A Window Somewhere

Campfire

2012-01-26T05:02:00.000-08:00

Piotr Kowalski

"Cube 5 A"

1967

"We are born trapped in our own selfish skins, and we open our eyes to the rings of existence around us. The ring right around us, of lovers and spouses and then kids, is easy to encircle, but that is a form of selfishness, too, since the lovers give us love and the kids extend our lives. A handful of saints "love out to the horizon," circle after circle—but at the cost, almost always, of seeing past the circle near at hand, not really being able to love their intimates. Most of the time, we collapse the circles of compassion, don't look at the ones beyond, in order to give the people we love their proper due; we open our eyes to see the wider circles only when new creatures come in, when we realize that we really sit at the center of a Saturn's worth of circles, stretching out from our little campfire to the wolves who wait outside, and ever outward to the unknowable—toward, I don't know, deep-sea fish that live on lava and then beyond toward all existence, where each parrot and every mosquito is, if we could only see it, an individual."

Adam Gopnik, from "Dog Story," The New Yorker

Bloomberg Design and Construction Excellence Commission

2012-01-20T04:53:00.000-08:00

The Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) building in The Bronx via Inhabit

I was walking up Second Avenue the other day. On the corner of 69th Street there was a fenced off piece of nothing. The building had been demolished and an empty lot of dry earth and stone rubble was all that remained. What I noticed first was the light; it's brighter away from the shadows of tall building. A breeze whistled unfettered down the street to ruffle my hair and raise the smell of earth last exposed in the time of Edith Wharton.

What had been there just a few weeks before? I couldn't immediately recall. Two rumpled 19th-century 5-story brick tenement buildings: the type that is ubiquitous (but every day less so) across the east side, upper and lower. One of the store fronts had housed an Italian restaurant closed for over a year. Undoubtedly, a high-rise glass and steel residential building will rise up in its place.

It's sad to think of old buildings where generations have lived being torn down, and yet, it's also sad to think of New York not continuously renewing itself, looking towards the future.

Engine Company 201 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn via Flavorwire

The loss of older buildings is often felt acutely because of the design features ubiquitous in an earlier, more ornate age. Many newer, but not new, buildings seem purely functional, yet not in a cool, stripped down Bauhaus kind of way. Government buildings, often working with tight budgets, have traditionally been among the most soul-dampening.

However, in the past decade, New York's Design and Construction Excellence Initiative (DCE) and subsequent Department of Design and Construction (DDC), have injected a shot of adrenaline into government bids. Mayor Bloomberg first announced the DCE in 2004 and appointed the British architect David J. Burney as design commissioner.

While mindful of the bottom line, Burney made clear that the city values design. Jobs did not automatically go the lowest bidder, but to design firms willing to think both creatively and cost-effectively.

Engine Company 277 in Bushwick, Brooklyn via Flavorwire

One of Burney’s first acts as commissioner was to challenge STV architects to design something exciting for Engine Company 277 in Bushwick. The building subsequently received the 2004 Art Commission Award for Excellence in Design from the Art Commission of the City of New York.

The recession has increased the number of top-notch design firms available to work with the city. Via the DCE, the small budgets and strict requirements endemic to government buildings have inspired not just functional formulaic buildings, but rewarded flexible thinkers who view these challenges as sources of inspiration.

Many of the DCE's projects have targeted station houses, libraries, and other municipal buildings in neighborhoods under served by innovative high profile architects.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts via Flavorwire

Design is sometimes portrayed as the spoiled younger sibling to more substantive pursuits. But good design seems to fulfill quite a primal therapeutic human need, dating back to the vivid sketches on cave walls. Design is an outward expression of our most noble aspects of humanity, and it engages us, and makes us take pride in the spaces we inhabit. The DCE marks an exciting turn in the progression of New York. If we must have new, let's make it our best new.

Two of My Favorite Ladies

2012-01-09T17:43:00.000-08:00

Via Tom and Lorenzo

Christina Hendricks and Vivienne Westwood.

Werk.

Nog

2012-01-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

Via Chow

The season of egg nog has ended.

It ushered in December, sipped while jostling elbows under the cracktastic light spectacular at Rolf's bar — New York's most infuriating and magical Christmas spot. Clutching overpriced store-bought egg nog mixed with liquor, us diehards held firm at the bar eyeing potential usurpers with the death stare, avoiding the food, slightly dazed by the profusion of garlands, tchotchkes, and hollow-eyed porcelin dolls hanging from the ceiling. Yet, it's perfect. Standing in a halo of lights and holiday baubles, everything seems right.

Via Jared The NYC Tour Guide

And then a few weeks later, we celebrated at home with home-made egg nog. Egg nog seems to date back to at least 1600s England, where the fresh ingredients of cream and eggs made it a quaff available only to the monied classes. Those with access to fresh dairy promptly mixed it with brandy or Madeira or even sherry. Ancestors of egg nog are posset, a mixture of eggs, milk, and ale or wine, or the egg flip, where similar ingredients are tossed between two glasses until frothy.

But egg nog really hit its stride in the American colonies, where plentiful land meant people of more modest means had access to fresh dairy. Rum, known as grog — started coming into play and things started getting awesome. Rum was part of the Triangular Trade from the Caribbean; so it was more affordable than brandy or other European spirits. Egg-and-grog became egg nog, though some argue the name derives from the word "noggin," a small wooden mug used to serve drinks in taverns. Nog is an old English word for a kind of strong beer (hence noggin). Egg and grog in a noggin? Rum ran a little dry during the Revolutionary War, but the homegrown bourbon was a willing and able substitute.

Via BlissTree

It's been a good run this past month, with egg nog in coffee, egg nog on cozy evenings glazed in brandy; its heft pleasant in the hand. And just as quickly as this indulgence came calling, it is gone again for the year. And the cool calm of January sets in, where a simple hot tea or a bourbon alone calms the spirit with its singularity, its clarity.

The holiday season has a slight mania to it, where every fun event is a bulwark against the harrying craziness of end-of-the-year loose ends threatening to form a choke hold. And so those festive parties and rituals become ever more charged, like the old pagan winter festivals whose burning yule logs warded off the darkness of endless night. The holiday lights gleam bright, we are warmed, and restored, and by the new year, we are recalibrated, free of both stress and indulgence, a calm slate ready for new adventures and new cocktails.

Happy New Year.

Eyes on the Future

2011-12-07T04:32:00.000-08:00

Via oh darling my darling

"Just when it seemed like we might have to marry poor Chuck, Viv got a love letter from a man she'd never met. It came to her at the Portland Hotel where she operated the cigar stand on the evening shift."

— Diane Simmons, from the story "Letters"

Imprint Movie

2011-12-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

Via libraryman

One of my favorite questions to ask people is "What movie did you see at in impressionable age that forever changed the way you saw all other movies?"

This isn't the same as "What is your favorite movie?" It's entirely possible, though implausible, that your "imprint movie," as I'll call it, isn't even a movie you like anymore, but simply a movie that was the one that hit you at the right time, the one that made you grow up and see things differently.

The imprint movie is the movie that makes you realize that any movie you saw before it doesn't count anymore; you might as well re-add it to your list because you didn't really see it, at least from the guise of your adult self.

Via Unboxed Writers

For me, that movie was Mike Nichol's 1967 film The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. Hey, I never said the "imprint movie" had to be some indie gem known only to you and your coolest compadres. :)

In the movie, Ben (Dustin Hoffman) is a college graduate who returns to the glossy comfort of his parents' posh southern California world. He is filled with utter malaise, feeling expectations upon him to make the right choices and continue on the path to prosperous adulthood.

Via engadget

More out of apathy than desire, he succumbs to the advances of Mrs. Robinson, the elegantly aggressive and profoundly damaged older woman who swans in the same circles as his parents.

Via The Guardian

Ben "wakes up" when he begins to aggressively pursue Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine. Despite her loveliness, it is unclear what drives him so manically, other than sensing a fellow innocent soporifically gliding along on the path so clearly laid out for her. Benjamin takes action on her behalf, but it's unclear who he is really doing it for. That ambiguity about who he is, where they are, and where they are going continues towards the famous ending.

I saw this movie when I was about 16 or 17, when I was just beginning to imagine a life I might make for myself. I don't think the pressures I felt were imposed upon me; rather I imposed them on myself. The Graduate had an honest directness that spoke to me at the right movement. The glorious shots of California at its most dreamy and the crooning sounds of Simon and Garfunkel at their most haunting added up to a move experience that I hadn't known existed before.

Via DGA

I spoke to a teacher last week who said that his greatest wish was that his students become something. He didn't care what they became, as long as they became.

He wanted them to avoid stasis and live in a continuous state of becoming. That sounds about right.

Easy Being Green

2011-11-28T04:50:00.000-08:00

Via Johnny Vintage

Happy holiday season everyone.

Peachy

2011-11-17T05:31:00.000-08:00

Marilyn in 1949 via We Heart Vintage

"I was very devout in those days and was practicing my religious devotions almost to perfection. Since then I've become hypocritical about my lip-service and a little tired and cynical. Because now I am grown so old and neutral. . . . But then I really believed in the reality of charity and kindness and humility and zeal and neutral tranquility and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world (usually the immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco) in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise."

- Jack Kerouac, from The Dharma Bums

All that Glitters

2011-11-10T04:16:00.000-08:00

One of the most memorable anecdotes in Dana Thomas' excellent book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster was that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some victims used their Red Cross vouchers to buy Louis Vuitton bags instead of food and supplies. I wonder if they felt the bags would nourish them more, either to make them feel better by bringing their lives a touch of glamor or as an opportunity to bring in extra cash if they sold them on eBay to others desperate for a piece of the dream. Either way, it is a testament to the power of the perception of luxury, of a belief that possessing the right things make one somehow more right. And that need, Thomas argues, has been carefully cultivated with ferocious tenacity by the dwindling handful of corporate owners of the myriad number of luxury brands that haunt our dreams.

Written in 2007, the text is already somewhat dated, as ostentatious consumerism has been tempered somewhat in the wake of the economic downturn that bore down upon us in 2008. Still, she makes a compelling case that we are obsessed with buying and specifically, buying into luxury. And that is because, she argues, for many more people, the luxury fruit doesn't hang so high on the tree. Luxury companies, like Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, she argues, used to serve only the super rich, and produced items handcrafted in small numbers by skilled artisans, and the very few with the means to purchase these items paid mightily for them. And so it went. For decades, luxury items were for the very rich. The rest of us could never dream of owning them.

Inspiring, truly individual style via Advanced Style

But over the last 20 years, luxury became big business and executives realized that value could be infused into not quality but in status, in the logo, in the "It" bag. And everyone wanted status. And everyone could feel like they could have it. Quietly, executives started targeting the middle class, not the truly rich, and while they staged splashy runway shows to stoke the fires of desire, their bread and butter became the aspirational entry-level items, the perfumes, the sunglasses, and especially, the handbags. These are the small items that the middle class can grasp onto and be part of the dream. A $300 pair of sunglasses, while expensive, isn't a $5,000 dress, and you can wear them every day, and everyone will see the conspicuously-placed Prada label, and you will be a part of It.

At the same time the target customer has secretly become the not-so-wealthy, the quality of many luxury items, Thomas argues, has gone down. With the exception of a few companies (Hermès receives a particularly glowing write up for their individual hand-craftsmenship), many have quietly moved their manufacturing overseas to mass-production factories and have subtly cut corners on craftsmanship and materials. Bags and logo-branded smaller items took over a bigger part of the advertising budget.

Inspiring personal style by FrouFrouu

Of course, the major fashion design houses do have truly talented designers working on crafting beautiful things, that brighten our world and help us express ourselves in a way that makes us our best, most chic, most creative selves. I love style, I love aesthetics, I love the self-expression of adornment. Every season I check out the collections on style.com. This book did nothing to temper those feelings, but it did provide a helpful reminder that behind the creative visionaries, fashion is still a business intent on making a profit. I was reminded how important it is to like beautiful things because they truly speak to me and to try to resist buying into the fantasy of marketing hype.

I'd recommend Deluxe to anyone interested in fashion, in economics, in globalization, and, of course, in luxury (whatever that means).

You Could Lose Your Mind

2011-11-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

Via Olsens Anonymous

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen at the Metropolitan Opera gala premiere of Rossini's "Le Comte Ory," in March, 2011.

I would have never imagined that these two would become such original voices.

The chic restraint of their covetable collection The Row and their fascinating personal style is a consistent source of interest.

Arias with a Twist

2011-10-29T09:59:00.000-07:00

Via The Advocate

I am sitting in a coffee shop listening to Sinatra staring out at a beautiful New York afternoon. The neon sign of the corner coffee shop shines even in the pure afternoon sunlight.

Many people come to New York to become who they wish to be. The characteristic unfriendliness here is really a way of providing an artificial sense of personal space. Sure, wear that crazy outfit; no one's going to comment.

Via Janet Charlton's Hollywood

Joey Arias, one of New York's treasures since the late 70s, is a singer and performance artist and knows how to fill out a sequined evening gown.

Why am I drawn to him? I like his confidence. The way he sings in a beautiful smoky jazz voice (which is pleasing and disarming at the same time) the campy humor, and the armor-like glamor of high artifice.

Via QueerMagnet

Arias grew up in Los Angeles, where he performed in a rock band and in the famed SNL-seeding improv group, the Groundlings. He came to New York and found a job at the Fiorucci clothing store, where he and other employees danced in the shop windows to show off the clothes. While there, he met the legendary downtown icon Klaus Nomi and became his collaborator. Arias and Nomi performed with David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979.

Via Ages of Delirium

As part of the 1980s performance art scene, he performed regularly at downtown clubs and in cabaret rooms, where he honed his uncanny homage to Billie Holiday. In the 90s, Arias hosted legendary weekly shows at Bar d'O. In between, he found time to appear in a few movies, including Big Top Pee-wee, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

After a stint in Vegas, he teamed up master puppeteer Basil Twist to create Arias with a Twist, which played to rave reviews off-Broadway. The show was the subject of a 2010 documentary that played at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Via Brightest Young Things

I recently was privileged to catch a brief revival of Arias with a Twist at the Abrons Arts Center. Basil's fabulous creations were ingenious, delusionally silly, and uncannily beautiful. The visual and musical spectacle was unlike anything I've seen before.

Via 24700

The plot was incidental — something about an alien abduction (and subsequent "probe"), landing on another planet, returning triumphantly to New York as a giant, a descent into hell, a nightclub performance — something like that. It doesn't matter. Ever present was a full scale visual spectacle, talking plants, marionettes, fabulous Basil, always Joey.

Via Three Dollar Bill Cinema

Every day is a performance, what we wear, how we express ourselves. Build a shield of sequins.

For more on Joey Arias, here is a recent New York Times article.

Toy Soldiers

2011-10-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

Via The Style Scout

I am back from exile. It is restorative to take a break from the daily demands and even the pleasures that have become rituals. To see where you are, you need a little distance.

Filled now with clear thoughts and intentions of self-improvement, it is no longer baffling to think of someone hotglueing toys to a headband to achieve eye-catching whimsey. In a time when people seem to be smiling less, it seems like time very well spent.

March onward, my friends.

Let the Music Play

2011-10-06T03:57:00.000-07:00

Muppet Annie Hall via Muppet Wiki

This weekend, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image to see an exhibit called "Jim Henson's Fantastic World." It was lovely to learn about his wunderkind career (he had his own TV show at 19!), his early innovations in commercials, and his ultra-cool 60s design work. Seeing the actual muppets was a thrill in itself. Their nubby fuzzy fur was so close; apparently the first Kermit was made out of Henson's mother's old overcoat.

But the best part was the little screening room set up at the end of the exhibit. Colorful beanbag chairs were strewn around the floor. People lounged and sat, gazing up at clips of Henson's various projects: Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, the muppet movies, and on and on. Children sat next to hipsters sat next to suburban moms sat next to urban professionals. The joy was palpable.

And I felt a little emotional tug when I saw the fraggles bouncing through their theme song, "Laugh your cares away, worries for another day . . ." I had watched this show during its original run when I was preschool-age. I hadn't really revisited it since, but that song stirred up some primal part of who I was.

I can never address nostalgia as beautifully as Don Draper did in the Mad Men Season 1 finale, but to quote him, "it takes us to a place where we ache to go again." Of course, not really. We remember most clearly what was good and shed the old pains, which is admirable. But that goodness, though remembered, is locked away from us forever, never to be recaptured, only recalled.

And yet, Jim Henson's work is not just a nostalgia trip. His work was direct, and clear, and tapped into a very elemental level of joy that is infectious. Some gems, like this one, came to me much later in life, and I wonder how I could have missed out on such fun for so long.

Update: an interesting article on the origins of Mahna Mahna.

Happy Friday

2011-09-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

Donald Sutherland via Nerd Boyfriend

And a good day to you too, Sir.

Going Under

2011-09-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

Via The Boat Lullabies

"In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do so many Englishmen; dead, he is not even the ghostly creature he was then."

— Jorge Luis Borges, from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" Ficciones

In all candor, I can't say I understand this story, but the language sticks with me like elegant morsels I want to taste again and again, while the ideas waft up to me like fragrant illusions of something mysterious and elemental.

Comfort

2011-09-14T05:42:00.000-07:00

All paintings in this post by Mark Rothko

It was a weekend that was supposed to be full of guests; the pull-out couch was ready to be sprung. Cocktail places were scouted; brunch menus planned. But then amidst all this, the hurricane warnings began trickling in, people began leaving early on Friday, wishing each other well with a "Stay Safe" as they slipped out into the streets and into the subway, where energy buzzed amongst the riders. The disparate spirits of New Yorkers unified beneath the pale sunshine that preceded the storm.

The trains were shutting down the next day at noon; our house guests had canceled. I sat on the train, ticking off a shopping list to fill our bare cupboards. The next day, as the wind howled, I roasted a chicken, stirred a risotto, and chilled a bottle of wine. These aren't the guilty pleasure comfort foods that I crave most often — cheeseburgers, mac 'n cheese. No, the chicken seemed comforting yet serious — a reflection of the gravitas of dark skies and potential doom from something I couldn't control.

In the end, the city was spared much of Irene's wrath. The weekend became a quiet retreat; we holed up and cared for the body and soul. In informal polls over the next few weeks, I learned that many of my friends took to their quiet kitchens, roasting chickens, baking bread, pressing macarons into vanilla ice cream. Amidst the mania, there was a simple desire for comfort: to nourish and warm the palette.

This past week brought many somber remembrances of the September 11th attacks: museum memorials, grey magazine covers, a man draped in flags walking across 42nd street, and a concert of choral singers in the lobby of the building I work in. I dreaded the anniversary; I'm surprised by how much these reminders have upset me. Perhaps because they haven't really been reminders. It's still a fresh memory; each day a New York paper reports on the construction efforts at the World Trade Center site.

September 11th came at a very key point in my adult life, literally weeks after I had ventured off into the world to become who I wished to be. And it shaped my understanding of the world.

But really, it's just very sad.

People were hurt; people learned to fear.

Column McAnn has a small piece in this week's New Yorker about how he watched a woman sit alone at a cafe in the days after September 11th. Slowly and methodically, her expression blank, she ate a piece of chocolate cake, staring off into the distance, lost somewhere.

A simple act that was hard to understand, like a lot of things.

cool

2011-09-07T04:37:00.000-07:00

Photo by Laurent Weyl via hui yan

''Most of my ideas seem startlingly self-evident. I wonder why I didn't think of them before.'' — Claire McCardell

Claire McCardell

2011-08-31T05:36:00.000-07:00

Via Fashion Encyclopedia

The Fashion Institute of Technology houses one of my favorite museums in the city. Regular free exhibitions highlight exquisite examples of clothing design through the ages. At a recent exhibition of American fashion, a name kept popping up next to refreshingly simple, yet stylish garments. Everything seemed clean and playful. And so smart. Smart in both the British sense of stylish -- but also smart in the sense of intelligence. Clothing that was functional, yet beautiful, understated, but not boring.

Via Metropolitan Museum of Art

The designer was Claire McCardell (1905 - 1958), whom I now understand to be one of the most influential figures in American fashion history.

Via Ye Olde Fashion

One of the first American designers to have name recognition, she is often compared to Frank Lloyd Wright for her quintessentially American style. She did for fashion what he did for architecture: created pieces formed by function, inspired by the lifestyles of their future owners. She was known from the 30s to the 50s for designing functional, affordable, casual, and stylish women’s sportswear. Called the creator of the “American Look,” she is considered the founder of American ready-to-wear fashion.

Via Decades

"The gal who defied Dior" had a democratic approach that rejected the formality of French couture that was the pinnacle of mid-century fashion. Her simple, inexpensive clothes, capitalized on World War II restrictions on the availability of French fashions and fabrics.

Via Corbis

In a 1955 Time cover story on McCardell, the author argues that the American concept of leisure had shifted from serenity and conspicuous wealth (as identified by Thorsten Veblen) to something else:

". . . in the U.S., the meaning of elegance has changed as much as the meaning of leisure. It is a leisure of action—barbecue parties in the backyard, motor trips along country roads and across the country, weekend golf and water skiing. From America's lively leisure has evolved a new, home-grown fashion, as different from Paris fashion as apple pie from crepes suzette."

Via Flickriver

McCardell did owe some debt to France. In her second year at Parsons, McCardell attended the school's branch in Paris, where she studied techniques of the couture houses, such as Madeleine Vionnet.

Via CMadeleine's

McCardell became known for her use of common, natural-fiber fabrics such as cotton, denim, and jersey (even in eveningwear). She was the first to use zippers, popularize leotards, put spaghetti straps on evening gowns, and was the originator of mix-and-match separates, pedal-pushers, bareback summer dresses, and strapless swimsuits. In 1942 she started the ballet flat craze after wartime shortages forced her to put her models in fabric-covered Capezio dance slippers.

Via Metropolitan Museum of Art

She simplified evening wear and dressed up day wear. The beauty of McCardell's clothes lay in the cut which produced a clean, functional garment. Her clothes are simple and clean of line, with "buttons that button and bows that tie." To McCardell, garments needed to have a reason and comfort was an intrinsic part of style.

Via Shrimpton Couture

McCardell was very interested in the draping and styling of classical Greece and Rome. Her clothes accentuated the body but did not require structured undergarments, such as padded shoulders, girdles, corsets, and crinolines.

Via Metropolitan Museum of Art

McCardell's clothes reflected the changes in her lifetime: jazz, realism, Rosie the Riviter, and postwar optimism. Revolutionary in their time, her clothing married athletic freedom with style.

Pantsuit from 1938 (!) Via Ye Olde Fashion

Clothes designed by Claire McCardell are now held by museums across the country. Her ideas have so influenced and pervaded contemporary fashion that Life magazine, in 1990, named her one of the 100 most important Americans of the twentieth century. Four years later, New York Times senior fashion writer Bernadine Morris even dubbed her "this country's finest designer."

Via Metropolitan Museum of Art

Coco Chanel is purported to have said, "Elegance is refusal." But I think McCardell's work represents "Elegance is ease." Or at least, in McCardell's hands, it looked easy.

Via Metropolitan Museum of Art

It means a lot to me to to think of McCardell defining and encapsulating an American look. She didn't live that long ago. Though the 20th century was pretty indisputably the American century, we are still a young country. When we are at our best, I'd like to see the truism of the "American look." Smart, practical, innovative, with a style all our own.

Via GlamourSplash

Lizzy Stardust

2011-08-26T05:34:00.000-07:00

Via Australia Potter

Oh, don't mind us.

Dischord

2011-08-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

At the punk show in the gutted, graffitied tenement on the Lower East Side, sweat dripped off artful tattoos in the stuffy air.

But her? She smelled like chai.

Strandbeest

2011-08-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

Animaris Umerus walking - June '09 from Strandbeest on Vimeo.

Built by man, powered by air, the beast minces with the off-familiarness of dreams.

More about Theo Jansen's amazing kinetic sculptures here.

The Dinner Party

2011-07-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

All images via Sweet Paul magazine

From my mother I learned the importance of sitting down together at the table each evening, the bounty of farmer's markets, and the casual elegance of California cuisine.

From my father I learned showmanship, the allure of imported ingredients, and to always keep a guest's wine glass full.

From my stepmother I learned to be ambitious when planning menus, but to make the final experience seem effortless.

From myself, I learned to learn from my mistakes, that timing is everything, and that a pre-dinner cocktail is always a good idea.

And the Livin Is Easy

2011-07-21T03:49:00.000-07:00

Via I'll Sing This Buried With You

Maybe I'll see you at Coney Island, where the broken glass sparkles along with the glittering sea, and the air smells of hot dogs and salt.

Lady Wilde

2011-07-19T04:27:00.000-07:00

Via

"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."

I met someone last week who went by the name Lady Wilde. She was young and self-assured and loved Oscar Wilde.

And really, who wouldn't?

Via

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, natty dresser, and aesthete, was one of the great intellectual lights and sparkling wits of the last century. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest, have become canonical. His life unfortunately ended sadly and too early, but he is remembered as one of art's most dazzling and delightful personalities.

Via

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

The question of who, living or dead, would you most want to have dinner with, came to mind. Such is the conceit of Woody Allen's new movie, Midnight in Paris, where a modern man finds himself transported to Paris in the 1920s and perfect versions of literary and artistic greats -- like Hemingway and Dali -- invite him into their world.

Via

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."

Yet, the problem that always weighs upon me when I think (clearly, overthink) of this scenario is that the question presumes that such a person would want to have dinner with you. Could you imagine sitting with Oscar Wilde, or Dorothy Parker, and not having anything to say?

Via

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

I am reminded of an anecdote I once heard about Virginia Woolf. A young niece of hers sat in on one of the Bloomsbury Group's salons. Virginia read a piece of her beautiful and devastating poetry prose to a rapt and ecstatic audience. Then, she turned her rapier eyes upon her gobsmacked niece and said with a smile, "Now you read."

Via

"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."

My fantasy dinner party would be a large one, where I could sit near the end of the table and watch my idol in full flower, offering an occasional remark.

Via

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."

The late writer Wayne Brown once asked a roomful of his students why they wanted to be writers. I said that I never felt that, when I spoke out loud, I was saying the right thing or it never came out clearly, I almost couldn't trust that who I spoke myself to be was really who I was.

Via

"Only the shallow know themselves."

But when I wrote, I could communicate more honestly. And I wanted to communicate; I wanted to yell to an indifferent universe, "Hey, I was here!" So, yes, an utterly selfish reason. I have no ideas that must be shared with the world, a dearth of sparkling witticisms that would inspire sorority girls to name themselves after me. I just want to speak clearly.

Via

"Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more."

There are many reasons to write, I can't say my own is the one I wish to have, but that is that. A childhood book I had on life skills had a central admonishment to be a doer, not a watcher. I, to this day, try to live by this tenant. I say try, because, unfortunately it doesn't always come easy to me. Like many writers, my natural state is to hang back, and observe the world through the narrow peephole of my life.

And hopefully, in art, to make it perfect.

Waxing Gentile

2011-07-07T03:23:00.000-07:00

Via The Rumbling

Chris Gentile, Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York

I could never stop myself from touching the wax, never letting it be, never letting it form such beautiful stalactites.

Little America

2011-06-23T03:55:00.000-07:00

Nigella Lawson's library via Tell You (Today)

One of my earliest blog posts highlighted Diane Simmons' exceptional short story "Suitcase."

It has been republished as part of Simmons' new short story collection, Little America, winner of the Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction.

Ghost Town Gallery

2011-06-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

Belmont, NV

We moved East to grow up. The future was wide and so inconceivable that there was nothing to fear. And no place would ever be lonely, because we were together.

We packed up a Ryder truck that we naturally had to name Winona. And she was angsty like her namesake. Her steering wheel was misaligned so we had to steer crooked to drive straight.

Berlin, NV

This country is beautiful, with wide spaces that were extraordinary to my young eyes.

But Nevada seemed haunted. There is no silence in the desert. The wind roared over the parched earth, as loud as a city yet devoid of people. Winona's radio cycled over and over, searching endlessly for a break from the static.

Caliente, NV

Between the cities where people go to dream big, there is a vast space. Yet even the gas stations have slot machines, where you can pull a lever and hope to be able to buy gas enough to take you to the limits of your imagination.

One of my favorite sites is Ghost Town Gallery. It reminds me of that time in the desert, though the places featured there are much more beautiful than what we saw.

Candelaria, NV

We drove onto windy narrow paths made of dust in search of a ghost town. At the end of the road we parked and got out.

We looked around but all we saw were collapsed buildings. The wood of the walls had blown over the landscape; the foundations the only testament to what was there before. It is amazing how nature will reclaim what is hers.

Goldfield, NV

We stood for a while, a bit sad. And suddenly it occurred to us that we were standing deep in the desert, miles from the highway, alone with a truck containing all our worldly possessions. We were unintentional pioneers.

There was nothing for us, so we left that little outpost in the desert, our lives packed up with us, just as people did a century ago, when the mining dried up and the railroads and highways created paths that made certain locations right or wrong.

Goldhill, NV

And we headed off together, eager to become who we would be, bouncing over roads, building our own foundations.

All images via Ghost Town Gallery.

Rihanna and Annie

2011-06-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

I would have never imagined that I'd end up mentioning Rihanna twice on this blog. I'm not an especial fan of her music. However, she seems to have a gift for partnering with the right people to create moments of stunning visual impact.

Rihanna by Annie Leibovitz for American Vogue, April 2011

The 21 Club

2011-06-09T05:14:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Via Glamamour.

If you were Jimmy Stewart, had a bum leg, and were about to become an obsessive window watcher, what should Grace Kelly bring you?

Why, lobster from 21, of course!

Outside 21. Photo by Dave Beckerman

New York's 21 Club began as sophisticated speakeasy in the 20s, became the ne plus ultra of Manhattan chic at mid-century, and still retains a certain classic old New York cache. According to the book Celluloid Skyline, 21 has been featured in more NYC movies than any other restaurant.

"Lunch is for wimps." Wall Street image via Virtual Gourmet

A line of lawn jockeys decorates the entrance, gifts from wealthy equestrian patrons in the 1930s. The ceiling of the Bar Room is festooned with toys and doodads: a TWA plane from Howard Hughes, a model of PT-109 from JFK, a smashed tennis racquet from John McEnroe, and countless other tokens from industry giants, celebrities, and sports icons.

The Bar Room at 21 via The Daily Mail

Originally located in the Village and called The Red Head, it changed locations and names several times before settling at 21 West 52nd Street in 1929. The site, previously a bordello, was one of many excitingly shady establishments on 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, nicknamed "Swing Street."

Via

During prohibition, 21 was raided countless times, but the authorities never found any liquor. The bartenders would activate a system of levers to tip the shelves of the bar, dumping the bottles down a chute into the city sewers. (That part always makes me so sad.) There was also a secret wine cellar hidden behind food storage and accessible only by inserting a slim piece of wire through a crack in a cement wall. 21 held the private wine collections of such luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Sophia Loren, Mae West, Aristotle Onassis, Gene Kelly, Gloria Swanson, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Marilyn Monroe. The wine cellar is now a private dining room.

(AP) Frank Sinatra escorts Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis into 21, 1975

According to lore, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall get engaged at Table 30 in 1944. JFK dined at 21 on the eve of his presidential inauguration. Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and Salvador Dali were regulars. It was here that Hemingway supposedly told the bartender, "Since I'm not drinking, I'll just have a tequila."

Via Mona's Apple

Poet and Village doyenne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was a regular when it was a Washington Place speakeasy called the Fronton. Millay fan Dorothy Parker began attending with her Algonquin club crowd when the business moved uptown. Coming into 21 on a rainy night, Robert Benchley is remembered as saying, "Get me out of this wet coat and into a dry Martini."

Wine Cellar at 21 via Local Bigwig

The night we went to 21 was after a 20s/30s/40s-themed Halloween party. We were giddy with cocktails and emboldened to walk confidently through the doors without a reservation. Yet, in our peplum dresses, gloves, fascinators, jackets, and ties, we were dressed appropriately, if perhaps oddly. We were whisked in, but stood simply at the bar, not daring to take a seat and open the menu with the $30 burger.

Alfred Hitchcock at 21

We drank Old Fashioneds, because it seemed right and we kept expecting Don Draper to walk in. Yet, we didn't mingle with the jet set. The bartender Ed pointed out with studied casualness the table in the corner that was Humphrey Bogart's favorite, and told of us of the legendary methods of managing the prohibition raids. Mary the restroom attendent called me a dear and said we were perfect for a night at 21. And in an old-fashioned dresses behind conquette-ish net veils, we were. Haunting old New York, looking for ghosts.

Via Wall Street Journal

Chic

2011-05-24T04:15:00.000-07:00

Via FaceHunter

Such a striking combination of "look at me" and "don't mess with me."

Celebrity Deaths

2011-05-19T04:59:00.000-07:00

"Windy Day" by Marvin E. Newman via The Met Museum

My latest parlor game has been to ask people if they've ever been deeply affected by a celebrity death. Responses tend to be mixed, perhaps because it's been a while since Kurt, or Janis, or Jimi, but maybe also because admitting interest in celebrities is uncool, the word "celebrity" most often used these days to describe glossy souls with ephemeral accomplishments.

But one night, after scotch with tobacco bitters, I posed the question once again and G answered without hesitation, "David Foster Wallace."

"Wall Street" by Marvin E. Newman via Le Clown Lyrique

Wallace, the novelist, essayist, and short story writer, is perhaps best known for the novel Infinite Jest. In a 2006 review Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times book critic and not exactly an effusive praiser, wrote “He can do sad, funny, silly, heartbreaking and absurd with equal ease; he can even do them all at once.” The obituaries that followed his 2008 suicide described him as one of the talented and influential writers of his generation. And yet, with the exception of an essay excerpt, I had never read any of his work.

"Broadway 1" by Marvin E. Newman via New Amsterdam Lemonade

I related this story to J months later over barley wine, and the next day she sent me an email titled simply "DFW" that contained nothing except for a link to the very short story from Esquire called "Incarnations of Burned Children." I read it in a two minute burst, my eyes never glancing from the screen.

It is a textbook case of a masterful short story, exceedingly brief, powerfully suspenseful, and utterly devastating in the best possible way. Nearly three years after his death, I understand a little better what we've lost.

The story is here.

There Ain't No Where I'm Going To

2011-05-10T03:07:00.000-07:00

Via If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

I once drove fruitlessly around a graveyard in Lowell, MA, searching for Kerouac's grave.

Though, I guess I'm not sure he found what he was looking for either.

And so when the dusk began to settle on the cold stones, we stood in front of a grave labeled "Smith" and raised a toast.

End of the Line

2011-05-06T04:41:00.000-07:00

Night by Léon Spilliaert, 1908

"The man went to a pet store to buy himself a little man to keep him company. The pet store was full of dogs with splotches and shy cats coy and the friendly people got dogs and the independent people got cats and this man looked around until in the back he found a cage inside of which was a miniature sofa and tiny TV and one small attractive brown-haired man, wearing a tweed suit."

These are the opening lines of "End of the Line," a short story by Aimee Bender that has stayed crisply in my mind for six years since the moment I heard till now, where I find myself immersed in Willful Creatures, the collection from which it comes.

Staircase, Vertigo by Léon Spilliaert

Bender is both a novelist and a short story writer, but I think her talent is best expressed in the short form. There, her spare, fable-like style becomes the ideal showcase for her sad, hilarious, and cruel tales. Her stories are like memories from a time you were just learning how to remember, where the boundaries of what is yours and what was told to you are permeable, when fuzzy lemony sunshine crowded the edges of long ago rooms, where the voices are tinny and far away, and where the stories are a part of you but outside of you. Bender's writing exists in a shadowy area of magical realism strengthened with a steel spine of modernity, detachment, and deadpan humor.

The Posts by Léon Spilliaert, 1910

I heard her read this story years ago at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA. They had a fabulous series called "Books and Brews," where everyone who attends the reading is given a drink ticket for the bar next door and decamps there with the author. It was a beautiful night, in the early stages of a friendship with someone lovely, in a moment when the world seemed filled with more gauzy possibilities than actualities, and the wine flushing my cheeks gave me the courage to ask Ms. Bender simply, "Why are you so awesome?"

Marine Jaune et Mauve by Léon Spilliaert, 1923

Turning to the entire collection, not every story works as well. In some cases, the spare fairy-tale delivery can seem more two-dimensional than Kafka-esque. Yet, the stories that work, End of the Line, Death Watch, Dearth, and several others have a lasting emotional impact and a dark magic.

Mary Katrantzou in Vogue Russia

2011-05-03T03:33:00.000-07:00

Mary Katrantzou in Vogue Russia via ZFashionBlog

I've been sick lately. Spring seems as unwelcome to my body as it is welcome to my spirit. Time to break out of windowless rooms, even lovely patterned ones. Mary Katrantzou's Fall 2011 collection continues to delight.

Revisiting My Love of Country

2011-04-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

Via NY Flyway

Grant's Tomb in Morningside Heights, steps from Columbia University, is the largest mausoleum in North America.

Via The Weblicist of Manhattan

Who is Buried in Grant's Tomb?

Well, no one is really buried there. The bodies of Ulysses S. Grant and Julia Dent Grant are interred there, but they aren't underground. Their sarcophagi are in a circular crypt flanked by a ring of bad-ass busts of Grant's generals. Standing eyeball-to-fierce-eyeball with Tecumsuh is indeed startling. Don't mess.

Photo by Mike Lynaugh

Though born in Ohio, Grant spent his final years in New York. Completed in 1897, his tomb was once a hugely popular tourist attraction, but the visitor stream has slowed to a trickle. After a long period of decay throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the structure has since been restored.


Via http://www.grantstomb.org/ov5.html

When we took our tour, our guide turned to a camera-clad man and asked, "What is the first thing you think of when you think of Grant?"

Startled, he said, "He saved the union."

And then the guide turned to me, "How about you?"

And, I didn't know what else to add. That is the first thing I think of when I think of Grant. I think of scruffy mud-splattered Grant accepting the sober surrender of Lee at Appomattox courthouse, I think of how he turned the tide of the Civil War through his victory at Vicksburg.

And so, I eloquently said, "Uh, that's what I was going to say."

Nice.

The guide seemed surprised. He called us a positive crowd. He said most people come and say that they think of Grant as a drunk and a bad president. Yes, he struggled with alcohol, and yes, his presidency, though laudatory for the establishment of Yellowstone as the first National Park and his progressive views towards African-Americans during Reconstruction, was beset by scandal and is graded poorly by historians.

Still, his death in 1885 was met with great outpourings of public grief and the impressive tomb that houses his remains was raised via public fundraising. Though his civilian life was characterized by missteps, his key role in the creation of the this country, as a unified nation, is indisputable. I think his place on the $50 bill is deserved.

Via Museum Planet

This Thursday, April 21st, Grant's Tomb will be open for a free candlelight tour to commemorate Grant's role in the creation of the National Park System.

Silver Smoke

2011-04-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Via Jak and Jill

Maybe just say yes, but just for today.

I just don't know what to do with myself.

2011-04-08T05:17:00.000-07:00

Via Dipity

I love this White Stripes (RIP) video.

I love that it doesn't seem like a video that the White Stripes would make.

I love that it TOTALLY seems like a video Kate Moss would be in.

I love that at first it doesn't seem like a video that Sofia Coppola would direct, but then I remember this and this and it all makes sense.

The song, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, has been performed by Dusty Springfield, Dionne Warwick,Isaac Hayes, Elvis Costello, Linda Ronstadt, and Smokey Robinson, among others.

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

2011-03-31T03:36:00.000-07:00

Via Samantha West Photography

I love this 1956 Richard Avedon photo of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller taken near the beginning of their reportedly tumultuous 5-year marriage.

It reminds me of the e. e. cummings poem "somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond."

Special

2011-03-29T03:46:00.000-07:00

Photo by Keegan Gibbs

I couldn't stop staring at this Keegan Gibbs photo, trying to decide if it was blissful or terrifying. I am constantly reminded how each of us is just one very, very tiny element in a vast universe. In a sea of options and possibilities, sometimes its hard to avoid a paralyzing sense of rudderlessness.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be special. I am part of a generation that grew up with the sense that we are all special, maybe even destined for great possibilities ahead. But what if that's not true? Sure, we are all unique, but are we all special? Most likely not.

Via Milk is Good For Your Bones

Roxane Gay recently explored some of these issues in her thought-provoking but sobering article on self-publishing in HTML Giant. She dares to suggest that not everyone who self-publishes does so because they are too forward-thinking to be noticed by the establishment; maybe the work just isn't standout enough compared to others'.

We may only reach a handful of people in our lifetimes. But if it's a good life, a thoughtful life, a kind life, a life where one pursues his or her passions and interests purely, that's a wonderful goal to ascribe to, even if we never reach the greatest heights, even if we are ultimately no more special, no more deserving of "success," than any other person with the mental capacity to contemplate for even a few moments their place in the universe.

The ripples one makes may only be small, but so what, just start paddling. It's quite liberating actually.

It's startling how the changed angle of this second Gibbs photo, coming in closer on the woman, revealing the glint of the sun on the water, a sense of horizon, and the addition of sunglasses, changes the feeling completely, despite the fact that she is still in a vast sea.

We had the first hint of spring last week in New York, and its amazing the sense of weight I felt lifted off both my shoulders and the electric buzz of energy coursing through East Village revelers. We started with martinis at the Carlyle and listened to the piano player sing "How About You?" Then on to Tompkins Square Park to eat takeout sandwiches at chess tables in the dusky air.

Happily adrift in a sea of millions.

Get Back

2011-03-22T03:13:00.000-07:00

Ruben Natal San-Miguel, Glamour Break Diva, Harlem, 2009. Via Asya Geisberg Gallery.

Sorry for the slowdown in posts, kittens. More soon.

Robert Longo's Lost Men

2011-03-07T03:55:00.000-08:00

Via Robert Longo

Starting in the late seventies, artist Robert Longo created a series of iconic paintings called "Men in the Cities." Young, trim men in stylish business suits writhe emotively against white backgrounds.

The clear space and stark color palette focuses one's eye on the subjects. They are faceless, defined by their suits. The meaning of the suit has changed in our more casual world; only the most conservative professions require them. The suit's significance continues to shift — from the infamous symbol of mid-century conformity à la the gray-flannel suit, to the Armani badges of power for 80s masters of the universe, to now, where they have become almost a form of cultural rebellion among urban aesthetes.

Longo's men belong to the 80s. Their suits invite the suggestion of power via conformity, power in a highly ritualized way. People in well-tailored suits don't usually writhe around like that. Are these men in pain, thrashing about lost in an abyss, in the throes of pleasure, asserting themselves against the world that defines them? These are all young men, stylish men, urban men; are they in the process of becoming who they will be? Fading to black or coming into focus?

Longo's men also belong to New York. They are another iteration of a long line of New York types characterized by their drive and ambition to "make it here." People move to New York to become who they want to be. They move to San Francisco to escape who they thought they should be.

Longo's "Men in the Cities" continues to be an iconic touchstone, showing up in Patrick Bateman's apartment in Mary Harron's film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho.

Via Vanishing New York

And of course, the influence on the presentation of my current favorite lost man, Don Draper, is unmistakable.

Is it summer yet? I'm counting down the days till Season 5 begins.

All that Glitters

2011-02-25T03:53:00.000-08:00

Glitter Stairway at Lords South Beach Hotel, Miami, Florida.

Via What is James Wearing?

Why so sad, Patsy Cline?

2011-02-22T03:57:00.000-08:00

Via last.fm

I would definitely take Patsy Cline with me to that fabled desert island of deprivation. You know, that mythical island of want, where you are only allowed 3 albums, where your bleak existence is punctuated with unlimited amounts of limited music.

Via CMT

She wasn't a songwriter, and I sometimes wonder if she'd be allowed to be famous today, because she wasn't movie star attractive. But her voice was such an expressive instrument; one listen and I raise a torch to sentiment. She personified heartache; that contralto voice was made to make hurt beautiful.

Via FanPix

Patsy Cline only topped the charts for about 5 years, achieving country and pop music success during the era of the Nashville sound in the early 1960s. She died in a plane crash in 1963 at age 30.

Via last.fm

Her star-making moment came with a performance of "Walkin' After Midnight" on the CBS program Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts in 1957. In a physical manifestation of her country pop crossover, she wore a cocktail dress, instead of the fringed cowgirl outfits that had been a previous signature.

Via Heaven's Gate

After that, the cowgirl never rode again; replaced by a modern woman in chic wiggle dresses, heels, and bright red lipstick. Cline's "risque" new look shocked the country music establishment at first, but, like her sound, her image went from being mocked to widely copied.

Via Phillip Philes

Her signature song, "Crazy," was written by the inimitable Willie Nelson. Cline is said to have initially disliked the song, finding Nelson's method of singing on the demo tape too difficult to mimic. After fraught hours in the studio, she recorded her signature version, in a style completely different from the demo. According to Loretta Lynn, she received three standing ovations the night she premiered "Crazy" at the Grand Ole Opry.

Via last.fm

The musically complex ballad features elements of pop, country, and even jazz, and helped her win an even larger crossover audience. The lyrics feature a world-weary individual, who notes with sad bemusement that she is irrationally in love with someone who clearly doesn't share the same feelings.

Via Patsy Cline Tribute

Perhaps so many artistic expressions describe unrequited love (or chart its demise) because that feeling needs creative output. Love's happiness is complete; it finds expression in itself.

Via last.fm

I've focused here on Patsy Cline's artistic accomplishments, not her personal life. But, despite singing so many sad songs about jilted love, Cline seems to have lived a well-balanced life. Struggles sure, but also happiness; she seemed very much a woman in control of herself and her career.

Via Flash Strap

Like her female contemporaries, Cline was introduced to audiences early in her career with lines such as "Pretty Miss Patsy Cline." But, that soon changed. Johnny Cash said it best on their 1962 tour together, when he introduced her as, “Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Patsy Cline.”

Puff

2011-02-18T03:40:00.000-08:00

Cigarette Smoker, 1964 by Alfred Gescheidt

Via Hot Parade

Blue Valentine

2011-02-07T03:23:00.000-08:00

I saw Blue Valentine recently. It charts the beginning and the end of a great love story. Bravely-acted, the characters are heartbreaking, and flawed, and endearing. The movie is joyfully sad.

Mary Katrantzou Spring 2011

2011-02-02T04:32:00.000-08:00

All images via style.com

Mary Katranzou used old issues of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors as the basis for the stunning digital prints in her Spring 2011 Ready to Wear Collection.

The fabric, featuring images of windows, balconies, verandas, and other vistas, was precisely cut and folded into body-conscious shapes.

The effect is a three-dimensional trompe l'oeil.

Katrantzou adorns the body with images of places where one traditionally looks outward. Her arresting designs call to the outside viewer, like a beautiful view from a window.

Boldly, her window designs invite the viewer's eye and the wearer must be bold and confident to accept it.

Images of looking outward remind me that we often have trouble looking inward. And when we do, it's often hard to see clearly.

Our interiors are often worn on the outside, without our knowledge.

Maybe only other people can see us clearly.

Maybe they are the only ones who can populate our empty rooms.

Or maybe we an only see ourselves as we were, with the passage of time, when it's time to wear a new dress. And the old one is hung and gazed upon, and it doesn't fit anymore but you realize how much you liked it.

Memento Mori

2011-01-24T03:44:00.000-08:00

Tidal Ossuary Vessel, 2010. Made of found Victorian animal bones, silver, and medical grade stainless steel. All images via http://www.julialohmann.co.uk/.

Julia Lohmann is a German artist and designer who uses natural plant and animal materials as her media. Her work invites contemplation of how we use the natural world to sustain us.

Kelp Lamp, 2008. Experiments in seaweed

Lohmann regularly uses the waste products from the meat industry, such as organs, to create curiously beautiful and useful things.

Ruminant Bloom, 2004. Lights made of preserved cow stomachs

The effect is transformative, but the material's origins remain clear. The fact that these are cow stomachs is not disguised; yet as a viewer I am cajoled into finding beauty in something I'd never really considered before.

Flock, 2004. Sheep Stomachs

Her artistic training includes an education at the Royal College of Art in London, as well as time spent working on a horse and sheep farm in Iceland, raising animals for slaughter. Such an experience, she has pointed out, does not allow one to create an artificial distance between food and its source.

Cow Bench, 2005. A leather bench or bovine memento mori

"I used the leather of a commonly slaughtered animal to make an object that is commonly made from it: the leather couch. Instead of removing traces of the animal’s life I embraced them and eliminated the distance between the animal origins of the material and its utilization by humans." — Julia Lohmann

The Catch, 2007. Wave installation made from discarded fish crates from the Sapporo Fish Market in Japan

Lohmann's work is a beautiful, provocative, and sometimes unsettling testament to the beauty and bounty of nature, and also our unavoidable need to commodify its fruits in some way. But even more than that, it is just beautiful design. Perhaps if we see something differently, we will think differently. More of Lohmann's work can be found at her website.

The Dud Avocado

2011-01-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.

-- Elaine Dundy from The Dud Avocado

Via The Fabulous Audrey Hepburn

There is a strange fascination with the madcap girl about town, the fashionable yet kooky ingenue, who manages to get herself into scrapes yet coast willfully above them. Holly Golightly and Carrie Bradshaw are the two that spring most obviously to mind. One a party girl (a high-end prostitute really), the other a sex columnist.

Via the [haute] collective

Yet, in the arcs of their narratives, their professions are less about their risqué leanings and more about the freedom they afford them in terms of a nontraditional work schedule. Holly and Carrie spend their time gallivanting about the city, having high-end adventures that give them a taste of the good life, and an eye for its fashionable aspects, but also a sense of desperation. Their work is fickle, and they must dress the part to haunt the tinkling cocktail palaces. So they wear things they can't afford, and stand out as peacocks partly due to creative eccentricity and partly due to a palpable otherness from the wealthy circles they inhabit. These lovable kooks came from somewhere else, reinvented themselves in a great metropolis, and never looked back.

It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and, doggedly remaining there. Only I'd never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating.

Another madcap ingenue to add to this canon is Sally Jay Gorce, who predates both Holly and Carrie. She is the heroine of Elaine Dundy's novel, The Dud Avocado, first published in 1958. Though neither a sex worker or a sex columnist, Sally certainly does not lack for sex. After college, she is granted a modest monthly sum from her uncle to live in Paris for two years and discover herself. Like Carrie and Holly, she has the freedom to spend her days sipping Pernod and flirting in the afternoons, cavorting with titled older gentlemen, and joining her friends in the south of France for a month. Yet her apartment is modest, her clothes are held together by safety pins, and she is perpetually wearing the wrong thing, such as an evening dress under the heat of the midday sun. She is unfailingly the archetypal young American innocent abroad, with her freshness, her bluntness, and her rat-a-tat humor.

Blushingly I recalled a night when I had suddenly fallen in love with the Place de Furstenburg in the moonlight. I had actually--oh Lord--I had actually kissed one of the stones at the fountain, I remembered, flung my shoes off, and executed a crazy drunken dance.

Elaine Dundy, second from right.

A cult classic, The Dud Avocado made a splash upon publication, only to be periodically out of print over the next fifty years. Still, it was passed lovingly between insiders. A madcap lark of a story, a souffle anchored by something more substantial, it describes a young woman coming into her own. In a letter to Elaine Dundy, fan Groucho Marx wrote, "I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you're the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)."

The sun shone on: the shade of the awning vanished in the hot, white, shadowless midday. In that blaze of heat, I was loving Paris as never before.

Elaine Dundy

For all the madcap adventures, the parties with bohemians and Countesses, the regretted mornings (indeed the book is quite the rebuke to the cultural myth that sex was invented in the 1960s), I sensed an undercurrent of sadness. Her years in Paris are but a stopover, a temporary reprieve from a traditional life in her future. She is searching for something, trying to be someone, trying to get somewhere, but she's not sure yet what, or who, or where.

We danced and kissed through the jazz. It was cool and hot and blue. Midnight blue. Blue smoke. Blues.

Via The Independent

And so she makes the most of the time she has. She dances, and laughs, gets into scrapes, and remembers that she is young. There is time enough for all things. Let us make a toast. The Dud Avocado is a lovely read, fun, ripe and fresh as ever.

Dear Yoko

2011-01-06T03:55:00.000-08:00

via Spanish Moss

Geek Love

2010-12-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Water. 1566.

I attended a talk last month about grotesque art given by Nancy Hightower to accompany the exhibit Another Roadside Attraction, on view at the ISE Cultural Foundation.

Francis Bacon. Self-Portrait. 1973

Beyond the usual descriptors that one might give to the grotesque—that of something scary, or off-putting, or strange—she argued that there was a key element that qualifies something as grotesque. As unsettling or disturbing as something might be, it needs to contain an element of the familiar, something that we recognize as normal.

Otto Dix. Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden. 1926

The deliberate subversion of expectation is what gets under our skin. Like all art, we are most affected when we see some semblance of ourselves reflected, or fractured.

Constantin Brancusi. Danaïde. 1913

I recently enjoyed the captivating Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, a novel about a struggling circus performer couple who drum up business by creating their own freak show, made up of their own children whom they've bred to be "special" through various cocktails of pre-natal drugs. As a family, they embrace and adore their oddities. Already unsettling, the book turns dark when the power balance in the family shifts to frightening effect.

Hieronymus Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights, inner right wing, detail. 1503-1504

The book is both horrifying and delightful, with characters that stirred my heart and raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Dunn continually subverts expectations of what it means to be a "freak" and a "norm." A National Book Award nominee when it was published in 1989, it's a macabre, grotesque, funny, and insightful look at people's inner and outer strangeness.

R. Crumb. Minds are Made to be Blown. 2001.

Most people are guided by two simple principles. They want to feel loved. And they want to feel special. But it's a world filled with so many others, where to make one's mark is a daunting challenge and the quest for uniqueness feels futile. One way people keep moving forward is be convincing themselves of their originality, their weirdness even. Behind the placid surfaces, we invite the scary and tempt our own freakishness.

James Ensor. Death and the Masks. 1897

Haven't we all dabbled?

Amuse-Bouche

2010-12-01T03:18:00.000-08:00

An icon, a quotidian task.
Performative, self-aware, like everything Andy.

Fast Food Pop: God Bless America.

Via Purple Diary

Spanish Night at the Frick

2010-11-18T03:12:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, The Frick Collection hosted a “Spanish Night” to celebrate their current exhibition, The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya and presentation of The King at War: Velázquez's Portrait of Philip IV. The evening featured curated talks, live Spanish music and refreshments and sketching in the central courtyard.

The Frick Collection is one of New York's many gems. It is a smaller art museum housed in the former Fifth Avenue mansion of steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The circa-1914 building was designed by Thomas Hastings, the architect of the New York Public Library.

Frick Collection via New York DiaryStar

Frick surrounded himself with art that pleased him, always intending to transform the home into a museum after his death. Museums of this sort possess a special intimacy that is eminently charming.

The Frick Collection’s Fragonard Room
as seen from the Living Hall.
Michael Falco for the New York Times

The permanent collection is impressive, including Fragonard's The Progress of Love, several pieces by Vermeer, and other works by major European artists. The pieces span the centuries and styles before modernism. Yet, there is a sense of cohesion in knowing that each of the original pieces (the museum has expanded since Frick's death) made a personal connection to a single individual.

The Fragonard Room

I am not in a position to buy serious art and may never be. Yet, I desire a visually-interesting living space. What I might admire might not necessarily be something I’d choose for my home. I would need to feel a personal connection to it; to see myself reflected in the work in some way.

“Mistress and Maid” (circa 1666-7) by Vermeer. The Frick Collection

On Spanish night, I attended a discussion on The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya hosted by senior curator Susan Grace Galassi. You can see her introducing the collection here. The exhibition is on view till January 9, 2011.

Jose de Ribera. Study of a head in profile c 1622.

Having a curator guide me through a drawing exhibition was particularly illuminating. I tend to focus less on drawings when I'm in museums. They always seem so intimate, so out-of-scale, on a museum wall. She led us to see the startling detail and expressiveness of the drawings.

Excerpts from the Spanish Manner exhibit. Frick Collection

Of particular note were drawings by Goya of everyday people, silhouetted against white backgrounds. He conveys great emotion in their faces and body postures. One gets the sense of his subjects’ backgrounds, occupations, mental states, and history even though they are unanchored from any scenery.

Goya's "Mirth"

Ms. Galassi spoke of the pieces with reverence and joy. How wonderful it must be to work at the Frick, to feel a protectorship of all those fine works of art. Seeing her bring an elegant hand to her throat to marvel at a particularly expressive piece, I was reminded of a documentary I once saw about The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a similar art museum held in the former home of a great collector.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston. Photo via Apartment Therapy

The Gardner Museum is sadly often most remembered for being the site of the largest art heist in history, with thirteen pieces stolen, including work by Vermeer and Rembrandt. In the documentary, when they asked the curator about those pieces, she teared up and said I just hope they are being taken care of. They are fragile; I just hate to think of someone not treating them well. She spoke of them like lost children.

Stolen Rembrandt, Gardner Museum. AP Photo/Josh Reynolds

Art makes people feel so deeply. It makes them do impressive and alas sometimes crazy things. It inspires them to build monuments to beauty and to commit heartwrenching crimes.

I guess because, in ways difficult to describe, art reaffirms our specialness, our humanity.

Frick Collection via Gawker

The Frick Collection is a place to feel restored, to be awed, and to be inspired.

Style of a Certain Age

2010-11-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

[Photo By Richard Riddick thedpc.com]

I neglected to do a fashion post during New York Fashion Week, one of this blog's few traditions. I feel like the window has passed, so now I have to write about something more lasting than fashion: style.

Via The Sartorialist

Unless otherwise noted, the pictures in this post come from two of my favorite street style blogs: Advanced Style and the Sartorialist. Advanced Style focuses exclusively on the mature set. The Sartorialist, the grande dame of the street style blogs, is a global look at chic.

Via The Sartorialist

The beauty that comes with youth will sadly fade in time. Style, drawn from self-knowledge and wit, is an inexhaustible well. What once looked good, through sheer nothing effort of 22-year-old-ness, requires committment at some point in years hence. But by then, one has developed an individuality that, while perhaps does not supplant the youthful blush, at least trumps it in terms of depth and interest.

Via Advanced Style

I am often most inspired by the ladies of a certain age, not the shellacked hair, beribboned-flat-shoes-wearing ladies of means, but the kooky ones. The ones with the chunky jewelry and the flair for the dramatic, the ones that don't care to please anyone but themselves anymore, the ones with joie de vivre, the ones who've earned it. I seek the Eddie Beales and the Miss Havishams, minus the crazy and the sad. I worship at the alter of Iris Arpfel.

Via PEM

These women inspire me. Will we continue to see them, in years hence? What about the girls who grew up in jeans and graduated to casual Mon-Tue-Wed-Thurs-Fri? Will they pile on the costume jewelry and palazzo pants, sip mai tais behind big sunglasses, and wave around bejeweled knuckledusters as they reminisce? I hope so. I will.

Via Advanced Style

And the men. After some lost years, it's delightful that younger men are starting to rediscover just what their grandfathers knew about style.


Via The Sartorialist


Via The Sartorialist

Via The Sartorialist

An Apropos Typo

2010-10-25T03:33:00.000-07:00

Contemporary Art.

Sometimes it’shit or miss for me.

The Food Canon: The Reuben

2010-10-25T03:32:00.000-07:00

Via Nikonians

In my high school history classes in the 90s, we didn’t study anything that happened after the Vietnam War. All the buzzwords from my childhood, like the “Iran-Contra Affair” remained mysterious. In college literature classes, we rarely read books that were published in the previous twenty years. Nothing recent was yet considered canonical; we needed time to figure out what we wanted to remember.

I seek out contemporary art and because it’s contemporary, sometimes it’s hit or miss for me. Granted, I’m unschooled. But I wonder which pieces that speak to me now will be rendered “Important” or worth remembering in a few decades.

Petah Coyne, Untitled #1240 (Black Cloud), 2007–08

Even canonical New York isn’t always that reflective of New York today. And I don’t mean that in a hand-wringy “It’s not what it used to be!” kind of way. Things change. New York’s capacity for change has kept it vital. But, to read a guidebook about “must-do” things in the city, it is somewhat a trip through the past, to what was pulsing and new some time ago, but that still tugs at the heartstrings in some way.

Via Amazing Facts

One piece of canonical New York that’s getting harder to find is the classic lunch counter or deli. Though, they're still there if you look for them. I like the classic counter experience at Eisenberg’s, where I feel like Hildy from His Girl Friday grabbing a quick bite before racing back to the office to write the latest scoop for Carey Grant. It is a long narrow lunch counter, a little dirty if you look too closely, where you can get a Rueben and an egg cream and maybe they’ll give you napkins, if you ask.

Via USA-Nachrichten

My other favorite Rueben spot is Artie’s on the Upper West Side. It isn’t really that old, but they get the details just right, down to a heaping bowl of pickles to munch on while you wait for your monstrously large sandwich and your cream soda.

Do these places reflect what’s hot and happening in NY right now? No. Are they ubiquitous, every-street-corner places like the guidebooks would have you believe? No, but the cheese is melty, the rye is piquant and the pastrami sizzles. It's like tasting the salt on a lover's back on that warm day when you knew it was forever.

Hubert's Freaks

2010-10-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

Photo by Adam Baron.

When friends come to visit New York, I've gotten to the point where I encourage them to go alone when they say they want to go to Times Square. It's a place that all visitors to New York must go; it's a spectacle of lights and cheap thrills. It's a sight to behold. Yet, no one I know who lives here visits the crossroads of the world on purpose; in fact they go out of their way to avoid it. It's just a bit exhausting.

It is a place that isn't really particularly emblematic of New York City at all; it's emblematic of America in general. It gathers up all our nation's chain stores, buffs them up, bedazzles them, and puts them on display as exotica. But, it's everything you've seen before, just bigger, shinier, and frothed into a frenzy. It's like a state fair when you've had too much candy; you just want to get off the Ferris Wheel.

Associated Press

It's hard to believe looking at it now that not too long ago it was a scary place, the source of Travis Bickle's angst, a reflection of our nightmares, filled with junkies and prostitutes. I guess now it reveals a different American underbelly, one that feeds on the excesses of consumerism not the painfulness of want.


Via PBS

This change has happened over such a short period. I was surprised to learn in the fascinating book Hubert's Freaks by Gregory Gibson that up until the mid-sixties, you could pay a quarter to see a freak show there. You'd be called in to look at natural human oddities, the deformed and the disfigured, the made oddities, the tattooed and the pierced, and native-born African Americans donning animal skins and jumping around spouting jibberish, masquerading as wild "savages" for the enjoyment of tourists.

Via Greg Gibson

One of these places, Hubert's, was frequented by photographer Diane Arbus, who despite her outsiderish gaze and her early self-inflicted death, was masterful at making her subjects feel relaxed and open. She found souls here who trusted her enough to let her take their images and hone her skills. Yet this part of her life went unknown. Her images at Hubert's were never exhibited or referenced during her lifetime.

Thirty years later, these photos were discovered in a storage unit among the abandoned personal effects of Charlie Lucas, a Hubert's manager, and were auctioned off after his death. Hubert's Freaks tells the story of how rare book dealer Bob Langmuir came to possess the Hubert's Arbus archive and his quest to authenticate the work and bring it to the public eye. It is a nonfiction book that reads like fiction and touches upon the fascinating worlds of collectors, the art market, the work of the legendary Arbus, the history of freak shows in the United States, Times Square, New York, and even what makes art, well art.

By Diane Arbus via Phillips de Pury & Co.

My only quibble with the book is that Gibson occasionally spends too much time dwelling on the personal dramas of Bob, his book dealing protagonist. Frankly, Bob's personal journey pales in comparison to the history and trajectory of the Hubert's archive. Still, it was a fascinating read, a compelling-written narrative through New York's past and present.

The Broken Kilometer / Angles

2010-09-16T04:02:00.000-07:00

West Broadway, Soho. Photo via The Weblicist of Manhattan.

Soho has a secret.

On 393 West Broadway, a street crowded with high-end boutiques and cafes that serve papery slices of prosciutto with melon, in a white iron-cast building, behind a heavy door, lies The Broken Kilometer, a room-sized art installation that has been sitting there silently for thirty years.

Walter De Maria, The Broken Kilometer, 1979. Image via The Politics of the Object.

Walter De Maria's piece has been maintained by the Dia Art Foundation since 1979. It is made of 500 polished brass rods, lying in five rows of 100 each. The space between the rods, glinty under florescent lights, increases imperceptibly the farther back they are. Those nearest the viewer are closer to each other than those far away. The entire piece spans 45 feet in width and 125 feet in length.

Image via Art Observed.

The effect I felt upon walking in is one of silence and stillness. The piece doesn't seem particularly interesting inherently, no flashy flourishes, just row after row of brass rods. Viewers are only limited to view the piece from one angle, forward, and it stretches on and on into the increasingly dark recesses of the rectangular space.

It is awe-inspiring in its scope and audacity. It's strange quiet symmetry functions as a contained space of order in a chaotic city. It's hard to explain. Unlike some art, my feelings about it didn't change or become more complex the longer I looked at it. Yet, in the quiet space, it seemed to hum slightly in the long windowless room.

Photo via Atlas Obscura.

The sheer scale moved me. I was also amazed that some of the world's most expensive commercial real estate was held aside for an unchanging art piece that goes unnoticed by most passersby.

Madison Avenue via Wikimedia Commons.

I was walking down Madison in a hurry the other day, hitting every stop light, pausing frustratedly on every street corner. A thin man with white hair, wearing billowing linen, and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette was hitting the same lights. We smiled about our predicament and he asked where I was headed.

I glanced up at the street signs. Six more blocks. A defined end point. OK, sure, let's do this. I told him the intersection I was headed to, and that I was late.

"Eh, I'm late all the time," he laughed, dragging on the tiny cigarette stub.

We talked vaguely about where we were going. In the complete honesty that one can only have with strangers, I said I wasn't really sure what I was doing, what I should do, with my life.

"What's your angle?" he asked. I shrugged.

His was selling vending machines, but he laughed and said he went months without selling them. Then he asked me how old I was. I told him.

"By now, you should have figured out your angle."

His question was specific; yet it seemed so much broader. I couldn't focus on the discussion anymore. He reached his intersection before mine and turned to go. He asked if I was married. We parted.

I kept on walking forward, a little troubled, no longer looking up at streetlights. I sought out instead the patches of light beyond the shadows of concrete and beneath the flurry of feet.

No angle. But not yet broken.

Change Comes Knocking

2010-08-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Around me, people are lamenting the death of summer. I can't believe it's the end of August, they cry.

I can.

It's been summer for a while, and the humid lugubriousness is seeping into my brain.

Alvy: You look like a really happy couple? Are you?

Woman: Yeah.

Alvy: Yeah? So how do you account for it?

Woman: I am very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

Man: And I'm exactly the same way.

Alvy: I see. That's very interesting. So you managed to work out something?

Man: Right.

Someday I will devote a full post to Annie Hall, one of my most beloved films.

There is a vestige of the old social season in New York in summer. There are fewer serious gallery shows, literary readings, and other cultural events (the exception of course being fabulous outdoor concerts and theater). And, I guess for those of means and circumstance, the social calendar is very much intact, with summer weekends meant for decamping to the Hamptons and fleeing the hoi polloi trapped on the baking asphalt.

I feel a touch of melancholy, perhaps the inevitable twinge that comes from the imminent change of season. I should take this time to drink pisco sours, sit in the sun, and wear sandals. The dark, crisp, coziness of fall will be here soon, and we'll gather in lively interiors and hopefully my interior mind will crackle and spark like the fireplaces we are sometimes lucky to warm ourselves by. And melancholy won't be called as such, it will simply be called introspection.

In the meantime, I'll listen to Timber Timbre, whose smoky, bluesy, scary sound comforts me. But, I'll keep the pisco sour in hand.

Image Credits: Central Park, Shallow Annie Hall Couple, Annie Hall rooftop

Overheard at the Cloisters

2010-08-13T03:49:00.000-07:00

"What happened to all the unicorns?"

"They don't exist anymore."

"Why?"

"They were overhunted and now they're extinct."

"That's so sad."

"Yeah, it is."

If a reconstructed medieval castle can exist on the the northern tip of Manhattan, apparently I can find two adults who believe in unicorns.

I can't decide if this exchange is just sad, or maybe a tiny bit charming. I guess its nice that they think the world was once a more magical place.

It's rational and right, but a little bittersweet

the day you stop believing in things.

Though, are the binders of little girls a horrifying reminder of the senseless slaughter?

Images via: The Cloisters, The Medieval Garden Enclosed, and Lisa Frank.

Fedora

2010-07-30T03:17:00.000-07:00

They say New York is falling apart;

Not what it used to be, devoid of its art.

But when we're with friends,

drink up and be merry.

The streets still twinkle in the lamps' blazing light,

the martini glasses still jingle jangle at night.

Take what is yours, put worries away.

For tomorrow you will realize how much you loved today.

Last week we bid farewell to Fedora, the half-century-old bar and restaurant in the Village with the iconic neon sign. The radiant Fedora Dorato herself, still lovely at ninety, barely peeked over the bar to hand us crisp martinis. She had run the restaurant with her husband until his death thirteen years ago, and then became its sole mistress of ceremonies, basking in the adoring smiles of her patrons. Her restaurant is a beautiful postcard from 1952, with a wood bar, an unpretentious menu, working phone booth, and some aging patrons who can remember its days as a safe haven in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village.

Last Sunday, she handed the keys over to a chosen new owner, who will no doubt make changes. Time moves forward and Ms Dorato undeservedly has earned the right to rest. Things can't last forever.

To paraphrase Don Draper, sometimes change isn't good or bad, it just is.

Yes.

But I sure was glad to be there for one last night.

Photo Credits: Michael Magill, Jack Lenk, Jill Vora, New York Magazine

Dovima with Elephants

2010-07-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

"A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." -- Richard Avedon

"Dovima with Elephants" is one of my favorite fashion photographs. It was shot by Avedon at the Cirque d'hiver, Paris in August 1955. She wears a Christian Dior dress designed by a young Yves Saint-Laurent.

The composition of this photo is among the most striking I've ever seen. Dovima, as the central figure, radiates surreal grace. The long lines of her limbs and couture, her milky skin, and composed coif are retro high fashion defined. The pose is classic, even religious in its grandeur. And she stands among thrashing circus elephants chained to a dirty straw-hewn floor.

She is utterly still in a photo coursing with movement. I can hear chains jangling, feel the left elephant stomping, smell the dust kicked up as the right elephant shrinks from her elegant hand. His eye is haunting. Yet, Dovima is outside her surroundings. I can't look away.

Aside from some reports of Avedon being displeased with the placement of her sash (he felt it should have more closely mimicked the right elephant's leg), I know little of the "story" behind the photo. Was Dovima scared? Was she not as delicate as she looks? Was this a comment on how fashion or the beauty ideal can be a bit of a circus? Was it simply a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress made more so by their surroundings? Even without knowing its inspiration or intent, “Dovima with Elephants” is arresting.

It reveals a photographer utterly confident behind his lens. It is in an exquisite fantasy, like Dovima herself, a Queens girl who became an icon. Born Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba, she was discovered on a Manhattan street and went on to become one of the most successful models of the 1950s.

"The ideal of beauty then was the opposite of what it is now. It stood for an extension of the aristocratic view of women as ideals, of women as dreams, of women as almost surreal objects. Dovima fit that in her proportions." -- Richard Avedon

Who but I?

2010-07-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

I will sing the song of companionship,
I will show what alone must finally compact these,
I believe these are to found their own ideal of manly love, indicating it in me,
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were threatening to consume me,
I will lift what has too long kept down these smouldering fires,
I will give them complete abandonment,
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love,
For who but I should understand love with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?

-- excerpted from "Starting from Paumanok," Walt Whitman

I began this blog with Whitman.

He said the words I wanted to say about New York. He was someone who knew his voice, and believed in it, even when it was just a lone one, struggling to be heard in an indifferent metropolis. On the occasion of debuting my own voice, I drew strength from a writer who simply asked, "Who but I?

Lo, body and soul -- this land,

My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,

The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio's shores and flashing Missouri,

And over the far-spreading prairies cover'd with grass and corn.

-- excerpted from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Walt Whitman

I had grown up thinking of Whitman's expansive words about America's vast natural resources and pioneer spirit, its prairies, buffalo herds and rivers. And it surprised me, later in life, to learn that he loved its great cities, New York in particular, just as much. And in my East Coast/West Coast, Brooklyn/Manhattan world, I found that refreshing.

I had always thought of him as a solitary artist, one focused on his beloved "I." Yet he was actually part of an eclectic community of New York writers, artists, and bohemians. They'd meet at Pfaff's, a bar long ago shuttered, where they'd talk and drink and retreat from a world that wasn't ready for them.

Currently up at the Rumpus is an article I wrote about Whitman's time at Pfaff's. He managed to surprise me yet again.

Photo credits: Walt Whitman, Mississipi River.

Obey the Fairey

2010-05-27T04:14:00.000-07:00

Was I the only who only recently found out that the same person who designed this:

also made this?

I first started noticing the Obey stickers in the 90s. They were mystifying. I only knew André the Giant from The Princess Bride. The internet was less robust when I first started spotting the Obey image everywhere and I was a less robust user of it. My first thought wasn't to get online and find out what the image meant and who was behind it. It was just something I wondered about for years when I'd see them pop up randomly like toadstools in the night.

I wasn't living in places where the trash you left out on the street would be transformed into a public art project or a man in fishnet tights and a thong would jog by me on my way to CVS. I was just living in ordinary places where I wasn't used to seeing street art. But it was clearly happening; I just didn't know to look for it. But, André was impossible to ignore.

The Obey stickers were on light poles and backpacks and windows and highway medians. It was like a secret that I wasn't sure if I was really a part of.

Shepard Fairey created the original André the Giant has a Posse sticker in 1989 when he was living in Providence, Rhode Island, supposedly on a whim from a wrestling ad he saw in the newspaper. The image, showing André's almost definitely inflated stats (7' 4'' and 520 lbs) emerged from the skater community, and was posted surriptitously in Providence and the northeast, becoming a phenomenon in the early nineties.

When threatened with a lawsuit in 1994, Fairey removed André's name and created a more stylized image of his face, with the simple word "Obey" beneath it. This image also percolated up from the skater, hip hop, and street art worlds to places where people like me might see them in perplexed amusement.

Why André? Could it have been someone else? Probably. Though, of all wrestlers of his era, he had a crossover appeal, due to the The Princess Bride. He had a certain magic. I knew him as the sweet Fezzik from a modern comic fairy (or Fairey) tale. His immense height and weight (due to the pituitary disorder acromegaly), and his Bulgarian background made him otherworldly. He is also reported to have once drunk 119 beers in six hours.

He had retired from professional wrestling by the time Fairey made his first André the Giant has a Posse sticker. And after his death in 1993, the Obey movement really began to take off.

Shephard Fairey closed out the last ever show at Deitch Projects in New York, with the exhibit "May Day," which featured his stylized stencils of famous faces and slick advertising-like slogans. A block of Soho street was closed off for the opening, bikers and skaters cavorted while we waited in line to get in, an artisanal popsicle truck tempted us, and there was the requisite celebrity sighting.

I can't say I felt challenged or emotionally moved by anything I saw. Several weeks later, I can't recall a single image from the exhibit that stood out to me. I am reminded of the Andy Warhol quote,

"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

But Fairey has certainly proved his ability to capture people's attention. He certainly did mine, when all those years ago in the 1990s, far away from the galleries I'd later haunt, I first saw something big.

Another fun piece of 90s trivia about Fairey? Guess who works for him now?

Images: Obama Hope, Obey Giant, Memo Pisa el Lodo, Manifest Destitute, Global Graphica, Brectbug, Boston.com, Free Space Comix, FussShop, Where's Andre, Gothamist, Brechtbug.

Different Strokes

2010-05-11T03:21:00.000-07:00

JK. Love ya, Bruce.

Via Coartato

Stone Fox: Jeffrey Eugenides

2010-05-03T03:47:00.000-07:00

"Though we felt for the Lisbon girls, and continued to think about them, they were slipping away from us. The images we treasured of them -- in bathing suits, jumping through a sprinkler, or running from a garden hose charmed by water pressure into a giant snake -- began to fade, no matter how religiously we meditated on them in our most private moments, lying in bed beside two pillows belted together to simulate a human shape."

After reading Jeffrey Eugenides' astounding Pulitzer-prize winning novel Middlesex, I recently picked up his excellent earlier novel, The Virgin Suicides. In a breach of proper reader/viewer etiquette, I had seen the Sofia Coppola film years ago and politely admired its exquisite cinamatography and haunting tone. However, I hadn't been particularly emotionally affected by the film.

The novel, however, was engaging, haunting, and, against all odds, a page-turner. As a reader, I knew from the very first line, even the very title, that the young Lisbon sisters will do themselves in. Yet, the pages bristle with tension, a bit of humor, and, of course, melancholy. I chewed through sentences, contemplating youth, and steeling myself for the inevitable.

The narrators in this first person plural novel are never named. A group of men reflect on when they were teenagers fascinated by the five beautiful sisters who lived down the street. Many years hence, they still struggle, like the larger community, to understand what drove the girls to do what they did.

The boys can't let go; their worship of these fragile girls gives their recollections a sad dreamlike tone. Through the perfumed descriptions I could see the sun-dappled windows covered in dust, feel the rustle of a floor length polyester dress, and smell the strawberry-scented hair of a girl at her first dance.

"Who knew what they were thinking or feeling? Lux still giggled stupidly, Bonnie fingered the rosary deep in the pocket of her corduroy skirt, Mary wore her suits that make her resemble the First Lady, Therese kept her protective goggles on in the halls -- but they receded from us, from the other girls, from their father, and we caught sight of them standing in the courtyard, under drizzle, taking bites from the same doughnut, looking up at the sky, letting themselves get slowly drenched."

The book captured, in a beautifully evocative way, the ache of teenage life and perhaps the sadness that stays with us always, just hidden, muffled, revealed only in later moments of weakness at the bottom of a bourbon class. Everything is just so near the surface then, when one lacks the life experience or padding to cushion the rawness. Teenage faces, like those of the aged, often have features that are out of proportion -- noses or ears that are a little too big for a slim face. But in time, the body fills out and embraces the rough edges, and we learn to play well with others.

The girls' decline is mirrored by the increasingly decrepit house they live in, the rotting trees on their street, and their parents' misguided decisions. But I'd prefer not to classify the book solely as a comment on the decay of American suburbia. That seems like a boring oversimplification. Hating the suburbs is a privileged position; many people would love the opportunity to grow up in a boring tract house on a nondescript street, under an unstylish but warm blanket.

"In the past, fall began with a collective rattle in the treetops; then, in an endless profusion, the leaves snapped off and came floating down, circling and flapping in updrafts, like the world shedding itself. We let them accumulate. We stood by with an excuse to do nothing while every day the branches showed growing patches of sky."

Among other things, The Virgin Suicides is a story about trying to find a place for oneself in the world, and about how some do not succeed. But even the lucky ones can't escape a glimpse of the darkness that lurks behind everything. Life is fragile; if we look closely at anything we'll see fissures, a veneer of grime. But, but, we also see beauty. People so often clearly remember the good times and dimly recall the negative. And I think the older we get, the easier it is to find the trail of breadcrumbs that will lead us out of the woods.

With the exception of the book cover, all photos in this post are the work of Colleen Plumb.