I like this place. My dish was tasty, and it was the right portion size.

The madame’s cool clutch and sooj’s hand, wearing my ring.

See, we’re all a bit goth.

Link: Marmalade Cafe

Picked them up on a whim at Neiman Marcus. Comfortable.

Link: Dan’s Super Subs

Service is decent, ingredients are of high quality, and the bread is fresh. I’m getting hungry all over again.

Tip: Phone in your order to avoid a potentially long wait time.

Link: Caveretta’s Deli

The above picture is from the story of Marco and Ciro, a couple of wanna-be gangster teens who quote Scarface and try to create their own little gang. Kind of funny.

Trailer.

Instead of providing a mediocre review, here’s a Copy+Paste of Frank DiGiacomo’s really good one from Vanity Fair:

Gomorra is a film about the Mafia, but unlike any of the American classics of the genre, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather films and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas and Casino—it is devoid of any Hollywood romance. This might sound strange, but Gomorra reminded me of Ridley Scott’s science-fiction masterpiece Alien more than any of the aforementioned mob films, because it is a movie about a relentless, voracious, ever-morphing force that seems to have an almost omniscient capability of tracking down and dispatching its victims and adapting to its surrounding environment.

Garrone’s Gomorra is an adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s bestselling book, Gomorrah, and both are a pun on Camorra, the name of the Neapolitan Mafia, which, according to Saviano, has killed more people than the Sicilian Mafia and the Irish Republican Army. I read Gomorrah after I saw Garrone’s film, and I should say that, in its own way, the book is as compelling as the film. In one of my favorite passages, Saviano describes Hollywood’s influence on the Camorristi, members of this far-ranging mob that has its hands in fashion, narcotics, gambling, and the illegal dumping of toxic waste. One Neapolitan gangster dresses like Brandon Lee in his ill-fated role in The Crow, and Saviano writes that there are female bosses whose bodyguards wear vivid yellow bodysuits like the one Uma Thurman sported in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Tarantino’s influence on the Camorra extends beyond fashion, too, although with messy consequences. Saviano quotes a “veteran of the Naples Forensics Division” who complains: “Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot! They don’t keep the barrel straight anymore. Now they hold it crooked, like in the movies, which makes for disaster. They hit the guts, groin, or legs, seriously wounding but not killing. And so they have to finish the victim off with a bullet to the nape of the neck. A pool of pointless blood, a barbarism completely superfluous to the goal of execution.” (Apparently, even the cops in Naples speak eloquently.)

The Camorra reportedly did not react kindly to Saviano’s inside look at their operations and he has since gone into hiding with round-the-clock police protection. Apparently, the Neapolitan mob is more forgiving of filmmakers because, as far as I know, the same fate has not befallen Garrone. In fact, when I first saw the film last fall, the director was in the audience, and Scorsese was introducing the picture, telling the crowd that one of the great strengths of Gomorra was that “there is no exit: forget exposition; traditional narrative: you don’t know what country you’re in, you don’t know what city; you don’t know what street it is. You never know that.” Scorsese, who knows a thing or two about stomach-turning realism and claustrophobic tension, continued, “You’re just dropped onto another planet, and you’re on your own. There’s no relief…. The only way out for the people in the film is going to be bad”.

A large part of Gomorra takes place in what appears to be a cookie-cutter apartment complex that is the essence of depressing. There are endless concrete stairwells and bleak landscapes that enable ambushes and gunplay, and the gritty sameness of the landscape underscores the fact that no one is to be trusted. The Camorra seems to infect everything it touches, even childhood, and, for me, one of the most memorable scenes in the movie depicts a small group of young boys who wait in line to don a crude bulletproof vest and brave a gunshot to the chest—what amounts to a rite of passage in a region where manhood is brutal and often brief.

The violence may be local, but both Saviano’s book and Garrone’s film show how the Camorra’s reach is increasingly global. Early in the book, there is a chapter titled “Angelina Jolie” that depicts the Camorra’s involvement in producing high-end clothing designed by Italian fashion houses in underground sweat shops. Near the end of the chapter, a particularly talented worker at one of these factories is at home channel-surfing his television when he sees Jolie walking the red carpet at the Oscars wearing a custom-made outfit that he had assembled. Garrone wanted to use Oscar footage of Jolie for a similar storyline in his film, but, at the screening I attended, he explained that the Academy wouldn’t release it to him. So, the filmmaker improvised and bought footage of actress Scarlett Johannson walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival in 2006. (Press reports indicate it was a vintage gown.) “I don’t know if Scarlett Johansson knows she is in the movie,” Garrone said at the time. A few days ago, I asked Johansson’s spokesman Marcel Pariseau if his client was aware of her appearance in Gomorra. Via e-mail, he replied that Johannson hadn’t seen the movie and, thus, didn’t have any comment.

She should see it. And so should you.

Links:
Gomorrah (Blu Ray)
Gomorrah (Regular DVD)
Gomorrah (book)
Oscar Crime: Gamorra Shoulda Been a Contender by Frank DiGiacomo, Vanity Fair, 2/26/09.

… it was okay.

Link: Giovanni Ristorante

Handmade Norse God mask with headdress made of faux fur, ostrich feather, coque feathers and gold leafed horns.

Handmade Aretus Pewter mask with beak and horns.

Handmade Etherial Dreams gold mask with large black feathers.

 Amazing Craftsmanship. I wouldn’t wear any of these; I’d like them to hang on one of my walls. 

Link:
Gilt (Sign up and get $25 off first order)
Claudia Hapeman Masks

Link: Giovanni Ristorante