“Apartment house at 860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago” by Frank Scherschel.

Long playing record…

I get boom service just like room service.

[Picture Via: Minus Manhattan ]

“Grey Wooden” by Stephen Scott Young.

David Bryne writes about New York City:

I moved to New York in the mid 1970s because it was a center of cultural ferment – especially in the visual arts (my dream trajectory, until I made a detour), though there was a musical draw, too, even before the downtown scene exploded. New York was legendary. It was where things happened, on the east coast, anyway. One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn’t move to New York to make a fortune. Survival, at that time, and at my age then, was enough. Hardship was the price one paid for being in the thick of it.

As one gets a little older, those hardships aren’t so romantic – they’re just hard. The trade-off begins to look like a real pain in the ass if one has been here for years and years and is barely eking out a living. The idea of making an ongoing creative life – whether as a writer, an artist, a filmmaker or a musician – is difficult unless one gets a foothold on the ladder, as I was lucky enough to do. I say “lucky” because I have no illusions that talent is enough; there are plenty of talented folks out there who never get the break they deserve.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down. I don’t romanticize the bad old days. I find the drop in crime over the last couple of decades refreshing. Manhattan and Brooklyn, those vibrant playgrounds, are way less scary than they were when I moved here. I have no illusions that there was a connection between that city on its knees and a flourishing of creativity; I don’t believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That’s bullshit. But I also don’t believe that the drop in crime means the city has to be more exclusively for those who have money. Increases in the quality of life should be for all, not just a few.

[Picture by Bags]

From her second cookbook, I thought I’d share bit of Marcella with you:

The Good Italian Cook

by Marcella Hazan

I know young people now who play the piano as … one can’t … can’t play it better. But then, when I hear them play it that way, I have my little questions for them. I ask them, when will you start to make music?

—From an interview given by Arthur Rubinstein on his ninetieth birthday

Music and cooking are so much alike. There are people who, simply by working hard at it, become technically quite accomplished at either art. But it isn’t until one connects technique to feeling, turning it into the outward thrust of that feeling, that one becomes a musician, or a cook.

The good Italian cook is an improviser, whose performance is each time a fresh response to the suggestions of an inner beat.

Those who set out to become accomplished Italian cooks have at least one advantage over others—there are no acrobatic movements to execute, no intricate arabesques to master. Italian cooking produces some of the most delectable food in the world, with astonishingly simple means. Except for rolling out pasta by hand, an Italian cook does not need to command special skills. There are none of the elaborate preliminaries one may find in other cuisines. La buona cucina is not an exercise in dexterity. It is an act of taste.

Taste, like rhythm, may be described, but it does not exist until it is experienced. Carefully annotated recipes are useful because they lead to the re-creation of an experience, they demonstrate what can be accomplished. But one must bear in mind that a recipe is only the congealed record of a once fluid and spontaneous act. It is this spontaneity that the good cook must recover. To attempt to reproduce any dish, time after time, through plodding duplication of a recipe’s every step, is futile and tedious, like memorizing a ditty in some foreign tongue.

As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, no one ever steps into the same river twice. One does not need to be a philosopher, only a cook, to know that no dish ever turns out again exactly the same. Cooking, like life itself, flows out of the experienced past, but belongs to the unique moment in which it takes place. From one occasion to the next, you will not find vegetables at the identical stage of ripeness or freshness. No two cloves of garlic, no two bunches of celery, no two peppers in a basket have exactly the same flavor, no cuts of meat duplicate precisely the texture and tenderness of those of another day. Each time you bring your ingredients together, your own hand falls with a difference cadence. The objective in good Italian cooking is not to achieve uniformity, or even absolute predictability of result. It is to express the values of the materials at hand, and the unrepeatable intuitions of the moment of execution.

All this does not mean there are no rules. Of course, there are rules. There is structure to Italian cooking just as there is structure to the music of a dance. The brief suggestions that follow here and the recipes of the book will succeed, I hope, in making you aware of how Italian cooking is achieved. Even more, I hope that eventually the recipes will release you from their grasp, and allow you to cook through the unfettered exercise of your own taste. Once you have understood technique you must stop paying attention to it. You must stop counting teaspoons and begin to cook.

Illustration by Jaime Hernandez.

Poor little Genie…

[Picture via: Ghost in the Machine]

Apple Cider Doughnuts. Seriously. 

Ray.

Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Bread? Heck yes.

Photograph by Nick D. Woods via MPD.

Strike a Pose.

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

Everyday…

[Photo Via: We Love it]

A simple risotto from Marcella. 

The beat goes on for Alex Rodriguez vs. MLB. 

Meanwhile, if you’ve never seen this legendary bit of hambone acting, you’re in for a treat.

Arthur Kirkland’s Legendary Opening Statement from gwenie on Vimeo.

Belated, but not forgotten, here’s your comedy for the week:

Picture by Slava Nesterov.

 Fashion in Leaves by Tang Chiew Ling.

Banksy’s back in town.