When Pad Thai Is Corruption
Thai PM forced out over TV chef role
By Amy Kazmin in Bangkok
Published: September 9 2008 11:22 | Last updated: September 9 2008 18:48
Samak Sundaravej, Thailand’s prime minister, was ordered on Tuesday to resign from his post by the constitutional court, which ruled that he had violated constitutional conflict-of-interest rules by making paid-for guest appearances on a television cooking programme after taking office.
The verdict is the latest bizarre twist in a destructive political stand-off pitting Mr Samak, 73, a conservative, against dogged protesters and influential Thais who believe that he is a proxy for Thaksin Shinawatra, the controversial former prime minister ousted in a 2006 coup.
Mr Samak, the leader of the People’s Power party, which is packed with loyal Thaksin allies, has been resisting intense pressure to stand down since August 26, when members of the People’s Alliance for Democracy seized his offices, vowing to remain until he quit.
But while Mr Samak has refused to yield – even declaring a state of emergency last week in a futile attempt to evict the demonstrators – the sharp-tongued politician has been undone by a post-election star turn on Tasting and Complaining, a television cookery and chat show.
A famous foodie, the bulky Mr Samak hosted the popular show until recently, whipping up spicy curries and other flaming Thai dishes accompanied by a stream of invective on whatever was on his mind.
At Last May We Come To Truly Know Our Past
from the New York Times (and Google)
Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives
SAN FRANCISCO — Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites, the company said Monday.
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers.
Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned millions of articles.
The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is creating a digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the United States from 1836 to 1922. It will be freely accessible on the Internet.
Alain Jacquet Gone
from the Long Beach Press-Telegram
Jacquet, 69, was icon of French pop
NEW YORK – Alain Jacquet, a French pop artist known for his reinterpretations of famous paintings, has died, the French Embassy said.
Jacquet, who lived in New York and Paris, died of cancer Thursday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the embassy said in a statement. He was 69.
Jacquet’s work often reflected the sensibilities of pop art, which emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and `60s and drew on advertising, comics and other pieces of popular culture.
He also revisited well known artworks from previous eras.
One of his best-known paintings recasts the impressionist giant Edouard Manet’s “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” which depicts a female nude picnicking with two fully clothed men. In Jacquet’s version, they are replaced by a gallery owner, an art critic and a painter. He also based works on two other renowned nudes, Manet’s “Olympia” and the neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ “La Source.”
Born Feb. 22, 1939, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Jacquet had his first exhibition in France in 1961. His work is held by institutions including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington and the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in France, the embassy said.
Are you going to call Child Services or should I?
Angel Down
Hells Angels leader Mark “Papa” Guardado shot dead in the street in San Francisco
Members of the Hells Angels. The San Francisco branch particularly has a history of clashes with the law.
———
Mark “Papa” Guardado, leader of the Hells Angels in San Francisco, was shot down on a city street there Tuesday night.
Guardado was found with gunshot wounds about 10:30 pm about a mile from the group’s clubhouse, according to CBS5 TV in San Francisco.
Witnesses told investigators the gang leader and the gunman struggled before the shooting, and that the suspect fled on a motorcycle, according to reports.
Guardado was taken to San Francisco General Hospital and died shortly afterwards.
The biker had been involved in an ongoing fight with a rival from another motorcycle group before he was killed, according to the Associated Press.
The San Francisco Hells Angels could not be reached for comment.
“I can draw the guitar like a motherf≥ckin’ riot…”
¡El Marielito Ha Veulto!
‘WRESTLER’ TAKES TOP HONORS AT VENICE
Aronofsky film pins down festival’s Golden Lion
VENICE — Darren Aronofksy’s drama “The Wrestler,” starring Mickey Rourke as Randy (the Ram) Robinson, a washed out pro-wrestler in comeback mode — both on and off the screen, it turns out — has pinned down the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion, providing the Lido with a grand finale.
“I think the reason people are reacting to this film is that there is a great talent revealing his soul,” said Aronofsky.
“Darren Aronofsky came here a couple of years ago and fell on his ass,” Rourke recounted in the Lido’s packed Sala Grande theatre, referring to the helmer’s “The Fountain,” which premiered in Venice in 2006 and subsequently flopped.
“I am glad he had the balls to come back,” Rourke added.
Step Up On The White Thang and Get Rid Of That Annoying Plastic Hoop
Damien’s Super Ego
Frank Dunphy’s art-market instincts have served Damien Hirst well in the past. The artist says he owes much of his global-brand status and $1 billion personal fortune to Mr. Dunphy. As far as Mr. Dunphy is concerned, the prices for Mr. Hirst’s art have never been high enough.
Mr. Hirst, known for his devil-may-care persona, rose to fame in the early 1990s by using dissected or pickled animal carcasses to explore themes like death and decay. Last year, the average auction estimate for a Hirst piece was about $470,000, up from $63,000 a decade ago. In June 2007, the royal family of Qatar paid Sotheby’s a record $19 million for “Lullaby Spring,” a mirrored cabinet lined with shelves of multicolored pills.
“People have a habit of underestimating Frank,” Mr Marlow says, “but you can’t outmaneuver him. He believes in Damien Hirst more than he believes in God.”
Tall and white-haired, Mr. Dunphy has a father-confessor demeanor that some attribute to his years of Catholic schooling in Dublin. He spent years as an accountant, filing tax returns for British performers such as Coco the Clown and strippers like Peaches Page before meeting a shaggy-haired Mr. Hirst over a snooker table at London’s Groucho Club in 1995. The artist had just won the prestigious Turner Prize and his hard-partying ways had made him a tabloid favorite.
Mr. Dunphy says he immediately recognized a star barely tapping his financial potential. He offered the artist his services, and the pair soon settled into a comfortable partnership, with Mr. Dunphy playing the bow-tied super-ego to Mr. Hirst’s id.
Friends say the artist loves to play pranks on his manager. During a trip to New York several years ago, he crept in to Mr. Dunphy’s hotel room while he was sleeping and decorated the entire room with cutout images of devils and demons “so that Frank would wake up in hell,” says Richard Wadhams, Mr. Dunphy’s former business partner.
Carlin’s Baseball vs. Football
AIDS Virus Yet Another Evil Plot of Caesar
Britons may be more vulnerable to Aids due to Roman invasion
Dr Faure believes the Romans introduced a disease which killed off people with a variant gene that now protects against HIV Photo: TELEVISION STILLS
Researchers found that people who live in lands conquered by the Roman army have less protection against HIV than those in countries they never reached.
They say a gene which helps make people less susceptible to HIV occurs in greater frequency in areas of Europe that the Roman Empire did not stretch to.
The gene lacks certain DNA elements, which means HIV cannot bind to it as easily and is less able to infect cells.
People with the mutation have some resistance to HIV infection and also take longer to develop AIDS, reports New Scientist.
A study of almost 19,000 DNA samples from across Europe showed the gene variant seemed to dwindle in regions conquered by the Romans.
Generally only people in Europe and western Asia carry the gene and it becomes much less frequent as you move south.
More than 15 per cent of people in some areas of northern Europe carry it compared with fewer than four per cent of Greeks.
It is not clear why this is so since the spread of HIV – which began in the early 1980s – is too recent to have influenced the distribution of the variant.
The difference in frequency of the key gene mutation reflects the changing boundary of the Roman Empire between 500 BC and AD 500.
But study leader Dr Eric Faure, of Provence University in France, does not believe the Romans spread the regular version of the gene into their colonies by breeding with indigenous people.
Dr Faure, whose findings are published in Infection, Genetics and Evolution, said: “Gene flow between the two was extremely low.”
Instead he believes the Romans introduced a disease to which people carrying the gene variant were particularly susceptible. As the Romans moved north this disease killed off people with the variant gene that now protects against HIV.
“Hello, Naomi – didn’t work out this time. You know they’re going to go for someone a little more sexy.”
Degas’ Dancers
Degas’s Ballet Students Teach the Lessons of Their Art
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Visitors with “The Little 14-Year-Old Dancer,” a bronze by Edgar Degas, from about 1880, at the Metropolitan Museum. The galleries have two depictions of her. More Photos>
In 1955 the art historian Kenneth Clark was visiting a museum in Copenhagen with Ninette de Valois, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet in Britain and the main architect of its style in the classroom. “How beautiful, “ Clark remarked as they were looking at paintings and statues of dancers by Degas. Soon he became aware of a severe expression on de Valois’s face. Then she said, disapprovingly, “Line!”
That story returned to mind as I recently viewed the endlessly absorbing Degas ballet paintings and sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Even if you’ve been looking at Degas ballet pictures for decades, it remains astonishing how few of his dancers are actually dancing. The rest are stretching, adjusting ribbons and costumes, waiting in the wings, resting, gossiping or watching what performing there is.
By contrast, in Degas’s 1890s paintings of Russian folk dancers, you can’t miss that these women are all dancing. Their long sleeves and boots (Degas called this series “orgies of color”) are another world from the Paris Opera ballet he had been depicting since 1870. (The Met has just one Russian dancer, from 1899.)
The ballet pictures feature remarkably little pointwork. Even when it occurs, Degas sometimes obscures it. In “The Dance Class” (1874), a single dancer is stepping onto point in attitude. Yet we can’t quite see the clinching detail of her toe, for the tulle of another performer’s skirt blocks our view.
The proportion of dance content is higher in the room of Degas statues, which contains 25 bronzes of dancers. Most, interestingly, show models in the nude. And three depict women doing the same arabesque penchée; each might have caused de Valois to exclaim, “Line!”
Rothko’s Chapel
He was one of the 20th century’s greatest artists, whose hypnotic paintings grew darker and darker. Jonathan Jones travels to Texas to take in Mark Rothko’s final, misunderstood masterpiece – a haunting chapel the artist never lived to see
Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Monday September 1 2008
Darkness dawns … Rothko at work in 1961. Photograph: © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / VG Bild Kunst, Bonn 2008
‘Can you see it?” says the man in the Hawaiian shirt, pointing up at the purple canvas towering over us. “I’ve never been here before,” he says, his shirt standing out wildly in the cool grey of the octagonal concrete room. “But I saw it in a matter of minutes. Can you see the figure of Jesus Christ our Lord on the Cross?”
I look politely into the misty bloom of the gigantic abstract work. It contains no images whatsoever, Christian or otherwise. I mumble something noncommittal, and he goes around pointing out Christ to everyone else in the room. They soon leave. I walk around staring at one colossal rectangle of sombre colour after another. A student comes in and kneels before a vast triptych that people choose to see as an altarpiece.
This is the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Art surrounds you here. Paintings on a majestic scale dominate each of its eight walls. There is little to interrupt their power, just the bare plaster, a few benches, and a couple of cushions on the floor. There are doorways, but they don’t lead anywhere, except into a tiny alcove containing nothing.
La Premiere Chanteuse de France
| Carla Bruni to jam with McCartney, Metallica | |
| AFP | Published:Sep 01, 2008 |
French first lady Carla Bruni Sarkozy will jam live with Paul McCartney and Metallica on British television next month in support of her new album.
The erstwhile supermodel — who married French President Nicolas Sarkozy in February — will appear on “Later … with Jools Holland” on BBC television when it starts a new series on September 16.The late-night show traditionally starts with piano-playing Holland and his guests jamming together.
Bruni, who recently featured on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in the United States and Britain, will perform “a song or two from her recently released third album”, the BBC said in a statement.
On the same night, Metallica will make its first appearance on the show in 12 years, while ex-Beatle McCartney will team up with record producer and bassist Martin “Youth” Glover under the name The Fireman.
Italian-born Bruni’s new album “Comme si de rien n’etait” (Simply) rode high in the hit parade in France after its highly publicised release in July in much of Europe, including Britain.
No More Lines for Mirren
Helen Mirren: why I stopped taking cocaine
The Guardian, Monday September 1 2008
There are many reasons to give up cocaine: the price, the health risks, the illegality. But for Dame Helen Mirren the decision to turn her back on the drug was more specific: Klaus Barbie.
Mirren, who won an Oscar last year for her portrayal of the Queen, says she took the decision after discovering the Nazi war criminal had been making money from selling cocaine while he was in hiding in South America in the early 1980s.
“I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties,” said Mirren. “But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early 80s. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron. And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this fucking horrible man in South America.”
Mirren says that from then on she never took cocaine again. “Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain.”
In the interview with GQ magazine, Mirren, who starred in Prime Suspect as DCI Jane Tennison, says she has been held back by her looks. “I’ve always had big tits and blonde hair. That’s an … can be a terrible disadvantage,” she said. “Because you’re not allowed to be intelligent if you’re a woman with big tits and blonde hair. And if you are, it offends people. Intelligence does not fit into that package, and you are patronised, condescended and insulted. Professionally.”
The Model With The Golden Arm
Solid gold statue of Kate Moss unveiled at British Museum
A solid gold statue of supermodel Kate Moss worth £1.5 million is being unveiled in the British Museum today.
By Sarah Knapton
First glimpse of a solid gold statue of Kate Moss by artist Marc Quinn Photo: PA
Siren is the work of artist Marc Quinn whose most famous sculpture was Alison Lapper Pregnant which appeared on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square
His sculpture of Moss said to be the largest gold statue to be made in the world since the time of Ancient Egypt.
Speaking about choosing the supermodel as a subject, Quinn said: “I thought the next thing to do would be to make a sculpture of the person who’s the ideal beauty of the moment.”
The 50kg statue will be displayed in the Nereid Gallery of the British Museum, alongside other statues such as Crouching Venus, a Hellenistic model of Venus surprised while bathing.
Quinn’s latest work, which shows Moss in a yoga pose, is part of a collection, entitled Statuephilia, by contemporary artists going on display at the British Museum.
It is the second time the London-born artist has used the model as his muse. He previously created Sphinx, a white-painted bronze sculpture of the fashion icon.
Quinn is also known for Self, a bust of his head made from eight pints of his own frozen blood.
Other artists exhibiting include Damien Hirst and Angel of the North creator Anthony Gormley.
Claudio Gone
Gorilla mourning her son is image of grief that breaks human hearts, too
Bild-Zeitung /Marco Stepniak
A mother gorilla bereft over the death of her baby son brought humans to tears – and brought humanity a little closer to animals.
It is a picture of pain that made mothers of all species cry – a grieving gorilla named Gana holding her dead baby in her hands.
Gana’s traumatic ordeal began when her 3-month-old son, Claudio, suddenly died in her arms.
Holding him like a doll, Gana stared at her son, apparently puzzled by his lolling head and limp arms.
Gently, she shook her boy.
Gently, she stroked his hair.
There was no response.
A crowd gathered outside Gana’s compound at the zoo in Munster, Germany, drawn by the unfolding tragedy, but Gana only had eyes for her son.
She prodded her boy. She caressed her boy. She seemed to be trying to will him back to life.
After a while, Gana gently placed Claudio on her back and slowly circled the compound, stopping every few steps to see if her boy was breathing again. Claudio gave no sign of life.
So Gana, age 11, resumed her lonesome pacing while all around her hearts were breaking.
Hundreds of humans bore witness to Gana’s torment on Saturday
Dusty Likes It
If you accidentally inject air into your vein, it is important to cut off your arm immediately so you don’t die.
Man Attempts To Amputate Own Arm In Denny’s
Modesto police say a local man who tried to cut off his own arm at a Denny’s restaurant thought he had injected air into one of his veins while shooting cocaine and would die unless he took drastic action.
The man, identified by police as Michael Lasiter, 33, rushed into the restaurant on Friday night and started stabbing himself in the right arm with a butter knife he grabbed from a customer’s table, police say. When that knife didn’t work, Lasiter allegedly took a butcher knife from the kitchen and dug it into his arm.
Lasiter, who was arrested and taken to a local hospital with severe cuts, told officers he thought he needed to amputate his arm to keep himself from dying from the cocaine injection, says Modesto police Sgt. Brian Findlen.
The Denny’s closed for the night after the incident.
Dorman Lost and Found
Josh Dorman’s collaged paintings on display at the Craft and Folk Art Museum
His works are built of topographical maps and other elements.
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times
August 30, 2008
Josh Dorman’s show at the Craft and Folk Art Museum opens with a warning, but not the usual sober sign you see at the entrance to certain exhibitions, aiming to shelter the unprepared from “inappropriate” content.
The notice, painted in sprightly letters on a plum-colored wall, alerts visitors that viewing Dorman’s collaged paintings may cause them to experience instability or dislocation. They might lose track of scale, gravity, time. “While clear answers may or may not reveal themselves,” the wall text declares, “the loose logic of a dream state will surely reveal much truth.”
Most of the work in “Within Four Miles: The World of Josh Dorman” is based on old topographical maps that the artist has cut out and collaged onto panels or canvas, drawn into and painted over. Typically, maps offer certitude and a clear sense of positional relationships. Dorman’s versions shed the anchors of rational order. They trade scientific method for poetic instinct. In finding a new use for old materials, Dorman has also resuscitated an obsolete definition of the word “map”: “to bewilder.”
Mystery Tweet by Tweet
from the Bits Blog at NY Times
Introducing the Twiller
You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it.
Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.
Introducing the Twiller.
Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.
In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller. (Cheap word play is what you get when you disintermediate, as they say, your agent and editor).
It’s about a man who wakes up in the mountains of Colorado, suffering from amnesia, with a haunting feeling he is a murderer. In possession of only a cell phone that lets him Twitter, he uses the phone to tell his story of self-discovery, 140 characters at a time. Think “Memento” on a mobile phone, with the occasional emoticon.
Review of BRIGHT SHINY MORNING AudioBook
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
read by Trevor White and Lorelei King
For Raymond Chandler, 1940s Los Angeles was a big hard-boiled city ‘with no more personality than a paper cup’. James Frey dissects the same big hard-boiled city sixty years on through a relentless depiction of the hopes and shattered dreams of the many and various who move to the sprawling and diverse metropolis – a mesmerising and moving microcosm of the human condition.
Bringing to life (and to death) a selection of the multitude drawn to the city of angels, Frey populates his book with the lonely, the egotistical, the depraved and the lost in what for many is an illustration of the decay that prefigures the decline and fall of a once-great empire – the United States of America.
Trevor White and Lorelei King share the narration in a stunningly brilliant example of the art ofaudiobook performance, chorusing the ups and downs (mostly downs) of the characters in the novel.
Bright Shiny Morning is one of the outstanding publications of the year and will be top of my list for an audiobookaward.
* * * * *
© 2008 AudioBooksReview
Slimes and Shrooms on Speed
Mixed Martial Smooching
James Frey Interview on AuthorScoop
‘This bull, has probably never seen a man on the ground before…’
Bullfighting is seen by many as cruel. But it is not merely a gaudy circus spectacle; at its best it is an art form. Can aesthetics justify the suffering of the animal?
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
The following events occurred on 19th April 2007, the second day of the Feria de Abril in Seville, in the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza de Caballeria
The bull enters the ring at a trot, a fanfare of trumpets fading in the background. He seems tentative, his eyes sweeping the ring.
His breeders have named him Borgoñés. He arrived in town the night before from the pastures of Victorino Martin’s estate in west-central Spain, 50 miles from the Portuguese border. Here, on this mix of pasture, scrub and woodland, Borgoñés learnt how to use his horns on other bulls and built his 86.5 stone bulk of muscle and bone. Now that he is alone for the first time in his life, the restraints on his more ferocious instincts have been removed.
Standing at the far edges of the circular ring, some 60 yards from the bull, are three banderilleros: companions and employees of the matador in lesser versions of his “suit of lights,” each with a large working cape in his hands, pink on one side, yellow on the other. They flap their capes from the safety of wooden hides in the barrier of the ring until Borgoñés charges across the ring, selecting his target. The 
bull does not stop until he hits the wall of the wooden hide, the man safely behind as Borgoñés jabs again and again at the wood, splinters flying. Borgoñés has shown that he is quick to take the lure, that he charges straight, without hesitation or pawing the ground, and that he favours his right horn.
The matador walks into the ring, an unprepossessing 33-year-old man of neat figure and composed manner. Manuel Jesús Cid Salas, or “El Cid,” was born in a small town on the outskirts of Seville called Salteras. He flaps his cape and the bull turns, raising his great head with its wide-ranging horns so that the vast goring muscle, the morillo, bunches on its shoulders to a size outstripping any other breed of bull in the world. And then he charges. Unlike his cuadrilla, his group of companions, El Cid does not hide but stands his ground, his back ramrod straight, the cape held out to the right of his body in both hands, feet together, and waits for Borgoñés to come to him. Borgoñés is fresh, the distance is sizeable, and the bull nears 30 miles per hour as he reaches El Cid. El Cid moves the cape slightly, and Borgoñés takes the moving lure over the stationary man and thunders past, his horns low where the movement was, the cape sweeping over his face in a perfect veronica, named after the saint of the same name who wiped the face of Christ on his way to Golgotha.
Borgoñés comes out the other side, frustrated that his horn met no opposition, and turns within two body lengths of passing El Cid, who has readjusted his own position to receive Borgoñés in another veronica, as neat as the first, the horns passing some 18 inches from El Cid’s face as Borgoñés leaps into the air when he reaches the cape, trying again to sate his rising fury in living flesh. The crowd, already impressed by the first veronica, shout an “olé!” for the second. Again Borgoñés passes the man by, again the crowd roars, again Borgoñés turns, again he passes, a foot away from the man this time, and he turns again, comes back and this time El Cid winds the cape around his own hips as Borgoñés follows it, winding the bull around his body in a media-veronica. For a brief moment, following the increasing display of risk and skill in the veronicas, we are given the sight of the man, stationary, in the midst of a circling fury, wearing this great beast like a belt, the crowd cheering, until Borgoñés, driven by his own momentum out of the charge, is drawn to a halt by attempting to turn in a distance shorter than his own body length. He is left panting, facing El Cid three yards away, who is standing with his back to the bull. El Cid receives his applause from the crowd and thus ends the section called suerte de capote, “luck of the cape,” the first half of the first act of the bullfight called the tercio de varas, the “third of the lances.”
El Cid has now learned that Borgoñés is a bull truly in the prime of life, possessed of speed, strength, stamina and courage, but without the excessive aggression which would make him unpredictable and self-destructive. He has sufficient intelligence to follow the cape in these moves—which have been refined over 250 years—but not so much that he has learnt to distinguish man and cape early in the fight. This bull, after all, has probably never seen a man on the ground before, his herdsmen on the estate all being mounted on horseback. However, he is learning. At some point he will, inevitably, see the man.
[ click to continue reading at prospect-magazine.co.uk ]
Discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect‘s blog
Turn Down The Sound at 0:42, And Just Watch The Horse And Rider
Bright InStyle Morning
Industry Interview: instyle.co.uk’s Maria Milano
This week’s Industry Interview comes from Maria Milano, editor of instyle.co.uk:
As editor of instyle.co.uk, I am involved in all aspects of the website’s production, from writing, styling and editing my team’s work to more strategic tasks including budget crunching and analysing traffic figures to make sure readers are getting more of what they want. Attending A-list parties and fashion shows are certainly a perk of the job, although the quick turn-around time of the web means they’re also very hard work.
Read on to find out what Maria’s trend predictions for A/W are and what she’s been wearing to death…
What was the most exciting/interesting thing that happened this week?
I’ve just returned from holiday so I’m just getting back into the swing of things, but I received a number of fashion show invitations for the upcoming London Fashion Week while I was away, so I’m excited to do some RSVP-ing.
Which trends do you think are going to be big in the next few months?
There is a serious Seventies revival happening, so expect to see lots of flared trousers, fringing and earth tones. Also boho returns, but in a much more grown-up, luxurious folkloric kind of way. Gucci and Topshop have really nailed this trend. Personally, I’m excited to see that lace is making a comeback, which will be perfect for Christmas party season!
What are you wearing to death at the moment?
My Gap peg-leg trousers – I snapped up two pairs the minute they hit the shops.
What was the last book you read?
I just finished James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning. It’s about a group of characters living in LA, and I wanted to read it before my two-week holiday in California. I really recommend it, despite all the James Frey controversy!
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The Tortoise Always Wins, Perhaps, But The Hare Gets All The Nookie
