public water fountains in Germany

Stuttgart

Heidelberg

Munich

on the banks of the mighty daugava

It turns out I’ve visited Riga more than I’ve visited any other city, except the places I've lived.

2010 and 2012 were incredibly depressing visits. Streets completely empty, nothing except chains open anywhere, empty storefronts all over. It felt like we were the only people there between the ages of 16 and 50, everyone else having fled.

2014 was still pretty rotten. Different names on the bank buildings. Streets still pretty empty, and no one young out and about. We found a couple of new businesses, a brewery and a bakery, and wondered who the hell was starting businesses in the middle of a years long depression.

This year I found myself cheering for the place. You walk by a lot of crumbling buildings, but there’s construction happening again. Nearly everywhere we went, we’d hear Latvian, English, and German being spoken. Everyone we saw last time we were here is still here, and busier, and a bunch of new things have opened. The banker-hipster complex has taken root, and however ambivalent I feel about that, it’s a damn sight better than the alternative.

How do you make this city work? This place with no natural resources, shit climate, unremarkable location, and all of Europe to compete with for talent. It felt like a lot of the new endeavors were people saying "we know we're a backwater, and we don't fucking care" - we're just going to make something we feel like making. It doesn't matter if the visions have their roots elsewhere, the desire that gave these places birth is no less authentic, and no less real to us. 

space, privacy, sound, introversion, monotasking

Even in the friendliest of situations, offices are charged, politicized spaces where you feel like everyone is watching you, and the ambient noise level is never high enough that you feel like the person one desk over can't hear you, even if they were interested.

In a well-designed bar, you don't feel like anyone is watching you unless you are trying to attract attention, and the noise level is high enough that you feel like only the person you're talking to can hear you, because it's noisy enough that you can't listen without really focusing.

Library reading rooms also tend to be panoptic, but there's an expectation of visual privacy because it's a population of strangers, and because there's oftentimes just more space between people, so that you have to walk to see what the next person is doing (if you were so uncivil as to pry). There's aural privacy precisely because there is no expectation of aural privacy.

Most people want control over when they monotask and when they open themselves to random encounters, outside influences, and surveillance. The classic cubicle layout achieves this, but has a lot of cultural baggage attached to it, and is more space intensive than the open-plan row of desks, since the only ways of physically generating aural privacy being walls, distance, and interference. I sort of like the idea of rehabilitating the cubicle office.

But as we know from libraries and bars, we can also create an expectation of aural privacy through strong cultural norms. Designated quiet spaces with minimal visual barriers. Common spaces designated as "free conversation zones" in which any occupant is assumed to be open to starting a conversation. Interruptible / non-interruptible signs. Maybe this is less about actual privacy, and more about the expectation that no one is going to interrupt you, whether directly or accidentally; by starting a conversation next to you.

today's loaf

800g, 20% pre-ferment, 75% hydration, 10% rye. Dutch oven with parchment liner (which stuck to the loaf).

Really blogging about bread should involve a record of temperature, ambient humidity, and proofing schedules. Maybe when I have a hygrometer in the house.

the pop up future

We had a popup going at Journeyman this weekend, run by my friend Mike Betts. He's a personal chef, and his crew consisted of zero other restaurant professionals, one equities analyst, one engineer, and a young man who runs an urban farm. Mike makes part of a living off pop ups, but mostly from cooking for families that choose not to. 

This led D to wonder aloud, between bites of Mike's sliders, if the future of restaurants looked like that. Forget the initial investment and overhead, forget trying to pay cooks a living wage, forget the fuckwittage of tipped service. Instead, get a bunch of passionate, interested hobbyists together and make some food. Sell tickets. Do it once a month. Multiply by everyone who's ever thought about chucking their day job and going to culinary school. 

It's easy to see this as exploitative, but considering the existing alternative, it's difficult to argue that it's conclusively worse. 

I'm trying to think of industries with a similar structure. 

You'd have to consider fast food places and delis of convenience a whole other industry (to which gas stations might be the closest comparison), which is fine. 

Some obvious parallels with music and theatre and sport - garage bands, community theatre, the Sunday league. What's missing there is the way small acts get big, that crowd of interested observers / talent spotters. And all of the other three rely also on a critical mass of people and acts that do it full time, with an inexhaustible source of new labor and talent for the industry. 

And maybe the point here is that there is a gap in the world of food, that middle ground of hobbyists who are willing to get up on a stage, figuratively, and play in public. You can rattle off all the reasons this is the case, of course, but I still think there's a there there. 

ten years, apparently

Bouchard La Parcelle 2006. A damn fine white wine made of Pinot Noir. Perhaps a little fizzier than it should have been. Light but complex, complexity derived not purely from minerality, fruit, or acid, but a lovely, shapeshifting blend of the three. Tai chi wine, reacting to whatever we were eating, filling in gaps and showing different facets of itself.

i always wanted to drive one of those things

Looks like they've gotten more advanced since I was a kid.

Articulation! Steam nozzles! You can just see how this thing can split in two when you need it most, with someone hopping onto the rear section to pilot it independently.

I feel quite fortunate to be old enough that today's industrial designers clearly grew up with the same giant robot anime I used to watch.