The Errant Æsthete

Impersonation Party, 1927: Among the revelers are Elizabeth Ponsoby (back row), in wig as Iris Tree, with Cecil Beaton on her right. Seated from Left: Stephen Tennant, as Queen Marie of Romania; George Sitwell, with false nose; Inez Holden; Harold Acton. Foreground: Tallulah Bankhead as Jean Borotra.

“The social life of London
in “the twenties” must,
to the censorious young
of the present day,
appear like a prolonged
and rather vulgar orgie.

Overindulgence
in sex
and gin
was its main
surface characteristics.”

 

Long before the media circus of our modern obsession with celebrity, there was a renowned group of young sparkling Londoners known as the Bright Young People. Considered one of the most extraordinary cults of youth and frivolity in history, they were a voraciously pleasure-seeking band of bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded socialities who romped through the newspaper gossip columns of 1920’s London. Evelyn Waugh immortalized their slang, their pranks, and their tragedies in his novel Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall.

Over the next half century, many–from Cecil Beaton to Nancy Mitford and John Betjeman–would become household names. It is, in fact, the indomitable Betjeman, founding member of the Victorian Society, poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who’s Who as a “poet and hack” who is credited with the following little ditty describing one of the haunts that the group frequented: Patrick Balfour’s flat-cum studio in Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge:

 

The spurt of soda as the whisky rose
Bringing its heady scent to memory’s nose
Along with smells one otherwise forgets:
Hairwash from Delhez, Turkish cigarettes,
The reek of Ronuk on a parquet floor
As parties came cascading through the door:
Elizabeth Ponsonby in leopard-skins
And Robert Byron and the Tuthven twins…

 

Some Bright Young People, 1931, including Elizabeth Ponsonby (far left).

In life they were, in the main, insolent, hedonistic, and, despite inner melancholy, deeply and aggressively shallow. The real wonder is that acclaimed critic, D. J. Taylor has made such an absorbing book (“>Bright Young People) about such a wearisome, generally untalented, and, for all their frenzy, essentially joyless group of people. Those with talent and depth or just talent were either exceptions or something like fellow travelers.

One affair in 1929 was billed as the Second Childhood Party

Bright Young People … are not to be confused with Bright Young Things: a looser, international genus of flapperdom, of which the Bright Young People were a small, distinct, British, and, notwithstanding their racketiness, exclusive species.

Born around 1905, they were most visibly drawn from privileged backgrounds of social consequence, though that mix was spiced up with artists, exotics, and would-be’s from other ranks. Their reign, distinguished by outré parties and dress-ups, public escapades, and drunken pranks, was short, lasting only from the mid-1920s to at best 1931. They were marked by hostility to the preceding generation, with which they associated the war and their own blighted prospects. They assumed an air of hectic doom or, in Taylor’s words, of

“sorrowing in the sunlight,

good times gone,

the myriad champagne corks

bobbing away on a stream

turned unexpectedly chill.”

Bright Young People
The Last Generation of London’s Jazz Age
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

“ I am sending you
postcards from a place
where I am not.

We’re not tourists, we’re travelers

A tourist is someone who
thinks about going home the
moment they arrive

Whereas a traveler
might not come
back at all.”

 

Paul Bowles
The Sheltering Sky

Photo: Instanbul

Sweet is such a delightful

and complex word.

It represents everything

I want to paint about:

the pure,

the fragrant,

the desirable

and the dream of complete indulgence

in a perfect world.

The artist Will Cotton has been a fixture in the New York art world for almost a decade, using classical, Old Masters’ painting techniques to create completely modern confections. His subject matter may at first appear strange—he paints naked women cavorting in candy and cookies landscapes, a soft-core Candyland in soft pinks and whites—but it is ultimately irresistible.

But sweetness

taken to an extreme degree,

as it is in my pictures,

becomes cloying,

even repulsive

and that’s where it gets

interesting for me.

Candy for Cotton is what dark lush forests were for the 18th masters; an ideal of plenty and a site for temptation. There are no consequences depicted in these hedonistic scenes, but viewers know that outside the fantasy indulgence will have its price. Whether the models are his scenes’ protagonists, or just eye-candy, they never appear satiated or at peace. As we know, Candy may satisfy emotional needs and frivolous fancies, but in the end it only distracts the body from its genuine hungers, producing fat not fulfilment. Like the fatty foods he paints, Cotton’s paintings might appear light, but they are heavy with meaning.

The 44-year-old artist has long used an oven in his New York studio, making his own baked goods and then using them as models for his artwork, but he is about to take his pastry prowess to the public. For the next three Sunday afternoons, Cotton will be selling baked goods, including cookies, macaroons, and tarts, at new gallery Partners & Spade in downtown Manhattan.

“The difference between visiting my bakery and any other is essentially curatorial. It’s not just a random selection of sweets, it’s a collection of smells and tastes that have been important to me in my work, and have informed a lot of the imagery,” he explains.

“For me, making art is about telling a story and I’ve been feeling lately like there’s more to be said that’s not purely visual. Smells are so powerful and evocative, sometimes stronger than visual cues.” For the geographically advantaged, Cotton’s incriminatingly delicious art can be sampled at 40 Great Jones Street on November 8, 15, and 22.

Who has not at one time or another imagined themselves on pointed toe high above the stage lights, moving to the strains of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring with arms aloft and legs rigidly poised to execute a perfect arabesque penchée, all the while exuding a detachment of serenity and grace? Perhaps, its a musing of my own childish dreams to be adorned in tulle and satin, so feel free to substitute your own wishful fantasy (feathers and sequins, perhaps). But for those who love ballet, a rare true-to-life intimate access into the lives of those endowed with the gifts and fortitude, or both, to capture in full cinematic brilliance the portrait of a time honored institution.

La Danse… ventures beyond the stage and studios and into sewing rooms, cafeterias and administrative offices. Despite the aura of vérité purity, It ihas the heft and intricacy of great drama.

 

“A JOYOUS EXPERIENCE!”

David Denby, The New Yorker

 

“La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet,” which opened yesterday, lovingly captures frame by frame the mastery of art and technique as choreographed in the stately and elegant Palais Garnier in Paris, observing rehearsals, staff meetings and, finally, performances of seven dances, including classics like “The Nutcracker” and spiky new au courant efforts by younger choreographers. In the capable hands of master documentarian, Frederick Wiseman, this film, sumptuous in its length and graceful in its rhythm is, according to reviewer A.O. Scott of The New York Times, “a feast for ballet lovers” and “one of the finest dance films ever made.”

 

“Heavenly!”

V.A. Musetto, New York Post

 

“An absolute treat for balletomanes.”

Leslie Felperin, Variety

 

 

For the language impaired, fret not. The film is subtitled in English and as Scott tells it, it matters not a whit if phrases are lost or words misunderstood as the energy and cadences are so “mesmerizing” the viewer is swept up in the rhapsody of the “meticulous” and “magical.”

“Glorious!”

Jason Anderson,Eye Weekly

 

“What a thrilling week for dance onscreen.
A portrait of one of the
world’s great companies
by one of the
world’s great vérité documentarians.

LA DANSE captures a living ecosystem.
Beyond offering the privilege
of watching gorgeously photographed scenes
from seven ballets
classically smooth and atonally jarring,
LA DANSE is an anatomy.
It’s about flesh and bone and sinew,
about sublimity on Earth.”

David Edelstein, New York

If Paris and the Opera Ballet are simply unattainable right now, you might bring it all a bit closer with this Vintage 1920’s Black Velvet Opera Coat.

The details tell of an ermine collar with satin lining. Besides, who needs the crowds at the Palais Garnier? You can stage your own elegantly quiet evening of culture with a viewing of Swan Lake on DVD or a command performance via PBS, draped in this swath of impeccable glamor, sipping a cordial from your finest etched crystal.

Sunrise breaks in Oxford, England, home of Thomas Edward Lawrence, who came to be known as Lawrence of Arabia. Fascinated with history as a boy, “Ned” roamed the fields and riverbanks behind his home in Oxford, eagerly searching for artifacts from Britain’s age of chivalry. Later the scholar turned soldier fought alongside Arab forces in the Middle East. A hero for our time.

(Text adapted from and photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, “Lawrence of Arabia: A Hero’s Journey,” January 1999, National Geographic magazine)

Two exceptional books on the fascinatingly elusive figure of T.E. Lawrence:

Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, T.E. Lawrence

A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of  T. E. Lawrence, John E. Mack

This superbly carved portrait bust presents a pensive woman with a compelling gaze holding a scroll, the symbol of an educated person. The delicate, sensitive carving and the highly polished finish suggest that it was carved in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire and, it would appear, a forward thinking society in their attitudes toward women, perhaps as the funerary monument of a leading member of the imperial aristocracy. Her long fingers draw attention to the scroll in her hand, indicating her pride in being recognized as among the educated elite in an era that prized learning.

 

Portrait Bust of a Woman with a Scroll, late 4th–early 5th century
Byzantine; Made in Constantinople
Marble; Overall: 20 7/8 x 10 13/16 x 8 3/4 in. (53 x 27.5 x 22.2 cm)
The Cloisters Collection, 1966
The Met

How can you not want to emulate and/or follow in the path of a woman who had the uncommonly good sense to refrain from being seduced by the very business of seduction?

So intensely private was Madeleine Vionnet, dubbed the “couturier of couturiers”, she studiously avoided public displays and mundane frivolities, often expressing a dislike and contempt for the very hand that was feeding her — the alluring world of high fashion:

“Insofar as one can talk of a Vionnet school,
it comes mostly from my having been
an enemy of fashion.
There is something
superficial and volatile
about the seasonal and
elusive whims of fashion
which offends
my sense of beauty.”

Vionnet was not concerned with being the “designer of the moment”, preferring to remain true to her own vision of female beauty. She believed that “when a woman smiles, then her dress should smile too.”

Eschewing corsets, padding, stiffening, and anything that distorted the natural curves of a woman’s body, not to mention said woman’s essential comfort, her clothes were famous for accentuating the natural female form. Influenced by the modern dances of Isadora Duncan, Vionnet created designs that showed off a women’s natural shape. Like Duncan, Vionnet was inspired by ancient Greek art, in which garments appear to float freely around the body rather than distort or mold its shape.

“Taste is a feeling that makes all the difference between what is beautiful and what is merely showy – and also what is ugly!” the couturier Madeleine Vionnet once said. “It is transmitted from mother to daughter. But some people don’t need to be educated: they are innately tasteful. I think I am one of them.”

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Vionnet’s greatest distinction as a designer was her discovery of the bias cut. Cutting patterns along the bias forces the fabric to cling to the body and move with it, which created her trademark look of draped, form-conscious clothing.

When designer Issey Miyake first saw a Vionnet dress, it was like the first time he saw Winged Victory at the Louvre: “I thought then that the statue of Nike had been reincarnated in the dresses by Vionnet. She had captured the most beautiful aspect of classical Greek aesthetics: the body and movement.”

Though simple, her dresses were never plain; the use of a Cartier necklace as a halter strap is a classic Vionnet innovation. This inimitable combination of comfort and glamour made Vionnet’s clothes a favorite among European nobility, Hollywood royalty–notably Marlene Dietrich, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Katharine Hepburn–as well as socialites and other trendsetters. To this day, close to a century after its introduction, the bias cut remains an essential element in haute couture.

Vionnet’s mastery of sinuous line, proportion and, above all, how to dress the liberated and dynamic female body made her one of the most celebrated couturiers of her day, and one of the most influential on over three generations of designers. Cristobal Balenciaga, another master of purist form, considered Vionnet his great mentor and friend.

Model Marion Morehouse and unidentified model wearing dresses by Vionnet, 1930

This was a designer who toiled endlessly to liberate women from buttons, zips, corsetry and show-off embellishment. Hers was the language of extreme sophistication, where decorative elements such as rose motifs and fringes, drapes and twists formed the structure of her much-coveted dresses, rather than being mere appendages.

“Vionnet clothes appealed to the extremely sophisticated. The fabrics – silk tulle, crêpe de chine – were luxurious and the proportion and technique, perfectionist,” one expert noted. “The designs have a real presence – these were pieces that were not about prettiness but about beauty.”

Vionnet dress, 1938, made from silk tulle, panne velvet and horsehair, a silver lamé underdress and Lesage embroidery.

Her quietly sensual creations meant one had to have a strong sense of self to wear them. And, of course, only the wealthy would have been able to afford them.

 

“Designers make dresses,

artists make dreams”.

~Vionnet

Each piece was developed without the traditional use of live models. Instead, and throughout her entire career, she chose to work directly with fabric on an articulated 2 ft. wooden mannequin. This created the necessary distance from the female body, encouraging a more formal vision and greater abstraction.

Without any drawing or preparatory sketch, the geometer of couture produced designs from three essential forms: the square, the rectangle, the circle. It was in the arrangement of these archetypal shapes, – which were slashed, pleated, gathered, twisted and knotted-, that her stylistic vocabulary found form and was expressed. Dresses without linings nor stays, without buttons nor hooks, making obsolete all the trimmings that had imprisoned women as if in shackles. Thus, the corset was blessedly eliminated.

Today, Madeleine Vionnet is considered one of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century. Both her bias cut and her urbanely sensual approach to couture remain a strong and pervasive influence on contemporary fashion as evidenced by the collections of such past and present-day designers as Ossie Clark, Halston, John Galliano, Comme des Garçons, Azzedine Alaia, Issey Miyake and Marchesa.

It is thanks to her donation in 1952 to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs that you can, for the very first time in Paris, discover the masterpieces of her world renown work of which so little has been been revealed. Dresses, patron canvases, photographs, personal works…the first Parisian retrospective paying homage to Madeleine Vionnet is going on now, running through January, 2010 at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which spans her work from the setting up of her house in 1912 to the glory years of the Thirties.

Fellow blogger Silent Storyteller who had the good fortune to witness the exhibit first hand, was so mesmerized, she made three, yes, three separate excursions to see the work of the world’s most renowned dressmaker.

I find the idea that these dresses, that were worn for one evening 70 to 90 years ago are now exhibited on mannequins for [eight] months. There’s something quite lovely in that, don’t you think?

Les Arts Décoratifs
107 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris
lesartsdecoratifs.fr

Waiters in the Grand Hotel Dining Room watch Sonja Henie ice skating. St. Moritz, 1932.
Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt.

I’ve always been captivated with the idea of why and how certain images seem to stay with you. This is one of those photographs for me. Each time I see it, I take away something new. Intuitively, I know there’s a bit of nostalgia for a time I was not personally acquainted with, but could well imagine. With today, the first of November, and thoughts of winter, I am reminded of this iconic image snapped by a master photographer in this fabled hamlet in the Engadine valley of Switzerland long ago.

The black and white of it perfectly conveys the time. You almost feel the need to shield your eyes from the glare of the winter landscape outside as the blinding light of the snow pierces the panes of glass, accentuating the warmth of the moment and the quiet of the room, safely tucked atop a tower filled with awe, expectancy and the crisp starch of rolled napkins, pressed tablecloths, aprons in snapped-to precision and the dreams and fantasies of a tightly knit group of young men filled with excitement, wonder, and longing for that gliding silhouette on ice that might one day figure in their future.

It’s hard to imagine stumbling across the requiem for a heavy weight as Andy Warhol most certainly was in his day. Yet, that is precisely what happened to Christophe von Hohenberg one spring day in April, April Fool’s day to be exact, in 1987 when he happened upon Warhol’s Memorial Service at Manhattan’s famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Now published for the first time on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Pop legend’s death, von Hohenberg’s lens captured a veritable time capsule of the social swirl of the era that Warhol had such a hand in shaping.

Diane Von Furstenberg

A little background: There is no denying Andy Warhol’s place in the visual art movement or what came to be known as pop art. He was unmistakeably, the centrifuge of an artistic and social set that remixed the cocktail of café society to include everything from porn stars and princes, pop music stars and international society figures, movie stars and drag queens, and the dynamic cast of dozens of the eras major figures (many now deceased) that attended the memorial service that long ago day in April.

Just imagine, if you will, a gathering that included speakers Yoko Ono and Picasso biographer John Richardson, and attendants such as major artists David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel. Even more electrifying were the notoriously famous mingling on the sidewalk of the steepled landmark like Debbie Harry, Diane von Furstenberg, Bianca Jagger, Halston, Liza Minnelli, Paloma Picasso, George Plimpton, Ahmet Ertegun, Dominick Dunne, Henry Geldzahler, Claus von Bulow, Leo Castelli, Holly Solomon, Steven Sprouse and many others.

This entourage of celebrity is perfectly captured in a book that is a vibrant record of one of the most exciting eras in New York’s cultural life from the swinging sixties through the increasingly edgy 1970s and up to the heady 1980s that was started in the haze of Studio 54 and ended with the ravages of AIDS.

Andy Warhol: The Day The Factory Died is a fitting tribute to the Pop master whose seemingly soulless art was frequently tinged with the pathos of death.

Calvin and Kelly Klein

Before the tricks are a lingering regret and the treats a distant memory, this charming little animated relic out of the studios of Walt Disney. A silly symphony of near perfect nostalgia entitled The Skeleton Dance, 1929.

 

VIEW

1.

In the spirit of Halloween,
a creepy picture in need of a clever caption.

2.

What deviousness or hideousness lurks in the depths of your subconscious?

3.

Each ghoulish image is chronologically numbered. Simply reference the picture of your choice, note the number and pen a cleverly conceived caption.

4.

Silly, dumb, scary and/or delirious is okay too. It’s Halloween, after all.

5.

A shamelessly bad example:
What is it they say of revenge? A dish best served cold.

6.

The Gates of Hell or the Windows to your Perfidious Soul?

7.

A risky proposition, I know, since my readers are not of the chatty variety, but please consider joining in, won’t you? Or don’t consider. Just act — impulsively!

8.

An idea: for those who usually lurk nearby in silence — wear a mask! Come as anyone you’d like to be and feel free to pen a caption anonymously … but civilly (this being the Errant Aesthete after all.

May you revel in your deepest, darkest nightmares! Happy Halloween.

 

All of the above are the magnificently unearthly renderings of Virgil Finlay, master illustrator of the macabre, the supernatural, the other worldly. An exceptional talent.

 

 

I love the musical compositions of Rachel Portman. For those unfamiliar with her work, she was the first female composer to win an Academy Award for Best Original Score (“Emma” in 1997). Other personal favorites include Cider House Rules, The Joy Luck Club, Chocolat, The Duchess, The Lake House and on and on.

It’s wonderful to discover that her spirit as a person so beautifully coincides with the magic and integrity of the music she creates. The autumn issue of Intelligent Life features an interview with this very talented woman asking her to describe her own personal seven wonders of the world.

A sample:

JOURNEY: INTO THE DESERT FROM ZAGORA, MOROCCO
I persuaded a friend to come with me on a four-day camel trek from Zagora to the dunes (above). Apart from our guide, there was no one else around, and we slept under the stars. I thought we’d never get there, it was far too hot, and very uncomfortable. But it was worth it for the magnificent, honey dunes when we did reach them—we walked along the crest where no one had yet walked. I wanted to experience the emptiness of the desert and hear what it sounded like, because I was writing an opera based on “The Little Prince” by Saint-Exupéry, which takes place in the desert. I was writing in my head as I loped along on my camel. I wrote the little prince’s main aria, and I knew what the desert sounded like when I came back—the emptiness and the sound of the air hanging around me. It is a sort of sad emptiness, a hanging stillness unlike any I’d ever felt.

You’ve got to love the contrast that pairs pop art caricaturist Robert Risko’s images to the highly revered, sacrosanct list of some two dozen questions that French author, essayist and critic, Marcel Proust, answered in the 1880s, which came to be known as the acclaimed Proust Questionnaire. After sixteen years of being incarnated each month in the pages of Vanity Fair, this fabled, and oh-so-revealing, set of probing personal queries to a bevy of the most celebrated personalities of our time is being released this month in a wonderfully compacted book form by Vanity Fair and Rodale Press entitled, Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life .

While most are familiar with the life-probing queries of Proust’s legendary Questionnaire, it’s what’s little known, or what is seriously distorted that is most fascinating. For example, the Proust Questionnaire was dreamed up neither by Vanity Fair (which I knew) nor indeed by Proust (which I didn’t). The facts are these: it was a Parisian parlor game among the novelist’s bourgeois crowd, and it is believed to have been popularized by the daughter of the 19th-century French president Félix Faure. “Antoinette Faure’s Album”—a red leather journal adorned with an ornate, blind-embossed trellis—contained entries from many in Faure’s social circle. She would invite friends over for tea and then ask each an identical sequence of questions: “[What is] your favourite virtue?… Your idea of misery?… Your present state of mind?,” and so forth. They would all answer, in longhand, in her little red book. Fascinating, no?

Proust, who twice filled out Faure’s form with precocious gusto—at ages 14 and 20—subsequently published his answers as “Salon Confidences Written by Marcel,” in an 1892 article in La Revue Illustrée XV. His name would become associated with the questionnaire posthumously (he died of pneumonia in 1922) once the list was adopted more widely in France, Britain, and America as a form of 20th-century pre-pop psychology.

For more details on Vanity Fair’s revised version of the Questionnaire, read here.

A brief sampling of Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire

 

Brigitte Bardot
(December 1994)

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Nothing about me, everything about others.

 

Arthur Miller
(March 1999)

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I. Tremendous. Stupid. Idiot. Dream.

 

Bette Midler
(August 2008)

Which living person do you most despise?
The Bluetooth-wearing S.U.V. driver who idles in front of my building.

 

Judd Apatow
(July 2009)

What is your favorite occupation?
Reading self-help books and forgetting what I’ve learned.

 

Arnold Schwarzenegger
(July 2003)

What is your lowest depth of misery?
Did you read the reviews for Last Action Hero?

 

Fran Lebowitz
(November 1994)

How would you like to die?
Vindicated.

 

Now you didn’t think all of this Proustian publicity could possibly NOT include you, did you, dear reader? In a narcissistic culture such as ours, it did occur to those heady creative types in marketing that you just might be interested in knowing if you share a fear with the great Valentino, or perhaps, value the same traits in a man as say, Catherine Deneuve, for example. Thus, the ubiquitous Facebook marketeers have devised the Proust questionnaire so that you and yours may discover which illustrious respondents you most resemble. For more to torment over, proceed here.

And finally, in acknowledging my love for the lyrical and to grasp at the real gems of wisdom and beauty to be found in what is more than simply another publication on a decades old idea, there is the realization that amid the tumult and the dread, amid the many attempts to tackle the overarching issues of love and death and the meaning of life, there were, and are, flashes of pure Proustian poetry.

“Walter Cronkite once confided that, if he could be reincarnated, he would choose to return as “a seagull—graceful in flight, rapacious in appetite.” Allen Ginsberg’s most marked characteristic, he said, was his “incriminating eloquence.” While Julia Child most abhorred “a dreadful meal badly served,” William F. Buckley Jr. claimed to hate “lousy logic, tempestuously waged.”

Joan Didion, when asked “When and where were you happiest?,” referred to a character in a passage from her novel Democracy: “She recalled being extremely happy eating lunch by herself in a hotel room in Chicago, once when snow was drifting on the window ledges.” And Johnny Cash offered this six-word description of paradise: “This morning, with her, having coffee.”

“…this was our favorite episode of the season: sharply written, beautifully acted, and almost overwhelming. Thematically, you have to ask: Why does Don have such a wild, gothic backstory? Here’s one partial theory: Mad Men has always been obsessed with mirroring and self-perception, and maybe self-delusion. Almost every single character — Betty, Sal, Pete, Joan, Roger, Peggy — is struggling to embody some idealized self-image, and always falling short.

Don is at the center of this story because he’s the only one who discards his old self and constructs an entirely new one from scratch. “You’re a very gifted storyteller,” Betty tells him. He’s the living promise of advertising, which always says that if you buy this (or that, or another thing), you can be different. Almost all advertising (and especially advertising of this era) promises aspirational change, and whether the result is a happier you, a sexier you — or a more glamorous you, a more powerful you — it’s a different you in the end.

 

… “And who are you supposed to be?” the man with the candy asks Don, when his children show up as a hobo and a gypsy. It’s a beautiful line — the best symbolic capper to any episode this season — not because it’s cute, but because it gets at the idea that Don, having aped so many bits of this and that (a little Tyrone Power, a little Roger Sterling, a little David Ogilvy, and much more), probably can’t answer the question at all. He’s his most important account, and he’s about to lose it.”

 

Mad Men: The Masked Ball
New York Magazine

 

ED NOTE: A lot of thoughtful analysis to be found on Episode 11, Season 3: The Gypsy and the Hobo” of Mad Men. Considered by all to be the best of the season. Deservedly so. This review, in my opinion, is one of the most insightful.

Courtesy of www.boulevard-leopold.be/

Forgotten glory and just a hint of discretion: Boulevard Leopold. Rooms, furnishings and flourishes to covet. Experiences to share. A new fascination in Belgium and a new friend across the pond. My thanks to Neutral Heaven.

In an age of stupefying untruths and incredulous myths designed to fool, bedevil and deceive, it is beyond refreshing to discover an unrepentant figure in history who was not remotely cowered by her skirmishes with sin, shame, vice or deplorable conduct, but in fact, emboldened by her forcefulness to hold sway over the faint of heart.

BookFinder.com recently issued its annual list of the most sought after out-of-print books for the year. And what enlightenment it revealed!

Let’s take a moment to parse, shall we?

We all know that hard times can increase, and even accelerate, our own dismaying dreams of wealth, excess and the ridiculously obscene, particularly when it comes to those insufferable souls who flaunt it. Our fascination with, not only the identities, but the behind-the scenes lifestyles of the impossibly well heeled, can soothe our own troubled brows like no other induced stimulant — prescribed, casked, home-grown, Pyrex-baked or fermented — can.

Perhaps that explains why Norman Mailer’s long cherished Marilyn has been replaced atop the biography list with Aimée Crocker’s renowned tome And I’d Do It Again.

The skeptical might, legitimately, ask who is Aimée Crocker? And if we are to fawn over the lives of the inscrutably rich, why covet hers? Here is why, dear readers. She was a woman of means, not always a lady and never what you might call ‘proper,’ but she managed to acquire and surpass extravagance with flair, invincibility and unapologetic gusto. No shying, hypocritical, piously-pitied patsy she.

The particulars:

“Flirtation …

can be

the most

fascinating pastime

in the world,”

gushed this California heiress to gold and railroad fortunes.

Aimée (formerly Amy) Crocker (1863-1941), was the daughter of Judge Edwin B. Crocker, legal counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad, Justice of the California Supreme Court and founder of the Crocker Art Museum. Her father was also brother to Charles Crocker, one of the “big four” California railroad barons. How blessedly lucky at birth can one be?

By the age of sixteen, the voluptuary vixen had already tumbled for a German prince “who had the most romantic saber scars,” and a Spanish toreador (“his touch left scars on my soul”).

To the great relief of San Francisco society columnists, Crocker’s wounds healed quickly and she went on to hula á deux with King Kalakaua of Hawaii, jitterbug through the jungles of Borneo with a bona fide headhunter, and hootchy-kootchy her way into the harem of the Rajah of Shikapur.

Following is the account of her memoir “And I’d Do It Again” as reviewed by Time magazine, September 28, 1936.

“The silliest of the new crop [is] a muddled concoction written with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness, by a daughter of the wealthy and picturesque Crocker family of San Francisco, detailing her travels in the Far East, her love affairs with a Japanese baron, a Chinese tyrant, a Borneo chieftain and a four-yard boa constrictor named Kaa. Aimée Crocker first became aware of the lure of the Orient when, at the age of 10, she demanded that her mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she saw in San Francisco. “Very young indeed was I.” she writes, “when the finger of the East reached out across the Pacific and touched me.” No sooner had the East put the finger on her than her mother sent her to Germany to be educated. There she fell in love with a German prince (un-named), and was taken to Madrid, where she fell in love with a bullfighter.

The impressionable young lady then returned to San Francisco, married, was almost killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon, got a divorce, hired a 70-ft. schooner and set out for the South Seas, scandalizing the missionaries in Hawaii on the way by taking part in an “orgy,” the precise details of which she does not disclose.”

Continue reading ‘“And I’d Do It Again”’

For the chronically world weary who wonder why the point of it all, a little glimpse of that elusive silver lining we’re always being promised.

Background: AHIP is the powerful insurance lobby that spends 5 million dollars a week trying to kill health care reform. Billionaires for Wealthcare is a grassroots network looking to stop them – with song.

 

VIEW

 

From the Billionaires for Wealthcare folks.

More here.

 

 

Four Seasons Las Colinas

Hilton Antole, Dallas

Renaissance, Las Vegas

Mandarin Oriental Experience Center

MorrisonSeifertMurphy

EA Flix

 

The Giuseppe Tornatore Suite/Marlena

Performer: Yo Yo Ma

Composer: Ennio Morricone

 

A personal favorite.