J.Cruel
Constant. Sartorial. Wonderment.Archive for February, 2009
Translations: Bird
Sometimes we realize that fashion can be hard to understand. Lots of things are hard to understand. Chekhov. Metro North time tables. Cereal boxes. A reader alerted us to a recent shopping review in The New York Times’ formidable Style section. She found the review dense, confusing, and devoid of any actual information about clothes. As a public service, we the editors took it upon ourselves to offer up a translation of the offending article. It’s a little service we like to call J.Cruel Into English™
Envelope of Dreams
We loved the Academy Awards in our youth with a kind of fervor that we otherwise only lavished on our nanny, our pony, trips to the Ritz for tea, the monkey Father brought us from India, and tantrums. Now, however, we watch every year and wonder if our childhood self could possibly have been so gauche as to enjoy such a spectacle of ego and inanity. Read the rest of this entry »
She Walks in Beauty
He loved her, Martine. But she was a star beyond his sky. Oh Martine, he whispered, lighting a candle in the town square, you are the most famous weightlifter in all of Luxembourg. It was true. She was three times the winner of the Euro-Centraale Lift-Off, seven times the champion of the Cote Basque Invigoracion, and the unchallenged victor of the Luxembourgeois Weightloffte Contesten. And now she lay beautifully on a bower in the town square, surrounded by dozens of Luxembourgian hydrangeas, unconscious since the accident
The government had released two dozen swans to celebrate Martine’s victory in the Grande Barbelline Olympia. And as the swans climbed past the treeline, towards the Luxembourg Alps, one of them became entangled in the engine of a passing zepplin, which fell out of the sky like a hot coal and landed several feel away from Martine, who was knocked unconscious by the swan.
He visited her each day in the town square, hydrangeas covering the nasty swan wound. He cared for her swan wound, which was fiercely purple and smelled like a moldy rose. And when he could feel her breath grow stronger, he clipped the sleeves from her sweater, and pushed two tiny barbells into her palm, each no bigger than a cannonball. Lift Martine, he whispered. Oh you shall lift again!
Martine eyes fluttered open for a moment, but it was too late. Once it knew love, the swan poison was quick.
Fabienne vest in sable. Marie-Laure pant.
