KitKats from Japan: Mt. Fuji blueberry cheesecake (v sweet!) and purple sweet potato (less sweet, mildly nutty).

Remaking the world with a dear friend over pistachio sponge.

if you, like me, have been gripped with off-the-charts ennui lately, a trip to Poster House in the Chelsea/Flatiron District will (usually) cure whatever ails you. Or at least give you something unexpected to commune with.

During today’s visit, I was drawn to this group of four posters in the just-opened exhibition Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace. This series of corporate propaganda posters for the aerospace and defense company General Dynamics was designed by Erik Nitsche in the late 1950s—each poster represents a potential application of atomic energy. In particular, I couldn’t take my eyes off the piece in the upper right-hand corner, titled “Worlds Without End.”

From the exhibition description: Technology from General Dynamics’s Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program was used during the Space Race as part of numerous NASA launch systems. In this humbling design, a minuscule Atlas rocket skirts by a black hole and several galaxies, underscoring the infinite promise of space exploration—truly “worlds without end.”

What grabbed me about this piece was the intense blackness of the black hole. It reminded me of Vantablack, a shade of black so dark, it disappears details and makes objects look like two-dimensional cut-outs due to its nonreflective quality. Whenever I seek out images of Vantablack, my stomach does a little flip—I feel that I am looking at something that I am not supposed to see. It is so unnaturally dark, swallowing light like a rip in reality.

From the exhibition copy: To achieve the intense depth of black in the composition, Nitsche instructed his printer to pass each poster through the press multiple times.

I wished this poster were displayed at eye-level so that I could stare into it a bit longer.

India Pt. 1

India Pt. 2

India Pt. 3:

I hope we feel better soon.

lemony chicken & rice soup

Ingredients:
2 tbsp EVOO
Yellow onion, chopped
XXXL carrot, peeled, chopped
Large handful of celery, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 carton low-sodium chicken broth
5-6 dried mushrooms
1 tsp dried oregano or thyme
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup uncooked white rice
Shredded rotisserie chicken
½ tsp turmeric
Juice of 2 lemons

—In a large pot over medium heat, heat oil. Add onion, carrots, and celery and cook, stirring, until softened, about 7-10 minutes.

—Add garlic and cook about 1 minute more.

—Add broth, mushrooms, oregano/thyme; season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil.

—Add rice and reduce heat to medium-low. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until rice is cooked through, about 20 minutes.

—Add chicken, tumeric, and lemon juice and return to a simmer for 5-10 minutes

—Serve in a big soup mug, ideally with homemade focaccia on the side.

*Lorde voice* stoned at the Met on Valentine’s Day

It took me six years, but I finally finished this book. Here are some favorite sentences:

“I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature.”

“The magic has endured, and whenever a grammar book comes my way, I instantly turn to the last page to enjoy a forbidden glimpse of the laborious student’s future, of that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean.”

“I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.”

“I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts.”

“Already when I was ten, tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.”

“Let me look at my demon objectively.”

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

“The place combined pleasantly the scholarly and the athletic, the leather of books and the leather of boxing gloves.

"Our relationship was marked by that habitual exchange of homespun nonsense, comically garbled words, proposed imitations of supposed intonations, and all those private jokes which are the secret code of happy families.”

“I am now going to do something quite difficult, a kind of double somersault with a Welsh waggle (old acrobats will know what I mean), and I want complete silence, please.”

“Wine-red and bottle-green and dark-blue lozenges of stained glass lend a chapel-like touch to the latticework of its casements.”

“Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds—heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray, lepota (Old Russian for “stately beauty”), moving myths, gouache and guano, among the curves of which one could distinguish a mammary allusion or the death mask of a poet.”

“One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things, about many other things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words—but the ancient limes crowding close to the house drown Mnemosyne’s monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night.”

“I had already entered an extravagant phase of sentiment and sensuality, that was to last about ten years. In looking at it from my present tower I see myself as a hundred different young men at once, all pursuing one changeful girl in a series of simultaneous or overlapping love affairs, some delightful, some sordid, that ranged from one-night adventures to protracted involvements and dissimulations, with very meager artistic results.”

“There was later a period in my life when I might have found this relevant to my last glimpse of Tamara as she turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into the jasmin-scented, cricket-mad dusk of a small station; but today no alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain.”

“I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features—venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks—were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia.”

“As with folded arms I leant my back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer’s disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my teammates.”

“The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.”