I got a new camera last week on eBay. I’d only been saving up for about eight years. Here are some test shots from the Yale farm today (click for larger):

At long last, the calendar and visuals sections are up and running. Maybe I should also start a “victuals” section. Also a new page for my orchestra/string quartet piece for New York Youth Symphony: Senior.

The first time I was intro­duced to dumpling-making was at my friend Mingzhe Wang’s house about three years ago. Since that night, I must have made dumplings dozens more times in collab­o­ra­tion with various combi­na­tions of family and friends. Every time, I end up passing along the recipe to someone; I like to think that those people even­tu­ally instruct a few of their friends on it, and that Ming has an expo­nen­tially growing army of dumpling disci­ples. In the hopes of encour­ag­ing such growth, here is my tran­scrip­tion of the recipe. It’s pretty labor inten­sive, so it’s good to split the work up among a large group of hungry people. What I espe­cially like, though, is the flex­i­bil­ity of this recipe— most things in the filling are strictly optional, and you can fool around with the propor­tions until you reach your personal dumpling nirvana.

Ming’s Dumplings

Filling:

1 lb. ground pork, not too lean, plenty fat
1 lb. raw shrimp, all chopped up
shitake mush­rooms, chopped fine
a few large leaves Chinese cabbage, shredded real good
cilantro
scal­lions or Chinese chives
bamboo shoots
water chestnuts
fresh ginger
soy sauce
salt

Dumplings (makes around 100):

3 pkg. Hong Kong-style dumpling wrappers (or make your own)
Peanut or other high-heat cooking oil
water

Dipping sauce:

Soy sauce (1/3)
Chinese black rice vinegar (2/3)
Ginger
Garlic
Chili and/or sesame oil

Fold the dumplings. Put about a table­spoon of filling in the center of each wrapper. Dip your finger in water and run it along the edge of the wrapper. Then fold it in half over the filling, and crimp the edges toward the center.

Heat up a heavy pan (prefer­ably cast iron or non-stick) until it is really hot (to burn off all the residue). Then pour in a small puddle of oil. It should be smoking hot. Put in the dumplings, fairly close together. Don’t move them until they form a crust. Once they have a nice brown crust, pour in about ¹⁄₄ cup water and cover pan, leaving a small opening for steam to escape. Once water cooks off, flip the dumplings on their sides, make another crust, serve and devour. Hot. With the sauce. And a Cold One.

A few obser­va­tions about Wednes­day’s Radio­head show:

1. It melted our faces and vibrated our bowels.

2. Thom is getting older (but he can still dance). I noticed it in his voice, though; the group inten­tion­ally avoiding playing songs with more extreme high parts, and often Thom would slightly alter the vocal lines to include fewer falsetto notes (espe­cially in Paranoid Android).

3. Could Paul Lansky ever have envi­sioned 30,000 people wildly gyrating to Mild und Leise?

4. Radio­head hired some good lighting design­ers. Most of the visuals were quite beau­ti­ful and well-suited to the music. The was a partic­u­larly neat effect used during Every­thing in its Right Place (one of my favorite songs ever) where the lyrics of the song were projected against a forest of dangly rods so that it looked as if the text were scrolling towards you. There were two problems, though: IT’S “ITS”, NOT “IT’S”. I can’t believe nobody caught the misplaced apos­tro­phe in 1,000,000-point bright green type. See Strong Bad’s unfor­get­table mnemonic. Also, about that type: it was Comic Sans. No kidding. Radio­head’s visuals have their share of quirky typog­ra­phy, but this seemed somehow… unsuitable.

5. After A Wolf at the Door, Thom mentioned the title of the song “in case you were unfa­mil­iar with it”. This seemed like an odd choice, espe­cially in the context of the show, which was extremely light on chit-chat. Why would anyone be unfa­mil­iar with that song? It’s the last track on Hail to the Thief. Strange. The song has always kind of stuck out to me, though. Musi­cally, it feels like a throw­back to much earlier, Pablo Honey-era Radio­head.

6. Jonny did a little musique-concrète intro to The Gloaming on his Kaoss Pad (I think) which sampled some obnox­ious commer­cial/ra­dio-announcer types of voices. One line that popped out at me was “Win a Macbook Air!” It reminded me of this photo I found a while ago of Thom proudly display­ing a vintage rainbow Apple sticker:

I guess liking Apple products is no longer all cool and coun­ter­cul­ture. Oh well, it’s what we wanted all along, right?

7. I was excited to see Grizzly Bear, the opening act, but appar­ently nobody else was. Hardly anyone showed up until the stage­hands were busily setting up Radio­head’s lighting appa­ra­tus. Which was sad, because they were really good. Those guys do close harmony amaz­ingly well. The ampli­fi­ca­tion was a bit over-aggres­sive, though; the guitars were strangely sharp and punchy, without the beau­ti­ful haziness of Yellow House. Also, it would have been nice if Radio­head had let them use their piano. I’d love to see them in a more intimate venue with a more enthu­si­as­tic crowd.

8. Much has been made of Radio­head’s tour-greening efforts, but I’m sure that the carbon emis­sions from the disaster of a parking lot at the Comcast Center completely canceled out all the offsets that were purchased (not that carbon offsets are such a great idea anyway). Along with thou­sands of other cars, we sat in the parking lot for two and a half hours just waiting to get out. This place makes Tangle­wood look like a marvel of traffic planning.

Check out my new binding machine:

Actually, it’s more a glori­fied hole-puncher. The binding part is done by me, with those coil-crimping pliers. I’m a binding machine.

Also, check out that typog­ra­phy for the logo. I can only assume the design­ers were going for some­thing… bindy? Yet lighthearted?

In other news. We’re off to Boston today to see Radio­head. Cut the kids in half, every­body!

Just wanted to alert you to some new content on the site: some audio from two recent concerts, Ligeti Horn Trio and Home Stretch.

My life has been pleas­antly absorbed with summer rituals: dumpling-making, mushroom-hunting, karaoke-singing, lazily commis­sion-writing, new Pixar movie-seeing (I loved WALL‑E, espe­cially the Jon Ive-esque design aesthetic, but wasn’t as emotion­ally affected by it as I was by Rata­touille).

The other day I recorded a big flute-and-piano piece of Alex’s called Stile Antico. This was actually the second time I’ve recorded it. Alex explained that it’s gone through four iter­a­tions. I remember hearing the première, I think at one of our new music marathons a while back, when it was a huge, stately mass of ecto­plasm; since then, it’s gone from about 25 down to 13 minutes, all lovely and trim and concise. I really admire composers who are able to do that; for me, it’s some­times hard to find anything of value in a four or five-year-old piece, much less to tackle the thing all over again and make it sound fresh. I guess I just don’t have the patience. It makes me wonder what propor­tion of my music is fat and gristle; if I started doing Alex-style revi­sions, I’m scared I might end up with a bunch of two or three minute-pieces (perfect for radio!)

Stay tuned for the new record­ing of Stile Antico; you can hear one of the previous versions here. The flutist I played with most recently is the wonder­ful Daria Binkowski, who by now is probably up at Bangle­wood at Mass MOCA. (Check out this creepy story on their website.)

Happy late Inde­pen­dence Day. There is a bill­board here in town for a local salon that promises “Beau­ti­ful patri­o­tism” and features a flag-bearing blonde in a camo skirt. What does it mean?

The moment I’ve been waiting for for what feels like my whole life has finally arrived: my induc­tion into the Oberlin College Library system. Irving S. Gilmore, better step it up.

There is some­thing I love about moving. I have moved every year for the past five years; even if only across a court­yard, it was cause for excite­ment. This year we are two people moving across town. The apart­ment we spent the past year in was cozy and nice enough, but really only the living/working space had much person­al­ity. The new place is much bigger, so it feels almost spend­thrift even though it’s a fantas­tic deal; New Haven is completely spoiling my real estate sense of the real world.

What I find exciting is making all my stuff disap­pear into boxes and then emerge in a differ­ent envi­ron­ment, and then adjust­ing all of the little rituals that make up my life in order to adapt to those differ­ences. Taking out my contacts, boiling pasta, or putting on my shoes takes on new signif­i­cance by making me stop and think about each step of the action. In my current apart­ment, for instance, I adopted a completely new and revo­lu­tion­ary concept of face-washing in the morning— over the bathtub, because the sink is too small to contain all the drips and splashes. It looks ridicu­lous, but I can be as messy as I want. 

I also like the moment of the last look around an empty room, which I always find quite sad, but so loaded with antic­i­pa­tion— not a feeling I’ve expe­ri­enced in any other situation.

Next week is moving week, and it’s also WWDC! So ready for an iPhone nano. My dad is there and will be sending back live reports.

Every year I go through a cycle of redesign­ing my website, liking the design a lot, grad­u­ally liking it less and less, and then redesign­ing again. This has pretty much been happen­ing since 2001, so I might as well instate it as an annual tradi­tion. I haven’t kept very good records of the old designs, which is a pity, because some of them were really bad and hilar­i­ous. Here is what the home page looked like in 2001:

As you can see, I have gotten over the rounded rectan­gles thing, but I still like gray. 

The 2008 redesign is more of a collec­tion of refine­ments than a real overhaul. The fonts are differ­ent; I decided that Meta was looking too corpo­rate (not that Helvetica isn’t the epitome of corpo­rate, but it can also be a lot of other differ­ent things). The page headings are now in Gotham and Hoefler text (hooray H&FJ!). As soon as I started working with Gotham I began to notice it absolutely every­where, from Obama to Martha Stewart to Banana Republic, so I guess I’m still pretty much a corpo­rate poseur. But it is nonethe­less a great font.

Some more changes have taken place behind the scenes, as I’ve switched from GoLive to Dreamweaver. I don’t like either program; Dreamweaver is finicky (though perhaps in fewer respects than GoLive) but I still think GoLive has a better user inter­face. Dreamweaver feels like a Windows app, with features thrown together in a bunch of palettes (all of which operate in slightly differ­ent ways) without much regard to orga­ni­za­tion or visual hier­ar­chy. The WYSIWYG composit­ing tools are better and more reliable than Golive’s, though, which is really what counts for me since I don’t know how to program.

I will be making more incre­men­tal improve­ments over the summer. In the meantime, I leave you with this picture, which can be magni­fied courtesy of Cabel Sasser’s pretty sweet Fancy­Zoom: