fiori di zucca

Posted on September 11, 2011 by blaise

The sea­son won’t last much longer, so it seems a good time to share the tech­nique we use for mak­ing one of the loveli­est things one can pop into one’s mouth, e.g. with a glass of pros­ecco before din­ner with friends: fried zuc­chini flow­ers.  It seems that many peo­ple do com­pli­cated things with these flow­ers, like using them in soups or stuff­ing them with goat cheese, but in my opin­ion this is the very def­i­n­i­tion of gild­ing the lily.

There’s not much to it.  You heat up an inch of light oil to just below the smoke point.  While that’s hap­pen­ing, you mix flour and water to make a smooth, fluid bat­ter the con­sis­tency of heavy cream.  You slit the zuc­chini flow­ers along one side and spread them out to form a sort, um, let’s call it a frilly dress-like shape, max­i­miz­ing the sur­face area.  You coat the flow­ers lightly in bat­ter, slip them into the oil, and take them out with tongs when they just begin to brown, lay­ing them on a paper towel.  (Which should be kept well clear of the hot oil and flames.)  Sprin­kle gen­er­ously with coarse sea salt and serve with­out delay.  Unfor­tu­nately it can be quite hard to get any in your­self when you’re sweat­ing over the hot oil doing this for friends, as they seem to dis­ap­pear imme­di­ately.  Anselm alone has been respon­si­ble for mak­ing off with the lion’s share of this course.

Appear­ances notwith­stand­ing, the flow­ers one usu­ally uses are the males, which grow on stems.  This recipe can be used for female flow­ers also, which appear a bit later in the sea­son.  In Italy one can often find small zuc­chini (only a cou­ple of inches long) fresh enough to come with the female flow­ers still attached; cut­ting the whole thing in half length­wise and pro­ceed­ing as above yields a lovely sort of culi­nary cen­taur, half fried zuc­chini flower, half zuc­chini tem­pura.  Move over, Jef­frey Eugenides!


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chicken marbella

Posted on September 10, 2011 by blaise

Nancy made this for us last year, and it was great.  Appar­ently a clas­sic.  Adding it to the blog now because it’s today’s shop­ping list.

  • 4 chick­ens, 2½ pounds each, quartered
  • 1 head of gar­lic, peeled and finely pureed
  • ¼ cup dried oregano
  • coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • ½ cup red wine vinegar
  • ½ cup olive oil
  • 1 cup pit­ted prunes
  • ½ cup pit­ted Span­ish green olives
  • ½ cup capers or caper­ber­ries with a bit of juice
  • 6 bay leaves
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup white wine
  • ¼ cup chopped Ital­ian pars­ley or cilantro

In a large bowl com­bine gar­lic, oregano, salt and pep­per, vine­gar, olive oil, prunes, olives, capers with caper juice, and bay leaves.  Add the chicken pieces and coat com­pletely with the mari­nade.  Cover and let mar­i­nate, refrig­er­ated, sev­eral hours or overnight.

Pre­heat oven to 350°F.  Arrange chicken in a sin­gle layer in one or two large, shal­low bak­ing pans and spoon mari­nade over it evenly.  Sprin­kle chicken pieces with brown sugar and pour white wine around them.

Bake for 50 min­utes to 1 hour, bast­ing fre­quently with the sauce.  Chicken is done when thigh pieces, pricked with a fork at their thick­est point, yield clear yel­low juice (not pink).

With a slot­ted spoon, trans­fer chicken, prunes, olives, and capers to a serv­ing plat­ter.  Add sauce and sprin­kle with pars­ley or cilantro.


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testi espliciti

Posted on August 26, 2011 by blaise

A recent episode of the Planet Money pod­cast about the trou­bled Ital­ian econ­omy opened with some rather sticky hiphop, which on inves­ti­ga­tion turned out to be the wildly pop­u­lar (in Italy) and as far as I can tell unknown (in the US) rap­per from Le Marche Fab­rizio Tar­ducci, detto Fabri Fibra:

Pis­tole in mac­chine – in Italia
Mac­chi­avelli e Fos­colo – in Italia
I cam­pi­oni del mondo sono – in Italia…
Ben­venuto – in Italia
Fatti una vacanza al mare – in Italia
Meglio non farsi oper­are – in Italia
Non andare all’ospedale – in Italia
Sei nato e morto qua
Sei nato e morto qua
Nato nel paese della mezza verità…

He turns out to be pretty damn good!  There’s a lot going on in these songs, in the pro­lific machine-gun like text, in the music, in the rhythm of the deliv­ery.  The best of these tracks (espe­cially on the 2010 disc Con­tro­cul­tura) con­tin­u­ously sur­prise and delight with inner rhymes and dis­so­nances, missed and dou­bled beats, over­dubbed lay­ers that shift the text in and out of focus, sibi­lant or per­cus­sive syl­la­bles that seem to emerge as an instru­ment in their own right.  Maybe there’s recent Amer­i­can rap this good?  I’m not sure, but it seems like this deserves some exploration.


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places in corsica

Posted on July 26, 2011 by blaise

This blog isn’t much of a diary.  I’d be hard pressed to say what exactly it is, but one of its func­tions is to record things that might be use­ful or inter­est­ing later on, to our­selves or to friends or to whomever might hap­pen along.

The still-disorganized places tab is a frag­men­tary record (or in some cases to-do list) of use­ful places— mostly to eat.  We all eat about three times per day, and if you’re prop­erly alive, you’ll agree that eat­ing is one of life’s great sources of plea­sure.  Espe­cially when trav­el­ing.  And it’s not even optional!  So in what fol­lows, I’ll record some of our mostly food expe­ri­ences in Cor­sica, Provence and Paris, where we’ve spent the last cou­ple of weeks.  Then I’ll copy and paste lib­er­ally into the places page.  This seems a good way to relive these plea­sures one last time on the plane before buck­ling down to an inten­si­fied regime chez David Bar­ton.  And if you hap­pen to find your­self in north­ern Cor­sica, Mar­seille, Arles, Avi­gnon, Les Baux, or the 6th Arrondisse­ment of Paris any­time soon, you’ll have some recent intel­li­gence from the field that might add a dash of joy to an evening out.  Com­ments, sug­ges­tions and updates are very much appreciated.

Lama

In Cor­sica, we stayed at a rental place in the pic­turesque vil­lage of Lama, pop­u­la­tion 176 in 2008 accord­ing to Wikipedia.  It’s an inland ham­let perched on a steep moun­tain­side about halfway between Ile Rousse and Bas­tia.  Lama reminded us of cer­tain moun­tain vil­lages in the rel­a­tively unde­vel­oped west of Crete, where we (not coin­ci­den­tally) spent an idyl­lic cou­ple of weeks last summer.

In the main square there are some sofas under a canopy where you can have tar­tine in the morn­ing, tarti­nated (let’s just adopt that word) with hand­made fig pre­serves and local but­ter.  You won’t be con­fused about which estab­lish­ment I mean, because there’s noth­ing else in the main square aside from the oblig­a­tory lit­tle church.  This place also had a wood-fired brick pizza oven and prob­a­bly does a decent job of it; pizza was very com­mon in Cor­sica, betray­ing its kin­ship with Italy, which often seems stronger than its kin­ship with France.  (Though sadly, this doesn’t extend to the cof­fee.  Here they must need to pay their dues to their French oppres­sors, if my French Cof­fee The­ory is cor­rect.  A more benign the­ory is that since pizza cul­ture is much older than espresso cul­ture, this is an arti­fact of the length of the period dur­ing which Cor­sica has been cut off from Ital­ian influence.*)

When our friend Michael arrived, he brought with him, cour­tesy of his taxi dri­ver, a 10cm disc of some kind of no-name Cor­si­can sheep’s milk cheese with an ash rind, which was unbe­liev­ably good.  Com­plex, dense, nutty and rich, slightly dry around the edges, moist but not runny in the cen­ter.  Not to be refrig­er­ated.  We tried our best to spread the eat­ing of this cheese out over sev­eral days.  I’m sorry not to know more pre­cisely what this thing was called or where it came from.

We ate din­ner twice at the town’s fancier restau­rant, Campu Lat­inu, and were very happy with it.  (We only repeated a restau­rant twice on this trip.)  The set­ting is beau­ti­ful and atmos­pheric, with out­door seat­ing on a stone ter­race under fig trees and climb­ing vines over­look­ing the val­ley.  As dusk comes in, around 9 o’clock, lay­ers of moun­tain­ous sil­hou­ette rise softly out of the clouds on the far side in pur­ple bands.  One of the tra­di­tional dishes served by Campu Lat­inu, a sort of beef pot pie with juniper berries in the stew, was a stand­out.  It was unfor­tu­nate that this was being split among three of us, each try­ing to bal­ance gra­cious shar­ing against gluttony.

Meals at Campu Lat­inu stretched out lux­u­ri­antly into the night.  Here and else­where in Cor­sica, one orders the 50cl bot­tles of Pat­ri­mo­niu wine in order to avoid the excesses of full-sized 75cl bot­tles, but the intent to mod­er­ate is ruined by the inevitable sec­ond bot­tle.  Like a lot of local wines in Europe, this stuff is roughly the price of bot­tled water in the gro­cery store, sug­gest­ing that Jesus’s par­lor trick was a wash eco­nom­i­cally speak­ing.  And it goes with the food per­fectly.  Such wine might or might not sur­vive recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion.  There are higher-end Cor­si­can wines too, though, and we had two excel­lent ones later on at Emile’s in Calvi.  But I’m get­ting ahead of myself.

We didn’t get the sense that there are a great num­ber of clas­sic Cor­si­can dishes.  One that came up often was can­nel­loni stuffed with ricotta-like broc­ciu cheese.  We were never par­tic­u­larly con­vinced by this recipe.  It’s bland, and unfor­tu­nately seems the likely model for the sort of “cheese can­nel­loni” made pop­u­lar in the US by fed­er­ally funded school lunches and microwave dinners.

Corte Corti

In Cor­sica, as through­out Europe, there are stan­dard­ized enter­ing and exit­ing signs along the roads as they wind their way through one ham­let after another.  The town names are writ­ten first in French, then in Cor­si­can, which looks pretty much like Ital­ian with ter­mi­nal o’s turned into u’s.  (But of course this must never be men­tioned, just like it must never be men­tioned that cer­tain of the many “offi­cial” lan­guages of Spain look just like Span­ish but with some j’s turned into x’s.  Orthog­ra­phy strain­ing to reca­pit­u­late ethnog­ra­phy, or some­thing.)  Corte is the town at the heart of Corsica’s on again, off again inde­pen­dence move­ment, and there, even more than else­where on the island, French spellings on the signs have been graf­fi­tied over.  The uni­ver­sity has posters on it that seem to sug­gest some kind of “lib­er­a­tion stud­ies” curriculum.

The short walk from the town’s main square, Place Pas­cal Paoli, up to the cas­tle, with its won­der­ful panoramic view­points, is rec­om­mended.  At Café de la Place on this square we had a very good hand­made pasta dish with san­glier, which are the wild pigs liv­ing on the island.  (Roger, our apart­ment guy, cau­tioned us on the day we arrived to latch the gar­den gate against these maraud­ers.)  But much bet­ter over­all was a meal we had on the ter­race of the nearby U Paglia Orba, a place focused on high-quality regional cook­ing.  The pro­pri­etor was kind and atten­tive to the kids, and the bill was very reasonable.

It was a Thurs­day.  As night fell, some kids in the street below hooked up elec­tric gui­tars and started doing cov­ers of Rolling Stones and U2 songs, mostly get­ting the lyrics right.  The sur­round­ing few blocks quickly became lively with rov­ing crowds of all ages, food stands, and musi­cal acts, most notably a band singing tra­di­tional Cor­si­can polyphony, which is quite beau­ti­ful in its belted-out, fullthroated open-fifths kind of way.  This tra­di­tional stuff attracted a much big­ger crowd than the Anglo-American cover acts, this being Corte Corti, after all.

Gorges and Falls

The Reston­ica Gorges, near Corte, are worth a hike.  Bring your swim­suit.  If one wends far enough up the twisty (and very nar­row) road along the gorge and finds a place to pull the car off, one can pick a path down to the river and spend a very pleas­ant after­noon swim­ming in the rock pools and boul­der­ing.  Even bet­ter, though also more touristed, was the Cas­cade des Anglais in the heart of the island, a chain of water­falls, nat­ural slides and pools under over­hang­ing gran­ite ledges.

For a serious hiking holiday, the GR20 trail looks pretty great.  On the way to Cascade des Anglais we stopped to walk a small section of it, down a valley and up a hill to an abandoned keep.

One can just make the keep out in Bing’s aer­ial imagery (shown below at three lev­els of detail with a push­pin at the geo­tag of the panorama above):

     

Porto, Giro­lata and the Scan­dola Reserve

On the sea­side in Porto, there are lots of out­fits offer­ing boat tours and rentals to explore the coast.  It would have been fun to rent a zodiac for the day, but we arrived a bit late for that.  We did make it out on a snor­kel­ing tour of the Scan­dola Reserve, a beau­ti­ful stretch of coast­line walled in by steep gran­ite cliffs and rock for­ma­tions.  The boat also stopped at Giro­lata, a vil­lage acces­si­ble only from the sea and per­haps by ATV.  Porto and Giro­lata both have old stone watch­tow­ers, part of a net­work of dozens cir­cling the island built by the Gen­ovese dur­ing their occu­pa­tion, though the ruins proved hard to access.

There are sev­eral places in Giro­lata good for hav­ing a glass of wine or a beer before going back to the boat.  In Porto, we ate at Le Robin­son, which is reputed to be one of the few places where one can get real Cor­si­can lan­goustes, but were mostly unim­pressed.  The prepa­ra­tion method of the lan­goustes involved an incon­gru­ous dark sauce, and they were overcooked.

Calvi

We were in Calvi only briefly, for a walk around the citadel and din­ner.  I wish we’d had more time to explore— it’s the most attrac­tive of the Cor­si­can sea­side towns we saw on this trip, some­what rem­i­nis­cent of the Venet­ian har­bor of Cha­nia in north­west Crete.

 

Views from the citadel were mag­nif­i­cent, and the old town high up within the citadel had appealing-looking tea houses and shops, while the more pickpocket-friendly pedes­trian alley­ways below thronged with the usual mer­chants sell­ing hats, ice creams, and USB sticks.

Michael’s father had booked us in to Emile’s on the water­front, a Michelin-starred place with a second-story bal­cony.  It was white table­cloth (what Miche­lin place isn’t?), but not exces­sively for­mal.  The meal was very good, and the wines excel­lent, though Michael Sr. was to be thanked for his expert selec­tion on this score, and I neglected to take notes.  I let Anselm get away with eat­ing all of the truf­fles in my amuse-bouche, which prob­a­bly counts as overindul­gent par­ent­ing.  As we were fin­ish­ing up dessert and dark set­tled, Bastille Day fire­works started up over the har­bor.  Pretty perfect.

Saint-Florent

We had a very nice upscale lunch on the water at Saint-Florent, but I’m now unable to find the name of the restau­rant, which is quite frus­trat­ing.  It began with an “M”, and one accessed it by walk­ing down a some­what hid­den ramp off the main square.  The lan­gouste in lemon but­ter sauce here made it clear what all the fuss was about.  This place also served deli­cious stuffed sar­dines, in which broc­ciu was deployed to bet­ter effect than in the cannelloni.

To be continued..

*OK, another smar­tarse is likely to point out that the mod­ern pizza with tomato and moz­zarella was only invented in 1889, around the same time as espresso (1884).  (The 1880s were a fruit­ful decade for the Ital­ians!)  But pizza is much older than this, and the addi­tion of slices of moz­zarella on top is, while culi­nar­ily sig­nif­i­cant, con­cep­tu­ally triv­ial.  Idea dif­fu­sion— noth­ing but a dropped com­ment in a bar— is suf­fi­cient to intro­duce the Margherita recipe to an exist­ing pizza cul­ture, while it’s totally inad­e­quate for intro­duc­ing espresso to a pre-espresso cof­fee culture.


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french coffee

Posted on July 25, 2011 by blaise

We’ve had a won­der­ful time abroad.  More on that soon.  But a notable minus of Cor­sica: the cof­fee sucks.

In fact, the cof­fee sucks in France as a whole.  For a cul­ture that so val­ues gas­tron­omy, this is dif­fi­cult to come to grips with; I think with­out excep­tion every other coun­try on the Med under­stands cof­fee.  The French just don’t get it.  They don’t do crema.  They seem to extract the hell out of the shot until it flows weak and bit­ter into the cup, pro­duc­ing a kind of undrink­able dish­wa­tery fluid, irre­spec­tive of the qual­ity of the beans or equip­ment.  Then, if they deign to add milk, it’s great glugs of low-fat UHT stuff steamed coarsely but to the brink of ion­iza­tion.  Our only decent cof­fee of the past two weeks, it pains me to say, came out of a Nespresso machine at our friend Ivo’s in Marseille.

When going out, it’s unwise to order cap­puc­cino, mac­chi­ato, espresso, or any­thing of the sort; “café crème” is your best bet, if you’re phys­i­o­log­i­cally depen­dent.  If you’re not, just skip it.  And if you must have a “p’tit café” after din­ner, expect to use the sug­ar­cube to blunt the edge.

Why, or how, can it suck so badly?  Here’s the best the­ory I can come up with.  The Ital­ians have per­fected espresso; after try­ing one at Sant’Eustachio, there’s noth­ing much fur­ther to say on the sub­ject.  Some other coun­tries, like Turkey, Viet­nam* or Ethiopia, have their own indige­nous and aes­thet­i­cally valid take on the drink.  Oth­ers, like Israel and Aus­tralia (yes, and Seat­tle), are happy to learn their craft from the Ital­ians, and if they’re ambi­tious, try to improve upon per­fec­tion by scor­ing really spe­cial beans, con­trol­ling their process with excep­tional rigor, or hir­ing unusu­ally hot baristi.  But the French don’t have a cred­i­ble cof­fee cul­ture of their own, and they can’t adopt the Ital­ian one, because they loathe the Ital­ians.  Also because they resist adopt­ing any­thing non-indigenous, whether it’s food, lan­guage, tech­nol­ogy, what­ever.  So instead, every restau­ran­teur, baker and bar­man belongs to an unspo­ken con­spir­acy.  Their mis­sion is to con­struct an alter­na­tive uni­verse in which cof­fee is a kind of ironic com­ment on how cof­fee is actu­ally noth­ing, noth­ing, like an aspirin, or a toothpick.

This seems like a frag­ile sit­u­a­tion.  It would only take one expat, one rogue bar, one cor­ner café in a fash­ion­able neigh­bor­hood, to top­ple the house of cards.  Extreme mea­sures must be in force to pre­vent such a thing.  With­held busi­ness licenses?  Sab­o­tage?  Deportation?

*Someone’s going to write a snarky com­ment about Viet­namese cof­fee hav­ing been intro­duced by the French.  While it’s true that cof­fee cul­ti­va­tion and the inverted fil­ter came from France in the 19th cen­tury, cafe da is clearly a Viet­namese inven­tion, as evi­denced by the fact that it’s only avail­able in France at Viet­namese restau­rants.  It should also be kept in mind that much of cof­fee his­tory takes place in the 20th cen­tury; the espresso itself was only invented in 1884.


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allsaints

Posted on May 15, 2011 by blaise

A few months ago, I drove past the cor­ner of 5th and Pike in the evening and saw some­thing new, a shopfront that flash­ing by looked like some sort of Bab­bagesque mechan­i­cal com­puter, brass machin­ery grid­ded in glass and lit gold­enly from behind.  I would have cir­cled around the block to take a closer look, but was run­ning late as usual.  This was how I first expe­ri­enced what is per­haps the most beau­ti­fully designed win­dow shop dis­play I’ve ever seen— and, shock­ingly, in Seattle!

Although the hun­dreds of vin­tage sewing machines in their win­dows did hold my inter­est for many min­utes when I went back there to explore on foot, I was com­pletely unin­ter­ested in what this shop actu­ally sold, once I under­stood that it involved clothing.

This is because for more than a decade I’ve worn noth­ing but jeans, black T shirts, and black shoes.  Fam­ily, friends and col­leagues will con­firm that this is very nearly not an exag­ger­a­tion.  The shirts are fea­ture­less, with no logos, writ­ing or tags.  The shoes are fea­ture­less too, with no laces.  Their main prop­erty is that they slip on and off eas­ily in the secu­rity line (Mer­rell World Traveler).

Why such a joy­less apparel diet?— well, I just didn’t want to think about it.  I find triv­ial choices dif­fi­cult.  Much bet­ter to just round down these aspects of life to their func­tional min­ima: pull a black shirt from the top of the stack of iden­ti­cal such shirts, ditto the jeans, and step into the shoes on the way out the door.  In fact I felt very smug about all this, the smug­ness of out­smart­ing one­self by set­ting one’s watch just the right num­ber of min­utes ahead.

But I’ve been wak­ing up, slowly and by small incre­ments, to the pos­si­bil­ity of clothes as a valid means of self-expression.  (Yes, I live under a rock, bla blabla.)

In fact I began wak­ing up a few years ago, when Adri­enne dis­cov­ered Eileen Fisher.  (Not that she has ever been clothing-challenged like me.)  This women’s clothes com­pany makes really beau­ti­ful things.  Their use of color is both spar­ing and intense.  The fab­rics are won­der­fully tex­tured, and the pat­terns bor­row lib­er­ally from the visual lan­guage of other forms, things like scarves that fall like torn petals, wispily knit­ted jer­seys that cling and bil­low like iri­des­cent jel­ly­fish, coarsely woven jack­ets that some­how feel like Japan­ese but­ter­fly books.  Yet unlike the dis­torted inhu­man art­works one sees in fash­ion mags, these clothes some­how feel made to be worn by real peo­ple in the real world, by women who live and work sub­stan­tial lives out there in het­ero­ge­neous envi­ron­ments that include peo­ple like— well, like me, in my jeans and black shirts.

I’m not entirely sure how this effect is achieved, but I think one key ingre­di­ent is a sense of tan­gi­ble work­man­ship and solid­ity in the fab­rics, the seams and the fas­ten­ing sys­tems.  From this per­spec­tive, Eileen Fisher clothes are per­haps draw­ing from the same well as jeans.  Jeans are so endur­ingly, uni­ver­sally pop­u­lar, I think because their entire nature and con­struc­tion empha­sizes a sense of secu­rity in their integrity of form and func­tion, in the con­text of a wide range of social and phys­i­cal inter­ac­tions with the world.  In a good pair of jeans, one feels unfussy, ruggedi­zed, ready for life.  This is what is really meant by “com­fort­able”.  The effect can be achieved with more del­i­cate fab­rics too, if the work­man­ship is robust and the con­text well suited.

The ele­gance of the leop­ard, both func­tional and beau­ti­ful, is more com­pelling than the fop­pish­ness of the pea­cock.  Aside from my own issues, my dis­com­fort with fash­ion comes from two inter­twined evils, I think: first, that like pea­cocks, we’ve largely reserved exter­nal beauty for one gen­der— the other one; sec­ond, that the way we express beauty in women’s cloth­ing seems so often to tend toward the pea­cock end of things.  Trans­gen­dered pea­cock.  Girl-peacocks make me uneasy because I men­tally mir­ror their dis­com­fort and lack of bal­ance, rather than enjoy­ing their fragility and the dubi­ous sense of con­trol that’s sup­posed to give me as a male.  On the other hand socially accept­able beauty in (socially accept­able) male clothes is of such a sub­tle and con­tin­gent char­ac­ter, it makes me think of a bunch of hens cri­tiquing each oth­ers’ dull brown plumage.  Is James Bond’s suit and tie so much bet­ter than Dilbert’s?  I sup­pose so, but it’s all shades of tedious, if you ask me.

The Asian jun­gle fowl, now that’s more my kind of chicken:

How mag­nif­i­cent is that.  My own exper­i­ments along these lines began in earnest with this pair of orange shoes.

I’ve found them to have a real effect on my sense of self and well­be­ing in the world.  Peo­ple— strangers— smile at me more with these on.  Even with no other ele­ments, or per­haps espe­cially with no other elements.

Bet­ter jeans fol­lowed (Adri­ano Gold­schmied Pro­tégé, for what it’s worth), and other small things.  Finally, All­saints was brought back to my atten­tion.  The inside is as appeal­ing as the out­side, con­tin­u­ing in the same prewar/postpunk vein.

This store very much cap­i­tal­izes on the val­ues of denim cul­ture.  Hol­lis Henry surely shops here— though a turn-off for us both would be its fetishiza­tion of the “authen­tic”, includ­ing chem­i­cal treat­ments lov­ingly designed to mimic skate­board trauma, or the patina of sev­eral con­sec­u­tive nights’ sleep in the gutter.

Still, All­saints is as charm­ingly asperg­er­sish in its approach to clothes as the shop dis­play sug­gests, sort of like Bloc Party.  Even the safety pins are custom-made.

The palette ranges from dirt, through cer­tain oxides, to the neu­tral grey­line, to blue, to just shy of white.  The design lan­guage is con­strained enough, and the mate­ri­als and work­man­ship appeal­ing enough, to make it pos­si­ble for me to shop here with­out over­load­ing my deci­sion cir­cuits.  There’s a solemnly play­ful sense of “hoodie cou­ture” about some of these things, e.g. the fol­low­ing object:

Although at first glance it might appear to be made for another species, in fact that tubu­lar head struc­ture piles up into a sort of hybrid between hood, turtle­neck, scarf and.. ruff.


Posted in appearances | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

violin

Posted on May 9, 2011 by blaise

The vio­lin is in some ways a prob­lem­atic instru­ment.  I’ve always had mixed feel­ings about its pop­u­lar­ity, the way it dis­placed its noble and diverse pre­de­ces­sors, the viols, its grasshop­pery diva nature, its demand for vir­tu­os­ity.  I give the vio­lin a lot of shit, but one really can’t argue with its emo­tional punch.  There’s a rea­son why it’s such a suc­cess­ful inva­sive species, blan­ket­ing the musi­cal land­scape from Ice­landic pop to Appalachian hoe­downs to Kar­natic ragas.

Here are four pieces of music that make me love this old enemy.  Start­ing with the blind­ingly obvious,

Bach’s vio­lin sonata in g minor, as per­formed by Schlomo Mintz.  The sonatas and par­ti­tas are uni­formly gor­geous, but my favorite is this first sonata.  It’s tech­ni­cally chal­leng­ing to pull off its many dou­ble and triple stops while still keep­ing the voic­ing clear, the rhythm solid, and most impor­tantly keep­ing that secret fire lit that burns under­neath Bach’s best stuff, that vol­canic power.  On the piano, nobody can do that like Glenn Gould, though I’d have to give Vladimir Viardo an hon­or­able men­tion.  On the vio­lin, it’s Schlomo.  This is max­i­mal music for solo vio­lin, a moment of flow­er­ing for the instru­ment that stretches it to its utmost poten­tial and, in cer­tain respects, beyond.  It’s like an Old Mas­ter draw­ing exe­cuted in a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous stroke, with­out lift­ing the pen­cil off the paper.

(As a side note, the g minor works beau­ti­fully on Baroque lute as well, where many more notes from amongst the inner voices can be enun­ci­ated.  It then becomes a dif­fer­ent piece alto­gether, less spare, yet still expres­sive.  One can think of the Baroque lute as a mid­point between the vio­lin and the harp­si­chord.  On the vio­lin, both hands tend inti­mately to each note, with every ana­log nuance of fin­ger­ing and bow­ing reflected in the sound.  The harp­si­chord is “pure dig­i­tal”, with every ele­ment of a per­for­mance reduced to a tim­ing code.  The piano is the mod­ern answer to rein­tro­duc­ing ana­log into key­board instru­ments, but it’s a very reduc­tive, MIDI kind of ana­log: a sin­gle, per­fectly mea­sur­able para­me­ter per note, the speed of the ham­mer when it strikes the strings.  With the lute, the left hand artic­u­lates the notes against frets, mak­ing it a “dig­i­tal hand”, but the right hand is expres­sive in that infi­nitely sub­tle, con­tin­u­ous phase-space man­ner of the violin.)

Now we move back in time from 1723 to 1676, around the time of the emer­gence of the vio­lin in the form we now know it, as a solo art instru­ment.  The first great vio­lin­ist and vio­lin com­poser was Hein­rich Ignaz Franz Biber.  And my pick #2 is:

The pas­sacaglia in d minor that con­cludes Biber’s Rosary Sonata cycle, some­times called the Archangel Sonata.  This cycle of fif­teen “mys­ter­ies” has a place in my heart.  Every sonata is pre­ceded by a round engrav­ing rep­re­sent­ing a bead from the rosary, and every piece is in a dif­fer­ent tun­ing or scor­datura, totally chang­ing the tonal­ity of the instru­ment.  Some even involve swap­ping the mid­dle two strings.  The scores are writ­ten as if to be played on a nor­mally tuned vio­lin, mak­ing them read oddly and some­times non­sen­si­cally on the page; the tun­ing must be dis­cov­ered, and they must be played with blind faith, like prayers recited over the rosary beads.  The result­ing music of course doesn’t cor­re­spond to what’s writ­ten, falling in this sense some­where between score and tablature.

Only the first mys­tery and the pas­sacaglia are in nor­mal tun­ing.  The pas­sacaglia dis­penses with the basso con­tinuo accom­pa­ni­ment of the pre­ced­ing sonatas.  The solo vio­lin begins with the four descend­ing osti­nato notes, G, F, Eb, D.  The rest of the piece is based entirely on this bassline, spin­ning vari­a­tion after vari­a­tion.  This highly con­strained for­mula is hyp­notic, tran­scen­dent, and some­how nar­ra­tive in that way that vari­a­tions can be when done per­fectly.  A melan­choly sun­set, brushed in slow and red over a north­ern sky.  Mean­ing with­out mean­ing, a world within a dew­drop, minor key scales with­out end. 

The killer per­for­mance, with Franzjosef Maier on vio­lin, is no longer so easy to get.  It was released in 1990 on CD by Deutsche Har­mo­nia Mundi, and Ama­zon says it’s out of stock but avail­able new or used start­ing at $202.02.  Ah, con­nois­seur­ship is alive and well..

Next:

Keith Jarrett’s Elegy for vio­lin and string orches­tra.  He wrote this in mem­ory of his Hun­gar­ian grand­mother, and at its melodic core it lilts that gap-toothed gypsy note, as dis­tinc­tive as the blue note, recall­ing the shad­owy alley­ways of East­ern Europe.  As clas­si­cal motive music some crit­ics find fault with Jarrett’s com­po­si­tion, call­ing it vague, aim­less or even incom­pe­tent, which utterly misses the point.  Like Michael Chabon, he brings a pow­er­fully asserted and defi­ant point of view to his art, an insis­tence on the sen­sual irre­spec­tive of art fash­ion, a sen­si­tiv­ity to the idiomatic.  Jar­rett is a knight, a defender of what mat­ters.  He has described his pieces as “prayers that beauty may remain per­cep­ti­ble”.  In the Elegy, to fail to per­ceive the beauty is to have an ear unus­ably dis­torted by affec­ta­tion or style.  The vio­lin, whether grounded in the dark chords of the orches­tra or soar­ing free from them, trans­ports the lis­tener.  The theme is lost in a har­monic labyrinth, the trav­eler med­i­ta­tive on a path of uncer­tain return, the dusk now turn­ing to night.  But what is given trust­ingly is returned freely.  In the loose reaches of this sound-poem, sound is re-invested with luminance.

Finally:

Spiegel Im Spiegel, by Arvo Pärt.  This ten minute work, spare and min­i­mal, occu­pies an oppo­site cor­ner to Bach.  A piano repeats quarter-note tri­ads, one-two-three, four-five-six, through­out the piece in the mid­dle reg­is­ter, with a stripped-down bass chord occa­sion­ally thrum­ming under­neath for a whole beat, a high bell-like note struck at times.  The vio­lin, very human in its voice, plays slow frag­ments of dia­tonic scales over this ground.  (Spiegel Im Spiegel can also be played with a cello, but I think the greater tonal sep­a­ra­tion of the vio­lin from the piano makes that ver­sion more potent.)  This music came at the end of Pärt’s self-imposed silence of sev­eral years, a period Paul Hillier described as one of “com­plete despair in which the com­po­si­tion of music appeared to be the most futile of ges­tures”.  Another war­rior, then, another defender of beauty.  As a rebirth, shorn of the super­flu­ous and reduced to its inmost core, Pärt’s new tintinnab­uli style could not be more per­fect, and I think Spiegel Im Spiegel— named after mutu­ally reflect­ing mir­rors, evok­ing infi­nite regress— is the most dev­as­tat­ing expres­sion of that style in its direct­ness and tenderness.


Posted in music | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

panorama madness

Posted on April 23, 2011 by blaise

Super pleased by the recep­tion of the Pho­to­synth app.  We’ve blown through a mil­lion down­loads, and we’re five stars now in the app­store, with about 900 rat­ings in the first four days:

Fatjack1 writes, “AmaZ­ing / My head asplode!”  “Holy Sh*t!” adds Alphawolf333.  “Unbe­liev­able / Would eas­ily pay for this”, writes Chil1swaggtapejuic3, which is surely the high­est com­pli­ment in the soft­ware busi­ness these days.. espe­cially when Ban­jokeith quan­ti­fies, “Eas­ily worth $5”!  It’s funny how Apple, of all com­pa­nies, has done more to com­modi­tize the soft­ware busi­ness than the Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion ever did.  Makes me a bit nos­tal­gic.  Guess there’s no point to crack­ing soft­ware any­more when the killerest of apps, fruit of count­less hours of pas­sion, skill, cre­ativ­ity and lost sleep, cost less than a caffe latte.

Snark aside, I’m feel­ing very proud of the team, and it makes me very happy that we’ve made some­thing peo­ple are in love with.  I’m espe­cially chuffed to see many users (and panora­mas being shared) out­side the US.

 


Posted in mobile | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

photosynth app!

Posted on April 18, 2011 by blaise

As every­one who’s been glanc­ing now and then at my face­book page knows, I’ve been post­ing a lot of panora­mas lately from the mys­te­ri­ous “Pho­to­synth pub­lish pho­tos” app.  Well, the app is now finally avail­able on the iPhone— just look in the app store for “pho­to­synth” or “bing” (Apple’s index looks like it’s rebuild­ing now, hope­fully by the time I put this post up it’ll be fully live).

I’m very excited to finally have this app out there.  The team’s done a won­der­ful job on it.  Here’s the offi­cial blog post.  They also shot a very nice release video, which to my cha­grin ends with y.t. pon­tif­i­cat­ing on a posthu­man future.

A few notes on this evo­lu­tion in the Pho­to­synth and Bing Mobile story, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

expe­ri­ence

This app is a lot of fun to use, and the out­put is— I think— com­pelling.  It addresses a fun­da­men­tal lim­i­ta­tion of cam­eras as we now know them: field of view.  A phone’s cam­era is the right size and design for tak­ing a snap­shot of, say, someone’s face at a party.  But as any­one who has tried to put up real estate pho­tos knows well, try­ing to cap­ture a view out the win­dow with an ordi­nary cam­era is an awful expe­ri­ence.  With your eyes, you see a whole for­est; in the cam­era frame, you see a cou­ple of trees.  With Pho­to­synth, you rotate the cam­era to take in the whole view, and the app fuses that view together:

Of course there’s an inher­ent dif­fi­culty in tak­ing these wide fields of view and pro­ject­ing them down into pla­nar images.  It’s the­o­ret­i­cally pos­si­ble to do this with a per­spec­tive pro­jec­tion when the field of view is less than half a sphere, though in prac­tice the image starts to dis­tort unpleas­antly when the larger axis exceeds 60 degrees or so.  Remem­ber that in our own eyes, the retina is hemi­spher­i­cal, not pla­nar.  Our very wide nat­ural field of view doesn’t rely on a rec­tan­gu­lar pro­jec­tion the way film or dig­i­tal cam­eras do.

This is why, when Pho­to­synth pub­lishes pho­tos to a flat medium, like the inline news feed in face­book or the flat image above, it uses a spher­i­cal pro­jec­tion, which results in a dis­torted image.  Straight lines turn into arcs.  This kind of imagery can be quite beau­ti­ful in its own right, though it can get a bit coun­ter­in­tu­itive, espe­cially as the field of view grows all the way to the full sphere.

Pro­ject­ing the sphere down to a rec­tan­gu­lar image is of course just what one does when one makes a flat map of the Earth.  We’ve all seen pla­nar world maps so often that we think of them as “nor­mal”, while the above image looks “dis­torted”, although really they exhibit the same dis­tor­tions.  Yes, Green­land is big— about three times the size of Texas.  Not twice the size of the whole USA.

The best way to expe­ri­ence a panorama is in an immer­sive viewer, which repro­jects the imagery inter­ac­tively into a smaller win­dow, allow­ing you to rotate.  We’re work­ing on view­ers that let these things hap­pen in native Web-ese, though it requires advanced browsers (HTML5, Can­vas or CSS3).  In the mean­time, it can be done with Sil­verlight.  Here’s the panorama of the Neue Nation­al­ga­lerie above, ren­dered this way:

tech­nol­ogy

In the past few years there has been a grow­ing trickle of “smart” cam­eras and phone apps for stitch­ing together pho­tos or video into panora­mas.  Many of them aren’t par­tic­u­larly good, but I do need to give a shout out to our friends at Occip­i­tal, whose 360 panorama app was an inspi­ra­tion to the team.

As far as I know, ours is the first app that goes beyond “strip” panorama mak­ing to allow cov­er­age of the entire visual sphere with real­time track­ing.  This relies on some pretty cutting-edge com­puter vision hack­ing (thank you Georg).  Extract­ing fea­tures from the video stream on the fly, fol­low­ing them from frame to frame, and mod­el­ing the envi­ron­ment in real­time is hard­core stuff, and requires not only high-performance algo­rithms, but also very aggres­sive low-level opti­miza­tion and trick­ery with the cam­era and graph­ics pipelines.  Fusion on the sphere isn’t all the way to full 3D mod­el­ing, but it already involves its share of topo­log­i­cal com­pli­ca­tions and trade­offs between local and global recon­struc­tion.  By all means, dear CS grads, try this at home (and send us your screen­shots)— but be fore­warned, there’s a rea­son why we haven’t seen a mobile app like this before in the mar­ket!  This is a bit like Doom first appear­ing on the PC in 1993.  Now that it’s been shown to be pos­si­ble, we should expect quite a few fol­low­ers, and a rapid evo­lu­tion in real­time com­puter vision on mobile devices.

design

There’s another rea­son I’m very pleased by Pho­to­synth for iPhone: it’s the first rea­son­ably com­plete appli­ca­tion of our design sys­tem to a non-Windows phone.  We’ve been work­ing for more than a year with the very beau­ti­ful design lan­guage cre­ated by the Enter­tain­ment and Devices peo­ple at Microsoft (yes, Microsoft can do beau­ti­ful design!  It’s true!) for Xbox, Zune, and Win­dows Phone 7, code­named Metro.  The “laven­der” map style we released last year is a car­to­graphic embod­i­ment of this lan­guage.  Trans­lat­ing Metro for an envi­ron­ment like iPhone, in which there’s a strong native look, feel and inter­ac­tion model, is risky busi­ness.  Done poorly, the result is con­fus­ing and incon­gru­ous.  Some would argue that an app should always adopt native con­trols, look and feel, tai­lor­ing itself entirely to the host plat­form to min­i­mize cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance.  This is an old argu­ment.  I remem­ber it from the X win­dows days, and ear­lier.  (More recently, Apple’s first release of Safari on the PC gar­nered much crit­i­cism for its dis­so­nant non-PC look and feel.  Today they’ve moved closer to native.)

I think from this per­spec­tive the Pho­to­synth app is a great suc­cess.  Its inter­ac­tion model, look and feel are very Metro, dis­tinc­tively ours, yet it works in the iPhone con­text.  It has a dis­tinct voice, yet remains trans­par­ent and usable.  It isn’t anti­so­cial in its approach to the plat­form.  I was delighted to read this post Adri­enne found on Giz­modo (unchar­ac­ter­is­tic read­ing mate­r­ial for her)—

Also, Microsoft, who as you may know makes their own mobile phone OS these days, has puck­ishly brought the Win­dows Phone 7 aes­thetic to the iPhone app, which, man, is just really really nice. You don’t realise how, I don’t know, corny all these bev­elled but­tons and 3D ani­ma­tions are until you see Microsoft’s flat, geo­met­ric UI on your iPhone’s dis­play... More apps that look like this, please.

One of the things that I think makes this eas­ier to do on mobile devices than on PCs with win­dow­ing sys­tems is the fact that mobile apps are always full-screen.  They can cre­ate self-contained worlds by book­end­ing an expe­ri­ence in time.  This works for Web pages too, because the Web has evolved from the world of “con­tent” instead of “appli­ca­tion”— one wouldn’t com­plain about dis­tinc­tive design lan­guage on a web­site, any more than one would com­plain about incon­sis­tent fonts on the cov­ers of dif­fer­ent mag­a­zines lined up on a rack.  For­tu­nately, between web­sites and mobile apps, we have the next decade pretty much covered.

Here’s one of my favorite screens from the Pho­to­synth app:

The typog­ra­phy is beau­ti­ful and clean, the visual bal­ance rem­i­nis­cent of mid-20th cen­tury Swiss design.  Sur­faces are flat, cor­ners square, and any con­tent shown is authen­tic, not just rep­re­sen­ta­tive.  That unstitched pano is a lovely arti­fact in its own right, a bit of a nod to David Hockney’s join­ers.  I hope that with this app we prove that we can have our cake and eat it too— usabil­ity, beauty, a dis­tinc­tive voice.

bloop­ers

There are a cou­ple of sim­ple rules to fol­low in order to make a great panorama.  The first is to rotate the phone in place instead of hold­ing it out at arm’s length and sweep­ing it.  This is espe­cially impor­tant in indoor envi­ron­ments, where many sur­faces are nearby and any move­ment of the focal point will result in images with dif­fer­ing per­spec­tives— which are much harder to stitch.  Admit­tedly it’s a bit awk­ward to do this.  In prac­tice it means doing a lit­tle dance around the phone— you orbit around it while it stays in place.  It helps to iden­tify a land­mark on the ground and make sure the phone stays right over it.  If you want to do a full sphere, you’ll also have to point the phone down at the ground at some point, and if you don’t want your dis­em­bod­ied feet in there, you’ll have to back away from the phone and point it down care­fully to avoid them.  You’ll look silly, but the beau­ti­ful immer­sive pano will be worth it, right?

The other rule is that when there are peo­ple in your pano, you want to try to get them to stay very still while you’re shoot­ing near them, or man­age your cap­ture in such a way that they only appear in a sin­gle photo.  Oth­er­wise, between the graph cut algo­rithm and the Helmholtz blend­ing, you’ll splinch your friends:

(The pano on the right is espe­cially inter­est­ing.  Mike is wear­ing Heather’s legs.)

One final tip.  If you can, turn on “expo­sure lock” in the set­tings screen.  This will help the blend­ing.  With expo­sure lock off, the algo­rithms must do their best to blend shots taken with very dif­fer­ent expo­sure set­tings and color bal­ances, which will some­times leave arti­facts in spite of our best efforts.  It’s not always pos­si­ble to lock expo­sure, because in some panora­mas you’ll be shoot­ing both straight at the sun and into deep shadow.

what about win­dows phone 7?

I’m sure over the com­ing days and weeks we’ll be answer­ing, over and over, the “why didn’t this ship first on Microsoft’s own phone” ques­tion.  Our approach to the design of the Pho­to­synth app hope­fully pro­vides some evi­dence that we very much think of Win­dows Phone 7 as brethren and inspi­ra­tion, not to men­tion proof that Microsoft can make beau­ti­ful things.  (Such a joy and a relief, after the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of Win­dows phones!)  If we could have shipped first on these devices, we would have.  But the level of cam­era and low-level algo­rith­mic hack­ing needed to make Pho­to­synth work meant that, if we wanted to get this out as quickly as pos­si­ble— and we surely did— we needed to do so on a plat­form that pro­vided the nec­es­sary low-level device access.  Win­dows Phone 7 doesn’t yet allow this for apps.  It will soon.  It’s worth keep­ing in mind that the first sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of iPhone device and OS wouldn’t have allowed us to build this app either.  For now, iPhone’s plat­form matu­rity— and of course the large num­ber of peo­ple with iPhones out there— meant that it made sense for us to go for it.

At Bing we’re always inter­ested in reach­ing as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, which means we’ll always develop for mul­ti­ple plat­forms.  But over time, we’ll be doing more and more of our early inno­va­tion on the Win­dows Phone.

future

We hope that in addi­tion to being a good party trick, the Pho­to­synth app will have lots of peo­ple record­ing places and events they want to remem­ber and share with friends.  And share with the world.  A major ele­ment in the larger vision of Pho­to­synth is to let many dif­fer­ent types of media con­nect together into a kind of shared “world tapes­try”.  I’ll be talk­ing about this, shar­ing both our think­ing and some of our lat­est work, at Where 2.0 on Wednes­day.  That might require another post.  It’s excit­ing, in any event, to be fur­ther­ing this story again, after a year spent mostly on incu­bat­ing other aspects of Bing Mobile.


Posted in maps, mobile | Tagged , , , , , , | 27 Comments

minusculoyer

Posted on April 12, 2011 by blaise

minus­cule is the tutoyer of the internets.

none of these are new obser­va­tions, but— i’ve been notic­ing again the “inner sig­nals” of writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion by email and text.  orthog­ra­phy of course tells you loads about a per­son— like, in so-called real life, accent, dic­tion, hair and clothes, smell, and so on.  are there errors?  what are their nature?  are there delib­er­ate mis­spellings, abbre­vi­ated spellings like “thru”, num­ber­slang like “l8r”, omit­ted apos­tro­phes in “it’s”, are the omis­sions arbi­trary or delib­er­ate?  (guess: “it’s” and “its” will col­lapse accept­ably to “its” over the com­ing decades, fol­lowed by the lin­ger­ing ill­ness and death of apos­tro­phe cul­ture as a whole.)

one of the sig­nals i’m find­ing myself most attuned to is the vari­a­tion in the use of all-lowercase.  typo­graph­i­cally, as has been men­tioned, i’m fond of the low­er­case and its uncial script roots— hell, every­one is— and from the ear­li­est days of the inter­nets there’s been a taboo on the harsh mind­sound of ALL CAPS.  all-lowercase is prac­ticed rig­or­ously by some (in cer­tain prod­ucts this requires an explicit turning-off of auto­matic cap­i­tal­iza­tion fea­tures), and the effect is both casual and self-deprecating, though in the lat­ter capac­ity it must be used with care to avoid the thing becom­ing its oppo­site.  (i’m think­ing of poncy email from a cer­tain famous designer here.)  the heart of the mat­ter is the minus­culiza­tion of the “i”, which almost looks like a lit­tle bow, doesn’t it?  you know, the dot is the head, and so on?  (nev­er­mind.)  some­thing i’ve never seen but expect to come from japan one of these days is an email ren­der­ing “i” in low­er­case, but “You” cap­i­tal­ized.  a more grace­ful vari­a­tion was sent to me recently by a very lit­er­ate old friend whom i’ve missed these last cou­ple of years, writing

i thought of you today bc i’m going to Port­land on Fri­day to read, not that that makes robust sense.

what does make robust sense here is the lovely use in this con­text of the con­trac­tion “bc”, and the con­trast­ing cap­i­tal­iza­tions of Port­land and Friday.


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