Posts Tagged “cameraphone”

I wonder if cameraphones are the new polaroids. The pictures they make are quick, easy, sharable, used to document events or evidence, engagingly low-quality but sometimes oddly beautiful, and often a form of social lubrication. Sure, most of this goes for any digital camera, and some of it doesn’t really apply to the professional Polaroid films, but look at these shots of Revere Beach (MA not FL) at dusk and tell me if the grain and color doesn’t remind you of SX-70. Yes, I cropped them to square. No, that’s not cheating.

No-snowed out of snow shoeing, I took a walk with L about five miles from Harvard Square to the Boston Common, by way of the Harvard bridge and the Howard Yezerski Gallery, where we saw a fun show called “Inside the Box, A Diorama Exhibition Curated by George Fifield & Phaedra Shanbaum” (don’t be afraid, step on the pedal, it’s worth it!) but the real gems were the delicious Daewoud Bey Polaroids from his Class Pictures series in Yezerski’s back room.  Another hidden gem of the Newbury Street gallery scene is the collection of mostly black and white photos adorning the Banana Republic store at #28.  Don’t miss the Eric Lewandowski triptych on the ground floor.

Wintry clouds scumble
the sky over chic boutiques.
Sunset on the Newb.

The transportation horrors of getting to Chicago behind me, I had two impressive dinners this weekend. The first, at Green Zebra, was far more enjoyable but I will post about it later. The second dinner, a 12-course menu at Arun’s Thai, was impressive but less satisfying overall. But it was far more photogenic. Or at least better lit. Here are four of the 12 courses.

Appetizer #4: The Emerald Sea

This is really the dish I was going to devote a whole post to. Gotta love a dish that has a poetic name, although I keep mis-remembering it as The Emerald City or The Emerald Isle. This photo does not do an adequate job of describing the exquisite greenness of the pea sauce base – more jade than emerald to my eye – swirled with black bean sauce. The single shrimp is wrapped in taro noodles and balanced on a nest of fried noodle with steamed noodle within, and a snap pea pod on top. The shrimp was almost irrelevant next to all that springy green pea sauce, which I mopped up with the noodles.

Appetizer #5: Beef Salad

Here is where the back-room vegetable artists start to show off. A perfectly done slice of sirloin on top of some crispy chiles, onions and arugula with chili sauce on top, it’s fittingly accessorized with a hot-rod flame made of carrot.

Entree #3: Crispy Fish with Tempura Vegetables and Disturbingly Life-Like Carrot Goldfish

We were advised not to eat the goldfish because there were toothpicks holding it together. Relatively typical chinese-style fried fish with tempura-like broccoli (broccolini?) and zucchini, garnished with the incredible goldfish and some kind of seaweed.

Dessert #2: Lychee Sorbet with Poached Pear

The final course, a palate-clearing sorbet of lychee in a pastry cup with some poached pear and berry sauce.

I washed it all down with a nice Grüner Veltliner.

I’m on record for several disparaging remarks about the effectiveness of advertising in in-flight magazines and in-flight radio programs, so I was as surprised as anybody when I actually ripped out and saved this bit from JAL’s Skyward magazine:

If the fine print is too fine, I’ll summarize: People in Japan are getting fatter, and some healthcare outfit is piloting a program where users send in cameraphone pictures of things they’re considering eating, and the service sends back nutrition information to help guide the would-be dieters.

I was hoping this would be an application of some fancy food-recognition AI, (Something like IBM research’s super-cool Veggie Vision) but it seems to be dependent on a bank of nutritionists, so it’s not as scalable as I had hoped.

Seems like a useful service in any case. I wonder which will evolve first, food-recognition AI, or calorie and cholesterol detectors for mobile phones?

Here are eight things I considered consuming over the last few weeks. I ingested seven of them. Can you guess the odd one out?