The Met Gala is Monday in New York City. Here are some exciting and affordable alternatives.
CBS News New York's Hannah Kliger shows us how one event is using fashion and performance to make a real difference.
Debt Gala raises money to relieve medical debt
In a studio space in Downtown Brooklyn, performers are dancing through their routines at their final rehearsals before the third annual Debt Gala.
Dancers from the Royal Haus of Silk will be among those dazzling the crowd for a cause. The Debt Gala is a red carpet fashion show to raise money to relieve Americans' medical debt.
"It's important to check up on those that get quiet, especially in these times of need," said Robert "Silk" Mason of the Royal Haus of Silk.
Co-founder Tom Costello, a Broadway theater director, says it was an idea born after the pandemic.
"Because of the way that our medical system is run in this country, it is one of the most punishing ways that people are affected," he said. "We really wanted to figure out how we could be most effective in helping to make people's lives somehow better."
In the past two years, Costello says the gala has raised enough money to forgive more than $2.5 million of medical debt. The night is filled with iconic looks, most of them upcycled, recycled or homemade costumes.
"This is the artist's response to the Met Gala," said PJ Adzima, host and producer of the parody charity. "When we look at the Met Gala, it's a sign of absolute opulence, and right now, there is such a disparity between the hyper wealthy and the needs of so many people in this country."
Brooklyn Public Library hosts the People's Ball
The Debt Gala is one of several upcoming alternative events meant to give regular New Yorkers a chance to show their best on the red carpet.
Also on Sunday, the Brooklyn Public Library will glitter with gilded guests at the People's Ball, an annual event to merge fashion and inclusivity. New Yorkers will walk the runway as a celebration of democracy, no invitations necessary.
The glue, lace and rhinestones are coming out this weekend as people put their costumes together for the big night.
The Debt Gala kicks off at 6 p.m. at the Bell House in Gowanus.
The People's Ball lights up Sunday at 6:30 p.m. at Central Library.
The Met Gala begins at 6 p.m. on Monday.
Have a story idea or tip in Brooklyn? Email Hannah by CLICKING HERE.
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The Ghost of Lady Murasaki
In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I'd become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can't help setting our world on fire. I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we'll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It's about people whose lives differ so much—in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics—from the lives of 21st-century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language. Even so, this novel, which I first encountered almost three decades ago, returned insistently. Once again, I was caught up in its radically unfamiliar world and literary form. Unlike most Western books, Lady Murasaki's tale isn't guided by an Aristotelian arc of action that steadily rises to a climax, followed by a denouement. Instead, the novel is episodic and patterned with recurring images and ideas: swiftly fading cherry blossoms, clouds moving through the sky, autumn leaves, the aching transience of life on this planet. The spirits of jealous lovers possess and sicken primary characters; scandals in one generation echo, transformed, in the next. Nine centuries before Gabriel García Márquez was born, Lady Murasaki infused her story with magical realism. Classics resonate through time for a reason, but what The Tale of Genji was saying to me so urgently was far too faint to hear. I wanted to track down the ghost of its author in her own city, now Kyoto, which was then the capital of imperial Japan. I wanted to get her to speak to me a little louder. Medieval women have long fascinated me, particularly artistic medieval women whose work seems to push against the limits of their era and, as a result, show the places they write about in a strange new light. In my 2021 novel, Matrix, I imagined a life of the 12th-century writer Marie de France, the first known female poet in the French language, whose Lais, a series of courtly poems, brims with weird vitality, and about whom only two facts are known: that her name was Marie, and that she came from France but lived in England. I have lived in both of those countries, but the Heian era (794–1185) in Japan is thrillingly distant to my imagination. What we know of the contours of Heian imperial-court culture makes The Tale of Genji 's very existence miraculous. The lives of high-born women within the court were both isolated and political: They were pawns in a clan system by which men acquired social status and power through marriage. Polygamy prevailed in the aristocracy, and a husband's various wives were ranked in importance. Once married, women in the ruling class lived almost entirely in seclusion, and were forced to hide their faces behind screens and fans. Almost no court women were taught to read or write Chinese, the language of the imperial bureaucracy. In response, women in the court developed a written form of Japanese, which was still relatively new when Lady Murasaki, likely born in 973, was growing up. Along with monogatari, fictional tales drawn from the oral tradition, the first fully Japanese prose texts were women's autobiographical writings. The other famous work from the era that remains famous today was a racy diary about the Heian court, The Pillow Book, by a contemporary of Lady Murasaki named Sei Shōnagon. Men in the imperial aristocracy also avidly read texts in Japanese, but nobody, male or female, bothered to retain for the historical record the actual name of The Tale of Genji 's author, even though she was recognized during her lifetime as a supremely skilled writer. She was given her pen name, which means 'purple,' in homage to one of the central female characters in her tale: the child-wife—and dearest beloved—of the eponymous Genji, who is a prince of both imperial and common blood. Shikibu, which means 'ministry of ceremonials,' has nothing to do with the writer, either: It refers to the position of her father at court. On the night I arrived in Kyoto with my husband, I was delighted to bump my suitcase down Teramachi Street, where Lady Murasaki is rumored to have lived with her father at some point in her youth. In the dark, Kyoto is at its most magical. It emanates a deep softness and hush, despite the hordes of tourists eager to touch the layers of history that the city so conscientiously maintains. The buildings are traditionally wood, and so most of Kyoto has been repeatedly subject to fires, razed and rebuilt many times over the past millennium. Still, the streets of the city's old sections, though immaculate and nearly odorless, seem to retain some of their medieval flavor, with small buildings pressed closely together, and tiny storefronts on the bottom floors gently illuminated by round lanterns. Teramachi Street, much of which is now a covered arcade, surely looks nothing like it did in Lady Murasaki's time, yet its refined-but-accessible vibe tracks with the known outlines of the writer's life. She was born into a family waning in power, a minor offshoot of the most prominent clan at the time, the Fujiwaras. Her pedigree was literary: Her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and brother were all celebrated poets. Her diary offers intimate glimpses of her private thoughts. It tells how, as a young girl, she eavesdropped on her father as he taught her brother Chinese, and proved herself the far better student. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' she describes her father saying. To be a woman fluent in Chinese was so freakish that she 'pretended to be incapable of reading even the inscriptions on the screens' that divided rooms and shielded women's bodies from view. She 'worried what people would think if they heard such rumors' of her abilities. In the year 996, still unmarried at a time when marriage in very young womanhood was expected for the aristocracy, she accompanied her father north to Echizen; he'd been appointed a regional governor, which was considered something of a dishonor, as power diminished with distance from the capital. She returned to Kyoto in her mid-20s to marry a much older relative, Fujiwara no Nobutaka, who is vividly described in The Pillow Book as a flamboyant character with many other wives. He died two years later in an epidemic, leaving her with a young daughter who would eventually become a poet known as Daini no Sanmi. During her widowhood, in the early 1000s, out of grief or boredom, Lady Murasaki began writing The Tale of Genji in Japanese. Because The Tale of Genji described scandalous love affairs, reading it became a craze, something like watching a prestige television series today. Around the same time that its circulating chapters won admirers, Lady Murasaki was summoned to the aesthetically refined court of Emperor Ichijō. There she entered the service of Shōshi, the second empress and the daughter of the most powerful man of the day, Fujiwara no Michinaga, the controlling figure behind the emperor's throne. Shōshi surrounded herself with ladies talented in music, drawing, and poetry, and when she discovered that Lady Murasaki could read and write Chinese, she asked for secret lessons. Lady Murasaki's diary suggests a sort of singing-bird entrapment—a sense of being under immense pressure to add new chapters to her tale; Michinaga would even go into her private space to steal her work in progress. She was lonely at court and reserved among the competitive women. One moment in her diary has always stood out to me, when the careful screen of convention slips and a piece of the too-bright self flares through. She is talking about the ladies of the court and how they see her: 'No one liked her,' she writes, ventriloquizing their views of her. 'They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful.' Sometime after 1013, the year she may have turned 40 and the date of the last mention of her in court records, she died. I discovered an onsen, or a hot collective bath segregated by gender, in the basement of our ryokan, a small traditional inn, in an old part of Kyoto. My husband and I descended from our room in slippers and traditional cotton robes (yukatas), which we'd been instructed to fold left over right before fastening them with the embroidered obi, because right over left is how the Japanese dress their dead. Then we scrubbed ourselves pink with bucketfuls of water before climbing into the pool. It was very late, and the heat drew out the travel weariness from my bones. I floated and dreamed, and I had an inkling that, though my love of Lady Murasaki could be explained only through beautiful abstraction—by meeting her mind in her work—I might begin to understand something tangible about her through the wordless animal body. The Tale of Genji 's early chapters are rooted in fairy-tale monogatari, but the book soon metamorphoses into its own strange thing, a courtly romance that follows Prince Genji over his half century of life, and then, after Genji's death, takes up the lives of the next generation. Genji, called 'The Radiant Prince,' is the son of an emperor and his most beloved wife, who has no powerful family to protect her child. Like Lady Murasaki herself, Genji is both an insider and an outsider. As a young boy, he enters the court with the rank of a commoner, but he becomes by far the most beautiful and talented of men, easily outshining his half brother, the future emperor. He is also wildly, and audaciously, sexy: As a teenager, he seduces and has a son with one of the wives of his father, the current emperor. Though Genji goes on to marry several times, he continues to make a game of seducing as many of the most beautiful women at court as he can, a game as much of spiritual and poetic yearning as it is of bodily lust. When he's about 26 years old, his scandalous behavior leads him to years of exile in Suma, by the seaside. There he begins another relationship, one that produces a child who becomes an empress. When he returns to court, restored from disgrace, he never stops chasing women. My husband and I rise early; even in Japan, we were up with the birds. Nothing opened for hours, so we descended to the onsen again, then went out on a quest for coffee—not easy to find in Japan before 8 a.m., we learned, unless you like cold coffee in cans from the vending machines on every street. This is how we discovered the wonders of the Japanese 7/11, full of tasty fresh foods such as onigiri, seaweed-covered rice pyramids, and the internationally and justly famous egg-salad sandwiches, with their incredibly soft white bread and tangy, smooth egg filling, which became our favorite anytime snack. I had a surreal moment while we sat on the clean-swept Kyoto curb, drinking hot coffee and eating egg-salad sandwiches, when the barely dawn-touched streets were entirely empty of people. I suddenly felt myself living outside time for a brief spell, not within the 21st century or any of the other centuries visible in Kyoto's smooth palimpsest, but within the hovering dual-time that is the experience of reading a great novel. I do think The Tale of Genji is a great novel, and some of its greatness comes from its self-contradictions. Prince Genji is held up as a courtly ideal, yet he's also a renegade; he's an amorous adventurer, yet also deeply attached to one of his beloved wives, Murasaki. The narrative sporadically darts into his consciousness, reflecting a conflicted conscience and a degree of interiority that make the book revolutionary. I believe interiority is necessary to define a novel as a novel, and its absence disqualifies the other books that scholars have proposed as alternative 'first novels' in the history of literature, such as Apuleius's The Golden Ass. Interiority is especially fraught in the evocation of Genji and his young wife Murasaki's relationship. He discovers her as an enchanting child of about 10, kidnaps her, secludes her in a lonely house, molds her into the perfectly accomplished wife he wants, and marries her when she is a teenager, which the narrative presents as something of a romantic coup. But the prose simultaneously makes clear what is happening from Murasaki's point of view: This man, who first presented himself to her as her adoptive father, comes to her bed when she is still a child and violates her painfully, against her will and to her immense distress. None of the people who care for her lifts a finger to help her. Genji pursues many other affairs, then suddenly the narrative reveals that he has died at the age of 52. At this point, The Tale of Genji does a spin in the air: There are 13 more chapters, set primarily in Uji, a city south of Kyoto, which feature two men of the next generation vying for the love of the young princess Ukifune. She is driven to despair by their caddish treatment, and her suffering becomes the focus of the narration. This final section closes the book cryptically and counter-romantically—Ukifune renounces the world and becomes a nun —and delivered a jolt when I first read it, because it goes against any epiphanic or revelatory ending that I've been taught by Western narratives to expect. When I returned to the book with the idea of visiting Kyoto, I began to read the final chapters as the novel's firm renunciation of itself. The tale turns its back savagely on its previous concerns, saying that the things it had taught us all along to think of as so important—the heartache, the rise and fall of fortunes, the attention to aesthetics—in the end actually mean nothing; it is as if the author has lost patience with male callousness, upheld for so many pages as the signature of courtly elegance. The reader of any text provides half of its meaning. To me, an American woman in the early 21st century, prickly and free-spirited Lady Murasaki now appears to have been chafing under conformist pressures in the Heian court. I read her radical evocations of characters' internal states as though they are eruptions of the author's own rebellious soul. Perhaps this subversive interpretation is wish fulfillment on my part. But Kyoto itself seemed to agree with it. The city is a place for people who love history and appreciate ambiguity. Shinto shrines are everywhere, meticulously maintained and restored, robust memento mori of the many generations of humans who have lived and died adoring them. The April cherry trees, with their brief pink opulence, seem infused with the spirit of mono no aware —the Japanese idea of the transience of things, the gentle sadness yet also the beauty of impermanence. This is a place where Lady Murasaki's work has never disappeared, yet also has never ceased to take on new shapes and transform to fit the current moment. By dawn, we were driving along the Kamo River next to runners confettied by the last of the cherry blossoms. We were joined by Takako Kido, our spark plug of a photographer, and her friend (and fellow hip-hop dancer) from college, Masaaki Kaga, who had once been a historical tour guide for schoolchildren, and had been roped into being our driver that day. When I asked them about The Tale of Genji, Takako shrugged. 'Everyone knows Genji,' she said. 'It's in our bones.' But neither she nor Masa had read the book in decades. As a millennium-old, omnipresent reference in Japan, like Shakespeare's work in the Anglophone world, the book 'no longer has to be actually read in order to have been 'read,' ' Dennis Washburn, a professor at Dartmouth College, writes in an introduction to his 2015 translation (in my opinion the best one, with its clear and accessible prose). Soon after The Tale of Genji appeared, it inspired fan fiction and painted illustrations, and artists in every century since have used the tale as a prism to refract the aesthetic, political, and spiritual concerns of their times. Its legacy is everywhere you turn—in Noh drama, erotic parodies, Buddhist rituals, advertisements, manga books, games, anime films. At the Tale of Genji Museum, in Uji, we watched one film that featured a teenage girl who turns into a cat and ends up in the arms of Genji with a bizarre expression of ahegao, or 'sexual ecstasy,' on its face. The homage to the novel is eclectic and ever-evolving, both irreverent and faithful. One can find echoes of the work, too, in places frequented long ago by Lady Murasaki and her characters that can be visited today. It was still dawn when Masa brought us to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan, the Shimogamo, the original version of which was built in 678 and would have already been antique by the time Lady Murasaki venerated its deities there. Shintoism is an Indigenous animist belief system that predates Buddhism's arrival in Japan, and Shinto sites of worship now exist comfortably alongside Buddhist temples. The forest that surrounds the shrine itself is a kami, or 'powerful spirit,' and when we watched people, out giving their Shiba Inus an early-morning walk, bowing to individual trees that wore rope belts from which dangled paper lightning bolts, we discovered that the trees were also kamis. Genji visits these woods before his exile to Suma and composes a poem wishing that the forest might one day see the injustice against him reversed. As the sun rose, the vermilion paint that decorates most Shinto shrines to ward off evil and misfortune began to shine dazzlingly. At the main shrine, Masa taught us how to pray: throw a small coin into a slatted wooden trough, bow twice, clap twice, pray, then bow again. We prayed, feeling a great spiritual potency in the place, and because it never hurts to send sparks of gratitude into the world. Kamis can have negative power, too, and shrines are not always portals to peace. In Genji, the Kamigamo shrine—loud and crowded and too bright in the hot mid-afternoon sun when we arrived there—appears often, sometimes as a place of conflict. In a memorable scene, one of Genji's lovers, the intensely jealous Lady Rokujō, and his first wife, Aoi, have both come in ox-drawn carts to Kamigamo to see Genji ride by during the Aoi Matsuri, or wild-ginger festival, and are soon jostling for the best viewing spot. Rokujō's jealous spirit eventually enters and sickens Aoi's body until she dies. Later, young Murasaki is also possessed by that bad spirit. We were too early for the wild-ginger festival, which takes place in mid-May, when celebrants in Heian-era costumes process to the shrine from Kyoto's Imperial Palace. I was happy to be spared the crowds jostling for views. The palace itself, which burned down many times over the centuries and in 1855 was rebuilt in the Heian style, is breathtaking in scale, with astonishing roofs curving up at the corners, constructed of layers of cypress bark lashed into place with bamboo strips. Its surrounding lawns of raked gravel and its park of pruned trees made it appear even bigger. Takako had never visited before— 'this is an entirely new Japan for me,' she murmured. A moment later, a loud alarm went off: She had leaped across the moat surrounding the wall to take a photo, and leaped nimbly back, laughing, after she was scolded by the guards. Inside the palace, the rooms were dark and very large; in the days of the Heian court, they would have been partitioned off by screens and curtains. I thought of Murasaki Shikibu trying to write in this place, separated from the noises and voices and smells of others by thin silk, trying to lose herself and her worries in the composition of her text. I saw that the book she was writing would have been another screen between herself and the world, even as the fame the book brought would have, paradoxically, served to bind her even tighter to that world. Although Lady Murasaki wrote in her diary of her loneliness and alienation at court, one of her childhood homes was only a couple of miles away. Rozan-ji is a dark-wood Tendai Buddhist temple on the grounds where her family house is said to have been. Fire destroyed the original residence centuries ago, but in rooms off the temple's quiet courtyard is a small exhibition of scrolls and gilded clamshells decorated with scenes from the novel. A sign at the front gate lays claim to Lady Murasaki, proudly calling her a Great Woman of The World. Masa brought us to another quiet courtyard just off a busy road, where we found the grave site of Lady Murasaki. Inside were two neatly maintained mounds, with two markers. Her ancient bones are thought to lie beneath the big mound; under the smaller one are those of Ono no Takamura, a poet who lived two centuries before she did, and who was considered to be a protector of souls sent to languish in hell. No one knows how they were paired up, but legend has it that Lady Murasaki's admirers, fearful that her scandalous book had consigned her to punishment in the afterlife, put them side by side so that he could help her travel out of the underworld. I said a quiet thank-you to her remains for the book I love so much. I was answered by birdsong and traffic on the street beyond the walls. The solemnity was broken by a garbage truck puttering by, singing out in a recorded loop a warning in the voice of a small Japanese child. Perhaps the most important location for the book is an eighth-century temple called Ishiyama-dera, east of Kyoto on a hillside overlooking Lake Biwa, the largest body of fresh water in Japan. The myth is that Lady Murasaki, during a visit there after her husband died, was struck with the inspiration to write her chef d'oeuvre while gazing up at an August moon. Although Ishiyama-dera is the most stunning of the shrines we saw, with hiking paths and high views of the lake, we encountered very few other tourists, perhaps because the trip from Kyoto requires two train transfers. The grounds were dotted with statues of Lady Murasaki, all of which depict a woman with a large forehead and loose hair, her writing brush in hand. As soon as we entered the gates, I felt a strange, holy energy. I believe that places, like people, hold memory, and when place memory announces itself, it does so through the body. A tiny museum on the grounds displayed ancient scrolls on which Heian hands had written, sculptures of ancient Buddhas to which Lady Murasaki might have prayed. The temple of Ishiyama-dera rising up from huge, jagged slabs of wollastonite; the pagodas perched like little hats atop the hill; the dangling purple wisteria; the lake glittering below; the way the cool wind and the April sunshine filtered through the leaves and pressed upon our skin—an ambiguous understanding that I'd been searching for arrived. There, my body recognized something of the long-gone body of Lady Murasaki, who had also once stood, an animal like me, seeing the stones, smelling the woods and the lake, feeling the breeze and the warmth on her flesh. I was gripped by the truth of something I'd known only intellectually: how much courage Lady Murasaki, as a woman in her era, had to summon, how much loneliness and insecurity she must have felt, when she dedicated her life to literature in Heian Japan. We climbed the steps to the great temple, where we found a statue of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of compassion and mercy. We tossed the money, rang the bells, clapped, and prayed to Kannon for the sake of our wounded world. By the end of our trip to Japan, I knew less than ever about the real Murasaki Shikibu. She did not visit me as a ghost in the night. Although I sensed in Kyoto a more rebellious artist than I'd imagined her to be from her work, I didn't hear a clear message from her to blow up the poisonous narratives that have created the tragedies of the current age. I didn't understand much more of the heartache of her life, the person beyond the words. Yet my body understood The Tale of Genji and its marvelous writer far better. First through the sense of taste: At a ryokan near Lake Biwa, famous for its geothermal onsen, we ate a kaiseki dinner, which is a seasonally inspired sequence of courses, their flavors and textures and aromas carefully choreographed. There was no Aristotelian arc in this meal, no central main dish. Every course was equally important, to be savored in its own way. Soup gave way to sashimi so fresh that I could swear it twitched, and this gave way to simmered salted fish, which gave way to a grilled course, and on and on, for three exquisite hours. The meal was episodic, patterned, refusing the very concept of climax in its devotion to the moment. The sense of sight taught me other things when, at the Zen Buddhist Tenryuji Temple, we walked through the most stunning garden I've ever encountered. Japanese gardens aren't subservient to symmetry in the way that many European gardens are. They aren't built around any central focus point. Instead, they are created with keen attention to texture and color and season. The one at Tenryuji is said to remain as it was when it was built in the 14th century, when the designer and head priest, Musō Soseki, integrated the surrounding hills into the garden's pattern, in a tradition called shakkei, or 'borrowed scenery.' As a result, any place in the garden has its own perfect view; every spot holds something new to contemplate. The neat lines of raked gravel around the buildings bring awareness to the present moment and to the impermanence of all things. As I walked its paths, I became hyperconscious of pattern, repetition, texture, transience, the shifting of viewpoint: koi, pond, stone, azalea, camellia, pine, weeping cherry, hill beyond in its gradients of green. I felt I had been given a three-dimensional map of The Tale of Genji. And then, at a tea-and-meditation ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple, the Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami, in his splendid purple robes, gave voice to the things that my body had been telling me in its wise, oblique way. We sat on cushions in a room that opened out onto a cool garden, and were led through a long meditation, after which the reverend spoke, telling us that of course there is no single definition of enlightenment. The self is a shifting, inconstant phenomenon, brain and body ever transforming in time and space, with no clear delineation between what is self and what is other. Westerners want certainty but we should embrace ambiguity, he told us; ambiguity is part of nature. He said that to taste tea that has been steeped in cold water, first we should taste with the tip of the tongue, then with the back of the tongue. First you taste umami, then you taste the floral. First you taste the bitter, then you taste the sweet. Travel Notes Kurama Onsen The closest one gets to a genuine geothermally heated onsen in Kyoto is 30 minutes outside the city. Canny travelers go straight from checking into their hotels to the electric train up the mountain to watch the sunset while steaming away their jetlag in the outdoor baths. We were too tired to do this our first night and regretted it for the rest of our trip. Learn from our mistake! This onsen is said to be especially gorgeous in winter, when snow is falling. As is true at most onsen, Kurama's baths are separated by gender, and although tattoos are forbidden at many geothermal public baths in Japan, people we know had no problem with their body art here. 520 Kuramahonmachi, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, 601-1111, Japan Tea and Zen Meditation Ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple Shunkō-in means 'Temple of the Ray of Spring Light,' and Reverend Takafumi Zenryu Kawakami, in his purple robes, is also a brilliant ray of sunshine, funny and wry and so full of insight that you'll wish this experience were twice as long. He leads tourists—seated on cushions (though chairs are available for the stiff in hip)—through two short Zen meditations; shows them how to taste excellent green tea from Uji; gives a tour of the temple; and delivers a philosophical lecture with so much to chew on that you'll find yourself recalling his words months later. The gardens outside the meditation room are full of flowers and butterflies. The gilded screens inside are decorated with cypress trees and cranes and peonies, the work of the 19th-century painter Kanō Eigaku. This is a calm respite to help you gather your forces before visiting yet more shrines. 42 Hanazonomyoshinjicho, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, 616-8035, Japan Kyoto Handicraft Center One of the lessons from Reverend Takafumi's talk was about how, traditionally in Japan, art and craft are the same; there's no hierarchy of makers. Hold a perfectly balanced, handcrafted knife in your hand, and you'll understand how an everyday object can be as much a work of art as a Picasso painting. Although plenty of stores in Kyoto specialize in specific crafts, the sheer range and diversity of the goods in this quiet, well-lit place—ceramic tea sets, graceful prints of birds and flowers, silk kimonos—will have you buying a bigger suitcase to get all your gifts home. 17 Shogoin Entomicho, Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, 606-8323, Japan Late-Blooming Cherry Blossoms at the Ninna-ji Temple The Japanese take the sakura (cherry blossom) so seriously that the Japan Weather Association puts out a nationwide sakura forecast every spring. If you miss the peak in Kyoto, the Ninna-ji Temple, in the northwest of the city, has late-blooming Omuro-zakura varietals beyond mid-April. I found the experience surreal: It was very hard not to be moved by the pink field of cherry blossoms swaying in the wind under Ninna-ji's picturesque five-story Edo-period pagoda, and at the same time, I felt as if I had somehow found myself a three-dimensional postcard picturing the most Japanese experience possible. 33 Omuroouchi, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, 616-8092, Japan Ryō-shō Michelin-starred restaurants abound in Kyoto, but it's hard to find one as intimate (only eight counter seats and a private room) and inexpensive, with food as fresh, as the two-starred Ryō-shō, located down an atmospheric street, lit by red lanterns, in Gionmachi Minamigawa. Chef Makoto Fujiwara creates a beautiful, leisurely, many-course omakase meal right in front of diners; pairs each course with a carefully selected beverage; and personally escorts diners to the door at the end of the meal to thank them. The spirit of hospitality was part of the meal's flavor. I'm pescatarian—I don't believe that fish have souls—but I couldn't resist a bite of my husband's Himegyu beef, which was soft and buttery and so excellent that I didn't feel bad about eating a soulful creature: The chef's extreme care seemingly mitigated the sacrifice. Ryō-shō means 'to eclipse the sky,' and each luscious mouthful is enough to momentarily make you forget about anything other than what you're tasting. 570-166 Gionmachi Minamigawa, Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto, 605-0074, Japan Nijō Castle I focused on the Heian period during our trip to Kyoto and found the Imperial Palace overwhelming, but Nijō Castle, built in the Edo period (1603–1868), the time of the Shōgun rulers, is hard not to be cowed by. This is intentional. The Ninomaro Palace within it was the first shōgun's residence while he was in Kyoto, and it was designed with maximal awe in mind. Each room—I have no idea how many there were, because rooms led onto rooms, and I soon went into a fugue state—had a superabundance of gilded screens and wood carvings. The floors are called 'nightingale' floors, and they sing underfoot in little bird chirps; some say the sound effect is an anti-theft measure, but in reality, it's a result of nails squeaking against floorboard clamps. The twittering noise, the scent of tourists' bodies pressed together, the darkness of the wood, the minimal windows, the elaborateness of the decor—all can make a 21st-century visitor feel as if they're walking through a fold in time. 541 Nijojocho, Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto, 604-8301, Japan Ponto-chō Alley The wildest, most thrilling meals we had in Kyoto were the accidental ones. We loved the experience of wandering into a restaurant, hovering our Google translator over the menu, and pointing to whatever looked interesting, or like something we couldn't possibly get anywhere at home in Florida. I had the best smoky eel of my life in a place with large plastic bins where strange, spiky, unidentifiable (by me) sea creatures sat waiting to be plunked into baskets and fried. This alleyway, right next to Kyoto's main Kamo River, is packed with tiny, pristine bars and yakitori, an excellent place to sit outside and watch people—of all ages and nationalities and levels of tipsiness—flow by.
Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
Rock Band Cardinal Black Recommends Welsh Travel Sites
Welsh rock band Cardinal Black poses triumphantly after their first concert in New York City at a sold-out Gramercy Theatre. Cedric Perrier Most American travelers are unfamiliar with the riches of South Wales Valleys in Wales. They are very familiar, though, to the members of Cardinal Black, a Welsh rock band that performed a stellar debut concert in New York this month before a sold-out audience at the Gramercy Theatre and then embarked on a U.S. and Canadian tour that ends Aug. 30. 'It's a picturesque part of the world with a strong national identity and an abundance of character, history and heart,' says Chris Buck, Cardinal Black's super-talented guitarist who, like all the band members, hails from the region. 'There'll be a welcome (for Americans) in the hillsides.' There are several can't-miss sites in South Wales Valleys, Buck says. The region, located north of the English border and Welsh cities Cardiff and Swansea, extends about 60 miles from Carmarthenshire in the west to Monmouthshire in the east. 'Even though I've been there innumerable times,' Buck says, Big Pit, our national coal museum in Blaenavon, always has a profound impact to see the dangerous, claustrophobic conditions that my grandfather and great grandfather worked in for most of their lives. There's also the Roman fortress in Caerleon, one of the best-preserved examples of a Roman amphitheater in the United Kingdom.' The South Wales Valleys, according to the Welsh tourism website offer 'big green spaces that are perfect for walking and mountain biking.' The website suggests a visit to Aberdare, a town dubbed 'Queen of the Hills' that sits 'at the base of a wide and grand valley.' The town has quaint cafes, restaurants, pubs and bars and is 'the cradle of the British film industry,' where filmmaker William Haggard produced more than 30 films. Members of the Welsh rock band Cardinal Black take in the sights at Newgale Beach in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. Lewys Mann About 23 miles south of Aberdare and just south of South Wales Valleys, Buck recommends a visit to St. Fagan's National Museum of History in Cardiff, Wales' capital and largest city. The museum is located four miles west of the city center. 'It has dozens of meticulously relocated historic Welsh buildings,' he says, 'including a cenotaph commemorating, amongst others, my great uncle who was shot down and killed over Berlin (in World War II) in 1945.' Cardiff Castle is 'a notable part of Cardiff's history and skyline, reportedly first commissioned by William the Conqueror and with remains from the Norman and Victorian eras,' Buck says. 'It's also a pretty epic place for a first gig, as we found out in late 2021! Maybe we should go back!' Caerphilly Castle, about a 20-minute drive north of Cardiff Castle, is the biggest Welsh castle and worth a visit, Buck says. It also was a good place for a high school prom, he adds. Buck and his wife had their wedding reception at The Skirrid Inn in the Brecon Beacons mountain range adjacent to South Wales Valleys. 'At nearly a thousand years old, it is Wales' oldest pub and one of my favorite places in the world,' he says. 'It has a slightly macabre history, having been frequented by the infamous Hanging Judge Jeffreys, who presided over the execution of seemingly every petty criminal in Wales in the 17th Century. The subsequent rope burns are still visible on the wooden beam in the pub's stairwell, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it's reported that the pub is prodigiously haunted. Granted, it's not your typical tourist destination, but it's fairly indicative of Wales' varied and sometimes dark history.' Brecon Beacons National Park includes four mountain ranges, according to and is 'full of grassy moorlands, heather-clad escarpments and old red sandstone peaks, softened by weather and time.' The park has more than 2,000 miles of footpaths and is a favorite of mountain bikers. Outside his home region, Buck has other recommendations for travelers to Wales. 'West Wales, particularly Pembrokeshire, has always been a firm favorite for family holidays, not just my own, but pretty much every family east of Swansea!' he exclaims. 'Joking aside, it's an extremely beautiful part of the world and home to St. David's, the U.K's smallest, quaintest city.' Members of Cardinal Black (left to right), vocalist Tom Hollister, guitarist Chris Buck and drummer Adam Roberts, stand behind the Welsh flag in West Wales. Lewys Mann Since starting his own family, Buck has a newfound appreciation of Tenby, a town known for its harbor and beaches about a tw0-hour drive west of Cardiff. 'Although fairly touristy, it's a quirky, incredibly pretty little seaside town,' he says. 'Further north (more than a three-hour drive from Tenby), Snowdonia National Park is stunningly beautiful and home to Wales' highest peak. The Wye Valley on the Wales-England border is also incredibly scenic and home to Tintern Abbey. For all its beauty, Tintern Abbey will always make me think of overhearing someone in an adjacent pub inform children that the Luftwaffe was responsible for its state of disrepair, despite Henry VIII having beaten them to it by some 400 years.' Laugharne, about a 90-minute drive northwest of Cardiff, was the home of poet Dylan Thomas, and visitors can see the Boathouse where he worked. 'I'm convinced that, at some point on the drive into Laugharne, you pass through a portal that takes you back into 1950,' Buck says. 'You're transported to a simpler, bygone era replete with charming cafes, bookshops, pubs and Dylan's Boathouse and writing shed. Browns Hotel may not be the dingy, smoke-filled boozer of Dylan's era, but Laugharne still has a character and charm uniquely its own.' Browns Hotel was Thomas's favorite local pub. When he lived in New York, he loved the White Horse Tavern, which apparently reminded him of the Laugharne pub. Cardinal Black's visit to New York was brief—the band headed to Toronto a day after its sold-out New York concert—but Buck noticed some similarities between the Big Apple and Cardiff. 'Obviously, they're world's apart in terms of scale,' he explains. 'New York's a global metropolis; Cardiff's a small capital city of a country with half the population of New York City. I only had a few days in New York City, but I got a feel for a similar sense of local pride in its identity. 'I spoke to no end of New Yorkers excited to tell me about their city and offer advice on where to visit,' Buck continues. 'You'll encounter a similar enthusiasm for their city from someone from Cardiff, especially around (soccer) match days or gigs in the stadium. Oasis recently opened their comeback tour at Cardiff's Principality Stadium, and the atmosphere in Cardiff around that show was electric. There was definitely a vibrancy and energy around Cardiff that I sensed, however fleetingly, in New York.' Cardinal Black concludes its North American tour Aug. 30 in Camino, California, and, heading back to the United Kingdom, Buck will have fond memories of New York City. 'I fell head over heels in love with it,' he says. 'Admittedly, a truly memorable sold-out show at the Gramercy Theatre probably predisposed me to like the place a little more, but there's something so impactful about rounding a corner and being confronted with buildings and places that you've only ever seen in films. It's truly iconic and awe-inspiring. I'm looking forward to going back when we have a little more time to actually soak in the city and not run around collecting backline (equipment needed for a live show). First dates of a tour are always a little hectic, and it's a shame those dates fell while in a city that I'm so desperate to see.'
New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
Lee Zeldin says Army's 250th anniversary parade made him ask Pete Hegseth if he could rejoin
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin says he was so stirred by the esprit de corps of the US Army's 250th anniversary parade in June that he asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if he could rejoin its ranks. 'I'm coming off of the grandstand with the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and I turned to Pete, I said, 'Pete, that was awesome. I regret getting out of the military, sign me back up,'' Zeldin revealed on the latest episode of 'Pod Force One,' out now. 'And he looks at me,' the EPA leader told The Post's Miranda Devine. 'He's like, 'I could change that. I could get you right back in.' And then we just kept walking. I didn't run with it, just there, because I think I was happy … But in a brief moment there, during that great military parade in Washington, I was ready to sign back up.' 4 Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin was so stirred by the esprit de corps of the US Army's 250th anniversary parade in June that he asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if he could rejoin its ranks. Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post The Army's 250th birthday fell on Flag Day, June 14, 2025, which also happened to be President Trump's 79th birthday. Hundreds of thousands of Americans flooded into the nation's capital to watch more than 6,000 troops and hundreds of vehicles and aircraft process along the route. The celebration, marking the military branch's founding a year before the Declaration of Independence, also featured drum and fife players in Revolutionary War-era costumes. Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here! Other soldiers wore Civil War, World War I and World War II, Vietnam War and Gulf War-era uniforms as they marched down Constitution Avenue near the National Mall. The Army's Golden Knights parachute team also made an appearance, drifting down into the Ellipse near the White House. 4 'I'm coming off of the grandstand with the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and I turned to Pete, I said, 'Pete, that was awesome. I regret getting out of the military, sign me back up,'' Zeldin revealed. REUTERS 4 Zeldin served 22 years as both an active-duty and reserve officer in the Army, before retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in May. Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post 'Every other country celebrates their victories,' Trump said in a post-parade speech that month, calling the Army 'the greatest, fiercest, and bravest fighting force ever to stride the face of this earth.' 'It's about time America did too,' he added. Full Episode Zeldin served 22 years as both an active-duty and reserve officer in the Army, before retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in May. 'A lot of what I learned inside the military relates here,' Zeldin noted of his public serve. 'I wore around my dog tags seven Army values, the acronyms, leadership, loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, personal courage.' 4 A staff sergeant once told Zeldin to be a well-liked platoon leader he needed to 'drive a nice car, chew tobacco' and 'smoke' his troops 'on their PT [physical training] test.' Ron Sachs – CNP for NY Post Zeldin also remembered as a young ROTC cadet getting some straightforward advice from a staff sergeant about how to be a well-liked platoon leader. 'He said, 'Drive a nice car, chew tobacco, smoke them on their PT [physical training] test.' Start your day with all you need to know Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters Between 2003 to 2007, the future member of Congress was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and deployed to Iraq in 2006. 'When you're single as a 20-year-old, going out the back of a plane, nothing about it makes any sense, but you're not overthinking it,' Zeldin recalled to Devine. 'When you're married with kids and you're walking out the plane … ' he added, before saying he'd recite his wife and twin daughters' names each time he jumped.
