Yoko Ono's Map Piece (1962)

Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map. If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside. When you reach the goal, ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet. The map must be followed exactly, or the event has to be dropped altogether. Ask your friends to write maps. Give your friends maps.

Warm and Crusty

Justine Lai, Join or Die,* 2007

I cannot stop looking at these paintings. On the surface of it, the project sounds super-stupid: a 24-year-old recent college grad paints self-portraits of herself getting it on with each President of the United States in chronological order. Yup, that's right. But there's something about them that's kind of amazing. I'm going to try to describe it, but maybe it's just a gut feeling, so feel free to skip these next three parts.

I'm surprised, first of all, because I'm really not into art that's about artists' own sex lives.** Koons's brand of pop being the prime example of why: it feels exhibitionist, flashy, conversation-halting, kind of gross, and not really as interested in exploring meanings as using sex to get a rise. What's most annoying about this is that the rise is temporary. You either put it in the art category, or you don't. If not, you may just say it's pornography, which is fine. We've all got genitals, why not? But even if you do accept it into the hallowed halls of, say, the MCA, it's still, as Koons himself says, just a "ta-da" moment. (Not my thing, art- or porn-wise.)

Lai's works don't work this way. Certainly, her pop roots are strong. There's the initial shock of the subject-matter, the magpie treatment of cultural icons, the play with reality and fantasy. But there's also this other thing, what I think of as the sustainable side of pop. It's like this curious calling-attention-to that touches off more thoughts and resists that Koonsian hardening of the surface.***

For example, John Tyler's strange, blind fingering in her mouth and her fearful one-eyed gaze while grabbing his wrist. What's that about? Or Abe Lincoln's weary teat and wearier face. Of course! Of course, that's what that would look like! As Lai herself writes, it's about the vulnerability and the ambiguity. It becomes more than a game of three-card monte with "the artist," "the presidential likeness," and "the viewer" each cycling through their proper positions. They escape becoming fixed or known entities in the exchange, while the range of emotions on display ensures that the stakes remain fairly high, not jokey. I suspect this will become harder with the more recent presidents, since their roles in our collective sex fantasies are more clearly scripted. The first 18, though, are really impressive.

Justine Lai, Join or Die, 2008

To what else does this post's title refer? Why, homemade bread, of course. I've got a batch of this 20-hour creature rising and bubbling by the radiator right now. Should be ready to go by late-morning tomorrow. In this video, the baker from whom Bittman cribbed the recipe demonstrates how everything, even bread - especially bread! - has all this secret knowledge behind it involving squiggles and cracks, crumbs, crusts, and bubbles, proportions, substrates, and who knows what else? In other words, like snuggling up to a fat Martin Van Buren, delicious. Good night.

*No idea what the title means...
**Strange, I'm having trouble coming up with other examples not by Koons where the artist him/herself figures into the explicit image and not just images of partners, implied partners, or stand-ins. Comments?
***Like a printing error in a Warhol Car Crash.

ETA: The bread was a disaster. Better luck next time?

If You Are In DC...

Go see TJ Clark give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. The first one was last weekend, but there are five more.

Pablo Picasso, Nude Standing by the Sea, 1929

Here's something from an interview with Clark about the upcoming lectures (parts 1, 2):

If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.

You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.

One of the things we can say about Guernica is that never has a picture been more explicitly about the end of a certain kind of secure interiority, the kind of ripping-apart of the world. But I think there's a pre-history to Guernica, and one of the things I'm going to try to argue about the previous 10-15 years before 1937 is that Picasso is trying to find a way of re-imagining space, and making a space which is kind of much more insecure and open and porous to the outside. At some kind of deep, intuitive level this is his response to the coming to an end of a bourgeois form of life.

It would probably be a cliche to wax on about his sensitive eye, but it should also be mentioned that Clark is one of the few art historians who cuts through the packaging and gets right to the meat. By which I mean the relationship between form and meaning - what can we say about pictures, or what is it that pictures tell us? His answers are daring and problematic, but also stated with conviction and very evocative. They really inspire (me) to go beyond schematic, empiricist thinking. To push the relationship and squeeze out meanings that matter, not just ones that could be said, but don't change anything by having been said. Whether or not you're convinced by his argument, I think the lectures will be well worth it, not least because of his sensitive eye.

The Comforts of Home (update)

Two notes to share:

1) Home-made haircuts are OUT. MG has lost his mad skilz. Or perhaps he never actually had any and was just deluding himself/never looking at the back of his head. It's been known to happen.

As luck would have it, though, there is a basement parikmakherskaya just around the corner from my woodland hut that charges 100 rubles* for a haircut, doesn't rush you or question how short and implicitly unfeminine the desired haircut happens to be, does not cause any bleeding of fingers or ears throughout the duration of the haircut, and asks you whether you are indeed Natalie Portman, the person in the picture you brought with you for reference. It was bar none and hands down the most enjoyable (not to mention most decent, and I'm not just eating up the flattery) haircut I've ever received. And whilst I waited, I got to watch some of the most impressive back-combing outside of Memphis happening all around me, for free. Gulia will be seeing me again rel'soon.

Question: how/how much do you tip a stylist on a 100 ruble haircut? Is it kosher to give the receptionist 100 rubles and the stylist 500? Or is that insulting?

*That's $2.90, people.

2) This is a sparrow hawk.


I think these are his eggs.

They are now in this gote's tum tum.

ETA: Okay, okay, okay, maybe not literally his eggs, and maybe not literally captured from the air by yours truly. But maybe his:


Or at least certainly captured by this king of Russky Produkt and at in turn by MasterGote? Or, can we at least agree that shopping in Russia is a kind of hunting? And MG did cunningly find this medal winner in his local cooler section. Enh? Ennnnh?

Still snowing here...

Savior Cathedral, Andronikov Monastery, Moscow. ca.1410-27

(info info)

File Under: Ebay, Trashheap of Your Lamest Fantasies

In case you're interested.

Also, a search for variations on Reisiger schwarzer Ballon revealed:

Really, German ebay? You have a 13 thousand-carat diamond to sell me? Well, I've got a diamond of my own you might be interested in. I found it on the sidewalk in Philly after my first (and last) half-marathon. It's pretty shiny...

ETA: Right, commas = decimal points. Those crazy Europeans, getting MG all hot and bothered. Blow me.

Toothy Carrot Soup

Totally unintended product placement.

People! MasterGote totally shocked himself today by improvising a recipe and having it turn out good. Like, really good. Sweet, sweet vindication goes well with a little peppery carrot soup.

Some background: I watched this awkward interview the other day and decided that 1) in addition to providing me with sufficiently indignant, yet pleasantly humorous updates on the apocalypse, Rachel M is, indeed, the cutest; 2) Martha S totally has a crush on Rachel, resulting in her uttering responses such as "Oh, really? OK"; and 3) carrot soup sounds kind of easy to make.

Carrot soup, as Martha tells us, requires a blender and two cups of broth. Check and check. Remember aerial reconnaissance? That was the prewar Bundesrepublik Fungusbrothia. Made using both fresh white mushrooms and dried shiitakes from Bella's trip to Switzerland. (Um, yes, that chocolate is long gone...)

So, to sum up, I modified Martha's recipe a little bit and, though I did not try her version from the TV machine, I was shocked (in a good way) when I saw and tasted mine. The key to this carrot soup with a kick are: mushroom broth (instead of regular), a lot of pepper and ginger, additional greenery, such as dill and parsley, to deepen the orange color and make cute little green flecks, and ixnay on the milk. The whole thing took about one and a quarter episodes of Rachel, or about an hour.

Here's how it was done:

1) Chop up a bunch of carrots into circles and half-circles to fill a deep soup bowl.
2) Heat up 3 T butter in a soup pan and add half an onion (chopped). Cook for a bit, and then add the carrots, one clove garlic (minced), a chunk of ginger (grated), sea salt, a good amount of ground black pepper and then a little more, and a couple of pinches of brown sugar. Cook the veg until the carrots start to soften up, suck up the butter, and get a bit dry. (The carrots, not you, dahling.)
3) At this point, add about 2 cups mushroom broth and keep cooking until the carrots get baby-tooth soft, around 15 minutes, or a Rachel interview with Cindy McCain, a story about the Dutch baseball team beating the DR twice in the World Baseball Classic, and Just Enough Pop Culture with her friend Kent.
4) Once the carrots are nice and soft, add some chopped parsley and dill into the mix, and cook a little bit longer, like through the Cocktail Moment and the commercial.
5) Forget the milk, and blend the whole thing in your loud loud loud blender.

Pretend like Spicy Squid Salad never happened.

Help A Brother Out

Dear readers, please take this poll and help out my friend, Buster. I know you're just looking for more stuff to procrastinate with: here's your chance. (In case you're interested, I got an 8).

Machoing Up Int'l Women's Day Weekend

Well, I think some of you may know what this post is going to be about.

But first, how about a little down-hill action? I must admit, I was not excited about this hill. Unlike our previous inner-tube outing at Leninskie gory (or in the Sierra Nevadas, for that matter), the snow here had been on the ground for some time and an icy layer had formed. I don't know about our brave companion, but MG had to give pause before committing to launching himself down. (He notes this in the spirit of truthfulness, and not without some embarrassment.)


In his defense, and though it's hard to tell from the photographs, this hill was epically long and treacherously steep.



This is where our hero grabs some air and ends up biting his tongue...


Bravely losing his hat and glasses along the way.


And as wise BrotherGote counsels, любишь кататься, люби и саночьки носить.*


*If you like to ride, you'd better like to carry the sled.

Then it was on to the main event. Represented here by the blind walrus cooling his tail. The walrus, it is well known, is a cold-weather cousin of the gote.


Walrus-gote family reunions are legendary. Here is another commemorative plaque of a reunion past.


Wait, what? I'm sorry, gotes can't read stick figures.


Ah, here we go. Our little changing area.

Friendly ducks gather to lend support.


A little calisthetics...


And...


For some reason, there seems to be no evidence of Alex's dip. But here he is performing gymnastic feats.


And here he is seeking the comfort of old Mr. Greeny.


And if you come visit, you can come swimming too, and then I'll show you the rest of them, even the embarrassing ones, even without creative Photoshopping.

(A big thank you to Alex for documenting the event, and apologies in advance for likely f-ing up the post-production.)

Cooking Challenge #2

I am imagining a juicy loaf of brown speckled fluffiness. Something between a warm, steamy banana bread and the rolling, fat thigh of a gurgling, laughing baby. That I can slice and put on a plate. Like the meat loaf of your dreams, but made of guilt-free, delicious fungus and root veggies.


I also have a strainer-full of little winking mushrooms and carrots that I've boiled with bay leaves and herbs to make a steamy mushroom broth (see below), with which I am now dressing my daily portion of buckwheat kasha and may use to make a glazed carrot or glazed beet soup. But, the strained goodies, how could I throw these away? Let's travel to the future together and collectively invent a recipe for vegetarian meat loaf made from these little tidbits!

How would you go about making this dream loaf? Would you add some bread crumbs and maybe an egg or two and some milk and blend before baking in a bread pan? Would you roast some other things into the mix? Which herbs? Comrades, let's make this veggie loaf dream happen!

Aerial Reconnaissance

Happy Birthday, BrotherGote!

For your relentless progress into the future, I salute you!

I Am Kino-Eye

I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. (Dziga Vertov, 1923)



Try 5:10