Sushi à la Corb

I walk by a 7-Eleven everyday and recently I notice the store is promoting a NT$39 sushi roll for breakfast. The poster on the store window shows a sushi roll that is based on a progressive transformation of a rectangle into an ellipse.

I can't help but be reminded of Le Corbusier's St-Pierre at Firminy-Vert. The church was designed in the 60's and completed in 2006. The building's main volume is based on a transformation of a square plan into a hollow conic shell.

What Recession?

Taiwan's economy shrank by slightly more than 10% last quarter. However, you wouldn't notice the downturn if you went to 鼎泰豐 for a meal. There is still a line outside with people waiting to get in. The restaurant is almost recession-proof. The good news is the food is still as good as ever.

Cheaper Scoops

A 14 oz carton of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in Taipei costs twice as much as in New York. Since ice cream is so expensive, I decided to pull out my old Cuisinart ice cream maker and make some myself.

By my daughter's request, the first one we made is chocolate. I used a simple recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. In the near future I will start making more exotic flavors.

Gaga

During a recent family gathering my cousins, niece, nephews, and I discussed the subject of pop music. I didn't have anything to offer to the discussion since I have been busying listening to Rudresh Mahanthappa; actually I haven't listened to much pop music for quite some time. Since I didn't know what's hip, I was curious to know what the tweens are listening to these days. The answer, according to my nephew, seems to be Lady Gaga.

Of course I had no idea who Lady Gaga is and what kind of music she makes. I thought the name was kind of intriguing but didn't think too much about it until I got the April 27 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine's music critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote, "Gaga can really sing and really write" and "If you want melody and a cheerful embrace of the moment as it happens, Lady Gaga is a wise bet." Since I didn't want to be the un-hip uncle, I decided to buy Gaga's album and listen for myself.

I bought Gaga's The Fame from 博客來; another new experience for me. It is a bit like Amazon.com for Taiwan but with far fewer selections. Instead of using a credit card and having the goods shipped to me, I picked up my order the next day at the local 7-Eleven store and paid in cash. The CD comes bubbled wrapped inside a grey envelope. The whole process is quite convenient since there are 7-Eleven stores everywhere in Taiwan.



After a night of repeated listening, I quite like The Fame. The music reminds me a bit of Madonna and David Bowie. Some tracks are a bit like disco music. I suppose things tend to come back every 30 years or so; what's old is made new again.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/04/27/090427crmu_music_frerejones

Taichi

The Ju Ming Museum was established in 1999 by the Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming 朱銘 to display his works. The museum is located at 金山, north of the city of Taipei. This weekend we took the hour long drive to visit the museum for the first time.

The museum is mostly outdoor and contained numerous works by Ju, including his Living World series, Nativist series, and Taichi series. The Taichi series are probably the most famous ones by Ju and remain my favorite.

The Taichi series are more abstract than Ju's other works. They are also more dynamic with more interplays of light and shadow.

The pieces often create very intriguing negative spaces.

The surfaces of the sculpture have textures that add to the spatial qualities of the works.

Since no museum can exist without a gift store, Ju Ming has one as well. At Ju Ming not only can one buy the usual t-shirts and bags, there are also Taichi cookies.

http://www.juming.org.tw/opencms/juming/index.jsp

Finding Time

I am not sure when I will ever find the time to finish reading Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, but for the time being I am spending time making madeleines.

I used to make the madeleines based on the recipe in The Gourmet Cookbook; they turned out very well. Recently I have been using Dorie Greenspan's recipe and chilling the batter before baking to get the hump on the madeleines. So far I have only made the traditional version with grated lemon zest and vanilla. In the future I will experiment with some other flavors.

Unlike Proust, madeleine doesn't bring back childhood memories for me. Instead, I am reminded of the warm mini-madeleines that I had as petit four at Daniel Boulud's eponymous restaurant in New York.

Kinsmen

It has been a while since I bought a jazz album, but after reading the New Yorker article by Gary Giddins on Rudresh Mahanthappa, where he declares the album Kinsmen as "a momentous achievement that will be around for a long time to come", I felt I had to get one. Since Mahanthappa's album is from a New York based small label it is not available in Taiwan, at least I can't find it. Luckily, a good friend of mine came to visit from the US and was able to bring Kinsmen back for me.

I listened to Kinsmen almost non-stop last weekend and really enjoyed it. I found some passages in the album to be quite unique and beautiful. I am so glad I found Mahanthappa's music. Now I need to get Mahanthappa's Apti.



http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2009/03/02/090302crmu_music_giddins

Les Gouttes de Dieu

I finally got my hands on 神之雫 (Les Gouttes de Dieu) in Chinese. This Japanese comic book written by the brother and sister team of Shin and Yuko Kibayashi is about a competition between the son and the adopted son of a deceased wine critic to find thirteen wines.



In the books, wines trigger dramatic stories and images. For instance, the tasting of 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild evokes The Angelus by Jean-Francois Millet. Since the wine is rated 100 by Robert Parker and costs around US$1800 a bottle, I probably won't be able to have the same profound experience any time soon. Nevertheless, the comic books are fun to read and quite addictive. I read three books at one sitting and learned a few things about wines.

Another interesting thing I found was about the character 雫 in the title of the book. At first I didn't think 雫 is a Chinese character and certainly didn't know how to pronounce it. I thought 雫 is a Japanese character meaning drip and pronounced as shizuku. A little research on the Internet showed that many people were wondering about 雫 as well. This is a rarely used character and does not exist in most dictionaries. I finally found the character in the 10-volume 中文大辭典 in our home. The only problem is in 中文大辭典, the entry for 雫 says 義未詳. Since 神の雫 is a Japanese comic book, I will go with 倭俗 and interpret 雫 as drip.

Explanation of 雫 is also available here: http://www.yywzw.com/STW/stw5-11.htm

Salon

We finally had some time to hang the artworks in the kids' room. Instead of hanging the pictures individually as we always did before, we decided to try the salon style. One advantage of the salon style is we can just keep adding pieces to the wall. We inevitably will have more and more things to hang because the kids keep producing new works of art.



Currently the wall consists of only five things, clockwise from the top left: Warhol reproduction from Vera's 乾媽, Yoshitomo Nara reproduction purchased at the MoMA store, original score by James Fei that we commissioned for Vera's first birthday, and two pictures by Vera.