Posts Tagged ‘Angst’
Alice in Longlocks Hair Sticks Land
As Alice sat by her computer, she felt all men should worship her as Botticelli loved his Venus. Her long, flowing red hair was freshly washed with homemade egg shampoo and nonchalantly tickled her waist. Yawn. Pills. Water. Sigh. Then she noticed the label on her prescription medication. It was her cat’s! She had taken medicine from the wrong bottle!
The smell of tuna fish in her refrigerator’s tupperware container immediately became irritating. Why couldn’t she get at it? She smelled it. Sleep was the only answer, so she fell off the chair and went into a coma. Her cat Grace sat on her face.
Falling down a long black narrow hole, her REM dream frazzled her. “How am I supposed to keep my dignity, when I’ve just landed from this stupid tunnel and bumped… “Oh!”
“Look at the bouquet of pretty flowers! The patterns on the hair sticks would make me so beautiful. Dressmaker!” A tuxedoed tailor, looking way too much like her parrot Harry, came waddling out with his sewing machine. “What shape would you like?” he asked. “I specialize in haute couture peanut-shaped dresses with the correct texture.”
“I don’t care if I am in a dream induced by a coma from taking Grace’s medicine by mistake, Harry. You are not getting another peanut. Make me a white flowered dress immediately so it will go with every hair stick in this bouquet!”
“No,” said Harry. That was his usual answer. Why should it change because Alice was in a coma? But out of a love Stendhal couldn’t even describe in a moment, 100 pages long, Harry started sewing. As Alice looked through her flowers, Harry said, “You know, you could get back to your computer and into your own world again if you found the blue magic wand.”
“Why do I want to go back to my world? Here, there is no electric bill!” “Get the wand,” Harry wasn’t kidding. Alice found it.
Suddenly she woke up to a closeup view of Harry on her nose yelling, “Cracker!” while her cat Grace had moved to sleeping on her stomach. “I’m home!” she screamed, as both animals dashed out of the room. “My Longlocks Hair Sticks collection!” The Waterford crystal vase in which she kept them rested beautifully on her antique desk, coloring her world.
“Grace, stop switching my pill bottles… please?” Alice begged as she went to the refrigerator to get her tuna fish. “Yes, Grace, of course you can have some.”
Filed under: Angst
Rex Harrison Needed at Ascot
By BarbaraAnne:
Dr. Dolittle
“Well after all, Pickering, I’m an ordinary man,
Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance,
to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants…
An average man am I, of no eccentric whim,
Who likes to live his life, free of strife,
doing whatever he thinks is best, for him,
Well… just an ordinary man…
BUT, Let a woman in your life and your serenity is through,
she’ll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome,
and then go on to the enthralling fun of overhauling you!”
Filed under: Style, Angst
A Room of One’s Own
By BarbaraAnne:
This is my friend Miriam’s art studio. I see its silent, sunlit beauty. I also see all the gifted women who never had a hope in the world to get a space like this.
Jane Austen
Emily Dickinson
Charlotte Bronte
Mary Ann Evans
Emily Bronte
This picture represents women’s liberation, the revolution realized. And unlike men, our symbol of victory is not a monument to death in “blazing glory,” but a quiet place, where we take the power to make war irrelevant.
Virginia Wolfe’s
“Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.
“Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
“Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Filed under: Style, Angst
Vintage Gloves
My Mother’s Gloves
By BarbaraAnne:
Vintage rhinestoned pink they were
Perfectly kept in a mahogany drawer –
A time capsule for accessories,
in case we required delicate attire.
Our prepared identity,
my mother’s and mine
must be kept safe.
But tragedy does not a lady make.
Sometimes I open our drawer
and smell her meticulous keeping.
Her perfume brings back her voice.
“It’s all I have,” she used to say,
until she died on Valentine’s Day.
Looking at her gloves, untouched,
I wonder if they were a gift from her true love,
who never gave her any place to wear them.
Filed under: Style, Angst
Calvin Klein Obsession
By BarbaraAnne:
I have been thinking about life’s meaning and its relation to obsessions.
The pendulum swings from stalking to passionate collector; murder to magnificence.
Annabel Lee
John Lennon
Me
Obsession
channeled intelligently
begets beauty.
So I bought perfume today,
A Calvin-Klein-scented life.
As scent flowers my skin,
Dull, grey fear will disappear.
Calvin, have you met John Keats?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Filed Under: Style and Angst
Galliano & Dior: Behind the Curtain
By BarbaraAnne
Is the establishment outraged by anti-Semitism only when it appears in front of the curtain? John Galliano as Mel Gibson, News at 11? The President of Dior fired him immediately saying, “I condemn most firmly the statements made by John Galliano which are a total contradiction with the essential values that have always been defended by the House of Christian Dior.”
Really?
What “essential values” did Christian Dior display when he designed dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators during WWII? The same values as Coco Chanel? It was only after the War that the French Minister of Fashion enlisted cotton magnate Marcel Boussac to finance Dior’s landmark 1947 haute couture collection, the “New Look.” Economically, France had to begin competing again in world markets.
Natalie Portman had to say something, and she said what her lawyers told her to say. She will still continue to make money from her perfume contract. Dior will still show Galliano’s designs next week because they want the money. In other artistic media, we rank Karajan as one of the greatest conductors who ever lived, and he was, but he played Bruckner symphonies IN FRONT of Hitler. He was an actual card-carrying Nazi.
So we worship the art, but forgive the past. We worship the artist, but are only outraged when their anti-Semitism goes beyond the boundaries of discretion — when it is in such bad taste, they get caught. Plausible deniability is the name of the game.
That is the game Galliano lost. He will have to pay a price, maybe go to jail — for bad taste. That a designer at his level was this careless is what shocks me. That he is an anti-Semite allows him to join most of Europe. The academic papers, convenient editing of memory, historical revisionism, private dinner conversations, immigration law, and countless silent forms of anti-Semitism continue to prosper.
I am a Jew. I know the steely eyed glance, which lasts only a second, but which communicates quite clearly that the person looking at you thinks you are a little mouse. They wouldn’t think twice about stomping you out if they could.
John Galliano will hire a publicist and “reform.” But for those of us around the world who are truly not racists and anti-Semites, this is a sad day. One of our heroes revealed he was really a monster. One of our geniuses pulled back the curtain.
Filed under: Angst
In Moments of Repose
By BarbaraAnne
Surrounded by pomp, owned by a role performed perfectly, there are moments of repose.
Precious seconds of stillness when thoughts beat as you wait for the dance to start again.
Society’s choreography. Adornment’s responsibility.
Touching our secrets in between breaths, dare we wonder what freedom would be like?
Caption: Midnight Revelry at Dozo Sagama by Kitagawa Utamaro. Edo Era. Ink on colored paper. In a grand salon, geishas play music and pass the night. In this closeup (top, right), one geisha looks at the mountains lost in thought. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian.
Filed under: Angst, Longlocks GeishaStix
