The Blog is Back! Sunday in the Park with Joan

(if you click on the photos they get bigger)

I haven’t written an entry since the weekend of "Brides and Pirates in New Orleans" and that was about six weeks ago! But I haven’t given up on the travels of A Rolling Crone.I had several writing deadlines and a hurricane of activity getting ready for our family trip to Greece but the deadlines were met (pretty much) and now I’m in Athens with Eleni and Marina waiting for Nick to arrive. Then we’re off to Mykonos for a wedding but I’ll tell you about that then.

Right now I want to celebrate Central Park the way it looked about four weeks ago. Everyone in Manhattan, young or old, flocked into the Park to savor the briefest but most glorious season in New York as Spring burst into bloom. There were horseback riders and bikers, brides and painters, boaters and picnickers, bands and singers and comedians and lots of pets. Nearly every year I visit the Park to photograph this evanescent miracle. This time I started off from daughter Eleni’s apartment on 80th and Third, stopped by Eli’s for an old-fashioned sugar cone, admired the flowers outside the brownstones. (One of them –double size—was just bought Madonna for a reported 40 million dollars.)

Into the Park by the Metropolitan Museum with background music by African steel drums. Children and their parents climbed over the Alice in Wonderland Statue (I used to take my kids to story hours there) and the statue of Hans Christian Anderson (I think that’s who he is—hence the goose?) On to the toy boat lake where you rent a remote-controlled sailboat. I headed toward the big lake and the Boat House Restaurant. (We had such fun there at a recent lunch watching Eleni’s godson Demosthenakis feeding everything he could get his hands on to the GIANT gold fish and turtles who live in the lake.)

Outside the Boathouse were a bride and groom posing under a blossoming cherry tree, and sunbathers and artists galore on the banks of the lake as rowboats sailed past. On to my favorite spot—Bethesda Fountain, watched over by the Angel of the Waters. (Those are healing waters-- you may remember the important role of the Angel in the TV version of "Angels in America".)

For forty-five years Central Park has been part of my life. Back when I was single, I was at a press party at Tavern on the Green when the first great New York Blackout hit. As we sat by candlelight, Nick, who lived nearby, came to rescue me. (That was the good black-out when everyone behaved valiantly. The second blackout—the bad one, when there was looting—was in July 1977 when I was married to Nick and in New York Hospital with a new-born Marina. The only lights visible in the city were in the hospitals, with their own generators.)

My kids grew up with the Carousel and the pony rides and the Children’s Zoo—I was there with other mourners when they closed the Zoo for its makeover.

Just last summer I stood in line for hours one summer morning at the DellaCorte Theater to score FREE tickets to a wonderful outdoor performance of the rock musical Hair—forty years after I saw it for the first time. The revival was magical. Now it’s on Broadway. And definitely not free!

They call Central Park the lungs of the city but to me it’s always been its heart.

In two days—photos and a celebration of Athens.

A NEW ORLEANS WEEKEND OF BRIDES AND PIRATES

This Rolling Crone has been in love with New Orleans since I first visited 23 years ago and saw an authentic jazz funeral that blew me away. We toured the haunted houses and feasted on crayfish étouffé and heartily embraced the city’s motto: “Let the good times roll!”

This past weekend, with daughter Eleni, I returned to NOLA for the first time since Katrina. I found the city as beautiful and vibrant and filled with festivity, food and music as ever. We were there for the grand New Orleans wedding of Katherine, Eleni’s long-time roommate and dear friend; a beautiful southern belle whose family call her “Blossom”.

All weekend, as we ate beignets and café au lait at the Café du Monde near Jackson Square, we found the French Quarter filled with brides and pirates. It was the weekend of the annual pirate convention, or PyrateCom, and the quarter was bursting with buccaneers and their wenches, virtually all of whom (the wenches) seemed to be ample and voluptuous and showing a jaw-dropping amount of décolletage. The long weekend festivities of the Pyrates included the “Search for LaFitte’s Ghost”, Haunted New Orleans Tours, the Voodoo Queen’s invitation to Party with the Dead at a grand ball, and the auction of afore-mentioned wenches. (We learned that the way pirates greet each other is with a very loud ARRGGHH!)

Katherine’s wedding , on a much more exalted plane, began on Friday night with a cocktail party given by fourteen couples at the elegant Appartement de L’Empereur in Napoleon House just off Jackson Square. On Saturday we began at Café Du Monde (where we counted in the Square maybe a half dozen brides with their attendants in tow). Then we toured the French quarter ending up at the First Cemetery and the grave of voodoo queen Marie LeVeau.

Saturday night was the wedding at the famous Arnaud’s “Classic Creole” restaurant just off Bourbon Street. To get to the wedding on time, we had to push and shove our way through a street filled to overflowing with the Pirates’ Grand Parade.

New Orleans’ grand families attended Katherine and Matthew’s wedding, which filled Arnaud’s rooms from the tiled floors to the crystal chandeliers. There was a jazz band and singers and rooms full of Creole delicacies, spirited dancing and a shrimp boat large enough to sail down the Mississippi. At the end of the evening I witnessed a New Orleans custom that I’d never seen before — the Second Line.

The bride and groom were each handed decorated umbrellas and the guests all received lavender handkerchiefs printed with the couple’s names and the date . Then the band began to play and the bride and groom danced along behind and all the guests, waving their handkerchiefs, boogied and shimmied behind the newlyweds as they “second lined” out into the streets of New Orleans to celebrate the marriage and to mix with the pirates and their wenches who were celebrating a Pirate wedding and also second-lining in their be-feathered tricornered hats. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

(Click on the photos to see a larger version.)

MORE FASHION VICTIMS, INCLUDING CELEBS!

Here are five more of the Vintage Fashion Victims cards that I designed using photos from my collection of antique images. As I wrote in the text introduction that will be included with the 30 jumbo postcards in the series, once photography was “invented” by Daguerre in 1839 (other men like Talbot were also discovering their own photographic processes at the same time), everyone wanted to have at least one photographic portrait taken in his or her lifetime, and a trip to the photographer’s studio required much thought about what to wear.

By 1854, paper photos mounted on cardboard backing became generally available and not as expensive as the cased images—daguerreotypes and ambrotypes—that came before. (Small ones were called Cartes de Visite or CDVs and larger ones were cabinet photos). Everyone eagerly bought, collected and put in albums photos of celebrities, politicians, freaks from Barnum’s circus (especially “General Tom Thumb”) and actors and actresses, as well as members of one’s own family.

Two of the women in the photos above were celebrities—one was the Queen of Spain and the other was a mistress of the Prince of Wales. Naturally women everywhere wanted to see what these illustrious women wore, so photographers selling their portraits made good money.

I’m also including one of the earlier images—a daguerreotype of two sisters in identical dresses. A friend noticed in my last blog entry that one of the women was wearing fingerless gloves a la Madonna. The two sisters in the dag above are really rocking the black lace fingerless gloves, which were in style in the 1850’s when this daguerreotype was taken. If you click on the photos, they’ll get bigger.

11. The caption on the card says “I’ve got a tiara, a title and an 18-inch waist, and I still can’t get a date.” On the back, the explanatory note says: This cabinet card was taken in Madrid by Fernando Debas, who seemed to make his living photographing the Spanish royals. The lady is “Maria Christina de Habsburgo-Lorena, Queen of Spain”, whom he also photographed in 1893 with a little boy identified as “Alfonso XIII, King of Spain.” The photographer airbrushed a bit to make her tiny waist even smaller. Imagine the corset she’s wearing, and the pain!

13. The caption says: "Someday I bet, women will get to vote, smoke, and wear skinny jeans.” The note on the back: Image from a stereoview published by George W. Griffith in 1903, a racy photograph of a “fast” modern woman showing lots of leg and smoking a cigarette. The caption on the original stereo card says, “Waiting for the Boys to Come Up.” (Stereoviews were 3-D when viewed through a stereoscope and views of famous sites around the world and comic situations acted out by actors—often in risqué situations-- provided hours of amusement in every home. This is what people did before there were movies!)

26. The caption says: “Does this suit make my butt look big?" The note on the back: Those two bathing-suit beauties are back on the beach in their sassy shoes, shamelessly showing off their bodies on this stereoview, but it has been stamped on the back ‘Approved for Sunday 1930’ by the Commissioner of Public Safety in Boston, despite the risqué display of skin. These flappers are clearly members of the Lost Generation.

3. The caption on the photo: “My stylist swore it was one of a kind!" The note on the back: A daguerreotype of two sisters(?) in dresses made from the same extraordinary fabric. Both have white lace collars, black lace fingerless gloves and the winged hairstyles that date this to around 1850. Boned corsets underneath bind their breasts flat. The tinting to their faces and hands was done in the photographer’s studio.

9. The caption on the lady in the foxtails and fur wrap reads “P.E.T.A. Schmetta! These foxes should consider it an honor!” The note on the back: Written on the back of this cabinet card, taken by W&D Downey in London, Photographers by special appointment to Her Majesty the Queen are the words: “Mme. Cornwallis West, June 27th ’83.” Mary Cornwallis West (1835 – 1917), nicknamed “Patsy” , was the daughter of a mistress of Price Albert. She herself became the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, when she was just 16. She was quickly married to Col . Cornwallis-West, a loyal man about twice her age. In her fifties, she fell in love with a 23-year-old sergeant who had been wounded in the First World War, causing a scandal that rocked the government. In this photograph, “Patsy” is 48 years old.

VINTAGE FASHION VICTIMS – a Preview

I know I haven’t finished the story of the Hindu wedding – the extravaganza we attended in India that rivaled a Bollywood production. I will! With lots of beautiful photos! But lately I’ve been preoccupied with finishing a project I’m working on called “Vintage Fashion Victims”.

It’s not a book, it’s 30 jumbo postcards (5 by 7 inches) with the subtitle “A humorous look at fashion foibles of yesterday and insights into photography’s roots.”

For over a decade, I’ve been collecting antique photographs from the very earliest (daguerreotypes, beginning in 1839) through ambrotypes, tintypes, CDVs and Cabinet Cards, and I wanted to design a series of postcards showing some of the funniest and/or most beautiful fashion images in my collection. On the front of each card is a caption, making fun of the outfit, although I dearly love each and every one of these women! And as I point out in the text included with the postcards, if these vintage bathing beauties in their bloomers and brides dwarfed by giant corsages could see a photograph of me in a 1960’s mini-skirt, they would fall about laughing. We’re not laughing at each other, but with each other. Really!

On the back of each postcard are a few words about the woman on the front and the kind of photograph it is. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing a few images from the days when a woman’s visit to the photographer’s studio required a lot of thinking about what to wear. I’ll post a few more tomorrow. (If you click on the postcards the images get bigger.)

Card 1. The caption on the front is; “I like to dress on the cutting edge” and the information on the back says “This cabinet card was created by M. Borsuk in his studio at 124 Norfolk St. in New York City. Both the bespectacled young lady with the extraordinary hat and two fur ruffs and the photographer, who designed the studio setting, seem to agree that more is more.”

Card 5. The caption on the front is: “Proud to be a full-figured woman!” and the explanation on the back: “She’s an actress with more oomph than Mae West! On the back of this cabinet card (circa 1905) in handwriting: ‘Virginia Drew Trescott, leading woman in ‘Fast Life in New York’, American Theatre, Feb. 6…the lady is an old and valued friend of mine—she is too good an actress for melodrama – and is only in those to get a New York hearing. Hope you can make a picture and come to see her work. Yours, Lawrence H. Eddy.’

Card 30. The caption on the front is: “Unlike men, women are born with the ability to accessorize.” On the back: “A cabinet card by Brigham of Dover, N.H. shows that the young ladies of Wolfboro, photographed on Aug. 8, 1883, have a far better sense of style and ability to accessorize than the young men in their group.”

Slasher Films--Who is the Victim?

It’s been a busy week for mass murderers.

On Tuesday, March 10, a 28-year-old man named Michael McLendon in Alabama killed 10 people. He started out by killing his mother and setting her body on fire on the living room couch, then he went to where he used to work and killed nine more people and when he was cornered, he killed himself.

The next day a 17-year-old youth named Tim Ketschmer went to his former school near Stuttgart, Germany and started shooting, and before he killed himself, 15 people died.

Then, on Friday, I read reviews in all the newspapers, of the latest slasher movie to open nationwide. The movie is call “The Last House on the Left” and it’s impossible not to know about it because of the relentless ads on TV. I’ve been trying to ignore them but they make the plot very clear—crazy bad guys terrorize, rape and torture some young girls and then go to a house which happens to belong to one of the girls’ nice parents (dad is a doctor) and when the parents figure out what their drop-in guests did (“Shall I tell you what I did to your daughter” is one line from the TV ads) the parents exact revenge on their daughter’s tormentors using many household kitchen aids like the microwave oven and the garbage disposal.

I stopped watching horror films a long time ago. Isn’t there enough pain in the world without paying money to see more?

Many eons ago when I was young I saw some of the first and best horror movies—including Psycho and a French film that scared us silly called Diabolique. I remember well the end of Diabolique when the presumably dead body floating in the bathtub suddenly leaped up to attack. That was really scary because it was the first “dead body that suddenly comes to life” in a film. Since then, nearly every scary movie has at least one dead body that suddenly leaps back to life and attacks.

And Psycho—the greatest scary movie ever. When Janet Leigh gets knifed to death in the shower—as you probably already know—none of the gore and slashing is actually seen on film. All you see is some blood circling the drain. That’s enough. We were all scared out of our minds. Some of my friends vowed they’d never take a shower again.

Now we have competing exploitation and slasher-porn films in which teenagers inevitably go somewhere they shouldn’t and then are slowly killed by one by one in a variety of ways. Every film keeps trying to push the envelope and increase the violence. Here are some of the lines from yesterday’s reviews of “The Last House on the Left”:

From the New York Post: “Multiplies the horror to an almost unbearable level… One scene in the middle is almost outrageously cruel and graphic. ..This is the most depraved and dreadful piece of screen horror since last year’s “Funny Games.”

The New York Times in a brief review: called the film “a toned-down, tarted-up remake of (Wes Craven’s) infamously brutal 1972 debut film…Mr. Iliadis alternates visceral violence—a knife slowly entering a girl’s quivering stomach, a garbage disposal chewing relentlessly on a man’s hand—with interludes of dreamy anxiety.”

And the Worcester Telegram and Gazette ends its review: “The Last House on the Left” is a dispiriting exercise in ultra-violence that even the gorehounds will find disappointing, and that everyone else will be glad they don’t have to see.”

I’ve known for a long time that these slasher/porn films were out there—every “Friday the 13th” or “Chainsaw Massacre” tries to push the envelope a little farther.

And I think it’s numbing people and acclimatizing people to violence. Not people… men. Not many women rush to these films. Women are usually the victims and women moviegoers are likely to identify with the victims—the girl whose abdomen is being sliced open.

The only filmgoers who will not identify with the victims, who will actually get off on the gore, are men who can convince themselves that the victims are not human beings and deserve to be punished.

This is the same mind-set that made possible things like the Holocaust. If you’re going to spend your life torturing and killing people, you have to convince yourself they’re not really human beings.

The young men who go to these films are being brutalized and dehumanized by the increasingly explicit gore.

I don’t believe in censorship at all. I’m a journalist and I know that censorship is unacceptable. But I think it’s time for the entertainment industry—that means both film and television—to start self-censoring and to think what they’re creating in those movie theaters packed with unhappy, often mentally unbalanced men who ultimately decide it makes sense to go out and kill a lot of random people.

Why would anyone sit through a couple of hours of graphic torture and gore? Women don’t do this, but some men do. They feel powerless—maybe they’re unpopular or preyed on by bullies or fired from their job or yelled at by their parents. And they feel helpless and small. And then they can go to a movie and identify with villains who are torturing and killing just for the power trip and the surge of power it gives them

And I’ll bet that by the end of this weekend, the film “The Last House on the Left” will be the number-one film in the country and will have earned its makers multi-millions of dollars in its opening weekend. And I’ll bet the filmmakers—the director and producers and actors and scriptwriters—will not spend a moment wondering what they have created.

“What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

The Hindu Wedding -- at Last!

A friend (Hi Althea!) wrote: “I read your blog Monday (snow day) expecting to have a full accounting of the wedding. I loved everything else you wrote about, but no wedding? Maybe it’s going to be a book?”

It’s true I’ve been putting off describing the Hindu wedding that was the centerpiece of our trip to India, because there’s just so much to say. So I’ll do it with photos. And in two parts. (If you click on the photos they get bigger.)

The bride’s parents spent months planning a wedding so fabulous –three days of celebration, with fireworks, marching bands, dancers, musicians, buffets, and so much more. I ‘m sure I’ll never see another wedding to compare with this one.

The first party—New Year’s Eve—was western style so I won’t show any photos. It was held in a nightclub called “On the Rocks”, next to our hotel, the fabulous Ajit Bhawan which was a Maharajah’s palace and is still decorated entirely in the style of the Raj, with vintage autos and a staff of tall Rajput Warriors in turbans, who always greet you with the prayerfully folded hand gesture of greeting and the word “Namaste.” The brother of the Maharajah still has his private living quarters in this hotel and he invited the entire wedding party to come from the nightclub to his place after midnight so, as fireworks greeted the New Year, we were running through the palace grounds to the afterparty in a bar which seemed ready for Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet to walk right in.

The next day the bride’s family led us to their local temple to Ganesh, the elephant god, to make offerings in honor of the wedding. We all rode in the ever-present motorized rickshaws—called Tuk-Tuks—and the one for the bride was specially decorated. The offerings in the temple given by the bride’s parents were sweets, money (distributed to beggars and holy men) and the marigold necklaces called malas given to the god.

That night, the bride’s parents’ front yard –about the size of a football field, it seemed—had been converted by miles of draped fabrics and sparkling lights into a huge tent complete with stage, dance floor , tables, chairs and an immense buffet that reached around two sides of the field. All sorts of vegetarian delicacies were prepared before our eyes, from the round breads dipped in ghee at one end to huge vats of a milky sweet dessert drink and fried pastries at the other end. I took a photo of one of the lady servers because I was fascinated by the bracelets she wore on her upper arm. How did she get them on?

The invitation to this event came with a real peacock feather, for peacocks were the theme of the night—visible everywhere including behind the stage. The ladies were invited to come early for the Mehendi—when everyone’s hands were decorated with henna by artisans hired for the occasion. The bride’s decorations were the most elaborate—she and the groom (who is not Indian but from California) had their feet and hands decorated. Both their names were worked into the bride’s design—which the groom has to discover for himself.

In addition to the henna-decorated hands, each woman was given bangles to match her garments, made by a man who created them from resin and sized them on a hot iron. The bride emerged from her house, looking like a film star in her red and gold sari, her arms heavy with gold bangles, and flowers woven into her hair. Her good-natured groom was dressed in a traditional groom’s outfit.

Couples began to arrive, piped inside and announced by musicians. This before-wedding party is the Sangeet which literally means “singing together”. Traditionally, it’s a time for good-natured teasing of the bride and groom. A troop of tribal musicians and dancers performed first. The women dancers gave me my first look at a popular trick—they would bend over backwards until they could pick up a ring from the ground using their EYELASHES. Don’t ask me how. Later I saw other dancers pick up things like a razor with their eyelids!

The bride’s family and siblings and cousins offered their own entertainment—dancing and singing popular Bollywood love songs. A group of their friends (including my daughter Eleni, the blonde in turquoise and pink) had been practicing a Bollywood dance number—similar to the dance at the end of Slumdog Millionaire. (I’ve heard that taking Bollywood dance lessons is becoming a craze in the U.S. now.)

At the end, the bride and groom and their parents also danced, and the bride’s funny uncle—the man in a dark suit with a long pink scarf-- performed a hilarious parody of the traditional bride’s dance—shy yet seductive.

The little children fell asleep on the canopied divans, while everyone else sang, danced, cruised the buffet, and admired each other’s saris or salwar kameezes or other traditional dress. No one wanted to go home, but the next night was to be the even more lavish wedding itself!

The Saga of the Bangle Lady Continues

A while ago I wrote about the Bangle Lady who, with many other women, sits on the ground in the marketplace in Jodhpur, India, near the Clock Tower and sells plastic bangle bracelets all day long. She is among the anonymous poor of India who somehow scrabble out enough to keep their families alive.

My daughter Eleni first encountered the Bangle Lady in January 2006 and took her photograph as she sat with her young baby boy in her lap, thrusting bracelets at potential customers. I liked the photograph so much—an Indian Madonna multi-tasking—that I painted her portrait in watercolors from Eleni’s photograph. (That’s a detail from the painting, above left)

As I painted, I noticed how carefully she had adorned herself with jewels in her nose, on her forehead, in her hair, on her arms and around her neck. Later , when I went to India this past December, I learned that a Hindu woman is supposed to wear 16 adornments. The bangle lady certainly followed that rule and I thought she was as beautiful as any movie star in her bright pink sari.

A year later Eleni went back to the same place and handed the Bangle Lady an enlargement of the photograph. She was thrilled, because she had never had a photograph of herself before. Now she was happy to let Eleni photograph her in her green sari. The little boy who had been an infant in her lap was standing behind her.

That was January of 2007. The Bangle Lady never knew that I painted her and hung her portrait in my solo show last spring at C. C. Lowell’s First Gallery in Worcester, MA.

Now two years later, in January 2009, I went with Eleni to the marketplace in Jodhpur and there she was. I recognized her immediately. The Bangle Lady greeted us with enthusiasm. This time the baby by her side was a girl. We took her photo and, although we didn’t have any language in common, she made it clear to Eleni that this time she wanted two copies of the photo. When she smiled, I saw with surprise that one of her front teeth was missing and the ones on either side were discolored— this had happened in the two years since Eleni’s last visit. But when the Bangle Lady smiled with her mouth shut, she still looked as beautiful as a film star, young and serene.

That same day we went to a digital photo store and had the photos developed. The next day, when we went to give them to her in the market, we saw the Bangle Lady had brought her mother with her to be photographed --a toothless crone in a bright pink sari. (“Pink,” as Diana Vreeland famously said, “is the navy blue of India.”) I realized that this toothless hag, hunkered on the ground behind her beautiful daughter, was probably a good bit younger than I am. Maybe in her forties or fifties?

The Bangle Lady insisted that Eleni take some special plastic bracelets that she had selected for her – as a gift.

So here are photos of three generations of the Bangle Lady’s family. Eleni made sure that a friend took the latest photos back to the marketplace after we left. The Bangle Lady may be among the poorest segment of Indian society, but I noticed that she was beautiful and proud and wore a different sari in every photo.