At The Believer, I talked visual art, music and making things with Shannon Shaw of Shannon and the Clams, Greer McGettrick from The Mallard, and Hannah Lew of Cold Beat. These are smart, talented musicians who offer many fascinating insights into the creativity and creative cycles. You can read it here. 
HANNAH LEW: I think abstracting on our reality and making our own shapes out of our feelings and responses to our world is vital to our understanding. If we don’t include our emotional responses to things into our vocabulary about our temporal existence, we can’t really move forward as a society. You can get away with confronting a lot of taboo subject matter within the realm of abstraction and reproduction that you can’t in normal dialogue. There is a lot of truth telling by way of telling lies, which is all an artist is really ever doing.
Archive for September, 2014
Interviewed three musicians about making visual art, for The Believer
Posted in Music, Writing, tagged California, Cold Beat, music, Oakland, San Francisco, Shannon and the Clams, The Believer, The Mallard on September 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Wrote an article for Harper’s about automated restaurants
Posted in Food, Travel, tagged Harper's Magazine, Japan, Japanese snacks, Matsuya, shokkenki on September 20, 2014| Leave a Comment »
This piece explores the social and economic implications of automating restaurants, and what Americans can learn from Japan’s badass, semi-automated shokkenki restaurants, like the popular chain Matsuya. Here’s the intro:
This spring, at a time when American fast-food workers were marching to demand pay increases, and local governments were voting to raise the minimum wage, the Chili’s restaurant chain installed more than 45,000 tabletop touchscreen devices at 823 of its franchises nationwide. Customers at these locations can now order drinks and dessert directly through monitors, pay without the assistance of a server, play games, and read the digital edition of USA Today. The company has also installed computerized ovens at 1,200 locations. Applebee’s, meanwhile, has announced plans to follow suit with approximately 100,000 tabletop tablets by the end of 2014, while Panera Bread is replacing many registers with self-serve kiosks and adding technology that will allow customers to sit down, enter their orders and table numbers on a smartphone, and have their food delivered to them.
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