At a formal dinner I attended recently, a woman in a backless, black Madame X type of gown left the table and returned a few minutes later in her fur coat.  You see, she had gotten the chills.  After we’d retired to the lounge some young men lifted the coat – a gorgeous, fluttering smoke-grey alpaca – and modeled it for jokey photos.  They were stylish in the ironically nerdy way, with clipped beards and horn-rimmed glasses.  Brandishing tumblers of scotch, with the coat thrown over their slim-fitting tuxedos,  each one looked effortlessly (and, perhaps, unwittingly) glamorous.

It takes a special kind of man to wear a fur.  GQ, an authority in such matters, recommends against it.  There was a time in the early twentieth century when it was socially acceptable for men to wear fur.  (Picture F. Scott Fitzgerald at a Princeton tailgate in a full-length beaver skin.)  But this was very simply to keep them warm.  Jim Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and other rock stars wore furs in the 1960’s, with a strong bohemian, androgynous edge.  Joe Namath wore furs through the 1970’s, as if headed out to the Playboy Mansion, although, perhaps to his credit, he never seemed entirely comfortable about it.  The men who wear furs best today are athletes and rock stars, who are best able the requisite hyper-masculine swagger.  For most rappers, like 50 Cent and Sean Combs, it’s just another cliche, along with private jets and Cristal.  But Kanye West takes it to another level, wearing full-length furs with astonishing ease, all about town, over his jeans and sneakers, and open in front, so that it’s perfectly clear he’s not trying to stay warm.  Like the young men in the grey alpaca, he’s not trying too hard, and he’s enjoying it.  A lot.

There’s a moment in fourteenth century painting, in Giotto, when human emotions suddenly surface.  Figures are no longer just standing in groups, they’re looking to one other.  And they no longer possess a blissful indifference; they’re frightened and despairing, elated and surprised.  They reach out to one another, so desperately and so tentatively, with outstretched limbs and contorted faces that the artist seems to be rendering for the first time ever.  Is what we’re witnessing an art historical advance or a psychological one?  That is, is this the first representation of emotions in western art, or the invention of emotion itself?

I felt a similar shift, although on a much smaller scale, at an exhibit of work by the early twentieth century sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.  The statues, all female busts and nudes, are starting to stir.  These are conventional figural works, finely-proportioned and well-observed .  (You sense that the artist was looking at a real, live, flesh-and-blood woman while he modeled the clay.)  And yet each one is also slightly perturbed, averting the eyes.  That slight movement disturbs, perhaps more so than the outright emotionalism of Kathe Kollwitz’s sculpture and the inward, abstracted rage of Alberto Giacometti’s.  The works on display were completed by Lehmbruck between 1911 and 1918, during World War I, when the artist was living in Germany.  Yet they’re suspended in a pre-modern innocence.  While each woman the artist has sculpted know it’s impossible, she tries to maintain a classical repose.

My heart skipped a beat last when I stumbled across an article called The Case for Saving Ugly Buildings.  I wanted to learn what  makes a building ugly, and what makes an ugly building valuable.  Instead I learned that landmark preservation laws in the United States generally single out buildings for their “singularity” and “irreplaceability” without regard for their utility, sustainability and aesthetics.  And I learned that many cities, like New York, enacted preservation laws at a time (in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) when it was already too late to preserve beloved Victorian and International Style structures, but just in time to preserve brutalist ones, which are typically very difficult to maintain, to renovate, and to look at.  Maybe they should have called the article The Case for Saving Brutalist Buildings.

Brutalism was a movement that, obviously, didn’t put too much stock in appearances.  Rendered in hulking, windowless, raw concrete forms, brutalist monuments often look less like buildings than futuristic ruins.  Some, like Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture Building, are confrontational in image but thrilling in spatial and sculptural character.  Others aren’t.  The article cites the AT&T Long Lines building at 33 Thomas Street in New York City as an example of the latter.  It’s a building that’s singled out by novelist Teju Cole too, in Open City.  The hero of that book, who wanders sadly and endlessly through the city, imagines workers inside the windowless tower pushing heavy carts through muffled, shadowed hallways, distressed from the lack of light and air.  (Actually, the building houses equipment for phone switching.)  Although its concrete frame is clad in reddish granite, the building makes no concessions to good manners.  Swallowing an entire block near the heart of TriBeCa, it’s blank facades have a monstrous, sullen presence.  But during the day the Long Lines building possesses a kind of laconic American heroism, like the Hoover Dam.  And at night, its hard edges softened, it has the quiet mystery of a Hugh Ferriss rendering.  One of the pleasures of New York is the democracy of the streets.  Everything fits inside them, even those buildings that make no effort to please the eye or the body.

The Superbowl XLVI party I attended was, really, a Madonna viewing party.  We had the highest expectations for the halftime show and weren’t disappointed.  Madge entered the stadium to perform Vogue Cleopatra-like, in a chariot drawn by a fleet of helmeted, half-naked centurions.  She was in a metal headdress by Philip Treacy and a short black dress with gold trimmings by Givenchy.  Styled by Bea Akerlund, the costume looked like something Bob Mackie would have whipped up for Cher forty years ago, over-the-top and also very pretty.  Then Madonna did some quick wardrobe changes to transform into a high school cheerleader for Give Me All Your Lovin’ and, finally, a church choir soloist for Like a Prayer.  Throughout the thirteen-minute set she looked great and sounded great and, in high heels, on a precarious stage, executed some rather complicated moves.  It was a tremendous show.  But everyone at the party agreed that she should have stuck with the ancient goddess theme all the way through.  During the game’s fourth quarter, long after the Material Girl had left the field, and when a Giants victory was far from assured, someone asked out loud, “Where did all those gladiators go?”

These ancient Roman stylings fit Madonna beautifully for a lot of reasons.  They channel D. W. Griffith, Liz Taylor as Cleopatra (the diamond earrings the singer was wearing were purchased from the movie star’s estate), the movie Gladiator, and Madonna’s own Italian heritage.  And, as it’s deployed here, the style is pure kitsch, a license for fantasy, a conglomeration of historic Greek, Roman and Egyptian details that most of us only really know through movies.  And it’s a style that’s not typically tapped by pop stars.  Madonna’s headdress, with its gleaming, pointed horns, looks more like one worn by an Egyptian god than an Egyptian queen, and she’s wearing it with a gladiatrix skirt, fishnets, and hooker boots.  She’s channeling everything, splendidly, at once.  I only wish that she’d stuck with this imagery — let’s call it Mishmash of Ancient Civilizations — through the show.  Of all the styles she’s adopted throughout her career, this one might be the most perfect fit for her heroic energy and ambitions.