Posts Tagged “chocolate”

Hot chocolate, a peanut butter cookie, and a map!

This is the third post this month featuring Broadway, and the second one combining it with chocolate.  Not the most helpful web site, but giving credit where soupy, chocolaty credit is due: The City Bakery on 18th street in NYC.

Last night I attended an excellent photo lecture by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher sponsored by the Photographic Resource Center in affiliation with the New Center for Arts and Culture at the BU Photonics Center. (Photonics Center?? What goes on at such a place?) And after, I was able to join some PRC people for dinner with Max and Andrea. (Yes, he’s the child of Bernd & Hilla Becher, but we weren’t there to talk about them.)

A married couple, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher work individually as well as collaboratively using photography, film, video, and digital media, to create highly conceptual and critically acclaimed images. The primary focus of their work is, what they call, “the transportation of place” — situations in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one. Whether the subject is Germany in Africa, Germans dressing as Native Americans, American towns dressed as Germany, New York in Las Vegas, New York in Cuba, or Cuba in exile, their interest tends to be a place out of place with its various causes and consequences. They will discuss examples of this work from their two recent books Transportation of Place and Brooklyn Abroad .

I won’t go on at length about their work, you can check it out yourself (buy the book buy the book) but I will mention what was a somewhat offhand comment - Becher or Robbins said, “In order not to go blind, you have to travel” (it’s characteristic of them that which one said what is not entirely clear after the fact, and they have no interest in helping you figure it out) Meaning that if you stay in one place too long, you cease to really see it, and that only by traveling to new places and returning can you maintain real vision of your own place.

You can see that this idea appeals to me.

Among other great topics of conversation and presentation, Robbins & Becher showed photos and short film about St. Pierre & Miquelon, a small island part of France that’s located in North America just off Newfoundland. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about American islands or towns that dress up as French or have French heritage, this place is in fact part of France (see how they voted in the recent French election!) just 800 miles Northeast of Boston. I must visit.

And finally, I found this on Becher’s web site. Early work, but I must cite it here because it speaks to so many limeduckian themes: Chocolate Broadway.  I can see the block where I grew up.

I got an ice cream sandwich from the freezer.  Not actually an ice cream sandwich, but one of those soy-based fake ice cream ones, but it was a real sandwich.  Although it was half-sized.  Usually I eat two at a time.

I unwrapped it, put it on a plate on edge, and took a paring knife and cut it in half right through the middle of the fake ice cream.  Flopped the halves on their sides and added a smear of organic peanut butter.  Reassembled.  Ate.

Revelatory.  Truly.

It was 3:30pm and we needed the chocolate. It was inevitable, really.

Confused? Read the backstory, such as it is, here.

There’s just not enough time to eat everything. that’s why I love grazing, small plates and tastings. After a fine dinner of seafood (risotto frutti di mare and local grilled fish) and some very local wine (the waiter pointed to the hills above the city) my translator was blotto and I was too weak to resist the cute busgirl’s invitation to try some chocolate mousse.

This was a recommended but modest restaurant so I was not expecting a fancy dessert. So wonderfully wrong! A selection of chocolate mousses, clockwise from top right:
+ coffee with tiny roasted beans
+ ginger with shreds of candied ginger
+ balsamic vinegar(!) with little puddles thereof
+ dark chocolate in a chocolate shell

There’s definitely something interesting about the Viennese stamp left on this Italian and Slavic town.