F is For
Fast cars and Fun accessories and Fatigue and FREE!
Can we skip the preamble about how I’m sorry it’s been so long? This is free, my gorgeous friends! Free means never having to say I’m sorry, especially not for having a life! A life and some newsletter fatigue!
What has happened in the weeks since I saw you last? I have been traveling a lot for work, mostly domestically, more on which to come…soon. Frieze has come and gone, and yes, now the Oscars rises up to fill the void. This means very little to me. We are not really participating in any part of the swan song of 2024’s endless awards season this time around: we will be leaving town for a quick trip to Hawaii* on Friday and truly I expect to not feel one single ounce of FOMO. Best of luck to all! May the speeches be short and sweet, the red carpet be anything but boring, and may there be enough viral memes that the social media editors and take-havers can pack it in early and relax.
*Please do send me any big island recommendations if you have them: I’ll put them all together to share with the class. So far I am packing a lot of bright colors and at least one party skirt. I feel good about it.
We went back to Mexico City for Valentine’s day, and had a really wonderful time. I very much recommend the new Soho House there, which is exquisite, and boasts the largest pool of any of their properties in the Americas. (Only four bedrooms at present, though they are terrific too.) It is in Colonia Juarez, where we haven’t stayed before, and there’s lots of good things to eat and see and shop. Other new recommendations to add to your list: Salon Palomilla for drinks under the stars, right next to the still-excellent taco spot Paramo; Mari Gold for a fun lunch (Indian fusion and insanely good, maybe our favorite things we ate this time around); Loose Blues for cool vintage and contemporary Japanese clothing (there’s also a good bar and restaurant above). Walking everywhere, seeing friends, seeing art—including a surrealist exhibition at RGR that was heavy on the Leonora Carrington which really knocked me sideways, in the best way—seeing the line at Panaderia Rosetta, still 20-plus minutes at least after all these years. These days I often go places one time and then not again for many years (a travel writer’s lament); it’s been a wonderful treat to find myself going back to CDMX so often. With each visit my understanding of the city has developed a little more, sort of like the way images surface on Polaroid film. Streets and neighborhoods lock into place like puzzle pieces. And that familiarity somehow doesn’t lessen any of the fun of exploring, probably because there’s still so much newness every time: it’s a city that seems to breathe and stretch and constantly overflow a little at its edges, threatening to splash over entirely. (Admittedly, all that lovely newness comes at a cost: a water crisis exacerbated by climate change and infrastructure not being up to the rapidity of the city’s expansion. Sigh.)
While there I visited my friend Olivia at her perfect Chava Studio. I bought some of her superb made to order shirts(!) and some wonderfully exaggerated hair bow barrettes(!!). I wore the red ribbon to Frieze on Thursday. Jason said later that he used it to find me in the crowds, like the way people put neon things on their kids at the mall. But look, at least I felt very Catherine Deneuve (below). File under: Dressing to be noticed! An experience I always recommend, when you’re up for it.
(The blueprint. I would also like that dress, by the way.)
On the plane I watched Jeanne Du Barry, which was fun mostly for Maiwenn’s wardrobe, including a striped frock she gets unhappily married in that I want very badly. It does co-star Johnny Depp, which may be enough to put some of you off, though I will say he is very good at playing a liver spotty and saggy and eventually smallpox afflicted Louis XIV. I realized while watching that I like Marie Antoinette movies that are not from Marie Antoinette’s perspective (this should be a Letterboxd category if it is not already). A good companion listen would be the recent Sentimental Garbage podcast episode about mistresses and the role they play in society and history (especially royal history), if you wanted.
The main attraction on my flight though was one I downloaded in advance: Nicole Newnham’s documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite (Amazon). I was shocked to realize that I am among the many of my generation who had never heard of Hite, a now deceased former model and best-selling author who released a pioneering study of women’s sexuality in the late 70s that took seriously women and their pleasure and suffered greatly for it. A pre-Madame Web Dakota Johnson is a producer and reads Hite’s parts, culled from her diaries. Hite’s method for bearing up under intense misogyny in the media and beyond still feels particularly relevant, to the extent that I rewound the movie and took notes. Here’s her “Plan for not feeling like a stereotyped creation of your society: 1.) Spend three days alone. 2.) Take yourself seriously. 3.) Whenever caught in a situation where you are made to feel girlish, or helpless, bitchy, or aggressive, or any other stereotype, leave immediately and do any other action that you enjoy and is yours. 4.) Rely on your own resources at all times. 5.) Enjoy yourself—a lot.” It’s definitely worth seeing.
A book I just finished and really loved: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. A debut novel (by a poet who has been published everywhere excellent poetry gets published) about life and death and addiction and dreams and family and America and Iran and art. It’s just gorgeous.
Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of being healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.
I feel like the less I tell you about it the better, actually, so if you’re looking for something new and ruminative and beautiful, just trust me.
Hat tip to the always spectacular Today in Tabs for sharing this piece about F1 by Kate Wagner, which was I guess too hot for Road & Track, as they seem to have unpublished it. It’s a shame, because it’s honest, and excellent, but hey, thanks to the internet we can still read it, which I recommend even if you don’t care the least bit about racing. Here’s a taste:
One thing that strikes me about Formula 1 is its unexpected resemblance to fencing—it is an absolutely poised and disciplined affair. Recently, for my 30th birthday, I took up medieval sword fighting—historical European martial arts, they call it. For the first two weeks we worked on standing in a good medieval stance, always prepared to move. Sword fighting is learned through what are called set plays, specific motions of sword and body combined into one fluid action. But when you watch people who are really good at sword fighting, an ornate, flowing dance emerges from these seemingly disparate parts. Formula 1 is like that. When the cars line up on the grid, everything is totally neat and rehearsed, completely in its place. Tires, people, staff, even journalists. The teams are meted out in perfect sections—they don't call it the grid for nothing. But when time comes for the sprint to begin, team members move in perfect coordination, synchronized. They have stances and footwork. This is most true of the pit crew and the astonishing speed at which they travel through space as one organism, totally practiced in set plays of their own. This was beautiful to watch in real life. The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground. Before the heartbeat, they respirated.
When they set off, one by one, first in the sprint, then the first shootout, what struck me was how quiet the cars were. This makes sense to me as someone who once studied acoustics in graduate school. Formula 1, again like sword fighting, is about an economy of motion. Noise is a hallmark of mechanical inefficiency. When mechanical systems work well, they work quietly. Noise at its core is excess energy. In Formula 1 cars, being perfect machines, that energy is redirected where it could be of use. The track began with a big hill, 11 percent in gradient, which made for a spectacular formal gesture, especially with the people on the lawn alongside it crowded on blankets. This, the finish line, and the straightaway coming off the final turn, were all I could see. There was a television above the opposite grandstands, but information was refreshingly scarce. When I watch F1 on TV, I'm used to the constant chattering of the commentators, the endless switching of perspectives and camera angles, the many maps. Here, I stood, and the cars merely passed, and when they passed, numbers changed on a big tower. It was so clean and almost proper, the way they flew by me in the sprint, dutifully, without savagery. Team principals and engineers were lined up on stools in their little cubbyholes crowding around laptops. In between each car was a calm lull in which calculations and feedback were made. A man with a sign walked up to the edge of the track to mark the laps for the Mercedes drivers. Then, almost bored, he sat on a stool waiting to do it again. I found this lull and surge transfixing, as though I were viewing the scaffolding behind a convincing theater set, the mundanity behind the spectacle.
The story is more about grotesque amounts of money, really, than cars. Funny! That’s true of F1, too, isn’t it.
I recently learned that the musician Nick Cave has, for many years, maintained a blog, “The Red Hand Files,” in which he sometimes gives advice, among other musings. Here’s a perfect little thing he wrote in 2021 in response to two prompts: “I’m 17 years old, what can you tell me about love?” and “How do I not have my heart broken?”
I once, years ago, helped a friend of a friend with their advice column. I loved it. People say that vulnerability is a super power, but like anything enough people say and don’t do, it can stop sounding true and start sounding like merch. But in my experience, and I’ve been relearning this again recently, when a person brings an honest moment of vulnerability, someone will rise to meet it. And everyone ends up feeling less alone as a result. I think that’s beautiful. I think people can be beautiful. It’s a less chic disposition than holding everyone at a disdainful distance, but what can you do.
Other things: I made this highly recommended lemon barley soup (soothing and perfectly seasonal!) and I am watching Shogun (Hulu) and really enjoying it. Join me?
That’s all I have for you at the moment. Thank you, as always, for being here. It means everything. Send me a note if you feel like it. I love to get them. Hell, send me a question and I’ll give you advice if you want.
Until next time!