Folks, Daniel Mitsui’s work is just blowing me away. Anyone who knows me and is familiar with my art knows why I love this stuff: it kicks color to the curb, overdoses on ornamentation, and adopts an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail. Very large to very small detail work always gets me, and, well, heave a happy dose of Christian religious symbolism and medieval artistic sensibilities into that and I’m one happy camper.

It all reminds me of some of my favorite of Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Faust — but minus the disturbing phallus, and with more random little dinosaurs and amoebas thrown in.

Keiko Hara was a constant source of stress for me when I was a fine arts major at Whitman. Even before I had a class with her, I heard stories of her insanity. As a professor, she was crazy and unpredictable; a combination of less-than-stellar English skills and her general verbal ineptitude caused frustration for us even trying to understand what she was telling us to do. If that wasn’t bad enough, it always has seemed to me that taking art from an artist whose art you dislike is just asking for trouble.

Keiko became a source of ridicule to some of my fellow students and me. We hated how confusing her classes were and we couldn’t understand the point of many of her exercises, so we’d make fun of her in ways she couldn’t understand; her poor English led to expressions which became humorous catchphrases to us, phrases like, “Can you come?”, “Really kind of,” and “Are you the sweat?” We even made up several corresponding hand signs, and would perform these clandestinely whenever she uttered one of these catchphrases. Once, she accidentally locked herself out of her office, and called me (since I was working in a helpdesk position) for assistance. There was nothing I could do, and I told her to call security; but as soon as I’d hung up the phone, I snickered up my sleeve in a gesture of pure schadenfreude, and quickly told the story to my fellow students.

She was a horrible teacher. I thought at the time she was a horrible artist. I thought her classes were a waste of time and money. I tried for awhile to think generously and get something out of those classes, thinking that even if she was a horrible teacher, I would still be able to glean something from enforced studio time and the resources provided by those classes. This was true to a certain extent, but I was discouraged by the fact that works that I intentionally made to be (what I considered) artsy-fartsy — paint thrown at paper and then ripped up and reassembled without any purpose — were things which she absolutely loved, while the works which I poured my heart, soul, and effort into, she criticized as being too tight, too controlled.

But I wish I’d paid more attention to her art. If I had looked at it closer, or as an artist, rather than as an amateur viewer, I might have been able to understand her better. Now, several years since the last time I had a class with her, I find myself looking at her art — especially drawn to her Verse series, work she’s done in the time since I knew her — and feeling like I can understand better what she was trying to accomplish with us. I actually like it quite a bit. But I couldn’t appreciate her use of color until I’d learned just how hard a good sense of color is to achieve, especially with oils. I couldn’t appreciate her technique until I’d learned how to handle oil paints.

Expressions like “draw the air” were fodder for our ridicule, but just because we didn’t get what she was trying to say, it doesn’t mean that she didn’t have something to say. Many artists have managed to imbue space with a physicality through various techniques — many of the Impressionists did this especially with optical blending and brush stroke techniques — but we didn’t get it.

She tried to get us to embrace the physical act of creating art, to work ourselves up into it and open ourselves. Although I still don’t see it as a weakness, she was right: my own work has always been very painstakingly controlled, tight, closed; but even when I was still at school, I started to realize the value of physical exhausting yourself to create a work of art, or even just to warm yourself up so that you can extend yourself. It’s not necessarily about “being the sweat,” and maybe the result won’t be anything you’d want to hang on your wall — but the flow of a line is entirely dictated by the energy and freedom (or lack thereof) which is poured into it, and you can easily tell where it starts and stops from the finished product, when there’s energy and when there isn’t.

I wish her methods had been easier to follow, so that I could have understood her message. I was miserable at the time, but I think that there was value in her teaching, nestled in amongst the suffering, the sweat, and the mockery, waiting a few years ’til I’d matured a bit in my pursuit of art so that it could jump out at me like a maggot in cheese. Not that she made it easy, but I should have listened harder. I might be a better artist now, and it would’ve been much more charitable at the time.

Again, the main point of this post is the food porn. It’s not an original recipe so I won’t re-post it, but this is a vanilla bean panna cotta which I made in the new large silicon muffin-pan (a little unconventional, perhaps, but it worked). The white chocolate “lace” was made the same way as it was for the shortcake, and then I just stuck it in the panna cotta. Ordinarily I might not recommend mixing these textures, but the white chocolate is so soft that it melts while you eat, and therefore isn’t too hard for the panna cotta. Oh yeah, and then I just threw some blackberries on the side. Next time I think I’ll try making a coulis, though: I didn’t fancy the blackberry seeds getting involved in my panna cotta.

Photos of my Easter Sunday dessert — flourless chocolate cake with powdered sugar and fresh berries — may be forthcoming, if they came out well on my ma’s camera.

Here’s my contribution for the Illustration Friday theme “Fleeting.” It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, but I saw the theme and this idea popped right into my head. And now I feel a little guilty about it

Poor lil guy. I don’t think he’s going to make it through the night!

I’ve been wanting to go to Spur for awhile, and after eating there last night, I can safely say that it is so worth it. If you visit their blog, you’ll see all their notes about what they’re trying, awards they’re receiving — and their menu right now, because it changes monthly. (I guess that means I’ll have to go back in May.)

Their décor is a sort of industrialized cowboy look, and tucked as they are in a narrow front on Blanchard, they didn’t seem to be getting much traffic (though it was only a Tuesday night). The atmosphere was friendly, though, with lots of communal seating available, and the whole menu made up of shareable small plates. With the lunar, offbeat menu, the whole place has an experimental feel, but it’s obvious that the chefs know what they’re doing. A note at the bottom of the menu proclaimed that substitutions would absolutely not be offered; it seems that the chefs have decided exactly what they want to cook this month, and they’re not going to allow anything else.

A friend and I ordered a bunch of these small dishes, including the Sockeye Salmon Crostini (with mascarpone, capers, and pickled shallot), the Fried Potato Dumplings (with a Tasmanian peppercorn sauce, fondue, and chives), the Warm Spring Artichokes (with Fromage Blanc, sherry, and miners lettuce), and the Hamachi Crudo (with chiogga beet, champagne vinegar, and horseradish leaf). The Fried Potato Dumplings were very warm and welcoming, with a mild, creamy fondue, while the Warm Spring Artichokes made up a fresh, buttery salad. The Hamachi Crudo felt like a German take on sushi; the vinegar and beet were tangily delicious, but somewhat overwhelmed the fish itself. But the star of our evening was the Sockeye Salmon Crostini: the mascarpone had been made in-house, and it showed; it was silky smooth, and the smoked salmon it was paired with had a great taste that shone through without being overly salty, as smoked salmon so often is.

The cocktail menu was mostly devoid of standards, which I did find a little daunting — for some reason I seem to think that experimental cocktails are more likely to Go Wrong than are experimental foods. Still, I’m willing to give it a go, and next time I go back I think I’ll be trying out the “Lover’s Lock” — made from Aperol, grapefruit, and absinthe.

The whole experience felt more like the opening of an art show than a meal; the food was so unusual that it was not terribly conducive to conversation about something other than the food. It’s certainly not somewhere I’d like to go all the time, but as Seattle restaurants go, it was a bit further out on the edge than I’m used to, and therefore a lot of fun. Besides — I do like conversations about food.

I love the pageantry of this time of the liturgical year. Even if I’ve been an irregular churchgoer, the Lenten and Easter seasons always bring me back.

But Easter Vigil is hands-down my favorite service of the year, and always has been. When I was little, it meant that I was allowed to stay up extra-late and play with candles (I may have set my church program aflame once or twice). When I was in high school, I made strawberries dipped in chocolate for the always-amazing after-parties we’d have at our church. And when I was at Whitman, going to Easter Vigil in Walla Walla every year felt a bit more like being at home.

It’s pretty theatrical, sitting in the dark and listening to stories that are thousands of years old. My mind always wanders at some point to imagining ancient life in the holy land; to contemplating the symmetry of the whole story, from the passage of the Jews to the resurrection of Jesus; to wonder at the questions raised by his triumph over death and the rising of the dry bones. I love how the readings anchor the Christian story firmly in Jewish tradition. I love the theatricality that makes this Eucharist different from every other one we might celebrate throughout the year. The year that I attended Easter Vigil at St. Mark’s Cathedral, they did the full nine lessons and psalms, and when it came time to celebrate the resurrection, the bishop yelled it out, they threw on all the lights at once, and the organ went full-blast. It was not entirely unlike watching a geyser erupt.

If you have the time this Saturday night and are so inclined, I’d highly recommend it. If you’re not Christian, it’s like a crash course — it says: here, this is what we’re about. If you are Christian, but haven’t experienced it, try it out. It will renew and reset your perspective. And it’s fun.

The Episcopal service opens with this prayer:

This is the night, when you brought our fathers, the children
of Israel, out of bondage in Egypt, and led them through the
Red Sea on dry land.

This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and
rose victorious from the grave.

Via Wessel and Liebermann (Seattle antiquarian and rare booksellers) comes the tale of how the CPSIA is resulting in a crackdown on old books. The long and short of the story is that because of the broadly sweeping (read: oceanic) terms of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the government is now authorized to force booksellers and libraries to dispose of books — some of which may have been on shelves for the last century or more — if they test positively for containing lead in their inks.

I understand that they’re trying to make the world safe from lead poisoning, but I think it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. These books represent not just literary development for our children; they represent centuries worth of work, of authors’ lives and dreams and hard work. And even if they didn’t, they’d still be works of art and part of our history. Are we really going to let the idea that ravenous, bibliophagic infants may have a small chance of ingesting a tiny amount of lead into their systems lead us to burn or otherwise destroy 200+ years of children’s literature? What about books that had small runs, books that were never reprinted?

It’s just ridiculous. I’m not even sure I support the act at all (it crack downs on independent artists and craftspeople as well, and has slammed Etsy down already with a wave of legal headache), but even if I could buy into the idea that we need to protect ourselves from all the wicked chemicals of the earth, it seems like vast overkill to have this enacted retroactively.

After all, how much damage have these books actually caused? Don’t you think we’d have heard about it if this were a major cause of lead poisoning? If any harm had come from them, wouldn’t they have been pulled from the shelves long ago?

It just all feels like some bizarre back-door entry to Farenheit 451…

Mostly I just want to show off these pictures. All this foodie-blog reading is making me more adventurous in the kitchen, and it seems that I’m buying an excess of food just so that I can ruin some of it and still have something to eat.

Here, my main thrill was in playing with chocolate, and trying to make something that would look shmancy. I wanted really offbeat, organic shapes, and I wanted an extra-dark chocolate so that it would be hard and hold up just fine. First, I covered my counters in wax paper. Then, I melted some extra dark (70% cacao) bittersweet chocolate with some mint oil over a double boiler. Once it was thoroughly melted and mixed, I took a fork and just started dripping and swirling the chocolate onto the wax paper. I slipped the sheets of wax paper in the freezer for about 10 minutes, and that was all it took to thoroughly harden (and chill!) the chocolate. To get the chocolate off the paper, I stationed a large bowl atop a chair, and put it next to my counter. I ran the wax paper along the edge of the counter, and the chocolate fell off it in both large and small bits into the bowl. Then I just popped that bowl into the freezer until serving time!

The base of the dessert is store-bought angel food cake, and some great strawberries which I let stew in a little apple cider and some powdered sugar. But mostly it’s all about playing with chocolate. And the mint with the strawberries was perfect. I also like that this is a dessert for which you can make all the components the day before, and then it’s just a matter of five minutes to assemble them on the plate when you’re ready to serve. Great for hosting after you’ve only just gotten off work!

That’s right, folks! I moved from the old Blogger-blog and have started exploring the mighty and worthy world of WordPress. Enough of this proprietary stuff, already! Go PHP, for freedom!

If you need something from the old blog, you’ll find it, still, at http://sarahmcmenomy.com/archive/homeblog/ — and I may re-post one or two things here, for general reference and, you know, friendliness.

Welcome, friends!