I learned via Boston Photography Focus that Miriam Goodman passed away this week. There’s also an obituary in the Globe with information about memorial services and where to contribute in her honor.

I took a class from Miriam years ago, a class about writing and photography. Themes from that class still float around in my work. The image above is my poor pastiche of the wit and mystery of Miriam’s own work. The world is poorer for her loss. I don’t know how much longer her website www.miriamgoodman.com will be maintained, but I urge you to take a look.

Book Club: Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

Love the blog, now bought the book: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

Don’t know why:  A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

For work:  BrandSimple by Allen Adamson

Trying to drink the cool-aid:  Conscious Business by Fred Kofman

Can’t stop listening to:  Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb

I love bread. Anybody paying attention here around the ‘duck knows that, but I just noticed that I have not yet blogged about two of the most important bread topics there are. I’m not talking about bialys, I already did that, I’m talking about pumpernickel, and that means I’m also talking about When Pigs Fly.

My love of pumpernickel goes way back to a black corn rye I used to get in New York called “Russian Health Bread” by that particular bakery, long since closed. I’ve never really figured out what it was or where to get anything like it, but I’ve been a fan of dark dark rye ever since. In college, I met somebody who seemed to know what I was talking about. I eagerly asked what it was called, and almost sobbed when he said, “chleb,” which simply means “bread” in Russian. (хлеб) Not much help there.

I’ve had some great black bread in Finland, but it wasn’t until I discovered When Pigs Fly a few years ago that I got a decent local source for a good daily black bread. WPF pumpernickel isn’t as black as the Russian bread, but it’s darker than most and redolent of coffee, anise, chocolate, caraway and all sorts of complex flavors. I like it with sharp cheedar cheese and thin slices of pear or green apple, with salami and tomato, with honey roasted peanut butter, and especially with smoked fish. Not all at once, please.

Now they have a bakery store in Davis Square, at 378 Highland Ave., a block from my office and right next door to Kick Ass Cupcakes. This store carries varieties not available in the regular supermarkets, things like tomato bread and chocolate bread pudding cake. And because they sell whole loaves sliced on demand, it tastes a good deal fresher than the pre-sliced loaves in the supermarket. I can’t recommend it enough. They have free samples and are very friendly. Go check it out.

PS - I’m not even going to discuss the possibility that “pumpernickel” means “devil fart”

Etymology

The Philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states about the Germanic origin of the word, in the vernacular, Pumpen was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, a word similar in meaning to the English “fart“, and “Nickel” was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., “Old Nick“, a familiar name for Satan). Hence, pumpernickel is described as the “devil’s fart”, a definition accepted by the Stopes International Language Database,^[2] the publisher Random House,^[3] and by some English language dictionaries, including Webster’s Dictionary.^[4] The American Heritage Dictionary adds “so named from being hard to digest.”

[wikipedia, where else?]

Sadly, there’s nothing like a high-profile natural disaster to give Americans a crash-course in world geography and politics.  It might have been Peterman’s getaway on Seinfeld, but Myanmar has been under military dictatorship since 1992, and life was hard there well before Cyclone Nargis.  Usually when disaster strikes, caring people try to figure out how to gather the supplies and expertise most needed to relieve the pain and suffering.  The current situation in Myanmar has shifted the discussion to how to actually get the goods to those in need over the objection and meddling of the national government.  I have to wonder if this will come to foreign jets flying over sovreign Myanmar territory and dropping supplies directly to the needy.

The New York Times Lede blog identified a dozen charities known to be active in at least attempting to provide relief in Myanmar.  Some of these organziations have managed to get people on the ground already.  I urge you to consider a donation to any one of these organizations.  I’ve set up a fundraising page (see the widget in the sidebar at right) for one, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and there are other Firstgiving pages operating for the Heart Touch Project and WorldVision.

I set out with intrepid museum buddies A and L last rainy Sunday for the tenth annual Somerville Open Studios. Like us, the SOS has expanded with age. There were 350 artists and 120 sites across Somerville. We chose to start with Vernon Street Studios, two large buildings with about 75 artists between them, and then meandered around Highland avenue, dropping on on Jade Moran Jewelry, Ruchika Madan’s pottery shop and Beads Without End in vain search for the perfect mothers day gifts. (As usual, I sent a novel to mom, hoping its not the same one she intends to give my for my birthday)

Back to Vernon Street. We saw a stunning array of work from inspiring to insipid, but almost all of it quite fresh, and even affordable as original art goes. Here’s my top five in alphabetical order:

Ariel Freiberg - Large paintings of lascivious women with a wicked sense of humor and great hot colors with surprising passages of white. She writes, “My work has developed by observing women who express their sexuality in the most candid and explicit fashions. So superficial and promiscuous are we, so determined to drag into the light what might thrive better under the bushes, that sex has lost much of its relish. But what we see in the beautiful bodies paraded in front of our eyes isn’t sex but the shadow play of sexiness. At its fullest, sex is erratic and raw, truly mind shattering.” I’m a big fan of anybody who pairs nudes with cake. Freiberg was also the friendliest studio hostess, greeting people much more enthusiastically than most open studio artists.

Colleen Kiely - Creepily sweet kitsch-inspired dog portraits, intricate pencil drawings of semi trailers on paper doilies, and more peculiar juxtapositions of vernacular with disciplined technique. “Working with imagery from vernacular visual culture, these paintings investigate aesthetic and class boundaries, contradictory definitions of beauty and the complexity of sentimentality in painting. The sources of inspiration for this work are found in drugstore gift items, greeting cards, the devotional imagery of Catholicism and the history of western painting.”

David Palmquist - Operating from the other side of the brain from Kiely and Freiberg, Palmquist appeals to my cartography fetish with neat paintings inspired by satellite photos of suburban sprawl and the grids of urban design. “I enjoy a certain predilection for order; this tends to carry over into my paintings in the form of graphing, pixilation, and exaggerated definition. I am drawn to images that lend themselves to being segregated into smaller divisions or to images that when taken out of scale, reveal a more dramatic and surreal reality. Further, I enjoy working with abstract geometric forms, am drawn to the purity of modern design, and am fascinated by observations on how well or poorly manifested ideals exist within reality.” But he’s not all square - check out the droll work called “Terms of Use Kitty” on his site.

Heather Pilchard - Arguably the most traditional of my five, Pilchard makes landscape paintings that are all about the special light of Cape Cod. I don’t see what must be her newest work on her site, but at open studios she showed several works that used audacious strokes of seemingly unmixed orange to great effect in sunset skies. “I like to think of my work as a place where careful observations of the natural world and inner vision meet. Through color and patterns I hope to recapture a glimmer of recognition of a moment. The challenge for me is to create an illusion of space using color and minimal detail. By layering the paint in thin undercoats, the painting surface glows with life. On one hand, finding formulas to make an illusion of topography is what I am doing, but until I invest an emotional connection to the work it doesn’t have the spark. If it were otherwise, than why not just take a photograph? The paintings tend to have a certain amount of vagueness of actually geography, which gives the viewer space to add their own stories and meaning.” We also love her white birch box frames. I wonder where she gets them.

Tova Speter - The hallway outside Speter’s studio was hung with two huge wooden doors. If you had the guts to open them (people are generally averse to touching what might be “art” on the walls) you’d see her delightful overpainting of the wood grain, a simple but surprisingly engaging method. She writes, “I am drawn in and mesmerized by the artistic process through which the imagination is visually realized. Seeking to expose the obvious that is often overlooked; I use color to offer a glimpse into the amazing natural beauty that may otherwise remain unseen. In my current work, I utilize found wood as a conduit for an exploration of the energy found within. The grain serves as my guide on a journey into the lines, shapes, and flow of the composition of the wood.” Sorry I almost stole the only copy of your price list, Tova, but I’m still thinking of commissioning a work, if I can just find the right plywood.

It’s almost a year to the next Somerville open studios, but don’t let that stand in your way. Check out artists websites, get in touch, invite yourself to their studios, maybe buy something. You won’t be sorry.

Yesterday afternoon, after helping J relaunch her food blog, now called Grow Cook Eat, I was planning to get some work done around the house before heading off to a birthday party in Dorchester. But then I got a text message from A: “On off chance that u free want to try new jp restaurant tonite?” Gotta love txt msg diction. In my warped sense of geography JP seemed to be along the way to Dorchester. New restaurant sounds good. You can’t live entirely on birthday cake. Well, except maybe at the Foster house in Belmont.

Cut to us settling in at cozy Vee Vee, a “New American Bistro in Jamaica Plain, serving mid-priced, modern American food, with a focus on fresh seafood, vegetables and grains.” Pescovegetarian and locovorian, like many of my friends, the menu was enticing, and the wine list, largely “Grown sustainably, organically or biodynamically” was impressive. Recently a tea house, the 25ish seat restaurant was small but high-ceilinged, with orange walls hung with lots of mirrors. It was a little on the dark side, but very comfortable.

We began with crispy polenta, mushroom bolognese, shaved parmesan ($7) and tonnato, white & green asparagus, orange confit, fennel ($8). I have to say the tonnato was the worst of the dishes we had, but that’s a bit like my contention that Rome is the worst city in Italy. The bottom of a superb field is nothing to be ashamed of. Emulsified tuna and orange confit just didn’t do it for us, but the asparagus was very nicely done, and I usually despise white asparagus for being mushy and awful. Not the case at all.

The crispy polenta was amazing. A bit like the turnip cake I had in Hong Kong, it came in five small cubes arranged around a central well of mushroom, cheese and greens. Crispy, salty, a hint of cheese and maybe truffle. These are what tater tots pray to be reincarnated as. I would siphon ethanol out of flex-fuel vehicles (if there were any) to turn the corn back into polenta if I could.

For mains, we shared black-eyed pea fritters, wild rice, carrot-cashew puree, sauteed pea tendrils and quinoa croquettes, fava beans, spiced yogurt, tomato-cucumber relish, $14 each. These dishes had certain yin and yang similarities and both were satsifying. The black-eyed pea fritters looked like falafel, but it was the quinoa croquettes that had the true spiritual connection to that middle-eastern treat.

The croquettes were about the size of crabcakes, crispy on the outside and quinoa-like on the inside, and luxuriated in a tahini-like yogurt sauce and israeli-style tomato-cucumber salad. The fava beans were super fresh and a welcome surprise. The fritters were smaller and darker, crunchy and spicy in a different tradition, with a small pile of cold wild rice and a nest of delicious crunchy pea tendrils. And you know how much I enjoy any kind of carrot puree.

All in all, it was a very well composed and satisfying meal with wine but no dessert (remember, birthday cake), almost completely vegetarian except for the tonnato. The menu is brief, but I expect it to change with the seasons. It seems a silly bone to pick with a place that offers so much to vegetarians, but I would quibble that the choices were very restricted if you opt out of shellfish, and the kosher and allergic sets often do. Sorry it was too dark to photograph any of the food, as it was attractively plated, too.

I was a little late to the new Battlestar Galactica thing, but I’m decidedly hooked. It’s some pretty good TV. But with no cable and no TV, I’ve had to be creative. I rented the miniseries and season one from the local video store. Then I bought seasons two and three from iTunes for $1.99 per episode, then I totally cracked and bought the Razor DVD. Now it’s season four, and the deal with iTunes is off for the usual reasons of greed and silliness.

I was generally resigned to poaching off friends or waiting until the end to get the DVDs, but it turns out that the SciFi channel is streaming full episodes delayed a week or so on their web site, http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/episodes/index.php so now I watch an episode on Saturday morning and pay nothing.

Sure, I can’t put it on my ipod, and the episodes could disappear from the site at any time, but I was happy to pay $1.99 to iTunes or about $4 per DVD to the video store. It seems to me that the SciFi channel people have missed out on some of my money. Too frakkin’ bad for them, I guess.

Still trying to catch up on blogging all the art stuff I’ve been doing. The weekend before last, I ran into photographer and JP real estate macher Andy Brilliant at a “photo brunch” party in Brookline. He turned me on to an event happening that same day called Art House Boston. So I headed on over to JP.

Art House Boston is a collaboration of real estate agents and artists that puts on art shows in homes that are on the market. It increases foot traffic for the real estate agents, makes the homes look good, and gives some exposure to artists. That’s what I call a win-win.

This time, the show was at 34-36 Tower Street in JP, a pair of 3-floor, 3-bedroom, 2.5-bath townhomes. Featured artists were photographers Adam Lampton and Andrew Brilliant, painters Elisabeth Cugini, Kelly Carmody, Russell Eric Moore, Richard Perkins and Seth Minkin, and mixed-media artists Gretjen Helene Hargesheimer.

I’ve already said I’m a big fan of Andy’s photos, so I’ll just add that the work he showed at Art House was of the moody black and white type, of Prague and other great cities, just my kind of thing. Also worth calling out were the hilarious and often scatological paintings of Seth Minkin. Check out the sushi paintings, a steal at only $50 each, but who can get just one? Kudos to Gretjen Helene for using duck eggs in her work, among other anatomical oddities.

I don’t know when the next Art House will be, but I hope people who like to look at art and people who like to look at homes will both support it.

With apologies to Ed Ruscha…

Look really closely at the top sign. See the bolt at the M of “EACH MONTH”? It says “SOMERVILLE” under there just inside the red margin. Ditto the no bikes sign - below the black border, SOMERVILLE.

Hmm. This sign is close to where I parked. It might say SOMERVILLE on the top sign like the one previous, but it’s covered up by the lower sign, which has no city designation.

A split decision here. The street cleaning sign does say SOMERVILLE in small letters, but the permit parking sign says nothing.

This pair has no city on it. Are we in Cambridge yet? Probably not, since the street cleaning days match the Somerville signs.

This is definitely the largest type size for the word SOMERVILLE so far.

Aha! Pretty clear lettering by Cambridge, plus a different street cleaning zone.

More Cambridge.

CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. Can’t miss that.

Ditto.

In sight of Mass Ave, if you weren’t sure yet, you should be now.

The tally: Five signs in Somerville, about half of them saying Somerville, and six signs in Cambridge, all unambiguous. A pretty poor showing by Somerville since only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the length of the street is Cambridge.  The facts aren’t in doubt, but it took some squinting to find them.

I while ago I heard a rumor that there was a border dispute between Cambridge and Somerville. I wasn’t able to get any confirmation, so I put it out of my mind. But now it appears that I might have fallen right into it. I know what you’re thinking. This is just the sort of thing that could happen only to me. Perhaps.

As you may know, I live in Central Square, Cambridge, and work in Davis Square, Somerville. My car is registered and permitted to park in Cambridge. I don’t normally drive to work, but sometimes if I have to drive somewhere after work, it makes sense to drive there and then hop in my car directly after work. So I decided to try and optimize things by finding the point in Cambridge closest to my office in Somerville, and parking there free. It was surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative map of the border, but I eventually dug up this street cleaning zone map on the Cambridge DPW web site.  For what it’s worth, the Somerville web site had zero helpful information.

Based on this, I decided that parking on the East side of Russell street near the corner of Elm would be the optimal location, just inside the Cambridge line, but about as close to Davis square as possible. In the past, I had parked lower down Russell street where both sides are clearly Cambridge. Today I got a spot in front of 44 Russell street, a couple of houses from the corner.

Officer Soares saw it differently.

For $20 I might have sucked it up, but for $40, I decided to stand by my city’s DPW map and look into this. I visited the Cambridge police station near my home and consulted the large map on the wall. It seemed to match the street sweeping map. An officer asked me what I was doing, and I explained the situation. He picked up a phone, called some number and asked, “44 Russell street, is that us or Somerville?” and told me that it was in fact a Cambridge address. He did note that it was possible that the city line existed between the house and the curb, but could not confirm one way or the other. One could argue that the DPW map above shows that, but I assumed it was sloppy illustration.  That’s what happens when you assume, but it still sounds like reasonable doubt to me.

The back of the ticket states, “This violation may also be appealed and adjudicated by mail if supporting documentation is mailed within 21 days of issuance.” I got home and began to assemble my case. I checked a source perhaps even more respected than the police. I searched “44 Russell Street, Cambridge, MA” and got a nice map. Just to make sure, I then tried “44 Russell Street, Somerville, MA” and look what I got:

Very interesting. I think I can say with certainty that #44 is in Cambridge. Now I have to go back to the scene and double check the signs to see if there are any clues to the ownership of the street itself. So far, I haven’t been able to see any “permit parking only” signs that say Cambridge or Somerville on them.

No doubt, this story is to be continued…