Curio is a public sketchbook for Los Angeles-based artist Eron Rauch. Curiosities both small and large, art and not-art, local and borderless alike. When you are in need of inspiration, just bored or even want to dredge up something to argue about at the bar you can always stop by Curio and hopefully you'll stumble across an idea or two that will pique your interest.
"Group Of Women — Horizontal"
From Neo-Japonisme
Acrylic, Anime Advertisements, Board
Now that I'm an artist in my early 30's I've been rather more preoccupied by musing (and stressing out) about what constitutes success. One of the many thoughts I've had regarding my own life is that I seem to have missed a number of important memos about how to achieve and hold success. Aside from all the usual ones that plague most people (be charming, be lucky, be rich, etc.) I've come to pinpoint one particular problem that seems to have left me in the shadows of history again and again. There isn't a particular word that describes the phenomena that I'm aware of, but the basic problem was made clear to me when I saw an article on Alpaca Niisan, which is a surrealist video game. it wasn't the content of the article that sent my mind spinning to the outer orbits of anxiety, but rather the tiny bio of the author where she mentioned she was getting a PhD studying manga.
You, dear reader, may expect that my next step here is going to be to decry the stupidity of pop culture, or make fun of academia's hyper-specialization. Instead, what this comment triggered in my head was a strong memory of how damn fiercely and how damn long ago it was that I was on the front lines of the anime revolution. Sure, I was never a superstar, but I started five anime clubs (four at different colleges), helped start an anime convention, pushed anime as serious art on my professors (making many converts and writing many papers, a few of which got published), argued on the burgeoning anime academic forums about Nausicaa, edited a zine that published both comics and essays about the form, helped set up dozens of screenings of serious anime movies like Princess Mononoke, was a lecturer at the Schoolgirls and Mobile Suits conference and even traveled around the country to do a six year photo essay that explored the weird, hazy edge-spaces of anime cons.
This essay isn't some more-hipster-than-thou bullshit rant about how I did it first and somehow have unfairly been denied success. Instead, what I find is that I can't help myself thinking about what might have happened with my life if I had just stuck with that first passion. Because here's my problem: I've been involved in a similar way with the rise of electronic music, New Weird fantasy/sci-fi literature, MMORPGs, eSports, craft cocktails, beer nerdery, poetry, Japanese street fashion, underground metal, and even this new-wave of American food culture. With each of these cultures, I've huddled in the cultural trenches and done a solid part to help get them establish themselves. In all of these places, I've met fantastic people who are intimately involved in these scenes, publicly and personally promoted and loved these cultures, and advocated for them to be included in the broader American dialog.
All of these bourgeoning cultures, I too have left. All of them too are no longer my home. I've picked up near-but-not-quite-expert level knowledge in each culture as well. Even when I was young I have been aware that I don't have that one massive passion that my whole life will revolve around. I've also always been hellishly jealous of people who just knew what they were put on this world to do and just did that thing with focus, dedication and passion.
What made me feel this way so intensely when I saw that PhD in anime/manga studies was that my head suddenly reverberated with all the possibilities that might have happened if I had just stuck with that one damn first passion. Or even stuck with any single one of those myriad of later passions that I helped get started then left. What might of happened with my success if I had just focused on going forward with my passion for anime? An additional decade and a half is a damn long time to advance in any of the worlds I've mentioned. All of those connections that would have multiplied and intensified; all of that infrastructure that I helped lay that would have born my stamp; all of the research and academic credit-hours spent amassing knowledge that I could have brought to bear.
Perhaps it was inevitable that someone who hopped around between such a wide assortment of blossoming cultures, helping nudge them toward acceptance and maturation would eventually end up in the art world (especially photography). Certainly, on paper, art is the one constant, the one over-arching professionalism of my life. Certainly, art can be a phenomenal home for this wavering mirage of interests. Yet, on these gray LA days, I can't help but dream of what might have been if my life been less of an intricate web and had just followed one of those threads to the horizon. Daydream congeal in to dancing shades of Eron-the-musician, Eron-the-brewer, Eron-the-sommolier, Eron-the-game-designer, Eron-the-chef, Eron-the-editor, Eron-the-record-label-owner, or Eron-the-anime-oracle, then I shake my head, sip my coffee and go back to hashing out my notes on my projects that I get from my gallery meetings. Anyway, I suppose I should stop meandering the alleys of the past and get moving forward toward finding my new interest, right?
If you are in Los Angeles this week, come by the opening reception for my project Neo-Japonisme this Thursday! Art, ice cream, and beer! Eron Rauch Neo-Japonisme Opening Reception: April 11th 7-9PM Scoops Westside 3400 Overland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90034
More Info:
After Commadore Perry and his Black Fleet forcibly opened trade with Japan in the 1800's there was a fad for Japanese culture that swept across Europe called Japonisme. The results of this fetish can be seen in both the subjects and forms of a wide range of architecture, objects and clothing from that period. The influence of Japanese ideas in the 1800's was especially prominent in art history with numerous anecdotes placing famous artists such as Monet rummaging through the wrappers of shipped goods hoping to find discarded woodblock prints.
In the 2000's a new Japonisme has rushed across America with an influx of anime, ramen, "Harujuku" fashion, kawaii toys, Japanese artists, and video games. Neo-Japonisme is a project which interweaves three veins of artistic investigation to explore the undercurrents of this new-millennium Japanese obsession.
The first thread frenetically re-imagines anime advertising by layering then excavating numerous variations of stock character poses suspended within layers upon layers of gloss varnish. The second thread features sensuously photographed black and white origami crafted from Japanese amateur fan porn comics. The final vein is a rambling pedestrian photographic exploration of Los Angeles's historically fraught and often-redeveloped Little Toyko.
Based in Los Angeles, Eron Rauch received his MFA in photography from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006 and a BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His installation work has recently been featured at the Blue Whale and his writings on the intersection of video games and photography have been presented by the Austrian site Video Game Tourism. More information and projects is available at www.eronrauch.com.
Hi everyone — This is the first day in six weeks that I haven't had to devote every free moment to making work and it feels great! I still have to prep my portfolio of photographs from my Romance project for Photo Lucida, but for the moment I wanted to share some of the shots I took at my recent installation show at the Blue Whale. Daniel Rosenboom and his cohorts absolutely wrecked the place with their astounding music and I want to thank them for bringing me on to be part of a really intense and adventurous night. Be on the lookout for a live album/DVD from the night soon! (Some tracks from a previous session with a different band are up at Daniel's Bandcamp site http://danielrosenboom.bandcamp.com/). The photo-cubes came out quite nicely, having the soft light quality of oversized paper lanterns surrounding the band with a menagerie of vignettes that intersected with the songs they had written for the event. Daniel Rosenboom on trumpet, Alex Noice on guitar, Gavin Templeton on reeds, Kai Kurosawa on bass, and Dan Schnelle on drums.
Up next I'll post the photos from the installation with Wreck & Reference, Crowhurst and So Stressed!
Hi all! If any of you readers are from the Los Angeles area, I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be showing an installation project at the upcoming Daniel Rosenboom Quintet show at the Blue Whale. I'm so excited to be involved with such amazing musicians at such a renowned venue. The installation will be a large, sculptural re-imagining of the Apartment Homes Fakebook project. What better a way to pay homage to the strage, underground, typo-ridden history of jazz Fakebooks that inspired AHFB than at a jazz club — Daniel even wrote a couple of tunes based on the images so expect a really immersive event. Here's a sneak peak of the project:
Saturday Feburary 9th at the Blue Whale! $10 at the door. 123 Astronaut Onizuka St. Suite 301, Los Angeles, CA 90012. I even put together a few copies to sell of the ultra-limited AHFB 1 & 2 xerox books (and might have #3 done as well if everything goes right). Hope to see you there!
PS: The following weekend I'll be doing another installation at a big warehouse show featuring the inimitable Wreck And Reference.
I wish to announce publiclally that I love end-of-the-year music lists. However, before I get flamed as just another hack trying to drive traffic to my site or a neck-beard taste-follower, I don't love these lists because I enjoy pointless numerical rating systems,"top of the decade" prognosticating, or genre-worshipping, dick-measuring nonsense.
No, I love these lists because, similar to making a giant bone-in-ribeye roast and popping a few nice bottles of wine for friends and family, the twilight hours of the year are the perfect time of year to take a rare fifteen minutes away from our hectic jobs and lives and share something cool with each other.
For my list, I have a few caveats: I'm not giving any rankings; I didn't care what genre the music came from; I'm never cool enough to follow what's trendy; Nor is this list complete; This music is just a glimpse of some of the most interesting and potent stuff that inspired me in 2012 that I want to share with all of you!
2012 was a year where the whole hodgepodge of things I like (experimental jazz, electronic, dreamy rock, underground metal and ambient/noise) started really bleeding together in my musical explorations. Just so it's clear, even though I'm giving Alex at Lurker's Path some necessary shit for his pretentious grandstanding, his best of the year "non-list" had some real gems in it so check it out.
In no particular order, here are the albums that inspired me in 2012:
Pinkish Black — Pinkish Black
Exploratory, eclectic, weird, and dark are just the first of many words that might describe this Austin-based project. Fusing doom metal, electronics and dark underground music like The Swans, Pinkish Black takes a lot of chances on this record and it paid off by presenting a bold artistic statement. Not only is this album great, but it is adventurous enough that future releases are all but certain to be even more interesting. For all you fans of strange underground music, this album is a beacon for the future and the past to come together and blend in to a complex web while still retaining a level of expressionist emotional fervor.
Locrian and Mamiffer — Bless Them That Curse Us
It was hard to pick a Locrian record that would best sum up their uncanny ability to collaborate with other artists and end up with the final product being than either band could have accomplished individually. But the project they did with Mamifer on "Bless Them That Curse Us" is perhaps the most amazing because Mamifer is possibly the acoustic polar opposite to their usual guitar-soundscape sensibility. Noise dronescapes and clanking piano melodies interweave. Dark farmhouse echoes and buzzing feedback form midnight architectures. However, what really makes this record shine is it's conciseness. The songs are focused and highly-resolved in a way that more experimental recording artists could learn from. (Check out Locrian's Christoph Heeman collaboration for a mind-blowing, but very challenging listen on the inimitable Handmade Birds label.)
Aesop Rock — Skelethon
Completely strange yet engaging beats warp your head while dark wisdom stutters all around. This is easily Aesop Rock's most mature work to date, and the fulfillment of all of his abstract rap experiments since Labor Days. While dozens of underground hip-hop artists have come and gone during his tenure, the themes of this album show that Aesop's ability for self-criticism and self-reflection have kept him above fray and pushing himself to new and more uncanny places.
MGLA — With Hearts Toward None
It's the year after black metal went mainstream — As such, I didn't expect to find much this year that was interesting if just because there would be a flood of mediocre hipster crap on the market, but damn, this MGLA album leapt out ahead of the pack on the first listen with it's no frills, high quality, guitar-forward tracks. Dark, angry, filled with ringing distortion, it still manages to maintain a sense of melody that renders some of the tracks bordering on "catchy." Modern sounding (that is, with good, weighty recording) but still just as potent as it's nihilist predecessors.
Purity Ring — Shrines
If you had asked me at the beginning of the year if I would have added a post-witch-house album to my best of the year list, I would have laughed the beer I was drinking out of my nose. But Purity Ring absolutely floored me at FYF Fest this summer. Yes, they use a lot of stripped-down and lo-fi electronics in their work, but as musicians they resemble a modernist take on Portishead's soulful vocal tightness more than Salem's intentional/hipster sloppiness. Massive bass, simple synths serve as the foundation for the trippy, well-performed vocals softly speaking of creepy, morbid and erie subjects. Just take the car out for a pointless drive, turn this up and let it wash over you. Then listen really close and get a bit freaked out.
Horseback — Half Blood
I still don't really understand this album. But I say that in the best possible way. Listening to Half Blood from the perspective of metal must be somewhat similar to what seeing Cubism was to people used to Academy realist painters in the early 1900's. What makes this album so shocking in a world filled with mediocre drone bands who are content with nearly building an exterior perception of being "inaccessible" while relying on the same familiar core motifs, Horseback's layers, fragments, repetitions and shimmering sonic textures are the core of the album. Half Blood is reframing what metal and underground rock could sound like,and doing it all while working without a tightrope. Three paths seem like good inroads for the non-initiate to experience this music: 1) A lot of what's going on here sounds like early and mid-period Sonic Youth guitar texture experiments. (This realization came when I noticed that a track from Impale Golden Horn, their first album, sounds like Phillip Glass doing a cover of the first 4 bars of "Daydream Nation.") 2) This is the repetitive flatness of black metal taken to a hypnotic extreme. 3) The Americana-inflected instrumentation serves as a cue to attempt to read these tracks as being poetic ruminations about the specific kind of Southern Gothic psycho-geography.
Zelienople — The World Is A House On Fire
The World Is A House On Fire — aside from having a brilliant album name — may be the most overlooked album of the year. Combining minimal acoustic Americana artiness and lush studio production, Zelienople has made the quintessential 3AM album. Loss, longing, shadows, echoes, forgetfulness and melancholy are harnessed to craft a sonic geography populated by loops of specters made from mist with the dawn still a long way off. Great studio production and stellar work by a band functioning at their peak as a unit.
Tim Berne — Snake Oil
2012 was a brilliant year for jazz. So many young, amazingly talented, deeply committed and broadly inspired musicians are finding their voices in jazz. I think one of the places to watch in the musical underground is going to be how avant jazz integrates it's reach in to the rest of music in the coming years. For now, we should be glad we have such brilliant mature musicians like Berne leading groups of upcoming artists. Twisting but inevitable compositions, adventurous harmonic structures and a supernatural precision of execution mark these tracks. If you have any doubts about the whether or not this kind of music might be sought after as next wave after post-rock finishes fizzling out, it's indicative that the drummer for Xiu Xiu is the drummer on this album. The pinnacle of both intellect and energy fused in to one album.
Pallbearer – Sorrow And Extinction
At this point, it seems almost redundant to talk about this album, given it's perpetual placement at the top of many other year-end-lists. However, I want to use my statment to point out some of the more obtuse, but significant, threads that weave through this album. Yes, it sounds a lot like classic doom metal, but there are moments of melodic-cathartic brilliance in the compositions that have as much to Purity Ring as Electric Wizard— and there are moments of vast sonic-Americana-architecture that read more like Zelienople's late-night melancholy than any High On Fire album. It's the emotional range, spanning loss and redemption, moshing and mourning, (and one might say emotional "maturity" if that weren't a dirty word in the music world) that separates Pallbearer from their peers.
Al-Namrood — Kittab Al-Awtahn
I hate symphonic black metal. I nearly vomited because of the first track's MIDI synths on this album and shelved the album for another 6 months. Next time I listened, I skipped the first track and was met with an insane barrage of psychedelic Middle Eastern music and ferociously guttural black metal. Completely unique and brazen with curious polyrhythmic percussion and howling overdriven guitars. This is really jaw-drooping music, and doubly so that the band name means "the non-believer" and they are located in Saudi Arabia.
Oak Pantheon — From A Whisper
Another band that might fall in to the "post black metal" label if just because there isn't a great fit in any other genre, Oak Pantheon put out a fantastic short EP last year that got folks in the metal world talking. From A Whisper, far from a retread of the EP, is a massively forward-looking statement of an album. The spawning tracks that make savvy musical callbacks to themselves and other tracks. Epic guitar riffs, piano breakdowns, unsettling guttural monologues, shout-along choruses, stifling double kick drums, political content, fingerpicked acoustic guitars and more all resound together. With a heart of punk, the hands of prog rockers, their heads filled with cathartic movie soundtracks and their dark souls owned radiating black metal, this album is breathtaking. Sure there are a few indulgences and missteps, but it's one hell of a ride to listen to the whole album.
The Great Old Ones — Al Azif
If last year was the year black metal died a very public death, nothing was more disappointing than the inevitable rise of "post-black metal," which like most "post-" genres is pretty much like the original thing, but way more boring and less risky (the same with that genre tag "progressive"). However, being as wide of a net as the term is, it inevitably catches artists that don't fit in to another genre. Al Azif is one of those bands — Sporting a name from HP Lovecraft, and writing songs in the Cthulu mythos I wasn't expecting much, but these tracks are very sonically challenging and well-composed. Taking a cue from complex post-rock bands like And So I Watch You From Afar and post-metal (i.e. sludge) bands like NeurIsis and The Ocean, Al Azif fuses it all with the unsettling intensity of black metal. Arty but still extreme, this album is a brilliant meditation on alienation, inhumanity, and the horror of the unknown. Perfect music to be the soundtrack if the Mayans were right.
Willits + Sakamoto — Ancient Future
Charming is not a word that you see used much for minimal soundscape and ambient work, especially a work with an icy and crystalline bent, but the work crafted in Ancient Future by the interweaving, pausing and fading guitars and piano duet made me sigh with pleasure. This is subtle, slow-moving music perfect for contemplating the winter landscape. Many of the emotional overtones of this album remind me of the more pastoral moments in Miyazaki films. Charming without sacrificing it's sense of contemplating alone-ness.
Aksumite — Prideless Lions
I'll be up-front: I ganked this wholesale from Lars's NPR best metal list. I had never heard of the band or their label, but I managed to get a copy a few weeks before 2012 ended and I have listened to it a dozen times already. Reimagining the black metal / punk hybrid through the idiom of live 2" tape recordings and overwhelming walls of analog distortion, this two piece band will have you moshing (note: my first version had this autocorrected to "noshing") and pumping your fist in your bedroom every time you play it. Ferocious performances across the board make this blend of early black metal's rawness and hardcore punk's energy sound as massively potent as Venom must have sounded in their heyday without any hint of being "retro." "Instant classic" gets thrown around by lazy writers, but this 25 minute long album has that particular quality of inevitability which makes that term relevant.
Ikue Mori, Evan Parker, Bill Laswell, Mark Naeseef — Near Nadir
This album came out in December last year, but after most 2011 lists had been released so I'm including it here. This is the most tripped-out, sonically challenging jazz album I've heard in ages. Jittering electronics, saxophone screeches, walls of God-knows-what-pots-and-pans-percussion and eerie guitar drones weave through a twisting hyperspace of improvisation. Legitimately challenging in the intricate interplays happening at a break-neck pace , these pieces have a vibe of a deep space in a shattered far future — this is the soundtrack of the wreckage of fleets of warships to drift through the void for eternity, haunted only by the ghosts of their computers and the unheard howl of the solar wind racing through their punctured hulls.
Dodecahedron — Dodecahedron
From the initial skronky dissonant "riff" that opens the album, this album sets it's own anxious, inhuman corse through the shadow realms of blackened death metal. Spitting in the face of the low-end heavy djent explosion, the instrumentation of Dodecahedron has an emphasis on a razor thinness that reminds me of the notorious sonic aggression of the "treble attack" bands like Heroin, Cromtech and Arab On Radar. Angular is an adjective often used to describe music with obtuse guitar runs and curious drumming, but here the music tends toward a bleakness that is more like the outlines of shards of a fractured mirror than any prog-rock wanking. I'd highly recommend this album to any Dillenger Escape Plan, Converge or Car Bomb fans who are searching for something even more frighteningly chaotic.
Slugabed — Time Team
This is a trippy, silly but still banging electronic album filled with glitch cuts, fractured samples and oblique melodies. What separates Time Team it from the rest of the pack of post-IDM is that it has a wry sense of humor that stems from a deep macro-understanding of the interconnected sonic ecology of electric music's notoriously myopic genres. A single song might have asymmetrical funky drums, hyper-synthy kick hits, disco-y samples, some warped 8-bit meandering chimes, occasional spurts of distorted dub step bass that might immediately fades in to an electropop breakdowns then go off into the most shimmering complexity like late 90's IDM then dropping in to a post-downtempo tribal who chambers. Even if all that rambling doesn't mean anything to you, you'll still probably like it, since similar to Mount Kimbie or Burial, the handicraft of the music production process sits fairly far forward giving the whole swirling mess an improvised and organic feeling. Some serious ear candy.
Gigan — Quasi-Hallucinogenic Landscapes
Psychedelic + death-metal + hardcore = ???? This album continues my fixation this year on "weird." Swirling guitars punctuated by death metal growls, skittering guitar runs overlapping reverb-drenched synths all jammed in to massively sprawling break-neck song structures. This is at once the most intense but also most grin-inducing death metal album I heard this year. Sure to be polarizing, and more than a bit self-indulgent, Gigan's newest album ups the ante event further into the sheer-craze zone that was hinted at in their first release. This is an extremely unique, idiosyncratic rec-onception of death metal. Like the Dodecahedron album, "Quasi-Halluciongenic Landscapes" album will probably be more interesting to Dillenger Escape Plan fans than fans of Kreator. It's certainly way more interesting than the disappointing Car Bomb album from this year.
Janel and Anthony - Where Is Home
I had the opportunity to hear guitarist Anthony Pirog play in DC earlier in the year, but wasn't sure what to expect from the duo album he did with his equally talented wife, violist Janel Leppin. Both known for creating wide sonic palates with their respective instruments, the album wanders and unfolds to fully utilize their many modes of playing and composing. Some tracks are relatively straight forward romps through place-music, such as "Big Sur," while others, like "Where Will We Go" veer deep into sonic experimentation filled with electronic manipulations. All of the tracks are built in such a way that they feel lively and intimate even as they open up to reveal cinematic their impressions. Their humble use of space and sparse melody disguises deeply adventurous structures and improvisational phrasings which reward repeated listens.
Wildernessking - The Writing Of Gods In Sand
Clean, defined and mixed to sound like humans are actually playing the instruments this is an album that seems a bit unassuming on the first listen. But I came to love the combination that resulted from the direct-sounding recording and the winding structures of modern black metal on The Writing Of Gods In Sand. This is very modern sounding music that knows how to restrain itself from the mythopoetic and operatic tendencies of so much modern black metal. The sound of the instruments here is more akin to a live recording of a post-rock band than most metal. But what it lacks in flashiness it cashes in to reclaim metal's ability to act in an artistically directly way (which is where the punk influence really shines) in the modern world that is so obscured in the 2012 rise of "occult" and "retro" bullshit.
Pure, unapologetic bedroom experimental music. Arty and obtuse as hell, but it still has a sense of hazy coolness that makes it kin with some of My Bloody Valentine's more abstract recordings. These tracks all have a sense of nostalgia that is counter-balanced by a keen awareness of the wear and tear of the modern world. Sound-as-architecture conceptualism combines with direct use of instruments to comment on the poetics of internal spaces in such a way that the music is always intimate and inviting. It's strange to call an album of sound art "observed" but the hints of melodies and emotional resonance of the warm synth sounds and spoken phrases seem nearly diaristic. This album is a collection of almost unbearably rich, complex explorations of the ways that music constructs itself to interact with our emotions.
Before I sign off for a while I want to mention a few additional records that I suspect might have made the official list, but for one reason or another I haven't listened to it enough to make a firm judgement.
Sutekh Hexen — Larvae
This is by far the darkest, most bleak album I heard this year.
Agalloch — Faustian Echoes EP
I'm normally not an Afalloch fan, but the addition of Aesop Dekker on drums has really changed the artistic tenor of the band, and I think I like it.
Gojira — Le Infant Sauvage
I just haven't listened too it enough, but it seems like their best album since From Mars To Sirius.
Cloud Nothings — Attack On Memory
Really uneven, but had some interesting ideas and reformulations of the indie-noise-rock paradigm.
No Youth — Wreck And Reference
Super dark, gloomy, emotionally painful metal. It's pretty hard to listen to all the way through, but the sheer sonic vocabulary and rawness of this album is amazing.
Anla Courtis, Okkyung Lee, C.Spencer Yeh, Jon Wesseltoft - Cold/Burn
I really don't like drone music, but I'm a huge Okkyung Lee fan after discovering "Noisy Love Songs" last year, so I gave this album a try. Only listened to it a couple of times so far, but the richly layered, nuanced live strings make for a fascinating sonic tapestry.
Coffee and a rainy sunday afternoon are the perfect combination to facilitate a day dedicated catching up reading Critical Distance, making end-of-the-year mixtapes and, as promised, typing up some new recipes. Winter may not have been the most auspicious time to rejoin the Silverlake Farms CSA, but from past experience I've found whether it be red kobocha squash or freshly picked beets, there are plenty of interesting items to challenge my cooking skills.
In this recipe, I'm happy to be able to share one of my favorite kitchen tricks, which is using both the beets and their greens. If you haven't ever cooked with beet greens, don't worry at all — slice them off the top of the beet and lay them on the counter and you'll realize it won't take too much imagination to think of them like chard or kale.
Roasted Beet and Wild Rice Salad
Serves 4 As A Main
1 small sweet onion (1/2 of a larger onion), chopped
1 cup wild rice
1.5 lb beets w/greens (3 large beets), greens thoroughly washed, stemmed and sliced in to thin strips (1/4")
1/4 walnuts, roughly chopped
1 tbs + 1tbs olive oil (divided)
1 tbs fresh lemon juice
2 tsp nice sherry vinegar (white balsamic or champagne vinegars would work as well)
small handful of fresh basil, sliced in to very thin strips
1/4 c. chèvre cheese, crumbled (goat feta or even crumbly blue cheese works great as well)
salt and pepper to taste
1) Roast the beets: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Chop off the greens 1" from the top of the beet and reserve. Wash beets. Wrap each beet individually in foil. Bake for 60 minutes on a baking, or until they are tender when poked with a fork. Let cool. Once cool, remove the skin using your fingers (it should come off fairly easily if they are cooked through.) Cut in to 1/2" cubes.
2) Make the wild rice: Wash the rice well in a strainer. Put rice, 4 cups water and 1/2 tsp salt in a kettle. Bring to a boil, cover, and reduce heat and gently simmer for about 45 minutes. Uncover and let stand for 10 minutes. Drain excess water if necessary. Fluff with a fork and let cool a bit.
3) Make sure to thoroughly wash the reserved beet greens since they tend to be quite dirty. I prefer to soak them in cold water for five minutes and then wash them. Dry the greens in a salad spinner or on paper towels. Cut out the stems (and discard) then slice the remaining leafy parts in to thin strips (1/4").
Hello everyone! It's been a couple months since I made a post here, but it's been for good reasons. I've been working like crazy, both professionally and artistically. Between taking trips to NYC and Chicago for work and getting the first stages of my project about professional video gaming as well as planning a trip to PhotoLudica.
The next post I have planned is a rundown of my favorite albums from 2012, but in the mean time feel free to check out some of the of revised portfolio at my site, especially "Romance," my project about Renaissance Faire architecture. If you want some good reading, head over to Critical Distance, which compiles the most fascinating and challenging articles about video games and gaming culture. Also, if you have any interest in furthering your understanding of Duchamp, I recently read "Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess" which explores his relationship professionally, personally and artistically with the game.
Also, Callie and I have started getting CSA produce again so expect some recipes in the mix!
I am a Los Angeles based artist and writer with an MFA in photography from the California Institute of the Arts. This blog is a place to showcase the expanded field of my interests in an informal way. If you want to see more of my art, I have many projects available to view on my web site http://eronrauch.com! Also check out my tumblr, Romance, which features work-in-progress. Connect up with me on Twitter for the latest news at @eronrauch.
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