Lured by the promise of sampling a piece of a cake prepared by “The Leonardo Da Vinci of cakes” - whose average cake sells for over $100,000 - my wife convinced me to attend the taping of a TV cooking show at Roger Bintliff’s “Chef’s Kitchen Studio” in Edgecomb on June 18. In another life, he was a chef in the Monterrey-Carmel area of California, two towns at the northern end of what may be the most scenic roadway in the US. He offered us some coffee with donuts, bagels, and bear-paw sized muffins, then took us upstairs and got us seated at one of the ten tables set up just behind the cameras with a close-up view of the kitchen set and the bakers. He graduated from the New England Culinary School in Vermont, and fell in love with pastry during his stints at some of the best eateries in New England, where, fortunately for us, he set a goal to become one of the premiere pastry chefs in New England.
In thinking about the people I respect the most, to the one they possess the uncanny ability to take the most complicated of issues and simplify them. Consider all the presentations/meetings you’ve attended in the last few weeks; was it the people who able to articulate their positions in a simple and straight forward fashion, or the individuals that made things complex and tedious that got traction with their ideas? It is one thing to toss around the latest buzz-words or to have the most complex flow chart, but it is quite another thing to actually possess such a deep and thorough understanding of your topic that you can make even the most complex issues easy to understand. Those of you that know me have come to understand that I prefer to cut to the chase and get to the root of an issue as quickly as possible…this requires the ability to simplify not complicate matters. If you are already in the commercial real estate business, or looking to break in, imagine giving your clients the opportunity to give up the tenants, the toilets and the trash but not the profits.
In 2004, I was part of the editorial team of the regional office of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization to come up with a book with the same idea but related to forestry. They have not confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others do them, but always a little better. Noah was considered a deluded engineer for he designed and built the ark in the middle of a desert. Coming into a town on a donkey, having to fish to pay your taxes, and forgetting to bring the wine do not seem like ingredients for success. Crying like a rejected lover, passing out invitation to a feast that largely go unanswered, having to stand on front porches and knocking hardly sound like a job description for a king.
The 400 works that make up the Yury Zlotnikov restropective at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum reflect the long and creative life of the Moscow painter. Moving between the topics and canvasses, it becomes apparent that the painter’s color scheme has not changed with time and with age, even if the themes have moved on substantially from the 1950s into the 1990s and the new century, and as he moved from representational art to abstraction. During the press conference that preceded the exhibition’s opening event last week, Zlotnikov said that has he always tried to remain upbeat and express positive feelings in his work in spite of the harsh realities of Soviet and Russian life. He began to visit laboratories and medical institutes and to study the rhythms of the internal organs and the heart. The city inspires the artist and he returns to city scenes, to the crowds filling Moscow streets, to the cars and the stores, time and again in his work.
