At 14 years old, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players drummer (and daughter of its singer/guitar player Jason and costumer/slideshow operator Tina) is already playing a more active role in local politics than most of us ever will.
New Yorkers are, by now, familiar with the proposal to extend term limits and allow our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to run for the city's highest office a third time. As part of the process, the city council is now holding public hearings, allowing citizens to argue for or against the plan. On Thursday, Rachel spoke to the council, making the case against allowing Bloomberg to seek a third term.
In her testimony, Rachel told the council that, because Bloomberg raised taxes to give money to the Yankees and move the fountain in Washington Square Park slightly (and continuously sided with landlords on rent stabilization and affordable housing issues, I might add), her family was priced out of their East Village home. Now, they live in Bushwick, where their friends are often mugged at gunpoint. "Any monkey can raise taxes," says Rachel. "No offense to monkeys."
A minute of research shows that Rachel is enrolled in school in SEATTLE — which means her family’s apartment in New York is at best a business necessity and at worst a luxury or status item, even if it is now in Bushwick. Boo. Hoo.
Artist Lou Cannizzaro went back to 96 St Marks Place in Manhattan 33 years after that location starred on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. Robert Plant should have aged so well.
The album's sleeve design features a photograph of a New York City tenement block, with interchanging window illustrations. The album designer, Peter Corriston, was looking for a building that was symmetrical with interesting details, that was not obstructed by other objects and would fit the square album cover. He said:
We walked around the city for a few weeks looking for the right building. I had come up a concept for the band based on the tenement, people living there and moving in and out. The original album featured the building with the windows cut out on the cover and various sleeves that could be placed under the cover, filling the windows with the album title, track information or liner notes.
The two buildings photographed for the album cover are located at 96 and 98 St. Mark's Place in New York City. But to enable it to fit, the building (which is actually a five-story building) had to be cropped out. So for the album cover it became a four-story building instead. The buildings used on the cover were the same that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were filmed in front of in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend."
My husband Rossano left for Honduras last week (don't ask me where that is) and I am not a happy camper. He's doing a TV show called L'Isola dei Famosi, which means "Island of the Famous." It's the Italian version of Survivor but with celebrities. I am freaking out! He's going into the jungle where you can get all kinds of diseases, and he went through a thousand pills and malaria shots. For some reason the show asked me to send his wedding tux to this hotel in Honduras. I said, "You think I'm going to send a $10,000 Dolce & Gabbana suit to Honduras? UPS takes like three weeks. It's never going to arrive because somebody will steal it." Countries like that are beautiful but they are very poor, OK? So I am passing on that. Rossano is just looking for adventure. But I am really slightly worried. In the jungle there are no mobile phones, no computers and no cigarettes, but there are plenty of tarantulas, cockroaches and snakes. I hate those slimy things. I can deal with the sharks on Wall Street and the barracudas on Madison Avenue, but this is really too much. And I honestly cannot see Rossano eating snakes unless it is smoked eel at Nobu.
It certainly wasn’t going to look right in one of those swaths of raw space near St. Marks Place or in any of the other 138 spaces, downtown and uptown, that the couple checked out in the course of a year in the mid-1990s.
The Sheraton-style table required just the right setting, as did the circa 1790 Hepplewhite serpentine-front sideboard. So, apparently, did Ms. Houlgrave, 46, a model who has worked for Glamour, Vogue and Self magazines, and who has a second career as a wedding and fashion photographer.
“I didn’t want to live in the stinky East Village,” she said with characteristic directness. “It was so unattractive. I am from Richmond, Virginia.”
