Civility

After years of shuttling between continents in economy, I've managed to accumulate enough frequent flyer miles to earn a coveted seat in business class. As I write this, I'm enjoying a very lovely glass of sauvignon blanc at the complimentary wine bar while I wait for my spa treatment before being served my pre flight supper in the terrace lounge dining room. There is also a beautiful spanish man sitting right across from me working on a crossword puzzle. I feel so fabulous it hurts. I can only imagine what it must be like in the first class lounge.

Indelible

It was my first ever drum n bass party at the Prince of Wales. I was 18 and pilling off my tits on half a blue butterfly and this track came on




Christ I've been getting nostalgic these past couple of weeks!

Thank Allah Its Friday

Sometimes when I'm having a shitty day, it just takes something like this to make it all better

Agony Aunt

My friend Seth and I are starting up an advice column blog. So please email us your questions about life, love and everything else in between. We promise to be rigorous, honest and most importantly, very very drunk in our analysis of your issues. Click on the owl above for the site.

Write in at: theriotactNYC@gmail.com

I Love Techno

Chris Liebing is playing in New York. It's been a good six months since I've danced to hard, minimal German techno. I can't fucking wait. If anybody is interested, I'll be at Cielo on the 20th. You'll find me doing my two step shuffle next to the speaker at the back.

Bespoke

Finally, it is done! I love it and I'm never taking it off.

Sing it Mary

Glasses

The Universe Is Trying To Tell Me Something

My horoscope from this month's Vanity Fair:

"Just when you've accepted the fact that you're going to spend the rest of your life alone under your grandmonther's afghan, peek-a-boo! There's somebody under there with you. Try to hold on to em however and poof! There they go. That is the nature of a 7-th house Uranus transit, so you'll just have to be Zen about relationships. Besides, you're a Virgo remember? You're supposed to be throwing yourself into service and focusing on staying healthy, not chasing people you can't catch. Who can blame you though?"

Foolish Pride

I've been listening to a lot of torch songs recently. Must be the weather or something.

Happy Freakin Halloween

8 Ways To Sunday

Ingmar tagged me for this meme a while back. So here they are:

1. To this day, I find still find The Exorcist too terrifying to watch.

2. As a child, I used to pinch the bridge of my nose in the vain hope that it wouldn't grow flat.

3. I got to strut around on stage in a purple toga as Pontius Pilate in my high school's production of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Jesus Christ Superstar.

4. I've used the word incandescent to describe several of my moods and yet I can't work out a way to introduce the phrase "cooter slam" into my daily lexicon.

5. I'm a poor aural learner. When listening intently to someone speak I have a tendency to look away in order to concentrate.

6. It took me about a year to REALLY get over my last relationship.

7. I 'shop' for West Village apartments and brownstones on my lunch breaks.

8. I dragged my parents to go see Priscilla: Queen of the Desert on my 14th birthday. And they LOVED it.

Out on a Limb With Fingers Outstretched

So the past few weeks I've found myself in the same situation over and over again. Dressed immaculately with my hair done just so, a half smile on my face and doing all I can to exude the easygoing charm and confidence of a functional, competent and engaging human being while at the same time subjugating the multitude of neuroses and that creeping feeling of inadequacy that all overachievers are invariably saddled with. The smalltalk tends to be my undoing. I've never quite mastered the art of chit chat, a skill that mid-western women seem to possess in great abundance. I can't help but marvel when I hear them on the street or as they are being led to their table at a restaurant.

"Oh, where am I going? This is nice. Look at those candles, aren't they just spectacular. Are the tables mahogany or oak? Do I turn left? Is Nancy behind you Fred? I'm so hungry. I'm glad we found this place. Have you been open long? We don't have to walk too far to get back to the hotel....."

And they just keep on going. Always ready to produce a cordial, anodyne white noise of pithy observations, rhetorical questions, cheerful slogans and excerpts from their inner monologue.

But I digress.

I want this person to like me. To remember me. To call me. I am doing my best to be myself. Well, the witty, intriguing, little sparkle shine out of my smile self. I want to do this right and I know I have to believe. And if it doesn't work out, I have to go right out and put myself out there again. Somethings gotta stick, right?

Job interviews suck.

Melancholy Never Felt So Good

I've Been Busy

Things have been hectic. I'm gonna get back on the regular posting wagon real soon.

Will Somebody Take Me To This?

Crazy Talk

I guess the Iranian government is doing a great job at executing it's gays.

Bespoke - Part I

I was sitting in the subway the other night thinking about the start of YET another school year and it dawned on me that in less than two years I'll have accumulated 5 freaking degrees. Now having lots of fancy letters next to one's name is all well and good but it's all got to lead to something right? So with next summer's crucial intern recruiting session looming, I've decided to put my heart and soul into getting the best job possible, or at the very least one that will sustain my rampant sybarism (we all need to sublimate our rage somehow right?). As a first step, I've made appointments with the school career people to help sort out my resume and arranged to have a whole pile of business cards printed out.

Now here comes the crazy bit.

I've decided that a fundamental component of my job search arsenal will be a bespoke suit. Thats right, a unique, hand made suit made entirely to my specifications. Now granted, its going to cost the same as the per capita GDP of Cuba but part of the reason for this particularly obscene indulgence is the fact that standing at a towering 5'5 and weighing 120 pounds (or a 165cms and 54kgs) means that there isn't an off-the-rack suit in New York that actually fits me. I am also insane. But I figure, nothing inspires and communicates confidence and competence more than an exquisite suit that fits perfectly.

My suit is going to be made by Duncan Quinn and the dapper fellow below is going to be my tailor.


I'll keep you guys posted throughout the fittings and such!

Beth Ditto Shows Britney How It's Done

Obituary Sundays - Britney's Career

One only had to look at Fiddy's face around the halfway point. It really says it all. Horror, surprise, and finally, pity. Also, from the New York Times:

"Thanks to her annus horribilis — or, more accurately, anni horribiles — she was one of the most anticipated V.M.A. performers in years. Voyeurs around the world were ready to see a fallen star back onstage.

She didn’t disappoint: she was awful. Visibly nervous, she tottered around the stage, dancing tentatively and doing nothing that sounded or looked like real live singing."

Poor thing, strutting around and gyrating half-heartedly in that spangly bikini with her extra 25 pounds for all the world to see. Why not a corset? Or that big metallic belt that Dolce and Gabbana did this season? Hell, even a couple of panels of smoky chiffon and organdy would have been an improvement.

The host, Sarah Silverman sums it all up perfectly

"Was that incredible? Britney Spears, everyone. Wow. She is amazing. She is 25-years-old and she's already accomplished everything she's going to accomplish in her life. It's mind blowing."

Gwen Stefani Needs To Be Stopped

A white, belted stretchy mini with a single ruffle slapped on the side? A sparkly checkerboard fringe top paired with a hooker skirt complete with a zip in the front for easy access? An awkward mutant pea coat with pedal pushers and an oversized animal print bag?

Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B is a conundrum wrapped in a mystery, dipped in a vat of shit and rolled in ugly. It evokes so much anger within me. Burning, burning anger. Burning.

The Three Layers of Fashion Hell

Haute Couture - Dior Spring/Summer 2007


Ready-to-Wear - Dior Autumn/Winter 2007


Broke down, half arsed American copy of Dior - Marchesa Spring /Summer 2008


And people wonder why I hate on New York fashion week. Nobody needs to see a dress that's a permutation of a permutation of an original that was shown two seasons ago, made in an inferior fabric. For shame Georgina Chapman. For shame.

Strike The Pose

"I'm having a quiet weekend"

Or so I kept on telling myself as I stood on line trying to keep my Yohji Yamamoto apron/kilt from dragging on the sidewalk, avoiding the sprinkles of ash tumbling from a cigarette attached to the pneumatic, vinyl glossed lips of a 7 foot drag queen towering behind me.

"I'm sorry, could you mind the ash? This is a Gaultier"

"I'm sorry honey, my bad. Love your Chanel bag by the way"

"Thanks."

Despite my best laid plans to spend the evening pottering around my apartment with a glass of sauvignon blanc I found myself invited to the annual Latex Ball, a highlight in the Ballroom Party circuit. Now to the uninitiated, a Ballroom party is an event that is simply beyond imagination. Originally a underground scene involving gay African American and Latino men, a Ballroom event is essentially a night long competition where 'houses' pit their members against each other in vogueing battles and runway walk offs. Thats right, vogue is alive and well in New York City and lord it is fierce!

Worlds away from the genteel and predominantly white, upper middle middle class gays that society has become so accustomed to, the crowd at a Ballroom event consists primarily of black and hispanic teens dressed to the nines in what can only be described as haute couture viewed through the very murky lens of ghetto fabulous. There were little black boys in scarlet latex minis and killer patent leather high tops and my personal favorite, an ultra skinny Latino boy vogueing and posing for his life in tight white clam diggers and Nine West kitten heels. But never forget, these bitches are prissy but they will fuck. you. up.

Dominating the ballroom is a gigantic runway where the battles take place to thumping vocal tech house. Honestly, some of tracks played would have been right at home at Filter during its hey day. The new style of vogue is also a sight to behold





The atmosphere was absolutely, astoundingly electric. The runway was pretty much open to anybody and all one had to do was to climb on work it and let the crowd decide whether they should stay or get off. The energy and sense of unity and community was amazing. Quite frankly, I've never encountered this kind of exuberance at a gay club or event. Ever.

So the moral of story is:

Wear what the fuck you want.

Be who you the fuck you want to be. Butch, Femme, All American, Bear Daddy, Teen Queen, whatever.

Work it.

Obituary Sundays - Brooke Astor

Brooke Astor, who by night reigned over New York society with a disdain for pretension and by day devoted her time and considerable resources to New York’s unfortunate, died this afternoon at her weekend estate, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. She was 105.Her death was confirmed by Kenneth E. Warner, a lawyer for Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony D. Marshall.

Mrs. Astor’s image as a benevolent society matron was overshadowed last year by that of a victimized dowager at the center of a very public family battle over her care and fortune.

Yet for decades she had been known as the city’s unofficial first lady, one who moved effortlessly from the sumptuous apartments of Fifth Avenue to the ragged barrios of East Harlem, deploying her inherited millions to help the poor help themselves.

Among the rich of New York, she was perhaps the last bridge to the Gilded Age, when “society” was a closed world of old-money families, the so-called Four Hundred, ruled over by a grandmother of Mrs. Astor’s by marriage, Mrs. William Backhouse Astor.

But it was a changing social order that Brooke Astor oversaw. Hers was a society defined more by balance sheets than bloodline. It opened its doors to entrepreneurs and Wall Street movers and shakers who had bought entree with so many millions that in the 1980s Mrs. Astor declared herself “nouveau pauvre.”

Although aristocratic in upbringing, style and social milieu, she never sought to be the arbiter of society that the Astor name might have entitled her to be. She never wanted to rule over a world that she was among the first to recognize was no more.

And in her advanced age, her own world seemed to collapse as well. In a startling episode that played out in court and on the front pages of the city’s newspapers last year, one of her grandsons, Philip Marshall, accused her only son of neglecting her care and exploiting her to enrich himself and his wife.

Although Anthony Marshall vigorously denied the accusations, the public was suddenly given a picture of Mrs. Astor as a mistreated centenarian. By the grandson’s account, she had been stripped of her dignity and some of her favorite art, denied medicine and the company of her two dogs, Boysie and Girlsie, and forced to sleep in chilly misery on a couch smelling of urine.

The dispute stretched over months, its every wrinkle making headlines. Then, on Oct. 13, the parties announced a settlement, avoiding what could have been a costly and sensational trial. In December a State Supreme Court judge overseeing the legal battle said that the claims of elder abuse had not been substantiated.

Her close friends said her declining physical condition left her unaware of the tumult, but it was a bitter and unlikely last chapter for a woman who had defined high society and made philanthropy her career for almost four decades.

She took up that vocation after her third husband, Vincent Astor, heir to the fur and real estate fortune of John Jacob Astor, died and left about $60 million to her personally and an equal amount for a foundation “for the alleviation of human suffering.” Her husband had told her, “You’ll have fun, Pookie.”

In fact, she said she had a great deal of fun giving money away. With a wink and a sly smile, she liked to quote the leading character in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” saying, “Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”

It was Mrs. Astor who decided that because most of the Astor fortune had been made in New York real estate, it should be spent in New York, for New Yorkers. Grants supported the city’s museums and libraries, its boys’ and girls’ clubs, homes for the elderly, churches, landmarks and other institutions and programs.

She made it her duty to evaluate for herself every organization or group that sought help from the Vincent Astor Foundation. In her chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz, she traveled all over New York to visit the tenements and churches and neighborhood programs she was considering for foundation grants. Many times a welcoming lunch awaited her on paper plates and plastic folding tables set up for the occasion. She would exclaim over what she called the “delicious sauces”: deli mustard and pickle relish.

Socialite With a Common Touch

At night — almost every night, even into her 90s — she could be found surrounded by crystal and caviar, done up in her designer dresses and magnificent jewels, seated to the right of the host. (She was always seated to the right of the host.)

If she nurtured a playful and sometimes wicked eye for the manners of high society (she once said that “unlike Queen Victoria, we are amused — we are always amused”), she made a point of showing her appreciation for people who worked to help the needy. She always “made an effort,” to use a phrase of the upper class.

For her forays around the city, she dressed as she did when she joined the ladies who lunch at East Side bistros: a finely tailored suit or a designer dress, a hat in any weather, a cashmere coat when it was cool and, in her last years, an elegant cane, her one apparent concession to age. She always wore a ring of precious stones, a bracelet, a brooch and earrings.

“If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I’m talking down to them,” she said. “People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

She could talk to anyone as she made her rounds, offering encouragement to a child working at a library computer, counseling a mother about the importance of reading. To a janitor pushing a broom at a branch library — and she tried to visit every branch — she might give a word of thanks “for keeping this place so clean.” She was thrilled when the Bronx Zoo named a baby elephant Astor in her honor, delighted when a baker at a market the foundation supported pressed two loaves of bread on her.

When the Astor Foundation closed its doors in December 1997, Mrs. Astor had overseen the disbursement of almost $195 million, almost all within New York City. Although the foundation was not large compared with powerhouses like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie, its contributions often served as seed money: others followed, knowing that if Mrs. Astor had given her seal of approval to a cause, it was worthy of support.

As she neared 99, she said she was glad she had not lived in the kind of indolence her fortune would have allowed. She had had fun helping the needy, she said. If she regretted anything, she said, it was that she had not visited friends in Europe often enough and that she had not been able to read, and write, all the books she would have wished.

She was slight of build, somewhat frail and very thin in her last years, but her hair remained honey-colored, and she liked to boast, although it was widely doubted, that she had never had a face-lift. She kept fit well into her advanced years by swimming 1,000 strokes each weekend day and nearly every day in summer, even in the chilly waters that surrounded her house in Northeast Harbor, Me. Every year she liked to march behind the fire engine in Northeast Harbor’s Memorial Day parade, waving a little American flag.

Even into her 90s, she loved to go out, especially to places where there would be dancing. “When that music starts,” she said, “it enters my blood like a fever.” When she stayed home, she would have people in. An invitation to one of her small luncheons or dinners — especially if it was for a first lady, like her friend Nancy Reagan — was a sign of having arrived at the highest level of society.

When Mrs. Astor slowed down, it was often at Holly Hill, her 68-acre weekend estate. “It’s like backing up to the Esso and getting refueled,” she once said. “I love people, but I couldn’t do it seven days a week.”

In her 98th year she was still writing articles for Vanity Fair magazine, noting with regret, for example, that gentlemen no longer wore hats and that women no longer flirted, something she said she herself never failed to do.

If she had any weakness, it was for her dogs. She always had several and called them her “lovey babes.” She loved Henry O. K. Astor, a dachshund, even after he bit off a piece of her middle finger.

Mrs. Astor spent a good deal of her time in the boardrooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, Rockefeller University and other prestigious cultural centers. A trustee of each, she worked with curators and other staff members. She finally devoted herself almost exclusively to the New York Public Library.

Vartan Gregorian, who was president of the library when Mrs. Astor took it as her main cause, observed then that Mrs. Astor stood apart from her class. “She is of them, but not part of them,” said Mr. Gregorian, who is now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “She’s not dominated by the same considerations many socialites are.

“Hers is not a socialite’s attitude,” he went on. “She is genuinely concerned. There’s a lot of effort and mental discipline. She’s one of the few who have read so much. She’s a teacher; she teaches by example, by analogy. If you spend an evening with Brooke Astor and come away empty, there’s something wrong with your antennae.”

The Early Years

Brooke Russell was born in Portsmouth, N.H., on March 30, 1902. She remembered a childhood that was secure and happy, if often solitary. She had no siblings and spent much of that time in foreign lands. One of her earliest memories was of standing on her bed saluting as a marine bugler outside played during a flag-raising at the American legation in Beijing, where her father, Maj. Gen. John H. Russell, was commander of the guard. (She remembered that the bugler’s name was Johnny Malone, and that she had loved him.)

Her father, who later became commandant of the Marine Corps, also took the family along when he was assigned to Hawaii and Panama. She remembered her mother, Mabel Howard, as beautiful and flirtatious and said that patriotism ran in the family on both sides.

Mrs. Astor kept the diaries, letters and drawings from her childhood travels squirreled away in Briarcliff Manor in a closet that she called her “archive room.” Some of her early drawings, poems and plays were reproduced in an illustrated edition of “Patchwork Child: Early Memories,” published in 1993.

“I’ve been scribbling all my life,” she said. Her writing came to include many magazine articles, two published volumes of autobiography — a 1962 edition of “Patchwork Child” and “Footprints” (1980) — and two novels, “The Bluebird Is at Home” (1965) and “The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree: A Period Piece” (1986).

What she remembered as an idyllic childhood ended abruptly, she said, when, at age 16, she was invited to the senior prom at Princeton to fill in for a girl who had fallen ill. There she met J. Dryden Kuser. Her mother, she said, was “dazzled” by Mr. Kuser’s substantial fortune. After a brief courtship, he asked Brooke to marry him, and though she felt unprepared for marriage, she said, she reluctantly agreed.

“Dryden promised me my own house, all the dogs I wanted, and a car as soon as I was old enough to have a driver’s license,” she said.

Married Life, Times Three

They married in 1919, and for 11 years they lived in great luxury and considerable misery. Her merry nature gradually darkened as the marriage headed for disaster in every respect except for the birth of her son, Anthony. She and Mr. Kuser divorced in 1930.

Her second marriage, two years later, to Charles Marshall, known to everyone as Buddie, brought her 20 years of happiness. Mr. Marshall, she said, was the love of her life. She wrote that her son admired him so much that he adopted his last name as his own.

Charles Marshall died suddenly in 1952, leaving Mrs. Astor without an inheritance. She took a job at House & Garden, a Condé Nast magazine, where she had previously worked.

Not long afterward, still in mourning, she met Vincent Astor at a dinner. A month later, he proposed. She described the scene in “Footprints”: “I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But you hardly know me,’ I said. ‘We really don’t know each other at all.’

“ ‘I know a lot about you,’ Vincent answered. ‘And I can swear on the Bible that if you marry me I will do everything I possibly can to take care of you and make you happy — and earn your love.’ Well, such suddenness would have thrilled me and elated me at 20, but in my late 40s, I was frightened by it.”

Within months, however, she became his third wife, in 1953. She had, perhaps, been right to hesitate. Vincent Astor, she said, was a suspicious man who thought everyone wanted something from him. As a result, the couple were often alone. She said she lost contact with her friends. He even asked her not to chat on the telephone when he was at home. But she tried to make him cheerful, she said, playing the piano for him and amusing him.

The marriage was brief. In five and a half years, Mr. Astor was dead, leaving his millions for her and for the foundation. “After Vincent died, I recreated myself,” she said, referring to her decades of philanthropy at the Vincent Astor Foundation. “Now I feel I’ve become a public monument,” she said during one of many meetings and interviews since the 1980s.

A Living Landmark

She was, in fact, named a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which said in 1996 that “a list of the city monuments is incomplete without her name alongside.” At bicentennial celebrations in 1976, the Municipal Art Society of New York had a medal struck in bronze to proclaim her achievements. Mayor Abraham D. Beame said Mrs. Astor had done more for New York than any other person.

The Astor Foundation’s annual reports had become a Baedeker to the city, showing important contributions to what she called New York’s “crown jewels”: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as the Cornell University Medical College, Rockefeller University, the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), the South Street Seaport and many others.

In 1977, when Mrs. Astor made the New York Public Library her primary cause, the Astor Foundation offered a $5 million matching grant if the library could raise $10 million. She then went out to help raise the $10 million. The main entrance of the research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was named Astor Hall in her honor. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she took a particular interest in the construction of the Chinese courtyard and scholar’s room, which was named Astor Court.

But having her name on a wall was never much of a priority. Foundation money often went for necessities the public never knew anything about. There was no Astor name affixed to things like air-conditioning or a staff lunch room at one institution or another.

Astor money went to provide new windows for a nursing home on Riverside Drive, fire escapes for a homeless residence in the Bronx, a boiler for a youth center in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and vest-pocket parks around the city. The foundation was among the first to support neighborhood and community-based development projects as well as jobs programs. Grants, to name a few, also went to institutions then known as the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Academy of Design and Columbia College as well as Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, Ellis Island and the Animal Medical Center, to care for the pets of the elderly poor.

“Old people have old pets,” she said. “It’s a wonderful place. When I’m sick, that’s where I want them to take me.”

A Family Divided

Mrs. Astor remained at her Park Avenue duplex apartment as age and infirmity overtook her. Though she made occasional social appearances in her last years — David Rockefeller gave her a 100th birthday party at the Rockefeller family’s Hudson Valley estate in 2002 — she had become all but a recluse toward the end.

Then, in July, came the astonishing news that Philip Marshall had sued his father, Anthony Marshall, accusing him of stripping Mrs. Astor’s apartment of artwork to enrich himself and neglecting her in ways that threatened her health and safety.

Philip Marshall enlisted the help and affidavits of Annette de la Renta, Mrs. Astor’s friend of more than 45 years, as well as Mr. Rockefeller, Henry A. Kissinger and others as he sought to wrest control of Mrs. Astor’s affairs from his father.

Anthony Marshall, 83, a Broadway producer and former diplomat who once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, said the accusations were “completely untrue.”

Under the settlement, he and his wife, Charlene, admitted no wrongdoing, but both were required to give up their roles as co-executors of Mrs. Astor’s estate, and Mr. Marshall agreed to cease being steward of his mother’s health care and financial affairs. They also were required to rescind the transfer of Mrs. Astor’s Maine estate to themselves.

The settlement stipulated that JPMorgan Chase & Company and Mrs. de la Renta would be her permanent guardians. Mrs. de la Renta quickly moved Mrs. Astor from New York to her beloved estate in Briarcliff Manor and was said to have visited her regularly. The bank, which had overseen Mrs. Astor’s finances since the court filing in July 2006, agreed not to pursue litigation to recover millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that it believed Mr. Marshall might have improperly obtained while managing his mother’s holdings.

Any future legal claims against Mr. Marshall, the settlement said, were to be dealt with in Surrogate’s Court on Mrs. Astor’s death and left to the discretion of the executor of her estate, to be named by a judge.

Besides her son, Anthony, of New York, and her grandson Philip, of South Dartmouth, Mass., Mrs. Astor is survived by another grandson, Philip’s twin brother, Alec.

A widow for 48 years, Mrs. Astor had a number of suitors in that time but did not want to marry again. “I just don’t want anyone tugging at my sleeve at 10 o’clock telling me it’s time to go home,” she once told her friend Marietta Tree. “I want to go at my own speed, and it’s a lot faster than theirs.”

But she remained open to new friends. She used to say that each year she took on one new friend to replace an old one who had died. While Mrs. Astor lost track of some of those friends over the years, she regretted the misunderstandings that arose from time to time. When she was 98, she recalled with satisfaction that she had telephoned a man who had once made her so angry that she had stopped talking to him. The call was to compliment him on an article he had written. “I want to be at peace with all of my friends when I die,” she said.

Reality Check

You know when your sense of what is reasonable and sane is completely fucked when a pair of corduroy slacks at Uniqlo costs less than the sales tax you paid on a similar pair from Dior.

Remembering Cocoa Butter @ The Lounge

Some of my happiest dance floor moments happened at a club called the Lounge back home in Melbourne. I met and hung out with a lot of my best friends there and we all used to loved this song

Like Sands Through The Hourglass...

Ok, it's been a while since I've written about my life and where I'm at and I'm sure everybody is dying to know. Well, that is, everybody who hasn't been chatting to me on instant messenger on a daily basis. So here goes:

After spending a rather decadent couple of weeks traveling to London and Barcelona with the ever delightful Johnny I arrived back in New York a little bit worse for wear and in a rather precarious financial state (two pairs of Comme des Garcons pants, a Thom Browne shirt and an exquisite Prada bag will do that to you). Fortunately, in addition to securing an instructor position for the second half of the summer teaching an intensive 6 week course in statistics, I was able,thanks to Josh, to find gainful employment as a statistical analyst for a relatively small hedge fund for the rest of the summer. So the past few weeks have been rather hectic, getting up early to teach morning classes and then dashing up town to the fund to work. The good news is that I'm done with the teaching, half of my debts have been paid off and I'm well on my way to eliminating the rest of it. That is, of course if I can resist buying that gorgeous Prada coat I tried on over the weekend. Le sigh indeed.

Another good thing to report is that I've been out and dating and not resorting to my usual schtick of being a sexual or romantic recluse because I hate being rejected. It's hard though, managing my own expectations, not wanting to want too much or too little. But I guess thats the name of the game. Hopefully a suitable gentleman will come along soon.

Want

I've been thinking about updating my wardrobe with a few new autumn/winter pieces. Here are a few ideas that I like

Would You Buy Into This?

Something is not quite right with the new Marc Jacobs. I've never been crazy about his label but I got the whole hip downtown vibe his clothes tried to project. Now that he looks like a smarmy Chelsea boy I can't help but wonder if people are still going to derive the same sense of cool when wearing his clothes. Could it be damaging to a brand so closely associated with young, fresh, creative people when its figurehead buys into the bland, generic aesthetic of the wealthy, white, upper middle class gay man?

Obituary Sundays - Monday Edition

Mohammed Zahir Shah, called to rule Afghanistan at the age of 19 on the assassination of his father, Nadir Shah, presided over a regime which tried to continue the transition from medieval tribalism to a modern unitary state, which had begun under King Amanullah in the 1920s. In this, guided at first by his uncle who was also Prime Minister, he had a certain amount of success, given the volatile and unstable state of the country.

His reign of 40 years, from 1933 to 1973, was in sheer duration a remarkable achievement in a state whose rulers have tended to die violently. Even today some look upon it as Afghanistan’s golden age. Certainly none of the country’s successor regimes has ever seemed to have comparable legitimacy.

Zahir Shah trod the tightrope of keeping his country neutral during the Second World War and afterwards. He was one of the few leaders of any country to receive aid simultaneously from both America and the Soviet Union in the postwar period and his European education and background made him able also to encourage firms from Europe to invest in engineering projects. Nevertheless the country’s economy remained weak and its infrastructure primitive. Zahir Shah’s deposition while he was out of the country by his cousin, Lieutenant-General Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, another former Prime Minister, ushered in a period of savage faction fighting.

That Zahir Shah’s name should have again been mentioned as a potential unifying leader of Afghanistan, almost 30 years after his overthrow, was a testimony to his perceived qualities within a country which has been racked by various forms of civil strife ever since the coup which lost him his throne. In April 2002, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taleban government of Mullah Muhammad Omar, Zahir returned to Afghanistan, not, as he said, to stake any claim to reign over the country again but to be close to the process through which the country’s interim leaders would decide its destiny.

At that time it was believed in the West that he might, in fact, have the support of as many as 80 per cent of the Afghan population. His being of the majority Pashtun people was to some extent to his advantage. But at the same time it exposed him to attack from those of the anti-Taleban forces who made no distinction between being Pashtun and Taleban at any level and were strongly opposed to the involvement of Pashtuns in the interim administration. In the event the leadership of the post-Taleban Afghanistan fell to a Pashtun chief of the Popolzai tribe, Hamid Karzai, who, in June 2002, was elected President of the country by a loya jirga (tribal assembly) after a period of six months in which he had headed an interim authority, whose formation had been overseen by Zahir Shah.

Thereafter Zahir Shah gave his support to Mr Karzai, though the latter’s real grasp on power in the country remained, and remains, precarious.

Mohammed Zahir Khan was born in Kabul in 1914, the son of Mohammed Nadir Khan. He was educated in Kabul until the age of ten, when he went to Paris with his father, who had been appointed Minister there by King Amanullah, the first Afghan ruler to be to be styled King.

Zahir completed his schooling at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and later studied at the Institut Pasteur and the University of Montpellier. In this process he added fluent French to the Arabic, English and Dari (an Afghan form of Persian) of which he already had command.

In the meantime, in 1929 Amanullah, whose pace of reform was adjudged to be too wholehearted and hectic, had been driven out of Afghanistan by a coup staged by a band of outlaws who seized Kabul. Nadir returned to Afghanistan, recruited an army, defeated the rebels and was himself proclaimed king. The following year Zahir broke off his studies and returned home to join his father, who ensured that he received military training on infantry courses previously established with Turkish instructors and then appointed him an assistant in the Ministry of Defence. In 1932 he became acting Minister of Education.

Zahir's father was soon to fall victim to the political ferment of the times, shot and stabbed to death by a student in the palace gardens as he was leaving the royal harem. Propelled to the throne at 19, Zahir was lucky to find in his father’s Prime Minister, Sardar Hashim Khan, a trusted adviser who had no ambitions for the leadership. He was to stay at Zahir’s side until 1946, watching him mature into an increasingly sound and even progressive ruler.

In the 1930s a programme of development was undertaken with German financial credit, this continuing with American assistance after the war. In 1949 King Zahir returned to Europe on a six-month tour, during which he observed industrial trends and, in the process, encouraged the initiation of German and Swedish engineering projects in Afghanistan.

Zahir was astute enough to keep countries both sides of the Iron Curtain in play. In the 1950s he visited Moscow for talks with the Soviet leadership and this led to financial and material aid to Afghanistan. Pakistan and India were, too, wooed equally and even handedly, while his neutral country sought common cause with Tito’s non-aligned Yugoslavia.

The success of these initiatives owed a good deal to the support of Zahir’s energetic cousin, Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, who had become Prime Minister in 1953. In an apparent spirit of reform, Zahir demanded Daud’s resignation in 1963, decreeing that no member of the royal family could hold office as Prime Minister. Working with Daud’s successor, Dr Yusuf, Zahir introduced a new democratic constitution, which aimed to combine Western political ideas with Islamic religious beliefs and social customs. Zahir could not really make this mental leap and continued to refuse to let political parties operate in the country. The new parliament was largely packed with the king’s nominees, rather than reflecting any of the country’s political groupings, and this stifling of political aspirations inevitably led to rising tension as time went by.

Zahir had for some years been suffering from a degenerative eye condition, which required treatment abroad. While taking the cure at the mud and mineral baths on Ischia in the Bay of Naples in July 1973, he was overthrown in absentia by Daud, who promptly proclaimed Afghanistan a republic, renounced his royal titles and assumed the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defence.

Zahir remained in Italy thereafter, periodically breaking silence to comment on the state of his country, and occasionally seeming to be on the verge of playing some role in its affairs. As the Soviet Union prepared to withdraw from the country in the late 1980s he was spoken of as a possible force for unifying Afghanistan by the leaders of several moderate guerrilla groups. The Soviet leadership also appeared to be enthusiastic about such an idea but when the Soviet Ambassador in Kabul did meet Zahir for talks in Rome in December 1988, the former king seemed lukewarm about the idea.

By the time Zahir eventually did signify an interest, in the spring of 1989, the time was past. Enthusiastic supporters clashed on the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan with hardline Afghan guerrilla leaders, determined that Zahir should never return either as monarch or in any other political guise. In 1991 Zahir was stabbed in Rome by a Portuguese convert to Islam, posing as a journalist.

Yet, with Afghanistan (and neighbouring Pakistan) in chaos once more in the wake of the terrorist suicide attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, Zahir’s name again surfaced as a potentially unifying force. Old and ill as he was, the notion seemed at first to be no more than a pipe dream.

As time went on and the American bombing campaign against the Taleban exposed the country once more to the spectre of the age-old clash between its Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek peoples, Zahir's candidature as a, perhaps interim, leader began to take on a more serious purpose. Though by now in his late eighties, he himself appeared to acquire a new lease of life at the prospect and in April 2002 he left his Rome villa to return to the country over which he had ruled for so long. Opinion within the country, which had been so utterly opposed to him when the possibility of his return had been floated a dozen years before, was suddenly much more receptive to this solution to Afghanistan’s seemingly unending miseries, though Zahir always made it clear that he had no personal ambitions to restore the monarchy.

When the 2,000-strong loya jirga — the first tribal assembly since Zahir Shah’s overthrow in 1973 — gathered to elect Afghan’s leader in June 2002, the former king cleared the air by making it quite clear that he had no intention of running for any office, and that he backed the interim Prime Minister, Mr Karzai, for the presidency. Though Pashtun delegates to the loya jirga expressed their dismay, regarding the former king as being a strong counterweight to the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks who had dominated the interim authority, Zahir Shah remained as good as his word. He even demurred when it was proposed to give him the purely honorary title “father of the nation”.

Zahir's increasingly frail health would have made any active participation in government an impossibility. He had twice broken bones slipping in bathrooms while on visits to France for medical purposes and subsequently required treatment for enteric disorders.

In the event, a constitutional loya jirga of 2004 produced a constitution declaring Afghanistan an Islamic republic, effectively consigning the monarchy to oblivion. But Zahir Shah remained in the country, living quietly in Kabul.

Mohammed Zahir Shah married, in 1931, his cousin, Princess Homaira, daughter of Sardar Ahmed Shah. She died in 2002 in Italy, while preparing to join her husband in Afghanistan, but her body was taken to Afghanistan to be buried in a Kabul cemetery. There were five sons and two daughters of the marriage

Wish It Were Sunday

Queeny

Obituary Sundays - Tammy Faye Bakker Messner

Tammy Faye Messner, the mascara-laden former wife of televangelist Jim Bakker, the charismatic TV preacher with the choir-boy face with whom she appeared on their popular Christian talk-variety show until his downfall amid scandal in the late 1980s, has died. She was 65.

Messner, who underwent surgery for colon cancer in 1996 and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004, died Friday, her booking manager, Joe Spotts, told the Associated Press on Saturday night.

In a letter posted on her website in May, Messner said that doctors had stopped treating her cancer and that her weight had dropped to 65 pounds. "Now," she wrote, "it's up to God and my faith."

She revealed that she had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer during a March 2004 appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live." That Messner would publicly announce her diagnosis on King's talk show underscored her status as a faded yet enduring pop culture icon.

Indeed, her radiation treatments even became part of a 2005 documentary, "Tammy Faye: Death Defying."

"During radiation," she said at the time, "I did not lose my hair, but I lost my eyelashes, which is the funniest thing in the world to me, because it's my trademark."

As Tammy Faye Bakker in the 1970s and '80s, she was known as "the first lady of televangelism," a high-profile pioneer of the "electronic church."

At 4 feet, 11 inches tall (not counting 3 1/2 -inch spike heels) and with her red hair and heavily made-up eyes, Messner was described in the media as a "human kewpie doll" and someone who seemed to "ooze kitsch."

As prone to giggling as she was to crying mascara-stained tears on camera, Tammy Faye Bakker proved to be irresistible fodder for late-night comedians.

"She was the most laughed-at woman in the Western world," Fenton Bailey, codirector of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a largely sympathetic documentary on Messner's life, told the Los Angeles Times in 2000.

"I don't know of any woman in our time who has been so ridiculed, put down, maligned," singer Pat Boone said in the 2000 film. "Really, I equate her with Hillary Clinton, because these two women have both suffered tremendously by the things that their husbands may have done, and yet she just keeps going."

During the heyday of the Bakkers' television ministry, "The Jim and Tammy Show" reportedly was carried on more than 1,400 stations and their PTL ministry took in millions of dollars a month.

The centerpiece of their evangelical empire — Heritage USA, a 2,300-acre Christian theme park, resort and ministry headquarters in Fort Mill, S.C. — reportedly attracted some 6 million visitors in 1986. Those who stayed at what was often described as "a Christian Disneyland" could buy eight different Tammy Faye record albums, not to mention items from the Tammy Faye line of cosmetics and pantyhose.

PTL stood for "Praise the Lord" and "People That Love," but critics insisted it stood for "Pass the Loot" and "Pay the Lady."

The downfall of Jim Bakker began in 1987 with the revelation that he had had a one-time sexual encounter with a former church secretary from New York, Jessica Hahn, in a Florida motel room in 1980 — and that $265,000 in ministry funds were later used to keep Hahn quiet.

In March 1987, the scandalized Jim Bakker resigned as president of the $129-million-a-year PTL ministry and turned it over to the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Three months later, Falwell placed the ministry, which was more than $60 million in debt, in bankruptcy and turned financial records over to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 1988, Bakker and former top PTL associate Richard Dortch were indicted on federal charges of fraud and conspiracy. The 24-count indictment, returned by a federal grand jury, charged that Bakker and Dortch had fraudulently oversubscribed at least $158 million worth of $1,000 "lifetime partnerships" that guaranteed contributors three nights lodging per year at Heritage USA to help maintain Bakker and Dortch's "lavish and extravagant lifestyles."

The indictment further alleged that at a time when the PTL was in poor financial shape, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker received bonuses totaling some $3.5 million for their personal use.

Messner, who was treated at the Betty Ford Center in Palm Desert in 1987 for prescription drug dependency, was not named as a defendant in the indictment.

She publicly defended her husband, who pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, and she complained that the media vilified both her and her husband unfairly. "We lived no differently than any of the other evangelists," she told People magazine in 1996.

Dortch pleaded guilty to four fraud and conspiracy counts in a plea bargain in exchange for his testimony against Bakker. In 1989, Jim Bakker was convicted on all 24 counts of wire fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy. He ultimately served about 4 1/2 years of an eight-year sentence and was released from prison in 1994.

The Bakkers had divorced two years earlier, after three decades of marriage and two children, Tammy Sue and Jay.

Tammy Faye married former PTL contractor Roe Messner, the chief builder of Heritage USA, in 1993. Three years later, he was sentenced to 27 months in prison for federal bankruptcy fraud, and Tammy Faye once again found herself standing by her man.

Jim Bakker also remarried, and he and his second wife, Lori, now live in Branson, Mo., where they have started a new television ministry.

Tamara Faye LaValley, the eldest in a family of eight children, was born in International Falls, Minn., on March 7, 1942. Her parents divorced when she was 3 and she was raised by her mother and stepfather.

When she was 10, she underwent a life-altering experience during an Assemblies of God church service after the preacher asked "everyone who wants God to touch them" to come forward. She later related that she practically ran down the aisle and threw herself down on her knees by the front pew. She then found herself flat on her back, her "hands up in the air toward the Lord," as she spoke in tongues.

"As that language flowed from my innermost being, I actually felt the presence of God within me," she wrote in her 1996 autobiography "Tammy: Telling It My Way." "I have never in my whole life experienced such love. Liquid love pouring over my entire being!"

Her "encounter with God," she wrote, let her know what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

In 1960, she entered North Central Bible College, the Assemblies of God school in Minneapolis, where she met and fell in love with fellow student Jim Bakker. Unknowingly violating the school's rule against student marriages, Jim and Tammy Faye wed in April 1961. Forced to leave school, they were soon traveling the Deep South preaching from one Assemblies of God church meeting to another. That ended when a puppet show they had been putting on for children after their Sunday services caught the eye of an aide to Pat Robertson.

In 1965, the Bakkers joined Robertson's fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network in Portsmouth, Va. When the Bakkers first made their commitment to do what became a very popular children's puppet show, Messner recounted, one of their conditions was that Jim someday would be allowed to host a "Tonight Show"-type program for Christians, something that he felt would "change the face of Christian broadcasting."

The result was Christian television's first talk show, "The 700 Club," hosted by Jim Bakker. The show quickly attracted a large audience and generated considerable donations.

But Robertson began taking over as host of "The 700 Club" several nights a week and, according to Messner, he and Jim Bakker had differences over Robertson's ideas for bringing secular programming to the network to broaden its financial base. In 1972, the Bakkers left CBN.

They moved to Orange County, where Jim Bakker teamed up with Paul Crouch, his former youth pastor in Muskegon, to launch the Trinity Broadcasting Network in Santa Ana in 1973.

With Jim Bakker as president and Crouch as business administrator, Bakker began hosting the PTL (for "Praise the Lord") show, with his wife as the featured co-host and singer. The show was soon being syndicated across the country. But, according to Messner's account, the board of directors voted Jim Bakker out as president.

Shortly thereafter, however, Jim Bakker received a call from friends in Charlotte, N.C., saying they needed his help to start a new Christian TV ministry.

Within only a few months after launching "The PTL Club" in a storefront in Charlotte, Jim Bakker's new show went into syndication and the viewers began pledging financial support. By 1979, donations reportedly totaled more than $27.6 million, compared with revenue of $255,000 four years earlier, and Jim Bakker had survived an FCC investigation of allegedly improper fundraising practices.

But eight years later came the fall.

Since then, Messner never strayed far from the spotlight. She wrote books, including "I Will Survive … and You Will Too!" (2003), and she made talk show and game show appearances. She also hosted an infomercial for her "You Can Make It" motivational tapes, appeared on the TV sitcom "Roseanne" and marketed Tammy Faye Celebrity Wigs (in 16 colors).

In 1996, she co-hosted a short-lived nationally syndicated daytime talk show with comedy actor Jim J. Bullock. More recently, she appeared on "The Surreal Life," a reality series on the WB in 2004 in which she shared a house with five other celebrities, including actor Erik Estrada.

An icon in the gay community, she had been the only member of the televangelist community to embrace AIDS patients, interviewing a gay man on her PTL show, "Tammy's House Party," during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the '80s.

She openly championed gay civil rights, and some years ago hosted Drag Bingo in Durham to raise money for Alliance of AIDS Services Carolina.

In the end, she had permanently tattooed lip-liner, eyebrows and eyeliner, along with those famous false eyelashes.

"Without my eyelashes," she said in her namesake documentary, "I wouldn't be Tammy Faye. I don't know who I'd be."

On Thursday, an emaciated Tammy Faye appeared with her husband on CNN's "Larry King Live" to provide an update on her condition, for which she was receiving hospice care and taking morphine to ease the pain of swallowing food.

"I talk to God every single day, and I say, 'God, my life is in your hands, and I trust you with me,' " she said. Asked if she had any regrets, she said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

Added Messner: "I believe when I leave this Earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven."

A private family service was held Saturday.

Learning Computers

Josh forced me to learn SQL today. I felt a little bit like this:

My One Shot At Stardom

Here is a scene from a script that really needs to be made into a full length feature film starring me, courtesy of the brilliant mind behind kim jong il's hilarious blog.

THE TERROR

INT. NATIONAL KOREAN ORPHANAGE FOR ORPHANS – NIGHT

The room is dark with two rows of six beds lined against the side walls. Two children sleep soundly in each.

A grotesque man, BORGE GUSH, creeps slowly between the rows of beds. He is seven feet tall with green, boil-covered skin, and he reeks of whiskey and feces. He wears a baseball cap, a t-shirt, frayed jean shorts and work boots, and his sweaty hands are alternating between patting his engorged belly and rubbing the stubble on his chin.

BORGE GUSH

(Laughing maniacally)

Looks like I’m going to be having orphan bolgogi tonight. HAHAHA! Little does the world know that I need the souls of these Korean orphans to keep my worldwide military industrial complex afloat. Once I devour the spirits of these children, there will be no stopping Borge Gush, and my evil worldwide criminal organization: the Anited States of Umerica.

Outside the door to the room our hero, FANTASTIC KIM, leans casually against the door frame. He is just taller than six feet, wearing a bomber jacket and male capri pants. An unlit cigarette is nestled behind his right ear and aviator sunglasses rest on his head.

KIM

(Sighing)

Just when I thought I had a few days off …

In a fluid motion, FANTASTIC KIM flips the cigarette to his lips and drops the aviator sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose. He strikes a match against the wall tossing it in the air and letting it light his cigarette as he pulls two submachine guns out from behind his back. With his elbow he smashes the “IN CASE OF NUCLEAR WAR” alarm and turns to kick the door open.

KIM

(Aiming the submachine guns at BORGE)

Surprised to see me, Borge?

The alarm triggers the bright lights of the room and BORGE GUSH is temporarily blinded but he knows the voice of his most feared adversary. The children instinctively roll under their beds, safe, for the time being …

BORGE GUSH

(Taken aback)

Fantastic Kim! But … it can’t be! I thought you were dead!!

KIM

Oh, but it is, Borge. It is. Now you have two choices. One: I can fill your bloated green carcass with lead right now. Or two: I can drop the guns and just rip your head off with my bare hands. Your choice, cowboy.

BORGE GUSH

(Pleading)

Wait. Kim, my friend, can’t we just … talk about it?

KIM

Talk?! Ha! You had your chance to talk, Borge. The time to talk is over. I know all about your plan to use the souls of these Korean orphans to fuel your war machines.

BORGE

Oh yeah? But did you also know about … this!

BORGE shoots six bullet-quick poison darts from his fingertips. KIM dives to his left behind the nearest bed and turns it on its side to use as a shield for himself and the two children behind it. He hears the next round of poison darts hit the thin mattress. The sheets sizzle and disintegrate.

BORGE

You can’t defeat me, Fantastic Kim! I have devoured too many orphan souls for you to match my strength. Give yourself up, and maybe I will let half of these children live …

KIM snuffs his cigarette out of his forearm, a practice he maintains to erase the tattoo of a loved one who betrayed him long ago. He checks the cartridges of his weapon as he hears the third round of poison darts hit the bed behind him. Soon the bed will have completely disintegrated leaving him exposed. Suddenly ORPHAN ONE taps him on the shoulder. (Ed. Note: Ideally ORPHAN ONE would be played by Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

ORPHAN ONE

Fantastic Kim! Fantastic Kim! I can help you!!

KIM

No way, Orphan One. This is my fight. I don’t want you getting hurt.

ORPHAN ONE

But I want to help, Fantastic Kim. If I sacrifice myself to Borge Gush, while he’s devouring my soul you can get a clear shot!

KIM

(Remembering something from his past)

I … I can’t let you do that, Orphan One. I just … I can’t.

ORPHAN ONE

(Undeterred)

Fantastic Kim, this is my chance to fulfill my duty to both you and the great People’s Republic. I have the opportunity to give the ultimate sacrifice! Please let me do it!!

KIM

(Thinking for a moment)

Ok, Orphan One, OK

(rubbing his head and smiling).

If only more Korean children were as courageous and strong-willed as you.

ORPHAN ONE jumps out from behind the bed, waving his arms

ORPHAN ONE

Hey, big scary man! Over here!! Fresh Korean orphan soul for you to –

Before he can finish his sentence, BORGE GUSH thrusts his spiked tongue through the torso of ORPHAN ONE, recoiling it with ORPHAN ONE’S heart in tow. What he doesn’t realize is that Fantastic Kim has stood up with both guns cocked.

KIM

(Gritting his teeth)

Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it’s impolite to stick out your tongue!

With one gun he severs the tongue in half, and with the other he blasts off BORGE GUSH’S legs at the knees.

BORGE GUSH

(Almost incoherently, as he has no tongue)

Oh no, my legs!!

KIM walks over to BORGE GUSH, stepping through the oozing green blood which is raining from his stumps. He places a foot on both shoulders, pinning BORGE GUSH to the floor.

KIM

Any last words, Borge?

BORGE GUSH

Yeah, Kim. Go to he-

Before he can finish his sentence, Kim unloads four rounds into his skull. He sticks the guns into the back of his pants and slips a cigarette in his mouth from a silver cigarette case. The kids all emerge to gather around him. But as all this happens he hears someone slowly clapping from the door behind him…

UNSEEN STRANGER

Congratulations, Fantastic Kim.

KIM

(Pulling out his guns)

Show yourself.

UNSEEN STRANGER

Haha. Put those toy guns away. Conventional weapons cannot hurt me. But I will say they’ve done quite a number on my protégé.

The UNSEEN STRANGER walks into the light and he is revealed to be no other than CHICK DENEY…

END SCENE

I can already smell the Palm D'or.

Obituary Sundays

AMONG his many unguilty pleasures—Marlboro Lights, Irish whiskey, bacon and eggs, blue jokes, smoke-filled dives where the music wandered on till four in the morning, voracious sex with good-looking men and women—George Melly especially liked to fish. The man famous for red, green and cream striped suits, red fedoras and a huge, rude, laughing mouth could often be found quite still, thigh-deep in the Usk or the Teifi, preparing to cast as soon as a bold trout tickled the surface of the water. And the singer whose party piece, when touring with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, was to scamper round the stage and groom the clarinettist's head during his rendition of “Organ Grinder Blues”, would admit that his thoughts on the river bank were of poppies, midges, Magritte and clouds.

And sex. This had been his driving force since his first schoolboy fumbles at Stowe, first rampantly homosexual, then generously heterosexual, among anchor chains and on Hampstead Heath, in the backs of vans and in glorious pulsating piles on the floors of stately homes. And there was, he confessed (being the most shockingly confessional of writers), sheer orgiastic pleasure in the tug of a bloody great fish, the line screaming off the reel, the catch leaping from the water in a shower of diamonds, the net sliding under it and the fish laid, beautifully marked, on the grass. Phew! Time for a ciggie.

But Mr Melly liked fishing for another reason. As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”. Chance might give him a fish with the next cast; and chance shaped his drifting, exuberant, deep-drinking life, from Stowe to the wartime navy to art-dealing to journalism on the Observer, through a rich cast of queens, hoodlums, sailors, old trouts, whores and martinets, until in 1974 the career of a risqué jazz singer finally hooked him for good.

He sang for 30 years, stoutly and louchely fronting the Feetwarmers at Ronnie Scott's and round the country, until he had to growl his Hoagy Carmichael numbers from a wheelchair. Mr Melly was possibly the most popular jazzman in Britain, and certainly the most outrageous.

Like all the addictions of his life, jazz burst on him at school. A friend's study; a gramophone; an old 78, and the voice of Bessie Smith, straight out of Harlem.

Mr Melly sang Bessie, “Empress of the Blues”, more than anyone else. He would entreat her to possess him before a performance. But the Bessie that emerged from that quivering, beer-wet throat was partly a white, English, middle-class creature, drawn from music-hall turns and end-of-the-pier shows, dressed in bowlers and blazers, and with the plunk-plunk of a banjo never far away. Trad jazz, in the person of Mr Melly, Humphrey Lyttleton and a few others, limped through the 1960s and 1970s until out of sheer graft, longevity and good humour it came back into favour. He helped it survive.

Classlessness and anarchism drew him to jazz also. Though his background was wealthy Liverpudlian, his inter-war fling with left-wing politics stayed with him for life. So, too, did other flirtations. On shore leave from the navy in “amusing” bell-bottoms in his roaring homosexual years, he admired a pimp encountered in Leeds in a mauve silk shirt and kipper tie, and the way Quentin Crisp's painted toenails accessorised his golden sandals. The gay fetishes faded, though as “an old tart” he could always have his head turned by pretty boys; but sharp tailoring in eye-watering colours became his stock in trade.

This aesthetic streak pointed to yet another side of his sprawling personality. He knew about art, and had an eye for it, ever since his inclusion as a wide-eyed petit marin in the Surrealist circle round E.L.T. Mesens in Soho in the 1950s. On impulse he made surreal objects himself (a dead starfish caught in a mousetrap, a nude with Carnation Milk tins as her breasts), but he also learned to buy cleverly in a difficult market. One train trip back to Liverpool from London was spent in silent adoration of two new acquisitions by Max Ernst, propped on the opposite seat.

As old age advanced, Surrealism became an increasing comfort to him. It gave an aesthetic purpose to his multicoloured lines of pills, and to the hours spent in limbo in the scanner. Deafness reminded him of Surrealist word-games in which question and answer were unrelated, or only incidentally and wonderfully so:

What is reason?
A cloud eaten by the moon.

Fishing, too, was still a comfort. He imagined his cancer—for which he refused all treatment so that he could go on performing—as a tiny fish dangling at the end of his lung, wrinkling its whiskers, ready perhaps to be caught. And he often said that his favourite end, other than collapsing in the wings of a theatre with wild applause still ringing in his ears, would be to be discovered smiling on a riverbank with a big beautifully marked trout beside him, death and sex together.

Get Your Freakum Dress On

So everybody's been talking about Galliano's 10'th anniversary couture show for Dior. Now don't get me wrong, its pretty darn good, but it doesn't hold a candle to the Spring/Summer couture collection he showed last season. Mr Galliano is at his best when he has a dominant narrative to work with, like his Egyptian collection or the Psychedelic raver vibe he channeled in the late 90's. The most recent collection seemed to be a bit like a greatest hits album. You know all the individual components are good, but it never seems to amount to something greater than the sum of its parts. Judge for yourselves:

Autumn/ Winter 2007/8







And now for the truly transcendent Spring Summer collection:







These dresses still make me gasp, despite the fact that they are in a crappy youtube video. The construction and draping is just fucking breathtaking. To take heavy silk gazar and press it into delicate origami pleats and folds is just bloody genius if you ask me. This is the kind of stuff that really makes you stop and dream about different proportions and drape. It also reminds us how boring and disingenuous all these chain store collaborations are. Stop buying loads of poorly made crap people! Save your pennies and get something exceptional instead!

Obituary Sundays

I love reading obituaries. Hard. They have all the pathos and epic sweep of a Danielle Steele novel crammed into a single page. I'm going to try to post an interesting one at least once a fortnight. Here's a cracker from the London Telegraph to start the series off:


Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous "glamour" charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders club. Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Von Bismarck's university career ended in catastrophe in June 1986, when his friend Olivia Channon was found dead on his bed, the victim of a drink and drugs overdose. Von Bismarck admitted that his role in the affair had brought disgrace on the family name; five years later he told friends that there were still people who would not speak to his parents on account of it, and who told his mother that she had "a rotten son".

In the reunified Germany, von Bismarck managed several telecoms businesses and, armed with a doctoral thesis on the East German telephone system, oversaw the sale of companies formerly owned by Communist East Germany to the private sector.

By the late 1990s von Bismarck was working for Telemonde, Kevin Maxwell's troubled telecoms firm based in America, with responsibility for developing the business in Germany; the company collapsed in 2002 with debts of £105 million. Von Bismarck eventually returned to London, where he became chairman of the investment company AIM Partners, dabbled in film production and promoted holidays to Uzbekistan.

Never concealing his homosexuality, von Bismarck continued to appear in public in various eccentric items of attire, including tall hats atop his bald Mekon-like head. At parties he would appear in exotic designer frock coats with matching trousers and emblazoned with enormous logos. Flitting from table to table at fashionable London nightclubs, he was said to be as comfortable among wealthy Eurotrash as he was on formal occasions calling for black tie.

Although described personally as quiet and impeccably mannered, von Bismarck continued to live high on the hog, hosting riotous all-night parties for his (chiefly gay) friends at his £5 million flat off Sloane Square. It was at one such event, in August last year, that von Bismarck encountered tragedy for a second time when one of his male guests fell 60 ft to his death from the roof garden. While von Bismarck was not arrested, he was questioned as a witness and there were those who wondered - not, perhaps, without cause - whether he might be the victim of a family curse.

Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen was born on September 19 1962 in Brussels, the second son of Ferdinand, the 4th Prince Bismarck, whose own father had served in the German embassy in pre-war London until a feud with the ambassador, von Ribbentrop, ended his career.

As a talented young scholar, Gottfried had studied at what he described as "an aristocratic Borstal" in Switzerland and worked at the New York stock exchange before going up to Christ Church, Oxford.

Von Bismarck never fully recovered from the death in June 1986 of Olivia Channon, the striking 22-year-old daughter of Paul Channon (later Lord Kelvedon), then one of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet ministers.

To celebrate the end of their finals, von Bismarck and Olivia Channon had taken part in a drinking bout involving excessive amounts of champagne, Black Velvet and sherry before she overdosed on heroin. At the inquest her cousin, Sebastian Guinness, described how he and other revellers had repaired to von Bismarck's bottle-strewn rooms, where Olivia was found dead the following morning.

Von Bismarck himself was charged with possessing cocaine and amphetamine sulphate and was later treated at a £770-a-week addiction clinic in Surrey. Following Olivia Channon's funeral, at which he was said to have "wept like a child", von Bismarck was ordered home to the family castle near Hamburg by his father.

His removal from Oxford was so abrupt that he was not given time to settle his bills; Prince Ferdinand sent a servant who did the rounds of von Bismarck's favoured watering-holes, restaurants and his tailor bearing a chequebook.

The tabloids quoted words of repentance from von Bismarck himself - "My days of living it up are all over. This past week has just been too much" - but although he was reported to be leaving to finish his studies at a German university and eventually to enter German politics, in the event he was treated again for alcoholism at a German clinic.

He returned briefly to Oxford, where local magistrates fined him £80 for drug possession; he wiped away tears as his lawyer offered mitigation, pointing out that since the Channon affair von Bismarck had received a bad press in Germany.

Doubting whether he would be able to find work in his own country, von Bismarck was said to be planning to study at a university in Los Angeles while continuing to receive treatment for his drink problem. Olivia Channon's death, his barrister said, would prove to be a shadow over von Bismarck's head "probably for the rest of his life". So it proved.