Alexandra makes a Lemon-Ricotta Cheesecake (dig what she uses for the crust).

Yes, please.

Oh, Brother.

[Photo Via: What’s Left]

Beautiful photograph by Paul Meleschnig via MPD.

Allen Barra on the Duke. 

David Lebovitz makes a bacon and radicchio risotto and what time is dinner?

“Guitar” (sheet metal sculpture) by Pablo Picasso (1912)

Check out this meaty 1989 Comics Journal interview with Bill Watterson (found over at Longform):

WEST: In looking at Krazy Kat, do you draw any strength from what Herriman did in terms of the relationships of his characters?

WATTERSON: Krazy Kat is a completely unique strip. I think it’s the best comic strip ever drawn. Ultimately, though, it’s such a peculiar and idiosyncratic vision that it has little to say to me directly. I marvel at it because it’s beyond duplication. It’s like trying to paint a sunrise — you’re better off not even trying. Peanuts and Pogo have been inspirations, too, but these strips are much more down to earth, and are much closer to my own way of thinking, and have had much more direct influence. Even so, I try to keep the instances of blatant plagiarism to a minimum. Looking back, you’ll see that some of the old strips are one-gag formulas, endlessly varied. Krazy Kat revolves around the tossing of the brick. Little Nemo was always a dream, and you know the kid is going to wake up in a heap at the bottom of his bed in every single strip. I find Herriman a lot more interesting than McCay, but both are working within a very limited construct. It’s a very different approach to cartooning that what we do now. I would go insane working with limited formulas like theirs, but on the other hand, Herriman and McCay gave us something better than gags. Back then, the fun was in the getting there. The destination of each strip was the same, but every day you went there by a different road. Today, we want the strip over as soon as possible — “Just hand me the punch line, please.” The fewer panels, words, and drawings, the better: I think Pogo was the last of the enjoy-the-ride strips. It’s a shame. We’ve really lost what comics do best.

WEST: Can’t you still do that with the Sundays?

WATTERSON: The Sundays are frustrating — you have to waste the entire top third of the strip so that the panels can be dropped or reconfigured for certain-sized newspapers. This really limits what I can do. Krazy Kat had a whole page to itself, as did Nemo. Even so, there’s more flexibility on Sundays than in the daily strips. I’ve always tried to make the strip animated, even when the characters aren’t moving, with expressions or perspectives or some sort of exaggeration. There’s great potential for that which has yet to be fully mined.

Happy Easter.

[Photo Via: Craft and Burn]

Sour Cream and Cinnamon Crumb Cake. Indeed.

Oh, Charlotte.

[Photograph by Terry O’Neill]

A Study of “The Room” by Hisaji Hara (via Biblioklept).

The French New Wave…

Pictures by Raymond Cauchetier…

over at Everyday I Show.

Photograph by Ana Grigolia via MPD.

True.

[Picture via: Married to the Mob…found over at This Isn’t Happiness]

I found this cool documentary linked over at Laughing Squid.

Worth a look.

[Image Via: NPR]

Dig this.

[Image via: The Cotton Ball Conspiracy]

Never quit.

Yes. 

This is worth reading. Ben Smith on Tom Lehrer:

If you get hooked on Tom Lehrer as a kid, it’s not because you think he might be a sweet old man. It’s because beneath the cheerful tunes is an edge, a sheer nastiness and even sadism, that kids have always loved. It’s the same edge that makes Roald Dahl so appealing to children and disturbing to their parents.

Lehrer saw this Peter Pan in himself, joking about it before one of his last performances, in Copenhagen in 1967. “All of these songs were part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life,” Lehrer said. “Namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.”

But when Lehrer is the nostalgic music of your childhood, you want to like him. He always replies politely to his fans, no less when they are journalists seeking to profile him. Earlier this year, he put up with a brief telephone conversation with a BuzzFeed reporter, whom he referred to “Mr. Google” for further research. Told that search results concerning him are full of gaps and contradictions, he just laughed. “It doesn’t matter if the answer is correct — who cares?” he said. “And I lie a lot too.”

He then replied to our letter full of nostalgia and curiosity with a genial dismissal. “You seem to have devoted so much thought to the questions you ask that you should perhaps just write what you think is the truth, even if it’s just speculation, which — judging by today’s commentators on TV — is the easiest and therefore the most common form of punditry. I neither support nor encourage your efforts, but I shall not try to thwart them,” he wrote. And he was true to his word. He didn’t respond to a second letter, nor to a fact-checking email sent to his AOL email address; his email handle includes a phrase along the line of “living legend.” When we stopped by his Sparks Street house on a cold night in February, a light was on and a Prius was in the driveway, but nobody answered the door and Lehrer wrote that he had left town for California.

Five common word usage mistakes from the late David Foster Wallace. 

[Image Via: Fifty Foot Shadows]