Spike Jonze Presents: Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma (2011)

   It's not often that collaborations turn my head like a topspin, though judging by 2009's fling with Uniqlo, I reckon that the rather good Opening Ceremony have a facility for a damn fine get-together


   This number was presented by Jonze for OC's blog

L'Amour Fou (2011)

“I’ve gone through much anguish, many hells. I’ve known fear and a tremendous solitude. The deceitful friends that tranquilizers and narcotics turn out to be. The prison that depression can be and that of mental-health clinics. One day I came out of it all, dazzled but sober. Marcel Proust taught me that ‘the magnificent and pitiable family of neurotic people is the salt of the earth.’”

   I think few things explicate the psyche of a sophisticate like examining his desire for the splendid, so I am greatly looking forward to this ostensibly intimate film by Pierre Thoretton. For what the world certainly needs is a documentary about the lives and tastes of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé

   It's pretty gratifying to see that the muses - Betty Catroux, Loulou De La Falaise and Catherine Deneuve - are present and correct, as well as knowing that L'Amour Fou (“The Crazy/Mad Love”) does not shy away from acknowledging the distraught and depersonalised depths the industrious, sensitive, aesthetically-obsessed Saint Laurent could slide into, almost unbidden, whilst Bergé navigated much of his life for him

   Interspersed between the reminiscences from a 50 year love affair are moments from a confessional on the catwalk, the copious collections of objets d'art that filled the rooms of houses the world over and the delivery of said objets into the funereal hands of auctioneers (because nothing marks the passing of a life lived in connoisseurship quite like the wholesale of one's acquisitions) and then to those of that sagacious breed whose avarice and passion match those of Saint Laurent himself: collectors

   For all the attention lavished on works by Mondrian, Degas and Picasso, it's more interesting to me that there was a democratic element to the couple's assorted pretty things; Saint Laurent was apparently apt to see value in the bric a brac of a Marrakech market as he was in Chinoiserie pieces, Constantin Brancusi forms and Egyptian sculpture. And personally, an openness to the potential beauty in the affordable and the aureate is what makes such accumulative types all the more endearing

   Frankly, a production like this would always feel akin to the closing of a chapter

 

Mode Parade x Final Fashion

Final Fashion is the column of adroit fashion illustrator Danielle Meder, who relocated from Toronto to London not long ago. She arrived just in time, for since my return to this town, my oh-so-cosmopolitan circles have indeed expanded to include more Canadians and blondes. Brought together by fate, Twitter and The Grumpy Owl, yesterday we spent a late afternoon indulging in some mutual portraiture


For the record, this is the first artistic endeavour I've produced in over 10 years, created over pots of Chilli Chilli Bang Bang and Adventure tea at the ever temperate Yumchaa:

Here is Danielle's rendering of your author - "More handsome" defines her take on Mode Parade's baby Afro'd boy (I'd also venture, "More Nigerian," as I'm happy without needing my features to be chiselled). In a rare moment of vanity, I, of course, asked for my lips to be accorded more accurate proportions:

Danielle and I might do this again at some point. I've certainly threatened to begin sketching again. I was always a little dangerous with a crayon when I put my mind to it


The tale of the tape may be found at Final Fashion

Upper Class Living

 

   Having little care for what passes for entertainment television in this day and age - and how fuddyish of me to consider that I wish Dick Cavett, Michael Parkinson and Michael Aspel were still the leaders of chat shows - I nevertheless chose to watch the latest in class-based reality television, E4's Made in Chelsea, an anaemically produced and performed "inside view" into the lives of monied twenty-somethings that resembles a televised version of the The Sun's photostories, albeit more unintentionally funny and with the crowning achievement of being less intelligent. I wonder if they share scriptwriters; that insipid line about eyelashes could only have come from the mind of one raised on a diet of softcore porn, Dynasty and Brookside

   Of course, even this sterling material cannot quite survive when delivered by a group of young turks who, despite their varying degrees of attractiveness, function under quite a glaring charisma embargo. This concept might have gone over better if they had employed genuine actors with the requisite backgrounds and who would at least delivered the necessary irony to make this more palatable. Of course, the ones I am thinking of - Eddie Redmayne, Imogen Poots, Harry Hadden-Paton - presently have better things to do

   Why were the most poignant comments of the show about eyelashes - from the fellow with great hair as he struggled to reciprocate his girlfriend's gushing compliments about his character - and pineapples - from the pompous-but-lovelorn-so-he-might-be-alright-in-time fellow stroking a globe and openly praying for posterity to record his alleged greatness and socio-economic acumen? Why did they have an ostensibly 15 year old girl socialising in Raffles and hanging around modelling shoots? Why did they not concentrate on the lead girl's singing, a trait infinitely preferable to the written-for-automatons-by-automatons lines she delivered on the subject of her ongoing "love triangle?"

   Aside from the laughs, I gained one nugget of information - The Troubadour on Old Brompton Street is still in business. We are all honour bound to support our aged, ramshackle haunts, after all

   Although he no longer lives here and would have to go online, I wonder if viewing this will cause that Laguna Beach Blogger Fellow - the most SW3 of us all - to experience copious flashbacks to his 1980s days

   I may tune in next week, primarily for the girls, of course. Not for the reasons one might imagine, however - I simply have a theory that most of them prefer the company of dogs to the company of men. And I will never sleep again until this is proven

A Blast of Bombast

   For all the simplicity of the palette I chose, this might be the most forceful colour play of mine, thus far:

It is certainly fair to say that my Holliday & Brown aggressive abstract acid shirts are getting quite the workout; teaming one with H&B collaborator Prada (the bootcut dress trousers) and the Spencer Hart-designed Aquascutum coat, gives the wearer an overall look of a hedonist in search of a happening 


Adding to the fun, in the Lobbs I am just shy of 6'4"


Photograph by Harry L

Tie Up

   Edward Sexton, also known to me as "My Favourite Tailor," presents an instructional on the four-in-hand, the only tie knot that connotes an unfussy mind when it comes to necktie styling. His dummy's name is Ben Fogle, reporting for NBC as part of a piece on morning dress:

   Thanks to Edward's assistant, Dominic Sebag-Montefiore, for sending this to the MP inbox

A Wake

   

   Popular culture is perpetually at a stage where its degradation is marked by the passing of its figureheads perhaps as much as the dwindling of the culture itself. And at this time, I'm not certain we are superseding those luminaries with anyone better

   That said, I may just be venting from having memorialised more interesting dead people than I'd like on this column over the last year. But the thought persists, nonetheless

   For the most part, I could possibly muster more energy on these performers if I spent more time with my age 18 and below relatives. But they keep asking me to pay for the MP3 downloads and sing into their hairbrushes with them. I might look like I am made out of money, but I will only ever accommodate them on one of those requests

   It's the latter, in case you were wondering

   I think that for now, I will stick with the dissections of the old school, thank you. At least the past  can still feel perpetually alive

Beastie Boys - 'Make Some Noise' (Cornelius Remix, 2011)

All I can say is, they have all made me a very happy man today. Given the influence the middle-period Beasties had on Cornelius's middle-period 69/96 album, this is a more natural pairing than one may initially be led to assume


Maestro? Some noise, please:

The Greenbrier Revisit

   Now with added video, as the hotel's leadership itself has seen fit to join with the YouTube generation. Needless to say, it is a document of a different time; a few familiar celebrity visages abound as The Greenbrier  in 1948 is shown to reassert itself as a hub of aureate activity and sybaritic sensations. We now know how long that lasted

   With thanks to Virginia S