torsdag, januari 31, 2008

In the Snake Pit

I'm heading off to shoot runway at Fashion Week, Fall Winter/08. I'm taking the youngest, meeting the oldest at college, have invited a high school Swedish girl to join us (she's at boarding school in North Caroline for a year; her mother died a year ago), and I hope to catch up with an old colleague who let me crash with him in Dresden one weekend long, long ago. He has come over to NYC for the weekend.

I already have a hangover. How is this going to work out? I'm crashing now and getting up in a few hours. I must remember to write. . . .

onsdag, januari 30, 2008

Color Wheel

Every year Pantone tells us our color psyche

2000 cerulean blue (we were reminded of this in Devil Wears Prada)
2001 fuschsia rose (boy, that's disorienting)
2002 true red (well, now that that's clear)
2003 aqua sky (is that possible?)
2004 tiger lily (isn't that a Disney character?)
2005 blue turquoise (as opposed to green turquoise, ok, I actually get that one)
2006 sand dollar (where I will always be)
2007 chili pepper (where I will always want to be)
2008 blue iris (I swear, f/k/a periwinkle)


As much as I love Scandinavian seating when they get it right, no one can say "Only stay a moment" better when they get it wrong. Meet the Spline, which must be Norwegian for "split spine."

Refinery 29. Must explore more.
I want the Smeg refrigerator for so many reasons, including the childish use of refrigerator magnets.

One of the kids left a glass of milk on the arm of the inexpensive Ikea leather couch my husband insisted on getting instead of a Ligne Roset or Roche Bobois "are you insane?" piece. I lifted the glass up to escort to the dishwasher, and half a sheet of cow accompanied the glass and me. Man, I should be dunking my leathery face into milk acid every hour on the hour. Anyway, I just set back the chances of getting a dream couch, oh, about ten more years.

Louis Poulsen, a Dane, makes beautiful light fixtures and is referenced in an advertisement as a furniture architect. I love that phrase. I wonder what the architect architects think about that. Probably not so much.

Colon Blow Hard

It has been suggested that I write a piece about colon cleansing. I suggested that the suggestor write a piece about colon cleansing. Besides, I don't think I can put together anything more entertaining or off-putting than "She's Gonna Blow", an article I saved for the collection of words for "arse" alone.

A week before I read the article, my youngest spotted one of those rubbery bags in the drug store, and in front of a large group of people waiting for the pharmacist asked me, "What's this for?"

"It's a water bottle for a sore neck or ankle, I guess," I answered, thinking it was. How was I supposed to know? Growing up, we didn't even have a thermometer in the house. "If you don't have a thermometer, you can't have a fever," Mom would reason. Living as we did with the good Dr. House, why would we have anything as sophisticated as an insides cleaner-outer?

Anyway, that colonic guy needs to get out of his mom's house, right after he tries a few more funny 'speriments
And now that I think about it, what do my kids do when I'm gone?

måndag, januari 14, 2008

More Notes

I never met a Lamaze class I trusted.

"the Tate (think MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney all rolled into one[.]" Alice Rawsthorn, NY Times Style Magazine, Holiday 2007. Now I have to see the Tate because I refuse to believe on word alone that anything is as breathtaking and monumental as the moment one realizes what the MoMA houses. As my husband put it, "It's not just that the MoMA has all the greats of modern art; it has all the greats from the greats of modern art."

Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, Prada, Lanvin, YSL, Comme Des Garcons - repeat three times each in a sentence and commit the 2008 lines to memory.

söndag, januari 13, 2008

I've Been Such a Waste of Cake

Eye Dialect - spelling a word as it sounds when sloppily pronounced.

I want to wake up the house tomorrow with The Kills' U R A Fever.

In my long life, "senescence," ironically enough, is a word I've never come across.

When it comes to ignoring pain symptoms, "stoic" is just another way to spell "stupid." (It was a better quip in my mind, where I thought that each word had the same number of letters, but now I realize that I was just being stoic.)

But what I really want to be when I grow up, Mommy, is a beard: At a hotel convention, the man behind me in line at the, gack, buffet claimed that the number of vacationing single-women was way up. In response to me asking him why that was so, the man explained that it was because more men were coming out of the closet and didn't feel compelled to have to live with woman anymore. I had noticed, before he offered me this explanation, that the man, a professor at Paul Smith, a college within the SUNY system, exhibited a gay affect. The whole scene was one of those wire-crossers: too many messages, impulses, and responses all jumping about at once in my brain, forcing time and my mouth to grind to a halt. I don't really think that all men hate women or that most heterosexual acting men were closeted gays. Maybe women actually make enough money now to go on vacation by themselves, or their husbands have left them for other women, or that more women won't settle for just any guy for the sake of a "Mrs." degree, or the husband has traveled his butt off for work and wants to stay home, or the husband who actually kind of loved his wife died of a heart attack because that's what some men do, I guess, but only when they aren't all so busy trying to come out of the closet. It felt so mean what he said, like in a perfect world we girls would be so unnecessary.

Stay Young, Staycation. To save money on ski vacations, don't pay for unappreciated chic, fly as little as possible - think "large airport endpoints" and look for ski resorts with all amenities at the mountain base, or so today's NY Time's travel section advises. It would be even cheaper if I could just stay home. Besides, I don't need the reminder that I could be dead in less than two decades. There is nothing more convincing on the topic of my own mortality than feeling nausea-level muscle fatigue by the simple of act of letting gravity do its thing and push me downhill. Or how about the 53 places to go in 2008, from 12/9 Sunday Times? (I haven't had the time to read a Sunday paper since 12/2, it appears.) I'm certain to get to Laos, Lisbon, and Tunisia, right after my 49 trips to the international food aisle of the local Wegman's supermarket. Maybe I can substitute one airline ticket to Rocky Mountain Death Camp for something at Mid-Beach, Miami, something like the Fountainebleau.

Geneology - 23andme.com or genetree.com or ancestry.com. Someone did an extremely thorough job on my lineage. It's a heartbreaker to find out you're not a princess. It's sickening to find out that a long ago, distant relative married a woman who hacked up their six-year-old son in the barn, after dinner one night. (They had ... a barn?) It's sad to know a great-great uncle rode a train engine down off a trestle, the way a captain goes down with the ship, except without the water. Or the ship. The princess fantasy was working my life-drive way better than what yellowed newspaper clippings had to offer. No nobility, and barely a whiff of good judgment in the whole lot.

Botox as a gateway drug: (1) Must do research on the medspa mall (?) chains - Sleek, Sona, Pure, Dermacare, Skin Care Clinics, and American Laser Centers. HealthWest and SkinKlinic closed. Medicis about to get FDA approval for Reloxin, which will be the first US competition Allergan has had for its Botox. (1) Must remember to tell Dad to sell Allergan stock, although it seems that anything Allergan does, like Annie Oakley, it does better.

I can't imagine ever having a home theater. I'm not sure I'd ever get out of the seat.

lördag, januari 12, 2008

Quote

Mark Hanna - McKinley's 1896 campaign manager: "There are two things that are important in politics. The first thing is money and I can't remember what the second one is."

McKinley is important to people from Buffalo because we killed him here at our Pan-American Exposition in 1901, and we've never recovered from the hit. He didn't die directly from the assassin's two bullets, but from the gangrene that set in because the doctor only found one. Our better surgeon, Dr. Roswell Park, was performing cancer surgery in Niagara Falls that day. The end result is a lot of things named McKinley to remind us of our bad timing and hapless fate, big things like high schools, monuments, streets, traffic circles, engraved site markers.

"Here is another reminder of how we screwed up. Again. Sorry. So sorry."

We should have similar endowments for all those blown Super Bowls, too. Anyway, I liked the quote.

torsdag, januari 10, 2008

College Trip

I have no choice. I have no time, but if I don't find some to write every day, my head it going to pop off. We're now into college search for kid #2.

"I'm thinking Miami," she said.

Miami of Ohio, right? Right? Right? Please add "of Ohio."

"... I want to be warm.

She would be the queen of cigarette boats. I suggested she look at the schools in Massachusetts and New York for starters.

"These places aren't so warm. How about Kansas?" She asked after spending a little time exploring the University of Michigan and Ohio State.

I wanted to respond, "How about it? How about Idaho, Missouri, South Dakota, and Oklahoma, too? What I know about Kansas is that you have just suggested studying biology in a state where evolution hasn't been invented yet." I held my tongue and for a second considered getting the wooden map of the United States down off the bookshelf. I could blindfold her and we could play pin the tail on her future alma mater. Would she feel out of place in Texas? Would she get religion jammed down her throat in South Carolina? Who will inspire her? Who will take her? Who can I afford?

This is going to be one hot mess.

tisdag, januari 08, 2008

What To Do With Leftover December Cash

Found The Jewelry Blogger looking for some info on David Yurman. The JB makes for a great PR person, actually, for all the designers featured so far.

I was just trying to clear out some catalogs, not my bank account.

Remembering What?

Deciding to look at 2007 books before Fall, I came across a receipt with the word "strattera" written on it. Thank god for the internet, because of course I could google the word and feel compelled to take the "Do you have adult ADHD?" test.

That's why I never finish the books until the third quarter, the following year.