Sound Travels

I'll do a short set of posts on Norway soon. But to get you started, check in on AG's travel blog, Sound Travels. The man behind Fulton Lights has taken off to see the world, spread the word, play some shows and, well, I don't know. Get up to as much no good as one can. I am envious and the swell of demand in my own soul for a third-life crisis grows stronger by the day.

MondoGDL

Life and how to live it. Friend and ex-colleague AK always seems to have a bead drawn on that one. Heck, I think I'd rate him as one of the coolest people I know. Lately, he's been living in Mexico, with his wife and two young kids, renovating a house in Guadalajara, and seeming to have an all around great time. He has started a blog, MondoGDL, chronicling the art and culture of Guadalajara. Serving half as a guide for locals to find out about art and movies, and half as a kaleidoscopic view of high art, indie music and movies, and Guadalajara's culture, definitely worth a look from time to time. Also, as a general comment, it's amazing how deeply turned on further and further corners of the world are to the aesthetics and actual art that falls outside of the mainstream. Another hash in the plus column for globalization, I suppose.

Andy, still waiting for a report from a Chivas match...

Food Coma

Actually, not the good kind. I'm coining a new usage for the term, where I feel like I've been incapacitated for a few months and have somehow not managed to have a truly heroic meal in quite some time. There have been a handful of notable intervening moments, some even in the run of day to day life. Curried chicken sandwiches from Balthazar, arepas at Caracas, dim sum and Singaporean pan-fried noodles at Kudeta in New Haven. But nothing momentous, and no food adventures planned in advance.

Lazing in the apartment this afternoon after soccer and a stroll through Brooklyn Flea brought the sorry truth crashing down on my head, as I had the TV on as I puttered about, and the only channel worth watching was 13, since every other over-air channel had been pre-empted by La Papa rock and roll mass-travaganza in Yankee Stadium, and the only thing on 13 was a string of food shows. Two observations: while I enjoy food shows, love watching food made and presented, love the travelogue context in which most of them are presented, I don't think I would personally get along with most food writers. They just seem so pompous, badly built for TV, but also badly built for sharing a dinner table. Second, they need to re-invent smell-o-vision. When you are watching a food show, and the hosts and the guests and everybody involved is just ooh-ing and aah-ing over the aromas in the kitchen, well, how frustrating!

On that note, a few food-related links on the Interweb:

- Chocolate and Zucchini, a Paris-based food blog which I was introduced to while watching one of those shows on 13;
- AR's delightful Treat A Week recipe blog, which was featuring donuts, the last time I checked;
- The Moko's ridiculous and charming candy blog. It's bizarre that she is one of the most influential women in Europe, but she has a secret sugar problem;
- Food Candy, dB's epicurean side-project, which I woefully under-use.

With that, any recommendations for great NYC food resources? Or anywhere I should go eat?

Alien Sex Planet

To the extent that you could make a belief system from the works of David Byrne, and the liner notes of Stop Making Sense are its bible, then I am an adherent. So it is with a bias (that of a fan) that I recommend David Byrne's journal. It is regularly amazing. Another form that the man has absolutely mastered - and mastered not by reflecting or subverting, but by simply embracing. It is surreal how banal David Byrne's journal can be. Just a man writing about his life, on the internet. Nothing to see here, folks. Except, of course, that it's David Byrne.

It's worth a regular visit, say once a month, but certainly check out his recent post about a cross country-trip. My favorite part? That he stays in Holiday Inns. Budget conscious in America. Just like me. An excerpt:

We cross into New Mexico and arrive at Carlsbad Caverns National Park by 2:30pm. We’ve missed the last guided tour and a chance to clamber down the natural entrance, so we take the elevator down and spend almost 2 hours wandering the marked paths underground. The Big Room is vast, bigger than a football field (one quote claims one could lay the Empire State Building down in here — what an image!), and other spaces branch off from it. There are electric lights cleverly hidden behind rocks and formations so one can see pretty well, but some people still bring flashlights and I saw one couple with lights on their heads.

The formations are creatively named, as they often do in these caves: The Chinese Doll Theater (really!), The Temple, The Klansman(!), the Twin Domes, The Giant, The Lion’s Tail. I remember seeing some hilarious B&W pieces that Mike Kelly did where he made up his own names for cave formations.

I find the formations disturbingly biomorphic, organic, and mostly sexual. Alien sex planet. The names they give them seem to belie what they actually resemble. It seems the underworld is comprised of vast landscape of penises, vulvas, vaginas, tentacles and fleshy flaps. Freud would have had a field day in here: it’s as if our own forbidden images and imaginings have all been forced not merely into the unconscious, as he would have it, but physically underground, in exaggerated form, with elements of the male and the female sometimes mixed together. Other elements seemed strongly sexual, but not quite human, like the sexual organs of insects, or deep-sea creatures. Only in this case it is the sexual organs of rocks hidden 830 feet beneath the earth’s surface, as they should be. Imagine farmer Jim White seeing a plume of weird black smoke being spewed out of the earth near the top of a ridge – these were the bats. At sunset, thousands gushed from its small orifice, the way in to the sexy underground world. Any artist producing objects like these in such quantity and profusion would be considered a pervert, or at least obsessed. In this case, it is the Earth that is the pervert.

The World Is Not Only Beautiful...

I am a sucker for monuments, and a sucker for shiny, modern objects stuck in the midst of charming, old world cities (or dropped in the middle of nowhere nature). So how I missed the opening of the Dublin Spire, I don't know. Just adding to my list of reasons to visit Dublin, I guess.

In the meantime, while we're sitting at home in front of our computers on a Friday night drinking beer because we're too lazy to go see The Walkmen up in Williamsburg, why don't you check these out:

- An interview with the foxiest band in Brooklyn, Fur Cups For Teeth, who are back in action this fall;
- The Says-It Mix Tape Generator;
- Alyson Fox's excellent drawings, courtesy of JG's blog;
- Listen to "Myriad Harbor," one of the Dan Bejar tracks on the new Challengers album by the New Pornographers, and my current favorite song of the moment;
- And just so I don't have to say it again (and again), the best blog on the Internet right now: Paleo Future (aka, holy shit did we miss the mark!!!)

Photos above and below from a Flickr search for 'Dublin Spire.'

Paleo Future

Holy shit, can I just say you need to look at this blog, Paleo Future, and the attendant videos and photos that they are posting on the Internet. A good place to start is here, which is the video that MF sent me that started this all of for me, and you may as well follow up here. MF, thanks for the heads up, and if this is one of your projects, you are doubly-genius and making the rest of us look completely useless...

Flying and Falling

JG, over at Cup of Jo, has been posting awesome photos and articles all week. A rave for that blog on another day, when people actually read this. In the mean time, I am going to totally cheat and steal some of her photos, but you should head over there and check this stuff out!

Moko and the Mignon

EBC returned from Finland and brought us all Mignon eggs for Easter/our birthdays. They are real eggs, drained of their content (presumably sterilized) and then filled with delicious chocolate. Totally charming and delicious. But this is not the blog for reading about chocolate. This is.