A Year In New York

Recently I headed to Williamsburg in Brooklyn to see an exhibit by Joe Mangrum, an artist friend who creates fantastic visions from everyday things. He and I moved from San Francisco about the same time.
Joe unlocked the door of Chi Contemporary Fine Art and showed me around just after the place closed for the night. [...]

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In the frigid air of March, in the gloom of a deep recession, Manhattan’s clothing merchandisers have announced the dawn of a new, happy age in which everyone wears lime-colored golf shirts and bright peach polos. New Yorkers pull up their collars and seem unmoved.

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I am concerned that President Obama has passed two and half weeks in office already, distracting himself with Economic-Stimulus-This and Closing-Guantanamo-That, while one of the hairiest questions of his presidency hangs fire: who will be our First Dog?
You’ll recall that, in the misty-eyed moments after he won the election, Obama walked onto the stage at [...]

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I got to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before dawn today with some friends and found a spot near one of the Jumbotrons about halfway between the Washington Monument and the Capitol. Shivering be damned; I wanted to see Barack Obama become President Barack Obama and learn what tone he would set for the [...]

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the most popular blog post I’ve ever written. I take little credit for this fact. If this post were a pop song, I’d be the bassist holding up the wall while another guy wagged his tail at the audience. That guy, of course, was an Illinois senator named Barack [...]

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As the presidential election results came in, Joo and I stood on the corner of 43rd Street and 7th Avenue, the edge of Times Square, surrounded by an exultant crowd of people who hadn’t had reason to celebrate in a long time.
Most were young and they were of every race, many of them mixed couples. [...]

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With food shortages popping up around the planet, I’ve been drawn to visit the art museum known as P.S. 1, which this summer has built a rural farm right in the middle of Queens.
The exhibit, called Public Farm 1, occupies the courtyard and is composed of cardboard cylinders planted with 51 varieties of edible veggies [...]

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I met my friend Jacques for a drink in the West Village, where we navigated the bridge-and-tunnel crowd buoyed by political bonhomie and a dangerously strong pitcher of margaritas.

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