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 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 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.

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.

The Lux Lotus Guide to New York

Hotel bars I like: Bemelman's at the Caryle, where I spent my hurricane exile, and Bar Pleiades at the Surrey across the way.

Downtown: The Blue Bar in India House.

Haircut: Gerald DeCock in the Hotel Chelsea penthouse.

Work of Art: Joseph Cornell's "Setting for a Fairytale," at the Guggenheim; "Bedroom from the Sagredo Palace, Venice," at the Met. I've been paying homage to those two since I was a teenager.

Brunch or lunch with friends: The Fat Radish. Any time of day, Cornelia Street Cafe is happening, in the loveliest of ways.

Place for a tryst: Bacaro. Dinner at Duane Park in Tribeca when there is a burlesque show is entertaining, in the right company.

Unexpectedly good, affordable theater: 59E59.

Vintage: make an appointment with Sally Cohen, who also has a few things on display at Estate Jewels in Fort Greene (and at the Brooklyn Flea on the weekends), another absolute must-visit.

Fragrance: Aedes de Venustas, if you've never been. I wear "Carnal Flower" by Frederic Malle, which I buy at Barney's.

Place for quiet conversation: The Morgan Library Dining Room or Cafe, or Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, or join a private club (the old-fashioned kind; that's what they're for).

New York novels: That I've publicized, and highly recommend–– Lightning People by Christopher Bollen, The Exquisite by Laird Hunt, YOU or the Invention of Memory by Jonathan Baumbach, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Further reading –– Katherine Lanpher's Leap Days (essays), Amor Towles' Rules of Civility. For more reading with a sense of place, visit Idlewild Books.

On Fortune

This evening, a Lunar New Year dinner party in Chinatown ("We'll be wearing red")–– this afternoon, I received a telephone call from the extremely chic hostess, an artist who became a jewelry designer after a fateful trip to India, to advise that we'll dine at nine and accommodate a guest's lover's flight from Paris.

On Housekeeping

First, if you'd like to read Lux Lotus posts via Facebook, for your convenience, you may.

Second, a reader politely requests a guide to my New York. I will happily supply my top 10 recommendations in categories that you suggest in the comments ("Hotel Bar," "Haircut," "Work of Art," that type of thing). "Vote" as many times as you like.

On Portraits

Lately I've been fascinated by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the iconic Jazz Age ex-pats who set the standard for Americans in the South of France, and frankly, anyone and anywhere they went. He was the heir to the storied leather-goods manufacturer Mark Cross, she was richer and had parents who objected to a suitor "in trade." She was 32 when they married, and five or six years older than he. Delightfully mis-, or perfectly, depending on how you look at it –matched, off they went to France, in pursuit of a more favorable exchange rate and number of miles from their perturbed families.

Known for an innate and fully comprehensive elan, the couple was widely sought after and said to have influenced more than one portrait by admiring members of their circle, most famously Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and, more loosely, Hemingway's Garden of Eden. Many sketches of them exist in that sense –– Calvin Tomkins' 1962 profile in the New Yorker is exemplary, as is Peter Schjeldahl's review of a contemporary show on their "art & style" –– but photographs are extremely hard to come by.

Descriptions will have to do, and the one that is most oft-employed in Sarah's case is a particular habit she had of wearing her very precious pearls casually slung over a shoulder as she walked down to the beach at Antibes. Naturally, when I made plans to spend a few days of much-desired relaxation on the beach in sunny Southern California next month, then immediately came across a twenty-year old, sixty-four inch strand of Chanel pearls at Estate Jewels, well, you know: I knew it was mine.

If you enjoyed this post, see "Craft Can Save Your Soul," which I wrote about influential, inspiring artists, Joseph and Anni Albers.

Los Angeles & London

As I worked all through the summer, and all through December, and all through this weekend, it's given me immense pleasure to make arrangements today to travel to Los Angeles next month to walk the red carpet at the NAACP Image Awards with nominee (and my long-time publicity client) Tayari Jones, and to stay on for a long weekend off, and to travel to London for a week in April.

Here's a picture of me relaxing in style at the Chateau Marmont, one summer when I flew across the country just to have dinner.