Dream in Focus
Watching “jiro dreams of sushi” was like a sweet escape. Jiro, his sons, and apprentices are irresistible and remarkable in their singular focus and dedication, especially in comparison to our overstimulated multitasking lives. Go see it at IFC before May 10th if you can. It is time well spent. This quiet and elegant film is a meditation on work, family and the art of perfection. It centers on 85-year-old Jiro Ono’s restaurant, inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station, which has been honored with three Michelin stars.
A Zone of Relaxation, Odin’s Pop-up Store
Odin recently opened a pop-up store in the East Village, at 330 East 11th Street, which offers their growing selection of fragrances for sale. The store is a collaboration with Snarkitecture who created the sculptural installation to display the unisex fragrances and candles. The installation consists of plaster casts from the Odin fragrance bottles. On the ceiling they created a wave of the plaster bottles, while in the middle of the store they are clustered together to display the fragrances.
When visiting the pop-up store you will feel like you are entering a space of relaxation, an escape from the busy streets in the city! An advisor, completely dressed in white, will guide you through the different scents and explain the ingredients, helping you to find the perfect scent for you.
-RVDB
Googa Mooga?
Anyone who has walked through the subway station at West 4th Street might be wondering the same thing as a few of us here at the Dizon Inc. office, what is The Great Googa Mooga? There are billboards bombarding you as you walk down the hallway, covering the walls of the station with photos of top NYC chefs and their respective restaurants.
This prompted me to google Googa Mooga once I arrived at work. According to the website, http://www.googamooga.com/, The Great Googa Mooga is “An amusement park of food & drink… something wonderfully great.” There will be live musical acts to accompany your food and drink consumption, as well as featured guest speakers. An amusement park of food and drink with live music? Well sign me up! Here at the office we take our food seriously and were all over this, even setting an alarm to remind us to register for tickets! Luckily we were all able to get tickets and are patiently awaiting May 19th & 20th to enjoy the festivities. Will you be going to The Great Googa Mooga?
-SP
Jugaad Urbanism
RESOURCEFUL STRATEGIES FOR INDIAN CITIES
The concept of Jugaad, roughly translated from Hindi, means to “make do”. To be a Jugaadu is to be resourceful, clever, and the ultimate creative problem solver.
This concept is presented at The Center for Architecture’s current exhibit “Jugaad Urbanism: Resourceful Strategies for Indian Cities” focusing on patch-worked communities in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Pune, that improvise energy solutions with jerry-rigged cars, homemade stoves, and do-it-yourself water filtration systems. The show illustrates how these innovations born of necessity provide important lessons to city planning agencies, NGOs, and designers alike.
The show is organized into “resource” categories: Land, Water, Energy and Transportation. Juxtaposed with the images of DIY solutions are examples of proposed design solutions. Highlights include an energy-generating spinning machine that charges a transistor radio and a lamp with a decorative shade. A home water filtration system is composed of two buckets and an affordable filter that can last up to 14 years.
While most architecture exhibits focus on high design and cutting-edge technology, this exhibit offers a way to approach the economic, environmental and design challenges facing the world’s rapidly growing cities from an alternative, sustainable perspective.
The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place
NY, NY 10012
Gallery Hours
Mon-Fri: 9am to 8pm
Sat: 11am to 5pm
-JB
Infinite Variety
Infinite Variety: Three Decades of Red and White Quilts, was a magical and monumental exhibition presented by the American Folk Art Museum at the Park Avenue Armory from March 25-30. Entering the Armory’s soaring drill hall, one felt as though they had walked into a swirling deck of cards. 651 quilts, restricted to a palette of red and white, were ingeniously hung in spirals and rings and a vast wall along the back. As visitors wandered through this forest of craft, the sense of awe was palpable.
The quilts are from the collection of Joanna Semel Rose, who started buying quilts at flea markets in the 1950s, and never stopped. The title Infinite Variety reflects the hundreds of variations in style and technique throughout the show. Although a few standard motifs emerge, each quilt is unique, as they are all the products of individual women unsung for their talent and craft. Some of the quilts are simplistic in construction or pattern, while others boast impressive complexity and precision.
The creativity of everyday women to design and shape the world around them is evident in the piece below. When cloth for patchwork was scarce, women would re-purpose materials to work their quilts. Flour sacks were made of cotton and when emptied, could be washed and bleached of their logos, then the white fabric could be used. In this case, rather than erase the printed design, the maker used them as templates for embroidery: each square shows a different brand of flour.
Whether the technique employed patchwork, appliqué, quilting, or embroidery; or emerging designs were geometric, abstract, or figurative, the literal thread that links them is their simple red and white scheme.
Visitors young and old enjoyed the show. Women who were quilters themselves admired the work of others in their craft; children with drawing notebooks were fascinated and inspired as well. In time, a new generation may fashion quilts of their own.
-EM
Fat Tuesday- Frankies 457
There is something about a great neighborhood restaurant that makes New York somehow shrink, if only for a moment, into an intimate, comfortable place that feels like home. Frankies is that place in my neighborhood. There is often a crowd at night, so lunch there is my favorite meal, sitting at a sturdy wooden table with some slices of crusty bread, a plate of perfect pasta. I once noticed a man who sat in a sunny corner one Saturday afternoon with a plate of meatballs, a whole bottle of white wine, and a book, and thought “perfect.”
Frankies can feel at once like a place to see-and-be-seen, but also a secret; humble details like a vase of flowering branches in the front window that changes with the season infuses the space with a quality both timeless and ephemeral. My favorite dish there is something I often make at home with the help of Frankies’ friendly cookbook.
Frankies Spuntino 457
457 Court Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
Cavatelli with Sausage & Browned Sage Butter
Serves 6
1 pound hot Italian pork sausage (4-6 links depending on the size of the sausage)
7 tablespoons unsalted butter
8-10 sage leaves (fewer if they are very large, more if they are very small)
Freshly ground white pepper
Ricotta Cavatelli
1 cup grated Pecorino Romano
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley leaves, coarsely chopped
1. Put a large pot of water on to boil and salt it well.
2. Meanwhile, put the sausages into your widest sauté pan with 1/2 inch of water and turn the heat to medium. After 10 minutes, flip the sausages over and simmer them for another 5 minutes (replenish the water if it threatens to boil off). After 15 minutes, the sausages should be firm and cooked through. Remove the sausages to a cutting board (discard the water) and slice them into coins just shy of 1/2 inch. (You can do this an hour or even a day ahead of time if you like.)
3. Add 1 tablespoon of the butter to the pan and turn the heat to medium-high. After a minute, add the sausage coins in an even layer and let them cook, untouched, unstirred, unfussed with, until they’re deeply browned on the first side. (If there is not enough room to brown all the sausage in one pan– which there will very probably not be– split it between two pans or brown it in two batches and use an additional tablespoon of butter.) Flip and brown them on the B side. The browning in integral to the ultimate depth of flavor of the finished dish– don’t stint on it. When the sausage is browned, remove it from the pan (a plate lined with paper towels is a nice place to hold it) and return the pan to the butter.
4. Keep the heat at a medium-high and add the sage, the remaining 6 tablespoons of butter, and a few twists of white pepper. Stir the butter and scrape at the browned bits on the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. After a minute or two, it should not stop foaming and start to take on color. That’s when you should drop the ricotta cavatelli into the boiling water. Continue to cook the butter until its deeply browned and fragrant, about 4 minutes more, which should be just about how long the cavatelli takes to cook.
5. Do not drain the cavatelli too thoroughly. The water clinging to the pasta will give the sauce body. Add it to the butter sauce along with the sausage and stir.
6. Add the cheese, stir again, and portion the cavatelli among the serving plates. Scatter each with a couple of pinches of parsley. Serve immediately.
from The Frankies Spuntino Kitchen Companion & Cooking Manual. Edited by Frank Falcinelli, Frank Castronovo, & Peter Meehan. New York: Artisan Books, 2010.
-EM
Sonia Delaunay at the Cooper-Hewitt
Today we visited the Sonia Delaunay exhibit at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The galleries are overflowing with her gorgeous graphic patterns. The geometric and floral prints are still fresh some 80 and 90 years later. Her very identifiable graphic style and color combinations have clearly influenced so much of what we are seeing in current collections.
The great aspect of this exhibit is that it shows her paintings on an equal footing with her design and textile work. She stated that she saw her commercial work as just an extension of her art, and not a lesser form. The exhibit includes glimpses into her notebooks so you can see how a beautiful fabric went from a sketch to a textile.
-JB
Tara Donovan at Pace Gallery
Taking advantage of the lovely weather in New York– and trying not to think about how long it would or wouldn’t last– our office ventured outside and took a field trip to the gallery-thick neighborhood of Chelsea. We lingered for a long while at Tara Donovan, who is showing in two of the Pace Gallery spaces. The first stop brought us into a large installation, Untitled (Mylar), 2011 , a shimmering coal colored assemblage of spheres that are reminiscent at once of disco balls, molecular structures, and a billowing smoke cloud. The spheres were made of curving tubes of thin metallic sheets of Mylar. The effect of light bouncing off of the reflective surfaces of the folds created variations of color and shadow, shiny and matte. The whole composition seemed to have built itself in every direction like coral, multiplying from the inside out.
Curious about what the accompanying show Drawings (Pins), 2010, would have waiting for us, we headed a few blocks north, where the white walls were hung with what seemed to be canvases of monochromatic compositions. Considering the name of the show, the works might have been large-scale re-imagining of day-dreamy pencil drawings, experiments in gradation and interlocking circles made with a compass. Upon closer viewing, however, the works revealed themselves as more sculpture than flat canvases: thousands of steel pins had been pressed into a backing board. The designs were created by varying the density of the pins to allow more or less of the white background to show through. The result were patterns and gradations of color with incredible depth and dimension. Like the larger installation, the play of light and shadow on simple forms was fascinating.
-EM
