1. I went for a run yesterday morning and got caught in one of those dead leaf mini-cyclones. It was exciting. This morning it was so cold I almost needed my gloves for the entire run. My ears went numb. It’s strange to be hot and numb at the same time. 

2. I made a pumpkin-hazelnut bread yesterday morning and forced it on the scattered printers working at the Center yesterday so I wouldn’t eat the whole thing. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think I’m in love with pumpkin. 

3. I finished this: 

which I quite like, thank you. I’m trying to remind myself that yes, I am working on this book, it really is happening, albeit verrrryyy slowwwwwllly. 

4. I finished the holiday cards for the Center, which gave me a wicked printing blister and a sore shoulder.

5. I made not just one, but two gratins, of which this was by far the better:

6. I witnessed a stand-off and thought about mopping my floor:

It was a full weekend.

I’ve been thinking a lot about timing.

And pacing. I’ve gotten better at both. I think it’s mainly developing a sense of how very long things take. 

Cooking is one of those things that teaches you about time. Also about how you change over time. I always thought I hated cauliflower, I thought it was the most boring vegetable I could think of, almost as loathesome as peas. I learned I was wrong about that this week. Apparently cooking a vegetable properly makes it taste better. Who knew? 

I think that drawing also teaches you about time, a little bit, depending on how you do it. Drawing for me is satisfying because it’s something that can happen in bits over time. I don’t actually have a lot of time all the time, so this works well. 

But nothing has taught me about time as much as setting type does.    

Or building a form does. I like having learned a new way to think about how long time lasts, how long it takes to finish something. I like that time is variable and shifts depending on where you are and how you’re feeling.   I like that’s something you can learn, and not something you’re just sort of stuck with as is. 

I like thinking about reading and time, how your consciousness of time disappears when you’re engrossed in what you read and how it’s a kind of internal time, rather than an external one, regulated by your own pace and not something outside.

I just made spicy red beans and rice, and now my nose won’t stop running. 

I went to see Rachel Getting Married tonight, which was the perfect thing to see this weekend and the perfect mix of salt and sweet, tough and loose. Starring a perfect sister and a hot mess. And then I went home and made a big perfect pot of andouille sausage and lentil soup, which was the perfect mix of spicy and earthy. And ate two bowls, and now I don’t know how to top perfect. I love when you can hold two opposite things in your head at the same time, perfect and messy, functional and not, painful and joyous.

Pie was the high point of MY thanksgiving, I don’t know about you. Remarkably interesting “incidents” and humorous family happenings afforded fascinating entertainment of considerable educational value. Did he have to take curmudgeon so literally? Why do people choose to live like this?  I can’t tell you why.

But then again, there was pie. Chocolate pecan pie: 

And sour cream pumpkin pie: 

And both were very, very good. I have a new crust recipe that involves freezing various things at various points. I was supposed to knead it inside the safe confines of a plastic freezer bag, but I decided that was taking things too far.

I like how baking is like craft and like science, and there are many, many different ways to do the same thing, and it takes a long time but not in a self-conscious way, and then the end product gets consumed. And it tastes good.

I am taking a few days to deal with the various issues I’ve been avoiding. Like that cell phone that doesn’t turn on, and my piles of junk mail, and jasper’s unfortunate new habits.

I like creating order out of chaos.

She won’t stop trying to knock the pictures off the wall. 

Flurries! 

Twice this week I get to present to an audience, which makes me feel like I’m not getting enough oxygen. I always tell myself, ‘If I practice this, then I will get better at it.’ I’m not sure that’s working.

I spent the weekend reading too much of what I don’t enjoy. I struggled my way through a stilted interview with two academics, thinking it would be good for me. It reminded me of the intellectual-boy equivalent of those conversations my pothead brothers have, where they trade a steady stream of quotes back and forth from Judd Apatow movies, Jay-Z, The Daily Show, and Chris Rock routines. Heidegger! De Saussure! Deleuzian! Robbe-frickin-Grillet! Like dueling guitar solo-theoretical-one-upmanship. When my brothers do this I always feel I don’t really need to be here, do I? I think the reason people don’t read criticism is that criticism doesn’t really want people to read it. 

I made a mediocre dinner involving bacon and brussel sprouts. I know, how can it be mediocre when there’s bacon involved? I don’t know, I managed it somehow. 

I finished a print:

And started another one. 

I went to the Museum of Arts and Design and wondered why, when they started blurring the lines between art, design, and craft, somehow the word craft got erased.

Their new show is over-installed and not as  exciting as the last two cutting-edge craft shows they’ve done. It’s very one-liner, as in, look! It’s an obsessively made sculpture made out of a whole lot of buttons! There’s one made of sunglasses! There’s one made of shoes! Plastic spoons! record albums! plastic combs! and on and on like that, and there’s condescending wall text everywhere telling you why it matters that there’s so many plastic spoons. 

But then there is a great piece made of accumulated five and dime junk store shiny things, lots of different kinds of shiny things, built up into a series of three or four, i don’t know, sort of like a combination of spaceship and boat, and when you walk around them all of a sudden you realize that hidden inside is a little baby doll peering out, aiming a machine gun at you. It’s like a nest for a very angry magpie. It’s great, though of course I didn’t write down the name of the artist. 

I finished this: 

Which is how I used to live, five million years ago.

I just got back from an excellent panel discussion, strange as it is to say. EFA Project Space hosted a talk about printmaking and collaboration, specifically the professional collaborative relationship. It was really engaging, in the way you’d like all panels to be engaging. I think it was partly because they invited three artists (and their respective collaborators) who had worked on three very different kind of print projects, so between the three groups of people they could cover many different aspects of collaboration- performative, experimental, intimate, social and community-oriented, driven by an equal exchange of knowledge. One of the artists on the panel had a long-established relationship with one of his collaborators, and could speak to the way their relationship had changed over time, one had worked with his respective collaborator only once.

That artist was particularly fascinated by the formalized roles in the professional collaborative relationship: that this was a situation defined by specific roles, created by an exchange of money, for a specific period of time, that would be expected to produce an end product. He likened the master printer to a combination of his therapist, his bartender and his hairdresser, and seemed to feel that the fact that the relationship was formal- that each person had their role to play, and that money had exchanged hands- made it more generative than other less structured kinds of collaborations he had attempted. It was refreshing to hear. It’s like that argument for why NY is still a productive place to make art-that the competition and the economic pressure tends to bring out the best work in the artists that stick it out. Which, of course, is the kind of self-serving argument people only make who still live here, but no matter.

I liked that all the printers on the panel could talk about how they switched between roles, and felt like the process of collaborating taught them new things about their tools and skills that they wouldn’t had discovered otherwise, and how they all framed the problem-solving part of making as conceptual. 

It was in conjunction with the current show at EFA Project Space: Beyond a Memorable Fancy, curated by Michelle Levy and up till December 13. My friend Wennie Huang has a great new piece in it.

I’m back in town after spending the weekend at the Pyramid Atlantic book arts fair and conference. I took no photos this weekend, thus the picture of wigs will be taking the place of photos of happy shining booksellers. Impressions of the conference include the following:

1. Less hot than the NY Art Book Fair.

2. Why is Silver Springs, Maryland a great place to eat Burmese food? 

3. Why is the book arts field so incredibly split along gender lines? 

4. And when am I going to stop being so incredibly irritated by that? 

5. Jana Harper gave a fantastic talk about walking and pace and how it relates to artist books. About how the pace of reading is like the pace of walking, about the conflation of past and present and future time periods that can take place in a walking tour. Great stuff. 

6. Which was followed by another talk about driving and the artist book, which my boss attended (we switched off, because we have learned how to share), which according to him was much more macho and incoherently theoretical. Which I enjoyed hearing, as it supports my bias in favor of walking versus driving.

7. I picked the book I’d like to buy myself for Christmas, though I sadly will have to wait until i have some actual cash in hand. Darn economic crisis. 

8. Where do people go and what do they do when they are done with their MFA? There was a whole section of younger artists in an upstairs section this year, which I thought was great.  I need to spend more time aggressively recruiting. 

9. Silver Springs has an outdoor mall in the middle of ‘downtown’, which my boss insists is just like much of LA. It’s strange to walk through what looks like a shopping center full of chain stores, but which does actually play the role of a town plaza, that serves as a social center in the evening, that has people walking and interacting in public together, which isn’t what I would expect in the middle of what otherwise looks like a whole lot of sprawl. It’s a funny little urban space. 

10. In the middle of which is: Moby Dick: House of Kabob. I should have taken a photo of that, if nothing else. 

11. I got a good chunk of holiday knitting done during table-sitting. I’m terrible at pretending to be friendly for long periods of time. Thank god for knitting.

My brother went to school to be a marriage counselor, once upon a time. At one point he was treating married couples decades older than he was while he was a single twenty-something guy living with his mom. He told fantastic stories about his anger management support group. I wonder if he made faces at his patients. I would have, if I was him, at the patients I didn’t like. It’s always perfectly clear to others what I think about someone. I’m terrible about hiding things like that. 

I am still tense. I think I worked too much this weekend. Didn’t stretch enough. My roommate is getting up before dawn to vote tomorrow. She says her family voted early this weekend and waited two hours in line. So did her friend in Florida. Early!

I hope people aren’t expecting the next president to work a miracle. That would be unfair. 

I made brussels sprouts with pecans and butter tonight. Perfect little cabbages.

I’m glad someone is able to relax. I went for a long run this morning to try to improve my mood with mixed results. I’m on edge, and I’m not sure why. It was one of those verge-of-tears runs I don’t have very often any more. I came home and realized I ran out of checks without noticing and am annoyed about having to pay my rent in some other, less convenient way, and order new ones. And here I am trying to sit on the couch and Jasper the (large) cat is trying to elbow me out of his way. The nerve! 

I’m thinking some cooking might relax me. I’d like to make this tonight. Or this. Now that it’s November I want to cook large elaborate meals again.

In the meantime, remember this: