Lux Lotus

How to Be Entertaining

Giving a dinner party during the week is hard, and I'm still cooking it with half an hour before the guests arrive... Essential tips: one, take time to bake the cake as early as you can. If it's out, people will assume you have everything together. This particular one is a bourbon-coffee-chocolate that I haven't made in a few years. Second, I always order pretty things for the table in the middle of the night. I'm debuting my periwinkle tablecloth, napkins & rings and 1930s pheasant menu holders from Wales. 

On "Glamour"

The New Inquiry explores the topic, and asks me for my thoughts.

On Snapshots

I'm pirouetting around the living room, having enjoyed the better part of a bottle of chenin blanc at dinner, informing my sister, who's doing her homework for Italian lessons –– and practicing, You look amazing, like the gods –– that I"ll be spending the weekend at the Lake Como, PA, farm of my portraitist. "Did you know that when I took ballet in Ithaca, they said that I could come back and dance en pointe?" We agree: bad for the ankles. 

On Complimentary Pairings

This afternoon I decided to skip this evening's engagement and relax at home, in a caftan found on last summer's splashy Provincetown/Vineyard weekend, and roast a chicken. A friend says: "You're like Auntie Mame, but without all the divorces and stock market crashes." I've ordered these chairs, Louis Philippe from the South of France, that will arrive in a month. Having slept in, I'm grateful for my dimly-lit, art-filled abode. Playing? Kay Kyser's "On a Slow Boat to China." Drinks at seven, dinner at eight.

On Words

Emma says, "Lauren Cerand writes Lux Lotus, which is amazing," which reminds me that Roxane said, "I am also a big fan of Lauren Cerand. She’s not a writer, necessarily, but her blog and Twitter feed are as endlessly readable to me as anything else I read. She is a constant reminder that magic and elegance are alive and well if you make room for them in your life." Later this week an upstart publication that I respect will run my thoughts on "glamour," and I am working on a commissioned piece for another on "elegance," and one about blancmange. But first, I'll sleep 'til eleven or noon. 

On Sleep No More

Last night I went to Sleep No More, the much-discussed dramatic immersion that spreads actors and participants over five floors of an artfully deshabille Chelsea warehouse, made over to resemble a 1930s-era hotel. The dozen or so actors, who are differentiated from audience members by the fact that the latter wear masks and move in complete silence, weave in and out of the elaborate domestic tableaux, acting out scenes in a movement-driven interpretation of Macbeth. This experience can be entertaining or life-changing, depending on how much theater and avant-garde art you enjoy on a regular basis. Although I had a companion, my favorite element of the evening, which starts at midnight, was how much the experience is heightened by the individual's degree of interaction with the rapidly evolving environment. We followed along most of the time, and spent the last couple of hours in the show's point of origin: Manderley, a sort of house cabaret bar, drinking Lillet punch and Scotch respectively, listening to a singer glide through her repertoire of torch songs. Today I'm reading Shakepeare After All for the notes on Macbeth.

How to Get It

After I began working at 9am and finished up at 3am, I started reading for a few minutes' relaxation and chanced upon the sentence that would advance my outlook on life completely:

“To do anything,” she told the duke, “I’m going to need a million pounds.” 

On Providence

Wednesday, I stepped into Bowne & Co., the old letterpress shop at the Seaport that's new again, and found a book of nineteenth-century recipes, set and printed there, that includes blancmange. I've been looking for the right one for months. That night, I found a Victorian dessert mold that shipped from England today, and with a little luck, should arrive the day before the dinner party.

Up Next, "Upstairs..."

"Patrick Melrose has survived. It was never a sure thing," says the Wall Street Journal. At Last is "beautiful and startlingly hopeful." Observes Slate, "St. Aubyn, a direct descendant of William the Conqueror and godparent to Earl Spencer’s son, writes what he knows." I'm excited to note that we'll have Edward St. Aubyn as our guest at the next edition of "Upstairs at the Square." He's been praised, by the New York Times, for "a style of social comedy more reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell or Nancy Mitford than of anyone writing today." Our musical guest will be Joseph Arthur, whose album, The Graduation Ceremony, the Times deemed "elegantly wounded," and who just appeared on David Letterman. His new double-album, Redemption City, is available for free download on his site, and a sublime companion to the books. Join us, February 15th, at 7pm. The show's one hour, with our host, journalist Katherine Lanpher, and it's free.

Above, an illustration by Lux Lotus reader Gary Michael Porter.

Windowlicker

I'm at the Estate Jewels showroom (by appointment), and picked a selection of my favorite things. All are available for sale.

Windowlicker is from the French for browsing: faire du lèche-vitrine.