Exotic Foods

By PETER PLAGENS

New York

Artists can be classic or romantic, fussbudgets or spewers, cultural radicals or cultural conservatives, and so on. One division that’s always struck me is the one between those for whom art is a disciplining force (say, the photographer Cindy Sherman, or the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth), and those such as the sculptor John Chamberlain (1927-2011), whose art seems to flow naturally from their hands. They make art the way a hawk flies.

In the summer of 1958, Chamberlain rented the painter Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton, on Long Island. He discovered a 1929 Ford delivery van sitting in the back yard, and yanked the fenders from it. Then Chamberlain drove over them with his car. He didn’t do it to be radical, to shock anybody, to be clever, or to indulge in that old modernist trope, expanding the boundaries of art. Chamberlain did it to get the shapes he wanted, which he then welded together to create the industrially jazzy sculpture “Shortstop” (1958). It’s but one of nearly 100 works—mostly Chamberlain’s exhilarating sculpture, but also some adroitly energetic works on paper—in “John Chamberlain: Choices,” an exemplary retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.

Chamberlain, the son of an Indiana tavern owner, dropped out of high school and undertook—in the middle of World War II’s gas rationing—a road trip, with the idea of getting some sort of career in Hollywood. (Until he started selling enough art to support himself, he would earn a living as a hairdresser.) Busted in Blythe, Calif., for neglecting to pay a restaurant tab, Chamberlain enlisted—though underage—in the Navy, and served for a couple of years, in the Pacific, on the aircraft carrier USS Tulagi. In the mid-1950s, he made his way to that touchstone for so many of the best American modern artists, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There, he met and was profoundly influenced by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, the poets who helped run the place. The rest, as one might say, is sculptural history. A half-century on, Chamberlain’s early 1960s sculpture looks as fresh—if not fresher—than anything that opened in a Manhattan gallery last Thursday night.

At first—with such works as “Essex” (1960), a 9-foot-wide wall piece in which Chamberlain uses his almost-trademark found color of crumpled auto-body parts—he was suspected of operating within the boundaries of Pop Art, of having more in common with Andy Warhol’s silk-screened car crashes than with Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist paintings. Not true. Chamberlain is practically sui generis—though the idea of his best work (where steel is as malleable as paint) being AbEx in 3-D is a little closer to the truth. While “Three-Cornered Desire” (1979) obeys a couple of art-world maxims—make it big, and make it red—Chamberlain gives you more variety in his found rouges than most painters could stir up in a week of trying. Wonderfully contrapuntal bits of green and aqua punctuate the back side. The guy really knew his color. He also knew scale—his miniatures seem monumental—and could be really funny in where and how he placed hood louvers among his steely folds. Chamberlain’s work is genuine American rock ‘n’ roll sculpture; it looks the way a good garage band sounds.

John Chamberlain / ARS/David Heald/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

His works look the way a good garage band sounds.

Only certain full and robust artists can make some mediocre work and still be great. Chamberlain produced his share of middling art—which, on anybody else’s aesthetic scale, is still pretty good. After his breakthrough car-metal pieces and ultranonchalant works in cinched foam rubber, Chamberlain switched in the later 1960s to plain galvanized steel, leaving you (or at least me) with a feeling that something vital had been taken away. The exhibition contains a couple of 1970 works in clear polyester resin that are exotic in a not-good way, and the crinkled, shiny-silver aluminum finale in the rotunda, “SPHINXGRIN TWO” (1986/2010), might be a giant extraterrestrial Gumby.

In “Gondola Charles Olson” (1982), Chamberlain regains his automotive mojo, and right into our current century his oeuvre comprises a plethora of treasures in salvage-yard Baroque, including the atypically small “LEXICONOFFURN” (2006) and “Dictator Taxidermist” (2006), as well as the reassuringly big—about 10 feet tall—”Women’s Voices” (2005). The last three of these by the way, are white and chrome, a combination only Chamberlain could handle without getting precious about it.

“It’s all in the fit,” was Chamberlain’s motto. He was a master at plucking the right part from the scrap heap, and a genius at making it fit—that is, in making it contribute almost effortlessly to the slash and flow of the piece as a whole. It’s been said of Picasso that he was a great painter who basically painted pictures of the sculptures that his paintings could have been. Chamberlain is thought by some to have done the reverse—made sculptures of the paintings that they could have been. But Chamberlain’s forms and volumes and hollows and edges are so good that we joyously realize that they simply constitute some of the best sculpture of the past 100 years.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared April 11, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looks Like Rock ‘n’ Roll.

By Associated Press

Associated Press

Medics assist Livorno’s Piermario Morosini as he lies on the turf after he collapsed during a soccer match in Pescara, Italy, on Saturday.

MILAN—Livorno midfielder Piermario Morosini died Saturday after suffering cardiac arrest and collapsing on the pitch during his team’s Serie B match at Pescara. He was 25.

Edoardo De Blasio, a cardiologist at Pescara’s Santo Spirito hospital, confirmed the death, saying that “unfortunately he was already dead when he arrived at hospital. He didn’t regain consciousness.”

It was the latest high-profile case of a football player collapsing from heart failure on the pitch, coming less than a month after Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba suffered cardiac arrest during a game in England. Mr. Muamba survived, but remains in intensive care.

All Italian matches this weekend were immediately called off after the death was announced.

Mr. Morosini, who was on loan from Udinese, fell to the ground in the 31st minute of the match and tried unsuccessfully to get up before receiving urgent medical attention on the pitch. A defibrillator was used on the player, and he was conscious when he was stretchered off the pitch.

“He looked at me in the eyes when he was taken into the ambulance,” Pescara’s general manager, Danilo Iannascoli, told Sky Italia. “We are living through a drama.”

Italian media reports said a car belonging to traffic police blocked the ambulance’s way into the stadium and a window had to be broken so the car could be moved.

“I don’t know if the ambulance was late, but I know that the entrance onto the pitch was blocked by a vehicle,” Mr. Iannascoli said. “Morosini collapsed, he tried to get back up but then collapsed again.”

The match was abandoned with Livorno leading 2-0, and the other players left the field in tears. Livorno players and officials rushed to hospital, where they were told their teammate had passed away. They were paying their respects to the body before it is moved to the morgue.

Last month, Mr. Muamba collapsed during an English FA Cup match against Tottenham after suffering cardiac arrest. Bolton has said he is making “strong and steady improvements” in his recovery.

Days after that, Indian football player D. Venkatesh died after collapsing on the field during a local league game in the southern city of Bangalore.

By MELIK KAYLAN

Benaki Museum, Athens

Part of an encaustic icon of Christ from between the sixth and seventh centuries.

New York

Across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 52nd Street in Manhattan stands a tall, black-glass high-rise. Enter the glitzy atrium lobby, descend a flight of stairs, and quite suddenly you are enveloped by a miniature bubble of the ancient world. You have walked into the Olympic Tower’s Onassis Cultural Center, dedicated to exhibitions about the Hellenic world. Despite having been open since 2000, the center has the air of a pleasantly well-kept secret frequented by dapper elderly scholars and New Yorkers of Greek descent. It’s an ideal lunchtime escape from the nearby Fifth Avenue shopping crowds, especially with the current show. “Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century A.D.” offers a corrective to the rampant consumerism of our day with a condign lesson in Christianity’s classical roots and intense devotions while also reminding us that a trade in objects flourished from its earliest times.

To be sure, the show’s overarching message is scarcely intended to focus on holiday shopping habits. After all, it stays open until May 14. Ancient mosaics, busts, coins, jewelry, glassware, building fragments and the like—some 170 objects in 2,500 square feet of space—have been pooled mostly (but not entirely) from Greek museums to tell us about a critical phase in our collective Western consciousness. From the Greek viewpoint (two of the three curators hail from Greece), these four centuries were not the Dark Ages, despite the Euro-centric conventional wisdom. In recent decades, scholars have used the less pejorative term “Late Antiquity” because, while Rome declined, the eastern Roman Empire known as Byzantium increasingly gathered strength. As the show’s catalog points out, “for much of this time events in Western Europe could be regarded as a sideshow. The east stood out as the more peaceful and prosperous region.”

Yet culturally it was not exactly a stable time, as the curators illustrate repeatedly with objects that are often a patchwork, an uneasy synthesis of the pagan and Christian. From a moment in history when Christians were often persecuted by pagans, the show moves through seven sections to the last gleams of the pagan consciousness as it becomes inexorably stifled under Byzantine-Christian dominance. The underlying message concerns our era: This is how it felt to phase from a stable, coherent world-view toward an unknown outcome, in a period of multicultural fusion and confusion, before the next era of coherence. As the catalog further states, “these poignant fragments of a long-lost age speak to us directly of what it was like, on the ground, to live through an era of mighty transition. . . . It is this that brings them closest to us. For we, also, live in a world of change whose horizons have opened up dramatically. We also do not know the future.”

The show’s seven thematic sections, beginning with “The End of Antiquity” and culminating in “The Genesis of Christian Art” are not strictly chronological, dwelling at times on static snapshots under such themes as “Urban Realities” or “Daily Life.” This being an argument or narrative made through objects, the displays don’t at first dazzle the eye. We have seen mosaics and marbles and coins before. Yet on closer inspection one is gripped by the cumulative effect of seeing pellucidly through a time-window into a vast cultural morphing process.

One learns that sculpture went from the three-dimensional to a kind of bas-relief because Christian doctrine disdained natural representation. As a result, busts had noses hacked off or crosses inscribed onto cheeks or foreheads. Painting, too, lost its fledgling advances in perspective and depth because images began to function as symbols rather than as realistic representations of the observed world. You didn’t need to see saints depicted in exact proportion to anything, even to other saints, because their real proportions existed in heaven.

Yet the archetypal Roman bust of the philosopher as a balding, contemplative figure served well into the Christian centuries as a boilerplate for busts of community elders or painted depictions of saints. And believers continued to hedge their bets with hybrid religious emblems, as illustrated by the extraordinary double-sided stone slab with a Medusa on one side and a cross on the other. Just as churches and basilicas often took over the sites and stones of temples, Christian relics borrowed from pagan aesthetics. The first century Egyptian funerary “Mummy Portraits,” on wood panels, so vivid and naif, inspired styles of Christian icon paintings that lasted well into the 19th century in Russia.

Byzantine authorities stamped out pagan traditions most effectively by superimposing Christian substitutes. A truly poignant object is the patinated bronze sheet with names of Olympic champions inscribed on it from the first century B.C. to A.D. 385, after which the Olympics were outlawed. Horse races in hippodromes took their place. But, as the show palpably demonstrates, the transition lasted an entire age. Pagan gods ultimately went into hiding but pagan customs in many permutations proved immortal.

Mr. Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.

By JEREMY HILDRETH

San Marino, Calif.

‘The people of America,” wrote the modernist architect Richard Neutra in 1948, “have found a new mode of living, and Southern California, the richest community in the world, is fostering the economical, colorful, casual California Way of Life that you may all enjoy.” One luminary of this postwar creative environment was Sam Maloof, the Chino, Calif.-born son of Lebanese immigrants who earned, within his own lifetime, a reputation as perhaps America’s greatest-ever furniture craftsman.

For six decades, Maloof toiled happily in his Alta Loma workshop, producing about 75 pieces of furniture a year. When he died in 2009, at age 93, he had a six-year backlog of orders. And while Maloof himself always affected an unflappable—and largely authentic—persona of the simple woodworker, his pieces became lauded as great art. One of his rocking chairs became the first piece of contemporary furniture in the White House; another sold for $75,000 in 2001, according to Ray Leier of del Mano gallery in West Los Angeles, a longtime friend and dealer of Maloof’s.

Alfreda Maloof/Maloof Foundation

Maloof’s furniture fused engineering and art through intuition and deathdefying technique.

“The House That Sam Built,” at San Marino’s venerable Huntington Library, includes 35 splendid examples of Maloof’s furniture. They’re arranged in domestic settings alongside paintings, sculptures, ceramics, enamels and other artworks by his Pomona Valley contemporaries, including his mentor, the painter Millard Sheets.

Out for the visitor to look at (but not to sit on, alas) are Maloof’s first sofa and some early chairs—flagrantly Danish in inspiration, but lithe and lovely in walnut, maple and the occasional exotic hardwood—and the prototype home-office furniture he fashioned for industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss created the Princess and Trimline telephones, among other renowned 20th-century designs; he was Maloof’s second customer. There are also coffee tables, side tables, music stands, bassinets, settees and barstools. (If Maloof ever made a bed, none is in evidence here.)

The piece that draws a crowd, though, is an armchair with a sign: “Please be seated,” an offer few visitors refused. Beholding folks settling into the spindle-backed number revealed Maloof’s genius. “Oooooh, it’s really comfortable,” said a pregnant lady, slumping into the seat with a sigh. A thin, short woman was equally appreciative: “It hits your back in just the right place. And my feet touch the ground.” A taller fellow agreed: “It’s amazing. It works no matter who you are. How did he do it?”

When an object is handmade, you can’t help but commune with its maker, a phenomenon Maloof reveled in. He wrote in “Sam Maloof: Woodworker” (1989), “Each time a person sits in one of my chairs, or at one of my tables, or opens one of my cabinets, I want him to feel that particular piece was made especially for him to use. Knowing this, there is enjoyment for both of us: maker and user.”

Moreover, he explained, “I try to make each of my pieces beautiful and pleasing; yet no matter how well designed and crafted, I want each piece to be useful. . . . I once tried a rocking chair in a New York museum and slid right out of it. I commented on this to the museum director, who chastened me, ‘Oh, Sam, you’re not supposed to sit on it. It’s just to look at.’”

Maloof’s philosophy harked back to a bygone age, according to Jonathan L. Fairbanks, a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, when “the artist’s and the craftsman’s work formed the basic material matrix in the community. In general that does not happen today; buyers almost never meet producers.”

An exception to this, I realized, might be Apple. For when you buy an Apple product—and maybe this will change with Steve Jobs no longer the obvious animating spirit of the company—you feel like you know the guy who made it; this gives the product tangible humanity and enhances its appeal.

Like Jobs, Maloof aimed to imbue everyday objects with beauty and practicality, and recognized the role of intuition in achieving this. If an experimental product just didn’t feel right to use, or didn’t look good, Jobs would kill it off. When making a chair, said Maloof, “I do it all by eye. I do it by feel. I use the measure of my hand rather than a rule. . . . People have asked me how I go about developing a design. There are three things that I emphasize: eye, hand, and heart.”

And a fourth thing, too, I believe: guts. Watching a video of Maloof cutting compound curves freehand into blocks of wood with a band saw is like watching Jimi Hendrix play guitar or Evel Knievel jump fountains. His technique is convention-shattering, death-defying, mesmerizing. “I don’t recommend doing it this way,” he says in an old television documentary as he twists the wood into the saw, his fingers millimeters away from the relentless blade. (I wish a 60-second loop of that were on view at the Huntington.)

In this realm of craft, where engineering and art fuse together, a healthy perfectionism arises to keep the maker honest. “A chair leg may suddenly look a little heavy or a tabletop a little thick,” Maloof explained. “When they do, I change them.” Likewise, he said, “it does not matter how much work I have and how much pressure the client puts on me I maintain a steady pace. Not one piece of furniture leaves my workshop that I would be ashamed of.”

Would that we all managed to bring such care, pride and soulfulness to our work, and such excellence to our living spaces. That is the paramount lesson and inspiration of Sam Maloof’s life and woodwork, plainly visible in this Huntington exhibition.

Mr. Hildreth is an identity consultant to cities, countries and companies.

A version of this article appeared January 12, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Comfort and Joy.

Fox Search/Everett / Rex Features

From left, Sandra Oh, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti in the 2004 film ‘Sideways.’

It was a chance remark that persuaded Rex Pickett to venture a little farther north, “over the hill,” as he says, into California’s Santa Ynez Valley. That was in the mid-’90s, when the author of “Sideways” was more interested in golf than he was in the delights of Santa Barbara County’s flourishing Pinot Noir. But once there, in between rounds of golf, he began to sample the local wine. Pretty soon the road trips turned into weekend stays at hotels and he was inviting friends up from L.A.

Then one day he invited Roy Gittens, an electrician he worked with in the film industry, and they took a tour of the region’s tasting rooms. That afternoon proved the genesis of a tale, which has arguably become the most successful wine story of all time, the story of two middle-aged men—Miles and Jack—who take a road trip to the vineyards of that very same valley.

“It was Roy, who is actually the Jack character, who first suggested I write it,” says Mr. Pickett. He set out to write a screenplay, which turned into a comic novel and finally, in 2004, was the basis for a hugely popular film. “Sideways,” directed by Alexander Payne, and co-written by Mr. Payne and Jim Taylor, won a slew of awards including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Now we have a stage play. Later this spring, the Ruskin Group Theatre Company in Santa Monica will throw open its doors to California’s wine lovers, as it transforms its foyer into a temporary wine tasting room, where Pinot Noir will be served to enjoy throughout the performance. It’s not often that I dream of Santa Monica, but the thought of sipping a high-end Pinot Noir while watching the antics of Miles and Jack unfold on stage really does appeal.

“It doesn’t have to be Pinot,” says Mr. Pickett in a voice not dissimilar to that of Miles. “We’re thinking outside of the bottle. We may even have a Merlot week.”

Actually, that’s not as unlikely as it sounds. Before the so called “Sideways effect,” which saw a spike in sales of Californian Pinot Noir following the release of the film, it was other grape varieties such as Syrah and Merlot that the Santa Ynez Valley was known for.

“When I first started going up there, there wasn’t much Pinot Noir being produced at all,” he says. “But Richard Sanford was a pioneer, and he started planting west of the 101 [highway]. Now, of course, there is Pinot everywhere.”

True to form, it was at a Pinot Noir festival in Santa Monica, where Mr. Pickett was promoting the “Sideways” sequel “Vertical,” where he was first approached by Jason Matthews, a playwright with the Ruskin Group Theatre Company, to adapt his novel for the stage. He jumped at the chance. It was, he says, an opportunity to get back to his indie-film-making roots and work on a project where he had an element of control. After more than 15 rewrites on the play, casting is now pretty much complete.

The process also gave him the chance to work again with wine language. “One thing I really love,” he says, “although people might think it is pretentious or ostentatious, is the language of wine. I love reaching for those polysyllabic, those metaphors, even though sometimes it is ridiculous, and I love that wine inspires people to speak in a certain way.”

He says that the appreciation of wine is similar to the appreciation of other art forms such as great literature and film. But despite films such as “Sideways” and a generation of younger, more informal drinkers, the world of wine is still replete with snobbism.

“With literature there is a level playing field,” he says. “There is nothing to stop me reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ but when it comes to wine, a lot of it has to do with money, and that kind of snobbism I don’t like.”

His next project, a television series based on a well-known wine critic, is a comedy set in Sonoma that, he says, will be a “look into the wine world.”

All this seems a long way from when he walked into a wine store in the Santa Ynez Valley and was offered a glass of Pinot Noir. “I remember there was a British guy, who was a little unhappy about his salary so he took it out on the inventory and I got to experience a lot of wines I would never have been able to afford. You could say I owe it all to the Brits,” he laughs.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear.

Every piece of clothing has a story: There’s far more to a $155 polo shirt than a yard of fabric, four buttons and a length of thread.

The tale of a KP MacLane polo shirt offers a rare look inside the planning and global transactions behind the clothes people wear. To begin, though, there is an actual KP MacLane—Katherine, who founded the brand with her husband, Jared MacLane.

The MacLanes met while working as sales managers at Hermès in Beverly Hills. They shared a fondness for polo shirts, and their closets were full of versions by Ralph Lauren, Hermès, Lacoste, J.Crew, Vineyard Vines and others. When they decided to move to Atlanta and launch an entrepreneurial venture last year, their minds went to those polos. “From the beginning, we knew we love classic pieces,” says Ms. MacLane. Mr. MacLane adds, “We want to take it to the next level.”

A notable facet of the fashion industry is that the barriers to entry are low. Etsy is full of items sewn in someone’s spare bedroom. Many big-name designers started small. Thakoon Panichgul sold his first collection from an upturned trash can in a lower-Manhattan warehouse, and Zac Posen sold his concept from his parents’ living room.

While that gives new entrants hope, it also creates a big risk. Stores are full of clothes from brands that disappear too quickly to recall. Standing out is a challenge.

Yet the MacLanes believed there was one shirt that hadn’t yet been made: a polo that could cross from sport to the office. Their concept would forgo a logo so the shirt could be dressed up with a blazer. The women’s version would have a slightly longer, more flattering sleeve and a lengthier buttoned placket.

“I just wanted to be able to see my jewelry and have it open without being too revealing,” says Ms. MacLane.

They planned to sell it the way they had sold luxury products—with attentive service and attractive packaging. They would sell online initially and wholesale to stores later. Products would launch individually, with a men’s polo next.

Reality hit when they started looking for a fine cotton fabric and mother-of-pearl buttons. “We knew from our experience at Hermès that the best fabrics come from France and Italy,” says Mr. MacLane. Yet it took six months to find a source for a soft, well-draped fabric that was free of potentially harmful dyes and finishing chemicals.

Cotton fabrics turned out to be stiffer and harder to dye than some blends, and the planned piqué weave looked too casual. Cotton prices soared in a global shortage last year. They settled on a cotton-modal blend (modal is a form of rayon) that offered a soft feel, attractive drape and absorbed color well. From a factory near Paris, it cost $6.80 a yard—less than the $9 a yard for cotton fabric but more than some $5-a-yard blends they had investigated.

Their plans for fine buttons changed as well. Mother-of-pearl cost $1 a button. Samples broke and chipped during wear and laundering. The MacLanes were using four buttons rather than two (three on the longer placket, plus an extra), raising the cost per shirt. They found a durable plastic button with a shell-like sheen for three cents each. “We’re calling this the practical approach to luxury,” Mr. MacLane says.

Finding a factory to sew the shirts was challenging. The MacLanes wanted to manufacture in the U.S. “There’s been a big shift to things that are made locally, and we wanted to be a part of that,” he says.

The first New York factory they approached refused to submit a bid. The owner believed they would take his patterns and samples and send them to China for production.

They found a willing Brooklyn factory and set to making samples. Planned grosgrain ribbon inside the hem made the “tennis tail”—a longer back shirttail for easy tucking—curl up. They substituted simpler cotton tape to reinforce the edge. Fully enclosed French seams, often used in men’s shirts, looked bulky with the stretchy fabric, so they chose a simpler “overlock” stitch that looked finished yet trim.

When picking packaging, they worried that boxes would become landfill waste. One afternoon, Ms. MacLane pulled out a laundry bag in which she was storing some scarves. It was from the Sea Island, Ga., hotel where the couple had been married. “She said, ‘Oh my God, how about if we sent a shirt in a laundry bag?’ And I was like, ‘That’s brilliant,’ ” Mr. MacLane recalls.

It took several iterations to get their logo—a colorful bird—stitched on the linen bag in the exact Pantone hues they’d selected. From their work at Hermès, they knew Vietnam has a reputation for producing great hand-embroidery, so they decided to make the bags, which cost $3, at a factory there. But they had to send samples back and forth to get the thread colors right.

The hang tags come from a printer outside of Atlanta, using string from a Texas firm.

Ultimately, the cost of materials and labor for each shirt added up to $29.57. This brought into sharp focus the cynicism of the New York factory owner who had predicted they would take his work to China. Factories in China, they found, would produce similar shirts—without the MacLanes’ choice of materials—for as little as $1 or $2.

Using standard industry markups, the MacLanes set the wholesale price for the women’s polo at $65 and the retail price at $155. (Retailers in the U.S. mark up wholesale prices of ready-to-wear by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 times.)

From those profits, the MacLanes pay themselves, cover marketing and overhead, invest in new-product development—and pay for shipping to customers, for whom ground shipping is free.

Finished shirts are sent to their home in Atlanta. There, they juggle caring for their 10-month-old son with fulfilling daily orders. “We knew how to fold,” Ms. MacLane says. “We’d both been at Hermès.”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com or follow her on Twitter: @BinkleyOnStyle

A version of this article appeared February 2, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Polo Puzzle: What Goes Into a $155 Price Tag?.

By JOHN JURGENSEN

Photograph by Adam Golfer

GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL At 65, director John Waters is still impish, hilarious and subversive but has also mellowed a bit with age.

John Waters, the writer and director who emerged from the midnight movie circuit of the 1970s, has earned his status as a social critic. In 13 feature films, including “Pink Flamingos” and “Hairspray,” he gleefully presents depraved characters undermining a society of squares.

In the seven years since he made his last film, the director has written “Role Models,” a collection of essays about his idols who hurdled over adversity, including Johnny Mathis, Little Richard and a seedy pornographer. He’s also hunting down funding for his next script, “Fruitcake,” a Christmas movie for kids. He lives in Baltimore, his native city and the setting for his films, in a house purchased in 1990.

At age 65, Waters remains a celebrated figure for counterculturists but accepts that his time as a revolutionary has passed. Earlier this year, protestors at Occupy Baltimore built an encampment they called Mortville, a tribute to the criminal enclave depicted in Waters’s film “Desperate Living.” Waters supports them but declined to join. “I have three homes and a summer rental, and some of my money is in Wall Street,” he explained. He champions younger filmmakers whom he says succeed in subversion, including Johnny Knoxville and Todd Phillips. At the same time, he reviles “the new bad taste,” which he defines as entertainment that tries too hard to shock and lacks inventiveness and wit.

“If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, he should have an outfit for that.”

When I was a kid, my parents were a little uptight because the things I was interested in weren’t the proper things for a six-year-old. It wasn’t, “Isn’t that nice that he wants an encyclopedia?” I wanted to look up heroin addiction. Did it say in the Dr. Spock book what to do if your child played car accident all day? I don’t think so. It wasn’t easy to find out what to do with me.

I used to come home from kindergarten and tell my mom that there was a really weird kid in our class, and he only drew with black crayons. But that kid was me. I was creating my own character, I guess. I don’t remember that being traumatic or anything. I learned early that other people weren’t interested in my obsessions. I lived in suburban Baltimore and went to private school. They hid those things from you. “Life” magazine was my key to the outside world—they made beatniks and Jackson Pollock famous. That’s where I read about [B-movie director] William Castle. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered there was bohemia.

When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that. Get a look! I’m not judging what they do; I hope they don’t shut me down.

I think my parents made me feel safe. They were horrified by what I did, but they encouraged me to keep doing it because I was obsessed, and what else could I do? My movies were very humiliating for them. No one said they were good for a very long time. Yet I borrowed money from my father, and I paid him back. I was doing something. I think they were amazed that I went around the country and got them shown and got the budgets back. Even though Vincent Canby said in the Sunday “New York Times,” “What, did he have faulty toilet training?” My mother was so mortified. I can laugh about it now; I don’t know if she does.

The kind of bad taste I portrayed never achieved wide success, except for “Hairspray,” and that happened unexpectedly. What America now exports in culture is also bad taste, but a bad taste that tries too hard to shock. I never tried to top the graphic end of “Pink Flamingos.” If I had, I wouldn’t be here today. The only way you change anything is to use bad taste to get somebody to accept something they didn’t before. I think higher of my audience. That’s why my films don’t make money.

The person who does bad taste the best in movies today is Johnny Knoxville. The “Jackass” movies are watched by blue-collar guys with their children. It’s butt gags for the whole family, and it makes $170 million. That is brilliant. That is anarchy. I don’t know how he does it.

There’s no such thing as exploitation films anymore. When Herschell Gordon Lewis made “Blood Feast,” the ultra-gory horror film, in 1963, he did it because in that moment no studio would ever make something so explicit. The underground exists, but it’s on the Internet and nobody can figure out a way to make money from it. I’m on the Internet, but it did ruin every business I’m in. But there are still filmmakers like Gaspar Noé, Lars von Trier and Todd Solondz, who are really good and transgressive and who continue to surprise me.

John Currin uses bad taste in a perfect way. His paintings look like old masters, but he paints sexual things or weird gay couples. He confuses you in a beautiful way, which is what art should be. I think Warhol’s films are the last thing that will be discovered and will be even as big as his other art. That’s still to come, when people finally have in their homes a way to display video art seamlessly, like they would a painting. The Warhol films did that style of video art first, and they’ll be there forever.

I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a gangsta rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator. I want to hear about that kind of rich. Of course, the worst is having a convertible if you’re over 20 years old. If you’re 50, please, buy a painting.

Photograph by Adam Golfer

‘I like rap music. But bragging about being rich to poor people is really offensive. I want to hear a gangsta rap song about buying a Cy Twombly painting or dating a museum curator.’ –John Waters

My audience is younger and younger. I’m proud of that. I believe that tomorrow is always going to be better—I don’t believe my time was better. We saw things nobody will ever see again. But half my friends are dead, too, so there are two sides to that. I don’t hide my age. I think it’s like heroin. Once you start, you can’t stop. That’s my fear—getting touch-ups with needles from quack doctors in L.A. who you meet in the airport hotel between flights.

Routine is not the enemy of creativity. I’m very organized. I go out to get the paper within 20 seconds of the same time each day; my hangovers are scheduled a year in advance. I don’t have time to be nuts. If I was retired, I might be completely out of my mind, because I’d have time to give in to neurotic thinking. Now I just have to work it into a schedule. That neurotic behavior has to produce.

I can’t get a movie made right now; I’ve found different ways to tell stories about what’s obsessing me. I’ve made 15 movies. I’ve made ‘em. I wouldn’t make a super-low-budget film now—I’m not going go back to when I was 18. And I can’t go faux underground. I use unions. I have four employees. I’ve gotta work.

“Fruitcake” will get made eventually. It’s a children’s movie, the only genre I haven’t done. That would frighten parents at one time, but now I think they’d be for it. It’s a commercial movie, but I think all of them are. It’s not important to scare people. I want to surprise way more than to scare. Scary would be, like, me in skinny jeans.

A 65-year-old man who’s angry is a loser. A 20-year-old angry man is a sexy leader. Nothing makes me angry anymore.

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

For decades, the judges on television courtroom dramas and police procedurals were adjudicating enigmas. From “Perry Mason” to the capacious “Law & Order” franchise, they did a bit of overruling here, a little sustaining there, demanded order as needed and, at the climactic moment, called for the verdict. What did these blank-faced, black-robed benchwarmers think? About anything? Now, there was a case worth cracking.

“Growing up watching ‘Perry Mason,’ I can’t remember many of the judges doing more than ruling on evidentiary issues. You didn’t feel you knew them at all. But on modern TV you do get a peek behind the veil,” said David E. Kelley, who was one of the first to lift that veil as the creator of shows like “The Practice” and “Boston Legal.”

The former featured the sexually rapacious Roberta Kittleson (played by Holland Taylor) who skillfully and unrepentantly seduced her law clerk, made advances to litigants, and ordered those who displeased her to go stand in the corner—all while making impeccable legal rulings. The latter included Clark Brown (Henry Gibson) who—so much for judicial restraint—reacted to witness testimony with commentary like “shocking,” “disgusting” and “outrageous.”

But in exposing judicial tics, quirks, bluntly stated biases and ethical failings, “The Good Wife,” now in its third season, sets a benchmark. Witness Judge Richard Cuesta (David Paymer), who has no tolerance for being interrupted and even less for naughty language—those who appear before him must substitute the word “fluff” for profanity. And witness Judge Charles Abernathy (Denis O’Hare), a committed blood donor and a committed liberal—but, he wants you to know, fair-minded—who’s convinced that lawyers are less likely to be at each other’s throats when seated and leaning back in their chairs.

There’s also Judge Lee Sutman (Chip Zien), who reminds lawyers that “unless I point to you, you do not speak”; Judge Felix Afterman (Jerry Stiller), who frequently nods off in court and tries to disguise his snoozes as time when he’s “thinking”; and Judge Patrice Lessner (Ana Gasteyer), who insists that lawyers preface every statement with “In my opinion” to make it plain that such statements are in no way to be construed as facts.

Robert and Michelle King, the husband-and-wife creators of “The Good Wife,” had long viewed TV judges as untapped sources of drama, conflict and surprise, pointing, as a model, to 1959′s “Anatomy of a Murder,” the big-screen adaptation of a novel by a Michigan state supreme-court justice, John Voelker. “There was a sense of the judge [played by Joseph McCarthy's nemesis Joseph Welch] having a personality, and having likes, dislikes and interests,” Mr. King said.

The Kings had also chafed at the fusty tropes of legal dramas, chief among them witnesses breaking down on the stand—file under Mason, Perry—and the passionate closing argument that saves the day and saves the defendant’s bacon.

“There’s a certain rhythm in courtroom dramas, and that rhythm usually involved it being a debate between two sides—the prosecution and the defense,” said Mr. King. “Then the authority, the judge, comes in and offers a binary answer, either yes or no. We wanted to make the usual strategic moves in court more complex by adding a third side, a judge who would have quirks and biases so the chess game was never two-sided. The players—the lawyers—would have to take into account a referee who every now and then flicks a chess piece from the board.”

What followed from this thinking, Mr. King continued, “was that the judges should be interesting in their own right: unpredictable, real and far from omniscient.” Even a little zany, if perhaps not in the same league as the jurists on the comedy “Night Court” and the comedy-drama “Ally McBeal.” “At a certain point courtroom drama grinds down into tedium,” Mr. King said. “One of the ways to avoid that is comedy.”

The complicated, complicating judges have made the courtroom scenes livelier. They’ve also made for a nice thematic fit. “‘The Good Wife’ is about things coming at Alicia from all sides,” said Ms. King, referring to the often beleaguered title character (Julianna Margulies), who goes to work as an associate at a large law firm to support her children after her politician husband (Chris Noth) is jailed in the wake of a sex and corruption scandal. The unpredictable judge is “yet one more side that something can come at her from.”

Giving judges more dimension and more face time doesn’t mean they’re ready for their own series, however, though the USA network’s “Fairly Legal” has a mediator as its central character. “It would be difficult because they’re decision makers in the course of the trial but you can’t involve them in a case to the same extent you can involve a lawyer,” said Mr. Kelley, whose legal drama “Harry’s Law,” now in its second season, uses judges sparingly.

“In 41 minutes, sometimes it’s all you can do to service your main characters and you don’t have time for the judges,” he added. “Sometimes my scripts run to 70 pages because I’ve given the judge a bit to do. When you have to get tough and edit the script, sometimes it’s the judge’s material that goes.”

Robert and Michelle King have a friend on the bench who would be happy to have some of their judges’ material go as well. “He thinks some of what we do is flamboyant and shows a little disrespect for a judge’s authority,” said Mr. King, who concedes that “The Good Wife” “went a little broad” in the middle of the second season, and that it’s time, perhaps, to pull back a bit.

“Of course, TV shows deal with the extreme,” he said, “because that’s most entertaining.”

Ms. Kaufman writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.