THE STORY IN THE TABLESCAPE

Just as beauty is essential to the nourishment of the human spirit, 

so is the telling of a good story.

 And what more accessible, more comfortable, more receptive place 

to provide that succor than at table and at this season.

History offers us splendid models for this effort. Not surprisingly, the most extravagant derive from 18th century European court life, a world in which love, wealth, education, and creativity in art, music, theater, dance, and fashion went hand in hand with sports, the rewards of travel, trade, and exploration, and the intrigues of politics. The French love of protocol and elegance spread to palaces from Russia to the Rhineland where the nobility all aspired to the aura of gentility and glamour.  Philosophers, writers, poets, and scientists lent their knowledge and wit to salon---and--table conversation.  Artists were commissioned to design tables' settings of silks, crystals, silver, and porcelain, to arrange bouquets of newly discovered flowers and imported blooms, and to create narrative centerpieces.

The themes for these complex tablescapes were rooted in the festival traditions that had governed court society since the Renaissance. The earliest examples, which illustrated the dances, rituals, and costumes used in the various celebrations, were made, surprisingly--of sugar. The custom of sugar sculpture, in fact, dates as far back as the 12th century when the Egyptian caliph al'Zahir dressed his tables for the Islamic feast days with hundreds of sugar-formed figures and table-sized models of palaces. The practice reached the European courts in the 16th century. Scenes of the life of the goddess Minerva were crafted in sugar for a banquet celebrating the entry of the newly-wed queen of France, Eilsabeth of Austria, into Paris. In the early 17th century, the Labors of Hercules and a winter scene of hunters and mechanized animals, all of sugar, decorated the tables at the wedding banquet of Maria de' Medici and Henri IV of France. By the end of the century, sugar table sculptures had become a regular part of court festivals throughout Europe.

As porcelain replaced sugar as the formative medium toward the middle of the 18th century, narrative scenes grew even more elaborate. Gods, goddesses, animals, allegories, figurines of courtiers, soldiers, shepherds, peasants, actors, tradesmen, musicians, Orientals, Amazons, Spaniards, characters from the Commedia dell Arte and personifications of the Four Seasons were arranged in tableaux for the delight of the emperor, empress, monarch, or noble and his or her company.

The garden, a central feature of 18th century court life, was among the most popular re-creations on the banquet table, which was natural enough since garden ornament and table ornament shared the iconography of leisure. Imagine the statues, grottoes, trellises, and fountains of the formal French garden as diversions for repast. Imagine a dessert centerpiece composed of walks and parterres made of colored sands and sugar, tiny porcelain urns filled with orange blossoms or artificial flowers with gilt and varnished branches, porcelain architectural follies, and miniature  pedestaled figures framed in porcelain arbors like garden statuary, and all supported on a gilt bronze tray.

Extraordinary as these scenes might seem,, we must remember that their extravagance was even more fantastical to the 18th or 19th century beholder for whom porcelain was a rarity as precious as we find platinum or pearl today. Europeans had been obsessed with the beauty of this high-fired vitreous clay ever since Marco Polo brought the first examples from China in the 13th century. However, for the next four hundred years, its formula remained a mystery. Rulers such as Augustus the Strong, the 18th century King of Poland and Europe's foremost collector of Chinese porcelains sponsored desperate efforts to unlock the secret. In 1710 his court potter, Johann Friedrich Bottger, succeeded. Intent on safeguarding the discovery, Augustus promptly imprisoned Bottger and his staff.

Russia's Peter the Great was so enthralled with porcelain that he sent emissaries to Peking to uncover the secrets to the formula. They failed. Decades later his equally determined daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, chained her court potter, Dimitry Vinogrodov, to his workbench until he discovered the key. He succeeded, but the mission drove him to drink and an early death.

Fortunately, none of us have to resort to such extremes to set an extraordinary table, although I'm sure we could go around this room and learn that each of us has a story about an extravagance, a sacrifice, some over-the-top gesture we've made for the sake of elegance. After all, style, beauty, and good stories are not just our business. They are our passion.

For this reason, the legacy of exquisite design passed along to us by history's patrons and artisans, nobles and slaves provides a wealth of models for emulation and reinterpretation. Just as they borrowed from other cultures to expand their own language of beauty, we can look to them for inspiration. Perhaps the richest resource of all is the Russian Imperial style. For the Russian rapture with Western taste brought together the refinement of European art with a notion of grandeur unparalleled since the time of the Pharoahs. The result is timeless.

These decorations and Faberge settings illustrate one way of bringing history and narration to the table. They illustrate a traditional theme -- the celebration of the season, rebirth, the revivial of the earth -- in a visually exalted context. The motif of the egg, which you find in the centerpieces, was chosen for its associations with spring, with Passover and the rebirth of the earth, with Easter and the resurrection, and with Faberge, who so luxuriously reinterpreted the Russian custom of decorating eggs.

Creating such tablescapes is much like the performing of a ritual. It provides a focus for congregation, a context for communion. It brings us together with pleasure and encourages our gratitude for what we have -- and are about to receive: nourishment for the body, nourishment for the soul, and a feast for the eye.

THE ART OF THE TABLESCAPE

Just as beauty is essential to the nourishment of the human spirit, so is the telling of a good story. In fact, the more accustomed the world seems to become to blank facades, minimalist canvases, and other unarticulated surfaces, the greater our need grows for visual narration. And what more accessible, more comfortable, more receptive place to provide that succor than at table.

History offers us splendid models for this effort. Not surprisingly, the most extravagant derive from 18th century European court life, a world in which love, wealth, education, and creativity in art, music, theater, dance, and fashion went hand in hand with sports, the rewards of travel, trade, and exploration, and the intrigues of politics. The French love of protocol and elegance spread to palaces from Russia to the Rhineland where the nobility all aspired to the aura of gentility and glamour.  Philosophers, writers, poets, and scientists lent their knowledge and wit to salon---and--table conversation.  Artists were commissioned to design tables' settings of silks, crystals, silver, and porcelain, to arrange bouquets of newly discovered flowers and imported blooms, and to create narrative centerpieces.

The themes for these complex tablescapes were rooted in the festival traditions that had governed court society since the Renaissance. The earliest examples, which illustrated the dances, rituals, and costumes used in the various celebrations, were made, surprisingly--of sugar. The custom of sugar sculpture, in fact, dates as far back as the 12th century when the Egyptian caliph al'Zahir dressed his tables for the Islamic feast days with hundreds of sugar-formed figures and table-sized models of palaces. The practice reached the European courts in the 16th century. Scenes of the life of the goddess Minerva were crafted in sugar for a banquet celebrating the entry of the newly-wed queen of France, Eilsabeth of Austria, into Paris. In the early 17th century, the Labors of Hercules and a winter scene of hunters and mechanized animals, all of sugar, decorated the tables at the wedding banquet of Maria de' Medici and Henri IV of France. By the end of the century, sugar table sculptures had become a regular part of court festivals throughout Europe.

As porcelain replaced sugar as the formative medium toward the middle of the 18th century, narrative scenes grew even more elaborate. Gods, goddesses, animals, allegories, figurines of courtiers, soldiers, shepherds, peasants, actors, tradesmen, musicians, Orientals, Amazons, Spaniards, characters from the Commedia dell Arte and personifications of the Four Seasons were arranged in tableaux for the delight of the emperor, empress, monarch, or noble and his or her company.

The garden, a central feature of 18th century court life, was among the most popular re-creations on the banquet table, which was natural enough since garden ornament and table ornament shared the iconography of leisure. Imagine the statues, grottoes, trellises, and fountains of the formal French garden as diversions for repast. Imagine a dessert centerpiece composed of walks and parterres made of colored sands and sugar, tiny porcelain urns filled with orange blossoms or artificial flowers with gilt and varnished branches, porcelain architectural follies, and miniature  pedestaled figures framed in porcelain arbors like garden statuary, and all supported on a gilt bronze tray.

Extraordinary as these scenes might seem,, we must remember that their extravagance was even more fantastical to the 18th or 19th century beholder for whom porcelain was a rarity as precious as we find platinum or pearl today. Europeans had been obsessed with the beauty of this high-fired vitreous clay ever since Marco Polo brought the first examples from China in the 13th century. However, for the next four hundred years, its formula remained a mystery. Rulers such as Augustus the Strong, the 18th century King of Poland and Europe's foremost collector of Chinese porcelains sponsored desperate efforts to unlock the secret. In 1710 his court potter, Johann Friedrich Bottger, succeeded. Intent on safeguarding the discovery, Augustus promptly imprisoned Bottger and his staff.

Russia's Peter the Great was so enthralled with porcelain that he sent emissaries to Peking to uncover the secrets to the formula. They failed. Decades later his equally determined daughter, the Empress Elizabeth, chained her court potter, Dimitry Vinogrodov, to his workbench until he discovered the key. He succeeded, but the mission drove him to drink and an early death.

Fortunately, none of us have to resort to such extremes to set an extraordinary table, although I'm sure we could go around this room and learn that each of us has a story about an extravagance, a sacrifice, some over-the-top gesture we've made for the sake of elegance. After all, style, beauty, and good stories are not just our business. They are our passion.

For this reason, the legacy of exquisite design passed along to us by history's patrons and artisans, nobles and slaves provides a wealth of models for emulation and reinterpretation. Just as they borrowed from other cultures to expand their own language of beauty, we can look to them for inspiration. Perhaps the richest resource of all is the Russian Imperial style. For the Russian rapture with Western taste brought together the refinement of European art with a notion of grandeur unparalleled since the time of the Pharoahs. The result is timeless.

These decorations and Faberge settings illustrate one way of bringing history and narration to the table. They illustrate a traditional theme -- the celebration of the season, rebirth, the revivial of the earth -- in a visually exalted context. The motif of the egg, which you find in the centerpieces, was chosen for its associations with spring, with Passover and the rebirth of the earth, with Easter and the resurrection, and with Faberge, who so luxuriously reinterpreted the Russian custom of decorating eggs.

Setting such tablescapes is much like the performing of a ritual. It provides a focus for congregation, a context for communion. It brings us together with pleasure and encourages our gratitude for what we have -- and are about to receive: nourishment for the body, nourishment for the soul, and a feast for the eye.

AN URBAN HIGH

 HOW ONE MAN’S VISION REVITALIZED NEW YORK REAL ESTATE

and PROVIDED A PERPETUAL URBAN HIGH

It's almost as if the whole of 20th century architectural form -- from early brick geometries to glass-paneled perpendiculars to undulating choruses of banding -- convened to pose for this picture which I took (with my iPhone!) from New York City's High Line. Would that the visionary of this great elevated park, Peter Oblenz, had lived to see the beauty and vitality his grand scheme has contributed to New York life --  a park in the sky, pastoral, futuristic, yet accessible to everyone. Obletz lived alongside the abandoned elevated Tenth Avenue train track that ran down the middle of the street (and, with distressing frequency, ran down pedestrians; The street was nicknamed Death Avenue.) His vision would be hard won, require decades to manifest, and would transform an industrial derelict a paramount  example of urban reclamation and a signature New York destination.

 The original High Line was built in the thirties to service the warehouses along the West Side. No sooner was it built, however, than train traffic slowed to a trickle, thanks to the familiar death blow of the Depression and the popularity of truck transport. The last train ran on the High Line in 1980 (carrying, it is said, a load of turkeys on Thanksgiving morning), leaving the artery to rust and grow wild with weeds. Conrail, the railroad that owned the High Line, wanted it gone, as did a consortium of local property owners, led by one of the area’s largest interests, Edison Parking, and the City. The only reason it remained in place is that, essentially, no one wanted to pay to take it down. And so the High Line languished. Then, Peter Oblenz began rallying for the site's reclamation.

 It would be a decade and half before a not-for-profit group of neighborhood residents, business owners, design professionals and civic groups formed Friends of the High Line to carry forth Oblenz's mission. They garnered notable and powerful New Yorkers in the art, architecture, and civic world to support the vision of an elevated park. These efforts, of course, pleased no one who’d been entangled in the long battle to topple the High Line. For 20 years, local property owners were the main opponents to the park-conversion plan. At the height of the battle with Friends of the High Line, Edison Parking launched a propaganda campaign. One flyer read, “”Money doesn’t grow on trees, and last we checked, it isn’t growing in the weeds of the High Line.”

 Ultimately, the possibilities of the High Line caught the public imagination, and movers and shakers were able to persuade all the property owners to sign over their rights using the tool of allowing the owners to transfer their development rights to surrounding properties. They then rezoned parts of West Chelsea to allow for new, larger developments.

 Today the High Line is one of only two elevated parks in the world (the other, in Paris).  A Standard Hotel, built to straddle it, is among the City's fashionable, and a new branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art has come to the neighborhood. The landscaped walk-in-the-sky is planted with wild flowers, carving its way for  miles through the urban fabric two to three stories above ground.  Framed mostly by the backs of buildings and billboards, with occasional views opening out to the Hudson or across Manhattan, it is a voyeur's paradise, a nature-lover's retreat, an urban oasis.  Its uncanny isolation is magical, for  the park is integrated into the urban fabric so seamlessly as to be nearly invisible.

 As a result of the Peter Obletz' vision, its articulation, and the forbearence of those he motivated, even the humblest civic undertaking in New York today has become viewed as a potential gold mine. What the High Line achieved for pedestrian pleasure, it also accomplished for the future of urban design. City planners who once had to coax developers to build in rundown neighborhoods are groping for strategies to keep them at bay.

THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT: A Publishing Legend Dies

A wake of shock and sorrow keeps washing over me since I learned of the sudden death of my friend, the publishing enfant terrible J-C. SUARES, a little over a week ago. Nothing in the world could have been more unexpected. The baronial art director/illustrator/teacher

graphic designer/writer/editor was the embodiment of robust passion. No one I know had his appetite for work, life, and athleticism. An intense competitor, he was finally, at the age of 71, winding down his polo career, yet was still regularly at the gym, boxing. He was constantly on a plane to see clients and still working with the ambition of a 25-year-old. J-C had the creative drive of a raging bull. There were always dozens of projects on his plate at any moment, among the most current a book he and I were working on about Marilyn Monroe.

J-C was a connoisseur of art, books, movies, fine food, tailored clothes, good cigars, fancy cars, and objets d'art. He loved amd drew dogs and cats, owned horses (at one time a stable of polo ponies – he was avid about the sport of Kings, a young man’s game he couldn’t forsake), and, in decorative taste, was a devoted Anglophile. He spoke six languages (including Arabic and Mandarin Chinese) and could laugh in each one of them. He could be as sweet as a teddy bear and as impatient and imperious as Napoleon, to whom he bore a resemblance. He was once mistaken for Pavoritti. While walking down Park Avenue, someone called out to him, "Hey Luciano!" "Until that moment, I don't think I had realized my girth," he chuckled.

Besides his wicked sense of humor, what I adored most about J-C was his European sensibility -- his taste for beauty, his signature elegance. They were evident in everything he produced and in the world he created around himself, beginning with his beautiful wife, the artist and equestrian Nina Duran. Lithe and athletic, with long, sun-streaked hair, Nina ran the New York City Marathon several times. "She's going to run with her hair down, flying behind her," J-C confided prior to one of the races, the look on his face conveying his great pleasure at the image. When I visited their art-filled, book-filled, antique-filled Upper East Side apartment, the first thing J-C showed me was the display wall of Nina's equestrian ribbons.

The J-C- stood for Jean-Claude. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, his father a Sephardic Jew (hence the Suares with an s) and his mother a German Jew. The Suares family had been bankers in Egypt for generations. His mother's family had escaped Dresden before the city's destruction in the War. After Egypt, his family emigrated to Italy where he spent part of his teen years. Then came America and, following service as a paratrooper in Viet Nam and a stint on the staff of Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, he embarked on a career that would make him the rock star of late 20^th century publishing. Within a year of establishing himself in the New York scene, J-C had made his mark and was successful enough, he told me, to buy his first Rolls Royce. Within ten years, he had paid cash for his Upper East Side apartment.

As his New York Times and Variety obituaries described, his early career was cobbled together from alternative and mainstream publishing ventures. Early on he was art director of underground papers like The New York Free Press and Screw. He was later a design consultant for Scanlan's Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine. He became the first art director The New York Times Op Ed Page in 1970, radically altering the way editorial illustration was used there. For decades, the newspaper “refused to hire an editorial cartoonist or have art on the editorial page. But with the blessings of the page's editor, Harrison Salisbury, and The Times's design director, Louis Silverstein, he adopted a daring idea: Rather than restrict artists to illustrating only specific passages of text, J-C pushed to give them license to interpret an entire article. The approach helped guide the paper into a new visual era and influenced other newspapers and magazines.” He explains in a video history commemorating the Op-Ed page's 40th anniversary how, "It was time for a big change. I wanted the art to be well drawn, and I wanted to create some kind of emotional reaction."

Accordingly, he applied his linguistic talents to recruit a small posse of artists from around the world. "He gave us an opportunity to redefine what graphic art could be and do," described Brad Holland, an illustrator whom Mr. Suares helped achieve prominence. “Many of the artists he called were from Soviet bloc countries and fluent in surreal symbolism, which offered thought-provoking concepts instead of editorial cartoon clichés like Uncle Sam and John Q. Public. Captions were rejected. It was a form of visual commentary rarely found in other publications,” the Times obituary reads.

Until this time, the Op-Ed art form was widely overlooked in America. In 1973, J-C arranged an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and edited the catalog, "The Art of the Times."  “(The jazz great) Thelonius Monk came up to me,” he told me, “and spread his arm out to the exhibition crowd. ‘All this is here for you,’ he said, and for the first time in my life, I understood that.”

J-C worked with everyone from fashion illustrators to authors, from artists and photographers to publishers and academics, and from socialites and movie stars to national icons. Every once in a while he’d email me a photograph he’d come across in what must be a vast archive, and there he was: watching the U.S. Open with Kurt Vonnegut, escorting Martha Stewart to a dinner party, or.... tah dah -- working on the Michael Jackson autobiography "Moonwalk" with Jackie Onassis at Doubleday. While researching the Marilyn Monroe project, I happened to ask J-C if he knew the photographer Inge Morath who documented the making of Marilyn’s final movie The Misfits and who later married Arthur Miller. “Oh sure,” he said. “I used to have lunch with the two of them on weekends in the country.” When I sent him a photo of a very young Lauren Bacall taken in her mother’s kitchen in the Bronx, he wrote back, “She was a nice girl until she became a pain in the tuchus.”

There was no beating around the bush with J-C. He was forthright, concise, as ribald as he was refined, and, not surprisingly, temperamental. I heard tales of his explosiveness, but I never witnessed it except to see him to curse out a cab driver with the virulence of an Egyptian camel driver.

Every encounter with J-C was indelible, whether it was a brief meeting at his apartment where he worked at the dining room table in front of a Zuber scenic wallpaper or a glimpse of him in full riding gear, walking his bear of an Akita, George, down Lexington Avenue. (Where is Cartier-Bresson when you need him?) He once took me on a magazine assignment to Malmaison, the Upper East Side antique store christened in honor of Josephine Bonaparte’s country house near Paris, to meet its owner, the eminent French fashion photographer and Napoleonic aesthete Roger Prigent, (who J-C and Nina treated like family). Prigent taught his followers to believe, as he did, that everything is “chic or not chic.” During that visit, I caught sight of J-C paused beside a stupendous marble bust of the Emperor. Where was my camera when I needed it!

An autodidact, J-C read voraciously (“Autodidacts are the best educated,” he believed.) In fact, the idea for the Marilyn book arose from an article he sent me from the “London Review of Books” by the feminist academic Jacqueline Rose. He consumed histories, biographies and books on movies. Unsurprisingly, J-C himself was a beautiful writer. In his introduction to his book City Dogs he describes the marauding packs of feral dogs that terrorized the streets of Alexandria. The image has never left my mind. He co-authored "Uncommon Grace: Reminiscences and Photographs of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis" with J. Spencer Beck and wrote numerous magazine pieces. He taught for years at Parsons School of Design. Here are his words from the City Dogs intro: “A pack of wild dogs running down the Corniche, the fifteen-mile promenade along the Mediterranean, was not an uncommon sight in the Alexandria of the early 1950s. The dogs looked like the painted wooden likenesses found in tombs of the later dynasties: lithe greyhound bodies, large jackal ears, long snouts dripping with foam. Hungry and sick, they moved like a swarm of crazed bees. They overturned trash cans and stole from food carts. And Hanem, my Bedouin nanny, warned that they were known to attack children. The wild dogs came from the desert. They had followed caravans and were now trapped. Perhaps they would find their way back to the desert where they could certainly survive on small mammals, but here they were doomed.”

In 1976, the release of "The Illustrated Cat: A Poster Book" by J-C and Seymour Chwast started a craze for cat-themed books. J-C produced several more, including "Cats in Love," "Hollywood Cats," "City Cats" and "Sexy Cats." "His timing was great," Seymour said, "He always knew what was going to be big."

J-C put his imprint on more than 100 books, magazines, and newspapers and drew cover illustrations for the New Yorker, Atlantic. Publishers Weekly, and numerous others. He also designed or redesigned publications including New York Magazine, Broadcasting & Cable, Connoisseur, Buzz, Inc. and Fast Company. He was the founding creative director of Poz and 7 Days and design director of Columbia College Today (for 25 years) and Connoisseur. He also oversaw redesigns for Publishers Weekly, Military History, and Variety where he was recruited in 1989 by editor-in- chief Peter Bart, whose mandate was to revitalize the paper. “Bart felt a sophisticated graphic redesign was crucial,” reads the Variety obituary. Accordingly, J-C departed from the 85-year tradition of strictly black and white and a crowd of stories on the front page. He used a different typeface and paper stock and changed the always-in-black Variety logo to red. He designed the front page with multiple photos (which had been rarely used in the paper), fewer stories, and “one or two of his own trademark sketches, often comical drawings that included film cans, showbiz logos on human legs, people carrying suitcases, and, most frequently, cats.”

When I think of J-C, it is always with a pen in hand. He drew as fluidly as he spoke – sweet and lovely dog and cat cartoons, piercing political cartoons, comic art, layout designs, illustrations. The whimsicality of the dog and cat pictures could have been a surprising counterpoint to the acid bite of the political drawings, but the contrast mirrored his persona. One of his most famous political cartoons, which appeared in the Nation during the Viet Nam years, is of a slaphappy, bronco busting LBJ riding a missle. J-C and the magazine’s publisher, Victor Navasky, remained close friends from that time on.

J-C was not only a faithful friend, but a generous benefactor of assignments. "He made you feel you were working on something really important when he called you," Milton Glaser, the renowned graphic designer recalls. When I first met J-C, in the late 1980s, not long after I had moved back to New York to accelerate my writing career, he had recently been named art director of Simon and Schuster.  A mutual acquaintance - a magazine editor - had passed along my name to him and he phoned: "I hear we're doing a book together on Russian Imperial art." “We are?!” rang the shocked voice in my head. “It would be my pleasure,” spilled my disbelieving voice into the phone. The book, Russian Impeprial Style, would be shot partially in St. Petersberg. Most of the research would be done at A La Vielle Russie, the Fifth Avenue gallery, established in 1851, that specializes in Russian art and antiques. (The goldsmith and jeweler to the Czars Peter Carl Faberge had been a client.) J-C explained that, with the exception of Jackie Onassis’ primarily black-and-white book, In the Russian Style, published in 1977, there existed no other book (lavishly illustrated and in color) purely focused on the imperial art (architecture, decorative arts, fashion and jewelry) of the era between the 17^th and early 20^thcenturies. The assignment gave me the opportunity to travel to Russia, immerse myself in the A La Vielle Russie library, and savor the opportunities to hold in my own hands there examples from rare collections of enameled presentation boxes, personal jewelry from the Imperial family, and figurines carved in precious and semi-precious stones. Whatever images for the book weren’t shot on location in Russia, J-C photo styled himself in the store and in his own apartment where pieces he had acquired –porcelain clocks, a 19^th century mahogany, ebony, and gilt table with a bucolic scene painted in tempera -- were interspersed among the other fine antiques he collected.

From the moment I met J-C, I wanted to hear his life story, and I continuously prodded him to assemble an autobiography. I even offered to write it for him, “like Alice B. Toklas did for Gertrude Stein,” I said. “You talk, I’ll write, you’ll edit.” “I’m not ready yet,” he’d always answer, but he must have been thinking about it recently because he told me he’d put out a call over the internet to locate his acquaintances from Alexandria. “Within half an hour, I had a dozen replies,” he reported.  Only a month ago I composed an outline for how I thought his memoir might unfold. I thought it could begin with his introduction to City Dogs.

J-C lived through and influenced so many eras of design evolution that his reflections on publishing alone could have filled a book, not to mention his take on the luminaries he worked with. Who wouldn’t want to know what it was like working with Jackie, or earlier, with the genius fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez who brought Grace Jones, Jessica Lange, and Jerry Hall, to name a few, into the spotlight. Then there would have to be stories about his experience as an Army paratrooper during Viet Nam, and chapters on horses, cars, and polo.

 J-C lived with such vigor that it’s impossible to believe that he could have been felled at such a relatively young age, let alone by something so fast – a bacterial infection that raced to his heart. Of course the heart is where genius is typically most vulnerable. The infection brought him down in days.

The digital revolution in publishing must have shocked J-C, as it has many of us, with its sudden pervasiveness and impact on graphic design. I can only speculate as to how he regarded its portent as he observed standards of taste and quality decline and long-time clients and significant income fall away. Of course, he kept doing what he did best – working harder than ever.

J-C was more than a literary lion, he was a literary impresario. I know there are legions of friends and colleagues around the world who are as stunned and bereft at our loss as I am and who will be composing recollections of him enough to fill volumes. I suspect J-C was loved more deeply and by more people than he would ever have believed. My prayer is that our lion sleeps, surrounded by the essence of all the beauty and happiness he created, in perfect peace.

LINKS TO THE OBITUARIES IN THE NEW YORK TIMES AND VARIETY 

AND A SHORT GALLERY OF J-C's ART: 

http://variety.com/2013/scene/news/graphic-artist-j-c-suares-dies-redesigned-variety-in-the-1990s-1200571682/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/media/jean-claude-suares-daring-illustrator-of-the-timess-op-ed-page-dies-at-71.html?hpw

http://variety.com/gallery/photos-the-art-of-variety-illustrator-j-c-suares-remembered/#!15/the-art-of-j-c-suares

 

Laura Puts Out...pictures, words, ideas: Preview "THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT: A Publishing Legend Dies"

Laura Puts Out...pictures, words, ideas: Preview "THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT: A Publishing Legend Dies": http://variety.com/2013/scene/news/graphic-artist-j-c-suares-dies-redesigned-variety-in-the-1990s-1200571682/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/media/jean-claude-suares-daring-illustrator-of-the-timess-op-ed-page-dies-at-71.html?hpw
http://variety.com/gallery/photos-the-art-of-variety-illustrator-j-c-suares-remembered/#!15/the-art-of-j-c-suares

SHIRLEY NOW AND THEN...AND THEN AGAIN

                                                               Shirley Now and Then, acrylic on canvas, 2009      Laura Cerwinske

Our neighbor Shirley, who died last summer, was as indelible a presence in the neighborhood as was her startling makeup and Indian black hair. A tiny woman in brilliant red lipstick and vivid circles of rouge, she walked up and down the neighborhood for at least four hours -- or eight miles -- a day. A vision of perpetual, steady motion, her head bent forward, her frozen shoulder curved behind, she was a moving fixture enveloped in an aura of happiness. “When I’m walking, it’s like I’m in heaven,” she used to say.

No one knew how old Shirley was, except Harold, her deeply protective husband who was retired from his career as a welder for Pan American Airlines and who wasn’t much for talking. I guessed from her height (maybe 4’10”) and sun-stained skin and fragile-looking bones that she might be around eighty. Of obvious Cherokee descent (her hair was obsidian black and her cheekbones angled high), she grew up on Florida’s west coast in deep orange grove territory where, on her walks to school, she encountered all manner of “Swamplandia’s” creatures. When the School Board insisted she ride the school bus, she refused. Her mother stormed the School Board office, arguing on Shirley’s behalf…and won. Shirley walked the several miles and several hours each way, in bliss.

Her mother must have adored her, for when she asked Shirley what kind of dress she’d like for her first grown-up outing, Shirley showed her a picture of Suzy Wong in a frock with a Chinese collar. Her mother sewed the dress for her and added a bauble that Shirley wore around her ear. Years later, she would have a portrait painted of herself taken from a photograph of her in the dress and bauble. This portrait was the beginning point of our friendship.

I, too, am an avid walker. And whenever Shirley and I crossed paths in the neighborhood, we’d stop and chat. Usually about our mutual love of being in nature. “I could live happily under a tree,” she’d say. “I could live happily in a tree,” I’d answer. When I revealed to her that I was an artist, she asked if I’d like to see the portrait. It seems Shirley also loved to paint, and it was this passion, along with her love for the memory of that dress and her mother, that had prompted her to have this special portrait made.

I was eager to see this evidence of Shirley’s history. Waiting outside the chain link fence that surrounded the ramshackle house where she and Harold lived, I contemplated Shirley’s devotions – walking, communing with wildlife, and now, it seemed, art. Harold emerged through the front door carrying the portrait. Even from the sidewalk, I could see that it was elegant and articulate. Up close, I could easily detect not only the determination Shirley possessed in her youth, but also her youthful beauty.

Colorful, dare I say dramatic makeup was only one among Shirley’s notable features. Her black eyes were starkly framed by bangs and braids. A beautician once convinced her to cut off the braids. She compensated with braided wisps which lent her an incongruous twist of urban chic.

Shirley’s smile outshone everything else. I never once encountered her on my dog walks when she didn’t greet me with a grin so generous it could fill a movie screen. “You look so pretty today. I love what you’re wearing…or, I love those earrings…or I love the color of your shirt,” she’d say. And she truly meant it. She was easy to delight.

I asked Shirley if I could bring over my camera and photograph her with the portrait so I could do a painting of her. Harold granted permission and chaperoned the event.  Later that year, 2009, I invited them over to my house a few blocks away to see the finished work. The painting is nearly life size, and I titled it, “Shirley, Now and Then.” Harold nodded at it. Shirley grinned and glowed. “You’re a really good artist,” she told me. Then I took a photo of her standing next to my painting of the picture of her holding the portrait and then another photo of her standing next to my painting holding the photo of her holding the portrait. (Very post modern, indeed.) Now, added to her compliments about my appearance whenever I saw her was always praise for my talent.

Shirley and I often talked about animals – my dogs, the squirrels and birds she fed, her own dog, Bonnie. Bonnie was a sweet old pit bull who, apparently, loved to dance. Music was yet another of Shirley’s passions, and she told me how every night she would put on a record and dance. (Learning this was reassuring, because I’d never been entirely sure their house had electricity). Bonnie, it seems, also loved dancing.  Upon hearing the music, she would stand up on her two hind legs and “walk” across the floor to dance with Shirley.

For years, Harold and Shirley bought birdseed to spread around the front yard poincianas where Shirley also fed individually-named squirrels and foxes. You might have taken her for St. Francis of Assisi…or Snow White (if Snow White could be a tiny Cherokee woman with vivid lipstick and wispy braids), surrounded by adoring woodland creatures and glowing with beneficence. (Knowing, squawking blue jays perched on Shirley’s shoulders as she tossed morsels to the assembly, their tails a riot of twitching arabesques. Then, money got tight (I assume Harold and Shirley lived on his Social Security), and Harold determined that the wildlife food was too much of an expense. The feedings stopped. Still, a squirrel or two would often trot alongside Shirley on her walks, chattering, maybe scolding, but undoubtedly sustaining the bond.

Long after telling me the story of Bonnie the Dancing Dog, I asked what had happened to Bonnie. Dade County, it seems, had passed an anti-pit bull ordinance restricting the breed from residential neighborhoods, and the dog police had come and taken Bonnie away. Shirley related the story to me soberly, but without anguish or even nostalgia. I was crushed. Shirley resumed her walking.

copyright c Laura Cerwinske, 2009

TURBULENCE... A VIRTUE?

Orange Springs, oil on canvas, 2003                    Pat Jacobs

In numerous spiritual traditions, brokenness is looked upon as a path to power. The little known Hindu goddess Akhilandeshvari, for example, typically depicted as a woman riding like a warrior on a fearsome crocodile through deadly turbulence across a river, derives her power from being pulled apart, from having to live constantly in different selves simultaneously, from never being “complete”. What does such a concept offer us, what could such an image teach?

The crocodile is a predator that kills not through the brute force of its huge jaws, but through the power of violent disorientation. It snatches its prey from the riverbank, thrusts it into the water, and spins it “like a dervish seeking God.” In this way, the victim virtually scares itself to death. What could be better!

Like the crocodile’s prey, we, too, can scare ourselves if not to death, then into sickness, paralysis, and impossible disorientation. Our stories run our lives, and when these stories are disrupted or in any way “broken,” the illusion of being “whole” implodes, our specific sense of the future dissolves, our expectations grow meaningless, and our anticipations either no longer apply... or resound with all too much disappointing familiarity. Then, our role takes on a new and different responsibility. We must reassemble the pieces of our story/our lives – either back into their previous form (which can never truly be replicated – time and energy have intervened) – or into a new shape and motivation that integrates the changes wrought by the brokenness.

Consider these words of one of my students: Every time she erupts, I fall apart. I am broken into pieces and sent flying. I want to come down to earth. I want to feel whole. I want out of the paralysis of grief and terror. I want my momentum restored.

Because the writer was consciously and non-judgmentally observing his emotional self (as opposed to unconsciously acting it out), he had the option of grasping for the shards of the old story and/or conjuring a horizon in which the disorienting picture can be diffused, resized, re-colored, rearranged, or dissolved. He can use his brokenness to reshape the story and realign an inner compass.

The crocodile archetype represents the reptilian brain, the neurological aspect where the fight or flight reflex resides (in the part of the prefrontal lobe known as the amygdale). In times of brokenness or panic, the reptilian brain surges into action, flooding the endocrine system with hormones that put our minds and bodies into a state of full alert. In moments of physical danger, this can save our lives; but as a repetitive emotional pattern affixing us into a condition of fright, the reptilian brain remains, like the crocodile, geared to devour us with every bit of its disorienting force. The female divinity -- the symbol of the right brain, creativity, and transformation – rides the crocodile through the prismatic refraction of watery turbulence to arrive at a new location, perhaps even on a different shore. Akhilanda does not tame or kill the predator, but uses her own power – the power of non-judgmental introspection and divine intuition -- to navigate the waves.

But then, even when Akhilanda lands, battered but safe, her newfound unbrokenness is but temporary. (Ishvari means female power in Sanskrit, and Akhilanda means “never not broken.” In other words, she is the “always broken goddess.” She must continue breaking apart and reassembling herself, riding the next crocodile and navigating the next waves. Her brokenness is life, the crocodile itself, the river, the spinning, the disorientation. All are elements of the process of living, which, after all, is one of allowing our pieces to fall away and collecting them for the next reassembling.

Thus, there are always fractures, unexpected curves, and dangerous edges to our storylines... both crisis and growth make them evident. Observing, releasing, reinventing, and riding our crocodiles across the turbulence, we never get the story straight. And never have. For the story – past, present, or future – never is straight. After all, nothing in nature moves in a straight line,. Our stories hold our power, and our power emanates from the imagination which resides in the subconscious, in the fields of our right brain, in the realm of the reptile.

copyright  c  2013 by Laura Cerwinske

with acknowledgement to Julie Peters and Eric Stoneberg

http://www.radicalwriting.com, http://www.lauracerwinske.com

NICE KNOBS

NICE KNOBS

Laura Cerwinske

Patsy Pendarvis was known for her knockers. So, when she came knocking on Gordo’s door, with its fine 18^th century burnished brass door knob and gilded mounts, Gordo sat up and took prompt notice.

Gordo ran an antique hardware business known for its rare and superlative knobs. His mother, an interior decorator, had raised him in a home furnished with the finest continental furnishings and extraordinary interior detailing, but most of all, with an acute understanding of how “hardware is the jewelry of the room.” This is why Gordo’s knobs were so nice -- because of how completely he grasped the significance of touch. The knob is the most tactile of all hardware. When it comes to touch and to the man, Gordo himself, only the nicest will do.

This, too, is why Patsy Pendarvis was such a revelation. Here she came with her fancy knockers thinking she was just the Queen of the May. And she was! Especially with those knockers. Beautifully proportioned as in the Georgian style. Yet with the merest grace note, too elusive to be baroque, yet not quite near to Renaissance.

Patsy Pendarvis was pretty jolly for a girl with so prodigious

a pedigree. She came by her knockers naturally. Her mother had been born to a family of French courtiers with ties to the House of Balencieaga. Her father was a silversmith for the great Swedish silversmith Georg Jensen. Patsy, although raised in so rarefied an atmosphere, nonetheless possessed a constitution that was oddly robust.

This was fortunate in light of her previous relationship to a “bounder,” as her family had called him, a man on the run, a man to whom running was second nature. His urge was known to begin somewhere between his groin and solar plexus, and could be described as a driving compulsion to take off. To find the next thing. To get out of Dodge. Patsy had been the longest run of his life.

Well, that was over. And now it was Patsy and Gordo and their grand dreams.

Their moment of formal reinvention would occur in a dazzling dew-struck garden beneath a pergola crafted by Gordo himself, an intricate architecture of knobs and knockers. He soldered together in an open basketweave pattern original brass, glass, gold plate, silver, and gunmetal elements along with reproductions in styles of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries. The pergola was a work of jeweled splendor, an homage to Patsy’s knockers. The event of their union – “joining” as it was referred to it in the world of hardware -- promised seismic rejoicing.  The nuptials were announced via a hand-inscribed parchment invitation in an envelope fastened with a small 18^th century clasp. The velvet rope could hardly handle the response.

Orders for knobs and knockers also flew through the doors. Even the Pentagon wanted merchandise, specifically the knob-and-knocker pergola. No wonder. A pentagram was hidden in the basketweave. Gordo and Patsy Pendarvis were ready for a good laugh.

After the wedding ceremony, Gordo and Patsy retired to a gated residential community in central Florida selected for

the elegance of the wrought iron gates at its entrance and the fine hinges and hardware upon which it swung gracefully

open to greet them. Its choice was also based on the community’s smoking policy—one of encouragement.

The community, known as Pandora, was built by the same conglomerate of tobacco companies that had conspired to buy the Associated Press and other media sources as a way to control publicity about the effects of smoking. Pandora was the only town in America where cigarette smoking in public was not only allowed, but welcomed. Patsy, a lifelong and committed smoker, was a connoisseur of Pamuks, a slender Persian cigarette that looked most elegant at the tip of the fingers. It tasted of a dark and smoky richness that Patsy found divine. She refused to be constrained in her smoking just as she refused to end her habit of correcting people, to their faces, of spoken errors in grammar. The most common – and vulgar – of these errors, which grated almost unbearably on Patsy’s fine sensibilities, was the use of me instead of I and its positioning before the name or pronoun, as in “me and J.J.” instead of “J.J. and me.” She first noticed that particular grammatical blasphemy popularized on the TV sitcom “Roseanne” when the Roseanne Barr character announced to her kids that, “Me and your dad are ......” From that moment on she noticed it everywhere, even eventually out of the mouths of classroom teachers and medical doctors. “Oh, Lord,” thought Patsy, “What’s next?”

Well, next came hyperbolic redundancies: a terrible tragedy (is there another kind?), very unique (it’s already superlative!), very monumental (ibid.), completely ubiquitous, and the others which the ubiquitously (proper usage) hair-sprayed, uber-tanned newscasters (not to mention weathercasters!) so dearly loved to pepper their reports. The egregious use of such inane redundancies caused Patsy to shield her eyes, as if the grammatical affront might harm her eyesight. She equally deplored the habit of using nouns as verbs, as in, “The meteor will impact the atmosphere,” when the true, original verb, effect, worked perfectly well. Or the linguistic atrocity that was so often repeated during the Olympics, causing Patsy to boycott the television altogether during its two-week duration. If she heard a sportscaster intone, “The U.S. is sure to medal in this event,” once more, she would surely set someone aflame. “You mean to place, you idiots!” she screamed, jabbing her finger across the remote.

Patsy was also quite adamant about such obnoxious overused parlance as amazing (“Meaning what? Beautiful, magnificent, extraordinary, unusual, courageous, heroic? I mean, if I can think of a hundred more precise modifiers, why the hell can’t anyone else!”) Journey (“For Christ’s sake, it’s not a fucking journey, it’s an experience, an effort, a life!”) And then there was that terrible slang for vegetables, veggies. Even television’s master chefs and her own neighbors were drowning their food conversations in it, like some terrible lumpy Russian dressing. The word sounded to her like something only a cooing yuppie stay-at-home dad would use cajoling his insolent children to eat. (“What’s so hard about pronouncing one little extra syllable?” Pasty’d lament, throwing a stick of unwrapped gum at the face of Rachel Ray on the screen. Patsy kept packs of gum at her bedside for exactly this purpose. “Veg-ta-ble, veg-ta-ble, that’s all. You’re on TV, not hanging out a juice bar!”

Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, even strangers were not immune from Patsy’s corrections. She wasn’t a tree-hugger or a political protestor or a campaigner for justice. Patsy’s avocational mission in life was to clean up the language, and anyone who committed a verbal transgression in her presence was in for remark. Gordo had lost a sale or two, one to career-long customer, over Patsy’s insistent correction (right up close in the poor man’s face) of his use of the word

less rather than fewer. “One indicates a number, the other a quantity. Get it straight!”

Once settled in Pandora, Gordo and Patsy set about mapping out their new strategy. Knobs and knockers had been a start, but the couple aspired to empire. The basketweave pergolas had been only a beginning. In appreciation of the obvious, they quickly determined their

new endeavor in Pandora to be, naturally, a line of specialty boxes, Pandora Boxes. The nature of the products they were to contain didn’t much matter since it was the boxes themselves people would want. Gordo designed their hardware: hinges, clasps, and joins replicating those of Napoleonic and imperial Russian presentation boxes. Patsy created the wrappings: origamis of Fortuny-like folds, tied with sprigs of orange blossoms collected from trees grown in their very own groves. They had rescued these trees from the original groves just before they were bulldozed by the tobacco conglomerate to make land for expansion, for the construction of what would become Pandora II. Patsy and Gordo rescued trees enough trees to keep them in orange juice and decorative sprigs for the rest of their lives. Business bloomed.

Following the much heralded success of both the

basketwoven knob-and-knocker pergolas and Pandora Boxes, what could possibly have been left to the golden couple but to have a baby. Patsy had no trouble finding one she liked online – it was available at an orphanage in Bukhara. The orphange had been founded by a sister of the Katerine Order which had been formed in the early nineteenth century and devoted to the production of textiles used in Russian Orthodox Church ritual. Its name derived from Katherine II of Russia in whose court the arts of textile design flourished and from which originated the ritual draping of a priceless fleece shawl over the sarcophagi of popes, priests, Tsars, and Tzarinas. After Katherine’s death in 1796, the Order was convened for the purpose of creating the “shawl imperiale” to be draped across the Empress’s own sarcophagus and, following that, those of subsequent potentates.

From the time of their creation, Katerine shawls were coveted not only for the luxuriousness of their fleece (sheared from Tibetan goats and Siaga antelopes), but also for their elaborate motifs. These were crafted in double-faced weaves – the front and back being indistinguishable. As a result of the vast viewing of the shawl at Katherine the Great’s funeral (attended by monarchs across Asia, Europe, and Africa), word of its extraordinary beauty spread beyond the empire. Ultimately, the garments crafted by the Katerine Sisters became so highly prized that their cost equaled that of the price of 2,000 serfs or as much as 300,000 gold rubles. A less complexly woven scarf might require six months of labor; others involving greater virtuosity commanded as long as two and a half years.

At the culmination of a life of intensive service at the needle, Katerine sisters would be retired to a convent located in a bleak region where blinding snow dominated the landscape, making optical, if not mystical vision irrelevant. For by the time of their retirement, the Sisters’ work had rendered them blind.

The eruption of the Russian Revolution forced the Katerine Sisters to take flight; members of their Order were dispersed across the continents. Some fled to the Houses of Worth,  Balenciaga, and other Parisian bastions of haute couture to practice their arts and, ultimately, thrive. Other Sisters, by various and serpentine routes, ended up in Argentine lace-making studios and Cuban guayabera factories. One found herself employed in the atelier of a Broadway costume designer where she became known as Sister K of Broadway. But it was the blind sisters left behind when the sighted ones fled who, finding safe haven in Bukhara, one of the most ancient cities of Uzbekistan and once a large commercial center on the Great Silk Road, founded an orphanage where they would teach, even within their optical darkness, the arts of the needle. The orphanage was little known outside the Soviet Union until the Communist fall when it became acclaimed in international adoption circles for the skill of its orphans. The Bukharan Orphanage of Katerine Sisters was also the first adoption agency to advertise its orphans online.

Among the top orphans was an impish nine-year-old

with a mischievious mouth and eyes like a dove. Little Osman, as he was called, had tiny hands that, since the age of five, had proved useful for detailed embroidery. Unfortunately, as he grew older, the fingers, knuckles, and wrists that hung from his arms like prisoners to gravity signaled a future of manual forcefulness. The Sisters convinced Gordo and Patsy that a child of nine would be far more suitable for them than a mewling, puking infant. Little Osman held up his paws for their inspection. With one glance at the boy’s digital musculature (the implications of his strength and dexterity implicit), the couple signed on the dotted line and whisked him back to Pandora.

 Little Osman was more than ready to make his way out of the box. He adored his new parents and was eager to please. Within a short time, fed on Florida watermelon, orange juice, and prime rib, he grew to a towering height and showed an interest in working at the forge. With his dextrous fingers and wrists like Sequoias, the boy determined to extend the family legacies and become a silversmith. He set up shop under the spreading orange trees and grew renowned. Pandora Boxes, with their clasps and inlays as finely tooled as any presentation box from the court of Catherine II, became for decades the de rigeur society gift. In no time, Georg Jensen would try to knock them off.; in even less time, Patsy would rebut with a lawsuit.

Gordo swelled with pride when he spoke of his towering son. Little Osman cherished the adoration and the dark pools of his dove-like eyes sparkled. He had made his parents proud. He had also made his parents a lot of money. Not that they needed it. Gordo and Patsy pondered what to do next. Their business ambitions, financials goals, and childrearing more than satisfied, the future was theirs. But then, it always had been.

Patsy determined to open a  School of Grammatical Correctness. She enlisted a grant writer to compose a pitch to the tobacco conglomerate for a subsidy, mentioning that she would even allow her profile picture to include, discreetly of course, a cigarette between her fingers. She had in mind a Cecil Beaton-like portrait of Coco Chanel (before her Nazi collaboration days). Only a curl of smoke rising behind her frothy mane could be seen.

Patsy’s teaching method was, not surprisingly, dictatorial. Handbooks, exercises, rote assignments, and harsh discipline for those who failed to modify correctly. Gordo and Little Osman applauded her. Her program for errant television personalities would have been more successful had the applicants properly filled out their admissions forms. But once Patsy got a look at the sloppy penmanship (no penmanship, in fact, since cursive writing had long been abandoned in public education), she was too enraged to entertain the thought of their admission.

Everyone figured that pack-and-a-half-a-day Patsy would be the first to go, but Gordo’s death, caused by acute indigestion brought on by a binge on the highly spiced Turkish delicacies that had come as a premium with the shipment of Patsy’s Pamuks, preceded hers by seven years. Held in kryogenic suspension until the day when they could be buried together (in casket-sized Pandora Boxes with silver fastenings fashioned at the hand of Little Osman), Gordo was consoled in his state of stalled ascendance by the music track Patsy had installed and transmitted through the kryogenic fluids in his holding tank. The music was an endless loop of Gordo’s favorite recording artists singing, “Knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s Door.”