ok this pic is ROUGH but these are the first two focaccia loaves I’ve ever made, and they were very special.
Virtuous or masochist?
How Alix Brown Spends a Sunday
I feel like I’ve crossed paths with her before. Maybe she was on a moodboard I made while I was in college. Maybe she was at that strange fashion week party I attended in 2010, back when going into the city was an all-day event, and I had to carry around the addresses of the places I wanted to visit on a post-it note along with the subway directions to get there.
I distinctly remember walking past — but not going inside — BookMarc, Marc Jacobs’s bookstore (which is, to my great shock, still in business). I also arrived WAY too early to a party held at a Juicy Couture. The shopgirls took pity on me and let me in early. I think… (I THINK?) either Alix Brown or Chelsea Leyland or someone else who I’d read about in Nylon Magazine was DJing this party, because I recall feeling starstruck and flustered by some beautiful person in my peripherals.
This party was also the first time I’d ever eaten a macaron, after only seeing pictures of them on my Bloglovin feed. It was tiny and pink and tasted like bubblegum.
“This amazing ad represents a perfect little punctum in the world of midcentury attentional surveillance, a moment in which the scientific advertisers advertised scientific advertising as…an advertisement. Which is to say, what we have here is an ad for menswear that deploys the datasets developed by an actual eye tracker that had been developed in order to measure the attention value of advertisements!”
— D. Graham Burnett, “Fracking Eyeballs”
In which, I become a superfan of dark chocolate & orange.
“I have always drawn women. I can remember when I was three or four, drawing a Barbie-like character based on my mother, although Barbie Dolls didn’t exist until I was 10 years old.
Two decades later, trying to figure how to support a fledgling fine art career, I created a portfolio of black and white Aubrey Beardsley-inspired women. They emerged from this female character I’d drawn all my life, but now she was sexually amplified by the liberated 60’s, and inspired by choreographer Bob Fosse, master of jazz burlesque choreography.
I was fascinated by the bizarre, exaggerated moves, the bawdy comedy of it. My characters were mentally animated by his dancers, as I drew women in black and white, like the notes on sheet music.”
- Olivia De Berardinis via her bio
My dreams have started getting very interesting.
Good place to take a lunch break.
On Saturday, I went for a long walk from my apartment down to MoMA PS1. To get there, I traversed this rainbow corridor.
I said hello to this single, spindly November rose.
And then fell into a reverie contemplating the mantra “Pipe is our life.”
Do you remember the Windows ‘95 game Pipe Dream? It is, blessedly, preserved on the Internet Archive. Along with Rodent’s Revenge and Chip’s Challenge.
When I arrived at MoMA PS1, I beelined for the cafe, thinking that I would grab a quick mezze app from Mina’s. Turns out, Mina’s closed back in June!! This is what I get for being very offline. I am heartbroken but VERY grateful that I went for one last visit back in January. Hopefully a new Mina’s will emerge elsewhere.
Determined not to spend $4 on a NOT-Mina’s cafe muffin, I sat outside and thoughtfully chewed on the Dave’s Killer Protein Bar that I brought with me.
Turns out, if I wanted lunch so badly, I should’ve just gone upstairs.
The main exhibition was Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “A Lot of People” and there was a “participatory piece” going on in which attendees were served pad thai that was made on the spot.
As tempted as I was to hop in line for free food, I decided to just sit back and observe the artwork.
Another part of the exhibition was a studio space with microphones and instruments where people could just jam out. And there was also a ping-pong table available for anyone who wanted to pick up a quick game.
This would’ve been a good opportunity to find another solo person and do something lighthearted and out-of-the-ordinary with them (which were probably the intentions of these exhibits). But I was feeling very quiet and inward-focused this day.
Embracing my hermitude, I went to go commune with the sky in James Turrell’s “Meeting.” Instead of playing ping-pong or belting out “Someone Like You” with one of my fellow museum-goers, we all sat quietly in this cold room.
Finally, I visited the “Historic Boiler Room.”
It was exactly what it sounds like.
Made Mom’s apple crumble on a Friday 🍎