Proof I'm weird

I visited And/Or Gallery in Dallas this afternoon to take notes for a review I'm working on. It's a show of Net-based art plus some hacker stuff that exhibits just the the right amount of edge without giving in to snarkiness. One of the artists in the show, Olia Lialina, has a Web site here with her partner Dragan Espenschied. Since the mid 1990s, she's been making Web-based artworks that have something of the awareness of material semiotics you find in the works of really good sculptors. Only here, the awareness is applied to the niceties of HTML code and low-grade digital graphics, not plastic, stone, rubber, etc.

My plans to work on a second review were crushed, however, when I found the gallery closed. In fact, all the business owners in the neighborhood met with the mayor this afternoon. So lots of places were closed. Foiled by community development.

Back home, I sliced a passel of homemade bacon, fried it up, and schlepped it to the Spot down on the square to share with Friday happy hour friends. That I took a mess of bacon to a bar this evening is proof that I'm weird. Nobody hauls bacon to a bar.

My friends liked the bacon, and I'll visit the gallery tomorrow. I hear the mayor has the day off.

Bacon

The review is at the magazine. I've begun research for the next one, and I've hacked away at another disgusting part of my studio.

But my point here is that the bacon is done:


Raw above. Cooked below.



BLT's for dinner, of course.

Studio

I spent the day slogging through some of the mess in my embarrassingly too big studio. Vacuum cleaners and machetes and stomping bigass spiders behind me, I have at least one room in a non-toxic state tonight. The work was pretty much physical, which was a gift, actually, since I needed the break from writing.

The writing proceeds apace. I have a draft of a review for one mag and a glimmering about what to do for the next one. The next one comes tomorrow -- a day late by my schedule, but that's what happens when you spend the afternoon hacking arachnids with almost illegal blades instead of writing. Wonder what my deadline is?

Meanwhile I also have three chunks of cured pork belly in the smoker pit right now. The belly chunks have been in a cure for a week as of tonight. It's time I had a good look at them.

Bacon beckons. More later.

Personalizing the losses

I just saw this at BAGnews. There's a link to the Rocky Mountain News story about his family and the damage his death in this idiotic war has done to them.

The howling animal joy that possessed me when my daughter entered the world 24 years ago is something he will never know. I guess that's why I experienced a very personal grief for a young man I didn't know. He was just a little older than my daughter.

Prosciutto

We bought half a hog last fall. In January, I packed a piece of the ham (the local meat processors cut the ham into two parts, alas -- I didn't know they were going to do it, so I didn't know to tell them not to) in salt and weighted it down to cure in the refrigerator. After the salt cure, I wrapped it in cheese cloth and hung it in a wine storage unit for a little more than five months. Today is my birthday and so I unwrapped it. That's me trying to slice it above.


I'm pretty happy about how it turned out. Never tried to cure a ham before. The only hard part was the waiting.

Bacon again

It's our wedding anniversary. I'm making bacon:


Three batches of bacon, each weighing more than three pounds.



We bought over ten pounds of pork belly at Rudolph's meat market in Deep Ellum today. Back home, I cut it into three chunks and applied the basic salt cure described in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie. In a week, I'll smoke it.

Sex and assassination in the city

Last night I was waiting at an outside bar on the south side of Dallas to meet two women from a magazine I sometimes write for in New York. The joint is called Lee Harvey's, and it's a ramshackle collection of picnic tables, gravel, beer, mixed music, dogs, and casually dressed patrons just off Akard Street south of I-30. Some of the patrons were quite casually dressed indeed. One woman in a spaghetti-strap tank top offered us more than a little of what comedian Dawn French once termed an "astonishing bosom." But that's Dallas.

A 2006 poll of Dallas Observer readers named Lee Harvey's the best place in Dallas to "pick up some tail." Sundays the music is run by DJ Sistah Whitenoise, according the the bar's Web site. I was pretty anxious going in. I'm not accustomed to scenes where one picks up tail. But the dogs were fun. A woman with an ordinary bosom tossed a filthy tennis ball for a pair of rambunctious standard poodles; a badly behaved mutt jumped on a picnic table a little before the patrons seated there were done with their onion rings.

I'd never met my dinner dates, having only spoken to them on the phone. They were here in Texas to get a sense of the regional art scene. Also to get out of New York for a couple of weeks. Sipping a Shiner Bock, I started getting concerned that I'd not recognize them when they arrived.

But I did. It wasn't only the shoes -- hair, blouses, posture, gait all gave them away -- but the shoes alone were enough to tag 'em. Not Manolo Blahniks, but not Dallas either. Really not Dallas. Introductions complete, we got more beer (well, one of us got a Shirley Temple because she's pregnant.) and studied the menu. Burger, salad, onion rings (said to be the best in Dallas, but they weren't), two chicken panini sandwiches. An adorable mutt who could have been the model for that asshole Rodrigue's "Blue Dog" pictures begged impertinently and futilely for my sandwich.

Conversation ranged from Dallas galleries to the Kiefer winged book in Fort Worth to their itinerary across Texas. They plan to finish up at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. I raved about the Judd aluminum boxes and about the Flavins. Probably I got pretty boring, but that's me.

Talk turned to the name of the bar. Yes, I said, I was here when JFK was killed. I was 12 and really too young to process what had happened, but still naming a bar after the killer is a mistake. Even if it's a very friendly place with cute dogs and lovely women. I still remember my mother lying face down on the bed sobbing that terrible afternoon.

Today my dinner companions drove to Houston. I stayed in Commerce.