Admiring:

Life magazine’s May 12, 1947 “Picture of the Week”:

“On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me… I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody…,” she wrote. Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.”

McHale’s New York Times obituary, “Empire State Ends Life of Girl, 20″:

“At 10:40 A. M., Patrolman John Morrissey of Traffic C, directing traffic at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, noticed a swirling white scarf floating down from the upper floors of the Empire State. A moment later he heard a crash that sounded like an explosion. He saw a crowd converge in Thirty-third Street.

Two hundred feet west of Fifth Avenue, Miss McHale’s body landed atop the car. The impact stove in the metal roof and shattered the car’s windows. The driver was in a near-by drug store, thereby escaping death or serious injury.

On the observation deck, Detective Frank Murray of the West Thirtieth Street station, found Miss McHale’s gray cloth coat, her pocketbook with several dollars and the note, and a make-up kit filled with family pictures.”

Wiles’s photo inspired Andy Warhol’s print “Suicide (Fallen Body)…”

Watching:

Since I first discovered the 1993 film a year ago, I’ve watched it after every time I finish rereading the novel The Age of Innocence.

The Age of Innocence, as directed by Martin Scorsese, is a perfect complement to the novel: the film’s so faithful to the book that it serves best as a moving illustration, clarifying how seamless a writer Edith Wharton was: every key conversation is at a fire place, May’s wedding dress is re-worn at the height of her husband’s infidelity, and the time of day Newland falls for his unrequited love has the same sun setting as at his last glimpse of her.

While you may think it odd for Scorsese to direct the passive elegance of The Age of Innocence, Major Dukes noticed that the theme of repressed passion is representative of Scorsese’s most violent works…

Watching:

Despite a plethora of models/actresses/directors/writers/baristas handing out business cards printed with their headshots, and a sundry of films about characters less human than the ones you’d see walking on the Strip in Vegas, the only thing worth seeing at Sundance is Banksy’s documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” and the art Park City should thank him for…

Hating

Even perfectly suited regret isn’t chic. How did I miss that Mad Men is Ayn Rand fan fiction? (It may have to do with not owning a TV.)

You don’t need to know that when a beatnik asks Don Draper how he sleeps at night, since he’s in the advertising business, Don Draper answers, “On a bed made of money.” You don’t need to know that Don Draper is a man moved by an independent moral compass and a passion to sell. You don’t need to remember that “Bert Cooper, one of the founders of the show’s fictional ad agency, Sterling Cooper, recommends… Don Draper read Ayn Rand’s 1,000-plus page tome Atlas Shrugged. ‘You are a productive and reasonable man and in the end, completely self-interested,’ said Cooper by way of explanation.”

All you need to know is how Don Draper gets an apology…

Seeing

I just saw Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza under a big-top tent bordered by beach fog and the Santa Monica Pier.

I’d tell you how amazing Kooza was — the beautifully boneless contortionists, the ballet on a unicycle, the audience seamlessly woven into the theatrics –

But I may as well tell you a Porsche has four wheels, an engine, and is designed to drive.

You need to go see it…

Reading

I’m on a new diet. Every day I wake up to an hour at the gym, down matcha green tea and fresh fruit for breakfast, and eat VeginOut delivered meals for lunch and dinner — except Sunday.

On the lord’s day, while in Giuseppe blue satin slippers and Marlies Dekkers panties, I consume a bag of Uncle Eddies vegan cookies and flip through Helmut Newton’s Playboy photography.

The key is to eat the cookies until you feel sick, and to stare at Helmut Newton’s photos until those shots of long models’ legs begin to slice the “sur” out of “surreal.” Like Newton’s play of gleaming glam and subconscious camp, it’s all about balance.

And Oscar Wilde said moderation is fatal thing…