Thought for the day

Edith and Thea

(thanks to cookie and via wow)

Much Ado About Nothing

I'm just back from taking my lonesome to see the newest (Josh Whedon's) version of Much Ado About Nothing.



The best way I can describe it is it's kind of like if Shakespeare had written
a Banana Republic ad

But anyway....it wasn't bad, but a bit contrived.. I did like the soundtrack a lot...and the actress playing Beatrice was very good, but....
 let's cut the crap...who cares.

This is about cute boys, dammit. (isn't it always?)



All the boys were cute in their own way, but this is about the one who caught my attention most
Claudio, as played by
one Mr. Fran Krantz, whose charms I'd been sadly ignorant before today.

Because I'm a perv curious, I shamelessly did a bit of googling in the theater during one of the many lulls in attention and found
this gif:

 And that, dear souls,  is all you need to know.

thought for the day

Our Lady of Lawns

Here are just a few of the front lawn Madonnas I saw in the five minute (!) walk I took today from my car to the library. What can I say, we love our virgins down here.

Our Lady of the Lizards

Madonna of the Mardi Gras

Madonna Leda and the Swan

Our Lady of the Daylillies

Our Lady of LourdesLawns

Upstairs

Today is the 40th anniversary of the arson at the Upstairs Lounge, an event I didn't even know about until a few years ago.

Of course, that's the point.

Until a few years ago, it wasn't talked about.

This year, however, there are documentaries: "'The Upstairs Lounge Fire,' delves into a fire at a gay nightclub that Anderson says is the worst mass murder of gays in U.S. history. "

And even a musical.

 I'd posted this four years ago, but I thought I'd post it again.
 To remind myself, if nothing else.

 
(the only known national news coverage at the time)

From the Huffington post:

Gay Weddings and 32 Funerals: Remembering the UpStairs Erik Ose

"...To fully understand recent events, it's important to remember a tragedy that happened thirty-five years ago, and how much things have changed for gays and lesbians since then.

On the last Sunday in June, 1973, a gay bar in New Orleans called the UpStairs Lounge was firebombed. The resulting blaze killed 32 people. At the time, the bar had recently served as the temporary home for the fledgling New Orleans congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church. Founded in Los Angeles in 1968, the MCC was the nation's first gay church...

That Sunday was the final day of Pride Weekend, the fourth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Yet there was still no Gay Pride Parade in New Orleans. Almost two dozen gay bars dotted the French Quarter, but gay life in the city remained largely underground...



Original site of the UpStairs Lounge at 141 Chartres Street as it looked in Spring, 2008.

Before moving worship services to their pastor's home earlier in June, congregation members had been holding services at the UpStairs on Sundays. But the bar was still a spiritual gathering place. There was a piano in one of the bar's three rooms, and a cabaret stage. Members would pray and sing in this room, and every Sunday night, they gathered around the piano for a song they had adopted as their anthem, United We Stand, by The Brotherhood of Man.

They sang the song that evening, with David Gary on the piano, a pianist who played regularly in the lounge of the Marriott Hotel across the street. The congregation members repeated the verses again and again, swaying back and forth, arm in arm, happy to be together at their former place of worship on Pride Sunday, still feeling the effects of the free beer special.

At 7:56 pm a buzzer from downstairs sounded, the one that signaled a cab had arrived. No one had called a cab, but when someone opened the second floor steel door to the stairwell, flames rushed in. An arsonist had deliberately set the wooden stairs ablaze, and the oxygen starved fire exploded. The still-crowded bar became an inferno within seconds.

The emergency exit was not marked, and the windows were boarded up or covered with iron bars. A few survivors managed to make it through, and jumped to the sidewalks, some in flames. Rev. Bill Larson, the local MCC pastor, got stuck halfway and burned to death wedged in a window, his corpse visible throughout the next day to witnesses below..."

You can read the rest here

Reminder...

And now a word from our sponsors....

Bals

This is the book on my nightstand now, Bals.
(courtesy of the library) 
Actually, it's so big it's taken the place of my nightstand.
True to its name, it's a sort of pornography.
But no one is nude. 
(thank God)

 It's kind fabulousity overload....I just may end up with a hangover.
 But I'm not complaining.

Here's a short film from the publishers about it.  (Books have trailers now? I didn't realize.
I guess books that cost $195.00 do. I better not spill any diet coke on it.)

(Oh, and not to namedrop, but that's Princess Radziwill at the Black and White Ball of 1966 on the cover, btw)

Here's the inner cover, with the Baron and Baronne de Rothschild at their Surrealist Ball of 1972

Table of Contents

 

                                               At the Baron de Redé's Oriental Ball in 1969.

 About de Redé (in black), we hear this tidbit:

"This remarkable change in his fortune was effected by a bisexual, party loving antique collecting, multimillionaire Chilean guano baron, Arturo Lopez Wilshaw"   who snatched the young  de Redé up and set him up in high style. "This remarkable menage a trois survived over 20 years...and Redé and Lopez-Wilshaw's widow remained close friends after his death."

a "Bisexual Chilean Guano Multimillionaire"

 Now there's a phrase we don't hear nearly enough nowadays, do we?  
 Well, I don't at least.

                                                   Brigitte Bardot at the Oriental Ball

                          Jacqueline de Ribes and her identical handmaidens at the Beistegui Ball in 1951.
                                                  (I just love  this photo....so fabulous and creepy)

                        Leonor Fini looking like a figure in one of her paintings at the Beistequi Ball

                             The dashing John Jacob Astor IV.... before his death on the Titanic

The Grand Duke Alexandrovich at Czar Nicholas 2nd's Romanov Ball

Camel riders at the Cuevas Ball in 1953

                                        Frank and Mia at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball in 1966

Warhol at the Black and White Ball

Marisa Berenson as Marchesa Luisa Casati for the Rothschild's Proust Ball in 1971.    That, by the way, must be one the most fabulous sentences I've had the joy to type.

La Liz at the Proust Ball

My favorite part of the book so far is from Cecil Beaton, (about whose sex life I learned more than I ever wanted to know a few months ago) in regards to this (his) photo:

 

"I have always loathed the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste, she combining the worst of US and English taste, he as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be. She wanted compliments. She got none. I felt I must be professional and continued, but not without loathing at this monster. Her breasts, hanging and huge, were like those of a peasant woman suckling her young in Peru. They were seen in their full shape, blotched and mauve, plum. Round her neck was a velvet ribbon with the biggest diamond in the world pinned on it. On her fat, coarse hands more of the biggest diamonds and emeralds, her head a ridiculous mass of diamond necklaces, sewn together, with a snood of blue and black pom-poms and black aisprey aigrettes. Sausage curls! Alexandre, the hairdresser, had done his worst. And this was the world's biggest draw! In comparison everyone else looked ladylike." - via The Unexpurgated Beaton Diaries, 1970-1980

What a bitch!
How I wish I had been there next to him.

thought for the day...

Casanova Brown

So I've kinda been singing this to myself all day long for some reason...and I can't stop.
So I figured I'd inflict it upon you too.
You're welcome.

I got some strange looks in the Whole Foods produce section, you know from that bitch in the in the yoga pants who thinks she doesn't need deodorant..... I know you know the one......but screw her.




Supercool dude sitting cross the room....