April 24, 2014 Jolie/Laide The Aulds Have It By Charlotte Druckman Jolie/Laide is a series that seeks the beautiful and the ugly in unexpected places. Angela Lansbury in Terry Richardson’s iconic cover shot for The Gentlewoman. Continue to present yourself as a woman of loveliness and dignity, a woman who feels good and knows she’s looking her best. —Angela Lansbury, The Gentlewoman, Autumn/Winter 2012 When I was a little girl, I had no reason not to follow my parents’ edict to respect my elders, especially when it came to my female elders. My mother was stunning. I’d watch, mesmerized, while she applied her makeup, spritzed her Chloe perfume, and put on her latest Valentino or Ungaro ensemble before an evening out with my father. I thought her mother, my grandmother, was the epitome of elegance in her Upper East Side tweed uniform. Flipping through my mother’s latest issue of Vogue, I saw a photo of Sophia Loren in glasses. “This woman looks like mom when she wears her glasses,” I announced. “I do not look like Sophia Loren, but I thank you for the compliment,” my mom said. At the time—the eighties—Sophia was in her early fifties. The mask of fright she now wears, courtesy of an aggressive plastic surgery regimen, had not yet been donned. During that period, I also saw pictures of Audrey Hepburn, who was ten years Loren’s senior, and I thought she, too, was beautiful. Of plastic surgery, she once said, “I think it’s a marvelous thing, done in small doses, very expertly, so that no one notices.” Read More
April 2, 2014 Jolie/Laide Sit on It By Charlotte Druckman The art of sploshing. (Contains mildly NSFW photography.) © Martha Burgess The Friday night before last, on an otherwise abandoned block in Gowanus, I spied a young man and woman; she was carefully carrying a plastic bag that contained a boxy package. “Are you here for the sploshing?” I asked. They were. I followed them to their destination—Trestle Gallery, a nonprofit art organization affiliated with Brooklyn Art Space, on the first floor of a building that once housed factories. Was it their first time sploshing? I wanted to know. It was. And me, would I be participating, too? No. I was only there to watch. I’d learned of artist Martha Burgess’s “Cake Sit” a few months prior, over dinner at Omen, the serene, Zen-like Japanese restaurant on Thompson Street. The novelist Monique Truong, whose Book of Salt I often cite as one of the best examples of food writing, turned to me and asked, with wide-eyed excitement, “Have you heard of cake splooshing?!” Although I spend an inordinate amount of time writing, thinking, and talking about cake, to say nothing of eating it, this splooshing, as Truong called it, was new to me. People, she explained, sit on cakes and get off on it. Read More