The Errant Æsthete

Desired Things

•03/07/12 • 4 Comments

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I was reminded of this 1927 prose poem by American writer Max Ehrmann recently and found these simple and eloquent lines resonated with me now as they did then. Desiderata comes from Latin, meaning “desired things” (plural of desideratum, the supine of desidero). When I am impatient, unsure, afraid, or wallowing in what seems an eternal state of ennui, as I am right now, during these restless and uncertain days, I take the following thought and stitch it into the hem of my life:

And whether or not it is clear to you,
… the universe is unfolding as it should.

Image: Photo, Ernst Haas

Posted in Miscellaneous
Tags: desiderata, ernsthaas, max ehrmann, poem

Have You No Shame

•03/05/12 • 7 Comments

“She
had
wandered,
without rule
or guidance,
into a
moral
wilderness.”

Timeline:
Summer of 1642,
A Puritan village near Boston Massachusetts.

Writer, Nanthanial Hawthorne’s Magnus Opum, The Scarlet Letter tells the tale of a young woman, named Hester Prynne. She has been led from the town prison with her infant daughter in her arms, and on the breast of her gown is stitched “a rag of scarlet cloth” that “assumed the shape of a letter.” It is the uppercase letter “A” or what is to become known as The Scarlet Letter. It represents the act of adultery that she has committed and it is to be a symbol of her sin—a badge of shame—for all to see.

For Hester Pryne, the scarlet letter represented “her passport into regions where other women dared not tread”, leading her to “speculate” about her society and herself more “boldly” than anyone else in New England had ever done before. Throughout history, Hawthorne’s heroine has come to be viewed as his literary contemplation of what happens when women break cultural bounds and gain personal power.

Timeline:
Winter of 2012,
United States of America,
March, Women’s History Month
Presidential Election Year

Republican icon and preeminent conservative talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, in an attack against Georgetown University law student, Sandra Fluke, who testified before a Congressional Committee last week to amend the school’s current health insurance policy to cover contraception, shared his ideas about what should happen to women who dare disagree with him on women’s health.

“So Miss Fluke,
and the rest of you feminazis,
here’s the deal.
If we are going to pay for your contraceptives,
and thus pay for you to have sex,
we want something for it.
We want you to post the videos online
so we can all watch. …

Sandra Fluke goes before a Congressional committee
and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex,
what does that make her?
It makes her a slut, right?
It makes her a prostitute.
She wants to be paid to have sex.
She’s having so much sex
she can’t afford the contraception.
She wants you and me and the taxpayers
to pay her to have sex.
What does that make us?
We’re the pimps. The johns.”

Rush Limbaugh

All because a woman dares to hold an opinion.

Washington Post

Have you No Shame Rush?

Maureen Dowd

“What Rush Limbaugh Said Was Crude, Rude, Even Piggish”

Peggy Noonan

Limbaugh spent three days smearing, by name, Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University Law School student as a greedy nymphomaniac having so much sex “it’s amazing she can still walk.”

Media Matters

“I think what Rush Limbaugh said about that young woman was not only vile and degrading to her, but to women across the country.”

David Axelrod

Rush boss Clear Channel speaks thru it’s Premiere Networks, says “We respect the right of Mr. Limbaugh … to express those opinions.”

Huffington Post

This is “what a nervous breakdown looks like and that’s what has been broadcast across AM talk radio, Fox News and the Internet since last Wednesday.”

Bert Boehlert, Media Matters

“She provided a model of civil discourse. This expression of conscience was in the tradition of the deepest values we share as a people. One need not agree with her substantive position to support her right to respectful free expression.”

Georgetown president, John DeGioia

Mitt Romney reacted to Limbaugh for days with craven silence before finally allowing on a rope line on Friday night that “it’s not the language I would have used.”
Is there a right way to call a woman a slut?

Op Ed, NY Times

Conservative talk radio host, Mark Levin tells media ‘Go to Hell’ – ‘You’re not Going to Succeed in Driving Rush Limbaugh From the Airwaves.’

Mark Levin

“Rush only “apologized” to keep advertisers: “It was his bottom line that he was concerned about”

Ron Paul

Rick Santorum, whose views on women are medieval, said “an entertainer can be absurd.”

Op Ed, NYTimes

Don Imus today called Limbaugh’s apology “lame” and referred to his fellow radio talk show host as an “insincere pig” on his program.

Daily Caller

The logic makes no sense. There’s nothing substantive in common between being paid to have sex, and having contraceptives be provided by a health plan. (Would you call a man a gigolo because he uses a condom that he got for free from some university giveaway?) The allegation that somehow Ms. Fluke is “having so much sex” strikes me as misunderstanding the way birth control pills work: You have to take them all the time even if you’re having sex only rarely, and even if you’re having sex with only one person (I mention this because the implication seems to me that Ms. Fluke is being promiscuous).

Law Professor, Eugene Volokh

Rush Limbaugh said today he was “sincere” and “heartfelt” in his apology to Sandra Fluke, as he explained that he never believed the Georgetown University student was a “slut” or “prostitute” when he said those words last week.

USA Today

“The millions of American women who have and will continue to speak out in support of women’s health care and access to contraception prove that we will not be silenced.”

Sandra Fluke, Washington Post

“Let us,
on both sides,
lay aside all arrogance.
Let us not,
on either side,
claim
that we have
already
discovered
the truth.”

St. Augustine

Image: Hester Prynne. Wikipedia Public Commons
Quote: Nathanial Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Posted in Political Theatre

A Dry Martini of a Novel

•02/29/12 • 6 Comments

A recent release of a must-read for those aesthetes who believe in putting real swill back where it belongs. The book is aptly entitled, “Rules of Civility,” by Amor Towles and it is speaks to the return of the time-honored cocktail soiree where old world charm, grace, manners and just a touch of larceny ruled the day.

Set during the hazy, enchanting, and martini-filled world of New York City circa 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old, Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, our complicated heroine embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future that begins with a chance encounter at a jazz club on New Year’s eve. Let the incantations begin.

What the collective “we” are saying:

“Everything about this novel,
set in 1930s New York, is achingly stylish -
from the author’s name to the slinky jacket design.

If you want shopping at Bendel’s,
gin martinis at a debutante’s mansion
and jazz bands playing until 3am,
RULES OF CIVILITY has it all and more.

…While you’re lost in the whirl of silk stockings,
furs and hip flasks, all you care about
is what Katey Kontent does next.”

“Irresistible.
A cross between Dorothy Parker and Holly Golightly,
Katey Kontent is a priceless narrator in her own right
- the brains of a bluestocking
with the legs of a flapper
and the mores of Carrie Bradshaw.”

“Towles creates a narrative that sparkles with sentences so beautiful
you’ll stop and re-read them. A delicious and memorable novel
that will leave you wistful …and desperate for a martini.”

My book of the year. If the unthinkable happened
and I could never read another new work of fiction in 2011,
I’d simply re-read this sparkling, stylish book,
with yet another round of martinis as dry as the author’s wit.”

And in breathless summation:

“Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.”

Another one bartender, please.

These reviews are as frothy as the cocktails they invoke.

REVIEWERS (quoted): Guardian
Observer
Telegraph
Stylist
Herald

Posted in Arts & Letters
Tags: Amor Towles, capote, civility, deco, Fitzgerald, JAZZ, Literature, rulesofcivility

Retro Glamour, Circa Hollywood

•02/26/12 • 7 Comments

Faye Dunaway, Warren Beatty, premiere of Bonnie and Clyde,1968.

Elizabeth Taylor, Life magazine, 1948.

Sophia Loren, Rome, 1955.

Rita Hayworth, Hollywood, 1943.

Lauren Bacall, Life magazine, 1944.

Barbara Streisand, Look Magazine, 1960

Gloria Swanson, Halsman’s studio, NYC, 1950.

Shirley MacLaine, Irma la Douce, 1962.

Gene Tierney, Hollywood, 1945.

Marilyn Monroe, Life magazine, 1952.

Grace Kelly, Academy Awards, 1955.

Katharine Hepburn, Suddenly Last Summer, 1959

Catherine Deneuve, filming La Chamade, 1968.

Audrey Hepburn, filming Sabrina, 1954.

Marlene Dietrich, Deutsches Theater, 1960.

I love the movies, but like great art or literature that is often ignored, reviled, slandered, or forgotten until long after its creators have left the earth, the idea of honoring the best in film will strike anyone who has ever worked in the industry as deeply inauthentic and pathologically insincere; a kind of political Superpac sanctioned by a steady stream of the richest fatcats and most unsavory egomaniacs in filmdom’s history.

Nevertheless, Hollywood’s annual night of self absorption is a wondrous spectacle to behold. I wouldn’t miss it. While the show is always too long, too trite and, woefully, unimaginative, it is not the event we are celebrating. It is the magic that Hollywood inspires, creates and honors. Nowhere else can one experience or relive the thrill of sitting in a darkened theater or a dimly-lit room and feel the tiniest thrill in watching, yet again, Gene Kelly standing atop a street lamp, arms outstretched, crooning to the heavens in Singin’ in the Rain. (I feel sure many of you will question my cinematic tastes in sputtering all over this number from sixty years ago, but seeing a guy swooning and dancing in a downpour caught up in all that wonky ardor takes my breath away.)

Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain

Singin’ in the Rain endures to this day as a kind of cinematic inscription on the collective soul of the medium. Interestingly, it wasn’t even nominated in the Best Picture category in 1953. The forgettable Greatest Show on Earth was voted Best Picture that year. Yet, when the American Film Institute issued its first “100 Years…100 Movies” list in 1997, “Singin’ in the Rain” was the highest ranking film that never received a Best Picture nomination.

So, in honor of the Academy Awards with its red-carpet fashion fails, botched acceptance speeches, host misfires, and blitheringly indistinguished picks, we’ll all be there for what promises to be a night of enchantment, embarrassment and just the palest emerald of envy.

Images: Magnum Photos, via Slate

Posted in New & Notable
Tags: AcademyAwards2012

The Excellence of Habit

•02/22/12 • 5 Comments

“We
are

what
we

repeatedly
do.

Therefore,

excellence
is
not
an act.

It
is
a
habit.”

Every day for 100 days, Jessica Svendsen created a variation on a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster for a Beethoven concert in Zürich in 1955. The project was part of the Michael Bierut 100 Days Workshop at the Yale School of Art.

Think what you might do in 100 days.

Top Image: Original by Josef Müller-Brockmann
Illustrator on variations: Jessica Svendsen
Quote: Aristotle

Posted in Illustration
Tags: aristotle, Beethoven, excellence, habit, Josef Müller-Brockmann, yale school of art

Ode to Penn Station

•02/17/12 • 5 Comments

Any city
gets
what it admires,
will pay for,
and,
ultimately,
deserves.”

Thus began The New York Time’s poignant ‘Farewell to Penn Station,’ dated October 30, 1963.

“Even when we had Penn Station,
we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
We want and deserve tin-can architecture
in a tin-horn culture.
And we will probably be judged
not by the monuments we build
but by those we have destroyed.”

Comparing the old marvel of architectural ingenuity to the new edifice of corporate and commercial ambition, Vincent Scully of Yale University remarked,

“One entered the city
like a god;
one scuttles in now
like a rat.”

The comment, like the destruction that brought down the original Penn Station, a steel and glass shrine to transportation, an elegant Beaux-Arts temple with its 150 foot high ceilings and a waiting room modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla, was apt.

“Now it is an underground Habitrail™, lit by yellowed fluorescents and flavored by the odors of Roy Rogers™ and Cinnabon™ stinking down the corridors. Excepting the mad scurry for Amtrak platforms after the track number has finally been revealed on the big board, it is an oppressive space completely without joy.”

And now fifty years later, the congestion and aesthetic blandness that defines Penn Station is under scrutiny once more. Two weeks ago, the New York Times published a convincing argument, as well as an impassioned plea, to restore what it called a Gateway to Dignity.

Maintaining the stance that there is a historic justice in trying to rectify a crime committed a half-century ago that galvanized the architectural preservation movement, the newspaper simply stated:

“It’s time to address the calamity that is Penn Station.”

It goes on to say, “Nearly a half-century has passed since the destruction of the great 1910 station designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead & White, a “monumental act of vandalism,” as an editorial in The New York Times called the demolition in 1963. A vast steel, travertine and granite railway palace of the people, the old Pennsylvania Station had declined by the end into a symbol of bygone Gilded Age opulence. It was replaced by Penn Plaza and Madison Square Garden, Modernist mediocrities, erected to serve real estate interests, with a new subterranean Penn Station entombed below.

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.”

“To pass through Grand Central Terminal,
one of New York’s exalted public spaces,
is an ennobling experience,
a gift.

To commute
via the bowels
of Penn Station,
just a few blocks away,
is a humiliation.”

In the oft asked question that historians, politicians, city planners, preservationists, visionaries and dreamers pose:

What is the value of architecture?

The answer might be as simple as this:

It can be measured, culturally, humanely and historically, in the gulf between the two. As in exaltation or humiliation.

Image: Original Penn Station, destroyed in 1963
Quote: “Farewell to Penn Station,” New York Times, Oct 30, 1963
Image: Photographer unknown
Image: AP Photo/Matty Zimmerman
Image: Photographer unknown
Quote: New York Times, February 8, 2012
Image: Berenice Abbott, printed ca. 1935

Posted in Art & Architecture
Tags: Architecture, Penn Station

There Will an Angel Be

•02/14/12 • 1 Comment

“They come
near
to us,
there is a
lovely hint
of the human
and intimate
in them,
yet they are
not
of the
earth.”

While love is being celebrated the world over today, the loss of a love is being mourned quietly in my insignificantly small sphere. Her name was Roseann Vartanee Kurjian Johns and while our own time spent together was pitifully short, her presence on this earth graced, enriched and illuminated the lives of all who knew her. My heart aches for her husband, Gary, and her sons, Penn and Dominic, and for the space, the huge, now hollow space, left in this world by her absence.

The painting above is by Abbott Thayer whose painting of angels began with the illness and death of his own beloved wife, Kate Bloede. As her condition worsened, he began painting their three children in classically inspired compositions that depicted them as embodiments of perfection — as angels are.

He painted the first of his winged protective figures in 1887 with each ethereal creature rendered as one who watches and who guards.

The angel above features a pale brooding figure enveloped by darkness, seated on a rock as the guardian of the grave.

Somehow, her pose of unangelic comportment strikes me as just exactly right in how Roseann will conduct herself in the next life — with compassion, generosity, warmth, humor, and perfected nonchalance.

She is and will be missed for all the days remaining for those of us who knew, loved and cherished her.

But soon we shall die
and all memory of those five will have left the earth,
and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.
But the love will have been enough;
all those impulses of love
return to the love that made them.
Even memory is not necessary for love.
There is a land of the living
and a land of the dead
and the bridge is love,
the only survival,
the only meaning.