"You've got to grab it."
I was unfortunate, and very fortunate, that there were some terrible things I lived through. Obviously we had 9/11, but in a year I had three very close friends that passed away, I had my mom who was battling cancer again.
...At a certain point I realized that no one is going to be here. No one is going to spoon-feed you anymore. No one is going to teach you anything. You've got to grab it."
--David Chang, the now 34-year-old founder of the immensely successful Momofuku restaurant group on why he initially decided to open his first restaurant in Manhattan. From a very interesting video interview (found via the bryce.vc blog.)
Image of David Chang via Esquire Magazine
Image of David Chang via Esquire Magazine
Hip to be uncool
"Sometimes I'm questioning my work, questioning today, questioning yesterday, wondering is it good, is it not good, is it too much, is it not enough? I take everything seriously, not like, 'Well, whatever, let's do it, and try to be cool.' I'm not a cool guy."
--Lanvin lead designer Alber Elbaz, in a good interview with C Magazine (which I bought yesterday on a whim to pass the time on a Wi-Fi-less flight and am now seriously considering subscribing to.)
On delicious conversations
“It was just what you did automatically, go to lunch with friends. And it was so different than now. People were at the top of their form.
Those restaurants were so beautiful, and people felt they had to live up to the elegance of the setting. You wore your latest Givenchy or Balenciaga. And you felt that there were delicious conversations taking place at every table. Now you go into a place and everything looks transactional.”
--Socialite Deeda Blair on lunching with other New York high society wives in the mid-20th century.
Everything about the "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunched!" piece in the February issue of Vanity Fair was thoroughly entertaining, and I highly recommend reading it. The glamour of it all is fascinating.
I got to thinking about why things seem to have changed so much since then. I think mostly it's that people used to have to condense all their social interactions into an hour or two a day, at most. So during those short periods of time, they went all out: Designer clothes, full makeup, fabulous anecdotes, juicy gossip, and all the rest.
But modern technology has made it so that we can represent ourselves publicly much more often. Now, during our in-person times, the stakes are much lower. You can wear jeans and a t-shirt. If you're in a bad mood you can be a little rude; if you're in a funk you can be withdrawn. You can always make it up with a clever Tweet or charming email later on. Often, what you do online seems to matter more than your in person behavior -- after all, content on the web lasts longer and reaches much farther.
Anyway, I don't think this shift is an entirely good thing. This is partly because I think in-person interactions are the only things that truly feed us as humans -- and also because I'd like to get dressed up and wear eyeliner more often.
Photograph from VanityFair.com by Tony Palmieri/Conde Nast archive; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark. Left: the Duchess of Windsor and C. Z. Guest leaving La Côte Basque restaurant, 1962. Right: Lee Radziwill and Truman Capote outside the Colony restaurant, 1968.
On looking good in photos
Paul and Stella McCartney, Los Angeles, 1975. By Harry Benson
"You look stupid until a year later, when you think, 'Not bad. What was I complaining about?'"
--Harry Benson, the photojournalist whose 40-year career has included prominent work for Life, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, on how people react to photos of themselves (via his recent interview with the New York Observer.)
