Picture via Aberrant Beauty. 

Oh, man. Kottke delivers with this post on how to buy olive oil. It stars Tom Mueller who wrote an absorbing book about olive oil (birthday gift from mom).

I use a basic Fairway brand for cooking and then have a couple of nicer ones for more delicate things like salads. Frantoia does me right though I’m far from an expert.

Nope, you’re eyes do not deceive you, we are back with yet another Where & When.  It’s been a rather tight few weeks for me, but here I am popping in for a minute with another challenge for you to tackle.  I’ve been sifting through a number of sources for interesting photos that are also large enough to post; that’s been an issue for me because there are quite a few pictures I would like to use, but they are just too darn small.  I’ll finagle with Adobe Illustrator when I have time so that I can resize the small ones without pixelation, but in the meantime let your eyes fly over this fancy:

The city seems to have a a long love affair with fire escapes, and this was certainly no exception.  I feel this one’s distinctive enough to come up with the answer fairly quick, so your job is to find out the address of this building and the date the year the pic was taken (that will be surprisingly easy as well), and also tell us if you can how long the building has or had existed (year built, how old it is now or when it was shut down/demolished) .  Bonus points if you know anything about the photographer(!)

As usual, show us how you came to your answers. Your favorite brand of hot cocoa in a giant mug if you are the first with the answers, a nice cup of tea for us stragglers and a cookie for the bonus.  I will be in and out through the day, but I’ll be studying so please forgive me for not getting back right away.  No peeking at the photo credit and feel free to answer and discuss in the comments.  Have fun folks, see you later in the day!

[Photo credit: Read Media]

I just read on Twitter that Ralph Kiner has died. Salute.

Afflictor is a site worth book-marking. Here’s a recent post on a 1958 BBC conversation between Ian Fleming and and Raymond Chandler.

Hefty…

[Photo Via: Ann Street Studio]

“Chair with Bowl and Towel” by Roger Fry (1917-18)

The Tramp.

From the excellent Fairfield Writer’s blog check out these two long appreciations of Elmore Leonard. They are packed with goodies.

Part One.

Part Two.

Coolin’.

“Still Life” by Maurice de Vlaminck (1905)

April Bloomfield’s English Porridge is damn good.  I’ve made it often this winter.

I haven’t read much by George Saunders but I have read many interviews with him and think he’s really wonderful, the kind of guy I’d like to know.

Here is a “personal history” essay he wrote back in 2003 for the New Yorker:

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

[Photo Credit: Satoki Nagata]

We need a laugh.

Stir it up.

[Photo Credit: Jan Pypers]

Oliver Want on drum machines. 

Pork and Chive Dumplings. Yes, please.

From Glenn Kenny:

Art Pepper, the jazz saxophonist, wrote, with his wife Laurie Pepper, one of the great books about art and addiction, his memoir Straight Life. After describing his childhood, and his discovery of music, and his development as a musician in the Central Avenue “scene” of the 1940s, and his stint in the Army, Pepper writes, with great frankness, of the sexual compulsions he struggled with as a rising star in jazz. Then he writes about the first time he got high on heroin, and how, in a flash, he realized he had “found God.”

“I loved myself, everything about myself, ” Pepper writes. “I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila”—Sheila Harris, the singer who was getting Pepper high—”and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, ‘This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I’m going to do, whatever dues I have to pay…’ And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn’t be weak; I wouldn’t be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they’re black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don’t know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything.”

In Pepper’s unstuck-in-time rant of resentment (the actual scene is set in 1950, but his voice goes ahead to his stint in prison, and speaks to a number of attitudes he was still coming to terms with as he was composing the book) will of course remind one of Lou Reed’s song “Heroin,” in which the protagonist, asserting his intention to “nullify [his] life,” sneers at “you sweet girls with your sweet talk,” and celebrates the fact that “when the smack begins to flow/then I really don’t care anymore/abouts all the Jim-Jims in this town/and everybody puttin’ everybody else down/and all the politicians making crazy sounds/and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds.” The key phrase is “really don’t care” and the key word is “really.” The ecstasy of heroin, if ecstasy it in fact is, is the ecstasy of genuine indifference. You REALLY just don’t care. And really not caring can seem like an exceptional blessing to people of exceptional sensitivity. Hell, to people of average sensitivity, even. Who knows.

Lorne Michaels talks comedy. 

Rothko…via This Isn’t Happiness.