Archive for the “urbanism” Category

I recently helped a friend set up a blog. It’s a bit like turning somebody on to a drug - you know it’s bad for them and it’s going to eat up their life, but it’s already eaten yours, so why not share?  Over time, I’ve been “blogfather” to more than a couple of RSS feeds, some of which are in the duckroll blogroll at right.  Tonight I was rewarded with a wonderful dinner of thanks, and it’s only right that I should blog about it.

L took me to Great Bay in the Hotel Commonwealth, an excellent choice for many reasons, not least that she’s pesco-vegetarian. Great Bay - another awesome Michael Schlow joint - is in a beautiful space with a vaulted ceiling and a central sashimi station with a great lampshade-like canopy floating above it.  I recommend sitting at it if you can.  As is often the case, it was a bit dark for good photos, but I did the best I could with the meager candle.  Also note (excuses, excuses) that Great Bay’s online menu is a season or three behind what was served, so I don’t have all the precise details of ingredients.  I guess you’ll just have to check it out for yourself.

Service was attentive almost to the point of making us nervous, but they split both our soup and salad without complaint, and I’m sure we got more than the usual portion in total.  We started with a nice half bottle of Albariño from Lagar de Cevera, a salad with golden beets and candied pecans and a marvelous butternut squash bisque with perfect little scallops lurking just beneath the oil-dotted surface.

From the raw bar, we had Tasmanian salmon sashimi wrapped around crisp daikon with a topping that looked like tapenade but was actually black bean, rocoto pepper and lotus root for a nice zing.

Next up, two small plates as a main: lobster and shrimp dumplings with ginger soy and crab cake over corn salsa with a squirt of lime.  Despite the engaging and limey presentation, the crab cake was merely good, while the dumplings were more rustic in appearance but exceptionally tasty with a good dose of lobster meat.

Satisfied but not quite full, we walked through the hotel to the other end where we had coffee and superb dark chocolate cake with coffee buttercream at the bar of Eastern Standard.  As if having two great restaurants weren’t reason enough, I also love the Hotel Commonwealth because it hosts the Panopticon Gallery of Photography. Thanks to its hallway location, Panopticon never really closes and so might just be the art venue with the best hours in town.  We were lucky enough to see the new show - it doesn’t officially open until tomorrow with the reception on Friday - called Prohibition: Celebrating the Repeal, Photographs from the Collection of the Boston Public Library.  The show features modern prints of vintage photos from the BPL collection depicting life under prohibition and ties in with the 75th anniversary of repeal coming up on December 5.  In addition, images by Panopticon regulars Bradford Washburn, Karin Rosenthal, John Ponwall and Keith Johnson (among others) were on view.  Don’t miss it.

It seems goofy, but I’m thinking I should take a holiday in my own hometown and stay at the Commonweath.  When the weather gets cold, being able to see great photos and eat great food without going outside sounds pretty good.  Kenmore square has come a long way since I first moved here, that’s for sure.

Blue Shirt Cafe recently expanded Eastward into the space between them and Snappy Sushi, probably doubling their total square footage while increasing the dining seating perhaps fivefold. But there’s still not that much cheese in their cheese sandwiches.

I had the Little Italy, with tomatoes, roasted red peppers, pesto, provolone and balsamic on focaccia. I know, it’s not actually billed as a cheese sandwich, but a single slice of provolone isn’t much, and it’s one of the mildest cheeses out there. The tomatoes and peppers were plentiful, maybe even overly generous, and the pesto was mild.  The focaccia was well-grilled but could have been oiled a little more.  An all-around nice sandwich, but nothing super-special, and certainly not the cheese sandwich experience I’ve been seeking.

On the plus side, Blue Shirt is now offering free wifi. Until a worthier cheese sandwich makes itself known, this is a afwully good lunchtime blogging hideaway. And they have their own private label orange soda.  How cool is that?

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PS, In other insufficiently cheesy news, I’ve just become aware of Jeff Cutler’s blog and podcast Bowl of Cheese which I’m sorry to report is not hardly about cheese at all.  But it’s still worth a look and a listen.  And I’m not just saying that because Jeff gave me a USB coffee warmer from the cyberposeurs at the Cyberposium.

Running errands I found myself back at Sherman Cafe in Union square. I’ve liked the place since they opened, but there have been some ups and downs in quality over the years. We’re definitely in an up right now, and have been for a while according to local bakery maven J.

They’ve eliminated the raised platform in the window and created more seating, tidied up the back area and deployed some really excellent sandwiches. Maybe the opening of nearby Bloc 11 lit a fire under them. Less appealing to some is the one hour free internet limit, but I think that’s reasonable, and I’m pretty sure if you ask nicely and keep buying stuff, the staff might slip you an extra hour once in a while.

Today I’m enjoying a fresh orange juice and a sweet potato, goat cheese and rosemary scone. There’s a combo you don’t see too often. It’s tasty, but the goat cheese and rosemary are barely evident, even though the sweet potato is in plentiful chunks. It’s good to know it’s here, but I think I’ll stick with Sherman’s strength, their sandwiches.

Adding the obligatory geek note, this is the first post created entirely on the new mini notebook. I put the SD card from my digital camera into the computer’s media slot, tidied up the photo with GIMP and did the rest in the browser. Mission accomplished. This setup is going to be excellent when I’m on the road.

It was a photographic version of the colorful phrase, drinking from the firehose.  Thursday night I attended a lecture by Magnum photographer Paul Fusco and then Friday, an opening of a show by National Geographic photographer Cary Wolinsky, both events presented by the Photographic Resource Center.

Paul Fusco spoke softly but passionately to a packed BU auditorium where he discarded the podium and sat on the stage, insisting on near-total darkness so the images (projected from an authentic slide carousel) could be seen best.

First, Fusco showed images from his RFK Funeral Train project.  In 1968 (a time, he noted, that was full of both hope and uncertainty, not unlike the present) he was assigned to photograph Bobby Kennedy’s funeral and boarded the train carrying RFK’s casket from New York to Washington.  It turned out that nearly the entire route was lined with mourners, and Fusco photographed them from the train window.    It’s an incredible slice of history and a collective portrait of the people of America at the time.  Buy the book or at least look at the website.

Next, he showed work that has not yet found a publisher, a series he calls Chernobyl Legacy.  The beauty of Fusco’s composition and use of light does little to make these pictures any easier to look at, but at the same time you can’t turn away. In Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, Fusco photographed the hospitalized and institutionalized childen and adults terribly damaged by the fallout from the 1986 nuclear accident. Fusco’s passion for looking this event unflinchingly in the face and sharing it with the world was evident and contagious.

Among others, I ran into Jason Liu, one of the artists in Hudson Street Gallery’s current show, and David Strasburger, one of whose prints I bought at the PRC’s auction last month.

The next day, I attended the opening of the second exhibition of the MIT-PRC joint gallery space at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics.  That’s 6-304 for your Institute types, just go to the end of the Infinite Corridor and go up to the third floor, you can’t miss it.  Nor should you.  A new space has been constructed by enclosing the courtyard of building six, and the design of the space, even without the excellent artwork, is both inspiring and livable.  I wrote about the first exhibition in this space last year.

Cary Wolinsky showed work from two series: Sand House and Varanasi.  In Sand House, he documents a colonial-era house in Namibia that has been invaded by the adjacent desert and filled halfway up with sand.  You have to see this to fully understand the surreal beauty of it.  (And you should also check in with Max Becher and Andrea Robbins on how surreal the German presence in Namibia can be)  Varanasi is an Indian city on the Ganges and home to the fabric-dying industry documented in Wolinsky’s photos.  It’s part of his wider ongoing interest in textiles and fabrics and a body of work called “Fabric of Life.”

Besides the PRC show of Wolinsky’s photos, the MIT CTP space also has art and photographs by Sol LeWitt, Ansel Adams, director emeritus Robert Jaffe, and others.  Also don’t miss the LeWitt floor installation that you can see from the bridge to building 6C.

There’s ace photographologist Leslie K. Brown at left, setting the story straight on B&W films.  Also present were PRC director Jim Fitts and Jason Landry, currently the PRC’s interim education manager.  I was also lucky enough to see photographers John Chervinsky and Peter Vanderwarker, and one third of conceptual/political art trio Triiibe.  The official opening of this show is next week, so check it out.

Sometimes I get excited about small things.  Some would say that’s the point of this blog.  Others would say, “that’s what she said.”  Today’s little fixation is the Random Redirect Wordpress Plugin by Matt Mullenweg. I have implemented it near the top of the sidebar with a version of Det. Harry Callahan’s famous inquiry.  So give it a spin.  You gots to know, don’t you?

That’s a pretty thin post, even for me, so here are a couple of other random items.

World Run Day

Today is World Run Day, a global virtual event in which people so inclined run as far and as fast as they fell like, and some even raise money for charity doing it.  Some Boston-area folks are taking a 3.8-mile loop around the Charles River Basin today. I’m more likely to walk it, but I was pretty excited to learn about MapMyRun, an ad-ridden but still cool map mashup that lets you plot your route and share it with friends while compiling statistics on the route and your progress along it.  The elevation feature is exceptionally cool and (so I hear) useful for those in marathon training. Kudos also to the Librarian on the Run for having a cool blog and for starting her fundraising for Mass Eye & Ear for the 2009 Boston Marathon.

Things to Worry About

I discovered Jeff Cutler’s blog of things he claims we worry about via a random twitter encounter.  I have to suspect these might actually be Jeff’s own fears, but I can’t say they don’t often resonate.  It’s a bit like those Worst Case Scenarios books, but without any actual solutions or preventions for the disastrous scenarios.  For example:

Slotter Slaughter
That when you go play the slot machines in either Vegas, CT or RI, the new slot where you feed in money will grab your tie or handkerchief and strangle you unceremoniously. Which also leads me to wonder why anyone would have a ceremony for a strangling or any such event.

My general diagnosis is that Jeff should switch to wearing bowties.

Park and Pray

I noticed Park and Pray’s inaugural post, The Five City Parkers you Meet in Hell, via Universal Hub.  To my pleasant surprise, they have kept it up with a nice mix of parking news.  too bad they weren’t around when I did unsuccessful battle with lousy parking maps and poor signage at the Cambridge-Somerville neutral zone.  They describe Park and Pray thusly:

Chronicling the adventures of urban street parking, Park and Pray started in the unparkable jungle of cow path built spaghetti-grids that make up the Boston neighborhoods. A voicebox for the adventurous spot-hunter, we’ll report on just about anything with a cursory relationship to car ownership in the city.

They welcome tips - the informational kind - so check them out and share your parking stories.

Bead Babe Roz

As I’ve mentioned, I have a theoretical affection for Etsy, but haven’t yet been a customer.  Recently, I helped L photograph some jewelery for her mom’s Etsy site, which is now up and running.  So if you’re interested in some beady goodness for yourself or for a gift, head on over to Bead Babe Roz before she’s sold out for the holidays.