Eggs from Hidden Villa

Not cheap, but humanely raised, and aesthetically pleasing. Order here.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 95

So very clever, so very sweet.

Slime molds

Withering in our unfortunate dry spell, but still cool. Portola Valley, CA.

"Let's go back to the Gold Standard"...

... wrote Ms. Shelton. What could possibly go wrong?

Avram Fefer, "Magic Mountain"

Marc Ribot shreds it while Chad Taylor keeps it swinging. The whole album is nifty.

The Dinner Party

The day of Alexi's awesome recital, while he was preparing, I was left to my own devices and made my first-ever visit to the Brooklyn Museum. I had forgotten that Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party is housed there. Having come of age in the 70s, I was of course familiar with the work and had seen many photos of it. Nothing had prepared me for experiencing it in person, however. I was worried that it would be didactic, one-dimensional, dated, and maybe not that interesting to look at. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong: Beautiful and very moving. The scale was grander than I expected, and the "craft"– especially the ceramics– more sophisticated. The "vulvar and butterfly forms," as the museum website describes the plates, are blatantly, audaciously vulvar and glorious in their variety and cultural references... and not without a dose of humor. The emphasis on erasing the distinction between high art and folk art or craft was radical. But even were it not a work of major historical and political significance, it would be a great work of art.

Connecting the dots

Review: A Violinist Connects the Dots From Bach to the Present

Robert Conrad, RIP

When I was a kid, "Wild Wild West" was absolutely my favorite TV show. It mixed the spy and western genres with an element of sci-fi, tongue all the while held firmly in cheek. I loved Conrad's character Jim West, but especially his sidekick Artemus Gordon, played by Ross Martin. Having seen it since, I realize now that the show was really quite campy, and quite bad. But at the time, it was fun to imagine myself a blend of the dashing West and the clever Gordon. The freeze-frame cliffhangers that preceded each commercial break undoubtedly helped prime me for whatever they were marketing. It's surely a part of me, somewhere, somehow.

"I am not a member of any organized party– I am a Democrat"

Iowa is proving it!