YOU'RE THE STAR OF MY MOVIE

I am very pleased to have been the photographer of the just-released Franny’s Cookbook from Artisan Press.

My deep appreciation and gratitude go out to Francine Stephens and Andrew Feinberg. I’d never taken a food photo before shooting this book and they went to bat for me. Thank you Franny and Andrew!

Thanks are also due to Cindy DiPrima who styled the book (and held my hand on my first big project), editor Judy Pray at Artisan, writer Melissa Clark, and Kevin Brainard who art directed the book in it’s early stages.

“To be different without being confusing, to be radical without promoting a scorched-earth policy, to be intellectual while remaining emotional and to be emotional without succumbing to sentimentality, to find a new form that is immediately negotiable—these would be the aims I’d shoot for, in our drear day.”

- Jeffrey Eugenides to Jim Lewis, in a series of written exchanges about Bloomsday and literary modernism.

It is cold and snowy in NYC today (12.28). I’m eating soup for lunch. I used to make a kitchen sink soup all the time… you know whatever veggies were around and some chicken. My wife, Kerrilynn, got so sick of it she kicked me off soup patrol. I’m eating her lentil and borlotti bean in tomato broth right now which is quite good. Whomever cooks doesn’t have to clean up after the meal in our house… which might be why she kicked me off soup duty. I’m the kind of cook who makes dinner without a recipe and very little idea of what I’m going to cook until it’s on the stove. I love to cook that way. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it feels “creative.” Cleanup duty afterwards can be a rather, ahem, time-consuming activity though (even without the under-the-breath muttering of the cleaner). Mise-en-plus skills are on my 2013 goal list.

Here are some ingredient photos I took to accompany an article on soup in a recent digital edition of Martha Stewart Living. This is how I want my kitchen to look when I cook.

I took a photo of illustrator/designer Charlotte Linton in her garden. She is profiled on the Castor & Pollux LOVING blog. She made tea and I brought some chocolate. It was May and the summer was beginning to show what it had in store for us. Thanks for a lovely afternoon Charlotte.

Harris Savides died yesterday. May he Rest in Peace.

“Birth” is one of my favorite looking films of all time:

I found some outtakes of my promo photo session with the band Lemonade from Valentine’s Day. These guys play a blend of poppy electronic beach music that to my ears is a very current sounding Cruel Summer + Smalltown Boy (those are songs I absolutely love by the way). I kinda wish I was able to check out their record collections as these guys are serious about listening. They must have mentioned 50 bands or DJs I’d never heard of.

Here are the pix they used instead which are more in keeping with their sound. The top one is more gauzy/sunshiny and the bottom is has more of an early 90s cop show feeling:

ps The show of them on KEXP is awesome.

I shot the 50 Shades of Chicken Book!

Shooting this book was hilarious, super fast-paced, and the leftovers were delicious. (Chix pix to come once the book is released.)

A little Gene Clark to get the weekend started right. Granted, your weekend might be really weird if this starts it off. But every once awhile a song, or a photograph, or book hits you in the sweet spot and is really perfect. Possibly it is my mood, caffeine level, wrapping up the end of the work week, or getting ready for a trip to Cali, but I’ve heard this song many times and right now “The Strength of String” is hitting me perfectly.

I can imagine Wassily Kandinsky really appreciating the water splotches in this view of Lower Manhattan. The shapes seems too random for a computer to put them together. Is there a Google Map technician making artistic decisions about the way Google Maps look? I hope so, it seems like an excellent job. I would love to see a panel discussion between  that person and whomever names colors at the paint company Farrow & Ball. Full Disclosure: my living room is “Dead Salmon.“