Years ago I traveled into the city each day from southern Connecticut on Metro North.  Many of my co-commuters carried the New York Times with them in the morning and the New York Post at night.  The Times was for work and the Post was for pleasure.  It’s a distinction that’s reinforced by the tablet versions of these two newspapers.  The tablet edition of the Times is supremely elegant graphically; there’s a great deal of light and space on each screen.  But the links to almost all the articles – whether blurbs or features – are formatted in identical little squares with identical fonts.  There’s no clear hierarchy in the graphics to tell you what’s important to read.  And you can’t eye adjacent headlines and photos peripherally, as you can in the print edition, and circle through the paper this way.  It’s real work reading the day’s news items thoroughly on a tablet.

The New York Post, on the other hand, has developed a tablet version of their paper that preserves a great deal of the pleasure you get from reading it physically.  The splash page is simply a digital version of the print edition’s front page, with the same bad graphics and desperate puns (“Zoo-ccotti Park”), and the rest of the paper follows suit.  The tablet edition is an almost literal page-to-screen translation of the physical edition, with different news items, headlines and photographs crowded onto the same page. You can scroll up and down each column of print individually, which seems, somehow, more newspaper-like than swiping or tapping.  The  headlines (“He Woke Up from A Coma - Gay,” “Herm Made Her Squirm”) are rendered in the same monstrous, irregular fonts as in the print edition.  And there’s a navigation bar at the bottom that makes it easy to flip back and forth.  It’s the same trashy fun as the tabloid.

In windswept, granite-paved plazas across the country, metal sculptures by Alexander Calder preside like benevolent monsters.  It’s a shame these works possess so little of the charm that the sculptor’s smaller pieces have.  That charm overpowers at the new exhibit at Pace on 57th Street, Calder 1941.  The galleries are filled with pieces Calder completed that year, all with the signature spinning wire arms and medallions, and all scaled intimately.  The smallest pieces are the size of water pitchers, and the largest are just taller than a man.  Each one is light in form and in spirit.  Visiting the gallery was like walking through a garden.

These pieces, particularly the tabletop ones, have a toy-like quality that makes one want to get close to them.  The gallery guard issued three separate warnings to my friend and me while we were there, and he seemed especially harried, as if he’d been overextended since the exhibit opened.  What’s the appeal of these small pieces?  From every angle the sculptures take on a different aspect, so that it’s almost criminal to show them in a single photograph.  As one circles them, the experience is cinematic more than sculptural.  And, from every angle, the thin wire and flat metal shapes are strongly graphic, with delicate asymmetries gives them a personal feeling.  These sculptures feel like they’ve been drawn in the air.

When tap dancer Maurice Chestnut took the stage at City Center this weekend, dressed in black jeans and a t-shirt, he looked like a college student stepping in from off the street.  And when he got to work, along with two other young tappers, performing a piece called Floating, he looked like he was doing something as unremarkable as walking.  While his feet slipped around frenetically, his upper body displayed preternatural ease.  It was only the sounds that his feet was making – the intricate, impossibly fast, speech-like runs of criss-crossing taps – that conveyed the complexity and virtuosity of the dance. 

Like ballet, this kind of dance makes actions that require tremendous physical effort look easy.  It makes demands on the body, and at the same time obscures its stubborn physicality.  The performance reminded me of this photo, by Henry Leutwyler, of the sole of one of Michael Jackson’s bedazzled, banged-up Capezios.  Someone’s written his name right on the leather in grade-school lettering with a ball point pen.  Who else could this shoe belong to?  Michael wasn’t a traditional tapper, but he was, like Chestnut, a very serious dancer.  The photograph is testimony to all the work that goes on behind the magic.

A few years ago I took a friend who was visiting from Europe, a very sophisticated lady, into the Anthropologie store near Union Square.  She stepped inside, looked around, and said, “Get me out of here."  The tweeness of the place and the products made her cringe.  She’d be happy to read the piece in last Sunday’s Times announcing that the craze for all things "authentic” is over.  That piece focuses on home furnishings, but I think the whimsical, hand-made aesthetic it describes has been bad for architecture, fashion, and graphic design too.  I’m tired of seeing mass-produced goods that are heavily crafted and poorly designed.  Bone china that’s prettily asymmetrical, hand-knitted scarves with nubby flaws, delicate glassware with artful splotches, and letter press cards with off-center motifs.  And, everywhere one turns, there are cats and owls and leafless trees.  What is it with the leafless trees?  While the aesthetic is fading, chains like Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters seem determined to keep it alive.

Another friend, an architect, observes that this “authentic” is “not so much about authenticity, as much as it is about downplaying our materialistic consumer inclinations by camouflaging them in thrift shops and ‘feel good’ pieces."  In addition, the aesthetic is about strengthening a buyer’s sense of their own creativity, as if buying something with a hand-crafted look is as good as making something with one’s own hands.  When I was a kid I did Shaker Makers, latch hook rugs, tie dye, decoupage, macrame, and counted cross stitch.  I loved working with my hands, and these pastimes gave the simple satisfaction of making things, however inconsequential they were.  It wasn’t art but it was something.  Now all a person has to do to feel crafty is to buy a cat pillow.  In these trying times, why don’t we want to make that pillow ourselves?