Capucine: Snow Angel

‘Capucine’. One word, an icy brand distilled from the warmer ‘Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre’. But then her elegance didn’t permit intimacy. And that was her appeal. A snow angel with dazzling detachment.

Born 1928. A Parisian model at 17, then into films. She was surprisingly adept at comedy, a genre strangely receptive to manic depressives. Without darkness we can’t know light?

She was saved from suicide more than once, but who would believe such a thing? The cheekbones, the plush lips, swept-back mane, the porcelain skin, who would believe it?

It’s 1952 and she lands a 2-week modeling gig aboard a French cruise ship and shares a cabin with Brigitte Bardot, 17, a chorus dancer. O pillow talk. Who would believe it?

“Men look at me,” she opined, “like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents.” There’s a difference between beautiful and pretty — and in the face of beauty men grow wary, weakened by exposure to the spiritual, anxious to resume a cosmetic, manufactured appreciation.

She also said, “"Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time...” All the best faces know — instinctively it seems — the camera is a mirror in which you

slowly, with great art and artifice, seduce yourself, make love to the flesh and fear and forget-me-nots that are you. But therein lays disease and finally, after injecting one too many color chemical emulsions at 1/60th of a second — a kind of walking madness. Narcissus didn’t drown. He couldn’t tolerate the terrible pain of perfection — even his own.

So in 1990, she ended herself. A bi-polar decision lending a polar patina of white frost spangled like sapphires trailing the gorgeous curve of her neck.

The word 'Capucine' is French and refers to flowers. Poor snow angels, they never live to see spring.

Sonny Liston: A Phantom Punch from an Unseen Fist

There’s was always something about Sonny Liston. Always rumours. Maybe the mob connections. Maybe the way he threw the second Ali fight, or his weird death in Las Vegas.

It was as if he saw something out of the corner of his eye, distracted, something we couldn't see, a phantom, something fleeting and cruel. Maybe he was waiting for something, a meeting that he could delay if he just belonged somewhere for once, if he just punched hard enough, if he only endured enough pain because pain — both delivered and received — lets you know you were alive. So he tried: nobody punched harder and with more debilitating force than Sonny Liston.

He had to. He had to smash his way out of poverty and jail and racial discrimination and… you know this tune — it’s 12-bar blues but in a minor key. People spoke of his silent stare — eyes of a corpse, face drained of blood having taken such savage beatings at so young an age. But Sonny never complained, never explained. He didn't have to — because it was always between Sonny and the Big Man, not people. Shit, people were trouble. Best to avoid their bank accounts, their push-ups bras, their handguns. Best to fight then flee into the night.

That something, that shadow boxer, that bemused trickster who led ‘The Bear’ pawing through the black and white crowds of yesterday’s newsreels, heaving cigar smoke and screams, the women all hollow-eyed girlfriends, coiled off men’s arms, the men themselves straining veins and broken fedoras.

And so in May/65 Sonny once again met the newly minted Muhammad Ali. (Of all the men I must battle, why O Lord do you face me with the best of them — ever?)

Previously beaten by Ali even though he had managed to lace nitric acid on his gloves and grind them into Ali’s stinging eyes, this time Sonny said screw it and took the fall just half-way into the first round. First round? Sure. If you’re going to drop, why take a beating? Makes sense. They called him a stooge — and a lot worse. Some people called it a phantom punch. They had no idea how right they were. Sonny had seen the Phantom all his life... leaning in the corner of a jail cell, by his bed as he lay back cut and gutted, having survived one more predator.

After that loss he boxed in Europe, did well, but never got back to The Garden. Meanwhile, Ali danced around him and out into the whirling kaleidoscopic stratosphere of 1960s pop culture heroism. Sonny couldn’t shake the grey smell of backstreet whore houses, always the shadows, the pay phone whispers, the film-noir headlights sweeping his motel window and god knows who’s going to get out of the car with something heavy in their hands.

It's appropriate Sonny died alone in Las Vegas, a city that mocks your past because it cannot tolerate your future. The Phantom raised His fist for a final, merciful blow. And Sonny lowered his arms, unguarded now, exposing his ragged soul, and closed his eyes to Nothing, just as he had expected. A Big Nothing. And then down he fell for the infinite count to a white sea of foam canvas, he a silent cipher, just damaged goods drifting over the planet, more a ghost than a demon, less a man than a wordless tale of a brave spirit fighting forever under endless blows from unseen fists.

Steve McQueen: You Gotta Move

You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich, child
You may be poor
But when the Lord gets ready
You've gotta move

- Fred McDowell & Rev. Gary Davis

Seems there’s an inherent romance to moving…just being in motion…You might be On the Road. Perhaps getting Kicks on Route 66. Hey, there goes The Wanderer and exactly one million songs and books about that ribbon o’ highway. Because to move is to quest, and to quest is to discover... yourself… eventually, or the Big Man, or whoever is going to drag you legs jangling over the final finish line.

Cool is about failed romance, about the impossibility but yearning for an unbreakable trust, for love, for eternity, for that lasting embrace that lasts for as long as forever is, and you don’t get cooler than Steve McQueen — for he was the ultimate moving machine, a man head back and handsome, passing the galloping Knights of Old, switching a horse for motorcycle, a holy grail for a moto-cross trophy. McQueen was a loner in the most hallowed sense of the word, sensing at a young age the inverse relationship between distance and love.

Maybe he was racing from a rough childhood of alcoholic/absent parents and reformatory school. Could be he never held the mirror to his dyslexia. Nobody ever asked him because you know he wouldn’t have an answer — for anything. Answers weren’t his bag. Nor explanations. When asked about film acting, he replied the ‘bread’ was pretty good. That’s cool. Don't go too deep because the deeper you go the darker it is — and desperate ghosts wait in the shadows, so anxious to drag down the blue-eyed boy.

Better to hunker in a ’68 Shelby Mustang careening through the zigzag streets of San Francisco. Or to snatch up a beautiful Faye Dunaway from a pointless chess match and tell her ‘let's play something different’. Because in the end, it’s all a game. He would repeat that more than once. It's all a game.

The faster you go, the less you belong to earth, to all this, because speed always lifts you up and doesn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again. You don’t need the job and the wife and the house because they have no role in the pounding sex thud of torque and raining chain sparks as you skid off Coastal Highway # 1 by Big Sur, up and over the haphazard cliff and moving now thru sweet wet clouds with a high-pitch velocity unknown by anyone to that day.

The King of Cool was gunning a Husqvarna 400 Cross full bore when he jumped The Gates, and a thousand angels, taken by surprise, twirled like feathers in his winding wake.

Veruschka: An unwavering sense of purpose

1944, East Prussia. Along with a small group of fellow heroes, Heinrich Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler using explosives packed in a briefcase. The assassination fails and Hitler retaliates a few days later by having Heinrich — and his brethren — murdered.

Heinrich was Veruschka’s father.

That's our back story.

The ancient Greeks believed there are three aspects to beauty: symmetry, proportion, and harmony. But that analysis doesn't touch on the moment of inception. Can beauty be borne of tragedy? Could such circumstances hyper-inflate the Greek triad?

We all know that beauty is a lot more than strategic bone structure and straight teeth. We know that there’s a mystery to it, that it’s somehow intertwined with personality, with a particular attitude toward Life — and Death. We all know that.

And we know that Death and Sex are close friends. They need each other. Perhaps the relationship seems abusive, at least while you’re hidden, memorizing their slow movements through a window. But they’re opposites and each finds the other bewitching and dark and dangerous.

Beauty and Life are what remains when Death and Sex leave the party. Beauty is dumb fun. Life lies, all the time, without exception, to every one.

When Death ends up with Beauty, you get fallen angels — such as Vera Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort, our Veruschka, one of the top 1960’s models.

After Heinrich’s murder, his daughters and wife passed the war in labor camps. They were lucky to survive.

By 1960, Veruschka was a full-time model.

Richard Avedon called her the most beautiful woman in the world…but you know those photographer types…By 1966, when she appeared in Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ (in the most celebrated/imitated photographer – model sequence ever filmed) she had hit the big time.

Watch that sequence today. Are those eyes dead or disengaged, jaded beyond salvation or in hiding? Maybe beauty gets its strength from the soul: it’s a direct current wired straight through the eyes. You rarely see Veruschka with sunglasses.

That’s her quality, deep-cave inscrutability that finds light even under coats of body paint, an art form she developed long before it was an art form. Veruschka was the first to understand that models need background a lot more than background needs models…so she became the background, disguised and melding her thin form, naked and still, a child resting, pushed out of its cloudy nest.

Perhaps it was her defiance, born of that Death-Sex alchemy, so different from the daffodil-swinging marianne-faithfuls of Carnaby Street, a toughness that somehow redefined obvious vulnerability, that lightly lampooned Beauty, that made Sex seem more of a challenge than a pastime.

Her father was brave, not a transferable quality, but one that can be attained through a deliberate, unwavering sense of purpose, be it facing death… or the cold dead glass of a camera.

Tara Browne: a little life rounded with a sleep

Guinness Heir, 21, Is Killed In London Sportscar Crash

LONDON, Dec 18 (1966) - Tara Browne, 21-year-old heir to the Guinness brewery fortune and a leader of London’s “mod” social set, was killed early today when his sportscar smashed into a parked truck in the South Kensington district.

- New York Times

There are some people whose purpose in life — in a cultural sense — is to offer context to other people (and events). They are rarely catalysts for action; rather, they provide a kind of mood music or a subtext for movement. Tara Browne (1945-1966) was like that.

The short, happy life of Tara Browne survives in print and pictures for what he represents, not what he did. And what he represents is that burst of color and noise and fashion that ran amok through the Carnaby district of London, from about 1964 – 1970, give or take.


Perhaps he represents a little more. By its very nature, ‘Pop’ doesn’t do anything, doesn’t feed the hungry or house the poor. It just is, like Tara. No creativity required, no mesmeric eloquence or moon-lit beauty: you just have to be there in the right place in the right clothes. That’s it – but it’s not that easy because we only know where there is in retrospect.

Browne did a few things, such as spooning some of his inheritance into a fashion store called Dandy (on King’s Road) which sold clothes made by his tailoring business, Foster & Tara. He also had a wife, kids and girlfriends.

He was a little bit Edie Sedgwick, a touch of Porfirio Rubirosa, a dash of David Bailey, a pinch of Sir Guy Grand — with a lime wedge of poor-little-rich-kid. He was well liked. When Tara died, John Lennon wrote about it in ‘A Day in the Life’ and the Pretty Things recorded the more literal Death Of A Socialite’…Every little bit counts.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It’s been suggested that when Shakespeare wrote those words — almost the final words he ever wrote — he was saying that all art is ephemeral, nothing more than thin air. He was wrong of course (as his own longevity proves — and he knew in his heart): art, just like people, endures if it — or they — touches the Truth.

Whatever smartly-dressed Tara Browne discovered long ago — under a white Mary Quant umbrella — dancing in a warm rain down Kingly Court is a mystery — but it must have been some wonderful, deathless, fashionable Truth.

The last detachment of Ken Kesey

As I sat in the audience that evening, watching Ken Kesey read from his book ‘Demon Box’, I got a strange, low-level vibe. The clues were subtle — inflections of his voice, the way he swayed slightly at the podium, his contextually-wrong smile — that he wasn’t really engaged to the text.

Sure enough, after a few minutes, he suddenly looked at his watch and joked that “right about now” his favorite NFL team was likely losing.

And it was a good story he had been reading — about meeting The Beatles.

Kesey himself was a hard read — an evasive mumble of contradictions. The high school wrestling jock who condemned smoking but loved LSD. The soft-spoken, reflective author who blasted across the country with his pals in an old school bus, fueled by drugs and hard rock, periodically stopping to pull pranks because, hey, they called themselves The Merry Pranksters. (Paul McCartney heard about Ken’s road trips and wrote ‘Magical Mystery Tour’).

Detachment — that was the foundation of his loopy, sometimes childish, often self-engrossed, kinda provoking but rarely boring public persona. He knew when to cut out and get back on the bus.

Kesey wrote one great book, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, and it arrived before the whole 60s trip began. Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ made Ken a cultural icon. It gave him a stage but took away his writing.

Ken, one of the big time personalities of the west coast counter culture. The wide-grinning shaman with one hand holding ‘On the Road’ while the other spun The Grateful Dead’s ‘Anthem of the Sun’. Part hipster, part hippy.

That detachment let him walk through cultural walls with n’er a scratch… a day-glo clown, a rock culture Robin Hood, taking from the squares and giving to the groovies, turning on, tuning in, but never dropping out, equally at home with Neal Cassady or Timothy Leary.

Leary and Cassady: Party on

Kesey peaked early, and spent the last half of his life interpreting the first. So there he was, white-haired and stout, still hanging in the bus, driving across the U.S.A., now more a portable party than a quixotic quest.

The author as performance artist, the goof as holy fool. It’s hard to follow Kesey because he never had a map. The bus went where it did, no plans, no right or wrong way, rambling along the blue Pacific until a day in November 2001, when it pulled over for the last detachment and Ken waved goodbye to his friends and got off alone, without books or words or drugs or anything, and flew over the cuckoo's nest, arms wide open.

Ursula Andress: What beauty was always supposed to remind us of

INTERIOR - NIGHT: London. March 17, 1966. The Royal Film Performance of ‘Born Free’. B& W photo. On stage left (in profile) you have Deborah Kerr who, at 45, seems an atavistic Lady Bracknell, a chronological confusion, perhaps a bouffanted levee, holding back Time - at least for a blessed moment - from the startling beauty of Julie Christie, Ursula Andress and Catherine Deneuve, Sirens of the 60s.

Deneuve’s sexuality is empowered by a wistful frailty that demands isolation, to be regarded, not explored.

Christie is engaged but follows a silent muse. There’s heat but it’s random. Restless rather than bored.

Andress has the impenetrable mask. With her high forehead, deep-set eyes and strong jaw, it is a face culled from a sculptor’s hand, a late night Pygmalion, louche and love sick.

From her Venus-on-the-half-shell surf-side debut in Dr. No (1962), Andress entered the sixties without a resume. Few (aside from long gone Jimmy Dean) in North America knew her name. And suddenly there was this face, far removed from the rounded softness of Marilyn Monroe, who would die the same year, too famous to ever be hip, too submissive to ever be cool. And it took cool to swing in the sixties, baby.

Poor Pygmalion
Look at What’s New Pussycat (’65) or Casino Royale (’67). Acting not required. Just attitude. And Andress had the requisite attitude. Always game, never serious. A kind of Vegas-style swinger but with a bracing, Teutonic warp. No hippy dippy chick here. No Shirley-Maclaine Rat-packer. If she needed men, it was to turn off the light.

We can well imagine lyricist Hal David in a darkenend film theatre watching an early cut of Casino Royale. And then he sees the Face. And then he writes 'The Look of Love'.

Throughout the 60s Andress was always present but never there, drifting with the moon children through paisley parties somewhere between Woodstock and Monte Carlo — so...

...The Face, a kind of totemic, ageless apparition of what Beauty was always supposed to remind us of.

Jayne Mansfield...Never let a God fall in love with you

It takes a little skill and a lot of luck for a career to span pop movements. Most celebrities get creamed trying to jump the cultural chasm, especially if they’re B-level.

By the mid 1960s, Jayne Mansfield was a somewhat pitiful anachronism. Her pneumatic proportions had no place beside the incipient sophistication of slim new girls like Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway. Her voice was an audible cartoon, a breathless Marilyn Monroe underpinned with rinky-dink Betty Boop, made sad with aimless, self-destructive irony.

With Monroe’s death in 1962, it was assumed Mansfield would assume the Titular Throne, but it never happened. That throne remains forever empty, Titularless.

In 1956, she signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. But they dropped her five years later. Like many entertainers with calcified careers, Jayne headed to Las Vegas, commanding $8,000-$25,000 per week for her nightclub act. Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and once off the Strip she was reduced to playing dinner theatres. In June 1967, following a dinner theatre gig in Biloxi, Mississippi, she died at night on a highway in an automobile crash. She was thirty-four.

She was a pro and needed little provocation to expose her breasts, staging a series of wardrobe malfunctions. Critics often dismissed her as more exhibitionist than actress.

During the length of her career, there were many women hip-rolling around Hollywood who were far prettier, had more alluring bodies, and displayed at least rudimentary acting skills, but none succeeded like Jayne Mansfield. They're all gone. She remains. It's a mystery. (Posthumous popularity is always a little sloppy).

Every mystery begs an answer. The ancient Greeks believed those whom the gods love die young... with no time to gasp final wisdom bleeding on the tar of a Mississippi highway at midnight, no chance to suffer the crushing shame of silence where there once roared applause. Maybe the mystery staggers lost down that thousand-year-old rainy neon Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Never let a God fall in love with you.

The Avengers: A Land Without Children

Trying to analyse The Avengers leads to a conundrum, akin to racing over a sunny morning meadow, straining to net a playful butterfly: it’s delicate and fleeting, never looking back, and you know capturing the creature will destroy its beauty, yet beauty only exists if seen...

...But onward we beat, boats against the current…Let’s do a little analyzing, hopefully without impaling this profoundly original British TV series on the Great Cork-board of Life.

Above all, the Avengers (1961-69) was goofy fun — but goofy in a swinging 60s Matt-Helm kind of way, not a hippy-dippy Rowan-Martin mold. The two lead characters, played by Patrick McNee (John Steed) and either Honor Blackman (Cathy Gale), Diana Rigg (Emma Peel), or Linda Thorson (Tara King), were, by varying degrees, sexy, breezy, detached, bright, chic, educated, athletic and rich without any visible means of support.

The program made London and its surrounding environs a huge playground for grownups, that is, for Steed and his female buddies, blithely laughing over cocktails, meting out judo chops to vaguely threatening villains — always witty, always bemused, stereotypes of a stereotype that they were in the process of inventing. Big kids on expense accounts (though hard currency is never, ever seen. Way too real darling). In fact, it’s hard to think of an Avengers episode in which kids are present, let alone featured. For the appearance of a real child, along side a man-child/woman-child, tends to emphasize the underdevelopment of the latter. (How many kids have you seen in Bond movies?)


AvengerLand is a world without seasons and calendars, a timeless London of clean, neat streets (usually – strangely - devoid of humans and traffic), of bucolic Britain with lazy, leafy lanes and Elizabethan-era bridges. Technology, when it does appear, is most often associated with evil — sociopathic robots, mind-control machines – that kind of thing). Even Steed drives a forty-year-old car. And rarely is there a gun about, or an explosion heard. Entering AvengerLand is the upbeat flipside of poor ‘ol Patrick (The Prisoner) McGoohan entering ‘The Village’.

Trapping that butterfly called The Avengers will tell you nothing, aside from the notion that butterflies belong in a meadow, not pinned dying to a board: expressions of 60s pop culture should be appraised within that swirling, psychedelic glass dome of their times. Because outside that dome, the air is pure poison and sure to distort perspective and curtail ‘goofy fun’.

...So now we depart Steed and leather-cat-suited Emma, comforted in the knowledge that they shall always be there, when we need them, ageless and enticing, revolving in the digital aspic of a DVD, in pre-email Land where a man may contact his ravishing workmate with just a tasteful, embossed calling card, as in ‘Mrs. Peel, We’re Needed!’

Kubrick’s Killer Decade

From about 1960 to 1970, film director Stanley Kubrick could do no wrong. He fed off the sixties zeitgeist with vampiric cunning—intellectual, cynic, craftsman, always detached, always so mindful of the light.

His best films are about death—or seen through a different lens—about life’s absurdity. He didn’t create heroes or happy endings. His films are scripted thesis.< Does thought drive emotion, or vice-versa?> Stanley’s films are top-heavy with thought—but unlike the grumpy Jean-Luc Godard, who enjoyed his salad days at about the same time, Kubrick never hits you on the head with a book.

If you’re looking for the key to Stan’s mind, you might find it at the bottom of a magician’s trunk, or hidden under a chess board. The general sterility of his sets tricks you into believing ‘here’s a serious artist’ , but it is indeed a trick. Above all else, he is a humanist, and like others of his ilk, wasn’t too crazy about humans, at least their bodies.

So—similar to Hitchcock, actors never did that well in his films. Only two or three performances stand out. It’s no coincidence that his most memorable character is a computer.

Here’s killer Kubrick:

- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)

After ‘Clockwork’, one got the feeling that Kubrick wasn’t making the films that he wanted to – he was just keeping the wheels in motion with goofy stuff like ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘The Shining’. His final film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is disturbing, given that the same talent once gave us ‘2001’.


Today, Kubrick enjoys legions of diehard fans that have sanctified every frame of his opus. He was the kind of guy who could inspire such devotion. Only an artist who tells the Truth, his own Big Truth in his own Time, ever reaches that rarified stratum where angels dispense the mixed blessing of immortality.

And what is Kubrick's Big Truth? It has something to do with Light.