Birthday Girl: Last Dame Standing

I'm posting late today - one of those days; don't ask.  When I saw her picture scattered around some of my favorite destinations, I thought, oh, no - not that, too.  But no, it's not - it is instead her birthday.  Lauren Bacall is 88 today.

Somewhere, packed away in a box that's nailed into a crate that's been sitting for a decade and more in a storage space Somewhere on the East Coast, if I'm lucky, there's a microcassette (remember them?) that I saved out of an answering machine (remember them?) from 'round about 1989.  On it, among I'm sure many utterly forgotten dates and appointments and crank calls and Lord knows what all, is the first call I ever missed from Miss Bacall.  If memory serves, it was about changing the time that a car was to pick her up.  I must have played that message a hundred times or more, to myself and to friends, marveling that Lauren Bacall had dialed my phone number and left a message.

I will tell you the truth:  I knew her for a year or two, at the level that she would have known my name and probably thought I was a pretty good, get-things-done sort of person of the sort who are plentiful in lives like hers.  And never, ever in that time, was she anything but great.  A Star, absolutely, and conscious of it - but why shouldn't she be?  She earned it.  She did her job, and she was damn good at it, and for one reason and another - not least among them the amount it cost to live like Lauren Bacall, the Widow Bogart, Star - she did it for a very long time, possibly for a long while after she really wanted to.  I was always more than a little in awe of her, in ways that I wasn't with some of the other Great Ladies I got to know in one way or another.

I'm glad she's still here, and I hope she knows that still she's on a very, very short list of the best: a real New Yawk lady, staunch in her progressive politics, loved, admired, loyal, hardworking, and, I can attest, even at 7:30 in the morning in the rain, beautiful beyond belief.

When she really does go, we shall not see her like again.

The Falling Mortal and the Only Dancer

This doesn't seem, somehow, a week for camp, and so instead here's something that simultaneously manages to be both more soothing and more bracing.  Miss Audra McDonald sings the poetry of Mr. James Baldwin as if it were exactly what she had been born to do, as indeed it may well be.

As you may have noticed, we've been having a spot of bother, not so much directly here in the Sandlands (elhamdulileh, as we say hereabouts), but in the region more generally.  Mr. Muscato and I are keeping a wary eye on what seems to be a distinctly disintegrating situation in our beloved Cairo, and we are just a tad more aware than usual that one's situation as an expat can change drastically, quickly.

But we carry on.  We've had a house guest this weekend, our friend The Teacher, who lives in a remote part of the country and comes into the capital now and again for a dose of cocktails and supermarkets, both of which are in short supply in her part of the world.  We were first pals a dozen years ago or so ago, back when I was a carefree bachelor and living abroad nearly for the first time, in West Africa, and we just happened upon each again last year.  It's an unusual thing in this transient part of the world to have such a comparatively old friend around, and very pleasant.  That she has a mouth like a truck driver and a highly entertaining tendency to pick up shop clerks and other random acquaintances just keeps things all the more amusing.

She headed out earlier this evening, and the house is quiet again.  The dogs are napping on the sofa, and Mr. Muscato and I are gearing up for another week.  Morning comes early, and all seems very ordinary, with the worries of the world (the several familiar places we've been watching overcome with fire and rioters on the TV screen chief among them) put as firmly on a back burner as we can manage.

Somehow, Baldwin's words (in McDonald's thrilling, heartbreaking, nearly perfect voice) shine through:

I know that love is the only answer
and the tight-rope lover
the only dancer.
When the lover come off the rope
today,
the net which holds him
is how we pray,
and not to God’s unknown,
but to each other:
the falling mortal is our brother!

I have, this week, very nearly lost the last of my patience for religion, or more accurately for its followers, given the idiocy currently (and more acutely than usually) being displayed on all sides.  In its place, I rather like Baldwin's formulation: praying not to some final great unknown, but to each other, to the tangible world around us and the people in it.  Losing sight of that is part, at least, of what causes these appalling, indiscriminate upheavals, even as they themselves are the result of long abuse, misunderstanding, anger building up as cancers do and with very many of the same consequences.  I'm not wise enough to go much beyond that, and I find myself falling back on the song's refrain:  some days, some days.  Some days just getting through the day has to be enough.  Tomorrow we will start again, watching and waiting for what's coming on down the line.

Green Goddesses

When Edie (left) first met Stella and Elaine, on her first day in the typing pool at Snell Snell & Snell, she had no idea that within six months she'd be launched into an exciting second career in show business.

While it lasted, the Key Notes were cherished by a small and very specific audience:  people neither ready for the raw, youthful energy of the Faith Tones nor for the towering glamor of the Tri-Tones.

Sadly, it all went south when Stella got a tempting offer to go on the road as a Florence Henderson impersonator and had the nerve to drag Elaine along with her as Ann B. Davis.  For years, Edie was bitter, not least because she had had a bit of a name back in the pool for her spot-on Robert Reed.

Genius, First Class

Gradually I told my father that perhaps I would leave San Francisco. He was not disturbed by this, after all there was at that time a great deal of going and coming and there were many friends of mine going. Within a year I also had gone and I had come to Paris. There I went to see Mrs. Stein who had in the meantime returned to Paris, and there at her house I met Gertrude Stein. I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice. I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began.

- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I must be in a Rue de Fleurus sort of mood, which rather makes sense as Gertrude and Alice join the list that includes travel snaps in regard to being Things That Cheer Me Up.  One of my formative theater-going experiences was seeing the great Pat Carroll as the Great Gertrude Stein in a show called, if memory serves and rather logically, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, and from then on I have been a devoted fan.

I took this picture - of a terra cotta version of the Stein statue by Jo Davidson that in bronze graces Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library - when we were, as some may remember, exiled to Washington this past August.  I think she looks suitably formidable, but rather graver than in Miss Carroll's impersonation.  It is not a mournful statue, but at least as lit in the National Portrait Gallery, from my experience one difficult to photograph in any other mood.

Like Alice, I have met several great people, but only once for me has the genius-bell rung, at least at a level that could be considered "first class."  That genius was quite a personage, and most definitely a handful - both qualities, I am quite sure, that Miss Toklas was more than passing familiar through long experience.  It was exhilarating, but perhaps more than a shade tiring.  I can quite understand why, even as fond of Gertrude as she clearly was, she spent so much time in the kitchen, just as a relief from all that greatness.  Still, they had a marvelous time - a new, full life indeed - for a very long time, and that, in the end, is worth a very great deal.

I Like a View...

...but I like to sit with my back to it.  That's something that Alice B. Toklas said, but I've always sort of understood it.

For a variety of reasons, this has not been my favorite of days.  Rather than either trying, and more likely than not failing, to be amusing, or even worse, just whinging on, instead I'll pass on this snap, taken a couple of summers ago when Mr. Muscato and I visited Italy.  I like to look at it when there's a certain amount of bleakness 'round about.

It's from a town called Bracciano, which when we were there was still buzzing from having hosted the wedding of those glam newlyweds, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cruise.  Well, I guess compared to how that turned out, my day wasn't all that bad...

Redux: The Hour of Lead

I first posted this Emily Dickinson poem on September 11 in 2008.  We were at a crossroads then, waiting to see if the upcoming election would change anything at all about all the things that needed changing.  Now, some things have, but not enough, and again we're waiting.  And still on this day - perhaps always - the formal feeling comes.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs

The stiff Heart questions, was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone --

This is the Hour of Lead --

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow --

First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go --

- Emily Dickinson, #341

Jammin'

In the kitchen of the Villa Muscato (artist's impression)

It happens perhaps three times a year.  Mr. Muscato gets a sort of distant expression; he seems preoccupied.  Eventually, he disappears for a couple of hours, with no explanation.

A lesser, or at least less experienced, man would jump to conclusions, imagining a tawdry affair at the very least.  Me, I know better.  It's the jam, and it's got him bad.

So where's he been?  Why, the greenmarket of course, the chaotic and infinitely tempting labyrinth of market stalls and tailgated trucks that's as close as this artificial place comes to being a real, lively, Middle Eastern city (I can only imagine how disappointed the few people who sat through Sex and the City 2 and then show up here as tourists feel, presented with the slab-concrete-and-shopping-mall reality).  He comes home weighted down with flats and sacks of various fruits and veg, for all of which he's paid significantly less than the average housewife here pays for a kilo or two of carrots in one of the horrifically overpriced supermarkets.

And this week, it's happened again.  The house is steamy, the kitchen is sticky, and the dauntless Mrs. Galapatti-da Silva and I have been cajoled into the role played by the Demon Tots above, half helpers and half drafted admirers.  The dogs hang out beneath the kitchen table, alternately seduced by the smell and the occasional dropped dollop of hot syrup and terrified, for reasons unclear, by the low, guttural sound of the jam-to-be on a slow boil. 

Now, a tidy row of jars line one cupboard.  The current offerings are mango, a staple much in demand by people in the know and the base for Mr. Muscato's Legendary Mango Mousse (which makes strong men weep), along with a new experiment, a strawberry-tomato-clove combo that is, simply put, dynamite.  It's basically crack on toast. 

I would say that the fever has now subsided, but there is still a suspiciously large quantity of guava in the fridge, and I thought I heard him muttering something about trying out a fig-and-banana mix.

Of course, I really don't mind a bit, not least because Jam Week is frequently a prelude to a siege of baking.  If I play my cards right, this could carry us right up to the holidays, just in time for our annual round of experimental turkey roasting.  I've always thought waistlines were awfully over-rated...

Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

63 years ago today, photographer Peter Stackpole captured for the readers of Life this rather intriguing moment in the homelife of Mr. Mario Lanza.  I'm sure the very well set-up young gentleman on the mat is simply, as it were, encouraging the tenor to greater heights of physical fitness.

Well, there's certainly something physical about this snap, no?

Despite the undeniable presence (in history albeit nowhere to be seen here) of Mrs. Lanza and four little Lanzettes, I can't help but think it's telling how the erstwhile Alfred Cocozza chose his stage name - his sainted mother was born Maria Lanza.  And, whatever else may be going on here, you have to admit: great Adirondacks.  Which sound like it ought to be a naughty euphemism, but, at least in this case, isn't.

Question Time: Ask the Oracle #2

Hmmm.  to the best of my knowledge, I'm guessing the answers are:

no; only in spirit; no; no; more so than her career; no; up to a point; hells yes; that's the rumor; and probably not technically, but for all practical purposes, yes.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Mrs. Hart Asks a Question

Since we missed her birthday last Monday, I thought it might be nice to spend this week's SSCE in the always good company of dear Mrs. Moss Hart, née dear Miss Kitty Carlisle (well, actually née dear Miss Catherine Conn, but that's another story altogether).  We meet here here during her too-short stint in Hollywood, as one of the leads of 1934's Murder at the Vanities.

She's in an interrogative mood.  "Why am I puzzled?" she trills repeatedly, and one could argue that what should have been bewildering her isn't the not-all-that-mysterious origin and destination of show girls (Podunk and oblivion, mostly, respectively) as what's going with those sleeve/train/pompom things that have been attached to her Harlowische white bias-cut satin gown.  At one point it looks she's going to start using them as poi balls in a kind of tribute avant la lettre to Miss Dolores DeLago; pity she didn't, as it really could have classed things up... 

While the number does give a rather good idea of what a staged number at Broadway Vanities might have been like (complete with one of the oddest pieces of choreography I've ever seen at 3:13, right after, heaven help us, the lasso demonstration), I'm afraid the whole thing just kind of peters out, as if at some point all involved decided it was just easier to get on with telling the film's (too complicated, on the whole) story.  As the showgirl turntables go by, see who you can spy as one of the glorified stenographers, snapping gum as if she were born to it (I think she was).

Still, it's all great fun while it lasts.  And doesn't she have terrific diction?

Birthday Divas: It's Raining Queens

If the inimitable (thank heaven) Mistress MJ is to be believed, the is indeed ample cause for celebration, as it marks the natal day not just of Gloriana herself (seen here in what to me is still the portrayal against which all others - even that of Mr. Crisp, who comes close - are to be measured) but also of our own dear Thombeau.

Emperor of Fabulon, lord of Chateau Thombeau, and your urbane host over at the Redundant Variety Hour, Thombeau is a true polymath - a writer, musician, artist, and all around flâneur whose work, in whatever medium, is a constant inspiration, frequent amusement, and regular cause of envy.  Did you know that you can yourself beome the proud owner of his remarkable photographs here? Or of his extraordinary music - as Arcanta - on Amazon?

Well, now you do.  And I think you know what to do.  Besides, of course, wishing the dear old thing the very happiest of birthdays...

The Perils of Nightlife

Not long after midnight, Trent's evening took a turn for the worse.  By dawn, nothing was ever the same again.

Our Fair Lady

 

Isn't she great?  The terms of the coming election are really coming into focus, and on the homefront, I think the choice between Mom-in-Chief and Mormo-Robo-Scold is pretty clear.  We don't usually wax too political hereabouts, but really it's astonishing the difference between this week and last, and looking back home from a Sandlandian perspective, almost surreal.

 

Adore the dress - gorgeous color, flattering cut, and a pattern that would have greatly appealed to Grandmother Muscato, all without being retro-costumey.  The woman rocked.  Let's hope the polls do, too.

Unexpected Company

Startled, Clive looked up from the lawn and did a little quick mental calculation.  Tarnation!  This was the day that the ladies of the Charlotte T. Watson Garden Club were coming to admire his plumbago.

No one could have been more discomfited than he.  Except possibly the Vicar, on whom he was at the moment resting, or Mrs. Vicar, second from left.

Topical Philately: Summer into Autumn Slips...

 

You know, I miss the days when stamps were cheap, neoclassical, and featured decorative, holiday-appropriate Moderne beefcake.  Although I suppose I should find it disturbing that both Perfect Mother and Utopian Tot are more muscled than I could ever hope to be...

 

For all those Gentle Readers back in the U.S. of A., a very happy Labor Day.  Whatever happened to summer?  I didn't get nearly enough wearings out of those white shoes.  Damn.

Once upon a Time

On September 3, 1951, Time rather oddly asked the question "Whatever become of 'It'?" directly below a tinted photograph of Miss Ava Gardner.  I would say that she's the answer, with all due apologies to Miss Bow, in spades.

This was what a movie star looked like, 61 years ago.  Think of that, the next time you see Kristen Stewart, or worse (is there?).

Three on a Match

One of my favorite literary meetups took place 53 years ago today, when Lula Smith had Tanne Blixen and Norma Jeane Miller over for lunch.  It was a real lovefest that even the taciturn presence of Mr. Miller couldn't dilute.

I choose to regard as gospel truth the longstanding rumor that, before the afternoon was out, the three of them danced on Lula's marble-topped dinner table.

Magic Moments - Hal David, RIP

The quieter half of one of the great songwriting duos, Hal David created the tricky, often sharply bittersweet lyrics that somehow fit perfectly into Burt Bacharach's tricky, major-minor music.  Theirs was the sound of the non-hippy sixties, the sound of cocktail lounges and supper clubs and other late-night places.  They took the building blocks of pop and made it sound grown up.

David, in his lyrics, has a genius for taking bits and pieces, minutiae (waking up, putting on your makeup) and transforming them into thrilling, sweeping moments of power (forever and ever you'll be in my heart).  That combination of scrupulous detail and just-this-side-of-bombast, paired with the impeccable rhythm and sweep of the Bacharach melodies, keeps in check even the most over the top, hyperfervid passages (anyone who had a heart; without true love we just exist), making them all the more powerful.

I expect today we'll see and hear and, I hope, listen to a great deal of Bacharach-David - a welcome flood of Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield and Tom Jones and even, God help us, the Carpenters and B.J. Thomas.  Some of the best versions of these songs are the least canonical - I love Tim Curry's "Anyone Who Had a Heart," not to mention Elvis Costello's "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself."  Here we have the UK's Eurovision princess, Miss Sandie Shaw, who had a couple of B-D hits, including both this, "Trains and Boats and Planes," and "Always Something There to Remind Me" (if you need a little cheering up, here's a highly AustinPowersische rendition of the latter).

Listening, as a child, to Bacharach-David songs, was an unsettling experience; they were like glimpses of a future alternately thrilling (is there anything sexier than "The Look of Love"?) and uncertain (what happened to that woman, to send her back to San Jose?). Love was full of promises, promises, but it was also something into which one should never fall again. But then you do, and it's a star to wish upon. Wish.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: When Worlds Collide

This marvel was filmed in 1966.  At that time, it's quite astonishing to realize, the period between the high point of the Andrews Sisters' career and that of the Supremes right about this appearance was something like half what it is between then and now.  Then, the simple thought of one doing the other's material was inherently hilarious - that was what made it camp, then.  Patty, Maxene, and Laverne are clearly coming off of some sort of Flapper Number and so must have seemed especially antediluvian next to the Ultra-Now Supremes, making the contrast all the more potentially ludicrous. 

From our perspective now, though, it's clear that both do just great with what they're given, and if anything the Supremes' column dresses, wigs, and carefully ladylike demeanor seems just as period as the Andrews' boas and pearls.  Therein, in fact, lies the camp from today's angle: the distance that both groups have from us, and the unexpected success they wring from the setup.  Not to mention the presence of Sammy Davis, Jr., always an en-camping, as it were, presence in almost any setting.

And, to top it all off, we get a truly classic Diane moment at 1:28.  Why no one has ever hauled off and just slapped that woman I will never know.

As always, this one's for St. Flo, here for once right in the middle.

Redux: We Must Love One Another or Die

First posted here in 2009.  Today it seems more true than ever: Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, too many more.  Wystan was a wise, wise man.

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

- W.H. Auden