Concentrate

“I’ve told you a million times not to talk to me when I’m doing my lashes!”—Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight.

Concentrating is what I will be doing this weekend: on my flat (I've started the long process of redecorating/rearranging my place so naturally it looks like a disaster zone at the moment), on some work projects, and sleep. A lot to cram into two days but it's amazing what you can accomplish when you buckle down and concentrate. But first, it's "April in Paris" at the Met tonight with some La Vie en Rose cocktails at the Balcony Bar. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! 

Balto

Of the 29 statues in Central Park, by far one of the most popular is of a dog named Balto. On any given day you will find a steady line of children (and some adults) eager to climb up and pose for photos with the heroic dog who successfully led a sled team on the final leg of the great 1925 Serum Run to Nome. While many people are familiar with the statue, they may not know the story behind the real Balto's fame.

In January 1925, the small town of Nome, Alaska was hit with a diphtheria outbreak that threatened to turn into an epidemic. Their only hope of stopping the disease was a diphtheria antitoxin but the closest supply was in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away. With Nome's isolated location, wintry conditions, and no available planes, it became clear that the only way to get the serum to the town was by land. It was first sent by train from Anchorage to Nenana; from there, dog sleds took over. A relay totaling 20 mushers and 150 dogs carried the life-saving serum the rest of the 674 miles in blizzard conditions that included strong winds and sub-zero temperatures. 

The real Balto.

Responsible for the second to last leg of the journey was musher Gunnar Kassen and his team with Balto at the lead. The five-year old Siberian Husky hadn’t appeared to be much of a leader in the past but now proved his worth, keeping the team on the trail in whiteout conditions and at one point even saving their lives by preventing them from plunging into the Topkok River. Kassen later said, "Many times I couldn't even see my dogs, so blinding was the gale. I gave Balto, my lead dog, his head and trusted him. He never once faltered. It was Balto who led the way."

When they arrived at their stop, Kassen found the final team asleep so he and his team pushed on and at 5:30 am on February 2, 1925, after 53 miles and 20 hours, they successfully arrived in Nome and delivered the serum.

The public, who had been following the story of the “Great Race of Mercy” with bated breath, hailed Kassen and Balto heroes, and they quickly became worldwide celebrities. On December 17, 1925 a statue of Balto, sculpted by Frederick G.R. Roth, was erected in Central Park with a plaque that reads: “Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter of 1925.” Both Kassen and Balto were on hand for the unveiling. 

Kassen and his team spent more than a year touring the country on the vaudeville circuit before Kassen returned to Alaska, sadly, without the dogs. They were sold and kept on display at a freak show museum in Los Angeles where in 1927 former prizefighter turned Cleveland businessman George Kimble found them chained up, mistreated, and ill. Outraged, he founded the Balto Fund to raise the necessary $2,000 to purchase the dogs from their current owner and bring them to Cleveland. Within ten days, he had the money and on March 19, 1927, Balto along with Sye, Billy, Tillie, Fox, Old Moctoc, and Alaska Slim arrived in Cleveland where they were welcomed with a parade. They lived out their lives at the Brookside Zoo (now the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo) where Balto died on March 14, 1933 at the age of 14. 

Today, the famed Iditarod Dog Sled Race commemorates the valiant efforts of Balto and the rest of the 1925 rescue teams while at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History his preserved body can be found on display. As for the statue in Central Park, it remains a symbol of the words written on its plaque: "endurance, fidelity, and intelligence." What a grand dog.

Photos of the Balto statue by Michele.

Cary Grant's Chest

Cary Grant in London, 1946.

"I loved sinking my head into Cary Grant's chest."—Jean Arthur.

The actress who starred with Grant in two films, Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Talk of the Town (1942), must have been the luckiest woman in town. I mean, who wouldn't want to be in her place? And with that I bid you good night and have a wonderful weekend. 

The Frick Magnolias

With an unexpected free afternoon today and magnolias still on my brain, I decided to check out the famed magnolias at the Frick Collection.

Planted in the Fifth Avenue Garden in 1939, the two saucer magnolias and one star magnolia are magnificent and as much a part of the museum as the artwork inside. Some years I’ve missed the blooms and was afraid that this week’s cold snap would have done them in but there they were, a bit thinned out but still looking beautiful albeit against a grey sky.

A man on the sidewalk had his easel set up and was painting the lovely pink and white blooms. A doorman from one of the nearby buildings came around the corner and watched him for a while. I darted across the street to get a closer look (I really shouldn’t be playing chicken with MTA buses) at the painting and the magnolias, wishing once again that I could paint (no skill whatsoever).

Afterwards, I walked around the corner to see what was blooming in the 70th Street garden. There along the side of the museum were tiny snowdrops and grape hyacinth while a blanket of bluish purple pansies greeted you in the front of the garden. Both of the Frick gardens are off limits to visitors even if you’re a member of the museum (like I am). One of these days, I hope to get inside the gates and see everything up close. But for now, at least I got to see the magnolias.

All photos by Michele.

The Photographer of Paris

"Passage Saint-Benoît (sixth arrondissement)" Charles Marville (1864-67)

“Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris,” an exhibit currently on display at the Met, allows visitors a glimpse of a forgotten Paris, one before planning and grand design turned it into the City of Lights that we know today, and a chance to discover the work of the photographer who captured it all.

In 1862, Charles Marville was made the official photographer of Paris, tasked by Napoleon III’s urban planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to document the enormous renovation plans for the city of Paris. Marville made roughly 425 images of areas of the city that were slated for demolition as well as of the new construction taking place. Some of these images, collectively known as the Album du Vieux Paris, are included in the exhibit along with other works from Marville's career. 

Born Charles Bossu in 1813, he changed his unfortunate last name (which means hunchback in French) to the more pleasant Marville as a young man and went to work as an illustrator. Around 1850, he took up the fairly new medium of photography and travelled throughout France, Germany, and Italy photographing natural settings and architecture. Earning a reputation as a photographer of architecture, he was made photographer to the Louvre before being asked to document the newly created Bois de Boulogne in the 16th arrondissement, one of the earliest projects in the renovation plans for Paris.

"Haut de la rue Champlain (vue prise à droit) (twentieth arrondissement)" Charles Marville (1877-78)

"La rue Soufflot et le Panthéon" Charles Marville (1876-77)

Napoleon III had a vision of a grander, more modern Paris that would ease some of the burdens of the crowded city. To fulfill his plans, people and businesses were evicted and whole streets were torn down and replaced with wide boulevards and newer buildings of a similar size and design. The Gare de Lyon and the Gare du Nord were built at this time as was the magnificent Paris Opera; four major parks were created and existing ones were renovated; and water and sanitation systems were revamped, giving the citizens of Paris better living conditions. 

"Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche (from the Rue de la Huchette)" Charles Marville (ca. 1868)

"Colonne-affiches pour les Théâtres, menuiserie, fonte et zinc (Cie Morris)" Charles Marville (1876)

In the exhibit, you see the massive new opera house rising, Les Halles with its shiny glass ceiling, and the items that were to help the citizens and modernize the city—20,000 gas lights, public urinals, and those iconic Morris columns covered with advertisements. 

Unlike Brassaï, who famously roamed the streets of Paris at night with his camera, Marville worked mainly in the early morning (probably due to the exposure time needed for his images) so most of the photographs are void of people. We see deserted streets, a lone gaslight, empty parks. Occasionally a person will make an appearance, usually  looking away from the camera in a pose that was probably dictated by the photographer. 

The photos that are the most interesting in the exhibit are the before shots, the images of the places that ended up on the chopping block. These show a dirtier Paris, a medieval Paris that at times resembles a small village more than a European capital. Among these are images of various passageways that hint of mystery, beckoning the viewer to walk down them and see what's on the other side (you get the feeling that Marville was drawn to these as well). The one that I chose as my favourite was because of its name: the Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche (the fishing cat street), the narrowest street in the city, which luckily survived destruction.

"Cloud Study over Paris" Charles Marville (1850s)

Not all of the images in the exhibit are of the renovations. Though he rarely made portraits, there are some unusual ones of his assistant, Charles Delahaye, looking dark and brooding and even a few self-portraits of the photographer himself. There is also a series of images of the rooftops of Notre Dame including the various animals that decorate the top of the cathedral (it's not just gargoyles up there).

And then there are his pioneering cloud studies. In the early days of photography, clouds were difficult to capture and photographers often took to erasing them from the images all together. In 1855, Marville successfully made a series of cloud images from the roof of his studio using the new collodion negative process. In addition to being quite striking, they serve as a document of a skyline that would soon be altered. Marville, it seems, was already the photographer of Paris.

"Charles Marville" Photographer of Paris" is at the Met through May 4, 2014. For information, visit here.

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

There is a certain type of New Yorker who I’ve always admired: she’s an older woman who usually dresses a bit eccentric, is fond of exceedingly large glasses, normally resides on the Upper East Side, and can always be found speaking her mind. The legendary Elaine Stritch is one of those women.

The straight-talking star of screen and stage is a New York treasure who has done everything from being a member of the original Broadway production of Company to playing Alec Baldwin’s mother on 30 Rock. In the new documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, filmmaker Chiemi Karasawa follows the 87-year old Stritch around as she prepares to perform a one woman cabaret show, Elaine Stritch Singin' Sondheim…One Song at a Time, at the Carlyle Hotel where she lived until her retirement last year to Michigan to be near her family.

The grand dame of the theatre spares no punches, talking candidly about her sobriety (or lack thereof), the loss of her beloved husband to cancer, her frustration with and fear about the diabetes that causes her to have memory lapses, and the famous people she’s known (including a story about a date she had with a young John F. Kennedy). She has no qualms telling people what she thinks of them, including the film crew. In one scene, she gets angry with a cameraman over how a scene is shot (she’s unpacking a box of her Bays English muffins) and demands a reshoot.

The film is filled with laughs and light-hearted moments like calling a late Alec Baldwin "Alec 'Joan Crawford' Baldwin," faking an injury to get out of a parking ticket, or telling John Turturro about the first time she had an orgasm (it was during a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Friends and colleagues discuss her skills as a performer and her various eccentricities like the fact that she doesn’t like to wear pants—Stritch's trademark uniform is a white button-down shirt and black tights. One of the people interviewed is the late James Gandolfini, who Stritch clearly adores (the film is also dedicated to him); his appearance on screen brought sighs from the audience.

Stritch may be one tough cookie who is brutally honest with everyone but she is hardest on herself. Nowhere is this more evident than when you see footage from D.A. Pennebaker’s 1970 documentary Company: Original Cast Album in which Stritch is seen throwing a fit as she struggles to record her signature song, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” while a mainly silent Stephen Sondheim sits nearby.

Yet beneath all the bravado, the film reminds us that Stritch is vulnerable. We watch as a diabetes-related attack renders her temporarily disoriented and scared, crying for her accompanist, the saint-like Rob Bowman, to get her doctor. This scene and one later in the hospital are difficult to watch, leaving you feeling like an intruder.

The film opens with Stritch walking down Fifth Avenue dressed in a wild fur coat and her trademark glasses. People stop her along the way to say hello or ask to take a photo. “I wish I could fucking drive,” she says back at the hotel. “Then I’d really be a menace.” Love you Elaine Stritch.

Of Daffodils and Magnolias

After what seemed like endless weekends filled with rain and cold, the sun finally came out and so with camera in tow, I headed up to the 79th Street entrance of Central Park and slowly made my way across to the East Side.

I spent some time wandering around the Shakespeare Garden, which was filled with yellow daffodils, snakeshead fritillary, tiny chionodoxa, and various small tulips. Two bright red Northern Cardinals darted back and forth overhead while the squirrels were busy digging away. Leaving the garden, I walked toward Belvedere Castle, spotting bunches of yellow and white daffodils along the way. They were all lovely but the real beauty queens were the flowering trees.

There was a pretty cherry blossom tree in bloom near the great lawn while the magnolias were out in full force behind the Met, creating canopies of colour. One white magnolia was particularly fragrant, conjuring up memories of the South (or at least the magnolia perfume I found once in an old perfumery in New Orleans), and the saucer magnolias, with their pink and white cupped petals, were absolutely stunning. How wonderful it would be to sit underneath one and read a book or lay down and a take a little nap (preferably without so many people walking by). A little sparrow landed on a branch of one of the trees that I was shooting and just hung out, totally cool with me standing right in front of him. Finally, spring has arrived.

All photos by Michele.

Cup of Tea and a Biscuit

Caitlin Moran posing as Kate Middleton. Photo: Ian Harrison.

"Always remember that, nine times out of ten, you probably aren’t having a full-on nervous 

breakdown—you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit." —Caitlin Moran 

Isn't this so true? The next time I start to go into panic mode, I need to remember these words, take a deep breath, and go put the kettle on. Have a lovely weekend, everyone.

The Great Gatsby

The brilliant original cover by artist Francis Cugat.

Today is the anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the novel that so perfectly captured the era of flappers and bootleggers and whose universal themes of self-reinvention, corruption of wealth, and unrequited love managed to appear distinctly American.

The seeds for the story were first planted in the summer of the 1923 when Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, saying, “I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Fitzgerald hoped to write a novel that would not only be a commercial success like his previous novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, but would finally earn him a reputation as a serious writer.

His plans to start the new novel were delayed when a failed play, The Vegetable, and mounting debts (always Fitzgerald’s curse) forced him to spend his time writing short stories for magazines to pay off his creditors. It wasn’t until a year later that he could turn his attention once again to his new novel, which he would finish in late October 1924.

Scribner’s published the book on April 10, 1925 but all of Fitzgerald’s hopes were dashed when it received mixed reviews from the critics and saw disappointing sales of just 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald was devastated and felt like a failure. Toward the end of his life, he would write in a letter to his daughter, Scottie, “"I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing." The great tragedy is that Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack in 1940, didn’t live to see his book become a beloved classic, one that many consider to be the great American novel, or that the novel, which had received such a lukewarm reception back in 1925, would go on to sell more than 25 million copies around the world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Photo: Nickolas Muray.

The Great Gatsby is one of my favourite books, one that I reread every few years. For me the sentences flow like poetry, filled with striking imagery. Take for example this passage where the book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, walks into a room and sees his cousin, Daisy, and a friend of hers.

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

Isn't it just beautiful? So on this anniversary, if you haven't picked up the book in a while or if you've never read it (shame on you if that's the case), get yourself a copy and read it, now. You'll be happy you did (and please, whatever you do, don't watch the movie instead).

Drinks at the Midnight Frolic

In 1915, patrons of the Ziegfeld Follies at the New Amsterdam Theatre were invited to stick around and attend a new after show, Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, held upstairs at the new rooftop theatre. Originally designed and christened the Danse de Follies in 1914, this more intimate space had a stage and dance floor along with tables, box seats, and a balcony. There patrons could dance, have some dinner and drinks, and be entertained by a floor show that included some of the stars of the Follies: Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Bert Williams, and most importantly Follies girls including the beautiful Olive Thomas.

Margaret Morris, Kay Laurell, and Florence Cripps on the infamous glass walkway in the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic of 1916.

The Midnight Frolic was a bit more risqué than the Follies. For starters, the girls would parade across a glass walkway that ran above the first row of tables, allowing those seated below a unique view of the girls (Ziegfeld reportedly made sure they wore undergarments so it wasn't too wild). Small wooden hammers were distributed so that patrons could bang on the table when they liked something they saw. And then there were the costumes: one of the most notorious involved the girls being covered with balloons and the male patrons encouraged to use their cigars to pop them. 

The show was highly successful and ran every year until 1921 by which time Prohibition had started to take its toll on attendance. Ziegfeld would make one more go at it in 1928 but the show bombed and that was the end of the Midnight Frolic.

Recently I stumbled upon a menu from the show on eBay. The seller only posted two pages (seen here) but look at the choices: Rickeys, fizzes, punches, and lemonades, quarts of Champblanc and Champrouge, not to mention various mineral waters and even Coco Cola. The items listed tell me this menu is most likely from a one of the later shows after Prohibition had taken effect; most of the choices are non-alcoholic or could be made without alcohol (the Highballs, for example). And yes, Budweiser is on the list but Anheuser-Busch de-alcoholized their beer until Prohibition was repealed in 1933. I think I would have chosen one of the punches and slipped some gin in via my flask (oh course I would have carried a flask if I lived in the 1920s) or I may have splurged on a pint of Champblanc. Regardless, it's nice to imagine having drinks at the Midnight Frolic.

A Doll's House

Dominic Rowan and Hattie Morahan in A Doll's House.

Every now and then you see a performance that utterly engages your attention, one that draws you into the story and makes you unaware of everything else—the people sitting around you and the passing time.

This is what happened to me last month when I saw a production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at BAM. In this often produced play from 1879, Nora Helmer (Hattie Morahan) is a middle-class wife and mother whose husband, Torvald (Dominic Rowan), is due for a promotion at his bank. On the surface things appear to be going well but unbeknownst to him, the wife who he treats like a child has a secret: a few years before when Torvald was ill, Nora borrowed money from a shady source (Nick Fletcher), forging a signature in the process, in order to take the family south for Torvald to recover. Now her fear of being found out is about to come true when the money lender tries to blackmail her. The result is the unveiling of truths and a realization for Nora about who she is and her place in the world.

I had seen many productions of the play before and was actually a little reluctant to see another. But I had heard good things about this production directed by Carrie Cracknell, which had originated in London at the Young Vic. And so off I went.

When Hattie Morahan first appeared on the stage, flitting around the room with Christmas presents and greedily gobbling up chocolates from a bag, I immediately leaned forward in my chair. And so I stayed for the remainder of the play, enthralled by an absolutely mesmerizing performance.

Throughout the play Morahan’s Nora is constantly changing. First there is Morahan's wonderful voice that goes from being high pitched and almost sing-song like to full-on throaty and flirty to downright steely. Then there is her appearance: one minute she appears to be a dainty and helpless little girl, the next she is a sultry grown woman, forever adapting her persona to suite the situation she's in.

She also has a way of taking command of a scene by her mere presence. Whether she is front and center, spinning around the floor dancing the tarantella, or sitting quietly on a bed exchanging stories with Kristine Linde (Caroline Martin), the focus is always on her.

A superb set by Ian McNeil, which allows the Helmer house to rotate 360 degrees, is used by Morahan to her advantage. She flies about the house from room to room, playfully chasing her children or hiding from her husband; she is the symbolic bird caught in a cage. As the play progresses, her flight becomes more frantic, giving the impression of someone spinning out of control.

In the final act of the play the truth about the loan is revealed, and Torvald explodes, accusing Nora of the cruelest things and swearing that she will never see her children again. When the blackmailer returns the note and the threat of exposure is gone, Torvald is ready to forgive and forget, reckoning that Nora, a silly woman, couldn’t have know any better. But Nora is a different woman from the one we met at the beginning of the play and announces that she is leaving him and the children so she can find out who she is. The bird is flying the coop.  

Morahan is absolutely electric in this scene. Finally calm and level-headed, Nora coolly tells Torvald that she has been just a doll for him to play with and that she has never had a chance to think for herself, to have her own opinions. She goes on to say that she doesn’t love him and that she realized that night, when he didn’t defend her, that he wasn’t the man she thought he was. With each pronouncement, you see Nora growing stronger, more confident in her actions while Torvald is stunned and confused. When Morahan turns to leave, her back ramrod straight, you know that Nora will somehow survive.

While the other members of the cast did a fine job in their roles, especially Dominic Rowan who was brilliant as Torvald, the play belongs to Morahan who, without a doubt, has created one of the best Noras in recent memory. I for one can’t wait to see what she does next.

Unfortunately, A Doll’s House has closed but there’s a short film by Carrie Cracknell, Nora, that is a response to the play that you can watch here.

All photos by Johan Persson.

Hitchcock Roundup

Clockwise, starting top left, I Confess (1953), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), 

Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Wrong Man (1956), and Notorious (1946).

The “Complete Hitchcock” series at Film Forum is over, and I have to say that I feel like a bad cinephile since I only managed to attend a handful of screenings. Even though I had seen the “Hitchcock Nine” (Hitchcock’s nine restored silent films) last year at BAM and some of his other films before on the big screen (Rebecca, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, Suspicion, Spellbound, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Dial M For Murder, and The Birds), I had planned on seeing more than I did.

The ones I did manage to catch were: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock’s personal favourite, which is great film with a lovely Northern California setting and Joseph Cotton playing evil to perfection; Lifeboat (1944), which can come off as a piece of war propaganda at times but succeeds due to the always entertaining Tallulah Bankhead; I Confess (1953), a film that should get more attention, especially for the compelling performance by the brilliant Montgomery Clift; Rear Window (1954), which I absolutely adore from its fantastic set to Grace Kelly's unforgettable entrance; To Catch a Thief (1955), the first screening that I saw in the series (reviewed here); The Wrong Man (1956), which was shot on location in New York and is interesting at times but for the most part seems like your run-of-the-mill detective story; and Notorious (1946), my favourite Hitchcock film, which has a great location (Rio), the drop-dead gorgeous duo of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, one of Hitchcock’s greatest MacGuffins, and Nazis, loads of them.

Seeing a bunch of Hitchcock films in a short period of time reminded me of why I enjoy his work: the mix of humour with the macabre, the spot-on casting, the striking use of shadow and light, and the often brilliant scores. It also made me realize that I prefer his films from the 1940s, Cary Grant is at his most handsome when angry, and regardless of what has been written or said about the man himself, Hitchcock was a great director.

Now it’s on to “Tout Truffaut” at Film Forum: three weeks of the works of another of my favourites, the French New Wave director Francois Truffaut, including all of his Antoine Doinel films. It’s a perfect pairing as Truffaut was influenced by Hitchcock and interviewed him in depth in 1962, recording more than 25 hours of their discussion. At the American Film Institute Salute to Alfred Hitchcock in 1979, Truffaut said, "In America, you call this man "Hitch." In France, we call him "Monsieur Hitchcock." You respect him because he shoots scenes of love as if they were scenes of murder. We respect him because he shoots scenes of murder like scenes of love." Film Forum, here I come.

Poisson d'Avril

It's the first of April and the start of a new month. So far this year is flying by and, if I'm being totally honest, hasn't really been living up to what I thought it would be. But let's focus on today and the fact that it's also April Fools' Day.

Did you know that the holiday is believed to have originated in France? During the 16th century, King Charles XIV of France decided the country, which had been using the Julian calendar, would start using the Gregorian one instead, thereby moving the start of the new year from early April to the first of January. Some people refused to comply and others didn't find out for a while (news travelled slowly in those days), leading to their being labelled fools and having tricks played on them. Today the date is known as "poisson d'Avril" in France where the custom is to stick a paper fish on the back of an unsuspecting victim and shout "poisson d'Avril." Silly but harmless. So have a good day and watch your back.

Image from here.