View of the Macy's fireworks over the Hudson from the 53rd floor above 59th Street and Ninth Avenue looking southwest. 9:45 PM. Photo: DPC.
July 6, 2009. Beautiful Fourth of July Weekend in New York.
I stayed in town and from my vantage point, many New Yorkers left, to the beaches, to the lakes to the mountains. The Promenade had especially light traffic for a weekend. Many restaurants closed. I went with friends to Café Luxembourg for dinner on Saturday, and then to a friend’s apartment terrace – on the 53rd floor at 59th Street and Ninth Avenue to watch the fireworks over the Hudson.
As the sun was setting over the New Jersey hills, we could see fireworks way out there, stretching south to north across the ridges.
Click above to play. This vid was taken by JH from the Upper West Side (in the 80s) looking south over the Hudson, accompanied by the lovely Annie Lenox singing "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
About nine-twenty, when darkness had fallen – except for the lights of the USS Intrepid, several blocks to the south along the river -- several barges, positioned in the Hudson, looking like it was a little closer to the Jersey shore, set off their cache of pyrotechnics. The display came with computer efficiency all along the river.
My hostess told me she’d read in the WSJ that they all came from China. All thanks to Macy’s Department store that underwrote the event.
The show was fantastic. It lasted for about a half hour. When the finale faded to black, from that height of 53 stories and several blocks from the shoreline where thousands and thousands of people were congregated to watch, we could hear their cheering voices. New York was magnificent village for the moment.
East End Avenue on Saturday afternoon at 6:45 PM.
Manhattan, looking southeast from the terrace on 59th and 9th.
Looking west to the Hudson and the New Jersey hills where the red lights are pyrotechnics already going. In the following photos, the bright lights on the eastern side of the river are those from the USS Intrepid.
JH's view from the rooftop of his Upper West Side building ...
Helicopters fly towards the action 30 minutes beforehand.
Dozens of boats ride down river to catch the ultimate vantage point. In the foreground, a rooftop party in anticipation of the show.
Looking towards the Hudson crowded with onlookers in their motor boats and sailboats.
5 minutes till show time...
Twitter Twitter Glam and Glitter Aside. The big news that broke on Friday was about Sarah Palin resigning her office as Governor of Alaska. The mainstream media and the public reaction were curiously uncurious about the circumstances and the governor’s explanation of this surprise move.
A financial opinion web site that I follow called Market Ticker took a position of common sense that seems to be missing almost anywhere else.
The site’s author is a man named Karl Denninger. His opinions have authority, whether or not you agree. I am not certain of his political affiliations although I don’t think he’d call himself a classic liberal by any stretch. He is hard-hitting in making his points, non-naïve and no-nonsense.
In conclusion he is an idealist and a man who believes in the letter of the law, that being of course, the Constitution. One can learn from the breadth and depth of his grasp of the matters financial and their relationship to politics and politicians.
Dozens of boats riding upstream after viewing the fireworks display.
Moon over Manhattan, 10:30 pm, July 4, 2009.
The rest of the weekend was spent in the presence of two books I picked up on Thursday afternoon at Archivia. “Byron In Love” and “The Allure of Chanel.”
The Chanel “memoir” was written at her request by Paul Morand who was a contemporary of Mlle. Coco although five years younger (1888 – 1976 to her 1883 – 1971).
Paul Morand
I was attracted to the book by its size and feel. It’s small, the size of the old-time paperbacks, but beautifully wrapped in a soft white cover with a picture of the lady reclining, suit and hat and all on a Recamier in front of her fireplace.
The memoirs were never published and only found among Morand’s papers after his death (five years after the death of Chanel). From this writer’s point of view it is an excellent collaboration in that there are no fingerprints of the writer (Morand).
The character, Coco, as she refers to herself, is so powerful, with a voice is so powerful, that you quickly forget anyone else had anything to do with the book. Her words command a response be it laughter or awe or amazement or scorn. In several places she refers to herself quite openly as a “monster,” a matter about which no doubt she could find plenty of agreement. Although to hear her tell it, and it is quite possibly so, she was very generous with herself and her assets.
I’d read in one of the Cecil Beaton Diaries (edited by Hugo Vickers) books that said Coco later on in her life was a difficult person to be around. Beaton mentioned stopping in front of her atelier on rue Cambon and looking in the window. She spotted him and invited him in. After that he was prisoner.
She’s better in a book, perhaps. Coco has oodles of certainty, determination, and is as unsentimental about herself as she is about others. But not without charm, and full of common sense, as well as some uncommon nonsense which we will have to chalk up to personality.
Coco at 24 in 1907.
Chanel in a Paris nightclub, 1923, age 40.
Coco with an aunt Adrienne in front of her shop on the rue Cambon in 1912.
Arthur "Boy" Capel, Coco's first lover.
Coco in the New Chanel.
Morand was a diplomat and writer and popular literary figure in the years leading up to the War. When Hitler came to power, and the Nazis occupied Paris, however, Morand chose to follow Marshal Petain and the Vichy government which rewarded him with diplomatic posts. Many attribute his fateful choice to his Roumanian-born wife Helene, who was also anti-Semitic.
Morand survived the war but not the disgrace. He was exiled for survival to Switzerland. Chanel offered him this opportunity (to write the memoir). It looks as if she did it mainly to give a man another opportunity to work since she never bothered to publish it.
He was brought into the project after the Second World War was ended. Chanel had remained in Paris during the war, and was seen by many to be a Nazi sympathizer because she remained – although she removed herself to Switzerland after the defeat of the Nazis.
Coco, performing with Jean Cocteau.
The new Chanel.
She was clever and wise about restoring her legendary reputation among the French, avoiding the punishment doled out to many women and men who lived in Paris and befriended the enemy. None of this is dealt with in her version of her life.
It’s an interesting memoir because it’s all about what she thinks not what she did. She rightfully assumed we all know what she did. She is simply a compelling character to be around. She was very sharp, and sharp with herself too – to a degree. We all can fall for self-delusion every now and then over certain subjects or areas of interest.
When you read what she thinks, you can understand while all these decades later, after her death, almost a century after her starting her business, there is still a CHANEL. It’s Coco; she’s still breezing around in its ether.
The text is full of observations of a wise if somewhat cranky character, young or old. Such as:
Bemoaning one’s fate is to cradle complacently the child that continues to live within every one of us, and who is of no interest to anyone.
Or, her opinion about beauty versus vanity:
As for the real secret, which is to transform physical beauty into moral beauty, it’s the one trick which most women are incapable of performing.
Or:
A woman who is growing older must be in fashion; only a young woman can be in her fashion.
She lived in the great age of Paris in the first quarter of the 20th century, in the presence of friends and acquaintances such as Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Marie Laure de Noilles, Satie, Stravinskyk, Nijinksy, Diaghilev, Serge Lifar, Pavlova, Misia Sert, Poulenc. It seemed as if she knew whomever she wished to know.
In her youth she had rich, famous lovers, such as Arthur “Boy” Capel who died early in an auto accident, and “Bend’or,” the 2nd Duke of Westminster and one of the richest men in Britain. Bend’or’s gifts to her were legend. In one story he hid an enormous uncut emerald at the bottom of a crate of vegetables for her to accidentally find.
If these are her words in this memoir, she was not kind about gay men or straight women who befriended them. There is some irony to this concerning her long whispered reputation for being sapphically inclined herself.
When it came to herself, she could be as brutally frank:
Boy Capel would often say to me: “Remember that you’re a woman ...”
So as to remind myself I stand in front of a mirror: I see myself with my two menacing arched eyebrows, my nostrils that are as wide as those of a mare, my hair that is blacker than the devil, my mouth that is like a crevice out of which pours a heart that is irritable but unselfish, crowning all that, a great knot of a schoolgirl’s hair set above the troubled face of a woman who spent too much time at school! My dark, gipsy-like skin that makes my teeth and my pearls look twice as white; my body, as dry as a vine stock without grapes; my worker’s hands with cabochons that resemble an imitation American knuckle-buster.
Click cover to order.
The hardness of the mirror reflects my own hardness back to me; it’s a struggle between it and me: it expresses what is peculiar to myself ... Finally there are my gold-brown eyes which guard the entrance to my heart: there one can see that I am a woman.
A poor woman.
I was telling my friend Schulenberg about the book last night. He sent me the following message:
“I met Chanel, in passing, in Paris, in the early 60s. I had been introduced by her secretary Jacques Iskander. I was leaving the boutique, having visited Jaquie (as he was known) and at a distance, I saw this woman striding down the Rue Cambon. I noticed she was dressed from head to toe in Chanel and as she got closer, I realized that she was, head to toe, Chanel herself!
“She came up to us and Jacquie introduced us; she shook hands and, wasting no time, said ‘Viens, Jacquie!’ (‘Come’!)
“My impression was that even at 83, she was a very tough broad!
“Elegant - but tough!
“But elegant.”
Enter your email address below to subscribe to NYSD's newsletter. It's free!
