More ghostly recollections.

What a week! Again.

Now it's the weekend. Time for a movie.  In the slogan of the moment, might you want to "lean in" and see a meaty political thriller? If so The Ghost Writer has a cheery topicality; corruption at the highest levels of British government. Intrigue. Perhaps murder.

Gotta be fiction? Not necessarily. As a friend noted, the murder of respectable people by respectable people didn’t end with Shakespeare. But let's not argue: It is fiction, fiction with a point, delivered with great verve by one of the best directors.

Adapted from a novel by Robert Harris, it’s the story of a writer who’s never named. That’s appropriate; his skill is writing the memoirs of celebrities. He’s fast. And good: The last book he ghosted, “He Came, He Sawed, He Conquered,” the memoirs of a magician, raced to the top of the best-seller list. Now he’s called in to complete the memoirs of Adam Lang, former British Prime Minister. He has just a month to turn the manuscript in.

Consider how Harris and Polanski launch the story. The book and movie begin on the ferry, crossing to Martha’s Vineyard on a blustery winter’s day. The ferry reaches the dock, empties. Except for one car.  Where is the driver? It’s a mystery. It’s also great movie making.

We quickly learn about that car and its driver. Lang has been holed up in a beach house on the Vineyard. And, coming across on the ferry one night, Michael McAra, Lang's ghostwriter and long-time aide, went overboard and drowned. A suicide? 

Who's who in the cast? The former Prime Minister, played by Pierce Brosnan, is a stand-in for Tony Blair. His attractive, chilly wife is a version of Cherie Blair. And the fresh trouble Adam Lang is in, allegations that he helped the CIA kidnap four Pakistani terrorists, the sort of thing that The Hague might consider a war crime, isn’t unbelievable, at least in England. 

For the ghostwriter, these charges couldn’t come at a worse time. Lang is angry and distracted; instead of working on the book, he races down to Washington for a photo op with the American Secretary of State, a woman who just happens to be African-American. Slowly, painfully, the ghost begins to make connections between Lang’s new problems and McAra’s death. And the tension mounts…

If you are seeing parallels between The Ghost Writer and Polanski’s own situation - a man accused of terrible crimes, living in exile, trying to clear his name-give yourself ten easy points. If you see a connection to Chinatown a less than professional detective, way over his head, stumbles into a conspiracy so corrupt he’s unprepared to recognize it, give yourself ten more. (Extra-point question: The Asian man sweeping the decks at Lang’s beach house what’s his equivalent in Chinatown?)

The film making is confident, organic, and efficient at the highest level. Although Polanski is now 77, the director who made Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby and The Pianist still has his A-game. In an interview, Pierce Brosnan expresses his admiration:

“The lens was never far from his hand. I sat on the back of the camera one day…His viewfinder was burnished with time, the numbers were worn away and they were all penciled in on bits of gaffer tape…He’d be setting the camera up and having a private conversation with himself. You’d be going for the take and he’d be, ‘No, no, stop, no,’ and then, ‘Give me the camera, I want the camera, the fucking camera.’ He could freak some people out. But that was his passion.”

The Ghost Writer is fun and provocative and adult. It reminds us that a thrilling film can be made in a living room, that a sharp conversation can be as deadly as a bullet, that music and cinematography don’t have to assault the ear or poke you in the eye to be thrilling. How old-fashioned. How refreshing.

 

Great Fireside Evenings.

Three of the most pleasant and comforting words in the language are fireside, book, and wine.  They form a natural ménage à trois.  What follows is not to be taken too solemnly.

Arsene Lupin - you know him not, but to generations of European readers he was the French Sherlock Holmes. Alas, Holmes was on the side of the law, a stodgy enterprise. But Lupin was a burglar.  A gentleman burglar.  A burglar with wit and style. It was a thrill to watch him work.

And, indeed, you could watch him work, for Lupin-like the anarchists in The Four Just Men-liked to announce his crimes in advance, the better to turn theft into sports. In the most famous of the Arsene Lupin stories, he breaks into a house, takes nothing, but leaves a card for his unwitting host: "Arsene Lupin, gentleman burglar, will return when the furniture is genuine."

And how about this note, to a person so paranoid that he has had his house sealed, so that no one but staff may enter:

There is, in the gallery in your castle, a picture of Philippe de Champaigne, of exquisite finish, which pleases me beyond measure. Your Rubens are also to my taste, as well as your smallest Watteau. In the salon to the right, I have noticed the Louis XIII cadence-table, the tapestries of Beauvais, the Empire gueridon signed 'Jacob,' and the Renaissance chest.  In the salon to the left, all the cabinet full of jewels and miniatures.

For the present, I will content myself with those articles that can be conveniently removed. I will therefore ask you to pack them carefully and ship them to me, charges prepaid, to the station at Batignolles, within eight days, otherwise I shall be obliged to remove them myself during the night of 27 September; but, under those circumstances, I shall not content myself with the articles above mentioned.

Accept my apologies for any inconvenience I may cause you, and believe me to be your humble servant, “Arsene Lupin.”

P.S. Please do not send the largest Watteau. Although you paid thirty thousand francs for it, it is only a copy, the original having been burned, under the Directoire by Barras, during a night of debauchery. Consult the memoirs of Garat. And I do not care for the Louis XV chatelaine, as I doubt its authenticity.

There's something delicious about a man who commits non-violent crimes with panache - it's almost as if he's liberating the art and furniture, rescuing them from people who take pleasure only in owning them. The French thought so, anyway: Starting in 1906, Maurice LeBlanc pounded out twenty volumes of stories about Lupin, all in the neat, near-non-fiction style of de Maupassant and Flaubert. (Inevitably, Lupin would confront Sherlock Holmes. Guess who won?)  Later, there were plays, movies, even comics. And the character was easy to update-on television, Lupin morphed into “The Saint.”

Lupin is at once a 19th century figure and a modern rogue: “Why should I retain a definite form and feature? Why not avoid the danger of a personality that is ever the same? My actions will serve to identify me.” All he cares about is his art. It gives him pleasure to commit a crime even while locked in a jail cell. And because disguise and indirection are his greatest skills, it thrills him to announce, with all candor, “I shall not be present at my trial - Arsene Lupin remains in prison just as long as it pleases him, and not one minute more.”

It is great fun to try and outguess Lupin. Consider dressing the part while you savor these tales. A smoking jacket or a silk robe. What we need to drink here is something complex that reveals its secrets slowly.  Montrachet maybe? And Chopin?  After a while, Lupin's cracked morality starts to make a great deal of sense, and your mind drifts. By the third or fourth story, you'll be contemplating a jewel theft. And why not? Mrs. X doesn't really appreciate that necklace. And it is insured.

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

just between cousins - a voice from Old New York

If there was to be a Proust of New York, it ought to have been Louis Auchincloss. He made a career out of documenting the professional arrangements, private derangement's and social displays of New York’s old elite. The author of more than 60 books, Auchincloss described in his fiction the privileged, Protestant society that had dominated New York for centuries and the forces that encroached upon that society as he grew older. The basic contours of his charmed life are well known–his Upper East Side childhood; his school years at Groton, Yale and the University of Virginia; his work as a lawyer at a prestigious Wall Street firm–but Auchincloss brings to them new detail and great seriousness in the posthumous memoir A Voice From Old New York.

It is perhaps the blind spots in Auchincloss’ vision that clarify for the reader certain facts about the city where he lived. What he reveals, however accidentally, is how one’s own physical and financial security can seduce one into believing that this world is the best world. Insurance becomes assurance, an easy, trusting take on life.