Cooking Oils

A little bit of effort in cooking goes a long way. I just tried out a new recipe from allrecipes.com for salmon. The marinade called for peanut oil and sesame oil among other extremely fragrant spices such as ginger, and balsamic vinaigrette. Needless to say, it smells extremely pleasing. I haven't tasted anything yet, as I am going to bake it for dinner, but I just cannot help remarking on how powerful the oils are. One of these days I will be a little less lazy and start putting pictures up as opposed to just describing what I was seeing.

Link of the day: www.folj.com
What is it: a site with a good number of analytical problems and puzzles. The site design is extremely straightforward. Questions are grouped into Lateral Thinking, Logic Problems, and More. Hints and answers are hidden until users click on them. I tumbled across this site during one of my puzzle periods when I would comb the site for interesting lateral thinking and logic problems. They are extremely fun and often require more quick thinking than tedious trials and errors.

Artist of the day: Nan Goldin
Who is she: a contemporary photographer known for her portrayal of subcultures against a backdrop of drugs, glitz, and violence in the 1960's. Her photographs were mostly of her circle of friends (many of whom were transvestite and gay) and exposes a world the "average American" knows little about, juxtaposing glamour, alienation, despair, and attraction, just to name a few. To get an idea of her opus, check out Goldin's 2002 retrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Since then, she has been increasingly playing with cinematic ideas and tools. I have to admit, I am somewhat ambivalent about her work. On one hand, I truly admire the way Goldin composes lines and colors in her photographs. They are simply beautiful. I don't know if it is because I am constantly bombarded by glamour magazine images and she's the mother of all glossy covers, but Golin's pictures move me quite a bit on the aesthetic level. On the other hand, I feel that to appreciate her photographs as I do the works of Cindy Sherman and Diane Arbus seems oddly insufficient and relegates her to a "follower" status. Nan's subjects are in many ways much more intensely personal and to view them solely aesthetically or in cultural context is ignoring the very elements that make her works so moving. But where does the emotions and closeness of the subject matter to the artist becomes a factor the valuation of a work of art? Is Goldin's significance in contemporary photography only aesthetics and the fact that she used her friends as subjects? I surely hope not.