Saxophone Players are great.
One of the weird side effects of coming out of Peabody is that you get to know a fair number of classical saxophone players who are also bizarrely accomplished recording engineers. Ian Richter is just such a one. I’ve crossed his path before, but the first time I got to know him properly we were...
Watch Cucumbers & Gin
Thanks to the hard work of a lot of brilliant and talented people Cucumbers & Gin is now complete! This project has been an incredible experience, from our Kickstarter campaign, working with backers, through pre-production planning, the incredible day we shot and recorded the project, and through post-production as well, creating an interactive way for...
Cucumbers & Gin Cocktail Round-up
We’re done! We’ve created seven different custom cocktails each featuring cucumbers and gin for awesome our Kickstarter backers. It was harder and more rewarding than I expected. Both ingredients have very distinctive flavors, and coming up with seven different recipes that a) aren’t horrible and b) aren’t identical wasn’t easy. We created a lot of...
Final Cocktail: the Shoot My Brother
Shoot my brother. please! Basically, I’m morally obligated to taunt Dennis with his custom cocktail. He’s my brother – I have to. The name of the drink is one thing, but my favorite part is that he has to cut fiddly grapefruit supremes and wrestle with obnoxious plating requirements! This petty triumph, dear reader, is...
A huge thank you
To Sean for his performance, to Zach for his recording, to Alan, Mike, Kate, Gill, Dave and Ben, our fantastically talented crew, to Gramps and Maxine for welcoming us into their home with all the gear and the noise and the interruption, and to all our backers on Kickstarter for making the whole thing possible....
It’s game day.
I just posted an update on Kickstarter about how today is the day. We’re filming, we’re recording, and we’ve got well over half a ton of stuff if you count the people. Earlier in the week, the forecast said cloudy, rainy and gross. But the sun’s come out, so if our luck holds you can...
Final preparations for Cucumbers and Gin
We’re recording on Saturday. Sean and I are rehearsing every couple of days, and putting the finishing touches on his performance. If I could focus only on that, this would be easy. But we’ve got to sort out a film crew that seems to get new members every day (we’re up to five now). We’ve...
The Emilicious
Emily H is one of those brilliant people who winds up running the government (and she’s got a recipe blog!). She’s a civil servant, working for the NSF, NASA, and now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, so just remember: she’s on your side, and she’s good at it. This spring, though, every couple of weeks...
The Greg Fizz
Greg put us over the top on December 13th, and to a great extent he’s still largely a mystery to us. His Kickstarter profile lists him only as Greg D., but also shows him to be a prolific supporter of a huge range of creative projects – they’re really quite fascinating if you want to...
Wheaton’s Elixir
Sarah Wheaton is a great cook who cut her teeth as a political blogger for the NYTimes right out of college covering the election in D.C. Now she’s back at the mothership in NYC and has made reading the times into an addictive game of Spot Sarah’s Byline. Sarah’s cocktail is light and fizzy, matching...
Maxine’s Cucumber Manhattan
This cocktail is for my grandfather, Wesley Clark, and his wife, Maxine Rockoff. Not only are Gramps and Maxine generous backers of Cucumbers and Gin, they’re also welcoming the production into their home. When we shoot on April 2, we’ll be shooting in their lovely apartment with an incredible view of Brooklyn and the harbor....
Mona’s Martini
Mona Seghatoleslami is a lovely viola player and a very old friend. We took music theory together in high school and climbed trees and talked about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Now she lives in West Virginia and is a classical music public radio personality. I think once she even interviewed my old...
