Things Not Available In The U.S.: Moet & Chandon's Golden Jeroboam

We like to think of the U.S. as the land of plenty, but sometimes it's plenty of nothing.

At least that's the case as far as Moet & Chandon is concerned.

The French champagne house recently released their Golden Jeroboam, guaranteed to impress not merely because it stands a stunning 19 1/2 inches tall and packs three liters of Moet's finest sparkling wine, but also because the bottle is clad in gold leaf.*

(Some journalists have referred to this as "real" gold leaf. Honestly, is there any other kind?)

Moet has produced just 1743 bottles to celebrate the year of its founding.

And did we mention that if you are lucky enough to snag one of these beauties, it will set you back about $1,050?

It appears that Moet isn't making this particular treasure available in the U.S. or U.K. One place you can get it online is from the Parisian merchant-of-the-moment Collette.

Bonne chance et bonne année!

*You say jeroboam, we say double magnum. We always thought that a jeroboam contained 4 1/2 liters, or six regular bottles, of champagne, not three liters, or four bottles, as Moet avers. Do they know something we don't?
 

Carnations Aren't Just For Proms Anymore

Last year, we lived through bold bangles, harem pants, Barack Obama, social media, smartphones, Glee, and sibling names starting with the same letter (think Khloe, Kourtney and Kim Kardashian).

Not always scorned, carnations were painted by Van Gogh (above), da Vinci, and other masters

This year's trends: food trucks, the Tea Party, chocolate covered bacon, Irish baby names (Connor, Killian, Braden), and – ready for this? – carnations.

For years synonymous with cheap, prom night boutonnieres, the carnation was so reviled that upmarket florists hewed to the mantra, "No mums, no carns!" or risk upsetting their chic clientele.

That's about to change. The lowly carnation is making a comeback, writes Lettie Teague in the Wall St. Journal. She reports that Oscar de la Renta, Martha Stewart and Sarah Jessica Parker are among celebrities who have been seen sporting the flower recently.

Society stylist and event designer Bronson Van Wyck has taken a shine to them, too. During the just concluded Fashion Week, he assembled 30,000 carnations into fat topiary balls hung from the ceiling on fishing lines.

Teague says that today's carnations "look nothing like the flowers found at the corner store. They're much larger and showier, more vibrantly colored."

They come in a wide range of hues—yellow, red, pink, white and even green (natural, not dyed) and are grown primarily in Colombia. The main source for carnations used to be luxe Cap d'Antibes, attesting to the flowers once exclusive lineage.

Read the complete article here.
 

Books We Like to Give and Get: The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer

It's a shame that the American lyricist Johnny Mercer is less well known today than Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, and many of the songwriters who were his Tin Pan Alley contemporaries.

Johnny Mercer, the composer and Capitol recording star

If he is remembered at all, it's usually for a group of hit songs he composed, later in his career, with Henry Mancini for films like Breakfast at Tiffany's ("Moon River"), Days of Wine and Roses, and Charade.

It was a different story during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s when Mercer was as popular as Gershwin, Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter and the other greats who shaped American popular music in the first half of the 20th Century.

He wrote dozens of standards – "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)", "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Blues in the Night," "This Time the Dream's on Me," "I'm Old Fashioned," "Tangerine," "That Old Black Magic," "Too Marvelous for Words," "Fools Rush In."

As if those weren't enough to assure his place in the Pantheon of great songwriters, Mercer gave us the sultry jazz standards "Skylark," "Satin Doll," and "Midnight Sun" in which he rhymed ruby chalice with alabaster palace and aurora borealis

He could also produce clever rhymes that were catchy, disdainfully amusing, and topical at the same time. In his show business anthem "Hooray for Hollywood," from 1937's Hollywood Hotel, Mercer observed:

Hooray for Hollywood!
Where you're terrific if you're even good.

Forty years later the pianist and cabaret singer Blossom Dearie swung these lilting lyrics:

I dig Modigliani,
Jolson doing "Swanee,"
Several maharanees are my intimates, too.
I played with Mantovani,
And that's a lot of strings to get through.
But anyone can see
My new celebrity is you!

Mercer's novelty numbers, some with his own music, have endured, as well, even if we've forgotten who wrote them. "Jeepers Creepers (Where'd You Get Those Peepers?)", "I'm an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)" "Goody, Goody," and "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive (E-lim-mi-nate the negative)" are as familiar to us today as they were to previous generations.

Johnny Mercer made other significant contributions to American popular music.

In 1942 he founded and for many years was the driving force behind Capitol Records, home to Paul Whiteman, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, Stan Kenton and, later, The Kingston Trio, Dean Martin, and The Beatles. As a singer, he was one of the label's first and biggest recording stars. In the 1940s, sales of Mercer discs were on par with those of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

Mercer the performer and music industry giant are forgotten, and today we celebrate him for the marvelous words he wrote.

They've all been collected and annotated in The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, by Robert Kimball, editor of earlier volumes on the works of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Frank Loesser, and Lorenz Hart.

This large-format book contains every lyric Mercer wrote, more than 1500 in all. It includes his first song, "Out of Breath (and Scared to Death of You)" along with the complete scores for L'il Abner, St. Louis Woman, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Mercer's unsuccessful musicals are here, too: Saratoga, Top Banana, the infamous Bert Lahr flop Foxy.

We love leafing through this book, revisiting beloved standards and discovering unknown gems. Anyone who is a fan of the Great American Songbook will find hours of enjoyment within its pages, too.

The Annals of Luxury: It's Official! The Rich Are Just Like You And Me.

Or are they?

Last week The New York Times reported that the wealthy are "tightening their belts."

Until recently, affluent consumers had continued to spend, offering one of the few rays of hope for retailers suffering through these recessionary times.

Next stop, Rodeo Drive!

Now their confidence appears to have ebbed. At least that is the interpretation given the latest retail sales reports by some economic analysts, said The Times.

By affluent consumers, we mean top 5 percent in income earners — those households earning $210,000 or more. They account for about one-third of consumer outlays, including spending on goods and services, interest payments on consumer debt and cash gifts, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Moody’s Analytics.

Any cutback in purchasing by this elite group produces a disproportionate reduction in overall retail sales. Ouch!

The Times cites the usual reasons for the downturn in spending – swings in dividend payments, investment losses, low interest rates on bank savings accounts, uncertainty about the future, and (here's a new one) fear of looking prosperous.

It turns out that some executives and business owners who have laid off employees don't want to buy new luxury cars because they're afraid of how that will look to their remaining workers.

If things get worse, will they leave their Porsches and Lexuses at home and take the bus to the office?

Click here to read the full New York Times article.

The Enlightened Traveler: London's Charlotte St.

Even if you're a frequent visitor to London, you might not know Charlotte St.

Tucked away a few blocks north of Oxford St. and west of bustling Tottenham Court Rd., it's a quiet byway noteworthy for its many restaurants. These aren't London's finest eateries, though many of them are very good.

That makes Charlotte St. your preferred destination when you don't know where you want have dinner. You can work up an appetite as you stroll the area, inspecting your many options.

No phony Sicilian decor at Mennula, just simple, up-to-the-minute elegance

One that currently is attracting attention is the recently opened Mennula at No. 10. Sicilian-born chef-owner Santino Busciglio has worked at some of the city's better Italian restaurants, Rosmarino, Zafferano and Alloro.

We haven't been there yet, but we have been impressed by the reviews.

Time Out notes that Busciglio's "style of cooking is much more contemporary and refined than Sicilian home cooking, a fact underlined by this Fitzrovia site also being self-consciously smarter than London's other Sicilian restaurants."

The Independent writes: "There's nothing particularly flashy about Mennula; the lion's share of the work has gone into getting the food right, rather than "the concept"... If you're after simple Sicilian food, lovingly prepared by a talented chef, this is the place to come."

We cannot wait to try it.

The British Museum, Bloomsbury, Oxford St. shopping, Wigmore Hall, and West End theaters are 5-15 mins. on foot from Charlotte St. Goodge St. is the nearest tube stop.

The arty, chic Charlotte Street Hotel is a show business favorite and a luxe place to stay if your budget allows. Even if you are not in residence, you can enjoy a drink in the hotel's stylish Oscar Bar before dinner at Mennula or another Fitzrovia restaurant.

And Another Thing: Everybody's a Legend Nowadays

The advertising campaign for Blackglama mink, with it's often imitated headline "What becomes a legend most?," is one of the most famous of all time.

It had a simple premise: iconic, legendary celebrities (Judy Garland, Bette Davis, and yes, Ray Charles) were shown wearing nothing more than an elegant, expensive black mink coat in striking photographs by the great Richard Avedon.

So successful was the campaign that it has continued off and on from its inception in 1968 to the present century. If it's not broken, don't try to fix it.

For the most part, the subjects of the Blackglama ads were, indeed, legendary, as in meaning someone or something that is extremely famous.

Nowadays, PR people commonly invoke the L Word to describe anyone and anything even the slightest bit acclaimed. Take PR Newswire, the main channel for distributing news releases – we said news releases, not news – to the world's media.

If you look at their website, you quickly come to the cheerless conclusion that pretty much anyone with a publicist is considered to be a legend of some sort. This includes everyone from athletes who are in the twilight of mediocre careers to software developers about whom surely no legends ever have been or will be written.

Legendary should be used only to refer to (1) someone or something that has been celebrated or described in a legend (Paul Bunyan or King Arthur's Court, for example) or (2) someone who is extremely famous.

Here's a sampling of L Word references in more than 500 press releases on PR Newswire over the last 60 days. Which ones fit our description?

• legendary journalist Dan Rather
• legendary Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris
• legendary music photographer Rob Shanahan
• legendary songwriter Carole King
• legendary West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
• legendary music mogul Kevin Liles
• legendary concert promoter Leonard Rowe
• legendary software developer Kent Beck
• the world's most legendary queen, Cleopatra
• legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman
• the legendary Waikiki Beach

Cleopatra: legend; Kevin Liles: just a record producer

By our count, the only bona fide legend here is Cleopatra. While Dan Rather, Robert Byrd, and Carole King are well known in certain circles (and even may be nice guys, to boot), it would be a stretch to call them extremely famous. Waikiki Beach is a nice place to sip a pina colada, but please show us the legends that have been written about it.

As for Kent Beck, Leonard Rowe, and Kevin Liles, all we can say is, "Huh?"

PR professionals take note: the L Word should be used sparingly, if at all.

Not the Same Old, Same Old: Just in Time for Summer, Fun, Fashionable Sterling Silver Ballpark Cuff Links

Summer is heating up with major sporting events on every continent.

We've spent a good part of the week watching the World Cup and Wimbledon. (We're still marveling over that unbelievable Isner-Mahut marathon fifth set!)

Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, home of the Dodgers, then – and now!

With another week of top-notch tennis and two of soccer ahead, we'll be up most nights into the wee hours cheering on our favorite players and teams.

But long after the dust has settled at the All England Tennis Club and the last of South Africa's vuvuzelas are silenced, we'll still have four months of baseball to look forward to.

This bring us to our newest gift suggestion for clients and friends who (1) are mad about sports and (2) get properly dressed for work at least a few days a week.

What we're talking about here are handsome sterling silver cuff links inset with wood salvaged from the stadium seats of such historic ballparks as Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, The Polo Grounds, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Dodger Stadium, and seven others.

Ballpark Cuff Links, from top, Wrigley Field, Chicago;
Yankee Stadium, New York; Busch Stadium, St. Louis

Do not laugh! Apart from serving a utilitarian purpose for the dapper man or chic woman who knows that French cuffs are once again in vogue*, our ballpark cuff links are also collectible.

At the very least, wearing them is going to lead to some interesting conversations and maybe even new business or romantic relationships.

Each pair is unique: the painted surfaces of these unusual cuff links may be uneven or multicolored due to multiple layers of paint.

The cuff links are hallmarked with the name of the ballpark on the back and come with a certificate of authenticity. They are nicely gift boxed, too.

The price ranges from $150 - $270 per pair, depending on the scarcity of wood. To borrow from Will Rogers, they're not making wooden seats anymore. And some of these stadiums were torn down a long time ago. The ones still standing have had low-maintenance-but-still-tacky plastic seats for a decade or more.

Our ballpark cuff make memorable gifts for the man or woman has everything, but most assuredly not these! We think you should give them to all of your important clients, every cast member of your TV show or movie, and all of the groomsmen in your summer wedding.

Don't forget your friends who are coming over to watch the All-Star Game on July 13. Imagine how surprised and delighted they'll be.

We sell these in multiples of five or more, any assortment of teams you would like. Please phone us at (310) 581-6710 to place your order.

If you want just one pair, or would like to see the complete list of teams, click here.

*Not that they really ever went out of style. They're timeless, like Fred Astaire or a hot fudge sundae.