Perils of multi-tenant housing: the awkward hours

The thump of the Sunday Times

at your door.

Just when you thought it safe

to venture out for the wedding 

of the week, somebody shows up

to borrow the book review. And

what is this world coming to?

As if that weren't enough, he wonders if he mightn't borrow your shaver, resonating through the wall.

And, oh yes, by the way, just in case you aren't at the moment using your father's Mark Cross chinning gloves ..

or thought you might be able to take in a quiet swim, without drawing the entire human race into a traffic jam at this ostensibly private gym ..

but please don't even ask why he doesn't seem to have any hot water, not that you've been showering at unusual length ..

and don't say we didn't warn against a breakfast on the balcony, that's the slightest bit aromatic ..

so it would be only too gruesome, under the circumstances, to coun-tenance resort to the elevators.

Saturday commute xxxiii: doux de montagne ii

Between the droning shore and

the roiling, clashing rapids,

a rock affords a fulcrum of

escape.

Homage, Vittorio de Sica

ciné

The power of the tumblr

to concentrate the mind

by spontaneous projection

is an alluring defect, as

well as a reconstitution

of the sovereign weight of

the image. For Laurent the

stamp of de Sica's second

film is almost absolutely

peerless in its orchestra-

tion of coherency from tum-

bling shots of unalleviated

legitimacy, a moral judg-

ment unequivocally earned.

Here, a simple fashion shot

captures the youth's inher-

itance of the fedora, which

is all we want, to identify

that film without purloining

images meant for the screen.

Inheritance, again. When will

you ever learn, Laurent?

Vittorio de Sica

Ladri di biciclette

Produzioni de Sica, 1948

Are you really totally completely not darling ?

  

A 1950s kind of question,
perhaps, but it's not un-
wise to be prepared for it.


Before going out this even-
ing, see James Dean dealing
with this interrogation from
Julie Harris in East of Eden,
Natalie Wood in Rebel without
a Cause, Carole Baker in Giant;
or Brando, from Eva Marie Saint
in On the Waterfront; or Martin
La Salle from Marika Green in
Pickpocket. 


Think of a good answer, and then
adopt its opposite. She will not
be satisfied unless she draws you
to that other view, herself; and 
we do disfavour frustration. Love
favours victories which allow
either party a sense of exertion, 
both a sense of what they might
want, and which are not very costly.


And besides, we remember Heisenberg:
observation changes things. So what,
if you really are unspeakably adorably 
darling for a few hours? Live with it.

Getting free on Friday

ii Robert Capa

Annals of the palate: the winefloggers are coming

     Charlottesville, Virginia - of all places - is about to furnish accommodation to a national conference of bloggers on wine, complete with a wine tasting on the lawn at Mr Jefferson's house, on a day assured of reaching 100º. One's half a mind to journey to this convention of the industrially occult as a fly on the wall, but these are very nice walls, and at that temperature adhesion can set in, and I don't intend to stay. So one must be reconciled to mingling as the alien any human is, at such swarmings of expertise.

  One hundred degrees, on the Fahrenheit scale, are some dozen above the absolute shutdown of photosynthesis in a vine, itself, and about 40 above the most advanced temperature at which any wine below the alcohol content of Port should be tasted, much less appraised.


  But this is a convening of industrialists, in whom the posture of connoisseurship is as legible in their loafers as in their lowered madras prose of delectation. This junket is not likely to be so distracted by the excuse for itself, as to notice.

  In some 700 postings we have seldom accosted each other here, with digressions on any potable, but wine does appear to our right under Matter, not that fog does not [yes, yes; one knows this doesn't count fog's unheralded appearance]. And who would not rather, among this page's readership, speculate together on the properties of the mist's dear condensation, more fondly than on anything that's bottled? 

  Still, if there should be anything of interest in this meeting, to distinguish it from ordinary chatter at Davos on financial conspiracy, or at country crossroads porches down here on who had spilled his Floris on his hankie overnight, then we might send a synopsis to the editorial committee for a ruling on its posting here. We might, but we might also heed these madras warnings and stay away.

  But is a digression of this conjectural nature any cause to abandon our consideration of the next tummy? One should very greatly hope not; and so much so, in fact, that without hesitation the editors have posted, atop this note, some of the most impeccable abs to hammer themselves into the vanishingly taut skin of a vessel of delight since Hephaestus faked a boybelt for Achilles. We know better than to suppose there's a vogue for silver, anymore, with blogging raising the ante past the conceits of the Sun King; but this is a blog about tummy, dearest darlings, and it will see those stale doubloons and raise them parallel gadroons of swirling light.

  Who knows? Ours is a natural world, after all. It might rain at this thing, ushering the whole mob into the servants' quarters - much the loveliest, in their bunkered ranges and fixtures of unquestioned authenticity. And the wines, having all been madeirised in their sojourn in the sun, might make a merry spread for our supper's toast.

  Batik and teak wine service is incongruous around here, but nothing slips the taste of the traveled palate, and no tincture has been spurned in heat prostration. Just when have madras warnings ever been known to be a match for clash, incarnate, that natural lightness of head to be endured as one sleeve extends handshake to another? The scene unfolds as we speak: a lawnful of champagne flutes with pretty straws to slurp tartaric precipitates from the stem; in brief, a native style of travesty at that.

i  Tastevin, Tiffany & Co.

With any more of this weather, we may be compelled to remark on it

Andrew Cooper, you must realise, came to our auditions for O'Hara's Raspberry Sweater with a perfectly serviceable impression of that fruit upon his frame. By mid-morning, as you see, even he was aware, at best, that we could engage him only on the character of our present temperatures, upon which no civil remark can be fashioned.

Indeed, lengths, those reaches of whose greatness many have been known to pursue, to abjure consideration of our weather, are becoming curiouser and curiouser in the protraction of a present caricature of our unfortunate seasonal renown. At such times, it's a toss-up between Winnie the Pooh and naughty Wittgenstein, as to whose reasonableness holds the likelier shelter from that fright of every tea bag of spontaneous effusion. Dawn, indeed, may require confession of these circumstances.

For this evening then, let us band together in denial, our gouty feet defiant on a café chair's vented rest, and celebrate when trousers were required to precipitate that emission to which they gave their name. When people come to us, to ask how we endure it, their incredulity will be so sharp that they will believe anything we tell them.

And is that not the genius of the idiot savant? If it works for Mrs Palin, to hoist a perfect parasol against invasive fact, why should we not aspire for a night to own her bliss?

i  Chabernaud

ii Cooper

As every decent coxswain'll tell you

Navigation, as opposed to
flotation, is contingent,
a precarious manoeuvre
relying on a practiced
distribution of wit, mass, and speed.