Wyclef for president

This past Friday, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith hosted the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo, Norway to honor President Obama. My man Wyclef Jean brought the house down as usual. Oh, and that gal with the power pipes singing backup? She sang at my dad's birthday party. Check her out with Dan Bailey & Living Rhythm December 26 at the Stephen Talkhouse.
Part 1:

Part 2:

Go ahead, play with your food

If Will Cotton was a photographer, not a painter, and liked healthy food instead of candy, he would be an awful lot like Carl Warner. Warner's Foodscapes take advantage of nature's bounty to reproduce nature-scapes, a visual synecdoche of sorts.

To create his lush landscapes, the artist first sketches a scene, introduces the edibles, then captures each section in separate layers to prevent the food from wilting. Computer technology is then used to merge the layers into a final print. Eventually, Warner plans to use the images as part of an educational book to encourage kids to eat healthier. Guess his mom never told him to stop playing with his food.
Thanks to Dana for wising me up to this guy.

Music to keep you warm

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got to Get You Off My Mind,' but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules."
- Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Remember the art of the mixtape? This is not a mixtape by Rob Fleming's standards (or Nick Hornby's). It's not a mixtape at all; in fact, it can hardly be called a playlist. But I thought I'd share what I'm listening to this December - some old, some new, and some free for you! In no particular order.

The Kinks - "Lola"
Edward Sharpe & Magnetic Zeros - "Home"
Vampire Weekend - "Horchata"
Mos Def - "Quiet Dog"
Julian Casablancas - "Out of the Blue"
Girls - "Lust for Life"
The Cardigans - "Great Divide"
Squeeze - "Tempted" (you know you're a child of the 90's when ...)
Baby Bash & Frankie J - "Suga Suga" (and speaking of the 90s ...)
Mayer Hawthorne - "Your Easy Lovin' Ain't Pleasin' Nothin'"
Strawberry Alarm Clock - "Incense and Peppermint"
Florence and the Machine - "Kiss with a Fist" and "Falling"
Nneka - "The Uncomfortable Truth"
Lissy Trullie - "Ready for the Floor" (Hot Chip cover)
Mobb Deep x Bob Marley - "Got it Twisted" and "Shook Ones Pt. 2"
Vivian Girls - "Can't Get Over You"
Plastiscines - "Camera"

Death Star Canteen

Eddie Izzard gives voice to an irritable Darth Vader, depicted in Lego form:

Psychedelic subway stations

Check out some of the coolest subway architecture in contemporary existence. I think it's a three-way tie between Stockholm, Shanghai and Moscow. Get on it, New York.Pictured: Shanghai's Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, 2,100 feet of light effects projected onto the walls for a trippy traveling experience.

Space buzz

Leave it to the Japanese (by way of Sapporo Breweries) to invent the world's first space beer. It's brewed with barley that comes from seeds that spent five months aboard the International Space Station, bringing researchers one step closer to self-sufficient food production in space. Currently there are only 250 six-packs of "Space Barley" available; at $110 bucks a pop with winners chosen by lotto, your chances of taking a sip of the futuristic brew are about as good as ... well, setting foot on the moon.Next up: astronaut beer helmets.

Festive flair

Today is the day I fulfill the official "new girl duty" of decorating the office Christmas tree. Having never so much as strung a light or held an ornament, I'm feeling a little apprehensive. What if I hang the angel or star (or whatever the thing is that goes on the top) in the wrong place? Is there a manual for this stuff?
Then I remembered the photos of a makeshift tree my dad put together when I was a baby, a salvaged, Duchampian readymade piece constructed from the bones of broken umbrellas found after a particularly intense New York storm. It was far from traditional, but there was no mistaking its identity. Why not make this a creative Christmas?

Drying Rack Tree
Ladder Tree
Wall Tree

Malice N Wonderland

Check out this trailer for Snoop Doggy Dogg's new album, Malice N Wonderland, which has a totally absurd cover and a slightly confused premise (Batman meets Alice in Wonderland ...?). Whatevs, it's Snoop, and he's still got it. Props for incorporating Jamie Foxx and what looks suspiciously like a split-second clip from that bizarro Spike Jonze-directed Kanye movie.

Books in a booth

When the mobile library stopped visiting the English village of Westbury-sub-Mendip (the nearest stationary library is 4 miles away), the 800 residents took matters into their own hands. They voted to turn a phone booth into a mini sharing library. It's pretty much the cutest atheneum ever.Here's what I'd want donated to share in the year to come (or, my shortlist of books to read in the early days of 2010):

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
Invisible by Paul Auster
Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
The World According to Garp by John Irving
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Is it legal to start a phone booth library in Manhattan?

Blast the winter blues

If you're feeling anything like me today, you could probably use a drink to warm up and decompress from the post-Thanksgiving blustery entrance of winter. This one from the mixological mad scientists at Ideya Latin Bistro updates a summer staple and personal favorite (the Brazilian Caipirinha) for the chill of winter by adding cranberries. Bonus points for the fruit's immune-boosting antioxidants. So long, swine flu!

Ideya’s Cranberry Caipirinha

1 or 2 lime wedges (to taste)
1 small orange wedge
10 cranberries
1 tbs. brown sugar
1 oz. fresh lime juice
1.5 oz. aged cachaça

(1) Place the lime, orange, and cranberries in a mixing glass. Add the sugar and muddle with the fruit. Fill a rocks glass with cracked ice and transfer the ice to the mixing glass.

(2) Add the lime juice and the cachaça, and shake well.

(3) Pour everything, including all the muddled fruit from the shaker, into the rocks glass and serve.