OK Go!

Reunited

High Water Mark

Making A Venezuelan Lunch

Deborah was sweet enough to offer us a homemade Venezuelan lunch a few weeks back, when we visited her and Elias up in Briarcliff... First, you start with some 'pulling pork'...


You then pull the 'pulling pork', resulting in 'pulled pork'... Then stew it a bit..


Then you start making the 'arepas' from ground corn dough...


From Wiki: The arepa is a native sort of bread, a flat round, unleavened patty made of ground corn, water, and salt which is fried into a pancake-like bread.

The Day After

E for Eccentric, Endearing...

...and for entertaining.... Happy Holidays to all, and, to my fellow East Coasters, Happy Blizzard!

But neither sleet nor snow can stop Song of the Week!

I'm so glad there's a terrific new record from those indie-mope-rock stalwarts, The Eels, mostly the brainchild of 'E', aka Mark Oliver Everett. 'Spectacular Girl,' the lead-off single, is one of his best 'romantic' tracks. Romantic, for him, is a girl who's like a ray of sunshine breaking into dark depression and conquering it..

Everett is a sui generis - one of a kind in the universe - he's made inspiring, wry, deeply felt art out of much personal despair and family tragedy, including the suicide of a schizophrenic sister, his mother's death from lung cancer, and a cousin flown into the Pentagon on 9/11... His sound "alternates between furious indefatigableness, black humor, and strikingly authentic desperation." One critic praised him thusly..."Excellent eponymous effort, energizingly eclectic. Early enthusiasm effectively ensures E's eminence."

Here's a fairly simple but strange clip for 'Spectacular Girl'...


And on with the Eels classics, starting with 'Novacaine for the Soul,' their anthemic and witty but despairing 1997 breakthrough. Many nice touches, including 5 seconds of sudden silence at 1:34...


Brilliant, kinoscopic video for their downbeat but whip-smart midtempo 'Your Lucky Day In Hell'..

Mice and Men

Get trapped, alas... The East Coast lies under 12-18 inches of snow, frozen in place without air, rail, or bus service... My sweetheart, snowed in at his folks in Maine, won't be coming to Arizona tomorrow... Ah, the best laid plans..


Speaking of mice and entrapment, here's more art from SVA's Fall 2011 Open House. This field of vintage white mousetraps is triggered to snap in a chain reaction if the 'alpha trap' is snapped..

Ho Ho Ho! Good Will To All!

South By Southwest

Sedona Smiling

Angularity

Eye Wish

From The Techno-Human Divide

Pop-Up Store

But my photo of that was nowhere near as beautiful as this lovely yellow confection by 'prioritaire'..

What This Was

I'm Still Here!

Just Desserts

Years ago I sat down in the outdoor section of a restaurant café and the waitress asked 'Are you here for dinner or just desserts?' I couldn't resist answering: 'I always knew I'd get my just desserts!' For today post, just desserts... Let's start with some tiny, flat biscottini!


We were visiting Deborah and Elias. She has a device that foams milk for caps and lattes... Did you know 'Just Desserts' is the name of a San Francisco-based chain of six bakeries?


It's been a cupcake kind of month! These Hannukah cupcakes are adorable, it white and blue Israeli colors!

Getting Smart

Maya's Milestone

Putting On Your Levi

Boulevard of Broken Umbrellas

Sulfurous Fumaroles

Same Same But Different

The closer you get... ...the more it blends in.... at 6am, before my first coffee, it all blends together in my clouded consciousness..


There's actually a film called 'Same Same But Different'

Mimi's Table

Mimi is a nickname for JP's Mom. and, here's a delicious and easy holiday dish courtesy of my future mom-in-law: string beans, condensed cream of chicken soup, and fried onions..


Colorful plate blurs the line between veggie and starch... orange squash, twice-baked potatoes, a dollop of the aforementioned string bean-cream of chicken concoction, and a perfectly grilled sirloin steak-ette...


Platter of mouth-wateringly juicy sirloin steak-ettes...


Dinner table set for the entire Forrest clan, including me!

JP and Young Donovan

Perfectly Pleasant Plinkety Plink

What's The Story?

Hongie Kongie

Shanghai seemed like a gleaming futuristic metropolis; in comparison, HK was a dusty backwater...


Here's a more artsy shot from David's room. Love that vase.. My Hong Kong hotel story is the Very Expensive Soup. I ordered 'Shark Fin Soup' off the hotel menu for 350, forgetting that I was no longer in Indonesia (1800 rupiah to the dollar), but in Hong Kong (7 HK dollars to 1 of ours);

Must've been some shark...

Bee Intervention

More on the Red Bees of Red Hook!

On Tuesday we posted on the Brooklyn-based bees in Brooklyn pumping out bright red honey thanks to the presence of a nearby maraschino cherry factory and its vast amounts of super-sweet HFCS colored with Red Dye No. 40..

Bees discovered that large vats of marinating cherries are briefly in the open air while moving between warehouses.

We've now learned that the factory hired a bee expert to solve the problem without hurting the bees or the cherries.. The solution under study: draping the syrup bins in heavy fabric sheets soaked in vinegar.

Other ideas include building wooden and mesh "lockers" on wheels to transport the bins and placing feeders full of sugar syrup on the factory's roof to distract the bees.

Wet Work

IL-luminated!

Red Bees of Red Hook

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice — maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

Beekeepers were disappointed that instead of honey his bees had produced a red concoction more reminiscent of maraschino cherries, or of cough syrup.

Waste Not Want Not