Sunday: Hello High Line Park! or Rock on Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations!

Finally it stopped raining long enough for us to check out the newly opened High Line Park. I think this is the best urban park I have been to! It was amazinging! There are such amazing privileged views you get from up there. That alone makes it a must see. But the really great pleasant surprise is that the architectural and landscape design is actually most impressive and expertly done. I'm so glad to see how far Diller and Scofidio have come since their 'talkitecture' days back when I was still in architecture school. This work is really quite successful and really makes me excited to see more works from D&S in the city (I know they've got a few things in the works still). Please check it out if you're able, and if not check out these photos I took! By the way, yes, there was a line, but it moved instantly, so there was really NO wait. Do not worry.

Saturday: Making a Music Video, or Rock on Magico and Masa!

Saturday was pretty interesting for me. I recorded several sequences for a new music video that friends Masa Nakamura and his wife Magico are directing on Saturday. The video is going to be very cool. It's highly choreographed, so it was definitely tricky getting all the moves right, but fortunately things went very well and I can't wait to show the final product. You'll have to stay tuned for a couple weeks though. In the meantime, here's a still from the shoot:

Friday: Southern Foodways Alliance, Rock On! (or- I got to meet Jacques Pepin!!)

Wow, I had a really great time at the Southern Foodways Alliance's event 'Craig Claiborne: Mississippi Boy Makes Good, Defines and Deifies American Cookery.' This was a free event on Friday Evening at the Astor Center, but apparently you had to know about it way in advance in order to reserve a spot. Fortunately my wife has some connections with the Alliance and had our places reserved. I'm not very knowledgeable about US culinary history, so this was actually a fascinating experience for me to learn about how much Craig Claiborne helped to shape our modern views on Food in America.
The panelists were Jacques Pepin, Zarela Martinez, Edward Giobbi, contributing editor of Vanity Fair and author David Kamp, and moderator Pete Wells (editor of NY Times Dining Section).
Coloring my opinion of the evening in a major way was the fact that I got to meet and have a conversation with Jacques Pepin who it turns out is incredibly nice and super down to earth. I had a great time chatting with him and it was especially cool that he got to meet my wife, to whom he had provided a most witty blurb for her first novel, a number of years ago.
Another great thing about the event was of course that they served a few representative dishes of Mississippi and had plenty of Champagne flowing and some wonderful bourbon at the end. The coup de grace was the parting gift of Southern biscuits with country ham folded in. Oh my God, I did not know how amazing country ham tastes. I'm a convert!
Here are some photos of the event.

John T. Edge presenting the panel

Uninvited Guest

An uninvited guest for late night expresso