Month: September 2010

Halston SS2011 and don quixote

how did i get from the halston fashion show to don quixote… allow me to explain. i arrived at the halston show at the barbara gladstone gallery promptly at 7:30 as noted on my calendar, only to realize that the show was at 6:30 to 7:30 and not at 7:30. oh well, it wasn’t the first time… and besides, i don’t generally frequent the same locations as the horse lady… i’m sure i’ll see the lovely hard work tomorrow. given i didn’t have tickets to marc, i headed to the chelsea hotel bar next door, the don quixote… while we hung out there for a few glasses of wine and appetizers, i found myself lost in the many irritable versions of don quixote statuettes that lined the walls and every available surface. from porcelain figurines to marble busts, this restaurant bar must have been frozen in time since the 70’s.

once home, i had to buy the book and re-read the masterpiece that both wells and terry gilliam failed to tackle. in my search, i came across these bits and pieces… they don’t come close to my admiration for a single white, scrawny, stick figure statue of a man i saw at the door tonight, but perhaps they’ll do the trick for you… happy reading. by uh

CATEGORIES: books, clips

the most expensive book: John James Audubon’s Birds of America

having just spent days painting birds in mexico i found this book rather curious and desirable. if only i had 9 million dollars to spare, that is. a rare copy of john james audubon’s “birds of america” is heading to the auction block and is expected to fetch between $6.2 and $9.2 million. billed as the world’s most expensive book, it is one of only 119 copies in existence. the 2-by-3-foot tome consists of 435 hand-colored prints of Audubon’s famous illustrations. it comes, of course, from the collection of a british baron who died in 1955. sotheby’s, which will hold the auction in december 2010, has 8.8 million reasons to believe the audubon book will fetch a fortune. that’s how many dollars a copy sold for at a christies’s auction in just 10 years ago! wow! by uh

CATEGORIES: books, earth related

the 2011 bentley mulsanne: not that impressive after all

the beautiful lines that fail to exist outside of a lit studioa V8 engine that thinks like a V4. bravo!
the vintage beauty next to the muslanne is the original 8-liter that was first shown at the 1930 london motor show. a total of 100 cars were built in 1930 and 1931. it was capable of reaching more than 100 mph, which was surpassing every other manufacturer of the day.

now about the the grandson… at almost $300,000 the mulsanne comes with beautiful lines that fail to exist outside of a lit studio, and safety-first high-rise doors that ruin the lines of any car. it also includes a tail that is not worthy of showing, and an interior that is just as disappointing inside you will find a horrible digital screen that sits dead center on the dash, immediately killing any illusions of romanticism and the over-crowded cabin and its over-use of leather and wood make it to be the perfect candidate for the man who has everything in this world… but class.

all that said there are no new cars that are even worth reviewing short of the R8, the original boxter, or the first relaunch of the bug. so the muslanne must have something! and it does.

the nose with its distinctive over-sized lights could have won the prize had it not been ruined by all the “jeweled LED” trickery, but that said its still a nose of a noble man, despite the zits.

the other nice part is that the the new bently’s comes with a revised version of the automaker’s 6.75-liter v-8 engine, which has been updated with “cam-phasing and variable displacement technologies”, which translates into a ‘power-on-demand’ system that simply closes the valves of four of the eight cylinders to maximize fuel economy and reduce the mammoth co2 output by such a large and heavy car (5,700 pounds which is almost 3 tons… all to move one single, fat, rich, oily, man). it’s still far from a green car but an “A” for efforts is in order. by dd

CATEGORIES: cars