Peeb Nation

Does this X-Ray Make me Look Fat?

2011-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

So I really don't spend a lot of time worrying about my health or searching the web for my symptoms. I know that I am not a medical professional and so I don't like to diagnose myself. And I really like the fact that lately a lot of my medical imaging is getting digitized. For example, I have the digitized versions of my ultrasounds that show my cancer and mammograms that perniciously don't show my cancer. So I banged up my shoulder pretty awful last October and my chiropractor (after forbidding me to be on the trapeze) decided that this had gone on a little too long and so ordered me to have a shoulder X-Ray. And Tony, the X-ray tech handed me a CD of my pix. So I just popped this CD into my computer and had a total melt down. Um - no wonder my shoulder hurts I appear to have some random flecks of debris in my side. But how do I google this? It looks like I have sprinkles in my shoulder. Could it be the dreaded Cupcake form of arthritis? Maybe it's the frozen banana sclerotic disease? I would love to know what the hell these things are. And I have no idea how to search for this.

Ponies!

2011-03-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

So we went to the horse show, Cavalia, and it was spectacular. Literally a spectacle. There was some sort of theme about horses and mankind, but you couldn't really tell because there were horses! And Acrobats! And Aerialists! And trick riders! And magic vanishing ponds and trampolines!

It was a spectacle, and I saw it. And I never need to see it again. Once is enough in some senses and this is one of them.

Oh Dear Where has the time gone?

2011-02-19T18:02:00.000-08:00

So I keep on meaning to write a billion blogs on lots of topics with my usual acerbic wit and charm. But then I can't face turning on the computer to do fun stuff after being on the computer all day long.

However, I did mean to use this blog to write about the shows and stuff that I have seen so that I could remember what it was I saw. So instead of talking about Egypt or the fascinating article on how Texas has the worst schools and the highest teen pregnancy rate and how they only do abstinence sex education so there are just going to be more and more kids in Texas getting bad educations and pregnant which you know, won't help the fiscal problems of Texas. But no, I need to talk about Hair.

Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair Hair long beautiful Hair.

We saw Hair at the Pantages in Hollywood and it was a very, very fun show. The beloved C and the sister-out-law had seen Hair about 7 or 8 times when they were 6 and 7 so it was sort of a family nostalgia event that the sister-out-law organized.

Very fun show, very anti-war, lots of good tunes. Lots of very athletic dancing and at the end there is a "love in" of audience participation dancing and you would think the actors would be tired and want to stop dancing but there's another 20 minutes of applause audience participation dancing at the end. I suppose to make up for the fact that Claude dies. Yes, Claude gets killed in Vietnam. And we see the body. Unlike today's wars where we weren't allowed to. You barely know that people, our troops are dying and getting blown up. Hmmm. Hair was rather topical.
And much better than the Music Man, a show that the father-out-law once was nice enough to take me to which I thought was a misogynist piece of crap with some okay tunes. I've been humming Carbon Monoxide ever since. And very moving at the end.

We also, like a gazillion years ago in November saw Dengue Fever perform live during a screening of the classic "Lost World." Lost World really sets up the classic narrative arc of the white (British) folks exploring the unknown (Africa, Asia, South America) finding some strange beast (Tarzan, Dinosaurs, King Kong) and bringing them back to civilization and bad things happen. For example in this film they bring back a poor brontosaurus to jolly old London and it is hungry and confused and wants to find some greenery and so it just trashes London (this is a silent film obviously and it's before King Kong and Godzilla, but it is a very good large animal trashes city sequence) trying to find something to eat. The animation is so incredible you really felt the pathos of the brontosaurus and when it finally went off of London Bridge you hoped it would be able to swim back to South America.
Dengue Fever of course was totally awesome. They're one of my favorite bands.

Finally we went to LACMA and did not get stuck in the BCAM Barbara Krueger elevator.
We saw the exhibit "India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow" and since I know squat about the subject I actually read the signs. It was really fascinating. One thing I've always wondered about some Persian and Indian paintings, is about the buildings. The paintings have the flatness common to paintings that are not using 3 point perspective (or Renaissance Perspective) so things stack up in these novel ways and I could never quite tell what the buildings were like. They seemed to be endless, with patios and courtyards and arched walkways and second and third stories with large balconies. And I couldn't figure it out. Well there is an entire room where they have reproduced a large panorama of the city taken in the 19th Century of the palace (or the ruins of the palace) and holy cow! There are courtyards and colonnades and arches and open air patios and gazebos and it is endless. The palace goes on forever. So that answered that question.

The other thing this exhibit had was a painting from 1860 or so, and I guess I should say that Lucknow was primarily an Islamic city, but there was a painting of Mohamed lying on a bed with the Angel Gabriel. Which you know, sort of blew my mind in a whole bunch of ways.

Cheers!

Some Refreshing Thoughts amidst the Clamour of Hate

2010-09-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I am a non-theist but I think that people should be able to believe in a god if they must. And when I lived in New York and had to walk home amidst the rubble of my city 9 years ago to my 'hood in Brooklyn near Atlantic Ave., I can only say that there was an outpouring of community support for our Muslim falafel vendors. And I really resent the stupid comments of New Gingrich et al, about an Islamic Cultural Center in downtown Manhattan that will help serve all of the people of New York like the Jewish Cultural Center (which it's kinda modeled on, I hear) does.
Extremists who cloak themselves in religion and call for the deaths of my friend are complete fucking assholes who brain wash and isolate "followers" so that they commit evil, evil acts. And so it is refreshing to see this petition that defends the right to live and to speak of my friend Molly Norris who has been put on an Al Queda "hit list" because some people want to spread their evil so they can gain power.
And this is also an example of what I keep on saying about this country and the West and the Enlightenment ideas that founded this country. "We Win By Being Better Than Them." Better means more tolerant, more educated, more rule of law, more transparent in our democracy and less torture, less corruption, with better senses of humor. And this petition is a wonderful example of Being Better.

Fauna - Mega and Micro

2010-07-05T11:56:00.002-07:00

I was walking the dogs at the park at the La Brea Tar Pits and I was stunned to notice a sign saying that it was "Megafauna Awareness Day" Actually I had MISSED MEGAFAUNA awareness day.

Who doesn't like a day devoted to animals like the giant sloth, the Megatherium, the Diprotodon, a hippopotumus sized marsupial and my favorite the largest carnivorous marsupial, the Thylacine, which became extinct in the 1920s, unlike the Sloth which became extinct in the Pleistocene era. Most of the really good megafaunas died out in the Pleistocene but we have some elephants and whales still around that are classified as megafauna.

Megafauna means big animal and in general they are classified as bigger than humans. Hmmmm. Anyway, someone mentioned that I hadn't been posting any photos of the dogs lately, so I decided to take some snaps of them as MegaPBGV's. Here the towering Lechus MegaPBGVus is passively sitting. And below the Gigantorus Besosus is wondering what the heck I put on his pillow.

The dogs have definite seasons, like Fig Season (squirrels in fig tree), Feioja Season (squirrels in Feioja tree) and Avocado Season (squirrels in avocado season) which in a dog bred to hunt squirrels and vocalize about it is always a pleasant thing for the neighbors. Lately it has been little feral kitten jungle gym in the front garden season, which has kept the dogs in an aroused frenzy for several weeks now. They howl, run from front window to front gate, howl, bark and in general pull me off my feet when I try to take them for a walk. Often I end up in the shrubbery.

The other thing about feral kitten season is that all the neighbors walk around in the front yard looking at the kittens, feeding the kittens, trying to catch the kittens (ha!) which also arouses the dogs. It also means that I have to be a little more careful about being clothed.

A couple of nights ago the feral kitten coalition was wandering around the front yard. I was alarmed at first, who are these people in my front yard? But they had traps and were able to trap two of the kittens (out of six!) immediately. They were working on the whole gaggle of feral cats and kittens in the hood, and they baited some traps in our front yard and left to see what was going on down the block. I went back inside and both dogs rushed out screaming like banshees. Luckily the dogs were concentrated on the area in our front yard known as kitten jungle gym so the beloved C was able to grab Beso. Leche on the other hand, the little food hound, was actually in a trap eating the bait. She was so happy, eating! Unauthorized Eating! Yea!

And then she calmed down and went uh-oh. She had dived into the trap, couldn't back out, couldn't stand, couldn't go forward. Poor dear, she was trapped!

The Possibility of Disaster

2010-06-01T09:54:00.001-07:00

You know, one of the things that amazes me to no end is how often people in cars just cut in front of you, leaving precious little space and causing you to have to brake hard and hopefully not have the asshole tailgating you rear end you.

And it's a whole bunch of things about this that amazes me. Did they not go to physics class and learn about MASS and INERTIA?

But what it really is is that they can't imagine disaster.

Well, I can. But humans seem to be resistant to imagining the worst. The real actual worst.

For example, even though some people at British Petroleum were very open about how difficult it is to drill deep water wells, other people at BP were making decisions to use cheaper, weaker, pipes that they had seen blow before and that violated BP's safety standards. (See this article in the NYTimes "Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig") So even though people were aware that things could go wrong, they didn't imagine that it could actually go so spectacularly wrong and couldn't think strategically about what would happen if it did. Because they were expecting everything to be fine.

Just like, how did Condi Rice put it?, no one could know that terrorists would strike the U.S., even though there was a security memo saying exactly that.

Or just like everyone knew that housing prices were totally askew and that there was a bubble but we continued to act like housing prices could never fall, that buying mortgage based assets that were based on sub-prime loans that were rated A by Moodys or S&P because they were being paid by the issuer was not Damocles's Sword about to fall on our little heads. The occasional nay sayers of this scheme were ignored as no fun, and of course the mortgage crisis unraveled a whole lot more, no one was expecting total economic collapse.

I keep on hearing about "Strategic Thinking" and how the best and the brightest of the business world are strategic thinkers. And I think not. If strategy, as defined by my Oxford English Dictionary is "a plan for successful action based on the rationality and interdependence of the moves of opposing or competing participants." then strategy needs to incorporate the possibility of disaster. The worst case scenario can happen. And it can happen suddenly and blow you out of the water.

MOCA Collection; Matisse: Radical Invention

2010-04-07T09:48:00.000-07:00

I was walking the dogs one morning and thinking about Mark Rothko's paintings and how one needed to see them physically to understand them. Just seeing a reproduction wouldn't give you a sense of the scale or the subtlety of the surface as shades move into one another, how things glow. You get a sense that they are people when you stand in front of them because you have your physical body in front of the physical painting.

So I popped off to MOCA to see the collection which everyone is rightly excited about. It is a nice collection of modernism. And there, right in front was an entire room of Rothko's. Man that guy could push paint. It was like seeing the room of Monet's waterlillies at MOMA where you need a recovery room. I felt like maybe I should just waver in my physicality. And then it was off to another room of Franz Klines - those winter landscapes of gesture. So beautiful.
Anyway there were some spectacular paintings from the 50's and early 60's and then you wandered into some great Louise Nevelson sculptures and then on into the Rauschenberg combines and Johns - great messy paintings with the kitchen sink thrown in - very exuberant.
The show was arranged roughly chronologically for a large part. The photographic collection was incredible. In the 50's and 60's you have all these beautifully observed black and white prints from Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Then the 70's happen and painting sort of stops. People paint paintings of stripes. Stripe paintings are kind of boring, especially walking through entire galleries of them. Painting was just not happening. Other things were like performance, conceptual art and photography. For example there was a hilarious Bruce Nauman where you walked through a square box hallway, there was a small black and white tv monitor on the floor in each corner and a small camera pointed at each corner which fed a one monitor back, so you were constantly chasing yourself, seeing just a hint of your back turning the corner on the far monitor you were approaching. It's like you were chasing your ghost. Another thing that starts happening is more color photography, the curators made a Nan Goldin room that is totally devastating.
Leaving the exhibit you pass a series of photographs documenting performances or earth works by the artist Ana Mendieta which are so evocative of loss. The human figure making a mark on the earth and leaving, graves - the metaphors are so rich when you look at the work, it is such a shame she died so tragically.
Then I popped off to Chicago and while there I did a brief run through of the Matisse show there. It's late work for him (and as opposed to the LACMA exhibit of Renoir late work which is go awful) it has some gorgeous important work in it. Matisse understood the 9000 shades of blue in the world. He understood green. He understood shapes. In the painting the Moroccans, he uses the shape of a turban to echo the shape of the mosque domes.

How it became Now: Part 4

2010-03-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

Waves
Cancer is like having a tsunami pick you up, toss you around, throw you down and when you are finished coughing up water and look around, thankful to be alive even though you are in pain, the landscape has changed. Everything looks similar but different. Things you took for granted are missing - like the Sphinx's nose. Things you didn't imagine together are juxtaposed. You don't know where you are supposed to go now. You can stand, but don't really feel like it.

Floor
One thing that becomes a vast unexplored territory after surgery is the floor. If something is on the floor, it becomes lost, unavailable. My shoes have gone to Siberia for a while. Slip ons become terribly exciting. I am lucky because I was doing so many squats in my aerial conditioning class, my legs remember how to do a grand plie and so I can, occasionally pick up something off the ground.

Waiting Room
The first time I walked into the radiation waiting room I realized: "This is it, I am ill." Nothing makes you feel sicker than putting on a blue gown and waiting for your turn with everyone else who is in a blue gown, all with burned flesh.
A young bald woman starts talking to me and she pulls aside her gown and shows me - her burned flesh. The top of her breast is dark, blackish and she spends most of the day putting aloe on. She has a black Louise Brooks style wig that she pulls out to show me.
It's the breast cancer women who are the Chatty Cathy's of the radiation waiting room. We talk and get to know one another and swap stories and tips. Other people are not as talky, mainly because they are sick. Radiation makes you really tired and then you are tired from the surgery and the chemo. And the prostate guys, they don't talk at all.

Fashion
There's a kind of hierarchy in the radiation waiting room. If you are getting balloon radiation (which is rarer because all the things need to line up - clear lymph nodes, no metathesis etc.) there is a kind of awe and jealousy. Partially because you only have ten treatments, instead of 33. Partially because if you get cancer again you can save your breast again. If you have regular radiation and you get cancer again, you have to have a mastectomy. With balloon radiation you can have another lumpectomy and you can have regular radiation.
On the morning of my second visit I am clued into this fact: if you are doing balloon radiation you don't need the gown. You can just wear a button front shirt. So again, those of us with balloon radiation are in a different class. I wear my zip front hoodie and my coral pashmina because it is cold, and I am afraid of being cold. As the week wears on I notice that other people are accessorizing with wraps. I have always been fashion forward, a trend setter. I become friendly with the woman, C. who has the appointment after me, she was a Klingon on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Of course, I am having radiation with a Klingon. I rent one of her movies from the 70's and she does a little strip tease in it. Her breasts are cute. C has been doing "natural" estrogen as advocated by Suzanne Summers who is not a doctor and who is famous for being on a stupid sitcom in the 70's and getting fired from it. The doctors tell C. that she has cancer because she's been taking these drugs. She can't imagine a life without estrogen.

Process:
I wait until my nurse comes to get me. L. walks me to the x-ray room. The machine bed is high and they have a step stool so you can climb aboard. I wonder how people who are ill and not as athletic as I am get on and off. F., the x-ray guy says hi to me and L. and F. set me up. L. places a big washer on the top of my breast. F. lines me up and takes the snap. They look at the x-ray and decide if it's good or not. If it's good they print it for the physicist and the radiation oncologist. The big washer is supposed to be the same size as my balloon, so they can see if I'm leaking or not.

Then L. walks with me to the radiation room. She helps me lie down on the bed and then moves the radiation safe into position.
The radiation safe looks like a cross between R2D2 and a hair dryer with a dial along the snout of the hair dryer part that contains numbered ports. The higher the number the larger the seed of radioactive material.

There's a sheet of paper with my name and the instructions - I'm DIAL ONE, port three and tube one. L. removes my surgical bra and removes my bandages and cleans me up a bit. She then takes tube one and plugs one end of it into the dial labeled ONE on the radiation safe. She clicks it into position. Then she plugs the other end of the tube into port number three in my balloon catheter. The physicist comes in to check. The radiation oncologist comes in to check. The radiation girl comes in with a Geiger counter and measures the radiation in my breast (which should be none) and the radiation from the radiation safe (which should be none). And then everyone leaves and they shut the three inch thick door because I am about to get radiated.

Iridium is the 77th element on the periodic table and has an atomic weight of 192.217 and a half life of about 90 days. A piece of Iridium is on a string in the radiation safe. The Iridium seed is supposed to come up the tube into my balloon and radiate me internally.

It sounds like an Italian slurping spaghetti as it comes up the tube. That's how I know it's coming. It bursts into my balloon and makes the liquid vibrate. It takes 12 minutes lying there, knowing I have something very dangerous in my body. Every once in a while the Iridium hits something and I'm startled and the waves go around. Because of this I can't rest. Because I never know when this bump and pop and ripple is going to happen. I can feel the liquid getting hot.

I know it's done when I hear the slurping as the Iridium seed goes back into the safe. It takes about 4 slurps to come up and go back. There is a manual pulley that they can use if the automatic retreat fails.

The three inch door opens and the radiation girl comes in with the Geiger counter. My boob - not radioactive (which would mean I still had the Iridium in me - which would be way bad). The radiation is safely tucked back into it's little bed. L. comes in, now that the coast is clear and bandages me back up. I zip up my hoodie, find my slip on shoes, throw my wrap around my shoulders and go find who I came with. Then I come back later in the afternoon to do it all over again.

As a patient, I get dependent on the routine, the washer goes there on my breast, did the port click closed on the radium safe. I am also emotionally dependent on my nurses, they clean me up and tuck me in and bandage me. And it makes the leaving that much harder - who will take care of me when I am done? What will my days be like when I don't have to go to the cancer center twice a day?

Removal
On the last day they change to new Iridium. So my last two therapies are about 4 minutes instead of 12. Such is the power of half lives. After my final radiation the radiation oncologist and L. come in to remove the balloon. I am on Vicodin, but I only took one and I would recommend at least 2. They swab me up with Betadine and drain the balloon. It feels heavenly being deflated, all that pressure and swelling going down, just lovely. And then the doctor rips out the balloon - I scream loudly. It hurts like hell. Why they didn't numb me up I had no idea, but it was the only time I wasn't prepped with local anesthesia to do something. L. applies a huge ice pack as I continue to cry. And then the ice starts working and the pressure starts working and I feel relief.

Now I can start to heal. No one really tells me how long that will take.

Review: Steve Horowitz at Redcat

2010-02-06T15:19:00.000-08:00

Francesca came to visit because there was a performance at RedCat which included one of her collaborations with Randy. Steve Horowitz is an advocate of my old friend Randy Hostetler's (1963 - 1996) compositions and so in addition to Steve's compositions Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Retaking of Pelham 123 there were two pieces for string quartet of Randy's being played including Palm Quart which he did with Francesca.

So I ended up having a rather flash back week-end. RedCat is such a CalArts experience anyway, but at the party after the performance there were all these people who I HADN'T gone to school with, since Randy was getting his graduate degree two years after I had graduated. But the vibe was the same, and I couldn't help feeling that I had met some of these people, glancingly, since a lot of them were involved with Randy and Francesca and the cacophony of the Living Room Series. I guess the Living Room Series is now an archetypal art event - like being at some of the original happenings by Alan Kaprow or with John Cage at Black Mountain College or watching Marcel Duchamp play chess with a naked woman in a gallery. But I remember the ones I went to as fun and chaotic, the Tuba Trio in the kitchen, actually seeing Randy and his friends play the Living Room performing John Cage's Living Room Music. The shower singing. Camden and I did a piece with Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau. The Bowling Hypnosis tape that put everyone to sleep. L.H. wore a neoprene tutu and performed whale songs in a plastic kiddie pool with all of these electric wires criss-crossing in our old tri-plex with substandard electricity. (Which is funny come to think of it, since years later L.H. and I took a class at Machine Project, where we had to be in the basement with our computers and vats of water boiling away on old hot plates and sub-standard electrical wires criss-crossing the basement as we made felt and circuits. So maybe L.H. is much more of an electrical risk taker than I knew.)
Anyway, Randy's two pieces were interesting. First that he would write for string quartets - who knew CalArts even HAD string quartets. Aren't string quartets helplessly old fashioned even with Kronos??? (Randy never forgave me for being low-brow enough to like the Kronos Quartet). Second that he would write both specifically and abstractly with a completely new kind of musical notation that was both visual and metronomic. So the performers had to learn the new notation to play. And the notation was screened so that the audience could start to learn the notational rules at the same time. Floaters had a visual notation that was little boxes or circles of different colors appearing and moving on the screen. It was written on some sort of program that ran on MAC OS Sub 0.1 beta. I mean that was some OLD operating system we got a look at . In Palm Quart palm trees in a video created the musical notation. Both pieces were witty and brilliant and were so Randy.
Invasion of the Chicken Planet and The Re-Taking of Pelham 123 were both large scale pieces with actors and singers and a video by Zig Gron for Chicken and a film by Jane Brill for Pelham. These were the kind of smoking hot post-minimalist, rock-influenced compositions with a whole bunch of stuff that you get used to seeing at RedCat. Very fun, very enjoyable and with the ease of maturity. You know when you are young and serious you can't ease up and everything has to point out your knowledge. Later you add generosity and heart. It made me sad that Randy had never got to live long enough to have a mature body of work. You can look here to see a video Zig made of Randy doing 8 ball which I think starts to point to how his mature work would have gone.

How it became Now: Part 3

2010-01-26T09:57:00.001-08:00

After Surgery I just thought that I was going to heal up for a week and then start my radiation therapy on Monday.
But no, there was much more to do, and the hospital started calling me on Tuesday to set things up and I was not high on vicodin because I was feeling pain, but slightly stoned. So I didn't quite know what I was doing or setting up.

Temporary Balloon
First off, I had a temporary balloon and tube installed in my boob. And I know I wasn't feeling well because I didn't even make a feeble boob tube joke until 8 days after installation. The balloon was inflated with liquid and the tube (16 inches long!) looked like a low rent hydration tube in a sport bladder pack.
But they couldn't put the real catheter with all it's ports in because they didn't know if I would be having the radiation and the real catheter is tres expensive. So they put this place holder in during your operation and when you get your final pathology results and it shows no spread into your lymph then you can get the real one put in.
So on Thursday I went to sign up at the Cedars Cancer Center (at the Cedar's Breast Center across the street they have a valet and free parking, but at the Cancer Center you have to pay two bucks. So part of me wanted to park for free and walk, but I had had surgery three days before so I really couldn't walk. But it just seems totally awful to have people pay for parking while having radiation or chemo treatments!) and said Hi to Dr. M, the big puppy of a radiologist and made an appointment for the next day to get "measured."
Then we drove across the street to the Breast Center and it's free valet parking. I had taken a pain pill so I was kind of floaty as I walked into the exam room. My lovely surgeon, who still seemed to be about 12, asked if she minded if Dr. So and So watched and I have no modesty issues and feel that if anything I can do can be useful then yes! Hell Yes! Let Dr. So and So in and see my balloons get switched.
Now here is just another thing that strikes me about treatment. Dr. So and So was about 55-60 and clearly the senior doctor. But he didn't really grok the newer treatment. Which means that if I had seen him I might not have been offered the balloon radiation, because he wasn't comfortable with it. Similarly if I had been treated somewhere else, where they didn't have the expensive brachytherapy treatment unit it wouldn't have been an option.
Okay, the balloon removal. I'm lying there doing my Maja Desnuda impersonation again and they numb up my breast. (I love having lydocaine in my breast. It makes everything better.) Dr. D is showing Dr. S&S how to inflate the balloon to it's maximum to see if it breaks before putting it in, then she deflates it and puts it in the applicator, and I'm starting to get nervous. That thing looks huge and hard - and inflated the balloon is really BIG.
So I feel my temp balloon being deflated, which feels nice. And then it's yanked right out of my boob! And I feel a wash of warm liquid flow down my side. It looks like a tequila sunrise, the liquid has stained the terry robe (the Breast Center is just like a SPA and you wander around in a terry robe) a glorious wash of orange and pinks. Then there's all this shoving and pushing and grunting while the real catheter and balloon is shoved back into my breast. Then they inflate it and now I have my gorgeous, high-tech, 7 port balloon catheter in place and inflated so that I have a two inch sphere of liquid on one side, making balance a new and exciting thing.

How it Became Now: Part Two

2010-01-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

Waiting Again
While I really suspected I had breast cancer, I had only imagined up to the biopsy, so after the biopsy I became incredibly relieved. I had a huge bruise and my breast was quite sore and that I really thought was ENOUGH. So I know convinced myself that I was done, I wasn't going to worry. So I had a nice weekend.

The Call
On Monday morning I got a call from the doctor who had performed my biopsy. She told me I had cancer. She told me to call my doctor who had the name of the surgeon. My legs started to tremble and I heard about one in every three words the doctor told me - I was in a fuzzy fog of fear.
I started making the phone calls, which was incredible relieving - an action I could do. But once I was done making the phone calls, I was all alone, in the house with cancer.
C. had been preparing for a bunch of meetings that were all happening this Monday and so I couldn't call her to ruin her day.
I did an exercise tape and waited till lunch time to ruin C.'s day.
I was afraid, and I started to think that the breast cancer police would descend upon me and take me to surgical Gitmo where my breasts would be forcibly removed from me, my head shaved and poison dripped into my veins.
The surgeon's office called back and was able to re-schedule my appointment to Tuesday afternoon, which was lucky because I would have been a wreck waiting till Friday to get actual information. So on Tuesday C. worked from home and I went off to my morning trapeze class where I pretty much lost it in public - it's hard to sob really hard when hanging upside down, but it can be done.
However the surgeon, a brilliant 12 year old Vietnamese American who had somehow managed to graduate from Harvard and Columbia all before puberty had a lot of good news. For example I didn't need any really traumatic surgery, I just needed a lumpectomy. And she thought I was a great candidate for this targeted radiation therapy which was rather new, so she wandered out to find the radiation oncologist who was a big puppy of a Persian American who was totally excited about targeted radiation - twice a day for 5 days as opposed to once a day for 5 weeks. It made sense to me to have a lumpectomy and a shorter, more targeted, less disfiguring form of radiation so that's what I signed up for.

MRI
The next day I got to have my first MRI and my first injection of radioactive dye. My friend T. was sweet enough to give me some of his Xanax so I wouldn't have to have an MRI without anti-anxiety drugs.
And here was another example of why having the best and newest expensive machines is so great. My MRI machine was pretty new, and it was open on both ends! Yea!
So the machine had a table that had two square holes that were rather large and a Mr. Coffee coffee filter on the bottom of the hole. I was supposed to lay down on my stomach with my boobs hanging down into the holes (they didn't reach the coffee filters at all) and not breathe heavy. It's hard not to be conscious of your breathing when you are resting your sternum on a beam with your boobs in a hole. MRIs make really loud noises, but they are not musical. It would be really better if the noises they made had some sort of coherent musical narrative. I had been lying on my stomach listening to the noises for quite a while when the noise started sounding like bells ringing. You know the great cathedral bells that reverberate through your body. Gonggggg! Gongggggg! GOnggggggggg!!! GONGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!
They kept on getting louder and more resonant - we were really leading up to the crescendo of the piece and it was supposed to end on a great resounding note. But NO! I wasn't done. They need to get a composer to help design these things.
After my MRI I had three weeks till my surgery.
Three weeks to freak out.
Three weeks to tell people.
Three weeks to put things in order.

Surgery
I really like my surgeon. I really like the C-S breast center. I really had no idea what surgery would be like. Never having had any before. The night before I took a anti-anxiety drug so I could get a good night's sleep. It sort of worked, but I was up early so I could spend as long as possible awake without eating or drinking. It was a rainy day and the beloved C.'s father was coming to pick us up and take us to the breast center and spend the day with C. while I was in surgery. I was walking the dogs and when I came back Dad was there with C and they were slightly panicked. Apparently the hospital had called wanting to know where the hell we were. We had been told to arrive at 9:00 because the surgery was scheduled for 10:00 but the radiology people wanted us there sooner. So we were already late. Luckily we live close to the breast center. We got there and I was taken back into pre-op land immediately. There were a whole bunch of bays, with medical beds and little curtains to partition off the bays for when privacy was needed. Not that there is actually privacy when it comes to hospital land.
The firs thing you need for a lumpectomy is to have a needle locator put in your boob where the tumour is. You can't actually see the tumour unless it's really exceptional so they cut around the wire locator. You can imagine that the locator is key to getting the tumour. The more accurate the placement the more accurate the surgery and the less tissue they have to remove. So I went down to the radiology department in my little hospital gown, slippers and a blanket. Every radiology person I met reminded me that I wasn't on time - which you know, wasn't true, the hospital had told me the wrong time. The radiation tech who walked me down, after complaining about my tardiness, put me in a room with a mammogram machine. So I had to ask, why are we in a room with a mammogram machine? And she said that the doctor would use it to put in the needle. I then said that, no, that wasn't the machine we were going to use to place the needle in my boob, we were going to use the sonogram because you can't see my tumour with the mammogram. So she made me sit down and she looked at my chart and she told me to wait. I was a late, persnickety patient, but you have to ask for what you think is right, and I knew that the accuracy wasn't going to be right with the x-ray. She came back and then said, yes I needed a sonogram and plopped me into a wheel chair outside the sonogram room where I waited for 20 minutes. You know those pictures of old people in wheel chairs, drooping over, their spines so bent their chins are on their knees? Well it's not a function of being old, it's a function of being in the wheel chair. I slumped, bored and suddenly I was bent over like a woman with a widow's hump. Anyway the doctor, eventually came and after asking me about when I was supposed to arrive he placed the needle in using the sonogram and he nailed it smack dab in the middle.
Then I was back to pre-op land. They put in an IV for the anesthesia and one of the researchers came in and got me to give her a saliva sample and they let C. come in to hold my hand until they wheeled me out to the operating room. The anesthesiologist came by and explained what he was going to do and he put this pink fluid into my open line to relax me and they started to wheel me away.
The pink juice relaxed me. As we were rolling through the hallways I said "WEEEEEEE! This is better than Disneyland!!!!!!" And the nurse replied, "We're not going that fast." And I said "Go Faster!!!!"

Post-Op
When C. came back into Post-Op land to help me wake up after the surgery, apparently I was already making waves. The nurse asked her if I would stop it. Apparently I was making faces at the woman across the aisle in her hospital bed. Camden asked me to stop and I said "But she smiled at me!"
Always entertaining. I don't remember that. I remember being really discombobulated and having problems sitting up and getting dressed. I had a surgical bra on and a lot of packing and a large tube coming out (I later measured the tube, it was 16 inches long.) of the packing. The nurses hadn't seen a tube before and they didn't know if something had gone wrong or not. Eventually they safety pinned the end to my bra.
I was on the other side of surgery. I had had 5 lymph nodes removed, which was more than expected. They had every indication from the initial pathology that they had clear margins (I was in two research protocols about pathology margin testing and those tests were good as well). I could go home with my pain pills and loved ones and tube.
They just forgot to tell me that my pee would be blue.

How it became Now

2010-01-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

Collapse

Last week I went to my chiropractor. To start you always lie on the table, which they have packed hydroculators so it is warm and toasty and you relax with the heat before she comes in and talks to you. As soon as I lay down I started to sob. I cried through the entire hour of treatment. And it wasn't because the massage on my arm and back hurt. I have started to cry about everything. Haiti, my bankrupt bank account, a line in the NYTimes science section. I am finally becoming un-hinged, un-glued. I am finally well enough to not have to be brave.

I am writing this, not so anyone reads it, but so that I remember later. So don't feel you have to go on...

Discovery

On a Saturday, Halloween to be exact, I felt a pain in my breast and on feeling myself up, I found a small lump. It felt like a sticky burr - the kind the dogs get in their fur. It was sticky and thorny in a way. C. could feel it as well. I remembered that I had spend the past couple of months occasionally thinking I had something in my bra and rearranging my right breast. It was the weekend and we had a poker party the next day. We must have made food, but I don't remember what everything was, I know I made a artichoke, olive lemon dip because P. asked me for the recipe later. I remember playing poker and thinking "I have breast cancer!" On Monday I called my doctor and was able to get an appointment that week. She told me not to worry and to go get a mammogram and a sonogram at the mammogram place. She also told me to have the mammo tech feel my lump so they knew what to get. The Mammogram place couldn't see me for 9 days. Waiting sucks. There was nothing C or I could do, there wasn't anything to really tell anyone, we didn't have info, but we could stress out. Which we did. My trapeze classes helped take my mind of it. But even hanging upside down I could be like "Oh, I have a lump in my breast."

Biopsy Number One
On the day of the mammogram, C worked from home in case something happened. I went in and asked the mammo tech if she wanted to feel the lump, she didn't but she gave me a sticker to put on my breast where the lump was - it had a little round ball of metal that would show up on the x-ray. When she was done I went into another little room where a Russian woman was going to do the sonogram. This sounds like a Cold War thriller. She was locked in a small room with a Russian who had a medical device. But she was nice, it was just that there were a lot of Russian women working there. She told me that my mammogram was negative. And here is where things could be quite different now. She put cold gel on the sonogram wand (I am now rather a sonogram expert and the temperature of the gel used indicates a class act) and looked at my right breast. She told me she didn't see anything. My first inclination was to jump up off the table and run out of the room - negative negative negative!!!!! They don't see anything.
But I didn't. Instead I asked her "Then what's that lump there?" and she blanched. She asked if I could feel something, and I said yes - right here, feel me up. So she put on latex gloves and felt me up. Then she re-did the sonogram. And then she told me - "The Doctor needs to see this, wait here while I get her." So the doctor comes in and rubs the sonogram wand on my breast and Hmms and then says "You need a biopsy. I need to call your doctor to see if she wants you to have a needle biopsy or a surgical biopsy, but we have a needle biopsy cancellation today so we can fit you in." This was insane to me since it didn't give me any information or choices. Of course I would want a needle biopsy today rather than wait for a more complex procedure that would leave scars. So I told her that she should tell my doctor that I was good with today and a needle. So my appointment was set for 1:00. I went home and told C. that something had happened and I would need her to drive me. Here's advice, don't drive yourself to a biopsy because they hurt and you will be driving home with an ice pack in your bra.
It takes two to tango and three to do a needle biopsy. I was there to lie down on my side like a low rent version of Goya's Maja Desnuda. The sonogram tech to manipulate the wand and the doctor who is going to stare at the sonogram screen to insert the needle and then the actual biopsy plungers that take your samples. The biopsy plungers used here was like being stabbed with an ice pick five times. There was a local anesthetic, but not enough. This was one of the times that I screamed. When done they put a little titanium marker down the needle and gave me another mammogram for marker placement. Then they handed me an ice pack for my bra and I toddled off onto the streets of Beverly Hills wishing I had had a martini before the procedure.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa

2009-09-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

I took some photos at the studio today.

Fun in the Air

2009-09-02T10:10:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-06-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-03-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-25T14:23:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-07T17:55:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-07T17:50:00.001-08:00

What a difference a Day Makes

2009-01-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-16T09:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Turn Your Back on Rick Warren

2008-12-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

Imagine -
On Inaugural day, everyone in Washington turns their back on him.
Perfect.

Last day for Art

2008-12-31T11:04:00.001-08:00

On Nov. 15 we went to LACMA to see Machine Project's Field Guide to LACMA and it was a fun way to spend the day. Part of the reason was that the activities - scattered around the LACMA campus allowed you to see some art and galleries that you normally just avoided because let's face it, not only is LACMA blessed with the most hideous buildings for housing art (don't get me started on that - including the new Broad) but the collection isn't first rate, so you have a lot of second tier work from first tier artists or you have work from really justifiably obscure adherents to historical art movements. Though I do like the Georges de la Tour Magdalene a great deal - but it's sandwiched between such terrible work that I forget to go visit it. But to be in a room of rather okay religious works from the 1500 - 1700s and to hear Lewis Keller's Thornton Room Rumble Modification was great. The live re-mix of the ambient air conditioning system of the Ahmanson building lent a direness and urgency - a sense of dread to these paintings. The Musical Elevator was funny. And the Gothic Arch Speed Metal - one minute of speed metal from the roof of a building - complete with Gothic Arch and smoke machine was totally hilarious. My favorite piece was the Peeping Netsuke by Jason Torchinsky - Netsukes being these little hand carved ivory talismans from Japan. In the Japanese pavilion you went into the Netsuke exhibit room which has hundreds of these little carved figurines in little boxes and suddenly you see a photo of a large one popping up outside the window. Walking to the photo you look outside and discover the apparatus - a hand made machine - powering a slowly turning bicycle wheel that has the Netsuke photo attached. It causes the photo to appear and then disappear - all with a sly wink to Marcel Duchamp. Great fun.
In another element that would bring joy to the Dadaists - the throngs of people walking around behaving in a most un-museum goer like ways had some of the more uptight guards in a tizzy. As people snapped photos of performers and talked on cell phones they would be chastised by the ignored guards desperately trying to enforce rules.

We also saw the Martin Kippenberger and Louise Bourgeois shows at LACMA. Kippenberger reminded me of RW FAssbinder - prolific, intense, obsessed and lost. Seeing all the Bourgeois pieces together, the limp structures with the hard materials was all together creepy and made you wonder about her childhood, which the accompanying materials hinted at was dark without elucidating with specifics.

Finally we popped off last week to the Hammer to see the woodcuts and the Oranges and Sardines exhibits. Oranges and Sardines takes abstract work as it's starting points and asks several abstract painters to select two pieces of their own and then several ones that influenced them. This is an interesting idea that resulted in a completely uninteresting show. Which is I guess why curators have jobs. However Gouge the woodcut show was an excellent example of why we need curators. There was an idea for the show, excellent examples that displayed that idea and crisp language inviting the viewer to understand and wonder. My particular favorite was a print that was just a sinuous black line wandering down the page. This line depicts the map's border between India and Pakistan with the rest of the picture being gouged out into nothingness - the empty space, the negative space on either side of the border. Killer. Best thing I've seen in years.

I can't Imagine A Better President to Throw Your Shoe At

2008-12-15T10:03:00.000-08:00

And while we're at it, I want to send the moving van to the white house to pack the Bushies up and get them out of Washington today. Wouldn't it be great if a Mayflower moving van just arrived today and 20 workers got out and just packed them up and shipped them off? Let's get them out of there before the 20th! And let's throw shoes at them the entire way. Maybe Imelda Marcos can loan us some shoes. And did you notice? He didn't even seem to realize that this was an insult? I mean I didn't know that shoes and the soles of shoes was an insult in Iraq until after we invaded the country and killed all those civilians, but after we did I found out that it's an insult. You'd think that something about the culture of the country he invaded for no reason other than a neo-con's say so would have sunk in. What a fucking embarrassment.

Anise Seed Wafers

2008-11-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

I came across a recipe for Tortas de Aciete y Anis in the cookbook "Food of Spain". I am always looking for recipes where the fat in the cookie or biscuit or bread or wafer is olive oil and there seems to be some tradition of this in Spain because Mark Bittman has a great orange cookie recipe that he says is an ancient Sevillan recipe. So I tried this recipe and it is quite good - I of course added the part about whole wheat flour and I like a little less sugar. The totally weird thing about this was that the liquids are all alcoholic - beer and anissette - except for the olive oil. Easy to make and fun, they remind me of my friend T., an epicurean dandy who used to mix hash and tobacco into roll your own anise papers. Ahhh, the days of youth.

Speaking of which, I have started to notice that some people in LA have an abundance of statuary. This house has many many many replicas of David.

Tortas de Aciete y Anis
3 cups all purpose flour (or half and half all purpose and whole wheat pastry)
1/2 Cup Olive Oil
1/2 cup beer
1/4 Cup Spanis Anis Liqueur

1/2 cup Sugar
1/4 cup Sesame Seeds
2 Tabls. Aniseeds

Preheat oven to 400 - line baking sheet with parchment.

Mix flour, 1 teas. salt in a bowl and make a well. Pour in beer, olive oil and anissette. Mix into a dough. Knead for about 4 minutes. Make into a ball. Divide dough in half. Divide each half into 8 portions.

Combine sugar sesame seeds and aniseeds.

Make a pile of seed mixture on your work surface, put a piece of dough on it, roll out on top of the seeds, embedding the seeds into the top. You want a six inch round. Put the rounds on baking sheet, seed side up and bake for about 5 or 6 minutes, until bases are crisp. Then broil until the sugar carmelizes about 60 secs in my case in my oven.

Drink with coffee and a little anisette.

We have been stressing out about the election and so ....

2008-11-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

We garden.

Here you can see the central part of the driveway, which we dug up, removed the bricks and then planted with dymondia - a non-native plant that is drought resistant. The sides were dug up as well and California Fescue, which is native was planted. You can see the arch of the lemon tree that the beloved C. has been shaping.

The Rev. Auntie L got us started on this kick by giving us a garden center gift certificate. So off we went to purchase plants and to labour in the yard. The side garden here is coming along, soon we will plant bamboo mumbly and purple manzanita and then we will espalier meyer lemon and kaffir lime against the fence.

Here is the front of the house, with about a five foot square of evil grass dug up and planted with dymondia, and the front planter under the kitchen window having the weeds replaced with Allodia and some weird round ball stuff we had lying around in a pot with a distressed cactus. So we planted them in the planter as well and then took the stones that we had used on the back patio that we dug and really wasn't working because Beso was digging them out and eating the stones.

And here is a top - down view of the planter

Here's a close up of the Allodia.

And here is a photo of Beso looking like the flying nun.

Things I wonder about

2008-08-27T11:14:00.001-07:00

The New York Times reported that in Georgia, the Georgians count in Base 20 and have
consonant clusters like “gvprtskvni”. And that maybe the closest language is Basque.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/weekinreview/24barry.html?ref=weekinreview

What does this mean? How can you have a base 20 counting system in 2008? Do the children have to go to school barefoot so they can use their fingers and toes to do math?

In the markets do people say “gvprtskvni” while waving their fingers and toes about meaning I'll have DA20 cows and you can pay in .D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6D6 payments? I mean the Brits got rid of their base 12 monetary system years and years ago leaving us mystified readers when we have to read Dickens or Austen what's a shilling and why on earth do you need a ha'penny?

Further, isn't it interesting that Georgia has break away Republics like Ossetia, with the Ossetians speaking a Farsi like language, while the Basques are trying to break away from Spain?

I know we're all supposed to be appalled that Georgia is being invaded by Russia, and it's a democracy - but can you really be a democracy when you count in base 20? I don't think so.

This begs the question, why can't we all get along. As long as you do things my way, in Base 10.
Really. Counting is only useful when you can use just your fingers.

It's not like I am obsessed with garbage cans

2008-08-24T15:24:00.001-07:00

I am really not possessive and think that many things are little things that one shouldn't get gray hairs over. But imagine my surprise when - on a completely clear street, some tubby blonde from Lodi parked her Ford on MY TRASHCANS. Seriously these huge trucks are a hazard when knocking over three garbage cans and PARKING on top of one isn't noticed. And we know the tubby blonde didn't notice, because if she had she would have backed up and parked on the other side of the street so that it didn't look like the person who actually wrecked the garbage cans was around, right? People do hit and runs all the time, leaving people on the street bloody and dismembered, so why wouldn't the tubby blonde have giggled and driven on, leaving the wreckage of my garbage strewn on the streets for me to pick up? She certainly didn't pick up after herself when she left. Do we have statistics on how many children and chihuahas have been flattened by these trucks since cars have become so inflated? I bet the number of fling chihuahuas has increased by 450% in the past ten years.

The New York Times Freakonomics blog asked the question, Can we Shame Drivers into better behaviour and used the web site, PlateWire as an example. So I signed up and put the tubby blonde's plate in the database. You can see it here --> http://www.platewire.com/viewrate.aspx?rid=34558

Anyway, all I'm saying, is if you are a tubby blonde stupid enough to live in Lodi you need intervention because the crystal meth you are getting is a hazard - and it isn't making you any thinner and it's ruining your teeth. So just stop driving and hope that you haven't run anything over that matters.

2008-08-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

An old friend of mine, Dorit Naaman, did an email blast yesterday about being targeted by a right wing Israeli group that monitors Israeli academics and defames them. An idiot who knows nothing about Dorit's work named Lee Kaplan from isracampus.org is incensed that Dorit is an Israeli who supports Palestinian independence as a way to peace in the Mid East. So he called her a pornographer and now when you google her name his hate-filled rant shows up. However, if you would like to help out, click on the links below and those real articles that Dorit ACTUALLY wrote and what she ACTUALLY stands for (hmm, academic articles about cinema - heavens!) will sort higher than this scurrilous attack.

Oh, and the photos, figs are in season again. They look nice on the new counter top.

http://www.publicjournal.ca/submissions.htm

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1_36/ai_89985880?tag=artBody;col1

http://www.jff.org.il/?CategoryID=547&ArticleID=553

http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/od_ramar03.asp

http://www.yorku.ca/crs/Refuge/refuge_-_volume_22,_issue_no__1.htm

http://www.unescocenter.gr/programm.htm

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/512624?prevSearch=Dorit+Naaman

http://www.digipopo.org/content/

http://www.film.queensu.ca/Dorit.html

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=274&ArticleID=309

http://www.rabble.ca/in_her_own_words.shtml?x=58505

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/cinema_journal/v040/40.4naaman.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/nwsa_journal/v018/18.3naaman.html

http://inscribe.iupress.org/doi/abs/10.2979/HYP.2008.23.2.17

Yee Ha - It's a Sign!

2008-08-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

So I was up in Central No Cal hanging out with a bunch of sound engineers and I found this fabulous sign out near the edge of the slough. It was a beautiful day and I had just had a fabulous breakfast at the local greasy spoon which opened at 5:00 am for the fisherman crowd.

I don't know, but is it just me - I keep on hearing these pop culture references to "80's music" - the last time was in the promo for the sisterhood of the pants, or whatever the hell that movie is and all these pretty girls are preparing for a wild (tame) time of sisterhood and they're going through a checklist of what they need and "80's music" is on it. And last year there was that movie where Hugh Grant plays a washed up 80's pop star. Huh? Is the Clash safe now? What happened? Where am I? What happened to retro ironic bowling and poodle skirts? What decade am I in? How co-opted can co-option get? Is there nothing sacred?
Of course I LOVED when they played Wreckless Eric's Whole Wide World in Stranger than Fiction last year, but I just thought that the music editor had good taste.

Squirrely!

2008-08-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

Here are the hounds, exhibiting hound behavior, treeing a squirrel in the fig tree. Here is the squirrel, eating a fig.

Sex Organs - the flowers and the bees - Oh! My!

2008-07-04T14:57:00.000-07:00

So we planted some Zucchini and I promised myself that I would never, ever let the zucchini get overly large and watery. Too small and they are bitter, too large and they are ridiculous.

But really look at this flower - don't you just want to crawl right down it and never come back up? Check out the bee in the photo as well. Wow - it's drunk on orange pollen. This is some orgy of a flower. It is as promiscuous as the fruit of the plant. It wakes up golden in the morning and says "Honey!!!!!! Let's Make LOVE! And bring your FRIENDS!"

Dear me, I was practically fainting every time I walked out. And if the Zucchini sex extravaganza out back wasn't enough look at what I have out front. Yes the fried egg plant. Who knew?

These Matijila poppies are a big bush of white flowers and orange organ centers - dripping pollen all over. It's amazing that people ever paved anything with all this riot of flowering sex all over. And yes, Georgia O'Keefe was painting flowers and sex. Notice it, you know?

Today I made Zucchini bread, because I let some get too large. Sometimes it is just too much to keep the flora in control.

2008-07-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

We went to see the Kara Walker show, which was pretty incredible and filled with small children who didn't know what to do with the much more complex and sexual views of slavery that were on display. But my word what a great show.
I saw the Murakami show and that did nothing for me.
We went to the new Broad museum and the collection is wonderful, even if the building is not. The new BCAM building fits in with the other buildings a LACMA - boring limestone box (except the Japanese Pavillion which is round limestone) - it is a total disappointment. But inside there is quite a lot of great art. The show made me rethink Jeff Koons, who came across as a witty mastermind of pop art, and confirmed my opinion of Damien Hirsch as someone who picks the wings of butterflies. Yuck! Downstairs are some really great, massive sculptures by Richard Serra that are a gorgeous delirious experience.

Speaking of delirium, I made my first batch of cheese this weekend. You know, as a lark. Served it to guests just waiting to say Oh it's Fromage de Scott. But no one asked so I had to say "Hey I made the cheese!" And of course, everyone thought I was joking.

And at work of course, everyone thinks I am a joke - cheesehead!

Completion: A good Feeling

2008-05-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

When looking at the kitchen from the dining room you can use the portholes to see in as well as the doorway.

To the left we see the windows, range and the upholstered chair.

You can see the skye vodka tile here - 50% post consumer waste went into this floor. Too bad we had to do it twice, that makes it 25% post consumer waste or 50% my waste.

So far, I love my range. Though the convection oven automatically reduces your oven temp by 25 degrees which means that your banana bread isn't fully cooked in the middle.

Leche looks lovely in the kitchen as she comes towards me away from the custom shelves that we painted orange.

More Kitchen Photos

2008-05-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

The sink.

You can see the portholes in the kitchen door here.

A close up of the built in shelves with the legs for support.

Signs: Safari Inn - More evidence that Laura Bush is an idiot.

2008-05-06T09:07:00.001-07:00

So tens of thousands are dead and hundreds of thousands are displaced and homeless and Laura Bush says let US Aide in to the leaders of Myanmar's junta. Then she scolds them. Ummm. Like if you want to get something done, like US foreign aid, tone down the stupid scolding. Yes, yes we know they are not nice guys. Help the people who are devastated and then scold the dictators.

Also, isn't it the pot calling the kettle black when Laura says that the military junta didn't do anything before the storm? Has Laura forgotten her hubby's performance during Katrina when over 1800 people died in the flooding and people are STILL homeless?

Dear lord, she is such a )(**&^%^%#%@#$%# moron. People cut her slack and give her husband the benefit of the doubt because she's a LIBRARIAN. Well even LIBRARIANS can be right wing asshole stupid.

The Bleading Edge

2008-04-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

Who knew there was a bleading edge of tile? Not me! While I routinely caution my clients about changing to new IT products on the first release I didn't make the translation to tile products. I mean - what is new in tile? Humans have been tiling things for millenniums.

Well so we designed our whole kitchen around this new tile product. Made of 50% post consumer waste (Skye Vodka bottles, thank you!) the salesperson told me that it was a new product and that we had to use their sub contractor to install it because he was TRAINED to install the new product. So the Mark comes over to do the estimate and he's the head of the floor installation company and that's the last I ever see of him.

So they send two guys who have never seen the product before, without the tools they need, who can't read the instructions, with the wrong glue, on a day that is too cold. 10 minutes after they leave the tiles are popping up like toast. So I call the sales rep and say I don't think the floor should be popping up like toast.

Well it turns out they didn't roll the tile with the 150 pound roller, because they didn't have a roller. So I say, get them back here to roll. And they can come the next day to roll. But after 10:00 am because they have to get the roller. Meanwhile the Adhesive is DRYING and it needs to be rolled before the adhesive is DRY. There is 24 hours. Tick Tick Tick.

So Jose and Jose arrive and they have the 150 pound roller. They look at the floor, they try a little rolling, then they pull up two of the worst tiles and say - wow these two tiles have popped up - we can't do anything - We'll come tomorrow - Bye.

Well tomorrow means the adhesive will be dry. I've been assured by the sales rep, the manufacturer and that the best we can do is roll it soon. So I try and get hold of Mark but he's not answering his phone. So I basically tell the guys that they can't go and they have to roll the floor for 15 minutes in a diagonal pattern before they leave. And, while I don't believe in slavery, I basically lock them in the kitchen to roll while I stay outside slavering into my cell phone and pacing. This makes me feel even worse.

So the rolling doesn't do anything and I talk to many people and plan B is warming the tile up and rolling on Wed. At this point I start saying that I actually want people who know what they are doing, I don't want the B team anymore, I want the A team. I am assured that Miguel the supervisor will appear miraculously tomorrow.

The next day (and remember I am working from home for this fiasco because my boss is a sweetie pie, but I'm also not working a lot so I'm losing money) I get one Jose and a guy I assume is Miguel the supervisor so I ask, "Hi are you Miguel?" "No, I am the BROTHER OF MIGUEL." There's a whole lot of "Whose on First" that happens at this point. But basically as this escalates I start to lose it and my basic position is that I am not letting anyone in my kitchen with a blow torch who is not management and certainly not Jose and Brother of Miguel. Actual Miguel is in Ventura and after screaming into two phones - Miguel on one and the president of the flooring company on the other and pacing up and down the street Miguel agrees to actually come to the site. So does the president of the company. Who has been told by Jose and Jose that there is a problem with two tiles and not the ENTIRE FLOOR. The president of the floor company and the sales person both inspect the floor and agree that it was done wrong and that I will wait for Miguel and we will get Miguel's opinion.

Miguel arrives and burns my floor with the blowtorch.

Remodeling!

Beso pops out of the cabinet before the counter is installed, and the wonderful Luis looks around at the kitchen before the tile fiasco.

Oh yeah?

2008-04-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Dogs dogs Dogs dogs DOGS.

There I've mentioned something other than the KITCHEN REMODEL!!!!

More kitchen obsession: Signs

2008-03-25T09:43:00.001-07:00

So we now spend all of our time going out to Burbank to go to big box remodeling stores - like this one out by the airport. The mall itself is huge and has tons of big box stores and nice little airplane signs. Of course it is a mile away from another huge mall that has tons of big box stores, including Ikea. Have I mentioned that I hate Ikea? Let me count the ways starting with the fact that they are supposed to be here right now and installing the cabinets. And they are not.

Here I am in the kitchen on the last night before demo - we were of course hosting lovely guests. You can barely see the walls scrawled with sharpie where the counters, appliances and such are supposed to go. We did that in a manic phase with the designer we hired right before she disappeared. Drew on the walls with sharpie. Not the best move. Because we spent a month with sharpie on the walls, feeling like losers. Because I've never remodeled a thing in my life - and I don't know how to do it. (Really thank goddess I am a PMP - it does help!)

Here are the lovely vintage 1974 appliances we are getting rid of. Yes, Virginia, that IS a portable dishwasher.

Here are some demo shots. You can see where we are making the washer dryer cabinet. A sink will go here somewhere. Oh and a non-portable dishwasher. Which will be a drag you know if I was to wash some dishes in the backyard or something - maybe I should upgrade.

360 Days till the Bush Travesty is Over!!!!!!!!

2008-01-25T12:04:00.000-08:00

Not that I'm counting!

On the other side of travesty, we are doing a kitchen re-model. So don't say I'm not doing my part for the economy.

Here is a photo of going into the little tiny square opening into the kitchen.

And check out this lovely vintage plastic floor!

Here we look West into the silly unused and unusable nook space. I didn't take a photo of the appliances, they are too sad. My oven can't heat up to any temperature, and the 1974 fridge sucks enough energy off the grid to power a small village in other parts of the world. I got a pamphlet from the electric commpany about how much money you could save if you upgraded the fridge and they had a little chart with the years of your fridge and how much money it takes to run - and it stopped in the 80's. The seventies wasn't even on the chart!

The only good thing about the kitchen is that everything is so old all the VOCs have evaporated. So we shall see what we can do to improve the entire gestalt of the kitchen.

Feijoa

2007-11-05T09:07:00.000-08:00

These little guys are falling out of a tree in the backyard - the internet instructions for harvesting say "Shake the tree every couple of days" - well let me tell you they hurt when they fall on your head. Gravity it gets you every time. And so here they are - Feijoas - something I can't pronounce that are edible but odd. It's like that OScar Wilde's quip about fox hunting - the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible. In this case it's literally unspeakable and it's vaguely edible.
The garden in general is filled with things to eat - figs, avocados, lemons - but a lot of it is poor quality. I don't know if that's because none of it has been tended, fertilized, taken care of, or if it's old and ready to go. We shall see. But the Meyer Lemon, which the Beloved C. has it out for, has the most lovely smelling flowers and yet the lemons seem to never ripen.

Wine-O-Mat

2007-11-01T10:10:00.001-07:00

I've got a new thing to take people to when they visit us in L.A. - the wine-o-mat. Like the automat - a vending machine for food that was popular during the depression, the wine-o-mat is a wine vending machine. So you can sample wines at the wine store. You buy a ticket with a pre-approved amount of money on it and you taste your way through a few wines and so you can try before you buy. And of course, you can try things that you would never actually buy because some wine is just way too expensive. It was totally fun to do. So now you know what you'll be doing if you come for a visit.

Bill T. Jones - Blind Date

2007-11-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

So the beloved C. and I went to see the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane dance company perform Blind Date at Royce Hall. The parts of the dance were thrilling, the athleticism of the dancers was fantastic. Part of the war/anti war message was lost, but it was great to go out and see old Bill - who can still move.

I would expect this from Huckabee's Wife

2007-10-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

A Photo in the LA Times today showed the presidential candidates wives at the Conference on Women that Maria Shriver puts on every year in California as part of Maria's first lady of Cali act. The photo showed Mrs. Thompson (a blonde trophy wife), Cindy McCain (blonde trohpy wife - slightly older version), Mrs. Romney (Mormon version of blonde trophy wife), Elizabeth Edwards (who is also blonde and a real trophy if what one values is guts and intelligence) and Michelle Obama. Michelle was wearing a houndstooth frock that I don't think really suited her.

Anyway the LA Times quoted Elizabeth Edwards as saying:

Scanning the tall, thin women arrayed beside her, Edwards said she was reminded of the "Sesame Street" song lyric:

"One of these things
Is not like the others."
"Everyone is so beautiful," Edwards said. "Which one doesn't belong?"

Okay, so I have to say that I am truly offended by this. They are really going to have to reduce Elizabeth's pain medication if they want her on the campaign trail.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-na-wives24oct24,1,4418492.story

Global Fires

2007-10-23T11:07:00.001-07:00

There was a couple of interesting items I thought in the New York Times this week. One was the cover article of the magazine - drought and global warming in the Western U.S. and the other was the Op-Ed piece about how the "greenest" thing you can do is elect leaders who will actually pass laws that will change behaviours on a large scale. It all dovetails rather nicely with the firestorm that is happening right now in Southern California. It is smoky and hard to breathe and I'm not near any of the fires, being smack dab in west L.A..

Yosemite

2007-10-19T16:48:00.001-07:00

Don't you think that people who SPEED through scenic routes have no soul? I mean - why speed on the windy mountain roads that lead you into one of the most glorious places on earth, the Yosemite Valley? What part of wonder about life, the universe and everything are you missing?
That was what I realized when we went to the Valley for a short vacation. It was a glorious vacation - just my speed. We hiked all day up and down mountains in glorious scenery and we then came back to a hot shower and a good meal with a nice bottle of wine. Great way to deal with nature. This deer was feeding in a meadow underneath half dome. As I took a picture of the deer (Look, Honey! Nature!) I realized that it was a stupid photo to take (which was really apparent at dusk with other tourists on the path with tiny cameras far away from the subject and the little tiny flash bulb of knock about snapshot cameras. The little insignificant flash would illuminate about three feet of air and since the deer was far away it was a rather futile exercise. Totally futile. Especially since the next day I realized you could walk up to the deer they were so unafraid of humans and get a really in depth close up photo.)

Alberto Gonzalez is a BIG FAT LIAR

2007-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

And it's about time somebody did something about it. This whole administration is a pack of perjurers, I can't believe no one's done anything about it. If the Dems don't have the balls to impeach both Bush and Cheney then at the very least we can TRY THEM FOR PERJURY. Start the special counsels NOW!

Partners in so many things

2007-07-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

Still working analog.

So have I mentioned that we're buying a house? Have I mentioned don't use Redfin?
No? Well, I don't want to dwell on the negative.

The mortgage broker, J. called. The bank - owned by chinese californians wouldn't lend to us because we were in a partnership. They don't lend to partnerships, or trusts or corporations or companies. They do home loans for individuals and couples - you know married couples. But since we were in a domestic partnership, they wouldn't loan us money. Because they don't loan money to companies - particularly ones who provide domestics.

J. had to gently bring them into the 21st century.

2007-06-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

I've been working analog lately.
And I've been buying a house.
Don't use Redfin.

Big Dog

2007-06-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

Dogs

2007-06-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

It is good to roll!

Swinging on the old world

2007-05-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Weeeeee! It's fun to swing upside down, as A., a fellow swinger-upside downer shows here.

I lost my tasting notes but the last wine class was about THE OLD WORLD. And wine\food pairing. Hmmm.

So here is what I now know, France, there was a reason people thought Wine = France. Because they make good wine. Here's another thing I know, often after a broad overview class if you want to learn more you are told to pick one small thing and learn more in depth about that. A large overview class of art history - want to learn more - check out the cubists or Spanish artists. A large overview of wine - select a varietal or country to learn more. You know, pick a vertical. Well here's a vertical I'm never going to find more about German and Austrian wine. Dear lord. I was all willing to give up my prejudices against Riesling and such, but our instructor had a sweet tooth on him and so we were served sweet, sweet Rieslings and other items that we were told were artisanal and filled with terroir, but I couldn't help feeling I was drinking soda pop - soda pop with a nice acidity but soda pop nonetheless. And I thought "Give me a nice fruit forward oaked cabernet please!"

Even though I did learn that oak was not food friendly, and now I notice that it isn't if I drink oaked wine with dinner. However a nice bit of oak in a wine that you're sitting out on the patio watching the sunset NOT eating is not a bad thing. And a little oak in a tannic red is not a bad thing as well.

However a nice sparkling burgundy is cheaper than champagne but just a nummy, and that's a good thing to learn.

Well wine is over and I'm just back to two classes. Photography and circus acrobatics.

Weee - it's fun to swing upside down!

The Brave New World is Full of Oak

2007-05-10T15:49:00.001-07:00

I just have to say that I've always been glad about living in California because I can buy local and still drink world class wine. Unfortunately, I now know that not all California wine is world class, particularly in my "Night Train House Swill" price range. Oh the mis-use of Oak! There is no excuse for cutting down French and American oak trees to put grape juice in it. No no no, as Amy Winehouse would say.

Class Three was a whirlwind tour of the New World wines. Our professor has a bit of a sweet tooth so this class was remarkable for NOT having disgusting sweet wine in it , say what you like about old world terroir but I like a dry wine and there's dirt in New Zealand as well.

Enough! We started with a golden 75% pinot noir method champenoise wine from Meriwether, Cuvee Wm Clark Brut in Oregon, where they disgorge the wine to order. YUM! It smelled of apples and toast and was DELICIOUS. Why spend the dinero on champers from Champagne when you can get this lucky ducky. And it is local to my friend T., so it's good for the world.

Next up was a flight of American Whites, the Eroica Chateua St. Michelle - a reisling made in partnership with a german wine maker and a Viognier the Surh Luchtel Fortunati. Well the Eroica is a riesling but not an offensively sweet riesling. It smelt crisp and a little of apple and raisin pie; it had an appealing acidity that made it crisp on hte tongue. The Viognier was icky.

Next we had a flight of American Reds, a 2004 Daedalus Labyrinth Pinot Noir and a 2004 Nalle Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel. The Daedalus Pinot looked like rubies in your glass, smelt earthy and had peppery cherries on the tongue. Lovely. The Nalle Zin was a darker ruby - almost crimson a bit of green herb amid the cherry in the nose and was GORGEOUS.

Then we were off to the Aussie-New Zealand, South Africa-America part of the globe.

Starting with Antipodes we had a Cloudy Bay Sauv Blanc - all grapefruit and cat piss and a Hewitson, Old Garden Mourvedre. This was a crimson wine with spice and leathery tannins and was lovely.

In the next flight we had a Warwick Sauv Blanc (South Africa) that was a bit sweet and spicy with nice acids for balance and would be lovely with food. Finally we had a Luigi Bosca Mallbec reserve from South America that was dark ruby with a tannin bite at the end. It was very interesting.

All in all the bubbly was a total find, I'd walk a mile for some of the reds and I wouldn't cross a finger for the whites.

Sacred Monsters

2007-05-10T15:41:00.001-07:00

So the beloved C and I went to the U.S. premiere of Sacred Monsters a performance by Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem at Royce Hall. Well I just had to see the best ballerina of my generation.

So here was an example of how two traditional forms, ballet and kathak can be fused using the meta language of modern dance. And what a fabulous example it is. My word - so wonderful. Sylvie Guillem is very tall and you could see a movement start somewhere around her hip and snake up each elegant vertebra until it moved along and ended at a finger tip. And other times her movements were so spare and cohesive that you didn't realize how tall she was. It was like she could assemble and disassemble each movement depending on her whim. When Khan and Guillem danced together they were wonderful, elegant, wry and humorous. All in all, a wonderful night.

Vino Bambino

2007-04-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Just look at all these North Korean girl Sailors, they look like they've seen Madam Mao's "Red Detachment of Women" a little too often. Maybe Kim Jong-Il's current paramour and personal secretary, Kim Ok can come up with a model opera along the lines of Girls Goose Step on the Mizzen or HMS Kim Sailor Squad of Women.

Anyway their lock step motion would be a little amiss if they had access to the lovely and crisp NV 1+1=3 Cava that I tasted in my latest wine class. At 12.99 it's a great sparkler made in the methode champenoise way from Spain. Crisp, clean nice bubbles.

We also tasted a Gruner Veitliner (dear me, my spell check is going crazy, I don't know how the wine press stands it) a 2005 Nigle that was pale pale straw color, barely any color at all and with a spicy nose and nice acidity. It screamed out to be a food wine so I nibbled a little cheese, which had been sitting out for a gazillion years.

Speaking of faux pas, one of the students in the class brought an ice cold coke cola in with her and proceeded to sip from it, through out the class. Um, I may be a philistine but even I know that that is just bad form and even worse on the palate.

Our teacher's mantra is teroir teroir good - oak is bad. We had a landmark overlook chardonnay that was, as advertised by it's aroma, oaky and totally not worth the 23.00 you can get it for. Paired with that was a 2004 Hexamer Sobernheimer Marback Auslese, -7C. Which was a blonde ice wine with a bit of honey and minerals that was intensely sweet. But if you wanted to drink this with a bit of desert there you go. And of course, those sailor girls above would be tickled to drink it.

The 2006 Mas de Gorugonnier Rose looked like rose petals and had a tart cranberry and hibiscus flavor. After getting over the shock of it - I found it pleasant but didn't like it as well as the beloved C. did.

That followed with a 2005 Francesco Boschish Grignolino (From Italy) that was bitter and thin and that I did not like, but which the teacher thought was a far better example than the 2005 Ben Glaetzer Godolphin cabernet/shiraz blend from a famous Aussie wine maker that was inky inky opaque crimson in color with oak and berries in the nose. The taste has berries, grapes, pepper and oak (oak bad why drink wood?) with a tingly tannin finish. I rather liked it, even if it was a teeth stainer.

We finished the evening with NV Sandeman Royal Corregidor sherry that was dark topaz and smelled of leather and alcohol. It tasted like an old tweed study as well, with Morocco leather bound books and figs and sugar and tannin.

Still learning after all these years

2007-04-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

So I'm taking a class at UCLA (analog photography) and the teacher gave us all a handout at the end of the class. I got home and looked at it and it was the Wikipedia entry for Henri Cartier-Bresson. And I thought, um, I coulda done that. But if it's cheating if students cut and paste from the Wiki isn't it LAZY if the teacher just uses Wiki handouts?

Anyway off to a more fun, the beloved C and I are taking a wine appreciation class and it started this week. Here are some wines:

NV Mirabelle - eh, a crisp sparkler from CA but nothing really yummy.

1998 Montecillo Rioja Gran Reserva - this Rioja was lovely, tingly nicotine.

2005 Cortio 111 Rioja - this baby was young and yummy. It was also 7.99 and for that price it is a good value. It had enough tanin to give it a bit of a bite but not too oppressive and very pleasant mouth feel.

2005 Schoffit Gewurtraminer Cuvee Caroline - Yuck. Sweet. Had that typical Gewurtz nose, but thick and viscous on the tongue.

2005 Rombauer Chardonnay - oaky and buttery with malolactic fermentation, this is the kind of wine that gives chardonnay a bad name -yuck.

2004 Meo Camuzet Bourgogne - This smelled like good soil. There was a but of nicotine and dirt and fruit in the nose and on the tongue. I tasted it and thought "WOW" I really have never had any good Bugundies before and this one was something.

2005 Witness Tree Pinot Noir - this pinot from Willamette valley in Oregon was more fruit forward than the Burgundy above but it was wonderful as well, though it got a bit out of the dirt, reminding me of the Merce Cunningham saying about leaving Martha Graham's company - "I wanted to get off my knees!" Well this one wanted to get out of the dirt and it had flavors of cherry and blackberry and nicotine.

2005 Dr. Loosed Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spatlese - this riesling was very, very sweet. It's apparently a wonderful wine, but so totally not to my taste, I thought it was ICKY.

2007-04-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Well isn't this a beautiful example of felting?
L. asked me to take a class with her at
Machine Projects called Felt&Circuits. So I did. On the appointed day I drove in an atavistic haze to Echo Park. It made me feel 20 years younger! In my nostalgic ennui I found a building that reminded me of my days in New York City. So I walked into the old store front, that was completely raw space and walked down stairs that weren't quite made and hadn't really any hand rails and were totally not to code into a basement where there were little card tables set up with lots of power strips in the aisle in the middle. There were vats of water boiling on hot plates. We were there to make FELT! And circuits, so we had to bring our lap tops and plug them into the power strips.

To make felt you stress raw wool by heating it up and agitating it. So the teacher was filling large plastic watering cans with boiling water and dragging them up along the aisle (where the power strips were) and we were pouring water onto our pieces of wool with vinegar and soap and agitating the hell out of them. All the while I was praying that my laptop would survive the oncoming electrocution. If one of us survived I wanted it to be my pc. That's how much of a geek I am. The week after we dyed our felt in boiling vats of water filled with plants and in little mason jars that we set to fermenting with nuts and berries and sunlight and pee. Yes, piss is a good natural dye setter. While we were boiling nuts and berries we were laying out our circuits on our laptops. Electricity, boiling water - these young artists today! My word, I just remember taking lots of drugs as part of that whole art thing, but I guess extreme sports now affects everything and so it isn't art unless possible scalding and electrocution is involved.

I liked the soldering, drilling and assembly of the circuit and chips though. But I haven't completed my project. My felt leaves me anxious and depressed. It doesn't speak to me. The high achievers in the class were making cute little animals with their felt and sticking their circuits in them. But I am not really a cute little stuffed animal teddy bear kinda gal. So one morning I woke up and said "Fuck this anthropomorphic shit! I'm making a cube!"

But I really don't like sewing and haven't gotten around to making my cube yet.

Your Tax Dollars making You Safer

2007-03-06T13:19:00.000-08:00

Free Personality Quiz!

I don't know what it is about personality quiz's it's a sure way to suck people in. Ever go to the mall and find the spooky scientology people asking you if you want a FREE personality quiz? Ever see an issue of Cosmo that didn't have a personality quiz? Well the CIA in an effort to attract high quality job candidates has put up an online flash based (aren't they hip?) personality quiz that asks such insightful questions as:
What Form of Transportation do you prefer?
Hot Air Balloon
Amphibious Sports Car
Horse and Buggy -- This is for the Amish Spies apparently
Submarine
Jet Pack

Reviews: Magritte, Tiajuana, Icons

2007-02-23T10:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, how long did I say these slippers had a chance of lasting? Beso chewed the balls off them last night. He was playing with a ball and I had my slippers right next to me on the floor by the couch. Because I don't put shoes or slippers on the couch, because I was not raised in a barn. So he was running around and I was knitting a baby blanket for a friend and then suddenly he bounces in so happy happy happy that I know something is WRONG. Well somehow he had done it.

So, the beloved and I have gone to a few shows. The Magritte show at LACMA was beautifully arranged by John Baldessari, you walked on a carpet of clouds (how surreal!) but the Magrittes were you know, pretty Magritte-y and not very interesting. The work around the Magrittes by contemporary artists was actually very interesting. It was good to see some of Doug Hubler's Crocodile Tears series and some dynamic work by Vija Celmins, who is also having a major retro at the Hammer, which I haven't seen yet. But it wasn't really the best show I've seen and was rather disappointing. Though it will not be disappointing to the museum because it is one of those block buster shows that everyone takes their children to see. "Look honey the APPLE is a BIG as the ROOM!."

In contrast a more modest show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art does not disappoint. "Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana" was lively and engaging. It had some of the funniest video art I'd seen in a while. And there were some damn good paintings. SM Museum

At the Getty (Yes, we've been going going going in search of an art fix) there is a show of Icons from the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine underneath Mount Sinai. The Monastery is the continuous monastery going and they had a lot of icons that need restoration. So the Getty conservators stepped in and did a damn good job restoring things but then they took them to California and put them on display here. I assume the icons are eventually going back, since the Getty seems to be returning things these days. Anyway I figured that I would never get my ass over to the Sinai peninsula to see these in situ, and I'd probably be struck down by angry monks if I did, so off to the Getty we went. So as Fellini and Bunuel have ever been fond of pointing out, there is something surreal about priests in their robes. But really nothing is more surreal than having 50 Eastern Orthodox Priests on a pilgrimage to the Getty Center in their medieval-man robes and large crosses and long, long, long beards. And like medieval-man, they haven't really discovered deodorant so they are au natural. But like people everywhere, you could tell who the cool monks were. They could occasionally make jokes. There is a tension, however, in the display of objects shown both as objects and as objects of veneration. These are religious artifacts that have been in continuous use for 1000 years and as such are wonderful examples of medieval art. And so there is tension between the use and purpose of the object when taken out of it's context and placed in a secular modern one. It's rather embarrassing to see people kneel and pray in an art museum. Especially the Getty that temple to Mammon.

Anyway the monks made a good visual along with the art. There was a portal of full length portraits of Moses and Aaron, dark curly hair on one, long white beard on the other, one was holding a tablet and the other a scroll. I thought the white haired bearded one was Moses -- even though he was holding the scroll, but on reading the text I found out he was Aaron! Moses was the cute dude with the curly dark hair holding the tablets. Upon finding this out I then stood around and watched people approach and then would ask them, which one is Moses? And everyone pointed to old white beard. So poor Moses has over the centuries been slowly becoming less cute in the popular imagination. Cause I'm telling you two thousand years ago, he was the hunk. Speaking of which, there is an icon of St. Catherine (or 97 icons of Catherine, the monastery is named after her) where she is gazing coyly at the viewer, seductively leaning against her wheel. Which I thought was what she was martyred on , but apparently she was going to be put to death on the wheel and her touch broke it, so she was beheaded instead and angels whisked her away to Mount Sinai and the monastery started. Who knew?

Signs: Ye Coach House Curry

2007-02-19T10:18:00.000-08:00

So in last weekend's New York Times Magazine they interview Dr. Andrew Von Eschenbach the current FDA commissioner. He is asked about his predecessor, Lester Crawford, who resigned in scandal because he and his wife owned stock in FDA regulated companies. That is he was in a position to grant FDA approval to drugs for companies that he owned a financial interest. Um, this is obviously ILLEGAL and UNETHICAL, and Dr. Crawford is being sentenced next week. Asked about this, the new FDA head says: "It's very sad that these circumstances have occurred and that he and his family are facing this."

Now, I know that outrage is just useless in this administration, but wouldn't you want the new head of the FDA to say something against illegally profiting from companies that you are supposed to be policing? Like gee wow, I feel bad for his lack of judgment, but you obviously can't have the fox GUARDING the chickens. And I have set up my finances in a blind trust administered by so and so with the stipulation that all drug companies will not be assets in the blind trust. Dr. Von Eschenbach also said about his opinion as a cancer doctor about regulating nicotine as a drug he said "As cancer doctors, we have looked at the consequences of tobacco, of which nicotine is a component, but in which there are many other components." Well, gee, where do I start? First he didn't answer the question. And you can be against regulating tobacco and nicotine and also be against cancer. But he really sounds like he started out being one of those RJR shills - paid to obfuscate the fact that cigarette smoking and tobacco cause cancer. He may have looked at the consequences of tobacco, emphysema, cancer; but he seems mildly amused by them.

This administration's ability to find and promote complete amoral greedy people gives crony capitalism a new name. KBR not doing enough for Cheney's portfolio - let's have a fraudulent war!

Remoras

2007-02-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

It is winter and the wood floors are cold and so in a post-holiday fit of consumerism (the terrorists, they have not won!) I bought a pair of slippers. Allegedly the whole wait-until-January thing is all about getting things on sale. But ahem, these were too fabulous to be on sale, and of course, they were really too silly for anyone to actually buy, so they should have been on sale. But they weren't. And I bought them and took them home and ripped open the package and put them on my tootsies.

Well the peebs like them too. They just latched on to those little puffs and sucked on them, one on each side as I walked around. Latched on just like remoras. So I started to shake one foot and then the other. And they started to get real mouthy all over my slippers and feet. So I started running, which made them follow me. What a great game! She put fuzzy chew toys on her feet! Weeeee! So I'm taking bets on how long they last.

Another Outrage

2007-02-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

So apparently my two fans were complaining about my using my blog to test work media. Oh well. One of my fans suggested a romantic weekend getaway for my birthday. So I decided to look up some hotel costs. The Hotel Del Coronado for example starts at 540 a night, so it's making the dog motel built by the husband of a notorious con-woman and murderer in Palm Springs where we got bug bites look pretty good. But the thing that really startled me was this notation on the hotel room reservation: Bedding On Request.

I'm sorry, but for 540 bucks a night I EXPECT Bedding as the default.

Will it Nuke?

2007-02-08T10:44:00.000-08:00

I uploaded this video at myspace.revvervideos and the sound didn't work, so I'm testing it here.

Baths

2007-01-31T08:54:00.000-08:00

I just say you really haven't lived until you've been locked into a remodeled bathroom for an hour. You know, one that has a locking mechanism but no door handle and a window too small for your hips, and a dead bolt type tongue so you couldn't do ye olde credite carde poppe like you can in old bathrooms. The good thing about being locked into a remodeled bathroom is that it's nice. It would be much worse to be locked into an un-remodeled bathroom, one that looked like, say - the bathroom in Train Spotting. That would be desperate straits.
But I managed to lock myself into a nice clean newly remodeled bathroom, so I count myself lucky.

Abstinence of the Week

2007-01-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

The New York Times interviewed Rhonda Arias, a woman whose life work is preaching to women who have had abortions and who have been emotionally harmed by it.

She has two daughters, who she raised up right, telling them about contraception - oops I mean - abstinence, saving yourself for marriage, keeping your virginity. She came home from a trip and her 17 year old had some news for her! Surprise!

She's quoted as saying:

"Abstinence works better than birth control, really. It's just that people don't do it."

Well really, Rhonda, that's the point people do do it!

Too bad she didn't tell her daughter about lesbians. That's the sure fire lifestyle to prevent unwanted pregnancy!

Pray for Something Good for Christ's Sake!

2006-12-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

There was an article about this wall street pentecostal preacher guy and his wife in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week - complete with scary pictures of these people. The wife used to "pray to God to send her a husband." And HE sent her one! Good-oh! One up for GOD.

Then the beloved C came home and told me that her boss had told her that the beloved C was the answer to her prayers and that the boss knew that God had sent her (beloved C) to UCLA so that she (the boss) could give her (C) another department currently being run by a nimrod.

So here are two examples of GOD actively intervening in the lives of prayerful christians. And here's my question for GOD. Why is GOD interested in someones marital status? Or UCLA's alumni fundraising? Is GOD a BRUIN? With so much going on in the world, why is GOD listening to someones pray for a good data processing manager? Hello, GOD, I don't care about Margaret's period, I care about the fact that people, actual people are being raped and killed in Darfour. Triage? Priorities? Get GOD a damn PDA and a prioritized to do list before it's too late!

And here's my question for those who pray. What's Christian about praying to GOD to fix your SEX LIFE? Or to solve a little work issue? What kind of solipsistic, dumb-ass, personal, itty bitty kind of thing to pray for. Pray to stop civil war in Iraq.

Reviews: The Coronation of Poppea

2006-12-19T14:13:00.000-08:00

Well, yes, I know that there was no PBGV action happening when Monetverdi was around, but still, Beso is adorable and happy.

So we, the beloved C and I, went to see Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea by the L.A. Opera at the music center.

The Coronation of Poppea is a very long opera, 3 acts, two intermissions, 4 hours, one murder suicide, one attempted murder, three exiles and some royal adultery. A lot happens.

The Coronation of Poppea is one of the earliest operas and is a baroque opera. The orchestra was not a modern one, but one filled with a disarming lack of wind and percussion instruments. There were violins and a viola, harps, harpsichords, baroque cello, baroque guitar and best of all three, count 'em three theorbos. They were like lutes for Atlas-sized giants. I'll just let you google them, but dear me they were large - and we could see them big as ever from our outpost at the top of the balcony.

Anyway, it's a very long opera and it is not a "classic" opera, the music is baroque, the narrative arc is odd. It's about Nero and his girlfriend Poppea, who wants to be empresses so they need to get rid of the current legal empress who wants to get rid of Poppea.

Often in Operas the wronged wife is this noble character - like the Marchande in der Rosenkavalier, though obviously this was not a trope in Opera when Poppea was composed since it is one of the first operas, but Octavia, the empress, she sings sweetly about love and how her husband, Emperor Nero, is her one true love and how heartbroken she is that he's cheating on her, etc., etc.

And I thought, you know, if my husband was Nero - I might have a few other issues with him. Like the poisonings, murders, assassinations, thefts and the horse in the bedroom. Sleeping around is nothing.

Poppea and Nero arrange to murder Seneca, the stoic philosopher. He kills himself after the villagers sing to him asking him not to die. There are a few goddesses running around quarrelling. Mercury pops down and hovers around to tell Seneca that he's going to go. Seneca, being a stoic is a baritone and is glad to leave handling Nero to go take his chances with the gods. Nero and Seneca's nephew sing about love and feel each other up. (STOIC=BARITONE)

And that's just part of the first two acts!!!! The song where the villagers ask Nero not to die is absolutely gorgeous as is the duet between Nero and the nephew.

So (we're going to go faster now) Poppea's jilted boyfriend, Otho is told by Occtavia, Nero's wife, that he has to kill Poppea by dressing as a woman. He asks Drusilla, the woman who loves him to borrow her clothes and declares his love for her. She is stupid, so she believes this and gives him her outfit. Otho goes to kill Poppea who lies asleep in her garden but Amore, the goddess of love, stops him from killing Poppea, he is discovered and escapes though all can say that it was Drusilla who tried to kill Poppea. Did I mention that Otho is a counter tenor? That means he sings higher than I do. Love duets between men and women where they are both in the same vocal range are rare.

So Otho escapes, but Drusilla is easily caught and Nero threatens her with torture so she admits to wanting to kill Poppea and she is sentenced to death. But wait! Lo! There is Otho, striding forward and declaring that it was he who tried to kill Poppea! At the request of Ottavia! So Otho is exiled, Drusilla goes with him, and Ottavia is exiled. Now is Poppea's chance to be empress, Ottavia is gone and the way is clear!

The opera notes made a great deal of the fact that there is no moral compass for the audience to root for. Seneca the stoic baritone is killed off in the begining of the second act and didn't do to good of a job teaching Nero ethics. Ottavia wants to kill her rival but isnt' appalled at a husband who routinely murders his relatives and former teachers. Drusilla is willing to sacrifice herself for her lover, but she is also quite happy to help her lover kill her rival. Otho is totally willing to point the finger at the Empress, there goes loyalty. Nero is an adulterer and murderer. Ditto Poppea.

But my word, the closing duet between Poppea and Nero, declaring their love; gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous!

Show Dogs

2006-12-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

Here are the heebiegeebies all lined up in a row at the Eukanuba Invitational Dog Show in Long Beach last week. We took the our pbgvs and did a stint of oh, about 30 seconds at the Meet the Breed booth and then looked at the pbgv competition. Which was thrilling. Our Host, the wonderfully knowledgable pbgv breeder who was responsible for our irrepressible Beso knew a lot about hounds and competition. Her guy, Champion Janvan Gandalf, is pictured here, is a totally gorgeous, well-put together peeb, with beautiful movement. So we had a great time and it was so fun to go to the dog show with your dogs. That was totally fun.

Well I have to walk the dogs and get ready to go to the Opera, so I'll check in later this week.

2006-12-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

Okay I Project Managed this site: http://www.myroboreptile.discovery.com So go and take a look, play the game, watch the video and let me know how you like it.

Oh yeah, it keeps the number up. So thanks for checking it out.

Things I Wonder About: Holiday Decorations

2006-12-06T14:55:00.000-08:00

So you know that I am against overdone privacy plantings, this is because they are antithetical to new urbanism, discourage pedestrians and also because I like to look into other people's windows. Our neighborhood is an old one, with "spanish style" houses set back and front yards that are grass. Very sweet. (Well don't get me started on GRASS in Southern California that's another rant!) But some people, like the house above, have done a few privacy plantings. This house is a drag to walk by because you can't tell what's behind it, and the dogs bark but you don't know if they're outside or not and the plants are taking over the sidewalk.

But from the street, as you can see, there is no way to see the house. So what's up with the holiday decorations gone crazy? It started the first week of October with this extravagant Halloween display that no one can see. That was then re-done with stuffed chickens and turkeys for the thanksgiving holiday. Now of course it is a winter wonderland with christmas elves and trees. Stuck behind the privacy plantings. It is odd to think of this outpouring of public civic mindedness in decorating for the holidays and hiding it. An even odder note is that our neighborhood is predominantly and rather pointedly orthodox jewish and so the happy secular christmas theme hidden behind the privacy plantings takes on this subversive tone.

I don't get it. Going to all this decor galore "public" work and keeping it hidden.

Things I wonder about

2006-11-29T08:42:00.000-08:00

So day after day I read the LA Times and there are terrible stories about gang members pulling up to people's houses and firing shots at families and killing young children, teens and people who are either in or not in gangs. Just last August, while Mayor Villaregosa was down the street comforting a family of a young boy shot in a drive by killing, a teenage girl who was going to the memorial service was shot to death - on the two blocks from the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Now, I don't know, but I wonder. Why are these things called "gang" related and not militia related? How come we have "gangs" and Iraq has "militias?" Both have guns and ammo. Both have economic means of survival through black market activities. Both have support among some members of the community who are willing to shelter members and are willing to buy the goods controlled by the militia. The people who are randomly dead from their activities are all really dead. So when is a gang a militia? When is a militia a gang?

Car thoughts

2006-11-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

The Insurance Institute comes out with Auto Safety ratings every year and they make their criteria known in advance. So last year they said that no car that didn't have ECS technology, electronic control systems reduce skids, slides and roll overs.

No American cars made the safety list this year. Why? Because they didn't have ECS. GM, Ford have been having terrible years financially, they have made money on trucks for years but high gas prices have had sales plummeting. Lack of good design has made Americans buy hondas and toyotas and vws. Ford and GM are laying off workers and going to Washington for handouts and bailouts.

But isn't it telling, that with an entire year to install already existing technology, technology that would actually make their products safer, the American car industry could not CHANGE ONE SINGLE assembly line to insure that one of their makes of cars were on that safety list.

Shouldn't these corporations stop paying their execs huge salaries and start actually firing the CEOs and not the workers?

National Gluttony Day

2006-11-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

So the beloved C and I were going to have people (actual family) over for national gluttony day. Because I'm just having issues or I'm contrary, I decided that we would not have a "groaning board" for the holidays, that we would have a reasonable feast. That I would not make gazillions of dishes. That I would be freed from the tyranny of hor d'ouevre. Just say no to excess, to greed, to gluttony, to Americans using all of the resources!

So we decided to have a first course of butternut squash soup, a turkey breast, cornbread dressing, green beans. A friend who grows her veggies was bringing the salad. Desert a little apple pie. A lot of food, actually, but missing a few dishes from the traditional thanksgiving holiday overload. No biscuits, no potatoes, no mashed veggies.

Of course, we didn't have enough soup bowls for eight, so we bought little 1 cup bowls for the soup - actual chinese rice bowls. Little. But that was okay, since you just needed a little bit of soup, there was more food coming. It would just be a little taste. And so that weekend I made butternut squash soup and while I doubled the recipe, we ate it that Sunday for dinner and saved the rest. C spent the Sunday sorting through linens and ironing them, just like women were doing all over the nation. A little pre-cooking, a little ironing before the festivities.

I had been intending to make a free-form apple pie with puff pastry, and to use the left over pastry to make little cheese sticks. An hor d'ouevre! But don't tell anyone. Of course I couldn't find any puff pastry. Well I could find stuff masquerading as puff pastry. But, having made puff pastry, I know that puff pastry is made of flour and butter. Not transfat loaded salt flour with ingredients that no one can pronounce. So a little change in plan, I made pie dough pastry, and gave up the idea of little cheese sticks.

I had gone to Whole Paycheck and ordered a free range organic turkey breast, on bone, 8 to 10 pounds. I was scheduled to pick it up between 9:00 and 9:30 on Wed. Notice that if there was a problem I wasn't going to be giving myself a whole lot of time to fix the problem. To salt or brine a turkey I needed a couple days lead time. Obviously I didn't have time to defrost anything by then either. C came back and said, turkey breasts don't come in 8 to 10 pound increments, 6 pounds is the biggest that they come. So now I have a turkey that is less than one pound per person before cooking, when it shrinks. But that's okay, because there was going to be enough food. And people could fill up on dressing.

C asked how much ice cream I had bought for the ala mode aspect of the pie. 2 pints I said. I don't think that's enough she said as we were blocks from Whole Paycheck on Wed. But we didn't want to go back. Just a little drop of ice cream on the pie, we don't want to over do it.

So on Thursday I start making the dinner. I roll out the pastry dough into a tart pan and pour in the caramelized apples and realize that the apples don't fill the tart shell as abundantly as I had imagined. There are bare patches. A pie with negative space.

I start to make the dressing. I had made a loaf of cornbread on Sunday and another one on Tuesday. One of the loaves had mold on it. So I had half the amount of stuffing that I had planned.

And teeny, tiny soup bowls.

And a negative space pie.

And two to four pounds less turkey than planned.

And no hor d'ouevre.

We're the only people who spent hundreds of dollars on a Thanksgiving meal with not enough food.

Signs: Universal Pictures

2006-11-14T11:06:00.000-08:00

I have added a link to my old friend and professor's site, sharongoldart. I have also deleted the link to the old face city. Things there went sour, one partner executed a senseless coup and in general behaved like a Karl Rove, baseless lies, rumours and innuendo. So I can no longer recommend the site. Which is too bad. But I can recommend that you get a facial from the fabulous Robin, who works at Ole Hendricksen's spa and who was ousted from old face city by an evil partner. (310) 854-7700 is the phone number if you want a fab facial.

Reviews: Wolfgang Tillmans

2006-10-31T15:07:00.000-08:00

We went to the Hammer Museum to see the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit. The photographs are curiously closed down and matter of fact. Like they're pretending to be neutral and devoid of content. But they are queer, odd and emotionally resonant at the same time, they're tilted. One of a man and a deer on a beach, you can't quite reconcile beach, man, deer. Why is the deer that size, who has ever heard of a deer on a beach, why is the man near the deer? It's all very odd.

We saw it a while ago and I haven't mentioned it in my political catatonia and switching jobs and all. But I recommend seeing the exhibit. Go to Westwood and park in the building, they'll validate!

Talking Turkey

2006-10-30T12:24:00.000-08:00

This morning, as I made myself bacon and eggs for breakfast, I thought "What did I do in my life before I discovered turkey bacon??????????"

Turkey bacon, good turkey bacon, it's only s few calories per stick, it has a nice salty & smokey flavor, it's great on Turkey Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato sandwiches. BLTs didn't exist in my life prior to turkey bacon. Oh yeah, and eating any form of meat. BLTs wouldn't have been part of my life prior to starting to eat poultry and fish.

I love turkey bacon, and life is just great now that I have discovered turkey bacon. Some turkey bacon is pretty much like cardboard and I don't like that turkey bacon, but Wellshire Farms turkey bacon (I'll give them a plug) is pretty damn good.

You might be thinking, wow, turkey bacon. Or you might be thinking, what the fuck is up with Scott? She's usually a tad more pithy and angry than this. I don't stumble onto her blog to read about turkey friggin' bacon.

And you're right. There's an election coming up, over 100 soldiers have died in Iraq this month, 43 people exploded in a car bomb in Baghdad today, global warming is happening and I don't have air conditioning in my apartment. There's a lot going on. But I can't get into it. I'm happy to just walk my dogs, go to work, eat turkey bacon and shop. I could be doing something other than that. But it's just so hard to get up every morning and be angry. It's so hard to think globally and act locally. It's so hard to read the fucking new york times and Frank Rich's articles which totally rocked this week and have a take away. What's my take away? That the U.S. is being run by a ruthless bunch of motherfuckers who don't know what they're doing and who are too arrogant to take the advice of experts. Give me my bacon, man. I can't think about that. It's easier to think about turkey bacon.

Because how do you ask the last man to die in a war that was a stupid idea to begin with?

And our government has asked that question a hundred times this month.

And Halliburton has posted record second quarter profits this month.

Give .... ME ...... TURKEY ...... BACON

Axis of Stupidity

2006-10-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

Does anyone remember that axis of evil speech?

The duly unelected George Jr. gave it. In talking about Iraq, Iran & North Korea he said; "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. I will not wait on events while dangers (sic) gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The U.S.of A. will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

And then he invaded Iraq. A country that was run by a bathist, i.e. pan arab nationalist dictator who didn't like islamist fundamentalists and who didn't train or harbor Queda operatives and who didn't have weapons of mass destruction.

And in invading Iraq he put fear in Iran and North Korea who now have nuclear weapons while U.S. forces are stuck in a no-win quagmire in Iraq - a country that didn't have terrorists or weapons of mass destruction.

Good going George!

And while I'm on the subject of stupidity, the Republican hysteria on homosexuality continues to fuck them over. Yes, Dennis Hastert should resign, he protected an idiot for political purposes. But it ain't homosexuals who are ruining our country. If you're worried about children, then you should be locking up men. After all 95% of pedophiles are strait men.

Reviews: What to Wear

2006-10-02T09:56:00.000-07:00

So we went to see "What to Wear" an opera with music by Michael Gordon and libretto by Richard Foreman.

It was a totally amusing event, with fantastic music and a truly Dadaist sensibility. The costumes and props, of which there were many, were charmingly home made, like the original Dada costumes by Hugo Ball.

The opera concerned the concerns of Madeline X, who is beautiful. Madeline X was represented or discussed by a quartet of singers, dressed up like four psycho Andrews Sisters. Madeline has a brain inside her brain that is a box that either is or is not open. Madeline likes or doesn't like to play golf with or with out ducks. There are big ducks and BAD DUCKS in the opera. Ducks who go into restaurants beautifully dressed are eaten. There was a gaggle of "movement ensemble" performers and a rather large chorus who also moved. The performers who were not Madeline were dressed in black suits, with short trousers (the golf thing) and large kilted barrels wrapped around them. They wore striped glasses and a daub of paint on their chins to represent goatees. One of the chorines was an adorable young thing who was having a great time, she couldn't stop smiling. Though when you have a striped golf club as a prop you probably shouldn't be smiling. The set was a charming homemade mish mosh, with a card and mirror motif reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed the movement ensemble and chorus looked rather like pawns. Occasionally the movement ensemble would push in a large duck tank. I really enjoyed myself and would certainly buy the album - the music was absolutely wonderful. And I would recommend the opera to anyone who doesn't mind not knowing what's going on. If you have to know what's going on, then don't go.

This picture is of Leche with the "PRE" version of the french market bag. I knitted and knitted and got this huge bag, all floppy. This was my first knitting project that did not involve a rectangle or square. It was also my first felting project. I knit the thing in the round and it was large and floppy. Then I popped it into the washing machine in hot water. And it came out like below. I followed the recipe (I guess they call it a pattern) which I would never actually do if it was a recipe, and the things I wanted to change I should have changed. Proving that knitting isn't really that complicated. Here's a picture of the POST felted bag.

Reviews: Omayra Amaya

2006-09-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Okay Okay, I get more comments about Sci-Fi than I do about the shameful behaviour of the U.S. Government. So I'll shut up about torture. However there's a good op-ed piece in the LA Times today about the situation. Read about it Here

So Last Weekend we drove up to Santa Barbara to visit ye olde daddy and go to a flamenco dance concert that some lovely friends of ours had given us tickets too. As we drove along the 101 we passed the Day Fire in the distance, churning smoke into the sky. In the morning our car had a fine layer of ash upon it. Smoke is best seen with polarizing lenses otherwise you can mistake it for haze or for or clouds. Like when we were coming into California last, over the Sierras, driving over Donner Pass (7089 feet high) and into the great San Joaquin Valley I saw smoke - through my polarized sunglasses and suggested to my companions that maybe we should turn the radio on and see if we could get any news about the fire and whether the road was closed. But there was scoffing, scoffing at my suggestion. I was told that the Valley was always hazy. And then of course we turned a corner and went down into a smoke bank forest fire. But the Day fire is something, fanned by Santa Anas, it is huge and has scorched acres upon acres. Luckily though no one has been killed, and very few structures have been damaged.

Well ye olde daddy made us some artichokes and mahi mahi for dinner and then we went all greased up and happy from having some champagne and mayonnaise with our protein and veg to the theatre where we saw the Omayra Amaya dance troupe. They consisted of a guitarist, a singer, a percussionist and two dancers one of each genders. The percussionist played a box which is apparently a cajon drum, but that is what you find out if you google percussion box flamenco which, of course I didn't do at the time. The two dancers did not dance with one another, they had a series of solo dances. I liked it all, I thought it was rather thrilling and that Omayra had beautiful arms. My beloved companions were less enthusiastic. But we still had a good time. I actually like going to things I don't know anything about. Was this good flamenco? Bad flamenco? Is combining Modern Dance with flamenco a tragedy or brilliant? I don't have an opinion about it! I rather liked the Isadora Duncan\Martha Graham parts of the dance. I was reminded of dancers on Greek friezes during the modern part. I liked the stampy footy part too. But the performance was part of a greater Santa Barbara effort called the Flamenco Arts Festival, so when I read the program notes, I read about the other shows that were part of the Festival and I learned one crucial thing about flamenco. You have to be BORN to it. Flamenco dancers and guitarists have pedigrees and lineages, so don't go see someone who isn't the niece of an uncle of a grandpapa. So I recommend going to the theatre and seeing some flamenco. Oh, the guitarist, Roberto Castellon was brilliant.

And just a general note, I'm so glad the U.S. government has figured out that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. And now they're busy taking away our freedoms so that the terrorists won't hate us. Isn't that sweet?

Republicans Toe the Line, Part their Asses

2006-09-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

Well well well. Forget anything nice I ever said. The Senate leadership just rolled over and played dead. While pretending to be all moral and upright and concerned about the rule of law - unlike the white house, they were secretly in cahoots with the white house to oh, suspend rights that people had under the friggin' Magna Carta, much less the constitution.

Well I guess Karl Rove doesn't believe in habeas Corpus, and therefore no one else does either. This is just another way that the dancing republicans pretend to have diversity but actually don't.

McCain and Warner just suck the titty of the republican war chests, parting their partisan asses to special interests. Disgusting.

The Torturer Next Door

2006-09-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

Slate has an insightful article about why the US Military Lawyers are against the Bush Administration's proposal to make torture legal for the american military. It's called the Cooler Heads. One of the reasons the Military and old hands like McCain and Warner want to stick by the Geneva conventions is that it makes the rules of war clear for soldiers on the ground and it gives a soldier a legal reason to disobey an order.

Think about what we ask a soldier to do. We ask them to kill people legally. Isn't that a mind blower? A soldier needs a clear framework to do her job.

And now think, what happens to the person who is asked to hold a person's head underwater until they are breathing water? What happens to a person who is ordered to place electrodes on another human? What happens to the person who delivers the electrical jolt?

How can a government strip the moral integrity of a young serviceman by asking them to do that? And what happens when that young man comes home?

George Bush Says It's OKAY to Torture American Soldiers

2006-09-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm just so amazed at the ability of the Bush Administration to completely ignore the rule of law. So NOW the Republicans, lead by the "I never met a penis electrode I didn't like" guys at the white house, want to arbitrarily sign off of international rules about torture under the Geneva convention. And they're bashing the Republicans who don't want to abide by international treaties that 1) have been in existence for a while and 2) were mainly written by the US, back when we were the good guys. It's very interesting that the people who actually have served in the military, McCain, Warner, Powell, want protections for US soldiers while the guys who sat on their hands and have never been in battle don't.

There was an article in the LA Times yesterday about how this was going to cost McCain big among the evangelical christian right, who also, apparently think it's cool for governments to torture people. In fact, if it wasn't for those terribly Popish costumes, they'd be bringing back the Spanish Inquisition. What McCain and Powell get, and what this administration seems to be clueless about is that we win when we persist in being better.

There has been a shift away from property rights to human rights, and people persist in being confused by this. It used to be that children were the property of their father, a wife her husband, a farmer his landlord, a serf his lord, a nation it's King. But property rights suck. Human Rights don't. And there is a clear and shiny line that even the most Manichean among us can see. Which is you can not harm another person. You can not violate their dignity. Which is why the Geneva Conventions are a shining beacon of humanity, really one of the nicest things us people can point to and say "see, we're civilized."

So of course, the right wing extremists running our government are against it.

Stale Saying Commonplace Chestnut

2006-09-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

I went to the bookstore and forgot to get a book of Sudoku puzzles. But I did wander through the Sci-Fi section. My cousin had recommended a few books when I had last seen A., at the Sci-Fi World Con. I had gone to a store before and had not seen any of the one's she had recommended. So, in an effort to be gone from the house while the cleaner was there, I decamped to the mall and stalked around a chain bookstore. There are some pretty racy book covers in the old Sci-Fi world. A lot of breast plates and naked backs with tattoos. Anyway, I picked up a couple books. Science Fiction books with racy covers. Then I was feeling guilty that I was not at home working, so I walked over to the tech section and started to look at the books there. I thumbed through a few java books, thinking, "But I don't want to learn another language!" Can you hear me stomp my little foot? But then I saw a book about PHP and MySQL and since I'm futzing around with those as well I decided to buy that book. So I wandered around the chain bookstore and found the counter where you could buy the books. There were actually a lot of counters where you could buy books on every level of the store, they were just unmanned as it were so you had to wander until you found a populated counter. Anyway there I was buying some Sci-Fi and Computer Programming books and I thought;

"Am I a cliche?"

Chocolate

2006-09-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

Today is Milton Snavely Hershey's birthday, the man who brought us the chocolate bar. Who the hell names their kid SNAVELY?
Well apparently, now that we have the internet we can answer that question, not very many. But there is a popular limerick about Snavely the snail. Which goes like this:

Some unseemly snorkelers from Wales,
Were arrested and sent off to jails,
For acts most immoral
Among the reefs coral,
Such as writing graffiti on snails.

And then there is a site which morphs the limerick to different verse forms, (a la Queaneau) here:
A Study in Verse Forms by Peg Kay

Petty Tyrants

2006-09-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is just appalling how awful people are about everything and to anyone no matter what the situation.
For example, I had to go to the DMV, always a pleasant experience, for a second time in a month. The first time we had been told that we had filled out the transfer form wrong. The beloved's Rev. Auntie was leaving the country and we decided that the peeb nation fit in her car real well so we'd buy the car off her. The Rev was leasing the car, so the (paperless) title had to go from the lease company to her and then from her to us. And we had just mashed it all up on one piece of paper that the lady at the DMV had given us. So she told us to come back with two orange pieces of paper - going from the lease company to the Rev and then from the rev to us. Okay. So the Rev sent us the needed orange document from the lease company to her. Then she left for the outer Hebrides to bring the word of our lord to some sheep, some salmon and some men in skirts with no underwear. I popped over to the DMV.

So I explained to the woman behind the DMV counter what had happened, proudly displayed the two orange pieces of paper, waited for her to grock it. Then she said, whose Akbar? Which is something that I don't grock. I don't know I said. Well, whose Akbar she said again, quite pointlessly I thought, like why don't you give me more info because I don't know who Akbar is and I don't know why you're talking to him, capice? Well it turns out the VIN number was wrong, and Akbar had the VIN number on the (paperless) title, and so while the ORANGE pieces of paper and all my documents had ONE VIN Number the (paperless) title had Akbar's VIN number. So the woman behind the DMV counter told me to take the car, go around back follow the signs and get the car VERIFIED. What she didn't tell me was that I was supposed to take the car to the big glass doors right in front of her. Whatever, I can follow directions. So I get in the car and follow the signs and get in the VERIFICATION lane which is empty and right next to the driving test lane which has a line in it. The two lanes go up around the building and have little signs on the pavement demarking the lanes, here driving test, here VERIFICATION lane. With a STOP sign indicator for each lane. All the driving test people were in line behind the STOP sign and I drive up to the VERIFICATION STOP. I wonder briefly why I'm not parking way back there in front of the glass doors so that the behind the counter DMV woman can see that I am following directions waiting for VERIFICATION. But I am a smart chick, I can read, and so I park where the signs tell me to park. There is a guard guy ordering the test drive lane cars, and he sees me, waves at me and goes on ordering the driving test cars. When he has gone up and down the driving car lanes he comes over to me and asks "Are there a lot of people in there?" motioning to the brick DMV building beside us. "Yes, it's very crowded today." I say. "How many people are in there?" he asks, "A lot, it's crowded" I repeat, "You wouldn't know how many people are in there, would you?" "Many, many people are in there, " I say thinking maybe he doesn't like the word crowded. "Can you tell me exactly how many people are in there?" "Probably the average amount of people are in there, for an average September week day" I reply, getting more and more annoyed with guard guy. "But you wouldn't KNOW" he says triumphantly. "Not exactly," I say. "You wouldn't know cause you cant see through a wall!" I am amazed. I can't see through walls, doesn't he know that I am Superman's sister? I actually DO have X-Ray vision and can see that he has a very small penis. I don't often let on about who I am.

"So how can you expect them to see you if you're not in front of the glass doors?" He goes on to tell me. "Why does it say to stop here then?" I ask, but what I really want to do is punch this guy. "I don't know, but you have to move back." He proceeds to talk to me more about buildings, brick walls, signs; with his arm on the car door so I CAN'T MOVE BACK.

Well it goes on and on after that, but that guy is going to have one short life, because someone some day is going to have temper management issues. Someone who has no patience with being in some frigging Kafkaesque bureaucratic insane asylum is going to take him out. And I will testify on behalf of the defense, asking for clemency.

And of course, I have to go back.

Reviews

2006-09-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

There is a wee show at the Museum of Arts and Crafts that we went to see this weekend. Called Tigers and Jagaurs it featured local artists (L.A.) and was about Asian\Latino synergy and influence. Of note were Bari Kumar's "Mas Para Menos", which featured a multi-armed Kali\Jesus figure. Totally fantastic. And Clement Hamani's "Rice Rocket", a low-rider rick shaw blaring 70s oldies. Richard Duardo's energetic mish mosh of punk\asian\latino prints and Shizu Saldamando's chinese screen of a Hungington Park party. Small but choice. Upstairs there was a much larger exhibit of palestinian embroidery, that made me think, "Oh those Poor Exploited Women!" It certainly didn't make me feel how great palestinian culture was, it just made me think about how OPPRESSED those women are.

This is actually wrong, and not just silly wrong

2006-08-31T14:46:00.000-07:00

SO I was bumming around the internet, avoiding working, (yes! I am working, for pay and once, for a facial) and I found this photo of the Sedan Crater. I have a rule that all the photography I put on the blog is mine, but this isn't. Since I haven't been to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.

This is wrong. Making explosives that make craters you can see from outer space AND that are radioactive is immoral. Why would anyone want to do this? What moral compass do they have? Reading the articles that came out on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, I was amazed that anyone would want to continue to build new nuclear power plants. A week later the L.A. Times had an article about how nuclear waste site designers have to figure out warning signs that will last 100,000 years and be legible in languages that haven't even been invented yet.

Think about that. Warning signs for the ages in languages we haven't imagined yet.

Meanwhile the bobos in washington have continued to fuck up the world, squandering all good will towards the U.S. by invading a country that didn't do anything and now they don't have enough manpower or friends to stop nuclear proliferation, which, I hasten to mention, will actually increase the probability of dead people coming your way.

I originally wrote "Bonobos in Washington" but those monkeys would be doing a better job than the ID10ts currently there.

Orchid

2006-08-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

Here's an orchid that I've adopted and almost killed, but it is apparently happy and blooming now.

Just Plain Wrong

2006-08-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

apologies in advance. I don't have a picture, I didn't take my camera.

That said, it is just plain WRONG to wear your renaissance faire costume to the World Con Sci Fi convention. WRONG. Luckily there weren't a lot of people wearing Star Trek outfits, because most people at the Sci Fi convention were spherically challenged, and those outfits don't like an ounce of blubber, but still, at least a few pointy ears would be in keeping with the theme of the conference you spent money to attend. I hate to say this, but good old Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of York ain't in outerspace.

So I went to visit my cousin, who has been going to the sci fi convention since 1955, since it was in So Cal, this year and we had lunch and strolled the convention site.

There are many things that you don't really get to do as a grown-up, wear capes, make loud noises for no apparent reason, dress in costumes. Being a grown up is rather boring, so I'm all for a little fantasy dress up. In fact, speaking of loud noises I started tap dancing at one point because it's fun to make loud noises with your feet. Put me in a top hat and noisy shoes and I'm happy as a clam. But I do think ye merrye ye olde englunde is not sci-fi. Give me a Klingon, an Alien, Sigourney Weaver; but don't give me stale ale. If you know what I mean.

Anyway, there is a heavy duty component of FANTASY lumped into the fantasy - Sci-Fi world and so many people wear wizard costumes and purple velvet capes. You can buy handmade cape clasps in the shape of dragons and feather masks and such, lots of leather boots of all sorts - black shiny stiff storm trooper boots, soft brown leather elf boots. A rather popular, but to me totally bewildering, accessory was the tail. The first time I saw someone wearing a tail I thought, "Very few people's asses can take that kind of scrutiny. Yours for example. I wouldn't draw attention to it." Then I noticed it was a common trait, as it were. But wouldn't you think that people would be using something other than raccoon tails? First we have Elizabeth in Space, and now she's joined by DANIEL BOONE! Metaphors are getting mixed with a cement truck at the sci fi con! If I was going to wear a tail I think I would pick a dragon tail. Yet I did not see a single dragon tail being sported as I walked about. And did you notice? There was nary a tail at the Emmys last night. Someone better contact some Hollywood sylist types, I want to see Angelina in a tail. She's probably half dragon anyway.

So after lunch, we went up to the break out session on Restoration Dance. This is not THE EMPIRE being restored, but rather the secret Jane Austen sci-fi sect, who had gathered to do a little promenading around the conference room at the Hilton. Mr Bennett, Lizzie Bennett, Mrs. Bennett, Wharf, random Elizabethans, a few hobbits and some wizards were all there. I was reminded of going to the gay two stepping bar in Austin and watching the texan cowboy queers dance the two step together. Very fun to watch two guys in cowboy boots and hats waltz clog about the dance floor. Similarly, vary fun to watch a Klingon reach out a hand to touch the gloved fingers of Lizzie Bennett, who is wondering "Where the hell is DARCY?"

Well, I can never actually go attend the conference, since I obviously don't have the wardrobe, but it was grand fun and if you're in Japan next year, you can stop in.

Face Time

2006-08-20T16:11:00.000-07:00

Well I haven't written in a while, and I'm just going to blame the house guest who is staying with us, who is the most polite house guest on earth and who really isn't the reason why, but I'll just do that anyway. I won't blame the depression that only large quantities of bittersweet chocolate gellato could assuage, depression in the face of the continued rejection of job seeking.

Anyway, my next door neighbor is running this really great e-commerce site called face city shop and since I live next door I just sort of invited myself over and said, what face products should I use? Well Robin asked what I was using and ominously told me, "Those products are good, and EXPENSIVE, but they're not PROFESSIONAL." Well, dear me! I want to be CHEAP and PROFESSIONAL! Except of course, at work where I want to be employed, expensive and professional. Anyway it turns out Robin doesn't really believe in night creme or eye creme, which bummed me out because I was looking forward to the Ultimate Lift Eye Gel on the face city site. So I can't report on that. But I did get some TRUTH SERUM (watch out when you come over for tea cause I'll put a few drops in yours and see what happens) and some soothing creme and this stuff smells like those chewable orange vitamin pills from the 70s. So it's kind of weird to occasionally get a whiff of that orange smell as you talk to people about why they should hire you. Even though they are 10 years younger than you are and have never worked at a profitable company before and so you know they aren't going to hire you and you wonder why they bothered.

But my skin looks pretty good, but it's very potent stuff and I quickly realized that I was using too much and the vit c was irritating my dermatitis - except you couldn't see it. And so most of my redness and blotchiness is kind of gone. I will report back when I've finished the bottles off. But so far, it's pretty good stuff.

Technology

2006-08-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

I had this really good rant going about how this administration proves that neo con theories are totally stupid and bankrupt and how they've fucked everything up by being delusional school marms pointing their fingers at the world and tsk tsking when countries won't BEHAVE!
It was really good, but it all vanished when I tried to spell check, so you just have to take my word for it. It was pithy and well written and if Condi Rice read it she would fall down in tears. Alas, my ability to save the world was ruined by technology. Or my failure to SAVE prior to spell checking.
So here is a photo of a plaque at the Santa Barbara City Hall honoring the original white women settlers who came there. I thought it was appropriate today since today is not only the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but Henry Gates had an op-ed piece in the NYT about trying to find the descendants of the few free black patriots who fought in the American Revolutionary War so that they can join the Sons or Daughters of the Revolution. The DAR being the group that refused to allow the mezzo soprano Marian Anderson to sing in their hall because she was black. Most of the free black men who fought in the revolutionary war fought for the British, since they had abolished slavery back in Britain by then and they offered to manumit any slaves who fought for them. This was one of those anarchic things that tickled my fancy. Imagine the stuffed up snobby DAR and SAR meetings being suddenly packed with african americans. Hee heee!

The Hood: Flora

2006-08-01T14:23:00.000-07:00

I am not one who likes "privacy plantings" as they are called. They are not pedestrian friendly. Or community friendly. They are the opposite of the front porch that makes neighborhoods neighborhoody. I mean a few discreet plantings are all well and good. I have placed a potted senna, a lovely bush\vine, in front of my living room window, but it is literally in front of my ground floor living room window. Every time the neighbors walked by on their way to the trash my dogs went crazy. This bush just affords a little more privacy and makes people not walk directly in front of my window. It doesn't wall off my entire house from the community.

Well this picture is of privacy plantings run amok. Yes - there's a house back there!!! Vines cover the entire house and all the fences. There was a sign up for a while, instructing the mailman to just "throw the mail over the hedge."

I love that - just throw the mail over the hedge. It's so devil may care. Throw caution and your Visa bill to the wind! Don't even bother to find the mailbox, we'll find the mail among the weeds. I wonder if there are mail rules governing how things need to be delivered. Like "A Post Officer Must Never Heave Mail." It sort of gives a new meaning to over the hedge.

Reviews

2006-07-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

Don't read a review or talk to anyone, just go see Little Miss Sunshine. Damn I wish I'd written it.

I finished Allison Bechdel's Fun Home yesterday. It is a beautiful graphic memoir about growing up, reading with your father, and finally putting the family secrets all in perspective. Speaking of perspective, the drawings make use of prespective brilliantly, with the point of view shifting to help portray the story. At one moment you can be on the ground, the next looking up at children hanging off the stairs, looking down at your father catching you in the pool. It's really wonderful.

We also saw Devil Wears Prada, a perfect movie to spend some time enjoying yourself in air conditioning. It made me incredibly nostalgic for New York and the publishing world. My old haunts, my old scramble to clean the desk, my old not getting into the same elevator. The clothes were pretty awful and the story was pretty lame - she's BAD because she has to work late! But Meryl was magnificent and the girl who plays the first assistant was hillarious.

Battery! Schmattery!

2006-07-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

So I turned on the computer the other day and got a warning that said "Your battery is low, press F1 to continue and F2 to configure."
Ahem.
So I went to the Dell Website, thinking to go to their SUPPORT page and SEARCH for information about this low code OS ERROR on their machine. They didn't have one.

Think about this. A computer company doesn't have a place on their web site that consumers can look up support information. Is this dumb or what? You can't search for HELP at Dell. There is no little link on their main page, or poking around that sends you to a support area. I later find out that's because they have a separate site with a separate url. So if you just go to dell.com you can't get HELP.

So I rooted around in the closet and found the Owner's Manual. There were two battery entries in the book, one of which says that you need to be careful when you replace the battery because it could EXPLODE.

So I googled Dell Battery Explode and found out that there is a lovely photograph of a Laptop Exploding into Flames

So for now I am just keeping the computer on.

This is a photograph of a lovely, rustic mountain art cabin.