My Neighbor Eugenia
by John Hoppin

When it gets cold, you can put more clothes on. When it gets hot you can keep taking clothes off until you don't have anything on and it will still be hot.

I went into the hallway, my neighbor had her door open. It was 113 on the heat index. It was hot in the hallway. My AC was set to 78 degrees, it had blown the electricity and I needed keys to the basement. She had a grimy plastic fan. 90 years old, she lay on the couch in a transparent night gown with la enfirmera sitting next to her. Hace calor. Si, hace calor. It's hot. Yes, it's hot.

Last year she laid on the couch so long that they said it had bedbugs and carried it out one Sunday. In the middle of the family party when the men were there. They dumped it in front of the empty lot next door. Somebody took it, or threw it away or the kids broke it to bits. For a few weeks, she sat on a wooden chair in the middle of the room watching TV. Hardly anything in the old apartment, everything there was cracked and broken. The same fridge for 25 years with each landlord telling her she'll get a new one. The exterminator came to spray for bedbugs but it didn't do anything. I ordered diatomaceous earth from the internet and sprinkled it into every crack I could. The bugs didn't come, I don't think she had them in the first place. I think most of that stuff is to sell papers.

She moved to New York City from Puerto Rico in 1960. She has keys to all the buildings on the block because she had been the super back then. Patty was drunk on the stoop and remembered when Eugenia was mayor of the block. The keys hang on a ring inside the door kind of hidden. I have to borrow them whenever I blow the fuse with my AC and I need to unlock the basement and flip the breaker. Right when we got the AC it used to blow whenever you made espresso or when you ironed. It's avoidable if you are mindful of it. Eugenia has only been in our apartment once in five years and she said it was beautiful. I wanted to show her pictures but I couldn't find them.

I formed a relationship with my wife which eventually put my house in order. We put up ceiling fans, we had a friend make us a dining table, we went to the furniture store in Maspeth, and many other things combined to make the house comfortable. Our neighborhood can be very unpleasant because there is a waste transfer station a block away and garbage trucks up and down the streets at all hours. When I moved here I liked it because it was lonely, but people have started to come here despite the smell and the loud noises. Parking has become more difficult in the past couple of years. There is a hair salon across from the transfer station. They sold our building and maybe the new landlords will buy me out.

She told me I could make my own copy of the keys, that I could make a copy tomorrow, but I couldn't understand any more because I didn't speak enough Spanish and it was frustrating to talk about complicated things that I didn't understand.

Last year, we ordered two house fans on Amazon. They were stronger than her old white one so we gave her one of them. We had the AC now and we only really used one of them. She was happy. I didn't make a copy of the keys. I found out the other day that she thought I was from Colombia. For five years I have been telling her I am from California. My accent must be very poor.

I've been hanging out in the library again, reading Nathan Mhyrvold's Modernist Cuisine.  It's a six-volume encyclopedia of Modernist Cuisine, the foodie phenomenon resulting from the marriage of food and technology.  The books take a sober and scientific approach to food, but also a lush and seductive coffee-table-book giant-color-photograph approach.  The set cost about $650 when it first came out and they are down to a bit over $400.  I've been reading them at the library where they live in the reference room.

Periodically while reading I'll take some notes or take a photo of the page.  The page above has two recipes on it.  The first one is for garlic cloves and olive oil in a mason jar, in a water bath, and pressure cooked for two hours.

Nukazuke is pickled vegetables that are pickled in brown rice bran.  You flavor the bran with ginger, cabbage, and salt water.  The bran is traditionally stirred by hand every day, which prevents unwanted bacterial growth.  After a culture is developed from the ginger and cabbage, they get sifted out and the nuka is ready for use.  I am going to try to go to Sunshine Mart to get some of the stuff.  I had an epiphany that part of my home should be devoted to Japanese stuff, and this is part of it.

This is some space-age stuff.  You buy a bunch of Novozymes-brand Pectinex Ultra SP-L and some Smash-XXL and put 3g of it in with 1kg of water and 300g citrus fruit.  Sit the fruit in the water for 12 hours and the enzymes will eat the peel.  You can also include the pith and they will eat that as well.  The process can leave behind some residue, which is pictured at bottom-right.  This is like when you get those mandarin oranges in a can and they are peeled; this is how they do that more or less.  You can buy the Ultra SP-L here.  Smash-XXL is discontinued.  You can make the recipe using all Ultra SP-L and it will work.  However, this is part of what freaks me out about this type of cooking, that a food product can be discontinued, because Modernist Cuisine foods are processed foods, part of the military-industrial thing.  So I am not 100% at ease with this. 

Occupy Oakland, Frank Ogawa Plaza, the morning they took down the camp there.  You can see the back of garbage truck at the left side of the photograph.  They had backed it into the camp and were throwing everything inside.  The cops were out in a line, with guns, zip ties, and video cameras.  It sucked.  I shot this from behind a barracade stretched across 14th Street on the west side of Broadway.

People were getting hyphy in the intersection.  When I took a photo of them, they said, "Erase that photograph, blood."  The photograph wasn't of anything important, I was just taking pictures and I happened to take one of them.

In 2004, I lived in Oakland on Miles Avenue down the block from Ted Purves, Susanne Cockrell, and their son Oliver.  I lived at the corner of Miles and Hudson, one house in on the west side of Miles.  Ted is an artist and educator.  Mary lived in the house and I lived in the garage.  The main garage door didn't open, I came in and out through the side door.  I would pee in the yard instead of going into the house.  If it was raining I would pee into the yard from my doorway.   I lived in garages from November 2001 until June 2004.  They had oil stains and beds in them.  I got in bed fully dressed, I watched my breath fog up, I tried to stop shivering.  Miles Avenue had a high work table and I put everything on that, my glasses, my hat, my keys.  My door shut by hook and latch.  I kept the laptop under the mattress.  When I left, I locked the padlock.  I flew to New York to go to the opening of the Whitney Biennial.  Somebody put my name on a list, I went to a party.  The Times printed a picture with the caption "Dancing at the Whitney".  In it, I danced with a pretty girl, I wore loud tie-dyed gloves.  Somebody called from NYC to let me know I was in the paper.  My boss saw it and fired me right off.  I had scabs on my palms from cracking crabs.  The shells could be sharp.  I cracked a thousand a day.  My clothes stank, I left them in the yard.  I would take a hot bath first thing when I got home.  I emerged pink and steaming.  I got a copy of the paper and put it under the high table until I broke my arm again and had to move out.

My life is different: I am married, live in Brooklyn, inside the house, and I am happy to be here.  Sometimes on the weekend we go to see art shows.  One Saturday afternoon, we went to Printed Matter.  I remembered Ted mentioning that he sold stuff there years ago.  I asked if they had anything, and they looked through a binder of small books and came up with his 'Rain Work' from 1996.  It is a small artwork that was created by being left in the rain.  It is is reproduced here in its entirety.

Ted Purves, Rain Work, 1996.

We wanted to write a blog post about Roger, who will be debuting his latest music project at our party this Saturday. Roger is multi-talented and his work spans the spectrum of music and performance art. We loved his band, The Nasties, and the spookiness of their ultra catchy tunes. Roger and James Thacer also produce GLAZZ.tv, a multimedia web series that features NYC-based artists and musicians. Last, but not least, Roger is often the model for Mary Meyer men's designs and you've likely seen his combat booted feet smack dab in the middle of our online store and lookbook.

To top it all off, Roger is all-around awesome! Don't miss his performance this Saturday, January 14. While you're at it you can do some sale shopping and drink some free booze. SEE U THERE boo!

xx

Glazz.tv

On Saturday I went to the opening of Ai Weiwei's "Sunflower Seeds" at Mary Boone Gallery on 24th Street in Chelsea.  The sunflower seeds are handpainted porcelain.  Their creation was a labor intensive production requiring thousands of workers over several years.  Some five million seeds were produced for the project.

It premiered at the Tate Modern in London last year.  At Mary Boone, they have a portion of what was on view at the Tate, which was a much larger installation.  When it was first installed at the Tate, you were allowed to walk on the seeds.  However, it was determined that walking on them created toxic dust and after that you were not allowed.  At Mary Boone they are laid out in a long rectangle mirroring the shape of the room.  There is a margin of a few feet between the seeds and the wall and that you can walk around the seeds.  At the opening, people were sitting down at the edge of the seeds, so I took a seat to get a closer look.  There were two security guards patrolling the edge of the seeds making sure that you wouldn't disturb them.  It was theatrical in the way that monumental works of art can be.  It was massive and grey, and it reminded me of baseball, of being in the dugout chewing sunflower seeds waiting to come up to bat.  There were a lot of seeds.

Closer up.  The seeds are handpainted porcelain.  They are made in the town where they produced porcelain for the Emperor of China.  Ai Weiwei became one of the biggest employers in town for the several years it took to produce and paint all the seeds.  They are a little bigger than normal sunflower seeds but not by much.

One thing I love at art galleries is that practically every time I go, I get to take a picture with some nutcase.  This guy called that thing a 'sea rabbit.'

Seeds in a room, on view through the month.