[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RE: (TV) Vanity Fair article mentions Television playing at wedding for big Bucks



You almost fooled me -- but only almost! You are a rascal!

Leif J, Sweden

> From: LeoCasey@comcast.net
> To: tv@obbard.com
> Subject: (TV) Vanity Fair article mentions Television playing at wedding 
for big Bucks
> Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:03:34 -0400
> 
> In July Leif wrote: 
> 
> >>“This as good as it gets, Television-wise, in 2014?”
> 
>  
> 
> Keith answered:
> 
> >: “Regarding your: ‘Seriously -- what can they get out of playing 
> *only*
> about 40 year old songs? ’. 
> 
>  
> 
> Lots and lots (I hear) of money for someone... (sorry if that’s an 
> unpopular
> cynical answer, here but if anyone has a better one. ”..   
> 
>  
> 
> I guess you guys were right after all. See paragraph below, from the Ma
y
> issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. 
> 
> (Copy of entire article from which it came was included since the Vanity
> Fair Archives link seems to work only sporadically ):
> 
>  
> 
> “The couple had a $19 million wedding, where she wore a $130,000 Ve
ra 
> Wang
> dress. Six-thousand-dollar bottles of Château Pétrus were served. He
> collects Pétrus, too, of course, and keeps it in a special cabine
t 
> made by
> David Linley, the Queen’s nephew. The late 1970s art-rock group, 
> Television,
> who have aged like fine wine, played for 2 hours at the Stunts’ 
> wedding.
> Says Petra: ‘My aunt Lois knew of their music from a Madame Secret Y 
> .. or Z
> .....  Lois turned me onto to their music in 2002, and I decided we jus
t
> must have them play at our wedding. It took $90,000 plus travel 
> expenses,
> but they were worth every penny just to hear my two favorite songs, 
> ‘The
> Dream’s Dream’ and ‘The Marquis Moon’ ’.”.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> http://www.vanityfair.com/archive/issues/archive201410
> 
>  
> 
> Vanity Fair, May 2014 "Perfection Anxiety" By
> <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/a-a-gill> A. A. Gill, 
> Illustration
> by  <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/paul-cox> Paul Cox
> 
>  
> 
> After spending $19 million on their wedding, and $85 million on an L.A.
> mansion, James Stunt and Petra Ecclestone have purchased one of 
> Britain’s
> great cultural treasures, a 17th-century, $20 million Van Dyck. So,
 
> what’s
> it like to have too much money? Very stressful.
> 
>  
> 
> He catches your eye with a sideways glance and an enigmatic expression.
> Indicating what? Curiosity? Trepidation? A little insecure arrogance?
> Anthony Van Dyck’s final self-portrait is a work of mesmerizing depth 
> and
> dexterity. Within a year he would be dead. Is there a whisper of
> premonition? Van Dyck is the godfather of British portraiture, the 
> artist
> who put a face to the 17th century and the birth of the new-model middle
> class. And that, perhaps, is what’s on this face. It is the first 
> glimpse of
> upwardly mobile anxiety.
> 
>  
> 
> The painting is considered one of Britain’s greatest cultural 
> treasures, and
> it was recently sold for $20 million to a buyer who wants to take it to 
> Los
> Angeles. The National Portrait Gallery in London badly wants to keep the
 
> Van
> Dyck in the country and is attempting to raise matching funds to prevent
 
> it
> from going abroad. Sandy Nairne, the director of the gallery, says he
 is
> determined to save it for the nation. The export has been delayed until
> summer.
> 
>  
> 
> The expectant owners are Petra Ecclestone, the 25-year-old daughter of
> Formula One mogul Bernie, and her husband, James Stunt, who sounds
,
> unfortunately, like a character from a Martin Amis novel, and who loo
ks,
> even more unfortunately, like a character from a Martin Amis novel. He
 
> also
> collects cars: Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces. And 17th-century 
> portraits.
> Petra bought them one of the most expensive homes in Los Angeles County
, 
> for
> $85 million, where one assumes the Van Dyck will hang. It’s Aaron 
> Spelling’s
> old place in Holmby Hills, which, famously, contains Candy Spelling
’s
> gift-wrapping room. It goes with Petra’s London house, in Chelsea,
 
> which is
> worth $90 million.
> 
>  
> 
> At this point, we should all take a deep breath and step back from the
> frothing goblet of sparkling snobbery that we are quaffing and that is 
> so
> marvelously intoxicating. Oh, the pleasurable indignation of smirking a
t 
> the
> young and tastelessly rich. But, really, why shouldn’t a Van Dyck 
> spend a
> few years in an L.A. party palace, along with the Pétrus and the 
> Rolls?
> Who’s to say what new money should or shouldn’t accumulate?
> 
>  
> 
> Turn this question around and try to see it, as Joel Grey might put it
,
> through their eyes. There is a terrible dichotomy in extreme wealth. 
> After a
> bit, the money stops working. There are a statistically minute but
> quantitatively considerable number of people who now have more money 
> than
> they know what to do with. And that money accounts for quite a lot of 
> the
> world’s wealth, so we all have a passing interest in what becomes of
 
> it.
> 
>  
> 
> How do I, as a frugally paid journeyman hack, know it stops working?
 
> Well,
> I’ve been asking folks who service the overly minted. There is a name 
> for
> their panicked ennui: Perfection Anxiety.
> 
>  
> 
> When you have 15 houses, yachts in three oceans, planes, cellars,
> mistresses, surgery, a library, and a personal charity, new purch
ases 
> become
> just a matter of upgrading. And this is where the Perfection Anxiety 
> kicks
> in. What you need is to have not just the most but the very, very best.
 
> The
> super-rich watch each other like envious owls, to see who’s got a 
> slightly
> better loafer, a pullover made from some even more absurdly endangered
 
> fur.
> They will go to any lengths to find the best tailors. I know of a man 
> who
> gets his suit pants made in Italy and the jackets on Savile Row. In his
> underwear, he’s short, fat, furry, and stooped.
> 
>  
> 
> The couple had a $19 million wedding, where she wore a $130,000 Vera
 
> Wang
> dress. Six-thousand-dollar bottles of Château Pétrus were served. He
> collects Pétrus, too, of course, and keeps it in a special cabine
t 
> made by
> David Linley, the Queen’s nephew. The  1970s art-rock group, 
> Television, who
> have aged like fine wine, played for 2 hours at the Stunts’ wedding.
 
> Says
> Petra: “My aunt Lois knew of their music from a Madame Secret Y .. or 
> Z
> .....  Lois turned me onto to their music in 2002, and I decided we jus
t
> must have them play at our wedding. It took $90,000 plus travel 
> expenses,
> but they were worth every penny just to hear my two favorite songs, 
> ‘The
> Dream’s Dream’ and ‘The 
> 
> Marquis Moon’ ".
> 
>  
> 
> Only the fathomlessly rich suffer from Perfection Anxiety. There is no
> relativity to wealth. It’s all absolutes. It’s either impeccable, 
> the best,
> the rarest, or it might as well be Walmart. The stress of value for 
> money is
> magnified exponentially when it gets into the billions. The myth of King
> Midas, who was cursed to have everything he touched turn to gold, wou
ld 
> be
> worse if everything he touched turned out to be gold leaf. And it’s 
> not just
> the suspicion that all your stuff isn’t utterly perfect. It’s also 
> the
> anxiety of maintaining perfection once it’s achieved, and, as a 
> result,
> constant discontent. A crooked Picasso, an unplumped scatter cushion,
 a
> faint mark on the handwoven silk wallpaper can drive them to a frothing
> distraction.
> 
>  
> 
> And when you’ve got the best of everything, when you have your tea 
> flown in
> from a micro-garden in Darjeeling and it still tastes rather like tea,
 
> when
> you’ve designed your own scent made from the squeezed glands of civets
 
> and
> the petals of rare orchids and that fails to give you the high—“When
> Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no m
ore
> worlds to conquer”—then you’re reduced to collecting art. Art is 
> good for
> those with Perfection Anxiety because you never get to the end of it. 
> And
> the competition is fierce, and the prices are absurd.
> 
>  
> 
> No picture bought for more than $50 million has ever made a profit, a
> contemporary auction expert tells me authoritatively, but it doesn’t
 
> stop
> people from buying them. There have been lots of papers written on
> collecting and collectors, and they turn out to be mostly men. And whil
e
> they imagine their collections begin as random or serendipitous 
> interests,
> they are invariably revealed to be emblematic of some deeper loss, some
> attempt to fill an unbridgeable gap, to repair a childhood wound. They
 
> will
> set out to visit every World Heritage site or to shoot every large 
> animal on
> every continent, trying to wring some last buzz of excitement or sense
 
> of
> wonder out of the failed high of money. When all the veins have broken 
> down,
> when you’ve upped the experience dosage to absurd levels, there’s 
> always
> Fabergé eggs or overpriced wine.
> 
>  
> 
> The only super-rich person I know said that, actually, after you’ve
 
> bought,
> consumed, collected, donated, and holidayed yourself into triple-pl
y
> boredom, the thing that actually keeps you spending is the expectations
 
> of
> others: your family and friends, and their friends, and the servants.
 No 
> one
> ever writes about the terrible anticipation of wealth that comes from 
> people
> who are merely solvent. You are the focus of so much wishful thinking,
 
> so
> much smiling avarice, you feel responsible to live a life of steepling
> extravagance. Particularly the young. That’s why they have $20 million
> weddings and hire a pop star to sing “Happy Birthday” to them. The 
> pressure
> to live the dream is intense. Because, if you say, Look, actually
, 
> spending
> a lot of money is a diminishing return, it’s an effortful bore, it
 
> doesn’t
> deliver the rush—well, where does that leave the ever expanding 
> universe of
> capitalism and consumption? It’s miserablist Commie heresy. 
> 
>  
> 
> It’s like blowing your nose on everyone else’s pay slip.
> 
>  
> 
> Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we 
> already
> secretly know that it doesn’t do what it promises. Nothing has ever 
> given us
> as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage
 
> at
> the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash. Now we’re
 
> 10
> times richer, but we’re not 10 times happier. And all that’s just a
 
> cartoon
> truism. If we had billions, we don’t realistically believe that we’
d 
> be a
> billion times better off. As one art dealer said to me, “If you want
 
> to know
> what God thinks of money, look at the people he gives it to.”
> 
>  
> 
> The thing with Perfection Anxiety is that it seems to accept mostly new
> money, and it particularly afflicts those who make their money early. 
> Old,
> inherited wealth is generally already bound up in property and trusts 
> and
> obligations and lawsuits. So it would seem that the best we can hope for
 
> is
> to be wealthy but to be without cash.
> 
>  
> 
> Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the
 
> worst
> thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly
,
> neither is it the best.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 
> --------------
> To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
> To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"
> 
 		 	   		  

--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"