Palo Santo: Half Hatian chef whips up pan-Latin meals in a renovated church

I need to spend more time in Brooklyn. Palo Santo located in Park Slope, is an excellent pan-Latin restaurant. Owned by chef Jacques Gautier (who lives upatairs) this restaurant is in a renovated Pentecoastal church. Took Rushmi here for Valentines day. We loved it.

The Moth: Storytelling in NYC and the Celebration of Amateurs

Jordan Hill, a close friend of mine, is a professional storyteller. He has long hair, ethereal eyes and he waves his hands wildly when he speaks, holding his audience in a rapturous silence. In 2006 he was hired by NASA to tell stories about the Solar Eclipse. Three years ago, around Harvard Square I met Brother Blue who is also a professional storyteller. When I saw him last, he said: give me three themes and I will weave together a fantastic story for you. Lesbians, buckets and Jack The Ripper I retorted without much thought. He proceeded to tell me the most wonderful story.

Jordan and Brother Blue do this for a living. However, we all tell stories all the time. We are all raconteurs. The Moth in NYC was born to create a forum for everyday storytellers. A couple of weeks ago a bunch of us headed down to Brooklyn for a night of storytelling. The theme for the night was: backstage. I was blown away by the quality of the stories. The guy who ended up winning the “storyslam” told us a story about his alienation from his wife  and his inevitable divorce. It was deeply moving, tragic and funny at the same time.

I am glad that storytelling is very much alive in New York. I am also glad that New York has such a strong culture of celebrating amateurs. Lets not forgot that the word amateur comes from Amare, to love. Amateurs are therefore people who do things for the love of it!

Monocle Magazine

Over the last two weeks, I got to attended Internet Week and Advertising 2.0. At both these events one central question kept coming up: how to save the news and magazine business? I heard a lot of good and bad ideas that ranged from allowing premium access on web sites where people pay for some content to turning leading news papers into public properties like the NPR. Got me thinking about one media property that seems to run counter to every major trend: Monocle Magazine.

I first heard about it when a professor of brand strategy mentioned it to me. My initial take on the magazine was that is was overly pretentious and lacking in real substance. However, on giving it a second chance, I decided that they were in fact  pretty innovative and differentiated on multiple dimensions.

Content

In an age where traditional investigatory journalism seems to be dying in favor of pithy, punchy stories, Moncole invests heavily in sending their journalists and photographers to conduct extensive research on stories and to pick stories that are unique (innovation in Estonia, high-culture in Abu Dhabi, natural resources in Mongolia). This old school, on-the-ground, fact- based, long-form journalism is a breadth of fresh air amidst the cacophony of self-indulgent Tweets and poorly written blogs I find myself mired in. I also like the way in which content is organized: Affairs, Business, Culture, Design, Edits and the fact that they shun celebrity (the writers are not very well known). Also, their articles almost always focus on the notion of unexpected quality — stories about a 100-year-old Wisconsin shoe company that’s a luxury brand in Asia, to a lighting maverick changing the world of engineering are typical.

Customer

Your archetypical economist reader is probably male, older, over-educated, bespectacled, not terribly cool and works in a bank.

Your archetypical GQ reader is probably male, aesthetically inclined, educated enough, stylish, fashionable, mildly superficial and perhaps slightly insecure about  his intelligence.

Monocle is Economist + GQ. What is interesting to me is that they are not only going after the intersection of these two groups, but probably play on the insecurities of both groups as well i.e. smart people who want to seem hip and hip people who want to seem smart!

Distribution

Physical circulation of newspapers and magazines have dropped significantly over the last year. Monocle’s  business model is centered around the palpability of their physical product. The magazine is designed beautifully and is even considered a collectors item by some of their die hard fans. If you miss an issue, back issues cost double! Unlike most magazines that are available in supermarkets, convenient stores etc. Monocle makes sure that their distribution channels  are consistent with the overall brand image. For instance, when I was at the Design Museum last week, I found it in the Museum store.

Price

It is expensive! Priced at over $120 per year, it is more than than twice as expensive as the price of the median magazine in a similar category (factoring for frequency of distribution as well). Furthermore, while most magazines give you a discount when you subscribe for 12 months, Monocle charges you extra!

Business Model

Lastly, are they in the magazine business or in the lifestyle consumer products business? The magazine serves as a product catalog for Monocle branded hand bags, pens, T-shirts, wallets etc. They even have physical stories around the world (New York, London, Tokyo, LA)  where  you can shop. Magazines should never enter the retail business but hey… thats what they told Apple!

I would to love to look at their financials to see if their vision translates into $$$. However, I do give them points for attempting to disrupt the magazine business by….being a magazine.

Apotheke: Very pricey and decidedly dicey

The Green Door by O. Henry is one of my favorite short stories. It is about the spirt of romance and adventure. O. Henry writes:

In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain–and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

Going to Apotheke made me feel like the central character in the Green Door. Located in a narrow alleyway in Chinatown (called the “bloody angle” as former Chinese gangs used to duke it out here) one is suddenly confronted with a sign that says “Gold Flower Restaurant.” As you walk closer to the sign, you see a nondescript door that begs to be opened. You open the door and enter a cavernous dimly lit space that used to be an opium den but is now a high-end bar inspired by Feudal French apothecaries and resembling my high-school chemistry lab!

Drinks are organized by “what ails you” —  Aphrodisiacs, pain killers, stress relievers. Really cool spot but I left feeling like what ailed me most was the $75 tab and they did not seem to have a drink to cure this pain. Financial elixirs come with a price too!

Frank Lloyd Wright @ Guggenheim

Today I checked out the Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit at the Guggenheim. I learned a couple of things about the “father of american architecture.” 

1. He describes his work as “organic architecture.” While the modern interpretation of “organic” has very different connotations, for Wright, it meant a set of principles relating to a unified vision of a building/structure and its relationship outward  (with the natural surroundings) and inward  (design elements that permeate floors, walls, windows, beams etc.). The most widely cited example of this architectural gestalt is Fallingwater, the house he designed for the Kaufman family.

2. He hated cities. For him cities were overdeveloped, overbuilt and lacked any real architecural merit. He attempted to re-conceptualize the modern metropolis in his plan for “Broadacre City.”  Broadacre City  felt like the apotheosis of New York City. In his vision of the modern city, each family had a one acre plot of land and was heavily dependent on the automobile for transportation. To me this idea seemed more dystopian than utopian. 

3. He loved Japanese art and spent a fair bit of time in Japan. The Imperial Hotel in Japan was built by him. Apparently it was the one of the few buildings that remained intact after the 1923 earthquake which propelled him into fame in Japan.

4. He was commissioned to submit a plan for an opera house in the city of Baghdad and ended up building a model for a whole new city . In this current political climate we hear of so many competing visions of how to rebuild Iraq both physically and politically. Interesting to hark back to Lloyd’ s ambitious plan to build a whole city  on a plane between the Tigris and the Euphrates. While his plans were eventually deemed too grandiose and might seem anachranistic in today’s context, we might be able to learn a thing or two from his approach which was characterized by a deep respect and appreciation for Iraqi culture (his opera house had ziggurats) without detracting from the practical considerations of “modern” design.

At the end of the exhibit I was struck by three mildly contradictory themes: his houses are designed to promote family life yet he was chronically philandering; he hated the city but his most well known work, The Guggenheim is in the heart of New York; he talked about “organic architecture” and the symbioses between a house/structure and its environs yet he displays a well articulated predilection for building “from within outward.”

Chess, Hip Hop and Jujitsu

Last weekend, my father, sister and her boyfriend attended an event in SF called “Mind Over Matter.” The event was hosted by the Hip Hop Chess Federation, a non-profit whose goal is to: provide an inclusive setting for individuals to interact, play and develop life strategy skills with people they perceive as mentors. In attendance were hip-hop stars, jujitsu experts, chess masters and children. What a fun combination of people and art forms!

My dad said that he saw RZA from the Wu Tang Clan hanging out. RZA runs a subscription chess site called WuChess where fans can play chess online, chat, see scores of their games and other personal information, and get news about RZA and Wu-Tang! It is the worlds first hip hop chess social network.

Got me thinking about other permutations and combinations of board game + music genre + martial arts. I instantly rejected scrabble + classic rock + karate. What about Go, jazz and Kalarippayattu?

Organic Le Loup Blanc: The Green White Wolf

Last Saturday, thanks to Mr. Josh Levin (www.goodeater.org) a couple of us from NYU Stern were given privileged access to the Astor Wine Facility  — a beautiful, old, multi-story building that houses a retail store, restaurant and a large learning facility. Andrew Fisher, the President of Astor Wines and Spirits spoke to us about what it means to be in the wine business, the trials and tribulations of running a family enterprise and about his passion for wine. He was accompanied by Mark Russ Federman (the “lox maven”) who runs a 111 year old lox and salmon store in Manhattan. 

After the enlivening talk we were treated to a tour of the facility and a full-on wine tasting. Most of the wines were French Organic wines. My favorite was Le Loup Blanc (“The White Wolf”), a full bodied dark red wine made from Carignan, Grenache, and Syrah. I learned that “organic” = no sulfites.

The organic wine movement suffers from all the confusion that the organic food movement experienced over the last decade. When I took a closer look at the “organic bottles,” I found some claiming to be sustainable while others were bio-dynamic! 

What does this mean and does it matter? Nomenclature aside, a little bit of research revealed that there are two schools of thought:

1. Sulfites have been a winemakers ally for hundreds of years – sulfites act a preservative keeping sweet white wines from losing their fruity flavors and to date, no one has been able to find a non-synthetic replacement for sulfites.

2. Purity Enriches Flavor. According to  the dean of wine studies at New York’s French Culinary Institute, wines made from pesticide-free grapes usually are more interesting to drink. “The less interference in the farming of the fruit, the more pure the flavor is. Everything you do to that ingredient, the grape, is reflected in the final product.”

Not to mention the question of carbon footprint. If you really care about the environment and you live in California it might be better to drink your non-organic sulfite induced wine from Sanoma Valley than  your organic French wine?I am no oenophile, but I would like to know what the right answer is.

There is nothing better than spending a lazy Saturday afternoon pontificating about wine (organic and non-organic) after five glasses of wine! Below are the mildly inebriated pontificators extraordinaire.

 

Mehanata: Find your inner gypsy

Before I moved to New York, a friend once said: In New York, there is a critical mass of everything…Ukrainian women who love to Tango, Japanese Indian theatre of the absurd, S&M comic book jazz clubs…you name it. Last weekend (thanks to Mr. Becker), I was invited to Mehanata, a Bulgarian night club in the lowest east side! On the way there, I read this sentence on my iPhone (from nymag.com):

“There are 8 million stories in the Big Apple, and many of the good ones have involved depraved nights at this Bulgarian bar.”

The place lived up to its promise. It is definitely quite depraved and definitely feels like one is walking into an alternative universe. As I walked in, I found myself surrounded by crazy Eastern Europeans dancing to “Gypsy Punk.”  There is a room downstairs called the “Ice Cage” which has a sign that reads (verbatim):

1. $10 to open the door

2. Max. six persons

3. Everyone must wear uniforms

4. All you can drink vodka for two minutes

I am still confused about 3! What uniforms? Girls scouts? Army fatigues? How is number 3 enforced? By men in uniforms?

If you want to experience a fringe NYC scene, expand your music collection to include Gogol Bordella and learn how a  large and precariously dangling chandelier can share ceiling space with discarded bras, this is the place to be!

The Bovine and the Beautiful: Brazil’s newfound fascination for India

Two weeks ago, I met up with Adriana, my Brazilian friend who had just returned from Brazil. Whilst joking about similarities between Brazilians and Indians (Brazil’s connection with India dates back five centuries. Pedro Álvares Cabral allegedly “discovered” Brazil  after being blown off course on his way to India!) she enlightened me about the existence of a Brazilian soap opera shot in India about India. It has recently become all the rage in Brazil! Caminho Das Indias or Path to India began airing in late January by TV Globo and will run five days a week every week till the end of the year. What’s most amusing is that the cast is made up of all Brazilians (trying to play Indians). For instance, Juliana Paes, pictured above, looks like any other Bollywood actress and plays Maya Meetha. 

I fully endorse this superficial fetishizing of “exotic India” even though it hurts my artistic and cultural sensibilities at some deeper level. Its quite easy to dismiss this soap opera as not being representative of “real India.” However, at the end of the day, fantasy may be our biggest export (think Bollywood movies all over Africa) and I am fine with that. On a funnier note, I read that most Brazilian cows are of Indian origin and so I am glad that our national export to Brazil has evolved from the bovine to the beautiful:)

Here is a trailer:

The Meta-App

Over the last week, three people have asked me this question:

“What new applications have you downloaded to your phone?” 

With an explosion of iPhone applications, finding applications you like is  a non-trivial exercise. I would love to see an application that showed me a list of applications my friends have and gave me the option to download them on my phone. We have systems for sharing movies, books, music etc. but not applications. 

Build it!