Ann Steel is a Fembot, Taxi are Creeps

This 1979 track:

anticipates Robyn's delightful Fembot (which is otherwise strongly Kraftwerk-influenced).

This 1977 track:

anticipates Radiohead's delightful Creep (which is otherwise strongly Hollies-influenced).

Oh, that's right.
Still, there's always this.

Unpronouncable and difficult to remember

2010 was the year of:

• Thai Palme d'Or Winner, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
  
• Lithuanian Supermodel, Edita Vilkeviciute
  
• Icelandic Volcano, Eyjafjallajökull
  

But the pictures are nice!

Dorian, Suzy, Jo, Holly, Verushka

One of the most famous models of the mid-1940s to early-1950s period was a strictly brought-up, super-smart gal from San Antonio, TX, Dorian Leigh, nee Dorian Leigh Parker (her dad made her drop the family name for work because he didn't approve of modeling - he came around on that later!). Dorian was graduated early from High School, and after her family moved to Queens, she did night classes at Rutgers in NJ to get her math and sciences up to scratch, then quickly earned a Mechanical Engineering degree from NYU. What would be a rare achievement even now, was almost unheard of for a young single mother (of two) in the 1940s. But after the career this led to (designing aircraft wing parts and working at Bell Labs) started to pall (Leigh claims she was underpaid and sexistly passed over for promotion), Dorian took up modeling. Starting relatively late, at 27, she was nonetheless an overnight sensation, appearing on the cover of Bazaar in her very first assignment. (Dorian's first agent advised her to tell editors that she was 19. It's unclear whether editors such as Diana Vreeland were really fooled or simply decided on the spot that Dorian had the goods and hence to play along/be discrete. Still, evidently Dorian was quite the smartie pixie, and was well-motivated to carry off the charade by having had a guts-full of unjust discrimination in previous jobs.) Leigh had countless lovers, married lots and dated more, was good pals with Truman Capote ('We had many long conversations in the early hours of the morning, and became good friends.'), and generally lived a pretty wild and interesting, party-hearty life. (Hyperbolic, Almodovar-worthy melodrama and tragedy would come later.)^[1] She had the candy store across the street from her Lexington Ave apartment take messages for her (pre-answering machines - although as the first page of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's reminds us, during WW2, private phones themselves were scarce, so that local stores/bars often ran informal phone services for regulars), and her better friends often entered her apartment via the fire escape. (Leigh specifically reports coming home to find Capote playing with her cats, having let himself in through the fire escape.) Capote's nick-name for Leigh was 'Happy-Go-Lucky'. She appears to have provided core ingredients for Capote's (avowedly syncretic) Holly Golightly character (Leigh reports that Capote later repeatedly greeted her as 'My Creation!'). This was discussed when Breakfast at Tiffany's was published in 1958, and again in Leigh's obits in 2008. Of course, Capote always averred that Holly's character had many sources, and indeed, all serious biographers trace some of Holly's details to Capote himself and to his mother (who, e.g., married a man who spent 14 months in Sing Sing, just like Sally Tomato, the gangster Holly visits every Thursday). Interestingly, however, Leigh doesn't appear in many standard accounts of what Capote termed 'the Holly Golightly sweepstakes', e.g., as summarized here.

Dorian's youngest sister, 17 years younger in fact, was Suzy Parker. By all accounts Suzy was the ugly duckling (sickly, asthmatic etc.) of the Parker gals (there were two other sisters - what are their stories I wonder?), but when she emerged swan-like as a teen, Dorian got her a top contract with the Ford agency sight unseen, and introduced her to superstar photographer, Richard Avedon. Suzy's career blew-up immediately so that Dorian almost literally passed the (emerging) supermodel baton to her sister in the early '50s.

Suzy's fast rise and muse-relationship with Avedon was the (only thinly disguised) basis for Jo Stockton (and esp. her close relationship with Astaire's Dick Avery) in Funny Face. Avedon, of course, did a bunch of photography for Funny Face, and Suzy has a small role in the film: she's the redhead model in the ad-like bits of Kay Thompson's wonderful 'Think Pink' number.

Amazingly, then, Audrey Hepburn got to be both Dorian's (partial) and Suzy's (full) screen avatars. Here's Audrey playing serious, unconcerned-with-appearances, bookseller-philosopher Jo, resenting the fashionistas invading her bookstore (I wonder if the featured fashionista is, as it were, 'doing' Dorian?) as Kay Thompson spots her potential (is this utterly ingenious shot with Audrey's eyeline physically possible?):

Apparently, all of this is very well known in NYC-centric, fashion/design worlds, but for a film buff it's kind of astonishing to learn that there is this infrastructure of non-Hollywood beauties underlying some of the most glamorous films of the period.

Suzy Parker herself had an indifferent, fitful film career, but she was in a terrific Twilight Zone episode, 'Number 12 Looks Just Like You', which is on youtube here. Dorian went on to open her own modeling agency in Paris (w/ branches in Hamburg and London). I've seen it reported (but have not been able to confirm) that she helped discover both Twiggy and the ultra-long/leggy Verushka. The latter is now remembered mainly from the sexiest (but also most Austin Powers-worthy?) scene in Antonioni's Blow Up:

It's striking how great the distance is from Dorian/Suzy to Verushka. Verushka could absolutely be on the catwalk today (where she'd probably dominate) or hanging on some contemporary rapper or rocker's arm (or doing smack with Kate Moss or...), whereas the Parker gals, like Kelly and Hepburn, are from a different world of romantic glamor. This is a version of the 'mind the gap' problem that's hurt Mad Men slightly for many viewers (myself included) as it's moved into the mid-'60s in Season 4. The informalized, anti-hierarchical world of the late '60s that Mad Men is now rocketing towards is just the world we still live in, whereas the early '60s is/was a slightly foreign country, one where we speak the language but where nothing means quite what it does at home. The just-slightly-alien is intensely alluring, just as Dorian and Suzy are here.

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^[1] In her 1980 auto-biog. The Girl who had Everything Dorian writes from the perspective of a late-in-life Born-Again evangelical Christian, eager to confess, officially regret, and accept the wages of all of her juiciest sins.

ABC's United Kingdom

'United Kingdom' was the final track on ABC's fascinating but commercially catastrophic second album, Beauty Stab (1983). It's a fantastic song, full of love of country but also of incredible anger and sadness about the state of the industrial north of England that had come to a head under Thatcher. ABC were from Sheffield where Threads would be principally set a year later, and that sense of the late height of the ruinously expensive Cold War raging on while people are pauperized on the home front hangs over Beauty Stab and 'United Kingdom' in particular.

Sadly, the return of hard times now (with the probable incompatibility of our basic, post-hunter-gatherer economic model with a livable planet standing in for the Cold War!) makes this song very relevant again, and it really needs to be much more widely known and heard than it is. My little vid. tries to help with that.

Toy Story 3's slight surprise: no tragedy of the common toys

What's the problem with toddler daycare room in Toy Story 3? The toddlers play too roughly with the toys.^[1] Why's that? We're told that it's just because they're too young and don't know how to play with toys properly yet. I was slightly surprised not to hear another explanation explored: that the problem is that the toddlers don't own the toys. Rather, the toys are effectively every kid's property, so nobody's property in particular, and people/toddlers tend to trash (or use up as fast as possible) what they don't have the incentive to look after that private/personal control and ownership affords (or what they can't exclude anyone else from using).

TS3 does make it clear that the best outcome for a toy is to be with a specific (non-creepy kid) owner, but it doesn't push in the direction that (when watching for the first time) I thought that it was going to. Everyone's a jerk/creepy kid when it comes to public/non-excludable goods: the tragedy of the commons, and so on. I'd been primed to expect the appearance of such vaguely skeptical and 'right wing-y' notes in Pixar films by things such as The Incredibles,^[2] and was surprised (I currently can't decide whether pleasantly or not) to see that dark note go untouched in TS3.

I know that Pixar tend to spend years refining, rewriting, and polishing their wonderful scripts (whereas many big Hollywood films barely seem to have a script!). It would be interesting to know whether they ever seriously entertained the 'tragedy of common toys' idea, whether it was around in some early drafts of TS3's script, and if so when exactly it got chopped. Anyone (a Pixar insider perhaps?) know anything about this?

Anyhow, TS3 is a great film, but I do wonder whether it might have been a little better still, and also a little more troubling (as The Incredibles definitely is for example) if they'd found some way to squeeze in the common toys problem.

Update: A reader has suggested that daycare-aged toddlers are in fact quite destructive of their own toys (hence that my point doesn't work). Maybe that's right, but the 2-3 years olds I actually know are pretty zealous about their toys. They occasionally break one, but they get upset when they do, try not to have that happen, and go absolutely ballistic if someone else accidentally breaks one of their precious items. So, while my reader has helped me a complexity that might indeed have given Pixar pause, I think my basic point survives.

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^[1] That basic point is slightly contradicted by the end of the movie where the toddlers' play area's problems are somehow alleviated by the toys cooperating with/treating each other better, or something. But it's not clear how that's supposed to work: Ken and Monkey getting the party started doesn't obviate being painted with, having heads and tails ripped off, having springs irreversibly deformed, and so on. We therefore set aside this final piece of Pixar, make 'em laugh prestidigitation for the sake of the argument here.

^[2]The Incredibles was roasted by acidly bonkers feminists, and feted by completely mad conservatives. For some relatively sane and temperate dialogue about Pixar's alleged conservativeness, with The Incredibles as Exhibit A, go here and here.

top 20 songs for 2010

I've probably listened to or even heard of only about 1% of the music that was released this year, and my in fact ears this year have been largely turned to various, fascinating thematic podcast mixtapes (e.g. from here) as well as to lots of early '70s music that was either almost completely new to me (Labelle, Judee Sill, Jobriath) or that I'd heard before but not really appreciated (Neil Young, Modern Lovers). So, I don't pretend that my selections for 2010 have any special, objective merit!

At any rate here are 20 tracks released this year that rocked my world for at least a few days each, and that I still like come the end of the year. For me, overall, 2010 is the year of Robyn. She gets 4 tracks in my top 20 and it was actually painful for me to not be able to squeeze in further great tracks from her such as Get Myself Together. Arcade Fire are the only other repeaters on my list, but their 2 excellent tracks seem to me to be head and shoulders above the rest of their 2010 output.

Update 1: I haven't been able to confirm that Nest's track is a true 2010 release. It was definitely a download link on an up-to-date music site such as stereogum some time this year... but, if I've been misled, delete it from the list and consider the remainder my 'Top 19'.
Update 2: In the light of the Guardian picking Janelle Monae’s album as the best of the year I finally got around to checking out some tracks from her on youtube for the first time. Oh. My. God is she good. Too late for my list, she’ll have to be my Ms 2011.
Update 3: Yikes, I forgot about Wild Nothing's ('Is this The Chills?') treat, Chinatown. That should definitely be on my list.
Update 4: Just got a wonderful xmas present email from Tracey Thorn w/ a download link for a great new song, a nice photo, and a live-at-home performance of 'Singles Bar'. Terrific stuff. Thanks. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have devoted fans for excellent reasons. It's insane that Tracey's album hasn't received more end o' year love than it has (Alex Petridis was the only one of the Guardian's many music critics to list 'Oh, the divorces!' at year's end that I noticed. Grrrr.)

Kraftwerk Live on late night US TV in 1975

Staggeringly great. Has to be seen to be believed. Autobahn live in '75! On mainstream network TV!