A Silhouette: Edith Piaf

Fold

I work with a lady still wears a folding rain-cap, the kind they used to give away in beauty shops.  Maybe they still do.  Every woman I knew as a child had one or more of these in her purse.  Designed not so much to keep off the weather as to protect the architectural integrity of the lady's hairdo. Clear plastic, sometimes with a trim, sometimes not, the shape varied I suppose according to the height and style of the hair, but basically it was a kind of coal-scuttle bonnet with a flap at the back and a brim that extended out over the brow.  When I was little, the great fascination of these articles was in the fold.  Making an origami lotus from a sandwich-bag would be simpler.  I remember dozens of these caps being in a big bowl on the counter by the door; each in its little plastic pouch, with a flap and a single snap on the fancy ones, and each measuring no more than an inch or two square.  It was the sort of thing one fished out of grandma's purse, but unfolded at some peril as only a practised hand could ever get it square, and back into the pouch again.  (Not to resurrect a sexist assumption of my youth, but why only men were meant to be able to fold a map seemed to me even then a ridiculous assumption when every lady had a beauty shop rain hat.)

Saw the lady I work with step out onto the street yesterday.  Sure enough, this being Seattle in January, she unfolded her rain-cap and tied it under her chin, "Just in case."  I asked how long she'd had this article in her purse.  "This one must be twenty years old, at least!" she said.  Still worked admirably, may I say: her coiffure was pristine when I saw her sail back into the bookstore some time after.

This being Seattle, one tends to see more grey braids than actual hairdos on the street.  The preferred January headgear of most local ladies of a certain age seems to be a canvas fishing hat.  Not that there are actual fishing-flies hooked to the band, you understand, but the look of the thing does suggest at the very least a walk in the woods rather than a stroll out to the shops.

We just got a new cable-box.  Practically, this means we can now record up to four television shows at a time, which we may or may never watch.  Very exciting.  What this means in terms of actual hardware in the house is more than one might think.  The cable-box proper is, if anything, smaller and sleeker than it's predecessor.  With this however comes not one, but two new router boxes / thingummies, both bigger, blacker and with even more powerful blinky lights on them.  We take our cable with "wireless" service for the computers.  Thus the additional technology, wires and lights, you see.  (I don't pretend to understand any of this.)

Our house is a 1970 split-level.  Getting a modern cable-connection when we moved in a decade ago proved complicated.  In the end this involved no less than three representatives of the cable company coming out to drill holes in the walls and running cable through unlikely places along the floorboard.  We put the TV in our bedroom. We decided two houses ago that this is easiest and best.  Don't have to  wake one another from a couch in the living room anymore, or spend the night in a chair.  In the Seattle house this also turned out to be easier when it came time to route all the cables through the front, rather than the back of the house. Our bedroom faces the street.  It's been a popular decision with all but our very occasional house guests, who can be made uncomfortable when encouraged to climb the giant, California-King-sized bed and settle in to watch a movie while wedged between their ample hosts.  Put it another way, we like it.

The problem now is those damned blinky lights.  All those black boxes in the corner of the bedroom at night blaze like the mice are having a rave.  We sleep with the curtains drawn and the door closed.  In the best of all possible worlds, bedrooms are quiet as tombs and black as the grave, for me at least.  (The beloved husband, left to himself, sleeps with the television on, lights blazing, corn-chips, newspapers and whatnot scattered across the duvet.)  Maddening.

Various solutions were that night proposed: everything from books to bath-towels to "cable-cozies", that last being either a real thing we remembered or something we made up because it should be.  But, electronics must breath, it seems, as they generate considerable heat, thus the side-panels looking like designer cabbage-graters.  No towels then.  Finally, I hit on an idea, got up and went in search of construction-paper.  I haven't cut a silhouettes in years, nonetheless black paper I have.  The solution turned out to be single sheets, folded roughly in half and tucked over or standing in front of the annoying lights.  Works a dream, or near enough.  There's still light, but less, and no blinking!

Simple.

We've also acquired a new waffle-iron, by the way, our first waffle-iron in years.  My beloved husband, A. having in retirement become an expert, online shopper, a need I did not know we had was met last Sunday when I awoke to the heavenly smell of waffles and butter, walnut-infused maple syrup and deep and abiding love.  The new waffle-iron, unlike out last is not some modernist, multi-purpose grilling device, but instead a curved chrome beauty not unlike the one that proved so comically hard for Katherine Hepburn to operate in Woman of the Year.  Seems the beloved husband is still a dab hand at using the kitchen appliances of yesteryear, just as I can, when called on, crease paper.  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", as ol' Louis Blanc used to say when his beloved made him waffles.


Whenever I hear, yet again the now tedious debate between the partisans of the new technology and the defenders of the book, I will be reminded of that single fold of black paper, of ladies' rain-hats and of waffles.  Appearances to the contrary, I do not read by whale-oil, or mill myself the wheat for my waffles.  True, my copy of The Poems of Walter Scott is from 1904, and I am reading Marmion, but the light is electric and when I look up it is to watch o'er my waffles Teraji P. Henson fight for a Hip Hop Empire on an HD TV.

It's all good, or near enough so that we can fix it with construction-paper, at least for now.

From Beefcake to the Most Delicate Silhouettes

There was a happy day when, without thinking much about it, I could count on the publishers of photography books to provide me with my husband's birthday and Christmas presents. I needn't worry if I hadn't seen anything appropriate in the department stores or heard him mention a menswear designer he admired. Back then, he was an executive-type, always in need of something from Brooks Brothers. Easiest thing in the world. Whatever I spent on what seemed to me rather anonymous business gear, it was always money well spent, almost a business expense, so far as dear A. was concerned. As an hourly clerk working in a bookstore, I could ill-afford his good, if conservative taste in middle-class habiliment, but I could just manage a new shirt, an alligator wallet or a new silk tie. Hardly the stuff of romance, these pieces of practical finery, but I always felt, as when I saved to buy him a new briefcase he'd admired, that in some small way, I was doing my part to maintain his dignity and our primary income. But I'm not a wife, and back then, the word "husband" still had an irony attached to it for us that usage and experience have subsequently, surprisingly, worn away. (Who would have guessed?) The term one used most often then, perfectly acceptable amongst ourselves, if rather provocative in mixed company, was "lover," and I could hardly be satisfied giving my lover a tie, however happy it made him, now could I? After a few less than successful experiments with flowers, candy, beribboned champagne flutes -- as it turned out, neither of us ever became a wine aficionado, even at New Year's, pop records, comic aprons, and supposedly sexy silk drawers, I finally hit on something that perfectly suited his more salacious side, my budget and my line of work and started getting him nudes.

There was, back then, something of a boom in fag photography. In addition to the more refined offerings of the major art publishers in which establishment fashion and art types felt themselves finally liberated to share the record of their tricks and or print their blue studies of rent-boys-as-fawns, openly gay photographers were finding their more erotically and politically charged work collected and published in book form for the first time. Mapplethorpe having made hard-ons fashionable for the gallery set, there was also an ongoing effort to reclaim the gay cultural past by reprinting in large, handsomely made books, the lost studio-snaps of the likes of "Bruce of Los Angeles," and other quaintly camp pornographers from the Age of the Physique Pictorials, as well as the pioneering smut of the ancients, such as the exiled pedo-aesthete and dilettante photographer, Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose pictures of naked Sicilians with dirty feet were rediscovered and, long after all parties involved had probably passed over into forgetfulness, reborn as a indispensable record of lost, well-hung innocence. With the boom in respectable, book-bound porn, finding something for my lover in the way of artful ass to wrap up and slip under the tree come Christmas became as easy as buying the man cuff links. True, often as not, there was quite a bit of gushy, introductory academic prose made to justify the whole enterprise of making coffee-table-books out of "Old Reliable" excons flexing their tattoos and exposing their rather touching tan-lines, but one only read these books as an afterthought. I don't think anyone in the target market had to endorse all that windy historicism to enjoy browsing through a review of Korean War veterans in their bashful black and white all-together, or color Polaroids of drug-addled hippies slipping out of their cut-offs and tube-socks and grinning at the discovery of their tumescence as at an unexpected vision of love, peace and understanding. It was all such fun! True, there was the occasional grim beauty of a Nan Goldin junky, or an interleaved image or two of some sad adolescent girlfriend, but for the most part, the books I bought for A. provided us all -- and here I include all the friends who gathered over the years for various holidays at our house -- with hours of blameless quiet, which gave dear A. time to finish baking the pie.

But all good things come to an end. The day came when, bookshelves groaning under the weight of over-sized art books, and the Internet less expensively and more conveniently providing us with eye-candy, dear A. said, "Enough," and suggested he would rather have the new Josh Groban recording, or a porkpie hat for his birthday, or nothing at all for Christmas, as it would just be the two of us, and we really wanted to buy a flat-screen TV this year, or fix my shower floor, or finally get a back-splash put in behind the stove. (And that, my dears, is when one knows that one is married, for richer, for poorer, etc. and for life.)

So I seldom buy art books of any description anymore. My excuse for acquiring big, expensive books of nude photography has been taken from me, and sadly, not a moment too soon, as the boom has long since bust. Pickin's these days are slim.

But there are still beautiful, big art books that I still covet, books that fill me, for whatever reason, with something like the excitement of those other, earlier visual feasts of flesh, but that could not be more remote from that subject matter. A book published by Rizolli, just last September, Silhouette: The Art of The Shadow, by the art historian, Emma Rutherford, at $65.00, is really well beyond my present means, but that hasn't prevented me from keeping it for a week at my desk, carefully turning the pages in any spare moment and marveling at the treasures the author has collected up.

I've cut some silhouettes myself. I decorated my first college dormitory room with facing images in black and white of Balinese dancers I'd cut just for that purpose. My first roommate, a baseball scholarship freshman, named "Spike," failed to sufficiently appreciate my efforts, I thought. A couple of years ago, I cut profiles of some famous poets for a contest at the bookstore during National Poetry Month. I thought these not bad.

I can only appreciate how little I've mastered of the art now that there is, in Rutherford's book, a real record of just how extraordinarily well this sort of thing was once done, even by such rank amateurs as myself. Such beauties in this book! And such variation! A whole school of silhouette making, in which "bronzing" and gold paint and leaf were used to elaborate the features, or black ink was added in the most delicate flourishes to describe lace and elaborate hairdos, was previously unknown to me. The most amazing scenes of multiple characters and crowded setting, full of activity and motion, were done in silhouettes the like of which I'd never seen, or certainly never seen in such abundant example, before. This book is a remarkable record of a largely lost art, and a priceless bit of good curatorial scholarship. It would be a priceless prize for my library, had I the money to buy it before it is inevitably remained someday.

The story told in it is as interesting, in some ways, as the art itself, tracing what was a fad of an earlier century all the way back to Greek vases and the like. If Rutherford's prose is rather dry and without fuss, she has had the sense now and again to quote more amusing historical criticism of the form, such as in this:

"In his 'Shades: An Essay on English Portrait Silhouettes,' Sir David Piper (1970) describes how the silhouettist, bored with the painted black profile, 'went whoring after the third dimension.'"

And those gilded flourishes I find so fascinating? They are described in a quote from a contemporary craftsman as being "niggling, tortured," and a disservice to the sitter, so there we are. There's no accounting for taste. But the words aside, the book itself is a beautiful thing, and crowded with examples of amazing variety, from the most elaborate and artful aristocratic portraits, to the sweetest little silhouettes made as inexpensive memorials of common people, and, in one particularly charming example, even Queen Victoria's dog, Dash.

Emma Rutherford's is one, had I room on the shelf, and money in my pocket, I would happily add to our somewhat eclectic collection of oversized art books, and should it indeed make its way someday to one of the bargain tables, I will. The author needn't blush at the thought, as I'd put her next to Edward Lear's beautiful birds, maybe, or on the table with the volume of Cecil Beaton portraits and a collection of Phiz drawings I bought used for myself a Christmas or two ago. I'd promise not to put her in the steamroom atmosphere of most of the books I bought dear A. over the years. I fear all those glorious pages of Georgian ladies and gentlemen in profile would curl in such company.

Though some of those gilded old roués, and not a few of the ladies, might feel right at home in our collection.