Surprise! This is what we look like this year!

On a trip to the picturesque and somewhat deserted Parisian suburb of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, I fell in love with a six-year-old boy, the little cousin of my French Goddess. He spent ten minutes eating his soft-boiled egg from the rooster-shaped egg stand that his older sister had hand-painted. After cracking and laboriously picking away at the top of the egg shell (with my assistance), he dunked his delicately buttered baguette pieces, into the orange center of the egg and scooped out the contents little by little. Gleeful at his success in cleaning out the egg shell, he presented it to his mother. Most American children miss out on this elaborate procedure typical of European households.

I arrived back to New England from Paris to find a stack of Waspy holiday cards in my mother's kitchen. The tradition of circulating family Christmas cards always manages to bring out a vanity and tackiness in people that goes otherwise undetected throughout the rest of the year. Below is a sampling from the most egregious ones.

Gauche Things To Do In Your Christmas Cards:

1. Covering the front of the card with collage-style cutouts of the heads of your family members, the largest one being the newest born baby. This gives the card a startling high-school-year-book effect and makes the people appear disembodied.

2. Commencing the inside letter with the words, "What an exciting year for the ____s, as you see." If the offensive cover (and interior) collage of your family and a giant looming baby head is evidence of your "exciting year," I'd rather not read onwards.

3. Using any of the following terms in the body of the letter: Wall Street, nuptials, our newest addition, University of _____, skeet shooting, summer renting, empty nesters, start up company, Alpha Chi Ro, VP, bathroom renovations, tennis, golf carts, family clambake, gorgeous bridesmaid, detached retina, strategic real estate investment. Note: all of the previous terms were direct quotations from this year's batch.

4. Formatting the letter as an "Alphabet Soup" and mentioning each "significant" event at least three times so as to come up with twenty-six sentences.

Wasps have a special dialect sometimes incomprehensible to the untrained ear. The penchant for using the word "golden" as a noun (especially in describing the health, arrival, or death of your retrievers), and the overuse of the word "summer" as a verb, are just two fine examples of this tradition. I miss France. I wonder if they do this sort of thing over there.

Out and About

Sipping champagne and eating macaroons at Hotel Fouquet's off of the Champs-Élysées was followed by dancing at the grungy-but-cool art-and-film-world boîte, Le Baron. The second storey terrace of Fouquet's was dolled up for Christmas and had a revolving light installation reminiscent of Las Vegas. Parisian Christmas decorations are surprisingly tacky and American. There is an excessive volume of blinking twinkle lights that drip from every window of the Crillon Hotel in the middle of Place de la Concorde. At the entrance to The Ritz there are life-sized reindeer with creepily robotic bobbing heads.

After a big night out, I woke up to my French Goddess home from morning shopping, her hands full with fresh goodies for a crazy French breakfast: a loaf of beautiful seeded bio (organic) bread, perfectly prepared eggs, slices of ripe avocado, plump dried figs that were juicier than I thought possible, clementines and fisalis (small tart fruits inside delicate brown leaves that look like round orange hearts enclosed in birds' wings), and, last but not least, two sea urchins (uni: a Japanese delicacy I had never tasted before).

My friend bought the sea urchins (pictured above) from her corner fish monger. He has a crush on her and told her excitedly that the sea urchins came to him fresh from the shores of Brittany. Their taste was far too strong for me, especially before having my morning coffee, but I enjoyed them immensely as decorative accents to our colorful breakfast table. In The States I usually have a bowl of cereal.

Le Cinéma Parisien

Things I love about Paris:

1. Men at 7pm walking home eating le croûton of the baguette.

2. The way the nightclubs are a bit lousy. It is not a city for going out to les boîtes (like Manhattan) but more a place of private parties and dinners.

3. The lack of proper standing showers. Though it irritates me at first, it forces me to relax and take a bath instead.

4. The way people take their time. Though this lack of efficiency also annoys me at first, it is a refreshing change from northeastern metropolises. My friend says it's because a lot of things don’t work properly in France. For example, there will be a strike on the metros and it will be impossible to get a taxi, but it's not a catastrophe since no one is in such a desperate rush.

5. The hundreds of small cinemas showing everything from Cary Grant marathons to Agnès Varda's latest autobiographical documentary.

I saw a beautiful new American film near the Place de la Bastille, Two Lovers, which is a dark romantic story that takes place in Brighton Beach, the Russian neighborhood of Brooklyn that is lovely in its foreign and almost outdated atmosphere. Though the movie's poster presents it as a trite romantic comedy with hunky Joaquin Phoenix and former Hollywood belle, Gwyneth Paltrow, it is an emotionally complex and delicately told story of a man suffering from bipolar disorder and caught in between two loves.

Paris 2

A critical difference between French people (especially Parisians) and Americans is really something of privacy. Parisians tend to be so private. The kind of self-exhibitionism that is rampant in the states is not cool in Paris. For example, one never looks at other people in the metro. I wear my aviator sunglasses to watch at people without giving away my extreme Americanism. It is tiring to always have to avert one's eyes and to not be able to laugh and smile so much in public.

Gauche Things To Do As An American In Paris
(Though I've Observed French People Doing Each One):

1. When dining in a French bistro: bringing food from somewhere else and eating it (in France, that is just about the worst thing a person can do).

2. Brushing your hair (or someone else's) in the middle of a restaurant (I think that is indecorous in any city).

3. Going to Starbucks, or "Mac-Do."

I came down with a terrible case of food poisoning (une intoxication alimentaire) from some seemingly harmless chicken and was bed-ridden for sixteen hours. It is especially disorienting and uncomfortable to be sick and wretching when in a foreign country and staying as a house guest. I awoke, starving and disoriented, to find an elegant late-night dinner of caviar, salad, and chèvre waiting for me downstairs. It proved quite good for restoring my energy.

Edge of the Seine

I arrived in Paris to join one of the loves of my life, a French actress whose classic beauty is a mix of Sophia Loren's cheekbone sultriness and Audrey Hepburn's waifish charm. My friend was raised in the forest but escaped to Paris when she was thirteen years old to pursue drama classes and begin her life as an artist and international girl of mystery.

She has spent time in New York and for a moment even wanted to move there. But after her recent life epiphanies and a trip to an obscure meditation retreat in Egypt, she says frankly, "It has nothing for me, New York. C’est si décadent, et pas dans une bonne façon." It's so decadent, and not in a good way. Manhattan is given to a rather sinister seeking out of distraction.

There is a decadence about Paris as well, with its snobbish and obsessive approach to everything from the proper poulet to the tying of scarves. But Parisian decadence seems more intuitive and natural, stemming from centuries of well-meaning traditions.

My French Goddess (pictured above) said of Paris, "It is a city of so much history, everywhere you go. The buildings are much older. New York is so young in comparison, and it feels as though it is desperately trying to compensate for a lack of history."

Maybe this is what gives Manhattan its frenetic and destabilizing ambiance. In Paris there are medieval ghosts occupying the flats, but in New York there are investment bankers and upwardly mobile fashionistas ogling the streets.

Paris versus Manhattan: the difference between a glass of wine everyday at lunch and a bevy of vodka shots every end-of-week night. One seems intuitively wrong.

Departure

I am leaving for Paris tonight. In French the word for flight is the same as the word for escape. The expression "to take flight" is the same as "to flee." The word is feminine. I wonder if women take to hopping on planes and relocating for karmic realignment more frequently than men do. A former Wanker of the Week told me that he attempted to lift his spirits by taking a last-minute trip to L.A. for the weekend. Holiday season depression is a rampant problem often left as an unspoken malady. When cheer is institutionalized, drear can be closer than one thinks, and there is nothing more satisfying than the moment of takeoff.

In the above photo I am running through the Sol LeWitt exhibition at Mass MoCA.

Wigged & Dangerous

Last week a band of cross-dressing jewel thieves stole 102 million dollars worth of loot from the Harry Winston store on Paris' fashionable Avenue Montaigne. Armed, wigged, and dangerous, they not only snagged items from the display cases but also knew the ins and outs of the goods in the back room and called the salespeople by their names. Maybe they were the husbands of international socialites doing their recession time Christmas shopping.

I recently watched the 1968 Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway film, The Thomas Crown Affair. The Pierce Brosnan remake had a sexy art heist tone to it. I figured that the original would be even more alluring, especially since it was shot at my favorite mansion on Mount Vernon Street in Boston's Beacon Hill.

Verdict vis-à-vis The Thomas Crown Affair original
(click on the highlighted links for visual examples):

***** for pre-1970's cheese-factor
(though rather fetching male short shorts)

***** for atrocious Steve McQueen acting
(and absurdly unrealistic smoking skills)

***** for erotic chess-playing incidents

***** for fabulous over-sized hats

***** for excessive use of snazzy new split-screen editing

(and of typical high society leisure activities such as
polo playing, sauna sitting, and small plane landing)

Maybe the cross-dressing Harry Winston robbers are merely bored tycoons expressing their secret fetish for women's luxury items. It seems like more than a violent criminal act: perhaps the culprits have performance art aspirations.

Red All Over

The holidays fill me with cheer at the fact that the sooner they approach, the sooner they are over, and the sooner we can get on with a brand new unsullied year.

All I Want For Christmas:

1. A literary agent for my recently drafted novel (well, preferably a book deal from an established publishing house, but I'm not one to ask for things I can't get).

2. A kitty cat (to keep illegally in my new dorm room starting in January--I can fashion her as one of my childhood American Girl Dolls. When the college dean knocks on my door to inquire about the proliferation of cat sounds and fur balls wafting from my room, he'll think she's just a regular old Kirsten doll dressed up as the youngest virgin with candles on her head for that Swedish holiday, Santa Lucia.

3. A non Wanker of the Week male to give me a kiss underneath the mistletoe.

Notice that I have ordered things from most likely to receive, to least likely to receive. A cat is unrealistic and out of the question, as I am not sure of my life plans after April 28th (the last day of my senior spring classes). For all I know, my Carney Sandoe application won't pan out as hoped, and I'll be uprooted to Minnesota to teach runny-nosed preschoolers. Yes, cats can travel on planes, and certainly ones dressed as hot Swedish virgins, but I still think a cat is out of the question, especially since my college dean reads this blog.

That's what the holidays are all about: unfulfilled expectations. Since my picturesque early years in New England, the only thing in my holiday season that's been merry, jolly, happy, red, glittery, and shiny all over was an Elton John album, The Red Piano.

So please please someone alert me to a literary agent who is interested in dark chick literature that is decidedly mistletoe-free.

The above Christmas card is of my sister and me at Edith Wharton's house channeling Gilbert & George.

Unsuitable Boys

I received a bizarre email from a past lover who is now buried in an unfortunate conjugal bed. It seems that his desires for me have been resuscitated, or maybe they never died. Unfortunately, his grand gesture came out as a somewhat violent proposition for "intense physical engagement (no holds, no limits, fully engaged blow your mind)"....whatever that means. The desperate cries of a lonely man came off as an offensive and degrading proposal with little romance or sentiment attached. He even created a phony GMail account with a cheesy Italian pseudonym in order to cover up his tracks in case his wife abducts his Blackberry or breaks into his emails.

I am leaving for Paris in seven days and am excited to reunite with a man from my past who is NOT (and never will be) a Wanker of the Week like the above mentioned fellow. The Parisian homme has impeccable taste in art objects and a refined coolness to his personal styling—The Sartorialist should be so lucky as to catch him smoking outside of the Café de Flore in his ostrich-skin belt. But more importantly, he respects women and is absurdly funny. I asked him if he would pick me up at Charles de Gaulle airport, and he responded:

"je serai a l aeroport a 11 30 BIG LOVE"
Translation:
"I will be at the airport at 11:30 BIG LOVE"

On a somewhat unrelated note, I just read that the Iranian government has set up a "marriage bureaux" to help young people find spouses. According to the BBC News, "Iranian women complain of a shortage of suitable marriage prospects." Maybe they should flee to Paris.

Turkey Lurkey

Gauche is a term that pops into my life more and more frequently...

GAUCHE: French, literally means "left," also: "1: lacking social experience or grace; also: not tactful: crude <gauche to mention the subject> 2: crudely made or done <gauche turn of phrase>"; also has connotations of the Left Bank in Paris and its more artistic and youthful identity than that of the Right, like the left side of the brain.

I have decided to begin a weekly entry on All Things Gauche that I encounter...

Gauche Food Etiquette:

1. When staying somewhere as a house guest: presenting your host with a box of chocolates, opening them immediately upon arrival, perusing the box for the one caramel kind you like, and licking or picking at the rest along the way.

2. When dining at an elegant restaurant (or any restaurant, for that matter): after finishing your meal, dipping your fingers in your water and rinsing your hands like a raccoon.

3. When going out to a festive dinner with friends: talking about your latest low-carb diet or workout regimen.

4. When going to a cafeteria or dining hall: bringing Tupperware.

5. When having an expensive meal with your generous extended relative: getting so drunk that you take your pants off and pee on the floor.

6. Writing about peeing on the floor on your blog.

7. When staying at a local country inn: eating all the turn-down-service chocolates, and then telling the foreign maid you never received any in order to get more.

8. When having breakfast with your new girlfriend: telling her all about the things you're going to do that afternoon with your wife and kids.

9. When feeling full after eating appetizers: taking a "break" to unbuckle your pants, remove your shoes, and lay down on the floor.

10. When dining at a fine Italian venue: talking about how much you love the Olive Garden.

11. Generally: alluding to the Olive Garden.

12. When confronted with a platter of pastry "samples" at a cafe or bakery: eating all the samples while waiting on line, taking a look around, and then leaving.

13. When sitting down to your mother's lovely Thanksgiving dinner: sending naughty text messages under the table.

14. When attending a wedding reception or gala: moving from your assigned table until you find the table with the most attractive people.

(The above photo is of Josiah McElheny's "Endlessly Repeating Twentieth-Century Modernism" currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Sculptures & Squatters

As I stepped out of the elegant Art Deco lobby for the last time, I expected the doormen to be smug and satisfied that the five-month-non-tenant-impostor was making her exit. But to my surprise, the doormen exclaimed, "We'll miss you! You were always such a sweet girl. We put in a good word for you." The doormen were my friends and not my enemies in the case of my mysterious Park Avenue maid’s quarters eviction…

The real culprit was a disgruntled middle-aged male tenant whom I had encountered in the laundry room. He is the Wanker of the Week who spread malicious gossip about me to the superintendent and co-op board. He even knocked on my apartment door in a panic, asking me if the "stuff cluttering the hall" was mine. I reassured him that the items did not belong to me. He hobbled off in his needlepoint loafers. The "stuff cluttering the hall" included: a large Oriental rug, two Chinese horse sculptures, and a few expensive lacquer end tables and porcelain lamps. I felt like saying to him, "I am a student writing chick lit and squatting in a maid's quarters. Do you really think those valuable Asian heirlooms are mine?"

When my sister slept over, he interrogated her in the hallway, dashed off in his needlepoint shoes, probably clutching his antique briefcase and the key to his precious bicycle lock, and complained to the management about "the security of the building." To this Park Avenue lawyer with too much time on his hands, my sister, a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old girl in a pea coat and glasses, is "a security threat." The recession is turning the world topsy-turvy.

Prestige & Ice Cream

Through my pseudo-eviction and last-minute packing, the luxe environs of the Gramercy Park Hotel eased my preemptive separation anxiety. My final night in Manhattan was spent with two close friends: a slightly reformed winner of the Wanker of the Week award, and the vivacious redhead known for breaking champagne glasses. Hollywood director-producer extraordinaire, Ed Zwick, was our guest of honor. His new film, Defiance, is a sweeping Holocaust-inspired epic. Considering his pimp status with Denzel Washington and Leonardo DiCaprio, his Harvard B.A., his Rhodes Scholarship, and his expert knowledge of everything from Heidi Montag, to Imperial Samurai warriors, to West African hip-hop, he is a prime candidate for pretension and cockiness. However, he is one of the most down-to-earth men I have ever met.

He grilled me on the woes of being a twenty-one-year-old girl in Manhattan (preyed upon by weekly wankers and daily douchebags). He even listened to my idea for a series of novels geared toward the lucrative target audience of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls (who has more time to devour page-turners, see the same movie five times in theaters, and buy accompanying action figures?).

Ed Zwick was a breath of clean alpine air in a city of taxi exhaust and souvlaki-vendor smoke. Earlier this week I attended a media-infested auction house event where I encountered smug young bankers whose Ivy League degrees oozed out of their personalities as much as their knowledge of New York Magazine's restaurants-of-the-week. In comparison, Ed Zwick was the real good thing. My final night in Manhattan was like a bowl of homemade ice cream after six months of Tasti D-Lite.

Volvos & Evictions

I woke up on Saturday morning to discover an unfortunate note slipped underneath the door of my Park Avenue maid's quarters. The doormen and other tenants complained about me to the the elderly man who owns the glorified storage space in which I am living. His personal assistant cross-examined me, asking, "Do you have someone living in there with you?" If she had experienced the claustrophobic nature of my room on a daily basis, I don't think she would accuse me of hoarding some "extra person" in my apartment.

I recently broke the only key to my door while turning it in the lock, and I was forced to make a copy of the lobby's spare key. I think that the doormen, who are inordinately aggressive and snarky toward me, are spurning the malicious gossip, claiming that I had an extra key made for the mysterious "extra person" now allegedly taking root in my maid's quarters.

Everything is sexual, and I assume that their aggression stems from repressed jealousy and resentment at the fact that I had a male visitor on Friday night. I was supposed to go to a Waspy "40 Days 'til Christmas" ham and cocktail fête in New Canaan, Connecticut, but I stayed in the city and had dinner with my gay boyfriend instead. He walked me back to my Park Avenue address and came upstairs to watch the edited footage of the Halloween film my sister and I made, Princess Cricket. Upon seeing my male visitor in the lobby, the doormen gave me shifty looks and the next morning I woke up to the eviction note...

I escaped to New Canaan that afternoon, where I hoped to hop a ride back to Boston with my sister (to the safety of my mother's un-suspicious Beacon Hill doormen). But my sister had an unfortunate incident with a speed bump at the New Canaan Country Club, and the car was towed to the nearest Volvo dealership. With no alternative, my sister and I spent the night on Park Avenue in the infamous maid's quarters.

Now, someone (sexually frustrated doorman? nosey neighbor with some dark determination to do away with me?) is more convinced than before that I have a stowaway living in my room. Today I was officially threatened and told to vacate the apartment by Friday. The Wanker of the Week remains a mystery to be solved.... Who is bad-mouthing me all over the building? Upper East Side frigids at it again?

The above photo is from my visit to the Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum, but I too feel like a monkey hanging by a wire.

Big Men in My Life

I recently met up with a very important man for drinks. I suppose I stalked him. It turns out I have relative success with pseudo-stalking male celebrities and masquerading as a girl less desperate and deranged than I truly am. In the past year I have finagled my way into a personal email correspondence with Woody Allen and a personal Escalade ride through downtown Manhattan with Leonardo DiCaprio. Two days ago it was the love of my life, the ultimate man, the real deal (other than, sigh, Jack Nicholson, for whom I will forever have a special place in my heart). In psychological ways, this week's man is bigger, much bigger, so big in fact that he is referred to as such on a certain sex-and-shoe-related show.

We met over drinks at the Plaza Athénée Bar, one of the Upper East Side's rare (though decidedly square and semi-elderly) gems. The day itself had been surreal in terms of celebrity run-ins: I had stood a mere three feet away from Bill Clinton on my way home from an early-evening stroll through Central Park. He was friendly, with a head of bountiful white hair and a winning smile. Later, I walked right by Debra Messing and Katie Couric on their way to an event.

The stars were aligned, as I entered the dark-hued imperialist Morocco ambiance of the hotel bar to meet the man whose screen image lulled me to sleep almost every night of prep school (and, sad to say, most of college). Before he arrived, I encountered yet another middle-aged heart-throb who was sitting in the lounge: Pierce Brosnan. It was utterly uncanny.

So there I was, perched at the bar with two flesh-and-blood James Bonds, and only after leaving a single pseudo-prank cell phone message. So I guess it goes to say: a little stalking can go a long way on a Manhattan Monday of male mania.

W + Anchor

Things are strangely familiar these days. I went on a jaunt to New Haven to meet the celebrated transvestite-potter-artist-extraordinaire, Grayson Perry. He was in his little girl persona, Claire, who wore a poufy silk dress (pictured above) with red tulle underlay and a black bib embellished with rhinestone-encrusted phallic rocket ships. Perry's main source of inspiration is his childhood “cuddly toy,” Alan Measles, a teddy bear who takes on dictatorial status as “ruler of the establishment” in Perry’s art.

I sat in the front row and admired the artist’s dazzling glitter eye shadow and red patent leather shoes. I loved Perry’s insights into aesthetic, emotional, and global topics, especially his/her view that “testosterone is the most dangerous chemical on the planet.” I am also fond of his obsession with adding gold to most anything he creates: he says, “even the most sophisticated of collectors find their heads turned by a bit of gold.” Perry's firm belief in Barbaric Splendour (e.g. blinged-out pimp style, gauche use of patterns, etc.) contrasts any “minimalist or puritanical sense of restraint.” I like to think of it as Miami Beach vs. Beacon Hill.

Perry also showed his ingenious design of the letter “W” suspended above an anchor symbol--how clever: W + Anchor = Wanker (a pejorative term in British slang that literally means “one who masturbates”). I am in the midst of having a much-regretted tattoo removed from my hip bone (in a lengthy and somewhat painful five-month process), but I already envision my next tattooed mistake to be Perry’s W-anchor symbol. Maybe with “wanker” perpetually inked on my hip, I will cease to seek out these sub-par male characters in my everyday life.

When I approached Perry after the lecture, I noticed a fake black-glitter heart-shaped tattoo beneath the corner of “Claire’s” eye…the girlish embellishment speaks loads to art and life in general: glittery, heart-shaped, and black all over.

Gold Sequin Hot Pants

On Halloween I was lured to Brooklyn’s Dumbo to help out with a Tisch student film. The cinematographer happened to be Hollywood It boy and newly enrolled NYU film student, James Franco. He was wearing a very intense long green coat that had an odd fur hood—think football coach meets Russian militia meets Prada Sport. I was supposed to play the role of “Jogger,” but I failed to receive the memo and was wearing my Bond-girl tailored white coat and jeans. I was “Girl on Cell Phone” instead. I think it will sound better on my illegitimate acting resume anyways. Since I couldn’t play “Jogger,” James Franco ended up chasing after a random Brooklyn fireman and recruiting him for the part.

In the evening I absconded to my family’s neighborhood in Boston for the famous Beacon Hill Halloween: with the cobblestone streets, gas-lit lamp posts, and Louisburg Square townhouses embellished with ghoulish decorations and multi-colored gourd bouquets, it’s the closest event I can imagine to a Martha Stewart wet dream.

My sister and I shot the footage for a silent film entitled The Mysterious Hatted Woman Escapes into the Night, a tale of Princess Cricket, who “lives in an enchanted urban village untouched by the hypermedia of modern society.” She sleeps soundly in her bed (bathtub) to prepare for the festivities of the monthly Bacchus, when a sinister intruder, Boris, creeps into her chambers and shuns her with the curse of perpetual blindness. The only remedy for her condition: a kiss from a man of the people. We enlisted our favorite cashier at the posh Beacon Hill 7-Eleven to play the man administering the curative kiss. Moral of the story? When one retreats into fantasy there are fewer Wankers of the Week.

E Train to DateLand

I recently went on a date with a man I met in the subway. It was my second subway date of the last four months, but this time it was not with a strange New Zealander given to inadvertent Flight of the Conchords quotations. The newest SS (“Subway Stranger”) shares my fondness for screenwriting, my obsession with Woody Allen, and my college career path.

“Yalie-E-Train-Subway-guy” hosted me at his apartment for a home-cooked meal of spicy chili and his custom ginger-molasses ice cream. He brought me a pair of airplane socks to keep my feet warm while we watched Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog. The evening was PG-pre-Halloween hominess, not at all what I would assume to come out of picking up dates on the E train.

However, that evening I was in for a dark twist. While walking back to my maid’s quarters from the E train, I passed the St. Regis Hotel and stopped in for a glass of champagne as a glamorous change of pace. I quietly sipped rosé at the King Cole bar, mulling over the plot of my novel, when a well-dressed older man approached me with a quick and simple proposition whispered in my ear: “1535, a grand, for fifteen minutes.” Translation: he was staying in suite 1535 and offering me $1,000 for 15 minutes of sex work. Manhattan is full of indecorous surprises in the most elegant of environments (and decorous ones in the bowels of the E train). I suppose I found my WW (“Wanker of the Week”) after all.

P.S. The above photo is NOT the St. Regis Hotel but the Home Delivery exhibition at the MOMA.

Vertigo

I am obsessed with 390 Park Avenue (Lever House). I pass the building almost everyday on my way to the E train at E. 53rd Street. The International Style glass box skyscraper feels like an appropriate hub for the shoe-shined foot traffic of Park Avenue bankers striding to-and-fro. The courtyard’s plein air art gallery is alive and white with the bloated Hello Kitty sculptures that are divine in their kitsch lewdness.

Lever House resembles the green glass skyscraper in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but the actual office of the wrongfully accused and endlessly dapper Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the CIT building at 650 Madison Avenue.

I snapped the above photo of the Lever House first-floor exhibition space during the opening gala of Liza Lou’s new installation, “Maximum Security.” The piece consists of two long corridors of chain link fencing swathed in reflective glass beads that give it a diamante effect. The suspicious man standing in the center of the photo looks just like Alfred Hitchcock, overseeing the art in his usual fashion of pimp omniscience.

Speaking of the H bomb, the horrendous screenplay I read today (at my film internship) was an LA-Mexican-drug-bust-sex-colony-blood-bath spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Tom, Gilbert, George, by Gob!

I recently attended the Brooklyn Museum’s Gilbert & George retrospective. The Italian-British duo has been creating art together since the early 1970s, a divine time to break out into large-scale neon pseudo-sacred collages heavy in urban boy love imagery. My personal favorite is the above-pictured Hope from 1984. The series of six lusciously coiffed floating heads across the top evoke David Bowie.

Themes of boy love call to mind my recent run-in with Tom Cruise on the street in front of the trendy West Village eatery, the Waverly Inn. He was short, cute, wearing sneakers, and talking on a cell phone. I stared at him inappropriately, because I thought he was a cute guy bearing an uncanny resemblance to Tom Cruise. We maintained eye contact until I crossed the street and looked back to find him gesturing at me, as though to ask, “What? That’s it? Where are you going?” I would have invited him to dinner, or to jump around on a couch with me, but it was not until later that I realized it was Tom Cruise and not his youthful doppelganger.

This afternoon I bumped into Will Arnett, Arrested Development’s favorite “sexually deviant magician,” Gob Bluth. I charmed him with my juvenile autograph solicitation routine. He promptly asked, “Are you visiting from out of town?” It seemed like an unseasoned Gob Bluth pickup line, but the encounter was intriguing due to the excess of Arrested Development re-runs I have watched in the last week.

Wal-Mart Wonderment

I recently attended the 25^th birthday party of the heir to the Wal-Mart legacy. The invitation was embellished with a green serpentine mermaid holding up a goblet of absinthe. It proposed "a night of mystery in a grand lounge, hidden behind a Chinese restaurant on a long forgotten corner of Manhattan's Chinatown." In reality, it took place at the not-so-forgotten, quite trendy in the past few weeks, Bar Apothéke, behind The Golden Flower. There were cocktails of particularly luscious flavors (one infused with fennel oil and another with cilantro leaves), and the space was reminiscent of Fin de siècle Paris.

The company was surprising, as I expected a Wal-Mart-hosted event to be overflowing with shiny men from Arkansas bursting out of their polo shirts and eating Kobe beef sliders, whilst ogling bleached out women in taffeta party dresses. Instead, the birthday boy wore chunky dark-rimmed glasses, a military-inspired jacket, and vintage Nike kicks. He was more hipster-pseudo-straight Yale undergraduate than oversexed Republican carnivore. I felt that at any moment one of the Olsen twins would arrive wearing a plaid jumpsuit. Instead, the most major celebrity present was a former contestant on America's Next Top Model, who pranced about the room with her Jesus-looking indie boyfriend. There was also a cute bartender resembling actor James McAvoy.

My friend and I left into a torrential downpour and finally found a way home by ducking into an empty parked cab and praying for a driver.

Poison & Lingerie

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Degradable Self

At five feet ten inches tall, I have often fantasized about being a model—but it turns out it’s not a quick fix for world travel and financial profit.

Seeking an agency and free photographs for my portfolio, I bonded with people on Craigslist, frolicked around my friend's apartment in my underwear, danced at nightclubs merely to give a Xerox of my headshot to someone who supposedly knows someone who is someone who can possibly be of assistance to me. I even stood in line with 3,000 other girls for the open call of America's Next Top Model.

There has been a lack of interest in “my look”: a French agent said to me, “Your nose is too short to be a model in Paris…try South Africa or Singapore.” There have been demands that I lose at least half an inch from my hips: an American agent said to me, “I don't think you're fat, I just think you have wide hips.” Amidst my wandering from agency to agency, I came across a delightfully esoteric art bookstore at 33 Bond Street, Dashwood Books, and I finally re-connected with my intellect.

I discovered some beautiful photographs in Playboy: Helmut Newton that remind me of my senior essay research on the '60s and '70s high society photographer, Slim Aarons. The pictures also connect to my recent obsession with the reality television show, The Girls Next Door, a chronicle of the daily lives of Hugh Hefner’s three ultra-endearing girlfriends. Maybe next I should audition to be one of them.

New York Strip

I am newly positioned as a hostess at the swank midtown destination, BLT Steak, a member of the ever-popular Bistro Laurent Tourondel restaurant series. I walked in on a whim, because my friend thought it might be a good dinner place to encounter eligible bachelors. Apparently, women in Manhattan can become so desperate to procure a profitable nuptial arrangement that there is a website for just that: http://newyork.citysearch.com/bestof/winners/golddiggers_goldmine. So if you're an ambitious Russian girl with a Swarovski-encrusted cell phone, I suppose that would be a helpful resource.

I just figured it would be good people-watching. On my first night I escorted the former 60 Minutes broadcaster, ninety-year-old Andy Rooney, to his table. I also received a generous fifty-dollar tip from a restaurant "VIP" and regular, who is lovingly referred to in the computer's reservation notes as "Mr. Potato" (he is the president of one of the country’s largest potato corporations).

Working in a restaurant is similar to being an actor. It reminds me of that quote from When Harry Met Sally: “Restaurants are to people in the 80's what theatres were to people in the 60's.”

It's all theatrics, from the giant gruyère-coated popovers, to the ebony tables, to the tall Yale girl behind the hostess stand.

West Village Whites

During a Labor Day weekend walk through the West Village, in my below-pictured Miami best, I encountered a stranger who was wearing my self-same outfit. It was truly an uncanny resemblance. I photographed him, and I think he enjoyed the attention and posed for me in the end. I envy him his fetching hat.

White Jeans

Channeling: Keith Richards/Mick Jagger/J.C.
I'll wear them, even after Labor Day.

Luxe Loitering

The lobbies of 5-star hotels are ideal locales for fulfilling many of my exigencies as a Manhattan flâneuse. On a practical level, they provide hyper-clean ‘public’ bathrooms with elegant Molton Brown soaps (when the line at Starbucks is daunting). The wireless internet access is especially helpful to me since I am no longer able to tap into the wandering wireless in my maid’s quarters.

Right now I am sitting in a little salon in the Peninsula Hotel off of 5th Avenue and enjoying its luxuries. For New Yorkers dealing with cramped quarters and seedy apartments, the plush furniture, intimate lighting, and prettily framed art provide an idyllic refuge.

The people-watching is an added diversion. Foreign tourists mill about, dressed in their extreme takes on what’s chic in Manhattan. They clutch bloated Bergdorf Goodman shopping bags and are often in intriguingly ecstatic or irritated moods.

Lindt chocolate truffles and Granny Smith apples are additional perks. If you need something mailed, postage is free when you drop it with someone at the front desk. If you’re truly dressed to the nines, you can fudge your way into procuring a hard-to-get restaurant reservation from the overly accommodating concierge. With enough lurking, you may even meet an exotic stranger to foot the dinner bill.

New Yorkers have an obsession with cupcakes. From the over-sized candy-flavored ones at Crumbs, to the homespun buttercream-frosted ones at Magnolia Bakery, to the coconut-encrusted ones at Sugar Sweet Sunshine, to the gluten-free agave-nectar-infused ones at Babycakes, there seems to be a cupcake for every different Manhattan persona: the uptown gourmand, the decadent diva, the sweet-toothed hipster, and the high-maintenance neurotic. Even though I'm not one to frequent these bakeshop hotspots, I am intrigued by a particularly kitschy one that I always walk past on my way to Tasti D-Lite. It's called Bruce's Cupcakery and has a really divine neon cupcake in the window.

Pastis & Empty Promises

During a late-night dinner date at Pastis with my vivacious red-headed friend from prep school, we were enjoying our champagne cocktails and feeling particularly unwilling to pay for a third round. After re-locating to the bar, a pair of deranged thirty-something bankers eventually insisted upon buying two bottles of champagne for us and our two girlfriends.
In my red-headed friend's sudden tipsy haste, she managed to separate the top of her champagne flute from the stem in one clean break. Only twenty minutes later, the odd phenomenon happened again. I am a firm believer in signs, and it seemed symbolic on some level.

Outside for a breath of night air, my Swiss friend and I chatted with two other gentleman strangers. They were European, so my Swiss friend remarked on the American-girl penchant for hopping off to the bar with no cash or credit card in tow, expecting to be showered with les boissons gratuites upon arrival. The Swiss girl doesn't engage in this rather dated behavior evocative of AMC's period drama Mad Men. She prefers to pay for her own cocktails and forego the accompanying awkward feelings of obligation to strange, as in "unfamiliar," men. Of course, some women simply accept a free drink and deflect any of the drink's potential symbolic value. Maybe these are the truly modern women who are willing to use their feminine wiles to their advantage (?).

And maybe a champagne flute is just a champagne flute. Broken or not.

The Gleaner

During a jaunt away from Manhattan last week, I was on my way to pick up my father's car at Pat's Towing Services in Somerville, Massachusetts (I am notoriously negligent when it comes to vehicular matters), and I encountered the most delightful little graveyard of old radiators. I imagine that these "Radiator Gardens" exist all across America. It reminds me of Agnès Varda's famous documentary, Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners)--it's all about people who make a life out of salvaging discarded food and objects for sustenance or simply to imbue them with new aesthetic charms. Re-contextualization is one of my favorite aspects of art history bull shit. However, I am loath to pick up anything off the street in New York City, due to my paralyzing fear of infesting my Park Avenue residence with bedbugs--that would truly terminate my "pro bono publico Manhattan maid's quarters situation."

Massive Hello Kitty

Here is the above- mentioned shirt. I look a bit like a deer in the head lights, but I am standing on one of the very exciting oversized white sculptures of Hello Kitty by Tom Sachs. They are currently installed in the courtyard in front of Lever House on Park Avenue. I would love to do a performance piece in that space. It's corporate but sexy in an old-world Manhattan glamour kind of a way.

Maid's Quarters in Manhattan

"Haley's problem is that she's addicted,
she's addicted to strangers!"

This quote is intended to be read aloud in a Dashiell-Hammett-esque tone. My twin sister, "Tuna," recently had an epiphany about the primary problem I face by living in New York City. I moved there temporarily in June and am now staying indefinitely. I don't have a job or any prospects, per se, but I have procured myself free accomodations of a similarly indefinite nature (in a maid's quarters tucked away in one of those art deco lobbied doorman buildings on Park Avenue). My living situation alone epitomizes my "stranger situation," as the maid's quarters where I reside belongs to my mother's interior design client's Chinese art dealer's ex-client, a man who remains a stranger to me, as I have never even seen his face and only heard his voice once, distantly, as though off-stage.

While there are strangers and new faces in any small town or large city, Manhattan offers a certain something extra, and is therefore a "danger zone" for my curious and BPD self. I am a bit too quick to invite new people into my life and to accept invitations to partake in novel events. I always seem to use the excuse of doing "research" for an upcoming piece of writing (this blog, case in point). Aside from run-of-the-mill strangers, this urban center offers the fancy variety, in the form of A, B, and C-list celebrities who frequent the streets and darker underbellies of New York. I recently designed this t-shirt as an homage to two of my favorite "stalkable" and intriguing icons. I am still awaiting their arrival into my life.