This is your creativity; This is your creativity in cyberspace...

 (Wiki commons)

This is your brain. Note how neat it is, and how each area and its function are identified. This is a nice brain.

 

(Wiki commons) 

This is your brain after five days of doing computer things. Building websites for your work. Endlessly inputting meta tags and other garbage. Indeed, this IS garbage. No, your brain. No, garbage.....

 

This is all by way of explanation for my absence from the blogosphere recently. But today, finally, I finished a sales page that will go live on Monday. Which means that I can get back to painting. Which means that I can get back to writing about painting...or even writing about writing.

ANYTHING EXCEPT ENTERING THE SAME INFORMATION OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF CAFEPRESS. It is deadly; it is the perfect task for George W. Bush. He might have been up to that; he certainly wasn't up to governing the United States. And if he went on endless vacations, as he did, who would care? One would need only to get another smirking chimp to do the input tasks.

But I digress. I never really saw the need for artists' and writers' retreats before. I do now. After a week of cybercrapola, I need to retreat, into a world where meaningful things exist. Birds. Clouds. Movement. Sounds of nature. Sounds of human life. Interaction. At least two brain cells that are working well enough to communicate with each other and possibly create something...a thought, a picture, an object, even a swell dinner from scratch.

I'm cleaning out the garbage tonight. I'm having a change of scene, and I'm not going to waste the rebirth of my creative juices by cooking. We are going to our favorite Devon restaurant, Steps of Tavistock, a place that's so homey*, it could be home. The fact that the woman owner, Suzanne Oldfield, is a former American and her husband, Adrian Oldfield (the chef) is British--thereby offering precisely the same combination as my husband and I do--has nothing to do with it.

What has something to do with it is that it the atmosphere will be both restful and friendly, and the food excellent and well-prepared. The background music is either classical or post-big-band jazz, either of which let one's mind wander in gentle ways. 

Steps restaurant is familiar, indeed, it is almost genetic. Simon's late father, Ronald, went there once or twice a week for a good meal and some company after Simon's mother had died and Ronald had moved into town, diagonally across the street, in fact, from the restaurant. We lived in that flat for a year before we bought a house; great location, great flat. It retained the vibes of Ronald, a gentle man who actually wrote letters to his wife from their cat--in Cockney--when she was in the hospital giving birth to Simon. They used to keep mother and baby for a week back then, even when all was well as it was in her case.

I know what I'm having tonight: Adrian's fantastic green salad, perfectly dressed. The shallow fried crab cakes or maybe the sea bass, with sauteed potatoes. Adrian Oldfield is an artist with those potatoes. They are so perfect, so delicious that I could be perfectly happy with those alone. A bottle of Belle Muraille, a red wine, not expensive, but a favorite of Suzanne Oldfield, and us. And very probably the creme brulee.

See, I told you it was homey. In the perfection of its homey-ness, it is high art. In the perfection and consistency of Adrian's traditional Cordon Bleu British cuisine, there is high art. In Suzanne's running of the front of the house, there is high art. But it is comfortable art, precisely the kind that will salve the misuse of a creative brain so that it can begin again to find some new and interesting things about its own creative world, in my case, painting and writing.

* I must persist in the American usage. The British usage would be homeliness, but in the US that means ugly...and I can't gt past it. Mea culpa.

Making toast in England

The whole front panel lights up, in the order of the colours printed under the manufacturer's name. Talk about useless gewgaws......or maybe they wanted a mechano-electrical object to ape a cyberspace one....

I'm not a fan of the cyberworld.

Oh, sure, I use it. I use toasters and food processors, too, but I don't really have to be involved with them the way I do with a computer. And I don't need help to use them.

But, wait. I forgot. I live in the UK now, and in the first three years, have had a total of five toasters, each one more pitiful than the one before, regardless of price. We had one that produced a rainbow effect of lights as the toast went from white or beige to, sometimes, brown. Sometimes not. And god forbid you attempted to make white toast after granary; it simply wouldn't toast. Nor would toasting one of either kind right after another. By the way, all that applies not only to the rainbow toaster, but the other four as well.

To a former American, this toast thing is unacceptable. For 20 years in the US, I had a ten-buck toaster and it made perfect toast every time on demand, no matter how many pieces it had made right before. (I've gone on about this toast thing before, as my friends well know.) Apparently the simple solution to warm, crunchy bread in the UK is to spring for £110 for a Dualit toaster, which everyone says WILL make good toast every time. But I'm stubborn. I don't want to spend $170 for a freaking toaster (at today's exchange rate). I may have renounced my US citizenship, but I haven't yet renounced my belief that toast is a minor issue in life and shouldn't cost as much as a car payment to produce. Nor be as difficult as getting one's artworks posted in cyberspace. Still, I expect that someday I will run into Curry's and demand a Dualit. I may run in with a loaf of bread--no, two loaves, one white and one brown--and demand that they toast it all before my very eyes and prove the value of that Dualit before I buy the toaster.

I'm not in toaster overdrive. Really. This is all about art, the art of eating. The entire magilla has helped me to understand why the British like cold toast. Cold. Not even a hint of warm. When Simon butters his toast in the morning, it sounds like someone is sanding a door. Cold butter on cold toast followed by room temperature bitter jam with chewy bits in it; I refer, of course, to traditional marmalade. Simon and the dog like it (go figure). Me? I won't eat it, not for an exhibition of my work at the best gallery in Cornwall.

This is awful-looking toast by any standards. It looks like margarine plopped on top of it, first of all. Secondly, what a mess. At least when my engineer husband spreads real butter on cold toast, he does it neatly, edge to edge. Well, maybe OCD a bit, because for him it is REALLY edge to edge.

I don't eat much toast these days. It's too difficult to get the whole breakfast ready and then stand there monkeying around with the toaster to extract a warm and browned piece or two for myself. Why bother? After my toast joined Simon's in the toast rack, it would cool down PDQ. Toast racks, I have decided, are an invention of the devil. But I have two, both inherited from my late mother-in-law. Only a population deprived a priori of warm toast with butter melting lusciously into it could possibly have invented them.

In the US, they are called mail racks.

Maybe when we get the conservatory/dining room built and move breakfast back to the kitchen from the dining alcove where we eat breakfast now, I can pop up and make toast. Warm toast. Wit butter melting into it, and slathered finally with room-temperature Bonne Maman Strawberry Conserve...the ONLY thing to have on toast, except maybe lemon curd.

In the UK, this is a toast rack; it turns lovely warm bread into cold slabs of cardboard. In the US, it's a letter rack. Here's a clue: Most letters arrive cold and are meant to stay that way. Unless it's a bill from the tax folks and you would rather burn it...in which case you will need matches instead. Matches do the same thing in both the US and UK. Indeed, they could conceivably be used to make toast, as well. Warm toast.

So, anyway, back to the cyber world. I expect I'll be screaming by about 3 p.m. (it's not 1 p.m. yet), as I struggle to do the simple task of getting my Etsy store working, or at least started, and dealing with the quotes from the Giclee printer. Simon did the request for me yesterday, turning inches into centimeters and vice versa depending on what was being measured for what purpose. And he turned the Picasa stuff into RGB Tiffs. I mean, what is that? An RGB Tiff. OK. I know it means RedBlueGreen. A Tiff? Some kind of way of storing the bits and bytes and bosons or whatever that happen after you photograph a painting and download it to Picasa. Why it is different from jpegs (whatever that stands for), I have no idea. Anyway, Simon did it. Bless him.

But today he is traveling to London, so I've got to keep myself focused on something other than missing my soulmate. I could paint, but that would be enjoyable. So I might as well take the misery to the max and mess around with Etsy and CafePress and my new website that's almost ready to launch.

The truth is, I should have been born 150 years ago or so; then the only technologies I'd have had to deal with would have been useful stuff, like automobiles and airplanes.

No one expects you to tinker with those yourself; you just call the mechanic for the former and Virgin Atlantic or Aer Lingus (the two safest airlines) for the latter.

For cyberspace, who you gonna call? I'm lucky; I've got Simon the Computer Wizard in house. But even so, it's weird. I don't need help calling the mechanic or the airlines.

Oh, well. Maybe it's a way of keeping artist types creating more work because. As vexing as creative tasks sometimes are, they are light years better than dealing with the demands cyberspace. And making toast in England.