My cat absolutely doesn't give a sh*t

 

Winkle just turned 11

Happy Birthday.

// RIP Winkle 6/9/15 // 

Historical Dating

I'll just go ahead and admit it— I've found myself back on online dating again. Ho hum.

In a certain age bracket the selection of men seems to skew in 2 different directions: Old and old with a motorcycle. —Joke! —Actually, there are many at this age who go to great lengths to emphasize all the biking/skiing/rock climbing/surfing and general Fountain of Youth quaffing they do. Unfortunately, these dont work for me. I dread the inevitable big reveal when I have to admit that while, yes, I have been ON a bike, no, I do not actually bike. Or ski, or surf, etc. My intermittent exercise class attendance just wouldnt cut it with these silver Adonises so no, I guess I wont be checking you out on the slopes.

So, after scrolling and swiping my way through the bald and the beige, the Every Men, the superannuated skater boys, the dandies with unseemly numbers of profile pics, the leathery outer borough grandpas, each crag and jowl limned by the glare of a bathroom mirror selfie, I again find myself looking for solace in... the long dead or fictional. (I've been here before, and you can read more of the back story.) If you are well over a hundred I will probably find you devastatingly attractive. And I could create an OKChronos of the historical hotties I've collected over the years.

Without further preamble feast your eyes on sometime Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte’s Canoer of 1877. The nip of his waist! The snap of his brim! That grip! His steely intensity belied only by the cherubic indolence of his mouth. He could be in Williamsburg serving you your next Absinthe cocktail, and he could rock my boat anytime.

The Anatomy of Swearing

"The fact is swearing is an instrument, which like any other can only be effectively played
when it is sustained by a sufficient amount of feeling."

It sounded good. I found The Anatomy of Swearing by Ashley Montagu randomly at the Library hoping it might bear resemblance to one of my favorite books of recent times, The Anatomy of Disgust. (Also, I was amused at the idea of swearing being parsed by someone who may as well have called himself Percy, Lord Foppington)

Swearing is fundamental to human behavior, providing a psychological as well as physiological release. Montagu asserts that it is "a means of expressing anger and potentially noxious energy is converted to a form that renders it comparatively innocuous." He explains distinctions between swearing that draws strength from invoking sources of religious power and the sacred, and swearing that calls upon the secular, the "prohibited" and the prurient. Also, that swearing owes much to the form of the judicial oath, (May I be gutted like an oyster if its not true) whereas cursing invokes some evil to be cast upon the subject (A pox to thy bones). Obvious perhaps, but interesting enough, none-the-less, to someone who never thought about it before. He sets out to cover swearing from antiquity (did you know swearing was sex-determinant in Greece and Rome? Ostensibly women swore by female deities, men, male gods) onwards up through an unintentionally humorous analysis of motherfucker (“It may be used as a pejorative or as an honorific”).

Yes! the book is a bit high-flown, could you tell? Montagu revels in the British love of wit and wordplay (he touches admiringly upon invective and sportive swearing, essentially skillful put-downs as performance art). Here's a magnificently dashed off explanation which I loved:

Damn remains the great English shibboleth, the most widely used of intensives, and the one most likely to steer the swearer clear of the Scylla of profanity and the Charybdis of vulgarity.

Getting beyond the basic groundwork, though, I often found the book difficult to follow... The distinctions between swearing, oaths and cursing start muddying since definitions or partial definitions are given numerous times in differing ways. Mostly, I think, I got lost amidst the liberal excerpts from Shakespeare, Rabelais, Sterne, Smollett, Byron and on and on... Far, far too many long and digressive quotes, pages really, reproduced verbatim which was just a tad too much for this attention-challenged reader to handle.

I was hoping to get profanity, blasphemy, vulgarity and obscenity laid forth in a buffet of verbal amuse-bouche, but I got a fucking five- course sit-down dinner instead.

Songs of Himself: Levi's and Whitman, Sampled

Whitman was very conscious of his image-- literally and figuratively. He was among the most photographed men
of the 19th century with something like 125 known extant images. Here he is as audacious "loafer", 1855, on the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass— Even his portrait was an affront

Levi's "Go Forth" ad campaign of a few years ago. This spot features an actual recording of Whitman reading.
A mind-blowing conflation of American transcendent idealism and cynical commercialism.
I'm very gratified to have introduced Professor Alan Trachtenberg (see below) to these on Youtube!

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,
the scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer...
If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it.
— “Song of Myself” 1855

"No one in this age of [expensive] flour and high rents can afford to be a nobody. Be somebody— biographically, poetically, or historically."– satirical editorial in The Brooklyn Eagle, October 11, 1855
Revisiting an old post, with updates and edits:
As I noted a few years ago, I'm disturbed when I come across glaring gaps in my education—something that stops me short as I think, Wait, how do I not know this? Whitman: Titan of American literature, Leaves of Grass, "body electric," repressed homosexuality, beard—that was nearly the sum of what I knew. At that time, I got the Penguin Classics Collected Whitman and started on a mini research mission. In this current Whitman endeavor I've signed myself up for a course taught by the venerable Alan Trachtenberg, essayist and Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale. I now know I'm far more interested in Whitman as cultural-social catalyst and influence than I am in his works per se.

I do not like reading Whitman's poetry (prose, like Specimen Days, is more agreeable). Considering the sweeping vistas and universalism he invokes I find the reading experience leaves me clammy and oddly claustrophobic. (I'm guessing that Whitman was a close talker....) He does however, conjure a mystical rawness, an uninhibited immediacy, blatancy even, that is astounding. Especially when one thinks of his being published at a time when "Victorian" morality was in ascendance. (Emily Dickinson evidently wrote in a letter, "I have never read his book– but was told that he was disgraceful," which I find enormously funny.) Despite not actually enjoying his work, I'm finding the idea and persona of Whitman pretty compelling.

In Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, David Haven Blake places the self-styled "good grey poet" against the backdrop of America's developing intellectual identity and popular culture. A very good read. The 1850s was a time of an expanding awareness of a specifically American intellectual identity. The search for a "native American" literary style, independent of European models, was a cultural imperative. Whitman felt he was the answer to that call. It was also the time of Barnum and the rise of consumer culture. Whitman offered himself, seemingly, as an entity (or commodity) that could effect happiness and harmony with the world.

Whitman's sheer audacity is amazing; he craved attention. He self-published Leaves of Grass then published reviews of his own work anonymously ("An American bard at last!"). Later he compiled various laudatory comments and reviews as well as pans and included these as an addendum to later editions of the book. Throughout his life, it seems, Whitman was compelled to ceaselessly promote himself. "The public is a thick skinned beast," he confided to a friend,"and you have to keep whacking away it its hide to let it know you're there."

David Haven Blake's point, which was a new angle to me at least, was that celebrity in the mid-19th century could be seen as a true democratic phenomenon. Fame (and possible subsequent wealth) created and bestowed by the people– rather than by birth, class or inheritance–was, in a sense, sanctioned by popular vote. The celebrity was the embodiment of a culture sanctioned by the people, and an affirmation of the great American experiment.

In my current readings, Trachtenberg in “Walt Whitman Precipitant of the Modern” makes what I believe is the key to my interest in Whitman: the case of the poet's influence on the American avant garde-- ie the rise of Modernism in art and literature. Ezra Pound said of Whitman: “He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America.” I paraphrase Trachtenberg: Whitman breaks through constraint to say exactly what's on his mind, he sanctions desire, rebellion, individualism with an unprecedented openness of form and emotion.
IMAGES: the infamous frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, 1855. Virtually all reviews at the time commented on the "defiant", vulgar quality of the portrait. Whitman knew exactly what he was doing; Levi's Jeans "Go Forth" tv ad campaign by Weidan + Kennedy featuring Whitman's poems. Some of the comments on the Youtube page are interesting: “Is this some genius speaking through satire or has consumerism become this crass? The American dream of independence and self-actualization has become a pair of over-priced jeans....”; “2/3 length with hat outdoor rustic”--This 1877 photograph was Whitman's favorite and caused much to-do with acolytes and early scholars who argued about this butterfly. Whitman tried to foster the idea that the creature was real and had somehow alighted upon his finger... in the midst of a photo studio. In 1995, someone found the butterfly in a cache of Whitmaniana that had gone missing from the Library of Congress in 1942.

aesthetic consumerism notes: an update

The photo on the left is from the June 06 Martha Stewart Living, on the right is the Baldizzi kitchen as recreated to c.1935 at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

The Museum is an imaginarium of immigrant struggle. Its cleaned-up, prettified tableaux are irritatingly appealing to me. "People suffered in these stifling hell holes," I have to remind myself... and yet...that linoleum is... really cute. Somehow the privations of the past become... aspirational./
The Martha aesthetic rarefies the commonplace and defamiliarizes it. It takes the everyday and makes it exclusive.//

update: I posted the surreal juxtaposition of Martha Stewart Living and a kitchen in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at top 5-1/2 years ago. If the Tenement Museum represents the masses of yesteryear cozied up for an afternoon's tour, and Martha Stewart created an aspirational, nostalgic version of that long-ago for today's upscale consumer cognoscenti, what does the Pottery Barn catalog I got recently (above) represent? Dumbing down the rarefied nostalgia of yesteryear's masses for today's masses? Pottery Barn's ticking stripe ironing board covers and French wire hampers share space with prop rotary fans, faux washboard "art" and actual cast-iron hand irons. Seriously, PB is selling old coal-heated hand irons (scavanged from India) and fake washboards to hang in your laundry room. There's something odd going on in the aesthetic zeitgeist when a museum and a mass market catalog look alike. Where is Susan Sontag when you need her?

In related news, I have irrefutable evidence from that same catalog that my own home decorating style has jumped the shark. Scattered old wooden and metal letters? check. framed flea market-sourced antique buttons? check. Animal horns? I'm afraid so. Rusted metal industrial detritus? Color-grouped depression-era pottery? Done and done. Regardless of whether it's time for a change anyway, what does one do when one's formerly "personal" style, accrued over the years from here and there, is on wholesale offer at Pottery Barn? When anyone can buy all their 'vintage-inspired' needs at one fell swoop, what happens to the genuine collection? This nothing new — I'm sure all the peerage of Britain cough into their handkerchiefs at the sight of Ralph Lauren Home—it's just happened so rapidly and completely. And I happened to feel it personally.

I'm not saying I originated a style, I simply gravitated to the objects I was drawn to and my sensibility grew up around that. A sensibility already familiar to some, yes; there was John Derian or Anthropologie or ABC carpet along the way, for reference/inspiration/validation. Now my apartment could be any Brooklyn boutique— or Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn outlet. It feels phony. Yet I still like the horns and the 19th century type specimens and the twee rusted objets. The cognitive dissonance is killing me.

[several comments here are from the original post]

 

I'd just gotten this linen grain sack (!) up in Hudson, NY when I got the PB catalog.
Their vintage-inspired linen pillow cover, bottom.

five images above, my apartment

Pottery Barn

Dead|Sexy

At your leisure, please check out my new site.

I know this “Sexy Dead Guys” meme is completely pervasive and zeitgeisty right now (viz. Bangable Dudes in History, My Dageurreotype Boyfriend, et al.), and it may be difficult for you to believe, but my first flicker of this idea began a few years ago. Way back when I still bought the newspaper I came across an image of Anton Chekhov. “That is one surprisingly appealing dead author,” I thought and reflexively cut out the photograph. I felt sort of odd and shallow because I’d never actually read any Chekhov, but here I was saving his photo like he was Rob Pattinson and I was Sweet Sixteen. That led me to keep a clipping file of truly attractive men so I could recognize someone like that if he ever came along. (Read about my pivotal "all the guys I like are dead or fictional" self-realization here!).

I never did much with this guy file save for a couple of related posts on this very blog. So, getting my act together a bit late, I missed out on bringing this to book form (congratulations Bangable Dudes). I might as well put up that tumblr now, right?//

Fashion musing and arithmetic*

 

So we've gone from cajoling women to dress like children, and ogling children dressed like adults, to actually using children as "fashion muses". (Above, 14 year old actress Hailee Steinfeld as the new face of Miu Miu, and 13 year old Elle Fanning modelling for Marc Jacobs.) I'm not clear why this annoys me so much: is it the "exploitation" of underage girls? No, no, no. Is it the gimmick-novelty of using children in serious fashion? Possibly. But this gimmick has far less épater la bourgeoisie strenuousness than, say, parading supermandels Andrej Pejic or Lea T. No, I think it's only because I find the child-muse marketing so boring.//

I had just been formulating my thoughts about this when I saw the piece in the New York Times about 15 year old fashion wunderkind/industry insider Tavi Gevinson. For those of you who might not keep up with such things, Style Rookie is her blog, Rookie is her new magazine, she's written for Harper's Bazar and if you have any further questions talk to her publicist. Tavi was profiled last year in the New Yorker where, in an exquisitely sadistic moment, she was prompted to worry about her future relevance as she grows up.

Anyway, I left a fairly cranky comment on the Times piece about, among other things, Tavi's style sense. Gah! I'm insulting teenagers now. Afterward I realized that bile was misdirected: I have no issue with the girl— she's got a lot of what people long ago used to call Moxie. In fact, if I'd stumbled on her blog myself I'd be sort of enchanted: she's droll and enviably self-possessed. No, my bitter pearls were directed at the marketing juggernaut of publicists, mom-managers, product tie-ins, exclusive wedding-rehearsal-dinner-photo-sellers and ass X-ray takers that flogs things relentlessly and indiscriminately in order to corral my 1 millimeter of mental bandwidth and drain my wallet.//

If peevish-and-in-one's-40s ever becomes fashionable I am your new muse.//

*Anna Piaggi + Michelle Williams = Tavi Gevinson

 

 

Jersey Shore: the Pantone series

with props to Doug Clouse

The Ducks of Mill Basin

Michael Appleton, a Daily News photographer who shot post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, has said some of the homes remind him of minipalaces in Baghdad. Near this home there was one with a guard house and a white Rolls Royce in the drive.

At first I thought this was a shopping mall. In fact it is the 50 million dollar house of a Russian industrialist, complete with motorized gate and security guard, just out of the photo to the left.

The Senator's house which spurred my trip out to Mill Basin. A building so contrived, virtually its whole existence is as status proclamation.

The front entrance and garage doors are not wood— they're copper.

Catering hall or private residence?

In Mill Basin its not only about historical pastiche, there were quite a number of "modern" houses.
There's something 1970s ecclesiastical/synagogue about this one.

Sidewalk "parterres" on the street of mausoleums (see below). I actually really like this one.

I'd read in the New York Times about a Brooklyn Senator being investigated for corruption and incidentally they had a photo of his house. It was so outlandish, so kerazy I knew I needed to see this thing up close. So last weekend a friend and I took a drive out to the senator's neighborhood —out in far south Brooklyn adjoining Jamaica Bay. An area once known for oysters, clams and crabs, Mill Basin is now known for Greco-French Builder-Regency chateaus, bulging Juliet balconies and hypertrophied porticoes. It sent me running for my copy of Learning from Las Vegas, but more on that in a moment.

Mill Basin started off the 20th century with a lead smelting plant but up until then the shellfish were its major attraction. Landfill started the housing boom and bungalows and modest Capes —Levittown like—were built in the 1950s and 60s. Some streets still retain structures from the original building wave. One, lined with a series of spit-shined split-level shingle and brick numbers, each sporting enormous pedimented and columned entries, looked like a row of mausoleums. And that's not necessarily a criticism.

Some Things I Learned:
Mill Basin is almost preternaturally neat and tidy.
Recall The Truman Show where everything about the town is perfect—except for the fact that it's all a stage set.
While it's suburban in feel, Mill Basin is not exactly leafy.
A whole lot of custom sidewalk tiling laid in lozenge patterns, and a surprising amount of topiary lend it an orchestrated Home Depot-Vaux-le-Vicomte sensibility.
Mill Basin architecture is about symbols. As Robert Venturi et al. in Learning would have us understand, much of our country's commercial architecture and building "vernacular" is maligned because it's misunderstood.* See, the simplified story is that the big crude columns and empty historical and atemporal references of American buildings have to be B I G because they are meant to be seen and recognized from a highway, at 60 mph. The issue in Mill Basin is that the symbols of success on each and every home are meant for the neighbor across the street. Here, where the houses are built up to the very lot line, the chrome and novelty stained glass and balustrades practically assault you as you walk past. You're not protected by doing the 60 mph driveby.
Mill Basin is made up of lots of ducks.  Venturi and Co. on ducks:

Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building- becoming-sculpture we call the duck in honor of the duck shaped drive-in building on Long Island.

In other words the architectural form itself is the symbol, the meaning of the building. Like the senator's house, I would posit that many of the buildings in Mill Basin are architectural contrivances more than they are home. Their raison d'etre is to shout in the most personalized way that money can buy, "The Good Life Lived Here!"//

This sort of thing—teardowns replaced with custom-tailored stage show fantasies—is happening all over the city. Similar neighborhoods are mushrooming in Queens (see a Times piece on Bukharan Jews' architectural predilections in Forest Hills, and this new piece on the "Beverly Hills of the East Coast" in Malba). The Bukharan article especially gives some insight into the custom-paved-sidewalk mindset:

The Bukharian tendency to pave over everything is practical, he continued. Bukharians preferred a terrace or patio to a lawn, which he called “useless land.” A yard required mowing — “a waste of time,” he said.//

While doing some image research I came across Shenker Architects, a firm in Brooklyn, by way of Ukraine, that appears to do significant residential business in the High Arriviste style. From their web site:

many unexpected perspectives throughout the house were enhanced by carefully fashioned details, where design overpowers expensive materials.

*(Also because he thinks Modernists are insufferable poseurs who put one over on everybody, but you'll have to reread the book as I did to enjoy all the snide commentary.)