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The culinary world seems to swirl around Anthony Bourdain these days. A renowned chef and writer, Boudain is on my television all the time, with his own show, “No Reservations,” on the Travel Channel, and his guest judge appearances on Bravo’s Top Chef.

But Bourdain’s also all over the blogosphere, as both of the above programs have blogs on their associated web sites. He also makes appearances on author Michael Ruhlman’s blog. Bourdain’s a scathingly good writer, and a blog seems like the perfect medium for his up-front, in-your-face style. In fact, all of the Bourdain-related sites are seeing a strong fan base develop, with terrific commentary from hundreds of participants on these spaces.

Bravo, for example, has created blogs for all the judges, but, if comments are any measure of fan interest, Bourdain seems to be the biggest draw. (Although Colicchio’s no slouch, either.) But certainly it’s Bourdain’s writing that makes his Bravo blog worth reading:

What the hell is with Casey’s knife skills!? During the Quickfire, I was absolutely gobsmacked watching her methodically sawing away at those onions like Ina Garten on Thorazine. No. Let me correct myself. Ina Garten on Thorazine would be faster. MUCH faster.

You know, Ina Garten…Food TV? Oh, forget it. Trust me, it’s funny.

On the No Reservations site, there’s even more going on. The network is using both a discussion board and a wiki to create a sense of community through user participation and interaction. The latter, it seems, is not all that popular — the “Stories” section, for example, only has one reader story posted. So, it’s a fledgling wiki, but a wiki…

No matter. All this food writing and TV watching is hard to keep up with, but it’s fun. It’s providing an outlet for talented chefs to move beyond the kitchen, and it’s providing an outlet for foodies to interact with some celeb chefs, and each other. The commentary on these sites is often as well-written and entertaining as from the “pros.”

If you’re not acquainted with Bourdain, you should be. I suspect he’ll be hanging around our televisions, and our blogs, for a long time.

Most of the coverage around the recent Wikiscanner news is, inexplicably, something like, “OMIGOD people are changing things in Wikipedia!!!”

This Times article, though, seems to get it right, by highlighting, or at least simply mentioning, the most important aspect of the story:

Most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long.

This whole Wikipedia dust-up is really about how wikis actually work: people change things, other people notice it’s wrong, and those people make corrections.

The fact that people from Wal-Mart might be saying nice things about Wal-Mart, or people from Exxon might be trying to make Exxon look good, might be titillating, I guess, but hardly the real news here.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

- Susan Sontag, On Photography

Recently, I was packing up, getting ready for a move to a new apartment. Going through boxes of old stuff, I found a few photos from when I was young. Sixth grade talent show, things like that. Besides the flash of memory that ensued, the recollection of time and place, the instant taken-back-ness of seeing myself as myself, less 30 or so years, I was struck by just how far our digital lives have taken us from yesterday’s analog world.

I haven’t even held a photograph for some time. Everything is on my computer, and then at least some of it ends up on Flickr. It’s become a lost ritual: going to the development lab, getting the pictures days later, flipping through them one by one.

But what’s more striking is how an *old* photo has, in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the word, “aura.” For Benjamin, aura was, in part, rooted in the uniqueness, physicality, and tactility of a media object. With the advent of photography, art was now aura-less, as the reproducibility of the medium cast aside the historical nature of that form for the “nearness” of it, enabling “the original to meet the beholder halfway.”

In this sense, the photos I found had aura. They are completely unique; no negatives exist to reproduce the images. They are, in Sontag’s words, “experience captured.” A slice of life that’s passed, not only in the temporal sense, but, had I never found the photos, perhaps from memory, as well.

And that’s something that is lost in the Age of Digital Reproducibility. There’s no finding of photos in a box; the serendipitous nature of photography is gone, perhaps forever. I’ll never “stumble across” a picture on my hard drive — it’s all labelled, and categorized.

I don’t miss those pain in the ass trips to the photomat, but I wonder if, many years from now, I’ll regret giving up the annoyances of film for the convenience of digital…?

The city of Sao Paulo has decided to fight the corporate takeover of their public spaces by calling a halt to outdoor advertising:

…billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses have been eliminated at breakneck speed. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal, and strict new regulations have drastically reduced the allowable size of storefront signage. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape.

…Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful of billboards standing, the city, now stripped of its 15,000 billboards, resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. While it’s unclear whether this cleanup can be replicated in other cities around the world, it has so far been a success in São Paulo: surveys indicate that the measure is extremely popular with the city’s residents, with more than 70 percent approval.

Take that, Capitalism.