Lux Lotus

My Life in Pictures: Moment Oh

Tonight I had dinner with an old friend and I told him about how I bought myself an inexpensive purse for Christmas. It's lovely, and locally handmade, and I was thinking I'd wear it when I go out on the occasional date so that I will come across as casual and down-to-earth as one can seem without ever wearing pants (or, moreso, as one can seem while having purchased a vintage fur wrap at auction for a song last night because it was the same color as my hair). Overall, I might take things down a notch or two in 2009, which I am going to approach with all loveliness and enchantment and gossamer good intentions and no bones whatsoever; the kind of year where you have no doubt that all of the love that you'll ever need in your whole life can already be found in your own heart. Anyway, this clever man, in his easy way, nodded thoughtfully at my pretty-on-the-inside confession and pulled out a gift certificate to Zipcar as he informed me that less than a handful of blocks away from my apartment, I can go and pick up a BMW whenever I want! So I think I'll chuck the superficialities and be myself-- seems to be working so far. Minutes before that, Lisa Yuskavage came by and said hello to us and touched my shoulder and I was so shy that I barely cracked a smile while a million thoughts raced through my head but mostly: I'll never wash it again. Afterward, I came home and talked on the phone with another pal, who totally gets me, about big plans, or the broadest sketch of them, and allowed myself to dream a little about the pleasure that might be possible in life (as opposed to being guided wholly by my bred-in-the-bone duty to persevere), and I liked the way I was feeling so much that I took a picture so that I'll remember it forever. And then wrote it down here, for the same reason. Right now I'm about to climb into bed with James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, as I often do (I stay in the car with Christina, our heads leaning back, our eyes closed. "He's a nice boy," she says. "Don't you wish you were that young again?" "I'm not that old." "Baby..." she says soothingly.) I have to work over the next few days and hope to get a break before or just after the New Year. And then I'll be back, as always, with more of the usual plus the shock of the new. Until then, I'm turning down the bright lights here at Lux Lotus, but I'll leave the twinkly ones on, the ones with the glittery strands that shine just for you. XO, doves. Be good.

Updated: I replaced the photo from last night with a better one that I took today!

Windowlicker: Christmas Eve Edition

I hosted a lovely little candlelight dinner in my apartment this evening and then it was off to John Street Church for more candlelight and "Silent Night" and now I am back home, blissfully content, curled up in my favorite chair with a cup of green tea, kicking my crossed-over leg in time with the rhythm of the falling rain and thinking how nice it will be to have a full day off tomorrow.  My family and I have made a pact not to exchange gifts this year, and so I'm not expecting anything beyond a leisurely lunch. But this particular stage you join me on tonight, Windowlicker, is the absolute -- Diana Vreeland says, wash your children's hair with champagne! -- antithesis of all that, and so I've been musing on what I'd like to find if Santa were really real (readers under twelve: oh, but he is). I am a minimalist at heart, and so I like the idea of anything I can carry, especially when traveling, or secret away in a pocket when my mood changes. I seldom wear earrings because they slip right out of my ears. At a big holiday party I went to a couple of weeks ago, I was hurtling toward inconsolable at the end of the evening because I'd lost a precious half of a pair that had been made especially for me. Of course, it became quite a circus of empathy, culminating in the charming, Gatsby-esque host plucking the missing object of my desire out of the loveseat, accompanied by fanfare akin to extracting the baby in a king cake. So I don't wish for earrings. If they find me, I just hold on to them for dear life, and try not to make too much of a scene. You'd think necklaces would be a different story, but remember those much-adored chains? I broke one the very next day when it caught on the handle of my oven, which I was using for the third or fourth time since I've moved into my apartment, where I've lived for as many years. Serves me right for wanting the goat cheese on my salad just a little charbroiled; that's what Zucco, my favorite French diner, is for. I feel like pins are out of fashion, so I'll wish for one of those. Nothing too extravagant. And not going anywhere, either.

[Vintage Fendi Bull Brooch, $100 at Etsy]

Bonus pick:

I bet men hate these and I'd wear them everywhere. They remind me of Jerry's in Soho, where I spent many happy evenings when I first arrived in New York. I was reading The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, discovering the thwarted whims of adulthood and attendant ecstasy of pure freedom, and looking for work while living mostly on a credit card that I wouldn't pay off in full for a decade. And wouldn't have traded it for anything.

[Chanel Striped Patent Platform Pumps, $700 at Bluefly]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - often appears on Tuesday and Thursdays at 10am EST-ish.

Seven to Savor: Books of the Year

Star pupil, 82 years old, reading her lesson in adult class, Gee's Bend, Alabama, May 1939 (from the NY Public Library Digital Gallery).

I'm wrapping up my projects for 2008, and getting ready for 2009. I get many more inquiries for my publicity services than I can take on, and am lucky to choose the projects I am most enthusiastic about, always. If you're looking for last-minute gift ideas (or something indulgent for yourself to curl up with over the happy lull), here are the books I helped get the word out about this year:

Correspondences by Ben Greenman ($50, limited edition)
Cost by Roxana Robinson  ($25, hardcover)
Crust by Lawrence Shainberg ($15, paperback)
The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudolph Wurlitzer ($15, paperback)
Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee ($13.99, paperback)
Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum ($14, paperback)
The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman ($12, paperback)

Rhapsodic reviews can be found at each of the authors' sites above, including many appearances on Best Book of the Year lists, such as  Cost (#1, Washington Post), The Drop Edge of Yonder (#1, Time Out New York), The Rowing Lesson (Financial Times, The Times-- South Africa), etc. etc. in the loveliest manner...

And there's also a year of extraordinary programming for "Upstairs at the Square," a series that I help to curate, produce and publicize, archived free online at bn.com/upstairs.

And as you know, I am a tremendous believer in and supporter of flourishing quality cultural and literary discourse online, so if you have a blog or contribute to one and would ever like to receive a review copy of a book I'm publicizing, please drop me a line.

Looking back, and looking ahead

I've just made a contribution of $700 to Girls Write Now to match yours. Thank you.

The lovely Mariana commented on my original post (which inspired the brilliant Tayari to start a meme!), saying, "so, i've been admiring this photo for a few days now and it's made me all the most curious about the teenage you."

It's no exaggeration to say that I am a publicist by trade because I prefer to talk about other people. My teenage years, like everyone's, were challenging and complicated, and as both my parents read Lux Lotus from time to time, I'll refrain from discussing anything about them at length. The simple truth is that you love people and their decisions hurt you and vice versa, and when you're young this is an intractable concept that can only be viewed in binary terms. And then you realize that everyone avoids pain and seeks pleasure and simply tries to survive, and thousands of years of poetry have captured the ache of the human condition and yet still it captivates us endlessly, for good reason (here's the first poem I ever memorized, at age twenty). To me, the experience of becoming an adult, as I was discussing with one of my dear siblings recently, is to take responsibility for things, not only the ones that are your fault, but for any in this world that you can improve by a measure.

So I won't talk too much more about my early years. They shaped the person I am today and I'm cool with that. Of course, I'd never leave a Lux Lotus reader hanging... here's another photo of me, at age sixteen, en route to a holiday party. 

A week or so before I graduated early from high school and moved to New York for a few months at age seventeen -- before heading to New Orleans, Upstate New York, New Mexico, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., before returning to New York at twenty three -- I made a list of "(100) Things I Would Like to Do/Experience Before I Die." Here are ten I've accomplished in the dozen years since, and five I'd like to do in 2009:

1. Grow my hair long (#5).
2. Go to Paris (#10; also, anywhere in the Caribbean, #17; Japan, #25; New Orleans, #40; London, #46).    
3. Stop dreaming and start acting on my desires (#15).
4. Hear good jazz live (#52).
5. Walk through the rain barefoot (#57).
6. Fly first-class (#69).
7. Teach (#79).
8. Never accept "It's not humanly possible" as a reason to quit something (#82).
9. Engage in an intensely passionate love affair, if only for a short while (#84).
10. Celebrate an occasion with Champagne (#94).

1. Take a road trip across the country (#20).
2. Spend the night in a hotel that costs more than $300 per night (#49).
3. Go to Venice (#51).
4. Own something by Chanel (#68).
5. Work hard, make a lot of money, and then relax (#86).

Windowlicker: Holiday Edition

I've been working nonstop, listening to The Kooks' cover Peter, Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" and Lily Allen cover The Kooks' "Naive" (hear 'em both at Hype Machine) and wishing I had a bike and somewhere less New York-y to ride it over New Year's. I'm not into Christmas but here's what my fantasy tree of this very moment would have tucked under it (ask me in ten minutes and I'll say a Vionnet gown, a train ticket and a case of Cava):

[Something shocking by Ellen Dollar, I Made You a Beard]

[Vintage 1970s Anne Klein Mongolian Lamb Vest, $375 at Etsy]

[Stars Legwarmers, $40 from Lola Stretch]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - often appears on Tuesday and Thursdays at 10am EST-ish.

Pictures of You

Portrait of me by Mark Milroy, November/December 2008. I am wearing a $20 dress I bought on Delancey and a fur wrap from a thrift store on the Eastern Shore. And no shoes! Also, the background is inspired by Van Gogh's The Postman, which he didn't even know that I love (although in re-reading that original post it's clear that I was a little bit feverish that day from having been driven to Philadelphia in a Ferrari).

Recently, after we met at a party, Mark Milroy asked if he could paint me and of course I said yes. Today I got to see the finished portrait and I look forward to one day when I am suitably rich and can track it down wherever it ends up, probably to quote my friend Carrie (quoting Sylvia Plath in an unrelated note last night), spirited away in a "Corsican monastery -- reachable only by donkey." After I stopped by the studio, Mark and his wife Kelly McMasters, author of Welcome to Shirley, and I went for lunch at a Polish diner in the East Village and there were these big, fat snowflakes falling down while we sat and laughed at the counter and walking home I thought of all those stories you hear about later-famous people kicking around New York like sixty years ago when everyone was just doing their thing and you can hardly imagine these people of universally recognized monumental talent and stature doing anything so mundane as eating and laughing and walking around and that's how I feel about those two. Anything but mundane.

You Never Knew the Teenage Me

Me, on the day of my high school graduation, January 1997.

Like everyone, my life has seen its highs and lows: I had a two-story playhouse that stopped traffic when I was five and couldn't afford to see a doctor when I was fifteen. I have a college degree that I didn't personally pay for, and can also tell you what it's like to live in Manhattan while barely making five figures. Fortune has favored me this year and yet I have no idea what the situation will be like twelve months from now. Or two. I was lucky to be born into privilege (even when it didn't last) and, for all of my self-made success as an adult, I would never conceal the fact that early opportunities paved the way. When I went to volunteer in a public school in New Orleans as a college freshman, I was stunned as a chunk of plaster fell out of the ceiling as I walked up the stairs. It was the first time that I understood why people talk about public education as being in crisis and how different my experience was growing up in an affluent Maryland suburb (although I did notice when I went to visit my same-age cousin's kindergarten class in Mississippi that they weren't reading in class, a fact my mother asked me kindly not to mention again). Tonight at a board of directors meeting for Girls Write Now, I was elected chair of the board by my colleagues. It means so much to me to have such an incredible organization put its faith in my leadership abilities. Girls Write Now is New York's premier creative writing and mentoring organization for high school girls. In New York City, one of the most influential cities in the world, almost half of high school girls will not graduate. I barely graduated myself, but I did, and went on to ever better things. If you enjoy reading Lux Lotus, please make a donation to Girls Write Now today. We'd like to pay our few staff employees more of a living wage next year. We'd like to move to a more vibrant space with better fundraising and event opportunities (my position is fully volunteer, with a fundraising commitment of $2,000 per year). We'd like to serve many more members of the next generation of writers and leaders and thinkers and doers. Every dollar you donate goes further than you could ever know (although if you're in New York, you can see it in action on January 17). If you make a donation, online, or through Facebook, or send in a check, please tell me, so that I can make a donation on December 20th to match it, with love for the holidays from everyone who reads Lux Lotus all around the world. Love, Lauren

The Letters That I Sent

"I'm having a vacation, and it's so beautiful, and maybe I'll never get another film idea in my life.” -- Lars von Trier

 Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry. -- Jack Kerouac

 Make voyages! Attempt them... there's nothing else. --Tennessee Williams

An index of my posts from other places this year:

April -- Charlottesville

May -- The Catskills, Chicago

June -- Lincoln

July -- Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, Green Gulch, San Francisco

August -- The Eastern Shore, Quebec, Montreal

September -- Omaha

November -- Scotland

And next: ???

My Life in Pictures: Venus in Spots

I've been meaning to show you my fake leopard coat from Scotland but since I traded up to the lens-less Blackberry "world phone," I haven't had a camera (hence my fascination with photobooths: Montreal, Omaha; as an aside, I've traveled so much this year that I can't remember all the places I've been off the top of my head. It did remind me today though that I promised my friend Alice at the ashram that next summer I'd rent a house somewhere chill for a month or two and we'd learn how to surf!). I don't usually mind, as I'd seldom stop to take photos; it might slow me down. I did manage to get a low-quality snapshot with my computer tonight, and couldn't get much in the frame but you get the idea (I bought the coat at William Armstrong & Son on Clerk Street in Edinburgh). You can also see my new gold chains from Guenevere Rodriguez that I got a sale at the Hotel Chelsea this weekend. Behind me on the wall: work by Amy Ross, Dan Sabau, Jenny Holzer and Jessica Cannon.

Windowlicker

Earlier this evening I was thinking that one of the nicest aspects of some of the places I've stayed this year -- the Vancouver Club, the Over Seas House in Edinburgh -- is that the rooms have keys. No cards. And so I mused on that passing fashion in jewelry design of discarded hotel keys being incorporated into motifs as huge quantities went on the market after reaching obsolescence in most places (there was a big spike, for instance, when the lot from the Plaza was sold) just as vintage/salvage chic went mainstream. Except when I found some examples, I realized my mistake: there's really nothing more alluring than the idea of hotels and nothing less romantic than the idea of clanging around with a janitor's key ring slung around your neck. It's just so... obvious, which is one of my best-loved expressions for tossing a benign label on to something I find abhorrent. And to me, personally, being obvious is the worst possible thing. It encompasses every quality I loathe in other people: to be uncouth, insensitive, striving, reliant on the approval of others for validation, lacking in judgment and the sort of basic elegance that can be acquired easily enough by learning to be observant and keeping one's mouth shut for a while.  And then I thought about it some more, and about the year as a whole in retrospect, and I thought, what's so bad about being obvious? What's wrong with that? Maybe being obvious could lead to all of the best things about 2009.

[How to Marry a Millionaire Silk Briefs, $78 at gildapearl/etsy]

Windowlicker - from the French for window shopping: faire du lèche-vitrine - often appears on Tuesday and Thursdays at 10am EST-ish.