“I Guess It’s Christmas,” Bottlecap Mountain
A holiday classic from Austin-based Bottlecap Mountain that you’ll want on your playlist year after year.
Time to spread Bottlecap cheer
Postcard from Paris, France: Chefs blur borders
Above: Mushroom tarte at Pristine
People who do not accept the new, grow old very quickly.”
A Guide to Modern Cookery, Auguste Escoffier, 1907
We’re already old. We arrived at this stage in but the blink of an eye and certainly have no desire to accelerate the aging process. This is the excuse I offer for not sticking to French food in France.
My hero chefs are those unafraid to pluck ingredients and fuse ideas from many cultures. The evolutionary development of European cuisine as a whole has been speeding along ever since those first traders sailed eastward to discover an explosion of spices and westward to find revolutionary crops – such as tomatoes and cacao.
Continue reading “Postcard from Paris, France: Chefs blur borders”Protecting the identity of the pothole patcher
Above: Street artist Ememem repairing a pothole in a sidewalk on Rainey Street in Austin
I’m just a sidewalk poet…. My work is the story of the city, where cobblestones have been displaced.”
Street artist Ememem, interviewed by Arnesia Young for My Modern Met
Sometimes I feel like a stalker on the trail of tile mosaics of the sidewalk poet of Lyon, France. (See the photos from 18 months ago at the bottom of this post.) So meeting Ememem in person at work Sunday afternoon in Austin left me gobsmacked.
Above: “Here Lies a Pothole,” Ememem, Rainey Street, Austin, 2025
The street doctor tries to maintain his anonymity, stealthily installing his mosaics in the dead of night. I imagine that’s due to the fact that often his sidewalk improvement projects are unauthorized.
Continue reading “Protecting the identity of the pothole patcher”
Postcards from Barton Springs 