Café Muscato

It's Alive!

2012-01-29T23:03:00.003+04:00

Philips Family fun-fact: Minerva (left) makes all their underthings - including Vern's (center) chastity devices - out of that self-same brown dotted double-knit. In fact, he's wearing one of her more cunning designs; it's a one piece that includes the necktie. It takes Millie (right) more than thirty minutes to get him in and out of it.

Fame's Footnotes

2012-01-29T21:16:00.009+04:00

Birthday thoughts, today, for two very different ladies, united only by the chance of their sharing the date - and the thoroughgoing way that, despite lashings of fame once upon a time, they have disappeared from the headlines and public consciousness alike. It's truly out of sight, out of mind for a lethal songbird and The Last of the Poor Little Rich Girls.

Murder first...

In 1976, Claudine Longet was just another middlingly successful, slightly faded pop star (had there been a Branson, she wouldn't merited her own theatre), recently divorced from her longtime, bigger-name husband Andy Williams. She had had a brief vogue in the mid-sixties for her wispy, charmingly accented renditions of middle-of-the-road pop favorites; you can, if care to, get a sense of her to my ears pallid oeuvre here. She returned to the front pages for all the wrong reasons when her boyfriend (and it was a scandal in itself, even in 1976, that a divorcée would have a boyfriend), a pro skier, wound up shot. She was convicted, if only of criminal negligence, and there was much agitation that her sentence was a mere 30 days.

That much I remembered. What I either never knew or had forgotten was that she ended up marrying her defense lawyer (after his own divorce), and as part of the settlement of a civil action that followed the first trial, agreed to stay mum for the rest of her life.

And so she's done. It's odd to think that she's still around, 70 today, apparently living quietly in Aspen, Colorado. You would have thought she'd had enough of skiing...

We see our second birthday girl, right, here in the first flush of her involuntary fame. Athina Onassis had the mixed luck to be born into almost inconceivable amounts of money, courtesy of an equally inconceivably dysfunctional family. Everything about her mother Christina's life made the papers, from her miserable love life to her miserable self-image to her miserable four divorces. The public seemed to take a kind of solace in knowing that all that cash couldn't make Christina happy, or pretty, or anything, apparently, but miserable. Athina was only three when the whole sorry spectacle came to an end, and her childhood was marked by a drumbeat of press looking to turn her into the living immolation her mother had become.

And here's the suprising thing: despite a spate of articles now and again when something caught an editor's eye (Athina taking her father's surname; various legal wranglings over her various inheritances; her supposedly mixed feelings about her Greek heritage), Athina seems to have let fame pass her by. Today she's 27, an equestrienne married to an equally horse-mad Brazilian, and seemingly living the life of a (comparatively) ordinary low-profile jet-setter.

One funny thing does unite these two: in true tabloid fashion, let's call it The Curse of the Kennedys.

Athina, of course, is Jackie O's step-granddaughter, and it was that connection that really fueled all the coverage of her mother's horrid life. Claudine, it seems, before she entered the limbo-land of the Hollywood ex-wife, had traveled in good circles: She and Andy were at the Ambassador Hotel, waiting to go out later, while their pal Bobby Kennedy gave the speech that was so decidedly interruped by Mr. Sirhan Sirhan.

One wonders what each would make of the other, were they to meet blowing out their birthday candles...

So...

2012-01-28T21:40:00.002+04:00

Geez. You go away for what, a year, year and and a half? Things really fall apart.

As did I, for a little while. I got sick, and then I got better, and through it all I stayed insanely busy trying to preserve the illusion that I'm fine, perfectly fine. Which I wasn't, of course, but what with having a new job in a new country, not to mention a heaping helping of debts and obligations, one tries to keep up. None of which is terribly amusing.

In any case, on the off chance that anyone's still paying attention, here we are. For the record: Mr. Muscato is still a saint, Koko is still a scamp, and we've even added a new terrier to all our lives, more of whom, perhaps, anon. We've learned to like, well enough, the life we're leading, and we're already planning Plan B.

And through it all, I've missed being here. All sorts of things good and bad have happened out in the Great Wide World, and I've missed dishing it all. Living, as I did for too long, in a kind of life-wide Writer's Block, I've missed out on so much. And now it's time to try and see if one can't, like Mrs. Levi, come out of one's personal haze - to the lights, if not of 14th Street, at least of this place I so enjoyed creating, once upon a time that feels longer ago than it really is.

In due time, I suppose, explanations and apologies as necessary. Today, I'm going to hit "publish" and see what happens. It's a little scary, truth to tell. But I'm learning, relearning really, as one must, that scary can be good. Here goes.

Birthday Girl: The Queen of Hollywood

2010-08-02T21:48:00.006+04:00

105 years ago today, a few miles outside Helena, Montana, smack dead-center in the heart of Broadwater County, a rancher and his wife had a bouncing baby girl. Who could have predicted that that flower of the prairie would grow up to be the most supremely gracious, self-assured, and self-aware lady of the American cinema?

She was, of course, Myrna Loy, and while the crown bestowed on her by Hollywood was really just something of another studio publicity ploy (the King, of course, was Gable), it fit her.

She only hit her stride as a star after a decade spent in what must have seemed an endless string of stinkers and unlikely ethnic parts. After putting in her time as Vamp, Lady in Waiting, Fifi, Chorus Girl, Inez Quartz, Girl in China, Yasmani, Nubi, Slave Girl, Lola Bland (!) and, God help her, Fah Lo See, Myrna was at long last rescued. MGM, having taken its sweet time, figured out what to do with her, which was: treasure her, glorify her, and, most of all, Americanize her - as if that took much doing.

And so she became Nora Charles; the glamourous leading lady who warmed up William Powell in all those Thin Man movies (and many others) and who came to epitomize a kind of ideal American lady. In a town not known for the quality, Myrna was serene. By the time she moved on to television and the stage, as Hollywood's onetime studio goddess eventually did, simply casting her was a kind of shorthand, a mark of quality. Myrna Loy was, remained, and, I suspect, always will be a class act.

Would that one could say that for every luminary sharing this her natal day. In truth, they're a mixed bunch. Let's say Happy Birthday, even so, not just to Mrs. Charles, but also to epic bibulist Peter O'Toole and antic jurisprudentist Lance Ito; to real-life Mr. Bette Davis Gary Merrill and television's Mr. Edith Bunker Carroll O'Connor; to the barely Transylvanian eternal pre-teen werewolf Butch Patrick and hardly Olympian sometime Prince protégée Apollonia*; and to pulchritudinous Loy co-eval Ann Dvorak, piquant thesp Mary Louise Parker, and putrid would-be conservacomic Victoria Jackson.

We see Miss Loy here a few decades after the height of her reign, but in my opinion she still looked damn good. I love that fiesty Old Dame look, one too little seen anymore in this taut and frozen-visaged era...

*Apollonia fun-fact: it was in fact her eponymous sometime girl group Apollonia 6 that first sang, on their equally eponymous first album, "Manic Monday", ages, more or less, before the Bangles. Who knew?

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Nice Muscles!

2010-07-30T22:29:00.005+04:00

In honor of Mr. Muscato and me finally finding a pretty good sushi place in our new community, I thought a moment's communing with the madness of contemporary Japan might be in order.

Oh, yes, I'm fully aware that everybody's over weird Japaniana; but then you stumble on something like this little startler, and you realize all over again that the "Why am I Mr. Sparkle?" Simpsons episode is still a work of sheer genius (not to mention verisimilitude).

Watch and marvel...

Meanwhile, at the Cookout

2010-07-28T23:14:00.004+04:00

"Oh, Christ," thought Carol, grimly setting the picnic table for yet another disastrous barbeque, "there goes another batch of hamburgers. Sometimes I wish those two would just screw and get it over with. And get Shirlee, with her goddam surprised act. If she hasn't figured it all out yet about her Ed, I'm going to have to draw her a picture."

Hare Today, Tomorrow, and Always

2010-07-27T21:07:00.003+04:00

It's hard to believe - given that if any Hollywood star deserves to be called "ageless," it's he - but today marks the seventieth anniversary of the screen debut of one of tinseltown's most versatile stars. Action pictures, musicals, horror, comedy, and even his own biopic (who can forget "Oh, we're the boys of the chorus/We hope you like our show..."?) - there's hardly a genre in which the great Bugs Bunny hasn't triumphed. Who else has done both noir and opera so successfully?

Yes, on a fine July evening in 1940, audiences at Warner Theatre's across the nation sat down for a nice double-feature to find their evening preceded by A Wild Hare, the gripping story of a hunter and his prey - and it's all been nothing but good times since.

What Bugs's epics may have lacked in length (averaging, I believe, something between six and ten minutes), they more than made up for in quality. I'm especially partial to the ones in which Bugs torments poor clueless Daffy Duck, although I can also be talked into a vintage Marvin the Martian now and again. The opera parodies, the triumphantly disastrous night at the Hollywood Bowl ("Leopold!"), encounters with fellow stars from Edward G. Robinson to Errol Flynn and with adversaries that ranged from a baby to a truly deranged witch - really, they're all pretty wonderful.

If I had to choose one favorite, I suppose it would have to be The Rabbit of Seville - what's yours?

Movin' On Up

2010-07-25T15:32:00.005+04:00

The vans arrive at the Villa Muscato 2.0 (artist's impression)

Movin' on up indeed, in the immortal words sung so memorably by Miss Ja'net Dubois, albeit to the very far East Side and not exactly to a deeluxe apartment in the sky-hi-hi (although I will be crushingly honest and admit that our new digs are not exactly up to the standards illustrated - the people actually movin' on up in that snap are in fact the Eisenhowers).

Yes, here we are, once again surrounded by a bewildering profusion of random possessions (it's not a good sign when your first thought on opening most boxes is "why on earth did I keep that?") and slowly sorting things out. I have been moving on average every three years or so since I was 18, but that doesn't make the process any less agonizingly annoying. While Mr. Muscato has been almost as consistently nomadic, he is significantly less a packrat than I, and so finds the whole thing that much more depleting.

I keep telling him that moving is like childbirth (a process neither of us, it must be admitted, is particularly familiar with aside from our own arrival), and one never remembers how very unpleasant it was once the baby (or, in this case, the decorator*) arrives. I don't think he believes me.

The dog, on the other hand, restored to us after a bureaucratic process only slightly less Kafka-esque than that required to extract a Soviet dissident, has found his favorite sofa cushion and is entirely content. So some things are as they ought to be.

* Who am I trying to kid, being so grand? To paraphrase Pogo, I have seen the decorator, and he is us.

A Goddess at Sunset...

2010-07-24T18:13:00.004+04:00

One reads with sorrow the news trickling out of the City of Angels. The indomitable lady whom dear Donna Lethal with very good reason calls Saint Zsa Zsa of Gabor does appear to be enduring a particularly horrid version of that staple of the tabloids, Sad Last Days. Her last decade or so, actually, seems to be turning into a particularly melancholy contrast to the whirlwind of glamour and silliness that preceded it, which really is just a lousy shame.

I'd rather remember her in palmier days, dripping in diamonds, teased out to there, and painted with an insouciance that seems almost Fauve, as convinced of her perfection as she is that the sun will rise in the morning (a time of day she last saw 'round about the time she may or may not have been Miss Hungary).

Allons, Enfants!

2010-07-15T16:43:00.005+04:00

In a terrible rush for all sorts of good reasons, darlings, but I couldn't resist (only slightly belatedly) celebrating le jour de la Bastille with this image of overwhelming fabulosity. Yes indeed, look who jetted in to help the Sarkozis celebrate their special day - none other than Café icon and Cameroonian style sensation, the glorious Mme. Chantal Biya!

I am madly in love with the almost baroccoco composition of this snap, in which La Chantal assumes the position of a beneficent background goddess, bestowing her approval on the curious union of the tiny if powerful President of France and his bride. As always, though, the primary thought on Chantal's mind appears to be how very much more glamourous she is than anyone around - and who can say her nay?

Jifts of the Season

2010-07-10T16:18:00.005+04:00

One of the great joys of a summer in Xanadu-on-Sea is the opportunity to catch up on what's been going on in the Great Wide World of Drag. On any given night, there are upwards of a dozen choices, ranging from almost embalmed traditional evenings of more-or-less straightforward impersonation* to performances that take makeup and heels as a springboard for something much, much more ambitious/transcendant/surreal.

Of these, I don't think there can be anything better than the creature pictured above, the incredible Dina Martina. It's actually rather hard to describe an evening in her presence, except that it is raucous, mindbending, and, most surprisingly, startingly cosy. She reminds me of one of my favorite Susan Sontag lines: "Camp is a tender feeling."

Who else could make an audience vie fiercely for the privilege of winning what are billed as "the world's largest underpants" (emblazoned, live on stage, with the star's own makeup faceprint)? Who could create a mash-up on "Fever" and "No Scrubs"? Most of all, who else could take an act made up of just about equal parts malapropisms, mispronunciations (g frequently becoming j -Ms. M. is very pleased with her "jifts"), hoary jokes, show-biz lore, and a healthy dose of the very difficult art of singing just badly enough (it really is tough, kids - just ask Jo Stafford)? I can think of no one but Dina.

Each of the acts we've seen these past few weeks have been pretty fab - the tight, Vegas-style evening of cabaret with Cher-extraordinaire Randy Roberts (whose own character, a diva poised somewhere between Ann Margret and Rita Hayworth, is even better than his star takes), the trip into Varla Jean Merman's glamorously demented song-stylings, nights with Miss Richfield and Miss Burlington and more, and of course the truly awe-inspiring trainwrecks that are each week's edition of the town's legendary "talent" contest/revue Show Girls. Still, it's Dina I'll take away as someone I'd not only like to see again, but maybe have a cocktail with, in character or out. I know nothing about the man behind the legend, but it must take a fascinating brain to go so far out and still feel so very much at home.

* Although no one, alas, seems to be doing Bette Davis this year. I have a hunch that you can guess who this year's sensation is, done in tributes ranging from respectful to disembowelling. If you were to guess that her initials are L.G., you wouldn't be far off (and no, it's not Linda Gray).

Call Me Madam Freedom

2010-07-09T19:14:00.007+04:00

Well, I bet you thought this was the last place in the world you were going to encounter a World Cup post, didn't you? Guess again, darlings, for Mr. Muscato and I have been caught up - as much as one can on the benighted shores of Massachusetts - with the goings-on in Capetown, Jo'burg, and thereabouts. Of course, it hasn't been the same since the team I was rooting for - North Korea, natch - was so unceremoniously ousted, but we've soldiered on.

Even better, I've got not one but two ways to tie the (it must be admitted) unaccustomed athletic theme into topics more regularly found herein.

First up, the video seen above - a regionalized version of the omnipresent tournament song, "Waving Flag", featuring my favorite Arab-pop ultrastar, that Kylie of the East, Miss Nancy Ajram. It's both an improvement on the original song and actually rather a fun little clip.

Second, as part of my ongoing effort to broaden your horizons, I'm proud to bring you a snippet of news from our once-and-future part of the world that may have escaped your attention. The National, a UAE-based English rag, has passed on the rather fascinating news that local religious authorities have declared via fatwa that the World Cup's signature contribution to noise pollution, the vuvuzela, is - at least in certain conditions - haram, or off limits. That'll learn 'em, but I doubt it will do much to quell the mosquito-like hum that has been the background to our lives for the past four weeks or so...

Better Safe...

2010-07-08T17:45:00.002+04:00

Decreasingly certain of her technique, Gladys took to donning some protective gear before attempting the pointe section of her trademark Dance of the Leopard Lady.

Of course, it wasn't the first time those kneepads had come in handy...

East Side, West Side...

2010-07-07T18:05:00.004+04:00

...Her Majesty was all around the town yesterday. Yes, while we laze here by the sea, feeling only slightly less attenuated and elderly after several weeks of crushing leisure, that indefatigable woman - who even at my advanced age is nonetheless my senior by very nearly a factor of two - topped a demanding week in Canada with a whirlwind day in Manhattan.

She dressed for the heat in floral prints (the better to show up, too, against the imposing green marble backdrop of the United Nations podium, from which she spoke very nicely about the importance of that at times invaluable, at times infuriating body), but as always the focus of her toilette - and the real reason for this post - was her charming and highly decorative chapeau.

I say the real reason for this post because, while I do of course as always appreciate a Royal visit, what I really want to do is call attention to one of my favorite recent blog-finds, Mad Hattery! A lighthearted, possibly borderline-obsessive look at topper trends among the titled classes, MH! is presided over by the almost impossibly knowledgeable hostess Ella, and she and her coterie of fascinator-followers make for very good company indeed.

Among other things, we share a level of despair over the sartorial choices of the Princess Royal, a healthy disdain for Princess Michael of Kent, and an unbridled fondness for the slightly demented charms of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, a lady to whom the MH! generally refers to as "Cake," for reasons obvious to anyone who studies her very distinctive hatting tendencies. Further afield, MH! takes aim from time to time at the studiedly dull dressing of the Japanese Imperials, looks now and again at such regional favorites as Princess Haya of Jordan (and Dubai) and the colorful Sheikha Moza of Qatar, and is now gearing up for the August nuptials involving the erstwhile Greek royals. It's all in excellent fun, and I really can't recommend it enough.

(Re)Born on the Fourth of July

2010-07-04T17:22:00.007+04:00

Well. So where were we? What? What do you mean, "where have you been?" Oh, very well, if you insist on explanations, here's the deal, or at least as much of it as I can cope with at the moment.

First things first: we're all well - Mr. Muscato, Koko, and me. It's been something of a wild ride over the last few months, a whirlwind of surprises, difficult decisions, unexpected opportunities, enormous annoyances, horrid misbehavior from startling corners, the occasional complete nervous collapse, a shade too many doctors and lawyers, endings, and, now, beginnings. It all required a good long rest, which I have to say we've been enjoying tremendously.

Now that I'm catching up, at last, I can't tell you how much all the interest, concern, and nagging from friends and Gentle Readers over recent months has meant; I only wish I'd had the energy not simply to disappear for a while, and I hope, very much, that forgiveness will reign for the long and enigmatic silence.

So, here's what's up, more or less, in no particular order.

Alas, the Villa Muscato is no more. One of the first signs, in fact, that the universe - ours, at least - was falling out of alignment was the unwelcome news that our longsuffering landlord had at last awakened to the fact that he was being woefully underpaid and was exercising his option to retake his little slice of heaven, ostensibly for a family member.

In discussing domestic options, it became clear that my betters at VeryDull International Consulting (a wholly owned subsidiary of Gilded Cage Career Choices, LLC) were not encouraging about the prospect of a new long lease. "I wouldn't," said my Fearless Leader in the Home Office, "count on more than six months, really..."

At that point, much becomes mercifully unclear even in such recent memory.

Lights up, then, on a sunny morning some six weeks later, in which after much backing-and-forthing, suggestions, proposals, and just the slightest hint of threats in several directions, our way forward became clear(er). In short order, we were dealing, badly, with the appalling prospect of packing, closing accounts, zeroing out obligations business, fiduciary, and social, and generally steeling ourselves to entirely unendurable levels of activity, change, and general stress and strain.

The first wrench was saying adieu to Ermilia, our stalwart domestiche, who is now brightening the lives of a charming expat family who have taken on the formidable bureaucracy currently required to secure the presence in one's life of what Grandmother Muscato referred to as Good Help. Even the temporary attentions of her silent and eccentric chum, the ever-reliable Flordeliza, were only a pale substitute for our lamented factotum.

But then, at last and with a curious mix of relief and melancholy, Mr. Muscato and I bade farewell to the peculiar little Sultanate in which we'd made our lives for the past six years. I suppose I will have more thoughts as time passes on the place we've called home, but for the moment, suffice it to say that we don't miss the driving, and it's wonderful not to feel guilty wearing shorts.

And ever since we've been recuperating, most recently for an extended stay in one of America's loveliest, most relaxing, and most invigorating (a seeming contradiction, I know; but it's not) seaside villages, one that will I suspect be familiar to at least a few of you from the snap above. We've slept, we've luxuriated in the sun and sea, we've gorged on lobster in all forms, we've regaled friends and family with tales of our injustices and triumphs, we've shopped furiously for perfectly useless bibelots, we've made our way through a fair amount of Champagne, and now...

We're preparing, with a certain amount of mixed trepidation and excitement (and a great deal of procrastination and inertia), for the next Great Changes.

Soon, therefore, we will once again be expatriates. We've found ourselves, long distance, yet another commodious-looking villa not too far from the sea. We will shortly be reunited with our beloved Koko, who has spent his long summer leave in the devoted care of friends and who has been sorely missed. We will be facing all sorts of new hurdles and opportunities, from securing basic services in a place almost as noted for bureaucracy as the dear Sultanate to securing a (pale, but with luck adequate) Ermilia-replacement to finding a decently amusing place to spend a Thursday evening.

It all raises the question, I have to say, of what to do with the Café. The name, of course, will no longer be entirely accurate, nor, for that matter, will my own nom de blog. We shall have to see, as things go along, and I hope you will be as patient with me as I figure these things out as you all have been while I went, for a while, underground.

In the meantime, a lovely Independence Day to all of you who care for such things; we'll be celebrating in our own quiet way, before shortly setting off for our own New World. I hope you're all as well, or at least as content, as, in the end, it's turned we have managed to be.

When Worlds Collide

2010-03-08T22:31:00.004+04:00

So we're sitting home tonight, Mr. Muscato and I, watching that award-handing-out thingummy that y'all back there in civilization caught last night. Mostly what I'm thinking is, "Hmmm. Not all that interesting, the current crop of WAMPAS Baby Stars, are they?" Also, "What is George Clooney on and where can I get some?"

But they just did the criminally short bit assigned to this year's honorary award winners, and all I could do when presented with the spectacle of Lauren Bacall standing next to Roger Corman, the two of them being ovated by All Hollywood, was imagine what she was thinking: "What the f*** am I doing standing next to this hack, the Putz of Poverty Row? I've survived pictures from To Have and Have Not to Dogville - and he produced Attack of the Giant Leeches."

But he's thinking all "Yeah, whatever, Mrs. Bogie. At least I didn't make The Mirror Has Two Faces."

File Under "Bedfellows, Strange"

2010-03-07T22:00:00.003+04:00

I tell you, by reading some of America's smaller papers, one can learn the most astonishing things. For example, the above gem comes to us from a feature in TCPalm, proudly serving "Florida's treasure coast and palm beaches."

If you pay close attention to the second paragraph, you'll discover something both astonishing physiologically and intriguing in terms of its implications to film history.

And as for the copy itself, well ... I suppose I'm not that surprised that this plucky little periodical doesn't have a fact checker, but really - couldn't they even spell her name right?

Blond on Blonde

2010-03-07T07:14:00.003+04:00

Mr. Warhol presents his portrait of Barbara Millicent Roberts. Should I be embarrassed that I know that the subject is depicted in her Superstar Barbie incarnation? It's a look that's half '80s trophy wife, half JonBenet, but Andy makes it work...

A Family Saga

2010-03-06T22:01:00.004+04:00

Poor cousin Winky tried to go on and act like nothing had changed, but she was never really the same after Aunt Marvelle expelled her from the Tri Tones. It's not as if there was much she could say, not after Marvelle stumbled on that little scene with Uncle Waldo in the vestry.

"That pert baggage," said Marvelle later, on learning of her niece's solo release, "would have been better off learning to say 'I don't.'"

In Local News: Censorship Strikes Again

2010-03-06T14:08:00.005+04:00

UPDATE: Well, how very interesting; following a major blowback from local blogs, the site is suddenly, in mid-evening, unblocked. Certainly a turnaround in record time from our beloved monopoly Internet provider. Bravo to the local cybernauts!

This one's mostly for readers here in the Sultanate, but to those outside - enjoy freedom. It's a precious, fragile thing.

I've written about this before, but now our Local Information Overlords have really lost it, blocking just about the most interesting local expat voice on the Internet and, potentially, giving the country a real black eye in the estimation of people everywhere who care about freedom of expression. Yes, blocked as of this morning is Muscat Confidential, an invaluable resource and a great read.

Fortunately, on the Internets, everything is possible (almost), and it's my joy to do for MC's Undercover Dragon what he did for another site that recently faced the censor's axe: provide a link that, through the miracle of Google, allows local readers who don't have their own ways around the dungeon walls to make their own decisions about what they read.

Here it is: Muscat Confidential for all, Muscat Confidential forever! If things don't improve, I'll add a link over there on the right for more permanent use, but for the moment, I hope any local readers who stray by find it of use.

(Not) At The Movies

2010-03-05T21:49:00.004+04:00

So apparently the Oscars are this weekend. Living in a country with, on a good day, three movie screens showing films not made in Bombay or Cairo, and most of those featuring things blowing up, it's easy to fall out of the habit of keeping up with Film Today, and I'm afraid I have.

I realized, in fact, when reading about the coming festivities this morning, that this is very likely the first year ever in which I have seen exactly none of the nominated films in the theatre, and only one of them on DVD (that was Inglourious Basterds, which seems to me far too weird to be an Oscar-winner).

Still, I remain intrigued by the people, if not the films, and I was pleased to run across a gallery of luminaries snapped at these year's BritOscars, the BAFTA Awards. It included the usual run of wholly obscure outside the UK TV types, but also two of my current favorites:

The excellent Stanley Tucci, whom I first fell for in Big Night and then A Midsummer Night's Dream. He has that nebbishy/hot thing down pat and gives every indication of being exceedingly smart and very, very funny. In The Devil Wears Prada he managed to be both funny and tragic at the same time, which is really a very New York state of mind. I just wish he played more in movies that feature shower scenes.

And my newest favorite, the irrespresible Miss Gabourey Sidibe. I'm actually kind of hoping she doesn't go home with the little gold gentleman, as I'm afraid it would doom her to one-hit wonderdom and eventually having to make movies with other one-time-rans like Marlee Matlin and Brenda Fricker. I think she's just about perfect and likely only to get better as she goes on.

I have to reason to hope that this year's is a record I won't repeat; if nothing else, it truly reduces one's interest in the proceedings, red-carpet gawping aside. Although that, after all, takes one a very long way; there's always the off-chance that Stanley will show up in the world's first topless tuxedo, isn't there?

Birthdays: Jack in the Box

2010-03-05T09:45:00.006+04:00

Two birthdays come to mind, with no real relation between them except that funny way that odd allusions can fire random synapses.

First up, beloved UK canary Clodagh Rodgers, a performer whose moment in the spotlight as fourth-place finisher in the 1971 Eurovision Song Contest was forever overshadowed by the taking in vain of her name in one of the greatest of all Monty Python pieces, the extended "Cycling Tour" episode. I know it's hard to imagine if you haven't seen it, but "Ce n'est pas la belle Clodagh ... c'est Trotsky, le revolutionaire!" is one of the towering comedy moments of all time.

Here she is, though, at her moment of triumph, in all her be-hotpanted splendour, belting out her biggest hit; sadly, it's a song so idiotic that even here, when it was new and shiny and fun, even Clodagh doesn't look like she's having a very good time.

Also celebrating today, albeit in a completely Different Part of the Forest, is American broadcaster and writer Ray Suarez. His name, to me, will always conjure up a very specific time, one when his smooth, reasonable voice was, although I didn't know it then, something of an anchor for me.

In the early nineties, I was just coming off a spectacular, demanding, and really rather impossible job, one that had taken me around the world, allowed me to meet many of the people I most admired, and, when I left it, left me exhausted, adrift, and a little bit miserable. I was living in New York, I had contacts and friends and all sorts of potential opportunities, and I didn't want to do anything.

Which was a problem, since like most New Yorkers working in the arts, I was also quite thoroughly broke. Knew everyone, went everywhere, of course, but had a standing balance in the high two-figures down at the Chase Manhattan.

Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue; she needed someone to clean up tens of thousands of data records for a project on which she was engaged and decided I would do. Although I was a complete computer novice, she taught me the database program (Paradox in its pure DOS form, for those who care) and set me loose.

For the better part of a year I spent at least part of most days sitting in a tiny, windowless office off Times Square, completely alone, correcting spelling, making formatting consistent, and generally learning how data works (which is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. Or at least I think so). At a time when I needed it, this seeming drudgery provided refuge, structure, and consistency. I would walk up from the Village, let myself in, turn on the radio, and sit down and try to figure out how to standardize international phone-number fields.

NPR was the background noise, and "Talk of the Nation" often the show; even today I can hear Ray Suarez's calm, reassuringly sensible voice. It brings back exactly that empty little room, the endless packets of Nabisco Vanilla Cremes I went through, the clanking sounds of pipes in the ancient, faded building.

Looking back, I suppose I was probably pretty depressed, and the undemanding routine of Paradox and radio just about the best therapy I could have had. As the project was ending, my friend - surprised, I think, that it had gone so well - asked me if I would teach other people, her clients, how to work with the product she was developing. Talk to people? It was a big step, but I gave it a shot, and it worked, and from there has turned into all sorts of other lines of work.

So here I sit today, on a nearly perfect morning on the far side of the world, with Mr. Muscato asleep upstairs, Koko curled up on the sofa, and the birds singing in the garden, and think gratefully of Ray Suarez, 53 today.

Were I a real writer, I'd probably try to find a way to link it all together - some kind of a pop-music epiphany/jack in the box/time in its flight kind of mashup, but instead all I can think of is Graham Chapman dressed as a French girl, shrieking "Oh, Maman! Ce n'est pas..." and so dissolve in giggles. Koko really must think me very odd.

What If...

2010-03-04T22:19:00.003+04:00

...Hollywood's most fabled feud was nothing more than a PR stunt? I've never seen these two broads look more relaxed and at ease than here. And isn't it kind of fun thinking that maybe all those years they actually got together once in a while for a couple of vodka-Pepsis and a whole lot of laughing at their enemies?

Radio Boom Boom (Sha La La La La)

2010-03-04T08:04:00.005+04:00

Watch this first. I'll explain.

So, as the tumbleweeds rolling around might have clued you in, life has been hectic for the past couple of weeks. Something vaguely resembling a lull, however, may be in sight, and so last night the Mister and I celebrated by retreating to our favorite pub. We normally sit on the terrace, which has great views of our little city and the sea and less smoke, but last night lots of folks were out and about, and so not a table to be had.

We sat inside, in a quietish booth near the bar. Mr. Muscato was actually quite pleased, as it meant he (vy. vy. butch, you know) could watch the big football match (Sultanate vs. Disdained Neighbor). So there we are, in a relatively quiet nook, him looking over my shoulder at the vast screen at one of the room and me... discovering that tucked into the other side of our booth was a mysterious little screen, the size of a computer monitor ten years ago, that for reasons wholly mysterious was showing a succession of Asian pop videos with the sound off.

I was lost. Football fans on all sides raged, our excellent meal came and went, and we were even treated to an especially choice version of one of our favorite bar sights (older and very respectable local man enjoying the company of a lady distinctly not his wife, sister, mother, or daughter, although very likely about the age of the last). My eyes stayed glued to the Silent Mystery Karaoke Screen.

One video especially stood out. Now, I know nothing but nothing about Asian pop; my last flirtation in that regard came two decades ago while I was living in Japan. I came home armed with only three words gleaned from the credits: Seaside, Super, Shinee. And, thanks to YouTubes, here it is. I think that what most enchants me is that both this video and the version in the bar featured handy English subtitles - which appear to be almost entirely different (last night's version featured a great deal of "going down the road of love," which is wholly absent here, for instance).

They do share, however, the deathless refrain that has provided the title above. I think the boys are Korean, they're certainly very energetic, and, unlike I would ever be, they're able to keep a straight face while exclaiming "Take me Take me Enjoy Today!" My current guess is that the song is "Seaside" while the band is Shinee. After watching it three or four times, Seaside Super Shinee is exactly how I feel.

Thieves in the Night

2010-03-01T22:51:00.002+04:00

One of the surprises of running the Café, I've discovered, is that despite being only at best intermittently about topics local, we still quite steady draw traffic from Gentle Readers here in our little Sultanate.

I therefore take the liberty of appealing to those in this part of the world who haven't already done so to pay attention to the current posting by fellow blogger Suburban, who is looking for insight into the realities (which seem very likely to be harsher than we realize) of crime in this generally idyllic place.

That I can do so while reminding myself of one of my favorite Kay Francis pictures is just a little of what my Lousiana pals would call lagniappe. Fortunately, the Villa Muscato features very little to attract a jewel robbery; now, if there were evildoers out to steal biographies of minor royalties or Garbo DVDs, we'd have something to worry about...

Cha Cha!

2010-02-27T08:05:00.002+04:00

A little lesson from Miss Bakaire on the essentials of fabulousness - a headpiece to die for, a couple of insinuating numbers, and a deathless belief in one's own mythos. Even here, with all the limitations of an early-TV variety special, in Germany yet, Josephine demonstrates why she was one of the very great sensations and, among other things, a matchless dancer...

Mamaji Knows Best

2010-02-23T22:29:00.005+04:00

I don't know about you, but I just hate it when a sudden tension headache renders me unable to appear in an Indian-temple-dance-tribute-number.

Actually, we're having a rather Anacin kind of week at the Café, darlings, for which apologies. I'm sure things will look brighter by the weekend, which after all in this part of the world is practically moments away...

Mirror, Mirror

2010-02-20T21:14:00.002+04:00

Just another night backstage at Carnegie Hall; it would appear that the Maestro likes what he sees, and why shouldn't he? Not all that remarkable, really, except that it was fifty years ago tonight, and Life was there.

A Pre-Raphaelite Moment

2010-02-20T20:59:00.002+04:00

"Oh, for Christ's sake, girls," grumbled Daisy. "Those dykes Lily and Rose are old news. I've got the latest and this is it: Stephen Haines is stepping out on Mary!"

The Life That Late She Led

2010-02-19T12:40:00.003+04:00

The ranks of Hollywood royalty have thinned just a little this week, with the passing to Fabulon of MGM's prestige soprano of the early '50s, Miss Kathryn Grayson. Her brand of wholesome, high-brow appeal - a slightly too sweet amalgam of coloratura and cleavage - may not have aged particularly well, but during her moment in the sun, she was Queen of the Lot.

In memory, it will always be 1953, the year that saw her headline three of MGM's favorite things: a much-loved classic (The Desert Song), a hagiographic biopic (So This is Love, the story of Grace Moore, herself a onetime MGM asset), and a great big Broadway hit, Cole Porter no less (Kiss Me Kate). In the last, it must be admitted, she's really very good, happily sending up her image and gleefully sparring with dreamy costar Howard Keel.

If all her parts had been as challenging, as off-kilter, as Kate's Lilli Vanessi, she might have had a longer career, but audiences were tiring of operetta and what Lena Horne later called "pretty mouth" singing. After only one more picture (the creaky Vagabond King, from a 1925 Friml original, at Paramount and opposite the not exactly Keelische Oreste Kirkop), Grayson moved on to theatre, television, and graceful retirement.

She was a lovely lady with a lovely voice who appears to have lived a dignified and happy life, and if that's not the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood legends, it's still no mean feat. What leading lady of today will have as good a name in fifty years?

Meanwhile, at the Cocktail Party

2010-02-19T10:19:00.002+04:00

I'm not quite certain what's going on here, but I have a feeling that the next time those pocketbooks are put down - any minute now - there's going to be hair-pulling, drink-throwing, and recrimination all around.

What Do You Go For?

2010-02-19T09:25:00.004+04:00

I've been flying solo these last couple of days, with Mr. Muscato on the road for business. As usual in such situations, I have dived into the voluminous Villa Muscato film archive, taking advantage of temporary bachelordom to catch up on various obsessions that the two of us may not entirely share.

Last night's treat was the comparatively least celebrated of Warner Bros.' run of early thirty musical spectaculars, Dames. There are perfectly legitimate reasons that it doesn't have the stature of, say, 42nd Street or Golddiggers of 1933, but it's still a fine evening's entertainment.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler do their usual business (brash and blushing, respectively) quite competently, and Joan Blondell, as always, livens the proceedings. The plot requires Guy Kibbee and ZaSu Pitts, as Keeler's parents, to bumble and dither as is their wont, but Pitts is oddly absent, doing nothing with what is basically a pretty nothing part (she looks like she wishes she were back with Stroheim in Greed).

The real reason for these pictures, of course, isn't the plot, but rather the numbers, and here Busby Berkeley certainly delivers. From an idyllic Central Park setting for the rather treacly "When You Were a Smile on Your Mother's Lips (and a Twinkle in Your Daddy's Eye)" to set the Powell-Keeler romance moving to the title number that highlights the inevitable show-within-a-show, the music moves along briskly. A bizarre Gibson Girl/Gay '90s number, "The Girl at the Ironing Board" gives Blondell the chance to frolic with an entire laundry's worth of en-puppetted long johns (a feint at least in part a result of her advanced pregnancy during filming).

One thing this picture does require is a very high tolerance for the standard that it launched upon the world, "I Only Have Eyes For You," of which one hears a very great deal in the course of the film's 91 minutes. It first appears early in the picture, but then gets the full-fledged demento Berkeley treatment later on, in an extravaganza that imagines the Second Coming as the Apotheosis of Ruby Keeler, or perhaps what Kim Jong Il might get up to if he had an unlimited supply of white organza (and Ruby Keeler). It might seem the last word in Bekeleyiana, but in reality it only sets the stage for the big "Dames" finale, which, like the rest of the best of Berkeley, is basically indescribable.

Actually, it's what Leni Riefenstahl might have done if she'd had better drugs and a sense of humor. In fact, it's odd having seen this movie and the Leni documentary in one week; it causes all sorts of thinking about what was really going on in people's minds in the 1930s.

I've decided that there is a truly fundamental difference between Riefenstahl's massed thousands of perfect Aryans and Berkeley's intricate compositions of giggling Hollywood chorus girls. It's that Leni came out of entertainment (having started as a dancer - of sorts, if the clips available are any indication - and actress) and applied what she had learned there to the glorification of Fascist pomp and circumstance. By contrast, Berkeley took his military-academy background - his love of regimentation, precision, the endless geometric replication of pattern - and applied it to the most basic tropes of show-biz: boy meets girl, kids meet fame (on a soundstage the size of all Burbank, in the company of endless numbers of extras moving in unison).

That is, although in some ways the products seem almost eerily similar, they're actually coming at each other from entirely different universes. One gilds a vacuous evil, giving it a frozen, gimcrack glamor; the other adds a backbone of steel to the June-Moon-Spoon of a thousand nights in Vaudeville, turning it into true cinema that's still, by virtue of its inherent absurdity, gloriously entertaining and oddly human in scale. Surely there can be few less Fascist concepts than 350 dancing Ruby Keelers, let alone having all of them serenaded by the keening croon of the eternal juvenile Dick Powell.

If only he could have done more with poor ZaSu...

Respect

2010-02-18T10:07:00.003+04:00

Over at his intriguing little corner of the digital universe, dear Norma has of late been engaged in pointing out the sad results of poor decision-making by a onetime glamour girl. Yes, it's true: the divine Marisa Berenson, if Norma's snaps are to be believed, has vainly sought eternal youth in a doctor's office, and it's not really very pleasant.

Still, I think we can't forget what an extraordinary creature she was in her prime, as here, a vision in orientalische Halston with the whole world ahead of her. There have been few more lovely women in recent decades, and if her film career never went much beyond Cabaret and Barry Lyndon, both of those are in their own ways landmarks in which she is very, very effective.

Here at the Café, Miss B. holds a special place, having been responsible for one of the very first little traffic spikes back eons ago when all of us were mere cyber-tots. Much should be forgiven the fabulous, but the killer combo of trout pout and a forehead as flat and immovable as the Antarctic do try one's patience, if not one's admiration for all that went before...

A Must Read

2010-02-18T09:17:00.005+04:00

Well, if Clare Boothe Luce liked it, it has to be good!

It was especially thoughtful of the designer to have included this tome's original title, so that paperback buyers needn't have fretted whether Red Carpet for Mamie Eisenhower (or is it actually the more stentorian Red Carpet for MAMIE EISENHOWER?) was in fact a new and different biography than the seminal Red Carpet for Mamie that they had bought in hardback last year when they were on vacation at Ogunquit and it was the only thing the damn drugstore stocked besides the awful Taylor Caldwell novel that Aunt Gert gave them at Eastertime.

Can't Help It

2010-02-17T06:51:00.003+04:00

I finally got around this week to watching a Christmas gift - the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

The film is far more than the story of Hitler's favorite filmmaker, the woman whose rollercoaster career took her from silent stardom in the now unwatchable genre of German Mountain Epics to scubadiving at 90+ in the Indian Ocean - heights and depths, indeed. What it really is, I think, is an almost continually frustrated attempt to answer one question: "What was she thinking?"

For decades she maintained one obdurate story: she was an apolitical artist, one who got caught up, all unawares, in the frenzy surrounding the rise of Nazism and who just happened to create its most enduring visual records. She was, in fact, a victim - of Goebbels, who repeatedly frustrated her perfectionist vision; of her postwar critics, who saw in Triumph of the Will the potent danger of a genuinely gifted eye meeting a poisonous message; and even of later writers, like Susan Sontag, who looked at Riefenstahl's '60s work photographing African tribesmen and saw a continuation of her Nazi-era celebration of what we know think of as body Fascism.

In the movie, she hews to this line, a nonagenarian vision of raddled UFA glamour as she tells her well-worn tales, dimpling guilelessly at the camera like the old pro she truly was. She compares herself, repeatedly, to Dietrich, whom she admires, it seems, not for her boldly anti-Hitler stance, but simply for having escaped and endured. She notes that she needed the same kind of lighting Marlene required - a high single spot to create the legendary shadows - and makes the dubious claim that she had been in the running to be Von Sternberg's Lola Lola in The Blue Angel.

Only once does the mask drop. Reunited in the stadium of the 1936 Olympics with two of the cameramen she had schooled to realize her almost demented glorification of athletic perfection in Olympia, she sits, during a break, chatting with them, apparently unaware her mic is live. Suddenly, briefly, her days as the toast of Berlin come to life. The three dispassionately move from talking about apertures and exposures to chitchat about the more routine assignments of who filmed who - "Ah, ja, you went to Moscow with Ribbentrop, no?" and for just that moment, you realize what an abyss she is, a vacancy, not apolitical but amoral, genuinely unable to fathom the bizarre experiences she has been through.

At the end of the film, she tries one last justification, another repetition of her tropes - I was not a party member, I never said anything anti-semitic, people lie so terribly about me, I was (looking very much intact) "shattered" to learn of all the atrocities, what could I have done ... and it occurred to me. Leni, in the end, really is a Lola Lola, a woman who, for film as the original was for sex, is so wholly self-absorbed, "von Kopf bis Fuß " made for nothing else, that she just ... can't help it.

For Marlene, Lola was just a role, the one that finally set her on the road to real stardom and out of the black orbit of National Socialism. Leni, though, was the real deal, Dietrich's dark shadow. It's a paradox, then, that she enjoyed a long, vigorous old age and, finally, a measure of renown apart from her vilification, even as her braver, more clear-eyed coeval languished in a geriatric haze of liquor and self-pity in Paris. Good choices don't always make for happy endings, but even so, while both women may have had "wonderful, horrible" lives, I have to think Dietrich's was the better path.

4 Girls 4

2010-02-16T23:38:00.001+04:00

Something tells me that, whatever else is going on, this is not the beginning of what, in the end, proved an astonishingly long evening...

Birthday Boy: Butch

2010-02-15T23:21:00.005+04:00

Latin lothario Cesar Romero would have been 103 today; we catch him here making a radio appearance (and rocking a dashingly bearded look) with now-forgotten early-thirties screen favorite Sally Eilers.

Romero's was a fun career - steady work certainly, with 60-odd pictures behind him before he went into TV in a big way in 1950, enough familiar roles to make up for a fair number of quaintly obscure titles (Love Before Breakfast, anybody? Carnival in Costa Rica? Happy Go Lovely?), and a nice long old age to bask in the appreciation of fans. He worked with everybody from Shirley Temple to Divine, and he always seemed to enjoy himself.

Never married and one of Hollywood's favorite "Confirmed Bachelors," Romero earned the title noted above the hard way: no less than Joan Crawford, who no question knew from butch when she saw it, bestowed it on him.

Eilers is really is just the ghost of a name today. Here she seems just a shade too happy to be on the radio, although I suppose it could be the "yes, I still have a jawline" pose she's having to hold for a moment or two longer than is strictly comfortable. She's one of those people who was bigger then than we would credit today without ever having really clicked. She never did television - maybe she should have learned a thing or two from Butch.

L'Amour, L'Amour...

2010-02-14T23:01:00.003+04:00

By the end of the evening, Peenee and Norma agreed on only one thing: Craigslist was no way to set up a Valentine's Day blind date.

A Very Happy...

2010-02-14T13:23:00.002+04:00

...Karen Valentine's Day!

(it's a Café tradition, after all...)

Birthday Bonanza

2010-02-11T09:03:00.003+04:00

Many happy returns, today, to Our Lady of the Knobbly Knees, sixties superdesigner Mary Quant. UK stamps certainly have come a long way from all those endless Windsor profiles.

Also celebrating today are a dizzying array of Café favorites: St. Eva of Gabor, eternal castaway/sex bomb Tina Louise, sex bomb/survivor Burt Reynolds, Method megastar Kim Stanley, bossa nova biggie Sergio Mendes, deft self-satirist Leslie Neilsen, and two of my favorite Egyptians: King Farouk and my very own Mr. Muscato.

We're less thrilled that he shares the day with a certain Mrs. Palin, formerly of Wasilla, Alaska, but we're going to be sloughing off that slight vexation with a quick road trip to this Dubai place that everyone's always going on about. If it's radio silence in these parts for the next few days, you'll know that we're having fun...

Meanwhile, in Ruritania

2010-02-11T08:52:00.003+04:00

Surrounded, at an august and certainly dressy gathering, by what Queen Victoria referred to as "the Royal Mob," the late Countess of Snowdon is shown to be something of a pocket princess. She turns a rather limpid gaze on one of her Scandinavian cousins. As for me, were I that tiny, encorseted, diamond-bedecked lady, I'd be paying a great deal more attention to the lesser but distinctly dishy Pahlavi on her left...

So I Say to Hot-cha-cha...

2010-02-11T08:39:00.003+04:00

I've had this song in my head for no very good reason the past few days, and I pass it on here - in a rendition by arch UK soprano/crossover sensation Lesley Garrett - so you will too.

Sadly, Maureen McGovern's startlingly funny version hasn't been Youtubed, although you can, if you like, catch a rather more elegant singing of it by the exquisite Dutch diva Elly Ameling (I adore how those ladies bring such a genial, "look Ma, I'm dancing!" air to their encore numbers).

Knowing you, though, you'll probably click right through to the (maddeningly unembedable) dance-spectacular featuring the improbable trio of Steve and Eydie and Gene Kelly. Nothing says Gershwin like a 1975 TV special, after all.

Head over Heels

2010-02-09T22:11:00.002+04:00

Well, I don't quite know what's gotten into dear Mr. Victor Mature, but he certainly seems to be enjoying himself. Almost, judging by that expression, a little too much...

Shopping is a Feeling

2010-02-09T21:44:00.005+04:00

And you dreamed it all
And this is your story.
Do you know who you are?
You're the dream operator...

Sometimes the era earned the nostalgia with which we now look back on it; this is one of those moments.

The Joy Girl

2010-02-09T07:48:00.003+04:00

Olive Borden is just be a shadow of a name today, a briefly popular young actress given one of her era's ridiculous nicknames (she was "The Joy Girl" of 1927 just as Ann Sheridan a decade or so later was "The Oomph Girl."). She lived hard, married badly, and drifted out of the public eye.

Hers is story that doesn't end well (death on skid row in 1947) and that didn't leave much behind - but, for a moment, in her gold lace wrap she was just about perfect, and it looks like she knew it.

Also, her final film has, I think, a marvelous title: Chloe, Love is Calling You. It ought to be a romantic screwball about a feckless heiress, with maybe a fun part for Helen Westley or Edna May Oliver as her aunt/chaperone. Instead, because by that point nothing was going right for Borden, it was in fact a lurid 1934 cheapie filmed in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Still - that photo, that moment...

Gun Show

2010-02-08T23:12:00.003+04:00

Just because he hasn't turned up around these parts in a while, Mr. Upen Patel. Yup - still stunning. His constant stream of importuning e-mails has trailed off, but only, I think, because Mr. Muscato threatened violence; if only the poor boy would accept that it's simply not meant to be...

Chosen

2010-02-07T23:29:00.001+04:00

Actually, I'd be willing to wager that there hasn't been a Brand New Touch in that bloodline in at least three generations.

Tell It, Sister!

2010-02-07T23:08:00.001+04:00

All the regulars over at Sydney's - even the once-a-month wash-and-sets - know the truth: Stephen Haines is stepping out on Mary!

Zsa

2010-02-06T21:50:00.001+04:00

Zsa. 93 today. Bless.

Song for the New Depression

2010-02-05T15:35:00.002+04:00

For your (dubious) listening pleasure, Jacek "The Polish Bobby Vinton" (is that redundant?) Lech brings you his 1966 hit "Bądź dziewczyną moich marzeń" ("Be the girl of my dreams") .

It's notable mostly for the appearance on backup of a rarely seen legend: yes, here we have not only Thing One and Thing Two, but their lesser-known sister, Thing Three. If this is what they could come up with for primetime TV, imagine what the girls in the steno pool were wearing. Snazzy frock on the slightly-too-enthusiastic hostess, though, you have to admit...

Local Color

2010-02-04T18:17:00.007+04:00

This really is the most perfect time of year in our little Sultanate - long warm days, balmy evenings, and the most wonderful cool, crisp nights. While there are apparently prospects of more rain (making this the wettest winter in a very long time, with upwards of eight or even more rainy days), for the moment things are blissful.

The above was snapped during Miss Rheba's Christmas visit, in the garden of the Grand Mosque; the profusion of flowers everywhere is one of the distinct features of the local winter, not just in snazzy public places like the Mosque, but along the roadsides, in massed quantities on hillsides, and decorating intersections and traffic circles (the latter an endangered species as they are replaced by red lights). That they're all the sort of northern flowers - petunias and such - one finds in suburban English gardens only makes it that much more picturesque.

As usual, Mr. Muscato, Koko, and I have spent part of our weekend at our favorite seaside spot, joined this week by visitors from Europe (stunned at the sunshine) and the Emirates (stunned at the dire local nightlife). There is always great people watching at the beach - the Western tourists cluelessly wandering about in inappropriate swimwear, the gaggles of subcontinental gentlemen and local youth ogling same, and the wide variety of family outings - from nuclear families of three to extended clans of ten or more times that - enjoying sun and sand.

I'm particularly interested in how women deal with the competing and contradictory demands of modesty, fashion, and comfort. One solution is standard sportsclothes under the enveloping black abaya and headscarf - teen sisters racing along the beach after smaller siblings with the abaya sailing behind them, inevitably recalling comic pre-Vatican II images of nuns at play.

Another, very common in the Muslim world, is to try and meet all three priorities via layering. When I was living in Cairo, the fashion among junior misses was to go with the then-stylish strappy mini-sundress - over skin-tight jeans and turtleneck, creating a kind of slightly slutty (but totally covered-up) jumper effect.

Yesterday we encountered a remarkable local variation of that look that saw both the comfort and fashion angles taken to new extremes: a matron frolicking on the beach with her tots, resplendent in an ensemble that consisted of a scarlet tracksuit (the type with stripes down the sides, previously more familiar to me on elderly Italian gentlemen in South Philadelphia or perhaps on third-tier rappers) worn under a form-fitting metallic-silver jersey cocktail frock, complete with ruffled handkerchief hemline, the whole completed up top with a gold fishscale-pailleted scarf and down below with rainbow-striped platform espadrilles. Yes, the combo led to a certain amount of unavoidable lumpiness, but on the whole, whatever else you can say, Madam was fierce.

On a different note - why is it that, whether in times of boom or, as now, shall we call it lack-of-boom, that local building contractors don't seem to take any special advantage of the more comfortable weather? A very high percentage of the many high-profile projects around town seem more or less stalled - not only the ones with reputed Dubai-related money woes that clearly have been knocked awry by the financial crisis, but the publicly financed ones like the long-pending opera house.

A few are proceeding apace, but in general the city presents a silhouette of still cranes, a six-story high mini-version of Dubai's sixty-story skyline. If previous years are a model, come the summer, things will rev up significantly, because, of course, as much as possible has to be done and perfect by National Day in November. I think it would be a mercy to the workers, if nothing else, to reassign that deadline to the July accession anniversary, just so the rush could be going on now, when it's not pure torment to be outdoors.

Mae

2010-02-04T09:08:00.001+04:00

She's a Brooklyn gal, so don't be fooled by fine feathers. She will cut a bitch.

Heavage 2.0: How You Doin'?

2010-02-03T07:36:00.004+04:00

Dear Mr. Tarek Naguib - deprived, it seems, of his chance to shine at the Café's favorite handsomeness pageant, the long-postponed Manhunt International - instead looks ready here for his audition for the Egyptian version of Friends. In addition to his other many talents, it turns out, Tarek does a mean Joey Tribbiani...

Jo Anne

2010-02-02T23:04:00.001+04:00

Just thinking about her makes everything seem all right.

Portrait of a Lady

2010-02-01T22:03:00.005+04:00

Helen sometimes found herself unaccountably weighed down by her accessories. Perhaps her sense of existential gloom would have dissipated had she not been so deathly afraid of hat-hair.

Putting the Grim in Grimaldi

2010-02-01T21:33:00.003+04:00

This deathless moment of pure pop horror is enough to simultaneously cure one instantly of any lingering 80s nostalgia and turn one into a wild-eyed anti-monarchical anarchist. Yes, it's HSH The Princess Stéphanie "Brakepads" Grimaldi, Monaco's very own contribution to the world of bargain-basement Eurotrash dance music.

The clip's mise-en-scène recalls nothing so much as one of the era's lesser poolside gay porn romps, although the burly singer - perhaps "performer" would be a kinder, if no less euphemistic, term - appears considerably more butch than most stars of that genre in those days when Twinks Ruled the World.

And it's her birthday - 45 today. She's had the kind of life that can be summed up by pointing out that her short-lived popstar career was actually one of the saner things she's ever done...

Birthday King: Dear Mr. Gable

2010-02-01T21:12:00.002+04:00

The King of Hollywood would have been 109 today. We catch him here in a domestic moment with the third Mrs. Gable, aka Carole Lombard, and a couple of small friends.

It's always seemed to me that the light went out in Gable after Lombard's death, and except for the rare spark here and there (and some deeply touching moments in his last film, The Misfits - Monroe's influence?), something about losing her (and the War, I suppose, and just passing time) quenched what it was that had made him such a Total Star.

Sharing the day? Well, it's a mixed bunch - the great Victor Herbert alongside Saturday Night Live also-ran Garrett Morris; the inimitable Incomparable Hildegarde and byproduct-of-fame Lisa Marie Presley; two Very Different Divas, the superlative Renata Tebaldi and subculture superstar Exene Cervenka; and two of the more mordant talents of the Anglophone world, Miss Muriel "Jean Brodie" Spark and Terry "the Pepperpot Python" Jones.

Oh, and another lady who will shortly merit a post all her own. Don't say you haven't been warned...

Mystery Clowns

2010-01-31T20:16:00.002+04:00

Clowns: even when it's only a group of Johnson-era tots dressing up, they give me the creeps. I'm especially put off by Miss Thing there, dead center, not to mention the little leg show that Bozette's giving over on the right. The sad harlequin in between, though, looks just about ready for Miss Quinn's kindergarten pageant version of Les Enfants du Paradis; him we like.

Best Line Ever

2010-01-31T19:44:00.003+04:00

"You haf booped your lest boop." *

Lugosi has gotten a lot of respect in recent years as the Great Thespian Done Wrong by Hollywood machinations, just as Ed Wood has gotten more than his share of props for "rescuing" the onetime Austro-Hungarian heartthrob and showing him some respect at the end of his long, strange trip.

In this clip, though, we can see that only two years after his greatest triumph Bela was already quite willing to trash his own image - although there is something in his glance at about 1:16 that does convey a shade of existential sorrow, as if in realization that he's starting down a slippery slope.

Frankly, the only thing that frightens me about this number are those damn mannequins. Well, that and the piano player...

*Transylvanian accent absolutely required.

Children? Some People Shouldn't Even Have Pets

2010-01-31T19:38:00.002+04:00

You know I adore me some Joan, but the only thing I can see in that poor spaniel's eyes is "Kill me. Kill me now."

Desperate Measures

2010-01-30T19:25:00.002+04:00

In the dying days of Burlesque, things got so bad they'd try anything; still, The Cubist Cuties of 1951 didn't help.

To Sleep; Perchance to Dream...

2010-01-29T18:05:00.003+04:00

One of the reasons I've been less than productive these past few days is that I've been sleeping oddly. Not badly, mind you; as happens occasionally, I've actually been sleeping rather too deeply. Mr. Muscato discovered this when a couple of nights ago I was unmoved and unwakened by a series of loudly slamming doors (wind; the downside of having the house opened up during these precious cooler months) and subsequently furiously barking dog.

When I go through these bouts of sleep-to-the-point-of-unconsciousness, I often wake more tired than after a similar amount of the usual dozing. Moreover, I'm more prone than usual to remembering dreams - usually long, complicated, and repetitive dreams. This week's featured, in a starring role, Miss Bonham Carter, albeit not in a lilac fur-trimmed peignoir as seen here.

We were walking together, for a very long time, doing the usual dream-state pointless searching for things, talking about other things, and generally not making much sense.

I woke suddenly yesterday morning at one such dream's end, just as she turned to me and said, "you know what the real problem is, don't you? Don't you?"

"Tell me," said I.

She turned away; looking gravely over her shoulder as she walked off, she said, simply: "Mystery clown."

And so I woke up. And this is what I Googled from that phrase:

Amazingly, despite the horror of that image, last night I slept the dreamless, refreshing sleep of the innocent and feel much restored.

But what could it mean?

Girl Just Wants to Have Fun

2010-01-29T11:04:00.003+04:00

I know I've already run one Carole Samaha video this month (and how many blogs do you read that can claim that?), but over the last couple of days I keep running across this one and find myself smitten - it's random and poppy and just great fun.

It's the Lebanese diva's hit "Ali", and in it she, a couple of girlfriends, and a pair of I'm quite totally certain platonic pals dance it up. I'm loving the ice-cream colors, the Demoiselles de Rochefort choreography, the very 1986 synth hook, and the way it makes me think of numbers from things like Star Struck, if it were Middle Eastern instead of Australian.

{Nite}Club Sandwich

2010-01-29T10:35:00.003+04:00

I don't know about you, but if I could find a joint like this for lunch, I'd never again darken the doorstep of the staff cafeteria. Afternoon productivity? To hell with it; I'm spending the rest of the day with my new friends Pepper, Chet, and Rita...

Freeze Tag

2010-01-28T22:36:00.007+04:00

I have to admit that the prospect of having been tagged (see horrid logo, left) has very nearly stopped me in my tracks, given that it presented the appalling prospect of having to display this image and then talk about myself.

Well, we've been over this ground before, but Peenee (predictably, what with being evil incarnate and all) showed no mercy, and he was even joined in his devil's work by the 'til now comparatively benign Felix.

So, it seems I've been double-tagged, which - as with so much in life - turns out to be not nearly the naughty romp it sounds like it ought to be. herewith, even so, my turn at the Kreativ Blogger Meme Award, or whatever it's called.

1. Thank the person who nominated you for this award.

Thank you, Peenee and Felix. And damn your eyes, while we're at it.

2. Copy the logo and place it on your blog.

Done, over my better judgment.

3. Link to the person who nominated you for this award.

See 2, above.

4. Name 7 things about yourself that people might find interesting.

...And this is where it gets appalling. I've not been nearly as sharing (to put it kindly) as some people (looking at Peenee), but having been writing about myself in drips and drabs for the past year and a half, it's hard to come up with too much that's terribly fresh. I think I'll just free associate for a bit and hope for the best:

(1) My Arabic has been improving of late, to the point that at times I will pretend to understand less than I do, mostly so I can listen to Mr. Muscato chat with friends while they think I won't get it all. Not that he's ever really come out with anything amazingly indiscreet (although the friends occasionally do, mostly on the Appalling Conspiracy Theory front), but I've kind of got to like being the silent one when we're out with the boys.

(2) I worry that we've gotten too comfortable living in a comparatively quiet and provincial place, and that when and if the opportunity arises, we'll end up being boring country mice anywhere slightly more happening.

(3) The most amusing Big Lady I ever got to work with, hands down: Tyne Daly. Smart, funny, foul-mouthed, and amazingly talented. She can sing an adagio version of "There's No Business Like Show Business" that will, as she herself has said, make strong men weep (never thought about it as a slow song? Believe me, it works - that's a lyric that can be sung sad). She's the real deal. That said, she's not the one I loved the most. But that's another story.

(4) I have been mugged or assaulted five times - twice with a gun - and been burgled twice (once with arson for that extra frisson). Yet the most that any of the idiot failed criminals ever got off me was $5, a ring with a cracked amethyst, and a small bowlful of change and subway tokens (leaving contemptuously behind the small bowl itself, a rather good piece of Georgian sterling courtesy of Grandmother Muscato). The fire, admittedly, got a good deal more, but that hardly benefited the perp.

(5) On a brighter note, I have never in more than twenty years of at times essentially continuous travel had a moment's (knock wood) difficulty, not anywhere from Tokyo to Ouagadougou, despite having now and then been, to be kind, a fairly Easy Mark. Strangers have benevolently put me in taxis and sent me back to the occasional hotel; I've found myself by happenstance in neighborhoods neither accustomed nor welcoming to new faces; small coups, even, have broken out nearby - but to date I've sailed serenely through. Here's to twenty years more...

(6) I may not be freakishly double-jointed like some people, but my first ballet teacher (a small and ill-tempered Russian woman) declared with satisfaction on first looking me up and down that I possessed the best natural turnout she had ever seen in a boy. Sadly, that forever after remained my principal terpsichoric distinction, and it only gets one so far, but it did serve as her principal, if steadily less encouraging, talking point about me for the next five years.

(7) 2010 promises to be a year of changes that may or may not provide the chance to revisit some - I profoundly hope not all - of these issues. Watch this space.

5. Nominate 7 Kreativ Bloggers and post links to the 7 blogs you nominate.

But this is where I reap the benefit of being so terribly late in accepting my tag - I truly think this is one meme that has run its course and needn't be inflicted on anyone further. At least until somebody comes up with a better logo.

Birthday Genius: The Big Bad Woolf

2010-01-25T07:37:00.003+04:00

I'll be wishing many happy returns today, on her 128th, to the amazing woman seen above in a portrait by her almost equally remarkable sister. The picture is a 1912 portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell; once upon a time they were the daring Stephen sisters who took a house in Bloomsbury without a chaperone, and many, many things have been different ever since.

The work of Virginia Woolf too often these days is overshadowed by her life and career, by the people she knew and, most recently, by the often byzantine biographical and literary reinterpretations dreamed up by the people who study her and them. I can't recommend too strongly just going back to her books, which while they can be a challenge, reward it. If nothing else, she's a great deal more interesting than Nicole Kidman's wan, swanning impression, or even Michael Cunningham's rather sharper take.

Were I teaching Woolf 101, the introductory course to Bloomsbury for the Quizzical, I would start with Orlando, followed by The Voyage Out and some of the essays, only after which would students be permitted to read Quentin Bell's engrossing biography of his aunt and then embark on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. After that, one would be ready for anything, even the novels of V. Sackville-West and the acid pen of Mr. Lytton Strachey.

It's one course, however, that one cannot slide by on by seeing the films. Vanessa Redgrave is lovely in Mrs. Dalloway, but it's not really very Woolfy; The Hours can't really count; Orlando ought to be burnt; and anyone who goes into Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seeking biographical insight is only going to come out very, very confused.

Today actually offers an authorial two-for-one - sharing the day is Mr. Somerset Maugham, in his day a far more commercial author and sometime acquaintance of the Woolfs. Neither he nor his work has aged as well, however, although one would still be better of being afraid of him than the languid lady painted by her sister...

Why Don't You...

2010-01-24T22:10:00.002+04:00

...attempt a climb up the slippery slope of Absolute Perfection? Babe Paley gave it her best shot - and very nearly achieved the summit. It didn't make her happy, but...

Actually, on second thought - why not stay home in your bathrobe and enjoy life a little?

Serpent of Old Nile

2010-01-23T23:53:00.003+04:00

Well, kids, the bad news is that the Café's favorite handsomeness pageant, the fabulous Manhunt International, appears to be on indefinite hold for the moment, ostensibly, according to its homepage, because of H1N1-related concerns on behalf of this year's host government, South Korea.

The good news is that thinking about this august annual event gives me an excuse, however tenuous, to run a photo of the rather exquisite onetime Mr. Egypt, Tarek Naguib. He's seen here rising from the Nile. Which, from what I remember of the Nile, may not be the world's most salubrious idea, although he certainly makes it look pleasant...

It's the Story...

2010-01-22T22:21:00.002+04:00

I don't know about you, but it came as a complete surprise to me to discover that, for a time, Michael Jackson and his family lived in a home designed by noted West Coast architect Mike Brady.

The Ladies in Red

2010-01-22T00:59:00.002+04:00

Is it just me, or does it seem a little World Turned Upside Down to see a photograph in which Liza Minnelli is significantly more tastefully dressed and looks calmer and more self-assured than Audrey Hepburn? She must have, for once, have gotten the meds just right.

File Under "Business Names, Dubious"

2010-01-22T00:48:00.002+04:00

My forebrain accepts that this undoubtedly entirely respectable enterprise is very likely named after a term of art in the omnipresent local petroleum-extraction industry - but my lizard brain just laughs and laughs...

Yesterday, When We Were Young

2010-01-20T23:59:00.003+04:00

More like rising thirty years ago, actually. Time in its flight...

Tri', Tri' Again

2010-01-20T22:38:00.006+04:00

Yes, once again it's everybody's favorite Anodyne Recordings* superstars, the Tri'Tones!

This is, I believe, a still from their failed attempt to join the cast of The Beverly Hillbillies as a quartet of singing Bugtussle lovelies who come to visit the Clampetts. Either that, or they're showing their devotion to The Lawrence Welk Show by dressing up as Norma Zimmer.

In any case, it didn't get them far - for which I think we can all be grateful.

* A wholly owned subsidiary of Bland-Whitebread Amalgamated Enterprises.

Compare and Contrast

2010-01-20T22:09:00.005+04:00

Today, let's do a little show-biz exegesis, shall we? Herewith, three versions of one song, spanning, in various ways, three eras of entertainment and of interpretation.

First up, Judy. Her rendition - complete with an almost never-heard intro - is a reminder, among other things, of what a superb band singer she was. She brings all she's got to this number, but never for a moment lets you really think she believes it - a very Vaudeville attitude toward what could be a pretty cynical number.

Barbra's version is, as you'll see at the very end, actually from her appearance on The Judy Garland Show; in fact, it aired the fall before Judy's. Still, it's light years away from her hostess's playful but faithful rendition, poised as it is on the edge of mid-sixties "kookiness", as if just waiting for Laugh-In to happen.

Streisand at this age - just 21 - is amazing to watch; she's not so much performing as possessed by a talent she's still trying to figure out how to handle. That makes the bridge of this arrangement, a mishmash of other love songs, so odd and so oddly effective. How is it possible that this awkward, basically uneducated and unworldly girl can be at succeeding moments the gawkiest thing since My Friend Flicka and a one-woman compendium of twentieth-century show-biz?

Finally, the state of the art, turn of the century edition. Audra McDonald has the most "trained" voice of these three, and she gives a sense of acting the part of a nightclub belter rather than being one. Still, she's got the chops to put this one over, and her manic break midsong is if anything even more fun than Babs's.

What does it all prove? Honestly, I'm not at all sure, although I do know that I adore all three. I've never understood the need to choose one diva and automatically shower filth on any other. I think that maybe the lesson is: talent will out.

Heavage

2010-01-19T23:12:00.003+04:00

I can't think what could have put poor dear Upen Patel into such a pensive mood - unless it's the prospect of doing up all those buttons. Or the sudden realization - having been reading Peenee again - that what with International Male more or less folding, he'll never be able to replace that shirt with any other garment as utterly tawdry.

Diamond Anniversary

2010-01-19T23:01:00.004+04:00

Sixty years ago today, Elizabeth Taylor ended her academic career, a fetching graduate of Hollywood's University High School. Or at least was photographed by Life, cap-and-gowned, as doing so.

Housewife Superstar

2010-01-19T22:20:00.005+04:00

Oh, dear - time in its flight; Edith Bunker is 87 years old today. Rather, of course, the great lady who played her, Jean Stapleton, has reached that great age.

All in the Family and being Edith may have been what made Stapleton a household name, but real Jeanketeers love her best as another memorable New Yorker: Sue, proprietrix of Susanswerphone, in the treasurable musical (stage and film) Bells are Ringing. She plays the voice of reason - never an easy thing in a musical comedy - and does so in a way that only sets off sweetly, wildly anarchic Judy Holliday to even better advantage.

Once upon a time (and you will forgive me if I stroll down Memory Lane, won't you?), back when I was doing my Birdie Coogan impression and being amanuensis to a Personage of the Theatre, I was on dressing-room door duty. My Personage was not the fastest of changers, and so quite a group would sometimes form to say good evening and (a vanishing phenomenon, I think, however familiar from the pictures) have a drink or two. I had just put my head out and been encouraging to the dozen or so people waiting, when what felt like just seconds later there was a firm rap at the door.

I was busy, dammit, and it was with rather too much force that I threw the door open with something likely along the lines of "What?" Collecting myself, I looked...up. Standing there was a very tall and, briefly, very apologetic lady. Briefly, because within nanoseconds I was falling over to (a) frantically apologize and (b) not make a total fool of myself in front of Sue. She was far nicer than I deserved - what with her having known my Personage for significantly longer than, at that point, I had been alive and all - and the evening went uphill from there.

I think some of the other people who'd been waiting felt quite put out that I wasn't nearly as flustered by them. What can I say? They never spent any time on the same switchboard as Our Lady of the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company...

Birthday Boy: A Star to Remember

2010-01-18T22:37:00.002+04:00

Cary Grant would have been 106 today. He probably would still have been better looking than most of us and cooler than all of us, put together. When you've held your own against everybody from Mae West to Hitchcock - with more than a little Katharine Hepburn in between and even a little Audrey - I guess there's not much that fazes you.

And wasn't he lovely?

Wet Wet Wet

2010-01-18T21:54:00.005+04:00

Dear Felix has pointed out that Saturday marked the 90th anniversary of the onset of Prohibition. I think that calls for cocktails for everybody, don't you? Not to mention summer furs.

I Believe in Angels

2010-01-18T21:37:00.002+04:00

...And my destination makes it worth the while -
Pushing through the darkness, still another mile;
I believe in angels,
Something good in everything thing I see;
I believe in angels.
When I know the time is right for me:
I'll cross the stream
I have a dream.

Happy Birthday, Dr. K.

Dreams Downtown

2010-01-17T23:00:00.004+04:00

I've written about this place before, but I just came across these photos. This was my first dream palace, but of course these pictures come even before my time (rumours of my having played piano at the first screening of Way Down East being a gross libel), in 1949. Just look at that marquee.

Just waiting outside would have been kind of a thrill, no? And imagine crowds actually lining up to catch what can kindly be called a routine sort of picture. It was cold that night; the movie came out in the first half of March, and the Warner was very much a first-run house.

Wouldn't you love to step into all that, just for a moment - to have a chance to see what was in those shop windows, hear the music drifting from the tavern down the street, get a look at a world - small city urban America - now as gone as Pompeii?

At night, the street had a real noir feel, a shade mysterious and cosmopolitan. By day it all has a slightly more mundane feeling, I suppose, but it's still pretty wonderful. The big department store was just off camera to the right, and the Warner's marquee, less dramatic at mid-day, juts out a block or so in on the left.

It's a funny feeling to see pictures like this. South of St. Louis doesn't seem like my parents' kind of night out (they were married four years right about then), but you never know; they might have decided, just that evening, that you couldn't go all that wrong with Joel McCrea. For that matter, that could be Grandfather Muscato in one of those behemoth automobiles, tooling downtown to the office on a perfectly ordinary day. He was a Packard man, mostly.

And now it's gone, mostly; certainly any vestige of that urban feeling; what's left is a patchwork of redevelopment and (mostly misplaced) optimism. The theatre hangs on, but the shops are long gone, and old people live in the onetime department store. Downtown is as much open space as solid brick commercial buildings, and I think that all but one of the eye-astonishing office blocks - one topping out at 12 stories - have turned into those open spaces.

Most of all, it's a place I may never see again, for the grandparents are as gone as Packards and our roots there (although they went back to earliest days, frozen ex-revolutionaries wondering why they hadn't settled somewhere less inclement, Georgia, maybe; south of St. Louis, certainly) are pretty thoroughly cut. It's good, still, to be from somewhere, and to think how permanent it must all have seemed, one winter's night in 1949.

Tri-ing Times

2010-01-17T22:02:00.002+04:00

Ladies and gentlemen - meet the Faith Tones' glamourous aunts. They live in Vero Beach, drive Dodge Darts, and are staunch members of the Central Florida Abstinence in Marriage League. Well, all except Marvelle there, bottom left. Sometimes she can't help herself.

Birthday Roll Call: Goddesses and More

2010-01-17T07:15:00.006+04:00

It's a banner day on the birthday front, starting with the remarkable fact that sharing the day are ultrastars Dalida (shown here effortlessly demonstrating her fabulousness) and the still much-missed Eartha Kitt.

Those two alone would be more than enough to brighten up your average January Sunday, but there is, it turns out, so much more: demurely foul-mouthed TV survivor Betty White, iron-armed White House tenant Michelle Obama, redheaded Red Shoes wearer Moira Shearer, Lambchop-wielder Shari Lewis, second-tier Blonde Bombshell Sheree North, and Gallic yé-yé songbird Françoise Hardy, for example. That's not to mention, on the distaff side, arch novelist Sir Compton Mackenzie and his camp coeval, Ronald Firbank, pugilistic poetaster Muhammed Ali, the stentorian James Earl Jones, and hairburner extraordinaire Vidal Sassoon.

Altogether, that's enough natal glamour to offset the presence of the last and least Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, Larry Fortensky, and talk-show dullard Maury Povich. It seems presumputous of them to have chosen Dalida's day, but such is her magnaminity that I'm sure she would have risen about it all. And I can't help thinking that she and Eartha are having a hoot, possibly in tandem with Mr. Firbank...

Wild, Wild West(ern Arabia)

2010-01-16T09:40:00.002+04:00

Living here in our Sultanate's quaint little capital, nestled on its narrow plain between the hills and the sea, it can be easy to forget that there is a whole other world on the far side of those hills, in the country's interior.

Over the holidays, we took Miss Rheba for a long drive - what the Grandparents Muscato used to call a Sunday Motor Trip, although theirs were to exotic destinations like Ashtabula or Titusville, rather than, say, the medieval fortress that served as the Residence of the Imam. One bonus of the recent rains was that, unusually for this part of the world, there were clouds, which meant much more interesting light and shade than we often see.

This study of a very Southwest-seeming tableau was snapped from the top of that fortress, a charming attraction, if one that would benefit greatly from escalators.

Trouper

2010-01-16T08:58:00.005+04:00

I love books you can dip in and out of, finding fresh treasure every time. Such a tome is Some of These Days, the refreshingly direct and unpretentious memoirs of the one and only Sophie Tucker. If you only know Sophie from Bette Midler's affectionate takeoff, you owe it to yourself to check out the real thing; the Last of the Red Hot Mommas was also the epitome of a special and vanished kind of show business.

She was a woman who worked hard all her life and enjoyed every moment of her considerable success (just look at her there, in her ermine and orchids at a Hollywood premiere - you don't get that far just sitting on your tuchus, kids). Turn one page and she's making her first break in Vaudeville; skip forward, and she's fighting MGM's attempts to turn her into the next Marie Dressler; back a little and she recounts the time a baby was born in her drawing room on a train heading to Chicago (it wasn't hers, but they kept in touch - she seems to have never lost track of anyone, ever).

The legend about this book is that its author flogged it herself so indefatigably that it's actually worth more if it's not autographed. Mine was signed over with Love to Elaine and Ernie Maxfield in January of 1960, and I'm sure they were glad to have it. I know I am.

Shopping Mall Confidential

2010-01-14T20:26:00.003+04:00

Consider this a private note to the Café's local (or any other dishdasha-wearing) male readers:

If you feel like stopping for a cup of coffee at the Starbucks tables located outside the Border's Books at the top of the escalator shown in the pre-opening sketch above - and yes, I know, they're the only ones at that Starbucks where you can smoke* - that's all well and good. But please - for the love of God, please - remember that if, while watching the world go by, you decide to get comfortable by, say, putting one foot up on an empty chair and swinging your other leg over just so...

Let's just say that the kilt effect goes into play, and your dishdasha and wissar** ride up, and ...

On a clear day, those lucky folks coming up the elevator get an excellent view of your Ras Al Djinn, if you get my drift.

Frankly, I'd think the draft would have gotten your attention, even if the giggling girls (and not a few interested-looking gents) going for multiple escalator rides didn't...

* for the moment, kids - this town is going smoke-free in a couple of months, and not a moment too soon!

** the local masculine petticoat-equivalent; think a wrapped half-slip.

Questionable Moments in Evening Wear

2010-01-14T18:44:00.002+04:00

Lavinia's mother had assured her that the cut of her new black velvet guaranteed that the other girls wouldn't notice her cankles - but now that she was actually at the year's first sorority mixer, she wasn't so sure...

The Pain in Spain

2010-01-14T08:39:00.006+04:00

The moral of this video? Do not click on one of the "related videos" on offer when done checking out the latest madness over at the Chateau. You will lose hours of your time and, possibly, your sanity.

It fascinates me that this is in fact only the credits to what appears to be a Julio Iglesias variety show. What on earth could possibly top it? Joining Sr. Iglesias (and his parrot) are the talented - well, certainly energetic - ladies and gentlemen of El Ballet Zoom de TVE, who are clearly Spain's answer to the Juul Haalmeyer Dancers.

Isn't it Always?

2010-01-13T23:47:00.000+04:00

Eastern Beats

2010-01-12T23:26:00.004+04:00

I know we've ventured into the world of Arab pop quite recently, but I find myself very taken with this new song, "Ma Bkhaf" ("Don't be Scared") by Lebanese diva Carole Samaha, now in heavy rotation on the local video channels.

It's actually a pretty good dance song. Samaha appears to be staking out a Jennifer Lopez sort of role for herself, and the overall affect is a little more minimalist than some of her competition. The clip is causing a certain amount of controversy, not just, as usual, for the amount of skin on display, but for the daring casting of its extras. Check out the saucy couple at around 1:23 and you'll see what I mean.

I'm always happy when this part of the world surprises with its diversity, on all fronts...

Happy Days

2010-01-11T22:52:00.004+04:00

The Most Famous People in the World, Mary and Doug, rather mystifyingly enjoy a little canoeing in the pool at PickFair.

So much of this image seems as vanished as if it never had been. Just think of it: in this photo, the two stars are presented as if frolicking outdoors; today, they would look overdressed for church. This house was America's ideal, the most elegant, even ostentatious last word in Hollywood glamour; today, it doesn't measure up, in square footage or general showiness, with the average real-estate-bubble McMansion in Des Moines.

And, it goes without saying, Pickford and Fairbanks, even at opposite ends of their little boat, project an aura of starry perfection. Now, we know that things didn't end well. Just a little while after this sunny morning, Hollywood's Perfect Marriage was as gone as hats for canoeing. Doug drifted off, leaving Mary at Pickfair, where she stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

But they really were a lovely couple.

Tuesday on Monday

2010-01-11T22:35:00.003+04:00

Blogging never ceases to amaze. One of the things I love is how you can stumble onto a whole separate, parallel - yet welcomingly familiar - world. It's like opening one of those little doors in the endless corridor in which Alice finds herself.

I felt that way earlier this week when, while ~~looking around for some photos to steal~~ doing some photo research, I fell into the orbit of A Touch of Tuesday Weld. Here was a whole new world of star appreciation, snarky comments, vintage moments, and shared glee at the oddity of the world. The Proprietrix has a healthy list of followers and a varied blogroll, with, to my eye, no immediate shared names between her world and what I suppose we can think of as the Fabuloniverse (somebody thinks it's the Peeneeverse, and perhaps we oughtn't disasbuse him).

In any case, why not stroll on over and see what fun awaits? Just beware if a hookah-smoking caterpillar offers you cake...

The Blonde Crusader

2010-01-11T07:15:00.002+04:00

No, not the latest Marvel superhero - just Loretta. Loathe her, even as a golden-haired Plantagenet-by-marriage. Loathe her.

Birthday Boy: St. Sal

2010-01-10T07:28:00.002+04:00

Impossible as it is to believe, Sal Mineo would have been 71 today. It's a damn shame he's not. He was carving out an odd and interesting career toward the end of his life, one that seemed on the road to overcoming his somewhat unsustainable stardom as a sidekick-ephebe. Perhaps today he would be a an offbeat elder statesman, playing off-kilter character parts, directing (as he did late in life) the occasional opera, and generally enjoying life as one-who-was-there. Alas.

Sharing the day are two fellow heartthrobs, Bollywood sensation Hrithik Roshan and silent god Francis X. Bushman; '80s diva Pat Benatar; bland-furniture-line namesake and revolutionary Ethan Allan; the eternal scarecrow Ray Bolger; and porn pioneer Linda Lovelace. One hesitates to think what they all might have in common...

Meanwhile, at the Bargain Center

2010-01-10T06:44:00.002+04:00

During her recent stay, Miss Rheba was treated to all the highlights of local tourism: we took her to forts and castles; she went on a dolphin-watching excursion; we visited the Grand Mosque and the capital's steadily expanding Royal Palace. She saw the souq, smoked a shisha, and ate in restaurants brimming with local color (experiencing one oddity of life in the Gulf: the more atmospheric, thousand-and-one-nights the restaurant, the likelier it is to serve Lebanese food. For very good reasons, mostly, if you've ever tried the actual traditional foods of the Arabian Peninsula).

And, of course, we took her to the One-Rial Store.

...where she experienced the legendary Wall of Knockoff Colognes, an ever-changing array of horror and splendor. This time the highlight was this I'm sure entirely coincidental hommage to one of the region's signature buildings. If you can't actually stay at the $1,000 a night Burj al-Arab Hotel, why not wear a $1.50 parfum that vaguely looks like it?

None of the dozens of Walking Angels on display showed even the vaguest sign of the promised flapping wings (and we wondered whether, in this part of the world, her prayers would be particularly welcome). Nonetheless, we were taken by the way in which she resembled nothing so much as a L'il Edna May Oliver doll and were briefly seized with the idea of a whole line of infantilized character ladies (Baby Marie Dressler, Toddler Magic Margaret Rutherford...).

And this particular offering made us laugh and laugh. We didn't feel good about that, but we did. I know it's just a set of tumblers and pitcher, liberally gilded. But still: golden water set.

Somehow, when inevitably we return to the dear old shores of North America, going to Costco or Target is going to seem awfully dull...

La Publicité!

2010-01-08T22:09:00.005+04:00

Despite an onslaught of unrelentingly creative guesses, ranging from Sophie Tucker to the Queen Mother (and including the popular favorite, the highly likely Mr. Peenee), the identity of our Edwardian mystery lady remained unsolved. She was, of course, the roguishly charming matron seen above, Miss Mary Boland. With no prizes to hand out, it just means wee drinkies and radio cowboys in the bar car for everybody.

Boland's was a fine career, encompassing everything from turn-of-the-century Broadway to a solid place in moviegoers' hearts for more than two decades after the her appearances in early talkies. As in her best-remembered role as Flora, Countess de Lave in The Women, she generally played vague, funny ladies, frequently of the upper classes.

In her last picture, an obscure 1950 indie noir curiosity called Guilty Bystander, she apparently played against type as "Smitty," a flophouse manager. Sadly, despite being third-billed, she didn't make the poster. From the look of it, she could only have helped.

Rock On, Local Dudes

2010-01-08T09:33:00.002+04:00

Apparently, the shebab - the Sultanate's rising crop of teen boys - live in some kind of pop-culture time warp, at least as evidenced by this graffito Koko and I found on a pavement yesterday in one of our wanders around the neighborhood. It's not a place we go regularly, but often enough that I'm fairly convinced it's new-ish, at least.

This is a tag that would have seemed fairly naff back when I was of the age to be doing this sort of thing, rising thirty years ago. Here, it approaches the surreal. Which is, I suppose, all too often what one can expect from the intersection of East and West...

She's Leaving Home

2010-01-07T09:31:00.002+04:00

Looking back over the years from her Park Avenue penthouse, Carlotta realized that that had been the very moment at which she left little Ethel Mae from Wilkes Barre behind once and for all.

Shoot the MSGer

2010-01-07T09:19:00.002+04:00

Here, for no particular reason, we have Egyptian pocket heartthrob Tamer Hosny.

Arabic pop stars all too frequently have mystifying taste in sportswear. I have to wonder: if love is his MSG, does it leave him with a numb jaw, roaring headache, and hungry an hour later?

Dear Dead (Birth)Days

2010-01-07T08:51:00.003+04:00

If he hadn't had better things to do, the inimitable Charles Addams would have been 98 today, and I really rather wish he were; we could do with a little more of his mordant point of view in the world today.

Beyond the obvious and enchanting glee in the macabre, the thing I think I like best about Addams cartoons is that they demand something of the viewer; they assume a shared set of references and start from the understanding that you will, as here, be amused by the very idea of one of Velazquez's Meninas staring gravely out from a group that includes a menagerie of her fellow art-history greatest hits.

A splashy musical of the artist's best known creations, his eponymous Family, is apparently making its slow and not-untroubled way to Broadway. Even with Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth, it's hard to imagine it outdoing not only previous incarnations, but the originals - perfect little vignettes of bizarerie that really don't seem to cry out for a Big Tap Number or whatever else they will do to them.

Sharing the day? Well, it's a mixed bag, ranging from John Abraham's ~~beard~~ girlfriend, Bollywood leading lady Bipasha Basu, to presidential punchline Millard Fillmore. Also celebrating are Butterfly McQueen [insert birthing no babies and/or slapping joke here], eternally dapper character man Alan Napier, actress Terry Moore (forever fixed in one's memory dividing her affections between Joe Young and Howard Hughes), puzzling film success Nicolas Cage, and the ill-fated Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, who came this close to reducing her younger cousin Victoria to the insignificant footnote that she herself has become. Had she not died in childbirth, we would have to put up with books like Eminent Charlottians and have had great aunts who collected Charlottiana. Sometimes destiny knows best.