Music hath charms…. or is it “has?”

Remember that wonderful scene from “Out of Africa”? Actually there are several of them. The monkeys and Mozart. Mozart on the porch with Finch-Hadden, Mozart without Finch-Hadden…. all thanks to the Victrola.

That’s our version, above, with Frank Sinatra’s “Night and Day” ready to be cued up.

With all due respect to the people who revolutionized portable music with the Walkman and iPod, there is something about vinyl that gets under my skin. Maybe because I grew up with it. I do have an iPod and love to sound design my environment. See, that’s what it has become. I “sound design” rather than listen to music. And those earbuds… I don’t know… I can’t use them. I pipe the playlists through a Tivoli Model One, or the stereo.

Mrs. E. tells the story of visiting a boyfriend’s family at home. At cocktails, they would drag a record player out into the yard, sip gintonics and listen to Gershwin, or Porter. It may have been during those late afternoons that Mrs. E. began to develop her definition of the art of living well.

It’s time to bring a little gentility back into your world. In honor of LucyInStLou’s post on the Murphy’s yesterday, why don’t you mix “the juice of a few flowers” (Gerald Murphy’s phrase), dust off the vinyl jazz records (the Murphys were huge fans of the genre and amassed one of the foremost collections of their time of early jazz) and retire to the veranda? Use your iPod if that’s your only option. But make sure to play American standards or a little jazz.

And don’t forget to add a splash of grapefruit juice to the gintonics… it is a citrus that plays well against the lime. It is Friday, after all.

(To borrow a favourite catch phrase of HOBAC’s, now playing: “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess.)

(Gerald and Sara Murphy on La Garoupe beach, Antibes, Summer 1926. Gerald and Sara Murphy Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © Estate of Honoria Murphy Donnelly/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.)

I should have entitled this post “Living Well is the Best Revenge” but I’ve already used that… It is the title of a book by Calvin Tomkins about Sara and Gerald Murphy. If you haven’t met the Murphys yet, I can’t recommend highly enough Amanda Vaill’s wonderful book

Everybody Was So Young

The Murphys were often thought of as wealthy patrons of the arts and counted among their friends Picasso, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Cole Porter and the Fitzgeralds. Their life inspired numerous works of art by those lucky few who ran in that circle between the wars. The Murphys are also widely credited for popularizing (for better or worse) the French Riviera as a summer resort destination.

While we were living in St. Raphael, the Inimitable Mrs. E and I picnic’ed on the same beach (La Garoupe) where Gerald Murphy first cleared seaweed and rolled out the Oriental rugs and umbrellas to enjoy the sun. In the front of my journal I pasted a color reproduction clipped from The Washington Post of Gerald Murphy’s painting “Cocktail.” I had no idea of the enduring legacy that they had left behind them, nor of the impact that their story would have on me.

A new exhibit dedicated to the Murphys and their influence (the first of its kind, I believe) is being unveiled at Williams College, July 8 - November 11. It will also travel to Yale University and to Dallas Museum of Art. If you can get to any of the shows, do.

As you will see, the Murphys cultivated the art of living well, refining their aesthetic with doses of modernism, French and American culture while they and their circle of friends helped to birth the modern movement. If there are role models to follow in our examination of an everyday elegance, I think it is safe to say that they are the tops (as Mr. Cole Porter wrote.)

I can’t do their story justice. In my mind, they glow. The life that the Murphys built for themselves, despite a number of tragic events, continues to inspire me. I hope it does you, too.

Photo source: www.lecapdantibes.com
But what defines “living well” ? For me, living well has always been a very abstract idea. Sort of an “I’ll know it when I see it” state of being. For my former business partner living well meant that he had become affluent enough to have a phone in the bathroom. I thought that having a car and driver would suffice. If I had to boil it all down, I would say that the easy and elegant life is simply more gracious and enjoyable.

This site is my attempt to define how I could live a little more elegantly — living well, and well within my means. Together, we’ll explore what the French call “l’art de vivre” (what those folks in the photo above seem to have grasped so well), learning what constitutes elegance, how to cultivate your particular tastes, how to entertain your friends with style (and within a certain budget). In short, how to make your life a little more gracious.

As for Juan Les Pins? It’s changed since the photo was taken, but there is a wonderful jazz festival there every year. If you can get to it, you won’t be disappointed.