Heroine With 4000 Faces

A Cubist Portrait of Nicole LaLiberte

By Ahmed Mori

Originally published in Z!NK Magazine, Holiday Cover Feature

Perhaps not uncommonly for members of my generation, my childhood run‐ins with ballet were limited to Holiday season performances of The Nutcracker. And while I learned Tchaikovsky’s name early on, my only true appreciation of his ballets through puberty was a monophonic Swan Lake ring tone for a high school girlfriend on my old Nokia. College made me more culturally inclined, but I’d still be pressed to nail a classical dance category during an episode of Jeopardy.

Therefore, I was equal parts intrigued and intimidated when Nicole LaLiberte suggested I watch an old YouTube clip of Anna Pavlova performing The Dying Swan. Choreographed by Mikhail Fokine in 1905, the pint-­sized ballet was a piece d’occasion for Pavlova, who performed it over 4000 times. I first watched a 1907 recording where stage lights flicker off her skin as if it were translucent and harbored heaps of lit roman candles. The famous 1925 rendition is identical in form, but the lightness is gone and her world-­weariness comes across as melancholia.

“She was so true,” said a spellbound LaLiberte of the Pavlova footage.

The Dying Swan’s off-­stage history encases 4000 sides of one individual. It’s fitting, then, that LaLiberte describes her personality as a perennial flux of interests and worldviews, and every character she plays represents one of 4000 or so facets. Even her movie tastes are difficult to collapse, although she displays a penchant for pre-­talkie gems and, for the sake of our conversation, settled on Greta Garbo’s Mysterious Lady.

Like Pavlova and Garbo, LaLiberte boasts a brand of candid anti-­academicism that distinguishes her from our generation’s crop of up-­and-­comers. Her polymathic resume is penned with a seismograph, tracing a path from humble Clifton Park beginnings to classical ballet student in NYC, and later a series of modeling gigs en route to becoming an eclectic actress with enough alt-­flare to reach the Tumblr mob.

Email me to read more, or purchase Z!NK Magazine’s Holiday 2011 Issue

Allergic to Failure

Steve Aoki trades Allegra for microsleep

By Ahmed Mori

Originally published in Z!NK Magazine

Not everyone is a morning person. Mine are riddled with coffee breath and hypnic jerks that often preface ‘Aha!’ moments, akin to a Tasered temporal lobe. Although on one particular morning, a more epiphanic jolt helped me realize my first ever Skype call would be an interview with Steve Aoki in Bryant Park.

List that under ‘bragging rights’ on my Google+ profile.

For those unacquainted with the electronic music and DJ scenes, Aoki is a silky-haired green tea junkie who presides over his audience like a conductor behind decks, brandishing imaginary katanas above his head. As son of former Japanese Olympic wrestler and Benihana founder Rocky Aoki, brother to supermodel Devon Aoki (and uncle to her newborn son, Hunter), the Miami-born, LA-based DJ hails from a family of A-type personalities with B-type swagger. His passport booklet looks like a teenage scrapbook, his list of Twitter contacts could sell for millions on eBay and his list of entrepreneurial ventures in the last three years alone would make MBA students and weathered businessmen watch him with the kind of skepticism the rest of the world harbors for James Franco.

With that said, Edison once criticized people who sleep eight to ten hours a day, claiming they were “never fully asleep and never fully awake”. Indeed, the image of Edison, Tesla and Ben Franklin battling sleep deprivation is a romantic one, as is the idea of Greek muses dropping off Temazepam prescriptions. In 2006, Aoki’s ‘Pillowface’ concept, defined as “what I consider my alter ego when I’m traveling, [in which] the only time I can sleep is on planes”, culminated in the following year’s Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles, a debut mix album marked by collaborations with renowned names like Justice, Bloc Party, MSTRKRFT and Peaches.

Email me to read more, or purchase Z!NK Magazine’s September 2011 issue.

Salvation Army Seeks Funds for Summer Day Camp

By Ahmed Mori

Originally published in the White Plains Patch

Jesus Palacios first read about the Salvation Army in a letter from his wife, Elizabeth, on a bunk in the South Texas Immigration Detention Facility.

Palacios’s absence took a toll on his significant other, who worked round the clock to provide food for their children and finance her husband’s legal battles. His children were rebelling in school and treating Palacios as a stranger—acting coldly during phone conversations and not wishing to write him.

“In the first few months, [my children] were taking on strange attitudes, acting as if they weren’t mine,” recalls Palacios, who migrated from Mexico to White Plains 11 years ago with his wife. “They were becoming rebellious and weren’t learning much. The Salvation Army accepted my children into their program, and they changed greatly.”

Elizabeth Palacios first approached the Salvation Army of Greater New York to seek help caring for her children while she raised money to cover her husband’s legal fees.

The Salvation Army welcomed the Palacios family with open arms, enrolling their daughter, 10, and son, 6, in both the summer day camp and after school programs.

“The professionals at the Salvation Army explained to my children why I wasn’t there, and helped console both them and my wife,” said Palacios, whose run-in with immigration officers stemmed from an expired work permit.

Today, Palacios is a legal U.S. resident and is reunited with his family in White Plains.

Click here to read more