The rose garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is in bloom this month. It’s an over-the-top sumptuous sensory experience, I promise. If you go early in the morning, you can avoid the bees. Tuesdays are free.
I made a leek and goat cheese tart yesterday that came this close to disaster.
My brother called while I was shopping for ingredients; I told him what I was making and he said, boy you’re obsessed with pie. If you were on Top Chef you’d be the person who made everything into a pie.
I said, But Dave, that’s the beauty of pie!
The phrase of the day is: Embrace the opposition by killing them with kindness. That’s never been something I’ve excelled at. But I’m trying.
I can’t even express how glad I am to see spring. Life is good.
I’ve got most of a dummy for a book done.
Well, actually, not. Pretty much the opposite, really. But right now I’m interested in the elephant in the room, the story these people over here know, and those people over there do not, and how the telling and not telling, and the planning out of who to tell and when, charges things and gives them a power.
I think that’s why when there’s something you’re not telling someone that that’s exactly the subject they will want to bring up and ask questions about. There are things that have happened right in front of me that I have not seen and registered, that I didn’t know about at the time, but once I was told specifically that there were there, then I could see them. There are things I’m really conscious of trying to describe as factually accurately as possible.
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.
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.