Vegas, March 2009

I leave the house before dawn tomorrow to go to Vegas.  I guess I ought to pack...

Antibiotics II

It's about four hours later and both Fay and I are feeling better.  She ate some banana and peanut butter and my head has cleared.  Whew, what a relief!

I think my problem was the mug of coffee I drank.  The drug information sheet says to avoid having "too much caffein."  I thought  a mug of coffee would be okay but maybe I was wrong.  Tomorrow I'll try a cup of tea instead.

It's nice to have my head back.

Antibiotics

Fay and I are under the weather.

She started feeling lousy yesterday which was fortunate (I guess) because she had a vet appointment scheduled for last night.  It was determined that she has a skin infection and possibly a urinary tract infection.  She's on antibiotics now and I'm hoping they'll make her feel better.  So far (two doses in) they haven't.  All she wants to do is lie down and rest.  The vet doesn't know for sure what's making Fay feel bad so the antibiotics might not help.

I'm on antibiotics too.  I've got ciprofloxacin.  I don't know if that's making me out of it or if I'm just out of it. We all have those days, you know?

I'm supposed to go to Las Vegas this weekend for a bachelorette party.  That sounds pretty wild, doesn't it?  Yeah baby!  I'll be swingin' from some neon sign with my fifth cosmo in one hand, wearing nothing but a red patent leather thong and seven-inch stiletto gladiator sandals!  Woo!

Does that count as an hallucination?  Should I call the doctor about changing my medication?

Actually, it's not that kind of crowd at all.  I hope I can go but I won't if Fay's not feeling better.

I have to say that I couldn't be more grateful for antibiotics.  If it weren't for them I probably wouldn't be here.

Hard But Rewarding

Philip Guston: today's exhibit A of how hard it is to make what you have to make.  There's a good article on him and his work in the Washington Post.  Talk about heroism - he was an acclaimed cerebral abstract expressionist when all of a sudden he pulled a u-ie and went cartoony low-life.  He went from this:

to this: 

Formally there are a lot of similarities between these two paintings.  That's a digression.

So-called friends dumped him (for changing his painting style?  That's not friendship) and in the beginning the critics excoriated him.  

Guston won though, as we can see (links to google image search)  These days it's hard to find a contemporary artist who doesn't worship him.  He had the guts to moon his meal ticket.  He abandoned conventional success for bald honesty and the grueling job of facing his darkest emotions.  These late works are paintings of vicious battles fought doggedly and, in the end, with compassion.  They aren't pretty paintings but they are beautiful.

I don't want to belittle his early work though.  Only Athena sprung fully developed from the head of Zeus (what the hell am I talking about?!)  The rest of us have to build our strength and skills to be able to do our best work.  We have to get fed-up with ourselves and with what we've already done.  We have to find our way before we can take a shot at being a hero.

I hope that what I'm doing now is the foundation for more difficult work to come.  I know I'm not ready yet to take on my incarnations of the monsters Guston fought.  At least, not head-on.  The truth is I can't even imagine how to do this.  I have to do what I'm doing now at the very least because I don't know what else to do.  

So why complain?  Just get to work!

Compulsion

Here's how I make my work:  I go into my studio and something takes me and forces me to make whatever it is that comes out.  It doesn't matter what I think about the thing I'm making.  I just have to make it.  It isn't even that simple because wherever I am , whatever I'm doing, something in my mind is planning what's going to happen when I get to my studio.   

That sounds kind of neat but it's actually hard.  I'm constantly questioning my actions.  Most of the time I like something I've made because I feel responsible for it and not because I think it's any good.

It's really hard to have spent seven years making work that you know is nowhere near what "experts" in your field would look at twice. 

It's hard to get to work every day and do something you don't understand.  For example right now I have to work with strawberries.  Not the juicy, sweet fragrant and delicious strawberries you might be picturing.  No.  I have to work with cartoony plastic strawberries with an artificial scent and polka dots instead of seeds.

I have no idea why.  I can't imagine how me making "artwork" based on fake strawberries could ever add up to anything remotely profound or useful.  I want to make better work.  I just can't figure out how.

I keep trying to think myself out of this predicament.  I keep trying to figure out a way to produce work that I'd receive praise for, that other people might respect.  I used to be pretty good at portraits.  Elizabeth Peyton does portraits and people approve.  People liked my black and white abstract work - at least in art school they did.  Mostly I felt like I was making shit up when I was making abstract paintings.  If I were a real artist I could think up a way to make what I want to make coincide with larger ideas going on in the contemporary art world.

You can figure out what people want to see, what people recognize as "Art."  It's not hard to jump on a bandwagon.  But I know that if I shot for a target audience and made what for me would be contrived bullshit I'd just feel sick all the time.  Besides whatever I made that way would still not be profound or meaningful.

Every day I confront the fact that the best way, the only way to be a successful artist (and I don't mean commercially though that would be great) is to let the thing that drives drive, hope to God it's going somewhere good and don't try to grab the steering wheel.

That means more and more years of not knowing what the hell I'm doing.

I actually like not knowing what the hell I'm doing.  But I don't have a good explanation to give other people for why I'm doing it.  Nor can I explain why I do it when it isn't financially rewarding or even producing many successful objects.   I can't justify to others why I put all my resources into making the things I make.  I do know, though, that I desperately desperately don't want to stop making them.

I'll never stop making my work no matter what anybody thinks about it.  Letting go and surrendering to the thing that's driving feels too good.  It's transcendent.  I guess it's a kind of chemical dependency and I'll put up with any amount of disapproval to be able to feel that again and again.

Poor Sap Vermont Vegetarian Travesty Of Jambalaya.

I was talking to Michaela today and we were discussing how nice it would be to go to New Orleans.  She pointed me to the Mardi Gras section of epicurious.com. 

First I made myself a Sazerac cocktail because I happened to have a little Sazerac Rye and some Absente hanging around.  Highly recommended.  

I got hungry while I was sipping it and checking out the jambalya recipe.  I decided to make some "Poor Sap Vermont Vegetarian Travesty Of Jambalaya."  I didn't have all the ingredients for Jambalya but what I made turned out to be surprisingly good.  So here's the recipe.  You're going to have to fudge the amounts for yourself depending on what you have on hand and how many people you're feeding:

olive oil (plenty)

vegetarian hot dogs, sliced into rounds

onion, chopped

garlic, chopped

celery, chopped (if you have it - I didn't)

bell pepper, chopped

left-over (cooked) rice

Green Mountain Gringo Salsa (I don't like it as salsa - it's not very Mexican tasting - but it's good for this) or some other wet canned (JJ would vote for jarred) tomato product 

vegetable broth

ground cayenne pepper

ground black pepper

hot sauce like Crystal, Frank's Red Hot or Tabasco

fresh parsley, chopped

Heat up a frying pan and pour in a mess of olive oil.  You're going to need a lot of olive oil to make up for the fact that you're not using nice, fatty sausages.  But keep in mind you can always add more in the end if you need to.

Saute hot dog slices, onions, garlic, celery, and peppers until they are soft and as browned as you like them.  Add rice and enough vegetable broth and wet tomato product (chopped, stewed, salsa, anything but paste) to make the mixture loose but not quite soupy (if it's soupy you just have to cook it longer - but no harm done really)  When in doubt use more broth, less tomato.

Season to taste with the cayenne and black peppers and hot sauce.  I recommend being generous with these, as you like of course.  Spicy heat mitigates the disappointing flavor of the fake hot dogs.  I found I didn't want extra salt but to each her own.  Taste to see if you need to add more olive oil.  Cook until the mixture is heated through and as firm as you like it.

Remove from the heat and stir in chopped parsley.  Serve.  

Obviously it's not authentic New Orleans  food but considering the ingredients it's darned good.

Warning: Gruesome

I had an unusual dream last night.  It was about vampires and, I think somehow, the economy.

I'm not one of those people who have a thing for vampires.  I haven't read the "Twilight" series.  I can't stand Anne Rice's writing or horror movies in general.  

Sometimes some people are able to write good stories with vampires in them.  Dracula, by Bram Stoker is a wonderful story beautifully written.  "Buffy  The Vampire Slayer" was a great T.V. show.  It had engaging characters, surprising plot-lines and was presented with humor and humanity.  In all of these examples vampirism is eroticized (which is probably why some people like vampire stories)

My dream was nothing like any of them.  In my dream groups of vampires would take huge bites off of people, removing half their body-mass in three quick chomps.  What was left, partial torsos on legs, stood bleeding on the sidewalk.  The vampires would drink their victims' blood from pools in the street. 

When they weren't devouring people the vampires were rather personable, even endearing.  They just seemed like normal, genial people until all of a sudden - bang - half your head was gone.

No eroticism, no remorse.  It's just the way things happen.  People do that too.  Look at farm animals.

Like I said though, I think this dream was about our economic situation.  For example, I'm sure that most of the people who speculated with money, from the house-flippers to the mortgage traders, CDS traders and ponzi-schemers, are loveable people.  I'm sure most of them never thought about what they were really doing.  They probably ignored the fact that down the line somebody (not them or anyone they cared about) would get screwed.  

We all do things like that sometimes.  We all ignore how our simplest actions (or inactions) can really do damage to others.  Damage is a law of nature.  I absolutely believe that nothing can live without somehow  damaging something else.  

People can't think about things like that all the time.  We'd be immobilized.  We do have to think of it a little bit to mitigate the harm we do.

Anyway,  it wasn't the kind of dream that would make my Netflix queue.  I hate gore.

Doom

I'm doing it again.  My inner doom buggy is running away with me (Of course I know that's the name of a Boston metal band)

I'm getting help from the news.  All those stories of people who are homeless or who are trying to sell everything they own including personal stuff that nobody wants because they have nothing left.  Bad economic news is piling up relentlessly every day.  In addition, global warming is going faster than previously predicted.  

Pretty much every path my mind goes down these days leads to some aspect of armageddon.  

This morning at around three (Fay woke me up) I thought I heard a spring peeper.  It's way below freezing here in VT so if that were so (is it even possible?) it would be very bad.  I started imagining the day that there are no more frogs.  

I don't know... Somehow I got whammied.  Gotta keep moving though.

A Trade In Flesh

Hi there.  I hope you will allow me to introduce myself.  I am Melissa Winter Weiss and I am a person.

Maybe this has always been the case and I'm only just noticing but it seems to me that there's a huge marketing fad going on now.  People are branding themselves.  There appears to be a segment of the world's population who think it's really important to become a product that they can market.  

What's more they have no interest in interacting with other people who are not so conveniently packaged.  The belief is that if you aren't branding yourself then you're missing the boat and aren't on the ball enough to talk to. 

Well I'll save them the time of bothering with me.  I'M NOT A PRODUCT.   I'm a person and I like it that way.  I don't fit in a package with a hip, eye-catching label.  What's more I am not interested in becoming any such object. 

It's like personality anorexia or something.  One must have to shave off, ignore or disown all sorts of facets of one's psyche to become a marketable product.  It takes a lot of effort but if one keeps focused on one's brand one is free to ignore one's more inconvenient traits.  This allows one to see oneself more simply and with fewer misgivings.  One would concentrate on refining the product - the marketable aspects of oneself - and present to the world this unified object, free of human shortcomings.  

That sounds like a disorder to me.

I am a person.  You have to spend time with me to begin to understand what I am.  It takes time and effort and you won't know until you've spent it whether it was worth it or not.  I can't be encapsulated.  I will not curl up into a ball so that someone may consume me more easily.  To be honest I don't believe I'm capable of it.  Maybe that's why this is all so frustrating to me.  Maybe I would if I could.

I want attention too.  I want people to think I'm interesting.  I can't invent a short cut to that end though.  I'm difficult and I will be difficult.

There it is.  I'll just let all those speeding balls of product roll on by me into the glittering future and do what I do in the dowdy backwater of now.

Travesty In The Snow!

I found a camera.  I don't think I ate that much of the bottom of the cake.  But if I didn't I don't know where it went!

It's only a little roughed up in a couple of little spots.  Most people who have some probably won't know there was a problem.  Tee hee!

An Unexpected Scenario

Here's one: the cake wouldn't come out of the pan!

The up-side of this is that the burned bottom fell off all by itself.  I got the cake un-molded using a spatula and have now soaked it in glaze.  It looks dark but it might still be good.  I have to say I ate some of the bottom that fell off and it's pretty good.

I'd love to take photos but I have no idea where my camera is.  I'll go look...

Where Is My Head?

After a couple of days feeling barely functional I have decided that it's important to do anything I need to to keep moving.

I had been afraid that my productivity would suffer if I did things I enjoy (besides work)  I think I found out instead that my productivity grinds to a halt if I don't do things I enjoy (besides work)  

To that end today I worked on a scarf I am knitting as a gift for someone.  I want to have it finished before spring arrives.  I am also baking a Bahama Mamma cake (from "Sticky, Chewy Messy Gooey")  It's in the oven right now.  Yesterday I made chocolate chip cookies for Pete as a Valentine's Day gift.

Yeah, the Valentine's Day gift was a day late but Pete approves.  I had big business in Boston on Valentine's Day.  The important thing was we were together for dinner that night.  Believe me, we've been making up for lost cookie-eating time.

The cake baking endeavor has been a minor adventure.  For example I was running low on vanilla extract.  I noticed this the last time I was marketing and picked up a bottle.  When I went to add the new extract to the teaspoon I was measuring out, much to my alarm it came out viscous and syrupy.  I looked at the bottle and it isn't vanilla extract.  It's Frontier fair trade vanilla flavor, made with glycerine as a solvent instead of alcohol and the same vanilla-derived flavors in vanilla extract.  I only needed a quarter-teaspoon more so I went ahead.  

I understand that they can't call it "extract" because it's alcohol free but I don't know why you would need such a product.  What is the benefit of glycerine over alcohol?  The only thing I can think of is that it would keep every possible form of booze out of the clutches (gullets?) of the family souses.  The product information page on the website is vague.

I've also had problems with the oven temperature and with adding the half-cup of rum the recipe calls for to the glaze too soon.  You can see that alcohol in my vanilla extract is hardly a concern in this case.

In fact, it would have been just as well had I drunk the rum!  I just burned the cake!  I took it out thinking it was done and turned the oven off.  I realized my mistake, turned the oven on again and put the cake back in.  Five minutes later I realized that I'd never turned the oven down to the correct setting after I'd turned it on again.  My cake is very dark brown.  It's thoroughly cooked now.  If I'm lucky I just burned the top (which will be the bottom once it's turned out of the pan)  and I can cut that off.  If I'm unlucky the pan is too thin and the whole surface of the cake is burned and we'll just have to chop off the outside and eat the middle.

I'm not saying "die" on this cake.  Thank God all that's left to do now is soak the thing in rummy syrup.  I don't think I can wreck that too badly.   Unless I spill the syrup all over the carpet (or the dog!) or get the cake nice and rummy syrup-soaked and drop it on the floor.