negative megalith #5

michael heizer at dia beacon.

the tomato special

kevin and mimi are diabolical geniuses.

above you see a poached egg with chimichurri and fried garlic sand on frisee on a slab of heirloom tomato liberally furnished with cubes of slow-cooked bacon and lashings of bacon fat. this architectural dish is not suitable for those on vegan or low-tastiness diets.

since it is now saturday night, you will have to wait until next saturday to get the tomato special during brunch at toscanini's.

optical phenomena in central square

journeyman

the life of the mind

We err when we stray too far from the life of the mind and the potato.

"contact," in the raw and the cooked, jim harrison, 1992.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

douglas adams [thx pbarry].

the chemical sandwich

"every hour is banh mi hour, if the sandwich is eaten within five minutes of it being made. There is something close to alchemy when the baguette is still hot and has lent its warmth to the pâté and the sausage, while not wilting the cilantro or cucumber spears."

monique truong, in the wsj.
she echoes some early rumblings about sandwich theory.

the new botany

"the new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not evolutionary, success."

amory and hunter lovins, a tale of two botanies

storm king

is neat, but doing dia beacon and storm king in the same day is like drinking two 750s of beer where just one is a sufficiency. maya lin's wave field was undergoing maintenance and was looking scruffy—not a word that usually applies to land art, but there were weedy plants growing all over it.

dia beacon

last weekend, we drove westward into upstate new york to visit dia beacon. the drive, google maps tells us, takes 3h 22m. on I-84, we saw a sign for "FREE SNAX" that aroused some interest. a few hundred feet later, another sign for "FREE DRINX." we took the next exit just as we saw the third sign: "NEXT EXIT." it turned out to be a troop of boy scouts with coffee and doughnuts from dunkin' donuts. from a distance, we inferred that they would give these items away but make meaningful motions towards the donation jar while doing so. we hit the road again.

dia beacon is on the eastern bank of the hudson river. if you seek the fabled alexis diner that is close to beacon, know this: google maps will lead you not to alexis but into the parking lot of a hotel and conference center nestled into the woods. here, you will discover that the diner you seek is in newburgh, 30 minutes away and on the opposite bank.

from the parking lot, dia beacon looks trivially small. an old box-printing factory skinned in dark brick, one storey tall, barely a city block wide. entering the gallery, it becomes obvious that dia beacon is actually quite a bit larger on the inside than it looks on the outside. when you notice the sub-level containing a series of huge serra steel sculptures hulking in the half-gloom, you realise that dia beacon is, in fact, enormous.

the main galleries have glazed concrete floors, ceilings of frosted glass panes angled at 45 degrees, and are painted a neutral white. on a sunny day, light pours in from the ceiling and the main galleries are full to overflowing with a soft but powerful light. doubtless one of the best installation spaces i've been in.

the best things there:

• silver meters and gold meters by walter de maria. two series of steel plates with increasing numbers of silver and gold discs embedded in them, where the total mass of precious metal is the same in each plate. serious bankroll art, though the fabrication was interestingly variable. the steel plates were drilled out, the discs placed, and then polished down. imagine the serenity and glacial perfection had each sheet been polished down as a whole rather than spot polished where the discs were placed. (they were not.)
• three torqued spirals and a torqued ellipse by richard serra. i saw the serra retrospective five years ago at moma, crowded in with hundreds of other people, and have been seeking his pieces out since. standing under a leaning plane of rusting steel, or inside the narrowing and widening spaces inside the torqued spirals, the overwhelming sensation is of being under a large looming mass, or between two massive bodies. it's the essence of cliff and valley. the beacon installation puts them in a dimly-lit but cavernous room where they seem even more massive.
• one little john chamberlain piece that had no title but was the smallest of all the pieces on long term view. blue with cream and chrome, it was happy and light and just right. the others were neat, this one was perfect.
• north, east, south, west, by michael heizer. these four large negative spaces lined with weathering steel seem infinitely deep and also infinitely massively empty. essence of void. they make me want to go see the original double negative out in nevada.
• a slew of fred sandback yarn installations. these were, in their own way, the most amazing of the pieces at beacon. where a serra creates a sense of mass with a massive, space-filling piece, the sandback pieces slice up space using nothing but pieces of coloured yarn that define the edges of planes. there is such economy in the understanding of how we perceive space and planes that words fail. you have to see it for yourself. i saw my first sandback installation in munich, a single pair of pink yarn verticals at the pinakothek der moderne and that was neat, but the beacon collection is bemusingly vast by comparison.

no photos. nothing i have does this space justice.

disambiguation

the technical term for this is chutzpah

if there's something coherent here, i'm damned if i know what it is.

a long week, and one especially jarring from the contrast with maine last weekend (a weekend of nothing much but paddling around the bush compound in warm, dry, sunny weather, and getting mild sunburn). tuesday or wednesday it was so hot that the sheets felt warm to the touch. not pleasant. the humidity broke yesterday afternoon in a storm of tropical intensity and brevity, so today was hot but comparatively dry.

jim is in town for band camp so there has been more eating out than usual since he is one of the rare individuals willing to absorb high variance for a high mean in food. he also brings me latvian rye on request, which is a minor wonder of density.

i'm continually fascinated by how some people have carefully refined understandings of what seem to be impenetrable regional variation in food. jim, for instance, appears to know the inner grammar of many of the major streams of chinese cooking even though he cannot pronounce the name of his favourite chinese vegetable (丝瓜) to save his life. i do not have this knowledge of the terrain, probably because chinese food is all blended in the motherland (i had observed this previously but the ramifications, such as they are, were not evident then).

in any case, i was made aware yesterday that i'd never before eaten food that was identifiably shanghainese before, so we made our way today to what was rumoured to be an outstanding shanghainese restaurant. despite the hoop-la, it was not particularly good. in fact, some of it was actively egregious. (i ate a surprising amount of the inexplicable pancake made of corn kernels held together with lumps of cornstarch and drizzled with a spicy mayonnaise, but have since decided that it was just the surprise at work). the lions head meatballs were nice.

later, in watertown, we discovered a new, bigger, and (apparently) better middle eastern market (massis) in watertown that had hitherto eluded detection by being a block further up mount auburn street than sevan or arax. as usual, jim on faith and gut instinct alone bought enough exotic salads and pastries for a mid-size regiment. i was much more restrained and got away with some (mediocre, it turns out) cookies and a bunch of extraordinarily plump, golden-hued apricots. those were not so mediocre. then we went to sophia's and narrowly missed the last serving of frozen lemon yogurt made with their house yogurt (i got a spoonful and it leaves berryline in the dust) while downloading some local knowledge from a charmingly food-obsessed woman buying dodonis feta at the counter.

i stopped in at violette on the way home and got into a prolonged conversation with richard, the owner, who got a bit wild-eyed about the naturally made wines which he stocks almost exclusively and opined that we've been trained to not trust the taste of honest (for which read naturally made) wine. he rambled on for a bit about how natural wine is both a set of initial decisions about the processes that will and will not be used in winemaking as well as the totality of the processes and consequences that are a result of those decisions. implicit in the rambling excursus was the idea that somehow natural winemaking is the only way that wine can be made to be honest to the grape and to the drinker. this is what we grasp after when we search for authenticity. there were echoes of david pye everywhere. richard also pointed out that natural winemaking should not be confused with craft or artisanal winemaking. while this is certainly true, it is only true because of some slippage in the definition of craft. from his account (and the ongoing discussion at saignée), natural winemaking sounds like an instance of craft in the ideal-typical sense of the word.

artisanality (really, what does that mean other than small batch, laborious) has become inextricably connected with craftsmanship, and we've lost the sight of the ideal-typical conception of craftsmanship. which is, of course, the unglorified situation of making things that have to work well enough to be worth the time put into making them. the craftsman has to be understood not as an individual but as a member of a group that persists over time. and over the long evolution of crafts (like coopering or typography or boatmaking), craft processes and products gradually converge to a stable situation: they are generally neither overdone nor underdone, corners are usually not cut, the lily is not gilded as a matter of course.

put another way, the convergence of craft to a steady state is equivalent to saying that craft is a process of coming to understand, over the course of plenty of trial and error, the materials and processes available and the optimal manner in which they should be used. what doesn't work is selected out of the system. what's left is the ideal notion of craft: brutal honesty with process and material. in the real world, that can be a product of conscious refinement and cognition but often is just the consequence of selection pressure. (on this, the unknown craftsman is a great resource, and i've mentioned it before here).

and when we experience an object of craft, something of that brutal honesty comes through. we become aware (whether consciously or not) that no shortcuts taken that shouldn't have been taken, there is nothing (or almost nothing) extraneous in the object. appreciating craft as process and outcome is a form of connoisseurship as much as the appreciation of art is, and perhaps is as much a natural inclination that has to be encouraged, nurtured

triangles and their centres

when i was growing up, one of our tv stations was dedicated to public access and education. it often ran informational videos including one on the virtues of rice. this video, about the various centres of triangles, is of about the right vintage.



i love informational videos.

V&A

brilliant stuff from troika—2-axis rotational sculpture with a minor modification of the original V&A logo by alan fletcher.

Posted via email from flavourcountry

turf dancing in the rain

via youtube.com

posted everywhere on the interwebs, but still worth watching anyway.

Posted via email from flavourcountry

impedimenta

single shot villain gibraltar

another great drink from hi rise, where the espressos are perfect and the sandwiches well-constructed.

1945-1998

via ctbto.org

isao hashimoto's narrative map of nuclear explosions worldwide, 1945-1998. watch the whole thing.

Posted via email from flavourcountry

what a thoughtful gift

when i think back

i've been spending quite a lot of time looking for shade.

mucho caliente

89F here in the shade. this is new work from los carpinteros.

linking to data

gdocs spreadsheets let you link directly to individual sheets. would be even better if every cell, row, and column were also directly addressable.

solanaceous

2008 was the international year of the potato.

in praise of the potato

Potato, sojourner north, first sprung
from the flanks of volcanoes, plainspoken kin

to bright chili and deadly nightshade,
sleek eggplant and hairy tobacco,

we could live on you alone if we had to,
and scorched-earth marauders never bothered you much.

I love you because your body's a stem,
your eyes sprout, and you're not in the Bible,

and if we did not eat your strength,
you'd drive it up, into a flower.

david williams

yogurt is a happy culture

mac invited me to help host tonight's diybio meeting, which was an informal chat about making yogurt, why we might prefer mixed cultures over monocultures (on which, more soon), and other issues pertaining to folk microbiology. i brought some yogurt culture to share, to guard against the day when i accidentally eat the last of it. i got the original culture from the google kitchens back in 2008, and that in turn came from harold mcgee's very old indian strain (referenced here).

the mixed culture and fermentation method i use produces a thick, pleasantly-tangy yogurt without the complications (and equipment) involved in maintaining a constant incubation temperature for many hours. i just wrap a bunch of towels around the warm containers to slow down the cooling rate and leave them undisturbed for 6-9 hours. since the culture probably contains multiple types of bacteria with different temperature and ph preferences, fermenting at a range of different temperatures as the containers cool down might even be preferable to fermenting at just one constant temperature over time (which would probably be great for a pure monoculture). some work using genetic algorithms to optimize yogurt culturing seems to support this hypothesis.

and for those of you who were at diybio tonight, here's a more comprehensive, printer-friendly yogurt culturing protocol.

swarm light

another light installation by rAndom, showing light moving in swarms through three LED matrices. it's pretty neat. they also did radius, which is distinguished by a catchy but tacky soundtrack.

Posted via web from flavourcountry

complex, fluid, collective

Confusion as an indicator of validity is a crucial nuance [if organizations are conceived of] as superimposed structures. This imagery implies that there is not an underlying "reality" waiting to be discovered. Rather, organizations are viewed as the inventions of people, inventions superimposed on flows of experience and momentarily imposing some order on these streams. Notice, however, that many portions of the streams of experience will remain unorganized, and those portions being temporarily organized by imposed ideologies will remain equivocal. These enduring equivocalities should be detected by scrupulous observers, but since that which is noticed is partially indescribable and partially incomprehensible, the efforts at description will appear flawed. Such are the dilemmas that face those who choose as their topic of interest phenomena that are complex, fluid, collective.

karl weick, the social psychology of organizing, 1979

from this, and from many other bits of weick's writing i've read, i get the sense that he would agree that form, the shape an organization takes, while itself complex is only the tangible instantiation of processes that are much more complex, interesting, and organizational.

the analogy i've recently taken to using is this: studying organizations identified through recognizable organizational forms as analogous to studying a bunch of concrete objects or fixed points (using the formal mathematical definition), while studying organizational processes is analogous to studying the fixed point combinators—higher order functions or processes—that give rise to those fixed points. why does organizational analysis (whether at the micro or macro levels) remain so rooted in studying organization as a noun/object and resistant to studying organization as a verb/process?

weick's book prompted that question by acknowledging that organizations are complex accumulations of processes of sensemaking. but the hat tip to complex, non-deterministic models of social behaviour also reminded me of some thoughts about social theory and model robustness i had after going to a SALT lecture nassim nicholas taleb gave in san francisco a few years ago.

i ended then with the question of whether we might develop a theory of organization that is essentially scale-invariant and which therefore describes behaviors and processes that exist within and between groups of entities generally, rather than those that exist for particular types of entities (e.g. individuals, small groups, firms, and the like). the field of organization studies seems to think this is a bootless inquiry, but then you run across weick and suddenly everything seems possible again.

terrestrial shrub rover

via youtube.com

Posted via web from flavourcountry

the gate in the gorge

this was on the grounds at louisiana. serra's cor-ten sheets blend in while still dividing the landscape, and they are all but invisible until you stumble onto them.

pigs in mugs

frederiks have

[clearing out the backlog from denmark—i had remarkably good luck eating in copenhagen.]

so, you never go to a conference expecting a really nice dinner. at least, i don't. but surprises are sometimes pleasant. we finished the first day of papers early and were instructed to reassemble at frederiks have, smallegade 41 at 7pm. i left for the restaurant 30 minutes earlier than i had to so i could see what the neighbourhood was like, immediately took a wrong turn, and wound up on a completely residential side street innocent of all but the most mundane charms. i popped out eventually, by sheer chance, on the cross street the restaurant is on and was puzzled by the shutters on the shopfront until i heard a piercing whistle from the people assembled in the outdoor garden around the corner. we sat outside with beers until the rest of the contingent showed up.

the first good sign was an enormous lozenge-shaped carved wood bowl filled with the kind of heavily-caramelized baguette that you know will have a crisp, resilient (yet tender) crust, and a soft, gelatinised crumb. some of these showed up on the table shortly, accompanied by a remarkable, crusty sourdough bread rich with olive oil and sea salt and baked in tiny rounds the size of a small biscuit. they required no butter, but i put some on anyway. at this point, i allowed myself a tiny, pre-emptive chuckle at my luck. a good bread basket is almost always a good sign.

then the first wine of the night emerged, one of three selected by the owner to go with dinner. it was a 2009 natural yeast fermented pinot gris from alsace, from a biodynamic producer called josmeyer. this was richly-flavoured with the flavour (but not much of the fragrance) of soft stone fruit and sweet, but also crisp with acidity. having the owner choose and pour a good biodynamic wine from a relatively unfashionable grape/region combination is a good sign (on which, also see chapeau!). the restaurant was full and the kitchen was open and quiet: a very good sign.

as it turned out, frederiks have is one of the small but growing number of restaurants in copenhagen informed by the manifesto of the new nordic cuisine. the food was consciously seasonal, simple yet complex (you'll see in a minute), competent while concealing its technical refinement, and the staff were serious but weren't taking themselves seriously. awesome. the crockery was white, graciously proportioned, not oddly shaped, and didn't call attention to itself.

dinner was:

• a perfectly poached egg, fat spears of poached green and white asparagus, tiny boiled fjord shrimp, a sharpish foamed custard hollandaise of stinging nettle and shellfish fumet (probably made with the shells and boiling liquid from the fjord shrimp). [mise du printemps, 2009, jos meyer, alsace]
• lamb loin cooked sous-vide to a perfect rareness, then seared quickly to crisp the binding of fat, served with a rectangle of lamb rillettes, fried green cabbage, roasted golden beet, golden beet and sherry vinegar puree, dill, and roasted new yellow potatoes. [avan tempranillo, 2008, nascimento, ribera del duero—a tempranillo with smooth tannins, purple tasting, dry finish, violets]
• a rhubarb soda, pacojet rhubarb ice cream, (green) rhubarb preserve with (green) rhubarb brunoise, white chocolate mousse, cardamom crumbs. [a sparkling gamay FRV jean-paul brun, beaujolais]

at 8.30pm, the kitchen was halfway broken down and ole, the owner, let me poke my head inside. while i talked with mattias the chef (who was passing a heavily reduced stock through some flannel), ole mopped up the floor.* they serve 40-50 covers with a cvap, an immersion circulating heater, a pacojet, and a 4-burner stove and flat-top. 

together with great conversation, mark this down as another perfect meal.

* a nicely democratic touch. they also list every major employee, including the waitstaff, on their website.