In honor of Easter - food...

Toni Bourdain in his “Les Halles Cookbook” expresses the following:

"Good cooks do not exist in a vacuum…Think of food like drugs. If you were a druggie, and you moved to a new and unfamiliar town, chances are you wouldn’t know where to score your drug of choice. First thing you’d do is to seek out other drug users. You’d pick out an obvious spot, like the parking lot of a methadone clinic, a bad part of town, a pawnshop, a Phish concert, and you’d make “friends” with fellow travelers of similar interests. Soon, no doubt after a few bad experiences, some trial and error, you would find what you need. Same thing with food. Kind of.”

Eye Candy

The result of a fruitful Saturday.

Blurry Reasoning

I have a bizzare fascination with blurry photos. I always find them more mysterious, and often, more beautiful than their perfectly focused counterparts. Of course, there are many a time when a crisp image is absolutely necessary, but sometimes I miss the enigma of identifying objects through the blur, be it intentional or accidental.


I photograph every theatre show that I work on, ostensibly for portfolio purposes, although I had no need to share my portfolio with anyone for close to four years now. I find the documenting process fascinating, and my iPhoto is littered with an average of 100 shots per show, when I *might* use 2 to represent a particular production. I work on up to 15 shows a year - you do the math.



And when photographing the show, accidents happen. Not enough light or too much motion on stage being the most frequent culprits, I always end up with folders titled "BLUR". So I would like to share my most recent one, and maybe you too will be fascinated with blurry reality...

My 25 things...

This was going around Facebook...so I thought I'd cross-post...

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

1. I am deathly afraid of telephone communication, but only in my personal life. I am terrified to speak to strangers when in need to make an appointment, argue with a utility company, make an inquiry, or even when calling friends. I've always tied this to the fact that we did not get a phone until I was 14 years old, and in my mind phones are for business and emergencies only.

2. I want to be an interior designer when I grow up.

3. I have a secret desire to be a singer in a (nonexistent) cover band for a specific Russian rock band.

4. I dress preppy, and am slightly ashamed of that. But only slightly.

5. I don't spend nearly as much money as I would like to on clothes and nice shoes. That said, 60% of my closet is dress clothes. Also, I'd like to eventually have a job where I could dress nicely.

6. I find that with opera, people either love it or hate it. Which confuses me, because I am totally indifferent towards opera.

7. I spend too much time reading design blogs, and not enough time implementing the ideas I garner from them.

8. I regret not having learned to bake from my grandmother before she passed away.

9. I am an overeducated snob, and proud of it.

10. I look at my high-school years with neither fondness nor regret, but rather a bit of indifference, which I am told is different from other people...

11. I am a classically trained pianist who has not touched the piano in almost 3 years. I miss it.

12. Sometimes I miss my 1.5 hour train commute, because I got a lot of reading done. Actual novels. That was before Google Reader showed up in my life.

13. I walk to work, it takes me 5-7 minutes depending on the snow. LOVE IT!

14. When I grow up and become that interior designer, I will live in the San Francisco Bay Area and probably miss New England.

15. When I was a child in Russia, we had to bring a change of shoes with us to school October through May to keep the school floors semi-clean. I think about that every day as I change into my work shoes under my desk, and then go on to mop the dirty shoe-prints from the newly painted black stage.

16. Speaking of shoes, to this day I don't understand why so many American homes and apartments have front doors that open directly into the living room - you NEED a coat closet and a place to take off your shoes and put your bags down. I feel funny if I come to your house and you don't ask me to take my shoes off.

17. Seeing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in my life in August 1992 was a truly life-changing experience. Seeing the Pacific in 2000 was just as strong, as they are so completely different. Even though I can't see the ocean from where I live, I can smell it on windy days, and that keeps my love affair with the ocean going.

18. I will never understand why theatres in the United States don't have extensive lobbies and cloakrooms. I understand about the cost of real estate and maximizing your profits, blah blah blah. BUT - The first time I went to Lincoln Center, I found people just as dressed up as they are going to the theatre in Russia, and there ARE cloakrooms there. THEN I went to BAM and discovered that I have to keep my coat on my seat, which totally cheapens the cultural experience. When I took my mother to see Chicago on Broadway, and we had to queue in the street in March because there is no lobby, I was embarrassed for the state of the culture in the United States.

19. I am much more fluent in English than in Russian in this point in my life, and that saddens me, as nobody should lose their native tongue.

20. If I never see anyone misuse "lose" and "loose", as well as "buses" and "busses", it will be too soon.

21. I discovered pedicures for the first time in my life at the age of 31. Now I get one whenever I can afford it - the foot massage alone is worth it.

22. I am Russian and I don't drink vodka. So there.

23. If I wasn't agnostic, I'd convert to Judaism.

24. Social interaction exhausts me. I am much better at dinner with 2 people than at a party with 10. If I go to any gathering with over 20 people, I need to rest a day afterward. When I used to teach, two hours in front of a classroom left me feeling as if I'd just run the marathon.

25. I like any ice cream, any time, but even more so if it's coffee-flavoured.

More experiments in furnishings

Before: slightly outdated, sometime eaten by a small canine who pulled the stuffing out, and very very very dirty.



After:


Unfortunately, red is a very hard colour to photograph, so you can't see the fine woven detail on the fabric. It's also more crimson and less tomato in real life. BUT it also attracts lint like crazy - I must have lint-brushed it 20 times while I was working.


As a bonus, when I took the previous upholstery off, I discovered the fabric was a sheet. Just a regular ol' flat sheet. Needless to say, not the best material for upholstery.

While the chair hung out in my apartment, the cats have adopted it, and often used it as a two-tier cat seat - one on the seat, the other under. They also got very sad when the chair went away. So I've been scouring Craigslist for a cheap chair to bring back for the felines, but to no avail - all the cheap ones have really bad lines.

Feline Angst

LK and I are owned by two bossy felines, one of which is a terror to both humans and cats, and the other usually is a very peaceful individual. I've been privy to some weird canine behaviors lately, and while the stories are amusing, I don't generally think of our cats as especially destructive. I mean, look at him, isn't he a perfect portrait of calm?


His name is Miles, by the way, and this is how he looks when he is very tired:



And this is what he does when he does not like being left alone for 18 hours (or so):


If you look closely, the napkins are not just strewn all over the floor, but they are also eaten in the corners - almost every single one is chewed up. While Miles is an expert at eating paper - just in the last two days, he took bites out of a bill for car repair, a Postal Office receipt, and an Inaugural edition of the Boston Globe - we try to keep as much paper out of his reach as possible.

Therefore it did not occur to me to hide a *closed* plastic container of napkins on a kitchen counter. Every day I thank heavens he is not a larger feline...

More Recent Distractions

As I can't stay away from doing crafty things with fabric, I covered this screen with different fabrics I chose for a production at work:

Notice how the screen fabric matches the throw on the chaise? That's intentional:)

And then I turned this:

Into this:

I think to date the back-and-white has been my favourite fabric to work with, as it was a linen that did not fray at all, and the pattern, while complex, was both symmetrical in all directions AND predictably repetitive:)