The One

This is quite possibly the best photo I have ever taken:

It references this photo of French writer and philosopher Albert Camus:

I've been reminded recently of photographer Henri Cartier Bresson's famous quote, "Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." I've definitely taken that many photos since I got my first film camera in 2004, and I think I'm just now starting to get good at it. I'm just now finding that happy place between what I love and what I'm good at. I've known that I love photography and that I'm okay at it for a long time now. But only in the past year or so have I really started to explore the particular type of photography that I love and can do well (thanks in large part to having Josh and Lou in our house for the better part of that year). Hopefully, I'll keep getting better at it.

Delicious Soup

Doug and I tried a new recipe the other night for Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup. Tomato soup is not my favorite thing, probably because my choices have always been the stuff in a can (ew) or the rich creamy stuff (bad news for my lactose-intolerant tummy). But Doug loves tomato soup and even eats the canned kind without adding any water. So, I decided to give this recipe a shot. It was SOO delicious! The recipe is from America's Test Kitchen, but I altered it slightly. Here's what we did:

1/2 red onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

pinch red pepper flakes

1 280z can whole tomatoes

1 1/2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 slices high-quality sandwich bread, torn into 1-inch pieces (we used french bread from the bakery)

1 cup low-sodium chicken broth

1 tablespoon brandy (we substituted bourbon)

black pepper

olive oil

1/8 cup chopped fresh chives

Heat olive oil over medium high heat in large pot or dutch oven. Add the onion and pepper flakes. Cook until onion is translucent, stirring frequently. Stir in the tomatoes and their juice. Mash with a potato masher until no pieces larger than 2 inches remain. Stir in the sugar and bread; bring the soup to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium

and cook, stirring occasionally, until the bread is completely saturated and starts to break down, about 5 minutes.

Transfer the soup to a blender (you may have to this in batches if you're blender is small). Add a touch more olive oil and process until the soup is smooth and creamy, 2 to3 minutes. Rinse out your pot/dutch oven and return the soup to the pot. Stir in the chicken broth and bourbon. Return soup to a boil and season with pepper to taste. Sprinkle chives on top and serve.

We enjoyed ours with cheese toast/grilled cheese made with cheddar on french bread. Perfect for a winter day.

New Pictures!

When friends come to visit, they get their picture made. It's mandatory. =)

Thanksgiving

Doug and I had Thanksgiving with his family this year out in the country. It was super low key and I got to try a few new recipes, which is always exciting. I was able to find fresh, locally grown green beans, sweet potatoes, and pecans. Yum! For the green beans, I just sauteed them with butter and garlic, and added some chopped pecans and a touch of Worcestershire sauce about halfway through. The sweet potatoes turned out to be the best sweet potato dish EVER. I used a recipe from Food Network's Guy Fieri that included Agave Syrup (found at our friendly neighborhood Publix), whiskey (we used Bulleit bourbon), pecans, nutmeg, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, butter, and apples. Incredibly delicious. Next time I think I will add more apples.

Our local health food store had free range turkeys for sale and I really, REALLY wanted to get one, but they were $50-$60. Not outrageous, in my opinion, but still more than we could pay. Maybe one day we'll either be rich or have more access to local food and can buy a smaller free range turkey. Or maybe both of those things will happen.

Hope everybody enjoyed their time off from work and time spent with family and friends. And I hope everyone will participate in the required kick-off-the-christmas-season tradition of watching Home Alone. It's not a real holiday season without some John Hughes.

What is with Damien Hirst?

Damien Hirst is one of the most famous (if not the most famous) contemporary artists in the world. His art is highly controversial, and lots of people think it's total bullshit (myself included). Hirst's most well-known pieces are the giant formaldehyde-filled tanks with dead animals inside. He won the fancy-pants Turner Prize for new contemporary art for the piece below, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Ha.

This piece was done way back in 1992 and people still talk about it. Here's another animal-in-a-tank piece, called Mother and Child Divided. It's lovely.

Yes, the cow and calf are divided, as in cut in half and placed in separate tanks. What is this? What does he want us to take from this? No wonder average joe doesn't want to go to the art museum. Who can be impressed by this other than people just like Damien Hirst, artists who talk about themselves and make art to shine light on their own divinely bestowed intellect, rather than to say something about the world.

So, I think this type of contemporary "art" is total hogwash, nonsense, bullshit. I'm not alone in that. But art and literature, films, etc. are what we use to learn about a particular culture in a particular time. So was does the presence of this type of artwork in our most prestigious museums say about our culture? What does it mean that there is a huge disconnect between the world of "important" artists and the world of everybody else, that art has become so lopsided on the side of intellect and concept that no one can really take anything from it without reading about the artist's intentions, and are then still left feeling confused and inferior? And who are we that we can't seem to articulate why we don't like this artwork or why most of us don't really consider it art at all? Does it mean something that while we can't seem to sufficiently describe what makes art good or bad, many of us can't decide what truth is, or explain why we disagree with war or why we hold the religious or moral beliefs that we do? Hell, many of us can't even tell each other why we like the music and movies that we do. And of course it means something.

More for your reading pleasure: Trash, Violence, and Versace: But Is It Art? by Theodore Dalrymple

Group of artists with a strong distaste for art like Damien Hirst's: http://www.stuckism.com/info.html Try to disregard the hideous website design (or lack thereof). The content is interesting, I promise.

And, on a happy note, one painting I do love. It's called Chop Suey and was painted by Edward Hopper in 1929.

Making Connections

I've been reading about education a lot lately. This week I read an article my sister sent me about a married couple of academic types who decided to homeschool their three children. This is happening more and more. Homeschooling used to be reserved for country bumpkins, religious fanatics, and all-around strange folk. Not any more. Academics and intellectuals are now pulling their children out of formal schooling and are educating them at home. They take their children to museums and parks, travel to new places, and only spent a minimal amount of time doing formal study. These new homeschooling families emphasize that learning takes place constantly, learning units of measure while cooking, learning about biodiversity at the farmers' market, learning Dewey Decimal inside the actual library, and learning color theory at the art museum. It's a wonderful new movement, I think, as more people realize that our formal education system crushes creativity and discourages real thinking. The most significant difference in this type of learning (learning by doing in everyday life) is that it is almost always relevant to daily life. Their learning take place within context, not within a classroom. Because they might actually be in the forest while learning about leaves and bugs, there is automatically an opportunity for them to discover something new on their own. "What kind of bug is that, mommy?" they might ask. And the parent may reply, "I'm not sure. Let's look it up." And then, through the entire process of figuring out what kind of bug it is, they may also have hidden "lessons" on how to take a photo of the bug, how to look things up, and how to determine what information about the bug is most important. And not only does homeschooling allow for more relevant and in-depth learning, it also creates incredibly strong and meaningful relationships within families. Older siblings teach younger siblings, parents and children really get to know each other, and the family becomes the foundation by which they all understand how to build outside relationships and community. Many educational reformists are convinced that this same kind of learning, experiential learning they call it, can take place in a school with teachers and classrooms. I agree with them, though I know it will be no easy task to try and make such sweeping changes in the way we all think about and do school. We do not currently teach our children how to think and connect ideas and how to learn new things on their own. We teach them how to do school, to stay in the lines, sit quietly, and do what they're told. We are teaching compliance. We are raising a generation of people who are not prepared to think for themselves, form opinions, create new systems. We are raising a new work force of people who know how to stay in the lines, sit quietly, and do what they're told. Don't ask questions, don't wonder why, don't make suggestions for a different way of doing things. This is very dangerous for us. Without thinkers, people who push the boundaries and search for new ideas, we'll have no new discoveries and we'll be unable to create new systems when our traditional systems fail us. So, no worksheets and no homework, I say.....and that's just a meager start. We need to totally overhaul the way we've always thought about education. And I understand that not everyone can or should homeschool. But everyone can get involved in educational reform. We have to.

As a sidenote, I think it's very interesting that at the same time that you have the local food movement with people growing their own stuff, composting and recycling, and people moving back to downtown and trying to rebuild communities, you also have the new homeschool movement. None of these "movements" is very new, actually, but all have newly found attention and interest. Are people really moving toward a slower-paced, relationship-emphasizing, home based life? Will people really stick to trying to make everyday life more meaningful rather than trying to achieve, succeed, and attain? I hope so. Time will tell, I suppose.

This is my three year old niece cutting up vegetables with a knife and cutting board, with supervision from my mother. She uses a small knife, of course, and needs to be supervised, but she can learn to do pretty much anything she wants. Children are so much more capable than we give them credit for, and it really upsets me. Part of the problem with our education may be that adults have so little faith in children. They can do it! Look at her go!

Bobby Kennedy

I started reading a new book called The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America. You might wonder what in the world would lead me to pick up such a book, so I'll tell you. A couple of years ago, I read an excerpt from this book in an issue of Vanity Fair, the very first issue I had ever picked up. It was so powerfully written that I kept that issue of the magazine with Bobby Kennedy's photo on the cover, made a mental note to some day read the whole book, and began grabbing a copy of the most current Vanity Fair whenever I got the chance. After reading two books lately that were both about young thirty-somethings who needed to "find themselves" as their marriages were falling apart (no more memoirs for me for a while, thanks), I wanted to read something with some real substance. Then I remembered the book about Bobby Kennedy. I'm only about sixty pages in, but I there's a passage from one of his speeches that I just really wanted to share. For those of you who don't know anything about JFK's younger brother Bobby (I didn't either before reading this book), he decided to run for president in 1968 because he felt morally obligated to do whatever he could to oppose Lyndon B. Johnson and his involvement in Vietnam. JFK had been assassinated in 1963 and when Bobby decided to run, people (especially young people) loved him. But many of his colleagues and family members worried greatly that someone was going to shoot him. They were right. 82 days into his campaign, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated that year. And a lot of people still believe that had Bobby become president that year, America (and particularly it's political climate) would be very different today. So, here's a piece of Bobby's speech from the early days of the campaign: '"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things," he said. "Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but the GNP - if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead...and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage...it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."' Bobby Kennedy, 1968.