50 Shades of Grey . . .

. . . by DvH design

"Holy Cravat!" gasped Anaethesia, "That's just overwhelming....breathtaking...!!!"

"And all for you Anaethesia," growled Chris Blimey, charismatic, damaged and dangerous - the sort of Top Designer that knows his way around columns...a guy who put syncopation in his presentations.

Anaethesia's  Inner Goddess did a mental pole dance, before putting her back out and having to be helped to the divine pearl grey divan.

Yes, it was truly the biggest display of neck vanity Anaethesia had ever seen.

"And now", said Chris Blimey, "I am going to take you to the Taupe Room of Pain..."

"Oh no, not the client counseling room," groaned AnagoshthisnameistoolongcanIjustcallherNasty?, her Inner Goddess revolting gently and lighting up a fag.

"Yes," was Chris' masterful reply. "And there you will do something you have never done before…you will advise clients to choose from the 50 Shades of Grey...yes, suffer! Can I help it, that I have this tremendous Semi-Gloss Appeal?"

Yep, daahlings, almost everyone I encounter has read or is reading Those Books.  Except me, I must be getting on a bit.  I am resisting, out of sheer contrariness...I just enjoy reading reviews and listening to women discussing them:

"I was up to 4 am reading it."

"Some of those things are just not physically possible."

"I told my husband I was off to bed to read it - when he joined me ever hopeful, I was fast asleep with my reading glasses on."

"Ms Edna, sorry but you can't stand here with us, you have to go stand over there with the other people who have not read it;  yes, your client, oh, wait a minute, he's read it now too... oh my, Utah will never be the same."

I even spotted an updated Facebook page with "It's all coming to an end with Mr Grey."

And when I looked at Grain de Musc the perfume blog of Denyse Beaulieu, I found that she is currently working on the French translation of 50 Shades ....it's everywhere!

I suspect my refusal to join the Greyfest is largely motivated by jealousy - I wish I had penned a bestseller. 

Alas, my designer’s porn* is going to be less erotic and more idiotic. ...

"I want you now, here, on the escalator," demanded Chris urgently.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, there is just something about escalators."

"No, I mean, don't you mean "elevator" not "escalator"?" queried Anaethesia, breathlessly, "We don't want to get anything caught in the moving parts and the other shoppers might not like it…"

"You bourgeois fool you," blazed Chris, as they arrived at the second floor of the PDC.

*50 Strike-Offs Of Grey 

Designer At ... Large

The Perfected Grey

Movies for Foodies

It has been too hot to cook. 

Ergo the next best thing is; movies for foodies.

Eating as a focus in the movies is a fairly recent development.  The film, Julie & Julia, is an index to how far we have come, not only in our culinary evolution but in our cinematic one. It is hard to think of an American movie before the 1960s that concerned itself with food.  Not until the 1960s did food begin to be directly represented in movies. Julia Child’s televised approach to cooking seems to have augured the change.

Follwing are two of my all time favourite eating scenes-

From the 1963 movie Tom Jones. Running for over three minutes, the characters say nothing whilst slurping and caressing their way through increasingly luscious, symbolically aphrodisiac food.

Compared to today's movies, it seems a bit tame, but hasn't lost its sex appeal. Any movie that can keep the audience's interest for nearly four minutes with no one speaking is worth a look. The prototype for food porn!

And the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces (1970) which satirizes the rigid menu policies ("No Substitutions") of a few decades ago - those days when the establishment was more important than its customers.

Of course, neither of the older movies is so postmodern a meta-movie as Julie & Julia - being as it is "quintupply " about food, learning about food, writing about food, learning about food through the original writing about food and writing about it. Just what I said - quintupply!

So Bon Appetit! Here's to food in the movies.

1. Babette’s Feast

2. Eat Drink Man Woman – The Opening Scene

3. Spanglish – The World’s Greatest Sandwich

4. Like Water for Chocolate – The wedding cake

5. Soul Food

6. Chocolat – The Chocolaterie

7. Waitress

8. Volver

9. Tampopo – The Noodlemaster

10. Big Night – The Big Feast