September 19, 2012 Arts & Culture A Week in Beirut By Nathan Deuel WEDNESDAY I wake up early to make ice cream for an old friend who is visiting from Riyadh. I blow a fuse in the power converter getting the machine to turn fast enough, but I have a spare fuse and all is well. The visiting friend, Matt, flies in on Saudi Arabian Airlines, which is now a member of SkyTeam, so you can use your miles on Delta or Air France. That night, Matt, my wife, and I stay up late drinking beer and wine and telling stories about the life we shared in Riyadh, where my daughter was born and where Matt still spends weekends DJing parties. THURSDAY Matt and I follow the old coast road up to Byblos, where the ticket taker laughs when I say we met in Riyadh. He asks, “You are an American?” When I confirm, he says, “Ahlen Wa Sahlen,” which means “welcome.” Under a blazing September sun, Matt and I climb ten-thousand-year-old stairs, noting how few guardrails or official paths there are. Then I find a pomegranate tree growing from rocky soil, and we pause to admire the strange fruit hanging from gnarled branches. Hungry, we take a car to a fish restaurant that’s been open forty years. Lunch is grilled sea bass, which we eat on a table in the water, so that waves wash up our legs and sometimes splash on the fish, giving it a little more salt. Before we can leave, our waiter insists on my taking a shot. I ask for something brown, and he takes down a bottle of coffee-flavored Patrón. FRIDAY I make sure Matt sees this killer little cassette shop, Deep Music, which is just down the block from my apartment. Then we have a final lunch at a nearby restaurant, where they bake their own bread and many, if not all, of the salad greens are local and organic. We each drink a spicy pale ale, brewed by a guy I see around town, and then we share a bowl of merguez sausages drowning in sour syrup, and a seafood frikeh made with an intensely, earth-green grain. Read More
September 17, 2012 Arts & Culture Immoderation: On Sharing an Idol By Lesley M.M. Blume Last year, I was given the birthday gift of a lifetime: I got to spend the occasion with Diana Vreeland. A friend, who has long been close with the Vreeland family, took me on a weeklong pilgrimage to the Marrakech home of one of Vreeland’s sons. Our hosts, aware of my longstanding obsession with Diana, settled me into what is alternately known as the “D.V. Room” and the “T.V. Room,” for it boasted a rather ancient television set that looked like it might electrocute anyone who dared near it. Above it hung the splendid William Acton portrait of Vreeland that graced the first edition of her memoir, D.V. (edited, incidentally, with gusto by Paris Review cofounder George Plimpton). The painting lovingly depicted her trademark red talons, lacquer-black hair, and the leather thong sandals she claimed to have had recreated from those donned by a slave perfectly preserved (in coitus, no less) by the ashes of Vesuvius. For Vreeland, inspiration came from the most unlikely of sources. The local souk held countless wonders for the other houseguests, but the sprawling, glamorously disheveled Vreeland house engrossed me far more. The D.V. imprint was everywhere. First of all, nothing quite made sense—at least to the orderly, pedestrian mind. You had to resign yourself to wandering the labyrinth and surrendering to the various unexpected delights along the way, such as a turret room festooned entirely with leopard print, or a dark hidden library, filled with hundreds of Vreeland’s books, many (if not most) of which had been inscribed to her by their authors. In yet another room stood one of her famed Louis Vuitton traveling trunks, her initials D.D.V. emblazoned in imperial red ink on one side. One evening, after too many bottles of Moroccan wine, our party took a vote and elected to open it up. The candles in the room blew out as we lifted the lid. Vreeland was clearly present—and making it known that she could only tolerate so much reverential curiosity. Read More
September 14, 2012 Arts & Culture “Thule, the Period of Cosmography”: An Illustrated Panorama By Jason Novak This anonymous love lyric about the polar regions was set to a madrigal by the composer Thomas Weelkes in 1600. Four hundred years ago, poets had the luxury of looking at the horizon and marveling at what might lie beyond it. We’ve since lost that hopeful curiosity about the external world. The natural wonder of volcanic eruption is now classified as a natural disaster, and the once romantic Andalusian merchant is now seen as a capitalist pig. Having run out of physical space, exploration has turned inward. Thule is now the period of an interior cosmography. We go there not as heroes, but as a collection of anonymous users. The point of the poem—and I think it endures—is that the commonplace grime and dirt of our own feelings is still more powerful and exciting than the Thule of either cosmography. Read More
September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 2 By Katherine Bernard Ernest Hemingway goes hunting at the Marc Jacobs Spring 2013 show. I am in range and my hat, which is in this season, is good and on, a damn cute hat, and I can see the entire show and the open runway, which is showing fashion. Afterward, Marc, who is an American man who can wear a skirt and make it look good, will throw a party. Open bar. There she is. That’s a damn fine one, too. The spots are fine, and her hair parts in a fine way, and the dress hangs low and true and near the floor, within the finery. It’s as dark as if it wasn’t light. I could shoot, aim, and get my shot. But then there’s the crowd. Well, the crowd. Yes, the crowd. Hm, the crowd. Come on. Shoot. She’s not going to stand there all day and it’s already dark and in the darkness I can see the next one emerging. Hell, is it a worthwhile head? She’s a small target with a small face and what if the dress got marked? It’s Marc Jacobs, which is too good. Which is too good.
September 13, 2012 Arts & Culture Small, Good Things By Casey N. Cep One of Mary Oliver’s poems begins “Something has happened / to the bread / and the wine.” A most unusual mystery, the comestibles have not gone the way of the plums in William Carlos William’s “This Is Just to Say.” Oliver’s wine and bread, as she explains in the second stanza, “have been blessed.” These two central elements of the Christian faith have been lifted from their ordinariness, isolated in order to show the extraordinariness of even the most ordinary of things. The bread and the wine join water and words to become what believers call sacraments: Eucharist is a sacrament made from staple food and festive drink; baptism is a sacrament made of clean, clear water. One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. Read More
September 12, 2012 Arts & Culture Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part 1 By Katherine Bernard F. Scott Fitzgerald Attends the Alexander Wang Spring 2013 Show. I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere sit in front of you at the Wang show: —“So sorry, but the front row is reserved for bloggers. Writers are in the second.” “I am most certainly a blogger.” —“What’s your blog?” “It’s called Tumblr. Keeps my readers in high spirits.” [A pause; it endured horribly.] I cannot accept that I’m to be deprived of half the view of a show that endures for a mere five minutes. Not to mention the insult of being told by an intern. In turn, I— —“Hi, can I take a quick picture of your style for my blog? ” “Oh, absolutely!” —“Wait, don’t smile.” “Oh, no, of course, I’m sorry.” —“And who makes your suit and shoes?” “Happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing. You can just put ‘vintage’.”