It's spring! Art is in the air.

Forgive me peeps, this is going to be an untethered ramblefest. But at least the links will take you to pretty pictures.

Somewhere last week someone (might have been Jezebel) was writing about muses. Why are they always young women musing older men? Do women artists have muses? I certainly have a reappearing character in my paintings who looks very much like me. Does that make me my own muse?

I was talking to Ruth this weekend. 13 years ago, when i left the kid's dad and dropped out of college the first time, I was studying art. I figured I couldn't be a broke ass artist and a single mom and that I needed to study something more practical. Now I live the life of a starving artist anyways, but without the portfolio to show for it. Irony is kicking me in the ass.

And good lord I am desperate to paint. All of my brushes were lost in the move. My good set of Kolinsky sable brushes will cost nearly $500 to replace. To say nothing of canvas or paints or pallets or palette knives. Even my drop cloth is gone. That ugly old paint stained sheet had lived through numerous cross country moves and 15 years of paint and red wine.

I guess I will have to make due with my $5 colored pencils and grocery store sketch pad. The real problem is the size. My work is usually big, 48" x 48". On such a small scale as an 8" x 11" sketch pad it looks cartooney and I can't get proportions right. So instead I've been drawing trees and trying to get myself to break the abstract barrier. Mondrian started his abstracts with trees. Then he got to the graphic colored boxes we all know so well. Lemme tell you that there is something incredibly happy making to the eye when you put down a bright primary color next to a hard black line in a negative white space. It's like jazz music for eyeballs. Klee and Miro and Kandinsky and any of the New York School abstract expressionists for examples.

But at the same time that I am trying to break out of figurative painting into abstraction, there is an idea (well two actually) that have been fermenting in my head for a good long while that are more traditional. Well, tradition tuned on it's head. I'm back to the muse and thinking of the male gaze and women as objects. I want to take a series of master paintings like Ingres' Odalisque or Picasso's Women of Avignon and turn the woman's body into negative space. What happens when we're just left with a woman shaped hole in the pieces we've been taught to admire? Do we realize that women in art are objects just as much as a piece of fruit in a still life?

Or what if we turned the nude woman idea around. What if it was two well dressed ladies having a serious discussion about philosophy while a nude man posed for the artist, instead of the way Manet saw it? And wouldn't it be a much more profound commentary if Annie Leibovitz made fun of her own photo of Tom Ford (a man who spends his life clothing people) and two naked actresses by making the clothier the naked and vulnerable one, instead of stuffing 3 grown men into body suits?

That is what I want to create. I want to make art that asks questions like that.

But I am stuck with crayola pencils and a real starving artist budget. Que sera sera.

What's the difference

between Carl's Jr



and PETA



Not a god dammned thing when both of them treat women like pieces of meat.

(BTW- every time I see a "I'd rather go naked" ad I want to wrap myself in chinchilla and knee high crocodile boots and eat a heaping plate of veal and fois gras. PETA message fail!)

Harry Potter Vs. Twilight

Today at the Seattle Public Library there is an actual, old fashioned debate about which is better- Harry Potter or Twilight.


As I said at Random Babble a few days ago- Harry Potter may have its issues, but no one ever almost died of a fucking papercut in the Potter series. And papercuts should NEVER be a serious plot point.

Besides, if it wasn't for Harry Potter we wouldn't have this thing of beauty.



(Yes I've posted this before. No I don't care that it annoys you.)

Battlestar morning after blogging

Here be spoilers for the series finale


WTF was that load of tripe? Seriously? A show that has been complex and and never trite winds up with such a fucking cliche of an ending that I am still pissed. I will give the BSG guys some credit though, they managed to make me thoroughly uninterested in anything the characters might have done once the credits rolled. Shit, even Friends made me kinda curious about the lives of the people on the show, but not BSG. I am pretty sure that with the first bout of cholera because they've given up on actual plumbing they will be wiped out.

I'm pissed. I am pissed that a show that took so much care at showing how difficult and complicated choices are took the easy way out. It was like an "ah fuck it" moment. I was jokingly saying that Starbuck was going to disappear in a poof of angel dust, and then she did! I was hoping when they showed Earth II there would be some comment about the difficulties in blending into a pre-verbal, pre-pastoral native society and maybe some allusion from a show that has used historical moments as plot fodder to the fact that a technologically advanced society was descending on a less advanced society and the complications that might involve. Instead they decided that the whole of the Colonial fleet was gonna give up technology and go native as some fucked up way of avoiding repeating past history. We're tired of fighting with our own creations, so now we're all gonna shit in the woods and die of influenza or childbirth or chicken pox.

There was exactly one moment that I liked, well loved. Baltar, divine instrument of "All this has happened before and will happen again" gets stuck being the thing he never wanted. The dude who did everything he could to run away from his roots, and in that running set off the chain of event that destroys the human race (over and over again), gets stuck being a farmer. Just like dear old dad.

RQ Cooks and comments about "man food"

So last night was Birthday, Battlestar and Dips and I made french onion dip from scratch. No soup packets!

French Onion Goat Cheese Dip

4 medium onions, diced
Olive Oil
1 log (11oz) of goat cheese
1 small container plain goat yogurt (6 oz)
Worcestershire sauce
1 cup strong beef broth (I used Better than Bullion No beef flavor. I used about a teaspoon and a half to one cup of water)
Salt & pepper

Cook onions in olive oil. Depending on how patient you are you can carmelize the onions, though the dip is fine if you just sweat them till they are translucent.

Add beef broth and Worcestershire sauce. Cook until the liquid is almost gone. Add yogurt and cheese and continue cooking over low heat to the cheese melts all the way. Add salt and pepper to taste. Refrigerated for at least one hour.

You will never want to eat onion dip made from dried soup again. It's that good.

I also made a gorgeous fruit salad with Raspberry mint dressing. We had raspberries, blackberries, mango, apples and oranges. To dress them I used the juice of 2 lemons, and equal amount of raspberry vinegar, a couple of teaspoons of honey and dried mint. It keeps the fruit from browning and adds a depth of flavor without being too sweet or thick.

We ( well Ruth mostly) also did a ton of fried stuff like fried pickles and zuccini and homemade potato and sweet potato chips. My left hand is now a mangled bloody mess because using the guard on the mandolin takes too much time. I sliced myself 3 separate times and bled all over, but it was worth it. Homemade chips are good and fried pickles are awesome!

Now about man food. I put out a tray of veggies to go with the dips (we also had Ruth's famous spinach tofu dip and some dill dip that I whipped up in about a minute). There were the normal things, carrots, celery, cukes, tomatoes and radishes. Towards the end of the night the radishes were the only left on the tray. I walked past and someone asked me if I ate radishes. I said I do, grabbed one and ate it. I was then told that radishes are man food cause only dudes eat them.

I love radishes. I also love steak and bacon and really good hamburgers. And I make some awesome slow cooked ribs. The Kid likes good greek yogurt with honey and just about any vegetable or fruit and bready things like muffins and toast. I am not a dude, yet I love and cook "man food". The Kid is not a girl, yet he loves and eats "girl food". How seriously fucked up is our society when food is gendered and the act of eating a radish calls someones gender identification into question?

Eh, it's only another trillion

But what does a trillion dollars look like?

Is it bigger than a bread box but smaller than a car?

Turns out it looks a lot like a football field stacked 6 feet high in hundred dollar bills. Who knew?

(H/t to Corrente)

Girl talk! makes 911 operators fail

Cracked.com has this list of 5 horrifying tales of 911 call incompetence.

Now while the average reader may just see stories of incredible failure on the part of the 911 operators to do their jobs, when seen through feminist lenses it looks a lot different.

Every single caller in these stories is female. Two of the women callers were in the middle of being beaten or possibly stabbed to death by their male partners (domestic violence apparently bores 911 operators). One was a teenage girl dropping f-bombs cause her dad was having a seizure (nice girls don't cuss, watch your language ladies). One was a women who was having her window tapped by a stranger (perhaps the police would like to prevent a crime instead of waiting for one to happen) and one the 911 operator made jokes about shooting a woman's out of control child.

Girl talk people. When women talk, we aren't supposed to be taken seriously, even (or especially) in an emergency.