There really isn't a "wrong" time to play a little La Lupe... Happy Friday!
Read more about La Lupe
CAMP: "A cornucopia of frivolity, incongruity, theatricality, and humour." "A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." "The lie that tells the truth." "Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals."
Friday, 26 November 2010
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Tutti Bella!
Here at Dolores Delargo Towers we never tire of that delightful and unique source of "entertainment", the Italian TV spectacular!
Why ask for quality primetime weekend television when you can have sweatbands, instantly forgettable music, leggings, spangles, boobs, lycra and frenetic dancing? Just don't mention the clowns, OK?
Monday, 22 November 2010
Casta Diva
What better way to cheer up a miserable Monday than with a bit more culture? Ladies and gentlemen, here for your delectation is the outrageous drag queen Lala McCallan singing operatic arias as only she knows how...
And here, she tackles the highly appropriate "Natural" Woman:
Brava!
LaLa McCallan website
Sunday, 21 November 2010
Ultima Recital
A little reprise...
I ... thought I'd share with the world another new discovery. Here is the incredible Ulrika von Glott (in real life French singer and impressionist Marianne James), a diva extraordinaire. Truly bizarre...
Marianne James on French Wikipedia (translated by Google)
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Ugly, ugly Irma!
"Sometimes in a room when I'm on a show they'll say "Are you the gay Lois Bromfield?" as if there's another one that might be heterosexual and married in Orange County. I say, Yeah, and they say, "Oh, oh, OK.""Let us celebrate today the lovely Lois Bromfield, comedienne, actress, writer and producer of shows like Roseanne and Grace Under Fire.
One of those rare breeds - an out lesbian in Hollywoodland - Lois was born in Canada and began her career as a stand-up comedian.
But this is undoubtedly her finest hour - I laughed until the tears ran down my face:
Read an interview with Lois
First posted in 2009 on my daily blog - read more on Give 'em the old Razzle Dazzle.
Friday, 19 November 2010
You need to be inspired by something in order to look good
"I think thinking is stylish. Looking is stylish. Culture is stylish. I think you need to be inspired by something in order to look good. A poem, a picture of Wallis Simpson, tailoring… I have an obsession with Wallis Simpson. When people talk about ‘style’ & ‘stylish’, they’re talking about trends. I think style is about a person recognising what their best features are and if your best feature is a waist, wear a fucking waist. If you’ve got a good bust, go empire. I think it’s about finding a mood that you keep to. Then everyone can identify with that style. I think that unstylish is, as celebrities do nowadays, to borrow things from the PRs. They borrow, and it’s so clear that the dress has just been sent. You can feel the bike delivery."
Isabella Blow
On this day in 1958, that fashion maven and instantly recognisable photo-journalist's dream Isabella Blow was born. Her style, her championing of hats by Philip Treacey and Stephen Jones and her eye for "the next big thing" in fashion were legendary.
I still have an enduring image of Isabella at Paddington station, surrounded by trunks, hat boxes and flustered porters, on her way to her train. She looked every inch the glamorous star - a little more steam and whistles and you would have sworn it was Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express"...
The world is a little less stylish, just a little less fun without her.
Read the tribute to Izzy published in Vogue , the magazine for which she worked for so long.
Saturday, 6 November 2010
"A sweetly vicious old lady" - writers on writers
Today I thought I would post for your delectation a favourite article of mine from the "award-winning author" Arthur T. Vanderbilt. Enjoy the bitchiness of writers on other writers...
We're all ConnectedRead the whole article on the PageOne literary newsletter website.
It's pretty well conceded that writing can't be taught. Nevertheless, aspiring writers-and indeed, most writers-need the help of other writers to make the publishing process work. Unfortunately, that help is rarely forthcoming.
To be sure, there are bright examples of authors who have lent a helping hand. Ezra Pound performed major surgery on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Hemingway sat at the feet of Gertrude Stein, drinking her natural distilled liqueurs made "from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries" and eating her cakes and learning "the wonderful rhythms in prose." Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Max Perkins: "This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the Transatlantic Review and has a brilliant future."
Malcolm Cowley, then a junior editor at The New Republic, advised the still teenaged John Cheever: "Tomorrow, write a story of one thousand words. Sunday, write another, and Monday write another, three and a half pages, and do the same thing on Tuesday. Bring them all in on Wednesday and I'll see if I can't get you some money."
Dashiell Hammett helped Lillian Hellman with her first play. Booth Tarkington sat with his friend Kenneth Roberts evening after evening, helping him edit his books rather than "playing backgammon and getting beaten most of the time." John Barth taught for forty years "out of my attachment to university life and the pleasures of coaching a small group of selected advanced apprentices." James Michener donated generously to graduate writing schools and programs that support aspiring writers.
Such examples of one writer helping another shine like beacons through the dark, dismal night of author envy. "Writers today seldom wish other writers well," Saul Bellow once noted. William Wycherly was a little more direct: "Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other."
Ah, now we're getting there! He might well have expanded his aphorism to include not just poets, but all writers. With their special talents, they often turn this curious hatred into an art form on which they lavish more attention than on their writing.
Truman Capote was an easy mark. "Truman Capote has made lying an art," mused Gore Vidal, "a minor art." Tennessee Williams opined that "I think you judge Truman a bit too charitably when you call him a child: he is more like a sweetly vicious old lady." To Katherine Anne Porter he was nothing but "the pimple on the face of American literature."
But Truman himself was a master of the cat fight, and sharpened his claws on each of his contemporaries:
Truman Capote used the forum of the "The Tonight Show" to ridicule Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls; at the time it was getting as much attention as his In Cold Blood. Susann, on her next appearance, rolled out her best Truman Capote impersonation. Capote then let it be known that he believed that Susann looked "like a truck driver in drag," whereupon Susann threatened to sue him for one million dollars. "She was told she had better drop that law-suit," Capote cackled, "because all they had to is bring ten truck drivers into court and put them on the witness stand and you've lost your case. Because she did look like a truck driver in drag!"
- On Saul Bellow: "I've known Saul Bellow since the very beginning of Saul Bellow and I think he's a dull man and a dull writer. Saul Bellow is a nothing writer."
- Philip Roth: "quite funny in a living room but forget it."
- Richard Malamud: "Unreadable."
- James Michener: "He's never written anything that would remotely interest me. Why on earth would I be interested in reading a book called Chesapeake?"
- Gore Vidal: "Gore has never written anything that anybody will remember. Talk about fifty years from today, they won't remember it ten years from its last paperback edition. See, Gore has literally never written a masterpiece."
- John Updike: "I hate him. Everything about him bores me."
- Joyce Carol Oates: "She's a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium or in Shea or in a field with hundreds of thousands. To see her is to loathe her. To read her is to absolutely vomit."
Capote, of course, did not originate this black art form, any more than he did the non-fiction novel. The habit of insulting one's fellow writers has been practiced for centuries and has even been known to bring out a writer's best skills. Plutarch lambasted Aristophanes, whose language, he said, "reeks of his miserable quackery: it is made up of the lowest and most miserable puns; he doesn't even please the people, and to men of judgment and honor, he is intolerable; his arrogance is insufferable, and all honest men detest his malice."
Lord Byron had a few choice comments on the work of John Keats: "Such writing is mental masturbation - he is always frigging his Imagination. I don't mean he's indecent, but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state, which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium."
George Bernard Shaw was never one to beat around the bush: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise William Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."
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