Salon.com > Susan Emerling

Not forever

Wed, 27 Sep 2000 19:27:00 +0000

Nothing lasts forever and with the death this August at 91 of Harry Oppenheimer, the South African diamond magnate and former CEO of the De Beers cartel, the end of an era in which the world's diamond supply is exclusively controlled by one company and one family may be at hand.

In his 27 years as CEO of De Beers, from 1957 to 1984, Oppenheimer became one of the world's wealthiest men. During his tenure, De Beers controlled between 80 and 90 percent of the world's diamond supply. His many companies, most notably Anglo-American Trust and De Beers Consolidated Mines, at one point constituted 54 percent of the South African stock market's total assets. He was even one of the first white people who Nelson Mandela wanted to see upon his release from Robben Island Prison -- although this was perhaps more a sign of Oppenheimer's willingness to recognize the significance of the African National Congress for the smooth running of his business than testament to his great moral virtue.

Where the elite meet to pawn their Patek Philippe

Wed, 05 Jul 2000 18:52:00 +0000

Laugh if you like, but Los Angeles is the sort of town where conspicuous displays of wealth are considered compulsory. In bankruptcy proceedings, valid arguments can be made that a new Mercedes and a house in Beverly Hills are essential business assets, without which it would be impossible to keep the Mercedes and the house in Beverly Hills. This is survival of the fittest taken to a materialistic extreme. The city is a dreamer's paradise where people and businesses hemorrhage cash until blood runs in the streets.

The fact is, being wealthy doesn't come cheap, and sooner or later just about everyone needs a little help to make ends meet. Whether you need $100 to pay a phone bill, mad money for the cash-only Httel du Cap, a quick bailout without a credit check or friendly terms with which to upgrade last year's Cartier Pasha chronograph to this year's Patek Philippe, you can stop by South Beverly Wilshire Jewelry and Loan in Beverly Hills and ask for Yossi Dina.

You'll instantly know who he is. An intense, dark-skinned man in his mid-40s who could double for Yul Brynner, Dina is an impatient charmer. In a fast-forward combination of Hebrew and heavily accented English, he cuts through pleasantries with a rapid-fire "How much you want for it?" or "How much you give me for it?" before asking, "You want to come to yoga with me?" or "When are you and your boyfriend getting married?"

The sushi mogul

Wed, 28 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

There are so many celebrities floating around the universe of master chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa and his nine Nobu and Matsuhisa restaurants, that it's probably best to get a handful of them out of the way immediately so we can move onto other subjects. Here you go: Bobby, Nicole, Kenny G, Celine, Robin, Liv, Cindy, Gwyneth, Martha and Giorgio.

In fact, the restaurants are so successful that when the doors to the 6-year-old Nobu Restaurant in New York open at 5:45 p.m., there is already a line of 30 people, with and without reservations, who have been waiting on the sidewalk for 45 minutes. Even then, anyone who is seated is "signed" to a verbal contract guaranteeing they will relinquish the table in time for the almighty 8 and 8:30 p.m. reservations.

Shear madness

Mon, 22 May 2000 17:19:00 +0000

Mae West is headed for her longest run on Broadway
since her own play href="/people/col/cintra/2000/02/17/maewest/">"Sex" landed her in jail
on obscenity charges in 1927.

Actress and playwright Claudia Shear re-incarnates the original Hollywood
diva to hilarious effect in her new Tony Award-nominated play, "Dirty
Blonde," which chronicles the rise of Mae West from second-tier vaudevillian
to full-fledged star. West accomplished this feat by adopting her now-famous
parody of sexy persona and confounding Hays-era censors with a
suggestiveness they couldn't quite get their code around.

Forget about Madonna's chameleonic transformations, Mae West figured out
her magic formula and then packaged and preserved it the way Procter &
Gamble might have, forever. She even turned down the Norma Desmond role
in "Sunset Boulevard" to keep the legend intact. West also knew her
audience: In 1971, the 78-year-old legend told Playboy magazine that
"camp" could be defined as "the kinda comedy where they imitate me."

Public radio's bad dream

Tue, 07 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The perfect Joe Frank experience is driving down an unfamiliar highway alone at night. You turn on your radio and are greeted by a lush, resonant voice that lulls you into a seemingly simple tale of love: a man at an airport saying goodbye to his wife over the phone, which abruptly turns into a vision of betrayal, alienation and death -- often from obscure disease -- all brought about by some profound personal failing, which is redeemed at the last moment by a nearly transcendent moment of joy.

In the 10 minutes between his first "I love you as much as day we were married" to the end of the story, the man is confronted by an elderly woman having a seizure, his wife's infidelity, a near-fatal collision with an ambulance, a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer and his profound loathing for his own son.

Then Frank will shift the scene and you'll find yourself listening in on a private conversation caught midstream between lovers or strangers, parents and children, patient and shrink, pastor and supplicant. It has no obvious connection to the preceding story, but is so disarmingly intimate -- and, at times, so patently absurd -- that you are left wondering if you can believe what you're hearing. Frank coaxes along a confessional flow of sexual encounters or childhood humiliations that serve as unlikely springboards for the most profound questions of human existence: the need for love, the longing for family or the nature of suffering.

David Hare

Tue, 07 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Have you noticed? It's always the death of the theater. The death of the novel. The death of poetry. The death of whatever they fancy this week. Except there's one thing it's never the death of. Somehow it's never the death of themselves ... The death of television! The death of the journalist! Why do we never get those? It's off to the scaffold with everyone except for the journalists!"
--"Amy's View"
If the theater is dead, what was all the noise last spring about people not being able to get tickets to "Amy's View" or "The Blue Room"? Indeed, you'd have to drive a stake through playwright David Hare's heart to truly put an end to the theater. Otherwise Hare would keep on doing what he has been doing for the last 30 years: setting loose complexly conflicted characters caught in sparkling irresolvable dramas that grapple with the questions, "How do we change the world? And if we cannot change the world, how can we live in the world as we find it?"
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Artist's little helper

Fri, 29 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The art preparators are coming to pack Fred Tomaselli's enormous new work, "Gravity's Rainbow," and move it from his Williamsburg studio to the Philip Morris branch of the Whitney Museum. The show opens on Oct. 29, and now, at the 11th hour, Fred is pondering whether the 8-by-20 piece that seemed so large and ambitious while he was making it, is actually large and ambitious enough for the occasion. These are hard factors to assess in a city where an artist finds himself competing with the likes of the Empire State Building for size, beauty and lasting impressions.

Tomaselli creates gorgeously pristine paintings characterized by mesmerizing patterns and a precise order that reference both early American Shaker quilts and latter-day psychedelic hippie art. Like much of his earlier work, "Gravity's Rainbow" is constructed from complexly overlapping garlands of pharmaceutical drugs strung like beads on a necklace. Hemp, datura leaves and cut-outs of lips, eyes, hands, birds, reptiles and bugs are draped in inverted rainbows of color against a deep black background, which makes the images appear to float in space. Layered over the real pills are garlands of painted pills. This creates a tension between the real, the photographic and the painted that is totally deceiving from a distance and rather mesmerizing up close, and provides a humorous and ironic commentary on the allure of mind-altering experiences and the unreliability of perception. The drugs, enough in any given piece to create a healthy overdose, are safely sealed away from use -- in enough resin to kill the average human being. His ironic play with the toxicity of beauty is a recurring theme in his exploration of the sublime.