We’ve been getting emails from friends who are on their way down to the ramp supper in Helvetia, West Virginia – ramps being the pungent wild leek that grows throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. We wrote about the supper this time last year, when we were headed to Helvetia ourselves, to the feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked.
The 2011 ramp supper marks a year of big changes: two of Helvetia’s visionary elders passed away and the unique Swiss culture of the town seemed threatened. But the younger folk there are pulling together to protect and nourish what they realize to be a rare place, carrying on its rich traditions and legacy. In honor of this big transition, we reprise a chunk of the post Sally wrote last year about the spectacular Helvetia Ramp Supper, including a recipe that contains a basic method of preparing ramps that can be used for endless improvising. We offer it despite having recently read the disturbing news of the threat to ramps from over-harvesting reported in the New York Times. We don’t want to stop eating ramps – but we want to know that they were harvested sustainably, and perhaps, buy less this year, just a taste’s worth to remind us of the wild…
For years, we’ve been amazed at the clever and imaginative solutions our friend Holton Rower has come up for his various spaces – both at home and work. Take the chic leather cabinet pulls we’ve been seeing around at high-end housewares stores, for $20 + a piece. Holton starting making leather pulls twenty years ago to use in an apartment and has been making them himself ever since. They are nothing more than a rectangle of leather folded in half and held fast with a roofing nail – a common nail that has a particularly large flat head and a fat shank that holds fast to wood. Holton is an artist who knows about all sorts of materials and how things work, knowledge to which he applies his acute visual sense (check out the 1.6 million hit YouTube video of one of his paintings). He likes the dot within a rectangle that the pulls make – evocative of Bauhaus. read more…
…found at Raised on Sandwiches with these words: “the smell of fog juice in action… reminds me of chicago’s most talented folks”.
We looked at that fog, and thought again about unformed ideas coursing around, in confusion… the seeming impossibility of finding answers and then – clarity, illumination, understanding as the fog clears. This fog made us think of the opposite of fog.
We fell HARD for artist Max Lamb‘s work after we sat on a Lamb stool owned by our friend A.S.C. (Sandy) Rower, President of the Calder Foundation (more on that big adventure soon). The stool was beautiful and comfortable and made by an ancient process of sand casting: Lamb goes to the beach and makes a mould in the wet sand, then pours molten pewter (heated on a camping stove) into it, waits for it to set, then digs out the strangely elegant stool with its roughly granulated legs.
Lamb embarked on his ad hoc method of sand-casting after he was unable to afford to have a professional foundry do the casting process for him. He remembered building sand castles as a kid, and knew he could figure out sand casting himself. He publishes videos of his work process, because he wants other people to know how he does it. Watch the sand-casting video here (making the mould runs until about 2:40 when Lamb pours the liquid metal; he digs out the work at 3:37).
Then Sandy showed us a picture of some incredible library shelves he’d commissioned Lamb to make for him (below). They were based on another classic Lamb technique: carving polystyrene (think packing materials and take-out coffee cups) into a usable form (like the chair, above), then spraying it with a polyurethane rubber finish. We love it because, as Lamb says: ”A variety of simple tools and a reasonable amount of energy is all that is required…”He makes us believe WE could do something like that,read more…
Betty Blake Churchill alerted us to this inspired conceptual birthday card by artist/designer Heather Tompkins. It’s the perfect thing for when you need to give a little gift. It seems Tompkins made it for a friend, and is not selling it commercially. Too bad. We just might use our color printer to printing it out on heavy paper, and credit Tompkins on the back. It is so-o-o good.
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot of people complaining about how little time they have, how stressed they are by all there is so do, being hyper-scheduled and unable to get off the strange treadmill they have found themselves on, trying to keep everything going. We’ve been mulling this very thing for quite a while now, wondering if it’s our VIEW of time that is the problem, or how we organize ourselves…remembering times in our lives when we felt there was enough time.
We find ourselves taking great comfort in this photo of Patti Smith in the ’70′s. “Fuck the clock!“: simple and to the point, an essential attitude to start working into our days.
We also found many great nuggets in the The Possibilian, the April 25th New Yorker profile by Burkhard Bilger about brillianto/researcher David Eagleman, whose brush with death – and that slow-motion thing that happens during an accident – catalyzed his obsession with the mysteries of time and the brain.
Here are our favorite bits (among many) that shed light on the big question of how time works: read more…
One of the reasons that we so look forward to the latest issue of Canal House Cooking, the ongoing cookbook series by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, is that the recipes resonate so deeply with the way we live. In other words, they completely cut the $#*!@, providing us with ideas and recipes that are of the season and senses, do-able in our insanely busy lives, AND which work from the inside out: each recipe seems to ask “what do our spirits REALLY need? What do we need to be fed?”.
Take for instance our favorite chapter of the newly-released Volume 6: Crax & Butter for Dinner. Crackers and butter is our secret perfect meal; although it seems unmeal-like, it is somehow utterly nourishing and satisfying. Volume 6 presents endless plays on the theme of crackers + ______, from homemade Pimento Cheese to Anchovy and Lemon Butter, not to mention a lovely recipe for Tender Cheese Crackers: butter and cayenne-dusted Parmigiano held together with a bit of flour to make little savory bites that melt in your mouth (it would make a swell pie crust for an apple or pear tart…)
But Volume 6′s recipe offerings range to many compelling, simple dishes that we could imagine making for a heartening lone supper, like read more…
We’re wishing you a wondrous weekend celebrating Easter, Passover, or just….Spring. Our plan is to totally chill, take Monday OFF, sleep late and then eat some perfect soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, in honor of the season’s great ancient symbol of new life – and ideas- emerging…
This clip from an animated Krazy Kat cartoon drawn by Charles Mintz Studio’s the 1930′s reminded us how music often opens the way in the creative process… read more…
Dangerous Minds posted this free hour-long mix of the now defunct band Kraftwerk’s pioneering electronic music. (It seemed revolutionary when it first appeared. Curiously, we read that they were heavily influenced by the Beach Boys, in addition to the German composer Stockhausen). It’s an example of what’s possible from MixCloud, a site full of free music mixes.
We find short doses of Kraftwerk good to work to, i.e. we can think and write while it’s on in the background…some of it makes our ideas shoot around in a nice way. Some of it makes us jump around. (We don’t know how to shift off a song we’re not crazy about without interrupting the mix, so we just turn the volume down way low.)
We’ve always loved this scene from A Day at the Races, when Harpo and Chico buy themselves some time while being chased by the chic hotel’s security. The astonishing, hilarious and beautiful 4-or-so minutes start at the 2:30 mark. If you’re pressed for time, we recommending letting the video load until you can move the cursor there, when Harpo takes over, in sublime improvisational mode, to watch a true artist at work.
“When life hands you lemons (a piano and a bunch of cops), make……………..!”
(Short version, without Harpo’s sweet riff, here.)
Nannucci is known for his luminous neon writings. Check out the mind-altering digital companion piece to the work above. The constantly changing line at the top resonates big time:
…”another notion of possibility”…
……..”nothing new to say but something to say in a new way”…
…decouvrir different directions”…
…….”new worlds are dark as long as they are not lighted”…
We wish we could light them up in colors in this post as they light us up inside.
