How can art and design bring the world together in enhanced ways in the future?

What do you think?

Thomas is baking madeleines tonight, and the whole apartment smells of buttery goodness. He’s using a very promising recipe after trying three or four that were just okay. I wonder if I can somehow incorporate madeleines into my answer to John Maeda’s question, because they have definitely enhanced my life a hundredfold.

Cover of Glass magazine. February 2010.

I haven’t always been the biggest fan of pizza. Well, sure, I ate a lot of it as a kid and teenager, and loved pizza day. But it was the phoned-in, chain pizza that I grew up on,  or the 99 cent pizza place near campus. Delicious in the way that any cheese melted onto anything bread-like is delicious, but nothing mind-blowing.

That is, until I moved to Victoria. I know, I know. It’s unlikely that a quiet government town on the south-west corner of Canada that is famous for being British-lite and a place for cruise ships to dock would wake up my pizza sensibilities. But wake it did. With bells and air horns and cymbals.

Prima Strada Pizzeria makes thin, chewy, fresh, addiction-inducing pizzas in a beautiful brick oven. Their pizza makes me silent and weak in the knees. Every time I go there, I want to order four different kinds. At least. Their restaurant made me understand what all that pizza fuss was about.

So it was only a matter of time, and a bread-making course later, that I thought I’d try my hand at making pizza. Well, rather, I’d try my hand at finding lots of pizza recipes and Thomas would make it. We cobbled together bits and pieces of different recipes, methods and instructions, and away we went.

Homemade Naples-Style Pizza

bread flour: 4-1/2 cups
sea salt: 1-2/4 tsp
instant yeast: 1 tsp
water: 1-3/4 cups, ice cold

Make ahead: Mix all of the ingredients until incorporated. Knead for 6 to 8 minutes to bring the ingredients together even more. Rest 10 minutes.

Knead a couple more minutes to strengthen the gluten. The finished dough should be springy, elasticy, and slightly sticky. It shouldn’t  stick to the sides of the bowl, but it may stick to the bottom. Divide the dough into 3 or 6 pieces, depending on what size pizzas you want to make. Gently shape each into a loose ball. Wrap in saran wrap and store in the refrigerator for 1 to 3 days.

On the day of cooking: Take the dough out of the refrigerator and let sit at room temperature for two hours before baking. Preheat your oven for at least one hour before baking. Set it to the highest temperature it will reasonably go (ours was about 500 F), with the pizza stone set on the second to highest rack.

Roll out and shape your dough. We tried the “twirl the dough on your knuckles” method , and found it only lead to sorrow, hopelessness and much cussing. We followed this fellow’s instructions to much better success. I’ll try to put it into words, but the video really explains it best. Spread a generous amount of flour on your work surface. Coat both sides of the dough and your hands in flour. Sprinkle a bit more flour on your work surface for good measure. Gently push the dough outward into a circular shape with the pads of your fingers. Turning the dough with one hand, gently flatten the dough with the ball your other hand. Now the real shaping happens. Place both of your hands on the dough, with your index fingers and thumbs forming a bit of a diamond shape. Your index finger should be at the edge of the dough. Use one hand to anchor the dough. With your other hand, gently pull the dough to the thinness you want. Rotate the dough a couple inches and repeat (Anchor, pull, turn. Anchor, pull, turn). Does this make sense? Just watch the video.

When the dough is stretched out, lay it on a piece of parchment and add your toppings: some fresh mozzarella and a simple uncooked sauce of crushed canned plum tomatoes, some minced garlic, salt and pepper, was just lovely. Slide the pizza with the parchment onto the hot pizza stone and cook until your toppings are bubbling and the crust is golden brown. Our pizzas took from 6 minutes to 10. Pull it out of the oven and top with some fresh basil. Eat immediately.

When I was a pre-teen and fancied myself a bit of a writer, I spent a summer break or two holed up in my room writing terrible fiction. At the time, Blur’s Parklife was all I could listen to on my old yellow Panasonic Shockwave with those cheap foamy headphones (horribly ugly but very comfortable). The whole album, just over and over and over.

I’m not entirely sure what is clicking between my mind and my ears when Andrew Bird is playing, but it works. Twyla Tharp talks about rituals in The Creative Habit. Each morning, Ms. Tharp wakes up at 5:30 AM, dresses, and takes a cab to the gym for a two-hour workout.

First steps are hard; it’s no one’s idea of fun to wake up in the dark every day and haul one’s tired body to the gym. Like everyone, I have day’s when I wake up, stare at the ceiling, and ask myself, Gee, do I feel like working out today? But the quasi-religious power I attach to this ritual keeps me from rolling over and going back to sleep.

It’s vital to establish some rituals – automatic but decisive patterns of behaviour -  at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way….Turning something into a ritual eliminates the question, Why am I doing this?

Andrew Bird on La Blogotheque:

Frank from an interview with Scout Books:

Execution is important because you don’t learn otherwise. We learn best through experience and by doing, and doing creates artifacts. If you make something (even just a rough something), now you have something to talk about, something to critique, something to analyze and something to change. More importantly, you get a sense of accomplishment. You were productive and you get to see what you did that day. I think there’s a special satisfaction to that, but unfortunately the fear we have of judgement is stronger than our memory of the pride of doing something.