from TIME Magazine

Behind the Home-Butchering Craze

By JOSH OZERSKY

 The thud of heavy knives bashing bones, the splat of dead muscle hitting the table, the twisting of heads off bodies and the ripping of flesh from limp, cold limbs. Is this a nightmare vision from the makers of Saw or Hostel? An autopsy? No, it’s actually the scene at a home kitchen near you, as more and more young Americans are taking a DIY approach to meat. It’s part home economics, part politics and certainly at least part fad. But it’s changing the way many Americans approach meat, chop by succulent chop.

(See pictures of what makes you eat more food.)

Many of the young pioneers of this latest culinary trend may not even realize that butchers, like milkmen and iceboxes, were a mainstay of American culture for most of our history. The rise of supermarkets in the 1960s and ’70s, and the general decline of the blue-collar trades throughout the postwar years, contributed to the near extinction of the retail butcher — that gruff but lovable lug in a white apron who stood behind a counter and cut up chops for your dinner, and whom you knew as well as your baker and, yes, your banker. Butchers mattered in people’s lives, because they were part of the food supply. And they’re not coming back.

(See pictures of gourmet food trucks.)

But the service they provided is, thanks to recession economics and a very of-the-moment mood for getting engaged with how and what you eat. At specialty shops like Brooklyn’s Meat Hook, hipster parents and earnest “gastronauts” attend cult butcher Tom Mylan’s weekly lessons in how to cut up animals.

[ click to continue reading at TIME.com ]

from the NY Daily News

[ click to view full slideshow of Kandinsky at NYDailyNews.com ]

from The New York Times

 

[ click to read The Week Ahead blog in the NY Times ]

from The LA Times

Sockeye salmon with green garlic, fava beans

Sockeye salmon with green garlic is a lovely and deeply colorful dish that tastes grand. (Los Angeles Times/Kirk McKoy)

[ click for full recipe at LATimes.com ]

from NPR.org

NBA Star Shaq Attacks Art World

Basketball star Shaquille O’Neal has forayed into the art world as the curator of the exhibit “Size DOES Matter,” on view at New York City’s FLAG Art Foundation through May 27.

The exhibition, which explores the concept of size through art, features pieces such as Ron Mueck’s “Big Man” sculpture and tiny versions of O’Neal and the Obama family in the eye of a needle, conceived by artist Willard Wigan. Other artists represented include Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton, Corban Walker and Cindy Sherman.

Stephanie Roach, director of the FLAG Art Foundation, says O’Neal was selected to curate the exhibit because he represents “size not only physically but in terms of how he views life.”

[ click to read at NPR.org ]

from The New York Times

A 12-Hour Play, and Endless Bragging Rights

By PATRICK HEALY

Every theater season has its must-must-must-see show, the snob hit that separates the true sophisticates (at least in their own minds) from the cultural chaff. New York will have a doozy of a contender this July: a 12-hour production of a grim Dostoyevsky novel that will be performed only twice, in Italian (with English supertitles), in a warehouse on Governors Island, reachable only after a ferry trip and a 20-minute walk.

Golf carts will be available for patrons who want to avoid the hike; otherwise, comfort-food theater this is not.

Nor will the show, “The Demons,” be an easy ticket, setting the stage for I-was-there bragging rights that a certain brand of New Yorker finds irresistible.

Among those who quickly bought tickets on Wednesday was David Coats, a member of the Friends of Lincoln Center. He’s a theater director in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who is a fan of the Dostoyevsky novel and of the production’s director, the German auteur Peter Stein, and an even bigger fan of what he called theater as an adventure. Mr. Coats said on Thursday that he relished the idea of trekking out to Governors Island and testing his stamina with the marathon performance (which will be broken up by meal and bathroom breaks).

In Mr. Coats’s view “The Demons” will be a relief from the onslaught of films, music and television shows that clutter American culture. “This will be like going on an adventurous foreign trip without needing a passport,” said Mr. Coats, who will attend with his wife, Alma Becker, a guest artist at Skidmore College. “We’ve been to Berlin and just missed a Stein production there. We were in Moscow and just missed Stein there. Our colleagues and other theater people have spoken so highly of Stein, so we want in on the conversation.”

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from Uncommon Nonsense

Dali’s Adventures In Wonderland

   Posted by: Kenneth Rougeau   

Surrealist Salvador Dali was certainly one of the most influential & well known painters of the 20th century, but it’s not so widely known that he was also a gifted filmmaker, photographer, writer and illustrator. Eccentric by nature, it is no surprise that Dali was drawn to creating works to illustrate stories that touched upon his own surrealistic sensibilities, such tales as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Macbeth, and of course Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.

Dali created a series of 13 lithographs depicting Alice’s adventures (published in 1969 by Press-Random House), each vibrant and bizarre with a dreamy, almost child-like splatter-art feel to them, a bit like Ralph Steadman without the psychotic edginess (I love Ralph’s work). Alice, depicted as a girl jumping rope, is shown in each colorful image of the series as she travels through a dreamlike world of nonsense populated by an unusual cast of unlikely characters.

[ click for more reading and lithos at Uncommon Nonsense ]

from New York Press

Haim On You, Dr. Drew

Posted By: Tony O’Neill

They say there are certain inevitabilities in life. As the old cliché goes taxes and death are two of them, and here’s another: As soon as a celebrity dies of a drug overdose, Dr. Drew Pinsky will appear on my television screen before the body has even had time to cool, trying to sell whatever reality show crap he’s hustling this week.

Corey Haim died this morning of an overdose. If Dr Drew hasn’t already booked himself on The View before I am even done typing this, I’m taking bets on how long it is before he appears, like a grave robber relieving the corpse of gold teeth, to give his usual sales pitch, all dressed up as a faux-concerned “Although Corey Haim wasn’t a patient of mine, blah blah blah” speech. I have many problems with Dr. Drew. The first is that he is rather indiscriminate about who he decides is an addict. Anybody who has ever smoked pot, drank booze or even had sex is apparently an addict, so long as they are desperate enough to debase themselves on one of his reality shows. This season on Celebrity Rehab, as well as having real addicts like Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, and Tom Sizemore, we also had people like Kari Ann Peniche (best known for, uh, being in Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew) who was there because she knew how to play the role of the reality show villain really well, and Lisa D’Amato who was apparently a contestant on America’s Next Top Model, who liked to have a drink now and then. She wasn’t as hilariously pouty or dramatic as Ms. Peniche, so I guess they needed D’Amato to make up numbers.

This dearth of actual addicts is not just because it’s season three and Drew is running out of fresh meat. In season one he had Jaimee Foxworth from Family Matters, in rehab supposedly because she was “addicted” to marijuana. (Her appearance on this reality show was nothing to do with her porno career tanking, I’ll bet.) When she came in Drew warned her—with a straight face, no less—that she might expect some “heroin-like” withdrawal effects when she stopped smoking. Which might have played in the 1930s when all most people knew about pot came from the insane fantasies of Harry J. Anslinger and movies like Reefer Madness, but in 2010 a statement like that just serves to totally undermine whatever credibility the doctor has. Remember this is a man who appeared in Wild Hogs with Tim Allen, so he doesn’t have a whole lot to start off with.

But no, instead of getting into all of that—which is a whole article in and of itself—lets just sit back in wonder at the shamelessness of a man who thinks that news of another untimely celebrity death is the perfect opportunity to boost his ratings. If anyone has actually gone though rehab (full disclosure: I have, for a monstrous heroin/crack/meth rampage which took up most of my late teens and twenties) they will know that the rehab in Celebrity Rehab bears no more resemblance to a real rehab than the set of Rock of Love: Charm School did to a Swedish finishing school for young ladies. Instead what we see on Celebrity Rehab is more like a drug den for people whose addiction is to being on TV. And Dr. Drew, for all of his empathetic looks, nods and pseudo-wisdom on the subject of addiction is not the dispassionate clinician he likes to portray, but the instead the dealer, doling out another hit of public exposure and kinda-sorta fame to his jonseing clients.

I would love to see what Dr Drew thinks of prohibition itself, and whether he thinks that lives could be saved be decriminalizing drug use and moving to a more progressive position on the whole matter. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts leads to much better success rates than either methadone or prison, and that criminalizing a huge segment of our population for smoking an herb as benign as marijuana is costly, counterproductive and ineffective. But just like the drug cartels and the politicians, the Dr. Drews of this world need the status quo to be preserved. After all, in a post-prohibition society Dr. Drew couldn’t build his empire by pathologizing and exploiting drug users. Maybe then he could get back to what he was best at: sitting around with Adam Corolla and telling us whether we really can catch crabs from toilet seats.

Tony O’Neill is the author of the novels Down and Out in Murder Mile and the forthcoming Sick City.

[ click to read at NYPress.com ]

from The New York Times

An Italian Antihero’s Time to Shine

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

ROME — By at least one amusing new metric, Michelangelo’s unofficial 500-year run at the top of the Italian art charts has ended. Caravaggio, who somehow found time to paint when he wasn’t brawling, scandalizing pooh-bahs, chasing women (and men), murdering a tennis opponent with a dagger to the groin, fleeing police assassins or getting his face mutilated by one of his many enemies, has bumped him from his perch.

That’s according to an art historian at the University of Toronto, Philip Sohm. He has studied the number of writings (books, catalogs and scholarly papers) on both of them during the last 50 years. Mr. Sohm has found that Caravaggio has gradually, if unevenly, overtaken Michelangelo.

He has charts to prove it.

The change, most obvious since the mid-1980s, doesn’t exactly mean Michelangelo has dropped down the memory hole. To judge from the throngs still jamming the Sistine Chapel and lining up outside the Accademia in Florence to check out “David,” his popularity hasn’t dwindled much.

But, charts or no charts, Mr. Sohm has touched on something. Caravaggiomania, as he calls it, implies not just that art history doctoral students may finally be struggling to think up anything fresh to say about Michelangelo. It suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people. His otherworldly muscle men, casting the damned into hell or straining to emerge from thick blocks of veined marble, aspired to an abstract and bygone ideal of the sublime, grounded in Renaissance rhetoric, which, for postwar generations, now belongs with the poetry of Alexander Pope or plays by Corneille as admirable but culturally remote splendors.

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com ]

from ABC News & Chef Nobu

[ click to continue recipe at ABC News ]

 

[ click to play the CodeOrgan ]

from The Coolhunter

[ click to continue reading at TheCoolhunter.net ]