dolester miles

Dolester Miles, who was named Outstanding Pastry Chef by the James Beard Foundation in May, has worked for more than 30 years at the Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Ala. Credit: Bob Miller for The New York Times

loved this advice from pastry chef dolester miles, who just won outstanding pastry chef from the james beard foundation:

Sometimes, dessert is just dessert and a job well done is its own reward, Ms. Miles said.

“Just do hard work and keep reading books and keep learning,” she said. “That’s what I do every day because that’s my philosophy.”

solid name

old things about me

• generally grumpy
• would prefer to be seated, or better yet, lying down
• like wilco
• don’t want to listen to most people talk

the fruits of an anstrology meme search

is this a banger

ross and i stayed up till 4am surveying R.E.M. songs (full disclosure i got home from work at 2am so wasn’t like we were talking about R.E.M. for 18 hours). i am not sure how i feel about R.E.M. in the long term but this song still rocks me. imagine if it came on the dance floor and you were middle-aged — BANGER. also i’m just getting into the NBA semi-finals duh and of course regretting my late fandom because i love basketball and knowing all the players and the games are so excruciating and exhilarating and why didn’t i at least start watching with the playoffs. but i’m here now YO. also slice of life, i met this couple from tucson today and they were so awesome, we talked basketball (he’s a celtics fan/anti-james harden), it was so fun to meet new folks and immediately be like, OH THIS PERSON IS SO GREAT. the guy reminded me of ben wu, prob why they got a pass.

IT ME

i know i should be embarrassed by this meme that @framacho obviously made about me but i'm too busy laughing.

A post shared by hillery sklar (@hillerysklar) on Apr 17, 2018 at 11:20am PDT

seriously tho

#middleagedgraffiti

A post shared by hillery sklar (@hillerysklar) on Mar 21, 2018 at 3:49pm PDT

this middle-aged graffiti is very funny.

also this

Tomorrow (May 19) is the birthday of both #MalcolmX and #YuriKochiyama. One you’ve heard of, the other you probably haven’t. I commissioned the amazing @ericuhlir to make their friendship come to life for me. I’m calling it “American Gothic X,” because it tells this story: The scene was where Yuri lived: the Manhattanville Projects in Harlem. The time was June 1964. A Japanese delegation of Hibakusha (the atomic bomb survivors) just arrived in NYC on a peace mission. Yuri, who knew Malcolm but not well, invited him to come speak. She did not expect him to show up. Malcolm, who three months earlier left the Nation of Islam, was on his own journey. We remember him going everywhere flanked by NOI members. But that day, Malcolm knocked on Yuri’s door alone. When he walked in, he sucked the air out of the room. He held court and connected identities and experiences. He said: “You have been scarred by the atom bomb. You just saw that we have also been scarred. The bomb that hit us was racism.” He came out against the yet-to-be escalated Vietnam War: “The struggle of Vietnam is the struggle of the whole Third World: the struggle against colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism.” After that, Yuri and Malcolm became closer, and they challenged each other: on integration vs. Black separatism, on religion, on internationalism. He supported the Hibakusha, she was the first non-black member of the Republic of New Afrika, Malcolm’s vision for the South. When Malcolm traveled the world later that year, she was one of two people he wrote to. When Malcolm was killed a year later, she was there. As Malcolm laid dying, it was Yuri who held him. Decades later, after Yuri successfully led the campaign for reparations for Japanese incarceration survivors, reporters asked her what she thought was next. She didn’t miss a beat: reparations for Black America, of course. I tell this story because America likes to tell its stories in black and white. Folks who are neither are often written out. Yuri was left out of Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (Angela Bassett, who plays Malcolm’s wife, holds him in the movie)… [To continue reading, go to the link in bio]

A post shared by Frank Chi (@frankchi) on May 18, 2018 at 9:54am PDT

learned about this via aminatou sow’s instagram story. embarrassed to say i’d never heard of yuri kochiyama and though i read the autobiography of malcolm x, it’s all pretty foggy (but what isn’t these days).

how good is this

This one is not in the shop but I thought I would post some road finds. Colpa Books and Video is open from 12-6 today. Published by Harry Abrams. Designed by Tina Snyder. Printed in Japan. #newart

A post shared by Colpa Press (@colpapress) on May 24, 2018 at 10:41am PDT

this guy!

brooks headley / photographer unknown (to me). via the creative independent.

completely dug this interview with — and sensibility of — chef, restaurateur, and punk rock drummer brooks headley (of superiority burger, which is famous for its veggie burger) (in the interview, he calls veggie burgers “kind of dumb”) (!!!) (also he plays music with mick barr, who is awesome, who played for ballroom):

That led to opening up Superiority Burger, which also has to do a lot with the complete bummed-outedness of working in a fancy restaurant for so long, where you are only cooking for really wealthy people. That had always been an issue for me the whole time I’d done it.

We really wanted to show that this is this place where anybody can eat. You can come and spend $6.53 and get a burger, or you can spend 50 bucks and get a whole big plate of food that would be enough for several people. There’s absolutely no elitism of any kind involved with this. I’m working 90 hours a week to make sure that we have the coolest, most delicious food that we can sell for as cheaply as we possibly can.

i guess this is where my frustration began, too — seeing the lack of access for people. wanting to be part of something that was fundamentally open to everyone.