spasticrobot

Autumnal Occurrences

I’ve been slammed with work lately. The opening of The National WWII Museum expansion is just a few weeks away and it’s ridiculously busy here. Here’s a laundry list of what I’ve been doing and thinking about for the past few weeks and months, when I’ve actually found any time for a life outside of work:

Baby preparations! My lovely wife and I are expecting our first child in April. Each week brings a new interesting development. I love my expanding family so much.

The 2009 New Orleans Saints, who are playing the best football in franchise history. I hope this lasts all the way to the Superbowl.

DEPT of CHANGES, a new project I’m working on with Erik Kiesewetter.

Sara Roahen, whose excellent treatise on Red Beans & Rice “Rising to the Occasion” has inspired a rebirth in my obsession with cooking that storied dish. If you’re a friend of mine you should get in touch to come over for dinner one Monday night. I’m making the best beans of my life right now.

Broadcast and The Focus Group - #1 : Witch Cults, a collaboration between the British graphic designer Julian House and the band Broadcast. The EP that this video is tied to has been on heavy rotation in my life throughout this season of the witch.

Fellini Satyricon: I revisited this film a few weeks ago and it absolutely blew me away. Roman decadence through the modernist lens of Fellini’s ego at its height.

Each time I listen to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion it gets better. This is my favorite album of the year and one of the decade’s best.

Momofuku. I’m still obsessing over David Chang’s approach to cooking, nine months after my consecutive trips to Momofuku Ssam Bar. His Momofuku cookbook is released today.

I’ve been on a Thelonius Monk kick lately. His dissonant jazz serenades are among the finest recorded material of the 20th century.

My mom gave me the Times-Picayune recipe collection Cooking Up a Storm for Christmas last year and I’m just now getting to it. It contains a wide variety of great recipes for New Orleans classics. My favorite recipe is for McKenzie's Oyster Patties. I'm going to try them for Thanksgiving. As a side-note my stepfather gets a great acknowledgement, he worked with the authors to retrieve files from Katrina damaged hard-drives.

The last of my work with Annunciation Interactive went live over the past few weeks:

1. The Annunciation site 3 years in the making finally launched a few weeks ago. Initial concept and design by yours truly. Flash, design expansion, copy & WordPress by Benjamin Seyna and Peter Rigney.
   
   
2. Lakeside Camera redesign. I designed the central concepts, layout, and interface for this very large project. Front-end code by Alan Kukral, Expression Engine integration by Jon Willoth.
   

3. The Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives, Tulane University. I designed this site based off of branding by Trumpet. Front-end code by Alan Kukral, WordPress integration by Benjamin Seyna.

Finally, a note of congratulations to my friend Stephen G. Rhodes, who recently had openings at Vilma Gold London, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin, Metro Pictures New York and the Frieze Art Fair. That’s on top of earlier shows this year at the New Museum and Misako & Rosen Tokyo. I’m looking forward to watching some Tigers / Saints football with him when he comes home in a few weeks.

Phildickian Slacktivism

Joshua Glenn's review of A Scanner Darkly is a treatise on the slacker as revolutionary in the literature of Philip K. Dick, the writings of Deleuze & Guattari, Richard Linklater films and the theory of Michel Foucault. It's the finest review I've read in some time. I can't wait to see this, I think it could be the movie of the summer.

Bourdain's 50th Birthday

If you are a fan of Anthony Bourdain's oeuvre be sure to check out Michael Ruhlman's account of the surprise 50th birthday party which was recently thrown in his honor. All kinds of characters were there from all of his works. The grillbitch, Big Foot, zeropointzero, Siberia bar, Tony's mother and Ruhlman himself all make appearances. Great stuff!

Also, the "lost" episode of Bourdain's A Cook's Tour, Decoding Ferran Adria, premieres a week from today as an episode of No Reservations on the Travel Channel. This is the episode that Tony and his crew made, renegade style, after the Food Network decided not to renew his show. It profiles legendary chef Ferran Adria, he of El Bulli fame, researching in his food "atelier" in Barcelona, foraging in the stalls of La Boqueria and cooking at the restaurant itself. Not to be missed!

My Summer Reading List

Earlier this month I compiled a list of my planned summer eating. Here's a list of my planned summer reading:

• Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
• Triksta: Life & Death & New Orleans Rap by Nik Cohn
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
• The Nasty Bits : Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain
• Barcelona by Robert Hughes
• Red Thunder by John Varley
• Pig Perfect : Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them by Peter Kaminsky
• The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• JPod by Douglas Coupland

It's a nice list of light and easy books with an emphasis on food writing. So far I've started reading Triksta, which is a good if loosely written anecdotal history of the Pre-K rap scene in New Orleans, and Heat, which is the brilliant story of New Yorker writer Bill Buford's adventures in Mario Batali's kitchen intermingled with the story of Batali himself. Both books are providing just the right amount of summer enjoyment.

I'm sure I'll have more installments as the summer wears on. What are you reading? I'd love to know.

Jane Jacobs R.I.P.

Jane Jacobs, the great urban thinker and activist, has died. She was 89 years old.

She was a true champion of the people, always fighting for the survival of neighborhoods over the mass-development and sprawl that dominated most of the 20th century. We need her ideas and words now more than ever with what is happening in New Orleans and in other places.

I urge anyone who isn't familiar with her work to immediately go out and purchase The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It will completely change the way you think about cities and communities.

Here's the very informative Wikipedia entry on Jane Jacobs.

Architect Witold Rybczynski's memorialization.

From her NYT Obituary:

In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.

Ms. Jacobs's thesis was supported and enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street.

She puts out her garbage, children go to school, the drycleaner and barber open their shops, housewives come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.

50 Books for Thinking about the Future

The Rand Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition has selected a really well-rounded and relevant list of books about the future. This is a great primer for anyone who wants to extrapolate factors that are likely to impact our culture and humanity at large in the coming years.

The intent of the list is twofold. The first intent is to act as a reading list for someone who wants to understand at a more-than-passing level the factors that we can say seem to be most pertinent today in thinking about the longer-range human condition. I would hope that anyone who had read all 50 of these books would have a good feel for history, for how to think about the future, for the kinds of trends that are likely to have a serious impact on the future, and for the kind of surprises that might befall us as we move into that future.

Best of 2005: Text

1. Katrina Lit
The books, articles, essays, and rants that spilled forth after the storm were the most important literary works of the year for me. They helped to forge my anger, sharpen my arguments and prepare for the next phase of this battle. They also provided much needed therapy and kept me sane at times when I thought I might lose it all and reminded of why I love this city so much. There were also a few older books about New Orleans in there that helped in the same way.

Alan AtKisson’s essay Dreaming of a New New Orleans
The Times Picayune, specifically Chris Rose, New Orleans’ new literary hero
Gambit Weekly
Why New Orleans Matters – Tom Piazza
Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children and Other Streets of New Orleans – John Churchill Chase
The French Quarter – Herbert Asbury
The Lords of Misrule; Mardi Gras and Race in New Orleans – Dan Gill

Fredric Jameson: Archaeologies of the Future

Fredric Jameson has a new book called Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire of Utopia and Other Science Fictions that examines the utopian narrative of fringe SF novels. From the publisher's description:

The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.

I found out about this book by reading Joshua Glenn's excellent essay in yesterday's Boston Globe called Back to Utopia: Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction? I haven't been this excited about a work of theory in a while.

101 Books I Need

If you know me it's probably obvious to you that the hardest thing for me to lose in the storm was my library. Those books were my most prized possessions and to me they were the physical representation of how I built myself back up from scratch after a seriously rough and tumble adolescence. I'll never really replace all of my collection but I will rebuild it as best as I can. Here's a list of 101 essential books that I plan on repurchasing. These will serve as the foundation that I build everything else on.

Best of 2004: Books

My Best of 2004 continues today with a list of the best books I read all year long. Some are new, others were published prior to this year, but all of them are great.

1. The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson
The Baroque Cycle is nothing short of a masterpiece. Stephenson places the ancestors of the main characters from his seminal novel Cryptonomicon in late 17th and early 18th century Europe. They participate n a myriad of landmark historical events including the writing of Newton's Principia Mathematica, the formulation of Leibniz's Calculus, The Popish Plot, The Glorious Revolution, The War of Spanish Succession, the invention of Newcomen's steam engine and the foundation of modern science and currency.

The historical detail elucidated in these 2,700 pages is mind-boggling. Stephenson goes into hyper-detailed, geekish depictions of such diverse subjects as piracy, alchemy, enlightenment-era scientific exploration, the structure of 18th century London's prison system, Protestant political dissent, the social behaviors of the court at Versailles under Louis XIV, and the invention of currency, trade and free market systems. In his acknowledgements at the end of The System of the World Stephenson notes his indebtedness to Ferdinand Braudel's Capitalism and Civilization, which really comes through in these depictions. This may be the first historical novel to ever utilize Braudel's "bottom up" approach in narrative form. These books are not only the best that I read this year, they are quite possibly my favorites of all time.

2. Getting Things Done by David Allen
Getting things done launched a movement this year. Geeks everywhere are figuring out that the systems laid out in this book are applicable to their everyday lives. I've been using the GTD system for a few months and my work productivity has shot through the roof.

3. Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
2004 was the year that I finally got the importance of web standards and it came to me right when I finally started to get it about content. Those two elements, standards & content, are the cornerstones of the web's present and future. This book makes the absolute importance of web standards even more clear and also lays down some really awesome strategies for designing sites with CSS/XHTML. Now if I can only make 2005 the year that I implement standards into all of my projects...