Precedence and its pitfalls

Amawalk Runagate Robbie

Being rusty in one’s Maupassant may well be a reason, but no excuse, for panic in recalling the protocol in any given promenade, for greeting someone with an offspring of another species. As a sometime “walker” of a dog, I accept that the question doesn’t arise, given that a gorilla or a giraffe may accompany a dog, and blur into oblivion for all the notice he achieves.

Weber

You’ll remember, the problem was finessed in Bringing Up Baby, more than once, where the principals were always so separated from Baby that the they could be addressed separately - with one trend-setting exception:

In the present case, however, the question achieves a refinement, through just that intimacy and emphasis of differentness we were spared by Howard Hawks, which shows how excruciatingly urgent the problem of precedence can be.

We know, the crisis of species-mixing is looming fast upon us, according to that organ embodying it - Fox News - as a crime wave against Nature it has found, erupting from the Equal Protection clause. Now is not the time to forget our Romance Lit - much less our Screwball Comedy. The problem calls for the candour of a Robert Benchley and the fast thinking of a Dorothy Parker, and comes down to this:

Does the welcome, “Who’s your baby, Tiger,” follow or does it precede, “Who’s your tiger, Baby?” Moreover (and the peril gathers as we speak) on the odd chance that the antecedent of the address is so equally distributed as to elevate confusion to catatonia, what is to be done?

An extremely kind reader wrote in

The other day, I received a very sweet note from a loyal reader, to the effect that the space had been absorbed too much by images of "perfect" physical representations. Of course one cringed at the very suggestion that such a concept could exist, but it was even more frightening to contemplate how much any message would be diminished, if that were true. For the present, then, I adopt an alteration in scale, if diminution can mollify where judgment must fail. 

We are all exceedingly pre-occupied just now - in the northern hemisphere, that is - with the gathering of physical specimens of our passion from vines we do our very best not to take for granted. Inevitably we too idly trust that it's understood, we mean well, in this probably vain pursuit. Perfection has really nothing to do with our intentions, which are driven by a concept of husbanding addressed in this space before, a conservator's anxiousness to convey a grace he cannot endure imbibing only for himself, whose extinguishment would be to him, unthinkable.


Excoriate our concentration, the fault is ours.

Saturday commute ii

We say, we welcome the weekend, but always there is the spectre of car trouble. 


One does all one can, to come to terms with a wholesome terror of car trouble.


An unseemliness attaches to car trouble, despite the most enlightened tolerance - to say nothing of the nasty suspicion, that we simply desire car trouble.




Who could possibly believe that?

Daydreaming of justice

a foot in the right direction






Se vuol ballare,
Signor Contino,
Il chitarrino
Le suonerò.

[the document]

Every one of them

. . taught us, learned with us.


This poem, The Yoke, is by a teacher, 
Frank Bidart. 
I'm going to take it.

don't worry   I know you're dead
but tonight


turn your face again
toward me


when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn


I sleep and wake and wake and sleep and wake and


but tonight
turn your face again


toward me


see   upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke


don't worry   I know you're dead
but tonight


turn your face again

Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio

E a parlare 
mi sforza d'amore


Un desio ch'io 
non posso spiegar






E, se non ho chi m'oda,
Parlo d'amor con me.








Lorenzo da Ponte after Beaumarchais
Photograph Hedi Slimane

A dialogue of need and nourishment ii

Commentary at a blog:

For me, the theft of "The Guy in the Striped Room" from the Frick always made it too poignant to visit the museum after lunch. Indeed, it made lunch necessary, to recompose upon a sequence of plates, those elements of nourishment the canvas had framed completely in itself. The failure, then, of the whole restaurant principle comes crashing down upon one, to return to that house on a full stomach.

The general crisis of public gastronomy has not yet figured here. However, it is obvious, that his participation in the cyclical drama of a basket of fruit is what Epicurus had in mind as he lingered for a table at Lucas Carton - which Senderens has self-named, at last, in despair of presenting cliché. Tellingly, he has adopted the very blues for himself that Louis Malle commissioned of Miles Davis, to guide Jeanne Moreau on her erotically anguished march down the Champs-Elysées in Elevator to the Gallows.

A jest, such as a culinary titan's embrace of the jazz theme of a murderess to project a radical passion, exposes a tension that is real, and famously inherent in exhibitive consumption. In fact Lucas Carton was an indisputable ornament of France. Senderens gutted it in every way, risking travesty to restore its meaning.

For his muse Senderens resorted to iconography even less assailable to the French, indeed to the world, than the name of his restaurant. Whether he fails as Mme Carala did, to salvage love in an assassination of husbandry, is less important than his assertion of artistry in the act.

Still, none of this answers to the tragic gap in the Frick Collection, since the heist of "The Guy in the Striped Room." It only pretends to. Another radical epicure already showed this, in an artistic gesture famously thrusting the life cycle beyond the edge of its shelf, into consuming space. The dialogue between need and nourishment, at least as old as Plato's Symposium, has not lacked depiction for 400 years.

Monochrome for author's comment at The Slab

Music by Miles Davis, "Florence sur les Champs-Elysées"

Colour photograph gift of Tassos Paschalis to Laurent

Jeanne Moreau by window light at midnight by Louis Malle

A Basket of Fruit, ca 1593, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

David Chaloub by window light, morning

sometimes the face of Julien Sorel

reminds, without a word,
he never went away.
He never will, he's our Julien.




Photo Paolo Roversi for Gucci
W, August 2010