just go with it

 

-------------------- [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures] -------------------------

...I was a bit apprehensive...but figured I'd just go with it and hope it worked.

        It did, and though it was one of the most uncomfortable shoots I've ever done, it looked great and the album was a big success.  We travelled back to London the next evening and Bryan invited me to stay in his house until I went back to New York.

        During the couple of days I spent with him, Bryan and I fell for one another.  I was 19 and he was 30 and we both felt we'd found what we were looking for in someone else.  We laughed a lot, talked over wonderful dinners, and promised to stay in touch.

        After I flew back to New York Bryan phoned me every day and I mooned around playing his albums.  I loved his version of John Lennon's Jealous Guy.

        As soon as he could get away, Bryan came to New York to visit me for a few days.  I spent most of the time with him at The Carlyle; the most elegant hotel in New York.  We went to a party that his record company, Atlantic Records, was giving.  

The Manhattan Transfer were playing there and we sat at a table with Ahmet Ertegun, the founder and chairman of Atlantic Records, and Earl McGrath who was vice president of Atlantic.  

        I adored them both and they were so much fun; we laughed all night like old friends, but I noticed that Bryan seemed a little annoyed.  It was the first time I realised that Bryan could be quite a jealous guy himself.  But it didn't seem important at the time, we were young, happy and in love.

---------------------------------------------------

Carlyle Hotel Art

-30-

the filmic arts

 

I was so happy when The Sting (1973 - Robert Redford; Paul Newman) showed back up on Netflix.

        Then after I played part of it once, a bunch of other American movies from the same era came popping up whenever I went on Netflix:

The Front Page  (1974)

Chinatown  (1974)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest  (1975)

The Parallax View  (1974)

Murder On The Orient Express  (1974)

Blazing Saddles  (1974)

The Conversation  (1974)

Netflix - fairly marinating in '70s films...

(Murder On The Orient Express was just re-made in 2017, also....)

When I was a teenager I heard of The Parallax View but never saw it or read about it.  I started playing it (streaming it) this past weekend - the beginning is the President Kennedy assassination only with different, fictional characters.  A senator (instead of president) gets shot and killed, and the trigger-man dies almost immediately - OK, that's Oswald, check.  Right?  And then a whole bunch of people who were close by that day wind up dead from various improbable accidents...  It's 1963 all over again...

But then after a while I was losing track of what was supposed to be going on, and when it got to a point where there was some kind of hide-out or something, with a boisterous, shrieking monkey (he wasn't hurt, he was just noisy...) and then different still photographs started appearing on the screen and going away, to be replaced with a word, "mother," or some other word, and then another picture, etc., etc. - then I just felt like, OK, I can't, with this anymore....

I checked on You Tube to see what other people think - I typed in the name of the film, and there was a video titled, "the best scene in the movie" and I clicked on it, and it was playing that crazy picture-and-words dream-scene that had made me turn it off!  LOL.

_____________________

-30-

like a fine skylark

 

Jerry Hall, photo by Norman Parkinson

I'm finding inspiration from the words of 

Jerry Hall, 

Taylor Swift,

and

Stevie Nicks.

I read recently that Stevie Nicks, replying to a journalist's question, said:  "I don't give Taylor Swift advice about fame; she doesn't need it."

♫ ♫ ♪

...Got the radio on, my old blue jeans

And I'm wearing my heart on my sleeve

Feeling lucky today, got the sunshine

Could you tell me what more do I need?

And tomorrow's just a mystery, oh yeah

But that's okay...

~ Swift

...Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

Will you ever win?

She is like a cat in the dark

And then she is the darkness

She rules her life like a fine skylark

And when the sky is starless...

~ Nicks

__________________________

----------------- [excerpt from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures] -------------------

I flew to London to shoot the cover of Bryan Ferry's album Siren in the summer of 1975.  I was looking forward to meeting him - at the time he as at the height of his fame.  I loved his music and thought he had the most beautiful voice, heartbreakingly touching and sexy.  

His band, Roxy Music, wore camp clothes, uniforms and eye-liner.  They'd invented a great look - very art-house, with a mixture of rock and an element of European elegance thrown in.

        ...We had dinner with Anthony Price, a very talented clothes designer who had come up with the concepts for all Roxy Music's album covers and was working on Siren.

        The two of them were both witty and charming and made me laugh.  I was excited about the photos and Bryan seemed shy and gorgeous.  He was incredibly classy and beautifully dressed and his black hair was slicked back, with just one lock that fell forwards over his eye.  I was dazzled by his glamour.

        That evening Bryan dropped me back at my hotel and the next morning he came to collect me for our trip to do the shoot in Wales.  Anthony came with us and on the way they explained that I would be dressed as a siren, from Greek mythology, and painted blue all over.  I was a bit apprehensive about that, but figured I'd just go with it and hope it worked.

__________________________

{song lyrics from "A Place in This World" by Taylor Swift, and "Rhiannon" by Stevie Nicks}

-30-

22 pages

 

----------------- [excerpts from Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures] -----------------

During this time I went on a three-week trip to India with Vogue Patterns and photographer Steve Horn.  We did some enchanting photos but the dresses were pretty awful!  I was happy to do it, because my mother used to make us dresses from Vogue Patterns, before she discovered the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue.  The dresses we took to India were very simple, which is why they put them in exotic locations, to make them look glamorous.

        For one shot, Steve made me climb up onto the edge of a building and hang on.  I really could have killed myself - we sometimes had to do crazy things while modelling.

____________________________

Norman Parkinson was an old-style gentleman photographer and I adored him.  He had one of those old fashioned plate cameras in which the shutter is held open for a few minutes while it absorbs the light.  

In that way it records a huge amount of movement.  

I worked with him many times, but one of my favourite shoots was the one we did in Jamaica with Antonio and stylist Grace Coddington, for English Vogue.  

        I had invited Antonio along for the trip and it was Grace's idea to include him in the photographs.  Parks used his special technique to photograph me and Antonio in a waterfall, with the water flowing behind us, so that the movement of the water was captured in a unique way.  I had to stand in front of the waterfall for several minutes, but amazingly only my feet got wet!

        We had great fun on that shoot.  Antonio and I were such great friends and Grace and Parks were brilliant - we had some wonderful dinners in the evenings.  Grace really was a genius artistically.  I think she admired Antonio's work and wanted to do something with him, so she was delighted when I brought him along.  Parks was quite old at that point, in his seventies.  He hadn't really been considered a fashionable photographer until Grace revitalised his career by using him for Vogue.

____________________________

The Jamaican shoot was a fusion of brilliant people.  Grace has a very pictorial eye, Antonio contributed a lot of ideas and Parks' photography was inspired.  It was on that trip that we did what became known as the blue series, with the blue bikini and swimming cap and gold Manolo Blahnik shoes.  

That resulted in my first English Vogue cover and 22 pages in the magazine.  And it was these images which were spotted by Bryan Ferry, the lead singer of Roxy Music, who rang and asked me to appear on his next album cover.

------------------------------------

{Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures.  Curated by Jonathan Phang.  Quadrille Publishing.  Copyright 2010.}

an early portrait of The Beatles, by photographer Norman Parkinson

-30-

♫ yeah, alright?

 

comin' into 2024

it's the Middle East again

climate change

russiaputin

and crazy people

everywhere you look

when an attorney

on You Tube tells us that

he really got to the true answers

during his encounters 

with psychedelic drugs

...you realize that

maybe it's all 

just 

one 

giant

distraction

_____________________________

-30-

evanescent experience

 

"On Long Island Sound"

Yesterday, along with the merengue music, I wanted to wrap up some thoughts about last week's passsages from The Great Gatsby.  But I couldn't organize commentary - I didn't know what to say about it except that it's terrific.

I like how descriptions of environment seem to tie in, to harmonize, with the narrative.

        In some books, descriptions of surroundings and weather, etc., kind of get in the way of finding out what happens, and the reader may find himself skipping them.

---------------------- [excerpt] ----------------- After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming-pool, and the hydroplane and the mid-summer flowers - but outside Gatsby's window it began to rain again, so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.

"If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. -------------------- [end / excerpt]

-----------------------------------------------

Professor Matthew J. Bruccoli wrote:

-------------- Many writers have been distinguished by a sense of the past; Fitzgerald possessed a complex and delicate sense of the passing present.  Malcolm Cowley has observed that Fitzgerald wrote as if surrounded by clocks and calendars.

        Fitzgerald's primary concern was with the rhythms, the colors, the tones associated with time and place - often expressed through synesthesia, as in "yellow cocktail music" (p. 49).  Time and place are inseparable in Fitzgerald:  not just how it was, but how it felt in "a transitory enchanted moment" (p. 217).  

        He later wrote, "After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains."  His task was to fix and preserve evanescent experience.  Fitzgerald's sense of mood was extraordinary....

Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2013 film version

-30-

merengue

 

I wanted to look up merengue music on You Tube - I found a video titled

Merengue del bueno mix

uploader / channel:  Fernando Alvarenga

one of the comments:

~  Crazy I remember hearing these songs in my family's apartment in New York and we'd been out in the hallway hanging out because there were so many people and random people never cared.  The good old days

-------------------------------------

-30-