when i graduated from college in 1990, i gave up black. it came to me in an epiphany one day when i opened up my closet and saw nothing but typical teenage despondence. and so for decades afterward i turned my back on black, i hardly ever went near the pigment except in the Spring of 1997 when Tom Ford and Donna Karan had practically every discerning client of mine desperately begging for it. then sometime around 2009, in the midst of a seemingly pointless never-ending war, the global economic and financial-systems meltdown, and persistent corruption in the government of the most powerful nation in the world, somehow black became appealing to me again. last year, in 2010, nearly every single article of clothing i purchased was black. go figure. if this brutal winter ever lets up, it might be time to live in color again.
back in late December, we had a major snowstorm. and it was a mess. there were buses backed up for dozens of blocks all the way up Fifth Ave. and everybody complained about what a disaster it was, the streets weren’t plowed for days in some cases. since i don’t have a car it really didn’t affect me that much, i generally walk everywhere anyway. so when everybody else got pissed, all i could think was: well, Mayor Bloomberg did say the city is toe-up, and apparently snow costs "a million dollars an inch." and then the mayor’s approval rating evidently went way down. and so the media joked that this time around he’d declared a "war on snow." (ha ha haa that’s pretty funny actually.) well, we must have won the war. it doesn’t seem that anyone is buried in avalanches today.
(i’m pretty sure the lost income to the city from all the snow-hobbled businesses actually ends up costing more than a million an inch but whatever.)
everybody always asks where i got this aviator "bomber" hat. at the little store that used to be on Houston St just west of La Guardia. they’re not there anymore. :(
spent one night in San Juan en route back home to NYC. the beaches are much nicer in Vieques. walked around and had dinner in Old San Juan, it’s a beautiful town.