Archive for April, 2008
Perfume For The Raunchy And Fabulous
There are many reasons to love Henri Bendel, and in my opinion, the fragrance section is chief among them. In fact, when I found L’Artisan Perfumeur in a nook on the second floor, I disavowed my allegiance Jo Malone in favor of L’Artisan’s Thé pour un Eté. Well, prepare yourselves for more changes on the fragrance front, as Bendel has recently added Vive le Parfum est Mort to its already impressive repertoire of obscure fragrances. Mort, however, isn’t your typical line of artesian scents – at least, not on the surface. Each blend has its own name that is avant-garde, if not completely raunchy. Similarly, each scent is accompanied by an extremely creative and often erotic description and represented by a picture, many of which feature genitalia in one way or another. My favorite titles are “Magnificent Secretions,” “Hotel Slut,” and “Don’t Get Me Wrong Baby, I Don’t Swallow.” One has to wonder about the line that in this case separates avant-garde and West Village raunch – it’s obviously fine, but is it more the high quality of the blends or simply a bad case of francophilia?
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SOUTH Play Union Hall
South is a band from the UK making noise in the U.S. Recently the group played shows at the prized SXSW festival, their album You Are Here drops today and we got a chance to see them firsthand over the weekend at Brooklyn’s Union Hall. South are most def British and show signs of their homeland in every way, from their singing accents to their pop sensibilities . Their music is moody and they have not only an organ, which could lead to dabble of psychedelia, but a love of ex-Stone Rose’s frontman Ian Brown who mentored the group. Together since 1998 they originally started out as an electronic set, which you can hear in their cover of New order’s Bizarre Love Triangle.
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Celebrate Brooklyn!
Celebrate Brooklyn’s schedule is up, so for all you starving artists out there—or for you non-starving artists who still enjoy a good bargain, get out your calendar! Free music! Well, music with a $3 dollar donation. Or free if you choose not to donate. If you’ve never seen a free show at Prospect Park with your toes kicked out of your flip flops, your big shades reflecting the slow descent of the city sun, your cold beverage sipped just low enough below the brim to allow a little bit of dancing—then, well, dust off your subway map, kid. There are some big acts here. This happens every spring. I start daydreaming of escaping to Montana, or Oregon, or the Sea of Cortes—and then, suddenly New York starts flashing its summer grin at me. And, sheepishly, I’m always crawling back…
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Classical & Cocktails
Tonight, a good friend of mine is hosting an event at Gallery Bar for her fundraising efforts to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society for blood cancer research and patient care. This is the third year she has participated in the 100 mile bike ride around Lake Tahoe (America’s Most Beautiful Bike Ride), which is on June 1st this year. The benefit tonight will feature a string quartet from the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, Silent Auction, and an Open Bar from 7-8pm sponsored by Ketel One. GofG will be there, and we hope you will come support this cause too! Everyone is welcome!
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Home Base III
Go HERE for photos from this event by Etta Shon
What is Home? That is the question that the Home Base Project is trying to answer. The annual site-responsive, community based project, established by artist and curator Anat Litwin, is in its third year at exploring the notion of Home. This year, their cultural dialog, collaboration and study is taking place in a four-story brownstone in West Harlem, in a neighborhood with more history than you can imagine.
Last Sunday, GofG was at the launch of HomeBase III. This coming Sunday, we will be hosting the party up there, along with FameGame and Sugar Hill Beer Company. More info is to follow, but it would be an awesome way to spend your Sunday evening, amongst a group of 12-15 international well-known artist from different cultural backgrounds and artistic mediums. Each artist was given a room in the house for them to create a site specific art based on the notion of Home and what Home means to them.
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The Strange Inheritance Of Disney Rock Stars
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was sort of a Disney World junkie as a child. My family went there once a year, my eyes were often glued to the Disney Channel, and, given a blank piece of notebook paper, I could probably sketch an accurate map of the Magic Kingdom in under six minutes. Sick, right? But, throughout my courtship with the living relics of my television fantasies, I somehow feel as if I can channel Annie Leibowicz’s desire to catch Disney’s latest buck-fetching songstress in nothing but a sheath. Let’s take a quick journey through the last few years of paparazzi hell:
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Purse Personalities
For women, purses are a lot like the little dogs they tote around inside them: pets and masters will, over time, begin to resemble each other in strange and startling ways. Women for whom “spa” is a verb, place a high premium being freshly-plucked and streamlined. So too with their compact clutches, all sleek minimalism and squared-off edges. Those of us who spend more time applying black liner than balancing budgets tend to go for bags that are studded and buckled within an inch of their life. With all their hardware and zippers they look like MacGyver’s dream but are actually totally useless except to lug stuff from work back to your apartment. Then there are the laid back, eclectic ladies who prefer their bags to mirror their lifestyle: Hobos for the Bohos.
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The Go Green Expo
[Going green has it's perks, now ANYONE can feel like a stylish socialite]
Go HERE for more photos from this event by Alex Iravani and Queen Samantha.
It’s getting easier to be green…
This past weekend the Hilton New York hosted the Go Green Expo, three floors of ballroom upon ballroom of environmental awareness. The head-spinning milieu featured everything from governmental and non-governmental organizations, to the usual environmentally friendly candle, cosmetic, and clothing lines, to hybrid vehicles, windows and flooring, event planning, eco-tourism agencies, book publishers, food and drinks, household items and elephant dung stationary. In short, it modeled a soup-to-nuts, environmentally sound existence. If you didn’t get a chance to stop by, I’m happy to share some highlights of the exhibits (sadly, I didn’t make any of the seminars):
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Live/Work @ Fame Game Gallery
[GofG peeps at FameGame's Live/Work event]
Go HERE for more photos from this event by Antwan Duncan.
This past Friday, the GofG staff mingled with those crazy FameGamers, for the opening of their Williamsburg Gallery, devoted currently to the Live/Work team. The Undergrad, and Oper8tor recount the experience below:
From The Undergrad:
Like our editor, we’ve been trying to bust out of our mono-borough rut, so we were overjoyed when we heard that our good friends over at Fame Game would be celebrating the inauguration of their Williamsburg gallery this past Friday. Currently, the space is devoted to the Live/Work team -fourteen artists cohabiting in what must, judging from their perplexing and arresting pieces, be one hell of a kalaidescopic pad.
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Ben Widdicombe Decides “This Is None Of My Business”
The gossip journalism scene, if that isn’t too oxymoronic for you, will be changing a bit in New York. Ben Widdicombe, who writes the gossip column Gatecrasher for the Daily News, wrote his farewell column today. After 10 years as a gossip columnist, he will be packing away his pens and penchant for the dish on celebrities, socialities, and any other booze-soaked scandalite looking for 15 minutes of fame, so all of our ears may be buzzing a little less. Why the change? After a decade of going to star-studded red carpet events pounding the pavement, his writerly relationship to scandal began to shift…and he actually heard some rumors and thought to himself, “This is none of my business.” Imagine that, in the era of paparazzi! No news yet on how the News will continue to compete on the gossip front with the Post’s Page Six in the ongoing tabloid wars, but Ben, us media whores who love the tabs’ gossip sheets will miss your crashing gates.
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Hannah Montana By Annie Leibovitz
I remember when I first heard about this “Hannah Montana” creature, months behind everyone else it seemed. Well, Billy Cyrus’ daughter Miley has become so big that she is gracing us on the cover of June’s Vanity Fair, which hits stands today. And, from the looks of it, Hannah Montana is all grown up.
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