A talent who was able to balance on the knife edge between poetry and a grungy kind of power, who was fond of tattered romance, a sweeping Byronic trench and the perfect line, Mr. Thimister was also a casualty of fashion’s transition from creative hothouse of individuality to global industry.
He was among the last in a line of designers who came of age in the late 1980s and ’90s still believing in purity of concept and allegiance to the creative muse above all else, only to discover that in the 21st century, marketing and constant streams of stuff were the new benchmarks of success, that the catchphrase wasn’t “vision” but rather a “vision statement.”
With her wry sense of humor honed by a coquettish but self-doubting vanity, the French novelist Colette would doubtless have been flattered to see the painstakingly authentic renovation of her childhood home by the Paris decorator Jacques Grange in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. Born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1873 in this Burgundian village 115 miles south of Paris, she went on to become a legend of French letters. Colette wrote more than 30 books and was made a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, the prestigious French Académie Goncourt and a grand officer of the French Legion of Honor, before becoming the first Frenchwoman ever accorded a state funeral in 1954 (she’s buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris).
As I knew from having read her most autobiographical works, Colette’s sensibility, by turns tender and sharp, sensual and austere, had been born and nurtured here, in this house and in this village. “My house remains for me what it always was, a relic, a burrow, a citadel, the museum of my youth. …,” Colette wrote in “Retreat from Love,” published in 1907. That house was opened to the public in 2016 after having been privately owned — and ever since, an exploration of Colette’s Burgundy has had a compelling centerpiece.
As a child, I kept photos of my parents in an old, torn shoe box. I’d often gaze at the ones of them posing with my dad’s 1947 Harley Davidson Knucklehead, and try to imagine their days before I came along. I’d wonder: What was it like for a white Appalachian man and a Salvadoran woman to ride a motorcycle cross-country in the postwar years? How had their love endured at a time when many Americans were hostile to interracial marriage?
More than a life story, it's an account of how to live an artist's life even when it looks like your artistic ambitions are grandiose and impractical. In fact, Castellucci shows, your artistic ambitions are pretty much guaranteed to be grandiose and impractical. That doesn't matter. What matters is how you live with your big dreams, what you give up for them, what you hang onto and what you let go.
Interesting on its own merits if you are a Bowie fan, this is far more than merely a list of 100 books that Bowie found influential in his own life and music. John O’Connell, the book’s author, fleshes out the list and the books included in the list to tremendous effect and makes this book infinitely readable and valuable beyond the Bowie factor. For every book included, O’Connell provides a summation that goes well beyond a Wikipedia entry and provides interesting tidbits on the work and the author while speculating on how that particular title influenced Bowie and his songs.