The Great Gatsby: Party On Christmas 2012

 

Spring hasn't yet sprung but we already know what we want for Christmas.  On December 25, 2012, Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge! and Australia, brings Jay Gatsby back to the Big Screen, this time in 3-D.  With Tobey McGuire as Nick Carraway and Carey Mulligan as Daisy, Leonardo DiCaprio will play the iconic role previously played by Robert Redford.  Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for the 1974 release and Mia Farrow played the girl  with the voice "full of money."

Actually, Fitzgerald already gave us his classic in 3-D.  Published in 1925, the book then and now relates to audiences with its complicated characters and carnival-colored world.   Most consider the book the Great American Novel and it continues to top lists world-over as one of the greatest books ever written.   Nick narrates: "There was music from my neighbor's house through those summer nights. In his enchanted gardens, men and girls came and went like moths, among the whispering and the champagne and the stars. I believe that few people were actually invited to these parties. They just went. They got into automobiles that bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby's door. Come for the party with a simplicity of heart that was it's own ticket of admission."

 We love Gatsby because he believed in the green light.  He saw America as a land of promise.  Like Nick, we recognize that "there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.… [Gatsby had] an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again."

Celebrating hope, Party On.

Classic Coup Gatsby shirt/Jenny Mandeville Photographer

Classic Coup Gatsby shirt/Jenny Mandeville Photographer

 

Birthday Boy Charles Dickens: The Big 200

Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life, sends this letter to the Birthday Boy.  In it she describe to "Mr. Dickens" the 21st century as still the "best of times and worst of times." Always for the underdog, Dickens wrote the first classic novel I read and loved in high school, Great Expectations. Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham,  like the man who created them, are unforgettable. But while some of Dickens' darlings and the author himself escaped poverty, the children Charles championed in his fight against social injustice still exist in multitudes. Proving there's still much work to do, The National Center for Children of Poverty at Columbia University profiles the poor in the US here.