The Wit of the Staircase

Led Zeppelin Playing, Becoming Yourself

Ingenious Balenciaga collection for Fall 2007 has right-on inspiration, below. This above might be the best outfit we at Wit have ever seen. I would like to wear something this smart and jewel-bright gorgeous every damn day...

“ 'It’s a big mix—a street mix, with symbols and colors that are very multicultural,' said Nicolas Ghesquière at the Balenciaga rehearsal an hour before the show. Then Led Zeppelin kerranged on the sound track, the girls started loping by, and he grinned, 'It's like in your room, on campus. It's about how girls become themselves.' In other words, this was Balenciaga brought back to the realm of the casual and young, but still just as layered, complex, and resonant as any Ghesquière projection into sci-fi."

Link: Balenciaga Fall 2007 Ready-to-Wear Collection on Style.com: Runway Review.

Ruthie's Wearing Blue: Uncollected J. D. Salinger Short Stories

"I never knew what color stuff a girl had on before I knew Ruthie. But with Ruthie you know she's got something blue on." From "Both Parties Concerned," an "under-published" story by J. D. Salinger.

Link: J. D. Salinger. Uncollected Writings.

Via: Coudal Partners.

Quote above from Coudal as well, as we haven't dug in and read them yet.

You know even now we secretly love these wistful Salinger stories, though we would like to be known as tough guys here, s'il vous plait.

Bijou Nude, Holding Own Head

Bijou Phillips holds her own head on the Hostel 2 poster. Wit is reminded of that 70s Hustler graphic of a nude woman in a meatgrinder that caused such a legal stir many years ago.

So this image kind of resonates with that free speech precedent for we of Wit. It really seems like it came out of the 1970s, which our decade is far outstripping in negativity and weirdness, with few correspondingly iconic images or other cultural bellwethers.

This image is actually really funny, and coming from Quentin Tarantino's general area it's more of a quotation as usual than an affront.

Wars. Threesomes. Drafts. & Mothers.

Link: Heretical Texts.

Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Bollingen Prize For Bidart

"Yale University has awarded the $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 2007 to Wellesley College English professor Frank Bidart.

A three-judge panel said Bidart's poems -- 'eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle -- venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry.'

The Bollingen Prize in Poetry, awarded biennially by the Yale University Library, was established in 1949 by Paul Mellon, and recognizes the best book published or the lifetime achievement of an American poet. Bidart's volumes include Star Dust, published in 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Bidart is 'one of the most important, influential poets in the country,' William Cain, head of Wellesley's English department, said in a statement. Other Bollingen Prize winners have been Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Louise Gluck, Adrienne Rich and Jay Wright.

`Groundbreaking' Work

'His work was enormously groundbreaking in terms of typography, he was using tons of odd punctuation and strange spacing, but it worked,'' said Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, and the co-editor of On Frank Bidart: Fastening the Voice to the Page, to be published by University of Michigan Press in March."

Link: Bloomberg.com: Muse.Link: Bloomberg.com: Muse.

Wild Choirs, Ghostly Fleas

Mr. Wit Of The Staircase's visionary artist relative, William Blake, had some novel ideas about portraiture that painter and filmmaker Mr. Wit has been mulling over carefully, as Mr. Wit will open a solo show of his own portraits in the Fall of 2007 at the Corcoran Museum of Art in his hometown, Washington, D.C.

Mr. Wit will present his abstract film portraits of designer Ossie Clark, poet David Berman and impresario Malcolm McLaren, in a trilogy of history portraits called Wild Choir: The Filmed Portraits Of Jeremy Blake.

These strongly individual spirits' representations will begin walking the Corcoran's boards on October 27th.

"William Blake's flea is evil, gothic, grotesque, stalking through a starry realm between stage curtains - walking the boards, in fact, as if the artist had ensnared this creature to appear in a spectacle at Drury Lane Theatre.

The ghost's spine is a throbbing, gristly column shooting into his scaly head with its bulging eyes and voracious tongue; his massive muscles are red-toned, as if infused with dried blood, and his loping, crushing walk is that of a colossus come to life. This vastness and mad-eyed bestiality contrasts with the visible form of the spirit's physical embodiment, which can be seen on the floor between his veined legs: a little flea.

Blake's explanation of the spirit he saw accords with the painting's extreme drama of scale, the contrast of the huge invisible monster with its tiny incarnation as insect. The blood-drinking household flea, said Blake, is in fact the physical shape taken by the souls of men who are so bloodthirsty that they are providentially confined to the size and form of insects.

The ghost is gorging on a bowl of blood. This is Blake's ultimate critique of the English portrait. How can empiricism, good manners and the sociability of a Gainsborough possibly acknowledge, as Blake does here, that one aspect of human nature is that of a blood-drinking ghoul?"

Link: The Ghost of a Flea, William Blake (c1819-20) | | Guardian Unlimited Arts.

Blondes To Become Extinct

"The last natural blondes will die out within 200 years, scientists believe.

A study by experts in Germany suggests people with blonde hair are an endangered species and will become extinct by 2202.

Researchers predict the last truly natural blonde will be born in Finland - the country with the highest proportion of blondes.

But they say too few people now carry the gene for blondes to last beyond the next two centuries."

Link: BBC NEWS | Health | Blondes 'to die out in 200 years'.

Via: Cynical-C Blog -.

She's Just A Shabby Doll: Britney Spears As Female Sacrifice

Mr. Wit and I were having the same discussion about "Spears" as this one from today's issue of New York magazine.

"Few gestures are as symbolically rich as the shaving of a head. That’s what monastics do when they reject the flesh to dedicate themselves to the spirit. In boot camp, soldiers lose their individuality with their hair. Delilah cut off Samson’s to make him defenseless. The French, after the liberation, shaved the heads of collaborators.

Unlike Madonna, Spears has never called her own shots. She is just a money-making toy adults sell children. The press rarely calls her 'Spears.' That might suggest she’s human. She’s Britney, the singing Barbie. A concoction. She was first marketed as a child celebrity—beginning as a Mouseketeer—and then, when she filled out, transformed into teen cheese.

Her mortification of the flesh at 25 is just the latest example of how bizarrely troubling American society finds the female body. (The current hysteria about anorexic fashion models, who treat the body as something to be designed, like clothing, is another example.) The sacrificial standard was, of course, set by Marilyn Monroe. It made perfect sense for Spears, after her mortification, to hide as Marilyn...."

Link: Britney Spears's Meltdown - Why She Shaved Her Head -- New York Magazine.

Who Did Your Dress?

"Here are some words you are unlikely to hear in any of the movie clips shown during the Academy Awards this year:

Ladies and gentlemen, the textile industry, in which you are spending your lives and your substance...is the only industry in the whole length and breadth of these United States of America that is not unionized. Therefore, they are free to exploit you, to lie to you, to cheat you and to take away from you what is rightfully yours--your health, a decent wage, a fit place to work.

'Unionized' isn't a word you hear in many American movies. 'A decent wage', now there's a phrase that doesn't crop up too often. As for the evocative 'your lives and your substance,' poetic descriptions of the human condition aren't generally found in contemporary entertainment...."

Link: Remembering 'Norma Rae'.

Night Blooming

"You go back, Jack, do it again."

--Steely Dan

Things get hidden in weird places at Castle Wit. We have a strange mnemonic system of storing things in their just-so place that is so unconsciously motivated that the entire collection, over years, and man--over the places--still waits in its entirety to be unearthed, all at once, all over, in split screen manner by strangers oh so unsuspecting. They hold the things up, squint...But hey! That's my shit, and I want and must have it all still!

Some of you might know the lovable and lauded old lady scholar of ancient magic and olde mental rhythms Frances Yates, who first described how orators remembered before writing. By systems of thought-pictures she said: "human figures wearing crowns or purple cloaks, bloodstained or smeared with paint, human figures dramatically engaged in some activity--doing something." They dressed things up, sent them out that way, so vivid they recognized them when they came back.

And so it happens I often twist my hair up out of laziness into a blonde snail's shell behind my neck and fasten it with an elastic band. Later, when I take the all-day elastic out, perfume is released like some newly minted silver coin, bright and oblivious and ready for spending.

Really, it's quick like Merlin stepping nimble from the tree where witch Vivan had "eternally" imprisoned him: You rang, motherfuckers? And Serge Lutens foresty-fiendish fine pine fleur peur (flower power en Anglais) Chypre Rouge would almost knock me down if I didn't descend into the archive of terrible memory pictures so bravely and so voluntarily, unlike, let's face it, you.

So the incredible fruit gum and the needlike kneels needles (read back from your notes, Dr. what'd I just say) carpeting the prickle-place (huh-wha) are both right there then.

And how the hell did they know? You chasing me through the apple orchard, blooming, alive everywhere, an Alps moving upward, and yet in the dark night it's snowing on the flowers. Because that's spring in Michigan, isn't it, and we were, let's face it, magic. That fruit gum from climbing trees, falling, running some more sticks on your hands and even thighs, or was it the pine tar or some sticky else?

This too in a shitty working class town where everyone knows how to count other people's pleasure with mean measuring auto factory eyes. Hated for this sort of thing still: hogging two seasons sometimes whenever pleases.

Under amber and patchouli also, I remember you, bloodstained or smeared with paint, in crowns, in purple robes, running under white on white. Human figures engaged in some dramatic activity--doing something.