I didn't have to use my AK

There’s nothing like a mostly white girl trying to seem gangsta…

But it was a good day, so imma gonna tell y’about it.

I like days when Kate and I are out of the office, and today was one of my fav sorts of fieldtrips.

We spent the morning with our favourite printer, Katy Martin. She’s such an incredible person to work with I’m inclined to keep her a secret but as Paul Arden says, share and more comes back to you.

Anyhoo, she lives and works in a giant loft in Tribeca and owns an equally giant Epson printer. She has the sort of place where the lift opens directly into her home and she awaits you, smiling visage and softly spoken. It’s all white washed in there and somehow she keeps the masses of prints and papers and boxes looking tidy with a mix of antique and industrial flat files and shelving. The place feels zen, for want of a better term.

So at Katy’s place, first you are offered tea, then you settle in front of her large and fancy computer as she methodically clicks through files and folders to create test strips and adjustment layers in an effort to get your work looking just so perfectly considered and completed on her expertly chosen rag paper.

Coming to her feels like the most glamourous completion of our work. Our images finally look and exist just the way we intended them. She has the right amount of involvement and detachment to make sure that the colour nuance is spot on and the saturation is just so and the contrast is finely tuned, so that finally, blissfully, our pictures are actualized, realized, whatever you want to call it.

Afterward we had a brilliant lunch at Bubby’s, then we stopped by the Mac store to check the biz email, then we parted ways, whereupon I bumped into the adorable Ryan Pfluger strolling with his Mom.

Then a funny thing happened on the way home. I saw not one but 2 girls on the subway, unrelated to one another and, realistically, unrelated to me, but both of whom I know now because I see them on the train quite frequently.

One has fake blonde hair, it’s been artificially straightened, it might be a weave but it’s hard to tell, and she’s pretty, full pink lips and very smooth skin. She could be a white girl with a fondness for fake tanner and bronzer or a black girl with some other culture in the genetic mix. What’s interesting about her is her artifice and for all the methodical painting and preening on her head, her clothes are plain, black pants with pin stripes, polyester looking, professional looking, but neck up she’s more like a dancer at Carnival in Rio. Today I saw her chatting with someone, possibly giving directions to someone, at Canal Street, her pink glossed lips pursing, her orange brown skin glowing.

The second girl is glorious. She has Josephine Baker cropped hair, tightly combed to her scalp. Her body is a particular sort, lithe, slender and long. She has impeccable style -impeccable because as lovely as she looks in tight grey jeans and a shearling jacket, the look seems utterly unconscious and probably because of that body, that sublime long body, a dishrag and some twine would look stylish on her. So it goes.

What I love about these girls beyond their singular beauty and beyond the fact that we mildly acknowledge one another as we walk on by, is that even here, in this gaping hole of a city, there is a peculiar sense of community, based as much on style as it is on familiarity.

Having been recently in State College PA, a tiny town in a valley well protected from the rest of the world, I saw a version of this community. I sat in the recently rehabbed movie theatre and looked at the backs of many heads and knew that if the lights were switched on and everyone stood up and turned around, that there was a very high likelihood that there would be a lot of hellos and hey theres.

Big little world.

Ca suffit.

Mils