Balenciaga

When I saw the bodice of Nicole Kidman’s gown during Sunday’s Academy Awards, I immediately flashed on John Singer Sargent’s famous painting of Madame X. (No novel thought, that. Years ago, Steven Meisel plugged Kidman into the Madame X mise-en-scene for a Vogue editorial; she wore a somewhat frowsy velvet ocher number, if I [...]

Reading Stein, or Why I Am So Staunch

Reading Gertrude Stein, I then turned to write an email and found that my writing had become Steiner. Simpler, but more methodical. Also more emphatic. Question: can one write about Stein without writing like Stein? Yes (note Perloff’s Poetics of Indeterminacy, Bernstein’s A Poetics., Koestenbaum’s “Stein is Nice,” ), but I’m always curious and [...]

Colors

X tells Y, “That color blue, the color

The academy

My friend J and I — actually, a different friend J, oh let’s just call him Josh — have been pondering our allergy to this year’s Oscar hype. Or perhaps more accurately: puzzling over our total apathy for the show in the vacuum of hype (the writer’s strike, etc.). My theory: that the race for [...]

Labels

I was having lunch with my friend J in the Hearst cafeteria.
We were talking about writing (mostly) and shopping (lately), when she announced, in what seemed a conversational shift,
“I love theory.”
Was she making fun of me?
“I, I love theory too, I guess.”
Then it dawned on me she meant Theory, the clothing line.

Bishop I

Woke up this morning thinking about Elizabeth Bishop and poetry’s inferiority complex.

I’ll start with the familiar story of canon-formation and shifting tastes. Langdon Hammer described the process well in a 1996 or 1997 essay in the Yale Review, which I haven’t looked at in years but am cribbing below.
Bishop, despite her small body of work, [...]

Steroids

X knew a trick was on the juice when he saw testicles the size of peanuts. “It was kind of the elephant in the room,” X remarked.

Devorah Sperber

Trolling for pictures to illustrate the last chapter of my dissertation, I came across artist Devorah Sperber’s brilliant take on the Picasso portrait of Gertrude Stein, which now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Picasso, not the Sperber).

I hope that Sperber won’t mind that I’ve posted her artwork here. The digital realm seems [...]

Celebrity skin

As a pendant to the videos below, I’m also posting Naomi Campbell’s first music video, George Michael’s Freedom ‘90. Sorry Omi, but as Gianni Versace said backstage at his penultimate runway show, “I think Linda may be star tonight.” If only because Ms. Evangelista frames the proceedings, like a Master of Ceremonies — an androgynous, [...]

Life Water

Naomi Campbell and a cadre of thirsty lizards vamp to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
On viewing the above catastrophe, alert viewers will no doubt be reminded of Naomi’s previous collaboration with Mssr. Jackson, the aptly (though alas not ironically) titled “In the Closet”:

In the original Jackson-Campbell pairing, directed by Herb Ritts, Omi’s beauty is original, monumental, fresh. [...]

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