Champagne is the most ruthlessly branded of all wines, promoted as the drink of happiness or, as Napoleon famously noted, the potion of consolation in defeat. Champagne is instantly recognizable in every corner of the planet. The Chinese love it. Americans pay millions for it. Weddings, anniversaries, boat launches, and New Year's Eve are unthinkable without it. Here are our recommendations for some bubbly pleasure.
Happy New Year from Men's Vogue.
Deutsche Grammophon, the recording company founded in 1898 that was among the earliest adaptors of the CD format in 1983, has now entered the digital age. DG has just launched their online Web Shop, where you can now click and download any of 2,400 initial offerings from the classical-music giant. Of special interest are 600 previously out-of-print recordings. Better yet: The quality of anything you download, from Reich to Rachmaninov, comes to you at a bit-rate of 320 kb/second.
(For the non-technorati, that's more than twice the quality of the going market bit-rate of 128 kb/second.)
Miss your liner notes? Not to worry: You'll get PDF of them with every download. Prices vary somewhat according to the length of the work, though $11.99 is fairly standard for a CD-length download, $1.29 for an average-length track. The site also includes an updated link to DG artists on tour across the world. Our current recommendation: Anna Netrebko at the Metropolitan Opera in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette. --COREY SEYMOUR
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I was enjoying a fine three-course dinner at the Italian restaurant Fiamma a couple weeks ago (the New York Times just gave it three stars) when I mentioned to the sommelier that I had to go to Vegas that weekend. I wasn't complaining, since I actually like Vegas, just explaining that I'd never had a really good meal there. She told me there was another Fiamma there, which was welcome news, but that one of her Vegas places was Lotus of Siam, a tiny place rumored to draw the likes of Anthony Bourdain and David Burke when they're in town tending to their mega-restaurants entombed within the casinos.
Lotus of Siam is not only off the strip (at 953 E. Sahara Ave., which is about a 10 minute cab ride), it's in a strip mall flanked by Korean BBQ joints and even a massage parlor. It is Vegas, after all. Inside, the walls are lined with autographed photos of D-list celebs--Pat Sajak, John Ratzenberger, Ronnie Fabre (?)--enjoying the fare. This is not a fancy place. There are chintzy chandeliers and a stainless steel buffet table in the center of the dining room, and a few Asian screen blinds for good measure.
Drunken Noodles Sea bass
I went on a Friday night and it was filled with locals and a very friendly wait staff. When I ordered the fried wantons, my waitress, a sweet older woman, corrected me and pointed to others. "No, the fried chicken dumplings is good, this is good..."
She was right. The bacon wrapped prawns were incredible. The Thai ice tea is so rich it looked like a root beer float. The entrees were very generous, and the northern Thai house specials were excellent--rich intense flavors, no excess grease, and spicy punches that linger seductively. It's the best Thai food I've ever had, and I'd finally found a bit of epicurean luck in Vegas. --MICHAEL MRAZ
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Steve Coe understands the value of a quality t-shirt. "I want to wear it to death," he says, "I want mine to fall apart out of their own volition." His fittingly named company, Worn Free, is dedicated to crafting shirts with enough character to have endured for decades.
After hunting through photographic archives for rarely seen images of rock n' roll icons, he recreates the vintage tees worn by the likes of Debbie Harry, John Lennon, the Ramone boys, Zappa, and Iggy Pop. But Coe, a student of music (and a guitar player himself) originally from England, isn't just seeking superstar names. They may get the most attention, but he's more intrigued by the casual wardrobes of Gram Parsons, Mick Ronson, Ian Drury, and other artists that inspired the icons. "He didn't really give a shit about what anyone else is doing," says Coe, of Drury. "So it really influenced a lot of people. It's kind of like a great British institution really."
This focus on the 60s, 70s, and early 80s is no coincidence, says Coe, who got his start in the industry selling shirts like "Jehovah's Fitness" to Urban Outfitters. By the 90s, he says, "Everything starts to become branded." Thus, notions of working with favorites contemporary acts such as Super Furry Animals, and maybe dipping into reggae with Jimmy Cliff, will have to wait. But that's not stopping others from taking notice now, as everyone from Common to Travis to the cast of HBO's Entourage has donned Worn Free tees. "It's all kind of connected in a nice way," Coe says of his legendary roster, but it seems it's no less true nowadays. --NICK MOSQUERA
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To you and yours.
From Men's Vogue.
In 2004, Cleveland sculptor Steven Tatar, snooping around the city's garment district, snuck into the defunct Ohio Knitting Mills factory looking for a 20-foot-long I-beam for a project. Instead, he found Gary Rand winding down what had been a thriving family business. For three generations, peaking between 1947 and 1974, OKM had produced mainstream American fashion for such merchants as Pendleton, Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Saks. But the longtime garment manufacturer had seen the writing on the wall: American textile production had been eclipsed by outsourcing long ago.
So what to do with 10,000 capes, sweaters, skirts, shirts, and pants--not to mention piles and piles of swatches--that had amassed over the company's history? Presciently, Rand's father and grandfather had preserved samples of every OKM garment, whether it went into production or not. This meant tons of vintage clothing that no one had ever worn, perfectly preserved. What's more, the designs were brave, from the symmetrically bold to the downright dadaist. So while Tatar never found his I-beam, he did find one of the most unique design archives in America.
In their patterns and colors, these clothes, which Tatar--who acquired the rights to Rand's stock--sells at his Ohio Knitting Mills store on Smith Street in Brooklyn, evoke postwar exuberance, when design blasted back the ration-minded anxiety of the war years. Granted, some OKM designs are a bit hyperactive, if not color-blind. But even the goofier pieces reveal tremendous care and craftsmanship. "They're playful," Tatar says. "They're even naive, to be honest. But the textiles themselves are extremely sophisticated." The cuts, too, are throwbacks: The sweater vests are short and snappy, since men used to dress in high-waisted pants. The shirts are tailored slim. We're reminded of an evolutionary fact--not so long ago, the American was, for the most part, smaller, thinner, perhaps fitter. "It's archaeological," Tatar says. "It's social history. And yes, it also happens to be cool." --PAUL REYES
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At this year's Design Miami, the rigorous and often gleeful questionings of form and function that have lately taken over the design world continued along two lines: among newly commissioned work shown by the event's 26 galleries (up from the 21 at last year's gathering) as well as archival pieces, many from the formerly accursed period known as postmodernism, which has lately been undergoing a kind of retro vogue. The newly minted Friedman Benda (New York) highlighted Wendell Castle's plastic lounge chairs from the seventies, but visitors were busy aiming their Canons at three pieces off in a far corner from Ron Arad's early eighties One Off series: a turntable, receiver, and pair of speakers, all tricked out in unforgiving concrete.
Over at Demisch Danant, another New York gallery known for its adventurous ways, the focus was on avant West German designers from the same period, particularly Stefan Zwicky, whose Domage a Corbu, grand confort, sans confort (1980) is a take on Corbusier's LC2 Petit Chair rendered in, you guessed it, concrete.
It was impossible not to wonder whether some intrepid collector would snap up the Arads and the Zwicky as a set--that unforgettable hair-blown-back Maxell ad (which famously featured an LC2) cast in cement.
It was also impossible not to get the point: The Corbu chair's status as an icon of sensible, enduring modernist form--and even the idea of enduring modernist form--has become stolidly monumental. And was it ever really that comfortable to begin with? Such interrogations might have seemed radical in 1980. These days, they're amusing and refreshing--like popping a mix tape from college into the cassette deck, for old times' sake. --MARK ROZZO
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