I just updated my internet setup and replaced my graphite-colored Apple Base Station, vintage 1999, with a faster, smaller wireless router.  But I like my old device too much to get rid of it.  Unlike my new router, which disappears into the sea of cords and plugs around it, the Base Station looks like an instrument that does something important.  And it doesn’t have the hyper-modern gloss that so many Apple products have.  Its shape evokes simultaneously mountain, UFO and silicone breast implant.

The Base Station’s design feels naive in relation to the next generation of Mac routers, which were designed to look like plastic dinner plates, and the current routers, which are designed to look like phone rechargers.  My Base Station has a coat of glitter beneath its cool acrylic surface.  And when it’s plugged in, and its three green lights are blinking at staggered frequencies, you can sense information streaming back and forth in the air.  Perhaps it’s such an appealing object because it tries to illustrate exactly what it does.

Patti Smith begins “Just Kids,” her book about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, remembering the moment that she learned he was close to death.  To console herself she listens to a television broadcast of “Tosca” and opens an art book to a reproduction of “Le Yeux Clos” by Odillon Redon.  The drawing, mute and mystical, shows a woman slipping off into a dream-state that’s both pleasurable and painful.

In the book Smith doesn’t dwell on the details of her affair with Mapplethorpe, but on their artistic partnership, a bond that steeled the young bohemians in their aesthetic convictions and set them on the paths of their extraordinary careers.  There are different ways to love another person and Smith and Mapplethorpe loved each other in art.  Smith offers a lovely description of them sitting up all night in their cramped Brooklyn apartment, side by side, filling notebooks with drawings.  It was Smith who supported Mapplethorpe until he was able to support himself.  And it was Mapplethorpe who strong-armed Smith into performing the music-poetry she was crafting.  They followed one another into the revery that’s required to do deeply creative work, while protecting one another in the real world.

I bought the hype for “Watch the Throne,” the much-publicized album by Jay-Z and Kanye West.  I mean, I loved the hype.  I ran to the “Watch the Throne” pop-up store in SoHo, although by the time I got there, two days after the opening, it was already over.  The custom-desecrated Maybach from the “Otis” video was gone.  All that was left inside was a stepladder and some cleaning supplies.  The “Otis” video has got the two men, in jeans and white shirts, taking apart the car with blowtorches and then dancing around in an empty lot while four models drive the car around them in circles.  At one point Kanye does a joyful pantomime of airplane with arms outstretched, leaning precariously to one side.  The music is great but, to be honest, I don’t like Jay-Z and Kanye singing together in the same song.  They’re entirely different characters and each time they switch voices it seems like the song is restarting.  John and Paul never sang together, did they?

The imagery of the video, directed by Spike Jonze, is classy, what with the Maybach, the high-fashion-looking models, the restrained costumes, and the minimalist scenario.  It was filmed in LA and it captures the city’s wide-open feeling and its bright daylight just right.  But I wanted something bigger.  These are the two most glamorous, grown-up men in rap, and two of the most deeply musical.  In that sense the CD’s embossed gold-colored foil cover, designed by Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tischi, is the most compelling emblem for the project.  Complex, dense, and shadowed, it’s modern baroque, and hints at what these two artists do best.

There’s a small exhibit of photographs at Peter Blum from atomic bomb tests the United States conducted in the 1940’s and 1950’s.  Only one photograph captures the low, geometric mushroom shape we’re used to seeing.  Instead the clouds here evoke, dreamily, a flying saucer, a jellyfish, a foam, a flower, a head of cauliflower.  Some are slender plumes, as high as 700 feet, that drift in one direction like trees bending towards sunlight.

Set in the Nevada desert and on small islands of the Pacific, the images are powerfully abstract.  Even in those scenarios that incorporate traces of life – palm trees, beach shacks, rock formations, spectators with dark shades sitting in rows of fold-out chairs – the scale of the explosions is surreal.  The US continued test explosions through the early 1960’s, long after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Some of the government photos here have been retouched with white paint to make the clouds more shapely, more palatable.  Taken by the scientists, the press, and by civilians, all the photos on display are of a piece: they capture the strangeness and enormity of the moment.