If only I lived in the pages of some loco photo-spread I’d wear things like cloven-toed ninja slippers.
And whited-out Robin Hood-y hats too.
But I’m stuck in the real world, where pieces like these just wouldn’t fly.
Over the years, Robert Palmer’s stud-muffin style and bouncy-boobed music videos stumbled into satire in pop culture, as if they’d been originally conceived in irony.
I’ve been slowly studying the star over the years and I think Mr. Palmer’s addictions to razor-sharp beats and even sharper suits were entirely earnest. Every single sight and every slinky sound he sent out was sex-drenched sophistication. An unwavering aesthetic that echoes today in the hot-lit, PG 13-porn of Purple magazine and Terry Richardson wannabes and FutureSexLoveSounds…
Robert’s dry-ice cool and wet-dreamy slick are attributes men and women both would be wise to play up, not parody.
This re-mix of my favorite of Mr. Palmer’s hits will prove my point.
Just listen to the dude bark – so rough, so right.
If I’m lucky, once or maybe twice a year I’ll see a film I enjoy enough to want to add the DVD to my permanent collection. I Netflix-ed the HBO Grey Gardens film last week and I’ve been haunted by it ever since. It’s not necessarily a flawless film, but it’s a fully fascinating one. It admirably attempts to explain what the 1970s documentary by the same name did not – how did two high society sweethearts, close relatives of Jackie O., stumble into such sad and suffocating squalor?
The HBO film arrives close to answering this question, and yet the reason why I keep thinking about the piece is because it doesn’t completely add up. It’s not explained, entirely, what happened to those women, or why it happened, rather. But maybe if their strange story could be explained and utterly understood then it wouldn’t be so fascinating anymore.
A preface to this volume including further information on its founding editor.
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