very simple

When I was trying to figure out where to go this summer, I was debating between Portugal and Morocco, and then I found this trip that went to both places (plus a bit of Spain), and thought PERFECT! It was a great time, if it a bit hot and maybe a bit too rushed in each place (I would have loved an extra day in Lisbon in particular), but it was still quite the adventure. In total, we went to Madrid, Salamanca, Porto, Lisbon, Evora, Olhao, Seville, Tangier, Chefchaouen (the blue city), Volubilis (the most complete roman ruins in Morocco), Fes, Casablanca and Marrakech over about 13 days (the trip was technically 15 days, but that includes the day I arrived in Madrid, and the day I flew out of Marrakech at 6 in the morning). As always, there are too many pictures, but only really a few for each location. And, as always, click on the thumbnails to get the actual pictures and (some) description.

One of the few things I decided to do during this, the end of our second pandemic year, was actually go see the Jasper Johns exhibit at the Whitney. I got a membership to the museum in February 2020, the last time I went, and then, well, everything ended. So this is a tiny bit of full circle – deciding that my vaccinated and boosted self could brave Omicron for one day at a place that required vaccines, masks and social distancing to visit.

Fun Fact: Johns, who is still kicking it at 91, lives in the next town over from my parents, and my dad insists on saying “he lives right down the road”.

Also, this is some serious Americana.

Last month, after 18 months of pandemic, I finally took a trip. I ended up going to Greece in a bit of a roundabout fashion, due to my original trip to the US west getting cancelled (twice! once in 2020 and then again in 2021). All in all, Greece was a pretty nice backup plan. We traveled to a bunch of places, ate a ridiculous amount of food, watched a bunch of sunsets, and drank absurd amounts of wine.

we are living in interesting if…isolating…times. I’m relatively lucky in that I have a job that I can do from home (and that there’s still a job to do!) and that I don’t have to worry about how to suddenly home school several kids on top of trying to keep just myself alive. Right now my biggest issue day-to-day is that my cat is clearly annoyed with the fact that I am home ALL THE TIME. That and finding things to do while stuck at home during non-work hours that don’t involve getting sucked into hours of twitter nonsense or, well, eating. I like to sew, and I do needlepoint, but anything that complicated was overwhelming my pandemic-fried brain, so early on, when masks were in short supply, I decided to take some old scarves and some pillowcases and make my own face masks. It worked pretty well except that in the longer run, the scarf fabric was a bit too fragile to hold together after a multitude of washings and they started to fray. I still have a bunch, but they’re not gonna last for the long-haul that we’re now looking at. Plus, I was still bored. So I went searching online for fabric, and I discovered that I could get fun squares of cotton fabric for quilting that were the exact right size that I needed, and I made some more. I started out using the instructions in this youtube video, but after a while I started finding ways to make them a bit less raw-edged and fitted. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to post how I make them in case anyone else is bored out of their minds and wants to give it a try (or use that youtube video – it’s really useful for starting out!)

click on the thumbnails to find specific explanations.

yesterday, NYC officially ended our lockdown pause and entered phase 1 of reopening. Over the almost 90 days that I’ve been home since mid-march, I’ve collected photos that I never posted on instagram or elsewhere, and thought I would just round them up here, now that we’re very slowly emerging from our shells.

I’ve been trying to take walks early in the morning, before too many people are up and about, mostly on days where I have some other reason to leave my apartment (and it could be anything – if I had packages delivered the day before, a morning walk means my doorman puts them all together for me and I pick them up on my way back in the building after they’ve sat overnight. Today it was just that it was sunday and I needed some fresh air. So I grabbed my sneakers and my gloves (even though I planned on touching nothing) and my improvised face covering, and walked over to the park, where the flowers and trees don’t know there’s a pandemic and insist on blooming like it’s spring or something.

These are all just iPhone shots. Pictures were a bit of an afterthought until I saw the tulips.

(I realize I’m going to run out of these soon and I’m going to have to start just posting my backlog of random other stuff I’ve never gotten around to posting, but in the meantime, MORE ART!)

This week, I’m going a little further back in time. In the winter of 2018, the Whitney mounted a massive Warhol show that perfectly coincided with my time off from work for the holidays, so I spend a nice friday afternoon wandering among the crowds and the art (remember when we used to just wander among crowds?).

this week’s ‘art in the time before COVID-19’ is from a trip to the Museum of Modern Art immediately before we all started shutting down. The beginning of March, which was the beginning of public nervousness and social distancing, also coincided with some major art shows around the city and the opening of this fairly major show at the MoMA. My stepmom and I decided to venture out to this (rather than, say, theater, where I couldn’t at least run across the room from a coughing person), and we were some of the very few people to do so – A show like this would normally attract sold-out crowds and lines, but instead it was like a private viewing.

This was the last time I left my apartment for anything other than work (which became work-from-home a few days later) or essentials.

From the MoMA’s description of Judd’s work:

By the mid-1960s, Judd commenced his lifelong practice of using industrial materials, such as aluminum, steel, and Plexiglas, and delegating production of his work to local metal shops. With the help of these specialized fabricators, he developed a signature vocabulary of hollow, rectilinear volumes, often arranged in series. In the following years, “boxes,” “stacks,” and “progressions” continued as Judd’s principal framework to introduce different combinations of color and surface. Judd surveys the complete evolution of the artist’s career, culminating in the last decade of his life, when Judd intensified his work with color and continued to lay new ground for what ensuing generations would come to define as sculpture.

One week in to our new lives of living in social isolation, working-from-home, quarantining ourselves to protect the world from an ever more rapidly spreading pandemic, and trying to find slightly more productive things to do than just sitting on my couch and watching streaming TV all day (not having kids to wrangle right now is definitely making my individual situation much easier), I thought it was a good time to go through the massive backlog of photos I keep meaning to post and never get around to.

I thought I would start with some art from now shuttered museums around NY. First up…I went to the Vida Americana show at the Whitney in February. I don’t normally take a ton of photos of other peoples’ art, for a variety of reasons, up to and including that I can’t do the original art justice, but since no one can see the art except for online anymore, I thought i’d share the few pics I did take.

I was particularly taken with these two flower themed photos of women (the first is “Calla Lilly Vendor” by Alfredo Ramos Martinez and the second is “Flower Vendor” by Miguel Covarrubias):

next, the juxtaposition of these two images, the near painting named “Zapatistas” by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in front of an actual portrait of Zapata by Diego Rivera, was only possibly intentional given their placement on different walls.

Lastly, this is a recreation, given that the original was destroyed by Rockefeller and the actual recreation by Rivera is a mural in Mexico that cannot be moved, but it is, at minimum, a nice fuck you to see Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural recreated in the city where Rockefeller had it smashed to pieces (the official title is “Man, Controller of the Universe”).

I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to the NYC women’s march this year. Between the dueling group infighting last year, the focus on elections rather than just general “protest” this year, and the fact that it was going to be bitterly cold in New York today, I was wavering. But then I read about how the National Archives (the goddamn national archives) had “edited” (aka censored) official photos from the original women’s march to blur out criticism of the orange menace, and I just…well, there’s always something new to get me out the door. (yes, there’s a typo. no, twitter STILL doesn’t have an edit button)

I was debating going to this year’s match, but clearly SOMEONE needs to take photos that this piece of shit administration won’t alter to protect trump’s fragile ego. + https://t.co/7N7AKlwDCG

— sam (@verysimple) January 18, 2020

So anyway, here’s photos from this year’s march. it was bitterly cold, and it started snowing A LOT right in the middle, so that made it even more fun. but the National Archives can’t get their grubby, co-opted edit button on these.