He is Planet

I'm not quite sure what this is, but I believe it may be a nearly perfect specimen of whatever kind of thing it actually turns out to be.  And it has its own Know Your Meme page, for what that's worth.

And for what that's worth, this is pretty much the look of the moment in many of your more regrettable nitespots in this benighted part of the the world...

The Same Old Story...

...and it really was a tale of love and glory.  Four was the charm for Bogie, and 20-year-old Betty Perske found herself, at 20, embarked on a marriage that completed her transition into Lauren Bacall.  They were two radically different people, at totally different times in their lives, but they made something that for many - in terms of intensity, devotion, and sheer charisma - stands as one of the marriages against which others can be measured.

For them, the old trope about Astaire and Rogers ("he  gave her class; she gave him sex") morphs into something like "he gave her wry; she gave him warm."  Together, whenever we see them together, they give us a particularly potent form of star power.

And it all happened today, May 21, in 1945.  I'm glad the bride is still with us, and I hope she knows, no matter what the future brings, just what she meant and means, as time goes by.

Birthday Boy: Homespun Hotness

James Stewart (105 today, in a better world) isn't always thought of as one of Hollywood's lookers, but he could do a dreamy gaze into the middle distance with the best of them.

He also does yearning awfully well, and for someone mostly remembered for his good humor and folksy charm, he has an off-kilter angle on obsession that makes watching him in something like Vertigo especially gripping (one minute he's all wry grumbles with Barbara Bel Geddes, and the next he's a sweaty perv losing it over Kim Novak, and it never fails to startle).

Once upon a time I was temping at Lincoln Center, typing (on an actual typewriter. Yes, it was the Pleistocene).  I shared a tiny office with a formidable and elderly executive secretary who had gotten her start 'round about the glory days of Toscanini.  One of the benefits of the job was that we had an intercom in the office so that we could hear what was going on downstairs on the stage - mostly it was orchestral rehearsals, but one week the hall was to be used for a gala.  On the morning of the big day, We had the speaker turned down, as it was mostly tech run-through stuff, the stage manager shouting instructions and various people trying to focus lights and figure out entrances and exits.  After a while, we realized it had gotten rather quiet.

Then, out of nowhere, we heard two voices familiar from a thousand late night movies:  "Mister Stewart!" "Hello, Bette!"

She might have been old, but when she needed to, Miss Marzini moved fast - she was across the room turning that speaker up in nanoseconds.  It tuned out the gala was the annual Lincoln Center film tribute, and that year Bette Davis, the honoree, was to be introduced by Stewart.  They ran through their bit, and after a minute or two, Miss Marzini looked at me, and I looked at her, and we scampered down the back stairs four or five flights and stood at the back of the hall to see the two spotlit figures, one tiny and wiry and electric even from that distance, the other tall and slightly stooped and just as courtly as one imagined, work out their business.

It was only a few minutes, but it was magic, and I don't know that either of us, Miss Marzini and I, got too much else done that day.  We took the elevator back upstairs, and she of course had to call Mother up in Ossining to tell her everything, which took a while, and then I had to call one or two people who had to know that moment all about the Patrick Kelly suit and hat (in memory a brilliant green) Bette Davis wore, and then we just stared at each other and sighed.  Seeing Davis, of course was amazing, but, oh, sighed Miss Marzini, Jimmy Stewart.  In that oh was everything I needed to know to be certain that while the Cary Grants and Tyrone Powerses of this world have their place, never disregard the power of a quiet man with a charming stammer...

Shameless Sunday Camp Explosion: Birthday Diva

As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated... What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

We're a day late with this week's Camp Explosion, I know, but while it's no excuse, the birthday of no less than the great Grace Jones makes it entirely appropriate to mark the day today instead.

Here we see her in surprisingly cozy form - perhaps something in the sheer surreality of the setting brings out the lady in her.  Certainly, sandwiched between Dame Edna and late-period Tony Curtis, she seems by far the most conventional person on stage.  A snippet of her 1989 hit, "Love on Top of Love" reminds us of what alluring fun her mainstream (comparatively) pop era was, while her anecdotes of wild Paris nights with Jerry Hall now have something of the air of Innocents Abroad.  Who else would show up for a talk show - even a semi-spoof one - dressed as Delilah ("I brought my scissors along - anyone for a haircut?")?

Today, by the bye, this fierce creature is (are you sitting down?) - 65.  I suddenly feel entirely better about my own recent milestone...

Another Day, Another Seaside Glamour Spot

Well, we're heading home, Mr. Muscato and I, but this snap from this afternoon is distinctly more scenic than the airport lounge in which we find ourselves at the moment, so let it stand as an indication of how lovely our weekend has been.  The Bahrain boys flew out earlier this afternoon, so we had a nostalgic last evening to ourselves, revisiting old haunts and even pulling up outside the Villa Muscato 1.0, which is looking well (if, we couldn't help fancying, just the tiniest bit forlorn without us).

So tomorrow it's back to reality in that other, definitely less festive corner of the Sandlands, but every day brings us closer to the end of our Arabian idyll altogether.  Being here these past few days has made our seven years in these parts feel very short indeed, but I'm glad we've had the chance to reconfirm that our old haunts are just as pleasant as memory has painted them.  There's not much, I have to say (Mrs. Galapatti-da Silva aside) we'll miss from our current venue, so it's good to leave with pleasant memories uppermost in mind.

By the Beautiful Sea

"I'd like some ice," she observed lazily, "for my water, but it's too hot to get up and look for a waiter."

"Don't worry," I replied.  "It's nearly two, which means he'll be coming with our drinks any minute now."

One of the characteristic features of life in the Sultanate is that on Fridays, one cannot procure a drink 'til two, but you can, nonetheless, pre-order, so that at the magic hour, you needn't wait a moment longer than necessary.

We are vegetating in the shade, occasionally dipping ourselves desultorily in the turquoise pool or braving the long and winding stairs down to the beach and the tepid crystal sea.  Last night we caroused our way through tropical cocktails at that local bastion of cultural authenticity, Trader Vic's.  Tonight it's glorified curries at a trendy hilltop boite that morphs into a Bollywood nightclub later on.

Ah, but now it's two o'clock, so you'll forgive me...

Memory Lane: So Complete

This number, by UK DJ/Songbird Sonique, played nonstop for what seemed the better part of a year on one of the satellite music channels we would watch when Mr. Muscato and I lived in East Africa.  We were landlocked, and living in the chilly highlands, so this vision of a sultry pool party seemed teasing and unfair (never mind that neither of us were ever exactly the kind of pretty party boys who appear to hang out chez Sonique).  It's another of the songs I would probably have never run across if not for the bizarre life I led, and another I can't imagine doing without.

Visions of pools and sunshine seem a little more to the point at the moment, however, as the Mister and I are even as I type back down in our beloved old Sultanate, lazing in the shade of our favorite tree at our old beach club.  The Bahrain boys and some of their set have joined us, so it's all very gay in several senses of the word.  The weather is hot but bone dry, the pints are exactly the opposite, and all's well with the world.  Perhaps there's something to this being fifty business after all...

Two Gentlemen of Manhattan

39 years ago this very day, photographer Gjon Mili caught this intense moment at a rehearsal in New York City.  The work being considered by these two august gentlemen* is the ballet Dybbuk.  Then in preparation for its Lincoln Center premiere, the piece featured the choreography of Jerome Robbins set to the music of Leonard Bernstein.  As a piece of art, let's be tactful and just say it turned out to be not quite West Side Story.  But what is?

Note the discreet and studious presence of one of Mr. Robbins's Nice Young Men.  Unlike some, I'm guessing he was not hired because he could type.  The dance world's funny that way.  As was Robbins, from most accounts for that matter.  Add him, by the bye, to the very short list of Great Names I've encountered (in his case, thankfully, only second hand) about whom I've never heard a nice word.  His collaborator was something of a handful, of course, but generally, and justifiably, I think, considered a far pleasanter gent.  It's some measure of Robbins's force of character that Bernstein looks almost - not quite - cowed.

There are some shows, in all media, that you know you'd far rather be at rehearsals than the final product, and this is one.  Unless, I'm guessing, you were working for Jerome Robbins.  In that case, I suppose you'd far rather be at the St. Marks Baths (well, it was 1974)...

* It took all the strength I have not to to title this post "When Ladies Meet."

Now We Are Six (Plus 44)

Well, now that I've been so thoroughly outed by dear Mistress MJ, I suppose there's no point not admitting it:  I'm old.  This is not just a birthday, you see - it's one of those birthdays, the kind unreasonably freighted with significance just because they end in a zero.

Fifty.  The very sound of it is Eeyorish.  Fifty.  The age at which Gloria Swanson starred in Sunset Boulevard, a full two years older than Bette Davis in A Catered Affair.  It's the age - as all too many people are eager to remind you - that one becomes eligible for membership in the American Association of Retired Persons.  Fifty.  Oy.

Well, it's better than the alternative, I know that. And I'm also learning that all those people who go on about how you feel freer as you get older to do as you please, actually do have something of a point.  Also, it's nice, sometimes, to have a great store of experience to drawn on, even if it's just to stare down some youngster.  I found myself glaring sternly at such a one last week, a wee creature who had come to confirm whether some petty detail he found amiss could possibly be correct.  "Well," said I, "given that this is something that I have been doing for a living for the past 32 years, and it hasn't been wrong until now, I think we might assume it's so, don't you?"  Apparently I can look quite formidable with brows beetled, and he scooted off, cowed.  I felt quite disproportionately pleased.

So our naughty weekend in Dubai was actually a birthday celebration, and a festive one at that, with a grand lunch at, of all things, a little Irish pub we like (they do a first-rate roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and those of us that indulge in that sort of thing can avail ourselves of their excellent sausages, gloriously made of what in these very halal parts we refer to as "flat-nosed beef").  Present were all sorts of people from hither and yon, from a sweet young thing who thinks of Mr. Muscato and me as his uncles (bless) to a an old pal from West Africa days who's recently washed up on these shores.  We ate and drank and laughed a lot, and I thought a little about the Long Strange Trip it's been.

Miss Rheba rang me up last night to commiserate, for she crosses the same Rubicon in just a few weeks.  As we've known each other since we were 14, we have few secrets and always lots to talk about.  "There are things we'll never do again," she said, "but I don't mind too much.  No, I really don't care.  Think of all the things we'll never have to do again.  I figure we have 30 more years, easy, of not caring what people think, and what a relief that is.  Imagine how much more fun we could have had at 25 if we could have just gotten over our cheap selves."  I think she's right.  Each decade's only gotten better so far, and with any luck, on that front, maybe things will hold, more or less like that, for one or two more.

In the meantime, we have much to do.  Tonight we enjoyed an excellent dinner, Mr. Muscato having not only roasted a chicken and whipped up his patented garlic mashed potatoes (the secret, learned from Julia Child, is incorporating the garlic into a cream sauce that's then folded into the potatoes, not fattening at all, of course), but also baked a raft of carrot cakes, one of which will go to the office to feed my colleagues (perhaps even that infuriatingly youthful whippersnapper) at our weekly staff meeting.  This weekend, we're apparently making a little jaunt one Sultanate down to our old stomping grounds, and on our return, God help us, we'll be just about a month out from totally uprooting ourselves and heading off on our next big adventure.

And, if nothing else, I get to keep an eye out for that AARP card...

Redux: M is for...

No, she's not my mother. Actually, we lost Mother Muscato almost ten years ago, and I'm still getting over the surprise.

Despite all she went through in her last couple of years - a familiar litany of complaints for women of her generation, the harsh follow-ons from everything that had seemed so au courant when they were girls, principally smoking - despite all that, I truly believed, on some level, that she was simply too strong-minded to let anything else, even cancer, have its way.

Until the end, she was a paean to the virtues of denial, stoutly maintaining that of course she was fine. Everything was fine. We didn't think all that much about it; her total distaste for bad news of any kind was an ingrained fact of life. When I moved away from home, after a few surprises I learned to phone home now and then for a rundown with her of elderly family and friends; "Oh," she'd admit grudgingly, "didn't I tell you? Cousin Adele died six months ago. Oh, come on, it's not all that sad - she was 87, for God's sake..."

I think, at the end, she must have thought a lot about just why she wasn't, in fact, a circus showgirl, or whatever it was that actually had been her dream a long ways back. I deeply suspect that where she ended up was pretty far from what she'd planned.

She married at the very tail end of the War and for more than half a century led a life that was was an almost entirely conventional blend of children, family, work, and church. In all that time, I don't think we ever, as you do, really thought all that much about her, if you know what I mean.

Until, of course, it was too late, which I didn't realize until we were clearing out her things. Having married into a family of packrats (just this side of Collyer-brother hoarding, really; Father Muscato has a warehouse he's never told the Evil Stepmother about), she went to the opposite extreme. Over time during her last couple years, she had pared her own possessions almost to nothing, easy enough to do when surrounded by her husband's and her children's plentiful detritus.

There were a few pieces of jewelry (charm bracelet, string of pearls, her mother's garnet set and her grandmother's jet mourning brooch...), a drawer full of neatly filed records (bills, taxes, mortgage) - and almost nothing else. She seems to have disposed of several generations worth of papers from her side of the family, from her great-grandparents' civil war letters to the correspondence her mother's mother had carried on with any number of interesting people she had met on long-distance freighter cruises (Great-grandmother Muscato shared a passion for penal reform with one, the gentleman who wrote 20,000 Years in Sing Sing; they had gotten to be chums somewhere between Shanghai and Juneau, and their letters had been numerous and voluble), and almost every scrap related to herself (this in a house that contained every Christmas card received since the Truman administration).

Except: in one dresser drawer, an unmarked envelope, large and faded yellow. In it were three or four magazines, story monthlies from the early 40s. There wasn't much to link them - they included a romance anthology, a "true confessions" format, and a Western, I believe. It was only as we passed them around, my siblings and I, that we noticed that each carried a story by an author whose name was an amalgam of our mother's mother's and her grandmother's maiden names.

We showed them to our father (already, although we didn't yet know it, trying to decide whether to wait until after the funeral to announce his engagement - but that's another story), and he said offhandedly that oh, yes, your mother had always wanted to be a writer. Those must be hers.

So maybe she didn't want to be a circus showgirl; maybe she dreamt of being Katherine Anne Porter or Taylor Caldwell or her favorite author, Mazo de la Roche. And on Mother's Day, each year, I sit a moment and wonder what else it is we don't know about the sharp-tongued, irritable, meanly funny suburban matron who raised us and, if nothing else, helped ensure we all got the hell out of Dodge even if she hadn't.

The stories? Never read them. My sister got hold of the envelope, and she's her mother's daughter.

M is for... first appeared on May 10, 2009 and appeared again in 2012.  And yes, I'm still getting over the surprise.  Happy Mother's Day, Mother Muscato, wherever you are...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Mr. America

There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." ... 

Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be 

approached as Camp merits the most serious admiration and study. 

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Let's have this wonderful moment, from 1975, stand as a birthday tribute to the song's creator, dear Mr. Irving Berlin.  If, over his long life, he became something of an American institution, this lady is part of the reason why.  Ethel Merman sang the work of all the greats of her day, of course, and while she did proud by Gershwin and Porter, and later on the likes of Sondheim and Herman, something about an Irving Berlin song fits her like a glove.

And never more, really, than this song, both her trademark and, on its own, a monumental summing up of the show-biz culture that was passing even as the show it's from, Annie Get Your Gun, took the stage.  Seeing the Merm here, fronting a band that can really challenge her, is like watching a racehorse test its mettle.  Within a few bars, she's abandoned even the minimal concessions of scale and gesture she usually made for TV and lets us see, if in an autumnal way, the sheer unbridled staginess of her performing style, her stand-and-delivery way of putting over a song.  Some singers (Peggy Lee, Julie London) seduce you.  Some (Minnelli and her mother, Streisand) sell it to you.  Merman simply puts it out there, look at what I can do (and anything you can do, I can do better - that's more Berlin, actually).

What makes it Camp, though, isn't the song, or the singer - despite the chiffon muu-muu and the hair out to there, Merman is, I think, too good to be Camp.  It's the whole package - the Boston Pops, Arthur Fiedler, the countless genteel households tuning in across the country on PBS, the adoration of the audience, even the hushed tones of Miss Bernadette Peters setting the scene.  It's a tinsel setting for a voice of brass, but the voice cuts through the nonsense to deliver, once more, the goods: the costumes, the scenery, the makeup the props - all there, in front of you.  When she sings it, what Irving Berlin knew as a fact is conjured up again, and it really is like no business you know.

Weekend at the Waldorf

Well, perhaps not exactly the Waldorf, but certainly a place of comparable luxe and comfort.  For various reasons, some of which may in due time be disclosed, Mr. Muscato and I have hied ourselves up the road to Dubai for a silly minibreak (a term I first encountered in the diaries of Miss Bridget Jones and have always liked).

Having arrived mid-afternoon (following a dramatic escape from the confines of the office), we have already steamed away our troubles and are now, as the snap attests, doing our best to distance ourselves from the cares of the world in our nearly favorite kind of place, a good hotel's club lounge. If things are quiet around here for a bit, blame the excellent and caring staff of Mr. Hyatt's little hostelry...

Victory!

May 8, 1945 may have been V-E Day for much of a war-weary world, but for at least a few happy Londoners, it would seem that it was also TV Day.  While the boy on the right is achieving a sort of Talullahesque insouciance, his companions are clearly indulging in what our pal the Professor refers to as "booger drag."  Perhaps it was rationing, and they just couldn't get hold of a decent pair of heels...

Rockbird Superstar

If the photo evidence is to be believed, much of the fashion worn by the preening guests at last night's annual Metropolitan Museum gala was pretty woeful.  Even so, the organizers of the celebration - in honor of the Costume Institute's new "Punk: from Chaos to Couture" show - certainly got one thing right: they hired Blondie as the evening's headliner, and it certainly looks like dear Miss Deborah Harry delivered.

I don't know about you, but I'm always touched by her presence, dear.  I bet Mrs. Vreeland would have been, too...

Landmarks in Children's LIterature

In the second volume of this tremendously educational series, Jerry's Overdraft, Mr. Martinson of the greengrocer's there proves to be very generous to our hero, setting the scene for the epic third installment, Jerry Moves to Greenwich Village and Finds a Sugar Daddy.

Birthday Stars: C'mon Along...

It's surely only happenstance that the attractive couple above share a birthday, but it's a pleasing conjunction of circumstances nonetheless.  

Alice Faye and Tyrone Power made only three pictures together; all of them - In Old Chicago, Alexander's Ragtime Band (ballyhooed in this still), and Rose of Washington Square - more significant to the Faye oeuvre than to Tyrone's, but all solid yarns.  Together, the two stars have on each other something of the effect attributed to the more prolific pairing of Rogers and Astaire: down-to-earth, commonsensical Alice grounds the ethereally pretty Power, while his admiration helps the audience realize that she's more than just a prole-pretty face.

I'm not really able to be impartial about Alice, about whom I've already shown myself enraptured.  Power I find a more acquired taste, but he's certainly never less than decorative and frequently a great deal more.  Both had relatively short, intense careers, with Faye walking away from Fox and movies at 40 (with nearly the finality of Durbin, athough she continued to flourish on radio for a decade after leaving Fox) and Powers dead at only 44.  

They certainly make a pretty pair,and they seemed thoroughly to have enjoyed each other's company.  They're both good eggs, wielding a kind of star power that's hard to imagine these days, and I hope that over the years they had many an amusing shared birthday.  Do you think that in sixty-odd years anyone will wax nostalgic over the memory of any of today's screen couples?  

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Ave, Vale...

"Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot 

be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'"

- Susan Sontag

I've found myself thinking, rather to my surprise, a lot about Deanna Durbin since we learned of her death earlier this week.  I've also listened to her a great deal more than I probably ever have before, and it makes me sad I hadn't done so earlier. Whatever you can say about her vehicles, which were pretty much doomed to mediocrity just because she was tied to Universal rather than a studio, like Metro or Paramount maybe, that could have surrounded her with taste and style, she herself is really rather marvelous.  If nothing else, she's hugely livelier and more unaffected than her rather turgid reputation would suggestion.

She's remembered, I suppose, far too patly, as the stiff and stuffy girl soprano who represented High Culture against the swing stylings of the likes of Judy Garland - a role she played (without the stuffy part) exactly once, in an MGM short, Any Sunday.  Her fans have known better, of course: she can act, she can charm, and more than anything else, she can sing, really and truly, in a way that puts to shame most of the other light soprano darlings of the day.  There's a story that she turned down a chance to sing at the Met, and while that may be a stretch, it's not the ridiculous puffery it would be if attributed to, say, Jane Powell or even Kathryn Grayson.

It's moments like the above, however, that probably haven't helped her case.  Here we have the climax of 1940's It's a Date, with St. Deanna singing Schubert in a Vera West habit that calls to mind the more risible moments of the old Radio City Easter Pageant.  This is one of those sequences when the plot has long finished and the principals are assembled solely for the purposes of admiring the star as she trills her way to a lingering fadeout.  On hands are, by Universal standards, a host of extras and a treasury of characters, led by Eugene Pallette and S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall (as the Famous Playwright whose vision this scene somehow fulfills), along with Kay Francis as Durbin's actress mother, at the start of her coast into supporting parts that ended in Monogram quickies and summer stock.*

It's all, in Sontag's words, just a shade "too much."  But close your eyes, or better, focus them only on Deanna: that's real music, an old chestnut sung straight, and well, and on its own terms genuinely moving.  The scene is Camp, through and through, but she's someplace else. Gratia plena, you might almost say...

* The part is by way of being a kind of rite out of passage out of stardom; Joan Blondell** Ann Sothern played it a decade later in her last MGM picture, when It's a Date turned into Nancy Goes to Rio.  She was saddled with Jane Powell as the daughter, actually ,which only makes it all the more so...

** Thanks to Gentle Reader Joel65913 for the correction.  Why do those two ladies insist on confusing themselves in my feeble brain?

Birthday Girl: Hallelujah, Betty

Basya Cohen was born 96 years ago today, in Brooklyn.  Over the following nine decades, she turned herself into Betty Comden, one of the brightest lights of Broadway and one of a small handful of people - many of them, like her, self-created, smart, funny women of unconventional good looks - who can be considered quintessential New Yorkers.  And of all the strange and wonderful things I've gotten to do in my own five decades to date, knowing and working with her is one of the two or three things of which I'm proudest.  It wasn't for all that long - three or four projects over five or six years - but I had the incredible good fortune to watch her at work, in tandem, of course, with Adolph Green, and I did my best to make myself both useful and unobtrusive, both of which I think she appreciated.

Eventually I made the decision to leave New York, and that meant leaving behind Miss Comden and the others of her extended circle with (who am I kidding? for) whom I worked.  I decided that as tempting as it was, being the Nice Young Man who helps out in a pinch was not a long-term career strategy, and that all the exciting opening nights and terrific travel, the enviable Rolodex and the easy familiarity with people whom I was raised from earliest childhood to revere, wasn't a trade-off, long term, for one's own life.  It was a wrench, and it's been sad ever since to watch them go, one by one, while I've been on the other side of the world.

Not long ago, though, I ran into someone from those days, a man who is now a Power to Reckon With, in fact, in rarefied circles of High Kultcha.  He was surprised to find me, a former Nice Young Man, way out in the Sandlands, and we had a long and surprisingly philosophical chat over drinks, at one of the silly places here sixty-odd stories up looking out at the sand and dust and distant water.  I told him that, wonderful as it had been, I had seen too many too-old people still trying to be Nice Young Men, and I thought it might be soul-killing.  He looked at me thoughtfully, a look you've seen in the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section, and told me something very nice:  he remembered me, he said, because he was backstage at some rehearsal once, when I was working for a friend of Miss Comden's, a very great figure indeed who was revered for his art and notorious for his fondness for the young and handsome.  He was standing with a couple of the hard-boiled old timers who do the heavy lifting of making art look easy - lawyers, producers, managers, the unsung backstagers - and one said to the other, watching me be a Nice Young Man to, at the moment, a very tetchy and impatient legend, "well, if nothing else, I'm glad he finally hired one who could type."  Meaning, he said, one who wasn't pretty and useless and in it for the room at the Four Seasons or the table at Le Cirque.  "I thought," he said, "You'd probably do fine."

I have.  I still regret Miss Comden, though, and I hope that she had, through those later years, a Nice Young Man to keep things humming for her.  She deserved it.  "Make someone happy," she wrote, "Just one someone happy."  As far as that goes, that's me.

(Hmmmm.  I just checked, and apparently I used the self-same title for a birthday post for Miss C. in 2009.  I stand by it, though, both as a little play on one of her lesser shows and as a fine expression of how I feel about her.)

Prime Beef, Delhi-Style

Dear Mr. John Abraham has gone distinctly butch for his latest epic, a rather grim-looking picture called Shootout at Wadala. He sports a rather more traditional Bollywood hero than usual - short hair and trim moustache, and is even more than usually formidably fit.  I thought about running the controversial big number from the picture, "Laila" (one of the things I like about Bollywood is that even the wildest action pictures still contain a Big Number or two), but he remains resolutely shirt-wearing throughout, a sad fact that can't overcome even the most extravagant production values.

His costar in the picture is Miss Sunny Leone, a new sensation in Mumbai, but a fixture in Hollywood - or at least the San Fernando Valley - for the past decade.  Given the Indian film industry's notable conservatism (despite its fevered romances, morality still rules with a firmness not seen in American pictures since the Hayes Code), it's fascinating that it has so readily embraced a woman whose previous titles include Alabama Jones and the Busty Crusade, The House of Naked Captives, and the particularly piquantly titled Shut Up and Fuck Me.

Well, if nothing else, John can give her a run for the money in the busty stakes...

RIP: The Girl Who Walked Away

Another great one gone: Universal's savior, the little girl with the prima donna voice, Deanna Durbin.  As this shot proves, she had the moxie to make it as a grown-up star, but instead left for France and more than six decades of what sounds like a perfectly happy and rewarding private life.  Her resolute silence has meant that she's a comparative unknown, but one had only to see the expression on Mother Muscato's face when her name came up to know what a Very Big Star she had been (she was on a very short list of Mother's Immortals, a curiously mixed ensemble that in addition to Deanna included Mary Martin, Roberta Peters, Gordon MacRae, crooner Al Martino, and, in later years, Sade, whom she referred to exclusively phonetically, as "Sayd").

Meanwhile, in a shadowy lair high above Grosvenor Square, the fine-veined hand of Luise Rainer crosses off another name...

Meanwhile, in Amsterdam

I'm a sucker for a little royal extravaganza, and while by Britannic standards the Dutch do things in a very low-key way, I've enjoyed watching events in the Netherlands the last day or two, helped in no small part part by some extremely erudite and amusing bloggers, not least the presiding genius of The Royal Order of Sartorial Splendor and dear Ella of the late lamented Mad Hattery, who now presides over the very thorough A Tiara a Day.

Having lived overseas, I think, gives one a rather personal feeling about the kinds of gatherings seen above, representatives of families ranging from the the House of Orange itself (its central players decked out in blue from head to toe, including some truly startling sapphires - go find some snaps of the new Queen Maxima if you're looking for today's sparkle fix) right on down to our own dear Sultanate.*

As the Sultan rarely joins what Queen Victoria called the Royal Mob, the Al Said family is represented by H.H. Sayyid Haitham bin Tariq (the gentleman at the very top of the back row there, in between the two in more traditional-looking Arabic headgear; he of course is wearing the distinctive Omani massar, or turban).  He's nice; I met him once or twice while living there. He used to pop up occasionally to open an exhibition or some such sundry duty, driving himself and usually startling the organizers by not requiring more fuss.

Also representing the region was the formidable Sheikha Mozah of Qatar, uncharacteristically sober in black and midnight blue, but the clear winner of today's Largest Necklace stakes.  I also like that her purse brooch matches her earrings. It's all in the details, kids.

The spectre at this feast, I think, is the mysterious Crown Princess Masako of Japan, decked out in unflattering thick vanilla brocade and looking as vacant and lost as she has ever since she forsook her career in the Foreign Ministry to join the imperial family. Having lived in Japan when her royal romance was daily tabloid fodder, it's hard to reconcile this woman with the lively, worldly girl who then disappeared into the maze of protocol and tradition.  It was a rare international outing for her (she is said to be fond of the Dutch royal family, who have been especially kind to her, perhaps one reason for the trip), and while it's to be hoped that this means that her lingering malaise may be lifting, her wan appearance is not encouraging.  While I'm dropping names, I suppose I could mention that also I've met her brother-in-law, the Crown Prince's brother (and winner by default as the heir presumptive, Masako not having had a son) who came backstage yonks ago when I was working on a production in London.  No one seemed quite sure who he was, exactly, but he was terribly polite; it turned our star had met him in Tokyo. Smoked like a chimney.

Charles and Camilla are there as well; one wonders what he makes of his Dutch counterpart's smooth transition from heir to monarch.  Watching Queen Beatrix turn herself back into a mere princess, in a simple ceremony that was actually rather moving, it was easy to see the virtue of having abandoned the principal of "the king is dead; long live the king."  Given the Windsor women's ever-expanding longevity (if things go on like this, Princess Anne will make 120), Charles must wonder if he'll ever get to stand in the center of a group of congratulatory visiting royals.

But today belongs to Willem Alexander, the first Dutch king since before Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, and his Argentine consort, who as of today commands a jewel box that would send Eva Peron into fits of jealousy.  They seem to have started out very well indeed, and it will be interesting to watch their story play out, the three little girls in blue growing up and now-Princess Beatrix fading properly into the background.  The secret of royalty is the seductive combination of spectacle and time, impassive continuity and little human touches. They look like a pleasant family, and there's something cozy in thinking that when I'm an old man, 30 years or so from now, I'll watch the inauguration of new Queen Amalia, perhaps with whoever the new Windsor now waiting to be born turns out to be looking on...


* One wonders if the Tongans have done something to offend; they seem to have dropped off the invite lists for these affairs...

Memory Lane: And as the Evening Falls

One of the things that keeps coming to mind as preparations for our move gather steam is all the music I've listened to all through the time I've been living overseas.  In these, the waning days of my expatriacy (is that a word?  It or some variant ought to be), I find myself searching out the various songs of all these fourteen years or so.  I hope you'll forgive me if over the next few weeks, we occasionally glance at one or two of them; they're an odd mix, I readily admit, and some I admire as much for the specific time and place they recall as for the music itself.

But not this one; I remain pretty crazed about the both song and its singers, "New York City Boy" by Pet Shop Boys.  It came out just a few months after I stopped being one myself (An NYCB, that its, not a PSB), and the memory it carries isn't Manhattan, but rather Accra, the West African capital in which I suddenly found myself, a place almost as mad and entrancing to me as my former home is to the twink who's transported there in the video.  He found Studio 54; I found great late-night jazz bars and local joints that played highlife music by the sea, long lazy days out at one of the beaches, afternoons of lobster kebabs and the terrific ice-cold local Star beer, and my own parties at my little white villa set in a garden full of bougainvillea and papaya trees.

To me this song is tied irretrievably to driving around the crazy streets of Accra, dusty and full of surprises, unpredictable flocks of tiny, hyperactive goats and peddlers selling everything from last month's Vanity Fair to giant forest snails (a local delicacy, albeit one I could never quite get into myself).  It was my first car (in Manhattan, who needs one?), a beat-up old green Jeep with a black hardtop.  For the first few weeks I wondered why sometimes people would duck aside as I pulled up at corners or outside one of the shops made from old shipping containers where I did my grocery shopping.  Only after the dozenth or so time did I finally think to ask someone, and they told me that there were to most people's knowledge only two cars in town that looked like that - and the other one, identical albeit a great deal spiffier, belonged to a particularly deranged cousin of the country's then Leader for Life (who actually, in a step rare for Africa then and now, stepped down a year later, much to everyone's surprise; the cousin, however, continued to be a local menace).  Until they got used to the white guy getting out of the Wrangler, people assumed it was Cousin o'Prez coming to cause trouble.  When we would occasionally pass each other, coming or going somewhere on the Ring Road or in Black Star Square, he would honk and throw me a thumbs-up for no good reason.

And the song that was playing, very likely, was "New York City Boy."  Oddly, it never made me feel nostalgic for the life I had left behind.  Instead, it seemed the perfect soundtrack to the new one I had embarked on, and it still feels that way, fourteen years later.  I won't be a New York City Boy - or any other kind, for that matter, given the years gone by - on our arrival back in the States, but I still relish the little thrill this song gives when it shifts into angel-chorus overdrive.  PSB have it right: the deal is real, and you'll never have a bored day.  One way or another, I don't think I ever have.

Birthday Girl: She's Hip

If nothing else, perhaps we can consider a few moments spent considering this lovely artist a corrective to yesterday's rather, I suppose, heavy-handed musical interlude.  Nothing, I think, could be less like that than the sophisticated magic of Miss Blossom Dearie, who had she not returned to Fabulon four years ago would be an I'm sure still girlish 89.

I still can't quite conceive that Manhattan no longer boasts the kinds of rooms in which Dearie and her fellow spirits once flourished, nor that she is no longer at the helm of some amusing boite on one side of town, while uptown a few dozen blocks one could find the likes of Bobby Short or Barbara Carroll and downtown somewhere warm and cosy hosting Karen Akers or Anne Francine.  I was lucky enough to live there in the waning days of cabaret, when going to see Blossom was just something one could do of a weekend; she tended to play in places that might have a cover charge, but not the kind the one had to save and plan for (as we did for the Rainbow Room or the Café Carlyle).

And don't be deceived:  her music may seem featherlike, but her lilting voice was still an instrument of remarkable suppleness and range, and her singing boasts a diction matched only by that of Mabel Mercer.  On top of that, she was a formidable pianist, able not merely, as here, to swing out a standard or two en français, but also wholly to reinterpret a number you think set in stone.  Don't believe me?  Check out her "Ladies Who Lunch."   It's eons away from Stritch - who does, admittedly, own the song outright, and never more so than in this sad week when she leaves New York behind - but in its own way equally implacable.

While she was around, Dearie was too often dismissed as just another fixture of the scene, a singer of knowing little novelty numbers like "Peel Me a Grape" and "My Attorney Bernie." She did them superbly, of course, but listening to her now, we know how much more there is to the kinds of songs she used sing in late-night clubs and can appreciate, now that they're all but gone, how singers, musicians like Blossom Dearie brought them to life.  C'est vraiment ça:  c'est le printemps.  Et je l'embrasse, toujours...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: EgyptProp

"It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized - or at least apolitical."

Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Herewith a little slice of Socialist-Realist extravaganza, Nasser-style.  Filmed in the late '50s, at the height of Egypt's attempt to create a Pan-Arab union, this remarkable number is El Watan El Akbar (The Great Homeland).  It features not only the composer, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, as the apparently only moderately enthusiastic conductor, but a range of the Arabic world's greatest stars, including Abdelhalim Hafiz (the Frank Sinatra of the Nile) and - the first female vocalist - the remarkable Sabah, who is still very much among us at an age rumored to be anything from 89 to 101.  Together, they present a regional pantheon, backed up during their solos by Ethnic Dancers of Many Lands.

In Arabic, this kind of patriotic pageant is called an "operetta," something that, if you are new to the region, can lead to false expectations when attending a state occasion, given the light years that separate them from something like The Merry Widow.

As a whole, this piece reminds me somehow of the finale of There's No Business Like Show Business as reinterpreted by Madame Mao. It's a reminder, perhaps, that there is not as much distance between the anything-to-entertain sensibility of Busby Berkeley and the aesthetics, such as they are, of authoritarianism as would entirely please either side...

Ticket to Ride

A remarkably hectic week, this, and now that it's Friday morning, I'm pleased it's over.  I had to go up to Dubai for a few nights (staying at our favorite hostelry, who really do treat one beautifully - when you find the right place, one of the few things the Sandlands really does right is mindless pampering, which even in a business context, which this very much was, is always a rather soothing thing).  It was a whirl of the usual nonsense, meetings and discussions and much backing-and-forthing, morning to night.

These days, thanks to the dubious blessings of modern technology, such trips require one to be in two (at least places) at once.  All the time that you're doing one thing, with the people with whom you are physically interacting, dealing with Very Important Out-of-Towners and the Critical Matters they have to discuss, you're also surreptitiously answering e-mail and checking texts and trying to figure out how to keep everyone back at the office content.  I wish I could claim to travel under such circumstances with all the aplomb that dear Miss Dietrich so effortlessly displays, but I fear that by Wednesday, when I finally got to come home, that was far from the case.

This trip was all the more surreal, for as it was happening, the background chatter with which I was dealing on the sly was of a sudden mostly about the remarkable fact, which has all just in those few days gelled to the point of no return, that in a matter of weeks we will be winging our way back to the only semi-familiar Great Unknown of life in the U.S. of A.  Flooding the BlackBerry was a tide of messages from travel agent, movers, veterinarian, and more, all requiring immediate answers about routing, packing, visas, shipping, you name it.  From that distance, it seemed a shade unreal; confronted back in the office with a stack of forms and an undeniable itinerary, right down to seat assignments, it suddenly is real.  Still terrifying, but now if nothing else plausible.

Mr. Muscato and I had a rather dazed and all-too-brief reunion on my return, for he has jetted off for a few days of well-earned fun with some old pals, during which they will doubtless cut a wide swathe across the loucher stretches of the Edgware Road (look out, Jon and other Café UK regulars, and keep an eye out for a stout Egyptian and a gaggle of amusing fellow-travelers).  That leaves me here with the dogs, who are increasingly suspicious about the various goings-on that signal change - piles of old clothes for sorting, stacks of magazines for throwing away, and worse.  Within a week or two we'll start breaking up the house in earnest, and then those few weeks of in-between that are a periodic feature of the nomad life, moving through a time when you go from being the proprietor of a comfortable, if anything overfurnished, house into a phase in which all you really have is a suitcase or two (or, if you're Miss Dietrich, ten), and then, as the shippers work their magic, gradually back again.

And on the side, what is more or less a whole new life, or at least a very different one.  House-hunting, for example, is something I've not had to do since the first Clinton administration (or rent-paying, for that matter).  We'll have to arrange for utilities and pick an Internet and cable plan and Heaven help us learn about recycling, which is not a feature of Sandlands life.  Expatriates are often warned about reverse culture shock when going home, and I have a feeling I'm in for a doozy.  In the meantime, though, I will study the serene resolve with which Dietrich approaches her voyage, and do my best to do the same.

Goodnight Mrs. Frankweiler, Wherever You Are...

Sad news in the New York Times this week (I'm just catching up):  E.L. Konigsburg, author of a longtime favorite children's book, the magical  (and magically titled) From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, has gone to spend her nights in a more celestial place even than the Metropolitan Museum.

Growing up in a Pennsylvania town, reading The Mixed-Up Files was a window into a world I fully intended someday to find my way into - if not as a runaway, like its heroes, at least some day, somehow.  And I did.  I first visited the Metropolitan Museum on my very first trip to New York, and while in one way it was a bitter disappointment - the Egyptian collection was closed, under wraps as part of a long-term renovation - otherwise it was all Mrs. Frankweiler promised.  When, years later, I moved to Manhattan, the Met was one of the anchors around which life revolved.  Of course, by that point it was an updated place, increasingly glitzy and retailized and not quite the slightly fusty, slightly eccentric sanctuary in the book.  Still, even today, it has its quiet corners and places where, if you stand still enough in some far corner, you can half fancy you, like Konigsburg's two runaways, might want to spend the night.

The offbeat story of Mrs. Frankweiler and her files appeals, I think, to children who already know they may be a shade eccentric themselves.  While for me she was a one-off author, known for only the Files, reading her obituary and learning of her other books confirms that that was a prime audience for her: children who would take naturally to stories about, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine narrating the story of her life from a comfortable seat in Heaven.  I like the the author's words about her own Pennsylvania childhood:  “Growing up in a small town,” she said, “gives you two things: a sense of place and a feeling of self-consciousness — self-consciousness about one’s education and exposure, both of which tend to be limited. On the other hand, limited possibilities also mean creating your own options.”  She also said, “I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that’s good because it makes you question things.”

The next time I go to the Met - skirting the crowds, defiantly refusing to pay the outrageous "suggested donation" (which you must remember is voluntary and quite contrary to the wishes of the founders of what is meant to be a museum open to all) - I'll climb the grand staircase and, as I've done before, thank the mysterious E.L. Konigsburg (E. for Elaine, it turns out - I don't think I had even ever really thought about her gender) for bringing me there.

Birthday Girl: American Beauty Nose

The Greatest Star, en style (faux) Warhol

Half a century on from what is to me still her most beguiling era - when she was the kooky fresh discovery with what seemed like a trick voice - today Miss Barbra Streisand turns a somehow unlikely 71.  She is what she is, much loved and much disliked.  As for me, I think she's swell.  How many people could sing "I'm the Greatest Star," confident in the knowledge you'll believe it?

The Eyes Have It

I have to admit that she's never been my favorite actress (too nervy, and the slew-of-adopted-chidren thing has always smacked too strongly of some kind of neurosis, not to mention the whole Woody/Woman Scorned thing; nonetheless, she's popped up hereabouts once or twice), but there's no denying that when dear Mr. Eisenstadt snapped her (on this day just 46 years ago, 'round about the time she was filming a little horror movie that made her a star), Mia Farrow was a presence to be reckoned with.  Is there anyone today with this kind of simplicity and intensity, not to mention a complexion of such extraordinary perfection?

Birthday Boy: American Auteur

The artist and his muse

One of America's great contributions to the world of cinema came into the world 67 years ago today, and in many ways, he has been as influential in shaping my appreciation of the movies as anyone this side of Griffith and Gish.  Working with the extended repertory company he recruited in the back alleys of his native Baltimore, John Waters made stars in much the way of the classic studios: by finding extreme types and then figuring out what really made them shine.  From Divine to Patty Hearst, he has given birth to some truly landmark performances: Edith Massey as the Egg Lady, Kathleen Turner as serial-killing sweetheart Beverly Sutphin, Johnny Depp as teen reprobate Cry Baby.  His very personal vision of cinematic glamour - equal parts pinup and puke, as it were - has proven amazingly durable, and while these days he's as much a writer and personality as director, he remains a consistently, even reassuringly, contrary voice of reason, sanity, and, of course, Bad Taste - of the highest order.

It's quite a day, for one could assemble a perfectly workable Dreamland cast just out of some of Waters's fellow celebrants - imagine the script he could craft around a roster consisting of Charlotte Rae, Glen Campbell, Jack Nicholson, Marilyn Chambers, and Sherri Shepherd, with a very special cameo by Bettie Page.  Throw in a couple of the regulars like Mink Stole and Mary Vivian Pearce, and he'd be all set.

In the absence of such a doubtless celluloid atrocity/triumph, I guess we'll have to make do with our well-thumbed DVD of Female Trouble, to me the film that most closely guarantees Waters a kind of cinematic immortality.  It's smoother than Pink Flamingos, a shade less full of shock-for-shock's-sake than Desperate Living, and even after all these years as serious a look as can be imagined at how  show business and the mania for celebrity can warp minds and lives.  The Midnight Movie might have gone the way of the dodo, but it's nice to know that Waters is still with us, keeping a jaundiced yet boundlessly appreciative eye on the foibles and messes of the world and prescribing for the least sign of boredom a little discreet mayhem.

Given the goings-on that he's depicted at at least one birthday party, though, I think a little e-appreciation like this is just about as far, at the moment, as I'm willing to go.

On The Avenue...

On this date in 1951, the inconveniently Midtown course of the ticker-tape parade in honor Gen. MacArthur forces a couple of unlikely pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the street.  He looks rather put out, but isn't she reveling in the unexpected attention?  a one-woman parade all on her own, really.  Looks to be this close to just centering herself in the middle of the Avenue and starting to wave.

Funny, isn't it, how ever more difficult it gets, as time passes, to credit that theirs was considered a Great Romance?  Here they look more like they've hardly been introduced, and wouldn't have much in common (taste in overcoats aside) once they were...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Mind Your Manners

This 1947 gem from no less than Mrs. Edwin Main (Emily) Post actually contains a great deal of very useful advice - little nuggets that, judging from the dinners I go to, not a few persons in comparatively lofty positions could learn much from.

I particularly enjoy the several things that many would now think likely to be the height of gaucherie that Mrs. Post reminds us are quite correct:  drinking from one's soup cup, for example, or the almost entirely forgotten fact that bread plates are not used at a formal dinner, and the bread (if any) is simply deposited on the tablecloth (for sopping purposes only, please, no butter).  I'm also quite taken with the parade of horrors committed by Mrs. Inexcusable Cigarette, who was clearly unused to human companionship of any kind, poor thing.

And wasn't American food plain?  Those cubed potatoes look to be strangers even to a little pepper, and you just know that Mrs. Post's cook had never heard of cilantro, fenugreek, or hoisin sauce.  At least she rose to exotic little touches like that challenging ethnic treat, SPAH-ghetti, and bravo to attractive Virginia Hopkins for managing it so deftly.

This missive from the Emily Post Institute (Emily Post, President) may have been filmed a decade or two before my time, but this was the world I was raised in.  There is not a little resemblance between Mrs. Post there in her garden and my sainted Grandmother Muscato, who actually did serve whole poached fruit for dessert and expect one tidily to cut around the stone, at a table that was never less neatly set than here, three meals a day.  Under her expert guidance, her Alice (She's a Treasure)* put out sauces no less drenching than Mrs. Post's Hollandaise, not to mention a creampuff in syrup that I'm sure would give Mrs. P's a run for its money. Even now, all these years later, I still feel a twinge of guilt, a cool draught over one shoulder, when I eat a bowl of cereal, milk poured directly from the fridge, perched on a stool, sans underplate, sans placemat, sans any of the things that "separate us from the savages, dear.  Sit up."

At a time when we may need more than a little reminding of the basic rules of civilization, on levels even more significant (if such were possible! cries the shade of Grandma M.) than table manners, they do remain a place to start. Tonight I think we'll eat in the dining room, and while we may not rise to finger bowls, we can at least be more Virginia than Inexcusable.  It's a start.

*  I actually for a little while thought that might be the housekeeper's last name...

Elegy for April, 2013

Science, Bella Pratt, Boston Public Library.  Summer 2008.

I don't usually post poetry I've written here.  Today, I can think of nothing else to say.

Elegy for April, 2013 

There is evil in the world.

Ideas that poison minds, blight lives,

Twist whole nations in their circus-mirror

Non-reality.  Evil knows no borders.

There is evil in the world.

There is evil in the world.

It can be well-meaning, right-thinking

Just as easily as endlessly malign:

Impersonal and fixed on triumph,

There is evil in the world.

There is evil in the world:

The drone in the sky, the kettle-bomb;

The killing idea that I-am-more if

You-are-less; the notion, horrible,

That might trumps all.

This is the evil in the world.

This evil in the world

Ignores the least of us

Ignites the worst of us

Destroys the best of us

Demands the mind to shut

The heart to stop

The hand to slap and not

To touch the tender sleeping face

Of one who dreams of only love,

Tomorrow's breakfast, summer, joy, and not -

Not yet - this evil in the world.

Fine and Dandy

When it's proved to be one of those weeks (and I won't deny this is one, O Best Beloveds), sometimes all it takes at least to start to feel that little bit better is to spend a while looking at the alluring work of M. René Gruau.

Known more for his ultra-chic ladies, resplendent in New Look Dior, Gruau (born, you know, the Count Ricciardelli delle Caminate) is almost equally adept at turning out very fetching gentlemen.  His swooping, calligraphic lines, so free and yet so precise, are somehow particularly attuned to bringing life to a very specific kind of urban type, cosmopolitan and good humored; his men all seem to be variations on the type that dear Mr. Ethan Mordden has immortalized in his own persona: The Cocktail Dandy.

Here we see an especially example, looking very dapper in his Ben-Day jacket and cap, his discreetly arched brow promising at the very least an amusing afternoon out - ending perhaps in a quick drink at one of those quiet little bars over on the East Side, on the edges of Covent Garden, or in the shadow of the Opéra Comique.  After that... who knows?

And after a trying week, isn't that an awfully attractive prospect?  Much pleasanter, you know, than reality just about now.  But that, I think, is point of disappearing, now and again, into le monde de Gruau...

Birthday Girl: The Baroness

The remarkable creature seen here came into the world 128 years ago today, in a place called Rungsted in the Danish countryside.  She went on to become, among other things, a baroness, a farmer, a socialite, a recluse (and then back again, improbably, into a kind of late in life party girl), and possibly the world's most glamorous invalid.  Oh, and a writer.  A very great writer.

She wrote as Isak Dinesen (except when she was Pierre Andrézel or Osceola); she was born Karen Christenze Dinesen; she was formally the Baroness Blixen-Finecke.  Her friends called her Tanne.  What her many lovers called her, we will likely never know, for despite being an inveterate self analyst, she did keep some secrets.  She was a shape-shifter who reveled in her various identities, playing off the grand-dame aristocrat and the raffish author, among other personae.  She was enormously famous in her lifetime, and then her work received another surge of notoriety when a vast, lumbering, and rather terrible movie was made out of her memoir (of sorts), Out of Africa.  She has appeared on the Danish currency, is the subject of museums in Denmark and Kenya, and the fact that she was considered for, but never received, the Nobel Prize for literature is a blot on that august institution's record.

Nonetheless, I have a feeling that her work is a little less than fashionable at the moment.  Alternately pitilessly searching and extravagantly sentimental, full of high-flying and obscure references to classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the eighteenth century, and things like the commedia dell'arte (hence her Pierrot costume here), her works can be off-putting.  Then, too, there's her take on colonialism: she liked it.* Rather, she liked (mild word indeed) her years in Africa, running a coffee plantation and discovering that she was more than just a well-bred Danish bluestocking - that she was in fact a woman of passion and intellect, a frightening hard worker, stubborn beyond belief.  And, in the end, one destined for tragedy, for, as she wrote in Out of Africa, "The land was in itself a little too high for coffee, and it was hard work to keep it going; we were never rich on the farm."  

After the farm was gone, and she returned, wounded, to her childhood home, she started writing in earnest.  She wrote about her time in Kenya, and she drew on her memory of childhood stories to tell her tales.  She spun yarns of mysterious divas and brilliant cooks and long Nordic winters.  at the same time, she lived a singular life, by turns holed up in her father's house, writing and living the life of a country gentlewoman (albeit one whose walls were bedecked with spears and tribal masks, and one whose preferred diet consisted, in nearly its entirety, for long stretches, of Champagne, asparagus, and oysters) and traveling on voyages that came to resemble pilgrimages in reverse - the object of veneration coming to the faithful, rather than vice versa.  Never again to Africa, but as far as New York City, where she was lunched by Babe Paley and, famously, met Mrs. Arthur Miller, who had had a couple of identities herself when you stop to think about it.

She had a marvelous time; she was a force of nature and an incredible life force.  At the same time, it seems likely, in retrospect, that she romanticized her ill-health (based, putatively, on syphilis passed to her during her unsatisfactory marriage to her Baron) and in the end starved herself to death, a genius and an anorectic.

Whatever she was, however, her works stands on it own, only burnished that much more brightly by the legends of her life.  I think she would be pleased to be remembered on her birthday; perhaps I'll have to see if we have any asparagus.  I know we have some Champagne.

* If she is a little too warm for current tastes on the idea of colonialism, I think it's important to recognize the extraordinary warmth with which she depicted her Kenyan employees and neighbors, as well as the genuine affection with which they regarded her memory for decades after she left Africa.

Shake, Shake, Shake

Well, it's been an interesting day out here in the Sandlands (not that it hasn't anywhere else).

There I am, more or less on the mend from my pulmonary nonsense, having a quiet afternoon at home (having ducked out of the office with what seemed, and may yet be, a migraine).  A little nap seemed in order, but I had no sooner gone into the lightest of dozes when the dogs started annoying me; something they were doing was shaking the bed.

I woke fully up just in time to realize that it wasn't the dogs - who were frozen at the foot of the bed, watching the curtains sway and the pictures lightly rattling on the far wall.  And the bed continued to shake, although now with a rather sickening lateral sway in additional to the shaking.  And then it stopped.  It seems the earthquake - apparently an enormous one - that struck in Iran this afternoon was felt all this way away on the other side of the Gulf.  As with the previous earthquakes I've experienced - in Egypt and Japan, on the exotic side, and in suburban Philadelphia, of all places, on the other - there is a surreality to the moment you realize what's happening, as well as a sound - a low rumble, primordial and relentless - that you can never afterward quite explain or describe, but that, given a choice, you'd opt never, ever to hear again.

I called downstairs to Mrs. Gallapatti-Da Silva, who was serenely washing dishes and had apparently missed the whole thing (she suffers from vertigo and likely just thought it was one of her Lucile Austero moments, although I doubt she thinks of them in that way exactly).  I thought it might have been a dream, but then the stream of calls and texts started coming in:  the office was evacuating (we're on a high-ish floor, and apparently I missed a festival of screaming in the tongues of many nations); people saw the shelves swaying at this mall or the chandelier doing a little dance at that hotel.  And a few hundred miles away, much, much worse.

But here, my Africa training kicked in, and I grabbed the passports and threw them in a bag filled with useful things that we keep for such purposes slung over the back of the bedroom door.  I headed downstairs and outside with the very clearly freaked dogs and by now hardly less freaked tiny Sri Lankan lady, and we sat for a while in the shade of the terrace, me be-laptopped and regularly hitting "refresh" on the U.S. Geological Survey's invaluable real-time earthquake monitor.  The aftermath of an earthquake, a mild one that is, is a funny moment.  You know that something else - and presumably worse - may happen, but that equally it may not.  In the moment, you feel rather foolish.

So that is where we are right now: anticipating aftershocks, nothing worse.  But unnerving all the same.  Perhaps we're getting out of here at the right time...

Why Don't You...

...cultivate an enigmatic expression?

After all, it was terribly effective on dear Miss Aline MacMahon here.  And her usually so jolly, too...

The Largest Moving Object in the World

A year ago today there was much to-do, but 100 years, after all, seems somehow more worth observing than 101.  Nonetheless, I think it would be too bad to let it go unrecognized that this is the date, 101 years ago, that the hubris of the Edwardian world was well and truly shaken by the sinking of the ship someone had what turned out to be the very poor idea of describing as "unsinkable": White Star's magnificent RMS Titanic.

Here we have the first few numbers of the Sydney production of Maury Yeston and Peter Stone's musical on the subject.  When the Broadway version was in preparation, back in the late '90s while I was still living in Manhattan, the show was the subject of much malicious speculation regarding just how big a flop it would turn out to be, mavens of such things all expecting a turkey of, well, titanic proportions, a kind of seagoing Carrie or Moose Murders.  Come opening night and the knives were out - but the thing itself proved something of a hit.  A few months later I took a flock of nephews and a niece, and they were enthralled and I impressed by the whole thing.

Tucked into this 2006 Australian cast, which seems on the whole to me vocally the equal to or better than the one I saw on Broadway all those years ago, is the great Antipodean diva Joan Carden, who plays Ida Straus against the distinguished tenor Robert Gard.  The Straus' story caps a series of plotlines of young love and marital devotion that punctuate the musical, and their duet late in the second act, the almost operettische "Still," (in which Carden and Gard shine*) is inexpressibly touching.  Not surprisingly, the Strauses were reduced to a single fleeting shot in the James Cameron film, which was longer on sex than sentiment (except about the ship itself).

Remarkably, what seems to be the entire Sydney production is YouTubable, for anyone who'd like a look at a work that I think has some of the finest ensemble and choral writing of any recent musical (if some longueurs in the recitative and solo writing).  The Broadway production suffered from a certain lack of visual panache that this one hasn't escaped, but the various sliding panels and rising and falling bridges do the trick.

Crossing the Atlantic last summer, we thought a lot about that cold April night.  Among our tablemates, there in the dining room of the Queen Mary 2 (grander by far than could have seemed possible in 1912), was a lovely older couple.  A few days out, they confided that they had decided to come across on the Queen because the husband's great uncle had been a crewman on Titanic, and they wanted to see the spot, or as close to as they could, where the great ship foundered.  They had his last letter home, sent from Southampton, and a memoir written by a cousin of how the family learned the sad news - White Star, a few days after the tragedy, telegraphed the big house in their village to confirm the death.  Sitting there over our Baked Alaska, with the dark ocean rushing by outside, it all seemed very close.  One morning they were taken down to a crew deck at the stern - as close as you can get, apparently, to the water - and threw a rose out into the wake, in memory of a young baker who had given up his apprenticeship in the local shop to go sea.  Watching the crew arrive (on stage) and register their wonder ("There she is!") makes me think of him.  Godspeed, indeed...

* It's about halfway through the fifth and final YouTube segment. 

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Hula-balloo

"We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

In this case, the fantasy appears to be Robert Young's, a few decades before his immortalization as Dr. Marcus Welby.  That it features perhaps the least Polynesian person ever to live, Miss Eleanor Powell, is one of the elements that elevates this particular number to the Camp pantheon.  That and her costume, which bears about as much resemblance to a grass skirt as it does to a lamé piano shawl.

This clip, from Honolulu (which also featured Burns and Allen for comic relief), is neither the most riotous nor the most ridiculous SSCE one could imagine, but it's nonetheless a genuine insight into Hollywood's ideas of the "exotic," circa 1939.  Powell's home studio, MGM, was less a center for these kinds of tropical fantasies than, say, Fox (with its South-of-the-Border spectacles anchored by Carmen Miranda and her Banda da Lua).  Nonetheless, Metro applied its usual level of polish to this little gem, for at this time Powell was one of its prestige stars.  I've always found her oddly weightless somehow, a star without consequence.  She gamely did her job, but had she never existed, I don't think she'd be much missed.  Still, here, in her rigorously affixed lei and equally fixed smile, she's pretty swell.  Who else could carry off a tap hula?

On Finer Newsstands Now!

Accept no substitutes.

Ever since I dug up an issue way back in 2008 (do you believe it?), this classic periodical has gained a certain discerning little following.  Dear Donna Lethal discovered several back numbers over in her droll corner of the cyberverse, and dear Jon has even come across an issue or two over in Blighty (perhaps he found them in some tempting corner of the Portobello Road?).

As with the legendary Flair, though, complete sets are hard to come by, and I do believe we can all live in hope of finding new editions.  Later issues seem to be especially rare - there's no denying dowagers were an endangered species once Mamie Eisenhower left the White House...