Fearless Flying Fannie is in the front window of East End Books Ptown. This is a true honor. Thank you Jeff G. Peters.
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Siblings unite to see how they can help their feathered friends. These children now live in our coop apartment in NYC since we moved out. The circle of life. Photo by @aviador143 Sharon Marantz.
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A delicious dinner at Debbie and Derik’s. DDDD, Joan, Al, Maddie, Don, Eliot and me. Four hours of non stop food and talking. Missing Gail and Dawn.
Welcome To Art Lovers Forum. Tomas Redrago is one of the youngest gallery owners in the United States. He became a gallerist in his homeland of Buenos Aires during the pandemic because he felt it was a period in all of our lives when we could try new things. He was just starting his career in foreign affairs when the world went into lockdown. He couldn’t travel so he turned to his love of art. Tomas was friendly with a number of artists who he really admired so he started representing them. He was only in his early 20s.
Today Tomas is a full-fledged gallerist working in both Miami and Buenos Aires. He explains that Miami is like a second home to people who live in Buenos Aires. They go back and forth all the time. The TOMAS REDRA-DO ART gallery is now located in Little Haiti, Miami. Address is 224 NW 71 Street.
Tomas feels his art business is very experimental. The gallery of tomorrow will not be what it is today. Collectors travel around more than ever before so you just can’t sit around in one spot and wait for clients to come to you. There are a lot of new opportunities for gallerists to show their collections. He talks a lot about that during our interview.
Americans emerged from their pandemic lockdowns with better jobs, extra spending money and a burning desire to live life outside of the confines of their own abodes, regardless of the price. In what was dubbed the YOLO economy (short for ‘you only live once’), or revenge spending, consumers shelled out for the experiences and goods they had missed.
“Covid showed all of us that life doesn’t go on forever,” Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told Before the Bell. “Preparing for a retirement that’s way off into the future and could be interrupted by something like a global pandemic changed our mindsets. People wanted to live in the moment.”
Now, five years after the onset of the pandemic, the free-spending party is coming to an end. And that may be bad news for the economy.
What’s going on: Consumer spending is falling back to earth, and even the highest-income Americans are turning to discount retailers like Walmart.
Target is slashing prices to lure reluctant shoppers back into their stores, and sweet-treat shops like Starbucks have reported that sales aren’t growing like they used to be — a Frappuccino no longer feels like a necessary expense.
So what’s happening? Inflation is still elevated and consumers are running out of their Covid-era savings, the job market is beginning to tighten and workers are getting worried about losing their jobs.
There’s also another explanation: Americans have gotten their post-Covid ya-ya’s out and are ready to tone things down again.
“There is an element of ‘how long can I live in this PTSD post-Covid environment?’” said Samana. “At some point you do have to figure out what the new normal looks like. Employers want workers back more often in the office and in certain locations, you can’t work from anywhere anymore, that’s also changing mindsets. There’s this sense of reversion to the mean.”
Well, they’re paring back in some areas. People are still willing to shell out for Taylor Swift concerts and plane tickets. Memorial Day travel was at its highest level in history, according to the TSA. But that means people are paring back their discretionary purchases and looking to trade down in everyday necessities, too.
And it still continues to be the most important measure of a strong economy – spending accounts for about 70% of gross domestic product, the go-to measure of US economic health.
So if that slows, that would be bad news and could potentially trigger the recession that economists began warning about way back in 2021. (Don’t worry, most economists at major banks and firms don’t predict that will happen anytime soon, and if it does happen, it might be not be a slowdown for everyone.)
It’s also rattling markets and keeping investors on edge – the Dow dropped more than 1,000 points between Tuesday and Thursday last week on unexpected economic data. It dropped another 115 points on Monday after a report showed that the manufacturing industry had contracted slightly.
“There’s really no indication that all of the factors weighing on the consumers’ mind are going to ease up anytime soon,” said Samana.
What comes next: These next two weeks will be important for investors, consumers and general economy-watchers. Official jobs data for the month of May will be released on Friday and analysts will pore over the numbers for hints about whether the labor market will continue to loosen.
Next week, the Federal Reserve holds its policy meeting where officials will also release their outlook for employment, inflation and interest rates in the months to come. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll see any change in interest rates at that meeting, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell could provide some guidance on when the central bank expects to begin its pivot.
Pauline talked to me about a new way of collecting art and then exposing it to others. I love this idea. Listen to her thoughts. I want to make it happen.
Pauline Shender
Episode 18 – Pauline Shender
Welcome To Art Lovers Forum. I met Pauline Shender a few years ago at Fountainhead Arts, an art residency in Miami. We are both members. She is a few decades younger than me but when I see her, I feel like I am looking at myself at her age. However, I’m far more brash, she is much more sophisticated.
Pauline has been studying contemporary art since 2012. What started as a curiosity about contemporary art has turned into a meaningful pursuit of further knowledge. An initial course with Kathleen Madden at Barnard College entitled: Conversations in Contemporary Art has led to collecting, Museum involvement and patronage of emerging artists. Pauline is currently or has been on the Acquisitions Committee at the ICA Miami, Emerging Collectors Committee at the Norton and is a Patron of the Fountainhead as well. She has amassed a growing collection of approximately 75 works from both emerging and established artists including: Azita Moradkhani, Nate Lewis, Tariku Shiferaw, Emily Mae Smith, Teresita Fernandez, Theaster Gates, Maynard Monrow, and William Kentridge. She made her first art donation to the Norton in 2023 of a Naama Tsabar “Work on Felt” and there is a performance planned at the Norton likely in 2025.
During a 19-song set at MetLife Stadium that spanned 60 years, the band tapped into what seems like a bottomless well of rock ’n’ roll energy.
Mick Jagger in a rare stationary moment. The Rolling Stones singer is flanked by Ronnie Wood (left) and Keith Richards, with the drummer Steve Jordan. Credit…Thea Traff for The New York Times
“This song’s for Manhattan!” Mick Jagger told the crowd on Thursday night at MetLife Stadium, before launching into a punchy rendition of “Shattered,” that agitated ode to late-70s New York City that closes out the band’s 1978 album “Some Girls.” In the ensuing 46 years, the city has changed in some superficial ways but somehow remained essentially the same — much, as they showed throughout an impressively energetic two-hour set, like the Rolling Stones.
The Stones’ first New York-area stadium gig in five years was sponsored, without a hint of irony, by AARP. It was appropriate: At times what transpired onstage felt not just like a rock concert but a display of the evolutionary marvel that is aging in the 21st century. (Albeit aging while wealthy, with every possible technological and medical advantage at one’s disposal. I’ll have whatever vitamins the Stones are taking, please.)
Ronnie Wood, the core group’s baby at age 76, still shreds on the guitar with a grinning, impish verve. Eighty-year-old and eternally cool Keith Richards pairs his bluesy licks with a humble demeanor that seems to say “I can’t believe I’m still here, either.” And then there is Jagger, who turns 81 a few days after the Hackney Diamonds Tour wraps in July. Six decades into his performing career, he is somehow still the indefatigable dynamo he always was, slithering vertically like a charmed snake, chopping the air as if he’s in a kung fu battle against a swarm of unseen mosquitoes, and, when he needs both hands to dance, which is often, nestling the microphone provocatively above the fly of his pants. Sprinting the length of the stage during a rousing “Honky Tonk Women” — the 13th song in the set! — he conjured no other rock star so much as Benjamin Button, as he seemed to become even more energetic as the night went on.
Jagger, right, was more Benjamin Button than rock singer, our critic writes — somehow becoming even more energetic as the night went on. Credit…Thea Traff for The New York Times
Last year’s “Hackney Diamonds” — the Stones’ first album of new material in nearly two decades — was the nominal reason for the tour, but they didn’t linger on it, and the crowd didn’t seem to mind. Across 19 songs, they played only three tunes from the latest release, including two of the best: The taut, growly lead single “Angry” and, for the first part of the encore, the gospel-influenced reverie “Sweet Sounds of Heaven.” Mostly it was a kind of truncated greatest hits collection, capturing the band’s long transformation from reverent students of the blues (Richards’ star turn on the tender “You Got the Silver”) to countercultural soothsayers (a singalong-friendly “Sympathy for the Devil”) to corporate rock behemoth (they opened, of course, with “Start Me Up”).
Jagger, Richards and Wood all still emanate a palpable joy for what they are doing onstage. But those joys also feel noticeably personal and siloed, rarely blending to provide much intra-band chemistry. That is likely a preservation strategy — the surest way to keep a well-oiled machine running and to continue sharing the stage with the same people for half a century or more. But when Jagger ended a charming story about a local diner that had named a sandwich after him (“I’ve never had a [expletive] sandwich named after me! I’m very, very proud”), I did not quite buy his assertion that he, Keith and Ronnie were going to go enjoy one together after the show.
Wood, left, is the baby of the core group at 76. Richards is 80 and still eternally cool. Credit…Thea Traff for The New York Times
Some of that fractured feeling is likely due to the absence of the great Charlie Watts, the band’s longtime drummer who died in 2021; the Hackney Diamonds Tour is the Stones’ first North American stadium tour without him. His replacement, Steve Jordan, does about as good a job as anyone could — like Watts, he balances a rock drummer’s power with a jazzy agility — and his presence never overwhelms. Though they are surrounded by plenty of talented backing musicians, the staging makes it clear that the Rolling Stones are now a trio.
The night’s breakout star, though, was Chanel Haynes, a backing vocalist who took center stage to sing with Jagger during two of the night’s best performances. Haynes — who played Tina Turner in the West End production of the jukebox musical “Tina” before joining the Stones’ touring band in 2023 — ably filled the shoes of the mighty Merry Clayton on a blazing “Gimme Shelter,” and sat in for Lady Gaga on “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” matching the megawatt intensity of her “Hackney Diamonds” cameo. Though Haynes could be velvety soft when the song called for it, at her most impressive she sang with a low, grumbling hunger that often swelled into ferocity, as if she were taking big, meaty bites out of the songs.
Jagger, for his part, delivered many of his lines in his signature bark: The second song, a somewhat slowed down and blues-ified “Get Off of My Cloud,” was transformed by his almost scat-like delivery. But in fleeting moments — including a few falsetto runs — he showed that a certain tenderness in his tone remains intact.
Decades into their career, the band members still emanate a palpable joy at performing onstage. Credit…Thea Traff for The New York Times
That was most apparent on a gorgeous rendition of “Wild Horses,” the song that gained inclusion in the set by winning the nightly online “fan vote.” For so much of this show, the Stones effectively proved they could outrun age, irrelevancy and all the other indignities that time brings to mere mortals. But here they settled into something more contemplative, elegiac and vulnerable, and the show was better for it.
At a time when their few remaining peers are wrapping farewell tours and bands that have been together for half as long are running on fumes, the Stones are an anomaly. It’s not that their show is devoid of nostalgia, but it’s not coasting on it either. They don’t look like they did in the ’70s — who does? — but when their sound is gelling they are able to tap into some kind of eternal present. For better or worse, they seem intent to be the last band of their generation standing, to ride rock ’n’ roll all the way to its logical endpoint. Astoundingly, they don’t sound like they’ve reached it yet.
