In the meantime, some things to be thankful for: Smart friends full of ideas; great and talented partners, smooth working relationships, and a business lithe enough to turn on a dime; a genius husband of 23 years who supports you in all you do. Happy launch day to all!

Today, we rolled out the cool new literary event search features at CaliforniaAuthors. Users can now search — right from the pages of our site — for events listed in the big-and-growing BookTour event database. CSS/php master Val did a really beautiful job with the coding and I am proud and happy with the implementation. Click here to read a nice message about our partnership from BookTour.com’s Kevin Smokler. Click here to give our new search a try!

On another front, Val’s back seized up yesterday, giving his spine a disturbing “S” shape and essentially immobilizing him. So we spent the morning visiting Claudio, getting x-rays, etc. Val is icing tonight for more of the same tomorrow. So this evening we’re having comfort food: this deeply good and supremely easy mushroom soup from famously cranky TV chef Anthony Bourdain. We made ours with shiitakes.

As part of our dinner conversation last night: off the beaten path spots for the M&M road trip. Tips from around the table:

1) Middendorf’s in Pass Manchac, Louisiana. You’ll never get a better fried seafood platter and its thin-filleted fried catfish — made with the same recipe since 1934 — is famous. I just read that its under new management since 2007, but the old-line staff is still in place and it seems like the new owner respects the menu and the history of the restaurant, so you should still be able to get the good stuff there.

2) UCM Museum in Abita Springs, Louisiana. A walk-in art installation where you can see the Bassigator among many other oddities. Exceptional place to stop for souvenirs. But since the whole place is a description-defying work of art, you’ll just have to go experience it to see what we mean. (Handily, Abita Springs is the home of the Abita Brewery — and my favorite beer is served up right there at the Abita Brew Pub. And, it’s just down the street from my mom’s house, where — if you are Mark and Michelle — she might hook you up with a shrimp po-boy from her favorite place (not on any map) Frabielli’s — the real deal with buttered french bread toasted just right.

3) If you happen to be on the long long Texas route and anywhere near Bourne, TX, don’t miss the Bear Moon Bakery and Cafe. I always stop here on my LA to New Orleans trips. When Laur and I were there in February of 2006, a baker displaced by Katrina was making killer king cake (in Texas?! who figured?) and lots of delicious goods are baked on-site, real espresso and yummy food made from fresh ingredients. Great breakfast. Reasonably-priced and cute.

Click here or on the map above to get a google map with links!

I know I said the curation of the recent portrait exhibit at the Long Beach Museum of Art fell flat, but the paintings themselves left an impression on me. I found myself thinking a lot about the high level of technical performance required to create the hyper-real portraits in the the show. So when — while checking The Night Note’s clustermaps stats — I saw a little hyper-real portrait of a girl staring out at me from the Google Ad stack, I took a second look. The text said: How to Oil Paint DVD. Top world realist teaches simple method. ANYONE can learn.

ANYONE? I clicked through and landed at thecardermethod.com. There was a lovely realist still life, one that I would certainly be proud to paint. I hit the play button. The video pitch was aimed at encouraging prospective buyers who had never made a painting before; the salesman extolled the method as requiring “no talent.” Hm.

But it also talked about some cool tools that painter/teacher Mark Carder had developed: a little color checking tool that helps your eye focus on specific colors and a proportion-measuring tool used for sketching. These reminded be of Old Masters tools like framed-grids. He’s also developed his own slow-drying medium. I thought I might be able to make some use of these tools, even if I did have a little talent. I clicked around the site and saw some clips from the DVD. Carder was teaching the basic method of training realist artists to paint what they actually see not what they think they are seeing. I started to think that working though the program might be a great exercise for the “back to basics” work I’ve been doing. So I bought the package.

It turned out to be full of good old-school practical advice about studio lighting, still life set up, paint mixing, canvas stretching and toning and other basics. It also detailed a painstakingly exact process of color mixing and painting, one that requires patience, because it is a tedious way to work. But the process is about slowing down and remembering (or learning) how to see and — while I am going to do a few still life paintings using the method — the real payoff will be in how such intense “seeing practice” plays out in my work to come.

In the meantime, I’ve set up the studio with a simple still life in a light-control box and I’m beginning work on my first Carder Method still life. The configuration of the lights, the box, the easel and the chair — which must stay in exactly the same positions during the one to two weeks I’m working on the painting — have swallowed my studio space and that has us living in a little corner of the room with our big TV. [pix above] So I am very dedicated to getting this done and re-configuring the studio back to its old sunny self. I’ll let you know how the school work goes.

Below, the first canvas with pencil work.

For a post script, click

PS#1: There are people who say using tools and processes like the Carder Method is “cheating.” To them I say, working artists know better. Go learn more about art and artists — who have and always will be technologists at heart. Then come back and we’ll talk.

PS#2: If you click around Carder’s bio stuff, you will see that he painted an official portrait of George H.W. and Barbara Bush — eeeeyew! I’m trying to get over that, though, I mean an artist needs work, right? And, besides, what business is it of mine? (But, eeyew)

Wow, things are suddenly so busy here — only time to bang out a roundup.

Doing: With Val’s hot, under-the-hood stylings, I’m redesigning a new and streamlined CaliforniaAuthors [sketch], with a simultaneous rework of thenightnote [sketch]. Also: I’m still on board with Claudio, helping him with the lightning-fast launch of his dream practice. While he works with other designers on a corporate image and web presence – because I swear, I am not in this buisness anymore – I’ve put together an interim web presence for him. Also: I’m working with Lynette and the Louisiana Creole Research Association on their corporate ID and site. Val at Work is still on the easel.

Field Trip #1: Long Beach Museum of Art exhibit “About Face: Portraiture Now.” The museum touted the exhibition as a show of artists who “defy modernist conventions of abstraction and non-representational imagery to produce breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly realistic human portraits.” It is true that the show contains the work of some very skillful artists who have produced some very skillful and occasionally beautiful and insightful portraits. But — with only a few exceptions — as a group, they touch on only a small part of what today’s representation of a real human figure can be. There was just too much super-slick photo-real work in the show. Made me wish for a Lucian Freud — something “incredibly realistic,” but something more about paint. Believe me, I am in no way knocking John Nava, who has a couple of pieces in the exhibit and whose famous super-real genius is scary-good; I’m not down on any of the individual artists in the show. It’s just that “Portraiture Now” is much more that what is hinted at by this collected group — it is the collector, the curator, that leaves me dry on this one. One long smooth note, hit repeatedly, turns the individual achievements into a monotonous hum.

Still, it is always good to see and think about art and I am glad that I went.

Field trip #1 sidebars: A) I went to museum on the first day after the vertigo cure and while walking on the pedestrians-only sidewalk in bluff park, I was buzzed by a man on a bicycle. He startled me, and I tripped and fell. He didn’t stop. It was weird, after a week of being obsessed with falling, there I was on the sidewalk, looking up at the perfect blue sky. Then I got up and went to the museum and I was pretty thankful that it was so easy to do. B) I ran into Lynn and Blair at the museum, colleagues from my long ago Orange County Register days. They said they were enjoying retirement and they looked it. It was nice to see them.

Field trip #2: Val and I took a trip downtown to go to the Superior market on the hunt for cool Mexican and Latin American food ingredients. We got different kinds of peppers–fresh and dried, some yummy sauces jarred in tall thin drinking glasses that will be great for having a cold cerveza with our home-made enchiladas, also some fresh tortillas, crema, and empanadas from the bakery. Yum.

Something for you to look at: Enjoy an existential moment at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just purchased: New lights for painting (woo, up to 1000 watts of day-stretching light) …

… and a set of round bristle brushes. I usually work with flats or brights. (Here’s a comparison.) I’ve enjoyed experimenting with the rounds, which load up great and seem to encourage more gestural brushwork. I was inspired to get them when watching Duane Kaiser’s little time-lapse painting videos.

Up next: Taxes — barf.

Thank you! to everyone for all your kind comments during the vertigo days.

Still there are members of congress — I’d say members who are against having an educated and informed populace — who are fighting hard right now to cut funding for public broadcasting. It is easy to let them know that Discovery Channel’s Shark Month, The History Channel’s never-ending Nazi fest and The Learning Channel’s Wedding Story Marathon are not an equally good free-market replacement for public broadcasting. Tellthempublicmatters.org has a super-easy form for sending the message to the appropriate members of the House and Senate. It takes less than 3 minutes to stand up for public broadcasting — you don’t even have to write a sentence, if you’re not feeling creative.

Yes! Public does matter! Take me there now!

[1] Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 (pdf). Learn more about the Congressional Research service here.