A Magical Horse I met on a recent trip to La Pedrera, Uruguay.
Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, “Bears,
Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”
And the little bears growl to each other, “He’s mine,
As soon as he’s silly and steps on a line.”
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It’s ever so portant how you walk.
And it’s ever so jolly to call out, “Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares!”
Lines and Squares by A. A. Milne
Yet another beautiful photograph of my father, taken when he was in his early 20s (mid 1950s).
A good friend sent me this. “You, circa 1918”
Niddy Impekoven photographed by Hanns Holdt
One of my favorite watercolors by the incredibly talented Bulgarian artist, Oda Jaune.
We walked upside down, hand in hand, at the neck of the bottle. She dressed in black almost exclusively, except for patches of purple now and then. She wore no underclothes, just a simple sheath of black velvet saturated with a diabolical perfume. We went to bed at dawn and got up just as it was darkling. We lived in black holes with drawn curtains, we ate from black plates, we read from black books. We looked out of the black hole of our life into the black hole of the world. The sun was permanently blacked out, as though to aid us in our continuous internecine strife. For sun we had Mars, for moon Saturn, we lived permanently in the zenith of the underworld. The earth had ceased to revolve and through the hole in the sky above us there hung the black star which never twinkled. Now and then we had fits of laughter, crazy, batrachian laughter which made the neighbors shudder. Now and then we sang, delirious, off key, full tremolo. We were locked in throughout the long dark night of the soul, a period of incommensurable time which began and ended in the manner of an eclipse. We revolved about our own egos, like phantom satellites. We were drunk with our own image which we saw when we looked into each other’s eyes. How then did we look to others? As the beast looks to the plant, as the stars look to the beast.
—Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
[video]
4 of my Aunts: Anne, Joan, Loretta and Agnes.
It’s funny, because I bought the exact same dress when I was 14 from Dollhouse (at the time it was the coolest shop in downtown Manhattan). It’s still hanging in my closet in NY. Eat your heart out, Guillaume Henry.
The other day I was thinking about the trip I took to Rome when I was 17, when lo and behold this Prada ad popped into my head. It was taped up on my wall at boarding school. Shortly after we arrived in Rome, my friend insisted we go to the Prada store. I tried on the dress just for kicks- so bold! I had absolutely no intention of buying it. I used to do that a lot more before I actually worked in fashion: try on clothes I couldn’t afford just for the heck of it. As I recall, it looked great. Where are you now, perfectly crisp white Prada dress?