I met Tim Gunn two years ago at Borders. He was signing his book, A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style — which was, truthfully, aimed at women, but I wanted it, so whatever. He looked genuinely delighted to be there, and really, why wouldn’t he be? Tim Gunn was 50 years old when Project Runway took off; he’s a poster child for reinvention at any age.
So I shook his hand and gave him my book, staring at his pen as he etched the title page: NORMAN, MAKE IT WORK! I realize he probably wrote this in everyone’s book, but I felt like Tim Gunn was talking to me. I was in the middle of a major upheaval in my life — a late-in-life reinvention of my own as I decided to go back to school after sixteen years in order to become a teacher — and “make it work” was something I needed to tell myself every day.
My boyfriend leaned over to him and said, “You have no idea how much he loves you.”
Tim Gunn bellowed. “But I’m old enough to be your grandfather!”
“No, you are totally not,” I told him. “But I love you even more for believing that.”
The moral of this story: Don’t call me past ten o’clock tonight. Project Runway is on.
In 1947, the New Yorker ran an article about Harry Dubin and his family — because they owned a television set. Man, developing new content was so easy back then.
Anyway, he was actually far more interesting than that article would let on. During the 1940s — as a form of bonding recreation, I suppose — Dubin and his son created a series of images for a family photo album they called “Dubin at Work”:
It was such an interesting collection. Each of the pictures depicted a man in uniform intently doing his job, whether it was a street sweeper, gas station attendant, or hansom cab driver. When I looked at them twice, I realized something: all of them were Harry!
Harry explained that all of them were taken by his son Ronald, who was then a teenager, after Harry managed to convince each worker to change clothes with him in an alley and let Harry do his job for a few minutes so the picture could be taken.
In other words, there was actually a time in New York City when people would agree to walk into an alley with a total stranger and trade clothes with him for what they believed was nothing more than a father-son hobby. (I wanna live in that New York.) New photos are currently being scanned and uploaded here.
I was about to wrap up my super ambitious Top 50 Albums of the 2000s list yesterday, but Firefox crashed and took my work with it. So that will have to wait until after the holiday — or whenever I’m feeling clever enough. In the meantime, because it’s Thanksgiving and I don’t have a family to go home to like normal people, I thought I’d take a moment to talk about a few of the more random things that crossed my mind this morning.
I’m thankful for deli coffee. It occurred to me this morning, while I was at the supermarket, that I didn’t want to buy coffee to make at home. There’s no joy in that, I think. Just an hour earlier I walked to the fancy French café around the corner from my house for a croissant and then totally dissed them by crossing the street to the bodega for a cheap Law & Order-styled cup of coffee. I mean, who does that? I do, apparently.
I’m thankful for Glee. I was going to watch it last night, but then I thought, wait. I’m going to be alone on Thanksgiving and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to watch the only show on television that makes me feel good to be alive every single week on that night. It’s like a bizarre post-apocalyptic utopia, where openly gay kids hang out with 6-foot-3 football jocks and the Glee Club teacher is an awkwardly hot straight guy who can even find a way to sing “The Thong Song” earnestly. If it wasn’t so blatant, it would be subversive.
I’m thankful for my friends, who are my family. For as long as I can remember, I’ve depended on the kindness of people I’m not physically related to. I think about this a lot, because I know that even though we share no formal ties, I love and am loved back. There is no blood-is-thicker-than-water platitude to explain the fact that it’s remarkable to love someone because you want to, and not because you have to. That happens with blood relatives sometimes, if you’re lucky. But those of us who aren’t so lucky are, sometimes, even luckier.
• DOWNLOAD | OWEN “A Trenchant Critique” New Leaves, 2009
I’m not going to try and sell you on my visual arts credentials; I don’t have any. Like most of my experience with the arts in general — graphic, visual, industrial, musical — I rely on intuition to experience something. I’m the kind of person who hates being told that he can’t touch a sculpture, the guy who rolls his eyes when a museum placard explicates a piece of work by offering that the “project provides an oblique commentary” about something vaguely political. (We should note that the word “oblique” suggests that this type of “commentary” would not actually have a point to it — which is like saying there is no substantial discourse happening at all. Better, then, to say that “this project could be saying something important, but we might just be making that up.” Or something like that.)
I went to the Dia:Beacon over the weekend with far less cynicism going in than going out. Among the exhibits: a pile of industrial scraps, a collection of boxes, and an entire room dedicated to this guy, who essentially painted a series of canvases in the kind of flat white paint reserved for public restroom walls. The artist responsible, Robert Ryman, is “often classified as a minimalist, but he prefers to be known as a ‘realist’ because he is not interested in creating illusions, but only in presenting the materials he has used in compositions at their face value.” In other words, Here’s some stuff you can buy at the Pratt Store.
Last weekend, I walked over the Brooklyn Bridge with all of the tourists and marveled over its construction, its symmetry, its sheer majesty. I saw the year etched in stone, 1883, and tried to process that information: The Roebling family actually designed this bridge in the nineteenth century — three years after the first cash register, two years before the first motorcar. (Further context: Jesse James and Billy the Kid were, like, real people when they did this.) It took conceptual thinking and a sense of grand-scale aesthetics — in addition to engineering prowess — to pull it off, and as I stood at the center of the bridge it occurred to me that this was art. It was deliberate and meaningful and humbling — some stuff you could buy at Home Depot transformed into something you never imagined possible. Sometimes you need to leave your museum memberships at home to remember what that feels like.
The Observer comes through with another great story, this time about the semi-rise and total fall of Condé Nast’s Portfolio magazine. (They’re kind of on a roll.) So here’s the thing: I realize that Condé Nast in 2009 works on a much larger scale than, say, Anti-Matter in 1996. But I fail to see how today’s economy of magazine publishing — when everything on the Internet is free or free with the right passwords — could ever justify a $100 million launch. Especially, I’d imagine, when the open checkbook comes paired with a damning lack of vision:
“None of them could clearly explain what the magazine would be. They just said, ‘It’ll be really good, it’ll do what the other magazines don’t do. It’ll be Vanity Fair meets Fortune.’ But none of them had a clear idea or had an inspiring answer. I kept pressing them for a piece in another magazine that ran that they’d like to run and none of them had a good example.”
In all of my entrepreneurial ventures, I’ve tried to stick with one simple rule of thumb: If I can’t explain my idea to you in a few minutes or less, it’s probably going to fail.
This photo comes via an amazing collection of New York City photos that compares specific locations as they appeared in 1961 to the way they are today. It proves something I’ve always believed about the city: some things change fast, and some things never change.
