Sometimes something just comes over me, I get a vision and I must do anything and everything to bring that vision to fruition.  Recently my friend Becky and I were in Sur La Table and I saw a lip cookie cutter.  The picture above is the result.  I don’t have any secrets to share about how to make outstanding sugar cookies or frosting. I do have this video of encouragement that might even propel you into sales: LINK

Recipe / Frosting / Lips

On Sunday, I had a chance to visit the L.A. Zine Fest at the Last Bookstore in Downtown. The place was packed with buyers and sellers of zines, shirts, and prints a’plenty. Among the exhibitors were DUM DUM zine (more on that to come), our friends from Synchroncity, as well as our dear Andrew Cox. The event included panel discussions in the bookstore with themes such as DIY Art Spaces and Zines As Agents Of Social Change. It was an awesome and inspiring event and one that I look forward to attending again next year!

From the website:

The Los Angeles Zine Fest 2012 … is an opportunity for So-Cal zinesters to come together en masse and meet and exchange ideas with those from all over the country. Stay tuned sub-culture armies! Hold up your staple guns, Los Angeles!

Find our more: VIDEO and WEBSITE

A long time ago when I was in 7th grade I saw a 12th grader and she forever changed my life.  She was the epitome of cool – her looks, her senior quotes, her love of music.  How rad is it that today I am featuring an interview with her and she is just as cool as ever.  It is with great enthusiasm that I introduce you to Trinie Dalton.  She is a writer and visual artist with an ever growing list of creations, the author and editor of five other books, fiction and art.  She has a new book out that I can’t wait to read called Baby Geisha.

What are some of your current obsessions?  That would take me years to properly answer, but a few recent experiences, research tangents, and objects are lingering: looking out the window on the train, paper lanterns, Cedar Waxwings, the young Rufous hummingbird raising himself on my nectar feeder, cast iron railings, electricity, singing along phonetically to songs with lyrics in languages other than one’s own, saunas and hot tubs, listening to academic lectures on podcast, the horrors of post traumatic stress disorder, flannel, blood oranges, and bonfires in the snow.

What are some of your daydreams?  I just finished writing the first draft of a poem about how the world was made from cheese instead of cosmic dust, and about how human evolution has happened because of cheese’s supply and demand.

Tell us a story from your childhood.  My favorite restaurant was a place called Luau Gardens in Sacramento, where I could roam free at the Chinese buffet. I loved these meats wrapped in triangular pouches of foil, and would eat as many as I could until I felt sick from the sugary marinade. As an adult who hasn’t been on a camping trip in way too long, I associate those tiny pork pyramids with larger foil pouches that we used to roast in the fire for dinner outdoors. We’d put eggplant, onion, cheese, herbs, and olive oil in there, fold it up, and steam. Maybe all this signifies is that I should start cooking with foil more often.

What is something you recently heard or saw that has stuck with you.  I’m excited that California has a wolf! I hope he stays, and I wish I could toss him a chicken appetizer to entice him. Here is the photo I found on the LA Times blog:

What are some things you are looking forward to? I look forward to swimming in a warm ocean again, and reading Mary Ruefle’s collected lectures when Wave Books releases it this coming Fall.

Thank you Trinie!

Website

I thought this quote from Roland Barthes was a fitting way to wrap up this Valentine’s week. Here are some of my favorite love-related posts from around the interweb that made my eyes twinkle a bit:

- A letter written in 1937 by Ansel Adams for his best friend Cedric Wright after Adams had recuperated from a nervous breakdown: LINK (Thanks, Joanna!)

- This David Foster Wallace quote from Good Old Neon in Oblivion: LINK

- What I Did For Love, episode 457 of This American Life: LINK (particularly Act One, Best Laid Plans)

Have a lovely weekend, friends!

P.S. I just finished “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides, which was a great story and a wonderful read. As Michael Silverblatt said on Bookworm, “If you like to read, you will like to read this novel.”

On our last trip to Utah and Arizona I got up in the night, barefoot, to cross over to the bathroom.  Thank goodness I didn’t step on this centipede – I was nervous at first, but then really stoked to see this cute arthropod (who was safely caught and released into the desert night)! Even though their name suggests that they have 100 legs, it actually ranges from 20 to 30 pairs (this one has 20 pairs). Either way, they are pretty speedy and mesmerizing-ly smooth movers.  They have been found everywhere, including at the arctic circle.  Keep your eyes peeled in the darker areas of the world and you might just spot one of the oldest creatures on earth (400 million year old fossils have been found with centipede imprints!)

Play one of my favorite games – the online version pales in comparison to an original arcade experience, but hopefully it can tide you over:  LINK

I read this article on mindful eating in the New York Times last week and have been thinking about it a lot lately, especially when it’s time to eat. I’m a fast eater and a lot of my meals take place at my desk, staring at a monitor. As much as I try to slow down, it’s hard for me to peel away from my work and internet wanderings to just sit and eat. This article was a reminder for me to rethink my eating habits and to practice small changes that remind me that I’m eating when I am and what that means.

QUOTE:

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it… Mindful eating is meant to nudge us beyond what we’re craving so that we wake up to why we’re craving it and what factors might be stoking the habit of belly-stuffing.

P.S. The photo above is of the contents of a recent CSA box I picked up. I couldn’t resist taking a picture. Those colors!

You might hate me after reading this post and if you do I will drown my sorrows at one of the best places in the world, The Amangiri.  I was truly a lucky lady when one of my birthday presents was a stay at the Amangiri Hotel in Canyon Point, Utah.

(a million kisses to NR)

Hands down (prayer position in the direction of Utah) this is the best hotel I have ever stayed in.  Situated on 600 acres of beautiful Utah land,  mesas, desert, ancient caves and trails await. The architecture is breathtaking – a perfect marriage of the man made and nature.  There is so much care and attention to detail paid to the entire experience of staying here, from the service (which was beyond expectations) to the room (filled with the most thoughtful accents and accessories).  The view from the room is meditative with the changing light of the day. The pool was outstanding, wrapping around a large boulder next to an infinity spa, both open 24 hours. All this gushing and over-use of positive adjectives may seem a little out of character, but the place is just truly sickening with beauty.

Everything was luxurious and perfect… the only thing that was not perfect was leaving, that just didn’t seem right.

A friend said to me, “it is either camping or this – nothing in between will do anymore.”  I agree… Luck be with all of us!

Website / More Pictures

I met Ben Goddard at an LA LOVE potluck dinner a couple years ago, soon after he had moved to Los Angeles. Ben is a photographer whose work is, to me, equally thoughtful as well as it is humorous, complex as it is straightforward. His images have a lot to offer visually and figuratively.  Here is Ben telling us more about himself, his interests and inspirations.

Hi Ben! Tell us a bit about yourself. I’m an artist living in Los Angeles. Been here for close to two years now. I grew up in Boston and studied photography at Bard College in New York. I didn’t get into photography until the last two years of high school. The first pictures I took were of the city streets while my Dad drove me to school in the morning. Music was what I spent most of my time doing in elementary and high school. Kids thought I was pretty whacky because I played saxophone in my high school’s concert and jazz bands, while at the same time played guitar in metal/hardcore bands around Boston. The most fun band I was in growing up was called Combat Death. It was a bit short-lived, unfortunately, but I still listen to the EP we recorded. I remember I had six shots of espresso before we recorded and I could barely play guitar because my fingers were shaking from the caffeine. It made for some interestingly sloppy and tweaked out guitar solos though.

Anyways, I didn’t begin spending a lot more time with photography until I got to Bard. I hadn’t looked at much photography either in high school, so taking my first history of photography class freshman year was a huge inspiration for me. Upon graduating, I moved down to Austin with a friend from school. Although Austin is a beautiful and fun city, I decided after six months that it wasn’t the place for me (I was lucky to make friends with some awesome artists down there though). I’ll miss this abandoned airport my friends and I used to hang out at. It’s the old Austin airport that the city never tore down and it’s now right next to a cookie cutter-style development neighborhood. The control tower is even still there overlooking the neighborhood, which is pretty eerie juxtaposition (here’s a link to a picture I took of the tower from the neighborhood: LINK). We went up the stairs of the control tower once and there are tons of documents strewn everywhere. It’s pretty crazy. Also will miss this bar called Ginny’s Little Longhorn that has chickenshit bingo every Sunday night (yes, it’s true: LINK). So yeah, after six months, I moved out here to L.A. and have been here since.

Let’s see, what else I can say…I’m a gemini and my parents were going to name me Megan if I had been born a girl.

What are you working on now? I’m working on these self-portraits that all involve mirrors in one way or another. They are black & white. I started making these pictures after I became obsessed with looking at pictures on Google image search that people take of themselves in mirrors. So my pictures are playing around with the most obvious, cliche way of taking a self-portrait: photographing your reflection. They’re pretty theatrical and humorous. I use a lot of props along with the mirrors. I’m also currently trying to edit down about 100 or so pictures to create a small series out of them. I took most of these pictures while visiting friends and family in other places over the past year (most of them are not portraits though). They are all pictures I’ve only thought about on their own up to this point, so I’m excited to see how some of them might be able to work alongside each other. This is the first time I’ve used Costco to get really cheap 4×6″ prints made just to be able to shuffle prints around easily. The quality of the prints are surprisingly good!

I just recently got my first studio space which is really cool to have. It’s been nice to have a place where I can make more studio-based work while still taking pictures out in the world. It’s in Atwater Village in my friend’s garage. She has a cat named Fang who is the coolest cat ever (except for maybe my cat Otto). My studio is also right around the corner from Alias, an amazing local bookstore for used art/photo books. I like going there to take breaks, but it can also turn into a huge distraction as you could imagine.

What is the last place you visited? Tell us about something that happened there. One of the last places I visited was Long Island over Thanksgiving. Other than hanging out with family there and eating a ridiculous amount of bialys, Long Island is usually a pretty boring place for me to visit. During this visit though, I went with a friend to check out Wardenclyffe, Nikola Tesla’s laboratory on Long Island that was shut down due to lack of funding and support from the scientific community. Tesla’s goal was to build these towers across the world that would send electricity into the air, which would provide free electricity to everyone. The first tower was built in 1901 at the lab in Long Island and it still stands to this day (can you tell by now that I enjoy exploring abandoned towers?). The property is fenced off, unfortunately, but we were still able to get a good look at all of the buildings and the tower. It looked really wild. Very sci-fi. Sort of like the power plants in Antonioni’s Red Desert. We even met a British tourist there who was observing the remains of the lab as well. He definitely was either a scientist or a science enthusiast because he told us all about Tessla and his inventions. There’s a good article in the NY Times about Tesla and his Long Island lab from a couple years ago: LINK.

Oh yes, and my friend also drove me by Schwing Electrical Supply Corporation that’s on Long Island. A very nerdy yet most likely unintentional Wayne’s World reference right there.

Where do you turn for inspiration? Reading books and watching movies are really the most inspiring activities for me. “Moon Palace,” by Paul Auster is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read. I love documentaries. Agnes Varda’s “The Gleaners and I” is a very inspiring documentary for me.

I also find going to thrift stores to be inspiring. I tend to get ideas for pictures from finding weird stuff at stores. I love picking through the VHS section at Goodwill. You can find some really strange movies there.

Places that I often visit are inspiring as well. My aunt’s house in the mission district of San Francisco is one of those places. All of the walls in the house are literally covered with memorabilia, art, pictures of friends, left wing political activist posters from the ’60s/’70s, etc etc. I always get creative ideas when staying there.

Thank you, Ben!

WEBSITE — TUMBLR

A poem by Raymond Carver for you today.  xo

Please visit Carversite.com for more information, poems, and history.

A Birdsong Sampler is a 2001 project by Kerry Tribe in which she had ten friends (all artists and most grad students from UCLA) imitate the chirp of the bird of their choice. The results were then digitally mixed to produce an ambient soundtrack in “the spirit of a sound effects CD or New Age nature sampler.” The project exists as an audio CD and as a site-specific audio installation. If you’re ready to be chirped away, click HERE.

About Kerry Tribe: Kerry Tribe’s film and video installations investigate the relationships between memory, subjectivity, and representation, using image, text, and sound. Often working with multiple projections and timed loops, her installations are designed to structurally underscore the content of her work. She rarely disguises the apparatus of her work’s presentation, instead incorporating the machinery into the presentation of the project. Tribe’s use of film, video, audiotape and  often customized looping systems works as a commentary on memory, physically emulating how it functions in the brain. (SOURCE)

Learn more about Kerry Tribe HERE.

Read more about her work HERE.