There’s a feature in this month’s Vogue about Rodarte, the fashion house led by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy.  They make singular, ephemeral garments that look as if they could be ripped off a girl by a good gust of wind.  The ones I’ve seen in person don’t seem tailored so much as assembled: from strips of leather, twists of fabric, feathers, baubles and trim.  And they don’t seem to be fitted to a woman’s body so much as wrapped around it and pinned in place.  (What does it feel like to wear one these dresses?)  The article praises the designers for their unusually artistic perspective and for building a thriving business in Los Angeles, at a distance from the media frenzy of New York.

Their current collection looks to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings for inspiration.  In its palette of shimmering, impossible-to-name golds, greens and blues, it’s faithful to the artist’s blooms and skies.  The dresses are all immaculately, inventively cut, and stunningly pretty.  And maybe that’s why I can’t, like the editors at Vogue, simply fall in love with the clothes.  They go down easy.  They don’t get at the crazy life in Van Gogh’s canvases; they simply adopt their colors and images.  Some dresses literally reuse parts of the canvases (sunflowers, a night sky) as prints.  The most successful outfits mix solid-colored pieces with evocative silhouettes to capture some of the graphic dynamism of the paintings.  But no garment gets at their raw physicality or emotionalism.  They’re drowned out in loveliness.

Is there anyone as cool as Miles Davis?  And is there anything cooler than the cover for the 1959 album Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quartet?  Album covers, because they’re big and square and flat, have a fundamental graphic presence that book covers don’t.  And jazz album covers, because they don’t pander to teenage tastes, rock-and-roll cliches, or bourgeois pretensions, seem altogether more sophisticated than other types of album covers.  Different Miles Davis covers showcase cutting edge graphics, photography, and renderings.  On Workin’ there’s a photo of the master trumpeter and bandleader taking a break from a recording session on a quiet New York City side street.  He’s natty, sporting an Eton collar and a skinny black tie, holding his coat closed, and just barely smiling, waiting for the photograph to be taken so he can light his cigarette.

What seduces is the backdrop.  Across the street, sealing the view, there’s the sort of banal concrete and glass building (scaleless, endless and monotonous) that gives modernism a bad name.  The street is empty except for a steamroller, a man crossing the street, and the bumper of a car that just barely pokes into the frame on the left-hand side.  While the perspective lines are dynamic, there’s an air of mystery about the proceedings, an Edward Hopper kind of loneliness, but one that’s distinctly urban.  Is the other man, who looks as if he’s in uniform, a worker operating the steamroller?  Whose car is it?  And is someone looking down from the building across the street, through the open jalousie?  It’s a scene rather loosely (perhaps even accidentally) composed, without heroism, yet it feels ripe mythologically.  Everybody’s going about their business on an ordinary afternoon, and yet it seems like it could be much more than that.

I followed the news about Salman Rushdie’s banishment from the Jaipur Literature Festival last week with considerable interest.  The local government claimed that Mumbai-based goons, engaged by pro-Muslim fanatics, were on their way to assassinate him.  It was a sub-plot as fantastic as the ones in The Satanic Verses, the book that started all the fuss twenty-three years ago, and that remains banned in India.  The last time that I thought about The Sanatic Verses in political terms, as anything other than literature, was when it was published in 1989 and the Ayatollah Khomeni’s fatwa sent the author in hiding.  I was in college and some students staged a public reading from the book, in protest.  Last week in Jaipur writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi read from the book, in protest, and were themselves, in turn, banished from the festival.

The Satanic Verses is, I think, Rushdie’s finest book, the most complex in its language and ideas.  It’s the only book I know that captures both India and the west (in this case England) with true emotional richness.  There are passages that I can recall from reading the book over fifteen years ago (a plane crash, a boy eating pork, a man spitting into another man’s food) with devastating clarity.  Yet my most powerful memories of the book aren’t related to the narrative, or to the edition I read from (a fat, secondhand hardcover that the author signed for me years later).  What I remember is the physical circumstances in which I read it: over a string of late summer evenings, in my first apartment, with the windows flung open, sunk low and dreamily in the only chair I owned – a secondhand one with nubby green cushions and Danish modern stylings.  I still have the chair, refinished and reupholstered, in a corner of my living room, although it only really gets used as a step stool.  My memories of the chair, and of the book too, remain more vivid than the things themselves.

Pity the poor starlets!  Every time they step out they are photographed, the photographs go online, and they are scrutinized instantaneously by a heartless, fashion-savvy public.  Most celebrities have professional stylists for support, but even so they once in a while end up wearing things that are very simply wrong.  Last Wednesday, just halfway through the festival, Huffington Post ran a slideshow of the worst-dressed celebrities at Sundance.  This event is tricky to dress for: it’s cold, it’s snowing, and there’s a self-conscious artsiness to the proceedings.  It’s a very particular brand of glamor that just about all of the starlets (and stars) miss; they tend to dress down completely rather than adjust their glamorous signature styles for the weather.

They might take a hint from New York City ladies, who don knee-high rubber rain boots at the first hint of any kind of precipitation, from an hour-long drizzle to a foot-high snowfall.  Along with a good coat and an umbrella, they’re all that’s really necessary to face the weather.  You just pull them on over your existing outfit and go.  Since the rage for dark olive Hunter boots five years ago the rubber rain boot has become, like the pea coat and the pashmina, a winter wardrobe staple.  Hunter makes them in all styles and colors, in metallics, and with a Jimmy Choo-designed croc imprint.  And there are good-looking copies everywhere that can be had for twenty dollars or so.  The tall boots look right paired with both jeans and skirts, with both trench coats and furs.  They’re practical, iconic, and have an anglo-aristocratic edge.  The Queen wears them at Balmoral, Kate Moss wears them to Glastonbury, and Kristin Dunst wears them in Melancholia.  Starlets at Sundance can wear them too.