Tragic news: Uber is no more. The economic debacle has hit home, leaving La Vie en Rose and the many, many other sites that lived at this innovative, thriving place without a host. Earlier this week, distressed investors backed out of a third round of funding and the board voted to shut down Uber. I am sad. Sad for the extraordinary bunch behind Uber, who were among the most passionate, brilliant and genuinely nicest folks I’ve had the good fortune of knowing. Sad because they all had worked endless days to develop the most groundbreaking software and they did it with an artist’s heart and eye. Sad because they finally zeroed in on how they needed to position this technology and their mission so the uninitiated could understand it, finance it, run with it. Timing is everything goes the adage, and unfortunately the times are bananas (certainly with those monkeys running D.C.). Always preferring to see the Champagne glass half full, however, I choose to believe that the software Glenn Kaino and his team of clever kids created will find another life. As for me? Come good times or bad, there’s always plenty going on to share. This is not the first incarnation of La Vie en Rose (a page that first appeared in the OC Weekly a dozen years ago!), and it will not be its last. Thank you LVER Readers for your comments and critiques, support and interest. I’m always grateful when you take a few minutes from your busy lives to read something I’ve written for a magazine, a book or for this blog. And I hold dear the thoughtful gestures, like the image here by Evelyn Black, a young artist I met one night who surprised me with this a few days later. Thank you. It’s any one’s guess how much longer Uber will be visible. If you’d like to be notified of my next address, please drop me an email at rosesblog@me.com. Be well. Keep your cents and sense. And don’t let life’s thorns keep you from painting the town rose. -Rose Apodaca
Suzy TV: Touring Tom Ford's new menswear Valhalla in Milan
For those of us weaned on Saturday morning episodes of Style with Elsa Klensch, the pioneering fashion TV mag that ran on CNN for two decades until it was unceremoniously pulled in 2000’s AOL merger, there’s long been a desire to see another incarnation of the show. Hope springs eternal watching this clip of International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes. Memo to Bravo: Guilty fun as they are, it might be time to move beyond the rice cakes and Diet Coke you keep serving viewers and introduce something with a bit more complexity and taste.
Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black
The inimitable antidote to the fashion week, er, cycle (since it’s now moved on to Europe), is none other than the high-theatrics rock ensemble The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. If you never witnessed the horrifically camp spectacle lead by uber provocateur Kembra Pfahler, a California Girl of the punkest variety who’s cut and kicked her career in New York, you’ve been missing something.
Dancing Queen: One of the Girls of Karen Black
Mme. Pfahler and band, along with friends and fans, celebrated the release of the “Beautalism” book, a Deitch Projects imprint chronicling moments from her 2008 Whitney Biennial project and other notoriously legendary moments—such as stitching up her waxed and painted vagina on stage. Last week’s early bird special presentation at Santo’s in SoHo (we were out of there by 9 p.m.!), erupted without the found props that are so signature to the VOHKB art performance concerts. But as with the Whitney event, the show opened with the dandy theremin artist Armen Ra and left us all equally drained and energized. And, really, as terrifyingly subversive as Kembra’s caustic blitzing of the female sexuality paradigm is, is it really any weirder than what goes on in the name of fashion?
Armen Ra
Dear Santa...
Santa at Santo's
Before the Show: Bryan Rabin and VHOKB's Adam Cardone
It’s become a cliché to compare fashion to architecture. And most often the analogy is based on some house-of-cards notion that’s supposed to impart a designer’s work with all the forte and skill required to raise a towering column of steel and glass and concrete.
Of course, with every cliché there’s a morsel of truth. And when it comes to the calculatedly constructed, simply refined clothes of Yeohlee Teng, the parity to architecture is reasonable, even inevitable. Since introducing her collection in New York in 1981, Yeohlee’s work has been about challenging conventional trends and challenging conventional execution, thoughtfully and intellectually. Like the best architecture, her dresses and jackets are a puzzle of geometric cuts, surprising silhouettes and quiet simplicity. This may not always go over with the fashion brigade, who discover her, ignore her and repeat the cycle again every few seasons. Now a new wave of designers, including Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa, are referencing her modern perspective. Smart as a whip as she is, Yeohlee is no dour mad scientist of cloth and needle. We first met in 2006 at MOCA’s inaugural gala of the exhibition “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.” It was a sort of esprit de corps at first meet and we’ve kept in touch since. So a week after her well-received presentation at the Van Alen Institute in the Flatiron District, I dashed into her studio off Seventh Avenue for a quickie fitting. I had my eye on a paper-thing rubber bubble jacket from the Spring 2009 presentation, inspired, wouldn’t you know it, by the deconstructivist architect Bernard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette in Paris. But my reason for being there was a dress and jacket from this fall season that required a nip and tuck before I could finally step out in them.A lovely Polish expat named Maria measured and pinned, while Robert Barr, my former assistant and now Yeohlee’s inhouse publicist, grabbed a pair of the sexiest stiletto slides so we could get the full effect. The arms on the jacket were slimmed down; the dress became less A-line, and was taken up to my knee. “Love, love,” declared Yeohlee, her entire face smiling.
Dinner capping an exhausting New York Fashion Week didn’t end with the port Friday night. I caught up with several editor pals (all whom I got to know when we slogged for WWD, and who’ve now gone on to some pretty great gigs) for a bloody hangar steak at the Frenchy bistro Belcourt in the East Village. After a nightcap at the corner bar, my plans to get cheek to pillow were wildly diverted as soon as I got back to the apartment and found my dear Bryan Rabin ready to roll out. Despite a delayed flight to New York from L.A., a full log of welcoming texts from friends convinced him that staying in for the night just wouldn’t do. So I slipped out of my sneakers and into a tall pair of new boots (wicked Westwoods!) and we set out.
Patrick McMullan and a whole lotta pals at Mr. Black
Downtown Princess Aimee Phillips
Bryan and me.
First stop was just a couple of blocks away at the dark and dirty Phoenix, an institution among the boys who like boys who play the Pac Man machine near the door. We moved on pretty quickly to our next stop, thanks in part to Patrick McMullan’s text to get ourselves there right away. We find Patrick, delirious from a cuckoo week, outside of Mr. Black. Paper cutie Drew Elliott was hosting the opening night afterparty for David LaChapelle’s new show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, and it was one surprise after another mulling about on the sidewalk and into the brightly lit corridor leading to the scene down below. But before we walk the plank to the inside sea of crazies, Bryan goes nostalgic with the door diva, Connie Girl, once upon a runway favorite of Thierry Mugler's.
Hey there, Connie Girl
Inside the cavernous basement club we find David go-go dancing like a madman on stage. Nearby shimmied Ms. Amanda Lepore. And surrounding them, cavorted and sweat a small army of kids just wanting to be close to the light of the party. We just about witnessed the light of day, dragging ourselves back to the apartment as the neighborhood bakeries scent the early morning air.
Rose Apodaca is a pop culture and style journalist and the co-owner of A+R, the design retail lab in Los Angeles, and its online sister http://www.aplusrstore.com. She consulted on and helped launch Image, the new Los Angeles Times style section, and she contributes to Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Glamour, Style.com, Paper, Preen and other publications. Her first book, Style A to Zoe: The Art of Fashion, Beauty & Everything Glamour, an all-encompassing lifestyle guide written for celeb stylist Rachel Zoe, is now in bookstores. She is currently authoring a biography on Fred Hayman, co-founder of Giorgio Beverly Hills and marketing architect of Rodeo Drive.
A+R is located in Silverlake and now on Abbot Kinney in Venice, CA.
Rose helmed the west coast bureau of fashion-industry bible Women's Wear Daily and was a contributor to W Magazine for six years until March 2006, when she left to join partner Andy Griffith in A+R and focus on related projects. She has long championed Los Angeles and California style and design, from the streets and runways to interiors and food. She is the first recipient of the Los Angeles Fashion Awards Communications Prize for bringing global attention to the region's fashion industry and style culture. With A+R, she continues to showcase rising and undiscovered talent from around the world.
An active supporter of the arts, music and nightlife scenes, she is a co-owner of Beauty Bar Hollywood and Las Vegas, and serves on various arts organization boards. Rose and Andy, who tied the knot in September 2007, live in Silverlake.
* All photographs appearing on this blog were snapped by Rose with her Leica D-Lux 3, unless otherwise noted. Please credit all photographs accordingly.
Illustration below by the talented EvelynBlack1955.
Due to a bug in the Uber messaging system, I'm really sorry (I won't do it again! I ain't no spammer!) but I have to use the comment system to let you know this:
First Article on Uber Electronica: Mushi Music!
Check out my first article on Uber Electronica!
It's about one of our fellow Uber members: Mushi Music! An original musician to discover, for sure someone to get inspiration from and to follow.
Hey Rose! I'll be in touch via the regular email and PLEASE do the same. Been nice connecting again, here at Uber. Sending you great vibes for all current and future writing and fashion endeavors! xoxo
One of the best lesbian dating club dedicated to lesbian singles, gay woman and bisexual woman. Lesbian chat, lesbian dating, woman seeking woman, lesbian personals, lesbian love and lesbian marriage at http://www.lesmingle.com/ is really a nice place that I met a lot of lesbian friends and it also has a lot of hot long time vids and pics
Hi Rose - Just ordered two of your "This is not a paper cup's." Can't wait to get them. I've been looking for something designed like this for a long time. Just posted a link to the M+R site on the coffee blog I'm getting off the ground (http://smallaxecoffee.com/node/13) and am excited to post a review once they arrive.
Hey Rose, how's it going. Remember me and you're like who and I'm like Sada's husband. Maybe Sada is easier to remember, from Action Sports, with Neil and Paul and John Stoffer. I just found Neil and saw you as a friend so thought I'd say hi. We saw your book down here in Oz (where we live now) and it was totally awesome. Hope you're well, Cya.
just wanted to throw an eye at you to see how you do and talk about
THE WAY OF LOVE WITH YOU (universal content design ) &
(besides i really like thoses pieces)
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
good morning Rose! I love your blog~ So happy that you are doing great~ will pop in and see you soon. Thanks for the good and obviously sad (Paul Starr) readings... lots of love tracey groce
I'm a huge fan of Uber. I loved your post the other day about Tarina Tarantino! Anyway, I wanted to give you a heads up about a new site, ideeli, that you would enjoy. I actually work for the site, and we sell really great bags and accessories at unbelievable prices. I thought you might want to check it out and see what we've got coming soon, because you (and all of us who read your blog!) should always be in the know about sites like this one. It's members-only, but if you'd like to see what's up on the site, you may use my private code: vip1. Just go to www.ideeli.com to see for yourself :) If you like the site, we'd love you to feature us, and I'd be happy to set up a special invite code for your readers - just let me know!
hi rose ....i am a interoir designer fromindia.....m quite impressed to see ur collection .....can i buy things here in india ....do u ship in india....i have some close relatives in canada....do u ship in canda.....?
Wow, Im so flattered and thankful that you enjoyed the show. I hope that you can make it out sometime soon to "The Bullfight " act that I do when it is booked here in town. Its pretty flamboyant , just the thing for these boring summer evenings. lol. Its always a pleasure to see you Rose. Much love, Ava Garter
Wow! Roger Lloyd Pack "Owen" from the Vicar of Dibley and Andy could be brothers, or at least each others Doppelgänger. Fantastic photos. Thanks for sharing these amazing images.
