Las Vegas Studio
Edited by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli
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Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess title.
Stephen King on the Big Screen
Mark Browning
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Intellect Books title.
The Great River: A Novel
by Charles Dee Sharp
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Center for American Places title.
Drawings and Prints by Vincent van Gogh
Teio Meedendorp
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Amsterdam University Press title.
The Chattertooth Eleven
Eduard Bass
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Karolinum Press title.
For over fifteen years, architecture critic Michael Sorkin has followed the same path from his home in Greenwich Village to his office in Tribeca. This daily ritual allowed him to observe the startling transformations in New York during this significant time of urban transition and gentrification. This week in ArtForum's 500-Word Column, Sorkin discusses Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, his personal and insightful account of a constantly changing city.
This provocative claim for the origins of pie begins Janet Clarkson's fascinating culinary study Pie: A Global History. While today we may struggle at home to perfect the buttery, flaky pie crust that is the pinnacle of pastry (or cheat with one of those oh-so-convenient frozen crusts already molded and crimped in a metal pan), there was a time when that crust was nothing more than a utilitarian container, cookery in its most basic form. Clarkson explains:
“It seems likely that the earliest ovens were actually kilns, used to fire clay objects such as figurines and pots. Bread, meanwhile, was baked in flat cakes on hot hearthstones. . . . Meat, meanwhile, was cooked by direct exposure to the fire, on a spit or in the coals. The problem with cooking meat this way is that even if it does not burn, the valuable and tasty juices drip away and the meat dries and shrinks. Other cooks at other times got around this problem by wrapping the meat up to protect it—in leaves, for example. Or clay. Clay that, to another cook in perhaps another time and place, felt just like dough. This last inspired step created the primitive meat pie—something medieval cooks called a bake-mete.”
In keeping with this original idea of the pie as a practical container, I decided to try making pasties—the half-moon-shaped, usually meat-filled, single serving savory pastry. The pasty is a traditional food of Cornwall as well as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. One might consider it the cousin of the calzone as well as the progenitor of the mass-produced Hot Pocket. Most importantly, it has always been a convenience food:
“Today's pasty is the working man's version, a perfect meal in the hand, easily transportable to the mines or the fields.… The traditional ingredients of the ‘oggie,’ as it is called in the old Cornish language, are naturally disputed, but on some things most experts agree: the meat must be chopped, not minced, the vegetables (perhaps potato, onion, and turnip) must be sliced and the ingredients are not pre-cooked before they are put in the pastry. The twisted or crimped edge is traditional too, and forms the handle by which it is held for eating—hence the crimp must be on the side, not the top edge. The wives of Cornish tin-miners used to mark the pastry with their husband's initials to ensure that their man got the correct lunch, and they supposedly made the pastry sturdy enough to survive if it was dropped down the mineshaft.”
A sturdy pastry? This, certainly, I could do!
Cornish Pasty, adapted from Pie by Janet Clarkson
Ingredients for the exterior shortcrust pastry dough:
8 oz or approximately 2 cups of all-purpose flour
4 oz butter or a mixture of butter and lard
a pinch of salt
2 to 4 tablespoons of cold water
1. Cut the butter into tablespoon sized pieces and pulsed them in the food processor with the flour and salt until it resembled coarse crumbs.
2. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, pulsing after each addition.
3. When the dough starts to form a ball and pull away from the sides of the bowl remove it from the processor and finish shaping it into a ball by hand. Wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least half an hour.
4. While the dough is resting, prepare your ingredients for the filling. The most traditional beef filling calls for: 3/4 lb beef cut into small dice (not minced); 1 finely chopped onion; 1 diced turnip; and 2-3 diced raw potatoes. However, I was eager to recreate a ham and cheese pasty I had once eaten on the street in Leeds from the West Cornwall Pasty Company. For my filling I used a chopped ham steak, chopped sharp white cheddar cheese, and some fresh peas.
5. Roll out the pastry to about 1/4 inch thick and cut into rounds of the size you wish.
6. Pile the filling onto one half of each round (I overfilled mine; but what they lack in appearance they make up in taste.) and fold over the dough. Damp the edges and crimp together with your fingers or a fork. Brush with beaten egg if you wish to have a glazed finish.
7. Bake the pasties in a 375 degree oven for 35-45 minutes, until golden.
I'm not sure whether they could survive a fall down a mine shaft, but they certainly packed up well for the bumpy bus ride to the Press building. —Carrie Olivia Adams
On this date—May 18th— in 1897 Bram Stoker's Dracula was first published, forever cementing the fascination with vampires in the imagination, a curiosity that continues in popular media from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Swedish film Let the Right One In. In honor of the 112th birthday of the world's most famous vampire, here are some suggestions for bed (or coffin) -side reading. So, pull the curtains and await the potential of nightfall.
A wide-ranging and engrossing chronicle, From Demons to Dracula casts this blood-thirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complex and telling totem of our nightmares, real and imagined.
Stephen King on the Big Screen is an entertaining and accessible guide to the complete corpus of Stephen King films and is a must-have for fans of his fiction and of the many directors who have sought to capture his macabre stories and bizarre characters in cinematic form.
Whether you love the splatter of blood or prefer to hide under the couch, Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film cuts to the heart of why we are drawn to carnage.
Transfigurations explores our cultural obsession with film violence from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the shower to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Francis Ford Coppola.
As I your loyal publicist type this, it is 81 degrees in Chicago with a warm breeze and sunny skies. Even the most doubting of this city's denizens are considering it time to put their gloves and hats in the closet and take their down coats to the dry cleaners. Spring is here. And on decks and porches from the North to the South side barbecue grills will be fired up tonight in celebration.
On many menus, whether at home, at the ball park, or midway through a lazy stroll around the neighborhood, will be hot dogs—a food Chicagoans take seriously. Among those most serious about hot dogs is food historian Bruce Kraig, author of Hot Dog: A Global History. Bruce is not only a true hot dog aficionado, but an expert on the history of the hot dog, the origins of its funny name, and the seemingly endless regional variations.
Bruce has been and will be sharing his hot dog knowledge and trivia with listeners and viewers throughout North America. If you missed Bruce's recent interview on CBC Radio One Toronto, you can download a podcast from their website.
As you listen, you can watch this short film of tantalizing Chicago Hot Dogs to complete the experience.
If you're hungry for still more hot dogs, you can catch Bruce and find out more during these upcoming interviews:
Monday, April 27 at 7:00 PM Central
WTTW Chicago Tonight
Thursday, April 30 at Noon Central
WGN Mid-Day News
Friday, May 1 at 2:00 PM Central
Martha Stewart Living Radio on the Sirius Satellite Network
An exhibition of Stephen Longmire's photographs from Keeping Time in Sag Harbor will be on display at the Nantucket Historical Association through June 7th. He will be speaking as part of the exhibition and signing copies of the book on May 9th at 2pm. In anticipation of the event, Longmire offered the following perspective on the changing times in Sag Harbor:
Like many large photographic projects, Keeping Time in Sag Harbor began with an impulse to record something that was disappearing. That's strange to say, since its subject is the architecture of a community protected by landmarks legislation. This former whaling port turned summer resort, my home on and off for over forty years, was heavily rebuilt during the nation's recent housing boom. The photographs were made to help me tell a story, as I watched the balance shift on an eclectic community of artists, writers, working people and retirees, while their houses were gradually transformed into weekend homes for wealthier New Yorkers. Many local people were priced out, even as others profited. The reasons were larger than local, as we now know.
![33-PPT[1]_x.jpg](http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/distributed/images/33-PPT%5B1%5D_x.jpg)
As the book went to press, early in 2007, I was updating the manuscript to reflect the early signs of an economic downturn, which had realtors on the East End of Long Island worried. One can no longer speak of a booming real estate market, even here. The East End is Bernie Madoff country, one big Ponzi scheme, which fed on the conviction that property values could not drop, that new money would keep pouring in. "Capitalism," a University of Chicago friend told me years ago, "is the only perpetual motion machine." The machine may have stalled, but the story I tried to tell, of a preserved community struggling to shape its future, has continued.
The summer the book came out, Sag Harbor celebrated its 300th birthday, and many concerned citizens worried their community was being taken over by developers. The trend that had been working over the back streets arrived downtown. Several condominium projects were proposed at once, and rumors swirled about national retail chains buying up commercial buildings. Suddenly, the village was full of buttons and bumper stickers saying "Save Sag Harbor" and "Sag Harbor is Not For Sale." In the 1960s and 70s, local merchants struggled to attract tourists, eager to sell them on the charms of a historic port just 100 miles from Manhattan. Was this the price of success—or had no one bargained on two decades of cheap credit?
Starting in 1973, the village became a historic district, giving its citizens a say in any change to their built environment. In an increasingly seasonal community, where many houses are empty much of the time, the people's voice isn't always strong, but recent efforts to organize seasonal residents have changed this somewhat.
Some front page topics of the past two years… Should a historic factory, once a toxic Brownfield site, be remodeled as luxury condominiums? And does the developer have an obligation to provide affordable housing, an urgent community need, on site? Should an unbuilt section of the waterfront be developed as more condos, or acquired by the village as parkland? Should the library expand into a recently vacated church nearby or build a new building on the outskirts of the village, like the church's congregation? Should the shopping plaza at the base of Main Street be taken over by a large chain store, which would sell certain essentials cheaply, or should the many small businesses now there be protected?
The biggest question of all is not yet up for debate: can the community continue to make its living off real estate, selling its property at a profit, or will it find another business? Sag Harbor has faced economic crises before, reinventing itself as a manufacturing center after whaling went belly up in the 1850s, then shifting its focus to tourism when its principal factory, which made watch cases, failed—first in the Depression, then again in 1981. What will it do next?
I hoped the book would address issues of concern elsewhere too. What is the value of protecting bricks and mortar, if human communities cannot be protected when economic forces overwhelm them? Is historic preservation a success when it saves a community for newcomers? What can we learn from such early American boomtowns that have died and been reborn before? Where do a community's values reside?
These issues were on my mind as I prepared a companion exhibition of my photographs for two venues outside Sag Harbor, at New York's South Street Seaport Museum last fall and the Nantucket Historical Association this spring. Sag Harbor and Nantucket were rival whaling ports; Sag Harbor and New York City were once the state's ports of entry. All three communities enjoy landmarks protection and have survived economic transformations. Resorts like Sag Harbor and Nantucket are on the front lines of the collapsing housing market, since they became preserves for economic speculation—of which whaling was an early form. It's ironic, since these communities, with their recycled housing and walkable downtowns, should be models of sustainable design.
The two years since the book came out have been poignant ones for me, as I've wondered how long I could call Sag Harbor home. I photographed and wrote the book after moving away, then returned unexpectedly as it appeared—the result of changes in my wife's employment. After trying again to find a balance between housing and work here, we're packing to move away again as I write. (The median price of a house here remains over $1 million, and people describe houses that cost three-quarters of a million as cheap.) I'll keep my sailboat mooring and my grave plot—the only Sag Harbor real estate I expect to afford in this lifetime. But I remain hopeful for my community—and hopeful I've returned some of the favors it's done for me. —Stephen Longmire
All photos copyright Stephen Longmire
For more information on Longmire's Keeping Time in Sag Harbor, you can watch a recent interview with him on Plum TV.