soundtrack to life

Utabautayun by Ikue Asazaki

Recently, I've been listening to a lot of what could be categorized as folk singing or traditional music or ethnic music, but the label is not so important to me. What I think is that the human voice is possibly the most beautiful instrument in existence. My taste spans genres, but I am exquisitely moved by a voice that is laid exposed and unfeigned; honed and molded to the rawest, barest economy of beauty and intuition and sound. I liked mournful music and sensuous music, lilting, coy music, and music that I don't understand but feel, nevertheless.

Regardless. Youtube this woman. She's glorious. 

la mer

I have dreams of monstrous sea cliffs and sweet faded seashores and crashing waves and muslin and sultry days  and girls and women and black and white photographs. How about you?

'

Zippora Seven in Russh Australia/Brigitte Bardot/White Cliffs of Dover/Brigitte Bardot/Kate Moss Vogue 06/Moss again/great flapping mass of seagulls; origin unknown/Bardot/Camilla Belle in A Devira (Adrift)/Moss/Zippora Seven/Sea Cliff from Tdd Rchrdson/A Devira/il postino/Brigitte Bardot and seafoam

my imagination explodes and showers bits of schiaparelli. It's raining schiaparelli? I like.

                                    Tear Dress, 1938, Elsa Schiaparelli

A coastal town, rocky beaches, ochre buildings. Somewhere beautiful and Catholic. Italy? Spain? The Hotel Cipriani, Venice. The coffeehouse. Alfresco. Everything is pale and perfect. It's either breakfast or dinner. Not lunch; too un-chic. She is, perhaps, alone. She reads Faust.  Absentmindedly, she brushes the just barely translucent headscarf to one shoulder. A peek of an austere, fiercely beautiful widow's peak. She has dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin burnt olive by summer. A young wife? 

Don't you love when a dress, deceptively simple, is so magnificently, provocatively, incredibly fun-ly evocative? And it's such a personal thing too. One dress can conjure up ten different scenes in as many people. I always have these little visions when I look at a dress I am particularly fond of. Where, who, when. This feels like an old movie dress to me, from the time when movie dresses were memorable and had personalities. Isn't Elsa Schiaparelli wonderful? Obviously her posthumous reputation hasn't held up as Chanel's has, but in the day, they were contemporaries and rivals. Coco famously dismissed Schiaparelli as "that Italian artist who makes clothes". Legendary female designers cat fight? I'm totally there. Forget girl's gone wild, can I please please watch?

I can totally imagine the exchange. Round One: Bias-cutting. Ding Ding. I'll show you. I know my way around a pair of scissors. Okay, that's sleepy, high on pretty dresses me talking. No, stopping talking.

                                              Hotel Cipriani