bulli. But such quixotic gestures are not in my repertoire as I like to plan my spontaneous extravagances. However when my wife learned of the exhibit at her favorite Florida museum, the Dali in St Petersburg, she figured out a way to make her Veterans' Day holiday work for us.

The remarkable thing about Adria is how carefully he recorded each of his 1846 unique receipes, none of them ever served more than once. He took notes and photographs and recorded them in "year books" also on display in the photo above.

The exhibit had video endorsements from artists and chefs praising Adria's extraordinary approach to food as art. 

And a presentation on one wall showed a loop video of pictures of each dish served at El Bulli:

How I wished I had gone! Or at least tried to go...I saw pictures of some of his creations at least:

 Inspired by nature...

And the peculiar plates and serving devices -no knives ever, just fingers forks and spoons and not very much meat served either, most dishes were fish and vegetable based. 

Because Dali was Catalan also the museum included a few of his pictures relating to food, peasant-like fish and bread artworks. Though I can say that I got so immersed in the show I got muddled over the provenance of this cutlery set, actually by Dali but I thought it was El Bulli...such were the connections between the two.

It is said Adria took inspiration from Dali's surreal artwork too in the creation of some dishes. We left feeling pretty hungry so we  stopped and got a taste of the black acorn-fed wild pig ham offered at the entrance to the exhibit. No wonder Adria loved this stuff, aged  for three years unlike any other. It was not terribly salty which  air cured ham often is, and was full of the flavors of the forest, quite unique. 

It was a great exhibit and a fine tribute to an artist who is now operating a  foundation they say in Barcelona where Ferran Adria is teaching his skills to a new generation. And not necessarily doing Spanish cuisine any favors his critics claim. As for the belief that this was the "best" restaurant in the world I don't know what to say. Not least because I never ate there but had I eaten there no doubt I'd have loved it as everyone did. A part of me shudders at the extravagance of making food art but part of me too recognizes the need for human thought to be pushed beyond mere expectations fulfilled. I think the world is a poorer place without El Bulli. Interestingly Adria himself knew he could have multiplied his prices by any amount but he wanted to give ordinary people access to his art so he operated a hotel in Barcelona to pay for El Bulli which barely broke even.

On the other hand if you want to eat, as we did last Friday, some dim sum, a cuisine not available in Key West, El Bulli would have been a rotten choice. Plus we got out for around thirty two bucks for both of us. 

And then we rushed over to pick Rusty up from the boarding kennel where he had spent the past five hours. It seemed the best solution for him while I stared at Art, and I took him for a long long walk and fed him treats to compensate. He acted like it worked for him.

On the passing of El Bulli I recall this article from Vanity Fair LINK.

Photo Essay

A few pictures without words for a Saturday morning. I bought a camera yesterday to supplement my iPhone.  I wonder what a telephoto lense will do for me when the FZ300 arrives next week...I miss that more than anything else with my telephone camera. A new era of better pictures dawns...though I'd better not overstate the case. 

Armistice Day

From Wikipedia:

Armistice Day is commemorated every year on November 11 to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France. 

The Armistice was for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918. The date was declared a national holiday in many allied nations, and coincides with Remembrance Day and Veterans Day, public holidays.

History

The first Armistice Day was held at Buckingham Palace, commencing with King George V hosting a "Banquet in Honour of the President of the French Republic" during the evening hours of 10 November 1919. The first official Armistice Day events were subsequently held in the grounds of Buckingham Palace on the morning of 11 November 1919. This would set the trend for a day of Remembrance for decades to come.

In 1919, South African Sir Percy Fitzpatrick proposed a two-minute silence to Lord Milner. This had been a daily practice in Cape Town from April 1918 onward, since being proposed by Sir Harry Hands, and within weeks it had spread through the British Commonwealth after a Reuters correspondent cabled a description of this daily ritual to London. People observe a one or more commonly a two-minute moment of silence at 11:00 a.m. local time. It is a sign of respect for, in the first minute, the roughly 20 million people who died in the war, and in the second minute dedicated to the living left behind, generally understood to be wives, children and families left behind but deeply affected by the conflict.

Similar ceremonies developed in other countries during the inter-war period. In South Africa, for example, the Memorable Order of Tin Hats had by the late 1920s developed a ceremony whereby the toast of "Fallen Comrades" was observed not only in silence but darkness, all except for the "Light of Remembrance", with the ceremony ending with the Order’s anthem "Old Soldiers Never Die". In Australia, the South Australian State Branch of the Returned Sailors & Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia developed during the interwar period a simple ceremony of silence for departed comrades at 9 p.m., presumably to coincide with the traditional 11:00 a.m. time for Armistice ceremonies taking place in Europe due to the ten-hour time difference between Eastern Australia and Europe. Veterans in New Zealand have used silence to pay homage to departed comrades in general at veteran functions, as the toast of "Fallen" or "Absent Comrades".

Levin, New Zealand

In Britain, beginning in 1939, the two-minute silence was moved to the Sunday nearest to 11 November in order not to interfere with wartime production should 11 November fall on a weekday.

After the end of World War II, most member states of the Commonwealth of Nations, like United Kingdom and (as Canada in 1931), moved most Armistice Day events to the nearest Sunday and officially began to commemorate both World Wars. They adopted the name Remembrance Day or Remembrance Sunday, using poppies found across the fields of conflict of  World War One.

Other countries also changed the name of the holiday just prior to or after World War II, to honor veterans of that and subsequent conflicts.The United States chose All Veterans Day, later shortened to 'Veterans Day', to explicitly honor military veterans, including those participating in other conflicts

Night Key West

Photos taken in the area of Catherine and Eliza Streets, a short walk from the police station, around 1:30 am.