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Showing posts from June, 2010

Love is agony, isn't it? I've been involved with someone for quite some time now, but it's all so complicated. . . There is no hope.

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THE BEST..........!

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Angel of Beauty The Story of Dr. Erno Laszlo “Once upon a time,  in a  land of princess and palaces, of grand romances and glorious beauties, there lived a notorious not-so-beautiful princess.  Denied the fairy-tale happiness, she became a shadowy recluse at court, humiliated and tormented by her plainness, until the young Dr. Erno Laszlo was summoned.  The story of his “cure” marks the very first marriage of dermatology and cosmetology, of treatment and cosmetics, not unusual today, but revolutionary in the early part of this century.  And so the legend of Laszlo began.  One that would span two continents, as the Erno Laszlo Institute relocated from war-torn Budapest to Fifth Avenue in New York.  Royalty, society, and celebrities flocked to the exclusive inner sanctum of the Institute, to the doctor who could make them feel more beautiful than they ever had before.  Erno Laszlo has discovered, with great insight and understanding, the true s...

That simplicity has very little to do with the kind of pristine Minimalism that has often dominated the design scene in recent decades. When Biesenbach bought the Manhattan apartment in 2007—after seeing it listed in The New York Times online classifieds—he took out a few walls and refinished the dark wood floors, but he left most of the place untouched, not even bothering to repaint the living room walls. (You can still see faint outlines where the previous owner’s pictures hung.) Clearly it’s an approach that allows him a break from the countless aesthetic judgments that his day job requires. As MoMA’s chief curator of media, Biesenbach oversees the museum’s fast-growing collection of multimedia installations and video and performance pieces. (He co-organized last year’s Olafur Eliasson survey, curated the current Pipilotti Rist exhibit and is preparing upcoming shows of Marina Abramovic and Tehching Hsieh.) “Normally I have to make so many decisions about the tone of white and the tone of gray,” he says. “And should this be a half an inch higher, and to the left? So I actually think this space is about making no decisions.” Biesenbach doesn’t have a single painting or photograph in his apartment. He wonders whether people who live with static artworks look at them enough. The “ephemeral” pieces he generally favors—performance, video, film—tend to demand far more active engagement. On the floor of his living room Biesenbach has an old InFocus video projector, which he uses to display a movie or a video piece on the wall. (He’ll sometimes move the mattress from the bedroom to sit and watch.) Mostly, though, he likes to keep the projector turned off because it distracts from what he considers the apartment’s main attraction: the mesmerizingly cinematic view from the 340-square-foot terrace. “When I first walked out here, I said, ‘Wow, this is like a movie,’” says Biesenbach, pointing out his favorite elements of the hyperkinetic urban tableau: boats cruising the East and Hudson rivers, commercial jets on their way to and from the area’s three major airports, subway cars snaking out of a tunnel to cross the Williamsburg Bridge. On the ground, the teeming streets, sidewalks and handball courts are like the giant set of some deconstructed epic film that’s on permanent loop. The apartment is on the 18th floor—low enough to make Biesenbach feel almost a part of the action but high enough to afford some distance from it. From up here, he says, it sometimes seems as if you could see the curvature of the earth. “Of course you can’t,” says Biesenbach, “but it feels as if you can.” Biesenbach, who lives alone, spends most of his time on the terrace, where the sights of traffic jams and the sounds of police sirens conjure memories of Kojak and other American TV series that he grew up watching. “There is great sympathy for what you see, but you also feel very disconnected,” he says. “And you’re constantly hearing this sound, but it’s not really a feedback into reality—it’s a feedback into fiction.”

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Vogue editor Anna Wintour has issued a statement on the passing of Alexander McQueen: "We are devastated to learn of the death of Alexander McQueen, one of the greatest talents of his generation. He brought a uniquely British sense of daring and aesthetic fearlessness to the global stage of fashion. In such a short career, Alexander McQueen’s influence was astonishing — from street style, to music culture and the world’s museums. His passing marks an insurmountable loss

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Sutton Place NYC NY

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"I never think that people die. They just go to department stores."

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Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola August 6, 1928. Born to Slovak immigrants, he was reared in a working class suburb of Pittsburgh. From an early age, Warhol showed an interest in photography and drawing, attending free classes at Carnegie Institute. The only member of his family to attend college, he entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Melon University) in 1945, where he majored in pictorial design. Upon graduation, Warhol moved to New York with fellow student Philip Pearlstein. He found steady work as a commercial artist working as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. He also did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Prophetically, his first assignment was for Glamour magazine for an article titled "Success is a Job in New York." Throughout the nineteen fifties, Warhol enjoyed a successful career as a commercial artist, winning several commendations from the Art Director's Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. During this period, he shortened his name to "Warhol." In 1952, the artist had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, exhibiting Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Subsequently, Warhol's work was exhibited in several venues throughout the fifties including his first group show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1955. In 1953 the artist produced his first illustrated book, A is an Alphabet and Love is a Pink Cake, which he gave to his clients and associates. With a burgeoning career as an illustrator, he formed Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1957. 1960 marked a turning point in Warhol's prolific career. He painted his first works based on comics and advertisements, enlarging and transferring the source images onto his canvases with an opaque projector. In 1961, Warhol showed his paintings, Advertisement, Little King, Superman, Before and After, and Superman, Before and After, and Saturday's Popeye in a window display of Bonwit Teller department store. Appropriating images from popular culture, Warhol created many paintings that remain icons of 20th-century art including the Campbell's Soup Can, Marilyn and Elvis series. In 1962, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited his Campbell's Soup Cans and in New York, the Stable gallery showed the Baseball, Coca-Cola, Do It Yourself and Dance Diagram paintings among others. In 1963 Warhol established a studio at 231 East 47th Street which became known as the "Factory." In addition to painting and creating box sculptures such as Brillo Box and Heinz Box, Warhol began working in other mediums including record producing (The Velvet Underground), magazine publishing (Interview) and filmmaking. His avant-garde films such as Chelsea Girls, Blow Job and Empire have become classics of the underground genre. In 1968, Valerie Solanis, a periodic factory visitor, and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into the Factory and shot Warhol. The attack was near fatal. In the 1970's, Warhol renewed his focus on painting and worked extensively on a commissioned basis both for corporations and for individuals whose portrait he painted. Works created in this decade include Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos, Maos and Shadows. Warhol also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again). Firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, Warhol was given a major retrospective of his work at the Pasadena Art Museum which traveled to museums around the world. In the late seventies Warhol began dictating an oral diary to his colleague Pat Hackett, which became the basis for the best-selling Andy Warhol Diaries. He also frequented Studio 54 along with other members of the international jet-set saying, "I have a social disease. I have to go out every night." The artist began the 1980's with the publication of POPism: The Warhol '60s. He also began work on Andy Warhol's TV, a series of half hour of video programs patterned after Interview magazine. In 1985, "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" appeared on MTV, half hour programs featuring celebrities, artists, musicians, and designers, with Warhol as the host. The paintings he created during this time included Dollar Signs, Guns and Last Suppers. He also produced several paintings in collaboration with other artists including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente. Following routine gall bladder surgery, Andy Warhol died of complications during his recovery on February 2, 1987. After his burial in Pittsburgh, his friends and associates organized a memorial mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 1 that was attended by more than 2,000 people. In 1989, the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a major retrospective of his works. In 2001 Heiner Bastian curated a Warhol retrospective that began in Berlin and traveled to the Tate in London and finally to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

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990 5th ave NYC NY

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A 7,500-square-foot co-op hit the market yesterday at 990 Fifth Avenue on the corner of 80th Street for $42 million. The triplex unit is being marketed by Sotheby's International Realty agent Lois Nasser, who is a long-time friend of the seller, whom Nasser would not identify by name. The five-bedroom, five-bathroom unit includes a 1,200-square-foot terrace, five fireplaces and views of the park. Nasser said the unit was on the market several years ago, but was later taken off.  Although the seller's previous effort to sell the apartment was thwarted, Nasser said that the current owner is willing to wait for an aggressive offer. "I wouldn't call [them] a highly motivated seller," Nasser said. The owner is willing to "wait for the right [buyer] to come along and pay the price." While Nasser said that she's received queries from other brokers about the listing (none of whom she was willing to name), she conceded that she might be waiting on an int...

Anderson Cooper's Mother

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TIMEX

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For more than 150 years, Timex has focused on quality, value and timeless style. Today, trusted favorites testify to our customer loyalty, redesigned classics make bold modern statements, and worldwide popularity proves wearing a Timex tells more than time. Through trends, technology, expeditions, marathons and generations, Timex®, keeps on ticking

In his heyday, there was no brighter star in the Hamptons social orbit than Truman, but after the serialization in Esquire magazine of his thinly veiled satire Answered Prayers, the writer entered a darker phase, in exile by the shore, taking solace in a bottle. The devastating impact of Capote's fall came swiftly. According to John Knowles, "he was completely unstrung" by the reaction and fell into an irrevocable depression. "Towards the end, of course, he was drinking too much," Clarke recalls. In July of 1980, Dunphy found Capote collapsed on the steps of his cottage with broken glass all around him. Dunphy rushed him to Southampton Hospital, where Capote told him, "I drink because it's the only time I can stand it." Three summers later he was dead. These days, it's fittingly that another creative figure, artist Ross Bleckner, resides in Capote's storied cottage, having preserved the compound now adjacent to protected lands, never to be overshadowed by the McMansions Capote would have despised. And what would Capote have made of the Hamptons today? "There was a different sort of society out here then," says Clarke, "and it was so much quieter. Who's out here now? Rock stars, movie stars... It's a publicity society." On second thought, Clarke muses, perhaps it would have suited Truman just fine. In the '70s he hobnobbed with Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones. "Who knows? If he were still alive today, he might have been at the center of P. Diddy's latest party, making little asides...taking it all in."

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