Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: ADVERTISING SLOGANS (90%); COFFEE & TEA (89%); BRAND EQUITY (78%); COFFEE (78%); INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW (73%) COMPANY: ALTRIA GROUP INC (57%) TICKER: PMO (BRU) (57%); MO (NYSE) (57%) INDUSTRY: NAICS312221 CIGARETTE MANUFACTURING (57%); NAICS311919 OTHER SNACK FOOD MANUFACTURING (57%); SIC2111 CIGARETTES (57%) PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (62%) GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (79%) LOAD-DATE: May 18, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: REINCARNATION: River West Brands is helping revive three ''ghost brands'' that had largely disappeared from store shelves. 1. Underalls, formerly owned by Hanes. 2. Salon Selectives, last owned by Unilever. 3. Eagle Snacks, once owned by Anheuser-Busch.. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW BETTLES GASLIGHT AD ARCHIVES TOP AND MIDDLE LEFT: GASLIGHT AD ARCHIVES. BOTTOM LEFT, AND RIGHT TOP TO BOTTOM: RIVER WEST BRANDS L .52 L.C. AND AFFILIATES)
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 766 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Bag Man BYLINE: By CHRISTINE MUHLKE. Christine Muhlke is a deputy editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. SECTION: Section BR; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 997 words BRINGING HOME THE BIRKIN My Life in Hot Pursuit of the World's Most Coveted Handbag. By Michael Tonello. Illustrated. 257 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95. The end of the world just inched a little nearer: an eBay seller has written a memoir. About handbags. Not just any handbag. For those not familiar with the Birkin bag -- made by Hermes, the French luxury leather goods company, for the singer Jane Birkin in the early '80s, after its chief executive saw the chanteuse struggling with her vagabond-verging-on-cat-lady straw purse on a plane -- it doesn't matter, because you can't get one anyway. Any other Jane who walks in off the street and asks for a Birkin is politely told there is a two-to-three-year waiting list. Oh, and the entry-level leather model costs about $7,500, with a crocodile-and-diamond version topping out at $150,000. These days, Americans versed in pop culture -- ''Sex and the City,'' Oprah being turned away at the Paris Hermes store -- know about Birkins. And for a woman of a certain class anywhere in the world, carrying one is the quickest way to telegraph to other women, ''I win.'' And so some of them will do or pay just about anything to get one. At the start of ''Bringing Home the Birkin,'' the author, Michael Tonello, is a party boy in Provincetown, Mass., who doesn't know a Birkin from Burkina Faso. Weary of traveling the world as a hair and makeup artist for commercials, he decides to move to Barcelona after working on an I.B.M. shoot in the city. A job magically materializes, then vanishes, and Tonello is stuck in Spain with a five-year lease, no work visa and expensive custom closets he had built to fit his designer clothes. He was up a particular creek ''without a paleta,'' he writes. But his father reminds him of his American entrepreneurial pluck, recalling how, as a teenager, Michael made money for his French class trip by selling sandwiches at their country club out of a golf cart. Lightning soon strikes, as I suppose it sometimes does, in the form of cashmere: rearranging his sweaters for the ''800th time,'' he realizes it's not actually that cold in Spain. He lists a Ralph Lauren scarf on eBay, bought at an outlet for $99, which sells for $430. Paleta found. Suddenly, everything in his apartment has eBay appeal. Even his ''friends,'' his first-edition Lillian Hellman and Truman Capote books, are put on the virtual block. Tonello breezes through a paragraph of advice for potential sellers, then barrels toward his fateful sale, a silk Hermes scarf that draws aggressive bidding, as well as e-mail messages from desperate collectors imploring him to help them complete their scarf ''wish lists.'' ''I intimated that this was 'only the tip of the iceberg,''' he writes in his exhaustingly chatty, girlfriend-a-girlfriend tone. (Tonello has never met a cliche he didn't love, and is addicted to alliteration. Sample: ''I didn't mind the calculus of currency conversion or the etymology of exotic entrees.'') Soon our plucky hero is an eBay ''Platinum PowerSeller,'' shipping over $25,000 in Hermes merchandise a month. His life becomes a circuit of computer to post office, plus buying trips around the continent. (''I was drowning in silk by the time I realized I was in uncharted waters.'') Many of his conversations are recounted in e-mail form, as the only other contact is with his new love, Juan, and their cat, Dali. When the buyer of a deck of Hermes playing cards asks him if he has any Birkin bags, Tonello has to contact his scarf mentor, graceofthegarden@yahoo.com, to ask what one is, which seems disingenuous, since even when this was taking place, pre-BlackBerry, any eBay search for ''Hermes'' turned up pages of Birkin auctions. (Trust me, I was looking then; I have a little Hermes ''wish list'' of my own.) Dazzled by the potential profit margin, he phones every boutique in Spain and asks for one. No dice. He drives to every store in the South of France and inquires. Tant pis. On a scarf-buying mission in Madrid, however, he accidentally hits upon the winning formula: he piles up 10 or so scarves, then casually asks, ''Oh ... and one more thing. ... Do you have a Birkin?'' The $18,000 bag nets him a $5,000 profit, and soon he's spending over $1.6 million a year on handbags bought through an international network he's established to feed to the market for marked-up Birkins (especially crocodile). His business affords him a great lifestyle. He recounts tales of expensive meals, bottles of Champagne, chic hotels and shopping sprees. One buyer asks him to drive her Aston Martin from Massachusetts to Florida; graceofthegarden lends him her Upper East Side apartment -- and he'd never met either woman, such being the bond of luxury. It also gives Tonello that je ne sais Robin Hood feeling. He writes: ''I definitely dug the idea of beating Hermes at its own game. Maybe it was silly, but I found it exciting to think I had knowledge that had eluded even the wealthiest people in the world.'' But outwitting the fiercely protective company loses its appeal after the death of his mother (''I didn't know if my malaise was a phase, or what''), and he realizes that his role was to satisfy the narcissism and insecurity of people who ''lacked for nothing, but who longed for more.'' Is Tonello biting the hand that clicked ''Buy It Now''? Just a coy nibble. He presents himself as a blithe ingenue in ''Jil Sander charcoal trousers and a dark lime green cashmere turtleneck, with a pair of tabac matte crocodile Bottega Veneta brogues'' who'd rather gossip over a few bottles of wine than think about his own relationship to designer goods, which led him to where he was in the first place. If he'd tucked into what really makes people define themselves by their obsession to Hermes, ''Bringing Home the Birkin'' could have brought home some very important truths about our times. But that might have gotten in the way of a potential movie deal.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 767 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final BEST SELLERS: ADVICE, HOW TO AND MISCELLANEOUS: Sunday, May 18th 2008 SECTION: Section 7; Column 0; Book Review Desk; Pg. 29 LENGTH: 420 words Rankings reflect sales, for the week ended May 3, at many thousands of venues where a wide range of general interest books are sold nationwide. These include hundreds of independent book retailers (statistically weighted to represent all such outlets); national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; university, gift, supermarket, discount and department stores; and newsstands. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. Among those categories not actively tracked are: perennial sellers; required classroom reading; text, reference and test preparation guides; journals and workbooks; calorie counters; shopping guides; comics; and crossword puzzles. Expanded rankings are available on the Web: nytimes.com/books.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: RETAILERS (91%); BOOK REVIEWS (90%); NEWSSTANDS (78%); BOOKSTORES (78%); NON FICTION LITERATURE (78%); GROCERY STORES & SUPERMARKETS (73%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (72%); CHRISTIANS & CHRISTIANITY (67%); RELIGION (61%); CATHOLICS & CATHOLICISM (60%); BOOK SALES (90%) PERSON: RHONDA BYRNE (54%); RACHAEL RAY (51%) LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH DOCUMENT-TYPE: List PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 768 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final A Home as Quirky As Life Itself BYLINE: By FRED A. BERNSTEIN SECTION: Section RE; Column 0; Real Estate Desk; HABITATS THE BOWERY; Pg. 4 LENGTH: 926 words WEI WEI SHANNON and Andrew Gluckman occupy one of the more eccentric spaces in Manhattan. Their two-story apartment, in an ancient wood-beamed building on the Bowery, rattles whenever a truck passes by, and the structure has settled so much that the floors slope steeply toward the center. ''If you drop something on the floor, you know just where to look for it,'' Mr. Gluckman said jokingly. He and his wife share an ability to see the upside of life's downward slopes, despite their very different backgrounds. Mr. Gluckman, 37, is a lifelong New Yorker who helps run his family's hat, glove and scarf business. Ms. Shannon, 30, was born in China and organizes cultural exchanges with that country. The couple not only share the space with their baby son, Kai (who was born in March), but also manage several organizations from the apartment, which overlooks the lighting fixture stores that dominate a section of the Bowery between Broome and Grand Streets. Ms. Shannon runs People's Architecture, a nonprofit group that arranges design-related events in the United States and China. Its latest project is an exhibition of buildings by young Chinese designers, at the Center for Architecture, on LaGuardia Place. At a time when it seems as if China were in thrall to Western architecture, Ms. Shannon thought it was important to show what Chinese designers have accomplished. But she is hardly jingoistic. With surprising candor, her wall text for the exhibition explains that one of the buildings, an art museum in Shenzhen, never opened to the public, a result of poor government planning. The exhibition, she said, ''isn't a showcase for China; it's meant to be an honest examination.'' The couple also run a business, called ArcXchange, that employs workers in Beijing to create renderings for architects and real estate developers in the United States. (The pay for those workers is a fraction of what it would be in this country.) Mr. Gluckman, who is involved in both ventures, is also an executive of Fownes Brothers & Company, which manufactures winter accessories. The company, founded in London in the 19th century, moved to New York in the 1930s, when it was bought by Mr. Gluckman's great-grandfather. Since 1996, Mr. Gluckman has been making regular trips to China, where the company's products are manufactured. (Its brands include Nautica, Kenneth Cole and Ugg.) Now the couple's trips to China are his-and-hers adventures, in which Mr. Gluckman may visit a hat factory one day, and help his wife set up an exhibition the next. Both the family clothing business and ArcXchange take advantage of low wages in China. Neither Mr. Gluckman nor Ms. Shannon sees anything wrong with that. ''American consumers demand cheap products,'' she said. He added, ''You go where you need to go, for both price and talent.'' For their apartment, they have no choice but to pay Manhattan prices: just under $4,000 a month for about 2,300 square feet. But they haven't had a lease in years, and the building is on the market (part of a development site offered at $14 million). The couple recently bought a smaller place in the West Village, which they are renovating. When and if they move there will depend on what happens to the Bowery apartment. In the meantime, they are getting ready for a trip to China that will last most of the summer. Ms. Shannon was raised by her grandparents in Beijing while her mother, Jian Leng, an archaeologist, traveled, first to do field work in Tibet and later to study in the United States. When she was 14, her mother, then on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, brought her to this country, where she took the last name of her new stepfather. She studied architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Mr. Gluckman attended private school in Manhattan and then studied political theory at New York University. He explored various career options, but in 1994 decided it was time to join the family business. The couple met on the street in September 2001 and married five years later. They began renting the Bowery apartment in 2003. Their renovation work included building a level floor in the home office (so chairs on casters would stay in one place), and turning an open loft into two separate bedrooms. One is for Ian, Mr. Gluckman's 12-year-old son from a previous marriage. That room is designed around Ian's interests, which include sports, superheroes and shark jaws. Dominating the living room is an opium bed -- an elaborate, carved-wood platform, which now houses nothing more sinister than a play mat for Kai. There are other Chinese pieces, including a coffee table made from a gigantic porcelain fish tank, and ornate, carved-wood chairs with red silk cushions. On one of their first trips to China together, they bought the furniture and had it shipped back to New York. There are also artifacts like a poster called a dazibao, from 1968. The big Chinese characters on the poster form political slogans and names of public enemies. The names crossed off in red represent people who were executed, Ms. Shannon said. Paper banners -- promising health and prosperity in Chinese -- hang from the living room's wood posts. Ms. Shannon has chosen to remain a Chinese citizen, for both practical and emotional reasons. ''There's no way I'm going to apply for a visa to go to my own country,'' she said. Mr. Gluckman, meanwhile, is a citizen of the Bowery. ''There's no other place in the world as diverse as this street,'' he said. ''I hope we never move.''
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 769 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Post 9/11, a New York of Gatsby-Size Dreams and Loss BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Pg. 25 LENGTH: 1375 words NETHERLAND By Joseph O'Neill 256 pages. Pantheon. $23.95. Driving a rented car up the Saw Mill River and Taconic State Parkways, Hans, a Dutchman displaced in New York, thinks of the Dutch names -- Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck and of course Peekskill -- that sprout amid places like Mohegan, Chappaqua and Ossining, and finds himself superimposing on the landscape ''regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child's irresponsibly cinematic sense of things.'' He has a similar sense of America's vastness and panoramic possibilities when he travels up the Hudson and glimpses spectacular, unspoiled vistas of forests and mountains ''canceling out centuries'' -- vistas unimaginable, he says, to someone who grew up in the congested, overpopulated landscape of the Low Countries. Much of New York and America boggles his ''newcomer's imagination'': the island's ''exhilaratory skyward figures'' as his taxi from Kennedy Airport crested ''the expressway above Long Island City, and Manhattan was squarely revealed''; his observation that making a million bucks in 1990s New York ''was essentially a question of walking down the street -- of strolling, hands in pockets, in the cheerful expectation that sooner or later a bolt of pecuniary fire would jump out of the atmosphere and knock you flat''; his sense that in New York ''selfhood's hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.'' If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of ''The Great Gatsby'' and its vision of New York -- ''the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes,'' the ''fresh, green breast of the New World,'' which nourished its hero's belief ''in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us'' -- the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate, for, like Fitzgerald's masterpiece, Joseph O'Neill's stunning new novel, ''Netherland,'' provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream. In this case it's the American Dream as both its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York, teeming with magical possibilities for self-invention, as well as with multiple opportunities for becoming lost or disillusioned or duped. Like ''Gatsby,'' ''Netherland'' is narrated by a bystander, an observer, who makes the acquaintance of a flamboyant, larger-than-life dreamer, who will come to signify to him all of America's possibilities and perils. Mr. O'Neill's narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a ''reticent good egg'' who works as an equities analyst for a large merchant bank. Hans grew up in the Netherlands; lived in London, where he married an Englishwoman named Rachel; and since the late 1990s has lived in TriBeCa with Rachel and their young son, Jake. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 pummel their neighborhood, Hans and his family relocate to the Chelsea Hotel; a month or so later Rachel announces that she is moving back to London with their son. Rachel's decision is partly based on her fear of another attack on New York: they were trying to understand, Hans recalls, ''whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the '30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow.'' And yet Hans soon realizes that his wife's decision is also based on her conviction that their foundering marriage is doomed, that the narrative of their lives together has derailed. Overcome by passivity and existential dread, Hans hunkers down in the Chelsea Hotel, flying to London once or twice a month to see his son, while getting more and more depressed, his existence sustained by a ''succession of men who arrived at my door with beer and pizzas and sparkling water.'' Hans is someone who has never really been unhappy before -- a fact he attributes to his pleasant childhood in the Netherlands -- and is ill prepared for the realization that his life has become an arithmetic lesson in subtraction. Through a chance conversation with a taxi driver, who tells him about a Staten Island cricket team, Hans re-embraces the sport he loved as a boy, and is soon spending much of his free time commuting to various boroughs for matches with his new teammates, an enterprise that helps, a little, in alleviating his solitude. In time, cricket leads Hans to make the acquaintance of a ''rare bird'' named Chuck Ramkissoon, a charismatic Trinidadian entrepreneur and storyteller, who comes across as a combination of Jay Gatsby and one of Philip Roth's long-winded, comic cranks. Chuck, who runs a gamut of enterprises, from a kosher sushi business to a numbers-running scam, is clearly something of a hustler (when he learns of Hans's work on Wall Street, he immediately says he has a business opportunity that might interest him), but he is also a dreamer with the quixotic vision of turning cricket into a national sport in America, of bringing what he sees as its civilizing and globalizing influences to the New World and building a state-of-the-art cricket field in New York. Despite his misgivings, Hans quickly finds himself charmed by his new friend. ''Because his deviousness was so transparent,'' Hans says, ''and because it alternated with an immigrant's credulousness -- his machinating and trusting selves seemed, like Box and Cox, never to meet -- I found all of the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing. Then again, this was a time when I found solace in the patter of Jehovah's Witnesses who stopped me in the street, a time when I was tempted to consult the fat beckoning lady psychic who sat like an Amsterdam hooker in a basement window on West 23rd Street.'' His own life, Hans says, ''had shrunk to very small proportions,'' and Chuck is one of the few people who notice just how truly lost he is. It's not long before Hans finds himself driving Chuck to mysterious meetings with faintly menacing associates, and witnessing the seamier side of Chuck's wheeling and dealing. Hans's account of his life cuts back and forth in time, looping back to his childhood in the Netherlands, and his life in London with Rachel and Jake. His focus, though, remains on the curious interlude he spends in New York with Chuck, who not only hauls him out of his cloistered existence as an equities analyst, but also takes him to the distant reaches of the outer boroughs and introduces him to a startling array of fellow dreamers and con artists and survivors -- people, who for a time at least, become a kind of surrogate family to Hans, and reawaken him to the possibilities of life. In recounting the story of Hans and Chuck, Mr. O'Neill -- who was born in Ireland and raised in the Netherlands, and who has written two other novels and a family history -- does a magical job of conjuring up the many New Yorks Hans gets to know. He captures the city's myriad moods, its anomalous neighborhoods jostling up against one another, its cacophony and stillness, its strivers, seekers, scam artists and scoundrels. He takes us to Queens and Brooklyn, and gives us glimpses of the lives of immigrants from the West Indies, the Middle East, Africa and Russia. He gives us Manhattan as Eliot's ''unreal city,'' with crowds climbing and descending the passages and walkways of the subway system ''like Escher's tramping figures.'' He gives us Manhattan as a Magritte painting, where the street looks like night, ''while the sky is day.'' And he gives us Manhattan as a place where anything can happen, where the visitor might encounter anyone from Monica Lewinsky wearing a track suit and large sunglasses, to a man dressed as an angel savoring his coffee and reading a newspaper. Most memorably, he gives us New York as a place where the unlikeliest of people can become friends and change one another's lives, a place where immigrants like Chuck can nurture -- and potentially lose -- their dreams, and where others like Hans can find the promise of renewal. Download 5,58 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham:
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