terrific day at dossier, and also in L.A.

This is why I love Dossier. It's an outrageously gorgeous day at the style site (click), and the front page pointed me to a website called My Parents Were Awesome (click), which inspired me to dig up this photo of my mom, who is still awesome, holding my older sister, who arrived in L.A. today from her home in Australia. (click.)

Welcome back, Sar!

spain part I

As I batten the hatches for Fashion Week (click), there's not much time for writing about my short summer holiday. But here are a few photos before autumn sweeps us away.


First stop: Barcelona.

You can fill in the blanks from the hotel review I wrote for Mr and Mrs Smith. (click.)

Next stop, the Costa Brava...

craig claiborne: 1920-2000

From Craig Claiborne's Kitchen Primer:

"The second bête noir for the beginning cook is a lack of daring and a fear of failure."


A lack of daring is definitely one bête noir (sort of like a pet peeve) that Craig Claiborne did not suffer from. He was a son of the south who saw the world in the Navy, decided he'd like to be the food editor of The New York Times and enrolled in Swiss hotel school, thanks to the G.I. Bill. In 1957 he took his post at The Times, where he remained until the mid '80s. He was also openly gay in the puritanical post-war U.S., which must have been very difficult. Perhaps that's why he was known for being utterly approachable in spite of his gift for elegance and style--he knew what it meant to be an outsider.

I learned about Claiborne at a panel given at The New School last week, where food writers discussed what his career meant to their field. I most enjoyed hearing about him from those who knew him.When I say "those who knew him," I mean people like his former colleague Betty Fussell, who once called him "a yokel and a gooney bird" in print and restaurant consultant Clark Wolf, whose starry-eyed memory of Claiborne's 60th birthday party appears in this short piece I wrote for Saveur (click.)

But I also mean people like my mom, who knew him only from his columns in The Times. "I trusted him," she told me when we talked on the phone last night.One of the first cookbooks she gave me when I went to college was his Kitchen Primer, a little marigold yellow paperback that's sitting beside me now.


It has many wonderful basic tips, all written in Claiborne's clean classy style. We learn from his advice, but also from his life's example. As he says in the introduction to the Kitchen Primer:

In my opinion, it is harder to cook spaghetti to the proper degree of doneness (most people overcook it) and get it to the table hot than to make a proper soufflé. And have courage. The best of professionals have known (and later cherish) their early disasters.

Find the Saveur piece here: click.
And please, vote for Deanna, if you haven't yet today, here: click. It's working! Her rank is rising.

love, MOM

Seriously, I am about to give you all the best Mother's Day gift. It's called Postcards From Yo Momma (click)--a bulletin board of hilarious correspondence from moms. You won't regret this.


I learned about it from Lauren Collins in the New Yorker (click) a few weeks ago, and laughed out loud on the train. (Is there something about childbirth that bestows a genius for the comic use of punctuation and capitalization?)

I have plenty of gems in my inbox from my mom too, who generally signs emails in all caps: love, MOM. Here are a few favorites:

Subject: Pixel pink
Finally got the lipstick and will bring it to you soon, only 10 days! love, MOM (I didn't know you jumped out of a plane!)

Subject: Home again
Hi there, I hope your class went well. Tabbouleh is made from bulger wheat, not couscous (what was I thinking?), but I see no reason not to make it with couscous if one needed too. lots of love, MOM

Subject: CORSICA
HELLO? I AM HERE. ALL IS WELL; THIS ISLAND IS SO BEAUTIFUL. THIS FRENCH TYPING IS BAD? KEYBOARD IS STRQNGE. LOTS OF LOVE. MOM

Mom and Sara

So, MOMs can make us laugh without even trying. But making my mom laugh? Like, really really, laugh, is another story. It's something that only my sister can truly achieve, and it's totally priceless. So, we're pulling out all the stops on this one. Happy Mother's Day, MOM. Scroll down...


love,
your Jaybird

mom and richard serra: the pulitzer, st. louis

banksy, beatriz and brooklyn

So last week food was politics. This week art is politics. I mean, art is food. And it's all interactive. Wait a minute. Here I am, totally confused by this, text messaging via a pack of Orbit Sweetmint.

I'm sending a message to my mom, who has been here for the past two weeks and now refers to SOHO as "my neighborhood," and only walks on Broome cause there are too many tourists on Spring.

Tom Slaughter took that photo. He tends to get his lines crossed as well. Click here to see his Obama poster and vote for it, if it's your favorite. You're voting for a poster, rather than a candidate at this stage. I told you it was confusing. This was a great article in the Times Magazine about artists and Obama, from a while back. Click here for that.

Tom knows that I looovvvve Beatriz Milhazes' work. Last week I brought my mom to her opening at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea. Go, go, go to this show. Color-therapy, that's what her work is. A visceral simultaneous embrace of and escape from all this stimulus, food, art, politics and what not.

And a bit of Brazil.

Here's another detail from the show below.

Mom was impressed. Sort of. (Moms are tough, you know?)
I'll tell you who she's really impressed with.

Banksy.

She feels he must be just about the smartest guy in the whole world.

We happened upon the anonymous ("genius!") artist's West Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill the other night. Complicating matters further, these fish sticks are swimming around in front of another gallery owner (who doesn't know who hired him to sit at the Pet Store).

His gallery in Williamsburg, Artbreak, is also having an Art for Obama event in October. Click here for more information on that.

Banksy's New York ambush coincides exactly with my mom's visit to the city, leading me to wonder...no...

Mother Hen watches over her chicken little nuggets.

My sister and I are going to have to go a long way to beat mom's new favorite. Even Sara's own chicken-raising (click here) might not give old Banksy boy a run for his money.

I'm afraid I might have fueled mom's new art-crush, with the help of the New York Times.

My enthusiasm, and street cred (I'm talking in the eyes of my mom here) combined with the Times' credibility (see their article here).

I'd been thinking a lot about interactive art since I did my homework (here) about Maia Marinelli's piece Mocean.But what I've concluded after all this interactivity is that the point is that we all interact with each other, not just with technology. Especially now. Except for that I'm saying this online.

Paradoxical, I know. It all goes back to that pack of Sweetmint.

Tonight momma will move from her neighborhood to mine for the next couple of nights.
That's where I took this last photo, on Grand Street in my neighborhood...the same Grand Street where the pet storekeeper's gallery is.