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The Times Travel section covers Art Basel Miami Beach and the satellite fairs that will invade Miami next week. There's so much going on that the director of Art Miami advises visitors to "make a spreadsheet and write in what shows they want to see and hours and locations in order to plot their course." If you're not familiar with the spectacle that's Miami Basel, it's not your typical open studio weekend. For proof, check out the list of event sponsors. (Think NetJets, Cartier & UBS.)
If you're one of the lucky tens of thousands who'll be there, make sure to visit the Aqua Wynwood satellite fair and stop by Traywick Contemporary. Lots of great work's been packed up and shipped for your visual pleasure; tell the wonderful gallerist I sent you.
Our beloved Tivo Series 1 kicked the bucket this week, dying a wheezing, whining, hard-drive clicking death after more than seven years of reliable service.*
Normally I'm not the type to mourn the passing of a device -- after all, how many have I willingly tossed recycled in the same period? But there's something to be said for that simple, well-designed box that changed the way we watch television. It paused while we went for popcorn, treated us to the entire back catalog of Sports Night, reliably delivered hundreds if not thousands of hours of season passes week after week, and kept us sane and entertained during countless 3am feedings.
Rest in peace, old friend. The house may be quieter without the constant whine of your tired, old, underpowered and undersized hard drive, but trust us -- we'll miss you.
* Don't panic, though, we have a Series 2 in the living room; the Series 1 was the luxurious second Tivo that lately was responsible for recording endless episodes of Arthur and Mickey's Clubhouse. Sorry, kids.
Martin Puryear
Originally uploaded by Anile P
As if I needed another excuse for a trip to New York, there's the Puryear exhibition at MoMA. Tyler Green's been doing a series of posts at Modern Art Notes putting Puryear in perspective; today's post is about the connection between Puryear's sculpture and minimalist painting. I'm an unabashed fan of minimalism (surprise!) and loved this sentence in Green's post: "Of course to this day Puryear's sculptures are reductive, almost tidy in their banishment of anything even potentially, remotely extraneous."
Slate's Mickey Kaus on the cop out of covering candidate "electability."
"Who's electable" is a Neutral Story Line--it seemingly doesn't require reporters and publications to take stands or sides. You can write dozens of "Is Hillary Electable?" stories without letting on what you think about, say, government-guaranteed health care. It's harder to write "Will Hillary be a Good President?" without doing that.
From Katherine Boehret's review of the Wildpad:
The pad, from WildCharge Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. (www.wildcharge.com), eliminates the messy tangle of wires that many people struggle with each time they want to charge their portable devices. But more to the point, it turns charging a gadget into something that happens in the background rather than an active task. And it spares you from that nagging question: Did I remember to plug my phone or iPod or BlackBerry in before going to sleep?
Thank GOD charging my phone is now something that happens in the background. I can't tell you how much mental energy I've wasted over the years on that incredibly active task.
So while the tech types commence with the time honored tradition of eating of their young, a couple of notes on why I want a Kindle. Maybe not this Kindle, but a Kindle.
So those are all the rational reasons. The slightly less rational reason is that a Kindle will let me hide my habits. Kindle will let me buy and read books without having to worry about where they're gonna get shelved after the fact...or how they'll be perceived while I'm reading them. Just imagine -- I could finally indulge my long-standing curiosity about romance novels and devour 10 or 12 of them in a row without having a single one show up in my bookshelf or in my bookbag. On the outside, it looks like I'm catching up on the latest in linguistic pshychology, while on the inside I'm enjoying the latest bodice-ripper from J.R. Ward. And no one but me -- and Amazon, and all of the trusted third parties my purchase history is shared with -- has to know.
