Musing from the impetuous 30something Cosmopolitan chronicles the modern life, personal commentaries and unconventional thoughts of a thirty-something professional woman on a quest to live life on her own terms.
Exit Art tell you the war stories through the vision of 9 international artists. Love/War/Sex considers memory, history, weapons and personal stories. As a cultural center, it is Exit Art's mission to reflect what is going on in our society. The installation reveals how war images are so common that it makes us immune to death. This art work is a chapter of the history of power. The present exhibitions deal with the current global conflicts and the countries fascination and addition to war. The title demonstrates the paradox of what war really is and it contradictions of emotions, passions, idealisms and convictions. The installation of Love/War/Sex includes real weapons of war in the show, while telling the stories of the relationship between love, war and sex and its brutality and insensitivity to humanity. It provokes surprise and shock with the realization of war. Click her to view LOV/WAR/SEX at Exit Art.
Thus far, Zadie Smith is one of the great writers of my generation. I read White Teeth and On Beauty. I love that she envelops who she is in the story line. The dysfunction and inadequacies which permeate through her family structure are often woven into the character she creates. Hence, the perils of the human experience make for good fiction. I am amused at her amazing comparative cultural antitheticals which seamlessly convey the symbiotic mural of life(one planet, one people, with cultural differences). Her British dry wit, clever sarcasm, illusive charm, and exhaustive imagery makes for great humor and a well develop plot leaving the reader wanting more. Zadie definitely exemplifies the typical Impetuous 30Something Cosmopolitan.
JANICE SIMPSON wrote in April 2006 TIME magazine wrote Zadie Smith's books. They arm wrestle, get in one another's faces and climb into one another's beds. Smith's precocious debut novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, just three years after she graduated from Cambridge, centers on two World War II buddies—a white working-class Brit married to a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness and a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh who imports what he thinks will be a traditional wife from the old country. But it's also the story of their children, who grow up, as Smith did, in a post-postcolonial London where the old gentlemen's agreements about class and race are being shredded. The book earned lavish critical praise, was turned into a TV mini-series and established a model for how to make sense—and art—out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century.
Smith, 30, likes to work big. Her narratives sprawl with Dickensian swagger. Her cultural references leap the high-low divide from John Milton to Eminem. Plus she's funny. Refugees from the era of political correctness and others who are easily offended probably should stay clear. Last year Smith published On Beauty, a novel set in the hothouse of American academia and scheduled to be made into a movie produced by Scott Rudin, who has adapted such provocative works as The Hours and Closer for the screen. Like White Teeth and her second novel, The Autograph Man it is simultaneously intellectual and visceral, a panoramic view of the way we live now.
Interview with Zadie in Stockholm 2006 Double click bottom arrow to view an interview with Zadie Smith in Stockholm the summer of 2006 when her book On Beauty had been translated into Swedish.
James Lasdun's review on the Novel "On Beauty" (Source: The Gaudian UK) I completely agree with the James Lasdun's review of Zadie Smith’s newest novel On Beauty. He wrote: among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives .
White Teeth had a similarly heterogenous cast, but whereas in that novel Smith kept it together by keeping it light, with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded to throughout, is EM Forster. Forster's style, which looks simultaneously backward to the epigrammatic polish of Jane Austen and forward to the looser, more discursive amplitude we favour today, resonates strongly in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many beautiful descriptions and gently ironic authorial interjections that frame and connect the bright pieces of Smith's mosaic. You can hear it in everything from the stately scene-setting passages (particularly where rooms or houses are being evoked) to the most incidental moments, for example where the lovelorn elder Belsey boy joins his mother and her middle-aged friends at an outdoor festival: "Jerome, in all his gloomy Jeromeity, had joined them. The ill-pitched greetings that compassionate age sings to mysterious youth rang out; hair was almost tousled then wisely not ... "
More specifically, the plot of Forster's Howards End, ingeniously re-engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty. The unruly Belseys, like Forster's Schlegels, become embroiled with another family whose conventional household seems the stolid opposite of their own. In both cases the wives form a surprising friendship that leads to a valuable legacy being bequeathed by one woman to the other. And in both cases the family of the deceased woman conceals the legacy from her surviving friend.
Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra-conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment, exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt. To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches.
With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope for all the familiar farcical posturings so dear to the heart of academe. But while Smith does indeed deliver a superbly wicked example of that genre, this is only a small part of her achievement. Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression (from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner.
But that isn't quite it either. The word "liminality", which a student of Howard's has to look up at one point (she would have found that it has to do with thresholds and boundaries), perhaps best expresses the driving idea of the novel and the source of its most powerful passages. These occur some way along, after the plot has been laid and the book begins coasting on its own momentum. They consist of a series of encounters in which the discrete worlds incarnated in these highly diverse characters start colliding and breaking each other open. At its most basic, the illumination that results is simply that of the surprise perspective - Levi Belsey applying his hip-hop worldview to a casual thought about Richard Branson: "Levi liked the way the mythical British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world ... " But in its more sustained form this collision principle becomes a way of taking apart and investigating elemental human configurations: parent and child, teacher and student (some of the most sensitive writing I've read on what actually goes on in this particular relationship), black and white, employer and employee.
A degree of psychological violence is always implicit in such mutual broachings: Kiki Belsey's gravitation toward Carlene Kipps is a betrayal of her own husband; minor, but forceful enough to set off a cascade of reappraisals of both Howard and herself in her own mind. Sometimes the impact sets off a whole ricocheting chain of further encounters. Howard Belsey, usually armoured with a sneer (or a snore) against anything overtly "sublime" in art, becomes unexpectedly overwhelmed when a choir breaks into Mozart's Ave Verum at Carlene Kipps's funeral in London. He reels out of the church, the shock of mortality reverberating in his head, and finds himself wandering toward his childhood home in Cricklewood, where his father, whom he hasn't seen for years, still lives. Here, as the conciliatory impulse gives way to ancient antagonisms, a still more devastating confrontation takes place, and Howard careens off again, first to a pub, then to Carlene's wake where, drunk and dazed, he allows himself to be seduced in an upstairs room by ... well, by about the last person on earth he should be allowing himself to be seduced by.
A further pleasure of these charged encounters is the extraordinary vividness with which they have been imagined. Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life.
There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip-hop moves to the gleeful horror of his kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper-intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir Monty, who's fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of a punch.
But with so much done so extremely well, it seems ungrateful to dwell on imperfections. Numerous virtues more than make up for them: characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp, touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself, who starts out like an escapee from a Malcolm Bradbury novel but whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening and strangely sweetening his character. Above all, just the sheer novelistic intelligence - expansive, witty and magnanimous - that irradiates the whole enterprise.
James Lasdun's The Horned Man is published by Vintage
=======>About the Author======>(Source: Wikapedia) Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith (she changed her name when she was 14) in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne McLean, and an English father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and immigrated to England in 1969. It was her father's second marriage. She has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper Doc Brown. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist. Literature, however, came to be her principal interest.
Smith attended the local state schools, Malorees Junior School and Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.[1] In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Smith was keen to correct a recent newspaper assertion that she left Cambridge with a double First. "Actually, I got a Third in my Part Ones", she said. At Cambridge she published a number of short stories in a collection of student writing (see Short stories) called the May Anthologies. These attracted the attention of a publisher who offered her a contract for her first novel. Smith decided to contact a literary agent and was taken on by the Wylie Agency on the basis of little more than a first chapter.
White Teeth was introduced to the publishing world in 1997, long before it was completed. On the basis of a partial script an auction among different publishers for the rights started, with Hamish Hamilton being successful. Smith completed White Teeth during her final year at Cambridge. Published in 2000, the novel became a bestseller immediately. It was praised internationally and won a number of awards (see Novels).
In interviews she reported that the hype surrounding her first novel had caused her to suffer a short spell of writer's block. Nevertheless, her second novel, The Autograph Man, was published in 2002 and was a commercial success, although the critical response was not as unanimously positive as it had been to White Teeth.
After the publication of The Autograph Man, Smith visited the United States as a 2002–2003 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University. [1] She started work on a book of essays, The Morality of the Novel, in which she considers a selection of 20th century writers through the lens of moral philosophy.
Her third novel, On Beauty, was published in September 2005 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book won the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Smith met Nick Laird at Cambridge University. They married in 2004 in the Chapel of King's College. Smith dedicated On Beauty "for my dear Laird." Laird has published a collection of poems, To a Fault, and a novel, Utterly Monkey, early in 2005. The couple lives in North London, UK.
Tom Byrne is an Ireland born Parisian painter with 20 years of painting of his belt. Tom's day job is as a freelance illustrator who specializes in creating award winning illustrations for media campaigns, outdoor advertising campaigns, web communication, packaging, large posters, point of sale and F.M.C.G promotion, corporate portraits. Tom's work exudes a spirit that speaks to viewer, with impeccable creative expression. Tom's work will be on display in a NYC galary in beginning of 2008. More of his work can be viewed Tom J.Byrnes Studio Contact: tj@tjbyrne.com and view updates on Living Painting
Why does acid jazz, disco house and trance music sound so much better, and feel so better when one listens to it in an aesthetically exquisite surrounding, with reasonably priced drinks and small prortioned treats? Is it just me, or does the thought of going to a lounge that plays the music you like, no matter how esoteric, bring you immense joy also? If so, check out the APT lounge located in NYC meat packing area.
The apartment has been a staple in New York since the 2000. When the APT lounge opened, there was nothing else in the neighborhood, but the meat packing industry meat lockers. APT has maintained its low key identity as a haven of high quality, diverse music in a superbly designed setting with phenomenal sound system. The club has played host to everyone from Luke Vibert to Grandmaster Flash, Nicky Siano and Laurent Garnier and held residence with Bobbito Garcia, Rick Medina, Theo Parrish, Dirtybird, Jazzy Jeff and many others.
When APT first opened, the address was anonymous. People would walk up and down W. 13th Street for any signs of this nightlife location. It was an interesting idea, if you found the secret buzzer. Once in, one can go to the upstairs restaurant or the downstairs which was a quintessential New York bar with its DJ’s and beautiful people. It looks like a trendy furnished apartment. It’s been there for eight years, the secret is out, a nd it’s still uber-groovy.
