This frightens me...

I was out in the 'burbs recently and saw this.

Vietnamese comfort food

Soooo good last night: Canh Chua and Thịt Kho. Oh my God, I'm still stuffed. Oh wait maybe that's because we just ate the left overs for breakfast!

(Thanks Trac for the Thịt Kho!)

Trees and herbs staying in for the winter

One nice thing about winter time is that we get to enjoy our little 'forest' inside.

Photo from around 1940

I assure you, this is no propaganda poster. This is actually a photo of my mom as a little girl from around 1940. This was taken by a relative of her next door neighbor (pictured on the left) who apparently won a photo prize with it and it was shown nationally in a magazine in the US. Pretty wild. Thought I'd share.

more strange mobile phone pictures

Saw this the other night.

No Domping

We saw this near the Gowanus Canal. Had to share.

Fig Harvest

Well one great thing about the fall, aside from not having to deal with impossibly hot and humid days anymore, is harvest time. For me this year (it was a very tough growing season) that mostly means figs from my fig tree. The tree has gotten so big at this point since I planted it some 5 years ago that I can't even reach the highest ones with a ladder. So, I guess this year the birds and the squirrels will have to fight amongst themselves for those ones.

Trung Thu (Mid Autumn Festival) 2009

To celebrate the Mid Autumn Festival last night, we had some friends over and had some incredibly delicious home made Goi Ga (a Vietnamese chicken salad) shrimp crackers (an Indonesian brand called Komodo - definitely the best I've ever had), and shrimp/crab/pork Cha Gio (spring rolls) from Saigon Eggrolls in Houston. (Saigon Eggrolls, 11920 Beechnut St, Houston, TX 77072). For dessert we had Moon Cakes (of course) from Cafe Queen Bakery, 2869 Senter Road, San Jose, CA 95111. Tel: 408-226-1627. (Thanks Trac). Yum!

September 11th Memorial Lights

I've had a little side project of photographing the 911 memorial lights each year since 2002 from my roof. Strangely this year, it was so overcast that all you could see from Brooklyn was an eerie glow from Ground Zero.

My neighborhood is not completely gentrified yet ;-)

So, fortunately it seems that the hipsters haven't completely run the old-school Italians out of my neighborhood yet. Here's a typical Sunday on Court St.

MTV VMAs

we (UVPHACTORY) worked on the Lady Gaga CG set backdrop for her performance tonight on the MTV VMAs. Check it out tonight broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall. Here are a few shots I took a couple days ago when we tested the lighting and CG set.

Philip Johnson estate (photos)

OK, so I was a bit delayed in getting these on line. Here is a photo set I took while on the 'long tour'. Hope you enjoy. Click Here

Philip Johnson estate!

Stay tuned, I just got back from the 'long tour' at the Philip Johnson estate in New Canaan just now and I took a whole slew of photos. I hope to post them within a week. Regardless of what you think of the man (and believe me, I'm no fan) it's still fully worthwhile to check out the place.

Roxy Paine at the Met

We were checking out the last day of the (really excellent) Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met the other week so we went up to the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (my favorite spot) to see the Roxy Paine installation "Maelstrom". If you go to the Met, make sure to check it out! (warning bad iphone photos follow)

Street Art???

Uh, this is sort of the old-school Carroll Gardens aesthetic. What do you think- a sort of suburban street art? ;-)

July '09 Street Art

Trying to catch up on some stuff I wanted to share from this summer...
Make sure to check out the new(ish) mural by Brazilian brothers Octavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, known as Os Gemeos, that went up mid-July on the North West corner of Houston and Bowery. These lame iphone photos do not do it justice, since it's quite detailed and needs to be seen in it's entirety.

MoMA visit

We went to the MoMA today to check out some of the current exhibits. There's been a lot brewing there over these past months. There's an interesting exhibit on the New York punk and post punk scene called Looking at Music: Side 2. They've got some nice listening stations in the exhibit as well as some videos and a bunch of memorabilia. I saw the "Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" music video among others. Wow, remember that tune? Another interesting exhibit by Roman Ondak allows the viewer to participate. Your name and the date you visited gets recorded on the wall of a room at your height. One of most notable exhibit's is by Song Dong. He meticulously lays out all of the belongings of his mother's house. I've included a number of photos from the various exhibits here.

Renegade Cabaret at the High Line

I forgot to post this last week, but last Friday we went down to the High Line again ('cause we love it so much) and got a chance to check out the Renegade Cabaret, which I would definitely recommend. Make sure to check their schedule and time your next trip to the High Line so you can see it. Don't forget to donate!

Stereoscopic Red Camera rig

An early look at the prototype ...just in case you're into that sort of thing ;-)

Haunch of Venison

I went to a very interesting art opening at a super swanky gallery tonight, high above midtown, called Haunch of Venison that a friend of ours is associate director of. The show is called 'The Figure and Dr Freud' and is actually pretty interesting. There's definitely something for everyone here. They have works by 31 artists, spanning this past century. So, there's people from the canon like Picasso, Giacometti, Chuck Close, Maplethorpe, Arbus, etc. as well as newer folks like Patricia Piccinini (I love her work) and Robert Lazzarini (this is the same 'skull' photographed from two different angles) and Richard Butler. Butler has two works, one of which I'm showing below. It's quite traditional in composition, but actually totally tweaked and interesting. The photo below really doesn't do it justice at all, so check it out in person. Well, the piece really interested me and I was trying to figure out what I knew of this artist when suddenly I see Psychedelic Furs frontman, Richard Butler walk by and I realize 'oh that Richard Butler.' At any rate, I got to talking with him and he's quite nice and definitely a talented painter.There are a number of other good pieces that are worth seeing, so if you're around between now and August 22, be sure to check it out:
Haunch of Venison New york, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 20th Floor. 212-259-0000

July 4th weekend in Greenport, NY

We were lucky enough to be offered free accommodations in Greenport last weekend, which is in the North Fork of Long Island (thanks S&R). So, of course we had to say yes to a break from the constant noise of the highway construction project going on outside our window each morning. Here are some photos of Greenport, Shelter Island, and Orient Point. We did a really good job finding vacant areas in which to hang out. It's been super stressful for us lately, so this really helped us relax a tiny bit.

New Music video for SOUR

Magico and Masa finished up that music video that they did for SOUR that I was in. Take a look. I think it came our very nicely. They have credits for the video on the you tube site. (If you look closely, you can see me in 4 sections.)

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