The Gloved One

Maybe you were like me, and capped second grade with a sacred ceremony to rival a chapel wedding in its grandeur. For my First Communion - a religious rite Caribbean Catholic households are known to fete with lavish receptions - my mother outfitted this 7-year-old in an ecru gown and wrist-length gloves of elaborate lacework. At the time, I hated that my dress wasn't looseleaf-paper white like every other girls' (lady had to be different!), but I remember loving my handwear. Never mind that I looked like a tiny cake topper - I was having a "Like a Virgin" moment. Now that I'm all grown up, I find something so devilishly naughty about white lace gloves. Say what you will about the former Mrs. Ritchie, but after all these years, she still owns the look. (W, March 2009)

See Spot. Run and Cop These Pants.

My life sometimes feels like a high-wire act, one that requires nimbly balancing any number of competing goals and desires. I've decided that if you're gonna go through life walking a tightrope, might as well do it in style! These cranberry-colored silk polka-dot trousers ($1,250, detail, at right) from Louis Vuitton's spring/summer 2009 collection, had me seeing spots when they were first previewed last Spetember. Enough to make a girl drop the bad-news Business section of The New York Times and join the circus. And now the parachute pants are everywhere: Model Jourdan Dunn sported them in a February 2009 Vogue spread; Lindsay pairs them with a boyfriend blazer and midriff-baring tee on the cover of Nylon's April 2009 anniversary issue, and Ms. Ciccone features them in the latest LV campaign.

Uptown, Monday Night

Where do you live? If you live in a city like New York, teeming with transplants, you'll invariably get asked that question and I've found it has far more loaded meaning for the person asking. As a native borne of and raised in this city, I don't take all that seriously the signifiers that people attach to its topography (e.g., hipsters live in Williamsburg, trust fund babies slum on the Lower East Side). Rather, you plant roots wherever makes you content. In BET's latest foray into reality programming, Harlem Heights, a group of upwardly mobile, black 20-somethings agree to have their lives taped and find out what happens when people stop being polite...oops! (wrong show). Unlike MTV's The Real World, which thrives on the inevitable clashes between seven disparate - if formulaic - personalities, this series pivots on the homogeneity of its cast.

And therein lies the flaw. In seeking to shine a light on the affluent Harlem, an endeavor that I agree is long overdue, the creators nearly erase the bustling Uptown of corner stores, incense vendors, hair braiders and weavers, and the aroma of greasy fried catfish and greens at eateries like Taste of Seafood. Panoramic views would help. And maybe a few more cast members employed in industries beyond media, fashion, and politics and educated at institutions other than the venerable HBCUs. As it is, Jason (aka 'Young Harlem'), a young dad with swag to spare sometimes appears out of his element.

Still, it's verry cool to see on camera the upscale spots that many have yet to discover: the airy Hudson River Cafe, bouncing club Body, Covo, Revival, and more. An incredibly photogenic cast that includes Kanye West ex Brooke Crittendon and DIME magazine editor Christian Grant-Fields (aka 'The Accidental Heartbreaker') makes the views all the more scenic. Fellow viewers have taken issue with how stilted some of the dialogue seems, almost scripted. Pierre, the Trenton, N.J.-bred success story who now works for a nonprofit, at times induces eye-rolling with his penchant for speechifying. But the underlying dramas ring mostly true: There are love triangles, broken friendships, career discussions, and so forth.

A Hungry Ghost

The New York Public Library hosted a reading by Kate Taylor, the editor of an anthology titled Going Hungry, which focuses on "desire, self-denial," and our shrinking appetites. On the first Monday in March, I braved a snowstorm in support of my former colleague, with whom I'd broken (low-calorie?) bread over discussions of body image and disordered eating and overeating. What distinguishes her book is that it gathers writers, authors, and journalists to address the topic and not, for example, embattled teen girls sporting red "ana" bracelets.

If ever there was a taboo subject, this would be it, and perhaps even more so in the black community, where conventional thinking has it that more is more once you step on the scale - and that the zaftig will be rewarded by longevity and male admiration. Real women have curves, right, not jutting rib cages? (At left, an image from designer Hedi Slimane's photo diary of Lindsay Lohan.) Yet increasingly I hear from chicks of colorful complexions who are anxious about their weight, staring down bottles of herbal appetite-killers and passing on dinner. In Tibetan Buddhism, the hungry ghost is depicted with a large, bloated stomach, gaping mouth, and a neck too small to pass food, a metaphor for those who can't grasp that to be full-filled is to go within. But going without, that nihilistic impulse to deny corporeal needs, ultimately just leaves you where you started...hungry.

Fist Bumps for the First Lady

If you haven't picked up this week's New York magazine, run! The cover story on Michelle Obama features briefs by writers including Edwidge Danticat, Margo Jefferson, and Terry McMillan on topics such as Mrs. O's transformation from "militant" to "princess"; her statuesque build, in "Her Body, Ourselves," and an examination of how this first couple engenders a new sexual politics. An online slideshow of artists' renderings (above, illustration by Kim DeMarco) depicting the mom-in-chief is a must-see.

Radio Killa Writes the Songs

Like a lot of people, I tend to tune my week, month, or just a particular moment to a certain frequency. I'll have a song, maybe an album that just plays on repeat either because it mirrors what I'm feeling or projects where I'm trying to go. Sometimes it's more about the music capturing a pre-existing mood - swaggerific, meditative, introspective, combative - that happens to be in need of a melody. This month, I've been letting The-Dream serenade me (when he's not dreaming up publicity stunts to promote his Love vs. Money) with "Rockin' That Thang."
You guess how I'm feeling. (laughs)

The Sweetest Words You Ever Wrote

Every week, Washington D.C.'s young, gifted and black wordsmiths gather at Busboys and Poets on 14th and V streets for "Sunday Kind of Love," a themed open-mic event held in the afternoon. On a wet Sunday in March, we drove past the popular meeting place and I couldn't help but think of the film that sparked a spoken word renaissance when it opened in 1997: Love Jones. Suddenly poetry and verse had moved beyond the literati, New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and underground slams, and every would-be Saul Williams and Sonia Sanchez seemed to have a composition notebook buried somewhere.

In the Chicago-set romance, Nina Mosley is an aspiring photographer who has her eye on a gig at VIBE magazine, and Darius Lovehall (aka "Brother to the Night") is a struggling writer whose classic meet-cute with the lenswoman begins at a words-and-blues lounge. He freestyles his "Blues for Nina," and I imagine attendance at these events, at the time, swelled right along with the box office take. Moreover, the soundtrack was unforgettable.

Which brings me back to the Chocolate City: In the age of Obama, himself a Chicago transplant, one hopes this metropolis of alphabet streets and abandoned avenues can fully salute its inheritance. The soaring, renovated townhouses and brownstones of Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, of Columbia Heights, washed in red and pale blue paints, were a sight to behold even as they competed for space with the darker corners.

It Ain't Hard To Tell

This April marks the 15th anniversary of the release of Nas's seminal Illmatic. The 34-year-old son of Queensbridge was a babyfaced 20 years young when the record came out. Suffice it to say, anyone who knows this blogger, knows that I've been nursing a major crush ever since. Nasir Jones is the quiet boy in your third grade class who wrote your initials just above his, with a "+" sign in between, and left it in your book bag for you to find. He's that guy with his New Era Yankees cap cocked just so, who walked you halfway home, holding your umbrella above your heads and unfurling his brilliance along the way. There's a reason rap devotees called "God's Son" a prophet. Okay, maybe the messianic language was overblown, but regardless of what issue you might take with his flow or track record, no one in the game can more densely pack metaphors, similes, Five Percenter lore, egyptian history, street knowledge... into 16 bars. In hip hop, there's really no map anymore, we don't live and die by coasts, pledge our allegiances by borough. And it's been years since New York had the market on "real" hip hop, but if you can remember the first time you heard "The World Is Yours," it's hard not to get that old feeling. It's a "New York State of Mind."

Love Dying on the Walls

A few years ago, I read an article in Vogue about a socialite of sorts who had fallen in love and married a man whom she later divorced. Asked what she thought had gone awry in the seemingly fairy-tale setup, she said that marriage stuffs you up so close, you could practically see the "love dying on the walls." I must have read that phrase a million times. In 1961, Richard Yates's first novel, Revolutionary Road, was published. An alcoholic, modestly successful short story writer, Yates drew upon the stark reality of his own marriage to craft a masterpiece of an indictment of suburbia and matrimony in 1950s America. Yates lived part of his own married life in Connecticut, and the book's descriptions of Route Twelve, cottage houses, and commuter rail lines landing in Grand Central Station, seem eerily contemporary, even 50 years later. In finishing the book, I've found that I've had an experience that is increasingly rare (but perhaps hoped for by every novelist): The plot lingers. It's been hard to shake the bitter aftertaste. A couple, Frank and April Wheeler, comes together, love blooms, expectations are set then left unmet. ... The love gathers moss - as the two gradually destroy each other. For those who can't be bothered to read the book, the film (above, which I haven't seen) is in theaters now.

Americana

Now that First Lady Michelle Obama has given J.Crew her imprimatur, making it all right for black people everywhere to line their closets with wool gabardine, I thought I'd make a confession: For years, the mere sight of the J.Crew catalog in my mailbox has brought me untold, sentimental joy.

I was an undergraduate when I first started grabbing the seasonal books; they'd be in piles next to stacks of the Daily Orange, at the entrance to our dorm. After months of pushing to get through a particularly brutal upstate winter, I ordered a candy-striped cashmere sweater with streaks of pale blue that I thought would cheer me up. And it did - for a while. But I soon realized that I derived a heady kind of contentment flipping through the pages of the retail mag itself. The WASP-ish model with freckles and beach-battered skin, clad in my cashmere sweater, seemed a world away from the stresses and concerns of life on campus.

Indeed, the genius copywriters and art directors at J.Crew (which launched as a catalog in 1983), have created a blissful world untouched by recession, environmental crises, you name it. Houses are built on the water, couples perch on a front stoop perusing The New York Times or The New York Observer. Weddings are on Martha's Vinyard, receptions follow in Nantucket. Now, I know this is a feat in advertising as clean and calculated as Ivory's well-known "99.99%" campaign, but I fall for it.

Ms. Keri, baby

Someone I know once said that he never listened to R&B because all that performers ever did was to snivel about love lost or unrequited. Sure. But that isn't accidental: Sometimes love knocks you down, as Keri Hilson says. This has been so since humans evolved the concept of romantic love as the basis for marriage and courtship. Either we sing about it, give ourselves over to it in dance - or risk taking a drubbing.
On his latest podcast, the New Yorker's resident music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, argues that our well-greased American pop/R&B machine simply cannot produce "witty, brash" singers. Instead, he says, the Britneys and Beyonces are "ciphers" rewarded for hewing as close to the Stepford Songstress packaging they get coming off the industry assembly line. So while the UK's Lily Allen drums up clever symbolism to excoriate bloodthirsty bloggers and paparazzi, our Beyonce wags, shakes, and J-Sets to a catchy riff on marital aspirations. But in Keri, who marries many of the seemingly opposing virtues of red-white-and-blue pop and Britpop, I've found a defense. The wordplay is spot on if not erudite (does it need to be? check her well-placed jabs at Sasha Farce and Ciara), the music infectious, thumping, and always comes together in flawless 3-minute bites (Hello, Timb). Album 'drops' March 24.