Strong Week Links 2

I'm gearing up for a trip to New York this week. I'll be visiting my best friend since middle school who lives in Brooklyn, but I'm looking forward to some Lower East Side shopping here. (In middle school I would've been more excited about this place right around the corner.) Any favorite recommendations?

I'm loving @puppethorse, the Instagram of sweet stylist Georgie Perrins (who I helped out on a few shoots a while back). She's so good at capturing a certain LA scenery look - palms and vegetation plus iconic Southern California architecture in a quiet palette with dramatic lighting. 

Bemoaning the fact that your cart is like a sieve on the Mansur Gavriel site the day of the relaunch and restock of their uber-coveted bucket bags. I'm entertaining other options, like this. 

I'm digging these shoes.

Speaking of shoes, even though I love the Charlotte Stone sandals I got at James Rowland Shop last summer after I ordered a pair of Birkenstock Arizonas and thought they looked weird, I kinda want to give Birks another try. After all, "You try to survive your first visual influence. It is love on second sight."

Photo by Darcy Rogers.

Strong Week Links 1

I've barely had time to catch my breath this week, but when I did, these were a few of the things I was thinking about. 

I'm obsessed with real estate, including (really, mostly) in places I don't live. My sister-in-law recently broke down why Hi Fi in LA is so great, and now I'm adding it to the list of places to fantasize about.

Speaking of my sister-in-law, she's a landscape designer in addition to being a real estate agent, and this past Christmas I got her this book. Now the sequel is coming out in March, with more and stranger plants depicted by contemporary artists, along with this cool planter.

My brother and sister-in-law also turned me on to this show, which I've been meaning to start watching. Now that I know there's a Rachel Comey-centric episode, I want to watch even more.

I was just thinking about how it seems like about time for a new Tame Impala record, and then they released this.

The Fall 2015 Louis Vuitton show made me want to buy this, stat.

I'm still taking in the new redesign of the New York Times magazine, and loving the Letter of Recommendation section for its endorsements of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and LaCroix Sparkling Water (which I've been wanting to get into since I learned they have this flavor).

I could watch this 1 million times. Crying laughing. Viva goats!

Big Sur

2015. 33. To ring it all in, we took a trip to Big Sur, a place so close and so beautiful I can't believe I'd never really been. The weekend was unseasonably, freakishly warm, and the drive down was a bit like a dream. 80 degrees, sunshine, the glinting Pacific, and whales. Tons of them migrating. You could see spouts everywhere. At one point we pulled off at a roadside vista where we stood with an older couple with binoculars and an aging hippie fixing his moldering VW. We watched whales pass by, announcing them to each other, and saw dolphins playing in the surf while we listened to sea lions bellowing below.

We stayed at Deetjen's, a very cool old collection of wooden cottages from the 1930s originally built by Helmuth Deetjen after the style of buildings in his native Norway. Inspired by the room they offer with a record player (it wasn't available), we brought our own along with a tote full of vinyl. The restaurant was just as charming as the rest of the place, and we had an evening drink at the bar as well as a great breakfast in the indoor garden-like dining room.

We spent our nights at Nepenthe, which is like heaven. It's hard to imagine a prettier place. Our fears that Big Sur in January might mean freezing wind and rain seemed laughable on warm nights drinking rose and watching the sun set into the ocean. I liked to snag a seat at the back deck for sunset and spend the rest of the time at the long wooden table overlooking the southern coastline.

Instead of the ambitious hike we'd planned on Saturday we did the short walk to McWay Falls and part way up the Canyon trail on the other side of the highway. There we found another waterfall, a stream, and plenty of beautiful wooded spots with rays of sunshine beaming through the forest.

Other must-dos were Big Sur Bakery in the morning for pastries, coffee and people watching (we also had a great, cozy dinner there) and the Henry Miller Memorial Library. Apparently they've stopped doing shows there for the time being, but you can stop in to browse and buy a curated selection of books and records, and wander around the quaint grounds of what was once the house of the author's best friend.

We found so many places I can see becoming favorites. I already can't wait to get back and do it all over again and explore what more Big Sur has to offer. Next time: bring binoculars for whale watching and call Esalen at 9am sharp to get a night bathing reservation. More pics over on Instagram.

Joshua Tree

For the third time in as many years, we drove to Joshua Tree for a much-needed high desert getaway. We stayed at the same cabin as we did last year, a special spot rife with weird, wonderful, decorative details the owners have put into the place. It was originally a chicken and turkey ranch until it became a full-on hippie commune in the late 60s and early 70s. According to Green Acres’ owners, Gram Parsons (whose specter and Cosmic American music still casts a near-spiritual vibe over J Tree) and Keith Richards spent time hanging out at the ranch. A fact like this is impossible for me to ignore and imbues the place with even more mystique than that provided by the otherworldly landscape and sound baths at the Integratron. This year I read Keith Richards’ autobiography Life as a companion piece to last year’s Gram Parsons biography Twenty Thousand Roads.

I wore my new Flax by Jean Englehart dress, we ate seitan sandwiches at our favorite restaurant in town, Crossroads Cafe, and I stopped by the new and more visible location of bkbceramics where I picked up a small ceramic dish and a post card by High Desert Test Sites. A non-profit organization with an inspiring mission to enact temporary, intellectually rigorous and culturally relevant conceptual art in the high desert, HDTS seems to embody the draw of this place and to gather the people drawn by it.

During the day we passed red barrel cacti on a hike to the beautiful and serene 49 Palms Oasis before heading over to Pappy & Harriet’s and spending the afternoon traveling down dusty unpaved roads in search of the real estate listings I stalk year-round. At night, we shut off all the lights, stretched out on outdoor lounge chairs and hunkered down under Mexican blankets and in my case, a newly acquired vintage Levi’s shearling jacket, to stargaze. It’s easy to forget what darkness looks like living in a city — a fact thrown further into relief when we got back and I listened to an interview with the author of The End of Night, a book which explores how little darkness is left on Earth and the impact it has on its inhabitants. We saw some of the biggest, brightest shooting stars we’d ever seen.

On the way to our second stop in Palm Springs, we drove through Joshua Tree National Park stopping at Cap Rock and Cholla Cactus Garden and watching the high Mojave desert turn into the low Colorado.

Tune In: Lost In The Dream

Photos by Adam Granduciel via T Magazine

I recently came across T Magazine's article on a year's worth of photos taken by The War On Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel. As the year begins to draw to a close, reflection on its best albums will begin, and for me, Lost In The Dream will almost certainly occupy the number one spot. The photos span a year the band spent traveling the world in support of the third album and show Granduciel's eye is on the level of his ear.



This session for KEXP in Seattle has some fantastic live versions of songs from the album, along with a bit of background on its making. They've certainly earned their comparisons to Tom Petty and Dylan, but I was most delighted by the strains of Roxy Music that run through several tracks like Under The Pressure  and Disappearing. If he and sometime bandmate Kurt Vile can each put out a record on alternating years, we'll be in good shape. Also, as I learned from an interview with Vogue, Granduciel is a writer characterized by anxiousness and perfectionism, always on the quest for "beautiful moments of 'hey,'" and with a penchant for eBay alerts and vintage denim — a man after my own heart.

Destination Desert Highways (& The Pool)

Debaucherous rock and roll autobiography: check. Latest Gentlewoman: check. New bikini: check. Favorite Karen Walker Anytime Sunglasses: check. Sunhat: check. Olio E Osso No. 2 Lip Balm: check.

I couldn't be more ready to spend some days relaxing in the Joshua Tree high dez and poolscapes of Palm Springs.

Test Fest: Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan & Byredo Mojave Ghost

Lately I've been indulging my penchant for fragrances by buying testers. It's the perfect way to try out scents without the commitment or trip to a department store or boutique. I've found it interesting to try a few scents over the same period of time to play them against each other, tease out their different qualities or similarities, and to pick a favorite or even my next full-bottle purchase. 

This round, I sought out scents from two perfumers that are always popping up on cool girls' wishlists and beauty shelves: Byredo's newly released Mojave Ghost and Serge Lutens' Ambre Sultan. Byredo's Ben Gorham takes an approach to developing scents that's exactingly aesthetic and up-to-the-minute but also rooted in nostalgia and dreams. Serge Lutens is a French photography, beauty and perfume creative known for styling for the likes of Vogue and Richard Avedon (also a hero of Riccardo Tisci), and I was inspired to pick Ambre Sultan after my Q&A with The Cut's Editorial Director, Stella Bugbee, who's also scent obsessed.

I expected Mojave Ghost to be a musky, desert-y unisex scent based on the name and description, so I was surprised when I was met with the smell of sweet pear with my first spritz. I have to admit it was more feminine than I thought it would be, and it was so different from what I expected that I was put off. But of course with scents, you have to wait and see. When the tropico-floral top notes settled down, what enveloped me was a lighter, more subtle muskiness that said: refined; pulled-together; womanly; expensive; esoteric; bohemian; intoxicating.

Ambre Sultan I also expected to be musky, mysterious and unisex, and in this case it turned out to be closer to true. Without the floral aspect of Mojave Ghost, it was a straight-ahead but deep and moody  take on sandalwood. At first I thought it settled into whiffs of grandpa-cologne territory, but more and more it ended up feeling: feminine; powdery; rich; spicy; far-flung; powerful; soft.  

I'm not sure I could choose a favorite between these two as they offer very different and compelling moods. But I have a feeling I'll still be thinking about them both when the testers run out, and then time will tell.