Announcing Season Three & Ed Ruscha at The MoMA

Now did you have any lunch?

I have eaten?

What did you have?

Had?

Some passion fruit? Is that on the menu at the moment?

Not passion fruit? That's worry.

Yeah, I saw you like very nice.

He doesn't know a red pepper from the passion Better get another m hm. A beautiful autumnal day. The sun is out, that's slightly crisp in the air, and the leaves are falling.

The river is high, and the living is easy. So I'm sitting here with Zad Rogers and William Lensky, who produced the podcast, through these table four and we're just so excited to announce season three with an amazing lineup of new guests, including Guy Ritchie s Devlin, Chad Apatow, Wes Anderson, Ray Fines, and many many more. Until then, though, we don't want to leave you, so we're going to be sharing some of our favorite episodes of the past two seasons, beginning with edvar Sha.

It's very busy as ever in the River Cafe, but today there's a special date because of the wedding going on downstairs. So if you hear some background noise, that's what it's much much more importantly the week.

My week I was in New York.

I went because Edvarsha has a retrospective, which I would say to anybody, including you, because you're going to run, don't walk. It's a spectacular show. It's a retrospective of his work over the last I guess maybe fifty years, and it was very, very moving. I took Austin Butler, who also was on a podcast with us, and Austin had met Ed because we were in LA at the same time in July, and I took Austin to ed studio when I went, and they were kind of two peers in the park.

But for our listeners, this is the same whose podcast can be found on the table for podcast series. And also actually I remember being with you in LA maybe this time last year recording it.

And it was a dog.

We were in the Gozing Gallery in l A and he brought his stray dog and he just he just looked like he just came out of the desert. He was this sort of tall, dusty lean person. But Ed is famous in the podcast series. He's the only person that read his own recipe, which was what it was.

I'm sitting here in LA with Dexter and Edwards Sha Edwards. Sha is the artist and Dexter is the dog, and I hope we're going to hear from them both in the next half hour.

Did you bring the cactus armor?

Yeah, there's a small work of art by my bed that I say hello to every morning and say good night to every night. I think of the day it arrived in the River Cafe from Los Angeles, wrapped in layers of bubble wrap. I knew then unwrapping it that this was one I would never let out of my sight. The artist was ed Rushee, and the word in bright red says yum. I've known ed Richet's work since the early seventies. I followed admired his work through his career,

Then I fell in love with the artist. Would you like to read a recipe?

Shall I read your recipe?

But I'd like to hear yours.

You'll be the first person to read a recipe that is not a river cafe recipe, and I think that's good.

What is that cactus omelet which I make occasionally? You have to get nopolytos little cactus pads that they slice into little bits, and so says utensils omelet pan are similar type pan with rounded bottom, mixing bowl, wire, whisk or fork. Instructions. Break two eggs in bowls slightly under mix with whisk or fork. Heat butter in pan until it bubbles and begins to turn brown. Add the eggs and let them sit in the pan until the bottom

Where does this recipe come from?

I sort of made it up.

Yeah, And I always liked the taste of They're kind of slimy of cactus, you know, nopolitos and uh, but they have a flavor all their own, and I've always liked them.

Yeah, because you know, where we live, we don't get cactus cacti.

So was it when you came out here to l you had it?

Yeah?

Did you go in the desert?

Uh? Well, Los Angeles.

I've talked to artists.

I've interviewed Damian and Tracy, but I haven't had an artist or painted about We talk about food and have food in their life and food in there are But you actually painted with food.

You use egg yolk and you used didn't you.

Was that a certain period that you started painting with with actually food?

I was maybe I was frustrated with art materials or it felt like I had reached a apex or a stopping off point. And then I thought about why you can make marks on paper or on canvas with any number of things.

Why does it have to be pigments?

And so then I started using these things like axle, grease.

And caviar, and.

Well, it's of course egg, and it's pretty stable and it hardens and it's proven to be pretty pretty stable over the years.

Also, the paintings that you did with caviar still ye, still still there.

They've yellowed a little bit, but yeah, that's what do we call that entropy or something? But you don't do anymore, No, I haven't done that for a while, But don't give me any idea.

I think I'm going to give you an idea. When I came to a studio, you have an orchard in the bat and I was wondering, you know, what what does that mean to you to have fruit growing in behind your studio.

Well, fortunately I.

Got this building that had a large backyard I had no real use for, so I sort of divided the backyard in half and thought, well, I'll just put an orchard in here. And I've always wanted to grow citrus and other things too, figs, pomegranates, cherries, and then I've got some raised beds there that that I grow. I was growing the world's hottest pepper the boot you Lochia. It's like an Indian called ghost pepper. It measures out to be the hottest pepper in the world.

Well, I mean, how do you eat it? That's a nobody ever has the answer to that.

Make it that's too powerful, I guess so, and make it so fine, grind it so fine. And I think there are people that are still working on it to get the.

Get the Blue Ribbon for the hottest pepper.

That so that it judges that competition. But you cook a lot, don't you.

That recipe for an omelet is a really interesting recipe because it's using.

An ingredient that is so local.

You know, you go into great depth to tell how you fry the eggs, you season it, the heat of the pan.

That's a chef's recipe.

Well it's sort of hit and miss, you know, And so that's fine. Since I'm usually cooking for myself, it doesn't matter. But only other thing I really cook is chili, and I like. I like to make chili. I make it without onions, without beans, and without tomatoes. That's fun to make, and that takes a few hours to do that, but it's worth it.

When you're painting, how do you eat and paint generally?

And I don't even eat lunch.

I mean I will maybe have a banana or a piece of fruit, and that's my lunch. I don't eat three meals a day like I used to. But I know it's in our artistic tradition. It's always been a ceremony with artists to stop working at eleven forty five.

And sit down. And I don't drink wine.

Yeah, so and then you know, it's also a tradition to have wine with lunch.

But in New York in the kind of sixties seventies, wasn't there the whole thing where artists would be in their studios all day, very solitary, and then go to Max's or to you know, to the culture of kind of being alone and then going out every night. And were you ever part of that culture or was it.

Lle Well, yeah, it's the pnemonium of crowds of people in a place like Maxis, Kansas City or any of those kind of places, and.

It was almost ceremonial.

You know, you'd go and have great fun and drink and uh, that was part of life.

I guess you live in New York?

Did You never did live in New York.

No.

It was always too complicated or too expensive.

For me to live there.

And uh, just the idea of trying to take a two by four across town was such an issue that made California impossibly convenient.

Yeah, we saw Frank Gary yesterday and we talked about the camaraderie between for him many more artists and architects. You just loved the feeling of the la kind of artists being together here.

Was that part of your world as well.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Did he tell you that his favorite restaurant was the Pacific Dining Room.

Yes, he did, yeah, and they closed it, I think, and.

He loved that place. Did you ever go there?

Oh yeah, I went there with him too, and.

Mister Chow.

Chow and yeah, oh yeah, he's a great man.

I went there one time and I with a friend and he said, can I bring a friend along? And I said yeah, who is it? And he said Groucho Marx No. And so we met at chows here and Groucho comes in and we all sit down and have a good time. But then the food comes and Graucho has his food sent in from Nate and Al's delicatessen. He didn't even have the He said, I've heard about this place. I've heard about this place, And so he dined at Chow's restaurant without having its food.

That I've heard of people, you know, of course, people bring their own wine at the River CAF.

People like to bring their own wine.

And once somebody bought their own truffle. They've been to Italy and they brought a white truffle and asked us if we would grade it for them over their pasta. But I never actually have heard of anybody actually ordering their own food. But I suppose if you're grudging in Marx.

Yeah, did you go to chaws a lot? Who would go there with you? Oh?

Lots of different people.

I mean used to go there with Tim Leary and his wife and they were regulars there for a good while. And it's so good and so traditional. I mean they opened I think nineteen seventy five or something like that, and they established a menu that they really didn't vary from in London.

They used to have a kind of cart that you could actually make the noodles.

Yeah. Yeah, they do that here too.

Yeah, we should all.

Okay, are you going out much? Are you trying to stay quiet?

I'm happy to you know.

I love loud Hollywood parties, but I don't miss them one iota.

It's been there and done that. Why did you go to the desert?

Yeah? I go to the desert.

What do you eat there? You hunt?

I used to do that, but I don't do that anymore.

And I have a lot of quail out there. And oh it's out north of it's east of Big Bear Lake. It's not the kind of desert that is like palm springs with palm trees. No palm trees up there, they have Joshua trees. If you know what those crazy things look like.

Beautiful.

They're very spiky, spiky, and they look They got called Joshua trees because the pioneers thought they looked like silhouettes of biblical figures, so they call them Joshua trees. And that grows out there. They're almost endangered because of the global warming. But then I get pinion pines there and I harvest some of the nuts. If you've got time to do that that well, just get the pine cones off the trees and very carefully take all the little seeds out of it, but usually the squirrels get them

Where you've kind of been through hell in this country with our previous president and the and everything. And I have a beautiful poster that you sent me, which is a treasure.

That was enough.

Oh enough?

Oh can you tell me the story of enough.

I don't know where that came from.

It's just well, Norman Lear asked me if I would do something, and so that was just some incentive to make some statement about the condition of America and you know where people sit on the subject, and so expressing myself in that way in a poster was fun to do.

You know.

It was like, enough of this kind of politics. We've got to move on from this to something better, and luckily it moved that way.

Yeah, maybe it'd be nice to talk about from the beginning.

Tell me about where you grew up.

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, very center of the United States, and then we moved to Oklahoma when I was like five years old. So then I grew up from there, and it was kind of a cultural wasteland in a lot of ways. Food especially, I mean, there was no such thing as an artichoke or an avocado,

A big pizza.

Yeah, because you originally came from Chicago or.

State New York, State New.

And we had real southern Italian foods.

I thought Italian food was meatples and spaghetti and eggplant parmesana and pizza pie until I went to Italy thirty years later.

Yeah.

But go back to the pizza pie. When did that come?

Well, that started coming when around the time I was in high school and it became a popular go to type of food, kind of novel and unique. And there were half a dozen places in Oklahoma City that actually served pizza pie, and one place was called Sussy's.

That was the place you'd always go to.

I did how who would cook in your house? Was it your mother?

Yeah? Did you mom cooked? No?

Father didn't really cook so much. But Mom tossed everything together and you know, it was a really it was all meat and potatoes. I like her pies particularly, and she made a cherry pie that I always liked. Also, she made rhubarb pie, which was another thing, and so that was big.

Do you think the cherries were fresh or did she get them from the cans.

She'd get them from a can, or sometimes when they were there, she would get them fresh. And the effort was not so much into absolutely fresh food back then. No, canned food was very big and exciting. Yeah, and then came frozen food after that, and there's you know, there's a big debate over those nutritional value of those foods.

Did your mom work? So she would work all day and then come home.

She was a housekeeper and prepared food for us, and and no, she didn't have a job. And so I grew up in the Bible Belt there and we were Catholics, so we were called mackerel snappers is what people would call us, meaning you don't eat meat on Friday, you eat fish on Friday. So mackerel snappers. But the kind of food that they served there, the only international food was called Chinese food. And every Chinese restaurant would always say on the outside of the building Chinese and American food.

To alleviate the fear of looking into Chinese restaurants.

And so you could get Chinese, Yes, you could get chop suey things like that, and then you could also get a hamburger.

So they were gonna offer you.

Chinese food, but also just in case, please come anyway because we can make.

A hamburger for you. Familiar.

Yeah, but did you go to restaurants? I mean, would your parents take you out for a.

Meal and a time.

Occasionally we'd go to barbecue and that was popular.

Then.

The one food that was really hit it big was okra fried okra, and they grow it, Yeah, they grow it in a big way there, and so there's lots of corn that you're giving almost every day.

Yeah.

Also during the war, we had a victory garden. It was sort of pick yourself up by your booststraps, by growing your own food and participating in the war effort World War two. So it was an extension of that sort of went to your dinner table and other people would save metal and that sort of thing to recycle into the war effort.

And so victory garden it was a very popular thing then.

I wasn't there.

Just we'd grow tomatoes and corn and celery and various vegetables, and that was kind of a unified attitude at the time to have victory gardens in your backyard. I had a paper route in Oklahoma and I'd deliver my papers at like four in the morning and then come back and drink almost a half a gallon of milk and then oh, about twelve fourteen something like that.

Yeah, you said that, You said once said that you thought that Oklahoma was like a black and white movie?

Do you think that? Do you think back on those days?

I still do when I think back on it, But as I go back there occasionally I see that it's more progressive than I allow.

My mind to make it be. Yeah, so you know, it's caught up with the rest of the world.

What's happened to your house there?

Do you still happen still stands? Yeah?

When was the first time you went to Europe?

About nineteen sixty one and I went there with my mother and brother and we we bought a little Citron two CV automobile in Paris and drove it around Europe and then came.

To your mother's first time.

Yeah, it was her first time too. So what was that like?

What was it like? Food wise?

Well, food wise, well, we we were kind of on a budget, so there wasn't nothing particularly fancy, but just the idea of having, you know, stumbling onto wild strawberry, which I'd never had before those tiny little wild strawberries was great. That was in France. We drove all over Europe and for about four or five months, four or

We couldn't find it. Did you paint or draw?

Yeah?

I took a little homemade kit a package that I would carry around and you know, allow me to do something on about eight x ten format, and brought paints along with me and worked like that. And my mother came back to the States after about two months, and then I stayed over there by myself for a while.

One of the things that I think is very moving about your studio, part from the garden and the trees and of the fruit, is there seems to be a very strong community there and that when you come to London for your shows. When we went out to dinner afterwards, I think Puppy was the Tait and then there was a dinner at the National Gallery.

Because you had two shows.

You were the first artists contemporary artists to show singularly in the National Gallery.

I was told at I found it hard to believe, but it's true.

Yeah, and then I think virget Riley maybe had something yeah recently there.

Yeah. Do you bring everybody with you pretty much?

That's so nice.

People that work with me, Yeah, travel with me. Yeah, that's good.

You're animals. There are dogs? How many do you have any idea of how many dogs?

Uh?

Dana has five other dogs besides Dexter, so you know she's got her handful. I mean she's got she needs a kennel license.

Do you when you travel do you take a dog?

He goes in the every So you have a painting called Dexter.

Again, don't give me any ideas.

I am can I just tell the story about Ruby. I've had such a kind of passion for the Ruby painting. I didn't know Ruby meant to me. It filled me with kind of imagination, and I kept thinking, who is Ruby? So I just dreamt about who Ruby could be. I thought she might be a woman that you were in love with when you were a teenager in Alcoholma. I

Who was she?

Who was this ruby? Who was the inspiration for these beautiful, beautiful paintings?

And you said ruby was a dog.

That's right, that's right. But it was not the inspiration for that painting or that work. It wasn't.

The ruby I did came long before the dog. Actual, Yeah, And so I don't I'm not really sure where that that a name came from. It didn't come from a person in my life.

I didn't know. But I liked ruby as.

A feminine name, and It's just got a really good sound to it. And also it has a double meaning too with the gem ruby, and so it just meant that to me and kind of was an excuse to make a work.

It's a beautiful work. It's a beautiful, beautiful work. Thank you. I have one last question.

So you've described food as a journey across Oklahoma to California. You've described it as an explosion of wild strawberries in France, you've used it in your work, used to actually paint made out of food. But if you were feeling that you needed food is comfort? Would you say there's a food you turned to and comfort?

I would say that some kind of soup might be the answer. It's kind of traditionally of healing kind of food, so almost any kind would chili could be, although chili might make you hop up and down. Yeah, they may not be so RESTful, but comfort food might be in the form of some kind of vegetable soup.

Yeah. I get that good. So are you staying here for bid? You're going?

Uh? Actually, I am going to the desert? Yeah today?

Yeah, I hope I'll see you soon.

Yeah.

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Ruthie's Table four is a production of iHeartRadio and Adami Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.