'Album Runs' running club brings music fans and bands together, and how liqueur got to the liquor cabinet
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, May 30
Animals
I’m slowly but surely becoming a bird watcher. Besides the rare sightings, my favorite is the nearby mockingbird (probably plural) who loudly imitates all manner of sounds, including car alarms, frogs, and I’m sure I heard the other day one sound like a man whistling at someone.
Here’s an (aptly named) bird that knows how to sew (a skill I’m trying to pick up in the next few weeks, to some degree0.
In the forests of Asia lives a small bird with a very apt name — the common tailorbird. These animals, which are covered in a coat of green, gray, and chestnut feathers, are known for their ability to sew leaves together to create a nest.
The birds poke holes in leaves and then, using their beak as a needle, stitch them together with bits of spider web, plant fibers, or other string-like materials. It’s pretty incredible to watch.
A good question is, how the hell does a bird know how to sew? Was it taught by its elders? Or is it instinct?
The same question applies to a number of other animal behaviors: Beavers building dams, squirrels burying nuts, cats always falling on their feet.
In other bird news, scientists say that backyard feeders changed the shape of hummingbird beaks.
Art
Vulture explores “how the Black portraiture boom went bust.”
Then, in 2024, the wider art market cooled — notching about $10 billion less in sales than its pandemic high — and younger artists were hit particularly hard. In the first half of the year, sales of work by artists under 40 fell by 39 percent from 2023. By this time, anti-woke sentiment had infected the mainstream and interest in showy egalitarianism and visible diversity was noticeably lower. The fervor for Black portraiture peaked and plummeted in just four years.
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Some of the artists who were subject to the boom are happy to have had the windfall, however brief. Others begrudge the collectors who sold while the market was hot and gained at their expense. A good number of the painters had known little of the art market when the frenzy began. As Clottey puts it: “We just gave it away.”
Cities
A roundup of city stories of note:
Altadena, California
“Five Months After the Eaton Fire, Altadena Restaurants Are Finally Reopening”
Dallas
“The Coolest Underground Dinner Party Series in Dallas Is in a Ceramics Showroom”
Every chef we talked to, it was no hindrance whatsoever to them. Every chef has some story about cooking for 30 in an elevator shaft. We got a couple of induction burners for the Chilean dinner. We have a toaster oven for staff to be able to make avocado toast, things like that, that get used in every dinner. We’ve had so many different types of cuisine, from sushi to Kent Rathbun using a flat iron grill in the main part of the warehouse that someone left here. We’ve had chefs bring in additional induction burners, sous vide, and finishing dishes with fire or torches for a final sear. It depends on the chef — we’ve had some do a lot of prep before coming, while others set it all up here. The biggest addition we’ve had is adding more electricity to the room. After the first few dinners, I realized we kept flipping the breakers. We went from renting to buying a generator for the dinners, and now we’ve had more electricity installed. It is a huge leap of faith for diners to find this warehouse in the Cedars and walk through to a back room. And now that we’ve worked through the wrinkles, it feels like a smoother experience. But having that rawness and feeling like you’re in someone’s home where you can see the hustle and food being made through a window, all adds to the charm.
London
“London’s car boot sales have become fashion design testing labs”
(P.S. Boot = trunk here.)
For nearly two decades, this schoolyard has transformed each weekend into one of East London’s liveliest micro-communities. Car boot sales like this are no longer just about clearing out your loft; they’ve become crucial spaces for emerging designers and resellers to test, tweak and shape fashion, escaping the studios and spreadsheets for face-to-face feedback, with the very people wearing it.
“Coming here, I get crazily informed,” says Lagos-born and Glasweigan-raised Olubiyi Thomas, a designer who sells archival fashion alongside pieces from his namesake, Nigerian-inspired label. “You have everyone: youngsters, stylish people, mums, dads, uncles, kids. If I have 60 garments on the rack – all different styles, colours, shapes, materials – after a while I start to understand what people want from selling to them directly.”
Los Angeles
“2028 Olympics: L.A.’s ‘no-build’ promise faces housing crisis reality”
Osaka
“‘Girls capturing girls’: A female perspective on the women of Osaka”
“Japan has become the world’s playtoy – a dream destination reduced to a hyper-curated fantasy,” says the photographer Ellie Aoki, one half of the Osaka-based creative pair behind the photo series The World’s Playtoy. “The West sees Japan as a neon-lit fever dream, surreal aesthetics, a playground for anime otakus and the birthplace of many subcultures.” In collaboration with creative director and stylist Erika Fujiwara, Aoki sets out to challenge the mythologised and reductive lens through which Japan is so often viewed, capturing the magic of Osaka both from a female perspective and outside of the tourist’s gaze.
Rotterdam
“A Museum of Migration Celebrates People on the Move”
“It’s all about movement,” said Wim Pijbes, the chairman of the foundation that runs the new museum. “It’s not genealogical, it’s not art historical, it’s not documentary. It’s a mix of objects: high art, low art, personal objects, video, film, photography, ceramics. It’s all there, like a symphony.”
Unlike other migration museums in New York, London or Paris, which typically narrate specific histories of immigrants and refugees, Fenix takes a different, more wide-ranging, approach.
Film
The Criterion Collection is releasing a box set of Wes Anderson’s first 10 feature films.
Anderson himself approved the 20-disc collection which also has special edition features ranging from essays by Martin Scorsese, Richard Brody, James L. Brooks, Bilge Ebiri, Moeko Fujii, Kent Jones, Dave Kehr, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Erica Wagner, as well as more than 25 hours of bonus content including audio commentaries, interviews, documentaries, deleted scenes, auditions, short films, home movies, commercials, storyboards, animation tests, archival recordings, still photography, discussions, analysis, and visual essays.
Food (and Drink!)
Chef Gregory Gourdet opened his first restaurant at age 46. (He’s now 50.)
But after 25 years in the business, Gourdet now has a growing empire of his own, and he has spent the morning tending to his latest high-profile project, the ambitiously often-Haitian-accented Maison Passerelle, one of five venues he’s overseeing in his role as culinary director of the new Wall Street branch of the grand Parisian department store Printemps.
Maison Passerelle is a lavish 85-seat project with two entrances, one of which is just past the designer-shoe section, where you can purchase your pair of Christian Louboutins for several thousand dollars. The menu includes an impressive (and generally delicious) selection of fat-cat specialties (Cane Syrup Glazed Duck for $72, spaghetti with lobster for $60, strip steak rubbed with Haitian coffee for a whopping $150), although as our modest lunch proceeds ($77.49 total), Gourdet, who lives in Portland, Oregon, starts to reminisce about the homecoming moments he’s been experiencing around the city over these past few weeks and months.
In other food and drink news:
“This Ancient African Grain Could Change the Way We Drink Beer”
“The 'Oscar' of food prizes goes to a Brazilian who harnessed the power of bacteria”
Music
A Chicago run club unites musicians and fans.
Each month, often by The 606, a group gathers for Album Runs, a monthly meetup that invites Chicagoans to listen to a full album while running, jogging or walking.
The group listens to a little bit of everything – from hip-hop and electronic to rock and indie — and sometimes they’re later joined by the artist to dive into and discuss what they just listened to.