A Day in the Life

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

~ Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
via:

Image via: Magnified World

Joe Jackson

Keiko Gonzalez, found at salart.org

via:

Lucy Dominga by Brian Matthew
via:

When He Dined, the Stars Came Out

On May 18, 1962, readers of The New York Times woke up to learn that of all the Chinese restaurants in the city, “there is probably none with a finer kitchen” than Tien Tsin, in Harlem. The same article praised four other places to eat, including Gaston, on East 49th Street, which “may qualify as having one of the most inspired French kitchens in town,” and Marchi’s, on East 31st Street, “one of New York’s most unusual North Italian restaurants.”

The author of these judgments was Craig Claiborne, the newspaper’s food editor. He prefaced his article with a short note: “The following is a listing of New York restaurants that are recommended on the basis of varying merits. Such a listing will be published every Friday in The New York Times.”

And that is just what happened, first in what were called the women’s pages (“Food Fashions Family Furnishings”), and then, after 1976, in the Weekend section; by that time, the column was not a listing but a review of one or two restaurants. In 1997, with the invention of the Dining In/Dining Out section, it jumped to Wednesdays, where it still lives.

Some American writers had nibbled at the idea of professional restaurant criticism before this, including Claiborne, who had written one-off reviews of major new restaurants for The Times. But his first “Directory to Dining,” 50 years ago this month, marks the day when the country pulled up a chair and began to chow down. Within a few years, nearly every major newspaper had to have a Craig Claiborne of its own. Reading the critics, eating what they had recommended, and then bragging or complaining about it would become a national pastime.

As the current caretaker of the house that Claiborne built, I lack objectivity on this subject. Still, I believe that without professional critics like him and others to point out what was new and delicious, chefs would not be smiling at us from magazine covers, subway ads and billboards. They would not be invited to the White House, except perhaps for job interviews. Claiborne and his successors told Americans that restaurants mattered. That was an eccentric opinion a half-century ago. It’s not anymore.

by Pete Wells, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Paul Hosefros

via:

via:

Claudia Rogge, Circulate I 2008, found at claudia-rogge.de
via:

Caribbean starfish (via Topyti)
via:

Arts and Crafts and Money

When “small batch” equals big dollars and one-person companies are supported by corporate-size websites, is “hand-made” what we think it is? A report from North America’s largest consumer craft fair, where the competition for puppet dollars is intense.

I ate dinner recently at a pop-up restaurant. It’s the latest thing for urban foodies, at least in Toronto, where I live: Individual chefs doing small, high-concept dinners in fly-by-night venues. People at the dinner were young and chic and talked about websites like Pinterest and Etsy. Interest in all things local and small batch was intense: clothes, home décor, jewelry, desserts. My impression was that everyone who’s anyone makes a life from this, or strives to. All things artisanal have become the default preference, unambiguously good and worthwhile and “with it,” supportive of creative people and communities, the best of all possible worlds. 

Does any of the following sound familiar? The interpretable gist of a dozen people talking at once: “There’s a guy in my neighborhood who does tremendous book rebinding.” “My grandmother knitted this sweater for my grandfather.” “I only eat Ontario tomatoes.” “I like being able to have a conversation with somebody who cares as much about coffee as I do. Who cares that I like good coffee [full stop].” Being a bit of a slow thinker, I spent the dinner mostly listening, but admittedly I liked what I was hearing. My neighborhood in Toronto is determinedly un-franchised, small business, a summertime surfeit of farmers’ markets and outdoor craft stalls. Bikes can seem to outnumber cars, the best bars are the worst preserved. The neighborhood’s more shabby than chic, and that’s why I moved here.

It’s also why suburbanites arrive by the SUV-load on weekends, new coffee shops are designed to look vintage, and jeans so tight they squeak end up costing a week’s pay. Something for everyone, maybe, depending on where your interest lies, but unanimous enthusiasm always makes me nervous, and some post-prandial web searching didn’t help this feeling.

The clearest indicator of ur-commercial preference is probably handicrafts, which preference turns out to be serious. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2011, the worldwide market for handmade sewing, woodwork, jewelry, and the like was roughly $30 billion. The largest growth is happening online: Sales of $1.4 billion in 2011 are expected to reach $2.2 billion in 2016. The website Etsy.com is the biggest online player, accounting for nearly half of 2011’s revenue. Consumers want “a sense of authenticity and buying from people who they know,” Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson told the Journal, all but channelling the guests at my boutique dinner.

There’s something incongruous and strange about large-scale interest in stuff that’s ostensibly small-ish and personal, literally handmade. Not quite the irony of mass-market expressions of self, but something like it, maybe, lurking and dissonant. But it’s hard to figure just what when you’re sitting at a restaurant table set for 12, even harder when you’re online and alone. It so happens that during the winter I attended the One of a Kind Christmas Show and Sale, North America’s largest consumer craft fair, perhaps the clearest example of contemporary interest in handicrafts. It’s certainly the most tangible: Featuring 800 booths erumpent with creativity and charm, the show is both corporate and non-, providing a unique vantage from which to view what might be called the “new commercial life.”

by Christopher R. Graham, The Morning News |  Read more:
Illustration: Skip Sterling

Murali Cheeroth, Untitled (blue flood) Oil on canvas 60” x 60” 2007
via:

Paralysis of the Heart

[ed. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers everywhere.]

I was driving my 11-year-old son, Joe, to school. It had been one of those mornings. He was singing opera and doing hip-hop moves when I needed him to put on his shoes.

As we pulled up in front of school just in time, I snapped: “I can’t start our day this way. This kind of stress is going to make me sick.”

He burst into tears. “Don’t say that!” he yelled. “Promise to never say that again!” He raced out of the car, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

On more than a few occasions, he has expressed his fear that something might happen to me. As the child of a single mother, he clearly has been pondering the same questions I do: Who will take care of him if I die? Who will love him as much as I do?

Joe’s fear of my mortality jarred me into reality, and I called my doctor. There actually had been a reason for my harsh statement. My face and arm had been numb for months. I had shrugged it off as stress but then started to get chronic headaches, too.

My doctor agreed to see me right away. After examining me, she said, “If I can’t get you in for an M.R.I. at the imaging center, I’ll need to send you to the hospital in an ambulance.” She explained that stress doesn’t create the symptoms I was having. It could be an aneurysm, a tumor or early signs of multiple sclerosis.

Someone else might have panicked, but this kind of situation makes me practical. She got me an appointment for an hour later. In that time, I did what any sensible person who has been ordered to get an emergency M.R.I. does: I got the car washed. I wasn’t in denial; there’s just so much time to get stuff done, and worrying wasn’t on my checklist.

by Michelle Fiordaliso, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Brian Rea

The Confidence Game

Ida M. Tarbell, a writer for McClure’s Magazine, a general-interest monthly, was chatting with her good friend and editor, John S. Phillips, in the magazine’s offices near New York’s Madison Square Park, trying to decide what she should take on next.

Tarbell, then forty-three years old, was already one of the most prominent journalists in America, having written popular multipart historical sketches of Napoleon, Lincoln, and a French revolutionary figure known as Madame Roland, a moderate republican guillotined during the Terror. Thanks in part to her work, McClure’s circulation had jumped to about 400,000, making it one of the most popular, and profitable, publications in the country.

Phillips, a founder of the magazine, was its backbone. Presiding over an office of bohemians and intellectuals, this father of five was as calm and deliberative as the magazine’s namesake, S. S. McClure, was manic and extravagant. Considered by many to be a genius, McClure was also just an impossible boss—forever steaming in from Europe, throwing the office into turmoil with new schemes, ideas, and editorial changes. “I can’t sit still,” he once told Lincoln Steffens. “That’s your job and I don’t see how you can do it!”

At McClure’s, there was always, as Tarbell would later put it, much “fingering” of a subject before the magazine decided to launch on a story, and in this case there was more than usual. The subject being kicked around was nothing less than the great industrial monopolies, known as “trusts,” that had come to dominate the American economy and political life. It was the summer of 1901.  (...)

Ah, old media. Good times. Savin’ the worl’. Remember when a single investigative reporter with the temerity to demand a decent living (McClure’s paid more than $1 million for the stories in today’s dollars) could pull the curtain back on one of the most powerful and secretive organizations on the face of the earth, a great lawbreaker as well as a value-creator? Tarbell is credited with triggering the great antitrust case that finally broke up the “octopus” in 1911. But her true greatness lies in how, using a mountain of facts carefully gathered and presented, she could explain to a bewildered and anxious middle class the great economic question of her age.

McClure’s had planned a three-part series, but, as copies flew off the newsstands, it soon became seven parts, then twelve, then a national sensation. New installments became news events in themselves, covered by other papers, including the fledgling Wall Street Journal. “The History of the Standard Oil Company” ended up as a nineteen-part series, quickly turned into a two-volume book. A cartoon in Puck would depict a pantheon of muckrakers with Tarbell as a Joan of Arc figure on horseback. Another contemporary magazine pronounced her “the most popular woman in America.”

No one reading this magazine needs to be told that we have crossed over into a new era. Industrial-age journalism has failed, we are told, and even if it hasn’t failed, it is over. Newspaper company stocks are trading for less than $1 a share. Great newsrooms have been cut down like so many sheaves of wheat. Where quasi-monopolies once reigned over whole metropolitan areas, we have conversation and communities, but also chaos and confusion.

A vanguard of journalism thinkers steps forward to explain things, and we should be grateful that they are here. If they weren’t, we’d have to invent them. Someone has to help us figure this out. Most prominent are Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen, whose ideas we’ll focus on here, along with Dan Gillmor, John Paton, and others. Together their ideas form what I will call the future-of-news (FON) consensus.

According to this consensus, the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.

At its heart, the FON consensus is anti-institutional. It believes that old institutions must wither to make way for the networked future. “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society,” Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, his 2008 popularization of network theory. “As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed.” If this vision of the future does not square with your particular news preferences, well, as they might say on Twitter, #youmaybeSOL.

by Dean Starkman, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

The New Yorker Cover Department's Greatest Rejects

Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker’s art editor since 1993, doesn’t have normal relationships with the artists who draw the magazine's covers. “Think of me as your priest,” she told one of them. Mouly, who cofounded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with—Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb—not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she's fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. “Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist,” Mouly says, “but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.”

Until recently, you would have had to visit Mouly's office on the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building to see the rejected covers she keeps pinned to a wall. Now, some of those uninhibited outtakes have been collected in a new book, Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See ($24.95, 128 pages), out today from Abrams. I talked to Mouly about the most incendiary sketches, the difficulty of publishing serious covers over Christmas, and why she heartily recommends listening to Rush Limbaugh.

What’s the process of deciding on a cover every week?

I’ve been the art editor for about 19 years, so I’ve been responsible for about 950 different published covers, and the process has been different for each one. But the general outline is that I set up a lineup every season of evergreen covers. So right now I’m talking to artists, soliciting ideas for Mother’s Day or spring or wedding or graduation.

And then there are timely political images or things that seems like the right idea at the right time—it can be a tsunami in Japan, but it can also simply be something that defines a time. Right now, one of the things I’m talking to artists about is the Republicans’ war on women. There’s not a specific moment for this, but it’s a subtext that’s in the air. Recently we did an image around the Republican primaries that involved a dog on top of a car, and that certainly was timely.

When we have something like that, then we are poised to upset the apple cart, and that can be turned around in as little as 24 hours. I’m in a constant conversation since I’m not commissioning or assigning any specific ideas. I’m not calling up artists and saying, “We need you to illustrate the war on women,” or whatever. We seldom have illustrations of cover stories on our covers. So we are dependent. What I’m really looking for are ideas that come from the artists on topics that will give us a sign of the era that we live in and, as a collection of images, will collect a picture of our time.

by Michael Silverberg, Imprint |  Read more:
Illustration: Art Spiegelman — The New Yorker — May 10, 1993

Kelly Reemtsen:  short leash.  laartdiary.com
via:

Empire of the Bun

Here’s the story Adam Fleischman likes to tell about the genesis of his Umami restaurant empire: Hunched over a ketchup-red plastic cafe-teria tray at the Culver City In-N-Out Burger, Fleischman, a 35-year-old wine entrepreneur, peers into a cardboard box flecked with french fry grease. He ponders the questions that bedevil future restaurant moguls: Why do Americans hunger for pizza and hamburgers more than any other dishes? And why, exactly, is the In-N-Out Double-Double he’s devouring his most beloved indulgence, not to mention one of Southern California’s premier sources of bragging rights?

Somewhere between bites of the dripping cheeseburger, a word comes to mind that afternoon in 2005. It’s one Fleischman has been encountering often, on select food blogs and in books by the pioneering British chef Heston Blumenthal. That word is umami. The Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda came up with it in 1908 to describe a flavor that’s at the root of Japanese cooking, present in staples like fermented soy, seaweed, and the funky dried-fish broth dashi. Americans experience umami in different ways. It’s one reason they crave bacon. It’s why Italian grandmothers sneak anchovies into everything, and why something that smells like an old gym sock can taste like heaven. The professional food world has embraced the umami flavor as a unique fifth taste distinct from the sensations of sweet, sour, salt, and bitter.

Fleischman concludes that what he loves about an In-N-Out Double-Double isn’t the fresh ingredients or the to-order preparation. A hamburger, he realizes, is America’s preferred umami intake device. It is also consumed by the billions each year. “That was the aha moment for me,” says Fleischman. “I saw Umami’s financial potential right away.”  (...)

After his umami revelation, Fleisch-man didn’t go on a fact-finding mission to Japan. (He still hasn’t, although he considers his dining experiences at Beverly Hills’ $325-a-head sushi restaurant Urasawa close enough.) Instead he dissolved his BottleRock partnership the following year and worked his way around town, consulting on a variety of other businesses. When similar dustups arose with partners at a second wine bar, Vinoteque, he’d had it. “I said, ‘OK, the next time there won’t be any partners. I’m going to do this all by myself.’  ”

In 2009, with $40,000 in his pocket from selling his stake in BottleRock, Fleischman decided to open a restaurant centered on the umami flavor. He knew that an umami-focused menu would attract a burgeoning breed of foodies who had been weaned on the Food Network and had developed a sort of teenybopper crush on the heady flavors of pork, organ meats, West Coast IPAs, and superripe cheeses. What his place would serve remained up in the air. As it happened, he settled on burgers.

Fleischman didn’t have a business degree or much experience in the food industry aside from helping his mother with her catering business as a kid. He certainly didn’t have any professional chef’s training, and his familiarity with hamburgers was limited to flipping a few in his backyard. But he did have a devout faith in his palate and a mean perfectionist streak that borders on the tyrannical.

On a late summer day he stepped into his kitchen armed with a bundle of Japanese ingredients he’d scooped up at Mitsuwa Marketplace in West L.A. He began to experiment with recipes, incorporating dashi, miso, fish sauce, and soy. He ground up fish heads and sprinkled them on top of ground beef and pork. He tried making Parmesan fondue and melting it over the patty. “It was a mess,” says Fleischman. Regardless, as a passionate, intellectually minded greenhorn, Fleischman—so he claims—created his masterpiece in a single day.

With that first burger-shaped umami bomb, Fleischman launched a brand that has not only changed the culinary landscape of L.A. but has turned its founder into a food industry powerhouse arguably as influential as Nancy Silverton or Wolfgang Puck. Since its debut in a former Korean taco stand on La Brea Avenue, Umami Burger has expanded into a multimillion-dollar restaurant group with financial backing from hospitality giant SBE. At present there are seven Umamis across L.A., one in San Francisco, and at least a dozen more in development nationwide. The Umami Group’s Neapolitan pizza place, 800 Degrees, recently opened in Westwood Village and continues to draw lines out the door. The newest addition is downtown’s 8,000-square-foot UmamIcatessen, which houses five food and beverage concepts. In the works are a scaled-down fast-food burger chain called Umami Ko and a line of Umami-brand condiments. The company also retains a controlling share of chef Jordan Kahn’s upscale Beverly Hills Vietnamese restaurant, Red Medicine. Umami Burger, however, remains the foundation of Fleischman’s realm.

The signature Umami burger isn’t some towering, sloppy menace that’s as impossible to grasp as it is to bite. It’s compact, almost cute, with a reasonable six-ounce patty served on an eggy, Portuguese-style bun that Fleischman sources from a top-secret local bakery. “The burger-to-bun ratio is key,” he says, “but it’s amazing that nobody ever gets that right.” Once cooked to the lowest, pinkest edge of medium rare, the meat is seasoned with the now-patented Umami Sauce and Umami Dust. “We don’t use MSG,” says Fleischman, despite many accusations to the contrary. The full recipe is classified, but he will allow that the sauce contains some soy sauce and the dust, some ground-up dried porcini mushrooms and dried fish heads, among other umami enhancers. Toppings include known umami heavy hitters such as oven-roasted tomatoes, shiitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, and a crisp Parmesan wafer. “Parmesan,” says Fleischman, “has the second-highest umami levels of any ingredient, and it has the most of any cheese.”

by Lesley Bargar Suter, Los Angeles Magazine |  Read more:
Photograph by Misha Gravenor

Joni Mitchell

[ed. Joni Mitchell would be a national treasure in the U.S. if she weren't from Canada. Instead, she's an international treasure. With a voice that's as accomplished as any jazz singer, she not only sings but composes, arranges and plays guitar (in a variety of complex tunings). A true genius talent. Here she is with a jazz supergroup composed of Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Jaco Pastorious, Randy Brecker and Don Alias.]

Lyrics

Bonus: Harry's House

via:

The Snack Bar, Edward Burra | Tate
via:

Delta Dawn

How Sears, Roebuck & Co. midwifed the birth of the blues

Delta blues is as much legend as it is music. In the popular telling, blues articulated the hopelessness and poverty of an isolated, oppressed people through music that was disconnected from popular trends and technological advances. Delta blues giants like Robert Johnson were victims, buffeted by the winds of racism, singing out mostly for personal solace. The story is undoubtedly romantic, but it just isn’t true. “It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy,” B.B. King complained in his 1999 autobiography Blues All Around Me. “As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion.” 

The tragic image of the blues that originated in the Mississippi Delta ignores the competitive and entrepreneurial spirit of the bluesman himself. While it is certainly true that the music was forged in part by the legacy of slavery and the insults of Jim Crow, the iconic image of the lone bluesman traveling the road with a guitar strapped to his back is also a story about innovators seizing on expanded opportunities brought about by the commercial and technological advances of the early 1900s. There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Music has always been an instrument of upward mobility in the black community. During slavery, performers were afforded higher status than field workers. As the entertainment for plantation soirees, musicians were expected to be well versed in the social dance styles demanded by white audiences. But when performing in slave quarters, they played roughly the same repertoire. Former slaves’ narratives reveal that the slave musical ensemble closely resembled later minstrel-show string bands: fiddles and banjos, accompanied by various percussion instruments, usually the tambourine and two bones being struck together as claves. While the image of slaves dancing waltzes seems odd now, it was common in rural black communities well into the 20th century.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, freed black men were suddenly looking for employment. Musicianers, as they were called, could earn more money than the typical day laborer. With newfound freedom of movement, and cultural norms that had established entertainment as one of the few widely accepted jobs for blacks, Reconstruction became a time of great opportunity for black musicians. In an 1882 article in The Century Magazine a white onlooker at a 19th-century Georgia corn shucking described the elite status of the musicianer like this: “The fiddler is the man of most importance. He always comes late, must have an extra share of whiskey, is the best-dressed man in the crowd, and unless every honor is shown him he will not play.”

The music played by these 19th-century musicians was not blues, and their plucked string instrument was not the guitar; it was the banjo. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson wrote about the instrument slaves played at his plantation, the banjar, “which they brought with them from the hinterlands of Africa.” These simple instruments usually had four strings and no frets.

It may seem odd that an instrument with African roots, originally played by plantation slaves, would become popular among the white masses, but the banjo was portable, melodic, and relatively easy to play. Banjo proselytizers, seeking to overcome anxieties about embracing a product of slave culture, would go so far in trying to whitewash the instrument’s ancestry as to claim that it had “reached its apogee through the contribution of whites” who had added frets and a fifth string to the original banjar.

A few early “classic blues” recordings featured the banjo, often fit with a guitar neck to provide a wider range. But these vaudevillian sides, cut by people like “Papa” Charlie Jackson, sound only distantly related to the Delta blues of Tommy Johnson or Skip James. The sound of the Delta is the sound of the steel-string guitar. The guitars of the 19th century used gut strings and were expensive and difficult to play. So despite having superior range and flexibility compared to banjos, guitars were still a rare sight in the black community. That all began to change in the 20th century.

by Chris Kjorness, Reason.com |  Read more: