Veritas et Venustas

Live from Santa Fe

THE COYOTE CAFE has new ownership, with the chef from Geronimo moving over to the Coyote Cafe to be one of the owners. I used to go to their Cantina, which has a nice open roof spot one floor up from Santa Fe's Water Street. But that's closed for the winter, and we ended up at the bar. Little did we know that the bar seats are now the "chef's seats," where you sit and watch the cooks at work.

We went in for Margaritas. We had the Coyote Cafe's "Senoritas," which have a foam with lime, salt and egg white instead of a salt on the rim. Then we stayed for dinner and the show.

The "short stack" of corn cakes and shrimp and the butter lettuce salad with a warm dressing were wonderful. The Niman Ranch filet mignon with a tomato hollandaise was excellent. Shown above is the well-aged 24 oz (!) "Cowboy Cut" ribeye.

Twice during the meal the chef brought amuse bouches to his fans in the chef seats. Here he's putting black truffles and a cream sauce on buffalo meat. Hold on to your liver.

Separated at Birth?

Architecture Critic of the Year: James Howard Kunstler

THE 2008 results are already coming in. Those who don't know Jim Kunstler's work should look at his Eyesores of the Month. Here's the January 2008 Eyesore — you might think it's a Photoshop joke, but it's just another monument to Starchitecture and the human ego (text by Jim and the Starchitect):

     Another American city bends over to pick up the soap for a gang of Eurotrash art theory hustlers. The addition to the Akron Art Museum by competition winners Coop Himmelb(l)au. (That's how they spell it -- cute, huh?). Here's what the designers say about their building:

The museum design introduces the firm's unique approach to historic structures, pioneered in Vienna, to the United States.... The museum of today is not any longer only the storage of knowledge, it is an urban concept. The museum of the future is a three-dimensional sign in the city, which transports the content of our visual world. There are no longer showrooms, which show digital and analogue visual information in the most diverse forms, but also the spaces which cater to urban experiences... Rather than going to the museum simply to look at art, visitors are welcomed to engage in artistic discourse, attend music and arts festivals, or maybe just hang out on their way elsewhere.

    Well, okay. Whatever. To me it just looks like a mechanical alligator snarfing down a Beaux Arts post office. Note the baleful blank wall that the addition presents to the street. Surely this is not an "innovation," since American cities are composed of little more than blank wall buildings. The upper jaw thing hanging over the original building is called "the roof cloud." I suppose it will allow visitiors to "hang out" on the roof of the old building when it's raining out. Or something like that.

December's Eyesore: "The winner of the competition for the new National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague: a previously unknown parastic protozoa related to Cryptosporidium muris, which causes debilitating diarrheal disease in rodents, also believed to be transmissable in humans and responsible for a recent outbreak at the Czech National Bramboráky-and-Bratwurst Cook-off in October."

January 24, 2008 in Architecture, Culture, Current Affairs, New Urbanism, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Monday, January 21, 2008

Dude, They Pimped My Bimmer II

1966 Mercedes-Benz 220 SE Cabriolet

GOOGLE "Fire Chris Bangle" and you'll find a petition you can sign to do just that. That says pretty clearly what  lot of BMW owners think of his work.

Andres Duany pointed out to me yesterday that Bangle is the master of the concave curve. Very few cars have had concave curves, but Bangle puts them all over his, along with contrasting, attention-getting bulges, creases and slashes. It's all supposed to give the company a distinctive brand, but it already had a distinctive brand, one with elegant, sporty cars, "the ultimate driving machines." Now they drive better than ever, but Bangle's effort to make them "different" has made them look like ugly hot rods, increasingly less different than American and Japanese iron. From certain angles they look like your father's Oldsmobile, or one more squashed Japanese bug.

Flipping the channels last night, I saw Hugh Grant and Renee Zellweger driving through the English countryside in a sky blue Mercedes-Benz 220 SE Cabriolet similar to the one above, in a scene from Bridget Jones. It was so elegant.

Under Wilhelm Hofmeister, BMWs were less expensive and sportier than Mercedes, but also elegant and harmonious (unfortunately I couldn't find a good photo of the very elegant BMW 2000cs, below). It seems Bangle just can't stand harmony, which has a lot to do with why so many BMW owners can't stand him.

Hofmeister wanted to make a beautiful car. Bangle has the conceptual, non-visual idea that something different is needed for branding.

1965 BMW 2000cs Coupe

PS: Note the Mercedes pictured had a 2.2 liter, 4 cylinder engine, and the BMW a 2 liter 4. I don't know if either had more than 120 horsepower. BMW now offers a 730 hp 10 cylinder engine and a 6 liter V12, and Mercedes has a 600 hp, 6 liter V12. These are part of the reason why Global Warming is upon us.

PPS: The Bangelicious successor to the 2000cs -

1966 Toon Town Cruiser
2007 BMW 650i

Bangelicious features include,

• the chrome doo-dads on the top of the grilles,
• the aggressive bulge of the nose,
• the oversized second grille below the grille,
• the cartoon-like reproportioning of the classic BMW double grill,
• the chrome doo-dads on the headlights,
• the pseudo-organic outline of the headlights,
• the high "belt-line,"
• the low, sloping roofline,
• and the aggressive slashes and creases.

The chrome trim on side of the 2000cs unifies the car. Bangle uses his chrome trim on the door to fragment the design, making the 650i look like the 2000cs after lots of double espressos and a serious nervous breakdown. (I just wish I could find a better picture of the 2000cs, which is more elegant than it appears in this photo.)

Dude They Pimped My Bimmer!

January 21, 2008 in Architecture, Culture, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

La Bellissima

Men do not love Rome because she is beautiful, Rome is beautiful because men have loved her.

—Leopold Kohr

Other Quotes from Kohr:

"Small is beautiful."

"Whenever something is wrong, it is too big."

(continued)

"As the physicists of our time have tried to elaborate an integrated single theory, capable of explaining not only some but all phenomena of the physical universe, so I have tried on a different plane to develop a single theory through which not only some but all phenomena of the social universe can be reduced to a common denominator. The result is a new and unified political philosophy centering on the theory of size. It suggests that there seems only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness...

"There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations have been welded onto overconcentrated social units. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe. For social problems, to paraphrase the population doctrine of Thomas Malthus, have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are part, while the ability of man to cope with them, if it can be extended at all, grows only at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that, if a society grows beyond its optimum size, its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them.

Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.

"A small-state world would not only solve the problems of social brutality and war; it would solve the problems of oppression and tyranny. It would solve all problems arising from power."

January 21, 2008 in Architecture, Classicism, Culture, Quote of the Day, Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

James Taylor on Martin Luther King Day (redux)

Oh, let us turn our thoughts today
To Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood
That we are bound together
In our desire to see the world become
A place in which our children
Can grow free and strong
We are bound together
By the task that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead
We are bound and we are bound

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

(chorus)
Shed a little light, oh lord
So that we can see
Just a little light, oh lord
Wanna stand it on up
Stand it on up, oh lord
Wanna walk it on down
Shed a little light, oh lord

Can’t get no light from the dollar bill
Don’t give me no light from a tv screen
When I open my eyes
I wanna drink my fill
From the well on the hill

(do you know what I mean? )

- chorus -

There is a feeling like the clenching of a fist
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest

Oh, let us turn our thoughts today
To martin luther king
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood

Martin Luther King

January 21, 2008 in Current Affairs, History, Music, Religion & Metaphysics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

“To Drive Or Not To Drive”

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment. Someone from the past, I think, would marvel at how much time we spend in cars and how our geographic consciousness is defined by how far we can get in a few hours’ drive and still feel as if we’re close to home. Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

And it has all come to pass in just a couple of generations. My dad was born in the mid-1920s, just as the automotive moment was becoming inevitable. And now here I am, always wondering how much longer we will be driving, certain that every time I start the engine in my diesel pickup I am firing up a dinosaur technology. You could ask for no clearer sign of the bind we are in than Mitt Romney’s campaign promise to reinvigorate Detroit in an era of $100-a-barrel oil. America is full of people like me, who remember when gas was 21 cents a gallon, which is the price of admission to climate change.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, January 21, 2008

January 21, 2008 in Culture, Current Affairs, Quote of the Day | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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