Michael Fassbender On February Cover Of Interview

It’s Brad Goreski’s World

by Scott Holland

He is cute, he is sassy and he is definitely fashionable. He is the adorable Brad Goreski who we all came to love on the Rachel Zoe Project. As his new show, "It’s a Brad, Brad World," gets ready to premiere on Bravo it was a pleasure to sit down with Brad.

What is this season of "It’s a Brad, Brad World" focusing on?

The show is focused on me building my business and me as the lead role of stylist as opposed to the assistant role I had with Rachel Zoe. The reason I wanted to do the show was to show the process. My personal and family life is a big focus on this show as I wanted to let people see the other side of my life; my fantastic family and great partner/boyfriend.

There has been some controversy in the news as Rachel’s camp was saying you left to have some down time and they are upset you started your own Stylist business. How do you respond to that?

Unfortunately that wasn’t discussed when I left. The whole point of me going off on my own was to be a lead stylist. I went with Rachel to learn, that’s what most assistants do. I broke off with the intention of being my own stylist.

What are the differences between Rachel’s show and your show?

Rachel is at the top of her game... I had to prove myself as an independent stylist. It’s a lot for a celebrity to put their image in your hands. The pace is different.

How hard was it to transition into lead stylist?

It was very hard. It was a whole different amount of stress. The last thing I wanted to do with Rachel was disappoint her. Now it’s about disappointing myself. Being a boss in general is something I had to learn.

Are there any drawbacks after being associated with Rachel Zoe?

No, I think it was an extremely positive experience. The only set back is having to work that much harder to prove I have my own sense of style.

Did the cameras complicate anything as you were going about your day?

I think in some instances yes, as there are times you bump into a camera, etc....but I do have to say that the crew had this production down to a well-oiled machine so it worked so well. They were kind of like Ninja’s everywhere.

Were you at all nervous about sharing your relationship with America?

I was, but I am very proud of my 10 year relationship and he is such a great person; he is funny and charming and handsome, so I though why not. We have a normal life with a family around us that supports us. I have been blessed with a guy who is a strong supporter of me and I feel it’s a positive representation of a gay couple at home. I felt this was an important message to put out there with all the bullying and homophobia going on in the world.

Due to the curse of relationships on reality television, did you have a "don’t go there" look?

No, we made an agreement when he agreed to do the show that if we weren’t having fun or if either of us felt we were acting differently on the show we would address it immediately. Luckily that never happened. In actuality, the show brought us closer together. It was a positive incredible experience.

Who are your fashion icons?

In terms of men, I get inspiration from Tom Brown, Tom Ford and on celebrity front Ryan Gosling; I absolutely love him as he gets it spot-on all the time...he is my number 1. For women Emma Stone and Kirsten Dunst are killing it!

How long did it take you to find your own clientele?

I left October and I get my first client, Jessica Alba, at the end of November. So it was about 2 months. After her, it took another 2 months to get another client. But thank god I am busy now. I do owe a lot to Jessica for taking a chance on me and I will always be grateful to her!

Who are styling for right now?

Jessica Alba, Rashida Jones, Noomi Rapace, Abigail Spencer, Shay Mitchell, Christina Ricci, Demi More and a few more are on the horizon.

Who would you love to dress?

It’s been such an organic process finding the people I have worked with. I would love to dress Kristin Wig and Emma Watson.

What have been your career highlights for 2011?

My shoot in the September issue of Details and my first In Style shoot in the March issue.

What are your fashion ideas for the New Years?

Denim shirts, I am obsessed with them as they go with everything. It has replaced the white shirt with me. It’s cool and relaxed.

What is your definition of style?

The way you present yourself out in the world and what makes you feel good on a daily basis is your style. Be bold and brave and if it makes you happy on that day and you feel like you can conquer the world than you are in fashion!

What is about you that makes everyone take notice?

I think it’s because I wear things that people wouldn’t picture a guy wearing. I feel I keep it masculine but yet kind of show girly. I have loved clothes my entire life. The wackier the clothes are, the better for me. I like to push the boundaries always!

Are you having any collaboration with designers?

I can definitely say yes, but I cannot say who, but it will be in the near future.

What’s in your emergency kit on a styling job?

I don’t go anywhere without top stick, a hand steamer or footpads. They are all a must!

I hear you are writing a book, what’s it going to be about?

It’s called "Born to be Brad" and it will be out at the end of February and it’s about where my influences came from, internships, and all my experiences. It’s also about my life; being bullied, growing up and how everything shaped me into who I am. I hope it’s an inspirational story for people. I am really proud of it.

What’s ahead for Brad?

My big mission in life is to help get more color out into the streets. Pick the one item that is going to be colorful and put neutrals around it. Don’t we all just want the world to be a more colorful place!
Award season is upon us... I had my first Golden Globe fitting last night. I also have a new project that will be announced after the New Year. A lot of exciting stuff is on the horizon. I am grateful to have a great team to work with me!

Catch "It’s a Brad, Brad World" premiering on January 2 at 10 pm on Bravo.

Artist Spotlight: Wes Hemphill: Part 1

Playing around with paint and brushes given to him by his partner, artist Jack Balas, launched his career. This writer-turned-artist's first gallery show sold out. Understandably so.

By Christopher Harrity

Farmboy Idyll

For decades, Wes Hempel has been committed to reenvisioning the depiction of masculinity in contemporary art. By setting psychologically acute portraits of modern-day men against backdrops appropriated from such disparate sources as neoclassical history painting and Dutch golden age landscapes, the artist’s works forge provocative dialogues between the exigencies of the present and its endowments from the past.

Joining the mythic allusions and technical fluency of classical art together with the ideas of personal narrative and social content of postmodern art, Hempel’s paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, august ideals and the profoundly individual. The artist recasts modern male figures in historical and culturally iconographic settings, provoking both a rethinking of assumed narratives and mythic themes and inviting a similar reconsideration of contemporary life, masculinity, and sexual norms. Hempel’s societal investigations are rendered in sensuously modeled flesh tones, gleaming marble surfaces, and the immersive depth of Arcadian landscapes — proving as visually seductive as they are conceptually rigorous.

Hempel’s art has been the subject of more than 80 solo and group exhibitions and is included in a growing number of esteemed private and corporate collections, including the Denver Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Arnot Art Museum, Microsoft Corp., the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.


The Advocate: Why are you an artist?
Wes Hempel: I always wanted to be a writer, but in graduate school, I began playing around with some old brushes and paints that my partner, Jack Balas, had given me. I was mesmerized. I completed my degree in creative writing and began teaching at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but I had fallen in love with art. Jack showed some of my early pieces to his gallery in Denver, Robischon. They gave me a show, which sold out. I’ve been painting ever since.

What catches your eye?
There is something specific I’m always looking for, though it’s hard to put into words — the visual equivalent of a deftly turned phrase or the unexpected image in poetry. In painting an emotional quality can arise from the interplay of composition, color, and value, regardless of subject matter.

Tell us about your process or techniques.
It’s a very traditional technique. These days I do a full-color underpainting in oils — sometimes with the help of an assistant — on gessoed canvas, then apply one or more top coats, making adjustments to form and to heighten the richness of hue and quality of light. I also use glazes to add surface depth and to complicate the coloration. I have a few tricks I’ve developed along the way — I suppose most painters have these — that I hold close to my chest.

How do you choose your subjects?
One of my ongoing projects is a reenvisioning of what art history might have looked like had homosexuality not been vilified in the culture. The paintings one sees in museums are revered in part because they enshrine our collective experience. But it’s a selective past that gets validated. By presenting contemporary males as objects of desire in borrowed art historical settings, I’m able to imagine — and allow viewers to imagine — a history that includes rather than excludes gay experience — and thereby ride the coattails, as it were, of art history’s imprimatur.

What artists do you take inspiration from and why?
This changes all the time for me. When Jack and I first moved to Boulder, I took a year off from working and went systematically through the art library at CU, taking down each book and carefully going through it. It took me the entire year to work my way through the shelves. I used to joke that my faulty knowledge of art history is the result of the books that were checked out.
 

Edge Interview with Gregory Maguire

One of the gay websites I read had this incredible interview with Gregory Maguireand I had to share with all of you, my faithful readers.  Hope you enjoy as much as I did.

Grimm, Company One’s latest production, brings to life seven stories from the early 19th century fairy tales collections by the famous German brothers and does so with a difference. Instead of being literal renderings these stories are re-imagined by some of Boston’s best-known playwrights: Melinda Lopez (Sonia Flew), Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly, Voyeurs De Venus), Kirsten Greenidge (The Luck Of The Irish), Marcus Gardley (Dance Of The Holy Ghosts), John Kuntz (Salt Girl), and John Adekoje (6 Rounds/6 Lessons).
But by far the contributor with the biggest marquee value isn’t a playwright at all: novelist Gregory Maguire is best-known as the author of Wicked and a number of other fictional works in which he re-imagines classic children’s stories. Wicked is, of course, a reworking of The Wizard of Oz, offering the Wicked Witch of the West’s side of the story. As popular as the novel was, what has made the property a household name is its musical version, which is already one of the most successful stage musicals of all time. In its seventh year on Broadway, it is still one of the highest weekly grosser, and has repeated that success in London, as well as in major American cities where sit-down and touring productions continue to break house records. (The musical returns to Boston’s Opera House on September 1, 2010 for a six-week run.)
For Grimm, Maguire took Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and imagines what happened after the story’s heroine left with Prince Charming. Called The Seven Stage a Comeback, it follows their quest to be reunited with her. What makes Maguire’s contribution different from the other plays in Grimm is that it is used as a framing device with scenes dispersed between the others. Another difference is that unlike the other contributors, Maguire hasn’t written a play since he was 8 years old when he provided Sunday night entertainments for his eight brothers and sisters. EDGE spoke with Maguire recently (just as he was to depart to Paris on a vacation) about writing for the stage, his fascination with fairy stories and if Wicked influenced his writing for the stage.


Guilty pleasures:

EDGE: Did fairy tales capture your imagination as a child and if so which one(s) in particular?
Gregory Maguire: Since my mother died in childbirth and I was raised by a stepmother (who was anything but wicked) the tropes of fairy tales, which almost always begin that way, had special fascination for me from childhood. I still read them in middle school, though when I took the books from the library I sandwiched them between searing problem novels from the YA section so no one would see my guilty appetite for stories that had both magic and moral consequence in their bones.
EDGE: You impressed me with your sensitivity when you came to The Park School in Brookline to talk to 7th and 8th graders about writing and brought a sample of your writing from that age (rather than something you were currently working on). How do encounters with children inform your writing?
Gregory Maguire: Well, I don’t do the school visits anymore, and frankly I talked so much and so fast (as you may remember) that I rarely gave the children time to land a comment. However yours is a good question and one of the reasons I did it was to witness the light that emanates from children as they listen, as they believe and consider or even doubt what they are being told. That light is nutritious and life-repairing. Even if you’re not old and jaded and struggling with that pin in your hip, you can enjoy and even cherish the fresh appreciation for life that children come to naturally, and be restored in your own appreciation by their example. So what I took from them was not anything related to story particularly but related to life itself. And some would argue you can only care about story if you care about life, deeply. Though it sounds rather banal to put it down on the computer screen like that. (I specialize in early morning banality.)

A shy boy:
EDGE: How did you get involved with Company One which is staging The Seven Stage a Comeback?
Gregory Maguire: Liana Thompson, literary director, got hold of me somehow and invited me to contribute. I am deep in deadlines and ought to have said no, and did say no, but then I remembered I had written a short story about 10 years ago in sort of 18th century high classical verse style, a la Alexander Pope. I dug it up and rendered it more colloquial, in some places, and they thought it would do.
EDGE: Did your experience with the dramatization of Wicked influence you to write for the stage?
Gregory Maguire: Well, I am a shy boy who never dances unless he is asked. So although I had wanted to write for the stage ever since Wicked hit Broadway, I hadn’t found the time or inclination. But once asked, I couldn’t have been happier to try my hand at it. I would like to try it again, too.
EDGE: Why of all the Grimm fairy tale characters did you choose Snow White or is the Disney movie your take off point?
Gregory Maguire: While I loved the Disney movie as a kid, the various versions of Snow White that predate even the famous Grimm version, which is the one we know best, are darker and more mysterious. There is an Italian version, perhaps from Il Pentamarone (I’m not sure that’s the correct spelling but I can’t find it on a quick search in my library and can’t keep hunting) in which the seven helpers aren’t dwarves but seven robbers. Outlaws, outcasts, not much difference, eh? So I tried to concentrate on the ways in which the seven dwarves would have to be alike, and united (unlike in Disney, where they have names) and the ways in which they might be differentiated--really, morally, developmentally differentiated, not just with a single attribute, like a tendency to sneeze, but a deeper identity that might keep them from working in concert for--or against--the ambitions of Snow White herself.
EDGE: Revisiting fairy tales, what surprised you the most about them?
Gregory Maguire: Well, my dear, I have never left them, so I can’t say I have been revisiting them.
EDGE: Writing plays you write in real time. Was this a difficult transition for your from novels?
Gregory Maguire: I just finished a novel that has 220,000 words--that is about half the length of Gone With The Wind. So writing a play is truly an exercise in verbal dieting--and it is an exercise that is very good for me to do. I do tend to go on (and I like to read long books too). But one should be able to be brief when required, and playwriting is a necessary corrective to prolixity.
EDGE: What was it like for you seeing "The Seven Stage a Comeback?"
Gregory Maguire: I saw it yesterday for the first and only time, as we leave for vacation today. I confess I had tears in my eyes at the end--good tears, not "oh my gosh it’s so @(&*’ed up" tears. The players lent a kind of vigor to the story arc by their physicality, which was just as important to the story (I saw to my astonishment) as anything that they said or did. The staging made use of every inch of a modest space; it was nothing short of magnificent. I have never felt the story of a journey told more convincingly in a theater, ever.
EDGE: Were you surprised by the phenomenal success of Wicked?"
Gregory Maguire: Well, duh. No, let me rewrite that--I don’t mean to be impolite. What I mean to say is that no one goes into the arts expecting to make money or to be noticed. I mean, one dreams of it, of course (like the Elaine character in Seinfeld dreaming of meeting John Kennedy Jr.) but one can dream a lot of things that are not going to put mustard on the meat loaf. What has happened with Wicked, in its essence, is that my own rather old-fashioned preoccupation with the childhood question: "can I be good--can I do good--and does it matter if I do or not?" was somehow a deeper question that resonated, once I put it in narrative terms, with a whole subset of the culture. I can’t be happier--and yes, I was completely surprised. Previously my readership had been confined exclusively to a small set of cousins from the upper Hudson River valley.
EDGE: Are you involved in the planned for film version?
Gregory Maguire: I have elected to take a distant seat in those proceedings, which is good for my inflatable ego, good for my family, and good for the work that I really need to do--which is write. But I will be involved courteously, I imagine, and no doubt will visit the set and perhaps be allowed to have a walk-on role as a disagreeable Munchkin dentist or someone.
EDGE: Do you have a favorite Grimm fairy tale and why?
Gregory Maguire: My favorite is always the next one I want to think about, and that next one may be Rapunzel. I’m not sure. The story called "The Juniper Tree" is both classic Greek tragedy and Bergman Nordic psychodrama and, depending on how I am feeling, reading it again can make me either want to go back to writing with a new vengeance or ring the Suicide Hotline for help.
EDGE: Is your play suitable for children?
Gregory Maguire: Yes, though I think one or two of the other plays in GRIMM are a bit raw for children.
Grimm continues through August 14 in the Roberts Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont st., Boston’s South End. For more info go to www.companyone.org