As a person who travels often, and not infrequently to inconveniently placed destinations (as is typically the point), I am periodically on the receiving end of a line of questioning that begins with “how” and ends with a “do you do it?” (Sometimes there’s a “the hell” in the middle, sometimes a “the fuck.”) I will tell you what I tell them, which is there isn’t really an art to it. Or not much of one. You release control. You accept that you will be a little brain dead on the front and the back end, once you arrived and once you’ve returned, and you make allowances for that (try to avoid serious meetings, entanglements, or people prone to interminably heavy conversations). Use good skin care before, during, and after travel, and pack your supplements (magnesium, probiotics, whatever your preferred immunity potion), work out (or get a lot of movement, preferably through walking) on the first day, and don’t sleep until it’s time to sleep where you are. After that, it’s cake. Anyways, I’m back from São Paulo by way of London and Austria, so forgive my tardiness in writing until now. But it was a long weekend, and I figured you’d be busy, too.
I was in Brazil with Bottega Veneta to celebrate the work of Lina Bo Bardi, which was a true thrill. (Here’s my story about it for Vogue.) I learned a lot about Bo Bardi, and Brazilian Modernism, and the current art scene in São Paulo, and I also ate exceptionally, and could have shopped even better, if I’d had more time. It’s a deeply cool city I can’t wait to return to and explore more. The new Rosewood hotel there is terrific, too.
What I watched on the plane: Class of ‘07. Basically: what if Yellowjackets was… funny? It shouldn’t work, but it somehow really works? Truly charming, light fare. Highly recommend for long travel days and low stakes couch time.
What I read: Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo, a semi-autobiographical account of the end of the 20th century in China that was first published in 1992, and now in English for the first time. Raunchy, bawdy, hilariously subversive; an A+ satire with comps to Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. And it gets a few extra points because I bought it in the perfect London Review of Books bookshop on a divine spring day after a long lunch with an old friend, which is the best way to buy anything but especially a good book.
Rebecca Bengal’s Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. I had the great pleasure of editing Rebecca at vogue.com, and a few of those pieces show up in this collection of essays and interviews, coolly meditative considerations of artists like Prince, Ming Smith, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston. If you like photography, good criticism, and great writing, you’ll like this.
The Goodby People by Gavin Lambert, a funky little early 1970s remnant of a novel. The vibe is kind of a gentler Gary Indiana. Recommended if you like stories about: late 1960s LA, unreliable friends with great real estate, beach houses, handsome strangers, fragile people, Hollywood ghosts.
Judging by my social media feeds, people are crazy about Emma Cline’s latest, The Guest. I found it well done and incredibly tense, with a terrifying vacuum at its center that’s been kind of trendy lately in novels about young women. (I feel like this probably began with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, though I’d be open to other theories.) If you enjoy that sort of peeping through your fingers pit in your stomach feeling, it’s the vacation read for you. Either way you will definitely be seeing copies on the beach. I thought this write up from the New Yorker nailed it.
People outside the fashion industry sometimes wonder about how to get in it, or how to ascend and then stay on top. Going forward I will probably point them towards this piece in the NYT, which is a really well done look at why that’s so particularly hard (and expensive!), even when you’re a celebrated, award-winning talent. And this one (NYer) is a really bonkers inside look at someone on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, whose improbable financial successes have been an object of industry fascination and speculation for years. Great reporting on both.
SPEAKING of fashion! I am constantly in search of a cute skirt that packs well and looks good with nearly anything. I found it, and it’s not expensive, you’re welcome. Also everyone asked me about these shoes and I wore them in three different countries last week, including to a very elegant wedding in Austria, and they stayed on and comfortable until 6:30am. This shirt is one of those things that feels tied together enough for work meetings but fun for summer drinks when you lose a few buttons. Looks fab with jeans. 10/10. Here’s how it looked all together.
If you, like many people I met last week abroad, are curious about what’s going on with the WGA strike and some of the larger context for Hollywood, here’s two great interviews, one with David Simon (of The Wire, and excellent tweets), and one with my former WWD colleague and brilliant media reporter John Koblin. So listen and then go forth and be able to hold your own in a conversation!
Related (Hollywood, movies, good writing): I can’t wait to see this.
Fellow Los Angeles inhabitants, Pace Gallery has a very good show on of Virginia Jaramillo’s paintings. Jaramillo has been working for six decades and I love what her paintings do with light, space, questions about the spirit. There’s a little Hilma af Klint about it, which I mean as a compliment. (She’s also 84 years old and was at the opening, looking probably 20 years less than that.) If you go see it let me know what you think.
Three unrelated small delights: Cate Blanchett and Todd Field in the Criterion Closet. I remain a total sucker for miniatures. This made me laugh out loud.
My friend, the wonderful Marlien Rentmeester, wrote about our trip to Mexico for goop, and included everywhere we ate and stayed and lots of good vacation packing planning tips. If you don’t follow her blog, Le Catch, you should. (Though if you, like me, are trying not to shop so much, it’s a dangerous email to get! She is very convincing.) Marlien is one of those kind of dressers who make you want to rethink everything you own and just copy her head to toe. She has the best style: personal, elegant, fun. I feel very lucky to be in her orbit!
One last recommendation: getting lost. I am someone who prides themselves on being a “good” traveler (really, a very very good professional traveler), which means that I plan, I plot, I fully charge my devices—I rarely allow such things to happen. And then there I was in London, running all over town, drunk on the walkability of that city, even for enormous distances, really getting into gear, you know, and my phone died, of course, likely because some corporate overlord thinks I should buy a new one so now the battery drains every 5 hours. Admittedly, this isn’t like someone dropped me blindfolded in the Ozarks. This is a major metropolitan city with a famously good metro system that I have visited many times before, and I had a general idea of where to go (the way from which I’d come, the day before, when I wandered on 3 hours of bad plane sleep), but there was a little panic, I’ll admit. A light dusting of “oh shit.” But then, you know, I started walking. (And here’s a lovely little treatise on walking, for you.) And while I walked I ran into a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in years, a person who I did not know even lived in London and who I never would have seen if I had not been wandering wide-eyed and alert and looking up at the world, rather than lost in a podcast or eyes cast down at my phone or unthinkingly on some familiar goat path, blind to everything I’d seen a million times before. And I was reminded that in 2006 Rebecca Solnit wrote a whole beautiful Field Guide to Getting Lost based around the sentiment that “never to get lost is not to live.” The word “lost,” she writes,
comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.
“Never disband their armies”! I love that. And then this part:
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Writing this on memorial day, rich in loss feels like a good place to end. It’s properly summer now, especially on the east coast, I hear, though L.A.’s been a bit June Gloom-y as of late. It is my birthday on Friday (June 2!), and I am counting on the sun to come out in time and an elaborate cake and then I am leaving town again on another impractical short trip a few days after. But not to fret! I’ll write to you from one plane or another (literal, astral?), probably on a sugar high.
Thanks for being here. I love you.