Simple Things Made Great
It all boils down to letting artistry and reality intermingle.
That's what elevates a casual meal to a defining family moment, or a small community meeting to an event that inspires and engages. A microphone and a voice creating something you'll remember in ten years.
I take simple ingredients and add vision, then mold and guide them into something remarkable.
I read a great description last week of that moment where you realize the coffee you’ve been drinking and thinking is the best thing in the universe for years is actually crap. I had never actually identified the phenomenon, but the very next morning when I made my single drip cup of Peruvian Organic Coast Roast, I took a sip and said, “meh”. Blah. Not bad, but just not ME anymore. The Peruvian Organic has run its course in my soul and it’s not gonna give me anything new at this point.
So once this was all out in the open other facets of my life began to appear dated. Like the couch. Which was a prized possession twelve months ago and is now shockingly and uncomfortably narrow for a pregnant lady, her wife, and a five year old. It’s green. Why did we pick green?
And the books. How long are the essays of Leroi Jones going to sit on that shelf before I pick them up? I forced myself to rummage through it and remembered why it never made it to the bedside table. I adore Amiri Baraka with all my heart, I think he’s wonderful and inspiring and brilliant, and sitting in a small room with his booming voice reading Somebody Blew Up America with an upright bass and jazz kit along for the romp was one of the high points of my life. But the Black Arts Movement commentary of 1968 is not doing it for me. Henry Miller’s Black Spring, even, sits unloved, unopened for years. Once it was a bible.
And finally, the music. Suddenly my entire music collection is dusty, creaky and completely unrelatable. Even things that seemed avant garde last spring are just played. We have seventeen thousand Ani Difranco records but why only the ones through 2001? Did she stop being relevant or did we? Would it pain us to determine what’s happening in hip hop right now and let go of the Method Man 1993? Can we listen to girls play guitars who DIDN’T grow up listening to Liz Phair?
I’ve ordered* a batch of musical joy. And am suspicious that we may be entering what I affectionately call a “bout of minimalism” where all the schmanvas (urban dictionary. look it up.) gets re-homed, and we smile big smiles.
I’m putting all that old stuff to rest and setting a new little boat to sail. I’m thinking of writing a new record (this would be 12 years after the first was released) but approaching songwriting from a more calculated perspective. As inspiration goes, I will no longer rely on the dulcet tones or words of those old reliables. No more repositioning on the sad little IKEA chairs. Time to buy a decent chair, for crying out loud. I need some fresh, new energy to match this summer sun.
Onward!
*that’s right, I said “ordered”. As in actual discs. You can roll eyes all you want. My uncompressed files and I will still be around when your ipods start seeming like little blinky toys.
There is a humongous two-story flax plant in my front yard that threatens to envelop the neighborhood. It eclipses the Volvo. It sits like a giant pineapple next to the front porch, providing a misshapen privacy screen between our front window and the sidewalk. Its eight-foot leaves whack you on the head when you’re pulling the recycling can out, and the snail population that lives within its folds (an overachieving variety that seems to not understand the concept of a “snail’s pace” but rather hauls it en masse from one side of the sidewalk to the other while I’m grabbing a grocery bag out of the car) is healthy to say the least. The gardeners must whack it back weekly along the sides, so that it has a little upside down mullet: short spikey on the bottom and long and lovely on the top.
When we bought the house years ago, the flax plant was a three-foot, decorative feature among what I considered to be a fashionable assortment of grasses on a landscaped mound. I envisioned that the stark modernity of our slate grey stucco and blue-black door would eventually be softened as we added in structural, tropical greenery: reeds, elephant ear, papyrus. We would update the fencing around the house someday with the ultra-cool horizontal slats of eco-friendly Ipe that we used in the back. All of this would provide the perfect setting in which to screen black and white art films along the side of the house as we entertained and cocktailed hipster neighbors and recalled tales of backpacking through Indonesia. A Mazurka band would play ironically in the background as platters of amazing food were enjoyed. It would be the art that we feel in our hearts daily, manifested into a warm, vibrant and intelligently curated space.
In actuality, the yard was never updated with well-placed tropicals but rather with unwanted leftovers from a client’s landscape installation, and sparingly. We meant to have tall bouganvillea fluttering along the porch grate by now but somehow ended with three inch rockroses and a repotted houseplant that grew too outrageous for the kitchen. The mulch badly needs re-doing. That dark cool-kid black paint is peeling off the sidewalk and front door.
Life, just plain life, has been complicated these last few years. When we bought our house, our child then two years old, the gods seemed to smile down on us. Problems and solutions were syncopated. We felt things solidify and developed family goals (a fun and mysterious concept to two adults from dynamic single-parent households). Our careers stretched out and expanded and the sun just seemed to shine on everything we touched. I loved that time.
But, as the our child grew, the economy collapsed and our professional challenges mounted, we became stressed out about the things we were expecting to enjoy. I regularly returned home from work after the baby had been put to bed, having missed her entire day. I began to use my creative energy for work projects, rather than personal ones. The rented upright piano I had once relied so heavily on for late-night therapy did not fit into the 1940’s living room with the needs of the family, and off it went. We tried desperately to keep up with things: making time for each other, cramming in trips to the coast (during which I was eternally checking my blackberry and running off to make phone calls) and find the drive to stay interested in the world, but we ended up learning how to just buckle down and grind it out. It felt horrible to divest in my family, even though it was the right choice. We did not thrive, but we survived.
One morning several weeks ago, with the sun beginning to travel a stronger path across the backyard, I wandered outside, still my in pj’s and very much pre-coffee. I found myself suddenly, maniacally, pulling every houseplant I could find out on the back patio and pulling each out of its dry and cracked plastic liner, and too-tight pot. For several hours I filled new, bigger ones with sweet, healthful soil and a long drink of water, placing each shallow tangle of roots deep and tight. The sun grew stronger and I tossed my slippers into the bushes and rolled up the legs of my pants. The dogs wandered in and out of my workspace, hungry for breakfast but curious enough about my odd behavior to hold off on begging. I realized I hadn’t spent this much time outside by myself in, literally, years.
Since that afternoon, I have fantasized daily about taking a machete to the monster flax plant in the middle of the night. Some new neighborhood mandate about plant height will leave us with no choice but to dig all 300lbs of it from the earth and put it on craigslist. Or we may just get to the point where we just can’t stand it anymore and something has got to change, no matter how irrational it seems. And plant an olive tree where something overbearing and ill-fitting once stood.
You know those songs that are so effing good they take the wind out of you, reach down and pull out your core and dangle it around in the wind? Those are prescription songs. Here’s my RX for a heartbreak of sorts, and a grateful goodbye.
Some things we come to naturally. Some movements, our bodies feel inclined to make. When we are engaged in those activities, time passes quickly and with ease, and we just feel at home. We feel like ourselves, or in some moments, almost amplified versions of ourselves when we are doing not only something we love, but something that just feels right.
For me, no activity is more natural than creating a scene in which a social event will occur. I love nothing more than starting with an empty room and the intended feeling of the final product. Like soulful or intimate. Or liberating. It’s very much like songwriting: taking an emotion and figuring out how to manifest that for a group. With food events I do it by working lighting, music, linens, food, flowers, even making custom art, whatever the space calls for. Then filling that up with people who are open to delightful laughter and great conversation. I threw my first dinner party at age 13 and have been doing it ever since.
this was a midsummer night's dream party with a custom roofless tent!
When you are setting the scene for an event, you have the power to create a feeling in the space that will extend to your guests: it is a gift that they are trusting you. It is also a great gift to give: to lend your guests not only your personal space and time, carefully prepared food and hand-picked booze, but also your goodwill and generosity. Inviting someone to dinner (at least to me) and really following through with creating a nice event, is the ultimate act of friendship. And if a little art and style comes into it, all the more fun.
I am throwing a dinner party for some friends soon, and thought it would be nice fodder for a new how-to series on Dinner Parties. Since I most often am asked how to throw together a stylish event without spending years creating it, I thought I’d keep a running dialogue as it all comes together. Heck, maybe I’ll learn something too. Or maybe you’ll just want to come over. Which is fine too.
I’m going to tip my hat to Pinot and Prose here, my NYC foodie friend with whom I hope to soon be throwing dinner parties constantly.
XO
My great grandmother taught me how to make meatloaf. I would pull up her turquoise stepstool to the formica counter and crack each egg perfectly and measure each tablespoon out exactly as I was told because you do not mess with your great grandmother at any point in time. Sure, she chain smokes and can’t always keep track of which generation she’s talking to, but she lets you watch Solid Gold whenever you want and cook in a method that involves squishing ground meat with your bare hands and you can’t beat that with a stick.
Cooking in my family sadly involved standard canned ingredients and copious amounts of Miracle Whip. Whatever recipe we used for meatloaf did involve eggs and milk and ground meat but the similarities to the kind I make now end there. Good lord, I probably wouldn’t still have a beating heart if I lived off the kind of food my family ate in those years. Instead, we love a good old fashioned Country Meatloaf, which is decidedly healthier and absolutely Velveeta free.
I have always assumed that the Meatloaf is just a convoluted American version of a French Terrine. A terrine typically combines layered and rough-chopped meats and lard, and is pressed into a loaf pan and cooked in a water bath, thereby forming an oily sliceable “chunky pate”. I am fascinated by the way various cultures figure out ways to make cheaper cuts of meat come out tasty and of a nice consistency, and terrines and meatloaves are no exception. The French peasants of the late 1700’s and the American housewives of the 1950’s have something in common here. It’s not haute by any stretch. But to many families, it’s soul food.
I’m not a recipe-posting kind of gal, and I hope you won’t mind that. I rarely use recipes at all, and instead sort it out by feel and taste as I go. Luckily the fun thing about meatloaf is that you don’t really need a recipe. It’s probably best to follow one the first time just to get a rough idea of the ideal consistency for when you’re mixing the dry and wet ingredients BUT keep confident in the fact that you really can’t screw it up as long as you follow a basic plan. Hence, my great grandmother’s heavy reliance on the dish.
The general idea of country meatloaf is that in addition to the traditional ingredients: ground meat (pork, beef or turkey), breadcrumbs, egg, milk and a healthy dose of tomato paste (or ketchup if you’re going for authenticity), you just add sautéed mirepoix (that’s onion, carrot and celery), thereby turning a senior citizen staple into something with an actual consistency, color and flavor (not to mention a chance at nutrition). If you want to get crazy you can add fresh herbs to the sauté.
After the vegetables have cooled a bit, you’ll toss everything around in a bowl and smash it with your bare hands until combined. Then you’ll season it, form it into a loaf shape and bake until the oils are sputtering and lovely brown edges are forming on the bottom of the pan. At this point you can combine the leftover tomato paste and brown sugar and spread it over the loaf for the final 10 minutes of baking, which will form a sweet yummy glaze and cement your place in 1950’s middle America.
The New Year has clutched its eager baby fingers around my available mama hand and we’re crossing the street together.
I am always looking for a reason to make big changes and long lists of how to get from place A to place B, and the annual covergence of winter solstice, the last full moon of the year and a major federal holiday is just the spot to start dressing the windows in my mind of what life will be like next. Sometimes it starts as simply as the selection of a color, or an image. This year it began with a disdain for all things 2009. I literally pushed 2009 out the front door and bolted it behind her. A bit late, as we were returning from a fabulous friend party in the neighborhood and the champagne had tempered my 2009 aggression. But I did remember to do it, and I didn’t even leave the porch light on for 2009. She’s on her own.
Anyhoo, welcome to the New Year and all its exciting unfoldings!
I’ve made lists (whee, joy) of all the goings-on I want to attend this spring, which involves many classes and meetings about lost arts (like canning and curry-making) but I’m also sticking with my must-do list that STILL includes cleaning out the garage. This one, unfortunately a holdover from ‘09 just might have been on the ‘08 list as well. Ahem. We try, and it’s all we can do.
And to support those lists, I’ve rearranged my bloglines/rss feeds to intentionally EXCLUDE the blogs that make me feel terrible (like design*sponge, which I truly cannot look at without wanting to redo my entire household and who needs that on a DAILY BASIS). I’ve rearranged my closet and made lists of all the lovely things I must have before spring arrives, lined up the books to augment the classes I’m taking, and even mapped out an idea of what congratulatory vacation might follow the ultimate attainment of said goals.
XO
(Nina Simone looking entirely badass and awesome here in honor of 2010, and perhaps the coolest woman who ever lived. Photographer unknown)
Three in the morning on Tuesday found me in the garage in pj’s and bare feet, moving storage shelving around and reorganizing the dog supplies.
It began innocently, putting in a load of laundry just before bed. While sorting and loading, I noticed the growing coin collection on the cabinet beside the washer. Brushed the soap flakes off the coins and shoved them in my pocket. Glanced to the shelving below to see the hammock we purchased on our honeymoon to Oaxaca, taking up priority shelving space. Forehead wrinkles, muttering expletives under breath about how can it be so complicated to keep the outdoor items in one location and preserve shelf space for items that we need on a regular basis, like the picnic backpack which clearly belongs there. Moving the hammock into the proper location required the relocating of the fairy wands I ordered for the little monkey’s 3rd birthday.. and then the consideration of whether we actually need to keep the fish tank, now that beloved Raspberry has moved on from the mortal world. And then, wait, why are the storage boxes for the extension cords sitting so precariously? The garage turned into a single-player world of Tetris and before I knew it the night had given way to morning. Bleary eyed but wired, I fell into bed only to realize I hadn’t finished the laundry.
We’ve had a love-hate thing going on with the garage since we bought our house three springs ago. While providing the modern Bay Area dream of storage space for the jogging stroller, cruiser bike and rollerblade collection, the garage has also given us the go-ahead to just “set it and forget it” as we shove all our not-right-now issues onto an Ikea baker’s rack and out of mind forever. I remember standing in the empty garage just after we closed on the house, telling my wife about how we would “of course” be parking the Suzuki in the garage but that it would be nice to have a little extra space for the toolbox and baby clothes. Maybe even the holiday decorations. Oh how we fall. There is not a chance in hell that an actual CAR will be making its way into the garage unless I take a vacation devoted to sorting, filing, shredding, donating and, well, dealing.
That night, while all up in our stuff, I realized I was sitting in the land of discarded dreams: the boxes that house the remnants of my wife’s photojournalism career, the last printed labels from a release from my now-defunct record label, the files from our catering business that opened and closed at the beginning of the 00’s. The acrylic paints in simple primary colors for mixing that I assumed would one day be used for meditative and reflection-time painting after I put my daughter to bed. The stack of board games I always thought would work its way into family fun night, which turns out to be more eating and talking and story-telling than Chinese Checker-playing. All these reminders of the things we loved long ago; the dreams we chased and then cleared from our lists. I decided not to pursue music as a profession by age 25, because I wanted to be able to support my family, financially and in-person. We pursued catering for a few years but decided the payout wasn’t worth the backaches. My wife toted her photo equipment all over the Bay Area to shoot fires, speeches, famous people and bottom-of-the-ninth moments, then realized that she was more captivated by the human moments, and candid soul-searching of artful portraiture than something the newspapers wanted to run.
So here’s the epiphany: We pursued these dreams with our whole hearts. But then we moved on, and it’s time for the garage to reflect that. I know deep down that we won’t be returning to those pursuits (no more catering in my future, or beta fish, for that matter), simply because our dreams are bigger now. Our life experiences have broadened our capacity to pursue all our grand ideas, but unless I unload the remnants of dreams already lived, we won’t have room for them.
Here is a song to bump you for Friday afternoon, and through the weekend. I can’t get enough of it.
Scroll through most Myspace band pages and you’ll see flash ads along the side columns for a snarky message tee company. All that insta-cool to be had for $34.99! The hipsters are all wearing them! Styley plastic sunglasses-clad kids are looking all “I just grabbed this off my floor and threw on a pair of vans and got on my cruiser bike” with their American Apparel tees, proclaiming something witty (sometimes) and standing against a brick wall in Encino, headed to a free show at a gas station (because THAT is punk rawk).
Let’s all have a moment of nostalgia and think back to the late 70’s iron-on
tshirt shops. You picked out your shirt size and color, and then the art from stacks of binder books with images divided into categories like “girls” “boys” and “adults only” (Lord knows what was in those, I was five). Most were appropriate for that moment in time; my sister’s was a rip off of an ACDC album title. Mine was light pink, and I chose a cartoon drawing of a kidney bean dancing in a rainbow field of flowers with the message above proclaiming “I’m a human bean”. Awesome.
I’ve been temporarily tempted to buy into the message tee when I see something especially awesome like this one, available from Smash, whose message tees focus on their homestate of Iowa but has a few good general ones too:
or this one from Delia’s (who actually has a reliably cool selection but alas is cut for 10 year olds):
And there’s the classic Neighborhoodies, whose price points have kept me just out of reach from ordering pride shirts for my various SF neighborhoods for YEARS (though I am still considering “Lower Rockridge” because that’s just plain funny, and only to people who live within 3 square blocks of my house). Their readymades are often smart:
Ultimately, while trying to narrow down a choice, I realize that it’s ridiculous to condense my outfit’s intention for a day into a little snippy comment on culture, politics or certainly Team Britney. It’s a bumper sticker for my boobs. And it’s probably not going to be funny to me for long. And it smacks of “think I’m cool please”. And I just can’t commit. But I still browse. Looking for that “one” to make me overcome my hispter annoyance and dive on in.
Time for more music! Here's a playlist that I've been sitting on for awhile that includes some really cool and creative covers. I make these every few months to reflect whatever I'm working on- like a soundtrack for my personal documentary. This one clearly is about reckoning and is pretty serious. But sadly beautiful. Thankfully music will often render the emotion for us, confront us with it and let us move through it.