Miscellaneous Inspiration

A few things:

Fashion inspo: I started doing the J. Crew sleeve roll last week. And I am never going back to regular rolls.

Music inspo: I am always a fan of songs about food.

Party inspo: Lauren Santo Domingo was the chair and Rebecca Gardner was the event planner behind this Carnegie Hall party that took place earlier this week. The decor is...intense. I suddenly want tassels on everything.

Insta inspo: The Sun's dining guide will be in the paper this weekend - this roundup of local food Instagrammers to follow is part of it. They are all awesome. More on the rest of the guide later, after it pops up online. I am crazy excited to see it in real life. It takes a village to put that thing together; I've been feeling lucky to have been  part of the team.

Musically Inclined

The September issue of Bon Appetit is their restaurant issue and restaurant editor Andrew Knowlton has an interesting section about the intense tour of the nation's restaurants he undertook for the issue. After 120 days and a LOT of restaurants, he noticed some consistencies, not all of which were culinary.

One of the more interesting (to me) parts of the issue is a tiny sidebar on page 58, where Knowlton lists a handful of songs that have made it onto soundtracks at the new cool kids restaurants. The list isn't super surprising - Mumford & Sons? Black Keys? - but interesting nonetheless.

For some reason, music rarely makes an impression on me in restaurants. I think that's probably because it's usually quiet and innocuous enough that it just fades into the background. I wish it played more of a role in Baltimore eateries - it can be such a fun way for a restaurant to show off its personality.

Of course, first they have to get the music right, which means it has to work for the staff and the diners - it has to fit the brand and audience. When we ate at Wit + Wisdom, not too long after it opened, I was surprised by the cheesy, easy-listening quality of the music. It wasn't nearly sophisticated enough - or even fun enough - for the place.

On the other hand, I still fondly remember a dinner we had at Clementine during the spring of 2011. We ate there a lot back then but one meal stands out - because of the music. They mix up the tunes - you never know what you'll get - and that night a classic rock lover was manning the iPod. I loved it so much that I went right home and made a playlist ("Cooper Goes Camping") inspired by that dinner. I started with Janis Joplin ("Mercedes Benz") and went from there.

Quirky, ever-changing music works well at Clementine since it's a quirky, homey type of restaurant. What they do wouldn't be right for everyone.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm curious about where else in Baltimore uses music well. Any favorites?

Artsy Wednesday: Bootlegs and Biographies; Dylan and Shakespeare

Ron Rosenbaum has an interesting, meandering article on Slate right now. It starts out with sixties bootlegging and a collection of about-to-be-published Bob Dylan poems, winds its way through the debates of Shakespearean attribution, and ends up with the author begging (but maybe not seriously)?) Dmitri Nabakov not to go ahead with the publishing of his father's final unfinished work.

Sounds all over the place, but it follows the rules of logic, I promise. (Though I'm pretty sure it also offers some insight into how Rosenbaum's mind works.) It's worth a read if you have any interest in Dylan, Shakespeare, Nabakov or literary drama.

Two points were of particular interest to me. The first involves the idea of bootlegs. Those dorm room staples - mildly illegal tapes of jam bandy concerts. Rosenbaum reports on a lunch he had with Clinton Heylin, Dylan biographer and author of a new book on a hotly contested collection of Shakespeare sonnets published in 1609. It seems that Heylin puts forth the theory that the 1609 collection is actually a bootleg - authored by Shakespeare but published without his knowledge. Rosenbaum bites and it's an interesting use of modern pop culture language to explain historical questions.

The second point, though a short part of the article, addresses a big idea. Rosenbaum gives some column inches to the late David Foster Wallace:

Last Sunday in the New York Times' Week in Review section, A.O. Scott reminded us of the late, lamented David Foster Wallace's complaint about biographical criticism of another great artist, Jorge Luis Borges—whose stories, Wallace once wrote, "so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant." Yes!

Rosenbaum gets here by mentioning that a number of women have claimed to be the inspiration for particular Dylan songs...probably because Dylan told them himself that they were. The same could be true for Shakespeare - the argument over to whom certain sonnets are dedicated might be more complicated than we thought, since it's possible that the old bard was also an old dog, throwing "inspiration" around whenever it suited.

But then, DFW asks, does it really matter? If the work itself is that good, can't we just take it on it's own merit and let the biographical details fall where they may?

I think this is one of those questions that keep art history (or music history or English) departments funded. In fact, just yesterday, my friend Mark and I were having a semi-political discussion when he invoked the "can you separate the art from the artist" question. It's eternal.

And...how is this about food? Well, originally I was going to try to find some convoluted way to define bootleg food. But instead I'm going to focus on part 2 of the poast - the art/artist debate.

The idea of food as real art, not just craft, is a fairly modern one. One of the things that comes with that is the elevation of chef from craftsman to artist. It seems that we've just hit the point at which the chef/artist's biography does inform the end product. I can imagine, for example, that the experience of eating at Babbo is heightened by knowledge of Batali's personal culinary experiences and history.

So maybe the separation of artist from art is a characteristic of an evolved medium? And regarding food-as-art, we're still in the early stages of evolution?

Or...maybe I'm trying to hard to find a food connection. But still - interesting article, even if it has nothing to do with food.

Artsy: Bertrand Goldberg Is Still Cool

I can't find it online, but in the "archive" section of the current issue of Dwell, there's an interesting article about mid-century Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg.

Before I read the article, I didn't really know anything at all about Goldberg, but his work looked familiar to me - especially the Marina City Towers in Chicago (as an aside - check out that link. Talk about a weak website for an iconic set of buildings).

After reading the Dwell article, especially the "10 Things You Should Know about Bertrand Goldberg", I realized at least part of the reason why the buildings look so familiar is that they are on the cover of Wilco's CD Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Not that I own the CD, or that I am even cool enough to listen to Wilco, but I'm guessing that I must have seen the CD case in my brother or sister's car at some point. Because they are cool enough to listen to Wilco.

Here's how this is about food: one of the other ten facts is:

In 1963, Goldberg's wife, Nancy, opened the only franchise of the haute cuisine Parisian restaurant Maxim's de Paris in Chicago.

Kind of cool, right? Right there, just on one simple magazine page, you've got iconic architecture, a celebrated alt-country album, and an uber-famous restaurant.

This is what I'm talking about whenever I mention crossover and connoisseurship...

Artsy: Food Songs Part Deux

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an incredibly lazy Artsy Wednesday post about songs about food. Well, here's a much better discussion of the same topic on Elizabeth Large's blog.

MUCH better.

Artsy Wednesday: Food in Song?

I had a pretty grand plan for today's Artsy post. Inspired by hearing the Rusted Root song "Food & Creative Love" the other day, I was going to compile a list of my 10 favorite food-related song lyrics.

And somehow I thought I'd be able to do that in about 20 minutes this morning.

Unfortunately, searches for food-related song lyrics turn up a couple of random songs that don't have much to do with food, one tortured Eagle Eye Cherry metaphor, some Weird Al and a couple of kids' songs.

I thought about opening up to drinks, but then I was overwhelmed by the options.

So instead, you get this. A poor excuse for a "would've written if I'd thought it through better" post...

Artsy Wednesday: La Traviata

I'm kind of visual art-centric, so my "artsy" posts tend to be the same. Not today.

Last night I had an excellent dinner at Mari Luna with Dara from Dining Dish (more on that later) and she mentioned a video that pairs Verdi's La Traviata with a crazy food-related claymation video. It's more than a little bit Christmas-special-on-acidy. It's cool.

Here it is, on the Sotta Sopra blog. Enjoy!

Tom Petty's Los Angeles

The second concert I ever went to was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. It was October 24, 1991 and they were touring in support of Into the Great Wide Open. I was a junior in high school and a gigantic TP fan. Full Moon Fever was in regular rotation in my tape player.

Still would be, too, if I had a tape player. I love Tom Petty - his music has aged incredibly well (or maybe it's just that it's aged the same way I have).

I'm always happy to know that I'm not alone. In LA Weekly, Daphne Carr writes a super cool article about Petty's LA (found via Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker). It's accompanied by a cartoonish map of the city, highlighting the spots important to Petty, both in his real life and in his music.

And how is this about food? I confess - as I read the article, I wasn't really sure how I was going to make it about food. Then, towards the end, Carr writes about Le Seur, an LA restaurant. Seems that Petty went there for dinner one night and was promptly escorted into a private room where George Harrison was eating, creating one of the relationships that formed the Traveling Wilburys (another band I love).

Cool, right?

Artsy Wednesday: The Creative Lifespan

A couple of days ago, Ann Althouse linked to a NYT article by Bernard Holland comparing the creative lifespan of several major composers. Some, like Haydn, stretch their creative output over decades and may even be internally artistic long after their bodies no longer have the physical will to create. Others seemingly cram the same decades worth of creation into a very short time span - Holland cites Schubert as an example, saying, "forty composer-years were lived in about one and a half".



Althouse hones in on the disparity between our creative and actual lifespans. What resonates the most with me is the idea that because we never know what the future will bring, we just don't know if we'll have the energy, inclination or even capability to do things we're saving for "later", when we have more time or money or whatever.



Of course I immediately relate that to myself: what am I putting off that I should just go ahead and do. And wouldn't it be awesome if I had capabilities like Schubert (minus his crippling STD).



But looking back at the original article - the differences between composers in terms of patterns of creative output - I'm sure there's a comparison to be made here with chefs. I don't know enough about current or historical chefs to actually make the comparisons, but isn't it logical that some people are wildly innovative and successful and creative in short bursts early in their careers, but artistically (or physically) burn out at a young age, while others spread their greatness across a long career and gently fade away, or sputter out physically as creative ideas about food still bounce around in their brains?



Yet another thing to help me justify writing about food as an art...

Revolution Trickles Over

Today's Washington Post Style section includes a thought-provoking artile on the debatable success of the Cubism Revolution. "Debatable" because both the objectives and the outcome of the revolution in question are, apparently, up for grabs. The article's author, Blake Gopnik, talks to numerous experts, most of whom fall firmly in the "rousing success" camp. Gopnik has a more complex view, which I won't rehash here because a) if you're into this sort of thing, the article is really worth reading in its entirety and b) Gopnik's a good writer and trying to summarize would be futile and, likely, embarrassing.

I will make one comment, though: nobody in the article talks about Cubism's influence outside of "art-art" - namely, sculpture and painting. There's nothing about jazz, nothing about any type of architecture and, obviously, nothing about food. But to me, the tenets of Cubism directly influenced molecular gastronomy, at the very least, and probably a lot more.

Regardless, good article, even if its not all inclusive.

DaVinci the Composer?

This is unspeakably cool. An Italian musician has uncovered what he believes to be a piece of music encoded in Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper. He suggests that it's a requiem, meant to convey the somber mood of the last supper as an event.

I absolutely love - and am not at all surprised - by the idea that Leonardo would have created complementary works of art to touch multiple senses.

It does make me think, though, that the one thing that sort of sucks about food is its ephemeral nature. Maybe the artist also recreated the meal itself - the smells and tastes (and sights) - but unless he wrote about it, we really wouldn't know.

Reading this does make me want to recreate some old menus, though, and go hunting for symbolism in every dish.