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.

Anise Seed Wafers

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 ....

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

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.