Pictures by Erin Wong.

Slammin’.

Upside down you’re turning me.

[Photograph by Brandon Voges]

Loopid.

Collage by John Stezaker

There’s No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

A secret Treasure via the Etsy Blog.

My mother is Belgian so we grew up with tarts. Sure, she made a pie on occasion, and cookies too. But tarts were the thing.

Dig this blog, Taste Food. It’s really wonderful.

David Levine on the mess that Mark Rothko’s death made. Fascinating read.

David Lebovitz takes Manhattan.

George…

Oh, baby.

Another sure shot from Nicole Franzen.

Thanks to Long Form Reads for linking to this 1965 Hunter Thompson piece on the Hells Angels written for The Nation:

“We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us,” one of the Oakland Angels told a Newsweek reporter. “When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We are complete social outcasts–outsiders against society.”

A lot of this is a pose, but anyone who believes that’s all it is has been on thin ice since the death of Jay Gatsby. The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it–and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.

I went to one of their meetings recently, and half-way through the night I thought of Joe Hill on his way to face a Utah firing squad and saying his final words: “Don’t mourn, organize.” It is safe to say that no Hell’s Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a Bushmaster, but nevertheless they are somehow related. The I.W.W. had serious plans for running the world, while the Hell’s Angels mean only to defy the world’s machinery. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. There is nothing particularly romantic or admirable about it; that’s just the way it is, strength in unity. They don’t mind telling you that running fast and loud on their customized Harley 74s gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.

Oh, Nat.

Happiness is this record:

Yeah…Uh-huh…Sure.

Diane hipped me to this fun list of movie tag lines.

“You are cordially invited to George and Martha’s for an evening of fun and games.”

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it on the streets…”

“In space no one can hear you scream.”

“It’s a Strange World.”

“A Lot Can Happen In The Middle Of Nowhere.”

“Untitled (Medici Princess)” By Joseph Cornell (1948)

We’ve talked about this tomato sauce before, but since the folks at Food 52 brought it up recently, why not mention it again?

Dope on plastic.

There is a long profile on Danny Meyer in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine:

New York is a city of rooms. Most of them are tiny, dark, lonely and the wrong temperature. Meyer makes rooms that are exquisite — overlooking, in the case of the Modern, the greatest sculptures of the 20th century — and intimate. You feel at home. His goal, he told me, is for customers to make his restaurants their clubhouses.

Meyer’s track record is near perfect: one closing (Tabla, a 283-seat Indian place that lasted for 12 years), 25 openings and counting. And for most of his career he has expanded without repeating himself. He has created new restaurants as though they were each his first and only — the singularity of a place always as important as the food. His looseness and precision are qualities more reminiscent of an athlete or an artist. Whatever Meyer is engaged in — jaywalking, French-speaking, grease-inhaling — receives his complete attention.

Some of this is hereditary. Meyer’s father, Morton, owned hotels and had a gift for hospitality. As Meyer told me, “My dad gave me the gene to enjoy cooking, and to enjoy consuming good food and wine.”

…It has taken Meyer 26 years to go from the owner-manager of a single place to C.E.O. of a company — Union Square Hospitality Group — that employs 2,200 people and oversees the operations of all his restaurants. His mother calls the company “his business family.” Its core is a tight-knit group of five general partners whom Meyer has known for an aggregate of 102 years. Together they oversee three places that are in the Zagat Guide’s Top 5 (Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Union Square Cafe), plus the Modern, Maialino, Blue Smoke, the two cafes at the Museum of Modern Art, the newly opened restaurant at the Whitney, a jazz club, a handful of seasonal stands including one at Citi Field and a catering and events company. Meyer is on the board of Open Table, the Internet restaurant reservations service that not only allows him to materialize midlunch for a full-body hug but also tracks the eating habits of his 3,500 or so fine-dining customers each day. (Shake Shack feeds more than 12,000 daily.) This has all taken decades. And Meyer might have remained an incrementalist were it not for Shake Shack, which began as a hot-dog cart that he told the staff of Eleven Madison to set up in the park across the street in 2001. The cart was such a sensation that he expanded the menu to include burgers and milkshakes and opened an actual 400-square-foot shack in the park in 2004. Eleven Madison owned Shake Shack from 2004 to 2009, when it became its own company — but the mobbed burger stand provided the capital required to hire the Swiss chef Daniel Humm away from a restaurant in San Francisco, reduce the seats in his new dining room, double his staff and establish a venue so elevated in its pursuits that it’s less a restaurant than a graduate program in taste. Four stars from The Times ultimately followed.

I know some people in the restaurant business in New York and they all speak highly of Meyer. He’s the Mariano Rivera of the industry.