Category Archives: Reviews

Top Restaurant Videos: Gion Mikaku In Kyoto, Japan’s Best Steakhouse

Gion Mikaku, founded 1929: – 2 different cuts of beef: Tajima beef filet mignon and Kobe beef rump steak with just the right amount of marbling (intra-muscular fat) and no extra-muscular fat – 400g in total. Steak cutting behind a window in their kitchen, friendly, dedicated service, pleasant view, extra hot griddle for proper searing, right timing and handling of the steaks: they certainly know what they are doing – This restaurant meal included garlic rice (between steak and dessert).

Gion Mikaku Kyoto Japan Best Kobe Beef Steakhouse Menu

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Cookbooks: “Les Dîners de Gala” (1973) By Salvador Dalí Reprinted By Taschen

From an Art Daily online article (March 19, 2020):

“I love eating suits of arms, in fact I love all shell fish… food that only a battle to peel makes it vulnerable to the conquest of our palate.”

Les diners de Gala Salvador Dali rerpint by Taschen 2020This reprint features all 136 recipes over 12 chapters, specially illustrated by Dalí, and organized by meal courses, including aphrodisiacs. The illustrations and recipes are accompanied by Dalí’s extravagant musings on subjects such as dinner conversation: “The jaw is our best tool to grasp philosophical knowledge.”

NEW YORK, NY.- “Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste … If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”—Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí Les dîners de Gala cookbook Taschen book

Read fabulous review in Brain Pickings

Food and surrealism make perfect bedfellows: sex and lobsters, collage and cannibalism, the meeting of a swan and a toothbrush on a pastry case. The opulent dinner parties thrown by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) and his wife and muse, Gala (1894–1982) were the stuff of legend. Luckily for us, Dalí published a cookbook in 1973, Les diners de Gala, which reveals some of the sensual, imaginative, and exotic elements that made up their notorious gatherings.

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Art Books: “At First Light – Two Centuries Of Maine Artists, Their Homes And Studios” (Rizzoli, Mar 2020)

At First Light Two Centuries of Maine Artists Rizzoli March 2020At First Light chronicles twenty-six extraordinary artists of the last two hundred years who have lived and worked in Maine. Published to coincide with the state’s bicentennial in 2020, the volume considers the significant contributions artists have made to a deeper and more profound understanding of Maine’s history, its land and its peoples. Maine’s unique and breathtaking landscape–from its rugged coastline, quaint harbors, majestic mountains, and verdant forests–continues to have a powerful effect on the artists who are drawn to its shores.

Written and expertly researched by some of the foremost scholars and curators in the field, each chapter focuses on a different artist, featuring the artists’ artworks and anchored by breathtaking contemporary photography of their homes, studios, and surroundings. From picturesque bungalows to grander structures with beautiful vistas, the houses and studios featured are as diverse as the artists who have inhabited them. The artists featured include fan favorites to lesser known yet important figures from the eighteenth century to the present day, working in a range of media from painting to photography to sculpture, including: Jonathan Fisher, Winslow Homer, Frank Weston Benson, Charles Herbert Woodbury, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Marguerite and William Zorach, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Eliot Porter, Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Ashley Bryan, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Bernard Langlais, Robert Indiana, David C. Driskell, Molly Neptune Parker, Richard Tuttle, and William Wegman.

About The Author

Anne Collins Goodyear is codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Frank H. Goodyear III is codirector of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Michael K. Komanecky is chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Maine. Stuart Kestenbaum is the Poet Laureate of Maine. Walter Smalling is a photographer based in Washington, D.C.

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New Environment Books: “Koolhaas. Countryside, A Report” (Taschen, Apr 2020)

The rural, remote, and wild territories we call “countryside”, or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces―climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches―are playing out. Increasingly under a ‘Cartesian’ regime―gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production―these sites are changing beyond recognition.

Koolhaas Countryside A Report Guggenheim Museum Taschen Books April 2020

Countryside A Report Rem Koolhaas Taschen April 2020In his latest publication, Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth’s vast non-urban areas.Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near Fukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan’s infrastructure and agriculture are tested; a greenhouse city in the Netherlands that may be the origin for the cosmology of today’s countryside; the rapidly thawing permafrost of Central Siberia, a region wrestling with the possibility of relocation; refugees populating dying villages in the German countryside and intersecting with climate change activists; habituated mountain gorillas confronting humans on ‘their’ territory in Uganda; the American Midwest, where industrial-scale farming operations are coming to grips with regenerative agriculture; and Chinese villages transformed into all-in-one factory, e-commerce stores, and fulfillment centers.

This book is the official companion to the Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future. The exhibition and book mark a new area of investigation for architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, who launched his career with two city-centric entities: The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (1975) and Delirious New York (1978). It’s designed by Irma Boom, who drew inspiration for the book’s pocket-sized concept, as well as its innovative typography and layout, from her research in the Vatican library.

The book brings together collaborative research by AMO, Koolhaas, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University in the Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi. Contributors also include Samir Bantal, Janna Bystrykh, Troy Conrad Therrien, Lenora Ditzler, Clemens Driessen, Alexandra Kharitonova, Keigo Kobayashi, Niklas Maak, Etta Madete, Federico Martelli, Ingo Niermann, Dr. Linda Nkatha Gichuyia, Kayoko Ota, Stephan Petermann, and Anne M. Schneider.

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Podcasts: The “Brilliance” Of Hilary Mantel’s Trilogy On Thomas Cromwell

Monocle on Culture Monocle 24 logoRobert Bound, John Mitchinson and Ted Hodgkinson review the final – and rather hefty – instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Best New Fiction Books: 57-Year Old Author Lily King’s “Writers & Lovers” – On The Road To Happiness

Writers & Lovers Lily King March 2020Writers & Lovers follows Casey―a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist―in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Euphoria Lily KingLily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

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Lily King is the author of five award-winning novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, will be published on March 3rd, 2020. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award, The Maine Fiction Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.

Lily’s website

 

 

Conservation Short Films: “Los Zanjeros – Follow The Water” On History Of Arizona Water Usage

Filmed produced by: Cooper Davis, Jared Reasy, Jake Kelly and Pete Burr

4 Brophy faculty members and native Phoenicians followed the Salt River via bicycle from its source to their faucets to better understand the history of water in Arizona and how to protect and advocate for its future.

 

Design Books: “Architizer – The World’s Best Architecture” (Phaidon)

Architizer The World's Best Architecture Phaidon April 2020The Architizer A+Awards represent 2019’s best architecture and products, celebrated by a diverse group of influencers within and outside the architectural community. Entries are judged by more than 400 luminaries from fields as diverse as fashion, publishing, product design, real-estate development, and technology, and voted on by the public, culminating in a collection of the world’s finest buildings.

Each year, winners are honored in this fully illustrated compendium, and on Architizer.com, the largest online architecture community on the planet. Featuring select A+Award winners, this is the definitive guide to the year’s best buildings and spaces.

Architizer is the leading online resource for architecture. Through its vast building database, daily content, ‘Source’ marketplace, and A+Awards, it is revolutionizing the way architects connect with building-product manufacturers and the world beyond.

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