Cafe Gratitude and ritual flensing

Ever wonder what a ton of petroleum jelly would look like if you put it in a big mold, let it harden to a semi-solid state, and then took away the mold, letting it ooze out over the deck of a Japanese whaling ship? Well, now you can. The only hitch is, you have to get to the SFMoma museum before tomorrow, when the Matthew Barney exhibit ends.

Barney's stuff is pretty wild. He's into documenting the process of creating art, so his previous works include videos of him clinging to a wall, drawing, while attached to the floor by a rubber restraint. Hence the title of his latest works, "Drawing Restraint." It takes a good bit of athleticism which, fortunately, he has. Evidently he was inspired by hypertrophy, which my brochure describes as "the process by which muscle tissue grows larger after having been broken down through strenuous exercise." Barney's been at this for awhile, so this is #9 in the Drawing Restraint series. He hangs the resulting pictures in frames of self-lubricating white plastic. They are pretty.

This installation hosts the snowy deck ooze, along with a 25-foot-long baton of shrimp shells, rebar, and petroleum distillates and two recreations of a flensing deck (where sailors hack blubber off a whale with a "flensing" blade -- a curved knife on a 7-foot stick), complete with barnacles. All are props from his feature-length movie in which he and his wife, the singer Bjork, undergo a ritual flensing on their wedding night. This takes place on a giant Japanese tanker (yes, whaling vessel) after a tea ceremony which I swear was in real time (i.e. interminable). After they've hacked each other to bits in a sensuous but detached display of mutual destruction, they swim away as whales. Show over.

Last night I dined at Cafe Gratitude before seeing Berthold Brecht's anti-war play, Mother Courage. The food's pretty good there -- all fresh, vegetarian, organic. But it's the menu that keeps me going back. They name their dishes with self-affirming titles like, "I am loved," "I am dazzling," and "I am kind." It's sortof hard to choose. The kicker comes when your waittress returns with, say, a mixed green salad and pronounces, "You are Fulfilled."

Thank you, very much.

The play was pretty good, too.

You wouldn't believe how much work unemployment is. Today I have to sign up for Cobra, open a Personal 401(k) using the EIN number I got from the IRS on Thursday, and read a 68-page blueprint for my volunteer branding project. That, and I started work at UC Berkeley this week, editing their Spring catalog. It'll take me through the next two months, and then I'm hoping to pick up seasonal work at a retail store where I will basically just hand over my paycheck and take home beautiful things -- at a significant discount, I hope.

My sister had her baby this week, a healthy 8-pound, 8-ounce girl whose name will soon be revealed. Our mother says she's beautiful, but that "maybe that's her grandma talking." I'm sure she's right.

Last tidbit: Been taking lots of tests lately, and assessing my career options using the career transition services Sun pays for. According to the personality tests, I'm a hardcore introvert. Who knew?