purejuice | Entries tagged with old babes

Tonga, 1954. I think I detect a glint of empathy in her eye.
http://www.tongaturismo.info/rt/index-e.htm

Her hostess is the 6'3" Queen Salote, the only royal at Elizabeth's coronation who did not have the top put up on her carriage in the procession to the ceremony. It was raining, and Salote said if the people can come out and stand in the rain for this, so can I.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Fasi_fakafonua.mid

Crossposts: http://purejuice.livejournal.com/1787067.html

By Rex C. Curry for the NYT
Mary Pyland, 92, of Abilene, eating fried chicken. Rock those nails, Mami.

For others, eating well is a way to keep traditions alive. Mary Pyland, 92, of Abilene, Tex., was raised on a ranch. “We had a fried chicken dinner every Sunday,” said Ms. Pyland, who ran a cosmetics store until she was 84. “I lost my husband 16 years ago, and I try to keep up everything we always did. Honey, I just had fried chicken with cream gravy and biscuits and mashed potatoes for dinner last night. And I made a caramel pie that was just about the best thing you ever put your lips around.”

One trope that comes up often in conversations with older gourmands is that eating what they want is, at their age, a right or privilege. For some of these privileged or righteous folks, it’s a question of not curbing one’s impulses.

Larry Garfield, 95, of Key Biscayne, Fla., worked in the carpet industry until he was 83. Asked why he recently ate a rare calf’s liver with mashed potatoes at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Miami Beach (even though he shouldn’t have, given his diabetes), Mr. Garfield said: “You ever walked down the street and seen a pretty girl and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’? Well, I looked at the menu and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’ ”

For other righteous or privileged folk, eating is a reward. Barbara Hillary, who reached the South Pole in January at age 79, making her the first African-American woman on record to stand on both poles, said she ate too much milk chocolate during the trip. “If I had frozen to death down there, wouldn’t it be sad if I’d gone to hell without getting what I want?” she said.

In some cases, this same right or privilege seems to stem from having lived an exalted life. Nancy Cardozo and Aileen Ward met at Isadora Duncan’s school on Nantucket when they were 14. Ms. Cardozo said: “We did Duncan dancing. We flitted on the grass in little Greek dresses.”

Both went on to lead vivid lives. Ms. Cardozo wrote fiction and poetry for the New Yorker in the 1940s and ’50s; Ms. Ward won the National Book Award in 1964 for her biography of Keats, and used to car-pool with Vladimir Nabokov when she taught at Wellesley.

Now, despite some technical difficulties (“There are chewing problems,” Ms. Cardozo said. “That doesn’t sound very attractive, does it?”), they eat luxuriant foods, albeit in small portions. “It feels like entitlement,” Ms. Cardozo explained. “We deserve it because it’s the way we’ve always lived, and we don’t want to change.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/dining/02Elder.html?scp=1&sq=abilene&st=cse

Food and foodies, the monetization by doctors of diet regimes, Obama pushing his basically anorectic ways, the Bourdain/Pollan-inspired snuff film porn aesthetic of off-the-grid butchers, are getting intolerable; I cite again the recent no-shit-Sherlock discovery in Arizona that treating Alzheimer's patients like adult humans -- with bacon, chocolate, bourbon, perfume and dollies if that's what floats their boat -- as a paradigm changing concept.

Noah Berger for The New York Times
Bobby Seale, 75, Black Panther, eating bobbycue. It's baaaaaaaaaaaaad for you, Suzy Creamcheese.

Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in court, Chicago 7 Trial, 1969.

Crossposts: http://purejuice.livejournal.com/1728983.html

I wanted to note the passing in May of the captain of the Old Babes team.

She had the very dubious distinction of shining like a true genius at all the dreary exhibitions of feminist art the women's museum in D.C. mounted -- like watching Dr. J shoot in the midst of mortals

or Baryshnikov do his Nijinsky thing in rose-colored tights,

the magnitude of her talent and her engagement with some of the issues the worm artists were trifling with, radiated light and power evident to the merest layperson.

She was also a babe.

Vale, Louise Bourgeois.

( Louise Bourgeois Obit NYT )

Whoever Vuitton has got giving the BJs to the boddhisattvas to recruit them for their luggage ads must be very, very good indeed.

Compare and contrast excellent Old Skool Teeth with Zidane's shark-like plasticoes.

Pele, who for service to humanity and the Very Best Old Babe Smile and Haircut Ever, has until this morning been co-captain of the Old Babe Team, is now appearing in Louis Vuitton luggage ads. He hasn't had his teeth fixed. He's not abusing vitiligo medication. He appears with Zidane and Maradona, both of whom look a thousand years older and seriously decadent, in a shoot by The Leibowitz playing foosball at the Cafe Maravillas in Madrid.

Two of the co-captains, cheek to cheek.

Ever since I discovered that The Leibowitz, who has squandered millions, is famous for coke binges, ripping off her employer, shooting the cancer-ridden corpse of her dead lover, Susan Sontag, and publishing the photographs without ever coming out; and telling the octogenarian Queen (the third co-captain), who had dressed in her official head of state uniform specially for the shoot, to take off her crown of state because "It's too dressy", I have stricken her from any consideration for babeness, or indeed discernment or news judgement of any description.

Pele and the third co-captain. Note how both captains are smiling unaffectedly despite having been separated by the bearded lackey.

But so The Leibowitz shot the gods of World Cup soccer for the Vuitton ad -- and Keith Richards too.

I forgave Keef, for services to mankind. For putting up with Jagger for 50 years.

And I think I'm going to have to forgive Pele too. Old Babes wouldn't be babes if they didn't do something repulsive every once in a while.

It is a mark of my bloody-mindedness that I am resolutely ignoring Very Bad News on the front page of the Sunday New York Times to view the Vuitton ad and judge it to be even worse.

There is, NB, nothing like an old babe who has become an old bore on the subject of how the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It takes real courage to be an optimist.

Just sayin'.

There are, as it happens, good reasons to question the good faith of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. (Thank you,

oneroom, and

the_sikh_geek, for the heads up.)

I would merely like to point out that she has the same tragic Lesbian haircut, as it was called in the comments on my militant hair discourse disparaging Drew Gilpin Faust's hair cut, as the first female Harvard president.

I have connected it to the dreadful Daphne Merkin phenom, in which The New York Times encourages JAPs of a certain age to let the self-loathing all hang out in the very strange belief that it's amusing. The Times encourages specifically Merkin, Joyce Wadler and Alex Kucynski to display very creepy, pornish, Color Me Ugly girl vibes, which are uncomfortably close to a kind of laddish pull-the-flies-wings-off style that others in the eastern corridor hip world find appropriate for women. (Lady Gaga, about whose oooover I've been thinking, does it too. Give me your psycho.... Elsewhere someone has picked up on the Golden Girl fallacy with respect to Betty White's SNL host appearance -- to get old women to talk exclusively about genitals and sex is funny. Tina Fey's census segment, billed as best in show, was the only segment which avoided the tired old vieja verde tropes. Supposedly written by Fey, it made fun of White's dementia instead. It is, how you say in English? Shucking and jiving.)

I submit that Harvard requires of its president and its law school dean that its president write basically about Miss Anne and what she did during the War Between the States, that its law school dean hire only white people as professors of law, and that each of them wear haircuts that Joseph Kennedy might have given his developmentally disabled daughter Rosemary before he gave her the lobotomy.

These haircuts, I will now go farther on to say, are self-mutilating and have nothing to do with tragic Lesbians. I can't think of one right now -- and certainly Kagan is not one -- but I suspect that tragic Lesbians would have fabulous hair.

Note the Elvis lip. The hair? She is hott.

Kagan's fine dark eyes could support, I submit, more of a Hammurabi fingerwave with circlet look:

Or, early messianic rebbe buzz cut for the follicularly challenged, which ages into an Albert Einstein white aureole:

It looks like the Messiah plucks his eyebrows. Dayenu!

I like the way queens dress. There's no shuck or jive. And Queen Margrethe, tall, pretty, artistic, has always been bold in her choices in a way that Queen Elizabeth, for all her wearing odd colors for videogenic and diplomatic reasons, has not been.

QE2 gets her Hindu on laying a wreath at the site of the Amritsar massacre.

Then there is the way they wear clothes as armor -- QE2's handbag is famous for its ceremonial role. And the jewels. Ohhh grrrl. One of my favorite pix of QE2 was taken when I was present, QE2's eyes practically bugging out looking at some enormous rock, earned on her back, that Elizabeth Taylor had on her neck, especially for the shootout at the Stone Stone Corral.

So it's Margrethe's 70th birthday, and if you're the queen you can wear red lipstick and half the pearls in Denmark and not cover your sundamaged skin and smile and toast the people of Denmark for being so kind to you for 50 years.

http://www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/gallery/201004143292/queen-margrethe/70th-birthday-celebrations/begin/1/7/

It's good for old women to work. And she's worn red nail polish all these years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/arts/music/24wincenc.html?scp=1&sq=les%20amies&st=cse
Flutist Carol Wincenc celebrates 40 years of concert performance with a trio of girlfriends, Les Amies, conformed for the occasion.

Alexeyeva in the snow maiden outfit she got busted in New Year's Eve

Everyone knew the sentence for crimes against the state: seven years in a penal camp and five years in exile. On her way into K.G.B. headquarters, Ms. Alexeyeva would stop to buy a ham sandwich, an éclair and an orange. These were delicacies in the 1970s, even for the investigator, who was headed for a lunch of gray cutlets. Halfway through, Ms. Alexeyeva would unwrap her lunch and lay it out on the table.

“They reacted very nervously when they started to smell ham,” she said with a sweet smile. “Then I would start eating the orange, and the aroma would start dissipating through the room.” The effect was reliably hypnotic.

“That’s how I amused myself,” she said. “It was a way to play on his nerves.”

( 82-year-old Soviet dissident Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva )

On the Old Babes Martha Nussbaum disquisition, I wanted to add this.

panjianlien, who is very thoughtful and indeed an expert on the subject of sexuality, has no problem with professors and students getting it on with each other. I asked her about the possibility that Nussbaum's leather jacket and other stated aspirations toward being a transgressive teenager means that Nussbaum is seeking, like Socrates, to fuck her students. And PJL says that having observed many such professor/student relationships, she has no ethical objection.

I am way more medieval on this. I'm with Dante: teacher/student sexual relations are an abuse of privileged access. Dante puts these people, as well as hosts who betrayed their guests, and guests who vice versa, and pupils who betray their masters, ditto, at the very pit of the Inferno, below mere mass murderers like Attila the Hun. This is a very fine and humane disposition: abuse of privileged access. Love the Guidoes.

I also think PJL's ethical disposition, that philosophy, professing it and sexuality are not and should not, be mutually exclusive, is also a very fine and humane one.

If Nussbaum is helplessly and cluelessly, or even with complete sentience, trying to hit on her students, I object. Big time. And I think that's where this is headed. Toward the young stuff. Watch out for the hemlock, Miss Thing.

Martha Nussbaum's expressing inchoate horniness, in panjianlien's musicologically expert, shrewd and humane assessment of the Cherubino arias Nussbaum sings for an hour before dinner every night,
channeling a kind of dommey femmey thing in her black leather ninja jacket, as shrewdly and artistically noted by filmstills, who with true genius pulls Carine Roitfeld out of the hat as the Frenchy Voguey dommey femmey Old Babe whose vibe may well be the one that Martha Nussbaum is aspiring to and, because of her innate Episcopalianism or Chicago-ness, isn't quite achieving, and
Susie Bright's piercing (!) assessment, via the excellent eye of minniethemoocha of Camille Paglia's channeling a butch bottom, vide the excellent clip provided by oneseriouscat which shows Paglia in a couture camo blouse which has got to be the very avatar of butch bottomness.

I leave it to y'all, who are so very brill, to think upon the political agenda -- or survival agenda -- an Old Babe is choosing with her clothes -- competence, viability, employability and, in Nussbaum's case, fuckability. Please note that both femmey dommey and butch bottom convey competence as well as -- sweetness? Willingness to please? Approachability? Fuckability?

I hope your comments will have produced a PhD. thesis on these important matters when I get home tonight.

Always leaving aside, of course, the not-very-vexed question of whether or not a French Vogue editor, much less the foremost female ethicist, should wear fur or leather. This one problem alone, the utter cluelesness on Nussbaum's part, supports entirely

panjianlien's Cherubino mental health assessment. Paglia may be an asshole, but, unlike Nussbaum, she's not a hypocrite wearing leather (any more). The couture camo is perfectly judged.

You all? Rock.

P.S. What I am wearing to shoot the starving New Mexicans is what they wear: jeans, sweater, jacket, running shoes. I don't know if I will go so far as to wear my one pair of blue jeans. 'Cause the black jeans are just so much more....Roitfeld. Grrrrr.

Update: Wore the blue jeans, which are very dowdy, but also my Tuareg earrings. And my $90 real chambray J Crew blue collar shirt. Everything else is black. Thank God.

I'm way beyond criticizing Martha Nussbaum for showing her fanny. Or whatever it is. That's not at all what I'm objecting to. Here are some of her betters in the pansexual pantheon of really well-dressed academic Old Babes.

( Camille Paglia )

( Judith Butler )

( Susan Sontag )

Is that a leather top you’re wearing in this photograph?
Yes. I wore it when I went to speak at the first meeting of our University of Chicago lesbian and gay alumni association, and I thought it was so sweet for them to invite somebody who wasn’t gay to be their keynote speaker. But I wore this outfit, and they said, “We want to thank you for wearing leather.”

-- Martha Nussbaum, who goes on to scrupulize about marrying again or eating in restaurants when others cannot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/magazine/13FOB-Q4-t.html

I know that people I worship around here worship Martha but I think the booties in this pic, or maybe its the ninja jacket, not to mention that it is leather, or maybe the sum of the parts, is too much.

I can't gank the pic as is the usual practice of the fashion police. I have accused Martha of dressing like a transsexual, not that there's anything wrong with that, but there is something both cluelessly butch and over-fastidious in the way the goddess dresses. Is she channeling Judith Butler or cruising her? One could begin with the too-tan decolletee and the ca. 1988 anchorbitch necklace, going for the Andree Putman PIB look. I think Putman pulls it off. I think. Jury still out on Putman, though Putman definitely has the Old Babe hair problem licked. I think there is a not so very fine line, of which Nussbaum and Putman may be beyond the pale, between Old Babe and what we call in Spanish, a vieja verde. Which is nasty, and the antidote for which is watching the shipboard scene -- the midget doppelganger with the makeup -- in Death in Venice annually. Compare and contrast with the Italian Old Babes of a previous post. Or the adorable Princess Lilian.

Andree Putman

What I'm saying is Martha is not following the Old Babe accessories rule. If you wear the red lipstick, you have to eliminate almost everything else you're wearing, the ca. 1995 Vamp nail polish at the top of the list. If you wear the ninja leather jacket, you do not wear the red lipstick, the Happy Rockefeller Hair Done, the low cut wifebeater, the necklace, the mini skirt, the opaque black stockings and the booties.

Happy Rockefeller

If you wear the jacket, you wear it, I think, with pants. Actually, the mini is good. If you wear the booties, you wear them with pants and not that jacket. Oh Jeez, the wifebeater again. She's got a thing about her bicepses. As I do not. Please. Martha. Dude. Put your shirt on.

Nussbaum in what I have called her Jan Morris outfit, with the wifebeater, anchorbitch necklace, Happy Rockefeller hair and biceps, but without the ninja leather jacket she sports in today's NYT.

And I have to say, viewing the most recent Tina Turner concert, while she certainly is old and certainly is a babe, Tina, grrrl, it's time to pack it up when you can hardly walk across the stage and the backup dancers (BUDs) have to do the heavy lifting. Yikes. Love the Lurex pedal pushers tho. And I'm, uh, relieved you didn't wear the booty short version your BUDs rock. Oh jeezus. I'm not sure that's enough of a credential to award you Old Babe status. Like Putman, however, you do have what is possibly the very best Old Babe hair.

My official biography of Little Richard arrived today.

This may be my favorite performance of his.

He has the all time best hair.

And one of my favorite photographs is of him. It's on the other puter, this is the netbook, but it shows the very young Richard shirtless in the driver's seat of a car, with all that hair, looking in the rear view mirror and flirting with a guy who is standing in the street.

Here 'tis:

I could never figure out if he invented Jerry Lee, of whom a friend of mine once made the immortal statement, The Rolling Stones pretend to be bad, but Jerry Lee Lewis was baaaaad, or if they just both sprang from that special erotic hellfire that is Dixie. Ouf.

I hope this bio is better than the Sam Cooke one I tried to wade through, which was just as voluminous, hagiographic, leaving out big chunks while including every burp, and as BORING as the one I am now enjoying, the official biography of the Queen Mum, which I got for $15 at Costco. Major sucking up. Back to my rant on rock critics, they're just as insane as biographers of royalty. Blech.

I did Princess Lilian for lunch.

Here are some of my favorites.

( She meets Prince Bertil at her 28th birthday party, London, 1943. )

( She marries Prince Bertil in 1976 after living together for 30 years, never having been presented at court, and foregoing having children, due to secession issues. )

( With Bertil. )

( Babe. )

And finally, my favorite, party like it's 1999. Princess Lilian arrives for the Y2K New Year's Eve Party on the arm of her grand-nephew Prince Carl Philip.

The NYT design magazine had a feature this past Sunday on five Italian design divas -- all over 70, I'd say, with portraits.

Now as everyone knows, Italians eschew plastic surgery, uno, segundo, are obsessed with the presentation of la bella figura, and have the most beautiful clothes for people of all ages, not the coquettish shit or pretentious intellectual shit the French produce nor American MTV slut wear. It's gorgeous on young and old and depends not on flash but on the expression of beauty from the wearer. Taupe is Armani's best color because it's flattering not because it's eye catching.

Anyway, I was looking at the beautifully dressed, uncut, old design ladies and was impressed. I am deciding whether one wants the
old man's hair cut,

Gae Aulenti, 78

the spikes,

Maddalena de Padova, 78

or the soft chignon.

Eye makeup for sure, but not perhaps the clown effect.

Nanda Vigo, 69

I think the old man's haircut and the I. M. Pei glasses are an aged gamine's trope. I think we shall avoid it.

I think no jewelry but zipper tabs and cigarettes rocks. There's nothing creepier than an old woman covered with dirty diamonds and fur.