Pledge

Hardwood

Portmanteau

Stall

Seminal

The Latent Image: No. 800

The Latent Image

By MAX J. MARSHALL

Post No. 800

6 July 2012

Why a blog? There are already so many.

In a field of roses, is one not the most perfect and beautiful?  Hah!  But seriously, anyone who is interested in starting a blog should do so!  Just because there are many blogs that exist, doesn’t take away from the fact that each person has an equal chance to provide interesting, unique, and stimulating content!

How has The Latent Image changed in concept, content and purpose over the years.

At first, I honestly didn’t know what I wanted the blog to be.  I did some posts on food, movies, and even paintings (gasp).  Since then, the majority of the posts have been 5 images from one photographer.  I used to post my own photographs as well as in progress projects, but I’ve since stopped doing this and focused completely on featuring other photographer’s work.

Which blogs do you follow? How do you decide what to read each day within the vast expanse of the Internet.

There are many blogs that I follow…!  I have a bookmarks folder which contains around thirty links.  I check all of these daily.  Some of my favourites are “Banana Leaves” by Christopher Schreck, “Too Much Fast Food” by Bobby Scheidemann, “Conscientious” by Jorg Colberg, “I like this blog” by Paul Paper, and of course “The Last Bite.”

I look for a lot of qualities in a blog, but most of all I value dependability and consistency. 

The direction of art. Where is it going. What does it need. What does it lack?

It’s very tough for me to definitely say the direction of art because I truly believe that art trends are fluid and ever changing.  However, I can say that I love the current push away from establishments and institutions.  More and more artists are starting collectives, self-publishing, and forming alliances.  Some of the most (what I consider to be) successful artists today are Aurelien Arbet and Jeremie Egry who do EVERYTHING.  They run a publishing company, they make photographs, they curate exhibitions, they run a blog, they make music videos, they even produced a film with Alec Soth recently.  And mind you, it’s all gold!  I love everything they do.  It’s this kind of auteur mentality that gets me excited to be part of the 21st century and its artist era.

How do you go about finding the artists that you highlight? What parameters merit a selection and subsequent post.

I source other blogs, tumblr, the news, conversations with friends, artist rosters, friend’s links, photography books, magazines, museum catalogs, auction catalogs, book stores, the list goes on!  There is no limit to where good photographers can be found.  And really, the only requirement is for me to find the photographs to be compelling, interesting, unique, or stimulating.  No BFA or MFA required.

Your own work. What's going on lately? How has your approach to photography and art changed.

Since just moving to New York with Andrea Nguyen, my girlfriend (and also collaborateur on our blog “Tillsammans, Man" !!!), I have been having a hard time keeping with my studio practice.  Andrea and I do plan to keep working on photographic series together, but finding a balance between work, NY, our cat Ducky and shooting photographs has been tough!

American artists versus the world. Who and where do you find yourself focusing upon. What trends do you see across the board?

Oh man, what an interesting question!  I’m having a hard time deciphering between the two…I don’t really think there is a categorical difference?  I think “the world” makes photographs the same way American artist’s do.  But the major difference is the vernacular that surrounds them.  Imagine if Robert Frank had gone to Canada to make his series “The Canadians”; Or a world where Ansel Adams took pictures of the Swiss Alps and not Yosemite National Park.  What would photography be like today!

What are you doing to celebrate? What's next for MJM, The Latent Image, and beyond?

The way I’m celebrating the 800th post is by reaching out and asking fans of The Latent Image to share the blog with their friends!  And most of all, if you are interested…I urge you to submit your photographs to me!  I very much appreciate the viewership that I have gotten over the years, and I am very thankful to be able to speak with you today!

JNSQ

America: No. 236

NYT 2-Stars: Hill Country Barbecue Market

An Homage to Texas, by the Pound

By PETE WELLS

The New York Times

3 July 2012

IN the line of duty, I’ve eaten food served on a curl of bark, food served on a slate shingle, food served on the end of a wire, food served in an antique silver caviar caddy and food served in a box of rocks.

But for sheer power to send ripples of anticipation through the pit of my belly, none of those vehicles beat the greasy butcher paper at Hill Country Barbecue Market.

Whenever I eat at this restaurant on West 26th Street, I head for the meat counter and ask for a pound of moist brisket. If a pound strikes you as too much, then you haven’t had Hill Country’s moist brisket. A counter worker with a long knife tears off a sheet of brown paper and proceeds to bury it under slabs of meat. Beef ribs, too, yes, and some jalapeño-cheese sausages.

A couple of those, please.

Let’s make it three.

When I stop at last, the counter worker grabs the ends of the butcher paper and scrunches them to form a basket filled with smoked meat and serpentine wisps of steam. I carry that basket to my table and set it down in front of my friends, casual as can be. They look amazed, and if they don’t, I rethink the friendship.

At the table, the paper is flattened into a communal plate, and I cover one patch of it with seasoned salt. Pink from cayenne and spotted with black pepper grains, the salt goes with brisket better than barbecue sauce. Paper, meat, salt: by now my stomach is in a riot and I am sure I should have ordered two pounds of brisket.

Moist brisket on greasy paper is not the only reason to eat at Hill Country, but it’s a convincing one. The term “moist brisket” is the restaurant’s euphemism for the deckle and tip of the brisket, upholstered in fat that will slowly render and baste the meat during the 13 or 14 hours it spends in the smoker. Carved just before serving, the meat is juicy throughout, but the parts that really get me going are the blackened edges that give way to a mahogany-tinted quarter-inch or so of smoky borderland between crust and interior.

The moist brisket, along with the beef and pork ribs that carry a similarly peppery, crunchy top layer, show Hill Country’s rotisserie barbecue pits at their finest. The restaurant is a state-of-the-art Manhattan homage to the preindustrial craft of Texas barbecue, particularly as it is practiced in the town of Lockhart.

The flavors Hill Country achieves in its pits are not precisely the ones I remember from meals at Lockhart’s legendary rivals, Smitty’s Market and Kreuz Market. At both places, the smoke was deeply entrenched in the meat.

Despite burning about 1,500 pounds a week of post oak shipped in from Texas, Hill Country doesn’t produce that kind of deeply smoky barbecue. It produces very slowly roasted meat with an echo of campfire around the edges. The low smoke quotient makes a spongy, beige pork chop a disappointment, and leaves the market chicken just another slightly dry rotisserie bird.

But it does no harm to the prime rib and the beef shoulder. They may not be great Texas-style barbecue, but they are still terrific slabs of roast beef, cooked medium-rare through and through and ringed with that salt-and-pepper crust. And the jalapeño-cheese links, shipped to Manhattan by Kreuz Market, are always full flavored and insistently spicy, though their juiciness varies from day to day.

When Hill Country opened, five years ago last month, it joined a wave of new restaurants that tried to coax more smoke into barbecue than had seemed possible on the tightly regulated shores of the East River. In a glowing $25 and Under column in 2007, the last time Hill Country was reviewed in The New York Times, Peter Meehan focused on the meat, especially the brisket. “No other barbecue place that has opened in New York in recent years has gotten it so right, right out of the gate,” he wrote.

Since then, Hill Country’s other virtues have become easier to notice, or harder to ignore. Year after year I am drawn back to the dessert case for another plastic cup of banana pudding, built upon a custard so thick with eggs and cream it brings Paris to mind, and not the one in Texas. And as New York has become cluttered with strenuously playful cupcakes, few make me smile as easily as the one at Hill Country that is filled with grape jelly and frosted with a fluffy turban of peanut butter.

According to hard-liners, the only permissible side dishes with barbecue are white bread and saltines. Anything else is as out of place as a yuzu macaron.

Hill Country takes a more liberal point of view, thankfully. When I can afford to surrender the stomach space, I will have some peppery corn pudding, which has roughly the same relationship to an ear of corn that an ice cream sundae has to a cow. And I am always grateful for the relief provided by crunchy, sparingly dressed coleslaw and a vinegary salad of black-eyed peas.

None of these dishes look like restaurant food; they seem like things packed for a church picnic by the best cook in town. The cook in this case, or at least the one whose recipes the kitchen follows, is the restaurant’s executive chef, Elizabeth Karmel. Named in her honor, EAK’s Bowl of Red is a ground-beef chili that could be a meal in itself, although it’s soupy enough that I wish Hill Country really did serve it in a bowl rather than in the same paper cartons used for all the sides.

In Texas, much of the atmosphere of a barbecue joint is provided by the employees and the customers. Since shipping live Texans across state lines can be complicated, Hill Country’s owner, Marc Glosserman, bought inanimate objects like battered butcher blocks, salvaged floorboards and an old Blue Bell ice cream freezer.

All this may be mistaken for the set dressing a big chain might use, but no chain would play Ray Wylie Hubbard and Reckless Kelly, or hire bartenders who mouth the lyrics as they tuck their bottle openers into the back pockets of their jeans.

Hill Country may not be the real thing. But it plays the part better than anybody else in town.

Invert