left brain

Spinning : September & October

Sorry for the lack of interest in doing this entry last month but I really didn't have a whole lot to write about.  This month, I have tons ... which is what I was hoping for.   Lets begin:

Marie Antoinette was sorta a lame movie but the soundtrack is amazing.   Itunes also has it.  Pop 80's music, French baroque music, alternative edgy stuff.   The Strokes - What Ever Happened (the song from the US trailer) is fantastic.  Emotional, strained, angry, very me... haha.   New Order's Age of Consent will also get bopping your head.  Punk band Adam and the Ants song King of the Wild Frontier is punk rockish, hysterical, angry again and another fun time (especially if you can identify where it was played in the movie).   Aphrodisiac and I Want Candy by the Bow Wow Wow's and Hong Kong Gardens is also fun.  Radio Department is a new band to me but their song Keen on Boys  and Pulling Our Weight are again strained, emotional, depressed, bleak.  No, there was no Madonna in it but I am sick of seeing Kirsten Dunst.  The songs are Fantastic for the Fall !

I have been to see Offer Nissim spin live twice.  Once in Rio where he was fantastic but that could have been because of the Brazilian boys going wild around me, and in my mouth, and once at the Roxy which was shitty.  His remix of Abba's SOS is fantastic.  Lately, if I want to get pumped for going out dancing/clubbing/bar hopping than I will listen to it on the subway train.  Super SUPER fantastic.   After going to Crobar for the Evolve party with Victor Calderone I have started to break out my old remixes by him.  I don't have any new ones sadly and I really REALLY wish he would come out with a brand new CD remix.  Until then I only have some random recent mixes like This Beat Is, Magalenha, and one of my favorite Depeche Mode songs, Precious.

One of my hot French friends in Paris sent me a song.  Charlotte Gainsbourg L'un part, l'autre reste which I ultimately think was created by Chanson but I am not sure is beautiful, touching, and inspiring.   So break out the French press, a fantastic book (the French read more than New Yorkers), and a box of kleenex.

holy SHIT photoshop !

It is pretty incredible how much work goes from changing the woman or man into the model we all see and believe is real.  I do definitely believe NYC has some absolutely beautiful people in it, many of which I am sure are models since everyone here thinks they are, but this following video is just jaw dropping:

Now if we could just have "photoshop corrective lenses" and the world would be so much more beautiful. :P

Happy Halloween :P

Created by artist Bruce La Bruce.  So it is art...not porn.  It is also the first time I published dick without a warning.  I have to admit I think this photo is actually sorta hot but it is also seriously fucked up.  A bunch of seriously out there artists have inspired me for the new painting.

Ginch Gonch NEW Arrivals

Head on over to Ginch Gonch and check out some of their new HOT as fuck styles.
I swear that the GGonch underwear are the softest, hottest, best fitting underwear you can buy.
For Real !

Halloween Weekend

After a last minute hunt to find a restaurant to eat in before seeing a movie, I ended up getting a table at Bar Americaine.  Bobby Flay's other restaurant (he also runs Mesa Grill which I used to have an interest in going to) but    I sorta no longer do.  We chose Americaine because of it's proximity to MOMA and to the movie and it was a short list of options.  The decor is nice but the now sort of typical, colorful, whimsical large Manhattan restaurant idea.  The service was attentive but the food wasn't hitting the mark.  Needless to say it was removed from Michelin 2007 and for good reason.  I had a Johnny Cake with duck and a raseberry demi-glaze for an appetizer and a piece of skate so heavily covered in some thick ridiculously creamy stomach that I couldn't finish it.   It sorta made my stomach turn.   Sauces, in a thick creamy style, are so... over.  They have been for about 10 years too.  Weird that Flay sadly hasn't caught on. 

Babel, the new movie with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and a bunch of random people that the director found to throw into the movie, should be called Intolerable because it is.   I think Alejandro González Iñárritu is an excellent director and writer but his movies are all becoming very similar.  The whole three overlapping and interconnected stories was EXCELLENT in Amores Perros but the third time I just feel like it is getting tired.  The best story is set in Japan with a deaf mute girl and one of the best scenes in the movie is when she enters a big club.  The experience of a deaf mute girl in a big dance club is horrifying and unbelievably one of the most striking pieces of film I have seen in awhile.  However, not enough to see the movie again or highly recommend it.  The cinemaphotography is also really beautiful in the film but it won't hold your interest for the entire time, sadly.  Every time the story went back to the Moroccan story (the Brad Pitt story), I rolled my eyes and nearly fell asleep (which I did in turn a few times).

Roxy for Halloween was insane.  And by insane I mean that gold card members (You have to nearly bend over backwards sucking yourself of to get one, but is WORTH IT since it is free to get in in a bunch of places once you get one) had to wait in a line halfway down the block.  The regular line was down the block and around the corner.  That is just ridiculous.   It is also ridiculous that Peter Rauhofer is still spinning because even though he seemed to entertain the crowd, most people I know agree that the music was atrocious.  I even recognized (and I am not even a DJ) that he had the same mix playing three times!  However, there was unbelievable costumes (Marie Antoinette), some seriously hot boys, and an unreal crowded dance floor.  I guess it was expected but I was surprised given that lately Roxy has been a little less than packed.  Very fun though, I came home at 5 which means the night was really good, haha, and I got to see the Brazilian boys in Boston who are always fun and entertaining to hang out with. 

I also saw The Prestige this weekend with Huge Jackman and Michael Cane.   I love Michael Caine and Jackman.  One is hot while the other is just a spectacular actor, haha.  Christopher Nolan, the Batman Begins and Memento director, is equally as amazing.  His filming, sets, and just overall appearance of the movie are always terrific and The Prestige certainly holds true to that.  I actually thought that with one minor tweak this movie could have been excellent, but instead it was really good.  It definitely was very entertaining, interesting, and pretty well acted.  But it would have been excellent if they didn't gave away one minor detail that gave away the surprise twist  a little too early.

Set in a stylized late-Victorian world of dueling music-hall magicians and diabolically clever inventors, it has a satisfyingly puzzlelike structure, zipping around in time and scattering clues throughout its busy scenes and frames. Like “Memento,” also directed by Christopher Nolan and based on a story by his brother, “The Prestige” is a triumph of gimmickry, a movie generous enough with its showmanship and sleight of hand to quiet the temptation to grumble about its lack of substance.

The point of a magic trick, after all, is not the content, whatever that might be, but the ingenuity of its conceit and the skill of its execution. And “The Prestige” — the title is a magician’s term of art referring to the climactic surprise that seals a successful trick — manifests an enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of illusionism that is pretty much irresistible. It is a mock-gothic costume drama with more than a touch of Las Vegas extravagance, a larger-scale, flashier — if ultimately less haunting — relative of “The Illusionist,” another recent cinematic tale of 19th-century abracadabra.

D & G S/S 2006 MEN COLLECTION

                 

I love Fashion TV

Double Dose of Boys This Friday

If I ever questioned if I was for sure a homosexual, this video eliminates any doubt what-SO-ever. In fact, I think we should use this video to recruit new homo's (not that I think homosexuality is learned, lol).

Hot Boy Friday

The Perfectionist

I finished reading The Perfectionist.  Life and Death in Haute Cuisine by Rudolpho Chelminski today and I just first have to say admit that I broke into tears near the end.  The book is a magnificent journey following the life and sadly the death of one of the most famous chefs known to man; starting with his early childhood in rural France (a place that even Bernard called Maldavia), his education in a Troigros restaurant,  his struggle to gain one, two, and three stars, and then ultimately his spiral downwards.  A spiral that I think any human being (who has a passionate dream) can associate with.  It is a poignant commentary on modern life and the seduction and excessiveness of stardom and sucess.  The book obviously is about the journey and then the downfall of Bernard Loiseau, the chef that killed himself years ago in the rural town of Salieau because he believed the critics and the Michelin Guide had turned against him and were going to remove his "stars."   One of the many highlights in the book is the chapter devoted to how Michelin came to be.

For those unfamiliar with the Michelin Guide, as I was two years ago, should understand that Michelin Guides coverage of European countries is so extensive and clear that during the Second World War both German and American armies pirated the guide and issues copies to frontline officers for navigating through urban areas.  The US version was stamped FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.  It is well known that certain competing guides and food writers use the Michelin as the best and most reliable restaurant data base.  A one star means a "very good restaurant in its class"; two stars, "excellent cooking, worth a detour"; and three stars, "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey."

I dog-earred many pages so I don't know where to begin in trying to tempt you to read the book which I would highly recommend if you are interested in haute cuisine or chefs.  To test you, if the following paragraph gives you a near hardon, then I would run to your nearest Barnes and Noble:  The astounding manipulations of Ferran Adria's Catalan school of laboratory cooking, he served many of his dishes in liquid rather solid form; injected ingredients by hypodermic syringe at tableside into other ingredients; occasionally presented sauces in the form of ice cubes; used strangely shaped plates; had clients drink through organic straws or out of test tubes put dry ice chips in the bottom of a glass to create smoky-hokey billows of clouds; made deliberately provocative mixes of taste (mousse au chocolate with wild thyme; and in general carried on like a carnival Houdini.

One of the most interesting statements in the book is by a chef named Guy Savoy (who is opening up a restaurant in Las Vegas to my demise) who says, "Restaurants are the last refuge of civilization on the planet. "  The writer continues to argue that, "certainly restaurants are businesses engaged in seeking profit, but it is remarkable how often they can be something very much like a calling, how often the artisans engaged in that calling are stricken by the artist's imperative to transcend the dreadful, passionateless bottom-line mentality that more generally rules the modern world."

As one could tell in reading my blog, within the last year of my life, I have become obsessed with the restaurant and haute cuisine industry.   When I try to pinpoint where it began, I pretty much have to say it was my last trip to France which was mostly a mad dash around the countryside, Michelin in hand, hunting down cute cheap lunches and three star dinners.  Here is a link to the photo gallery of the trip.  It has almost been a year ago actually.  A year since I have eaten in Bernard Loiseau's Cote d'Or where at the time I didn't realize as much as I now know about Bernard, the industry, the concepts of it all.  The photo of me, to the left is a year old and in the town of Salieau.

I totally agree with Anthony Bourdain (you might recognize his name as well) comments on the book, "The Perfectionist is a knowledgable, wise, unsparing yet sympathetic portrait of a great chef at a crossroads in culinary history.  A sobering account of the real human costs of being the best."


The photos, other than the press photo of Bernard when he was awarded 3 stars, are all mine and of the Cote d'Or last year.  It is by far one of the most magical places I have ever been to.  A total hideaway from the world, exactly as Bernard hoped it to become.

Madonna - Oprah - President Bush - Iraq - Television - Report

Madonna - Oprah - President Bush - Iraq - Television - Report - New York Times.

The president and the pop star went on television yesterday looking more like victims of circumstances beyond their control than visionaries.

Madonna went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to assure a skeptical public that she didn’t snatch an African baby on a fashionably philanthropic whim. President Bush held a news conference to assure a skeptical public that he is inflexible in his willingness to be flexible in managing the Iraq war.

“Our goals are unchanging,” Mr. Bush said. “We are flexible in our methods to achieving those goals.”

Both showed viewers an unfamiliar side of themselves. The president, whose political identity is founded on an image of unwavering cowboy resolve, looked uncertain and chastened behind the lectern, at one moment staring downward and gnawing his lip in a rare tableau of weary anxiety.

The singer known for saucy aplomb was as prim and cautious as a politician, even if her clipped duty-free British diction undercut some of the poignancy of her appeal.

“I’m disappointed because it discourages other people from doing the same thing,” Madonna told Ms. Winfrey via satellite from London. “I feel the media is doing a great disservice to all the orphans of Africa, period, not just the orphans of Malawi.”

She said she learned that she was at the center of a global scandal only when she returned home. “I don’t read newspapers or watch television, but all of my friends have let me know what everybody’s talking about and what’s going on in the news,” Madonna said. “So it really didn’t hit me until I got back to England. It’s pretty shocking.”