Next Stop, Miami Beach!

We may not have bacchanales on the scale of yesteryear on tap today, but I'm still indulging in a favorite Hallowe'en treat...

News of the Rialto

So Miss Peters is set to succeed Miss Midler as Mrs. Levi.  It seems a fully respectable, but somehow deflatingly predictable, sort of choice.

Beautiful Dreamer

Birthmark, 1980

One of the unexpected boons of the sometimes-plague that is Facebook is the chance to catch up with all kinds of onetime crushes.

Once Again - 'Tis the Season

Over the years, this little gem has become the way we usher in the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, and while I'm still having a few doubts as to how wonderful this one's going to be, here goes.

Shameless Monday Camp Explosion: So Special

Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

- Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp

Happy New Year, Possums!

I suppose it's inevitable that after the festivities and distractions of the last few weeks - the race through Christmas toward the new year - that there might be something of a lull this first weekend of January. Well, I can't think of a more bracing tonic for the post-holiday blues than a while spent in the high-wire company of everybody's favorite Housewife Megastar.

'Tis the Season

Well, it's time to kick off the festive season, and with that comes traditions - few dearer to me than starting off each year with this little gem as the first Christmas song I listen to on purpose (as opposed to all the elevator music that's been being pumped out hither and yon since something like the week after Labor Day).

The Powers That Be

Yes, it's time to get back on the train, due to a circumstance beyond our control, and while it might not be as disastrous as a pigeon from hell, it does feel rather like a chain gang...

After All These Years, Still Definitely Not a Fruitcake

Here at the Café, our Christmas holiday has started, so it seems appropriate to kick off the festive season in the way that's become something of a tradition hereabouts.

All the Eyes That Watched Her Once

Over in his erudite corner of the blogiverse, the Post Apocalyptic Bohemian has reminded us that this week marks what should have been the birthday of a remarkable performer who made it on Broadway, became a household name in a vehicle unworthy of her talents, and then flamed out far too quickly.  Nell Carter would seem in no way to have been an easy person, but at her best, she was magical.

Birthday Girl: Hellcat

A baby named Anne Frances Robbins was born on this day in 1921 in New York City, the daughter of a car dealer and an only middlingly successful stage actress.  That means that today, Nancy Reagan is 93.  So the old saying does have some truth in it, sometimes: only the good die young.

Memory Lane: The Love We Feel

Ah, the joys of 1990!  It was a remarkable year, for me at least - the first full year in a rather glam job, one that brought with it the first trips abroad, to London and Paris, Berlin (West and East) and Tokyo.  Not to mention a memorable cross-country car trip, New York to San Francisco, as '90 turned into '91.  Whatever the destination, this number was most definitely on the soundtrack...

Distinctly Not a Fruitcake

In many ways, I truly don't feel like the holidays are upon us until I've seen this a few [dozen] times.

Why Don't You...

...frame your entire approach to this year's Hallowe'en in the context of this sublime work, Sally Cruikshank's magnificent Face Like a Frog?  Even if it's only all in your mind.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock and Roll

32 years ago today. Feeling old yet?

Birthday Girl: Folkbird?

Well, here's a surprise with which to start off July...

Birthday Girl: Strange Angel

Miss Laurie Anderson is 66 today, and while she might not be the cultural touchstone she was for much of the last two decades of the end of the last century, I'm sure she remains cooler than it's really possible to be.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Don't Look Down

"Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Herewith a Very Special Edition of SSCE, an old familiar treasure I was lucky enough to stumble upon this morning.  It's one I suspect will be familiar to many a Gentle Reader, but it remains as wonderful the thirty-oddth time as it was all those years ago back in the summer of 1984.  It's Bette Midler's epochal Art or Bust tour, seen in its full version (rather than the sadly trimmed hour-long HBO special that omitted, if memory serves, the incredible medley of "Broken Bicycles," "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and "Here Comes the Flood").  It's all here - her swaggering "Pink Cadillac," the great bits of video from the Continental Baths and her breakthrough appearance on the AJC telethon, her Dolores DeLago disco marathon (in which the Harlettes prove they are troupers in every way), and finally a breathtaking "Stay with Me."  It holds up.

Art or Bust came out just as I turned 21, and watching after very nearly three decades (and many, many viewings in the interim), it struck me how much it was part of shaping my taste, shaking me out of the solemnity of studying Art History and showing me that it was possible to take things - funny, sad, loud, mad - right to the edge and then that little bit beyond.  We may none of us have the unstoppable momentum, the half-crazed inspiration, of the Divine Miss M. (I didn't then, and heaven knows don't have it today), but how lucky we are to bask in her glow, to draw on her energy - her extraordinary generosity as a performer - even now.  If you've got a spare hour-and-a-half this Decoration Day weekend (for all you Statesiders), enjoy.

Shameless Sunday Camp Explosion: Birthday Diva

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

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

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

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

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

Rockbird Superstar

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

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