Changing Bags

It's that time again. I've broken up with that cognac satchel after a good long year. Maybe it's been my obsessive marathoning of Mad Men this summer, but I can't help but love feeling like Betty Draper every time I click open my bag for a cigarette. It's been a welcomed new $9 love affair.

We Think Alone

20 emails in 20 weeks over 20 different subjects from 10 different individuals. This starts tomorrow and if you know anything about me I consider Miranda to be a god. So, sign up now!

Summer Listening

A few of my current favorites. I went to Eleanor's gig earlier in the month and fell in love with not only her but her opening band, TEEN. And what is as perfect as The Mamas and the Papas played on repeat during the summertime? Enjoy.

Summer Reading

My summer reading looks a little something like this, and it's only June: Dancing Girls by Margaret Atwood, Collages by Anaïs Nin, Selected Poems of Rūmī, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, Frida by Frida, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume Two and Colette by Julia Kristeva.

Marie

My mindless strolls after work have paid off. Those long stops in random bookstores and libraries have introduced me to Eugene von Bruenchenhein. An American Folk artist active throughout the 1940s who took portraits of his wife Eveline "Marie" in various exotic poses, elaborate costumes and artificial botanical settings. I don't think I have ever found anything more perfect.

Morning

Sunday mornings with homemade carrot-lime-ginger-mint smoothies and de Beauvoir.

Portland Apartment

Whilst trying to get my groove back, I've ventured into meticulously rereading all my old posts and drafts. This one is from October when I visited my now home for the first time. But it's never too late right?

Above is the gorgeous mother-in-law apartment I stayed at while in Portland. Situated on the side of a big old house with an overgrown yard - it was my own little oasis for six days. I spent the cold mornings in bed with the radiators on high mapping out my days and making breakfasts in the kitchen with fresh eggs from the chickens that live in the backyard, and listening to the sounds of Joni Mitchell seeping through the floor boards from an upstairs record player.

Really Good Stuff

Me back in February on a particularly good Sunday browsing antique shops for furniture and getting new hats for free.

Back in Business

I'm back. In a new city, in a new apartment and back in full force with internet. Hi.

The Marchesa Casati

In honor of International Women's Day, I give you the wonderful and weird Marchesa Casti: a woman who kept wax mannequins as guests at her dinner table, took her pet leopards on strolls, naked, under a fur coat and who wore live snakes as jewelry. A woman recently on my radar after discovering a glossy $50 hard-backed copy of 'The Marchesa Casati: Portraits of a Muse' at my favorite boutique and deciding that it would end up being mine one day. Until then...

valentine's.

All I want for Valentine's is: Nina Simone records, a new perfume, sex, oysters and prosecco.

henry & june.

Starting the new year off with old favorites like Henry & June. Listen to the soundtrack here.

book one.

I chose yesterday, January 9th, to start my first official Beauvoir novel. It would have been her 105th birthday.

I was born at 4 o'clock in the morning on the 9th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and over looking the boulevard Raspail. In the family photographs taken the following summer can be seen ladies in long dresses and ostrich-feather hats and gentlemen wearing boaters and panamas, all smiling at a baby; they are my parents, my grandfather, uncles, aunts; and the baby is me. - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Book One

just the same but brand new.

The people in the street had overtaken you
By the time you rounded Second Avenue
So I walked away
All perfumed
Felt just the same
But brand new
And anything you wrote I checked for codes and clues
The letters stopped unceremoniously in June
So I changed my I's
And A's to yours
I'm just the same
But brand new
And I do my best impression of weightlessness, now too
And I might be wrong, I might be wrong, I might be wrong
But honey I believed I could
Float away
Dangling
I'm just the same
But brand new to you - St. Vincent

Hello 2013, it's me.

the afterparty: 2012.

My fifth annual New Year's Eve afterparty playlist. Click here for my current favorite mix of old and new, classical and thematic. Something to relax and make resolutions to. Happy 2013 everyone!

rhapsody in blue.

lingerie, american apparel; earrings, etsy

christmas gifts that match.