Easter has returned from decades of obscurity in St. Petersburg, and now hosts a variety of processions, church services and festivals. Take advantage of the ‘Easter Dreams for Art Lovers’ package from The Rocco Forte COllection’s Hotel Astoria between 20th and 25th March 2008 and you too could sample the celebratory atmosphere. Prices start at 64,050 rubles (approximately 1,830 euros) and includes 3 nights accommodation, Champagne, private tours of the Hermitage Museum and the Imperial Palaces, a Russian classical massage and a Russian Table buffet at Davidov restaurant.

Although they aren’t mandatory, fireplaces have a unique way of turning a house into home. They are cozy and romantic. The new Cyclone is a whirling pillar of fire enclosed within two towering upright glass enclosures. It’s very much like grabbing hold of lightening in a bottle. But, at 15,000 BTUs, it’s not such an impressive heat source. The free standing glass cylinder lets you enjoy the full 360-degrees view of the fire. The whole setup doesn’t come cheap as the price tag attached to it reads $3,799 but I think that goes well with the flamboyant looks of the Cyclone.

[Via Gizmodo]

Ever fantasize about having your favorite rockers play a marathon set just for you and your friends? Well, thanks to a considerably more corporate-friendly environment in the music industry, it's now a distinct possibility. From has-beens like KC and the Sunshine Band to superstars like The Rolling Stones, many musicians are willing to play at weddings, corporate events and even bar mitzvahs for amounts ranging from five figures into the millions.

Although it has become more commonplace, most acts still won’t openly admit to playing such events and will generally insist on a signed agreement guaranteeing secrecy — that is, no photography or media coverage. It’s hard to criticize this discretion considering the mocking hubbub that followed the unveiling of pictures of 50 Cent — he of the multiple gunshot wounds and unimpeachable street cred — rapping at the bat mitzvah of a defense contractor's daughter. 

Here are the top 10 music superstars who are reportedly available for hire.

Number 10

Busta Rhymes

The combustible Busta is something of a hip-hop icon, best-known for slightly deranged anthems like “Woo-Hah!!! Got You All In Check” and “Dangerous.”  Although it may be hard to imagine him serving up his brand of bug-eyed, jabber-mouthed rap to a bunch of suited stiffs, Busta has reportedly become a regular and willing performer at corporate events and private functions. Unlike most of the other names on this list, Busta’s price tag runs in the low- to mid-six-figure range, making him a definite “bargain” for flow fiends.

Number 9

Beyonce

Before Beyonce forged a solo career, Philip Green — owner of Top Shop and several other stores — hired Destiny's Child to play at his son's bar mitzvah. This was after the young boy’s first choice, Justin Timberlake, reportedly backed out. Beyonce has openly confirmed her participation at a bar mitzvah “in the South of France,” and she apparently remains for hire as a solo artist. Perhaps for the right price she could even drag beau Jay-Z out to perform a riotous version of “Crazy in Love” for some lucky couple’s wedding party.

A singer who was paid almost $4 million for three songs, two high-priced divas, and more…

Whats is it?

Mirror Op-Art is an intimidating construction of circular mirrors that can be arranged in limitless patterns. Each mirror is connected to the wall mount by its own wire, which means you can arrange the mirrors to all focus on you or you could share the wealth and capture different aspects of the room.

What We Think?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?

When is it Available?

Visit Store.SproutHome.com to make your $189 purchase.

[Via Askmen]

With Google promising to open its video platform to indie filmmakers, and the acquisition of YouTube, it would seem self-distribution of movies is on the rise. Digital distribution makes sense, and it is potentially a powerful tool for those without a huge budget to get their films to audiences. With this in mind, Brian Liolia of DV Guru recently interviewed Sujewa Ekanayake. His film, Date Number One, was made on a shoestring, and Ekanayake is a master of DIY filmmaking. Now, with digital tools at his disposal, he has entered the world of DIY distribution as well.

[Via DVGuru]

Opening weekend the movie only pulled in $179k on a limited number of screens and tremendous word of mouth (due in part to Digg) it has climbed this week to third place in box office with 10 million dollars! Lets keep the ball rolling on this fantastic movie.

[Via Boxofficemojo]

The watch maker Tag Heuer (owned by LVMH) is preparing to release a cell phone within the coming months. Tag Heuer is having a completely new phone designed for them by the French phone maker ModeLabs who make custom cell phones for various companies including MTV and Virgin Mobile. ModeLabs also makes the Elite Model Look cell phone mentioned last year. The phone is expected to be made of stainless steel and have many similarities to Tag Heuer watches. This is another attempt at the luxury phone market created and dominated by Vertu, in recent months other companies such as GoldVish and Gresso have also enter the market but have yet to make an impression.

[Via Sybarites.org]

"The other night in Los Angeles, I caught up with my old friend Jeremy, who’d just landed a big sales job with a wireless company. We’d decided to check out Clap Your Hands Say Yeah at the Henry Fonda Theater. As you get older, and adult responsibilities cake up your life like shower mold, preparing for the time-honored male-bonding ritual of seeing an indie band becomes a Byzantine task, so we were psyched. Before I flew out from New York, I’d figured that since I’d always lent Jeremy a couch to crash on in the past, when he was a struggling singer-songwriter, maybe I could save a few bucks and stay with him and his wife and kids near Laurel Canyon, and . . . well, wait. No, that wouldn’t do.

I opted for the Ritz-Carlton instead. But we would have some extra time for dinner, of course. And for a moment I thought about all the great L.A. dives that you associate with rock shows—Oki Dog, Señor Fish, Tommy’s World Famous Hamburgers—but that nostalgic impulse quickly morphed into Naaah, let’s go somewhere nice—what’s the name of that amazing new sushi place near the Sunset Marquis? (It’s called Wa, and I highly recommend the tuna sashimi with truffles.)

Then there was the issue of clothing: Would my indie-rock T-shirt be appropriate at the sushi place, or would it come across as too downscale, in which case would I need to change in the car? Oh, and, my rental car looked a little putzy—wouldn’t it make more sense to take Jeremy’s SUV, this being L.A. and all?

Okay! Rock and roll!

Had he seen me at that show, the younger version of myself—the one who saw the Clash at the Hollywood Palladium and once backpacked through Morocco and slept in an olive grove—would have uttered three words that were popular in the late eighties: Die, yuppie scum. And right he’d be. Twenty years after the heyday of that mockworthy monster of American affluence, I have become the enemy. Hi, my name is Jeff, and I am a yuppie. We're all yuppies now.

Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we’re not even supposed to use it anymore. We’re expected to come up with a neologism—a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we’re not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. Oh, har har har, that crazy yup!

The yuppie could be found working off stress with a shiatsu massage and a facial, learning as much as possible about fine wine, traveling around the world on vacation, exercising at a fancy health club, listening to Bessie Smith and Bob Marley and the Police on a tiny device attached to headphones, drinking bottled spring water, freshening up in a five-star-hotel-quality bathroom, typing away at a computer while sitting in an ergonomic chair, racking up gobs of debt on his credit card, and—the clincher—eating tuna sashimi for lunch! The mere mention of tuna sashimi for lunch was apparently seen as the height of hilarity back in 1984. “A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (This was long before BlackBerries.)

All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know. Trust me: There is not a single sentence in The Yuppie Handbook that could make you chuckle. By now, the entire manuscript comes across as nothing more than a rote annotation of urbane American life. “When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point,” says Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever. “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”

If anything, your average upwardly mobile young professional has so outstripped and outclassed the mid-eighties yuppie that if Gordon Gekko himself were to show up in polite society in 2006, he would look kind of provincial. (These days, no host worth his fleur de sel would serve brie at a cocktail party—not when there are hundreds of obscure cheeses on display at Trader Joe’s.) Compared with us, the eighties greedhead was practically restrained.

Officially speaking, the yuppie died on October 19, 1987. That day’s stock-market crash, and the subsequent recession, ushered in the indie/slacker/die-yuppie-scum sensibility that held sway in the American head space until 1994 or so. We gulped through another crash in 2000, amid the dot-com meltdown, but the yup is impervious to boom-and-bust cycles. He’s a shape-shifter. Just like Lucifer in the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” he finds ways to reenter the American psyche. Look at how he has carved out a place for himself in movies like Wall Street and Boiler Room, in books like American Psycho and Liar’s Poker and The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bobos in Paradise, in countless rap songs.

“The yuppie never went away,” Frank says. “For a while, there was a sense that it might be better not to be too ostentatious about your consumption—like, instead of parking the expensive Porsche out front, you bought a house with a garage in the back. But people never lost their taste for quality things.” By now, in fact, an argument could be made that the yuppie phenomenon is the most enduring and influential social movement of the past 50 years. The boomer media love to get all swoony over the Woodstock era, but how many real hippies do you know? The only remaining trace of hippie ideology can be found in supermarket aisles full of organic, farm-raised food—but don’t kid yourself: Those people creating a boom market for Whole Foods and organic baby food are yups, not hippies. Dead rebel artists like Burroughs and Kerouac were long ago turned into useful “bohemian” brands, tailor-made for Gap ads, but nobody actually aspires to be a beatnik anymore. (At this point, beret might as well be French for dickhead.)

Instead, what we have is a vast and diverse spectrum of yuppiness: guppies, buppies, alt-yups, schlub-yups, dharma-yups, crypto-yups. Former edge-dwelling slackers might be discreet enough to make their consumption appear casual and offhand, but that doesn’t mean they’re consuming any less than their flashier neighbors. (Especially now, when the stock market finally seems to be yawning awake.) Comedian Mo Rocca recently went out with a bunch of friends, he says, “and somebody was saying that it’s so tacky to have a television in the living room. And a friend of mine went, ‘Fuck that, I’ve got a TV in every single room! I love it. I love TV. I love eating in front of the TV, and the TV’s always on.’ And I thought, Oh, my god, it was so liberating to hear him say that.”

Even back in 1991, novelist Douglas Coupland, the man who introduced the term Generation X into the mainstream, was picking up on a generation’s natural vulnerability to comfort. “When you’re 27 or 28, your body starts emitting the Sheraton enzyme,” he told People. “You can no longer sleep on people’s floors.” By 37, the Sheraton enzyme mutates into the Four Seasons endorphin. People, like neighborhoods, have a tendency to gentrify. On my recent trip to the West Coast, I went back to the section of Pasadena that used to be my beloved slacker drag strip in the eighties—a scrungy wonderland of pawn shops, Bukowski-approved dives, vintage clothing shops, used bookstores, greasy taco trucks. As I poked around in this, the fall of 2006, it came as a shock to see that every last drop of that suburban boho-scape was now gone, replaced by upscale trattorias and tapas bars, boutiques and Pottery Barn and Tiffany’s.

A shock, but only a minor one. While the yuppies were colonizing my favorite neighborhood, apparently they were doing the exact same thing to my brain."

[Via GQ]

Boss Steve Carell may hog The Office’s spotlight, but it’s his watercooler underlings who do all the heavy lifting in TV’s best comedy. If only B.J. Novak, Rainn Wilson, and John Krasinski dressed like this more often—they’d probably get promoted

It is said, usually during PowerPoint presentations, that there’s no I in team. But as anyone who’s worked in an of?ce knows, every team is actually full of I’s— bored, frightened, insecure I’s. We bring our anxieties, our prejudices, and our deepest yearnings to work every day like a brown-bag lunch, and no TV show has captured this more eloquently than The Of?ce. Of?cially, these characters push paper for a living. But as David St. Hubbins, from This Is Spinal Tap—a major Of?ce precursor—would put it, they’re really full-time dreamers. The black-hole neediness of boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) may be the show’s center of gravity. But Carell’s castmates are television’s ?nest human resource.

• John Krasinski | Jim Halpert
Relevant work experience: Former intern, Late Night with Conan O’Brien; once played a snot-nosed punk on Law & Order: Criminal Intent
On the highly specialized genius of Rainn Wilson: “I auditioned with him, and I remember thinking, God, this guy better get the part. He’s perfect for it, because he is annoying.”
On how he’s planning to deal with the footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which he’s adapting for the screen: “I’m actually going to go to every theater when they show it, and the movie will pause, and I’ll click on a little reading light and actually read the footnotes aloud to everybody. It’s really going to cut into my time on The Of?ce, but that’s okay.”

• Rainn Wilson | Dwight Schrute
Relevant work experience: Former ad-agency receptionist; played a creepy mortician on Six Feet Under
How he gets inside Dwight’s head: “I draw from a rich tapestry of nerddom. I spent a lot of hours playing Dungeons & Dragons. Nobody needs to tell me about being a dork; it’s in my blood. But the thing I love about Dwight is that he’s kind of an ass-kicking, blue-collar, heavy-metal nerd. He would have beaten himself up in high school.”

• B. J. Novak | Ryan Howard
Relevant work experience: Signed up with an actual temp agency to research his Of?ce role. “They still call me on the set sometimes and ask if I’m available.”
On maliciously hoodwinking celebrities as a regular on MTV’s Punk’d: “To say that I acted opposite Hilary Duff is probably misleading. I acted at Hilary Duff. I acted upon Hilary Duff, perhaps.”

[Via GQ, Alex Pappademas]

Give someone special this holiday season an exact replica of your DNA. 

Monograms are so bourgeois, and bolting faux-gold nameplates to one's holdings is a practice best left to the comb-over king of New York real estate. But now you can be more subtly self-aggrandizing–and indulge your artsy and geeky urges as well–by getting abstract art generated from your DNA. The backlit Gloframe looks rather like a plasma TV, less than an inch thick and either 18 by 24 inches ($900) or 24 by 36 inches ($1,300). Choose from seven color schemes to make sure your chromosomes match the carpet.

[Via Cnet, Julie Wildhaber]