The Best Thing I Saw This Week: Kara Walker at the Domino Sugar Factory

If there are two things Brooklyn hipsters love, it’s highly anticipated cultural events and cleverly repurposed old sh*t (why do you think the Brooklyn Flea is so popular?!), so I anticipated quite a long wait for this much buzzed-about art installation in a legendary decrepit building. To my pleasant surprise, however, we were in the doors within 15 minutes of arriving (after signing an amusing waiver acknowledging the possibility for any and all types of bodily harm incurred within the slowly crumbling structure). As I expected, Walker's installation was incredible, and so was the opportunity to wander around the old factory. 

Entrance to the exhibit. The installation's full title, as stenciled on the factory's brick wall, is "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant"

Mad Stones

The latest installation in the Mad Sq. Art series is a breathtaking set of sculptures by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Elements in the series, titledIdeas of Stone (Idee di Pietra), are beautifully simple in form, yet harrowingly expressive. Using the weight of the stones, Penone manipulates branches of live trees, making them seem alternately exquisitely fragile and deceptively strong.

In his creations, Penone takes two natural elements and creates a decidedly unnatural situation, making us feel suspended in a strange, fantastical moment. Says the artist of his series, “A tree summarizes in an exemplary way the contrast between two forces: the force of gravity and the weight of life we are part of. The need and the search for balance, which exists in every living being to counteract the force of gravity, is evident in every step and in every small action of our lives. It is a river stone that appears amid the branches of a tree. A stone suspended amid the branches of a tree, separated from the soil by a structure that is not land and is not air, a stone that lies between the force of gravity and the force of the attraction of light.”

Giuseppe Penone in Madison Square Park

My favorite piece is this one, a delicately reaching tree balancing one stone between its branches while bowing under the weight of another, which pins its arm to the ground in a graceful arc. Triumphant and restrained, delicate and strong, it perfectly embodies Penone’s dual forces, and creates an exquisite silhouette against the park’s snowscape. 

An Outsider's Take on NYFW: Coats, Coats, Sweaters and Coats

I don’t consider myself much of a fashionista, but the looks spotted on the streets this NYFW (yeah, I guess there was some cool stuff on the runways, too) were f*ing incredible. In perhaps the only positive outcome, besides the occasional decent “snowstagram,” of New York’s polar past few weeks, the city’s stylish masses flocked to Lincoln center unable to ignore one serious consideration: keep warm. As such, streets swarmed with layers on layers of coats, hats, sweaters (even, be still, my heart, more than a few turtlenecks!), coats and more coats swaddled around fashion’s finest. 

Since I’m a cold, cold person with a dark heart, I live for cold weather clothing, and the looks I saw this week had me seriously considering a buffalo-hunting trip out west so that I, too, might procure my very own wearable hide. 

I had to keep from drooling while clicking through Adam Katz Sinding’s gallery of street style looks for W magazine. Eva Chen expectedly nailed it in a killer purple coat that looks like something Willy Wonka would wear to tour Siberia (and I mean that as the highest praise).

Someone showed up in a pea coat bold enough to wake me from the snowstorm-induced daze under which I’ve been operating for the past three weeks (how the $*#% is it February already?!) and a hat which may finally present a solution to getting lost from my friends at the bar. 

Lauren Santo Domingo got a little black fox to hold down her lapel. (I’d like one of those, please!), and Lynn Yeager reigned over everyone in a drapey hide which I feel should have been hiding scrambling style bloggers in a Fashion Week version of The Nutcracker’s Mother Ginger. Also, any New Yorker is lying if she says she hasn’t wanted to crawl into one of these at some point over the last few weeks.  

I was transported back to my kilt-wearing private middle school days by this tartan dream, and reminded of the era of Furbies with this orange fuzzball. Louis Vuitton made Little Red Riding Hood a style icon, and someone (very) seriously wore a feather duster. New York’s lumberjack invasion undoubtedly proved very confusing for the native hipsters, who, miffed that the fashionable set got their hands on their flannels, have subsequently declared them “uncool.” For dessert there was Neapolitan ice cream. 

Thank you and goodnight; I’m off with a crossbow to whatever mythical land Eva Chen’s coat-animal inhabits.