Guilty Pleasures

By Associated Press

Haruki Murakami unveils his new short story at a Tokyo literary event

TOKYO | Only 1,100 lucky audience members were there to hear the yet-to-be published short story “Kaho,” read aloud by bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami himself.

The reading took place at a Friday night book event called “The Owl Reads in Spring” — a fundraiser for the Waseda International House of Literature library at Murakami’s alma mater in Tokyo, also featuring award-winning author Mieko Kawakami.

“It’s freshly made, only about 10 days ago,” Murakami told the audience, adding that he wrote it for the event. The last Murakami short released was “First Person Singular,” more than three years ago. His prolific literary work also includes essays, non-fiction and translation.

Murakami, relaxed and casually dressed in sneakers, jeans and a dark jacket, said writing a story for recitation was not easy.

“It’s actually quite hard to write a new story for reciting,” Murakami said. “Its content and style have to fit recitation, and it has to be relatively short.” The story still came out too long, he said, and read it in two parts during the event at Waseda University.

Journalists at the event were allowed to report story names, but not their content.

Now 75 and one of the world’s most popular and acclaimed novelists, Murakami debuted with “Hear the Wind Sing” in 1979, four years after he began writing while running a jazz bar in Tokyo. His 1987 romantic novel “Norwegian Wood” was his first bestseller, establishing him as a young literary star. His latest bestselling full-length novel, “The City and its Uncertain Walls,” was released in 2023 in Japan and is awaiting an English release.

The Owl event is a second for him and Kawakami, who said she is a longtime Murakami fan from years before she became a novelist. The two took turns reading aloud at a 2019 event where Murakami unveiled an earlier short story, “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey,” later published as part of the short story collection “First Person Singular.”

Kawakami, now an acclaimed author known for her bestseller “Breasts and Eggs,” translated to English in 2020, recited her new short story titled “Watashitachi no Doa (Our Doors)” at Friday’s event.

She debuted as poet and her first novella, “My Ego, My Teeth and the World,” in 2007, and her novel “Heaven” was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.

Iris Apfel, fashion icon known for her eye-catching style, dies at 102

NEW YORK | Iris Apfel, a textile expert, interior designer and fashion celebrity known for her eccentric style, has died. She was 102.

Her death was confirmed by her commercial agent, Lori Sale, who called Apfel “extraordinary.” No cause of death was given. It was also announced on her verified Instagram page on Friday, which a day earlier had celebrated that Leap Day represented her 102nd-and-a-half birthday.

Born Aug. 29, 1921, Apfel was famous for her irreverent, eye-catching outfits, mixing haute couture and oversized costume jewelry. A classic Apfel look would, for instance, pair a feather boa with strands of chunky beads, bangles and a jacket decorated with Native American beadwork.

With her big, round, black-rimmed glasses, bright red lipstick and short white hair, she stood out at every fashion show she attended.

Her style was the subject of museum exhibits and a documentary film, “Iris,” directed by Albert Maysles.

“I’m not pretty, and I’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter,” she once said. “I have something much better. I have style.”

Apfel enjoyed late-in-life fame on social media, amassing nearly 3 million followers on Instagram, where her profile declares: “More is more & Less is a Bore.” On TikTok, she drew 215,000 followers as she waxed wise on things fashion and style and promoted recent collaborations.

“Being stylish and being fashionable are two entirely different things,” she said in one TikTok video. “You can easily buy your way into being fashionable. Style, I think is in your DNA. It implies originality and courage.”

She never retired, telling “Today”: “I think retiring at any age is a fate worse than death. Just because a number comes up doesn’t mean you have to stop.”

“Working alongside her was the honor of a lifetime. I will miss her daily calls, always greeted with the familiar question: “What have you got for me today?,” Sale said in a statement. “Testament to her insatiable desire to work. She was a visionary in every sense of the word. She saw the world through a unique lens – one adorned with giant, distinctive spectacles that sat atop her nose.”

Apfel was an expert on textiles and antique fabrics. She and her husband Carl owned a textile manufacturing company, Old World Weavers, and specialized in restoration work, including projects at the White House under six different U.S. presidents. Apfel’s celebrity clients included Estee Lauder and Greta Garbo.

Apfel’s own fame blew up in 2005 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City hosted a show about her called “Rara Avis,” Latin for “rare bird.” The museum described her style as “both witty and exuberantly idiosyncratic.

Her originality is typically revealed in her mixing of high and low fashions — Dior haute couture with flea market finds, 19th-century ecclesiastical vestments with Dolce & Gabbana lizard trousers.” The museum said her “layered combinations” defied “aesthetic conventions” and “even at their most extreme and baroque” represented a “boldly graphic modernity.”

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was one of several museums around the country that hosted a traveling version of the show. Apfel later decided to donate hundreds of pieces to the Peabody — including couture gowns — to help them build what she termed “a fabulous fashion collection.” The Museum of Fashion & Lifestyle near Apfel’s winter home in Palm Beach, Florida, also plans a gallery dedicated to displaying items from Apfel’s collection.

Apfel was born in New York City to Samuel and Sadye Barrel. Her mother owned a boutique.

Apfel’s fame in her later years included appearances in ads for brands like M.A.C. cosmetics and Kate Spade. She also designed a line of accessories and jewelry for Home Shopping Network, collaborated with H&M on a sold-out-in-minutes collection of brightly-colored apparel, jewelry and shoes, put out a makeup line with Ciaté London, an eyeglass collection with Zenni and partnered with Ruggable on floor coverings.

In a 2017 interview with AP at age 95, she said her favorite contemporary designers included Ralph Rucci, Isabel Toledo and Naeem Khan, but added: “I have so much, I don’t go looking.” Asked for her fashion advice, she said: “Everybody should find her own way. I’m a great one for individuality. I don’t like trends. If you get to learn who you are and what you look like and what you can handle, you’ll know what to do.”

She called herself the “accidental icon,” which became the title of a book she published in 2018 filled with her mementos and style musings. Odes to Apfel are abundant, from a Barbie in her likeness to T-shirts, glasses, artwork and dolls.

Apfel’s husband died in 2015. They had no children.

Film director who was shot by Baldwin says it felt like being hit by a baseball bat

SANTA FE, N.M. | A movie director who was shot by Alec Baldwin during a movie rehearsal — and survived — testified Friday at trial that he was approaching the cinematographer when he heard a loud bang and felt the bullet’s impact.

“It felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my shoulder,” said Joel Souza, who was wounded by the same bullet that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set for the upcoming Western movie “Rust” on Oct. 21, 2021.

Souza never filed a complaint but was called to testify as prosecutors pursue charges of involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence against movie weapons supervisor Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who maintains her innocence. Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer on “Rust,” was separately indicted by a grand jury last month. He has pleaded not guilty, and a trial is scheduled for July.

Prosecutors are reconstructing a complex chain of events that culminated in gunfire on a film set where live ammunition is expressly prohibited.

Souza said his workday began before dawn with the realization that six camera-crew members had walked off set. Hutchins put out urgent calls for replacements, and filming was back underway by late-morning in an outdoor scene involving horses and wagons.

Work after lunch started with positioning a camera in preparation for an extreme close-up take of Baldwin drawing a gun from a holster inside a makeshift church. Souza said he moved in behind Hutchins for a closer look at the camera angle but never saw the gun that shot him.

“I got up behind her just to try to see on the monitor, and there was an incredibly loud bang,” Souza said. “This was deafening.”

Baldwin and his handling of firearms on set are coming under special scrutiny in questioning by prosecutor and defense attorneys.

On Thursday, prosecutors played video footage of Baldwin pressuring the movie armorer to hurry up as she reloads guns between scenes.

“One more, let’s reload right away,” Baldwin says at the close of a scene. “Here we go, come on. We should have had two guns and both were reloading.”

Gutierrez-Reed can be seen quickly loading a revolver.

Expert witness Bryan Carpenter, a Mississippi-based specialist in firearms safety on film sets, said Baldwin’s commands infringed on basic industry safety protocols and responsibilities of the armorer.

“He’s basically instructing the armorer on how to do their job … ‘Hurry up, give it to me fast,’” Carpenter said. “Rushing with firearms and telling someone to rush with firearms is not — not normal or accepted.”

On Friday, defense attorney Jason Bowles pressed Souza to remember whether the script explicitly called for Baldwin to point the gun toward the camera, where he and Hutchins were standing.

“And do you know whether, from the script, whether that firearm was supposed to be pointed towards the camera?” Bowles inquired.

“It’s not a matter of the script, really. For that specific shot, it was literally supposed to be the gun being pulled out sideways,” Souza said.

Prosecutors say Gutierrez-Reed is to blame for unwittingly bringing live ammunition on set and that she flouted basic safety protocols for weapons — partly by leaving the church rehearsal while a gun still was in use. Defense attorneys say it wasn’t Gutierrez-Reed’s decision to leave.

Souza said he only recalled seeing Gutierrez-Reed inside the church after he was shot.

“I remember at one point looking up and her standing there … distraught,” Souza said. “I remember her saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Joel.’ And I remember somebody just screaming at her, and they just ushered her out.’”

Prince Harry gets OK to use key evidence in phone hacking case against Daily Mail publisher

LONDON | Prince Harry scored a tactical victory in his battles with British tabloids Friday when government ministers said he could use confidential documents that show payments by the publisher of the Daily Mail to private investigators who allegedly snooped on him and several celebrities.

The Duke of Sussex, Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley and others claim that Associated Newspapers Ltd. hacked their phones or used other unlawful means, such as bugging and other electronic surveillance to spy on them.

Justice Matthew Nicklin in November had rejected the newspapers’ effort to throw out the case, but his ruling also dealt a blow to Harry and the others.

Ledgers showing payments to private eyes that had been leaked to Harry’s legal team from a government inquiry into phone hacking could only be used with the newspapers’ permission or by an order from the judge who oversaw the 2011-12 probe or the government ministers who had ordered the inquiry, Nicklin said.

Associated Newspapers, which firmly denies the allegations and called them preposterous, refused to turn over the documents and opposed the government releasing them.

In a joint statement Friday by the home and culture secretaries — the departments that had ordered the Leveson Inquiry into press standards — said the documents could be used in the court case.

“In our judgment, the public interest in promoting the just, speedy and economic resolution of the proceedings outweighs the countervailing public interests,” the statement said.

Associated Newspapers said it would not comment on the decision.

The development comes as Harry’s flurry of litigation is winding down with trials due in the case against ANL and another case alongside Hugh Grant that makes similar allegations against the publisher of The Sun.

Harry won a big victory in December after a judge found phone hacking at Mirror Group Newspapers was “widespread and habitual.” After winning a judgment in court, he recently settled remaining allegations for all his legal fees. The total sum wasn’t announced, but he was due to receive an interim payment of 400,000 pounds ($505,000).

Harry, 39, the younger son of King Charles III, has bucked family tradition by going to court in his crusade against the press and was the first senior royal in over a century to enter the witness box when he testified in the Mirror trial.

His luck, so far, in the hacking cases has proven more successful than three cases related to the government’s decision to strip him of his publicly funded protection detail in the U.K. after he quit working as a member of the royal family and moved to the U.S.

A judge ruled Wednesday that the government did not act irrationally or treat him unfairly when it decided to provide security on a case-by-case basis. Harry vowed to appeal.

He recently withdrew a libel case against the Daily Mail over an article that said he tried to hide his efforts to continue receiving government-funded security. He dropped the case after a judge ruled he was more likely to lose at trial, because the publisher could show that statements issued on his behalf were misleading and that the February 2022 article reflected an “honest opinion” and wasn’t libelous.

He could be faced with big legal bills in the cases that he has lost or dropped.

—From AP reports