What I’ve Been Watching and Reading
As 2012 draws to a close, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a handful of the articles, books, shows, conversations and documentaries that informed, inspired and entertained me throughout the year. I hope that a few are also informative, inspiring and entertaining for you. Elon Musk in Coversation 2012 was a standout year [...]
New York Fashion Week Grows Up
There has been a whole lot of sexy going on in New York this past week. That’s normal, for this time of year. Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, which began last Thursday, wraps up today. And while the après Labor Day fashion buzz is nothing unusual, what has struck me this go round is that the transition people [...]
Christo in Colorado
For five decades artist Christo has been inspiring and infuriating, uniting and dividing communities large and small, urban and rural, around the globe. Last Friday, nineteen years after he and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude (who passed away in late 2009), conceived of their proposed Colorado project Over the River, it came one step closer to fruition. The [...]
A Neophyte’s Guide to the Singularity
I have capitulated. I have stopped avoiding the Singularity. For the past couple of years–at least–I have been catching threads of chatter about the concept of the Singularity–loosely, the point in time when, through Artificial Intelligence, genetic engineering or other technological manipulation, a superhuman intellect is born. I have heard just enough to be weirded out. So I’ve [...]
Taking it to the Streets
Today the Guggenheim Museum kicks off a six year commitment to catalyzing conversations on 21st century urban environments: BMW Guggenheim Lab. Over the course of the Lab’s life, three commissioned structures will travel to nine cities around the globe. Teams of programmatic curators in each will draw together artists, scientists, economists, architects, political leaders, environmentalists, [...]
Monday’s Miscellany
Another mashup of quick items. This week, focus New York–on swimming, China in the city, and cowboy boots. Swimming +Pool sounds like a far-fetched idea that would take flight and die over beers on a hot summer night: let’s build a floating pool in New York’s East River, and let’s design a filtration system so [...]
Monday’s Miscellany
Fabulous Find Fab.com is a daily deal site à la Gilt, targeting design aficionados. Launched less than two weeks ago, it truly is fab. Beautifully executed–naturally–it features a great mix of small items and serious investment pieces by household name and emerging designers, as well as small, regional artisans. Upcoming sales include mod furniture from [...]
Considering Alexander McQueen
Yesterday I went to the Met to see the Alexander McQueen retrospective Savage Beauty. I thought I might beat the crowds by going first thing on a Tuesday morning. No such luck. One of the guards on duty told me that it’s never not packed, every day from open to close. The exhibit has broken [...]
Monday’s Miscellany
Over the past several weeks a number of items have caught my eye, all worthy of mention, but not necessarily material for an entire article, so I’ve pulled them together here–Monday’s miscellany.
Patron of the New.
Patron of the New. is über sexy. A friend tipped me to the just-opened TriBeCa store last week, so I stopped in last weekend, on my way home from my ritual Saturday morning spinning class. Oh. My. God. Located on Franklin Street in a stunning, prototypical TriBeCa space–soaring ceilings, concrete floors, columns down the middle, [...]
To Market, To Market
I generally do a decent job of keeping up with what’s going on in New York. But this is a big city–so every once in a while something does manage to get by me. And occasionally it’s something that’s right under my nose, in my own back yard. Early last week I learned for the [...]
Green Energy
One of the things that grounds me is running. I’ve run off and on since I was in college, but it’s only in the last few years that I’ve gotten serious about setting goals, training, running longer distances. Half marathons are my favorite. There’s a significant amount of tweaking you can do for your running [...]
Master Craftsman
I have a very funny, charming dog, a five year old, white French Bulldog. He catalyzes lots of conversations everywhere I take him in New York. And, this being New York, on occasion those conversations take place with celebrities. My personal rule of thumb for these encounters is to roll with the moment, resist temptation [...]
Champion Trailblazers
I watch very little televison. To the extent that I do, I find I’m generally drawn to shows on Bravo, Sundance and PBS. I don’t think I’ve ever spent time watching anything on USA Network, home to shows I’d never even heard of–White Collar, Psych and Fairly Legal, for example–before recently learning about the network’s [...]
Unorthodox Performances
Earlier this week I had the fortune of having a conversation with Paul Haas. Paul is the Founder and Artistic Director of musical ensemble Sympho. Sympho is grounded in a very specific vision for what classical music can be in the 21st Century: collaborative, engaging and mobile. Others innovating in the world of classical music [...]
Promote Peace
If you are a film, television or documentary producer with projects in far flung corners of the globe and you don’t yet know about the UN’s Creative Community Outreach Initiative (CCOI), you should. This tiny but effective four person team provides creatives with access to UN facilities, film and photo archives, experts and even field [...]
Exacting Detail
I absolutely love the windows of E.R. Butler & Co.. Really, to call these windows is to do them a disservice. Located on the north side of Prince Street between Lafayette and Mulberry, they are four vitrines, tall, deep, grand, used over the last three years to great effect to showcase the work of high-end, [...]
Love Life
Ayse Birsel is a designer, a Turkish designer. In tandem with her Senegalese husband, Bibi Seck, she runs award winning studio Birsel + Seck. They’ve created products for Hermann Miller, Target, Hasbro and Johnson & Johnson and were among the designers featured in Patricia Moroso’s colorful and celebrated M’Afrique salon at the 2009 Milan furniture fair. In May last year they participated in Headspace, a symposium on scent sponsored by SEED Magazine, Parsons and MoMA.
In Play
On Sunday the Green Bay Packers face off against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas in Super Bowl XLV. Probably unsurprisingly, I’m not a die-hard football fan. But every year, around mid-January, I start paying attention. Inevitably, I have no idea which teams have made it to the playoffs, but I get sucked [...]
Irrational Exuberance
Earlier this month the window display at Sicis on Broome Street in Soho caught my eye, as it often does. Only this time it was, as I wrote when I posted a picture of it on Twitter, ridonculous–beyond. It was a bathtub–in the form of a gold, mosaic, high-heel platform pump. I loved it for [...]
Fashion Democracy
This past Saturday the first of two annual transatlantic fashion marathons kicked off with men’s fashion week in Milan. Every year those intimately familiar with the fashion calendar (the way others are intimately familiar with professional sports seasons), eagerly anticipate the mid-January to mid-March romps down the runways of Milan, New York, London, and Paris, followed [...]
Fierce Smarts
Fierce smarts turn me on. They crackle. In October I caught wind of a marketing campaign fired by fierce smarts: the promotional effort for Jay-Z’s forthcoming book, Decoded. An interactive scavenger hunt, pages from the book appeared imprinted on billboards, Gucci jackets, parked cars, pool bottoms and roof tops in New York and London, Miami, [...]
