Welcome to the New Blog

I went to NYC for spring break this week. I love Manhattan because all over the place there is a level of style and quality that is difficult to come by outside of a global metropolis. Moving on from MySpace blogging is another step for me towards participating in the conversation about what that style and quality is, and what it is becoming. Thanks for reading, and please leave me comments so we can start this conversation in earnest. Here's a rundown of the most interesting stuff I saw:

The MOMA has a beautiful new building but the museum is too successful and is unbearably crowded, even on a Wednesday. The show Design and the Elastic Mind is intriguing, but I didn't like the overall scheme of mixing together silly, absurdist ideas with serious, well-thought-out inventions.

The Muji store on lower Broadway is a little cheaper than the paper-goods-only display in the MOMA store, but really it was worth the extra effort to see it just to learn that Muji makes everything for the home. I've heard it described as the Japanese IKEA, which is entirely accurate as they carry everything from forks to beds to clothes and shoes. What's really amazing is that they fit it into a space smaller than an IKEA lobby.

The best part of the Whitney Biennial was an annex a few blocks from the museum in the old Park Avenue Armory. This immense building, whose drill hall is one of the largest unobstructed enclosed spaces in all of Manhattan, was decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffanny around 1901 and has the air of a stately, venerated gentleman's club. There are small brass signs over the doorways that give the rooms name such as "Board of Officers' Room" and "Company Room G." While the art was pretty good, it was the beautifully haunting deterioration of the building which really took me in. Although all the fixtures and wall-coverings seem to be present, the place hasn't been maintained in decades and is falling apart. It is the most spectacularly engaging built environment I've seen outside a video game.

Walking to an art show in SOHO I chanced to pass by PapaBubble (papabubble.com) and got to taste some hard candy still soft and hot, fresh from - well, I didn't see that part of the process, and I really have no idea how it got to that point. I watched these two craftspeople roll the taffy-like substance into bars and then stick those together to form an image. Later they'll cut it into short chunks. This whole process is exactly like making millifore in glass. I couldn't justify the $7.50 for a bag of candy, but I took these free samples to photograph for you and they are really tasty.

The Guggenheim is under repair again. Frank Lloyd Wright did some amazing things, but his work was not often executed at the highest level of crafstmanship. I only hope that someone will value some of my work enough to spend millions and millions of dollars to preserve it.