O'Hara Makes the Fashion Scene

Normally I don't flip through T: The New York Times Style Magazine, but this week being the Men's Fall Fashion issue, and having just a few moments to kill before readying Vaughn for this morning's doctor appointment, and since it fell out and was placed on top of the rest of the paper, I figured I'd check out some of the often silly fashion statements. Found a surprise on page 92 (which comes after about 82 pages of ads, e-gads), a small picture of Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems. Michael Bastian, fashion director of something called Bergdorf Goodman, says "We wanted to capture that whole tweedy, rumpled city-guy feeling, like a character in Cheever of Salinger, or like the poet Frank O'Hara."

So the Fall Fashion issue contains as many references to poetry as this week's worth of New York Times "Arts" sections: 1 (unless I missed something). The one was a music/poetry review of the Paul Auster evening at the Guggenheim, which contained this nice little anecdote: "The difference between Mr. Auster's reading and some of the settings raised questions among the composers themselves. Mr. Karchin, for example, wondered whether his gentle approach to the final lines of "Matrix and Dream" had been a mistake, since Mr. Auster read those lines more forcefully. But Mr. Auster once said in an interview that an author must surrender control of a work once it is finished, and he apparently holds to that view. He suggested that perhaps his own reading had been incorrect."