no Lisa Simpson - or is she?

Wow, as you might say. You guys know I don't really follow American politics until I'm put in a position where I have to - but I've just read a long article in the Washington Post (via the Huffington Post) all about the blog (or "blogette") kept by the Republican candidate John McCain's daughter, Meghan. Now I am practicing stroking my own hair, but it isn't as smooth as Meghan's, so I fear it may not do me any good. And anyway, "blogette"? Yet somehow...

I mean, even her blog has staff! Baroque Mansions only sits five comfortably in one room, so that's a non-starter for this place, you'll be either pleased or dismayed to know.

Anyway, here's a taster:

"Some time back, McCain posted to her Web site a detailed explanation of her campaign trail makeup regimen, including her approach to maximizing lash 'density' by blending two brands of mascara, and her technique for priming lips with concealer before applying Benefit brand lip gloss.

'I just decided to do it 'cause a lot of girls were asking,' she says. 'And then I was dutifully punished on the Internet for writing about makeup.' She starts to giggle. 'But I got a lot of good response and Benefit actually sent me an e-mail being like, "We love that you love Benefit!" Yeah. So, I was like, "Yay"'. "

She's 23. She studied art history at Columbia.

And get this:

"The Web site is not affiliated with or funded by the McCain campaign, according to Meghan and a campaign spokeswoman. McCain says she didn't want to have to cede 'creative control' to her dad's staff.

So how does she pay for it?

'We don't talk about it,' McCain says firmly. ' 'Cause, like, once I answer one question it leads to 50 others.'

But, because she is the candidate's daughter, her press requests are routed through the campaign and, at one point, Brooke Buchanan, the McCain campaign's traveling spokeswoman, comes into the room to keep an eye on the interview.

'Hey, girls,' Buchanan says. She perches on the arm of Bae's chair.

'Did you change your hair?' one of the blogettes asks her."

See? She really is just a normal kinda girl. Srsly. And, blogged up, her family really do start to sound like the Simpsons:

"There's sprightly, 96-year-old Roberta McCain, who not too long ago told C-SPAN that the Republican base was just going to have to hold "their nose" and vote for her son. There's the senator, 71, who famously spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. There's Cindy, 53, John McCain's second wife, who was addicted to prescription painkillers for several years when Meghan was a child, and who in 2004 suffered a stroke. There's Meghan's brother, Jack, in the Naval Academy, and her other brother, Jimmy, a Marine who has served in Iraq. There's her little sister, Bridget, whom the McCains adopted from Bangladesh as an infant, and who was, in Dad's 2000 presidential race, the object of a smear campaign insinuating that she was the product of an illicit union."

And then there's little Lisa, the little PR genius.

The Post again:

"McCain is a political outsider with an insider's access, and on her Web site she notices the things political junkies never would, like the 'really cute' shoes Chelsea Clinton wore when they met. She posts photographs of her own shoes and of the shoes she encounters on the trail, including those belonging to such fashion luminaries as Dick Armey and Henry Kissinger.

'Because I love shoes, and who doesn't want to know what kind of shoes Dr. Kissinger wears?' she writes on her blog.

We didn't know we wanted to know, but now that she mentions it, we kinda do."

Hmm. You couldn't make it up.* She may never even need to fall back on that education, ya think? (Make sure you click on the pic.)

* But if you did, don't forget that foundation!

life: the new art

"We have art so we will not die of the truth."


picture courtesy of the Neitzsche Family Circus: click on it to be transported (& thanks to the Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for the tip)

Gilbert & George. What would happen if they were to split up? This is what I'm left wondering after a discussion sparked off by a post at That's So Pants (yes, I know this is the second citation in half a week; no, she's not paying me). Starting out as a mere bagatelle illustrated by cutout paperdolls of the two artists (one artist?) with matching cutout suits, it has transmogrified into a conversation about whether the act of dying itself can be an act of artistic expression. Or, rather, can be expressed in such a way as to be, effectively, art for its observers. It got there by way of the Life-As-a-Work-of-Art trope.

I'm not going to enter into some definition of Art, and is it the cause or the effect or the intent or the purpose, or give hostages to fortune in the form of those people who think everything has to be "true" - we're going to take it as read that art is the basis for a particular kind of experience - an opening-up of some area in our being, maybe the third eye or similar, which enables us to see everything in a different, a richer, way - which comes about as a result of something someone made or did in order to provoke this response.

Back in her discussion, Ms Pants (yes, I know: not her real-world name) makes the excellent remark that: "Most cultures ceremonialise death in some way that's artistic. In European culture it tends to be decorative - tombstones, epitaphs, flower arrangements. It's not a huge stretch to accept the act of death as artistic."

It's interesting how foreign this idea is to us. How offensive. And life itself as an artistic act? I was offended by Michael Landy's stunt in 2001, when he took over a disused Oxford St shop premises and systematically fed all his possessions through a shredder. These possessions included family photographs and his father's coat, and I thought - and still think - that it was more like passive-agressive posturing than art. His mother was reputedly very upset: morally, those things weren't his to destroy. It also seemd a bit fake to me, in that Landy also didn't have to live thenceforth without even a coffeepot, because he simply stayed with his girlfriend (another artist, Gillian Wearing) and used, for example, her towels. So I don't really think of this as true life-as-art: it's more like appropriating art to seek attention, with life as a prop.*

Well, this has been a week in which life-as-art has been highlighted. My Elegantly Dressed Wednesday, about Isabella Blow, was on the same subject. (I think we can take as read, for the purposes of this discussion, that Isabella Blow presented her self as a work of art. Certainly there were many people who knew the images, the aesthetic, but not the woman - and that this aesthetic has meaning is clear from the hits my post has attracted this week. They come from absolutely everywhere.)

Yesterday the Telegraph published an article with the news that Blow's grandfather, Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton, was in fact the White Mischief murderer, in 1941. This will be better off as the subject of a separate post, but here I'll just say I think it occupies a corner of the life-as-art spectrum - not through his intent, certainly. Through our reaction to it.

Ms P goes on: "I think of Robert Capa's iconic image of the falling soldier as a place where art and death meet quite comfortably. I don't mean that callously as it must have been horrible at the time for the family of the fallen soldier to see their loved one's death so publicly displayed. Capa captured a moment that he could have done nothing to change. That is one of the purposes of art."

This remarks interests me. Captures a moment he could have done nothing to change. Certainly. Art is one means - sometimes the main means - by which we learn to negotiate our world, and indeed to accept it. This model is like the Jamesian notion of the "donnee," a given, something that is simply there which you can choose to make into art, as an act of acceptance.

Is this the opposite, maybe to what Isabella Blow and other "my-life-is-my-art" people may be doing. Is the art, to them, a construct?

What will Gilbert & George do when they get tired? They can at least play Scrabble. As long as neither of them cops off. And they only have to be works of art when someone can see them.

So what IS one's life? Where does its power and beauty reside? Maybe in some of us the beautiful thing is not the life, but has to be wrested into being, as an act of will - the way survival had to be made - and all that's needed is the will. Mine will probably come back, once I've been exorcised - sorry, I mean excised - of the evil bile spirit that is currently possessing my innards. And then I will be able to go back to directing all my energy outward. That certainly seems to be where the Baroque capability for art resides.

But is life, can life itself be, a construct? (I watched the execrable, if fun, Marie Antoinette film the other week; her life was certanly a construct, though less so in this version - this version was a construct of Sofia Copppola's life, I think, in LA.) Maybe, without falling prey to excesses in the style of Versailles, I'd be better off if my life were a little more of a construct. If making art is the act of imposing order on chaos, of discerning pattern and thus meaning in the seemingly random universe, maybe so. Gilbert & George seem very happy. I seem to have an idea that one of the things they love most is jam.

Isabella Blow certainly seems, from my far-outside vantage point, to have had a loving and happy marriage, not that that saved her. Then again, the imposition of order on chaos, the constructivisin of our actual life, would mean that we, ourselves, would be stifled, and this our artistic selves couldn't grow. This means that in neither of these cases can an imposition of form be sald to be happening. What is happening is a natural expression of the form and order that exists within these artists.

THis may seem obvious. I've just taken a few hundred words to conclude the obvious, which anyone could tell you. You have to be able to live in your own skin, it is your only house. All your art must come out of your own house, however you find the way to do that.

But, I mean so, do Gilbert & George not operate under the same constraints as the rest of us? At what point, and how on earth, did they know this construct would work? Did they just know they would never want to be apart, ever? How did they know that? Do they never have disagreements and feel that they can't spend another week, let alone decades, under the same roof? What if one of them copped off with someone else? Forever? Unthinkable. Or is it? Might it only change the shape of the work of art that is "Gilbert & George"?

A commenter in the discussion at That's So Pants said he "distrusts iconic photographs" because so often they turn out to have been "staged". Funny: they are true to what the photographer wanted to convey, which may be a reconstruction of something that happened too fast for the shutter, or may be an externally-recognisable response to something - like, for example, the end of the war. They are the manifestation of the photographer's Self. I'd have thought that was a good reason TO trust them.

Click your heels together three times and repeat after me:


* I just refreshed my memory on this piece, and thus have read more about the aftermath of the installation. There is indeed something troubling about it, and Michael Landy seems troubled. He talks about being at peace with the whole thing, but no one that determined to have nothing can be said to be at peace. So maybe that is life-as-art, after all.

... and the prize for best comment goes to...

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please direct your attention back to February 21st, 2007? It was the day WH Auden would have turned 100. Here at Baroque Mansions we hung out the bunting and celebrated with a new poem, made largely - not entirely - of lines from Uncle Wiz himself (though Madame here forgot to keep notes of where the pertinent lines came from! I know I have the book around somewhere...).

I think it is time to address attention to this post again, if only to address attention to the comment it received today. I've never made a post out of someone's comment before, much less the comment of an unknown poetaster. However, there is such a thing as progress, and just as Marie Antoinette might have put the world's first feather pompoms on her pink satin mules, I intend to break with tradition right now and post it.

Heiranonymous Bosh, Poetaster De Luxe, writes:

"Madame B., thank you for your delightful poem, which I like very much in all its alleged rough-hewness. I shall be sharing it with sympatico friends. It is a graceful & generous hommage to such a rare one as Auden, who did indeed (though certainly no angel himself) commit some of the 20th century's "sanest, most liberal, & chaste poetry in English", successfully interpenetrating the sacred & the profane in a "user-friendly" poetic fashion.

Incidentally, I have just chanced upon this interesting site of yours via a bewildering cascade of chance search-engine turns & twists whilst researching-- of all things-- the celebrated (or, more mischievously put, "the sainted") Maya Angelou as viewed speculatively in the light of both Vladimir Nabakov's provocatively iconoclastic ideas regarding the poshlost & its viral inroads into the heart of man in these days of the global exploitation of Admass, & Paul Fussell's conception of the ultimately barbaric jingoist-consumerist faux-Culture swindle of BAD. (Whew! Try saying that a few times!)

Just pour lagniappe, a few perhaps germane things I've also just chanced upon:

One Patrick Kurp, of Houston, Texas, usefully referencing The Prolific and the Devourer in a caustic protest against the misuse of poetry in the forlorn-hopery of misconceived Good Causing:
http://www.evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2007/02/poets-against-war.html

"It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done-- or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never _made_ anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself-- beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing."

I'm sure most will be familiar with this sharp-edged but humane piece by Randall Jarrell, but it is evergreen & bears another look:
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/gunner/bad-poets.html

The Pakistani-American writer Maliha Masood spotlighting (against the current deep-darkness of the geopolitical background) a past master of what is arguably the most radical poetry conceivable who, though long dead, is currently holding his spirited, lively, & unyieldingly Sufic own against the rigours of attempted feel-good co-option by out-&-out frauds and even well-meaning but ignorant acolytes of the current terror-drenched dispensation of global provincialism & fuzzy-thinking/feeling (Whew! Try... O skip it):
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FJ06Aa01.html

Roger Downey's "In-sufi-cient: Translating Rumi's verse into the stuff of self-help books"--Traduttore, tradittore:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/arts/0141/arts-downey.php

Recently-read joke which I stared at, mind-nulled, for several seconds, like an emu contemplating a chrome lug-nut, before reaching Epiphany:
"Don't you know the King's English?"
"No, sir, is he?"

I am looking forward to perusing your site at greater length. Cheers!"

Ms B says cheers to you too, Mr Bosh.

Oh, and by the way - by following the links I came to a home page that seems to belong to Mr Bosh, and bless me if I didn't find a description of myself there!

"Button-cute, rapier-keen, cucumber-cool, and gall-bitter..." -- S.J. Perelman.

the Veruca Salt of filmmaking

My darling mother, Mama Baroque, sent me this article over the weekend, to cheer me along my sickbed. It did! It is a review, by Dana Stevens at Slate.com, of the Marie Antoinette film, which opens with the sentence "Sofia Coppola is the Veruca Salt of American filmmaking." Talk about hooking the reader! (One is a total sucker for any sort of reference to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in higher discourse.)

I actually disagree with much of what she writes (is it a she?) - sometimes simply in matters of tone, as in her assessment of Lost in Translation, where what she says in a damning-with-faint-praise way I think sounds right, but praiseworthy - and I think she fails utterly to substantiate her critical stance - but it's a long time since I have been so roundly entertained.

Naturally Ms B hasn't seen the film yet, as she has not yet arisen from her bed of pain to take on, once again, the mantle of the world - but this review is keeping the flame alive.

Little Miss B did go yesterday with some friends - it's half-term, remember - and her assessment was a shrug. She liked it; her friends were bored.

Kind of like Marie Antoinette, I hear you say.

why are pirates called pirates?

Because they arrrrre..!

Today, me mateys, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day - a fine tradition, and one we on Baroque Island are proud to honour, by the leg of Long John Silver and pieces of eight! Any dirty lubbers among ye who don't like the idea can walk the plank, and may the barrrrrnacles stick to yer eyes and nestle in yer nose, ye rum dogs!

It's off to locate the buried doubloons we arrre, and when we find 'em we'll be forsaking the halls of Barrroque to parrrrade in our finery at the Marrrrrie Antoinette -


that's enough - ed.

we might have known

... by the way, it appears that the shoes for the new Sofia Coppola film "Marie Antoinette" were all designed by Manolo Blahnik. He will sell the designs in his shops - one pair of each of five designs, one pair in each of five sizes.

The queue starts...

... ... ...

... ...

...
HERE! (but wear trainers and carry a stick)

PS - no pics on web. If I can, I'll scan it. It is too, too funny.

PPS - On second thought, no, I'm not quite interested enough. Though as I remarked, the fever is building, and it is going to be interesting to observe the jostling for place of the New Utilitarian and the New Excess. I forgot to mention the other day the amount of metallic leather around at the moment.

And my colleague remarks, this little wheeze does take movie merchandising to a new height (well, about 2 inches).

I did love the part in The Observer where Manolo himself was gushing something like, "Marie Antoinette has always been such an inspiration to me in all my work! It is wonderful to see her getting the adulation she deserves at last!" or words to that effect. The sad, sad sack.

the Queen of Hearts and the curse of the milkmaid: or, may you live in interesting times

She "rocked the world", according to US Vogue* (this makes sense: Queen: "we will rock you"); here is their wonderful over-the-top cover.

Of course, true to my name, I had to buy the magazine, and carry it home, all 754 fashion-packed pages of it. If I'd been Marie Antoinette I'd have had a mule to strap it onto, but as it was I had to lug it on the Tube in the bag with my new back-to-school, I mean back-to-work-now-it's-autumn, shoes. (They're a bit drop-dead, in a good way I mean, with ankle straps that buckle in the front, but with sensible crepe wedge heels. M.A. never had those.)

Of course this is a Zeitgeist Moment. It's all about Sofia Coppola's film, starring Kirsten Dunst: a sort of Virgin Suicides with brocade draperies. (I wonder. I'm sure I'll comnent once I've seen it.) Years ago I did try to read Antonia Fraser's biography, which is also Coppola's source. I went along for a few hundred pages (it's almost as long as Vogue) until it cloyed, like sweetened milk left in a milk can for fun - and I never did finish it. Ultimately it was just too much apologia, which of course began to have almost the same effect on me - it's a matter of degree, I find - as it had on Robespierre back in the day. Eventually the book went to the charity shop, but it did get me thinking. Marie Antoinette was a victim of the system, just like the rest of us - if slightly better housed - but I'm still not seeing her as a Queen of the People. Not precisely.

Now they're marketing her as the Princess Diana of her day and it does make you wonder if there's a curse, like the Curse of Superman, or the Curse of Blue Peter... Think: they were both married off young to rather inbred princes who, for one reason or the other, couldn't have cared less; they both suffered in their self-esteem as a result of this sexual rejection, and made up for it later on with increasingly glamorous and powerful lovers; they were both (erroneously, in poor Diana's case) famous for their fashion sense; they both learned, after a bad start, to cultivate their personal 'brand' (if you like) to recoup positions of power, relying on intrigue and denying doing so; they died within a year of each other's ages, both violently, both in Paris.

Apparently now Paris has gone Marie Antoinette mad, which would be something to see. I think it's the guilt. And the relief that suddenly it's okay to like nice dresses again.

Most of us, of course, are not in Paris. Speaking of the Zeitgeist, let's look at the World Situation surrounding this - again, something M.A. herself could have done with doing. Social flux; changing means of production and even crises about what to produce; widening gaps between rich and poor - both people and countries - with increasing anger from the powerless; new, cheap, universally available means of disseminating information and opinion; increasing religious intolerance even in mundane places; random, violent reprisals in the street, against innocent people, for alleged philosophical and religious 'offences'; Government justification for 'any means necessary' to repress those whom they perceive as the troublemakers; loss of democratic rights; fears for the future of our civilisation; fear. The shops are all full of grey clothes. Narrow, grey skirts. Jackets are "playing with volume" but they are cropped and the sleeves are cropped, and the buttons are so big that when you wear the clothes you look a bit like a Borrower. It's not clothing of power. The placement of this Beautiful craze is interesting, n'est-ce pas? Remember that the pundits are saying the Enlightmentment is over.

After reading the book, I have to say, the famous drawing of Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine becomes very powerful. It is a tragedy, and that is what comes out. What struck me, after about ten minutes looking at it, was how sad to have this drawing made as you go to your death, by someone who doesn't love you - who hates you. But the person who drew it was in fact unable to take away the small but all-important fact that you are a person. I now rather regret having given the biography away, though one can't keep everything. Perhaps if I had a little summer house for the books.

*okay - "rocked Versailles", I see now, having finally managed to upload something bigger than a thumbnail. So much for Blogger beta. Anway, Versailles, the world, same diff.

baroque, battered and beleaguered

...battered by red tape, that is, which is why I have been so strangely silent these past days. Actually, more trussed than battered: that comes after. The culprit is the nice man in the immigration queue at Heathrow last year who, chatting merrily with me about the incredible length of my residence in London, so distracted himself that he absentmindedly stamped my passport "leave to enter for six months, employment prohibited."

Add to that the fact that the US Passport Office doesn't recognise deed poll (yes, like a raving lunatic who thinks he's a different person every other month, I had to go and change my name by deed poll after my - more Gothic than baroque - divorce, as no one agency would accept a new name without evidence that others already had) as legitimate. So the passport in question in fact gives me a name I haven't used for over ten years. (As an aside, when you change your name by deed poll you have to swear an oath that you will only ever use the new name in future. So the mighty US Passport Office, in their insistence upon a long-defunct name, are forcing me already to break the law. If challenged to produce ID in support of my passport I would be utterly unable. I wonder what the penalty is for that.)

So, what does this mean, in real life? It means that not only can Ms Baroque not work until this is sorted out, but it is going to take jumping through an ever-lengthening succession of hoops - letters, faxes & phone calls in all directions, reams of supporting documentation, personal appearances at both the US Embassy and Croydon, and (crucially) weeks and weeks, to GET it sorted. Plus it looks like costing upwards of £600.

£500 of that is the Home Office fee. All to rectify their mistake! Then there are the endless phone calls (three hours already on hold at Heathrow Terminal Three Immigration Office, & still haven't got through), Recorded Delivery fees, loss of earnings (which looks like, is even worse than, and indeed also amounts to, loss of earrings), and the incalculable wear and tear on my only-just-back-to-normal nerves.

The people on the phone at the Home Office have a terrible way of saying, in answer to any little nuance of this problem, "It all goes on the most recent stamp." That's not much nuance, in my decorative little opinion, for something that was a patent error, which if it had been an actual decision would have been insupportable on any legal grounds. And the word "apply" does have a meaning: it means "ask." I'm told the result of this application will be "at their discretion" - in other words, I'm being told to supplicate for permission to live my own life!

Meanwhile, the Council Tax bill is due. Let's see, who do I pay first...?

Marie Antoinette had no idea.