Guest Chef is the brainchild of Bay Area real estate developer Scott Cameron. Simply put, it is a permanent space without permanent cooks…So the 20-seat restaurant changes hands every two weeks as a new emerging or established chef takes over with access to a fully stocked kitchen, wine reserve, and three-person base staff of dishwasher Manuel and servers Kristen and Shannon. The two-week window ostensibly gives the chefs a chance to find out if they are confident and skilled enough to impress area crowds with their adventurous long-term ideas.

 

So far, it’s working. Local firefighters drew a crowd in early November when they prepared a benefit dinner for the venture’s inaugural event. Since then, cooks have ranged from Eva Santillanes, a grandmother from Zacatecas, Mexico with no industrial kitchen experience, to Michelin-Star-winning Joseph Humphrey.

 

The effort began with an empty kitchen. Last year, chef Mark Valentine—a friend of Cameron’s—suggested that they find a creative use for an unused space along a gentrifying Oakland neighborhood’s main drag.

 

“I’m like an artist in a gallery,” he says. “An artist doesn’t wait for a buyer to arrive in order to start painting. I’m here to cook my food and work on my craft. If people come in, I will be happy to share my passion and cook for them.”

A nurse has recorded the most common regrets of the dying, and among the top ones is ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. What would your biggest regret be if this was your last day of life?

An article from The Guardian by Susie Steiner

Read the full article here.

“To love,” said Stendhal, “is to derive pleasure from seeing, touching, and feeling through all one’s senses and as closely as possible, a lovable person who loves us.” This is the popular view of what love is–a deep, all-pervasive positive feeling toward another person.  Indeed, it is such a view of love that leads many of us to ask questions like these: “Is this feeling that I have really love?”  “Yes I feel comfortable with him (her), but is this love?”  “I thought falling in love would feel like fireworks going off, and this doesn’t.”  “We have great sex but I am just not sure if it’s love.”

The answer I want to suggest is in the affirmative; for in my view, love is not a feeling in the first place.  While people in love do indeed experience tingles, titillations, or other warm and fuzzy churnings, these are not themselves what love is.  These positive feelings and sensations may be like the icing on the cake, but not the cake.

Love, I submit, is a purposive activity undertaken by two (or more) people in a close, intimate relationship such as the aforementioned ones.

Want to know how to get better at loving or find out how good you are at it?

Click here to read the full article.

From the post:

 

Facebook’s Timeline (the new version of the user profile which is slated to be released to the general public “in the next few weeks”) wanted to do something more: It wanted to convey a feeling. Two feelings actually: The feeling of telling someone your life story, and the feeling of memory–of remembering your own life.

 

Facebook wanted the Timeline to be a place for self-expression: A way for users to reveal who they are and what their lives are about.

 

Facebook could simply have given the same weight to each individual event–a song you listened to or a run you took–as it gives other pieces of data, like status updates, and listed them all in the Timeline. But that doesn’t work well over time. Individual songs are interesting in the moment you’re listening to them. But over time, you’re more interested in patterns. So Facebook created a set of aggregations and reports, to let you “find those individual patterns that define your identity,” Felton says. By seeing aggregate reports on what songs you listened to at particular times in your life, you get to see “the soundtrack of your life.”

 

Whether we like it or not, within the next couple weeks the ‘Timeline’ is going to be the only interface Facebook offers. What do you think? Will this new design create a more ‘memorable’ social networking experience?

Here’s all you have to do:

• think of up to three great country artists
• list them in a comment

After two weeks we’ll cull the list down and then have a debate. Hopefully we can get to a Top 20 list of Curator fan’s top country acts.

To help you get started, here is my suggestion for the list: Dierks Bentley.

Happy listing!

I really do.

I used to love it.

After moving to the New York City metro area almost seven years ago I went through withdrawal. There was no country music station. Top 40 was everywhere.

It was awful.

But then something started happening in country music shortly after I moved up here. The neo-traditional wave started by artists like Alan Jackson began to putter out and was replaced by progressively, poppy country music that has culminated in the Taylor Swift-ification of country music.

Country music has been hijacked. It has Stockholm syndrome.

Left bereft of any good music, and the death of radio in general, I ascended the hipster-adorned ladder into the cloud of unknowing that is indie rock.

What I was missing was good music and powerful, gothic lyrics. The ones that were the bedrock of country. What Rebecca Parker calls “sadness, coated with betrayal, layered with loss” in her essay “The Lost Art of the South.”

I began to find this in indie rock. Sufjan Stevens singing about serial killers and hard times. Folk rock acts that actually sang about gritty, dust covered life. Country music was founded on lyrical proximity to the grit of the earth. Now it is just dressed up in poser cowboy boots and abhorently bad musical renditions of arrested development, binge drinking, adolescent love, pseudo-Christian ideals and bad Shakespearean puns (Swift!!!). Country music has even entered into a weird stage of singing about how country music used to be good.  I have a message for you Jason Aldean: stop dressing up your bourgeois problems and Hangover-tinged penchant for Las Vegas as some working class revolution song by name-dropping Johnny Cash (the aptly named song “Johnny Cash”) or George Jones (the very creatively named song “Dirt Road Anthem”). How about you actually write songs like Johnny Cash? He didn’t sing about running from problems. He didn’t write an anthem to dirt roads and name drop George Jones to add some credibility to a trite pop-country diddy. Cash actually sang about people dying on the road by railroad tracks (Give My Love to Rose). He didn’t sing about getting married by an Elvis preacher. Cash lamented about sinfulness and approached the darkness in all of our souls (pretty much every Cash song, but the most macabre are Folsom Prison Blues, Cocaine Blues and Deliah’s Gone).

Country music has lost its soul. Thankfully, as she closes her essay, Rebecca provides a call to artists that echoes the beauty and pathos that has been erased from so much Southern and Country art today:

Johnny Cash sang that he wore black for the sick and lonely, for the reckless, and the mournin’, for the poor and beatin’, and the prisoner and the victim. And as artists create today, perhaps it is our duty to take on the strands and fringes of black both to honor and connect us to the spirit, land and people of our place. So we take from the fragmented pieces of our community’s collective conscience, take the black, and take the blood, and in doing so, create an enduring piece of work, reminiscent of this old melancholy.

Here’s hoping that country can find its way back to the scratchy, guttural melancholy of its past.

While Ijäs is a skilled draftsman, he is anything but a traditionalist. Using digital media enables him to work quickly and directly in his chosen landscape or setting. The device’s portability allows him to capture the exact quality of a mid-day, sunlit landscape viewed from a hilltop in Namibia’s remote Damaraland, as he does in Ugab River……

In his drawings Ijäs balances an interest in perception and realism with meaningful, productive distortion. In doing so his work is in dialogue with the history and traditions of painting. His interest in the work of Matisse, the Fauves, and Van Gogh is reflected in his use of luminous, intense color, expressive linework, and a painterly approach……

-Andries Fourie, Curator, Roger W. Rogers Gallery

To view the full article with images of his wonderful works, click here.

Or visit the artist’s website: http://www.mikkoijas.com/Mikko_Ijas/Artwork/Artwork.html

“At Oliberté, we believe Africa can compete on a global scale,” he says, “but it needs a chance. It doesn’t need handouts or a hand up. It needs people to start shaking hands and companies to start making deals to work in these countries.”

Oliberté—the name melds “liberty” with the “O” from the anthem of Dehtiar’s home country—

 

“TOMS Shoes is a good marketing tool, but it’s not good aid,” agrees Saundra Schimmelpfennig, an international aid expert who blogs at Good Intentions Are Not Enough, where she aims to educate nonprofit donors about effective charity. She’s criticized TOMS for competing with local producers by handing out free goods and for being “quintessential Whites in Shining Armor.” “The idea of creating jobs that pay a fair wage and provide necessary benefits,” she says, “can have far more impact than aid.”

 

According to its latest giving report, TOMS also uses factories in Ethiopia, in addition to ones in China and Argentina. “I’m not saying ours is a better way,” Dehtiar says, “but people just continue to give away stuff to Africa, and there’s no incentive for dependencies to end.”

 

Instead of striving to produce the cheapest shoes possible, the company focuses on quality. “When it comes to footwear,” Dehtiar says, “we don’t want people to think of Africa as the next China. We want them to think of it as the next Italy—think quality.”

Although truthfulness is essential for good human relationships and personal integrity, it is often abandoned in pursuit of other life priorities.

The problem now is that we seem to be reaching a dysfunctional tipping point in which an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed in our society. If this is indeed the case, the danger is that the bonds of trust important in any society, and essential for a free and democratic one, will dissolve so that the kinds of discourse required to self-govern will become impossible.

What was different about this time, other than the hours I suddenly had to spend, was that I started writing again. There was a three week spell before this break when I didn’t write a poem, blogging was a chore and I didn’t have many ideas churning around my head. I had taken a break, stepped back from life for a bit, and the writing finally started to come again.

This experience was similar to what Kendall Ruth explored in his essay “Listening Past a Writer’s Block.” Where many people try to beat Writer’s Block into submission, Kendall began to see the positive effects of listening, and how there is a rhythm in taking a step back from your art. Only then can we begin to create again:

There are plenty of inspirational books and essays out there about the creative process– the kind that make you think you could be the next Wordsworth or Rembrandt. There are even books on the neurological mechanisms of Writer’s Block. There are few that say, “Don’t beat yourself up. Just put the brush, the pen, the camera down…. and listen.” This listening is an art form in itself. How else will the good stories, the kind that speak to the True, ever be heard and, thus, written?

What is your favorite way to take a break from your creative work?

How long of break do you take?

How is your creativity affected when you come back from a break? When you don’t take a break?