The best line about Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild came from Mickey Kaus, in response to “Democrats Need to Shake The “Elitist’ Tag,” her obtuse Wall Street Journal op-ed — “You lost me at ‘de’.” Yesterday, she announced she’s the Lockness monster-equivalency of a demographic: a former Hillary supporter now backing McCain. About Obama, she said, “I feel like he is an elitist.” Nevermind that last year, in an interview with Portfolio, (who called her “the flashiest hostess in London”) she said, “I think if history is our guide, we’ve had stronger economies, more wealth creation, under Democratic presidents than we have under Republican presidents.” Obama is just too elite for the “CEO of EL Rothschild, a holding company with businesses around the world… married to international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild…[who] splits her time living in London and New York.” She’s planning a party for McCain right now, in which case I hope Vanity Fair is there to estimate the cost of her outfit. Since this election isn’t lacking in absurdity, I really hope “the only baroness in the DNC” steps in as a surrogate with this message. Her thoughts on “elitism” should go over well on the Sunday talkshow circuit.
NYT reports on another “self-contained island” in India: Hamilton Court. Although it’s not quite as strange as Auroville, it’s a powerful example of the gulf between the country’s rich and poor. “’Women and children are not encouraged to go outside,’ said Madan Mohan Bhalla, president of the Hamilton Court Resident Welfare Association. ‘If they want to have a walk, they can walk inside. It’s a different world outside the gate.’” More here, “Gurgaon itself is a miserable cancer of construction dust, gleaming shopping malls, and failed infrastructure….The flipside of the equation is this: look how many more people can now afford to live in comfort!”
Huntington Hartford II died last week at 97 (via.) NYT revisits his life history squandering his family’s A&P supermarket fortune, starting with The Huntington Hartford Museum. The architecture critic called it, “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.” (More on the history of that building here. It closed after 5 years, being home to only “unremarkable” art.) Another venture gone pear-shaped: Paradise Island, his makeover of an island in the Bahamas. “Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, overextended and unable to get a gambling license, he wound up losing an estimated $25 million to $30 million.” Toward the end of his life, he declared bankruptcy — while still the beneficiary of a trust fund yielding more than $500,000 a year. “To most Americans the worst errors are financial, and in that respect I have been Horatio Alger in reverse,” he wrote in Esquire in 1968. Other failed ventures: a handwriting institute, a modeling agency and stage adaptation of ‘Jane Eyre.’ He inherited an estimated $90 million and lost an estimated $80 million of it.” Well, he had one modest accomplishment: Peter Owen, publisher of my favorite mid-century author — did publish his book.
Would you take up an offer from a company called Fake Design addressed “Dear Mr/Ms Architect”? A hundred architects were called to build houses in Ordos, China’s “Texas” with “wide open spaces, the frontier attitude and the seemingly endless flow of money (an annual economic growth rate of 40 percent) from natural resources.” Artist Ai WeiWei organized the project. It either meant, as Lebbeus Woods explains, a promising project like Weissenhofsiedlung or stage as accidentals players in Ai’s performance art. (Slideshow)
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
