pesto /  by mrm

is a truly wonderful thing, particularly if you've managed to acquire a Cuisinart ($25 at a yard sale, I kid you not). Below, last night's mint/basil/pistachio pesto. May I say it was tasty?

stone fruit /  by mrm

I'll admit it: left to my own devices, I would have taken the lazy route. I've have had a few epic failures in the past whenever that have shaken my faith in my ability to bake sweet treats, and so I was planning on just showing up and paying the $5 at Omnivore's stone fruit cooking contest. For such crises of confidence as these, however, the right housemate at the right time is the best if not only remedy. Micah was so jazzed at the thought of this competition that, mere minutes after emerging from his bedroom, he scaled a tree all monkey-like and tossed plums into a bowl below held aloft by yrs truly. 

In a quick hour and a half, he whipped up an Italian pistachio plum cake and plum compote (both vegan). Kristin & I assisted. We cabbed it over to Noe (time was of the essence!) and entered. 

What I love about Omnivore's food contests is that they're community-judged, so you get to eat everything and cast your vote. Which also means that you get to eat everything:





We didn't win, but I'm claiming for us an unofficial third place (they only announced the first and second place winners, so really, who's to gainsay me?).

dancing with myself /  by mrm

is not something I've ever minded (and if you know me at all, you know that already). I also like to take myself out on a nice date from time to time. And so it was that Friday night found me at the de Young, listening to some opera, drinking wine. There was a circus performance, which involved a contortionist act by two tiny girl-child acrobats, one so young she stuck out her belly, beaming all the while, cheeks like tangerines. Once their act was over, she danced twitchily on the side of the stage, while two dancers performed a ballet duet to a soft-rock/adult contemporary cover of "Don't Stop Believin'." I kid you not. Sometimes things like this really make me want to make art, in the most combative way. Sometimes they make me want to never make art again. Then I bought myself a nice dinner.

languidezza /  by mrm

My time in Cambridge and Boston could be considered an extended exploration of Leopardi's observation that
"...in fact, most human pleasure consists in some sort of languor" ("...anzi forse la maggior parte dei diletti umani consistono in qualche sorta di languidezza," from "Parini's Discourse on Glory," Operette Morali, Giacomo Leopardi, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti).
Consider that thesis well supported.

I would go to bed with at best a vague idea of what I'd be doing the next day, and wake up and form a very loose sort of plan. This is so far from my usual M.O., especially when on vacation, and I think it did me a world of good. Lounging about, while far from my permanent state, is not to be underrated. Of course, my idea of lounging involves walking all over town, but with nice breaks for coffee, for snacks, for reading in a pleasantly shady spot along the Charles. And eating. Frequently and well. On that, I think, more to come.

museum of fine arts, boston /  by mrm

My art education was always a gradual and ad hoc thing. Untaught in what is strangely called "art appreciation," I was somehow always a classicist (in form, in technique, in metrical scheme – I was writing sonnets regularly by seventh grade) and it wasn't until entering high school that an odd assignment for world history found me studying Picasso. With a hard heart and a harder head, I can admit it; I was convinced his art didn't interest me. But here of course is the wonder of immersion, the complete unseating, shifting, the changing of a heart; and that was the beginning of it all for me, as far as I can tell.

I continued to carry around tiny pockets of art knowledge until later in high school when my involvement in Academic Decathlon (the Olympics of nerd-sports) found me studying art again, with a truly incredible art teacher. The way the competition works is this: each year, the selection committee (whoever they are) choose several pieces of art from a specific U.S. art museum, and the lucky contestants study the pieces, their makers, their eras, techniques used, &tc., &tc. And the first year that I was on the team, the pieces were selected from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

I took a redeye from San Francisco to Boston and arrived on the 15th, beat tired and kind of hazy in my mind. I dropped my bag off at the hotel, took a nap in Boston Common, and headed over to the MFA, a place I'd been hoping to get to for about ten years now.

By now of course, things are somewhat different than they were when I was sixteen. I moved from the Sacramento suburbs to la città dell'Arte, and have had the ridiculous good fortune to spend time in some of the best art museums of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, England, the U.S., and the Netherlands. And yet the MFA was one of the pleasantest art museum experiences I've ever had. I would enter a room, look around at its contents, and then find myself startled to see something so familiar that I'd also never seen before, in person at least. A bit like meeting a pen pal, I imagine.* It was surprisingly soothing, comforting, casual.

My thanks forever to Ms. Jill Pease for her inspiration and infectious enthusiasm.


*when I was a child, I had a pen pal for about four years. His name was Karthik and he lived in India. We have never met.

holiday /  by mrm

I have too much to say. I was asked today, what were the three highlights of your trip? I thought that was a good question. "Tell me about your trip" is so broad, and "what was the best thing" is so narrow. A perfect solution, no, but a nice middle way. Yet without a doubt, the main highlight was seeing my good friends. Deeply affirming. People who've known you a long time remind you who you are. I think a lot about Florence, where I could in ten or fifteen minutes walk to the house of anyone I wanted to see. I missed a lot of my friends in the states, of course, but while I was there, all of my friends there were so conveniently located. Someday I'll found a town. It'll be an invitation-only town, a curated town. Only people I like. If you're reading this, the odds are pretty good that you'll be invited to come live there. (Say yes.)

More details shortly.

cosi secreti /  by mrm

"Again, had he been in love...himself, I fancy that the tender passion would, with him, have been so vague and feeble a sentiment that he might have gone down to his grave with a dim sense of some uneasy sensation which might be love or indigestion, and with, beyond that, no knowledge whatever of his state."
                     – Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon (published 1861)

Oh, I do love an overwrought Victorian novel every now and then.

why indeed /  by mrm

Foucault: ...Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer your question simply, I would say this: why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject of our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.
So I can't answer the question of why I should be interested; I could only answer it by asking why shouldn't I be interested? Not to be interested in politics, that's what constitutes a problem. So instead of asking me, you should ask someone who is not interested in politics and then your question would be well-founded, and you would have the right to say "Why, damn it, are you not interested?"
                       –The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

punctuation /  by mrm

Pull quotes get on my nerve. I don't understand them at all. I do my best to avoid reading them, because I only end up feeling frustrated when I end up encountering the exact same words later in a newspaper or magazine story, with more context. Does anyone enjoy them or find them useful or beautiful? Convince me.

day tripper /  by mrm

I think it's fair to say that mine is an excitable nature. Nonetheless, I have difficulty imagining that anyone would have been unmoved by the truly splendid hike I went on last Friday in Marin.

Gorgeous sunshine for the first time in days, and a winding way along some cliffs. Blissfully alone.

Along the way, I rubbed the rough felty pods of lupin not yet in bloom.



In places the trail was wide and obvious, but when it dipped into the forest it was often overgrown. The air was warm in these areas, and damp, and thick. Then I came out into a narrow stretch where California poppies and dandelions were clearly in competition with one another for Most Cheerful and Exuberant Wildflower. (Also, did you know that dandelions sometimes get strangely foamy?)

When I finally got to Wildcat Beach (nearly six miles from the trail head), it was gorgeous (in that cold, scrabbly, Northern California way), and disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, devoid of wildcats. 


It did, however, offer the persistent hiker a gorgeous waterfall.
The benefits of hiking alone include but are not limited to: walking as quickly as I like, not getting mocked for laughing at things like funny beetles, and singing as soundly as I want (doubles as a good defense against mountain lions). Also, a great way to get some space back in my head.

I ate good snacks whilst hiking, but the beat-tired exhaustion after twelve miles makes me realize I must give serious consideration to my vague plans to hike a good ten or twelve days or so of the PCT. Not that I won't/shouldn't, just a reminder that hiking uses different muscles than my other extracurricular activities.

grief and grieving /  by mrm

The complexity of things surprises me sometimes. It's hard for me to explain why I'm upset. I mostly feel so lucky to have such a wonderful mother, and such sorrow that her mother was never as kind and supportive and loving to her as she is and always has been to me.

updates from the garden /  by mrm

It's been a while since I last showed off my garden, and now it's springtime (more or less) in San Francisco. My kale had lost it's mind:

Basically, it's trying to make babies. I keep cutting it back and it keeps growing back. It is rather persistent, licentious kale.

I have some nice new plants, as well. Baby arugula, baby broccoli raab,
 
some burgundy beans that seem to be quite happy in the world so far, 



a tiny chili plant for whom I have high hopes, 

and of course, tarragon and rosemary. Mmm...


As a decidedly inexpert and wildly inexperienced gardener, I grow these plants with water, sun, and a hell of a lot of optimism. We'll see how we do.

do you do you do you do you want to dance /  by mrm

"...And: 'If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don't want to dance, then you're going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango.' "
                        – "War Dances," Sherman Alexie

Couldn't have said it better myself.

saturday /  by mrm

No one deserves to be this lucky. Certainly not me. But isn't it nice (sometimes) that we don't just get what we deserve in life? Things would be pretty harsh otherwise, I think.

I woke up this morning with no plans, and stumbled my way into an invitation to brunch with my downstairs neighbors. I offered to provide something, but ultimately only made coffee. And I got to eat the most gorgeous frittata,


 



and a beautiful tortilla español, fabulous apple wood smoked salmon from the Alemany farmer's market, sweet potatoes, fresh bread with blackberry/lemon jam from Blue Chair, and to sit and talk (and listen! I was doing some listening!) with a bunch of enthnomusicologists and mathematicians about music and USAmerican foreign policy and the Arabic love of puns.

And then I went back upstairs to find everyone making kimchi. Let it be known: Kristin is an amazing pickler of vegetables. I did very little, besides chop some ginger (and of course, all the photo-documentation). In case I had been feasted enough, we feasted! (Yes, that's right, John made biscuits again!) And then we watched The Philadelphia Story. Does no one agree with me that Katharine Hepburn & Jimmy Stewart should end up together? They have so much chemistry! And she and Carry Grant just don't do it for me. Sigh.

a way to attain beauty /  by mrm

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the most novelly novel I've read in ages, and it was such a delight. A few glimpses:

"Art is life, playing to other rhythms."
"Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty..."
and finally,
"The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a license given to all, at little cot, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed."  

slide ranch part II /  by mrm

Some late pictures from last weekend at Slide Ranch.


It's almost disgustingly pretty.


All that washed-out California wood.


And I found that there is nothing more strangely touching than a small child, very still, petting a chicken with utmost solemnity.





Also, dead shark!


Dadaism.




And a final cliché (I just couldn't help myself).