Why I Cook, and March

There are a boggling number of reasons #whyimarch, but a handful of them can be explained by two shepherds pies.

One I made a week or so back as part of a post-pregnancy meal train for Andy and Caitlin, who recently brought a sweet babychild named Willa into the world. Andy and Caitlin are exceedingly warm and generous humans, who I feel grateful to have gotten to know over the last year or so. They are also young organic dairy farmers in Central Maine, who work tirelessly to provide both exemplary care for the land and animals they steward and truly delicious, nourishing eats that are helping to build our state’s increasingly robust foodscape.

The other pie I made this evening and brought to Meghan, who is currently VERY pregnant with her third kid. I met Meghan very early on my first time around living in Gardiner, when she helped me out considerably as I attempted to cut my teeth on this whole community mobilization thing. A natural organizer and deeply engaged community volunteer, she is also a member of the core group who has spent the last three-ish months coordinating tomorrow’s local Women’s March in Augusta.

Cooking for other people is the primary way I carve out space to socialize these days, especially with all these babies popping up all over the place. As my friends and collaborators build their families and settle into their local worlds, this still somewhat rootless human has a great deal of gratitude to these and all others who, in ways seen and unseen, are likewise engaged in some version of “the work” – some sort of effort to strengthen our communities for the benefit of all. This work is necessarily diverse; it has domestic, personal, civic, and public components, and will discourage and exhaust just as easily as it can invigorate and embolden. I find that preparing a hearty meal for someone else is a reliable means for fending off that discouragement and exhaustion - it's pretty obvious that eating one, too, has a similar effect.

I march, in part, for the same reasons I cook for others – to take time out to be the change, show my thanks, and create time and space for care and connection.

Culinary Integrity - in Retrospect

I've left quite the gap - nearly a year and a half - between this posting and the ones from my first weeks of C school.

My first months at ICC were especially challenging for me culturally, personally and technically. I ended up getting pretty enmeshed in the experience of landing in such unfamiliar territory after FoodCorps service in rural Maine, and found it more difficult to process as I went than I thought when I started to blog about it.

All these many months later, I found a post I drafted sometime toward the end of December (2013). It was titled "Culinary Integrity," and consisted of the following three intentions:

• Integrity in learning: dedicating time to practice, being gentle with myself if I'm not progressing as quickly or seamlessly as I'd like, seeking out help, and the right kind of help, if I need it.

• Integrity in self-care: making sure that I'm leading a whole life, being happy. Spending time with others, making food outside of class, getting out and exploring the city.

• Integrity in ethic: managing my perspective of how what I'm learning can be applied in the future. Avoiding getting wrapped up in the "prestige" culture of professional cooking in NYC.

I wrote these out at the height of some serious self-doubt around my decision to do this culinary school situation. I missed Maine, my FoodCorps crew, the amazing support network I'd developed, powerfully. It was the winter of the polar vortex, we were in school through Christmas, and I wasn't able to be with my family during the holidays. I felt outpaced and minimized in the city, which heightened all other negativities.

I ultimately did a fair job of navigating these challenges as they came along. Mostly, it was thanks to the people who helped me make the most of and find deep value in my time in New York.

Christmas Dinner prepared with my classmate, Jade Neo.

I had, for instance, some really wonderful extracurriculars that introduced me to some highly worthwhile individuals. Working with Carrie Dashow to combat neophobia and pull off some highly creative taste tests in partnership with the New York City Greenmarket and the Umami Food and Art Festival was a major highlight.

Carrie's awesome poster promoting the presentation of our taste test results at the Umami Food and Art Festival.

As were assisting some very playful chefs hosting workshops at the Kids Food Festival in Bryant Park. And developing a friendly acquaintance with an edible wild foods enthusiast who published a beautiful memoir about her relationship to foraging in the city and shared some truly excellent recipes with me. And, of course, the wonderful pals who invited me to cook and host a Food Justice dinner at AMO Studios, and all the attendees who hadn't anticipated that part of the evening would involve making themselves an education "6 plant parts" salad and rose to the occasion.

The Salad Course at AMO Studios.

Early on, I had a really helpful framing conversation with Annemarie, of the superb Saltwater Farm, who gamely talked me through the myriad ways in which sticking out the murky first month of C-school would be worthwhile. One of the greatest moments of closure after my Maine return was finding myself at her restaurant one morning and being able to thank her in person.

Class field trip to the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm.

Jade, my adventurous, cosmopolitan classmate from Singapore, requires a big time shout out for being a total rock throughout. She became a great co-conspirator in the kitchen, and general instigator/enabler in all kinds of food and art-related experiences NYC had to offer that I wouldn't have sought on my own. So pleased this woman will be taking the city by storm again, this time as a Masters candidate in the NYU Food Studies program.

Jade and I on Long Island, right after I met the first oyster I ever loved.

I learned all kinds of lessons, intentional/unintentional, while working under a veritable army of formidably talented chef instructors. That said, one in particular had a profound effect on me: it was Chef Sixto's excellent guidance through our charcuterie unit was surpassed in his generosity and willingness to spend the extra time at the end of class teaching us how to hot smoke the breasts off the wild duck he'd hunted near his home in New Jersey. (I still haven't made his Field and Stream venison sausage recipe yet, but one of these days...)

Sixto Alonso in his element.

I think between his influence and Chef Janet's expert cutting instruction, my future in meat was etched in stone.

Carving the roast beast.

The week I spent at Blue Hill at Stone Barns was also hugely positive and formative. The energy of that place is really beautiful, in the way that only places that can embrace their own brand of chaos will be. Our immersion there was such a thoughtful, special concentration of everything we'd learned up to that point, and felt like such a natural return to considering the farm behind the food in developing a cooking ethic as a culinary student.

The Blue Hill at Stone Barns parsnip altar/dinner interlude.

Really, at this distance I can roundly view and appreciate my formal culinary education. In two weeks I'll be headed back down to New York, after nearly a year; I'll walk the stage at Carnegie Hall and formally acknowledge that I did, in fact, give myself over to the process of becoming a better cook. I sure am glad I did. I'm a better good food advocate and educator for it!

Farm-to-Table C/O June '14 

Culinary School: the First 2+ Weeks

A quick overview of the ups and downs thus far.

Most enjoyable days: 

• stocks - seriously, making stocks is pretty much nirvana-status contentment. 
• food preservation - duck confit, gravlax, preserved lemons, and brandade, the light fluffy salted cod spread descended directly from the heavens.
• fried potatoes - enough said.

Days that required extreme decompression (read - naps) immediately after class: salads (seriously though), soups, sauces. All dishes bearing the reminder that improvement will come, with time. 

It’s pretty much unfathomable to be reminded that I’m halfway through my first level of culinary school. First of all, it feels like I’ve been here 6 months. Which happens to be the actual length of my program. It's partly because of the breadth of material we’ve covered so far: soups and fish and salads and sauces and stocks and potatoes and preserved foods, as well as knife skills, equipment usage, presentation, kitchen hierarchies and organization, product identification, chemistry. That’s right, chemistry. And a whooooole lot of french vocabulary. 

The time warp I’m finding myself in is also a result of the class bonding that’s occurred in the couple of short weeks. Turns out, when you spend 30 hours a week with the same 13 people you get friendly pretty fast. Though most (but not all) of us were drawn by the Farm-to-Table angle in one way or another, it seems to me that our class as a unit is extremely diverse, in a totalizing sense. Finding out what brought my fellow classmates to working with food is utterly fascinating. While our backgrounds and lenses can vary pretty wildly, the one thing that comes to the fore in every conversation I’ve had that's landed in the “why food?” arena is the same visceral undercurrent: “I love to cook.” 

Guiding us along are two highly experienced chef-educators: Chef April, a former “Chopped” contestant, and Chef Veronica, who trained and worked in high-end professional French restaurants for 30 years. The word “passion” gets thrown around a lot in reference to chefs and cooking - there’s an appreciation for process, the history, the tradition, and, with all these as a foundation, the opportunity for innovation that all come to a head in what Chef V refers to as “alchemy” in both the professional and educational kitchen. Both of our chef instructors also have backgrounds in the arts; both fields, arguably, have an alchemic element to them.

It’s extremely clear even this early on that its equally important for us to learn our ingredients backwards and forwards, as well as the reasons for using the techniques we learn, in order to master them. Those techniques, by the way, are highly “classical” in the sense that they are capital-F French and often originated a few hundred years or so ago, thus also involving doing a lot of dirty work by hand. Machinated shortcuts are not much of a “thing” in culinary school, and our chefs, trained in the classical style, are teaching us extremely old-school kitchen skills. 

Between the pared down, history-steeped  nature of classic French culinary education and the farm-to-table addenda, it's easy to locate a kinship with a back-to-the-land ethic that translates really nicely through our in-kitchen and out-of-kitchen experiences. This week, we visited the NYC Greenmarket and chatted with both a local farmer and a chef about the evolution of their relationship to each other via the market. In January we’re visiting Blue Hill Farm to get some exposure to their particular F2T approach as a preamble to our week out there at the end of the program, as well as Mast Brothers to learn about chocolate, which I’m so obscenely excited about I can’t think straight. 

All this is to say that both the community building and information inundation in levels 1 and 2 (of 6) at the ICC is definitely at a maximum. We have written tests - frequently - and biweekly evaluations from our lead instructor, as well as a comprehensive practical at the end of each level. Studying and testing may not be totally unfamiliar territory, but practicing peeling potatoes into tiny footballs (tournage) and cutting carrots into 1 cm cubes (brunoise) for several hours a week outside of class is definitely venturing into unexplored territory. 

To be honest, I haven’t adapted as quickly as I hoped I would. Kitchen etiquette, multitasking, active use of my peripheral vision to monitor the kitchen activity around me, speed and confidence with my equipment, and even just maintaining my knives properly are all practices I’m adjusting to pretty clumsily. But I’m still gripped by the whole thing, and I’ve been assured by my instructors that though not progressing at the inhuman pace of my dreams I’m right where I ought to be. And if there's one thing I've learned so far, its that what chef says, goes.

"Christmas Around the World" family meal last week (ICC Facebook)

Joining the Chef's Table Part 1: One Year Ago

Practically a year ago to the day, I unwittingly stepped into a kitchen that brought me precisely to the spectacular undertaking to which I am fully relinquishing the next six months - life as a culinary student at the International Culinary Center’s Farm-to-Table program. 

That kitchen belonged to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant located on the campus of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY. Blue Hill is widely lauded as one of the most innovative and aspirational farm-to-table establishments pretty much anywhere. The day I found myself there I was attending a rescheduled Whole Animal Butchery workshop, one among a plethora of educational offerings at the National Young Farmers Conference, an opportunity for 200 new and hopeful farmers and agricultural advocates to come together for resource exchange, inspiration and education at Stone Barns each year. The “rescheduled” detail is a significant one; the workshop was one of the conference’s most popular and required pre-registration, but because of the changed time there were conflicts that encouraged some people to opt out last minute. En route to the workshop I took a pit stop to commune with some pigs rooting around for acorns in the soil of a nearby field. On arriving, even though I was late, the smaller crowd allowed me to snag a seat right at the front of the room. 

2012 NYFC Whole Animal Butchery Workshop at Stone Barns. That's me on the right! 

(From NYTimes.com)

It's difficult to explain the effect that watching Jose Morquecha, Blue Hill’s master butcher, carve up a half pig into perfect, precise cuts of raw muscle and fat had on me. I’ve tried to put words to it again and again, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is to say that I had this unprecedented, visceral desire to get my hands in that pig. Adam Kaye, Blue Hill’s Vice President of Culinary Affairs who started out as the restaurant’s meat cook, narrated the process Jose played out, describing how each part that was pulled away from the carcass might be cooked in their kitchen and the kinds of dishes it might be incorporated into. I listened and took painfully meticulous notes, but the proof was in the visual: the realization that I was going to learn to do what I was seeing was basically instantaneous.

My NYFC attendance was subsidized by a scholarship that I qualified for in part because of my status as a FoodCorps Service Member living on a modest Americorps stipend (more about FoodCorps later), and because I had pretty significant travel costs to cover as a result of coming all the way from Maine. The three other scholarship recipients I shared a hotel room with - two other FoodCorps members coming from Mississippi and a FarmCorps member from Colorado - and I had become fast friends over the weekend, and when we all convened for dinner that night in nearby Tarrytown I couldn’t shut up about the porcine miracle I’d witnessed earlier that day. I also distinctly remember ordering pork belly in celebration. 

Informational overload was part and parcel of the conference experience, and among the pamphlets and info sheets I accrued over the course of the weekend was one with details about the ICC’s new Farm-to-Table program. Blue Hill’s Executive Chef, Dan Barber, was a graduate of the Classic French Culinary program when the school existed under a different name, the French Culinary Institute. He designed the farm-to-table component of the program, which included a week in the Blue Hill kitchen and on the farm at Stone Barns. Culinary school wasn’t even on my radar as a conceivable next step at that point. But over the course of the year, in the midst of food-based education projects and a cascade of professional development activities focused around meat, all informed by that singular workshop experience, it became the inevitable next step. 

Now a week and a half into my culinary school adventure (I’m in the midst of preparing for our first test tomorrow), it’s pretty wild to look back to last December and revisit that first glimmer of my present trajectory - advocating healthy community development through cooking great food. I’m hoping to get a decent camera soon (ATTN Santa!) to better record my progress over the next six months as I’m immersed in the “to” of farm-to-table/nose-to-tail/bean-to-brew/cacao-to-chocolate/etc. In the meantime, check out my classmates Amanda and Lauren’s blogs for pictures and more details about the beginning of our collective foray into the educational kitchen. 

As Chef Alain says when he strolls into our class every so often: joyeux cuisine (happy cooking)!

Home:Tree

From Colossal:

"Photographer Marianne Kjølner snapped this pair of photographs of a bizarre tree in Denmark. Of the photo she says:

This old pink house is situated at the old dunes, a few hundred meters from the west coast, a very windy place were there isn’t much that can grow. So the tree can only grow where it has shelter. It has looked this way always.

I can’t help but think the tree might have had some helping human hands, but perhaps nature really is this awesome."

on shaping something enduring and sustaining

perfect songs, sung perfectly

Scholarly pursuits, at least for now, have ended. I'm in the sweet spot: between being an undergraduate student - the last socially mandatory educational rite, as far as most of us are concerned - and reaching the point where it becomes imperative to bring some definition to the terms of a post-collegiate reality. Many people have assured me that this, the initial post-grad limbo, was the most frightening period of their lives, but that they felt better about it once suitably terrified, or annoyed, or bored, or otherwise spurred into some sort of action that seemed to move them definitively out of it. 10 days in - after a deep tissue massage, quality time with meine mutter, and several excellent meals both of the homemade and professionally-prepared variety - I'm holding up just fine.

New Territory: Using the KITCHEN

My current bicoastal existence tends to land me in or near two of the foodiest locations in the United States: Portlands Oregon and Maine. Portland West has recently been tapped at the Food Cart Center of the Universe, as the food cart population evolves in variety, affordability, and atmospheric excellence. Portland East, meanwhile, is a more traditional sort of culinary paradise, with the unstoppable combination of a hyper-aware eating culture and easy/plentiful access to good local fixings inherent in the state of Maine's largely rural constitution. My college, it turns out, is no exception: I did some work with Bates Dining Services last year and discovered that the food program at Bates is about as conscientious as it has the capability to be, considering the 1800+ mouths the institution feeds on a daily basis nine months out of the year. Clearly, the places i live tend to care about what goes into their respective inhabitants' bellies.

Food culture is as closely associated with heritage as it is with locality, and last summer I took my first foray into the foreign yet personal territory of heritage cooking by attempting to prepare one of my grandmother's recipes. Grandma Mary's been gone for about fifteen years; the recipes that survive locate her in what seems to me a pretty unique cultural moment and place, as both mid-century New England suburban housewife and Jewish southerner. Endeavoring to eventually work my way through her repertoire, I thought a good place to start would be an old standby, stuffed cabbage. With a Sauvie Island potluck to attend, Dad and I set to preparing two versions of the dish - one meat, the traditional by-the-book approach, and one veggie (with mushrooms), our own adaptation, one July afternoon.

Once we started the preparation process, I got the lowdown on the significance of this particular dish in Joslin family history. The deal with stuffed cabbage was that, according to my Grandpa Bob, it was never as good as Nana's (his formidable mother). It turns out the the recipe was in fact not Mary's but Nana's recipe, and my grandmother's thankless task was to attempt to recreate it to my grandfather's taste periodically, a fundamentally futile undertaking. The difficulty of doing so certainly became clear to me and my Dad in attempting to decipher the instructions for preparation: every aspect of the directions, from the ingredients list to the order of assemblage to the time required for each stage of preparation, is as vague as the next. One of the ingredients is listed as "box of raisins" -- without the slightest indication of how big said box ought to be, or perhaps how many raisins it should contain. Dad suggested that this may have been intentional on Nana's part, which instigated a foray into familial history: stories of a mother-in-law's disapproval and, deliciously, society scandal (!). The storytelling turned out to be an integral part of the process, and along with some inspired guess work and improvisation established both of our versions - necessarily pretty loose translations, that is - of the stuffed cabbage recipe as instant hits. The process took three and a half hours, and paid off delectably.

such success.

While I may not be terribly prone to cooking for entire afternoons as I did that day, much of last semester -- my first living off campus at Bates -- was dedicated to cultivating cooking chops. My two regular dining companions, Limor and Hannah, were better about preparing for food preparation than I was, and between Limor's vegetarianism, my dairy allergy, and all of our busy schedules, we had our work cut out for us. Still, a few favorites dishes emerged victorious in our searches for easy/healthy/tasty meals, with a whole lot of help from the impeccable food blog Smitten Kitchen. The absolute tops was a seemingly bleak day when we had almost nothing in the kitchen to work with; luckily, SK published a recipe for spicy squash salad with lentils and goat cheese and between our two households we had all the ingredients, down to the element that arguably made the dish: smoked Spanish paprika.

Amidst my cooking kick, my friend Alyssa's boyfriend, Will, a photographer in NYC, made this little film. Using the vimeo as a platform for relaying cooking instructions, via a magazine-like visual format. It didn't escape the attention of NPR, and for obvious reasons.

Cooking Dinner Vol. I from William Hereford on Vimeo.

And so the fun continues. Now living in New York, I've become addicted to cooking risotto at home: my friend Evan and I followed this recipe, again from Smitten Kitchen, with mushrooms, artichokes and asparagus, when we were both home in December. I've been making modified versions of it every week or so since, and there's plenty more where that came from. New York may have some seriously spectacular restaurants, but it's to my own kitchen I'll head when seeking to satisfy my appetite for fine fare.

Typhoon Season

It's summertime again, which means the responsibilities and useful activities that are normally given first priority instead give way to enough delicious boredom to encourage a blog post. I tried blogging regularly in Europe, by anyone's estimation unsuccessfully, which leads me to the conclusion that i simply may not be a regular post kind of girl. Moving on: there's been enough excellent stuff punted across my screen that I feel inclined to share some of it. This one's a music post.

To start off, let me say that I love summer in Portland. The weather is perfectly mild and sweet, the days are optimally lazy, and I get a chance to catch up on all the new excellent music churned out over the course of the past nine months that I've spent toiling away in Lewiston. On this last point, contracting mononucleosis this season has had the undesirable yet unavoidable result of (largely) missing out. Even though only able to make it to a handful of shows since I got home, I thankfully have a host reliably in-touch local friendly types, ready and able to compensate for my summertime inexperience and bring me up to speed. Thus I present, courtesy of a certain KUPS radio dj in Tacoma, the newest contender for the ever elusive title of Most Epitomic Portland Band Of Our Generation: Typhoon.

Possible and presumptuous exaggeration. But this band is lovely, and as such I'm loving on them. There's something about their tunes and their vibe that's so preternaturally of this place, the city that feels like a town that's growing into a city but wants to stay a town, where i love to spend the best dozen or so weeks of my year. I might be projecting, but it seems to me that Portland's growing pains are echoed throughout the band's reverberative repertoire. It could be just that their songs play really well on the farm's ancient busted stereo. For some less subjective, bona fide support for their aforementioned nomination, try these on:

Exhibit A. They went over huge at PDX Pop Now 2010.

Exhibit B. Their next three shows are at the Enchanted Forest (! HOW many birthday parties I attended here in my youthier youth is anyone's guess), Pickathon, and Music Fest NW.

Exhibit C: perhaps the most potent evidence of all is their first music video, filmed in Portland and imbued with youthful Portland-y Portlandness:

and, for good measure, Exhibit D: this year's summer anthem/favorite track off their first album, Hunger and Thirst: CPR / Claws Pt. 2

For those with knowledge, I'm not going to nitpick over the fact that Typhoon is actually from Salem. They are integral to the portrait of my 2010 hometown summer. That's that.

Runnin' and Lovin' (if you wanna)

I can't say I'm all that enthralled with the entirety of the film created in conjunction with and set to Noah and the Whale's latest album, The First Days of Spring. This piece of it, however, is a true gem.

Love, At the Cellular Level

the

tide stretches, the air circulates without haste,

nothing in this instant alters the certainty of

a flow not be disturbed, the constancy of the

mind destines itself to other places; no longer

the seduction of certain arms tending to

lament, or lips saturated with praise, rather the

steady movement towards the present of dreams

and the water's constant documentation

- Lila Zemborain, Mauve Sea-Orchids

Even while acknowledging the psychological residue of a severe childhood hydrophobia that still lingers in my nerves, Zemborain's combination of aquatic images and bodily sensation feels oddly resonant. Probably because of it, actually. Whatever the cause, her work is beautiful, and I especially enjoyed hearing it read in the original Spanish.

Peter Funch: World Class Flaneur

This image is collaged from separate photographs of a single street location taken over some period of time. (My limited knowledge of blog formatting mysteriously allows only parts of the image to be displayed. Click on it for the fuller effect.)

Lovely.

Sometimes I Like Living On This Planet

Occasionally one finds something truly spectacular.

If I could do one thing for the rest of my life...

... I would want it to be making marvelous stop-motions like this one.

Small Space, But Living Large

Gary Chang, an architect based in Hong Kong, has turned the 32 square meters apartment he grew up in (and shared with his family of six) into a spatially flexible single-occupancy unit over the course of his 30 years living there. Employing a system of movable wall/furniture/storage pieces, Chang is effectively able to arrange his apartment into 24 different room configurations. It is, by far, one of the most creative high-density living experiments I've come across.

Chang's set up reminds me of the opening scene in "An American in Paris." In his undersized Parisian flat, Gene Kelly goes about his morning business, a choreographed routine revealing a hyper efficient system of hidden furniture, strategically placed around the apartment to enable optimal utilization of a supremely limited space. This consists primarily of raising a bed arranged on pulleys up into its position of disuse, in order to make room for a folded breakfast table and chair pulled out of the out of the closet. While operating the pulley mechanism, Kelly's character makes efficient use of his time by washing his face with a towel, which had been hanging from one of the bed's springs and became available when the bed was raised. A mundane routine, artfully elegant in it's execution.

Kelly's character, a by-the-book impecunious painter seeking inspiration in Paris, lives where he lives, and the way he lives, presumably as a result of fiscal destitution. Chang, on the other hand, is a well-established practicing architect, and chooses to live in his family's old residence. Drawing from his close-quarters upbringing, during which his entire family occupied the apartment he now inhabits alone, he learned to value the constraints of compact space. The architectural evolution of the apartment over the course of his life is traced in a book, "My 32m^2 Apartment," in which it's revealed that Chang's first architectural mock-up was a re-design of the apartment he drew as a teenager. (He gave himself his own room.) Functionality and flexibility are the rule.

The design of the apartment in its current configuration is impressive in and of itself, but what I find most interesting is that it's the result of an unusually long engagement the architect has had with this particular space. From both first and secondhand experience, I know that it is not unusual for an architect to turn his or her own house into a lifelong design experiment. In Chang's case, it seems pretty clear that his fascination with and devotion to this particular apartment declares him an architect whose house has become a veritable extension of its inhabitant.

Here's a link to the article the New York Times wrote on the apartment. Chang's book can be found here.

Homier Than Thou: Meet the Boxhome.

I've been obsessing over this project for a few weeks now. It's some combination of the Boxhome's simplicity, extraordinarily thoughtful design, rational and spare use of materials, all combined into a near-perfect teeny tiny space. Unnecessary floor area is kept to a minimum, natural light is the primary source of interior illumination, and most of the furnishings are built in. There are four rooms: kitchen/dining area, bathroom, living room, bedroom.

bedroom & bathroom

exterior

side exterior

dining area

One of the things I find so fascinating about the Boxhome, even as a pre-fab, high-density living prototype (which it is), is that it draws from a wide variance of design ideologies, and marries them almost seamlessly. There are elements of Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion House -- energy efficiency, low-cost, and (theoretically) the opportunity for mass-production. In other elements, including a distinct vernacular aesthetic, craftsmanship detailing, and inventive use of space there's some pretty basic Wrightian overlap. On a different note, there's also an Ikea-esque sensibility: the lofty goal of tasteful, interesting, and affordable design. It's an easy comparison to draw, considering the project's design team was led by Scandinavian architect Sami Rintala, but there it is just the same.

I love the idea as a high-density living alternative. Its not functionally efficient to the point of detachment, nor aesthetically efficient to the point of discomfort; the design is equal parts useful, beautiful, comfortable, economical, and, to an extent, ecologically benign. Not that this is the answer to everyone's prayers, but, well... that just seems like a lot of grace for a 19 square meter (205 square foot) structure.

Here's a link to the Dwell article that spurred my interest.

Welcoming to the Blogophere!

Dear Lily,

Welcome! Congratulations on successfully maneuvering your way into the mysterious realm of the interweb blogosphere. You may think that because so many have been able to find their way here much sooner than you, your discovery of this relatively well-trodden webternet path is less worthy of praise and exaltation. Not so! A contribution is a contribution, and it seems that your belief that you have something to chip in is as good a reason as any. Though you seem to intend for this blog to be nothing more than a collection of things you think are "pretty freaking RAD!", we here at the Blogosphere Command Center realize that you are young and show great potential; our hope is that, with time, you will undergo some sort of clarion transformation which might then enable yourself to grow and learn a great deal from your experiences with us.

Best of luck with your blag-a-rific endeavors and thanks oodles,

The Blogosphere

______________________________________

Hmmm. I have somehow ended up not on the world wide web, but the widely worldly web. The two are (understandably) quite easily confused, but the latter tends to have much higher expectations of its contributors than the former. Well, here I am, there's no turning back now. Maybe the pressure of my "potential" to achieve a "clarion transformation" will actually reap some fruit. Eh? Eh? I suppose time will tell.

I will start with an explanation of the story behind this blog. First of all, I have a couple of friends who have started very interesting blog-like things, which are usually centered around some sort of hobby, or project-oriented, or something thematic or purposeful or just for fun. After reading a handful of such blogs, I decided that with all the great things I find (or, much more often, that other people direct my attention to) on the internet that I can contribute just as well as any old bean: a collection of all these interesting, tid-bitty thinger dingers that one with a certain amount of time on his or her hands is bound to comes across.

The visual makeup of this blog so far is a pretty fair testament to that: a sort of coagulation of a few liquidy, elusive prompts that, combined, start to solidify into something a little more meaningful. The title of this blog, "Ich Habe Genug," is a borrowed phrase from "The Principles of Uncertainty." "Principles," a monthly illustrated column by artist Maira Kalman, which I subsequently became a religious reader of when it ran in the online edition of the New York Times my freshman year of college, was a gloriously hodgepodge-y, yet utterly fluent, work of genius. (A collection of the columns was also released in book form last fall.)

Kalman's ability to pull together twenty unrelated thoughts, visuals, and experiences into one imprecise yet beautiful vertical storyboard -- and have a new one ready on the first Wednesday of every month is enviable. This panel is from the December 2006 column, which I'm pretty sure happens to have been the first one I ever read:

For me, this translates as a covert, underlying principle to everything I do: deliberately repositioning myself not to "need" unnecessarily. That said, necessity is largely in the eye of the beholder, so ideas of "want" and "need" and "use" and "purpose" are always, and inevitably uncertainly, blending together. Thus, the challenge. But more on that later.

The subtitle of this blog is a reference to Jane Jacobs, whose first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was an incredibly influential critique of contemporary planning methodology. In 1961, Jacobs pointed out that urban renewal projects largely worked against the nature of how people live, destroying communities by pulling apart the dynamic fabric of cities. Jacob's work gave rise to a whole host of new planning thought -- such as New Urbanism and Smart Growth -- and many U.S. cities have since adopted progressive design policies inspired by the themes promoted in her book. My hometown, Portland, Oregon, happens to be one such city, widely considered to have implemented some of these ideas better than most.

J.J.

My dad, who has been a city planner in Portland for almost fifteen years, took me to hear Jacobs lecture when I was in high school. My collegiate path has been greatly informed by these readings and thus, true to form, Jacobs' effects on me are onion-y (they've got layers).

Last but not least, the background image. This is a photograph of an architectonic landscape installation by Sami Rintala, a Scandinavian architect, who I very recently became interested in while reading about a 205 square-foot pre-fab house he led a team of architects and builders in designing and constructing in a back issue of Dwell magazine. I'll likely write a full post on it soon, so we'll just leave that there for now.

Anywho, that's this blog. It'll probably continue to run along similar lines; commentary on anything else I come across that I'd like to pay some attention too. So look at that! Blogosphere's already doing it's thing!