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| Saturday, November 9, 2019 |
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| 9 min. reading |
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Suggestions for your senses,
every Saturday at 9 a.m. |
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Good morning!
This week, we watch The Apollo, HBO’s new Roger Ross Williams–directed documentary about the legendary Harlem theater; think tactility with a new book from Kinfolk and Norm Architects; talk gyokuro tea with expert Micah Spear; tune in to The Workspace of Tomorrow, a new podcast we’re producing in partnership with ROOM; and revel in the potent potpourri of Lewis Miller’s Flower Flash project.
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 On Ep. 25 of our Time Sensitive podcast, Spencer talks with filmmaker and artist Rashid Johnson, whose exhibition “The Hikers” opens on Nov. 12 at Hauser & Wirth’s Chelsea gallery. |
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One commonality shared by Michael Jackson, B.B. King, Diana Ross, and James Brown: They all did their thing at the Apollo. “If the United States is the big circle, inside of that is New York. Inside of New York, of course, is New York City. Inside of New York City, of course, is Harlem. And inside of Harlem is the Apollo theater,” journalist Herb Boyd says in HBO’s The Apollo, a new documentary about the historic epicenter of black cultural production, community-making, and artistic expression of more than 85 years.
Directed by Roger Ross Williams, the film traces the theater’s rich history, beginning with its opening, in 1934, as one of the nation’s first nonsegregated theaters for African American performers and patrons. Home to swing, vaudeville, rock, and just about everything else, it quickly became a hotbed of talent in the jazz heyday, debuting Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Ella Fitzgerald (whose legendary scatting was said to be the result of her forgetting her lyrics). The Apollo still plays host to a vibrant mix of musicians, poets, comedians, dancers, and performers these days, from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Dave Chappelle. A few highlights to catch this fall:
- Head to the longstanding Amateur Night, a weekly open-mic variety show where booing is a tradition and the tagline is: “BE GOOD OR BE GONE.” Only the strong survive the notoriously unforgiving audience, and pressure creates diamonds, as they say. (Lauryn Hill was booed at age 13; the rest is history.) Wednesday evenings, 7:30 p.m., $24
- Catch Cocktails & Cinema, the Apollo’s new quarterly series for black music and independent film. Clemency, the Sundance award–winning psychological thriller about a female prison warden, screens this month. Nov. 21, 6 p.m., $25
- Be wowed by the National Double Dutch League as they hop it out for the glory at the 28th Double Dutch Holiday Classic, the annual tournament that transformed the schoolyard game into a competitive team sport. Dec. 3, 1 p.m., $22
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| A spread from The Touch: Spaces Designed for the Senses. (Courtesy Gestalten and Kinfolk & Norm Architects. Photo: Adrien Dirand) |
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Good design doesn’t just look good; it also feels good, in all senses of the word. That’s the driving ethos behind The Touch: Spaces Designed for the Senses (Gestalten), a handsome new book—full of polish, warmth, and sophistication—from Kinfolk magazine founder Nathan Williams and Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen, of Norm Architects, the Danish design studio whose work spans architecture, interior design, industrial design, photography, and art direction.
Together, the duo muse on the philosophy of sensuous design, spotlighting 25 jaw-dropping projects around the world and discussing everything from the finer points of artful lighting to the essence of finely textured materials. They also interview an older generation of designers, including John Pawson, Juhani Pallasmaa, and David Thulstrup, for their insights; revisit the work of the late Modernists Lina Bo Bardi and Richard Neutra; and take a romp through art history, referencing color theory along the way.
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| Freshly brewed gyokuro at The Slowdown’s headquarters. |
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Tea enthusiast and expert Micah Spear shares his epiphanic encounter with gyokuro, the centuries-old Japanese varietal of green tea that keeps him buzzing.
Do you remember the first time you tasted gyokuro?
I was with a friend in Tokyo—a talented designer by the name of Hiroshi Fujiwara—and he brought me to lunch at Hiroshi Sugimoto’s café in Omotosandō. This was my second time in Tokyo. At the time, I had no interest in tea whatsoever—it just wasn’t on my radar. He ordered me gyokuro, and it came with this beautiful set with a pitcher of water at just the right temperature, a tiny vessel, and a little teacup with the first steep. We shared it, and the first taste was so profound and new to me—it gave me a buzz that made me very present. Afterwards, I just was floating the whole day. The next day, I went back myself and asked Hiroshi where to get this tea. He said, “Oh, I don’t know… Ask my other friend,” and I just sort of followed that fishtail in Tokyo for a few years.
When I went back to New York after that trip, I picked up a bunch of books on tea and tried to educate myself as much as possible, because the flavor was so fascinating. I started to read about the myths and legends associated with it, learning about traditional tea ceremony and contemporary ceremony, and how these tea masters were artists (and, really, sort of the first performance artists). It just branched off—to my interest in architecture and space, poetry, ikebana, and things that are interrelated and the building blocks of what I think contemporary art is today.
What sets gyokuro apart from other types of green tea?
Green tea is a type of tea from the Camellia sinensis plant. This grows in many different countries and is cultivated, grown, and bred for a multitude of outcomes. Tea and wine are super similar in that way: There aren’t two types of wines, there are cultivars that are bred for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, right? Tea is the same. It’s about the region, the farmer. The best tea, in my opinion, comes from skilled, passionate farmers.
Can you tell us a little bit about how gyokuro is cultivated?
To farm it requires a little bit more effort, mostly because of the specific method, time, and care that it takes to grow. It’s a shade-grown tea. Right before the leaves are about to mature, they put a shade on the crop for ten to twenty days. Because of that, the plant has to fight a little bit harder to photosynthesize, and as a result, there’s a deeper concentration of polyphenols [antioxidants] and caffeine chemicals that make the tea special in terms of its flavor and fragrance, as well as scientifically. There’s an amino acid, theanine, that acts as a neuromodulator: It comes from the tea plant and, in the right concentration, increases our alpha brainwave activity and our ability to relax and concentrate. It’s really powerful.
How has your interest in tea evolved over time? Still chasing that first buzz?
Now, it’s less about that first taste, and more about how it’s been radical to me, and how I’ve been curious to authentically share it with others similar to me—people who [had] no interest in it, that [didn’t] know about the power of the tea. It becomes less about the tea, and more about the intimacy and curiosity that results from it.
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From social change to technological advancement, from innovation to creativity, today’s workspace sits at the nexus of several rapidly shifting concerns. In The Workspace of Tomorrow, a new interview podcast series that the New York City startup ROOM is producing in partnership with The Slowdown, our co-founder (and this newsletter’s editor) Spencer Bailey speaks about the future of work with a range of leaders in business, the social sciences, design, and architecture.
For the project’s debut episode, released this week, Spencer sits down with theater and hospitality impresario David Rockwell, founder and partner of Rockwell Group, to talk about the notion of play and how great interior design is akin to choreography. “If you think about a restaurant, or an environment, or a hotel, that has a sense of welcome, that morphs and changes throughout the day,” Rockwell says. “So much of what happens that’s meaningful in a workspace is what happens in between doing other things—on the way to doing other things. It’s not the planned meetings or the individual workstations.”
Stay tuned for our upcoming episodes, featuring lead-user researcher Jennifer Magnolfi, founder and “principal investigator” at Programmable Habitats; Harvard Business School’s Ethan Bernstein, a specialist on open-office environments; and Mauro Porcini, chief design officer at PepsiCo.
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| A Flower Flash display in New York City. (Courtesy Lewis Miller Design) |
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The renowned floral designer Lewis Miller, creator of the Insta-popular #FlowerFlash (in which he installs exquisite, over-the-top bouquets in public spaces throughout New York City) and author of the book Styling Nature, tells us why the spontaneous act of spreading beauty gives him the “ultimate dopamine rush.”
“I entered the world of floral design in the early nineties, in Seattle, then moved to Manhattan and established my business in 2002. I loved it, but after a bit of time went by, I felt that some of the passion started to waver a bit. Flowers—this world of magnificent beauty—somehow became very routine and expected.
Then, one day, some years ago, while heading to my studio on a Friday afternoon with an armload of huge yellow garden roses or peonies—the leftovers from a project—I was walking one way while all of the busy Midtown commuters were walking the other way. The hunger I saw in their eyes, just from seeing these blossoms, was of incredible awe. I might as well have been carrying a peacock around. It was a small incident that got me thinking.
Fast-forward to October 2016, right around when we were going through the [U.S. Presidential] election—and [we were] frankly pretty miserable about everything—and it kept resonating in my mind: I’m getting older. There’s so much talk about giving back, but what am I doing? How can I actually give back in a way that feels right and authentic, that’s actually fresh and going to inspire me as well, and be unexpected? That’s how Flower Flash started, as a bit of an experiment. We didn’t have any expectations whatsoever.
At the Flower Flashes, people will say, “Wow, you can really smell that!” We’re actually coming out with a Flower Flash candle soon. Psychologically, when you’re in a city that’s concrete and steel, garbage and graffiti, then [you] turn the corner and see this decadent display, it’s really impactful. You can smell the flowers, whether you’re really there or not. It triggers something. The element of scent is so important, because it is that kind of third level to the next dimension. I even teach a class at my studio where we focus on creating arrangements with flowers that are heavily scented.
From the very beginning, the Flower Flashes were just about me doing my thing. There was no financial transaction, so nobody could be displeased with the results. And it was fast and spontaneous—like, boom, here’s this guttural experience—people are going to touch them, take the flowers, take a picture. It wasn’t like my day-to-day, [agonizing] over every last detail. It’s not a profit thing; I’m not in the business of selling them. Nowadays, I could probably do nothing but Flower Flashes for people, but then it would just become another commodity—it would be dead. And, honestly, it’s kind of like my ultimate dopamine rush.”
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Until next week...
Today’s email was written by Aileen Kwun.
Editor: Spencer Bailey
Creative Director: Andrew Zuckerman
Producer: Emily Queen
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