ANNE: I spent a very happy morning at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week, wandering through what has to be one of the most joyful exhibitions of the year. “Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics” introduced me to the pop art-inspired, manga mania of Japan’s most famous contemporary artist. Impossible to not to smile at a mural covered in gold leaf and psychedelic happy flower faces, or a wall-size canvas exploding with dozens of Murakami’s signature baby-faced anime characters, Kaikai and Kiki. The backstory is even cooler — between 2009 and 2011, Japanese art historian Nobuo Tsuji dared Murakami to make a series of works in response to historical themes. “Battle Royale! Japanese Art History” was their first collaboration. They picked up the game again for this exhibition, which left me wanting to know more, so now I’m on the hunt for books about Murakami.
STEVE: I’m reading Mohsin Hamid’s novel “Exit West.” It’s set in an unnamed city, which seems to resemble Lahore, Pakistan, where Hamid lives. Two young people meet and fall in love as the city is descending into civil war. With a touch of magic realism, they end up fleeing to Greece and then London and San Francisco, joining the global exodus of refugees. Mohsin has a talent for tackling big ideas in his fiction, and this one digs into questions about migrants, borders and the tensions between globalization and tribalism. It’s very much a novel of the historical moment we’re now living in, and Hamid - who’s lived on three continents - has an unusual vantage point for writing about these issues.
HALEEMA: I’ve been back home for almost two weeks since I spent part of the month of March traveling abroad. Two weeks is enough time to reach peak levels of efficiency at work and home, vacuum the tumbleweeds of cat hair lingering in the living room, and re-establish a skincare regimen...right?
Well, I’m not doing a very good job of getting back into the swing of things. A recent pimple on my chin told me that.
After a blemish-zapping face mask and an internal conversation with myself about the importance of getting back into my ideal routine, I stumbled across this essay entitled “The Skincare Con.” I was struck by one part in particular - “within the current paradigm, a blemish seems like a referendum on who you are as a person…Pimples today are stigmata. The sin they betray is nothing as tawdry as adultery but just, well, not taking care of yourself.”
Perhaps the exploding skincare industry, which has righteously encouraged moisturizing over mascara, is as guilty of promoting perfection as the makeup counter people are so quick to criticize.
MARK: There are 32.5 square feet of big box retail store space for each and every one of us in the United States, space that is quickly emptying out as the Best Buys, Toys R' Uses, and other retailers kowtow to the seemingly unbeatable online retailers of the moment. Popular Science has a great piece posing a question anyone with one of these stores in their community is asking right now: what happens to these stores now? Some of them will become re-zoned for irony as Amazon distribution centers, but architects and activists have some more creative ideas, including turning them into sprawling multi-level urban living spaces, churches, community centers, and more. Sounds a whole lot more uplifting than what has become of many of the nation's abandoned malls.