Reference Page: January 2009

Pirate’s Booty
In a decade that gave us not one but three Pirates of the Caribbean, 826 Valencia’s whimsical pirate store (www.826valencia.org/store) was bound to get old. Eye patches? Message-stuffed bottles? Pirate dice? The shop, you might say, had become a Heartbreaking Work of Staggeringly Twee Crap. So 826 smartly called in Office (www.visitoffice.com/main.html), a San Francisco–based graphic-design firm that has made over big brands like Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and Target, to outfit the store with some fresh new booty. Behold: remedies for pink eye, gangrene, seasickness, and scurvy—piracy with grit! Bizarrely, the store’s rebranding coincided with a ramp-up in real-life piracy. Wayward fishermen off the coast of Somalia pillaged their way onto the front pages of newspapers everywhere, enlisting a spokesman (yes, pirates have spokesmen) to spin reporters. “Think of us like a coast guard,” Sugule Ali told the New York Times after taking part in the hijacking of a Ukrainian freighter. (Search www.nytimes.com for “Somali pirates.”) The geopolitical machers, of course, aren’t terribly amused. At press time, the United Nations was fielding pleas to punish crimes on the high seas with a special pirate court. (Google “pirate task force.”) But before it comes to that, might we suggest a sit-down over some bone soup and bottled bilge?

Delays Welcome
Airports don’t have much to recommend them these days. The ritual strip-down at the security gate is enough to deter even the most enthusiastic exhibitionist. So imagine our surprise when a foodie friend announced that he was headed to JFK hours before departure to take in JetBlue’s new restaurant-studded Terminal 5. (Go to www.metropolismag.com/pov for our take on the new building, which sits behind Eero Saarinen’s TWA masterpiece.) Though the Gensler-designed architecture hasn’t garnered much praise—New York magazine called it “a coolly stylish, smoothly generic machine for feeding and processing the populace” (search www.nymag.com for “Idlewild to Just Plain Mild”)—the dining has made giddy girls of the city’s moules-frites-minus-the-frites–loving gastronomes. JetBlue smartly hired such high priests of the kitchen as the Mario Batali protégé Mark Ladner; Michael Schulson, formerly of Chelsea’s Buddakan; and Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, longtime chefs at the Manhattan bistros Balthazar and Pastis. (See their T5 menus at www.jetblue.com/about/jfk/dining.html.) But perhaps the terminal’s greatest draw is its gargantuan cocktail list: Smokin’ Margaritas, All Nighters, Grandma Smashes, Aviation Cocktails—the list goes on and on (www.jauntsetter.com/posts/a-toast-for-terminal-5). Happy drinking!

Degentrifying Condos
In 2002 Boston launcheda program to promote affordable work spaces for artists, but the city’s Fort Point Arts Community (www.fortpointarts.org) continues to shrink. As big cities become more expensive, some smaller towns are trying to attract creative types. This explains the success of projects like the Paducah Artist Relocation Program (www.paducaharts.com), which provides economic incentives to artists wishing to settle in Paducah, Kentucky. With its population of roughly 26,000, warm climate, and historical downtown, Paducah has lured painters, writers, designers, and musicians from as far away as Hawaii and Germany. To request your own complimentary relocation packet, go to www.paducahchamber.org and click on “relocating.”

Rethinking the Interstate
This month Karrie Jacobs interviews Earl Blumenauer (blumenauer.house.gov), a Democratic congressman from Oregon’s Third District who has biked to work every day for 12 years—and saved $94,000 in the process. Although some of his constituents have questioned his sartorial judgment—one local blog ranked his bow tie number eight in its tally of Portland’s most dismal features (thingsaboutportlandthatsuck.wordpress.com)—most are fully supportive of his environmental agenda. Blumenauer is in his seventh term, and his D.C. office has never bothered to apply for a parking permit. Last year his Bicycle Commuter Act was passed into law, giving businesses tax incentives to support employees’ biking to work. Ironically, Blumenauer voted against his own bill because it was attached to the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which he opposed.

The Improbable Act
Many students at the Rens­selaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York, have mixed feelings about Grimshaw’s new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (www.empac.rpi.edu). Nicknames for the building include “beached whale” and “1970s television”; instead of celebrating the center’s opening performances, the student news­paper wrote an outraged editorial about underage drinking at the gala. (Go to www.poly.rpi.edu and search for “EMPAC” and “opening.”) Nevertheless, there is plenty of enthusiasm for the diversity EMPAC hopes to bring to this isolated cam­pus. Bucking the stereotype of engineers as insular nerds, the student body at RPI longs to be “well-rounded,” the president of the student union recently told the Albany Times Union (www.timesunion.com; search for Robert Odell).

Smart Environments: Arabian Library
Sarah Palin notwithstanding, the sexy-librarian aesthetic reached its zenith in the 1970s and ’80s with novels like Sex Behind the Stacks and What a Librarian!, to name a couple of the tamer titles. (For more, explore the writer Holly Black’s occasionally academic sexy-librarian page: www.scils.rutgers.edu/~hblack/sexylibrarians.htm.) It took the libraries themselves a lot longer to learn the art of seduction. Gone are the windowless reading rooms and dusty book stacks. Today’s libraries are all wild angles, mood lighting, and flirty landscaping. The Phoenix-based architecture firm Richärd + Bauer has led the way, with some two dozen libraries to its name. We’re particularly keen on the Desert Broom outpost (www.richard-bauer.com/desertbroom.htm), where splashy colors and playful room dividers conjure images (for us, at least) of gorgeous, bespectacled librarians lending copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Smart Environments:
Sweetgreen Restaurant
Nicolas Jammet, Jonathan Neman, and Nathaniel Ru, 23-year-old recent business-school graduates, first met in an entrepreneurship class at Georgetown University. Together they hatched a plan for an eco-friendly business and sought the expertise of Core Architecture + Design (www.coredc.com) to redesign an iconic hamburger shack on M Street. The result of this collaboration is Sweetgreen (www.sweetgreen.com), a certified green restaurant (dinegreen.com) offering healthy salads, wraps, and frozen- yogurt concoctions. The three partners hired an all-student staff, which worked perfectly until the first day of classes, when every employee called in sick, leaving Nicolas to man the salad station and cash register—on the very afternoon the Washington Post stopped in for a look-see.

70 Behind the Scenery
Fifteen years after the release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, the director Henry Selick returns to theaters with a film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s creepy children’s tale Coraline (HarperCollins, 2002). Trailer clips and an in-depth, chronological account of the collaboration between author and filmmaker can be found at neilgaiman.com. Although flashy computer graphics are all the rage these days, stop-motion has a rich heritage of its own: Wallace and Gromit, Mr. Bill, and the ever popular Gumby, who made a bizarre comeback in the mid-’90s as a shill for the government. (Google “Gumby,” “spokes­character,” and “Library of Congress.”)