Pottering About

I've never read the Harry Potter books though my friend Jeff has already cast Daniel Radcliffe as me in the forthcoming, sure to be ridiculous, movie of my life. Newcomer producer Jeff swears we met at Santa Monica College in Home Ec 101, but I beg to differ: I met him panhandling outside some fancy shop on La Brea Boulevard. Back when I worked in movie advertising the company worked on the first Potter movie for a couple of weeks before Warner's moved the project elsewhere. We each received a copy of the book to get us into the swing, but in that stressed out world, when you move on, you move on like it never happened. The latest hottest brief, book or script takes precedence. So I didn't read that one or any of the other Potter books and each new movie remains a fresh treat. Controversial or not, I find them very entertaining, and we went to see the latest last week at The Vista Theater, a block from where I live. The Vista Theater has been restored during my time in the neighborhood and there is no place in the world that I like to see a movie more. The Vista has wide open aisles and a wooden floor sprung like timpani, which bounces and magnifies the sound of its remarkable speaker system. Sound has become one of the most interesting parts of a movie for me and a concrete floor does nothing but soak up the acoustics in most other theaters. The Vista was built with remnants of the set for D.W. Griffith's Intolerance in the late 1920's, filmed on that site and which provided inspiration for architectural elements at Hollywood and Highland which houses the Oscar driven Kodak Theater, and in The Vista some of the original re-gilded golden busts look down at you as you sit in front of its single silk framed screen. It is now privately owned. I am excited by the fact that I live in a building that was part of the original studio row.

Hogwart's Dining Hall, in the first of the Potter movies, was filmed on location in a place where I ate frequently for the first two years of my tenure as an Oxford undergraduate until I took to the countryside in my last year. Lunch and dinner were served to us by our Scouts, individuals assigned to our residential staircases and who took care of our apartments and us. To attend Oxford University, a federation of 40 or so colleges, one has to be admitted to one of them to attend The University, and I was absorbed into Christ Church (they drop the "college" nomenclature). Built around Oxford Cathedral by Cardinal Wolsey as his country seat, it was quickly appropriated by Henry VIII when Wolsey fell out of favor. It is mentioned a couple of times in The Tudors, Showtime's semi-fictional, melodramatic and rather strange miniseries that has just ended here on cable TV. I don't subscribe to cable and my neighbor Shauna Tivoed it for me as she thought it was important that I see it. As a result of Christ Church's passage of ownership, the reigning monarch is always its head, and is called The Patron. Charles I, as Patron, held court here, on the run, from The Deanery during The Civil War and surrendered to Oliver Cromwell from there after he lost The Battle of Oxford. Like Wolsey before him, Charles, having tested Cromwell's favor, subsequently lost his head and then the country spent 10 years or so under Cromwell's Protectorate. Since then, traditionally, Christ Church is the College of England's Princes and aristocrats if they attend Oxford. Christ Church is the largest College in The University with about 350 Members. "Students", at Christ Church are actually the college faculty, the students are called "Members". I have no idea what the current figures are but the entire university in those days numbered but 7,000 heads. As a Member of Christ Church, the staircase to Hall, Hall itself, and The Cathedral Cloisters, in the Potter films are familiar. The success of the movie franchise means that all these places have been rebuilt digitally and on permanent set to avoid regularly disrupting life at the college. After all, in England, you are instilled early on with the idea that food is mostly a time to enjoy bounty and to "network", and that , in my time was considered an important part of an education. Would not be good to perpetually interrupt that. The Hall, its gothic staircase, and the cloisters, can be seen here in the college's excellent QTVR virtual tour.

Institutional food is always lacking and I remember little of the food served there. If one got tired of it, The Sorbonne, which closed its doors in the early 90s, served a good Rable de Lièvre (saddle of hare) in an alleyway round the corner from the college above The High, or if you felt like venturing further there was the excellent Quat' Saisons then in not so grand a location. I do remember trying to get invited to next-door Merton College as often as possible, as some rich American had left an endowment to them just for food, and any day of the week you were able to choose from roast duck or beef and a dozen other main dishes decently cooked. Amongst the most pleasant memories of dining at Ch Ch was sitting at the long tables with those glowing lamps neatly interspersed along them, we in our gowns, our voices rising up into the rafters, dark wooded paneling and ghostly portraits, many by the leading practitioners of each century on English soil. I personally loved the Lely's, a Dutch portraitist who did well in England during the 17th century. I remember The Grace spoken in latin by a Scholar stood beside their table at one of the large fireplaces near High Table before we ate, and the feigned boredom of many of The Dons at High Table. I have not yet used my right to sit at High Table.

A great visual joke in the Potter movies is the attention to detail with regard to the arrangement of food down the center of the long tables in Hogwart's Hall. In this last movie I felt some envy, for they seemed cornucopial in a Regency sense, smacking of Careme's accomplishments, visually at least. If school cooking had been this elaborate back in my time, even and only with regard to presentation of such don't touch just look centerpieces, you might have justifiably called us all "spoiled". I haven't had to deal with institutional cooking since those days, except for a couple of times in a federally funded kitchen here in Southern California, and I'm glad to say the food there was worse than anything I remember before at University in England, or at prep school where we were subjected to pretty horrible spam fritters and toad in the hole. Like bad teeth, bad food is one of those myths we Americans love to perpetuate about the English.