Shisquared

J.Crew | Blog: To Market, To Market

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:52:36 -0400

a weddings & parties shoot warrants flowers—lots of them. we tagged along with our set designer
Tracy on a recent trip to New York City’s flower district (the inspiration for this month’s shoot) to learn just why you shouldn’t arrive at the market later than 7am and why Tracy never travels…

Listen to the Fresh Air interview here.

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:49:00 -0400

Listen to the Fresh Air interview here.

American director, producer and scriptwriter Steven Spielberg...

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:15:06 -0400

American director, producer and scriptwriter Steven Spielberg will preside this year over a star-studded Jury. Eight top-flight international film celebrities, active in a variety of creative fields, will help him select the winners.

Vidya Balan (Indian actress)
Naomi Kawase (Japanese director)
Nicole Kidman (Australian actress/producer)
Lynne Ramsay (British scriptwriter/director/producer)

Daniel Auteuil (French actor/director)
Ang Lee (Taiwanese director/producer/scriptwriter)
Cristian Mungiu (Romanian scriptwriter/director/producer)
Christoph Waltz (Austrian Actor)

The task before the Jury of the 66th Festival de Cannes is to decide between the various films in Competition. The prizewinners will be announced during the Closing Ceremony on May 26th, culminating in the award of the most coveted title of all – the Palme d’Or.

A photo taken on May 14, 2013 shows the official poster of the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:44:03 -0400

A photo taken on May 14, 2013 shows the official poster of the Cannes Film Festival on the Palais des Festival on the eve of the 66th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes, one of the world’s top film festivals, opens on May 15 and will climax on May 26 with awards selected by a jury headed this year by Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg. Photo: LOIC VENANCE, AFP/Getty Images

You Know It As Spring These are the standing-water weeks....

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:01:03 -0400

You Know It As Spring

These are the standing-water
weeks. Sliding gray skies
stall, and puddles lie more dull
for looking up. Lakes
shudder below gusts and stick out
their many chins. They cannot
be budged. All the world wants
is to be like winter
promised, but mortal
are the seasons, too. You are
tall, so tall, so
maybe you’ve never left
your body like this, standing in water
rising, the face islanded.

Enjoy … Jill Osier’s poems here: http://blogs.slc.edu/campbellcorner/2011-2/jill-osier/.

Now Showing | Urs Fischer Culture By TRINIE DALTON April 23,...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:45:37 -0400

Now Showing | Urs Fischer

Culture

By TRINIE DALTON

April 23, 2013, 11:15 am

The artist Urs Fischer may humbly refer to his ambitious exhibition occupying 65,000 square feet of Los Angeles MOCA’s two venues as “pretty much a sculpture show,” but it’s more than that. Fischer and Jessica Morgan, the Tate Modern’s curator, have designed a stunning visual presentation collecting more than 10 years of Fischer’s artworks into a formal exercise in high contrasts — order built from disarray, precision from destruction — presented through radical scale shifts, disharmonious color schemes and surprisingly cohesive textural oppositions.

The exhibition showcases many of Fischer’s canonical works, like “Untitled (Soft Bed),” a cast aluminum bed that’s sagging and collapsed but as sublime as an L.A. sunset with its pale paint striations, and “Untitled (Bread House),” a witchy hut made from crusty baguette logs. These more surreal stand-alone representational works, whose narrative whimsies are reinforced by surrounding sculptures depicting lazy skeletons, overgrown fried eggs and cheese blocks, are perfectly undermined by cavelike holes Fischer has cut in the museum walls, and the dirty black brushwork with which he’s disheveled the pristine floors. “A lot of artists I like create a very specific order,” Fischer says. “I would like to be an artist like that. Most art is about structure or order, just like our lives have order.” He adds that despite that admiration, “somehow disorder is not unnatural to me. It’s more natural.”

The exhibition is designed to oscillate between, as Fischer says, “things made straight from the real objects: a horse, a bed, wallpaper, scanned or processed, not handmade,” and artworks that “start with digital data, then go artisanal.”

Case in point: colonizing the Geffen space is a massive site-specific collaborative clay sculpture project made by 1,500 participants over four weeks. Here, a series of dusty, labyrinthine trails meander through clumpy, dioramic universes stacked with rough-hewn objects ranging from psychedelic abstractions to more figurative and cartoonish pieces: sand castles, igloos, hearths, gnomes, tree stumps. Aesthetically, this wonderland serves as an elaborate botanical garden for three previously made giant wax candle sculptures, prefaced outside by a gargantuan “scholar’s rock” installed in the museum’s parking lot, which Fischer scaled up from a palm-held piece of clay into a hotel-size monument. Fischer calls this effort “my biggest collaboration yet: free, fearless, instant fun and very direct. And inclusive as a way to subvert museum exclusivity.”

So is this a retrospective, as it’s been labeled? “It depends on what kind,” Fischer says. “It’s based on atmosphere rather than on an academic run-through. I wanted to find a way to deal with old work as well as the new without being aggressive about trying to change what it all is.”

“Urs Fischer” is on view through Aug. 19 at MOCA Grand Avenue and the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA; moca.org.

chevronandgeometrics: Sofia Coppola photo by Ben Toms....

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:05:42 -0400

chevronandgeometrics:

Sofia Coppola photo by Ben Toms. Published in VOGUE November 2011.

Morocco by Garance Dore

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 15:48:00 -0400

Morocco by Garance Dore

Cate Blanchett for Harpers Bazaar Australia

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:44:58 -0400

Cate Blanchett for Harpers Bazaar Australia

Audio

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:11:49 -0400

Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln “I miss playing Lincoln. Very...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 14:47:00 -0500

Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

“I miss playing Lincoln. Very much. I miss the proximity to his character. There was a time in my life when it wasn’t clear whether or not I would amount to anything. I was fearful about my future. In England, people were hell-bent on certifying me—to them, the way I work as an actor is the system of someone who is unhinged. As a young man, when I saw the early movies by Scorsese, I saw a way to be, a kind of liberation. In those movies, America seemed like a place of infinite opportunities. In Lincoln, we tried to show that sense of grand democratic possibility. We created a world I didn’t want to leave.”

By Lynn Hirschberg
Photographs by Juergen Teller
Styled by Zoe Bedeaux

February 2013

NYFW: Liu Wen for Carolina Herrera.

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:24:00 -0500

NYFW: Liu Wen for Carolina Herrera.

LFW: Michelle Dockery @ Burberry Prorsum.

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:20:00 -0500

LFW: Michelle Dockery @ Burberry Prorsum.

LFW street style thanks to Phil Oh @ vogue.com

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:19:00 -0500

LFW street style thanks to Phil Oh @ vogue.com

Ristretto | Books for the Coffee Lover By OLIVER STRAND The...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:06:14 -0500

Ristretto | Books for the Coffee Lover

By OLIVER STRAND

The annual annual avalanche of cookbooks, food memoirs and single-ingredient investigations has largely passed by coffee. For some reason, the publishing industry hasn’t been that interested in what you drink every morning.

That changed this year, making it an unusually active run for coffee books. Of the dozen or so titles to released in recent months, two stand out: “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee: Growing, Roasting, and Drinking, With Recipes,” by James Freeman, Caitlin Freeman and Tara Duggan ($24.99, Ten Speed Press), and “Coffee Life in Japan,” by Merry White ($24.95, University of California Press).

They are two very different books. “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee” is a thoughtful introduction to this moment in coffee - it’s for the everyday drinker who’s curious about what goes into that cup. And “Coffee Life in Japan” is a study of the centuries-old cafe culture of Japan by a professor of anthropology at Boston University - it’s required reading for coffee’s true believers and industry insiders.

Part of the appeal of “The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee” is found in the lush photographs and delicate line drawings that are a tribute to why print still matters. It’s a handsome volume that falls somewhere between cookbook and art book. While the book is from the minds behind Blue Bottle Coffee, and the voice on the page unmistakably belongs to the founder James Freeman (for an example, read the passage titled “A Special Place in Hell: Pod Coffee”), it’s less of a company monograph than a peek behind the curtain at what goes on at the highest end of coffee. There are sections on how coffee is grown and processed, what roasting does to a coffee bean, how to steam milk and the specifics of organic certification. If you aren’t already convinced that you should buy a good grinder, you will be soon after reading this.

The book is packed with information, but the tone is so conversational that it goes down easy. It’s true even when the book doesn’t pull punches. The section on home espresso starts off on a discouraging note (“Let’s be real: making espresso at home is expensive, difficult and time-consuming”) before giving advice you can use:

“It sounds simplistic, but the single best predictor of the adequacy of an espresso machine is weight. Heavy machines usually perform better than lighter machines. Weight implies metal rather than plastic parts, copper or brass boilers rather than steel, larger group heads rather than smaller, commercial-grade rather than consumer-grade.”

You won’t find any smart-shopper tips in “Coffee Life in Japan,” an engaging book written by the anthropologist Merry “Corky” White. The book is a comprehensive account of Japan’s relationship with coffee, which started in 1690 but didn’t take off until the first kissaten, or coffeehouse, opened in Tokyo in 1888. Named Kachiichakan, it was torn down long ago, but White includes a photograph of a monument - a blocky brick column topped by an oversize coffee cup - erected to its founder, Tei Ei-kei, in 2008.

It’s details like this that will grab the imagination of the already converted. White is an academic, and not a part of the coffee industry, but she obviously enjoys the topic and the people who populate the scene. Some of the figures are historic, but most are contemporary - Noda-san at Otafuku in Kyoto, Katsuyuki Tanaka at Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo - and her description of going to Kyoto’s Kafekosen, one of the few where the coffee maasutaa is a woman, gives you insight into how seriously Japan takes its kissaten.

In fact, White’s cultural insight and linguistic pedagogy are her greatest gifts to the reader. She first started visiting Japan in the 1960s, and she is able to illuminate a sometimes opaque culture. On kodawari, a form of meticulous professionalism, she writes:

“Kodawari is embedded in the thing produced - it is not only in the attitude or practice of the maker but is consumed by the recipients or buyers of the goods themselves. Architecture is often cited as good ‘if you can feel the kodawari of the person who designed the space.’”

Yes, White is talking about coffee.

Of the other coffee books out this year, a handful deserve a special mention. “Joe: The Coffee Book,” by Jonathan Rubinstein, Gabrielle Rubinstein and Judith Choate ($19.95, Lyons Press), is an overview of coffee from the much-loved independent chain of New York shops, and “Left Coast Roast: A Guide to the Best Coffee and Roasters from San Francisco to Seattle,” by Hanna Neuschwander ($16.95, Timber Press), is a rundown of the leading roasters in California, Oregon and Washington. (Too bad that, just as the subtitle says, the book tilts north: there is nothing on Los Angeles, San Diego or any other part of California south of Big Sur.) Both books include brewing tips and techniques.

And then there are the slim, pretty books that you want to flip through. “A-Z Coffee: A Kick-Starter for Geeky Conversations” is from the mind of the Oslo barista and illustrator Lars K. Huse ($13, Kaffikaze). It’s a a delightfully twisted survey of what the coffee nuts are talking about in 2012, arranged alphabetically (“A-is-for-AeroPress”). Then there’s “The Craft of Espresso,” with text by Hanna Neuschwander and illustrations by Ben Blake, ($12, Clive Coffee). A comprehensive and succinct examination of that dense little drink, the book is also a pretty object, with a letterpress cover and hand-stitched binding. Unlike the other books listed here, both “A-Z Coffee” and “The Craft of Espresso” are self-published, which makes sense: D.I.Y. printing from a D.I.Y. industry.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/ristretto-books-for-the-coffee-lover/?ref=food&pagewanted=print

gensdumonde: Feeling Good, Nina Simone.

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:03:40 -0500

gensdumonde:

Feeling Good, Nina Simone.

Splitting but Not Leaving By MANOHLA DARGIS A wistful romantic...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:55:19 -0500

Splitting but Not Leaving

By MANOHLA DARGIS

A wistful romantic comedy about love, marriage and never wanting to say you’re sorry, “Celeste and Jesse Forever” doesn’t try to rock the world — just gently nudge it. Set in Los Angeles, it begins as a mildly, self-consciously quirky story about a young married couple, played by an appealingly matched Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, who have split up without moving on or out. Best friends, Celeste and Jesse share the same adolescent humor, fondness for stupid voices and even property lines: a hard-driving trend forecaster, she lives in their house while he’s a laid-back artist who now flops in the backyard studio. You see what keeps them together, even when it shouldn’t.

A lot of contemporary romantic comedies, stuffed with clichés and grinning idiots, unintentionally work your last nerves; at least initially, “Celeste and Jesse” seems rigged to shred them. Written by Ms. Jones and Will McCormack and directed by Lee Toland Krieger, it takes off with an increasingly, discomfortingly cutesy scene of Jesse and Celeste chortling over a dirty joke involving a squirting tube of lip salve. The scene is more awkward than funny, but that’s the point because there’s something hermetic, maybe stunted about Celeste and Jesse’s intimacy. Once home, they head in opposite directions. The next time you see them, they’re side by side once more and having dinner with friends, one of whom, Beth (Ari Graynor), announces that she can’t take it anymore and splits.

Beth isn’t running away from her fiancé, Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen); she’s running out on Celeste and Jesse. The problem isn’t that they’ve split up and made life unbearable for friends worried about choosing sides: it’s that, in many crucial ways, they’re together. Jesse may be roughing it in his studio, but he and Celeste live much as they always have, sharing the same old habits and jokes until a plot twist snuffs out the laughs and they have to figure out something new. There’s no script for what they’re doing, other than the one Ms. Jones and Mr. McCormack wrote. That’s why, while “Celeste and Jesse” is decidedly conventional in most respects, it’s pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that’s no longer predicated by mutual desire.

It’s also consistently lightly funny and loose, with a believable lived-in sense of Los Angeles that largely steers clear of the usual regional clichés for more recent ones, including the Prius that Celeste drives and the pot dealer (a funny Mr. McCormack) who gripes about how the city’s legal medical marijuana dispensaries are cutting into his business. Mr. Krieger, shooting in digital, leans too heavily on the hand-held cinematography when trying to create an air of agitated familiarity. But he’s very good with the actors. He pulls warm performances from his leads without sacrificing Celeste’s hard edges and gives the supporting players enough space to fill their characters with personality, including Emma Roberts as a petulant pop star and Elijah Wood as a somewhat butcher Eve Arden.

The evocation of old Hollywood is intentional. Like screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s “Celeste and Jesse” hinges on the assumption that marriage is invariably rough going. Once upon a studio time, screwball comedy was where men and women redefined gender relations in between zingers and slapstick. In some screwball romances a man and a woman battle their way into marriage; in others it’s an estranged couple who fight their way back into love. As gender relations evolved, the romantic comedy rarely rose to the great screwball occasion, dragged down by antediluvian stereotypes and formulas. Equality between the sexes, or so it seems, turned out to be a joke killer, one reason bromances exist: if you can’t imagine women as equals, just sidestep them.

In the affable 2009 bromance “I Love You, Man” Ms. Jones made the best of a supporting role as a woman whose fiancé, after deciding that he needs dudes to pal around with, goes on a series of man dates. A friendship with one man follows, and reaches its apotheosis when they declare their love for each other while Ms. Jones’s bride waits at the altar. It’s easy to imagine that Ms. Jones, a regular on “Parks and Recreation,” grew tired of waiting. With “Celeste and Jesse Forever,” she and Mr. McCormack have righted the sex imbalance of the bromance with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

“Celeste and Jesse Forever” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Curses and dope.

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger; written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack; director of photography, David Lanzenberg; edited by Yana Gorskaya; music by Sunny Levine and Zach Cowie; production design by Ian Phillips; costumes by Julia Caston; produced by Lee Nelson, Jennifer Todd and Suzanne Todd; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes.

WITH: Ms. Jones (Celeste), Andy Samberg (Jesse), Chris Messina (Paul), Ari Graynor (Beth), Eric Christian Olsen (Tucker), Mr. McCormack (Skillz), Rebecca Dayan (Veronica), Rich Sommer (Max), Matthew Del Negro (Nick), Rafi Gavron (Rupert), Elijah Wood (Scott) and Emma Roberts (Riley).

Blizzard meals: (1) Nancy’s chicken soup; (2) miso ramen @...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:45:29 -0500

Blizzard meals: (1) Nancy’s chicken soup; (2) miso ramen @ Chuko and (3) Veronica’s deconstructed Bibimbap.

@ the New York City Ballet w/ Jenny - Swan Lake

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:37:00 -0500

@ the New York City Ballet w/ Jenny - Swan Lake

lecieldeparis: agentlewoman: thatkindofwoman: Use Somebody...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 23:33:52 -0500

lecieldeparis:

agentlewoman:

thatkindofwoman:

Use Somebody (Kings of Leon) // Bat for Lashes

(via themusiclibrary)