Birthday Boy: St. Sal

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

Ginger

I suppose it's no surprise that the ridiculously talented Ginger Rogers also played the accordion. But could she do it backwards in heels?

There's a Hex on Our House!

The first time I saw this amazing cartoon - Sally Cruikshank's Face Like a Frog - probably not long after it came out in 1987, and very probably, if memory serves, at some midnight movie, I was severely stoned.

In many ways, life has never been quite the same - but that, I think, is all for the best. For years we repeated various lines from the cartoon, and I can still get a laugh out of Miss Rheba by going all Gabor with the line "My name's Galooey!"

Misty Watercolored Mem'ries...

That season at Baden Baden, in those permanently sunny days before that sad unpleasantness at Sarajevo, would be just the dimmest of recollections were it not for those stolen hours with Prince Boris.

He was importunate - and had fabulous hair - but I simply could not see myself in a Balkan context. Good thing, too; nothing turned out well in that part of the world for the next eight decades or so...

RIP: A Funny Lady Says Goodnight

I have a love-hate relationship with the New York Times obituary page. As much as I appreciate its detailed and attentive reviews of fascinating lives and times, I also find myself resenting, somehow, when it calls to my attention - just this little bit too late - someone I feel I really ought to have known about all along.

That's distinctly how I feel about learning of the death, on January 1, at the fine age of 98, of Jean Carroll, a trailblazing lady in the all-male world of stand-up comedy and someone who would seem to have been on all fronts a very good time.

As for this record cover, I find it distracting, not so much for the sock-gartered businessman in the background, but because I think that my mother had those orange towels in the guest bathroom 'round about '72.

The Other Miss Davis

And, I suppose, the other Judy, come to think of it.

During her recent visit, dear Miss Rheba brought with her a plethora of marvelous little gifties. As we had not seen her in several years, this trove included any number of things intended to bring us more up to date on stateside pop culture. Chief among them so far has been the DVD of The Starter Wife, which Mr. Muscato and I, despite being the last people in the world to see it, are enjoying enormously.

It's leaving me, I have to say, entirely in awe of Judy Davis, whose merciless delineation of an East Coast lady of a certain age lost and adrift on the wrong side of the continent (and of a distinctly bibulous inclination) is a wonder. I had thought she couldn't top her Garland, but this role - while comparatively a miniature, closely observed but circumscribed, next to that comprehensive marvel - is very, very wonderful indeed.

Who's That (Gibson) Girl?

Anybody recognize this buxom, severely laced young lovely? I certainly didn't at first glance...

The Sweet Smell of Excess

Color me gobsmacked. Mr. Muscato and I just watched, live on Dubai TV, the opening of the Burj Dubai Khalifa. It reminds me, as someone once said of, I believe, the films of Cecil B. DeMille, that it's the kind of thing God would do, if he had the money.

Staged in the presence of Dubai's vision-man himself, Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid al Maktoum (although, alas, his festive wife HRH Princess Haya of Jordan was nowhere to be seen), the spectacle combined the world's most overproduced time-share promotional film displayed on vast screens placed around the building; a dancing waters display that made Las Vegas's Bellagio look like a grade-school drinking fountain; a score that was equal parts Wagner, Moroder, and a low-rent bellydance CD; and, finally, fireworks.

We're not talking your common, garden-variety July 4 fireworks - we're talking cannonades of fireworks; fireworks launched from neighboring towers (their measly 50 or so stories dwarfed by the new tower's 160); fireworks rising out of the ornamental lakes surrounding the tower; and, most jaw-droppingly, fireworks bursting out of what seemed like every inch of the 800+ meter tall building itself.

All it needed was Bette Midler popping up in the palm of a life-size King Kong replica at say the 130th floor to sing "Lullabye of Broadway" to be absolutely perfect, but I'm afraid intentional camp is not something with which Sheikh Mo is terribly familiar.

Dubai gets a lot of bad press, but I have to hand it to them - they know how to throw a housewarming. Still, I fear, there may have been a bittersweet quality to it all for the host, who at the last moment found himself announcing the surprise renaming of the new monument. The former Burj Dubai now glorifies his fellow Emir, Khalifa of Abu Dhabi, who perhaps-not-coincidentally has come through with billions of dollars to help keep the whole show running in recent months. A nice gesture, I suppose, even if not, one suspects, entirely a voluntary one.

1,400

I think of Kay Francis as something of the Café mascot. She's dropped by, in languishing mood beneath her fetching hat (and apparently doing a Marisa-Berenson-in-Cabaret impression), to mark this august occasion: the 1,400th post.

Why this matters, I couldn't say. But anything that gives us a chance to pause and consider Miss Francis must have some (dare I say it?) point...

Point / Counterpoint

A Gentle Reader writes, rather brusquely: "What is the point of your blog?"

I have to admit, this has rather thrown me for a loop. It's not enough to sit around appreciating, in no particular order, the splendiferous career of Dalida, the oddities of life in a petromonarchy, the glories of Bollywood masculine pulchritude (can there be masculine pulchritude? Does the male have its own separate word meaning "state of beauty"?), and whatever else comes to mind in the course of my dog-obsessed, trivia-savoring, peculiar life? Now, on top of all that, I have to have a point? Sheesh.

Apparently, for 1,398 posts, I have nattered on without one; I think it's probably too late to change. If I were absolutely pinned down and forced to declare a theme, I don't think I could top what I came up with back when it all began:

"A vague and jumbled set of fantods, mairzie-doats, and farthingales from someone who ought to know better." I ought to, but I don't, so here we are. And that, in the end, is the point, isn't it?

The Eyes Have It

Dear Donna Lethal has recently reminded us of the importance of the right makeup; here, it would seem that John Abraham has taken up the Nita Naldi school of kohl application. And I think we approve.

Blonde Bombshell

Here, in the latest go at our ongoing mission of spreading the good word about Arabic pop, is one of the region's leading blonde sensations, the vivacious Miss Madeleine Matar, singing her latest hit, "Ama Ajayeb" ("What a Wonder").

Visually, she's a stunning combination of Anna Nicole and Hedwig; vocally, she's not going to set the Nile on fire, but that's not really the reason for her reputation after all, is it? If her emoting and her dancing undulating aren't enough for you - even with her truly Desperate Living-quality fashion choices - there's the truly classy moment in which she catches a Champagne cork in her teeth.

And as for her supporting cast, I do think she has rather good taste in male models. If you've not got the patience to sit through the whole thing, there's an especially fetching moment 'round about 4:00...

Birthday Queen: The Sandwich Consort

Let's pause a moment, this New Year's weekend, to send our regards to a royal lady born this day in 1836. Queen Emma of Hawaii (named more colorfully in her day the Sandwich Islands), known to her friends as Emma Kalanikaumakaamano Kaleleonalani Naea Rooke, was a popular queen consort, and an educated and sophisticated lady.

Of how many people can it be said that of them Queen Victoria herself remarked, "Nothing could be nicer or more dignified than her manner"?

While her machinations to succeed her husband Kamehameha IV came to naught, she seems to have been a good sort in general. Her favorite things included traditional Hawaiian song, enhancing the royal library, and Episcopalianism; her least favorites likely included her successor (and aunt) Queen Esther Julia Kapi'olani, who was probably a pill.

In the Garden

So here we are, in what feels like a new decade even if the numbers-minded (who were last heard from reminding us that the millennium really began in 2001) disagree. I find that since writing so many fewer checks, I don't honestly notice the change of year as much as I once did, but even so it seems quite odd to already be so far in to the 21st century. Time in its flight and all that...

Which doesn't, I suppose, have a great deal to do with this picture taken while visiting a local museum in Miss Rheba's company last week, although there is something comfortingly non-transitory about this kind of garden.

The house feels quiet today, for Miss Rheba jetted back off to the hurly-burly of the U.S. of A. at an ungodly hour this morning, and as a result Mr. Muscato and I find ourselves sleep-deprived, or rather even more than one usually is on January 1, and enjoying that quiet, sneaking sense of relief one experiences upon the departure of even the most treasured houseguest. I think we're ready to face the new year, but we're taking an extra day of vacation just to make sure.