A Couple of Things in Place of my Sunday List, which I think I've given up on entirely

If you know anything about me you know that I love gin. It's delicious and it kind of goes with anything sweet, sour, or salty. I had bought myself a bottle of Hendrick's for Christmas a couple years ago and it was still hanging around in my fridge. I had a sort of productive day which included a doctor's appointment, finalizing some details regarding an art show I'm organizing and hitting up 401 Richmond to check out a few shows (more on that later). I got home hungry and ready to cook some quinoa which was pretty uneventful but when I decided to segment a pink grapefruit my afternoon started to look up. I decided to drain the Hendrick's and throw my grapefruit juice and segments into the same glass with some ice cubes and top it all off with some blood orange sugar. I never drink at home when I'm alone but this Tuesday afternoon cocktail is well deserved (please keep in mind that my Tuesday is equivalent to a normal person's Sunday due to my work schedule). The only thing detracting from my productive and positive afternoon is the raging fight taking place between the people who live above me, lots of yelling and slamming things up there but I've got some Gram Parsons playing so it's drowning it all out.


As I mentioned I went to 401 Richmond today to check out the Harun Farocki show at Prefix Gallery but it turns out they aren't open on Tuesdays, boo. I did get to see Aleesa Cohene's video piece "Something Better" at YYZ. I will admit that I usually have very little patience for video work but this is one that you truly must see. It's part of the 22nd Images Festival and you owe it to yourself to see it! You can check out some of her other work here: www.aleesacohene.com

That's kind of it for now, I have a ton of stuff to read for research, organize a one night art show, update my resume, look for some internships and possible artist residences, create a facebook group, call Brooke, book hotels in Spain, Shannon and Dublin....I'm going to have an anxiety attack! Good thing I have a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and 3 more grapefruits! (I'm joking, I promise!)

Hibiscus and Rosehips

Prepare yourselves to be harassed into coming to this event.

The Hibiscus and Rosehips Folk Tea Party

Hibiscus and Rosehips was created to support the Lymphoma charity 'The Hibiscus Fund for Hope' with music community related events. The Hibiscus Fund supports people going through Lymphatic Cancer treatment in countless amazing ways that are not covered by the health system, to help ease the burden of what life turns into while undergoing Cancer treatment. They help provide drugs that are key to treatment that are not covered by OHIP and are incredibly expensive, along with helping single parents who suddenly find they need to have their children in day care and simply don't have the money. They make it possible for patient's families to be with them while undergoing treatment by helping to pay travel costs and lodging. They provide support in so many other overlooked areas to ease the difficulties of life while undergoing Cancer treatment.

The first event to raise money and awareness for the 'Hibiscus Fund For Hope' will be a Folk Tea Party Bake Sale in a Toronto art studio space. Musicians will strum and pluck and sing and cupcakes will be eaten with relish (Gusto! not the condiment). Some group hand clapping is fairly inevitable and locally produced crafts and jewelry and artwork will be available for perusal.

It will be a family friendly event and there will be colourful caffeine free tea and finger sandwiches with no crusts for younger tastes.

It will also be the release of the Hibiscus & Rosehips compilation Cd.
check the Cd page for more details.

Location: The Resistor Gallery
284 College Street 2nd Floor (at Spadina)
(416) 849 3975 Map

Date: Sunday April 19th 2009
Time: 1pm - 6pm

Bands Playing

Luxury Pond
Snowblink
Erin Lang
Owl Eyes
The Youngest
Jesse Smith

Go to www.hibiscusandrosehips.com for more info and please, please, please attend and support this great cause!

Best Brownies Ever

I promised Kyle that I'd make him brownies for his birthday which was last Monday. I didn't get around to it until Wednesday mostly because I'm a huge procrastinator but they went over extremely well and I thought I'd post the recipe.

Peanut Butter, Peanut Butter Cup Brownies A.K.A "I'm Fat Now"

1 cup of bittersweet chocolate*
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into pieces (this measurement translates into 1 stick of butter)
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup + 1 tbsp all purpose flour
1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
12 small peanut butter cups, cut into quarters**

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and grease or line your pan
2. Put about an inch or two of water in a medium sized pot and when it starts to boil put a stainless steel bowl over the pot with the chocolate and butter inside and heat until warm and melted. Remove and set aside.
3. In a separate medium bowl or mixer whisk together eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla until the eggs are thick and light coloured (approx. 2 mins)
4. Stir peanut butter into the warm butter-chocolate mixture until completely blended
5. Whisk in the chocolate-butter-peanut butter mixture and then fold in your flour
6. Bake for 25-30 mins

*you can use chocolate chips if you like, if you decide to use Baker's chocolate measure out 8oz. of chocolate for the recipe

**I used President's Choice mini peanut cups which were cheaper, and tastier than Reese peanut butter cups. If you can only get your hands on the large peanut butter cups use between 7-8 of them

Money and Haircuts

I got my haircut yesterday and I'm just realizing how much I got chopped off! I must admit it feels great though, no more dead, dry, nasty split ends! I went to Vidal Sasoon and got a free haircut from someone who had cut 2 of my friend's hair and he did an excellent job. I swore I'd never do the free haircut thing again after going to Aveda a few years ago and leaving with almost no hair...seriously I had to tell the girl to stop because there was no hair left for her to cut/butcher. I was very impressed and made sure to tip him nicely when I was all done. If anyone is interested in getting an excellent free haircut please let me know and I'll give you the stylist's name etc.

So my free haircut goes hand in hand with my new resolution to stop spending money. I'm going to Europe in May and I don't want it to break the bank completely so it's to to smarten up and save my cash! I usually don't cook for myself but I think it's time I get over myself and start bringing a sack lunch to work if I want to drink pints of Guiness in Dublin and sip sherry in Jerez.

In order to save some cash I've also decided to start spending less money on food and start learning to cook for myself. I found this great website tastespotting.com and I've fallen in love with it. There are great pictures and recipes from all over the place. I'm making post-birthday peanut butter cup brownies for Kyle tonight and we'll wash it all down with the $7.45 bottle of wine I picked up. The motto of the chef at the restaurant I work at goes a little something like this "Life's too short to drink bad wine", but honey I'm broke...

Another Sunday List

I've been slacking and I apologize here is my weekly list of all things good, fair and just.

- I have just returned from having dinner at The Black Hoof on Dundas West and it was amazing! They have great charcuterie, an affordable wine list and great cocktails. Not for vegetarians or the faint of heart (think pig terrine, bone marrow and cow tongue) but if you can handle it this little place is great to his before or after dinner and their cocktails are different, affordable and tasty!

- On Sunday evening I attended the "Lobster Sunday" event held at Jamie's Area in Kensington market, which was hosted by Dean Baldwin and was a brand new kind of experience for me. My father is obsessed with lobster, we have many nicknames for him in my family and shellfish is one thing Dad doesn't mess around with. I have witnessed him retrieve a lobster from the garbage because there was still some meat left on it. Anyway, this lobster sunday event (acutally Lobster Sundae) featured approximately 50 lobsters and all you can eat ice cream sundaes. The set up was a big long table down the middle of the room with 3 hotplates and boiling pots. Dean started the night off by dropping 2 or 3 lobsters into the first pot and the rest of the night involved sawing, breaking, hammering, cracking and poking lobster meat out of their exoskeletons. Amazing. Check out my other blog at daysinayear.blogspot.com for a few videos of the event.

- www.chocolateresearchfacility.com = mmmmmmmm


- check out David Maisel's work at www.davidmaisel.com, he was featured in Flaunt magazine this month.

“Each canister holds the remains of a human being, of course; each canister holds a corpse – reduced to dust, certainly, burnt to handfuls of ash, sharing that cindered condition with much of the star-bleached universe, but still cadaverous, still human. What strange chemistries we see emerging here between man and metal. Because these were people; they had identities and family histories, long before they became nameless patients, encased in metal, catalytic.

In some ways, these canisters serve a double betrayal: a man or woman left alone, in a labyrinth of medication, prey to surveillance and other inhospitable indignities, only then to be wed with metal, robbed of form, fused to a lattice of unliving minerals – anonymous. Do we see in Maisel’s images then – as if staring into unlabeled graves, monolithic and metallized, stacked on shelves in a closet – the tragic howl of reduction to nothingness, people who once loved, and were loved, annihilated?”

Or do we just see ourselves in another form? The byproduct of a chemical bloom of color, the matter we used to be creating a florescence marking not the end, but continuous and constant change, even after death?"

Dentistry

We took The Cobra to the vet today and she needs to have a tooth removed. She has a broken canine tooth (it's weird that felines have canine teeth) and that baby needs to come out soon!

I didn't add my weekly Sunday list this week, mainly because I forgot about it until yesterday (Wednesday) and I was feeling too lazy to do anything about it...I'll smarten up this week though.

wine and more wine

I'm not going to lie, I bought this bottle of wine because of it's label but I'm drinking it as I type this and it is one tasty bottle. That's it! Time for bed!

I'm way late but whatever...

I have never been one for gardening but lately I've been in love with the idea of starting a terrarium. I went home for a few days earlier this week for my brother's birthday and while shopping for a gift for him my Mum and I stumbled across the perfect terrarium container. It looks just like this but without anything inside it of course, I was too lazy to take a picture

When I was in San Francisco last summer I visited this amazing shop called "Paxton Gate" which is kind of like a gardening/curiosity shop. While there I picked up some seeds that I thought were venus flytrap seeds but it turns out that they are Drosera capensis seeds which is another type of carnivorous plant that looks like this:So I was thinking of planting this bad boy in my terrarium and maybe ordering some venus flytrap seeds online and making a badass carnivorous plant terrarium. I'm offically a big nerd!

From the vault

This is an old image that didn't make the cut for a third year project where the theme was "mundane". I went to the cemetery and photographed fake flowers at the end of winter...my teacher thought it was great, I'm just a weirdo who is fascinated by cemeteries. When my brother and I were kids we used to love to visit cemeteries, most likely because we thought they were haunted. Our parents thought we were crazy but I distinctly remember a trip to our grandparent's house one summer when we made them stop at every one we passed by on our way there. To this day I find myself drawn to the Mount Pleasant cemetery and the one in St. Jamestown and I'm not quite sure why, maybe I was a grave digger in a past life.

Sunday Blowout

- I went to Caplansky's for lunch last Thursday and if you eat meat you need to eat meat there. For $12 you get a bowl of soup or fries, coleslaw, a smoked meat sandwich and a pickle! Wash everything down with some root beer and top it off with a slice of pie and you will be full for about 2 days. Caplansky's is on Clinton just south of College and I'm pretty sure they only serve lunch and it's kind of weird because they operate out of the Monarch Tavern but seem to be a separate entity.

In the heart of downtown Philadelphia, among abandoned buildings and impoverished neighborhoods where drugs and unemployment pervade, is a place called Fletcher Street. A block that upon first glance looks just like all the others, that is, until you see the horses and hear their hoof beats.

Horses? In the middle of the ghetto? Surprisingly, yes. They have been here for years, when the African American community thrived in Philadelphia, before drugs and unemployment steadily encompassed healthy neighborhoods and they disintegrated into urban war zones.

Despite it all, the horses have stayed, and they have because of the small, passionate, dedicated group of men determined to reclaim their neighborhood and their children. In this fight, they use the one thing that they know, love and trust, the horses.

Check out the work of photographer Martha Camarillo at www.marthacamarillo.com

- I'm sure I've already mentioned this in earlier posts but I love the TV show 30 Rock, and you should too
- I stumbled across this great plate and many others at www.thomaspaul.com. Thomas Paul is a designer from New York and you can see the variety of his work on his website. I love the gothic doily melamine plates

I think that's it for this week! Happy Monday!

Music for the 2nd Week of March

Eazy-E

Untitled (for the time being)
Cross-stitch embroidery on fabric
8 inches x 8 inches

Detail

Biggie

Untitled (for the time being)
Cross-stitch embroidery on fabric
8 inches x 8 inches
(He's a little green in the face, I know. Too much Moet and Alize, or the computer file was a little wonky)

Detail

Tupac

Untitled (for the time being)
Cross-stitch embroidery on fabric
8 inches x 8 inches

Detail

The Little One

My brother was born when I was three and the only things I remember about going to the hospital to see him was seeing the lizards that are kept in the hospital lobby terrarium and a nurse giving me tiny bottle of Scope mouthwash (I'm not sure why). We've had our differences but Paul is a pretty awesome dude who shares my disgusting sense of humour, swears like a trucker and can be pretty profound sometimes without even knowing it. We have been through a hell of a lot together and I'm sure there's still a lot more shit left for us to handle. I was looking through photos on my computer when I found this one and just felt like it was time to write a little something about my little brother, or as I refer to him "Lil Brudder". You're Grade A all the way, Raymond!

The Sunday, Sunday, Sunday List on Monday, Monday, Monday

Hi Friends,

Due to getting called in to work and drinking a lot of wine last night I could not compile my weekly list of amazing things so here I am to let you know all the good stuff I discovered last week...

- Hibiscus and Rosehips is a charity organization that a friend of mine told me about. They support 'The Hibiscus Fund for Hope' which supports patients and their family who are undergoing treatment for Lymphatic cancer. They will be hosting their first fundraising event which is a folk tea party and bake sale on April 19th in Toronto. I just contacted the organizer today to see if I could get a spot selling some anti-cancer cupcakes at the event. When my brother ws going through cancer treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma my family's mantra was "FUCK CANCER!" which is a phrase I'd love to pipe onto vanilla cupcakes, I'm not sure if everyone would find it as appropriate as we did though.

- Go to www.toast.co.uk and check out their spring/summer catalogue, the clothing is simple, too expensive for my blood these days but I love the hankerchief in the pocket thing that's going on

- www.loyalloot.com, check out the log bowls...amazing

- I also discovered google books when I was searching for a book I found today at the Toronto Reference Library. It seems that the only copy that exists in Toronto is at the Reference Library and I was relieved when I found the whole book available for me on google books, ahhh technology.


Also, I just canceled my website andrea-raymond.com and will be using this blog to post images and updates of my work from now on, or until I get someone to design a classier website for me. The website featured mostly undergrad artwork which is no longer relevant or even stuff I'd like others to see!

A Playlist For the First Week of March

So I figured I'd start to make weekly playlists (I'm all about posting things weekly or monthly it seems). There are 7 songs on this playlist, one song for every day of the week. I would like to mention that the T.I song on this list is dedicated to Zoe who is back in MTL, I had fun playing Trouble and being completely offensive with you this week!