Book 'Em

Over in her curious corner of the cyberverse*, the esteemed Mistress MJ has requested a glimpse at her Dear Readers' bookshelves, and I feel compelled to oblige.

Meretriciocracy

Well, kids, don't say I never do you any favors...

All Kinds of Empresses

Forget Sissi; forget Maria von Trapp - this is the face of Austria in 2014.

A Sumptuous Sense

We have, for various reasons, been enduring enjoying a raft of visiting family over the past several days, culminating this afternoon in one of those occasional kinship rituals that will bring together friends and relatives from multiple sides of the clan.  Pray for me.

Rooms Worth a View

Now that's a drawing room.

From the prologue to Bride of Frankenstein, it's a cozy retreat for Mary Shelley and her circle (including the divine Una O'Connor in her brief turn as a glorified dog-walker - the lesser-known of the film's two dual roles), and it probably has as much to do with any place the Shelleys actually lived in as it does to a Chinese tea house.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have you started cooking yet?

Such Devoted Sisters

It doesn't surprise me a bit that they were terrier gals...

Le Weekend!

It's been that kind of week...

Unpack the Luggage La La La...

...Hi-ho the glamourous life!

Things That Happen at Our House

At some point in the past month or so, Mrs. Galapatti-Da Silva had apparently had just about enough of our not finishing up with putting away the last of the Christmas decorations and decided that our tree topper needed to go for a ride.  Yes, she's a former South Africa Barbie dressed in a vintage tulle and silver lamé ballgown.  You got a problem with that?  As for the camel - believe me, you live in this area long enough, you end up with camels.  You live in Africa, you get masks; in Egypt, papyrus and scarabs.  The Sandlands, camels.  They come with the territory.

We use the "company" part of the Villa Muscato infrequently enough that I only noticed it today because I was padding around the house in an invalidish sort of way, as I'm feeling poorly.  It makes me wonder what other decorative innovations she's come up with that have escaped our notice...

Room with a View

I hope you'll pardon the hiatus of the last couple of days; Mr. Muscato and I have been off on a more-or-less unplanned little jaunt, courtesy of a friend in the travel business.  We are, you see, in the early stages of what chez nous is considered the busiest holiday season of them all:  Mr. Muscato's birthmonth.  Back home in WASP-land, we tapered off on birthdays by ten or so; not so, it seems, in Egypt, where birthdays are big business for, as they say at the circus, children of all ages.  In any case, various friends up in Dubai wanted to throw him a party, and at the same time, we got an offer to spend the weekend in what must be one of that very silly city's very silliest hotels at a highly advantageous rate.  Of course, we leapt at the chance.

The hotel in question is located out on The Palm, Dubai's man-made peninsula in the shape of a many-fronded tree surrounded by a halo of land that both acts as a breakwater and the home for a series of resorts.  The most famous of these, I suppose, is Atlantis, an overblown horror show I once wrote about after what the Mister and I realized was our last visit to The Palm, some four years ago.

Our hotel is a more recent arrival, a resplendent pile meant to recall the splendor and excess of the Ottoman empire, which, it must be admitted, to a creditable degree it does.  Unlike so much of Dubai, most of which is as humorlessly charmless as a place devoted to Fun at All Costs can be, it shows signs of having been designed with a certain wit.

Here, for example, is a quiet corner of the lobby.  The snap hardly does justice to the riot of colors and textures set against the limitless expanses of polished inlaid marbles, but whether or not one fully approves of the taste, one has to grant that it has a very definite Wow Factor.  As did our suite, the view from which appears up top (with Dubai doing a very creditable impression of a real city, in the distance; being on The Palm does give one lovely skyline views).  It was a dark and rather mysterious lair, with the walls colored a  burnished bronze that was offset with long panels of antiqued mirrors, a great deal of Louis-XIV-meets-a-belly-dancer furniture in black and gold, and a bathroom that would not have been at all out of place in a Gloria Swanson-Cecil B. DeMille epic.  If the place didn't also sport a spa that recalls in scale the Baths of Caracalla and in decoration the home of Miss Belle Watling, we might have just stayed in the suite all weekend.

Breakfast is served in a vast long gallery that's working hard to recall the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, but which seems in the end more like a department-store dining room of the mid-thirties.  The food was great, but I'm afraid my attention was riveted on this dear lady.  As with the snap of the lobby, this photo is but a pale indication of the splendor of her hairdo, even of her general presence. Sadly, we see the coiffure here on Day Two, when it was more than a tad deflated and even a little scruffy around the back.  The preceding morning it had been an orb, nearly perfectly spherical, made of descending rows of tidily arranged little curly waves; better preserved, I think, is the color scheme, which alternates patches of cotton-candy pink and an amber-yellow.  She seemed very proud of it.  Bless.

Oh, and that birthday party?  Well, few things on earth are less well organized than the average group of multinational Dubai-based confirmed bachelors, and apparently it's next weekend.  We didn't mind all that much; we steamed and swam and had very good massages and ate far too much and made good use of the Free Flowing Champagne offers on hand (and good stuff it was, too, not the usual sparkling vinegar Dubai seems to specialize in) and generally forgot how very dreary it can be at the office.  Back to reality tomorrow, but for moment, now that we're home and the dogs have calmed down, all's well.

Ev'rything Old is New Again...

Over in his cosy corner of the cyberverse, dear Cookie has been regaling us with tales of real estate and family furniture - perennial hot topics, both, whenever two members of my extended family gather.  The Farm and Why We Lost It looms large, as does We Never Saw That Chiffonier Again After Your Aunt Ginnie Got Her Hands On it, and variations on both can take us well into the night, outlasting both patient spouses and the cocktail supply (the former by a lot, the latter only very slightly).

Quite independently of all that, I've been thinking of furniture now and again, mostly in the form of wondering whatever happened to mine.  Oh, I know, well enough, but after all these years overseas, it all feels rather abstract.  Back in the beginning, when the Great Emperor Clinton ruled the West, I thought I'd take a flyer and see what the expatriate life might be like.  I gave up my (rue the day - rent-stabilized!) Manhattan apartment and, on the instruction of my new employer, put all my things into storage.  "Don't get rid of too much," they told me, "Many people only spend a year or two out and then come back to the Home Office."  Well, we know how that turned out.

So there it all sits, still, my life more or less frozen in amber, some two tons of it (what?  A lot of it's books), as it existed back when Cher was having her seventeenth or twenty-third comeback with "Believe."  Among the great mass of regrettabilia that I can still remember are something on the order of 160 snowglobes (a passing fancy that snowballed, as it were, into a collection only because people kept giving them to me), an acid-washed tour jacket for a production I worked on (which I might still be able to wear, were abbreviated boleros ever to have an unexpected renaissance), and, I think, a fair amount of the product of Catalina Studios, on VHS.  Surpassing all that, however, in terms of sheer bulk, is a remarkable amount of Victoriana, much of it passed on from relatives - three china cupboards of various capacity, a bowfront secretary, several clocks, a great many spindly end tables, and so many impractical things on which to sit that, for a while, some of them hung from the walls and some acquaintances referred to my place as "The Chair Museum."

"Your apartment," a friend once told me, "is very nice.  For an exiled archduchess.  For you... well, I'm not surprised you're single."

Were all of that ever to descend back on me - now us (and so there, Gene Boarderman!*) - I'm not quite sure what we'd do.  Some of the things have sentimental value; some fewer are inherently attractive; and as for the chairs, my grandfather's vast tufted armchair aside, I'm not sure there's a single one on which either Mr. Muscato or I could sit without endangering it and us.  Market wise, the bottom has fallen out of nineteenth century furniture, and none of my various nieces and nephews show any sign of wanting to become the next generation of caretakers.

All of which brings us to the image above, the work of one Darci Goodman, who put this rather beguilingly rethought settee into a "Colorful Ranch House" she designed.  You see, sitting there in some East Coast warehouse, among the tawdry videos and doubtless now unusable rolled-up carpets, is a love seat very like this one, albeit still clad in the dowdy hunter-green shot silk I put on it when Grandmother's lilac velvet finally gave up the ghost in 1989.

Perhaps, when my Long Lost Possessions and I are finally reunited, this is the way I'll go: throw caution to the wind and run a little wild.  Having had the domicile of a Pym heroine in my twenties and thirties, perhaps I'll become the male equivalent of those women who constantly recite that "When I am Old I Shall Wear Purple" poem and decorate wildly.  I'd like that settee in my foyer, wild orange stripes and all; I can only imagine it will go better with what I've picked up on the road - African totems and huge Ottoman brass trays, Egyptian knick-knacks and such - than the shot silk.  Rather nice to think: while I may have no choice but to grow older, at least my taste can grow a little younger as the years roll by, no?

* Name changed to protect the catty and inaccurate.

Master of the House

Well, one of two them, next to whom the two bipeds are mere supernumeraries.  Here we see Boudi in his favorite sunny corner in the drawing room at the Villa Muscato.  The rather regrettable white slipper chair was some previous tenant's idea; we inherited a great deal of tat courtesy of one of my predecessors over at Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International, which provides not only employment, but also furnished accommodation to its lucky expatriate employees.  The crimson cushion, the blue-bordered fauxbusson, and the chinoiserie mirror, though are all ours.  Ditto the Yorkie, however much he thinks he owns us.  Some day I look forward, once again, to living with my own furniture.  If you're not careful, I'll show you the sofa, a swaybacked federal edifice in a distinctly dispiriting shade of pea-soup floral jacquard, and you'll know exactly what I mean.

If I'm in a domestic mood this weekend, it's because things are uncommonly quiet hereabouts.  Mr. Muscato is off for the approaching local holidays to see after Mama and the family in Egypt, leaving me and the dogs bereft.  Actually, I have to admit that, on a strictly temporary basis, it's rather nice, as I have a far greater tolerance for our lesser cabaret singers than Mr. M., and so have the music on whenever I like.  Still, I'll happily trade even dear Marie Blake for Mr. Muscato when it's time for him to come home.  Heaven knows the dogs will; they are already thoroughly bored with just me around to divert them...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: "The PineSol Scented Air..."

 

Herewith the too-little-shouted-about Miss Ellen Greene preserves on film one of the finer moments I ever saw in the theatre.  Actually, now that I think about it, the 1986 movie of Little Shop of Horrors isn't all that much shouted about anymore either, but I remember it in general as both great fun on its own and fairly true to the delightful stage version.

 

Greene has one of those trick voices that in the theatre can be uniquely thrilling - one minute a tiny, buzzy rasp and the next a bell-like clarion that raises the rafters and the hair on the back of your neck.  The first time I saw her sing this, way downtown at the old Orpheum Theatre, she made people cry, me among them. 

 

This one may not do that, but it does evoke quite effectively both her character's and our nostalgia (false, reductive, seductive) for something simple, that seems clean and fine and worthwhile.  It's not something that Ellen/Audrey ever achieves (the character, after all, gets mauled to death by a killer begonia run amok)* or that we really want - but in the moment, it's beautiful - and that, my dears, is camp.  More calculated than some, perhaps; some would argue that calculation itself puts it beyond the pale of campery.  I disagree - by turning something inherently ridiculous into something moving, largely through the art of Miss Greene, it becomes the real, tinselly thing.

* In the stage version, that is; I've just been reminded that in the film's revised ending (released in place of an also-filmed and truly apocalyptic version of the stage's "Don't Feed the Plants," a great number), Audrey actually does achieve her Better Homes and Gardens dream.  Which kind of ruins it really; I'm with the fans who say they should have stuck with the real ending.

Why Don't You...

...take up a hobby, like dear Miss Dinah Shore here?  Prolific!  While you're at it, be sure to match your palette to your sofa cushions, for that little something extra.  There's simply no such thing as Too Much Williamsburg Blue.

Lady of the House Speaking

Fifty years ago today, this lovely lady - then most commonly referred to as Mrs. John F. Kennedy (and which makes you feel older, that form of address or the phrase "fifty years ago"?) became a TV star.  She led Charles Collingwood of CBS News on a tour of the White House that was one of the most widely watched programs to date.  She even won an Emmy (well, an honorary one, but still).

Millions of viewers got a heaping helping of vintage Jackie, in a film that, seen today, seems almost as primitive as a Biograph two-reeler.  It's hard to imagine the country now glued to something as stately, sedate, and reverent as the factually titled A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, and in 2012 it makes for curious viewing (you can see it,whole, here, although alas without contemporary commercials).

Mrs. K. won plaudits for banishing from the president's residence what were then seen as decades of bad taste - to paraphase that Ultimate Arbiter of Good Taste, June Bride, she gussied up the McKinley Stinker she moved into, making it into, if not a Kennedy Modern, then at least a paragon of American Elegance.  To today's eye, though, she replaced Teddy Roosevelt's moose heads and Taft's potted palms with something that looks very much like every middle-brow resort hotel lobby of the next decade (until mod swept away the last vestiges of Mid-Century Federal, sending smoked-glass mirror tiles and mud-colored shag carpet cascading up walls at Hyatts and worse across America). 

It's odd, too, to see so much of the future Jackie O; once her image was frozen forever a year and half after the broadcast, she was never again so present, in such abundance.  Watching her drift from room to room, her vaguely anaesthetized voice murmuring rapturously about "masses and masses of gold and glass..." or the night Pablo Casalas played the East Room, she is at once charming and disconcerting.  Her artless delivery recalls nothing so much as that of a supporting player in a John Waters movie, and the whole thing moves at an underwater pace. 

Her often parodied accent (the still-unfinished Treaty Room is "a chambah of HAAARahs...") is even more distinctive than one expects, an at times beguiling, at times giggle-inducing fugue of Boston (did she pick it up from the in-laws?), lockjaw, and the breathiness more associated with her famous blonde rival.  She smiles on cue, she nods her vast coiffure (Mr. Kenneth at his most cotton-candied), and says things like "It really is terribly good," (of a Van Buren-era portrait) in a way that calls forth the spectre of Gloria Upson.  When her husband joins in for the last few minutes, he seems by contrast to be speaking perfect Broadcast MidAtlantic.

We leave them there, that handsome couple, serene in the cluttered, half-decorated Treaty Room.  All these years later, we know more about them then they ever could have dreamed, a depressing amount of it not even slightly flattering.  The White House still looks much the same, even though it's survived being Ultrachintzed by Nancy Reagan and Little Rock Contempo'ed by the Clintons.  Bits of the Obama updates look even more Conference Center Classic than Mrs. Kennedy's Diplomatic Reception Room (there's a good article on presidential decorating, by the bye, here).

And yes, I am home sick from work today, with too much time on my hands.  Why do you ask?

B is for...

Bourgeois (this interior), Bess (Truman, the lady deep in her magazine, left), and Birthdays.  Today is hers; she would be, in a better world, 127 today.

Few would argue that she was the most exciting of first ladies, but she had her own kind of homey charm, and she simultaneously managed to keep Harry happy and put up with Margaret (who would sing), which is no mean feat.  If nothing else, she set the stage for Mamie, who seemed by contrast both stylish and vigorous.

I don't know about you, but I'm just mad for that davenport, and I have to admit with a certain pride that somewhere in the depth of a storage unit back home, I have a chair just exactly like Harry's.

Too, Too Divine

The news from dear JoeMyGod that things have gotten even odder in the world of That Somewhat Different Bishop, Eddie "Muscles" Long, got me thinking. Why I love the Internet is that what I was thinking about was, more or less, this very wallpaper. And therein lies a tale.

The paper, you see, is from a longtime Philadelphia institution that I've only just discovered disappeared seven or eight years ago. It was a place called the Divine Tracy Hotel, a name that only hints at the bizarerie within. The DT, you see, was run by the International Peace Mission, better known locally as the Church of Father and Mother Divine. Theirs is a saga that reads like fiction (think Sinclair Lewis meets Nathanael West), but it was just part of the background weirdness of living in the City of Brotherly Love back then.

The Tracy was, even thirty years ago, more than a shade down at heel, but it had its standards. Actually, it was entirely a creature of its standards, which followed the particular diktats of Father and Mother and ranged from a vegetarian diet (served in the actually rather cosy Keyflower Restaurant) to a strict dress code (no shorts, please!) to a total segregation by sex (men on one floor, women on another, and no mixing allowed). It was way eccentric, but it was cheap and cheerful.

Why, then, the wallpaper revery? Well, you see, once upon a time one was a student 'round about those parts. From time to time it was extremely inconvenient not to have a quiet place uninterrupted by roommates, houseparents, or worse. Where better, then, for a young man of Artistic Tastes to repair with a friend for a quiet evening of, um, studying, than a quiet and almost laughably inexpensive hotel that ruthlessly enforced a single-sex setting? As long as you kept things quiet, the very patient (except with short sleeves and lamb chops) staff (who all had noms d'hôtel, or I suppose du Divine like Sweetness Peaceful and Cheery Faithfulness) were none the wiser. Actually, I have to admit that after the fourth or fifth consecutive weekend I took up residence in one of their $15 doubles (with, I also have to admit, varying study pals), I think Mr. Faithfulness might just have had a clue.

In any case, that's wallpaper I've seen from all sorts of angles, none of them strictly kosher, as it were, by Divine Tracy house rules.

Sadly, the glory days of the International Peace Mission have long ago come and gone. The Tracy is now student apartments, and its grander sister, the Divine Lorraine, lies derelict in North Philadelphia. Amazingly, though, Mother Divine lives on. Here she is, pictured in the Main Line mansion that is now the focus of the movement:

The snap's from a few years ago, but I picture her still there, just a shade more Miss Havishamy, waiting either for the return of Father Divine or for Mr. Faithfulness to bring in her doubtless meat-free dinner.

So in any case, Bishop Eddie may now claim to be a king, but he's still a piker by Father Divine standards - he after all, convinced not a small number of people that he was God incarnate, and got rather a fascinating life out of it. What Mr. Faithfulness and his fellow church members got out of it is less clear, but they all seemed serene enough. Maybe he tries on Mother's stoles when she's not looking...

The wallpaper comes courtesy of Katbert's very festive Flickr photostream.

Be Our Guest

Much excitement about the Café today, as we're getting ready to welcome this evening our dear friend The Executrix, on a break from her dauntingly high-powered metropolitan life up in Europa. We look forward to several days of gossip, intemperance, and general catchings-up.

Seen here, of course, is one of the principal guest chambers of the Villa Muscato, in which we shall be lodging the dear girl . Oh, all right, it's not; it's a bedroom in the fabulous doll's house that formed one of Queen Mary's great legacies and which is one of my favorite things to visit when I've an idle hour to spare in Windsor. I do like to think it rather gives one an idea of our décor, though...

Why Don't You...

...drop last year's tired old Mid-Century Modern off at Goodwill and go all out Neo-Deco-Georgian, en style Dorothy Draper? So much more soothing...