Pompeii and the Roman Villa

Okay, this photo has nothing to do with the exhibit at LACMA "Pompeii and the Roman Villa" but it is from my aerial photo shoot and I like it. So - on to thoughts about the exhibit.

We caught the tail end of the exhibit, it's closing soon and I was kinda interested but not really interested. It's not a period of art that I know that much about and most of my Roman history has been gleaned from reading Colleen McCullough novels (if I am even remembering the author's name right) and watching I, Claudius from the BBC. However I found the exhibit to be really interesting. In part because it takes art from a small selection of rich people's houses who were all competing to have the most lavish spread (Bernie Madoff anyone?) and they spent wads o' cash on decoration that we now call "Art." There is a disconnect between what we call "art" which we think of as a rarefied pursuit that is expensive and only for those in the know and what in ancient times was thought of as decoration and craft. Opera used to be the tele-novelas of the day - the sculptures and frescoes of the exhibit were things that people bought to live with - children played on the sculptures, people leaned against the painted walls. People create stories and narratives and pictures to entertain and amuse themselves and when we stick things in museums and put huge price tags on them and call them rare we take them out of the ordinary practice of meaning with in the culture and to a certain extent ossify them into non-meaning. Look at the hissy fits about the Met's new Tosca and LA Opera's Sigfried. Outside of the fact that they might be good or bad productions - the new stagings creates a new context for an old story and so brings these old texts somewhere into our contemporary life.
Anyway, the relatives of Julius Caesar and his cohorts were rich and lived with some really nice art. (They also lived with slaves but that's another topic) And it all got nicely saved when Vesuvius blew up in 79 AD. One of the things that I forgot was that the Romans had three point perspective. Certainly the ancient Egyptians didn't have it. But the Romans had it, the frescoes had perfect vanishing points and this absolutely breathtaking three panel fresco of Apollo and the Muses was incredible (The Moregine Triclinium: Apollo and the Muses). Apollo and the Muses are painted (with such tenderness) wandering among a colonnaded and trellised space with perfect perspective for the architecture they are pictured in. Simply gorgeous. And perspective becomes lost so soon after this. As the idea of art becomes entwined with Christianity perspective fractures and flattens. When you look at the ancient devotive icons from St. Sophia's space falls away as if insignificant - leaving you to worship only the sad eyes of the saint. Or if you look at some of the Madonna's from the 12 or 13 Century the landscape and the people collapse and circle around the holy pair.

Another landscape fresco was straight out of some surrealist nightmare. It depicted a garden with statuary and frescoes and heads flying around. What were those heads? Why are they just hanging out in the air? Who knows? It's creepy and beautiful at the same time. The birds are painted so specifically (This one's a swallow, this one a thrush) and these heads are flying around with the birds. Really odd, what were they thinking?

The beloved C. pointed out that there were also portraits of people who were recognizably different - people we would consider to be retarded, hermaphrodites. And that - in those days of Polytheism - that you had multiple models for the holy so that on one level everyone could partake of grace. With the advent of monotheism there becomes only one model of being - male becomes normal, there is no grace for difference. And the landscape changes to flat.

Friedl, Falling and Carrie, Hanging

I don't know about you, but I often feel like this. For example, just yesterday I was being shown another way to get out of "Gazelle" where you take your back arm and twist it around your back, under the bar and then let go of the foot that's wrapped around the rope - you know, the one thing that's keeping you up in the air in "Gazelle" and so when you let go you - you know gravity happens - and you fall. But your other arm holds you up and your other leg somehow hooks onto the bar which it wasn't doing before and you spin around and down and it's kinda shocking the first six times you do it.

More Fun in the Air

I took some photos at the studio today.

Fun in the Air

I took a few photos of my group's recital. I had a fun time, there were about ten people I think in the audience and that really helped because when it got to be my turn on the trapeze I really put a little something extra into my routine. I didn't spend a lot of time taking pictures during practice and I think that I could get some interesting snaps to work with if I spent some time working with the acrobat I was photographing. Luckily for me they are all performers (well, I'm not a performer, I may be a ham, but I'm not a performer) and so they like having photos taken of them.

Self Portraits with Bruises

Someone has asked me "What's up with the trapeze thing?" and well, I just want to be a middle-aged swinger. So I've started taking aerial acrobatics classes at a circus school. I know, first there was the feminist Karate Cult (Yes, Sensei!). Then there was the rhythm tap beatnik world-wide tap dance cult located in Soho. And now I am swinging from ropes or silks or a trapeze and I must say it is fun. I'm in beginning aerial acrobatics (I can do the splits, upside down, swinging!) and we're coming to the end of the semester so everyone is supposed to be working on "Short Choreography with at least three tricks." When I was in first grade we had a school show and my class had to be bunnies and I had to get a pail and long red false eyelashes and we skipped around in a circle with out eyelashes and pails and sat on the pails and did other things appropriate to the coordination level of five year olds. I remember the eyelashes and the pail so well. And sitting down on the pail. This is about my only performance so I remember it. Well I think this choreography with three tricks is pretty funny, about on a par with watching five year olds with eyelashes. But all the teachers and students are very serious about it and they are picking out music and practicing.

So I decide that I'm going to do my piece on the trapeze and not the silks and that it will be about (drum roll here) bent legs and straight legs. And while I was practicing one of my teachers said "Well before you do the Cross, you should do a Reverse Straddle and hang upside down and mirror the angles you've been doing with your legs with your arms. Then roll back up into the cross." Imagine sitting on a trapeze with your legs hanging down and your hands on each side of the rope. Now imagine stretching your arms strait out sideways and sliding your hips off the trapeze bar. Now you are supporting yourself with your arms against the rope and your legs are together pointing and you look like you've been crucified. Hence the name Cross.
Well I didn't know how to do a Reverse Straddle so after I got that down, I flipped back over and off the trapeze into the cross and hit it wrong and got tangled in the ropes. And you can see the results. On both right and left sides - six inch bruises.

So much has happened lately, all my random thoughts never got captured. And they were really timely, pithy and witty.
A tragedy.
Oh well. I'll try banal. Borscht. Yep. It's summer and pink is in. I made some Borscht and it was pink. Very pink. I used a recipe from David Yanis' book "A Platter of Figs" - K., a vegetarian gave the book to me, which is odd because most of the recipes are pretty meaty and pretty fussy if you ask me. But K. was coming over for dinner and so I made the borscht which was such a pretty colour and used chives from the garden. The recipe calls for cloves, whole coriander and way too much cayenne. The flavorings do give you a nice central European zing, but the coriander and cloves get ground up when you blend the soup which you are then supposed to strain. Well my soup didn't strain (and who likes to strain 8 cups of soup? That's fussy. I was trying to press the soup through a strainer and gave up - pureed beets are too thick to strain) and I didn't like the ground up spices. The next time I make this, because over all I liked it, I am going to put the spices in a cheesecloth pouch that I can pull out and I'm going to add a chuck of fresh ginger and reduce the cayenne.
It's also the season of rose. I was walking through the wine store and picking up some roses to try and find this season's rose. You know something refreshing and interesting that is food friendly and they decided to stick all the roses in the French section of the store. So I'm not wearing my reading glasses and I pick out 6 bottles of French rose, I particularly like the roses from the Lang D'Oc region (which I am misspelling the Lang part). When I get home I notice that one of the wines has an alien head on the bottle cap. And then I noticed that the etching of the vineyard on the label has a cigar shaped UFO on it! Sacre Bleu! Something must be up - since when have the French gotten funny about wine? Putting on my reading glasses I realized that this was from Bonny Doon Vineayrds and so of course it was from an iconoclastic American vineyard. The wine was lovely and at 12.00 with a UFO on the label is probably going to be this summer's house wine. We did try a New Zealand Rose that was awful, okay (that is just wrong!) and bitter. Yuck!

I have also been making a lot of Farro salads. This one has fava beans, scallions, mint in a olive oil and meyer lemon vinaigrette. This was good with a few grilled shrimps on top. My recipe for Farro says to soak it overnight and boil it for a couple of hours, like it was a legume instead of a grain. I find that if I soak it for a couple of hours it cooks within 30 minutes making it easy to cook up, cool off and through some vegies and dressing on.

Handy and Fun in the Great Recession

So being unsuccessful at beer traps for the snails I have dreams of wrapping m plants in copper which apparently gives the little things an electrical shock, but you have to use a lot of copper (which is expensive and has an impact on the earth)because some of them can nimbly maneuver themselves OVER the copper barrier. The copper barrier tape I saw at the hardware store was about two inches wide. Okay, imagine a slug or snail that was large enough to hop over a two inch wide copper barrier. This is why I don't live in the Amazonian rain forest where slugs get so large they feed a family of five.

Instead I've been having a wee bit of coffee and going out and picking the little buggers. They reproduce at a tremendous rate and I got about two pounds of young ones yesterday morning. But it's gross and it would help to have a wee drop o brandy in the coffee to do the work. But I refrain. Partly because we can't afford brandy and partly because it's not on the diet. Speaking of brandy in the morning, I was walking the pooches and my unemployed neighbor was walking his. He's been out of work for three months now and is starting to worry. He had either been out partying all night or he had been putting brandy in his coffee for he was tipsy and confided to me that he was not having fun looking for work. He had to fill out forms on the internet and he didn't want to make less than 250k. I thought "No wonder his house is so much nicer than mine and he has a pool and a French Bull Dog!" And then I thought, wow if I made 250k I'd live in a better neighborhood, I have to have the City of LA Graffiti Removal Hotline on my phone. Which just goes to show you that we live in a way mixed neighborhood.

I had ponied up 20 dollars in January for a sweater from J. Crew. It was a white v-neck sweater in cotton and cashmere and for 20 bucks it was a good comfy buy. I promptly spilled red wine on it and so I have drips down my chest that diligent application of eco-friendly stain remover wont remove. So I decided to save my coffee grounds and see if I could use them to dye my sweater. This didn't work. I can still see the red wine stains and instead of a white sweater I have a dingy sweater that isn't brown and isn't white.

Another money saving idea was to take some wine that we got over the holidays that we weren't going to drink and make wine vinegar. Mark Bittman gives an easy recipe (wine, water, vinegar, jar, cheesecloth, time) and pooh poohs anyone who would spend hard earned bucks on vinegar. So I put red wine and water and organic vinegar into a jar and 6 weeks later --- I don't have vinegar. I have something that tastes nice and mellow - like a flabby merlot which amazingly enough, is what I used as the wine.

So I have to dump this and see if I can make some wine from the La Mancha Recession Red I pick up at Trader Joe's. But I have a lot of this vinegar wine mixture and I can't decide what to do with it. It's not like it's vinegar so I can't clean the house with it or use it in salad dressings. I'm thinking the acid might kill the SNAILS, but what if the reservatrol in the wine makes SUPER SNAILS? Ones that grow large enough to go over a two inch barrier???? I'm also tempted to see if I can use it to dye the dingy sweater with stains - the stains are red wine (but a pinot noir) and the wine is red (but it's merlot, will it match?) and vinegar sets dies. But then I'll have a dingy red sweater with stains that smells like coffee, vinegar and wine. Maybe I'll put up a poll and let my friends decide - experiment with snail control or dye dingy sweater?

SOS - Big Art Group

So last weekend, in a fit of devil may care spending we went to the theatre. Unlike going to a broadway play, the symphony or the opera, CalArts' Red Cat is an affordable venture if you are willing to see stuff that is off the beaten track. I, for one, am obviously off the beaten track, so I've enjoyed everything I've seen at Red Cat, while I have spent money on Broadway tickets and been totally grossed out. I remember being appalled at seeing a revival of the Music Man - the content of the play was reprehensible and the direction was something to the effect of let's try and be as bland as possible for the IOWANS who are VISITING our FAIR CITY who would not be able to understand anything sophisticated and who will be wowed(!) by a little breaking the third wall by having a marching band go up the aisle.
So for a mere 30 bucks we saw Caden Manson's group perform SOS. It was a loud play with many video screens that were edited on the fly with the actors performing in front of small video cameras and changing scenes were created by holding up postcards for backdrops. There were three lines of action - one was Logan's Run with Plushies, another was Valley Girl Consumer Competition and the third was Bader-Meinhoff America's Top Model. In the end all of the actors encased themselves in balloon armor and had a fight.
At one point the contestants in Bader-Meinhoff America's Top Model were having a car chase. One actor held cards of streets up to a camera. Another actor held cut outs of a car hood, roof and windshield up to another camera. Two Actors stood in front of a camera - while another one (in the car behind) was in front of a fourth. Edited together it looked like there were two people careening in a car through the streets of a city with another person in hot pursuit behind them. The plushies - See here for a definition - were actors dressed in plush-outfits representing a raccoon, bunny, deer and wolf (I knew something was up when there was a carnivore amongst the ranks, quite frankly, that was a bit that you could see was coming from miles off) with a camera strapped on a pole in front of them and a flashlight that they could use to illuminate their faces. It was always dark during these scenes and the way to see the actors was to follow their flashlight faces or to watch the video screens which could only see the actors who had their flashlights on. Very fun.
Last weekend we also went to the Hammer to see Nine Lives work of 9 LA based artists. It was fun to see Jeffrey Valance's work again - I dimly remember him from nine thousand years ago and it's nice to see him alive and kicking, but the work I thought was totally standout in the exhibit was a series of large scale photos (I wouldn't be able to fit one in my house - don't have a wall big enough) about motion and stillness. They were black and white photos, exquisitely printed of a moving cat - where the exposure was long so that the cat was a blur, except for one where the cat was sitting curled up and still. Gorgeous work, really gorgeous.

Even More Fun!

So I have discovered the recession proof industry - exterminators!

Meanwhile, I have spent 2.35 cents on beer and lured one, count em, one snail to its death.

So last week I noticed two little black dots on the living room wall and the little black dots were bumpy - extruding out from the walls, I pushed on the bumps and they crumbled to the ground and there were two little round black holes in the wall. Yes, traveling, swarming, subterranean termites have taken residence in my wall. Well, they are not living in the wall, they are living underneath my house in some sort of hive and they crawl up the wall to eat the bearing part of my load bearing wall. They swarm! Yuck!

So the Western Exterminator people can't visit me for ten days, they are too busy! Hence the thought - I need to become an exterminator! Termites don't downsize with the economy!

Anyway with work slowing down and no end in sight to work slowing down, I am not panicking (like a boyscout I am always prepared! To panic that is!) about the fact that I need to spend 2500 to stop the evil fuckers from eating my home. The Orkin man managed to be able to fit me in and so he told me that I have DRYWOOD termite as well and that I would have to tent my house. That's another 2500 bucks!

Now, I'm a city girl. I like cities. I've tried to live in medium sized cities and it was like purgatory - I like my cities big, full of museums and traveling bands and weird performance artists. I like my cities full of people and interesting things to do. I live in the middle of Los Angeles. I expect Gang graffiti. Instead I am also beset with: snails, fecund feral cats, raccoons, crows, wasps, two kinds of termites. This is why I don't live in nature - imagine what kinds of things live there???

So to calm myself down about my bugs and my finances I went to the kitchen and started washing dishes. I stared at the avocado tree which seems to be flowering and noticed a whole bunch of bee activity there. So my gaze wandered over to the lemon tree - which is also flowering, lovely scented flowers whose aroma wafts into my bedroom - and it was also filled with bees. Lots of bees. Way too many bees. Bees that seemed to be flying from my lemon tree to the avocado tree to the neighbor's vents in their wall. Yes, we now have a bee hive to contend with! Undoubtedly when they smoke the bees out of their house they'll just move one house down - after all there's lots of company at my place.

More fun things to do in the depression

No, this isn't a picture of my victory garden.

The best thing I've found to do with the nutty little white flowers that bloom when your arugula bolts and matures (which hasn't stopped me eating the greens) is to sprinkle them on tomato soup. The red soup and the little white flowers are very pretty. They are also nice in salads. But really this whole flower eating business has gotten out of hand (and is so rather excessive in this moment of less is more.) The local pizza delivery place puts handful of edible flowers in their salad (yes, that is a clue that it is not a chain pizza joint, but as one who has truly been Michael Pollen-ated, local and organic) and I want lettuces in my salad and not flowers.

Anyway, the arugula has got to go, not only is it four feet tall, not only is it blocking the afternoon sun from my romaine lettuce starts, not only am I bored with the pretty flowers, but it HARBORS SNAILS!

Ick. There is really nothing ickier than skipping out to your garden and picking a few greens - tossing them (tra la, tra la!) into a sink full of water and pulling them out to find a whole bunch of snails floating in your sink, I mean I am not French. Ick, snails.

There is an old tale of Snail Control that involves putting beer in a shallow pan in the garden - the snails are attracted to the yeast in the beer, fall into the shallow pan and voila dead snails. Repeat until snails are controlled.

So off I go, like an undergraduate, to find cheap beer. Standing in the aisle of the drug store (note there is no cheap beer at the whole paycheck) I ponder my choices, would the snails like a Lite beer or would they prefer the full flavor of Budweiser? Can I actually buy Coors Lite? An awful beer from an awful company? I've never bought Coors in my life - I was of an age to be aware of beer, but unable to buy beer when we were boycotting Coors for their homophobic and anti-union actions, so I am sure that the snails won't be attracted to it either. No, no Coors lite for them, so I go with Bud, it's 30 cents more but it has that attractive and retro red label that I remember from my childhood, and the Clydesdale horses, and plus when I was 17 I lived in a slum two blocks away from the Busch cannery in the Valley and breathed in the smell of hops on most days.

I bury a shallow dish near the borage which is a decoy plant, a plant you plant so the snails and bugs leave your real plants alone. I figure the beer will lure the herd of snails amidst the borage.

Now the problem with the beer thing, is that you have to wake up in the morning and dispose of a whole bunch of slimy icky nasty gross things. So I go to bed with trepidation about the whole disposal thing.

Not that I should have worried, there were snail trails everywhere glistening in the morning sun, but not one snail was in the dish.

So the experiment will have to continue.

Things to do during the New Depression

Since the stock market decided to go up four days in a row last week - I thought I would engage in some high finance. Actually the first day the stock market went up, I was like Hurray! The S&P is now at 712 points! I had been meaning - oh for the past three years or four years to move my 401(k) into an IRA; and since January I've been pegging when I would do it to the S&P. So for a while I was like, when the S&P is at 900 points again, I'll transfer. Then it was, well, when the S&P is at 850 points again, I'll transfer. Next it was when the S&P is 800 points, I'll make my move! Then well, when it's over 700 I'll go. So I transferred the money but the market continued to go up and the S&P ended at about 756 - while I had cleverly bowed out at 714. So don't count on me for stock tips!
In this new era of pinching pennies I have started composting (who needs to buy fertilizer?!?) and have started making my own vinegar. This entails mixing wine, vinegar mother and water in a large non-metallic jar and having it hang around in a warm place breathing until the wine has miraculously turned into vinegar. So I have a bunch of Merlot hanging out in a jar with some vinegar - and now I have to find a place to put it where it won't be in the way and won't be accidentally knocked over - because two bottles of red wine and a bottle of vinegar knocked over would probably create some horrid chemical bond with the residue of Murphy's oil soap that I use to wash the wood floors and I can imagine the red liquid moving like wildfire on my floor, burning it's way down, down, down to the basement. And goddess knows that no one has any spare let's replace the floor cash around. So I have put the jar of about two liters of liquid in the bathroom, on the floor of the shower (a handy drain!) underneath the camera enlarger. But it's a little weird to have guests use a bathroom that has a vat of vinegar wine as aromatherapy in it. So when guests come I hide the vinegar\wine mixture in the outdoor coat closet, which makes all the coats smell like - you guessed it - wine!

We are also composting. The compost media posse make it seem like "Oh! Just Throw your lettuce scraps in here and VOILA! Dirt!!!!!" But then you actually get the instructions and you have to have the right mix of brown vs. green, you have to turn it over, you have to add dirt, you have to add yard waste but not weeds! My yard waste is weeds! You have to add paper, but not printed paper or white paper and you have to keep it all in balance or you start getting little bugs flying around. So I have bugs.

I diagnose the compost heap - not enough "Brown". So how do I get more brown? My garden is not supplying it. I start walking around with bags and a rake and start raking other people's leaves. Look there's the crazy lady stealing leaves!

Now I just need to find some ducks to eat the snails that are eating my chard!

My cousin went to the Alamo Movie set and the "Marshall" an Alamo Movie Historian who dresses up like a Marshall, gave him this photo of my grandfather and Richard Widmark. If you peer past grand papa you can see some extras in costume.

I was in the Delta a while ago and came across this sign for Bab's Delta Diner - a great place for breakfast before you go fishing, which of course you can't do since the California salmon fisheries have collapsed.

A Great Weekend, Beach, Dogs and Expiremental Theatre

Last Sunday we went to Red Cat to see Teatro Ciertos Habitantes perform Monsters and Prodigies: The History of the Castrati Which was hilarious and beautiful and not only was there a beautiful horse on stage there was a food fight! Yea! Teatro Ciertos Habitantes is a theatre collective based in Mexico where they live in a forest and try and preserve the eco system and create plays.
On Saturday we went to the Huntington Beach Dog Park to meet other pbgvs and that was swell.
Beso of course was the total ID. Total Id - I'm not sure who the superego was but Beso was the Id. He ran into the water, ran up on the sand, rolled around in the sand, humped a few dogs, ran in the water, rolled in the sand, tried to rip the treats out of passing strangers pockets and bags, humped a bit more and gave voice freely. Cartman won the second runner up in the Id category, while I think that Cooper won the most photogenic. I didn't get a good photo of Frankie, but Beso met a cousin of his, Zoe and I have a shot of them together.

Here are some photos.

More doggie photos

What a difference a Day Makes

One thing you can say about the new Obama administration - they're quick! They've already got a new whitehouse.gov site up and running - apparently along with the secret codes for the nuclear bombs and the red phone you get the web masters passwords at 12:01 as well.

So the thing about the new white house web site that TRULY differentiates itself from the previous white house web site is that you are ONE CLICK away from sending a comment to the new administration. You couldn't email Bush no matter how you clicked around the old site. It drove me insane because I would have to snail mail my hate messages and waste money on postage when we have all this TECHNOLOGY that makes it easy to communicate and is the whole purpose of having a web site really - two way communication. So it was another confusing item about the old evil Bush administration - you had to wonder - did they NOT WANT INPUT FROM THE PEOPLE?????? Or were they STUPID ABOUT TECHNOLOGY??????????????? Did they really think they could just put up pictures of Barny the dog and think that the citizens of the US were fooled into thinking that they were doing good? Well I don't agree with any of his policies - like continuing to advance global warming, torturing prisoners and spying on us citizens and outing secret agents but hey that little Scottie Terrier sure is cute, surely his master has something on the ball.
Well the new site is simple, clear and easy to use. You can easily look at the president's agenda. Bravo!
Of course, once they get a dog (which will not be cuter than my dogs) I wouldn't mind a photo or two of the pooch on the site.

Look what Is, amazingly, still there

After 8 years of the Bushie non-scientific hate agenda.

What you can't see here in this photo I took last year when I was in Yosemite is the animals that are not there thanks to the Bush administration yanking half the flora and fauna of the US off the endangered species list and the fact that what's left of the fauna is moving higher up the mountain because their environment is getting warmer - however trees find it harder to pack up and move. Maybe no one told old W that trees were unlike Ents from the Lord of the Rings. 6 days before leaving office the Bush administration de-listed the Grey Wolf from the ESA.