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From the NY Times:

For three nights a week, Richard Kuo and Frederik Berselius operate this tiny Brigadoon of a Scandinavian restaurant in the back of Kinfolk Studios, a Williamsburg gallery. There are just 18 chairs. Reservations as staggered as gradually as at any four-star restaurant, but there is no four-star restaurant in New York that serves a seven-course tasting menu for $45. It may represent the city’s best bargain in fine dining.

More information at www.frejnyc.com.

RSVP here.

NPR has the whole dang thing here. Bloom is out 5/15 on Sub Pop.

According to the band:

“It’s 11 tracks, because some of the tracks don’t have drums to begin with. It’s all the pop songs without drums… I think people will have a lot of fun with it because everyone keeps remixing ‘Birds of Paradise’ because there were no drums on it… I also mastered an instrumental version of the entire album. I always master multiple versions in case I want to collage or edit them later. I was really liking the way the vocal mixes sounded with no drums and I think that the drums on the album are so heavy, that it’s interesting to hear the record as this almost-empty, almost-a cappella kind of thing.”

Grab it here.

He says it’s very comfortable:

Mr. Kiernan has spent the last year lobbying to fill Regis Philbin’s seat on “Live! With Kelly,” and he has had a handful of guest host appearances on the morning show in the last two months. It is precisely this timing that helps make Mr. Kiernan’s move seem, on the face of it, rather odd.

Here he is, a local celebrity, pounding on the door of one of the most coveted jobs in broadcasting, the glitter of national-talk-show fairy dust sprinkled in his neat blond hair. And there he goes, moving from a fabulous penthouse on the Upper West Side to a house with vanilla-colored siding that is across the street from a hardware store and costs half as much as the place where he lives now.

No, the choice is not obvious. But on a walk through their new home on a rainy afternoon last week, Mr. Kiernan and his wife, Dawn, explained that at first sight, the house, its garden, the neighborhood and even the L train got under their skin.

“We’re under no illusions that it could be confused with a trophy property from the front,” Mr. Kiernan said, explaining that the location and the pristine interior were much more important to them. “We’re not trying to build a showy property. We just want a comfortable place to live with our family.”

And it will be comfortable, indeed.

The kitchen opens up into an immense back garden, all warm reddish brick and leafy trees. The couple’s daughters, Lucy, 10, and Maeve, 7, will have their own floor. And the 2,600-square-foot home was fully renovated just over a year ago by a family that planned to stay for the long haul, Mr. Kiernan said. The structural steel, the plumbing, the electrical systems — all were spruced up.

While you were busy yesterday sleeping off your Cinco de Mayo hangover, France was electing a new president. Socialist candidate François Hollande won 51.6% of the vote, beating incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, who had 48.4%.

So what should you know about Hollande? One of his biggest challenges will be dealing with European and national debt, which he plans to address by raising taxes on the rich and corporations. He also wants more teachers, judges, and houses, and supports gay marriage. The mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, is also an important French Socialist politician.

Oh, and his official campaign video is set to “Ni**as in Paris.” Quite a different direction from Sarkozy’s politics.

Hollande may take office as soon as May 14th. At least Sarkozy can always fall back on his wife’s singing acting career.