Paul Caine

thediscography:

(via saturday-night-hemorrhagic-fever)

lickystickypickyme:

Urban Sprawl in the United States: Incredible Aerials

To be honest, when seeing it like this it creeps the shit out of me. It may have it’s benefits but it looks like those crop circles supposedly made by alien species.

I’m not sure how to write about my current ire toward Top Chef without sounding impossibly petty and dumb, so I’m going to shoot for a calm, analytical approach.

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Here’s the deal: Everyone who watched Season 6 of Top Chef knows that this season’s cast represents a significant downward direction in aptitude, experience, and creativity. Last season was a grand tour of the current culinary vanguard, and towards the end became a series of deft master classes. There were moments when the judges seemed hopelessly behind the times, like representatives of an long-gone avant-garde. Think about this: When Craft opened in 2001, the menu—farm-to-table components, selected by diners and prepared by the kitchen with classic technique—was considered revolutionary. Now that’s par for the course, having given way to molecular gastronomy and bold flavor combinations of a sort proffered by the top few contestants last season.

Which is all to say that I wonder whether last season was perceived as a threat by the old guard, who could dish out all the criticism they wanted while knowing that if it came to a head-to-head with one of the top contestants, they’d likely get their asses kicked. And with that in mind, I can’t help but think that this season’s (comparatively) mediocre lineup and surfeit of gimmicks is a way to turn the tables once again.

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I’m okay with the contestants being not-so-stellar, although it’s more fun to watch great chefs make innovative food. What I object to is the onslaught of gimmicks, which inject randomness into what should be a meritocratic pursuit and create stupid situations whereby the worst contestants hold leverage over the best. The sniping, the intrigue—that’s great for other reality shows. But in a show where one is ostensibly judged for the plates they put out, a gimmick like last night’s “Cold War” is unforgivable. The contestants, divided into two teams, judged their peers on the other team, and the chef deemed worst by the other team went to the elimination challenge. Seeing an opportunity to eject a strong competitor, one of the teams pretended to despise Kenny’s dish, and in doing so sent one of the competition’s strongest chefs to the elimination challenge.

While this sort of nonsense creates infighting among the contestants (and leads to obnoxious admissions, like that one of the contestants used to sleep with another contestant’s girlfriend), it also discredits the judges. You are there to judge, judges! We want to hear what you have to say! We want the best food to win! For next season, how about some challenges that don’t involve two-person aprons, nefarious plotting, or musical chair-style shuffles? How about challenges that force chefs to make great food?

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Just a thought.

No internet still, and Verizon is less than forthcoming. So the Tumblr dries up a bit, in favor or short, pithy “tweets.” A question: To what extent are foreign-based customer support representatives taught to emulate regional dialects/accents? I ask because the first of many, many representatives I’ve spoken with about this internet situation—who was very helpful, by the way—had a Texas twang mixed in with what sounded like an Indian accent. I have since spoken with representatives offering flat Midwestern, nasal New York, and colonial (vestigial?) British. Very interesting. I’m sure there’s a pop psychology book about this that I’ll pick up the next time I’m at the airport.

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I have a new favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and I am sad that I will have to save it for special occasions. It’s called Matyson, and it’s New American Etc. but with a twist: every week, they offer a different tasting menu based on a specific ingredient, five courses for $45 and BYOB to boot. When we went, the menu centered on lobster, which, if you think about it, is the best possible ingredient for this sort of conceit. (A few weeks ago it was onion, evidently. No offense to onion, but this is no contest.) It was insanely delicious and involved much more lobster meat than one might imagine for the price. And eating lobster and foie gras in the same bite made me feel so rich and important and powerful, like some character in a Tom Wolfe novel before something bad happens to him and his fatal flaw revealed.

They’re serving the menu for one more week—next week, I mean—and I recommend everyone go. Here it is:

Lobster Mania

Ceviche

Cucumber, melon, mint, basil & yuzu 

Consomme

Local summer vegetables, breakfast radish, & chervil 

Butter Poached

Seared foie gras, jalapeno corn cakes, blueberry-ginger sauce 

Smoked

Poricini spaetzle, wild mushrooms, bacon, chicken jus 

Summer Berry Tiramisu

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Okay, bye.

There was no internet. And there was also no electricity. People actually used candles as their principle source of light! And not necessarily fancy candles, either. Sometimes they used Hanukkah candles which, for some reason, accompanied them on a July move from one city to another.

And when their iPhones died or when they wanted to send important e-mails, they would have to walk an entire block to the coffee shop—in particular, a coffee shop with a vibraphone-heavy soundtrack—and purchase expensive beverages, in order to accomplish these tasks.

(The soundtrack just changed to reggae, completely breaking my train of thought. Internet and electricity arrive tomorrow.)

From a private collection: Two copies of the seminal tweet anthology Twitter Wit, edited by Nick Douglas. The first is an uncorrected galley of the book in very good condition. This particular item is especially rare, as it is believed most book reviewers disposed of their copies immediately upon receiving them. The second copy is a first edition of Twitter Wit, in mint condition and almost certainly unread. The current owner would prefer to see both books sold as a single lot, ideally to a collector with the wherewithal to share these important resources with the public. Price upon request, or $5.

I love the guitar, in spite of a perennial inability to improve my skills or understand music theory. Watching a bunch of people shred, as I did for this story in Nylon Guys, was obviously going to be a lot of fun. And it was a lot of fun, both the watching and the writing. The piece is an attempt at ‘Talk Of The Town’ style, and I think got close. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

BONUS: If you look closely, you can see me in one of the photos. (You’ll have to employ Waldo-level looking skills, though. Good luck!)

(Click for PDF)

I interviewed Kele Okereke—lead singer for Bloc Party, recent solo album releaser—at a café on the Lower East Side. Doesn’t that sound dumb? “A café on the Lower East Side”? “An antiques shop at the end of a winding boulevard.” “A pagoda by the banks of a rushing river.” Whatever. His album is worth checking out—dark, heavy, metallic.

(Click for PDF)

This piece appeared in Nylon’s Young Hollywood issue, which recently left the shelves and wandered off to…actually, where do old magazines go when they’re done with the newsstand? To a landfill? Probably. Interesting question to ponder, or for that matter, to easily look up on the internet.

Anyway, it was a pleasure speaking with so many excellent directors, all of whom acknowledged the odd, not-exactly-rational nature of their industry while avoiding cynicism—and even more, while staying more or less optimistic about the future of things.

(Click for PDF)

Components

-Scallops, of dubious provenance but reasonable freshness, pan-seared in butter

-Kabocha squash, roasted until outrageously creamy

-Roasted asparagus mayo

-Toasted Napoli baguette

Remarks

Weirdly, this sandwich may have been better without the scallops. Kabocha squash is incredible once it’s been roasted for a while and sprinkled with sea salt (it’s amazing in other guises, as well, but I think roasting works best), and it could’ve anchored the sandwich. Next time.

RYAN Says:

I hope and pray for a safe return But i personally think these parents are idiots come on you let your 16 year old daughter try and sail the world solo did your brain fall out of your skull when she came up to you with that pretty smile and big eyes and said “please daddy im just gonna sail around the world how long could it take” I understand having dreams i’ve had many but my parents barely let me borrow the car on a saturday night let alone take a 3 month trip around the world in a sail boat by myself parents get real take control of your kids lifes and get involved with them its ok to tell your kids no i do it all the time yeah i hear some whining but guess what my kids are not lost at sea wake up parents stop living your lives through your kids stop being there buddies and discipline them then they might actually respect you

thediscography:

quartzcity:

getbackvassifer:

puffoflogic:

raptordevitesse:

agree2disagree:

briittaany:

I just want this on my blog forever.

No idea what this means ……. but I love it.

Speaking as an alumni, UC Irvine (go Anteaters!) really needs to get on top of the “fuck you, I’m an anteater” meme.

Amazing.

And presented without comment.

I’m currently on deadline, and skimming through photos to remember key details.

This was perhaps my favorite meal in Korea: pork bulgogi, bean sprouts, and octopus, simmered on the table in a big metal tray. We ate this at the wildly popular Kongbul restaurant, in the Hongdae neighborhood. (Thanks, Dan.) Serve with rice and copious quantities of watery beer. Bib recommended.

Yesterday I wrote about an excellent piece on gentrification, with a note that lucid analyses of the subject don’t appear all that often.  Today, a counter-example, courtesy of Bushwick blog BushwickBK. 

Barrett Brown (who, full disclosure, I used to edit at the A.V. Club) writes a weekly column there called Freelance Wasteland. The newest essay is titled “In Defense of ‘Hipsters’ and the Controversial Practice of Moving to a City Not of One’s Birth,” which makes its point sort of laboriously but basically asserts that native citizens of Bushwick shouldn’t criticize recent arrivals to the neighborhood, as they themselves are unable to fill the numerous creative/media jobs in the area that need filling and which “hipsters,” as it were, tend to fill. I’m not sure it’s his finest work:

There are also, contrary to popular belief, many such gigs available in this city. They are almost always awarded to those of us who came to such places as Bushwick from elsewhere, as the alternative would be to depend on the talent pool found in such as places as Bushwick. For some reason, the city’s editors, producers, and the like are disinclined to do such a thing, although this will certainly change if more outlets end up needing people to honk at parked school buses, throw old televisions out of windows, play shitty Top 40 dance music from parked cars at 600 decibels, scream at bodega clerks, avoid branch libraries, give money to Pentecostal preachers, buy t-shirts that say “Hi Hater” on one side and “Bye Hater” on the other and then wear those t-shirts in public, await the Jewish Messiah, worship the Christian Messiah, and play the lottery.  

 Anyone who’s ever moved to a dense urban area from somewhere more affluent and suburban has likely felt this, at least in passing. The break from one’s comfort zone leads to the indulgence of stereotypes that liberal-arts college degrees are supposed to get rid of. But stereotypes aren’t truths in disguise—they’re the opposite—and it’s lazy to present them that way. Not that the comment section is any better:

Brooklyn in another year or two will be completely overrun with pasty-faced, talentless hacks like yourself and turned completely into a faux Portland. Only natives can see how tragic that would be.

I should mention at this point that my favorite Scorcese film is Gangs Of New York.

Which is why everyone should read Benjamin Schwartz’s article in The Atlantic, “Gentrification and Its Discontents.” Schwartz stresses the temporal aspect of gentrification—of the unspoilt city as a moment in time—rather than the usual rhetoric, which frames gentrification in terms of spatial incursion by outsiders. It’s a much better way of thinking about the issue. Like this:

Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment. Indeed, what has changed since [Jane] Jacobs’s day—and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue—is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression (Zukin is perceptive on this point) and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy.

And this:

 Confronted with this unstoppable process, Zukin proposes waving a magic political wand by calling for an assortment of mandates and controls to ensure that certain ethnic groups and social classes and the practitioners of certain livelihoods that contribute to the “authenticity” of the city be able to live there. Surely this is taking the fetishization of vibrant Jacobsian urbanity too far. It’s entirely reasonable—in fact, humane—to argue that the state must ensure decent living conditions for its citizens (and God knows we are terribly far from that situation). But it’s a wholly different proposition to argue that, in the name of what Sorkin calls “the protection of … the local” and to forestall “a landscape of homogeneity,” the state should create the conditions necessary for favored groups—be they designers, craftspeople, small-batch distillers, researchers, the proprietors of mom-and-pop stores—to live in expensive and fashionable neighborhoods or boroughs. That effort would ultimately be an aesthetic endeavor to ensure that the affluent, well-educated denizens of said neighborhoods be provided with the stage props and scenery necessary for what Jacobs and her heirs define as an enriching urban experience.

Mostly, though, such political solutions seem quaint: all this bellyaching about authenticity and lost soul. Sorkin and Zukin, sentimental progressives, need a bracing dose of Marx. Manhattan is the primary locus of global capitalism, the most voracious force for change in history. Best to pick a different place to try to render fixed and solid that which inexorably melts into air.

I know this is old news, but the “Like” option on Tumblr feels wholly inadequate sometimes. This example comes from Cajun Boy; there are several hundred more “Likes” that the screen grab couldn’t capture, of course.

Andres Duany:

The Gen-Xers also discovered the cities; they’re buying in a proper way. The Millennials are the ones we’re talking about. And they love cities desperately. And they’re loving them to death.

This Gawker comment hits on something:

As someone who doesn’t live in New York, I’m continually amazed by how much of living in New York seems to be about Living in New York. So, when you’re done Working in New York and Organic Grocery Shopping in New York on the way back to your Neighborhood As Signifier That’s The New Previous Neighborhood, when do you find time to just, well, just…be in New York and clip your toenails and make toast and subtly fart? Say what you will about the concrete slabs of Toronto, I still manage to find moments where it’s not about an obsessively documented narrative of Living in Toronto.

I recently discovered Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, and I’m into it. (Think of the next couple of paragraphs as my ‘Solange discovering Hipster Runoff’ moment.) PRR is sort of a media-watchdog site for Pitchfork’s reviews and essays, an absurd conceit that’s played pretty well by whoever writes it. It’s earnest and perceptive and well-reasoned, but also kind of crazy. A recent “Morning Roundup” asserts that the Sleigh Bells review, by stalwart reviewer Mark Richardson, “isn’t ‘classic Richardson’ but it does the trick.”

PRR’s position on Pitchfork’s influence is that it’s as major as can be. The writer has mentioned he’s(?) in his mid-20s, so that would put him right in the demographic that recognizes Pitchfork as vastly more influential—and maybe more authoritative—than, say, Rolling Stone. I especially like the connoisseur’s distinction between different types of reviews and ratings:

holy fuck will continue toiling in relative obscurity (as THAT band perpetually opening for a band you used to like (at bigger venues than where you used to see that band you used to like)) after another “better luck next time review”, this one a 7.8

Reminds me of the time Serious Eats argued that Motorino deserved two stars from the New York Times. Sam Sifton had waxed poetic about the place and then handed out only a star. That single star looked a lot like a ceiling, proof that no matter how good the food at a pizzeria was, it’d have to be somehow more complete—more like a “real” restaurant—in order to qualify for more than one star.

Anyway.

This city, so far, is:

Le Corbusier’s wet dream.

Land of Doughnut Plant franchises. (Take that, New Yorkers who think themselves swell for eating unhealthy blackout doughnuts at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge!)

Home of octopus served live, with the tentacles still wriggling around and the suction cups still quite functional.

Aaron Sorkin:

The problem doesn’t have anything to do with sexual preference. The problem has everything to do with the fact that we know too much about each other and we care too much about what we know. In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people’s lives.

And on a related note, I’m about an inch away from bidding farewell to Facebook. My resolve grows stronger every day. But—alas—others have grown too dependent on Facebook, such that even e-mailing me would be a stretch for them. Ergo, I’m obligated to maintain a profile, however bare-bones, and the tentacles stretch out farther and farther.

That said, I can no longer keep up with all these privacy settings, the absurd gymnastics of keeping one’s information to one’s self. Diaspora?

Man, is it tempting to pun off of Seoul. It is so alluring.

It will be difficult to resist when I head there on Friday, for work. Luckily I’m going with S, who speaks Korean. When pronounced properly, Seoul does not lend itself to puns. And anyway, the concept of a “soul,” such as it is, is most likely not a cognate across Korean and English.

Why not go ahead and pick up the latest copy of Nylon? It’s the “Young Hollywood” issue, and I wrote an essay about the difficulty of distributing independent cinema. There are some tweens—perhaps they are teens, I am not sure—on the cover.

People Quoted
Lynn Shelton
Andrew Bujalski
Joe Swanberg
Antonio Campos

Concepts Touched Upon
Technology
Video-on-demand
Digital versus film
Festival clout

The exciting, very apropos illustration comes by way of Andrea Wan. Rad.

Pizza, baked in a conventional oven on a stone, will never approach the greatness of a wood-oven pie, like that served at Motorino. But we must try nonetheless.

Patti Smith:

“New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city.”

“We basically had to build a new pool,” he said, “and the whole time people couldn’t access the spa area. It’s a perfect example of how people who bought in the beginning had to go through some pain. But now it’s done.”

From Wikipedia:

In an interview in June 2009, when asked about his best investment in life, he replied, “I think investing in a good education has been key for me, although the investment was more in time than money.”

1) “Green Grass of Tunnel” (Finally We Are No One)

2) “I’m 9 Today” (Yesterday was Dramatic, Today Is OK)

Or Buffalo, or something:

Softer housing markets are likely to dampen the magnitude and the burden of displacement, or obviate it all together. In cities like Cleveland, with much vacant land and low-priced abandoned residential and commercial shells, developers can create attractive housing for newcomers without displacing existing renters or homeowners. In fact, rather than posing a problem and inciting opposition to community revitalization, the slow influx of newcomers seems a welcome change from decades of population loss and concentrated poverty.

Components

-Squid, dredged in flour, then egg, then corn meal, fried in shallow oil.

-Leftover crushed tomatoes, leftover amaranth greens, garlic, simmered.

-Mayo

-Toasted Napoli baguette

Remarks

There is no way this sandwich wasn’t going to be delicious. I knew it the second I saw how the calamari were (was?) crisping up: the flour/egg/corn meal process really makes for a thick and crunchy batter, which cooks well even when there’s not much oil. Oh—and this isn’t really an experimental sandwich.

Components

-Mackerel, rubbed with cajun spices, sauteed, and finished with lemon juice

-Onions, garlic, and amaranth greens, sauteed with a little bit of beer

-Silken tofu blended with Sriracha

-Sliced round loaf from Napoli

Remarks

Good sandwich, although wasabi mayo would have been better than silken tofu and Sriracha. Mackerel is my favorite fish, and from what I understand it’s more sustainable than most. It also works quite well for sandwiches, being oily, tough, and kind of pungent (in a good way).

A travel feature I wrote for Nylon Guys is now on newsstands. (It’s the May 2010 issue.) My girlfriend, Sharon Kim, took the photographs. Click through to enlarge.

Presenting a new feature of the Caine Blog: Experimental Sandwiches.

I frequently assemble strange sandwiches with whatever ingredients are lying around the apartment. Starting today, I’ll attempt to document them for posterity. First up is a “Korean Banh Mi,” in quotes because it’s absolutely not a banh mi. It does, however, have some things in common with the legendary Vietnamese sandwich.

Components

-Ground beef, onions, and garlic simmered with soy sauce and chili oil and finished with toasted sesame oil

-Kimchi mayo (kimchi is homemade; it features in many sandwiches)

-Cucumbers, lazily sliced with the peeler

-Napoli baguette—the best there is

Remarks

Good sandwich, but the kimchi needs to be more fully drained and dry before mixing with the mayo.

The NY Observer reports that a feud between two factions of the Satmar Hasidic sect is imperiling the ugly-as-shit Rose Plaza development in Williamsburg. For details on the feud, read the Wikipedia page. (Fair warning: As with much of Wikipedia, it’s a contested site, so to speak.)

Running as an undercurrent in the drama is the complex world of Williamsburg Hasidic Jewish politics, with two bitter rival factions of Hasidim’s dominant Satmar sect staking out opposing positions on the issue.

Like oil and water, the two factions frequently take opposing sides in the community, supporting rival political candidates and warring with each other over proposed developments. The split initially formed over a succession fight after Grand Rebbe Moshe Teitelbaum, the sect’s leader, died in 2006, leading both his sons, Aaron and Zalman, to claim leadership. Their factions together have tens of thousands of members.

Recently, they stood in virulent opposition to each other on the hard-fought Broadway Triangle affordable-housing development planned for East Williamsburg, with the locally dominant Zalmanite faction strongly urging the plan, backed many Brooklyn Democrats and Mr. Levin, and many Aaronites working to defeat it.

If stopping poorly thought-out development—or at least giving projects time to breathe—is a side effect of the ongoing clash, I’m all for it. The Satmar community’s neighborhood in South Williamsburg has a kind of anti-aesthetic (I’ll explain more in a future post, once I can take some photos), and projects steered by Satmar developers often (but not always) de-emphasize design and context in favor of very utilitarian concerns. We shall see what happens here.

This was consumed at 1 a.m.

I’ve been perusing the PDF proofs for the piece about Montreal. It’s long and juicy and weird in unexpected and pleasant ways, and I’m excited to get it on this website. I wish I’d kept a diary alongside all of my notes for the article, though I wonder if I really would have had enough time to actually reflect on what I was seeing.

For example: we went to Saint-Viateur, the venerable bagel shop in the Mile End neighborhood, several times. We were first escorted by our tourism representative, Tanya, then we did a photo shoot with a band, and finally we stopped in to buy bagels to bring back to New York. Every time I went, I enjoyed a hot bagel, still warm from the oven. They were delicious. Here’s a dude making a few of the many thousands that the bakery produces every day. (Saint-Viateur is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which is sort of insane.)

I never really appreciated the spartan space, or aroma, or the bakers with their wooden planks, because every time we were there I was thinking about where to take a photo, or where we should go next to maximize our time. There was always a loft party to attend:

Along those same lines were my impressions of Montreal’s architecture—I saw much of it, and learned about little. We met with a young, forward-thinking architect and professor named Thomas Balaban (who doesn’t seem to have a website), and gazed upon cool juxtapositions like this one, in Multimedia City:

But never got any kind of overview of Montreal’s city planning. Although it’s a pretty small place, all things considered, and there’s basically one main road (Saint-Laurent) that runs northwest from Old Montreal to the city’s outskirts.

A final note: People compared individual neighborhoods in Montreal to those in New York (e.g. Mile End is Williamsburg, Multimedia City is DUMBO), and compared the general climate of the city to Berlin. All these observations seemed pretty much on-point. Montreal is smaller than Berlin, of course, but it’s dirt-cheap and many people we met don’t pay rent at all. The people that do pay rent save all their loose change for the month, which is more than enough to cover the miniscule bill. Fuckers.

And on an assignment, no less. Should I go anywhere in particular? Let me know.

From the comments section of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, about the futility of graduate school in the humanities:

The system is ethically bankrupt. I am walking away from my tenured position (to go into business for myself) this year because I don’t want to be part of it any more. There are well meaning faculty out there. But few, very few, who are willing to tell themselves and their students the truth about our conditions of labor. And the kicker—they know Marx chapter and verse.

What a depressing article, too. Academe is not my destiny, but it’s the destiny of a whole lot of folks I know.

I found out I was being made redundant the day after I took a tour of the Jazz Loft Project’s exhibit at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It’s worth a visit—and the accompanying book, also called The Jazz Loft Project, is worth picking up as well. I had a lot of fun conducting this interview.

Time can transform a given place into hallowed ground, the kind that’s spoken of in reverent terms. The Chelsea Hotel, Black Ark, Dischord House—they’re hard to contemplate without thinking about someone or something famous. The Jazz Loft is not one of these places. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a converted commercial loft in New York’s garment district played host to raucous late-night jazz jams, attracting musicians including Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans. Men-about-town like Norman Mailer and Salvador Dali dropped by to check out the scene, a tableau of hidden bohemia. All along, a former Life photographer and amphetamine addict named W. Eugene Smith compulsively documented the goings-on. His output, totaling 40,000 snapshots and 4,000 hours of recorded audio, includes everything from arty, experimental portraiture to jam sessions that could redefine jazz history.

But Smith never got around to organizing his work, and when he died in 1978, few people had seen or heard what happened at the loft. Now that’s starting to change, thanks to the Jazz Loft Project, a coordinated scholarly effort dedicated to documenting the building’s history. After years of archive-digging, the organization just released a book, The Jazz Loft Project, which presents hundreds of never-before-seen photographs from the collection. I spoke with Jazz Loft Project curator Sam Stephenson about digitizing thousands of hours of audio, the project’s impact on jazz scholarship, and Smith’s inscrutable motivations.

Paul Caine: How does an unfinished loft in New York’s Garment District end up as a cultural hub?

Sam Stephenson: Well, it was just a commercial building in a neighborhood that was zoned commercial from the beginning. In 1954, four people moved in, and it was just a shell—planks and bricks and no electrical work and no plumbing. Two musicians and two artists—a painter and a photographer—moved there in 1954 to use it as studio space. The photographer was Harold Feinstein, a longtime associate of Eugene Smith. The musicians realized that it was a good place to have rehearsals and jam sessions because there was nobody around. It was not a residential area, and there was nobody around at night to complain about noise. The scene just sort of sprouted in 1954. In 1957, Feinstein moved out and Eugene Smith moved in, and that’s really how it got started. If you look at a map of Manhattan, the loft is almost in the dead center of Manhattan, which made it easy for musicians to stop by if they were on their way to or from somewhere else. I think that’s an important part of the story because word spread pretty fast that this was a place for jam sessions after hours.

PC: Eugene Smith himself seems like a pretty interesting guy. He was living in the suburbs with a wife and kids, and then he just moved to the loft and started documenting. What happened?

SS: He was going through a personal crisis in his life. He was looking to get out of his house, where he lived with his wife and four kids and a live-in housekeeper and her daughter and a live-in photographic assistant. They were in this huge house out in Croton-on-Hudson, and he was expected to provide for the household. He was in the middle of the most obsessive project of his life, a massive study of the city of Pittsburgh, and he was sort of in a desperate situation artistically. The more structured obligations of a family weren’t fitting into his artistic ambitions, so he moved out and sort of abandoned his family. I think he felt more at home in [the loft] than he did in a traditional household.

PC: Some of Smith’s photography is very experimental. Did he see himself as a documentarian, or as just another creative presence in the building?

SS: I think probably both. I think something interested happened to him when he moved into that building. He came from a tradition of photojournalism, which is what he wanted to do from a very early age, and he was a combat photographer in World War II. Back in that time it was a heroic way of life—to go out into the world and document it with your camera and then come back to New York and report to middle America through the pages of Life magazine. What he did in the loft was very different. He didn’t go anywhere. He just started documenting right where he was. [Famed photographer] Robert Frank actually told me years ago—and he was well aware of Smith’s lost work at the time—that Smith went from a public journalist to a private artist in the loft. And I think that what you’ve perceived is accurate. He did experiment, and there’s not as much of a documentary journalistic mission with the work. Paradoxically, this may be his greatest documentary work.

PC: What’s also staggering is the sheer amount of footage: tens of thousands of photos, thousands of hours of reel-to-reel audio. What did Smith expect to do with all of it?

SS: That question pertains to his entire life and not just this project, although this project is the largest body of work in his life and career by far. When he worked for Life, the photo stories would be four or five pages with 12 images. He would make 5,000 photographs that eventually became a 12-picture layout. He was an extremist—excessive with everything he did. He had 25,000 vinyl records when he died. If he decided to do something, he dug the whole distance. I don’t know what his goals were, and after 13 years of studying him, I’m still trying to figure out his motivations. He made around 20,000 pictures in Pittsburgh, and he considered 2,000 of those pictures valid for his photo-essay. Another photographer once asked him, “What in the world are you going to do with these 2,000 photographs?” And he didn’t know. There’s nothing practical to do—you can’t exhibit 2,000 photographs and you can’t put them in a book. I’m still struggling with coming up with a valid answer to that question.

PC: Smith produced his jazz loft output over a period of years, and then the project seems to have slunk into obscurity. Why was it lost?

SS: That’s a great question. I think the reason it was lost was because his reputation was in tatters. He had left Life magazine where he had made a lot of money—and where they also paid for all of his expenses, which was easily as much as his salary—and he gave that up and left his family and moved into this ravaged loft building. People thought he’d lost his mind. The official photography world (which consisted of about eight or 10 people at the time) considered him to be a lost cause. Nobody wanted to hire him because they were afraid that a simple assignment would blow up into a giant odyssey, like what had happened in Pittsburgh. So when he started making the tapes, these photography world people saw it as a complete waste—he was gifted as a photographer, so why would he spend all his money? Tapes back then were expensive. The original reels still have pricetags, and they were each $2.95 or $3.95. That’s like $25 in today’s money, and there were 1,700 of them.  So he was spending a lot of money on these tapes, not to mention the equipment. The photography world didn’t give much credence to the tapes, and I still run into that today. I’ll see someone in New York and I’ll get a comment like, “Are you enjoying listening to those cats meowing?” You know, snide quips. That was the reputation of the tapes, that he had just taped all these useless sounds instead of doing what he was gifted at, which was photography. I think the other reason is the sheer volume of the collection. There have been some people who have come across these tapes in the past and they were daunted by the volume. We were too.  It took over $600,000 merely to transfer them to digital files.  The University of Arizona [which held Smith’s recordings] would not let anyone listen to the tapes until they were properly preserved, and that really prohibited anyone from doing anything for a long time, because you couldn’t really do anything unless you had a lot of money. We were lucky enough to get some big grants early and that allowed us to tackle the project.

PC: How has your team gone about piecing together all the parts into a coherent narrative?

SS: I started working on this project four years before we’d heard any of the tapes. I picked through all the reels of tape and noted every name that I recognized—138 names—and I figured out who was still alive and I began tracking them down and interviewing them. And once we got the tapes transferred to CDs, we began listening to them one by one. The question of how we made sense of this comes up a lot. I came up with a metaphor that it’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces. When you open the box and dump the puzzle on the table, it looks like it’s going to be impossible. One by one you turn over the pieces and separate the corners, and with each new piece the next piece becomes a little bit easier to find. That’s how it’s done.

PC: What does the new material offer to jazz history buffs? Will any narratives end up revised?

SS: Specific revision will involve Thelonious Monk. I think that there’s a view of him on these tapes—a glimpse of him that doesn’t exist anywhere else. You get to hear him talking at length about his music. To be even more specific than that, there will be a revision of how his big band concerts came about. The way it’s been written ever since it happened, really, is that Hall Overton created these charts almost on his own, using Monk’s music. These tapes reveal that that’s not what happened. Monk was the creator. Everything that happened in the big band was Monk’s idea, and you can hear that on the tapes. You can hear Monk talking with Overton about these concerts and about the arrangements. That’s quite a big change in how those particular bands will be discussed. In general, one of the things I like to say is that if you take a jazz history angle with this project, then everybody’s important. Not just the great musicians, but also the ones who are mid-level or even low-level. It isn’t really about the greats, though there are greats in it, but this is really about everyone else. I think, in some ways, jazz history is just beginning. We’ve covered the greats over and over, but for every one of those there were 20 others, or even 100.

This is, roughly, the third incarnation of Caine Blog. (A previous version is looking pretty sad here.) It’s returning because I am a victim of the Great Recession, an editor without copy to mark up. Indeed, The A.V. Club closed its New York branch a couple of weeks ago, a damn shame and—in my opinion—a harbinger of carnage to come. (As far as small-ish businesses go, The Onion maneuvers about as well as the Titanic.)

What a glorious run it has been! I didn’t make very much money, of course, but that’s kind of besides the point when you’re working with really smart, really cool people—folks like my editor, Andy Battaglia, A.V. music editor Josh Modell, Joe Garden, Kat Pfau on the business side, and many more.

For the past few months, I’ve been a part-time graduate student, studying urban planning at night at NYU. I assumed that come fall, I’d leave The A.V. Club (at least on a day-to-day basis) and enroll full-time in another program. The day after I got laid off, I got my first acceptance letter. A sign? An odd coincidence? Regardless, I’m taking it to mean that I’m going about things more or less correctly.

So: the next few months will involve a lot of freelance writing, a little bit of travel, and maybe some sort of internship. I’m killing time, but I want to kill it productively, such that its remnants—like great taxidermy— can be mounted on the wall that is this blog. A bit like this:

Here’s my plan of action. First, I’m going to post some pieces I was working on when I got laid off, the ones I really like. (Coming next is an interview with the author and curator of the Jazz Loft Project, which is about the coolest thing there is.) I’m also going to post thoughts on urbanism and music, sometimes at the same time. I’ve always been fascinated by the organic shifts in use that go down in fringe neighborhoods—the empty loft turning into a music venue turning into a wine shop, or vice versa—and now I’ll have a bit more time to think about that.

I’m not prepared to call this whole ordeal a “blessing in disguise,” but it’s starting to pan out that way. Maybe?

Anyone who’s ever shopped at Ikea knows the feeling. You’re there to buy something specific—track lighting, say—but by the time you leave there’s all sorts of other nonsense in the cart, accumulated during the meandering journey across the ground-floor “Marketplace.” By the end you’ve got a potted plant, or a picture frame, or one of those sheepskin rugs—something that’s completely unnecessary and that you never intended to purchase in the first place. Your cart has become an object lesson in why the guy who founded Ikea is a billionaire, and why you (most likely) are not.

Anyway, we had this experience yesterday. We got great track lighting, but we also ended up with a large wok, priced to move at $4.99 and conveniently displayed all over the place. This was an especially silly purchase because our range is extremely narrow—20” x 20” with four burners—and the wok covers essentially the entire surface area.

Hence: fried rice, using leftover white rice from last night’s kimchi jjigae. Into the wok went the rice, along with garlic, onions, cabbage, red peppers, kale, Quorn (the best fake meat there is), and Korean hot pepper paste (that deep red paste that goes on top of Bibimbap). We finished the dish with sesame oil and scallions and consumed it quickly, with some weird Australian wine that merits no further discussion.

We ate one of our final meals as Brooklyn residents at Fatty ‘Cue, a new restaurant in Williamsburg that trades in idiosyncratic Asian barbeque. For a main course, we shared the Ikan Bakar, which the menu describes as such: “whole mackerel, turmeric salt, smoked and seared in a banana leaf, chili-garlic-lime sauce.” It was rich, acidic, more or less perfect.

Although we lacked (and still lack) basically everything needed to replicate this dish, we did have some fresh mackerel, which we figured was a good enough starting point. We marinated the whole mackerel in a haphazardly prepared blend of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, beef gochuchang (beef chili pepper paste) and garlic for about 30 minutes; placed the fish, half-submerged in its marinade, in an oven preheated to 450 degrees; sloppily flipped it over at some point; and plated it on a platter, garnishing with thyme and drizzling the whole thing with the hot marinade.

The meat fell off the bone—a good thing when you’re dealing with so many tiny bones—and it tasted pretty great, to boot. Next time, we’ll try to use lemon or lime juice, which should allow us to cut down on the vinegar.

What’s better on a 90-degree day than a piping hot bowl of spicy soup?  We sauteed leeks, chicken, and homemade kimchi; added vegetable broth, kimchi juices, and hot chili paste, and simmered for about 30 minutes; finished the soup with sesame oil and soon-dubu (soft tofu that comes in a phallic tube); and ladled the result into a bowl and topped with crushed sesame seeds and a poached egg.

Served with rice and a chilled Pinot Gris from Oregon, the latter purchased at the Maryland state line since the wine situation in Pennsylvania is beyond depressing.

Hi there. We’re Paul and Sharon, and a few weeks ago we moved from Brooklyn to Philadelphia so one of us could attend graduate school. We like it just fine, but for any number of reasons—money, time, a decent kitchen, access to great produce—we cook a lot. This blog is meant to be an ongoing document of the meals we make.

I’m a writer and graduate student who lives in Brooklyn, New York. For the past year and change I worked for The A.V. Club, the arts-and-culture adjunct to The Onion, where I wrote about music and culture. I currently freelance for a number of publications, including The A.V. Club, Nylon, and Eater.

As a student, I study neighborhoods. I’m particularly interested in changes in use, as well as innovative private and public development.

My resume and some writing can be found below; peruse at will. To contact me about writing, e-mail me at paulcaine.writing [at] gmail [dot] com. If you’re just writing to say hello, do that at paul.j.caine [at] gmail [dot] com.

Sadly—and needlessly—most of my work for The A.V. Club is no longer available on the front-end of the website. Articles written for the national A.V. Club or picked up by other cities can be found here.

Pieces I’ve written for Eater can be found, with a little digging, here.

Other writing will be added in the coming weeks.

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Carleton College, magna cum laude, June 2008
Major: Sociology and Anthropology (Distinction in major, distinction in senior thesis)
Concentration: Cinema and Media Studies
GPA: 3.71, Writing Portfolio Judged “Exemplary” (Summer 2006)

Employment

Assistant City Editor, The Onion A.V. Club, New York, NY, November 2008-February 2010
Edited The Onion’s newest media property, A.V. Club New York, a locally-oriented event and city guide
Hired and maintained correspondence with interns, freelance writers and photographers
Contributed to The A.V. Club’s national website (~2m pageviews/month)

Editorial Intern, The Onion A.V. Club, New York, NY, September 2008-November 2008
Covered local events and culture for a high-circulation weekly publication
Attended various city events for coverage in the print edition of The Onion
Compiled music and food listings, wrote capsule reviews for featured events

Editorial Intern, Curbed Network, New York, NY, June 2008-present
Researched and wrote for a New York’s largest real estate blog network.
Copy edited and fact-checked for editors and the publisher
Attended development-related events, community board meetings, and government hearings
Utilized professional content management and web-publishing software

Awards

Recipient, Carleton Class of 1963 Fellowship, Northfield, MN, August 2007 – September 2007
Received a competitive grant to create a multimedia project on Berlin, Germany’s changing cityscape
Studied with new media theorists, artists, and both mainstream and radical urbanists