In Search of Q, Perfection Edition

My Christmas gift to my tastebuds: a trip to my most favorite barbecue joint. It's down the hill from my parents' house in a strip mall in Little Rock. I don't have much other commentary....this place is pretty much perfect. Yum.

Photo Essay: Things We Do at Home

Franke's


Dillard's


Friends


Catfish


Community Bakery


Sweet Babies


I-40

Sow's Ear

Sorry for the silence. Mr. MJ and I have been busy acquiring said sow's ear. I don't know if we can turn this old girl into a silk purse or not, but we'll give her a try.

Time, it is Blowing in the Winds of Change

Despite the radio silence, which may serve as evidence to the contrary, this Arkie is still adrift. However, after a five-day sojourn across most of I-40, she is now reporting from the Eastern Time Zone, specifically, Washington, DC.

Mr. Arkie and I arrived here nearly two weeks ago, he to fight the good fight in the national halls of justice, me to try again to make art and find community in another new place.

Stay tuned for future “Back East” adventures.

Centraltrak Set Up

I live in Unit #3 at Centraltrak. Here it is.

Travels and Brief Mentions, Long Overdue

After a year-long exile, I went back home for my birthday at the beginning of this month. I’m a little ashamed to say that my memories had faded a bit. As soon as I woke up from the long, dark plane ride, I was gobsmacked by the green and the wet, like my eyeballs had been painted with chlorophyll. I marveled at the crazy, figure shaped oak leaves, the heavy, moist air, the big, muddy river. I missed out on barbecue, because I’d eaten too much Big Mista the week before (party leftovers!). Catfish, Franke’s, and red beans & rice were on the menu instead.

***
I saw a couple of art shows over a month ago at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown that I kept meaning to blog about, but clearly I’ve had other things (food! party!) on the brain. So even though the shows are down, I still want to give a shout out to Jancar for some rockin’ feminist presentations: Ilene Segalove upstairs (hurray for old-skool, patriarchy-skewering photo appropriation!), with Alison Foshee & Katina Huston downstairs (three cheers for obsessive, super crafty, mixed media blitz!). This show made me smile bigger than any has in a long time.

I’m going to check out some more shows this week, so stay tuned…

(photos above are of the Arkansas River, taken by me; and of Alison Foshee's works Basketroid and Supernova, both mixed media and 2009, from the Jancar Gallery website.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

The day is nearly, or even just now, past, but the weekend rolls along....I made my first solo pan of dressing today (see photo, left). I am used to being the assistant on this type of project, but I muddled through alone and produced something quite tasty, even though I forgot the eggs. And, it was not dry in the least! The dish has come back home about 2/3 empty, so I guess even though my in-laws didn't seem to know what it was or what to call it, somebody at the table took a liking to it.

Even better, I have a third left all for myself. Whee!

ps -- Whooooooo........Pig! Sooie! (see photo, right)

smelly memory

a few days ago i went thrifting and came home with a few choice items. i hand washed these and left them to dry in the bathtub. afterwards, every time i went into the bathroom, i was hit with this certain smell....a smell like wet coats hung up in the hall to dry, with a touch of soap or dryer sheet. exactly like the smell of the hallway in my old illinois apartment building.

at this time of year as the season just barely begins to change, i think back to moving to illinois from arkansas, to my first good apartment, and being alone in it after my family had left. the promise of a fresh start, crisp blue skies, all walks through fallen leaves to the library or the parking lot or to a snug bar downtown...the future promise of good steam heat, promised by the wet coat laundry smell in the basement near the boiler the super will light in a couple of months, steaming up through my clicking, tapping radiator vents to fog the windows and turn the streetlights into fuzzy halos.

coming home from the library, wooly-gloved hands full of books to read in bed under blankets. sweet garret life, traded in for sunny skies and Santa Ana winds.

diggin' in the dirt

tomorrow morning i head up to san francisco to install some work for a small solo show at The LAB. so in preparation, over the holiday weekend, i gardened (instead of packing, washing clothes, or getting my ducks in a row)!

we have a beautiful backyard spot, but it has some serious gaps in the plant department. i started the greening process by the path up to our front steps, with the help of some succulent cuttings from my mother-in-law and some cactus parts i found around in the neighborhood yard trash. turns out prickly pears are really easy to root.

grow, my pretties! quick, before the landlords come back! :D

New place, new outlook?

M and I just moved, to a tiny little house with a barn-looking shack in the yard that I have converted to a studio (see past few entries for photos). Now that this is done, I feel full of pent-up potential, and I hope I can actually make something happen in there...

Until then, I have been indulging my nesting urges by reading lots of “shelter blogs” and meditating on our possessions and new space. During grad school, I was very invested in ideas about homemaking, interior design, and other domestic arts. Not only did these ideas inform my art practice, but they also were important to me personally, shaping my outlook on life and method of making my way in the world. I read a lot of scholarly and not-so-scholarly books and articles about this topic, everything from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, to Witold Rybczynski’s Home to design books put out byMartha Stewart, Sunset, and Better Homes and Gardens.

But lately, maybe since I moved out here to LA, I have lost touch with that facet of my inspiration. Even though I very carefully thought out the arrangement of our old apartment and placement of things within it, I never felt truly at home there. I cooked and wiped and vacuumed and watered, but I did not felt invested in that nest. And at the same time, those ideas seemed to fade out of my work, in favor of using art as way to investigate and record this new landscape I was experiencing.

So now that I am re-investigating home-making, I wonder what effect this will have on my art, especially since my studio will be next to our house. Will I become reinvigorated with these ideas or remain in this floating landscape world I have working in for the past few months?

New starter

With a new year always comes new resolve: to be better, to do more, oftener. So here I am, crawling back to the dusty blog. Since I last posted, I have: been home (back to Little Rock) twice, via the bedraggled and unloved American Airlines system; started working as a glorified docent at an art museum (MOCA, in fact); moved out of my studio; had the starter in my car replaced after nearly getting stuck; and rented a new place to live that includes a beautiful little red barn I will convert to a new work space. I feel that these new developments bode well for 2008.

The new year also brings hoped-for victories and meaningful food. Yesterday was not a good day for the teams I shout at on the television (Arkansas, Illinois, and Hawaii all lost, and looked bad doing so). Even so, I cooked up big pots of black eyed peas and collard greens, well seasoned with salt pork and pepper sauce, complimented by a pan of cornbread. These foods are meant to bring me good luck and good fortune for the rest of the year. Remember that next time, tribes and hogs.

Basin Street Blues

The calendar has rolled around again to the end of August, and like a lot of other folks I’m thinking about New Orleans. I remember going to bed on the night of August 28, 2005, (or maybe it was early early in the morning on August 29…I was still in grad school then) believing everything was okay. The storm had passed, and the cities I know on the Gulf (Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola) seemed to have escaped. But when I woke up the next morning, that picture of safety had been traded for about the most awful thing imaginable.

I never lived in New Orleans, but I visited it often during college (just five hours east on I-10, cruising along the coast and through the bayou). And growing up where I did, New Orleans was always in the architecture of my imagination this magical, far-away place of glamour and big-city life, a distant shiny thing on the horizon down the river (New York City being too far away to be possible). Like Memphis, only more so.

So when I did finally visit for the first time, over Labor Day weekend of my first year of college (it was 1997, and we learned that weekend of Princess Diana’s death), I fell in love. (I’m sure this feeling was helped along by the presence of the boyfriend I was visiting, who was matriculating at Tulane.) New Orleans was a beautiful, many petaled flower unfolding before me, wrapping me in its ornate perfumes. It was like I had imagined when I was little, only more so. Since then, I have harbored a secret, romantic wish to live there, but I know that’s not likely now; the river of my life has taken a different course.

I felt far away then, in 2005, (an eight-hour drive from Home, so 16 hours from the Crescent City), but now, sitting here at the other end of I-10, I could be in a different country. The sun shines and the traffic rolls on here as if nothing ever happened “back East,” as if “back East” might just be a figment of our collective imaginations. Late in 2005, I was visiting Los Angeles in advance of my move out here, and a long-time Angeleno remarked to me that he didn’t believe money should be spent rebuilding New Orleans. His attitude was “It’ll just happen again, and it’s not worth that much to our national economy, so why bother?” I wanted to retort “Why should the rest of us want to help rebuild Los Angeles after your next big earthquake?”, but I held my tongue. His comments hurt, because I knew that his attitude reflected this disconnect from the rest of the country that I would feel out here.

But a few things that make me feel closer: I’ve noticed that newscasters (at least on the radio) have gradually reformed their pronunciation of the city’s name over the last two years. Instead of “Noo OR-LEE-enz,” we now hear “NuWOrlans,” much closer to the native language. And at this time of year, I can hear those familiar voices on the radio: the Cajun almost-Northeastern accents, the African American accents, the old-time accents from small towns in Mississippi; these almost sound like Home to me. And Home is why things, cities, get rebuilt -- we all need one, even if only to imagine it.

Changing Idea of Home?

In celebration of my almost-one-year anniversary with LA...

Lately, I’ve become a little bit enamored of reading local real estate blogs, like the one on the LA Times, Curbed LA, Westside Bubble, and some others. Maybe I like to confirm for my more negative side the untenable-ness of life out here, I don’t know, or to be brought down to earth after ogling too many for-sale, super cute, super-expensive (to my artist’s bank account) 1-bedroom bungalows.

Reading about the property adventures—and misadventures—of others creates many questions in my head. Here’s a recent line of thought I followed on the Westside Bubble Blog:

Saving Houses, by Westside Bubble, 6/17/07:
“I hope you all read Anon's comment to "Untouched by time" in the Valley, ending, ‘... I have to ask if am I alone in my view that these houses can be saved? Does every single house have to be move in ready? What happened to working on a house over the years to make it special and yours?’ I've remodeled, not quite as old as his, still a moving experience contemplating who originally built it and how they built then. Many in Santa Monica grieve for the feeling of its older neighborhoods that are being lost to mansionization. That helps inspire my written incredulity at $5M+ listings. Or condo-ization…See also Paris2LA's comment at the bottom of Airport influence area, ending, ‘... living as a person whose life centered on ideas and creativity, not money. With these prices, I suspect the population that lives there now is all about money.’__Which leads to a question for all of you: What are you seeking, what is your favorite neighborhood, and why? Is there still a place to find it? My ideal house is a modest fixer amid friendly neighbors that we could expand and update modestly. Haven't found it yet for a price we like.”

I responded to the post with the following:
My parents-in-law have lived a couple blocks north of Montana on 15th for almost 30 years, and I know that they feel bothered and confused by the new, large houses they now live sandwiched between -- they chose to modestly remodel and expand, as did many of their long-time neighbors. I think they now feel like they can't relate to the newer folks in the neighborhood. I'm originally from the South, where the attitude about saving things is quite different -- people who buy into old neighborhoods and do the tear-down thing are really looked down upon, because society's focus is on historically-correct preservation. I’m not sure either extreme -- either save everything, or build everything anew -- is better. I chose to live in the Silver Lake/Echo Park area when I moved to LA because I really enjoy the mix of old and new that is there (though I admit to preferring the old for myself, perhaps just out of habit and nostalgia for home). As an outsider, that sharp contrast seemed to me to be what LA is all about.

*
So, this whole discussion, along with the tear-down phenomenon, makes me wonder: is our idea of “home” changing? During grad school, I made an effort to learn about the concept of home and the ideas it embodies: I took a seminar about the development of suburbia during which I read D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land, and I also read a lot of Gaston Bachelard and Witold Rybczynski. I learned that a home is meant to foster comfort and well being, to be a space where our bodies can relax so our spirits can flourish.

Evidently, the posters to Westside Bubble feel that their spirits are being cramped by looming McMansions (and as I posted, my in-laws aren’t big fans either). But what about the people who live in these extra large houses? How do they feel, and what are/were their motivations? And how will History judge these Moroccan-Tudor architectural fantasies? In some ways, I see them in a positive light: they represent the optimism of the owners, their desires for a “perfect” house, and are kind of the ultimate incarnation of the American Dream—build your castle and make yourself king.

As I suggested in my blog comment (see above), I really enjoy the mix of old and new that some parts of LA cultivate. It seems to me that history and innovation should be able to peacefully coexist, each providing a striking and respectful backdrop for the other.

Can architectural confrontation, maybe even violence, be part of that kingship? Am I just looking through grad school goggles again?

Westside Bubble: http://www.westside-bubble.blogspot.com/