Archive for May, 2007
This is the work of an Italian photographer who calls himself “Aged Senator.” I asked and received permission to use this photograph to headline this post.
This man has been taking photographs since the 1950s. His early photographs are a stunning black and white record of a world that is gone and that I am sad not to see. Some of the work is on camera oscura which is so demanding that in school I accomplished one shot which I had to do to pass and then walked away forever. It requires lenses arranged so that you can see or shoot something not really visible to you. His are masterpieces. His portraits stun with their reach into the portrayed.
As his work moves into color you find that he not only is a great composer, but great at seeing the chromatic detail that tells Italy’s story. I want to go everywhere he shows.
I can’t spend a lot of time looking at his photos at one time, because they overwhelm me. There’s a physical sensation of being filled up so that I can’t breathe. I want to know his people, see his places, I want to be there at once and I am greedy for all the feelings he evokes. Go forewarned that you may also feel helplessly involved in his world.
I can’t even remember how I found his pages, but I am so satisfied that I did. It is a museum of images past and present that paint the Italy that invaded me in 1973 irrevocably and made me come here to live. All of Italy is not beautiful, but all of the Aged Senator’s Italy is charged with an energy and a searching quality that will make you overlook what she’s got wrong. Because you can see that she’s got it mostly right.
Just go.
May 26th, 2007
This is an all-new dish and I had to give up half my lunch yesterday to get the last taste test done by an Italian! It was OK though, because it was the third time I’d made it to be sure that I had the proportions right. Yours will look better, because yesterday’s version was missing the spinach because I ran out of it.
Let’s talk about truffle oil before we begin. There is, as you may have read, fake truffle oil out there. There is also real truffle oil, and that’s what to buy. It may look expensive at first, but it is used by the drop and if kept cool in the dark– fridge door?– it can last for years. It offers a truly upscale taste to many mundane foods. I use it perhaps once a month. Look at the label and it must say first oil and then truffles. If the label is in Italian it must say olio d’olive followed by tartuffo or tartuffi. If it says anything else it is only chemical fake truffle taste. You can make this dish without truffles of course, but it’s just yummy then, and it is brilliant with the truffle flavor.
Ingredients for six people:
1 cup of raw rice, cooked with 3 cups of water and 1 teaspoon of salt until done according to the package
6 tablespoons of butter
6 tablespoons of cooked, chopped spinach
2 tablespoons of dry powdered or rubbed sage
salt to taste
12 thin slices of lean pork, boneless loin or fresh leg
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
salt to taste
12 drops of truffle oil
2 more tablespoons of olive oil
Start with this:
Using the battecarne as shown, or something else without teeth to beat it with, beat the cutlet until it is half as thick and about twice as large. Don’t shred it! Do all this ahead of time because once you start to cook the meat it is done in moments.
You should also start the rice cooking so that it is ready just a few moments before you wish to eat. You can use the twelve minutes to prepare the meat.
When the meat is all refined and slim, heat a large and heavy frying pan and add the olive oil. Put as many cutlets in as will not crowd the pan and sauté one side briefly, then turn, lightly salt, and sauté the other side. It takes less than 2 minutes for them to be done through because of the beating. Continue to cook the pork until all are done. Add two tablespoons of raw oil to the pan and stir it around to pull up more flavor.
When the rice is done, stir in the butter, the sage and the spinach. Taste it and correct for salt. On to each cooked cutlet, spoon some of the rice and roll it up and plate it. When they are all plated, two for each plate, put a drop of truffle oil on each one, then drizzle a bit of pan juice/oil over the serving. Add a fresh sage leaf or two as a garnish.
In answer to any possible question as to whether this would be better with fresh sage, no. Fresh sage has some resinous overtone that is less pleasant than the dried. Use the dried…. Olga agrees with me.
I know that this sounds like too much butter and an excess of sage, but believe me, it isn’t. The filling is something I have made for years and years and it is lovely on its own or with chicken or pork or turkey, but in this combination with truffle added, it is just a new sensation entirely for me.
May 25th, 2007
Here at Style.com there is the tale of 5 girls who have selected fifty items from what is available right now. They are all in the biz, and they have their own take on things. I wondered, for example, why Tina Chai was so interested in coats and sweaters, considering the heat that will descend on the mid-Atlantic states before too long. But look anyway, because they’ve picked what they think looks good this year, with prices ranging from $30 to the sky.
May 24th, 2007
Orzo
Originally uploaded by Decobabe.
This is what the field in front of my house looks like right now. Orzo is barley, and the poppies grow up though it higher than my head.
While the orzo is being grown for feeding cattle, the poppies are a special treat for poultry. Olga pulls them up when they are fresh and green and feeds them to her ducks, geese and chickens. And then she eats them.
Why the cinghiali, wild pigs, plowed up my garden instead of this lush field, I don’t know. If they do it again we may be having tagliatelle con sugo di cinghiale.
May 23rd, 2007
An article in the International Herald Tribune brings us up to date on what is happening to items of classic modern design. With the exception of a very few– as these things go– forward looking collectors, great modern design has suffered a good deal of neglect.
There was a brief flush of appreciation in the early mid-1900s, but overall the consuming public has rejected modern design for comfort-design that evoked their own or someone else’s past. Maybe they didn’t have the required confidence in their own taste or maybe they were more comfortable with giving the illusion that they came from families that passed their furniture down. Looking at the market for new furniture and objects of design, the hugest part was given to replica or copy or just plain fake period furniture, then cheap modern like IKEA, and last of all came the real thing. There seemed to be a sentiment that tried and true was the way to go, and every new version of charming reproduction design jumped onto shelter magazine pages and then into wish lists and finally into homes.
Now, slowly building, is a growing market for genuine pieces of invention from the minds of modern designers. Because so little was sold, the remains are few and the prices are becoming astronomical.
As a designer who did design furniture, I can say that the demand for it was slim at best and was meant to finish in eclectic rooms, as if perhaps it were not so shocking to see not-Chippendale if it kept company with Queen Anne. Over the centuries various designers had perfected various pieces. I always felt there was no reason to re-invent the wheel. I have a Sheraton chair and I used it to make sure every chair I designed was comfortable and safe. No chair I ever designed would tip over when you got up suddenly, thanks to Sheraton. You could sit in it for hours thanks to Sheraton. There were never that many demands for especially designed chairs because a chair is relatively impractical to make by hand. It takes a long time and extremely large pieces of highest quality wood. And even fifteen years ago a single chair designed and made to order cost many thousands of dollars. I feel privileged to have had any opportunities at all to design chairs.
Tables are easier and cheaper to do and there was a larger demand for them. I left the eastern part of the United States sprinkled with new tables. Overall, however, no one, and especially not I, left a large collection of designs never seen before. That’s the reason why the rising interest in modern design is so satisfactory to me. There’s little possibility that our era will get a name like Chippendale and kings and queens have long ago stopped being patrons of the arts. Most recent designers will pass the scene and if their designs live on many will remain entitled as anonymous designer. The avant garde mostly did not become famous.
Throughout the world are museums that feature great modern design, usually manufactured designs. Art furniture has been neglected in those collections. It’s worth the effort to see them, however, and to know that our era hasn’t been one in which invention died.
Here are a few links to museums in places you might find yourself.
Design Museum London
Moma New York
Wolfsonian Miami Beach, Florida
Various resources in Texas
Trapholt DK
Bauhaus Germany, which claims to be the world’s largest.
Monteral Museum of Fine Arts Montreal, CA
Other fine museums around the world feature expositions and shows. The Pompidou Centre in Paris is a reliable resource for great modern art, with changing features. The Metropolitan Museum in New York doesn’t exclude modern design, although it is not her strength. There are several Japanese museums that have wonderful collections but the links are to pages in Japanese, so I haven’t listed them.
No one knows better what there is to see than a native. It would give me a lot of pleasure if you would leave the names of other museums that show modern design objects. Who knows, I may one day be in your town and I would definitely go to see what has been recognized in your country.
The chair at the top of this post is the Aeron Chair designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf and manufactured by Herman Miller. I know this chair and find it just about the most comfortable way to work there is. It makes part of the collection in London. Another interesting note is that the 1970s are represented almost exclusively in Italian designs. That was the pinnacle of Italian design influence and is the reason I first came to Italy in 1973.
May 22nd, 2007
Do you remember the 1960s style of Laura Spagnoli last year? The one that looked like Brigitte Bardot would wear anything in the collection?
John Galliano just mounted a resort 2008 collection for Chritian Dior that looks like the rich folk looked in the 1960s. Think of Tina Onassis and Jackie Kennedy walking through the then-chic San Tropez.
Style.com has the whole show for you. There are many details you can find this year to look next year. All the day wear includes hats– better even than sunblock for your face. Big sunglasses are all over it. The colors are as romantic as colors get. I wouldn’t wear the cropped pants under a just-over-the-knee dress, but with sandals and the hat, I’d just wear that green tunic. The tailored and detailed bikini? In my dreams.
Even the evening wear, which most of us need only a little of, is copyable. The big necklaces on the Dior models may cost thousands, but they are ethnic and you’ll find great ethnic necklaces in shops in your town. I did last Saturday in my little city.
It’s a very feminine collection for today. Even his kaftans are styled to show a shape, not to billow around you in tent fashion. I’d copy the colors, the details and if I thought it wouldn’t make me look like a character out of Lord of the Rings, I’d love that tall hat!
As strange as Galliano can sometimes seem, here he makes women pretty, pretty, pretty.
May 21st, 2007
Monday, May 21st, the hosts are moving us to a new server. The old one has been down intermittently 50% of the time lately. The new one should be safer and much faster.
They have advised me not to add or change anything from Sunday until it’s over.
Today Other Guy orange cat has to have surgery, so I am off to the vet.
Yesterday I went someplace very interesting. The route I took was interesting, too. Remember that terrible Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times.” I think I collected on the curse yesterday, but I’ll report on the good part later on.
May 19th, 2007
Anthony Bourdain at Macchu Pichu
May 16th, 2007
Hi All
In case you are wondering this is rich but more than that it is a test to show that photopress is working from my end. As soon as Judith sees it I hope that she will delete it.
Just for fun…. I put it in the category “Beauty”! I was tempted to put in the brains one but no definitely not!
May 16th, 2007
Look at this article and click on the picture to see delightful Swedish girls looking sharp in Spring. They look cold, too, but they are handling it.
May 16th, 2007
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