g a s t r o p o d t r e e f r o g

we have a map of the piano

2007-09-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

Like good phrenology, but geographic. Mirth and tranquility are too small.

Also, we have a map of the piano - live in japan.

> enter the window

2007-09-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west, and a dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small window which is open. On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers. A clear glass bottle is here. The glass bottle contains:

A quantity of water.

(zork)

New Pickle

2007-09-12T17:39:00.000-07:00

Interesing seeds at Seed Savers, including Red Malabar spinach, fat Oxheart heirloom carrots, Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, and Sutton's Harbinger peas (won an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1901, apparently).

I am anxious to try pickling a batch of West Indian Gherkin cucumbers (above). I think they would be a nice addition to a bloody mary with some kind of hybrid wasabi/horseradish.

stop yodeling until oktoberfest

2007-09-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

maybe the funniest thing the New York Times has printed, ever:

A Rough Script of Life, if Ever There Was One

... "Caller from the 100 block of North Morehead Street requested to speak to animal control because caller felt that someone was coming into his yard and cutting the hair on his dogs. Dispatch advised caller to set up video surveillance on his house. Caller said he planned on it." ...

decorative

2007-09-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

A great Soho design store, Moss...mossonline. Their Aphrodite pitcher reminds me of a plant I saw at Wave Hill in the Bronx,

the nipple fruit:

Not sure know why.

local eats

2007-09-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

I had a great oyster from Duxbury, MA a little while back at B & G Oysters. I found these Duxburys at my local whole foods last night and brought a few home (something I rarely do because I can't open them without gouging my hand open usually). They were fantastic with a shallot-ponzu-rice wine vinegar mignonette.

The view from the back garden at B & G.

love the Ging Nang Boyz

2007-09-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

Stick with it until 2:50.

calf stretch

2007-08-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

It really is not easy being green. Everyday I wake up and feel less flexible. I don't understand what niche this fills, but I am going to study it.

potato and onion tart, No. 1

2007-08-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

My first attempt at the kind of tart you cook.

1. thinly slice some onions, and saute them down with some garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. Add a lot of sea salt and pepper. Set this aside to cool to room temperature after it's all softened and smells great.

2. thinly slice some russet potatoes

3. Play stringbean jean by Belle and Sebastian.

4. make a single layer of potatos, cover with a layer of the onions, then another layer of thinly sliced potatos, and repeat this until you are satisfied.

5. Add some chicken stock until it comes up about 1/3 of the way in whatever pan you've started making your tart.

6. Cover with aluminum foil, and back it at 350F for about 45 minutes.

7. Uncover it, and sprinkle a handful of goat cheese on top; place it back in the oven at 350 or 400F for another 30 minutes, until most of the stock has evaporated and the goat cheese is nice.

8. Let it cool for 20 minutes before cutting squares out of it.

sunday rustic short ribs

2007-08-19T21:55:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about cayenne and pomegranate. Here is my experiment with cayenne and pomegranate braised short ribs.

1. take a couple bone-in short ribs
2. rub them with coarse salt, back pepper and cayenne
3. brown them on all sides in a tablespoon of olive oil
4. remove them, and then soften some rough-chopped celery, carrot, and shallot in the same pan.

The umami gets released as the miripoix cooks.
5. deglaze with a cup of pinot noir or syrah
6. add a cup or so of good stock and pomegranate juice (I knew there had to be some use for POM), let these meld together
7. add back the short ribs and some thyme, cover and simmer for a couple hours.
8. remove the short ribs and strain the braising liquid; add a little more cayenne, then reduce this until there are just a couple tablespoons left
9. reheat the short ribs in the reduced braising liquid
10. plate with some carbohydrate such as good bread or egg pasta.
11. Hot and sweet. Yummo.

proposed poems from The New Yorker

2007-08-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

We will watch every John Waters film
We will read the Sunday Times every time
(I in this order:
week in review
Magazine
Sunday styles
Metro
Real estate
Arts and leisure)
I will try not to crash our volvo,
On our days off we'll laze on the chaise
Flopping gasto journal from my fingers
Two story wall of windows letting something in
Soapstone reverberating like the Getty,
Something needs to shore me up
Something needs to fight for me against all the
Metastatic cancer in the world
I will still be telling
That story of throwing up in the bathroom
Of honmura an
When I'm sixty four
After getting an ileus at yale.
In a dream I have
We will sit back somenight again
Like two figurines next to each other
At the formosa café
With all our friends about us
We will never let the atmosphere
Atomize us again like this,
We will walk our dog in the indifferent night
Petting some cats along the way
I will throw a cigarette into the street
And no pain or consfusion can fastforward our lives
In those kind of lonely nights
We will watch every john waters film.

4 | 5 | 6

2007-08-10T21:19:00.001-07:00

looks like soho

06355 | July 21, 2007

2007-07-24T20:24:00.001-07:00

D.N. ad infinitum

2007-07-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Norman
1931 gelatin silver print 11.6 x 9.0 cm.
ex-collection Georgia O'Keeffe
GEH NEG: 37390 74:0052:0094

paperback favorites

2007-07-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

All my books for the past year come from the table in the front of a Barnes & Noble.

pickles à la minute

2007-07-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

Grub Street at NY Mag has a great section called The Annotated Dish. This week's feature on Le Bernardin’s surf and turf (Kobe steak and grilled escolar), includes a Kimchee à la minute which is a single leaf of Napa cabbage marinated in korean barbeque sauce. I love to quick pickle things, and my latest experiments involve both baby cucumbers and Napa cabbage. Here's the process, which is the same for whatever you'd like to pickle, as long as it has a relatively high water content (so it can equilibrate with the salinity of the pickling liquid . . . or something like that):

1. wash your vegetables in cold water, and put them in a Mason jar

2. cover them with cold water

3. add some white vinegar (or for a more subtle flavor, use rice wine vinegar); it's hard to know how much to add, and it's up to your taste, but if ~5% of the total volume of the liquid is vinegar, that's probably a good start.

4. Add a couple large tablespoons of salt.

5. Cut a few very thin slices of garlic, ginger, and red onion, and add these.

6. Add a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice.

7. Tast the liquid at this point; dilute it if it's too salty or vinegary, or add more of whatever you think is missing.

8. Invert it a few times to mix everything, and place in the refrigerator.

You can eat these a soon as after a few hours, and it only gets better with time. After about a week or more there will be a special tanginess which will remind your palate how fresh and "à la minute" these pickles are.

['pit.tsa]

2007-07-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

My search for good pizza outside NYC begins. Here is the "Oliver's" pizza I got at Todd English's Fig's in Beacon Hill tonight. It was nice and thin, with a good chewy texture to the dough, nicely charred in spots from the wood burning oven.

five albums --> desert island

2007-07-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

(unchanged since 1994)

(except a)

1. the cure

disintegration

2. cowboy junkies

the trinity session

3. afghan whigs

gentlemen

4. catherine wheel

chrome

5. new order

substance

a. radiohead

the bends

Red Hook | June 9 2007

2007-07-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

Is this where all my classmates from Dartmouth went when they said they were going into consulting? Were would the world be without them?

objet trouvé

2007-07-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes art can be found in unexpected places. Here is a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi in an otherwise featureless corner of Mount Sinai Hospital.

You can visit the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City near P.S. 1.

something good comes from Kid A?

2007-07-01T18:47:00.000-07:00

Could this be one of Radiohead's best and most overlooked songs ever? or is this just the endgame of my (still) trying to find something transcendental and worthwhile about the album?

super simple pasta

2007-07-01T18:17:00.001-07:00

pasta with sage and brown butter

1. rough cut a handful of sage and some garlic

2. boil some spaghetti (or some bucatini if you can find it) until al dente

3. heat a couple tablespoons of good butter in a shallow pan until it starts to brown; wilt the sage and garlic in the butter for a minute or two

4. transfer the pasta (with some of the pasta water still clinging to it) into the pan with the butter and sage; toss this around for a minute; loosen it if it's too dry with a couple spoonfuls of the pasta water

5. add some fresh black pepper

6. top with parmesan just before removing to a plate

security blanket cuisine

2007-06-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

The best gauge of what someone's concept of "comfort food" is might be the first dinner they cook for themselves in a new home. It is sort of the inverse of a last meal, but the two might be similarly revealing. Grilled cheddar with maple bacon, spicy pickled green beans (I found the ones that Stand includes in their pot of pickles - they're Rick's Picks 'Mean Beans') and garlicky dill slices, sunflower greens with a simple vinaigrette, and a Harpoon summer beer.

the preternatural sky

2007-06-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

I always wonder about the 4 giant blocks on the Met's facade...presumably unfinished scupltures.

hard-won fruits de mer

2007-06-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

The Haenyo divers are a group of women freedivers who collect abalone, seaweed, lobsters, octopus, oysters etc in the very cold waters off the southern coast of Jeju Island in Korea.

sakagura | last night

2007-06-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

Thinly sliced duck breast, wrapped around some Julienned scallions, with a drop of (maybe) wasabe/edamame puree. The duck was rare, but the fat had a nice prosciutto-like quality. In the background is some grilled Japanese squid with miso and raw ginger I laid waste to. This non-presupposing restaurant in midtown is like a less rarified Momofuku Ssam. Sakagura, 211 E. 43rd Street,

pot of pickles

2007-06-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

This is the excellent pot of pickles I had at Stand on East 12th yesterday. There were some nice new pickles, very sour dills, spicy pickled beans, some small green cherry tomatoes, and few other interesting things with some notes of nutmeg.

Visit the Pickle Wing of the New York Food Museum (Pickle Day on Orchard Street is set for Sept 17th).

Maybe more interesting, the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul.

kayakers in the east river | June 16 2007

2007-06-18T14:35:00.000-07:00

An incidental finding; taken from the Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City.

five years

2007-06-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

a great cover; Brian Molko from Placebo:

simple roast chicken

2007-06-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes considered the measure of a cook's mastery of the basics, a good roast chicken. This is a simple method adapted from Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. He serves it with French green lentils, pearl onions, button mushrooms, bacon lardons, and sauce Chasseur (hunter-style sauce of mushrooms, shallots, and wine) . . . probably none of which are necessary.

1. Start with a chicken that weighs between 2 and 3 pounds. Rinse it really well under cold water, and dry it thoroughly (inside and out) or it'll end up steaming instead of roasting. Salt the inside and outside with a good amount of coarse sea salt and black pepper.
2. Heat the oven to 450F; meanwhile, truss the bird:

3. Place the chicken into a shallow roasting pan, then into the oven:

4. Close the oven door, and don't open it for 50 minutes.

5. 10 minutes before the chicken is done, chop a bunch of fresh thyme:

6. Remove the roasting pan from the oven, tilt it so the juice collects in one corner, and let the thyme wilt in the juice. Spoon it over the bird continuously for about 10 minutes:

7. Let it rest for 15 minutes. Pull it apart with your fingers. Eat the wings first. Look for the two "oysters" on either side of the backbone as you pull the thighs away. Plate it.

no brainspace,

2007-06-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

only this Nobuyoshi Araki of watermelon eating.

more scanpaths

2007-06-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

A classic paper by Yarbus in 1967 tracking saccadic eye movements when subjects looked at Ilya Repin’s The Unexpected Visitor (1884), and asked: 1) free examination of the picture, 2) estimate the material circumstances of the family, 3) give the ages of the people, 4) surmise what the family had been doing before the arrival of the "unexpected visitor," 5) remember the clothes worn by the people, 6) remember the position of the people and objects in the room, and 7) estimate how long the "unexpected visitor" had been away from the family.

strike zone = crotchal region?

2007-06-10T19:26:00.000-07:00

An interesting article about using eye tracking to measure how long people are looking where...and using this to design better menus and news articles and web pages. Buried in the piece, however, is the interesting finding that men spend more time than women staring at the crotchal region when watching baseball.

dorothy norman redux

2007-06-10T19:17:00.000-07:00

Portrait of Dorothy Norman
STIEGLITZ, ALFRED, b.1864-1946
Alfred Stiegliz: A Personal Vision, 1932
7.5 x 9.1 cm

brisket yarmulke

2007-06-09T12:59:00.001-07:00

From hats of meat:

"THE COW-BOY HAT - This American classic, made of the best marbleized cuts of beef available, assures that you won’t just herd cattle, you’ll wear them. With this beauty, the cows are alwavs on your mind."

Also see meatpaper, the magazine about meat.

does the super-id exist?

2007-06-08T21:15:00.000-07:00

Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means more money in his pocket. He is like God, in a sense — the God of your own creation. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, implore, cajole, pray or curse — he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot. He has nothing to lose. But if you realize that he is not a god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom but a wanderer along the path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice.

-Henry Miller, Sexus

lolmetal

2007-06-08T20:33:00.001-07:00

I guess any idea, taken by degrees too far, becomes ridiculous.

cameron at the museum

2007-06-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

mcnugget enhanced

2007-06-07T20:50:00.001-07:00

here are a few pictures of 'enhancing' things with chicken mcnuggets. photo from slice.

venus | 2007

2007-06-05T22:38:00.001-07:00

My favorite nude, by Modigliani. Visit the face transformer, upload a picture of yourself, and see yourself as a Modigliani.

sous-vide @ home

2007-06-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

It's already a bit passe, but sous-vide ("under vacuum") is a method of cooking which involves sealing food in air-tight plastic and cooking it in a tightly temperature-regulated water bath, usually at a low temperature for a long time. The main advantage is that this method is basically the only way to cook something while keeping the integrety of the food completely intact. You essentially (in theory) end up with every molecule you started with in the final result.

Here is an experiment I did with sous-vide duck breast:

1. Start with a nice duck breast, with some garlic, orange peel, thyme, salt and pepper.

2. Seal it all together in an air-tight plastic bag that can withstand near boiling (I used a cheap Seal-a-Meal...but these machines can be ridiculously expensive).

3. Immerse in a water bath that is maintained at around 130F (a laboratory thermoimmersion water bath would be best, but I just balance a thermometer on the edge of the pot and adjust the heat). The larger the volume of water you can use, the more constant the temperature will be. Let this sit in the water for 2 hours..up to 12 hours (at maybe a slightly lower temperature).

4. Remove the breast and open the bag carefully.

5. Essentially, it's done.

The next steps are optional:

6. Fire it in a pan to crisp up the skin.

7. Remove it to a plate.

8. Deglaze the pan with a little Gran Marnier. Set it afire.

9. Serve it with some watercress. Yumm-o!

four thousand holes in blackburn, lancashire

2007-06-04T18:49:00.000-07:00

For a summer between 5th and 6th grade I was obsessed with the 'Paul is dead' myth. I think this was sort of a high point in the deep reading of bands, and the epitome of the (critically endangered) dialectic that bands once had with their fans. The story still impresses me because of the amount of textual spadework--interpretation of obscure symbolism, sussing lyrical interreferentiality, and just even technical analysis--their audience was engaged in. The fans are not engaged in a futile, Baudrillardian, cataloging of free floating signifiers...seeing meaning where there is none...but there is actually a great dialogue that goes on over years between the band (who love wordplay and clever studio editing etc) and completely obsessed fans.

Friday was the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The cover is one of the most paul-is-dead-symbolism-laden pieces. Besides the fact that it's shot at the edge of a freshly dug grave, other details people have pointed out: the yellow flowers are in the shape of a bass, with three rather than four strings, and are arranged to spell 'PAUL?'; some people have interpreted the statue in the foreground to be the Hindu goddess Kali the destroyer, and she is pointing one hand at Paul and the other at a wax figure of him; if you place a mirror horizontally across the midline of 'Lonely Hearts' on the drum, you will see 1 ONE I X HE ^ DIE....of course endlessly interpretable. Crazy stuff for sure...but sometimes I wish a band still engaged us in this kind of meta-hoax-art game.

'Paul is Dead' [wiki]

cartographic license

2007-06-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

From her biography:

"Francesca Berrini transforms vintage maps of places she has longed to visit into fine art maps of entirely new and imagined worlds. She obsessively tears up original vintage maps into tiny pieces, and then reconstitutes them, using a painterly process, into new maps and directional devices that reflect a longing for places unseen."

Also see this interesting site, strangemaps.

poor pillow mouse

2007-06-03T00:06:00.001-07:00

Dog toy cemetary, from Natalie Dee.

Temptation | 1984

2007-06-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

Bernard Sumner wears short shorts!

the high art of passive-aggression

2007-06-02T08:58:00.001-07:00

'On the Meaning of Losing Teeth in Dreams'

2007-06-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

A classic anxiety dream of mine involves loosing teeth. It turns out that the symbolism of teeth in dreams is common (Freud called them "typical" because so many people seemed to have almost identical dreams). One of the ealiest attempts at addressing this was in a paper by Antonie Rhan in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1923. He thought that such dreams lead back to the earliest stage of thumb sucking, when the baby has no teeth and enjoys itself without disturbance from reality.

The title of this post is taken from a paper published by Sandor Lorand in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1948. He reports one of his patients' particularly entertaining tooth-dreams:

I have a painful tooth, a lower front tooth, which is abcessed. I put my fingers in my mouth and pull it out. At the root of the tooth and clinging to it is the pus sac of the abcess. I thought in the dream, 'Why, that is just like a penis in a rubber condom with the seminal fluid collected at the end of the condom'.

So of course, Lorand concludes that "her associations to the dream were first to her castrative tendencies toward her husband as well as against herself. This thought led to the expression of her feelings of guilt and responsibility for causing her husband difficulties in attaining his orgasm. I was able to elicit even deeper associations along the following line: first, self-castration, self-deprivation through castrating her husband (by fellatio—biting); then guilt and self-mutilation as punishment. Further..." it goes on. Great stuff.

Walden, 27 May 2007

2007-06-01T20:38:00.000-07:00

A man is rich in proportion to the number

of things which he can afford to let alone.

- H. D. T.

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

2007-05-31T12:31:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-05-29T21:35:00.001-07:00

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

prop bottles of wine

2007-05-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

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

elderflower wine | 1996

2007-05-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

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

smallcool

2007-05-27T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-22T19:07:00.000-07:00

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

azerbaijan airlines

2007-05-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

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"

2007-05-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-17T22:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

From Indexed.

The After Hours | June 19, 1960

2007-05-17T21:23:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-16T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-05-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

strozzapretti.

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

Terrapene a la Baltimore

2007-05-08T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-08T20:02:00.001-07:00

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.