Fair Padua

Fay-shun has resurfaced en Italia!

Luv

Lately, when it comes to pop, I've been pretty open (hello Miley). I'm just not so consumed with style or ethics in the face of a good/fun song. I am leery of this fella's overcooked costumes, but the tune is a total charmer. It's been stuck in my head all day (almost made me skip down First Avenue). That line about sunscreen is a cube of sugar!

We've preached an odd mixture of temperance and total embrace of 90's redux at A&P (see directly below for another of the trillion mentions of the stuff). It's just an odd experience, seeing the very items that I bought at Contempo Casuals on the backs of high school girls who've now picked them up at thrift shops. But, of course, at the top of this decade, we redid the eighties, despite hardly remembering them (and we looked good)...anyhow, when it comes to musics, I have no fear or trepidation. I am very ready to hear the 90's again, though less grunge, more Garbage or Elastica or 'what have you'-style pop rock, comme ça (oh Yes!)--

Nail Color For the Days of Awe

Essie's "Loophole" (with moderate chipping)












I suppose one could go about this many ways. There are those who, admirably and age-appropriately, live with permanent nail uniforms (be they red or ivory), not to be shifted on account of any old tea-dance, trend, holy day. For the young (or young-at-heart) and changeable, I think a snazzy/garish set of neon or primary digits is a no no--not only because they reek of non-atonement, but also because summer is ovahh.

Yom Kippur is a day of 'decking' with heels and hair-sheen, a girl's luxe but sober autumnal best. I fully intended to get a manicure today, a flat beige or a russet or a forest green (the colors I'll be opting for all season). But as lunch left me with less and less cash, I found last week's 90's redux-obvious (yet handsome) silver paintjob, about 30% chipped away, looked just right--ragged, full of yesterday's intentions. And the name of the varnish is just too too hilariously correct for the occasion!

Sex and Scotland

Henry Fuseli
Macbeth and The Witches
1793-4

Whatta Schmata

I really think she looks tremendous.

Verses

A chart of symbols found in the 'Tarocchi of Mantegna'--

Iliaco       Sun disc
Chronico     Ouroboros Dragon
Cosmico      Heavenly Globe
Temperance   Two vases                 Dog, Cat, weasel,
                                      or stoat/ermine
Prudence     Mirror                    Dragon
Strength     Sceptre                   Lion
Justice      Sword and scales          Crane
Charity      Wallet, offering charity  Pelican
Hope         in attitude of prayer     phoenix
Faith        Chalice and Host          Dog

Luna           Moon disc
Mercury        Flute Caduceus with two
           intertwined dragons     Cock
Venus          Seashell                Ducks
Sun            Sun disc                Scorpion Crabs
Mars           Sword                   Dogs (hunting)
Jupiter        Arrow (thunderbolt)     Eagle
Saturn         Scythe                  Ouroboros
Eighth Sphere  Starry Disc
Prime Mover    Empty Sphere
First Cause    Cosmos

Waxing Moon

I'm mad suspicious of MacKenzie Phillips's claims of an affair with her Pops, and even more suspicious of her story that brilliant modelizer, Mick Jagger, wanted to boff her since she was ten. Clearly I'm having a rough week, and I'm being cruel but...why won't anyone talk about how ridiculously unattractive she was(is)?! She's an actress and a junkie and not so pretty, methinks she has plenty reason to lie about this stuff for attention/benjamins. Her poor siblings. Or poor her? Whatever.

Hotness for Thursday

Gorgeous Google search.

Wednesday is About Protest Songs

Have you seen the video of Hiram Mon. dragging his girlfriend through their lobby? He best get at least 2 years, because he's a violent scumbag who's trying to topple the New York State government as well as cut-up women who love him, and because that's what Plaxico got. Plaxico had a gun, an illegal gun. I know. I'm clearly effected by how good-looking and young he is, how he's a baller. But isn't shooting yourself in the leg punishment enough? Two years at Rikers for a guy who harmed himself (and who has small children). It's awful. No other developed nation imprisons the high percentage of its population that we do, or at the cost that we do. This seems sad, expensive, dumb.

And that's the end of my kvetching for this week (ha).

When I first spotted one of these print ads I was struck with fear---did Budweiser redesign their packaging??!!! But no. It's some new red ale stuff. Fine. I hate hate this label (it looks like Boston, beneath the E*Trade building or along the Harbor). And if they even think about changing the original lager label...

As The World Turns

Woah! When I praised Jay-Z's recent "Empire State of Mind" (see below) I knew nothing of this----
---his new and pisspoooooooor track that makes use of that odious cover-sample-thing of/from Alphaville's "Forever Young". It's gross. And foolish. And disrespectful. And not even a little bit in keeping with what makes the original so good. Eww.

Welcome to La Nueva, "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution."

Fuck Fay-shun Week...it's Diplomacy Week!
I suggest you read all of this.
And then look at all of these.
And then, can we talk about it?
xo

p.s. This shit is an ABOMINATION.

...as far as I can tell, this incessant pairing of his name with Ahmadinejad's by the media, is rather crude. Opposition to Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic (obviously the Iranian leader's Holocaust denial is). Am I wrong?------He's so glamorous.

View of a Demolished Building

The Charles Schwab Mansion, West Manhattan (Riverside Drive and 73rd St.), built 1901, gutted and fashioned into apartments in 1930, wholly demolished and replaced comme ça c.1950.

Snap

I've always admired/feared the way the English grip their celebrities. It's such a very small island with just so maaaannnnyyyy tabloids. If you are famous at one time, even for one thing, you will continue to be covered, regardless of your having any sort of career, for many eons. If you are "of the moment" you will be covered to death. So, if you're among those soignée Harry Potter children (relevant, present, A-list) or if you were once a one-hit wonder or soap (or reality) actor who now has got gouty and unemployed, either way, you will be in magazines and papers, receiving all form of publicity, great and small. It's a shame how ready to out-mode--in general--Americans are, positively exiling all who/anything that lacks "freshness" or "power." But, however charmingly encompassing their coverage, it's also a shame how ruthless English schlock journalists can be, most likely to attack or smear, outright lie-tell. Anyhow...this above lady, Nicola Roberts, is a member of Girls Aloud, the most successful of a spate of U.K. reality television bands from the early aughts (como Danity Kane). They've had something like twenty top ten hits in the U.K., though a glance at the numbers, shows them peaking at #10 and #11 in 2008. They are reaching "the end of a glittery reign" perhaps? I'm out of touch with these dynamics overseas, but I get the distinct impression that Ms. Roberts is entering the "famous as a former famous person" phase of her Brit celebrity story arc. And--mall makeup aside--she has never looked better. There should be more breasts addressed this way in fay-shun, not as overspill, but as form, through sheer fabric, or none at all (como las Minoans). It's stripper by way of Mary Quant by way of Poiret, absolutely charming. And I imagine it's being roundly mocked (that's always a good sign). Here are some more views.

Monday

William Henry Fox Talbot
Breakfast Table
Photogenic drawing
c. 1841

Tekiaaahhhh

I got bored and sad talking about Fashion Week. Even before I could write-up Calvin Klein and Oscar and those beautiful, light and peachy warm-weather furs at Dennis Basso and Queen of Los 90's, Isaac Mizrahi's, decade-delayed return to the Tents.

It wasn't the clothes. I really love to think and write about clothes. It's how the Fay-shun business, a fat, airy planet (and it's moons and its satellites), is spangly and aggressive and (mostly) dumb. It's bi-annual (and sometimes tri-annual) stomping and performing rites are meant, I suppose, to sell and be...pleasurable. But--despite what I said at the outset-- the consumerist "violence" fell/felt flat this year. I'm not some Recession Puritan, who eschews all gross displays of wealth in these hard times. It's just, the New York factions looked to be pretending there wasn't a Recession on at all. Instead they might have, with a bit of bravado, used the dingy economic circ's to be subversive with their brand of excess...also, it's just quite apparent that NYC lags behind Paris and Milan (and Belgium). At the end of the last century, Europe was dogged by tradition, a certain narrowness, while, in attractive opposition, America was an open expanse, ungoverned, candid, audacious. These days, the tables have turned MAJORLY. We are the stiff-necked and delusional population, the ones with some great blockage.

However, I have been feeling pretty dedicated to America lately. And so have my friends. I'm pleased to look American ("unsophisticated" though it may be...?). And travel American. I'm pleased to think about American history, both proud and dismal. I can no longer pretend an America. All I can see is the actual. Though this does not leave off sentiment...

I'm getting particularly sentimental about hometowns (Memphis and the NYC) and "representation." And though I've tried to be sour about his new effort (ahem), I seem to be liking Jay-Z's single, "Empire State of Mind." It's merit is entirely due to Alicia Keys's solid, rallying cry hook--

New York!!!! Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York!!! These streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York!

So, it's corny for sure. And thank G-d. This is a great moment for corny. And if anyone can get away with singing baldly about things like "inspiration" and "dreams" (with exclamation marks) it's Alicia Keys, a not always stylish, but certainly earnest artist. The refrain at once uplifts, as intended, and deflates with it's exuberance, a quality made real in the song, but not necessarily abundant in this listener, in many of us, at the close of a trying, oft creepy summer. I like this push and pull. I like the conflicting emotions it draws out.

Jay's voice is one I've been feeling less and less comfortable with. I love his story and his wife, their upper upper echelon. But, over time, I've been able to read what a businessman he is, ever-cool, relatively soulless. I've said for a while (and so have others) that Jay-Z's first huge summer-jam pop single, "Hard Knock Life," was aimed straight at me and peers, bourgeois, preteen girls (as of 1998), with its sample from the musical Annie. In this new single, Jay speaks to us, now aged (alongside his subsequent Blueprints and Black Album) directly, with a verse about post-collegiate party girls errantly "addicted to the high life" (the very 'high life' he and like-others sold us?). As Alicia "uplifts," Jay declares "8 million stories out there in the Naked City/It's a pity half of y’all won’t make it." The crosspurposes persist. And Alicia's voice begins to sound desperate, as if she's trying to wail Gospel with no air left in her lungs. Our town's greatest poet (I think I'm allowed to say that) wrote, "I contradict myself. So, I contradict myself." This (teehee) high/low, up/down, brave/despondent, open/limited stuff is pretty quintessentially New York (American...human). The song may achieve far more than it set out to...

Among D.J. A.M.'s last communications before his August suicide was (sadly enough) a Twitter post that went something like "New York City ain't all it's cracked up to be." And he was right. This town reneges on promises. It is the Omni-American capital, the seat of our Big Commercial Empire, Empire of Capitalist teasing, illusions, smoke, mirrors. New York is extraordinary, handsome, tough, varied, rich, "naked," FAST. The dashing of hope, met handily by its constant renewal, marks the New York Experience. It is never what "it's cracked up to be," because the place has already shifted as a summation of it is made. These revolutions can dazzle, and they can also terrify, make one miserable. New York is one thing to a visitor (a glittering, sleepless mecca), and another to a citizen (your house, your block, your long walk to and from the grocery store). It is our home. For us, it must needs be average or below-average, at least some of the time. The mythology of the place, the thrill of the tourist, the interloper, can either boost our prodigious egos or make us smart with bitterness. It depends on one's luck, on the weather.

Here is "Empire State of Mind" and the song that accompanies it on my current favorite playlist, bang--

Funny For Sickday

I googled "how to stop a cold" last night, and found myself on the Men's Health website. I once read an issue of this hooey uncomfortably drunk at ten in the morning on the couch of a creep who worked in advertising (I think he had a subscription). Anyway, here is a particularly miserable piece, penned by a lady, about how to woo a lady. Lawd.

For Petrova

Dot Biz

I'm amazed that Beyoncé Knowles still has so many god damn detractors. Recently some friends mentioned they disliked the nasal quality of her voice, which is a welcome criticism considering how scurrilous and weird most media/blog attacks on the pop star are. It's a matter of taste. I happen to like nasal sounds when they are used with style and subtlety, as with Bey, as a portion of a crafted noise. Bey will make a siren call through her nose, and then, in an instant, turn a corner and snarl or rap or belt.

Anyway, as mentioned, most criticism launched at this accomplished diva is foolish. There are the obvious attacks on her body and clothes, mostly launched by mean gays. Then there's the (also obvious) attacks on her drive, ambition, and success as, you know, a womyn. A site that I check weekly or biweekly, Bossip, calls her a bitch and a robot and a fake on the regular. Por ejemplo, they thought they were really onto something when they got news that Bey's giving over of the spotlight to Taylor Swift (O.M.G. have you heard that number?!) at the VMAs was arranged, planned. Um, yeah. It was. Because the VMAs are a live televised show, and they have a "plan" for everything that happens, because otherwise, it wouldn't happen. Taylor came from backstage. It was obvious. She had been in Times Square performing mid-ceremony. I'm sure that MTV and Bey and her people and Taylor and her people had a conversation. Maybe, in the course of that conversation MTV informed Bey that she would be winning Video of the Year. Maybe, she already knew. Kanye had hurled them into an unexpected P.R. kerfuffle. Each of their brands had been brought into his media-circus-wooing, and they each needed to come out on top (Kanye be damned). Why are people so confounded by art+commerce--particularly, pop music+commerce?! Beyoncé Knowles is a businesswoman, and a very good one. Beyoncé Knowles is a performer, and a very good one. What the fuck is "realness" anyway? I got the impression that Bey "meant" the gesture, however it was orchestrated. But, whatever. Why are we so concerned with the character of our artists and performers, with what "sorts" of people they are? I'm not saying I'm immune to it (clearly), but I wish I would be.

Update: Bossip just posted this. And then this caca. It's OVAHHHH between us!!!!

Verses

"Ten Cents A Dance"
Lorenz Hart
1930

I work at the Palace Ballroom,
but, gee that Palace is cheap;
when I get back to my chilly hall room
I'm much to tired to sleep.
I'm one of those lady teachers,
a beautiful hostess, you know,
the kind the Palace features
for only a dime a throw.

Ten cents a dance
that's what they pay me,
gosh, how they weigh me down!
Ten cents a dance
pansies and rough guys
tough guys who tear my gown!
Seven to midnight I hear drums.
Loudly the saxophone blows.
Trumpets are tearing my eardrums.
Customers crush my toes.
Sometimes I think
I've found my hero,
but it's a queer romance.
All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.

Fighters and sailors and bowlegged tailors
can pay for their ticket and rent me!
Butchers and barbers and rats from the harbors
are sweethearts my good luck has sent me.
Though I've a chorus of elderly beaux,
stockings are porous with holes in the toes.
I'm here till closing time.
Dance and be merry, it's only a dime.

Sometimes I think
I've found my hero,
but it's a queer romance.
All that you need is a ticket
Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance.

New York Fashion Week, Spring 2010 Collections: Big Kids

Marc Jacobs—For a couple of seasons now, I've found his work (here and in Paris) murky. The ruffles. Those grotesque bags. That tawdry Aughts-cum-30's (or 40's or 50's) satin underwear. The sheer and ill-fitting gowns and belted coats (not so much "belted coats" as coats and belts). I don't hate this list of elements. I've sported and celebrated each of them. But, though I almost never say this, a girl would be a fool to shop these looks anywhere but in a thrift shop or a Mama's closet.

Donna Karan—I had to glance over the collection a couple of times to stop decrying the hats. They began to recede, and I felt as if these were clothes that I had made (but for their delicacy and precision). I mean, they look like the product of some extraordinary home experiment in drapery. It is as if the models wrapped themselves with the finest fabrics, trimmed, sculpted, fastened with a sash. It's ancient! I love this lady.

Carolina Herrera and J. Mendel—My second and third favorite of this sort of fussy luxe (Oscar being the clear first). Herrera is doing print and sheen in a way that I am v. ready for. The critic who invokes a tired, "Uptown-Downtown" reading does her a great disservice. The gestalt of J. Mendel is a little too tasteful (without ease), for me, but the coats, set apart, are PERFECT.

Thakoon—Whatever.....is that mean? Maybe I'm just tired.

Baby Baby Baby Baby

Congratulations are in order! Weezy and, personal (life)style icon, Lauren London delivered their healthy baby bhoy in Atlanta this morning. And what's more, they gave him a hot (sorta Jewy) name!

Over the weekend I watched The new Lil Wayne Behind the Music on VH1 (they don't cover enough rappers). Do take a look if you have an hour to spare. I plan on rewatching it. Multiple times.

I've become a great fan of his ex-wife Toya's, via her BRILLIANT B.E.T. reality collaboration with T.I.'s main lady, Tameka "Tiny" Cottle. And, as I've stated, A&P loves Lauren too. Next (in a couple of months), Millennial hot girl, Nivea, will give birth to Mr. Carter's fourth heir (there is another son, born between Toya and Lauren's girl and boy, whose mother remains unnamed).....um....remember Nivea's masterful 2003 joint effort with Roberto K.?--

THIS IS YOUR RECEIPT AND IS NOT A TICKET FOR TRAVEL

News of the Monday

Bill and Barack had a late lunch at Il Mulino today. A bit of news that is glamorous and happy. But I hate how the Obamas have eating disorders (at least Bill's still an aesthete...).

Don't Let Me Hear You Say Life's Taking You Nowhere

'Cause the VMAs are stupid anyway. Bey was absolutely robbed. And Kanye was just doing what he always does, which is rip off people that are way cooler than him.



Also, Kanye wins because he got to go home with the best trophy of all. I can't find a picture of Amber Rose's outfit that isn't going to take up the whole blog, but can we talk about it? Where does she shop? I want to go to there.

New York Fashion Week, Spring 2010 Collections: A Backward Glance

Despite my high hopes, for the most part, this weekend's shows have read...Angelino. Of course, many BIG HOUSES won't be trotting out garments until weekdays, which accounts for (some of) the lack of lustre. But, really, there's a whole lot of designer-stylists making down(ish)-market luxe right now—the sort of clothes that belong on racks, in closets, in the mix, but not whole, total, look-to-look-to-look on a runway (not enough theater or architecture or MONEY, by miles).

Last month, on a lunch mission to buy this incredibly smart, wool double-breasted jacket, I came across two Alexander Wang satchels, one in slashed-up, buttery, dull, black leather, the other with a sort of pewter lamé treatment. They're $900 each; so, for me, no dice. But I was quite impressed. They were useful and beautiful. They had a nice weight, felt tremendous on the shoulder. They were cool and urbane and unfussy, real New York items, American Sportswear sans the Prep. However, I found myself "not getting" his Saturday showing. "Not getting" is a thing I don't think I do much. I'm no genius, mind you. I just am never that preoccupied with "getting," compartmentalizing, encompassing. I'm quite comfortable with loose and dead ends, with disconnection and collage. But here, though the "vintage football" theme is clever, the clothes just do not make any damn sense to me. The items look stiff, awkward, tailored against (not for) the body, not so much to invoke art or gender politics, as to appear modish-via-inelegance, the dullest and tiredest of hipster tropes.

The other most-buzzed as of Sunday A.M.: Ohne Titel. I have an even harder time with this stuff. Again, I dig the stated origin point of the collection, mummies. But the clothes cloy. They are of the "body-con" school, which I find severe and socially irresponsible and DONE. And--speaking of "DONE"--this haute, 80s-tinged tech-sportsgear feels very, very Balenciaga to me. These garments are over-designed, lacking permanence and...relevance?

These two, and a few not-so-worth-mentioning others, didn't take me anywhere but down the block (to some godforsakenvelvetropedbottleservicelounge).