proteanme

Lately, I’ve had good luck with a run of recipes that feature some kind of ground meat. The overhead is low but the taste is high. So run don’t walk to your kitchen and try one of these: Curried pork noodles, Thai Basil chicken, and Green chili with pork.

With the economy so uncertain and having endured a round of layoffs, I updated my freelance site. Next up my resume.

At the end of 2008, I recorded a couple songs. These are scratch tracks and  here’s one of them Just Now (at 3am).

Rachel Papo is an Israeli who was born in 1970 in Columbus, Ohio but was raised in Israel. She began photographing as a teenager and attended a renowned fine-arts high-school in Haifa, Israel. At age eighteen she served in the Israeli Air Force as a photographer. These two intensive years of service inspired her current photographic project titled after her own number during service — Serial No. 3817131.

A couple hours before sunset the grey skies gave way to blue and now the hues of the what will soon be dusk are visible. This is the kind of thing for which Portland is so perfect. Outside my window the world is lit up pink. Pink with bursts of orange and red because it’s been so warm here this fall that many of the trees that were the last to change colors are still holding on to their leaves. This is the stunning part of Oregon’s nature that I can be myself in. Maybe because it’s nature all hemmed in by roof lines and brake lights and power lines. But it’s living art, I think. And because there is so much quiet in my life right now I’ve got the chance to notice it happening. To sit on my stoop and be in it as it unfolds. Amazing.

John Currin: who knows the title?
Originally uploaded by pucci.it

This is from John Currin, who’s re-wroking the techniques of the Old Masters. Another guy who’s work I’d like to see in person.

Alex Kanevsky – KB
Originally uploaded by eumenades

Similar to Ann Gale. I’d love to see this guy in person. Interesting interview.

Ann Gale
Originally uploaded by visualinventory.blogspot.com

This year I’ve discovered some new painters who I find quite moving. The first one I wanna share is Ann Gale. I saw her show in Portland this winter. Her portraits almost seem to capture something about the model’s interior. I wanna say she’s painting them from the inside out, because it all feels so unguarded.

I mentioned in my hilight list that I went to the MOMA. I envy New Yorker’s access to such a treasure. I was down right blown away by De Kooning and Pollack. The De Kooning drawings seemed so deliberate and careless all at the same time, nothing finished and still everything was there. I’m not sure I even have words for Pollack, but I kept thinking about how great performers leave it all on the stage, and with Pollack it felt like he left it all on the canvas. Powerful, powerful stuff. It also had this wonderful balance of head and heart that was so, so moving. And while not a huge Picasso fan, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, was amazing. Really, I’ve never seen something so perfect in planning and execution.

Plus we kept running into these class tours led by these super cute women, who, from what I overheard, were saying all sorts of smart and engaging things. And I kept thinking how I would just fall in love with art if they were teaching my 7th grade art class. By comparison my 7th grade art teacher seemed to be doing time behind the desk. Wasn’t til I got in highschool that I got a real art teacher.

Compared to the MOMA most of the New Museum collection seemed like a joke. And I’m not just talking about throwing down some of these young guys (and by the way where are the women in art) with Pollack, I’m talking about judging them against the MOMA’s collection of self taught and outsider art. By and large the New Museum’s collection reminded me of a New York review of Books critique of Jonathan Lethem, which said something like Lethem needed to remember that the number of times he’d seen Star wars was not profound and that Lethem and a number of his contemporaries are caught up in the minutiae of their coming of age stories but unable to make it meaningful beyond nostalgia. I left the New Museum thinking good lord we’ve raised a generation of narcissists.