There's nothing like a recession to make a girl generous, so here is my secret to affordable designer shoes in New York:
On 1st Avenue between 13th and 14th Street, you'll find a storefront that looks more Turkish bazaar than Harper's Bazaar, but don't be fooled. Inside Gabay's (which is owned by Turkish Jews, by the way), you'll find "It" bags and shoes marked down by 80 percent. Gabay's buys the over runs from Bergdorf Goodman and carries everything from Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin to Prada, Jil Sander, Derek Lam, Marc Jacobs...you get the picture. If you're lucky, you may even find Lanvin, Chanel or Azzedine Alaia. Last week I walked out with a cute pair of patent flats by Bettye Muller that were marked down from $500 to $100. Now that's what I call a recession special. Happy shopping!
Monday, March 31, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Answer To A Foodie's Prayer...
My first travel piece runs in the Travel section of the New York Times today.
"Yay!" would be a massive understatement:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/travel/30surfacing.html?ref=travel
I also have a feature in Page Six Magazine in the New York Post, but I can't post that here as they're not digital (weird, I know). Feels good though, to have knocked both in one Sunday.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Seagull
Alan Cumming is marvelous as Boris Alexeyevich Trigorin in Chekhov's The Seagull, directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev. And Kelli Garner (she plays Nina Mikhailovna) is one to watch. You may remember her as Margo from the film Lars and the Real Girl. She is the picture of innocence in her lace dresses. The Seagull is such a timeless story, but I didn't like Diane Wiest in the role of Irina Nikolayevna. She seemed too old to be believable as the woman who manages to keep her man in the face of youth's bloom. My sister said she saw the play in Central Park a few years ago with Meryl Streep in the role. Now that would have been interesting.
I read a funny story about a lunch where Chekhov when to see Leo Tolstoy to get feedback on his play. Tolstoy spoke about everything but the play and as the lunch dragged on, Chekhov began to despair that his mentor didn't like his work. Eventually he plucked up the courage to ask him what he thought of the play and he said: "It's almost as bad as Shakespeare." Hear, hear.
The Seagull has extended its run for another few weeks at the Classic Stage Company.
I read a funny story about a lunch where Chekhov when to see Leo Tolstoy to get feedback on his play. Tolstoy spoke about everything but the play and as the lunch dragged on, Chekhov began to despair that his mentor didn't like his work. Eventually he plucked up the courage to ask him what he thought of the play and he said: "It's almost as bad as Shakespeare." Hear, hear.
The Seagull has extended its run for another few weeks at the Classic Stage Company.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Bear Stearns Discount
This story in the Styles section of the New York Times this past Sunday summed up the mood here far better than I could:
"THE collapse of a major financial institution is usually an occasion for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over potential job losses, lower consumer spending and missed mortgage payments.
In New York City, it’s also seen as an opportunity.
For many of the city’s middle class, especially those in the creative class, who have felt sidelined as the city seemed to become a high-priced playground for Wall Street bankers, the implosion of the brokerage house Bear Stearns raises a tantalizing possibility: participation in an economy they have been largely shut out of."
Read the full story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/fashion/23envy.html?_r=1&ref=style&oref=slogin
***Today marks my first anniversary of Ms Rubin Reports***
"THE collapse of a major financial institution is usually an occasion for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over potential job losses, lower consumer spending and missed mortgage payments.
In New York City, it’s also seen as an opportunity.
For many of the city’s middle class, especially those in the creative class, who have felt sidelined as the city seemed to become a high-priced playground for Wall Street bankers, the implosion of the brokerage house Bear Stearns raises a tantalizing possibility: participation in an economy they have been largely shut out of."
Read the full story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/fashion/23envy.html?_r=1&ref=style&oref=slogin
***Today marks my first anniversary of Ms Rubin Reports***
Monday, March 24, 2008
Divorce and Buddhism
Storms Can't Hurt The Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce is Gabriel Cohen's excellent memoir-come-self-help book chronicling his journey to the other side of anger after his wife walked out one day and never came back. This is possibly the male answer to Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. Did anyone stop and think about the husband she left behind? Well if he was anything like Cohen, he may have stayed in New York and attended a talk about anger given by a Buddhist teacher and then gone on his own spiritual path. Like Eat, Pray, Love you don't have to have had the experience yourself to relate and get inspired. This book has taught me much and I've never been anywhere near a divorce. Read it, even if you do get quizzical looks on the subway.
Cohen will read from Storms Can't Hurt The Sky at Sunny's Waterfront Bar in Red Hook on April 6. He is the man behind the Sundays at Sunny's reading series, so it should be a good one. Get there early for the free Italian pastries.
Cohen will read from Storms Can't Hurt The Sky at Sunny's Waterfront Bar in Red Hook on April 6. He is the man behind the Sundays at Sunny's reading series, so it should be a good one. Get there early for the free Italian pastries.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Friendship Against All Odds
I went to see Two Men Talking at the Barrow Street Theater in the West Village last night. Paul Browde and Murray Nossel, the two men talking, hail from Johannesburg. This is unscripted theater where Paul and Murray confront issues in their lives that would make the average person's toes curl. The two men went to King David High School and Wits University. And then each faced their homosexuality, came out and moved to New York City. Except since 1974, when each man was 14 and they were paired off by their teacher to tell one another a story, they hadn't spoken. (They'll tell you why). These were parallel journeys. Paul, only a few years after coming out, became HIV+. He is now a psychiatrist with a practice on 102nd Street, and he openly declares his status. (He tells me that even from his empowered and privileged standpoint, he still feels the stigma).
Murray met Paul when Paul's French-Canadian boyfriend was hired to direct Murray's play. Murray is a qualified but non-practicing clinical psychologist and an Oscar-nominated film maker. These days he's a full time story teller, offering the art to corporations through his company Narrative Inc.
Imagine their surprise -- to discover one another again, in a different time, a different place, a different sexuality. The two have been best friends ever since. Paul introduced Murray to his partner of 15 years, also a doctor living with HIV. And Two Men Talking has been performed around the world for the past 10 years. When they took the play to South Africa, King David High School wouldn't allow them to perform it for the students (yawn), but Paul and Murray took it into the Soweto and Alexandra townships and into Aids organizations in the Western Cape.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had this to say: "Storytelling is a powerful medium for communication. Especially in situations where the message is too painful, too embarrassing, too secret to speak it. Storytelling can then become a journey to the truth. Paul Browde and Murray Nossel have been telling their story on stage to acclaim. They speak of being gay, homophobia, racism and HIV/AIDS, subjects that should be acknowledged and discussed but which are too often avoided or denied."
Murray and Paul joined us for dinner after the show. At the end of the evening, Murray said: "Paul and I will do Two Men Talking until one of us dies."
In New York, the show runs at the Barrow Theater on 7th Avenue and Barrow Street until May 3. See it.
Murray met Paul when Paul's French-Canadian boyfriend was hired to direct Murray's play. Murray is a qualified but non-practicing clinical psychologist and an Oscar-nominated film maker. These days he's a full time story teller, offering the art to corporations through his company Narrative Inc.
Imagine their surprise -- to discover one another again, in a different time, a different place, a different sexuality. The two have been best friends ever since. Paul introduced Murray to his partner of 15 years, also a doctor living with HIV. And Two Men Talking has been performed around the world for the past 10 years. When they took the play to South Africa, King David High School wouldn't allow them to perform it for the students (yawn), but Paul and Murray took it into the Soweto and Alexandra townships and into Aids organizations in the Western Cape.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had this to say: "Storytelling is a powerful medium for communication. Especially in situations where the message is too painful, too embarrassing, too secret to speak it. Storytelling can then become a journey to the truth. Paul Browde and Murray Nossel have been telling their story on stage to acclaim. They speak of being gay, homophobia, racism and HIV/AIDS, subjects that should be acknowledged and discussed but which are too often avoided or denied."
Murray and Paul joined us for dinner after the show. At the end of the evening, Murray said: "Paul and I will do Two Men Talking until one of us dies."
In New York, the show runs at the Barrow Theater on 7th Avenue and Barrow Street until May 3. See it.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
America's Swart Gevaar
An excellent opinion piece here in yesterday's New York Times by Roger Cohen who spent some of his childhood in Muizenburg. (His parents immigrated to London).
"Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman."
Using his experience of apartheid South Africa and the fact that it is no more, he draws a comparison to Barack Obama's recent speech on race.
"It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Read the full piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20cohen.html?em&ex=1206158400&en=f37f26e473175c8d&ei=5087%0A
"Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman."
Using his experience of apartheid South Africa and the fact that it is no more, he draws a comparison to Barack Obama's recent speech on race.
"It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Read the full piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20cohen.html?em&ex=1206158400&en=f37f26e473175c8d&ei=5087%0A
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Online Dating and Diller
Is it very bad that I have more faith in match.com since I found out that Barry Diller owns it?
(Not that Diller's doing so well right now if this feature in the NYT is anything to go by: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/business/media/16diller.html?scp=2&sq=Barry+Diller&st=nyt). Perhaps I'm confusing Diller with his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg. After all, if she can create the perfect dress for every body, surely he can do something about my missing Mr Right, right?
But back to match.com, because that's really what you want to know about. First things first: I am not going into juicy details about my dating life here. What I will say is this: I wish online dating hadn't become the norm, but in a city like New York it has. (Alternative is being a de facto nun for months and months on end). However, I do like the ego boost it supplies should a potential "thing" not reach fruition. You can literally pick yourself up, dust yourself off and be back on the dating bronco within 24 hours (not always recommended). I've periodically returned to the Internet (usually when said nun status is starting to set in). I've tried J.date, but it's too conservative for me. Nerve.com...cute guys, but not ambitious enough for me. Match.com has been the most satisfying so far (if satisfaction can be measured purely in like-mindedness...I have yet to have a relationship via match.com that actually sticks). There's an old New Yorker cartoon that sums up online dating for me, even though it has nothing to so with it: A woman is trying to read while her cat begs for attention at her ankles. Book in hand, she is looking down at the cat. She says: "You were stray once and you could be stray again." Ouch. Online etiquette does not dictate that any follow up at all is necessary. After all, there are many stray cats on the world wide web.
But hope springs eternal, especially when there's chemistry. Though chemistry also is not always enough. The last guy I dated had this to say about my DVF wrap dress:
Him: I like your dress.
Me: Thank you.
Him (reaching across the table to finger the fabric at my wrist): The pattern...it looks a bit like a Metro card. (Note to South African friends: This is not a compliment. The Metro card is badly designed and it is yellow and black. No one in their right mind would buy a dress that looked like one and no woman wants to be told that her dress looks like a ticket to the Underground. Hmmmn, just realized the Freudian double entendre here.).
(Not that Diller's doing so well right now if this feature in the NYT is anything to go by: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/business/media/16diller.html?scp=2&sq=Barry+Diller&st=nyt). Perhaps I'm confusing Diller with his wife, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg. After all, if she can create the perfect dress for every body, surely he can do something about my missing Mr Right, right?
But back to match.com, because that's really what you want to know about. First things first: I am not going into juicy details about my dating life here. What I will say is this: I wish online dating hadn't become the norm, but in a city like New York it has. (Alternative is being a de facto nun for months and months on end). However, I do like the ego boost it supplies should a potential "thing" not reach fruition. You can literally pick yourself up, dust yourself off and be back on the dating bronco within 24 hours (not always recommended). I've periodically returned to the Internet (usually when said nun status is starting to set in). I've tried J.date, but it's too conservative for me. Nerve.com...cute guys, but not ambitious enough for me. Match.com has been the most satisfying so far (if satisfaction can be measured purely in like-mindedness...I have yet to have a relationship via match.com that actually sticks). There's an old New Yorker cartoon that sums up online dating for me, even though it has nothing to so with it: A woman is trying to read while her cat begs for attention at her ankles. Book in hand, she is looking down at the cat. She says: "You were stray once and you could be stray again." Ouch. Online etiquette does not dictate that any follow up at all is necessary. After all, there are many stray cats on the world wide web.
But hope springs eternal, especially when there's chemistry. Though chemistry also is not always enough. The last guy I dated had this to say about my DVF wrap dress:
Him: I like your dress.
Me: Thank you.
Him (reaching across the table to finger the fabric at my wrist): The pattern...it looks a bit like a Metro card. (Note to South African friends: This is not a compliment. The Metro card is badly designed and it is yellow and black. No one in their right mind would buy a dress that looked like one and no woman wants to be told that her dress looks like a ticket to the Underground. Hmmmn, just realized the Freudian double entendre here.).
Elephantitis of the Emotions
My friend Brent Greenblatt and I went to the Whitney Biennial two Saturdays ago. As always, it is an eclectic and sometimes difficult to understand collection of contemporary pieces by American artists, but what stood out for me was the crossover of art and documentary. Everything from Spike Lee's excellent documentary about the aftermath of hurricane Katrina When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which was originally shown on HBO, to a beautiful piece by the artist Javier Téllez titled Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See. This gorgeous black and white video could have been filmed by Jean Luc Godard. Téllez's art gives a voice to the marginalised (how cool is that?). It's his way of offering us an out from our false assumptions. In this video, the artist re-created the Indian parable "The Blind Men and the Elephant," filming six blind men as they touch a real live elephant who is standing in the middle of the McCarren Park swimming pool in Williamsburg (now emptied of water and often used as a concert venue for Indie rock bands). The idea is to show that "every being experiences the same thing in a unique way." It was a great lesson in how different people open themselves up (or not) to the same experience. Some of the men lightly touched the majestic (and patient) animal, one man folded up his stick and touched the elephant with his entire body. An embrace. Enormously moving.
Marianne Fassler, who was here last week and also deeply touched by this video, felt that is was addressing the idea of "the elephant in the room": We would never ask a blind person to tell us what they see. True. (She pointed out that elephants were something of a mini-theme at this year's biennal. Another installation upstairs saw just elephant feet and a tusk, and where the rest of the elephant should have been, simply the words "Iraqi Oil".
The Whitney Biennale is on for some time. See it if you get the chance.
http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_tellez
Marianne Fassler, who was here last week and also deeply touched by this video, felt that is was addressing the idea of "the elephant in the room": We would never ask a blind person to tell us what they see. True. (She pointed out that elephants were something of a mini-theme at this year's biennal. Another installation upstairs saw just elephant feet and a tusk, and where the rest of the elephant should have been, simply the words "Iraqi Oil".
The Whitney Biennale is on for some time. See it if you get the chance.
http://www.whitney.org/www/2008biennial/www/?section=artists&page=artist_tellez
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
A Jew for President?
Fran Lebowitz in New York Magazine had the following to say: "...it's never going to happen. Because people don't like Jews. You must have noticed that by now. And I will also tell you, as a Jew, I don't want there to be a Jewish president. We have enough problems. Imagine if they could blame this on us too."
Sunday, March 9, 2008
It's Always Been About the Hair
The actress Jean E. Taylor came into my friend Aliza's Greenpoint living room last night (that's Greenpoint in Brooklyn, not Greenpoint in Cape Town) and turned it into an alternate universe. The Wild Hair Living Room Tour is an example of "basement art making," she says. "Exploring how possibility may emerge from a gloomy sense of nothing, we discovered scrap cardboard and string to be handy tools for constructing the world of our piece."
With a roll of tape, a doctor's coat, a chalkboard, and the aforementioned string and cardboard, Taylor (Ophelia disguised as a museum docent) began her highly entertaining "lecture" about the Wild Hare as part of the so-called Museum of Natural History's Outreach Program. This soon morphed into a tale of Wild Hair (read: non-conformists) and Dark Castles...a fairy tale about a thwarted love affair between a prince and a maiden, a dark place filled with immoral people and a young woman who needs to find the courage to step into the unknown. Of course this was all a metaphor for much deeper stuff.
Taylor is an energetic and talented performer and there is something about theater inside a living room that takes away the sometimes unbearable intimacy that I usually feel in a much larger theater. Or perhaps because it's in the living room there is no need to feel that intimacy as something "other".
At the end of the performance, there was a video made where the audience was asked to share an experience of being a "Wild Hair". Of course I had to get involved...told my story of leaving Elle (Dark Castle) when most thought I had a dream job. No regrets there.
For more info: http://wildhairlivingroomtour.com/index.php
With a roll of tape, a doctor's coat, a chalkboard, and the aforementioned string and cardboard, Taylor (Ophelia disguised as a museum docent) began her highly entertaining "lecture" about the Wild Hare as part of the so-called Museum of Natural History's Outreach Program. This soon morphed into a tale of Wild Hair (read: non-conformists) and Dark Castles...a fairy tale about a thwarted love affair between a prince and a maiden, a dark place filled with immoral people and a young woman who needs to find the courage to step into the unknown. Of course this was all a metaphor for much deeper stuff.
Taylor is an energetic and talented performer and there is something about theater inside a living room that takes away the sometimes unbearable intimacy that I usually feel in a much larger theater. Or perhaps because it's in the living room there is no need to feel that intimacy as something "other".
At the end of the performance, there was a video made where the audience was asked to share an experience of being a "Wild Hair". Of course I had to get involved...told my story of leaving Elle (Dark Castle) when most thought I had a dream job. No regrets there.
For more info: http://wildhairlivingroomtour.com/index.php
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