Monthly Archives: February 2012

Feb 22 2012
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How We [Almost] Beat IKEA

Many speak of the often ill-fated IKEA relationship test. Few live to tell the tale.

On a recent episode of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon and her boyfriend Criss decide to take the aforementioned relationship litmus test. On the way in they see an old couple arguing while leaving the store. The old man exclaims, “I’m going back for those cute bowls!”

She replies, “I swear to God I will stab you!” Foreshadowing their downfall.

Though Liz picks the table she likes beforehand, Criss starts to have second thoughts when he sees it in person. On top of that, he does not take the power of IKEA seriously and foolishly considers buying heart shaped salt and pepper shakers.

My manfriend and I for some reason decided to go to IKEA on Sunday, the worst day for IKEA. We expertly weaved and slithered our way through the screaming children, cheap furniture that is 90% glue, and impossibly organized showrooms. A disgruntled woman and I got in each other’s way, you know where you do that thing that you go back and forth, when one tries to take the right way, the other goes that way, you know the one. She actually grumbled, “This is a nightmare…” But me and B made our way to the end with the exact items we planned to get and therefore stayed within our preplanned budget. Hurrah! We had beat IKEA. Drunk with self-pride, we also squeezed in Home Depot, Fred Meyer (like Target), and the Farmer’s market, all back to back. At the end we were not angry, we were actually in a good mood and managed to plant the herbs we had just bought and put them in the window sill. Basically, we were crapping out rainbows.

There was just one problem. We have had our eye on this particular IKEA countertop for a while, (if I told you the one I would have to kill you) but knew it was out of stock. On Sunday, we asked when it was coming in and the guy said Tuesday (yesterday.) No problem! we said, we will come in before B’s work then. Well yesterday we did not have time, and since there were 20 pieces, we figured it would have to be there today. I called today when they opened, 10am, just to double check their inventory. They only had 10 pieces. So we begrudgingly went there before B’s work and went straight to the warehouse part since I had expertly written down the Aisle and Bin number down before. When we got there, there was a woman struggling with a large countertop. My heart sank. But alas! There was one left, under the one she was struggling with. We offered to help and said we were planning on getting one as well. She replied, “Oh I am getting two, they said there were 8 though,” passive aggressively saying, “I’m taking both of these bitches, so back the fuck off.” Needless to stay we stopped helping her and left her grunting and wrestling with the awkward countertop. In vain, we asked an employee if those were in fact the last, knowing full well they were. Their next shipment is in five weeks.

It hurts going all the way to a store and seeing the item you wanted out of stock. It hurts even more seeing the last item being taken from you in front of your eyeballs. What a slap in the face.

The ride back was a tense one. To add insult to injury, IKEA is right next to my manfriend’s work. So we went to IKEA, came back, and then he left to go back to the same IKEA area. Why not me just go by myself? B’s truck is stick and I cannot drive it. Why not B just go on his way to work? Because the countertop would stick out of his canopy and he could not leave it like that at his work parking lot. Do not question me! This was the only way.

We suddenly kept asking questions with no answers. Why couldn’t we have just gone 10 min earlier? Why couldn’t I have gone yesterday and have it sticking way out of my Honda? Why did IKEA only restock 20 pieces when that product has been out of stock for months? Why were all the streetlights turning red? Despite the unseasonable sun, everything had a grey cloud cast over it. At one point I actually said, “Why didn’t we push her down and take the countertop? She was overweight and couldn’t possibly catch up to us.”

So IKEA, you may have won the battle but you have not won the war. Let this be a cautionary tale, don’t ever let your guard down…this is when the IKEA monster strikes!!!!

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Feb 17 2012
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“Keep Calm and Carry On” Tree Transformed

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” tree that I admired so much during New Year’s has been transformed for Valentine’s Day. “Stop in the Name of Love” it now reads. And it’s covered with love-related quotes. I love it! Pretty in a kitsch and gaudy way.

Plus, everything’s abloom! It’s apparently already springtime in California.

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Feb 14 2012
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Live Glassmaking at Museum of Glass in Tacoma

If you’ve never seen live glassmaking, a visit to the Hot Shop at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma is in order. Go. Now!

I went last Sunday with the fam, and they’ve got quite the sweet set-up there. Visiting artist Ann Wåhlström was conducting the insanely intricate orchestra of moving, thousand-degree parts. Over the course of creating several pieces there were anywhere from 3 to 10 people working together, each with a designated role. There’s amphitheater-style seating, and it’s possible to walk 360 degrees around the action. A narrator describes what’s happening to help us newbs understand what we’re looking at, and a large screen shows closeups.

We were so impressed that we barely made it out of the shop to run through the galleries before they closed.  I did manage to sneak a peak at the breathtaking work Glimmering Gone by Beth Lipman and Ingalena Klenel.

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Feb 05 2012
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The Iranian coin and a French flip

I experienced a fun cultural mashup the other day. It was Groundhog’s day, which falls on a Christian holiday called Candlemas, having something to do with the purification of the Virgin Mary and presentation of Jesus. Who knew? In France on this day, you’re supposed to hold a gold coin in one hand and flip a crêpe with the other to bring you luck and prosperity for the year. (I don’t know what happens if you miss the flip.) The only gold coin I have is yek pahlavi given to me by my great aunt.

So, here we are in the Bay Area, on Candlemas, Groundhog’s day, with six more weeks of winter, one year of prosperity, and inshallah not too much longer until Iran finds stability and peace.

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Feb 03 2012
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Pinch your butt to ward off jealousy

For as long as I remember whenever I did something good such as do well on a test, my mother has pinched my butt. As a child she would literally pinch my butt, in more recent years she instructs me to pinch my own butt, or as she says in Assyrian, “theesa moocha” which is usually accompanied by a “mash allah,” or “God wills it.”

For years and years I did not question this. I didn’t necessarily think it was normal but I guess I kind of thought it was like a pat on the back or a congratulations, just in an ass pinching style.

It dawned on me more recently to actually ask my mother why she asks me to pinch my own butt. The answer was so convoluted it could only be Iranian.

Apparently if something good happens to you, spirits will cause harm to you because they’re jealous. The extremely beautiful are especially susceptible. To counteract this, you must hurt yourself by pinching your butt so they won’t be jealous of you anymore. The idea is that everyone is jealous of you all the time. Every time I would say that someone was not nice to me or I was mad that they didn’t invite me somewhere, my mother would always say, “they are just jealous of you.” I usually had to laugh because jealously had nothing to do with anything. At least it would make me feel better.

This is along the same lines as the evil eye. You have probably seen it before, that blue charm usually made of glass hanging from people’s (probably Middle Easterners) rear-view mirror. It stares back at the world to help ward off the evil jealousy. Blue eyes are supposed to be more evil or at least more prone to receiving evil mojo, so what I can’t figure out is why the charm is a blue eye.

It is hard for me to understand why every time something positive happens to you, you should do something negative to yourself in order to counteract it. Can good things just not happen to us? On second thought, it is kinda like yin and yang, there needs to be a balance. It is weirdly reassuring that completely different religions and cultures have such similar ideas.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that on Wikipedia’s evil eye page, Assyrians and ass pinching are mentioned (though it was probably one of my cousins that added it).

So go forth and when you get that job promotion or get an A on that test, theesa moocha!

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Feb 02 2012
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Dolls and Masks in the Meatyard

In an unassuming room with bright white walls and cool cement floors hangs a body of work that is delightfully dark. The nearly sixty black and white photographs taken by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, currently on view at the de Young in San Francisco, call attention to the human body, identity, and family relationships in the most unsettling ways. Even his name connotes viscera: physical bodies, weight, animal, slaughter, tearing flesh apart, clawing, chewing, raw… (what does my quick word association say about me?) Most reviews point to the dichotomies in Meatyard’s work, arguing for example, that he “explores the contrasts between youth and age, childhood and mortality, intimacy and unknowability, sharing and hiding.”

This is true. I find tension even in the act of viewing the work. Because they are dark and extremely detailed, the viewer must get physically close to each photograph to discern all the objects, figures, and settings. Once the viewer is able to read these details, she realizes how troubling some of the imagery is and she takes a step back. Pauses. Thinks. Intrigued, she takes a step forward to get a better look. Back and forth, back and forth, she does this dance between wanting to look, but not wanting to see.

It’s the imagery and composition that are so enticing. What could be more appealing and subversive than small, black and white prints of dolls and masks on family members taken in the 1960′s (think cutoffs and long hair in wide open spaces or abandoned houses)? Dolls are fascinating. Ever since I saw slides of Hans Bellmer‘s work in my first art history class I was hooked on creepy dolls. (Actually, it probably goes further back than that. Back to when Seana and I would get dolls as gifts. For instance, my mom brought us grandparent dolls from Germany. They were made of fabric. The grandma was posed with knitting needles and the grandpa was smoking a pipe, and boy would they freak us out.) Dolls are creepy because they are stand-ins for humans. They are also associated with children which makes them especially creepy when placed alone against decaying architecture or fractured mirrors. Meatyard uses a fair amount of mannequins and dolls as human substitutes in his work, and it gets me every time. It’s somehow easy to put oneself in the shoes of a doll or mannequin, somewhere between human and object. They make the viewer second guess what humanity is, particularly in photographs because they are static images. The expressions and poses of mannequins are just as frozen in time as the human figures’, making it easy to confound the human and non-human. And when the viewer guesses wrong, it’s troubling.

The other tension I felt looking at the photographs was in trying to read their messages. As soon as I started focusing on the imagery, I would start picturing the behind-the-scenes activities that went into setting up the shot. I got distracted by this and could no longer focus on the work in front of me. Meatyard would have family members wear masks and pose for his photographs in dilapidated buildings, mossy steps, backyard spaces, fields, or somewhere else in their “backyard” in Lexington, Kentucky. Knowing this makes me picture the communication that occurs between father and child. “Why don’t you put on this clown mask and perch on that broken step for dad,” I imagine Meatyard saying to his son as he sifts through a pile of rubber faces staring back at him. I love imagining the production behind these scenes and only wish there were more of his work to explore.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard said that masks erased the differences between people. Romance (N) from Ambrose Bierce #3. 1962.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Untitled. 1962. Vintage Silver Print. 7″ x 6.75″
This exhibition ends February 26.
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Feb 01 2012
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Which is better in Food: Local, Sustainable, Organic or all?

Now I know what you are thinking, yet another blog post about sustainability, eco-friendly, organic yada yada. But I am excited because I finally found a view on the matter that makes sense!

My beautiful sister gave my fantashtish boyfriend a Southern cookbook with a twist for Christmas, A New Turn in the South by Hugh Acheson.

photo taken from Hugh’s friend’s blog: http://beautyeveryday.com/

Among dozens of pickled recipes (yum!), chanterelle recipes, and fried recipes, this Canadian born, now Georgia-based chef clearly explains in order the importance of these three movements. Here is an excerpt from his book:

A Message About Community

My mantra is this: local first, sustainable second, organic third. Local has impact and impact produces change. Change is the process of making the farming sustainable, and once sustainable the next step is certified organically grown. The demand for immediate and complete change by some food advocates is one that just is not feasible for most farmers and one that the average consumer cannot yet afford. Small steps will win this race and those first small steps are about your local sphere. The small steps that you take as a consumer are multifold: Shop at your farmer’s market, buy local crafts and art, frequent local independent restaurants, buy locally roasted coffee, buy native plants, learn how to garden, don’t eat overly processed foods, know the person who raises your eggs. This has nothing to do with a political stance and everything to do with a community stance. I am not a fanatic, just a believer. I believe in the place we live and in finding ways to make it great everyday. I am endlessly enamored of my local sphere, my community.

It is a clear, direct, non-fussy opinion about what he believes needs to happen to gain a better community with better food. What a breath of fresh air compared to the endless naggy, finger-wagging, scare-tactical, eco-”friendly” blog posts I have read in the past. I am interested in learning more about this stuff but some people involved in this movement make me shy away.

I have always had mixed feelings about jumping on the huge organic bandwagon. It seems like a good idea, right? Pesticides and chemicals = bad; it’s a no-brainer. But then usually once a year somebody dies from eating manure or something on organic spinach. I feel like people assume just because it is organic it means it is good quality. This is not true. For instance, we got some organic bananas but we live in Seattle. Guess where these bananas came from … Ecuador. Of course they could not come from anywhere near the Pacific Northwest. So they tasted fine (though I am not always convinced organic necessarily tastes better) but as expected their quality did not last very long. I have an issue when I think about how far that banana had to travel. How many hands and pieces of machinery did it have to touch? We like to pick up produce and meat in the store and try not to picture where they came from. But that meat did come from cow far away and that carrot was submerged in dirt. We don’t like to think about these things because they are yucky. This total disassociation with our food is a problem.

Now my biggest priority is taste and quality. It just doesn’t seem possible to have these when your food comes from a different continent. Not to mention the carbon footprint of the banana that used who knows how much oil and energy to become better well travelled than myself. Why not put your money in your community and buy local, fresh, and therefore in season food? I try and will try harder to buy farmer’s market food. Additionally, like Acheson mentioned, the local farmer may not have the money right now to become certified organic. They may be very close to being organic already but the farmer does not have to jack up his/her prices. Now if you have the money to buy only organic, by all means go ahead, but do not wag your finger at me or poor people when they simply cannot afford it or have other priorities to spend it on. It is elitist and entices zero interest for them to listen to “your cause.”

So is organic good? Yes, the idea is but we have to consider how we can provide sustainable and organic choices to everyone, not just the upper class. My point is we should not lump organic foods and non organic foods in two categories and that’s it. It is not black and white. There are many different factors that affect your environment, community, and your food.

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