Missing Bruges: bridging

Missing Bruges: tourist view, view of tourists

Missing Bruges: allee

Missing Bruges: dusk

Missing Bruges: Beguinage

 

Missing Bruges: belfry

Missing Bruges: belfry

 

Missing Bruges: map

Missing Bruges: looks good

Madonna in Manhattan

Madonna 2006 tour: Confessions On A Dance Floor

World Cup: world-class hair

If only Serbia and Montengro played as well as forward Danijel Ljuboja’s hair looks, they would still be alive in the World Cup. We especially like the look of Ljuboja’s locks when pictured next to the world’s roundest ball. Separated at birth?

 

Photos: 6 rows above: 1st row: Xavier, Portugal; David Beckham, United Kingdom. 2nd row: Umit Davala, Turkey. 3rd row: Clint Mathis, USA; Taribo West, Nigeria; Ahn Jung Wang, Korea. 4th row: Ronaldinho, Brazil; Carles Puyol, Spain. 5th row: Kazayuki Toda, Japan. 6th row: Ronaldo, Brazil

Photos: Loco, Angola; Christian Wilhelmsson, Sweden

Now that we have seen 16 of the 32 teams in the World Cup, some early favorites are emerging for the coveted Worst Hair award.

Angola defender Loco takes the Ronaldo-circa-2002 look to a new level with the half-cut dreadlock look. Do you suppose he got a discount for only having 50% of his hair cut?

Sweden’s Christian Wilhelmsson takes us back to the 80s with an impressive flowing rat tail (couldn’t find an actual picture of it, but this one gives you an idea of what that dude is all about.) that could very well poke out an eye or two in his next match.

Who will emerge to challenge these players for this prestigious honor? We should know more after the next few days.

Djibril Cissé, France

Bleach It Like Beckham

By ERIC WILSON
New York Times | June 15, 2006

THERE was nothing exciting about David Beckham’s hair.

After England’s 1-0 victory in its World Cup opener against Paraguay on Saturday, won by a free kick mistakenly rebounded into the goal by the opposing captain, the team was exhausted. A bigger disappointment, for aesthetically minded soccer fans, was that David Beckham’s tresses — normally the beau ideal of the soccer world’s array of aggressively directional haircuts — were just tired. His previous dos have included a frosted fauxhawk, blond cornrows and a confection of rooster’s peaks, but on Saturday Mr. Beckham’s hair was, like his game, neatly prostrate and minimally styled. Mere gel, in soccer, is a letdown.

”The British players are tidied up now,” said Howard McLaren, the creative director of the Bumble & Bumble salon in Manhattan. Was there a tinge of disappointment in his voice at the recollection of what Mr. Beckham’s fauxhawk did for men’s grooming during the last World Cup in 2002, when the look was widely imitated?

”If you look at the long hair of players from Argentina and Brazil, they are constantly pulling it out of their mouths, which can be distracting,” Mr. McLaren added. ”But they are willing to pay that price for the way their hair looks.”

When you are viewed from overhead on a television set for hours on end, hairstyle is substance.

American sports fans are largely unaccustomed to the personal style that is routinely on display at the World Cup. But from now until the final game on July 9, the soccer peacocks will be difficult to ignore. Viewers will see glimpses of Angola’s defender, Loco, who wears only a beanstalk patch of braids sprouting from his forehead; Christian Wilhelmsson, a midfielder from Sweden, who has unruly blond spikes and a retro rat’s tail; Danijel Ljuboja, a forward from Serbia and Montenegro whose dye design recalls the white stripes of a skunk; and Fernando Torres, a forward from Spain, who arrived in Germany with a bleach-mottled mullet. When the Japanese team lined up against Australia on Monday, the field looked like a hairstylist convention — progressive dye jobs versus chippy spikes.

That so much attention is paid to players’ hair and to the customary postgame swapping of jerseys no doubt contributes to soccer’s standing in the United States as a vanity sport, even though it is the most popular one in other parts of the world. But with the global exposure of the World Cup, players who are famous in their home countries — and emulated by local fans — are now influencing style around the world, setting trends, endorsing designer brands and appearing in advertising campaigns.

”There’s a euphoria about soccer players like I’ve never seen here before,” said Timothy Everest, the London tailor who outfitted Mr. Beckham for his wedding. ”When they were doing the walkabout here before the World Cup, it was reminiscent of the Beatles.”

Soccer players are passionately studied on and off the field by billions of fans, and designers and athletic clothing brands have responded by courting the most stylish ones. Mr. Beckham has been both celebrated and reviled as soccer’s most famous clotheshorse, capable of igniting debates on diamond earrings and multistrand beaded necklaces for men, but he is not alone.

There were fashionista footballers before him — George Best and Charlie George in England and Charlie Miller in Scotland, to name a few. And many more have since turned up in the front rows of fashion shows and posed seductively for men’s wear designers, pushing Mr. Beckham, the once unrivaled star of metrosexuality, to fashion’s equivalent of the bench.

”I really like Hide Nakata,” said Italo Zucchelli, the men’s wear designer for Calvin Klein. Mr. Zucchelli is Italian and therefore is familiar with the international stars of soccer, among them Hidetoshi Nakata, a 29-year-old midfielder playing for Japan.

Mr. Nakata was a star player in the Asian leagues before he was recruited to an Italian team in 1998, and his style and interest in fashion often draw comparisons to Mr. Beckham. After Mr. Nakata began turning up at the runway shows of Giorgio Armani in Milan and Dior in Paris, often wearing racy T-shirts under a blazer or a fur-trimmed bomber jacket, he became known as the ”Asian Becks.”

”Beyond the fact he is a really beautiful man, he has a very nice style,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”He plays with fashion like all of them now, but in a cooler, more sophisticated way than many others.”

Other designers and fashion houses — John Galliano, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and H&M — have cited soccer as inspiration for their collections, some claiming that soccer players have more style than other athletes. When Mr. Armani announced this month that he would outfit the English team for their appearances off the field at the World Cup, he said, ”Footballers are today’s new style leaders.” This is a bold endorsement from a designer who has usually expended his marketing energy on dressing blue-chip movie stars.

Mr. Armani cast the Brazilian midfielder Kaká in his new ads for Emporio Armani, and Andriy Shevchenko, a forward from Ukraine, in an ad for Armani Collezioni. Mr. Shevchenko, 29, has an interest in promoting Mr. Armani’s designs, as he also operates the Armani Collezioni and Armani Jeans franchises in Kiev. Dolce & Gabbana, which designs uniforms for the Milan team’s regular season, has cast five of its members in a provocative new underwear campaign, posing in a locker room.

Greg Williams, a partner at the media consulting company art/words/pictures and a former editor of Arena magazine, wrote about the relationship between soccer players and fashion for the catalog of an exhibition on sports and culture that is opening on Wednesday in Florence called ”Human Game: Winners and Losers.” Mr. Williams compared the athletes’ celebrity to that of actors and musicians: ”Fifteen years ago you’d hire a young white rapper with a six-pack named Marky Mark. Today you hire a Swedish soccer player with a panther tattooed on his abdomen.”

Mr. Zucchelli noted that Calvin Klein hired that model, Freddie Ljungberg, for its underwear campaign because soccer players were becoming more like media stars, especially in Europe where the company is expanding. The ads not only enhanced Mr. Ljungberg’s celebrity, they digitally altered his physique. (No, not that. Mr. Ljungberg’s panther tattoo is actually on his back.)

”Playing with fashion allows you to create a character out of yourself,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”People respond to that.”

The current interest in soccer players echoes the intense branding that has become pervasive in sporting events with a high international profile. Zinédine Zidane of the French team is the face of Dior’s Eau Savage, and Lukas Podolski of Germany sells Axe body spray.

Certainly the athletes are aware that a commercially appealing package can reap financial benefits. ”What we have seen, especially in Europe, is this sort of fashion-conscious persona many of them have created,” Mr. Zucchelli said. ”There is this very hairstyled player with supercontrived, huge sunglasses and a lot of jewelry. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.”

If the players were not so talented, the level of style competitiveness would threaten to eclipse the sport. Ronaldinho, the Brazilian held up as the world’s most talented player, wears his hair long and wavy, pulled back to reveal gaudy earrings with his number in diamonds, and adorably pulls his cuffs down over his hands during warm-ups.

Djibril Cissé, a 24-year-old striker from France, is among the most visually imposing players, often appearing with platinum-dyed facial hair. He is also wont to remove his shirt during play (and shorts in the case of a pinup calendar) to reveal a set of angel’s wings tattooed onto his back. Mr. Cissé was sidelined from the World Cup last week when he broke his leg.

There are American athletes who are known for their flamboyant style — Dennis Rodman, the Williams sisters or Johnny Weir — but in this country there is a puritanical tendency to play down individuality. Think of the constant nattering about hem lengths in basketball and resistance to facial hair in baseball, which is even codified by the New York Yankees’ stubble ban, known informally as the Mattingly rule.

Soccer players embrace their eccentricities, a tendency that Mr. McLaren of Bumble & Bumble suggests is explained by the pride of those with humble roots who have achieved international success.

”Usually it is the normal kids who become talented,” he said. ”It’s not like a tennis star whose parents spend millions training them to become a star. It’s the more common person who has contact with the streets at a young age. They are exposed more to street-level culture. They tend to pick up on that a bit more.”

It’s a theory, but it does not take into account the styles born of other sports. Just Tuesday, a television report noted a rise in sales of capri pants in Spain, linking the phenomenon to the tennis victory of Rafael Nadal. He wore them at the French Open on Sunday.

Hair History: 2002 World Cup

Hair in the many colours of the rainbow. Hair in all shapes and sizes. No hair.
However you look at it, hair was the fashion statement of the 2002 World Cup.The short back and sides is out – except for losing teams. The Mohawk, the chin lock, the skinhead, the dreadlock, the 1970’s long flowing locks look – even some styles you’d never dare wear in the streets – were in.It seemed as though a player was as likely to arrive at a game with hair dye in his kit as his football boots.

Wacky Aki
What does it all mean? Is it just vanity or something deeper?

Top Japanese hair stylist Aki Watanabe, who does the hair of Japan’s French coach, Philippe Troussier, when he is in Tokyo, says that in the modern game hair has become the only way for a player to standout and express his individuality.Watanabe, whose salon is a magnet for Japanese and foreigners alike, says that as a result of the explosion of money in football through marketing and advertising contracts what a player wears is tightly controlled.“The only thing he has control over is his hair,” Watanabe told Reuters. “If he wants to make a statement that he is a warrior, he wears a mohawk. If he wants to say to opponents ‘Beware I am a hard man’, he shaves his head.”In short, hair can get you noticed! Watanabe says that in the era of football globalisation, where players have become mercenaries seeking the highest wages anywhere in the world, a stand-out hair style is a way to be noticed by talent scouts.“If you’re trying to break into the big time, you change your hair style or colour so you leap out from the other players on the field, not just with your skill but your look,” he added.

Chin lock

The award for the standout hair – singular – went to Nigerian defender Efe Sodje (pictured right): an example of a player still trying to be noticed and get into the big money bracket.Sodje, who used to play for Crewe Alexandra, sported a chin lock. The single-strand of beard, in the national colour of green, jutted out from his face at a gravity-defying, guaranteed to attract an opponent’s attention. “My wife spent hours doing it for me,” he said.

Beckham’s locks
Even for an established star like England captain and fashion icon David Beckham, his hair style causes as much comment as his ball skills.

In fact, he sets trends and he’s been copied by the likes of Japan’s Kazuyuki Toda (pictured left).Beckham’s ever-changing hairstyles always attract media attention. When Beckham, wearing a modified mohawk with a black stripe down the middle of his blond hair, was replaced midway through England’s 1-1 draw with Sweden, one fan commented: “He was obviously having a bad hair day.”

The Mullet returns
Even long hair is beginning to make a comeback both on and off the pitch.

Senegal’s French coach, Bruno Metsu (pictured right), and Cameroon’s German coach, Winfried Schaefer, both favoured shoulder-length locks.England’s goalkeeper David Seaman even joined in the anti-fashion race by sporting a ponytail for the last few seasons.

Just dying to play
Hair colour, not style, has become the hallmark of 2002 World Cup co-hosts Japan and South Korea as much as their rise as Asian football powers.The Japan team sported some seven hair colours from several shades of brown, via the bright crimson, once orange, of midfielder Kazuyuki Toda to the silver locks of midfielder Junichi Inamoto, hero of Japan’s surprise 2-2 draw with Belgium. South Korea’s multi-coloured hair took the team all the way to the semis!

Hair stylist Watanabe credits Japan’s Hidetoshi Nakata with starting the present worldwide craze for standout hair.The naturally black haired Nakata dyed his hair red at the 1998 World Cup in France to catch the eye of European scouts.“A change of hair made all the difference to Nakata’s career,” says Watanabe.

Cool up top
Most players on both teams sport the clean cut, short back and sides that would make a 1950’s school sportsmaster proud but is unlikely to provoke a squeal from a 21st century teenage girl.

“He is just so kakkoii,” schoolgirl Saori Shinohara said on the eve of the tournament, using the Japanese word for “cool” to describe England captain Beckham.“Everything,” she replied, when asked what it was about David Beckham that she liked.So the lesson is – to get ahead in the World Cup, get a hairstyle!

Red vs Blue Redux

A Country Divided: Examining the State of Our Union

George Stephanopoulos and ABC News Look at America’s Political Polarization

June 30, 2006 — – Members of Congress may not come to the floor armed with pistols as they did in the days leading up to the Civil War, but their words are as toxic as any time since then. And we are — in many ways — a more divided nation than any time since then.

In interviews with political leaders, media analysts, and people in communities around the country, ABC News found what appears to be a new phenomenon: the polarization is feeding on itself. It’s not just politicians, business or religious leaders, liberals or conservatives — or the media: It’s each of us. And it’s alarming.

“The Big Sort” — Surrounding Ourselves With Ourselves

Bill Bishop, a reporter for the Austin-American Statesman newspaper in Texas, conducted a three-year investigation into America’s divide. Bishop and statistician Bob Cushing reached back over the last 14 presidential election cycles and counted Republican and Democratic votes in all 3,100 American counties.

The research yielded some startling information. “There’s a steady trend line from ‘76 to 2004 of the country becoming, pulling apart, becoming more politically segregated. We began to see this pattern that we eventually end up calling “The Big Sort,” said Bishop.

Montclair, N.J., is one of the many communities across the country that illustrates “the big sort” that Bishop and Cushing observed. A generation ago the community’s vote was split 50-50 Democrat – Republican. But the 2004 election was a blowout: 78 percent for John Kerry.

In Essex County where Montclair is situated, the margin of victory has steadily widened in every presidential election since 1976. It’s happening across the country. In 2004, the overwhelming majority of counties were decided by margins of 20 percent or more. The number of Americans living in these landslide counties has doubled over the last 30 years. Today, half of all Americans are living in polarized communities.

And to the political scientists who say this notion that we’re divided more divided than ever is just an absolute myth, Bishop says: “I would say spend some time in Lubbock, Texas and then spend some time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You have to look at the street level. You have to look at where people live. It’s not states. States are the wrong way to look at how people live. People live in communities. It’s at that community level that people are becoming more segregated.”

Bishop says part of it is just a natural part of social interactions. “Given a choice, people will choose to read, be among, watch, live with, worship with, vote with, people who are like themselves,” he said.

What’s Pushing Us Apart?

In “State Of the Union” ABC News conducts two experiments that illustrate the impact of “the big sort.” In the first, Cass Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor, conducts a remarkable experiment for ABC News that demonstrates that like-minded people are pushed to more and more extreme positions when they group together. It has profound and troubling implications for the country. In the second experiment, University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz demonstrates the impact of so-called “shout TV,” which is the media manifestation of “the big sort.”

She shows that viewers are very likely to misunderstand those who disagree with them when they watch people shouting at each other. And the ongoing civilized debate that is a cornerstone of American democracy can be lost in the process. All of this is accelerated by the internet. About eight million people log on to political blogs, or partisan web journals every day, creating virtual communities of like-minded partisans who demonize each other.

Some politicians, partisans themselves, see the problem but not the solution. Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., tells Stephanopoulos: “I think that culturally right now we have a system in which we don’t have a broad conversation among people who don’t agree with each other.

And one of the biggest challenges I think we face as a nation is how do we create those spaces. Supposedly the Senate, the body on which I serve, is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world&It’s not happening.” Republic North Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham adds: “The best evidence I think of how polarized America has become is that it makes news when Democrats and Republicans do something of substance together and that truly is a shame. We’ve gone from the Senate being presumed to be above party politics to where the news is we rejected party politics.”

Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

Temari sushi

Uploaded to Flickr by chotda.

Temari sushi, a super simple way to make sushi at home. just lay down a square of plastic wrap (or cloth handkerchief, if you must), place your topping in the middle then about 2 tablespoonfuls of sushi rice on top of that. gather the corners of the wrap or hanky, twist, and form a tight ball. sushi!

From back to front: shiso (perilla) leaf with salmon roe, kim chi, ika cuttlefish roll with shiso, salmon, yellowtail, seaweed and roe. 

Barcelona no? Say it ain’t so…

 

Barcelona Daily Photo | Top: Tibadabo, June 30, 2006 | Bottom: Invisible man at Port Olimpic, June 27, 2006

<Following excerpt from longer article>

Guardian Unlimited | April 29, 2006 

Is Puglia the new Tuscany? Could Ibiza become the next Provence? And what does it all mean anyway? Simon Mills on the fickle world of travel trends

Trendsetting jetters … mining those places ‘on the cusp of discovery’.

Photo: Getty

What makes a hip resort? Having been around a bit, I thought I had a pretty good idea. But, just to make doubly sure, I phoned up Jeroen Bergmans, travel editor of Wallpaper* magazine, the upscale, hip-hunter’s bible.Over the years, I explained to Jeroen, I had stayed in any number of adobe boutique hotels in the Balearic islands, waking up at midday with an agreeably mushy disco hangover, swathed in crisp Frette bed-linen, to the sound of goatherds and crickets, before power-showering away the previous night’s hedonism with a selection of complimentary Kiehl’s products, breakfasting on warm, non-indigenous brioche, Illy coffee and the latest edition of English Vogue. Next to a small but perfectly formed infinity pool.

I had eaten sushi in the Alps, sat in the company of models and movie makers during piste-side lunches, nodded my head to superstar DJs playing in coolly equipped, après-ski boîtes, and hung out in Metropolitan-style members’ bars with Arc Teryx-clad groovers, quaffing premium vodka cocktails after long days on the mountain. Oh yes, I told Jeroen confidently, I think I know a hip resort when I see one. He sounded fairly convinced.

“And last summer,” I added, proudly, on a bit of a roll now, “I spent a rather fabulous weekend in Barcelona.” The phone went distinctly quiet. “Barcelona?” Jeroen hissed out the word in indignantly pronounced Anglo Saxon, where once (only a few years back) it had been so proudly enunciated with a self-conscious but locally correct, Catalonian lisp. “Barcelona isn’t a hip resort any more,” he said flatly.

“For a start, it’s way too accessible. EasyJet flies there, for God’s sake, as do several other low-cost airlines. There are great big chain hotels opening up pretty much every week. It’s now just a magnet for drunken packs of Brits on stag nights and screaming girls on hen weekends.” Hen weekends? In the newly fashionable, Olympic “Bath-a-Lonah” of Mariscal, Gaudí, Adolfo Domínguez, the Hotel Arts and Absinthe? Oh dear.

Magnificent Barcelona, it seems, has fallen to the curse of the hip resort. A victim of its own highly successful global public relations job, its stock among the travel cognoscenti had plummeted to an all-time low. The bachelor parties and bum bags had moved in and the fashionable set had long since moved on to. . . where? Madrid? Malaga? Valencia?

Actually, not even that far, as I would quickly learn. Spain’s newest, hip resort destination is the recherché Sitges, only a few miles outside Barcelona. It has a lovely beach, a healthy gay scene, thriving bars and clubs and a good mix of bohos and jet-set types. “And some of the most expensive real estate in Spain,” interior designer David Collins, informed me.

Reading for crazed foodies

The most entertaining crazed-foodie book since Anthony Bourdain’s ground-breaking Kitchen Confidential

Rufus disses crystal

   

Rufus Wainwright Journeys to ‘Gay Hell’ and Back

By ANTHONY DeCURTIS

New York Times | August 31, 2003

There were a lot of `Boogie Nights’ moments, with 20 naked people in my apartment and me in my bathrobe playing `Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,’” said Rufus Wainwright, describing his social life before a scarifying emotional collapse, a stint in rehab and the completion of his gripping new album, “Want One.”

But as he was finishing his anecdote, he was distracted by a movement on his left. “There’s a mouse right there,” he said, indicating the entrance to the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, near the bench on which he was sitting. The mouse darted back and forth in front of the building, but never left. Mr. Wainwright, unfazed, resumed his narrative, adding one now-relevant detail. “Oh, and there were loads of mice in my apartment,” he said.

The little visitor notwithstanding, Mr. Wainwright chose this location for his interview because of its proximity to the Metropolitan Opera House, one of his favorite places in New York because of his longstanding love of opera. As he spoke on a humid summer afternoon that was punctuated by a gentle rainstorm, the Metropolitan framed him and gave him comfort. “I’m a bit hesitant to talk about all this,” he said. “I don’t know what the impact will be. But I’m only doing it because it might help somebody — and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!”

Mr. Wainwright, who is gay and has been out since he was a teenager, was not always convinced of that. Methamphetamine is one of a number of drugs — including ecstasy, cocaine, K (or ketamine, an anesthetic) and alcohol — to which he has turned over the years to bolster his confidence and to propel his quests for anonymous sex. Despite creating a body of work whose central theme is the search for true love, he has never been in a serious relationship, a consequence, he says, of having been raped by a man he picked up in London when he was 14.

Typically in recent years, he would get high, go online to discover willing partners and arrange meetings. Eventually Mr. Wainwright found himself drawn to a subterranean world that he described in the most lurid terms as a “gay hell.”

“I’m not talking about a bar in the meatpacking district,” he said.

Mr. Wainwright believes that crystal meth presents specific dangers — and specific temptations — for homosexual men, and that its use is a menace to their community. “Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong — speed takes care of all that in one second,” he said. “It was a world where people are going so crazy that they’re not making sense any more. If you wanted safe sex, you were a nerd, uncool. I was one of the nerds who did have safe sex, thank God. But I’m still mentally shattered by the whole experience.”

“For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man’s mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty,” he went on, “and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal. And with drugs, what’s more dangerous is more sexually exciting. On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. I had a few of those real gay lost weekends, where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged.”

Mr. Wainwright hit bottom last year when a morning line of cocaine designed to lend momentum to an apartment cleaning project led to a sex-and-drug binge that left him devastated. “I really crashed,” he said. “I hadn’t slept for a couple of days, and I started seeing visions. I remember hallucinating thousands of boxes of pornography with Jerry Garcia in them!” He laughed hysterically at the thought of that image.

“I felt like New York was a painting that I was looking at and couldn’t enter,” he continued. “It felt tragic, and it made me wildly depressed. For a moment, I thought I wouldn’t make it back into the world. But I did. I realized that I need help, so I went and got it.”

Mr. Wainwright spent a month at Hazelden, the addiction treatment center in Center City, Minn. When he returned to New York, he was filled with renewed energy, and he began to collaborate on “Want One,” his third album, with the producer Marius de Vries, who had been the musical director on the “Moulin Rouge” soundtrack, to which Mr. Wainwright had contributed a song. While Mr. Wainwright’s last album, “Poses,” which came out in 2000, chronicled his attraction to forbidden pleasures — of which “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” are merely the most quotidian — his new songs reflect the tumultuous journey he has made since then. While the lyrics are often more poetic and elliptical than nakedly confessional, Mr. Wainwright delivers them with undisguised emotion.

Musically, if “Poses” was stripped down by the singer’s unabashedly baroque standards, “Want One” (Dreamworks) more than lives up to the wry judgment his mother, the Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, once delivered about his songs: “somewhere over the top.” The more robust Mr. Wainwright was so productive that the “Want” project, which he initially wanted to release as a double CD, is now to be released in two parts. “Want Two,” filled with even more elaborately wrought songs, is set to come out next spring, though Mr. Wainwright fears, given the music industry’s persistent doldrums, that such a grand plan might fail to achieve fruition.

“I really don’t want/ To be John Lennon or Leonard Cohen/ I just want to be my dad/ With a sprinkling of my mother,” Mr. Wainwright sings on the song “Want.” Mr. de Vries said it was precisely Mr. Wainwright’s willingness to jump into the emotional deep end that infused heart into his music’s luxurious orchestral arrangements and rescued them from preciousness. “It wouldn’t work without that element,” Mr. de Vries said. “The reason he can get away with being so ambitious in the arrangements is because there’s a quite raw, and at times quite painful, emotional honesty in the way he writes. A really strong personality comes through in his singing and in his lyrics, and that authenticates the production.”

Perhaps the rawest song on “Want One” is its concluding number, “Dinner at Eight.” In Mr. Wainwright’s characteristic fashion, the song juxtaposes a jaunty, cocktail-society title with a charged portrait of his relationship with his father, the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Mr. Wainwright’s parents divorced when he was 3, and the abandonment he experienced when his father left home still roils at the core of his personality. Since that time the two men have had a rich, difficult, complex, competitive and, ultimately, loving relationship that bedevils both of them.

“Dinner at Eight” describes a meal the two men had after they had done a photo shoot together — a rare occurrence in itself — for Rolling Stone in support of Rufus’s debut album, which came out in 1998. Simply called “Rufus Wainwright,” the record had generated a great deal of attention and praise, and the young singer’s ego was puffed up. Beneath a surface cheerfulness, the photo session was tense, and the two men had to be persuaded to show some semblance of familial affection. At the meal later, Rufus crossed a line. “In interviews I had been flippant about surpassing his career and surpassing him,” he said of his father, who had released more than a dozen well-regarded albums at that point. “And he had been attacked by some interviewers, who would ask, `Did you abandon your children?’ So he was raw from that. Then, after a couple of glasses of wine, I intimated that I had gotten him into Rolling Stone. That was it. We didn’t speak for a long time, and I went home and wrote this song.”

Mr. Wainwright’s piano and vocal provide the song’s center, though they are eventually enveloped by strings. Anger, regret, self-loathing, bitterness and a desperate need for approval contend with one another in the lyrics, as Mr. Wainwright recalls the circumstances of his father’s leaving from the vantage of a prideful, but rickety, adulthood. “But why is it so,” Mr. Wainwright sings, “That I’ve always been the one who must go . . ./When in fact you were the one/ Long ago . . . in the drifting white snow/ Who left me?”

“During my drug phase and my subsequent breakdown, it all came back to my father,” Mr. Wainwright said. “When it came time to make a decision, I either wanted to go to Hazelden or go live with him. And for every man in group therapy there, the minute they would get to their father, the tears came.”

While Mr. Wainwright and his father do discuss each other publicly, each usually refuses to do interviews for stories about the other — partly as a result of the events described in “Dinner at Eight.” Consequently, Loudon Wainwright III politely declined to discuss his son for this article. For her part, Ms. McGarrigle expressed relief that her son had taken steps to bring his excesses under control. Noting that as a family of musicians and writers, neither the McGarrigles nor the Wainwrights were particularly abstemious, they all recognized the need to preserve their ability to create.

“By nature, Rufus is a party animal,” his mother said matter-of-factly. “The word in French is sauvage. But he saw that he had to stop it. None of us is self-destructive. We’d all rather live than die, so you do whatever is necessary to keep that life going. I mean, you can’t make records when you’re dead.”

And Mr. Wainwright is determined to continue making records. “One of the reasons we’re near the Opera House today is that I would really love to base my career on Verdi,” he said, a bit sheepishly, but with absolutely no irony. “Each opera he did until the last one he wrote in his 80’s got better. Nothing dramatic, but a steady rise upward.” Mr. Wainwright is applying that ethic of incremental improvement to the rest of his life as well. Known for his boyish good looks, he now regularly works out. He had cut his hair, and he looked fit and strong.

But he is still wary, still finding his way in his new life. He turned 30 recently and, though he’s young, he now realizes that his time is not infinite. He remains hopeful, however. “I’m always worried talking about my sobriety,” he said. “That could change at any moment. That could change right after this interview. But I will say that the minute that I started taking care of myself, so many other things slipped into place. This record really just flowed. I took care of myself, and the music took care of itself. Something was very kind to me.”  

Truth is stranger than fiction: Koizumi at Graceland

 

Photo: Reuters | June 29, 2006

The oddest foursome of recent months? Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan at Graceland with Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley and George W Bush