Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works.

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art.

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.”

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.

Cityrag reports that the Shake Shack, Danny Meyer’s hot dog and burger kiosk in Madison Square Park, is set to reopen on April 1 after shutting down for the winter. I’ll probably be going there for lunch the first week of April to get myself a couple of the Shack’s remarkable Chicago-style hot dogs and an order of fries.

[photo from Curbed.]

According to Cityrag:

called Danny Meyer’s management company (everyone we spoke to was very helpful) and were directed to a woman in operations. she told us that… the Shake Shack will reopen on Friday, April 1st! for the first month they will only be open for lunch (11-4). then around May 1st they will extend to full hours (which they anticipate being 11-10.) she also told us there won’t be any menu changes right now, just the same great stuff….

The Shake Shack not only has great food, it’s beautiful to look at, too. I’ve become sort of obsessed with Neutraface, the elegant typeface used for the Shake Shack’s metal signage, its menu [PDF], and elsewhere in and around the Shack. Neutraface is retro, it’s modern, it’s gorgeous. It’s also in danger of becoming overexposed: I see it everywhere these days. It was used for onscreen graphics throughout Inside Deep Throat, for example, and it’s also found in House and Garden and lots of other magazines. I love the way the middle line sits below center in the capital E, the capital H, and other letters. Neutraface costs $249 from the designer, House Industries, which is too much for a hobbyist like me to spend on a single typeface. If it were $50, I’d probably plunk down the money.

Following up on the previous post: The official Vegemite site contains lots of weird and interesting stuff, including a gallery of Vegemite print ads dating back to the 1920s and photos of historical Vegemite memorabilia.

The history page gives some background about this weird food:

> Vegemite dates back to 1922 when the Fred Walker Company, which became Kraft Walker Foods in 1926 and Kraft Foods Limited in 1950, hired a young chemist to develop a spread from one of the richest known natural sources of the vitamin B group - Brewers Yeast.

> Following months of laboratory tests, Dr. Cyril P Callister, who became the nation’s leading food technologist of the 1920s and 30s developed a tasty spreadable paste. It came in a two ounce (57g) amber glass jar capped with a Phoenix seal with the label "Pure Vegetable Extract."

> In an imaginative approach, Walker turned to the Australian public to officially name his spread. He conducted a national trade-name competition offering an attractive 50 pound prize pool for the finalists. How the 50 pounds was distributed or who was the winning contestant has unfortunately been lost in history, but it was Walker's daughter who chose the winning name out of the hundreds of entries.

> That winning name was Vegemite and in 1923 Vegemite first graced grocers' shelves. It was described as "Delicious on sandwiches and toast, and improves the flavour of soups, stews and gravies." However, it took 14 long years of perseverance from Walker before Vegemite finally gained acceptance and recognition with the Australian people.

Improv Everywhere is a New York-based performance art group that stages elaborate public pranks. This weekend the group completed its latest mission: deploying a tuxedoed bathroom attendant to the men’s room in the Times Square McDonald’s.

Here is a full report, complete with some video. It was a solid mission. But I doubt Improv Everywhere will ever top its most inspired mission to date: Best Gig Ever, whereby the group and dozens of its associates showed up at a Mercury Lounge gig by a little-known Vermont band and pretended to be fanatical fans—not to mock the musicians, but to warp the space-time continuum. Genius.

Get that designer a curly quote! The unfortunate sign at left hangs above a restaurant on Broadway around 102nd Street, a few blocks from my apartment. The restaurant is called Ana’s, but the long, noncurly apostrophe looks a lot like a lower-case L—which spells the plural of a word you tend to see more often in porn film titles than above restaurants.