Well, Crap

– G. Stein in E. Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast

Don, Come Join Me By The Pool

I have been re-watching the entire Mad Men series to date because I’m getting prematurely excited for season four. One of my favorite episodes is Season 2, Episode 11 where Don freaks out and goes to California and has a weird adventure with that strange group of people in the gorgeous California ranch house. I wish I could also freak out and leave New York and go to California for a few days and hide with people in stunning swimwear who drink all day and play geography games over dinner. Instead I shall have to settle for staring at vaguely vintage-looking swimsuits on the internet.

Clockwise from top left: Nearly Nautical Bikini from Anthropologie; Pindot Swimsuit from J.Crew; Revival Bikini from Anthropologie; Hayden Harnett via I Am A Greedy Girl

New York City Polaroid Project

I love New York and I love Polaroids. This is exactly what it sounds like: some guy took a bunch of pictures of New York. Go look: NYCPP.

Bornay Flowers

I can’t help it. I love flowers. They remind me of daffodils from my childhood backyard and Saturday markets in small towns  in Italy and extravagant displays at Harrod’s in London. Good thing I have  Bornay, a gorgeous flower blog, to tide me over until I am wealthy enough to have a constant stream of fresh flowers decorating my apartment.

Things I found on the internet today

Random links from today because I am lazy:

1. A perfect skirt. {from Frolic}

2. A totem of bowls disguised as a vase {from Design Crush}

3. If fonts were dogs {from Beautiful Decay}

4. Wet bugs (cooler than it sounds, I promise) {from The Daily Mail}

Indoor Gardening Update!!

Spotted: Terrarium Party on Got A Girl Crush. I’m so jealous. I must host one immediately.

Stuffed Artichoke Fantasy

It occurs to me that I have not yet posted about food today, which seems rather blasphemous. So now I shall write about my longing for stuffed artichokes.

When I was a child, this was one of my favorite dinners. This might have been partially because it didn’t involve making a mess on the stove and therefore that I didn’t have to clean the stove after dinner, but that is an irrelevant detail. I also liked stuffed artichokes because they were extremely tasty and you could stuff them in your mouth with your hands (I am going to propose a theory that almost all truly delicious foods elicit a desire to be eaten with one’s hands). I loved peeling off the leaves one by one, sucking the stuffing off them, and depositing them in the brown paper lunch bags my mother provided. Yum.

Artichokes are back in season now and I keep seeing gorgeous ones at the grocery down the street from me. Today seems like a perfect day for them too; it’s chilly and damp and I’m longing for a dinner that comes out of an oven. I’m also apparently much more eager to spend my evening cooking food and eating it than going to the gym, which happens a lot. I’ve been looking up recipes in case I decide that rain means that I cannot, in fact, go to the gym (in my building) and need to spend the night puttering about my kitchen instead. See the Saveur recipe, Martha Stewart’s recipe, and the New York Times recipe.

Thoughts (not my own) On Lying

I was reviewing my post on Lady GaGa from the other day and it occurs to me that I have accumulated some fantastic quotations about lying over there years. Here are some of my favorites:

“People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“The idea is that when many lies are told, unfettered by immediate comparison to fact, they end up comprising a kind of truth. On that truth too lies can be based.” – Jesse Ball, on the structure of a verisylum (an asylum for chronic liars), in the novel Samedi the Deafness

“Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it’s better if you do.” – as made famous by Alice Ayres/Jane Jones, as played by Natalie Portman in the movie Closer, based on Patrick Marber’s play Closer

“Your own father said that artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.” – V, from V for Vendetta

“What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.” – Lady GaGa

These are just off the top of my head. I’m missing some important people who probably have something profound to say about lying: Andy Warhol, Woody Allen, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare. Leave your favorite quotation about lying in the comments.

Stripes

First of all, I would like to apologize for moaning about the weather yesterday because today is much worse. Thank you, weather gods, for putting everything in perspective by sending us a monsoon. Now please bugger off and bring me happy, sunny spring weather instead of attempting to drown me in the subway.

Secondly, and more importantly, I have been thinking about striped shirts a lot lately. I have been seeing them around the internet as part of a sailor thing or as part of a French thing. To me, though, the ultimate striped shirt inspiration is neither nautical nor French. Nobody rocked the horizontal stripes like Picasso, pictured above, and it is my wish to wear them with the same careless, polished ease that he did.

Examples of striped shirts I like after the jump.

Weather-Appropriate Logic

It’s funny how much difference weather can make. On sunny Mondays I am happy and generally productive. I don’t mind cleaning the apartment or going grocery shopping or doing something culturally enriching such as going to a museum, visiting a bookstore, or staring longingly at the diamonds on the second floor of Tiffanys. On ugly-ass crappy Mondays like today, I am completely, 100% worthless. Today I ate left-over pizza while lying on my living room floor, actually did laundry but then got halfway through folding it and gave up, and finished reading that Patricia Marx book (see McNally Jackson, Addiction, Narcissism) while hiding under a mountain of unfolded laundry. This means that I have accomplished one half of one item (the laundry) on my to-do list for today. And because it is so crappy out and because my brain is refusing to do anything useful, I have also established a new logic in which the only way I could become productive for the rest of the day is if I were this beautifully styled woman with this perfect pink handbag and the most gorgeous shoes I have ever seen in my entire life:

I believe it is time for a nap.

Perfectly styled woman from The Sartorialist.