NY missive no 183 – Fashion Institute of Technology, and “multiple pieces we can play with”

JNH, inspired by “Stranger Things”, has recently become interested in acting. This January he started classes on Saturday mornings at The Barrow Group in Manhattan. It’s near the 28th Street flower markets where we bought the pussy willow branches for C and my wedding, and near 333 Seventh Avenue where my office was when I first moved to New York. So bringing JNH here is like walking through memories. Those memories are seen through a lens of the pandemic – a fine, hazy film that shifts the way things look in retrospect but in ways that are not entirely clear yet, nor should they be.

Today, I spotted the costumes on display through the windows at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Their bright splashes of color are in stark contrast to the modernist gray slabs of the building itself. After dropping JNH off, I went to check them out. All the installations are created by students or teachers at FIT.

There’s “Walking Palm” by Woolpunk, a glorious spindly, stretching tree draped with mossy and occasionally shiny wool. On her website, Woolpunk explains: “Walking Palm is inspired by the tree on the verge of extinction which can be found in the Amazonian Rainforest. The tree has the amazing ability to re-root itself using stilt roots which is the ultimate sign of resilience.” There’s something of a contradiction in that; if it is so resilient, why is it on the verge of extinction, but that just makes you root for it even more.

Woolpunk's Walking Palm

There are breathtaking dresses by Esther Yitao, constraining and liberating at the same time, the wire of the dresses shaping and extending the forms of the women/mannequins who wear them.

Esther Yitao Li, Supima Collection

Esther Yitao Li, Sketch lineup of the "Distortion" collection

Melanie Reim found her collection of shoes in a closet during the pandemic. She decided to draw them one by one, accompanied by their story – stories of buying them, of wearing them, of the places where she was and the people she was with when doing so. “I am a fraction of the way through,” her exhibition statement says, “determined to continue, even as the world opens up, and it will be time for shoe shopping again.”

Melanie Reim, Shoe Stories

And there’s Anabella Bergero’s installation of dresses that emerged from a four-step exploration of the formation of her identity in Argentina and Mexico: old family photographs, including from the Argentinean village where her father was born, dress markets in Mexico where she had shopped for quinceanera accessories, wooden folk masks, and an indigenous festival in Oaxaca. 

“This project was building space for different configurations of identify by first acknowledging that we are not this monolith of how we were born. We have multiple pieces we can play with,” she says.

Anabella Bergero, Constructing Identities

Pieces do not always fit neatly together. Sometimes some are more in focus than others. That is certainly one thing that the pandemic has done, shaken pieces, set them adrift, broken them up or soldered them together, and we can respond - or not - as we feel is right in any given moment, or just watch, and reflect.

New York missive no 43 - Windy walk, dogs, and inspiring people

Two sensations from last Thursday. In the evening, putting back on the same warm socks I’d just worn for a work-out at the gym. Should have been disgusting but was strangely comforting. And in the morning, a wonderfully frantic winter wind that blew me about on a walk down the Hudson to work – or at least, from 109th to 50th, before I had to succumb to the subway. The water was whipped up choppy, the boats on the 79th street pier bobbed like horses at their bits and there weren’t many people around except for dedicated joggers and walkers of happy dogs. I arrived at work with witch-like hair.

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There were a lot of posh dogs posing about this week on the stretch of Seventh Avenue just North of the office. There was a perfectly clipped Bedlington, a proud Briard oblivious to admiring crowds and svelte greyhounds rippling with pedigree. They looked superior to the people milling around them in their clumpy winter coats. I later realized that the reason for this canine conglomeration was Westminster dog show (the winner: a Sussex Spaniel called Stump).

People so love dogs in this city, and while I used to find that bizarre for an island with so little green space for them to run about in, I’ve come to think it’s precisely because of the lack of space that people love their dogs. They re-connect their owners with nature – giving them a reason to get out and find it, or just rubbing it in their faces with a shake of a shaggy head and a wet lick, with the thump of tails and paws on a wooden floor. That love, of course, can lead to (usually) harmlessly irrational behaviour. T and A, who hosted S’s birthday party last weekend in their expansive Chelsea apartment (too expansive in my view, because however big the party people always feel conscious of saggy pockets of empty space floating around them), spend more on conditioner for the fur of their proportionately expansive, immaculate Rottweiler as they do for their own hair. TE, at a KBG Bar reading by a quartet of Writer’s Studio teachers, read her poignant and hilarious story about a man’s love for his Black Labrador “Bird”. And Ch described how the other day running in Central Park she almost stumbled over a famous elderly actor, as he scooped up his dog’s turd. Their eyes met briefly, they smiled, and she jogged on (of course I’ve forgotten the actor’s name, me being so crap with famous people’s names…pun kind of intended).

[Added later: Ah, just remembered, not an actor but a musician, it was Lou Reed. Re-christened Poo Reed by Ch].

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A sense of priority totally recalibrated this week by the stories of four inspiring people. One of the 50 people killed in the Buffalo aeroplane crash on Thursday was Alison des Forges, an advocate for justice for the Rwanda genocide. As Ken Roth says in Human Rights Watch’s tribute to her, "She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist - principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people.” Journalist Michael Kavanagh says in his Slate article on des Forges: "The most common criticism of Alison's work, particularly on Rwanda, is that it sometimes failed to take into account the unique political and security needs of a country just emerging from conflict. The criticism is not unfounded, but it misses the point. The job of a human rights worker is not the same as that of a politician who needs to make unenviable compromises between security and justice. A human rights worker is in the business of giving voice to the voiceless, uncovering injustice, and advocating for its redress. Alison Des Forges—brilliant, indefatigable, and, above all, passionate [him and Ken Roth must have been talking re different kinds of passion...] —reveled in this."

Then today in the gym I caught by chance a documentary on Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two African American athletes who gave the black power salute from the podium when they won the gold and bronze 200m medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. On their return to the US they received a torrent of death threats and it’s only relatively recently that their bravery has been recognised. The documentary wove accounts of the build-up to their salute, with its aftermath, with their moving return to the stadium in Mexico last year.

And just now I’ve posted on our website an article about Ma Jun, the Chinese environmentalist who persistently, patiently and effectively exposes polluting companies in China and pushes them to clean up their act.

New York missive no 33 - Zarela's, and Chelsea art

In New York stories just present themselves, there’s no need to invent them. I arrived at my writing class last Thursday, as always a little late, to find everyone in mid conversation about the teacher’s selection of a Doula (his wife’s due to give birth on the day of our 4 Dec class). Two have made the final shortlist: a 6’1’’ tall former marine, and a Norwegian former potato farmer. What made them decide to become Doulas? What skills from their former professions do they apply in their new one?

Sleeping patterns are a bit skewed this weekend. Mexican food at Zarela’s in midtown East on Friday night with Si and A. The restaurant’s namesake moved to New York with her two young twins after a failed marriage in Texas and opened it with $20,000 of savings to bring good, regional Mexican dishes to Manhattan and beyond – she succeeded. Somehow it was 3am by the time I got to bed, then was up again at 6 to head into the office for our last 2 interviews with candidates for the Dakar-based Francophone Africa post. After a gym work-out to sweat out the sleepiness met S to gallery-hop along W21 and 22 Streets in Chelsea where every second building’s been converted into an airy space for contemporary art, and the buildings in-between into apartments only crazy people can afford or shops like Comme des Garcons, that only crazy people can afford. Then girly natter over beer and broccoli soup at La Graine cafe. S has moved out of her Weehawken Street box room now (to move in with her soon-to-be-husband, which makes sense), but the others are still hanging on in there…ok yes I was just a bit crazy to have moved out when I did. Then homewards for what I thought would be a nap before a Saturday night out but turned out to be an epic 13 hour slumber…

This morning made progress buying an amusing collection of items that Ra wants me to send to Chennai (he'd forgotten to put the order in before I left for India). A certain variety of Old Spice High Endurance Deodorant; a Mr Clean magic eraser (?!); Paul Mitchell's Instant Moisture Daily Shampoo to, apparently, zap the damage done by the Tamil Nadu humidity. And now heading to South Street Seaport. Given the Fulton fish market's no longer there, we're going to get a taste for it vicariously through the rosy prism of a reminiscent art exhibition.

New York missive no 20 - Art, branding

Am now in Cambridge, Mass., prior to speaking on a panel at the UN Global Compact US Network tomorrow at Harvard Business School. Spent yesterday late afternoon sitting by the bank of the Charles river in the Spring sunshine, pulling together ideas for my presentation amid that rarefied atmosphere shared by old-university towns: rowers gliding over the water, birds gliding through the air, students gliding on bikes or in running shoes over the grass discussing anything from the boiling points of various liquids to poverty reduction strategies for developing countries.

And am currently in the Cambridge equivalent of S’nice café, "Darwin's", surrounded by others tapping away at laptops, skimming through mountainous Sunday papers and scribbling in journals.

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Kicked myself for not making more of a schmoozing and insight-gleaning opportunity, when I Googled the guy whose 50th birthday party H, J and I found ourselves at in Washington DC. My sleepiness, combined perhaps with the fact that an artist there had hung a wall-sized painting caricaturing Clinton and Obama as Warhol and Basquiat in their iconicly photographed boxing-glove pose, and the fact that the guy’s new(ish) young wife used to be McCain’s communications director, meant I superficially presumed most of the people in the room were Republicans who, as I wasn't in inquisitive journalist mode, wouldn’t be that fascinating to get into conversation with. Yet I only registered after the Google search that the birthday boy was Ronald Brownstein, former political editor of the Los Angeles Times and now political director of Atlantic Media Company who published his sixth book in November, called “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America”. I could have no doubt learned a few things journalism- or election- related had I spoken with him. Having said that, being quizzed by a curious English girl was probably the last thing he wanted to do at his party, and H and I still passed the hour or so that we were there most productively – nattering, tucking into the delicious spread of food and knocking back the pear martinis.

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Friday evening went to an art show opening that actually had art in it. Unlike the one that P and I had attempted to attend a couple of Thursdays ago. We had turned up at 11ish at a venue teetering on the edge of Chelsea by West Side Highway expecting to find Sa’s paintings on display - some of which had been festooning the rooves of 11 Weehawken Street - and the after-show party in full swing. There was a party inside, of sorts, but no art. The walls were draped with white sheets. And along one side of the room were a few straight rows of chairs. It turned out that Sa had cancelled her show after one fight too many with the woman directing a production of David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture” with which Sa was supposedly sharing the space (taking the paintings down for the duration of the play, which apparently was long). So the people still hanging around were the cast, their family and friends. We stayed anyway, drinking free champagne, eating blackberries, chatting to the cast a bit and to the gay barman who’d been invited to serve the drinks in return for $20 and enough free alcohol to fire him up for the rest of the night in a club downtown, where a guy he’d been dating was going to be DJ-ing. All very surreal and all very New York.

This Friday though, there was art. It was by R’s Colombian friend J: abstract arial views of cities hung in a SoHo 4th-floor space more like a string of little offices than a gallery. That was followed by a drink at Café Noir and some dancing at an exceptionally cheesy salsa place called Sequoia on South Street Seaport that by the time we arrived had regressed from salsa to reggaeton...

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Michael Conroy’s recent book “Branded” describes how the importance of brands to companies is a powerful tool in encouraging them to improve their social and environmental conduct. Branding’s always been crucial for companies. Some, like Coca-Cola, are their brand. It seems that branding is now increasingly important to countries too.

The US is wondering whether brand America can recover from the damage done to its international reputation by the Bush administration. Or whether it will remain forever tarnished in many people’s minds even if the next administration tries to turn things around, just as Nike has had a tough time shaking off its sweatshop image despite the fact it’s now doing more than a lot of apparel companies to reduce labour abuses. Or maybe the appeal and idea of America will survive the reputational damage and people will continue to flock to its shores in pursuit of a better life, in the same way that they continued to buy Nike products despite concerns of child labour in its supply chain: I don’t think the sweatshop allegations made much of a dent in Nike’s bottom line.

Then there’s France: a brand which resonated authenticity, quality and sophistication with a significant splash of arrogance, yet which was beginning to look a little dusty and antiquated. Enter Sarkozy with his re-branding exercise. It's going disastrously wrong, à la expensive management consultancy-overhauls that fall on their face because the consultants are more enamored of their own prestige than the prestige they promise their client.

And brand China. A brash, brave, new-kid on the block brand internationally, unafraid to flaunt its somewhat naughty reputation, using the Olympics as a skys-the-limit coming out party, but now realizing that it too will need to give at least lip service to improving its human rights and environmental record to keep the protestors at bay.

People supposedly grow to look like their pets. Perhaps these national branding efforts say something about the increasingly snug relationship between political and corporate interests, and point to the corporatization of international relations. Or maybe I’m just pulling out a few details to identify a trend that is not really there, all the better to package and sell my argument.