I am interested in the suggestion that the city’s major water polo facility as a factor in the low crime and gang rates for the area, despite the fact surrounding areas are rife with gang activity.

Few places have Commerce’s water polo heritage or infrastructure. The city has a median family income of only $34,040, but children play water polo free year-round in a $20 million facility built with water polo in mind. The pool is designed to Olympic specifications and occasionally hosts the national team.

The city pays for its youth players to take bus trips to tournaments, their entry fees and for pool time. All a child needs is a bathing suit — and the cost of that is sometimes covered by booster clubs.

“We’re surrounded by areas prevalent in gangs and we’re very fortunate we don’t have gang problems in Commerce,” said Jim Jimenez, the director of parks and recreation, who has worked in the department for 35 years. “Our kids are kept busy in swim lessons and water polo and other things. It’s a community effort and it shows.”

The positive outcomes in investing in the children of the community, by offering them both financial and municipal support are quite evident here. The overall cost of the facilities, labor, and supplies may seem like a lot, but if we factor in the costs that would have gone into battling gang activity and dealing with the consequences, I’m sure more people would be attune to this idea of preventative interaction.

June 18, 2008
Water Polo’s Premier Springboard
By PETE THAMEL
COMMERCE, Calif. — The most improbable American water polo pipeline began here one generation and four trash cans ago when a coach wanted to give her youth swim team a rest.

To break the monotony of training, the coach, Sandy Nitta, plopped four trash cans into the pool to serve as makeshift water polo goals.

Fast forward 30 years. Commerce, a working-class industrial city of 12,500 southeast of Los Angeles, has developed one of the most prolific and sophisticated youth water polo programs in the United States. The city employs two full-time and three part-time youth water polo coaches and spends more than $250,000 a year on its programs.

“It’s not a rich community, but what the city has done for water polo there has opened so many doors,” said Nitta, a former Olympic swimmer who now coaches youth water polo teams in Las Vegas.

With the United States women favored to win their first Olympic gold medal in water polo this summer in Beijing, two Commerce alumnae are part of the backbone of the team. Fittingly, the captain Brenda Villa and the sniper Patty Cardenas are so appreciative of the doors that the Commerce youth program opened for them that their ultimate goal is to play well enough to open doors for others.

Villa understands that the explosive growth of women’s soccer and softball in the United States was fueled by the gold medals the national teams won in Atlanta in 1996. She is eager to see if water polo gold, which the United States won at the 2007 Pan American Games, will lead to more trash cans being dropped into swimming pools throughout the country.

“It’s our country and our culture — it’s gold or it doesn’t matter,” said Villa, 28, who has earned bronze and silver medals in the last two Olympics. “To me, it’s my hope to bring home that gold medal. Then we’ll see. We’ll see if that’s what we needed all along to get our sport to be a national sport, not a California sport.”

Few places have Commerce’s water polo heritage or infrastructure. The city has a median family income of only $34,040, but children play water polo free year-round in a $20 million facility built with water polo in mind. The pool is designed to Olympic specifications and occasionally hosts the national team.

The city pays for its youth players to take bus trips to tournaments, their entry fees and for pool time. All a child needs is a bathing suit — and the cost of that is sometimes covered by booster clubs.

“We’re surrounded by areas prevalent in gangs and we’re very fortunate we don’t have gang problems in Commerce,” said Jim Jimenez, the director of parks and recreation, who has worked in the department for 35 years. “Our kids are kept busy in swim lessons and water polo and other things. It’s a community effort and it shows.”

Villa and Cardenas are first-generation Mexican-Americans. Cardenas’s parents and Villa’s mother have roots in the Mexican town of Tecalitlán. In Commerce, their mothers worked as cleaners, and Villa and Cardenas stumbled into water polo by tagging along with their older brothers. Before long, their weekends were crammed with as many as 10 games. The pool became their social hub.

“It was the thing to do,” Villa said.

Villa competed with and against boys at Bell Gardens High School, enduring plenty of snide comments. But the competition only improved her game, helping her develop the smarts and instincts that have contributed to her becoming one of the best players in the world despite being just 5 feet 4 inches.

“She’s small,” United States Coach Guy Baker said. “But she makes up for it with intelligence and being deceptively strong for her size.”

Villa, who played at Stanford, is a celebrity in Commerce, and is called upon to appear for Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July and Mexican independence day celebrations.

Villa is so revered that when Cardenas spoke recently to a fifth-grade class in Commerce, the first question was, “Do you know Brenda Villa?” When Cardenas laughed and answered yes, the students, in unison, said, “Wow!”

“Their inspiration is immeasurable,” said Gabriel Martinez, one of the city’s full-time youth water polo coaches. “We ask the girls before the season who their heroes are, in and out of the water. One hundred percent say Brenda and Patty.”

Bell Gardens formed a girls water polo program when Cardenas, who is 23, was a freshman. By the time she graduated, the team had won four California Interscholastic Federation titles and lost just three games.

Like Villa, Cardenas spent her childhood playing with boys and being toughened up by her older brothers. One brother, Ivan, would kneel on her arms to execute something he called the Happy Slapper, which involved him slapping her face until she screamed for help.

Cardenas became so tough that after the webbing between her toes was ripped open during a youth game, she insisted on being taped up so she could continue playing.

Now a senior at Southern California, Cardenas will be playing in her first Olympics. She plans to continue competing through the London Games in 2012.

Water polo may be a fixture in Commerce, but it is not nearly as popular in the rest of the United States. None of the members of the women’s national team have the individual sponsorships that are common in swimming, soccer and gymnastics.

The team’s training headquarters is on a military base in Los Alamitos, Calif., a step down from the facility in Commerce. As the national team finished practice there one day recently, children paddled around on kickboards for swim lessons. The backdrop includes soldiers running and shouting, “I don’t know what I’ve been told,” and the constant reverberations from landing helicopters.

“We feel very safe there,” Cardenas said, smiling.

The spartan facility is a window into the sometimes thankless world of Olympic training. The United States Olympic Committee pays each athlete $2,500 a month, which does not support a glamorous Southern California existence.

“Obviously, we’re not in this sport to make money,” said Villa, who has played professionally in Sicily. “I’m grateful. It paid for school and I’ve traveled the world playing this sport. I think if more people knew how cool and special and unique the sport is, more people would play.

“But we’re not in it to be Shaq or Kobe status,” she added.

For now, Villa and Cardenas will settle for having that level of status in Commerce, for being contributors to an impressive legacy that sprung from the humblest of beginnings.

“The program there has just boomed,” Nitta said. “Every major youth national championship, whatever age group it is, Commerce is right up there.”

She paused and smiled. “And it all started with trash cans,” she said.

You also might be interested in this NPR interview with Michael Paterniti on his experience.

The Last Meal
By Michael Paterniti
Esquire, May 1998
Volume 129, Issue 5

A two-ounce songbird. A lemon-sized tumor: An imperial appetite for death, flesh, and the immortal gesture. It was time for dinner.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE LAST MEAL, I visit a stone church where mass is being said. In the back row, a retarded boy sits with his mother, his head tilting heavenward, watching, in an unfocused way, the trapped birds that flutter and spin in the height of the church vault. About a hundred yards away, in the immense holy hangar, tulips bloom on the altar. It’s the end of December–gray has fallen over Paris–and the tulips are lurid-red, gathered in four vases, two to a side. A priest stands among them and raises his arms as if to fly.

Last I remember, I was on a plane, in a cab, in a hotel room–fluish, jet-lagged, snoozing. Then, by some Ouija force, some coincidence of foot on cobblestone, I came to a huge wrought-iron door. What brought me to France in the first place was a story I’d heard about Francois Mitterrand, the former French president, who two years ago had gorged entry gal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird–ortolan–supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole–wings, feet, liver, heart Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.

I wondered then what a soul might taste like.

Now I find myself standing among clusters of sinners all of them lined in pews, their repentant heads bent like serious hens. When the priest’s quavery monotone comes from a staticky speaker, cutting the damp cold, it is full of tulips and birds.

Somewhere, a long time ago, religion let me down. And somehow, on this night before the last meal, before I don a white hood, I’ve ended up here, reliving the Last Meal, passing my hand unconsciously from my forehead to my heart to either shoulder–no–yes, astonishingly pantomiming the pantomime of blessing myself.

Why?

When it comes time for communion, why do I find myself floating up the aisle? Why, after more than a decade, do I offer my tongue with the joy of a boggled dog and accept His supposed body, the tasteless paper wafer, from the priest’s notched, furry fingers? Why do I sip His supposed blood, the same blood that leaves a psychedelic stain on the white cloth that the priest uses to wipe my lip? Why am I suddenly this giddy Christ cannibal?

At the end of mass, the priest raises his arms again–and the retarded boy suddenly raises his, too, and we are released.

Then I find the hotel again. I lie awake until dawn. Fighting down my hunger.

That’s what I do the night before..

On his good days, the president imagined there was a lemon in his gut; on bad days, an overripe grapefruite, spilling its juices. He had reduced his affliction–cancer–to a problem of citrus. Big citrus and little citrus. The metaphor was comforting, for at least his body was a place where things still grew.

And yet each passing day subtracted more substance, brought up the points of his skeleton against the pale, bluish skin. He spent much of his waking hours remembering his life–the white river that ran through his hometown of Jarnac, the purple shadows of the womblike childhood attic where he had delivered speeches to a roomful of cornhusks. He sat, robed and blanketed now, studying how great men of ancient civilizations had left the earth their final gestures in the space between life and death. Seneca and Hannibal went out as beautiful, swan-dive suicides; even the comical, licentious Nero fell gloriously on his own sword.

Yes, the gesture was everything. Important to go with dignity, to control your fate, not like the sad poet Aeschylus, who died when an eagle, looking to crack the shell of a tortoise in his beak, mistook his bald head for a rock. Or the Chinese poet Li Po, who drowned trying to embrace the full moon on the water’s surface. Yes, the gesture was immortal. It would be insufferable to go out like a clown.

So what gesture would suit him? The president was a strange, contradictory man Even at the height of his powers, he often seemed laconic and dreamy, more like a librarian than a world leader, with a strong, papal nose, glittering, beady eyes, and ears like the halved cap of a portobello mushroom. He valued loyalty, then wrathfully sacked his most devoted lieutenants. He railed against the corruptions of money, though his fourteen-year reign was shot through with financial scandals. A close friend, caught in the double-dealing, killed himself out of apparent disgust for the president’s style of government. “Money and death,” the friend angrily said shortly before the end. “That’s all that interests a him anymore.”

And yet as others fell, the president survived–by tricks of agility and acumen, patrician charm and warthog ferocity. Now this last intruder hulked toward him. He shuffled with a cane, stooped and frosted silver like a gnarled tree in a wintry place. It took him an eternity to accomplish the most minor things: buttoning a shirt, bathing, walking the neighborhood, a simple crap.

And what would become of the universe he’d created? What would become of his citizens? And then his children and grandchildren, his wife and mistress? Was this the fate of all aged leaders when they were stripped of their magic: to sit like vegetables, shrivel-clicked, surrounded by photographs and tokens of appreciation, by knickknacks and artifacts?

When he slept, he dreamed of living. When he ate, he ate the foods he would miss. But even then, somewhere in his mind, he began to prepare his ceremony des adieux.

I’m going to tell you what happened next–the day of the last meal–for everything during this time in December shaped itself around the specter of eating the meal.

That morning, I pick up my girlfriend, Sara, at Orly airport. I’ve prevailed on her to come, as any meal shared around a table–the life lived inside each course–is only as good as the intimacies among people there. Through customs, she’s alive with the first adrenaline rush of landing in a new country. But then, as we begin driving southwest toward the coast and Bordeaux, she falls fast asleep. It’s gray and raining, and ocean wind sweeps inland and lashes the car. The trees have been scoured lifeless. Little men in little caps drive by our windows, undoubtedly hoarding bags of cheese in their little cars. And then a huge nuclear power plant looms on the horizon, its cooling towers billowing thick, moiling clouds over a lone cow grazing in a fallow pasture.

There is something in the French countryside, with its flat, anytime light, that demands melancholy. And I wonder what it means to knowingly eat a last meal. It means knowing you’re going to die, right? It means that you’ve been living under a long-held delusion that the world is infinite and you are immortal. So it means saying sayonara to everything, including the delusions that sustain you, at the same time that you’ve gained a deeper feeling about those delusions and how you might have lived with more passion and love and generosity.

And then the most difficult part: You must imagine yourself as a memory, laid out and naked and no longer yourself, no longer you, the remarkable Someone who chose a last meal. Rather, you’re just a body full of that meal. So you have to imagine yourself gone–first as a pale figure in the basement of a funeral home, then as the lead in a eulogy about how remarkable you were, and then as a bunch of photographs and stories.

And that’s when you must imagine one more time what you most need to eat, what last taste must rise to meet your hunger and thirst and linger awhile on your tongue even as, before dessert, you’re lowered into the grave.

It was just before Christmas 1995, the shortest days of the year. The president’s doctor slept on the cold floor of the house in Latche while the president sleet nearby in his bed, snoring lightly, looked down upon by a photograph of his deceased parents. He was seventy-nine, and the doctor could still feel the fight in him, even as he slept–the vain, beautiful little man punching back. In conversation with the president’s friends, the doctor had given about a 30 percent chance of making it to December. And he had. “The only interesting thing is to live,” said the president bluntly.

So there were lemon days and grapefruit days and this constant banter with the tumor: How are you today? What can I get you today? Another dose -of free radicals? Enough radiation to kill the rats of Pans? Please go away now. There was also a holy trinity of drugs–like blessed Dilaudid, merciful Demerol, and beatific Elavil–that kept the pain at a blurry remove, convinced him in his soaring mind that perhaps this was happening to someone else and he was only bearing witness. Yes, could it be that his powers of empathy–for all his countrymen–were so strong that he’d taken on the burden of someone else’s disease and then, at I the last moment, would be gloriously released back into his own life again?

With the reprieve, he would walk the countryside near Latche, naming the birds and trees again, read his beloved Voltaire, compose, as he had thousands of times before, I love letters to his wife.

He planned his annual pilgrimage to Egypt–with his mistress and their daughter–to see the Pyramids, the monumental tombs of the pharaohs, and the eroded Sphinx. That’s what his countrymen called him, the Sphinx, for no one really knew for sure who he was–aesthete or whore-monger, Catholic or atheist, fascist or socialist, anti-Semite or humanist, likable or despicable. And then there was his aloof imperial power. Later, his supporters simply called him Dieu–God.

He had come here for this final dialogue with the pharaohs–to mingle with their ghosts and look one last time upon their tombs. The cancer was moving to his head now, and each day that passed brought him closer to his own vanishing, a crystal point of pain that would subsume all the other pains. It would be so much easier . . . but then no. He made a phone call back to France. He asked that the rest of his family and friends be summoned to Latche and that a meal be prepared for New Year’s Eve. He gave a precise account of what would be eaten at the table, a feast for thirty people, for he had decided that afterward, he would not eat again.

“I am fed up with myself,” he told a friend.

And so we’ve come to a table set with a white cloth. An armada of floating wine goblets, the blinding weaponry of knives and forks and spoons. Two windows, shaded purple, stung by bullets of cold rain, lashed by the hurricane winds of an ocean storm.

The chef is dark-haired man, fiftyish, with a bowling-ball belly. He stands in front of orange flames in his great stone chimney hung with stewpots, finely orchestrating each octave of taste, occasionally sipping his broths and various chorded concoctions with a miffled expression. In breaking the law to serve us ortolan, he gruffly claims that it is his duty, as a Frenchman, to serve the food of his region. He thinks the law against serving ortolan is stupid. And yet he had to call forty of his friends in search of the bird, for there were none to be found and almost everyone feared getting caught, risking fines and possible imprisonment.

But then another man, his forty-first friend, arrived an hour ago with three live ortolans in a small pouch–worth up to a hundred dollars each and each no bigger than a thumb. They’re brown-backed, with pinkish bellies, part of the yellowhammer family, and when they fly, they tend to keep low to the ground and, when the wind is high swoop crazily for lack of weight. In all the world, they’re really caught only in the pine forests of the southwestern Landes region of France, by about twenty families who lay in wait: for the birds each fall as they fly from Europe to Africa. Once caught–they’re literally snatched out of the air in traps called matoles–they’re locked away in a dark room and fattened on millet; to achieve the same effect, French kings and Roman emperors once blinded the bird with a knife so, lost in the darkness, it would eat twenty-four hours a day.

And so, a short time ago, these three ortolans–our three ortolans–were dunked and drowned in a glass of Armagnac and then plucked of their feathers. Now they lie delicately on their backs in three cassoulets, wings and legs tucked to their tiny, bloated bodies, skin the color of pale autumn corn, their eyes small, purple bruises and–here’s the thing–wide open.

When we’re invited back to the kitchen, that’s what I notice, the open eyes on these already-peppered, palsied birds and the gold glow of their skin. The kitchen staff crowds around, craning to see, and when we ask one of the dishwashers if he’s ever tried ortolan, he looks scandalized, then looks back at the birds. “I’m too young, and now it’s against the law,” he says longingly. “But someday, when I can afford one . . .” Meanwhile, Sara has gone silent, looks pale looking at the birds.

Back at the chimney, the chef reiterates the menu for Mitterrand’s last meal, including the last course, as he puts it, “the birdies.” Perhaps he reads our uncertainty, a simultaneous flicker of doubt that passes over our respective faces. “It takes a culture of very good to appreciate the very good,” the chef says, nosing the clear juices of the capon rotating in the fire. “And ortolan is beyond even the very good.”

The guests had been told to hide their shock. They’d been warned that the president looked bad, but then there were such fine gradations. He already looked bad–could he looked worse?

It seemed he could. On his return from Egypt, he’d kept mostly to himself, out of sight of others; his doctors still attended to him, but they had begun to quarrel. The president’s stubbornness, his fits, and his silences–all of them seemed more acute now. When he entered the room, dressed in baggy pants and a pleasant coat, he was colorless and stiff-legged. He was supported by two body guards, and part of him seemed lost in dialogue with the thing sucking him from earth–with his own history, which was fast becoming the sum of his life. He was only half physical now and half spirit.

When the dying are present among the living, it creates an imbalance, for they randomly go through any number of dress rehearsals for death–nodding off at any time, slackening into a meaningful drool. They ebb and flow with each labored breath. Meanwhile, we hide our own panic by acting as if we were simply sitting in the company of a mannequin. It’s a rule: In the vicinity of the dying, the inanity of conversation heightens while what’s underneath–the thrumming of red tulips on the table and the lap of purple light on the windowpane, the oysters on crushed ice and the birds on the table, the wisp of errant hair drawn behind an ear and the shape of a lip–takes on a fantastic, last-time quality, slowly pulling everything under, to silence.

The president was carried to a reclining chair and table apart from the huge table where the guests sat. He was covered with blankets, seemed gone already. And yet when they brought the oysters–Marennes oysters, his favorite, harvested from the waters of this region–he summoned his energies, rose up in his chair, and began sucking them, the full flesh of them, from their half shells. He’d habitually eaten a hundred a week throughout his life and had been betrayed by bad oysters before, but, oh no not these, Hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous–a dozen, two dozen, and then, astonishingly, more. He couldn’t help it, his ravenous attack. It was brain food, and he seemed to slurp them against the cancer, let the saltwater juices flow to the back of his throat, change champagne-sweet, and then disappear in a flood before he started on the oyster itself. And that was another sublimity. The delicate tearing of a thing so full of ocean. Better than a paper wafer–heaven. When he was done, he lay back in his chair, oblivious to everyone else in the room, and fell fast asleep.

Now I have come to France, to the region of Francois Mitterrand’s birth and his final resting place, and on this night, perhaps looking a bit wan myself, I begin by eating the Marennes oysters–round, fat, luscious oysters split open and peeled back to show their delicate green lungs. Shimmering pendulums of translucent meat, they weigh more than the heavy, carbuncled shells in which they lie. When you lift the shell to your mouth and suck, it’s like the first time your tongue ever touched another tongue. The oysters are cool inside, then warm. Everything becomes heightened and alive. Nibbling turns to hormone-humming mastication. Your mouth swims with sensation: sugary, then salty, then again with Atlantic Ocean sweetness. And you try, as best you can, to prolong it. When they’re gone, you taste the ghost of them.

These are the oysters.

And then the foie gras, smooth and surprisingly buttery, a light-brown pate swirled with faint greens, pinks, and yellows and glittering slightly, tasting not so much of animal but of earth. Accompanied by fresh, rough-crusted, homemade bread and the sweet sauternes we drink (which itself is made from shriveled grapes of noble rot), the foie gras dissolves with the faint, rich sparkle of fresh-picked corn. It doesn’t matter that it’s fattened goose liver. It doesn’t matter what it is. Time slows for it.

This is the foie gras.

The capon is superb–not too gamey or stringy–furiously basted to a high state of tenderness in which the meat falls cleanly from the bone with only the help of gravity In its mildness, in its hint of olive oil and rosemary, it readies the tongue and its several thousand taste buds for the experience of what’s coming next.

This is the capon.

And then the wines. Besides the sauternes (a 1995 Les Remparts de Bastor, a 1995 Doisy-Daene), which we drink with the oysters and the foie gras, there are simple, full-bodied reds, for that’s how Mitterrand liked them, simple and full-bodied: a 1990 Chateau Lestage Simon, a 1994 Chateau Poujeaux. They are long, old, and dark. Complicated potions of flower and fruit. Faint cherry on a tongue tip, the tingle of tannin along the gums. While one bottle is being imbibed, another is being decanted, and all the while there are certain chemical changes taking place between the wine and its new atmosphere and then finally between the changed wine and the atmosphere of your mouth.

This is the wine.

And so, on this evening in Bordeaux, in the region where Mitterrand was born and buried, the eating and drinking of these courses takes us four hours, but then time has spread out and dissipated, woodsmoke up the chimney. Mitterrand, who was famous for outwaiting his opponents, for always playing the long, patient game, once said, “You have to give time time.”

And so we have, and time’s time is nearing midnight, and there are three as-yet unclaimed ortolans, back in the kitchen, that have just been placed in the oven. They will be cooked for seven minutes in their own fat–cooked, as it’s gently put, until they sing.

With each course, the president had rallied from sleep, from his oyster dreams, from fever or arctic chill, not daring to miss the next to come: the foie gras slathered over homemade bread or the capon and then, of course, the wines. But what brought him to full attention was a commotion: Some of the guests were confused when a man brought in a large platter of tiny, cooked ortolans laid out in rows. The president closely regarded his guests’ dismayed expressions, for it gave him quiet satisfaction–between jabs of pain–to realize that he still had the power to surprise.

The ortolans were offered to the table, but not everyone accepted. Those who did draped large, white cloth napkins over their heads, took the ortolans in their fingertips, and disappeared. The room shortly filled with wet noises and chewing. The bones and intestines turned to paste, swallowed eventually in one gulp. Some reveled in It; others spat It out.

When they were through, one by one they reappeared from beneath their hoods, slightly dazed. The president himself took a long sip of wine, let it play in his mouth. After nearly three dozen oysters and several courses, he seemed insatiable, and there was one bird left. He took the ortolan in his fingers, then dove again beneath the hood, the bony impress of his skull against the white cloth–the guests in silence and the self-pleasing, pornographic slurps of the president filling the room like a dirge.

At the table now, three ortolans, singing in their own fat. We’ll eat the birds because the ocean storm is at the purple windows; because this man, our chef, has gone to great lengths to honor us at his table; because we’re finishers; because it’s too late and too far–the clock is literally striking midnight–to turn back.

We offer the third bird to the chef.

And so he’s the first to go. An atheist, he doesn’t take his beneath the napkin. He just pops the bird in his mouth, bites off the head with his incisors, and holds a thickly bundled napkin over his lips, occasionally slipping it from side to side to sop up the overflowing juices. Slowly, deliberately, he begins to chew. As he does, he locks eyes with Sara. For long, painful minutes during which we can hear the crunch and pop of bone and tendon, he stares deeply across the table at her, with the napkin to his mouth.

I believe the chef is trying to seduce my girlfriend, a scene mirrored by ortolan-eating lovers in Proust, Colette, and Fielding. But then I realize that he’s not so much trying to take something from her as trying to find a still point from which he can focus on the chaos in his mouth. He’s chewing, sucking, slobbering, savoring. And he’s trying to manage all of the various, wild announcements of taste.

After he swallows and dabs his napkin daintily at the corners of his mouth, it’s our turn. We raise our birds and place them in our mouths. I can’t tell you what happens next in the outside world because, like Mitterrand, I go beneath the hood, which is meant to heighten the sensual experience by enveloping you in the aroma of ortolan. And the hood itself, with its intimation of Klan-like activity, might trouble me more if not for the sizzling bird on its back in my mouth, burning my tongue. The trick is to cool it by creating convections around it, by simply breathing. But, even then, my mouth has gone on full alert. Some taste buds are scorched and half-functioning, while others bloom for the first time and still others signal the sprinkler system of salivary glands.

And now, the hardest part: the first bite.

Like the chef, I sever the head and put it on the plate, where it lies in its own oil slick, then tentatively I try the body with bicuspids. The bird is surprisingly soft, gives completely, and then explodes with juices–liver, kidneys, lungs. Chestnut, corn, salt–all mix in an extraordinary current, the same warm, comforting flood as finely evolved consomme.

And so I begin chewing.

Here’s what I taste: Yes, quidbits of meat and organs, the succulent, tiny strands of flesh between the ribs and tail. I put inside myself the last flowered bit of air and Armagnac in its lungs, the body of rainwater and berries. In there, too, is the ocean and Africa and the dip and plunge in a high wind. And the heart that bursts between my teeth.

It takes time. I’m forced to chew and chew again and again, for what seems like three days. And what happens after chewing for this long–as the mouth full of taste buds and glands does its work–is that I fall into a trance. I don’t taste anything anymore, cease to exist as anything but taste itself

And that’s where I want to stay–but then can’t because the sweetness of the bird is turning slightly bitter and the bones have announced themselves. When I think about forcing them down my throat, a wave of nausea passes through me. And that’s when, with great difficulty, I swallow everything.

Afterward, I hold still for a moment, head bowed and hooded. I can feel my heart racing. Slowly, the sounds of the room filter back–the ting of wineglasses against plates, a shout back in the kitchen, laughter from another place. And then, underneath it, something soft and moving. Lungs filling and emptying. I can hear people breathing.

After the president’s second ortolan –he had appeared from beneath the hood wide eyed, ecstatic, staring into a dark corner of the room–the guests approached him in groups of two and three and made brief small talk about the affairs of the country or Zola or the weather. They knew this was adieu, and yet they hid their sadness; they acted as if in a month’s time he would still be among them.

And what about him? There was nothing left to subtract now. What of the white river that flowed through his childhood, the purple attic full of cornhusks? And then his beautiful books–Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Camus? How would the world continue without him in it?

He tried to flail one last time against the proof of his death. But then he had no energy left. Just an unhappy body weighted with grapefruits, curving earthward. Everything moving toward the center and one final point of pain. Soon after, he refused food and medicine; death took eight days.

I’m eaten up inside,” he said before he was carried from the room.

food and wine, alone with our thoughts, feeling guilty and elated, sated and

The day after Mitterrand’s last meal seems to have no end. Huddled together, we wander the streets of Bordeaux, everyone on the sidewalks turning silver in the half light. And then we drive out toward Jarnac, the village where Mitterrand is buried– through winding miles of gnarled grape trees in the gray gloom. We visit Mitterrand’s tomb, a simple family sarcophagus in a thickly populated graveyard, and stand on the banks of his childhood river.

If I could, I would stay right here and describe the exact details of that next day I would describe how we watched children riding a carousel until twilight, all of their heads tilting upward, hands fluttering and reaching for a brass ring that the ride master manipulated on a wire, how the stone village looked barbaric in the rain, with its demented buildings blackened by soot from the cognac distilleries.

We just seemed to be sleepwalking. Or vanishing. Until later. Until we were lost and the streets had emptied. Until night came and the wind carried with it the taste of saltwater and the warm light in the boulangerie window shone on loaves of bread just drawn from the oven. And we were hungry again.

We ate two Thanksgiving dinners, one with her side of the family in Chinatown and the second in our own home with family friends. Both were different but equally good.

I liked this piece by Hemon and his intermingled longing for food and family. As I traveled north, my own suitcase contained a carefully wrapped container of leftovers.

Aleksander Hemon
The New Yorker
September 3, 2007
Vol. 83 Issue 26

The Last Meal

In the days of my adolescence, my parents returned from work around 3:45 P.M., and the family dinner was held at four o’clock. The radio was always on for the four-o’clock news, featuring international disasters and domestic socialist successes. During the meal, my sister and I were subjected to an interrogation on school matters; we were never allowed to eat in silence, let alone read or watch television. Whatever conversation we could muster had to be terminated in time for the weather forecast at four-twenty-five; dinner was over at four-thirty, by which time we were obliged to have finished everything on our plates and to have thanked our mother for her efforts.

Although my sister and I were invariably given the biggest and best morsels, we experienced our family meals as a means of parental oppression. We always complained: the soup was too salty, peas were served too often, the weather forecaster was obviously lying. For the two of us, the ideal dining experience involved cevapi (grilled skin sausages, a kind of Bosnian fast food), comic books, loud music, television, and the absence of our parents. It was only once I was in the Army that I grasped the metaphysics of family meals and understood that the food was prepared over the low but steady fire of love.

In October, 1983, at the age of nineteen, I was conscripted into the Yugoslav People’s Army. I served my time in Stip, a town in eastern Macedonia that was home to both the military barracks and a bubble-gum factory. I was in the infantry, where the main training method was a kind of ceaseless debasement that began with the way we were fed. At mealtime, we’d line up on the vast tarmac for roll call, then march into the cafeteria, unit by unit, where we’d slide our sticky trays along the rails, each of us trying to solicit bigger portions from the pitiless kitchen staff. Our menu choices were fantastically limited. For breakfast, we got a piece of dry bread, a boiled egg, a packet of rancid margarine, and occasionally a slice of gooey, unsmoked bacon; we washed it all down with tepid sweet tea or decondensed milk in plastic cups that had been absorbing grease for all eternity. Lunch always required the use of a spoon; our favorite dish was a thick bean soup - complete with tiny sprouts that looked exactly like maggots - because it was filling and set us up for an encyclopedia of fart jokes. Dinner consisted of modified lunch leftovers, unless it was lunch all over again, plus a cup of prune-based bowel-movement potion. There was never time for conversation; we had to devour the grub quickly and then make way for the next ravenous unit.

Those were the good meals. We longed for them after we were deployed to the arid Macedonian plains, where we rehearsed for battles and slurped indefinable concoctions out of canteens or munched on the contents of our M.R.E.s: stale crackers, ancient cans of tuna, impenetrable dried fruit. Perpetually hungry, I often recalled my family dinners before I went to sleep, constructing elaborate menus that featured roast lamb or ham-and-cheese cr&êpes or my mother’s spinach pie.

Besides tough-loving us boys into manhood, the Army was supposed to be one big family, a community bound by loyalty, comradeship, and sharing. But you never shared a goody-laden package from home or left any food in your locker; in military dorms, pilfering was encouraged as a form of preparation for pillaging in future wars. What you couldn’t eat alone you traded for clean socks and shirts, for an extra shower or a daytime fire-watch shift. Food was a survival commodity.

One soldier in my unit went on a hunger strike. The officers ignored him, assuming that he was bluffing. Like everyone else, he was required to be present for each roll call and the subsequent meal. Suddenly he had a lot of close friends who were eager not to let his food go to waste. After a while, he became too weak to walk; he had to be carried to meals by two soldiers. The lucky men fought over his boiled egg while he smiled with his eyes closed, his gaunt cheek laid on the table.

A few months after my conscription, my mother and sister undertook a two-day trip from Sarajevo to visit me. By then, I was deployed in Kicevo, in western Macedonia. The weather was dismal, so we spent the visit at their hotel. Mother had brought along a suitcase full of food: veal schnitzels, fried chicken, spinach pue, even a custard cake. She spread a towel on the bed, as there was no table, and I ate from plastic containers. The first bite of spinach pie - that sublime blend of spinach, eggs, and phyllo pastry - brought tears to my eyes.

I never had any intention of becoming a novelist — at least not until I turned 29. This is absolutely true.

I read a lot from the time I was a little kid, and I got so deeply into the worlds of the novels I was reading that it would be a lie if I said I never felt like writing anything. But I never believed I had the talent to write fiction. In my teens I loved writers like Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Balzac, but I never imagined I could write anything that would measure up to the works they left us. And so, at an early age, I simply gave up any hope of writing fiction. I would continue to read books as a hobby, I decided, and look elsewhere for a way to make a living.

The professional area I settled on was music. I worked hard, saved my money, borrowed a lot from friends and relatives, and shortly after leaving the university I opened a little jazz club in Tokyo. We served coffee in the daytime and drinks at night. We also served a few simple dishes. We had records playing constantly, and young musicians performing live jazz on weekends. I kept this up for seven years. Why? For one simple reason: It enabled me to listen to jazz from morning to night.

I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck. The band was just great: Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Art Blakey in the lead with his solid, imaginative drumming. I think it was one of the strongest units in jazz history. I had never heard such amazing music, and I was hooked.

A year ago in Boston I had dinner with the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez, and when I told him this story, he pulled out his cellphone and asked me, “Would you like to talk to Wayne, Haruki?” “Of course,” I said, practically at a loss for words. He called Wayne Shorter in Florida and handed me the phone. Basically what I said to him was that I had never heard such amazing music before or since. Life is so strange, you never know what’s going to happen. Here I was, 42 years later, writing novels, living in Boston and talking to Wayne Shorter on a cellphone. I never could have imagined it.

When I turned 29, all of a sudden out of nowhere I got this feeling that I wanted to write a novel — that I could do it. I couldn’t write anything that measured up to Dostoyevsky or Balzac, of course, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to become a literary giant. Still, I had no idea how to go about writing a novel or what to write about. I had absolutely no experience, after all, and no ready-made style at my disposal. I didn’t know anyone who could teach me how to do it, or even friends I could talk with about literature. My only thought at that point was how wonderful it would be if I could write like playing an instrument.

I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.

One of my all-time favorite jazz pianists is Thelonious Monk. Once, when someone asked him how he managed to get a certain special sound out of the piano, Monk pointed to the keyboard and said: “It can’t be any new note. When you look at the keyboard, all the notes are there already. But if you mean a note enough, it will sound different. You got to pick the notes you really mean!”

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

The latest addition is a pair of ten-eye black and burgundy steel-toe boots from Steel Boots company. They are similar in style to Grinders but much less expensive. I started wearing them seriously this past weekend but still need some breaking in.

What fascinates me about this article is Hlavecek’s pursuit to recreate perfectly a historical shoe. Much like Buzz Rickson’s 110% exact copy of the MA-1 Flight Jacket, Hlavecek strives to recreate with the same pattern, material, and techniques while refusing shortcuts the modern age has to offer.

By Burkhard Bilger
February 14, 2005
The New Yorker

Petr Hlavacek’s obsession with odd footwear stops just short of his own feet. During the week we spent together, he always wore the same shoes: crepe-soled loafers, wide at the front for uninhibited toe movement and low at the heel to encourage good posture. Their uppers were of grayish suede, without insignia or decorative stitching, and were pieced together with a thick seam down the center. Their insoles were an experimental sort, designed for the tender feet of diabetics. They were the kind of shoe that would not have looked out of place on a medieval peasant. The kind, as Hlavacek would say, “that know what the feets need.”

Hlavacek is a professor of shoe technology at Tomas Bata University, in the Czech city of Zlin. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on stitching-specifically, on the effect of high needle temperatures on thread quality in the making of leather uppers-and has mounted shoe research expeditions to Mongolia, Turkey, China, and Vietnam. He has measured the feet of twenty thousand Czech children and cross-indexed their growth patterns and deformities, and he has concluded that our feet are in trouble. “The number of incorrect and dangerous shoes is high. It is higher and higher!” he told me one afternoon in Zlin, over a bowl of garlic soup. Czech shoes were once the best-made in Europe, he said, but in recent years his country, like the United States, has been flooded with cheap, poorly designed Asian shoes, and the effects are showing. “The Czech Republic is nature’s laboratory,” he said. “You can give them Far Asia shoes and see what happens. And we have found that the number of complications is three times higher than twenty years ago. Half of all women have deformed feet!”

Hlavacek (his name is pronounced “la-VA-check”) is fifty-five years old. He has a sturdy, companionably bulky build, like a badger’s, with long, shrewd features and thick blond hair combed straight back. When he speaks English, he tends to add syllables to his words (”applicate,” “observate”) and to punctuate his sentences with exclamations, as if to mimic the elaborate endings and accents of Czech. “You look at the woman, she is full of pain. Who is guilty? Shoes!”

Listen to Hlavacek long enough and you may come to believe that shoes are responsible for a great deal-that human affairs proceed largely from the feet. “There is a shock when you realize what role shoes play in history,” he says. Why did Alexander’s armies conquer the world? Because they got shoes from the Persians. Why did Napoleon’s armies overrun Europe? Because French scientists devised the most supple, sturdy leather for army boots. (Hlavacek thinks that today’s soldiers, who do little marching, would be better off in sneakers.) One of the pivotal points in Middle Eastern history, he believes, came in 1956, when Egypt kicked British and French shoemakers out of the country. Eleven years later, when Egyptian soldiers fought Israel in the Six-Day War, the soles of their boots were held together with tacks. The farther they marched, the more the tacks heated up on the sands of the Sinai and drove through the leather, until the soldiers felt as if they were walking on red-hot nails. In pictures of their retreat, you see abandoned jeeps and tanks, and hundreds and hundreds of shoes.

Over the years, the plight of modern feet has prompted Hlavacek to develop a number of new shoe technologies, such as the insoles of his loafers. Mostly, though, it has led him further and further back, into prehistory. The majority of today’s footwear is less ergonomic than Roman sandals of two thousand years ago, Hlavacek believes. And so, like a Renaissance scholar scouring ancient Greek texts, he spends much of his time trying to rediscover what his predecessors knew. In the past two years alone, he has analyzed a fifteenth-century German pilgrim’s shoe, reconstructed a pair of ten-thousand-year-old sandals found in Oregon, and classified the shoe styles worn by angels in Byzantine religious icons. But the shoes that have taught him the most, the ones that first drew me to Zlin, are those worn by Otzi, the Ice Man.

Early one September afternoon fourteen years ago, two German tourists were hiking down a glacier in the Otztal, in South Tyrol, when they came upon a dead man, frozen up to his waist in the ice. He was emaciated and perfectly hairless, bent over a pool of meltwater with his arms propped beneath him, as if trying to wrench himself free. The hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, took him for a mountaineer at first, as did local police when they came to investigate. But a team of archeologists at the University of Innsbruck soon reached a different conclusion: the body belonged to a Stone Age hunter, they said, who died in the valley more than five thousand years earlier. He was fully equipped and well armed-an axe, a dagger, a net, a bowstave, a quiver of arrows, and birch-bark containers were found in the ice around him-and when he died his corpse was naturally mummified by the glacier.

Otzi, as he came to be called, was subjected to countless scientific indignities in the months that followed. Excavators tore him from the ice with a pneumatic chisel, damaging his buttocks and one of his thighs; biologists probed his teeth for traces of disease and squeezed samples from his rehydrated colon to reconstruct his diet. At various points, they concluded that he was a vegan, a vegetarian, and an omnivore (his last meals were of cereals, ibex, and elk). He died of hypothermia or ritual sacrifice. When a stone arrowhead was found buried in his left shoulder, and DNA analysis identified the blood of four other men on his clothes and weapons, it was suggested that he had been killed by rival big-game hunters. Otzi had arrived in Europe like a time traveller, and scientists seemed to glimpse all of Stone Age culture in his remains.

What they didn’t pay proper attention to, in Petr Hlavacek’s opinion, was his shoes. “They were not shoemakers,” he says, flatly. “They had no knowledge of the feet.” To Hlavacek, a shoe is both a social statement-”It says who I am, how I am rich, what are my goals, what are my tendencies”-and a kind of medical file. He can read a person’s height, weight, and physical ailments in the shape of his sneakers and the scuff marks on the soles. Over the years, he has worked on a number of cases with Czech historians and police, dating and identifying murder victims and other bodies. He made a diagnosis of syphilis in Albrecht von Wallenstein, the seventeenth-century Austrian general, based on his boots alone. (Advanced syphilis gives people an awkward, stork-like walk that leaves crescent-shaped marks on their heels.) A physical anthropologist later exhumed Wallenstein’s bones and confirmed the diagnosis.

Hlavacek first heard about Otzi’s shoes five or six months after the body was discovered. “I have friends in Germany; they are shoemakers,” he remembers. “They called me and said, ‘Otzi is with shoes!’ ” The Ice Man had become an international celebrity by then. His body had nearly sparked a border skirmish between Austria and Italy-the remains were found less than a hundred metres from the frontier, on the Italian side-and Konrad Spindler, the principal archeologist, had been hounded by requests from other scientists and reporters. When Hlavacek wrote to invite him to a shoe conference and to ask if Otzi’s shoes might be examined, Spindler politely declined the invitation. But, in his reply, he noted that the shoes had been moved from Innsbruck to a museum in Mainz, Germany. “One very free interpretation of his letter was ‘The shoes are in Mainz for you,’ ” Hlavacek says. “So I told myself, ‘Only people with courage are successful!’ “

A week later, he was on an overnight train to Mainz, carrying Spindler’s letter with him as an invitation.

“I am a curiosity,” Hlavacek admits. “It is not so usual to be so interested in shoes.” His father was a shoemaker, so one might suppose that he inherited his obsession, but his home town probably had more to do with it. Zlin is a city of shoes the way other places, shaped by the strict divisions of labor under Communism, are cities of linen or pipe fittings or plastic explosives. It lies two hundred and fifty kilometres southeast of Prague, in pious Moravian farming country, and has spent much of its history recovering from periodic plunderings by Hungarians, Austrians, and Poles. Until the twentieth century, the area was best known for its potent plum brandy, slivovitz, which locals drink as a kind of folk medication, muttering phrases like “Where it goes, there it heals.” In 1894, Tomas Bata, an eighth-generation cobbler with a utopian streak, opened a small shoe shop in town. Within forty years, he had turned it into the largest and most sophisticated shoe company in the world.

“It was practically a republic within a republic,” Hlavacek told me when he gave me a tour of the city on my first day there. As we walked, his right arm swept periodically across the skyline in the manner of a civic booster from the nineteen-fifties: Here was the first Czech escalator! There the country’s first skyscraper! There its tallest chimney and its largest movie theatre! By the nineteen-thirties, Bata was producing fifty-eight million pairs of shoes a year and had sixty-five thousand employees, in thirty-three countries. (In parts of Africa, a sneaker is still called a Bata.) As the company grew, Bata hired modernist architects to rebuild Zlin along the lines of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, with modular factories of brick and glass. He built schools, hospitals, and homes for his peasant workers, then sent his wife, Marie, door to door to teach them modern manners and hygiene.

In its heyday, Zlin was known as the Czechoslovak America. But by Hlavacek’s time it had lost most of its utopian spirit. Bata was killed in a plane crash in 1932, and the rest of the family fled to Canada after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. By 1950, when Hlavacek was born, Zlin’s name had been changed to Gottwaldov, in honor of the country’s first Communist President, and Bata was sending most of its shoes to the Soviet Union.

Hlavacek might never have studied shoes at all had his father not had a feud with the local Communist Party boss. It began when his father refused to play the flugelhorn at a May Day celebration. (He was annoyed at having been denied an extra allotment of coal the previous winter.) By the time Petr graduated from elementary school, the Party boss so disliked the Hlavaceks that he had the boy designated for farm labor, despite his high grades. Petr’s father visited the high schools in Zlin to plead his son’s case, and eventually arrived at the shoe academy that Bata had established. Though geared toward industry, it offered a full baccalaureate degree and excellent instruction in math and science. There had been a shortage of male applicants that year, the principal remarked, to which the elder Hlavacek replied that his son had always had a deep interest in footwear. By that night, the decision had been made. “He came back and he said, ‘It is clear!’ ” Petr remembers. “You will not be a farmer! You will not mine! You will not join the Army! You will study the shoes!”

Hlavacek says that he is apolitical, but he seems to have inherited his father’s rebellious streak. He led student protests in Zlin during the Prague Spring, in 1968, and again during the Velvet Revolution, in 1989. As a young man, he had little patience for the Communist social clubs he was told to join, so he took refuge in the local shoe museum, where he led tours. There one could see history’s bloody reforms and counter-reforms reduced to oscillating toe lengths and heel heights. The French traded in their high heels for modest slippers after the Revolution. The Germans renounced their sabatons, with foot-long, articulated toes, for the stub-nosed shoes favored by Martin Luther.

In time, Hlavacek traced the patterns back through Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, to the Egyptians, who were buried with sandals for their long walk in the afterlife. But there the line seemed to end: shoes were either too perishable or too disposable to survive from prehistoric times. “It was my dream to see the oldest European shoes,” Hlavacek says. And then came Otzi.

When Hlavacek first saw the remains at the museum in Mainz, they didn’t look much like shoes. The leather was torn and partly decomposed, mixed with blackened hay and bits of twine, like a clump of horse dung. The curators had given Hlavacek only twenty minutes, so he worked in a state of near-panic, making sketches and taking measurements, examining abrasions and noting what looked like repair marks. In twenty minutes, he managed to contradict much of what previous researchers had found-noting, for instance, that the right and left shoes were identically shaped, rather than asymmetrical, like modern shoes. He faxed his report to Konrad Spindler the next day, a Friday. By Monday, Spindler was making arrangements for him to see the Ice Man’s feet.

“It was like winning the Nobel Prize,” Hlavacek says. “It was like flying with angels.” In the months that followed, Hlavacek painstakingly reconstructed the shoes’ original design. He took imprints of the mummy’s feet, then converted them to three-dimensional drawings on his computer. He compared the joint and heel measurements with those of local schoolchildren-Otzi was only five feet three, with a modern adolescent’s build-to get a sense of how the feet were shaped before their muscles atrophied and dried out. Then he took the closest match, a twelve-year-old boy, and made plaster casts of his feet. When he was finished, he called his longtime collaborator, Vaclav Gresak, and asked him to make some shoes.

Gresak, who is fifty, teaches leather-working in Hlavacek’s department. He spends his free time making replicas of historic American saddles, and may be the only man in the world whose business card reads “University Professor. Saddler.” Tall and rangy, with tanned, chiselled features, Gresak dresses like a somewhat dandyish Marlboro man: crisp plaid shirts open at the chest, bluejeans with fancy stitching. Hlavacek and he make an oddly effective team. One is an excitable theorist, the other an unflappable pragmatist. “We are a tandem,” Hlavacek says.

To Hlavacek, Otzi seems to be a distant, otherworldly figure, with savage customs and strange, animistic beliefs. (He is taken with Spindler’s theory that Otzi used bearskin for the soles of his shoes so he could absorb the animal’s power as he walked.) To Gresak, Otzi is more of a kindred spirit-a prehistoric colleague. If he was able to make the shoes five thousand years ago, Gresak thought, when he first saw them, why shouldn’t I?

Hlavacek’s reconstructed design called for plain leather uppers and soles, stretched across a netting of braided linden bark, with a thick stuffing of hay. It seemed simple enough. “But I have experience that these simple things become very complicated,” Gresak says. There was the matter of materials, for instance. Microscopic studies of the leather had shown that it came from three sources: deerskin on the uppers, calfskin on the bindings, and bearskin on the soles. Deerskin and calfskin were easy to find, but bears are endangered in Europe and strictly protected. To get a fresh hide, Hlavacek and Gresak had to hire a bear hunter in Canada and have him send his kill to the Czech Republic. In return, they agreed to stuff what was left of the animal and send it back. (As it turned out, the bear’s hair fell out on the trip over, so taxidermy was out of the question. They ended up paying the hunter three hundred dollars-about half a month’s salary in the Czech Republic-and hanging the bear’s mangy head on the wall of their shoe laboratory.)

That left the knottier problem of technique. Tanned leather is a fairly sophisticated material. It has to be salted, soaked, and scraped, then treated with an agent that chemically toughens and preserves it. People have used everything from chestnuts and sourdough to urine and saliva as tanning agents, but microscopic analysis suggested that Otzi’s shoes were processed with some sort of fat. The obvious candidate was fish oil, which Native Americans often used for tanning, but Otzi lived far inland. Squeezing enough fat from local trout would have taken months. Olive or grape-seed oil might have worked, but only if applied under high pressure, and marrow fat was a disappointment: when Gresak and Hlavacek tried it on the bear hide, after boiling down twenty kilos of bones, the leather turned hard and brittle.

It was Gresak who hit upon the answer. Leafing through a nineteenthcentury book on tanning, he found a reference to the early Inuit, who tanned polar-bear hides with the animals’ own brains and liver. To test the technique, he bought some pig organs from a butcher (the Canadian hunter hadn’t sent the bear’s innards) and took them to a cabin he has in the Beskydy Mountains, fifty kilometres east of Zlin. He boiled the fat out of the liver, mixed it with the brains, and smeared it on pieces of skin hung outside on a primitive wood frame. “The smell was so powerful that all the flies from a five-kilometre area, minimally, flied to this concentrated place,” Hlavacek says. But the results were gratifying: enzymes in the liver acted as an emulsifier, dispersing the fats through the hides. When Gresak washed them clean in a stream a few days later, they had become decay-resistant and moderately flexible. All that was left was to cut them to size with a piece of flint, stitch them together with a bone needle, and take them for a walk.

One afternoon not long after I arrived, Hlavacek, Gresak, and I drove up to the Beskydy Mountains, to a hiking path not far from Gresak’s cabin. The land had once been a collectivized farm, Gresak explained, but now belonged to a private riding stable, with mounds of hay in the fields for the horses and flower boxes hung from the windows of an old red barn. When we arrived, Hlavacek opened the trunk of his Ford Fiesta, took out a brown paper sack, and pulled out two pairs of shoes. The first were replicas of the oldest known American footwear: ten-thousand-year-old sandals from a rock shelter in central Oregon. The original sandals had been found under a layer of ash from a volcano that had killed the wearer but preserved the shoes. The replicas, made by Gresak, were like little baskets for the feet: tightly woven out of twisted strands of wormwood bark, with arched toe coverings and open heels. Hlavacek walked over to a wooden bench to put them on, then handed me the second pair.

Before I came, Hlavacek had sent me an e-mail with travel arrangements, then added, in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were a standard formality between new acquaintances, “What is size of your feet?” These shoes were the reason. Gresak had made eight pairs of Otzi replicas. The first three were historically exact, built around the plaster casts of the twelve-year-old boy’s feet; the others were custom-made for different wearers. This pair was made for Hlavacek, who, as it turned out, had the same size feet as I do. They were much bulkier and more ungainly than the sandals, with open netting at the heels and bulbous leather toes. They didn’t look like the sort of thing a big-game hunter would wear into enemy territory. They looked like prehistoric clown shoes.

“Science demands sacrifice!” Hlavacek exclaimed, grinning, as I sat down beside him to put them on. We would take a five-kilometre hike and then compare notes on the replicas, he said, but he already knew I had the better pair. He and Gresak had tried out the Oregon sandals that winter, on snow-covered roads in these mountains, and had found them less than orthopedic. “First ten minutes, no problem,” he said. “One hour, no problem. But after four hours . . . ” The sandals were made to be worn without socks or other insulation, so his feet got cold, and blades of cut grass kept sliding up through the weave to spear his soles. Not so with Otzi’s shoes. “You will feel a little bit discomfort, but it is only a question of one hundred metres,” Hlavacek assured me. “Then you will feel the best level of comfort, the warm comfort.”

As Hlavacek talked, Gresak knelt down beside me with sacks of hay and moss and began stuffing fistfuls into the netting that lined the shoes. The hay would pad my feet and insulate them, he said; the moss would keep them comfortable. “In the Czech language we have expression for a man who is very poor,” Gresak said. “We say you can see the hay sticking out of his shoes. With Otzi it is the opposite: you have to see the hay for comfort.” Once my feet were bundled up, with thick tufts sprouting around the ankles, we set off across the field in single file, Gresak in the lead. “Don’t hurry,” Hlavacek said, bringing up the rear. “We are in the Stone Age.”

The path wound through pastures and orchards and through stands of lofty, gray-barked beeches to a ridge that overlooked the Podrevnicko Valley. Here and there in the distance, church spires and grain silos rose above clusters of red tile roofs and turnip fields. It was a balmy Indian-summer day, and as we walked our feet stirred up the scent of wild rosemary and oregano. Gresak sauntered over to a tree along the path, plucked something from it, and handed it to me: a tiny purple plum. “It’s symbolical,” Hlavacek said. “Otzi had dried plums when they found him.” These meadows, he added, were a lot like those Otzi must have passed through on his long trek to the high country.

I felt a little sorry for the Ice Man then, and not just because he was fated to die on that trip. The “little bit discomfort” that Hlavacek had warned me about was persisting well past a hundred metres, and the moss was proving no substitute for a good pair of socks. My feet itched; they itched a lot. If not for Hlavacek, I would have taken the clown shoes off immediately and gone barefoot. But the sight of him shambling along behind me was oddly inspiring. His face was flushed; his shoulders hunched forward; his fanny-pack was pulled toward the front and bulging with supplies. He had a heart valve replaced eight years ago, and was taking blood thinners to prevent clots from forming. Yet here he was. The woven soles of his sandals were smooth on the bottom, so he had to use a walking stick to keep from slipping on the wet grass. Once or twice, his feet flew out from under him completely, sending him into midair and onto his seat.

To be a shoe historian, it seems, is to stumble continually over a basic question: Why do people wear shoes at all? The foot is one of nature’s most splendid creations. Paleontologists say that it was the first body part to achieve its modern shape, and no wonder: as bipedal creatures, our evolutionary success depended on getting this one appendage exactly right. The foot’s segmented, elegantly arched design is wonderfully flexible and strong. It can tolerate temperatures as low as forty degrees and, given time to develop calluses, negotiate most terrains in relative comfort. It’s a supreme example of form following function-so of course people have spent a million years trying to redesign it. “Society, apparently, agrees that the human foot as formed by nature is coarse, vulgar and unsightly, and that its width, especially at the toes, is entirely too great,” an orthopedist by the name of Philip Hoffmann wrote in 1905, in the American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery. “What it so commonly does admire is the dainty little shoe that hides its own handiwork-the distorted, cramped, calloused and repulsive foot.”

Hoffmann’s anti-footwear feelings had been stirred by a visit to the 1904 World’s Fair, in St. Louis. A group of African Pygmies and Philippine tribesmen, barefoot all their lives, had been put on display for the edification of shoe-wearing peoples. Hoffmann took a look at their feet. In a hundred and eighty-six pairs, he reported, he didn’t find a single deformity or ailment. There were no broken arches, no hyperextended joints-none of the weaknesses “so characteristic and common in adult shoe-wearing feet.” In the pictures published with the article, the tribesmen’s feet look almost alarmingly healthy. They’re leathery, thick-knuckled, full of character. Their toes are so widely splayed they look prehensile, like a gecko’s. With the right training, you imagine, they could play Jelly Roll Morton. By comparison, our own feet are pale, spindly, useless things. They’ve devolved, as Hoffmann put it, into “mere pedestals.”

Shoes serve some practical purpose, of course. The Bata Shoe Museum, in Toronto, built several decades after the family’s exile from Zlin, is full of ingenious footwear for unpleasant environments: Yup’ik boots from the Alaskan coast, made out of waterproof salmon skin; Swedish shoes made out of birch bark, with antibacterial properties to prevent foot odor; Dutch smuggling shoes that leave footprints headed in the opposite direction. But until the nineteenth century most people in the world went barefoot much of the time. Even in Europe and the United States, shoes were largely a status symbol, all the more impressive for their impracticality. “If you can prove that you don’t have to walk, it’s one of the best ways of proving all the other things you don’t have to do,” Elizabeth Semmelhack, the curator of the Bata Shoe Museum, told me.

Urbanites were the first people to wear shoes year-round, and generations of them have gradually turned cities into a new sort of extreme environment. Yielding footpaths have given way to abrasive sidewalks, grassy fields to blistering parking lots, until few feet can stand to go unshod. “Maybe it is a mistake in human development,” Hlavacek said. “But I think to stop using the shoes is impossible.”

Otzi’s shoes fascinated him, in part, because they were designed to handle the rocky slopes of the high Alps-the Stone Age equivalent of New York’s streets. The Ice Man probably went barefoot at lower elevations, Hlavacek said, or stuck his feet into a stream, as I eventually did, to moisten the hay. But, once he reached the glacier, he put on his shoes.

Flimsy as they looked, the shoes were ideally suited to the mountains, Hlavacek found. He and Gresak measured the tensile strength of the leather and the thermal conductivity of the hay. They took the shoes to a hockey rink and pushed each other around in them, to measure the sole’s adhesion to the ice. They taped pressure sensors to the bottom of their feet, put on the shoes, and walked on a treadmill. The results surprised even Hlavacek. Aside from their tensile strength, which couldn’t equal that of today’s leathers, the replicas outperformed their modern counterparts in every category. The hay had more loft and was better insulating than standard synthetics; the bearskin gripped as well as the best rubber. The shoes were so well cushioned that the body’s weight was evenly distributed across the soles: the peak pressure points were half as high as in hiking boots, seventy-five-per-cent lower than in sneakers, and eighty-five-per-cent lower than in high heels. “It is miracle,” Hlavacek said. “In these shoes you can practically not obtain the blisters.”

The true test came later, though, in the Alps. Botanists had by then identified the wood and plant fibres in the Ice Man’s weapons and clothing, and the pollen grains in his colon and lungs. They had concluded that he’d died sometime in the late spring or early summer, after hiking into the mountains from the Vinschgau Valley, some thirty kilometres to the south. (One theory held that he was a sheepherder on the lam, pursued by men who had massacred his village.) Hlavacek hoped, at first, to recruit some hikers of roughly Otzi’s stature and foot size to make a similar trip. But “to prepare an expedition of twelve-year-old boys was rejected as too dangerous,” he later wrote in a paper. Gresak was sick with an intestinal parasite that he had contracted while on vacation in India. So Hlavacek asked three other colleagues to join him. Among them was Vaclav Patek, a well-known Czech climber and designer of mountain-climbing shoes.

They set off on September 17, 2001, each stuffed into a pair of Gresak’s replicas. Over the next three days, they climbed more than fifteen hundred metres, across snow-covered glaciers and granite scree. They trudged through streams of meltwater barely above freezing, yet their feet felt only a momentary chill. When, periodically, Hlavacek stuck a thermometer inside the hikers’ shoes, the readings hovered comfortably around seventy degrees Fahrenheit. More surprising, to a climber like Patek, was how well the shoes performed on difficult terrain. Their soles were so light and flexible, their leather so adhesive, that they could easily scale granite boulders. By the time the expedition reached Otzi’s grave site, on the tenth anniversary of his discovery, Patek had declared the boots more comfortable and capable than any he’d worn. “There is no mountain in Europe that couldn’t be conquered in these shoes,” he told Hlavacek.

In the years since, as Hlavacek has made the rounds of shoe conferences with his findings, he has often been asked the same question. As he puts it, “Can we applicate it?” His immediate answer is “Yes! There don’t exist other hiking shoes where you cannot obtain the blisters!” But, on further reflection, he admits that hay and bear hide are not obvious materials for mass production. “There is a little problem, I must say, with the hygiene,” he told me. “It is not possible to change the hay every day.” Some aspects of the shoes-their light, flexible construction and the loft of their padding, for instance-could be put to use in modern designs, but only in the most abstract form. “Practically nobody wants to wear shoes like this,” Hlavacek said.

Unfortunately, the alternatives are often worse. Making his way down the aisle of a shoe store in a mall one evening, Hlavacek picked up a tiny sandal made out of a translucent red synthetic. He held it up to the light and peered at the cartoon bug glued on top. “Very dangerous are these full plastic shoes,” he said, frowning. “They are good only for a short time, in the sea.” He set the shoe down and moved on, taking in each new horror in turn. Over here were some tennis shoes with Velcro straps that would cut off the foot’s circulation. Over there a pair so airtight that they would turn into steam baths (”very, very perilous”). Some shoes were made of vinyl or faux leather with no “shape memory”-in time, they would mold the foot to their own twisted form. Others seemed almost deliberately cruel.

“What to say?” Hlavacek told me, stopping in front of a display of stiletto-heeled boots. “They are not made for walking on the feet.” The high heels would shift eighty-five per cent of the body’s weight to the toes-the part of the foot least equipped to handle it-while the heel bone, one of the sturdiest in the body, would be left hovering in the air. Shoemakers divide feet into three broad categories, Hlavacek said: Egyptian feet, in which the big toe is the longest; Greek feet, which have a long second toe; and cubic feet, with toes of equal length. But no foot in the world was shaped like these boots: needle-toed and impossibly slender. Whoever bought them, he added, would probably unknowingly add to her misery: half of all women buy shoes that are too small for them.

For a time, after the 1989 revolution, Hlavacek had a more optimistic view. He dreamed of rekindling the old Bata spirit-of creating shoes that would combine new technologies with ancient innovations. He imagined a shoe store like a high-tech cobbler’s shop: patrons would get three-dimensional scans of their feet, choose a style and material, and have their shoes custom-made by machine. Parents would enter their shoe sizes into a store computer, along with their children’s sex, foot size, and date of birth. Then a program that Hlavacek developed, based on a statistical study of two thousand families, would predict the children’s foot growth in coming months and tell them what size shoes to buy.

On December 13, 1989, three days after Vaclav Havel announced the appointment of a new cabinet, Thomas Bata, Jr., who is now ninety, returned to Prague from a fifty-year exile in Canada. At the airport and along the road to the city, thousands of people gathered with flags and handmade signs to welcome him home. Bata and his wife, Sonja, drove to Wenceslas Square that day, where he was to speak to a crowd of a hundred thousand. First, though, they met with Havel, “officiating among bits and pieces of furniture, half-empty pop bottles, and unfinished sandwiches,” as Bata later recalled. Havel’s grandfather had been a Bata executive before the war, and Thomas Bata, Jr., had dated Havel’s mother as a young man, but the two never mentioned these connections. Instead, as the cameras rolled around them, Havel pointed to his shoes. “The quality is terrible,” he said. “I am sure you could do much better.”

After the Batas fled to Canada, in 1939, they tried to spread the company’s philosophy around the world, building little Zlins in Canada, India, Madagascar, and other countries. But, as the industry shifted to Asia and profit margins crept down, Bata’s free clinics and schools began to seem like so much excess overhead. By the late nineteen-eighties, the company was shutting down many of its foreign factories, and gradually shifting from manufacturing to retail. “My son is a Harvard M.B.A.,” Sonja Bata told me. “He says, ‘Mauritius has never made us a dime. Why are we in Mauritius?’ ” There was no room for utopias in the modern shoe business.

The day after their meeting with Havel, in Prague, the Batas drove back to the city that Tomas Bata had built, the city of shoes. On the outskirts of town, someone had papered over its Communist name, Gottwaldov, with a sign that said “Zlin.” Once again, Thomas Bata, Jr., spoke to cheering crowds in the town square, and once again there were intimations of a new golden age. “They thought the whole town would come back, including the jobs and the shoes for nine crowns ninety-nine,” Sonja Bata told me. “But, frankly, it would have killed us to take over.” The Batas had long since become Canadians, and Zlin was in no condition to be revived. “There were these huge factories built to export shoes to Russia. The machines were antiquated, and the people . . . They are the major assets, and if they have acquired funny habits . . . ” She sighed. “My husband would have said it was a real omelette. And you can’t make eggs out of an omelette.”

Zlin’s sleek modernist factories are mostly empty now. Only one, on the outskirts of town, is still used to make Bata shoes. At the university, the shoe-technology program shrinks a bit every year. During the week of my visit, Hlavacek was moving his office to a smaller room, with lower ceilings, on a floor that Tomas Bata, legend had it, once reserved for architects who screwed up designs for his buildings. “My only error is that I do not bring in enough students,” Hlavacek said. In his shoe laboratory, industrial sewing machines stood beside hulking leather-processing devices. Most were painted a pale institutional green and were chipped from decades of use. “Here was concentrated all the knowledge of what needed the feet,” Hlavacek said. Then he shook his head. “The shoes are leaving Zlin.”

To attract new students and to spread his shoemaking knowledge to where it’s needed most, Hlavacek has lately been recruiting in China and Vietnam. The time of eighth-generation Czech cobblers has passed. His son Pavel, who is twenty-four, is getting a master’s degree in political science; his daughter Jana, who is twenty-six, is an artist who works with stained glass. (She won a shoe-design competition in high school, but decided there was no future in it.) Still, Hlavacek didn’t seem dispirited. “I am naturally optimist,” he said. “I think we are really at the bottom of the situation-the decreasing knowledge, the feeling of disillusion. Something must happen. Some butterfly must be quickly moved by the winds. Some pacemaker must start running with a flag, saying, ‘Care is coming!’ And I believe that it will be better.”

One day several years ago, he said, his father broke down in tears. He blamed himself for his son’s career. He said that if he hadn’t spoken to the principal of the shoe academy forty years before, Petr might have been forced to find a more promising profession. “He said, ‘I am guilty you are a shoemaker!’ ” Petr remembered. “And I said, ‘You are not guilty! I am proud!’ ” Perhaps shoes weren’t the most exalted subject in the world (he lifted his hands above his head as if reaching for a book), but he had studied history and medicine, he had become a respected specialist, and he had helped people with their foot problems. “Can you imagine if I was not a shoemaker?” he told his father. “I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine my life without shoes.”

I cringe at the easy pun of the title, but here is another interesting article about the dating scene for Japanese women. Actually, this reminds me of the Ester Pan article about Asian men in general becoming “trophy mates” for white women. That was published in 2000…and save for Daniel Dae Kim’s inclusion as one of 2005’s “Sexiest Men Alive,” I haven’t witnessed that much of a change in perspective in the media.

This reminds me of a small wank over at a a celebrity gossip blog, where photos of popular bi-racial actor Daniel Henney were posted. Choice quotes:

“asians do nothing for me.”

“I KNOW it seems racist and all that but I could never find myself attracted to an Asian man. I don’t know why.”

“not to impose a stereotype on anybody, but he’s tall for an Asian guy.”

Japanese women seeking Seoul mates
Strong, sensitive Korean guys are hot in Toyko

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post
September 17, 2006

TOKYO — Thin and gorgeous in a slinky black dress, Mikimoto pearls and a low-slung diamond Tiffany pendant, 26-year-old Kazumi Yoshimura already has looks, cash, and accessories. There’s only one more thing this single Japanese woman says she needs to find eternal bliss — a Korean man.

She may just have to take a number and get in line. In recent years, the wild success of male celebrities from South Korea — sensitive men but totally ripped — has redefined what Asian women want. Gone are the martial-arts movie heroes and the stereotypical macho men of mainstream Asian television. Today, South Korea’s trend-setting screen stars and singers dictate everything from what hair gels people use in Vietnam to what jeans are bought in China.

Yet for thousands of smitten Japanese women like Yoshimura, collecting the odd poster or DVD is no longer enough. They’ve set their sights far higher — settling for nothing less than a real Seoul mate.

The lovelorn Yoshimura signed up last year with Rakuen Korea, a Japanese-Korean matchmaking service, to find her own Korean bachelor. And she is hardly alone. More than 6,400 female clients have signed up with the company, which says its popularity has skyrocketed since 2004, when “Winter Sonata” became the first of many hot Korean television dramas to hit Japan.

“South Koreans are so sweet and romantic — not at all like Japanese guys, who never say `I love you,’” Yoshimura said as she waited for her blind date, a single Korean man, in the 50th-floor bar of a chic Tokyo skyscraper. A telephone operator who lives with her parents in Hiroshima, she has spent thousands of dollars on her quest for a Korean husband, flying to Seoul 10 times in the past two years and bullet-training to Tokyo for seven blind dates with Korean men. So far, though, she hasn’t found the one she’s looking for.

“Maybe I’m living in a fantasy world,” she said, pouting her blood-red lips. “Maybe I’m looking for the TV stars I can’t really have. But we are all allowed a dream, aren’t we?”

In part, the new allure of Korean men can be traced to a larger phenomenon known as the “Korean Wave,” a term coined a few years ago by Beijing journalists startled by the growing popularity of South Koreans and South Korean goods in China. Now, the craze for all things Korean has spread across Asia, driving regional sales of everything from cars to kimchi.

Meanwhile, the number of foreign tourists traveling to South Korea leapt from 2.8 million in 2003 to 3.7 million in 2004. The bulk of the growth, South Korean tourism officials say, stemmed from Korean Wave-loving Asian women. Partial statistics for 2005 indicate the tide has not yet let up.

For the South Koreans, who have long suffered discrimination in Japan and who have hardly been known as sex symbols, it all comes as something of a shock.

Korean male celebrities are now among the highest-paid actors outside Hollywood. According to the South Korean media, “Winter Sonata” star Bae Yong Jun — whose character stood by his first love through 10 years of car accidents and amnesia — is now charging $5 million a film, the steepest price anywhere in Asia.

In Seoul, the neon-lit streets are mobbed these days by Asian women, many sporting rhinestone-studded T-shirts emblazoned with images of their favorite Korean stars. Some fans have been known to stake out eateries for hours in the hopes of catching a glimpse of their celluloid beaus.

“It’s still a little hard to believe that it’s gone this far,” said tall, tanned Jang Dong Gun, now one of the highest-paid actors in Asia, during an interview in Seoul.

Jang said he was shocked when, during his first trip to Vietnam in 1998 to promote his new Korean TV drama. Thousands of women mobbed his plane at the Hanoi airport and an armada of female fans on motor scooters chased his car all the way to his hotel.

In 2001, the Seoul-based manufacturer Daewoo Electronics hired him as its Vietnam spokesman. Over the past five years, the company said, its refrigerators’ market share in Vietnam went from a blip to a robust 34 percent.

Last year, Daniel Dae Kim, the Korean-born actor from the hit show “Lost,” was the only Asian to land a spot in People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive” edition. Entertainment industry leaders in Seoul credit the phenomenon to good marketing coupled with an uncanny response throughout Asia to the expressive nature of the South Koreans — long dubbed the Italians of Asia. A hearty diet and two years of forced military duty, industry leaders and fans insist, have made young South Korean men among the buffest in Asia.

Most important, however, has been the South Korean entertainment industry’s perfection of the strong, silent type on screen — typically rich, kind men with coincidentally striking looks and a tendency to shower women with unconditional love.