Thursday, December 14, 2006

Mae West: Iconic

The iconic and ironic side of MAE WEST was explored in Peter Conrad's book: Views and Versions of New York [NY: Oxford University Press, 1984].

• • According to one reviewer, "At the heart of New York City is the world of imagination, where people attempt to depict themselves and their place as special and to leave proof of this across time. One beauty of The Big Apple is that most people fail at this, but their attempts are poignant, day after day. A rarer beauty is that a few seem to succeed. These people leave fragments of art that can ease the daily failures of New Yorkers and of those beyond who imagine something more than mortality, who can stare at the city's river through the eyes of Walt Whitman on the Brooklyn ferry [or Mae West] and know that others will come after to view the life they see and appreciate its joy and pain. ..."
• • Author Peter Conrad has the good sense to linger over King Kong atop the Empire State Building and to recall that Mae West once portrayed the Statue of Liberty. ''King Kong is the city's nightmare of itself, Mae West its lubricious day-dreaming,'' wrote Conrad.
• • In the film Belle of the Nineties [1934] costume designer Travis Banton went to town on Mae. The film opens with a vaudevillian styled production full of scantily-clad dancers. Set in the 1890s, the famous opening features Ruby Carter [Mae West] appearing in front of various backgrounds such as a rose, a butterfly, a spider, and finally as the Statue of Liberty.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photograph: Mae West • • 1934 • •

Mae West.

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