Writing and Drawing, Writing about Drawing...Drawing about Writing?

Both writing and drawing are best done daily. When one actually has to write something, the daily practice makes the cold, hard white of the empty page easier to attack. When one has those inevitable blocks, or worse, when one has entangled oneself in horrible twists of words and concepts, the daily practice of writing helps work through the mess faster and easier. When I was writing for the newspaper, other writing was much easier, because newspaper work demands FAST writing. You interview someone, write it up and file the story. There is no begging for more time. Newspapers do not allow more time. Even working at home the writer feels the hot breath of the editor at all times.

In writing, as in other pursuits, the perfect is often the enemy of the good. Newspaper writing cures that. The story at hand might be mediocre, but it doesn't matter. There will be more stories later.

Drawing is the same way. The more you do it, the surer your hand is. Even if all you are doing is shading studies on eggs and white cylinders, the act of daily practice focuses the eye, and keeps the hand in tune.

If I have been taking a break from either writing or drawing and suddenly find myself with a job to do in either discipline, it is much harder than if I had been in practice.

This should explain the sudden burst of life on this blog. Use it or lose it, baby!

Now, I personally find writing about the craft of writing to be just about the most boring crap out there, but all writers do it. It is often that we are writing to ourselves, reminding us what it takes to make a lively passage out of all those words. So, to my readers (if there are still any out there), I apologize. But this has to be done, once in awhile. I will try to make a habit of the daily writing, but not a habit of writing about writing.

I don't care what the motivation of the writer is. Amalia has to take these standardized tests of language arts that have these questions about why the writer wrote the piece. Never is the option "because he wanted to be paid" or "because his editor assigned the piece" given. And, quite truthfully, that is why almost all writers write. It sounds mercenary, and I used to think such statements were cynical half-truths, until I started writing professionally. I don't care about the latest Honda, perhaps, but it hardly matters when I have had to do an automotive story. There are (presumably) some readers who care, and it is my job to tell the story with the tools I have at my disposal in a way that keeps the reader's eyes moving along.

But that is writing about something I am nearly totally passive about. What about writing about something that I do care about? Music reviews or food criticism, for instance? This requires a degree of detachment. I must realize that even though I am gaga over a record of Asian brass band music, the reader needs more meat than my own personal enthusiasm.

Writing about art is even more difficult, as I am realizing. Part of the problem is that the historical view has taken over much of the world of art criticism. The historical view demands progress, and that is a wrong-headed way to view art. Certainly there is a constant web of influence, and it is right to point it out. However, a work of art is not about its own place in art history. If it is any good it says little about the time and place of the artist (although it is fair game to note when it does). Writing about art should speak to what is on the canvas (or wall or panel or whatnot) the way that music theory writing sticks to the "facts" of the piece. This is the direction that I am trying to take when I write about art. Art theory. What makes a work beautiful, what complexities lurk there that elude the quick glance? These are the questions that make art writing worth reading.

I have just finished reading a book about California art that takes the opposite approach. Art, in this wrong-headed view, is merely illustration of verbal points about colonialism, about race, about gender, about all sorts of things that art is ill-suited to concern itself with. I am not even sure that art is a good medium for self expression, which is probably best done by shouting out of the window.

"I am mad as Hell, and I am not going to take it!"

"Nice turn signal, jerk!"

"I love my city!"

When we paint the thing we love, that love motivates us, but if the art is successful, something else takes over, some mingling of the objective and subjective that eventually eases the artist right out of the equation. If I am trying to make some grand statement about the Invasion of the Sudetenland, the art will fail to the exact degree that it sticks to the message. For someone interested in art, the historical painting does not excite us because of the event portrayed, rather it excites us because there are layers of visual interest in the composition, the color, the texture, etc.

The problem with this theoretical view of art is that the image does creep in, with all the baggage that comes with it. This is the rhetoric of images, and it will always be there, and the writer must not simply brush it under the rug of a more musical theory or art. The problem is that today the balance has been shifted too much to the rhetoric of images. Such and such a painting is "about" this or that problem of modern society. It is "relevant" because the problem is currently perplexing the common good. Bah! Bah! and Humbug! If one wants to discuss why colonialism is wrong, write an essay.

So, yes, this is a rambling and nearly unreadable little piece about writing. But it needs to be written, if only to make the more interesting piece a little easier to write, a little more interesting to read, a little truer and a little more beautiful.

Lettuce

Have I mentioned how good it is to have fresh lettuce growing in your backyard? What? I didn't hear you...you in the back. Oh, this wag says, "well, I suppose it is better to have fresh lettuce growing in your backyard than old lettuce!" Har har har.

Anyway, if you have even a small patch of dirt, or just a planter box, lettuce is easy to grow. And no matter how good your farmers' market is, nothing is quite as tender and fresh as lettuce eaten within an hour of harvest.

Ah, you say, how to get started? I recommend going to your local nursery and getting two six packs of lettuce starts (this is your first time, so we will not go the seed route), one of a green variety (summer bibb is excellent) and one of a red variety. For a little extra fun pick up an arugula and a mizuna as well.

Wonderful, you say, but what is a good salad dressing?

I am so glad you asked:

Use a fork to get a small blob of Dijon mustard out of the jar. Put it in the mixing bowl. Add a couple of dashes of pomegranate glaze, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar (use the cheap stuff for this). Mix it all up. Double or triple (depending on your taste) the volume with Extra Virgin Olive Oil (don't use the cheap stuff here). Mix it into an emulsion and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Oh the snow...Oh the heat...A new name for Redding.

Usually when we go visit my inlaws I talk about going "under the volcano", it is a tribute to a very good book, and gives a nod to the beauty and geology of the area. I am thinking of changing the Redding area's nickname to The Land of Fire and Ice. It was around 100 the other day, and we took a short drive to Mt. Lassen and had a snowball fight. Unfortunately the main road is still closed for winter, as is the Bumpass Hell trail, so we had to miss the boiling mudpots, fumaroles, and other reminders of how thin the crust of the Earth is.

As I have frequently mentioned here, heat is essential to our experience of summer, and I am not talking about the five days of 90's that we got every summer in Oakland (11 years of no real summer!), but rather a good number of 100+ scorchers. We had a nice little salvo last week here in Vallejo, but going up North was quite refreshing. It wasn't quite hot enough for the "car sauna", though. You know the car sauna... you get into the car that was parked in the sun, and the heat assaults you at every pore, every breath, your eyes, your nose, and your brain screams, "Yes! Summer! Now, how fast can we get moving so the air comes on?"

Fire.

Remnants of massive volcanic action. Intense summer heat. Even the Earth itself looks like fire as iron oxides dye the soil the same sanguine one sees all over the South (which must draw the southerners, as you hear more drawls here than the rest of the state). You slow down in heat like that. You stay indoors during the heat of the day. At night you try to capture every little cooling breeze you can. You sit outside reading until the wee hours (OK, I do that even in the cold weather).

Ice.

Amalia asks, "is it always hotter in Redding than in Vallejo?" No, I tell her, in the winter it is much colder. And you don't need to drive all that far to find ice and snow, even in summer time. Mt. Shasta is completely white in winter. It still is close to completely white now. In the summer it harbors something like ten glaciers. Our weekend experience of high heat and snow was not the first time we have had that happen, but it still is somewhat of a surprise.

There are many inviting streams and rivers in the sun-baked North. Nothing beats a cooling dip when it is triple digit weather. Until you jump into a deep, blue swimming hole and think, "hey, I could be swimming in my martini shaker!" The rivers are fed by snow melt, and run swiftly. You expect to see flakes of ice churning along with them. Of course, you never have to worry about your beer getting warm, but you do have to be skillful in securing the cans. Every so often you see a full can of beer that has floated away from its herd. Do beer cans travel in herds? Packs? Gaggles? Braces? A brace of beer cans.

The one thing that we did not do this trip was to visit Turtle Bay Exploration Park. We always go there, but the drive to Lassen and family events took precedence. If there is one message that my readers will get from reading Erik's Rants and Recipes, it should be this: go up to Redding and spend a whole day at Turtle Bay. Another thing we did not do was to get some more olive oil. There is a great little olive oil producer up there, and he sells his oils at the farmers' market, but we did not get a chance to stop by.

Now we are back to the routine, where the temperature is somewhat moderated by the proximity of the ocean (although in Vallejo we do get some real summer heat, and it is only a quick ride over the hill to bask in Vacavillian splendor).

Maybe it's time for a technological upgrade...then again, maybe it's not!

I was sitting by a reedy estuary near Monterrey the other day, watching the aquatic birds, the grey, foggy light bouncing off the water, the trees bending in the wind, and thinking. I was thinking about art history, and the problem with art history (to make sense, art has to be viewed as a road from A (primitive) to C (advanced) through B (the intermediate)). Once you through out the whole notion of progress as the most important thing about making sense of art, Art History is reduced to what it is, for the most part: trivia about artists. Art Theory is the notion that there is some overriding sense of beauty in art that can be explained (mas o menus), no matter if the painting under discussion is by Giotto, Rembrandt, Rothko, or some unknown folk artist in the back woods of South Carolina. I was also thinking about the consequences of Puritanical views on art and beauty, how that betrays a mistrust of all knowledge that is not immediately practical, how the Puritanical mindset is a bargain with the Devil in which one loses one's soul as well as the thing that one is bargaining for, and, as a result, thinking back to a conversation I had with a friend the evening before walking around Santa Cruz late at night.

It was one of those great, meandering tangles of thought, abruptly changing direction, while rooted to the central idea, and all of that. In short, it was the perfect thing for a blog post. However, I did not have anything to write or pluck out my thoughts. I was walking and thinking and observing and walking and once in a while sitting, but not writing or typing. By the time I got back to the hotel, I had to warm up my hands before I could write anything, and then it was time for dinner. By the time I had a moment to write, it was a reconstruction effort, and that is always a bit tedious, although it is certainly good discipline.

Perhaps, I further mused, if I had one of those little portable devices that people have (I am really not quite sure what they are called, but you see them all the time, where people are writing or typing on a miniature key pad, etc.), perhaps I would have recorded my thoughts and been able to do an edit rather than a reconstruction. However, this sort of technology can quickly consume one's focus. You see the world differently with a camera than without. When you are always at the ready to write, you think (and what's worse, talk) differently.

Sometimes I think that we have the best ideas when we are not able to write simply because by not being able to write, our minds are allowed to associate different things, well, differently. The trick is having the discipline to take those meanderings and to hammer them into an essay later. Ah, discipline, sweet and sour discipline.

A Brilliant Idea

Ever since I was in college, I realized that, as a rule, I did not like college students one bit. When I read accounts of problems with them in the sixties, I found myself rooting for the National Guard. For the most part, college students are lazy, spoiled, stupid and generally contemptible. There are a few exceptions, but this is the general profile, especially for the Anglo college student who sees higher education as a combination between an entitlement and a badge of social status. So, when I read this proposal to tax college students simply for being college students I jumped out of my seat with joy. Every college town ought to do this.