I just posted to Styleforum my article on Karl Lagerfeld’s Visions of Fashion exhibition of photographs at Pitti Palace. Read the article here. 

Antica Sartoria

I’m in Florence for Pitti Uomo and happened upon this charming storefront while wandering around one of the many small side streets near the cathedral. “Antica” means “ancient” in Italian, suggesting that this sartoria boasts a lengthy heritage indeed. Already from their window display one can perceive their delight in the vibrant colors for which Italian tailoring is so well known. I only had time to snap this photo before moving along to my next appointment, but I plan to return tomorrow afternoon to enquire about commissioning a new suit. If all goes well, by next Pitti I should be having fittings. Fingers crossed.

THE 10 BEST PRINCE PERFORMANCES ON YOUTUBE

If you read my post at No Man Walks Alone, you know I greatly admire Prince, in particular his concerts. Until recently, it was difficult to find any of his concert footage online because his lawyers always had it taken down. But since his death, it seems that this is no longer a priority, so there are quite a few up right now. So you can get at least a sense of what his concerts were like. Here are my ten favorites among the ones I’ve found. Watch them now, because you never know when they’ll disappear.

(In chronological order)

“Do Me Baby” (1982)

This is the kind of performance that first made Prince famous - overtly and intensely sexual. It’s over the top, but it’s also genuine and inspired by lust more than attention-seeking. He doesn’t just rub his crotch as a gimmick. He builds the mood and energy of the song with his voice, bringing the crowd along with him. Full concert here.

Purple Rain Tour, Syracuse (1985)

This is the whole concert, but just watching the first few minutes will give you an idea of what absolute bedlam a Prince concert was like, especially in the 80s. He could take a town like Syracuse and turn it into sex-crazed asylum for two hours or more. He comes out in some kind of feather boa thing and has his shirt ripped open by the second song. 

Sign ‘O’ the Times Warmup Concert (1987)

To me, Sign ‘O’ the Times was Prince’s greatest album. The variety and complexity of sounds on that album make it his masterpiece among masterpieces. This is a “rehearsal” for the tour supporting that album, held at the First Avenue club in Minneapolis (the site of much drama in the Purple Rain movie). Prince comes out in a polka dot suit (and glasses!), and starts out in a casual, playful mood. It’s jarring when he suddenly breaks out of this quiet, almost scholarly, character and launches into the first song (”Housequake”). But a few bars in, the jacket comes off. And by the time the sax solo starts, it’s a full Princegasm.

“Purple Rain” (1991)

Ok, you probably want to see him play “Purple Rain”. Here you go. This is on the Arsenio Hall Show (remember that?). In the early 90s Prince went through a period of mellowing out his sound some to fit into the R&B trends of the time, leading to songs like “Diamonds and Pearls.” But performances like this remind that he could still lay down the fire. The pose he strikes at the end of the song, and then blowing on his guitar as if to cool it off, is very Prince. Also pompadour hairdo FTW.

“Motherless Child” (1999)

This is a Prince-ified version of an old negro spiritual, and my favorite performance among the ones listed here. You can see his command of the whole band as well as his own instrument, and how much of himself he’s able to get into this song. You can see more footage from the same concert here.

Acoustic Set, Musicology Tour (2004)

I like this clip because it captures Prince’s relationship with his audience. The first time I saw him was on the Musicology tour, which featured an acoustic set in the middle of every concert where Prince would just play acoustic and mess with the audience. The connection is natural and direct, with no special effects, as little amplification as possible, just like you’re in his living room and he’s playing you your favorite songs. It ends with a (somewhat rare, he usually played it on piano) version of “Sometimes It Snows In April,” finishing with the lines:

Sometimes I wish that life was everlasting

But all good things they say never last

And love, it isn’t love until it’s past

He recorded the studio version on April 21st, 1985, 31 years before his death to the day.

“Shhh” (2008)

This is the same Coachella performance at which Prince played his now-famous cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” This song is kind of forgotten because it was on The Gold Experience, a great album that was a casualty of Prince’s falling-out with Warner Bros - it wasn’t really promoted, and now is caught in some kind of purgatory that keeps it off of Tidal. The CD is out of print, so if you want a copy, you can pay $85 for it on Amazon. "Shhh” is now known more through Tevin Campbell’s cover than Prince’s original recording. But Prince played it often live, and this is my favorite version. I can only imagine what happened to the poor group that had to follow Prince at Coachella. I mean, what do you do when a dude just burns it down on stage like that? “Uhh...so umm...we’re the Lumineers...thanks for sticking around.” 

“Crimson and Clover” (2009)

Everything about this performance is so random and yet so cohesively Prince. First, he’s on the Ellen DeGeneres Show (kind of wtf, like what is he doing exactly on a daytime talk show?), and second, he’s covering (sort of...by the time he’s done, it’s a much different song) a hippie pop song from the 60s, and third, he’s gone with a red-ruffled shirt, reading glasses, and a leopard print guitar strap. It all works because his guitar melts the impurities off the ore. Really wonder if the Ellen crowd knew what just hit them. 

“All The Critics Love You In New York” (2009)

His last few years he got more and more into taking old hits like this one and drawing out the groove for long jams. At this point he had been playing with the same set of musicians - Renato Neto on keys, John Blackwell on drums, Rhonda Smith on bass - since at least the Musicology tour, and was very comfortable leading them. All those cues - “break it down” - are instant and flawless. They’re not planned changes in the song, he’s just leading them with the cues. This clip also shows again how versatile he was without compromising his own voice. He’s at a jazz festival, so he does some scatting around 7:45, but he still calls out the audience (”Am I funky? Are you funky?”) and gets them dancing (”Let’s jump up and down!”). Full concert here.

“How Come You Don’t Call Me More” (2011), with Alicia Keys

This show was part of a run of 21 concerts Prince did in LA in April and May of 2011 called ‘21 Nite Stand’. Prince was a huge influence on Alicia Keys and he admired her work as well - she introduced him for his induction at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he clearly enjoyed her performance of ‘Adore’ at Prince’s BET Award ceremony. 

Prince and Alicia Keys both recorded versions of this song, although Prince wrote it. I like Alicia Keys’ version and I love her voice, but hearing them sing the song together shows what set Prince apart even from other great artists. Alicia sounds great singing the first verse, but Prince’s second verse accesses different senses. The song isn’t just a sound anymore, it’s a feeling. There’s no other performer who could sing it like that.

Runners-up: 

“Red House (Purple Version)” 

“Gett Off” - at MTV Video Awards, the famous assless pantsuit performance

Prince Bass Solo

Everything else...seriously, there are no bad ones.

BEST OF BEST OF BEST OF 2015

If there are one thing the Internet does well, it’s porn. But if there are three things the Internet does well, it’s:

1) porn

2) aggregation

3) lists

I’m going to test the bounds of two of these three things. You might have noticed that over the few days every goddamn site is doing some kind of “Best of 2015″ article (aggregating, listing). Even porn sites. 

You might not yet have noticed that some sites have taken this a step further, and done Best of ‘Best of’ posts, aggregating into a list all the best aggregated lists. Here at Ivory Tower Style, we like to think of ourselves as being are pretty much never on the cutting edge, so we are taking this yet another step further. I present to you, the Best of ‘Best of ‘Best of’’ posts for 2015:

Maybe I should have done a Worst of ‘Worst of ‘Worst of’’ list instead. Anyway, here is the goal for 2016, sheeple. You make your own Best of ‘Best of ‘Best of’’ lists. Only then can some great spirit arrive to create the hallowed Best of ‘Best of ‘Best of ‘Best of’’’ list. If we keep this going long enough, by the year 2060 we will spend all of New Year’s Day clicking through lists to finally get the best porn vid of 2059.

Laurie Pepper, on her late husband, the jazz great Art Pepper

SART NOUVEAU

Last February I went to Paris for the first time. While there, I visited the Musee D’Orsay, an old train station which was turned into a museum about thirty years ago. I went somewhat reluctantly, on the last day of a ten-day trip. I don’t really go in for the Impressionists, which are well represented at the Musee D’Orsay. I was once fascinated with Degas, but his pictures have become monotonous for me and his character repulsive. I still enjoy Toulouse-Lautrec’s bawdy sentimentality, and Gaugin’s Tahiti paintings. But Seurat and Monet make me feel like I’ve eaten too many jelly beans. 

“Devant une façade rose,

Sur le marbre d’un escalier.”

It’s here: my Fall Style Guide.

Some outtakes from the photoshoot for my article on fall clothing, forthcoming in Monday’s Styleforum Brief. 

HUNG

Some two years after I posted about my admiration for de Monvel prints being conquered by my laziness, I have finally hung up all my pictures. Including the Monvel prints that I bought and framed, and had been sitting unappreciated in a closet. 

I’ve now got one (bottom left, above) next my coat closet that shows an older man dressed in what looks like a red tailcoat helping another nonplussed ginger gentleman in white tie into what may be a green overcoat. His ginger friends already have their green overcoats on, except for the one who I think may be wearing a frock coat, which would have been archaic even when this picture was made. Anyway, I think the older guy is a salesan trying to sell either the hat or the coat or both. But it could be this is a coat check and these gentlemen are all depositing or retrieving their things before heading to the theater.

I’ve got another (top picture above) next to my front door - it shows a man snappily dressed in a double breasted coat, tophat, spats, and cane. It’s next to the door because this is what I imagine myself to look like when I leave the house. He also has an “X” for an eye. I’m not sure if the custom of using the “X”-eye to indicate a dead person predates this picture or not. He may also be blind. Which would make his outfit that much more impressive.

Finally, I’ve got a small picture (bottom right) on the inside of my closet door, next to my ties. A salesman proudly shows off his newest neckwear to a surly cross-armed gentleman. This is what is going on inside my head when I grab ten ties from my closet, thinking any of them would be gorgeous with that day’s outfit, and then upon reflection (in the mirror, of course) end up rejecting them all.

After two years of procrastination, putting the pictures up took about ten minutes. On the whole, I’m very happy with them.

Who Cares Where a Brand is From?

I was minding my own business scrolling through Tumblr on a Sunday morning, and fifteen minutes later managed to find myself imbroglioed in a promise to write a blog post. The casus bloggi is this post from dirnelli, which led to an exchange on Twitter. To summarize, dirnelli got all #actually on GQ for calling Eidos an “Italian brand” though their designer is American and they do not currently sell in Europe; I got all #actually on his #actually since their designer is an American of Italian descent, and their factory is in Italy, and they are owned by an Italian company; this led to a discussion of whether brand nationality means anything, at which point I felt like 140 characters could no longer contain me. So here I am, taking to Tumblr.

My main point is that if you care about a brand’s nationality, full stop, you are prostrating yourself to the great god of marketing. Because you will perceive a brand’s nationality to be whatever they market themselves as. Eidos markets themselves as an Italian brand, with some justification, mentioned above. Meanwhile Ralph Lauren - considered a thoroughbred American brand - is also made in Italy. As is Huntsman, the doge of Savile Row. French luxury giants under the LVMH umbrella produce much of their goods in China. 

Does this matter? Does Italian manufacture make RL any less of an “American” brand? Should you care? 

MUST A MAN HAVE A CODE?

Omar Little, the shotgun-toting stickup man who was Barack Obama’s favorite character in The Wire, famously said that “A man got to have a code.” I think most people believe this. The world is a complicated place, but it should be navigated, so this thinking goes, using a limited set of basic truths, from which all others are derived.

In mathematical proofs these are called “axioms.” You get your audience to agree to a set of axioms that seem obvious, and then you lead them down a logical path. At each step, you say, if you agreed with that last thing, then you’ve clearly got to agree with this next one too. Eventually, with enough steps, you arrive at whatever it is you wanted to convince them of.

There are less formal axioms floating all around us, unweighted by mathematical proofs but much more consequential. The Ten Commandments are a set of axioms for righteous behavior. As is The Golden Rule. Aesthetics tries to formalize basic criteria for what is pleasing to the senses and what is not.

These distillations seem to simplify and clarify difficult judgments of what is right and wrong, or what is beautiful and what is ugly - a life hack, just like learning to distinguish real gold from fool’s by biting it. Using axioms would also seem to make your decisions consistent, and therefore coherent.

But these advantages are mostly illusory. Axioms usually either lead you into conflict with your intuition - and at this point the intuition usually wins, nullifying the value of axioms in the first place - or become so demanding as to eliminate every option available to you.

Unmoored 

Sometimes life rhymes. Last week I wrote about seeing a production of Two Gents that showed how unpretentious and accessible Shakespeare is. Yesterday I saw Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor at the Anacostia Playhouse, in a production that made the same point, and many others, in a much different way. Just in case my prose doesn’t keep you captivated all the way to the end of this article, let me start with my most important point: Go see this play. If you have any interest in Shakespeare, race, life, or death, go see this play. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Mr. Cobb both wrote and now performs this 80-minute soliloquy. The text is very rich, and is layered on top of Shakespeare’s Othello, itself an extremely rich text. I can’t possibly do it full justice in a few hundred words here. But I will do my best to describe American Moor’s major arcs, I hope enough that you will be motivated to see it yourself, either during its current run in DC or on its next stop.  

A Bootleg Review

Shakespeare is the most widely quoted, but perhaps also the most widely misunderstood, writer in the English language. Because his language seems archaic to the modern ear, and perhaps because Hamlet is what gets taught in high schools, the typical American thinks of Shakespeare as a brooding intellectual. In popular culture he has acquired an air of pretension, his name pronounced with an exaggerated British accent and a glass of brandy held aloft at one side. But to those who know him well, there is no writer more humane, more accessible, more active, more vulgar - and I mean that in the absolute best way.

I wish anyone who soured on Shakespeare after being forced to memorize “to be or not to be” as a 16-year old could have watched this week’s performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona by the Taffety Punk Theatre Company. Because this production was absolutely irresistible. Everything that Shakespeare should be.

This Picture Has Been Created to Lower Your Self-Confidence

Every day, we see many people - in a magazine, on TV, on the Internet - who are more attractive, intelligent, rich, or successful than we are. Sometimes all of the above. It’s enough to make you wonder what good it is getting out of bed when such superior beings walk the earth. An economist would be quick to point out the difference between absolute and comparative advantage, which is just another reason you should avoid economists as much as possible.

Camilla Olson and Samantha Jensen recently published an op-ed in the Business of Fashion pleading for a small concession in this onslaught on the self-worth of the average consumer of modern media. They argue that when photos are touched up to make already beautiful people look even more impossibly beautiful, we should be told about it in a disclaimer. The idea being, perhaps then Jane Doe will not worry so much that she will never be as hot as Kate Upton looks in her bikini shots - even Kate Upton herself doesn’t look that hot. 

I support the Olson/Jensen cause of buttressing the average consumer’s self-confidence in the face of restrictive and unattainable standards of beauty. But I’m not sure the disclaimer requirement would do much good, and could even be counterproductive.

I think I have a new hero

Edmund Wilson on Tristan Corbière:

“In 1873 there had appeared in Paris a book of poems called “Les Amours Jaunes,” by a writer who signed himself Tristan Corbière. “Les Amours Jaunes” was received with complete indifference, and scarcely more than a year after it appeared, the author died of consumption. Only thirty at the time of his death, Tristan Corbière had been an eccentric and very maladjusted man: he was the son of a sea captain who had also written sea stories and he had had an excellent education, but he chose for himself the life of an outlaw. In Paris, he slept all day and spent the nights in the cafés or at his verses, greeting at dawn the Paris harlots as they emerged from the station house or the hotel with the same half-harsh, half-tender fellow-feeling for the exile from conventional society which, when he was at home in his native Brittany, caused him to flee the house of his family and seek the company of customs-men and sailors - living skeleton and invalid as he was, performing prodigies of courage and endurance in the navigation of a little cutter which he sailed by preference in the worst possible weather. He made a pose of his unsociability and of what he considered his physical ugliness, at the same time that he undoubtedly suffered over them. Melancholy, with a feverishly active mind, full of groanings and vulgar jokes, he used to amuse himself by going about in convict’s clothes and by firing guns and revolvers out the window in protest against the singing of the village choir; and on one occasion, on a visit to Rome, he appeared in the streets in evening dress, with a mitre on his head and two eyes painted on his forehead, leading a pig decorated with ribbons. And Corbière’s poetry was a poetry of the outcast: often colloquial and homely, yet with a rhetoric of fantastic slang; often with the manner of slapdash doggerel, yet sure of its own morose artistic effects; full of the parade of romantic personality, yet incessantly humiliating itself with a self-mockery scurrilous and savage, out of which, as Huysmans said, would sometimes rise without warning “a cry of sharp pain like the breaking of a ‘cello string.”

Robert Benchley, 1930