Red, Mirrors, and Watermelon
Some weeks feel like molting.
Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just a shedding that happens quietly while you’re still going about your days. I’ve been walking through this one with heightened senses — as if everything is slightly louder, brighter, more symbolic than usual.
Pain can do that. It sharpens color.
Red Everywhere
Lunar New Year unfolded in Chinatown like a fever dream in the best way.
Red poured down the streets. Gold flashed from storefronts. Drums pounded so hard it felt like the pavement had a heartbeat. Lion dancers — often called dragons, but technically lions — went door to door blessing businesses for the year ahead. They bowed. They blinked. They snapped their jaws open and shut, playful and fierce at once.
The ritual is ancient. It calls in prosperity. It wards off bad spirits. It invites luck in through the front door.
Children carried tanghulu — fruit skewered on sticks and dipped in melted sugar, hardened into glass. The fruit glowed like jewels. Hawthorn berries sealed in sweetness. Sticky and shining.
Confetti stuck to the bottoms of shoes. Cymbals clashed. The dragon undulated down the street — long, embroidered, shimmering — powered by many bodies moving as one.
It felt like collective optimism.
I stood there thinking: yes. Let’s try that. Let’s try optimism again.
Entering the Void (On Purpose)
I saw Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery and walked straight into a mirror that swallowed me.
His surfaces bend reality until your sense of proportion dissolves. One piece curved inward with a severity that almost nodded to Richard Serra — heavy, minimal — but Kapoor’s mirrored voids do something stranger. They erase edges. They destabilize your footing.
You step closer and your reflection stretches, fragments, disappears.
It felt like entering a dimension without friction. A quiet void. A pause in the noise.
There is something deeply comforting about distortion. It reminds you that perception is flexible. That what feels fixed might not be.
I stayed in that calm for a long time.
The Moka Pot and Repetition
Back home, I’ve been drawing my moka pot over and over again.
Line. Line. Line.
No erasing. No fixing. Just repetition.
The moka pot is all pressure and release. Water heated. Steam forced upward. Something bitter turned warm.
Drawing it feels like holding something steady while everything else rearranges itself. The repetition quiets the static. It’s almost funny how something so small can anchor a day.
If you draw something enough times, it starts to feel like prayer.
Watching From the Periphery
Fashion Week unfolded like theater from a slight distance.
Khaite still understands tension.
Diotima feels intentional and exact.
Ralph Lauren remains cinematic — a master of atmosphere.
Marc Jacobs plays with proportion like it’s a joke only he understands.
And Tory Burch — something fresh there. A subtle shift over the last few seasons. Cleaner. Sharper. Less eager.
It’s interesting to watch from a different vantage point. Less frenzy. More observation.
Watermelon, Metal, Oud
I finally stopped into Naked Ghosts — a perfumery that feels less like retail and more like conversation.
We talked about scent as sculpture. As distortion. As memory.
One fragrance — Strinking by Rich Mess — opened with shockingly ripe watermelon. Wet. Metallic. Almost too bright. It lingered longer than expected, then melted into something ambery and woody, still whispering fruit.
I keep imagining layering it over something dark. Dirty oud underneath bright sugar-water fruit.
Sweet over smoke. Youth over age. Fresh over ancient.
Juxtaposition again.
Blossoms in Dirty Snow
This week has felt like blossoms pushing through snow that hasn’t fully melted yet.
Things are rough. My body and mind are not entirely aligned. Healing feels slow. But there have been flashes — red confetti, mirrored voids, sugar fruit, coffee steam — that remind me how alive things still are.
You can feel unwell and grateful at the same time.
You can hurt and still notice beauty.
You can reset without announcing it.
For now, I am drawing small objects. Watching lions bless storefronts. Standing inside mirrors. Plotting the year quietly. Sending applications into the distance. Letting sweetness sit over something darker.
Molting.
Let’s see what emerges.
-Anthony Amadeo