This is an incredible mosaic in the bathroom of the New Museum of Contemporary art in New York. It is also EASILY the most impressive thing in the whole museum.
New York was filled with good times, as usual, but a couple of the things that totally blew my mind (and that are link-friendly) were Jamaican beef patties at a place called Christie's in Flatbush and an offshoot of San Francisco's Blue Bottle juggernaut that recently opened in New York, Abraco [a nice NY mag review]. Yoshi insisted that we stop at Christie's even though we'd just eaten a big brunch, and we got a couple of warm, spicy patties to share on a walk through chilly Prospect Park. The first thing I noticed is that they're not really "patties" in the sense of hamburger patties. They're like hot pockets, but freshly baked, with an amazing crust and filled with super-spicy beef. Pretty much the perfect walking food.
On an unrelated note, last week's This American Life was the best I've heard in a long time. Every segment ...
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05 Mar 08 · filed under: architecture, new york, travel, urban · 
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Thanksgiving 2006 came and went, attended by friends, family and the customary dramas.
An East Coast / West Coast feud flared up in the week before the holiday. Gabriel (East) sent what some in the West perceived as "a salvo across the bow" in the form of a PowerPoint presentation (a slide of which is pictured below). It contained a financial-style analysis of Thanksgiving: how Thanksgiving East has performed over the past decade, trends, projections, and outlines for future growth.
Some saw this as evidence of a diabolical plan; I was naive and asked for clarification on specifics:
Dear Gabe, TYs (Thanksgiving years) 2003-2004 were characterized by broad guest sector diversification. What is the likelihood that a diversified strategy, with exposure to the Shanahan sector, for example, will be pursued in the future? Secondly, to what extent will "value" guests (e.g., McClorys and Preslers) continue to anchor the portfolio? Will you pursue more (potentially) volatile "growth" guests in order to boost performance in the coming years?
Gabe replied:...
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07 Dec 06 · filed under: flickr, new york, san francisco, the ancient past · (0) ·
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“People don’t know where they are anymore, “ [the writer Will Self] said, adding: “In the post-industrial age, [walking] is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”
This is from A Literary Visitor Strolls in From the Airport, a New York Times account of writer Will Self's walk from JFK to his hotel in Manhattan. Self walks 20 miles through a colorful cross-section of Queens, taking photos and chatting about his philosophy of perambulation. Cars (and TVs and computers and so on) have imposed a "windscreen-based virtuality," he says, effectively cutting us off from the landscape around us. The NYT writer name-checks psychogeography in connection with this discussion, but doesn't elaborate. Apparently, psychogeography is a common, everyday concept in which everyone is conversant. (I would guess that it's not). Also discussed: Self's seat-of-the-pants route-planning (he relied upon native New Yorker Rick Moody), and his experiences in the less-traveled parts of the borough:
Not long after negotiating the Cross Bay Parkway overpass, Mr. Self decided to go “off piste,” as he put it, borrowing the ...
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06 Dec 06 · filed under: new york, urban · (0) ·
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The NYT just rolled out a beta of something they're calling MyTimes. As a daily reader of both the print and online editions, I'm intrigued by new developments and ideas at the NYT, and I've been pleased with their recent site redesign. MyTimes, however, strikes me as somewhat misguided.
First off, the name MyTimes sounds like a portal, recalling the confused era when every company wanted to make a my-prefixed version of their site. Unfortunately, it also evokes the subsequent realization that what people really wanted was not control over layout and content, but greater system intelligence -- smarter defaults, recognition of the things they normally do, a clever way of pointing them toward related things. The portal-sounding name wouldn't even be so bad if MyTimes didn't look and act like portal. Alas, it's got all sorts of crap to add and move around and modify, allowing the reader to add RSS feeds from anywhere on the web, view movie times, weather, Flickr images, whatever. To me, the problem is that the NYT ...
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07 Sep 06 · filed under: ixd, new york, web · (0) ·
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So it seems I'm a couple of years late to this particular artist, but some recent conversation on the Book Arts list turned me on to Swoon, a NYC street artist. Her medium is the cutout -- from paper, wood, linoleum -- and she attaches these to walls all over NYC. The paper ones are the most amazing to me; they're like those snow flakes you make in grade school, but life-sized and really elaborate and of people. Check out this Flickr cluster to get a sense of the way that the paper ages on the wall, and the way that this fragility and sense of impermanence reacts with the rest of the wall.
This interview in the Morning News has some good detail about her process:
There’s something particular to the images that make me choose that material ... A lot has to do with the limitations of the material. The linoleum you can get so much more detail from. Everything that has more nuances, I use linoleum. The wood is rougher, but a good roughness. The paper is really hard to think ...
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05 Sep 06 · filed under: new york, street art, visual · (0) ·
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A few months ago, the NYT Sunday magazine ran a profile of architect Daniel Libeskind and his Tribeca loft. (Incidentally, check out that link to his website; there's some pretty hot flouting of web conventions. For example, when you mouse over a link, almost everything on the screen disappears, except a few stray words and the other links. Hmm.) Anyway, the most memorable part of the magazine article was a photo of the interior of his sauna. In it was a very small window, perhaps 18 inches high by 4 inches wide, and through that window the saun-ee could achieve a compactly framed view of the Chrysler Building. How cool is that? The image here shows the architect's rendering of the different landmarks visible from vantages within the loft. Neato.
26 Aug 06 · filed under: architecture, ixd, new york, urban, visual · (2) ·
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Like most things in New York, the Park Slope Food Coop is exclusive, filled with beautiful people, and a source of high drama in the lives of everyone involved with it. Most everyone I know in Brooklyn is a member, and all of them are on some sort of weird coop probation because they're behind on their shifts. Skipping shifts is really naughty, and the lengths to which some members will go to get out of them has become the stuff of folklore. On the other hand, others seem almost pathologically conscientious -- in a recent issue of the newsletter was a story of a member who had written into the coop to explain his absence. You see, he was in prison for eco-terrorism. So he may not, you know, be able to cover that Tuesday afternoon produce sorting shift.
08 Jun 06 · filed under: ecology, new york · (0) ·
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The roots of (modern) urban gardening can be traced to the Liz Christy Garden on New York's Lower East Side. (Some good 70's photos of urban hippies getting their hands dirty). When I visited, the cherry blossoms were going off.
25 Apr 06 · filed under: ecology, new york, urban · (0) ·
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A couple of weeks ago, Mara and Jonathan and I went to the Frick, where we saw this painting by Duccio. It's called "The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain," but I vastly prefer Jonthan's title (hint: it's the subject of this post). Incidentally, how great is the Frick? Ghostly Whistlers, multiple Vermeers, "St. Francis in the Desert," an excellent sculpture of a dead bird (was it a bird?). One might say: Frickin awesome.
21 Feb 06 · filed under: inside art, new york, visual · (0) ·
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