a light installation by rAndom, at home house in london.
Apr 24, 2010
Apr 23, 2010
sourdough baguettes
the sourdough culture, having been killed twice by negligence, is back and vigorous. salt, water, yeast = baguette.
mimosa
an installation of motion-sensitised flat OLED lighting panels from phillips, designed by jason bruges.
Apr 19, 2010
inside the volcano
EO-1, controlled by goddard SFC takes a photo of the inside of eyjafjallajökull. left is visible spectrum; right is infra-red. more at nasa.gov.
Apr 18, 2010
97 polysiloxane hoses 3.0mm, compressed air, 2010
Apr 16, 2010
Apr 15, 2010
essentials
some quotes deserve re-posting:
I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting—the humanistic values they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there ... If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would be able to just look at it.frank stella
No matter how radical the pursuit of presence, the work of art will always fall short of that purer art that is its telos. It points beyond itself and lacks the plenitude it demands.karsten harries, on frank stella
Apr 7, 2010
Apr 3, 2010
art
good art often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.
iris murdoch, the sovereignty of good
sandwich theory
here in the northeast, it is a clear nearly-spring morning (we have to say that, in case it actually still is winter) and the dawn chorus has just been and gone. i am up at 6.20am, for reasons that will be detailed anon, and have just breakfasted on a toasted burrito of my own confection (turtle beans, chipotle morita, aged cheddar, avocado, cilantro and red onion, cholula, on a wheat tortilla). i could eat these every day, they're so tasty.
today, i made a tactical error: i folded the herbs and cold avocado into the burrito and toasted everything slowly on cast iron. i had forgotten that, in some things, there is an absolute minimum number of steps required for satisfactory results. when added only at the end, the cilantro, onion, and avocado in one of these toasted burritos are the requisite cold and crunchy counterpoint to the soft, warm cheese and beans.
which brings us to theory. great sandwiches almost always have contrast. few of the sandwiches i love are uniformly one or another temperature, which is why most of the truly great sandwiches must be made to order and consumed instantly. the two top of mind are: 1) the grilled english muffin, sweet butter, honey, and sea salt; 2) the toasted focaccia or sweet baguette, olive oil, cheddar, tomato, scallions, black pepper.
1) has to be cold and rapidly melting butter, cold honey, salt, blazingly hot muffin. 2) has to be a warm, crusty (but still tender) bread, thinly-sliced, ripe, cold tomatoes, thinly-sliced, cold scallions, cool or room-temperature cheddar, olive oil, and lots of fresh black pepper. this is also a sandwich that can only be eaten satisfactorily standing up at the kitchen sink, with crumbs and juices raining down as you go.
Mar 31, 2010
two weeks ago, 2300 miles away
fly to el paso, rent a car, grab some tamales, drive 3.5 hours west-northwest. you end up in marfa, tx. a neat place, with yurts. art's not bad either.
donald judd
john chamberlain
dan flavin
roni horn
more judd
exactly what it says
(L-R) a mallory, some buttered toast, a beezus, a coffee mug
Mar 29, 2010
Mar 27, 2010
a yurt
is a round tent with an internal support structure and a central hole in the ceiling for ventilation. nearly all yurts are weatherproof but some are poorly insulated against the below-freezing nights of the far west texas high desert.
Mar 26, 2010
Mar 19, 2010
Mar 12, 2010
slow morning
the winds have stopped, it's cold out and bright, and the heat is on. robert byron's road to oxiana recalls a much earlier time in travel, and neil young and crazy horse are on the turntable.
Mar 11, 2010
100 works in mill aluminium
marfa is 3 hours fast drive from el paso, which has few charms for me except a panoply of tamale shops. in marfa, you can see donald judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum. the pieces are all of the same external dimension, but inner volumes are all variations on a theme and no two are the same. in the light that washes in through the enormous windows on the east and west walls, the mill aluminum surfaces of these massive boxes dissolve and become transparent. these two images are of the inside of the second shed. an unsettling yet quiet place, where solidity and evanescence coexist.
Mar 5, 2010
Feb 26, 2010
hole in the wall mega street cred eating places
often, what i really want is a little place that isn't all hyped-up and which gives me the good stuff. it's always a struggle: tell everyone about it? or keep it to myself? if the latter, sometimes it goes out of business (taking irreplaceable deliciousness with it--see bay leaf cafe's toor dal soup, now gone forever from my (and your) life). fortunately, most of the institutions on this here list of hole in the wall eating spots seem relatively secure. also, i blame christine for this, even if she does have a nice ligature on her homepage.
Feb 24, 2010
grindin'
via youtube.com
it's the transformers! these blocks, ladies and gentlemen, are real. stop motion is such a wondrous thing. the video is great, but the making of video is even better.
Feb 21, 2010
last days at mugaritz
via youtube.com
mugaritz is one of the vanguard restaurants (the owner worked at el bulli before setting up on his own). their kitchen burned down about a few days ago, and this video by this season's stagiaires captures some of the last days at the restaurant.
Feb 19, 2010
Feb 15, 2010
Feb 12, 2010
a brief history of pretty much everything
via youtube.com
not quite everything, but with brilliant little comic twists. thx ben
Feb 10, 2010
metropolis
via vimeo.com
rob carter's paper cutout visual history of charlotte NC. monty python-esque and worth seeing.
Feb 8, 2010
tampopo, tonight!
TONIGHT: Mon, Feb 8, 6pm. TAMPOPO, in the Adams Pool Theater in Harvard Square (map). Free and open to the public. Introduced by Tom Levenson (MIT). The ultimate movie on food and sex. A struggling single mother, with the help of a cowboy truck driver, aims heroically high to make the best ramen noodles. Told in parallel, the story of an epicurean white-suited gangster and his girlfriend whose pursuit of pleasures involve doing interesting things with live shrimp in bed. Woven around this core are episodes turning social hierarchies and connoisseurship on their heads, culminating in triumphal noodles and a death speech about yam sausages. For more information, see IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. IMPORTANT: If you do not have a Harvard undergraduate (College) ID card, you must arrive at the Pool Theater by 6.15pm to be admitted.More details at www.food24fps.com
Feb 1, 2010
skillet pizza
the skillet pizza article (AFC story; detailed instructions; primordial origins) ran on the atlantic's food channel earlier this week and got picked up by lifehacker and adam kuban at slice.seriouseats.com. the latter is particularly cool, since i've always sort of wanted adam kuban's job.
if you decide to try this at home, use the original post since some of the instructions and formatting got taken out by the atlantic's editors and i think they're sort of useful. here again is the incredibly tasty result of experiment 7 (fresh tomato sauce, pesto, onions, basil, sourdough crust).
the breakfast report
nothing better than waking up in sheets line-dried in the cold. (and it's been cold.)
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