Walking Down Sunset in Tennis Whites
I was thinking about calling this edition of HWG “The Jet Lag Chronicles” and then remembered how much I bragged about having figured out/cured jet lag in my last missive. Whoops. Well, a girl can dream.
I will freely admit that these two sides of the coin (indefatigable and cocky, exhausted and sullen) really suit my Gemini self. As does the reality of my current situation as I write, which is, yes, walking down Sunset boulevard after a tennis lesson, fully kitted out, racquet in arms. What, I like to walk! You can take the girl out of New York, etc. Speaking of being a Gemini, yes, it was my birthday on June 2nd, a date I share with Andy Cohen, Awkwafina, a rapper named Beetlejuice, and a Twitch streamer named Shroud. (If you are unfamiliar with the total mayhem and mindbogglery that is FamousBirthdays.com, well! I suggest you get involved. There are many online arguments to be had over their ranking system, which you would think is maybe SEO/ Google result based, but is almost certainly not.) But back to me, because you asked: I had a party, it was great. I had a magnificent cake from the utter geniuses at Rose & Rye. It was tiered, a gorgeous giant. It was frosted with raspberry rose buttercream and dotted with candied kumquats, it had cardamom and rose and orange and almond cake with raspberry jam inside. It was my favorite thing. Bliss! I have no idea how Beetlejuice or Shroud celebrated. I hope it was nice.
Then I left, again, this time for St. Tropez with Chanel Beauty to meet and celebrate their new Cometes Collective. I stayed at the Château de la Messardière, an exceptional hilltop hotel with panoramic views, a couple of jasmine and lavender-bush-lined pools, very good restaurants, and an excellent Valmont spa. My one complaint, if I had to make one, and I suppose it is French to do so, is that lunch could sometimes take around three hours. But A.) LA has prepared me for ineffective service in restaurants, B.) in the south of France, honestly, that’s kind of par for the course. And C.) really, what else are you there to do, if not linger over lunch? I’d have stayed all summer if I could. I would have liked to have spent more time in town, pretending to be Brigitte Bardot in her hotpants era (i.e. before we knew she was racist), but the problem with a wonderful hotel that requires a 10 minute drive to town is that sometimes you never want to leave. We did, though, prying ourselves away from the pools to spend an afternoon at La Commanderie de Peyrassol, a vineyard founded in the 13th century by the Knights of Templar and owned by only three families since. Not much remains of the medieval part (a wall and a cellar), but it now has a very interesting art collection (including a wonderful kaleidoscopic glass arch by Daniel Buren), a delicious restaurant, and a very good selection of wines to taste. I hadn’t been to the south of France in a few years and it was a nice reminder that while Somerset Maugham may have said “the French Riviera is a sunny place for shady people,” it’s still really just a divine place to be, come summer. Lord knows there are shady people everywhere. Might as well enjoy the view. I’ll be back sooner rather than later, I hope.
Since returning home I’ve been in a bit of a fugue state that I’ve only recently shaken off. (The coming back is always worse than the going, I’ve learned the hard way, especially in LA, which has been overwhelmingly gray this early summer, beyond just the marine layer that typically lingers over the west side. Like rain, or public transportation, it’s a situation that no one here is particularly prepared for.) This has meant a lot of cranky soul searching, passing out before 8pm, and shall we say, aggressive cultural consumption. (Sounds better than “binge watch,” doesn’t it?) Good news! Most of it has been great. So allow me, in the spirit of these emails, to share the fruits of my non-labor.
I WATCHED:
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Amazon Prime) and it felt like a cool hand stroking my fatigue-fevered brain. Sweet, smart, loving, a good bet for everyone who was or knew a preteen girl. Plus, Kathy Bates! Rachel McAdams! …Benny Safdie? 5 stars.
Platonic (Apple+) I’ll say it: this definitely didn’t look like it was good. It looks like one of those weird streamer MadLibs-style projects that you scroll past one random Sunday like …huh, wonder how much everyone got paid on that. But it’s actually rather sweet and funny and I started it and kept going to the point that I’m now all caught up. The gist: two college best friends (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) have grown apart in the intervening decades, and reconnect when one of them gets divorced. It’s not a rom-com, which I love about it. The poignant part is not the “will they or won’t they.” The poignant part is the shared memory of a prior self, the 40-somethings trying to capture the remembered light-footed looseness of life in their 20s, before kids and real jobs and real hangovers and consequences and bodily betrayals, the way an old friend can make that feel possible, even if its just for an evening, or an hour. (It’s important to hang on to friends who “knew you when,” I think. I didn’t always used to think that.) Anyway, it’s not so deep: hijinks ensue, of course. Byrne maybe doesn’t get enough credit as a comedic actress, and the show is pretty on the nose about certain indignities of living in Los Angeles as a grown up. (Mostly Seth Rogen’s funky little hats and Byrne’s pretty power mom cropped cargos, but there’s also a really funny episode about trying to find affordable real estate for a family of five.) Anyways, I recommend it if you have Apple+, not least because the other stuff on there is often weird as hell.
The Other Two (Max) continues to nail it—and predict the future!— though I find certain characters (ahem, Cary), becoming increasingly villainous in a way I must say I abhor! (Though that’s kind of the point.) It’s maybe the smartest show on television in that it’s certainly the funniest.
Somebody, Somewhere (Max). A beautiful, perfect little jewel of a show. Moving, deep, funny, real. Bridget Everett is a national treasure, and so is the rest of the cast. Thrilled it got picked up for a third season.
Never Have I Ever (Netflix). Season 4, the show’s last, fully stuck the landing. A sweet warm hug. Complete comfort food.
Mascarade. I watched this movie on the plane coming back from France. It is totally sexy and insane and is not the newest plot in the game but it stars a lot of beautiful people, some of them really maybe the most beautiful, and should you find yourself on Air France with a cold glass of airplane red and a couple of hours to kill? Well! Insert Gallic shrug here.
I READ:
Gagosian sent out the first chapter of a serialized short story by Percival Everett—A Vera Tatum Novel: By Leonora McCrae: By Percival Everett | Gagosian Quarterly— and I greedily choked it down at some ungodly hour like 3am. I am keenly awaiting the rest.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein, I read over a year late. I didn’t love or maybe just wasn’t particularly hooked by the first few pages when it first came out, which is my in-bookstore test for any book. But after enough friends mentioned it (one of whom, in particular, is looking for the kind of “slutty summer reads” best consumed poolside, should you have any to recommend), I kept at it. I ended up really enjoying it, not least because it’s set in an early aughts version of New York that I recognize and remember both fondly and with great trepidation. (I am not yet old enough, it seems, that embarrassing memories are uniformly fun or nostalgic.) One funny thing to notice is the amount of present day books set before iPhones truly took over and ruined any sense of drama. This is also true of movies!
I picked up the new issue of Vogue, with Margot Robbie on the cover. Not just because it includes a fun little beauty piece I did about ponytails, a hairstyle I have rarely revisited since my feral one in my preteen years. I also enjoyed the latest Paris Review, which has some excellent stuff, including journal pieces by Lydia Davis and very good short stories by Caleb Crain and Juliana Leite, among others.
I started two books at the same time which is never a good idea. Unnecessarily confusing! I have since finished neither. But the one that I’m really enjoying is Ned Beauman’s satirical novel Venomous Lumpsucker which is both laugh out loud funny and an incredibly dark vision of capitalism-driven environmental collapse. You’d think that wouldnt be funny after wildfires blotted out the sun in New York for several days last week and yet, it’s to Beauman’s credit that it is. Very. I will report more once I’ve finished it.
I SHOPPED:
The Simon Miller x Mango collection is pretty vacation perfect. I scooped up some beachy stuff (long woven dresses, printed short ones) for later summer trips and am eyeing even more before it totally sells out.
I love everything Andrea Mary Marshall is doing at Salon 1884. Sexy, 1970s tinged, sleek power woman shit. This is how I dress in my dreams. And some of it is currently on sale!
There’s just something about a slightly batshit accessory. A fuzzy purse, a belt made out of giant gumball-sized beads, funky sunglasses, a clunky shoe. These heels by Yume Yume scratch that itch but not in a totally ridiculous you’ll never actually wear them way, and they look great with jeans. Expect to see them on me this summer.
Everyone asks me about this phone case. It’s almost embarrassing, or just too silly to have real pearls dangling from my phone, but it definitely worked on the Chanel trip, and now I’ll admit I like the way they dangle out of my pocket like an ultra luxe bike chain.
Okay! That’s all for now. Next week the sun will be out and I will be fully back in my body after all this travel, I think. (I hope?) Let’s look forward to that. In the meantime, thanks, as always, for being here. You’re the best. xo