Camelot's kooky crusader

Pet portraitist Mimi Vang Olsen marches to the beat of her own drum

Mimi Vang Olsen operates in the West Village equivalent of a goldfish bowl. Every day, the eighty-five-year-old pet portraitist settles in a chair in her studio-cum-storefront on Hudson Street and gets to work, painting dogs, cats and the occasional guinea pig. Tourists stop to peer inside, cooing over a haphazard display of postcards and paintings. Locals tap on the glass to wave hello. During the pandemic, curiosity intensified: Vang Olsen’s shop became an Instagram sensation after she attached a blue mask onto a pug portrait hanging in the window for some much-needed levity. Vang Olsen, however, is nonchalant about the attention. She doesn’t have a cell phone or social media.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The dangers of faux-education

François-Marie d’Arouet (1694-1778), commonly known as Voltaire, devoted his life to waging intellectual warfare against Christianity — the Catholic Church and Catholic culture in particular — along with its historic political and social allies, royalty and monarchy, which he condemned as a monstrous entity in his famous battle cry“Écrasez l’Infȃme!” Given his aims as a polemicist, a deist and a republican, Voltaire did not misconstrue the enemy whose destruction he called for.

Bill Kauffman

Michael Cimino’s gift to cinema

In the spring of 1981, I committed what the entertainment press of that day regarded as an act of self-abuse: I bought a ticket and sat through Michael Cimino’s epic flop Heaven’s Gate, and then I went back for another viewing before the universally reviled film ended its one-week run at the local cinema. In the four decades since, I have abused myself in similar fashion four or five more times. Heaven’s Gate is a 200-minute-plus mess of beautiful incoherences and stupefying contradictions, its pattern set by a gorgeously preposterous prologue in which forty-something actors Kris Kristofferson and John Hurt waltz across the greensward as newly minted Harvard graduates, class of 1870.

Cosmo Landesman

The joy of missing out

As I write this the coronation of King Charles hasn’t happened yet, but I’m having great fun watching the procession of those who have been royally snubbed by royalty. Only a thousand people have been invited to the King’s coronation in Westminster Abbey and a lot of other people — dukes, earls, A-list celebs, actors, society figures — are pissed they didn’t make the cut. The British press reports daily on the latest person to be “snubbed.” So far the snub scorecard is as follows: Prince William is snubbing his brother Harry. Harry is snubbing everyone. His wife Meghan is snubbing Charles and President Biden is snubbing Britain.

Life