Sublime Frequencies, the label run by members of the Sun City Girls, has just dropped a bundle of new CDs on the world. The label describes itself as, “a collective of explorers dedicated to acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2005
Tiki Tracking
Big Friend Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing posted about Critiki, a wonderful database of tiki bars and restaurants now online. This could be very handy if you’re traveling the wilds of America and get struck with the urge to tie one on with a lot of flowers and volcanic rock heads surrounding you. Link (via [...]
Posted in Cities, Daily Accumulations, Drinks, Restaurants
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Fool’s gold
A columnist on Slate (a “former securities analyst”) is moving to China to cover the “gold rush” there. Given the country’s rate of progress, it is hard to imagine China not becoming the leading economic superpower over the next 50 to 100 years. The intermediate steps, however, will likely be incredibly complex and volatile, especially [...]
Posted in elsewhere, Daily Accumulations
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As money goes suburban, the symphonies follow
The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal looks at how arts organizations are opening in the suburbs so that sprawl dwellers can get a bit of culture to go with their lawns. “What’s happening is that the power base is shifting to the suburbs–they have the political and economic power to get what they want,” observes [...]
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Lone Star Sangria
The New York Times reports on a drink that made a debut in Washington last night. The most surprising Lone Star delicacy, at least to some locals watching in dismay, was a new drink ordered by a group of Texans: merlot with 7-Up. It was described as a Texas version of sangria. Of course, Texas [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Drinks, Intestinal Tracts
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A San Francisco Welcome
The party tonight in San Francisco was at City Hall, where thousands gathered to protest Bush’s second term. As several helicopters floated like hummingbirds over the civic center, a standard San Franciscan mix of radicals and freaks did their best to highlight the stark difference between reality and rhetoric in Bush’s address. More poignant than [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, San Francisco
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Some People Know How to Party
Not invited to the inauguration? That doesn’t mean you can’t do your part to mark the day. Perhaps you’d like to throw a little party of your own; kind of an historic moment. If you’re feeling presidential, you’ve got a few models. You could follow this year’s lead, when “moral values†won the election. In [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Recipes, Tokyo
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New Japanese Traditional Dance
Researchers at Tokyo University have taught a robot to dance. Katsushi Ikeuchi, a professor of engineering at Tokyo University, said the robot, which is usually used at construction sites, was taught traditional Japanese dance to preserve the art for the future. The slow-paced dance, which is performed in groups and accompanied by lutes and other [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Tokyo
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Booty Call
Pirate Soul, new museum of pirates has opened in Key West, funded by millionaire Pat Croce, the former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers who has now become a motivational speaker. Fascinated by pirates since childhood, Croce has spent a lot of his own dough buying up artifacts. “I’m funding an expedition off Haiti, for Captain [...]
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Berlin Restaurant for Bulimics
A restaurant has opened in Berlin that offers people suffering from bulimia a place to go out. The names of the dishes are often poetic. “Wolf’s Hunger” describes a lamb dish, “Soul” is the name for cappuccino creme with biscuit. Other techniques help entice people for whom food has taken on another dimension to the [...]
Posted in elsewhere, Daily Accumulations, Restaurants
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Turing Test for Crappy Food
On the subject of Twinkies: “T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. stands for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is a series of experiments conducted during finals week, 1995, at Rice University. The tests were designed to determine the properties of that incredible food, the Twinkie.”
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Intestinal Tracts
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Slouching Toward Your Kitchen
Love the food at Applebees? Drinks made at Bennigans? Or how about the special sauce at McDonalds? OK, maybe you don’t. But imagine you did. And when cooking at home you wanted to forgo real homemade goodness and make everything taste weirdly like the food you get in chain restaurants. Where to turn? In the [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Recipes
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The Two Towers
It’s a good time for visionary architecture fans in Tokyo, looking forward or backwards. The fantastically high museum on the 53rd floor of the Mori Tower is hosting Archilab which “examines for the first time ever in Japan those radical and visionary approaches to building design and urban planning that, since World War II, have [...]
Posted in Cities, Daily Accumulations, Tokyo
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Sleeping With Grandpa
And speaking of Galveston, for some background on what it was like growing up there–and well as a bit of his fine personal storytelling, this is probably a good time to mention these stories of Sam’s life that got posted on HotWired back in the day. Nicely illustrated and everything. Grandpa was always drunk. Once, [...]
Posted in Daily Accumulations, Galveston
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Say Cheese
There can be nothing more important to die-hard urbanites than to have a real physical rapport with Nature. From time to time. In small doses. Now, if you could conveniently shop downstairs for it, that would be flawless – the good things of the countryside are better accepted when they move into the big city. [...]
Posted in Cities, Intestinal Tracts, Paris, Restaurants
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“A One-Sketch Admission”
You have heard about Proust’s madeleine, about how, by power of words, we could again smell his loose butter; about this French exercise in choosing ovenproof words for cooking up childhood memories, with plenty of sweet wake ups on provincial France mornings. From the end of Impressionism to the start of this ending century we [...]
The Studio of Dr. Moreau
Maybe the man (1826-1898) was and remains one of the more mocked of French painters. His palette is dismissed as a bit of “sidewalk color” (read: “vomit” colors) because Moreau loved acidulous and sour associations. “He puts clock chains at the Olympia gods” because Moreau loved tattooing his nudes with hieroglyphic macaronis of a sort. [...]
Posted in Cities, Paris
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The Big Hole
Les Halles is not only a deep wound which the city licks endlessly, not just a shopping pit full of rotting suburbanites (check your latin dic’s for the meaning of the word “forum”) with ugly, shitting dogs, it’s a wondrous ancient quartier where megatons of fresh meat, fish and vegetables were once hurled, sliced and [...]
Posted in Cities, Paris, Restaurants, Shops
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Welcome to Paris?
Although the mayor and even the federal government have tried to convince Parisians to flash our best set of teeth to you outsiders with big bold posters and, ugh!, official badges that say that you are invited to talk to us in whatever ugly dialect you cling to, but there is no way we are [...]
Atlantic City Lost Souls
Though located about 100 miles south of Canal Street, Atlantic City qualifies as a subsection of New York City by virtue of the fact that you can get there from Port Authority bus station for free. In fact, if you can travel on a weekday, the casino of your choice will usually reimburse you the [...]
Posted in Cities, New York
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