Perfection is a Killer

I think of all the roadblocks I encounter, my innate perfectionist my worst enemy. I was a classic perfectionist in late elementary/junior high and I wasn't happy unless I got 100 per cent on an exam. I disliked subjects like English because it was impossible to get a perfect score. I was over-achieving, neurotic, and terrified of failure. It has been a long road to recovery from that particular personality flaw. People know me now probably wouldn't think of me as a perfectionist at all. Some of my fellow students were tortured by their inner perfectionism and became anorexic or bulimic. I was lucky to avoid those diseases.

There are days when the artistic process is hard for me because of the rough edges, the unformed ideas, the early days of rehearsal just feel like I'm making bad art. I've made a lot of bad art, I know, and sometimes it haunts me. It's living in the NOW rather than obsessing about past failures that keeps me sane.

It's all about ego, isn't it. Ego gets a bad wrap these days. I think it's important to have a healthy ego and feel pride in your accomplishments, but ego can be that strange animal that grows and shrinks according to what kind of positive and negative feedback the world is giving you at this moment. The important thing to remember that it's all about balance--avoiding the thunderheads of self hate and not flying to close to the hot sun of self-grandeur. The trick is to keep a neutral attitude towards the tasks you are doing in the present, and then later, from a distance, putting your critical hat on. Ya gotta be tough. Ya gotta be sensitive. It's all a part of the process. But the important thing is that you have to be happy with what you wake up in the morning to do. If you're not happy with that, it's time to visit your inner travel agent and book another trip.

My New Blog

Hi folks! Happy Chinese New Year. I have started up a new blog called Beespeaker Saijiki. In that blog I'll be making posts that are seasonally related. Of course, there will be some overlap, but Potluck Canuck is my more private interface and Beespeaker Saijiki will eventually be made public.

Zakkushi on Main

Green Eggs and Tofu

Citrus fruits are an essential part of our winter diet. I've been hand-squeezing grapefruit and blood orange juice for breakfast and on Sunday Pierre made green eggs and tofu. I use the green salsa from Sweet Cherubim to give scrambled eggs a kick in the pants.

It was sunny on Sunday so I spent a pleasant afternoon sorting seeds and makign chicken stock. The doorbell rang and my boxes of watch maker's cases arrived by special delivery! I wrote the names of the seeds on the bottom of the cases so students can learn which plant they are from.

I went out in the garden and dug the last little carrots out from under the snow.


Last night we had an excellent 100 mile Community Kitchen dinner. We had homemade bread made with wheat from the Island, squash and potato soup, bok choy with sprouted pulses and Thai basil, and a lovely strawberry rhubarb pie with whipped cream. Ules had some of the pie for breakfast, fork in one hand and book in the other: How to Train Your Dragon.

Happy Birthday to Art!

Today is the birthday of art, as designated by Fluxus artist Robert Filiou. We went to the Western Front and watched videos of RF explaining his playful theories of the Eternal Network.

He saw art as an eternal creative process, and helped to create a communications art network that spanned the globe and will be celebrated with live broadcasts linked up at art venues and radio stations around the world.

I love Art's Birthday! Especially when it is a huge culture jam linked up with webcasts from several different parties.

This year we watched grainy black and white footage of Filiou and Clive Robertson sitting on a toilet and we decorated cupcakes. Some kids play soccer on Saturdays, mine is forced to make art with baked goods.

I had a concept, so I brought Smarties and Pocky.

Ullie had his own free-form entry into the cupcake contest and we collaborated on the Dalek cupcake. We won the second round! Woot! Two martini glasses and a Whispered Art History Catalogue. We are not worthy!

Hope you all are having fun at parties around the world making art and raising hell! Exterminate boredom!

Happiness is... Blood Orange Season

The weather is finally feeling less oppressive. Squirrels are cracking nuts all around the neighborhood. Blood oranges are in the stores! Woot! I love them and tonight I made a feast that featured the blood of the orange most ruby. I roasted a Polderside chicken, along with parsnips and carrots cut lengthwise. I cut some BC Brussel sprouts in half, steamed them, then sauteéd them in toasted sesame oil, then added some blood orange juice, salt, pepper and honey until they'd sopped up the flavours. I toasted some pine nuts and added them just before serving. We had a spinach salad with blood oranges and I had a dish of lox trimmings that we had as a little garnish. (I missed the crunch of bacon on the spinach salad.) Bevvy? Blood orange and lime juice. For dessert we had Liberty's fennel almond shortbread with a tea made of a blend of black, green and white tea leaves.

My son has started his own blog. Needles to say it will only appeal to die hard WoW fans so far, consisting mainly of screen shots. But at least he's creating his own narrative around it, which is good.

Art's Birthday is coming up soon. Stay tuned for cupcakes at the Western Front!

Let's Crack that Nut

January is a tough nut to crack. We've had our holiday fun and now it's back to the hamster wheel of work and school. It's so hard to get up early after sleeping in for three weeks. And it's raining. I know I have SAD when I'm walking down the sidewalk with tears running down my face unconnected to a conscious sadness.

Look around you. Other people have it to. There are depression dodgers among us and maybe we can help each other out. Do what you need to do for yourself too. This is the time to invest in those things that help keep you above the water level. Get your hair cut, book a massage, or take yourself out to lunch. Notice what helps make other people happy and help them out. Do a mitzvah.

Seek out music books and movies that give you light. Stay light on your feet. Let go of the worries and burdens that could pull you under. Be gentle with yourself. Break looming tasks into mini steps. Take tea breaks. Take your vitamins. Give yourself time to daydream and enjoy those weekends sleeping late. Talk to other people about how you feel and you'll be surprised at how many people are struggling with sadness at this time of the year. Sometimes grief is seasonal.

Musical Interlude

And now it's time for a musical interlude. I found some cool songs for a dreary rainy day in January.

1) The River Man, by Nick Drake is a moody folk music video created with black and white stills which really works well as a video particularly for the web.

2) Nothing but Flowers, a sweet, and funny vision of utopia written by the Talking Heads, covered by Latin artist Caetano Veloso. This would be a great song for kids to dance to.
here's the music video of the same song by the Talking Heads.

3) Joanna Newsom's The Sprout and the Bean is a lovely quirky surreal song (voice and harp) with a playful video to match. Beautiful use of animation. Kids would like this one too.

Wrapping it Up

I spent the day after New Year's packing up Christmas. The sun streamed through my windows warming the house as I listened to my favorite Hilliard Ensemble recording. I took the time to carefully wrap the fragile ornaments in tissue and paper straw, sipped green tea and ate biscotti.

I've been thinking about the theme of my New Year's resolutions. I think the word would be "lightness", to have a softer, more subtle touch, to add more levity to my life, to let go of the attachments that drag me down into the dreck. The trick of living in a big city is to have a compassionate outlook and attitude, but not let the suffering and frustration you see around you overwhelm your soul. Many troubles weigh on our minds--especially when we listen to the news on the radio, but at the end of the day you can only hold so much sorrow in your body. You have to let it go. My new trick is to compose haikus in my head before I go to sleep. It's a good habit to get into.


We are waiting for the snow to melt. It's been three weeks. Apparently there's a warm rain gonna fall. I'll believe it when I see it. Lots of trees with broken branches on the walk to school today. Lots of small cars spinnin' their wheels in the snow. Even a big truck full of ale was stuck on Ontario street today. Beer dude, like stay on the main roads! Too bad it wasn't a chocolate delivery truck.

I'm entering the New Year reluctantly, which is odd for me. I just see big piles of work on my desks, tables, chairs, even on the floors. Maybe the rain will melt those piles away too.

Truly you know Christmas is over when you eat the last scrap of Oyama paté, which I did this evening. Well...I still have some discounted Christmas goodies from Choices and Sweet Obsession, so you see I'm stretching it out even further this year. I don't want to risk a lack of chocolate between now and Valentine's Day. Especially with all this snow on the ground and delivery trucks getting waylaid. But if you are driving past our house and get mired in the white stuff, just be sure that we will shovel for chocolate. Good luck with your New Year's Resolutions.

Herd Instinct

The following is an entry I wrote in late November, 2008. I needed to sit on it awhile before I posted it. All the photos are from the East Side Cultural Crawl in Lois Klassen's beautiful little studio.

'Tis the herding season, with crowds gathering to stock up on rich delectable foods and shiny pretty things for the holiday season. The East Side Cultural Crawl was a great opportunity to see what magical things artists have been creating in the neighbourhood this year. Lois Klassen generously opened up her studio to some of her colleagues to have a show and sale of a year of activism and art. It was subversive to have Klassen's studio represent work outside the cash and carry model in this context, but at the same time allow for her friends to sell some objetcs that help earn a few loonies to fund more art projects. Some of the public were perplexed, but many came away charmed. Lois also took the opportunity to a launch a project with Pierre Sonolet that acts as a protest to the skyline as it has been purchased and reformed by the Olympic consortia. I can't wait to participate! Let's get together for a photo-shoot party!

'Tis the stampeding season, with crowds enticed by door-crashing deals to get as much as possible for the lowest price, even if that means someone has to die. And they did. And the herd kept shopping. Non-stop shopping. It is this sad event, which occurred at a Walmart recently which coloured my experience as an audience member attending Herd Instinct 360º by performance artist Fia Backstrom. Images grabbed from the internet whirred past as the artist delivered a stream of consciousness sermon on the darker side of the human instinct to form groups. "I don't believe in relational aesthetics..." she declares, wearing her cynicism on her sleeve and flashing us images of distopias from Andy Warhol's factory to Hitler's followers. The trouble with isolating quotes from her performance is that they are part of a web of stream of conscious text that never really settles on a fixed idea.


"We cannot organize, we cannot produce, nor can we define and contain. It has to pass through us. Happening then dissipating, an inoperative experience. That’s why this meeting, like all the others, is a failure instead of a parody, little less than entertainment. An organized staged theatricality, a gathering, a fictive situation we may call art. I titled it HERD INSTINCT 360 degrees. Stay Connected."
--Fia Backstrom, Herd Instinct 360º

Backstrom calls our gathering a meeting of the art cult, and says tonight's gathering is a (planned) failure. She is cool, intellectual, dissecting the decaying corpses of failed utopias. Backstrom tells the story of a right wing Christian sect, a Baptist settlement in Sweden controlled by a so-called "Bride of Christ" with a God-complex. That story ends in infidelity, murder, and the congregation distancing itself from their male minister because he is Norwegian, and therefore suspect.

"I believe I ought to offer something, but I don’t know precisely what that is. Yes who believes in fists anyhow? Maybe it’s about the stomach instead, the gut feeling of being in touch, of in-touchedness."
--Fia Backstrom, Herd Instinct 360º

Some of the more interesting parts of the lecture refer to the changing motifs of the panther, jaguar and tiger images. How they are used emblems of radical groups, but end up co-opted by capitalism in the luxury car industry. I would have been more interested in this process, the morphology of imagery, and the process of a group turning from a utopia to a state of darkness. Calling the performance Herd Instinct 360º suggests a cycling of good to evil and back again, but there was no talk of redemption here. Backstrom's web site contains the script of the performance.

'Tis the season to be cynical, to be sure, when one sees the herd instinct on Black Friday crush the innocent dreams of redemption through the birth of Christ. But surely there is an option for at least avoiding the Christmas rush. Some tips for dealing with the stress of a prolapsed economy and a growing skyline that leaves our city a little darker every day.

Here are my tips:

1) Avoid Walmart at all times.
2) Be crafty. This time of the year to do those dorky or elegant crafts you've always wanted to indulge in.
3) Go to those craft fairs around town even if you don't buy something. Get inspired.
4) Eat rich, delectable foods.
5) Call someone just to hear the sound of their voice--no really, just do it!
6) Buy some shiny sparkly eyeshadow and/or lipstick.
7) Enjoy the herd on your own terms, and be thankful we can gather with friends and family in a peaceful country, even if the political leaders are uber nerds.
8) Say a prayer for the victims of the attack on Mumbai and for the recent victim of Black Friday.

Moody New Year

On the first day of January 2009 I went for another journey through the snow to the MOP. On the way I caught these photos of a moody sky. What you can't see here were are the hints of iridescence that reflected off some edges of the clouds. It was most unusual.

More Reflecting

Hot Chocolate made with Cocoa West's Poblano Cocoa. Ules garnishes his with whipped cream, marshmallows and chocolate shavings.

What kind of year has it been for you? This year we didn't have a babysitter, so went out very little as a couple. Our dinner at Parkside and the Christmas party at HSG were two exceptions. I truly got stuck in my epicurean trifecta of Chutney Villa, Aphrodite's, and Trafalgar's. Strangely, I really lost my urge to cook or bake much this year. Too much to do and not enough downtime. Meals at our house became economical in terms of time, money, and effort.

This year I really indulged in my love affair with Indian Sweets. These saffron burfi are one of my favorites.

This year food became pared down and simple for me. It has become a mood elevator and means of sustenance rather than an adventure. I rely on food to keep me buoyant and energetic when I start to flag emotionally and physically. Food is medicine for body and soul. This year my diet has to become even more simplified as I struggle to lose some of "the weight." I plan on being more acetic with my food choices. We'll see how that goes, especially with my love for dairy products and sweets.

Making three nutritious meals a day is part of my job here Chez Zucchini, and I need to be more organized this year to create more variety in our diet. In a word, we've sort of been stuck in a rut, especially with regards to school lunches. I'm going to have to do some research on lunch ideas. Anyway, blah blah blah, that's my New Year's ramble on food!