Category: Beauty

A little light Russell

Hey! Is that Mr. Nipsey Russell the Cat doing a little bedtime reading in last week’s New Yorker? Certainly looks like it. When he’s not writing #1 hits, what else has Mr. Russell been up to? Getting in Trouble…Getting dressed up…

Hanging out with Hemingway…And just hanging out…What a busy guy. He’s got so much on his plate he’s looking to cast a replacement. Once he finds the right cat for the job, he’s really looking forward to taking a load off this weekend…

Yes, I like my cat a lot.

Thanks to Miss McKay for the New Yorker image, mugshot from here, Indian from here, Hemingway from here, Russell lounging is just Russell lounging, and Cat audition is from here.

Garden Party

Sweetheart and I just returned from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s amazing annual plant sale with this little red wagon load of delectable goodies for the backyard! Early Girls and Kirby Cukes, Packman Broccoli and Medusa Peppers, Rosemary, Thyme, and Lavande de Provence… like all gardeners at the beginning of the season, out wagon brims almost more with hope than with bounty. Luckily my ever-lovin-horticultural Mama is coming next week for any course correction if we city mice have bitten off more strawberries than we can chew.

ps. I always love the Botanic Garden, every time you go it’s different depending on the weather and the season. Today, the bluebell wood was in bloom. After last night’s hard rain, the trees were silent except for the occasional drop of water and the flowers were like a quiet sea. It was truly beautiful.

Ghost Party

For Miss McKay’s birthday she threw a Ghost Party in the sea islands. All in attendance were asked to choose and channel one of the many spirits of Cumberland, the most mystical and undoubtedly magical tide and mist limned island of the lot. This was certainly cause for a most unearthly celebration. We went to the boneyard and gathered armadillo skulls, deer jawbones, and miscellaneous backbones from the woods, and, like all good ghosts, everyone had a bone necklace and placecard.We went into the saw palmettos, foraged mossy branches and long fronds and festooned the room with bones, vines, and spanish moss.

We dressed as timacuan squaws and revolutionary war generals, the ghosts of great great uncles and bastard octoroon daughters, as ghost dans, zoave blockade runners, french pirates, notorious brides, and wayward travelers. The birthday girl herself went as fierce and beautiful Aunt Lucy who answered to no one and rode her horse with a crow on her shoulder, and Miss Mia made our portraits.

We ate shrimp and grits, drank champagne and rum, and played music and danced mystically into the night. It was perfection.So much love and supernatural joy to Miss McKay on this occasion of her birthday.

And infinite thanks and sharkteethbrujaja to the divinely talented Miss Mia Baxter, timacuan squaw and photographer extroidanairess, for the majority of these stunning images.

Happy May Day!

Even though it certainly doesn’t feel like the official beginning of summer, today is May Day! In honor of the pagan half-solstice and commemorating the birth of the 8 hour work day, we’ll be knocking off early and wreathing our brows with May crowns of newly-arrived bodega peonies and market lilacs (both spotted this week!).

Glorious old May Day images from the Ames, Iowa Hstorical Society.

Gremolata & Cancellaresca Milanese

Though I’m not too well versed in it, I love typography. Borrowing from illuminated manuscripts, morphing from baroque curlicues to the lazy S’s of the Virginia Gazette (headline to the uninitiated: The Frefest advice, Foreign and Domeftick), from the ubiquity of Helvetica to the transgressions of Comic Sans. My love of fonts is pretty basic and visceral, my knowledge of custom running type limited to when my Mama had a font made of her handwriting in the mid 90’s (awesome). But, when I stumbled on this kickstarter campaign, my eyes fluttered. A brand new typeface. Bold and Italics not just header buttons on command. Languid, tilty, romantic italic letters paired off with their stand-up roman bretheren based on exact harmony between letter and meaning. Type made in the oldest way, in a foundry, painstaking, precise, hand wrought. Marvelous. The finished typeface will be a marriage of Cancellaresca Milanese (a typeface based on one that first appeared in Milan in 1541 in the books of Giovanni Antonio Castiglione) and Gremolata (a newly designed type with a slightly larger set of capitals based on those in the Cancellaresca, and paired with a lower case that is inspired, but not based on, Alpine typefaces of the mid-sixteenth century). Of course. the I gave $10, the project is funded, and the boys have started carving out their type. Just as in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king, in the kingdom of Kickstarter, even the pauper is a patron. Here, the type:

Getting The Spirit

Up several flights of stairs into a small but airy blue sanctuary with high windows, the singing hasn’t started, but the drums and organ are warming up, seats full and pews stocked with paper fans from the local funeral home. Needless to say, getting the spirit raises temperatures. Amen. This Saturday I met Carrie up in Harlem for the fourth annual gospel choir festival at the Elmendorf Reformed Church. Our friend Laura was singing, the proceeds went to autism research, and the noise promised to be joyous unto the lord and anyone else who might be listening. The church itself (now in its fifth home uptown) was founded 350 years ago, and, as the MC Elder Kevin Spooner said “it feels like some of us have been here that long”. Amen. Four choirs. Organ, piano, bass, drums.The crowd instructed to sing out if the spirit moved us, and moved we were. And afterwards, we waltzed out into the warm Saturday Harlem night to Sylvia’s for fried chicken. Amen.

Heart Art

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am in love love love with this Molly Ledbetter painting. Deep Dark Secret Confession: I’m one of those boring poopers who usually prefers when art is a picture of something. Like a horse or a ship or a faith healing. I probably would have been gasping and “well-I-never!”-ing at the 1913 Armory Show. Yet even though dear miss Molly’s work is large scale, graphic, and abstract, it’s also deliciously tactile, lovely and compelling, with riotous pops and swags of color and I just love it. She’s got a marvelous new site (and a great blog to boot). Now if I could only decide which piece is my favorite…

New York, I Love You

This weekend we have dear friends visiting from down south, a pair of bon vivant and raconteur travelers who’ve found themselves in the flats of Iowa, the mountains of Virginia, and the deep pines of Athens, Georgia- all for the pursuit of knowledge. Though they live among the rolling country hills right now, the countdown is on for the end of their bucolic tenure and their subsequent carbetbag transatlantic move to London. There couldn’t be a better time to show them our New York. She’s tricking herself out in flowers and opening her arms as she always does for spring wanderers. And, in making plans for their arrival, I’m reminded that the best way to fall back in love with your own city is to show off her best sides to someone you love.

On the docket:  Sichuan in Bay Ridge, a visit to MoMa, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and a brown bag picnic at the carousel, dinner at Roman’s, The first session of the Brooklyn Flea back outdoors, the opening of the Dekalb Market, Passover Seder with Sweetheart’s family, lunch at Spumoni Gardens, a trip to Coney Island to ride the soon-to-be-closed-Sweetheart’s-childhood-favorite Eldorado AutoSkooter Bumper Cars, A trek either to Arthur Avenue or to Staten Island for Italian delights, and Michael Daves at Rockwood.

Chag sameach, thank you New York, and may everyone have a marvelous weekend.

 

Gorgeous top image: Ernst Haas, Central Park, Spring, 1970
from the awesome ICP photography blog.

For your listening pleasure…

The Association for Cultural Equality was founded by American Folklorist and Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax to preserve the “intangible heritage” of humanity. Starting in the 30’s, traveling with a tin can recorder powered by car batteries, Lomax recorded people making joyful noise, preservation for posterity. The American South- blues soaked or banjo based, far flung calypso islands, the Gnaoua of Morocco, sketches of Spain, giants of jazz, crooners, raconteurs, ragtime kings, and clear voiced mountain queens. Our songs, our stories, our oral histories, our git-boxes, our diddley bows, and our polyrhythms. Decades of sound saved, history kept. For your listening pleasure, the Association for Cultural Equality has made 17,000 of those sound recordings available FOR FREE online. AMAZING. Listen here.

 
Besos to Anna for the heads up.

Cocktails, Dreams, and a very happy weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carrie came over last night and we had what might be the last glasses of red wine of the season. Now, New York hasn’t exactly been cooperating with this season business- winter was a mere turkish delight’s worth of chill and March has come on like a liger, tricking the crocuses and then making them cry. My mourning for red wine and whiskey is almost more symbolic than anything else, a wish for the warmth I know/hope is coming. To that effect, I think maybe instead of looking back on the end of the season, I’ll look forward. To late sun and backyards and flowy striped dresses with bare legs. And for that I need to raise my glass with something fresh, light, champagney, and not too silly. Perfect timing for Meags sending me this early-spring-perfect concoction, the cherub’s cup. Added bonus: you can fix it in batches in a big pitcher, alleviating muddle fatigue, and allowing for that “breezy effortless hostess” thing that’s so very hard to capture. Oh this? Just whipped it up.

Cherub’s Cup

1/4 cup sliced strawberries + more for garnish
1/2 cup St. Germain
1 cup Hendrick’s gin
1/3 cup lemon juice (this is NOT exact, so you can adjust)
~1.5 bottles dry sparkling wine (enough to fill your pitcher 3/4 of the way)

:: Muddle your strawberries with a bit of the St. Germain (it’s easier to muddle if you’re working with a small volume)

:: Pour the muddled berries and all the hard alcohol into a large pitcher. Stir in the lemon juice and the sparkling wine and taste to make sure you like the proportions. You can make a bit more of the St. Germain + gin mix and add it in if you like. Add additional sliced berries to the top for a pretty finish, or slice a slice on the diagonal and perch it on the rim of the champagne flute.

:: Put on pink lipstick, something cottony, maybe a silk scarf, and tiptoe through the tulips.

It should get to 55 today, let’s cross our fingers and our legs at the ankle and pray for 60. Happy weekend.

Cherub’s Cup Recipe/image from new fave (and serious sister-in-cocktails) Heart of Light.