Homemade Jewelry 2014 part 1

The last few days I have dived into my pearl and bead storage. Many I have bought myself and many are sent to me from LS. A few are picked up on my travels, in Bologna, Italy, in NY, USA and on local markets in Sweden and other countries. (I have some black Icelandic lava from the past summer trip, but it has not revealed itself yet, I don't know what I will make out of it.)

So, beads are made of clay/ceramics, shell, plastic, acrylic, wood, minerals and glass. These shown in the pictures are mostly glass, colored jade and colored magnesit (often called synthetic turquoise) and metal alloys.

 Turquoise-colored magnesite

 Citrine (?) earrings and painted (plastic) seashell

 Owls from NJ, US and Russian dolls from Stockholm

 Rose quartz and hematite

Sometimes my handmade jewelry have names. This one is called Blue China. Another one is called Gone fishing.....I´ll show it some other day.

Hurricane Irene: calculations...

Hurricane Katia is on her way towards USA.... stop it, we don't need any more hurricanes!

From a comment on NY Times:

"Bridges must survive (bottom of the structure to be above the flood water elevation) a 100 year storm. This is a storm that statistically happens once every 100 years although it can happen at any moment. Large drainage structures under principal roadways must pass a 50 year design storm and common pipe and catch basin systems are to carry a 10 year storm. Above that, damage and clean up occurs.
Rainfall from Irene was somewhere between a 100 and 500 year storm. " 

Imagine that.  I can't. And I am afraid there are more of these on their way.

Even Maureen Dowd, opinionator in New York Times, is annoyed at self-pitying New Yorkers that thought the storm was too hyped, and they  bought too much bread. 

And, things are still very bad for many.  Poor Vermont.  We are aching for you!

Walk the High Line

On southern Manhattan on the eastern side of the island in the neighborhoods of Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District are the remnants of an elevated train line. It was used since the 1930s to get the dangerous freight trains off the street, and shipped in produce, meat and wares to stores, warehouses, and markets in lower Manhattan.  As trucks took over this type of transportation, the High Line because less and less used, with the last train delivering frozen turkeys in the 1980s.  Since then it was abandoned and became an eye sore, until a visionary proposed to make it into an elevated long, narrow park.  Imagine a steam locomotive coming by on that elevated railroad.  It once did...

The High Line is a long narrow park, with gorgeous plantings and many places to sit and ponder the city scapes. The first section opened in 2009, and I walked it a few weeks ago.  Two more sections will open (one just did), and when finished it will run from 34 Street all the way past down 13th Street.  In many places, the High Line is the only real green you can see in this urban landscape.

Right next to the High Line are abandoned old factory and warehouse buildings, inhabited only be pigeons and rats (and maybe some homeless people too). You have the urban history within literally hand's and feet's reach, and you walk the line past in time. 

I love the benches, with shapes inspired by railroad sidings ('sidospår' in Swedish).

You can see New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River from the High Line.  Tugboats, ships, ferry terminals, they are still there.

Parts of the elevated tracks are wider and have been made into meeting spaces and performance scenes.  Even trees are planted up here. I bet they have a large water bill.

This railroad spur once went into this building to unload cargo, but now it is a wildflower meadow.  What a juxtaposition with the industrial, natural and architectural all meeting at one point.

You are not allowed to walk on the tracks, except here. I love 'frogs'.

You can walk under people's bedrooms.  And underneath the High Line is a Bier Garten.

The High Line is really an amazing place.  It brings people outside, and it is green snake oasis in a environment of hot (in the summer) or cold (in the winter) concrete, metal, and glass.  It elevates the whole neighborhood, from just regular dirty New York (with fancy bars and stores mixed in) so something that is awesome. The person that pulled this off and got this done, has done amazing things for southern Manhattan.  Finally some green is back on the island.

I didn't see one weed on my hour-long walk.  There are gardeners everywhere and the plantings are impeccable, made to look natural but with horticultural varieties and species. It is gorgeous, designed, and honestly, not naturally planted, but who cares?  This is really like painting with living plants, and I love it too. And after all, the plants are growing on a railroad track, in the air, on a man made structure.  I was wondering what would happen if you stopped weeding and watering - probably just what happened when the railroad was abandoned in the 1980s.  Weeds and trees came in, and now they are all gone.  Removed for more organized plants and less dirty, less chaotic plant life.

Many more photos from my visit here.

Art gallery hopping in New York City, 21st Street

Recently me and two friends from the art world spent a few hours looking at mostly contemporary art in galleries along 21st Street in Chelsea, NYC. It was an interesting experience. Variable impressions, many types of media and like a long entertainment event for the brain. Here are works of some of the artists we saw, with my very personal, and non-artsy comments.  I didn't know any of the artists from before so this was really fun, like a new world that opens up. The photos are linked from Flickr (Vilsekogen) so you can click on them and see larger versions.

Ellen Koi: Seen at the PPOW gallery. Ellen's giant photos are gorgeous, and something you can look at for a long time. Each one is slightly mystical, tells a story, but you don't know exactly which one.  Like this one, probably from a seashore in Holland, where a family is out maybe digging for clams in the dawn, or maybe looking for something else.  The photos are staged, but they are also very natural. I love these. More of Ellen's art here.

Amy Jean Porter:  I have been looking for art that includes weeds, such as dandelions in this painting.  Otherwise Amy's art is a bit to simplistic for me, even if she builds a lot on old historical storybook drawings which I love (such as Elsa Beskow, John Bauer, etc.). But she has weeds in her art! (Which is a good thing.) More of Amy's art here.

Jessica Rohrer. Painting exhibit at PPOW gallery. It was very hard to find information about Jessica Rohrer online, but she has refreshing paintings of everyday objects (an open fridge, a shelf with household cleaning supplies, cars, etc.).  A painting like this can tell you a lot just with the selection of books on the shelves...

Mary Frank: Wood sculpture and drawing exhibit at DC Moore gallery. I don't have a photo of Mary Frank's amazing wooden sculptures, but click on the DC Moore link and you can see some of them at the gallery. She made these over 40 years ago, and their dark wood, organic shapes and half-formed figures remind me of smooth ocean stones, driftwood, Picasso, and Dali all at the same time. 

Clifford Ross: Landscape to imagination exhibit at Sonnabend Gallery. Clifford Ross' digital video movie installation of a photograph of a mountain transformed into a myriad of swooping color and black and white photo pieces was simply STUNNING.  I wish it was available online so you could all see this 5 min movie. Philip Glass provided the music, and a prime example of a kind of movie/art/photo installation you could never have done before, because you need computing power and giant hardware storage.  But I liked it not because of the technological feat but just because it was natural, artificial, and beautiful, all at the same time.   One large prints from the movie sells for $30,000.

"Academy Award winner Philip Glass composed Harmonium Mountain to accompany the Clifford Ross film of the same name. The groundbreaking animated film presents an imaginary landscape of colorful, animated elements derived entirely from one high-resolution photographic image of Colorado's Mount Sopris, the latest step in Ross' exploration of objective reality and subjective experience." (link to source, centrum.org)

Jasper Johns: Sculpture and prints at Matthew Marks Gallery. 
I guess I should have heard about Jasper Johns because he is one of America's most famous artists.  But me, I stay mostly in scientific worlds, and never took an art class since 9th grade (I still love art though).   These giant metal sculptures of numbers are impressive - and immediately made me think about old typography techniques and industrial and publishing history.  To take something common and enlarge and blow it up, gives it such a new perspective.  Here my thought was: "Oh my god, those number 3's have gorgeous shapes, and we don't get that anymore with our laserprinted Word documents."  I love when art makes you create new connections in your brain, especially between emotion, facts, and history. So I loved, loved these.
 

"One of Johns’ best known series is his numbers works. Using the numbers zero through nine, the artist has revisited the classic grid with an exhibition of relief sculptures at Matthew Marks. A perfect example of his obsession with creating something, refining it, and doing something else to it, Johns has produced these pieces in bronze, aluminum, and silver, each with a unique patina. They are on their own pedestal display, allowing us to view both front and back."  (link to source here)

Wolf Kahn: More artwork here. Interesting paintings by Wolf Kahn, famous for his massive colors and giant paintings.  Maybe not what you want to have in your living room, unless you have a white-painted sparse living room with nothing else in it.  It would easily become a bit overpowering.  Still, the aspen (?) forest he had in this exhibit reminds me of early spring in Sweden, with sunset colors on purple-colored snow in the forest shadows.  I guess it was just too much of the good thing (color) for me.

Urban Street Art.... The bubble says: "If we lived in a small town we wouldn't have cultural opportunities like this."  So true. That is why I like to visit New York City now and then, but not live there, ever again.   I don't know who the artist is, but Simpsons is an obvious influence. 

Happy birthday, BV!

ALCO 0-6-0 Locomotive, 1940, originally uploaded by schenectady2009.

BV is one of the frequent readers of this blog, and here is a 0-6-0 for you!

If you click on the photo you get to the Flickr page where you can read a lot about this switch steam locomotive, built in 1940 in Schenectady (I know, I don't know how to pronounce that either), New York. Thanks scenectady2009 (=Schenectady County, i.e., local government) for adding this to Flickr and letting us link to it.

Congratulations, BV! In a few (20) years I hope to post a 0-8-0!

The most gorgeous seed packets ever

At the Philadelphia Flower Show a new little start-up seed company had the nicest booth and the nicest seed packets. Hudson Valley Seed Library, I love you!   Every seed packet design (ArtPacks) is made by different local artists in the Hudson Valley and adjacent areas. Hudson Valley is that wide valley along Hudson River that stretches north from New York City up towards the state capital Albany. The packets are unique, gorgeous, personal, and artsy.  You can even buy the packs and use them as nice gifts, or frame them as art to put on the wall.  Wonderful.

All their seeds will soon be locally grown, while many other companies buy seed in bulk and repackage it.  Look at this corn package, isn't it marvelous? Or the spotted trout lettuce above. Things like this makes me happy. A nice thoughtful design for a nice thing based on ethical concepts that involve both nature and culture.

Their showbooth had nice wooden shelves with old rusty tagholders on it, like items reclaimed from an old grocery store or pharmacy.  The whole exhibit and design, from the seed packs to the metal tags on the shelves, looked more northern European than American to me. It was a wind of fresh design air at a show that mostly otherwise was about the biggest, colorfulest, and boldest combination of colors - and that is not usually the best thing.  More design and thoughts like this please!  Thanks Ken and Doug!

Old times - pressed, printed, papered, and nearly pulverized

An old map of southern Manhattan (New York City) from late 1700s was recently found, but it was tattered and yellowed and fragmented and on its way to destruction.  But with some restoration and preservation tricks it is now nearly like new - check out before and after here, and use the zoom to see details. Incredible how you can change paper for the better...

Back then New York itself was just a village at the very southern tip of Manhattan, down near Battery Park and Wall Street. A great book has been written about how the nature looked like on Manhattan when the Europeans arrived - Mannahatta by Eric Sanderson.  There were meadows, springs, small ponds, hills, and saltmarshes. Bears roamed on Manhattan and there were several indian villages.  Today it is a concrete jungle.  Fascinating...

Book review: The dirty life by Kristin Kimball

Another name for this memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristen Kimball, could have been The inconvenient life or The unexpected happiness in a ditch or under a cow belly.  Kristin Kimball is a New York City journalist when she shows up at an organic farm in Pennsylvania to interview the youngish farmer, Mark.  He was too busy running the farm so he put her to work, weeding, to begin with. During the second day she finally managed to get some answers to her questions, and by then she also had her old interest in farming come alive again (she was always interested in food).  

This book describes the development of her passion for farming, and first her relationship and then marriage with Mark, who is a somewhat crazy hippie-like man.  She is brutally honest, funny, and writes eloquently about everything from her mom's appalled face when Mark shows up with a newly slaughtered turkey in a plastic bag (with the neck hanging out) at their first Thanksgiving, to the feeling of warm, good soil that is just waiting for the spade and shovels and plows.

They move away from New York, trying to find some land to farm organically and 'completely', in the sense that they want to be a self-sustained farm that produces everything a family might need year round: grain, sugar (maple syrup and honey), vegetables, milk (and cheese and yogurt), pork, chicken and eggs, beef, sheep for lamb, and so on. That is a lot complex than to farm just one thing (milk cows or corn for example), but also much more rewarding.

They find some land they are allowed to lease in upper New York State and start Essex Farm.  Mark is a true back-to-old-times person, hating any kind of plastic and waste of resources.  They decide to try to do as little as possible with tractors and instead they buy two draft horses, which will help them to plow and weed and transport manure and maple syrup buckets around, you name it. There is a great interview with Kimball here.

The first year they work all the time, live on nearly nothing except on what they can grow and are worried because they are not sure that the neighbors are willing to become members and get everything they need from the farm instead of from the regular grocery store.  But, if you build it they will come. The neighbors, many of them retired farmers from farms that now are abandoned, help them out with sage advice, ancient rusty but important draft horse equipment from old barns, and a hand here and there when needed.  And they start to sign up as members to get part of what is produced at the farm.

Today, 7 years later, the farm has over 100 members and is thriving.  Kristin Kimball wrote her book on early mornings between 4 and 7 in the fire station, before her daughter woke up and the work at the farm started.  I really loved this book, and read it faster than most because it captures you.  Not only is the story both compelling (and sometimes disgusting) and interesting, Kimball's way with words is beautiful, often poetic.  But mixed with a great sense of humor - she never takes herself too seriously, but she also can be very serious at times.

I am not ready to become a farmer with draft horses after this book, but I sure would love to have a farm like this close-by to get great, real, local, handmade food from.  I am so glad Kimball wrote this book because I hope it will inspire both young people to become farmers and conscious eaters and 'cookers', as well as all of us to think about what it is that we really need in our lives.  Flat screen TVs and the latest world news don't seem that important after you have read this book.  A bunch of hay and a sunset and a well-cooked meal is more real.  So, read it.  It is one of the top ten books I have read in 5 years, and I mean it.  So, grade A+, 5, or *****.

[Disclosure: I did not get paid to say anything of this. :)  Better put this in here so I am not like those corrupt and greedy economy professors in the movie Inside Job, which I recommend the whole world to see, but more on that later.]

Some excerpts:

"A farm is a manipulative creature.  There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die.  It's blackmail, really."

About preparing bull testicles for dinner after a slaughter:

"I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling I will end up with nothing.  So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture - more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me.  I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and pan-fried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast.  The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size."

"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I'd filed "agriculture," in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as "nature." As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war."

"It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags int he root cellars.  Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row."

"The food at harvest season is so right the less is done to it, the better.  Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on top."

Help, I am pixelated!

Here is a really cool animation movie. Unfortunately you have to ignore an ad first for 25 seconds or so, be patient, and the fun will come.


PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. -

Happy Birthday, OK!

Here is some smily rust for you!
(Seen in Susquehanna Depot, NY State, on an old Erie railroad box car, which had seen better days. More photos from this place in my photostream.)

From times past - no more telegrams are swishing by (photo for EH)

old telegraph pole with glass insulators, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

This photo of an old telegraph pole with glass insulators was taken two days ago in downtown Endicott, New York State, where there were many of these along the railroad line. Nobody had cared to harvest these glass insulators for selling them at $10/each in New York City's antique shops. Telegrams are no longer sent, and these lines and poles sit here like a fragment of a past that is long gone, like many other things in this area of southern New York State. Old road signs, store fronts, milk jugs, abandoned industries and rusty railroad bridges, it is all there. Sad to see, but I rather see them even if in a bad state, than have them being eaten up by McMansions, WalMarts, and enormous anonymous parking lots outside megamalls. During our little roadtrip we stopped at two historical diners to eat some classic American food, but more about that later.

Sweden in New York

There is actually a lot of Sweden in New York, if you just know where to look. For example, they are now selling the 1970's progressive hippies most loved attribute, the backpack Kånken for $110. I had two when I grew up, both were used so much that they fell apart after years of use. Now they are in fashion on 5th Avenue (and AREA has one, green of course). The company Fjällräven (= the arctic fox) has opened its first store on Manhattan.  Unfortunately their fantastic pants are just too expensive for normal people.  Do you think any millionaires would wear Fjällräven pants?  Maybe. 

There is the cafe called FIKA, which we should check out sometime. But, didn't someone tell these guys that white text on devilblack background is very hard to read and doesn't look good? And guys, you are in the US, how about having American spelling and not British?  And fix your grammar, it isn't even Swenglish sounding.  Whoever made their website gets an F grade in user friendliness, design, and text. Oh, and there is no way to get back to the main menu when you have clicked on About... embarrassing.  Oh, their coffee is Löfbergs Lila, which I do not like, it is in my opinion the most overrated Swedish coffee.  Tastes burnt.  OK, maybe I will go someone else instead, like the NewsBar. 

There is even a Swedish bonfire party on April 30 to welcome the sun back (this is called the Valborg festivities in Sweden - a great excuse for lots of college students to get drunk and for many to sing old traditional songs). 

And if you read this blog, know Swedish, and have an ipod, I highly recommend that you download free podcasts from the Swedish public radio.  Sommar i P1 and Tankar för dagen are my favorites so far.

Finally, it seems like the intra-Atlantic mail is working again, after being stopped due to diabolical ash clouds from the mid-Atlantic ridge island...

I would not like to be asked to do a DNA test of this...

(Oh, you want to know what it is? I went to New York and had to go to the bathroom at Penn Station, and in the booth one tile was removed at eye height, and instead was this... about 150 chewing gums I think, all pressed in. You could get some good fingerprints here I think!)

Bits and pieces

I have just returned from a lecture about how to best manage the flood of e-mails, spam, semi-spam, and non-spam that is inundating our inboxes (more about this in another blog post), but as a result of this I think I will start adding interesting things here on the blog instead of sending so many links via e-mail to my friends and family. Don't worry, you (family and close friends) will still get the personalized stuff, but not the 'hey, look at this cool thing I found" in your inboxes. It will be here instead as 'bits and pieces of life', so you can look at it whenever you feel you have time, and also so the rest of you blog readers can see it.

So, here is today's Bits and Pieces:

I love WPA (Works Progress Administration) posters, made in USA by Roosevelt's Depression Job-making programs in the 1930s. Here is one promoting travel to Montana and another for an art exhibit in Chicago. Clean lines, shapes and even colors, little text, but the message is clear. Today so much advertising and information is drowned in messy unimportant things (like too long, verbally winding emails with a hidden message somewhere, but where?). You can see more WPA posters here.

Britt Irick is continuing to make amazing illustrations, see them on his blog. I love the one of the dinosaur with leafy, homemade wings.

Things I have learned recently: More than half of American meteorologists do not think that global warming exist. An island that has been the source of border debates between India and Pakistan for a long time has ceased to exist. It sank into the sea. The Amazon river basin is as wide as The United States and only 4 million people live there. It takes an amazing amount of water to make half a kilo of sausage (this includes the total water needs for growing the foods for the animals, treating the waste from the animals, etc.) - see most recent issue of National Geographic Magazine. And 20% of all fresh water is in the Amazon.

Tomorrow is April 1st and the day before Good Friday. In Sweden young children will dress up as witches with brooms, coffee pots, and cats (at least sometimes), and go from house to house and beg for candy. This is not a joke.

Some gorgeous things: nice candles on etsy.com, the Design Observer's Today images are never boring (even some Swedish ballet in this one) , flowering crocuses in our yard, and a planned summer trip to Colorado...

And the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden was gorgeous and at the same time too much orchids.... a fantastic example of how you can have too much of a good thing, just like perfume, ice cream, and jewelry around your neck. But I bet most people love it. I just think that sometimes you see beauty more if you have to look close and think about it, instead of having it stuffed into your face repeatedly. Orchids are gorgeous after all... (Dear NYBG web designers [if you read this], if you had some nice permanent web pages about the show with readable normal-sized text, interesting links, and additional photos I would have loved to link to them, but since that is lacking... sorry).

Mastering art, cooking, and life...

This is two book reviews, a movie review and a cookbook review all in one post. A few nights ago we watched the movie Julie & Julia, which is based on Julia Child's life. Julia Child died a few years ago, but she was the person that popularized French cooking in home kitchens in America in the 1960s and onwards. She had a TV show, very barebones and very loved, and a personality that I would call 'sprudlande' in Swedish. I don't know how to translate that - maybe like an overjoyed fountain. She LOVED food. In France she went to cooking school, and went from someone that like to eat to someone that could make food you fall in love with. I imagine this at least, since I never tasted anything she cooked... I can't think of any Swedish chef that is as famous in Sweden as Julia Child is in the US.

Mixed in with the story in the movie Julie & Julia is another story about (and by) Julie Powell in post-9/11 New York, who in 2002 decides to start a blog called Julie/Julia Project (nearly the same title as the movie, and nearly the same title as the book published from the blog) about her attempt to cook all recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (hereafter MAFC) in one year. That is 524 recipes. She succeeds, but not without lots of marriage and cooking troubles, some that are shown in the movie. Her current blog is here. (Julia Child didn't like the blog project either.)

I have read the blog book by Powell and her original blog, the biography My Life in France about Julia Child's years there in the 1950s, and now seen the movie. But I had never cooked anything out of the classic MAFC cookbook until yesterday when I took PP's mom's copy from 1967 [good vintage] out of the bookshelf and looked up French Onion Soup, which is what we then had for dinner. The soup was great. The recipe was supereasy. But the best part of the cookbook (from the two parts I read) is the foreword. It is wonderfully and uniquely written. Here are some examples (but get your hands on a copy and read the whole thing! and remember this was written in 1961):

This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat. Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. But like any art it requires practice and experience. The most important ingredient you can bring to it is love of cooking for its own sake.

So here are my reviews:

The cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Based on the Foreword and one French Onion Soup recipe, this is a wonderful book. I want to tackle the deboning of a whole duck at some point, but maybe I should start with something simpler first, like roasted duck with orange sauce on page 276. [grade A]







The book, My Life in France: I could have sworn I had reviewed this wonderful biography here in the blog but I am glad I didn't swear on it, because it appears I never did. This is a great book, based on letters and stories. I loved it, and many scenes from this book make it into the movie. You don't have to be a food freak to love this book. It also wonderfully describes the very loving marriage between Paul and Julia Child. [grade A+]





The book, Julie & Julia: This book was also not reviewed on the blog, and I know exactly why. I read the book (which is based on her blog), but I didn't like it too much. A 20-ish woman blogs and whines about everyday life and miseries and successes in her tiny kitchen. The attitude was so different from Julia's attitude to life. I have sympathy, it is just that I didn't think it was great literature or very interesting. (Sorry Julie, if you are reading this... but I don't like swear words in print.] Her husband at the time must have been a very patient and understanding person (and is a great character in the movie). I actually didn't keep the book, I gave it away and I remember forcing my way through some pages. But it lead to something good, the movie... [grade C]

The movie, Julie & Julia: Meryl Streep plays Julia Child and is the best I have ever seen her. Incredible. Just see the movie to see her! Julia's husband Paul, is a wonderful person and done by a great actor. The actress that plays Julie Powell, the blogger, got criticized for being 'too nasty and grumpy' in the movie, but they actually toned her down compared with the book. There are many other great actors as well, so the acting is outstanding. Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, remember that one?), was the director and she is also a former food journalist, and also had part in meshing the two stories together in the script. It works OK, but not great, to move back and forth between France in the 1950s and New York in 2002, and when you are in the New York scenes you just want to get back to France. But I would say New York is rather accurately depicted, after living there myself. The food looks amazing in the movie, it is nearly so you can smell it.

After seeing the movie, I slept bad the night after and woke up repeatedly with yummy images of giant whisks with whipped cream, tarte tatin, and sole in lemon butter... mmmmmm... However, some parts of the movie story made no sense, and were disconnected from the rest of the story, such as the government 'are you a communist'-interview in Washington DC of Paul Child, and the wedding of Julia Child's sister. But overall, it is a great movie, and the married men of both couples are wonderful, wonderful husbands. There is a lot of love in the movie, and not just love of food. Nora Ephron manage to show life and love and the art of living and cooking all at once. So rent it, it is gorgeous.

Grade A for the movie, would have been A+ if not for the lobsters that had to be put in misty cold water (looking like hot water) and "off camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitored the creatures’ health" - come on, guys, there is death and dying of seafood in every restaurant, why does this matter in a movie?! And to all you vegetarians, did you know that plants scream when we cut and cook them too? We just can't hear them. I am all for humane treatments of animals, but not being allowed to throw a lobster in boiling water in a movie is a bit too much. These people should worry more about pink slime in hamburgers. New York Times review here

Real Julia Child (left) and Meryl Streep as Julia Child (right).

Ferocious creatures, big and small

This amazing insect, over 4 inches (10 cm) long, was sitting on a gas station wall on our way to Connecticut on Monday. What a beast! It is a male dobsonfly, in the order Megaloptera, named after its giant wings of course. Wikipedia says dobsonflies are "known as "the king bug" because of their intimidating mandibles", but the males can actually not bite anyone with them and only use them to hold on the female while mating. Imagine carrying around something that big that you don't use that much! And they live most of their life as larvae in streams, only to come up and hatch to live for a week. I have never seen one before, and even if amazing I wouldn't want one of these caught in my hair at night. (Two more photos of this on Flickr, photo 1 and photo 2)

Subway still life

A photo I took a few months ago in New York City. I like how it came out with the pillars framing the people, like cages or a film strip.

Stamp of the Day: Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island

The Stamp of the Day series has woken up from the dead. Here you go! This is just how they showed it in Golden Door. Even the mustache is correct.