Apr 26, 2011

DIRECTIONAL NAILS




READ SALLY SINGER INTERVIEWED HERE AND HERE.


I'm in a phase of being sort of obsessed with nail art, partially because I'm not allowed to have it at work and partially because New York women love their nails. Your basic manicure costs $7, making it a very affordable luxury in a very expensive city. When I went to Chicago in March I got neon orange with white and silver fireworks on the thumbs. There is something attractive to me about being a working person who uses her hands and then pampering them in this semi-Sisyphean but totally feminine and fun way.

STUDIO VISIT WITH BAGGU ON SIGHT UNSEEN. I have gotten to know Emily a little bit and I think they do something very cool and very smart. New York is covered in Baggus!

Apr 20, 2011




ERIC VEIT w/ JAMES at EXTRA-EXTRA. PHILLY, MARCH 2010. This space was rad.

Apr 19, 2011


I went to a Passover Seder at my father's first cousin Karen's home last night. It felt somehow shockingly essential to me, eating gefilte fish and matzo balls with people in my blood line. My grandfather Halley, named for Halley's comet and pictured above in his army uniform, grew up in Brooklyn in the Bensonhurst area, the son of Max and Gussie Lipp, both childhood emigrants of the Russian Empire's Jewish diaspora. And it turns out, unsurprisingly yet totally shockingly, that I have an entire extended family in and around the NYC area that I don't know.
I am lucky that one of them, my second cousin in New Jersey named Jay, has put some serious effort over the years into researching our family. He created and maintains a family tree that I accidentally stumbled upon in its skeletal stage maybe eight years ago in a then primitive google search of my own name. As technology has become more advanced, and most everyone living on that family tree has joined Facebook, more photos, facts and ephemera have been made available.
Gussie's father, Schloime Breslavsky, is memorialized as the namesake of an extended family gathering that my father remembers attending as a child. According to the tree:
In 1916, motivated by the death of his wife Esther, Louis Gratz, his sons Isadore, Solomon, & Michael, and 15 other members of the family joined together to form the Schloime Family Society. The Society initially gathered 10 times a year and over the course of the next 42 years came together 290 times to celebrate and support the family in whatever ways they could. After that meetings became increasing less frequent.

My father was but a twinkle in my grandmother Ruth's eye when THIS was the menu at one of them.


Also according to the tree, Max was a paper box manufacturer and Gussie was a dressmaker, a ribbon factory employee and the proprietor of a hotel in the Catskills called the BranLip, from which this card seemingly also exists. Cryptic!

Apr 15, 2011

Apr 14, 2011


i haven't been to a lot of live art since being in nyc, mostly because i work a lot, but most of what i have seen has been largely uninspiring. i bet this kid will be making some good shit in a decade. he also makes me wonder what my brother and i would have been doing in the early nineties if we'd had youtube and a camcorder. scary, maybe.

Apr 12, 2011

THE MOON RISES IN THE BADLANDS













It's hard to believe I left Portland six months ago, but life in NYC seems entirely regular now - I can direct a taxi around with the best of 'em. We live in a loft in Bushwick in a neighborhood filled with secret factories, open space and ample parking, surrounded by comparatively few people who make comparatively few dollars. I work in the East Village at a tiny restaurant called Prune, and am lucky to have two of my close friends from Portland, Lauren and Susan, there working beside me. Once the initial shock of the incessant honking and gratuitous expenses gave away, I have found it quite normal to spend $10 on fresh juice, to be at the tailor with a celebrity, to see only my coworkers and boyfriend for weeks at a time. I spent several months also working at a small natural wine bar in Crown Heights called Thirst and interning for fashion designer Caitlin Mociun. I have been cooking Japanese food, collecting ceramics, waited three hours for the best pizza and had food poisoning twice. When Lauren and Nialls look out their bedroom window on E. 12th St. they see the Empire State Building, perfectly framed in the glass. When I exit my subway stop across the river and walk the block to my apartment there it also stands, perfectly framed, flanked by the buildings on either side.

I have allowed myself these six months to adjust, to absorb, to decompress. The game is on, however. I have a show in July back in Portland at Nationale, and Jess is coming to New York next month to, among many other things, work on it with me. The wheels turn.

COLOR STORY





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