peek from the studio

So, this is the sort of thing I've been working on up at UCSC. Combining photoetching with monotype to create a series of images. That's Bob, my cat, having a snooze. She will float at the top of these images, alternately dreaming about cat things (you can just make out the fish) and being an overseeing benevolent presence against ominous announcements and other life struggles.

Last night I was there again, up till 1am sanding copper plates to shine in prep for more etching. I probably over-polished--toward the end I realized I was crouched over a cloud of copper dust, and drove home with a metallic taste in my mouth--but the kids have good music to listen to up there, so I was content.

As part of this class I'm auditing, I have access to the Cave, the art dept's name for their room full of computers, fancypants printers and high quality scanners. It doesn't see daylight. On the assumption that I'll only have access to it for the next 5 weeks, I find myself scheming about other small works I can haul up there to be scanned and made available for you-all to see.

Not today, though. It's raining buckets. So no cliffside strolls for me, either. Today is all about baking banana bread, framing my piece for the Pacific Grove Art Center show (Feb 23-April 5, reception Fri Feb 23 7-9pm--see you there!), and tidying up around here. Putter putter.

My friend 4ank sent me a copy of the Neverhood, a fun puzzle-solving computer game made in 1996 by Dreamworks Interactive--out of clay. It's a claymation game. Years ago when I visited 4ank in Washington he was noodling around with it, and it charmed me enough to be thinking about it 10 years later. So I imagine I'll be fooling around with that, too. I'm already stuck.

Pip

studio marathon

Lordy! Who's had time for cocktails & sunset, beach walks, blogging, cooking mad pots of soup or just chilling with my crabby old broad of a cat? Not me. It's been quite an exhilirating run of studio, studio, studio. I've forgotten what a time sink intaglio printing is-- when I know what I'm doing. This class I'm auditing, up at the university, in photographic etching? It's like playing that operation game, where you are loudly buzzed for the slightest gaffe with the tools. There are a bajillion wax-on, wax-off steps that go into making a workable print, and I've come home from the print shop in the wee hours several times the past couple weeks with a mere baby step's progress. Good ideas are coming out of the process, though, and my first critique went well. I'll see if I can get some prints scanned for you to see.

It's interesting how photography has popped up recently. It all started when my friend 4ank was visiting, and I mentioned polaroid tranfer prints to him. That's a process in which you get the image from a polaroid onto paper. It tends to soften the image and evoke a sense of memory. Purdy. He went home and researched it all up, and has sent me a wad of the good info, links & suggestions from practitioners. I'll compile it here for our mutual benefit.

Then there's this photo-etching class I'm eavesdropping on.

So I figure it's time I get a digital camera. For my birthday, Mom got me research & a kick-start check towards one. Thanks, Ma! And my brother suggested I honor my good eye for imagery by treating myself to a real good one. Any leads out there?

Then I meet this guy who, it turns out, is big big into photography, and has done the whole Open Studios & art fair thing with his work. He has view cameras, 120 & 220 film cameras, fancy-pants digital cameras, the works. We're trying out photoshooting together as part of a whole Artist's Way/creativity push thing. We'll see if that becomes a rewarding steady gig full of sparky collaboration, or another Santa Cruzish good intentions trail-off.

A couple months ago I thought I'd be spending the next months on wooodcut printing, but the Universe has spoken up. Good things come from listening, I hear.

Pip

I have a trio of Nikki McClure posters on my kitchen wall. I am using them as reminders for how I'd like to conduct myself in the coming year. This in lieu of the sort of resolutions we're ecouraged to take up: lose weight, find a man, chase money. Instead, I seek to congregate with friends & creatives, share a table with them, and collaborate with them in projects that are greater than our individual selves.

Since retreating up the coast, I've calmed my schedule and my nerves, and sculpted a life that allows for more of the creativity that had previously gone fallow. I had resolved to do so a couple years ago, and voila! Now I work two days a week, and have lots of time in which to volunteer and make art, fine meals, and other happy messes.

In this current scheme, I notice I am most successful creatively in a structured environment--a radio show to program, and art class with assignments to interpret and classmates to interact with, a blog or a correspondent to write to. In the open free time here at the coastal shack, it's another story. I'm like the tree in the forest with no-one around. I often just drift about like a dust mote. In fact, I've become something of a hermit. So okay, a little wisdom has come with the ample time I now have for solitary reflection. I am sparkier playing off other people.

Oh yeah, I remember. In past co-ops & accidental communities, there have been massive meals which inspired love, a Winchester Mystery Basement Kitchen Orchestra that inspired the current rage, and downtown mischief that is still going on today. But, lately...?

"Lately," however, is different than "now." And now is a new year, isn't it? Ergo the McClure Resolutions. I'm letting a little more of this gathering and mischief back in.

Tonight, I join the Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra at a performance at UCSC's College Nine/Ten Dining Hall for their College Night. Not clear on what the theme might be of a dining experience for which an orchestra of cast-off metal and plastic could be an accompaniment, but thankfully we won't have to eat there.

And at the end of the week, I'm gathering with pals to celebrate my birthday. Cocktails at one occasion, and the next day, a potluck made up of things we've been hankering for lately. Much more interactive than last year's marking of the occasion, in which I prowled the railroad tracks and unexplored side-trails between my place and the town.

Pip

I never think of Davenport, but today I went there for lunch. So-so turkey burger and a Fat Tire ale at the Whale City Bakery's sunny, window-side table. I brought along a New Yorker to read, and passed the time guilt-free and bask-happy. That's better. Those Kelly's Bakery guys are on to something.

Earlier, as I was leaving for lunch, I heard a lot of automotive banging around in the driveway. I thought it was one of the new tenants moving in. (Holgar found a woman with a Chihuahua to take the room above his warehouse. I guess small dogs are okay.) But it was Holgar himself, wrassling with an enigmatic object in the bed of his truck. It was a big plastic drum, with some gunk on the bottom, attached to what looked like the side of a car.

I go, "What's that?" And he's all,"That used to be my washing machine. I think it just gave up." He told me he tried to fix it, "but this gaddam modern appliances, made in China, you have plastic-here-and-plastic-there, and it snaps together so once you snap it apart to fix it, that's it, it's over, okay. It used to be you could unscrew the top to take a look, okay? But now they have one long screw all the way on the bottom, and to undo it you have to take this-apart-and-that-apart, okay, and all the time Mahlia is telling me 'I don't think you should do that, what are you doing to the washer?' And I say 'Mahlia!!' and she says 'But I don't think you should be doing that,' and I say 'Mahlia, PLEASE!!'"

I laughed, enjoying the picture he painted of frustrated repair with the sweetie "helping," and seeing the pathetic result of his efforts in the bed of his truck. "So now are you going to get a new one?" I asked. He already had one, of course, in his warehouse. "I was at the Salvation Army awhile ago, okay, and they had an end of the month sale, and I think 'well, someday I'm going to need another washing machine', and guess what? That day has come!"

I tell him it's a lucky thing he has so much storage space. Holgar has a warehouse with its own address, a long building with a high ceiling that is full of stuff he'll need "someday". Mahlia calls it a "shed." When I first moved in, I noticed that my closet, that had been behind the front door when I first saw the place and said yes to it, had moved out with the previous tenant. I asked Holgar what I was supposed to do about hanging my clothes. No problem, okay? He unlocked the big side-rolling door to the warehouse, a dark and dusty place lit by windows way up there next to the ceiling. We went past the Bush-Cheney posters that mark his office, past a block of those metal grill shelves filled with old phones, electroncis and clots of wire, to a plywood wardrobe that had been painted yellow. It was only a little warped, a little stained, and only a little smaller than the space it would go in my place, but that was enough for me to refuse it. He said the wardrobe had come from my place, several tenants ago, and he'd moved it into the warehouse after that tenant declined to want it. "I thought, 'oh, is still a good wardrobe,' okay?" So he put it back here thinking someday someone will want it. Ha ha fat chance, I thought at the time. But see how that extra washer came in handy? And didn't he repair my suffering electricity with spare parts he had in the warehouse? So, okay, then. Maybe there's hope for the little yellow wardrobe.

I wish back then I'd taken a closer look around at what Holgar had in there, and at how far back it went, and at how many rows of shelves the space held. At the time, I was fresh off of missing my Dad, who was also an electrical engineer, who was also a packrat convinced that he could fix/reuse/find a use for all kinds of dusty stuff he crammed into the garage. Knowing Holgar had a whole hanger of stuff was a comfort at the time. I didn't really need to know what the contents were. But if I'd taken a closer look at it all, I could have decribed it for you in more colorful, gory detail.

Pip

Best Lunch Ever

Sometimes, when I go to Kelly's bakery on the Westside, I see a fellow I know, basking in the sun at the seat by the door and reading the morning paper over coffee. Last time it was a guy I worked with at a local winery; this time it was a guy I worked with at the radio station. Must be the best seat in the house, I thought. Then I thought, these guys know how to savor a languid morning. I do something similar, on lightly scheduled days, reading the New Yorker over breakfast and tea in my sunny coastal shack; but afterwards I often feel guilty for having squandered my time. Both these fellows were in a happy lounging reverie. Now that I think about it, when I showed up & said howdy, one started mumbling sheepishly about being caught reading reputation-bruising material, and the other gathered up his things to leave while he talked with me. At the time I thought I had smudged up their privacy, thereby ruining their groove, but now I wonder if they don't suffer the same guilt I do at morning-basking.

I was there to get a baguette for lunch at my friend Rita's. We made it together--a mussel and chard soup (chard from the farm where I work), a side dish of my own devising, and baguette. For side dish I had prepped ahead peeled, boiled sunchokes lightly tossed with lemon, olive oil, S&P, and fresh minced parsley. It turned out to be just the thing with the soup, mussels & chard in a clam-wine-tomato broth, a pinch of fennel seeds....well here, here's the recipe, which she'd clipped out of some magazine or other:

for the broth:
2c. white wine (we used cheap champagne)
2 8oz jars clam juice
for the beurre manie:
1T butter
2T flour
for the persillade:
2T minced garlic
1/4 c fresh minced parsley
also:
2# fresh mussels, scrubbed & debearded
1 bunch swiss chard, thinly ribboned (about 4c.)
3 tomatoes (about 2c.) peeled and chopped (--and deseeded, but eh.)
1c. (about half a decent-sized) finely chopped red (or other sweet) onion
1/4 t. fennel seeds (the recipe dubbed these optional, but if you ask me it makes the whole dish)
s&p to taste

*Okay so you knead the flour into the softened butter into a beurre manie (Julia Child explains that this is just an uncooked roux) & set it aside. You'll add it at the end.
*Same with the garlic & parsley. Mince em, mix em together, set aside.

*In a soup pot with a lid, pour in the wine & clam juice & heat it up.
*Add 1/2 the chard, mussels, tomotoes and onion; then add the other half plus the fennel seeds.
*Shake the pot vigorously, or stir with a wooden spoon to mix this stuff up.
*Lid it for 5-6 minutes so the mussels can steam & open up.
*Remove the mussels, take them off the shell, and put the meat back into the pot. Ones that won't open=dead. Don't use 'em.
*Add the beurre manie, add the persillade.
*Stir & simmer a minute, S&P to taste (ours needed none).
*Serve in warm bowls & garnish with a drizzle of olive oil (another step we skipped).

A quick soup, perfect for lunch.

Oh, and since the milk I was going to put in my tea was sour, Rita took the opportunity to make sour milk cake. A use for off-milk! She says it's like mild buttermilk, totally useable. The resulting cake is like a super light, moist brownie:

1c, sour milk
1/3 c. melted butter
1 1/2c. flour
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. powdered chocolate (or more, if you ask me)
1t. baking soda
1 egg
3/4c. nuts

Mix wets. Add dries. Put in greased 9 x 13 pan. Bake at an amenable temperature (her oven only has one) till you start to smell it, then check every 5 minutes till done. If it's not a total fucking cake emergency, you could even frost it after it cools. I'm thinking a cream cheese frosting could work, maybe with vanilla and some grated orange zest. We, however, snarfed ours warm & untopped, which was just fine.

Pip

I stayed wakeful longer than I expected yesterday. Last night, as I was climbing the ladder to the loft where I sleep, my morning alarm went off.

Perception got a little interesting, in the last half of the day. The band of ocean I can see at sunset looked like a vertical steel-blue plate that the sun slipped behind. When I got home from the print studio, the night sky was crystal clear. Looking up as I got out of the car, the stars really were arrayed on the underside of a vast black bowl. Wow, I thought. This is what everyone saw before science proved our perception to be off. Then I thought perhaps science had it wrong.

This morning I woke at 10, incredibly late. And I was late the rest of the day, perpetually crossing things off my do-list as time for them ran out. In fact, I wound up doing practically nothing. So tonight I am determined to get my creative on. Some free-form artplay.

Holgar's been trying to find someone to rent the place across the driveway from me. I considered it myself--the place is bigger, and shaped in such a way that I could actually fold my table out all the way and friends could sit around the whole thing. But it is really shady (read "even colder in winter"), and purportedly has a mold problem. My art papers, imperilled!Holgar fixed the leak that caused the mold, but who knows if its really gone? But it is still vacant. So I am still considering it.

I ran into my landlord this morning (late morning) as I was heading out for my consititutional around the Brussels sprout field. He said he's turned down eight or nine people with dogs, including a ceramicist who move away from the neighborhood and now wants to come back. Her dog was too big, he said. I told him he was picky (she's a great dog), but then he pointed out that he didn't want dogs to disturb the predatory birds the biologists had next door (also on his property). He's an odd blend of coldheartedness and doing right by his people.

Today I had work, delivering organic produce to restaurants in San Francisco. It is satisfyingly straightforward work in which I get to drive a big truck, stride into the back rooms of 30+ fine eateries, and be on a first-name basis with some chefs.

I wasn't sure how it was going to go today. I bed down early on nights before work, since the day starts at 2:45 am(!) so I can get to & leave the farm with the truck by 4am(!) so I can be in the city by 6ish (!). Last night, I slept poorly. And I dreamt about sleeping poorly. I even dreamt about other people sleeping poorly.

But the routine is automatic anymore, so when the alarm went off--ditditditdit! Ditditditdit!--I and Bob the cat* shuffled out of bed and went about our morning ablutions as usual.

Sometimes I worry about The Drowse, the temptation to close my eyes for just a second on the way to SF. On nights when the bedcovers are made of led, it can be a fight to keep the eyeballs open while driving, a kind of reverse-Clockwork Orange. But today I drove perkier than usual, and was aware enough to be tuned in to KQED in time for my 5:35am treat: Ian Shoales, speediest commentarian ever.

And I stayed sharp throughout the day. It was possibly the first time I ever made my delivery colleague, Javier, crack up spontaneously. (I suspect him, most of the time, of courtesy-laughing.) The soles of my shoes slipped nicely along the floor of Campton Place's delivery elevator, so I did a little soft-shoe routine. That's all it takes, I guess.

Tonight may be another matter, wakeful-wise. I've taken a shift monitoring our University's excellent print studio 7-10pm Saturdays. Last week I napped in the afternoon and still felt a bit tapped by the end of the shift (though absolutely nothing happened). I'm not napping today--still feel perky--and I have a project to work on up there....so it could go either way.

Produce tip of the day: I asked Modern Tea what they planned to do with the watermelon radishes I delivered. Normally they offer them on their nibble plate, sliced in a ramkin with salt you can add to taste. That's similar to what I do: I quarter the thin slices, sprinkle them with salt layer by layer in a tub, and refrigerate overnight for a quickie saltpickle. But you can also (Modern Tea said) slice and saute them in olive oil to put over pasta.

Pip

*of all the friends, co-workers, neighbors & other people in the encounters I relate in this Blog, Bob may be the only one who goes by her real name. Yes, "her."

Question about Holgar's "escape"

Geoffch goes,

Just how old is Holgar? In 1956 when I was 15 the USSR rather brutally put down an uprising in Budapest. Eisenhower's Sec. of State, John Foster Dulles, let it be known that if captive peoples rose up the US would support them. This was a foolish promise since we could in fact do no such thing. The uprising was unsuccessful but lots of Hungarians wound up here.

And I'm all:

Jeez, how old is that guy? Old enough to have been around for the Budapest uprising, I'd say. I wonder what his journey was like getting here? He's not banished, anyway; one of his vacations this year was back to Hungary to see family. So either not everyone got out, or he left for other reason. You'll forgive my lack of investigative journalism; I dig the mystery. Any story that unfolds slowly over time, with clues collected here & there...I mean, that's tasty.

Holgar's done pretty well for himself since leaving; man does he love this country! He's collecting 6 sets of rent from this property-- he must be close to paying off the mortgage if he hasn't already. And a place in Hawaii, for rent of course. He also does "repairs" for people in his old-country, that'll-do way. Later I'm sure you'll read about "Holgar technology" in this blog.

Pip

Who IS Holgar?

My landlord says things like, "I escaped Hungary to get away from this Socialist, internationalist bullshit, but now all I hear is how everyone is [here he switches to a simpering, mocking tone] 'afraid to hurt anybody's feelings'..." He tinkers and repairs and maintains the property out of the gigantic warehouse in back of my little place, with Rush Limbaugh blaring from his van, and thinks that if Europe wants to know how to really be in the world, they should follow Bush's lead in foreign policy. He's an electrical engineer with a few patents under his belt, including some sort of anti-hijacking device. He speaks multiple languages--aside from Hungarian and English, Japanese (after hosting Japanese friends in Hawaii, and brushing up on his Japanese, he is thinking of being a tour guide for Japanese because, among other reasons, "they tip really well.") and Spanish (upon hearing I use Spanish in my job, he once disoriented me by switching to Spanish in mid sentence, but with the same thick Hungarian accent that he uses in English, so I wasn't sure *what* language I was hearing.) So, you know. He's a smart cookie with a fierce point of view. What kind of life adds up to this character?

I heard the This American Life show on supers this weekend, as in, superintendents. Landlords, like. In the first one, a colorful, crabby Brazilian super amuses his residents with outlandish tales of, for instance, how there is an exception in the Brazilian constitution for him such that he could even kill the Brazilian president & not be prosecuted. Hah hah hah, funny old man. Then it turns out that he was, in fact, Brazilian secret police and had been in cahoots with the owner of the building to do crime, have people killed, etc. Woah, what?!? It's a great story, produced by Jack Hitt. Give it a listen sometime.

It made me think of an ominous statement that Farmer D said many months ago. Farmer D, you'll recall, is the foreman of the commercial, chemical-friendly farm across the street. The farm across the street and my colorful, foreign-born landlord have a history of feuding, about which I only know bits. Like Holgar fought the farm for neighborhood access to the public beach ( a worthy and righteous struggle, which he eventually won), but did it with such vigor & vitriol that he is now banned from walking the farm roads the rest of the neighborhood is free to traipse. Last fall the farm's irrigation reservoir was choked with something like duckweed, a green coating over the whole surface of the lake that then turned rusty brown. Farmer D lamented that because of it, the mallards wouldn't come to hatch their duckies (since then, they haven't, thoug hthe pond is now clear) and told me that area botanists identified the choking weed as nothing local. Where did it come from? Farmer D was sure Holgar had planted it out of spite. It's gotten that far, their mutual disregard and suspicion.

One time, in telling me about his previous difficulties with Holgar, Farmer D said, "He's not even a citizen of this country, did you know that?" I didn't; Holgar had met his current sweetie at the flea market 25+ years ago, so I know he's been in this country for a long time. How did Farmer D know this? "One time," Farmer D said, "he had a little trouble with a gun, you know know, brandishing it , but he had immunity and the authorities couldn't touch him." I admired the outlandishness of this statement so much that elected not to soil it with follow-up, so I don't know what the story behind *that* story is. But still, after hearing the TAL piece this weekend, I wonder what immunity means for Holgar, and what brandishing a gun means. I wonder what was going on in Hungary that my landlord had to escape.

Spooky, huh?

My organic farmer neighbor (not the commercial, chemical-friendly one) is off for a week or two, so I'm minding her chickens and ducks, and harvesting the eggs. Creaking chickens, grumbling ducks. Tasty eggs.

I live in a one-road neighborhood north of my coastal town, in a compound whose landlord is locally famous for shooing strangers off the road and the little beach you can walk to from here. He is colorful for being Hungarian, going against the local political grain, having a legendary past about which any of us only know snippets and initmations, and being frankly unsentimental and money-grubbin'.

On Monday I engaged him in a squabble about my suffering electricity, and the landlord--we'll call him Holgar--said he could check on it the followng day. He just got back from Hawaii, though, sprucing up another rental property, and needed to buy bread first. And eggs. Eggs, you say? I presented him with a six-pack of duck eggs I had just collected that morning. Holgar hadn't had them before. "Are they good?" he asked. I shrugged. "Dunno. I haven't tried them yet." Holgar held up the carton, eyed it suspiciously, thanked me and left.

Tonight he calls me, asking, "So, you try your egg yet?" I had. Duck eggs, it turns out, have thicker, yet almost translucent-white shells. When they break they seem less brittle, more plastic. The yolks are gigantic, and being freshy-fresh, they are bright orange. Because I cooked them with a little onion and cotija cheese in homemade corn tortillas with sour cream, though, I couldn't tell him if the eggs themselves tasted any different than hen's eggs.
"And are you feeling okay today?" he asked.
"I'm fine," I said.
"Ahh, good, then tomorrow I'll try my eggs."
I laughed; fine, I'm His Highness' taster. No poison here. The kingdom is safe!