T LOunge for March 9th, 2023

Velvet Bar at Corinthia – London, UK

LUXURY, darlings. Wrap yourself in it. Today is THURSDAY and the LOunge is a mood and a half. We’re feeling it. There are velvet couches aplenty, just waiting for your ass to descend upon them. Go on. Order something dark and bitter. Whisper some gossip. It beats probably most of our real-world plans for the day, no?

Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Sobriety and Self-Care at 30
After an emotionally turbulent year, Delevingne is slowly beginning to find her center: She’s proud to tell me that her commitment to sobriety is some four months and counting. “The games, the crazy performances, the escape rooms—I loved giving that to people,” she says. “They could come here and leave their stress and responsibilities behind, and maybe that sounds like Willy Wonka, but it was the idea that they could come and just be like kids,” she says. “But in giving that to people, I was kind of stuck in myself.”

Christina Aguilera Is Looking For Simplicity
But that doesn’t mean she’s slowing down.
Christina Aguilera has been around for a while — you don’t become a household name overnight. Since the age of six, she’s been in the spotlight and has continued to shine throughout the years. Of course, a career like hers comes with a very specific and busy lifestyle. So now, the musician and actor is looking to simplify.
“I made a promise to myself when I was really young, before I even had a record contract, that no matter what happened, my messages would always encourage others to feel good about themselves. And when I had the opportunity to make an album that truly came from me — like Stripped — included all these elements of being a woman that I felt represented beauty, feeling good about yourself, and feeling empowered. These are messages I’ve always stayed true to, and that’s helped me. When you become famous, you’re inundated with so many different opinions and it can be really hard, especially as artists — we’re very sensitive people.”

The Long, Hard Road to Nashville
Forget the rhinestones and ten-gallon hats. Amanda Shires, Adia Victoria, and Allison Russell talk about their challenges in the punishing music business and how they’re remaking Music City.
Is the Nashville music industry still a boys’ club? My new novel, The Farewell Tour, follows a fierce, ambitious female singer-songwriter named Lillian Waters who is trying to crack the country-music establishment from the 1940s through the 1980s. Lillian balances multiple day jobs, struggles with rejection, and even into her 40s, is categorized as a “girl singer,” instructed to sing about heartbreak and family rather than her real life, and told there’s not room for multiple women on a music label.
To see what’s changed, and what hasn’t, in the real world in the decades since, I spoke to three ascendant Nashville-based musicians about their lives and work.

Artist Gabriela Salazar on the Art of Moving Forward
In honor of International Women’s Day, Hearst is partnering with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art on “The Art of Moving Forward” to amplify the voices of women artists. All artists selected a work of their own that speaks to the title of the initiative, including Gabriela Salazar, whose installations explore the fragility of the built world.
Gabriela Salazar’s creative practice examines built space and material instability. The New York artist’s architectural installations have included casts of her apartment’s windows fashioned from water-soluble paper and a tarp-covered sanctuary space made from disintegrating, coffee-based clay blocks. An awareness of the climate crisis—and the steps we need to take to combat it as we look to the future—is a subtext of much of her work. “It’s sculpture that is vulnerable and fragile and more permeable to the world, like we are,” she explains.

In New York City, a Ukrainian Dance Company Finds Strength in Tradition
From afar, the dancers of Syzokryli look like dolls with floral halos—vinki—around their heads. Up close, their faces tell a different, fiercer story. Today the women of this Ukrainian dance company have come together to perform at a small studio a few blocks from Union Square. The modest room, packed with roughly 11 women (plus 10 apprentices) ranging from their early teens to their late 30s, gets blisteringly hot after each routine. The footwork is intricate, fast, and executed with almost military precision. By the end, beads of sweat glisten on top of their self-administered, stage-ready makeup: red lips and pale powdered faces with dollops of blush. They wear two braids fastened at the top of the head—not a flyaway in sight.

Meet the Grande Dames of Milingimbi: The Women Who Weave
Well, as I live and breathe! Before my eyes the IRL, technicolor, real-deal version: the grande dames of Milingimbi, the women who weave. A mix of master and emerging weavers—the single fiber practice is a 360 degree one set to the rhythm of harvesting, preparing, dying and weaving gunga (Pandanus Spiralis). Whether everyday or ceremonial pieces weaving connects each artist to her ancestors and is imbued with ancestral wisdom which then takes form through each weavers distinct signature. Each bag, basket, piece of jewelry has an artful artisanal feeling only possible when something is truly of the hand. Really this craft cannot be spoken of truly by an outsider, just described, to that point Susan Balbuŋa Warrawarra, a cultural leader and master weaver, tells me: “Weaving is law. Weaving is culture. Weaving is forever, forever, forever.”

How These Mesmerizing Henna Artists Are Modernizing Traditional Body Art
Growing up Muslim in India, I was accustomed to my home being inundated by relatives when Eid came around every year. My mother would pass around cups of tea as the henna artists assiduously went about their work, emblazoning my relatives’ hands, while I was tasked with feeding them on account of my palms being dye-free. I still remember my relatives chiding me for being a “mehendi-abstaining tomboy”—a term I secretly derived great pleasure from because I had consigned henna to the “hobby of the elderly” compartment of my brain. I simply wouldn’t be caught dead in my baggy cargo pants, tank top, and ever-present sweatbands with orange-red curlicue patterns snaking up my arm.

How Generations of Indonesian Women Are Preserving an Ancient Juicing Tradition
Jamu, the general term for traditional herbal drinks that help improve digestion and maintain overall health, is a daily way of life and a cornerstone of culture across the Indonesian archipelago. “Jamu is all about accessible wellness, and that’s what makes it so powerful; it’s not just a beverage, it’s the concept of taking care of yourself,” says Metta Murdaya, founder of jamu-based beauty line Juara and author of Jamu Lifestyle: Indonesian Herbal Wellness Tradition. A typical jamu juice, which falls somewhere on the bitter and sweet spectrum in taste, is created first by blending together a combination of roots, herbs, and spices to balance taste and desired health benefits. Then, the mixture is boiled in water until it’s ready to be bottled and served at room temperature later.

A New Book Surveys the Eclectic Food Traditions of the Italian Islands
Sicily is but one of the many overlooked corners of the country that [Katie] Parla explores in her seventh cookbook, Food of the Italian Islands. Leafing through its pages, which are packed with enough gorgeous photos to have you googling flights before you’ve even made it halfway through, you’ll be transported variously to the volcanic outcrop of Pantelleria, with its dusty caper fields; immersed in the decorative, sculptural bread-baking traditions of Sardinia; or discovering the unique agricultural conditions of the Venetian island of Sant’Erasmo, whose unusually savory artichokes and chicory are carted over to Venice’s Rialto market daily to serve the kitchens and restaurants of the city. “I wanted to acknowledge the beautiful coastlines, and all of the delicious foods you want to be eating with the sea view—but also tie in the other elements of the islands, because a lot of their culture developed over millennia inland,” Parla explains.

There’s a New Reese’s in Town, and It’s Completely Dairy-Free
Treats for everyone!
Reese’s peanut butter cups have come in all different flavors and sizes, but none that vegans or dairy-free eaters could enjoy. Until now.
On Tuesday, Hershey’s announced the addition of a new plant-based Reese’s option, made with oat milk rather than cow’s milk. The product, the company shared in a press release, will become widely available to consumers this month. Though the brand did not share the coming product’s price, PBS found a listing for a 1.4-ounce package of two plant-based Reese’s Cups at Rite Aid for $2.49, which is $1 more than the current regularly packaged product.

How to Store and Freeze Strawberries to Maximize Their Freshness
Make the most of this fruit’s short season by extending their shelf life when fresh and correctly freezing any extras.
In-season strawberries are fragrant, red, juicy and sweet. They taste delicious on their own and are the cornerstone of dessert favorites like strawberry shortcake and strawberries and cream. As much as we love the fruits, however, we know they aren’t the hardiest. To help you keep your strawberries fresh for as long as possible—and extend the life of the strawberries you can’t eat right now—we asked chefs, cookbook authors, and strawberry lovers to share their best tips and techniques.

The Difference Between Perennial and Annual Plants
These two common gardening terms are used to describe the growing cycle of plants.
Whether you have a garden or you’re interested in starting one, you’re likely familiar with the terms annual and perennial. Both are used to describe the growing cycle of plants, but knowing the difference between annuals and perennials (and their lesser-known counterpart, biennials) will help you understand which is better suited to your gardening style and help you plan your yard’s layout from season to season. It will also dictate the type of care your plants need at key points during the growing season.

Donatella Versace on celebrity, creativity and refusing to conform
The inimitable designer, who has never been afraid of taking centre stage, talks to Alexander Fury as she unveils her latest collection in Hollywood
For decades, Donatella Versace has been dismissed: while working alongside Gianni, the press often labelled her a ‘muse’– understandable, given she was the embodiment of the Versace woman, but unfair in its implication that she spent her time lying around on chaises longues looking fabulous and fiddling with her jewellery while ‘inspiring’ her brother. When I ask her about the biggest misconceptions people have of her, she replies, in an instant: “That, when Gianni was alive, I didn’t work. That I was just around, in my high heels, blonde hair, just someone to look at. That I didn’t have any specific role. I heard that so many times.”

Goldie Hawn on Her Big Oscars Regret, the Death of the Movie Star and Not Retiring From Acting Just Yet
On the evening of April 7, 1970, the budding 25-year-old actress, with just two film credits to her name, was half a world away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles when Fred Astaire opened an envelope and read her name as the best supporting actress winner for “Cactus Flower.” Instead of basking in the glow of television history, the “Laugh-In” star was sound asleep in London as an early call time loomed for her next film, “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” opposite Peter Sellers.
Hawn, now 77, is sitting in front of a fire in a woodpaneled study in her Pacific Palisades home as she recalls those few seconds that changed the trajectory of her life but that she never experienced firsthand. Throughout her trailblazing career, which includes such classics as “Foul Play,” “Private Benjamin,” “Overboard” and “The First Wives Club,” Hawn has created no shortage of indelible characters and experienced many artistic triumphs. But if she could get one do-over, she would haul her ass to that 1970 ceremony.
“I never got dressed up. I never got to pick up the award,” she tells me, her bare feet propped up on a coffee table as she stretches her arms over her head. “I regret it. It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It would have been so great to be able to have done that.’”

Seth Rogen Says Negative Reviews Can Be “Devastating”: Some People “Never Recover”
In a recent interview, Rogen spoke candidly about the negative reaction to a pair of his major projects: The Green Hornet and The Interview.
“I think if most critics knew how much it hurt the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second-guess the way they write these things,” Rogen said on a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast. “It’s devastating. I know people who never recover from it, honestly—years, decades of being hurt by [reviews].” He added that the rejection can feel “very personal…. It is devastating when you are being institutionally told that your personal expression was bad. That’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives, and I get why. It fucking sucks.”

Kerry Condon On Her BAFTA Win And The Road To The Oscars
How did it feel to get that Oscar nomination, too?
“The day before, I was like, “If I don’t get it, it’s all good”, but as the day wore on, I realised my heart was racing and I started to feel super anxious. I thought, “Why am I so stressed?” Then Colin said, “Do you want to come over and watch it with me?” It took me hours to decide whether or not that was a good idea. But then I drove to his house at five in the morning, in the dark, and it felt like I was doing something illegal. The nominations felt really special, though. Angela Bassett’s name was called first, and then Hong Chau, and I remember thinking, “There’s only three left. It might not happen.” But then it did. It really ages you, the stress of it [laughs]. I’ll be lucky if I’m not in a wig by the time we get to the Oscars. I was thrilled, but I didn’t feel off the hook because Colin had to wait a long time for his. And the fact that we all got nominated? It’s kind of a miracle. My mother cried on the phone – she’s big into films and it blew her mind.”

Why daylight saving is so hard on the body — and what to do about it
The key is to ease into it.
The premise is simple: shift the clocks so people can get the maximum amount of daylight. In the spring, the one-hour change means more daylight in the evening and darker mornings; in the fall, the sun sets earlier while mornings are lighter. But this transition can be more disruptive beyond just losing one hour of sleep. Whether you’re a parent (to humans or pets) or an early riser who hardly enjoys waking in the dark, you can make the transition into daylight saving a little less painful.

For Rare Book Librarians, It’s Gloves Off. Seriously.
When handling rare books, experts say that bare, just-cleaned hands are best. Why won’t the public believe them?
Last month, The New York Times reported on an ultrarare medieval Hebrew Bible that was headed to auction with a record-smashing estimate of up to $50 million.
The reaction was swift.
“Why are they handling this without cotton gloves? Shame on them,” one reader wrote in the comments section, referring to photographs showing someone touching the worn pages.
“This photo is disturbing,” wrote another. “Why is this person touching such an old book with ungloved hands?”
The alarmed tweets and emails kept rolling in. At the same time, a silent scream of exasperation arose at rare book libraries around the world.

[Photo Credit: corinthia.com, davidcollins.studio]

• T LOunge