Anna Piaggi’s Costume Drama

When the style icon died last year, she left behind a colossal stockpile of clothing and accessories, the true extent of which only she knew. Now her family is struggling to find a permanent home for what might very well be the world’s largest, unruliest most thrillingly unexplored closet.

By J.J. MARTIN

IN THE CAPRICIOUS WORLD of high fashion, there are two types of collectors: those who treat their acquisitions with white-glove care, cataloguing their inventory inside temperature-controlled shrines; and those who rip off the price tags, wear the hell out of their garments and then shove them back in their closets. Unsurprisingly, each views the other as deeply foolish.

Anna Piaggi, the late Italian fashion idol and longtime contributor to Italian Vogue, was the ultimate spontaneous and undisciplined fashion worshipper.

Until her death at age 81 last August, Piaggi lived with a vast collection of clothing in a dark and cluttered Milan apartment, where she continually begged her landlord to rent her extra rooms to accommodate an ever-expanding sartorial inventory. By the end of her life, 40 rolling racks had overtaken every wall in every room, where priceless pieces by Poiret from 1912 tangled with modern-day Dior and McDonald’s staff uniforms. This supremely stocked closet was the source of the riotous outfits Piaggi created every morning, offsetting layers of valuable historical costumes, contemporary haute couture and worthless dime-store finds with her waves of dyed-blue hair, cupid-bow lips and powdered-white face.

“She was not a fashion curator,” says designer Karl Lagerfeld, who first met Piaggi in the early ’70s. “She lived with her clothes, old and new, and never paid attention to them in a special way. They were part of her daily life.”

Piaggi died of a heart attack while watching TV at home alone. She was scheduled to finalize her pages for Italian Vogue’s October 2012 issue the following morning, but she never made it to the meeting. With no children of her own, her clothes and accessories were passed on to her brother, Alberto. Overwhelmed by the size and significance of their inheritance, he and his son, Stefano, called Judith Clark, professor of fashion and museology at London’s University of the Arts, who had collaborated with Piaggi on a popular exhibition dedicated to her style at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006. “We met down in the basement of her apartment building to see the clothes she had never shown anyone,” Clark recalls of meeting Alberto and Stefano after Piaggi’s funeral. “They were in one of the worst states of conservation I’ve ever seen, but at the same time, [her collection] was full of historic gems.”

Piaggi’s estate also piqued the interest of Milan’s former cultural assessor, Stefano Boeri, who wanted to lay the foundation for the city’s first fashion museum using the clothes. Alberto put Clark in touch with Boeri and together they began talking about creating a professional database for each piece, hoping to find a permanent home for them at Milan’s Fabbrica del Vapore. But in March, Boeri was fired, and the plan disintegrated.

The collection now hangs untouched in her brother’s storage space, its future uncertain.

Wireimage (2); Tim Jenkins/WWD Archives (Blahnik); Getty Images (2); WWD Archives (Lagerfeld)

DRESSED TO THE NINES | Piaggi in some of the many flamboyant, one-of-a-kind looks she created throughout the years. The black-and-white photos show, from far left, Piaggi with shoe designer Manolo Blahnik in 1973 and, close left, with Karl Lagerfeld in 1978.

DESPITE HER VERY LOUD LOOKS, Piaggi was a quiet woman. “She was very discreet,” says Italian Vogue’s editor in chief, Franca Sozzani, who worked with Piaggi for 23 years. “I never knew anything about her personal life.”

Born in Milan in 1931, Piaggi was inducted into the fashion world by the photographer Alfa Castaldi, to whom she was married until his death in 1995, and with whom she collaborated on Arianna—one of Italy’s first women’s magazines—and the avant-garde publication Vanity. But her style compass was set by vintage dealer Vern Lambert, a longtime friend who introduced her not only to the allure of old clothes but to Karl Lagerfeld. (Her relationship with him was recorded in Karl Lagerfeld: A Fashion Journal, a book published in 1986 of his many sketches of Piaggi and her clothes.)

“The period after Vern Lambert died [in 1992] started to be a sadder period of her life,” remarks Lagerfeld, who fell out with Piaggi around the same time. But even so, Piaggi continued to enthusiastically champion designers, acting as both muse and client to young names like Gareth Pugh and established talents such as Manolo Blahnik, who famously called her “the only authority on frocks left in the world.” Another of her closest relationships was with milliner Stephen Jones—beginning in the ’80s, she capped off every one of her looks with a hat bursting with anything from fruit and fur to a warped clock and dead pigeons.

Though she spent nearly a half century contributing to Italian Vogue, where her doppie pagine—double-page spreads of collages of text and images—revealed esoteric cultural references and an academic knowledge of fashion, Piaggi was best known for how she got dressed in the morning.

Whether it was for a lightbulb-flooded front-row seat along a runway, or a banal trip to the butcher (where she once ordered a slab of beef in 15th-century Milanese chain-mail regalia), her outfits were laborious constructions of fashion theater. “My philosophy of fashion is humor, jokes and games,” she told WWD in 1978. “I make my own rules.” She wore giant Union Jack capes with 19th-century pantaloons; nurses’ uniforms with Manolo Blahnik boots; and dresses whose ‘page layers’ made her look like a walking novel.

Some might say Piaggi was a precursor to the conspicuously costumed bloggers, editors and aspiring glitterati who now populate fashion shows, hoping their pictures will end up online. But Sozzani disagrees. “You can’t even compare the two—those people are sponsored by brands, and it’s more like watching shop windows,” she says. “Anna never wore something because it was the latest skirt or newest shoe. She experimented with fashion on herself and liked to have a story for each object she was wearing.”

““Anna never wore something because it was the latest skirt or the newest shoe. She experimented with fashion.” ” —Franca Sozzani

Those stories were about ’20s Chanel dresses, costumes from the Ballets Russes and an entire wardrobe created in the 1870s for a Roman princess by Charles Frederick Worth (the world’s very first haute couture designer), bought for her by Lagerfeld. But even with highlights such as these to give shape to her closet, its full extent remains a mystery. “Anna was the only one who had access to the clothes and who understood where everything was,” says Moreno Fardin, Piaggi’s assistant of 16 years. “Every once in a while she’d call me in to help her move a rack and then discover something—like the beautiful [Pierre] Cardin she got married in. She never archived anything.”

For the 2006 Victoria and Albert exhibition, Piaggi provided the museum with a list of her wardrobe’s contents: 265 pairs of shoes, 932 hats, 2,865 dresses, 1 exercise bike and 31 feather boas. “I am rather certain Anna made all of that up,” says Clark. “She didn’t have a clue as to what was in her closet.”

When it came to getting dressed, Piaggi’s intimacy with her clothes came quite literally at a price. “When you wear the dress, you also wear it out,” says Pat Frost, director of textiles and costumes at Christie’s. “Its value goes down, and it is much less likely it will end up in a museum.” Conversely, in perfect condition, high-end couture can yield big results. A ’30s design from Vionnet, according to Frost, can fetch over $75,000, while Christie’s sold a Schiaparelli jacket for nearly $100,000 last November.

In 2009, when Christie’s auctioned a small portion of Piaggi’s best historical pieces, the 17 garments in the lot yielded an unspectacular $51,867. “The only truly successful item was a Jean Paul Gaultier cone dress [sold for $20,000],” says Rome-based fashion historian and curator Enrico Quinto. “This is a woman who used to use a Fortuny dress as a scarf. She was cutting and customizing her pieces. Anna desanctified the clothing. She deconsecrated it.”

What now lays in storage is an assemblage of garments that reflects a full life. “The collection is more interesting as a whole rather than in single pieces,” says Clark. “It’s an accumulation of her looks and moods and how she wanted to dress up that day.” But what’s to be done with a collection that gives equal weight to Juicy Couture as Dior Couture? Alberto and Stefano Piaggi are hoping to organize a series of exhibits in Milan, “and maybe even a fashion show of her clothes,” says her brother. “I don’t think Anna would’ve liked to have been in a big museum.”

Clark has offered to help the family make sense of the inventory. “It is such an idiosyncratic collection, and the point of the archive is to reveal exactly that,” she says. “I think by documenting everything, we will keep all possible interpretations alive”—just the way Piaggi liked to dress.

See more slides at the link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324715704578481230138795900.html#ixzz2UDWE7SYp

Cressida Bell Cake Decorations

Leland Bobbé, famous for his gritty Seventies New York City street shots, the photo series, The Women Of Fifth Avenue, sets a dramatic and lavish scene between 50th and 60th Streets.

Inside the Paris apartment untouched for 70 years: Treasure trove finally revealed after owner locked up and fled at outbreak of WWII

Full article here.

Ray Harryhausen, special effects pioneer behind films including Clash of the Titans, dies at 92

• Special effects designer would produce films on tiny budget
• The master’s methods still used by directors today

By ANNA EDWARDS

PUBLISHED: 17:06 EST, 7 May 2013 | UPDATED: 18:45 EST, 7 May 2013

The man responsible for bringing films like Jason And The Argonauts and The Clash Of The Titans to life with his special effects has died.

Ray Harryhausen, a special effects master whose sword-fighting skeletons, a giant octopus, Cyclops and other fantastical creations were adored by film lovers and admired by industry heavyweights, has died. He was 92.

Biographer and longtime friend Tony Dalton confirmed that Harryhausen died yesterday at London’s Hammersmith Hospital, where the special effects titan had been receiving treatment for about a week.

Dalton said it was too soon to tell the exact cause of death, but described Harryhausen’s passing as ‘very gentle and very quiet.’

Harryhausen’s films included The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, Valley Of The Gwangi and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

‘Ray did so much and influenced so many people,’ Dalton said. 

He recalled his friend’s ‘wonderfully funny, brilliant sense of humour’ and said: ‘His creatures were extraordinary, and his imagination was boundless.’

Harryhausen had been so overwhelmed by King Kong that at the age of 13, he vowed he would create unworldly creatures on film.

As an adult, he fulfilled that desire and then some, thrilling audiences with skeletons in a sword fight, a gigantic octopus destroying the Golden Gate Bridge, and a six-armed dancing goddess.

Though his name was little-known by the general public, many directors borrowed Harryhausen’s special effects techniques. 

‘I had seen some other fantasy films before, but none of them had the kind of awe that Ray Harryhausen’s movies had,’ George Lucas, the man behind the Star Wars films, once said.

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury, a longtime friend and admirer, once remarked: ‘Harryhausen stands alone as a technician, as an artist and as a dreamer.

‘He breathed life into mythological creatures he constructed with his own hands.’

Bradbury, who met Harryhausen in 1938, wrote the story for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. 

‘He and I made a pact to grow old but never grow up - to keep the pterodactyl and the tyrannosaurus forever in our hearts,’ Bradbury said.

Harryhausen’s method was as old as the motion picture itself: stop motion. 

He sculpted characters from 3 to 15 inches tall and photographed them one frame at a time in continuous poses, thus creating the illusion of motion.

In today’s movies, such effects are achieved digitally on a computer.

Although he admired what could be done with modern digital effects, Harryhausen said he still preferred the look that stop-motion animation gave a film.

‘I don’t think you want to make it quite real. Stop motion, to me, gives that added value of a dream world,’ he once said.

Modern filmmakers, meanwhile, continued to revere him. In a tongue-in-cheek salute from the makers of the 2001 animated hit Monsters, Inc., the monsters gather after work at a nightclub named Harryhausen’s. 

In contrast to the millions spent on digital effects today, Harryhausen made his magic on a shoestring. 

His first effort, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), cost $250,000 for the entire film. He commented wryly in 1998: ‘I find it rather amusing to sit through the on-screen credits today, seeing the names of 200 people doing what I once did by myself.’

He found ways to economize. For It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), he employed an octopus with six tentacles instead of eight. That saved time.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963) demonstrated the intricacy of Harryhausen’s tricks.

He had three live actors dueling seven skeletons and it took four months to produce a few minutes on the screen.

Harryhausen’s last film, The Clash Of The Titans (1981), was the only one with a big budget and major cast that included Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith, Harry Hamlin and Claire Bloom. 

Hamlin as Perseus struggled to tame a white-winged Pegasus and to battle the snake-haired Medusa.

In 1992, Harryhausen received a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Smart-aleck customers are flexing their comedy muscles on Amazon, with snarky reviews and silly photos of products like banana slicers and fresh whole rabbit. WSJ’s Michael M. Phillips reports.

Rand Corp.’s 600-page paperback, which delivers exactly what it promises, sells for $64.60 on Amazon.com . Yet 400 people have submitted online Amazon reviews, most of them mocking the 60-year-old reference book for mathematicians, pollsters and lottery administrators.

“Almost perfect,” said one reviewer. “But with so many terrific random digits, it’s a shame they didn’t sort them, to make it easier to find the one you’re looking for.”

Five stars from this commenter: “[T]he first thing I thought to myself after reading chapter one was, ‘Look out, Harry Potter!’ “

Several reviewers complained that while most of the numbers in the book appeared satisfactorily random, the pages themselves were in numerical order.

Amazon’s online superstore has become the unlikely stage for 21st-century amateur comedy, where thousands of customers have submitted reviews for products ranging from the self-explanatory explanatory book “How to Avoid Huge Ships” to the Hutzler 571 banana slicer, a yellow plastic banana-shaped device that cuts bananas into even slices.

Rand said its long list of random numbers, first published in 1955, is one of its all-time best sellers. “It’s a tool of some sort, but it’s beyond my clear understanding,” a Rand spokesman admitted.

One Amazon reviewer panned a real-life copycat publication called “A Million Random Digits THE SEQUEL: with Perfectly Uniform Distribution.” “Let’s be honest, 4735942 is just a rehashed version of 64004382, and 32563233 is really nothing more than 97132654 with an accent.”

“We are always amazed by the creativity of our customers,” said an Amazon spokeswoman.

The late John W. Trimmer’s earnest guide to maritime safety, “How to Avoid Huge Ships,” won a prize for oddest title of 1992 and is now out of print. Online, though, it’s the gift gag that keeps on giving.

“Reads like a whodunit,” said one five-star reviewer, joking “I bought ‘How to Avoid Huge Ships’ as a companion to Capt. Trimmer’s other excellent titles: ‘How to Avoid a Train’ and ‘How to Avoid the Empire State Building.’” More than 1,500 people said that review helped them decide whether to buy the book.

“Saved My Life and My Sanity,” praised a 2012 reviewer. “For about 8 months now I have noticed that a huge ship has been stalking me…I was fearful because my parents were killed by a big ship when they went out one day 4 years ago to walk the dog, and I have nightmares about it to this day.”

That reviewer gave the book four out of five stars. “I do have to deduct a star because this book did not come out in time to save my parents.”

Many “Huge Ships” shoppers also viewed “The 2009-2014 Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats in Greater China,” a $495 e-book by Icon Group International, which publishes computer-generated market reports.

“I was thinking, ‘Sweet! Finally a version of Outlook that will run on my wooden Chinese toilet seats!!’” wrote one disappointed reviewer. “Little did I know this has **NOTHING** to do with Outlook for Windows or any other Microsoft product.”

Putative buyers of the “Fresh Whole Rabbit” ($45.90) appear taken aback by what arrives in the mail. “It’s Dead!” complained a California reviewer. “I bought this for my kids since they wanted a bunny for Easter…They cried the whole day and it really made the Easter Egg hunt a downer…It may have been alive when it was first packed but the box didn’t have any holes in it.”

Philippe Desandre, French-born chairman of the rabbit purveyor, LeVillage.com, suspects animal-rights activists are behind the flurry of comments and photos posted to the Los Angeles company’s Amazon page. “It’s because in America rabbit is considered a pet, which is not the case in Europe,” he said.

Images Scientific Instruments

Images Scientific Instruments’ uranium sample has reached ‘cult status.’

Nearly 11,500 people found helpful this three-star review of the Images Scientific Instruments Uranium Ore sample: “I purchased this product 4.47 billion years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.”

John Iovine, president of the Staten Island company, has adopted an any-buzz-is-good-buzz attitude toward the endless radiation jokes. “After 100 or 200 [reviews], you just have to give in and just let it go,” he said.

Besides, an Amazon manager wrote Mr. Iovine congratulating him for his uranium’s “cult status.”

The Hutzler 571 banana slicer—which can be pressed onto a banana to slice even pieces—has generated 4,000 reviews. “I had to return this product because it is only for bananas that curve to the right and I can only find bananas that curve to the left,” a one-star reviewer complained.

“Imagine my disappointment when I opened the box to discover that they hadn’t sent the power cord,” wrote another. “This may be the best thing since sliced beer, but I have no way of knowing.”

A more favorable comment from a customer identified as Mrs. Toledo: “What can I say about the 571B Banana Slicer that hasn’t already been said about the wheel, penicillin, or the iPhone.”

“For decades I have been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana,” said one customer. “‘Use a knife!’ they say. Well…my parole officer won’t allow me to be around knives. ‘Shoot it with a gun!’ Background check…HELLO!”

Monique Haas, vice president of family-owned Hutzler Manufacturing Co., in Canaan, Conn., said when the design team came up with the 571, she wondered whether the world needed another way to cut bananas. She came around after her children test-drove the $3.59 device. It hasn’t hurt that the wiseguy reviews have boosted Hutzler’s sales among wiseguys.

The sharpest-edged consumer sarcasm seems reserved for the thin-barreled BIC Cristal For Her Ball Pens.

“The delicate shape and pretty pastel colors make it perfect for writing recipe cards, checks to my psychologist (I’m seeing him for a case of the hysterics), and tracking my monthly cycle,” wrote one reviewer. “Obviously, I don’t use it for vulgar endeavors like math or filling out a voter application, but BIC Cristal for Her is a lovely little writing utensil all the same. Ask your husband for some extra pocket money so you can buy one today!”

A package of 16 sells for $13.12.

“We continue to be intrigued by the conversation that surrounds the BIC for Her line and are always interested in hearing consumer feedback about our products,” said BIC USA spokeswoman Jill Johnson.

Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 1, 2013, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: These Products Are No Joke, But the Online Reviews Are.

from Unseen Andy via here.

In his essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that, by 1926, society “had divided into two main streams, one flowing toward Palm Beach and Deauville and the other, much smaller, toward the summer Riviera.” Fifty years later, during the first week of September in 1981, British photographer Steve Wood showed up on the coast of Normandy to snap the celebrities who were attending the Deauville American Film Festival for the Daily Express of London, and found that same festive element still streaming in. Amid the glittering red-carpet arrivals of Rock Hudson and Clint Eastwood, the then-35-year-old Wood happened upon his friend Elaine Kaufman, famed proprietor of the New York City restaurant Elaine’s, staying at his hotel. Kaufman, who was in Deauville on her honeymoon, introduced Wood to her friend Andy Warhol and encouraged him to shoot some portraits of the artist. “I think Warhol saw himself lost at a film festival,” remembers Wood. “There was no interest in him.”

Wood, a second-generation photographer who had sold his first picture to a newspaper at age 11 and who had already snapped an iconic portrait of Princess Diana before her marriage to Prince Charles, was admittedly less than starstruck at the prospect of shooting the pop personality. “It’s a bit like Picasso. I’m aware that he’s a great artist, but I’ve never been impressed by him personally,” Wood says. “I’d studied art and was always more into Van Gogh and the classics.” Still, Wood spent a free afternoon photographing the then-53-year-old—and notoriously guarded—Warhol, capturing an openness and vulnerability the artist rarely exhibited. “He seemed to be quite pleased with the way I looked at the light,” Wood recalls. “I suppose I photograph people the way he himself would like to be photographed: clear and crisp with no veil.”

A journalist who accompanied Wood didn’t see a reason to interview Warhol for the festival so there was never any call to publish the images. The slides then went into one of Wood’s filing cabinets in London, where they sat until 2012, when photographer David Munns, who shares studio space with Wood, got to talking about Warhol. “David said, ‘You’ve never met him, have you?’” Wood recounts. “I said, ‘Of course I have!’ David said, ‘Go on, prove it then.’ So I went to the files.” From a file marked “W” emerged the incredible, never-before-seen pictures that make up the show “Lost Then Found,” opening at New York’s 345meatpacking this month, with color shots of Warhol posing with, among other props, a yellow sunflower, a September 1981 issue of Interview, and his own purple nylon backpack.

Astonishingly, according to Munns, Wood was blasé about the pictures. He still didn’t think they were worth anything. “I told him they were great and that they had to be seen,” Munns says.

a tale of love and taxidermy

via The Guardian UK

David Sedaris wanted to buy a stuffed owl as a romantic gift, but tracking one down was only the beginning. In this exclusive tale, one of the world’s greatest storytellers recalls his introduction to a weird world of dead kittens and preserved Pygmies

Flights of fancy: a stuffed tawny and barn owl. Photograph: Alamy

Does there come a day in every man’s life when he looks around and says to himself: I’ve got to weed out some of these owls? I can’t be alone in this, can I? And, of course, you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Therefore you keep the crocheted owl given to you by your second-youngest sister and accidentally on purpose drop the mug that reads “Owl Love You Always” and was sent by someone who clearly never knew you to begin with. I mean, mugs with words on them! Owl cocktail napkins stay, because everyone needs napkins. Ditto owl candle. Owl trivet: take to the charity shop along with the spool-size Japanese owl that blinks his eyes and softly hoots when you plug him into your computer.

Just when you think you’re making progress, you remember the owl tobacco tin and the owl tea cosy. Then there are the plates, the coasters, the Christmas ornaments. This is what happens when you tell people you like something. For my sister Amy, that thing was rabbits. When she was in her late 30s, she got one as a pet, and before it had chewed through its first phone cord she’d been given rabbit slippers, cushions, bowls, refrigerator magnets, you name it. “Really,” she kept insisting, “the live one is enough.” But nothing could stem the tide of crap.

Amy’s invasion started with a live rabbit, while Hugh’s and mine began, in the late 1990s, with decorative art. We were living in New York then, and he had his own painting business. One of his clients had bought a new apartment, and on the high, domed ceiling of her entryway she wanted a skyful of birds. Hugh began with warblers and meadowlarks. He sketched some cardinals and blue tits for colour and was just wondering if it wasn’t too busy when she asked if he could add some owls. It made no sense nature-wise – owls and songbirds work different shifts, and even if they didn’t they would still never be friends. No matter, though. This was her ceiling, and if she wanted turkey vultures – or, as was later decided, bats – that’s what she would get. All Hugh needed was a reference, so he went to the Museum of Natural History and returned with Understanding Owls. The book came into our lives almost 15 years ago, and I’ve yet to go more than a month without mentioning it. “You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”

“I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later: “Hold on a minute… what about… Understanding Owls?”

David Sedaris: ‘There’s a story behind this.’ But what human limb in a Waitrose bag is not without a story? Photograph: Jacob van Essen/Hoge Noorden/Hoge Noorden

We’ve performed this little routine more times than I can count, but back then, when the book was still fresh-smelling and its pages had not yet yellowed, I decided that because Hugh actually did get a kick out of owls, I would try to find him a stuffed one. My search turned up plenty of ravens. I found pheasants and ducks, and foot-tall baby ostriches. I found a freeze-dried turkey’s head attached to its own foot, but owls, no luck. That’s when I learned that it’s illegal to own them in the United States. Even if one dies naturally of a stroke or old age. If it chokes on a mouse or gets kicked by a horse. Should one fly against your house, break its neck and land like magic on your front stoop, you’re still not allowed to stuff it or even to store its body in your freezer. Technically you’re not even allowed to keep one of its feathers – that’s how protected they are. I learned this at a now-defunct taxidermy shop in midtown Manhattan. “But if you’re really interested,” the clerk I spoke to said, “I’ve got a little something you might want to see.” He stepped into the back room and returned with what I could only identify as a creature. “What we’ve done,” he boasted, “is stretch a chicken over an owl form.”

“That’s really… something,” I said, groping for a compliment. The truth was that even a child would have seen this for what it was. The beak made from what looked to be a bear claw, the feet with their worn-down, pedestrian talons: I mean, please! This was what a chicken might wear to a Halloween party if she had 10 minutes to throw a costume together. “Let me think about it,” I said.

Years later we moved to Paris, where, within my first week, I found an albino peacock. I found swans and storks and all manner of seabirds but, again, no owls, because stuffing them is forbidden in France. In the UK, though, it’s a slightly different story. You can’t go out and shoot one, certainly. They’re protected in life just as they are in the US, but afterwards, in death, things loosen up a bit. Most of the owls I saw in Britain had been stuffed during the Victorian era. I’d see them at English flea markets and in Scottish antique shops but, as is always the case, the moment you decide to buy one they’re nowhere to be had. I needed one – or decided I did – in February 2008. Hugh and I were moving from our apartment to a house in Kensington and, after going through our owl objects and deciding we could do without nine-tenths of them, I thought I’d get him the real thing for Valentine’s Day.

I should have started looking a month or two in advance, but with Christmas and packing and helping to ready our new place, it had slipped my mind. Thus I wound up on 13 February calling a London taxidermy shop and asking if they had any owls. The person who answered the phone told me he had two, both recent specimens, and freestanding, not behind glass as most of the old ones are. The store was open only by appointment, and after arranging to come by the following afternoon, I went to where Hugh was packing books in the next room and said: “I am giving you the best Valentine’s Day gift ever.”

This is one of those things I do and immediately hate myself for. How is the other person supposed to respond? What’s the point? For the first 18 years we were together, I’d give Hugh chocolates for Valentine’s Day, and he’d give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn’t have been easier. Then I quit smoking and decided that in place of cigarettes I needed, say, an 18th-century scientific model of the human throat. It was life-size, about 4in long, and, because it was old, handmade, and designed to be taken apart for study, it cost quite a bit of money. “When did Valentine’s Day turn into this?” Hugh asked when I told him that he had to buy it for me.

What could I say? Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don’t need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they’re somehow always the ones who benefit. “Eventually we’ll celebrate by spaying a few dozen kittens,” I said, “but until that day comes, I want that throat.”

On Valentine’s Day, I carried a few boxes from our apartment to the house we’d bought. It looked like the sort of place where Scrooge might have lived – a narrow brick building, miserly in terms of space, and joined to identical, equally grim houses on either side of it. From there I walked around the corner and got on the underground. The taxidermy shop was on a quiet street in north London and, as I approached, I saw a man and his two sons with their faces pressed against the barred front windows. “A polar bear!” one of the boys shouted. The other tugged on his father’s coat. “And a penguin! Look at the baby penguin!”

My heart raced.

The man who owned the shop was so much taller than me that, in order to look him in the eye, I had to throw my head all the way back, like I do at the dentist’s. He had enviably thick hair and, as he opened the door to let me in, I noticed an orange kitten positioned on the floor beside a Dalmatian puppy. Casting a shadow upon them was a rabbit standing upright on its hind legs, and above him, on a shelf, sat two tawny owls, each mounted on a stump and standing around 20in high. Both were females, and in great shape, but what I’d really wanted was a barn owl. Those are the ones with spooky white faces, like satellite dishes with eyes.

“We do get those from time to time, but they’re rare,” the taxidermist said. Above his head hung a massive seagull with its beak open, and next to him, on a tabletop, lounged a pair of hedgehogs.

I’ve seen better variety, but there was no denying that the man did beautiful work. Nothing had crooked eyes or bits of exposed plaster at the corners of its mouth. If seen in a photo, you’d think that theseanimals were alive and had gathered peacefully to boast about their excellent health. The taxidermist and I discussed the owls, and when my eyes cut to a glass-doored cabinet with several weather-beaten skulls inside it, he asked if I was a doctor.

“Me?” For some reason I looked at my hands. “Oh, goodness no.”

“Then your interest in those skulls is non-professional?”

“Exactly.”

The taxidermist’s eyes brightened, and he led me to a human skeleton half hidden in the back of the room. “Who do you think this was?” he asked.

Being a layman, all I had to go by was the height – between four and a half and five feet tall. “Is it an adolescent?”

The taxidermist invited me to guess again, but before I could he blurted: “It’s a Pygmy!” He then told me that in the 19th century the English went to what is now the Congo and hunted these people, tracked them down and shot them for sport.

Funny how quickly this changed the mood. “But he could have died of a heart attack, right?” I said. “I mean, how are we to know for certain that he was murdered?”

“Oh, we know, all right,” the taxidermist told me. It would have been disturbing to see the skeleton of a slain Pygmy in a museum, but finding him in a shop, for sale, raised certain questions, uncomfortable ones like: how much is he?

“If you like the odd bits and pieces, I think I’ve got something else you might enjoy.” The taxidermist retreated to the area behind his desk and pulled a plastic bag off an overhead shelf. It was, I noticed, from Waitrose, a grocery store described to me upon my move to England as “a cut above”. From the bag he removed what looked like a platter with an oblong glass dome over it. Inside was a man’s forearm, complete with little hairs and a smudged tattoo. The taxidermist said, completely unnecessarily: “Now there’s a story behind this.” For what human limb in a Waitrose bag is not without some sort of story?

He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, 100 years ago, the taxidermist’s grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a sabre, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. After it happened, the crowd went wild. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist’s grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought: Well, it’s not like it’s doing him any good.

The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but there was no denying that the arm was real. The cut had been made two inches south of the elbow, and the exposed end, with its cleanly severed radius and ulna, reminded me of osso buco. “It was my grandfather who mummified it,” the taxidermist said. “You can see it’s not the best job in the world, but it’s really rather good for a first attempt.”

I leaned closer.

“Touch it,” the taxidermist whispered.

As if I were under a spell, I did, shuddering a little at the feel of the hairs. Equally creepy was the arm’s colour, which was not Caucasian flesh tone but not brown either, the way most desiccated body parts are. This was the same slightly toasted shade as a spray-on tan.

“I think I’ll just take one of those owls,” I said. “The one on the left, if that’s OK.”Heads up: a taxidermist’s workshop. Photograph: Alamy

The taxidermist nodded. Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. “Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just the smoke they used to preserve the head.”

That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often, so it took a moment for it to sink in. When he opened the bag, I saw that he might more accurately have said “the head of this teenage girl”, for she’d been no older than 14 at the time of her death. This sounds super grisly but is, I propose, just medium grisly. The head was 400 years old and came from somewhere in South America – Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry and thin, like leather on an old worn-out purse. Parts of it were eaten away, exposing the skull beneath it, but what really struck me was her hair, which was sleek and black, divvied into delicate, slender braids.

I didn’t ask the price but said a little more emphatically: “I really think the owl will do it for me today. It’s a Valentine’s Day present – perfect for our new place. A house, actually – no basement, and three storeys tall.” I wasn’t trying to be boastful. I just wanted him to know that I was loved, and that I lived above ground.

A few minutes LATER, the owl secured in a good-sized cardboard box, I headed back to the underground. Ordinarily I’d be elated – I’d been determined to find Hugh the perfect present, and, by golly, I had done it – but instead I felt unhinged, not by the things I had seen so much as by the taxidermist.

It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you. “Like to try Belligerent, the new fragrance for men?” I’ll be asked in a department store. And I always think: Really? Do I seem like the kind of guy who would wear cologne? Hotel operators so often address me as “Mrs Sedaris” that I no longer bother to correct them. I’ve been mistaken for a parent, a pickpocket, and even, God forbid, an SUV owner, and I’ve always been able to brush it off. What’s rare is not to be misread.

The taxidermist knew me for less time than it took to wipe my feet on his mat, and, with no effort whatsoever, he looked into my soul and recognised me for the person I really am: the type who’d actually love a Pygmy and could easily get over the fact that he’d been murdered for sport, thinking breezily: Well, it was a long time ago. Worse still, I would flaunt it, hoping in the way a Porsche owner does that this would become a part of my identity. “They say he has a Pygmy,” I could imagine my new neighbours whispering as I walked down the street. “Hangs him plain as day in the corner of his living room, next to the musket he was shot with.”

I’d love to be talked about in this way, but how did the taxidermist know? Plenty of people must go into his store, ask for a kitten or a seagull or whatever, and walk out five minutes later knowing nothing about the human parts. Why show me the head in the grocery bag? As for the arm, how had he known I’d been dying to touch it? I hadn’t said anything one way or the other, so what was the giveaway?

At the station I went through the turnstile and stood on the platform until a train arrived. The owl wasn’t heavy – in fact it was surprisingly light – but the box was cumbersome, so I was happy to find a seat. At our first stop, a teenage girl in a school uniform got on and took the spot across from me. Deal with a kid her age today and the thought of her head winding up behind some shop counter in a plastic bag might not be all that troubling. I mean, the mouths on some of them! That said, it shouldn’t be just any kid that age. The one the taxidermist showed me, for instance – what was her story? Fourteen-year-olds existed 400 years ago, but teenagers, with their angst and rebelliousness, their rage and Ritalin and very own version of Vogue magazine, are a fairly recent construct.

In the 17th-century jungles of Peru, a kid that age would have babies already. Half her life would probably be over, and that’s if she was lucky. To have your chopped-off head preserved and then wind up in a Tesco bag some 6,000 miles away – that was the indignity. Tesco! At least the arm was in a Waitrose bag.

It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than the head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn’t consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them. Find someone with a similar eye, and Christmas shopping is a breeze. I can always spot something for my sisters Gretchen and Amy. The three of us can walk into a crowded party and all zoom in on the person who’s missing a finger, or who has one regular-size ear and one significantly smaller one, while my sister Lisa will pick up something else entirely.

Hugh and I don’t notice the same things either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superficiality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil – point this out, and he’ll say: “David? My David? Oh no. He’s not like that at all.”

A person who’s that out of it deserves both an owl and chocolate, so I got off the train at Piccadilly Circus and picked him up a box. Then I caught a bus and hurried toward home, thinking about love, and death, and about that throat, so elegant in its detail, which was, no doubt, awaiting me.

Extracted from Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris, published by Abacus at £12.99 on 23 April. To order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

Pennyfarthings and all…  via here.

angrygeishadesign:

Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits, published by Pointed Leaf Press

by Photographer Matthew Rolston 

Illustrator Joana Avillez via NY Mag

angrygeishadesign:

Check out the oh soho creative egg post here.