30 January 2010

Suspicious Package

Weekend telegram: Earl Greyhound's new record, Suspicious Package, will clear your mind. Official album release date, April 13th.

29 January 2010

Slow, slow, slow, and steady.



He travels in a cloud of jazz, day and night. I'll take orchestral dreamtime, please.

27 January 2010

The bracelet from Rome


My best girl is in Big Sur right now and it would be a massive lie to say I'm not in the thumping throes of jade green envy. The early tugs of Cabin Fever crept under the door yesterday, and were encouraged in their impetuous ways by talks of another L.B.'s summer Hudson Valley wedding and the country house they are searching for in Woodstock. I came home, last night, to rose candles blazing, the very same ones I burnt at my birthday last year, which is in April, the 13th actually, which made me think Spring! Persephone! Elysian Fields!, which reminded me of my Cabin Fever. I deftly dealt with Cabin Fever by inciting an argument this morning- an expert move, L.B.. Now, the windows are thrown open, the dishes are clean, the first lady of France is murmuring low, and my mind's eye has wandered into the passenger seat of a Fornasetti Mercedes-Benz 280TE, roaring along a coastal byway.

26 January 2010

"Therewith fantastic garlands did she make/ Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples"


It's said that Oriental rugs are representations of gardens ferociously blooming, a verdant mirage laid flat and low amongst the unfurling dunes. The Bahârestân carpet was woven by the Zoroastrians of Ērānshahr, an image of Paradise's Garden, laid with precious stones and silver and gold threads. The Sassanian (Ērānshahr) Empire was stormed in the year 637 and the carpet was cut into pieces and distributed amongst the vanquishers as souvenirs of their triumph.

25 January 2010

My castle, my books.


Just cracked open my 25 cent, Playboy Press copy of Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon. Certain already that this will be impossible to put down, as this is what has met me on only page 2:

A centenarian has told me that memory protects one from this burden of experience. Whole segments of time dropped out, she said: "Of five or six years, say, around the turn of the century, all I can remmber is the dress that someone wore, or the colour of a curtain." And I would be pleased, rather than otherwise, at the prospect of remembering Naples in similar terms - a lilac dress Gioconda wore one morning driving to Caserta, or the Siena-coloured curtains of the apartment in San Biahio dei Librai.

The future is bright (amongst friends)


I spent the weekend in my black bloomers, topped off with my love's newest button-down and my old fur stole. First project to be executed in winter uniform is an invitation for nuptials set to take place on Beltane. Expect loads of butterfly wings and fairies, flowers and Indian princesses, anthropomorphized animals and desert dwellers, finished off in hothouse hues.

21 January 2010

Porcelain candies

Valentino Spring 2010 via Souvenirs & style.com

To stroll through Le Marais, or down Graham Avenue, a chalky palette, bare legs, lace, black nail varnish, bedhead, kohl, and volume around the ankles is all I ask for.

20 January 2010

Next week, a plum.


Last night's late night salon music? Scott 4 on 180 grm vinyl, because that's what he loves. He also loves brass faucets in the shape of swans and massive Napoleon III mirrors towering over clean chrome ovens, which all works out rather nicely because I do, too.

19 January 2010

Even the tiniest room at the Chelsea Hotel is still a room at the Chelsea Hotel

Tonight is a night for rhapsodizing. On 11th Street, Ghost Gamblers deliver songs of the desert and desertion, and on 17th Street, Patti Smith will cast her lately lustrous, "Dracula's daughter" spell.

“We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.” They sound like Hansel and Gretel, living in a state of shared delight, blissfully unaware of what awaited on the path ahead. - frm Janet Maslin's review of Just Kids

18 January 2010

Confession, from the night we toasted Cono & the mermaid house

"dear virginia, an odalisque on the payphone" $3.50 or $15/box at www.ilovejezebel.com

It's true what you said. Some days, I am the odalisque dropping a dime into the payphone. Today might be one of those days.

15 January 2010

My castle, my books.

A few weeks ago I read Lady Sings the Blues, autobiography of fellow chihuahua-owner, Billie Holiday. While reading Lady Sings the Blues in public, I had quite an interaction with a guitar player (not my guitar player), but I'm feeling way too decimated from listening to President Clinton talk about Haiti to tell a story tonight. Some other night, okay?

13 January 2010

"Audiences on the boulevards and other places"


Everyone I love is getting warm. He's off to Los Angeles for the night. I'm gathering my girls close tonight for a viewing of Grand Hotel. Ladies must learn to be ladies.

12 January 2010

"Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice"


Green-eyed Jeanne Hébuterne was the vulpine ideal of all Amedeo Modigliani had been questing for. Two days after he died of meningitis, aged 46, she, aged 21 and 8 months pregnant, walked backwards out of a window. They left behind a small daughter, Jeanne Modigliani, aged 2, to be raised by relatives who scoured the family tree of her bohemian, wild-living begetters. The little girl, who knew not from whence she sprang, grew up a painter, like them, and devoted her life to restoring her mother's artist legacy. Her father's legacy as a painter required no such assistance (his "Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne" sold for $15.1 million at auction in 1998.)

11 January 2010

Love Babies

the dreamers + sophia coppola for louis vuitton via souvenirs

When a house is well stocked with coffee and ginger snaps, piles of books, swan-lovers, new amps, and little girls, there's very little to induce a vagabond stationer to leave, save for the requireds or unbelievably desireds. A forgotten Indian tunic reinvigorates the lounge wear - world, I'll be seeing you...

08 January 2010

A costume of crystals and moth-ridden pullovers


My mother and brother flew to Puerto Rico this morning, and another brother is vacationing in Mexico. It's snowing in New York. I'll spend some time with the Russians this weekend and have a little time-travel holiday of my own.

05 January 2010

A fine layer of down on your arms

Alexandra Romanov

I met a childhood friend for a glass of wine last night, and we reminisced about people I thought I had forgotten. I began to tell her a story of a dear girl, who I hadn't seen since the 1990s, and she gently interrupted me to let me know that the dear girl from the 1990s died of a brain tumor in February. I am so sorry that we never met for tea 2 years ago, after you asked in your sweet rambling way if I was the same Leigh Batnick. I am the same Leigh Batnick, and I have not forgotten you.

Shamelessly, a list


saipua saltwater soap (received) + CDG tulle & silk jacket (coveted)

Holidays brought a new Teepee bracelet and a lucky 7 ring from Bittersweets NY, a bar of Saipua saltwater soap, a kettle to replace the one that regularly scalds us, a night at the slot machines, and a slim television that will constantly flicker with 1930s comedy of manners, 1960s New Wave, 1970s American independents, and Wayne's World.

04 January 2010

Jezebel giveaway vol. 5: She who is chosen



Random.org has worked it's dark magic and chosen KATHERINE as the winner of the Bittersweets NY gold twig ring. KATHERINE, please stop thinking about the feather bracelet for a moment, and let me know what size and sort of gold (rose, white, or yellow) you'd like your ring in, and where the piteousness of pearl-encrusted doves should deposit your new treasure.

Come see, feel, try, buy Bittersweets at Catbird, and do not forget to visit the Bittersweets NY website when you are in need of a pearl necklace that'll reach from a gloomy tower to the Prince waiting patiently on the loamy ground below.

In the event you are a billionaire's baby, born in January





I'm late, I know it. I've picked out some jewels for you from 1st Dibs, featuring your birthstone, the garnet. Let me know which one you get.

02 January 2010

It is 2010, and I thank you, dear visitors


Let us continue to flock together. Let us blast great cries of imagination on shiny horns. Let us be guided by Crescent. Let us wear black dresses to parties if we care to. Long live the messy files.

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea
-The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot