Friday, April 30, 2010

oh BP. your oil spills like my tears at your oversight.
















 


Thursday, April 22, 2010

this vegan chocolate cake is Amazing

Moosewood '6-min in the pan' Vegan Chocolate Cake
Serves 8 (or in my case 1-2)
Preparation time for cake: 6 minutes
Baking time: 30 minutes
Preparation time for glaze: 15 minutes
Chilling time (if using glaze) 30 minutes
Equipment: 9-inch round or 8-inch square cake pan, 2-cup measuring cup, double boiler

Cake Ingredients
1 ½ cups unbleached white flour
⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
½ cup vegetable oil
1 cup cold water or coffee
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Chocolate Glaze
½ pound semi-sweet chocolate
¾ cup hot water
½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Sift together the flour, cocoa, soda, salt, and sugar directly into the cake pan. In the measuring cup, measure and mix together the oil, cold water or coffee, and vanilla. Pour the liquid ingredients into the baking pan and mix the batter with a fork or a small whisk. When the batter is smooth, add the vinegar and stir quickly. There will be pale swirls in the batter as the baking soda and vinegar react. Stir just until the vinegar is evenly distributed throughout the batter.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes and set aside to cool.

To make the optional glaze, melt the chocolate in a double boiler, microwave oven, or reset the oven to 300º and melt the chocolate in the oven for about 15 minutes in a small ovenproof bowl or heavy skillet. Stir the hot water and vanilla into the melted chocolate until smooth. Spoon the glaze over the cooled cake. Refrigerate the glazed cake for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

la la la human steps amelia

This is the opening scene from Edouard Lock's Amelia, performed by Montreal based La La La Human Steps whom I saw perform live at the Granada theater in Santa Barbara in 2008. It was one of the most amazing acts on stage I've ever witnessed. Thank you mom!



* film description from DailyMotion.com: Edouard Lock's award-winning dance film featuring the La La La Human Steps dance company blends evocative music by David Lang, classic Lou Reed lyrics, and painstakingly designed choreography to create a uniquely minimalist piece. Avant-garde dance aficionados won't want to miss this tender and challenging work


Björk

hunter live

gilled fava beans, yum yum


image by John Burgoyne

Ignacio Mattos’s Grilled Favas from Il Buco (ny,ny)

1 pound fresh fava beans in their pods, the younger the better
1 teaspoon fleur de sel 
1 teaspoon ground chile pepper 
1 teaspoon picked rosemary
3 or 4 cloves chopped garlic 
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to finish
2 tablespoons water
1 whole lemon, for juice
7 or 8 canned anchovies, in oil
Handful of toasted bread crumbs


Mix first 7 ingredients together in a large bowl. (1) Toss to coat the fava pods, then place them on the grill over medium heat.(2) Grill favas for several minutes, until charred, then flip them over and char the other side, cooking until the pods seem about to open. Remove pods from grill, return them to the mixing bowl, and (3) squeeze the lemon over them. Toss the pods to coat. Check the seasoning, and add salt if necessary. Chop the anchovies, and add them to the bowl, mixing well. Place the pods on a serving platter, drizzle to taste with olive oil, and sprinkle the bread crumbs on top. Serve hot or at room temperature, with steak or whole grilled fish.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

happy birthday to my younger twin sister!!!!


If you had to identify yourself in this photo...which one is you sissy? I'd say you are the puppy and I'm the pissed off little chick, but you are so precious I can't protest...story of my life.
xox

Thursday, April 15, 2010

mauve?: 27 October - 23 November

a boutique gallery encounter?
About the show:  Not entirely dissimilar to the ways in which most great masterpieces are born, the inspiration for this project sprang from a crude diagram penned onto a slightly soiled white paper napkin while dining with a friend in a cafe a few months back. While admittedly, I have drawn several identical diagrams in the past, this one ended up on his fridge and became quite the conversation piece.
I am interested in trying to rationalize a deeply painful emotional experience that revolves around my life with scoliosis. It is not the physical pain, but rather the skeletal architecture over which I am prone to obsess. This rib cage deformity is what I seek to understand. For several years I hid inside this crooked cage, stepping out has come only in time, with age. The resulting visual narrative, inspired by the curve and lateral rotation of my spine, is one way in which I seek to document the evolving relationship between my mind, and the abnormal physicality resulting from my (dextro)scoliosis. In my search for answers, I find many clues along the way, some of which I share here with you today.
a work in progression.
*every day I forget, every day I remember
     About the Artist: 
     First:Jana Middle:Moffett Last:McClure
     D.O.B.: 4/17/1986
Hometown: 34.436N. -119.631W. Elevation: sea to mountain top (+/- 318ft.)
Intriguing facts: identical twin, auntie, lover of books, cooks, maps, animals, secret forts, small knick-knacks, cardamom, farms and the sweet smell of horses. Retired tennis player, ever in search of the perfect writing implement and surface plane.
Secrets: yes, a few.
Hobbies: reading, playing, cooking, smelling, loving, searching, looking, making, sleeping, doing, tinkering, seeing, helping, learning, sharing.



Wednesday, April 14, 2010

the killing fields

By what error it be so bright that on this fiery night,
numbers, racing in terror, should meet their death.
the great furnace reflects, first by the moon and then on sweat, existence becomes marred with betrayal. 


Know this by the wretched howls, the gurgling sounds,the hoarse screams,
industry hitting bone:
black, red, pink, white, metallic. 
panic pounding hearts explode,
minds loose control, ravenous beasts devour flesh amid hoards of competing spies. Animals alive. hot blood, warm flesh.


[or alternately]


know this by the wretched howls, the gurgling screams, the dross of bowls,
industry collides with bone:
silvers marred by red and stone,
panic pounding hearts explode,
rapacious beasts devour souls.


...first the flies and then the rest will devour what is left
corpse to carcass, they lack respect, who will care when there's nothing left?

necropolitics

I liked this bit by Achille Mbembe and Libby Meintjes from their essay: 'Necropolitics', which I believe was published in 2003. I came across this piece during some reserach last semester on biopolitics.


"In such circumstances, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked by excess. What connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics. The future, here, can be authen- tically anticipated, but not in the present. The present itself is but a moment of vision—vision of the freedom not yet come. Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.”79 As Gilroy notes, this pref- erence for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of free- dom itself (or the lack thereof). If this lack is the very nature of what it means for the slave or the colonized to exist, the same lack is also precisely the way in which he or she takes account of his or her mortality. Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers, Gilroy sug- gests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate."


...in which they quote Frantz Fanon's work on apartheid in South Africa...



"'The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is [End Page 26] a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.' 52 In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not."

M y s t e r i e s- Knut Hamsun

"You go to the woods and lie down under an open sky, where there is more room for those who are strangers among men and for birds in flight. And you find a bed in a damp patch, you lie on your stomach on the marshy ground and take pleasure in getting thoroughly soaked. And you bury your head in the reeds and soggy leaves and crawling things, and soft little lizards crawl on your clothes and onto your face and look at you with their green velvety eyes."

"The beauty and stillness of the night filled him with such elation that his breath came in gasps and his eyes filled with tears. 'What magic in these white nights.'"

quotes took down two years ago in a book.
from Knut Hamsun's Mysteries, translated from Norwegian, I'm not sure the publisher nor translator...

"the day obscenity became art"


1959 vs. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice

(image taken from NY Times article "
The Day Obscenity Became Art" July 20 2009)

it takes the mind of the beholder

         i beheld this poem a while back, in a library. I believe it is from UC Berkeley's 'Places' publication...

I T T A K E S T H E M I N D O F T H E B E H O L D E R

wondering
imagining
                  caring how things are 
                               and might be
                                   It takes circumstances and promise and
                                                                   Companionable surroundings
                      That is to say it takes being alert among things
                                            Standing beside them
                                            Moving Among them
                                            Being enfolded
                                            Discovering positions in a larger pattern
                                            Choosing among paths and vantage points
                                            Investing attention

                                            It takes events
                                                          Everyday and momentous
                                                                                 Spontaneous and contrived
                    which fill in the spaces between and bring them to life
                    which engage the senses and prompt the mind.

                                 Magic rings of silence
                                 Sounds that touch the nerves of being, echo and spur
                    recollections.
                                 The flows of social action
                    It takes marking the things that surround us in ways that
                    call out and recall events that take place.

                                Inscribing thought in matter
                                Tracing the acts of conception and construction
                                Embedding ornament that intrigues and offers to narrate
                                Reflecting the joy of seasons and of ritualized time.

                                Forging libraries of aspiration
                                Indexing paths through the repository of the city.

                  It takes Companions
                                            Faces that challenge
                                            Faces that confirm
                                            Faces that dance

                  The many great faces that help to bring places into being.
                         And Yes, the face of the unfamiliar.

-Donlyn Lyndon

what the cookie monster said*

here are no cookies but only milk
milk and no cookies and the empty jar

    -for cookie monster(s) everywhere that I love...



*see: [V.What the Thunder Said]
      here is no water but only rock (10)
      rock and no water and the sandy road(11)
     -T.S. Eliot 'The Wasteland' 

*modern forager