An A+ Staycation in Santa Monica
Hello from The Georgian Hotel, a revamped classic Santa Monica stay which offered us a summer solstice dinner party and a room for one night to celebrate the grand reopening of their sexy subterannean steakhouse/speakeasy, The Georgian Room— and who are we to resist? Dinner was very fun, with all the requisite West Side Italian joint swank: a groovy, flatteringly-lit room with huge booths and a great bar, a giant Tomahawk steak served atop double-fried smashed potatoes, an excellent whole branzino, a Ceasar salad, a spicy rigatoni, burrata, bottarga-topped broccolini. I think there’s a cheesecake. You know the drill. I’ll be back, and with friends, so as to order big and split everything.
The hotel is ocean-facing and feels glossy and brand-new. I am happy to report that the (pet friendly) place’s 84 guest rooms (28 suites), two restaurants, petite art gallery, library, and lobby bar have been thoughtfully, elegantly updated from their 1933 beginnings. The beds are comfortable, the soft furnishings fetching. As far as the new style, my friend Christina wrote about The Georgian’s re-opening for Vogue a little while ago and got all the nitty gritty details, and some great images, including those of the “bright turquoise exterior, striped awnings, and quirky Art Deco architecture.” The building, she writes, “looks like something straight out of a Wes Anderson film.” (More on that in a second.) There’s a bronze “champagne” button in the minibar as well as one to summon books, and one labeled “the usual”—which the hotel owner later told me orders up your “favorite thing,” which you told the front desk when you checked in. (I asked what if I’d said a puppy. He said most people say chocolate chip cookies.) Good books by Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, and Shel Silverstein are scattered throughout. The staff is charming and friendly and fetchingly uniformed: the bell hops wear baby blue uniforms, replete with hat.
Though not always obvious, and certainly underrated in a season when it seems like every single person you know is splashing in the Med or Aegean, a staycation in one’s own city is always a nice idea, in my opinion. (Also, unlike, say, Le Sireneuse, or Passalacqua, it feels charmingly unexpected, and definitely less showy, this time of year.) You get to experience a different part of a place you already know, with fresh eyes, and hopefully be pampered a little. Plus, you can’t beat the airfare! And Hugo could come, too! I am sitting in the hotel’s royal blue robe with bright yellow piping and looking at the Pacific as I work. It’s a treat. In the apartment building next door, someone has multiple Emmy awards in their window. You really can’t get more L.A. than that. Anyway, I highly recommend The Georgian, for dinner or a stay, or maybe lunch on the greenery draped oceanfront terrace. You do you.
Speaking of ‘doing you,’ back to Wes Anderson. I saw Asteroid City last weekend and it left me kind of cold, though that may increasingly be the point, as Anderson’s love of and talent for the flat surfaces and his very particular aesthetics has always been the most recognizable thing about his work. (This piece from Dirt touches on the A.I. pastiche of it all—though the writer, Terry Nguyen, liked the movie a lot more than I did, and Asteroid City “spoilers,” I guess, abound, as they also do in this play-by-play rave from Richard Brody. I was intrigued by this little story from AirMail, namely because Anderson says he never looks at the A.I. imitations or TikTok homages to his work (probably smart, if Herculean in willpower). “If somebody sends me something like that I’ll immediately erase it and say, ‘Please, sorry, do not send me things of people doing me.’ Because I do not want to look at it, thinking, ‘Is that what I do? Is that what I mean?’ I don’t want to see too much of someone else thinking about what I try to be because, God knows, I could then start doing it.”) For the record, I think those A.I. imitations are lame and bad, the loving (human) homages are sweet and harmless if pretty played out (also Wes Anderson didn’t invent wallpaper, bathrobes, typewriters, or speaking with a flat affect), and that I am extremely down for a filmmaker making exactly the kind of movie they want to make, even if I don’t particularly like it!
I feel like part of the problem is that everyone who likes Anderson’s movies has one title of his they hold in especially high esteem and then nothing else ever really surpasses it. For one friend it’s Rushmore, for another it’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, for one old boyfriend it was The Life Aquatic, and he made me listen to that soundtrack until I hated it (now it makes me nostalgic). In high school I told people that Bottle Rocket was my favorite because as a deep cut it felt cooler, but really it was The Royal Tenenbaums, which, though basic, is pretty unbeatable as comfort food. It’s an interesting problem for an artist, to have your art be so beloved that your fans are constantly feeling let down that you haven’t lived up to your own high water mark.
Anyway, Asteroid City is flatly beautiful, like the fictional southwestern town it takes place in, and many of the performances are great, but there’s a lot going on in terms of framing (the Russian doll style of storytelling being a familiar Anderson trope, if not one of my favorites), and I left feeling like the whole thing was maybe just too clever by half. One friend has pointed out that Owen Wilson was a co-writer on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, both of which have a real depth of humanity to them that’s not always been in evidence since. (Here’s a delightful piece from a 1998 issue of Texas Monthly about the beginnings of their friendship / working partnership.) My favorite part of the movie was probably a fisherman sandal that Willem Dafoe wears with a black suit about 3/4 of the way in. It convinced me of that particular style in a way The Row never has!
Speaking of accessories, this clip from an interview with Jane Birkin re: the history of the Hermès Birkin is really pretty great.
I will be reading The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, which was deftly reviewed in the new New Yorker by Kathryn Schulz, who also took on the “heist” genre in general, which is, of course, a personal favorite of mine (and everybody else’s). I always love when someone delves into a concept or terminology (i.e. “the heist”) that you use all the time without really considering it:
Although the heist genre shares a border with mystery novels, spy novels, true crime, and crime fiction, it has its own distinctive conventions, the first of which is that the object of the theft must be spectacularly valuable. Steal thirty thousand dollars or a Rolex watch and it’s a crime; steal thirty million dollars or the Hope Diamond and it’s a heist. Second, that object must be taken from an institution of significant standing. Heists do not occur at Sunoco stations or suburban homes; they happen in banks, preferably on Wall Street, or museums, preferably the Met. Third, the theft must be borderline impossible. That’s why every heist plot pauses at some point to explain why, for instance, the thieves have to rob not one casino but three at the same time (as in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of the aforementioned “Ocean’s Eleven,” among the most genre-satisfying of all heist films), or why they have to steal not one car but fifty in less than three days (as in the 2000 remake of “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which features Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie in what you might call a car-studded cast: among others, an Aston Martin, a Ferrari Testarossa, a Lamborghini Diablo, a Bentley Arnage, and a 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500). Give or take some paraphrasing, in almost every heist story someone says, “It can’t be done.”
…
Of all the priceless objects in the world, however, perhaps none lend themselves so well to the heist narrative as works of art. That’s not just because art is expensive, housed in grand institutions, and difficult to steal. It is also because anyone motivated to steal art—for art’s sake, as the convention dictates—seems intrinsically refined, the kind of genteel thief whose moral lapses are overshadowed by excellent taste. This idealized criminal reached its fictional apotheosis in the 1999 version of “The Thomas Crown Affair” (another remake, like many good heist movies), which stars Pierce Brosnan as an art thief so charming and cultivated that the insurance investigator tasked with trying to catch him falls in love with him instead. But, as the actual people responsible for catching art thieves understand, Thomas Crown is not merely fictional but also fantastical. A thief like him—daring and skilled, but also motivated by aesthetics and deeply knowledgeable about art—is a figment of our collective imagination: so virtually every police officer, detective, and museum-security expert would have told you, until Stéphane Breitwieser came along.
Irresistible!
And speaking of art, if you happen to be in D.C. before August, maybe go see this exhibition of rare Leonardo da Vinci drawings make their US debut before they are plunged into darkness for the required three years. Though please, resist the urge to “heist.”
The news has been full all week of stories about the missing Titanic tourist submersible, which I at first followed with fascination (the hubris!), but with every passing hour felt more and more ghoulish. To be honest it’s just really sad, though as has been pointed out, the OceanGate submersible’s hull collapsing offered as instantaneous a death as is possible for a human being, and represents only a small fraction of the life lost in the latest devastating, heartbreaking migrant boat tragedy in Greece, which seems to be getting a miniscule fraction of the airtime, by comparison. If you need a silver lining here, well, the captain of the super yacht who came to the rescue of 100 of those people is a hero.
Another hero? White Gladis. Orcas appear to be organizing against watercraft, luxury and otherwise, and you know what? I’m #TeamOrca. Doesn’t hurt that the presumed leader, White Gladis, appears to be a wronged female orca, and that there have been zero casualities. “Experts suspect that a female orca they call White Gladis suffered a ‘critical moment of agony’ — a collision with a boat or entrapment during illegal fishing — that flipped a behavioral switch. ‘That traumatized orca is the one that started this behavior of physical contact with the boat,’ López Fernandez said.” Go get ‘em, girl! We humans have been ruining these waters with our chemical spills and great swirling garbage patches and flatly murderous fishing hauls for too long! Take back your ocean! People could stand to be a little more afraid of tooling around on these insanely pollutive skyscraper-sized superyachts.
Speaking of ladies who’ve been through the wringer, I enjoyed this bonkers interview with the reliably bonkers and always divine Parker Posey in New York magazine. It’s full of nearly nonsensical gems like: “How much these A-listers make next to the scrappy little indie people is crazy town — it’s unfair and bananas. It’s unfair bananas. It’s rotten bananas, which makes the best banana bread.” (Not not how I’m afraid I sound via text.) Let this be your sign that if you haven’t seen Party Girl, you must add it to your list ASAP. The original New York cool girl heroine. Carrie Bradshaw who?
Okay, okay, I’ll watch …And Just Like That. Even if it never seems to gel. Mostly because I am in awe of my brilliant Vogue colleagues for this fun video.
So, look, I’m not a Black Mirror fan, per se. I respect the vision, but I regularly find real life horrifying enough (see above: lost submersible; desperate migrants) without imagining what would happen if, say, England’s prime minister was forced into an act of bestiality live on TV (Season 1, episode 1, for chrissakes). That said, I am curious by nature, and you may have noticed that I love having an opinion, and I am actively procrastinating from a few deadlines, so I did watch the first episode of the new season, “Joan is Awful.” My review: not disgusting! Pretty funny, very meta, and (slight spoiler) not misery-inducing at the ending. (This is less true of the subsequent episode, “Loch Henry,” which is also very clever and meta and funny at parts but also horror-flecked and deeply sad. But worth seeing if you can bear it.) I then accidentally watched what I have since learned may be the worst episode in the series’ history, “Mazey Day,” and decided to be done with the whole endeavor. So there you go!
I also watched Blackberry (streaming on Apple+, Amazon, etc.), the movie about the creation, brief category-defining success, and ultimate demise of that device we all had before the iPhone. I, for one, loved my Blackberry(s). Thanks to the keypad, I could type under a (cocktail, banquet, nightclub) table without anybody noticing, which was a real boon in my WWD party reporting days. It’s a fun movie, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton is terrific. He should be in more things. (And I don’t just say that because I love It’s Always Sunny an unholy amount. Though I do!)
When I first moved to L.A. it was still deep in it’s pandemic era, and so I spent a lot of time walking, for health (mental, physical, and Hugo’s, of course). I fell in love with the streets lined with palm trees, as iconic a part of this town’s landscape as the Hollywood sign. So I was surprised to learn that not only are they not indigenous to the area, they’re also not a particularly great fit here, in re: the climate. (And many of the ones around are on their last legs, apparently— they live for around 100 years total, and many were planted in the 1930s.) It’s a good time to envision what a more appropriately drought-aware landscape for this city might look like, if the powers that be would allow that to happen—nostalgia is a hell of a drug, even in a place as pre-fab/sound stage-esque as L.A. can be. Here’s a super interesting video explaining the whole thing. And let’s enjoy the ones we’ve got for as long as we can.
I recently received some Sangre de Fruta bath products for my birthday and am besotted with the head of roses shampoo and conditioner and the neroli body wash and jasmine body serum. Just in case you’re wondering/ also want to smell like a well-tended Los Angeles garden this summer.
I am continuing to work with CLOSED, which is wonderful for me because I get to wear Closed. If you’re looking for great jeans and shirts and sweaters and even shoes and bags and things that aren’t ever trying too hard (when aren’t we), they’ve got the some of the best! The latest addition: these fab jeans, which are just a smidge lower-slung than I usually wear and have just the right looseness in the (straight!) leg. Very cool.
My dream dinner is probably a table full of little salads and apps, banchan, basically, and just to lazily graze upon it while drinking something similarly delicious. Perhaps you, like me, prefer delectable little vegetable focused sides to main courses? I made this very good and insanely easy arame salad from Nicole Berrie’s (of the beloved Bonberi mart) cookbook, Body Harmony (which I really recommend, it’s full of good ideas), to rapturous reviews, and was told it was “better than Erewhon” which is basically the best compliment I could receive?????? if probably a lie. (Recipe below, because I can’t find a link.) And then, because who doesn’t love being on a roll, the next night I made this cucumber salad with roasted peanuts and chile (subbing 1 tbsp fish sauce for one of the soy) to go with this ginger chicken, and the cukes stole the show entirely. 5 stars. Maybe 6 stars (out of 5). Rich and silky and fulfilling but still light and crisp enough for summer. And it looked gorgeous on the plate. Could eat the entire 2-4 serving platter myself and call it a day. Don’t mind if I do!
ARAME SEAWEED SALAD (from Nicole Berrie’s Body Harmony, 2022):
Serves 2-4 (or just 1, and that’s great too)
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup hydrated arame seaweed (5 oz / 150 g)
1 cup frozen edamame beans, defrosted
1/2 cup peeled and shaved carrots
1/2 cup thinly sliced Persian cucumbers
Dressing
4 tablespoons tamari sauce
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon maple syrup
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds
2 scallions, thinly sliced
METHOD
Combine all salad ingredients in a medium sized bowl. In a separate smaller bowl, whisk together the dressing ingredients. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. Serve cold.
Look at us! Sharing recipes. We’re so cute.
That’s all for now, I think. Thank you, as ever, for being here. This is my favorite email that I send all week, without exception. Love you.