Lux Lotus

Sparkle and Fade

Iconic as the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's may be, I've always preferred the original novella. Truman Capote captured the louche sensibilities of young people starting out in the city in a way that Audrey Hepburn's Hollywood glamour eclipsed in the movie. Re-reading it last night, I came across one of my favorite style pointers from a literary heroine, ever:

"It's like Tiffany's," she said. "Not that I give a hoot about jewelry. Diamonds, yes. But it's tacky to wear diamonds before you're forty, and even that's risky. They only look right on the really old girls...wrinkles and bone; white hair and diamonds: I can't wait."

I couldn't agree more. Maybe by the time that I'm ready for them, the diamond industry will have ended its exploitative practices.

My Love is Like a Dead, Red Rose

TMFTML points out this excellent essay in The Guardian, in which Geoff Dyer discusses the love affair between Edward Weston and eternal muse Tina Modotti.

Weston was contemptuous of "bourgeois" respectability but he was wary of "too much sentimentality over the proletariat. Too much deification of the Indian." Modotti, though, was becoming steadily more drawn to the simmering cauldron of Mexican politics.

That certainly sounds like every one of my failed relationships. The exhibition is at The Barbican Art Gallery in London through August 4.

It's Psychedelic, Baby!

In a recent post, I mentioned the installation that Brazilian-born artist assume astro vivid focus is currently showing at The Whitney, created in collaboration with LA art-rock band Los Super Elegantes. At a show I went to last month, The Distillers did a fabulous cover of "You're Gonna Miss Me," a song by Austin, TX '60s psychedelic rock pioneers The 13th Floor Elevators. Style.com has a slide show of the season's fashion highlights, with picks from designers Aya Takano, Jonathan Saunders, Henri Bendel's Stephen Burrows revival, and Marc Jacobs.

Long-banished as a holdover from the hippie era, psychedelia is back in a big way. An article in The Herald (UK) entitled Go on, give us a swirl sums up the trend succinctly:

Now truly stylish sneakers come adorned with the cartoon stars and moons of 1970s pop artist Peter Max and the luggage that marks out its owner as a traveller of sensibility as well as substance displays the colourful swirls of a Pucci print rather than the repeated initials of a French fashion house.
Glowing with colour, but a universe away from the days when putting purple next to pink counted as daring, the psychedelic fashion that burst the barriers of good taste in the 1960s has come of age.

Also in on the bohemian trend are the oh-so-easy-to-do-at-home ombre knits that Prada is showing. On the other end of the spectrum, Matthew Williamson, a British designer who has made a career out of his rich hippie aesthetic with collections like "Electric Angel," cashes in this season with a gorgeous, lush collection for luxury stationer Smythson.

Destinations like Amsterdam delight this spring with plenty of options for the traveler who'd rather spend money on other things:

Anna's Youth Hostel, located along Spui Strasse, is a must-stay. If you're a boho-chick, you'll love the Indian-styled arches, richly coloured voile drapes and vibrant pink and orange interior. The hostel isn't just pleasing on the eye - it is equally pleasing on the wallet. For a reasonable 18 euros per person per night, you get to stay in the heart of the city, in a stylish dormitory, with linen, towels and internet access thrown in.

And of course, no discussion of bohemian style would be incomplete sans mention of Antik Batik and its kindred fashion spirit Antoine & Lili, a Parisian chain of magenta-clad boutiques selling exotic, eclectic kitsch and an in-house line of designer clothing. Elements of this look can easily be acquired with a quick trip to Pearl River for a dose of peony power and a dash of whimsy for your crash pad.

And, in semi-related news, here's a terrific piece from Slate on why no one does acid anymore.

The New Service Economy

The International Herald Tribune has a good piece reviving interest in what seems to be a perenially provocative topic: organizing sex workers. According to the article:

"It's not easy," said Lopes, who also said membership had grown to 300 in the London area. "The main obstacle is that there's no tradition of unionization, so many sex workers don't know what the union is, and there's the whole issue of keeping their job secret."

With human trafficking becoming a growing concern both here in the United States and abroad, it's going to be interesting to see if trade union organizing emerges as a solution.

In California, the Exotic Dancers Alliance has won some real gains, especially for workers at the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, whose organizing drive was the subject of the short film Live Nude Girls Unite!. I saw the film at the DC Labor Film Festival a couple of years ago, and I believe that Makor is showing it here in New York in June.

From Juke Joints to Rudy's Old Hat

Anyone who knows me knows that I love New Orleans. It's the most wonderful place on earth, but sort of complicated and a little too biblical for me, and so I live in New York and visit New Orleans whenever I have the opportunity. Since I was last there, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art has opened at the University of New Orleans, and it looks intriguing. Like the Folk Art Museum here in New York, it looks as though the museum may be too reliant on survey exhibitions that lean toward being too precious but there are a few potential gems, like this work: Bailey's Late Nite Spot, Rolling Fork, Mississippi by Birney Imes, part of his Juke Joint series.

While we're on the topic of Southern culture, it's worth taking a look at this online project about the First Monday tradition in Ripley, Mississippi:

The standard wisdom is that you can find anything you want at First Monday (and a lot you probably don’t want but might buy anyway). Items offered for sale or trade include sunglasses, guinea fowl, videotapes, baby strollers, sweet potatoes, bumper stickers, shotguns, porch swings, worn-out farm implements, dolls, microwave ovens, dogs, T-shirts, artificial floral arrangements, and just about everything in between.

I haven't been to Ripley, but my mother's family does live in the southern part of the state and I remember often going to a local junk shop when I was small and we used to visit my grandmother in Moselle. My father actually bought a samovar there, and if you have ever been to Mississippi, you can imagine what a strange and wonderful find that would be. Miraculously, I found a story online about Rudy and his shop, called Rudy's Old Hat.

My grandmother died earlier this year, and I hadn't seen her for a long time. I have wonderful memories of going on errands with her to Magnolia Bank and then grocery shopping at the local Jitney Jungle. Her name was Virginia, and she was a true original. She only called me by my middle name because she felt that it was a better Southern name than the one my father ("that Yankee") had given me. She could appreciate a good chapeau like all Southern ladies do, and let me keep her company while she listened to gospel records by Elvis and sometimes drink an RC cola from her stash.

Charmed and Dangerous

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't many opportunities to post things. Also, my waking hours are relentlessly overcommitted, and I'm always running from one thing to the next. I'm leaving for Sleater-Kinney in a few minutes, so I won't have enough time to write a nuanced, well-composed post. However, the blog is a mouth that must be fed, and also, I'd like to comment on the Dorothea Tanning profile in the new New Yorker while it's still fresh and new. And of course, who knows when I'll be back again, and I don't want to leave you with nothing to ponder. The experimental solution I've devised is that I'm just going to type my notes for tonight, and we'll see what comes of it.

Life & Letters dispatch from The New Yorker
by Jane Kramer

"A gallant + glamourous life," emerges

read Dorothea Tanning's memoir!

Charmed and Dangerous? [ed. note: already looking for a title]

"At ninety three, Tanning is still working on what, by any standards, has been a gallant and glamourous life, revisiting it here and there to make it more enticing."

Notes:
Things I must see
Tate Modern, "where her famous 1970 pnk wool sculpture 'reclining nude' sits in a big Plexiglas box in the 'subversive objects' gallery."

Phila. Museum paid almost $1m for "birthday" self-portrait, 1942 - saw that at the Surrealism exhibition at the Met last year. It's the one with the lemur, I think.

"oldest living emerging poet" she will say when she's...

read Another Language of Flowers

"Between Lives" is memoir title

Surrealism: Desire Unbound was @ The Met in 2002

She endowed the Tanning Prize in poetry, and then changed the name to honor Wallace Stevens and deflect attention from herself.

[poet J.D.] "McClatchy calls her Lolita - 'the wide-eyed voice of a ferocious, fanged wisdom'

She is complex but not complicated. She is provocative, smart.

Well, that's all there is, and it sort of works because it must for now. Do pick up the magazine; it's well worth it for her mordant wit alone. Here's an interview she did a couple of years ago. Elizabeth has more on Ms. Tanning over at the Cupcake blog.

It's Not Such a Bad Thing After All

I spent a lovely Sunday in Brooklyn, although you are just hearing it about now because I don't have a computer at home so I scrawl everything in a spiral notebook the old-fashioned way and type it whenever I have the opportunity. It took me an hour and a half to get there, but it gave me plenty of time to observe people on the subway and think about what it may be that I want to do next. And, it worked out in the end, because Elizabeth drove me home and we listened to Los Super Elegantes in the car and looked at the skyline of Manhattan at night and that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

There was a tourist on the subway who was trying painfully hard to fit in, but to accomplish this unfortunate aim he chose to don a velvet blazer and a pink pique polo (say it 10 times fast!) with the collar straight up. Straight up. When I finally got to Park Slope, I faced a wardrobe miscalculation of my own, as I was wearing a late-spring poncho when I should have stuck with an early-spring wrap instead. And, of course, there was nowhere to buy a sweater because it's Brooklyn. It's great because it's cheap or something. The Tea Lounge had the Singles soundtrack blaring, and it felt like someone turned on the "way-back machine" in there, in a good way.

Anyway, it was a great day, and it reminded me of a poem I like to read when I'm feeling sort of aimless. It's from Guru Punk by Louise Landes Levi, a poet who sort of riffs off "established" styles in the Buddhist/Beat tradition from a modern, feminine perspective:

MEDITATION

I
suppose I really
should be out defending
human rights somewhere/feeding
the hungry (apart from my
street offerings to the
homeless people),

somehow improving the
condition of the world/ but
then, it's not such a bad thing, after-
all, to take a peaceful walk down
14th Street, in NYC, listen-
ing to the way the people
talk here & looking
around,

"THIS YEAR I'M GONNA HIT
ST. VALENTINES DAY
WITH A PASSION"

he said on
Avenue

A

Tulips, to Kiss You

There was a good piece in the Christian Science Monitor on Friday about an intriguing artist whose paintings have been rediscovered.

The French Huguenot painter Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533 to 1588) was valued in his time as an artist who would record accurately what he observed.

...Le Moyne's botanical paintings convey the pleasure of recognition. He didn't paint rare plants. Certainly the wild daffodils he portrayed were immensely common.

...Le Moyne lived in a century when plants began to be appreciated for their appearance, and not simply for their folk-cure properties.

I, too, found myself beguiled by spring and her attendant charms as I walked a few blocks to the subway yesterday and was amazed to see tulips planted in nearly every windowbox and planter in my neighborhood. Every conceivable color and type seemed to be represented - pink, yellow, red, white, scalloped edges, rounded edges, etc. It was quite lovely, especially compared to my old neighborhood in, where else, Hell's Kitchen, where I had to keep a constant eye on my open window lest the neighbor's rottweiler come barreling in from the fire escape. Not lovely, but I could hear the foghorns of ships on the Hudson, and that was nice.

My birthday is not too far away, and my dream gift is a class at Jane Packer's Flower School. I think it sounds like a very interesting time, because everyone knows that good flowers in New York are astronomically expensive, and it makes sense to do the best you can with the sort that abound at the corner store. So, I think it will pay for itself, and I'll have a good time for a few days while I look for a new job.

One of these days, I'm going to check out the Lotus Garden, on a Sunday when it's open to the public.

Good springtime reading would be The Tulip: The Flower That Has Made Men Mad by Anna Pavord.

Always clever, The Morning News has devoted its "non-expert" columns to houseplants today.

Outside. Looking In (cont.)

The other day I wrote about outsider art, and mentioned this:

At the Guggenheim, I once saw an intricate, highly ornamental coat made by an institutionalized man who thought he would wear it to meet God. I think it was part of the Brazil: Body & Soul exhibition, but I'm not certain of that fact.

Someone inquired, and so I did a little further reading made easy by the fact that I bought the exhibition catalogue at the show, which is nicely summed up here.

The artist in question is Arthur Bispo do Rosario, and a nice overview of his life and art is provided, including photos of the aforementioned piece, "Presentation Mantle:"

Bispo do Rosario was in the town of Japaratuba in the northern state of Sergipe in 1911. He held a variety of jobs in his early years, then entered the navy, where he became a championship boxer. After leaving the military in 1933, he went to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked as a security guard and a housekeeper, among other occupations. In 1938, Bispo do Rosario was arrested and committed to a series of mental asylums, finally being transferred to the institution where he spent the rest of his life, the Colonia Juliano Moreira in Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after his arrival there, he began to create embroideries featuring intensely worked patterns of words and iconic symbols. Some of these embroideries refer to sports, others to ecstatic religious experiences. He also created a series of sashes for participants in imaginary beauty pageants.

That last part is the kicker, naturally. They have very intensely lettered titles on them, and tassles. Sort of monochromatic, though, albeit festive in their own imaginary way.

A good sample of his work can be seen here, including the jacket, but no pageantry seems in evidence.

Hit or Miss

I have lots of new and interesting things to post tonight, but there are a couple of new items I wrote over at the brand new Cupcake blog, a delightfully antagonistic discussion of so-called "chick-lit." Please do check it out, although be advised it's so new that the plastic wrap is still on it, and it's still a bit of a work-in-progress.