I’m working now from an office on the twenty-eighth floor of a building on Forty Second Street just west of Fifth Avenue.  From the south-facing window I can see a bit of Bryant Park and beyond that, mid-block on 40th Street, the American Standard Building (formerly the American Radiator Building and now the Bryant Park Hotel).  Built by Raymond Hood and Andre Foulihaux in 1924, it’s been overshadowed by its taller, younger and prettier neighbor, the Empire State Building.

From the sidewalk the Standard Building’s elaborate stonework and gilt are dank and oppressively fancy.  But from the office window the building seems stately and finely dressed.  It’s gold-tipped crown captures light on even the dreariest mornings.  Like many first generation skyscrapers, it was meant to be seen from above and afar.

When I was young my mother told me that red was my signature color.  So it’s no surprise that when we hit the boutiques along lower Broadway to look for boots she pulled a pair of classic Cherry Red Dr. Martens off the shelf and asked me to try them on.

Dr. Martens have shed their counter-cultural image.  They’re no longer worker shoes or punker shoes, and are produced in all sorts of insane and unnecessary variations (flowered, plaid, metallic, high-heeled).  The Cherry Red ten-hole, one of boot’s original styles, is a darkened red, not an obvious, look-at-me red.  The shade accentuates the piecing and stitching, details that are lost on the black boots, and complements the clear rubber sole and yellow stitching.  It’s the most elegant version of the boot.

One evening at dusk, to research an upcoming article, I toured the Otto Kahn Mansion on East 91st Street.  The financial baron’s house, built in 1918, was designed by architects J. Armstrong Stenhouse and C. H. Gilbert in a somewhat restrained, neo-classical style inspired by the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.  I was suitably impressed by all the things I should have been impressed with: the immaculate French limestone facades, the vaulted and frescoed library ceiling, the raised patio overlooking Central Park, and the pretty, pagoda-like elevator cab.  But what struck me the most was how dark the interiors were and how the darkness diminished my spirits.

Elaine Scarry has written with supreme elegance about the light bulb, and how it answered a deep human desire to see and live differently.  I’m wondering how the light bulb changed architecture, that is, how a building designed with the memory of candles and gaslight might be more shadowed, and less obliging, than a building designed after the advent of electric lighting.  The Kahn mansion was wired for electricity, but it still has the imprint of a building that was designed to be moved through at night only slowly, with apprehension.

My friend Natasha is visiting India for the first time and emailing postcard-ready images of palm tree-lined beaches, rainbow-colored bungalows, and cows roaming the street.  But none of it conjures India for me like this happy, dopey painting from a slideshow of Indian street art compiled by graphic designer Meena Kadri.  I like everything about it: the pre-Renaissance perspective, the orangey colors, the girl’s crazy hairdo, and her mannish, moonish face.

The painter commissioned to make a sign for the roadside phone booth (they’re called, alarmingly, STD’s) that’s being advertised probably wasn’t given complete instructions but just told to make something attention-grabbing.  So he imagined this girl having a conversation with a friend.  The simplicity and exuberance of the message shine right through.