25 February 2010

How we are made.

Brighton Beach photo by Joanie

My mother has always wanted to take us to the Bronx Zoo on the snowiest day of the year, so we could see the polar bears smile.

24 February 2010

3 cats & a computer


I saw the best writing on the wall:
I have nothing
Well, you have a pen...

Speaking of pens, I'm working on making good on a resolution.

23 February 2010

AnOther's Lovers

The editors of AnOther Magazine crowned my 79 LOVE, a first edition of Cecil Beaton's Ballet, as their favorite LOVE of the week. A visit to Paris Hotel Boutique, home of Beaton's Ballet, has been an intergalactic ritual of mine for as long as intergalactic rituals have been around. Lynn, proprietor of P.H.B., formerly John Lee Hooker's personal assistant, made one of the more enviable professional transitions I know of.

22 February 2010

19 February 2010

Next time, gin.

Saipua + Unchanging Window

Dinner last night in Red Hook with Ladies, smart, sweet, and perfectly tart, Sarah, Amy, and Nea. Without knowing my desires, months ago I was given a bar of my most coveted Saipua saltwater soap, and without knowing my desires, last night's dinner was a balance of bitter and hot, tastes I love so, I cannot taste them enough.

18 February 2010

A Year of A's


I was on the way to clarity last night at La Superior, and I pushed my mind into a loftier atmosphere by walking home on the ice rink city sidewalks. I've opened my palms fully, accepted all that has been sent in a northeasterly direction, but the waters change with the winds and it is time to steer this ship starbound.

17 February 2010

New towels and new sheets, a lavender plant, and a hibiscus tree.


She took the little silver cream jug and let the smooth fluid curl luxuriously into her coffee, to which she added a shovel full of brown sugar candy. Sensuously, rhythmically, she stirred the mixture round and round. -Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf

ON HOME

16 February 2010

821 Sixth Ave.


Respectively, and supremely, we all carry our weapons of choice in our back pockets. To paraphrase: ought you suffer slings and arrows, or ought you arm yourself against that sea of troubles? He has his, I mine, and weapons not the same are deployed, with not the same effect, nor with the same intent. But no! Intent, I think, I believe is, in the very deepest center of itself, the same. Love is love, joy, joy, melancholia, melancholia. We each feed the same sea, but our tides, the pull, the force of our moons is for one a lovesick ballad on the bongos, and another, a dirge, dense and deafening, hammered out on the 88 keys.

15 February 2010

Goddess of Speed


What if the song were to take us somewhere, what if the song were to take us apart? Miles, Bird, Trane, a small room, night, Carnegie Hall. Monk, Pops, Mahalia, a day, a night, visitors who limned the gardens of the Vanderbilts. The looseness, the joie de vivre, the deafening depths spring from command and control, some acquired, some imbued. We peer down the tunnel of the past so intensely, eyes blinking in the face of pure white light. Peer down the tunnel, the other way: What if the song were to take us somewhere, what if the song were to take us apart?

12 February 2010

Rest in beauty, Alexander McQueen.

A ghost in your world, before you became a ghost in ours. The angels will be more beautiful than ever - a dressmaker for the cosmos is in their midst.

10 February 2010

Bat Music.


Last night I had a glass of wine with Adam P-D, he of the Indian nose-rings & lamp-filled closet, he of the lavender heart. We stepped out of the Roebling Tea Room and the snow began to fall.

Proust questionnaire: Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
Marcel Proust: A woman of genius leading an ordinary life.

Bill: What do you do or what would you like to do when you grow up?
Adam P-D: I’d like to open an antique shop and maybe found a queer commune. I’m into collecting, free love and country living.

09 February 2010

No use for really good shoes


How to tolerate a stranger, with even stranger ideas: let him bring water to the desert.

08 February 2010

Gimlet-eyed.



When I was a child, in country here, and she was a child, in country there, we flipped through Sunday's catalogs, and obliged ourselves to pick one thing, no more, and no less, from each page, no matter how wanton or waning our desires for a collection fell. I'm taller now, and my silver hairs thrive, and Sunday is no longer black & white cookie day, but the thrill of the catalog game remains, updated for my third decade to include a Bakst evocation alongside each chosen jewel.

I'm sure I've told you before, but its worth repeating: I hate breaking rules. Rules dictate that I must tell you that in exchange for this post, LuShae Jewelry is sending me a piece of my choosing. They asked so nicely, and I was so thrilled to receive an email that had been spell-checked that I just couldn't say no. What will I choose? Though I'm rather a snide little snob re: CZs, I like the Baba Beaton moment of the Once Upon a Star earrings, and the flower buds satisfy that desire to sprinkle tiny diamonds across my ears like the elf I'd like to be.

My castle, my books.


Unceremoniously, yet joyfully returned to the copy of Between the Acts that I began and abandoned on a return voyage from Buenos Aires. Upon completion of Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones, and laid herself to rest in the River Ouse. She left behind one of the greatest oeuvres of the 20th century, and a letter for her husband, Leonard.

She who is chosen: Jezebel giveaway vol. 6!


Random.org has worked its dark magic and has chosen MYTWOCENTSWORTH as the winner of the Flotsam and Jetsam pirate ship earrings. MYTWOCENTSWORTH, before you sail off to Spain, please let me know in which direction I ought point your pirate ship earrings. I wore my pirate ship earrings on Saturday with black lace (thank you, Rebekah of Water Street!) and Sunday with bloomers - and I solemnly swear they flash beams of mythical, high sea magic across the sloth of deep winter.

If you did not win, do not despair! Another giveaway is coming up next week, and the pirate ship earrings, along with a trove of other Flotsam and Jetsam NY pieces are available at Catbird.

05 February 2010

This is not about what happened in the middle of the night.


I will tell you the truth. Sometimes in the flicker and clicking, the rapid departure from one imagined place to the next, a real sting can pinch the underside of a winter-white arm. Like you, I am a vagabond in this world of ours, this world that is without actual walls or locks on the doors, this world that has no odor, no scent to ring off alarm bells: good day! or bad. After the sting, the order of things goes disappear, protect, retreat, define. And then, a gathering of one's rights and wrongs, an assessment, straight back, freedom, flight.

"What I like about the landscape of Italy," Gianni informed me, "is that there's none of this nonsense about the great outdoors. That sort of thing's all right elsewhere. Here you could practically say it's an indoor landscape. It's Nature with beautiful manners -- no, that's too tame. Rather, it's as if Nature was capable of thought, of joy." -The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard

04 February 2010

It's snowing, it is Tuesday, you have been waiting for one year and six months.

"le bolero" via biblioOdyssey

All the world is queer save thee and me.
And even thee is a little queer.
-Sir Robert Owen

Task at hand: teaching a not so old dog new tricks.

03 February 2010

Lilacs from a 28 year old Divorcée

Evelyn Nesbit photo frm somewhere I've neglected to note

These days I have white gold lucky seven ring from Bittersweets NY circling my right thumb. Happy Wednesday.

02 February 2010

But will we let you? I don't know. I just don't know.


Like all others, I want a little beaten black leather jacket, a star-studded tiara, and days and days to spend with what J.D. Salinger we have.

Brigitte Bardot once wanted to buy the rights to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and he said that it was uplifting news. “I mean it,” he told me. “She’s a cute, talented, lost enfante, and I’m tempted to accommodate her, pour le sport.-Bearable, Lillian Ross's remembrance of J.D. Salinger

01 February 2010

Jezebel giveaway vol. 6: Flotsam and Jetsam New York ship earrings!

My 21st century modern flowers, meet the love vessels of 1762. The polar easterlies may be blow strong, but the fire in the hearth will never die out, and the sails will dance and sway the night away in our pelagic gardens.

In a southeasterly corner of wild Manhattan, Flotsam and Jetsam crafts jewels from "the realms of monsters, sudden squalls and shallow shoals." Rebekah, pirate bride of Flotsam and Jetsam will alight a pair of her earrings to she who is chosen, wherever she may be.

To enter: visit Flotsam and Jetsam New York's website, and between now and Sunday the 7th leave a comment here, at this very post. Do make sure that I'll be able to find you, as I'm most certain you will be the winner. And, don't despair if I am wrong and you are not the winner- capitalism is not dead. Remember! There is a day of love fast approaching, and a pirate ship ring and necklace are also available so he and thee can a fleet of ships be.

The answer? Nosegays & garlands, corsages & wreaths.


Back from brunch at Cafe Gitane in the Jane Hotel, formerly the American Seamen's Friend Society, where I sat with Rose and Jessica in a nook flooded with light off the Hudson. Tucked in a banquette, we ordered avocado toast, fruit with mint, and americanos, under the same roof where Titanic survivors were spirited away until the end of the American inquiry into the sinking of that great ship.

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


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