February 2012
17 posts
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“As badly as he wanted the Alinea job, he walked away from Mr. Achatz’s first...”
– The Chef Alex Stupak Opens Empellón Cocina - NYTimes.com
Going rate, circa 2005, of a pastry chef in top tier dining (though outside of New York). $35k sounds…insulting, doesn’t it? For a restaurant like Alinea?
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“This business, by the way, of officers giving employment to their batmen, their...”
– The Abbey That Jumped the Shark by James Fenton | The New York Review of Books
DUN DUN DUUUUUN!!! Spoilers abound, but a Downton piece that’s worth reading because American writings inevitably anchor the soap to pop culture, whereas this piece compares the simulacrum to the real in a game of...
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“At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol.
At 13, he lit out for the Amazon...”
– John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74 - NYTimes.com
Despite being flattened and edited into a NY Times obituary, John Fairfax’s life seems uncontainable. I can smell the gunpowder, the jungle at night, and the salt of the ocean. Untether me from objects and obligations. I want to...
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“I had sensed that extracting this industrial miracle food of yesteryear from the...”
– The Believer - Atomic Bread Baking at Home
Simple sliced white bread—a yeasty tabula rasa—as the rosetta stone for 20th century American culture. Germophobia, xenophobia, red scare and our current orthorexia are all projected onto its uniform whiteness. (Is it too much to read into...
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“High-end consumer culture in Japan survived 20 years of economic decline and has...”
– Made Better in Japan - WSJ.com
Extreme perfectionism in Japan that springs superior clones of foreign cultural vestiges—an ur-object created in reverse. Put this way, Japan seems like a paradise of perfect clothes, food and cocktails. However, there is something in that quest for ultimate...
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“Basically, there’s a service charge, so everyone gets an hourly rate, which is...”
– Workplace Confidential - The Per Se Waiter — New York Magazine
A tiny morsel of high-end dining reality. Reading about the $4000 tip reminded me, somehow, of a scene in Judy Blume’s Then Again Maybe I Won’t wherein the protagonist leaves a bunch of pennies at the bottom of an...
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“I also miss the pit in my stomach, the uneasiness that comes with the ascent. As...”
– My Last Day: Le Bernardin’s Pastry Chef Reflects on 8 Long Years - Michael Laiskonis - Health - The Atlantic
I never thought about equating the queasy, floating guts feeling of ascending physically, as in a fast elevator, to ascending figuratively through the ranks in one’s career....
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“So I worked there, and I also discovered porn there, unfortunately. I really...”
– Louis CK Q&A
Louis C.K. dissected. Pedestrian things like how KFC made its fried chicken becomes fascinating when Louis talks about his days working as a KFC chicken fryer guy.
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Watch165 million year old love song. Scientists used a very detailed fossil of a Jurassic cricket to recreate its mating call.
Does it sound more forlorn 165 million years later, with no one to answer?
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“A week later, the raft was stolen, and I managed to track down the people who...”
– Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview | Politics News | Rolling Stone
Of everything in this lengthy Julian Assange, this story stood out to me as a strangely poetic interlude.
What the whole Assange/Manning/Wikileaks affaire impresses upon me is that hindsight isn’t 20/20. Sometimes,...
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“Money can be like an energy, fueled by the desire to make a mark in the world,...”
– On Louis CK, the Future of Media, and How We Feel About Money and Corporations - By Reihan Salam - The Agenda - National Review Online
Oh, intentionality! National Review tries to cast Louis CK as a conservative because he said money can be like an “energy” fueled by creativity and...
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“The copyrightability of designs has been a hot topic of late in courts. Could...”
– Judge Declares Batmobile Is Subject to Copyright - Hollywood Reporter
I’m so sorry, you cannot be Batman. Copyright firmly keeps Batman in the realm of fiction as DC Comics’ intellectual property. Which leads me to wonder, will there be an open source Creative Commons superhero anytime...
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Cronenberg
lareviewofbooks:
JONATHAN PENNER David Cronenberg © Ian Welch, Welchtoons.com
David Cronenberg arrived on the world’s cinema screens with a viscous splash. His unmistakable Cartesian horror films Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, and Existenz were extraordinary meditations on making the mental physical, and made Cronenberg one of the most admired auteurs of the late seventies and...
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“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher,...”
– ‘Room 237,’ Documentary With Theories About ‘The Shining’ - NYTimes.com
You should read into things, but then again, you shouldn’t. These theories about the true meaning of The Shining is buh-nanas, don’t you think? Even taken at face value, the Kubrick classic offers so much to chew... 