This afternoon, Lex and I went to SFMoMA to check out the new Luc Tuymans exhibition. Go. It’s really great.
Tuymans (b. 1958) is a Belgian painter who creates dreamy yet haunting scenes from source photography as well as his own memories. His work is almost always political—works in the SFMoMA show reference the Holocaust, WWII, the Congolese independence movement, and post-9/11 America—yet the activist messages can be subtle (though sometimes they’re not). You have to dig a little, step back, move forward, or return to a work. But that’s okay—you’ll want to linger.
The painting from the show that is sticking with me the most is the title piece from his Holocaust series Der Architekt (shown above). The painting—a portrait of Hitler’s chief architect, taken from a home movie shot by his wife—shows a man wearing skis, laying prone on the ground after a fall. His face is blank, a ghostly splotch of white paint. The audio guide references Hannah Arendt’s famous line about “the banality of evil,” and that is so fitting here. Absolutely mesmerizing.
The show is up through May 2, 2010.
Lex & Dan →
Oh, wedding planning. I could blog endlessly about you here, but I’ll spare my five readers. (We’re getting our wedding blogging ya-yas out here.)
But I will share this: our wedding site is live. It’s dorky… but full of info!
About a year ago, after a walk through the Elizabeth Peyton exhibition at the New Museum, my friend Jessi and I popped into the SoHo WholeFoods to pick up beer for the evening. We were instantly grabbed by the Brooklyn Brewery Black Chocolate Stout and decided to procure a number of other chocolate stouts and make a tasting out of it. We invited a bunch of our friends, decided to present the beers Model U.N. style, and voilà, Beer Club was born.
Since then we’ve sampled oatmeal stouts, IPAs, and a selection of beers from Berkshire Brewing Company. When Jessi and her boyfriend Will made plans to visit San Francisco this month we began plotting our first West Coast Beer Club gathering. We landed on coffee stouts, which, well, wasn’t a very good idea. Almost all the beers we tasted, with the exception of AleSmith’s Speedway Stout, were terrible. The common complaint? The coffee flavoring was overpowering, making the beers either too sweet or too bitter and basically drowning out all beery goodness.
Will has written more about the trouble with coffee stouts over on his new weekly column “The Draft” on GQ’s Forked & Corked blog, which, if you like beer, should be added to your feed reader.
She Lives Here →
Lex is featured on the latest post over at i live here:sf. It’s a nice piece about how the arts have helped her find a footing in our new city. The post is accompanied by a really great (and quite glamorous, I must say!) photo shoot.
TBTL-athon →
Ahoy hoy.
Too Beautiful to Live is my favorite thing, and by “thing” I mean regularly-consumable cultural product. It’s up there with my favorite television and public radio programs. I’m a devoted Ten. I probably like TBTL too much.
TBTL is a daily podcast produced by Luke Burbank, who you might be familiar with from Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. A few months ago TBTL was cancelled by the Seattle station KIRO. Since then Burbank has been producing the show from his home, and in my opinion, its only gotten better.
Obviously, I recommend TBTL highly, but you have to listen to it consistently for several eps in a row to really give it a fair chance. This week Luke’s been running a pledge drive to keep his “imaginary radio show” on the air. Listen to TBTL for a week and if you like it to, throw him a few bucks if for nothing else than because you care about my well-being.
Two weeks ago I finally got around to setting up our jerryrigged television setup. The pieces were sitting around for over a month, and I wondered if we even needed them, but I couldn’t resist a good NFL playoff binge (Go Jets! Boo Favre!).
The setup involves a USB Adapter (Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid) and an HD antenna (Terk’s HDTVa Antenna Pro) running through my 20-inch iMac. (Affiliate links, y’all. Hope you don’t mind.)
The reception on the HD antenna is excellent, and one nice thing about HD signals is that they are either strong or nonexistent—all or nothing—so no futzing with static. This setup, however, didn’t work so hot on our Wii. Technically it “works” but the resolution is awful and there is a lag big enough to make playing a game like Super Mario Wii impossible. Oh well. One out of two ain’t bad.
More music metrics
I’ve been a Last.fm user for a while now. I don’t play the stations often, but I like having them there when I’m sick of my music, and I enjoy the metrics. Last.fm “scrobbles” your music as you play it and offers recommendations based on your taste. You can also view what your top artists and songs over various timespans. Here are two snapshots of the past 12 months:
Before it's too late: my 2009 music wrap-up
This is a little late, but since it’s only January 17, I deem a post like this still acceptable. It’s hard for me to look back on 2009 and pick my favorite music, and a year from now, my favorite 2009 album could be something I don’t even own yet. What I can do is analyze my iTunes data—particularly play counts and star ratings (which I obsessively keep).
According to iTunes, of songs that came out in 2009 these are the ones with the highest play counts. My two favorite songs of 2009 are “Lalita” by The Love Language and “Walkabout” by Atlas Sound and Panda Bear, neither of which cracked the top 10.
1. Bat for Lashes, “Daniel”
2. Bon Iver, “Blood Bank”
3. Grizzly Bear, “Two Weeks”
4. Bon Iver, “Beach Baby”
4. Grizzly Bear, “Ready, Able”
6. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, “Doomsday”
7. Built to Spill, “Hindsight”
8. Delorean, “Seasun”
8. The Dodos, “Fables”
8. Say Hi, “Maurine”
There were dozens of great albums this year. These aren’t my favorite albums of the year, but they are the ten albums with the most 4★-plus rated songs in my iTunes library.
Five 2009 albums I loved which aren’t on this list (probably because I was too busy rocking out to rate the whole thing) are Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors, Bird-Brains by Tune-Yards, Fever Ray’s self-titled record, Now We Can See by The Thermals, and Songs of Shame by Woods. Ok, the list (number of 4★-plus rated songs in parentheses):
1. Elvis Perkins in Dearland, s/t (8)
2. Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (7)
2. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest (7)
4. Freelance Whales, Weathervanes (6)
4. AA Bondy, When the Devil’s Loose (6)
6. St. Vincent, Actor (5)
6. Antony & the Johnsons, The Crying Light (5)
6. Dark Was the Night (5)
6. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career (5)
6. Fanfarlo, Reservoir (5)
I’ve lost my taste for coffee. My daily intake is just a way for me to get through the early morning (where I go about three steps from my bed to my desk and immediately log into work—which is already buzzing on east coast time). A couple years ago I just started drinking espresso because I didn’t like the taste of coffee so much that I couldn’t bear to sit and sip anymore.
Moving to San Francisco and having easy access to wonderful roasters—like Philz, Blue Bottle, and the nearby Ritual Coffee on Valencia—has revived my interest in coffee. So I’m taking action.
One Saturday morning at the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market I noticed that Blue Bottle coffee uses a pour-over method, and after a little research it didn’t long for me to stumble upon Chemex coffee makers. I threw one on my Amazon wishlist and shortly after received one from my future in-laws for Christmas.
Game on.
It took me a couple tries to get my technique down (the video above was extremely helpful), but I can happily say that I thoroughly enjoyed a few batches of Chemex (affiliate link) coffee this week. I hope it stays that way.
Eat Real Festival, Oakland
August 28, 2009
