Nico: The Wayward Beauty of Solitary Confinement

 

“I have been in the highest and the lowest and both places are empty.” - Nico

 

Why even ask—Who is Nico — she that was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne in 1938? Survives the Nazis... Then in Paris. She’s 16 and meets Coco Chanel. Models. Gets bored. Travels to New York City. Studies acting with Lee Strasberg. Talks to Marilyn Monroe.

1959. In Rome. Hello to Frederico Fellini. Gets bit part in La Dolce Vita. Really, who is she?

Back in New York City. 1963. Sings ‘My Funny Valentine’ at the Blue Angel Club. Can barely stay in key, but that makes it better. A determined contralto if you will. Rarely smiles.

Hey, she’s over in Paris. With Serge Gainsborough and then pregnant by Alan Delon. Has a son. Leaves him behind.

Hangs with Brian Jones. He plays, along with Jimmy Page, on her first EP.

Really, how does this happen to one person?

In London, meets Andy Warhol’s friend, then off to New York City again. Calls Andy. Her first line to him. “I only like the food that floats in the wine.” Warhol is thunderstruck.

Nico enters Warhol's Factory and dethrones Edie Sedgwick. Such is life.  Meets Bob Dylan. He gives her a song.

Stars in three Factory films. Andy becomes manager of The Velvet Underground. Says he wants Nico to sing. Member Lou Reed disagrees. Nico sings. She is what happens when the Weimar meets the Haight.

Parts from the Velvets. Makes music of her own. Now to Los Angeles. Beds Jim Morrison. Next morning, Morrison is found naked, dancing on a rooftop. Nico, also naked, is crying in a garden. Lots of drugs. Goes from Jim to Iggy Pop. Interesting progression.

Records music. Takes lovers. Wanders the world. Dies in Ibiza, 1988. Age 49. Today, revered as a Goth pioneer.

Some artists follow a muse; for others, the muse is themselves. It’s an involuntary reaction. Nico lived as she did to stay alive. A soul in solitaire. 

Look closely, her eyes are rimmed with frost, for her beauty comes from the pain you see when a face is frozen by tears.

 

#nico #andywarhol #loureed #jimmorrison #thedoors #iggypop #goth #music #blog #pop #1960s #Christ Päffgen #leonardcohen #bobdylan #fellini #velvetunderground

Twiggy: Perfectly You

 

Just a wisp. Short and skinny. A boy’s haircut. Awkward poses. Lesley Hornby. A most unlikely fashion model yet perfect for a time and place that loved to smash the parapets. Who wants to be ‘normal’?

Twiggy by name and by nature. O those Margaret Keane eyes. It was her very anomality that made you notice how much fun she was, how different from steely-eyed glamazons glaring from Vogue covers. Fewer pretensions in a Britain too poor for a class war. The candor of her gaze expelled irony. We could join her at the party.

Carnaby Street. She strolls by without a watch, a purse or purpose. Up for the next laugh, celebrating her good fortune, unencumbered and unfettered, swinging now to a future so deeply in love with itself.

And of herself, she said, “I always describe her, 60s Twiggy, as my little friend who sits on my shoulder.” How wonderful to stroll the leafy lanes of life knowing that you have been, all along, indisputably, irrefutably, perfectly, you.

 

#twiggy #lesleyhornby #carnaby street #fashion #1960s #1967 #davidbailey #theboyfriend #documentart #london #davidbowie

Sharon Tate: How to Enter the Mystic

She appears delicate. Her skin, almost translucent. Feminine and maternal. There is an innocence in the deep-set eyes, watchful but wistful, perhaps a playful turn of the lips. We uncover a realism in her persona that makes her noticed. Uncommon. She is unexpectedly nervous.

Her films are forgettable. She needed more time. But her future, and motherhood, ended in a slash of violence decreed by a mentally ill man, trying to raise awareness for his demons.

Her name endures with the crime of her demise. Or does it? There’s more. Others have met terrible exits. Somehow, she’s the fleeting nymph under a diamond sky, dancing unchained from Time. Somehow the crypt has no purchase. It makes little sense. But immortality has nothing to do with material gain. Unveiling that ruse is the first step to entering the mystic.

Perhaps her soul was more powerful than others, far from madding Manson and the broken Polanski. There is no conclusion to her tale. Her film will never read ‘The End’. She always leaves the frame before forfeiting her freedom.

Perhaps people like Sharon Tate hold furtive, flickering candles, wayward ghosts who light the way out of forgotten caverns.

Past is prologue, and prologue just may be that wind-swept bikini-clad woman on a blue-sky Malibu beach, out of touch but never out of reach, leaving no footprints as the pounding white surf pulls her far down the coastline.

 

#sharontate #charlesmanson #romanpolanski #film #hollywood #tarantino #beachboys #crime

Ernest Hemingway: Beneath the Waves

 

“Oh, Jack.” Brett said, “we could have had such a good time together.”

“Yes,” I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so.”

-          Last lines of ‘The Sun Also Rises’

“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death.”

-          Hemingway

Everyone could write like Hemingway. It was simple because his style was simple. But when they tried, there was no magic. Scribes manqué. They had never faced the Big Fear and that was the key.

Hemingway said he followed the iceberg theory whereby most of a story’s meaning is hidden beneath the surface. How he did this has never been determined.

In many of his most compelling tales, if you’re quiet enough, you can hear a mind that’s running off balance, a scattered electricity somewhere, stressed metal that crackles and sparks. There’s a nameless dimension that might flash out of dark corners, unexpected, a tension where there should be peace.

With Ernest Hemingway, cold shadows of Death can suddenly cross the sun of the most benign scene. But you only realize it years later. Things are best when they are clean and well-lighted. Keep away from the shadows. Always. And remember, without death, life would be intolerable.

All the books, the hunting, the accidents, the wives, the drinking, the guns—all of it seemed to mean nothing. He just wanted to stop the pain.

So, he did. A man of action determined to annihilate... action. It all makes sense when you accept that for those who can see beneath the waves, all is darkness.

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