A month or two ago I tried David Chang's chicken wings at Momofuku Noodle Bar. They were second, and just barely second, to the wings at Dinosaur BBQ but they were far more interesting and complex. I finally got around to reading the profile of David Chang in the 3/24/08 issue of the New Yorker and I got an explanation of what made those wings so delicious.
Take the chicken wings, for instance. All you knew when you were eating them was that they tasted really good. What you didn't know was that they'd been brined in a salt-and-sugar solution for a whole day (but not longer, or they'd be too salty), then dried out and cold-smoked over mesquite for forty-five minutes, then poached in a vat of pork fat for an hour and a half, then browned on the flat-top, then glazed in a chicken-infused soy sauce combined with mirin, garlic, and pickled chili peppers. Each step, executed perfectly, was vital to the dish. This was what the cooks at Noodle Bar understand.
Normally I'd just stick this in the sidebar as a quick post, but I didn't want to make you click again to see this. Hot damn, this is the worst/best ad I've ever seen. It may be our modern day Wendy's training video rap.
It's an in-line two seater, which is weird, but they are bringing this to market in just two years. The tank will only hold 1.7 gallons, but that will take you 400 miles. It maxes out at 75 mph, but at 700 lbs. that seems plenty fast. Hopefully they can keep costs down and provide adequate storage because that will be the determining factor.
On Saturday, Jori and I took in the New York Photo Festival. There wasn't a whole lot to get excited about, but we were both curious about Jeffrey Milstein's AirCraft typology.
The photos are much more striking when seem large, but we couldn't help but wonder how he took these photos. A release about another exhibition explains, "Standing with his camera at the end of a runway watching them descend, he freezes their headlong 200 mile per hour motion, capturing all the details of their shapes and construction with absolute precision."
That was my guess, but the photos were so perfectly aligned and photoshopped it was hard to believe. Now, Mr. Milstein, I believe.
By Michel and Oliver Gondry, for French pop star Laquer. I also just watched America Unchained, which is Dave Gorman's attempt to cross the country without purchasing anything from corporations, including gas. It was good. [via alaina]
The winners were announced sometime in the last week or two (based on where these links lived in my tabs) and I tabbed through all of them for some creative inspiration. These were my favorites.
Sanlitun North by Lot-EK
This is a mixed-use building in Central Beijing by Lot-EK and designer Kengo Kuma. I'm a sucker for boxy with a twist.
Title Sequences by Prologue Films
The film stills above are from the title sequence of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a pretty good move with great titles. This team is also responsible for the great Spiderman 2 and 3 title sequences.
Magazine Design by Open
I've long been a fan of Good's design, especially the covers, and I was taken with what I saw of Scott Stowell's (he is the head of Open) work on The Nation.
Some remnant space between two bigger buildings was used for a home. The images really show the ingenuity and thought that went into this project. [via coudal]
"David Wax and his team at Free Green turn the home design business model on its head. They are charging exactly what most people are willing to pay for design: Nothing." They make their money from partnerships with vendors they include in the design plans.
For anyone who has fallen in love with blogging, you remember those early days when writing 5,000 words a week was like breathing. Of course, back when I started, I wasn't nearly as poignant as Roger Ebert.
Ebertt is following a trend I see of established writers who finally get blogging. Their first few months of posts are filled with topics that have been sitting in a large pile — similar to my pile of New Yorkers — of information waiting to be shared. Yesterday's post from Ebert is a good example of something he's probably thought about a lot but hadn't found the right outlet to share.
Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal started the same way. Now that he has gotten all of the long held tidbits off his chest, he's invited otherwriters to keep up the output.
This is certainly not a revelation, but it is fun seeing well respected writers following the same trends we've seen from bloggers since the beginning. Unfortunately for all of us, Ebert and Bruni have never written blog posts like this.
If I had only come across one of these, I probably wouldn't have even bothered to post them in the sidebar, but seeing them together somehow changes that.
Johan Lorbeer is a German street performer. He became famous in the past few years because of his "Still-Life" Performances, which took place in the public area. His installations includes "Proletarian Mural" and "Tarzan", which are famous in Germany. Several of these performances feature Lorbeer in an apparently impossible position.
Chinese artist Li Wei from Beijing started off his performance series 'Mirroring' and later on took off attention with his 'Falls' series which shows the artist with his head and chest embedded into the ground. His work is a mixture of performance art and photography that creates illusions of a sometimes dangerous reality. Li Wei states that these images are not computer montages and works with the help of props such as mirror, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics.
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