Ivory Tower Style

Anyway, it didn’t end up mattering as I spent almost no time looking at the Impressionist paintings. Instead I ended up getting completely absorbed in the Art Nouveau collection. Art Nouveau is a whimsical, curvaceous, flowered-but-not-flowery aesthetic that attaches best to furniture and glassware. There is some Art Nouveau painting but it’s almost uniformly terrible. But Art Nouveau woodwork can be gorgeous, like this desk at the M d’O:

or this wall cabinet:

But Art Nouveau’s truest medium is glass, which is perfect for the faded jewel tones of the Art Nouveau palette:

Art Nouveau had a sort of renaissance in the hippy ‘60s, mostly in poster and album art like this. Around that time Jimi Hendrix was often seen in military-inspired velvet jackets with an Art Nouveau kind of decadence about them:

I don’t know exactly when it was, but at some point I became captivated enough with this style that I decided I wanted to try to design an Art Nouveau jacket. Which led to the sketch you see at the top of this post. I presented it to Edwin DeBoise of Steed, expecting that he would be absolutely appalled, or even worse, deliver one of those devastatingly polite British refusals, like “That is a very brave proposal.” But he actually said yes, and within minutes we were looking at velvet swatches. The sketch you see laid on the velvet is his, of course. 

I wanted green, since it represents nature and is used heavily by Art Nouveau. The rest of the jacket follows the same horticultural themes, with the lapels mimicking the silhouette of a tulip, and the frogging snaking tendril-like at their base. 

I initially wanted a dark purple silk for the lapel facings, but it was hard to find the right one. Most were too shiny or bright. Then fate delivered me what I hope will be the perfect solution. While in Venice a couple of weeks ago, I visited the Fortuny showroom on Giudecca island. Fortuny is an old fabric producer that still uses printing machines they bought in the 1910s. Most of their fabric is sold to interior designers. Because most of their fabric is used for upholstery. But I found one that I decided to use for the jacket lapel facings, with a floral gold print on top of a smoky violet base. 

Maybe you want to buy something made by workers who are treated with respect and paid fairly. The “Made In” label is a very poor proxy for that. I’ve written before about how slippery these labels can be, even under strict regulations. But even if you do know for sure where every step of production has taken place, there is a huge amount of variance in working conditions within each country. There are factories in China that pay decently, have plenty of space, and don’t overwork their employees. Meanwhile here’s a story about Amazon warehouse workers in the good ol’ US and A. 

But I think most people care about brand nationality for what my friend Reginald Jerome de Mans calls that “frisson of impression” that we are getting a little bit of French je ne sais quoi with each Hermes tie or Dior belt. These are the people famed pitchman Vince Offer (Israeli-American, if we’re keeping track) is talking to when he touts his Sham-Wow as “Made in Germany - you know the Germans always make good stuff.” 

We laugh at Vince’s transparent shilling for a $20 rag, but then wax poetic about all the style and elegance represented by the “made-in” label on a $2,000 rag. It reminds me of people who spend a week vacationing in Paris and come back telling everybody that “the French” do this or do that. Of course, the Germans do make good stuff. But not always. And if you’re assuming that any Italian garment will give you whatever it is you have in your head as “Italian style,” then you are begging to get suckered. 

Part of modern life seems to be self-identification through consumerism - I buy such and such a thing, therefore I am such and such a person. When were we are from, both physically and culturally, matters less and less, people grasp for identity in what they buy. Imbuing products with some indelible national identity, and along with that the ethos of an entire people and history, seems to be a natural complement. Brands spend lots of money to emphasize their origin myths as a shorthand for their quiddities. But it is a cheap and facile sort of identification, and easily mimicked by unscrupulous profiteers.

So does it make any sense to care at all about a product’s provenance? Well, I do. I care about knowing the people who have had a hand in making my clothes. It’s not about the label, but my personal relationships with the people and places involved. Of course I realize that this is a time and money-intensive process, and not everyone has that luxury. But some brands and retailers care about it too, and try to bring you as close as possible to the people who make your stuff, rather than distancing you from it by re-branding everything with their store label, or hiding behind the need to safeguard industry secrets. 

The Golden Rule is an example of the first problem. Probably most people would agree if you suggested that you should treat others as you would like to be treated. But it’s easy to come up with examples where this advice is ridiculous. Should all masochists then become sadists? And all sadists machosists? Should all suicides become homocides? In these cases, our instincts mutiny, and we reject The Golden Rule.

You might ask why shouldn’t we just call the above cases exceptions and follow The Golden Rule the rest of the time. You could do that - you would basically be adding the exceptions to your list of axioms. But remember that the axioms are meant to supplant your intuition - to act as a rational guide based on abstract reasoning when your unthinking intuition leads you astray. Going back and editing your axioms whenever they lead to a conclusion you disagree with undermines the whole point of having axioms. You might as well just follow your intuition from the beginning.

There’s another, deeper problem with this method - your intuition has already shown you that your axioms do not generate good advice in every situation. This should make you question whether your axioms give you good advice in any situation. When the conflict between the axioms and common sense becomes too great - as in the case of suicidal people and The Golden Rule - then we notice. But there may be many other conflicts between what our axioms tell us to do and what we really think is right that are less obvious. Since axioms are supposed to be infallible, failure anywhere raises the possibility of failure everywhere.

But suppose you really wanted to stick with the axiomatic approach, and just thought you needed to improve your axioms a little bit by adding a couple more. You’ll soon run into another problem: there is no way to follow all the axioms at once.

My favorite example of this comes from economics, but it is broadly applicable. Suppose that as a society we have to decide together what our community will look like - who gets what, who has which rights, etc.. There are various options that we could choose. Every person in our society has a ranking of all these options, from their most favorite to their least favorite. Now we want a way to figure out which option is the “best” one - that is, we want a way to look at all the rankings that everyone has over the different options, and based on those, create a social ranking, from best to worst.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that there is NO way to do this that satisfies a fairly short list of axioms that seem necessary to insure common sense and basic fairness. The axioms are somewhat technical so I won’t go over them in detail, but basically they say that everyone has at least some input, no one person gets dictatorial power to just choose their favorite option, and you never choose an option if there’s another one that everyone likes more. Seems fairly innocuous, but even this is too much. There’s no way to construct a social ranking that respects even these basic properties. This is a mind-fucking tyrant of a theorem that makes you question the very existence of right and wrong.

Maybe you think you already know what’s right and wrong, but you want a set of axioms to support those views. Then Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem suggests that whenever you think you’ve found the set of axioms that’s right for you - since it supports your own viewpoint - there’s another very attractive set of axioms that tells you that you’re wrong. Your choice of axioms is just a restatement of your already-existing preferences. They provide no more fundamental reasoning or justification than mere preference.

And that’s really the difficulty with not having axioms. The most fundamental and meaning-pregnant decisions in our life - what’s right and wrong, what’s beautiful and ugly, what’s good and bad - are unjustifiable. It seems like you have no core values. After a lot of hard thought and consideration, the best explanation we can give is, “I don’t know, I guess that’s just the way I see it.” The reasons are felt rather than thought. And to some people, this robs those judgements of their meaning and righteousness. It’s disorienting. But I think this is the world we live in. The lives that we live in. There is no handy shortcut to knowing what the right thing to do, if such a concept has any real meaning at all.

Othello is essentially the only major Shakespearean role that must be played by an actor of color. Until only fairly recently, the part was often played by a white actor in blackface (most famously Laurence Olivier), and Patrick Stewart has played Othello in a production in which all the other actors were black. But usually these days, if you want to do Othello, you need to find a black actor to play your title character. As a result, every black actor who wants to do Shakespeare is chased and straightjacketed by the possibility of playing Othello. As Mr. Cobb says in his script, “have you played Othello?” is to a black actor what “do you play basketball?” is to every other athletic-looking black man. 

Most of American Moor covers the narrator’s audition for the part of Othello, in front of a white director, whom we hear but never see, except in our mind’s eye as a 140-pound 35-year-old drinking coffee in wire-rim glasses. For the audition, Mr. Cobb reads Othello’s first monologue of the play. In it, Othello speaks to the assembled senators of Venice. Venice is preparing to go to war with Turkey, and they need Othello to lead them into battle since, although he is a Moor, he is their finest general. However, Othello has just the night before eloped with Desdemona, the daughter of Brabantio, one of the senators. Brabantio thinks that his daughter would never marry a Moor in her right mind, and therefore accuses Othello of having ensnared Desdemona by “chains of magic,” “drugs or minerals.” Before taking up arms to defend Venice against Turkey, Othello must answer this charge by describing “how I did thrive in this fair lady’s love and she in mine.”

Othello says that Brabantio invited him to dinner parties at his house many times, and "questioned me the story of my life.” Desdemona overheard parts of Othello’s stories of bravery and “hair-breadth scapes” and wanted to hear more. Othello says, “she loved me for the dangers I had passed and I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft that I have used.”

Mr. Cobb does his first take of this speech, and the director tells him that his Othello is not ingratiating enough, not supplicant enough, not humble enough. This is the beginning of their battle over Othello’s dignity, and by extension, Cobb’s. The director wants Othello to sing and dance for the senators, just as he wants Cobb the actor to sing and dance for him. Somehow he can’t see the parallel, but Cobb exploits it heavily in his interior monologue. As Cobb says, “He thinks he is not in this play, but he is.” Cobb sees Othello as a proud warrior, confident in his own worth to Venice in the war that will follow, the spuriousness of Brabantio’s charges against him, easy and comfortable in the role of placating and charming the white folk so that he can get on to more important business.

In the second half of Othello, Othello is driven into a jealous rage by Iago’s suggestion that Desdemona has been unfaithful. He loses control of himself and kills Desdemona. Much of the second half of American Moor explores Mr. Cobb’s disappointment with Othello’s weakness - with the character of Othello, but also with Shakespeare for, according to Cobb, misunderstanding Othello.

The dramatic power of Cobb’s disappointment with Shakespeare is based on the first ten minutes of the play, in which Cobb describes his first interactions with Shakespeare - how his most potent emotions, in particular his anger, found voice in Shakespeare’s scripts. How he discovered himself as a person and as an actor through Shakespeare, even though most of Shakespeare’s characters do not look like him. But this heightens his sense of betrayal when the one major Shakespearean character who does look like him turns out to be morally weak. Worse, he is weak in the same ways that white America expects a black man to be weak - consumed by rage, easily goaded into self-defeating violence. A brute. A strong brute, but a brute.

Rejecting Shakespeare’s portrayal of Othello, Cobb turns to sympathy for Othello, in one of the play’s most moving sections. Cobb sees Othello the character, trapped in this white man’s script for over 400 years, fated every time to let his misplaced jealousy burn his dignity. But at the same time that he pities this eternal, immortal suffering of Othello the character, he sympathizes with the mortality of Othello the man. Othello is an aging warrior, like Cobb himself (Cobb is full of energy and vitality, but the script from the beginning contrasts Cobb as the experienced elder with the novice director, and emphasizes Cobb’s age further with later references to the aches and pains of late middle age.) 

Much of American Moor deals with the relationship between actor and director, actor and playwright, and actor and character. It is a tempting oversimplification to understand Cobb’s point to be that directors have no authority over actors, or that every part must be played by an actor with a life experience that mirrors the character’s. The script, and Mr. Cobb’s post-performance interview, drift into these more shallow waters occasionally, but I think the point is more subtle, and in some ways the opposite. It’s not that only black people have any idea how to play Othello. It’s that white directors have made Othello the one role that black male actors are qualified to play, and try to ram all of the black male experience into the part of Othello. And even still, they want to be in charge of how that experience is characterized. 

Even so, the director is not the villain in Cobb’s story. The director is trying his best, he is just limited by a system that has protected him from the slings and arrows of outrageous others. He is Brabantio, not Iago. Iago, who is Othello’s true villain, never enters Cobb’s script, and I think this is the reason. Cobb’s story is not about malevolence, it is about a lack of understanding, about a lack of empathy, about a fear of foreign lands in the universe of human experience, and about his own internal battle between playing someone else’s part or his own.

Mr. Cobb’s point, as I understand it, is not just that he wants control over his own Othello, although it is that, but more importantly, that he wants the freedom to play Romeo as well (Mr. Cobb’s fascination with Romeo is the only part of his relationship with Shakespeare that doesn’t resonate with me at all. I’ve always thought of Romeo as kind of a moron. Juliet is the much more interesting character, although I will allow that if Mr. Cobb had a hard time getting cast as Romeo, he would have still less success getting cast as Juliet.) In this sense, his aim is not to narrow Shakespeare’s characters until they can only be truly understood by those who have lived a similar story. His aim is to expand the characters, to show that anyone who has lived a human life will find themselves in all of them.

This show was the latest entry in Taffety Punk’s annual (I think?) “bootleg” series. These bootleg performances are little rehearsed and sparsely furnished - sets were minimal, and actors occasionally called for lines. This was a small price to pay for two great advantages - first, that the actors rendered their parts with a delight and openness to new possibility not yet trampled by an extended run of rehearsals and shows; and second, that the performance was free. I showed up at 6 pm, when the tickets were to be released, but it turned out they had already given them all away since people had started lining up at 3. I ended up lucking into a seat that had been reserved for some member of the press who didn’t show up. Since sat in a press seat, I’m continuing the gag with a review from this here dime-height soapbox.

Two Gents is a comedy, and this production lets you enjoy it. I saw a production of the same play at DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company a couple of years ago which cast the two gentleman lovers of the title as moody ‘90s grunge types. This interpretation sapped the script of its energy. Taffety avoided this mistake, with Dan Crane and Shawn Fagan’s enthusiastic Valentino and Proteus, respectively. The plot follows these two idiot suitors as they bumble and stumble their way into the arms of their lovers, Sylvia (played by Tonya Beckman) for Valentino and Julia (Kimberly Gilbert) for Proteus. 

The script is full of puns and slapstick comedy, and this troupe hammed these up with abandon. There’s an early scene where Sylvia flirts with Valentino, who is too thick to understand that she is telling him she likes him. There follows a long dialogue between Valentino and his servant Speed (played admirably by Esther Williamson). In the hands of shy actors, this scene would be impossibly dumb. But Williamson and Crane turned it into a riot, earning a huge payoff from the crowd when Valentino finally understand’s Sylvia’s meaning.

But the show was nearly stolen by Ashley Strand as Thurio, a wealthy suitor to Sylvia, favored by her father, but spurned by Sylvia. Strand played the role as a new money, heavily accented Russian in a velvet track suit and gold chains. This bit reached its sublimest moment with Strand coming out to sunbathe in a mesh speedo, preparing himself with a dousing from a can of Axe Body Spray, which he then stuffed into his crotch for storage. 

First, I’m not sure that the knowledge that the image has been doctored will mitigate its effect on the viewer. Consider Lara Croft, pictured above. Not too long, dammit. Eyes back here! Back here! Hey, I’m still talking! Anyway, you may have noticed that few carbon-based women look like that. It is obvious that these images are not just doctored - they are made of whole cloth. Yet even so, they make the viewer self-conscious. An experimental study found that young girls had lower body esteem after seeing a Barbie doll than after seeing a more realistically shaped doll. Another found that playing with a thinner doll had no effect on body image, but made the girls eat less. This makes me think that a disclaimer on a photo of a real person isn’t going to do much good.

It could even do some harm. I’ve described above what I understand to be the reasoning behind the disclaimer - no one is this pretty, not even Kate Upton. So you shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to look like this photo. But that’s not the only way the inference could go. Some might instead think, hey, even Kate Upton can’t walk around in public without hiding her unsightly blemishes. Therefore I should be that much more ashamed of my own physical shortcomings.

Finally, I wonder what effect the disclaimer rule would have on the models chosen for pictures. Advertisers would probably like to avoid having the disclaimer at all, since it might make the consumer question how worthwhile the advertised product could be if it is not on its own able to make even a model look good. This may lead advertisers to be even more demanding of the models they choose. If without the disclaimer requirement they might hire a fuller-sized or older model and edit the pictures, with the requirement they might choose the younger, skinnier model. In this example, the net effect of the disclaimer rule is to present us with ever more young and skinny models, without even the comforting idea that the pictures might have been edited.