I’m on to my next artisanal exercise—orange bitters, the old-fashioned way (another pun I simply couldn’t resist, but only serious tipplers will get it).

First I had to locate Seville oranges, whose sour rind is one of the basics of any decent orange bitters. A Berkeley specialty produce store had some, so I had my agents rush over and get some.

Grain alcohol was another de rigueur ingredient (even the words “grain alcohol” bring back queasy memories of fraternity party punch bowls). That was pretty easy. EverClear—which comes with no fewer than three “highly flammable” warnings on its label.
Coriander, caraway seed, cardomom, gentian extract — you practically trip over these semi-exotic ingredients thanks to our profusion of fine natural foods emporia.

But quinine powder.  Hmmmmmm - I’m still looking.

Meanwhile, I dried the orange peels in a very low oven. Then added them, plus seeds, to two cups of 100 proof alcohol. Now the infusing takes place. Two weeks worth, until the next step. (to be continued…)

I sympathize.

But I am not going along with the program of lowering standards.

If you have a house specialty, e.g. the jalapeño cornbread at Zachary’s, that has become a beloved signature of your dining establishment, don’t mess with it! Cut corners somewhere else. Or cut down the portion size. Just don’t change the recipe and offer some lesser dish in its place.

I’m one of those consumers with such a strong loyalty to my favorite places, that I wouldn’t mind seeing prices raised a bit to cover costs — rather than substitute ingredients, or lower the quality of the overall product. Many restaurateurs have told me that patrons will not tolerate prices going up — but my experience tells me that patrons will be even angrier if the product quality goes down.

Times are going to be tough for a while longer. But life is short. Make the decisions you, and your conscience, (and your clientele) can live with.

If you adore the literary ingenuity of Charles Dickens,

Better yet, come hear Jordan talk about Dickens, nineteenth-century English narrative fiction and his new book, Supposing Bleak House — Thursday, February 2, 7pm @ Bookshop Santa Cruz.

[Photo credit: Carolyn Lagattuta/UC Santa Cruz]

In the main gallery, prolific alumna Katerina Lanfranco unveils a gallery-sized installation, Natural Selection.
In the adjoining gallery, a group show Clear Cuts features work by Beatrice Coron, Kota Azawa, Matt Farrar, Felicia Gilman, Lauren Scanlon, Jill Sylvia, and Kara Walker.

Across the portico, in the Porter Faculty Gallery, enjoy an exhibition of Laser Cut Relief Prints by Richard Wohlfeiler. All of these shows are free and open to the public.

For details visit the Sesnon website.

Was the new “science” to be based upon some rational architecture of the irrational? the Oedipal desires, repressed sexual connections afflicting family hierarchy, and diagnostic answers based upon the inner logic of illicit sexual desires—as Freud insisted? Or were there even deeper channels within psychiatric patients tapping down into archetypal roles and tensions shared by all humans, archetypes such as the Wounded Warrior, and tensions uniting love and death in an eternal embrace—as Jung was beginning to suspect?

A Dangerous Method is now playing at the Nickelodeon.

Here’s what you’ll find:

1) this stunning film oozes Viennese sophistication, with ravishing costumes you would swear were designed by Gustav Klimt.

2) the men’s suits, details such as regional styles of ties, of lapels, of hats, are all impeccably recreated as if we were walking down the Königstrasse in 1912.

3) the women’s costumes — by Denise Cronenberg —are spun sugar lace and linen, very Jugendstil, and cut as razor-sharp yet tumescently as the libidinous desires of the actors’ characters.

4) this is an adult film—frank, erotic, probing, poignant and thoughtful.

5) A Dangerous Method is not a perfect film. It moves at a largo pace, and often we can feel that Cronenberg reaches to suggest far more than he, and the script can manage. But it is an unforgettable cinematic feast. Brief, searing, and brimming over with a soundtrack of revisionist Wagner that is an orgy for the ears.

6) Do not miss this film.

If you thought you were curious about this film simply because of leading actors Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortenson, you’d only be half right. You’ll end up smitten by their characters, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, just as much as the mesmerizing performers. In the years just before the first World War, the intellectual life of eastern Europe was second to none. It was the time of Mahler, Wittgenstein, Hödler, Strauss, and hypnosis was being used as an experimental therapy on patients whose illness had been vaguely characterized as “hysteria.”

Freud was already the giant in this new field, freeing patients of their most painful neuroses by way of “the talking cure,” which was adopted in Zurich by young newcomer Jung. The great tension of A Dangerous Method, involves the deep affection between the veteran Freud and his disciple Jung, an affection that will encounter insurmountable differences and which will eventually force them apart. Yes, like all great lovers, or all fathers and sons.
The dialectic this film unfurls takes place along so many axes—male/female, gentile/jew, reason/intuition, repression/addiction—that it amounts to a rich feast for the mind, as well as the eye.

Keira Knightly, pared down to corsets, cheekbones and wild eyes, is at the center of this study of the two great analysts. Playing Russian patient Sabrina Spielrein, Knightly opens the film as a raving, screaming, exceptionally disturbed patient for Dr. Jung. Her jaw jutting uncontrollably, arms, hands, elbows stabbing into some dark unseen hell, she will become the key territory upon which both men seek to assert their theories, and eventually she will become both a colleague, and lover to Jung (a situation that will provide unsettling, if gorgeous satisfaction for the viewer)…..to be continued.

As always, Fran’s gourmet goodies are all made fresh, fast and fully affordable. To taste is to fall in love.

Live Oak Market (Eastside,Capitola,Pleasure Point), open every Sunday, year-round from 9am to 1pm. The market is located at 15th and East Cliff in the parking lot of the East Cliff Village Shopping Center.

Astonishingly, Hugo is filmed in non-gratuitous 3D that actually moves the film along its kinetic tracks.
The atmosphere of Paris between the wars is exuberantly painted right down to steaming cafe au lait and seamed stockings. The child of the title, (played by Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who lives high atop a train station tower where he daily sets the intricate clockworks.Watching the bustling world below from his perch behind the face of the station clock, young Hugo mourns the loss of his father (Jude Law), a clock maker and engineer who left the boy an unfinished mechanical figure as a legacy.

Hugo, himself an eager mechanical tinkerer, undertakes the completion of this project. Thanks to parts pilfered from the repair shop of an eccentric gentleman (played by Ben Kingsley) Hugo has almost restored the mysterious figure when his finds that he needs one missing part—a heart-shaped key. Hugo follows the boy’s mischievous and often dangerous mission to complete this restoration, aided by a new young friend Isabelle (Chloe Moretz) and simultaneously chased down by the station’s implacable gendarme, played with comic restraint by Sasha Baron Cohen.

While the first parts of Hugo move predictably through chases and misadventures, it’s the second half that truly catches fire. When the character played by Ben Kingsley turns out to be none other than silent film pioneer Georges Méliès, and we find ourselves utterly transfixed by Scorsese’s re-imagining of just how those early films were made. The ending is, as Méliès puts it, “the place where dreams are born.” And, since this is Scorsese, the film is laced with references to famous moments from past silent films—big fun for cinema buffs.
Scorsese’s labor of love gives us new eyes for the great artform of our time. Famous for his devotion to the art and science of filmmaking—and film restoration—Scorsese has taken his fierce affection to new heights. Hugo is a story of loss and discovery, and of personal salvation. But most of all it is a sparkling reminder to adults overwhelmed with the busy frenzy of their lives, to make time for the rewards of cinematic magic.

The opening scene alone, one long winding visual dazzlement from the top of the clocktower looking over all of Paris, deep into the wrought iron stairway labyrinths of the station itself, is a tour de force. But the ending is even better.

Hugo, based on Brian Selznick’s bestseller The Invention of Hugo Cabret, will ultimately leave you in happy tears. Just what all fine movies should be able to do.

Yet, as I discovered once again last week….timing is everything.

Once I had seen Martin Scorsese’s agile love-letter to pioneer silent film director Georges Méliès—Hugo—I was unable to fall under the spell of The Artist, no matter how seductive and winning its leading man, and his scene-stealing little dog. After Hugo, The Artist was small and thin. A tasty amuse l’oeil, but not the generous feast that was Hugo. Perhaps because I am an addict of actual silent movies in all of their historical richness, period authenticity and frame-by-frame atmosphere of discovery, I found The Artist lacking save as a vehicle for Jean Dujardin, an actor who could give charm lessons to George Clooney.

Oh French director Michel Hazanavicius’ deserves tons of credit for daring to make a rags-to-riches (and back again) black and white silent film (!) about a rags-to-riches matinee idol of the silent film era. But about halfway through the film, as I sat there waiting for the gravitas to arrive—perhaps some ironic self-reference or  some larger metaphor about silence, about the fickleness of film audiences, that sort of thing—I realized that nope, this was what it was. A smartly packaged, tautly edited, rousingly acted silent film about silent filmmaking, starring an incredibly polished, confident French actor and a superb John Goodman as The Crusty Producer. C’est tout.

The exhibition will offer works by top area painters including Andrew Purchin, Frank Galuszka (Cliff, o/c, r.), Ray Ginghofer and others, including a rarely-seen artist who moonlights as a wine writer. Take advantage of the spectacular weather—and the spectacular coast. Davenport Gallery is next door to the Roadhouse, on Highway One.

Davenport Gallery - 450 Highway One - open Wed - Sun, 11am - 5pm

When a restaurant, for all the good will in the world, is consistently empty….it might occur to the management that “it’s the concept, stupid.”

Even for those who have read the book and gorged upon the multi-part television series, Le Carré’s tale is dense and labyrinthean as only a cold war spy tale can be. This is, after all, a tightly buttoned world in which there are no good guys. The ugly underbelly of bureaucratic betrayal makes a bracing cautionary bulwark for those still under the illusion that espionage is glamorous. There are no Sean Connerys here.

We meet the career MI6 agents—a sorry lot of paranoid professionals who have sold their individual dreams to a collective nightmare—just as a secret deal to bring in a high-ranking Soviet defector has gone horribly wrong. The botched operation leads to the dismissal of the head of the agency “Control” (played by John Hurt) and his deputy, George Smiley (played with haunting restraint by Gary Oldman). Almost immediately, Smiley is pressed back into shadow service to ferret out a double agent, a mole thought to be highly placed within the top tier of “The Circus” (MI6). It’s up to Smiley to find the double agent among a quintet of weary, jaded and secretive top brass. These men are career bureaucrats, whose claustrophobic schedule of tracking enemy agents by day and drinking themselves to sleep every night is a bracing antidote to the flashy glamor exemplified by James Bond. Recruited as a double agent while still at school in Cambridge, Carré intended his books to “out” the grim pathology of the Service, where so many spies work so many sides of the street that an individual’s identity issues mirror those of the governments they serve. Each agency —MI6, KGB or CIA—plays the same chess game. Same rules, different languages.

The suspects of Smiley’s narrowing field of background checks include Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), the new head of the service Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), tortured field agent Jim Prideaux (a memorable Mark Strong), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik) and suave Tom Hayden (played by last year’s Oscar winner Colin Firth), the latter of whom complicates matters by carrying on an affair with Smiley’s wife.  As Smiley conducts interviews and follows deeply buried clues, another storm gathers in which a Circus “scalphunter” (played by Tom Hardy), wants to bring in a Soviet defector who claims to have information about the mole’s identity.

Flashbacks do much to fill in the deliciously convoluted back story, as we learn of botched operations in Hungary, defecting spies in Istanbul and the efforts of Control— played by Hurt with magnificent and neurotic weariness— to shape up Britain’s secret service, always trumped by the superior intelligence gathering network of the Americans.

Tinker Tailor is a splendid, adult bit of filmmaking. The close-up camerawork lingers upon visual detail, and insists that we must look very closely at every single shot. London in the 70s never looked more decayed and used up. In the line-up of some of Britain’s finest actors, faces alone can telegraph nuanced clues as to motives and gnawing fear. Every performance is tight, detailed and restrained. Oldman, following in the huge footsteps of Guinness, does a smart thing in literally building his Smiley’s identity upon the fastidiousness of his predecessor.  The glasses, the umbrella, the quiet, searching face—Olman’s entire body listens carefully. And he has somehow reincarnated Guinness’ voice, which he uses sparingly, forcing us to hang on every possible clue.

That We might be Them, and vice versa, is conveyed especially well in one pivotal scene. At a Circus Christmas party, at which no guest remains sober, Santa Claus wearing a Lenin mask suddenly takes the stage and leads the company in a rousing version of the Internationale. The sight of all these Brits, toasted to the gills, happily singing the Soviet national anthem in word-perfect Russian, says it all. To stalk your enemy, is to love—and be—the enemy.

I won’t give away any of the plummy details, except to say that in Tom Hardy—and his indelible performance as a heartbroken killer—we are watching the next huge male movie star emerge. Beyond Daniel Craig, close to Heath Ledger huge.

Every performance rings like sterling, and by the end of the film you want to stay and see it all over again.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, opening Jan. 6 @ the Nick.