Siberian Pipe Dreams
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Kevin Godbee - Oct 22, 2014
- 9 min read
Julia Szabo
With pipe in hand, supermodel Irina Pantaeva is turning heads in Hollywood. She’s one of the world’s most sought-after supermodels, an exotic beauty who came to New York four years ago from her native Siberia. A brunette Eskimo, she sought to leave her mark on a profession still dominated by Scandinavian blondes. And leave her mark she did — she’s been photographed for the world’s glossiest fashion publications, and was profiled in The New Yorker by no less a scribe than Jay McInerney — and her lyrically-written new book, Siberian Dream (Bard/Avon, $23) poignantly tells the tale of how she made it happen.
It’s safe to say that Irina Pantaeva is smokin’ — and not just because of her more obviously intriguing attributes. Check out the Savinelli in her slender, perfectly manicured hand.
Her love affair with pipes began back in Russia, where Irina would spend childhood summers visiting her grandparents in rural Siberia. There, she watched transfixed whenever her "tadeshka" (Russian for "grandma") would take out her well-worn pipe, a cedarwood beauty decorated with Buryat Eskimo carvings, inlaid with semiprecious stones, and outfitted with a silver bowl-cap on a tiny silver chain. Little Irina always anticipated the moment when delicate rings of smoke would rise high in the freezing-cold air and vanish faster than they appeared….
"I loved to sit with her," Irina recalls, "and observe the way she would clean her pipe, then put fresh tobacco in and press it down a little bit, then try it without a fire. And then she would light it with these old Russian matches, and she would start to create smoke rings."
Little did her tadeshka know that the smoke rings she made for Irina’s delight weren’t ephemeral at all. How could anyone have suspected that early exposure to the rituals surrounding a fine, satisfying smoke would turn out to be a life-defining experience?
Just last month, Irina’s tadeshka gave Irina her treasured pipe as a gift. "I felt a great connection to her, a continuity between our generations," Irina remembers with a tender smile. "It’s a very old pipe — holding it, you feel like you’re holding centuries. I plan to use it, because if you don’t use a pipe, it’s not going to work any more."
But Irina fulfilled her destiny as a pipe smoker already a year ago, when she received the news that she’d been cast in Woody Allen’s film Celebrity as a fashion model named Barbara. Anyone would be thrilled at such news, but for Irina, an avid student of film and theater and an Allen fan, this was much more than a good career move. "I already knew a lot about his work and his philosophy," Irina says, although she can’t pinpoint her favorite Allen film because, she adds., "I love almost everything he’s done. I always find some great message in his work, and what I like is that he has great subtext that he delivers in a very subtle way — there’s always something in-between the lines."
Subtext is, of course, the exquisite specialty of the Russian Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov another of Irina’s favorite authors. For someone practically weaned on the works of Chekhov (Irina grew up surrounded by theater people, as both her parents worked for the theater in her hometown of Baikal) a chance to delve into dramatic subtext, to bring a character to life, was a dream come true.
Cut to her first meeting with Woody Allen. Clearly, Irina can make a lasting impression just by entering a room. Her resume already details film experience that includes headlining a Russian action-adventure movie in 1988, guest-starring on TV’s "Third Rock From the Sun," and landing the lead in the 1997 feature Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. But she wanted to make sure Woody Allen wouldn’t forget their encounter. So, when the enigmatic director stepped forward to introduce himself — "Hi," he offered, "I’m Woody Allen" — Irina responded by introducing herself in character.
"Hi, I’m Barbara," she announced. The line was a hit. Woody Allen laughed! Irina had succeeded in getting his attention. Her next hurdle was keeping it.
"I didn’t get the whole script, but I got my sides [the part of the script with her character’s role], and one of my scenes was with a couple of other actors, Charlize Theron and Kenneth Branagh," Irina explains. "It was a scene in a restaurant where we had to smoke and have conversation — one of those slice-of-life scenes [Allen] likes to have in his stories. But I didn’t have any lines, and there was no more information about my character except that her name was Barbara. So," she adds with a decidedly mischievous smile, "I was thinking, I should DO something in this scene." That’s when she decided to smoke a pipe.
"I started to think, Who is Barbara? Who is she?" Irina says. "I was not given a lot of circumstances, and no character history or storyline. I had to create them. I love doing that anyway, so I said OK, what’s going on in this scene? We’ll all be sitting at a table, and the focus will be on the dialogue between Charlize and Kenneth. And I thought, What am I doing there? Did they invite me? What kind of relationship do I have with them? If we’re sitting together at a restaurant, probably we’re quite close friends.
"And then I started to picture some scenes from Allen’s movies, and I figured it would be black and white, so I started to remember the scene from Manhattan, at Elaine’s, and how he shoots big scenes at restaurants, how his camera moves. I pictured in my mind how he likes to position his camera, how he pays attention to every single word from every actor in every scene — even if the actor isn’t the star, you can hear every word. So I thought, OK, there will be a lot of people in the scene, plus Charlize and Kenneth, and nobody knows my name. But if I smoke a pipe, when people watch the movie they’ll say, ‘Hey, do you remember that girl smoking a pipe?’ Besides, in black and white, it would look beautiful."
Over-the-top this may seem, but for an actor who cares deeply about her craft, it’s all in a day’s work. Remember, one of Irina’s countrymen, the great Russian theater pioneer Stanislavsky, made famous the notion of building a character — even one with no lines — from the inside out. It’s an m.o. that American theater pioneers such as Lee Strasberg would later reconfigure as The Method. In building her role as Barbara, Irina merely deployed Stanislavsky’s teachings with Method precision.
OK, so she knew next to nothing about her character. But this much Irina did know: Barbara smoked a pipe. Irina’s first task in building the role? Locate Barbara’s pipe.
At De La Concha, tobacconists in midtown Manhattan since 1966, Irina spent "almost two hours" selecting one, ultimately set tling on Savinelli’s aptly-named "Elegance" model. "They were very attentive and very patient with me," she says, "explaining to me what to do and how to clean it, and all these things. I really got into it. Here’s a store for real pipe smokers," she marvels, "and they took care of me like I was a member of their private club."
As for Barbara’s tobacco, Irina opted for Tropical Mist, a top-selling house blend of Virginia and dark black Cavendish that De La Concha’s Michael Bowman characterizes as "probably our second most popular aromatic, with a light kiwi-vanilla kind of aroma to it."
"I figured there’d be a lot of people around me on the set, and a lot of takes," Irina says, "and that’s a lot of smoke, so I wanted to get something that everybody could enjoy." After some quality rehearsal time — "I had to practice for a couple of weeks," she says, "otherwise I might choke right there on the set!" — Irina was ready for action.
"I brought the pipe with me the first day of shooting," she says. "I’m sitting in my trailer thinking, Should I ask? Should I tell? Should I just do it? So I changed into my outfit, a red top and black skirt with lotus flowers [provided by her friend Vivienne Tarn, whose designs are also favored by Julia Roberts and Madonna]. And they called me to the set."
As she waited for hair and makeup, Irina brought along Barbara’s pipe, concealed in a small evening handbag. Then, she recalls, "[Allen] started to block the scene, seating us at a long table. I was sitting right in front, at the end of the table, and he came over and said, ‘You know, you’re just having dinner, having a nice time … drink, have coffee, do whatever you want.’ I said, ‘Great!’ So I took my pipe out and I started to smoke."
Irina managed to turn heads, even among the presumably been-there, done-that Woody Allen crowd. "Nobody seemed to be upset," she recalls, "but they were really surprised. They turned and said, ‘Oh, you smoke a pipe.’ I said, ‘Yes, I do. So I started to smoke and we did one take, we did another take, and many many, many other takes. And later I started to feel like smoke was coming out of my ears!"
“Then Woody came over to me, and said, ‘Can you hold your pipe closer to your face? I will start with your close-up.’ And he did, following the long table and ending on the main dialogue on the other end of the table. We did that a couple of times, then he came to me, said, ‘Can you give me some lines please?’ and turned and walked away."
Since her childhood, when she would entertain her parents with impromptu stagings of skits she wrote and directed herself, with (who else?) herself cast in the glamorous leading role, Irina has demonstrated a talent for improvisation that’s served her well in all aspects of her life. (Her book chronicles the scary moments during which she fast-talked her way out of an attempted rape on a dangerous street in Russia.) Now, she had "literally a couple of seconds" to think of what to say.
"I was shocked — I had to think very fast, because already they said, ‘We’re rolling.’ So I started improvising lines, and with each take I had to come up with something new, because he likes to have something very real and fresh, and I knew that if I repeated the same lines he wouldn’t like it. It was a great experience."
By the end of the shoot, Irina earned praise from Caesar; evidently, her performance had impressed the great Woody Allen. "He came over and said, ‘You’re a crazy one!’ she reports, her smile in high-beam mode. "Of course, he said it in a very nice way."
Was it the pipe? Only Woody knows for sure.
PipeSMOKE Winter 98/99
Written by Kevin Godbee
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Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! Maybe especially with the help of their pipes in the art of thinking and philosophy. Recall the words of Mr. E=MC2 when he said, “I believe that pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in all human affairs.” Amen and amen! Dealing with world-rattling events takes a calm and objective view of things, to the Pundit’s way of summing it up. You just don’t go messing around with quantum physics without a calm and objective approach, methinks. Or as the extraordinary physicist Robert Oppenheimer said after he and a team in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Labs developed a way to split atoms into bombs during World War II. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said Oppenheimer referring to the development of the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It must be pointed out that Oppenheimer was more of a cigarette smoker than a pipe smoker. Nonetheless, pipes were part of his personality. Now, if you have read some of the great authors of the past and present, their pipes were always nearby. Reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can be a three-pipe problem at times. S. Lewis and Jean-Paul Sartre require time with your pipes to reflect on the existential problems and solutions these authors provide in learned novels and other narratives. Or take Edwin Hubble and Bertrand Russell, philosophers of another world. Pipes are required for reading. The quantum lode of ideas Pundit is attempting to sort out is that our pipes are relaxing and stimulate our thoughts and creativity. Especially in these last months of the year. Many times Pundit has had that light bulb flick on while smoking my beloved pipes. And friends in Pipedom, it ain’t easy to turn on the lights in Pundit’s rock pit head. Now it’s time for a quote from a Pipe Smoker of the Past. Shelby Foote was born Nov. 17, 1916, in Greenville, Miss., and died June 27, 2005, in Memphis, Tenn. A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Well there’s nothing like a touch of the plague to usher in the changing season. Leaving the airport just when the first advertisements for all things pumpkin spice began to appear—lattes, muffins, shampoos, trash bags, and myriad other concoctions—so, too, my ability to breathe freely disappeared. The unfortunate side effect of losing one’s sense of taste and smell for weeks is the utter inability to enjoy tobacco. Not that I consider myself an expert on anything but my own tastes, but be forewarned that this review was made with mildly impugned sensory equipment. Just when a comforting pipe was most needed, its comfort was denied. Be that as it may, the road to recovery found me limping along on one lung this past month, trying to wrest the particulars of two blends on offer from Sutliff: the latest 175th Anniversary blend, Silver Quarter, as well as their spooky seasonal Maple Shadows II. Silver Quarter is a new style on offer from Sutliff, their first coin-cut blend. Naturally a Virginia-Perique, it is enhanced with a traditional core of black Cavendish. In the tin it holds much promise, with a lightly bready and very woody, if ever-so-slightly sour, aroma. After some time acclimating to air, the bouquet softens further and offers hints of the burley with some chocolaty notes wafting through the more dominant dry grassy aspect. The tin art is of a coin-style bas-relief bust, presumably of a founding Sutliff brother, à la The Old Boss On the reverse of the tin we find the blend’s description: Reflecting on Sutliffs 175 years of tobacco excellence, we came across a brand that embodies true value, SILVER QUARTER. This name pays homage to Sutliffs roots, the legacy of two brothers who popularized pipe smoking in the burgeoning mining society of San Francisco. We celebrate this heritage with a coin cut composed of the finest African Virginias, complemented by a core of Perique and Black Cavendish. The tin notes are, forgive the pun, on the nose for a good VaPer blend: mild tart sweetness peeking out from behind dried hay and slight chocolate undertones, with a lightly tannic finish of weathered oak. It is always a joy to prepare a coin cut, my preference being to put a few in my palm and vigorously warm my hands together to fully break them apart. These well-formed discs pack and light easily, and smoke with little prodding to the end of the bowl. For technical points it scores well—it smokes light, and it’s easy to tend the ember. While it gets sharp after a few quick bowls, pacing should be heeded to easily smoke down to the heel without inviting bite. Of the flavor, though, I am left a bit wanting. There are tart and high notes aplenty, but very little of the lemony citrus I would anticipate, as well as scant midtones; they tend more toward the red wine-vinegary and sour. The flavors are muted, also, lacking the sweetness and piquancy of other marques—the small measure of Perique tickles the nose now and again with peppery hints, and there is a smidge of a deeper sweetness to be found in the Cavendish from puff to puff, but overall it lacks some dynamism. The Virginias, to my palate, come off a bit on the dry side, and here they dominate the blend. The aftertaste and mouthfeel are neutral, again evincing more of the dry, woody, tartly tannic end of the spectrum. The blend has plenty of polish, but not enough depth or richness (*yet) to make it a standout. Here, comparisons are inevitable: Luxury Bullseye Flake has more sweetness, both from its Virginia as well as its Cavendish, and a better finish; Davidoff is similar but with a pronounced umami that is absent here; as for Escudo, I haven’t had any fresh tins lately so it would be unfair to compare. While it rates as a solid, fairly mild smoke, particularly to lovers of the genre, it does not surprise with any exceptional flavors. To be fair, all the boxes have been checked for the blend to benefit from some real aging, and it would be worth checking in on this after a couple of years sealed away. I’ve set half my tin aside to sample again in a month or two, in case I’m merely suffering from the lingering effects of parosmia, and will amend this review in that case. Maple Shadows II, on the other hand, made up for the weeks of sniffling and sneezing I’d endured. Offered in a full 8 ounce tin with delightfully spooky Halloween art, it’s (hopefully) enough to last through the season. Somehow I had missed this last year, so it’s a real pleasure to get some in my candy bucket this year. As the chilling winds of autumn draw eerie prattle from contorted, deciduous limbs, we find ourselves possessed by the spirit of the season. Bewitched by a dissonant charm, we’ve created Maple Shadows. In a season that is defined by the unlikely harmony of treats and frights, we’ve joined the enchanting sweetness of maple with the earthy spice of Dark Fired Kentucky for a smoking experience that captures the senses with an otherworldly fusion of flavor. This may be the best aromatic blend Sutliff’s ever made—and they make a ton of them. First off, it’s not overbearing in the least—quite the opposite, it is also one of the more restrained aromatics they’ve ever made, with a clear but very light topping that melds oh-so-well with their choice Kentucky added to the mix. Opening the tin, the sweet maple is up front and center, but so too is the must of fallen leaves, bready pie crusts, and a crackling fire in the hearth—a perfect invocation of Herbstdüfte in a can. Packing best in an open and capacious bowl, the flavoring is subtle, and recedes to the background while puffing. With a sweet coffee or tea to accompany, the aftertaste of the maple is reinvigorated on the palate […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 632. Our featured guest on tonight’s show is the host of the Pipe & Tamper Podcast, Mike Murphy. Brian and Mike will have an extended chat revolving around the days before, during and after the Las Vegas International Pipe Show. We will hear about their travels to the show and the anxiety of Hurricane Milton bearing down on Florida at the same time while running a show and not knowing if your house is going to be there when you get home. In the end, the show went great and our homes survived, although many others in Florida were not so lucky. We’ll have clips from the show, and shoutouts to other podcasts and vlogs that were broadcasting from the pipe show.
Vegas Baby The show started out strong on the 14th floor hospitality suites hosted by the Vegas Pipe Show and Smoking Pipes as well as room hopping to carvers, estate sellers, and vendors to pre-game for the festivities. If you’re interested in what that looks like I’ll refer you to last years pipe show round up. I circled with Brian Levine to get the totals in comparison to last year: This year’s show numbers: 108 Exhibitor tables, 445 attendees, 3,250 Raffle Tickets, 100ish dinners, 172 Rooms in the Hotel. Last year, by comparison, 107 exhibitor tables, 425 attendees, 2,200 raffle tickets, 104 dinners, and 175 rooms on Friday and Saturday nights. We were at capacity, basically, when it came to vendor tables and the dinner, so there is no physical room for growth at this point except for attendees. That said, we filled that smoking lounge to the brim. New Carvers Spotlight Garret Woo (Pipes by Woo) How long have you been carving? Garret: I’ve been carving since 2021, and I’m guessing your next question is probably how’d you get started carving? James: Yes. Garret: In 2021 I took a break from my full time job – that included machining and assembly work and I thought maybe it was time I made something that I would like and I started looking at youtube and Instagram and putting together my shop. I did struggle on the stems to start and there was a lot of failure at the beginning. James: How many pipes have you made so far? Garret: I number my pipes, so I just finished up 186. James: What is your favorite shape you’ve been making? Garret: I really dig Canadians and pipes with longer shanks and lovat Canadian blends. I like to play with different shapes of stems on the longer shanked pipes. The billiard would be my go-to shape but I want to learn more techniques on freehanded shapes. I like to put brass and copper adornments on my pipes with my machining background it helps. James: What is the craziest thing you’ve seen at this show? Garret: The first thing that comes to mind is the table over there with C-Pipes with the shapes and the size and petiteness and the intricate details they did. You can check out what Garret is working on by going to his Instagram. Stefan Cashwell James: how long have you been carving? Stefan: about 3 years. James: What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen at the show? Stefan: The Adam Davidson pipe with the clear shape and the bamboo—I don’t know if it’s 3D printed or what, but it’s amazing. James: What’s your favorite shape to do? Stefan: That’s a tough question. I think they’re all the same shape, but what’s fascinating is that Dublin, volcano, and blowfish are all the same depending on how you turn them. Playing with that, with all its variations, is a lot of fun. My favorite accent to use is also horn; it’s finicky, but it’s a great accent on pipes. You can check out Stefan’s work on his Instagram. Science: Meet Pipes I chatted with Chris from the San Diego Pipe Club; he started off doing stem replacements for estate pipes but also improved the airflow. James: How are you doing 3d printing? What is the thought process? Chris: It’s a 3D-printed pipe with a briar insert. The design is a calabash meets a Peterson system meets a metal Falcon/Kirsten radiator style. It is a bottom draft smoking bowl like a radiator like those metal pipes. The inside chamber is a calabash. The stummel and accent rings in the stems are all 3d printed. The insert is briar, olive wood, or I have the potential to use meerschaum as well. This idea came about through the San Diego Pipe Club, wanting to see if we could 3D print a pipe and being curious about the technology; I have a printer and design ability, so here we are. James: What’s the type of plastic you’re using? Chris: It’s all PLA plastic, a renewable potato starch plastic that is food-safe. The stummels are printed with a plastic that has wood in it 40% wood fiber, bamboo, rosewood, ebony, redwood, and walnut are the woods I’m printing. For the accent rings I just got a new material that I’m printing that has 40% copper, so its real metal that you can sand, and polish the same as wood filament. The stems are 3d printed as well. The concept is renewable and cheap from a production standpoint, with the ability to make a very high quality smoking pipe based on the experience. By combining the calabash system pipe and bottom draft hole and using 3d simulations to see airflow, I can see where I’m having eddies and ripples in my current, and see where my moisture and all the particles are dropping back out from a vapor to a liquid. Most people who have tried these say the stems are clean, and they don’t even have to run a pipe cleaner afterward because everything collects at the bottom. Chris has also been experimenting with color-changing plastics so you can see the hotspots. Chris said he was able to use this to slow down his cadence, which, of course, could mean you could get a slow-smoke training pipe to teach yourself to perform better. If you’re interested in learning more or want to check one out, you can contact him on Instagram: Copper Beard Pipe Works The Negative Space The show was buzzing about one specific pipe, which had everyone guessing how it was made. I chatted with Adam Davidson briefly about it. James: How did this idea come to fruition? Adam Davidson: Smokingpipes.com had an expo back in August open to all of the makers they carry. The theme was to make a pipe utilizing bamboo. Given that the last time we had the expo I made a smooth Almond with three bamboo shanks, […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 631. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with pipe maker Dan Keller from Good Made Better. Dan is from South Dakota. Growing up working in the family hardware store where he was always finding solutions to fixing things, he ended up always wanting to make things. He now makes elegant handmade pens, pen holders, portable desks, blotters, blotting paper, book carry cases, and of course artisan pipes. At the top of the show we are continuing the virtual tour of Brian’s pipes with his “f#@k you pipes”.
