Everyone ought to have a cut crystal bowl spilling over with candy.

I don't particulary care for candy and I particularly don't care for websites with music, but this one is just too good.

Jezebel- tomorrow- at Secret Project Robot!

scene from Fritz Lang's robot-orific Metropolis

"ada's faded revolutionaries, all in gleaming furs"

I'll be selling Jezebel and all she has to offer, tomorrow, from 11-7 at The Gift: on Grand (on Kent), being held at Secret Project Robot on Kent and Metropolitan. I'll be sharing a table with my dear friend and inspirational/motivational figure, Rachel Milano, who will one day have a website of her own, which will be just as achingly perfect as the room of her own.

The Effect Being.

Jezebel is the featured site of the month over at Domino. Not only are they so lavish with their love, they produce My. Favorite. Magazine. Period.

Mythology gets me every time.

My friend, Thomas De Napoli, has posted some specs spots on YouTube. They are witty and sophisticated with a touch of Noel Coward and a whiff of sparkling champagne.

A bit natty, a bit tatty, and urbane, too.

The Urban Outfitters at Broadway and Houston has been kind enough to invite Jezebel to set up shop and sell her wares on Saturday December 1st. More details to follow...

Take me to New Mexico.

Georgia O'Keefe, 1918 photo by Alfred Stieglitz

Georgia O'Keefe, 1950

I want to explore the American Southwest. In lieu of the necessary funds to do so, I intend to embark on a Georgia O'Keefe - Alfred Stieglitz, DH Lawrence, Willa Cather binge.

Tonight, tonight, come hear my love tonight.

Monuments is playing at The Trash Bar in Williamsburg tonight, at 10:00. Kevin will be playing guitar and I'm thinking about having a Guinness evening.

The Woman who drew on White.

Nearly a year ago at a holiday sale, a woman brought this drawing to my table, done by her roommate who was too ill to attend, of the cards that she was meant to purchase from me. I was taken aback. I cannot draw a whit and I think this piece of paper is magic. Who are you, magic-maker?

auberon stole the golden moon

henrietta james, a sunken treasure

tallulah to the sea, the sea

henry and gertrude, criminal lovers

a madcap, punch drunk ballad for aubrey and oscar

Do do dududu do.

Following in the fierce and refined footsteps of Mr. David Bowie, Isaac Mizrahi will be narrating Peter & the Wolf, an essential madeline from my childhood. I must and will be there. Do you think Isaac's good and great friend, Maira, will be there, too?! Oh, and "Do do dududu do" is what I hear in my non-musician brain when I think of Peter & the Wolf.

The Best of Everything.

tiara created by Alice Temperley for a special magnum bottle of
Moet & Chandon White Star. i LOVE headgear.

I know what I want to do with my life. I want to be Jane Stubbs. Or, at least work for her. Pressing the right book into the right hands makes me feel like I've just downed a tumbler (yes a tumbler for I hate stemware) of champagne, chilled perfectly in a battered bucket bought at an estate sale for $5 or so. Oh well, wouldn't you know. Just guess what Jane Stubbs chills her champagne in. An column about Ms. Stubbs from the NY Times, March 16 2003:

POSSESSED; A Party Giver's Holy Grail
David Colman

SOME people get fed up with the too, too vaunted ideal of simplicity.

Not Jane Stubbs, the noted rare-book dealer, who has been spending her life in the all-too-full bloom of clutter. Because of extensive reconstruction in her apartment, its contents have been disgorged onto every table, sill and ledge in sight. There is china -- Ms. Stubbs collects early-20th-century hand-painted Wedgwood. There are rock and crystal specimens; there are lamps and silver family heirlooms. There are hand-wrought silver seashells from Cambodia, an old obsession; and several brass hands of Fatima, a new one. And there are the ladders, dropcloths and sundry construction paraphernalia.

''The maid finally quit,'' Ms. Stubbs said, her lilting Mississippi drawl hinting at the weight of the clutter on her shoulders. ''I have just simply given up.''

Still, the Stubbs apartment in the throes of disarray looks readier than most for chronicling in a shelter magazine, if an arty one -- perhaps the fanatically English ''World of Interiors.'' But whatever Ms. Stubbs does, she does with style first and substance second, knowing full well the oft-overlooked value in judging books by their dust jackets.

While her home is objet-ified to the rafters, it is one of the most utilitarian objects that she has the greatest fondness for: her Champagne bucket. Bought at an estate sale somewhere in Westchester County about 15 years ago, for about $5, the bucket has proved well worth the investment, having served as a Champagne or wine cooler or an ice bucket at every fete she has held -- at home and at her former Upper East Side shop, where she had very popular openings for artists. (Her stock is now sold at Bergdorf Goodman.)

Made of nickel silver, a silvery alloy of zinc, copper and nickel common in the early 20th century, the simple vessel is one of only two acceptable styles of ice bucket -- at least according to the 1948 edition of ''Vogue's Book of Etiquette'' (written by Millicent Fenwick, the onetime model who went on to represent New Jersey in the House of Representatives). Ms. Stubbs's bucket is fortunate enough to fit Fenwick's description of ''a modern straight-sided cylinder, as functional as a drugstore ice-cream container, and rather like one.''

As simple as it is, Ms. Stubbs said, ''it does make an entrance.''

''When you come in the room with it and a bottle of Champagne inside, everyone does smile,'' she said. ''It's not a solitary thing. It is by nature associated with people and fun, and it reminds me of different parties and different people from over the years.''

The simplicity of the bucket elevates it above even the rather fantastic silver-plated 1874 trophy urn given to Ms. Stubbs's great-great-grandfather, a horse breeder, by the owner of a sweepstakes winner he had bred (and which would also make a valid Champagne bucket, matching Fenwick's other permissible shape).

''I love the urn kind, too,'' Ms. Stubbs said, ''but they are a little grand. With this one, the grandeur comes out of the Champagne -- and the company.''

Moreover, there are practical reasons for the squattest shape one can find. ''With the urn, you really have to be careful,'' she said, ''and when Champagne is involved, you want to not have to worry too much.''

A dark day- a week later.

a view from my bedroom of the hordes of trick-or-treaters who
turn up every year for the haunted house across the street

Edward Gorey, my favorite to read on Halloween eve- not just
because he loves cats and books. Because he made things like this:

And from Lemony Snicket, on why we must face fear:

Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes,
follies and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all
stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in
the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.

Though I hate Gawker...

I do love my friends.

By the way, please don't let Gawker know that I take umbrage with their vile tactics. They scare me.

On the blue Danube.

henry and gertrude, criminal lovers

Lorenzo Mattotti
Six Scenes from Hansel and Gretel

The portfolio of Hansel and Gretel-inspired works over at the New Yorker reminded me of one of my favorite contemporary turns on a known fairy-tale: Francois Ozon's Les Amants Criminels, where the nightmare of a truly grim tale from the Grimm Brothers is explored deeply and rather madly.

Evening of Champions.

Kurt Vonnegut, 2006

Listen to Kurt: Don't spoil the party! Please join in the Evening of Champions, a night devoted to Kurt Vonnegut, organized by The Periodic Label and Monuments (the band in which my boyfriend plays some pretty ferociously gorgeous guitar).

artwork by the sensational Miss Julia Durgee

With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace

the Tribeca Grand, where I would like to live

Glass Tears, Man Ray 1932

I like the idea of these pillowcases rumpled against a monochromatic bed on a Sunday morning, with the record player whirling lazily and near-silent in the kitchen, as KP plays his acoustic as Coral listens intently. The bedroom floor will be covered with discarded sections from the Times and a round of magazines and a stack of books and the coffee will flow and the Kobo Grapefruite e Tabaco will burn. I'll briefly daydream about this vision as I sit in class on Sunday.

In the hall there hung two Watteaus.

The Marc Jacobs spring '08 show reminded me of this quote from The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford:

Meanwhile, preparations for the ball went forward, occupying every single member of the household. Linda's and my dresses, white taffeta with floating panels and embroidered bead belts, were made by Mrs. Josh, whose cottage was besieged at all hours to see how they were getting on. Louisa's came from Reville, it was silver lamé in tiny frills, each frill edged with blue net. Dangling on the left shoulder and strangely unrelated to the dress, was a large pink silk overblown rose.

These are looks for Louisa.

A beggar's banquet.

"bernice spoke latin with alacrity"

Inspired by an idea in the Kirsten Dunst guest-edited issue of Lula, I just moved my Library of Congress Division for the Blind and Physically Handicapped-issued record player into the kitchen right next to my desk, so that I may whistle while I work. At the moment, I'm listening to Nina Simone: Live in Europe. Yeow, Nina, you make me want to move. And Lula, dear Lula, you make me want to nest.

Your name is a marvel, Kenya Hunt.

What a lovely surprise I found in Metro, on an otherwise ordinary Wednesday morning. I smiled all the way through the Union Square Greenmarket. Thank you, to the gloriously named Kenya Hunt (an appellation worthy of Evelyn Waugh), for the nod.

I watered my Guitar Player and he sprouted into a Photographer.

After two weeks watching Blow Up repeatedly, we took our show on the road and created the baddest photography team in Southampton, PA for the wedding of Mr Jezebel's sister. Our pièce de résistance was our killer photography assistant- she's the one in hot pink. Her day rate demands enough time to watch Sleeping Beauty and hands to cover her eyes when Millificent turns into a dragon. Very reasonable.

J.J. Leigh, I'd very much like to eat bon bons with thee.

And Alber Elbaz, too.

A Metropolitan history, via glorious commerce.

Bemelmans Bar, The Carlyle Hotel
(murals by the creator of my beloved Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans)

Dulken & Derrick, where Eleanor Roosevelt bought her silk flowers

I really love this guide to NYC shopping at House and Garden (found via design*sponge). It is a perfect marriage of old and new and is deliciously quixotic, like these images of New York.

This is New York, Miroslav Sasek, 1960

nyc print, Matte Stephens, 2007

Lovely Rita.

Breaking news over at Domino, from one of my British Blonde girl crushes, Rita Konig- a list which, in addition to Ms. Konig, includes Dusty Springfield, Marianne Faithfull, Kate Moss, Sophie Dahl, the Mitford sisters (though mostly the dark-haired genius, Nancy), and Julie Christie. Here, here, and let it be known that this vagabond stationer has been known to scrape together all the quarters in the bottom of her beaten purse (all right, I'm a bit of a neat freak and don't really leave coinage lying about but story-telling, story-telling) in order to purchase British Vogue for the full $10, $10 I say they charge on this side of the turgid Atlantic, just so I could flip precisely to Rita's column and dream, dream, and scheme.

Julie Christie

Marianne Faithfull

for green eyes, leonard and leonard disposed of cigarettes.

Leonard in 1931

Of all the beautiful words I have read by Virginia Woolf, these struck me as being amongst the most plaintive. They are excerpted from a letter to Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Virgina Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell, and were written seven days before Virginia was to set off with Vita for a vacation in France, leaving behind her husband, Leonard:

"I am melancholy, and excited in turn. You see, I would not have married Leonard had I not preferred living with him to saying goodbye to him."

Leonard in 1966

And speaking of Virginia's dear Vera, I am selling a first edition of her Saint Joan of Arc in my etsy shop .