Who and what was Bloomsbury?
“Bloomsbury” was the nickname given to a group of young friends who met in Britain around 1905 and named for the neighborhood in London where many of them lived and worked.  As it happens, Bloomsbury included many men and women who would, in the next 20 years, distinguish themselves in their various fields.  E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes would make some of the most important contributions to literature and economics in the twentieth century; Roger Fry and Clive Bell defined and defend modern art; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were among the leading modern painters in England between the wars; and Lytton Strachey would revolutionize the art of biography.

Why do they matter now?
Seemingly without effort, these friends rejected conventional thought and expectations about nearly everything: religion, politics, gender expectations, family relationships, art, etc., and invented a modern and culturally liberated way of thinking and living. Besides revolutionizing their professions and bringing Edwardian England into the twentieth century, these friends supported and influenced each other in their work, and shared very unconventional living arrangements, accepting bisexual and extramarital affairs as a matter of course and necessary for happiness.  They also maintained journals, correspondance, and memoirs that chronicalled their personal and intellectual growth.  Separately, their professional contributions were substantial; collectively, their lively collaboration in life and work provide us with models of life and work far more ‘radical’ and satisfying than most of us experience nearly a seventy-five years later. And whatever else they were, they were always clever, insightful, refreshing, and happy to debunk whatever notions had grown beyond their need.

The major disciplines addressed:  visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy

The major works read are:
Forster’s Howard’s End
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Rosenberg’s The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary
Stansky’s On or About December 1910
also: selections from G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica
                              Roger Fry’s Vision and Design
 

Requirements: no pre-reqs;  about twenty pages (total) of research and personal writing.

The following links, especially the first two, will give you a sense of who the Bloomsbury group was:

Portraits of Clive Bell
Portraits of Roger Fry
Portraits of Vanessa Bell
Portraits of Virginia Woolf
Portraits of Duncan Grant
Portraits of Lytton Strachey
Portraits of Leonard Woolf
Portraits of John Maynard Keynes
Portraits of E.M.Forster
Portraits of Friends
1910 Exhibition
Design Pieces
Still Lifes
Bloomsbury Revisited 1990
 

Clive Bell

Clive Bell by Roger Fry, 1925 

   Clive Bell by Henry Lamb, 1909-10
 

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Roger Fry

  Roger Fry by Vanessa Bell, 1912
 
 

Roger Fry self-portrait,1930-2

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Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1918
 

Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant, 1942
 

Vanessa Bell by Roger Fry, 1916
 

Vanessa Bell self-portrait,1959
 

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Virginia Woolf

VirginiaWoolf by Vanessa Bell, 1911-12
 

VirginiaWoolf by Duncan Grant 1911 
 

Virginia Woolf in a Deckchair by Vanessa Bell, 1912
 

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Duncan Grant

  Self-portrait by Duncan Grant, 1920

        Duncan Grant self-portrait, 1926
 

Duncan Grant self-portrait, 1956
 

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Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey by Henry Lamb, 1914
 
 

                                                                                     Lytton Strachey by Roger Fry,1917

                                                                                            Lytton Strachey by Simon Bussy, 1904

    Lytton Strachey by Vanessa Bell, 1912
 
 

  Lytton Strachey by Vanessa Bell, 1913
 

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Leonard Woolf

  Leonard Woolf by Henry Lamb,1912
 

John Maynard Keynes

  J.M. Keynes by Duncan Grant, 1908

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E.M. Forster

   E.M. Forster by Dora Carrington,1924-25
 
 
 

   E.M. Forster by Roger Fry, 1911

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Friends

  Edward Carpenter by Roger Fry, 1894

Edward Carpenter was an early twentieth century defender of gay and lesbian identity; his books and articles, especially the 1906 work “The Intermediate Sex” in which he separated gender identity from sexuality.  His work was alternately banned and praised, but was most certainly an influence in Bloomsbury’s relative freedom about sexuality and gender roles.

   Adrian Stephen by Duncan Grant, 1910

                                                                                                    Pamela Fry by Duncan Grant, 1911
 

                “On the Roof, 38 Brunswick Square” (Virginia,Adrian,Leonard) 1912, by Duncan Grant

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1910 Exhibition

In 1910 and again in 1912, Roger Fry organized exhibits in London of mostly French Impressionist works; in both exhibits, he was challenging the very conservative middle class art market in Britain that valued representational art and classical and mythological subject matter.  He was trying to persuade the public that the composition or form in a work was the essence of great art.  Both shows received great oppostion, though slowly British fears were eased and tastes changed. The following are just a few of the approximately 200 paintings and sculptures exhibited.

Exhibition Poster
 
 

The Bar at the Folies-Bergere by Edouard Manet, 1881-82
 
 
 

Still Life with Bananas by Jean Marchand, 1912
 

    Three Tahitians,  by Paul Gauguin
 

   Paul Gaugin, Spirit of the Dead,1893
 
 

Paul Cezane, Mont SainteVictoire vu des Lauves, 1902-06

  Van Gogh, Dr. Gachet, 1890
 

Van Gogh. The Iris, 1889
 

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Design Pieces

For a few brief years, Fry also ran the Omega Workshop, a sort of artist’s cooperative that created and sold decorative and useful objects such as painted chairs, tables, screens, rugs, and pottery. This gave the Bloomsbury and other artists a broader market for their work.  Within this group of images you can also see Grant and Bell’s experiments in formal properties, such as the highly influential primitive style, as well as merging classical interest in form with fantastic subjects.

Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, Duncan Grant 1914

          Bathing, Duncan Grant 1911

Dancing Couple, Vanessa Bell 1914

Design for Rug, Roger Fry1916

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Still Lifes

                                                    Chair with Bowl and Towl, Roger1918

Iceland Poppies,Vanessa Bell 1909

Oranges and Lemons, Vanessa Bell 1914
 

Painted Omega Screen, Vanessa Bell1913
 
 

Still Life with Omega Flowers, Roger Fry 1919
 

The Coffee Pot, Duncan Grant 1918

TheModellingStand, DuncanGrant 1914

Triple Alliance, Vanessa Bell 1914
 

Berwick Church pulpit, painted by Duncan Grant
 

Berwick Church, painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

Clive Bell’s study

The Garden Room

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Bloomsbury Reflections
In 1990, shortly after Charleston Farmhouse was opened for viewing to the public, time-Life photographer Alen Mcweeney visited Charleston and photographed the descendents of Bloomsbury, including the Bell family, MacCarthy family, and relatives of Leonard Woolf, Sackville-West, Adrian Stephen, and others.  Also in the book are selections of their memoirs, in which they offer unique and often critical perspectives on their famous parents.  Given that these memoirs were written relatively recently and thus share our more contemporary views, they offer a more familiar voice and at times a much more rounded view of Bloomsbury than Bloomsbury had of itself.  As the book is no longer in print, some of the photographs (and eventually, text) are offered here to bring Bloomsbury into moreless current focus. (I have a photocopy of the book, if anyone has an interest.)
 

Angelica Garnett, 1986.  Angelica, though born Angelica Bell,  is the daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and married David “Bunny” Grant, her father’s one-time lover 25 years her senior.  She is a sculptor and author of the memoir, Deceived with Kindness.  The title is in reference to her family’s neglecting to tell her till she was 17 that Grant was her father, though everyone else had always known.
 
 

     Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell; children Julian, Miranda and Virginia; and grandchildren, 1986.   Quentin’s biography of Virginia Woolf remains not only the standard biography of VW, but a model for literary biography.  He also had a long and quite succesful career as a potter, art historian and teacher, and Bloomsbury memoirist. He died in the late 1990s.
 

  Julain and Sophie Bell, 1986.
                            Julian, named for his uncle who died in the Spanish Civil War, continues the ‘family business’
                           as an artist and art critic/historian.

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Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

Creators of a phenomenon, Chris DeWolfe, left, and Tom Anderson.

Shawn Shahani’s MySpace name is “born/again/peacoat.”

Michael Ainsworth/Associated Press

Hurricane Katrina quickly undid an effort to protect a storefront’s windows in New Orleans

John Bazemore/Associated Press

Strong winds damaged a building in Gulfport, Miss.

John Bazemore/Associated Press

A boat washed onto a highway in Gulfport, Miss. Hurricane Katrina is expected to move across southeast Louisiana and south Mississippi today, creating storm surge flooding.

Rick Wilking/Reuters

A police car was abandoned in flood waters in downtown New Orleans. National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that Katrina’s potential 15-foot storm surge, down from a feared 28 feet, was still substantial enough to cause extensive flooding.

Oscar Sosa/Bloomberg News

Capt. Rupert Lacy of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department tried to take a wind reading in Gulfport, Miss., today.

Rick Wilking/Reuters

The French Quarter was nearly deserted in the early morning hours before the storm arrived

Dave Martin/Associated Press

Blair Quintana, right, and Patrick Lampano took shelter in a doorway in the French Quarter today.

Dave Martin/Associated Press

Trees on Canal Street in New Orleans took a beating this morning.

Dave Martin/Associated Press

A van in high water in uptown New Orleans today. Heavy rains have flooded some homes to the ceilings, according to the Associated Press.

Andy Newman/Associated Press

National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield, left, and Billy Wagner, a hurricane liaison team member for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in Miami today.

August 29, 2005
High Winds and Rain Lash New Orleans and Southern Mississippi
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
and ABBY GOODNOUGH

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 – Hurricane Katrina pounded southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi as it came onshore today, carrying extremely damaging winds that began to lash New Orleans, a city perilously below sea level.

Most of the city’s 480,000 residents had already evacuated from the city but as many as 10,000 had taken shelter in the Superdome, which lost power today and started to leak rainwater, according to television and news agency reports.

The National Hurricane Center said early today that the center of the extremely dangerous hurricane was about 40 miles southeast of New Orleans and about 65 miles southwest of Biloxi. Maximum sustained winds are 135 miles per hour, having weakened from a Category 5. Hurricane force winds extend up to 125 miles from the center, and tropical storm force winds reach up to 230 miles from the center.

Power and telephone service flickered off in the city, where some residents and tourists decided to stay behind or were stranded. At a hotel near the Mississippi River about 1,000 employees, visitors and residents who were unable to evacuate holed up in the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, some with their pets.

“I understand that the storm is upon them,” said a spokeswoman for the hotel chain, Vivian Deuschl, after listening in to a call early today from the hotel’s general manager in New Orleans.

Ms. Deuschl said that this morning, they were all put into ballrooms and meeting rooms on the lower floors, away from windows. A generator was providing power, and there were movies and popcorn to keep people occupied.

In Mobile, a port city 140 miles east of New Orleans, vertical sheets of rain blew in tight circles, like whirlpools, and wind blew garbage cans down the streets this morning, though the brunt of Hurricane Katrina was not expected to move through until late afternoon.

The historic downtown, which is on Mobile Bay, faced a potential storm surge of up to 20 feet. The power failed around 7 a.m., and at least one hotel lost a piece of its metal roof, peeled off by the winds.

Katrina is expected to create storm surge flooding, with bands of very heavy rain continuing to move north across the area, the Hurricane Center said today.

Rainfall totals are expected to be at least eight to ten inches, causing flooding in the low-lying areas.

About 80 percent of New Orleans’ residents are believed to have heeded a mandatory evacuation order, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said.

“We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared,” the mayor, who issued the order to evacuate, said on Sunday. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

The city has avoided a direct hit from a powerful storm since Hurricane Betsy in 1965. In addition to the dangerous winds, Mr. Nagin said, Hurricane Katrina could bring 15 inches of rain and a storm surge of 20 feet or higher that would “most likely topple” the network of levees and canals that normally protect the bowl-shaped city from flooding.

That possibility was enough for many of the city’s 485,000 residents to heed the mayor’s call to leave, paralyzing traffic along major highways from just after daybreak on Sunday and into the evening.

“I probably won’t have a house when I go back,” Tanya Courtney, 25, who lives in the city’s French Quarter, said Sunday in Gulfport, Miss., where she and a group of friends bound for Atlanta stopped for a rest.

The approaching storm shut down much of the oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, which is responsible for one-quarter of American oil production. The price of oil rose more than $4 a barrel on Sunday.

The city

Today, howling wind from Hurricane Katrina peeled holes in the roof of the Superdome as thousands of people huddled inside, The Associated Press reported. Power was lost for a while, the A.P. said, though backup generators eventually restored it.

On Sunday, people waited five and six abreast in line for hours to get into the arena, which the city had designated as a shelter of last resort. They clutched children, blankets and pillows, oversize pieces of luggage or plastic bags filled with belongings.

“When you are on a holiday you don’t really follow these kind of things,” Neil Coffey, 35, a tourist from Britain, said Sunday as he stood in line to get into the Superdome. “We were surprised. We don’t get hurricanes like this at home.”

On Sunday outside the Superdome, which holds 70,000 people, security forces searched everyone entering for drugs, weapons and other contraband.

After crossing South Florida late last week, killing nine people as a weaker storm, Hurricane Katrina intensified over the warm waters of the gulf, growing early Sunday morning into a Category 5 storm, the strongest step on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Since records have been kept, there have only been three Category 5 storms to hit the United States – Hurricane Andrew, which ravaged Florida and Louisiana in 1992; Hurricane Camille, which cut a path through parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Virginia in 1969; and an unnamed storm that hit the Florida Keys in 1935.

President Bush, vacationing at his ranch in Texas, declared a state of emergency for the Gulf Coast, a move that cleared the way for immediate federal aid. Mr. Bush also urged people in the storm’s potential path to head for safer ground.

“We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities,” he said.

The president also participated in a videoconference on Sunday with disaster management officials who were preparing for the storm. And he spoke by telephone with the governors of the four states under immediate threat: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

In New Orleans, many restaurants and stores in the French Quarter were shuttered and hotels, almost all fully booked, struggled to accommodate visitors whose flights had been canceled. The hotels were also a refuge for many residents, who sought rooms above ground level in hope of staying dry.

“We call it a vertical evacuation,” said Joseph Fein, owner of the Court of Two Sisters, a French Quarter restaurant. Mr. Fein said the city was responding much as it had to many previous hurricane threats, but that Hurricane Katrina was “the most threatening we have seen.”

At the Omni Royal Orleans hotel, all 346 rooms were booked, with the hotel putting up about 100 employees and members of their families, said Amiri Hayden, the concierge. “Between guests who are stuck and employees who are staying here, every room is taken,” Mr. Hayden said.

Some out-of-town guests took taxis as far as Baton Rouge, 75 miles away, to find rental car agencies that were open, he said.

Louisiana state officials said that at one point during the evacuation of New Orleans on Sunday, more than 18,000 cars an hour were leaving the city.

“I think this storm is bigger than anything we have dealt with before,” Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said. “This is not a minor problem.”

On Sunday, officials in Attorney General Charles Foti’s office said they were investigating about a half-dozen cases of price gouging, including increased prices on gasoline-powered generators and hotel rooms. The Louisiana Legislature recently passed a law stiffening penalties for price gouging when hurricanes are in the gulf.

Farther east on the coast, the party atmosphere promoted by the region’s many casinos was nowhere in evidence. Casinos built on barges were dark on Sunday, and people all along the Mississippi Coast were ordered to evacuate.

In Gulfport, about 55 miles east of New Orleans, residents feared a repeat of Hurricane Camille, which smashed into the Mississippi Coast in 1969 with winds of 200 miles an hour, killing more than 250 people over several states.

“I’m afraid this is the one we’ve dreaded,” said Robert R. Latham Jr., the director of Emergency Management Operations for Mississippi. “I don’t think the scenario could be any worse for us.”

In Gulfport, the authorities made about a dozen schools and other public buildings available as shelters. But Joe Spraggins, the director of emergency operations for Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi to the east, urged residents to go to shelters only as a last resort. Most of the buildings were built years ago, Mr. Spraggins said, and not designed to withstand the anticipated winds of 140 to 150 miles an hour.

“We’re asking people to get out of the area,” he said on Sunday, “and to get out fast.”

Yet Mr. Spraggins and other emergency officials acknowledged that the hurricane could chase evacuees on a northeasterly route. Farther east in the Florida Panhandle, residents of barrier islands were urged to evacuate as Hurricane Katrina began sloshing water onto coastal roads and near homes.

“We’re all getting a little tired of going through this drill,” said Eric Landry of Pensacola, who was shuttering his house on Sunday afternoon, not quite a year after Hurricane Ivan ravaged that city. “But we’re not at the point of moving away. This is just what you have to live with.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, whose director, Michael D. Brown, flew to Baton Rouge on Sunday, was waiting to determine where the agency would need to deploy supplies and specialized personnel. A spokeswoman said FEMA had mobilized several hundred specialists, including about 20 medical teams and a smaller number of urban search and rescue teams.

The agency has also begun moving water, ice and military Meals Ready to Eat to sites in the Southeast, said the spokeswoman, Natalie Rule. Cara Every Calderon and her husband, Axel Calderon, flew to New Orleans from their home in Smithtown, N.Y., on Saturday to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. They had reserved four nights at a hotel in the French Quarter, and when Ms. Calderon called to inquire about the storm, she said, the hotel told her, “Come on down.”

The couple ended up at the Superdome, roller suitcases in tow, after finding themselves trapped.

“We’re resilient,” Ms. Calderon said. “We’re New Yorkers. But this is a little over our heads.”

Joseph B. Treaster reported from New Orleans for this article, and Abby Goodnough from Gulfport, Miss. Duwayne Escobedo contributed reporting from Pensacola, Fla., Marko Georgiev from New Orleans, Jeremy Alford from Baton Rouge and Thomas J. Lueck from New York.

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Detroit News file photo

Brian Jones, top left, drowned in 1969, the year this photo was taken. Included are Jagger, clockwise from bottom left, Wyman, Richards and Watts.

Mark Seliger

Charlie Watts, 64, from left, Keith Richards, 61, Mick Jagger, 62, and Ron Wood, 58, have kept rock and roll alive for generations.

Rock of ages
Rolling Stones concert raises old question about geriatric rockers
By Tom Long / The Detroit News

Who’s too old to rock and roll?
It’s a long-lingering question being revived once again this week as the Rolling Stones head into town to play Comerica Park. Old jokes about old rockers are everywhere. Does Mick wear Depends? Is Charlie on Lipitor? Has Keith had a blood transfusion?
OK, the last one isn’t really about being a senior citizen. Keith Richards was probably ripe for blood transfusions at the age of 26. Still, you get the drift.
And what about the audience? Will there be backups in the aisles because of people with walkers? Will prune juice be the hot item at the concession stand?
The people who used to drive to concerts in VW vans or their parents’ Chevy Bel Airs will now drive up in SUVs better suited to service in Iraq, in BMWs that cost more than their first homes or in the same sort of limos that Mick and Keith will be arriving in (sans the blood transfusion equipment, assumedly).
Let’s face it: Rock isn’t exactly a young thing anymore. Even if it was born on the enthusiasm of young things, rock has gone gray; it’s gone bald; it’s on its fourth liposuction treatment, and it’s just about ready to apply for Social Security.
Pete Townshend of The Who, the guy who wrote “Hope I die before I get old,” is now 60. He obviously didn’t get his wish. The guy who sang “I’m Eighteen,” Detroit’s own Alice Cooper, is 57. Crikey, the average age of the original Ramones, a band that didn’t even emerge until the mid-’70s, is 53, and three of them are dead.
As For Mick Jagger of the Stones, he’s 62. Keith Richards is 61. Charlie Watts, 64. Are they too old for rock and roll?
Their new album, “A Bigger Bang,” comes out Sept. 5. It’s the band’s 29th studio album! The Rolling Stones have outlasted the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union, punk rock, grunge rock, disco, Beanie Babies and three of the four Beatles.
Shouldn’t there be some statute of limitations for rockers? Or at least a physical exam that performers have to pass before they’re allowed to go on tour? Some universally agreed-upon contract that says no one older than the age of 60 can wear leopard-skin pants, no one who’s had triple-bypass surgery can sing about hoochie koo, and if you have to use a wheelchair, you can’t go onstage?
Yes, it would all be terribly discriminatory, but it might also save a generation that took its rock and roll very seriously from serious embarrassment.
It’s not the same with other forms of popular music, of course. Sinatra was belting out “My Way” long after his vocal cords had left the building. Blues giants such as John Lee Hooker and B. B. King are venerated in their later years. And jazz pianist Dave Brubeck will be headlining this year’s Detroit International Jazz Festival come Labor Day. Dave is 84.
But rock and roll was, and still is, the music of youth. It’s about rebellion and trendiness, pop culture and fad fashion, rage against the machine and the simultaneous frustration of being young and powerless and young and strong.
In fact, the Stones wrote one of the most essential rock songs ever, “Satisfaction,” which was actually about youthful dissatisfaction.
Problem is, the Stones look awfully darn satisfied these days. In fact, they’ve been pretty darn satisfied looking for going on four decades now. These guys have lived most of their lives as multimillionaires.
It’s doubtful that most of the people at the Stones’ show will be needy sorts either. The cheapest tickets are going for $60, the high-priced seats are $400 and the scalped seats will likely go for the approximate value of a Learjet.
So we’re talking about millionaires entertaining people who are, if not outright wealthy, probably at least plenty comfortable.
Are they too old to rock and roll?
Heck, no.
Or at least they’re not too old to pretend — because rock has always been about fantasy. And the fantasy continues.
All those suburban kids who flocked to Woodstock or Chuck Berry concerts, who grew their hair long or played in rock bands themselves, who put Clash posters up in their bedrooms and played air guitar along with Queen, Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, they were never really full-time worshippers at the altar of rock and roll.
They visited the church of rock nightly or weekly; maybe these days it’s monthly or every other year. But rock was always a flight away from reality for most.
The overwhelming majority of people get jobs as accountants and sales people. As cops and nurses and cooks and (gulp) writers.
Few people are really rebels, but most have some rebellion in their hearts. Despite its creaky knees and failing eyesight, rock still offers a medium for sharing that rebellion, for expressing youthful frustrations that never really fade away as time moves on, for remembering the sheer, arm-thrusting, head-shaking joy of losing the moment in rhythm and noise.
Rocking out for the great majority is really remembering rocking out these days, and what’s wrong with that? And if the best band on earth for bringing back those memories and rekindling those flames happens to be a bunch of guys in their 60s, so what?
Who’s too old to rock and roll?
Only those who are dead and those who can’t remember.
But Mick, please, no leopard-skin pants.
You can reach Tom Long at (313) 222-8879 or tlong@detnews.com.

August 28, 2005
Jeans Engineering
By ROB WALKER
Prps Jeans

By the 1950′s, Paul Fussell suggested in his book ”Uniforms,” wearing blue jeans ”became one of the pop styles of anti-fashion.” And thus, unavoidably, jeans promptly became ”just as much a uniform as the dark suit.” Since then, fashion types have tried to liberate denim from bourgeois casual-Friday uniformity; a current attempt comes from the growing swarm of ”premium” and ”superpremium” jeans.

Donwan Harrell, a founder of the clothing brand Akademiks, is a denim fanatic and can go on in some detail about his newest project, a premium denim line called Prps, which includes jeans that cost $250 to $400 a pair. The brand’s target buyer is not the person who rejects fashion but the denim supersnob: the type who studies interior stitching and other things that no one else notices. The production run for Prps jeans is quite small, and they are available only in men’s sizes, although there will be nine new styles for the fall. Prps is sold in boutiques and a few high-end department stores and is equal parts reaction to and example of the present denim frenzy.

Earlier iterations of the high-end jeans idea were mostly about slapping an established designer’s name (Calvin Klein, etc.) onto the back pocket. Tim Bess, who covers men’s wear for the Doneger Group, a fashion consulting firm, says the contemporary fancy-jeans consumer wants something different. The premium hits — True Religion, G-Star and 7 for All Mankind — made ”detailing more important than the actual logo,” he says. On the other hand, he notes, their success ”has a lot to do with the back pocket,” since the designs are recognizable to those in the know. And, really, isn’t a distinct pocket the same thing as a logo?

Still, one of the core principles of premium jeans is the inherent quality of the garment. And Harrell offered me a detailed chart to demonstrate exactly why his jeans cost so much. For starters, mass-market jeans are made in China, and many premium rivals are made in California, but Prps are manufactured in Japan. So what? Well, the Japanese manufacturer uses Levi’s looms from the 1960′s. These are less efficient than more modern looms but produce a fabric with a stronger edge. Along with a cutting process that wastes a lot of material, this helps to drive up the cost of fabric per jean to $30 (compared with $5.25 in China).

The cloth-making process, Harrell says, was inspired by the denim worn by actual workers before jeans became middle-class leisure wear. So were the details that seem to be the most crucial component of premium denim: the flaws. The process of making denim look 2, 5 or even 20 years old is touted by some jeans makers in long-winded tags that seem designed to ”educate” the consumer — like a pair of Paper Denim & Cloth jeans explaining that ”individually applied hand abrasion and scraping,” among other things, were inflicted on the denim for an ”average processing time” of 6.4 hours. Harrell has studied his own worn-out jeans and the ones worn by mechanics he deals with while drag-racing to guide the production of holes, fading and even the occasional ”organic” greasy smear. This process, he says, pushes production costs to $95 a pair.

Chinese and American-made jeans (produced for $19.20 and $43 a pair in Harrell’s estimation) introduce flaws with far less care, he argues, pointing to creases and marks in various rival denims that are ”not realistic.” Only by faithfully replicating the damage caused by physical work can the haute-couture demands of dedicated denim connoisseurs be satisfied.

Bess, the men’s-wear consultant, suspects that high-end denim is poised for a shakeout, with the likes of Old Navy imitating premium tropes that will probably satisfy people who aren’t experts (that is, the overwhelming majority of the shopping public). Harrell intends to keep Prps premium and rare. Interestingly, he makes no claim that a pair of Prps might actually last longer than other jeans. But while denim fanatics may like the idea of a stronger fabric, the reality is that they will move onto new styles long before actual durability becomes an issue. For them, settling for anything less than the latest premium breakthrough would be like being out of uniform.

E-mail: consumed@nytimes.com.

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Brian Cronin

August 21, 2005
The Bones of Summer
By JENNIFER ALLEN
Los Angeles

AT the peak of summer, my oldest son broke his leg. He’s 8. In a full leg cast, he dragged himself around the house for weeks. The beauty of summer had lured him and then dared him to play his heart out. And he did: he leaped off our porch, hurdled a bed of roses and aimed his airborne body for a landing on our cushy California lawn. Instead, he fell on a rusty-nailed railroad tie.

With the snap of two bones, he instantly crossed over the threshold into a new kind of summer. He left behind those safe, sunny, spoon-fed days and entered a new realm altogether, one that will lead inevitably to more independence, greater maturity – and the promise of increasing danger.

My son is growing up on the same streets that my brothers and I played on as kids back in the 70′s. It was here, one summer evening when I was out skateboarding, that I saw a car hit my bike-riding brother. The beat-up Chevy knocked him right off his bike. He held his head with both hands and squatted down in a crouch. An old man got out of the car and asked, “Are you O.K., son? You O.K.?”

My brother shot up, and yelled, “Shut up!” before running down a nearby alley. He was gone for hours, returning home long past bedtime, glassy-eyed and probably with a minor concussion.

Those summers my greatest fear was that the sound of sirens meant that one of my three older surf-searching brothers had fallen down the cliffs that led to the bay below our home. Brush fires didn’t scare me. But the nerve-burning screams of a brother calling out for, “Mom!” never failed to unhinge me because I knew what would come next: The trip to the emergency room.

My mother would place me in the back of our car, alongside my sometimes crying, sometimes bleeding, sometimes vomiting brother, as she raced us along the windy cliff roads to the local hospital.

In the E.R., I learned that standing outside the gauze curtains did not necessarily spare me from hearing what was happening on the other side as the doctor fixed whatever was torn or cut, swollen or broken. At the end of one particularly brutal summer, the nurses seemed to know us all by name.

Our mother seldom left us alone. But when she did she didn’t hire a babysitter. Maybe she thought we would watch over one another, and in some ways, we did. I remember one night, sitting with our dog, on a lifesaver on the steps of the pool. My brothers were taking turns running and slipping and jumping onto a half-inflated canvas raft in the pool. Each time, their heels would land on the flimsy cushion and they’d fall backward, nearly slicing their skulls on the tile edges along the pool.

Soon, it became a competition to see who could surf smoothly from one side of the pool to the other, and then it became a shoving match (who could shove the other off the raft), and then it became a free-for-all.

It was then that our dog, the only voice of reason, barked. A hunting dog, she seemed always to be able to smell the increasing potential for unwanted blood. She barked some more.

Game over. Time for bed. We all raced into the house, each victor slamming the sliding glass door behind him on his way in – until one brother somersaulted through it. He made it through, fine. Not a scratch. But sprayed a lot of glass. The next minute, we were all working together, cleaning up the mess and writing a note in crayon to mom and dad – “Watch your step!” – before tucking our tired, chlorined heads into bed.

One summer bled into the next. With my brothers, I think the general rule was: Why wait for an injury when you can make one happen?

For instance: Why walk down the cliffs along the well-worn path to the beach below? How about making your own path down the crumbling cliffs? How about jumping down them, like a skier, but without any skis, dodging rocks and sage and weeds?

One morning, a brother boasted how the night before he’d survived falling down the entire stretch of the cliffs without sustaining a single severed anything. A few days later, he lay on the couch, with an ice pack on his jaw. It was early morning. He claimed it was a surfing accident, but I didn’t believe him. Knowing him, he had probably been fine-tuning his cliff-jumping skills. An X-ray soon revealed a broken jaw.

From then on, he was pure frustration. Nostrils flared; he seemed to labor to even breathe. And while my mother served him raw-egg smoothies, the rest of us enjoyed juicy steaks at the family dinner table. I couldn’t stop asking him, “Can I get you anything?” Part of me was trying to help, but another part was trying to see if I could actually understand a single word he was trying to say through his newly shifted metal-tied teeth. But before I could completely comprehend him, he was gone, off to Pennsylvania to endure, with his mouth still wired shut, the physical and emotional trials of summer football camp.

Yet another instance: Why drive to the beach, when you can skateboard your way down the single-lane, blind-curve, hairpin canyon road – shirtless, barefoot, a towel around your neck, your surfboard under your arm? I recall riding in the car with my mother and seeing my brother skating, swaying, taking up the entire width of the road. For a moment, I was entranced by his grace, and then I remembered the grotesque surfing injuries that preceded this moment of ease. Earlier that summer, his lower teeth had pierced through his bottom lip. More recently, coming up for air after a wipeout, his longboard landed on the bridge of his nose.

FOR that particular break, I watched the doctor tweezer several inches of spaghetti-thin bandages out of my brother’s nose. When my brother winced, the doctor handed him a tin pan to hold onto to catch the soggy, bloody fabric that had been keeping his nose from dripping these past few days of no-surf, no-waves boredom.

And now, as we sped past my brother skating along the road, it occurred to me that he was over it. And so was my mom. She knew he was a big boy, capable of managing his own board down the path to whatever future might lie ahead. My mom didn’t even slow down to see if he wanted a ride. She simply honked her horn. He vaguely acknowledged us, lifting his chin in the breeze, lost in his own back-in-the-groove trance.

And so, summers went on, until my brothers grew up, grew safer and eventually grew proud of their past adventures. Scars became stripes. Broken bones, badges.

I’ve seen this in my own son. He’s now bragging to his two little brothers, “I broke two bones, not one!” Suffering is short-lived. Second-guessing is for losers. He’s already discovered alternative uses for his crutches – as blocking dummies for one brother, as objects on a collision course for another.

But he’s discovered something else, too: accountability. “Mom, it’s all my fault, I should have looked where I was going,” he told me on the way back from our first journey to the E.R. together. His short, painful summer leap, it seems, took him to a new place, one that’s a little farther from childhood and a little closer to all-grown-up than he could have ever possibly imagined.

Jennifer Allen is the author of “Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a Football Coach’s Daughter.”

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NORM: TV’s ‘Las Vegas’ kicks off LV style

Neil Sedaka got last laugh. Lara Flynn Boyle, above, and Rachael Leigh Cook, below, joining “Las Vegas” cast.

It’s official: NBC Universal has a Sept. 24 kickoff party planned at the Palms for the third season of “Las Vegas.”

The promotional bash at Rain nightclub will also feature a release party for the Season Two-Uncut and Uncensored DVD and the Treadstone Records release of the “Las Vegas” soundtrack.

“Las Vegas,” with newcomers Rachael Leigh Cook and Lara Flynn Boyle, launches its third season Sept. 19.

The DVD features behind-the-scenes footage, a gag reel from the first two seasons and a featurette on Las Vegas high rollers.

Last Laugh

Opening acts walk a fine line in show business.

Neil Sedaka tells Billboard magazine about a Las Vegas experience that went sour but turned out to be a blessing.

In 1975, Sedaka was the opening act for the Carpenters at the Riviera. “It was at the height of my comeback with ‘Laughter in the Rain.’ I was like a dynamo — jumping, dancing and singing.

“The audience went wild, and I had several standing ovations. The next I knew, I was fired by Richard Carpenter, and my name was immediately taken off the marquee! He said that it was because I introduced a couple of celebs in the audience. Baloney! I just got too many standing ovations.

“But [I] thank Richard. It caused such a sensation, I have been headlining ever since!”

The Scene and Heard

Among the celebrities in town for the MAGIC clothing expo, which opens Monday at the Las Vegas Convention Center: Nicky Hilton has a midnight fashion show for her Chick fashion line Tuesday at Pure nightclub (Caesars Palace), and “American Idol” contestant LaToya London is promoting her new album, “Love & Life” (which comes out Sept. 20) at the 3e Trading/Playboy Merchandise Booth. She’s signing from 2-5:30 p.m. Monday and 2-4 p.m. Tuesday.

Bob O’Neil, a co-owner of Triple George Grill, loves the location of the new downtown restaurant: On one side, the Celebrity gay show club, and on the other, the rowdy Hogs & Heifers biker bar.

“We’re thinking about putting up bleachers across Third Street and charging admission,” he said.

Las Vegans Melissa Camarillo and Rebecca Jaeger-Boehmer from The Firm Public Relations have carved out a claim to fame. After seeing Tom Cruise‘s couch-jumping antics during Oprah Winfrey‘s show, while proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes, the PR duo coined the phrase “jump the couch” and submitted it to urbandictionary.com. The Web site made it the word of the day July 29, and People magazine made it Catchphrase of the Week in the Aug. 15 issue. The site gives the definition as “a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end.”

Sightings

Renee Taylor and Joe Bologna, who opened their Broadway comedy “If You Leave Me … I’m Going With You” at the Plaza a week ago, dining at Stefano’s (Golden Nugget) on Thursday night. The Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated husband and wife team celebrated their 40th anniversary two weeks ago in Hollywood. … KISS frontman Gene Simmons, being presented with a birthday cake decorated with a likeness of his tongue-flicking face in KISS makeup at the Palms’ ghostbar Thursday night. Celebrating with him was Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, along with rockers Dave Navarro and Jerry Cantrell, who has been opening for Nickelback but is not in the group, as was incorrectly mentioned here Friday.

The Punch Line

“We can’t figure out what to do with (Saddam Hussein). The U.S. doesn’t know if we should put him in prison or just put him back in charge of the place.” — David Letterman

Norm Clarke can be reached at 383-0244 or norm@reviewjournal.com.

My single most overriding obsession in this life is to perhaps leave this world in some significant way, a better place than I found it.

There is nothing that recommends a parent as much as his or her judicious guardianship of the principles and values which are the foundation for the quality of life we have enjoyed in America over many generations. Unless we gage our actions and commitment through the prism of future ramifications, then we are shortchanging our children and their children’s children. What decisions we make and what actions we take now will have far greater impact on future generations than many of us realize. So even though the challenges are not completely threatening in any person’s particular circumstances, it does not absolve that individual from contributing in a way mindful of the world and it’s sustainability in generations to come.

Michael P. Whelan