Kevin Farrell is a specialist in the United States Army currently deployed to Kabul, Afghanistan, with the 508th Military Police Company out of Teaneck, N.J.
Oct 21, 2012
Modern Love: A Soldier Leaves a Girl Behind - Modern Love
For a long time I had this crazy idea that I could change the world if I just worked hard enough. The downside of having that idea is that it took me away from home for long periods of time. I dated Kathryn while I volunteered on the fire-and-rescue department, while I traveled the country for seven months with AmeriCorps, and while I was away for five months at basic training. Kathryn was always at home waiting for me. All told I was away for an entire year of the two and a half years we dated. I met Kathryn when I was 22 and she was 18. The short version of our story sounds great: Her house caught fire and I was in the fire department. The long story is less romantic: I wasn’t on the call and she wasn’t even home. She messaged me on Facebook a few days later when she saw a comment I left about the fire department on a mutual friend’s wall. We chatted online for a few days, then texted, then saw a movie and had lunch, and that was the start of her first relationship and my longest. We went to the beach and swam, held hands at the Fourth of July fireworks, went on roller coasters at Six Flags, ate Thanksgiving dinner with each other’s families, exchanged gifts on Christmas. We cried when I had to leave for long periods of time. When I got back from basic training a couple of years ago, I felt different, as if I was doing things with my life and Kathryn wasn’t. I wanted something more, something bigger, and it didn’t seem that she did, so I broke up with her. She was crushed, but she didn’t try very hard to change my mind. Maybe she knew me well enough to know that when I decide to do something, there is no stopping me. A few months later, in December, something bigger did happen. My National Guard unit was selected for a 2012 deployment to Afghanistan. With our country engaged in two wars, I knew it was not if I was going to war but when. Suddenly our monthly drills got more intense, and our annual two weeks of training that summer made me think over what was good in my life. I called Kathryn and told her I was still in love with her and I was a fool to have let her go. She said she had a new boyfriend and was happy with him and didn’t want me back. I looked on her Facebook page and saw pictures of him and her swimming at the beach and riding the roller coasters at Six Flags. I felt as if I was in a “Twilight Zone” episode where I woke up to discover someone else had replaced me in my own life. Even though Kathryn said she didn’t want me back, she entertained the texts I sent saying I loved her. One day while she was in the shower, her boyfriend went through her phone and saw the texts, and their relationship ended shortly after. Two weeks later our new relationship started. It was a lot different from the first time. Instead of going to school, Kathryn had a full-time fashion job in New York City that she commuted to every day from her parents’ home in North Jersey. She dyed her blond hair red, and she was less loving and affectionate. Reminders of her ex-boyfriend were all over: the stuffed animal on her bed, the iPhone he bought her. I tried to ignore the image of her with someone else, and I tried even harder to make our new relationship like our old one. I tried, but I didn’t do so well. Our evenings together mainly consisted of us eating takeout and her falling asleep on the couch as we watched reruns of “Project Runway.” Light from the television filled the dark room and flickered on us like a fire but gave no warmth. The space between us on the couch spoke more about our relationship than we did to each other. After two months of this, we were eating dinner one evening when I brought up the elephant in the room: “What are we going to do when I deploy?” “I don’t know,” she replied, quietly. “Do you still want to date while I’m gone?” She looked down at her plate. “Not really.” “So then what are we doing?” Again, quietly, she said, “I don’t know.”
Oct 20, 2012
Perez Hilton Pursues Redemption
When a photo of Julia Roberts’s hairy armpit flashed on a screen behind him, Mr. Hilton mischievously compared the fluff to a Chia pet. “I can’t say things like that anymore and it’s driving me out of my mind!” he cried with an oversize toothy grin. He lingered over a photo of Robert Pattinson, the actor’s shirt stained with sweat, and sniffed the armpit as the crowd murmured, “Eww.” Later, Mr. Hilton covered his maw as other photos flashed on screen: the battered face of the country singer Randy Travis after a car accident and subsequent arrest; an overweight Barbra Streisand; Oprah Winfrey, her face wrinkled like a Shar-Pei. “I resolved I must be kind!” Mr. Hilton sang (none too convincingly). One could argue that if Mr. Hilton was truly kinder, he might not have played his new persona for camp at others’ expense. But Mr. Hilton, who was born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr., has been on something of a redemption tour since he rose (or sank) to fame with his highly trafficked gossip Web site, PerezHilton.com. The site was a guilty novelty a few years ago, but celebrities and their support teams soon became fed up with his vicious insults (he once called the actress Jennifer Aniston “cripplingly codependent”) and doodles of penises (like the one he scrawled on a photo of Rumer Willis, the daughter of Bruce Willis). In 2009, he got into a brawl outside a Toronto club when he called the singer Will.i.am a homophobic slur. When Mr. Hilton started speaking out against the bullying of gay teenagers in 2010, some in Hollywood cried hypocrisy. He was widely criticized for a tweet referring to a photo of Miley Cyrus, then 17, getting out of a car, her skirt hiked up. The reality star Khloe Kardashian, a frequent target of Mr. Hilton, circulated a video denouncing him. He went on Ellen DeGeneres’s show to deliver a public mea culpa and got a chilly reception. Since then, a chastened Mr. Hilton, 34, has toned down his malicious rhetoric considerably, in keeping with a new culture of nice online that has accompanied the rise of social media. In April, he appeared onstage at Ms. Winfrey’s Life Class tour, describing his newfound enlightenment (brought on in part, he said, by weight loss) as a series of “aha orgasms.” He said he stopped drinking alcohol and began seeing a therapist this year. And in September, Mr. Hilton apologized on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens: Live” to Sarah Jessica Parker for years of mockery. Mr. Hilton seemed repentant for the damage he inflicted, aware it could take years for him to make amends, if at all. “What’s important for me is not being liked, but it is that people think I am no longer toxic to the world,” he said, sipping a glass of Diet Coke at Chez Josephine. He has revamped his Web site to include family-friendly pages on celebrity children, pets and fitness and says he wants to act on Broadway, have a talk show and host a music festival, all of which could put him awkwardly face-to-face with the very celebrities he has insulted for years. “I’m aware of the fact there are going to be a lot of people with lingering resentment and a lot of skeptics,” he said. “And that’s O.K. because I am not pretending to be perfect.” Mr. Hilton started blogging in September 2004 and reached the apex of his popularity in 2007 when he made the rounds of popular talk shows like “The View” and was profiled by ABC’s “Nightline.” But emboldened, perhaps, by his nom de plume and the curtain of cyberspace, he was less accountable to the truth than a Louella Parsons or Liz Smith. “I don’t believe that when you are famous you deserve to have lies written about you,” said Amanda Lundberg, a film and celebrity publicist whose clients include Tom Cruise, a frequent target of Mr. Hilton. “I don’t know why we as a culture think that’s cool.”
Front Row: Garment District Has Some Big Ideas
An illustration from a study of the garment district. WHAT to do about Manhattan’s shrinking garment district has been a point of debate among designers and their landlords for at least five years, as serious proposals have been made to concentrate factories in a single building, move them to another neighborhood or even relocate the fashion trade to New Jersey. 
A one-stop destination for Times fashion coverage and the latest from the runways.
Follow @NYTimesfashion for fashion, beauty and lifestyle news and headlines.But until Wednesday, no one had suggested actually making the garment district bigger, which, in effect, is the surprising recommendation of a long-awaited report by the Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit group that studies urban planning. Since 2009, at the urging of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the trust has taken on a study of the district to determine its own recommendations. Some of the plans are ambitious: the report recommends giving tax credits, like those given to the film industry, to designers and retailers who make or sell locally produced clothes, and changing zoning to allow landlords to develop new spaces (up to three times the square footage now permitted) for commercial or residential use. But some of the ideas are a little pie in the sky, including a hypothetical garment district that, in 2022, would include a string of connected rooftop parks called a “fashion skyway” and pop-up shops installed in the loading docks of high-rise buildings. There would also be runway shows in the streets. But getting to the point, after much research and some dreaming, the trust came to the conclusion that if New York wants to remain “the fashion capital of the world,” as politicians like to call it, the city will require a fashion industry. So the characteristics of the district, with its proximity to button and fabric suppliers, factories and schools, should be protected. “To relocate the garment district won’t work,” said Jerome Chou, editor of the report. “When you destroy the community and the organism, it takes generations to rebuild, and it may not come back at all.” To that end, the trust would like to see a campaign supporting “NYC Made” clothing and incentives for property owners, like putting up new high rises along Eighth Avenue and adding penthouse apartments to the tops of existing loft buildings. While the look of the neighborhood would change under the plan, fashion would still live there, too. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 18, 2012
An earlier version of this article contained an outdated reference to Jerome Chou’s job title. He is the editor of the report, not a director of the Design Trust for Public Space.
Social Q’s: Announcing a Death on Social Media
Carole, New York I’m sorry for your loss, Carole. (And hope your son restrained himself from creative use of hashtags: #bummer.) I also hope that none of your ex’s immediate family or close friends learned of his death via social media. To me, Facebook and Twitter are too chilly for sharing tragedies with our nearest and dearest. Not to mention that these posts would be sandwiched between gags by Jimmy Fallon and clips of Honey Boo Boo. On the other hand, social media seem well suited for spreading the word to workaday pals — after our first- (and possibly second-) tier folks have been notified. Ideally, your son and his stepmother should have agreed on a communication plan in advance: I’ll call Aunt Margaret, you tell his tennis pro. But I am willing to cut your son some slack, and hope that you and his stepmother will do the same. It’s only natural that he would turn to his comfort zone in a time of grief. For you and me and others north of 32, that would almost certainly involve a telephone. But for your son, who probably picks up the phone to speak rarely, if ever, his impulse would be to text and tweet and post his sad news on Facebook. There is little use in bemoaning our changing times. I just hope we all find what we need in our dark hours. And no matter what your son thinks, he should apologize to his stepmother for hurting her feelings. Eight Guests, Six Gifts We gave an elaborate paintball party for our son’s 12th birthday. We opened gifts and served cake at home. I was surprised that only six of the eight guests brought birthday gifts. I was even more surprised that neither of the (nongifting) boys nor their parents expressed any remorse for coming empty-handed. We live in a wealthy beach enclave, so financial trouble is probably not a factor. Am I wrong or petty in assuming that everyone should have brought a gift? And what should I say to my son, who hasn’t asked about the boys who stiffed him? S. S., Del Mar, Calif. You’re probably not wrong, Mama Bear (and naturally feel protective of your cub), but you sound a little petty to me. Party guests with gifts are always welcome, and I would never send my child empty-handed. But carping about a subpar gift rate seems rather grubby. It was a birthday, not a barter economy. Look on the bright side. You gave a terrific party that your son and his chums loved. He hasn’t said anything about the missing gifts. (So why bring them up? He probably didn’t notice.) Plus, there was cake! I’d call your shebang a raging success. For your inevitable follow-up: Yes, when the monsters who came giftless invite your son to their birthdays, be the bigger person and send a present (preferably, a messy one that comes in 3 million tiny pieces). It Was Better Than ‘Cats’ Six months ago, a former professor asked me to read a manuscript of his play, which he had professionally bound. I agreed. Yesterday, he asked if I had finished, because he wants the copy back. Unfortunately, it was awful, and I never made it past the first act. The manuscript also spent some time in a puddle of coffee. How can I avoid returning it and telling him I never finished reading it? Anonymous, New York The coward’s way is clear: apologize profusely for having mislaid the play, which you found powerful and thought-provoking. But since you’re no coward (and gave your word), how about sitting down — right now! — and spending the 90 minutes it will take to polish off the play, while dreaming up one thing you like about it and two pieces of constructive criticism? Then apologize for the caffeine debacle as the curtain falls on a rousing ovation (and assures your glowing graduate-school recommendation). Elbows Off Your Neighbor At several dinner parties, I have been seated next to men who jabbed me in the arm all night to underscore their points. While the force was inconsequential, it became a nuisance as the evenings progressed. Changing seats was not an option. Any suggestions? Stephen Two choices, depending on your demographic and self-image: Whisper “bursitis” or “new Harley tattoo.” Either will work like a dream.
For help with your awkward situation, send a question to SocialQ@nytimes.com or SocialQ on Facebook. You can also address your queries on Twitter to @SocialQPhilip. Please include a daytime phone number.
Scene Stealers: Larry Flynt, Pornography and Politics
IT’S tough to be bashful when you’re a pornography titan. So Larry Flynt, even at age 69, doesn’t really try. He runs Hustler magazine, a chain of strip clubs and a slew of additional businesses, including a $33 million on-demand movie service acquired just last week, from a 10-story tower in Beverly Hills, his name prominently displayed on top. He wears a seven-carat diamond ring, and his other fingers are adorned with fat rubies and emeralds. His wheelchair, a necessity since a 1978 assassination attempt left him paralyzed from the waist down, is plated in gold. His other ride? A black chauffeur-driven Bentley with extra tinting and vanity plates: HUSTLR. So it stands to reason that Mr. Flynt would pick one of the showiest restaurants in Los Angeles, Culina at the Four Seasons, as his signature spot. He has eaten breakfast or lunch there most days for at least a decade, camping at Table 29, smack in the center of the room. The same waitress, Valerie Benchetrit, usually takes his order (“I know how you like your salt, Mr. Flynt”), and Culina recently added a menu item in his honor: Larry Flynt’s Salad, $27, with Dungeness crab, shrimp, chopped vegetables, egg and garbanzo beans. “They at first tried to skimp on the seafood,” Mr. Flynt said, “and I told the chef: ‘Don’t even try it. Fill that bowl with goodies.’ ” Having seen Mr. Flynt stop traffic at the Four Seasons more than once — sometimes literally, since managers let the Bentley idle in the driveway while he eats — I grew curious about his routine. What was it about this restaurant at this particular hotel? (Paris Hilton did make her sex tape there, but even so.) Why every day? Why garbanzo beans? Mr. Flynt, it turns out, has a lot on his mind these days, none of which, or at least very little, involves food. (To answer the restaurant questions: the Four Seasons is close to his office, he’s a creature of habit and who doesn’t like a good garbanzo bean?) Over breakfast one day last month, Mr. Flynt touched on topics ranging from presidential politics to the sorry state of pornography to interior design. That is, when he wasn’t being tended to by one of his two bodyguards, Jose, who popped up without notice to offer a selection of toothpicks, stimulate his boss’s circulation by lifting him up by the armpits, provide medication and brush Mr. Flynt’s hair. Really. There were actually a lot of interruptions. At one point, a surgically enhanced woman in her early 20s, squeezed into itty-bitty shorts, came teetering over in stilettos. “I just moved here from Indiana to be an actress, and you are, like, my idol,” she said with a giggle. And there was Jose again, this time carrying a cellphone and whispering in his boss’s ear. Gov. Jerry Brown of California was on the line. Mr. Flynt apologized and took the call, saying that the governor, pushing a Nov. 6 ballot measure to increase taxes, probably wanted money for the campaign. “Governor! You must not have a lot to do if you’re calling me,” Mr. Flynt said, falling silent as he listened the response. “Have your girl call my office with the information,” Mr. Flynt said after a couple of minutes. He hung up and took a moment to contemplate his food (three soft-boiled eggs, a stack of bacon and black coffee) before remarking dryly of the phone call, “Exactly what I was afraid of.” Mr. Flynt is a fan of California’s governor, but don’t get him started on Mitt Romney. In fact, Mr. Flynt was preparing to have a little fun, saying he planned to take out newspaper ads offering up to $1 million for information about Mr. Romney’s unreleased tax returns. (The ads ran in The Washington Post and in USA Today; The New York Times, Mr. Flynt said, rejected the ad.) “I’m a total political junkie,” he said, adding that he thought Michelle Obama, who had spoken the night before our conversation at the Democratic National Convention, “was very, very good.” But he doesn’t have a good feeling about the election. “I’m not sure Obama can win,” Mr. Flynt said. “There is racism at work against him. It’s disgusting, but nobody has the guts to talk about it.” Mr. Flynt knows a thing or two about freedom of speech, having won a landmark Supreme Court case in 1988 over a Hustler cartoon of the evangelist Jerry Falwell. The suit, which clarified that public figures could not recover damages for offensive parodies, had wide implications for the media — which is why Mr. Flynt thinks he has trounced Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder, in terms of legacy. “History will be a lot kinder to me, I predict,” Mr. Flynt said, with “due respect to Hef.”
Scene Stealers is a new monthly column by Brooks Barnes, a staff writer in the Los Angeles bureau of The New York Times.
At Chloé, Clare Waight Keller Pushes Femininity Forward, but It’s More Modern
A PIN dropped. Twenty feet from where the designer Clare Waight Keller was sitting in the offices of Chloé on the Avenue Percier, it slipped from the hands of an assistant as he adjusted the hem of a crisp white popover top, worn by the 16-year-old English model Rosie Tapner, who had the sniffles. You could hear the plink of metal as it struck the painted wood floor. It was proverbially quiet in the Chloé showroom, three days before Ms. Waight Keller’s spring runway show here, as critical decisions were being made about the hair and makeup, the order the clothes would be shown, whether the colors and proportions were just right. A steady stream of guests came and went. A plastic box of Haribo gummi candies that had been full the day before was half-empty, but the detail that spoke loudest was the lack of noise. In the year since Ms. Waight Keller, formerly the designer of Pringle of Scotland, became the creative director at Chloé, many visitors have noted the remarkable calmness that radiates from her studio. That, and the fact that roughly 80 percent of the hundreds of employees at the company are women, which is a point of pride at a house that has projected an aura of femininity for 60 years. Guido Palau, the hairstylist, proposed a loosely tied ponytail, sort of half up and half down, with a deep part inspired by Twiggy. Ms. Waight Keller and her team considered whether it looked modern enough, or cool, or sufficiently effortless. They debated, then asked to see another model. Mr. Palau, in mock exasperation, said, “Oh, my God, how many girls are in this room?” He wasn’t being rude. It is a question Ms. Waight Keller has asked herself as she decided how to best approach a label that, for better or worse, has been reduced over the years to terms like “girly” and “flirty,” which do not do it justice. It is her job to balance the sweetness with something a little bit cooler and a lot more modern. Though clearly confident, she is prone to questioning her decisions. In moving to Paris, she brought along her husband, an interior architect, and three young children, and so a lot rides on making this a success. “Is the proportion right? she asked. “Do I like the colors? Is it too sweet?” She was concerned about a white top with frothy sleeves made of a Japanese polyester that in theory should have looked crisp but in fact were beginning to look like the type of collars that keep dogs from scratching themselves. Ms. Waight Keller, 42, English-born (though she has lived and traveled extensively), is the ideal image of the Chloé customer. She was raised in dresses and the skirts of school uniforms and has spent much of her adult life rebelling by wearing pants. And she is the type of designer who can make leather pants — like the forest-green ones she was wearing in the showroom, with a cool blue cotton shirt — look as comfortable as pajamas. She keeps her head down and walks with her hands in her pockets. But with the spring collection, which was shown on Oct. 1 in the Tuileries, Ms. Waight Keller gave herself a challenge by chopping and cropping pieces to unexpected lengths. And she sought to reconnect the label with the more playful elements of its past, including tanks that were styled after basketball jerseys, sequined tuxedo stripes that ended with the point of an arrow, and a floral print that resembled something from Hawaiian surf wear. “You can be too familiar with the look,” Ms. Waight Keller said. “You have to push forward. It can be a little bit of a trap to be the consumer.” The vision of Gaby Aghion, the Egyptian-born daughter of a cigarette manufacturer who founded Chloé and named it after a friend, was not girly. It was to create feminine clothing with less formality and more freedom than what was being shown in postwar couture. The pioneering Ms. Aghion, who is 91 and still attends Chloé shows when she is able, remains a notorious flirt. But she was more likely to describe her own style as “simple” and “classic.” Ms. Aghion once said something that Ms. Waight Keller found inspiring: “I don’t explain anything. I lived the life I wanted.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 18, 2012
A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of the hairstylist Guido Palau.
Hashtag Nation: On Twitter, Electoral Parodies
In the fall of 1862, a group of Louisiana blacks became the first to muster into the Union Army.
The documents on the sexual abuse of boys by scout leaders expose a familiar pattern of secrecy and negligence.Jun 10, 2010
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