La Vita e Bella - Life is Beautiful

My partner in crime, pasta, cheese, wine...what more could I want in life?

Lingerie on a Winters Night

What I love most about my friend Alicia is that she has a great attitude and as benign as it sounds, its not a trait many people have, or at least, with as much zest as she! The other thing I really like is her name that makes her sounds like Italian royalty...Alicia Anthony Giovanna Ficalore. Yum. Oh and speaking of yum, we know how to do it up when it comes to eating, no expense spared. She also happens to have the largest collection of lingerie I have ever seen.

Tonight we embarked on one of our random outings together, armed with press passes, to an event she was covering for a magazine. This time La Perla and Jean Paul Gautier collaborated on several new lingerie pieces and her presence was requested. Sometimes I play photographer for her, which really means I go to these events, run around frequenting the open bar, eat anything that is presented to me and in between try to take some nice pics for her article. She, on the other hand, does fashiony stuff... checks out the clothes, interviews people and helps me make conversation when my mouth is full. All things considered, the pictures don't look too bad...

Long Lost Photos... Holga Makes a Comeback

My holga and I were separated for quite some time and I recently reconnected with it after more than a year. With it, I found some old film - lost, and since forgotten. Getting it developed was like ... I don't know what... maybe giving yourself a surprise gift, cos I didn't remember what was inside. Turns out it was bits and pieces of Paris, London and New York.

Brain Polaroid

I’m not as motivated to blog from a pc and my mac is dead for now. A new one is on its way but am getting a little blogging withdrawal. So here are some thoughts, a snapshot of my brain at this minute, but no actual pictures.

1. I don’t think its always been 5 days of work and 2 days off, when did that whole thing start and why? Is it like that everywhere in the world? What would it take to change it?

2. Why can’t the whole world be on the same time zone and just have a system to monitor when it is night and day and business hours at different places? Would that be harder or easier to deal with than calculating time differences? Wouldn’t it be a more accurate representation of time since, for example, we don’t really lose time or gain it when we travel, although with time differences, it appears that way.

3. The teenage mutant ninja turtle song goes, “Turtles in a half-shell, turtle power” I always thought their shells looked whole, could I have been mistaken all this time?

These are a few of my least favourite things....

...but thank god there are people around me who make Halloween fun

Male Model Boxing

This is what was going on the other week in the loft across the street from me. I had a lot of fun taking these pictures - I was totally caught up in the moment of the fight and hardly noticed that I was being pushed and shoved by the big boys with big cameras.. everyone up against the ropes trying to get the best shot. So, this is what some people do with a big empty loft... sell cheap alcohol, drill together a makeshift boxing ring, give a bunch of male models gloves and make them fight each other for sport. Sweet.

Those Naughty Victorians

Food Movement

Its true that recently, in foodie land, a lot of attention has been given to the notion of cutting down the amount of "stuff" (handling, processing, time etc) between food at its source, and food in our mouths. Everyone seems to have a freshness radar which is now keenly used among some of the more traditional criteria to conclude on which dishes at which restaurants are best in class. Which begs the question...who is doing this, or more importantly who is doing this_ best?

My first experience with this kind of eating, aside from scoffing mulberries from a tree as a kid, was at Blue Hill in the West Village of NYC. Blue Hill is affiliated with Stone Barns Farm near Tarrytown in Westchester NY. A significant portion of the menu is created from the produce of the farm - vegetables, meat, dairy, everything. Basically, if no animals were killed that day, there is no meat on the menu...kind of thing. I have had, possibly, the best egg I have ever tasted at Blue Hill which was featured on the 5 course tasting menu, along with its mother, the chicken, beside it on the plate. Sounds like a cult suicide, but was delicious! The dish was quite simply called 'this morning's egg'.

I sat on the plane to Sydney around Christmastime last year chatting to a photographer (also apparently talented foodie/ author) about this and he whipped out a sample of his love project - Harvest to Heat. It explores the concept of farm to table, sustainable eating with some of the most sought after culinary minds in America, the likes of Mario Batali (Babbo), David Chang (Momofuku) and Eric Ripet (Le Bernadin) to name a few. The book embodies my love and lust for food, beautiful recipes and goregeous photographs in the raw and modern context of sustainable eating - which is not to be confused with humane eating, as the book includes a tongue in cheek interview with a fois gras artisan.

Now that I survived the hot and sticky summer, flicking through H2H has me reinspired to get my ass back into the kitchen and over the stove this fall!