Tag: Things of beauty

Art, music, whatever

About That Beauty Thing

Beauty, Drive Time

New Wife and I have a Saturday morning ritual which involves me making us tea and coffee and bringing the laptop to bed, where we read the online news and browse a few websites together.

The first thing we look at is this here website, because she doesn’t have time to read it during the week, so we scroll back while she gets a Whole Week Of Kim in one gulp, so to speak.  (And yet she still stays with me, which is a miracle, quite frankly.)

Anyway, our first read this past Saturday was my post about beauty and the differing definitions thereof.

I should point out that New Wife has if anything more conservative tastes than I do, and anything that reeks of “flashy” or “loud” makes her nose turn up in disgust.  Needless to say, she thought all the ’68-’72 cars I pictured were “dreadful” and “disgusting” except for the E-type (and even that gets only a begrudging pass from her).

One of the other websites we visit each week is C.W.’s Daily Timewaster, which on this occasion featured this vision of loveliness, a Jaguar Mk II from the early 1960s:

This she pronounced as the most beautiful car ever made, because it was classy (inside and out).

By her terms, of course, it is the most beautiful car ever made — because she thinks that almost all sports cars are “flashy”, and the family saloon car is the sine qua non  of automotive desirability.

I would actually agree with her, because as 4-door saloon cars go, the Mark II is undoubtedly exquisite, especially when compared to others of its ilk and era both European and American.  (With its 3.4-liter engine, it’s also plenty powerful, which she sniffily dismisses with “If you’re interested in that sort of thing”.)

And in case you’re interested in which sports car she would appreciate were we to win the lottery, it’s this one, the 1964 Mercedes 230SL W113 (“Pagoda”):

Can’t really fault her on that one, either.  (I’d prefer the later-model W113 280 SL because MOAR POWAH, but she’s unmoved by that, as we’ve seen before.)

Eye Of

Beauty, Drive Time, Gratuitous Chick Pics

Beauty of the visual kind is always subjective and as such, therefore, there will always be differing opinions on the various kinds of beauty.  I, for one, find the voluptuous Kelly Brook and Salma Hayek to be exquisite:

 

…whereas others may refute that, and prefer the more-slender silhouettes of Charlotte Hawkins and Nicole Kidman:

It’s not that I find the latter pair unattractive — not in the slightest — it’s just my preference is for the body shapes of Mlles  Brook and Hayek.

In similar fashion, therefore, do I regard Insty’s comment about the Lamborghini Miura interesting:

“I think the Lamborghini Miura was the most beautiful car of its time, but a spoiler doesn’t make it prettier.”

(He’s talking about Liberty Walk’s version of the Miura, by the way, which I think is quite beautiful for a modern car despite the spoiler.)

But the Miura was made between 1966 and 1973, and in terms of beauty, it had some stiff competition in the beauty department during those seven years.  Here’s the “traditional” Miura:

…which I agree is an absolute stunner.  The 4-liter V-12 engine didn’t hurt, either.

Then again, if we’re looking at the 1966-1973 years, there’s my personal favorite, the Dino 246 GT:

…and also from that period, the Bizzarrini Strada / Spyder:

…not to mention the incomparable Jaguar E-type:

Okay, as far as I’m concerned that whole decade (1963 – 1972) was the golden age of automotive body design, and there is scarcely a car made back then that I wouldn’t take in a heartbeat.

All more beautiful than anything made so far in the 21st century — in my opinion.

But you all knew that already.

Celebrity Pass-Arounds

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Before anyone gets all moralistic and sniffy on me, let me preface this post by stating that what I’m going to be talking about took place in the 1970s.  For those unfamiliar with the decade, it was a time when we did all sorts of strange stuff, and in those pre-AIDS days there was a lot of sex going on.

Having once been a rock musician, let’s just say that I’m somewhat familiar with groupies, both the term and its membership (so to speak), although I was not an enthusiastic user of same.  The ones I knew back then (in Johannesburg, principally) were kinda sad, really:  we all knew who they were (hi, Charmaine and Bev!), we knew where they were to be found, we knew them as pass-arounds, but none of us really despised them.  (I know that sounds strange, but it’s nevertheless true.)  You see, everybody was promiscuous — college students, musicians, secretaries, supermarket check-out clerks, opticians’ receptionists (hi, Jen!);  whether male or female, there were high jinks a-plenty.  That a few girls happened to prefer hanging out with musicians, pretty much any musicians, was little different from the girls who hung around outside the College of Medicine at any university.

But then there were the Celebrity Groupies, who will feature prominently from now on.  Many were from “good families” and not just low-class no-hopers (like so many were).  What they did was hang around the famous bands and musicians, and what they liked was the rock musician lifestyle:  the touring, the limos, the parties and being with famous people (in this case musicians).

As I’ve written before:  yes, they were young — in some cases scandalously so — but then again, so were many of the musicians.  Today, there’d be a series of prosecutions (like this one) and much censorious finger-wagging;  back then it was just something that happened.

The difference is that most of the girls below ended up writing about their experiences as groupies, and making more than a little money thereby, too.  And people bought those anthologies because, well, a huge number of people are fame-groupies as well — little different, in my opinion, from the groupies themselves — as the success of magazines like People  and Us  can attest.  Anyway, here are the girls:

Audrey Hamilton

Bebe Buell

Cherry Vanilla

(unlike the others, Cherry was actually a well-known rock musician herself — her backing band back then was The Police, FFS)

Chris O’Dell
(she actually became a well-known tour manager after a while)

Cleo Odzer

Connie Hamzy

Cynthia Albritton

(Also known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, for the plaster molds she made of her various lovers’ penises)

Sable Starr and Lori Mattix (l-r)
(both lost their virginity in their very early teens, Sable to David Bowie and Lori to Jimmy Page;  here with Slade’s bassist Dave Hill)

Sable

Lori

Morgana Welch

Pamela De Barres

Roxana Shirazi

Tawny Kitaen

Tura Satana

Uschi Obermayer

After the Seventies, they went on to have careers as actresses, singers or entrepreneurs, or lives as wives and mothers to “ordinary” men.

What I find interesting is that almost without exception, none of these women actually expressed regret for their groupie activities, but just shrugged it off as a life experience and some even looked back on it all with fondness.  And why not?  It was the Seventies.