Gentry style

The name of a legendary architect—Oscar Niemeyer—compelled Michael and Gabrielle Boyd to fly to L.A. from New York to inspect an airy white stucco house on the edge of Santa Monica Canyon. Was the house they were inspecting that day in 2002 really a Niemeyer—the only one in North America? … Michael Webb in the LA Times investigates.

Niemeyer, who is still creating brilliant buildings in his 100th year, is the father of Brazilian Modernism, the chief architect of Brasilia and, in collaboration with Le Corbusier, of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

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Here’s an article from TimesOnline by James Collard that we liked and thought we’d share. Discreet, laid back bars are where it’s at…

‘There comes a point in nearly every life when being comfy becomes more important than trying to be cool. Of course, some people instinctively have their priorities right from the get-go; they’re born in their carpet slippers. For the rest of us, the comfy factor hits us late, and like an epiphany. From teenage years onwards, the herd instinct has exerted a mightily powerful pull, dragging us to dodgy dive bars simply because they’re fashionable, and making us queue up for some big club night (or suck up shamelessly to the gorgon on the door). Then once inside, we get drenched in sweat and spilled drinks and deafened by whatever din happens to be the sound-du-jour.

The realisation that it doesn’t need to be that way is bliss. Perhaps we’ve got older, wiser, more jaded. Perhaps we’re married with kids (kids who doubtless will shortly be embarking on the whole nightlife malarkey themselves). Perhaps, like yours truly, you know it’s time to quit the club scene when you realise that Eighties synth-pop is in again, only this time round you’ve got a paunch and no hair. (more…)

You may not have noticed – though if you haven’t, then you soon will – tennis shorts are a style must this season. See ya, big-butted baggy cargo shorts. Farewell, the absurdity of the ¾ length trouser-short. If your inseam is longer than 4.5 inches this summer, you’d better be a skateboarding teenager or find a better tailor. Life is cruel, but so are most shorts on men.

Tennis shorts first made their cheeky appearance in 1932 when the audacious, fashion-forward British tennis player, Bunny Austin, chose to wear shorts rather than the conventional flannel trousers at Forest Hills and then at Wimbledon. (more…)

5. Friday Night lights
4. The Cincinnati Kid
3. The Natural
2. The Hustler
1. Rocky

5. Friday Night Lights:  I’m gonna miss the heat. I’m gonna miss the lights.

American football works well on screen, the staccato rhythms and technicalities of the game act as rounds of increasing tension, the variations of influential personnel offer us heroes, one after another. But there’s an inescapable hint of tragedy about the college game. The sadness of fleeting glory is exposed, the way in which the past, present and future of a young man is stripped down to one moment in one game; one decision, one twist, one turn; the significance of precision, the option of success. Coach Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) asks his team to be no less that ‘perfect’, no live nowhere but within the moment of victory. This is a spare, unsentimental film that discards the guts and glory myths that clog other movies to shed light on the stirring practicalities of focus, collaboration and belief. Peter Berg’s film allows us to see two rarely shared secrets: the fragility of the athlete and the possibility.

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This is a game we like to play every now and then. It’s purely hypothetical and likely we’ll never need to make the difficult choice, but given that you can’t walk down Cheapside in London these days without spotting either a Maserati GranSport or an Aston Martin Vanquish S, it’s not a completely irrelevant question to pose.

Let’s agree that both are good cars. They’ll both get you from A to B, and they’ll both do it stylishly and quickly. (Here’s something we’ve come up with that could well be true: If A happens to be half a mile from B, you can get there in about 6 seconds in the Vanquish S.) But they are very different in almost every other way.

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It’s never been easier to get in touch with your inner Modernist. Exhibitions in New York and London, plus a new museum in Stuttgart, make Modernism a must for spring 2007.

Let’s start in Stuttgart, with the new ‘Weissenhof Museum’, devoted to the architecture of the father of the International Style, Le Corbusier. The Weissenhof Museum is actually two recently renovated semi-detached houses designed by the modernist master. They were built in 1927 as part of an exhibition showing the very latest in modernist domestic design:

The Weissenhofsiedlung is one of the most significant landmarks left by the movement known as “Neues Bauen”. The development was erected in 1927 as a residential building exhibition arranged by the City of Stuttgart and the Deutscher Werkbund. Working under the artistic direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, seventeen architects created an exemplary residential scheme for modern urban residents.

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Although we once saw a man wearing a green blazer with some aplomb – sported with a blue Oxford cloth shirt and Argyle striped tie, gray flannels and penny loafers – it was on the body of a very old headmaster of a very old boys’ boarding school in rural Virginia. With a green blazer, context is everything. Our advice is: don’t try this at home.

The only green blazer we endorse whole-heartedly is the coveted ‘Green Jacket’ worn by the winner of The Masters at Augusta. It’s not every sporting event that asks you to get dressed up once you’ve won, and it’s to the credit of golfers the world over that no one especially laughs or pokes fun at the winner, who almost always looks a little bit foolish, sartorially speaking.

As we gear up for the Masters 2007 (the competitive rounds begin on Thursday, 5^th April, so plan your sick days accordingly), it’s worth knowing something about the tournament’s most striking feature. (more…)

Cabaret is back, and we don’t mean the musical (though there’s a fun, raunchy production of that show currently on in London, but we digress already.) No, we mean the return of high-kicking, can-can dancing, burlesque meets grotesque, fag cum drag, absinthe-fuelled cabaret NIGHTLIFE. Not since Weimar Berlin has cabaret managed to be so pervasive, so radical and so much fun. (Times of war tend to bring out the darkness in us all.)

For those in the know about downtown scenes from Sydney to Soho, cabaret acts have had something of a revival in recent years. The most triumphant and subversive artists out there are, of course, KIKI AND HERB – whose shows on Broadway, Carnegie Hall, and London have brought to a wider public the unique, politically engaged, angry and emotional work of Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman. Currently based again in New York (though they tend to pick up and move abroad without much notice, so keep an eye out), they continue to terrorize audiences in shows at Joe’s Pub on Sunday evenings at the witching hour. This is a must-see sort of thing, and we won’t spoil it by saying too much. Suffice to say that emotionally-packed covers of Gil Scott Heron, Radiohead, the Magnetic Fields and Kate Bush co-mingle. And that’s only in the first medley.

Also in New York is the latest clubland sensation, THE BOX – a small but fully-formed Moulin Rouge meets Vaudeville meets Whore’s Boudoir sort of theatre in the Lower East Side. This is the site of nightly decadence, complete with nipple- (more…)