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There are immediate benefits to the local Southern California shopper of the supermarket strike and lockout: a chance to experience new shopping venues and exchange recipes while waiting in long lines with fellow shoppers.

Shopping for baking potatoes at a nearby Mexican market, I noticed some items not usually seen on local supermarket shelves. At least, not seen by me; a combination of pickled capers and olives in the same jar. Was there a connection of some sort here? The very next day, waiting in a long line to pick up milk and seaweed-wrapped rice crackers -- we had run out of both of these essential ingredients of modern life -- I asked the woman in front of me in line about the caper-olive connection.

Her recommendation ("What I do...") was to put them together as garnish to a tomato salad, with basil covering the tomatoes. You have to arrange the olives and capers very carefully around the perimeter of the salad plate, as a decorative presentation. As a variation she recommended seaweed, with lemon drizzled on top to moisten the usually-dry seaweed sheaves.

Another idea from the same conversation: when you make pizza dough, work in some pesto as you're going. You'll have pesto-flavoured pizza, from the dough on up.

Sounds good, si?

Shopping my way into Toys 'R' Us over the weekend, I caught sight of two supervisors engaged in serious colloquy. It turned out they were comparing the new twenty-dollar bill to the old one, and I stopped by to take a gander at the new Andrew Jackson. What's new about the new bill?

I was fortunate enough to be carrying an old one, so we could compare the features point by point. The oval framing Andrew is gone, there's a new eagle on the front, and the engraving on the back is better too. A cute touch: the previously blank space around The White House on the back is covered with little copies of the number '20'.

And the pink? It's not bad; a nice subtle touch.

Yesterday we went to the opening, at the UCLA Hammer Museum, of Lee Bontecou's retrospective. Lee, highly regarded in the NYC art scene of the 1950's (?) dropped out of sight for decades. People kept writing to her on her farm in rural Pennsylvania, but evidently she ignored all the letters. However, she continued to draw, paint, and create sculptures, intricate welded and tied shaped canvases and mobiles, unlike anything you have seen.

There are many intriguing aspects to her work, which it is not possible to see and appreciate in an hour or a day. Of course, this is the fundamental flaw of consumed, rather than participatory, art.

Still, there are a couple of things to mention. In the first series of art, from around 1960 to mid-sixties, Lee Bontecou created shaped canvases, canvas pieces tied together onto welded frames, each with one or more windows onto blackness. The window looked in onto a surface of black velvet or soot, a dark window of the most soothing black, yet also somewhat disturbing. What world was it in? A window to where? Only 2 or 3 of the working drawings for these pieces provided a clue: a planet or perhaps the orb of an eyeball looking back.

Twenty-five year later Lee Bontecou was drawing eyeballs, vast complex connected point of view diagrams conceived as exploded diagram connected sculptures. Some of them also had teeth in them, or sails to take them somewhere. Still wrapped together with copper wire, but as with the window series, if you stepped back far enough the small pieces of wire disappeared from the visual field. Was this the right way to view the art, or up close?

Probably both.