This week brought a yummy meal at Gramercy Tavern (home of a top notch wine guy and his fun list), correct and clear from the main menu but a course sent out from the tasting menu (which now includes a veggie taster for spring) makes me want to go back asap....spring rules (till summer:>).....Spring Menu at Al Di La--wow--salad of fava, asparagus and other things spring, asparagus soup, white asparagus with a poached egg and bortagga (sp?), morel rissotto, a spring baby chicken and a great wine list!!
CHOW--off to Italy for work:>):>)

tribeca film festival's best of new york films list

Page Six it ain't.
The Papua New Guinea Gossip Newsletter

"We're using dogs in their purest form"
I don't want to see what they do with cats.

Alias.

Earlier Bird
The Prothonotary Warbler is a favorite of mine; now it's back, with a message about global warming.

jim/mb email alert--please check:>)

Sounds kind of interesting:

"THE SOUNDS OF SCIENCE"
Yo La Tengo, the Hoboken indie-rock band with a flair for crisp, three-minute pop songs as well as broad feedback experiments, perform live scores to "How Some Jellyfishes Are Born," "Shrimp Stories," "The Love Life of the Octopus," and other short films by Jean Painlevé. (Alice Tully Hall. 875-5050. April 6)

Do you film buffs know Painleve?

Review by a Yo La Tengo fan.

Food writing rides the wave.

I've never really warmed up to Richter, though I agree that many of the abstractions are "beautiful". They have a hollowness; a lack of engagement and belief, which typifies the transition between Modern and Postmodern (or some such thing). Like Johns & Rauschenberg, they're about letting the air out of Abstract Expressionism, but in a much cooler, detached manner, without the humor of the Americans. With Ab Ex, a bad painting might be an interesting sort of failure, with Richter, it's more like, "here's a good one, here's a less good one, let's move along". The photo-based works strike me similarly, but the imagery allows for more associative readings. Taken together, his various works make up a larger project, which serves to further deflate the value of any given piece seen in isolation. Again, this "whole greater than the sum of its parts" strategy is characteristically PoMo.

IMHO Richter has made some of the
most beautiful paintings in the history of art

Here's a cogent passage from that Gopnik article on Popper that Dratfink had posted.

But what really underlay the contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century's reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a law-the Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man (James Thurber) writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic…

I just want to say how true it is. And if any of you have been taken in by that namby-pamby, new age nonsense posted elsewhere, well, just let me assure you that it's strictly therapeutic. I require the bandwidth in order to dispense with these awful impulses of love and understanding that torment me. I am so thankful to have this means of eliminating my baggage, so that I can get back to my real business of being one nasty bastard!

I'm sure this has already been discussed but I missed it. What is up with the yellow underlined words in posts that then link to definitions of that word or in other cases, products.

bucky meets jesus --> future positive

Tom's astute equation of The Boards Of Canada and afterschool specials in his techno diary reminded me that I've been meaning to post a couple of links on this page.
On a hunch I bought on ebay a 16mm print of OWL AND LEMMING by the Dutch animator Co Hoedeman. The film is an adaptation of an Eskimo legend, one of a series he did in collaboration with Inuit artists and musicians.
The film blows my socks off.
16mm prints and videos of the complete series are available through The Film Board Of Canada.

Life: it's the Anti-Death!
(Happy Easter, in despite.)

Obviously the situation is very serious. The most up to the minute weblog reporting from Jerusalem I've found is Michael Bernstein. He's not a news reporter, but like many of us in NYC on 9/11 he is just trying to say what is happening. Does anyone else have any links to other personal reporting from this region? What's really going on over there?

spring has arrived at the Green Market--arugla rabe (new to me), dandelion, and a root i have never seen before from the mint family....will mix these three in small amounts to a risotto made with clam broth, to which i will add clams and squid....to celebrate ?? still being alive ??

gotta love a BYOB---this place is new, food quality dont know but its BYOB for now--TIP NICE:>))--Osteria del Sole
On what might be one of the West Village's prettiest corners, the late EQ has quietly morphed into this lively trattoria, with a moderately priced menu of traditional Italian fare and a boisterous Italian clientele that laps it up. Until the liquor license arrives, the busboys will happily fetch a bottle for you from the local liquor store (as long as you pay up front).
267 W. 4th Street
212-620-6840
Cuisine: Italian

free juice.

Elsewhere on the Tree we've been discussing Google, on and off. Two analogies I've been thinking about. Maybe someone else has posted about this.

1. Just as biodiversity is good for an ecosystem, having a lot of search alternatives is healthier than having just one. Practices such as googlebombing emerge because people figure out the weaknesses of the system. Eventually the system becomes unreliable, diseased, because too many people know how to exploit it in ways it wasn't meant to be used. If there are no alternatives remaining when it rots, the ecosystem (Web) as a whole suffers.

2. Google is like the Interstate highway system. Towns on older roads decay and shrivel up because everyone starts building to catch passing traffic on the superhighways. Weblogging, with its heavy dependence on the link-and-constant-update-loving Google, is like Motel 6 and the Olive Garden. Yet just as those clusters of Interstate franchises will be collecting tumbleweeds when the oil economy winds down, many webloggers now furiously linking to each other to "up their ratings" will be history when, say, Google is wrecked by greedy shareholders after it goes public. And there'll be no "old growth" community to fall back on, because static websites will have packed it in for lack of hits (see #1 above).

These are meant to be words of caution, not pessimism. Just use Dogpile once in a while.

Check out my sketches based on the movie Blade 2 here. Caution: not for the squeamish. Also, a capsule review.

Musto on murderous club-kid king Michael Alig. A movie is in the works, no doubt looking for that audience who's world didn't change on 9/11. Party on, kids.

not as good as the wheel's but interesting "favorite picks"

the gauntlet has been laid down!