Hey hey hey, last week of the class, and only two of us show up other than the teacher. And there was no developer anywhere to be found. So no darkroom time. Instead, we’ll get vouchers (if the dude remembers) for one free week of the open darkroom during the fall session. What, then, did we do? The three of us took a stroll around The Fan and I finished up my roll of 6×6 Delta 3200. And that was pretty much that…class over.
EPILOGUE:
Okay, so the dude was a pretty dead-beat teacher. I think anyone reading this already has that impression, but whatever his teaching skills, he’s still an artistic photographer and filmmaker, so I want to check out his work at First Fridays Artwalk on September 5th. I can’t let his lack of instruction prevent me from seeing his art, and I’d encourage anybody who’s reading this in Richmond to do the same.
Certainly my own interest in photography (and film photography specifically) hasn’t waned over the last ten weeks. I can still look forward to the spring, when I intend to take an intermediate class - hopefully with Valerie. It’s my intention to start processing my own B&W film later this year, and if things work out for Christmas I’ll even get a decent film scanner. All of that combined ought to keep me crankin’ out negatives for quite some time.
That’s pretty much all there is to say about that.
Tonight I braised a pair of beef shanks for dinner. A pair of dry-aged shanks from a humanely raised cow, to be specific. I used garlic, soy sauce, freshly ground ginger (a first for me), basil, salt, pepper, and water for the braise, and the zest and juice of a lemon to brighten things up a bit. I reduced the braising liquid afterwards to about a cup of intensely flavorful suace and finished it off with a few dashes of toasted sesame oil (WOW). The shanks were quite tasty, and the rice on the side (with several of the same flavors) complemented the meat very well.
The real star of the show, however, wasn’t the meat, the rice, or the sauce. No, the real star was the bone marrow.
After having been seared on both sides and braised for an hour and a half at 225 F, the marrow was soft and gelatinous. I had only to run the tip of my knife around the inner rim of the bone to release the teaspoonful of protein-laden marrow. I tentatively scooped it up with my fork out of the sauce on the plate, and ingested. HOLY CRAP, IT’S LIKE MEAT JELLY…but in the best possible way. I’d seen Anthony Bourdain spread marrow on toast on an episode of No Reservations, and I understand why. Had I more at my disposal I’d have done the same. The flavor was like the most complex essence of beef, as if somebody had distilled all the best flavors from every cut of a cow and amped it up tenfold.
Next time I head to the butcher I’m going to ask more about marrow…I could totally make a dish out of it, like an appetizer or something.
Last night Valerie watched Love in the Time of Cholera while I was in the room, so while I wasn’t actively participating in the viewing experience, I couldn’t help but observe the ridiculousness.
I really don’t mind spoiling anything here since you probably aren’t planning to see it. If you were, well, I’m saving you the trouble. Here’s the gist: Dude meets girl during late teens or something. Dude falls for girl even though he barely knows her. Girl’s dad doesn’t like it because dude is of little financial means. Dad takes girl away from dude, marries her off to doctor. Dude irrationally clings to memory of girl, plans to save himself for her no matter how long it takes. Until dude is pulled into a dark cabin on a river boat for some anonymous coupling. Now dude decides that sex dulls the pain of pining for this girl he met back in the day. Dude proceeds to nail any willing lady he meets, until one day when he’s in his seventies, girl’s husband dies. He meets her, writes to her, convinces her to be with him like he’s always wanted. Hooray.
While even that shell of a summary is horribly stupid, the details are what makes it worse. The movie attempts to be romantic, but the dude actually keeps score of all his…um…scores. At several points throughout the film we hear him recounting his various adventures in love-making in between throw-away scenes of social/political upheaval and the girl’s domestic life with her doctor husband. It’s hard to take our protagonist’s stories as anything other than comical, so we we’re left with a story that plays at love and romance but fails utterly.
Even Valerie agrees with me in giving this movie a 2 out of 5 stars. It gets two because at least the lead roll was played sorta well by Javier Bardem, but he does little to salvage a ship that seems designed to sink.
For the starting price (indeed, it goes much higher) of $4,600.00, you too can have a bespoke Leica rangefinder camera. I mean, a man can dream, right? Right?!
Holy Crap!!! Alton Brown has a new show starting on September 7th called Feasting on Waves which follows his trip around the Caribbean investigating island foods.
I know what I’ll be watching on Sunday nights (10pm!) for four weeks
Michael Ruhlman recounts, in entertaining style, a day of cooking and eating with his former cooking instructor Michael Pardus. The dual sense of serendipity and devotion to a craft make me want to spend a day like theirs…perhaps with some slightly less daring cuts of meat
Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating (if not slightly morbid) article about a 1924 kidnap and murder of a 14-year-old boy in Chicago by two young, wealthy, and deranged men. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb botched a scheme to kidnap and murder one of Loeb’s cousins while extorting ransom money from the boy’s father, and their trial gripped the city - indeed, the country - while a prominent prosecutor of the day battled with attorney Clarance Darrow between the death penalty and life imprisonment.
The article gave the impression that Darrow fought more for preventing another execution than for the defense of his clients, and his quote after the trial seems to feign disappointment at the “loss” of his case:
Well, it’s just what we asked for but…it’s pretty tough….It was more of a punishment than death would have been.
While the piece has been unfortunately paginated its window into early 20th century culture is worth the read.
Eran Hilleli is a student at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and each one of his shorts on Vimeo is a joy to watch, whether it’s stop-motion, traditional animation, or a blend of motion graphics generated by a computer.
“we used to call people late at night” - the video above - is my favorite so far. It’s creepy to me, perhaps because it feels both real and frighteningly fantastical at the same time.
