There and then, here and now

From Williamsburg Bridge (1928) by American realist painter, Edward Hopper.

Looking out my window onto Humboldt Street, Williamsburg.

Coasting in the Bike Lane

Thursday night just gone marked the launch of the Sydney Bicycle Film Festival's art night and the Ride: Life In The Bike Lane exhibition. By all accounts it was a great night at District 01 Gallery, and we have the lovely Andrew Quilty to thank for these pics. Quilts himself had a bike on show but was so modest he didn't even send me a shot of his own work!






This one was designed by Ben Brown and is called "Ghost Bike". Meanwhile, a group called The Skeleton Key put together this amazing video about the launch night- looks like we missed a corker.

BFF - RIDE - LIFE IN THE BIKE LANE from Skeleton Key on Vimeo.

The rainbow connection

Wanna know something embarrassing? For the longest time, I thought the Chrysler Building was the Empire State Building. Sure, the actual ESB is more imposing, but the Chrysler is so much prettier. I still don't understand all the fuss over the ESB, so I'm going to pay it a visit in the interest of further research. But last night, driving back to Brooklyn we copped an amazing view of it lit up in rainbow colours, and I have to admit it was pretty spectacular.

The building's website usually has details decoding what the ever-changing colour scheme stands for, but all it says about the rainbow effect is "private lighting". According to speculation, the rainbow could be a tribute to anything from Transgender Day of Rememberance to the Grateful Dead reunion shows happening at Madison Square Garden...

In my dreams we're still screaming

So this is the video Spike Jonze directed for Arcade Fire's title track from The Suburbs. Apparenly it was shot in the suburbs of Austin TX, and Win and Regine cameo as cops. Pretty powerful stuff...

Things I Love Thursday: November 18

New York is full of surprises. For example, of all the musical genres I expected to be exposed to here, let along won over by, bluegrass was not high on the list. And yet last week the Bowery Ballroom was packed for the Infamous Stringdusters and Trampled By Turtles. Fiddles, mandolins, banjo, upright bass, not a drum kit in sight... A surfeit of facial hair and even the odd pair of ill-advised overalls, and you can amuse yourself by trying to determine which band members are brothers/cousins.

Sure, it's impossible to dance to without looking stupid, but it's so fun you can't help attempting to jiggle in time. And that's exactly what I did as I tried not to think about the old days in uni when I'd stridently deride my friends' love of "redneck" music. Though I maintain that both these bluegrass bands were infinitely superior to anything ever recorded by faux "country" singers like Keith Urban or Brad Paisley or (shudder) Big & Rich. Back at the Bowery, the best part of all was when both bands came out together for the encore and carried all their instruments down off the stage into the middle of the crowd, rocking out unplugged and finishing with a huge singalong to "The Weight". It was a moment of complete cosmic atonement for the Levon Helm Incident.

Other highlights from another great week:

Impromptu dinner parties (and a less spectacular reprise of DPD)... Getting paid to do some work for a change... Perhaps the most hilarious Freudian slip ever - referring to social networking site Foursquare as "foreskin"... My first commission as a photographer (that's what I'm calling it, anyway!)... Jukebox gold at the Magician... Accidentally discovering "the pit" - the home of bike polo in New York... Bagels... Still with the T-shirt weather Saturdays in November!

Enormous cashmere sweaters from the thriftshop that clearly once belonged to enormous prepsters... Looking up crazy recipes in the lead up to Thanksgiving next week... This dude across the table from me at Second Stop (it's a freelancer sweatshop in here, you can hardly move for MacBooks and Moleskines), whisper-reading his poetry as he writes... Drunkenly denigrating Paul McCartney... "Band On The Run" vs "Fox On The Run"...

TEX MEX

My housemate has recently rediscovered her crockpot (not to be confused with the similarly addictive household appliance, the crackpipe) and I couldn't wait to give it a try. I had a go at recreating a dish we had at Back Forty a couple Sundays ago, called pozole. It's basically a Mexican soup/stew made with pork and white hominy (which is a fun word to say). Hominy, also called pozole/posole, gives the dish its name - it's a kind of puffed white corn, in which the kernels are processed to have the bran and germ removed. The Back Forty pozole was made with pork on the bone, which I wanted to use, but all the recipes I found online called for boneless pork rib, and that was what my butcher recommended, and so it goes.

This is the basic recipe I used, but I'll write it out here with the tweaks I made (metric system, how I miss you):

POZOLE (serves 5/6 people)
3 lbs diced boneless pork
2 brown onions, diced
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 big teaspoon cumin
1 big teaspoon fresh thyme
a few oregano leaves
1 29 ounce tin of diced tomatoes
1 29 ounce tin of white hominy
1 4 ounce tin of chopped green chilli peppers

Brown the pork and fry the onion until it's translucent, then throw all the ingredients into a crock pot and leave it on low. The recipe said for 5-6 hours, but I think mine cooked for about eight by the time everyone turned up for dinner. By then the pork was flaking apart when poked with a wooden spoon, which is the effect I was hoping for. Now I am the whitest wuss alive when it comes to chilli, but even I felt like this could have used more heat. We threw in a big slug of chipotle sauce, which helped. But my advice would be that if you know and love chillies (I am a novice), go nuts. That said, the pozole still had a lovely flavour and aroma.

The beauty of pozole is it can be a really comforting, warming stew; but you can also change it up with some fresh sides. This is the kind of Mexican food I love, all about colour and sharing and fragrant herbs and sharp citrus lightening the hearty meat dishes. So alongside the red-orange polka dot pozole I served blue corn tortillas; fresh green avocado, lime wedges and chopped cilantro (coriander); and a bright purple slaw.

The slaw was perhaps the big win of the night, one that will definitely be wheeled out again in the future. I ripped it off wholesale from my favourite food blog, Smitten Kitchen. Basically you just finely shred a red cabbage, halve and finely slice a red onion, and toss it all with a green onion dressing. To make the dressing, blend a cup of chopped green onions with some red wine vinegar, a dollop of mayo, a big glug of olive oil and some salt and pepper. The recipe calls for two serrano chillis - I just threw in some jalapenos and it could definitely have handled more heat.

I love this view across the rooftop from my kitchen window to the church down the street...

Beatles on bikes