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Sunday is for riverwalking. Ruth, Mel, Epiphanie and I tromped down the riverbank and off to the Forks. Along the way, we checked out some of the new Warming Shacks, functional art installations that are new since our last trip down the Assiniboine. They’re great! And, as I see it, a good first step toward Art Shanties in the vein of Medicine Lake.

The river and the Forks weren’t as busy as they were last time, probably due to the clouded-over sky and the fact that it was actively snowing.

Via Letter Writers Alliance, news of a super cool art project happening outside of Winnipeg’s unofficial sister city Minneapolis: the Art Shanty.

LWA takes interest in the Art Post shanty, naturally.

As a postal afficionado, I am equally intrigued by the prospect of a small construct where mail will be hand-cancelled, new stamps will be unveiled, and postcards will be mailed. However, I think that the Assiniboine River would be a perfect locale for our own village of Art Shanties!

Some Shanties that particularly capture my imagination:

• Ace Stellar Shanty — for stargazers, astronomers and astrologers!
• Art Swap Shanty — “Filled to the brim with intriguing art objects, and visitors are invited to swap their own art for any work that strikes their fancy.”
• The Black Bania — A working sauna!
• Dance Shanty — I think the name is self-explanatory.
• The Light House — “With the ‘light’ house, we intend to gather as much energy as possible so that we can give it away freely.”
• Shan-Tea — “The door is the handle, the stove is the spout, the Tea fosters hospitality, conversation and giving.”

If you ask me, this kind of project has Art City written all over it. Let’s do it!

I’m picturing Christine Fellows in a songwriting shanty. Fred Thomas in a graf shanty (though I suppose the enclosed space would preclude spray paint — still, there are other tools of that particular trade that are less toxic!). Send + Receive with a sound art shanty. Videopool with a video shanty. The list goes on! It would be a great midwinter antidote to the cold. Plus, one could skate between shanties!

It often happens that, when reading celebrated music blog Said the Gramophone, I will have my brain slightly wrinkled by the image chosen to accompany the post. It might be Leonard Nimoy-in-costume-as-Spock leaning against a late-model Chevy. It might be a cake that looks exactly like a piece of furniture:

Ceci n'est pas un sofa

The occasion was an art show/tasting put on by the Tate (London) and Kreemart, “an organization that lets artists explore desserts as a medium” (according to Cakehead Loves Evil).

Sweeeeeet

Demolition

You can see lots more photos from the event at ArtInfo (NB: you will also see boobies, so keep that in mind before you click).

What makes this creation so fascinating is that it is simultaneously realistic (I mean, looking at the first picture, would you guess it were a cake without being told?) AND absolutely scrumptious-looking. Look at the photo above and tell me you don’t want those people to cut you a slice. I enjoy watching Ace of Cakes and those other cake-design shows on food TV networks, or the lovely works in the Sunday Sweets feature at Cake Wrecks. The cakes you see there are definitely beautiful and amazing, but they don’t look particularly edible. Looking at this sofa-cake, I have a deep desire to plunge face-first into it.

Speaking of cake, Jezebel is a women’s interest blog, but it doesn’t really do recipes. But yesterday, contributing editor Sadie Stein posted a family recipe of hers (on the occasion of American Thanksgiving) for something called Wine Cake (the photo at left accompanied the post; I’m not sure if it’s an actual photo of Wine Cake or simply a Wine Cake-like cake).

Like many of the best mid-20th-century recipes, this one has only five (well, six) ingredients: yellow cake mix, vanilla pudding, oil, eggs and cooking sherry (the additional ingredient, icing sugar, is combined with sherry for the glaze).

Now, “cake mix” doesn’t exactly count as an “ingredient” by today’s epicurian standards — and often rightfully so. For instance, last year I made a couple batches of Bakerella’s Cake Balls for festive use and, on the recipe’s suggestion, used pre-pepared mixes and frosting. The result was something that people praised but in which I was disappointed. Prepared foods always have that inescapable chemical aftertaste, you know? This year, I plan to make the Cake Balls with from-scratch cake and icing. And I might make it gluten-free, too. I think the Wine Cake would lend itself to gluten-freeing as well — vanilla pudding is often found in GF baking for its binding and texture-enchancing qualities.

This morning I came across a new-to-me blog called Pictures of Cake. As you might be able to tell, it is relevant to my interests. The most recent post might also be relevant to Sadie Stein’s — it included this image:

Too bad we missed the big day!

This isn’t quite breaking news — I remember reading about this earlier in the year — but Racialicious had a post on it this week, spurred by a current gallery exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Dulce Pinzón took photographs of Mexican workers in superhero costumes. A window-washer is Spider-man; a laudromat worker is Wonder Woman. Here is her artist’s statement:

After September 11, the notion of the “hero” began to rear its head in the public consciousness more and more frequently. The notion served a necessity in a time of national and global crisis to acknowledge those who showed extraordinary courage or determination in the face of danger, sometimes even sacrificing their lives in an attempt to save others. However, in the whirlwind of journalism surrounding these deservedly front-page disasters and emergencies, it is easy to take for granted the heroes who sacrifice immeasurable life and labor in their day to day lives for the good of others, but do so in a somewhat less spectacular setting.

The Mexican immigrant worker in New York is a perfect example of the hero who has gone unnoticed. It is common for a Mexican worker in New York to work extraordinary hours in extreme conditions for very low wages which are saved at great cost and sacrifice and sent to families and communities in Mexico who rely on them to survive.

The Mexican economy has quietly become dependent on the money sent from workers in the US. Conversely, the US economy has quietly become dependent on the labor of Mexican immigrants. Along with the depth of their sacrifice, it is the quietness of this dependence which makes Mexican immigrant workers a subject of interest.

The principal objective of this series is to pay homage to these brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

This project consists of 20 color photographs of Mexican and Latino immigrants dressed in the costumes of popular American and Mexican superheroes. Each photo pictures the worker/superhero in their work environment, and is accompanied by a short text including the worker’s name, their hometown, the number of years they have been working in New York, and the amount of money they send to their families each week.

What struck me most was the sheer amounts of money these individuals sent home to their families. Noe Reyes, the Superman/Delivery Boy above, sends $500 a week. That’s $2000 a month — a staggering amount that doesn’t even include his own living expenses in a very costly city (or, at least, metropolitan area).

This kind of “quiet economic interdependence” is not unique to the relationship between New York City and Mexico. You have African traders in China bringing consumer goods back to the Continent (though given the size of China’s economy, it’s not quite the same kind of interdependence). And here in Canada, I think primarily of the Filipino community. Particularly in the western provinces (Alberta, B.C.) Filipina women come to work as nannies and housekeepers, sending large proportions of their earnings back home. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a local business owner who comes from the Phillipines. She runs a  successful commercial baking operation that services Winnipeg’s large Filipino population (as well as people like me who have a taste for delicacies like ube roll cakes). She told me about how she had just sent half a dozen computer systems back to her sister in the Philipines so her sister could open an internet/computer café where users could pay per hour to use the computers (apparently, Filipino students are expected to hand in typed assignments, but few families own their own computers).

I encourage you to check out the entire series of photographs, in which Pinzón makes visible the “invisible” workers of NYC.

I once again decamped to my parents’ house in Southern Manitoba for the weekend. It was just me and my dad as my mom is still in Vancouver spending time with my Oma. My dad had been there with her earlier in the week but came back early. He’s on vacation, but he was anxious to get back to work on finishing the basement of the house he and my mom have been living in since the end of ‘08.

There he is, hard at work putting in a door. My dad has some serious construction skills, as you can see — before he got to it, the basement was just a bare, unfinished cementland. But he can transform it into a beautiful, livable space. I have always been proud of him for having this ability. This room he’s working on will be an additional guest bedroom — useful, because the upstairs of the house only has two bedrooms and this way my brother won’t have to sleep in the floor of the family room in the basement when he and I sleep over at the same time (as clearly I get the office/bedroom on the main floor, no brainer).

Every time my parents come back from visiting my Oma they bring some objects. Amazing that there are still objects to bring, as they’ve been bringing things back for over 15 years. Anyhow, there are a few special items that I have always had my eye on for inheritance, and the time has finally come for me to take possession of a lovely one:

I have to ask Oma for the exact details of this statuette’s origins, but for me, it’s not so much the thing’s provenance as it is the childhood memories I have of admiring it in my grandparents’ home. It’s solid, made of some kind of stone, and about 20 inches tall. Its curvy lines and milky colour were pleasing to my eye even when I was five, and I remember putting my little finger tips in the rounded depressions of her cup and pitcher. It’s still a satisfying sensation! In this photo you see the statuette sitting on my parents’ hearth, and there it will stay for the time being. My apartment needs a serious spring cleaning before it is worthy of such an objet; even then, it might look better beside my mom’s fireplace. We’ll see!

One final shot: the view from the back of the house. I like the contrast of the dark prairie mud and the stark, leafless trees. But the snow is melting and spring is on its way!

Last Friday I walked home via the frozen river that runs behind my building, which during the summer months I have to cross via a slightly out-of-the-way bridge. Bridges are for suckers. Anyway, the river is obviously frozen in the winter and it is home to Canada’s longest ice trail, which Winnipeggers use to great effect for recreation and transportation — mornings and evenings you’ll see people skating and walking to and from work on it. Of course, this being Winnipeg, the weather is capricious. Last week was remarkable in that it was cold but not too cold — cold enough to keep the surface of the river frozen but not so cold that the thought of leaving your heated abode makes you want to kill yourself. So you saw a lot more people out on the river. Over the last few days, however, we’ve experienced and unseasonable thaw, complete with ridiculous thinks like freezing rain and large, chilly puddles. As a result, the ice trails on the river are disturbingly liquid-looking. No one has been on the river this week, because that shit is dangerous.

Friday night I was getting a ride home from St. Norbert with my neighbour Sean, who enjoys many outdoor winter activities such as nighttime photography and snowshoeing. “Every time you go out on the river when it’s frozen, you’re taking a risk. You have to be careful.” This came up as we were talking about certain quarters calling for improved warning signage around the many outlets that line the river, pouring waste water into the river and thus creating a melty spot in the otherwise frozen waterway. Certain individuals, leaving the designated skiing trail, have been known to fall in to such spots. Sean figures it’s unreasonable to cordon off or even put signs at each of hundreds of outlets along the rivers; also, it’s something he’s not particularly anxious to see, because he’s the sort who would rather have the freedom to go where he pleases, taking his safety into his own cautious hands. “So it’s risky even when it’s -40?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “But the thing is if you’re going to fall through the ice, you’re going to fall slowly.” Good point.

Anyway, it’s been kind of sad to look out my window at the slushy ice rinks and pathways that ribbon over the river this time of year. Kind of a waste, really. Especially since people in my building have taken to developing the winter landscape in the form of creating multiple toboggan runs down the riverbank from the parking lot to the surface of the river. So weirdly enough, I’m hoping the temperature drops from the 0/-1 level it’s been hovering around this week to a more manageable -10/-15. (All temperatures Celsius, natch.) This way the sidewalks will be less slushy/icy and the river will be useable again.

It's fascinating to take a close look at things that are inaccessible in warmer weather, like a bridge support, marked by high water lines and graffiti.

The river path is dotted with plywood shacks with benches for putting on skates and such. This one near the Osborne Bridge had been tagged with painted woodblock art by an artist whose identity I don't know. Al Lorde probably knows; I'll ask him and report back.

The concrete expanse that forms the base of the high-rise apartment building next to mine is a popular spot for graf artists, some with more finesse than others. This 5-foot high piece I found quite remarkable.

When the river initially froze, the water level was unusually high. As the water level sank to normal levels, the top frozen crust of the river broke up into chunks of ice that piled up on the riverbank. Neighbourhood folks created these inukshuk-like structures with the ice chunks.

Showshoe tracks on the river.

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