Livin' La Vaca Muerta

Are you a friend of Myrna's? If not, I think you ought to be.

Mock Time That Flies

Earlier this week we celebrated National Poetry Week, and while I missed out, here, belatedly, is my contribution: Dame Edith Sitwell intoning her hypnotic "Through Gilded Trellises" against Sir William Waton's evocative, spare music from Facade.

Of Mad Lords and Archaeologists' Wives

Mrs. Marie Beazley, Harry Bloomfield, 1923

Collection of the Classical Arts Research Centre, 

Faculty of Classics, Oxford University.

I seem to be on something of a portrait jag this summer; I do hope you'll forgive me.

Rachel, Rachel: Black Like She

Well, I've certainly been wasting more than enough time on the strange saga of Rachel Doležal,* that Jenny Stewart for the Post-Modern century.

What's My Wednesday? #5: [Sur]Reality TV

78 years ago today, the London International Surrealist Exhibition opened to a startled public, marking according to many the apex of the movement's success.

File Under "Sidewalk Curiosities, Viennese"

What is one to make of this?  In Hindu mythology, I've just learned, this is Hayagriva, "an avatar of Vishnu."  How do you suppose he ended up in the Graben, playing wistful Mitteleuropische melodies on his battered accordion?

Birthday Girl: Vissi d'Arte

Marguerite Seligman Guggenheim Vail Ernst, 115 years old today, had the great good fortune to have been born at exactly the right time and in exactly the right place - and to have had a great good fortune, to boot.

There's No One Left to Fly the Plane

Karen Black, alas, has gone back to the Five and Dime.

He is Planet

I'm not quite sure what this is, but I believe it may be a nearly perfect specimen of whatever kind of thing it actually turns out to be.  And it has its own Know Your Meme page, for what that's worth.

And for what that's worth, this is pretty much the look of the moment in many of your more regrettable nitespots in this benighted part of the the world...

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: One Mississippi

To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

In honor of her birthday this week, a reminder of why Miss Carol Channing is (a) divine and (b) the Queen of Camp, Broadway Division. No other performer, I think, combines so much skill with so much self-awareness, assurance, and flat-out eccentricity.  She has been playing the role of Carol Channing for 60 years or so, and it's safe to say that no one could ever do it better.  The miracle of it is that she has been able to channel that extravagant persona into genuine characters:  her Channingness, if you will, proved far more adaptable than you might think, so that when she played Dolly, she was Dolly, or Lorelei, or any of her parts.   She's a camp, but not a stunt.

Here she demolishes, in sequence, two kinds of show-biz survivors (not to mention two kinds of speech impediments): first, Dietrich in her glam-grandma phase (I adore how the Channing grin fights for dominance with the Dietrich pout in what really is a masterful impersonation) and then the myth-ridden once-upon-a-timer (Cecilia is a hoot, but with just a shade of a dark side; there really were ladies pretty much that deluded, after all...).

I can't believe I've never seen this clip before - is it something everybody knows about and I've been mysteriously in the dark?  If so, I'll never forgive you for not telling me before.  Enjoy.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: That's Entertainment?

"The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure..."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Oh, yes, that's entertainment all right.  Very, very disturbing entertainment.  Ladies and gentlemen, the Florida Trio!

It turns out that there are some very good reasons Vaudeville breathed its last...

Birthday Girl: A Glorious Voice

An embarrassment of birthday riches today, taking in everyone from Louis Pasteur to Oscar Levant, and from Marlene Dietrich to Cokie Roberts.  Here, however, we have a great lady who can hold her own with them and more, that inimitable practitioner of the gentle (and very nearly lost) art of musical satire, Miss Anna Russell.

If you know Miss Russell, there is is really no need to indulge in further superlatives; if not, it may at this rather distant remove from her heyday be difficult exactly to convey the impact she had on the occasionally rather solemn world of music when she burst upon the scene, as improbable a figure in her thirties as she remained for the rest of her long life.  Suffice it to say that rarely has anyone so deftly, thoroughly, and hilariously eviscerated the pretensions of High Art as she, wielding a combination of genuine authority on the subjects on which she discoursed and a mastery of broad comedy rarely equaled  - as a mistress of the double-take she is a peer of such immortals as Marie Dressler and Beatrice Lillie.

The summit of her art is unquestionably her dissection of Wagner's Ring Cycle, although her comprehensive guide to the writing of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta certainly has its partisans as well.  Personally, I feel lucky to have been introduced to her work at a dangerously early age, and I'm happy to confess that at various times in my life, back in the days when I was making an exiguous living on the fringes of the music business in New York and elsewhere, I have relied on what I gleaned from her recordings to seem a great deal more learned than ever I actually was. 

Here she introduces us to the basic necessities required for undertaking a career as a singer, and as a veteran of more than one encounter with that most fearsome of creatures, the Metropolitan Opera Soprano, I can attest that the description that closes this clip is as accurate a one as you ever will find.

Calling Gloria

This pre-Raphaelite pretty got married on this day just 56 years ago, and photographer Gordon Parks was there to capture it.  Remarkably enough she's still with us.  She was even rather well-known in her own right, not just before she became Someone's Mother (and then, indeed, you're camp) but even before this wedding.

She, of course, is the original Poor Little Rich Girl, one who now, should she so choose to do, could rejoice in the full name of Gloria Laura Vanderbilt DiCicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper (Not all that many surnames, I know by Gabor standards, but enough, still, to have kept her busy for a couple of decades).  It was her second and this groom's as well.  He's Lumet, as in Sidney, as in movies; his number one was Hollywood hotcha (and Grace Kelly bridesmaid) Rita Gam (also surprisingly still with us).  He followed up, after Gloria, with Lena Horne's daughter, before ending up with a Gimbel (apparently not of the Department Store Gimbels, which I think is too bad).  First, though, he and Gloria gave it a go for seven years or so.  She moved on, replacing Tinseltown nobility with literary cachet, after a fashion; her last husband (and the father of You Know Who) was a literary dilettante whose friendship with Dorothy Parker is probably the most interesting thing about his nonVanderbiltische days.

Gloria's is a curious career, both lengthy and episodic, running from the Coolidge administration right up to today, in which she's appeared before the public in a series of separate and quite disparate guises:  orphaned waif and tabloid darling in the '20s and '30s; after the Second War, classical music muse and maestro's child-bride; conventional, comparatively, high-society fixture in the late '50s and '60s; then, with a fame eclipsing her earlier notoriety, fashionista and jeans impresario (impresaria?) of the '70s.  More recently, when not being referred to as a maternal presence only, she's been recognized as an author, artist, and a kind of little-seen but influential, somehow, presence that hovers gracefully over the Upper East Side.  As a whole, despite the dramas and the headlines and moments of definite darkness, her life has a kind of careless glamour that seems very much of another time. 

I'd like to think that on this day, at least, she really was Happy at Last, but the wariness of her glance, the stiffness of her pose, even the needless complexity of her many cuff buttons, all combine to make me think that in the end it was just one more thing to get through.  The downside of being rich enough to have anything, I suppose, is that nothing's all that exciting, after a while. 

What does she think now, do you suppose, of those headlines, which made her famous, or the headline-making-business that has made her best-known child even more so?

Birthday Girl: Hello...

We now interrupt our travelogue to celebrate the 63rd birthday of a gifted and quirky American actress, one who rose to prominence in the heady days of '70s cinema, when she made such... oh, who am I kidding?  I'm only doing this as an excuse to run this video, an oldie that still makes me laugh and laugh.

But really, in our own ways, aren't each and every one of us, just a little, Shelley Duvall?

Birthdays: Ducklings into Swans

Birthday richness today, in the persons of two of the funniest people I know, both of whom turned potential liabilities into their stock in trade.

Ladies first (although in this company, that's a tough choice):  Mary Wickes was nobody's idea of a Hollywood star, clocking in just shy of six feet and possessing a face blessed with, shall we say, strong features.  Still, something clicked when she was on screen, and from the start her wry presence proved a match for even the strongest competition (and she started with just about the strongest possible, holding her own against no less than Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner and scoring big as a longsuffering nurse). 

After a successful run at Warners, she moved seamlessly to television, where her ability to play off stars like Lucille Ball and Doris Day gave her career a longevity that many much bigger stars would have envied.  She worked steadily into her 80s, ending with a turn in the Susan Sarandon/Winona Ryder Little Women; her Aunt March works every bit as well Edna May Oliver's in the peerless 1933 Hepburn edition.  You may not be surprised to learn she never married...

...nor, for that matter, did today's birthday boy, seen here looking rather more sedate than was his wont.  Paul Lynde, who first burst upon the scene in that cradle of fame, New Faces of 1952,* was about as far from leading man territory as Wickes was from pinup stardom.  Even so, audiences responded to his incredible timing and genial bitchiness with an enthusiasm that seems inconceivable given the era. 

Character men don't often get the juicy little parts (scheming secretary, dotty neighbor, deluded dowager, flighty aunt) that their female counterparts do (and that allow them to become general-public Beloved in ways that belie the scale of their roles).  Nonetheless, Lynde turned the smallest parts into little tours de force of innuendo and arch double-takes, and as Uncle Arthur on Bewitched (the Valhalla, in its way, of glorified character stars) achieved a kind of camp nirvana.  I can only think it was instructive (and beneficial) for those of us who were children of the '60s, sitting with our families in front of the flickering Mediterranean Fruitwood Veneer Consolette, to soak in the richness that was Lynde, Marion Lorne, Maurice Evans, Agnes Moorehead,** and the rest of the treasurable cast of zanies and oddities surrounding Elizabeth Montgomery and the Darrin of the moment - some of us, at least, thinking, "if they can get away with that, why can't I?"

Lynde really came into his own, of course, on The Hollywood Squares, dishing out slyly catty one-liners that must frequently have soared over the heads of many in the prime daytime-TV demographic, bored housewives (but that made some of their kids feel very sophisticated indeed).  He doesn't seem to have been the happiest of people, but I can't help feeling that he must, at the right moment, have been peerlessly good company.

The success of people like Miss Wickes and Mr. Lynde reminds us that, at least some of the time, talent will out, for even the gawkiest and queerest of us, and I think that's a reassuring sort of thing, what with being more a hint of both myself.  In whatever ineffable realm they now inhabit, aged 102 and 86 (only!) respectively, I hope they're sitting down over a celestial cocktail and congratulating each other on their improbable success.

* Lynde, Alice Ghostley, Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence, Mel Books ... it really must have been a hell of a night in the theatre, no?

** Odd, isn't it, that Wickes never did a Bewitched. She did turn up on the spin-off, Tabitha, but somehow, by that time, the magic was gone (from the series, that is - never from Mary!)

Incendiary Blonde

It's nice to be reminded, now and again, that even though we live in fallen times, still the occasional goddess walks among us.  Of that small number, it's even nicer to discover that one of them is, all indications to the contrary, sane, funny, wise, and really kind of a hell of a writer.

The legend in question may never have reached the uppermost heights of fame, even at her most notorious as a blonde sex bomb, but Mamie Van Doren has something over every one of her competitors, from the truly Olympian (Monroe) to the more than faintly risible (not just Jayne - think Joi Lansing and Cleo Moore):  she survived.  And she is, against all odds, in Mr. Sondheim's phrase, Still Here.

And more than that, she's online.  She recently relaunched her blog, Inside/Out, and after just a few entries it's become one of my favorite reads.  Whether talking about her clandestine nights with Joe DiMaggio or writing fondly of her (many) dogs, Mamie proves herself to be a good old girl, a broad of the classic type.  With the apparent goal of proving that 80-something is the new 30, she muses about everything from the end of the world next December to the next greatest catastrophe of 2012, MDNA, and she does so with wit and a wry, bemused eye for the absurd.

And, as you might not be too surprised to learn, she's still rocking some bodacious tatas.  Give her a read - I suspect you'll like her as much I've just come to...

But First, A Message from Our Sponsor

One-third less caffein (is that a vintage spelling or just local-market incompetence?), perhaps, but clearly two-thirds more psychotropics.  Rather like the mood around here these days.

Remarkably, the inimitable Page Morton Black, Chock full o' Nuts' very own answer to Vera Hruba Ralston, is still with us.  As is the brand, which was also a surprise.  Their website actually has some fun Flash animation - and a lot of that damn jingle...

Last Night I Dreamed I was on the Nile...

Over at Peenee's, the talk is of dreams.  When I dream, it's mostly about being lost and not quite knowing why - although occasionally, I have the most beautiful dreams in which I can fly.

None of which has anything to do with the above, although thinking of it did make me realize it was too long since we'd spent any time with The Tammys.  I think this fan video of their greatest hit is pretty nifty, even if it uses a take of the song that - whether or not you believe this on first hearing - manages to minimize its utter dementia.

In the immortal words of Gretchen, Kathy, and Linda:  "Dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance dance DANCE!"

Something Tells Me

The inimitable Miss Lene Lovich presents the very moment that New Wave died.  And went to lip-synch hell. 

Too, Too Divine

The news from dear JoeMyGod that things have gotten even odder in the world of That Somewhat Different Bishop, Eddie "Muscles" Long, got me thinking. Why I love the Internet is that what I was thinking about was, more or less, this very wallpaper. And therein lies a tale.

The paper, you see, is from a longtime Philadelphia institution that I've only just discovered disappeared seven or eight years ago. It was a place called the Divine Tracy Hotel, a name that only hints at the bizarerie within. The DT, you see, was run by the International Peace Mission, better known locally as the Church of Father and Mother Divine. Theirs is a saga that reads like fiction (think Sinclair Lewis meets Nathanael West), but it was just part of the background weirdness of living in the City of Brotherly Love back then.

The Tracy was, even thirty years ago, more than a shade down at heel, but it had its standards. Actually, it was entirely a creature of its standards, which followed the particular diktats of Father and Mother and ranged from a vegetarian diet (served in the actually rather cosy Keyflower Restaurant) to a strict dress code (no shorts, please!) to a total segregation by sex (men on one floor, women on another, and no mixing allowed). It was way eccentric, but it was cheap and cheerful.

Why, then, the wallpaper revery? Well, you see, once upon a time one was a student 'round about those parts. From time to time it was extremely inconvenient not to have a quiet place uninterrupted by roommates, houseparents, or worse. Where better, then, for a young man of Artistic Tastes to repair with a friend for a quiet evening of, um, studying, than a quiet and almost laughably inexpensive hotel that ruthlessly enforced a single-sex setting? As long as you kept things quiet, the very patient (except with short sleeves and lamb chops) staff (who all had noms d'hôtel, or I suppose du Divine like Sweetness Peaceful and Cheery Faithfulness) were none the wiser. Actually, I have to admit that after the fourth or fifth consecutive weekend I took up residence in one of their $15 doubles (with, I also have to admit, varying study pals), I think Mr. Faithfulness might just have had a clue.

In any case, that's wallpaper I've seen from all sorts of angles, none of them strictly kosher, as it were, by Divine Tracy house rules.

Sadly, the glory days of the International Peace Mission have long ago come and gone. The Tracy is now student apartments, and its grander sister, the Divine Lorraine, lies derelict in North Philadelphia. Amazingly, though, Mother Divine lives on. Here she is, pictured in the Main Line mansion that is now the focus of the movement:

The snap's from a few years ago, but I picture her still there, just a shade more Miss Havishamy, waiting either for the return of Father Divine or for Mr. Faithfulness to bring in her doubtless meat-free dinner.

So in any case, Bishop Eddie may now claim to be a king, but he's still a piker by Father Divine standards - he after all, convinced not a small number of people that he was God incarnate, and got rather a fascinating life out of it. What Mr. Faithfulness and his fellow church members got out of it is less clear, but they all seemed serene enough. Maybe he tries on Mother's stoles when she's not looking...

The wallpaper comes courtesy of Katbert's very festive Flickr photostream.