Posted at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Disturbing images and videos are now everywhere available on the internet. Art, exploitation, disturbing celebration - we seem to have come a long way from the shock at heroin chic first seen in Nan Goldin's widespread Vogue spread decades ago. There are now production companies which proliferate these videos. Granted on youtube there are the occasional comments vilifying the proliferation of these videos but more often the videos and web sites seem to be an outright celebration of anorexia. To any sane healthy person the images are incredibly disturbing but to young impressionable minds the images are glamorous and encourage unhealthy body image among our young. And by the way they aren't limited to women although the great majority are female images but there is even male thinspo.
www.myhamptons.us - kara
Posted at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.
The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with
schizophrenia
and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.
Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.
“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.
After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”
Posted at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Another intriguing -- and disturbing -- finding was that as more people quit, the remaining smokers tended to wind up on the edges of society, with fewer and fewer social connections.
"In 1971, you have this crowd of people, and smokers are dispersed among them. But eventually by 2003, the smokers have been pushed to the periphery of the crowd," Christakis said.
That indicates that the remaining hard-core smokers are more socially isolated, which by itself has been shown by other research to have negative health consequences.
"So at the same time we are trying to help smokers to quit, we have unintentionally been hurting them by wreaking havoc on their social lives," Fowler said. "One of the implications is it's harder to reach smokers. Increasingly, they are huddled together in groups that are not connected to other people who don't smoke."
The findings could also have implications for the obesity epidemic.
"If we use these norms to fight the obesity epidemic, we may, in the process of stigmatizing the state of being overweight, further stigmatize obese people," Fowler said. "Smoking is an example of how we can create problems at the same time we solve others."
Posted at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 04:42 PM in Hamptons | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
A new survey of moms in America was just done and one of the questions was Have you or Do you cheat. Apparently 1 out of 3 moms admitted to getting a bit on the side. Great finally a way to pass the time at the next christmas concert or school play. After you catch your progeny's 10 minutes on stage you can play spot the mommy most likely to be enjoying extracurricular activities. Personally don't know where all these moms find the time. 1 in 3 is a huge number. Where are the kids while all the fun is going on? Can you think of any moms you know that have been having an affair. They're out there. I can't think of one. Well, maybe one but she doesn't live in America so she doesn't count. But I bet its the least likely mom on your list. Actually if you look around at the next assembly just think a third of us are playing out of school. Where do they find the time, the partners, the energy!!
www.myhamptons.us - kara
Posted at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The Euro has turned the tables on the Dollar and Europeans are enjoying their new found buying power. According to the Daily News this weekend, German, French and British vacationeers are picking up Hamptons rentals at what feels like bargain prices. $125,000 for an East Hampton or Southampton rental used to mean around 175,000 euros to our overseas friends but with the dollars reversal of fortune it now means 75,000 euros and foreigners are filling the void created by the banking fiasco's effect on the Hampton's usually reliable and money-laden New York banker.
Of course this just adds to the curious and little known dilemna of the Hampton's overseas visitor. They can't drive in the two biggest villages, East Hampton and Southampton. So now not only will the villages clean up on their new permit and tax regimen on rentals but just think of all the increased traffic violation revenues. But I still ask what about the insurance repercussions of the bizarre US driver's license-only rules. Now the really rich celebrity foreigners don't pose a problem after all a car accident victim can go after american assets but what about all the other normal foreigners here just for two weeks what recourse will an accident victim have with them when the insurance company won't pay up because they were, in fact, unlicensed drivers.
Is it just me that sees the problem here.
www.myhamptons.us - kara
Posted at 11:36 AM in Hamptons | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
The East End has historically been a great nurturer be it potatoes, fish, grapes, books or art. The huge farms fed New York in the 1800's, The fishing and whaling industries grew here and were hugely successful. I believe all these industries which are so close to the rythymns of the earth and sea create an environment, an ambience even a karma that interweaves into the soul of the place and its people and nurtures and respects innate talents. Giving them an opportunity to grow and develop and the marvelous thing is here on our East End these talents get recognized.
This past weekend I saw the result of that tradition. An artist, Philip Letts who first began showing publicly only a year ago at my little gallery that I opened the first time last summer on Shelter Island has landed in one short year a major exhibit at a big contemporary gallery, Gallery Mark Hachem, on Madison Ave. in NY, just two blocks from the Whitney. This is a true Hamptons tale. I know because the artist is my husband and I know his story.
For many years, Philip had looked at his art as an indulgence, a wonderful pasttime that he couldn't afford to spend too much time on. But three years ago we decided to get off the hamster wheel and move out to Shelter Island. I admit I lured him with the promise that I was bringing him to a place where he could develop and grow as an artist. I probably overdid it on the line about how many great artists lived and thrived here. So we came and Philip began an intense journey as artist. he developed his craft and I turned an old cottage office on our property into a studio/gallery where he could display his work. He found a community in Amagansett where he put his working studio that supported and encouraged him.
People came to the gallery and talked about his work. Locals and New Yorkers bought it. Some of our clients introduced him further on to important dealers and bingo fast forward nine months and he's primetime Madison Avenue - the stuff of dreams or the luck of the Hamptons!!!
I'll keep you posted....
Posted at 12:48 PM in Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Leading Madison Avenue contemporary gallery, Gallery Mark Hachem has announced the inaugural US exhibition of British abstractionist photographer Philip Letts - who also has a studio and house in the Hamptons. A pioneer in the field of ‘blur photography’, Letts creates work that merges the realism inherent in the photographic medium with the painterly and abstractionist possibilities of brush and oil. Born in 1966 and educated in England (Durham and Buckingham University), Letts transformed his early success in revolutionizing product and graphic design into a commitment to using the technological possibilities of the digital revolution as a tool for personal creative fulfillment and expression. The camera was transformed into the paintbrush and with it the destruction of the limitations and expectations of what it meant to create a digital photograph. ‘Blurred Vision: Selections of a Moment’ is designed to highlight the innovative scope at work in both Letts’ style and subject matter. Choosing to focus on images from ordinary daily life, Letts’ explores the implications of the erasure of objectivity in vision and evincing a more complex and ambiguous understanding of physical and visual realities. Whether that be through the figure of a boy running along a beach or the fading light of dusk, Letts challenges not only our vision of reality but the overriding obsession of the majority of contemporary art to serve only as a tool of visual and social shock. The opening is on May 20, 6-8pm, at Gallery Mark Hachem on the corner of 77th and Madison - and Hamptons Mag readers are invited! The exhibition runs from May 21 to June 1.
www.myhamptons.us - kara
Posted at 12:59 PM in Art | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This is a follow up to our previous post "Paul McCartney Arrested in the Hamptons???". Several people have commented and questioned the veracity of the story. I don't blame them. It seems unbelievable that a village that depends on the tourist trade and summer visitors and touts itself as an international vacation nirvana up there with the French Riviera would enact such an obviously xenophobic law. But I assure you it is true. I watched as an East Hampton Village Police Sergeant very cordially explained the law to my friend as he wrote him up a ticket for being an unlicensed driver even though his driving license issued in a friendly european country was up to date. Even though the policeman admitted the ludicrous nature of the law he said it was a law and he was sworn to enforce it.
He recounted several stories of europeans arrested and ticketed for violating the aforesaid restriction on driving. He especially got a kick out of one story: a wealthy englishman who having rented a beachfront home for over a hundred thousand dollars flew into Kennedy picked up his $1000 a week Mercedes rental and drove into East Hampton Village to pick up the house keys from the agency whereupon he was stopped by the police and issued a ticket for unlicensed driving. Now the officer didn't say why the guy was stopped originally. The police don't lie in wait in some kind of rental agency speed trap hoping to overhear a foreign accent and follow them out to their cars. I don't think?.
Foreign Nationals can drive in the villages if they get US issued licenses. A pretty impractical solution. Is this legal? Would it hold up in a higher court if challenged? I don't know. I assume the US must have some kind of treaties about driver privileges between allies but I don't know for sure. And who is going to pursue it - not the hispanic worker (I suspect it was meant to harass) and not the vacationing european who will either pay the fine and be done with it or skip court and just never come back.
Posted at 09:21 AM in Current Affairs, East Hampton, Hamptons, Lifestyle, Politics, South Hampton, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)