ajchen.com

My friends from Tanner Goods stopped by NY for the weekend to sell their wares at the annual Pop Up Flea event. I stopped by their table to snap some photos of their offerings, some of which were brand new for the season. Keep an eye on their webstore, as I am guessing they should roll out to the general public soon. We also ate soup dumplings and chinese ice cream on Saturday night, but photos of leather goods are probably more interesting to look at.

Yesterday, for the first time in almost two years, I dusted off my fretless bass and gave it some play. This should come as no surprise to some of you, but I bought this particular instrument primarily for its aesthetic value. It sounds great, yes – but looks stunning, which was (and still is) very important to me. Despite that, I haven’t given it much use in the 7+ years I’ve owned it; I tend to play my traditional fretted bass more often out of sheer laziness.

Playing fretless requires precision and a careful attention to tone. I read somewhere that a famous bassist would use a fretless every now and again simply to train his ear, and I can certainly see why. Frets cover a multitude of sloppy fingerwork; through my struggles to get reacquainted with the bass this weekend, I was reminded of how playing it requires constant concentration. The second you stop paying attention, you’re in danger of playing a note that’s slightly off-tune. And if your ear isn’t trained to hear it, you’ll continually play other notes relative to that note out of tune as well. Pretty soon your entire riff is off.

I’d do well to apply those lessons to other areas of my life.

I see this Thruxton parked by our old office on Allen & Rivington quite often. It doesn’t look like much work has been done to it, but I like the little aesthetic touches that have been made – more flat black is always ok in my book.

During our road trip last month, L and I focused on eating at mom and pop restaurants that were representative of the particular city we were visiting. One exception was Waffle House – we had seen so many on the road that we decided to give it a go.

Although it’s a chain restaurant and each interior looks exactly the same, there was still a certain midwestern charm to the place.

The coffee was average.

So were the restaurant’s namesake waffles. But the unexpected star of the show were the hash browns. L astutely observed that they are real hash browns (and not home fries, which are mistakenly called hash browns at times). There are lots of ways to order them – we chose ham and diced onions. They were fantastic.

A month ago, I posted about shooting the 3sixteen Fall 2010 lookbook with Vincent Tsang. We’ve since released the lookbook on the 3sixteen website; the image above is my favorite of the lot.