I’m currently reading three books at once – which is unlike me, but not unlike me at the moment. I feel like I’ve been off my game for a couple of months so I’m a little scattered brained trying to find a spot to rest for awhile. I bid on a package at the Soiree a few weeks ago – and I won! It included this print from Firecracker Press…
…plus a $50 gift certificate to Kitchen Kulture (I know of them, but am not familiar yet – I need to take my new feet over to the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market on Saturday to check them out!), and Michael Pollan’s latest book Cooked. E saw that I was reading it and asked to read it after me. She’s been studying The Omnivore’s Dilemma at school, and she’s really into his writing. I love that we’re talking about this, that we’re talking about food, that she gets that it’s important. She was in charge of lunch today at school – her last time cooking before heading off to middle school. I’m grateful that she’s had the opportunity to study culinary arts and that she understands her way around the kitchen enough to be able to feed a school full of her friends.
I finally saw The Grand Budapest Hotel and I loved, loved, loved it. I would have happily watched it again, right there in the theater. I fully plan to recreate the Mendl’s Courtesan au Chocolat and you know I laughed until I cried at the tools smuggled into the prison in the cookies. I cannot wait to watch it again.
The album I want now. I keep catching bits of it in music reviews, and I want more.
This interview with Sam Baker, finding grace in the wake of destruction, a good segue into the following stories.
There has been a lot of talk this week about the opening of the 9/11 museum, and so I’ve been thinking about that as I listen – particularly interviews with the building and exhibit designers. This particular interview with a psychologist on the design team – as she described the approach to the museum’s design, building a scaffolding to the narrative of trauma. I think about places I’ve visited like The Holocaust Museum in DC or the museum in Dachau and how difficult it is to erect this scaffolding even though the narrative is so important. I toured Ground Zero November a year ago – oddly enough on the first day it reopened after the flooding from Hurricane Sandy. All those newly constructed spaces around the memorial, covered in muck and fans, drying out and cleaning up. How tricky it is to carve out a space for a moment in time in the middle of a place where time never stops, and Mother Nature certainly doesn’t either.
Time does stop a bit when you listen to Phillippe Petit in an interview. I’m excited to read his latest book. I loved the documentary Man on Wire, and wrote about it several years ago – his journey back and forth across that wire between the towers. One of my favorite books, Let the Great World Spin, features that walk in 1974 – I highly recommend this read, and the film.