2010 Primaries: When DId Voting Become Ironic?

Is it me or is there something "Not Ready For Prime Time" about Carl Paladino and Christine O'Donnell?

Carl Paladino, Republican candidate for Governor of New York, likes to share ". . . racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning state prisons into dormitories where inmates can be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally's comparison of the Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish to an "Antichrist or a Hitler." (NYT 9/15) Let the record show, however, that he defeated former congressman Rick Lazio for the nomination. Lazio, the pride of Long Island, makes that other pride of Long Island, former Senator Al D'Amato, look like Alexander the Great.

Christine O'Donnell, Republican candidate to fill Vice-President Joe Biden's seat in the Senate, ". . . has struggled for years with personal finance problems - she has reported earnings of only $5,800 for most of this year and last and she has defaulted on her mortgage - and fudged her educational background and former campaign achievement." She also founded an "...abstinence organization that denounced masturbation as a form of adultery" and has been criticized by Karl Rove (top White House advisor when Al Gore was elected and Dick Cheney was President) as "unelectable, untruthful and 'nutty.'" (NYT 9/16) That she defeated Rep. Michael N. Castle, one of Delaware's most popular and longest-serving Republicans, says, perhaps, more about the state than about her.

True, neither has been elected yet and Mr. Paladino has a formidable opponent in Andrew Cuomo, New York State Attorney General and son of former Governor, Mario Cuomo. Ms. O'Donnell will face New Castle County Executive Chris Coons in the Delaware Senate race - unless they find her legs sticking out of a mulcher first. Not that the Republicans would ever stoop to dirty tricks, but . . . if I were Christine O'Donnell, I'd keep my eye on Karl Rove.

Fashion Week or Fashion Strong?

You can look at fashion as art, industry or a form of entertainment. You can even look at it as clothing. I prefer to look at it through the eyes of photographer, Richard Avedon.

Avedon's work for Harper's Bazaar magazine in the late Forties and early Fifties is uniquely elegant and sophisticated because the people in it express a certain maturity. They smoke and drink and stay out late with authority. They wear evening clothes in a way that says, "What else would you wear in the evening?" Scenes in casinos, nightclubs and fine restaurants suggest that whatever happened to these people (and by implication, an awful lot did) wouldn't be wasted on them. There's nothing tentative or naive about them and they certainly don't worship a Youth Culture. These people enjoy their adult privileges. In fact, they enjoy a lot of privileges because they are unself-consciously elite. They aren't monsters of entitlement, they are gods and goddesses of it. Look at them. Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh don't live "next door" and they are, most emphatically, not "girls." Dovima is not trying to convince you that she's sixteen. Young as they are, they're women of the world.

Another strong element in Avedon's fashion photography is movement. He either catches his people in mid-action or in the moment just before or after. Even when they're posing or sitting or leaning, there's a tension to his photographs - the tension of a dancer balancing on one foot. More than a ballerina, in fact, the dancer his pictures suggest is Martha Graham. Partly, it's the grandly sweeping fashions of the time. To mark a sharp change from wartime austerity, Christian Dior's "New Look" employed extravagant amounts of fabric. To wear these clothes - and not look like you're wearing a costume - requires equally sweeping gestures and a strong degree of conviction expressed in a detached, almost abstract, way. Since Avedon, Graham and Dior were contemporaries, mutual influence is a possibility.

Avedon didn't work alone, of course. He collaborated with - indeed, owed his career to - some rather exceptional people. The fashion director of Harper's Bazaar, Diana Vreeland; Design director, Alexei Brodovitch and the magazine's editor, a woman with the appetizing name of Carmel Snow. Not only did they recognize Avedon's talent when he was twenty one, TWENTY ONE, they kept him busy and happy for the next twenty years. The fashions themselves are more than major contributors to these photographs, they are the raison d'etre. Yet, I don't want to go into detail. Any discussion of fashions then and now is bound to become a pissing match between fathers and sons, founders and heirs, mentors and students. Suffice it to say that Christian Dior, Balenciaga and their peers were at their peaks and produced exquisite work.

Then, there are the women. Take Dorian Leigh, considered by many to be the first supermodel. A 1949 photograph of her wearing a coat by Dior shows why. She is swaddled up to her neck in a coat with a fur collar and voluminous sleeves. Gloves and a small, fur hat complete the ensemble. A small dog sits patiently in her lap as she sits in the back of a convertible or open carriage, next to a large hatbox. All the movement is internal. She may be sitting, but her mind is racing. What is Dorian Leigh thinking as she gazes down pensively at the smoke curling up from the cigarette clasped in a long, elegant holder? Is she worried, bored or remembering something? Introspecting or waiting for someone? She's not smiling. Does that mean she's unhappy or just momentarily distracted? Is the way the smoke seeps out between her barely parted lips the hottest thing since nuclear fusion? If modeling objectifies women, then Dorian Leigh is a novel - by Colette.

Before we give in completely to the nostlgia induced by these pictures, we may want to consider the society that produced them. It isn't pretty. Not one of the socially progressive movements that we know today was even in existence back then. Racial segregation was legal, antisemitism widely and openly practiced and most of the women alive, Dorian Leigh included, were born without the right to vote. Not a single democratic or equalizing impulse had any influence - including the G.I. Bill of Rights. All the G.I. bill proves is that, in this country, you have to kill someone before the government will help the middle class. Of course, all that's really necessary to fall out of love with the era is to consider what they ate. There was no Italian food, only spaghetti. No Chinese, only chow mein and people smacked their lips over Chicken a la King. This is the kind of food that made Julia Child historically inevitable. Though we may admire the beauty that these ugly conditions produced, it's very hard to feel nostalgia for the real world of that time.

Not impossible, however. If life in 1949 was nasty and brutish if you fell short of the upper class, it was a much bigger world for everyone. Take Paris, the background for many of Avedon's most compelling fashion fantasties. There were far fewer ways to experience the French capital in 1949 than there are today. No television, computers, internet, cell phones, iPods, iPads or DVDs. Tourism, halted by World War II, was only beginning to revive. Commercial air travel was still in its adolescense, not its second delinquenthood like today. So, Richard Avedon didn't have to make Paris seem exotic - it truly was. There's a freshness to these photographs, a sparkle to the City of Light, that appeals to our jaded eyes. Not innocence exactly, more like an innocent view of experience that we can only see in retrospect.

Enough loitering in the past, where are the Avedons of today? The first place to look would be the Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines of today. (The former assuming pre-eminence after an exodus of stars - including Vreeland and Avedon - from the latter.) Look carefully, however, because you may not recognize them. With the exception of putting Blake Lively on the cover - something which, in my opinion, should be done all the time forever - they look rather, well, commercial. Lot of words, typefaces, colors and, occasionally, a banner across the entire affair called, appropriately, a "violator." It's easy for photograph to be overwhelmed, for fashion and style to get lost. Inside is the usual hash of demi-news and disguised marketing. (Thinly disguised, at best.) The fashions spreads show the usual twelve-year-old models, mugged by their hair and make-up stylists and left to strut against a colored backdrop. Clothes? Yes they're wearing clothes. One particularly edgy layout shows the backdrop itself. You can see that the models are in a photographer's studio. Edgy.

I realize that this comparison is unfair in several ways. We're taking the cream of twenty years work and comparing it with random issues of a magazine. I'm also aware, having worked in advertising, that pragmatic, marketing decisions must be made. And the pressures facing Vogue today are not the same as sixty years ago. Massive differences in style, though, overcome the differences in selection and presentation.

Style? What style? Thanks to Avedon and Harper's Bazaar, we know exactly what was considered stylish in the Forties and Fifties. We have a perfectly rendered set of fantasies that conveys it. What about now? What is stylish in 2010? Is urbanity still valued - even though our shrinking and interconnected world puts it, literally, at our fingertips. How about maturity? Has the Youth Culture, propped up by plastic surgeons and the cosmetics industry, slammed the door on adulthood - or are entitled Boomers trying to close the door on youth as they age? Do people still aspire to elegance and sophistication - or have fifty years of social advancement leveled the field until no one wants to play anymore? Have we been traveling in coach so long that all we can dream about is legroom? I hope not. Day-to-day life is not so rich that we can do without dreams. Life is not so full of good taste that "Jersey Shore" is a relief.

A Story For Rosh Hashanah.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family in nineteenth century Russia is Jewish. Especially in the little village of Anatevka, where, on this day in 1875, Count Vronsky is leading a pogrom. That means he and his regiment of cavalry are killing every Jew in sight. Vronsky has the local milkman, Tevye, by the beard and is raising his saber, when the frightened man pleads, “Why me? I’m just a poor milkman.”

“You may well ask,“ replies Vronsky, “I’ll tell you. I don’t know, but it’s a tradition!” The cavalry join him in a lusty chorus of “Tradition.”

In a Moscow train station, it’s love at first sight for Count Vronsky and Anna Karenina. Her chiseled features part the steam like an icebreaker. He’s no zhlub himself (he’s a colonel) and exceptionally dashing in his uniform. Anna, however, rejects him because she has a husband and child back in St. Petersburg. In addition to getting his heart broken, Vronsky sees a man run over by a train and his mother arrives for a long visit. “Now I Have Everything,” he sings.

When it’s time for Anna to return home, Vronsky insists on joining her and won’t take nyet for an answer. That plus quitting his regiment are enough to overwhelm Anna’s fragile morality. They

arrive in

St. Petersburg on a Sunday - to the evident joy of her son, a noisome cherub of the Freddy

Bartholomew variety and the

seething displeasure of her

husband, who looks like Basil

Rathbone and acts like Dick

Cheney. A high-ranking

paskudnyak in the Czar’s

government, he’s a proud man.

He’s also not into swinging, so

he gives his wife an ultimatum:

either give up Vronsky or never

see your son again. She agrees

to stop seeing Vronsky, but

secretly wishes her husband

would die in a samovar

explosion. “Sabbath Prayer.”

When the house of cards that

Anna calls her character

collapses in record time, she

and Vronsky are lovers once

more. Seeing no future in St. Petersburg, they plan to run away together. London or Paris, anywhere as long as it’s “Far From The Home That I love.” They decide on Venice and in no time, they’re canoodling on the Grand Canal. To further escape detection, they pretend to be a Jewish couple from Fairlawn, New Jersey. Toasting each other with Bellinis at Harry’s Bar, they sing, “L’Chaim.”

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, Anna’s husband goes to the matchmaker and demands his money back.

“I got you a wife who looks like Greta Garbo, “ she yells, “I should

have charged you double!”

“But she’s cheating on me with a man who looks like Frederick March!”

“I didn’t say you’d be happy. I’m not Doctor Philsky.”

Mr. Karenin pleads his case musically:

“Matchmaker/Matchmaker/Make me another match.

Find me another find/Catch me another catch.”

“Listen, Kerensky –“

“Karenin.”

“Whatever. I want my customers to be happy, but I can’t start giving refunds or I’ll go out of business.”

“Then how about a wife – for the night.”

“I’m a matchmaker, not a pimp!”

“And the difference is?”

“Making me angry won’t help.”

“Sorry.”

“Mr. Korsakov –“

“Karenin.”

“Whatever. I’m not out to cheat anyone, so, I’ll give you half your money back. Half! But you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone. Okay? “

Karenin agrees and sings, “Miracle of Miracles.” Then he goes home and tells his son that the reason the boy’s motheris missing is because she’s dead. The winsome tot refuses to believe him. Preferring, instead, to believe that it’s a “Rumor.”

Anna Karenina has no money of her own and Count Vronsky is rich in title only, so they run through their cash presto. On the train back to St. Petersburg, Vronsky muses on what their life would be like “If I Were A Rich Man.”

Anna is overjoyed to see her son again. He responds with a display of filial devotion matched only, perhaps, by Anthony Perkins in “Psycho.” As Anna is leaving, she meets her husband coming up the stairs. He banishes her forever, refuses to give her a divorce and tells her that she’s gained weight. She reprises, “Far From The Home That I love.”

Fortunately, Count Vronsky has a friend, Madame Ranevskaya, who invites the couple to stay at her country home. Anna loves spending time in the cherry orchard, but Vronsky, a man of action, grows restless. He tells Anna that his old regiment is planning a pogrom in Lithuania and that he’d like to join them.

“That’s just an excuse,” she says, “You want to leave me.”

“No, it’s very important that I go. There’s a cantor and kosher slaughterer who must be nipped in the bud before he has great grandchildren.”

“Admit it. You’re bored with me and can’t wait to leave.”

“It’s a small town near Vilna. We’ll demolish it quickly and I’ll come right back. I promise.”

“Do you love me?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you love me?”

“Do I love you?/With no cherries left to pick/

And there’s trouble back in town/You’re upset/

You’re worn out/go inside/go lie down/

Maybe it’s indigestion?”

“Vronsky, I’m asking you a question/

Do you love me?”

The Count is so frustrated that, instead of answering, he picks up an axe and chops down a local merchant named Lopatkin. (This later turns out to have been a good idea, but that’s another story.)

Vronsky goes back to Moscow and rejoins his regiment. Regretting their argument,

Anna follows. She gets to the train station just in time. His train is about to leave, when Vronsky sees her. He jumps off and they embrace. As they apologize and promise to love each other, the train starts to move. Vronsky is so happy, he reprises, “Now, I Have Everything.” The train begins to speed up, but before he can jump back on, three

women named Hodel, Tseital and Chava push him under the train, killing him. They are Tevye’s daughters. Anna Karenina briefly considers throwing herself under the same train, but comes to her senses. Taking the long view, she sings the touching, “Sunrise, Sunset.”