Word Blur

Welcome to the working week

More micro-incremental choreography (serial dance?) from a working week I spent at a seminar on library assessment at NYU. Filmed in my dorm room, with ghosts of past, present, and future.

A perfect sentence

From the "How Not to Boil an Egg" chapter of How to Cook a Wolf:

"Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg before it is broken."

The Wolf at the Door

I am officially in love with this woman, who I discovered via 30 Bucks a Week:

So, much so that I cooked a variation on this meal last night.  A few (I suppose luxurious) variations, based on the contents of my kitchen: I used chicken stock instead of water and fennel instead of peas.  This really made it taste like a homier version of one of my staples--pasta with braised onions and fennel.  This afternoon I recooked the leftovers casserole-style for lunch.

I added M.F.K. Fisher's salmon pancakes, from How to Cook a Wolf, which consist of tinned salmon with a couple of eggs and parsley.  My oldest daughter loved these--she ate a bunch of them.

I'm not sure that as cooked (or together!) these really were the most economical meals (and economical really matters for me this week), but I see the potential.  The pasta could have stood on its own and Fisher certainly would recommend serving the salmon pancakes with toast and a baked apple-it's all about toast and baked apples with her.

I'm a micro-food blogger

I love reading those blogs where people write about all the food they buy and all the food they eat.  I could read about the contents of someone else's stomach all day, but I'm not really up to the task of writing about food in that way here.  At the same time I'm trying really hard to cook from my farm share and on a pretty tight budget and I like the idea and sharing some of the minutiae of how I manage that, so I've been using twitter as a tool to track what comes in the farm share and what I eat.  I think I might be driving my twitter followers crazy; they keep gently taking the piss out of me--sweetly even.  Note the new sidebar with updates streaming in like crazy from my twitter feed.  And check out this list of food bloggers using twitter.

Unison (a work-in-progress)

This is a video I made for an installation last fall at the University of Vermont and as a way of starting a conversation with Bill Simmon, who shot this and accompanying footage. I edited it; Bill would have done so very differently (hint: better). In fact he has. It's a record of sorts, of a few different iterations of a group improvisational form executed in the waters of Lake Champlain. The performers have a set of minimal, gestural movements that they can execute in any order or relationship. Ultimately, they are trying to get to unison. Miraculously, they usually succeed. How?

How to Cook a Wolf

From the introduction to the revised (1951) edition:

"There can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts."

It's amazing to read this book, where you hear the arguments of Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and Alice Waters pre-dated by sixty years. Basically, she's saying: cook real food & eat it, even if times are tight. Especially if times are tight.

Voices from the Farm

As communes go, The Farm is interesting. It’s interesting because it’s still around; interesting because of the incredible influence it’s had in fields such as midwifery, agriculture, and philanthropy; interesting because of some of its more controversial aspects—the quasi-religion espoused by erstwhile leader Stephen Gaskin, the standing offer for women considering abortion to have (and leave) babies at the Farm, and the decision to move from commune to collective in the 1980’s (members no longer take a vow of poverty and live off of shared assets; they earn they own way, own their own stuff, and pay monthly dues), which resulted in a significant dwindling of member numbers. Voices from the Farm is very much a product of the Farm, but the voices really are plural. Thoughtful questions are posed—about what it was like to raise the children that were left behind by ‘sanctuary’ cases and about whether or not the social work being done by members caring for the runaways, drug addicts, and individuals struggling with mental illness who showed up at the Farm’s gate detracted from the commune’s real mission. And there are incredible stories, from Farm members working with earthquake victims in Guatemala to the satellite group who operated an ambulance service in the South Bronx. It’s impossible to read this book and not feel like The Farm, through both its successes and its failures, has learned something most of us at the beginning of the 21st century need to know. Thanks to Robert Dean Arnold for the tip!

The Great Tender Buttons Remix of FY 09

A video I made at the beginning of the summer, with apologies to Gertrude Stein (who had me thinking about phrasing) and Jarvis Cocker (who had me thinking about Gertrude Stein, with all that "baby this" and "baby that"). This is what I think I mean by micro-incremental choreography. What does making a dance look like in the middle of making a life?

Update: iMovie HD isn't playing nicely with YouTube.  I will fix this when I get to it, but the movie is really only 2:19 seconds long (you don't have to watch the remaining 2 minutes of blank space).  Next time I really will try blip, I promise.

Stuck in Vermont

It's the 100th episode of Eva Sollberger's Stuck in Vermont video blog.  Congratulations Eva!

Here's the piece (#31) that Eva did on the early development of The History of the Future, when I was showing work as part of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts New Art Space Assistance (N.A.S.A.) grant program:

Wow, do I look like a cranky old man in that still.  That's because I am a cranky old man.

Miss Rockaway Armada

I was at Mass MoCA over the weekend and very excited to be there.  But the shows, and this is no knock on the shows, were really dire, almost hopeless, really.  Video installations of high rises and factories in China (Eastern Standard) and heartbreaking evidence of the impact of warfare and pollution on the environment (Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape).  So, it was a relief to finally stumble on Being Here is Better than Wishing We’d Stayed, an installation by the Miss Rockaway Armada collective.  It was inspiring to see something--anything--that people came together and made, especially something with such a plapable sweetness.  Visitors could add typewritten notes or drawings; while I toured through the space an older woman was sitting at a table drawing, making occasional wisecracks to no one in particular, and humming along with the tinny music that played at random intervals.

Take a gallery tour: