8 oz rice noodles (or 6 oz for a less-noodles-more-ingredients approach)
1/2 cup sugar
little more than 1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup water
1 1/2 tbls soy sauce
2 tsps worcestershire sauce (secret ingredient!)
2 tbls vegetable oil
1 1/2 cups tofu, FIRM, drained and diced
1 1/2 cups shrimp, small, cooked (option, for meaties)
2 tsps minced garlic
1 egg beaten or 2 egg whites
3 cups bean sprouts
1/2 cup edamame
1/2 cup green onion, chopped
1/2 cup peanuts (or more to taste, unsalted)
First, soak your noodles for 30 minutes in standing hot tap water. After 30 minutes simply drain and set aside.
WHILE noodles are soaking, mix sugar, ketchup, water, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce and a dash of cayanne if available in a bowl (this is your pad thai sauce!)
Make sure your noodles will have a full 30 minute soak before proceeding.
Now heat oil in very large frying pan. Recommend a medium setting on gas but it depends on your hob. First add garlic and stir constantly for one minute. Add tofu and shrimp (optional) and stir constantly for another 2 minutes.
Mix in your pad thai sauce and let it heat up, just barely to the boil.
Now grab those noodles and toss them in. Mix all together, stirring constantly for 2-3 more minutes or until sauce appears to have been absorbed by noodles.
Push that mixture to the side or I like to make a hole in the middle. Drop your egg or egg whites in the open part of the pan, the noodles will stop it from spreading too far. Don’t scramble yet let it sit for 15 seconds. Now add half of your bean sprouts, edamame, green onion and peanuts and quickly mix everything in the pan together! QUickLY! Stir until there seems to be an even consistency throughout.
Remove and serve, sprinkle remaining bean sprouts, edamame, green onion and peanuts on TOP after servings are divided. This way there’s some crunchy stuff on top and some cooked stuff inside!
Modify to taste, this recipe is released under NNOSC – Nick Normal Open Source Cooking.
Classic diner on the outskirts of STL city in Maplewood that caters to the midnight crowds, there’s always a good rush between 1-2am and they are open 24/7. The crowds are loud which is a good thing because there’s always a conversation to join in on, and people here are expressive! Joann is the type of waitress whose been here 30 years, an old dame with a quick attitude and her own personalized approach to crowd management: if you are loud or obnoxious she will hit you with her stick!
Not actually the stick she will hit you with (she keeps that behind the counter), this BIG STICK is displayed right by the entrance. Been going here since 1997 or 98 and can’t say I ever noticed it before. The joint still manages to surprise.
The menu is classic, and includes local fare like the Slinger, a must-have for carnivores (even I recommend it, simply for the sheer OMG-factor!).
so Shalin lives in a dollhouse, Angie lives in a dog shack, and Martina doesn’t actually live here and was the catalyst behind convincing me and Angie to take a boat trip to Mexico. All of which has nothing to do with the house pictured above, but at the same time that’s where they all live, but not really. New Orleans is weird. Yup, and these are my friends.
Getting to the house was difficult, which was expected. The driver of a city cab didn’t use the meter and charged me $12 for a journey that would have been difficult considering the weight of my backpack but wouldn’t have been untraverseable any other day on foot (I’ve since realized). He didn’t know how to locate the cross street given the address and suggested that having to drive to find the address might be too far for the fare. Welcome to New Orleans!
Once settled, the first order of business was food, so we set out for a walk in search of po-boys! While walking, it became clear that New Orleans architecture is obfuscated by the abundance of growth and green here. The city neighborhood’s landscapes are dominated by trees, plants, flowers, foliage and probably account for 30% of the density of the town:
As for dinner, I think I just about managed to capture everyone with their faces stuffed:
So service here is so slow and almost awkward, but is a journey in and of itself, you just have to roll with it. Then you’ll have a great time! Our waiter must have made at least four maybe five trips to the kitchen to actually figure out what they had in terms of deserts, but eventually landed us with exactly what we wanted:
Devoured, Gone. We Are Hungry.
As I arrived in the city in the mid-afternoon, by the time we finished with dinner the sun was set. Even having been here a week now I’m divided between seeing the city during the day and seeing it at night. It’s beautiful both ways:
The moon here is flipping bright. Bright, and low. And routinely about as big as I’ve ever seen it. Definitely as bright as I’ve ever seen it. So much light gets reflected here, which was more pronounced once we got out on the boat (will save that for the next post).
As for my first night in New Orleans I experienced something magical that I highly recommend to all if you want a flavor of New Orleans that you simply cannot find anywhere else. I journeyed – under Martina’s guide – to the Venue, a club up river where DJ Jubilee (a high school special educator during the day) and Katey Red (a transvestite rapper and teacher also) spin a distinct brand of music that is unlike anything else I’ve heard. Part hip-hop, part electronica, part bass, Bounce as it’s called has it’s own beat rhythm and vernacular that rivals Grime in the UK in its propensity to energy, but is contained to the shores of this fair city.
Music and club shots begin around minute 4. That mirrored wall… will live with me forever!
from a recent bike trip to Far Rockaway and Rockaway Park and Breezy Point, hope to elaborate further soon. meanwhile view the whole photo set on my Flickr.
well after Budapest the posting got a bit thin, so I guess that’s as good a place as any to start.
or first I should just say that Budapest was awesome. really incredible city. not like any place I’ve ever been before. It’s interesting now, thinking back on the trip, and comparing experiences with the cities and peoples of places like Budapest, Zagreb, Pula, London, and recognizing how distinct they all are, but that Budapest really is a place unlike any others. It has almost no relatives linguistically; it’s Central but borders the East, West and the Balkans; it’s materially very poor but adopting to a consumer society, but still people get by making something out of nothing (i.e. there is very little trash on the streets because they don’t have much to throw away!); the weather was brilliant, perfectly seasonal, and the hills of Buda I am sure have something to do with it!; best of all in the peak of summer I didn’t have any allergies, which means I could well-live there; and lastly, I’ll be back! It was that good.
to Zagreb
The train out of Keleti pu to Zagreb was great. Of course, I decided to travel on the day after the end of the Sziget festival, which meant the train was completely packed with punters from the festival, meaning a lot of noise and a lot of backpacks, and hippies! Thankfully I chose a car that was eventually occupied by a friendly group of Croatians (you’ll understand my distinction in a bit) including Mati and Valentino who along with a group of about 20 people were attending the festival; in Croatia they all help run a sort-of-not-for-profit type of organization called Moving Project, which was setup to give younger people a place to go for DJ parties, gatherings, forums, etc., since this type of place didn’t exist for people of their generation. As Mati noted, Croatians are fairly open-minded people, and very progressive. Their energies are a testament to their desire to enjoy life and experience as much as they can in their time.
Unfortunately they had to depart early, as they actually live outside of Zagreb in smaller villages. Mati’s, Valentino’s, and two other seats became empty, and filled in by this group of highly pretentious French kids. They were obviously annoyed by the presence of everyone else on the train, and furthermore by that they were 6 people, the car was 6 people, and the remaining two of us would not get up (and essentially have to stand the rest of the trip) for their party, their clique. It’s amazing how well they managed to reinforce cultural stereotypes! Upon entering the car, one bloke was annoyed that I wouldn’t allow the ovehead fluorescent to be turned on – it was past sundown now – because he really wanted to read his novel. Of course, reading for him actually meant skimming a page, then going back 20 pages and mumbling to himself, putting the book down to go out in the hallways for five minutes, come back in and go 60 pages forward in the book to act like he was reading, etc. He was a prat. They were all dressed in culturally hip tshirts and clothes sporting images of Jim Morrison and fractal patterns, who knew English but refused to communicate with anyone else on the train. Whereas Mati, Valentino and I exchanged food, liquor and talk, they passed food around us, never offered us anything nor introduced themselves at any point. They were headed to Vienna eventually, this train route also goes through Zagreb. Once getting to Glovni K. in Zagreb, they were packing their stuff into our car before myself and some Croatians had even managed to grab our bags from the overhead compartments. The Croatians were mad at them, I was mad at them. They reminded me why I didn’t plan to visit France on this trip.
I was in Croatia to visit my friend Olja Stipanovic, a Croatian artist who also lives near me in Queens, and whom I’ve gotten into an exhibition or two and befriended. Olja lives in Pula but has friends in Zagreb; I was picked up in Zagreb by her friend Sandra, whom I also met around five months ago at the Albatross opening at Socrates Sculpture Park. I camped with Sandra and her boyfriend Miro overnight at their place, we stayed up until nearly 4am drinking some Unicum that I brought with me from Budapest, and some Croatian drinks including biska, a type of brandy made from mistletoe and herbs!
the next morning we took their Alsatian hounds for a walk in this gorgeous park in Zagreb, over 200 years old it is an all-natural forest containing five lakes! If you get to Zagreb you must walk this park! After the park I offered to make them a breakfast omelette, which neither of them had eaten or seen before! But we decided instead on a Croatian egg-scramble called frita. Let me just say that food in this part of the world is delicious: from Budapest to Zagreb, I never had a disappointing meal. The food is entirely organic as far as I can tell, because they don’t have the massive farming industries that we have in the U.S., and all the pesticides and pasteurizing that come with it. Food, as it should, has so much more flavour.
Zagreb was great but Pula was the destination. A bus trip was in order. I was picked up by Olja and her boyfriend Robi Challenge and given a ride in Robi’s 1970s French car, which gets plenty of looks and has even been written up in the local newspaper! And you can see why:
We went for a dinner (I had gnocchi) on the banks of the Mediterranean before heading to see Robi’s football team, Hajduk Split play Sampdonia. Unfortunately Sampdonia won 1-0 but the Croatian fans always give it their best, even when they’re down:
Robi joined us after work
The next day Olja and I headed to the (rocky) beach. You find a flat part, lay your blanket and padding down, and make a day of it! We made a day of it! I didn’t bring a laptop, nor music, not even a magazine or book! A whole day doing nothing is something everybody should participate in at least once a year. Me, I got that intentional sunburn! That was my only plan!
Later that night we went to the annual Arts & Music Festival (after Sziget I swore I’d never see another band again, but here I was!) held inside this old Austrian fortress on top of one of the city’s seven hills. There is only one hill higher than this one, but from the top you can see to the city’s ancientancientancient Roman amphitheatre. Turn around and on the other side you can see into Uljanik, a huge shipyard and the focal point of the town not only in geography and driving (in that everywhere you go you run into Uljanik) but also with respect to the working class in that it employs many thousands of people who weld and build ships there. Pula is not just a tourist trap, they also build some massive ships there! A reason I’d like to go back to Pula, possibly to do some research and work with the Uljanik yard.
Pula departure London journey
I flew from a warm and sparkly Pula to a cold damp and dreary London, where as the days I was there went on the weather only seemed to get worse and worse. A true English summer, few people were in short sleeves, while some had fur-capped jackets or rain coats and umbrellas were the norm. As my matey Ed remarked, at least the clouds give you something to look at!
A lot has changed in London. Throughout the city, the skyline is absolutelylittered with buildingcranes. (see this post also) But the best example is the supposed new transportation hub being built somewhere near Liverpool Street Station. This thing is a monster:
There are very few vantage points in East London (E8, E9) where you CAN’T see this place. I’ve only been gone three years, but am told most of this development has been in the past two. It shows how fast capital can move, and change the face of not only a city but its people, as Ed and I attended the Global Cities exhibition at Tate Modern (see my Flickr set) which examined several mega- or ‘hyper-cities’ around the world and suggested that in the next decade London would add over 600,000 residents, and since 1995 over 90% of those moving to London were born outside the UK – where will they all come from?
I didn’t do too much else in London (which was the point really, time off) except for seeing the Wellcome Collection with the Heart exhibition (see my Flickr set), before heading out to Whitstable, Kent to visit my mates Rachael and Jo.
Rachael (pink hair) with Cora, the baby of Sarah Andrews (standing, can’t see, but whom I was also on course with) and Jo (seated)
Rachael was one of the first people I met on course at Central St. Martin’s, and I participated in some of her early performance work. Her and Jo David were two of the best people I met while in London, and were gracious enough to offer me their then-new (and still going strong) alternative exhibition space, Space Station Sixty-Five, in South London, for what was then my first and is still my only solo exhibition.
One more night out was in order, so that I could return the phone I borrowed from my friend Noe and so that Olivia-jane Ransley would somehow get the opportunity to punch my face in:
I don’t remember how this transpired! Honestly!
And that’s pretty much it really. No, really, bugger off!
Coney Island eat your heart out! You have GOT to have one of these! a just-deep fried soft pastry, then quickly drained & covered, smothered in fact, with sour cream, then topped with some delicious cheese, and splashed with some garlic oil goodness. Coronary explosion!
Lighting on the diorama. 40 watts I think, gold incandescent, around 40 degrees, looking over the left shoulder of the fish lady statue, out into the valley. difficult to see during the day. natural lighting is pretty powerful – oh well, can’t win ‘em all!
that’s great guys! festival is over. let’s go home now! … what? it hasn’t even begun you say! (this was the VIP night, after tomorrow it starts accommodating around 40,000 people daily.)
Meanwhile:
the blister on my left foot is really starting to make itself known.
I finally had some cold food for breakfast. as in, milk, with cereal. The only way I knew it was milk was because the reverse side of the container was in spanish (leche), otherwise the container itself is pretty deceiving.
it’s funny, collaborating with 15 people. I thought the point of having an iPod was so that you could listen to music non-stop for 3 months or something to that effect. so why is it that you hear the SAME FUCKING ALBUMS over and over again? (and I’m not only talking about this installation!)
