Chicago's Bean

I haven't blogged at all in October. That's pathetic. My excuse is that I've been preoccupied with my search for a new job: travelling, interviewing, and so on. Just to get something up here before October ends, I'm gonna post this photo of Anish Kapoor's very cool, newish sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park. The sculpture is apparently titled Cloud Gate, but I've only ever heard people refer to it as "the bean." It does incredible things to distort visitors' sense of space and makes for one of the popular photo ops in the city. I've got more to say about the park and about Chicago.... I'll try to get to that before I move away from here.

Kitchen as Gender-re-assigned Space?

Maybe I should just make this a blog ABOUT Mark Morford's columns. His most recent is about his salad spinner and his observation (which is definitely borne out by my experience) that most of the folks he knows who like to cook are men. And most of his women friends don't cook. Anyway, that got me wondering...if the fact that more men seem to be into cooking these days might have something to do with the very clear trend in the construction of domestic and commercial kitchens to conceive of those as social, performance spaces. The kitchen is no longer cut off from the dining room or hidden from view. Food preparation is no longer (women's) work to be taken care of backstage. The process is performance; and the performers are masters at work, connoisseurs, gastronomes (which makes them sound fat), epicures (which makes them sound effete), foodies.... And at least as often as not, they are men. He's not "the cook," call him "Chef." (BTW, I'm addicted to the food network.) And, is it just me, or does Martha Stewart always look incredibly uncomfortable in the kitchen? Like, just before the camera started rolling, somebody (a guy, no doubt) showed her exactly where to stand and how to turn on the food processor and how big a spoon to use to scoop the cookie dough. Not like Emeril. There's a man who's in command of his kitchen and who's not afraid to get dirty in it. Shine a spotlight anywhere (even in the kitchen) and men will grab it.