Link: Teddy’s

Long (7.6″) and skinny (38), these guys are famed for starting life as Fidel Castro’s personal smokes. Produced in 1964 and named in 1969. Up until the early 1980s, they were exclusively given as diplomatic gifts. It was not until 1984 when they were made available for public consumption.

Really like the box.

I like that opening the box is an event.

And there they are. The vitola is Laguito No. 1.

Bottom of the box. This is a relatively new box, so like wine, these cigars will need to be put down for some ageing. Not lighting these right away is going to be a great exercise in self-constraint.

Cheers!

Links:
Habanos
Cigar Aficionado has a great article on Lanceros published in the July/August 2008 Print edition; Love of Lanceros

Apparently, it’s pretty hard to get a seat at one of Craig Thornton’s dinners. But luck would have it, I got an invite to Wolvesden. On my first try! (It’s okay if you hate me, I’ll still be your friend). To be fair, the chef doesn’t decide who gets an invite. I believe it’s a pretty random process, unless you’ve been unfortunate to get on their blacklist.

Anyways, the event started at around 7-ish pm, when a guy greeted us (in total, 8 different couples) on the sidewalk and escorted us to this spacious loft filled with all sorts of cool shit. They also had a pretty good music playlist (i.e. XX – Intro) adding to the ambiance.

After putting down coats, purses, and wines, everyone wandered around. As expected, many people gravitated towards the kitchen to see what was up for the night.

Walking around, I found the 9-course menu posted on the refrigerator…

 Table of fresh produce.

When we arrived, there were quite a number of things already prepared in the kitchen, including these delicious-looking Brussels sprouts (fifth course).

 Getting ready to chow down, I chose to sit somewhere in the middle, next to the crocodile head, of course.

Overhead. antlers, jaw bone, foot.

Pretty soon after we cracked open a bunch of bottles of wine, and making introductions and pleasantries, the first course was served. Pork belly. Yea, we started with pork belly! In truth, everything was good, but this dish was my favorite of the night. It had all of the complexity I craved – sweet, savory, fatty, yum.

After the first course was cleared, wandered around some more, watching the chef prepare the rice-less risotto for the next dish.

Tilefish. Curious enough, no one at the table knew what this fish was about, so I wikipedia’d it. I really enjoyed the crunchy bits in the pea risotto.

Scallop. The included bacon onion relish pretty much made the dish. Yum.

Crab, fava beans, and cheddar fritters. Whenever someone mentions fava beans, I immediately get the image of Hannibal Lector describing how he ate some guy’s liver with fava beans and chianti.

About half way through the dinner, there was a bit of pause, which allowed the group to rest, converse, and be merry (i.e. drink some more).

Yep. Everyone came with a bottle or two, and they were all opened. I considered bringing some Laphroaig scotch, but for whatever reason, decided to be on my best behavior and brought Port wine instead. Still, after the third course or so, I managed to have 3 wine glasses, filled with different colored wines, in front of me…. My friend thought outside the box. She brought beer! Another couple brought cherry coke.

The view from near the entrance. On the right, out of view, is the chef’s sleeping area, bathroom, etc.

After some time, the vegetable dish came out. I’m still not sure which one of the items is carrot top. Besides the crazy number of ingredients, the taste was remarkably robust. A medley of deliciousness.

Rabbit meat balls underneath a slice of pasta. Yum. I wished the portion was bigger!

The final savory dish was also the most beautiful. Lamb. The presentation was pretty. Artistically violent. I guess it fits in with the whole wolf(ves) theme. I particularly liked the cocoa soil over the mashed potatoes – a very interesting and good combination.

 Around this time, many people (girls) were getting stuffed. Still, they of course found their second stomach to consume the delightful desserts, including this creamy panna cotta.

We concluded with this great coffee pound cake. donut (!) ice cream. and a bunch of strawberry goodness.

At the end of our meal, we were each handed a red envelope and asked to donate whatever we felt the meal was worth.

As the party was winding down, but before leaving, got the opportunity to chat a bit with the chef. Cool guy!

Here he is with one of his friends.

If I get another invite, I’ll definitely be back. Cheers!

Tip: Did you know that it’s okay to park in a yellow, loading zone after 6pm, at least in LA? You won’t get a ticket as long as there are no other signs. Serious.

If interested, I recommend checking out this interview that the chef did with L.A. Weekly (Part 1 and Part 2). Good stuff.

Link: Wolvesmouth

Standing in the front row of the viewing area, reserved for press (I’m not press by the way, just rebellious with a sense of VIP entitlement), I witnessed Cai Guo-Qiang simultaneously set off 40,000 bottle rockets off the north side of MOCA Geffen. Prior to showing up, I knew I was in for a treat. What I did not anticipate was that those bottle rockets would fly directly at me! Holy shit was that thing crazy. I thought I would be engulfed in flames.

When I got on the scene, I thought the fire people were being too cautious and that we were situated a bit far from the wall. But really, when it was all said and done, it was just perfect. The most prolific bottle rocket landed right in front of the fence that was protecting us art folks, or the press at least. A legit art souvenir was inches away for the taking! I didn’t take any by the way. Instead, after gathering my bearings, decided I needed a drink and a smoke, and so, met a friend at the Grand Havana Room, my new man cave.

Cheers!

Limited to 5,000 boxes of 20 cigars, the street price in 2005 was $400 a box. A couple of years ago, at auction, a box went for $1410!

At about $70 a cigar, it was, needless to say, an AMAZING smoke.

Paired the cigar with a dram of Fighting Cock.

Lots of people read poetry as well. Fun night.

When I eventually smoked it a few days later, it was such a great experience. The flavors that emerged in the one hour sitting were amazing – chocolate and berries. In addition, the draw was good and the burn held sharp all the way to the nub! This is definitely a cigar I will need to get a box of.

Copy+Paste from the Torano website:

The Exodus 1959 – 50 Years is dressed in a captivating Brazilian Arapiraca sun-grown wrapper. This wrapper – highly regarded for its bold, spicy flavor – combines perfectly with the natural sweetness of the Nicaraguan filler tobaccos from the regions of Esteli and Pueblo Nuevo. The result is a unique and luxurious flavor profile which is intense and rich, yet rounded and balanced. Sweet, creamy notes dominate the palate with subtle hints of spice, dark chocolate, and raisins adding further complexity to this sensorial experience. The finish is long and lingering with a distinct leathery note.

Wrapper: Brazilian Arapiraca Sun-Grown
Binder: Honduras
Filler: Esteli & Pueblo Nuevo, Nicaragua

Link: Toraño

The first one we had was a beer (IPA) cocktail. It had a very grapefruit taste to it. One guy cleverly called it, Island Hops.

The second drink was an Hibiscus Sour. Pretty good and refreshing.

The third drink was temporarily named “Fight for Pedro” or “Fighting Pedro,” something like that. It included bitters, bourbon (supposed to be Fighting Cock), sherry (Pedro Ximenez), and mint. The hallmark of this cocktail is that it’s shaken, which apparently is against the mixologist rules for this combination of ingredients. I’ll take their word for it. But what really is certain, is that this was my favorite drink of the night. It was complex and still refreshing.

The last drink of the night, the guys were especially proud of – a cold Irish Coffee made with no water.

I recall that to get the coffee taste, they used actual coffee and cold-seeped it with Irish whiskey (Bushmills) for an extended time. This was a really impressive drink. My second favorite.

It was a great night. Cheers!

Link: Seven Grand

I think he’s right. The ingredients are pretty simple – pork belly, arugula, tomato, mayo, and ciabatta bread. What really makes the sandwich, in my opinion, is the glaze. It’s like maple syrup goodness. The combination of sweet, savory, and carbs. Yum.

Still kind of hungry, we tried the Roasted Marrowbones, which was served with shaved fresh horseradish, shallots, parsley, and four slices of grilled ciabatta. This was my first, and definitely not my last time, having this. I really liked this a lot, and will now be ordering this whenever I encounter it at another restaurant’s menu. It was fatty, rich, and satisfying.

Cheers!

Link: Library Bar

Overall, I liked the food, particularly the uni pasta (I always order some version of this whenever I visit a Japanese spaghetti place). The noodles had a perfect firmness, and the whole thing was really flavorful.

I also tried a bit of other things, like the White Snapper Carpaccio, which was not my favorite. I found the onions and cilantro a bit too overpowering.

The Grilled Romaine with Parmesan Dressing was something new I’ve never had before. It was okay and kind of tasted like cabbage.

The Prosciutto Salad was a bit of a let down, in terms of look and flavor. It was a mixture of mini slices of prosciutto, some mixed greens, Parmesan cheese, and a balsamic vinaigrette.

The Shrimp Mousse Ravioli with Shiitake Mushroom Sauce was actually really good. Very rich.

I might be back.

Link: Orris

Copy + Paste of the cigar’s description:

In order to create Partagas Black Label, Daniel Nuñez and his colleagues spent 10 years perfecting the Medio Tempo wrapper and the La Vega Especial binder. Cuban-seed Medio Tempo wrappers are darker, heavier and richer than other wrappers because they are harvested only after they have been allowed to age on their plants 50% longer than other wrapper leaves. The La Vega Especial binder is sun-grown in the Dominican Republic to give it a deep, rich flavor of its own. To enhance the cigar’s full-bodied character even further, the blend is a mixture of Nicaraguan Ligero and Dominican Piloto Cubano Ligero. These tobaccos and a larger ring gauge translate into a richer, fuller-bodied flavor.

Link: General Cigar

Link: Grand Havana Room

Wine Advocate: It is my opinion that Taylor’s tawny ports are the best of their type. When tasted against other tawnys, they all exhibit more aromatic personalities, greater fruit and ripeness, and a wonderful sweetness and length. Although I find the Thirty Year Old Tawny admirable, I prefer the richer, more vibrant Twenty Year Old Tawny. Score: 92. —Robert Parker, February 1995.

Wine Enthusiast: Although this famous name has produced quite a light 20-year-old, that lightness is more than made up for by the beautiful, smooth flavors, the taste of lemon jelly, dried apricots and peaches, and fine, fresh acidity. Score: 90. —Roger Voss, August 01, 2006.

Copy+Paste from Taylor’s website:

Taylor’s is one of the most highly respected producers of aged tawny Port wines.  This style of Port is fully matured in seasoned oak casks each holding about 630 litres of wine.  Here, over many years of ageing, the Port wine gradually takes on its characteristic amber ‘tawny’ colour, slowly developing the complex mellow flavours and the smooth luscious palate which are the hallmarks of this style of port. 

Taylor’s blends its magnificent 20 year old tawnies from its extensive reserves of old cask aged Ports matured in the firm’s cool and tranquil cellars (known as  ‘lodges’) in Oporto on Portugal’s Atlantic coast. 

In the 20 Year Old tawny, the fruit has mellowed further than in the 10 Year Old, and the spicy, nutty aromas of ageing are more powerful and intense.

The most popular 20 Year Old Aged Tawny Port in the United States of America.

These Port wines are bottled when ready to drink and do not require any further ageing in bottle.

Link: Taylor’s Port

They served from the Fine Oak Series, the 10- (pictured above), the 15-, the 17-, and the 18-year old. And from the Sherry Oak series (which is my favorite range from The Macallan), the 12-year old.

If you’re interested in single malt scotch, or just like free drinks (like me), The Macallan tastings are always fun.

Link: Raise The Macallan

To accompany my draft beer, I ordered the Library Burger. They had four other burgers on the menu that sounded equally appetizing, but I wanted to try their signature this first go round. Content with my choice, the bartender also mentioned that this was his favorite of the burgers.

Anyways, according to the menu, the Library Burger contains caramelized onions, sweet pickles, white cheddar, arugula, and mustard. My first impression upon seeing it was that it looked pretty small, like Umami burger small. But never mind the size, what really mattered was how it tastes. If it was as good as Umami, I wouldn’t hesitate ordering a second burger to compensate for the size. So, how was it?

In a word, okay. Though very tasty and worth a repeat visit (if I’m hungry and grabbing a beer at the bar), the burger experience wasn’t as great as I really wished it’d be. Specifically, I found the patty to be on the thin side, the bun to be a bit too hard (like it was over-toasted), and the mustard to be overwhelming. So, no second burger. Oh well.

Link: Library Bar

Cai Guo-Quiang, in orange, pouring gun powder…

Volunteer assistants laying over stencils…

When they were ready to ignite the gunpowder, we all had to move away from the barrier and sit ourselves on the bleachers. The actual ignition lasted for just a moment. And like most things that go bang, it was pretty cool to see.

The resulting smoke triggered MOCA’s fire alarm system. And that was my cue to leave. On my way out, I snapped this picture of the almost final product. You can see them starting to install the finished panels. Pretty cool.

Overall, it was a fun way to pass some time and has made me more anxious for the exhibition opening.

Though it’s on the mild side, I liked it so much that I had to give a couple of these to some friends to enjoy.

Hanging outside at LACMA…

Cheers!

Links:
Humo Jaguar
Rocky Patel
Good Review of Rocky Patel Edicion Unica Toro

When we left, I also ran into a couple of old pals from my UCLA days.

Of course, the way one lights his or her cigar is a personal choice. And for a while, I primarily used matchbooks, where I would ignite and use the entire matchbook in one go. That was cool and all, but I figured that if I’m going to semi-regularly indulge in a smoke with my libations, I should probably invest in a good lighter. So, like everything else that interests me, I researched the hell out of cigar lighters – looking at features offered across the price spectrum, from cheap and minimally functional to luxurious and over the top.

Now, if money were no object, I would not flinch about getting a classic St Dupont Gatsby. It’s masculine and exudes luxury. Maybe one day!

Well, after doing more realistic research, I came across this Black Label El Presidente lighter that distinguishes itself from other butane lighters with its Flat Flame technology – the engineers found a way to diffuse the flame from a typical, single rod to a thin, flat flame. It’s a pretty ingenious idea, if you ask me. By simply altering the flame shape, smokers, when lighting the cigar, can employ a painting motion at the foot to cover more surface area. Naturally, this provides greater control for toasting and touching up the cigar. Cool, right?

So, narrowing my search down to this lighter model, I was briefly torn between getting the black one or the copper one. Both looked really cool, but in the end, I was more drawn to the metallic, satin finish of the copper. Finally, bargain hunting, I found the best price off of Amazon ($79 vs $100 MSRP).

And here we are. As the close up indicates, it is a solidly built lighter. About the size of a 5-pack of chewing gum, it is all metal and feels substantial in the hand, and works as advertised. I am very pleased with this lighter! That’s my review =)

….. for a much better review (and one that actually convinced me to get this lighter), click >>here<<.

To light, flip open the spring-aided lid to expose the mirror-finished head, and pull down the black grooved trigger.

Bottom. Pretty standard looking. This lighter is made by Lotus.

See? Flat flame. Pretty cool.

Links to buy:
Black Label El Presidente (Copper Satin), like mine!
Black Label El Presidente (Black)

Link: Schott NYC

le cozze. mountain of steamed mussels flavored with garlic and chile flakes, served with toasted crostini. I really enjoyed soaking up every last drop of mussel juice with the bread. yum!

Actually, not really wanting to fuss with the menu, we all had the tasting menu, as well as our own bowls of steamed mussels inserted between the 1st and 2nd course. Thank goodness, because there was no way I wanted to share my mussels =)

So, what was exactly on the tasting menu…

We started with il carpaccio di scampi, which was basically langoustine (prawn) carpaccio, asparagus, yuzu, roe.

After the mussels, we had carbonara pasta. This was really rich and creamy!

Our fourth savory item was duck served with chestnut puree, potato, endive, and some balsamic reduction. This was very tasty.

 Finally, for dessert, la torta al cioccolato - dark chocolate palette, strawberry, pears, candied pistachio

As expected, a pretty good meal.

Cheers!

Link: Drago Centro

So, what I have pictured here is my second purchased bottle of The Glenlivet Nàdurra, and the cork top of the first bottle that I kept as a memento.

As can be read from the label, this scotch whisky was aged for 16 years in old bourbon barrels (where it gets its vanilla notes), bottled in November 2011 at natural cask strength (54.2% abv for batch 1111Q), has no artificial coloring, and is non-chill filtered. That is, it has qualities that I can appreciate. Taste wise, it is pretty refreshing with its floral and fruitiness. And with its high alcohol content, rather than add water, I like to continually enjoy this scotch neat but over an extended amount of time, savoring a sip every 5 minutes or so. Not only does this prolong the experience, allowing the whisky to breathe lets a whole plethora of flavor notes emerge – spicy, citrus, bitter, new band aids, vanilla, oak, fruity, aniseed.

I really like this. Cheers!

Link: The Glenlivet

That’s one of the crowd favorite Luchadores, Dirty Sanchez, above, walking around during intermission. Very cool.

Tip: Doors open an hour early. Seats are first come first served. Wish I knew that.

I’d definitely go again.

 Link: Lucha VaVOOM

I really like that tee underneath the biker jacket. New York Fuckin City.

Link: Tim Hamilton

What I can say for certain, though, is that this is another great drink from Laphroaig. It’s got tons of peat smoke on the nose and palate. In fact, I like it much better than the standard 10. Finally, its higher alcohol volume gives the cask strength a run for its money!

Link: Laphroaig

When we arrived, there was ample seating upstairs, but we decided to settle at the bar, and the one thing that immediately caught my eye was their whisk(e)y selection. Whoever stocked the place has great taste! I usually have beer with burgers but when I spotted a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle on the top shelf….yea, there was no way I was going to pass on this opportunity. For those not familiar, Pappy Van Winkle is among the critically-acclaimed wheat bourbons on the market and it’s also one of the scarcest, normally selling for twice its MSRP. Having been unsuccessful in acquiring a bottle of my own, I happily paid a reasonable amount for a dram of the 15 year old (you can see it pictured next to the ketchup below), which is not only bottled at a higher proof, it’s in my opinion, better than the older and pricier 20- and 23- year old. After savoring the first sips, I turned my attention to the food….

Between the two of us, we tried three burgers – The signature Short Order (pictured left), of course, Nancy’s Backyard Burger (foreground), and Amy’s Turkey Burger (in the back).

Between the bun, the Short Order burger comprised of a grass-fed beef patty, slice of semi-soft Morbier cheese, griddled mushrooms, some Bibb lettuce, and mustardy mayo, which made this standout from other burgers I’ve had. It was a good start.

In lieu of fries, we had the Short Order Spuds, which were asymmetrically torn chunks of fried potatoes, with their dipping sauce (sour cream? with bacon bits on top). Sinfully yum.

Next, I became acquainted with Amy’s Turkey Burger, which was good for a turkey burger. The organic turkey patty was accompanied by sage cheddar cheese, celery, leeks, and more mustardy mayo… they really like their mustardy mayo here.

Finally, saving the best for last, I savored every bite of Nancy’s Backyard Burger, which had a special blended patty and came with thick slabs of artisan bacon, slice of comté cheese, avocado mash, grilled onions, a slice of tomato, iceberg lettuce, and spicy mayo. My friend and I both agreed this was the best burger of the three we had that night. It was simple and had the standard condiments, albeit a bit fanciful…. It was familiar with some added class.

Overall, I enjoyed my experience at Short Order. I’ll definitely come back on another weeknight.

Cheers!

Link: Short Order

Society Notes:

Summery, with Jelly Tots, boiled sweets and fresh fruits followed by Cream Tea with Iced Gem biscuits. Water introduces lemon meringue and rhubarb and custard chews. A smooth texture, sweet taste and scented aftertaste.

The route I’d take: Beverly Hills > New York > London > Paris > Hong Kong > Rome >> Athens > Geneva.

For me, the real challenge is finding a way to clear my calendar for the next month!

Here are a couple of pics…..

Copy + Paste of the Press Release:

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” by Damien Hirst.

The exhibition will take place at once across all of Gagosian Gallery’s eleven locations in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, opening worldwide on January 12, 2012. Most of the paintings are being lent by private individuals and public institutions, more than 150 different lenders from twenty countries. Conceived as a single exhibition in multiple locations, “The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” makes use of this demographic fact to determine the content of each exhibition according to locality.

Included in the exhibition are more than 300 paintings, from the first spot on board that Hirst created in 1986; to the smallest spot painting comprising half a spot and measuring 1 x 1/2 inch (1996); to a monumental work comprising only four spots, each 60 inches in diameter; and up to the most recent spot painting completed in 2011 containing 25,781 spots that are each 1 millimeter in diameter, with no single color ever repeated.

In conjunction with the exhibition will be the publication of The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011, a fully illustrated, comprehensive and definitive catalogue of all spot paintings made by Hirst from 1986 to the present. Published by Gagosian Gallery and Other Criteria, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011 includes essays by Museum of Modern Art curator Ann Temkin, cultural critic Michael Bracewell, and art historian Robert Pincus-Witten as well as a conversation between Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari.

The third issue of the Gagosian App for iPad will also launch January, providing an interactive, in-depth look at the series that features more than ninety spot paintings.

“Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011” precedes the first major museum retrospective of Hirst’s work opening at Tate Modern in London in April, 2012.

Link: Gagosian

Link: Kushiyu

Originating from Bowmore, the oldest distillery (est. 1779) on Islay, this independent bottling was quite a treat!

The Society’s tasting notes:

The nose is varied and generous; treacle toffee, incense, beeswax, heather twigs and cakes (syrup sponge, ginger cake, Battenburg). The palate is big, sweet and smoky; toffee apples, roasted peppers, leather, honey and chocolate limes.

 If I could add, chewing this whisky neat reminded me of  lychee, while the finish gave a hint of rubber, durian fruit, and xylitol gum. This dram definitely had a unique flavor profile, and since it is sold out, is one that I will miss greatly.

Cheers!

Links:
Bowmore
SMWS (Scotch Malt Whisky Society)

It was cast and unveiled (in my opinion) at the peak of the Banksy hype in 2006.

It’s an edition of 12 and measures 25 by 30 by 21cm.; 9 7/8  by 11 3/4  by 8in.

Catalog quotes Banksy:

They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilizations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved then rats are the ultimate role model.

It’s painted bronze measuring 91 by 54 by 57cm.; 35 7/8 by 21 1/4 by 22 1/2 in. Executed in 2006.

Marc Quinn:

I was looking for the current incarnation of the Venus/Aphrodite archetype, and I looked at the various film stars and models. It was Kate’s ubiquity and her muteness that made her seem to me more like a classical divinity than any of the others I considered; she is someone who never really speaks but who is continually spoken about; that makes her a very effective mirror of ourselves – our desires, our obsessions, our dreams. What’s still more intriguing is the way that her and her image have parted company – she has one life and the image has a different one.

If I had the funds, I’d buy it.

Link: Hermès

Well, it definitely is a refreshing dram. Though still not as complex as single malts, it is unique among the blends. It’s sweet and fruity, think freshly sliced Gala apples and Asian pears. There’s the usual vanilla nose, as well, with a subtle peatiness. The finish is in the medium spectrum, and as good as it gets for a 43% ABV whisky. Overall, I like it.

This would be a wonderful to have in the Spring time at a park picnic or outdoorsy concert.

Link: Compass Box

Link: Thom Browne

On view, at Jerome Zodo‘s booth, was one of Solmi’s most controversial works, The Evil Empire, a 4-minute video that chronicles the exploits of a porn-addicted Pope in the fictional town Vatic-Anal-City (A trailer of it is at the end of this post). I watched it a few times, back to back, and with each viewing, I chuckled and marveled at the genius of it. The subject matter definitely inspired conversation; it hit every scandal that the Catholic church should be ashamed of, and then some. But the beauty of it all was how it was presented – a series of crude, bright drawings strung together stop-motion style. This was probably the first time I ever gave consideration to owning video art. Well, this was before I came to know the price – $20,000! And being around since 2008, all 10 copies of this video are now accounted for. I was able to at least leave with a copy of the catalog.

In addition, there were a bunch of these panels from the film mounted on wood that appealed to me.

…and if things go my way, I may be able to acquire a few of them.

Here’s a copy + paste of Federico’s Artist Statement:

As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing in my works, to analyze the paradoxical and neurotic urban landscape and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society. These are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based.

The protagonists of my videos are always catapulted into the middle of an undecipherable reality. Typically they are all lost characters; confused inhabitants of a world in which are desperately seeking their role and their identity and forced to live inside a mad and hostile society without rules. This is a world that inexorably continues to regenerate and to renew itself, while at the same time is falling in front of our eyes. The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling apart. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based.

 Here’s a video clip of The Evil Empire:

Link: Federico Solmi

le animelle. crispy sweet bread, gnocchi, huckleberry, rapini.

le pappardelle al fagiano. pappardelle, roasted pheasant, morel mushrooms.

le cappesante. diver scallop, acini di pepe, parsnips, olives, tomato confit.

Link: Drago Centro

Searching by my name, I found that I made it on to the hood. Check it out….

..very awesome.

]]> http://www.thekickitspot.com/2012/01/im-immortalized-on-the-hood-of-a-porsche/feed/ 0 http://www.thekickitspot.com/2012/01/drago-centro-tasting-menu-january-2012/ http://www.thekickitspot.com/2012/01/drago-centro-tasting-menu-january-2012/#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:29:35 +0000 admin http://www.thekickitspot.com/?p=4550 Tried the new tasting menu….

From the 2012 Winter Cocktail Menu, had the Remedy X. rosemary infused bushmills black bush blended irish whiskey, ginger infused agave, lemon.

il salmone. smoked salmon, baby fennel, celery root panna cotta

la pasta. sea food agnolotti, mussels, clams, lemon, chile

l’agnello. roasted rack of lamb, butternut squash, panelle, swiss chard

la torta al cioccolato. flourless chocolate cake, basil gelato, candied almonds

Link: Drago Centro

this is how I roll…

saw this on my way out. funny.

Link: ALAC

Copy + Paste of the article that went with the slideshow:

In a season full of black-tie benefits, it was at the more dressed-down art events where Los Angeles’ most interesting fall fashion could be found. Last week’s LAX Art’s benefit auction, held at The Brick Building in the Culver City, Calif. gallery district, drew a mix of street-chic looks and vintage flair — from colorful coats and tights to quirky accessories to, of course, the requisite black.

Link: WWD

Link: Dolce&Gabbana

In any case, at Prada, I’ve always found the cuts to be smart, the fabrics luxurious, and the construction built with quality. It reasons, then, that I’m always interested when Milan Fashion Week rolls around. And, scanning the photos from Prada’s Fall/Winter 2012 collection, this is definitely my favorite look.

I really like the contrast in pinstripe thickness between the pants and jacket. The accoutrements in the chest pocket are spot-on as well, adding color to an otherwise, somber palette.

Link: Prada (You can watch the show on their website)

Notes from LACMA:

During a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2000, Ligon held workshops in which children were invited to fill in images taken from coloring books from the 1960s and 1970s that were intended to foster cultural knowledge and pride among black children. The books included historical and contemporary African Americans, including Harriet Tubman, Malcom X, and Isaac Hayes.

The participating children hailed from diverse ethnic backgrounds and were mostly unaware of the figures they colored or the ideological agenda they were meant to promote. Sometimes they painted them a deep brown, but in other instances afros became bright orange, Frederick Douglass’ eyes blue, and Hayes’ beard blond.

These images became the basis for the paintings… “Icons are made and remade,” he has remarked. “The project is about getting at that mutability through these kids’ drawings and my reiterations of them… The slipperiness of the images…and the anxiety around that slipperiness was interesting to me.”

 =)

From the website:

Islay, South Shore

Wet peat, raw oysters, almond oil, smoked mussels, crispy duck, heather smoke, hot diesel engine, earthy dunnage floors and a whiff of perfumed new make made a diverse first nose. Diesel, dirty like a burnt pan, white pepper, rock salt and grilled mackerel or sardines to taste; while water made it sweeter and perfumed. There were mentions of Brylcreem, cinder toffee, flake (Australian gummy shark) and one Panellist was ice fishing with Grumpy Old Men Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau. To taste this was ‘easy drinking’, smoky, salty, sweet, earthy; one Panellist had radicchio or red chard. Prince Charles’ favourite whisky.

Drinking tip: A brilliant Islay and a very interesting example of the make

Colour: Platinum gold
Cask: Refill hogshead
Age: 12 years
Date distilled: April 1998
Alcohol: 58.5%

With 238 bottles in existence, only 150 of them made their way to the U.S. I got 2 for myself. However, after tasting it, I think I need to create a stockpile before it’s sold out! Tastewise, it’s similar to my open bottle of Laphroaig’s 10 year Cask Strength (Batch 002; Dec. ’10), but sweeter.

As a side note, I find it curious that there exists another 29.100 bottle with the label Sticky toffee pudding ecstasy. Apparently, it’s a 20 year old Laphroaig casked in a refill sherry butt that was unveiled at 2011 Whisky Live Taipei.

For my black shoes…

I wish I did a before picture. In any case, check out the shininess on these guys! I started by rubbing the white, creamy Rénovateur all over the shoe, including the leather soles. With mink oil being the main ingredient, the leather became much more supple. After letting it sit, I followed up with applying and buffing the Créme (Cream Polish), which is made of beeswax, turpentine, shea butter, and seven other nutrient waxes. This helped to restore the color. Finally, I used Pate de Luxe , which features carnauba wax, to restore the glossy finish.

For the tan-colored shoe on the right (left foot) below, I only used Rénovateur and the neutral Pate de Luxe. The light brown Créme I got looked a bit too dark, and I didn’t want to risk it on these beauties. Maybe I’ll try it some other day. In any case, even with just the use of the two products, the left shoe (on the right) looks much more supple after absorbing the mink oil, shea butter, and other magical ingredients from the Saphir line.

Though it took me about an hour just to do these three shoes, I found the process to be very therapeutic – I was in the zone! Also, I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

Cheers!

Yum!

Link: Sushi Gen

However, inside, it came with a bunch of useful tools.

There were ….

Two of these polishing cloths, which I’d use to give my shoes the final shine.

Two large horse hair brushes, one with dark colored bristles…

..and another with light-colored bristles. They each measured approximately 7.8″ x 2.65″. Pretty Solid. I use these primarily to remove any dirt before applying any of the shoe polishes or creams.

Two smaller horse hair brushes for applying shoe polish or creams. These were 6.5″ in length, with a 1.5″ diameter head.

Lastly, cans of black and dark brown shoe cream. Admittedly, I have no intention of using these shoe creams. Well, maybe, as a backup or as a last resort. Why? because in my research, I found other products, which I’ll review in another post, that were highly praised by shoe shining people worldwide.

Cheers!

 Link: Brooks Brothers

As its name suggests, Double Black is a much more intense version of the Black Label. Or rather, it’s a much smokier experience. Black and Double Black do share the same blend components though, just in different proportions — in an interview, Johnny Walker’s Master Blender Jim Beveridge shared that in Double Black, the smaller proportion of Cardu‘s fruity and floral whisky is offset by more peatier malts from Islay distillery Caol Ila…. interesting, but makes sense.

…so, is Johnny Walker Double Black worth the hype? In a word, maybe. It is definitely fun to do a Black vs Double Black taste comparison. I see Double Black as kind of a gateway whisky to nudge whisky drinkers into developing a palate for the smokier and polarizing Islay whiskies (i.e. Laphroaig, Ardbeg, Lagavulin, etc.), and there’s definitely nothing wrong with that! With that said, I do prefer the Double Black for the nose and the taste.

However, because I regularly drink my scotch at cask strength and neat, I found Double Black a bit underwhelming. Nevertheless, it is worth a try.

Link: Johnny Walker

Link: Arfango

..and having sampled it a handful of times in the past 3 weeks, I can say for certain that I’m not liking this that much, or really, at all……Sorry.

I guess I can take solace that Jim Murray also gave it a 79 score, and thinks that it’s “absolutely all over the place. The cask selection sits very uncomfortably with the malt…”

Yea, Oban, to me, is an “eh” whisky. Oh well.

Still, sipping it evokes memories of boat rides not far off the coast, like that time I went whale watching in elementary school.

I found this great youtube clip showing Hamish Torrie, Ardbeg brand director, discussing the legend of the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

Cheers!

Link: Ardbeg

According to its wikipedia page…

Rumour has it that when the second pair of stills were put in in 1975, a time capsule was discovered behind the name plate, containing an 1898 newspaper about the distillery fire wrapped around an 1898 bottle of Aberlour. The workmen who discovered the bottle polished off four fifths of the bottle during their lunch break, but the remains of the bottle went off to the laboratories in Keith, and were analysed. A’bunadh is an attempt to recreate this single malt.

In any case, I really like it.

Here’s a great clip featuring the Aberlour ambassador talking and tasting A’bunadh

Link: Aberlour

Link: School Food

Link: Intergalactic Lovers

This particular bottle came with this additional multifaceted glass orb stopper; I like it better than the ubiquitous heavy gold UFO-looking cork top.

Cheers!

Link: Courvoisier

Ate some bernerwurst. Sausage filled with cheese, and wrapped in bacon!

 Yum. Washed it down with some Licher Hefeweizen.

Top Row:

• Hedi Slimane: Anthology of a Decade. This coffee table book set captures a bunch of Hedi’s photographs. I’m particularly intrigued by the FR (for France) book, which shows some of his couture work at Yves Saint Laurent and Dior.
• Double Breasted Velvet Blazer by Yves Saint Laurent. This is an amazing piece I need for the current party season. I wear a 36, but can take the 38 and have my tailor take it in. =)
• Ardbeg Supernova. I have yet to try this particular expression of Ardbeg. However, the reviews of it have been pretty good – a lot of peaty and smoky notes; exactly how I like my scotch. Malt Advocate gave it a respectable 90 point score.

Middle Row:

• Cannondale Supersix Ultegra DI2. It’s a road bike with heritage, race-winning pedigree, and many more features than I need, but it looks pretty badass.
• Santiago Gonzalez Card Case made from a Colombian crocodile in a rich, navy blue. When it comes to personal accessories, I prefer to have something classic, and not so mainstream.

Bottom Row:

• Mr. Hare Jopling Patent Leather Shoes. I need these, especially with the raised cube toe.
• Garmin FR 70. It’s a heart rate monitor watch with ANT+ technology, which allows it to sync with the monitor on my gym’s stationary bike. I need this to better gauge the number of calories I burn.
• Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is much, much more than a cookbook, and even though I don’t really cook, I still appreciate the craft and skills involved in it. And this six volume set seems like a good place to understand all of the techniques involved in many of the restaurants I’ve been fortunate enough to frequent.
• Lanvin Flower Lapel Pin. I like accessories.
• Pappy Van Winkle Bourbon. Illustrated is a bottle of the 20 year old, but really, I’d take a 15 year old also. Currently, there is a lot of hype about this spirit. The reviews have been stellar, and admittedly, I am very curious.

Nevertheless, at 46% ABV, nosing it is easy. It’s smoky, briny, fruity, and a bit floral. On the tongue, it is sweet and full-bodied. I really like the lingering finish. The only thing that I’d quibble over is the label. It’s contemporary but not really appealing to my aesthetics. If I didn’t almost already finish the bottle, I’d definitely decant this in a crystal container.

I picked up a bottle for about $60 at K&L Wines in Hollywood. Now, I’m hoping they get the holiday cask strength variety, which features the same character on the label but in a Santa outfit.

Link: Big Peat

Upon paying my membership dues, they sent me this elegant box as part of the welcome package….

Inside, there was a similarly green Member’s Handbook (that talks rules, history, privileges, etc.), a small green Members’ Notebook (with a bunch of blank paper to write tasting notes), a members copper lapel pin (which I’ll proudly wear at home), and most notably, four small 100 mL bottles of Single Cask Scotch from various distilleries…. which leads me to the exact reason why I joined this club.

Not only is the Scotch Malt Whisky Society a private membership club dedicated to the appreciation and consumption of the most rare and unique of single malt whiskies, but they’re also an independent bottler of the good stuff. That is, they sell unique scotch not found on store shelves, and you have to be a member to buy it……..ta-daah.

And though they work with over 120 different well-known distilleries, they do not call out the name of the distilleries. Instead, the Society refers to each by a number (the codes can readily be found through a Google search). The reasoning behind this is that since the Society bottles from a single cask, the whiskies rarely typify the characteristics of the distilleries they came from.

Anyways, so what did I get……

From left to right, I got a 20 year old Bowmore, 3.171, given the quirky name Peasant honey and lime flowers; a 13 year old Springbank, 27.88, referred to as The dignity of labour; a 15 year old Glen Moray, 35.47, called Jelly Tots and Iced Gems; and finally, a 7 year old Dailuaine, 41.47, that goes by Bentley in Zanzibar. All very unique, indeed.

Interestingly, Jim Murray’s 2012 Whisky Bible does cover 41.47. Bottled at 61.4% ABV, he rated it an 86, noting that you can’t escape the fire, but you must have a heart of steel not to enjoy the oak-barley tapestry. In any case, I’m looking forward to trying all of these bottles.

Cheers!

Link: Scotch Malt Whisky Society

In the 19^th and early 20^th century, social interaction was a richly cultivated, well-mannered affair. The tool that facilitated these interactions was the calling card. Calling cards streamlined introductions and helped remind people of new acquaintances and needed visits. The calling card also served as a way to brand your social identity. The way your card looked and felt or the way you handed it to someone communicated your standing and relationship with the receiver.

… and it’s much easier and less awkward than having to write down info on a scrap of paper, or input digits in the mobile phone on the spot. I’d much rather hand out a card.

I kept mine simple, using the standard American business card size of 3.5″ x 2,”  with 3 lines – name, phone number, and email. To add a touch of elegance, I had my info Letterpressed in black ink, using Neutraface font, on Crane Lettra 220lb stock – love the heft and thickness. It feels solid in the hand. I kept one side blank for hand-written notes and messages. Finally, I had the edges colored in gold.

In addition to The Scoundrel, I got The Turncoat (Ivory) and The Villain (Charcoal Mohair). Despite being advertised at all being 1.25,” they did come in varying sizes – not a big deal.

Link: The Knottery

Of course, we ordered a few sticks of meat for ourselves.

Also tried this spicy tuna cracker thing….

I also ordered some sea urchin. yum.

and of course, agedashi tofu and some takoyaki!

We also had some ten zaru soba……. I love Japanese food.

Link: Izakaya Honda-Ya

Link: Vivienne Westwood

What I really appreciate from this whisky, is that it is at cask strength and is non-chill filtered, which allows one to taste the maximum flavors. It really has great balance, and is one I’d proudly pour a dram for my friends. Definitely, one of my favorite scotches. I picked up this bottle from the Hollywood outlet of K&L Wines, which had it for $59 (MSRP $73), a great price! I’ll have to go back and stock pile on more.

Here’s a clip with Jim Murray and Rachel Barrie, Ardbeg’s Master Blender.

Here’s a clip with Micky Heads, Ardbeg’s Distillery Manager, discussing the tasting notes.

Here’s a review by one of my favorite Internet personalities, Ralfy!

Link: Ardbeg

Originally starting life as high-quality Golden Promise Barley, like other The Macallan products, this whisky went through the same small copper stills and also benefited from the fresh spring water from the river Spey. It was only after The Macallan realized, back in the 1990s, they had a surplus of new make spirit that they sold off some of their barrels to independent bottlers, like Alexander Murray and Company. As the label indicates, this particular bottle was distilled when I was 10 or 11 years old, in 1991.

Though not an official The Macallan bottling, Alexander Murray and Company, for Costco’s Kirkland Signature label, did a fine job developing the new make spirit.

Previously enjoying this with a couple of friends, we found this single malt scotch an absolute pleasure, and best enjoyed neat. Rich in amber color, swirling it about revealed skinny legs (the streak marks making its way down the glass). The standard 40% ABV level made nosing the dry, fruity essence easy. Tasting it was just as effortless; its prolonged time in oak barrels smoothed its bite, while its 6 month encounter with sherry casks imparted its character citrus-fruity and toffee sweetness. Its finish was short. If I could improve on the experience, I’d only have the finish linger longer.

Now sold out, I wished I had stocked up on more! It’s a great whisky that will appeal to many different tastes.

Links:
Alexander Murray and Company
The Macallan
Costco

Link: 85°C Bakery Cafe

Through education (books and tastings), I found that smoky characteristic to be ever present in the spirits distilled on the Scottish Island of Islay; it has much to do with the way their unique peat interacts with the geography, and how they prepare their barley (Laphroaig employs barley floor malting). For more information, I’ve embedded a fascinating YouTube clip of the TV show, Modern Marvels - Distilleries that describes the process.

Now, as great as the flagship Laphroaig 10 year is, I am much more enamored by the Cask Strength variety. The color is a deep gold from being aged in American oak barrels. The nose is predictably more pungent. It has a lot of the same tasting notes (peat/smoke, seaweed, medicinal/iodine, vanilla sweet) as the standard expression.

What I think sets the Cask Strength apart, then, is the finish. It is much longer. The higher alcohol content allows it to linger and linger in the mouth, enhancing the spicy and medicinal characteristics. The heat refuses to be contained in the caverns of the mouth and does escape out the nose. I particularly like that chewing (yes, chewing) the whisky brings out the sweetness. Sipping it, I know I’m consuming something woodsy and potent. Exhaling, I feel like I’m blowing fire. I really like this stuff. It’s a bottle that will be mainstay in my bar.

It should be noted that the earlier January/February 2010 bottlings of “Batch 002″ registered a higher 58.3% ABV. I doubt that I’m missing much from drinking the December batch. But if I could get my mitts on one of the early 2010′s, it would be nice to do a taste comparison.

Random Fact: Laphroaig received a Royal Warrant from the Prince of Wales in 1994.

For those wishing to imbibe, I found that Astor Wines (in New York), where I procured a couple of bottles of this, had the best deal.

Cheers!

How Laphroaig Scotch is made:

If you’re wondering, the skull and crossbones motif is the same on the other side.

Link: Smathers and Branson

When I bought the Groupon, I had every intention of ordering and introducing Chichen Itza’s signature dish to a friend, significant other, mistress, whoever, and eating after 3pm to redeem the full features. Well, honestly, I didn’t care who would accompany me, as long as I could eat this deliciousness once more or at least before the deal expired! The menu describes the dish as succulent pork marinated with achiote, sour orange juice, and spices, cooked in banana leaves, topped with pickled red onions served with sauteed black beans, rice, fried plantain and steamy tortillas…sounds good.

…… Probably even more amazing than the deal then, was finding one of the previously mentioned to either be free to eat with me, be willing to dine in South Central LA (which really isn’t bad) after 3pm (while assuring that we won’t get mugged/carjacked), eat pork (surprised to find out some of my friends are Jewish), eat spicy (their house-made habanero sauce is a must-try) or just eat for that matter (a lot of my friends are humorously anorexic).

Anyways, stars aligned, and my kickboxing friend was free, and so we ate and ate…. and not only did I succeed in consuming some of the most tender and tasty pork, I also turned another buddy into a cochinita pibil fan.

One thing I did notice was that the portions this time around was a bit skinnier than last time. Was it because I used a Groupon or is it the new standard? Not complaining, just making an observation….to complete the picture of our meal, for the appetizer, we had the ceviche pescado (refreshing), and for drinks, horchatas! Finally, the habanero hot sauce was so amazing that we both bought a bottle (only 3.50 USD each) for home usage.

Until next time.

Links:
Chichen Itza
Previous entry has recipe for Cochinita Pibil 

Really great stuff.

Showed us some of his past projects…

…. he gets around in a silver BMX bike… very cool… he was also a gracious host and had wine (with his own label), beer, and chocolate covered deliciousness for us.

 a couple of photos sit at the foot of this painting…

masking tape still on….i really like seeing behind the scenes shit like this…

a multi-blue sculpture in front of the painting…

this larger painting really caught my eye….

i could see myself living with this piece. once i get my finances in order, going to have to commission a panel.

..Definitely, one artist to keep an eye on…….Cheers!

Link: Topher Chin

Huuuuuuuuuuuge…. delicious….also, i love their “new” pickles.

Link: Brent’s Deli

View from the street….lots of people in black (myself included)…

Free booze!

tasty..

Live auction conducted by Christie’s…

the only art work I considered buying… by Ned Vena.

….. everything else was not so good.

Link: LAXArt

Predictably, this event drew more of the Fashion crowd than the Art crowd…. it’s okay, I like pretty people.

Upstairs, there was this big cube projecting Hedi’s signature black and white images while LA-based No Age banged on drums.

Copy + Paste of an Article in The New York Times on the show:

November 9, 2011
A Fashion Designer’s Second Act
By AUSTIN CONSIDINE

WHEN Hedi Slimane stepped down as artistic director at Dior Homme in 2007, Fashion Wire Daily summed up his tenure this way: “Slimane leaves Dior with the well-earned reputation as the single most influential men’s designer this century, the most copied of his peers and the only one to achieve the status of a rock star.”

The comparison was apt, given Mr. Slimane’s celebrity and his role in styling the likes of Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Jack White, and the outsize reputation he garnered in his relatively brief life as a fashion designer, starting at Yves Saint Laurent in 1996, when he was just 28, and then at Dior in 2000.

Few people leave their profession when they are at the top of the game. In fashion, perhaps only Tom Ford comes to mind. But even Mr. Ford — after a stint in Hollywood that culminated in his direction of the Oscar-nominated “A Single Man” — came back into the fold and is now designing again.

But Mr. Slimane seems to have left fashion behind with nary a second thought, reinventing himself as a photographer in the past few years, one who has produced an array of strikingly intimate portraits, nearly all of them black and white, of some of the most famous faces in contemporary culture: Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Brian Wilson, Gisele Bundchen, Robert De Niro and Kate Moss.

Never one to talk volubly about himself — interviews from when he was at Saint Laurent and Dior were infrequent, and now read as if they might have been slightly torturous for the young designer — Mr. Slimane has remained somewhat elusive in his new career. He regularly declines to talk to the press and consented to an interview only under the condition that it be conducted solely by e-mail.

His postfashion life has not gone entirely unnoticed, however. Most recently, Mr. Slimane’s photographs of an all-grown-up Frances Bean Cobain — the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love — became an Internet sensation, bringing Mr. Slimane’s name back into the public domain.

Those portraits of Ms. Cobain — “It was about a simple testimony of her 18 years,” Mr. Slimane wrote in an e-mail — followed a series of well-received gallery shows in Europe and the release of a new book of Mr. Slimane’s photos, “Anthology of a Decade: 2000-2010.” And now there is the unveiling of an exhibition of his new work, “California Song,” which opens on Saturday at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center.

Taken together, they represent something of a coming-out party for Hedi Slimane, photographer.

Certainly, for Jeffrey Deitch, recently appointed the director of the Los Angeles museum, Mr. Slimane’s work is worthy of a major multimedia exhibition, which will include prints and projections and feature music by No Age, a Los Angeles band.

“I’ve always, from the beginning, thought that he was one of the most original artistic voices of his generation,” Mr. Deitch said in a telephone interview. “I’m fascinated with artists like Hedi, where there’s a vision of art that goes beyond one’s medium.”

As the name of the show suggests, Mr. Slimane, who is French, has found something of a muse in the state of California.

“It is just about alignments really, and everything falls into place right now,” he said about Los Angeles, which he has called home since last year. “Artists, museums, and galleries are much stronger. There is also the space for everyone, the distance to elaborate. It certainly had a big influence on me.”

When one looks at much of Mr. Slimane’s American work from the last few years, it is hard not to think of the Swiss photographer Robert Frank, the consummate European outsider looking in, identifying and reassigning to Americans their own lost mythology.

“It is almost about a utopia,” Mr. Slimane said of the show, adding: “I discovered Los Angeles in the late ’90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.”

Mr. Deitch said that in Mr. Slimane’s work there seemed to be no clear line between where photography ended and music, fashion or fine art began.

“One of the reasons why there’s such a connection between the photography and the clothing design is that his vision is sculptural,” Mr. Deitch said.

It is difficult to examine Mr. Slimane’s photo work separately from his reign atop the world of men’s fashion. In particular, the Dior years would define a very specific moment in his and pop culture’s conjoined histories. The black skinny jean, the skinny black tie, the short-waisted leather jacket or snug blazer: his work at Dior, where he created Dior Homme, is credited with helping bring men’s wear from the loose-fitting, slacker style of the 1990s into the postmillennial look of form-fitting, clean lines.

When Mr. Slimane left Dior amid well-publicized infighting with executives, published reports suggested he wanted to start his own label and possibly move into women’s fashion. Since then, however, the world of design is one he has not seemed particularly eager to rejoin.

“With fashion design, there was also always a risk at the time to lose the sense of the perspective, the discernment,” he said, adding: “It might have been perceived as an abrupt switch for others, but it felt like precisely the right moment for me, in 2007. I had already mainly defined my style, and could let it on its own for a while, see where it ends up, or survives in the streets.”

For Mr. Slimane, now 43, full immersion in photography was a return to an interest he pursued while growing up. As a student, he took classes in photography and studied political science, in hopes of becoming a reporter and photographer on international affairs.

Ultimately, he would switch his focus to art history. Fashion came next, which, like his photography today, exhibited an intense fixation on rock culture.

“Just like zillions of children, album covers educated and informed me, and certainly did I later transpose organically, rather than by intent, those principles both in fashion design and photography,” he said.

His photo work often portrays musicians at the fringes of fame or notoriety: up-and-coming artists whose bona fides lie primarily in the independent music scene. Others, perhaps, achieved widespread renown (or infamy), like Amy Winehouse or Pete Doherty, but seemed somehow to remain at the frayed, tragic edges of rock culture.

Mr. Slimane wrote that he felt most attracted to “a certain creative honesty, an authenticity, sometimes a vulnerability” when selecting photo subjects. Those subjects, whether emerging musicians or simply someone he discovers on the street, “are usually not yet fully aware of their talent, or grace,” he explained.

“They are either completely restless, in a romantic, antiheroic manner,” he continued, “or, on the contrary, totally introverted — which you might call an ambiguous space, or rather, for me, an oblique space.”

What unifies much of Mr. Slimane’s work is its fixation on the “transient age between childhood and adulthood,” as he described it. It also, as some have praised and others have criticized, vaunts a certain prepubescent androgyny.

“It is about transformation, and search of identity,” he said. “By nature, it is undefined, both psychologically and physically.”

Mr. Slimane attributed his longstanding fascination with androgyny in part to the ambiguities in his first name.

“Hedi was and is still misspelled ‘Heidi,’ and my perception of genders ended up slightly out of focus from an early age,” he said.

“Besides this ambiguity, my first record was a Bowie album,” he said, referring to “David Live,” which he got for his sixth birthday. He absorbed glam rock, he said, which “became a normative experience for me, and certainly the most significant creative influence for the future in both design and photography.”

One of Mr. Slimane’s favorite subjects at the moment — and the promotional centerpiece of “California Song” — is Christopher Owens, the singer and the guitarist for the San Francisco band Girls. A look at Mr. Slimane’s portraits of him make it clear why: the skinny, sad-eyed singer, with his painted nails, long, stringy blond hair, tattoos and haunting stare, perfectly encapsulates the California moment — its sun-infused indie rock sounds and its slacker-fashion renaissance, recalling early images of a young, drug-addled Kurt Cobain, peering warily and wearily into the abyss of impending stardom.

Mr. Owens said in a phone interview that Mr. Slimane’s portraits of Gore Vidal, one of Mr. Owens’s favorite authors, persuaded him to pose for several shoots: one in and around Mr. Slimane’s home in Los Angeles, and two more in Mr. Owens’s environs in San Francisco.

“He doesn’t talk very much at all while shooting or while he’s hanging out; he’s more of a listener,” Mr. Owens said. “He wanted me to very much be myself, you know; there wasn’t any kind of styling or weird things like that, which are always uncomfortable. He just wanted me to do my thing and be very natural. But, at the same time, he knew exactly what he wanted to do as far as the structure of the shot went.”

Still Mr. Slimane remains elusive, even among friends.

“It’s kind of embarrassing now that we’ve become friends, but I really don’t know that much about him,” Mr. Owens said.

That intense circumspection is, of course, what seems to make Mr. Slimane who he is. It’s a kind of resolute searching in the darkness that has come to define his work, which has, in turn, documented and informed, defined and refined the era in which he lives.

“He’s interested in performers, artists, who have an affinity for and an inspiration from the darker side,” Mr. Deitch said. “The work is something that leads into the darkness, but you come out with positive inspiration. It’s not all depressing work. It looks into the deeper recesses of the soul.”

Copy + Paste of MOCA’s Press Release:

The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Hedi Slimaneʼs California Song, the first West Coast solo museum exhibition of the photographerʼs work, on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center from November 12, 2011, through January 22, 2012. California Song spans the photographerʼs “California period” and traces his explorations of cycles of urban youth culture and artistic communities, through installations of photographic essays, exhibitions, and publications.

Slimane has achieved global recognition over the past decade for his discovery and presentation of emerging musicians and artists. His publications on London youth are among the first books published about the early days of the new British punk-rock movement at the beginning of this decade, capturing the birth of the first generation of Internet users, and redefining the concept of “fans” as an indie youth imagery that has developed globally through emerging social networks. Slimaneʼs widely followed photographic “diary,” created in 2006, established and popularized an entirely new genre—the online photo diary.

Slimane has invented a new and oblique visual language to represent youth and reinvent the rock documentary. In his work, live performance is reduced to a minimal, photographic lexicon—a ritual black-and-white convention of signs. Still life photographs become almost liturgical—a singular, silent expression of youth.

“Hedi Slimane has created a new and fresh visual language for youth today,” said MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. “His black-and-white images capture the essential expression of the emerging art, fashion, and music scenes around the world.”

Slimane’s exhibition at MOCA will be divided into two parts. An installation and a series of black-and-white print photographs from his California years will be presented on the ground floor, and a sonic, motion-photography installation, produced specifically for MOCA, will be featured on the second floor. The installation will reference a multi-projection, cubic, architectural format, which Slimane has constructed in previous exhibitions to present his photographs, using serial construction and repetition to create an archaic form of cinematic narration.

Slimaneʼs allusive portraiture, in which photographs, portraits, and still life compositions are often signs or fragments of a portrait, will be projected in a repetitive, almost ritual, manner. The installation will also address “performance act,” as defined for the first time in Slimaneʼs photographic essay, Stage (2004), and will include a live performance space underneath the projection.

Select California bands, such as No Age, will contribute to the installation, using a fragmentary sound system, and composing panoramic scores—extended, visual song formats—which will form a dialogue with and define a sonic vocabulary for the photographs.

The exhibition will reference Berlin Project (1999–2002), which was presented in 2003 at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and MoMA PS1, New York, and is accompanied by the book Berlin (Steidl, 2003). It will also encompass The London Years (2003–2007) presented in 2004, 2006, and 2007 at Almine Rech Gallery, Paris; at Sprüth Magers Gallery, Munich, in 2005; at MUSAC, León, 2008; and referenced in Stage and London Birth of A Cult (Steidl) in 2005.

The California period began in July 2007, during Young American at Foam Amsterdam. In February 2011, Fragments Americana, an exhibition of Slimaneʼs photographs, was presented at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. At the same time, Almine Rech Gallery in Paris presented California Dreamin—Myths and Legends of Los Angeles, a group show curated by Slimane featuring artists John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Bruce Conner, John McCracken, Aaron Curry, Mark Grotjahn, Mark Hagen, Patrick Hill, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, Joel Morrison, Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hedi Slimane, and Aaron Young, many of whom are included in the museumʼs permanent collection and have been presented in solo, retrospective, and large-scale thematic exhibitions at MOCA. Slimaneʼs book Anthology of a Decade, published March 2011 (JRP/Ringier), includes a photography essay dedicated to the California period.

The art was kind of crap.

Fortunately, the pretty people in attendance made up for it.

Copy + Paste of the Press Release from Gagosian:

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition “11.11.11” by Adam McEwen, his first in Los Angeles.

The numerical and graphic symmetry of the title gives an epochal feel to this major exhibition by McEwen, which makes explicit the interrelationships between individual works and persistent themes in his oeuvre via a specifically devised scenography. Wall-size grids of black-and-white photographic wallpaper—from the firestorming of Dresden, to McEwen dressed up as Bomber Harris (the British air commander who perfected the technique of carpet-bombing German cities during WWII), and gum-spattered New York sidewalks—line several galleries, drawing an analogy between planned destruction and urban desecration. They provide backdrops for droll “gum” paintings and impassive, machined graphite “paintings” that recall Minimalist compositions but which are, in fact, modeled on the figured, non-slip metal doors inset into New York sidewalks.

In 1994, McEwen made a drawing of a block, labeling it BLOCK OF GRAPHITE. But it was not until 2007 that, fascinated by the possibilities of this common but often unrecognized material, he began producing via industrial machining finely carved graphite sculptures that mimic real objects. In this exhibition, precise representations of everyday items—a water cooler, a roll gate, a safe—animate the galleries with their eerie reticence, a series of simulacra perfectly and perversely rendered in what is, in reality, dark, light-absorbing, compressed carbon. (The dust from the graphite industry is sold on to pencil companies.)

In a reverse Midas-effect, McEwen has answered to the shimmering claims of Minimalist art by creating contemporary work that is freighted with the leaden melancholy of modern history. As a meditation on the many lives and deaths of art, he has created a space that conflates a beleaguered present with the afterlife of a potent and contentious moment in art history, in much the same way as his obituaries narrate the future-perfect of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, and the notorious. McEwen’s dead zone of dark relics and faded memories confronts us, literally and metaphysically, with the filthy lucre of our past and present.

Adam McEwen’s work has been included in numerous group shows including “Haunted,” the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); “Beg, Borrow and Steal,” Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2009); “The Reach of Realism,” MoCA Miami (2009); “Into Me/Out of Me,” PS1 / MOMA, New York; and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. He curated “Fresh Hell” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as the 2010 edition of the Carte Blanche series.

Link: Gagosian

We were coming from another event down the street, and I suppose since we looked the part, we were able to walk right in, past the person manning the door with no problems. hahahahaha.

for drinks, we had whisk(e)y! i had a dram of my current favorite, Lagavulin 16. she had Basil Haydens.

For starters….persimmon, pomegranate and mint salad with burrata and pistachio aillade

lamb tartare with beluga lentils, avocado, green harissa and fenugreek yogurt

For our main courses… had to turn on the flash =X

braised beef short ribs with swiss chard, roasted cippolinis and horseradish cream

the pork chop was amaaaaaaaaaaaazing.

..way too stuffed to get dessert..

Overall, it was a great meal!

Cheers!

Link: Lucques

Close up of Big Dipper, 2011, Oil on canvas, 9′ (H) X 12′ (W)

MH and his girl messing up my photo of Desert Stream, 2010, Oil on canvas, 9’ (H) X 12’ (W)

My favorite from the show: Reliance, 2010, Oil on canvas, 8′ (H) x 6′ (W)

quite crowded.

Copy + Paste of Ace Gallery’s Press Release:

In 1976, as a young painter David Amico embraced an unstylized, abstract and demanding approach to painting and has been committed to this process ever since. He executes each abstract painting by never allowing himself to follow a particular technique or style so that each painting has its own unique composition and application of paint. Over his 35-year career, this non-serial pursuit has allowed him to explore painting in a most unrestrictive and innovative manner. This inventive engagement with painting can be experienced in the compositions and paint applications of his two most recent bodies of work, the Factory/Park Series, installed in his current exhibition at Ace.

Ace Gallery is the host of the first exhibition of Factory Series in the United States (the first exhibition of this series was in Singapore last year), an exhibition that will be combined with the newly created Park Series. The imagery found in both series is jointly inspired by the urban debris of Amico’s immediate environment: the Skid Row district of downtown Los Angeles. He transforms what has been discarded and considered unsightly into building blocks of beautiful contemplative spaces. Discarded cardboard, metal piping, broken concrete, shards of glass, graffiti, vandalism, and fabric scraps from the nearby garment factories – all these materials have participated in an unlikely transformation, inviting the viewer to share in what Doug Harvey has called “a zone of phenomenological flip-flop, where [the art is] neither one thing, nor the other, nor both, and not neither. Which is where paintings belong. The result is artwork that is unusually alive, that feeds information to the viewer in a flickering, almost cybernetic light, extending an invitation for the observer to partake in the continuity between the world, the artist, and his art.” (Doug Harvey, David Amico: Coloring Outside the Lines).

Amico has a relationship with these materials far beyond mere observation; he studies them in search of their quintessence. He then meticulously abstracts their qualities in paint, distorting the reality of the original subject. His precision in creating texture is so thorough that several works such as Augustine (2009) and Window (2009) convey the illusion of a layered collage but were in fact executed through the process of detailed paint application. Beyond the masterful manipulation of his medium is a deliberate use of compositional decision-making that separates Amico from the fluid chaos of Abstract Expressionism.

Amico’s practice is an exploration in the nebulous space between art and life, blurring the lines between the junk-objects we pass unnoticed, and the art-objects we admire. No matter what the origin of the abandoned material, each has arrived in the same place – on the streets of Los Angeles – bringing into focus a visual-syntax, and ultimately democratizing the relationship between the discarded object, the art work, and the artist himself.

David Amico has established himself as one of Southern California’s most influential contemporary painters. Amico’s first major solo exhibition was held at P.S.1 in New York in 1976 and he has since exhibited in galleries in the United States, as well as Switzerland, Mexico, and China. It was for the 1976 P.S.1 exhibition he first adopted his unique unstylized practice, and he has not deviated from this methodology since.

David Amico was born in Rochester, New York in 1951. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Link: Ace Gallery

… and let her do the cooking….=X.. hahaha..

we had the “Modern Mix”…..

actually, I did help out with some of the cooking and made this star-shaped okonomiyaki….

we also had some fried chicken, takoyaki (my favorite), and some clam soup (yum!)

It was delicious, and always a treat. Until next time!

Link: Gaja

 And of course, while there, I checked out his latest show, which is simply, amazing………..

Entering the main room, I was immediately drawn to this portrait of Kara Walker.

In fact, it was my favorite in the entire show.

the details are superb…

to the right was Laurie Anderson

turning another 45 degrees…

and another 45 degrees to complete the circle, encountered the face of Zhang Huan, another one of my favorite artists.

leaving the main gallery, entering a smaller room….

In another room…

In the final room, were two tapestries. I liked this one the best.

 This was definitely a show to remember.

Copy + Paste of Blum and Poe’s Press Release:

Blum & Poe is very pleased to present new paintings, prints, and tapestries by Chuck Close. This landmark exhibition is Close’s first one-person show with Blum & Poe and represents the most significant body of work assembled in Los Angeles in sixteen years. Featured will be new large-scale oil paintings of artists Kara Walker, Laurie Anderson, and Zhang Huan; works from Close’s ongoing self-portrait series; intimately scaled portraits of musician Paul Simon and arts patron Agnes Gund; a collection of prints; and immaculately crafted Belgian Jacquard tapestries. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity for viewers to experience Close’s stylistic range and technical capacity, while providing a deeper understanding of the human portrait.

Close’s nearly 50-year exploration of the human portrait is staggering in its breadth and level of dedication. Rather than landscapes or everyday urban scenes, Close has focused on his own image and those of his peers, differentiating his practice from photorealistic painters. His early paintings were predominantly large-scale and executed in acrylic on canvas. He has since evolved a process whereby these portraits begin as photographs, which are enlarged, transferred, and gridded on the canvas, allowing Close to work with his brush meticulously inch by inch.

Close moves freely between painting, photography (both analog and digital), numerous modes of printmaking and drawing, and most recently the art of Belgian Jacquard tapestry weaving. In an effort to capture his subject’s essence, Close has become fluent in myriad techniques, both traditional and exploratory. In 1972, his artistic practice extended beyond the canvas with an introduction to printmaking at San Francisco’s Crown Point Press. Following that collaboration, Close endeavored to expand his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries. His astonishing proficiency in a diverse range of media has firmly defined each new body of work as unique and progressive for its time.

Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA) lives and works in New York. He received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle and his B.F.A and M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art and Architecture. Throughout his distinguished career, he has been the recipient of many honors, such as the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art (1991), election to Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton (2000). He has been honored with numerous retrospectives, including Close Portraits, held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1980-81), which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Retrospektive, at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1994), later presented at the Lenbauchhaus Stadtische Galerie, Munich; and most importantly Chuck Close, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989-99), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Seattle Art Museum, and Hayward Gallery, London. Close’s work is in the permanent collection of over 70 public institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, amongst many others.

Link: Blum & Poe

Link: Timothy Oulton

Whisky Advocate gave it 94 pts and reviewed…

An old classic, but how do the newest bottlings fare? Rich, chewy, slightly oily texture. Deep peat, thick smoke, iodine, brine, charcoal, seaweed, tea (Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong), and the aromas of a summer barbeque. Vanilla and light caramel soften the intensity, while subtle citrus fruit teases. Powerful, yet polished and seamless. After all these years, this whisky is still one of the finest standard-issue peaty, smoky whiskies!

I like it; I’m going to try to track down a poster of it.

Copy + Paste from Christie’s catalogue….

Like Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, which to some degree this painting resembles, Roy Lichtenstein’s I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a singular and iconic work that encapsulates a sense of its creator’s entire oeuvre and serves as a foundation stone upon which much of it was built. Painted in the summer of 1961, this deceptively simple yet deeply significant and celebrated painting is one of the very first of Lichtenstein’s pictures to draw solely on cartoon imagery for its subject-matter and to invoke what is perhaps the central theme of his work as a whole: the complex relationship between art and perception.

With its stark minimalist image of a monochrome black canvas suddenly punctured by the startling and illuminated presence of a cartoon male figure opening and looking through a peephole, I Can See the Whole Room is a spirited work that appears to visually disrupt the nature of both what a painting is and what it can be. It also serves as a pictorial symbol of the dramatic transition from abstraction to cartoon figuration that had suddenly taken place in Lichtenstein’s own art in 1961. An exemplar example of the artist’s highly intellectual approach to painting, I Can See the Whole Room is an undeniable early masterpiece of Lichtenstein’s pioneering and “Pop”-defining vision that was eagerly recognised as such by Emily and Burton Tremaine, who acquired it for their collection very soon after it was painted.

Considered consummate collectors of their age, Emily and Burton Tremaine were also the most prescient: among the first to understand and appreciate “Pop” art, they came to play an important supporting role during the early years of its genesis in America, even facilitating introductions between some of its leading members. As Emily Tremaine remembered, “about 1961, a comet flashed across this dark scene with a blazing light and we saw objects we really had not seen before. We were too busy looking within, but now we looked out and saw a ‘Yankee Doodle’ world of pop bottles, trading stamps, and comic strips. This was ‘Pop Art’, and it painted the wonderful, vulgar, jazzy, free, and crazy New York. It was not like Dada: the artists did not know one another; no-one was angry; there was no manifesto. They were just aware of the same images, but they used them differently…. We made several visits to Andy (Warhol’s) studio; we saw Jimmy Dine’s and Tom Wesselmann’s and James Rosenquist’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s. Once or twice we invited these boys to our apartment and in several instances they had not yet met one another. I remember in particular that Rosenquist met Lichtenstein for the first time here. So it seemed to me quite clear that this was not a group movement with members influencing each other, but a general sensitivity that was occurring simultaneously. Each artist was commenting on our environment in his own individual way, but with no great popular approval as far as I could see” (E. Tremaine quoted in The Tremaine Collection 20th Century Masters, exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, pp. 21 and 29).

With its simple but paradoxical sense of both looking toward and being looked at, I Can See the Whole Room is also a work that, like Pop art in general, opens up an entirely new world of conceptual possibilities for painting. And in this respect it is a work that emphatically anticipates the direction in which not only Lichtenstein’s art would develop over the ensuing years, but also that of many of his contemporaries in the 1960s. As Jeff Koons has recently noted of Lichtenstein’s oeuvre, there is a pervasive sense running through it “that he is really interested in you as a viewer,” and also in you “sharing this experience” (J. Koons, quoted in “Dorothy Lichtenstein and Jeff Koons, Florent Restaurant, Gansvoort Street, New York, April 11, 2008,” in Lichtenstein Girls, exh. cat., Gagosian, New York, 2008, p. 11). With its deliberate undermining of conventional notions of looking and seeing and its Bruce Nauman-like title emblazoned over its surface in a bold and unashamed text invading the picture-plane, I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! is a work of “Pop” art that also articulates and epitomizes, both in style and content, many of the concerns and inquiries of the Minimalist and Conceptual developments of the 1960s.

At four by four feet wide, it is a comparatively large and imposing picture, whose overt painterly surface texture, hand-drawn text, graphic markings, and underlying pencil script, reveal much of the pictorial craft that surprisingly, perhaps, lies at the very center of Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings. In his later pictures, Lichtenstein often sought to mask the craft, the design, and the carefully considered alterations he put into translating a cartoon image into a successful oil painting by attempting to conceal it all behind a pristine and seemingly cold, mechanically-produced surface. But, in 1961, and as this work shows, Lichtenstein was still clearly fascinated with the extraordinary painterly dialogue between abstraction and mechanically-produced figurative cartoon imagery that had been established by his appropriation of such media.

Like its subject matter–a graphic contrast of a cartoon figure with an abstract black monochrome field–I Can See the Whole Room is a painting that visually appears to play on the edge of both abstract and figurative cartoon styles. Despite its often clinical appearance in reproduction, the flat monochrome black surface of this painting betrays a clear sense of its own making through a sequence of smooth, sweeping brushstrokes, whose autonomy and plasticity has been allowed to remain visible. These are overt painterly qualities that reflect Lichtenstein’s enjoyment in the process of creating the work and that in some respects can be seen as sly nods to the black paintings of contemporary “abstract” painters like Ad Reinhardt or even Franz Kline. Similarly, the flesh tones of the cartoon male figure have been attained with the subtle use of a grey wash, laid down before a regularized pattern of little flecks of red has been added. This deft and painterly simulation of the mechanical techniques of cartoon imagery would soon evolve into the more sterile mechanized discs of Lichtenstein’s trademark Benday Dot circles. Lichtenstein’s application of the yellow light of the background in the present work has been put down in two coats, whose differences have been deliberately left visible in order to advertise the working practice involved in the creation of the image. The first, a warmer, duller color, has subsequently been corrected and heightened with a thicker layer of extreme acid yellow that gives the apparent surprise of the cartoon image its full bite. In an extremely rare move, too, symptomatic only of these early canvases, Lichtenstein has added his monogram signature in red in the lower right hand corner of the work.

These are all comparatively traditional features of the painter’s art and of a consideration of the picture as a hand-crafted image that reflect to some extent how conventional Lichtenstein’s painterly practice was despite the radical, unorthodox, and, in the early 1960s, shocking, nature of his appropriation of cheap, mass-media imagery as the subject matter of his art. Reflective of a pure painter’s concern with his work, these features are ones that distinguish Lichtenstein’s early paintings from his later works, while also overtly illustrating how intensely Lichtenstein was deconstructing the conventions of picture making. As Donald Judd was among the first to point out at this time, “Lichtenstein is representing representation–which is very different from simply representing an object or a view. The main quality of the work comes from the contrast between the comic panel, apparently copied, and the art, nevertheless present” (D. Judd, “A critical review of the 1963 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery,” Arts Magazine, New York, November 1963).

It was, in fact, precisely the surprise and shock of the extraordinary visual power of such a crude, simple, and artificial mode of representation as that of a cartoon, when seen in direct comparison with his own more “arty” explorations of abstract pictorial form that had led to Lichtenstein’s adoption of cartoon imagery in the first place. By 1961, Lichtenstein had been painting for more than fifteen years and, for the last five of those years, primarily abstractions, before he introduced comic-book imagery into his work. Following in the footsteps of an artist such as Willem de Kooning–who would absent-mindedly sketch from all types of media representation, even the television screen, in his search to establish what he called a “slipping glimpse” of life through a single strong graphic line or dynamic pictorial motif–Lichtenstein at first sought to derive a similar kind of inspiration from cartoon imagery. He was attracted by the simple mechanics of cartoon representation, by the abstract strength of line in the way a cartoon artist would draw an eyebrow, for example, and ultimately sought in the strong linearity of cartoon draughtsmanship a prompt or spur for his own Abstract Expressionist style. “I was sort of immersed in Abstract Expressionism,” Lichtenstein recalled; “It was a kind of Abstract Expressionism with cartoons within the expressionist image. It’s too hard to picture, I think, and the paintings themselves weren’t very successful. I’ve got rid of most of them, in fact all of them. They encompassed about six months. I did abstract paintings of sort of striped brushstrokes and within these in a kind of scribbly way were images of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In doing these paintings I had, of course, the original strip cartoons to look at, and the idea of doing one without apparent alteration just occurred to me. I first discussed it and thought about it for a little bit, and I did one really almost half seriously to get an idea of what it might look like. And as I was painting this painting, I kind of got interested in organizing it as a painting and brought it to some kind of conclusion as an aesthetic statement, which I hadn’t really intended to do to begin with. And then I really went back to my other way of painting, which was pretty abstract. Or tried to. But I had this cartoon painting in my studio, and it was a little too formidable. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, and it sort of prevented me from painting any other way, and then I decided this stuff was really serious. I had sort of decided that as I was working on it, but at first the change was a little bit too strong for me. Having been more or less schooled as an Abstract Expressionist, it was quite difficult psychologically to do anything else” (R. Lichtenstein “BBC Interview with David Sylvester,” recorded in New York, January 1966, and reproduced in Some Kind of Reality: Roy Lichtenstein exh. cat., Anthony D’Offay, London, 1997, p. 7).

Soon Lichtenstein realized that a painterly truth lay within these clichd, mechanically-produced cartoon images–images which, because of the simplistic mechanics of their construction, were fascinating, both figuratively and abstractly. Maturing in an era in America in which painting was dominated by either the gestural or the non-gestural abstract color-field painting of the New York School, and in which any “return” to figuration was still widely frowned upon, despite the recent developments of such artists as Rauschenberg and Johns, Lichtenstein’s choice of cartoon imagery as a subject matter was, for a long time, considered scandalous. Something of this sense of scandal, shock, but also of cartoon imagery’s dynamic impact on the abstract realm, is undoubtedly both contained and expressed in the simple cartoon disruption of the abstract picture plane in I Can see the Whole Room

The imagery of the painting derives from a 1961 William Overgard drawing for a Steve Roper cartoon story (August 6) that depicts Roper’s war-time buddy and part-time accomplice in crime-solving, “Mike Nomad” looking through a peephole. Lichtenstein has cropped the image from its original rectangular format to form a square and then completely redesigned the speech balloon so that it extends across almost the entire top edge of the painting. He has also simplified the drawing of Nomad’s face significantly, reducing it to bare essentials, while the sharp yellow background is clearly his own invention. Originally intended in a milder tone more reflective of the source image, it is the addition of an acidic supermarket yellow here that ultimately provides the painting with its garish Pop art sense of impact. “Each color had a certain character to me,” Lichtenstein pointed out. “The yellow was acid…. I got some of these colours from supermarket packaging. I would look at package labels to see what colours had the most impact on one another” (R. Lichtenstein, “Interview with Diane Waldman,” in Roy Lichtenstein, exh. cat., New York, 1971, p. 26).

Lichtenstein’s long-time fascination with the science and psychology of perception is clearly reflected in these works as is the paradoxical idea, first established in I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It!, of engaging the viewer in a game of looking with its subject matter. Part of the deconstructive nature of Lichtenstein’s painterly investigation of the cartoon archetype was clearly aimed at what he described as “shaking up” people’s confidence in their own vision, and even more importantly perhaps, disrupting his own acquired conventions of seeing and perceiving. Inspired greatly in this by his teacher and mentor at Ohio State University, Hoyt L. Sherman, with whom he studied and later taught in the early 1950s, Lichtenstein’s adoption of abstraction, as with his later use of strip-cartoon imagery, was prompted by a desire to continually develop ever-new ways of seeing. Sherman’s “ideas on perception were my earliest important influence and still affect my ideas of visual unity,” Lichtenstein told Gene Swenson in 1963. (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers for Eight Painters Part 1,” Art News 62 no. 7, November 1963, p. 25).

Foremost among these, and with particular relevance to I Can See the Whole Room…, was the “Flash Room” that Sherman built in Ohio as a means of re-training his students’ perceptual habits and instilling in them an almost camera-like ability to record their visual impressions in an immediate an instinctive way, uncorrupted by the intervention of cognitive thought or emotional response. As Lichtenstein recalled, Sherman’s “Flash Room” was “a darkened room where images would be flashed on a screen for very brief intervals-about a tenth of a second. Something very simple to start, maybe just a few marks. And you would have a pile of paper, and you’d try to draw it. You’d get a very strong afterimage, a total impression, and then you’d draw it in the dark-the point being that you’d have to sense where the parts were in relation to the whole. The images became progressively more complex, and eventually you would go out and try to work the same way elsewhere-would try to bring home the same kind of sensing to your drawing without the mechanical aid of a flash room” (R. Lichtenstein, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Art of Roy Lichtenstein: Mural with Blue Brushstroke, New York, 1987, p. 14).

Lichtenstein evidently practiced this technique himself and clearly brought something of the sense of “visual unity”–or “perceptual organization” as he referred to it–that it instilled, into his later paintings of cartoons. The minimalist-looking image of a sudden circular flash of yellow light and a figure peering through an aperture-like hole amidst an otherwise monochrome field of black in I Can See the Whole Room would certainly have reminded Lichtenstein of Sherman’s “Flash Room” and the practice of sitting in a darkened void occasionally receiving the visual flash of an image. With its partial eclipse-like circles of intense color and light set at the center of a black void, this object-like picture also presents a mesmerizing and seemingly mechanical image, whose pictorial form both appears to echo and indeed function like that of the inside of a camera, a retina, or a projector. In exuding these mechanical qualities, the painting emphasizes the automated or mechanical nature of seeing and opens up once again the question of the nature of seeing; for here in this work, a mechanically-produced cartoon figure is shown doing all the looking. And, as if to compound this, the playful pictorial fantasy or fiction suggested by the painting’s cartoon imagery is extended still further by the caption accompanying it that refers to the fact that the illustrated figure is looking and can see a whole room, but no viewer.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back into you.” In I Can See the Whole Room and There’s Nobody in It! Lichtenstein seems to be humorously suggesting that a similar condition applies to the nature of looking at art. Like his later paintings of mirrors for example–object-like paintings that seem to reflect both the reality and fiction of the cartoon world–the overt falseness of image-making (or of his own art) is brilliantly summarized in a simple act of mimesis that anticipates the later conceptually-orientated work on the same subject by artists Giulio Paolini or Joseph Kosuth.

Such eloquence and simplicity, so central to the extraordinary and enduring power of this painting, has, in fact, been painstakingly arrived at in this picture through a subtle but involved process of re-arranging, recomposing, redrawing, and reducing the forms of the source image until each is at its most minimal, but still representational-a crystallized “archetype” of itself. Most notable in this respect, as the critic Albert Boime first wrote in 1970, is the speech bubble, which Lichtenstein has carefully restructured and arranged along the top edge of the picture in such a way that its elegant and lilting curves are echoed by the curves and the outlines of the man’s face and fingers. It is through such masterly refinement that the painting becomes more clearly and more simply an engineered artifice or construction of elegantly abstracted forms coalescing, seemingly arbitrarily, on the overtly flat surface into a unitary image. In this way, the picture becomes in every detail, from its subject matter and text to its pictorial and painterly content, a work that actively questions the viewer’s own belief in what it is they are seeing. Ultimately, it coerces them into a recognition of their own mimetic status in relation to the figure that this painting purports to depict-forcing them to understand that, despite what their eyes might be telling them, they too can see the whole picture and there’s nobody in it.

Link: Christie’s

Hilary Hahn and Valentina Lisitsa put on a fun performance. The main draw was Hilary’s playing of Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to a selection from Hilary’s Encores project, my favorite of which was Christos Hatzis’ Coming To.

This place has been hyped up quite a bit, and you know what, it lived up to it. The food was unique and pretty damn tasty. I’ll be back…

Here’s what we ate…

in the foreground, we started with the brussels sprouts, pig ears, house-cured lardo, apple

 charred avocado, hen of the woods, whipped fish sauce, mushroom chicharrón

 sea bass, cream of dehydrated potato, black olive oil, lemon, caper

 spaghetti, giant squid, squash, hazelnut-ink pesto, piment d’espelette

 butternut squash risotto, chicken wings, egg yolk, toasted wild rice, aromatic broth

 berkshire pork, charcoal crust, macaroni and cheese, leeks

 veal cheek, red curry, nante carrots baked in salt, fried and sticky rice

 quail, beet juice, quince, hazelnuts, banyuls vinegar

 apple, crème caramel, burnt wood sabayon, walnut

 chocolate, coffee, spice

Link: Ink.

Upon entering her space, I was immediately drawn to her circle paintings, specifically, that green one – I was staring at that one for quite some time. I really liked the scale of them, and the color was also very calming…  and kind of made me crave matcha. Anyways, the circle paintings all featured a large, inner circle with two surrounding halos in varying gradients. She spoke a bit about experimenting with the viscosity of the paints to get her desired effect. I wish I paid more attention to her talk; I was too focused on appreciating those halos, or I was probably texting someone =)

If I had the wall space, I’d definitely pick one up.

Anyways, here’s a Copy + Paste of an excerpt of her artist bio….

Her work is included in many corporate and private collections.

Exhibitions include the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Eli Broad Foundation of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (Barnsdall), Huntington Beach Art Center, Torrance Art Museum, the Toomey-Tourell Gallery (represented) in San Francisco, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, and Jancar Gallery in Los Angeles.

International exhibitions include the Lidovy Gallery in Prague and Galerie Califia in Horazdovice, Czech Republic, the Palace Ducale in Gubbio, Italy, the East China University in Shanghai, China, Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, Belarus, Zirrat Bankasi Gallery, Ankara, Turkey, Giacomo Projects, Venice, Italy, and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom.

Arrowsmith was born in San Francisco and received her B.F.A. from California State University Fullerton, and her M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate University. She lives and maintains her studio in Los Angeles.

Not only was it cool to see where he creates his monstrous sculptures, but it was really worthwhile to listen to him reminisce about his past shows at Honor Fraser, The Happy Lion, and the Wexner Center. I particularly appreciated learning about his process and inspirations for his art. It was fun to hear that he engages his kids in his art also.

Gustavo brought out a mold he used to cast his concrete sculptures.

………. telling us about his past shows

work in progress…

He had a lot of books and recommended to us Pictures of Nothing by Kirk Varnedoe. It’s about appreciating abstract art. His enthusiasm for the book really got me interested, and I’m considering picking it up after I finish the 10 books I’m currently reading.

 more works out on display…

made from invitation cards.

i particularly liked this one.

this piece was exhibited at The Happy Lion in Chinatown, and at The Gagosian in Beverly Hills.

A shelf with cool-looking sculptures…

close-up of the bottom left one..

close up of the bottom right one.

 C’est tout.

Looked like any lounge/club, just with less people.

Link: Club Nokia VIP