Six Degrees of Separation: A Gaultier Trench Coat, Hogaarden Beer, Saving Vogue, One Blue Lagoon Guy, Slow Living & Saying 'No' to Brussel Sprouts

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It’s fair to say that Vogue Magazine has been essentially dragged into the digital, free content world. Posting a Sexy Futures blurb on John Galliano’s retro lingerie influences in the Spring 2010 Dior collection, just shown in Paris, I stopped by Vogue, also on Style.com.

Jean Paul Gaultier on Vogue’s Fashion blog, Sp 2010Smart Sensuality women love fashion and style, but we’re so on the run with more important issues like saving the world’s children, slow living or creating “green” organizations, that we have only so much time for a daily dose of fashion.

For me the Vogue Daily blog is spot on with their coverage of the Spring 2010 collections. Covering the Spring 2010 Fashion Shows, there’s a single “definitive” photo of each designers collection, with a brief description.

Now for some free consulting advice.

Why the Vogue blog post on Jean Paul Gaultier doesn’t then link into the designer’s entire Spring 2010 collection on Style.com mystifies me, given that page views drive advertising revenue, when the content is free. Style.com (part of the Vogue family) gives us the entire Jean Paul Gaultier collection.

With all due respect, the Gaultier trench is by no means the definitive look of the whole collection — although it’s the consummate style for Smart Sensuality women. Sorry, my point is nothing more than two fashion directors being competitive with each other.

Looking through the Gaultier slide show, not only does Style.com offer the opportunity to view ads, but each photo takes us shopping. For certain, these two Jean Paul Gaultier posts should be linked on the website.

Presumably this insight about the Vogue blog designer photo connecting into the entire Style.com collection is a female-centric one, which is why I wrote recently that I sure hope that a woman led the McKinsey & Co consultant review on what to do with Condé Nast.

Brain scans confirm women’s tendency to link information differently than men, which is why a woman knows to link the Vogue Fashion blog into the Style.com designer slides, especially when the blog topic is the designer shows.

Women are always trying to get two silent factions talking to each other.

Now I just had a pessimistic thought.

What if the Style.com and Vogue.com teams don’t talk to each other — not even their web development teams? Perhaps they’re two siblings each only pretending to get along in cyberspace.

Looks can be deceiving, especially among Moderns in business. They’re not like the Traditional wings of the Palestinians and Israelis, who will blow up the whole world before figuring out how to share a piece of global property.

Moderns are different.

Everyone is smiling and having a marvelous time, but don’t turn your back under any circumstances. Modern ladies can be vicious with each other. Modern writer Kristopher Dukes has an enormously successful blog under her own name.

In fact, K is a Modern “it girl” blogger.

Few are better known than Kristopher, except that whimpy French woman Garance Dore, sitting in the front row at D&G’s fashion show. Dore is that French sweetheart Smart Sensuality blogger, featured last week in Dolce Vita: The Changing Face of Fashion Brand Management - Italian Style.

Back to the formidable Modern Kristopher Dukes. Writing about Nomade Exquis Jewelry, Dukes says: Mo charmed me at lunch months ago. She shared that one of the artists behind Nomade Exquis’s collection used such harsh methods to create his brutalist jewelry that only deaf people could be employed at his factory…

If you say so, Kristopher. Call me clueless in Modern, Gossip Girls fashionland, so I will get back to writing about casseroles and not think that I can compete in the fashion stratosphere. A smart woman knows her place in life, and mine is in the kitchen.

Heath ceramic casserole featured on Vogue.comMoving through the Vogue Fashion blog, sandwiched right between Paris Spring 2010: The Definitive Look at Balenciaga and Paris Spring 2010: The Definitive Look at Rue du Mail is this marvelously dynamic, sexy Heath Ceramics Red Casserole, one of 75 produced and selling for $195, which is pricey but each piece of pottery is hand made in their Sausalito, California factory.

For certain, we all want to support artisans, and not only in developing countries. We Americans had better start worrying about jobs for ourselves or we won’t have any. Sorry — I digress.

And now I am drawing another line in the sand. Forget the patriarchy and religion; this time I’m focused on vegetables.

With regard to the perfect recipe for their electrifying red casserole, Catherine and husband Robin, owners of HeathCeramics suggest the couple suggest Maryana Vollstedt’s Brussels Sprouts and Baby Onions with Mustard recipe (from The Big Book of Casseroles (Chronicle)).  “Our whole family loves brussels sprouts, and the bonus is that they look great in this red dish.”

Just Say No!

Via Kissing Frogs & Eating SnailsNo way! Game over. Brussel sprouts are not sexy, luscious, or enticing and no amount of maple syrup will make them so.

I don’t care if Australian blogger Kissing Frogs & Eating Snails wrote a post “Are Brussel Sprouts an Aphrodisiac?” Like me, she got no takers. I agree completely with British naval captain Wayne Keble who recently banned Brussels sprouts from the HMS Bulwark, calling them the “devil’s vegetable”.

If the Blue Lagoon god who cooked dinner for me this past Saturday evening took the cover off this sizzling red crock pot and showed me brussle sprouts — well I would put on my Gaultier trench coat and leave before dessert.

A gulp of Veuve Clicquot champagne and I’m out the door. And I don’t give a wit about his bronze God beach body,  patrician San Francisco family, affinity for older women, or ability to create the most enticing vision of a future Love Potions cooking show, concocting our totally original pasta dish while doing an impersoniation of a Japanese sushi chef.

She who has no sense of humour was jumping up and down unable to contain myself. Blame it on the Hoegaarden beer, which was the hit of our evening.I love, love, love it.

Who says I will not get out of my sensual sandbox and try new things! Actually, no one has ever said that about me; no one ever in my entire life … except the two guys who actually thought that I would …

As an aside, I just now realize that I get along with Blue Lagoon Man far better than my last encounter with a Mayflower pedigree ‘heritage piece of work’ two years ago.

After 11 days in the south of France, we didn’t even fly home together.

Back to Hoegaarden beer drinking and brussel sprouts.

Admittedly I was seduced with such naughty possibilities of love in the kitchen Saturday night, but it would end over brussel sprouts in that red casserole — much like my marriage did.

Brussel Sprouts and My Divorce

My enraged, high and mighty husband laid down the law about my overcooked, yellowed and semi-slushy brussel sprouts, and I left forever.

Lest I sound impulsive and superficial, he nearly strangled me. You know how pissed off men can get when food isn’t cooked to their satisfaction. In Afghanistan and Sudan, it’s “off with your head.”

Well, I was holding on to mine, and I hightailed it straight out of my marriage. I detailed the whole nasty brussel sprouts mess in my journal last week: Searching for Logic in Our Civilized World.

Back to casseroles.

Ok. Yes to Heath casseroles. No to brussel sprouts. No to brussel sprouts sandwiched between Paris designer fashions, but at this point, we must get rational and realistic about humans vs. computers.

Love Potions: The Seductive PomegranateOnly a human would make the decision not to place brussel sprouts between Paris fashions, so the casserole dish stands, if not hugged with passion.

Any thinking woman would have used pomegranates in this fashion editorial, NOT brussel sprouts. The truth is that a computer did the dirty deed, and indeed we must have a certain amount of automation in life, like it or not.

This is my exact worry with artificial intelligence being designed by men. Life will be so boring and not fascinating at all. Worse yet, two websites on the same platform won’t send traffic back and forth, in order to keep the lights on and writers paid.

One more note before we leave the casserole folks, once and for all today.

AnneofCarversville.com loves slow livingVogue blog says under “what’s next” that that the red casserole woman is working on a collaboration with Alabama Chanin, who we adore in Smart Sensuality.

Is it a small world out there or what!!!

See J’Adore: Alabama Chanin, written last month in support of Slow Living and the top article this moment Cultural Creatives Constitute the Core of the Slow Living Movement.

Gottcha! You thought I was kidding about casseroles. No way. This is six degrees of separation, web content style.

Perhaps after Let’s Make Love Salads, I will take up “Let’s Make Love Casseroles” — especially with Blue Lagoon Man as my culinary production assistant.

After all, he markets wines and gourmet brews. Move over Nigella Lawson.

The kitchen god in the French dessert commercial has dark hair and mine has that dirty-blond, beach boy hairdo — but everything else is the same here. In fact, if all chefs looked like this guy, I could lose my support for affirmative action in the world’s best restaurants.

Everybody stay calm. I’m just kidding. Anne has been far too serious lately, and I’m just carried away today.

The Sexiest Ad for the Sweetest Thing

Back to business — although how any woman can focus on commerce and making the mortgage payment after watching the Bonjour Desssert commercial beats the heck out of me.

Alas, we will not get Condé Nast out of the blood bath of business red ink it now faces, without holistic, left-brain, right-brain Smart Sensuality thinking. And with so few women execs in positions of power at McKinsey & Co, I suspect that cost-cutting was the biggest strategy coming out of the Condé Nast review.

Personally, I think Condé Nast should have hired Boston Consulting Group, who is drowning in women at the top of the pyramid.

And for an added dash, they can hire me to straighten out the failure of Vogue.com and Style.com to communicate, when most likely they’re in the same building. This isn’t Mars and Venus having a communication breakdown on 43rd Street. We’re still talking a boys club in web development platforms.

These tech guys all speak the same language, and it’s not mine. So put a woman’s brain in the center of the wheel and start spinning some synergies here. Media outlets NEED revenue.

Thinking Out Loud

I’m convinced that women have been sold a bill of goods regarding men being the rational thinkers. I think history has been one grand conspiracy of pulling the wool over our eyes, and it’s time to roll up the window shades.

via Flickr’s furiousgeorge81Not to worry. I can still see clearly through my rose-colored glasses.

Bottom line, my dear friends, I say it’s time for a reality check, before the world overcooks more than the brussel sprouts.

I keep having dreams about Armageddon, which must be why Blue Lagoon Man puts lemon in my ice water. I think he’s trying to cool me down.

Much love, Anne