640x480 Daphne
(24 June, 2000)
The results of the doppler ultrasound are, to say the least, distinctly unsettling. I have modest blockage in my left external carotid, which is apparently not a huge deal; but I also show the beginninngs of arteriosclerosis in both internal arteries, which supply the eye and brain... Inasmuch as the doppler ultrasound that was performed on me two years back revealed absolutely nothing (at least, as far as I'm aware), this is not exactly what I wanted to hear. I'm now taking 81 mg of enteric-coated aspirin a day as a general maneuver, and I'm also taking a fair amount of niacin as a specific corrective.
In addition, I'm looking for herbal items and foods that tend to increase HDL levels and halt or reverse the course of arteriosclerosis...
...whereon hangs a short tale: for a while, people thought that plaque in your arteries was what caused heart attacks and strokes of the infarct sort. This does, indeed, seem to happen some of the time; but there now appears to be another culprit, something that may be even worse, and does not show up on the usual scans. (Fortunately, ordinary occlusive plaque does show up.)
It seems that sometimes a deposit forms between the lumen (inner wall) of the artery and the outer wall. This deposit is semiliquid, and contains cholesterol and lots of fancy clotting agents of several sorts. The lumen becomes fragile, and if or when it ruptures, all the nasty stuff spills out into the bloodstream, where it soon (euphemism -- I believe this takes a few seconds at most) causes clotting. As you might imagine, the result is generally disastrous.
I'm not going to get into a big foofaraw about this, but I do have some family history, and because there is no way to see this "vulnerable plaque" problem on ordinary scans (yet -- they're working on it), I have no real idea whether I'm at high risk or low. Fortunately, statins (one or another of which I'll probably be on soon) seem to have some beneficial effect on this condition, as well as on cholesterol levels.
If and as I have further reports I'll probably put them on a separate health page, because I intend this page to be, for the most part, about what I'm doing rather than what's doing me.
That said, I adjure you all to be careful about your
health.
(The morning in question was actually that of Friday, 23 June, 2000; I wrote the report that evening, and I think I'll present it with as few changes as I can manage.)
I got up early this morning & went to the Smithsonian, where I found the offices of the Freer Gallery and was thence conducted into the bowels of the earth underneath the courtyard that separates the Freer from the Sackler. There, I was given a tour through the Asian ceramics collection of the Freer by Tim Kirk, a staff member. (No, not the comic artist, though this Tim is aware of that one's existence.)
I'd visited the public areas of the Freer and Sackler galleries last week, to give myself a sense of what to expect, and was rather impressed with what I saw there. Then, in email, Tim told me that less than 10% of the ceramics collection is on view at any given time, whereupon I realized that I'd slightly missed the mark and couldn't even imagine what I was going to see today.
I was right. I can't even describe it adequately, but I'm going to do a gloss here.
Imagine a shelf in a storage cabinet with a sliding door. On the shelf are fifteen antique Yixing teapots -- late Ming era to middle Qing, I think. I examine two of these. One, which dates from the late 18th or early 19th century, still has the remains of a few tea leaves in it, but they've been there long enough that the fragrance is only of dust and oldness.
That shelf is one of four or five; one of the others has more Yixing ware on it, including a brush holder and an exquisite little covered box. Other pleasant objects occupy the rest. There are little labels in front of, next to, or underneath the pieces, with things like "F97.34" written on them. (I suspect that this means it's the 34th catalogued item Mr. Freer bought in 1897; Mr. Freer is still held in considerable respect here, and with good reason.)
Across the aisle and a few cabinets along is one that has over a dozen tenmoku, oilspot, & hare's-fur teabowls on two of its shelves, and related items on the others. It is next to a cabinet full of Jun ware -- dusky blue and blue-white bowls with occasional splashes of purple, one of them broken and repaired (with iron staples!) -- on the other side of which is a cabinet full of odd flat-bottomed bowls and one or two plant pots. These are orchid or magenta or red-purple outside, Jun blue inside, mostly brownish & greenish underneath. I don't know whether to call them Jun ware, partly because I've never seen anything quite like them, but I don't know what else they might be.
The bowls, each of which has three cute little feet, show wear marks and scratches inside. I have no idea what they were used for; but used they certainly were. Tim brings a few of these to one of several large tables so I can photograph them. The tables are covered in sheets of thin firm white plastic foam so that it is easy to examine and photograph things, but not quite so easy to break them if you slip. I very carefully don't slip.
There are a few cabinets that have only two or three tall shelves each, on which are very ancient pots that are big and rough. Some of these are a textured dark gray with lighter shoulders, where some ash from the flames has maybe hit them & stuck; others look like they were directly in the path of the flames and close to the firebox, so that each has a greenish region on one side; still others look like they may have been deliberately coated or dipped in ash before firing, and are greenish above, brown below. Woodfire potters, Tim tells me, tend to get kinda crazy when they see these things. I am not surprised.
One cabinet contains only two pots. One of these is over two feet tall and almost equally wide (I think it's a water jug), gray with brownish drops of melted ash running down it. It is so monumental that I can't tell whether it is at all attractive. Next to it is a neolithic earthenware piece that's not quite as tall, with an open vase shape. It has a carved surface and an odd sculptured rim. It is strong, maybe even a bit harsh, dusty-brick colored, and quite beautiful. It is 5,000 years old...
...Now, imagine that there are perhaps as many as 100 of these cabinets, and that the provenance of each and every object in them is recorded in a notebook that is easily accessible if one wants or needs the information...
I am still stunned. Dazzled.
They are in the process of making digital photos of the entire collection, which they apparently intend to put on their Web site, so eventually you'll be able to get a fair look at it. (I may also work out permissions with them, if they're amenable to the idea, so I can put my own photos here; but I don't know the procedure yet, so it may be a bit of a while. ...And it's possible that they may not be amenable.)
There are just a few photos on their site now, in the descriptions of the exhibitions. The images are, unfortunately, kinda bland, but they will give you at least the beginning of a sense of what's there.
The Freer, btw, doesn't do much modern stuff (that's
more the Sackler's thing), so the two Hamada pieces (!)
that Tim put in front of me are from the study
collection rather than the main collection. The teacup
is very simple, but when I looked at the decoration (a
few brushstrokes of iron oxide that look to me like the
stem of a plant with two angular leaves and a blobby
little flower), I 'bout wept. Then I turned the cup
around to look at the other side, expecting if anything
to be moved in a similar way, and instead found it
amusing. (Just magic. No goddam wonder the guy was named
a Living National Treasure. Mind you, I was well into
overload at that point and it's possible that I'm being
excessively Hungarian about it; but still, the work is
superb.)
Earlier this week I was privileged to visit Bob and Daphne Stern and their offspring, partly because Sandy Stone was in. We get together and commit atrocities against food whenever we can, and this was a prime opportunity. Two friends of Sandy showed up from NYC, as did Lise Eisenberg, who doesn't seem to have a Web page and will be chastised severely. (If that seems harsh, there is information that you lack.)
Sandy produced a large pot of jook, which was flavored delicately with scallions, ginger, and black mushrooms. At the table we added pickled burdock, soy sauce, hot mustard, and other things, which deprived the jook of much of its delicateness but gave it considerable punch.
We jointly produced attieke, which I've mentioned elsewhere, and which we served with a variety of toppings including Unagi (hey, it calls for broiled fish, right?), ground chuck steak (not traditional, I'm afraid), panfried onions, a lovely west African hot sauce with an astonishingly long burn, Waha Wera (also mentioned elsewhere in these pages), the aforementioned pickled burdock, and some tsukudani nori, which we had in two flavors.
Daphne made some golden beets, which were fine in and of themselves; but in addition she cooked the greens, which were spectacular.
For dessert we had some Soan Papdi, which I'd brought up from Laurel, having acquired it at Apna Bazaar (my local Indian goodies place), and a comparison set of Valrhona and Cote d'Or chocolates. Wicked, I say, wicked.
(You were wondering about Soan Papdi? It seems to be sorta like little cubes of cotton candy, made of chickpeas and flavored with pistachios. Perhaps a cross between cotton candy and halvah... in case that description sounds merely bizarre, I should tell you that it is deliriously wonderful, which is why I brought it up. I can commend Haldiram's. They seem to know what they are about.)
The next day we did a bit of shopping, and I had the supreme good fortune to find fresh Ume at the Mitsuwa market (formerly Yaohan) near the Sterns. I got three packages of these (and three pounds of fructose a bit later at Whole Foods), and brought them home on Thursday evening. I stopped at Central Liquors in DC on my way back from the Freer gallery on Friday, and acquired two bottles of pleasant Polish potato vodka. Friday evening I put up about a bottle and a half of Ume cordial, which should be ready to drink around summer solstice next year if people are in a bit of a rush.
I say "supreme good fortune" because ume are usually harvested around the middle of May, and I was completely convinced that there was precisely zip chance I'd find any this year. As usual, I was wrong.
Ume cordial is really easy: it takes about 2 lbs ume; 1 to 1.5 lbs fructose or sugar or (if you want to be traditional) Japanese rock candy; and one bottle of vodka. I use potato vodka because I'm allergic to wheat, but I don't spose it makes a bit of difference what kind of vodka you use if you don't have a problem of that sort... though of course I'd go for reasonable quality.
Clean the "plums" (they aren't really plums, you know; I've tried to eat a ripe one, and I can tell you that they are really crabapricots -- fuzzy, bitter, astringent, sour... besides, they are in any case a separate species, Prunus mume, not your routine plum) and toss any that have real problems. Rinse them in clean water, shake or pat dry, and put into a jar that seals well. Pour a pound to a pound and a half of sugar over them, and then pour a bottle (750 ml) of vodka over the lot. Seal and shake.
Continue to "burp" and then shake every day or two until all of the sugar has dissolved and the contents of the jar cease to evolve gas. (This only takes a few days.) After that, you may casually ignore the action for at least a year, perhaps as long as two. Do not, however, let the stuff go too long, as it gets a peculiar flavor that is walnutty but not entirely pleasant.
To return to the Sterns, their daughter Arden looks like a pre-Raphaelite artist's model. I took a few photos of her and of Daphne before I drove home. Unfortunately, I didn't get any of Bob; I will have to visit them again for that. (I almost got a couple of Sandy, but she's a moving target, and they're all blurry.) Here, anyway, are Arden and Daphne:
640x480 Daphne
(27 June, 2000; 4 July, 2000)
...Well, this time, anyway, it gave. I'm quite pleased. Here's what happened when I sprayed the "hare's-fur" approximation onto a teacup:
Here's a page
about fluorescent glazes, with a photo of the most
recent results.
Pseudo-mailto: jon [at] bazilians [put it here] org
Last modified: Mon Jan 29 20:15:20 PST 2001