James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 11

Saffron

If you find Saffron on display in a Middle-Eastern spice bazaar, chances are it’s fake. More likely, the spice is kept in the safe in the back, because, at anywhere between $1,100 and $11,000 per kilogram, it is literally worth more than its weight in gold. Adulteration of the genuine article is one of the oldest criminal industries in history and, in medieval Germany, was even punishable by death.

The issue lies in the harvesting. Each Saffron Crocus yields just three of the tiny, blood-red threads, so it takes 150,000 flowers to produce a dried kilogram. The threads can only be gathered by hand, and all of the flowers in a crop bloom and wilt in a day. The frantic farmer has less than a one-week window to gather and dry his hundreds of thousands of threads before they–and he–are ruined.

With 90% of the world’s production, Iran’s northeastern Khorasan Province is the Saudi Arabia of Saffron, only more so. As with carpets and politics, the Islamic Republic is home to some of the finest quality and the worst fakery on the planet. In an era of hostility and embargoes, we Americans are stuck with Moroccan and Spanish strains.

A merchant at the Mısır Çarşısı in Istanbul got us started in Saffron snobbery by explaining how you detect the real thing: Drop a few threads into a tumbler of warm water and swirl. When the water turns golden, the threads themselves will retain their original crimson color. Otherwise, they’re cheap imitations, and heads (at least medieval German ones) need to  roll!

Every culture has its classic Saffron dish, from Biryani, Tagine, and Al Kabsa to Bouillabaise, Paella, and Risotto. Besides its deep, penetrating flavor, the spice is guaranteed to cure all your medicinal ills. Alexander the Great even bathed in it to heal the   wounds he sustained while conquering Persians.

If you don’t plan on starting any epic fights, Saffron is still one of the world’s legendary aphrodisiacs. So if you want your spouse to chase you around the kitchen, now you know what to cook. But it will cost you dearly.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Travel, Turkey

Lidice

On the dreary morning of 27 May, 1942, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was on his way to work in Prague Castle when a pair of British-trained Czech suicidal bombers, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, attacked his car on a country road outside of town and assassinated him. Adolf Hitler’s initial reaction was to shoot 10,000 hostages, but he was dissuaded. In one of the few direct orders that could have been documented in a war crimes trial, he instead ordered the obliteration of this bucolic village northwest of Prague.

The SS arrived on the morning of 10 June and set up shop in the last farmhouse above the glen. They rounded up and shot all men 16 and older, 173 in all. The 184 adult women were deported to concentration camps. The children were offered to SS families for adoption–the 88 who failed to make the grade being immediately gassed in Chelmno. Today, a few housing foundations and memorials like this one are all that remain of the village. The SS burned and plowed Lidice into the ground.

Even by Nazi standards, Heydrich was a vicious and ruthless operator. He led the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office) that terrorized and destroyed millions of his fellow Europeans. On 31 August, 1939, he masterminded the Gliewitz Incident that started off World War II. On 20 January, 1942, he chaired the Wahnsee Conference that set in motion the Jewish holocaust. As Hitler’s go-to guy, he knew no limits. Yet, scariest of all, there was no particular evidence in the man of anti-Semitism or any other form of bigotry. It was all a matter of naked, staggeringly empty personal ambition.

Like millions of other innocents, these villagers unwittingly contributed more than their share to the war effort. But had the dreadful Heydrich survived, there is no telling how much more damage and suffering he would have caused the European continent.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Czech Republic

Mosel River

The Middle Mosel, from Trier to Pünderich, might be the most beautiful river valley in the world. Terraced vineyards, broken castles, pristine crosses, and overhung footpaths line the banks between bucolic towns that have rarely suffered the sting of war or the axes of urban renewal. Life slows down here, not least because of the riverine twists and turns that transform a flight of 62km into a leisurely car or boat cruise of 144km. I’m sure it rains in these parts, but really can’t recall anything but gorgeous, sunny days.

The Mosel is Riesling country, along with plantings of the varietal’s more profitable offspring, the Rivaner, Müller-Thurgau, Kerner, and White and Blue Spätburgunder grapes. Yet the memory that sticks with me from childhood is of the sweet, pungent apple press across the bridge from the Cochemerhof hotel in Cochem center. My father used to drop me off here for weeks at a time to work on my German while he went about his business in Frankfurt. The owner of the hotel was a wonderful chef and human being who introduced and maybe indoctrinated this 14-year-old in the intricacies of German cooking–Schnitzel, Spätzle, Knödel, Bratkartoffeln, Sauerbraten, any kind of Wurst, and above all, massive tureens of thick pea and lentil soups.

Like any other paradise, this one has been overrun by tourists. But lately I’m wondering if tourism might not prove the salvation of our planet. From Madagascar to the Amazon to Yosemite to the Mosel, the only force that seems capable of holding back the furious grind of industry is the beautification and preservation required of a modern tourist trap. And with all of our jobs stolen by technology, what else will we have to do with our welfare checks?

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel

Mosel

The Middle Mosel, from Trier to Pünderich, might be the most beautiful river valley in the world. Terraced vineyards, broken castles, pristine crosses, and overhung footpaths line the banks between bucolic towns that have rarely suffered the sting of war or the axes of urban renewal. Life slows down here, not least because of the riverine twists and turns that transform a flight of 62km into a leisurely car or boat cruise of 144km. I’m sure it rains in these parts, but really can’t recall anything but gorgeous, sunny days.

The Mosel is Riesling country, along with plantings of the varietal’s more profitable offspring, the Rivaner, Müller-Thurgau, Kerner, and White and Blue Spätburgunder grapes. Yet the memory that sticks with me from childhood is of the sweet, pungent apple press across the bridge from the Cochemerhof hotel in Cochem center. My father used to drop me off here for weeks at a time to work on my German while he went about his business in Frankfurt. The owner of the hotel was a wonderful chef and human being who introduced and maybe indoctrinated this 14-year-old in the intricacies of German cooking–Schnitzel, Spätzle, Knödel, Bratkartoffeln, Sauerbraten, any kind of Wurst, and above all, massive tureens of thick pea and lentil soups.

Like any other paradise, this one has been overrun by tourists. But lately I’m wondering if tourism might not prove the salvation of our planet. From Madagascar to the Amazon to Yosemite to the Mosel, the only force that seems capable of holding back the furious grind of industry is the beautification and preservation required of a modern tourist trap. And with all of our jobs stolen by technology, what else will we have to do with our welfare checks?

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Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel

Boscotrecase

To anyone who has seen the inside of an Italian slum, the Neapolitan Commune of Boscotrecase, on the southern slope of Mt. Vesuvius, breathes organized crime. For years, public services have been, in effect, privatized to the Camorra, who have dumped millions of tons of industrial waste anywhere they could hide it. The road up the slope of the volcano is lined with gaudy, half-built projects that never would have been approved by an un-bribed inspector. In the 2014 garbage strike, pedestrians had to navigate mountains of garbage bags on the principal streets through downtown.

So it wasn’t a complete shock to hear that the communal government has now shut down because over half of its 60 employees have been arrested. The dastardly crime: absenteeism. The evidence: an employee filmed by the Carabinieri standing at a time clock with a cardboard box over his head, clocking in his fellow delinquents.

Not that we entirely blame them. First, there’s that view. Second, the neighborhood serves up some of the best seafood and pasta on the planet. Third, the fabulous local wine boasts a pedigree that reaches back to the Romans. Its name: Lacryma Christi, the Tears of Christ. No one in these parts seems to spend much time crying, and no wonder. How could anyone be expected to go back to work after a meal like that?

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Filed under: Travels Tagged: Italy, Travel

Praha

We started to upload this photo on June 19, which, by pure coincidence, was Father’s Day. Prague is full of Judeo-Christian-themed statuary, so we initially assumed this was Abraham and Isaac doing their thing—not exactly Father’s Day material.

It turned out that this was one of a pair of pagan statues by Ferdinand Platzer, entitled The Clash of the Titans. The only Greek Titan to use a sharp weapon was Cronus, who castrated his father Uranus and tossed the testicles into the sea (to bring forth, of all goddesses, Aphrodite, the patroness of love and beauty). Still, not exactly Father’s Day material.

Either way, these statues atop the entrance to Prague Castle struck us as oddly violent—as if alerting the visitor to the castle’s endless cycles of violence, rebirth, ruin, renaissance, and destruction. No lions, sphinxes, or dead emperors in sight.

As far as we could tell, the sculptor Platzer had been completely lost in the mists of art history. Bryan’s Dictionary of 1904 listed a Johann—whose “garish pictures have nothing to recommend them but manual dexterity”—but no Ferdinand. Another 20th-century Ferdinand was famous for turning his Newark Airport restaurant into “an outpost of culinary innovation,” but seemed to have never picked up a sculptor’s chisel.

Then, just as we were about to give up… It turned out that all the English-language guide books were wrong. According to an obscure German art historian, the sculptor was Ignaz Frantz Platzer (1717-1787), a Baroque artist who ruled Bohemian sculpture from 1750 to 1770 from his apparently renowned Prager Plastik workshop.

Just goes to show, you can’t trust anything you read—except us, of course.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Czech Republic, Travel

Piedmont

As any American schoolchild knows, the United States were physically united on May 5, 1869, when a silver hammer drove the Golden Spike into the iron rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads at Promontory Summit in Utah. 500 officials attended the ceremony, perched on the Central Pacific’s coal-belching Jupiter and the Union Pacific’s Engine 119 in a setting that is now a National Historic Site.

But the ceremony almost didn’t happen. With the project complete, rumors began to swirl that the government-funded and massively profitable contractors were about to file bankruptcy in order to avoid paying their workers. The citizens of Piedmont, Wyoming, responded by hijacking the train carrying the Union Pacific executives to the Utah event. 

The railroad officials wanted the US Cavalry sent in to take on the town and rescue the hostages. Instead, when a cashier’s check finally arrived from New York, the locals recoupled the cars and sent the dignitaries onward to make history.

Piedmont was a little less lucky—the four saloons soon shuttered and, by 1940, the last general store had closed its doors. This abandoned ranch and a few other structures are all that remain in this classic boom-and-bust ghost town in southwestern Wyoming. We stumbled onto the place entirely by accident on a cold winter morning.

[image error]Abandoned remote ranch south of Piedmont, a ghost town in western Wyoming, USA, North America.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Travel, Wyoming

The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch

Our favorite erotica peddler, the nearly real Eddy Casanovitch, is forced to drastically pull in his horns when the young rocket scientist Mallory and the runaway Texan teenagers Sarah and Cozette fall on him from out of the beachy California sky.

“You call that a plot?” Alex’s New York publisher Grace bellows. Maybe not, but then the ancient love of Eddy’s life, the gorgeous Keisha, shows up as a world-class madam with her own fascinating flock. And then the other love of his life, Sarah’s Mom Roxie, roars in from Texas to collect her due. All this while Eddy’s doing his best to talk Mallory’s irritated CEO Daddy out of killing her.

The fundamental problem: Eddy’s just a regular guy with a vivid, if degenerate imagination. But the more he tries to explain it to neighbors, lovers, vengeful CEOs, and publishers, the less they understand. After all, he wrote all that porn, didn’t he? But, as the exhausted man keeps repeating, there’s a reason they call it fiction.

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch
A Sad, Little Comedy of Less-than-Erotic Errors, Not for Lack of Trying

Dedication

To the memory of Veronica Franco, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, and Xaviera Hollander, three extraordinary women who created their own fates without losing their extraordinary senses of humor.

Author’s Note

The following is a work of pure fiction—unfortunately. The names have been changed to protect no one. As a matter of fact—now the author has a chance to think about it—the names haven’t even been changed.

Chapter 1

It’s not every Fourth of July a girl falls into your lap from out of the clear blue sky. Literally collapses on top of you from an excess of drugs and alcohol, as you sit out on your beachfront brick steps, minding your own business, with the half-baked, half-naked holiday madness flooding by.

It’s not every Fourth of July a girl misplaces the next four hours of her thrilling drunkard’s life, then wakes up, miraculously still clothed—if you can call it that in her itsy-bitsy bikini—on your living room floor. Yet that is exactly how I met the young woman named Mallory.

Not to be confused with the duck. “That’s a Mallard,” she observed with astonishing coherence for a hung-over beach bum with headache wedged in hands. “My name is M-A-L-L-O-R-Y.”

I’d taken refuge behind the pretend-desk as far across the living room as I could manage, with a sofa, a pair of filing cabinets, and a dead plastic fern for protection. “Glad you’re suddenly so precise. I take it you can float anyway? Although I was planning on waiting until dark to dump you in the ocean.”

“You want me to just leave?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Although I was serious about letting the neighborhood toddle safely off to bed before ejecting her.

This Mallory could do defensive when it suited her. “You don’t have to be so hostile, you know. I’ll pay for the damn computer.”

An interesting offer, considering that it wasn’t every Fourth of July your New York publisher forewent a day in the Hamptons to threaten you with bloody murder if you didn’t immediately turn in the manuscript you’d promised her. The manuscript in the laptop that, surprisingly enough, was sitting in your lap out on the steps, when the wingless duck took off in defiance of the laws of gravity and lost control of knees and elbows.

Just then an impatient publisher and a wrecked laptop were the least of my worries. The girl helped neither matters nor my mood by turning her head to focus past the empty salad bowl I’d left next to her once comatose, now airsick, brow for emergencies. Her eyes lit on the bookshelf beyond and brought on an attack of curious. “You really read all that trash?”

Trash? Did she say trash? “What are you talking about?”

She took a minute to recover either her sight or her ABCs. “The Casanovitch books. Aren’t they porn?”

Porn? Did she say porn? “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Holy shit. You’ve got a dozen copies of each. What are you, some sort of…?” But then a lightbulb must have shattered in her buoyant brain. “You’re him, aren’t you?”

“Who?”

“Eddy Casanovitch! You’re the porn guy. I heard he lived around here somewhere.”

I don’t know what I expected from the revelation. Not my ex-wife’s pseudo-shocked reaction when the word had leaked out that all that time wasted scribbling—whatever the hell I was doing—had turned into one of the larger viral sales outbreaks at the more colorful end of the internet publishing alley. Nor the neighborhood’s outrage as they raced to lock their doors and windows against the tidal wave of smut they suddenly imagined flooding out of my camouflaged literary brain.

Nancy hadn’t needed the scandal to justify her flight, but then my ex-wife was always a thorough soul. By the time she and her long-term boss-and-lover parted ways with me, her gossipy, pseudo-Methodist lips had over-publicized my tacky-cheesy nom de plume and left me a pariah from one end of our sand spit to the other. No more anonymous, smutty scribbles out of this molester and pervert. Only, as of the current afternoon, I was a pariah with a young, nearly naked waterfowl passed out on the floor of my living room.

Thank God for webcams and duck-proof desktop computers.

This Mallory girl must have read my mind. Her eyes quickly flitted over the ties and folds of her bikini for signs of unauthorized ingress. It was all I needed to see.

“Time to go,” I told her and crossed the room with a less-than-gentle lift of the nearest sun-fried wing. “No, I didn’t date-rape you, and yes, I can prove it beyond a shadow of your unwashed fingernails.”

“Hey! Lemme go! What’s the matter with you?”

I couldn’t very well tell her that I’d acquired an army of overwrought citizens watching for the slightest kink in my infamously fake and degenerate façade. No question, I needed to move and change my pseudonym. More immediately, I needed to stop admitting ducks in bikinis.

“Why’d you bring me in here in the first place?” Mallory protested, as I helped, or maybe herded, her to the front door.

“It wasn’t my idea. And get yourself better friends. After you passed out on top of me, they talked me into bringing you inside, then left to supposedly get your things.”

The panicky girl glanced past me back into the apartment. “What things? Where are my things? Who brought me—?”

I had no idea what she was babbling on about and cared less. As far as I could tell, the door opened on a clear coast. “Like I said, get yourself better friends.”

“Wait a minute!” She shook off my hand and shoved me away. “I don’t have any money. How do you expect me to get home?”

I wasn’t about to start handing out cash to departing bikinis in my front doorway. The crowds might have thinned from the exhausting day-long beach orgy, but there were always satellites, helicopters, and neighborly binoculars to consider. Not that I was paranoid.

I geared up for a foul-tempered retort, but mysteriously never let it escape my lips. The truth was, this Mallory had somehow struck me as a pretty harmless, maybe even pleasant, girl when she wasn’t airborne or critiquing my literary standards. Not to mention a figure-eight body with an impressive cleavage, muscular thighs, runner’s legs, and skin so smooth and unblemished that it was hard to picture her as a habitual drunk or drug user.

In spite of my earlier snarky comment about her fingernails, she at least looked and smelled like she might have suffered through more than one shower in her short life. But considering my situation, the operative word was short.

I shook my head at the utter stupidity of letting her get a word in edgewise. “Let me see your driver’s license.”

“How do you—”

“It’s stuck halfway up your overdressed butt, young lady. I noticed it when your pretend-amigos were flopping you in here.”

She reached back quickly enough that I was convinced when she insisted, “I’m twenty-six, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I’m not going to accuse you of anything, so get over it.”

“You’re a student?”

“Hardly. I’m a rocket scientist.”

“Very funny.” Yet when I turned over the thin, plastic sleeve she handed me, it included an employee ID card from a high-tech space and defense contractor, no less.

Maybe this genius Mallory would know which satellites and neighborly listening devices to jam if I ever dared to negotiate the beach walk with an unsuspecting, true-to-life date in tow. It wasn’t hard to forgive her twenty-six-year-old smirk, considering, but then she stormed the enemy position anyway with, “I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. In case you’re interested, I was mugged.”

Interested? I suppose it depended on the definition.

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.
Filed under: Novels Tagged: California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas

Podgórze

One of the more popular features of the Nazi “resettlement” policy was the way it opened up housing stocks for Aryans who otherwise couldn’t afford to buy homes. My own Jewish step-mother returned to Vienna after the war to find the house she grew up in occupied by a former neighbor with a perfectly legal bill of sale and no intention of giving up the property (“We thought you were dead,” the woman said before she slammed the door in the girl’s face).

So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised by the odd and maybe hostile looks we received  from the office workers who came and went as we stood outside this building in the former Nazi Jewish ghetto of Podgórze in Kraków, taking these photographs. Surely they had to know that, on 13–14 March, 1943, German troops entered the Jewish hospital on the upper floors here and the child-care center next door and murdered every doctor, nurse, patient, baby-sitter, and child they could catch. Within days of the ghetto’s liquidation, contractors were tasked with cleaning up and selling the houses and office buildings to buyers eager for a hot bargain. If it wasn’t for the plaques scattered about the neighborhood, you would never know a Jew had even set foot here.

Which brings to mind one of the great self-exculpatory myths of the World War, namely that the European peoples knew something was happening to the Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and infirm who vanished from their midst, but that they never knew or believed possible just how far the Nazis would take things.

The raw truth: Self-delusion should never be confused with ignorance. Everyone knew everything.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Poland, Travel

Dresden

This photo was taken at 20:03, or 2 hours and 11 minutes before the first sirens would have sounded on 13 February, 1945, to alert the Dresdeners to what was coming from this direction.

The target was the Altstadt, or Old City, not for its military value, but for the concentration of dry timber buildings. After the guiding flares, the first waves of bombers dropped high explosives to bust things up, and then the next waves dropped incendiaries to set them afire. 25,000 people died in the resulting firestorm.

Depending on whose wartime propaganda you believed, Dresden was either the heart of European culture and learning, or an armed military camp waiting to derail the coming Russian invasion. Either way, the Dresdeners had deluded themselves that they could sit out the war and reap the benefits of the vicious Nazi renaissance without paying its price. By the end of the war, 2 1/2 months later, they would be thoroughly disabused of that notion.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel