GWYNETH PALTROW

GWYNETH PALTROW and Daughter Apple

September 15, 2005
Acting by the Numbers: You Do the Math
By COREY KILGANNON
Acting by the Numbers:

You Do the Math

GWYNETH PALTROW was on the red carpet on Tuesday night at the Ziegfeld when her cellphone rang. She opened her purse and checked her phone but did not answer it. “Sorry, I want to make sure it’s not the baby sitter,” said Ms. Paltrow whose daughter, APPLE, turned 1 in May. “My paranoia.”

Ms. Paltrow was wearing a CHANEL for the premiere of “Proof,” which opens tomorrow. She stars with ANTHONY HOPKINS in the film, based on DAVID AUBURN’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Mr. Hopkins plays a tortured mathematician, and Ms. Paltrow his daughter.

We asked what she was doing these days. She said she would like to brush up on her French: “My grammar is atrocious.”

At the after-party at the Boathouse in Central Park, the director, JOHN MADDEN, said he hoped that the film, which is about unraveling a complicated mathematical proof, would portray mathematics as sexy. Certainly, it got the actors fascinated.

“I think, like me, they probably felt an attraction to the mysteriousness of numbers,” Mr. Madden said. “Math is reputed to be such a dull, boring subject, but in the higher reaches of mathematics, it’s a completely fascinating world, where real transcendence is possible.”

As for Mr. Hopkins, he seemed to be transcending that realm called fun. He brightened when we approached, but then regained his impatient look when we asked if the film made him think differently about problem solving.

“I don’t think like that,” he said. “It’s just a movie. I just do the movie and that’s it.” So, he didn’t learn anything working on the film?

“No,” he said. “It’s a job.”

Almost a Fashion Victim, Alas, the Poor Prada

MARY J. BLIGE was at the LUCA LUCA show in the Fashion Week tents at Bryant Park, as were CARMEN ELECTRA, KELLY OSBORNE and PARIS HILTON.

We spoke to the hip-hop mogul DAMON DASH, who said he began coming to Fashion Week a couple of years ago.

“I’m not going to lie, I came to look at the girls, right,” but added that he now comes for fashion tips.

“I like to be around people who know more than me,” Mr. Dash said, adding with a laugh, “which you know is not that many people.”

We saw AMY ASTLEY, editor in chief of Teen Vogue, at the BCBG MAX AZRIA show on Monday and she described having a large lighting fixture fall on her while at the DIANE VON FURSTENBERG show Sunday night.

“It was like, boom, it landed on my shoulder,” Ms. Astley said. “But some really lovely guys lifted it off. A PRADA sweater was destroyed, but I’m good. I’m fine.”

She said Ms. von Furstenberg apologized profusely.

“Diane has been e-mailing me, sending notes, ‘Can I replace your sweater?’ “

“Someone must have told her my clothes were ripped off.”

No Makeover for Kanye

QUEEN LATIFAH told us she had an interesting way of devising her own line of makeup, the CoverGirl Queen Collection. “I would look at samples and say ‘uh-uh, I don’t like it, whatever it is, get it away,’ ” she said on Tuesday night at B.B. KING’s Blues Club in Times Square. Queen Latifah, who recently finished shooting a movie called “Last Holiday” in New Orleans, said she was heartbroken about the hurricane devastation. “I gave $100,000 to the Red Cross,” she said, “and I hosted the BET benefit that raised over $10 million.”

Also on the subject of KATRINA: At a concert at the HENRY FONDA Theater in Hollywood that MTV2 plans to broadcast on Sunday, KANYE WEST – standing behind his recent comment on live television that “GEORGE BUSH doesn’t care about black people” – told the crowd: “It’s been a crazy last couple of weeks, but they haven’t done anything to me yet.”

Apparently ridiculing the president’s visits to the New Orleans area, Mr. West said, “Oooooh, I’m going to go kiss some black people now.”

With Melena Z. Ryzik, Kari Haskell and Joe Brescia in New York and Jordana Lewis in Los Angeles



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No Middle Ground, to Riders’ Delight

Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times

A prototype of New Jersey Transit’s new two-level trains, unveiled yesterday in Newark. The trains will begin running in late 2006.

September 15, 2005
No Middle Ground, to Riders’ Delight
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

NEWARK, Sept. 14 – New Jersey Transit officials offered commuters a glimpse of their train-riding future here on Wednesday and it was not drab, rigid or strictly horizontal. But what clearly was most appealing to all who beheld it was that it would eliminate the chance of spending more than an hour a day pressed between two strangers.

“The middle seat is gone,” cheered Maxine Marshall, who commutes from Plainfield, N.J., to work for a trust company in Jersey City.

Well, it is not gone yet. The gleaming vehicle that had Ms. Marshall grinning was a prototype of New Jersey Transit’s first bilevel passenger car, which will not be in service for at least a year. It was unveiled on Wednesday at a ceremony at Newark Penn Station.

But in late 2006, the railroad plans to start running the first batch of 100 cars to ease crowding on its trains into and out of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. Those trains are rapidly approaching full capacity during the rush hours, and there is no room in the tunnel or at Penn Station for additional trains.

The only solution is to squeeze more people onto each train, and the most comfortable way to do that is to add a second level, said Jack Lettiere, the state’s commissioner of transportation and the chairman of New Jersey Transit. With two levels, the cars hold more passengers, even though there are only two seats on each side of the aisle. A typical 10-car train will have 1,375 seats, or about 225 more than on a comparable train today.

“That dreaded middle seat is the bane of commuters’ existence,” said Mr. Lettiere, who was on hand for the unveiling. “It becomes a place where people pile things to keep others from sitting there. It’s not what the customer wants.”

The railroad’s officials said they had figured out what passengers wanted by asking them. A group of riders, including Ms. Marshall, visited Bombardier, the Canadian company that is building the cars, and shared their opinions about how the cars should look and feel.

Aside from the two-by-two seating, Ms. Marshall said she particularly liked the “soothing” blue walls and seat covers and the “not too bright, not too dark” lighting. She said they were a significant improvement over the brown benches on some of the railroad’s older trains.

“You don’t feel too closed in,” she said, adding that she would most likely choose to sit on the lower level because she was unsure about her ability to walk down the stairs while the train was moving.

The cars will have about 65 seats on each level. Each seat has about one inch more legroom than on the railroad’s existing cars, said Richard R. Sarles, an assistant executive director who is overseeing the acquisition of the cars.

The money to buy the first 100 cars, for about $1.9 million each, came from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. John S. Wisniewski, a Democratic assemblyman from Parlin, N.J., who is the chairman of the transportation committee, described the Port Authority’s chairman, Anthony R. Coscia, as “our rich uncle.”

But New Jersey Transit already has ordered 131 more of the bilevel cars, and the state will have to come up with its own money for those. Mr. Lettiere said that he was confident there would be enough federal funding to pay for the second batch of cars.

The new cars will run on the railroad’s main Northeast Corridor Line between Trenton and Manhattan and on its North Jersey Coast Line and Midtown Direct routes into Penn Station. At 14 feet, 6 inches high, they barely clear the tunnel under the Hudson River, which is owned by Amtrak. Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road have already spent about $2 million clearing obstacles at Penn Station to make way for bilevel cars that come in from Long Island, an Amtrak official said.

To make New Jersey Transit’s new model fit, Bombardier had to shave the front and rear corners off the roof, giving the car the profile of a giant harmonica. But as Mr. Wisniewski said, the railroad’s passengers will be more concerned about what is inside.

“These are comfortable seats,” he said. “The air-conditioning works really well in there. And there are no middle seats.”

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Wendy Whelan and David Michalek

Giovanni Rufino for The New York Times

Jock Soto, the bride’s longtime dance partner, and Luis Fuentes, right, joined the couple at the reception.

September 11, 2005
Wendy Whelan and David Michalek
By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

AS a principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, Wendy Whelan long ago came to understand the importance of timing in a successful partnership.

But she had a harder time with the rhythm of relationships offstage, her romances strained by the rigors of a performer’s life. Then one August day 12 years ago, Ms. Whelan walked through the door of David Michalek, a photographer based in Los Angeles, and he placed her on a pedestal.

It was just a prop he was using to photograph her for a magazine article, but she was surprised by the ease she felt when he lifted her. “It felt so effortless, so right,” said Ms. Whelan, 38, also noting his “very energetic smile.”

Mr. Michalek, also 38, who had apprenticed with the fashion photographer Herb Ritts, knew his way around supermodels. “But I’d never seen a ballet dancer up close, and it was sort of shocking,” he said. “She was so sweet, and so lovely.”

When Ms. Whelan traveled to California the next month for the company tour that Mr. Michalek was photographing, he took her for a drive, planted a kiss on her cheek and gave her his phone number in Los Angeles, where he owned a house filled with books.

In November of that year, he came to New York, and a breakfast date ended up lasting four days. In December he returned for four more days, and the couple emerged from Ms. Whelan’s home on New Year’s Eve so distracted that they left candles burning all over the apartment.

“Whenever I came to New York, I was more and more certain I only wanted to be with that person,” Mr. Michalek recalled.

And then Ms. Whelan, who had other romantic entanglements, vanished from his life.

“I had some growing to do,” she explained. “We were on opposite coasts and very involved in our separate careers. I was trying to think practically, and it didn’t seem to me that a relationship with David at that point could be real.”

As Ms. Whelan’s career took off in a big way, Mr. Michalek distracted himself with his own work, which shifted from commercial photography into fine art. Still, he recalled, “I thought of her constantly. I tried one or two relationships, but they went nowhere.”

Four years later, Ms. Whelan was a widely acclaimed dancer and now unattached. She called Mr. Michalek.

He was wary, but proposed a hike in Joshua Tree National Park in California. Ms. Whelan showed up in high-heeled sandals. “We got up the mountain, but she broke a heel on the way down, and I carried her the rest of the way on piggy back,” Mr. Michalek said. His wariness faded as they spoke about how their artistic paths had become more similar over the years they had spent apart.

“David was a totally different person, as was I,” Ms. Whelan said. “I was just turning 30 and felt like I had come into my own as a performer. He was more bicoastal in his career. He decided he wanted us to be together again, and I took a deep breath and said I was ready to try.”

Ms. Whelan said she returned to Manhattan filled with serenity and a confidence that was evident in her performances.

Mr. Michalek began spending ever more time in New York, living in her apartment. “I always knew that New York would be a wonderful place if I needed to be here for any reason, and now I had one,” he said.

Mr. Michalek proposed last year in Venice, where Ms. Whelan was performing. The lag in timing, he said, had nothing to do with any lack of a desire, on his part, to spend his life with Ms. Whelan, adding that he had “felt married in spirit to her for years.”

Rather, it was the normally light-tripping Ms. Whelan who was dragging her feet. She said she never harbored the desire to marry until an injury last year kept her home for four months, where Mr. Michalek tended to her. The leave forced her to be “a wife in a weird way,” she said. “I really enjoyed it, so I just knew I could be myself and not be a dancer with this person. I could look ahead into the future, and I was just so happy being me with him.”

At their wedding on Sept. 3, officiated by the Rev. Alfredo Balinong at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church on the Upper West Side, the bride glided down the aisle in an ivory silk Vera Wang gown, her ballerina’s bun loose at the nape of her neck. The reception, at Industria Superstudio in Greenwich Village, included Ms. Whelan’s teachers and City Ballet colleagues like Pauline Golbin, Tom Gold, Megan Fairchild and Nikolaj Hubbe. A few dancers tangoed between bites of a Spanish feast prepared by Jock Soto, Ms. Whelan’s longtime dance partner, and his boyfriend, Luis Fuentes, a chef and sommelier.

“Wendy and I were on the same level, and when we were on stage it was like meeting your soul mate,” Mr. Soto said. “With David I finally see that same equality.”

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Multiple Attacks Kill Nearly 150 in Iraqi Capital

Benjamin Lowy/Corbis, for The New York Times

Hospitals in Baghdad overflowed with wounded people.

September 15, 2005
Multiple Attacks Kill Nearly 150 in Iraqi Capital
By ROBERT F. WORTH and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Thursday, Sept. 15 – Insurgents staged at least a dozen suicide bombings that ripped through Baghdad in rapid succession on Wednesday, killing almost 150 people and wounding more than 500 in a coordinated assault that left much of the capital paralyzed.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility for the assault, which inflicted the biggest death toll in Baghdad since the American-led invasion of Iraq toppled Saddam Hussein more than two years ago.

The violence appeared to be retaliation for the weeklong siege of the insurgent stronghold of Tal Afar and included a bombing in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad that used a new tactic: luring scores of day laborers to a minivan with promises of work, and then blowing it up. At least 112 died in that blast alone, the second highest death toll from any single terrorist bombing in Iraq since the invasion.

The attacks coincided with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, attended by top Iraqi leaders and President Bush, who pressed for a resolution calling on all nations to take action against the incitement of terrorism.

Wednesday’s attacks demonstrated again how easily insurgents could still stage well-coordinated attacks, despite a series of highly publicized military offensives like the recent one in Tal Afar, a northern city that has been an insurgent base.

The explosions struck Shiite civilians, Iraqi security forces and American troops, the favored targets of Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency. The worst attack singled out workers in a Shiite neighborhood, Kadhimiya, with an explosion that tore through a crowded intersection, leaving the facades of nearby shops shattered and puddles of blood on the streets.

“I saw a huge fireball in the air, and I felt the heat and flame on my face,” said Kadhum Nasir Malih, 28, a laborer who lives in a hotel near the site of the blast. “I went outside the hotel, and I was amazed to see the number of bodies. Some were still, and some were groaning with agony, charred and covered with blood, with smoke rising from them.”

On Thursday morning at 8. a.m., a suicide car bomb detonated next to a police convoy in southern Baghdad, killing 16 people and wounding another 21, an official at the Interior Ministry said. Most of the dead and the wounded were police officers and the rest were civilians, the official said. Also in the capital on Thursday morning, gunmen shot and killed three Shiite pilgrims as they traveled toward the holy city of Karbala.

Senior military officials interviewed Wednesday said intelligence indicated that the bombs and planning for the Baghdad attacks came from insurgents in the Euphrates River valley in western Iraq, where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has his base of operations.

“We believe these attacks were spawned in the west, then the bombs migrated from the Euphrates River valley,” said a senior United States Central Command officer, who spoke anonymously because of the secret source of the intelligence. “The heart of Zarqawi’s network is not in Baghdad, we’re quite confident of that,” the officer continued in a telephone interview. “In a corridor from Syria to Baghdad is where he’s nested right now.”

Hours after the first attack, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia issued a statement calling the strikes revenge for the American and Iraqi assault on Tal Afar. It said the bombings signified that “the battle to avenge the Sunni people of Tal Afar has started.” The American military has said it killed more than 150 insurgents in Tal Afar over the past two weeks.

Bombings and other attacks soon followed the Kadhimiya blast, at a rate of several per hour. Police cars careered through the city struggling to restore order, and hospitals overflowed with the wounded.

Police officers transporting their own casualties to hospitals fired wildly and pointed rocket-propelled grenade launchers at drivers to force them out of the way. At Yarmouk Hospital, the floors were splashed with blood, and medics rushed through the halls carrying burned and bloodied victims. One man lay on the ground, his chest cavity held together by a few stitches. A girl was brought inside, her fingers blown off. A man lay in a bed, screaming after being told his leg was amputated.

“There were bodies everywhere, I was lucky to have survived,” said Saadi Hussein Ali, a 55 year-old laborer whose arm was broken in the Kadhimiya bombing, as he lay exhausted on a hospital cot. “It was only workers – why would they want to kill us? We are poor.”

At least 10 American soldiers were wounded in attacks that the military said struck at least three military convoys. No deaths were reported. In Taji, north of Baghdad, gunmen dressed in Iraqi uniforms abducted 17 men and shot them, the Interior Ministry said.

Later Wednesday, an audiotape released over the Internet that was said to be from Mr. Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, declared a “full-scale war on Shiites around Iraq, without mercy” to avenge Tal Afar and what the speaker asserted was a “war against the Sunnis” undertaken by the Iraqi government and conducted under the guise of attacking terrorists. The authenticity of the tape could not be verified.

Speaking in the United States, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari also said the attacks appeared to be revenge for the military sweep of Tal Afar. In recent days, several terrorist groups had vowed to avenge allies killed in Tal Afar, and one warning issued by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had pledged specifically to attack Shiites. Kurdish and Shiite troops made up almost all of the Iraqi troops in Tal Afar. The National Assembly and Iraqi government, led by Mr. Jaafari, who had given approval for the Tal Afar offensive, are both dominated by Shiites.

Iraqi and American officials have also been anticipating a rise in violence in reaction to Iraq’s new constitution, which has provoked angry opposition from many Sunni leaders and demonstrations in several cities since it was presented in the National Assembly last month. The attacks on Wednesday came as the acting speaker of the National Assembly announced that an amended version of the constitution was complete.

On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaafari’s cabinet convened an emergency session to plan a response to the bombings. In a statement it said the attacks revealed the insurgents’ “desperation and cowardice in the face of the setbacks they have suffered in Tal Afar and elsewhere at the hands of Iraq’s security forces.” Referring to the Tal Afar siege, the statement added that “the fact that the terrorists are claiming to be responding specifically to Operation Restoring Rights shows the serious blow that operation has dealt them.”

Several of Iraq’s leading political parties issued statements condemning the bombings and offering condolences to the victims. But there were indications that the continuing violence could soon be a potent issue in Iraq’s next round of parliamentary elections in December. The Iraqi National Accord, led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, released a statement condemning the bombings and “holding the government responsible for the deteriorating security situation.”

With the offensive in Tal Afar and stepped up airstrikes and ground attacks in Anbar Province, senior American commanders say they are pursuing militants, including Mr. Zarqawi, who have been driven out of cities in central and north-central Iraq, including Baghdad.

“The insurgency is much more pushed to the west in Iraq this year than it was in the previous years,” Gen. John P. Abizaid, the leader of the military’s Central Command, said in an interview on Tuesday. “I actually regard that as a sign that the insurgency is having a hard time getting established elsewhere.”

But on Wednesday, the senior Central Command officer said the new attacks showed that Mr. Zarqawi retained the ability to launch coordinated strikes in central Iraq. “Just when you think you have your foot on his throat, he can come back,” said the officer. “He marshals his resources in order to have days like today to get himself in the news.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Doha, Qatar, and Thaier Aldaami, Sahar Najeeb and Benjamin Lowy from Baghdad.

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No Heat Doesn’t Mean No Sweat

September 14, 2005
No Heat Doesn’t Mean No Sweat
By JULIE POWELL

OCCASIONALLY, even the most carnivorous cooks can find themselves tempted by raw produce. It may seem harebrained to try to one-up vegans by banning from the kitchen not only all animal products, but also all application of heat to any foodstuff, ever. Still, when one has sweated through enough party clothes in enough kitchens, putting the final touches on enough dinner party menus, one may start wondering how much easier a cooking life minus the actual cooking might be. So, fed up with the dry cleaning bills, this confirmed braiser attempted to convert to the uncooked way of life. The first hurdle in a fledgling raw career was outfitting my kitchen and pantry. This might seem simple enough, if you see raw foodism as some kind of pristine 21st century version of noble savagery. But raw food, at least as made by the glamorous authors of a host of recent cookbooks (or as raw foodists might put it, “cook” books), is the farthest thing from straight off the vine. Although the movement dictates no animal products and no heat, we’re not talking salad here. Raw foodists have much grander ambitions.

I first had to track down a tabletop dehydrator, an industrial-strength juicer, a mandoline and some nut bags for soaking and fermenting nuts. (I decided to forgo the recommended $400 Vita-Mix blender, crucial to the shakes and nut milks that are ubiquitous in a raw food diet.) Then there were the staples to buy: stevia and agave nectar, Celtic sea salt, the unpasteurized soy sauce called nama shoyu, coconut butter, cold-pressed macadamia oil and, of course, bags upon bags of produce.

I started my sojourn into raw foodism with “The Raw Food Detox Diet,” by the nutritionist Natalia Rose. A too-long section on colonics and self-administered enemas aside, this book seemed the sanest place to begin, both because of the relative simplicity of the recipes and because the highly structured diet plan allows for the occasional bit of simply cooked meat and fish. I didn’t know if I was ready to give up flesh cold turkey.

I began my first morning of living raw with the foundation of the Detox Diet, a concoction called Green Lemonade. One serving of this enzyme-filled wonder drink calls for a head of celery, six stalks of kale, two apples, one lemon and a knob of fresh ginger, all rammed down the throat of the juicer with a satisfyingly gutsy whir. The resulting three cups of chartreuse liquid tasted not entirely unlike a bloody mary. Too bad distilled spirits are not part of the raw food diet. Too bad, also, that I was supposed to be drinking up to 40 ounces of this stuff every day. Ingredients for a single day’s supply filled a large shopping bag to bursting, and took up an entire shelf of my refrigerator.

Lunch was a chopped salad with what would have been a perfectly respectable Dijon-cider dressing, if the recipe hadn’t called for stevia, an herbal sweetener that turned the vinaigrette into a sickly-sweet mess. (Ms. Rose specified that if you can’t find stevia – presumably because you live in some benighted no-Whole-Foods-land – you can substitute Splenda. How someone who rails against the evils of processed food can recommend molecularly engineered sugar, I don’t know.)

Dinner was gazpacho and sautéed maple-glazed salmon. Both of these dishes were simple and tasty. I was baffled, though, by the gazpacho recipe, which included a “meat” topping of yellow bell pepper, corn, apple and jicama. Since when does gazpacho have meat in it, real or simulated?

Ms. Rose is far from alone in her fervor for fakery; avid artifice seems to be a linchpin of the raw food movement. In “Raw Food/Real World: 100 Recipes to Get the Glow,” by Matthew Kenney and Sarma Melngailis, the “cheese” is made of nuts, the “pasta” of thinly sliced vegetables, the “ice cream” of coconut and cashews.

Mr. Kenney and Ms. Melngailis are chefs and raw converts who parleyed their missionary zeal into a successful Gramercy Park restaurant, Pure Food and Wine. A salad dressing blended like mayonnaise, with an avocado instead of an egg for a binder, was creamy and brightly flavored. The Fig and Grape Cleansing Shake, flavored with star anise and vanilla, might or might not have flushed all the toxins and mucus from my system, but it was certainly a refreshing treat for a summer day.

But the farther I wandered into the quotational wilderness of the raw food diet, the more frustrated I became. A “fettuccine” of paper-thin zucchini slices, tossed with “sautéed” king oyster mushrooms and cherry tomatoes, did bear a passing resemblance to pasta. But if you count the 12 hours of dehydrating time necessary to make the tomatoes and mushrooms taste cooked, between the “pasta” dinner and the Green Lemonade and cleansing shake preparation, I’d spent an entire day doing nothing but trying to feed myself.

And this was before the Lime Mousse Tart. Ms. Melngailis, whose fashionably cadaverous visage beams forth from page after page of her lushly photographed book, writes of this dessert: “If someone threw one of these pies in your face, it would be like an avocado mask.” Well, perhaps. But after spending 50 bucks and several hours for a khaki disk that tasted like artificially sweetened guacamole, I vowed to never again trust anyone who tried to get me to eat something by comparing it to moisturizer.

My enthusiasm for raw food was rapidly flagging. I should have been feeling more energetic by now. I should have been getting “the glow.” Instead, I was getting an increasingly insistent yen for takeout. My next project would be the “lasagna” from “Raw” by Roxanne Klein and Charlie Trotter. The recipe was intoxicatingly complex, the accompanying photograph so mouthwateringly gorgeous as to be nearly indecent. Surely this was where I’d find the beating heart of raw cuisine.

I soaked and sprouted wheat berries for Rejuvelac, a mysterious fermented liquid which I needed, along with soaked and ground cashews, to make the nut “cheese” filling, which itself had to “ripen” for several days. I dehydrated a ground pine nut mixture to make something called “Rawmesan.” I once again sliced zucchini into paper-thin strips for “pasta.” All of this took five days. I didn’t stand before a hot oven or pot of boiling water, but by 6 p.m. on the final evening, I was nevertheless ready to do myself an injury with my mandoline. The result was a dense block of something that looked vaguely like lasagna and tasted a lot like raw zucchini layered with tomatoes, spinach and ground, fermented cashew paste.

If I ordered my takeout burger rare, that would be close to raw, wouldn’t it?

I was grumpy. Well, of course – I was starving. In “The Raw Food Detox Diet,” Ms. Rose, echoing the exhortations of many of the movement’s gurus, raves about how you can eat “hearty, unmeasured quantities of food.” No question about that. The challenge, I was quickly discovering, was how to find enough hours in the day to eat enough.

Was it just me, or was this raw food thing totally unsustainable? What did the noble savages have that I didn’t? To find out, I called Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University.

“Well, this idea that modern humans are adapted to eating raw food, and that cooking is a recent and unimportant development, seems to be wrong,” he said. He went on to point out that chimpanzees in the wild spend 50 to 60 percent of their time eating, whereas humans spend only 5 to 6 percent. He thinks the difference is cooking, the set of technologies that enable humans to efficiently transform food into softer, more easily digestible and less perishable forms. “The biological evidence suggests to me that there isn’t anything in human history equivalent to cooking. It’s what turned us from non-human apes to humans.”

I found the professor’s words comforting. As a raw foodist, I’d found, my day was not unlike a chimp’s – I’d substituted laborious juicing and dehydrating for laborious gnawing, but still, my life had been distilled to the procurement, massaging into digestibility, and shoveling in of massive amounts of raw foodstuffs. In his 2003 paper in the Journal of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, “Cooking as a Biological Trait,” Professor Wrangham writes that just to maintain the minimum necessary caloric intake, a raw foodist must eat 11 to 12 pounds of food every day – more than what your average gluttonous American devours on Thanksgiving.

If Professor Wrangham’s theory is correct, then it was the invention of cooking that widened the available range of digestible, nutritive foodstuffs which subsequently freed for us the time and brain power to become human. So it is that cooking paved the way for a bunch of people to concoct the internal belief that cooking is poison – and to go on to write expensive books about how to make edible temples of artifice in support of this belief. Luckily for the rest of us, cooking also led to a few other things that separate us from the apes.

For some reason, takeout keeps coming to mind.

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Thursday, September 15, 2005

To Stand Out in a Crowd: Don’t Shout (Mick Excepted) Paul Burnett/The New York Times A a silk georgette ranch shirt and gabardine gauchos at Michael Kors   G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times A slim dress in a blend of crinkled cotton and metal at Narciso Rodriguez   September 15, 2005 To Stand Out in a Crowd: Don’t Shout (Mick Excepted) By CATHY HORYN The American spring collections have not been strong on subtlety. It is as though designers fear the unexpected shading, the perfectly placed seam. But on Tuesday in Chelsea, far from the noise of the tents in Bryant Park, Narciso Rodriguez took a brilliant risk. He spoke in a whisper. No doubt people will look at this collection and not see what distinguishes it from previous ones. But look again. Worked into the sides of a white cotton and silk faille jacket are tiny rays of seams. In the neckline of a silvery linen top is a lip of violet, the color of the skirt a shade of brown close to bark. But is it? You’re not sure. Mr. Rodriguez, through the powerful restraint and illusion of minimalism, has achieved a kind of magic with these clothes. A loose cotton dress – drab on a hanger – looks chic on the body, since he has cut it closer on the hips, giving it the illusion of a low-slung skirt worn with a blouse. In his collection yesterday, Michael Kors also made American simplicity look not merely chic but right. The Southwest of O’Keeffe was the general theme, but for once Mr. Kors didn’t get kooky. There were black gabardine jackets belted over white cotton eyelet skirts, and a terrific full-sleeved georgette blouse with black gaucho pants. It was a cool collection, enlivened by eyelet bathing suits. By contrast, Peter Som was mired in granny territory. If he eliminated half his fabrics and concentrated, as Mr. Rodriguez has, on the cut and finish of his clothes, he would have an easier time deciding what he wants to say as a designer. You can’t do Julie Christie minishifts and hackneyed sailor looks and expect to find it. What is the difference between Roland Mouret’s new collection of slim fanny suits and his last collection of slim fanny suits? Well, unless he has moved the buttons, not much. Mr. Mouret’s fascination with Hollywood fashion thrillers – this season he curled up with “The Women” while getting in the mood with Cole Porter – led him to produce more pencil suits with dramatic necklines. A square-neck dress looked identical to one he showed in February. For a designer who professes to love women, he doesn’t give them very much credit for knowing the difference. Yet as his show opened with a simple one-shoulder gray dress with a wide black belt, Mr. Mouret appeared to be going in a new, more contemporary direction. He offered some lovely draped tops with a swag of jersey down the side. These he paired with tailored shorts or wide gray trousers in a lightweight men’s fabric. If he had seen that this minimalist approach to draping and cutting was the logical next step after his constructed clothes for fall, he would have had another hit collection. But every time a pencil suit came out it looked dated. Mr. Mouret needs to trust his instincts rather than believe in his press. Boredom influences everything in fashion. The Marc by Marc Jacobs show took the long tiered skirt of summer and abbreviated it to a cotton jersey mini. On the whole, the clothes looked softer, with ballet tights and leotards in pale pink and blue used as an 80′s underpinning. Harder elements included military caps, patterned knee braces (hey, accidents happen) and cute bib-front jumpers in blue and engineer-striped denim. “Big game hunting from a weathered leather chair,” began the epigraph to Alexandre Plokhov’s show notes. “Tumbler of bourbon in hand, fingers tapping to the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.” Mr. Plokhov, the designer at Cloak, isn’t a stranger to the world of inarticulate young men in broken boots and skinny jeans, a greasy lock of hair pasted to their foreheads. Early Cloak collections had a hard-core sensibility. And though his models raced down the runway in the agitated manner of Hedi Slimane’s at Dior, you couldn’t really say that the clothes – the narrow, single-button jackets, white cardigans and charcoal diagonally pleated trousers – were like anyone else’s. So why did the show seem so off key? It may be because Mr. Plokhov has already taken his customer to such a refined place that you don’t really believe he has his heart in this safari-meets-rockabilly look. It seems a stylist’s concept rather than a designer’s. As Mr. Plokhov opens his first Cloak shop, on Greene Street, with library shelves and custom-built vitrines, he may be at a kind of aesthetic crossroads. He should take the mature road, which is also the direction of men’s wear. Of course, with the Rolling Stones in town, it’s hard to talk seriously about obscure fashion epigraphs. The Stones went on about 9:45 p.m. at the Garden on Tuesday, with Mick Jagger dressed in a gold sequined jacket, skinny pants and a black glitter T-shirt that were custom-made for him by Mr. Slimane. Mr. Jagger’s companion, the stylist L’Wren Scott, helped him put together his tour clothes, which fill two large wardrobe trunks and need constant replenishment. Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga also made special clothes for him, including a red suede jacket, as did Comme des Garçons, and the English milliner Stephen Jones did the hats. The other day Ms. Scott received a feathered coat from Prada lined in lavender silk. Mr. Jagger wore it to sing “Sympathy for the Devil,” tossing it across the stage halfway through the song, as he had done with the Dior sequins. In the audience were Bette Midler, Jann Wenner, Mica and Ahmet Ertegun, Linda Evangelista, Caroline Kennedy and Kate Moss, who came with the daughters of Patti Hansen and Keith Richards. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Turning Mere Beauties Into Glossy Goddesses

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

The makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury prepared a model for Alice Temperley’s show.

September 15, 2005
Turning Mere Beauties Into Glossy Goddesses
By NATASHA SINGER

JOSEPHINE RHODIN, a 16-year-old model from Sweden, looked like just another fresh-faced Scandinavian blonde until she arrived Sunday night at the TriBeCa showroom of Alice Temperley, a British fashion designer making her New York debut this week. Then Charlotte Tilbury, a British makeup artist with flame-red hair and a passionate personality to match, set about changing this teenager’s style.

It was the night before the Temperley show, and Ms. Tilbury was testing makeup looks on the model, trying to complement the midsummer-night look of the embroidered dresses. She began by rubbing a series of berry pigments into Ms. Rhodin’s lips until she got a plummy pink shade. Then she smudged a rosy stain into the apples of the model’s cheeks, and brushed dark lip gloss onto her eyelids. When Ms. Tilbury had finished, the once innocent-looking girl resembled a beautiful but slightly disheveled wood nymph after a night carousing with satyrs. Ms. Rhodin kept looking into a hand mirror, trying to recognize herself.

“It’s amazing,” Ms. Tilbury said, “how just a little makeup can change someone ordinary into someone gorgeous.”

Her ability to transform mere mortals into glossy goddesses has made her one of the world’s most sought-after makeup artists.

“Charlotte sees the world through a paparazzi lens; she always makes models look rich, famous and ready to be photographed,” said Patrick Eichler, a senior artist at MAC Cosmetics who works with Ms. Tilbury during some New York fashion shows. “Every girl wants to look like that. She turns them from just gorgeous into pure candy.”

Ms. Tilbury, 32, is at the forefront of a new generation of British makeup artists known for their light touch. Beginning with Dick Page and Pat McGrath in the 1990′s, they have dominated the international cosmetics scene. Her keen eye for beauty has landed her gigs with top photographers like Mario Testino and the team of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott; with supermodels like Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen; with magazines like British and French Vogue; and as the creative director of Helena Rubinstein cosmetics. For a recent series of Louis Vuitton advertisements, she helped remake Jennifer Lopez into an ultra-groomed Grace Kelly doppelgänger and helped restyle Christina Ricci as the reincarnation of Jean Harlow.

Next month in Paris, Ms. Tilbury will direct makeup at the spring fashion shows of Lanvin, Chloé and Alexander McQueen. This week she has been in New York to create makeup not only for Temperley but also for Donna Karan, J. Mendel and Matthew Williamson.

Just as the clothes paraded on those catwalks offer a preview of what many women will be shopping for next spring, the faces created by makeup artists like Ms. Tilbury have a history of influencing, in time, non-models. New colors of lipsticks and face pigments introduced at the shows end up at cosmetics counters.

Four hours before the Temperley show began Monday evening, Ms. Tilbury arrived backstage with her assistant to unpack her kit. Her main task was to teach a group of stylists provided for the show by MAC Cosmetics how to replicate the makeup she had designed the night before.

The makeup team crowded behind a bank of mirrors to watch as Ms. Tilbury demonstrated on Jennifer Massaux, a 19-year-old brunette from Belgium. “Where did you get those stretchy white jeans?” she asked the model, as if to invite her into the conversation. “And the jacket?”

Ms. Tilbury mixed two matte lipsticks on the back of her left hand to show the crew how to get the exact berry shade she wanted, and the stylists dutifully copied the color scheme into notebooks with pastel pencils. Then she brushed a darker, glossy lipstick onto the model’s eyelids until they were wet and shiny.

Finally she mixed gold, bronze and silver face pigments on her palm and gilded the lower eyelid. The longer she worked, the more her left hand – covered with red smears, gray blotches and gold patches – resembled a painter’s palette.

“There’s a fine line between doll and cool, between sugar plum fairy and rock-and-roll Ophelia,” said Ms. Tilbury, who sounded as if she were describing her own girl-about-town persona; her signature look is strappy high heels, cleavage-baring blouses and layers of black mascara.

“I want the models to look romantic but not too girly,” she said, sending the team off to practice on the few models who had arrived.

Ms. Tilbury’s childhood was spent on the beaches and in the nightclubs of Ibiza, surrounded by beautiful people. (Her father is a painter.) But as a redhead with pale eyelashes, she never felt attractive until she tried mascara when she was 13. Suddenly people she had known for years started remarking on how pretty she was. “It traumatized me to instantly become more popular just because of the mascara,” Ms. Tilbury said. “But then I realized that to achieve the power of beauty, sometimes you need a little makeup, darling.”

Some directors of backstage makeup work on models alongside their assistants. But Ms. Tilbury, a perfectionist who travels with 264 pounds of cosmetics in tow so that she can have every shade and texture at hand, prefers to observe her team at work. When she sees something go wrong, she intervenes.

“I think she needs a bit more shine,” she said to one makeup artist, taking charge of his model. She applied more and more glossy lipstick until the model’s eyelids were as dark and shiny as wet tarmac. “Next time make the eyes wetter, darling.”

Ms. Tilbury calls practically everyone she works with – from Marc Jacobs to Sophie Dahl – “darling.” In her vocabulary the word is not a term of endearment so much as a negotiating tactic.

And it works, said Katie Grand, a British fashion stylist who collaborated with Ms. Tilbury on recent Louis Vuitton advertising campaigns.

“Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lopez are women who think they know how to make themselves look their best,” Ms. Grand said, referring to the actresses featured in the campaigns. “But then Charlotte starts saying, ‘Darling, I know you like your mascara, but let’s just try a few false eyelashes on the outside corners of your eyes, darling.’ She’s so enthusiastic that no one manages to get a word in edgewise. Even if you’re a celebrity, it’s easier to say yes to Charlotte than to say no.”

So when a frantic producer rushed backstage to ask Ms. Tilbury to hurry up because the editor in chief of Vogue had arrived for the show, the makeup artist called her darling and kept working.

“But Anna Wintour has already been seated for five minutes,” said the producer, practically pulling her model off the chair. “We’ve got to go!”

“Just two more minutes,” Ms. Tilbury replied, sitting the model back down. “She just needs one coat of mascara, darling.”

The frustrated producer shrugged and marched away. Ms. Tilbury turned back to the model. She darkened her eyelashes, rubbed lipstick into the apples of her cheeks and sent her to “get dressed quickly, darling.”

As the Temperley show began, Ms. Tilbury stood backstage, 10 feet from the catwalk entrance, with a fistful of brushes and gobs of dark gloss on the back of her hand, touching up each model before she reached the runway.

“Look at me, darling,” she said, painting a lid and then pushing the model forward. “Close your eyes now. Quickly now. Who’s next? Who’s next?”

One of Ms. Tilbury’s frustrations is that she rarely manages to watch the fashion shows she works on. Instead she queries audience members afterward about how the makeup looked.

Once the show had ended and the models were changing back into their street clothes, Padma Lakshmi, an aspiring actress who is the wife of Salman Rushdie, rushed backstage and embraced the makeup artist. Ms. Tilbury grilled her about how the makeup appeared on the runway until she was satisfied that the models’ eyes had looked neither too subtle nor too oily.

“We live in a society where, I’m afraid, if someone looks striking or beautiful, people are instantly attracted to them,” Ms. Tilbury said later that evening at the fashion show after-party held in the Temperley showroom downtown. She surveyed a group of young women in sleeveless dresses drinking Champagne. “When I look at someone, I instantly know that just a little concealer under the eyes and a little bronzer could make them beautiful.”

To her the world would be a better place if only more women wore more makeup more of the time. Ms. Tilbury herself wears it even to bed.

“I think you must try to look gorgeous at all times, even when you’re asleep,” she said. “After all, darling, you never know who might burst in to your room in the middle of the night.”

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