schmindigo

Garden of Memory

Dang, I couldn't get online for the past few days. Serious withdrawal symptoms. So pathetic. Although it's a wonder how much you can get accomplished in the rest of your life when that happens. I know, I already said pathetic.

In the meantime, summer has arrived! The temperature yesterday must have shot up about 20 degrees in the late afternoon. Time to iron some linen sundresses....

Nothing (knock on wood) can keep me from the Garden of Memory, my favorite way to spend summer solstice evening. I missed it last year because I'd stupidly made another commitment. Won't make that mistake again, no way!

dense

So... about the South: based on this "practice trip" I now have a much better idea of how to set up the Real Southern trip. Just for starters: we're not in Wyoming anymore, Toto. The greater Atlanta area, indeed all of northern Georgia, is absolutely rife with Chinese restaurants. My database has over 500 for the state, & I'm quite sure there are lots more than that. I'd have to say I only got to think about taking out my pin to scratch the surface. We hit about a dozen restaurants between Nashville & Atlanta (including one in North Carolina, even!), bypassing many others along the way. It's dense down there, is what I'm trying to say, just like the air is dense with humidity, compared to the dry, thin air of Wyoming. Sort of overwhelming, but good. We interviewed a restaurant owner in Atlanta who had the perfect Chinese Southern Belle accent, a way of speaking that I could only have dreamed of before. Good thing my new mic & the rest of the sound equipment all worked beautifully! Other highlights: fried chicken at Swett's in Nashville; visiting Martin Luther King Jr.'s actual church; & all the sleek, healthy horses in their lush green pastures. Oh, & of course, the sweet balmy evenings... I wasn't cold once the whole trip.

southern mini-trip

Best of the Southern Mini-Trip: a field full of fireflies in Tennessee. More later... I'm nursing a mild cold. Friends who warned me I was trying to cram too much into a one-week trip: you were right!

packing

I swear, I am the world's slowest packer. I don't know why I can't just decisively throw clothes in a suitcase & be done with it. Anyway. I'm off to the South... this is my little pre-trip trip, sort of a pilot if you will, for the big, serious, Southern leg of the Chinese Restaurant Project (which will happen sometime later, perhaps this fall if the stars align properly). This mini trip is more about vacation & my cousin's wedding than it is about Chinese restaurants, but I didn't let that stop me from bringing all my sound gear & 2 Holgas & obsessive census maps & so on & so forth, all of which may explain why packing was such a difficult task. Oy vey!

I'll try to blog from the road, but no promises, especially since the one thing I'm not bringing is a laptop.

borderlands

Much too soon... Gloria Anzaldua passed away on Saturday, at the age of 61. I remember when Borderlands was first published, I read it with an enormous thirst because I needed those ideas so badly; we all needed them so badly. All these years later I can't even articulate what those exact concepts were, because they have become so completely interwoven within my understanding of the world & my place in it. I guess it's time to go back & read it again. I am so sad that this brilliant warrior has fallen.

Cheap Eats

This is a week late, but: Dan Leone has been writing Cheap Eats for TEN YEARS now! I love Dan Leone! He's always the first thing I read when I pick up the Guardian. There is no other pleasure in my life quite like the pleasure of reading his column. (I have lots of other pleasures, just none that are like Dan Leone's writing.) It's a little scary & wonderful at the same time to contemplate how much influence he's had upon me & everybody else around here who reads him devotedly. Mere mortals like me can only aspire to have such an impact upon the community, to provoke so much happiness, & to write such excellent stuff on a weekly basis. Rock on, Dan Leone!

Freddy Chandra

The Mills MFA show as a whole definitely kicks ass (have you ever heard me say that about any MFA show before?), but the reason why you should drop everything & go see it, multiple times if possible, is Freddy Chandra's installation. Talk about sublime... this work is an act of profound generosity. The craftsmanship alone is reason to be grateful, but then there's the beauty, the way it transcends its own concepts of architecture, time & light. I'm thankful for all of it.

whipped cream

Even better than yesterday's entry on the sublime: Whipped Cream Structure with diagrams & microscopic images & everythang! Do you think that whipped cream is its own little sublime universe? Seems very possible.... Abominations such as Mock Whipped Cream are in an entirely different universe, of course.

Then there's the infamous Cool Whip which is also its whole own universe. Not a sublime one though.

& just in case you wanted to know, here are some things you should never substitute for whipped cream. (They say for food sex, I say never for any reason.)

Wes Mills

I've been paging slowly through the hot-off-the-press Wes Mills book (from Printed Matter) & pondering the concept of the sublime. Donna asked me what I meant by sublime. In my first feeble attempt to answer this question, I caught myself sounding like those tired old discussions of what defines erotica vs. porn: "I can't explain it, but I know it when I see it!" Fortunately, this explanation is a lot more articulate. A lot.

country

I'm not the only one. (Actually, I knew that already, but....) Seems like there's a stereotype out there that Asian chicks can't like country music. This I have never understood: if we can be rockers, hip-hoppers, freakin' classical violin prodigies & shit, why not country? Is there something inherently less Asian about country than other genres of music? Hmm? Anyway, check her out! Those are some shirts, no? Read the full article for details of her serious fandom. I got nothing on her for full-on enthusiasm & obsession. Well, at least, not in the country music department. Chinese restaurants are another story, apparently.

FYI, here's a real country singer who's Asian American, & she's good, too. So there.

Thanks to Donna for sending me the article.

Roadside Elixir

Cheers to Claudia Tennyson for organizing a fabulously fun & inspiring Roadside Elixir yesterday at the Headlands! The weather was perfect, the best you could ask for, & a fine old time was had by all, hanging out & making art in the shade of a lovely old tree.

Best Lyric Request of the day came from Paul's friend Josh: four lines from "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain". When he handed his form to me, I got all manic & started frothing at him about the Carla Bozulich cover. After I drew the diagram, he & his pals hung around analyzing all the revealed meanings with me for a while. Music geeks geek out! What could be more fun?

Honorable mention goes to Jerome's mom Nathalie, who challenged me to diagram in French. I actually pulled it off, which is some kinda miracle.

Craziest Request is hands down, no contest, Stephan's "Schoolhouse Rock" listing of all 50 states. What a nut! I told him I was gonna have to mail that to him later.

Then we got to go to the beach afterwards! It doesn't get much better.

real live art

It has come to my attention that there is no obvious way for you good folks to buy my work from this website. That's going to take some doing, but for starters, you can see one of my most affordable, best deals if you keep scrolling down past other temptations on the Women's Studio Workshop order page. You can even download some seriously detailed photos of the piece so you can see exactly what you're getting. A mere $65 for real live art! Printed, editioned, signed & numbered by my very own loving hand! C'mon, how can you pass that up?

Headlands

If you're in the Bay Area this weekend, come to the Headlands Open House on Sunday from noon to 5pm. I'll be diagramming pop lyrics as part of Roadside Elixir, curated by Headlands Affiliate Artist Claudia Tennyson, who will be doing Street Repair. Other Roadside artists: Donna Keiko Ozawa, John Graham, Alison Pebworth, & Jerome Waag (& his mom). Should be a fun time for all, so start thinking about what lyrics you need diagrammed, & we'll see you there!

Flower Mound

The Chinese Menu gods are listening... just when I was exclaiming how wrong it was that I had no menus from Texas (considering what a big state it is, & how many people live there), here come some in the mail from Shannon. Thanks, Shannon! She sent menus from Flower Mound, Texas, near Dallas. One of 'em has Cowboy Wonton Soup! You heard me right: Cowboy Wonton Soup, described as "turkey wontons, sliced chicken & fresh spinach all served in a refreshing chicken broth." What is so Cowboy about turkey? Or is it the spinach? Wouldn't you think Cowboy wontons, or Cowboy anything, would be made of... cows? Obviously I'm missing something here. The same restaurant also offers Old Lady Tofu, Pungent Lamb, and Smooth Crabmeat Wontons. Getting awfully poetic down there in Flower Mound....

diligent

We should all be so diligent... someone (who apparently isn't Chinese) actually made the effort to learn Chinese characters just so they could read menus in Chinese restaurants. I gotta hand it to this generous soul for putting their extensive info on the web for all the rest of us. There's so much here that I haven't even come close to reading it all. & the photos are cool too!

angry asian man

Wow! Sometime recently while I wasn't paying attention, my homepage quietly passed the 10,000 visitor mark. Now it's over 10,300. I think I owe a lot of that to the illustrious angry asian man (no relation to angry little asian girl, who I notice has now morphed into angry little girls). Anyway, angry asian man is selling T-shirts that say "NOBODY LOVES AN ANGRY ASIAN MAN" which I would so totally wear if I were one. An angry Asian man, that is. I do wear my angry little asian girl T-shirt proudly, though.