Art on Ice: Sarah Meier

Because I wanted to open the New Year with an inspirational post to help you, dear reader, with your New Year’s Resolutions…

When Sarah Meier was growing up, it had been nearly twenty years since her native Switzerland produced a champion figure skater. That would be Denise Bielmann, who had the eponymous spin named after her and who captured the world championship in 1981. The country had produced dozens of world-class skiers and dominated the snow, but not the ice.

Meier at the 2002 Olympics

Enter Meier. At the age of 10 she was doing double jumps and was able to complete triples by age 13. (For reference, when I was 13, I was busy trying to point out the cultural references in the then-new sketch-com series In Living Color. I may not be young, or that athletically inclined as a child.) Coached by her aunt Eve Fehr, her career received ample support from her family and her skating federation. Meier subsequently captured the national figure skating title several times and went onto the junior figure skating ranks, where she performed respectably and medaled in several events.

By age 17, she had competed in her first Olympics and placed 13th. Her career started to peak in 2006, when she finished 8th in the Olympics, 6th at the world championships and captured the bronze medal at the prestigious Grand Prix Final, behind the future Olympic gold and silver medalists Yuna Kim of South Korea and Mao Asada of Japan, both of whom were making their senior debuts after years of conquering the junior ranks. In the next two years, Meier went on to win the silver medal at the European Figure Skating Championships and was a fixture on the international competitive scene.

Meier at the 2010 Olympics

By 2008, things started to unravel. A series of injuries kept Meier from reaching her potential and forced her to withdraw in several events. It didn’t help that the likes of Kim and Asada were soon joined by the likes of Miki Ando, Haruka Imai, Mirai Nagasu and other notable young skaters making splashy debuts on the world stage. By the 2010 Olympics, she had posted a 15th place finish and had sunk to 26th at the worlds just a month later. The long series of injuries took their toll and nearly brought an inglorious end to a once-promising career.

Meier persevered for just one more competitive season, vowing to end her career by winning the Europeans, which were set to take place in January 2011 in Bern, Switzerland. Meier decided it was appropriate to end her career where it began, on home soil, and make it a farewell performance. You can see her performance and the end result after the jump:

Classic TV: House Hunters International

Escapist TV has now reached the point where “house porn” is one of the newest forms of stealth soft-core erotica.

The original House Hunters on Home & Garden TV focuses on prospective buyers in the United States looking to upgrade or downsize into new homes. A global spin-off the series emerged in 2009, when HGTV decided that it was a good idea to show the challenge of buying or renting a home outside America. Given the terrible economic state and the startlingly high number of foreclosures in the U.S. within the last few years, it seems perverse to watch people get into debt while trying to find the perfect home. But the fact is that in our new economy, talent is moving globally and these people must all live somewhere. We move for love, for money, for a change of pace in life. This show might seem fantastical today, but it really shows that the dream of picking up and starting a new life isn’t out of reach.

House Hunters International (which I’m calling “HHI” since that’s a long title) follows, in each 30-minute episode, people who are moving entire countries, usually to take new jobs and / or be close to family, or for love or retirement. The prospective buyers or renters could be from anywhere. The show has followed a Canadian national moving home to her birthplace of Tel Aviv, a former Olympic skier from Edmonton who bought a rental mansion in Punta Cana, circus performers from Cirque du Soleil buying a country home in France, Brits buying vacation homes in Andalucia, two brothers returning to Singapore from Australia and Manhattan to start a business, and an Irishman who moves to Bulgaria to be with the woman he loves while she’s finishing university. HHI has gone to Turin, Nairobi, Sydney, Vanuatu, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Marrakesh. The show even follows, to my great surprise, a student from my university days who worked in the office across the hall from me in the student union building buying an apartment to make his stay in Tokyo permanent!

Dream home? Looking in St. Maartens

Some of the buyers are rather entitled and complain that they aren’t getting enough “bang” for their buck. Some are looking purely to acquire properties in areas that they always know to be “tourist-friendly” but who somehow seem to conveniently overlook kidnapping epidemics where they plan to settle as foreign nationals. Some pack up the whole family and simply think they can buy a residence in the centre of the city for a family of ten without paying a lot of money for it. This makes for unintentional comedy.

Perhaps what’s most interesting about HHI is not just entertainment value, but the living works of art they plan to move into. The homes are absolutely amazing in some episodes, given the size of the budget for purchase or rental. We are treated to palatial villas in Mexico right on the beach, six-bedroom three-level Cliffside homes with infinity pools in Kuala Lumpur, state-of-the-art condos in Zurich with private elevators, and brand-new lofts in the centre of Berlin that has more room for less money than you’d pay in New York, London or Vancouver. You can also find quaint homes such as tiny 300-square-foot pied-a-terres in Montmartre, seaside apartments in Slovenia that all overlook the Riviera, and historic but spacious attic spaces in Buenos Aires. Each home has the potential to be a work of art, and HHI shows the before-and-after once the buyer or renter moves in.

Move-in ready: planned community in Abu Dabi

It’s also a bit of wish fulfillment. I had mentioned how it was a dream to move for love, for a change of pace in life, or for a promising international career. It’s also surprisingly demure in tone for a reality series, with little sensationalism and no one throws up or has a hissy fit, not even during the home shopping phase. HHI is accompanied by a soothing voiceover that calmly makes the home-hunting process a relaxed experience. That sense of security and safety makes the show excellent comfort viewing, and for those of us who are cautious about moving out of the country to start anew, it’s also a revealing glimpse into local conveyancing practices. Who knew that Bulgaria doesn’t allow foreign nationals to own property, unless you do it through a locally-incorporated business you own or start up? In most of South America, the method of payment is cash-and-carry, meaning that you’ll have to get to the country with cash in hand, in a safe, and arrange to deliver the deposit in a money belt attached to your torso. You’ll also occasionally catch a glimpse into just how expensive cities such as London or Paris really are, and what you might expect to get at certain price points. (In case you’re wondering, they break down the price per square foot.)

It might be a stretch to consider HHI as “classic” television, but in fifty years’ time, this will be a time capsule showing how the global community moved in this time and place. Perhaps by that point we’ll have abandoned Earth and have moved to the Moon, perhaps we’ll all have gone underwater, perhaps international movement will become commonplace and it would be strange for someone to not have a career that takes them out of the country at least once in their lives. For now and for those of us who aren’t moving anytime soon (or plan on it), HHI is the kind of somewhat realistic escapist entertainment that doesn’t involve celebrity weddings, puking on the beach, or the initials “g”, “t” and “l” in that order.

Guilty Pleasure: Verka Serduchka (Верка Сердючка)

Have you ever looked at something completely ridiculous and, against your better judgment, not looked away from it even though you just know it’s the nuttiest thing you’ve ever seen? Some people have no stomach for something like this, but others have a penchant for taking pleasure in completely madcap, over-the-top spectacles and enjoy it without irony. I belong to the latter group, but if you have been reading my blog long enough, you’ll know that I have a mild fascination with Eastern Europe and in particular the Eurovision Song Contest in all its insane glory.

Verka Serduchka (Верка Сердючка) is perhaps the most outlandish music artist the Ukraine has to offer. He first came to prominence outside of Europe thanks to his unforgettable entry in the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest with “Dancing Lasha Tumbai”. A totally nonsensical song in English, German, Mongolian(!) and Russian, the pop-happy dance single is performed by a drag alter ego of Ukrainian singer Andriy Danylko. Given that Eurovision in 2007 contained an unusually large number of hard-rock entries attempting to ape the previous year’s winner Lordi, seeing an accordion-laced dance-pop single in four languages made up of catchphrases and no clear narrative thread or cohesion made for an unforgettable spectacle.

The single and its star were met with considerable controversy in the rather conservative Ukraine, and the selection committee was heavily criticized for sending a drag queen to represent them. Remember that in parts of the former Soviet Union, effeminate men are still the target of homophobia and Russia is in the process of trying to make any public references to homosexuality illegal, which if you ask for my opinion is just – and I am breaking with my higher level of diction here – totally dumbass and a total embarrassment for the entire country, and I hope they get over it soon. Anyway, back to the fun of Eurovision!

Watch the performance and take note of the genius of it.

Modern Film Classics: “Prêt-à-Porter”

Original American poster

 The great filmmaker Robert Altman was never concerned about the fashion industry. However, in the winter of 1984, he found himself in Paris during Fashion Week, was brought into a darkened tent to view a fashion show, and claims that he was absolutely dumbfounded by the power of the show. This was the circus, he thought to himself, and he resolved to make a film about the fashion industry.

Given that Altman’s career was in the doldrums at the time, following the stinging failure of his misbegotten Popeye motion picture in 1980, he didn’t have much creative freedom or financiers to realize his vision. However, the one-two punch of 1992’s The Player and 1993’s Short Cuts returned him to the forefront of American film directors, capped off by back-to-back Best Director Oscar nominations. The then-new generation of stars, along with his former 70s acting stable, clamored to work with him. It was in this atmosphere that he made 1994’s Prêt-à-Porter.

Models

In the winter of 1994, Altman was granted permission to make a multi-narrative comedy about the fashion industry. Accordingly, he was given unprecedented access to a number of fashion shows to give verisimilitude to his film: Sonia Rykiel, Issey Miyake, Jean-Paul Gaultier and many others. He was therefore also able to film a number of international models at work, including Helen Christensen, Tatjana Patitz, Carla Bruni and “the triumvirate” of Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. Even Icelandic singer Björk makes a cameo on the runway in the Gaultier show. The inclusion of actual designers and their shows into the film lends it greater credibility, and a much better sense of time and place.

The cast itself boasts a “who’s-who” of international film stars and acclaimed character actors. These include (and this list is by no means exhaustive): Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Rupert Everett, Anouk Aimee, Richard E. Grant, Forrest Whittaker, Ute Lemper, Lili Taylor, Kim Basinger, Rosy de Palma, Tracey Ullmann, Teri Garr, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Sam Robards, Chiara Mastroianni, Jean Rochefort, Michel Blanc and Sally Kellerman. A number of other celebrities and designers make appearances as well, including Cher, Harry Belafonte, Thierry Mugler, Paolo Bulgari and Elsa Klensch.

Crowd scene: Bacall, Kellerman, Hunt, Basinger, Grant

The film follows a fashion designer whose son has been bankrupting her business and who cheats on his wife; two gay fashion designers whose aesthetics clash but who carry on a secret affair; an incompetent American fashion reporter whose sincerity is no match for the outrageous answers designers give to her inane questions; a husband-and-wife from Marshall’s who appear to be on a covert mission; a “bad boy” fashion photographer who is courted simultaneously by the (fictional) editors-in-chief of Vogue, Elle and Women’s Wear Daily; two American reporters who hate each other but end up in bed together all week long; and two old lovers meeting again for the first time, after many years. (That last one stars, for those who love Italian film, Loren and Mastronianni, who re-enact the iconic seduction from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow one more time.)

The German Opera Project: the Bregenz Festival

Much can be said of stripped-down theatrical productions that do not diminish the power of the work. I once saw a production of The Laramie Project presented in the small theatre at the back of a Cuban restaurant, staged by Fighting Chance Productions. It in no way minimized the work’s message and reduced me and my companions to blubbering, quivering, weeping masses. It’s times like that when I love intimate theatre.

And then there’s the Bregenz Festival. 

What is the Bregenz Festival?

Think of opera. Now think of the phrase “go big or go home”, apply it to the staging, then multiply that to an absurd scale. You have the Bregenz Festival. Or just look at the picture to the left. That, folks, is a big-ass stage.

A competitor to the popular Bayreuth Festival in Germany, this uniquely Austrian opera company takes place every summer on the shores of Lake Constanza, located at the northern foot of the Rhine River. The first Bregenz Festival took place in 1946, a year after the war. Although the town itself did not even contain a theatre or outdoor performance space, the troupe still put together a production on two adjoining bridges and were backed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, who have been supporting and playing at the festival ever since. The Festival contains a number of concurrent performances including outdoor ballet, giving you the option of seeing Swan Lake not only in an outdoor theatre, but on an actual lake.

Over the years, permanent structures were put into place to house the orchestra pit as well as concurrent productions on different stages. Should the weather suddenly turn bad, the performances can move from the Festival Hall to the adjoining Seebuehne hall and house approximately 1,700 attendees, meaning that the performance would not be cancelled that evening and with only part of the audience members being furnished refunds in the event of rain. Now that is some outdoor planning. By 1985, some operas would run at least two seasons and stage structures were solidified so that the formerly outdoor festival would be able to run almost year-round.

What distinguishes the Bregenz Festival’s productions from your usual opera is the sheer audacity of the scale. The dazzling Lake productions are the ones that take place on mammoth outdoor stages that dwarfs the performers, reducing them to the size of ants. The concept of the staging is daring on a literally epic scale, with the floating stage by the lake towering several stories into the sky. Take for instance the picture to the left of the skeleton reading an oversized book the size of a small arena for the 1999/2000 production of A Masked Ball. Also observe the beheaded Statue of Liberty floating above the stage in a modernized version of Aida. You may recognize the giant “Tosca eye” from the James Bond film Quantum of Solace: that’s the opera Bond attends where there’s a chase sequence through the opera hall edifice. 

Cinematically Inclined: Midnight in Paris

Want a little intellect with your cinema? Woody Allen’s latest concoction, Midnight in Paris, is a joyful piece of tantalizingly literary cinematic candy.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter engaged to a Park Avenue princess (Rachel McAdams). They are on holiday in Paris with her moneyed Republican parents. Mother and daughter are the sort who enjoy art not for art’s sake, but for its acquisitional value. They run into a couple she knows, in particular a dilettante (Michael Sheen) who enjoys correcting local tour guides on the information they provide in their tours. Needless to say, this is the type who does not take kindly to being corrected, even in the face of irrefutable evidence.

One evening at midnight, Gil is wandering around and comes to a stop at a particular street corner. A car pulls up and invites him to attend a party. He accepts, unaware that the party acts as a time machine to the 1920s. How does he know about that the party takes place in that era? He meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at that party, that’s how. Soon, every night, he is at that same street corner and whisked away to drink with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), take editorial meetings with Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and hobnob with the Surrealists. Tampering his enthusiasm somewhat is the angelic Adriana. She is a flapper girl who blithely declares that Paris in the 1920s just isn’t that great, not compared to the belle époque of the turn of the century. Pretty soon, the future in-laws suspect that Gil’s up to something and the fiancée is spending increasingly more with the dilettante …

  

At this stage in his career, Allen has moved beyond the confines of his nebbish New Yorker persona. Gone is the neurotic, therapy-heavy, self-deprecating humour that tied so much of his previous work to Manhattan. Given the continuing propensity of Hollywood to make craptcular, mass-marketed action films, Allen wisely makes all of his films in Europe, with European money. It’s a great decision that has rejuvenated his creative spurt. Since 2005, he has produced the Bergman-esque thriller Match Point, the sexy ménage-a-trois comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and now Midnight in Paris. It’s appeared that The Old World has released new creative juices in our favourite neurotic Manhattanite.

Random Acts of Culture, #1

Tovey and the VSO (source: The Georgia Straight)

It’s often said, at least in North America, that the higher arts are inaccessible to the public due to high ticket prices and the esoteric nature of the material. While the Blogger easily sees the former being a barrier to access, he believes the latter is indefensible. Although many clearly don’t have any affinity for culture, and that’s all well and good, decrying it as being obscure and pouring money into the latest big-budget seizure-inducing Hollywood enterprise or pop star’s juggernaut concert tour while claiming to enjoy “the arts” reeks of sheer laziness.

The Blogger was thrilled yesterday to take part in the City of Vancouver’s 125th anniversary celebrations this past weekend. There were numerous outdoor events such as concerts and public performances meant to collect our citizens together in celebration of our glittering city of glass, still smarting from the ugly Stanley Cup riots of last month. Over the weekend, thousands of people gathered to peacefully partake in public events with minimal or no damage to civic or private property. Citizens were orderly, picked up after themselves at picnics, were generally polite on their cell phones, and there was little to no shoving, pushing, or unruly cattle herd-like behaviour. Who says we’re an unruly mob?

New York City free public concert in Central Park:
most of this, please. Lots more.

In particular, I was thrilled to see tens of thousands of people gathered in Stanley Park’s Brockton Oval to take in a free classical concert performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. Just when I thought higher culture had all but committed seppuku. Led by Grammy Award-winning conductor and composer Bramwell Tovey, the VSO performed to a rousing but orderly crowd under immaculate blue skies and a blazing yet beautiful sun. This is not unlike the free public concerts that are popular all over Europe, particularly in Vienna, and in the summertime in New York City. Why can’t we have more of these, please? In Vienna, they have free public concerts every weekend in the late spring and summer months. They support their arts enthusiastically. Even if you can’t afford a ticket to see certain plays, the opera house, culture exhibition halls and public parks are equipped with giant video screens in piazzas so that like-minded citizens and tourists can have picnics while watching the performances outdoors, live. And they don’t destroy it afterward, unlike the spoiled brats who defaced the downtown core during the hockey riots. That is how you make culture accessible.

Yesterday’s playlist was filled with instantly recognizable classics:

·     Rossini - William Tell: Overture

·     Strauss - Blue Danube Waltz

·     Baker - Through the Lion's Gate: Mountains

·     Wagner - Ride of the Valkyries

·     Haydn - Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major: I. Moderato

·     Borodin - Prince Igor: Polovtsian Dances

·     Mascagni - Cavalleria Rusticana: Intermezzo

·     Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture

The VSO also snuck in a piece by Canadian composer Michael Conway Baker, whose ode to our very own Lion’s Gate Bridge was far more ethereal and sublime than traffic on that bridge ever was or will be. The crowds peacefully took in the immaculate sounds and were transported to a world away, where people could literally waltz to the Blue Danube along the water. In fact, given that there was a large public space to do so, several couples got up and actually waltzed through Strauss’s The Blue Danube, and we were mere feet away from the ocean. Bliss. Given my obsession with German opera, I was thrilled to hear Wagner live.

Sound Advice: Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol”

Warning: This blog post may contain images and sounds that will cause you or parts of yourself to boogie at your desk. Please refrain from doing so, unless everyone else around you is free to join you in wild, abandoned glee.

Sometimes, pure genius doesn’t have to be deep or profound. Sometimes, genius can manifest itself in nothing more than words and sounds that mean nothing at all.

In the early 1970s, politically charged Italian singer-songwriter Adriano Celentano, having written some scathing and incendiary pop music, decided that he needed to loosen up, or at least for four minutes. The result is his hit single “Prisencolinensinainciusol”.

What does the title mean? Why, nothing, of course.

Celentano stated that after writing densely, thematically-packed music, he wanted to produce something playful. "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is his brainchid. The lyrics are an approximation of what English may sound like to non-Anglophone ears. When presenting the song on Italian national television, Celentano stated that he wrote the song to show how people in modern times cannot communicate effectively with one another. (He succeeds.) The above-noted clip is amalgamated and edited from two separate TV appearances of the song. Here they are:

What makes these four minutes such an absolute joy to behold is the audacious way in which Celentano delightfully, deliberately creates joyful nonsense for the sheer hell of it. His Wikipedia page indicates that two of his biggest influences are none other than Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. Given the way he contorts his face and swivels his hips in the clip, his performance has clearly been informed by both icons.

The performance itself is genius. It is choreographed nonsense combining a perfectly synched dance troupe strutting in supreme precision. There may only be a dozen dancers in the clip, but the use of the mirrors magnifies the experience and by extension the complete and total silliness of it all.

Modern Film Classics: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

“Lemon, the dating world is a lot like your haircut: sometimes, awkward triangles occur.” – Alec Baldwin to Tina Fey on 30 Rock

 

The good news is that both Woody Allen and Penélope Cruz currently have films at the Cannes Film Festival. The bad news is that they’re not working together. The truly terrible news is that while Allen’s presenting his much-admired Midnight in Paris, Cruz stars in the latest budget-busting, surefire-money-making, soulless Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. While the Blogger respects an Oscar-winning actor’s right to make a film solely for a paycheque as a break from continually stretching artistic boundaries the way Cruz has done in the last five years, why the Pirates franchise refuses to die like World.com is beyond his comprehension.

Allen’s comic romance Vicky Cristina Barcelona premiered to considerable acclaim at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, became one of his most successful films, and won Cruz numerous prizes including an Academy Award for her inspired comic work. It remains one of the Blogger’s favourite films, and will form one of the first entries in his Modern Film Classics selections (look for the tag on the side for other titles).

The premise is simple: two American college students, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) spend the summer in the titular Spanish city. The sensible, risk-averse Vicky is engaged to Doug, a stable lawyer in New York who has a suburban life waiting for them to settle into in Connecticut. Cristina is artistic and impulsive, evidenced by her sudden romance with local artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). The two friends are locked in a quintessential Apollonian / Dionysian contrast. Things get complicated as Vicky slept with Juan Antonio while Cristina was convalescing from food poisoning, Doug shows up to surprise Vicky on holiday, and Juan Antonio’s volatile ex-wife Marie Elena (Cruz) shows up, having tried to kill herself and needing care. In probably the strangest twist of all, Cristina, Juan Antonio and Marie Elena take each other as lovers and begin a three-way common-law marriage, and are impossibly happy. Or are they? And can it last?
 

Eurovision 2011: The Wrap-Up & Final Results

Well that was a most exciting three and a half hours!

Ell & Nikki of Azerbaijan, 2011 Eurovision winners

Azerbaijan made history this evening by winning the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time. As per custom, they will host next year’s contest at a location to be determined. Italy, returning to the contest for the first time in over a decade, claimed the runner-up spot. Sweden’s Eric Saade, whose fans were locked in a bitter Internet rivalry with fans of Russian Alexey Vorobyov, earned enough points to place third.

The Blogger is saddened that neither of his two picks for the big win, the UK’s Blue and Vorobyov, fared well, as both finished well out of the top ten.

It’s notable that when points were awarded to certain countries, the audience in attendance loudly booed their disapproval. Not wanting to ignite international warfare over pop music, the Blogger will simply attribute the placement of each entry to each country’s preference. The number of points any one entry gets in one nation will not necessary get points in another country. Some quarters have also accused nations for voting for their neighbours. One example is the perennial mutual awarding of top points between Greek and Cyprian entries, as well as those between Portugal and Spain. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in my previous article, despite the hand-wringing at this practice, what Eurovision succeeded in doing was bringing countries together. And unlike FIFA, there’s no four-year wait for the contest as it’s on every year! 

For those of you who missed it, here is the order of finish for Eurovision 2011 and the videos of each respective country’s entries, after the jump:

Guilty Pleasure: Eurovision Song Contest, 2011

UPDATE: the results of the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest are in and the recap is available here.

Eurovision 2011 Logo

Disclaimer: despite his proclamation and adoration for high art, the Blogger, like everyone else, has a guilty pleasure. His is the Eurovision Song Contest. Think of it as Martha Stewart having the occasional cheeseburger after eating healthy all week. No judgment.

 

Originally conceived in the mid-1950s by the European Broadcasting Union to unite a warm-torn, still-divided Europe, the Eurovision Song Contest was meant as a one-off light entertainment program. Fifty-five years after that first contest in 1956, the program has evolved into an annual international celebration of song showcasing the best Europe has to offer. It has also, in several corners of Europe, been met with much derision due to the rather, shall we say, extraordinary song choices. What may be considered hip, cool and cutting-edge in one part of Europe may be considered to be déclassé or outright vulgar. In North American urban nomenclature, one denotes this with the scathing words “Try Hard”. 

ABBA winning with "Waterloo" in 1974

Nevertheless, the Eurovision Song Contest has been indomitable and survived the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Prague Spring of 1968, international incidents at the Olympics, Perestroika, the fall of the Iron Curtain, the formation of the EU and the rather alarming albeit mercifully temporary ubiquity of Fabio. The contest introduced the world to ABBA and showcased a teenaged Quebecois singer named Celine Dion who competed and won for Switzerland in 1988. The show has also, with the inclusion of several former Soviet republics, expanded to become more inclusive and focus less on the western part of the continent. Individual countries spend the winter months choosing their entries via popular vote, and this is undertaken with considerable seriousness and a surprisingly high degree of gravity. It is this writer’s opinion that the contest may be taken more seriously than many actual elections. In the end, the winner represents the nation to the world at large.

The Artful Blogger Goes Shopping: TSUM, Moscow

Special to Retail-Details

Last week’s article on GUM in Moscow generated some unexpected intrigue. At least where the Blogger lives, there is a lack of awareness of luxury shopping in the Russian capital and readers have commented that thanks to the post, they have found their “new happy place”.

Although GUM is a luxury shopping mall, readers did ask about the leading luxury department store in Moscow, comparable to a Saks, Bloomingdales, Barneys or Harvey Nichols. Behold, TSUM.

Located in central Moscow not far from its chief rival GUM, TSUM (rhymes with “gloom” but far from gloomy) affords luxury shoppers an intimate and personalized shopping experience. Housed in a formerly drab state department store, it is now one of the ultimate shopping destinations not only in Russia, but in all of Europe.

Verber, with Naomi Campbell

One cannot understand TSUM without knowing something of the powerful woman behind it. TSUM’s fashion director is the mercurial Alla Verber, known as a long-time fashion power broker for Russia. In this interview for ABC News, no less than George Stephanopoulos compared Verber to the formidable Anna Wintour in terms of her clout. Trained in fashion and business in the West during the Soviet era, Verber returned to Moscow after the fall of Communism with a big idea: to bring the same luxury brands she loves into her beloved Russia. In an era when more democratically priced brands such as Levi’s and Calvin Klein were the most coveted designer clothes, Verber’s idea was unheard of, even at the end of the Soviet era. She spearheaded the revitalization of TSUM and shepherded it into its current form, which stands as a lasting testament to Verber’s love of couture and intense commercial ferocity. TSUM was spotlighted on the English-language site Moscow Out (via Russia Today) earlier this year, and includes an interview with Verber herself (the interview begins at 4:58).

Cannes Film Festival 2011: A Preview

Cannes 2011 Poster

Note: Post has been updated as of 16:00 PDT on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.

In April 2010, the Blogger had the rare opportunity of meeting a true international star. The enigmatic and talented French singer Charlotte Gainsbourg launched her first-ever concert tour in Vancouver at the famed Vogue Theatre to promote her critically-acclaimed second album IRM. She did not disappoint. Thanks to the generosity of local cultural paper The Georgia Straight and Warner Records, I met Charlotte herself after the show. She was effusive and charming, and a bit nervous. I asked her flat-out if, as the reigning Best Actress winner, she would be attending the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival. Gainsbourg looked a bit taken aback and then replied, with a twinkle in her eye, that she was “unsure”. Sure enough, a month later, she was on hand on the Croisette to present the biggest award of the festival, the Palme d’Or.

The annual Cannes Film Festival, now in its 64^th year, is not the biggest such gathering in the world, but it lays claim to being one of the oldest (after Venice) and most prestigious. This is the festival where Bridget Bardot once played in the surf in front of an international cadre of admiring paparazzi. This was where the film that gave rise to the word “paparazzi”, Fellini’s immortal La Dolce Vita, scandalized the Catholic Church and won the top prize, birthing an international sensation and helping popularize European cinematic discourse in North America. This was where notorious Danish director Lars von Trier won prizes year after year but showed his displeasure at not winning the Palme d’Or by first giving the jury the finger one year, and telling them seven years later that they gave him “the wrong award” for another film. Gong Li all but became an unofficial spokeswoman for the festival due to her annual appearance to in support of director Zhang Yimou’s films in the early 90s, every one in which she played a leading role. Sharon Stone never misses the Festival, whether or not she has a film to promote. This is where Catherine Deneuve, Maggie Cheung, Juliette Binoche and, yes, Brangelina come to be seen and to present serious work. To get an idea of the international star power on hand, have a look at this clip.

This year’s festival boasts one of the most exciting lineups in years. In particular, the Blogger is looking forward to the following films in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or:

The Artful Blogger Goes Shopping: GUM, Moscow

Special article for Retail Detail.

GUM corporate logo

This year, Forbes magazine reported that 79 of the year’s billionaires live in Moscow, more than in any other city in the world: that’s billionaire, not millionaire. This statistic means that there is plenty of wealth going around than ever before and a sign that, 25 years after Perestroika, Communism has indeed gone the way of the floppy disk.

With such an abundance of luxury, it’s no wonder that some of the world’s most luxurious shopping is now done in Moscow, with the largest shopping centre being GUM Trading House. GUM (pronounced like “doom” with a “g”, but far more pleasant) is located in Red Square and close to St. Basil’s Cathedral, situating it in perhaps the single most prominent and immediately recognizable area in all of Russia. The acronym “GUM” is derived from the Cyrillic “ГУМ”, meaning “State Department Store”, and was originally built as a shopping mall with an astonishing 1,200 stores housed within its walls. During Stalin’s reign, it was initially converted into an office and it even displayed his wife’s body following her suicide in 1932. Grim. Eventually, GUM was converted back into a department store and became one of the few well-stocked shops in the nation, given its centrality and its location next to the Kremlin. (Yes, Lenin is likely turning over in his grave next door.) Of the many state department stores, the one in Red Square stands alone today and remains the most iconic.

GUM, in all its glory. Note original architecture preserved.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, plans were eventually in place to at first partially, and then fully privatize GUM. It is now owned and operated by the Russian luxury goods distributor and boutique magnate Bosco di Ciliegi. Concurrent with the collapse of Communism, many Russian capitalists stepped out of the socialist closet and were eager to shop. Designers and shop operators, sensing a nascent new market on the verge of explosion, rushed to fill GUM with luxury goods to an eager public flush with wealth. 

GUM promenade, lit up at night

Fashionistas and even casual luxury brand admirers (such as this writer) are surrounded by a nearly obscene number of designer brands with stand-alone boutiques, such as Armani, Sonia Rykiel, Burberry, Hugo Boss, Dior, Hermes and Frey Willie. Luxury brand names populate their retail spaces with considerable amounts of haute couture, in addition to their second lines and prêt-a-porter collections. The Russian designer Valentin Yudashkin, whose haute couture works are so innovative and coveted that they have been on display both at Paris Fashion Week and at the Louvre, has one of his major shops here.