January 2011
8 posts
7 tags
In the movie “Please Give” a well-heeled New York City couple buys vintage mid-century furniture from dead people’s relatives and resells it to stylish, ignorant young urbanites, making a handsome living in the process. Parts of the film look like they were shot on location at the White on White showroom, which is stuffed with valuable pieces. Some, the chairs especially, are...
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“Building Brasilia” is photographer Marcel Gautherot’s account of the construction of this modern capital city.
The fine black-and-white images celebrate the surreal grace of Oscar Niemeyer’s sensuous whitewashed forms.
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Due to a string of back-to-back snowstorms I’ve been rocking knee-high rubber boots and a shabby hooded wool coat all month. Then last night at the grocery store I saw an older man wearing a shtreimel, the round, sable-trimmed hat traditionally worn by Orthodox Jewish men, and he looked outstanding and particularly well-equipped for the weather.
Jean Paul Gaultier based his entire 1993...
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Last week I passed an electronics recycling event outside the Tekserve store on West 23rd Street. It filled me with sadness seeing hundreds of hard drives, monitors and speakers, formerly state-of-the-art stuff, being abandoned. Over time they’d lost their allure.
Then I saw a gentleman carrying over a banged-up Bondi blue iMac G3 and my heart lept. This is a pretty, joyous machine. ...
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Last night I saw “Inception,” six months after the buzz, but nonetheless excited to lose myself in an elegantly designed movie. But the experience wasn’t visually compelling at all. The architect in the movie, Ariadne, is a young, hippie-ish woman, which is cool. But the synthetic worlds that she constructs for her team of dream-invading global super-spies fall flat. Roads...
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Long before the House of Balenciaga got hot for its studded, streamered leather handbags and its Space-Age Warrior Princess minidresses, it was reknown for the hyper-elegant creations of its founder, couturier Cristobal Balenciaga. The exhibit “Balenciaga: Spanish Master” at the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute on Park Avenue makes clear how little the image of the current brand has to...
7 tags
Right now I’m helping clients install a new washing machine and my parents install a new flat-screen television, so I’m especially attentive to the magical powers of shiny new machines.
Sculptor Danh Vo made this piece, “Oma Totem,” from gifts (television, refrigerator, washing machine) his grandmother received from a Roman Catholic relief agency when she arrived in...
I’ve had mixed feelings about Frank Gehry’s IAC Building on Ninth Avenue, his first in the city, since it was completed in 2007. It’s shape, meant to evoke sails, seemed strangely rigid, and its patterned white glass panels seemed ugly. During the day it felt willfully eccentric and at night it felt massive and misplaced, like a bright white spaceship.
Then this weekend I...
