Notes From Nowhere – Page 134

July 3, 2008July 3, 2008

Six Feet Under

There seem to be two kinds of people: Those who try to accumulate things (think of the basement in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), and those who try to get rid of them. I am of the latter kind. I once helped clean out the office space of a photographer who had lived well beyond 80. And this week I helped clean out the home office of a retired professor who has been dead for a few years now. Think of endless shelfs so dense with stuff that they turn into a black hole any second. Conclusion: Not only for ease of moving while I am alive, but also for the convenience of those who will have to take care of my things once I’m not, I want *everything* (photos – sans those hanging in the MoMA of course -, writings, tax files, a lawsuit against a client who failed to pay his bill, books, etc.) to be on my iPhone/iPod. If I make it past the year 2050, by that time the two-terrabyte-version should do. At that age, I don’t really expect to be replaced by another boyfriend. But in any case, think of these convenient possibilities: (1) iPod gets buried with you, (2), iPod gets synchronized with new set of data, (3), iPod is put in a shrine near the fireplace. I’d prefer all three of those to having anybody sift through a large pile of stuff that has built up over a lifetime…

July 2, 2008March 3, 2009

Baked Goods, By Mara L.

After our somewhat strained meeting at the Mercato Centrale in Firenze, I invited Jens for a homecooked meal. He was eager to leave the plains, running off to the mountains, but I had a strong argument. I was going to make some rather mountainy (is that a word? – it must be!) food, a kind of brioche filled with apricots, part of the Austrian ancestry of northern Italian cooking. But I was going to do so only under one condition: that he documented it, every step along the way. Jens has annoyed me lately by his new commitment to make, on principle, only photographs that are *useless*. How am I to write about delicious treats if I do not have images to go with it?

Austrians call this wonderfully simple food ‘Nudeln,’ that is, ‘pasta,’ which basically just means ‘things made from dough.’ It is such a generic piece of baking that this generic name is quite appropriate. You can make it with almost any fruit, and in comes in all kinds of shapes. The key is to make some truly soft yeast dough, and to find some ripe apricots or peaches or plums. If the fruit is hard and tasteless (as it sometimes is even in Italy), cut it up and cook it for a minute in lemon juice and a bit of sugar.

Once the dough has risen, you take a small amount, roll it into a little ball, and put your fruit in the middle. Now it goes into the baking pan, soon to be joined by more of its kind. At the bottom of the baking pan, put some butter and a tiny bit of sugar. That makes for a nice crust. Bake it until it looks nicely brown, and when you take it out of the oven, sprinkle a bit of powered sugar on top. Jens thought it was worth it, not just the work that I put into it, but also his temporary willingness to photograph the banal.

June 30, 2008

When Dogs Grow Mad

While I sometimes make a photograph of a subject *because* the subject has already been photographed, or painted, to death (like reflections of water in a swimming pool, this one from last week), I hardly ever print glossy. But in this case, I seriously consider ordering a super glossy 60 x 80 print and put it on the wall right over my computer screen in my New York Apartment, just for the summer months: Maybe it would make the Dog Days, the evil time “when the seas boil, wine turns sour, dogs grow mad, and all creatures become languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies”, just a little more tolerable.