Onward!

On time, and tea, and terribly good things ahead

I woke up the other morning with the distinct feeling of time passing like a rushing of water all around me. It was as if I were stood perfectly still and upright in a river flowing by and through and around me, which is of course unusual for anybody still lying prone in bed, but especially so for those of us who live in a climate that encourages so often the exact opposite sensation; a sort of seasonless float through the year. But maybe that's not unusual at all, maybe it’s just summer ending and another fall, back again, or really just around the bend, even if it may always be kind of summer here.

(Also, in case you are worried I am perhaps losing my mind, this did also occur to me, but I had also slept terribly, due in large part to seeing Blink Twice, which is much better than its marketing would have you think, and left my nervous system seriously disregulated—high praise for thriller connoisseurs! I recommend it if you like slashers, revenge, and the concept of Promising Young Woman as was laid out in its trailer [but not in that actual movie]. The cast is really great, especially Adria Arjona, who did warn me back in 2022 that the film, then shot under the much better name of Pussy Island, was “pretty fucking dark.” Did you see it? What did you think?)

The forward momentum of it all has me thinking though, and not just about the usual shopping lists: I want new school supplies, even though I no longer have school; I want new books to read, and a new wardrobe, and new people to see, and new things to watch, and places to go and reasons to go to them. But also, I have several huge deadlines and have to park in this chair and crank them out. One can take this kind of feeling two ways: panic, or presence. I almost wrote pleasure, just for the symmetry of it, but I don’t really know anyone above elementary school age who loves how fast time whips by. But here we are: getting whipped.

So on that note, some end-of-summer-ish* things for you to stay centered and cool:

*officially it continues until the 22nd, remember, and it’s going to be hot in LA this week, so who are we kidding.

The super shopper and extremely stylish Betty Halbreich died last week at 96. My friend just gave me her 2015 memoir, I’ll Drink to That, which I had somehow never read, and it is a perfectly stirred martini of a thing (in a chilled glass, of course). Highly recommend it. This profile of her from the New Yorker is wonderful too, not least for its day trip to her dream of a perfectly maintained Park Avenue closet. She was a real stylist, one who ignored labels and aimed to dress her clients to look their best, not like carbon copies of a trend or full looks from a designer. She also knew that clothes weren’t everything (but boy were they great). She also gave great reads of people, as you see in the profile. A dying breed! 

“The displacement of love, affection and attention onto a pair of shoes or a dress has built an entire industry,” [Halbreich] wrote. “Like all good defenses, however, they are best used in moderation and only when one understands a little of the motivations that lurk beneath the surface.”

A very good note for us considering our own back-to-school shopping!

Kate Spade keeps popping up, first in this great NeverWorns look at Contents, the original “What’s In My Bag” feature (also worth a read for its considerations about how that insider-y, legitimately interesting magazine feature went viral, got lazy, and became cliché spon-con).

The inside of a woman’s bag is a vulnerable place…A handheld cache of necessities and mementos, sometimes crumb-ridden, sometimes glamorously organized, generally somewhere in between. If the bag itself is a projection of how we want to be seen, its contents are a mirror of who we really are.

And then there was this WSJ piece about Kate Spade, her legacy, her company, and her deeply shocking 2018 suicide. It’s moving, mostly because like with anybody, there’s so much no one will ever really know about what was really going on. But I loved those bags once, and I still think they were pretty genius. From the WSJ piece:

“‘In the early Kate Spade days, Andy [Spade] would use the word mercury to describe a certain undefinable je ne sais quoi, a taste, a feeling. Recalling an old thermometer, he notes how you can’t put your finger on the quicksilver—it jumps at the merest touch. ‘I always thought we were mercury,’ he says. ‘Just when they think they know who we are, it changes.’”

(Fun fact about mercury: incredibly toxic! They used to let kids play with it in schools! And we worry about microplastics!)

BVLGARI has debuted a new collection around their iconic signature Tubogas technique of flexible seamlessly interlocking gold. (Town & Country has a fabulous breakdown of its history—it was inspired by a gas pipe!) Fall 2024 feels like the right time for a return to form, for reverence for the ultra-classic, the sleekly glamorous—and look, I always love yellow gold. I threw on one of the bracelets to meet my friend Domenica, an incredible artist and creative director, who made some deeply cool kites that we flew around LA to celebrate the apex of summer. (Kites are seriously underrated, by the way.) If you’re looking to invest in serious jewelry, these literally never go out of style. (I am now coveting this very elegantly 90s vintage watch.)

I am watching Chimp Crazy (MAX), and it is as advertised, utterly nuts. (…Apeshit, even… has anyone used that in a review yet?) A look at illegal captive Chimps in America and the people who love and lose their minds over them, from the folks who brought you Tiger King, if that gives you any indication. It’s must see TV, at least in my world, where everyone is watching and discussing at length. The fourth and final episode airs Sunday. Let’s watch it together?

I am not normally a “spritz” girl. I don’t love a face mist. I like those tinned water ones for airplanes in theory but when it comes down to precious carry-on space, well… this one, by beauty-artist founded brand Për Në, is enriched with Çaj Mali, which is apparently an ancient Albanian herb known to repair damaged skin, and I can tell you that it has utterly transformed at least two different friends’ skin for the truly glowing better. There is also a tea, which I have had, which is delicious (and decaf!). I will be ordering both in bulk.

I want to make this cake. But the problem with making a cake of course is that then you have a cake in your house. (This is admittedly more of a problem if you are a person who is constantly looking for ways to distract themselves from deadlines.)

I read Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, which is a furthering of the Sally Rooney project, i.e. the inner lives of sexy Irish people with emotional problems. I inhaled it. Willing to bet you will too. (Out Sept 24!)

I loved this story about the trees of Los Angeles (I am obviously partial to the Laurel Canyon section!). A good reminder to slow down and look around you. And I learned in the comments that any resident of Los Angeles can get seven free trees delivered to them by City Plants!  I also learned in the comments that people are so incredibly touchy, even about truly the dumbest things.

I will be watching The Fall, which has been re-released on Mubi. This movie rocked my world in 2006. Shades of The Princess Bride, but with the visuals turned all the way up, more emo, and starring Lee Pace(!). Stirring and inspiring! What do you know.

Anyway, I love it.

More tea! I am currently obsessed with these two teas with two distinctly opposite effects: Sana buckwheat tea (which I drink in the evenings, for digestion and its nutty mild taste), and Laka matcha, which is so delicious, so good for you, and portioned into perfect little packets for travel (they also do this with their delicious honey! The amount of times I have begged room service for honey!) and so I demanded a code for us all to get a discount if we wanted. I felt rather clever when I requested it to be: “LAKAALOT” (because I do!). It gets you 10% off, which adds up when you’re addicted.

The next time someone tells you AI is coming for all the creative jobs, send them this article, which is quite dry, but very straightforward, and I think makes a real selection of excellent points.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

[…]

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Take that!

I was speaking to someone recently for a story that I’m working on and she reminded me that’s important to remember when approaching anything creative that we’re all going to die someday. I told her I did not find that thought comforting, but hey. I guess I needed reminding. I guess maybe we all do? Here’s James Baldwin talking about the same idea with the divine Maya Angelou:

(And here’s the link to the full conversation, which is pretty great—and so 1975.)

And here’s a little more James Baldwin, because I love you:

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship, or family, or romance— is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is a still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

That’s from Nothing Personal, his 1964 collaboration with Richard Avedon, who was his high school classmate and lifelong friend. Wouldn’t you just kill to be in that English class?

Fostertalk’s last summer Friday issue was great, but honestly, they were all pretty great. The exact kind of online writing I miss from ye olde internet of the 2010s. Here he is about why he made it free:

Making a thing, and trying to make it original, and trying to make it for the love of the thing, and trying to do it with the enormous pressures we put on ourselves, to say nothing of all the reasons not to put your whole ass out there for everyone to see? By the numbers, there are more reasons to avoid doing it than not. And this was never going to be good if I charged for it. Money is an incentive, and when new incentives are introduced into anything, the fundamental nature of a thing is altered. Money for creative work isn’t a bad thing by any means. But that was never gonna be this. Ultimately, the incentive here was: I wanted to have fun writing again.

I get it! Boy, do I get it.

And get this! That’s all that I have for you this time. More to come soon (maybe even later this month!) when the current onslaught of deadlines are behind me, and I will have a lot of fun things to share.

Thanks, as always, for being here. Means everything. xx