Category: Food

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Stuck, or Play

The lovely and talented Les is back in town, and thus a-lunching was in order yesterday. Several things came up while discussing our respective life changes (his relocation and new career, my different relation to youth and lack of aesthetic obsession), and back at home I jotted them all down in gruesome detail, but lucky for you all, I forgot to save and, while tandemly designing the next Marjorie Wood Gallery show and finishing up Megan’s website, I experienced my first OSX non-stop spinning ball thingy. Well, I was probably just repeating myself anyway, so lucky for you, short attention span baby gays.

I have about 20 pounds of Italian prune plums that I plucked from my tree yesterday. Organic, Coco-grown AAA. If you’d like some, come on over before this weekend when it will all become plum jam–or come on over late this weekend and pick up some plum jam.

Philip came over last night, all in black and sporting his matching très chic soft sculpture black cast, raising the bar for ruptured plantar fascia fashionisiti. I made a Bolognese meat sauce, substituting ground calamari for more sentient fellow earth creatures, and we watched Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. It is one of the few films that I will call a masterpiece. Every frame is like a Vermeer painting, meticulously framed and designed. He slows down the action of Maggie Cheung descending a staircase, and weds the slow motion with a moving orchestral arrangement, amplifying and letting us savor the brief visual experience of her beauty.

It would seem I am in a rut. First I was obsessed with the Pole, then all the rest of Bear-landia, and now that’s all behind me and I just don’t know what to do next. My New York show is pretty much ready, except for little details that aren’t very time-consuming, and now I can start to think about the next thing. Because I’ve experienced such a major shift in relation to culture, youth, and my own process, I feel a completely different relation to my former subject matter, and am a little unsure about how to approach it, or even what I want to say about it. I told Philip and Les that I want this period to be about play, to just play around with a lot of ideas in the studio and see what happens. I’ve been doing this for a while actually, only now I’m going to call it play.

But did I mention all this before? Help! Somebody get me out of here! Maybe I should become a stock-broker?

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To Beard or Not to Beard

Should I grow my beard back or not? This is the kind of aesthetic dilemma that I grapple with these days. I’m a little weary of the Late-30’s Metrosexual look that I’ve toyed with since shearing my whiskers, and am thinking about repositioning my corporal identity. Again. The thing is, I’ve gotten really gray, with sideburns that are almost completely white. When but a wee homosexual entranced by all things over 40, I yearned for the day when I, too, had white streaks tumbling from my ears, but now, on the eve of 40, I have them and have exhausted all conceivable sideburn configurations to maximize visibility of the few remaining non-gray hairs. I’m left with the alternatives of looking like either your cool high school history teacher, or a nerdy geologist. Having always been attracted to a type that is quite my opposite, the gap between what I desire and what I look like is narrowing. Just narrowing, mind you, I don’t think I’ll ever have the cute little hairy belly and stocky legs that drive me insane. Narcissism is something that I’m not familiar with, as I’ve never thought of myself as particularly attractive, being drawn to such a completely different kind of creature, so hence the heart of my dilemma: do I embrace a slimmed down version of what I find I attractive (the nerdy geologist with a beard), or a regular late 30-something that continues the tradition of being detached from what people find attractive in me (your cool high school history teacher, senza beard)?

You decide for me, okay?

Last night, Philip came over for dinner and a movie with me, BC and Megan: mussels steamed in wine, thyme, tomato, onions and saffron, and mixed greens. Philip astounded us with his homemade maraschino cherries over ice cream for dessert, and we ended up drinking too much and ditched the movie.

Since I last made any real art work, photography seems to have died. Eeek! (I’m talking about photography that’s about an engagement with process.) This raises some challenging new questions for me similar to what I should do with my facial hair: do I continue to embrace an archaic form of capturing my experience, and have the process dominate the expression? I chose to work with the grid at the beginning of all this, when the internet provided a new and unparalleled access to the naked body. The structure of the grid organized the images like pixels. Nobody got it, though. Sigh. Anyway, it’s a beautiful day, with much to think about and no pressure to do anything about it.

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Midwest II: Party Food

So with our bellies and minds fortified for the trip, we made our way westward from Chicago to the Quad Cities, Land of BC’s people. As in Chicago, our trip was structured around food, specifically the food for Maggie’s graduation party–shopping, preparing, displaying and consuming. I was the official potato peeler, clocking in 15 pounds in 30 minutes, watermelon man, and sub-taster. Beth was the master organizer, calmly putting together her potato salad, ham and cheese sandwich materials, fruit salad, for 100 people, while hubbie Dan mowed their lawn and wacked the weeds of the entire block. Meanwhile, Momma baked the beans. The approach to foodmaking was the exact opposite of Alinea–that is, not messing with tradition. The potato salad had just mayonnaise and vinegar supporting and enhancing the delicate flavors of potato, celery and egg. The baked beans were just beans, brown sugar, and bacon. The ham sammies ham and cheese and mustard. And so on… A kind of unchanging and familiar yummy that warms the heart. I haven’t weighed myself yet, but I’m quite sure that there is much more of me than before the trip.

Stay tuned as Coco slims down…

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Midwest Trip: Alinea

Well, I just had one of the one most interesting meals of my life. Last Wednesday. Not only meals, but experiences. En route to Moline for the graduation party of BC’s niece Maggie, we stayed the night with BC’s dad, Stephanie, in Chicago, and I treated them to a dinner at Alinea.

One enters the restaurant though a narrow hallway that, due to the height of the ceiling lowering quickly as one proceeds down it, disorients, like stumbling down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland. The entry is an appropriate introduction to a cuisine that takes the notion of food as sustenance and extends it into the realms of sensation and invention.

Our first course was a tiny amuse bouche consisting of a wafer-like cylinder dangling from a grape branch. Within the cylinder was an intensely sweet grape surrounded by a peanut butter, that we were instructed to nibble straight from the branch. Course after course followed, each more challenging than the previous. The snapper course was so complicated that I don’t think I can articulate what happened. The snapper was embedded, like the yolk of a fried egg, within a thin tofu crust, topped with a lemon curd, and surrounded by pickled cucumber, tiny soy beans and a soy milk broth, the air scented with a ginger essence that the waiter created by grating ginger over each of our plates. He also poured the ginger juice from the essence production into the soy broth. Another course was a single broccoli stem enveloped in a thin brioche, sauteed in clarified butter, topped with a single slice of candied grapefruit skin, steelhead roe sprinkled about, a grapefruit skin shmear on the side of the bowl, all the flavors assaulting the tastebuds from every conceivable direction. The bison was one of my favorite dishes, served on the plate as a flirtation with beet and blueberries. On the left of the plate was a slice of bison filet next to a pile of dried blueberry dust, to dip the bison in. Moving diagonally across the plate, there first was a sort of salad of bison meat and fennel, covered in a thin gelatinous layer of beet, and next a puree of beet swirled into a puree of fennel, and then a few fresh blueberries, and finally a perfect miniature golden beet at the far end of the plate. There was also a tiny smoking dish on the plate that we were instructed not to eat, that provided an accompanying scent; cinnamon bark slowly roasting on a heated stone. Oh wait, back up a few courses to the heart of palm dish. 5 tiny stands were placed before each of us, in a single row. We were instructed to roll the contents directly into our mouths. On each stand was a slice of heart-of-palm hollowed out and filled with first a lemon pudding, then a bulghar wheat and garlic filling, then a prune-plum filling topped with sliced olives, and the final one stuffed with a persimmon truffle mixture. There was also a course consisting of a cube of avocado, a tiny wedge of burned orange, a sliver of olive, and a tiny shaving of orange zest, presented bobbing at the end of a skewer arced toward each of our mouths. We were again told to pluck it directly from the skewer using only our lips. We had twelve courses in all, plus a few extras like a glass tube filled with sour cream, dehydrated strawberry, and argon jelly, which were sucked out of the tube to come together like a science experiment in the mouth. Perhaps the greatest was the simplest, a bowl with a small dollop of pineapple foam in one corner, and near it tiny spoonfuls of pistachios, a reduced Chartreuse sauce, shredded coconut, angelica leaf and something else that I can’t remember. Whatever intense flavor was swirled into the foam combined dynamically with the pineapple flavor in the mouth and then dissipated quickly. One course was just a strip of bacon. But it was impossibly thin, fried to perfection, presented dangling on a horizontal skewer, and infused with the flavors of apple, butterscotch and thyme. The rabbit course paired little coins of bunny with morels in a reduction of delicious deepness, topped with a single perfect piece of wild lettuce and a nasturtium flower. There was also a liquid chocolate cake, a sponge cake attached to a vanilla bean that was used to sop up something fabulous and vanilla that has already receded from memory… Our wines included an Austrian Grüner and an Oregon Pinot.

I don’t get many chances to experience art that I can enjoy for such intense visual thrills and physical sensations, and get to eat it, too. If only all ephemeral art were this satisfying, and edible.

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Happy Cows Come From California

Dean and Doug treated me and Big Chrissy to a memorable Memorial Day weekend, beginning with a wonderful dinner Saturday night of local crab. Doug skillfully prepared the crabs, bringing them to the table cracked and cleaned, but carefully reassembled with the artistry of a taxidermist. Everyone had his own way of eating the critters: Dean pulled all of the meat from his crab and mounded it into a very neat pile before slathering it in cocktail sauce and eating it all at once. Doug took a similar approach, but cleaned and mounded half at a time. BC and I just tore into ours and made big messes. I drank too much and broke a glass while cleaning the dishes, even with Dean hovering overhead. I sent them a few replacements yesterday, fearful that my dear friends would be forced to drink wine from mugs due to my impaired dishwashing abilities. Early the next morning after Freedom Toast we went for a hike in Marin, past many happy cows and an abundance of wildflowers. Doug, the botanist, provided us with the genus and species of every living thing we passed or stepped on.

Upon our return to civilization, we took in the new Star Wars movie with D. Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars, duh duh duh duh. The effects were pretty spectacular, but really, the first one was enough. Excuse me, Episode 4. Anakin tells Padme that together they can rule the galaxy and she shakes her head and replies, “I just don’t know you anymore.”

And so the summer begins. This year is going by way too fast. Or as Yoda would say, “By way too fast is this year going.” Make it stop. Stop it make?

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Vegetarian Product Newsflash!

Fellow veggie friends, I’ve just discovered a new product at Trader Joe’s that I’m crazy about: Trader Joe’s Meatless Meatballs. I love meatballs, on anything that needs crowning by such little balls of pleasure, but since I’ve been avoiding eating sentient things larger than a bivalve, I’ve been exploring all of the fake meat products out there, and things have picked up since my last venture into pseudo-vegetarianism and these meatballs are pretty good. I made a marinara the other day and popped a package of the pre-cooked balls into the sauce at the tail end, simmering for about 10 minutes, and they infused the sauce with a rich grilled essence, and picked up the herbs in my sauce while still retaining a fluffy meat-like integrity. The only hippie thing about them is that they have a slight cardomom-y aftertaste, but the texture is wonderful, the flavor pretty good, and only 1g of fat per meatball! And $3.99 for a package of about 36 meatballs!

Now veggie burgers are a different story, and I’ve been a bit disappointed by what I’ve sampled thus far, relying on vast quantities of ketchup to provide a modicum of flavor. Any recommendations?

I need to get my pie out of the oven and get on up to Dean and Doug’s, so have a nice weekend everybody and throw some fake animal products on the grill!

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Little Bits of This and That

Remember my movie? I was supposed to start shooting this month. I really need to stop making these big announcements about what I’m going to do, and tell you instead about what I actually did. Well anyway, I’ve put off making my movie because of this New York show, so never mind about my being a filmmaker for now.

Boring but exciting photo news: Hasselblad has finally embraced digital technology, merging with Imacon, one of the main producers of digital backs for medium-format cameras. They’re producing new cameras with digital integration, and digital backs for older cameras. Now we don’t have to ditch our old equipment. The cost seems to be coming down, too, from $20,000 last year to $9,800 for a 16-megapixel digital back. Being able to work directly with digital imagery will take out an expensive and quality-reducing step currently necessary to make prints from my chromes. The cost still remains the only barrier between me and digital freedom, but I’m hanging in there, remembering the $150 price tag on my dad’s 1972 8-inch calculator.

Dean and Doug came over for dinner last night. Linguine with clams, a salad of arugula and orange, and chocolate cake for dessert. They didn’t seem to get my Limoncello. No one likes it, except me, The Cough Syrup for Boozers and Losers. But I know it’s good! What’s wrong with everybody? We talked more about politics than usual and then I had a weird dream about D, falling out of the window and bouncing down Collingwood Street. I’m sure it has to do with my fears of his leaving the nest, even though he seems to be getting along so well these days, being much more sociable and engaging. So back to Dean, he and Doug invited me and BC to their place in the country this weekend, so never mind about them, more about them later…

Here’s the groovy mid-century Light-o-Lier lamp that I just got for my hallway! Vintage lighting is my new blankie.

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eBay, a Few Movies, Free-Range Seafood?

I’m back on eBay. I just had to prove that I live where I say that I do, and promise not to do whatever they said that I did, which I didn’t do in the first place. Having jumped through all of their hoops, it’s good to be back amidst the possibility of more fine mid-century treasures.

I saw a delightful film the other night, a new film by Alain Resnais of all people, with whom I definitely don’t associate the term “delightful,” based on an operetta from the 1920’s, Not on the Lips, a really fun musical very much not of our time and utterly enjoyable. And speaking of mid-century treasures, I also watched Barbarella again, I guess because of all this Jane Fonda-ness around. What she does with that role is amazing. It’s basically her husband’s wet dream, and she takes this completely exploitative and stupid film and invigorates it with excellent comic timing and deadpan intelligence. The opening sequence, in which she slowly and clumsily strips off her space suit, and THEN turns on the gravity, is nothing short of visionary. And I absolutely MUST have a space capsule like hers, lined in long-haired brown acrylic fur. Every scene involves her being ravaged by some hostile but ultimately benign alien being, her spacesuit partially bitten off, some sexy guy saving her and then making love to her in the barbaric way that extraterrestrials do, and then another fabulous designer latex outfit. Every single man in the film lusts after her, except for the dude with wings, Pygar, who’s BLIND, but he at least gets to cop a feel when he finds her unconscious.

So channel surfing the other day I came across a piece of vegan propaganda on the public access channel about how poorly animals are treated and decided on the spot to be a vegetarian. This was of course following the Michael Pollen piece a while back about the cattle industry and corn-fed beef. Seeing those cute little piggies just broke my heart, and I pledged half-heartedly not to support such cruelty. I don’t have a problem with eating animals, just the cruelty part, so I’m limiting my animal intake to creatures with not much in the way of higher brain function, like seafood, and meat that I know has been raised in luxurious country settings. So not really a vegetarian. And I’m already a slow-food enthusiast. What would you call me? A compassionate carnivore?

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Orange and Brown

Tonight the Super Bears and I had dinner at the Pacific Cafe, in the Richmond. I’ve been going there since 1985, the last time I think in ’88, and absolutely nothing has changed, from the predominance of the colors orange and brown to the two choices of starch. As usual, there was a line out front, and as usual we were each handed a glass of chablis as we waited for a table to open. It took two full glasses each for a table to be available, so dinner was a delightful blur of crustaceans and conversation and a pretty yummy cheesecake for dessert. We made our way back to BC’s and watched The Conversation, continuing my reacquaintance with the films of the 60’s and 70’s, which I’m convinced was truly the Golden Age of film. It’s all about Before and After the New Wave for me. It’s filmed on location in San Francisco and, narrative aside, you get to see the Embarcadero Center being built, the City of Paris building before it was demolished and replaced by Philip Johnson’s Neiman-Marcus, the harmonious Union Square before it too was destroyed to make way for the abomination that sits on the site today, and a really really young Harrison Ford, before all the muscle! And Cindy Williams doing serious acting!

Earlier I took in a few of the new Mission gallery spaces with Emily, including hot shows at Mission 17 and Queen’s Nails Annex. The neighborhood is finally buzzing with some exciting artist-run spaces. I’m not lucid enough to recount the shows that I saw, so check them out before the next dot com bubble forces everybody out of town again.

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The Universe Within

So my sister Sue has been visiting. Sue is 50 and looks like she’s 29, with a matching disposition and complexion. Last week we went to see the exhibition, The Universe Within at the Masonic Hall. It consists of 100 or so actual bodies that have been preserved with a process called “plastination,” a kind of plastic petrification. The exhibit was a bit more visual than scientific, and offered several really stunning visuals, like a flayed man holding a hanger with his skin draped over it, an Asian-looking St. Bartholomew, and a guy sliced in half, the two halves turned to consider the other. There was also a cool exhibit of a person sliced horizontally into pieces about an inch thick, the slices spaced about an inch apart in a 15 foot case. Most of the guys were not terribly well endowed, but it was hard to tell since most of them had their entire skins pulled off. Only one particular specimen stood out, surrounded by giggling art students sketching his musculature. The bodies reminded me of the wax replicas of the various systems of the body made in the late 18th century in Tuscany, but lacking the scientific and even artistic qualities of those exquisite studies. The current models weren’t abstracted by the notion of an approximation, they were actual bodies, and maybe that’s what made it strange. All of those organs worked once. Instead of experiencing a sense of wonder at humankind’s scientific advancement, I felt like a steak by the end of the show.

Speaking of steak, Philip came over for dinner tonight. A salade niçoise, topped with a sliced rare tuna steak. I wanted to make him dinner so that he could relax, but instead he brought the dinner and cooked it, too. I look at all my friends now as if I can see their insides. I just can’t believe it all works. We’re all steaks.

I’m still in the midst of my continuing-mid-life crisis, although it looks like I’m going to be making a ton of art in the coming months, so thank you Cosmos, for the timing.