Queens International 2006

Most people don't know or think about the Queens Museum of Art, but years ago I went to a retrospective of conceptual art there that really belonged at MoMA. QMA is now showing Queens International 2006: Everything All at Once.

"Queens International 2006 is the third installment of the Queens Museum of Art's biennial survey of Queens-based artists. This year, 52 artists and two collaboratives weigh in on American culture, the politics of war, contemporary feminist issues, spirituality, the environment and a host of other subjects close to the hearts of many local residents.

The show opens on October 1, but the true opening reception is Sunday, October 8, 3-6 pm and is always an event to remember."

Above: Orly Genger, Studio view, 2006, nylon climbing rope and paint.

This just in from our Atlanta correspondent

Niki de Saint-Phalle at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

He who never set foot in America

Today I went to see Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum. The exhibition, which illuminates the fundamental influence of Pablo Picasso on American art during the last century, is just outstanding. I know it doesn't sound like the premise for something new, but there is so much to see and think about here. (Oh, and since we've been counting: Male artists - 10; female artists - 0.)

Art therapy

Last night, after drinks at Thalia, we went to an art opening in a chiropractor's office on West 50th Street. And, while we drank more wine and ate as much cheese as we could without attracting attention, the show sold out! Australian artist Cimon (pronounced "Simon") paints impressionistic portraits of his friends using frenetic brushstrokes and a broad palette.

So to any artist who despairs of ever showing their work, I say broaden your horizon. Hanging your art in a doctor's office, with its steady stream of captive viewers, is one of the best ideas I've heard lately.

What, too much?

Blugirl - Spring 2007 Collection

Sketches of inequality

Last night I watched Sketches of Frank Gehry, Sydney Pollack’s unpretentious documentary about his friend (and world-renowned architect) Frank Gehry.

I suppose because I watched it immediately after reading several discussions about gender inequality in the art world (on Edward Winkleman and Lisa Hunter), I couldn’t help but marvel at the complete absence of any women in this otherwise absorbing portrait. Pollack does interview one female at length – writer/curator Mildred Friedman – but the rest of his subjects constitute a pantheon of powerful white males, including Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Bob Geldof, Philip Johnson, Thomas Krens, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Ovitz, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, Julian Schnabel (wrapped in a bathrobe and holding a drink), and even Gehry’s 94-year-old therapist. Indeed, the most memorable woman in the film is found only in a passing reference to the architect’s pushy ex-wife, who made him change his name from Goldberg to Gehry in the 1950s. Even in his office, we meet only male designers and assistants. Are there really no women working at his firm, apart from (presumably) the receptionist?

To me, the overriding theme was one of risk-taking: These men are all gamblers, risk-takers on a gargantuan scale, with the colossal egos that such risks require. And that sentiment echoes what I’ve been reading lately – in a nutshell, that society rewards the grand gesture, not modesty; conviction, not timidity; and boldness, not diligence. It’s not that these are male or female traits, but they are cultivated differently.

Where does that leave architecture? A pessimist might say that a museum designed by Gehry will be best suited to showcase only the most muscular art, along the lines of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and so on – in other words, art that projects itself across an immense expanse of space. And so the cycle continues, as some have criticized about MoMA's recent rehanging. I am not that cynical, but I also don’t see where the change can come from. Where is that pipeline of young female architects and engineers?

Finished with jury duty!

Multiply this by 12 and you'll get some sense of our collective relief.

The Dahesh

Jury duty has left me agitated, annoyed, and unmotivated (though I’m happy to report that my experience in the New York City court system doesn’t bear any resemblance to these barbaric accounts of small-town justice). But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t had fun lately! Adding up the places I went to over the weekend reflects a peculiar, only-in-New-York diet - Zlatá Praha (Czech), followed by an obligatory trip to the Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden; Ginza (Japanese, supposedly, but I suspect it’s really Korean); `inoteca (cute Italian, as signified by that saucy apostrophe); Katz's Deli (hello brisket!); and Veniero's (old-school Italian pastries). Yes, a very weird list, more a function of geography than any real planning.

But more importantly, I finally made it to the Dahesh Museum of Art. This is quite an interesting and odd little museum, devoted to academic art of the 19th and early 20th centuries and located in what seems like the basement of 580 Madison Avenue. The Dahesh Museum was founded by, and named for, Dr. Dahesh (1909–1984), the pen name of Salim Moussa Achi, a Lebanese writer, philosopher, connoisseur, and/or cult leader, depending on your point of view. The museum’s main attraction right now is Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt, a visual account of Napoleon’s attempt to add Egypt to the French empire.

Above: Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke, Monuments of Egypt, ca. 1821-24

Can you love Tokyo without hating your own city?

This is what Pinky does when she is not chained to her desk at Beige, Inc. She takes incredible photographs!

Today, on the Seventh Day of jury duty, the judge dismissed us a little early, so I finally went to the Morgan Library and Museum, on Madison Avenue at East 36th Street. I never visited what used to be called the Pierpont Morgan Library before its recent expansion, so I had to sort of deconstruct the airy campus designed by Renzo Piano in order to understand how he unified its three buildings.

On view now are 50 of Rembrandt's greatest etchings, culled from the library’s extensive collection.

Above: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Self-Portrait, Etching at a Window, 1648

One other note in a long and strange day (which actually ended with pomegranate margaritas, but there is no way to make a coherent leap to that): At St. Mark's Bookshop, I finally had the chance to take a close look at Aftermath, the photographic archive of Ground Zero by Joel Meyerowitz, the only photographer to gain continued access to the area after the attacks. What struck me was his record of the impact on surrounding buildings; for example, I hadn't seen the three-story sections of the World Trade Center lodged into the facade of the Banker's Trust Building or the Pompeii-like dust covering everything inside the World Financial Center.

Countdown to Tuesday's (pre-) birthday celebration . . .

Il Buco . . . and a stripping policeman?

For addicts of sites like The Sartorialist, a new book provides a bit of New York fashion history. “On the Street, 1980-1990,” collects some of Amy Arbus’s portraits of people on the street in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s.

Elinor Carucci

I caught this exhibition of Israeli-American photographer Elinor Carucci by accident as I passed by the Edwynn Houk Gallery on Fifth Avenue. Carucci photographs herself, her husband, and her parents in surprisingly intimate settings and often in the nude. But these carefully composed images don't reveal as much about their subjects as they do about the artist's loving self-examination, a frank narcissism that encompasses her startlingly beautiful mother.

Caché

Caché - a psychological thriller that came out in 2005 - unfolds "at the Hitchcockian junction where voyeurism intersects with paranoia," in the words of A. O. Scott. It begins slowly - indeed the first thirty minutes seem fairly directionless - as Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, who play a literary couple in Paris, begin receiving vaguely threatening videos and drawings. But instead of a domestic drama, the movie has important moral ambitions, namely concerning France's treatment of Algerians and the terror of personal complicity.

You saw him in New York first

If you're in London, you can catch the end of Pierre Huyghe - Celebration Park at Tate Modern.

The artist's first solo exhibition in the UK will include This is not a time for dreaming (2004) and A journey that wasn't (2006), which attentive readers may remember reading about right here!

Today I actually got selected to serve as a juror. I don't know why anyone would want a porcupine on their jury. After the voir dire (or, in New York parlance, "vwah deeyah"), during which one of the six lawyers repeatedly asked "Can you promise to apply the lawr* as it is explained to you?," my name was called.

My plan is to take notes furiously, casually mentioning that I need to "get the details right" for my blog. "Your whaaat?" "My blog. Don't worry, Your Honor. I'm not using your real name. I am calling you Judge Squinty."

*This is a New York City court.

Remembering the World Trade Center

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now at the Asia Society

On Sunday I happened to stroll by the Asia Society at Park Avenue and 70th Street and decided to go in. The Asia Society is one of many small museums in New York that I've never visited despite its proximity to the major art institutions on Fifth Avenue. On view is One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, an exhibition of seventeen artists, most of whom were born in the 1970s. Two in particular caught my attention.

Binh Danh was born in Vietnam in 1977 and has invented a technique for printing found photographs onto leaves through the natural process of photosynthesis. (He was interviewed about his process - he calls his images "chlorophyll prints" - on NPR.) For his One Week's Dead series (2006), he took photographs from Life magazine of American soldiers who had died in the space of one week in Vietnam and printed them on leaves. The faces are not visible until you get quite close, and even then their clarity varies. The effect is subtle enough to avoid being maudlin; exhibited in clusters and showing signs of decay, the leaves evoke the decomposition of both life and memory.

Above: Drifting Souls (2001)

Indigo Som, a Chinese-American woman who grew up in California, photographs Chinese restaurants in isolated parts of the United States. The buildings are shabby, with fading signs, but they record the story of immigrants who moved beyond the country's urban ports of entry and tried to assimilate in remote areas where they may have been the only Chinese inhabitants.

You know how I was saying that my new glasses look like Nana's? This is actually more accurate.

Inez appears on Cyberchase on PBS.

Nana!

This is a fairly close approximation of my new glasses. I think I've just figured out what to do with my hair. Also, I will have to stock up on black eyeliner.

Nana Mouskouri, Song for Liberty (1982)

Jury duty and a Chelsea crawl

Today I began jury duty - just about the worst possible timing, as it came on the heels of starting a new job. (I'm really building quite a fan base at work.) But I met a very interesting woman there who helped make the experience considerably less excruciating - an engineer who is working to upgrade New York City's infrastructure.

Unwilling to miss the big kick-off of the fall gallery season, I rushed over to Chelsea as soon as I was dismissed - just in time to catch some of the crowds and some of the shows on 23rd and 24th Streets. As expected, it was more of a scene than ever before, and I'm not sure what that augurs for the art world.

Good job

Princess Kiko has given birth to a baby boy - the first male heir to the Japanese throne in 41 years - thereby dashing our hopes to see a woman ascend the throne.

Have you always dreamed of living in a hotel? Well, you can buy a one-bedroom apartment at the Carlyle Hotel for the reasonable sum of $450,000. The catch? The monthly maintenance charge is $6,626 - but the maid comes twice a day.

Like "offshoring" to India, here is a trend that we all should have seen coming: au pairs from China.

From my sister: A nationally known psychiatrist is killed by a patient, and the profession reels.

I'm starting to put together my Fall 2006 look. (Click on the photo.)

Check out Pinky in Nantucket...

And here's an approximation of my new specs!

Today I ordered my new Alain Mikli* eyeglasses. I know that these will be risky for the office, and that I will be forever identified by them. But, on the upside, I expect automatic and expedited entry to art events.

*Guess what - Alain Miklitarian is Lebanese!

By the way, if anyone reading this is really into glasses (and no, I'm not turning this into a shopping blog), Morgenthal Frederics is having a sale on their house brand, and they're not half-bad.

A perfect movie for a rainy Saturday afternoon is Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, with Jeanne Moreau and the music of Miles Davis, a "richly atmospheric thriller of murder and mistaken identity unfolding over one restless Parisian night."

One day I really want to attend the Burning Man festival...

This year's theme: The future.

An oddly nurturing environment for creativity

Read Holland Cotter's sad Remembrance of Downtown Past.

I've been trying to find photos taken inside the World Trade Center, but I'm not having much luck. I worked in the World Trade Center roughly ten years ago, but it never occurred to me to take pictures inside the office. I took some in the lobby for a photography class at Cooper Union, but that's it.

Honest weights, square dealings

After work I finally saw the Walker Evans photographs that are on display at the UBS Art Gallery in Midtown. I don't know much about Evans - just enough to recognize his most iconic images - so it was thrilling to see them.

In a nutshell, the digitally produced prints on display were made by John Hill and Sven Martson and use carbon pigments. They are much larger than the original prints, and the effect is, in Michael Kimmelman's words, "cinematic."

For example, several stories seem to be unfolding at this roadside store in Alabama in 1936. Beyond the signs promising a fair deal and listing the fish on offer, beyond the neat rows of fruit and the two guys hoisting melons, you can see two men peeking out of the store (the proprietors?) and, best of all, a little girl who lifts her skirt in a curtsy for the camera.

After I left the UBS Art Gallery on Sixth Avenue, I found myself right in the middle of the run-up to the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall, with limos and camera crews everywhere. Talk about a contrast!

Today on the train a boy sat across from me, carefully applying mascara. We were going downtown. But then you knew that already.

Today Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz died.

Lost children

It's hard not to think of the strange murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty contestant, when looking at the photographs of Australian artist Polixeni Papapetrou.

Surreal portraits of children are nothing new, of course. Most recently, Loretta Lux attracted a great deal of attention for her eerie images of children who appear isolated in their own worlds.

Papapetrou's series Haunted Country, however, will open at Foley on September 14, on the heels of John Mark Karr's false confession to JonBenét Ramsey's 1996 murder. The photographs depict the harrowing theme of children who are lost in the Australian bush.

Above: Hanging Rock 1900 #2, 2006

Unease about the flesh

"These days our identities hang by a thread, which may be why the pull of fashion on our imaginations is stronger than ever," says Daphne Merkin. She looks at fall clothes and sees "the present state of high anxiety concerning our corporal selves." Also in the NY Times Style magazine is Catherine Keener, one of my favorite actresses.

Business Week tackles the male shopper, and how Madison Ave has turned on the metrosexual.

Opening at MoMA on August 30 is Out of Time: A Contemporary View, with works by Martin Creed, Rineke Dijkstra, Cai Guo-Qiang, Mona Hatoum, Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, and others.

Above: Martin Creed, Two protrusions from a wall, 2001

A rainy Saturday and more design blogs

More enviable design blogs (sigh): design*sponge and The Sartorialist, again via hoping for happy accidents. So many wonderful links!

Also I am taking care of several plant fatalities owing to the recent heat wave and Vermont sojourn.

Photo: Rinko Kawauchi

Oysters at Cité

Tonight marked the end of my first week at the new gig, so I had to celebrate. Thankfully, Maestro and his wife were available to meet up at Cité, just north of my new job. Cité is having a happy hour special on oysters, so after two glasses* of Syrah, I tried them for the very first time. And they were delicious.**

(And by the way, I tried to see the Walker Evans exhibition at the UBS Art Gallery - and was told that it closed at 6 pm. Very annoying. At least Michael Kimmelman got there.)

*Thanks to bartender Justin.
**Not scary.

Dress code

The dearth* of art in the summer means I have been exploring more design blogs: Design Observer, Swiss Miss, and happy accidents, where I found hel-looks, a collection of street fashion from Helsinki. Go ahead and try to tear yourself away from the photos of these Finnish folks, who have never met a textile, pattern, or color that they didn't like.

(That reminds me of when a couple of friends and I decided to rename ourselves Dearth, Girth, and Mirth in Minneapolis one summer. I know that Girth referred to one guy's biceps, so it wasn't derogatory. Mirth was a fun-loving chick. Oh God, I think I was Dearth. What the hell does that mean?)

Walker Evans in midtown Manhattan

Walker Evans is on view in midtown Manhattan at the UBS Art Gallery - Farmer's Kitchen, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

Take a trip to Kyoto with Blue Lotus and her wonderful photos.

In the art world, unrealized but well-publicized plans can be as valuable as those that see the light of day. Commercial readymades need only happen once to provide the required documentation. In Jack Spade, Andy has turned branding and advertising into a high-concept game.

Brini Maxwell appears on PBS.

Morning commute

Chi Peng, Sprinting Forward

Take a look (but perhaps not in the office) at Click Opera, a curious Berlin-based design blog that I found by accident.

Anish Kapoor will join a procession of artists that has included Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois and Nam June Paik, in New York's center stage for public art, Rockefeller Center.

The conflict in Lebanon is not only being fought on the ground but also by a universe of bloggers, bootleg translators and self-appointed experts, writes Jon Alterman in the Financial Times.

Generic female office worker, look No. 278

Tomorrow is the big day! Yep, my first day at the new gig, which is not "business casual." Apparently they tried it back in the 1990s, and when the bubble burst and the market went south, they decided that their employees should show up to work in suits after all.

Of course, women have always interpreted this sort of dress code more loosely than men, who are stuck with a uniform of suits and ties. For women, the unwritten rules (and yes, there are written ones) are a bit ambiguous, and generally hold that the higher up you are in the office hierarchy, the more clothing you are expected to wear (executives did not show up to work in sun dresses and sandals during the heat wave) - up to but not exceeding in expense the wardrobe of your boss, if she is also female. (I haven't had a male boss since 1996.)

Separately, Slate is holding a Corporate Euphemism Contest. I know that you are all experts. The deadline is August 31, 2006.

Meet Biscuit the puppy

I can't seem to upload my photos in the order I want, so I'll put the puppy in a separate post. I am not a dog-obsessed person, so this is the last photo of a dog (or any other pet) that you are likely to see here.

Vermont

The weather in Vermont was glorious. Every day was clear, sunny, and around seventy degrees, and every evening was chilly. Carrie, the Irish Setter, tolerated Biscuit, the English Springer Spaniel puppy, the way any aging beauty would – with a great deal of pouting and eye-rolling. Also, some milk bones were brazenly snatched, leaving little recourse for a young puppy who hasn’t yet established her allies.

Gardening Leave

I am about to take off for Vermont and two weeks of Gardening Leave, something I had never heard of until negotiating the start date of my new job. As usual, we can thank the British for this quaint phrase.

I will take the train to Bellows Falls and then proceed to Chester, home to family and assorted dogs. The most notable is my grandfather's Irish Setter, the latest in a long line of Irish Setters. She may be upstaged, however, by my aunt's brand-new English Springer Spaniel puppy, for whom we all received birth announcements.

Internet access is limited there.

Trying Indian comfort food

On Monday night, I tried a new kind of cuisine – Chinese Indian food. Along with two young Indian associates from my office, I went to Chinese Mirch on Lexington Avenue. The visit was prompted by a conversation with the two women about the food that they grew up with in India – and by their nostalgic descriptions of Chinese dishes that incorporate Indian spices.

According to the New York Times, “Chinese Mirch is the first Manhattan restaurant to serve the strange but satisfying hybrid of two of the city's favorite cuisines: Chinese and Indian.” We began with gobi Manchurian, or fried cauliflower with slivered chili peppers and garnished with cilantro, then moved on to chili garlic noodles with mixed vegetables, chili chicken, and milder vegetable balls. The last two dishes were served with “gravy,” or a thick brown sauce.

My two dining companions promptly pronounced everything “not that spicy.” Of course, I wouldn’t know; it’s not the comfort food that I grew up with. But we've already made plans to hit the restaurants and bakeries of Jackson Heights.

Chez Zaha

Everything in the Zaha Hadid exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum looks as if it’s about to take off up the spiral ramp and catapult through the skylight in the rotunda. What makes the show even better is knowing that it’s all the vision of a ham-fisted 55-year-old Iraqi-born British woman, the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Better than her paintings, plans, and models, however, is a stunningly futuristic kitchen that comprises multimedia equipment, sound actuators and LEDs within a flowing shell of DuPont Corian. I guess that means I don’t have to stop blogging when I am frying up some eggs and bacon.

When hippie met Ozzy

I know, you’re thinking “What the…?” This is Hatebreed, a metal band that performed on Saturday at Ozzfest on Randall's Island. I had to look up Ozzfest to figure out what it was. Ozzfest is an annual tour of the United States organized by Ozzy Osbourne and featuring performances by heavy metal groups. My stepbrother, who is still in college, hosted some out-of-town friends for the all-day festival, one of whom turned out to be his girlfriend. On Friday night, we all met her for the first time. She is a Women’s Studies major who is interested in massage therapy.

Imagine my surprise to read about a Merrill Lynch report suggesting that art is one of the worst possible investments.

I still want to write up my recent trips to the Guggenheim Museum to see Zaha Hadid and to the Katonah Museum of Art to see Joseph Cornell. Yep, Pinky and I boarded a train heading north out of Stink Town to visit the cute little hamlet of Katonah, in Westchester, better known to some as The Town that Martha Stewart Blessed. We did our best to catch a glimpse of her - or of anything, really - but she has built a stone wall around the 153-acre estate at exactly the right height to block all voyeurs, no matter how slowly (or often) they drive by. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren doesn't let you see more than a gate.

Or so I've been told.

Porcupine grabs fedora and umbrella, heads for exit

After weeks of interviews and negotiations, some hair-pulling and a couple of fistfights, I am leaving the Ground Zero area and heading back up to Midtown! Beautiful Midtown, which I used to loathe, with its packs of tourists swarming out of hotels and along Broadway to matinees in the Theater District and chain restaurants in Times Square, now beckons sweetly, a bastion of civilization after working in the wasteland on the west side of the World Trade Center site. No more first-hand reports of the progress at Ground Zero.

Subatomic analysis of the long-term ramifications of working in what amounts to a psychiatric facility is confined to colleagues. My family didn't react much. My sister could never remember where I worked anyway, and my parents still can't believe that anyone pays me to do anything.

Then this happened

I'd like to think about art, but this happened, and the mind is barely able to cope with anything else.

One voice I turn to again and again is that of the Dove, a Lebanese-American woman who lives in California and writes with clarity and reason about the conflict even as her own relatives try to escape their south Lebanon village.

Finnish design arrives downtown

Downtown, in the World Financial Center, is an exhibition of contemporary design from Finland called SAUMA [Design as Cultural Interface]. The fifteen separate installations in the exhibition "explore new approaches to usability, user experience and the design process itself."

SAUMA begins in a long hallway, where three transparent globes by Hilda Kozári are installed. Each bubble is infused with a different perfume, designed by the artist to evoke the atmosphere of Helsinki, Budapest, and Paris. Stepping into each globe is like entering a scent-filled blur. Paris smells like roses, Budapest a bit musky, and Helsinki a bit smoky - so recognizably smoky, in fact, that I thought I was sniffing the exhalation of the man who had been in there before me.

Other installations are more clever than lyrical, however. Most begin with a familiar premise, but aim to solve a problem in a new way. For example, Klaus Aalto designed what looks like a traditional chest of drawers, but the drawers have been replaced by briefcases, so that their contents are portable. Kari Sivonen designed a portable solar panel system that allows the wearer to convert solar energy into electricity to, say, charge a cell phone.

In the "not in New York" category I would nominate Takkiainen, a jacket made out of Velcro strips "for lonely or bored people... It is designed to help the wearer to get in contact with others. Since we brush against each other every day as we move around in the city, we can use our clothes as a medium for meeting people and communicating with them." This sounds like a nightmare to me. I recoil when people brush against me on the subway, so the idea that someone would come along and actually stick to me is hair-raising - particularly any self-identified loners. Maybe it's different with Finns.

SAUMA is on view until September 10, and was produced by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York.

The fireflies of Madison Square Park

There is a hidden population that comes out at night in Madison Square Park. It's not the homeless people, though they do seem to materialize on park benches in the time it takes to turn your head.

It's fireflies. Thousands of them. They bob up and down just a few feet above the lawn, so that the grass seems to sparkle intermittently.

Most passersby don't notice them as they rush through the park, listening to iPods or chatting on cellphones or shepherding children.

But the ones who happen to look sideways for more than a second see them and suddenly smile, and look around to see if anyone else has noticed.

Above: Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan), Fireflies on the Water (2002), an installation I saw at the Whitney Museum's 2004 Biennial Exhibition.

Anna Castelli Ferrieri

If the words "design" and "Milan" in close proximity make your heart skip a beat, and candy-colored melamine inspires visions of a warm and fuzzy utopia in which even a toothbrush can have aesthetic integrity, then you are already familiar with Kartell. I grew up with parents who worshipped at the altar of modern Italian design, saving old copies of Abitare for decades, so I suppose I had no choice in the matter. I still get light-headed around apple-red plastic.

If any of this means anything to you, then you already know the work of Anna Castelli Ferrieri, who died on Thursday. Ferrieri was one of the few successful women in the Italian design field. In 1949, she and her husband, Giulio Castelli, founded Kartell, which became a leading furniture company known for high-quality plastic designs.

Two minutes, two goals

Was anyone else watching today's match between Italy and Germany in the semifinals of the World Cup?

I don't even like sports, usually, but between Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon this morning and the Italians this afternoon, the drama was too much to resist.

The Crocs

These they are indeed the shoes of a hypothetical distopian future, one in which the inmates they must be dressed in the footwear least likely to be useful in the popular uprising against the regime.

The nation it is sinking into the slough of bad shoes, and just when the curse of the Uggs had abated.

A blog bubble

"The world does not need more blogs," says Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, who estimates "there is approximately one reader for every blog out there."

Sounds about right.

Ursula von Rydingsvard

In Madison Square Park are four large sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard. The park is better known to some as the site of the Shake Shack, but it is quite an elegant sanctuary between 23rd and 25th Streets, a quieter cousin to the more frenetic Union Square Park. The sculptures - or "monumental vessel forms" - are so well suited to the park that they almost disappear among the mature trees like ghostly forms.

Von Rydingsvard normally works in cedar, but the centerpiece of the Madison Square Park exhibition is Damski Czepek, made of polyurethane resin. Damski Czepek evolved from the form of a bonnet, creating a concave space that you can stand in, complete with strings that meander outward.