Grey Gardens
'Don't need men if you have cats.'
(Dir. David and Albert Maysles) (1976) Lifestyles of the squalid and shameless…Edith and Edie Beale live in their ramshackle mansion in the Hamptons, cats lolling about, voiding, and racoons climbing through great holes in the roof. Daughter Edie swans about, recalling an interrupted career on Broadway; mother Edith (aunt to Jackie Onassis) sits in bed, watching, like a big spider. Two years of footage has been distilled into doco-length, where not much occurs beyond regular ranting, but try to look away. This eye-view seems like exploitation to us, but, nevertheless, of definite morbid interest. For this reason, it has since been filmed…
Continue Reading →Art Joke of the Week
'Rendezvous' by Konstantin Somov (c. 1918)
A New York attorney representing a wealthy art collector called and asked to speak to his client, “Saul, I have some good news and, I have some bad news.” The art collector replied, “I’ve had an awful day; let’s hear the good news first.” The lawyer said, “Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she invested $5,000 in two pictures that she thinks will bring a minimum of $15-20 million. I think she could be right.” Saul replied enthusiastically, “Well done! My wife is a brilliant businesswoman! You’ve just made my day. Now I know…
Continue Reading →“Marriage Equality”
The Marriage Settlement by William Hogarth
Rather, it appears to me As special pleading, don’t you see, Equality is not the name For making difference all the same And social change, go carefully About your task, respectfully; If to shadow-lands dissent Is forced, we’ll find new ways to vent And those could sting. For social concord, here’s a thing That could restore freedoms of old – Instead of choosing to be told What’s right, equal, or ‘appropriate’; Perhaps we should de-legislate And banish State from communal bed, Let couples choose to state instead What they are or wish to be – Let clerics moot matrimony.
Continue Reading →The Uses of Enchantment
By Hans Thoma
(Bruno Bettelheim) (1976) Bruno’s book meticulously deconstructs the beauty and the terror of the fairy tale, with its bullying utility (a boon for childish education) and wonderful rogues’ gallery of archetypes. It’s a great book on the power of myth that goes beyond J.G.Frazer to focus on the utter magic of childish understanding and imagination. Bruno, a Professor of Psychology, and holocaust survivor (for awhile – he, sadly, stifled himself in 1990), understood both the power of fable and its tendency towards brutal indoctrination. He knew from life and in his finely-chiselled mind that we are all bullies – we are all bullied, and that…
Continue Reading →Stuff We Hate
You know what we hate? :- Quizzes involving flags. Excessive celebrations by athletes. The Age (of recent times). Fitted sheets with narrow walls. The paper on which UK Grazia is printed. Alcohol-free wedding receptions. Expensive compacts (I’m looking at you, Lancômbe and Chanel) designed so that the application sponge presses against the mirror when the compact is shut – smudging and smutting the mirror. The much cheaper Revlon compacts are designed so that this doesn’t happen, people! Christmas wrapping paper on those annoying, inconvenient rolls. Why does it never come flat and folded up like other wrapping paper? The conversation-starters…
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