Brenda and the F Word

“The paths of excess lead to the palace of wisdom.” So said William Blake. Thank God! The designer, Valentino Garavani, wastes no time on wisdom but travels along his paths of excess to palaces via private jets and fabulous yachts. Because this is what makes the Matt Tyrnauer documentary so much fun. Who wants to read more dismal economic news when you can watch pet pugs get their teeth brushed by butlers and eavesdrop on catfights between Valentino, the original “too tan from a can” kind of man, and his shrewd, infinitely patient, long-time lover, Giancarlo Giammetti? (Catching a glimpse of Andre Leon Talley proclaiming and parading about like some deposed African potentate in huge sunglasses and a hand-sewn silk moo-moo is pretty amusing, too. I mean, talk about excess. Whoa!)

I was never a great fan of Valentino. But if only America’s richest designers handled excess with the same  style. If only they spent less time (and money) seeking spiritual enlightenment and meditating and more time exploring the joys of artifice. Of vanity. If only they believed less in focus groups, Buddhism, gurus, and Badoit water. If only they had a fucking sense of humor. ”I love beauty. It’s not my fault,” says Valentino at the beginning of this hejira through haute. Like Geoffrey Beene, Valentino understood a woman’s longing to be beautiful. Desirable. It sounds so dumbfoundingly simple. 

Alas! Building and repositioning brands has nothing to do with beauty. Nor does Buddhism and the bottom line. Sure, fashion can be shallow. As shallow and shiny as thousands of hand-sewn silver sequins on a confection of white chiffon. And as stupifyingly silly (not to mention astronomically expensive)as the vision at the end of the movie of ballet dancers floating anf flitting about in the skies over the Temple of Venus in Rome. But oh what fun, it was. And oh how sad that it’s now succumbed to the pitiless demands of a world-wide corporatocracy. 

On a Train

If ever there a sound of yearning, it would be the long, mournful whistle, the wail, of a locomotive. For me (and for German journalist, Joseph Roth), there is nothing more evocative than that sudden iruption of sound that pierces through the dark and fades, like a dream, at dawn. I used to hear it, right here in the city. The blast came in the dead of night from deep beneath the streets, underground. We called it the money train. I pictured it all lit up but empty, roaring past the usual stops until it reached some unknown destination. A secret vault. 

I hear it less these days. Maybe because the birth of Metro cards and the use of plastic means there’s less cash at the end of everyday. But I miss the sound. I looked forward to it because it always carried me back. Back to my life on trains. Trains from New York to Florida and to California, from Moscow to Vladivostock, to St. Petersburg, and Ulan Bator, trains from Paris to Vienna, Budapest and all the way to Istanbul, even across the highlands of Scotland and from New York to Chicago. The names of these trains were like poems to me:  The Silver Crescent, The Palmetto, the Broadway Limited, The Royal Highlander, The Orient Express, The Trans-Siberian…Oh. The glory of hiding out on these exquisitely slow moving ships on rails. Criss crossing countries and continents. 

I only wish I’d had the chance to ride on the train I’m reading about now in The Bloody White Baron, a marvelously wicked, weird trip through the life of Baron Unberg-Steinberg. “The railway was a mobile city: there were hospital cars, brothels, traveling theaters, dining cars appointed like opulent Moscow restaurants, libraries, churches, printing shops and torture chambers.” Skip the torture chambers and I’m there. Instead I’m here in Old Saybrook, Ct. for lunch with a sick friend. A lunch that isn’t going to happen. 

Amtrak was an hour late leaving New York. After 2 1/2 hours lurching forward in a series of teeth rattling fits and starts, I step off the train and no one is at the station. I’ve written down the wrong cell phone number. And I have no address. I’d like to just let go and wail. Instead I sit on a deserted platform, eating a slice of cold pizza and wait two hours for the train to take me back. 

Thinking of my son and daughter. They’re together this morning in Scotland. Feels like yesterday back when I was pregnant with J. My husband loved listening to the fetal heartbeat. So he bought a stethoscope from some medical supply company and every once in a while, we’d listen to the sounds of our son, reading in the womb. Kidding. Anyway, one morning at around 2 am, my husband wakes up, panicked. I’m lying on the floor. 
“Oh My God!” he wails. “Are you alright? Did you fall out of bed?”
“Shhhh!” I say. “I’m listening.” 
“Listening? To what?” he asks, peering at me over the edge of the bed.
“To the fight downstairs,” I reply, waving the tubes of the stethoscope around in the air. “This thing’s fantastic. I can hear every word they’re saying.”
R groans. “You’re out of your mind, you know that? Come back to bed and go to sleep.”

N: if you’re reading this, I’m wearing all your clothes. 

Like Treadwell should have Googled “bear” before it ate him all up in Alaska, I should have Googled “Blk Jks” before booking tickets at Santos Party House on Saturday night. Even Googling it now, AFTER listening to them, doesn’t help much. “Reminiscent of 80’s South African white bands whose avant boere jive fusion freak-in and erotic shebeen dub..” What the fuck? It was loud. That’s all I remember. And nothing like any black African band I have ever heard. In fact, I was tempted to curl up in the fetal position again and moan. Instead, I grinned and bore it as kids howled to the deafening screech of three hard metal guitars. And Janovic has run out of my white paint. And the day lies ahead of me like some endless stretch of highway in the Empty Quarter. (Speaking of which, if you haven’t read The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse, you haven’t lived.) Enough for now.

Alibi: Latin for elsewhere (which is where I wish I were)

Book (s) of the Night Club

The Peking Story: The last days of old China
David Kidd
The declining aristocracy in China’s imperial city–before, during, and after the Revolution. “Silk gowned ancient men, slender, white faced, pomaded sons, and their first wives, second wives, concubines, and mistresses…” All living in the decaying splendor of a great walled house. 

Counting My Chickens
Deborah (a/k/a Debo), Duchess of Devonshire. The last and youngest of the Mitford sisters free associates about life at Chatsworth

Out to buy more white paint.

Saturday morning. Killing time wandering through the magnificent ruins of Washington Irving High School. Waiting for my daughter to finish her SAT’s. Located in one of the poshest areas of town,  WI was originally built in 1910 as a school for girls, an academy for technical learning. Standing alone in this immense, empty lobby, I close my eyes and listen for the echos of excited chatter as girls stride by in tidy, pinafored uniforms with freshly brushed hair and arms full of books. Past ornately gilded oil painted murals, a gigantic San Simeon like marble fireplace and neo Gothic wooden staircases. Many of the girls back then were immigrants: Irish, Italian, Polish. Today, many of the students are also immigrants. Not the same ethnicity, of course. There are signs in every language from Chinese and Korean to Urdu, Arabic, even Hindi.

What would these earnest, hard-working girls think of metal detectors and X Ray scanners; of the three armed policewomen patrolling the corridors? What about the warnings about carrying weapons, cellphones, beepers, and pagers? And the signs that forbid all headwear: durags, bandannas, caps, kerchiefs, and colored headbands?

Washington Irving has become one of the most dangerous public schools in the city. I stop to read a poster tacked up on a white pillar near the theater. “Your Principal’s Goals for 2009″
The third goal? To increase the percentage of graduates from 33% to 60%.

Jesus! 33%. How the fuck did this happen? I wonder. Do any of the kids who bother to show up here and endure random lock-downs and body frisks also wonder how the f this happened. How a school as grand and as hopeful as this one, a symbol of society’s commitment both it itself and to education, somehow, ended up a dead end ghetto? A dead end ghetto that’s a short ten minute walk from where I live.

Then I think of my own beautiful, privileged daughter upstairs, privately educated and about to set off on a college tour of the Northeast. I also think of Cleo, a 12 year old girl I mentored for two whole years and casually abandoned. She lived out in the projects in Red Hook with a drunken grandmother. Two weeks before we met, she woke up and found her bed full of her own hair. Her grandmother had cut it off, secretly while she slept. A punishment for coming “home” after curfew. Cleo was tough, full of fire and dreams. I took her on visits to museums and for manicures with my daughter. My daughter still asks about her, this girl I abandoned so casually. How do I excuse that act of casual abandonment? How do any of us who live so close and so far away from millions of other lives like Cleo?

Suddenly, there’s the sound of thundering footsteps as kids race down the staircase and out the door. I see my daughter and I long only to rush over and hug her. I would do anything to keep this girl safe; to protect her. Was I ever loved like this as a child? No. But it doesn’t matter. Because this is how we excuse the act of abandoning others. By loving our own. 

Barney’s warehouse: Reduced from $2,750 to $999, to $500 to $300.

Just back from Jack’s. Had a craving for a home-made chocolate chip cookie. There were two women standing in front of me. They, obviously, knew one another. 
Woman#1: Daisy looks sooo tired.
Woman#2: She just got off the treadmill. Another stress test.
Woman#1(looks stricken): Oh no! Is she alright.
Woman#2(looks relieved): Her heart is fine. They think it’s something else.
Woman#1: Poor Daisy! Maybe she just needs to slow down. Like the rest of us.
 Woman#2:(paying for her soy latte) You’re probably right. I hope you’re right.
 
Woman #2 opens the door. “Here I am, Daisy,” she coos, squatting down to untie a leash. Daisy is a fucking dog. 

This just in from the Moscow Times. Hand delivered by a friend who has flown in to renew his work visa. Published by the Federal Consumer Protection Service in Moscow, the diet of potatoes, cabbage, and kefir offers Russia’s own solution to financial woes. “The aim,” explains a spokesman, “is so people don’t panic and know in any situation that there is a way out, including in nutrition.” So how come we haven’t thought of this, huh? How come I’m bundling my phone in with cable and cancelling Showtime when I could be eating 242 pounds of potatoes and 88 pounds of cabbage a year. All for a mere $77 a month. According to our source, the only pivotal “food” not mentioned in the diet is vodka. “Liters and liters of vodka.” Off now to buy a tub of popcorn and watch the new Valentino documentary. Oh wait a minute. My favorite section of the paper is the Classifieds. Here, Maria, Masha, and Kristina, the hottest babes you’ve ever seen, offer aroma massages and Russian language lessons. At the same time. Oh yeah! 

Hysterically funny piece in today’s New York Post re Corcoran’s new “dirty words” policy. Words currently banned in real estate ads include: bachelor pad, professional, (huh?), family friendly, nanny’s room, playroom, and kids. All for fear of violating anti-discrimination laws and offending everyone from the unemployed to singles and childless couples.But my favorite banned phrase? “Within walking distance.” This,  believe it or not,  for fear of offending the disabled. So why not ban “breathtaking view,” too. Just in case you offend those who can’t see it. Ie: the blind. Corcoran has also banned the words “quiet” and “safe.” What the fuck’s left, for Christ’s sake? I mean, the job of selling real estate is tough enough, right? But the irony here is that Corcoran also launched the original Beaver House ads for Andre Balacz. Beaver as in…? Yeah. You guessed it. With billlboards featuring a bunch of hunky, suited up guys and half naked women, falling all over each other, drinking and grinning, do you really think people associated ”beaver” with that buck toothed animal that builds little dams? I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. 

The point is, we’re living at a moment in time when a few bad men (well, more than a few and way badder than bad) have stripped the country’s coffers bare while others (I’m thinking of Madoff here) moan about spending a night in a cell that looks like some kid’s room in Domino. And we worry about offending the disabled with phrases like “within walking distance.” Makes no sense to me. None, whatsoever.