Lux Lotus

How to Spot the Real Thing

Years ago my mother gave me an antique gate-leg captain's table which, at my old place, seated two most often, and intimately at that. Where I live now, it's become a gathering place, to under-state the point. Tonight, my sister, who works at a venerable fashion firm, had a colleague over to our place, while I met Tiombe Lockhart, frontwoman for Cubic Zirconia for a drink at the Blue Bar at India House across Hanover Square. My legs were cold so I wore a full-length gown and a fur coat. The president of the Wall Street Rotary Club was there, hoping I would be too, and bought our martinis. Then Tiombe and I decamped for my place, I whipped up a pot of pasta with pesto, and we turned on Nina Simone, and the evening was made. With her Diana Ross-like star quality, as well as the caliber of who's been passing through lately, I would not be surprised at all if my humble table made it into a museum one day. What's that, Nina? Yeah, tell it like it is...

Eva Zeisel

Fearless and inspired, Eva Zeisel, germinal potter of the 20th Century, has died at age 105. I wrote at length about my first encounter with her work, at Hillwood in 2005. In her own words, her prison memoir  appears in the new issue of A Public Space.

Sundance, Rome, Sundance

In 2005, Craig Macneill's short film, Late Bloomer, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival. I handled his publicity, and he was featured in New York magazine and on NPR's "Marketplace." In 2009, I went to Italy in order to help publicize his feature (co- Alexei Kaleina), The Afterlight, for its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival. There was some wonderful coverage in the major newspaper, Corriere della Serra, which noted, "The landscapes and images echo the era of silent film," and many comparisons to Antonioni. Just this week, Craig found out that his latest short film, Henley (a collaboration with writer and playwright, Clay McLeod Chapman, as was Late Bloomer), has been selected for Sundance this year. The astonishing recognition is well deserved.

Related, from the Lux Lotus archives: Rome & the Afterlight.

On the Real Deal

All this time, I've thought that the ballroom at the University Club was the place to be, and that's where I'll be tonight, for the Center for Fiction Gala. I had no idea about the library. I will find a way.

Dickens, in his moment and of this Century

Tonight I made a rare venture to the Upper East Side, where I lived for about a third of the decade that I've lived in New York, and for the first stretch that made me think that I might stay. The occasion was a cocktail party at my friend Jesse's, for his "gently abridged for today's readers" version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with new illustrations (see one above) and a very new digital-only format. As usual, the party was full of boldly glittering names and conversationalists, and I skipped from Balzac's Lost Illusions to political economy and back again. My favorite sighting, though, was David Patrick Columbia, whose New York Social Diary published a series on the Jungman Sisters –– Bright Young Things and Beaton muses, Zita and Baby –– which charmed me to such a degree that I moved in with my own.

On Proust, He Writes

"...Anyway, I just came across this quote in The Captive, and for some reason it struck me as something I needed to share with you" –– One remembers an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it.

What to Wear to the Blue Flower?

My sister and I are going to the matinee performance –– inspired by Expressionism and Dadaism, and with an eight-piece band on stage. We loved Jerusalem. I'm thinking of going to Sleep No More next, although it sounds so scary. Have you seen it? What else?

On Art

Years ago, I met an artist named Sarah Crowner at a bookstore called Dexter Sinister, located below a gallery I was publicizing as it opened, and she told me about a show she was doing in Berlin of work inspired by Beatrice Wood, a name I hadn't heard before. It turns out that Beatrice Wood is one of the most amazing women who ever lived, of course. I read a little about her and it inspired me to take up pottery myself, although I wasn't any good. It's a dream of mine to visit her former home and now museum in Ojai, California. Tonight I read her endlessly quotable autobiography, I Shock Myself, which begins with her birth in 1893, and her immediate desire to escape the fetters of bourgeois life, her chance meeting with Duchamp, and love affair with the author of Jules et Jim. Most of the early part of the book deals with the cluelessness that is a burden of her sheltered life, in often endearing terms. For instance, I was so naive about social customs that when a Wall Street tycoon, whom my mother hoped I would marry, took me to the Plaza Hotel for dinner, I volunteered to pay part of the check.

Giveaway: 12 Beatles-Inspired Zines

I have a dozen zines to give away from Let It Be Beautiful, "a book project by Elizabeth Barker and Laura Jane Faulds. Over the course of nine volumes, Liz and LJ will rewrite every Beatles song (there are 300!) as a story or an essay." To win one of the twelve, simply leave a comment below (with email address).

On Cool

My father casually mentioned at breakfast today that, when he was sixteen years old, he saw Chet Baker play at Birdland in 1954.