10 minutes of Macca making mash. That’s what’s on the menu today.
The clip above was shot back in December 1998, only eight months after Paul McCartney lost his wife Linda to breast cancer. Devastated by the loss, McCartney stayed out of the limelight for most of that year. And only with this show did he start entering public life again. A chance to remember Linda, an opportunity to experiment with this new thing called the internet, the show let Paul field questions from fans worldwide, reminisce about Linda, and make a recipe from her vegetarian cookbook, Linda McCartney on Tour: Over 200 Meat-Free Dishes from Around the World. The demo is pretty hands-on. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It’s also comical and a joy to watch. And watch, you will.
They’ve teamed up with the printed electronics company Novalia to turn cardboard pizza boxes into playable turntables. Specializing in technology that adds touch and connectivity to everyday surfaces, Novalia has created two scratchable decks, each with controls that let you fine-tune the volume, pitch, playback, and crossfading. And it’s all done with the magic of conductive ink.
According to Live for Music, “the battery-powered box can be hooked up to a computer or phone through Bluetooth, then connected to any DJ software like Serato or DJ Pro.” Right now, the playable pizza box is only available at a few Pizza Hut locations in the UK. Above, DJ Vectra offers a primer on using the new gadget.
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If you head over to The Guggenheim in New York City, you’re bound to spend time immersing yourself in the Moholy-Nagy exhibit that’s now on display. It’s well worth your time. You can also take a side trip through a smaller exhibition featuring the work of Middle Eastern and North African artists. And there you’ll discover the work of Kader Attia, a French-Algerian artist whose work “reflects on the impact of Western societies on their former colonial counterparts.” Above, we have Attia’s replica of an Algerian city (Ghardaïa) made out of couscous. The Tate explains the conceptual thrust of the piece as follows:
The installation presents a model of the Algerian town Ghardaïa made from cous cous, shown alongside photographs of the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier and the French architect Fernand Pouillon, and a print of the UNESCO declaration that the town is a World Heritage site. During the nineteenth century Ghardaïa was colonised by France, but the buildings were not altered during this period and remain characteristic of Mozabite architecture. Le Corbusier visited Ghardaïa in 1931, just three years after becoming a French citizen, and made sketches of the buildings. These strongly resemble the style of modernist architecture he subsequently espoused in his treatise on urban planning, La cité radieuse.
That a noted French architect should take inspiration from an Algerian town may not seem significant, however, as Attia notes, ‘architecture has first to do with politics, with the political order.’ As Attia is a child of Algerian immigrants and grew up partly in a Parisian banlieue, this statement seems particularly resonant. The use of cous cous as the material to ‘build’ the model is appropriate as it will provide an approximation of the town’s decay over time throughout the exhibition, while representing one of the region’s most popular foods – now a staple of European cuisine.
By replicating the town as an architects’ model in this way Attia shows the impact of his native culture, which had operated as a non-powerful host to colonial France, on their old colonisers, who went on to play host to the artist and his family. As well as highlighting the cultural impact of the colonised onto the coloniser, reversing the normally reported direction of influence, this also reveals the complexity of hospitality between people and nations which often relates to dispossession and re-appropriation…
Attia’s couscous installation is also on display at The Tate. If you’re in London, pay them a visit.
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A new comedy video from Cracked makes a fair point: there’s a lot of bullshit that goes into the marketing of coffee nowadays. Slap the words “organic” and “fair trade” on the product, and everyone feels pretty good about keeping their caffeine addictions going. Several years ago, Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek took a closer look at this phenomenon and drew some interesting conclusions about how, within contemporary capitalism, companies like Starbucks have reworked Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, and found new ways to square our economic and spiritual lives. Starbucks has made it, Žižek notes, so that when we enter their stores, we’re not just buying coffee and being consumers. Rather, we’re buying fair trade and eco-friendly coffee, participating in charitable work, and leaving with a sense of redemption. The animated video is worth a look.
Earlier this week, Colin Marshall highlighted a trove of 3,000 vintage cookbooks on Archive.org, many of which date back to the 19th century.
Cookbooks, however, first arrived on the scene well before that. According to the venerable British Library, the “late 16th century was the first time that cookery books began to be published and acquired with any sort of regularity.” “It is also the first time that cookery books were directed at a female audience.” That is, privileged women who could read and had access to sugar, spices and other then rare ingredients.
Above you can find a recipe for making pancakes, straight from 1585. To make Pancakes, the text reads:
Take new thicke Creame a pine, foure or five yolks of egs, a good handful of flower and two or three spoonefuls of ale, strain them together into a faire platter, and season it with a good handfull of sugar, a spooneful of synamon, and a little Ginger: then take a friing pan, and put in a litle peece of Butter, as big as your thumbe, and when it is molten brown, cast it out of your pan, and with a ladle put to the further side of your pan some of your stuffe, and hold your pan …, so that your stuffe may run abroad over all the pan as thin as may be: then set it to the fire, and let the fyre be verie soft, and when the one side is baked, then turn the other, and bake them as dry as ye can without burning.
It’s Saturday morning. What are you waiting for? Give it a try. The page above also offers recipes for various puddings. Find those recipes transcribed here.
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By the time I got to high school, home economics classes had fallen out of favor: the boys, of course, considered them too “girly,” and the girls considered them enforcers of traditional gender roles wholly out of place in modern society. At that time, America’s widespread obsession with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imagine that learning to cook has regained a certain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home economics” itself, that curious banner that combines a definition of economics nobody now quite recognizes with the less-than-fashionable concepts of domesticity, practicality, and necessity?
At the Internet Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan highlights such works as the Pilgrim Cook Book, published by Chicago’s Pilgrim Evangelical Lutheran Church Ladies’ Aid Society in 1921 and including recipes for Sausage in Potato Boxes, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauerkraut Candy; 1912’s more subdued Food for the invalid and the convalescent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jelly, Cracker Gruel, and advice that, “among other things, beer and pickles are bad for children”; and even older, 1906’s A bachelors cupboard; containing crumbs culled from the cupboards of the great unweddedwhich, warning that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weakling is relegated to his rightful sphere in short order,” offers methods for the making of dishes with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indian Devil Mixture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Haddie.
Want to teach me physics? Make it interesting. Better yet, use a cup of coffee as a prop. Now you’ve got my attention.
Created by Charlotte Arene while interning at the University of Paris-Sud’s Laboratory of Solid State Physics, Physics & Caffeine uses a shot of espresso to explain key concepts in physics. Why does coffee cool off so quickly when you blow on it? It comes down to understanding heat and thermodynamics. Why does coffee stay in a cup at all? That seemingly simple question is explained by quantum mechanics and even Newtonian physics and special relativity. You might want to watch that section twice.
Shot image by image, this stop motion film took three long months to create. Pretty impressive when you consider that 5,000 images went into making the film.
Get more information on the film, and even download it, from this page. And find more physics primers below.
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Five years ago, actor Christopher Walken casually shared a simple recipe for roast chicken with pears, above. The lighting was amateur, his implements fairly utilitarian, and, much to my gratification, he couldn’t keep his cat off the counter, either.
His improvised patter was as nonchalant as his handling of his ingredients. Undeterred, legions of fans still found plenty of Walken-esque quotes with which to spice up the video’s comments section.
Chalk it up to the dozens of soft spoken, seriously unhinged characters on which this actor’s reputation rests. It’s painfully easy to imagine a rival gang member or law enforcement official lashed to a chair just off camera, squirming in terror as Walken pauses to appreciate the “little cookies” the caramelized pears leave behind on the bottom of his pan.
Whatever he’s planning to do to this imaginary unfortunate, one hopes it won’t involve flaps of skin and a vertical poultry roaster.
As to the recipe, it’s as delicious as it is innocuous. Try it!
If you’re feeling less than adventurous, you can decrease the creep factor by replicating the shoot with a grandfatherly gent of your choosing prior to serving. (Anyone who’s not Christopher Walken will do.)
Things get cooking with a visit to the Byzantine Stew Leonard’s supermarket, and end with a cell phone pic of Walken’s nose. There’s a live mandolin serenade and the kitchen seems vastly more expensive, but I found myself missing the homey sense of foreboding created by the original.
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