She's not my cat, but I definitely feel that Gracie is a friend of mine.
Gracie is a rescue cat and, I must say, an exceptionally pretty cat.
From Women's Wear DailyPublished: Friday, May 23, 2008
'Sex and the City': For Better and for Worse Dressed
By Jessica Iredale
Believe it or not, there are women out there who did and do not watch "Sex and the City." Not during its six-season run from 1998 to 2004, nor in the subsequent four years it has been available on DVD, HBO On Demand or in syndication almost nightly on TBS. And these women aren't necessarily bumpkin conservatives, but fashion-devouring city gals, as well. C--k talk and shameless puns aren't for everyone, after all. Still, here's betting that, whether or not they followed Carrie's, Charlotte's, Miranda's and Samantha's quests for happiness in New York, more than a few of those "Sex"-less women have donned a giant flower pin, flaunted Manolos or pined for a Birkin bag in the past 10 years, after an "SATC"-fueled fad gripped the masses. The HBO series was a fashion force that, thanks to Sarah Jessica Parker's effervescent Carrie Bradshaw and her costumer, Patricia Field, exposed a mainstream audience to flamboyant style extremes. It sparked trends like the flowers, the shoes and the general funky flash, and, according to some fashion editors, even spawned a backlash of Belgium-inspired austerity a few seasons ago.
So, when "Sex and the City: The Movie" comes out from New Line Cinema on Wednesday, legions of loyalists hope to learn more than the answers to the obvious questions: Will Carrie and Big get married? Will
Style-wise, the supporting cast is, for the most part, as it was.
Of course, the fashion story was and always will be about Carrie, a character, who, thanks to Field, holds dual titles as television's best and worst dressed. To the well-trained, high-fashion eye, Carrie's 81 costume changes make up perhaps the most metaphorical wardrobe in cinematic history. For half of the film she comes off as a polished, uberfashionable grown-up; the other half, she's the quirky, experimental fashion trailblazer/victim. Polished Carrie is done up head-to-toe in resort and spring 2008 trends: florals, like a gem-studded YSL sack dress, and full-skirted frocks made a little edgy with a studded black leather belt — even studs have gone uptown. It's hard to find fault with any of these looks — most were featured in every fashion glossy out there last season. They're intentionally perfect — too perfect for the sake of the plot. This is, after all, a character who for years eschewed the obvious in favor of her own eclectic style, which included tie-dyed tanks, midriff-baring tops and biker shorts, all while being over the age of 35.
At her best — or worst, depending on how you see it — Carrie entertains and impresses with imaginative combinations. As for her outrageous, often tacky, taste, she pulls it off with the help of Parker's taut, toned and all-around tiny figure — enviable on a 22-year-old woman, almost unthinkable on a 43-year-old — that can make even stonewashed, button-fly jeans look good. Or an all-black ensemble of a tarlike puffy coat, topped with a fedora; not to mention a pair of pajamas paired with a fur coat, white high-heel booties and a sequined beanie. Indeed, it's a taste of the wacky, and totally in character. Still, it fails to deliver the same euphoric fashion rush as did the series. Even the montage of Carrie cleaning her closet of supposed-to-be-shocking Eighties garb is too familiar to have the impact of, for example, that green satin ruffled-butt miniskirt she casually wore to dinner with Big during season six. That's the problem. In the 10 years since the show started, dedicated "Sex" maniacs have become so used to Carrie's style — her wild, tacky and impossibly theatrical gear — this time, including the film's grand showpiece, a Vivienne Westwood wedding gown and veil, festooned with a bird, it's impossible to shock them. Fashion-wise, the in-the-bag blockbuster "Sex and the City: The Movie" is definitely fun, but not enough to get carried away.
Kingsley Amis was a hangover artist. Had he written nothing more than his description of Jim Dixon regaining consciousness after a bender, his place in literature would be secure. "He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning," Amis writes in "Lucky Jim," his first (and best) novel. Dixon's "mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."
![[Hows Your Drink photo]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AI475_Cover__20080516155057.jpg) |
| Ericka Burchett/The Wall Street Journal |
Feeling bad isn't such a bad thing, from Amis's point of view. With its "vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure" of guilt and shame, the hangover provides a "unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization." In his book "On Drink," Amis recommends a raft of remedies for the Physical Hangover and then gets on to the Metaphysical Hangover, a combination of "anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future" that may or may not be the result of alcoholic overindulgence. Dealing with the Metaphysical part of the equation entails reading Solzhenitsyn, which "will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have," and listening to Miles Davis, which "will suggest to you that, however gloomy life may be, it cannot possibly be as gloomy as Davis makes it out to be."
"On Drink" is one of three slender books Amis cobbled together from his newspaper columns on the subject in the '70s and '80s, the others being "Everyday Drinking" and "How's Your Glass?" (the British equivalent of the expression that serves as the title for this column). They are back in print at last, Bloomsbury having gathered them into one delightful volume under the title "Everyday Drinking" that's now hitting bookstore shelves. It is essential reading for any literate bibber.
![[Kingsley Amis]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PT-AI494A_Drink_20080516160251.jpg) |
| Getty Images (Amis) |
| British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-95), shown in 1975. |
What sort of drinks scribbler is Kingsley Amis? Quirky, enormously opinionated, wickedly funny, and ever wary of flummery. And not unhelpful, as far as it goes: He punctuates the text with "general principles" of drinking and drink-making, many of which are perfectly sound, such as "G.P. 3": "It is more important that a cold drink should be as cold as possible than that it should be as concentrated as possible." Quite right. It is impossible to get a cocktail seriously cold without prolonged contact with ice, whether through shaking or stirring, which means that some of that ice will melt in the process, thus diluting one's gin-and-vermouth with a little water. Not to worry -- the slight dilution is part of the taste and texture of a proper Martini. Amis, by the way, preferred to garnish his Martinis with cocktail onions, which made them, strictly speaking, Gibsons.
Less sound, but more revealing, is the writer's first general principle, which recommends (short of serving some vile Balkan plonk) that one always go for quantity over quality in drink. Amis drank in amounts that would stagger -- and stagger the imagination of -- the average early 21st-century American. It sometimes left him the worse for wear: "After half a dozen large Dry Martinis and a proper lunch," Amis writes, "my customary skill with the commas and semicolons becomes a little eroded." Drink as much as he did and you will need to economize; but if your drinking is rather more moderate, you can afford to drink well.
Some of Amis's general principles hit far of the mark. Take G.P. 7, derived from the novelist's belief that a quick and easy Whisky Collins made from a generic "bitter lemon" soda is all one needs in the Collins department: "Never despise a drink because it is easy to make and/or uses commercial mixes." True, there are plenty of fine drinks that are dead simple: This summer I plan to enjoy Dark and Stormies, which entail nothing more complicated than pouring Gosling's Black Seal rum and Barritt's Ginger Beer over ice in a highball glass. But, pace Amis, I don't hesitate to despise drinks made with commercial mixes if the shortcuts result in inferior drinks. And the Collins family is Exhibit A in the category of cocktails ruined by prefab junk.
That said, the back half of Amis's seventh general principle -- in which he explains why an "Instant Whiskey Collins" is good enough -- is worth mulling: "Unquestioning devotion to authenticity is, in any department of life, a mark of the naïve -- or worse." This is what separates Amis from the garden-variety cocktail columnist (other than being one of the great writers of the 20th century): His approach to drinking expresses a coherent, compelling worldview reflexively opposed to snobbish pretense.
For Amis, nowhere is such phoniness more abundant than in the posturing of wine connoisseurs. And though he had an abundant knowledge of wine basics (to have any more than that, he says, one must have "a rich father, and I missed it"), he sneered at anyone who dared mention tannin or chalky soil. He was out to make such expertise "seem like an accomplishment on the level of knowing about the flora and fauna of Costa Rica or the history of tattooing -- well worth while, but hardly in the mainstream of serious thought."
Then again, when it came to something Amis actually cared about, he could be as punctilious as the archest of oenologists. A Macallan man (at least when someone else was paying), the novelist ponders which bottled water is best for adding a splash to one's glass of single malt, Volvic or Highland Spring. It is a curious palate that finds no important differences among French champagnes but can identify the comparative virtues of a few drops of water in whisky.
Water was all Amis would think of putting in his Macallan (no ice, please). But he was willing to mix garden-variety blended Scotch in the occasional cocktail. One of his own invention entailed making an Old-Fashioned with Scotch as the spirit and the Italian liqueur Amaretto as the sweetener (with bitters as the bitters). He called it an Antiquato, which "is Italian for 'old-fashioned.' Dead cunning, what?"
No doubt, as is the book as a whole.
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RALEIGH — Richard Childress grew up shooting rabbits and fishing for bass in the woods and hollers of Forsyth County. He went on to become a race car driver, tearing up the asphalt at Bowman Gray Stadium and then the high banks of Talladega.
Along the way, he left his education behind but never forgot his upbringing. He made the big time as a car owner for the late, great Dale Earnhardt, but he never forgot his friends.
Childress is North Carolina born and raised, and Thursday night he was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame along with some of the greatest sports names in the state's history, names such as Leo Hart and Roy Williams, Bill Hensley and Tom Butters, Ken Huff and Greensboro's Jack Jensen and Curly Neal.
They were all there together on the stage of the North Raleigh Hilton, all there for their prowess on the fields and the sidelines of their sports. Under the name Richard Childress were the words auto racing. But as the legendary car owner and vineyard proprietor looked out over a packed house, he saw table after table of friends and colleagues who had more to do with his rabbit hunting days than his days as a stock car driver and owner.
"I've always been an outdoor person," he said. "It goes back to my days as a kid running through the woods of Forsyth County. I support a lot of conservation efforts and do a lot of fundraising, and I'm really proud of what we've been able to accomplish."
Childress won six Winston Cup titles with Earnhardt and 11 NASCAR titles in all. He has won Busch and Truck titles in addition to the Cup championships, all this after driving from 1969-81. And to most North Carolinians and many people across the country, that's his claim to fame.
But in the wilds of Montana and on the plains of Africa and in the backcountry of Canada and in the unknown reaches of Mongolia he's the great white hunter, the very embodiment of America itself. Childress is one of the greatest big-game hunters of our time.
"I've got the Grand Slam," he said Thursday, smiling as everyone around talked about basketball and football and golf and assumed Childress was holding court about auto racing. And he was, because most of the people there only knew to ask him about his Cup titles or his current race team with Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer. A few others, including Jack Jensen's wife, Marsha, talked to him about wine. She said she had recently tasted some cantaloupe wine and loved it.
"Cantaloupe?" he asked. "And it was good?"
He's one of us, a man of the people, a common man who made it big. The truth is, we have no idea how big this man is.
"Yeah, I got the Grand Slam," he said almost matter-of-factly.
That means he's one of the few people who have killed the big four of North American sheep -- the Dall, Stone, bighorn and desert bighorn.
"I've got the Big Five of Africa, I've got the Dangerous Seven and I'm one away from having the North American 29."
Now let that sink in for a second because those words have probably never been uttered before, certainly not by anyone you know. He has hunted on every continent. Go to his race shop in Welcome, and you'll be impressed by all the Earnhardt cars he has there and those of his current teams at RCR and even some of the cars he drove back in the '70s. But there's also one of the most impressive displays of stuffed and mounted animals in the world.
Childress explains his trophies as people around him listen with their mouths open.
"Yeah, I've got the polar bear and the elk, all it takes," he said, explaining what the North American 29 is. "The only one I don't have is the caribou up in Newfoundland. I'm gonna go up there and get that."
He just got back from Mongolia, having taken something called an Altai argali, a sheep native to the Altai mountain range. This week, he'll enter his race cars in NASCAR's All-Star race in Concord. It's a long cry from the boy who lost his dad at age 5 and left school for the last time in the ninth grade.
"I felt then that I had to become a man," he said. "I didn't make it all the way through school. I had to go to work. I had to earn money. I'm not proud of that at all. I think everyone should finish school, but at the time, under the circumstance, you also had to make a living."
In his spare time, he hunted rabbits.
"Ri' cheer in North Carolina," he said. "Forsyth County. I lived over off Wayside Drive. We had fields out there and creeks. We'd hunt and fish as much as we could."
He still does. He also makes wine and owns a race team and sponsors wildlife causes and conservation efforts. He's all-American the way we used to think Americans should look. Davy Crockett in buckskins. Teddy Roosevelt in camo. Richard Childress in a suit. We saw that last night.
He looked right at home.
Contact Ed Hardin at ed.hardin@news-record.comMorning Edition, May 14, 2008 · The Sports Curmudgeon's bile has been rising at the general level of tackiness he has witnessed in sports, and so he has requested time to vent.
The Sports Curmudgeon has decided, however, that he should be a new kinder and gentler grouch. The Sports Curmudgeon tells me that by listening to politicians he has found out that if you preface remarks by saying "with all due respect," then you can insult anyone with impunity.
The Sports Curmudgeon asks me, ruefully, "Why didn't I learn that when I was just starting out to be a crosspatch? It makes grumbling so much more acceptable."
The Sports Curmudgeon maintains that he is every bit as patriotic as the next, more agreeable, fellow, but he says: "I still don't understand why they play the national anthem at games when they don't play it at movies and dances and art exhibits and reality shows. But now some teams are also playing 'God Bless America' as well as the national anthem at games. With all due respect, that's not patriotism; that's jingoism."
The Sports Curmudgeon has also noted the new special sections at several baseball parks, wherein slovenly fans buy a ticket that allows them to eat all they want. The Sports Curmudgeon grouses: "With all due respect, I'd rather be in a section with a bunch of tosspots where you can drink all you can drink than be with a bunch of slobs eating a guacamole taco every inning."
The Sports Curmudgeon has never been more upset at baseball players who hit the ball and then stand and admire its flight. "With all due respect, why aren't managers benching these so-called role models? The first thing you learn in baseball is: You hit the ball, you run. It's up to the creeps eating guacamole tacos to watch."
Of course, the Sports Curmudgeon is watching some sports on television, too. He notes that sports announcers don't anymore know how to pronounce the word indicated by the letters v-s-period. "With all due respect, have you noticed nobody in sports knows how to say versus anymore? They say 'verse.' It's the Yankees verse the Red Sox. No, no, it's not! It's not poetry; it's competition."
The Sports Curmudgeon, a consummate man of letters, is also presenting the Gertrude Award, named for the queen in Hamlet who allowed that someone "doth protest too much, methinks." Previous winners have been Bill Clinton, Marion Jones and Tom Cruise. The Sports Curmudgeon now presents a lifetime Gertrude Award to Roger Clemens. "With all due respect, Clemens never would have even had to protest too much, if he'd just kept his mouth shut. Never mind methinks. Me knows he is the biggest jerk in all of sports."
And an envious Sports Curmudgeon is increasingly upset that John McEnroe keeps getting television commercials. "With all due respect, McNasty's not half the churl I am," says the Sports Curmudgeon, who adds with a snarl: "If I have offended anybody, I don't apologize."
