How's Your Attention Span?
Summer is the perfect time to reclaim it. And Jane Birkin's Birkin. And great sunglasses.
I came across this Ray Bradbury quote somewhere about the increasingly pivotal skill of how to rebuild an attention span (I think he was actually talking about filling the deep well of references that a good writer needs, but it works either way):
I’ll give you a program to follow every night, a very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry... Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
Honestly? Solid advice. Especially now, amidst the thrills of late spring, with summer just over the horizon and distractions aplenty. I’m having a baby in late September, I have nothing but distractions. (Like how to dress now that my torso is an entirely new shape, and how to entirely re-do my skincare routine, now that I have to take rather seriously the ingredients list. If that’s of interest, I am happy to detail further! Just let me know. Presently I spend a lot of time looking at low-rise pants, an activity I haven’t pursued since the early 2000s. And wearing these. For someone who usually lives in denim, the pant thing has been…challenging. I object to those over-the-bump jeans with the giant spandex panel on moral reasons.) But in the meantime, I’ll take any good reminder to freely read while I can.
In other exciting news, I collaborated with my dear friend, the coolest woman in New York (/ really the world), Selima Salaun, on a pair of sunglass frames for her brand, Selima Optique. I first met Selima in my early days in New York when I would turn up at her exceptional Bond St store, which was around the corner from my apartment, and spend whole afternoons trying her insane vintage collection on (she has the best taste) and dreaming about the archival Hermès bags in the cases behind the counter and the endless amounts of fabulous eyewear, all of which my contributing reporter salary definitely couldn’t afford. But now we have made an addition to those cases! It’s called The Sasha. It’s a statement sunglass—the kind of thing you wear when you love your outfit and you want to be noticed. Or you hate your outfit and you want to turn it around. It’s a little vintage, a little modern, a lot classic—not for blending in. It’s a direct optimistic retort to the tiny nineties terminator frames we’re all so bored by now.1 More succinctly, The Sasha is what happened in Selima’s beautiful genius brain when I said the ideal shape for me was somewhere between the frames of JFK and Grace Kelly. (To be honest I said, “…like JFK and Grace Kelly had a baby?” You get it, right? She got it. Icons only.)
They come in black, white, red, and tortoise, and because she’s the best optician in New York, the lenses are perfect. All made in Paris. Check them out!
WATCHING/ READING/ OTHERWISE CONSUMING:
I have talked here, and in general, about Fred Rogers a lot in recent years. There’s good reason for that: Mr. Rogers was a big part of my childhood (likely yours too); there have been plenty of occasions to follow his advice to “look to the helpers” lately; and the man is probably the closest thing we’ve had to an American saint in the last century, at least on television. But after watching the new PeeWee Herman documentary on HBO, PeeWee As Himself, I feel like I should have been talking about Paul Reubens, too.
The sticky part of his story, as in what I’d retained these decades later, was the weirdness of PeeWee as a project—maybe too weird, for me, or my parents, who were in charge of what we watched at that age—and the later scandals, the suggestion of pedophilia and perversion and dark intrinsic wrongness (after all, he was so weird, something must be up, right?). And then instead to have Paul Reubens be revealed as such an important, subversive, devoted creative force—one whose roots were in adult, underground comedy, who loved kids (but not like that), who was forced to live a kind of half life (relatively deep in the closet, at least in Hollywood/ the public eye), and then penalized and targeted by politicians and a media determined to reveal that anybody so publicly different must be dangerous, even if they had to find perversion where there was none (like in his art collection).
It’s a great project, a real documentary (a rarity in these days of celebrity driven autobiography-style hagioraphies many streamers are pushing), directed by Matt Wolf (who wrote a moving piece about the difficulty of the filmmaking process for Vulture) and divided into two parts, with extensive interviews with Reubens and his friends and co-conspirators, and tons of archival footage. Planned further interviews were derailed by Reubens’ death, in 2024, from a cancer that he had hidden from nearly everyone for six years as he underwent treatment. He lived not far from where we are now, it turns out, and turned the land around his collection-filled home into something of a makeshift nature preserve, feeding and protecting the native wild animals there. He bought it, he said, because you could see the Hollywood sign when you dove into the pool. The doc is one of those rare projects that offers a complete reconsideration of what to many of us probably felt like a forgotten and settled case. I really recommend watching. Let me know what you think.
Speaking of well-wrought remembrances: John Steinbeck’s art of fiction for the Paris Review has one of the best introductions possibly ever, written posthumously by Nathaniel Benchley, a friend of the artist. It’s basically what you dream your best friend would say at your funeral. The whole thing is good, but this part especially:
Reading through his obituaries, I found a good deal of analytical writing about his work, and one rewrite man ventured the personal note that he was considered shy, but nowhere did I see a word about one of the most glorious facets of his character, which was his humor. All good humor defies analysis (E. B. White likened it to a frog, which dies under dissection) and John’s defied it more than most, because it was not gag-type humor but was the result of his wildly imaginative mind, his remarkable store of knowledge, and his precision with words. This respect for, and precision with, words led him to avoid almost every form of profanity; where most people would let their rage spill out the threadbare obscenities, he would concoct some diatribe that let off the steam and was at the same time mildly diverting. One example should suffice: At Easter about three years ago we were visiting the Steinbecks at Sag Harbor, and John and I arose before the ladies to make breakfast. He hummed and puttered about the kitchen with the air of a man who was inventing a new form of toaster, and suddenly the coffee pot boiled over, sending torrents of coffee grounds over the stove and clouds of vapor into the air. John leaped for the switch, shouting, “Nuts/!No wonder I’m a failure! No wonder nobody ever asks for my hand in marriage! Nuts!” By that time both he and the coffee had simmered down, and he started a new pot. I think that this was the day he stoutly denied having a hangover, and after a moment of reflection added, “Of course, I do have a headache that starts at the base of my spine...“ He spent the rest of the morning painting an Easter egg black, as a protest.
There was, oddly, a lot of little boy left in him, if by little boy you can mean a searching interest in anything new, a desire to do or to find or to invent some sort of diversion, a fascination with any gadget of any sort whatsoever, and the ability to be entertained by comparative trivia. He was the only adult I have ever seen who would regularly laugh at the Sunday comics; he raised absolute hell in our kitchen with an idea for making papier-mâché in the Waring blender with a combination of newspaper and water and flour; and he would conduct frequent trips to the neighborhood toy store, sometimes just to browse through the stock and sometimes to buy an item like a cap pistol as a Valentine’s Day present for his wife. To be with him was to be on a constant parranda, either actual or intellectual, and the only person bewildered by it was his children’s nurse, who once said, “I don’t see why Mr. Steinbeck and Mr. Benchley go out to those bars, when there’s all that free liquor at home.” And late at night, over some of the “free” liquor at home, he would sometimes read Synge’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura, and then he would weep. It wasn’t the liquor; it was the lilt of Synge’s words and the ache in Petrarch’s heart, and there was one of the sonnets that I never once heard him read through to the end.
See what I mean? Perfect.
Jane Birkin’s Birkin, aka the original, is going up for auction at Sotheby’s in Paris in July. Regrettably it does not appear to have any of her stickers still on it.
The story by now is famous: Jane Birkin was sitting next to Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas on a short flight from London to Paris, and at one point her carry-on—the iconic wicker basket she’d bought in Portugal in the 1960s—fell on him. They discussed, presumably, why she didn’t carry a handbag, and she explained her requirements (mostly about capacity) were not yet met by any handbag currently on the market. Dumas decided to make her one. (I have no idea why this situation has not yet happened to me, I am on planes a LOT and have plenty of good ideas for luggage improvements. Perhaps I need to bonk people on the head more.)
As of now, the most expensive handbag ever sold at auction was also by Hermès: a White Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Diamond Retourne Kelly 28, for $513,040. This one doesn’t have diamonds or crocodile, but it does have provenance! And to be fair, that is worth far, far more: Sotheby’s surely believes the OG Birkin is up there with Steve McQueen’s watches ($1-2.2 million at auction), or Marilyn’s Happy Birthday Mr. President dress ($4.8 million in 2016)—someone bought princess Diana’s black sheep sweater for over $1 million in 2023. Rowing Blazers has the exact same style by Warm & Wonderful for $178. It will be interesting to see how this goes. No estimate yet. I imagine a museum wants it, but who knows where it’ll end up.
Ironically, of course, it’s Birkin’s basket that remains one of the more coveted cool-girl summer bags all these years later. You can find one on Etsy for $33. Ideal for lawn /beach/ summer parties and all chic warm-weather errands. Extra points if you have fresh produce or a bottle of wine sticking out. You’re welcome!
This note is becoming increasingly French in interest, but you know what? That’s fine by me. That feels spring/summery, too. This Lauren Collins story from the latest New Yorker about a possibly nefarious plot to suppress El Mordjene, an Algerian Nutella competitor, is terrific. (If you are, yourself, a francophile, her Substack is an excellent window into an excellent American writer’s expatriation to that fair nation.)
A great surprise to me when I moved to Los Angeles, a city I had long heard was dangerously obsessed with youth and beauty, was the prevalence of donut shops, which are not particularly known for enhancing either quality. And then I realized that
bodega : New York :: donut shop : Los Angeles
and everything became a lot clearer. Now, it’s clearer still, thanks to the above IG explanation about how that equation came to be—and the Donut King, and the American Dream, and the important role that immigrants have always played in that dream. Another documentary to add to the list!
This n+1 essay about traveling to Peru to do ayahuasca to combat climate change/current-state-of-the-world despair is far funnier than you’d expect. I like a narrator who isn’t afraid to be unlikable.
That’s all I have for you this week. Thank you, as always, for being here! It means the world. Lots of fun things (and summer travels!) ahead.
xx ATC
But if ‘90s is still your bag—and no judgment there—it was Selima who made Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s iconic sunglasses, a style called The Aldo, which are still available to buy in stores and on her site. (There is also The Carolyn, which is the same shape but slightly larger, for those inspired by CBK but in possession of less narrow faces.)