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These are a few of my favourite things
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Month: June 2016
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My favourite day
Pooh and Piglet are channeling Milton Waddams
Stop poisoning our culture with your distrust
Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Ohm are in a car
Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Ohm are in a car
They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving.
The cop asks him “Do you know how fast you were going?”
“No, but I know exactly where I am” Heisenberg replies.
The cop says “You were doing 55 in a 35.”
Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts “Great! Now I’m lost!”
The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk.
He checks it out and says “Do you know you have a dead cat back here?”
“We do now, asshole!” shouts Schrodinger.
The cop moves to arrest them.
Ohm resists.
WWMMD?
For various reasons, I’m having a bad mental health day/week/month/quarter. I wondered out loud to Katy, “what would Moomin Mama do”? She said she’d probably give me a cigarette and a special drink. Yeah, that’d work right now.
[recipe] Braided chocolate star bread
450 g flour plus around 50 g for sprinkling
180 ml milk
2 egg yolks (use egg whites for brushing the bread)
8 g active dry yeast
30 g butter
70 g sugar
pinch of salt
200 g chocolate spread
Pour milk into a saucepan and heat it to 30C . When the milk is warm, add yeast, one tbs of sugar and flour and dissolve all ingredients. Let it sit for 15 minutes to activate.
For the best quality of the dough, sift flour through a sieve. Then, in a large bowl, combine all dry ingredients: flour, sugar and salt.
Separate egg yolks from egg whites. Add yolks, butter and yeast to the bowl with dry ingredients. Mix everything with a wooden spoon. Knead dough for about 7 minutes.
Once dough is smooth and just a bit sticky, put it into a bowl, cover with a cloth, and set it in a warm place. Let it rise for around 40 minutes (it should double its size). When the dough is almost ready, you can turn on an oven and heat it to 180C/350F, and put your chocolate spread into a bowl with hot water.
Place dough on a lightly floured surface. Remember to keep some flour for sprinkling at hand. Knead dough for around 1 minute, then divide it into 4 equal parts. Roll the first of four parts into a circle. The dough should be 2-3 mm thick.
Place the dough circle on a piece of baking paper. Take a cake tin and mark it off on the first layer. Cover the marked area with a thin layer of chocolate spread. Roll another layer of dough, place it on the previous one and mark off the cake tin on it. Then, put the chocolate spread on the marked area. Repeat the procedure with the next layer. Roll out last layer of dough. Put it on the previous ones and cover it with a cake tin. Cut excess dough with a knife.
Using a small glass or a coffee cup, mark the center of the cake. Divide the bread into quarters – start cutting from the marked circle (remember to leave the center intact!) Then, divide every quarter into four equal parts. At the end you should have 16 equal parts. Take two parts of the cake in both hands and delicately twist them in opposite directions. Repeat with all pairs to form eight-armed star.
Twist the ends of each arm underneath to create a round shape. Brush surface of the bread with egg white before putting it into the oven. Bake at 180C/350F, for around 15 to 20 minutes. For the first 10 minutes use only lower heater, then turn the upper one too.
Notes: if you want to make your life easier, you can substitute the handmade dough with store-bought sweet puff pastry. Changes the texture completely, but still very good. You can also mix-and-match any suitable combinations of fillings, such as jams and thick custard.
[gallery] Selçuk Yılmaz
Selçuk Yılmaz is a Turkish artist living in Istanbul. His work involves hand-cutting and hammering each individual metal piece. The final pieces contain thousands of hand-shaped pieces and can weigh hundreds of kilos.
I live in a crowded city and that can sometimes make me feel alienated. Especially when I see how the world is shaped by a passion for consumption. To cope with this fragmentation, I retreat to mountains for summer months. Nature helps me reconnect to the things that matter, and eases the sense of isolation. For me solitude is a gateway to creativity. My art is a response to social alienation. I see how society is full of turmoil and chaos. Creativity is a process that is alive in all things, and relates with human roots running deep with meaning. This evolution, from poor progress to doing something better needs patience. We need patience and have to know pain. What we have is time and space to use creativity in becoming better. When using the metal pieces I am using time and space, past and future, all that is in life.
The eternal struggle
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[gallery] Patrick Villas
Patrick Villas is a contemporary Belgian born sculptor who is currently working in France. He studied drawing and painting at the School of Fine Arts of Antwerp. He is a self-taught sculptor, spending hours at the Antwerp Zoo to watch the cats. This same zoo that in 2002 commissioned a jaguar for its gardens. He is an animal sculptor in the tradition of Rembrandt Bugatti, he developed a varied bestiary but the most striking works are undoubtedly the big cats that he likes to observe at the Antwerp zoo. These are an opportunity for him to study the different feline postures, their movement and behavior.
He begins by working on the skeleton, building the internal frame of the feline so to clear the lines of force of the animal can then be seen. His technique has evolved in recent years to appear more abstract, by using more diverse materials. The artist remains at the boundary between abstraction and figuration. The pattern is present but less intelligible.
Group photos
