The sun was shining on the sea,

On a yacht for a glamorous fete:

She entered with an opulent hat

Made with love by Louis Mariette-

The master of bespoke hat couture

With an eye for crowning la tete.

The other guests held heads in shame

Unadorned with jewels

They had not been transformed by Louis:

They all felt like fools

The woman shared her secret

Not wanting to be cruel:

“These hats they speak,” the woman spoke,

“And talk of many things:

Of clocks and ships and candle wax –

of papillons-and queens-

and why couture is right for you-

and whether hats have wings.

“With names like Bliss and Chess and Gum

These hats are divinely unique;

Mariette has mined and scoured the globe

For dazzling materials that speak

To his exotic upbringing in distant African lands,

And leaves no precious stone unturned

When you leave your hat in his hands.”

***

For more info, visit: www.louismariette.com

Sometimes a night out on the town is all about seeing if sparks fly. Or smoldering in the face of an old flame. Or just another excuse to dress extension cord optional. Like Hussein Chalayan’s Spring/Summer 2008 collection featuring laser beams and Swarovski crystals, rhyme & reason’s illuminated pieces assure you’ll be spotted from across a crowded room. In a dress of woven cotton jersey, hand crocheted flowers, and two dozen white LEDs, you’ll have a warm glow offering more magic and mystery than one too many glasses of wine. rhyme & reason also claims your clothes can “double in function as lamps”, which may or may not be a bright idea when going home with a stranger (re: wine). Either way, in radiant knitwear, you’ll certainly have some enchanted evening, or at the very least, light up a room.

***

For more info, log onto: http://www.rhymeandreasoncreative.com/electronic_fashion/index.html

Maybe it’s the thrill of the fight. Or stalking your prey. Or trading passion for glory. But you’ve always envied those with the eye of the tiger. Lucky for you, there’s a new way to earn your stripes. ColorOn’s Animal Instincts kit is all you need to put one over on natural selection. Press-on eye shadows in zebra, leopard, and camoflage patterns unleash your inner beast leaving you fierce without being catty. But when dressing for the urban safari (or nearest karaoke bar) remember what your mother always told you: a little leopard goes a long way…

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Coloron website: http://www.coloronpro.com/

TM and © 2007 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved. Not for sale or duplication

Jason Reitman is sitting in his car around 3rd Street and La Cienega suffering from road rage. A woman with a license plate of 5AEE461 (he requested I publish the number) has just taken up two parking spots irking Reitman with her social irresponsibility and less than acceptable driving skills. If only he could get out and direct traffic .

Luckily for the intelligent moviegoers of the world, Reitman has chosen to direct films instead of CLKs. As the writer/director of Thank you For Smoking , and the director of the Academy Award Winning Juno, he has paved his way as an artist with a potent, relevant, and socially conscious point of view. The son of Ivan Reitman, the acclaimed director/producer of the 80s classic Ghostbusters , younger Reitman shied away from movie-making at first, pursuing pre-med at Skidmore College. When his father saw there was something wrong in the MD-hood, he advised his son to surrender his scalpel and do what he loved. Reitman left upstate New York to become a Trojan at USC film school, where like many great filmmakers before him, he prepared to tackle Hollywood one frame at a time. Determined to make a name for himself and not just ride on his father’s proton pack, Reitman worked hard to find personal success at film festivals, like Sundance, and in commercial directing with his unique brand of enlightened, satiric humor. Along the way he discovered his individual comedic voice that has garnered so much critical acclaim. With Independent Spirit Award and Academy Award nominations under his belt, Reitman definitely has a knack for all sorts of moviemaking shenanigans. The traffic community might be mourning their loss, but Ellen Paige’s Juno would be friggin’, forshizz, exponentially proud.

EM: If you could interview one unsung hero, who would it be? Why?
JR: How unsung?

EM: I don’t know. What about a sung hero then?
JR: Sung would be Alexander Payne. Unsung would be Jordan Farmar of the LA Lakers.

EM: Why?
JR: I’d like his perspective on being a Laker.

EM: Do you have Staples Center seats?
JR: We have seats behind the basket.

EM: That’s pretty good.
JR: They could get better. You want to be perpendicular to the basket.

EM: What is your favorite local spot to eat?
JR: (No hesitation): Henry’s Tacos at Moorpark and Tujunga

EM: What songs are at the top of your playlist at this very moment?
JR: Can’t give you that answer because the ones at the very top are being used in my next project.

EM: Okay, how about next to top?
JR: Desmond Dekker’s "Israelites", Roxy Music’s "Love is The Drug", RZA’s "You Can’t Stop Me Now".

EM: What is the last great film you saw?
JR: Kung Fu Panda .

EM: Really?
JR: It’s a great movie, and it’s the first one my daughter has ever seen in the theatre.

EM: Your last intriguing read?
JR: A script I can’t tell you about. And Christopher Buckley’s new novel, Supreme Courtship .

EM: If you could remake/sequel one movie what would it be?
JR: I would remake Pretty Woman shot for shot with a real hooker.

EM: What medium do you go to when you look to be inspired?
JR: I go see bad movies.

EM: Why?
JR: Bad movies make me think "I can do that".

EM: What about good movies?
JR: Good movies make me feel like I have no business making movies.

EM: What new projects are you tackling right now?
JR: Jennifer’s Body , the new movie by Diablo Cody. It’s an amazing script. And we have two films by two first time filmmakers with Hard C (JR’s production company). If you like Thank You For Smoking you will like the next one I’m writing.

EM: I know you’ve discussed Smoking and Juno at length around town, but I just rewatched Smoking , so I decided to pick one question. Tell me about the father-son relationship. Clearly that was an important aspect of the film for you.
JR: Being a father was the most interesting dilemma for a guy who does what Nick Nailer does. You can’t pick who your kids are. It’s humanizing for Nick Nailer. The government parents, but parents should parent.

EM: Who do you currently respect in the industry and why?
JR: Pixar. They have nine or ten perfect movies. All the stories are sharp, interesting, moving, and funny. Alexander Payne. Everything he does says something. A movie has to have a POV, without a POV it’s hard to care. If I could steal someone’s career it would be his.

EM: Do you identify more as a writer or director? Why?
JR: When I’m writing, I’m a writer. I’m a softie, indecisive. My wife says my personality changes depending on if I’m writing or directing. When I’m writing I can’t decide where to go to dinner, and when I’m directing I order her dinner for her.

EM: What was it like being the writer and the director on your first project and then taking the reins after the writing as a director for your second?
JR: With Thank You For Smoking I was adapting. I was reacting and interpreting, carrying someone else’s story. I was probably more precious with Diablo’s script. And anyway you can’t think of a movie as just words, it’s moving; it’s telling a story.

EM: Do you think you’ll ever move into television?
JR: I directed an episode of The Office , and a Saturday Night Live . I think it’s an excellent medium, but it’s very time consuming. It’s hard with a newborn to balance the personal and professional.

EM: What about Cody’s new show, The United States of Tara? Would you consider directing an episode?
JR: I definitely want to get in and direct Toni Colette. But in the end, I want to make movies.

It’s always a thrill to put another feather in your cap. Or an owl on your scarf. Or a miniature zebra on your stingy brim fedora. Born in Turkey with a design career that began in Istanbul, Asli Filinta has a natural endowment for the exotic. Her head toppers are anything but run of the millinery adorned with peacock feathers, baby elephants, and orchids in bloom lending a Daisy Buchanan goes to Casablanca whimsy to the average riding hat. Her scarf collection has fewer notes from abroad but no less panache. Filinta’s current environ of New York City has inspired hipster checked prints in bright purples, blues, and muted blacks and grays. Although not groundbreaking, they distinguish themselves from the average scarf seen on West Broadway, welcoming you to the urban jungle with applique lions and tigers and…owls. Oh my! Might be your response when you flip through the price tags, but turning heads was never a cheap trick.

***
www.aslifilinta.com

About a year and half ago, I casually contacted Estella Soto, a former USC classmate in Marianne Wiggins’ Advanced Fiction Workshop, to see if she would consider giving me some feedback on a short story I was writing. We traded fiction, notes, and emoticons until one day I asked her, “Are you in a writer’s group or workshop? Maybe we should start one…”

Mysneakyuncle.com was born because I was reading daily in The Hollywood Reporter about some movie or TV show picked up off someone’s blog or other online post. I knew that in order to jump start our literary careers, we needed to get our fiction and our names out in cyberspace. The short videos are Generation YouTube’s (link to you tube video) version of the book reading. Instead of just reading straight from our written words, we’ve created highly stylized short films/marketing promos to entice the average internet video junkie to actually sit down for a full read. Five samples of what goes on in our crazy, angsty, funny, sweet, sad, ironic, paranoid, confused twenty-something minds are now on our site.

My Sneaky Uncle can be found at: www.mysneakyuncle.com

Also check out their Huffington Post review written by Patricia Zohn: Culture Zohn: My Sneaky Uncle

Frank Elgin, played by Morgan Freeman, is a washed-up and sometimes sauced-up actor with a career that’s been left for dead. He is given one last chance to see his name in lights by the charmingly earnest director, Bernie Dodd. Actor, playwright, and producer are ready to get on board with varying degrees of hesitancy, but Elgin’s wife Georgie, played by Frances McDormand, questions her husband’s strength to stay off the bottle long enough to headline a show. But is Frank’s tragic flaw the actor’s fragile ego, which washes down insecurity with something eighty proof, or is it his other love, his wife, who needs him, even though she yearns no to? Is Georgie his enabler or reason to be clean? And is he her raison d’etre or raison d’ennui? The brilliant writing ensures the questions are never answered, even up until the final scene, but pondered with relish as the audience wades with Gallagher through the murky waters of love, talent, companionship, and addiction. Watching a giant crumble is always a heartbreaking affair, and maybe even more so for those left to pick up the pieces. The only truth here is that weakness is the incurable human cold, and even cough syrup can do more harm than good.

The title of the play implies that McDormand’s character is in the number one slot, but Freeman’s layered and heart-wrenching turn as Frank Elgin and Gallagher’s constant discovery and boyish energy make it a horse race between the two men. Although strong, particularly toward the end, McDormand’s performance lacked any endearing girlishness frequently alluded to in dialogue and, as well, in the title of the play. The supporting bits were surprisingly strong, with Remy Auberjonois as the convincingly disheveled playwright and Chip Zien as the snarky money man we love to hate. Each scene was artfully inaugurated with the velvet curtain rotating round the set, inviting the audience to step inside a world as vivid and complex as a Realist painting. A fully realized production, this new run of The Country Girl reminds us that the theatre was once a venerable medium, driven by playwrights dedicated to exploring what makes us tick.

But no one said self-examination and resurrection were easy. “Every performance is what I imagine childbirth to be like, ” Gallagher said afterward, entertaining fans like Dana Delaney and Hagen’s kin in his lounge backstage, “and seems impossible to think of doing again the following night.” If Frank Elgin had been in the room, he’d have raised his glass to that.

***
http://www.thecountrygirlonbroadway.com

Music Box Theatre, NYC
Live Review: 5/27/08
***
In the Pulitzer Prize winning play, August: Osage County , Tracy Letts tells the tale of a rural Oklahoman family so dysfunctional, one could label them “highly gifted”. As a venomous black comedy, female-centric version of Long Day’s Journey into Night , this three-hour pilgrimage into the plains both tickles and disturbs to the core. Violet Weston, played by Deanna Dunagan, has swallowed many pills in her life of the bitter, upper and downer varieties, and the audience watches with “and I thought my family was messed up!” awe as the savage dysfunction pumps down the family tree to her three daughters and one granddaughter, nearly all destined to march by the beat of an extremely perverse and pathological drum. From addiction to pedophilia to incest, the plotlines are easily worthy of daytime drama and run the gamut of all that could go wrong in contemporary society, particularly when monster mothers like Violet take personal misfortune and hardship and hold it shamelessly against anyone in their path, including her own children.

It’s always darkest before it goes black in the Weston home; however the Music Box Theater is shot to life with the superb acting, direction and dialogue. The play is thick with monologues which sound more like character descriptions the playwright wrote for himself when developing, than speeches for performance. The acting is so specific the audience doesn’t need such long-winded introductions of who each character is. It’s evident in the way Violet limps angrily down the stairs, the way Barbara, expertly performed by Amy Morton obsessively sets a table, and the way the youngest, Karen, played by Mariann Mayberry, gobbles black olives off her fingertips. Letts already shows, so there is no need to tell.

The only point he could have expanded upon is the “why” of patriarch Beverly Weston’s inciting disappearance. The brief time the audience shares with him at the top of the show indicates he finds a sick yet entertaining humor in what the Weston family has become (we all do). He tells their Native American maid, “My wife takes pills, and I drink. That’s the bargain we’ve struck,” and he seems more amused than bitter; but perhaps that’s just the lifetime of Jack Daniels speaking.

Like the monologues, the set, a towering house sliced like a doll’s so the audience can see in, does little for the show. The rooms were not utilized to enlighten character or plot but rather to change up the location to offer a new room for one character to berate another in. Only the staircase seems to elaborate, creating hypnotic suspense when climbed in either direction. With a brilliant editor who would have been willing to cut a third, August: Osage County , with its colorful characters the audience loves to hate, laugh at, and “get even” with, would have been perfect, able to contend with all the famous literary ranks of evil mothers. After all, it offers such pearls of wisdom for coming of age: “Thank God we can’t tell the future,” Amy Morton’s character observes, “or we’d never get out of bed.”

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http://www.augustonbroadway.com/

If a photograph is worth a thousand words, just think how many names and numbers you could get with a snapshot of the Los Angeles skyline spread across your favorite party dress. Kristen Friedlander puts her vision of LA nightlife right where her party is with her striking interpretation of dusk ‘til dawn. A freshly graduated student from the Otis College of Art and Design, Friedlander has already hit it big with her thesis project in window displays at Neiman Marcus and Trina Turk, poised and ready for a night out on the glamorous town.

As part of the mentor project at Otis, Friedlander was linked up with Trina Turk, the established designer of patterned chic, and given ten weeks to design a line.

The challenge: Design a cocktail dress for a fashionista to wear at a gallery opening.

Her inspiration: Balenciaga and cut-outs for a modern, sculptural effect.

Sewing the extra mile: Her updated take on the 50s style dinner coat classic, lined with her new signature print.

The judges say: As the recipient of the outstanding student award, Friedlander obviously knew how to “make it work ”.

But to get her flawless version of La-La land required what the city’s already famous for: a little nip and tuck. Starting with two photos digitally meshed together, Friedlander then scanned her design pattern into Photoshop and manipulated the sunset to fit. She gave the City of Angels a little wing lift by adding different layers of colors, creating an ombre dip that’s worthy of any LA story. Finally, she sent the files and fabric to AVID Ink where they printed her digital image on panels used to create the final toast to the town.

Her fierce and fabulous frock and coat ensemble was unveiled at a runway show at the Otis gala fundraiser, intended to raise money for fashion students. “I wanted the person who wears this to feel like the hippest and most interesting girl in the room,” Friedlander says. There’s no question the girl in her dress would feel on top of the world, or, at least, Los Angeles. After all, isn’t living above Sunset every party girl’s dream?

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www.coroflot.com

]]> http://evilmonito.com/2008/05/21/kristen-friedlander-for-trina-turk/feed/ http://evilmonito.com/2008/05/14/keller/ http://evilmonito.com/2008/05/14/keller/#comments Thu, 15 May 2008 05:58:37 +0000 Liza Kaplan http://evilmonito.com/?p=239 Sometimes girls want to be girls and sometimes they just want to hang with the boys. Keller’s suit vests, fitted tees, narrow pants, and genderless shoes interspersed with paper bag skirts and simple print dresses allow one to glide easily between the two, recalling a more androgynous era. Based in New York, Keller is the brainchild of Kelly Clark, a graduate of New York’s F.I.T. Yet, her simple-turned-interesting pieces aimed to be timeless wardrobe additions reflect her B.F.A. in Fine Art and Art History. A black winter coat becomes a pièce de résistance with an intricately designed collar, and a monochromatic summer dress is eye-catching with oversized pockets in a different shade of grey. Whether you’re feeling like a Rosalind or a Ganymede, Keller has something exactly As You Like It. After all, all the world’s a closet… er, stage.

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www.kellerny.com

Available online at pixiemarket.com