Salon.com > Heather Chaplin

War is the new black

Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:55:00 +0000

It's true: Joan and Melissa Rivers, the gold lamé and jersey-draped mother-daughter duo best known for swooping down on stressed-out movie stars like a pair of harpies from the night, were banned from the red carpet at the 75th Academy Awards last night. Like the rest of the press, the E! Channel-designated Oscar fashion arbiters were in a TV studio, forced to watch the arrivals on a square screen like the rest of us.

Our four-day-old war with Iraq may have stopped Joan and Melissa, and may have ended the reign of the red carpet and bleachers of screaming fans, but it did not stop fashion.

"Oh, thank God!" croaked Joan, as first one and then another Hollywood actress stepped out of a limo revealing a bit of leg, some shimmering chiffon, a rustle of taffeta. "Thank God!" Joan was almost beside herself. "We didn't know if it was going to be glamorous or not! But here it is, people are looking good! Oh, thank God!"

The controversy over what to wear to this year's Oscars has loomed over Hollywood like its usual haze of smog since the moment President Bush stared into the camera last Monday and told the American people he was giving Saddam Hussein 48 hours to give up power or face war.

Sweet home Alabama

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 20:19:00 +0000

Natalie Chanin has spent more time than usual at the Whitney Museum of Art this winter.

It's "The Quilts of Gee's Bend" that's drawn her uptown, a collection of 60 quilts produced by a group of dirt-poor Alabama women who sewed together for 70 years from 1930 to 2000.

Like the other patrons, Chanin gets up close to the quilts. The patterns range from the strikingly symmetrical to the whimsically circular. Not one is uniform in shape or size. You can feel the human hands behind the quirky irregularities and the peculiar fabric selections. There are denims, corduroy, polyester blends of palm trees, striped wool, worsted cotton.

And Chanin is thrilled, once again, over how disparate, throwaway pieces of fabric sewn together can create something so whole, so pleasing.

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On Valentines Day, the final day of New York's Fashion Week 2003, about 40 blocks south of the Whitney, the Alabama Project, an underground chic fashion house -- which is the best kind of chic -- is getting underway. There are anxious-looking assistants in headsets with clipboards, reed-thin models, paparazzi.

Vox populi

Tue, 12 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

On a quiet street in Manhattan's East Village, there's an apartment building that lists "Sound Portraits" as one of its tenants. Hit the buzzer, and you'll be directed to a rather unremarkable and cramped one-bedroom on the ninth floor, the former home of 33-year-old David Isay, and the current home of his acclaimed nonprofit radio production company. Were it not for the Robert F. Kennedy awards on the floor of the narrow hallway and the sound equipment glimpsed through a half-shut door, one might wonder whether this were really the place from which some of the decade's most acclaimed radio programming has emerged.

"Sound Portraits" tells the tales of society's most ignored citizens: a freak-show giant; life-without-parole prisoners; children in a Chicago housing project; residents of a New York flop house. And while uncovering hidden corners of American life has become practically a cottage industry in hip media circles, its lack of pretension and the respect shown its subjects sets this show apart. Documentaries like 1993's "Ghetto Life 101" or last year's "The Sunshine Hotel" are examples of "Sound Portraits" at its best -- but if you didn't hear the NPR announcer say so, you wouldn't know Isay had made them. Not a syllable is heard from his lips in either piece. In fact, his aversion to taking center stage in his work seems so strong, perhaps it's not so surprising that his offices are unassuming to the point of seeming covert.

Once Upon A Number

Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

| If the very thought of being asked to contemplate a math problem beyond rudimentary algebra makes your chest tighten, you may open "Once Upon a Number," the new book from Temple University professor and math enthusiast John Allen Paulos, with a good deal of trepidation. Once you're a third of the way into this often charming narrative, however, you may begin to think that math -- with its prickly statistics, logic, probability -- is perhaps not so heinous after all.

"Once Upon a Number" argues that our everyday lives and the formal world of mathematics inform one another. The gulf between "statistics and stories" or "narratives and numbers," Paulos writes, ought not be so wide. He aims to bridge the gap "between these two fundamental ways of relating to our world," between the literary and the scientific. "Unfortunately," he laments, "the chasm between these two cultures persists, each continuing to hold the other in mild contempt."

Baby bulls

Wed, 15 Apr 1998 08:07:00 +0000

When Robert Gapasin graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo in 1991, his parents gave him a choice of graduation presents. He could have an all-expense-paid trip to Europe, $5,000 or 100 shares of IBM. Gapasin, who had never been the least bit interested in the stock market, still wonders why he chose IBM.

Bewildered, perhaps, but not regretful. Gapasin, a 29-year-old electrical engineer from San Jose, has since become an avid investor. He buys mostly technology and apparel stock, always in companies that have products he knows firsthand and never with the help of a broker. He's owned Microsoft, Nike and the Gap, as well as lesser known companies, such as KLA-Tenor, and he almost always makes a tidy profit.

Gapasin's success is due to skill but also to an employee stock purchase
plan, a 401K plan and one of the greatest bull markets in history. All told,
Gapasin has parlayed $5,000 worth of IBM stock into a portfolio worth
$100,000.

"This is a pretty unusual time," Gapasin concedes. "Anyone who's not in
on it now is crazy."

Baby hunger

Mon, 23 Feb 1998 18:14:00 +0000

A strange thing happened to me the other day.

I was walking home from the corner store, a paper tucked under my
arm, when I almost tripped over a baby. This child, who couldn't have
been more than 2 years old, had broken away from his mother and
was waddling toward me, shrieking in apparent delight at his newfound
freedom or perhaps just the ability of his legs to carry him.

The toddler, who had a big round face, blotchy red skin and pale yellow hair that
stood straight up in a wispy mohawk, stopped directly in front
of me. He looked up the long distance from my shins to my face and
stared at me as if he knew me. There was a pause. Then, for no reason
that I can think of, his face crumpled into a thousand creases and he
began to bawl, his arms stretched out at his sides as if he were being
crucified.