{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}
I suppose I should be grateful that the worst songs from Madonna’s ‘Madame X’ album are getting thrown out here first, not unlike the way the roll-out happened earlier this year. It will make the cuts to come that much sweeter. This is the dour ‘Killers Who Are Partying’ and the sooner it’s finished, the better. I like the sonics of it but the lyrics are messy and the melody mostly misses. Almost every Madonna album has a head-scratching clunker. (Even ‘Like A Prayer‘ had ‘Act of Contrition‘.) This is the one for the otherwise-excellent ‘Madame X’ opus.
I WILL BE GAY, IF THE GAY ARE BURNED I’LL BE AFRICA, IF AFRICA IS SHUT DOWN I WILL BE POOR, IF THE POOR ARE HUMILIATED I’LL BE A CHILD, IF THE CHILDREN ARE EXPLOITED
I KNOW WHAT I AM AND I KNOW WHAT I’M NOT
Despite my non-enthusiasm for the song, I’m interested in seeing what Madonna does with this for her Madame X Tour. It’s screaming for drama, and nobody does drama better than Madonna. It may also grow on me. I was playing the album while lounging by the pool and this one was surprisingly effective. Maybe it was the sun and mental meanderings of Portugal. Maybe it was the tequila.
I’LL BE ISLAM, IF ISLAM IS HATED I’LL BE ISRAEL, IF THEY’RE INCARCERATED I’LL BE NATIVE INDIAN, IF THE INDIAN HAS BEEN TAKEN AND I’LL BE A WOMAN, IF SHE’S RAPED AND HER HEART IS BREAKING
I KNOW WHAT I AM (GOD KNOWS WHAT I AM) AND I KNOW WHAT I’M NOT (AND HE KNOWS WHAT I’M NOT) DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE? (MM) WILL WE KNOW WHEN TO STOP?
SONG #153: ‘Killers Who Are Partying’ – Summer 2019
You won’t catch me in Saratoga until the track season is done. They got off to an earlier start this year, but we managed to sneak in a dinner at 15 Church before our little sabbatical from the August Place to Be. We also tried out Hamlet & Ghost for a pre-dinner cocktail, and I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a carefully-curated cocktail selection (and the careful measurements and high-cost that go with along with it).
I love a cocktail that you can drink with your eyes beforehand, so feast upon these and stop by Hamlet & Ghost if you’re strong enough to brave the August crowds. We’ll be back in September.
Due to a new work schedule, I’ve had an extra hour or two each morning before I’m scheduled at the office, and it’s been a happy reminder of how much I missed being up in the morning (and how much I can actually get done in the early hours, such as writing this post). As much as I love music, there’s something equally riveting about the morning silence. Actually, change that: morning has its own music, the world just needs to be very quiet to hear it.
A bouquet of pink chrysanthemums (daisies, for all intents and purposes) stands in an old-fashioned vase, blinking sleepily in the morning haze.
Water vapor rises from the pool, the welcome coolness relief from a string of hot days.
And then the song: a gentle trilling of bird chirps, the call of a distant insect, the pitter-patter of squirrel feet on the roof. Muffled, moving, and contemplative, it’s a music that matches the mist of morning, before the veil of the day gets lifted and folded gently into sun-soaked oblivion.
How sad – we are almost at the end of July! Where did it all go? Personally, I’m not totally unhappy to see it go – tomorrow marks the last day of this terribly-wretched bout of Mercury in retrograde. Lots of crazy shit happened during this one – not the least of which was me almost burning down the kitchen… but that’s another story that need not be told so soon after the fact. Peruse the links below – I’ve included a few extras because this is going to be a light day on the blog. It’s summer. Go out and get it.
The main event of the week was this Pier 1 Imports pillow debacle. Customer service is dead. So are all the items that Pier 1 puts in redline status.
When throwing a Flower Party, the featured fragrance should be, well, floral, no matter how non-groundbreaking that may be. At the very least, the invitations should have a floral scent to them. Enter Balenciaga’s sumptuously flowery ‘Florabotanica’ -which is what I used when crafting summer invitations earlier this season.
Balenciaga created a pair of fine florals a couple of years ago, and Florabotanica spoke to me because it had a green freshness that worked to temper the sweetness of its floral focus. The literature for this fragrance is as over-the-top as the scent itself, so of course I adore it:
The astonishing FLORABOTANICA came to life in a four-hand score. The two composers are Olivier Polge and Jean-Christophe Hearault. These two internationally renowned noses have written a music of scents that play on two major accords, like a plant world within a world. The Vetiver, Amber and Caladium Leaf accord to create a resonance of mossy and mysterious dark wood. And the Rose, Carnation and Mint accord like an exhilarating note with juvenile freshness. It should be specified that we are not talking about those extremely well-known roses from the Vulgaris Rosacea family. It is a hybrid rose born of the olfactory imagination of our two orchestrators. We cannot reveal all the secrets of these two floral, alchemists, but the Experimental Rose finds its origins in opulent Turkey. To give it a fairytale air, the two perfumers have added a formula of psychosensory plants, making it particularly enchanting. This Experimental Rose has the power to endlessly charm.
This isn’t one for everyday wear in my world – it’s too potent and dramatic. (And if I’m saying that, take heed.) But it is a beauty, one that opens up like its proverbial rose inspiration, and dries down to a slightly more delicate form. It is definitely floral as fuck, and shot through with enough greenhouse dreaminess to entwine the wearer with wreaths and tendrils of jungle sweetness. A guaranteed precursor of a summer swoon to those brave enough to try it on.
Sometimes costume gimmicks create themselves, as was the case with this semi-home-crafted fabric-glued party ensemble that had me adhering silk flowers to a watercolor robe, only to have them slowly fall off one by one during the entire duration of a party. It worked out well enough, and I promised that something magical would happen when the last flower fell. It’s good to build anticipation, even without a payoff, as we never did reach the final flower. A bit of performance art, that lasted but a day, and all the more beautiful because of it. Hey, you gotta have a gimmick, and I’m no good at bumping it with a trumpet, so falling flowers it is.
Are you the kind of person who cuts all the pancakes before you start eating them, or do you cut one bite at a time? In my life, I’ve mostly been the former.
Summer was made for gratuitously shirtless posts like this, featuring that now-infamous photo of a very naked Liam Payne, who has previously been a Hunk of the Day and looks to be again if this gloriously-nude session has any other shots. And here’s an underwear photo to grow on.
The wise among us noticed Yona Knight-Wisdom a long time ago. He’s making another splash with these Speedo shots. (Watch out Tom Daley.)
All the world (at least all the world that comes to these parts of the internet) loves a ginger. Hence Greg Rutherford.
Four of my favorite things are on display in the next two photos. Count Tom Ford and underwear among them, and the rest you’ll have to sort out for yourself. Jason Momoa got some online abuse for having a perfectly sexy and supposedly Dad-like bod in recent photos. Hey, if that’s your idea of a Dad bod, I want one. Antoni Porowski modeled some Tom Ford skivvies, and I’m all in for all of it.
The older I get, the more difficult it is to make new memories, and most of them pale in comparison to the old ones. That’s the beauty and the tragedy of memory. One day, though, the experiences we are having now may be tinged with that rose-colored hindsight of memory and become something better than they are today. Such is the simple scene that came to mind when I played this song by Sia. I’d been playing that album as I floated in the pool for one entire summer, idly turning the pages of a book while trying not to get it wet, then pausing for a stint in the sun and some iced tea. Then I’d return to the water, awkwardly scrambling atop some cheap float that served its sole purpose for a single season.
When my mind wandered from the book to my surroundings, it would also imbue the gentle trajectory of my float’s journey around the pool with fantastical notions of cruise ships stopping at various Ports of Plants – beginning with the Japanese cherry tree, moving through the grove of arborvitae, and rounding the corner of the weeping larch. We’d pause for an excursion through the side garden, beneath the coral bark maple and the climbing hydrangea, before re-boarding and sailing past the potted angel trumpets and feathery-topped papyrus.
The water would push us along to the next stop at the main gardens, where we would disembark for a tour of the shade border, rife with hosta in bloom, Japanese anemones in bud, and Japanese painted ferns in full splendor. A variegated Chinese dogwood still held onto a few of its creamy bracts, while its non-variegated cousins provided welcome shade beneath their handsome green canopies. In the main garden bed, an explosion of fountain grass rose to the sky, matched by the brilliance of a stand of cup plants. The latter hosted butterflies and bees in a busy flower market; one had to look closer and delve deeper to find a lavender-hued lace-cap hydrangea hidden beneath a dogwood and slightly behind the fountain grass. There were some special singe-flowered peonies there too, but they had long since passed their blooming period.
Back in the water, floating over the deep end, we would proceed to the Forest of Ostrich Ferns, which hadn’t quite decided to start their typical scorched decline just yet. A few stalks of Joe Pye weed rose above them, taking advantage of the extra water the ferns got, and the way they shielded the soil from drying out too much. A Korean lilac drifted by, or rather we drifted by the Korean lilac; once in a while it would throw out a welcome re-bloom with the fragrance that brought one back to the very beginning of the summer season. Here we were already a month solidly into it, and that gone too soon.
A stiff upright stand of zebra grass rose behind the pool ladder, then we sailed into the welcome shade of a seven sons’ flower tree, just sending out its late-season buds of sweetness. They would soon open their tiny white blossoms to the giddy intoxication of bees from all over the neighborhood, and as I returned to the spot where my cruise-float began its journey, I was relieved to think there was still much summer to come.
On another song from this album, Sia sang of a sweet potato, bringing to mind the ever-fresh chartreuse shades of the sweet potato vine. There were dark burgundy varieties that some planted to contrast with the lighter green, but I was never a fan. I wanted things to be fresh and bright always, to keep the beginning of summer and not let it deepen too much. There was enough of that on the oak leaves, already deep green and leathery, and the acorns that were forming and just beginning to fall. Ahh, that word. It’s been said. Let us not utter it again.
Back in the pool, there was more summer to be had. My cruise around its perimeter left me dizzy from a sun-baked haze. The undulating water threw shards of reflected sunlight back at my face. There was something disconcerting yet giddy about this in-between state. Between solid and liquid, between light and shadow, between sunlight and water, we rode the little waves as a song about a sweet potato played in the background – a mesmerizing siren call that left the listener doped in a sweet trippy state of aural intoxication.
I can never just bite my tongue once. It always has to happen twice, in the exact same spot, within minutes of the first. Does anyone else have this problem? No matter how careful I am, it still happens.
Previously profiled here, Roger Frampton has a new stretching program available to everyone (‘The Frampton Method: The Essential Guide to Stretching’), and after exploring some of his simple stretches, I’ve found it’s unleashed a better way of living, so I’m recommending everyone give it a try. It’s amazing the transformation a consistent but easy program of stretching can provide. I’ve spent the past few months getting into the surprisingly life-changing squat, which has provided relief and re-energizing inspiration during an office work day. It’s the pose on the cover of his new book, and it has completely reinvigorated and revitalized my forty-something bones. The age of the importance of flexibility is upon me, and I’m listening to what the body needs.
Frampton offers a program that is less focused on developing vanity targets, and more about providing the framework and tools necessary to improve the quality of life. It certainly does make things much more comfortable and enjoyable, and at a time when I’m less concerned with appearance and more concerned with maintaining some semblance of health as I gear into the later years, this is of utmost importance. Of course one side effect is that your body will, as a general rule, look better when you engage with a fitness program; Frampton has already earned his Hunk of the Day crowning as evidence of this. Check out the new program here.
The garden moves in cycles – drifts and bounty one week, droughts and drawbacks the next – and it ebbs and flows like so much of life. If you’ve come to gardening seeking perfect satisfaction, precise schedules, and predictable outcomes, you are probably in the wrong hobby. That said, there are incredibly consistent things, even when growing seasons start in cold and wet fashion, as this spring did. Nature caught up to herself and things are generally on their usual track.
At around this time, there is usually the first of what will be several lulls in flowering sessions. We had a nice long extended first flush of floral fireworks, aided and abetted by the cool and moist weather. That soon subsided for a stretch of hot and dry days, and it’s that which brings about a floral lull. The trick to getting through it and maintaining color throughout the season (if such is your wish) is to supplement a garden with annuals or long-blooming perennials. Rudbeckia and echinacea work wonderfully for this. Our cup plants have a pretty lengthy showing as well. Hydrangeas, particularly the ones that bloom on new wood as well as old, also throw off flowers pretty regularly. These are the backbone champions that see the garden through the tough high-heat/high-sun times.
Personally, I’m grateful and appreciate these little lulls. They are a pause in the boisterous riot of color the summer season produces, a chance to ease the eyes with the sumptuousness of green before it begins to yellow and brown off. That’s why I rarely bother with annuals. I don’t need the constant cacophony of blooms to reveal the beauty of the garden. It’s there in its structure, in its leafy canopies, in the long-forming buds of the sedum or the fountain-like grace of the grasses. A summer lull is a pleasant reminder that it is, still, summer.
