Via Kottke dig Jacqueline Lou Skagg’s paintings on pennies.

Drawing by the great Edgar Degas.

David Lebovitz’s french weekend.

Total heaviosity.

[Photo Via: Queen Maria Libertina]

Roasted pumpkin with rosemary and garlic, part of a  simple September feast indeed.

“Mademoiselle Mary de Borderieux,” By Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

True Indeed.

[Photo Via: Touchn2btouched]

It won’t mess up your hair.

Collage by Julien Ratouin-Lefevre.

Still Diggin’…

Here’s an end-of-summer treat from Nicole Franzen.

Here’s another wonderful short in the Made By Hand series.

Made by Hand / No 4 The Cigar Shop from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

Here is a good piece on Sarah Burns whose documentary on the Central Park Five is making the rounds at the film festivals.

Photograph Via Inspirefirst.

To Sir, With Love.

Bronx Banter Excerpt

Please enjoy this essay by Carlo Rotella, featured in his new collection, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, And Other True Stories.

“Bedtime Story”

By Carlo Rotella

I was in a city far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited the dog pound, a place of grimness even though—or because—the people who worked there seemed gentle and well-intentioned. All those pit bulls, muscled up with nowhere to go, flexing as we walked past on the other side of the bars. They were desperate and accommodating, and they knew that something was wrong. They could smell all the dogs that came before them. Where had they gone?

Around midnight I retired to the dingy motel where I’d been put by the magazine that sent me out to do the story. In an effort to cut down on expenses, its travel offi ce had found me a place where if you wanted to line up some crack or a prostitute all you had to do was hang out for a while in the parking lot. It had been a long day and evening, with drinking at the end of it. The pit bulls were on my mind. I don’t have much use for dogs but I kept coming back to the sight of the animals lined up in their cages, going all rigid and alert and eager to please when visitors came by. They had thought something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what it might be, but it didn’t happen. Life would go on like that for a while until, I guessed, some were adopted and some were taken out and killed, and then other dogs would take their place, and soon it would be the new dogs’ turn to win the lottery or die.

One thing to do in a dingy motel is to watch dingy TV. There was lots of it—tedious sports shows and talk shows, unfunny comedies, dumbass celebrity updates, bad movies of the ’80s, a charnel house of shitty writing and stale ideas. I ran aground for a while on an offbrand show or movie about the crew of a rocket ship who go around fighting space vampires. The heroes dashed from here to there shouting fakey jargon and toting futuristic weapons that looked like the weapons we have now with nonfunctional molded-plastic appendages glued to them. The vampires glowered, hissed, and suppurated. It kind of ruins the space-opera magic to wonder what the actors’ parents think when they see them on the screen, but that’s what I usually wonder about. The talented darling who starred in school plays and expectant local fantasies back in Elk Grove Village or Mamaroneck or wherever is now wearing fangs and slathered in gory makeup and being blown unconvincingly in half by a plasmoid megablaster. I picture the parents thinking, “Well, at least he is on TV.”

The lameness of it all caught me just right—in that end-of-day, far-from-home, buzzed-from-work mood—and laid me low. Deep gloom descended. I went through the channels a few more times, only growing more despondent, until I happened upon round one of the middleweight title fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi—held 22 years before, almost to the day. Hagler had his hands full, but he knew what to do about it. He was settling in to cope with Mugabi’s strength and power by taking him deep into the fight, wearing him out over the long haul and fi nishing him late. Mugabi, a blowout artist, had gone ten rounds just once and six only twice in his twenty-five fights, all wins. The turning point would come in the sixth round, when Hagler, having blunted the force of Mugabi’s early-round assault, would take over the fight by giving his man a spine-jellying pounding, then settle in to finish him inside the distance, KO’ing him in the eleventh.

All of a sudden I felt a lot better. I turned down the sound and put out the light. On the screen, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer, radiated calm and ease as he talked to his fighter between rounds. Everything was going to be fine; Petronelli’s every gesture said as much.His main task was to create a recurring pocket of serenity to which Hagler could retreat between hard-fought rounds for rest and reflection. Demonstrating a for-example combination he wanted Hagler to throw, Petronelli moved his own hands as if arranging flowers. Let’s just fix a couple of little mechanical things, he was saying, and it’s your fight. Doesn’t matter how strong the other guy is. Doesn’t matter what he’s done before this or who he’s done it to. We know how to beat him. We know how to beat everybody. Hagler wasn’t exactly looking at his trainer and he didn’t exactly nod, but he heard him. I took off my glasses and put them on the cigarette-stained bedside table, put my head down on the pillow, and was dreamlessly asleep before either fighter struck a blow in the next round.

Reprinted with permission from Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, by Carlo Rotella, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Carlo Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

[Featured Image: Motel Room by Greg Watts]

“Vivian” By Phillipe Deutsch (2010)

Think about that.

[Photo Credit: Dark Shadows]

Here’s an excerpt from Alex Witchel’s book about her mother’s struggle with dementia:

The meatloaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.

In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid.

[Picture Credit: Miya Ando via Zeroing]

Saturday morning I’m in a dentist office on the east side flipping through the pages of New York Magazine when I see a blurb on Maison Kayser a newly-opened bakery on the Upper East Side. It is the 80th location of the bakery worldwide but the first in the States. So when I finished the appointment I paid a visit, bought a baguette, a sugar brioche, and a pain au chocolat. They were all wonderful so I went back yesterday with my sister and The Wife for brunch.

My sister, whose been to Paris many times, walked in and said, “It smells right.”

We were in heaven. Maison Keyser is a bakery and a sit down restaurant. They are still getting their bearings in terms of service but nothing was egregiously bad and here’s the beauty part…I recognized a blond haired woman from the day before. She’d been working behind the cash register in the bakery, was friendly and had an open face.  Her name is Marine. I introduced her to my sister and The Wife and she asked us if we’d tried the white chocolate brioche (I think it’s called a Vin Blanc, but I could be wrong). We had not and she brought us one and explained that it is from Lyon, where she is from, a combination of a baguette and brioche.

We flipped over it and for $4.95 it might be one of the best greatest values bite-for-bite in the city. We wouldn’t have tried it if Marine didn’t offer us a sample. Eric Kayser’s breads and pastries are reason enough to trek over to the east side but he’s  fortunate to have someone like Marine working for him. She took great pride in their food and was eager to share it.  It’s that kind of care, warmth, and attentiveness that will keep us coming back.