things that i've learned

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

dave lerman: our pillow paparazzo

Holy media whore, Batman! Rocketboom's video of the pillow fight features none other than our own i-banker-cum-gothamist-photog-whore Dave Lerman. Eat your heart out, Amanda Congdon.

Labels: activities, crap, davelerman, nyc, pillowfightnyc

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Monday, February 26, 2007

so much for having a good eye

Took my parents to the Armory Show this weekend and saw several great artists whose work I'm completely unfamiliar with. My parents loved a Korean painter who, we were told, "spends 17 hours a day on his works and approaches painting like meditation." They were drawn to a piece that I guess can be called a hyper-realism still life of a stack of books. I'm doing a lousy job of describing the work, but it's a stunning piece of exquisite detail.

Over at another gallery's space, I was drawn to a piece that was made up of elaborate line drawings, sketched with graphite on looseleaf and small paper scraps. Put together, the collage looked like a beautifully detailed comic book montage. I asked about the artist, Zak Smith, took the gallery director's card, and felt very good about myself for educating myself on a talented new artist. Then I got home and learned that Zak Smith is actually a Cooper Union and Yale-educated artist and porn star. His piece at The Armory Show was not particularly erotic, but I find this whole thing pretty entertaining. Ambitious (and clean) as the pieces were, I'm not expecting to purchase any of his art anytime soon.

Labels: activities, art, blakestuchin, myparents, nyc

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Saturday, February 24, 2007

feathers of love

Today I learned that few things are more fun on a Saturday afternoon than a massive, 1,000 person pillow fight. I was interviewed with Bob by a French TV show (I'm horrified about what might come of that), made friends with a bumblebee, and hit hundreds of people over the head with my 499 pieces of down cotton awesomeness. The center of the pillowfight felt more like the middle of a rugby scrum than it did some kind of ironic hipster joke; it was so packed that I could barely raise my arms over my head to strike one of my meticulously practiced pillow knockout blows. Perhaps I was too eager for the catharsis...

All was well and amusing as the 4 of us started to leave after our hour or so of pillow fighting. Then, walking back along 14th street, some crazed middle-aged woman began yelling at us and telling us that the feathers we were releasing into the air was producing "enough dust to cause air conditioner clogging for 3 weeks." She then started yelling at us calling us everything from irresponsible to racist - with no basis for any of this - gradually raising her voice to the point of shouting at the end of her bizarre diatribe. The outcome of this is that going forward, anytime any of my friends does something stupid, I'm going to say that you've now clogged my air conditioner for 3 weeks. There's potential here.

That being said, it was really fun. It felt like there were as many photographers as there were pillow fighters, and we thought that everyone seemed to have a great time. Lots of Dave's pics are below, plus the full show on Dave's photoblog.

Labels: activities, blakestuchin, davelerman, juliabloch, mattnowak, nyc, pillowfightnyc

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Thursday, February 15, 2007

Baby Likes It Cheap

Last night I went to a Valentine's Day Chocolate Appreciation class at the Institute of Culinary Education on West 23rd St. It was taught by a culinary historian and chocolate expert who was a lot of fun. I learned that chocolate was refined first for consumption in beverages as a female-friendly beverage. The coffee and tea that dominated Europe in the 19th century, it was thought, were too harsh for the genteel female. I believe that drinkable chocolate's rise in popularity was also involved in the creation of the modern tea kettle, but I might have gotten mixed up by that point. There were a lot of slides.

I also learned that in the early 1900's as doctors began to understand a bit about nutrition, it was thought that all calories were created equal and that one calorie of chocolate was akin to one calorie of a fruit or vegetable. This led Hershey's to promote chocolate, with its high caloric content, as "a meal in itself." Men also wore bowler hats during that era, but I did not learn about bowler hats last night.

Then I ate about an entire box of chocolates. Mostly we were served dark chocolates, presented on attractive plates and paired with dessert wines that tasted like a cross between vinegar and ass. Dark chocolate is considered the more sophisticated cocoa product, so I guess it's no surprise that I didn't really enjoy it. Milk chocolate, the cheapo stuff that I grew up on (give me a bag of M&M's and I'm happy), is considered less "pure" and far less impressive among the chocophile set. My professor described most of these chocolates as "the type of thing that if it were a person you met at a party, you'd say that person is 'nice,' but someone I want to take home with me." Jacques Torres, home of perhaps the best chocolate I've ever had in my life, was also roundly dissed.

Promiscuity or intentions of my professor notwithstanding, my girlfriend and I both preferred the sweeter milk chocolate that "tastes like crappy kids' stuff," as one of the chocolate snobs in my class said. Regardless of our lack of sophistication in the chocolate world, it was a great time and I learned a lot about chocolate. And now that I've discovered the relative cheapness of my palette's sweet tooth, I'm not eating any chocolate for a month. Or at least a few hours.

Labels: activities, food, nyc

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