Recommended Reading / 23.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week, from Bill Cunningham's On the Street: a video called A Breath of Fresh Air, which spotlights young artists unafraid of what Cunningham calls "off the wall, off the ceiling" thinking. The clip, which features photos taken at the Spring/Break Art Show on 31st Street, offers a joyful glimpse into a world teeming with ideas and intriguing new voices (a refreshing change for a generation so often and unfairly criticized for laziness and inattention).  "It gave me the greatest hope for our civilization," Cunningham says. "If you ever were despondent about the big business and branding of art and fashion, forget it. A new generation just opened the door to fresh air…these kids think for themselves."

A few more, just because:
-An archive of teenage bedrooms.
-Durer meets Drake.
-Bacon, blue cheese, figs, and dark chocolate — on toast.
-And lastly, though the Oscars are long past: "If Critics Wrote About the Male Best Director Nominees the Same Way They Wrote About Selma Director Ava Duvernay."

More recommended reading, here. Have a wonderful Monday!

2 New on FvF.

Today: snippets from two recent features I was lucky enough to work on for Freunde von Freunden this winter. As it happens, the subjects of both interviews are my neighbors — the first is banker-turned-architect Huy Bui, who constructs beautiful wooden structures made to sustain plant life in cities. (I first wrote about seeing Huy's work, here.)

In response to a question about preferred vacation destinations, Huy replied: "I love to travel, but my work is a holiday. I’m very lucky. I’m happiest when I’m in my shop, making things. I have moments here that remind me of when I was a kid, five years old, playing with Legos. My parents would say, 'come down to dinner!' And I’d be ravenous. But then I’d think, wait, just a minute. I have to finish this."

The second feature spotlights Sam and Stefanie Wessner, a couple living just a few blocks from Huy's studio, in a one-bedroom apartment neighboring the East River. Sam is the co-founder of Manhattan's El Rey Coffee Bar and Luncheonette, and partner at Noble Denim and Victor Athletics. Stefanie is Projects Officer at the architecture and public health organization ARCHIVE global.

Says Stefanie about making a home in New York: "When we got here, we made a conscious decision not to entertain other options for a while, which was a challenge — but a good one. We've decided to try to just be present."

You can find more of my FvF interviews, here, and my "Meet the Contributor" page, here. Thanks so much for reading — have a wonderful weekend!

 All photos by my friend Emily Johnston.

POV: Lived In.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. Each POV entry will include a photograph and a short reflection based on what’s pictured. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories. 

According to everyone who lived there, myself excluded, the home my family inhabited during our eight years in Honolulu was tiny. I was tiny then, too, and to me, it seemed just the right size for a family of four, and a rabbit, and an ear-splitting, rainbow-feathered lovebird. The house had its quirks: a bedroom (mine) so small it might have been a hallway, century-old floors that gave us splinters, locks so old they required skeleton keys to open.

Still, it was home. With our things — and us — inside, it looked like ours. It felt like ours.

A few weeks after we moved in, our landlord stopped by and told us it looked like we’d lived there for years. “He meant to say it’s a mess,” my mom said when he was gone, looking at the mess of seeds that had spilled from the birdcage; the books and magazines and knick-knacks everywhere.

 My dad waved this off. “He meant to say it’s lived-in,” he said.

Four Inches.

I like the idea of four-inch paintings the same way I like the idea of six-word stories — both require making the most of very little, and confronting the challenges of limited space with creativity and care. With their four-by-four-inch works, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber manage to tell stories tinged with mystery, humor, and darkness, capturing worlds much bigger than the confines of their tiny canvases. See for yourself, here.

I'm also a longtime fan of the brilliant Animals with Sharpies series, which, as it happens, was the topic of one of my very first posts on this site. See more recent work on the blog Personal Message, here.

Recommended Reading / 22.

Every Monday, words to start the week. 

This week, from Humans of New York, an excellent answer to the question, do you remember the happiest moment of your life?: "This one time I was in Hawaii with my family, and we were walking to the beach, and we came to the top of this giant hill. And I said, 'I'm going to take it.' And I put my skateboard down, and started rolling down the hill, and I got going so fast that the board started shake because the trucks were loose, and toward the bottom of the hill I came to this crack, and the board got caught and I was thrown onto the pavement. I got all bruised and scraped and my mom was screaming because she's a total freakout.'"

"That was the happiest moment of your life?"
"Yeah. I was just glad I took the hill."

A few more, just because:
-Turning cemeteries into "sacred forests."
-I saw the band Wolf Alice last week and fell in love. Here they are, and here they are again.
-Warren Buffett on drinking five cans of Coke a day (and eating chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast): "I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among six-year-olds. So I decided to eat like a six-year-old."

More recommended reading, here. Have a happy Monday!