The newly re-designed CaliforniaAuthors.com is up and running. I always say — in terms of design and building — there are no small websites, but this one really doesn’t qualify as small; in fact, it’s big, with its 70+ author essays and excerpts, its many pages of directory-style resources, and its more than 1800 posts going back to 2002. It was a hell of a lot of work: Donna made the content fresh, Val made it all go, I designed it and did the thousand things to make the crufty old site fit into its shiny new suit. It’s nice to see it out there. It is especially nice to see it done.

We’re celebrating the re-launch with another cool book giveaway: Harry, Revised, the brand new novel by top LA litblogger, Mark Sarvas. Learn more about the book here. Then go over to californiaauthors and enter the drawing by sending us your e-mail address via the contact form, with the words Harry, Revised in the subject line. Enjoy! [Check out Mark’s great blog, The Elegant Variation, here.]

In other California book news, the official pub date for Donna’s book, Great Escapes: Southern California was May 5. On that day, the LAist gave it this sweet preview. Kevin Roderick also talked about the book on KCRW and at the renowned LA Observed. Learn more at Donna’s SoCal So Cool blog. Congratulations, Donna!

A day at the air show can leave you breathless, but too sun-drenched to blog — so we’ll have to let the picture do its thousand words. More on the March AFB Airfest 2008 to come — once we catch our breath.

As part of our dinner conversation last night: off the beaten path spots for the M&M road trip. Tips from around the table:

1) Middendorf’s in Pass Manchac, Louisiana. You’ll never get a better fried seafood platter and its thin-filleted fried catfish — made with the same recipe since 1934 — is famous. I just read that its under new management since 2007, but the old-line staff is still in place and it seems like the new owner respects the menu and the history of the restaurant, so you should still be able to get the good stuff there.

2) UCM Museum in Abita Springs, Louisiana. A walk-in art installation where you can see the Bassigator among many other oddities. Exceptional place to stop for souvenirs. But since the whole place is a description-defying work of art, you’ll just have to go experience it to see what we mean. (Handily, Abita Springs is the home of the Abita Brewery — and my favorite beer is served up right there at the Abita Brew Pub. And, it’s just down the street from my mom’s house, where — if you are Mark and Michelle — she might hook you up with a shrimp po-boy from her favorite place (not on any map) Frabielli’s — the real deal with buttered french bread toasted just right.

3) If you happen to be on the long long Texas route and anywhere near Bourne, TX, don’t miss the Bear Moon Bakery and Cafe. I always stop here on my LA to New Orleans trips. When Laur and I were there in February of 2006, a baker displaced by Katrina was making killer king cake (in Texas?! who figured?) and lots of delicious goods are baked on-site, real espresso and yummy food made from fresh ingredients. Great breakfast. Reasonably-priced and cute.

Click here or on the map above to get a google map with links!

M&M have arrived, providing us with a reason to celebrate and the main ingredient for the feast: grass-fed beef from the Hearst Ranch in central California. Laurie Sue will join us, so we’re preparing a leisurely dinner for five, with lots of delicious food and lots of time for meandering conversation. Last night, Val and I finalized the menu.

A carpaccio of beef with a selection of olive oils
Roasted artichokes
Walnuts and dates with Parmigiano Reggiano
olives and pickles
Cocktails and champagne

Steak Frites with a variety of sauces
Val’s glazed farmers market carrots
A salad of arugula with beets, oranges and goat cheese
Brunello di Montalcino

Spring berries with bay leaf custard
Coffee, port and champagne

A dinner with dearest friends — a beautiful start to a summer under the vine!

Damnit! It turns out that I can’t do a major website relaunch and keep my whole house out of whack with my do-it-yourself realist painting workshop. Too much chaos! Website work wants order! Okay, break down the still life, resked the whole thing after the launch and visit of M&M next weekend.

On the M&M visit front, boxes of beef arrived at my door today. Grass-fed, aged steak from the Hearst Ranch in central California. A gift from Michelle! Let the feast menu-making begin!

Nightnote Kentucky correspondent and friend Janice felt it! The big midwest shaker shook her area and she sends us this report:

You Californians might think this is normal but I was awoken at 5:30 this morning with my house shaking and a making all sorts of noise! We had a 5.2 quake and an aftershock of 4 point something that was a bit dramatic because I’m on the 12th floor of a highrise at this time. I’ve never felt the ground move. It was weird. I thought it was an explosion but it kept moving. I like terra firma. When I woke up, my cat was about to bolt from bed. I grabbed her, both to calm her down and to snatch her up if it was bad enough to force us to leave in a hurry. I didn’t want to have to hunt for her. As far as I can tell, nothing was damaged but some stuff knocked off shelves. I’ll check for cracks again when I get home, especially chimneys because several in the neighborhood fell or look close to falling. It makes me want to move back to the deep alluvial plane of the Mississippi River!

Thanks for the report J. Learn more about Janice’s shaker at the USGS.

In other earth shaking news, the USGS sent out a report last week that “found that California is virtually certain to experience at least one major temblor by 2028,” read more at the LAT. And, yes moms, we have our earthquake kit in order.

that will piss you off! Listen to this NPR interview to learn about the shadowy cabals known as hedge funds and how the Bush administration is assisting them in screwing the world. Yeah, that means you. (No better, the Dems regulatory response: huh? who, us? uh…) Warning: listening to this may make you want to fight the powers that be.

Long Beach leads California in water conservation. In October, I wrote about our town’s efforts to deal with deep cuts in its water supply and our own plans to do our part. This month, great news on both fronts! The Grunion Gazette reports that Long Beach won the Green California Leadership Award for Water Management at the Green California Summit in Sacramento. Long Beach has managed monthly water savings of 8 percent since it implemented its new conservation plan and the Cohens have managed to cut our usage by 15 percent over this month last year! Hooray!

Closed circle brushing. Did you know that tossed out toothbrushes add about about 50 million pounds of waste to American landfills each year? And, that most toothbrshes have grips and other components that make them un-recyclable? We can do better, and someone is. Last year I found the Preserve Toothbrush at Trader Joe’s. The Preserve Toothbrush — a nice, simple, smallish toothbrush made in the USA — is a completely recyclable brush made primarily from recycled Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups. Use it until it’s time to replace it (dentists recommend every 3 months), then put it in its postage-paid return envelope and send it back to its makers who grind it up to be made into plastic lumber — used for things like picnic tables. Ah, that satisfying click of the closed recycling circle! Try it. The brushes are available at Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s and online, where you can order a subscription like mine. The cost: about the same as an Oral-B.

Some mindful-living serendipity. Last week, I internet-met (hah! intermet!) artist Todd Davis when I emailed him to ask permission use an image in a post about his very nice painting. During our e-mail exchange, he internetroduced me to his wife Danielle’s smart/useful/cool website, lessismorebalanced.com. Danielle points us to all kinds of goodness from organic tequila and chocolate, to news on alternative energy like algae ranching in Texas, to truth-about-food links like the one to Bill Moyers’ coverage of farm subsidies, to where to find a good 100 percent post-consumer notebook. Nice and newsy; do visit!

… to katecohen.com April 2002: “The Catholic Church taught me how to deal with sin. Every day — every school day, weekend day, holiday and summer day — from September 3, 1965 to August 13, 1973, I prayed the Act of Contrition and The Confietor. The church taught me that these prayers were necessary because my very nature was sinful. Bobby socked, uniformed, bespectacled, I knew I was a monster of depravity. …” Read more from the original katecohen blog.

It’s crunch time on the californiaauthors.com redesign. [sketch] Thanks to Val, the shiny new site is already living and breathing on the test server and I am filling it up with the copious content CaliforniaAuthors has built in six years of operation. Val made the blog-port from Graymatter to WordPress look like a piece of cake. (Wow! almost 1800 entries — Go Donna!) And, this weekend, I was going move the more than 80 author essays and excerpts now posted at californiaauthors into the new system. Piece of cake? Not so much. And, I have no one to blame but myself.

Mea culpa! Look at all the sloppy stuff in pages I built myself! How is it that almost none of these pages — which look alike to users on the web — are alike under the hood?! They all require such cleaning up for our new, more orderly, publication system which likes nice clean valid code. (Who doesn’t?)

Opening the pages is like taking a core sample of the last six years. Here in the code are markers pointing to how the web has changed, how browsers have changed, how I have changed. Here is the history of css stability and my stability. If you know how to read them, they show that these six years of californiaauthors updates contain five of the most stress- and depression-filled years of my life, the years of my long-estranged and very angry sister’s illness and death. I would have abandoned the site a hundred times, but Donna kept coming up such with good and useful content and projects that I couldn’t walk away. And the site’s readership kept growing and it was so obvious that it was doing good in the world that — as crazy as I was — I couldn’t let it go. I was not at my best, so I just did what I could.

Last night, Val leaned against the wall in the heat (95° in April in Long Beach — wtf!?) and listened to me explain why the job of getting the content into the new site was taking me days longer than I planned. “Every page is different. This one has all these hard line breaks. That one closes every <p> tag; this one doesn’t. This one is different from paragraph to paragraph! And it’s because, in that moment in 2002, I just wanted to get that goddamned update done. Stuff came from different sources, multiple files, e-mails or Word docs from many creators. I cleaned it up just enough to get it up there and working on the web. Sometimes I was half crazy; sometimes I was a zombie. I definitely wasn’t thinking about the future. It’s all right there in the page files. And now I have to touch every individual file to clean it up.”

“Ah,” said Val, “you’re paying your code debt.”

So right, as usual. In the programming world, code debt is the debt of time you incur when you don’t do it right in the first place. If your code is not pure, correct, neat, well-commented, fungible, you might get it to work today, but one day you will have to correct it or abandon it. The moment you produce something sloppy that works, you incur the debt. One day is the code monkey on your back. Progress has thumb-breakers and if you want to move ahead, you’ll have to pay up. And, it looks like my debt is due now.

So this morning, I am about two-thirds the way through code purgatory and cleaning as fast as I can. The new site is looking heavenly, correct on its face and deep in its insides, that only Val and I will ever see. I am already feeling shriven. And I have learned my lesson: coding is always about the future.

I should also say that I am feeling very proud of CaliforniaAuthors and thankful to Donna for all her work in gathering such wonderful stuff to put on the web. And for keeping me involved in something so good and good-hearted during all those hard years. Late last night, with my back hurting from a day of mousing, I was a real crab, grousing to myself about the scut work I had loaded on myself. Then, I opened the file with the cool essay Janis Cooke Newman wrote about cooking her way into the mind of Mary Todd Lincoln while working on her book Mary. A nice piece written just for CaliforniaAuthors. One of so many nice things on the site, reminding me why we keep working on it, lightening my mood while I lightened my code debt, one page at a time.

I’m looking forward to the CaliforniaAuthors re-launch in the weeks to come. As I work through the pages, I am keeping track of my all-time favorite californiaauthors.com content and to celebrate the re-launch, I will post a list here. It runs the gamut from Mrs. Lincoln’s cake recipe to this excerpt about bank robbers’ nicknames. You’ll find them all at the new californiaauthors, beautifully coded, of course!

I’ve seen lots of paintings in the last few weeks: three juried group shows and an exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It’s been good; it sent me off on my current realist exercise and it’s been sort of encouraging. I feel a happy understanding of the language of paint. It is good to let the varied work speak to me in all its crazy dialects; to bring new story lines into the eternal internal narrative about technique, subject, palette, brushwork, surface, history, culture, love, death … Beyond critique or comparison to my own projects, it is just good to see the decisions painters make, the revelations and the disappointments.

Of the 90 or so paintings I’ve seen recently, here is one of my favorites. At 28 She Discovered She Had a Vulva by Todd Davis. I saw it yesterday at the California Visual Artist group show at the airy 2nd City Council gallery. I am thankful Todd gave me permission to post this little jpg of the painting, but it can’t do the actual painting justice. In fact, most of my favorite things about this painting are invisible in this image. First of all, the original is large — 48 X 30″ — and the surface is lush, laden with knife-loads of white paint, sometimes scraped away to reveal the dark ground, sometimes painted on, or sensitively incised to create the figures. So, in person, it is at once painterly and graphic — a sensation enhanced by the restrained and rich color palette. Yeah! That’s the way I like it.

Plus: It’s a very nice nude. The subtle modeling continues the dance between drawing and painting, between 2-D and 3, between being in and being on the background. She is anonymous, provocative and beautiful to look at, a L’Origine du monde.

And: I like the icon-ization of the ubiquitous, lowly-yet-jewellike pigeon, a theme that runs though the artist’s current work. From his website:

Todd’s work explores the ambivalent relationship between the pigeon and the public — sometimes aggressive, sometimes indifferent — and evokes, whether blatantly or furtively, those same dynamics that play out between people. The pigeon is a parallel to what is decidedly “other,” those around us who have been overlooked, loathed or merely tolerated. Todd is drawn to urban wildlife, environmental issues and underdogs of all kinds. Pigeons, in his mind anyway, embody all of them.

I don’t worry much about cracking the cypher of a painting. I don’t worry too much what a painting is “about” as long as it is also “about” paint — which this one certainly is. I avoid reading prosaic “artist statement” placards at exhibitions. In the moment of meeting a painting, I am less interested in what the painting means, than what it means to me. Thinking about the pigeon in At 28 She Discovered; perhaps any shocking discovery kills something, decides something, for us and ambivalence is at last extinguished. Or maybe only the death of one part of ourselves can offer us insight into the Big T Truth. Maybe the pigeon is an extraneous penis. Maybe the story was something the artist overheard in a bar … maybe … maybe it doesn’t matter; I like this painting.

Another fine Davis painting, Shopping Cart — which shares much with my favorite — took second place in this juried exhibit. You can see it here. Both are nicely priced around $2000. I got the distinct feeling that these will soon be bargain prices for Todd Davis’ work and I wish I had the extra cash to snag one. Then I could enjoy “the find” permanently.

Freda and Laurie! Very nice to see you!

Sigh. Spent the whole morning resetting my still life. That’s right. The still life lesson of the day: still lifes must be absolutely still. It seems that over the week since I set up the still life the first time, things have moved around just enough to make my original drawing seem off. Now, this is something I might try to roll with if I was just painting any old still life, but because I am using this one to learn a very exacting color mixing and matching process, the ever-so-slight change in the lighting blows the whole thing.

Okay, suck it up and reset. Tape everything down. Mark the floor with the positions of table, chair, box, lights, easel. Put a new canvas on the easel and start again. And heaven help the Rottweiler that bumps the table.

I spent the afternoon mixing medium into color — sitting on the back porch, listening to Miles Davis and thinking, “this is the best goddamned job I’ve ever had.”

The vine is going to town! And …

Ajax is getting into his daily summer sunbath routine.

I know I said the curation of the recent portrait exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art fell flat, but the paintings themselves left an impression on me. I found myself thinking a lot about the high level of technical performance required to create the hyper-real portraits in the the show. So when — while checking The Night Note’s clustermaps stats — I saw a little hyper-real portrait of a girl staring out at me from the Google Ad stack, I took a second look. The text said: How to Oil Paint DVD. Top world realist teaches simple method. ANYONE can learn.

ANYONE? I clicked through and landed at thecardermethod.com. There was a lovely realist still life, one that I would certainly be proud to paint. I hit the play button. The video pitch was aimed at encouraging prospective buyers who had never made a painting before; the salesman extolled the method as requiring “no talent.” Hm.

But it also talked about some cool tools that painter/teacher Mark Carder had developed: a little color checking tool that helps your eye focus on specific colors and a proportion-measuring tool used for sketching. These reminded be of Old Masters tools like framed-grids. He’s also developed his own slow-drying medium. I thought I might be able to make some use of these tools, even if I did have a little talent. I clicked around the site and saw some clips from the DVD. Carder was teaching the basic method of training realist artists to paint what they actually see not what they think they are seeing. I started to think that working though the program might be a great exercise for the “back to basics” work I’ve been doing. So I bought the package.

It turned out to be full of good old-school practical advice about studio lighting, still life set up, paint mixing, canvas stretching and toning and other basics. It also detailed a painstakingly exact process of color mixing and painting, one that requires patience, because it is a tedious way to work. But the process is about slowing down and remembering (or learning) how to see and — while I am going to do a few still life paintings using the method — the real payoff will be in how such intense “seeing practice” plays out in my work to come.

In the meantime, I’ve set up the studio with a simple still life in a light-control box and I’m beginning work on my first Carder Method still life. The configuration of the lights, the box, the easel and the chair — which must stay in exactly the same positions during the one to two weeks I’m working on the painting — have swallowed my studio space and that has us living in a little corner of the room with our big TV. [pix above] So I am very dedicated to getting this done and re-configuring the studio back to its old sunny self. I’ll let you know how the school work goes.

Below, the first canvas with pencil work.

For a post script, click (more…)

We just saw a piece on the news about Jeff Deck, a guy who’s traveling around the country correcting misspellings, including misplaced apostrophes, in storefront signs. His route is plotted on the Typo Eradication Action League site.

Here’s his post from New Orleans; he’s in LA right now!

I’m glad someone took up the challenge to do this; I think it’s important work, as you can tell by how I categorize it.

Sweet and yummy onion tart for spring! 1) Two pounds of onions, red, white and yellow. Four tbs. olive oil. Three sprigs fresh thyme. Brown slowly and gently for 30 minutes or more. Let the mixture cool. 2) Roll out a little pate brisse to a diameter of about 14 inches and slide it onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. 3) Put onions in the middle, remove thyme sprigs. 4) Fold the edges over to form a rustic crust. Bake at 375° until it is golden brown — about an hour. Cool on a rack for 20 minutes. (I added a little goat cheese topping. If you use cheese, sprinkle it on near the end of the baking; it will keep the cheese moister.) We served it up with a big green salad and a Petite Sirah. So good!

For a more detailed bootleg of this Alice Waters recipe, you can visit Eat blog.

Hooray! Robot-using dogs! [thx Laughing Squid]