“SERVES 10-12

INGREDIENTS2 oranges
2 1⁄3 cups sugar
Unsalted butter, for greasing the pan
2 1⁄2 cups flour, plus more for pan
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla extract
4 eggs
6 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1⁄4 cup fresh orange juice
1⁄4 cup confectioners’ sugar
Sea salt, for garnish

INSTRUCTIONS1. Trim about 1⁄2′ from the tops and bottoms of oranges; quarter oranges lengthwise. Bring 6 cups water to a boil in a 4-qt. saucepan; add oranges. Bring water back to a boil; drain. Repeat boiling process twice more with fresh water. Put oranges, 1 cup sugar, and 4 cups water into a 4-qt. saucepan over medium-high heat. Cook, stirring often, until sugar dissolves and orange rind can be easily pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes. Remove pan from heat and let cool to room temperature.

2. Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 10′ round cake pan with butter and dust with flour; line pan bottom with parchment paper cut to fit. Set pan aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda in a medium bowl and set aside. Remove orange quarters from syrup,…

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(Via Saveur.com: New Recipes.)

Queer Past/Queer Future: In Conversation:

Ted Kerr. Questions for a Revolution, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

“I first met the artist, writer, and activist Ted Kerr during the summer of 2008 when we were both interns at Visual AIDS. He was standing outside the West 26th Street building with the executive director, Amy Sadao. My memory of the day is a sweltering bleached blue; Ted was wearing bright red pants and a striped shirt. I think he was smiling and waving, or the grin on his face registered as a giddy wave. I bring up my very first impression of Ted because he is perhaps the most hopeful person I know and, for me, that sunny image somehow encapsulates his hopefulness.

His writing and collages strongly reflect this hopefulness not only in their optimism, but also in the way he poses questions about everyday things and events in light of queerness, AIDS, and collectivity. They’re not easy questions to consider, but in posing them, Ted is inviting others to ask more questions, to bring seemingly disparate ideas together, out of which some new space for thinking, art-making, and collective action might arise. Ted’s always looking to have a conversation. His collages are like snippets of dialog between images and text he has gleaned from television, museum exhibitions, and song lyrics. Rihanna’s We Found Love, a portrait of a snowy Walt Whitman, and Occupy Wall Street all make their way into his pictures and reveal their connectedness.

Ted Kerr. From ‘haunt: white gay men series,’ 2011. Collage. Courtesy the artist.

In Questions for a Revolution, Ted generates a list of suggestions and inquiries that relate the Occupy movement to the experience of being queer. Ted presented these questions at DYKE CHECK!, but he has also shared them on his blog, along with an invitation to readers to chime in with their own ideas. In that post, his questions are positioned next to a reprinted portrait of David Wojnarowicz, whose once-sewn lips have now been collaged with a new mouth. This is about undoing silence through a critical dialog with others. (As Foucault says in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, ‘There is not one but many silences.’ There’s the silence that the State imposes, but there is also our silence: the silence of the closet, our silence toward the State’s silencing, and our silence toward each other).

Channeling Wojnarowicz’s image and his ideas for unraveling and fighting against what the late artist called the ‘pre-invented world’ of normativity, passive acceptance, and indifference toward AIDS, Ted asks eight questions. Among them are:

‘How can AIDS OCCUPY your mind?’

and ‘What can [Occupy Wall Street] learn from queers living their lives every gawddamn day?’

and ‘In what ways can you see OCCUPY as not dissimilar from COMING OUT?’

What do the answers to these questions look like? And maybe before considering them, what would it mean for us, collectively and as individuals, and for the spaces and relations we inhabit, to be able to think about and discuss these questions?

In light of Ted’s questions, I think of being queer as being indelibly marked by the initial feeling of sexual difference, but instead of this difference driving queer people apart, it brings us together. Queerness is difficult, not because in being queer you are confined to yourself. On the contrary, being queer pushes you forward, beside yourself, and makes you see and consider what it means to be part of a larger social group, whose members—like you—share the responsibility of relating and empathizing with others, a responsibility that difference brings to bear on the singular self.

Ted’s work, with its social and utopic aspirations, reminds me of the artist/activist collective Gran Fury. The group emerged in 1988, made up of artists and activists who had previously worked with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) on the New Museum installation, Let the Record Show… (1987). In the late 80s and early 90s, they created public interventions in the form of posters and bus panels that mimicked the clean, look-at-me aesthetic of brand-name advertisements in order to put AIDS in the visual field of the public. Among these text-based agitprops were Read My Lips (1988) and Kissing Doesn’t Kill (1989-1990). The former was used to incite public kiss-ins; it was wheat-pasted on building facades and printed on t-shirts worn by protestors during rallies. The latter appeared on buses and train panels. Both projects sought to change public perception about AIDS, to combat homophobia and indifference by engaging people at street level. (An exhibition of Gran Fury’s works will open on January 31 at 80WSE Gallery).

Ted’s Questions for a Revolution parallels the four questions in Gran Fury’s 1993 poster, Untitled:

Do you resent people with AIDS?
Do you trust HIV-negatives?
Have you given up hope for a cure?
When was the last time you cried?

In a 2003 Artforum interview with the critic Douglas Crimp, Gran Fury’s Loring McAlpin explained the motive for the Untitled questions: ‘[We] were addressing a different audience. It was really directed toward our own community. We were trying to acknowledge something but not judge it, to ask, ‘What’s happening now? Where did our anger go? What are we going to do?’’

As a young queer person, I think about my generation’s place in this history and how AIDS has shaped queerness beyond the 80s and 90s. I think about Ted’s question, ‘How do you bring forward the past without falling victim to nostalgia?’ Perhaps the best response I have to this question is to pose my own questions: How can we see ourselves—queer persons born in the 80s and later—as members of that community which McAlpin speaks about? What is our individual and collective relationship to this past? What role does this shared history play in our personal and social coming-out?

‘Queer Past/Queer Future: In Conversation’ originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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(Via Art21 Blog.)

“Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. By Noo Saro-Wiwa. Granta; 309 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.ukTHROUGHOUT her childhood and early teens, Noo Saro-Wiwa spent every summer in Nigeria. The flight back always came as a shock, as was the arrival itself. The noise, decay and corruption of Lagos airport were unending, along with the insects, power cuts and the higgledy-piggledy way of living that was far too intimate for one brought up in Britain’s home counties.Ms Saro-Wiwa would far rather have stayed in the family house in leafy Surrey, with its golf clubs and Leylandii trees, or holed up with her smart boarding-school friends from Roedean. But her mother thought of their Surrey home as the ‘house’, whereas their Nigerian home was ‘home’, a character-building ‘tropical gulag’ with kerosene lamps, rice-and-okra soup, ‘body-temperature Coca-Cola’ and a live-in tribe of cackling uncles and aunts. Home, that is, until Noo’s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a businessman and activist from the oil-rich region of Ogoni, was arrested, imprisoned and then hanged in 1995 for his outspoken political views. The trips back to Nigeria came to an abrupt stop.For a decade afterwards, Ms Saro-Wiwa traded Surrey and Roedean…”

(Via The Economist: Books and arts.)

“A *very* common exchange I have with the general public regarding HIV-1:

Person– Where did HIV-1 come from?
Me– HIV-1 is related to a virus we can find in African primates, SIV. SIV crossed over from chimpanzees to the human population to make ‘HIV’ sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s. This event happened at least three times, giving us the three groups of HIV-1, Groups M, N, and O, however it most likely has occurred numerous times over the course of human evolution, it just never lead to a pandemic like what we have with HIV-1 today. You can go get blood samples from African hunters right now and find viruses not found in any other human.
Person– *makes a face* From eating monkeys? It wasnt from (whispers) having sex with monkeys?
Me– I seriously doubt it. People in other parts of the world hunt and eat monkeys the same way we hunt and eat deer. Technically, I would actually bet it would be easier to have sex with an unwilling deer than an unwilling chimpanzee. Opposable thumbs and like twice the strength of a human and such.

This observation isnt meant as social commentary, but I do think its *REALLY* funny that some people think it is more believable that we got HIV-1 from having sex with chimpanzees, than from eating chimpanzees. Some yall is messed up. LOL!

Yes, humans around the world do, in fact, eat non-human primates for food. This is a problem from an ecological standpoint, as they are killing endangered creatures, and its a problem from an epidemiological standpoint (see: HIV/AIDS). The next pandemic could be hiding in someones dinner.

And though some of you might be thinking you are safe, thousands of miles away from someone eating a monkey in Africa or SE Asia, Ive got bad news for you. That person sitting across from you in the break room might be eating a MLT (monkey lettuce tomato) sandwich for lunch, cause literally tons of bushmeat (including monkey meat) is illegally exported allllllll over the world. The meat, plus all of their associated viruses. The next pandemic might be *from* Africa, but *start* in Miami. And because all of this stuff is illegal, we have no idea to what degree the transport and sale of the meat is going on, much less the levels of potentially threatening viruses. We dont know what the risk is, but it could be very, very bad.

So various government wildlife and medical research centers got together to test meat confiscated at a New York airport:

Zoonotic Viruses Associated with Illegally Imported Wildlife Products

SPOILER: They found lots of monkeys infected with lots of viruses.

So, if you are a jackass eating illegally imported monkey heads, let me offer a couple bits of advice. 1) Make sure you wear gloves and proper safety precautions while preparing your monkey head. Cutting yourself while butchering could start another pandemic. 2) Make sure you cook your monkey head thoroughly. I know, I love me some raw monkey head as much as anyone else, but consuming raw monkey could start another pandemic.

I swear. Why can’t people eat cows and pigs like normal people.

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club
“

(Via ScienceBlogs : Combined Feed.)

Scones:

“MAKES 16

INGREDIENTS5 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
5 tsp. baking powder
21/2 tsp. kosher salt
14 tbsp. unsalted butter, cubed and chilled
2 cups milk
Salted butter, jam, and clotted cream, for serving

INSTRUCTIONSHeat oven to 450°. Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a bowl. Add butter and rub into dry ingredients with your fingers until pea-size crumbles form. Stir in milk until dough forms. Transfer to a heavily floured work surface and pat into a 12″ x 12″, l″-thick square; cut square into 16 smaller squares. Using a floured metal spatula, transfer squares to a parchment paper-lined baking sheet; bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes. Serve warm with butter, jam, and clotted cream.

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(Via Saveur.com: New Recipes.)