Lux Lotus

Acid Green Queen Machine

When the train I boarded in Brussels stopped in Antwerp on the way to Amsterdam, I was transfixed by a woman wearing a big, fringed acid green scarf knotted lazily around her neck. It was very soigne and of-the-moment, especially since it is really easy to get into the all-black, everyday lifestyle of New York and to forget entirely that color exists.

I saw the same scarf again and again on the street in Amsterdam, and felt eager to sport the trend myself upon my return home. I wish I'd picked up a scarf on my trip, as the right color and material are proving rather tough to track down now.

Bluefly.com has a nice approximation of the trend, although a bit high-end, with a silk-cashmere wrap in "lime" from Kashmere, on sale for $79.95. American Apparel has a budget-friendly cotton jersey version (pictured here) in "grass", which, although not exactly the right shade, is close, for $15.

For Shame

Growing up in a Maryland suburb a few minutes from downtown Washington, DC, I spent a lot of time at the National Gallery of Art. I always preferred the open, airy modern art wing to the older, traditional wing, although, at nine, I couldn't have explained why. I felt that the canvas of Abstract Expressionist paintings crackled with energy, though, and it's easy to see why I was attracted to the reverberating intensity of work by Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, and, later, Lee Krasner. Stuart Davis and Alexander Calder also explored bursts of color and kinetic movement that seemed entirely drained out of the cold marble distance of classical sculptures and paintings by comparison.

My newfound interest in art created prior to the last century is of a very recent vintage. Recent visits to the Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia, as well as museums in Belgium and the Netherlands, have broadened my understanding and appreciation for older art in an almost unbelievably expansive way.

Last month at the Getty in Los Angeles, I went absolutely mad over a small painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard called "The Fountain of Love" (1785). And I was so embarassed momentarily, like I should reject it because it lacked the shiny depth of Pop Art or a Jeff Koons sculpture. But I won't. It doesn't. I love it.

Mr. Bush Goes to India

Cory and I were friends in high school, went our separate ways for college and didn't meet again until one Saturday morning on the street in Adams-Morgan when we were both in DC. Now I'm in New York, and he's in Bangalore, with a smart and funny blog that's chock full of notes on his daily experiences and gorgeous photographs.

Doo-Wop (That Thing)

I highly recommend that you seek out the work of Ellen Gallagher if you're not already on intimate terms with it. I was lucky enough to discover her sharp, pop collages at the Whitney a few weeks ago in DeLuxe, a slim yet highly provocative exhibition of her work (through May 15).

The Brooklyn Rail has an illuminating interview with the artist about a new portfolio of her work. To wit:

Rail: So you think it’s okay that a lot of it is impenetrable? This feels like something I could study for a while, or that I should. In a way, I want to ask you about historical allusions everywhere. It just feels like they’re stories for you to tell. But that’s not what is happening visually here. It interests me in wanting to know more. Is there a character that is being brought forward here?

Gallagher: I hope DeLuxe exists as kind of a picaresque. I like the structure of a picaresque novel, where it’s one character continually evolving through all these archetypal characters, which is so funny to me. I also very much like the form of Melville’s The Confidence Man. It starts off on a steamship, and at the beginning of each chapter or segment there appears a new character who inevitably turns out to be a huckster. The first image in the book is the sign “No confidence here,” meaning “no credit.” And it’s Melville’s meditation on the American character—is the American character a series of fractured sells or are we a single sell? The way the book takes form is you never know if it’s the same character in several different guises or whether we’re just a steamship filled with ourselves all pulling a trick. Are we a fractured self or are we just this one character—the con man. It’s basically a meditation that says if a culture loses its innocence, and we become so tough skinned that we lose our ability to be tricked, we lose that innocence. And what gets lost are the cords that allow us to give credit to each other. Those suspended links of disbelief. If you actually become so worldly and you lose that—if we are all so knowing, knowing of our own limitations, we can never really enter each other, we create these finite points ahead of time. What kind of culture are we, how can we really exist, if we have to be so future-fixed.

Rail: And ultimately so isolated.

Gallagher: I read somewhere that the word onos, which means “nostalgia,” appears for the first time in the Odyssey. So he is looking backward, but he has to go forward each time. He gets back in the boat, he has to continue traveling. He’s desperately trying to go home, but of course he must go forward and have all these adventures, and through his future he ends up back home.

You can read the whole thing right here.

A Glimpse of the Spring Agenda

I have a few photos of my recent trip to the Low Countries, but I'll have to post them later. In the meantime, upcoming events on the horizon in New York, Washington, DC, and San Francisco means fun yet challenging work for me and lots of stimulating cultural fabulousness for you!

FRIDAY APRIL 22, 7PM in NYC: In this special event, entitled "Southern Girls Do It Better!", Georgia native Tayari Jones - winner of the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction for Leaving Atlanta - reads from her new novel, The Untelling (Warner Books, April 2005), with Texas-born, Florida-raised New Yorker Maud Newton, who reads from her novel-in-progress about fundamentalist Christians in 1980's Miami and how extremism can pass from one generation to the next. At Bluestockings. FREE.

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 4-7PM in NYC: Tayari Jones reads from The Untelling at the chic and intriguing Chocolat Literary Series (do click the link and leave the sound enabled for an ultragroovy moment or two). FREE.

SUNDAY, APRIL 24, 8:30PM in NYC: Katherine Lanpher, co-host of Air America's "Al Franken Show," tapes a pilot of "Liberal Arts," a new arts and culture program for the network, at Housing Works Bookstore and Cafe.
Grammy Award-winning musician Steve Earle discusses his plays and story collection, Doghouse Roses, and musician Allison Moorer performs her work, which has been described by Rolling Stone as "...like a Southern accent: eight miles an hour, deliberate and very dangerous to underestimate." Admission is FREE, but donated books are welcome and encouraged.

THURSDAY, APRIL 28, in NYC: The Civilians 2005 Benefit.

SUNDAY, MAY 1, 8:30PM in NYC: Katherine Lanpher hosts another episode of "Liberal Arts," taping live at Housing Works and featuring guests Jonathan Lethem, Eric Bogosian, and musician Willie Nile. FREE.

THURSDAY, MAY 5, 6:30PM in DC: In this special event, North Carolina-based writer Quinn Dalton, author of the novel High Strung, and the award-winning, forthcoming story collection Bulletproof Girl (Washington Square Press, April 2005) reads from and signs copies of her new book in her only DC metro area appearance, at Barnes & Noble, 555 12th Street NW. FREE.

SUNDAY, MAY 22, 4:00PM in SF: Tayari Jones reads at the West Coast book party for The Untelling, at a Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, with a signing and reception to follow. FREE.

The LC Report: Letter from Brussels

This week, I'll be posting my accounts of a recent trip to three cities in the Low Countries: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels.

The woman at the ticket counter told me to board a train to an Antwerp suburb and then switch for the fast train to Brussels. I decided not to heed her advice and instead got on a train that had "Brussels" on the signage, the only word I could decipher. It turned out to be a local train, and a complete bust. I tried to console myself by cheerily thinking, "this is the scenic route," as we stopped every ten feet or so. Then after we sat at a station for about ten minutes, a train employee got on and walked through the cars making an impassioned announcement in Flemish that caused everyone to get off the train and hurriedly walk to another track in a different level of the station.

I heard a British guy swearing and asked him if he knew what was going on, only to find he didn't, "have a fucking clue. Something about an argument." I found a bench at the end of the dusty platform and sat down to wait for the next train. Recalling a quote from the "Emotions" show I had seen in Antwerp, about how humans are the only animal capable of artificially inducing pleasant feelings, I thought it apt inspiration to break open a box of the Burie chocolate diamonds I had at the bottom of my bag. I asked an Australian couple on the next train what the fuss was, and the woman told me that all of the delays were due to, "the actions of a passenger against another passenger on the train in front of us." I definitely felt like I was headed into the (relatively) big city.

I arrived in Brussels open-minded although cognizant of the city's reputation as bland and boring. In truth, although I missed Antwerp terribly, it was nice to be able to converse with people a bit more and understand markedly more of what was going on around me. Brussels is definitely more French than Flemish, with a heady cosmopolitan vibe that exudes power and influence in a way that is easily recognizable as similar to the Washington, D.C. of my youth. The first thing that I noticed was that there were lots of beggars, a sight that surprised me in Europe. And tourists, which I had hardly seen in Antwerp, at least not Americans.

After checking into the Hotel Metropole, which was different than I expected although very elegant and well-appointed, I walked over to the Grand Place, which is the main square in the historic center of the city. I came to like the hotel more after walking around and seeing more of the city, but had dismissed it earlier for its location on what seemed like a rather tourist-y commercial promenade. Later, I appreciated that it was so well-located.

I took a couple of wrong turns on my way to the art museum and ended up on Avenue Louise, where international shops line the wide boulevard on both sides. From there, I wound around to the Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), arriving an hour before it closed. The entrance is through an older entryway, beautifully executed in high Art Nouveau style, with stained glass and motifs for an establishment called "Gresham's." Brussels has many gorgeous examples of Art Nouveau.

In the museum, I loved seeing "The Death of Marat," (which always makes me think of Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations, a novel that takes place in Los Angeles and Paris and remains a favorite of mine). There's also a nice showing of works by Surrealists Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux, whose work I've come to appreciate more and more. Seeing the work of Flemish Primitivist painters (such as Jan Van Eyck) active in the 15th and 16th centuries in various museums also gave me a new perspective on some of the potential influences behind early 20th century art. I didn't have time to see the COBRA (Copenhagen/Brussels/Amsterdam) mid-20th century collective's work, but how avant-garde could it be without including Antwerp?

I went through the "old" section of the museum, having breezed through the new and found I had some unexpected extra time, and loved the Flemish Primitive paintings on display and the vivid scenes of peasant life by Brueghel. I left at closing and walked back across town and up through Ste Catherine, where all of the more avant-garde shops, like Stijl, line a four or five-block stretch of rue Antoine Dansaert. I snapped a few photos and admired quite a few genuinely exquisite Art Nouveau facades along the way. I knew I needed to get up early the next morning to catch my flight back to New York, so I planned to eat in the hotel's Cafe Metropole and and then perhaps order a movie in my room.

The best thing going in Cafe Metropole was a hamburger, so I walked a few blocks over to Ste Catherine and Bonsoir Clara, unbeknownst to me one of the more happening restaurants in town. After knocking back a half-half (a local specialty that is half white wine, half sparkling wine, I think), I stumbled a bit over my schoolgirl French when ordering and misunderstood the difference between a glass and a pitcher of wine, setting the stage of perhaps the most fun evening of my trip from a joie de vivre perspective. My meal was absolutely divine (I had the croquillant d'agneau) and by the end of it the waiter taught me how to say "Do you have light?" en francais and was lighting my cigarettes*, which I grew more and more fond of with each passing glass of the excellent house red.

I asked the three English-speaking men at the next table if I might borrow their ashtray and they invited me to join them. Americans from Minneapolis and Eugene, Oregon -- Rob, Roy, and James -- they were in town for a bicycle race. We chatted amiably about our experiences in Amsterdam and Belgium and ended up going to a nearby bar for a couple of rounds of Belgian beer after we left the restaurant. It was a fabulous evening, and an absolutely perfect end to a perfectly wonderful trip.

*It's worth noting that although I don't smoke, other than in the course of the occasional social gathering, in my regular life in the U.S., I learned on my last trip to Paris quite memorably that it's easy to make friends if you smoke cigarettes. I learned on this trip that it's even easier to make friends if you smoke and don't carry a light.

The LC Report: Letter From Antwerp, Part II

This week, I'll be posting my accounts of a recent trip to three cities in the Low Countries: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels.

I started out early on Friday with a visit to Rubenshuis, the home and atelier of gloriously talented painter Paul Rubens. It had beautifully restored, and offered an intriguing glimpse into the life of an art history giant. I especially liked visiting his studio and the gallery, a sizable section of the house that was devoted to displaying the work of his friends and contemporaries.

From there, I walked over to 't Zuid (The South), to visit the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp). The work of Flemish painters active in the 15th and 16th centuries is bold and unexpectedly vivid, and it's easy to see where 20th century Surrealists could have drawn inspiration. Several large works by Rubens were extraordinarily affecting in their technique and subjects and several feet tall.

The museum labels were in Flemish, but I learned quite a bit just looking around. The work of Surrealist Paul Delvaux and Expressionist Rik Wouters are seldom seen in the United States and interesting, especially that of the former. From there I went to the Fotomuseum, which, besides being well-curated and designed, has an excellent cafe that was flooded with natural light when I was there. Also, the food was that rare balance of beauty: decadently good and relatively inexpensive. I had the pannekoek met vanille-ijs en chocoladesaus (more or less a crepe with ice cream and chocolate), and a milky cappuchino, although be aware that it is sometimes the custom to omit the foam and substitute it with whipped cream, a concept that I find personally disgusting. There was an exhibition of photojournalism on and I enjoyed seeing a photo of the Antwerp Six as well as other notable moments in recent Belgian history.

The next museum I visited was Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, aka MuHKA (The Museum of Contemporary Art). The main show was devoted to "Emotions," and it was probably my favorite temporary exhibition that I saw during my trip. Overall, I thought the mixed-media collection of diverse work was very good, but I had a few favorite pieces, such as the video art by Mark Lewis, where he stands in a crowd of anonymous passers-by while enthusiastically pitching a movie with "just extras." It's a funny and touching appreciation of humanity.

From 't Zuid, I walked up to St. Andries and did some window-shopping at the exquisite outposts of Ann Demeulemeester, Veronique Branquinho, Walter, and other shops like Louis and stops here and there along Kamenstraat. I stopped in the Copyright bookshop at The Mode Museum aka MoMu (The Fashion Museum) and purchased the Antwerp Fashion Walk guide, which was invaluable.

I whiled away Friday afternoon criss-crossing St. Andries in that manner (note: If you're short on cash, start at Labels, Inc. which sells "recent designer" clothing; I saw a couple of Marni dresses with the tags still on for 100 euros) and went to Frituur No. 1 again, by now on rather intimate terms with its charms, and also bought some diamond-shaped chocolates at Burie ("...for chocoholics who love diamonds"; check). Later on that evening, I went to Cafe Berlin, just a short walk from the B&B at which I was staying (by now seeming rather bohemian, even for my taste).

I enjoyed a pleasant meal of steak frites and local beer and savored the buzzing yet unpretentious atmosphere. Several people rode up on motorbikes and came in to join friends. I liked how each table had a red gerbera daisy in a green bottle and overhead spotlighting. Combined with the rustic/modern black and tan decor, the overall effect was dramatic and sophisticated albeit in an understated way.

The architecture in Antwerp is very beautiful, with uncluttered facades and formal lines. Tall buildings, 4 or 5 stories, with elegant proportions line well-laid out streets (with the exception of the old section of the city, which has narrow, windy streets that are less rational in design). Nonetheless, imaginative details abound, like the small statue of a jovial seated man on the side of one building, into whose hands someone had recently stuffed a real newspaper with pages fluttering in the wind.

It's a city that's also very clearly near the water, and ships and boating clearly have a place in the heart of the city, whose fortune was built on its port. I am still in awe of the strikingly original style there; the buzz on the street felt deafeningly glamourous without being showy at all, and nearly every aspect of the city influences or intimates minimalist chic and its best.

Saturday morning, I planned a full day in Antwerp, beginning with a visit to MoMu (I had only gone in the bookstore the day before) and Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal (The Cathedral of Our Lady). However, I started feeling more melancholy by the moment at the thought of leaving such a smart, vibrant place that I had only just begun to discover. I decided, then, to leave those last two sights unseen until next time (undoubtedly soon), and head down to Brussels.

The LC Report: Letter From Antwerp, Part I

This week, I'll be posting my accounts of a recent trip to three cities in the Low Countries: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels.

I briefly alluded to a few of my experiences in the Postcard from Antwerp I filed during the trip, but there was much more to the time I spent in that fairest of cities (swoon)...

Antwerp: so intensely different than Amsterdam from the word "go" that it almost spun me right 'round. For one thing, it lacked the feeling that I had in Amsterdam of America being so violent and scary by comparison, when we could be like the Dutch with big windows and few bars on them and no need for bicycle helmets, just a bell and basket for good clean fun. I saw plenty of broken windows in Antwerp.

Memorably sharp and gritty from the moment I stepped out of the train station, my impression of the city was that it was similiar to Amsterdam in some ways but more big city in the Parisian sense, e.g. a palpable frisson of the requisite urban awareness on the street, which was noticeably absent from Amsterdam. Like in Paris last winter, when a father holding a newborn on the Metro threatened to slap a rambunctious teenage girl in the crowded car we were all standing in, and the racial subtext of the encounter, not to mention the sheer outrageousness of it all, nearly made the whole scene unbearable.

I stepped out of the train station in Antwerp, and couldn't make sense of the public transit map at all. As I was looking at the system diagram, a group of teenage boys, obnoxiously leery in that adolescent sense and all taller than me (and I am not particularly short) came up behind me and sort of blocked me in before joking around with each other in Flemish in a way that made me instinctively walk away. I hadn't planned to splurge on a taxi, generally preferring to walk everywhere on vacation, but they are Mercedes and the first cab in line was driven by a woman, which I thought was pretty cool.

I got to my B&B, Enich Anders, attached to a stone-sculptors' studio and well-located on a small backstreet near the old section of town, and there was a note for me - in Flemish, which if you don't speak or understand it is uniquely mystifying. Luckily, a nearby smoker, happy to be less idle in that way that smokers are, it being a social habit after all, translated it for me. I was to buzz the innkeeper at another B&B a few doors down, which I did, and got my key.

My room (#5) was gorgeous, light, honey-colored floors, fir maybe, a big room with a couch and a kitchenette and a sunny yellow bedroom with private bathroom en suite for 50 euros a night. Of course, I did climb two spiral staircases in the dark when I returned later that evening, and didn't have a telephone, but it was still an extraordinarily lovely setting for a relaxing couple of days. After putting my bags down, I stepped out to explore the immediate neighborhood.

The Dries Van Noten store was around the corner so I popped in and touched everything. Lots of texture, studied forms, nothing frivolous or mass-oriented like mall staple DKNY or, heading that direction, Karl Lagerfeld. It was all gorge-gorge-gorgeous. After getting over how much Antwerp existed in service to some unidentified ethos that did not include the cozy, quaint Dutch ideal of gezellig (in some ways, a good thing: 48 hours in Amsterdam and I was well on my way to becoming a hobbit), I decided to get my hair cut.

I walked into De Client, where through the large storefront windows I could see that all of the stylists had hairstyles that I liked and asked (as politely as I could, in Flemish) if the proprieter spoke English. Of course, he did, and I asked for a haircut. Apparently (not that I would know, I can't read Flemish) it's appointment-only after 5pm, but he decided to make an exception for me. It was a great place -- soul-achingly hip in an unself-conscious way and not a Euromullet in sight.

Also, they serve wine and other assorted drinks and a salon attendant circulates skewered fruit cocktail on a silver tray. I got a stylist who I had just witnessed give an extreme Pixie-style crop to a formerly long-haired girl, whose long hair now laid on the floor beside the stylist's chair. I chose my words carefully: "split ends", "layered", "movement", "bangs", "keep the length". The stylist said she understood but asked me to point out photos in a large look book so that she could ensure that nothing was lost in translation. I pointed to a couple of pics of runway hair that was sculpted but styled loosely and she nodded in agreement. She gestured at the all-one-length style I was currently sporting, if you could call it that, and said, "I want to add, how do you say..." And I said, "Layers?" And she said, "Yes! I want there to be more, the word in English is..." And I said, "Movement?" "Yes!" she said. "You know just what I am thinking!"

My eyes caught hers in the mirror and we both smiled in a universally understood expression of simultaneous friendship, understanding and relief that crossed the cultural and linguistic divide between us. She smoothed out a long lock over my forehead with the tip of the comb and as a final comment before starting to snip away quite dramatically, gestured at my bangs-to-be and said, "And then... we do the pony!" Or something very, very close to that. The haircut turned out to be smashingly hot, the best I've ever had, without compare. She said she was thinking, "Beyonce", but to me it's all Antwerp.

Continuing my stroll after I left the salon, I noticed, with a hint of surprise and awe, that the window mannequins at the Ralph Lauren outpost (note: every major fashion designer, from Hermes to you-name-it, seems to have an outpost in this city of just 400,000 people, and that's not even counting the homegrown talent, most notably the Antwerp Six, that totally dominates the local fashion scene) were clad in head-to-toe black, which isn't even the case in New York. Antwerp is a very chic, very cerebral, somber city. I walked all over that evening, trying to find an ATM that would accept my American bank card, an exasperating experience that nonetheless allowed me to cover a lot of territory. After finally finding one, I was tapped out for further adventures.

I looked in the guidebook for the closest food establishment to my hotel. One was all-seafood (not my preference) and the other a frite shop. I headed for Frituur No. 1. To say that the fries served there are extraordinarily good is an understatement. When I bit into a couple of them I could feel the snap of still-hot oil within the ultra-crisp outer shell. I sat on a bench and began to enjoy my dinner. A crazy bum, stark raving mad in the classical sense, who sort of looked like Santa Claus, except he was wearing a skirt and shouting at the top of his lungs in Flemish, walked up. He was obviously mentally ill, and yet instead of ignoring him like New Yorkers would (not that that's the more communitarian approach) everyone was laughing and pointing at him in what I thought was rather cruel treatment.

Antwerp seemed like it's sort of like that. Many of the streets I walked down that first night in the city were deserted and there weren't many tourists even in the part of town that should have been inundated with them. I did see a procession of weeping Catholics, though, which just added a surreal note to an already unusual evening. The buildings on the Grote Markt square are utterly exquisite -- six stories high with those now familiar to me tall, narrow facades, dominated by windows and glass yet still remaining an imposing presence over the cobblestones below.

Tomorrow: Letter From Antwerp, Part II.

The LC Report: Letter From Amsterdam

This week, I'll be posting my accounts of a recent trip to three cities in the Low Countries: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Brussels.

My first day in Amsterdam, I arrived on Tuesday morning and immediately felt jet-lagged. I checked into my hotel around noon, the Hotel Agora on Singelgracht; it turned out to be superbly located, and although not particularly glamourous, an excellent value for the price. I slept during the afternoon and then walked to a cafe for dinner. It ended up being rather far on foot, about a 30-minute walk down to the Museumkwartier, but it was a nice walk and the restaurant, called Cafe Loetje, was a friendly, neighborhood hangout. I had steak frites and salad, and it was an excellent jet-lag remedy as well as the first good meal I'd had in a couple of days.

My impression of Amsterdam is that it's a mellow, idyllic city that both knows its charms and how best to display them. When I arrived, I walked to my hotel from the train station instead of taking a tram or taxi and saw a good portion of the older section of the city that way. I cut through the Red Light District which seemed much less threatening than say, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury or Alphabet City in New York. I found the canal I was staying on - Singel - and walked the rest of the way along it. Many of the houses are unbelievably elegant and well-kept with simple and beautiful facades. On my way to dinner, I walked through Gouden Bocht and admired some of the noted Golden Age mansions in that area.

I was especially fond of the way that just being in the city slowed my pace. On my way back from dinner, I saw a couple embracing, their bicycles pressed between them. After breakfast on Wednesday, I went to an Internet cafe to check-in with clients via email. I got about an hour of work done before a woman lit up a spliff at the table behind me and I decided to check out sans 10am contact buzz. Then I was off to the Rijksmuseum, which is mostly closed for renovation. Many of the masterpieces in the collection are on display, though, and I saw several exquisite Rembrandts and Vermeers.

Rembrandt's self-prortrait at 22, unusually lit from behind to leave his face in shadow, reminds me of something painter Elizabeth Peyton said at the Whitney a couple of years ago about wanting to capture people just before their moment of greatness. The Nightwatch, like my mother said, is much larger than one might imagine. I also particularly enjoyed a couple of pen paintings of battles by an artist who would sail with the Dutch fleet, sketch from life at sea, and then paint in his studio. The level of detail in these works is extraordinary, and the approach unusual. They are large, realistically-depicted scenes, meticulously painted in ink on a white background. It's an intriguing niche that the artist discerned and seemed to fill quite nicely. The family of Maarten Tromp, a naval commander who died in a noted battle with English ships who had blockaded the harbor, commissioned the most compelling one, and the original frame still bears his family's traditional insignia.

I was also intrigued by a painting with a reference to "birding," or depicting a woman being handed a bird as "an expression of making love," and the caption, "She eyes the pheasant with great interest." It was very amusing and wry for the 17th Century. An informal wedding portrait of a couple leaning against a tree -- she wearing a ruff, he in tights and short pants -- was a romantic glimpse into life and love in another century. From there, it was just a short walk to the Van Gogh Museum. I was surprised, having surmised that all of his best works were in other museums (as noted in my guidebook, published by the excellent Moon Metro series), to see two of my absolute favorite works on display: Almond Blossom and The Bedroom.

There was also a special exhibition of works by Egon Schiele, an artist whose work (and persona) I find simultaneously creepy and dead sexy, although the interpretive art commissioned to give a contemporary aspect to the work felt flat and overly self-reverential, e.g. the performance artist who lies on a platform in the main gallery and stares at himself in a video camera from 10-6 every day. My instinctive reaction was that the concept was not even remotely visceral in the moment of its creation as performance art as Schiele's drawings are nearly a century later without the context of externally applied inspiration to propel them. Crouching Woman and a portrait of the young collector Erich Lederer were most appealing to me. I also liked his drawings of ships in Trieste (a town he was quite fond of; perhaps I'll go there on my next trip) and a loose, unusual drawing of a yellow chrysanthemum.

I strolled over to P.C. Hoofststraat, supposedly the chicest street for shopping -- verdict: not really -- although I saw a Mulberry bag I wanted badly for a moment. If anyone doubts how gauche and masstige-oriented Chanel and Louis Vuitton have become, the "paparazzi"-themed shop windows of the former and the trailer-park cherry motif of the latter really settle the issue decisively, as far as I'm concerned. Following that, I went to HEMA, more or less a temple to budget-conscious design and aesthetic value; or, think Target without all the Rubbermaid. I bought white, pointy-toed espadrilles with graphic flower embroidery and a big, boldly-striped pouch that's perfect for traveling and the beach. In Amsterdam, I also bought a bicycle bell (for a future bicycle). It's black, matte, so very glamorous and functional.

The houses in Amsterdam do tend towards chromatic sobriety but the design and decor is very cheery and punchy; a swell of oranges, pinks and acid-greens everywhere you look. I saw multiple acid-green scarves knotted just so worn by women on the street. Wednesday afternoon, I walked all around the Eastern edge of the old section of the city and wound back around again to get some frites and pop into the hotel just before it started raining. I slept decadently until about 7, and then watched some television and got dressed for dinner. I went to Morlang for an excellent meal: goat-cheese lasagna that I practically inhaled and a full-bodied glass of shiraz that was its perfect complement. I had Belgian chocolates for dessert -- quite literally a jaw-dropping taste of what was to come in Belgium. Two puffs of a cigarette and I snubbed it out, just like Frank Sinatra.

Thursday morning started off sweet and slow in Amsterdam, which I realized when after I left gets down deeper in the bones than one might realize at the time. After checking out of the hotel, I walked around for a while, carrying my bags, it rained and, at first, the morning was kind of a drag. I had trouble finding the neighborhood I was looking for, Negen Straatjes (Nine Streets), and then it was right in front of me. I did a little window-shopping (not particularly keen on Dutch fashion, I hardly bought anything besides the afore-mentioned summer slides at HEMA) and then had a lingering lunch before walking to the train station and heading down to Antwerp.

Postcard From Antwerp

Hello, darling readers! I am in an Internet cafe on Nationalstraat, making my way back up to the fashion-oriented neighborhood of St. Andries after spending some time at museums in 't Zuid (The South) this afternoon. Three to be precise, bringing today's total to four so far. I'm having a lot of fun (trying to rationalize buying a black, gauzy sundress from Dries Van Noten, so far a vivid daydream...).

Antwerp is a sharp, sophisticated city that sort of gave me whiplash coming from Amsterdam. Amsterdam is, of course, a world capital for many reasons, but Antwerp is half as big and feels twice as large. It's gritty where Amsterdam was gezellig. The fashion on the street is amazing, and easily gives Paris and New York a run for its money. I got my hair cut in the city's hottest salon yesterday, and I think it's my favorite style ever: a long, sexy shag with a lot of edge. I've been wearing my new bangs clipped back today with a rhinestone bobby pin in homage to the city's booming diamond trade, which is perceptible but not visible per se.

My plans for the rest of the day include more walking and exploring as much as possible. This morning, before strolling down to the art museums, I went to Rubenshuis, where Antwerp's most famous son kept his home and studio. It was very elegant and well-proportioned, striking the perfect balance between country home and city mansion, even four hundred years on. There's a cafe called Berlin where I'll probably have dinner and drinks tonight, and after that, who knows?

Definitely more, more, more.