the culture of the time

papal skateboards

money and art

I felt that it was time for a bit of a status update. Not that I ever spoke much on here about what I spend my days doing, but nonetheless.

I am still a student at NYU, though I am not registered for any classes right now. The health insurance is cheap though :). I probably won't graduate this semester, but that's okay. I am making slow and debatably steady progress towards my masters.

I am working 3 days a week in IT infrastructure at a Very Large Bank, creating a somewhat peculiar software testing system. It's no great contribution to society but it pays well.

I can live with that because the rest of my time working I am making art, at least indirectly. On Tuesdays I work at Harvestworks where I work on any and all manner of things technical. This includes mundane IT stuff like fixing the wireless ethernet and some more interesting stuff like tutoring a resident artist in Max/MSP, and possibly working on an internet video piece being created by another (more details on that if I actually end up doing it - it's still in the planning stages).

A lot of people (myself included) thought I was crazy when I turned down a full time job at The Very Large Bank a couple of years ago. But you know what? There's a difference at the end of the day. At the end of the day at the bank I maybe helped out some other programmers to do their jobs better/faster/whatever. Which is alright. I certainly don't mind doing that, and I don't mind being well paid for it. But at the end of a Tuesday, I've helped someone make art, and that feels very different.

So just last week was a bit of a milestone. For the first time ever I got paid to work with an artist. It wasn't much, and the work was kind of mundane (embedding audio files in a webpage). But I got paid to help a musician with computer crap. And I think that's what I want to do.

/brian
musically inclined computer programmer

choice eats

Last night I went to the first Choice Eats event in the Puck Building. This was a food festival curated by Village Voice critic Robert Sietsema. It was, in a word, gastronomical.

First, a quick highlights rundown:

Most disappointing

I'm sure that the toasted walnuts with local honey and fennel pollen is a bar-snack masterpiece of subtlety when you actually have it at Jimmy's No. 43, but when the guy to your left is serving spicy chorizo and the guy to your right is serving an obscenely good rib (see below), it just doesn't cut it.

Kinda disappointing

I've been meaning to go to Hummus Place forever, given their rave reviews and rock-bottom prices. In fact, given the way people seem to swoon about it, I imagined that tasting this hummus was going to be a bit of a revelation about what hummus really could be. Unfortunately the hummus tasted like, well, hummus. And not especially flavorful hummus at that. Furthermore, perhaps its a hummus faux pas, but I think I prefer my hummus cold. This was hot.

Gone too fast

Everyone who I've seen cover the event said that Fette Sau was awesome, but they were gone before we got to them.

Best taco

Ok, it was the only taco I was aware of, but Mercadito had a pretty awesome one with shrimp and avocado.

Best food (honorable mention)

In comparison with my top pick (below), Fatty Crab's short rib "rendang" is much more composed dish, creative even. The short rib has, besides some kind of a sauce, some toasted coconut, lime and chili. It came with some coconut sticky rice. At first bite I was ready to say "well it's good, but too sweet..." but then came just the perfect amount of heat on the finish. Delicious.

Best food

The rib. Oh man. I almost melted when I tasted a wonderful, sticky, sweet, crunchy, unctuous, perfect rib from Kampuchea. I mean I am sucker for a really good rib in general but this was just a whole other level of awesome. So awesome that for my last piece of food I physically finagled my way past the line to get what turned out to be the very last one. Curiously, it doesn't seem to be on their regular menu

John and I agreed that neither of us had ever been that full in our lives, probably owing to the fact that we were eating at a pretty ridiculous rate. We also had plenty of alcohol (I'm talking shots of Jäger here), but were eating so much that it didn't seem to effect us much at all. The beer was actually one of the highlights of the event. There was a large number of varieties available, few of which I had even heard of let alone tasted.

And there you have it. Photos of the event on john's flickr.

song obsession update

• Otis Redding - Try a Little Tenderness
• The Police - Roxanne
• Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger (Alive 2007)
• Flying White Dots - Tonight We Play
• Harry Nilsson - Midnight Cowboy (Everybody's Talking)
• Jens Lekman - The Opposite of Hallelujah

Celebwatch 2005!

Peter Dinklage, walking a dog longer than he is tall.

George W. Bush is the Haman in the unending Purim that is the Democratic Primary process.

The relationship between checks and balances on the one hand and the reliance on the rule of reason on the other is the Da Vinci Code of American democracy.

- Al Gore