The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular

Phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall's 27 "brain organs" were:

1. The instinct of reproduction (located in the cerebellum).
2. The love of one's offspring.
3. Affection; friendship.
4. The instinct of self-defense; courage; the tendency to get into fights.
5. The carnivorous instinct; the tendency to murder.
6. Guile; acuteness; cleverness.
7. The feeling of property; the instinct of stocking up on food (in animals); covetousness; the tendency to steal.
8. Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness.
9. Vanity; ambition; love of glory (a quality "beneficent for the individual and for society").
10. Circumspection; forethought.
11. The memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility.
12. The sense of places; of space proportions.
13. The memory of people; the sense of people.
14. The memory of words.
15. The sense of language; of speech.
16. The sense of colors.
17. The sense of sounds; the gift of music.
18. The sense of connectedness between numbers.
19. The sense of mechanics, of construction; the talent for architecture.
20. Comparative sagacity.
21. The sense of metaphysics.
22. The sense of satire; the sense of witticism.
23. The poetical talent.
24. Kindness; benevolence; gentleness; compassion; sensitivity; moral sense.
25. The faculty to imitate; the mimic.
26. The organ of religion.
27. The firmness of purpose; constancy; perseverance; obstinacy.

I prefer the phrenological map from Zucco: Le French Diner on Orchard Street...which is modelled on a typical French truck stop. I think having steak frites on the mind is more worthwhile than "the sense of metaphysics."

tragicomedy, or just comedy?

watch this. You might laugh until you have a cramp.

prop bottles of wine

To tell the truth, I don't give a flying fuck what's in your fridge. Especially the "organic highlights."

elderflower wine | 1996

This is a recipe for elderflower wine that I originally recreated from The Cure's official website circa 1996. This is a simple and refreshing hock/riesling style wine. The elderflower has a commensural yeast which colonizes it (like uninoculated lambic beers...but specific to the flower rather than the geographic region), and gives it a distinct lemony flavor.

1. boil a liter of water and add a half cup of honey (or a quarter cup of sugar). let the honey dissolve. then let the water cool completely to room temperature.
2. take a handful of dried elderflowers (sometimes health food stores will sell these, or order online), and add these to the honey water, along with the juice of one lemon. Wait for the water to cool, or else the friendly yeast will all be killed.
3. stir
4. transfer the elderflower/honey/water/lemon soup to a clean (ideally...autoclaved) bottle and cap loosely.
5. let sit in a cool, dark place.

You can drink this after about 24-36 hours....but after about a week it will start to bubble and become very effervescent. Strain it and drink it cool. Best at about 10 days. Gets you drunk. If it doesn't kill you.

the varieties of banchan experience

Why does banchan make me so happy? Cucumbers, cabbage, chili, salt, vinegar...lightly boiled, pickled, chopped, chilled. A pictoral glossary from TriFood.

smallcool

From apartment therapy, one of the smallest coolest apartments of the year. This is a 620 sq. foot studio in Greenwich Village. Loads of room for books and a nice work space in the kitchen.

Dorothy Norman

Dorothy Norman, a strange adolescent crush of mine. By Alfred Stieglitz.

azerbaijan airlines

Airlinemeals.net has thousands of descriptions (and pics) of airplane meals. If you had been flying from Antalya to Baku on Jun 26, 2006, you would have enjoyed this lunch of pickles, boiled buckwheat with chicken chop and vegetables, cold chicken meat, cheese, butter, cake...with a Fanta.

Cloaca artificialiter

Deleuze and Guattari propose the body without organs (BwO) in Anti-Oedipus:

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it."

The more interesting, and nosologically accurate concept is the organ without body (OwB). Cloaca is an artwork by Wim Delvoye exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2002. It is a machine that is fed twice a day (restaurants including Markt and Savoy prepared meals for it), and sends the food through a series of stages which recapitulate the human digestive process...amylase, hydrochloric acid, pancreatic enzymes...and produces something that smells, apparently, very much like shit.

"pasta in the way a whore would make it"

Pasta alla Puttanesca

1. chop up a handful of pitted olives, capers, and garlic.

2. saute these in a pan with a couple tablespoons of olive oil.

3. add some red chili flakes. add some black pepper.

4. with the back of a fork, mash 5 or 6 good anchovies into the pan and mix until they dissolve into the oil.
5. when everything together in the pan smells great, add a can or two of good crushed tomatos.
6. Let the tomatoes simmer and reduce for a few minutes, absorbing the flavor of oil, olives, capers, garlic etc.
7. boil pasta such as spaghetti or capellini in water as salty as the sea.
8. transfer some of the pasta (and the cooking water clinging to it) directly into the pan with the tomato sauce. Add pasta until you reach your desired pasta:sauce ratio

9. Finish with Julienned basil and a dry cheese and some salt.

coded messages from the Hacienda

From a very encyclopedic discography of New Order. One possible explanation of the abstract color schemes which seem to recur through early New Order albums:

"Peter Saville designed a colour code for use on several releases circa-83. The decoder is the wheel design on the reverse of the cover to Power, Corruption and Lies. To clear things up a little, the colour wheel describes the meaning of the coloured squares on (not only) Power Corruption & Lies, (but also) Blue Monday and Confusion.

To decode the wheel, use only the outer two rings. You could divide the outer two rings into full colour, various on green, and various on yellow. The inner segments appear to be meaningless. Start with the full colour sections, the first of which will be the green one... This is 'A'. Work your way clockwise naming each colour the next letter. There are exactly 26 segments around the disc. From 'Z' work back into the full colours, the first of which is '1'. This means that the full green segment is either 'A' or '1', and the colour for 'I' is also that for '9'.

You should be able to decode the squares now. Start with the 5 on the front of Power Corruption & Lies, and you will find (if you have the vinyl) that the first 4 squares spell 'FACT' then next square is divided into two, with the lower half being '7' and the upper half being '5'. Therefore the code is 'FACT 75' which is the Factory number for this release. The code for the CD front cover is 'FACD 75'."

If only New Order had sublimated some of this abstruseness into writing better lyrics.

best moral compass ever

From Indexed.

The After Hours | June 19, 1960

The 7th floor of Bergdorf Goodman reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode:

A woman buying a gift in a department store tries to return it, but finds the clerk is a mannequin. She falls asleep, wakes up, then finds that she is a mannequin herself.

And precursors to museums, curiosity cabinets (Wunderkammer, wonder-rooms).

Foucault recalls Borges's 'Chinese Encyclopedia' in which it is written that animals are divided into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

Ah taxonomy. Mannequins. Michel Foucault. Andrew McCarthy.

bridges and powerlines

A friend's band. May be famous someday. They have traversed the heights from the Wreck Room in Bushwick to Pianos and Mercury Lounge.

Carmen [mp3]

huate taxidermy

A papier-mache antelope head by Farfelus Farfadets. A piece from NY Mag on the taxidermy that has become de rigueur in new NYC restaurants.

Corner Bistro, Monday 2 AM

May is National Hamburger Month. This burger was cooked last night at Corner Bistro and survived a half-hour subway ride from the West Village. Of course not the best burger in New York, but really good in its context.

friends or food?

My Pet Chicken has some nice info and pictures of different breeds of chickens. The Silkie Bantam...described as the lap dog of the chicken world.

"Fancy Features" of the Silkie:
Comb Type: Walnut Comb
Crested: Yes
Feathered Feet: Yes
Number of Toes: 5

Can taste be the final fancy feature? You would definitely burp up a feather after eating this bird.

strangled priest pasta

strozzapretti.

In the shape of a rolled up towel, for strangling priests, apparently. From the Cook's Thesaurus.

Terrapene a la Baltimore

The menus in the Buttolph Menu collection at the NY Public Library include dishes like clear green turtle soup, leg of mutton with caper sauce, pickled lambs' tongue, canvas-back ducks, and chow chow (a relish of chopped vegetables pickled in mustard).

Boxer

I think the new National album is superior to Neon Bible. And I doubt the national had to hole up for a year in a church in bumblefuck canada.