We All Scream for Goat Milk

Summer seems to suit Walter Youngblood handsomely. I meet him outside the Central Park Zoo and he is smiling and friendly despite the heat, wearing a highlighter green T-shirt, fedora, pinstriped pants, and a red cooler slung over his shoulder. I look to the cooler and know immediately what populates it: King Leche Cremes, the goat milk ice cream pops that Walter first debuted this summer.

Although the creation of King Leche Cremes marks Walter’s first foray into food startup entrepreneurship, he is no stranger to the New York City food world. Walter has been waiting tables for the better part of the twenty years he’s been living in the city, serving food for the likes of Wiley Defresne at WD-50, for Rick Bayless at Bar Americaine and, most recently, at the Good Fork in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Walter lives in East Harlem but is a native of Kansas City, where he can trace the origin of his love of ice cream to his large Missourian family. “I can taste it right in the front of my mouth,” he waxes nostalgic. “I can taste the cheap vanilla” of the ice cream his aunt would make for family gatherings. Read More

Shut Up & Read the Notes

So much music journalism is hyper-concerned with soundalikes, influences, and comparisons. And for good reason, really. Providing a reference point for readers creates an instant understanding between writer and reader. But this is quite the opposite of Boston-based trio Quilt’s approach to music. We met over coffee and pancakes recently at the East Village brunch-stitution, 7A, where I was able to learn more about the origins of their self-titled debut and one of my favorite releases of 2011.

Now, instead of keenly crafting my sprawling notes into a coherent, concise article, I’d rather you, the reader, experience it as I did. I kept looking at these notes trying to distill the experience into a consumable sound byte, but these short impressions represent the interview almost better than an article can. The band was a word-a-minute of super-fascinating genre theory and speculation on music criticism. It was interesting and enlightening. I had a great time. So, below, I present to you, my notes from the interview (nearly) unadulterated and raw as they came. Read More

Patterns with Purpose

It took a Terry Winter’s retrospective at the Whitney to help Kim Piotrowski put things into perspective. As a struggling pre-med student in college, Kim found herself shadowing the art student crowd on a regular basis. But it wasn’t until Winter’s exhibition that Kim finally decided it was time to hang up the lab coat and pick up the painter’s smock.

“That show changed me,” Kim explains in her City Island studio. “I couldn’t do organic chemistry anymore. I was horrible at it. I thought, how could I do this for the rest of my life?”

It was around the time of this major change that Kim’s father shared a National Geographic article on fractal geometry. Visually, she was drawn to the detailed, self-repeating patterns characterizing fractals. Conceptually, the prospect of maintaining some connection to the sciences even as she took the plunge into the fine arts was a reassurance. “I just started painting the fractals. All the while, I was attempting to blend the science and the art together so I wouldn’t forget one or the other.” Read More

Take Cover

On a rainy day in 2010, Yurika Nakazono and Marie Saeki watched the downpour through a nearby window, wrestling with the prospect of riding their bikes home without the appropriate outerwear. It was in that moment that duo decided to bring the idea of Terra New York to life. The chic raincoat company is defined by its classic styles fashioned out of semi-transparent, smoky-looking recycled TPU–a polyurethane material typically reserved for automotive instrument panels, inflatable rafts, medical devices, and other non-clothing uses.

Prior to that fateful rainy day, Yurika, Terra New York’s creative director, had been considering the concept for quite some time. “As long as it has been raining that I can remember, it has been on my mind,” she explains. “I have been working in fashion in Sweden, France, Japan, and New York, destroying beautiful accessories and clothes in the city rain on my way to meetings and events. I have been looking for the perfect outfit and never found anything to my liking.” Read More

Consider the Clasp

“I still don’t feel like I work in fashion,” Fay tells me. “In a sense, of course I do, because I make jewelry. But I never studied it, and before I started making it, I never thought I could be a part of it.”

Now working fulltime on her independent line from a studio in Greenpoint, Fay Andrada is enthralled by the process of creating staunchly unique and refined pieces of jewelry. In fact, it might be her high level of engagement with the creation of new pieces that makes her reluctant to self-describe as being “in fashion.”

“I really want to preserve the newness of the idea. I don’t present anything that I’m not super excited about. I’m really self-conscious about that, and I’m really picky about what I put out there. I don’t yet feel able to enthusiastically deliver ‘X’ amount of new ideas or styles a year in order to fulfill the seasonal cycle that the fashion industry operates on.”

Fay may term it as “pickiness,” but a more apt label might be integrity. Read More

Enlightened Adornments

Eco-jewelry. I suppose we think we know what that means–conjuring images of hemp bracelets donned by global-relations students. Or maybe that’s just me. But regardless of what we infer from the terminology, affixing environmentalism to our favorite adornments is, for the most part, an unnatural proposition.

Andy Lifschutz makes eco-jewelry. But you probably wouldn’t guess it from looking at his work and he certainly won’t be the first to tell you. “When i think of ‘eco-jewelry,’ I think of people using vintage watch pieces or old chains they got from estate sales. You know, people rummaging around and finding junk to string onto a necklace. I don’t think of it as people creating new designs that are every bit as ethical or recycled. What I do is eco-jewelry, but I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as modern, relevant art.”

Working primarily with reclaimed metals and stones found close to the earth’s surface (think: quartz), Andy’s work finds itself teetering between contemporary abstraction and enduring naturalism. Read More