Caviglia's Cabinet of Curiosities

Stop SOPA!

2012-01-18T09:47:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year! Bonne Année!

2012-01-01T12:21:00.004-05:00

Happy new year, friends and comrades! Like so many others on this day, I am full of resolutions. Which ones will be kept remains to be seen, but in the spirt of sharing and accountability, I list them here.

1. Be nicer to people who don't understand how the internet works.

2. Learn how to make cinemagraphs.

3. Eat better. I eat so poorly, I'm in danger of getting rickets. I think my big stumbling block is actually having food in the house. I intend to remedy this in any way possible. If that means Fresh Direct, it means Fresh Direct.

4. Waste less time. Don't be intellectually lazy.

5. Implement all my schemes.

Obviously, this is a broad outline. But you get the picture.

In which I become very, very UNpopular

2011-12-29T12:28:00.002-05:00

I’ve been threatening to do this for a good long while, but now it seems to be actually happening. By “this”, I mean my blog of unpopular opinions. The first post will explain the commenting policy, which I’m certain everyone will loathe. I will also be making a call for submissions very, very soon.

I’m really excited about this, and others seem to be too, which fills me with pretty much equal parts dread and delight. I’m an opinionated monster, but don’t much like conflict which I realize is a fairly toxic combination. So be it. My contrary odes to culture, art and society are imminent. More, of course, to follow.

It's not like I haven't missed you or anything...

2011-07-18T15:16:00.005-04:00

Dear Faithful Readers -

Firstly, I would like to apologize for my unscheduled but long mulled-over absence. The short explanation is that blogging became all-together Too Much. To post as much as seemed necessary to keep this blog viable, mostly prevented me from doing other things, most importantly, of course, the drawing of pictures.

The longer explanation is more difficult. For a while I assumed if I wrote diligently and well and consistently, my readership would increase as a matter of course, and possibly there would be someone somewhere who might consider paying me money for my labors. Unfortunately, neither of these things really came to pass and showed no signs of doing so any time in the future. I've thought a great deal about why this might be, and I assume it's mostly because my interests tend to be both obscure and diffuse. But I'm not precisely scholarly as I have very little formal education by modern standards. So, I think I might fall through some kind of crack in the blogosphere. I don't know, and at this point the question is pretty much moot.

It just became too heartbreaking to continue putting so much effort into something that gave so little in return. Not that I don't appreciate those of you who read consistently, and commented and posed hard questions, it's just that it became, as I wrote above, Too Much. I'm not a trust fund kid and I hate working for free. It became achingly clear that this wasn't leading anywhere, and I've never been interested in being any kind of hobbyist, so I just... stopped.

Life's a funny thing, isn't it? I've always been a little stupid about figuring out what I should be doing with myself. The most confusing thing being that although I write well, I'm in no way a writer. I'm a picture person. I've only ever bothered to write plays so that I might direct them. Writing something and not directing it holds exactly zero interest for me. Similarly, the thought of writing something that has no pictures attached makes no sense to me. I think everything should be illustrated. I'm with Alice, a book with no pictures or conversations is likely not for me. So, yeah. I've never worked or thought very quickly, so it's taken me a while to figure all this out. I draw pictures and tell stories, I've always known that. I'm not any kind of critic though I'm full of crackpot ideas, I don't know that they're organized enough to be called "criticism". I draw pictures and tell stories.

So, that's what I'm doing. About a week after I stopped working on this infernal blog and started posting pictures elsewhere, I got a commission of sorts. It all feels so much easier. I mean, I'm not a writer at all really, this is something I know top to bottom: I am not a writer. I draw pictures and make pictures. I like narrative. The writing part is entirely incidental.

This space will still be here, and I may write or post something now and again, but any sort of regular blogging is pretty much done.

My God, what a liberating thing to write. And again, I must emphasize: Thank you! Thank you all for reading these past couple of years.

Thank you, thank you, with all my heart.

Onward!

Counting the days...

2011-06-27T15:22:00.003-04:00

I can't wait. The shockingly talented folk at Pixar are finally making a movie (Brave) with a female protagonist. We are thrilled.

See the just released teaser trailer below:

What Caviglia Did On Her Summer Vacation!: An Introduction

2011-06-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

As has been briefly mentioned here, and as everyone is both buzzing and complaining and celebrating about: this June is madness. Theater abounds. Nearly everyone I know is involved in something. People are having birthdays, Same Sex marriage is now legal in Gotham. I'm at work on various projects, some involving pictures, some involving words, some involving both. And then there's the constant business of keeping it all afloat, AKA paying the bills. So there's been little time to spare to write it all up and I'm vaguely overwhelmed with the task, truth be told. But, never on to shrug off a challenge, here I go!

The following posts are a much boozier, artier, gorier version of the typical "What I did with my summer vacation" essay. At left is a picture I drew at Jazz & Sketch last Thursday at the Society of Illustrators (two minute pose, lovely model). Here at The Cabinet, we refuse to be either bored or idle in this City of our Dreams!

Zombies & Penguins

2011-06-22T16:30:00.001-04:00

Longtime Cabinet readers may remember a post way back in 2009 about artist Greg Stones, and his paintings of penguins and zombies and monsters and such. I love them.

Well, he now has two books, both available on his site and (bonus!) has YouTube clips previewing them.

The first is Goodbye, Penguin, which is a Ten Little Indians style story in which a group of fifteen penguins go for a walk, and about their various (mostly tragic) fates. I have watched this an embarrassing number of times. The one who is flattened by a snow man and the one who was abducted (which you can see at above) are my favorites. Watch it below:

His second book, is the aptly titled Zombies Hate Stuff, which is all about stuff zombies hate. Some of these things include hippies, cavemen, war reenactors and sharing.

Both of his books (and the rest of his art and prints) can be purchased here. Apropos of nothing in particular, I would like to point out that my birthday is one scant month away. In case you happened to be wondering.

Miss Saturn!

2011-06-22T08:46:00.004-04:00

My delightful inamorato is posting a series of pieces on modern vaudevillians he has featured on the stage of his American Vaudeville Theatre in honor of its 15th anniversary and the attendant FringeNYC show celebrating this occasion.

Today's post is all about the lovely Miss Saturn, so I decided to pull a sketch I did a few years ago out of the archives.

Incipient Mermaidhood

2011-06-22T08:19:00.006-04:00

The mermaids just won't stop!

This is nowhere near finished, I'll post it when it is. I'm snatching time to paint when I can amidst a ridiculously busy June. The first drawing is from life.

A Dress, A Car, A Hat

2011-06-20T11:00:00.001-04:00

I was raised Catholic and though not such a part of the modern church, saints reliquaries have always interested me.

(side note: honestly, at this point, I'm not entirely sure what it's all about these days now that it no longer seems to rule Europe or commission great art or give the younger sons of nobility something to do with themselves)

Back to reliquaries. If you don't know, they are containers of objects, often pertaining to saints. Maybe a finger bone, maybe a cup, perhaps a bell, oftentimes a hunk of the true cross, occasionally a skull. These items were (and by some, are) deemed holy. But, they are mostly a remnant of a culture that has long turned to dust, and other objects are of far greater interest to the public.

Which brings me to the sale of Debbie Reynolds's movie memorabilia this past weekend. Oftentimes when such sales are announced, and I look at the list of pieces to be sold, there's usually one or two truly exciting things, and the rest is far more ordinary. But this sale was the move equivalent of opening up the storerooms of the Vatican and selling off all the high Renaissance masterpieces. Looking at the list of items it seemed as if all of movie history was being sold off at once.

We're a strange species with a bent for mysticism and talismans. The biggest news from the sale was that Marilyn's iconic subway dress sold for approximately 5 million dollars. Of course, there are soulless rich people who snatch things up for investment purposes, but the level of excitement the sale of these dresses and objects has caused feels like religion. These pieces engender an ache, a longing, and remind us of feelings that might be something akin to holiness, or at least love.

It's a big cynical world, so oftentimes lacking in joy. Old movies whose stars are mostly gone from this earth, need to be preserved. Something like 90% of silent movies are lost to us forever. But, on a more positive note, the wonders of the internet have brought old and seemingly forgotten movies and stars to more delighted people than since they were first released. There are entire Tumblrs devoted to Howard Lloyd. Teenagers happily rave over pictures of Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy.

It's not just me, is it? Wouldn't having Chaplin's bowler in one's living room seem magical? And, yes. That was one of the items for sale. And, no. I wasn't the buyer.

Above left is a dress Claudette Colbert wore in Cecil B. deMille's Cleopatra.

Laurel and Hardy's Model-T Ford

Cagney's costumes from Yankee Doodle Dandy

Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes coat (via Flickr)

Seemingly all the costumes from Singing in the Rain.

Also included: costumes from the 1938 Marie Antoinette, a 1922 Valentino matador costume, a box of jokes hand written by W.C. Fields, Planet of the Apes costumes, Elizabeth Taylor's costumes from Cleopatra and Raintree County, Mary Pickford's dress from Taming of the Shrew, Marilyn's "Little Rock" dress from Gentlemen prefer Blondes, the Santa suit from Miracle on 34th Street, an on and on and on. Sigh.

All photos unless otherwise noted are from wormholeriders.net

Sarah Porter: Lost Voices

2011-06-18T15:00:00.005-04:00

I've been reading a great deal of young adult fantasy recently, as it's the kind of work I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I've been curious to see what's out there. Overall, I've found my reading enjoyable, but nothing has really captured my imagination or really rented out space in my consciousness. With the exception of Carrie Ryan's intelligently and beautifully written zombie novels, I've been left a little cold. Don't get me wrong - I did love The Hunger Game books, but I began to feel a little emotionally beaten up by them, and I know if I had read them when I was, say, twelve, they might have been too much. But perhaps I'm projecting. I think I might be more sensitive now, than when I was actually in middle school.

Which brings me to Sarah Porter's Lost Voices. As always, my disclaimer: Sarah is a friend. But the rave you are about to read is genuine.

In this first book of what I happily understand is a trilogy, she tells the story of a girl named Luce who lives in a coastal fishing community in Alaska. Her parents are dead, her mother died years before and her father was lost at sea. After a peripatetic life with her beloved vagabond father, she lives with a drunken, brutal uncle and life is grim indeed. After a possible death (or something like it), Luce finds herself in the sea, a mermaid, along with a tribe of other young girls, all of whom have had ugly lives and even uglier deaths. They do what mermaids traditionally have always done: they sing, and they lure ships to their doom. Luce finds a place for herself with her fellow mermaids, whose queen Catarina becomes her friend, mentor and, subsequently, inadvertent rival.

There were so many things in this book that really hit me at a deep level, and I'll likely go into some of them in embarrassing detail in this post. Here's the thing: Sarah is a poet. She just is. Her prose is evocative and gorgeous, and emotionally this story just cut me to the bone. I think she pretty much did everything right. Luce felt very much like a real girl to me. In so many books for young people, the protagonist is portrayed as "loner" or an "outsider", as this is the way so many young people feel even if this wasn't so much the case. It's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine that fictional characters recover from outsiderhood with such apparent ease, their former loneliness not leaving any scars or behavior patterns. They change circumstance, suddenly find friends and they actually, like, know how. Luce is so much more herself than many fictional characters.

In school, Luce is quiet and finds herself nearly paralyzed with social awkwardness. Upon becoming a mermaid this doesn't precisely change. She is thrilled to find herself accepted and embraced by a tribe of other girls. She also finds she has a particular talent for singing: the beautiful, alluring and deeply treacherous voice of the siren. But Luce isn't particularly used to playing with others - she's a good person, just used to being alone, which as I've so often learned to my chagrin, is much, much simpler. But that's not the way the world works: there are so many complicated social nuances, and among the teenage, social rules are strict and harsh - and these mermaids are perpetually teenaged, a horror movie concept if I've ever heard one.

There are so many interesting facets to this story, and Sarah has them all covered. So many of them have to do with the very nature of both mermaidhood and femaleness and the places in which these things overlap. Essentially, mermaids are killers, mass murderers. This is monstrous and horrifying from a human point of view, but mermaids are out of the world, it doesn't mean the same thing to them. But, still. And this forms a large part of Luce's impossible dilemma. She also asks, "Why only girls?". There's also the question of outsiderhood, and damage which lies at the heart of the story. When the terrifying mermaid Anais joins the tribe, Luce's fragile place within her new family is snatched from her. Anais is an amazing creation. She might be the most realistic mean girl I've ever encountered in fiction. Just reading about her sent bolts of anxiety through me in a very deep place I didn't think even existed within me anymore.

There's a very long history of monstrous females in myth and fairy tales. Baba Yaga, Lamia, Medusa, all the wicked mothers and witches and scheming servant girls in stories like The Juniper Tree and The Goose Girl, and, of course, the sirens themselves. And there's Anderson's The Little Mermaid, a story that as a child I found so sad it was almost unbearable. This book knows all of this, and is informed and enriched by these universal tales that form so much of who we are as a people. All these strange and sometimes evil and outsider women beginning with Eve. Luce is essentially a gentle soul who is thrust into the role of siren which is heady and confusing and upsetting and, all things considered, maybe not all it's been cracked up to be.

Sarah Porter also blogs at YA Outside the Lines, and a while ago she posted a great piece about dark subject matter in young adult fiction in which she writes:

Why would I feel the need to protect kids from an awareness of that human darkness with which they are perfectly familiar already, which haunts their imaginations and in some cases their lives?

Instead I felt responsible to be as honest as I could about the ways of getting through the darkness. Young teens are often in the process of confronting the worst aspects of humanity, and of struggling to come to terms with what it means to be a part of a species that perpetrates cruelty so routinely. Only by regarding that horror directly can they begin to withstand it.

I think she answers a certain kind of critic very well. I've started to write a bit about how I've gotten tired of dystopia, but maybe what I'm tired of is how manipulated into feeling awful I am by cheap narrative tricks. I'm totally okay with the darkness, but I want it to be earned. Lost Voices isn't a dystopian novel, but it is very dark, but it feels achingly and wonderfully real, I swear I could taste the salt water as I read.

Lost Voices's official release date is July 4th. BREAKING: Lost Voices is apparently available NOW.

Her lovely website is Sarah's Watery Den.

Below, the preview video created by her publishers (fancy!)

Mermaids of New York

2011-06-18T13:58:00.003-04:00

Mermaids of New York is a new short film making the rounds which features the legendary and lovely Bambi the Mermaid, Dame Darcy (who will have an entire post devoted all to her, soon!) and other glitterey, finned cohorts. See a clip, below, featuring Bambi:

Dame Darcy sings a sea chanty, of which she has an entire album, which you can purchase here:

As an added bonus, Dame Darcy's lovely illustration, "Dolls plunder and pillage the ship. Then drown the pretty sailor lad." From her book Dollerium which can be purchased (totally worth it) here.

The Coney Island Mermaid Parade

2011-06-18T10:27:00.005-04:00

Today is the day!

Out on the fair shores of Coney Island, along Surf Avenue and down the boardwalk is the yearly Mermaid Parade. As always brought to you by the lovely folk at Coney Island USA.

The yearly Mermaid Parade is pretty much alone in combining both family fun and toplessness (though, as my inamorato pointed out, there's also breastfeeding). It signifies and celebrates the official opening of the beach.

My first time out there it was a small, local affair. Now, it's grown to fairly gargantuan proportions and I think the best way of enjoying is is by participating. So, fair citizens, sew on some gils and attach those pasties firmly and enjoy next year's brouhaha, if it is too late to enjoy this one's. Did I mention that something like half a million people are projected to show up?

Of particular interest this year is one of the judges. You can see him below, pith helmet firmly on head, glasses at the ready.

The Crest Fest Art Show

2011-06-17T13:00:00.001-04:00

This weekend sees the opening of the Crest Hardware Art Show in Williamsburg. Sponsored by and situated in the Crest Hardware store, the show features works constructed from items commonly found in - you guessed it! - a hardware store.

The show kicks off tomorrow with the Crest Fest which will feature bands, DJs, beer and a sale of works by local artists. The proceeds will benefit the City Reliquary.

See at left this charming octopus made by Jude Ferencz. When I went and looked up the photo credit, I was happy to see the picture was taken by friend of The Cabinet, Theo Coloumbe of the Brooklyn Photo Studio. You can see more works from the exhibit here.

They are located here. In fact, it would really be beyond convenient to stop by this fest and then just run down the block and see a few offerings in The Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival (which I can't link to directly because of some egregious Flash usage, so facebook it is).

Happy Bloomsday!

2011-06-16T11:51:00.002-04:00

Raise a pint and crack open a modernist masterpiece and take a long walk and eschew punctuation!

The War Against Miss Winter

2011-06-16T02:00:00.001-04:00

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I'm an avid reader of historical mysteries, perhaps the geekiest of genres (where's our Con??).

There are all kinds. The hard-boiled works of James Ellroy and Megan Abbott which usually aren't referred to as "historical mysteries" but are. The excellent, melancholic Maisie Dobbs books by Jacqueline Winspear, all about the repercussions of the First World War on both the living and the dead. And, the insanely popular vogue for mysteries set in New York at the turn of the last century, likely inspired by the success of (the over-rated) Alienist in the '90s.

Historical mysteries are difficult to write, as there are so many different elements. Is the mystery any good? Is the book well researched and accurate, does it wear its period lightly, or is the author subjecting you to gigantic info dumps. How about all the usual novelistic elements, such as style and character? I've read very, very few that manage to be effective at all three of the above aspects of historical mystery-making. Most often, as in Caleb Carr's two mysteries, and in Victoria Thompson's Gaslight series, it's the mystery that suffers most. And in Carr's books, his characterizations are laughably simple-minded. The historical aspects are clearly the draw, so they get the most attention.

Which brings me to The War Against Miss Winter, a mystery set in the New York City theater world in the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It comes close to succeeding on all fronts, but falls a little short. The story is told by struggling actress, Rosie Winter, who has been supplementing her income (as so many of us must) by working as a file clerk for a private detective. When her employer is offed, Rosie is drawn into the mystery surrounding his family and a strange, reclusive playwright (no, not me). What's so interesting about this book is that the elements that are so often the weakest, are truly impressive. Her mystery is terrific. A true twisty, Christie-style stumper that plays fair with the readers. That is rare beyond rare. Also, first time novelist Kathryn Miller Haines is a playwright and actor, so her understanding of how the nuts and bolts of how theater works is better than in the average novelist.

Now for the not so great parts. In some ways, I am likely Haines biggest nightmare as a reader. Haines hails from Texas and lives in Pennsylvania. As far as I can tell, she has never lived in New York, and it shows. She also uses a 1940s style slang in a way that occasionally made me cringe. There was too much of it, and it felt a little forced. I grew up around people much older than me who had spent their whole lives on the island of Manhattan and the way people spoke, and the way the city was portrayed was off. The phrase "IRT" was never once mentioned, though that was the subway line Rosie lives on, and she talks about taking the subway lots. The theater Rosie winds up working for is clearly modeled after The Group Theater, but she places it on 14th Street, which just felt - wrong. Her description of the lobby of The Waldorf-Astoria made no sense if you've spent any actual time in the lobby. The city just never came alive as it does in Thompson's Gaslight series, for example, or the way Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s does in Ellroy's books.

Kathryn Miller Haines has three subsequent entries in her Rosie Winter series, and I'll likely try at least one more. Though the city isn't very compellingly drawn, and a couple of inexcusable anachronisms jumped out at me, the ability to write a complicated mystery is rare indeed.

Phylum: Mollusca Class: Cephalopoda Order: Octipoda Species: Argonautidae

2011-06-15T12:00:00.000-04:00

Oh, internet!

I just discovered the remarkable picture archive belonging to the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. I (unsurprisingly) searched the term "mollusca", and the following are a few of the images of the incredibly charismatic (but shy) Argonaut Octopus I found.

The above painting is of the female Argonaut Octopus. Painted in 1839 by one Mrs. Jeannette Power.

The above is by an unknown artist from the 1551 book, "L'Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins"

I feel as if I'm in danger of falling into an internet wormhole with this collection, emerging days later gibbering nonsense, gassy-eyed and unshowered.

Happy 50th Birthday, Kim & Kelly Deal! (AAAGH!)

2011-06-15T02:00:00.001-04:00

On June 10th, Kim and Kelly Deal of The Breeders turned 50. You heard, correctly: fifty. I suppose I have to get used to it, I mean, people who I never thought of as being all that much older than me turning ::gulp:: fifty.

Kelly Deal was basist of The Pixies, and I vividly remember seeing them years and years ago in (I think) Maxwells in Hoboken. And then a few years later saw them open up for U2 at The Garden and it seemed as if me and the friend I was with were the only ones who had any idea who they were back in the dawn of the 90s, and we stood by a railing and screamed "KIM DEAL!!" drunkenly at the stage. Ah, youth.

Kim went on to form The Breeders with Tanya Donnelly. For the band's second record, she brought in her identical twin, Kelly. Their birthday cake is hilarious. See at left the two fetuses in utero rendered in frosting.

The Cicada Princess

2011-06-14T12:00:00.001-04:00

It's beginning to seem as if everyone and their cousin has a kickstarter campaign of some sort or another, but this one particularly caught my imagination. Maybe I'm just obsessed with insect themed animation.

The Cicada Princess is an animated short currently in production. Like so much of the work that seems to interest me these days, it is not digital. It's old fashioned, meticulous stop motion animation and sculpture. Based on the children's book of the same title, the images are both charming and haunting. See their video below. Find their kickstarter page here.

Other Cabinets of Curiosities

2011-06-14T02:00:00.000-04:00

A little over a week ago, the Inamorato and I made our way over to Proteus Gowanus which includes within its walls the Observatory (a gallery space) and the Morbid Anatomy Library. The library has a nice little collection (the emphasis on "little"), but didn't seem miles more thrilling than what I would expect to find in someone's home.

In the Observatory, I was happy to catch an alchemy themed group show (Curses! It just closed yesterday.). It was, again, small, but well curated (by Pam Grossman, author of Phantasmaphile), with pieces from the always prolific Molly Crabapple of Dr. Sketchy's fame, Ann McCoy (whose work I really love), and a pair of etchings by Ukrainian artist Marina Korenfeld - who is new to me and was glad to find out about (at left, her etching Abraxas).

Over all, though, the artwork in the Obsevatory aside, excitement felt a little thin on the ground. When I picture what I want Proteus Gowanus to look like in my head, the images are far more dense, grand and exciting.

Remember that blog post of mine from way back in 2009 in which I wrote about thoughts of Victorian interior decoration, and about how taxidermy frightens me and about how I'm frightened of a mad, lonely, little old lady-hood? Well, many, many things have changed since that post and I am altogether one hundred percent aesthetically attuned with the person with whom I share my domicile. I don't think there's anyone in this house who would get particularly upset by a taxidermied crocodile, say (except, of course, with worrying about where it would go). What I really need are picture frames. I mean, I now live in a house where the biggest problems are all book and paper related, which is how it should be. Or maybe we have possibly too many wigs. I am certain we will keep each other from any sort of Collyer-dom. If there are any exciting design additions to Cabinet Headquarters, I will be sure to share them.

A couple of weeks ago, the Times did a piece on a loft in Williamsburg that has been called by its owners, The House of Collection, and it's just lovely. Unlike some of the homes featured a couple of years ago, Paige Stevenson and Ahnika Meyer's loft looks airy and sunny and livable. And I am heartily jealous, though maybe I shouldn't be because the amount of work put into it over the past three decades is more than apparent.

I think it's clear that I like the spaces around me to be dense and busy. I'm a maximalist all the way, and one of the hardest things for me at my day job are the empty gray walls. I began this blog with the idea of it being a modern, digital Cabinet of Curiosities, and as I near my 400th post, I thought it would be a good idea to re-examine that mission. And upon reexamination, I think it still explains better than anything what I am striving to do here. The world, both past and present is full of so much interest and excitement that each of us are lucky if we get the chance to see or experience even the tiniest sliver of it.

Photo at right via nytimes.com

Puppets, Fairies and POP

2011-06-13T12:00:00.001-04:00

I mentioned this spread this morning, so I thought I might as well provide a picture to go with it. Puppet wears Alexander McQueen. POP. 2007.

I haven't yet found another fashion magazine that was as relentlessly creative as POP was under Katie Grand. From the same issue, a fairy wears Yves Saint Laurent below.

Italian Vogue and the Myth of the Plus Sized Model

2011-06-13T02:00:00.002-04:00

I've written before about how tired and sad I find the current incarnation of American Vogue, and about how I think it might be time for Mrs. Wintour to call it a day. American Vogue is mostly white washed (or appallingly racially insensitive), and filled with spread after spread of white girls leaping into the air in front of plain backgrounds. Mrs. Wintour - stop hiding Grace Coddington's light under a bushel!

Not so with Italian Vogue. This is greatly due to the latitude given to photographer Steven Meisel by editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani. Unlike in the American edition, the editors of Vogue Italia have gone to great lengths to feature a much wider variety of beautiful women than their compatriots in America.

Back in 2008 they came out with what they called the "Black Issue", featuring black models exclusively throughout the magazine - except, of course, in the advertisements, the faces in which were nearly all white, making for a telling juxtaposition. This generated a great deal of talk of steps in the right direction and of exceptionalism both. Over all, the issue was extraordinary and really showed up how narrowly beauty is still construed (Mrs. Prada, take note: I blame you for a lot of it). Also of note - the issue was a blockbuster. Particularly in the United States, it sold and sold and sold and back issues on ebay go for about $80. But, contrary to what naysayers predicted, the magazine has continued to be innovative in their art direction and choice of models, and the magazine, as a whole, is far mare integrated than the norm.

The June 2011 cover and feature spread of Vogue Italia feature what are referred to in the industry as "plus sized models". As most people with an even passing interest in the industry are aware, there has been a great deal of worry over rapidly shrinking models. Women such as Coco Rocha have spoken out about how they have been encouraged to "look anorexic". The problem is simple: models should be pretty much the same size as each other so that they can fit into the samples without much in the way of alterations. That's simple practicality. The question that no one seems to be able to answer is: why do the samples have to be so tiny? There has been a great deal of hand-wringing over the effect on young girls and their perceptions of themselves and unattainable standards. Which brings us to the world of plus size models.

Like all models, the plus sized ones are beautiful, tall and pretty much flawless. The average size is an American 10 or 12 for plus size models (but these aren't, as some of you might know, actual plus sizes), and they work mostly modeling larger sized clothes or for print advertisements for various products. Rarely will you see a plus-sized model in a mainstream fashion magazine. But this is slowly changing. Glamour Magazine has started featuring larger sized models in recent years, and a few other magazines have followed suit. And then the most maddening thing of all happened. People started hand-wringing over the fact that plus-sized models might lead young people to believe that unhealthy life-styles are okay.

This made me want to bang my head against my desk until I bled.

If there's one thing (well, one thing among many) I'd like to get through the world's thick, stupid head, it's that aesthetics and fashion are separate from obesity and ill-health. Plus sized models are fit and healthy (unless they have some sort of underlying health problem we don't know anything about as we don't know these people, but that goes for, like, everyone). The only realm in which these women are considered outsized is in the world of very high fashion. Because they cannot, just like all the rest of us, fit into tiny sample sizes. They are not obese, unhealthy, over-weight or anything other than professionally gorgeous. I am completely mystified how anyone could thing that the picture above left could lead any vulnerable young woman down the sad road to obesity and horror (there's much sarcasm here).

But the most upsetting thing is -the skinny women are awful because they encourage women to be anorexic. The larger models are awful because they encourage women to be fat. It's unwinnable and ghastly. Here's the truth people: Ladies, just like gentlemen, come in many shapes and sizes. Some are deemed fashionable, some are not. This is about aesthetics. Health is abut the state of one's insides, something that is unknowable from either a glance or a photograph.

Back to Steven Meisel's editorial. It's one of the sexiest I've ever seen, Meisel is a brilliant and creative photographer and the young women in the spread are gorgeous. It is telling that they are, for the most part, undressed. Katie Grand, when she was still heading up POP, managed to coerce designers into making large sizes for Beth Ditto and others, and teeny sized for marionettes in one of my favorite photo spreads ever. But she might have magic powers and I've never seen anyone else accomplish that feat (though one would think if she had the inclination la Wintour could make that happen, but, as we all know, she lacks the inclination).

Still more images of non-white women, larger sized women or (heavens!) larger sized non-white women is all to the good. Particularly with most designers not casting non-white models because they say they "don't fit in with their aesthetic" as white women are seen as unthreateningly neutral. There are always more frontiers to conquer, and one delightful mini-trend I've noticed - again in Vogue Italia, when researching this piece - is the use of older models. Forty-seven year old Kristen McMenamy graced the cover in May, and forty-one year old Stella Tennant did the same in March. Maybe things are starting to crack!

Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place and a Minor Ode To the Forgotten Pinup Girls of Yore

2011-06-12T13:00:00.003-04:00

It's sometimes a sad old world, isn't it?

Last month, 1959 Playboy Playmate (July if you're curious) and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers was found dead in her house by a neighbor. Now, don't get the wrong idea, there was no scandal per se, she died of heart failure at the age of 82 or so. The thing is, she's been dead for nearly a year the medical examiner said, as her body was actually mummified.

Which, in a startling segue, leads me to my inamorato (the man self-styled Trav S.D.) and his performance of The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place. The performance was lovely, if I do say so. Jasper Jaxon is based on real life bank robber Elmer McCurdy, who upon his death in 1911 was over-embalmed and was displayed in various traveling side-shows and theater lobbies with various purposes until it was forgotten who this fellow had been or even that he was an actual mummified person and not just a prop. Like all great true American stories it is both tragic and hilarious.

Along with her Playmate of the Month fame, Miss Vickers had a pretty impressive monster movie career. She has the typical career of small roles in big pictures (her debut was in Sunset Boulevard!) and big roles in small pictures. Most well known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, she worked in television through the 1970s and appeared in other B horror movies, including Attack of the Giant Leeches, whose wonderful poster you can see below.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon is a long, rambling and extremely catchy song in the style of Woody Guthrie with definite shades of Bob Dylan. There's a certain species of Americana that seems to have fallen out of favor recently in our glittery techno present, and it's an awful shame mostly. In general, a sense of history is slowly being eroded. The internet in some ways both helps and hinders. There's such wonderful access to nearly everything, but the ease of finding whatever piece of whatever what puzzle one comes across, also serves to flatten it somewhat. The screen with which we view everything can decontextualize nearly everything until it's all just floating in a digital present.

Yvette Vickers cheerfully attended film festivals around the country in her old age. The fact that she could have disappeared for so long without anyone noticing breaks one's heart a little. The world is a lonely place for so many people, and one of my biggest fears, as it is for so many childless people, is that an end like that of Miss Vickers awaits us in the future. Both Yvette Vickers and the hapless crook Jasper Jaxon lived strange, picaresque and particularly American lives, only to wind up mummified, stuck in the parts of the newspapers designated for the weird and the uncanny, ready made to be turned, as all good American stories should be, into folk songs and B movies.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon will go on, no doubt and I will be sure to let you know of an recordings or return engagements.

Win Free Tickets to Five Things!

2011-06-07T09:12:00.003-04:00

Well, one thing. And that one thing is Five Things.

Recession blues got you down? Have you been pining to see a show with comedy, romance and a song about Nathan Fillion? Want to see a delightful show in The Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival?

If so, today is your LUCKY DAY.

Just head over to my delightful inamorato's blog, and you can have the opportunity to win a pair.

My rave of Five Things is here.

"All there is to this Follies racket is to Be Cool and Look Hot"

2011-06-06T14:43:00.000-04:00

Dixie Dugan: Show Girl In Hollywood

2011-06-06T13:30:00.003-04:00

Oh, Alice White.

The only reason she's re-entered the public's consiousness is because she is the subject of seemingly dozens of utterly charming publicity stills from the late '20s and through the '30s. I have a strong suspicion that the vast majority of those who are won over by her adorableness have never seen any of her pictures.

A few weeks ago we emerged from Cabinet Headquarters and ventured over to Film Forum where we were lucky enough to catch the rarely screened 1930 flick, Show Girl in Hollywood. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I have a particular fondness for the early sound musicals. Show Girl, like all of them, is a backstage musical, this one based on J.P. McEvoy's novel of the same name, featuring his show girl creation, Dixie Dugan.

The novel was serialized in Liberty Magazine in 1929, and as in its comic strip spin-off, the chorus girl protagonist was modeled after that most problematic and interesting Ziegfeld alum, Miss Louise Brooks. See below:

A first, silent Dixie Dugan flick, titled simply "Show Girl" was made in 1928, also starring Alice White. Prints exist, but it's not available on either DVD or online, unfortunately. The real question is: why was Louise Brooks never even considered to play the part which was based on her? The ways of Hollywood were and are still inexplicable. Show Girl was made by First National and Brooks was signed to Paramount (though she had been loaned out to First National before), and the studio wanted to promote their own version of Clara Bow, Alice White. The picture didn't do that well (neither did Ziegfeld's stage version of 1929 starring Ruby Keeler with songs by Gershwin), but a sequel was made a couple of years later once sound was introduced.

Back to Alice White. She is, inarguably, adorable. But she's not much of an actor. She mugs and is stilted. Her singing voice is dubbed and she's a barely adequate dancer. But, as mentioned previously, she's super adorable, a trait which has launched the career of many a starlet past and present. But, adorable does not a career make and Miss White's floundered as she became enmeshed in a tabloid sex scandal (also not uncommon among starlets past and present) and her career never recovered. One way in which she does differ from many starlets is that she was a girl with a college education who began her career working behind the camera. She was Erich Von Stroheim's script girl, but he eventually fired her. She then worked for Charlie Chaplin, who first put her in front of the camera, a goal I have a feeling she may have achieved via the Chaplin casting couch.

White made lots of silent comedies and then segued nicely into sound, but never really hit the big time. One can't help but wonder what the Dixie Dugan series would have been like had Louise Brooks (below right) starred. Alice White's gigantic peepers and baby-doll Brooklynese are charming enough, but Brooks had a great deal more force and charisma and was sexy as hell. And she was an actual Ziegfeld star, unlike Alice White who only performed on film.

This film itself is more interesting as historical curiosity than for its own merits. It's one of the only early talkies that shows the actual movie making process. In the film, Dixie befriends a fading silent screen star, played by Blanche Sweet, aging silent film star. Though, please mind, I use the phrase "aging" advisedly. Sweet's character is written and filmed as if she's on the verge of Norma Desmond-hood, but then she cries out with anguish, "I'm thirty-two years old!". In the screening I attended, this was not greeted by the audience with understanding and pity, but with great big gales of laughter.

As with Glorifying the American Girl, the last reel of Show Girl in Hollywood was shot in color, but in this instance all copies have been lost, and only black and white versions remain. Like in the Ziegfeld movie, there is s scene in which actual stars attend the premier of Dixie's movie. We are then treated to one of the strangest musical numbers I've ever seen (which is saying a lot, as I've seen some very strange musical numbers indeed). The song is called "Haywire" and in order to demonstrate "crazy" the filmmakers have chosen to include these bizarre dancing... figures. They look like homeless people possibly, or maybe the legendary Mole People who supposedly live below the streets of New York. It is so weird. You can see the whole sequence below:

All my caveats aside, I am beyond pleased to have gotten to see this curious picture on the big screen. And though one can't help but dream of a Brooks inhabited alternate reality version, it's a fascinating and entertaining curiosity.

The Comic Book Theater Festival: Five Things

2011-06-05T16:08:00.005-04:00

We seem to be going through a phase. And by "we", I don't actually mean "me". I mean people, or really, our culture seems to be going through a phase. We seem to be going through a phase in which in order for any sort of art to be taken seriously, awful things must happen in it. Even art for children! There is death and torture and apocalypse and dystopia of all stripes. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the gloom as much as the next person, but not, dear lord, to the exclusion of all else.

I am of the mind that qualities such as "charm" and "humor" and "good heartedness" are due for a comeback. I mean, they are certainly less plentiful than the gloomier ones, so doesn't that make them more valuable? Which brings me to Jillian Tully's play Five Things which is being presented as a part of the Brick's Comic Book Theater Festival. I saw it's premier performance yesterday afternoon and was thoroughly charmed by it.

On its surface, it's about terribly twee and simple things: a girl and her ukulele ode to Nathan Fillion, her genius, scientist cat who attempts to create a pair of opposable thumbs, a Fairy Dragmother, dates both bad and good, and tap dancing (done by the cat). But, like in Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books, the glittery surface is just a way of engaging larger ideas: those of identity and growing up and of making a real connection to other human beings. As always, in the spirit of full disclosure, Jillian is a friend, and her mode of communication is as much tap dance and pictures as it is words. The comic book aspect of the play is done through thought bubbles and signage of sound effects and wears it all lightly and well. As someone who loves comic books, but has pretty much zero interest in Superheroes, this was likely my sort of Comic Book Theater Festival show. It's very funny and sweet and well worth an hour or two of your life. There is science and romance and tap dancing. How many shows can one say that about, really?

Five Things

The Brick, 575 Metropolitan Ave. Brooklyn, NYC

There are three more performances: Sun 6/5, 6:30pm, Fri 6/10, 7pm, Sun 6/12, 6pm

Purchase tickets here

Below, see Jillian doing research for her role:

Top photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) and the Girl (Sarah Eliana Bisman), photo credit Beth Hommel

Bottom photo: Ruby (Jillian Tully) communes with a civilian cat, photo credit Beth Hommel

Glorifying The American Girl

2011-06-05T14:00:00.002-04:00

Glorifying the American Girl, the 1929 film produced and supervised by Florenz Ziegfield himself, is about as close as any of us are going to get to seeing the Follies live. Which still, isn't very close.

I love the very early talkie musicals from the late twenties and very early thirties, when they were just figuring out the medium which, because of that incredible genius Busby Berkeley, got figured out pretty quickly. They're all backstage show biz tales, and that goes triple for Glorifying the American Girl. It's tells a simple story, but it's far more realistic than the ones told in Gold Diggers of 1933 or 42nd Street.

Ziegfeld star Mary Eaton plays aspiring singer and dancer Gloria Hughes who, as the film begins, works as a singer in a department store. Now, let me explain this archaic mode of employment. Gloria works behind the counter of the sheet music department, and when a customer wants to hear what a song they are interested in purchasing sounds like, she sings it, accompanied on piano by her wholesome boyfriend, Buddy. The sheet music industry at the time was huge, and deserves a post of its own for sure.

Back to Gloria. While attending a company picnic at which the management has provided variety entertainment, she meets tap dancer Miller of the vaudeville act of "Miller & Moody". After seeing her dance, he asks Gloria to become his partner. She does and goes off on tour, her avaricious harpy of a stage mother in tow. It's a grueling tour of five a day shows and one night stands - quite realistic in other words. It soon becomes clear that Miller has cycled through many, many Moodys over the years, and that he is something of a hack. A nasty, greedy piece of work, who hates other's success with a passion and expects sexual favors from his dance partners. After havong been on the road a good long while, Gloria is spotted by a Ziegfeld scout and she and Miller return to New York.

One of the things we found most exciting about this film here at Cabinet headquarters was its New York location shooting. There's a long sequence in which the streets around Grand Central are seen from driver's eye view and it's pretty amazing. I'm also pretty sure The New Amsterdam is played by The New Amsterdam. Florenz Ziegfels was at the peak of his glory when this film was shot and it shows. There's a sequence in which a crowd of luminaries are announced as the enter the theatre, including: Mayor Jimmy Walker, Noah Beery, Texas Guinan, Paramount head Adolph Zukor, and Mr. Ziegfeld himself, accompanied by his wife, Billie Burke.

We then get to watch about half an hour of a Ziegfeld spectacle. We see a long (very, very long) Eddie Cantor comedy routine, a song sung by Rudy Vallee (who I will love forever for his hilarious turn in Palm Beach Story), and Helen Morgan boozily sings a torch song from atop her piano. Make no mistake: these were the some of biggest stars alive at the time this movie was made. And there are girls. Girls and girls and more girls, wearing some of the most extraordinary costumes, and dancing and gliding across some of the most magnificent sets ever created. The Follies was both wonderful and boring. It wasn't particularly hip at the time - there were jazzier, younger, sexier and faster reviews. The Follies was an American institution, and one critic likened it to an achievement more on par with Ford's, one of automation, something to be admired, but fundamentally unsexy. In other words, it was a great deal like the sort of shows we now find in Las Vegas.

The film was written by chorus girl expert, J.P McEvoy. He was a screenwriter, short story writer and the creator of Dixie Dugan, a comic strip based on the most legendary of all chorus girls, Miss Louise Brooks. He will be featured in a post later this week. Needless to say, he knew the lay of this starry eyed though hard-bitten land well, and it shows.

And what of our heroine, Gloria? She becomes a great Ziegfeld star, of course. And in one of my favorite plot twists ever - she doesn't get the boy. Being a star is awfully time consuming, and though she weeps, no doubt everyone will be happier as things turned out. And in real life, Mary Eaton was a great Ziegfeld star, and is thus completely believable once she fufills her destiny. When Glorifying the American Girl was originally released in 1929, much of the final reel was in color, extraordinarily enough. Sadly, the versions currently available are in black and white only, and some footage was snipped post-Code because of some mild Show Girl nudity. But, all hail YouTube! Much of the color footage still exists, some of which can be seen below. Hopefully one day it will be reintegrated with the film (Martin Scorcese, are you listening, Sir?)

And what of Mary Eaton, our chorus girl heroine? From a family of show biz siblings, she is most well known today for being the sister of fellow Ziegfeld girl Doris Eaton, who became the oldest living Ziegfeld Girl prior to her death last year at the age of 106. Doris is the subject of Lauren Redniss's amazing pictorial-graphic-collage-biography, Century Girl, which is an absolutely must have for anyone with an even passing interest in Ziegfeld, chorus girls, American social history, show business, or anything at all, really. Mary was one of those complete entertainment packages that proliferated at the beginning of the last century: she could act, do light comedy, sing, tap and dance en pointe. He career wained with the fall of variety and she succumbed, like so many other talented performers both before and after, to alcoholism. She died of liver failure in 1948.

If you would like to see more of the lovely Mary Eaton, she was also featured in the early Marx Brothers film, Cocoanuts.

Gotham Girls Roller Derby!

2011-06-04T03:00:00.003-04:00

No, those aren't the modern skaters pictured above, but that Life Magazine snap from the '30s was so terrific I couldn't resist posting it. The Inamorato and I have been attempting to enjoy a night of vicious and exciting roller derby, as it is some by the local Gotham Girls Roller Derby. Hopefully, tonight you will be able to see Mr. S.D. and myself sitting in the stands and munching popcorn as we watch Manhattan Mayhem battle the Queens of Pain.

Tonight. 8:30. Hunter College Sportsplex. Buy tix here.

Gilda Gray: Shimmy!

2011-06-01T05:00:00.000-04:00

Gilda Gray was a vaudevillian, a chorus girl, a headliner in The Follies and at the Palace, and a movie star.

Now, of course, she's pretty much forgotten. Doing all this research on these former chorus girls and silent movie stars, there's one thing I'm finding particularly telling: at least half are mentioned as being "possibly the model for Norma Desmond". I picture Hollywood in the fifties being filled with strange and lovely aging goddesses who still live on cigarettes and gin. In some ways Gilda was one of them, but at heart, she was a trouper.

Born in Poland in 1901 (or thereabouts: to paraphrase Angela Carter, the birthdate of actresses is often a movable feast), her parents were killed when she was an infant, but she was luckily adopted out of the orphanage by a couple who moved with her to Milwaukee when she was 9 or 10 (or thereabouts: see above). She began her career singing and dancing in local saloons. She married when still in her early teens, had a son, got divorced and went on the road. She danced what was called (and is still called) The Shimmy. People went wild for her.

She went by a variety of names until none other than the great Sophie Tucker suggested she use the name "Gilda" because of her golden blonde hair. This was in 1919. She did, and it stuck. Gilda Gray is a far better theatrical moniker than Marianna Winchalaska, the name she was born with. She was a success in vaudeville, which led her to be hired by Florenz Ziegfeld, and in the Follies, she truly became a star. In 1923 she headed to Hollywood where she was immediately successful. Her movies were huge hits and she made lots of money, and like most true show biz success stories of the age, she was a world class workaholic.

In 1929, she lost most of her accumulated fortune in the crash, and couldn't get much movie work as her thick Polish accent was not deemed talkie friendly. So, she went back to vaudeville, where she got a booking at The Palace in New York at $3,500 a week in depression dollars. She also made some movies in England, one of which, Piccadilly, has been recently restored. I watched it a few weeks ago, and - it's not very good. In general, the English silents are pretty deadly, and this one is no exception. It's painfully slow-moving and Gilda isn't great in it. From what I gather, she was neither a great actress or a great dancer: what people came in droves to see was a pretty young woman shaking with orgasmic delight in an otherwise fairly staid world.

She had a heart attack in 1931, largely brought on by overwork. Any sort of comeback was hindered by poor health. She shot a few scenes, playing herself in The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, but her scenes were cut from the final film. She continued to perform in nightclubs when she could, got married and divorced a few times, and did some very admirable work during the war on behalf of Poland.

She died of a second heart attack in 1958, all but forgotten. The Motion Picture Relief Fund paid for her funeral.

Vogue, 1946

2011-05-31T11:00:00.000-04:00

Hattie Carnegie dress. Erwin Blumenfeld photo. Vogue, 1946

I love how surrealism completely infiltrated fashion photography (after all, Vogue paid the bills for many an artist). I also love how even for a sort of workaday spread, Blumenfeld goes all out.

Mapp and Lucia and E.F. Benson

2011-05-31T03:00:00.001-04:00

Much like with The Fountain Overflows, the covers of the most recent editions of E.F. Benson's Lucia books makes them look really boring so I won't be using them. Instead, I will be illustrating this post with Edward Gorey drawings. He never illustrated the Lucia books, but he was influenced by them and should have.

E.F. Benson is the sort of fiction writer that doesn't really exist anymore. He started off writing serious, historical novels that didn't go anywhere (and are reportedly dreadful), and then went on to write dark and witty indictments of high society, then many, many short stories in pretty much every genre imaginable. Of particular note are his ghost stories, which are still heavily anthologized and pretty easy to find. He also wrote mysteries, horror, adventure stories, comic pieces, satire and crime stories. He wrote volumes of history, too.

But, what Benson is most remembered for now are his six Lucia books. Most importantly: they are hilarious. They stand as the only books that have ever made me well and truly miss my subway stop - and they did it twice. I think the first time it happened was when I was reading about the "duel" in Miss Mapp, and the second time was when Captain Puffin drowns in his soup. But more on that later.

E.F. Benson was a member of a strange and illustrious family. His father was Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the Benson siblings were interesting and accomplished. One brother, a celebrated essayist, poet and Cambridge professor, penned the lyrics to Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory" (which is a part of his Pomp and Circumstance, which we all recognize from every graduation ceremony ever). Another was a Catholic priest and popular novelist. Their sister was an artist, writer and Egyptologist. Sadly, the Egyptologist and the professor went mad, likely suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder - their father may have suffered from it as well. After the death of the Archbishop, his wife set up housekeeping with the widow of the previous Archbishop of Canterbury in a lesbian relationship that lasted the rest of their lives. It is likely that all the Benson siblings were also homosexual (E.F. certainly was).

The six Lucia novels span the years between the wars, the last one appearing shortly before Benson's death in 1940. They all (except for the previously mentioned Miss Mapp) star Mrs. Emmeline Lucas, who calls herself Lucia. She lives in the village of Riseholme and is constantly striving for social supremacy. She is elegant and snobbish and completely insufferable. All the squabbles and issues are ludicrous and overblown. I find the books incredibly difficult to explain as, if one is asked what they are about, the only answer is "a bunch of upper middle class middle aged English people who live in a village and bicker." Which is true. But they are so, so funny in an almost Fawlty Towers-ish kind of way. Lucia and her best friend Georgie pretend they can speak Italian, so of course Benson keeps throwing actual Italians at them. It's always hilarious.

Miss Mapp is introduced in the titular novel in which Lucia doesn't appear - but when the two of them meet in Mapp and Lucia, it is like clash of the titans. Lucia moves to Tilling, where Mapp reigns supreme and it's just great. They loathe each other. All the books are filled with comic set pieces and great characters. The Vicar who speaks in a made up Scottish accent. The young female painter ("Quaint Irene") who wears knickerbockers. The great opera singer who is always inviting Italians to stay. The medium who cons everybody. The local Riseholme museum that contains a taxidermied pug and some shards of pottery that everyone optimistically has declared Roman. The pages of intrigue surrounding Georgie's hair, or the "guru" with whom everyone is entranced who makes them do yoga.

There is no sex at all ("that horrid thing which Freud calls sex") and no children. I thought, at one point that there were, but then it was subsequently revealed that the character was actually around thirty but liked to effect a childlike pose. Gorey really should have illustrated them. What the books do, is turn a bunch of very ordinary, everyday people into stars of great drama. There was no television so they all had to make their own fun with their gurus and ouidja board and theatricals. Like all great leaders, Lucia is painted as being both monstrous and heroic, but the canvas she is painted on is miniscule. Women and gay men were so often portrayed in this period as depressed and thwarted or deviant. Benson was a very old fashioned writer, but in some ways he was radical. His open mindedness towards every brand of eccentricity and oddness is one of the things that makes the books so engaging. And they are, as I keep saying, very, very funny.

Memorial Day

2011-05-30T13:55:00.003-04:00

May everyone be enduring this muggy Memorial Day by ingesting hot dogs galore and cavorting in the surf.

On this day I would like to salute the lovely and brilliant Carole Lombard. She died, tragically, at the age of 33 when her plane crashed after attending a rally in her home state of Indiana during which she raised over $2 million for the war effort.

Few movie stars are more missed. I have no doubt she would have segued seamlessly into daffy little old ladyhood.

photo via The Profane Angel

Vogue: Cover by Dali

2011-05-30T11:12:00.003-04:00

I occasionally buy decades old issues of Vogue when I see them and have the cash. This 1944 issue, however, can't really be had for love or money (okay, maybe for love).

(image via kenodoxia.tumblr.com)

RIP Leonora Carrington

2011-05-30T03:00:00.004-04:00

"I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." - Leonora Carrington, 1983

But still, in the very first sentence of her New York Times obit, her relationship with Max Ernst is referenced. I have a feeling that might have rankled, though she admitted her debt to him, often. She was a wonderful painter who lived a long, productive and interesting life.

Like all artists (particularly of the female variety) she was remarkably self determined. Born into an upper class English family, running off to Paris to join the Surrealists wasn't precisely what her parents had in mind for her, to say the least. She ran off with the much older Ernst when she was about 20 and painted and wrote. There's a great anecdote about Jean Miro handing her some money and telling her to go get some cigarettes, which she essentially threw back in his face.

She first came to my attention because of her obsessions with the occult, alchemy and myth. She wrote as well as painted and I think I first encountered her work in an anthology of fantasy written by women. Like Ernst, she was a surrealist down to her very marrow. Her work is strange and autobiographical, oddly matter of fact in tone.

As for most everyone of her generation, the war was the defining event in her life. Ernst was imprisoned by the Nazis (but arrested first by the French Vichy government I think it's worth noting), and Leonora fled to Spain. She suffered a breakdown and her parents had her committed to a horrific asylum. I have no idea how apocryphal this is, but I read that she was rescued from the madhouse by her former Nanny, who arrived in a submarine. She eventually made her way to Mexico where she spent most of the remainder of her life. She and Ernst, both damaged by the war, never reconnected.

In addition to her painting and writing, she also designed for the theater. The picture above shows costumes she created for a show directed by Chilean director and filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who she mentored. Her life was long and interesting and productive but, naturally, I suppose, most people want to hear about the short years with the Surrealists in Paris. It was a time of such outrageous creativity, one just longs to have been there. At least I do - in my time machine wish list, Paris between the wars ranks high.

Leonora Carrington died this past week at the age of 94. In an odd way, I wish she could come back, as she is a painter uniquely suited, I believe, to showing us what the afterlife looks like.

Eleven A.M.

2011-05-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

Edward Hopper, 11AM, 1926

Tap Your Troubles Away!

2011-05-28T15:45:00.005-04:00

A late addition to the National Tap Dancing Day posting frenzy. Gilda Radner on The Muppet Show!

Huge thanks to Jillian Tully for posting this most charming of videos!

Happy Birthday Siouxsie Sioux!

2011-05-28T00:15:00.001-04:00

May the creative and wonderful Siouxsie Sioux have a fabulous birthday!

Siouxsie Sioux (neé Susan Ballion) was born 54 (!) years ago in Southwark (that's where Shakespeare's Globe was located - it subsequently went into decline. Parts of it were known as "the Mint", where criminals would hide out in the 17th-18th centuries as it was outside of the jurisdiction of the authorities of London).

She is and was a punk rock legend, my inamorato and I just saw clips of her in the Filth and the Fury the other night. Like so many genius artists, she embodies a persona and a particular aesthetic down to her very bones. Her look was so interesting and visually striking, her imitators turned it into a goth cliché. And I loved her band, the Banshees, when I was growing up. I saw her live in the 80s at least once (possibly more - things begin to fade).

She was married for many years to her drummer, Budgie, and they lived in gothic decadence in the South of France. Of course, the Banshees first drummer was Sid Vicious. She and Budgie have since divorced, I was sorry to hear. You can see them in happier times at right.

But it's really about the music, and the performance, isn't it? See here her video for Dazzle (embedding disabled) and you can see that she might be almost single-handedly responsible for bringing back the aesthetic of movie stars of the teens or twenties - wouldn't Mr. Ziegfeld wanted to hire her? Below is The clip for Spellbound:

I love how tall and strong and elegant she is - such a huge and endless influence. May she have the happiest of days!

Never Say Goodbye Twice and Don't Go Against The Family!

2011-05-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

No, I'm not getting all service-y again, spouting inexplicable advice via my posts.

The above heading contains the titles of two short films recently created and posted by friends of The Cabinet.

There's nothing I like better then pretend spies. I've watched every James Bond movie and all five Alias seasons (and some of those later ones were completely inexcusable). So, I of course watched the following with the utmost glee. Directed by Doug MacKrell as a part of the 48 Hour Guerilla Film Competition. Please watch it and send it to everybody, as they are intent on winning the competition, and that means hits. You will not be remotely disappointed.

Don't Go Against The Family is a hilarious short about a mob performance review by Josephine Cashman and Ken Simon:

Neko Case: Star Witness

2011-05-26T21:00:00.000-04:00

Just 'cause.

Gentlemen and Flappers

2011-05-26T01:30:00.003-04:00

Don't we all sometimes feel like we have a flapper inside trying to get out? Even me, who is so broody and anti-social. That said, one sometimes forgets, that as radical as the changes for women were at the start of the last century, there were many changes for men, too. After the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and after the stuffiness and formality of the Victorians were thrown over, men as well as women were done with being buttoned up and middle aged and embraced youth.

J.C. Leyendecker was likely the most successful commercial illustrator in the first decades of the 20th century (before that honor belonged to Norman Rockwell). Famous for his illustrations of the 'Arrow Collar Man' and for his Saturday Evening Post covers (He painted something like 300 covers for them). His most famous image today is from a 1922 Life Magazine (not that Life, the other one) cover, called The Flapper. But, flappers aside, Leyendecker likely more responsible for how we picture men in the early 20th century than anybody else. He used as his model his "live-in companion", Charles Beach, with whom he resided for many decades. Leyendecker never officially came out, so this is all really speculation but, I mean, really. It's just unfortunate he lived in a time when such subterfuge was deemed necessary.

Sadly, the decline of the collar industry hurt his career and his close identification with the decadence of the 20s didn't help either, after the crash in '29. He spent the remaining decades of his life in his estate in New Rochelle, living in near seclusion with Beach.

Some examples of his lovely and elegant work are below:

Happy National Tap Dancing Day!

2011-05-25T13:30:00.000-04:00

Today is National Tap Dancing Day, made so in honor of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's birthday. In The Cabinet's humble opinion the following is the greatest of all tap dancing sequences ever filmed. The Nicholas Brothers and Cab Calloway in five minutes of perfection:

I know I've posted this before, but this might be a close second (and my favorite). Here is the Moses Supposes number from Singin in the Rain. The Intellectual Property Gods have disabled embedding, so you'll have to click though and watch on YouTube. Gene Kelly had so many balletic pretensions, but for my money he was at his best when he just, you know, danced. I love Cyd Charisse, and think she's just lovely, but I'd far rather see Kelly and Fred Astaire dance with a hoofer, you know?

Speaking of which:

Swing Time is the film in which Fred dances his tribute to Bojangles (in the "Bojangles of Harlem" number) in which he sports, if not precisely blackface, something definitely akin to it. Which, I am sure, people have written dissertations on, as with most things, it's complicated. It's meant as a most sincere homage, but changing tastes and perceptions have made it somewhat cringe-worthy.

Dance in the form of tap (or otherwise) has nearly vanished form our screens. But, back in 1981, in Denis Potter's Pennies From Heaven, Christopher Walken danced to Let's Misbehave. This is a movie that had untold influence on me, and in some ways I've been ripping off the work of Denis Potter ever since. His strange and brilliant work for British television is simply unlike anything else. I believe everything you see that's interesting on television owes him something of a debt.

And now, finally, in honor of the man himself, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson's famous stair dance:

Housing Works Is The Best!

2011-05-25T11:15:00.003-04:00

I'm about to get all service-y again. As many of my fellow residents of Gotham know, Housing Works is one of the many things that makes living in this city a joy. Well curated Thrift Stores and auctions in many neighborhoods around the city and their truly wonderful book store. Most important, of course, is the good work they do on behalf of the homeless and people suffering from AIDS.

I, like many of us, have seemingly piles of old clothes to get rid of, but I'm not super fond of the Salvation Army's policy on homosexuality (to say the least), and because of rising rents it's getting more and more difficult to find places nearby to take one's old clothes. There used to be drop off bins, but they seem to have all disappeared.

Just today, I learned via the terrific Thrift Store Confidential blog, that Housing Works, in a partnership with the City, will now be placing clothing recycling bins in buildings around the city. I'm not entirely sure what this means for us residents of Brownstone Brooklyn, but hopefully there will be some sort of creep.

If you are interested in having your building participate, go here.

Todd Robbins: Play Dead

2011-05-25T01:00:00.002-04:00

Many, many years ago, boys and girls, they used to have outdoor rock concerts on Pier 84 on the West Side. I remember seeing tons of bands there at one point: you could drink cheap under-age beers, and there were promoters giving out free packs of crappy cigarettes. I mean, can you picture that happening now? I can't remember everyone I saw there, but I do know I saw The Psychedelic Furs (awful), The Cure, The Smiths and other people I can no longer remember. They were all-ages and general admission shows and afterward, we would walk over to Times Square and go to the (now departed) Howard Johnson's.

It was essentially a diner with a ticky tacky bar at the back, and they'd let you sit there for hours nursing your diet coke. It was late at night and aside from us and some of the usual late night Times Square weirdos, there was always a table of magicians. I can't remember if we recognized Penn & Teller from television or what (this was around '86, long before they were as famous as they are now), but we somehow wound up chatting with them one night.

A couple of years later, when I was 18, I saw Penn & Teller's show off-Broadway with my boyfriend at the time who was (among other things) a juggler who had attended the Ringling Bros's school down in Florida. As you can see, there has been a kind of striking consistency to my life. I was plucked from the audience and levitated (see below).

Fast forward a decade or so, and I'm working at FringeNYC where one of the first things I hear about our Production Manager is that her boyfriend eats light bulbs. When I met him, he seemed terribly dapper and affable and not at all what I pictured when I heard he ate light bulbs. Well, my former co-worker is now Mrs. Todd Robbins, they have a delightful son, and I've seen him perform many, many times over the past decade or so: at FringeNYC, off-Broadway, and at Monday Night Magic. Todd Robbins is something of a carnivalesque Renaissance Man: actor, sideshow freak, Ragtime piano player (he performs frequently with Woody Allen's band), and magician. For a long and entertaining post about Mr. Robbins, go here. If you walk past the sideshow at Coney Island, and you hear a voice beckoning to you from the loudspeakers: that voice is his.

All this self-indulgent prelude brings me to the spooky wonderment that is Todd Robbins's and Teller's Play Dead. I'm embarrassed to say, that last weekend was the first time I'd seen it, as it's been open for some months now. I blathered endlessly about myself, partly because I don't want to say too much about the show as so many of its pleasures are contingent on surprise.

As you enter the Players Theater on Bleecker, you first see a dire warning above the Box Office. That if you are claustrophobic or prone to panic attacks, please alert the staff before entering, as parts of the show are performed in total darkness. Now: I am someone who is claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks and all sorts of general jumpiness. But, this is a spook show and I intended to be scared. And I was. And I was completely and thoroughly entertained. The show is full of magic and scares and tall tales and misdirection and gaffs and frights. In other words, it is a near perfect thing.

I love horror, but as I've mentioned in this blog before, I am seriously distressed by what passes for entertainment, what I like to call "torture porn". I don't understand it and I think it points to a sickness in our culture that people watch such fare as "entertainment". Todd's horror and frights are of a more old fashioned sort, and he demonstrated that if done right, with great authenticity and skill, they can be very scary indeed. At bottom, the show works because Todd is such a terrific performer and teller of tales. This total scardy-cat knew she was in thoroughly good hands when the lights went out.

Even if those hands were covered in blood.

(Photo credits: picture of Todd Robbins by Carol Rosegg, picture of Howard Johnson's via ephemeralnewyork)

The Remarkable Animation of Ladislas Starevich

2011-05-24T03:00:00.003-04:00

I don't remember what circuitous route brought me to the gobsmackingly great animation of Ladislas Starevich, but it hardly matters. I watched his 1912 animated short The Camerman's Revenge on YouTube and was simply blown away. I mean this was 1912! And it's just lovely. As the description on the YouTube posting so aptly puts it, "[it] is about infidelity among the insects, a topic which I dare say has never before or after been attempted on film." Mr. and Mrs. Beetle are dissatisfied with their bourgeoise marriage, so they both embark on affairs - he with a glamorous dragonfly who dances in a nightclub, she with a local artist. Well, just watch. I promise you, it's not like anything you've ever seen:

Starevich began as a naturalist - he had been made director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania and his first films were live action documentary shorts about insect life. After directing a few films for the museum, he wished to feature insect behavior that was impossible to film, as the creatures were nocturnal and wouldn't behave normally under the lights. After seeing a short film by Emile Cohl, he decided to try stop action animation using insect carcasses. He soon branched into narrative shorts and moved to Moscow, where he created a series of animated shorts using dead animals which were acclaimed all over the world. Some people apparently couldn't believe they were animated and assumed the animals had been trained somehow - which sounds ridiculous to us, but imagine how magical his work must have seemed at the dawn of moviemaking.

You can see another of his charming insect films, The Dragonfly and The Ant, below:

After the September Revolution he joined the Russian expat community in Paris and worked there for the remainder of his life. He continued to make strange and creative animated movies until his death in 1965. Terry Gilliam has said he is a huge influence on his work.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains

2011-05-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

Remember Night Flight? It aired on USA from 1981 through 1988 and they played videos and movies and stuff? Things that never wound up on MTV or most anywhere else really?

I remember they played videos of lots of LA Punk and New Wave bands, but I mostly remember the movies. Breaking Glass, Rude Boy and some of the Paul Morrissey directed Warhol films. And best of all, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains starring a barely turned fifteen Diane Lane. I think I watched it every time it aired which was fairly frequently as they didn't have too many movies in their rotation. But then it disappeared. I left home and more or less forgot about it.

Since it had aired so many times during my formative teenage years, I had no idea how obscure and hard to find it would prove to be over the subsequent decades. There were all sorts of problems behind the scenes, and it never received any sort of proper release. The screenplay was written by Nancy Dowd who won the Oscar for penning Coming Home a few years earlier. She subsequently removed her name from the project for reasons that remain obscure. There is apparently only one print of the movie in existence and for many, many years it was pretty much impossible to see.

No more! In this age of accessibility, one can now stream The Stains via Netflix. Which is precisely what we did here at Cabinet Headquarters recently, and I got the chance to watch it for the first time in over twenty years.

First things first: it holds up. Truly. Recently, I've been watching lots of movies from the 80s and early 90s and it really makes one realize how strange and/or sanitized American films have become. Diane Lane plays Corinne Burns, a young girl who lives alone with her younger sister as their mother has just died of cancer (at 38). The two girls and their cousin (played by an extremely young Laura Dern) have started a band. They live in a dying coal town in Western Pennsylvania, where there's nothing for them. In a subtle way, the film correlates growing up working class and disenfranchised in Middle America to growing up working class and disenfranchised in London. Punk speaks just as well to kids in either place.

The film starts with a news interview with Corinne as a local station reports on "The Town That Wouldn't Die". Really, the moment you say that about a town, you know it's dead as hell. Corinne spouts teenage nihilism at the camera, calling herself, "Third-Degree Burns". Lane is remarkable with her tough little face and her eyes so full of hurt and anger. She's doomed and she knows it, all she has left is her rage and teenage bravado. She's about to lose her apartment, she can't find a job, school is a non-starter, she doesn't get along with her aunt (Christine Lahti), when she goes to see whatever band is playing at the local club that night. As Corinne watches The Looters, a punk band from London play, she first looks as if she's been hit in the face with a plank, then a look of recognition and joy plays across her face as she realizes this is it. This is what she's been looking for her whole life.

The fictional Looters sound as realistic as any fictional punk band in the movies, probably because it's comprised of two Sex Pistols and a member of the Clash (Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Paul Simenon). They are on a depressing, low-rent tour opening for an aging Spinal Tap like band of dinosaurs (the lead singer is hilariously played by Fee Waybill of The Tubes). The Looters have been promised sunny California, but have wound up in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kentucky. The tour is being run by a Rasta named Lawnboy who meets Corinne, and having seen her on the news report asks them to join the tour. Despite her bandmate's understandable reluctance (they've had all of three rehearsals), she jumps at it. The Stains are born.

Their first performance is something of a fiasco, and Corinne's frightened bandmates leave the stage when they're laughed at (cut them some slack - they're like 14 years old). But then Corinne reveals the look she's invented for herself in all its proto-Riot Grrl glory: striped hair, red eye shadow, see-through red top and tights. She sneers at the audience: "I'm perfect, but no one in this town gets me. Because I don't put out." As the tour goes on she develops a tentative relationship with the lead singer of The Looters (played by a very young and hunky Ray Winstone), but she's emotionally cut off and made of pure aggression and ambition, so he doesn't really stand a chance. Corinne's ability to grab media attention is worthy of Madonna (who I bet watched this movie with great attention). A local reporter knows she's news and starts following the tour. As little girls across the heartland start worshipping her and dressing like her, Corinne becomes something of a monster. But she's a pretty glorious one.

This movie is amazing in the way it anticipates both Madonna and the Riot Grrls. Dowd clearly knew that something was in the air, that girls were waiting for something, that there was so little out there for them. There are also shades of The Go-Go's who began as an LA punk band, but sold millions of records when they started playing sparkly incandescent pop. The Runaways may have also been in her mind, as the ultimate proto-punk teen rock band. Corinne is a creature of pure resentment and anger and carries a gigantic chip on her shoulder that causes her to do some pretty unforgivable things (mostly to Winstone, who proves to be something of a romantic), but that doesn't mean what she says on stage or in interviews is wrong.

The media satire is dead on and I'm always a fan of movies where the girl doesn't get broken. Let the girl be a monster, or a jerk, that's fine - just please don't grind her into powder. Enough of that. Third Degree Burns tells girls: "Don't get had". And the movie, remarkably, doesn't punish her for it. Awesome.

Arthur Rackham: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

2011-05-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

Arthur Rackham is one of the acknowledged geniuses of the Golden Age of illustration, and his pictures for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens have long been some of my favorites.

To my absolute delight (and hopefully yours), I learned today via the always wonderful BibliOdyssey that all fifty of his illustrations are now available online via the Harvard University Library.

How Exene Cervenka Saved My Life

2011-05-21T13:30:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, my inamorato and I sat down to watch the 1986 documentary X: The Unheard Music which I hadn't seen in well over twenty years. Back when I was a deeply alienated teenager, I saw it many, many times.

It was the weirdest thing. Aside from how much I love the band X, it was just like stepping into a time machine to the eighties. Let me just say right up front that few things are weirder and more off-putting to me than 80s nostalgia. It must have been how lots of people viewed the 70s nostalgia of the 90s, i.e. just baffling. The 80s were kind of the worst in a way, not miles away from living in these United States under Bush II. I think most people have forgotten or never knew.

It was the time of Iran-Contra, the first implementation of trickle-down economics, ketchup is a vegetable (when feeding children and the poor - so often the same thing) and the country, as whole seemed and felt culturally dead. In other words, a fine breeding ground for punk.

Exene Cervenka moved from Florida to Los Angeles in 1976 and formed X with John Doe (her soon to be husband whom she had met at a poetry workshop), Billy Zoom and D.J Bonebreak a year later. Their first four albums are all just great, all produced by Ray Manzarek from The Doors, and I had them all and played them again and again. My favorite has always been Under A Big Black Sun, their third.

Back in high school, I didn't have anywhere near the kind of money most of my classmates did. I mean, I couldn't compete with the mean little capitalist drones who sat in bio class with me, so eventually, and relievedly, I stopped trying. I wore clothes from thrift stores and yard sales (and there was some great stuff back then, believe me), my Mom's old clothes from up in the attic and my Dad's narrow lapeled suit jackets from the late 50s. I mostly stopped listening to Madonna and Duran Duran and began listening to stuff like X and The Cramps and The Replacements. Those first few REM albums and The B-52s and The Cure and The Velvet Underground and the (early) Clash records. And I began picking through my Mom's large and varied collection of LPs, stocked with folk and country and various oddities of all sorts.

Exene is a poet and a rock star and an artist right down to her bones and I worshipped her. I used to make all kinds of collages, and watching The Unheard Music, I wonder if I first started gluing stiff to paper because I saw her doing so in the film. Maybe. You can see at right a page from a more than 20 year old notebook. I don't remember where I found that picture of Exene. From Interview Magazine maybe? Way back in the early 90s she collaborated on a book called Just Another War about the first Gulf War. Henry Rollins published it on his press and I saw her on her book tour in '92. I was so thrilled to see her.

In some ways I feel she is the last of the true believers. She still writes and sings and wears thrift store clothes. She has a son in his early 20s who she had with ex-husband Viggo Mortensen (the amount of street cred he garnered when I found out he had been married to Exene for ten years is pretty much incalculable) . I just read she's been diagnosed with MS, which is just heartbreaking, and is likely why I haven't hear much from her recently.

I realize I've been writing a lot about people who have a very particular LA folk aesthetic. If I was to classify it, I would say it's a mix of old time Hollywood, punk rock, Mexican Folk Art and The Great American West. X's aesthetic falls somewhere in this too. I can't remember off hand if they are name checked in Weetzie Bat, but I think they might be. I'm a New York girl through and through, but there's something about the myth of California that's always appealed to me. When I was growing up in suburban NY, it saved me to know there were other places out there even if they were fictional: Narnia, Middle Earth, Old Hollywood, whatever. It was mysterious and glamorous and unattainable.

So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know if Exene Cervenka actually saved my life. But sometimes it sure as hell felt like it.

Photo: Jim Jocoy, We're Desperate

SPENT: The Game; or I miss the Connor Family

2011-05-20T16:00:00.002-04:00

"This is the game that moves as you play" - The Have Nots, X

This is another entry in my "I don't really play video games but" series.

Early this year, the Urban Ministries of Durham collaborated with an advertising agency on a pretty amazing project. They've put together a video game called Spent that mimics what it's like to negotiate the world when you have had all your middle class safety nets taken away and you are starting from zero. You have no savings and you are an unemployed single parent.

Your first task is to find a job. The first thing I did was try to get a temp job, during which, I promptly (and expectedly) failed the typing test. This has happened before in a much more real life and humiliating setting. So I got a job in a restaurant and had to buy the damn uniform. I opted out of their health insurance plan as I could not afford the premiums. The game says "Better not get sick!". Tell me about it. Fuck you, game.

And the game goes on. Rents are raised unexpectedly. Things go wrong. You get sick. All of this costs money and it inevitably snowballs. You have to make awful choices, like if you are running out of food money, do you take the ten bucks your kid's grandma sent him? I ran out of money on day 6 the first time I played. The game gives the option of "asking a friend for money" via facebook. I didn't try this. Also, in real life, when you are poor, most of the people you know are also going to be poor. Also, no one likes to ask their friends for money.

Being poor is really, really expensive, you see.

Here's the thing, and I'm always shocked how the privileged of this world aren't aware of it (and, really, I'm one of them. But I had the incredibly illuminating early learning experience of growing up around people who were far, far more privileged - for the most part- than I was). This is the deal: if you are a white, abled, middle class/upper middle class person, all you have to do is not fuck up. And then everything will be more or less okay. Of course, awful things can happen to anyone - disease, tragedy, what have you. None of us are immune. But a safety net helps greatly. If you are working class or poor, really, everything has to go right. You have to be smart and lucky and work very hard. To transcend one's milieu, you have to be special in one way or another. If you are rich, you can be kind of average and not work that hard and maybe you won't have the best life ever, but nothing truly disastrous will occur either.

And if you are a poor person, and have bad luck, you are going to be royally screwed. Spent demonstrates this tersely and clearly.

The class based nastiness in our culture seems to be going through a really bad phase. Sneering at poor people seems to have become a national past time. A co-worker this week is going to a "White Trash Party". Which, as far as I can tell, is a bunch of rich people making fun of a bunch of poor people. This is really complicated stuff, entwined with all sorts of issues of race and gender (non-white people and women are more likely to be poor), and lord knows, I don't have any answers. But maybe the first thing we need to do, is to have maybe just a tiny bit of empathy.

Television seems to be going through a particularly vile patch of worthless rich people worship (and much as I love Top Chef: Bravo, will you please just shut the fuck up and go away please?). Occasionally you see a poor or working class person who is presented for the purposes of mockery. There was a pretty great piece up at The Awl the other day about a truly repulsive new TV show called Repo Games which is worth a look. As mentioned here before, Jennifer L. Ponzer's book, Reality Bites Back is pretty much a must read at this point for anyone who has even a passing interest in what we watch. She points out, in great detail, how these shows reinforce a truly regressive version of the status quo. One in which poor people and women are to be ridiculed and to be Paris Hilton's fake BFF is something that one humiliates oneself to be.

Empathy happens when people acknowledge that other people are, like, human. And have exactly the same sorts of feelings they have. It's the opposite of objectification, that often misunderstood concept that strips people of their humanity. Which brings me to a piece in this week's New York Magazine, written by Roseanne about her show (Read it! Seriously, just read it. God I love her. She writes as only someone with nothing else to lose writes). I don't think you see enough about Roseanne when you see articles about remarkable and groundbreaking television. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe because it was a sitcom about a family, the most standard television format imaginable, it gets looked over. Maybe it's more insidious. I don't know. I miss the Connor family, and loved them as did the millions of other Americans who made the show number one in the ratings for half a decade. The Joss Whedon penned "Brain Dead Poet's Society" makes me cry just thinking about it, in which Darlene reads her poem in which she writes "too short to be quarterback, too plain to be queen".

So what I'm saying is, it would be nice if there were some working class Americans on TV who weren't the objects of ridicule. And I'm no Socialist, but this ultra-Capitalism we seem to be embracing is so culturally unhealthy and just gross. So, obviously, this grim little video game isn't going to do much in the face of all those "Housewives (TM)", but it's so bracing after a media diet that can seem like the equivalent of having frosting for dinner. Sweet, but so, so sick-making.

lluminating Fashion: The Morgan Library

2011-05-20T03:00:00.001-04:00

I often think about the semiotics of Fashion and Clothing (not exactly the same thing), so I'm champing at the bit to see Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, an exhibit at The Morgan Library which opens today. In it, they purport to chart the evolution of fashion in (of course) France during the Medieval Era through illuminated manuscript illustrations.

So rarely do so many of my obsessions come together in one exhibition! Illuminated manuscripts are some of the earliest European illustrated books, mostly rendered in egg tempera, one of the hardiest mediums known to man. The surviving pictures are still as bright and fresh as they day they were painted.

For many hundreds of years, one was able to tell precisely where a person fell on the social scale just by glancing at them. Strict sumptuary laws prevented any but the entrenched nobility from wearing certain fabrics and colors and styles. It wasn't until the rise of the prosperous merchant class in the Renaissance that these laws began to be stripped away. Nearly all of what we know about what people wore in pre-modern times is from art as textiles rarely survive so long. Because of this, our understanding of undergarments is minimal. Fashions moved slowly in a time before travel was common and before Mr. Gutenberg invented his remarkable press. Great world events influenced dress remarkably - the Crusades and the opening of the East brought silks and velvets and brocade to Europe, and the shapes of clothing changed as well. The corset became de rigueur in the 14th century. So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to seeing what the curators of this exhibition have put together.

For information about visiting The Morgan Library and Museum, go here. The exhibition runs from today through September 14th.

Lori Nix: Unnatural History and Other Worlds

2011-05-18T01:25:00.001-04:00

In talking about photography, I most often say that I like pictures of people. And mostly, the same goes for paintings. But, as in most things, there are oftentimes exceptions and the photographs of Lori Nix are a huge one. I was first introduced to her work via a facebook link posted by the always interesting Artistic Director of Art House. I was instantly intrigued and spent a lot of time with them.

There aren't any people in them at all, and Nix has said in interviews that one of her great influences are the Hudson River School of landscape painters and, in a way, it shows. When I first saw her photographs I couldn't quite figure out what I was looking at. They were from her series "The City", in which we see strange, long abandoned urban scenes in which trees and other foliage have grown back. I didn't understand where they were taken, or how she found these remarkable scenes to photograph.

Lori Nix's wonderful settings aren't found, they are made. She creates them herself, on tabletops. She then lights them and doesn't use any digital manipulation at all. They are perfect and melancholy and exquisite. There are landscapes and interiors and insects. She shares some of my personal obsessions, as do many of the artists I feature here - the conflict between the natural world and the structures of men; museums and toy theaters of all sorts.

I both want to know how she makes everything and I don't. Am I the only one who wants her to branch out into animation? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the power of her images comes from their silence and stillness. Qualities rare indeed in our noisy and over-stimulated world.

All photographs are the property of Lori Nix. If you are interested in purchasing her work, contact ClampArt. (Pssst: Wealthy admirers, I have birthday coming up, you know)

The Great and Wonderful L. Frank Baum

2011-05-16T10:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, as reported elsewhere, the great and wonderful L.Frank Baum would have been 155 years old. 111 years ago, Mr. Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He devised it because he thought the world needed an American fairy tale, one for the modern age, for modern children, that would leave out both the horrors and moralizing of Grimm. As we are all aware, he succeeded marvelously. He had the great instincts of a true showman, and he pleased his audiences beyond measure. So much so, thirteen sequels followed.

It's always seemed kind of unfortunate to me that most people, if they have read any of his books, have only read the first Oz book, the one on which the movie is based, as I think it is one of the weakest. Compared to the amazing flights of imagination in (my favorite) Ozma of Oz, or in The Patchwork Girl of Oz for example, it seems a little bereft of whimsey. I've mentioned Ozma of Oz elsewhere in writing about modern steampunk, as Mr. Baum presents one of the very fist literary robots.

I don't know if there is another author who has ever been as attuned to what children want as Baum was. Something about his stories goes right to the center of childhood itself. I think it has so much to do with friendship and animals and the fact that nearly everything talks. If there's one dream shared by many, many children it's that one's toys and pets would talk back. In Baum's invented universe, they most often do. One of my favorite bits of retconning is in (I think) The Lost Princess of Oz, when all the animals ask Toto why he didn't begin talking like all the other animals from our world do upon entering the Fairy Land of Oz, and he says he just didn't feel like it.

Baum reportedly wanted to cease writing Oz books, as he had other stories to tell, so he kept on introducing elements such as the spell Glinda cast that would make Oz appear to outsiders as just a continuation of the Great Sandy Waste that surrounds it. All of this is documented in his author's notes at the beginning of each volume. Inevitably, he will end a book with Oz being cut off from us (and thus, Baum, The Royal Historian of Oz, will be unable to write any more installments). He also, inevitably, reports receiving a letter from a little girl in which she asks "What about wireless?", and his writing about Oz continues, as it did until his death in 1919.

His influence upon my life is incalculable. We had a full set of the Oz books when I was growing up and I read them all repeatedly. W.W. Denslow, who illustrated the first book, is considered one of the great illustrators of the Golden Age. But, John R. Neill, who illustrated the other thirteen books has always been more to my taste. I grew up trying to draw as much like him as I could, and his massive influence is still visible all over my work. I was a strange and lonely child, likely with an undiagnosed case of OCD, prone to list making of all sorts (I swear, I spent at least half my childhood alphabetizing). At one point, I went through all of Baum's Oz books and made a list of all the characters. I (of course) alphabetized them and then drew each one. I also remember drawing each of Princess Langwidere's thirty heads.

I haven't reread them all in years and years. I think it may be time to do so again. I will, of course, share my findings here.

Sympathy For Lady Vengeance

2011-05-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

Park Chan-wook's Sympathy For Lady Vengeance (2005), the third film in his Revenge Trilogy, is a strange and beautiful thing. Vengeance, so common in movies, is unsympathetic and awful in real life, but I think its existence in the realms of fiction provides some sort of catharsis for people in their lives of quiet and ordinary desperation.

Lady Vengeance stars Lee Young Ae as Lee Geum-ja, a woman who has been wrongly convicted of the murder of a child who seeks revenge on the real murderer, who has ruined her life, and the lives of the families of the children he has killed. The story is slowly pieced together through stunning and often hilarious imagery. We watch flashbacks to Geum-ja's time in jail as she garners a reputation for extreme kindness as she helps her fellow prisoners, gaining their trust and putting them in her debt as she poisons a brutal prison bully and even donates a kidney. Upon her release, she calls in the favors she is owed - she needs money, a place to stay, a job, weapons. She has dropped the sweet facade she manufactured and is a creature of pain bent on revenge. We see her dreams of revenge and they are shocking and surreal.

One can't help but compare Park's film to the Quentin Tarantino epic, Kill Bill, as they were filmed at about the same time. Both are about a young woman who is seeking bloody revenge on an older male authority figure and her search for a daughter she has never met. But where Tarantino's film (which I enjoyed) is nearly entirely a complex and magnificent exercise in genre, Park's is something much stranger. There's a nearly operatic sense of grief and loss in it, and where Tarantino's film ends with what must be called a happy ending as Uma Thurman happily drives into the sunset with her daughter, in Park's film there are no such simple endings. Geum-ja knows she's turned into a monster and her daughter has been adopted by an Australian couple who are the only family she knows.

Not to say that many of the pleasures of this film aren't ones dripping with a pop sensibility, because they are. But bubbling underneath it is terrible loss, a strange melancholy. It's lovely, really.

Tentacle Pot Pie

2011-05-14T03:00:00.000-04:00

Learning how to cook more things has been on my agenda for quite some time. I really enjoy food and my culinary repertoire is somewhat limited, so I've been on the lookout for recipes I can try.

I've said elsewhere that I have no trouble eating meat, but I will not eat anything with tentacles. Maybe I spoke too soon!

I found this.

The Tentacle Pot Pie.

I'm entranced!

(photo and recipe via NotMartha.org and Megan Reardon)

Alfred Kubin: Symbolist Artist and Proto-Surrealist

2011-05-13T03:00:00.003-04:00

Alfred Kubin, born in 1877, was a strange, reclusive and emotionally fragile artist and illustrator. When he was about 20, he attempted suicide on his mother's grave and suffered a series of breakdowns. It was around this time that he discovered the work of Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch and Max Klinger and was profoundly influenced by them. Previously apprenticed to a successful landscape photographer, he moved into working in mostly pen and ink and lithography and began traveling in German avant-gard circles.

His work is grotesque and nightmarish, and feels profoundly Freudian (lots of scary vaginas). One the war started he pretty much became a recluse, and remained one for the rest of his life, holing up in a 12th century castle in Austria. His work was declared "degenerate" and "decadent" by the Nazis (if one wishes to be strictly truthful, he was both. The question is really whether you have a problem with it or not), but they pretty much left him alone. Unsurprisingly, he illustrated work by Poe, E.T.A. Hoffman and Dostoyevsky.

He also wrote a couple of strange dystopian novels, all of which are sadly out of print in English (unless you have a Kindle!). It's all terribly evocative. I decided to feature him here because I found that once I started looking at his pictures, I simply could not get them out of my head. I haven't read his famous novel, The Other Side, but I've heard very good things. One wonders what went on in his mind as he worked alone in his castle. One looks at his work and shudders.

Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows

2011-05-12T03:00:00.003-04:00

Rebecca West is one of the seemingly limitless number of people who was colossally famous in the 20th century and now seems to be nearly forgotten. As you can see, she was a big enough deal to wind up as the cover story of Time Magazine in 1947. She had a truly remarkable life, living until she was 90. She was a world class journalist, covering the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker, a novelist, a Feminist (she's name checked in Virginia Woolf's a Room of One's Own - I mean, does it get any better than that? Chapter Two, if you're interested), political crank, an intellectual who began her adult life as an actress (her real name was Cicely Fairfield, Rebecca West was the stage name she chose, from Ibsen's Rosmersholm) and all around fascinating person.

Her personal life was equally interesting and varied. She had a decade long affair with the much older H.G. Wells and had a son with him while Wells was still married to somebody else. She feuded with her son their whole lives, one of his grievances being she pretended, in his early years, to be his "aunt". I first saw her when she served as one of the aged talking heads in Warren Beatty's John Reed biopic, Reds.

I'll likely revisit West again on this blog as I read my way through her oeuvre, but here I want to talk about her 1957 semi-autobiographical novel, The Fountain Overflows. I first read it a few years ago and I loved it so much I didn't trust myself. What I mean by that is, I loved it to such a degree I knew I was blinded as to its objective literary worth. I remember knowing after I finished the first chapter, that unless she did something very stupid indeed, this was likely to become one of my all-time favorites. Needless to say, she did nothing stupid whatsoever, so one of my favorites it remains.

If you ask me what it's about, I'd answer: It's about a musical family (The Aubreys) in the first decade of the 20th century with a father who is a political journalist and a compulsive gambler, a mother who is a former concert pianist, three young daughters (one of whom, Rose, is the narrator) and a young son who is some sort of genius and is little more than a baby when the book begins. It is set in the very first years of the 20th century as the Aubrey family moves from Edinburgh to London, and the girls begin to grow up.

I realize this makes The Fountain Overflows sound like the most conventional novel, but it really isn't. If you ask me again what it's about, I would respond: It's about the difference between children and adults and childhood and adulthood, about art and what makes good art and bad art. It's about poverty and how children respond to it differently from each other. It's about women and how they function in a world in which they have very little autonomy, and about how some optimistically make do and how others flail and nearly drown. It's about what it means if one is a real artist and if one isn't. And how hard it is for each. It's about the uncanny and about how men can sometimes simultaneously knowingly destroy their own lives and unknowingly destroy the lives of those who love them. It might be the funniest and smartest book about what people are like that I've ever read.

The twins, Mary and our narrator Rose, are budding concert pianists. Their elder sister, Cordelia plays the violin, and the great tragedy of the Aubrey family is that Cordelia is a terrible musician and does not know it. This is viewed by Rose and Mary as a far worse tragedy than their poverty or their father's inability to hold onto a job. The worst of it is, though she is a competent musician, she just isn't any good. A distinction that is lost on most people, and Cordelia is a pretty little girl who looks charming when she plays, so she receives heaps of praise. This is simultaneously hilarious and awful and is one of the main threads of the story.

Their father is also both wonderful and monstrous. He's a political journalist of very great repute, who gambles and borrows money, who alienates his followers and friends, who cannot suffer fools. His children are all in awe of him and think him the most wonderful man, but there is a thread of nihilism and self-destruction that also frightens them. Near the beginning of the book, when they are all still small, he gives the children a remarkable and magical Christmas in which they receive elaborate toys he's made himself. They love hearing the stories from his childhood, and they watch as strange men come to the house and demand money from their mother for debts unpaid. There is a remarkable passage in which we find out that public opinion has swung against him, and his friends in Parliament think him mad because of a pamphlet he's written in which all the ills of the 20th century are laid out in black and white. It's full of extraordinary passages as Mr. Aubrey's MP friend shares his dismay and horror with Mrs. Aubrey - who knows nothing about politics but everything about music. She tells him that it's possible her husband is a seer because:

"'I am a musician, you know. We find that in the great composers. Much of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven is much more comprehensible than it was when it was first written, or even than it was when I was young. My teachers found Beethoven's later quartets quite baffling. That can only mean he wrote with a full knowledge of a musical universe that was still chaos while he lived.'"

There is a sequence in which Rose visits her cousin Rosamund and her mother in their shabby house and she and her mother discover them besieged by poltergeists. The ghosts or demons or spirits or whatever they are real and awful. But they are immediately and permanently dispelled once the two little girls and their mothers are finally in the same room as each other. Rose's mother, Clare, calls the supernatural a "dirty business" and is not something to be played with. Everyone in the Aubrey family can prognosticate to some degree or another, but it is not viewed as something that should be indulged, and if one does so the after-effects are never good.

Among all the remarkable set pieces in the book is a good old fashioned, Victorian murder. A school friend of the girls' mother poisons her husband and the Aubrey family wind up taking in the little girl and her aunt. The murderess's family are rich, uneducated Cockneys (while the Aubrey's are, of course, painfully over-educated upper class paupers), and West's descriptions of Aunt Lily are very funny. But what's remarkable is that while they are funny, they are neither condescending or sentimental. West manages throughout the book a combination of uncompromising truth telling and extreme kindness that I've never really encountered before. She's never, ever cruel to her characters, though many do awful things or behave badly.

It's really the oddest book. In some ways it's like the books one reads when one is a child, about a family of (mostly) girls, growing up in genteel poverty, who want to be brilliant musicians. I mean, I know that when one describes it, it sounds like a Noel Streatfeild book. And in a surface way it is like that, and I think if I had read it when I was eleven I would have loved it, too, and it's likely one of the reasons for my loving it (and I use that word literally - the things or people I love more than this book I can count on one hand). But as is so often the case when one reads very well at a young age, one misses nearly everything, and I would have loved it without understanding it - which in some ways is so much of what the book is about, as it is as much about being a girl as it is about anything. It has the shape in some ways of a very traditional sort of book written for young people. But, at its core, its a modernist masterpiece with all the pleasures of Victorian fiction. It's not a book for children, but it's very much about what it's like to be a child, and the child narrator is one of the most extraordinary voices I've read. West manages to make her sound the way children feel in their heads, rather than how they are heard by adults. It's often unclear how much time has gone by or how old the children are, it all flows seamlessly without the traditional markers used in more conventional fiction.

Also unconventional is that the book is entirely about the Aubrey family and their home. There are very few scenes which take place at school. There is no romance of a traditional sort in the book. The more I think about it, the more I think The Fountain Overflows might be an extraordinarily complicated, 400 page character study of Clare Aubrey, the girls' mother. Again, in some ways she resembles that perfect mother of our dreams, Marmee from Little Women. He love is what keeps their family from falling into irreparable chaos and misery, and her love and kindness is on offer to pretty much everybody who enters her home, or is swept up in her wake - including a discarded mistress of Mr. Aubrey's and the mistress's husband (meeting whom, causes her to reread Madame Bovary, which makes her forget to be angry at her husband). We see her through her children's eyes and they are fiercely protective of her, as they think they are tougher then she is, as their childhood was far more difficult, but like children reading a grownup novel - they miss the point a bit.

There is a thread of politics that runs through the book, but West is wise enough, or perhaps I only think she is wise as she thinks as I do, that people are more important than politics. And this is book that is about people and about art and about family. Rebecca West writes as well as anybody I've ever read, and better than nearly everyone. Her prose is so clear, so sane and so sharp. Her sentences and paragraphs are long, and like the novel itself, perfectly constructed. As she writes about the Aubrey family and their friends it's as if she's wielding a sharp paring knife, cutting deeper and deeper into the truth of who these people are. Her criticism could be vicious when she was young. Shaw said of her: "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." And here she cuts very deeply indeed, but never thoughtlessly, never unkindly.

In her author's note at the end of the book West writes:

"The main theme of the book might be said to be the way human beings look at each other inquisitively, trying to make out what is inside the opaque human frame. Piers and Clare Aubrey loved each other but never really knew how the other one thought and felt. Mary and Rose were divided from Cordelia and watched each other in irritated misapprehension, and were divided from Richard Quinn and looked at him in hope of comprehension. They were all looking for clues to understanding... But I only wrote this book, which is not to say that I am the best authority on what it means."

Whatever it means, I can say I love the Aubrey family and maybe that's enough meaning, really. West wrote two sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund, both still unfinished at her death in 1983. She apparently spent years tinkering with them and never thought them ready for publication. However, they have both been published posthumously, and they both sit on my shelf waiting to be read.

Anthropomorphica: Doll Parts

2011-05-11T03:00:00.000-04:00

One day, through channels I no longer remember, I came across a world, in the form of the blog Anthrpomorphica, I had never quite glimpsed before.

Originating in Edinburgh, the gifted proprietress of Anthropomorphica creates strange and wonderful dolls, names them, writes little narratives, takes their pictures and posts them on her blog. Her work is exquisite, gothic, charming. Sometimes she puts one of her dolls up for adoption (via her Etsy store).

She also sometimes features dolls made by other artists. It's a world I didn't know existed, with beautifully crafted figures made of clay and papier-mâché and paint and felt and bone. It led me through link after link of invented worlds and finely crafted beings. I love how so much of it is tied to narrative, and one certainly assumes that they do indeed come to life after the lights are put out.

Please look at:

Anthropomorphica (who, needless to say, owns the photo above)

Harem6

Evelyn's Wonderland

Breaking: Deadly Knitshade Hits NYC

2011-05-10T16:30:00.000-04:00

Yes, citizens of Gotham - the day has finally come.

Guerrilla knitter, Deadly Knitshade has struck our fair city. The result? Squid. Yes, you heard correctly - squid knit of orange yarn are hanging from some of our most storied skyscrapers.

I've covered the work of this particular band of rogues who strike seemingly at random across their native London in a previous post. But now... their most notorious, needle bearing member is Yarnstorming here.

Photo property of (the dread) Deadly Knitshade

Yuriy Norshteyn: Glorious, Glorious Animation

2011-05-10T03:00:00.000-04:00

I'm hoping one of my loyal readers who's knowledge of all things filmic and Russian far surpasses my own, will have some further information on Russian animation genius Yuriy Norshteyn (Fuzzy Bastard, I'm looking at you!).

His work is detailed and beautiful and charming - and unprolific. He is referred to in Russia as "The Golden Snail" for the slowness of his process - he has been working on his (yet unfinished) film The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nicolai Gogol, since 1981. The work by him that is available (on YouTube - the only Region 1 DVD I could find is a long out of print anthology of Russian animation) is beautiful. Below see the magical, toy theater-like Seasons:

And the unbelievably tragic My Green Crocodile. I'm not precisely sure what happens, as it is untranslated, but it's a simple story and I think I get the drift. The Green Crocodile falls in love with a beautiful cow. The other animals are jealous (I think) and it all ends in tears - which at least make flowers grow. It's stunning.

It is for work like this that I endlessly praise the internet. Such beauty, such genius - all at our fingertips, in our homes. It's not too easy, is it? I don't think so. With all this variety, most people still watch the same old corporate garbage to the exclusion of almost everything else. But there's so much to look at and listen to and to read and to watch. How could anyone ever be bored in this true age of wonders?

Au Revoir!

2011-05-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

I'm usually not super interested in optical illusion illustrations - perhaps because we see the same ones again and again (It's a vase! It's a lady!), but this one was too good not to share. From a postcard c. 1905-1910

via firsttimeuser -> vintagegal

Castles and 18th Century Theatrical Design: Whee!

2011-05-09T03:00:00.007-04:00

One day last week I had a few hours to kill between work and drawing at the Society of Illustrators, so I walked a bit in Central Park and wandered into The Met.

Whenever I visit this most glorious of New York City museums, I always start by seeing what they have up in the constantly rotating Drawing and Print Gallery on the 2nd floor. The current exhibit, which is pulled from the permanent collection, is pretty fantabulous. They've pulled out all the big guns with Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and William Blake well represented. I remember being twelve or thirteen and staring at the famous self-portrait Dürer drew when he was thirteen and being completely upset that I wasn't as good. Yes, for what it's worth, even when I was a child I compared myself with the Renaissance greats. One of my favorites is included, "The Sea Monster" (at left). I love the tortoise shell being used as a shield and the romantic castle of my dreams situated in the landscape.

Also on display, are a number of 18th and 19th century stage designs. Most are ink and watercolor. There are some glorious ones for a mid-19th century Magic Flute, and an 18th century design (at right) for a sadly unidentified production drawn by Johann Heinrich Ramberg that made me want to jump into my trusty (imaginary) time machine and create something in his glorious, repurposed space. There are more - beautiful Italian watercolors and chalk drawings and an interior of The Met Opera House from 1884 that put the currently used software to shame. Why is it that so many useful modern instruments also neglect to be beautiful?

The current exhibit is up through June 12.

I also made a quick sweep through the Alexander McQueen exhibit, and it even more wonderful than hoped. More on that later!

David Lynch Signature Cup Organic Coffee

2011-05-08T03:00:00.001-04:00

Let's talk a little about coffee. I drink too much of it, but I love it, and I have never thought to myself, "What would coffee be like if David Lynch was responsible for making coffee?" And I never thought, "What would the commercial for this David Lynch made coffee be like?" and I never wondered "What would the commercial for the David Lynch made coffee be like if he turned the camera on a Barbie head for four and a half minutes?". I never wondered any of these things.

Well. Now I know.

David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee from David Lynch on Vimeo.

via Coilhouse

Mermaid Moonbathing

2011-05-07T13:32:00.003-04:00

Spring, Glorious Spring!

2011-05-07T11:37:00.002-04:00

The flowers have bloomed in parks both Central and Prospect and the citizens of my beloved Gotham look happy and full of delighted expectation for the summer to come.

So, I draw and I paint and I sit in the shade. People who live in the country must take such pleasures for granted. Don't we (or at least I) need the contrast of traffic and buildings just yards away to really appreciate the tress and wide lawns and the flowers?

Class: Cephalopoda

2011-05-06T16:30:00.001-04:00

My fascination with squid and octopus and all the members of the illustrious Class of Cephalopoda (Phylum: Mollusca, Kingdom: Animalia) began almost ten years ago as I worked on what I referred to as my 9/11 play. It remains unfinished and is likely unfinishable. I called it Tricks With Make-Up and it is set in a barroom in which all surfaces are obscured by a dull gray ash. Whether it is purgatory or some kind of post-apocalyptic liminal neverland, remains unclear. In it, a Bird, a Killer, a Spy, a Victim, The Last Leopard and The Second To Last Leopard (Felidae Panthera Pardus) enact various power plays. Bird, in particular, is a monstrous, Stalin-like figure (in her home forrest, she sports the title "Chairmistress of Freedom, Animality and Discipline").

But it was a mess. A Frankensteinian creature created from pieces of other projects, ruminations on Jack the Ripper, reading I'd done on animal behavior and the deep, strange nihilism I felt after the fall of the towers which engendered a certainty in me that the human species was a complete failure in evolutionary terms. And I had an equally crazy design concept. I thought there should be a giant, animatronic squid suspended from the ceiling with enormous tentacles that wrapped around the audience. During the play, the tentacles would move with a barely perceptible slowness, the audience unaware of what was happening until the tentacles were everywhere, trapping them in their seats.

Now, I realized that the the chances of this design concept coming to fruition were, to say the least, low. But in preparation for the momentous day when my most extravagant dreams could become perfectly realized, I started researching squid and the other members of the family cephalopoda and became, in a word, obsessed. Giant Squid seemed more like creatures from the imagination of a 19th century fantasist, rather than something that could actually, you know, exist. Where we have water in our bodies, they have ammonia. Their espophogus bisects their brains. They possess a starting and uncanny intelligence. They use tools. Octopuses are prone to nervous upset and have been known to start eating their own arms. They are beautiful and other-worldly. They are nearly all venemous to one degree or another. They are beaked. There may be even larger, completely undiscovered squid that live in the deepest, most unknown parts of the ocean (some electrical pings indicate that this is not fantasy).

I joined all the squid list serves, I read all the latest scientific findings. They are amazing. I think one of my fascinations with these remarkable creatures is that they are nothing like us. They are completely, to their core, other-worldly and unknowable. Chimps and Bonobos are near relatives; dogs and humans have co-existed for millions of years and likely evolved symbiotically (for example, humans exhibit dog-like pack behavior that doesn't occur in other primates); dolphins, if fish shaped, are fellow mammals, and seem at least somewhat willing to interact with us. But with the clever cephalopod, we have no common language of any kind. Any attempts to get through have been met with a blank wall of nothing.

In our depictions of the residents of other planets, we most often have dreamed up humanoid creatures. Even if they were hostile, we could still interact. And if they were utterly unhuman (like Aunt Beast in a Wrinkle in Time) we could still breach the difference through touch or sound or something. Thus far, there has been no cephalopodean Rosetta Stone of any sort. To be honest, I don't know if I want one.

But I'm an artist, not a scientist.

My BFF sent this to me yesterday, a gorgeous film of a Dumbo Octopus. You can watch it here, as Blogger is being all fiddly and will not upload it.

Greed

2011-05-06T09:30:00.003-04:00

I've been in a shockingly acquisitive mood lately, so I've been indulging my hobby of internet window shopping. One just winds up unsatisfied, with nothing but increased longings. Below is exhibit "A". It is a pink tentacle scarf. I think I should own it.

It is from Creepling's Etsy store.

Here at The Cabinet, we are also in need of a bath mat. I understand a reasonable solution would be to just go to the store and, like, buy one. Instead, I am obsessively searching for the best bath mat. Most of them are so pedestrian. BUT, then I discovered bath mat Nirvana, in the form of ekra's Etsy store. Unfortunately, they are a bit pricey. But look!

Then i made the colossal error of visiting the John Fluevog website in search of replacement parts for a pair of shoes I need to get repaired. And I discovered these:

I think maybe I should own them. Sigh.

Back to loftier pursuits.

Ten Minutes

2011-05-05T07:00:00.002-04:00

And she held this pose for ten freaking minutes. Anyone who has ever modeled knows that ten minutes can seem like a long, long time. Also, that isn't some comfy settee she's draped over, but a stool turned on its side with a wrap thrown over it. Art modeling is physically taxing work, and those who do it well deserve celebration and praise!

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty

2011-05-04T01:00:00.001-04:00

Today, the long anticipated Alexander McQueen exhibit opens at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The designer committed suicide in 2010. It's always a tragedy when a beloved artist leaves this mortal coil in his prime, but the thought of him being so miserable whilst being so brilliant and renowned is just heartbreaking.

His work was witty and achingly beautiful. The picture above is part of a Grace Coddington styled spread in Vogue featuring model Coco Rocha (among others) wearing his creations. Some samplings from the exhibit below. I'm likely going to go some Friday first thing in the morning, sketchbook firmly in hand, to beat the crowds.

Particularly for those of my readers who are theater folk with little knowledge of fashion: his runway shows were truly beautiful living and ephemeral pieces of art. See this video montage below, courtesy The Met and Alexander McQueen's estate:

17

2011-05-03T07:00:00.001-04:00

The picture below was taken when I was seventeen a very long time ago. It was shot by a friend I no longer speak to and I think it's kind of great in its moody, gothy, self-involved teenager-y way. And my foot looks enormous.

I have a post coming up about bridging gap between one's teens and twenties, so I won't say much here, but I remember being so thoroughly confused. No one in high school would go out on a date with me if their life depended on it from what I could tell, and then when I left my horrible home town I got a lot of attention and mostly, I was baffled. I think I felt a little like Helena, you know, that everyone was making fun of me and I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Below is a really self-consciously arty shot. I remember that dress and I loved it. And I wore those boots until they were being held together with electrical tape.

Yet ANOTHER Fabulous Redhead turns 70: Ann-Margret Edition

2011-05-02T12:00:00.002-04:00

I've always had a major soft spot for Ann-Margret and think she's been both under-rated and under-utilized. She's so lovely (and still is! Was I the only one who caught the Law & Order in which she played a nutty stalker?).

Born in Sweden in 1941 (like every other fabulous redhead on Earth) and moved to the US when she was six. She catapulted to stardom in 1963 with her starring role in Bye-Bye Birdy. There was a great moment in the first season of Mad Men when they screened her opening number from the film and all the men found it sexy as hell, but Peggy found it to be embarrassing to watch. She has a point. Ann-Margret is trying so hard, it seems a bit - desperate. She was never a particularly relaxed performer.

I adore her in Viva Las Vegas in which she stars opposite Elvis, and for once (for both of them) it's an even match. They were simply the two sexiest people on the face of the Earth at that exact moment in time and they subsequently had a year long affair - about which she doesn't really speak. Subsequently, she married to actor/manager Roger Smith, a relationship that's lasted about 45 years. She is also one of the few performers who has the honor of being a Flintstone character!

But it's that sense of discomfort I wanted to write about a bit. I think she's a little hard to watch sometimes because she appears so eager to please. So many beautiful women on screen can just sit there and let the world bask in their loveliness. Not Ann-Margret. She always looks like she's working - I mean, look at the picture above. I find her scenes with Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge to be almost unwatchable; he's so cruel to her. You can feel the desperation leaching out of her pores. I really hate that film, and it's one of those situations where my loathing is so intense I'm not sure if I trust it.

Ann-Margret has made a series of awful films in the last twenty years, not that actresses in her age range have a great deal of choice if they wish to keep working. She's an aging sex kitten, and that's exactly what she portrayed in her recent L&O turn. She was creepy and weird and histrionic and pretty riveting.

All hail this most vivacious of screen presences on this momentous birthday!

For other entries in my Fabulous Redheads Turning 70 coverage go here and here.

Another Forgotten Chorus Girl

2011-05-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

A quick study of mostly forgotten Ziegfeld Girl Dorothy Flood. She was a performer in Whoopie and in the 1929 edition of the Midnight Frolic.

Tumblr of the Month! Collected Letters of the Widow Flannigan

2011-05-01T07:00:00.004-04:00

This delightful Tumblr describes itself thusly: An elegant tapestry woven of the shreds of human dignity. Like many of my favorite Tumblrs, it has a randomizer. See below for some images you may find if you subscribe to her always interesting feed:

~ Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society, Including Social, Commercial and Legal Forms, Letter Writing, Invitations, &c., also valuable suggestions on Self Culture and Home Training., by Richard A. Wells, 1891
via Internet Archive

Polaire. French-Algerian actress and music hall artist, c.1900. She was the first to play Collette's Claudine upon the stage!

And much, much more contained within.

I'm just an addict at this point

2011-04-28T07:00:00.000-04:00

Two more cinemagraphs by Jamie Beck. I'm completely and utterly addicted to these lovely, lovely images. The first one is from the series she did with model Coco Rocha, who always seems to be doing and saying interesting things. She came to the world of fashion via the unlikely route of competitive Irish step dancing in her native Canada. She'd never worn anything other than jeans or a school uniform before becoming a model and has been something of a bastion of sense in a senseless industry, speaking often and publicly about eating disorders and the pressure to acquire them. She's the model who was once famously told, "You need to lose more weight. The look this year is anorexia. We don't want you to be anorexic but that's what we want you to look like." She's also something of a throwback to the supermodels of yore when beautiful women with big personalities were in favor, rather than interchangeable 15 year old Latvians. She once step danced down Jean Paul Gaultier's runway.

I can't stop looking at this arresting New York moment in which a brief moment, a flicker of movement, has been captured for all eternity. Magic!

Incipient Mermaid-hood

2011-04-27T15:30:00.000-04:00

The above is a very quickly painted portrait that is definitely headed in a mermaid sort of direction. My watercolor skills are primitive, to say the least, so I need to just paint all the freaking time. Right? I have just so many ideas in terms of larger projects I have brewing and I can't wait until I am able to unleash them

Soon, I'll be writing about my newest obsession, Rebecca West and her extraordinary novel The Fountain Overflows. Which, honestly, you all should read.

Really. I've been rereading it for my post and what I previously thought of as one of my favorite novels has lept in my estimation into being possibly one of the greatest novels ever written. More on that later.though.

For now I need to find time to paint.

Nice Gams: the Art of Léo Fontan

2011-04-27T07:00:00.013-04:00

For the past few months I've been neglecting my new found fascination with all the wonderful illustrators who worked for the early 20th century French periodical, La Vie Parisienne. So, let me introduce you to the lovely work of Léo Fontan. Among some other achievements, he is most well known for a delicious series of postcards that should delight both foot fetishists and everyone else. That is to say, they are illustrations of women's legs and feet.

He moved to Paris in 1909 after art school and I was thrilled to discover that his first paying gig was illustrating the cover of Arsène Lupin novels!

:::crickets:::

Okay, Clearly, I'm the only person who was thrilled to discover this. Everyone else just wants more pictures of pretty girls. Which there will be - but first this: Arsène Lupin is a glamorous, fictional, super-thief, created by Maurice Leblanc in 1905. He is kind of similar to the English Raffles (with whom I often confuse him), and he isn't enough read by classic mystery lovers in the English speaking world.

There is a contemporary French edition which still uses Fontan's illustrations!

Okay, back to the girls, as promised.

I don't know what Fontan's fascination was with women's stockinged legs (and I'm likely happier not knowing), but the results are charming. As mentioned above, he also worked for many popular periodicals, such as the rightly celebrated La Vie Parisienne.

During World War II he began specializing in portraits, which is what he mostly continued to do throughout his life. He continued to draw and paint until his death in 1965, even though he was plagued with failing eyesight.

Elizabeth McGrath: Everything That Creeps

2011-04-26T07:00:00.005-04:00

I'm not sure where I first came across the work of artist Elizabeth McGrath, but I know I wasn't living in the current Cabinet headquarters, so it had to have been more than five years ago. I also own a book of her art, Everything That Creeps, and I have no idea where it came from. Well, things accumulate.

McGrath is a part of the punk-pop-goth-fairy tale aesthetic that is just busting out of Los Angeles from seemingly all directions. She constructs meticulously put together sculptures which often include small dioramas embedded somewhere inside them, using found objects, doll furniture and taxidermy. Her more recent work has a cleaner, more nursery rhyme feel, while her earlier work is much, much, much darker.

I always admire people who know how to make things, as my hands are clumsy and I'm no good at it at all.

See the pig below:

And then look and see what's embedded in its belly!

Her work is strange and beautiful and one gets the pervasive feeling one has entered an other-worldly dime museum. As if unseen wonders and horrors are being presented to us.

McGrath has some larger scale work too, of which I am less fond. I have a feeling, that like myself, she is a miniturist at heart. She's someone with which I would love to collaborate, actually, as I feel the people (or beings) in her work are just crying out for stories.

For now, she's on my list of artists whose work I'd like to own if I can ever afford art. I have to say, I'm a little transfixed by her earlier, slightly more diabolical work, which somehow really inspires me. Taxidermy (of all things) is having a moment, isn't it? I've talked about this here before about my fear of maggots and arsenic, but the fascination still lingers. And there this, a class on mummification coming up. I'm sorely tempted.

I Am Completely Doomed

2011-04-25T12:30:00.000-04:00

Butter Lane, the bakers of the greatest cupcakes in our fair city have opened a (for now) temporary outpost around the corner from Cabinet Headquarters. Let me explain. Butter Lane cupcakes are only very distantly related to that sugary nastiness over at Magnolia. Their strawberry icing is sublime. I had a bourbon soaked cupcake from them a few weeks ago that was life changing.

I'm going to spend all my money and out-grow all my pants! Look at the variety! Just look!

Playwright Wars 2011: This is the way things work when they are broken

2011-04-25T07:00:00.007-04:00

The thing is, art doesn't exist in an empty, airless space. And merit is as merit does, but things - paintings, novels, plays, whatnot - become a part of our larger culture, not in a self-replicating, Tribble-like way, but through familiarity. Also, people are freaking lazy and the same stuff gets cited and produced and then people will have heard of whatever the artistic thingy is and then it will be seen and mentioned and Presto! it's a part of the culture.

Which brings me to what I've dubbed "The Playwright Wars of 2011".

In theater there is simply not enough pie for anybody. Playwrights can't make any money, the big not-for-profits have the producing style (by and large) of frightened, penny-pinching industrialists, and if you don't have an MFA from a fancy-pants school you're in big time trouble. And if you're not a boy: watch out! And if you're not white: oh no! and if you're not rich: Sorry, you don't have a chance! But even if you are all those things: Still - not enough pie.

For those who haven't been paying attention:

Julia Jordan's Introduction to Opening The Curtain of Playwright Gender (FYI - I was at the meeting at New Dramatists she mentions, along with nearly every woman playwright I know, or have ever heard of for that matter, barring the ones who are dead or not in NYC)

Theresa Rebeck's Laura Pels Keynote Address

My blog posts on the Wendy Wasserstein Award debacle (and here is the complete text of Michael Lew's letter to the prize committee)

Michael Kaiser's deeply problematic post about finding quality new work for the HuffPo

Joshua Conkel's great and rabble rousing response, about the issue of class on the Youngblood blog

Dripping with privilege and entitlement, Mat Smart's post in which we find out why we're all a bunch of failures

Kari-Bentley Quinn's lovely and thoughtful response

So. Yeah. It's broken. All of it. There's lots of lovely work, but nobody is making a living hardly. There's not enough pie. Lord knows, I have no answers: except this. People don't go to theater much because most of it is really boring and it's expensive. And when things are broken people respond with conservatism rather than bravery. The first casualty are the new, the untried and the un-obvious. One of the great addictions of modern times is the listening to of people one agrees with. Olberman, Maddow, Beck, O'Reilly, all of them. There was a study published that demonstrated how people get a little endorphin rush when they listen to television talking heads say things with which they agree. It's fascinating, and I think people on all points of the political spectrum are addicted to the feeling. And I can't help but think that people of course want to feel that feeling all the time, that people have lost any sort of tolerance for unease (if they ever had it).

Easy choices are called that for a reason and the easiest choice of all is to pick work by white, straight guys, as they are, you know, neutral. I've so many times read or heard the phrase "voice of his generation" referring to some white guy, and by that they mean the voice of everyone. And then the phrase "voice of her generation of women" or "or voice of African-Americans today" or some such, as if women only speak to (and for) other women and African-Americans only speak to each other. That might not be what the person means, but there it is in the language, plain as can be. And hardly anyone ever means anything by it (except maybe Mat Smart. I think he meant every word), but the thing is, language is all we have. Culture is all we have. Otherwise, what separates us from chimps? So, of course it matters

I think in some ways if it was intentional, it would almost be easier. Because then one could just shun the jerks. But in this situation it's perfectly nice people who just don't think. Because, mostly, they don't have to. Because they ARE the default. It's not even a question of like being drawn to like. It's not a question of critics and artistic directors and writers championing their own. I think it's deeper than one's personal associations. It's cultural. That's why when women make lists they include plenty of men and often exclude women. White guys are considered the default, neutral. Everyone else is like an added flavor kind of. Like a topping. Like they are the only ones who get to just be playwrights. Everyone else is a "woman playwright" or a "gay playwright" or a "black playwright" or an "Asian playwright" or a "lesbian playwright" or what have you.

I'm not placated by "special" posts on Women in Theater or festivals of "Women Playwrights". It's not good enough. No more exceptionalism. No more of that bullshit.

But it's so hard, as I said, as there are so many permutations of all sorts. There's stuff like "talent". Merit plays a factor in getting pie, but the best pie, the Christmas pie with a gold sovereign in it, seems to be given to the same people again and again, and we all know that other people are better. And if we're talking about privilege, what people with it don't understand, is it's mainly the privilege of not having to worry about shit. So many times the issue of privilege can seem like an endlessly complicated game of rock-paper-scissors in which the rules are always changing. Like, I have boatloads of it being a white, thin, straight, conventionally attractive person.

Though everything has its flipside. Just talk to the person who was my boyfriend for most of my twenties. Being with me essentially changed his world-view forever, as he watched for years as people assumed, before meeting or speaking to me, that I was stupid, and behaved accordingly. I am many things, but one of my particular bits of privilege is that I'm smart as all get out. But still: people assumed I was stupid because of a certain physical presentation.

The other day, a downtown playwright, in a quickly written blog post, listed a bunch of playwrights he admires that have been published by the New York Theater Experience to introduce a podcast interview he did with Martin Denton. And they were all a bunch of white guys. Look. I know there wasn't any intent to slight. But I think it's a very useful example of what happens sometimes in a world with very little pie. As I've mentioned many times here before, Martin has done a really terrific job of featuring theater artists of all stripes in his yearly anthologies (even someone as prickly and unprolific as myself). We have so little, you know, all of us. So it seemed like such a shame, really, that the default system runs so deep. Something needs to break.

What would that list looked like if the editor of this particular series was a woman? Maybe the same? Possibly. We don't know. What if the editor of the theater section at Time Out was a woman? Or at the Times? Or at the Voice? See? The thing is we just don't know. Because none of them are, so we have no idea how the conversation would change, if at all, if that were the case. I'm not saying David Cote or Brian Parks are biased (I don't particularly think they are, though possibly the people who hired them are), I'm just vaguely curious to see if anything would be different if suddenly the percentages were flipped, everywhere, all at once, in terms of who was running things: editors, artistic directors, all of it. Wouldn't it be interesting, just to see?

What always gets to me, and what I spend a lot of time doing on this blog, is focusing on lots of writers and artists I find interesting. They're not all women, but lots of them are. Because their work just tends to interest me more. There's, again, not a great deal of intentionality there. But if the whole world was like me, men would be getting the short end of the stick, no doubt. That is exactly what the world is like for women. So many times it's pointed out "Look! I [wrote a feature on, produced, gave money to, curated] some woman [this one time!]", and I'm supposed to respond as if that person is Martin Luther King or something. Like they want even more pie for featuring some woman that one time. Yeah. I'm over it.

I realize I'm talking about too many things at once here, and none of them are easily solvable. Theater is a mess mostly because of the afore-mentioned pie issue. But c'mon. Really. Every mention in every publication ever in every blog post in every article adds to the sum total cultural currency of whoever is being mentioned. So everything matters. Just think, maybe about the aggregate factor of mentions in public places. It all just compounds and snowballs and just one tiny slight doesn't seem like a big deal, but when it's on and on and again and again it does, because it's not just this one small thing, it's a part of a much larger whole.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T07:00:00.003-04:00

Above is lovely starlet Alice White in a completely inexplicable publicity shot. She was never an actual chorus girls, she just looked like one. Discovered by Chaplin, she had a few roles in the '30s, but her career was ruined by scandal.

Now, I go off to celebrate Easter the way my family always does: with brunch and movies, possibly to be followed by Dr. Sketchy's tribute to Tura Satana.

And if you're wondering what to munch on while contemplating Spring: try Peeps Ceviche!

Ah, Spring!

Grave Encounters: TriBeCa Film Festival

2011-04-23T07:00:00.000-04:00

Grave Encounters, which just had its premier at the TriBeCa Film Festival was directed by a team that has styled themselves "The Vicious Brothers". But, particularly in these days of torture porn and :::shudder::: human caterpillars, nothing about this film seemed particularly vicious. I think of that as a positive attribute.

Do you enjoy those basic cable TV shows in which a group of (so-called) paranormal investigators wander around a hotel or an old Civil War barracks, and stand in empty rooms declaiming, "This is Dave. If there's anyone here, show me a sign. We don't want to hurt you." And they then spend the rest of the hour freaking themselves out and using all sorts of bullshit pseudo-science to prove the existence of hauntings?Yes? You enjoy these shows? Good! This review is written with you completely in mind. If you don't enjoy either horror movies or GhostTV, just carry on.

Grave Encounters, the movie, shows the (purportedly) REAL footage of the very last episode of Grave Encounters, the reality TV show. Let me restate: the CHILLING footage taken by the crew of Grave Encounters as they investigate the supposed paranormal occurrences which have long plagued the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital.

BOO!

Were you scared?

No?

You're no fun. Let's continue.

The cast and crew of Grave Encounters lock themselves into the abandoned asylum overnight, and it's all filmed pseudo-verité style. One inevitably compares it to The Blair Witch Project, but as I loathed The Blair Witch Project this wasn't really a problem. The parody of a typical GhostTV episode at the beginning of the film was very funny and the film was reasonably enjoyable as more and more horrible ghostly manifestations plagued the Grave Encounters crew. It was fun to watch them begin to be frightened as their crass cynicism melts away in the face of actual ghosts.

My criticisms are mostly structural. Things go from vaguely disquieting to full out ghost attack far too quickly and too early in the film. It could really have benefitted from a more gradual build. Truly awful things started happening a little too early which doesn't leave the filmmakers anywhere to go. But, it was enjoyable to watch what was essentially an old fashioned ghost story play out.

About ten years ago a friend and I were working for an outdoor rock festival upstate - we were in charge of the dorms they had rented for the staff. They were using the Unification Theological Seminary (i.e. a Moonie Seminary) which is in a truly incredible Gothic Victorian structure that used to be a boy's school. It was really incredibly beautiful, with arched stone walkways with views of the Hudson River Valley, which at night were home to bats which would flap quietly around the columns. Our second night there, Upstate New York was hit with a terrible rain storm. As I took a much needed shower, the lights all suddenly went out. As night approached we realized we were trapped - without a car, without electricity and far from a cell phone tower, we had few choices. We communicated via Walkie Talkie as we guided the festival staff to where they would be sleeping. The night was long and terror filled.

But - we survived.

I don't know that the same could be said of the Grave Encounters crew. All that seemingly remains is this found footage.

Which, honestly, was a little over-conventional. This is one of those films where I would have loved to be able to sit down with the film-makers and help them structure it. Because this sort of story is all based on rising action and it flatlines way too early. But the ghosts and some of the Boo moments are really effective. There are some fun ideas, like when the crew wakes up to find they all have hospital patient bracelets on, and I like that the token female crew member isn't a horror babe, but a pretty normal girl. There's a lovely moment early on when one of the crew is on the phone to his wife, having a mundane conversation, and the wheelchair behind him moves just enough for us to notice, unseen by him, but caught by the camera. They are full of fun ideas, it just feels a little half baked and messy.

If Grave Encounters comes on Chiller one night, you'll have a perfectly enjoyable time watching it, even if it won't particularly change your life.

Poly Styrene, I love you!

2011-04-22T12:09:00.001-04:00

Supercute!

2011-04-22T07:00:00.001-04:00

On a very cold and snowy night a few months ago, I was happy to catch Supercute!'s act when they shared the bill with Nihils (ahem!) a few months ago at Zora's Art Space (as a part of Crow's Nest). They are headed up by 17 year old Rachel Trachtenburg (of the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players) and sing songs about candy and turtles and about not singing about boys. They songwriting is really good in a loopy Sid Barrett-y kind of way - they are pretty much charm personified, and Rachel is a multi-instrumental artist. Check them out if you get the chance.

(I absolutely LOVED their song about rescuing a Chinatown turtle, but can't find it anywhere. I am inconsolable.)

And here is Rachel on her own, singing about pigeons.

BREAKING:

2011-04-21T16:22:00.004-04:00

AbFab is coming back!

I repeat, Absolutely Fabulous is returning this summer with THREE NEW EPISODES.

Below, is the original skit from French and Saunders .

Cheers, Darling.

I DON'T WANT MORE CHOICE, I JUST WANT NICER THINGS!

And this:

Fée Sans Ailes

2011-04-21T15:44:00.004-04:00

I'm in the middle of this drawing which I began on Tuesday night at the Society of Illustrator's Jazz & Sketch. I think she'll eventually have wings.

Garbo Was a Silent Screen Goddess (Note: Silent)

2011-04-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

In addition to the ridiculous number of films discussed here, we also watched, in our endless Cabinet viewing party, a couple of Greta Garbo films, namely: Mata Hari and Camille.

Well, I fell asleep halfway through Camille.

To be honest, I've never really gotten Greta Garbo. She seems so mannered and her films are a little dull. But then I realized that she is a silent film actress, or maybe a supermodel. But a sound actress she is not. Talking diminishes her.

You look at her, and she's all cheekbones and mystery. And then she starts to talk and she becomes literal and the spell is broken. At right she wears that extraordinary ensemble by that genius Adrian. I could stare at her wearing it all day. But then some sort of prosaic dialogue happens and I'm less interested.

I can't think of anyone else, probably because the overlap between successful sound and silent performers was minimal. I think if I lump her in with Lisa Fonssagrives or Dovima or Stella Tennant I understand her a little better.

I mean, look at that face:

Cinemagraphs by Jamie Beck

2011-04-20T07:00:00.004-04:00

The animated gif has been around for as long as the internet has existed (and longer still). They are easily created little graphics that can capture a piece of a television show:

Or make a point in a discussion:

Or are just really funny:

But thus far, they haven't really been created for the purpose of art. Books and magazines and newspapers printed on actual paper are soon to be done for. Soon, only the poor will do something so wasteful and ridiculous as not read off a screen. And then, I assume, the usual switch will happen. Paper will be rare and pricy and the rich will covet it. But, soon, magazines and books will mostly be digital. I don't think this has been thought through much in terms of content, and the capabilities digital files possess. That will come, I am sure.

Photographer Jamie Beck has begun creating what she's calling cinemagraphs. Animated gifs that are using technology to create moody little moving photographs. They're interstitial nature. They are neither film or photo. Below, she collaborated with model Coco Rocha in these lovely shots taken in Rocha's apartment. It's an interesting experiment, and I look forward to seeing where it will lead.

For those of my readers who have gotten tired of the decidedly (but wholly unintentional) fashionable bent The Cabinet has taken over the past week or so, here is another shot by Beck of a gorgeous old timey barber shop at 71st and Lexington that looks like something one can only visit via time machine:

The four above gifs are via Jamie Beck's blog, From Me To You, and the images belong to her.

Ghosts and Fairies and Witches and Books: Jo Walton's Among Others

2011-04-19T07:00:00.006-04:00

I think I've pretty much decided that the idea of dividing various books up into genres is essentially the work of marketers and not something that artists or writers should have to worry about. As one of my favorite and most world defining quotes puts it: "Humans like categories, nature likes a spectrum". That pretty much sums up my opinions on nearly everything. Taxonomy has taken over the world. Why does everything have to be one thing or another?

Which curmudgeonly paragraph brings me to Jo Walton. She's published by Tor, who publish SciFi and some fantasy. Walton's books include Tooth and Claw, a book about dragons that was greatly inspired by Trollope, and a trilogy of cozy mystery novels set in a alternative history dystopia. In other words, she's pretty much my sort of writer. Her most recent book, Among Others, is just as difficult to pin down. It's an autobiographical coming of age story. It's a boarding school book. It's about grief and loss. It's about fairies. It's about magic. It's about family. But more than anything else, it's about books. Books, books and more books.

The book is told through a series of journal entries (we are told they are written backwards, to keep people from reading them, something I used to occasionally do), written by Mor, fifteen. Her twin sister has recently died (either in a car crash or during a cataclysmic battle between good fairies and their evil witch mother or both - take your pick) and she's been sent to her father and his family who are essentially strangers to her. She misses her extended family and the Welsh valley in which she was raised. She's sent to boarding school, where she is bullied for her less than posh accent and for the cane she must walk with after the accident.

The narration is essentially unreliable and Walton's preamble just muddies the water further:

"So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red busses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."

And there are fairies, at least Mor can see them, or Mor writes that she sees them. I've seen one or two reviews of this book complaining about the magic. That they aren't able to tell what is real and what isn't. Does it matter? Or, possibly, that's the entire point. Walton has been awfully cagey in interviews (casting doubt on parts of her wikipedia bio, too), not giving much away, and good for her. It's funny, the parts that are about Mor going to school and dealing with her family (about whom we get a full but gloriously muddled history), and reading and making friends smack of complete documentary truth. They are immediate and detailed and interesting. The parts about magic and seeing fairies sometimes feel a little uncomfortable. But, the caginess feels intratextual. Mor worries people will think she's crazy or make fun of her more. She doesn't want something that means so much to her ridiculed. Or maybe she is making it up. But I don't think so. I think we should take Walton at her word: The fairies are real.

More about the books. Mor reads science fiction and fantasy with untrammeled abandon and concentration. She writes about what she reads constantly, and she longs for someone to talk about books with. This is a particular kind of loneliness that the existence of the internet has somewhat alleviated. No matter what you are a fan of, you can plug a few searches into google and likely find a few likeminded individuals. But back in the analog past it wasn't so easy. Mor slowly makes friends with her school librarian, finds a science fiction reading group at the local library, and the books are one of the few things she and her father have to talk about. Books are so important to lots of young people, more so to them than anybody. I remember so vividly the ache of it. She writes about reading Tolkien so eloquently and about the problem of Susan and about Heinlein and others. She picks up a copy of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and then four pages later apropos of nothing she says, "Who would have thought Richard the Third didn't actually kill the princes in the tower?", and I fear if you hadn't read Tey's book you wouldn't know what she was talking about.

But I haven't read much SciFi and I didn't miss alot I don't think (but I think I may have read more than I realize, particularly of the pre-80s books that Mor is reading). But Tolkien, I get. And lots more. It's a book about the lonliness of a particular sort of adolescence. An alienated book reading one, not the most original premise as so may of that sort of young person grow up to be authors, but they so rarely actually write about the books themselves and entwine it with the life stuff. Add that to the supernatural and there's something special afoot.

Among Others isn't perfect. It feels a bit unresolved and cagy to the very last. I have a feeling, upon reflection, this might be intentional. Mor is so smart and thinks about everything, maybe not giving feeling much of a chance. I think that might be because of the terrors inherent in feeling, maybe feeling is somehow akin to magic. There are tantalizing hints and bits of information about her mother's madness and about what happened, I mean with the devastation of Mor's sister's death. It almost feels unfinished, but I'm fairly certain Walton doesn't want us to know more. It's one of the strangest choices I've encountered in a book in this age of easy pleasures, I don't know whether it was very, very brave, or a complete failing of nerve. I actually don't know what to think. I really liked this book and so much of it made emotional sense to me with it's strange shying away from larger issues in favor of literature. The more I think about it, the more I think that may have been the point. Now all of you must read it so I have someone to talk about it with.

(This is my 300th post! Whee!)

Mon Amie La Rose: C'est printemps

2011-04-18T14:24:00.002-04:00

It's a grey Spring day which, for unexplainable reasons, makes me want to listen to French pop chanteuses. Below, the lovely Françoise Hardy.

Why Bette Davis and Alice Faye Are No Scarlett O'Hara

2011-04-18T07:00:00.003-04:00

The inamorato and I have been indulging in an orgy of movie watching of late. He's working on a play based on a 19th century stage sensation (I'm not sure if I'm supposed to spill or not), so his Netflix queue has been full of period films about women performers of one sort or another, and over all they've been mostly disappointing.

There were two, In Old Chicago and Lillian Russell, starring the ludicrous Alice Faye (left). Pudding faced, dull and completely lacking in any sort of discernable charisma, the best thing I can say about her qualities as a movie star is that she was probably a very nice lady. The real life Lillian Russell must have been something else. She is one of the prime inventors of the modern idea of celebrity, and ran her own career (i.e. there was no husband/manager lurking in the background) becoming a huge, huge star at the end of the 19th century. Watching Alice Faye in the bizarrely over-written Fox musical that tried to tell her story, you would never know it. Her character was strangely inert, her successes springing from a series of coincidences and accidents over which Russell had no control. I truly don't understand why the story of Tony Pastor accidentally overhearing her singing in her backyard is more compelling than the real life Russell angling and scheming and working her way to success and fame. Were people so uncomfortable with women of purpose and ambition that this was the only way they saw to tell this far more interesting story?

In In Old Chicago she is miscast as a music hall performer (in a role that before her untimely death, was meant for Jean Harlow) who winds up married to one of the O'Leary boys (they, of the pyromaniacal cow). The movie is lethargic and preposterous, most of it centering on the O'Leary family, with the requisite good brother (Don Ameche) and wicked brother (Tyrone Power) vying for political power. At one point Faye sings a song called "In Old Chicago" - I mean, at the time, wouldn't it seem like up to the minute, modern Chicago? The fire, however, was beautifully and excitingly shot, so much so that it seemed like an entirely different film. But the Faye character was mostly an empty plot point who sang songs.

It turns out that In Old Chicago was a rip off of a similar, but tonier MGM offering, San Francisco which starred Clark Gable, Jeannette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy. This film also adhered to the model later adapted by Titanic in which a fictional love triangle is grafted on to an exquisitely filmed real life tragedy. Clark Gable plays a disreputable nightclub owner who is bowled over by the light operatic skills of good girl, Jeanette MacDonald, while his Catholic priest best friend (and boxer) Spencer Tracy tries to save his soul. The actors are all strong and this was obviously a big budget, class picture. MacDonald, though far out of fashion, is a dynamic performer. But her character! She continually vacillates between sexy Gable and his Music Hall and a life as a respectable opera singer. The vacillations feel whimsical and unmotivated, which is a shame, because there was no reason why they couldn't have written her character as being torn between the pleasures of pop and sex, and her higher artistic ideals (and a far richer husband). As it plays out in the film, as she teases (virginally) both Gable and her respectable opera house swain, she just becomes unlikable and one wonder why either of them bother with her.

By this point I was thoroughly frustrated with 1930s Hollywood and couldn't wait for that damn earthquake. Which, incidentally, blew me away. In the middle of this rather ordinary studio film sits about five minutes of a Russian masterpiece. The quake looks as if it was filmed by Eisenstein, with gloriously expressionistic camera angles and a Potemkin-like montage. Really thrilling stuff. MacDonald survives to sing a Christian hymn among the wreckage and renew Gable's faith, which was less thrilling.

Then, one night, in the midst of all this movie watching Gone With the Wind came on TCM, and one felt as if one had been blasted into another world. Now, GWTW is an incredibly complicated film to talk about. Its depiction of slavery and race and the Reconstruction is greatly abhorrent. But, it also gave the first African American an Oscar. It's complicated. But that is a discussion for another day. I want to write about Scarlett. I know, I know. Everything that could possibly be written about this greatest and most problematic of American films already has been said, but I don't care. Scarlett O'Hara is the ur-American screen heroine. One of the other movies we watched was Jezebel. Bette Davis won the Oscar for the film, but I thought it was awful. The main character was a narcissistic pain in the ass, and in some ways it pointed to how Davis (who greatly coveted the part) would have played Scarlett had she been cast. And judging by this portayal of another strong willed Southern belle, it would have been disastrous.

Vivien Leigh was a miracle of casting perfection. Scarlett is a narcissistic pain in the ass too, but just the fact of that isn't supposed to make her interesting or attractive as it is with Davis's Jezebel character. Scarlett is a monster who interestingly lacks all the characteristics that are supposed to be attractive in a female. She's smart about business, but has zero self-knowledge or empathy and is shatteringly stupid about people. She wants to be a good person, in theory, but makes no effort to do the things that make one actually good. She's self-defeating and smart and a mess.

Compared to her, most of the women previously portrayed on screen look like stick figures. One of the reason for this is screenwriting 101: the choices Scarlett makes constantly set the story in motion and keeps it moving. The war happens to Scarlett, but how she behaves within this monumental circumstance is up to her. The other films we watched in the past couple of weeks or so, did not allow their female protagonists this privilege. Even in something so driven by a woman lead as Lillian Russell, was neutered. Lillian was not permitted to act on her own behalf, becoming a sort of boring object of either desire or career advencement for the swirl of men who surround her. Gone With the Wind is told, pretty much entirely, from Scarlett's point of view. She is no way objectified, she is agency incarnate.

The question is, why are there still, in goddamn 2011, still so few female characters this interesting to watch? Obviously, one can pretty easily say that there are few characters of either gender in American films that are this dynamic. In the first decades of the 21st century, I think it has become clear that most of the films being made in this country are for the most part, dirty minded amusements for children. Complex characters are for television. Or one can once again quote Joss Whedon:

So, why do you write these strong female characters

Because you're still asking me that question.

Note: Today is the anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. For a fascinating look at that day from a show biz angle, see what Mr. S.D. has to say here.

Patsy, Darling...

2011-04-17T07:00:00.000-04:00

Look! A very young Joanna Lumley back in her modeling days.

Below, see Patsy eat actual food:

I am lucky enough to own the complete series on DVD and I think a marathon might be in my near future. Who's in?

Advanced Style: Mermaid Edition

2011-04-16T07:00:00.000-04:00

I used to take a look at the Advanced Style blog nearly every day, but hadn't checked it out in a while, so I was glad of the Bust Magazine reminder. The blog is pretty much my dream of little old lady-hood. All these achingly glamorous older ladies in their chic or whimsical or creative or just plain old stylish ensembles (there is the occasional dapper gent, too).

Looking at Advanced style one realizes how boringly homogenized the world has begun to look. We all stare at the television and movies and magazines and advertisements and nearly everyone looks more or less the same. There's a base level of boring attractiveness in even comedic, non-romantic actors. And most people are so young, and with the scourge of plastic surgery sweeping the first world, the homogenizing process is complete.

Below, watch a delightful interview with 91 year old Ilona Royce Smithkin as she shows off her charming mermaid drawings. And - check out those eyelashes!

Happy 122nd Birthday, Charlie!

2011-04-15T14:38:00.003-04:00

For a delightful post chock full of actual information, go here!

All The Coolest Redheads Are Turning 70

2011-04-15T12:00:00.004-04:00

Seventy years ago on the British Isles there must have been something startling in the water, as two of the most interesting (and red-headed) women in fashion were born. In addition to the previously mentioned Grace Coddington, Vivienne Westwood turned 70 last week as well.

For good or ill, Ms. Westwood holds primary responsibility for what punk rock looked like in London, and continues to be worn in one form or another by disaffected (and fashionable) young people the world over. She is one of the most influential designers of the past 50 years. Without her, there couldn't have been an Alexander McQueen.

Dame Vivienne Westwood, like that other ravishing 70 year old fashion icon,Grace Coddington, emerged from a working class background. She spent only one semester at Harrow Art School because "I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world". She instead got a job in a factory and took a teacher training course (which, amazingly enough, is something Johnny Rotten would later do as well) becoming a primary school teacher, whilst designing and making jewlery that she sold at markets and on the Portobello Road. She met the always slippery Malcolm Maclaren in 1965, leaving her then husband for him. She continued to teach until they opened their shop, Let It Rock, in 1971 on the King's Road and fashion, music and social history would be absolutely changed forever.

I think Maclaren and Westwood's store is likely the most influential shop in history. In 1975 it was renamed "Sex" and became the center of punk (again, for good or ill). Westwood still owns it and sells her World's End clothing line from its historic environs. The question of who invented the punk look is always up for debate. Like all street styles, its influences and creators are manifold - but punk was small and contained in the early days, so its genesis isn't as difficult to track. Rotten and Maclaren had a lot of influence, and some of it came out of wearing one's poverty on one's sleeve. I've heard Rotten sneering at the idea of punks wearing head to toe leather (as popularized by Sid Vicious) as only rich people could afford such a look so it wasn't punk by definition. Westwood, the artist in the bunch, obviously has a lot to do with shaping the look. In later years, she has been extremely blasé about it, emphasizing that it was fashion.

Her first runway show was in 1981 and was inspired by pirates, launching what I vividly remember being the New Romantics, with Adam Ant and the early Duran Duran in their puffy shirts and Buccaneer jackets. She said she remembered seeing, when she was a small child, a woman dressed in Dior's New Look, and it left a huge impression on her. There's an extravagance in Dior that is definitely visible in Westwood's work, but it's never plays straight as Galliano often did with the same influence. It's always tweaked. Her garments are so deeply infused with fashion history, but her work, though decadent, never takes itself particularly seriously. Everything is always a little off center, as if this working class girl, now Dame of the British Empire, is still thumbing her nose at the upper classes. Most designers just make pretty dresses, but Westwood manages parody in hers.

Little Wooden Hands

2011-04-11T12:30:00.000-04:00

When a friend posted the above photo on facebook, my inamorato's comment made me laugh and laugh:

this made me laugh until the tears rolled down my cheeks. It's like the ventriloquist is unaware that his doll has turned into a monster

I was dying of curiosity. Who was this ventriloquist and his monstrous dummy? Was he successful? Did people run out of theaters and music halls screaming? Did the ventriloquist wake up one dark night with his dummy's small wooden hands around his throat?

Sadly, these questions remain unanswered. But I did find out about the photographer. It took a little digging, as the photograph was posted without a source. The photograph belongs to the collection of the National Museum of New Zealand and was taken by a photographer named William James Harding in 1870. He came from an English, working class family and emigrated to New Zealand in 1855 with his wife in the hope of bettering himself. It sounds as if he definitely had an artist's soul. He loved photographing landscape, but people don't much care about landscape photography (Ansel Adams notwithstanding), people want portraits. So, he begrudgingly took pictures of people, but his fury at having to do so was apparent. He didn't retouch or light his subjects in order to make them look better, he had no business sense of any sort. He just wanted to take pictures of the gorgeous and wild country he found himself in, thousands of miles from the place of his birth. Poor William.

We still have no idea who this ventriloquist with the monstrous dummy is. Just some itinerant carney, taking advantage of Harding's cheap rates? Or something far more sinister?

We can only wonder.

Charles de Lint: The Newford Stories

2011-04-11T07:00:00.006-04:00

I really have no business writing this at all.

I've barely dipped into Charles de Lint's loosely connected Newford stories, but having just finished his early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot, I thought "Why not"?

The phrase "urban fantasy" is being tossed around all over the place in these vampire ridden times, so I think the original impulse that created the genre has been somewhat diluted, or lost. To the point where I think the Wikipedia entry on the genre is kind of off. Currently, when the genre is talked about, what is usually meant is paranormal mystery or romance. Something like the Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire books or the Anita Blake series. That is to say, fairly traditional genre books (mystery, crime, romance, whatever) that just happen to have a vampire or a werewolf included. As most everyone knows, these books are unbelievably popular, but I'll leave looking at that particular phenomenon for another day. Some are very entertaining, and some are just awful. But, honestly, most just aren't very good or creative and special.

These aren't the books I'm much interested in writing about.

In the Wikipedia entry on the genre neither John Crowley or Charles de Lint are mentioned - which I think invalidates the whole thing. In 1981, Crowley's Little, Big was published. I have to re-read it before I write about it properly, but it's a book that I didn't precisely love when I first read it, but bits and pieces of it have been gnawing away it my brain ever since. It's a family saga and a fairy tale and part of it is set in a strange post-apocalyptic New York. It's not really like much else, and is one of those books (along with lots of Angela Carter, for example) that make you realize how deeply conservative most stories are. To leave him off any sort of list of Urban Fantasy authors is unforgivable, as he likely invented the genre. Of course, his book contains no vampire romance, so why would anyone care?

The other omission, that of Charles de Lint, is particularly shocking to me as I was under the impression that is was the absolute king of this genre. But, again, his books and stories sorely lack the vampire romance element, so I am clearly wrong.

For the past 20 years or so, de Lint has been writing books and stories about the fictional city of Newford. I'm not sure where it is, but I'm guessing somewhere in Canada, on one of the Great Lakes (de Lint hails from the great nation to our North). I'd read a smattering of short stories set in Newford over the years when I came across them in various anthologies, but I hadn't read any of the novels or collections. I had read his non-Newford novel, The Little Country, which I liked very much. As I have total completion mania, and like to begin things at the beginning, I'm finding the list of over twenty books somewhat daunting. I started with the early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot and I loved it.

He writes about poets and street kids and artists and buskers and musicians. He's not very interested in the middle class and the ordinary. He has a particular interest in traditional forms of music and in all sorts of folk tradition. Music has played a huge part in everything by him that I've read, and this anthology is no different (de Lint has recorded a couple of albums of folk and traditional music himself). The stories vary greatly in subject and tone, but there is a great deal of magic in all of them. There are fairies and mermaids and monsters. He intertwines these supernatural elements with the ordinary lives of the people who populate his city seamlessly. Some characters appear again and again, Jilly a former street kid turned painter most often. Many of the stories are romantic, in the old fashioned sense of the word, including a gorgeous mermaid story spun from the Anderson original. Like it (and unlike the Disney version), things end tragically. Though there is magic and one wishes with all one's being that Newford was real, he doesn't whitewash the horrors of poverty and runaways. Their lives are brutal, and the only reason anyone winds up on the street is because of poverty and abuse. His magic stories, like in the older fairy tales, are ways of showing and explaining people's lives, making something out of them, and as with lots of old tales, most often the lives of women or the poor.

Not to make his stories sound unbearably grim, because they're not. Even when they're sad (and at least three of them made me cry on the subway), there's always some sort of catharsis, nothing's ever a complete waste. He also has at least one or two horror stories. But, I think, it's his deep knowledge and love of folk traditions, both narrative and in music that give his stories their very special feeling. He knows what he's writing about and he rarely overplays his hand.

I'm trying to decide which one I should read next. It will likely be The Onion Girl as I already own it, and it's supposed to be something of a classic. But if anyone - human, fairy or vampire - has any other suggestions, I'll gladly listen.

Grace Coddington Turns 70

2011-04-09T16:55:00.006-04:00

Happy birthday to the lovely Grace Coddington who turns 70 today!

In this age of disloyalty and rootlessness, it's interesting to see that Coddington has worked in one way or another for the great Kraken Vogue for nearly 50 years. She grew up in a remote part of Wales, fascinated by issues of the Magazine that she managed to require, and then at 17 won teen modeling competition and moved to London. How exciting it must have been! She wound up on the cover of British Vogue in 1960 (see left). In 1967 her modeling career was cut short after her face received substantial injuries in a car accident. The following year she was hired as a junior editor.

Aside from a brief tenure at Calvin Klein in the '80s, she has remained a Vogue employee, working as creative director of US Vogue since '88. Most fascinatingly, has worked beside, with and against her friend and bête noire Anna Wintour for all that time, as Wintour began with the company the same time she did. Their riveting work relationship (Coddington as Style Director, Wintour as Editor in Chief) was wonderfully documented by former West Egg denizin R.J. Cutler.

In some ways Coddington is the anti-Wintour. She goes about her work life in shapeless and practical black, and functional flats, her mane of red hair flying everywhere. She's all about the art and the best things that appear in the magazine have her fingerprints all over them. She's something of a genius in terms of creating beautiful and evocative imagery, and is all about art while Wintour must look out for the money.

Grace Coddington is nothing like the popular idea of a fashion powerhouse. She's smart and intuitive and dithery. May she create lovely, lovely pictures for many years to come!

Starlet With Zebra

2011-04-08T07:00:00.003-04:00

Just because I absolutely love this publicity still of Leila Hyams, most famous for her role in Freaks. She performed in vaudeville as a child, segueing into a modeling career and then starlet-dom, never quite earning the sobriquet of "movie star". She appeared in films such as The Bishop Murder Case (based on a Philo Vance mystery) with Basil Rathbone. Needless to say, I'm dying to watch, but it doesn't seem to be on video anywhere. Fie!

Watch the trailer here (sadly, there's something wrong with the embed code).

(photo via Allure)