Things to do during the New Depression

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Great Weekend, Beach, Dogs and Expiremental Theatre

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

Here are some photos.

More doggie photos

What a difference a Day Makes

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

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

Look what Is, amazingly, still there

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

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

Turn Your Back on Rick Warren

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

Last day for Art

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

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.