The Thing thing in Houston, Part 1

I'm really stoked about being invited to an upcoming workshop at the Menil Collection on Byzantine materiality. The workshop is in conjunction with the 2013 exhibition "Byzantine Things in the World", which seeks out new ways of understanding the Byzantine viewer's relationship to objects and phenomena. This is a provocative question that many historians struggle with: how can we recover exactly what it meant to "see" in different periods, particularly periods that pre-date modern scientific ideas about vision and materials? (I think that it's going to be useful for my own work, since I'm asking a lot of questions right now re: what exactly people in the mid-20th-century got out of looking at a drawing. Did they feel the texture of the paper, or sense the graphite as a "quieter" medium than paint, or simply get a general sense of the depicted form? An oblique connection, but useful nonetheless.)

The presentations look fabulous, and range in scope from studies of ecstatic vision in Byzantium to examinations of individual objects (1000-year-old locket engraved with a duck, anyone?). My paper is an inquiry re: images of Christ's face in Byzantine architecture using the Menil Byzantine Fresco Chapel as a model (see above). I can't wait.

How to turn your blog into a Food Blog

I've been making a lot of pies lately. My housemate's 2-year-old daughter is obsessed with pie, as it's one of the few one-syllable words that doesn't allow for ambiguity. You want it, you say it. She draws out the last vowel as though it's an extra syllable: Pieeeeeeeee.

Today's pie was spiced peach in a Safeway pre-bought crust. As I made it, I fantasized about consuming all my fruit in pie form. This feels very American South or pre-famine British Isles or post-famine immigrant New York to me: maybe you're living in a region where high-quality fresh fruit is hard to come by, so you hide fruit's imperfections with sugar and a crust. I don't put much sugar in my fruit pies because the fruit here in California is perfect. It's better to make my pie recipes with perfect or near-perfect fruit, because you need less sugar that way.

Spiced Peach Sex on the Beach Pie

3 large peaches or 4-5 medium peaches, cut up

juice of 1/2 lemon

1 T cornstarch

1 1/2 T sugar

cardamom (not too much)

ground ginger (or fresh, not too much)

cinnamon

store-bought pie crust*

*I know they have trans fats. Fuck you.

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl and let them get juicy and runny. Pour into pie crust and bake for 1 hour. Try and do something productive during that hour so that you don't feel bad about eating half the pie for dinner later.

I think I'm going to experiment with cooked fruit recipes so that I can get the sensation of pie PLUS the ability to eat it anytime. In other words, not too carby and not too sweet. My girlfriend makes an amazing crumb topping and then bakes fruit and lemon juice and a little sugar in ramekins til the tops are browned. I like this method but right now I want to groove out on a crust. What are some good pre-made crust brands? Furthermore, how do I make a good crust without feeling like an ape or a pre-industrial housewife who spends all day in the kitchen?

Also. I tried to forage for fruit to put into this pie using www.neighborhoodfruit.com, but it was a Big Fat Fail. This website/app only maps fruit trees in the area; the app can't confirm whether there's actually fruit on the tree. There is some mint growing down the street from my house, though.

Next topic: what is the public perception of food foragers? All yupsters, or...?

How to Succeed in Coursework

My goodness. How shall I lay out this bank of new things I've been experiencing lately? This is my first year of teaching undergraduates, which is gratifying. From talking to other graduate students, I've noticed that there are two ways to approach undergraduate teaching: you can judge your students for being coltish and uncultured and raw and unruly, develop adversarial relationships with them, complain about their inept writing and perhaps post some choice quotations from their writing on Facebook, OR you can come to terms immediately with the fact that your students barely notice that you're alive and don't care a fig about your subject, and make it your job to get them to engage with class material even a little bit. When this happens, you are overjoyed and completely satisfied with your life. I, for one, am amazed that my students are even there in the first place, alive right in front of me and speaking to me, with their own distinct smells and goals and aspirations. It's amazing. I feel like a child discovering the world. I am humbled and exhilarated when they opine on any subject. Teaching is definitely for me.

Bachelorette fur barrette

Clearly I have problems with longevity here. Ha. In all seriousness, I got a phone last week with a camera in it, which, on paper, undermines the premise of the blog. But the blog isn't on paper, so I can just keep on writing. Ha again.

I've been invited to have dinner with some friends who have posted on Facebook some of the previous meals they've eaten. Its nice to get a preview of the style of food that someone's going to make you, and I think that the ability to research your dinner parties over the internet ahead of time says a lot for the state of civilization today.

Also, I'm writing this entry as a buffer against PMS's terrible, terrifying fear and anxiety. Ever get so depressed that your only resort is to meditate on things that have nothing to do with the things attached to your anxieties in real life? There has to be a better way to do this than mental projection or "PMDD" medication. Kittens maybe?

Don't you start away uneasy

This week I am making it a project to forgive myself of all my bad journal entries, even the ones that quote The Faint. I've been ashamed of them for a long time, and it's time to start thinking about them in a different way. My embarrassment about my online journals has only been getting worse as my scholarly training progresses, because art historians are such object and document fetishists that we would never ever ever consider online journals "real". If I quoted someone's online journal, or even an online book review, I would go to Academia Jail.

But the truth is that all my small writings between 2000 and 2008 are archival documents about my life. Once I printed out all my Diaryland entries and they totaled over 150 single-spaced pages, the largest piece of writing I had ever produced. It makes me wonder how I might treat my dissertation like an online journal. If funded in the proper fashion, I could write in it every day, wait 5 years to forgive myself of all its mistakes, and then begin edits. How many scholars and art historians take this long to produce each of their opuses? Maybe, for me, it's always been the natural way to work, and I've written two books since 1999 and don't even know it.

Here are a few choice quotes from journals past:

"I have been to the top of the mountain and seen the promised land, and it turns out that the promised land is not full of A Career like I'd been originally told; it is, instead, a wide basin full of Fritos and pot." - 09/2004

"London, London, how I love you. Even if your food is shitty and I got lost on the Tube four times. Went to the [anti Iraq War] demonstration in Hyde Park and let me tell you, the British will assemble like mad but they will NOT under any circumstances touch you. If your elbow gets jostled, you will receive a perfunctory apology from the jostler. Jesse Jackson was there, which was weird. His speech turned into this ritualistic series of chanting." - 02/2003

"My job has been taking a lot out of me these days. I feel as though I exist only as part of a secret art cult that worships motorcycles and meets in the basement of the Guggenheim and sings a lot of 80’s Britpop while dusting things." - 08/2001

"It's just beginning to get cold here. For the first time, I interpret the new weather, chillier nights, as an admonishment against continuing my current behavior rather than some whisper of promise. I don't plan to heed this "warning", though - meteorology is not my moral compass." - 09/2008

"At this party, I was treated as some sort of special person because I own a DVD that features an Iron Maiden concert from 1980 that Tim Bavington might have attended or seen on television. I would've imagined that the surplus of Iron Maiden enthusiasts in Las Vegas would have made such a scenario impossible, but it WAS a small party." -08/2006

Procrastinating again

Sometimes I love my apartment so much that I want the whole world to come to me instead of the other way around. I am renting my place this summer because of research fellowships and I feel like I am passing off a child or a treasured pet to strangers. What will I do when there are no soothing rows of Art in America (every single issue since 1982) to look at? No New York Art Book Fair 2008 poster to contemplate? No cerulean blue Thonet chair stolen from University surplus to sit on? No 400-thread-count sheets to fuck in? No midcentury teak desk for my dog to sleep under? Maybe the renter will let me drop in and visit.

All oppression is connected, you dick

So I'm an aspiring scholar of Modern art, right, but lately I've been reading a lot of postcolonial theory and taking classes that have subjected me to bad performance poetry and uplifting nonprofit speak. I'm starting to appreciate this. After spending the afternoon with Mike Davis' "Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City," I've generated a short list of "Don'ts" for those aspiring to live a more ethical life and remain conscious of exploited populations, even while living in a vastly wealthy first-world nation where one can [and I do] eat cake every day.

How to have Ethics:

1) Don't buy new computers

2) Don't buy a new car

3) Don't buy new clothes from just about anywhere (in Burberry yesterday I spotted a "Made in Haiti" tag on one of their garments - !!!)

4) If you want to invest in the stock market, you should hire one of those specialists that only picks stocks from green and labor-friendly companies

There, you rich brats. Suck on that.

For this class that has brought me all this nice reading, I'm going to get hold of a recording of this song: http://unionsong.com/u103.html and think about labor and vision for a while.